“No Stefan, you did that, remember? And you killed Nikolina too.”
Even mentioning her name caused his stomach to knot. He wished now that she was here, in his bed. Such a sweet girl, such an exciting lover, but she had betrayed him, Bulgarian whore. Even she had grown to love him. He had proved to everyone that he was capable of loving at least one person. In the end it was a simple case of if I cannot have you, as I want you, then no one can. He had sent a message that day too, etched onto her naked corpse.
Stefan had made the decision that he could not allow his brother to leave alive. He ran at him, throwing the poker. Rather than using it as a weapon, it hit the target in the chest, but caused no immediate injury. Grabbing Alex around the midriff and propelling him backwards, he knew he needed to use his superior strength. Alex countered by thrashing around with the carving knife, but now he was too close. They clattered into a stainless steel pedal bin, knocking its contents across the marbled floor. Now the fight was feral. Two street kids, rolling around in the mud, blood, tears, mucus, all mixing into a heady cocktail of unbridled violence.
Alex sank his teeth into his brother’s neck, clamping down, biting as hard as he could, tearing a chunk of flesh away and spitting it out. Stefan responded by driving a thumb into Alex’s eye, so hard that he could feel the eyeball moving backwards, slipping under his thumb, ready to pop at any second.
“I will push your eyeballs out you bastard.”
“You haven’t got the guts to kill me. Mummy’s little boy.”
Stefan leant back and punched Alex in the face, and again and again. Somehow he rode the storm. This wasn’t his first outing after all.
Alex lifted his knee up and into Stefan’s groin. It was the standard way to stop any man in his tracks.
Both men were quickly up, on their feet, bleeding, hurting, almost dancing, weaving left and right, trying to read the other man’s thoughts. Stefan was struggling. Alex jinked with the knife, getting closer. He was nimble on his feet – years of street fighting and gaining a reputation in some of the harshest prisons, backed into a corner and knowing the guards were turning a blind eye. Stefan picked up the bin and used it as a shield. He was slower but stronger.
“Just let me go, Stefan!”
“No. Not this time. It’s over.”
Alex threw the first of the kitchen appliances at his younger sibling, a small coffee machine, followed by a toaster, then a stone rolling pin. It gave him enough time to fumble in a cupboard. He produced a pistol – he had run out knives, so option two it had to be. He’d parked the weapon there years before, loaded and ready, near to his intended escape path.
The first shot was wildly inaccurate. The second drilled into the plaster walls as Stefan sought cover. Alex needed to leave, but he wasn’t going without a fight.
Outside the door to Alex’s apartment, McCall had stopped and was listening. What he heard said ‘conflict’ – muffled voices, angry voices and noises of urgent activity, and now gunshots. This was not ideal, especially as one of the protagonists was called Alex. And it was Alex he had come to have tea with, chat a while, hand over a few lousy pieces of paper and Foxtrot Oscar as they said on the team, return to the ranch a few hundred thousand richer and back to work on Monday morning. No questions asked.
‘Great, so now I arrive to a fight already underway. Now what?’
Gunshots. Chaos. Heightened activity. Yes, it was time to do what he did best.
He looked over the balcony down into the main hall. Dumb and Dumber were still out cold, although one was making a pitiful noise – one that sounded to McCall like it equated to months of physiotherapy for the victim but in a note a few octaves up from his normal pitch.
McCall pressed gently against the door. It was open. OK, unexpected bonus. ‘What’s it to be Mack?’ He carefully looked inside and could see two engaged in a fight. It was a fight that seemed to be lacking fairness, with one man holding a gun and the other using anything he could to avoid getting shot. One man was taller, stockier with blond hair, the other smaller, wiry with gloss-black hair. But which was the infamous Jackdaw. If he had to choose it had to be the smaller one with the shiny hair. Made sense. He already hated him.
Then the Jackdaw laughed. “Is that the best you have, brother?”
