by Karen Guyler
The man nodded and pulled the woman back inside the building.
She had to stop more coming outside. Shoving her way back into the arena, shouting her warning at everyone on her way, Eva jumped up on the box office counter, waving her arms and yelling.
“Mass shooter event outside, you’re only safe in here. The backpack’s been disposed of. Police Officer, you’re safer in here. Check your phones. Go back inside the auditorium, people are being shot on exit. Stay inside.”
The steady flow out through the exit doors halted as those at the front saw the bodies lying on the ground.
“You may have been tagged and be at risk. Turn around, go back inside.” Eva encouraged them and the tide started turning, people side-stepping the exits, turning back towards the auditorium.
“She’s right.”
“They’re shooting.”
“They’re dead, oh my God.”
The balance between order and panic tipped, and the pushing and scrabbling became more violent as the people’s momentum reversed. The screaming and crying chilled her, but they started moving in the right direction.
“Turn around, you at the back, go inside,” Eva screamed over the general hubbub. “There’s a mass shooter event outside. Tell everyone. Stay inside.”
Eva jumped down from the counter and ran round the building to the next exit where a trickle of people was easier to turn back. She swiped up a fire extinguisher from beside the open doors, checked the label. Definitely water, she couldn’t kill anyone with water.
Another person dropped ahead of her, altering the wave of people fleeing. Eva grabbed at the teenager who collided with her, a young boy with straggly facial hair that tried hard to be a beard. “Stop.” She held on to his jacket. “You need to take that sticker off, it’s how the weapon’s targeting you. Take the sticker off, get inside, wash your face then you’ll be safe.”
Young enough he believed her, she helped him pull it off. Sadie would need it.
“Take your coat off, fold it in on itself, there’ll be some residual tagging on it. Go back inside, don’t come out until the police tell you it’s safe. They’ll need your coat as evidence—” Eva hesitated, was it right to give away her name? “Tell them it’s for Eva Janssen, Security Services. Okay, you got that? It’s really important.”
He nodded, pulling his coat off as he ran indoors.
“You’re only safe inside the building. The VIP stickers are dangerous.” Eva spun around at a scream right beside her. A warm spray caught the side of her cheek. The lady beside her dropped to the ground. Her sticker on a lemon-coloured coat caved into her chest.
Eva felt the lady’s neck, no pulse. Her companion, maybe her daughter, screamed, shrieked, threw herself onto the dead woman.
“You need to go inside.” Eva said. “You’re a target, go inside.”
Sirens split the air, but the screams of the people around Eva were louder.
“The paramedics are here, they’ll take care of her. Please, she wouldn’t want you to die.” Eva bit off the ‘too’.
She watched the girl run, sobbing towards the exit, pushing her way into the building. Eva yelled at those around her, her message mostly being ignored.
Still crowds streamed away from the Arena, flooding the side streets, running for the safety of the tube. The drone could pick them off easily, even as they dodged around others in their headlong flight. So many targets. Sirens from beyond the chaos, salvation on its way.
She dashed towards the sound of sudden screaming, a Chinese teenager in a bobble hat that had once been white, was lying on the ground, her friend practically jumping up and down beside her in terror.
“Off duty Police Officer, do you have a sticker?” Eva grabbed the girl’s arm. “Do you have a sticker?”
The girl’s eyes were wide, vacant, she was probably going into shock. Eva looked her up and down, turned her round, holding on to her so she didn’t panic more and run away. She lifted her long black hair up and there it was, on the back of her neck.
She faced the girl and spoke slowly and clearly. “You need to take the sticker off. Can I do it?”
She nodded. But it was stuck too well, fragmenting in Eva’s hand rather than peeling off like the others had.
“Close your eyes, hands over them, trust me. This will be cold but it’ll save your life.” Eva directed the fire extinguisher spray at the ground beside the girl to get the measure of its force. She took a step back and sprayed the back of her head.
How much was enough?
“Put your hands over the sticker, back into the building quickly. The sticker is a target for a weapon. If if can’t read it, it can’t find you. You must stay inside. Do you understand?”
Eva wasn’t entirely sure to believe her nodding of her head, but the girl clapped her hands over the back of her neck and ran inside.
“If you’ve got a VIP sticker on, get back inside.” Eva screamed. The crowd was thinning as more ran into danger in the open space between the shelter of the Arena’s side and the emergency vehicles.
Above the sirens, piercingly loud now as the whole area was strobed in blue, Eva could hear the angry bees sound of drones. And there, ahead of her, remarkable in his stillness, Carl Rubin, watching his show. Mesmerised.
41
Eva quashed her first reaction. Running over to Rubin to plead with him wouldn’t make him stop. But he had to be controlling the weapon somehow. He didn’t seem the type to delegate something like that. She needed to distract him.
Hefting the fire extinguisher, she got closer to him than she wanted to. “Carl Rubin, put your hands up, you’re under arrest.”
His look of surprise was something, he’d had no idea she’d survived his attack on her nor, apparently, that it was her who’d drugged him with on the Overwatch. He pushed the lens of the odd glasses he was wearing up as if he could see better without it and so understand. “Eva Janssen? How are you here?”
