by Simon Toyne
She didn’t wait to hear the rest.
He’d said his name was Gabriel. He’d said he was a cop.
No.
He’d never said he was a cop. He hadn’t shown her his badge when he’d introduced himself. He just said Arkadian sent him and she had assumed the rest. Stupid. She’d been suckered by her own exhaustion and by the fact that he was nice-looking and polite. So who the hell was he?
‘Everything OK?’
She looked up and met his eyes in the mirror.
‘Yeah,’ she said, suddenly aware that her face must look a picture of concern. ‘Just work. I hopped the flight here in a bit of a hurry. Didn’t have time to finish off a few things before I left. My boss is real pissed at me.’
His eyes flicked back to the road as a van hissed past in a cloud of spray. A squeal of tyres and the interior flooded with red. The van in front had braked hard. Too hard.
Gabriel followed suit. The Renault’s wheels squealed across the greasy surface of the road. There was a violent jolt as its front bumper smashed into the back of the van. Liv was thrown forward hard against her belt. There was a sharp crack and for the briefest of moments, before the airbags deployed, she thought she’d been shot.
Then everything went into slow motion.
Chapter 48
Before the driver’s airbag even started to deflate Gabriel was beating it down, unclasping his seat belt and reaching for the door. He kicked it open as hard as he could, rolling into the rain before it had time to swing shut again. It happened so fast that Liv was still looking at the empty driver’s seat when her own door opened.
She turned, and came face to face with the muzzle of a gun.
‘Out!’ a voice shouted from somewhere behind it.
She looked past the black hole of the barrel at the young man holding it. He wasn’t much more than a boy. Acne scars showed through the fuzz of a sparse blonde beard and rain poured from the peak of a baseball cap pulled low over pale blue eyes.
‘Out!’ he shouted again.
He leaned forward and grabbed her with his free hand just as the glass behind her exploded, showering the interior with tiny, glittering shards. The boy jerked backwards, pirouetting as if someone had yanked hard on a rope attached to his left shoulder. Liv glanced back to see Gabriel framed in the jagged remains of the window.
‘Run!’ he shouted, then in a flash of movement he was swept from view.
Liv whipped her head back and stared through the open door at the pale-eyed boy lying where he had fallen, staring up at the stinging rain. A shower of glass jewels fell to the floor as she fumbled for the release button and her seat belt slid across her body. She splashed past the corpse towards the shadows on the far side of the street. She expected to hear the crack of a gunshot behind her at any moment and feel the thump of a bullet punching her in the back and spinning her to the ground.
She made it to the sidewalk and skidded across it to a verge of low bushes and grass. Given two years’ growth and kind winters the wiry shrubs might have offered some sort of cover, but in their current state they served as little more than obstacles. She zigzagged between them, slithering over ground so saturated it was like running on ice. She shortened her stride. Risked a glance behind her.
Visibility was practically zero through the thick curtain of rain. She could just make out the outline of the car and the van in front of it, but nothing else. Something whacked into her, throwing her violently backwards. She lay there for a few moments, blinking up into the rain as the coldness of the earth seeped into her body. For the second time in as many minutes she thought she’d been shot, then she became aware of a shape in front of her, stretched across the darkness like a huge spider web. She followed its faint outline until she saw something thin and sturdy jutting up from the ground. A post. She’d run smack into a chain-link fence.
She risked another glance in the direction of the two cars and saw her cell glowing on the ground near her head, thrown from her grasp when she’d fallen. She grabbed it, terrified that its meagre light might act as a beacon for whoever might be stalking her. She smothered the display with her hand, pressed hard on the off button. From her new position she could no longer see the car or the van. It made her feel better — but only for a second.
A shot rang out, followed by the sound of an engine starting up and the tortured shriek of tyres on tarmac. She heard the whine of bullets against metal from somewhere down the street and a window blowing out. The fleeing vehicle powered round a bend and was gone.
She looked back up towards the road. Saw nothing but the yellow haze of the streetlights. She imagined someone standing beyond the shallow ridge, gun in hand, scanning the darkness. Looking for her. But who was it? One of the guys who’d ambushed them, or Gabriel? All she wanted was to lie perfectly still, not run, not draw attention to herself. But when she had bolted from the car she’d headed straight to the first bit of cover she’d seen. She hadn’t even run at an angle. She was lying in the first place whoever was up there would look. She had to move.
She looked to her right, in the direction they’d been driving. A row of service buildings marked a junction. Storage units, most likely. Full of luggage or freight, and maybe even people working night shifts — just a few hundred yards away from her. In the other direction the glow of the airport terminal highlighted the under-side of the low cloud. She had no idea how far away it was, but it was a lot further than the service buildings. She listened out for someone approaching. Heard the hiss of the rain. Her own rapid breathing. Nothing else.
She took three quick breaths, scrambled to her feet, and ran. The logical thing was to head for the nearest units and try and raise the alarm, so she went the other way. Back to the warm, brightly lit concourse, and the crowds of tourists staring blankly up at the departure boards, and the two cops with the semi-automatic weapons slung from their shoulders.
