by Sam Leith
Alex Smart didn’t recognise Sherman but something in him knew instantly and viscerally that the man behind him was after him. He gasped, stumbled over on one ankle, recovered, hip-checked the back end of the line of trolleys and sprinted up the ramp for the entrance of the shop.
Shit shit shit. Sherman abandoned all pretence of stalking him and just went flat out. A fraction of a second of indecision – go right and round the line of trolleys, or try to hurdle them – resolved in favour of cutting the corner.
He grunted and put one hand out to grab midway down the caterpillar of trolleys, pushed off the tarmac and swung his legs up to vault – the kid whipping back his head to look with candid fright at the man cutting the corner off between them – feeling as he left the ground the trolleys sliding under his hand, his trailing foot now not clearing but catching the steel railing on the other side – angular momentum bringing him round faster than he could compensate for.
The electric doors of the supermarket whooshed open and Alex ran inside. Sherman crashed down onto the top of the ramp behind him. His left hand broke his fall at the cost of an impact in the heel of his hand so hard the pain detonated in his elbow. He lost a smear of skin – he didn’t feel it – then first his left then his right knee crashed onto the hairy black-and-red plastic mat that said ‘WELCOME’ in big letters.
Nothing was broken, but the physical shock – a charge of adrenalin and humiliation – made Sherman very, very angry. The electric doors had half swiped shut behind Alex, but then Sherman’s face broke the beam, and they jolted open again. Sherman scrambled to his feet and stumbled through the doors.
He got his head up just long enough to see, confusingly, what seemed to be the bottom half of a girl in a bikini before his forward momentum drove his head into the soft part between her bikini top and her bikini bottoms. There was a shrill squawk, interrupted by the sound of the air being driven out of her lungs by Sherman’s head. She went down and so did Sherman, rolling off sideways and sprawling on his back.
It was a girl in a bikini – two of them. Both blonde. One of them now on the deck somewhere, the other shying above him on her platform shoes like some sort of horse. As Sherman tried to get his footing and his dignity back, there was the sound of an air horn and his field of vision was obscured by an avalanche of something coming down on him – colours, red, white and blue…
He threw his hands up to protect his face, and yelped. Sherman was engulfed in something soft and multicoloured and swirling. The air horn gave another great asthmatic hoot and Sherman found himself spitting out something dry in his mouth… little bits of paper.
The girl on the floor was crying – or wailing, anyway – and Sherman was sitting in a small snowdrift of red-white-and-blue confetti, half of which seemed to be wrapped in flakes round his tongue. The air horn went off again.
Sherman scrambled to his feet. There was a guy in a white button-down shirt with a tie on, trying to help him up and grinning inanely in his face.
‘-tulations! Sir, yes, sir, sorry. Sorry, sir, let us -’ the man in the shirt sweeping confetti from Sherman’s shoulders, the one girl helping the other girl up – ‘quite unprepared, quite an entrance, ha ha, but no harm done, no, sir, let me extend the compliments of the store to you, yes, sir-’
‘What the fuck?’
‘Ha ha, sir, no, I’m sorry, sir, there’s no need for that kind of language, I think you’ll be pleased, sir, to learn – let me help you up with that – sir, this is a very proud moment, a proud moment I say, in the history of this store, to be able to say you are our one MILLIONTH customer!’
And with that the man in the shirt and tie extended the open palm of friendship to the man from MIC and the man from MIC hit him in the face.
Alex heard all this – or some of this – behind him as he ran through the store. He dodged a startled sales assistant, brought down a revolving rack of tennis shirts, gulped air, hurdled a low stool on which until moments before someone had been trying on a pair of trainers, and then seeing half concealed between two racks of off-brand sportswear a beige fire door with a bar across it at waist height rammed his hand into the bar so hard his palm hurt.
The door slammed open and disgorged Alex into a corridor of whitewashed breeze blocks and grey floor tiles. It smelled of stale air and long-ago bleach. Alex let the door shut behind him and ran down the corridor and round the corner, grabbing at a bit of pipework to swing himself round as he went.