“What are you doing?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Didn’t you hear my speech? We have to cull the population.”
“This is murder.”
“What do you think culling is? Strange, isn’t it, that we don’t give it a second thought when we go out to shoot deer, massacre seals, tear apart foxes, all in the service of keeping the numbers of species down to what we believe are acceptable levels because we don’t want them interfering in our human lives. Why should we not apply that logic to ourselves? It’s true, what I said in there, man’s hubris will push our planet beyond the tipping point where we’ll have to move to another world for our species to survive. We’re on course for that to happen before we have the technological capability to decamp.” He waved at the building behind them. “Didn’t you wonder about the name of the rally. How many heartbeats? Too many is what it is. I’m just redressing the balance on behalf of Mother Nature because we’re outpacing her best efforts to keep us in check.”
“You can’t do this.”
“I think you’ll find I have. So, tell me, how did you survive? How did you defeat the Lynx Assassin?”
“Hands up.” Eva tightened her grip on the fire extinguisher trigger and fired a stream of water onto the concrete until it pooled between them.
“You’re going to soak me into submission? Try to drown me in your puddle?” He laughed. “You almost deserve to live with tenacity like that. I’ll let you, in exchange for knowing how you survived.”
“So you can tweak the weapon to make sure no one else can? I don’t think so. It’s all over for you, get down on the ground.”
Her arms were tiring, the extinguisher was heavy. Now would be a great time for an armed officer to find her. But in her peripheral vision all she was aware of were other people falling, screaming, sirens, the noisy cacophony of a major incident. She dragged her focus back to him.
He shook his head quickly as if he were shaking away a fly. “You won’t hit me with that, you don’t possess the strength, your arms are tired already, nor do I bel
ieve you’re capable of brute force violence.”
He read her too well.
“Maybe not, but my daughter was in there.” She ground out, pulling on her fear. “If anything’s happened to her, I will make you pay.”
She took a step forward. He took one backwards, as she’d expected. Another step forward and she launched the fire extinguisher at him. He dodged it easily. It swung beyond her reach, too heavy to bring back in for another try. She let it fall, a metallic clunking on the concrete.
“See this?” He opened his hand, a small black object in his palm. “It’s as easy for me to operate this weapon as it is to unlock my car.”
It looked exactly like that, the fob you’d have instead of a car key.
“You can’t stop this.” The fire extinguisher’s metallic ringing as it rolled to a stop underlined his truth. “I’ve been enjoying manual mode, watching them fall one at a time. Time to try full automatic where the entire magazine’s fired in one go.”
“It’s what you used in Denmark.” she said flatly.
“It is, but only with three bullets, genius, isn’t it?”
“Not enough to fool us.”
“But if I fire it now, you’ll lose your hands, probably your arms. Are you prepared for that?”
His gaze dropped to her hands where she held the stickers she’d retrieved.
“It seems I have the upper hand again, if you’ll forgive the pun. Once again you’re on the end of my will.”
She charged at him, even while he was spouting his rhetoric. But it was too much warning, he stepped out of her way. She rushed right back at him, but he grabbed her coat, pulled her against him. “You’re about to appreciate the real genius of this weapon. I can order a strike and shoot you, it won’t touch me, even standing so close to you.”
She twisted against him, raked her heel down his calf. As he shifted away from the pain, his grip on her loosened enough she could get her arm up behind her. She tapped the stickers on his back, elbowed him over and over to distract.
He hit her in the face, making her eyes stream. She held onto his jacket as he spun away from her. His leg kicked out and she was falling, her feet swept out from underneath her. She grasped at his trousers as she went down, but still fell fast, heavy, colliding with the concrete, the air smacked out of her lungs.
He kicked her hard enough to make her double over, catch the breath she was trying to get. He squatted in front of her, the victor all powerful over his prey.
It was the hardest thing. But she unwound from her foetal position, looked at him right in the eye. “I’ve beaten you.” she coughed out.
“What, the stickers you’ve planted on my back?” He laughed, bounced up to standing, putting the fob in his trouser pocket, took his jacket off. “Ah, that’s how you beat it, isn’t it? You muddled the RFID signals. Clever. You had several stickers in your hand, so you’ve done the same to me. Your threat is useless.”
Eva dragged herself to the puddle from the fire extinguisher and shushed her hands in it, wiping them on the ground, palms, backs, fingertips.
“You think that’s enough?” He threw his jacket at her.
She kicked it away as if it was on fire, pressed her hands into the too shallow puddle again.
“I’m sure it’s not.” He retrieved the fob from his pocket and pressed it again and again so she could see him do it. “We’ll see, won’t we? Another test.”
42
The bullet arrived with no fuss, no noise, though it would have been difficult to separate any sound it made from the general cacophony of the major incident response as it tore into Carl Rubin’s leg.
He dropped to the ground, his face registering shock and disbelief.
Eva kept her hands pressed into the pitiful puddle, looking upwards, even though she was hardly going to see them coming if any of the other presses on his fob had ordered another bullet to her.
