Slip of the Knife читать онлайн

le, smoky, brushing his left ear. Then the elbow suddenly tight around his neck, pressing on his carotid artery. White bursts of light flashed in his eyes in the seconds it took for him to pass out.When he came to he was in the boot, bewildered as to who had kidnapped him or why. The first thing he thought of was Kevin-maybe Kevin was playing a mad joke-but Kevin would never, ever have taken Terry’s clothes off. Being naked meant it was serious.Looking for a motive for the attack, he ran through the casino night. He didn’t have the money, Kevin had the money. Even if Terry’d had the cash the guy had a car, a big car judging from the size of the boot, and two hundred quid wasn’t enough to kill for. He trawled his past for clues. In the last two years he had been in Angola, Liberia, Lebanon, New York, Glasgow. But he was a seasoned journalist, an observer, never participating or intervening, however much he wanted to. No conflict would be changed by taking him out.But someone was going to take him out. And no one was coming to help him.Terry remembered a fifteen-year-old prisoner of war, blinking at the scorching midday Angolan sun, a boy with navy blue skin, his pale brown eyes heavy with terror, exhausted. He had trailed passively along the dusty forest road towards his execution, saving his killers the trouble of cleaning his body from an inconvenient floor. Terry watched him kneel before a gun barrel, eyes darting around behind his executioner, looking for an intervention in the second the bullet left the barrel. Terry had interviewed Holocaust survivors, heard how they had hoped in the cattle trucks, knew they were headed for the death camps but hoped they weren’t and so waited.Assassins depend on that hope, he knew t