by Tom Grass
Red looked up at the gap between the buildings each time they reached the outer edge of the stairwell, wondering if she would see a pair of dark-clad figures leap across above them. But they were met by no one when they reached the roof and crouched, flattened against the back of a forty-eight-sheet advertising hoarding.
Her nerves were wrecked after the car chase but she was still thinking straight and she saw now, for the first time, the pain Bill was in and the danger his death wish posed for them all.
‘They’re late,’ he spat.
‘You drive fast, Bill,’ Fagin replied, pushing back with his feet so his back slid up the smooth weather-beaten plywood of the hoarding until he was upright and visible to the single dark figure who was running towards them.
‘About time,’ Bill growled.
‘Where’s Oliver?’ Red asked, not even trying to disguise her concern.
‘We got split up,’ Dodge replied.
Red watched him shuffle back on his feet, alert and out of reach as Bill stepped forwards.
‘Who’s got the paintings?’ Bill said.
‘He has. You think we switched in mid-air?’
Bill stayed within the shadow of the hoarding, his expression invisible to Dodge.
‘Where is he?’
‘He was right behind me and then …’ Dodge protested, throwing up his arms.
Red watched Bill reach slowly inside his jacket pocket and pull out his Beretta and aim it at Dodge’s chest. There was nothing to be done. He was fast and he was holding a gun.
‘He’s telling the truth,’ said a voice from above and behind them.
Red knew it was Twist and she turned, searching for him until she saw the outline of his body, dark against the dull glow of the night sky on the far edge of the roof. He had his right arm hooked over his shoulder and he drew the silver tube up from his back and held it skyward like a sword.
‘You want them?’ he said. ‘Then she comes with me.’ He pointed the tube directly at Red.
She moved too slow and felt Bill’s fingers snatch her and pull her hard against him, pressing the cold hard metal of the gun barrel into her right cheek.
‘You really think she’s worth it?’ Bill asked, and she saw Twist lower the art tube and hold it back off the far edge of the building where the river ran below.
‘Try me,’ he replied.
‘Do what he says, Bill,’ Fagin cautioned, stepping forwards so that he was behind Bill was was also moving, step by step, towards Twist with the barrel of his gun pushing into Red’s right ear.
‘Meet you halfway, boy,’ he said, watching Twist step down from the raised platform, cross the roof and rejoin the edge, walking along it with the tube extended fully in his left hand above the drop.
53
‘You got more stones than I gave you credit for,’ Sikes said, messing Red’s hair with the barrel of the Beretta.
Twist was close enough to see the scratches on the butt of the gun where the serial number had been filed off. He shuffled a half-step closer to the edge, watching Fagin cross silently behind Sikes and stick his neck out over the precipice.
‘Helicopters,’ he said, craning one ear in the air as he peered down at the street below. ‘We can’t hang about.’
It was a busy street. There were late-night shoppers leaving the Galleria, laden with bags in the darkness, a bus stop with a queue filled with exhausted grandmothers clutching their bargains, a pair of Spanish au pairs and a drunk who kept getting up from his perch in the doorway of the cinema exit to grovel.
For a moment there was silence. Twist met Sikes’s steady gaze and the pair of them stayed like that, eyeballing one another, waiting for the other to blink. But the growl from the stairwell surprised everyone. It was Bullseye with Cribb following.
‘I got the text,’ Cribb said to Fagin, pointing at the dog. ‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t hold him …’
Twist tensed, watching the dog pad across the roof, its head low to the ground, stalking closer, uncertain why it had been left alone, making its way back to the heel of its master. It was an ugly brute and stupid, even by dog standards.
‘Sick,’ Sikes muttered, and Twist looked down and saw an ugly snarl split the dog’s punched-in face, drawing the folds of flesh back to reveal its canines as it crept towards him across the rooftop, keeping low so that Twist could not watch dog and master simultaneously.
