The Birthday Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

with the gun had his eyes fixed on Mersiha and his jaw was set tight in anticipation of the recoil. 'No!' Freeman yelled, and he threw himself at Mersiha,
    trying to push her out of the way, trying to protect her from the man with the killer blue eyes. Bullets raked Freeman's legs and he screamed in agony. Mersiha began screaming too, and Freeman covered her with his body. His last coherent thought was that if the man with blue eyes wanted to kill the girl, he'd have to shoot her through him.
    Freeman drifted in and out of consciousness several times before becoming fully awake. His mouth was dry and he could barely swallow and he could feel nothing below his waist. He tried to raise his head so that he could look at his legs but all his strength seemed to have evaporated. A woman screamed to his left, a plaintive wail that made Freeman's heart start pounding. He slowly turned his head to where the sound had come from, but he couldn't see further than the neighbouring bed and its occupant - a man with heavily bandaged eyes. Blood was seeping from under the bandages and the man's hands were gripping the bedsheets tightly. Somebody was crying, and somebody else was moaning, and he could make out hushed voices in a language he couldn't understand.
    He managed to slide his left arm up the bed in an attempt to see what the time was but when he finally got his wrist up to the pillow he discovered that his watch had been removed.
    He turned his head to the right, looking for a nurse, a doctor, anyone who could tell him where he was and when he'd be going home. There seemed to be no one in authority in the ward, no one treating the sick or consoling the suffering. Freeman lay back and stared at the ceiling. At least he was in a hospital. For a while he concentrated on his legs, to see if there was any sensation at all. He tried flexing his toes and moving his feet, but he had no way of telling if he was succeeding or not. There was no feeling at all.
    He heard metal grating and glass rattling and he looked towards the sound. An old woman in a blood-stained blue and white uniform was pushing a trolley full of bottles down the 22 STEPHEN LEATHER middle of the ward. Freeman tried to raise an arm to attract her attention but the effort was beyond him. He tried to call out but his throat was too dry. Tears welled up in his eyes. It wasn't fair, he thought. It just wasn't fair.
    'Tony? Tony, wake up.' The voice pulled Freeman out of a nightmare where he was trapped in a car wreck, covered in blood and screaming. The scream blended into Katherine's voice and when he opened his eyes she was standing by the side of his bed next to a man in a grey suit.
    Katherine saw his eyes open and she sat down on the side of the bed. 'Thank God,' she said. 'Tony, are you okay?' She held his left hand and squeezed it.
    Freeman smiled at the question. He wanted to say something witty, something to make her smile, but no words would come. All he could do was blink his eyes to show that he understood. Katherine turned to the man in the suit. 'We have to get him out of here,' she said.
    The man nodded. 'That won't be a problem,' he said. He was American, his voice a mid-western drawl.
    Freeman tightened his grip on Katherine's hand and he shook his head. No, there was something he had to do first.
    The car rattled through potholed streets, past buildings that were pockmarked with bullet-holes and gutted by fire. Electric cables draped over the sides of abandoned buildings like dead snakes. In the distance Freeman heard gunshots, the single rounds of a sniper. He looked across at Katherine and she forced a smile.
    The man in the passenger seat twisted around and looked at Freeman over the top of his glasses. 'I can't stress enough what a bad idea this is, Mr Freeman,' he said. His name was Connors and he was with the State Department. He was the man who'd THE BIRTHDAY GIRL 23 taken Katherine to the hospital and who'd had him transferred to a United Nations