She crouched low, keeping the fence to her right, hoping to God that whoever was up there was looking in the opposite direction. A sudden flash of lightning split the night, burning an image on Liv’s retina of everything that lay in her path: the gate in the chain link fence about sixty feet in front of her, row upon row of parked cars beyond it. If she could just make it amongst the serried ranks of bullet-stopping family saloons and weekend runabouts, she might be safe.
Thunder rumbled overhead. The gate was now just forty feet away and the verge to her left started to flatten out as it dropped level with the entrance road. She was losing what little cover she had on that side, but there was nothing she could do about it.
The black-and-yellow stripes of an automatic barrier stretched across the opening in the fence. She forced herself to focus on it rather than on whoever was behind her.
Twelve feet now.
Ten.
Five.
Her right foot connected with the firm asphalt of the road and she launched herself towards the box containing the barrier’s mechanism, ducked behind it, fell gratefully back against the cold, wet metal and for the briefest of moments felt safe.
Then the rain stopped.
It was so abrupt it seemed almost unnatural. One minute she was enveloped in an almost tropical deluge, the next, the curtain lifted. She heard the gurgle of the gutters along the main road and the gentle sucking of the saturated earth. In the sudden silence her every breath sounded like the rasp of a chainsaw. She strained her ears for other sounds. In her fevered imagination the silence spoke of an enemy nearby, listening for her slightest movement, a gun pointing at the cold earth until a warmer target could be found.
The terminal building was still too far away, but she could pick out every detail of it now — which meant whoever was looking for her could too. She felt an overwhelming urge to sprint back to the cover of the parked cars, but fought it back.
Fifteen feet of tarmac was all that separated her from them. And now she noticed that the section where she crouched was lit more brightly than the rest. Elsewhere she could see comfortin
g corridors of shadow where the pools of light didn’t quite overlap. She’d be much harder to spot if she ran along one of those. The nearest was about twenty feet away. Plus fifteen more to the cars. Or she could chance it and run from where she was.
She closed her eyes and rested her head against the steel upright. Then she launched herself across the narrow stretch of road, keeping her head level with the black-and-yellow barrier.
Gabriel heard her distant footfalls on the wet tarmac and watched her bolt across the entrance road, change direction as she came to a stretch of shadow, then disappear into the ocean of metal.
He turned back and scanned the scene of the ambush, checking to see if they were compromised. A few security cameras were sited at the edge of the car park, but all of them were pointing inwards at the vehicles. The same story with the service buildings. No cameras trained on the road. It was safe to assume that none of what had happened in the last few minutes had been recorded.
He picked up the brass shell casings from the seven rounds he’d fired at the retreating vehicle. Most of them had been on target, but none had stopped the driver from escaping. He dropped the casings into his pocket with a muffled clink and turned his attention to the body.
Chapter 49
Liv nearly wept with relief as she stumbled through the revolving door into the merciful brightness of the terminal building. She limped on, trailing mud and rainwater in her wake, as fearful groups of tourists backed away from her. One of the cops by passport control looked up, alerted by the disturbance. She saw him nudge his partner and nod in her direction. The second recoiled as he locked eyes on the half-mud, half-mad creature heading towards him. He pressed a button on his walkie-talkie and started speaking into it. Both of them dropped their hands to hover near the trigger guards of their automatics.
Great. .
I make it all this way and now I’m going to be gunned down by these two bozos.
She dug deep into her scant reserves of strength and raised her trembling hands in the internationally recognized sign for surrender. ‘Please,’ she breathed, sinking to her knees in front of them. ‘Call Inspector Arkadian. Ruin City Homicide. I really need to talk to him.’
Rodriguez stood at the baggage check and watched the security guard empty the contents of his holdall on to the steel table and start going through it. An alert crackled through the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt, but he took no notice of it. The message called for back-up to deal with a woman in need of assistance. Rodriguez turned and looked back over the queue on the other side of the walk-through metal detector. His height gave him a clear view to the main concourse, but he couldn’t see the source of the disturbance.
‘Thank you, sir, have a nice flight.’ The guard pushed his canvas holdall to one side and reached for the next bag rattling down the rollers from the X-ray machine.
Rodriguez stepped aside and quickly repacked the passport he never thought he’d need again, the Bible his mother had died holding, the clothes that hung a little baggy on his slender, six-foot-five-inch frame. The last item he folded carefully, as if it were a flag to lay on a soldier’s coffin. It was a red nylon windcheater with a hood, meaningless to most but symbolically important to him.
He pulled the drawstring tight and picked up a small leather-bound volume, given to him by the Abbot, chronicling the history of the rides of the Tabula Rasa. He’d written a woman’s name and two addresses inside the cover. The first belonged to the offices of a newspaper in New Jersey. The second was residential.
He swung the bag over his shoulder and headed for the boarding gate. He didn’t look back. Whatever was going on in the terminal building wasn’t his concern. His mission lay elsewhere.
III
Chapter 50
Liv stared at the blank, soundproofed walls and the small mirror she knew from experience concealed an observation room. She wondered if anyone was in there now — watching her. She studied her reflection in the toughened glass, her clothes grimy, her hair plastered to her skull. She raised her hand to smooth down her fringe then gave it up as a waste of time.