He heard his own trainers squeaking on the lino, and his chest hurt at the Y-shaped bit where his lungs met.
There were what looked like storerooms off the corridor to one or other side – grey doors, with wired windows in them. He wondered about hiding in one but the fear of being trapped was too strong. Besides, his body – he didn’t know who that guy was, but he knew he needed to get away from him – seemed to be taking these decisions for him. He carried on running. At the end of the corridor there was sunlight leaking in round the edges of another door with a bar across it. Alex bet that would be the outside door.
He didn’t know how long the guy he’d heard fall over behind him would take to be on him and he didn’t want to find out. He barrelled into the door. It resisted the first bump, but then he pushed again and the bar yielded and the door opened. He spilled out into the light. He was by an open loading bay of some sort – a thin and inexpertly laid strip of tarmac led round to the far corner of the building and back out.
Ahead there was a shallow bank of scrubby grass, a low wall, a patch of waste ground. Further away, in the distance, the highway. He stopped for a moment and looked around. If he could sneak back down between the outside wall of the store and the hedge he could maybe make it to his car. But he’d have to cross the car park. That guy had moved fast. If he hadn’t seen where he’d gone would he have doubled back to try and ambush him? Or would he even now be making his way through the back corridor of the building?
Before he had the chance to speculate further, Alex flinched: in the shadow of the loading bay he thought he saw something move. He turned to face it, but his eyes were still adjusting to the brightness. There was something there, though. Definitely something there. He stepped a bit further back -
At that precise moment the fire door banged open again with some force. Out of the door came Sherman, looking as he was: furious. The door itself swung out and struck Davidoff – who had been unfortunate in the moment he picked to pounce – hard on the top of his forehead. Davidoff, behind the door, went down like a rail of shirts, but not before the momentum of his charge had sent the door slamming back onto his colleague. Sherman, weighing not more than three-quarters what Davidoff did, himself fell over, again, right at Alex’s feet.
Alex, not sure at all what had just happened, looked down at the crazy man – who, he noticed, had a gun in his sock and looked like he was proposing to start pointing it at Alex just as soon as he got round to not being on the ground again – and bolted for the corner. If the bad guy was now behind him, the decision where to run had become a whole lot more straightforward.
Jones had caught up with Bree outside the superstore. Jones was smoking and Bree was wondering what to do when Alex emerged from the gap between the low trees and the left-hand side of the store running at full pelt across the parking lot towards them.
Bree looked at Jones, whose expression was perfectly blank. Let him go, thought Bree. This was too public. They knew what car he was driving. The brief was to follow. Protect.
‘Like a bat out of hell,’ Bree murmured as the boy closed the gap between them. She felt a stirring of anxiety in her gut as to what was following him, then quenched it and put on her best bovine bystander expression.
Like a bat out of hell. She wondered about the origins of the phrase. Why were bats, especially, keen to leave hell? The boy ran right between the two of them, legs pumping almost comically high, breath coming in rags and tatters.
Something occurred to her as she watched him go.
‘Yo
u have no idea,’ she said to his departing back, ‘what’s going on, do you?’ He took a corner – Scooby-Doo legs – and was fumbling at the door of the silver Pontiac and then was in it, overrevving the engine before he got it in gear, then taking a wide loop round the near-empty parking lot and grounding the undercarriage with a scrape as he bounced down the awkward gradient onto the street. He was gone.
The guy Bree had hit with her trolley earlier came out from the same place more or less as Alex was getting into the car. He had something in his hand that he stowed quickly inside his jacket as he saw Bree. At around the same moment, the front doors of the store slid sideways and out came – to Bree’s considerable surprise – some sort of store detective in a brown uniform, along with a pair of cut-price beauty queens and a really distressed-looking guy with a wad of crimson toilet tissue clamped to his nose and nosebleed all down his cheap shirt and what looked like confetti in his hair.
