Keep Calm

by Mike Binder

  He had made a promise to Jack that he’d be there for him and he would, but, more important, he liked the idea of having Heaton and Georgia in one place together, of confronting them both at once. He made it over the top and threw himself to the yard below, into the back of Heaton’s property. He hit the ground in an awkward slant, his foot having gotten slightly wrapped in a vine on the way down.

  The force of the fall knocked the wind right out of him. As he slowly pulled himself to his feet, two security men ran across the manicured yard, speeding toward him. They were coming on at full tilt. Adam woozily stood, raised his hands, and spoke in a fake drunken slur, which was not hard to imitate considering how rattled he was from the tumble he’d taken.

  “Whoa, whoa, it’s cool … it’s cool. I was just trying to impress my girlfriend that I could climb the wall and fell over. I’ll go back, dudes, I’m sorry.… Not looking for trouble.” The two security men, both in cheap business suits, slowed down to listen. Adam recognized one of them. He was the shooter from up in the woods at Dorrington, the one who had murdered the young police officer with the long-range rifle. Whether they believed his drunken park-goer story or not, they both had sized him up as less of a threat, more of a nuisance. They came on him as a unit and drew close as one of them punched Adam square in the face. The other answered with a sharp kick to the midsection. One of them even laughed. They both came back in for more. Adam stood once again, doing his best not to lose consciousness. They grabbed him and were about to take the beating to a new level, both truly seeming to be enjoying the task at hand.

  Neither of them saw the pistol come out. The initial shot was their first inkling of how much trouble they were in. The first bullet tore into the taller one’s leg from an inch away. Adam was sure the man’s femur had shattered into pieces. The second bullet pierced the second guard’s hip straight on. He purposefully held the muzzle right against his body so as to dampen the sound as much as possible. Both men collapsed to the ground, rolling in pain. He saw a set of plastic restraints on one of their belts. He took it, and after a small struggle that got the Dorrington shooter pistol-whipped across the head, he managed to link them together, fastening them to the piping along the back wall. He took their radios, shattered them against the brick, then took their guns and headed up the back lawn.

  He crept up the side of the lushly landscaped mansion and waited for other security staffers to follow or an alarm to go off. It didn’t happen. He moved tenuously along the west wall, peeking his head carefully into each window, doing his best to be mindful of the security cameras. Finally, as he peered into the fourth window, a den on the first floor, he saw Georgia Turnbull on the couch watching a large television on the far wall. The volume was up loud enough so that Adam could hear it through the window, loud enough so that there was no way he would be able to hear what anyone in the room was saying.

  Jack Early wasn’t in the room. Neither was Heaton. He wanted to know that Jack was safe. He had played along well, Jack, and Adam had come to like his son, even to like Jack a bit. He pulled back slowly, needed time to figure out how best to make an entrance and confront both Heaton and Georgia with his digital file of Georgia’s confession, how to start the process of forcing them to clear his name and face the police, the press, and the public for what they had done. He needed to find out where Jack was. He was inside that house someplace and Adam was pretty sure he wasn’t having tea and cookies. If he were Heaton, the first thing he would do, he thought, was to shut Jack up in a permanent fashion. This poor pompous rich prick had a lot to lose.

  He pulled back, not sure what to do. It might be best to wait and get a better sense of the situation, to figure out which of the big double doors would be the best way into the house.

  He tucked into the safety of a large row of bushes, still trying to keep himself from being viewed on any of the security cameras. He had an idea that the two guards he had just shot had simply spotted him and weren’t sent from the security shack. If they had been, more help would be coming, and none was.

  There was a vine-covered latticework running from the ground floor to a second-story patio outside one of the upstairs rooms. Adam hated the idea of doing any more climbing, of wrenching open his barely healed wounds any further, but he needed to get into that house. He sucked it up and started to pull himself to the second story. He made it halfway up when his wounds demanded that he stop. His legs were on fire. He needed a short break from the pain.

  Two more security guards ran into the backyard, right as he stopped climbing. They ran right beneath him and toward their cohorts at the back wall. He tried to stay silent but the latticework rung he was standing on cracked, sending him sliding down to the next one. The noise alerted the two sentries. They stopped in their tracks, turned, and saw him hanging there, blatantly exposed. The first guard bolted up to the back of the house and practically flew as he scrambled up the latticework behind Adam, grabbing him by the jacket and tossing him backward onto the grass. The guard turned around and dove down twenty feet, landing on him as the other guard grabbed Adam by the scruff of his hair and began punching him in the back in the neck.

  Adam did everything he could to protect his face, his privates, and his stomach. These two punch-happy creeps were obviously cut from the same cloth as their buddies. They seemed to have been waiting for the opportunity to beat on someone like this. They reminded Adam of the dogs at Dorrington.

  Sadly for them, right in the middle of their cavalcade of cheap shots, Adam pulled a knife from its sheaf on his belt. It came out fully formed and ready. He didn’t even take the time to blink. He rammed it straight up into the center of the first man’s chest, just off to his left side, twisted it good, twice, then pulled it out and delivered an even better lunge into the second man’s neck and straight across: quick, fast, and deep, and ended it. There was no other way. One would be dead in seconds; the other would maybe have another minute to live.

