The Last 10 Seconds

by Simon Kernick

  Everything suddenly seemed to move in slow motion as the male cop – twenty-five at most, probably younger – raised his hands in surrender, his dreams of being a hero evaporating across his face as the fear took over.

  I wanted to react. To turn my gun on Wolfe and Haddock and tell them to drop theirs because I was the police, maybe even open fire and rid the world of my brother’s killers for ever. But then Haddock calmly pulled the Remington’s trigger.

  The cop was lifted off his feet by the force of the blast and he literally flew backwards through the air, hands down by his side like a toy soldier, before landing hard on his back.

  ‘Out of here, now!’ roared Wolfe, looking at me. ‘And grab Kent!’

  Even through the intense ringing in my ears I could hear the panicked shouts coming from Ryan James and the other cop in the car behind me as they reacted to the sight of one of their own being shot in front of them. This was my worst nightmare. Getting in too deep on a job and seeing it all go pear-shaped in front of my eyes. The wounded cop was still moving, thank God, and had rolled over on to his side, but without medical help he’d be finished. And with the ambulance on the scene a wreck, and the paramedics traumatized, I wasn’t at all sure he was going to get it.

  Hating myself, I ran forward and hauled the injured Kent to his feet, half strangling him as I dragged him over to the people carrier, helped by Wolfe, while Haddock kept everyone else covered.

  Incredibly, only about thirty seconds had passed since the whole thing had begun and no traffic had appeared on the street. However, the first pedestrians were now appearing from up and down the street, staring at the scene unfolding in front of them from behind rows of parked cars, and making me feel strangely like an actor in a cheap, contemporary street play.

  Wolfe opened the side door and I threw Kent inside, stuffing the shotgun into his spine and forcing him into the aisle between the back seats, before jumping in behind him, while Haddock leaped in the other side.

  Wolfe backed up in a screech of tyres, then drove round the ambulance as Tommy reversed the Bedford van into a parked car to create a gap we could drive through. As we passed, Wolfe slowed and Tommy jumped in the open door, yanking it shut behind him.

  We were on our way.

  Twenty-four

  For a good three seconds, Tina sat there trying to take in what she was seeing through the glare of the flashing lights and the gloom fifty yards down the street. At first she just thought there’d been a bad accident involving the ambulance carrying Kent and a van that must have reversed out of one of the side streets; but then she saw men in balaclavas wrestling another man through the side door of a black people carrier, and she realized what was happening. Kent was being sprung from his escort and, more worryingly, the people doing it were armed: she could see one holding a shotgun and, further away, a uniformed police officer, recognizable by his white shirt and black stabproof vest, was lying injured on the ground.

  ‘My God,’ said Grier disbelievingly. ‘Is this some kind of hijack?’

  ‘Call back-up,’ Tina snapped as the people carrier suddenly backed up and drove round the ambulance. She shoved the Focus into first.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘What do you think? I’m not letting Kent get away.’

  Wishing she had a better pursuit vehicle, Tina accelerated away after the people carrier, telling Grier to stick the emergency halogen light she kept in the glovebox on the dashboard so that their quarry would know the police were after them.

  Another balaclava-clad figure jumped in the back of the people carrier, then it drove through the small gap between the crashed vehicles and the parked ones lining one side of the road before picking up speed as it continued down Doughty Street towards Theobalds Road.

  Tina followed it through the gap, clipping a parked car in the process. She couldn’t read the people carrier’s number plate as it was driving without lights, so she slammed her foot hard on the floor in an effort to catch up.

  The driver must have realized he was being followed because he speeded up as well and hurtled straight across the junction without stopping, narrowly missing a man on a bike who had to mount the pavement to avoid being hit, before doing a hard right, tyres wailing, and accelerating in the direction of Bloomsbury.

  Tina knew she had to do the same. She couldn’t lose them. Not when they were carrying a cargo as valuable as Andrew Kent. Clenching her teeth and ignoring Grier’s protests, she shot across the junction, yanking the wheel and only just managing to straighten up in time to avoid hitting a taxi that was dropping someone off on the other side of the road.

