“I see.”
He turned and stood up to face her, being careful not to make any abrupt movement, and keeping his hands raised a little, but she still backed away a quick step.
“Don’t come any closer,” she said sharply.
He was just over an arm’s length from her then. He measured it accurately with his eye. And he was still utterly cool and removed from it all. The new stress that was building up in him was different from anything before. He knew now, beyond speculation, that murder was only a few seconds away, and it was one murder that he particularly wanted to prevent. But every one of his senses and reflexes would have to be sharper and surer than they had ever been before to see it coming and to forestall it... Every nerve in his body felt like a violin string that had been tuned to within an eyelash weight of breaking—
And when it came, the warning was a sound so slight that at any other time he might never have heard it — so faint and indeterminate that he was never absolutely sure what it actually was, if it was the rustle of a sleeve or a mere slither of skin against metal or nothing but an unconsciously tightened breath.
It was enough that he heard it, and that it exploded him into action too fast for the eye to follow — too fast even for his own deliberate mental processes to trace. But in one fantastic flow of movement it seemed that his left hand plunged at the gun that Lissa was holding, twisted it aside as it went off, and wrenched it out of her hand and threw her wide and stumbling while another shot from elsewhere chimed into the tight pile-up of sound effects; while at the same time, quite independently, his right hand leapt to his armpit holster in a lightning draw that brought his own gun out to bark a deeper note that practically merged with the other two... And that was just about all there was to it.
The Saint clipped his own gun back in its holster, and dropped Lissa’s automatic into his side pocket. It had all been so fast that he hadn’t even had time to get a hair of his head disarranged.
“I’m afraid you don’t have a very nice husband,” he said.
He stepped to the communicating door and dragged the drooping figure of Freddie Pellman the rest of the way into the room and pushed it into a chair.