Chris Bawa leaned back, away from her gun, and crossed his arms on his broad, muscular chest. He looked at her with no sign of agitation and spoke calmly.
"Shoot now."
Effe's eyes opened wide with shock.
"What?" she whispered.
Chris held up the black sunglasses he was holding, and Effe noticed that there were tiny coloured knobs on one of the stems of the sunglasses. He pressed one of them, and the device on her windscreen beeped once, and when Effe swivelled around with alarm, she saw that the counter was rapidly moving down from sixty seconds.
She turned towards him and pointed the gun again, her face frantic with sudden alarm.
"Turn it off!" she said, striving to sound calm, but her voice was shaking. "Switch it off now or I'll shoot your brains out, Chris Bawa."
"Go ahead," he said calmly. "This car will blow up in forty seconds. The bomb will kill you."
"You're lying!" she shouted as her mouth ran dry. "You won't kill yourself!"
"True," he said with that same infuriating calmness. "When it gets to twenty seconds, I'll break your arm and get out of the car. It will explode with you in it. Your choice, Effe."
Effe tried to keep her panic at bay but to no avail!
This man had killed her brother, and she was sure he would have no qualms about killing her in broad daylight, as preposterous as it might sound.
"Stop it!" she cried hoarsely as the counter ticked. "Disarm it, Chris! I will shoot you!"
"Thirty seconds," he said calmly.
"You bastard!" Effe screamed, tempted to shoot him in the face.
"Twenty seconds," he said.
Effe was filled with impotent rage as she suddenly switched the safety on and lowered the gun.
"Give me the gun," he said calmly.
"No!" Effe screamed.
"Ten seconds," he said.
"Bastard, Chris!" she screamed fiercely. "You damn murderer!"
She handed the gun to him as sweat fell off her face.
"Good girl," he said as he took the gun and dropped it on the seat beside him. He pressed a knob on the side of his sunglasses, and then the device blinked two times and reset the countdown to ten minutes.
"What the hell do you want from me?" she screamed into his face.
His eyes were expressionless now as he held up the sunglasses.
"This is multi-functional," he said calmly.
"Is that why you're here?" Effe asked venomously. "To show off your little silly toy?"
"No," he said, unruffled. "Just want you to know that it cancelled the AD signal you sent by pressing that earring."
And, just like that, Effe experienced great fear.
Suddenly, she knew why Sir Lance and the whole SPF held this man in almost reverential esteem. A man who could escape from Eden was no ordinary man, and suddenly it occurred to her that she was trapped in a car with a serial killer. Prodigal was a ruthless man who did not have any qualms snuffing out almost two hundred innocent lives on a train, and kissing the sister of one of his victims with impudence.
"It can also analyse the cadences of your voice, and fairly tell when you lie," Chris continued. "If you lie to me, I'll break your neck right here."
It was delivered in a bland monotone, a matter-of-fact voice without emotion, just a statement of fact, and Effe believed him, and with that simple establishment of a threat, she found her heartbeats pounding.
She was in terror of this man!
"Tell me how you came to be with the SPF," he said calmly. "Just bare, necessary facts. You have two minutes."
Effe glanced at the digital face of the bomb and shut her eyes briefly to still her fear. Quickly, she told him what had happened when her boss summoned her to the office and when she arrived, Sir Lance was there and asked her to join the SPF.
Chris pressed a button, and the right eye of the sunglasses beamed and began to analyse her voice, blinking a series of green dots at the bottom side.
"You speak the truth," he said calmly. "Do you know about Taipan?"
"What?" Effe asked, confused, and saw that Chris' attention was firmly on the blinking lights of the sunglasses, and then he looked up at her with a deadly glint in his eyes.
"Are you a part of Taipan, Effe?"
"Damn you!" she cried, highly agitated. "I know Taipans are very venomous snakes mostly found in Australia, and that's as far as my knowledge of them goes. Is that what you wanted to know?"
He looked at the glinting green lights on the sunglasses, and then he pushed them on his face. It fitted him so well, and for the millionth time, she wondered how a handsome man like him, a truly beautiful specimen of his type, could turn out so rotten.
"Give me the folder," he said.
"What folder?" she asked, and suddenly his hand shot out and gripped her arm so tightly that she let out a cry of pain. "Stop it, damn you! You're hurting me! Murderer!"
As he continued to grip her arm, she reached over to the passenger seat and picked up the electronic folder that Sir Lance had given her on Prodigal. He snatched it from her hand and let her arm go.