  Only twenty yards separated the Focus and the people carrier, and Tina felt a burst of delirious excitement that would have shocked her if she’d had time to think about it.

  Her quarry overtook a bus on the wrong side of the road, squeezing between oncoming traffic, hitting speeds of fifty miles an hour and getting faster all the time, and Tina followed suit, keeping tight to him.

  ‘Christ, be careful!’ yelled Grier as they swerved to avoid an approaching car. ‘You’ll get us killed!’

  ‘Get on the phone and tell them his number plate. We’re not losing this thing!’

  The people carrier weaved in the road, overtook another car, but it couldn’t shake Tina off. Now only fifteen yards separated them and she could just make out the numbers and letters on the plate.

  Then, without warning, one of the balaclava-clad figures leaned halfway out of the window and pointed a shotgun at them, looking very much as if he was taking aim. Grier yelled something unintelligible and Tina instinctively slammed her foot on the brakes and spun the wheel. She just had time to duck her head before the windscreen exploded, showering her with glass. The car spun round as she lost control and left the road, the suspension jarring angrily as she mounted the pavement and smashed sideways into an empty shopfront, scattering the diners at a next-door pavement café but managing to avoid hitting any of them, before finally coming to a halt.

  Tina’s breathing came in short, rapid bursts as she sat back up in the seat, letting shards of glass fall off her. The car had turned round completely now, but she could see the people carrier disappearing round the corner in her rearview mirror.

  She quickly checked herself but couldn’t see any sign of injury, then looked over at Grier, fearful that he might have been hurt, which would have been her fault. But he looked OK, shaken but uninjured. She felt an immediate relief. She’d already lost two colleagues in her career. She couldn’t face losing another.

  In fact he was still talking on the phone to the 999 operator, describing what had just happened, before adding that he hadn’t got a chance to take the registration number of the suspect vehicle. ‘We’re going to secure the scene now,’ he said, and rang off.

  Tina sighed. ‘Are you all right?’

  He glared at her, and she could see he was trying to keep calm, knowing that, whatever might be going through his head, she was still his superior – although for how much longer was anyone’s guess. Tina had always been considered something of a loose cannon, a copper who attracted trouble, even if that trouble wasn’t usually her fault. People who worked with her got killed; she’d even killed someone herself the previous year, while officially off duty, and though no blame had been attached to her for that, it was still seen by some as a blot on an already badly bloodstained copybook. Crashing a car into a shop during a high-speed chase and narrowly missing a dozen terrified pedestrians was another, especially when she’d been drinking.

  Tina sighed and rubbed her eyes. There was bound to be a breath test, and she was hugely relieved that she hadn’t drunk anything in the pub earlier, and that the two hits of vodka she’d sneaked in the toilet were long enough ago now to keep her under the limit.

  Even so, pretty soon her luck was going to run out.

  ‘I’m OK,’ Grier said quietly, his voice trembling with emotion, ‘but why did you do that, ma’am? You could have killed us both.’<
br />
  Grier was one of the new breed of cops, a desk man who didn’t like taking big risks, and although he’d held himself together enough to finish the phone call to the 999 operator, Tina felt a wave of contempt for him. ‘I had to make a split-second decision,’ she answered firmly. ‘I didn’t want to lose them.’

  ‘Well, you did lose them, ma’am,’ he said slowly, and she noticed that his hands were shaking. ‘You did bloody lose them.’

  And she had. She’d failed. She should have made sure Kent went to the hospital with an armed escort.

  Not only had she misread the situation, she also knew with a terrible lurch of certainty that if she’d held back rather than sped after the carrier like a teenage boy who’d just passed his test she would have stood a better chance of following them.

  She groaned. Whichever way she looked at it, the whole thing had been a set-up. And she’d fallen for it hook, line and sinker.

  Twenty-five

  ‘What did you shoot him for? You told me there was going to be no need for violence, and then your buddy here blows away a copper at point-blank range. Why?’

