Lie Down With Lions by Ken Follett

and stuck his foot in the way. The door hit his shoe and bounced back. But in the act of stepping forward he had spread his arms, for balance, and now his gun was pointing up into the corner of the ceiling.
    He’s going to kill Ellis, Jane thought. He’s going to kill Ellis.
    She threw herself at the gunman, beating his face with her fists, for suddenly, although she hated Ellis, she did not want him to die.
    The man was distracted for only a fraction of a second. With one strong arm he hurled Jane aside. She fell heavily, landing in a sitting position, bruising the base of her spine.
    She saw what happened next with terrible clarity.
    The arm that had shoved her aside came back and flung the door wide. As the man swung his gun hand around, Ellis came at him with the bottle of wine raised high above his head. The gun went off as the bottle came down, and the shot coincided with the sound of glass breaking.
    Jane stared, horrified, at the two men.
    Then the gunman slumped, and Ellis remained standing, and she realized that the shot had missed.
    Ellis bent down and snatched the gun from the man’s hand.
    Jane got to her feet with an effort.
    “Are you all right?” Ellis asked her.
    “Alive,” she said.
    He turned to Jean-Pierre. “How many on the street?”
    Jean-Pierre glanced out of the window. “None.”
    Ellis looked surprised. “They must be concealed.” He pocketed the gun and went to his bookcase. “Stand back,” he said, and hurled it to the floor.
    Behind it was a door.
    Ellis opened the door.
    He looked at Jane for a long moment, as if he had something to say but could not find the words. Then he stepped through the door and was gone.
    After a moment Jane walked slowly over to the secret door and looked through. There was another studio flat, sparsely furnished and dreadfully dusty, as if it had not been occupied for a year. There was an open door and, beyond it, a staircase.
    She turned back and looked into Ellis’s room. The gunman lay on the floor, out cold in a puddle of wine. He had tried to kill Ellis, right here in this room: already it seemed unreal. It all seemed unreal: Ellis being a spy; Jean-Pierre knowing about it; Rahmi being arrested; and Ellis’s escape route.
    He had gone. I never want to see you again, she had said to him just a few seconds ago. It seemed that her wish would be granted.
    She heard footsteps on the stairs.
    She raised her gaze from the gunman and looked at Jean-Pierre. He, too, seemed stunned. After a moment he crossed the room to her and put his arms around her. She slumped on his shoulder and burst into tears.

PART II

    1982

CHAPTER FOUR
    T he river came down from the ice line, cold and clear and always in a rush, and it filled the Valley with its noise as it boiled through the ravines and flashed past the wheatfields in a headlong dash for the faraway lowlands. For almost a year that sound had been constantly in Jane’s ears: sometimes loud, when she went to bathe or when she took the winding cliffside paths between villages; and sometimes soft, as now, when she was high on the hillside and the Five Lions River was just a glint and a murmur in the distance. When eventually she left the Valley she would find the silence unnerving, she thought, like city dwellers on holiday in the countryside who cannot sleep because it is too quiet. Listening, she heard something else, and she realized that the new sound had made her aware of the old. Swelling over the river’s chorus came the baritone of a propeller-driven aircraft.
    Jane opened her eyes. It was an Antonov, the predatory, slow-moving reconnaissance plane whose incessant growl was the usual herald of faster, noisier jet aircraft on a bombing run. She sat up and looked anxiously across the Valley.
    She was in her secret refuge, a broad, flat shelf halfway up a cliff. Above her, the overhang hid her from view without blocking the sun, and would dissuade anyone but a mountaineer from climbing down. Below, the approach