  Adam rose to his feet. He was covered in blood, most of it theirs, some of it his. He caught his breath as the two men on the grass groaned in agony, bled out, and died. He looked around and thought about the men at the back wall. The one whose femur Adam had shot out would most likely bleed out, too. He tried not to think too hard about any of it. They all had it coming, every last one of them.

  An alarm rang out: a loud, piercing scream of electronic panic. It was raucous and earsplitting, the loudest goddamn alarm he’d ever heard. The siren was followed by a hail of gunfire coming from the front of the house. Something was going very badly in the front of the mansion. Something that for once had nothing to do with Adam.

  STEEL ■ 7

  Steel had parked her car on Bayswater Road and walked onto Kensington Palace Mews. She headed down the street dubbed “Billionaires Row” and over to Heaton’s mansion. She was wearing a black rain slicker, sturdy boots, and a black cap over her dark head of hair. She walked slowly, weighed down with her favorite Glock 17, a spare Glock, her Browning shotgun, and an extensive supply of rounds for each of them. She had come because she had no choice. Her heart pounded louder and louder with each step she took toward the colossal home, yet she knew there was nothing coming that she would turn back from.

  To Steel, this was simply the lesser of two evils. Between this and waiting for Heaton and his men to come and get her, which she was sure was their next move after the failed attempt to kill her parents, this was the easiest way: to confront them all head on, to take the fight to Heaton and end it one way or another in a circumstance of her own making.

  Georgia and Heaton were part of a group of people that were above the law, above society’s rules. For some dark, unknown reason, they had rewritten the game and had felt entitled to change it all up in some seriously sinister ways. Steel knew that anyone in their way would have to be dealt with according to new norms. The only person she could tentatively trust was Major General Darling, and even though he would have no good alternative to suggest, he would forbid this, so she
moved with purpose down the sidewalk toward the house.

  She had expected it to be quiet, being Sunday morning, but it was even more shut down than she had thought it would be. She strolled right into the driveway past the open gate and the guardhouse, which seemed to be empty. A small model Ford was in the driveway, parked against the main steps. She looked closely at the bottom of the windshield and saw a weathered Downing Street employee parking sticker. It made sense, she thought. Heaton was most likely some kind of shadow prime minister at this point anyway.

  The first gun blast blew the side windows of the car out and into thousands of tiny pieces of glass. It had missed her by less than a few inches. She turned in time to see the young man she had shot up at her parents’ house coming out at her from the front door with a handgun, firing rounds as he came. He had a gimp’s gait to him, his leg bound up in a walking cast from their last encounter, but it didn’t seem to have slowed him down too much. She threw herself behind the car with a wild leap, landing in a way that allowed her to roll and grab her Browning in the same instant. The shooting stopped just long enough for an alarm to sound: a loud, piercing siren.

  Steel stood quickly and saw the young man prepare to fire again, so she dove back down and let him shoot up the car until he had emptied his weapon. She scurried around to the side of the vehicle and dove underneath as she grabbed the little Shetland pony version of a shotgun and let a blast out from under the car that sent a spray of munitions just wide enough to hit both of the young Heaton man’s feet.

  He collapsed to the ground in a broken flash. As he did, before his body fell to the surface, she fired off again. This time the discharge from the stumpy shotgun hit him everywhere: his chest, his stomach, his legs, and the side of his skull. It blew the top of his head clear off of its base as his body finally landed flat on the driveway.

  There was even more shooting now. From behind, at the guard shack at the tip of the drive, someone was once again shooting up the car that Steel had now abandoned, having run over to one of the many large concrete plant pots on the front lawn. She dove behind the cement planter and waited for this round of shooting to die down. When it did, as Steel noticed that none of the bullets had even come close to hitting the row of tall, ornate pots, she poked around to see Peet comically trying to hold an automatic rifle in two hands connected to two very badly bandaged shoulders. It was laughable if not pathetic. She thought, This old asshole has already taken two different rounds to each shoulder, and still hasn’t gotten the message that his job sucks.

  She jumped up now and ran over to the shack as Peet was trying to figure out a better method to use the gun with his particular handicap. Sadly for him, there wasn’t one in time. Steel got as close as she could and fired. She hit him once again in the shoulder.

  He crumpled down to the ground, wildly screaming in pain. She came over quickly and took his weapon. He had been arrested at her parents’ house the night before and was already out on the street in the pathetic shape he was in. That’s all she needed to know about how well connected all these people were. She checked in every direction, making sure that no one else was coming. That was it: these two broken-down morons. She poked into the guard shack, rifle first. It was empty. She shut off the alarm.

  The driveway fell quiet once again. She looked onto a wall of security cameras. There were two bodies lying flat on the center of the lawn at the back of the house, two other Heaton guards by the way they were dressed. Both were either dead or unconscious. Another camera showed two more men, leaning against the back wall overlooking Hyde Park. One of the men seemed dead as well. The other looked beaten, crumbled up into a painful heap.