Well, that confirmed that. Target very much acquired, and it looked like the other man might be an ally of sorts, but this was all very unfamiliar territory.
He checked off the possible issues that might face him if he burst through the door and then took a second to recall why he was there in the first place – stick to the mission.
He dearly wished his team were alongside him. This would be so much easier. Done by now, and as his British counterparts liked to say, ‘Home in time for tea and medals.’
All this activity and he hadn’t even begun to barter with this bloody foreigner, all this way with a few documents for a few hundred thousand. There was no going back now. The price had just gone up too.
He eased the Glock out of its holster. Didn’t need to check the safety, there wasn’t one. You just needed to know it had one up the spout and it did, little point in carrying an unloaded weapon. He patted the knife too. Lastly, he reached into the pocket of his jacket and fished out the smoke grenade. Through the door or down the stairs?
Decisions, decisions. And then he saw something that made his mind up quickly.
‘Christ, the bloody feds are here.’ Two men had appeared at speed down below and had now stopped short, in the doorway, confronted by the sight of the two doormen, one unconscious, the other now stirring and complaining that a freight train had run over his leg.
The police had their weapons drawn. They were speaking rapidly into their radios and McCall knew that in any language it wasn’t good. He was outgunned if they called for back-up and genuinely didn’t want to start a firefight anyway – not against the good guys. ‘Geez Scottie, this is really not going to plan at all. Time to re-evaluate.’
His options were simple. Jettison the weapons and revert back to being a shameless drunken tourist, who was lost in the big city; found himself in this lovely building and was just looking for the bathroom when all hell had broken loose. Good, but flawed. What if they had seen him enter? What if the coffee boy was right and the police were watching?
Option Two was crash through the door and hope the police followed. If he lived, he could always produce the amnesia card. Again, flawed.
Option Three came to him on a plate, edged in gold.
Artur Gheorghiu, Alex’s trusted lieutenant, had seen the commotion on the TV screen at the back of the nightclub. He had pushed back from his comfortable leather chair and calmly walked through the dance floor to a side door, carrying a pistol, followed by two younger men with stereotypical haircuts and miserable expressions. What Gheorghiu had seen was the result of McCall’s handiwork, not the cause. Right now his two primary doormen were down on the ground, and that concerned him enough to draw a weapon. He favoured a heavy calibre pistol and fired it correctly, not side on, gangster style, which was about as accurate as the local weather forecast.
As he arrived into the hall, his two men fanning out behind him, he was confronted by the sight of his two doormen on the ground, two men standing in the doorway, both armed and a commotion upstairs in the boss’s flat. He too had three options. Surrender. Make a few enquiries or start shooting. He chose the latter. As his pistol came upwards, into the firing position the two police staff responded.
McCall chose that moment to toss the grenade into the void. A second later it detonated with a massive bang which caused a chain of events to occur. The nightclub came to a halt, patrons already streaming towards the main door and fire escape panicked. The remixed track on the speakers would normally have made McCall smile, perhaps one day it would.
Ballroom Blitz by Sweet was blearing out of the huge sound system.
Their lead singer referred to a man in black and how he was encouraging an attack.
&
nbsp; As the song ended, the words ballroom blitz reverberated.’
The M18 grenade was pumping purple smoke into the hallway. It rapidly filled the room. Gheorghiu started firing. The police responded. Cars slammed to a halt nearby and disgorged more police staff, weapons drawn. Grig ran towards the impressive old façade of the city’s leading nightclub, saw the purple smoke billowing from the door, a slumbering dragon coming to life in Little Paris – as his city was often referred – and wondered when his life would ever be normal again.
‘Shots fired.’ ‘Urgent backup’. All he needed was ‘Officer down’ and his day would be just perfect. But it wasn’t like a US drama. Real life rarely was. Shots were fired but randomly into the acrid smoke curtain, and now both parties retreated. And when shots hit you, they hurt. They thudded into your skin and muscles and tendons and bone. They whistled sub-sonically into their target; screaming hot, reeking of black powder, cutting their way through anything they could or diverting up, down or sideways if they met something harder than themselves.