He heard its growl two feet from his groin and he fought the urge to look down at the threat, failed, and that was all it took. A hand flashed beneath his eyes and he felt himself caught by the front of his jacket and pulled down hard onto the roof. He was rolled over, flat on his back, a gun in his face, pushing its way past his teeth into his mouth.
‘I’m still faster than you,’ Sikes said, taking the tube from Twist and passing it back to Fagin who went to work immediately, his hands moving fast, pulling off the lid.
‘It’s them, Bill. Let him go,’ Fagin said.
Sikes forced the gun further into Twist’s mouth until it was pressing down into his throat so hard he couldn’t swallow.
‘Can’t do it, FBoss. Little runt thinks he’ll step into my shoes.’
Twist heard the hammer of the pistol being cocked, then felt the barrel scrape against his lips as Sikes pulled it out of his mouth.
‘Come here,’ Sikes said, pulling Red close to him.
It was below zero and the wind chilled the sweat in Twist’s clothes. He knew it was the end of the line. The game he was playing now was for everything and he was playing against a psychopath with a gun held to the head of the girl he was in love with. And even if the card he was about to play trumped Skies and they got away with the money, they still had to outrun the law.
It was a pretty hopeless situation and he had walked right into it with his eyes open but it was like Red said; the difference between a man and a boy was that a man stands up, looks you in the eye and asks for what he wants. And he’d made the decision to change the moment she had put it out there, but in one respect only. His imagination was his best friend. The only one who’d stuck around. And if he did get out of this alive he wasn’t going to compromise again.
He stared into Sikes’s eyes.
‘You’ll get more for them as a set,’ he said, watching Sikes’s eyes widen as he reached inside his rucksack.
‘Don’t you move.’ Sikes pointed the gun at Twist again.
‘Easy,’ Twist replied. ‘Just going for my phone.’
Twist watched as Fagin craned sideways, holding his head at an angle so he could see round Sikes’s back.
‘Go on,’ Sikes said.
Twist brushed the screen with his fingertips, spinning through the media, until the one marked ‘+3’ appeared and he saw Fagin pull on his beard and Red bite her lip and Sikes flick the gun barrel, telling him to start.
So he hit play and the grainy video began, shaky and indistinct, the screen filled with the red brick of a wall, the black metal of a pipe and the hand that gripped it. Then a shot of a section of a white wooden window frame and the room behind it, a bathroom, cobalt black tiles to the ceiling and an antique bath.
And then back to the window and a hand reaching up to unhitch the latch, and the worn sole of a red Converse gripping the glass from the inside. Then the camera readjusting to take in the room inside, a bathroom, and Twist looked up and saw recognition seep into Sikes’s eyes as he saw the polished gold taps in the cobalt-tiled wet room in the penthouse suite that belonged to the Russian, Arkady Rodchenko.
And the memory was not his alone. He watched Red’s eyes as the camera moved unsteadily down the hall from the bathroom onto a mezzanine level, then turn and look back suddenly to capture a twelve-foot-tall painting of an angel brandishing a broad sword.
Red risked a glance at Twist. She saw now what he had done. She looked back at Fagin, who stood poker-faced behind her, and wondered if he’d had anything to do with this deception. He watched over her shoulder as the camera entered the living room and p
anned round until it picked out three paintings hanging, uplit, in plain view on the living-room wall.
Their details were indistinct in the shadow but as the camera got closer it was clear to make out the first of the Losberne Hogarths, allegedly lost in a fire over two hundred and fifty years ago before resurfacing in the hands of a lecherous art dealer in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
A jump cut followed and then the camera was steady, propped up on the same table, capturing a pair of nimble hands reflected in a mirror, working quickly, rolling the third of the Losberne Hogarths up tight so that it slotted neatly into a tubular silver case.
Twist watched each of their expressions in turn as he appeared in frame, lifting his mask and raising his thumb to the camera.
He felt a hand slap him on the back and he dropped the phone. Twist watched as Dodge came round from behind him to pick it up but came up short as Sikes zeroed the Beretta’s sights on his left eyeball.