"You damn bully!" Effe said with tears of pain and rage in her eyes. "I hope you burn in hell, Prodigal! I'm going to get you; I promise you that! You should kill me now because I will never stop pursuing you until you're once more rotting in jail where you belong, you filthy murderer!"
"Walk away, Miss Kedem," he said quietly. "There is more to this caper than you think. Just walk away from this."
Effe glared at him with raw fury and disgust.
"Walk away? Did you say walk away, you bastard?" she asked bitterly. "Two times, Chris Bawa, two times I have told you that you killed my brother in the bloody bomb you planted on subway train five-nine-nine! Two times, and each time you did not say anything! You didn't even show a flicker of remorse! You beast! Don't bloody tell me to walk away! Would you walk away if you see your brother's murderer walking freely on the street?"
He was about to get out of the car, but he suddenly became still and slowly took off the sunglasses. He hooked it into the neck of his T-shirt and looked at her with very cold eyes.
"My brother?" he asked softly.
"Yes, your elder brother, Roland!" Effe said bitterly and with venomous intent. "The one that was shot dead during a bank robbery three months ago by masked armed robbers! Would you let his murderers go if you see them on the street?"
And Chris Bawa simply fell apart.
First, the coldness left his face, and in its place was a pained look, a look of indescribable pain as he looked at her with horror, his handsome face cut to the very bone, no longer calm and cold, no longer so self-assured!
Suddenly, Chris Bawa was like a child whose favourite possession had fallen overboard the ship into the roiling waters of a savage ship.
"Rollie?" he whispered, and his huge frame shook, his hands shook, his lips shook. "Shot dead? Rollie?"
And then it dawned on Effe.
He did not know!
He had not been informed about his brother's death!
Chris Bawa had not been informed that his elder brother was dead! In the folder, it had been specified that Roland and Chris had been the closest in the family. There were parents, one sister named Diana, and a second brother named Stan, who came after Diana, with Chris being the last of them.
Roland Bawa, a famous physician, loved his younger brother Chris like no other. They had been very close. Roland had been married once, but had lost his wife to cancer, and had never married again. His young brother, Chris, had been Roland's best buddy, and when Roland left the family house after marriage, Chris had left with him and stayed with him till he later moved into the mansion their father gave him and Elsie-Mina.
But they had still been close, visiting each other every weekend, going fishing, swimming, clubbing.
Chris and his brother had always been together.
Roland had been a vociferous voice in Chris' incarceration, fighting hard through the legal system to have his brother's case held in public instead of the secret trial and subsequent life imprisonment Chris had been subjected to.
Effe looked at the distraught man in front of her and, seeing his great grief, her anger slowly melted.
"You didn't know about Roland's death?" she asked with surprise. "No one informed you? It is in the… the folder!"
He held the folder with a hand that trembled and flung it at her.
"Show me!" he whispered frantically.
"Chris…"
"Show me!" he almost roared as he shot forward in the seat savagely. "Show me! Now!"
Greatly disconcerted and a little scared of how he was rapidly losing his iron control, she powered the electronic folder on, input the password, and then flipped through to the extract on Roland Bawa which showed images of the handsome elder brother and the grim pictures of him as he lay on the floor of the bank where the attack had taken place.
"Here," she said and handed the folder to him. "Three months ago, at the Eden Diamond Bank. Roland was there on a Friday evening to deposit money. Four robbers came in, stole three bags of large-currency dollars and fired shot indiscriminately. Three people died. Roland was one of them."
She saw him reading fast, and then he flipped the screen over and over, and when he saw his brother on the floor in a pool of blood, the folder dropped from Chris' hands and he began to tremble violently.
"No!" he whispered, and then he gripped the back of Effe's seat and shook it violently. "No, no, no, no! Oh, Lord, no!"
If anything, Effe did not expect the tears that fell down Chris Bawa's cheeks!
She had pegged him down as a man immune to tragedy, a man who lived violently and sold violence. She had not expected him to be hurt, yes, but to be cold about it in his usual way.
But his sheer grief was terrible to behold.
Chris Bawa was completely shattered with grief!
At that moment, he was not the thirty-year-old killer in the news. He was just a vulnerable man who had been handed a piece of horrible news.
He leaned back suddenly with his head against the seat, his eyes shut, his mouth open, and his teeth gnashing in grief. His hands trembled as he flung an arm suddenly across his eyes as the tears gushed beneath his eyelids.