You rarely got up and carried on. But adrenaline did strange things to people.
The police had backed out of the doorway, onto the street to a place of safety, and Gheorghiu and his men were back through the door, mixing with the nightclub guests who heard an explosion, saw smoke, heard gunshots and feared for the worst.
‘It was electric. So perfectly hectic.’ Sang the British band to no one in particular. An empty nightclub, plastic cups, two abandoned high-heels and the remnants of dry ice were all that remained of Alex’s great comeback. He hadn’t even made it to his own party.
For Sergeant Scottie McCall 1NZSAS it was good to back in the saddle. Hectic, Electric. Words he simply adored.
“Should have had them tattooed on your arse, Mack!”
The first flashbang went down into the void to keep both parties at bay – he hoped the police had no idea he had started it all. McCall uncovered his ears. The second went through the gap in the door, which McCall hastily pulled shut, covering his ears again. It was of limited use, but he knew it would at least stop the percussion effect.
Half a second afterwards he was through the door to Alex’s apartment, the room still ringing with the effects of the flashbang. His weapon was up in the ready position, scanning the room and identifying just two targets. Shoot one? Shoot both? Shoot neither?
Alex saw him first. Stefan had his back to the door, still fighting and with the feeling that blood was cascading from their ears.
Police? It had to be. That explained the commotion downstairs. But this man didn’t look like a police officer. He was quite scruffy, with a few days’ growth and longer hair. Undercover perhaps? Or an assassin sent by his primary enemy from across the border – the Bulgarian government.
Alex pulled away from his brother hurriedly and pushed his hands up to the ceiling.
“Please. I am unarmed,” he yelled in Romanian. Shouting overly loud due to the recent detonation in a confined space.
And he raises his hands to the sky.’
That was the last line of the song any of them heard, downstairs in the abandoned nightclub, the rest was just a muffled and disorderly set of words, somewhere in the distance, as the police hurled more flashbangs into the hallway, hoping to disorientate their enemy, waiting for the smoke to diminish and praying for a fast arrival from their tactical colleagues.
McCall saw the pistol on the breakfast bar and then the arms move. ‘Better to ask for forgiveness than permission, Mack.’
He had already squeezed the trigger twice, bang, smooth and fast, trigger reset, bang, hitting Alex in the chest knocking him backwards. Two 9mm rounds struck him like house bricks fired from a cannon, but the vest he wore, always, took the lethality out of the ordinarily deadly rounds. The third shot, to the head never came. Alex was lucky.
For Scott McCall, it was now about the money. He had risked everything and for all he knew the New Zealand authorities could already be hunting for him, along with the locals and God knows who else.
All McCall had wanted was a target incapacitated long enough to tell him where the money was. He knew this option only gave Alex a few minutes, but he felt little compassion towards him. If he had caused that beautiful girl to suffer on that quiet New Zealand road that day, back when McCall still had a moral compass, then Alex’s days were numbered. The more he looked him in the eye, the more he despised him.
And besides, it served him right for being so damned arrogant on the phone. McCall had decided to keep the documents for himself too. Could come in handy.
He’d made the decision on the flight over that he trusted this Jackdaw bloke about as far as he could kick him.
If he had known what was going to happen next, he would have taken the third shot.
Chapter Thirty-Two
McCall was having serious doubts about the veracity of the whole operation, realising that he really should have stayed back in New Zealand and found a legitimate way to deal with the debts. It would have been so much easier than engaging an enemy in his own backyard.
He’d done it before, in some weird and wonderful places, places that never offered to stamp his passport and ones which when asked, the New Zealand government would politely decline to answer.
‘We were there in an advisory capacity only.’
Mike Steel would have helped him. He wished Steel was alongside now; a moral and fatherly lighthouse in a raging shitstorm.