‘Where are they?’ Sikes said.
‘I walk out of here, with Red. I’ll call you, tell you where you can find them,’ Twist replied.
‘No way.’
‘We need the paintings, Bill … They’ll have helicopters up in the sky by now,’ Fagin said, twisting his hand up into the air as he entered the exchange on the right side of the gunman.
‘Helicopters should be the least of your worries right now,’ Twist added, watching Sikes’s expression.
‘Rodchenko?’
Twist nodded.
‘What’s he going to do when he finds out you double-crossed him?’ Twist said.
‘What?’
‘I sent him the video, told him where the rendezvous was. He’ll be here any minute now.’
Twist watched Sikes’s face as it hit him in the stone-cold silence that followed. The most powerful crime syndicate west of Moscow now wanted him dead. He was recalling the circular chamber and the oath. The night he’d bargained for Red’s freedom. Repeating the words, parrot-fashion, stood stripped down in the surreal luminous half-light cast by the jellyfish propelling themselves through the glass tubes of Rodchenko’s aquarium.
It had been the first of the eighteen vory codes that Rodchenko had spoken in Russian and Sikes recalled his frustration at being forced to wait, a full second, sensing Rodchenko’s sadistic pleasure, before the Russian translated the oath into English so that Sikes could understand it. It was, Sikes had since discovered, a ritual that now spanned continents but which dated back to a specific time and place, deep inside the ice fields of Siberia where the dark brotherhood had been forged in the frozen hell of Stalin’s gulags in defiance of the state.
He’d known that night that he was signing his life away but he’d had no choice but to comply. He had loved Red then and there had been no other way to save her than to accept the offer that Rodchenko had made him. To swear fealty to a higher criminal order which was the sickest joke of all considering his long-held wish to abandon Fagin and his two-bit schemes and move up to the bigger leagues.
Sikes had read the codes many times since the night he’d sworn to uphold them. He’d weighed up each oath in turn, playing through the kinds of situations that he might find himself in when he would have to abide by them or face the consequences. But he had never expected this and he smiled now, his eyes blinking as he stared at Twist, steeling himself to uphold the first oath he had sworn, that he would never, as a thief ‘under the law’, show his emotions.
‘Time’s running out, Bill,’ Twist said. ‘What’s it going to be?’
54
Sikes was smart but not like Fagin. His idea of a Plan B involved smashing a two and a half ton Phantom the wrong way up a one-way street and Twist watched as he struggled to assimilate all the facts. Fact one, he couldn’t do Twist like he had done Harry and then Batesy. Fact two, he was going to have to let Twist take his girl. Fact three, if he didn’t do what Twist wanted in the next five minutes he was going to die a horrible prolonged death at the hands of hardened Russian criminals.
Twist watched him turn to Fagin. It was a revelation to Twist, like watching the hands of a clock rewind ten years in five seconds. To a time before the gang, when Sikes had been running, wanted for attempted murder on top of two previous for aggravated assault. Red had told him all about it. How he’d caught up with Little Ricky, his younger sister’s dealer, in a truck stop café in Romford and stuck a screwdriver through the side of his skull. His sister, who had been sixteen when she’d OD’d. The only family he’d ever had.
Fagin nodded back at him and Sikes lowered the gun and released his grip on Red. She stepped away into the space between him and Twist. She looked at Twist and then turned and looked back at Sikes and at Fagin behind him.
‘I’ll find you,’ Sikes said.
But Red shook her head and took Twist’s hand when he reached forward for her and then they turned and they were running, building momentum, their hands separating as they approached the gap. A single shot rang out and Twist felt Red react, following her as she dug in her heels, skidding and dropping beside her, the gravel flying above their heads as they slowed to a stop.
He felt the gravel embedded in his hands where he had used to them as brakes, and turned to see Dodge wrestling with Sikes. He had deflected the first shot and now he was fighting for his life. It was a close contest. They were on the floor, grappling. Dodge had his thighs around Sikes’s chest and he was trying to choke him but Sikes was fighting back, using what little oxygen he had available to strike Dodge repeatedly in the face with the butt of the Beretta.