  We were now in the second getaway vehicle, a clapped-out minibus that had been stolen the day before from an old people’s home – a typically callous move from Tyrone Wolfe. He and Haddock were again in the front, with me sitting directly behind them, my shotgun resting on the back of Andrew Kent, who was lying lengthways along the narrow aisle separating the seats, face down and not speaking, eyes tightly shut. He was clearly desperate not to see any of our faces now that we’d removed our balaclavas, since to do so would effectively sentence him to death. Blood was still dribbling out of his head where I’d hit him earlier and one side of his face was covered in a network of dark rivulets. Behind me sat Tommy, smoking a cigarette and not saying a great deal.

  The people carrier had been dumped in a deserted car park behind a block of flats on the massive Barnsbury Estate in Islington, barely a mile from the snatch point, and set on fire to destroy any forensic evidence linking any of us to it. According to Wolfe, the area wasn’t covered by CCTV cameras, and no one had seen us change vehicles, so the minibus we’d been in for the last fifteen minutes as we drove north-west across London, mingling naturally with the other traffic, was clean.

  During that time I’d sat in brooding silence, shocked at what had just occurred. I was also thinking furiously about what I had to do to bring this situation under control. I knew I needed to gather as much information as possible about our next movements so I could lead police reinforcements to wherever we were going. First, though, I wanted to vent my spleen at the men who’d just gunned down a fellow police officer and, for the benefit of my recording device, get them to admit what they’d done, so there’d be no way they’d see the outside of a prison cell again.

  Wolfe was in the passenger seat now, Haddock doing the driving, and he swung round in the seat, the sharp, unforgiving features of his face pinched into an angry glare, the squint even more obvious than usual. ‘He got shot because he went for me, all right?’

  ‘But you got the guy off you,’ I snapped back. ‘At that point he wasn’t offering any resistance, so you could have just left it at that. Or if you were that worried, given him a whack with the butt of your gun. But no. Instead, this prick’ – I pointed at Haddock’s huge bulk – ‘shoots him, and now we’re going to have every copper for a hundred miles after us, not just for kidnap but murder as well. Maybe more than one, after the way you shot up the unmarked car that was following.’

  ‘Who are you calling a prick?’ demanded Haddock, glaring at me in the rearview mirror and slowing the van as he did so. ‘You apologize, or I’ll cut your fucking head off.’

  Wolfe told him to keep driving. ‘We don’t want to attract any attention. And you,’ he said, pointing at me, ‘apologize to him. Now.’

  I faced him down, no longer bothered about angering either of these two psychopaths, and finding it close to impossible to keep a lid on my emotions. More than anything right then I wanted to turn the shotgun on them, tell them who I was, and remind them of what they did to my brother. Then pull the trigger. Instead, I shook my head angrily. ‘Fuck you. Fuck you both. You’ve landed me in all kinds of shit.’

  ‘Come on, boys, calm down,’ said Tommy from behind me. ‘What’s done is done.’

  He’d already expressed his displeasure at the fact that a cop had been shot. But typical Tommy, after what could be described as a bit of a moan, he’d accepted it as an occupational hazard, and was now clearly trying to return everything to some sort of status quo. Like most violent criminals I’ve come across over the years, he rarely wasted time worrying about the plight of his victims, particularly those who wore a uniform, and I wondered if he used the same words to summarize what had happened to my brother. What’s done is done. Then just carried on with a big shrug of his shoulders, unworried by the havoc he’d caused in my family.

  ‘Well put, Tommy,’ said Wolfe. ‘What’s done is done. And I did what I had to do. If I’d tried to give him a slap and he’d grabbed the gun again, the whole thing could have been a complete fuck-up. There were four cops there as well as paramedics. We had to send a warning. That’s all there is to it. It was either put a hole in that copper, or run the risk of getting caught and spending ten years apiece inside.’ He sighed. ‘No one wants to shoot a copper—’

  ‘I do,’ said Haddock. ‘I hope the bastard’s dead. And I still want an apology from this dog.’

