by David Caris
Kovac glanced back and noted two men in cargo pants and matching black wicking tops a few hundred yards behind him.
A black wicking top wasn’t an everyday item. Which meant the odds of two of them appearing in this street at the same time were small. Add in the matching cargo pants and the odds became infinitesimally small. The two men were doing the same thing, too. They were moving with the confidence of cops, systematically approaching people.
Like they had instructions to clear the area, Kovac thought.
He picked up his pace, sensing a fight he couldn’t possibly win. He needed to get to the stadium.
The man Kovac had first noticed – the man in the rumpled jacket – fell in behind him. Kovac would normally have used his phone as a mirror, pretending to text as he used the dark screen like a car rear-view. But he didn’t have his phone. He was also out of cars.
He pretended to drop something and crouched to pick it up, managing a glance back in the process without being too obvious. The man was pushing fifty, short, with dyed brown hair and a beard that was white at the chin. He was on his phone.
Kovac resumed walking, keeping his pace restrained but putting real length in each step now. There was one street between Kovac and the football stadium. It created a T-intersection at the end of the street he was on, and there was a hawker on one corner. He was a young guy, who looked hopelessly bored. Kovac made for him, hoping to score a ticket, but a Mercedes Vito van pulled up nearby.
The sound of brakes carried on the evening air, as if Kovac were suddenly the only human left in London.
It took more than two guys to clear an area this big… Kovac didn’t bother with the hawker. He walked straight between him and the van, checking for traffic as he went. He glanced at the two men in the driver and passenger seats of the Vito van – because why not? Anyone crossing the road would.
Cops?
If so, that meant what? An ARV?
Kovac wasn’t convinced. If it was an Armed Response Vehicle, why was it unmarked? Was there even such a thing as an unmarked ARV?
Kovac made it a rule to study local law enforcement wherever he went, and London was no exception. He was familiar with ARVs, and equally familiar with what they usually contained. It wasn’t anything he wanted to see this evening – at least not until he was on into the stadium.
No one got out of the van.
Which meant Kovac didn’t need to run. Yet.
He closed in on the stadium’s main pavilion, which towered over a smaller, redbrick building emblazoned with the words “The Fulham Football Club”. Kovac guessed the redbrick building contained the ticket gates. He made for it, but heard the van’s doors open. He quickened his pace and stepped into the redbrick building, breaking into a jog as soon as he was inside. He ignored the large red ticket scanner on the wall, and two guys in a booth, both in orange vests, shouted for him to scan his ticket. He ignored them too and effortlessly jumped the few obstacles preventing entry.
Kovac risked a look back, and saw two men with holstered Glock 17 pistols.
Judging from the pistols, they were either mercenaries or British Transport Police. If they were police, they were likely to be part of a Specialist Firearms Team. The BTP specialist firearms team was normally a collection of Authorized Firearms Officers operating in pairs. Two-person patrols, like the men in the black wicking tops and the men behind him now. The two behind him didn’t have the wicking tops, but they did have the cargo pants.
Whoever they were, Kovac doubted they were going to waste much time on tasering or spraying. If things went pear-shaped here, he would need hostages.
Kovac strode across an open-air expanse of concrete between the redbrick building and pavilion, but didn’t enter the pavilion itself. Instead, he made for the first pocket of congestion he saw, slicing through the middle of the crowd before picking out another bottleneck. Here, he jumped a barrier, taking the chance to check behind him again. The same two men were on him. They’d dropped back a little, but both had their hands to their hips.
Kovac figured they were on comms, and that meant a good risk of another pair intercepting him up ahead.
He continued inserting himself into crowds as he made his way to the Riverside Stand. He joined a group of perhaps twenty jostling for position at The Riverside Bar – a hole-in-the-wall bar with a range of beers, hot food and snacks. A cleaner was exiting a side staff door with a trolley with bags for trash and a collection of mops and cleaning products. Kovac pushed to the front of the queue, removing his windbreaker and putting it on the counter before demanding a beer.