In the midst of the emergency lights of the police vans and ambulances strobing through the glare of the security lights, she could see the white lights of something else. Red lights flashed at its outer extremities, it hovered there, watching, an evil eye in the sky. Movement above it, another drone peeling away, flying to cause more destruction somewhere else.
The real evil lay moaning on the ground in front of her. Eva got to her feet, bending over to ease the pain in her side where he’d kicked her, and prised the fob out of his grasp. Light in her hand, larger than the one she’d used to steal his SUV, the array of buttons on it looked daunting, but, if she hadn’t known better, no more deadly than lock and unlock. She put it in her pocket as though it might explode.
“Not so lucky this time, standing next to the supposed victim. I’m no Goran Willander.”
Even where his face was screwed up against shock and pain, she saw him register the surprise that she knew.
Where she’d wiped the RFID tags from the stickers down his trousers, his leg was a mangled mass of bloody tissue.
“I’m not a doctor but you need to get that looked at right away, you’re bleeding, a lot.”
She frisked him, took his phone, left his wallet, removed his glasses. Heavier than regular ones, probably relaying a recording to somewhere. The lens was engraved with some kind of measurement marks. Sadie would like those, too.
“I have a deal this time.” Eva said. “Give me the location of the rifles, and I’ll get medical attention for you.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.” His face was growing greyer by the second, sweat beaded his forehead.
Eva squatted beside him. “You’ve deployed more than one rifle, same as you have more than one targeting drone. Tell me where they are and I’ll get help.”
He closed his eyes.
“Or, don’t, it’s up to you. Decide quickly.”
“Your government doesn’t want me to die. There’s too much on the table for them, the agreement tomorrow is just the tip of the iceberg.”
“You think I care what our government wants out of this? You’re going to pay for all those your weapons have killed since you first knew what a bullet could do.”
“You’ve got protocols—”
“Do I? You were right about my Interpol credentials being fake, I don’t work for any agency, so what I decide is okay, you’re just like my ex-husband and I never loved you so whatever happens, whatever fate I cause for you, my conscience is clear.”
“You’re still subject to the law.”
“I am. But the law doesn’t know about you right here, bleeding out.” She put on the same tone he had to tell her and Luke how he was going to respond to any interest in why they’d disappeared in Norway. “I’m so sorry, officer, I last saw Mr Rubin on the stage, I hope he’s all right, he’s doing such great work on climate change.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“We’re done here.”
“I have rights.” His words were punctuated by rapid, shallow breathing.
“More than those people you’ve murdered? Where are the rifles? Otherwise, I’m walking away and directing the paramedics to the opposite side of the building.”
Eva pulled the stickers off the back of his jacket. “You had your chance.” She took a burst of photos of him on her phone and uploaded them to the S server. Deleted them.
She was two steps away when he called after her.
“All right. I’ll tell you.”
Eva kept going.
“It’s in York House, Empire Way.”
One more step.
“You listening to me?” He sounded feebler. “York House.”
“And the other?”
“You can see it down that one’s scope.”
She walked back to him. “How do I bring the drone down?”
His breathing was becoming more erratic. She shook her head. “You don’t have time to be difficult.”
“It’s a sequence.”
Eva stared at the fob. Could she trust what he was saying? She wouldn’t like to bet on what m
attered more to him, his agenda or his life.
43
“If you lie, I’ll walk away.” Eva told Rubin. “If the drones do anything other than land right in front of me, I’ll walk away. Do you understand?”
He told her the sequence.
She pressed the first button. The second. Felt a sudden jab in her back.
“Hands up.” The voice behind her ordered.
“You know what to do.” Rubin breathed.
“This is a traditional handgun,” Sean Finch, Rubin’s bodyguard, pressed the gun barrel against her. “I press the trigger another hair’s width and you’re gone. Give me the fob.”
Eva gripped it tighter. But even as she realised she couldn’t feel the gun against her, so pain erupted across the back of her head and she was down again, lying on the concrete.
The ground was cold and gritty against her face, hard against her body, but she couldn’t quite understand how she’d got down there. The noise and brightness of the world around her faded in and out.
A rough hand grasped her wrist, and it was nothing at all for Finch to take the fob. Her hand bounced on the ground when he let go of her. The sound of the emergency services, everything around her, was coming from down a distant tunnel.
“Boss.” Sean Finch was leaning over Rubin. “What do you want me to do?”
Eva struggled to focus. She could tighten and flex her calf muscles, move her fingers. She couldn’t take Finch on if she was 100% fit, but brawn didn’t always win. She focused on the men just a couple of metres away from her. What could she learn?
“Get me to hospital.” Rubin’s breath shuddered in and out, he pushed his words out as though they were dead weights. “She’s got the glasses. . . show the client. . . weapon’s reliable. . . raise price. . . make sure shipment’s on time. . . time for lynx to change camouflage.”
Shouting, distinctly now, was getting closer, the words ‘over here, two more’.
Finch stood up, came towards her. Eva’s frantic instructions to her body to move were going somewhere other than her brain. She pushed herself up on one hand, tried to hold him back from her but he swatted her feeble effort away, ripping the things she’d taken from Rubin out of her coat pocket.