‘Oliver! Oliver! Come now!’
It was Red. She was up and screaming his name. Begging him to come with her before it was too late. Twist saw blood spurt from Dodge’s nose as Sikes broke it and Fagin running for the fire escape shouting at Sikes to stop but doing nothing to help the boy.
He turned to look at Red. He was torn. For all the trouble Dodge had got him into he’d been a good mate but now he had Red to think about, and she was screaming something about Russians and pointing down into the street below.
Two of them, getting out of the back doors of a Mercedes, one big and bear-like in a fur hat and the other angular and emotionless in a green puffa jacket and both of them light on their feet and moving fast towards the fire escape.
‘Argh!’
Twist heard the scream and turned. It was Dodge. Sikes had shot him and he was down. He was lying on the floor squirming in agony. His face was a bloody pulp and he was holding his left thigh and Fagin was waving his hands in the air, calling out to Sikes as he went to pull Bullseye off the stricken Dodge.
‘Run, Oliver! Run!’ Fagin shouted, as Sikes raised his gun and fired. Twist scrambled to his feet, following Red who was running for the shelter of the lift engine room halfway along the hundred metre roof. A fourth gunshot followed. It ricocheted off the engine room a fraction of a second after Red took cover behind it.
Twist sprinted wide, hoping the lights of the adjoining buildings would make it harder for Sikes to focus, getting as much distance between him and the bullets as possible, then turning sharply into a tight left-hander and running for the engine room and Red.
Two more shots rang out and Twist looked left to see Sikes hobbling towards him firing wildly. He signalled to Red to run for the furthest edge of the roof as the two Russians came storming up from the fire escape, moving together, the one in the puffa jacket covering the first from a kneeling position as the Bear reached the top and drew what looked like a machine pistol from a holster concealed inside his leather bomber jacket.
Twist was sprinting and Red’s hand was in his as they ran for the far edge of the roof not knowing what lay ahead. As they ran Twist thought of Dodge, left wounded, and Fagin and the paintings in the tube as the pistol shots sent gravel fizzing up from the flat tarmac to their right.
The edge of the roof came fast and they both dived flat. The rapid drilling of the machine pistols and the return fire of the Beretta sounded close on t
he roof behind them as sirens whined in the streets below. Twist followed Red as she turned her stomach to the edge and lowered her hands until they were hanging side by side, then they exchanged a look before dropping the twenty feet to the flat roof below.
This roof was on the third storey of the building. Sixty-plus feet to the ground but they weren’t alone and they watched, turning as they ran, as Sikes dropped off the edge, rolled backwards and sprang up on his feet.
‘Here I come!’ he yelled, limping, fishing for a fresh clip in his jacket pocket as Red and Twist zigzagged across the roof, vaulting air conditioning units and ducking for cover as a bullet smashed into a steel satellite dish and zipped out past them into the night air. But then the Beretta stopped and Twist realised that the drilling sound had stopped too. Which meant the Russians must have legged it, with or without their paintings, when they first heard the sirens. But it left one question: had Sikes stopped firing because he was conserving bullets or because he had run out of them?
Twist reached the edge first and looked down. There was a building below but it was too far to make from a standing jump and Sikes was closing fast.
‘You can do this!’ Red said and Twist looked up to see herdancing backwards, half skipping. His mind burned as he weighed up the risk.
A couple of bullets left in Sikes’s gun versus a twenty-foot-long jump with a vertical drop of twenty feet from a limited run-up. It took him about a millisecond.
‘You go first!’ he shouted at Red as he sprinted to her, fifteen feet back from the edge.
She didn’t budge. With Sikes just thirty feet behind her she didn’t move an inch. Not until Twist got to her and then they turned together, took a deep breath and sprinted for the edge. The floor dropped out from under him as he soared across the canyon looking down at the crowd staring open-mouthed from the street below.