People around him complained that he was jumping the queue. He ignored them. The pregnant woman serving gave him a dirty look but nevertheless poured his beer. She wanted him gone before tensions escalated further.
As he waited on the beer, Kovac grabbed a handful of paper napkins.
The beer came in a plastic cup. Kovac wrapped it in napkins and walked away. He left his windbreaker, as if he had forgotten it, and ignored the insults shouted after him as he broke clear and followed the cleaner.
The cleaner moved around a corner, swiped his pass and entered a restricted area, the door clicking shut behind him. This left the cleaner’s cart momentarily unattended. Kovac approached, simultaneously moving the napkins to his pocket and pulling up his shirt front. He put his beer on the cart, and used the cart to disguise his next few movements. He withdrew the Glock, and wiped it down with his shirt front, ready to drop it in the trash and cover it with napkins. There were no cameras on him here, and he would lose his gun but also avoid a weapons charge. A fair trade-off under the circumstances.
He listened for the AFOs around the corner. He heard them arrive, heard them ask about him, and heard everyone in the queue there happily betray him. The AFOs were told that he had left a windbreaker on the counter, but it didn’t have the desired effect. The officers didn’t tell everyone to step back and clear the area.
So not cops, Kovac thought. AFOs had a protocol to follow in the event of a bomb scare, and these guys were ignoring it. Or they didn’t even know about it.
So this was something else, someone else.
Kovac re-holstered his Glock as his mind moved to the possibility of a hit. If this was an attempt on his life, it changed everything. And not just his comfort level with carrying a weapon. He wouldn’t be able to involve a citizen, because he couldn’t rely on private contractors to prioritize the citizen’s life over his own death.
The cleaner re-emerged from the restricted area just as Kovac dropped his shirt front again and picked up his beer. He looked surprised to see Kovac lingering at his cart, so Kovac dropped a few remaining napkins in the trash as if he had been cleaning out pockets the whole time and asked the man for directions to the pavilion.
The cleaner relaxed and got busy pointing and talking in lefts and rights, and he was caught completely off guard when Kovac snatched the security pass from his hand, pressed forward and opened the door to the restricted area. He stepped inside, and pulled the door shut again with a satisfying click. He did it all before the cleaner could even react, locking him out and ignoring his shouting.
Kovac walked along a few corridors, casual as you like, then exited again and went straight for a public restroom. Here, he found a guy urinating and three empty toilet stalls.
No time to do this the subtle way, and too risky to use his gun. He put his beer down on one end of the urinal, and grabbed the guy by the back of his Fulham F.C. football windbreaker. He pulled hard and the man reeled back, his dick still out, piss going everywhere. Kovac snarled something about his girlfriend not being a whore, punching the man in the face as he forced him into the closest open toilet stall. He wasn’t punching hard, but hard enough. The man was bleeding. He was unbalanced, the back of his knees to the toilet bowl. He was spluttering that he didn’t even know Kovac – or his girlfriend. He put his hands out in a show of confused innocence, so Kovac used one of these hands to spin him. He removed the man�
��s windbreaker and Fulham F.C. cap, putting both on. ‘You know what,’ he said, forcing the terrified man down onto this knees and standing over him, ‘on second thoughts, you can keep her.’ Kovac delivered a vicious punch to a point halfway down the ropey sternocleidomastoid muscle, which just happened to be bulging helpfully on the man’s neck. The man dropped, instantly unconscious, and Kovac caught him, limiting the damage as he flopped forward. The man would wake soon enough, but it would be a long time before his garbled story about a guy and his girlfriend made any sense.
Kovac climbed out of the stall, leaving it locked, jumped down, collected his beer again and headed for the stands.
Chapter 8
Caleb Van Heythuysen was disgusted with himself. Not with his current self, his former self. To think he had once been a man so self-piteous, he cried himself to sleep: a fat, weak man, filled with equal parts anxiety and rage.