  Someone else had paid Heaton a visit. It was Adam Tatum. She was sure of it. She looked up to the house, then looked down to the old bald fucker lying on the ground, wrestling with the fact that his shoulders were never, ever going to heal. He looked up to her in agony, almost pleading for sympathy. She answered with a sharp smack to the middle of his face with the butt of her shotgun, full force. He fell back onto the driveway, out cold.

  Steel trained her gaze now on the silent mansion. It wasn’t going to stay that way for long. The front door was slightly ajar, inviting her to enter.

  Heaton was in there. She had lost the element of surprise. He was waiting for her. Steel had no choice. She was going in.

  * * *

  SIR DAVID WAS at the top of the front hall staircase. He was at the mouth of the long hallway, about to head down to the first floor, while she was carefully coming in the front door, shotgun first, each step a wary one. She looked up, he looked down, and both saw the other in the same instant. My god, she’s dressed like a nutter, he thought, like one of those paramilitary wannabes in America who go around shooting up high schools.

  He turned and raced down the hall as she chased up the steps after him. He passed the room with Early locked in the steamer trunk. If Early started kicking and pounding on the trunk, she would hear it, he was sure of it. She’d hear it, and she’d open it. She wouldn’t be able to resist.

  She slowed down once she made the top of the stairs and walked cautiously down the hall. She knew better than to assume he wouldn’t be waiting, wouldn’t be ready and eager to kill her. She moved carefully, room to room, making sure she wasn’t about to be jumped. She came farther down the hall and heard a struggle—someone kicking, maybe even calling for help. She carefully craned her head into the empty den. There were two steamer trunks in the center of the room. Someone was inside of one of them, kicking, calling for help in a muffled, terrified voice.

  Tatum, she thought. Heaton had somehow gotten the upper hand. She got herself a good sense of the room from her perch in the hallway. It was almost barren, just the trunks and a small, old-fashioned desk and chair. She went in and stepped cautiously over to the large wooden box. She turned quickly and clocked the door. She figured there was time to open the box and release whoever was trapped inside. She lifted the lid; there was a man inside. It was Heaton.

  He lunged up at her with the long, black shock-stick connected by a cord to the wall socket beside it. He pushed the button on it right as he held it against her neck. The charge raced through her body, making all of her muscles scream together in an instant, an excruciatingly symphonic chorus of pain. It was the same instant that he used to climb from the box and hit her again with the stick’s electric prod, kicking the weapon from her hand.

  He had caught her completely off guard and was now perfectly using his good fortune to advantage. He was fully out of the box, her gun kicked to the far side of the room, and was punching her. He was wearing garden gloves with leather flaps on the top of the fists. He zapped her again, this time between her legs, in her groin, which caused her to double over, giving him the opportunity to give her another jolt of the electrical charge under her armpit from behind, forcing her whole left side to freeze up. She fell flat to the ground.

  “I can’t begin to tell you how tired I’ve become of playing this game with you.”

  He started kicking her, one solid bolt of a strong leg after another. He kicked her a good four times before she could even raise her arms to deflect the punishing blows. He jumped down to her, quickly took all of the guns and the ammunition she had in her jacket, and threw them across the room as well. He took the electrical prod to her again, several times, each charge eliciting even more of a paralyzing jerk than the last. She knew she was about to pass out. She knew her body and brain would give way to the dark, seconds before it did. He was almost smiling, she thought. He knew it was over as well. He gave her one last lingering zap and then it was. She was gone.

  He easily lifted her limp, battered, broken body and dropped it into the second steamer trunk next to the one that housed Early. He looked down on her in the box, so small that she fit nicely, no need to stuff her legs in like he had to do with the other one. He wanted to spit on her. Piss on her. Vomit on her. She had been the fly in the ointment, had almost ruined everything.


  She made him sick to look at. He slammed the top of the trunk and locked it shut.

  TURNBULL ■ 8

  Georgia had become claustrophobic in the den. She was frightened, angry, and dizzy with an odd discomfort. Heaton had left the television on with the volume at a jarring level. She had no idea how to work the large over-buttoned remote panel “thingy” on the table, and when she tried to go for help with it, she found that she had been locked in the room, which infuriated her. She was forced to wait for him to return and, even worse, to watch a morning Sky News political panel drone on and on about how the government would now go to hell in a handbag under her watch. Earlier she had thought she heard some gunshots, and at one point there had been an alarm blast, but it quickly went away. She tried and failed to convince herself that maybe she’d imagined the gunfire.

  She truly had no idea what to do. She was livid that she had been made a prisoner in this awful man-cave of a room. Almost in answer to her frustration, at a point when she considered using the phone to call her security chief at Downing Street, she heard a key rattling in the door lock. It was Heaton. As usual, he was calm and contained.

  “Why did you lock that door, David?”

  “Why? Because the fewer people that know you’re here, the better. I didn’t want any of the staff just wandering in.” She stared at him, pretty sure he didn’t even expect her to buy that line.

  “Can you please turn that thing down or even off? It’s beyond words how annoying it is.”

  “The remote is right there, love, right on the table.”

  “That’s not a remote. That’s some kind of machine. You’d need a pilot’s license to operate that.” He smiled, walked over, hit one button, and the room snapped into quiet.