If nothing else he might be able to figure out where the greasy little bastard had gone – Mike was good at that, when all else was breaking down he could be found on a nearby hilltop with a cup of tea, figuring it all out, before arriving on a white charger and clearing everyone else’s mess up. It was why they sent him to places in conflict. That said, his last post had been London whereas a Defence Liaison Officer he had won many friends for his gentle humour, integrity and candour.
McCall walked carefully towards the island, with its white marble benchtops and matching sink. Glock in the favoured SUL position, close to his chest and under control, ready to punch out into the aim in a fraction of a second – it became an extension of his own body and up to about twenty metres his grouping was measured by the size of a human eye socket.
Three LED lights bathed the area in an arctic-white light.
Left, right. Up, then down.
He was gone. And McCall was distracted. ‘Never take your eye off the ball, Scottie.’
Stefan’s reactions were lighting fast. He grabbed the last of the knives from the woodblock and threw it sideways, across the worktops, slicing through the air and hitting McCall in the leg.
“Fuck me!” He almost shot him, a reaction and mark of his sheer and unbridled anger. If he had been able to see his feet he would have drilled a round through each one. Then stamped on them.
He strutted for a second, trying to reduce the pain. “By the looks of it, I’m here to bloody save you, bro’. What the hell did you do that for? Where is he?” McCall was furious.
“You are English?” The sudden realisation that McCall had been sent to help struck home, albeit it was entirely wrong.
“I’m sorry. OK? Don’t shoot me. He’s gone, through here. I thought you were one of his men.” He was looking down towards his feet. Perhaps he had read McCall’s thoughts about putting a hole in each.
Stefan pointed to a panel in the bottom of the kitchen island area.
“It’s called a priest hole. They used…”
“I know what they are, mate. And your man, there is no priest. So where does it go?”
“He’s my brother and no mate of mine. It heads into a set of tunnels. They were built during the Second World War. He built the kitchen around it. Said it would come in handy one day. He’s used it a lot since then to escape various people.”
“Such as?”
“Police. The taxman. Competitors. Criminals. Angry girlfriends…”
“Funny guy. So I have no chance of finding him?”
“N
one. Not once he gets into the city. It is not safe. But we are not safe either. We need to go. Do you have transport?”
“I do.”
“I need to get out of here. To get to London. I need to see someone in the city – someone very important. They need to know what Alex is planning, and I can only do that in person. I trust no one in Bucharest anymore. Alex has seen to that. This is of national level importance to Britain. You are British services, yes? Military?”
“Shut up. Just belt up will you before I shoot you, anyway.”
Stefan was the bigger of the two, but knew when he was outclassed by a man who exuded training and skill.
“You really expect me to believe that you are connected to the British government?”
“I do.” His eyes fixed on McCall. There was no telltale sideways glance. His non-verbals were spot on.
McCall scratched his head, “Mate, I was just coming here to sell a document for a few hundred thousand dollars. That was the plan anyway. Gone now. A lot of hard work and risk down the gurgler.”
Stefan’s mind began to engage on what this man had just said. The way he had handled himself was impressive. If he wasn’t police, he was definitely ex-military. Men like that always had a bearing, a sense of assuredness.
“I think I could be on your side. But I need something from you to show me I’m not deluded.” McCall continued, pointing the Glock at Stefan with one hand and checking the wound with the other. He would live.
“Truce?” Stefan put the last of the weapons down, a short-handled paring knife. He raised his hands slowly. “OK partner, don’t shoot. Seriously.” He spoke in English with a heavy and affected American accent.
“I think we might be on the same side too. But I need to know who you are before I make that decision. You haven’t shot me yet, so this is good – if you were one of my brother’s men, I would be dead. Police, possibly. Bulgarian Intelligence...” He threw his hands up in the air.
“I don’t know anymore. But I know we need to go soon. Those police down there, they’ll start searching the building soon and they know where Alex’s apartment is. Right now, I reckon we have minutes.”
Seven of Swords (The Seventh Wave Trilogy Book 3) Page 31