She could have taken him then.
Her gun was on the seat where he had left it. His sunglasses were in the neck of his T-shirt, and the bomb on her windscreen still had six minutes counting down. She could have gotten out of the car and fled, but for some peculiar reason, she was fixed in her seat looking at him.
She looked up, startled when there was a sharp crack on her window, and when she turned, she saw a uniformed police officer standing at her window. He was a big policeman, just like most policemen in the Kingdom Of Eden.
He was a motorbike cop and was still wearing his helmet.
Effe looked at the grieving Chris, and then she wound down the window. The police officer lifted the visor of his helmet and looked at her with irritation. He had been angry at whoever had parked so recklessly on the bridge, but finding out that it was an incredibly beautiful woman, he lost some of his ire.
"Hello, officer," she said and gestured with her head frantically at Chris Bawa in the backseat of her car.
"This is a no-parking zone, ma'am," the huge, muscular policeman said politely but with firm resolve. "I could have you arrested and charged; It's a Monday morning and I don't want to arrest you, so move the car along."
And because he was not understanding her gestures, she pointed at Chris and said in a fierce whisper:
"That's Chris Bawa! The wanted man! The murderer who escaped from prison!"
The policeman gasped and spun towards Chris whose arm was now off his face. The cop moved to the back door which was partially open and yanked it all the way open as he drew out his gun and pointed it at Chris Bawa.
"Get down, sir!" he screamed as he took four precautionary steps backwards. "Get down with your hands behind your neck! Don't give me a reason to shoot you! Get down slowly, and let me see your hands!"
Chris turned his head and looked at the policeman, and Effe noticed that he was still disoriented with his grief, and his eyes were reddened now as he stared dully at the policeman with the gun.
Effe quickly got out of the car when she saw that the counter on the digitally luminous face of the bomb was counting down three minutes.
"Get down with your hands behind your head, sir!" the policeman screamed as he thumbed back the hammer of his gun. "Last warning!"
Effe's heart was beating now!
It dawned on her that the policeman was panicking and doing several things wrong! She knew they were all rigged with hidden intercom that summoned other policemen close by, and the man should have called in the emergency immediately!
Secondly, he was too close to the car although he had taken a few precautionary steps backwards. She had seen how fast this Chris could move, and even though the cop had a gun, she would only feel safer if he had Chris in handcuffs.
She breathed with relief when she saw Chris stepping out of the car with his hands behind his neck as instructed.
"Take two steps forward, turn around and get on your knees, sir, with your hands still behind your neck!"
Chris took two steps forward… and suddenly, he was moving in a blur!
It happened so fast, so indescribably fast, that Effe barely saw what happened. One moment Chris was lazily taking a step forward, the next moment he had closed the distance between him and the policeman.
The eyes of the cop widened with disbelief and his finger tightened on the trigger, but Chris had already gripped the man's gun hand with his left hand and angled it upward at the same time that the base of his right hand slammed into the jaw of the cop!
The sound of the gun shattered the air, making pedestrians who had slowed down to watch the spectacle flee with terror. Motorists also sped up. The blow with the base of Chris' hand was so vicious that Effe saw blood spurting from the policeman's nose.
The huge cop was already unconscious as Chris ripped the gun from his hand and allowed the man to crash to the ground. Effe dashed for her car, and his voice reached her, low and fearfully savage.
"Bomb's still ticking."
She stopped and looked at him with impotent rage.
As the cop's body thudded to the ground, Chris moved quickly to Effe's windscreen and ripped off the ticking device, and then he spun and flung it high over the bridge and into the sky. Effe's attention was on the little black device as it arced into the sky, and then it exploded with a loud blast followed by a great flash of flame!
Cars came to screeching stops as the ground trembled with the force of the blast! Effe crouched suddenly, her body trembling, absolutely horrified that it had been a real bomb!
Chris Bawa had stuck a damn bomb on her windscreen!
If it had been on her car a second longer, the car would have exploded! Worse, if she had entered her car for the gun it might have exploded and killed her!
With a cry of fury, she straightened up and whirled around!
But Chris Bawa was gone, and so was the cop's motorbike!
She could barely walk to the car because she was trembling so badly.
But she eventually got in and called for help for the unconscious cop on the ground.
"I'll find you, Chris Bawa," she said grimly. "I'll find you!"