Cronos Rising Read Online Free PDF

over the sheer drop.
    Then his hands slapped against the railing and he caught hold and hauled his body up and over the low wall onto the platform of the balcony.
    It was directly outside the main bedroom, he assumed, as balconies tended to be. If Billson was in there, and awake, he’d likely have heard the soft thump of a man landing outside.
    Purkiss flattened himself on the floor of the balcony beside a tall pot plant and waited.
    He closed his eyes, held his breath to shut off his sense of smell temporarily. Focused on the data reaching his auditory cortex, channelling all his attention into the sensations passing through his ear where it was pressed against the cold stone.
    He heard nothing through the floor. No footfall. No creak of furniture shifting under someone’s weight.
    Purkiss opened his eyes. The sliding glass doors between the balcony and the room beyond were hung with heavy drapes on the other side. There was no light through the slight gap at the top of the drapes.
    He rose to his knees, then his feet, keeping himself to one side of the doors. Cautiously he crept forward and peered through the gap. He had a dim impression of a shadowed room beyond.
    Purkiss looked at the glass doors. There was a single mortise lock, the key presumably on the other side.
    He could pick the lock, but it would require pushing the key out first, and that would make a sound. The lock would yield in perhaps twenty seconds, if he was lucky. Twenty seconds would allow plenty of time for anybody in the room beyond to prepare himself.
    Purkiss glanced at the plants on the balcony. They stood four feet high, and sat in matching ceramic pots.
    Sometimes, finesse was the best approach. At other times, sudden force was necessary.
    Purkiss grasped the stem of the nearest plant, felt the solidity of its roots deep in the soil and the heft of the pot, and swung it through a hundred and eighty degrees.
    The ceramic cracked against the glass of the door, the noise exploding into the night. Purkiss swung the pot again, the glass splintering this time. The door was double glazed, and Purkiss’s third blow sent a nebula of cracks across the inner pane.
    He pistoned his foot against the glass and kicked great shards away and ducked his head so that it was protected by his arms and his shoulders and the padded material of his duffel jacket and charged at the ruined pane. He registered that there was indeed a bedroom beyond as he burst through the glass and hit the floor with his shoulder, rolling, balling himself up as tightly as he could to reduce the surface area available to anyone who might be waiting there, gun in hand.
    Purkiss was on his feet again even before he consciously registered what his senses had already told him: that there was a man in the room, on the bed to the right of the balcony doors.
    David Billson sat up, the bedsheets covering him to his waist. His eyes were wide in shock, but his face was puffy with sleep.
    Purkiss seized the quilt covering Billson and tore it away. No gun in the man’s hands, and he was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Billson shrank away, pulling his legs up so that he was kneeling. But Purkiss realised immediately the man wasn’t prepared for an attack, and wasn’t in need of subduing immediately.
    ‘Who the hell are –’ Billson began. Purkiss held up a warning finger.
    ‘Who else is here? In the apartment?’
    ‘What? Nobody.’ Outrage was beginning to wrestle with alarm on Billson’s face.
    ‘The woman. Where is she? I know about her, Billson. Don’t bluff me.’ Purkiss turned slightly so that he could keep the bedroom door, which stood slightly ajar, in the periphery of his vision.
    Billson said flatly: ‘She’s not here. There’s no-one else in the apartment.’
    Purkiss thought the man was telling the truth.
    When Billson started to edge towards the end of the bed, Purkiss said: ‘Stay where you are.’ He didn’t want Billson getting dressed. Sitting there in his undergarments