  ‘Leave it, Clarence,’ said Wolfe, before turning back to me and putting on a conciliatory expression. ‘What I’m trying to say, Sean, is that I don’t like hitting cops either, it’s always way too much hassle. But the fact is we’ve done what we were paid to do, which is get hold of this little fuck.’ He motioned towards Kent, who remained stock-still with his eyes shut. Instinctively, I pushed the barrel of my shotgun against the small of his back. After every other mistake I’d made with this investigation, I wasn’t going to let a dangerous and deranged sex killer escape.

  I sighed, wiping sweat from my brow with a gloved hand. The minibus had no air conditioning and the night was muggy and warm. ‘I want the rest of my money,’ I said, knowing I had enough evidence now to bag both Wolfe and Haddock, and finally avenge my brother. ‘Then I’m gone.’

  ‘You’ll get it when I’ve spoken to my client.’

  I wondered how the client was going to take the news that his plan for revenge had led to the death of at least one innocent person. If he was that interested in obtaining real justice, he was going to be very unhappy.

  ‘Speak to him now,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t order me around, Sean. I’ll speak to him at the rendezvous.’

  ‘And where’s that?’

  ‘It’s a nice, quiet spot, a long way from any nosy neighbours. About half an hour’s drive away.’

  ‘Who does it belong to?’

  ‘What do you need to know that for?’

  ‘Because I want to make sure there’s no paper trail that’ll lead the police to your client, and then back to me. That’s why.’

  ‘There’s no paper trail attached to this place. It’s been abandoned for years.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘The client told me, all right?’ Wolfe was sounding exasperated. ‘Now stop asking me questions. You’ll get the rest of your money later, and that’ll be the end of it.’

  I fell silent, knowing I was going to have to keep my wits about me for the next few hours because one thing was certain: no one in this van could be trusted. I’d had an uneasy feeling about this job from the beginning, but now, sitting here in the stifling heat, a trickle of fear ran down my spine.

  It was a feeling that grew a whole lot worse when Andrew Kent opened his eyes, looked up at me – his eyes full of the same kind of fear I’d seen in the uniformed cop in the moments just before he was shot – and said something very strange indeed.

  Twenty-six

  ‘You’re not one of them,
are you?’

  Kent spoke the words in a high-pitched, effeminate voice that fitted perfectly with the soft, boyish features of his face – features that I knew to my cost were dangerously deceptive. He’d almost escaped earlier, and my stomach still ached from where he’d caught me with what had been a particularly deft karate kick.

  I tensed. Surely he couldn’t know my true identity. I’d never seen him in my life before tonight.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked him.

  Wolfe shot round in his seat. ‘Shut the fuck up, you little runt! No one’s interested in what you’ve got to say. Tommy, gag this bastard.’

  ‘I’m innocent,’ said Kent desperately, staring up at me. ‘I swear it. You know that. They’re never going to pay you.’

  ‘I told you, shut it or I’ll kill you myself!’ roared Wolfe, pointing his Sig down at Kent’s face.

  But Kent didn’t back down, and when he spoke again there was a new defiance in his voice, and a glint in his eye. ‘But you can’t, can you? Because you need what I know. Don’t you?’

  A flicker of doubt crossed Wolfe’s face, then disappeared. ‘I can still put one in your kneecap easily enough. And I’ll do it with pleasure too. Cos I’ve got no truck with filthy little sex cases. Tommy, get that gag on him.’

  Tommy bit off a length of extra-thick parcel tape from a roll he had on him and grabbed Kent by the hair, lifting him off the floor.

  But I used my foot to push him back down so that Tommy had to let go. ‘I want to hear what he’s got to say. I thought we were here on a vigilante job.’

  ‘You don’t know anything,’ said Kent to me, gabbling out the words. ‘This is nothing to do with a vigilante job. It’s much bigger. I’ve got information they need and once they’ve got it they’ll kill all of us. You too.’