The guy with the gun in his jacket clocked them. Bree could see him making a swift calculation. He broke into the sort of awkward, loping run that someone who has just sustained a crunching blow to the coccyx might adopt. First he seemed to be making for the road on foot, the store detective making a half-hearted attempt to lumber in pursuit and the nosebleed guy waving one arm and shouting something from the safety of the doorway. Then, a way away, Bree could hear something that sounded like a siren and the man thought better of it and swerved towards a car parked near the entrance to the lot. He was gone before the store detective got halfway across the space between them.
The guy’s car was a rental. Bree shrugged. Everyone’s car seemed to be a rental. She had the plate. Red Queen would run something up.
‘’s go,’ she said. ‘I made the plate. Did you make the plate?’
Jones nodded. ‘Every one in the lot.’
‘Jonesy,’ said Bree. ‘There is a use for you after all.’
‘There was another man,’ Jones said. Bree looked at him with eyebrows raised. ‘He came past me when I was buying cigarettes. I saw them talking.’ Bree was thinking – what with them both having been standing in the middle of the parking lot for the last ten minutes and the guys in the stripy cars about to show up – that it was time for them to be off.
‘Wait,’ said Jones, and vanished at a run towards the far side of the building.
‘Jones!’ said Bree.
A police car rolled, siren blipping off, into the parking lot and pulled up outside the line of trolleys in front of the store. The store detective and the nosebleed guy mobbed the window as the cop got out. Arms were waved. Bree couldn’t afford to stay still and risk becoming somebody’s witness so she moved off, fussing ostentatiously with her trolley, and then stood behind their car pretending to do something in the trunk.
When that got boring, she sat in the passenger seat and started to eat Jolly Ranchers from the stash in the glove compartment, two at a time. She liked to combine the cherry and peach ones. Thinking about recipes kept her calm, she had discovered.
Where the hell had Jones gone? The cop had gone into the store with the nosebleed guy and his entourage. He had his notepad out and was writing as he went. He looked, from his body language at least, bored. Good. Bree waited some more. She ran out of Jolly Ranchers. She thought about calling Red Queen but then thought she better be safe and wait for Jones and wait for a landline. She wondered if there were some Reese’s Pieces at the back of the glove compartment. There were not.
Then the door opened and Jones climbed into the driver’s seat. He smelled of stale smoke and something else. He pulled a rag out from the compartment in the door and wiped at his hand. He was looking dead ahead. Under the level of the steering wheel Bree could see -
‘Is that blood? Jesus. Jones: what the hell? Are you hurt?’
‘No,’ said Jones. ‘The other man is dead.’
Bree was speechless, for a moment.
‘You’re joking.’ She felt dizzy.
‘Don’t joke,’ said Jones. A fact about himself. He showed her a cellphone. On the screen was a picture of a man’s face. He looked startled. There was a penknife sticking out of his neck. His mouth was slightly open. Very little blood. The background was tarmac.
‘He was unconscious,’ said Jones. ‘I was searching him and he woke up. I didn’t know what to do so I killed him. No documents. Only phone. Took his photograph. Might be helpful.’
‘You killed him?’
‘I didn’t know what to do.’
Jones looked intently ahead, turned on the engine, drove the car out of the lot.
Alex was freaking out. He spent at least as much time looking in his rear-view mirror – for what? He barely even got a look at the guy – as out of the windscreen. Within thirty seconds of joining the freeway he’d come so close to rear-ending a truck (he reckoned his front bumper had been about four inches from the sign reading ‘I Brake For Pussy’, which would have been fatal had the driver done as advertised) that he’d given himself an even bigger fright than he’d had round the back of the supermarket. He’d had one nasty near miss as he’d become confused as to what was the inside and what the outside lane when you’re driving on the other side of the road. A wailing horn had reminded him.
A panicky attempt to fish his mobile phone out of his left-hand pocket – he was still sketchy as to who he would call but he knew he’d rather have it on the passenger seat than in his pocket – had nearly ended in the sort of disaster they show on the news.