He was staring at his reflection in a gym mirror. He was a new man now, and he liked what he saw. He was sitting in a hoodie that was unzipped. He had no T-shirt, and he could see one side of his upper torso. One clearly defined pectoral muscle and two abdominal muscles. There was the shadow of a third ab and hardly any fat left around his navel. Deep in the shadows of the hoodie, his midsection now tapered down exactly the way male midsections were meant to do. He looked like a man again, instead of the doughy, bloated alcoholic he had so recently been.
The journey had been torturous. Salmon for dinner, with a side serving of green vegetables. Rice for lunch. Protein shakes for breakfast. And more seaweed than was left in the ocean. But with every temptation he overcame, with every pound he lost, there was a new belief in his ability to conquer anything.
He stood and reached for the overhead bar. He finished his last set of chin-ups, bringing his knees to his chest on each repetition, then dropped down and made his way through to the change rooms. He checked his phone. There was a message. It read: “At the stadium, on the run”.
He switched the phone off with mild irritation. Another update on John Kovac. He didn’t give a shit about John Kovac. He only cared about Luther Curzon. That fuck had taken everything Van Heythuysen had built. Ten years in a shitty office with three other guys, enduring their stink, their bitching, their countless coding screw-ups.
He hit the showers, reminding himself that his life was his own. The past was the past. He steered this ship nowadays. He was strong in mind, strong in spirit, and most important of all, strong in body.
He switched the shower off and went for a towel. He admired his naked form in this new mirror, before drying his hair, his torso and his legs. He wrapped the towel around his waist and put on his watch. He checked the time. His mid-shift break, which always came at 6 p.m., was almost over. He was required back in his little seat, strapped to a computer with a headset, like a dog on a chain.
He swore under his breath, before catching himself. He didn’t do that anymore. He didn’t complain. And what were a few more days anyway…? He had been calling people about their car insurance for close to two years… He could do two more days.
Chapter 9
Kovac was high in the stalls, seated, watching the match. If anyone arrived or tried to close in on him from any angle, he had it covered.
He began his wait, head down, eyes up, one human in an ocean of humans. He sipped at his beer, weighing his options. He wasn’t through this thing, whatever it was. He was just in the eye of the storm. He still needed a way out of this stadium – one that would go unnoticed.
He looked around. There wasn’t much lighting, everyone was shrouded in evening gloom. The stand had a giant roof with metal cross beams, the entire edifice supported by several large pylons which rose up from the seating. Down the front, near the goals, a section of the crowd had unfurled a giant Fulham F.C. flag. It covered perhaps thirty seats and was being flapped rhythmically. The noise of the cheering and chanting was like a passenger jet being throttled up and down – sometimes without much warning.
Kovac was happy to sit tight a while, because the crowd was good cover. Everything was moving. People were walking up and down the isles between the seats. They were buying or eating food. Yet others were jumping up and cheering, trying not to spill drinks and often failing miserably.
At the far end of the ground, giant lights towered over the opposing stands, flooding the pitch with light. They were presumably duplicated somewhere above Kovac, too. The grass was an almost fluorescent green.
An old guy with glasses beside Kovac had a beer that more or less matched Kovac’s own. He had just arrived, though he seemed harmless. He offered a toast. ‘Real football,’ he said by way of an opening. ‘Not in some sanitized spaceship center with prawn sandwiches, mind, but a real stand. Everyone packed in nice and tight. Can you feel it?’
Kovac nodded, head down, still scanning.
‘A hundred thousand with us, and all of them ready to break out in song.’ He offered his hand. The wrong hand, on account of his beer. Kovac shook it, without the least interest. He took another sip of his beer. He was wondering how he had messed up. How had these men closed in on him at the phone booth without him noticing sooner? And why the elaborate efforts to clear the area?
The man beside him was still talking drunkenly about the stadium. Kovac didn’t hear much of it.
Possibility one: Curzon had suffered a massive data dump and there was a warrant out for Kovac’s arrest.