To begin with she thought they’d brought her here because interview rooms were the one place in any police station you were still allowed to smoke, but looking at herself now, she wasn’t so sure. Maybe they were just keeping her out of the way because she looked like a crazy woman. She’d felt a little mad as she’d given her statement, describing the sequence of events from her arrival in the terminal building to the moment she’d staggered back after the attempted kidnapping.
It was as if it had all happened to someone else. Her sense of disconnection had increased when the officer taking her statement had gone outside to fetch her another smoke and returned with a subtly different attitude. His quiet sympathy had been replaced by a cool distance. He’d completed the ritual in near silence, got her to read and sign the document then disappeared without a word, the blinds on the outside of the window preventing her from seeing where.
There was no handle on the inside of the door. His change of tack and the silent wait in this stark room, with its table and chairs bolted to the floor, conspired to make Liv feel like she had been arrested.
She picked up the cigarette burning slowly away to nothing in the ashtray and breathed it in. It tasted foreign and unpleasant, but she persevered. Her own crumpled Luckies were still in her holdall in the back of Gabriel’s car, along with her passport, her credit cards, everything except her cell phone. Arkadian was on his way in, apparently. Hopefully he’d be more sympathetic than his colleague. She thought back to her own journey, driving up through the winding road between the dark shapes of mountains, then along bright streets through a city that managed to appear both incredibly old and very modern. She remembered the sights sliding past her exhausted eyes as she stared out of the back of the police car: the familiar logo of Starbucks, and the chrome and glass storefronts of modern banks standing right next to open-fronted shops, carved out of stone, that sold copper goods, and carpets, and souvenirs, as they had done since biblical times.
She took another drag on the foul-tasting cigarette, screwed up her nose and crushed it out in the ashtray with a picture of the Citadel printed on the bottom. She pushed it to one side and laid her head on her arms. The sound of the air-con hummed at the periphery of her senses. She closed her tired eyes against the glare of the strip lights and, despite everything she had just been through, was asleep within seconds.
Chapter 51
The Cat, Pet and Canine Clinic sat on the corner of Grace and Absolution in the heart of the Lost Quarter. A vet’s presence in such a sleazy and down-at-heel section of the city was surprising enough, but the fact that a light now burned behind its frosted-glass frontage was even stranger.
In the circles in which Kutlar moved it was generally referred to as the Bitch Clinic — testimony to the work that went on here during the hours of darkness. Most of these procedures, where medical records weren’t required and the bills were paid in cash, were performed on women. There wasn’t a pimp in the city who hadn’t used the clinic at one time or another for anything from a hastily arranged backstreet abortion, to a cut-price sterilization job done under the guise of fitting a contraceptive device. IUDs and slow-release hormone pills were relatively expensive, so it was more economical to sterilize them. Most of the girls didn’t even know about it until years later.
The clinic also offered other, more specialist services; ones that commanded a much higher premium due to the steeper prison sentences that resulted from discovery.
Kutlar had never used the place before. He owned no pets and until recently had been fortunate enough, considering his line of work, not to require any of its under-the-counter arrangements either. This had all changed on the rain-lashed airport service road when the nine millimetre round had flattened on its way through the van door and split in two as it entered his right leg. Part of the slug now lay in a stainless-steel tray. Kutlar looked at it now, felt his stomach lurch and turned aw
ay. He caught his reflection in the door of a medicine cabinet. His close-shaved head was varnished with sweat and shone in the overhead lights that made hollow shadows of his deep-set eyes. He realized he looked like a death’s-head, shuddered, and looked away.
He lay on his left side, propped against a raised part of the examination table while a fat man with a white coat and grey skin continued his delicate search for the second half of the round. Occasionally he felt a tugging sensation or heard a wet, tearing sound that made his stomach roll, but he fought back the nausea, forcing himself to breathe steadily — in through the nose, and out through the mouth — while focusing on a picture of a black Labrador slobbering happily from a large poster pinned to the opposite wall.
Kutlar had heard about the clinic from an acquaintance who specialized in the import and export of various items not generally advertised in the classifieds. He’d told him the doctor was generous with the painkillers, provided he hadn’t fallen off the wagon and snarfed them all himself. The clink of metal on metal announced the reunion of the second piece of the slug with its twin.
‘That appears to be most of the hardware accounted for,’ the fat man said in a voice that would not have sounded out of place coming from the mouth of a consultant. ‘I need to irrigate the wound now, flush out any smaller fragments that may still be there. Then I can seal the veins and start closing you up.’
Kutlar nodded and gritted his teeth. The doc picked up a clear plastic bottle with a thin spout and squeezed it with a doughy hand, carefully directing a stream of cold saline into the red chasm of his upper thigh. Kutlar shivered. He was still wet from the rain. His damp clothes, coupled with the blood loss, had started to shake him up a bit, probably with a little post-traumatic stress thrown in as a chaser. He looked back at the poster of the happy dog, realized it was recommending some kind of worm treatment, and felt the nausea rise again.