Who the hell was that man? With a gun! An honest to God gun. As he drove, he started to calm down. Just a random lunatic. Another one. America was full of those. But what had happened back there? It looked like the door had bounced off something and hit him. What had the door bounced off?
Alex’s appetite for his road trip was dwindling. What was causing him especially strong palpitations was the thought – he didn’t know from where – that he recognised that man. Could the man have been stalking him or something? He thought of Rutger Hauer’s character in The Hitcher: a blond, amused lunatic killing his way through the desert and always, as in a nightmare, seeming to get ahead of the hero. Wherever you showed up, he’d already be there, and would have marked his arrival with some dead bodies or a severed finger in a bowl of chips.
Alex kept going west.
He stopped, two hours later, when his petrol gauge started to wag into the red zone. He found a service station, a busy one. And only when he’d been standing in there for twenty minutes, affecting to browse the Doritos under the reassuring eye of the CCTV camera, watching the arrivals on the forecourt, did he set out on the road again with something like a restored sense of calm.
The guy couldn’t possibly be following him. Too much time on his own was affecting his imagination. Even so, he came within an ace of calling Saul, just to hear his brother’s voice, sleepy and annoyed, at whatever time it was in England.
Chapter 16
They’d risked sending the photograph of the dead man in over the dead man’s phone.
Red Queen had spent fifteen minutes talking Bree down.
‘I did not sign up for this,’ had been the agent’s first words when she’d got a line to the Directorate. ‘Your guy killed someone in cold blood. We don’t do that. We don’t do things like that. We have no -’ Bree flapped her hand – ‘no – we have no – we’re not -’
‘Don’t panic,’ said Red Queen. Red Queen was panicking.
‘- we have no jurisdiction. If we were – we’re not -’
Bree was hyperventilating, nearly. The DEI wasn’t a judicial body. It didn’t have any jurisdiction at all. It just had a remit.
‘Did you know? Did you know he was going to do that?’
‘Don’t panic -’
‘Tell me.’
Red Queen left a silence a bit too long. ‘No, I didn’t. He wasn’t supposed to…’
‘You – what – who told him? He’s… this, this “thing”. He’s like mentally ill, and you’ve got him -’
�
�We thought. Our Friends thought -’
‘He’s what? He’s what? Our Friends are involved?’
‘Of course they’re involved. This is very big. Of course -’
‘Jesus, RQ. He could go to jail. I could go to jail. He murdered someone. In a Kwik-E-Mart parking lot. With a frigging squad car outside.’
Bree breathed in and out, raggedly, gathering breath to continue, goggling at the telephone cable. She felt sweaty.
‘Where did he get a knife? What was he doing with a knife?’
‘Bree – half the people in this country carry a gun -’
‘So why didn’t he use a gun? What’s wrong with him? He’s a Friend? Are you saying he’s a Friend? I thought he was Directorate -’
‘On loan. Their asset.’
‘Well, how do you know? Was this part of their plan?’
Red Queen exhaled.
Bree said: ‘You don’t know, do you?’
The silence lengthened.
Eventually Red Queen said: ‘None of that matters. You know how important this is. Keep your head. Stay with it. Do your job. We’ll look after you. Trust me.’
Bree didn’t say anything to that, put down the phone, went back to the motel room.
The dead man, as Red Queen had feared, was linked to MIC: off-books payments over five years. Frederick Gordon Noone. Forty-one. A British national, ten-year veteran of the UK’s Parachute Regiment, where he was known as ‘Davidoff’ for reasons unclear to Red Queen.
Noone had got his boots sandy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clean service record. After leaving the regiment he had, along with many like him, touted for private hire and found himself doing a similar job for much more money and with the rules of engagement tilted in his favour. He was on Blackwater’s books, briefly – then left. The payments from a slush fund linked to MIC had started shortly after.
The trail pointed to sub-Saharan Africa, some time in South America – training FARC, probably, thought Red Queen. The run-of-the-mill end of MIC’s operations involved arming and training terrorists and their opposite numbers in government in most of the major conflicts around the world. Creating customers, was how they thought of it.