Unlikely. It still didn’t feel like the AFO. The AFO was a counter-terrorist outfit, but these men weren’t following the AFO’s protocols. Certainly wasn’t beat cops, either.
Kovac realized he could confirm or eliminate possibility one right now. He asked the old guy beside him for his phone, to do a quick Google search. The man didn’t hesitate. He handed over a state-of-the-art Samsung without concern, and said: ‘Pin’s 5555. My wife keeps telling me to change it, but sadly there’s nothing on there worth hiding. If I wasn’t married, I wouldn’t carry it. You know how it goes, I bet.’
Kovac nodded. The fuck he did.
He checked the Guardian. No new scoop on a corporate assassin. No talk of any compromising data stemming from the Curzon hack yet. If anything they were playing it down, walking back their original breathless speculation. It was now being characterized as a nuisance – some heavy-handed digital attention-grabbing.
Kovac handed the phone back. ‘How much for the phone?’ he asked, even as he let go of it.
‘To buy it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s not really for –’
‘Two grand do it?’
‘Two grand?’
Kovac took out cash from his rainy-day fund and waggled it as he moved on to possibility two: his identity was compromised, but not all the way. Perhaps his mug shot was yet to hit the press, but friends of people he had assassinated had it. There were plenty of those, and plenty who could pull together an attack like this at short notice.
Possibility three was the one he was hoping for. Curzon was looking to outsource the difficult job of bringing him in.
Kovac liked possibility three. It explained Bibi. Old enemies wouldn’t know about Bibi, but he had always wondered if maybe Bishop did.
Kovac saw the man in the rumpled jacket appear at one of the entrances to his stand. The man started scanning the seated spectators. He was alone, which meant Kovac had successfully confused the two officers tailing him by moving through a restricted area. They wouldn’t have expected that, and even if they did see him enter they would’ve had their work cut out following without passes. The disguise from the bathroom helped too.
The man in the rumpled jacket was a good operator. Kovac figured he was in charge. He was clearly a cut above his subordinates, and still vaguely on Kovac’s tail.
Kovac took a final sip of beer – enough to look like he was working his way through it, not so much he would ever feel the effects. The man in the rumpled jacket was still talking into a phone, and a few angry spectators shouted for him
to sit down or “fuck right off”. He ignored them, calmly scanning the crowd. He wouldn’t be looking for F.C. football clothing or a man with a beer, but he was probably good enough not to rule either out.
Eye of the storm, Kovac thought, realizing there was a way to rule out possibility three. He handed over the two grand to his bemused drunk, then punched Bishop’s number into his new phone.
He put it to his ear.
Chapter 10
‘I was beginning to lose hope you’d ever call,’ Bishop said.
‘These your dogs? Call them off.’
‘With the cap and beer and phone, and a new friend, I really don’t think they’re going to find you.’
Kovac lowered his head, emptying his lungs in defeat. Then, forcing himself to sit straight again, he swiveled in his seat.
Bishop was about fifteen rows back, off to his left. He had a phone to his ear and waved with his free hand: one fluid, relaxed movement, like a child palm painting a rainbow on an easel.
Kovac said: ‘You and I had a talk about creeping up on me, Bishop. It’s impolite. And dangerous.’
‘We did. And I said I don’t like doing it – which is why I’m fifteen rows back.’
‘Letting other people take the hit again, huh.’
Beside Kovac, the old man burped softly, then gave Kovac a smug smile. The eyes had changed. Kovac noticed he wasn’t just holding a beer anymore. He had a pistol. It was sitting in his lap, mostly obscured by his jacket, and pointed at Kovac. It was a Glock 36, and it had come from a holster not unlike Kovac’s. Which was flattering really. If nothing else, Kovac was keeping up with U.K. trends when it came to tacticool.
‘You forget I trained you,’ Bishop said via the phone. ‘When you move on instinct, you’re channeling me. It makes you easy to predict. And no offense, you’re slower than you once were.’