Thunder

by Anthony Bellaleigh

  Well, that’s all changing.

  Sixty. Sixty-one...

  ~~~~~

  Paris, France

  Iron sipped at his coffee and watched the crowds milling past him along L’Avenue des Champs-Élysées. The blue, Gauloises branded, umbrella under which he was sitting, fluttered in the pleasant evening breeze which gusted down the hill from L’Arc de Triomphe.

  No sign yet.

  His table, nestled in amongst the other locals and tourists, was ideally placed at one end of the sizeable pavement cafe. He’d picked a different table tonight. Maybe some of that training shit would be useful? It had certainly helped him during his evening soirees into the suburbs. The Clio was filling up nicely. Fair brimming with precious metals. A nice little bit of smelting, somewhere quiet, and he’d be well set. ‘Maybe I’ll head off to the Costa del Sol to start with?’ he thought to himself. A bit of sunshine would be nice. Perhaps he should get himself a pad down there? First though, he needed to get this job done.

  Iron looked at his watch. His target should have appeared by now. What if the little piece of shit had moved on? Had he pissed off, out of Paris?

  The worries vanished in a sudden flush of excitement as he spied a little olive-skinned man ducking in and out amongst the ambling tourists in the distance. The dude was a short-fucker, only about five-foot high, and he tended to drift in and out of sight as he came wandering down the street. It had been the same each evening for the last two nights and made it tricky to keep an eye on him, but Iron knew his target was heading here, to this little cafe. His little, bald, friend made a habit of coming here. This would be the third evening on the trot.

  Iron’s tip-off had been a brief message on his cell, “Be at the top of the Champs-Élysées.” Yes, since then, his little mate had made a terminal habit of coming here to eat. He seemed to have several bad habits. One of them was that he always had snails to start with.

  Iron grimaced at the thought of eating something so disgusting. ‘Well, the little brown slugs can sleep easier tonight,’ he thought. ‘This geezer ain’t gonna be a threat to them for much longer.’

  The target vanished again amongst the pedestrians. Where was he?

  Iron casually reached into his light sports jacket and grasped the hand grip of the piece he’d been given by his dopey employers. Unmarked, they’d said. Untraceable. Low calibre but hollow-point ammo. Nasty.

  “Don’t waste the killing rounds while you’re practicing with it,” the white-haired geezer had said.

  Well, he hadn’t wasted anything practicing. Not even a minute of his time. It was a fucking gun, wasn’t it? Point and pull. Practicing was for queers. He was just going to pop this guy and leg it in the panic that would follow. He’d be out of the city in no time. A proper hit. No pratting around.

  The target appeared again. Really close and, for some reason, looking straight at him.

  Wanker... Go on then. Have a good look, you arse-hole.

  Iron stared back and the target suddenly crouched to tie his shoe laces.

  The milling crowds split like the Nile before Moses and flowed around the small human obstruction. Iron loosened the pistol in its holster. Got ready to pull it out and send this fucker to whatever afterlife he may or may not believe in. Fuck the crowds. Fuck secrecy. It was time to get this stupid job done. What would those fucking amateurs know about a hit? Yeah... that’s it: fuck all!

  For a second the crowds thinned. Then were gone.

  His target was still stooping down.

  Iron leapt to his feet, his aluminium chair clattering to the ground behind him, and started to pull the pistol from its holster.

  The little dude’s arms were crossed, held out just in front of his crouched chest. He was holding something long in one of his hands.

  It was pointing at him.

  Iron saw a flash and his last conscious perception was of a small coughing noise as his brains erupted out of the back of his head and the shattered remnants, of whatever small intelligence he’d had, sprayed themselves violently into the fabric canopy above him.

  ~~~~~

  “In the middle of the Champs-Élysées!” Greere sounded apoplectic, even given the muffling effect of the encrypted cellphone transmission.

  “Yes, sir,” Ellard could imagine Greere waving his arms around, bug-eyes bulging even further out of his face. Sometimes spittle formed round the edges of Greere’s mouth when he went off on one. That spit could fly in any direction. Ellard had taken to keeping well clear during rants. Here, in Paris, heading swiftly yet casually up the aforementioned avenue toward Place Charles de Gaulle Étoile and its towering pale stone archway, was about as close to his boss as he wanted to get right now. “I was in another cafe on the other side of the road. Watching him. I’d assumed he was looking to tail the target. I planned to intercept him when he started moving. He didn’t clock me, even though I was in the wide open and paying him more attention than an underemployed hooker on rent day.”

  “He hadn’t cased the local environment?”

  “Nope. The street is busy, as usual for this time of the evening. I had no idea he was going to try something here, in the middle of the city. He couldn’t have picked a worse or more public spot.”

  “Where is he NOW?” Greere almost screamed the question.

  “Most of him is next to the table he was sitting at, surrounded by gendarmes.”

  “FUCK! Dead?”

  “Very. It was a clean head-shot to his face. Blew him straight backwards and his brains are all over the place. The target got up, cool as a cucumber, and wandered off down toward Place de la Concorde in the surrounding mêlée. I’m not pursuing.”

  “FUCK!”

  “I’m going to find his stolen car and try to get this cleaned up a bit, before the gendarmes start sniffing around and try to trace him backwards. With luck, no-one will connect the target to the shooting. Looks like a clean kill from here. The target was keeping himself obscured amongst the sightseers and shoppers. I don’t think they’ll get much, even from CCTV.

  “My plan is to get to his hotel room,” Ellard continued, “to stick some of Iron’s local thievery in there and then to find and dump the car. Can you send the wipe code to his mobile – the idiot might be carrying it for all I know – and also an anonymous text with a few local gangsters names and numbers in it? There’s every chance, sir, that we can make this look like a simple gangland hit or, if not, we can at least make them waste valuable time chasing the false leads.”

  “Good thinking, Deuce. I’m checking the recent DCRI Flash Reports right now. I remember seeing the names of a couple of French Most-Wanteds in them. Let’s see if we can give our colleagues over there an unexpected break.”

  Ellard nodded as he listened. As far as he was concerned, there was no harm in trying to stitch up some other bad guys.

  “But Iron’s mother will have to rot,” Greere continued. “Regrettable, after what she’s already lived through.” Greere didn’t sound all too bothered.

  “Erm, no need for conscience there either, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “His story’s been bugging me for a while, so on the way over here I put a ‘concerned neighbour’ call in to the local plod in Hastings. I kept it deliberately vague, then watched out for any reports.”

  “And?”

  “It was posted this morning. Plod got no response at the house, checked round the place, checked the neighbours – who of course denied all knowledge of the tip off call – checked again and could just make out what looked like someone, sitting in one of the front room chairs. They said there was a rotten stink around the place too. So, they broke down the front door and found good old mummy sitting there, dead for at least three months. It’s good to know that us Brits keep an eye out for our old people, eh?”

  “Him?”

  “Probably. Same M.O. as the old couple from his last robbery: head caved in with a heavy object. The body was too far gone for any meaningful analysis but Plod mak
es mention that there’s not a brass farthing left in the place. Stripped clean. Sounds familiar, huh?”

  “Fuck.”

  “Oh, and one other thing. Decomposed or not, I don’t think Plod would have written: ‘She was dressed normally: shoes, trousers, blouse and cardigan’, if she’d had no legs...”

  “FUUUUCKKKKINGGGG BASSTTTTAAA...”

  Ellard clicked off the call – he’d put it down to a bad connection if he had too. Then dropped the phone into his jacket pocket and headed up an alleyway to the small backstreet hotel’s rusting iron fire escape. With luck, it would get him into the lying bastard's hotel room...

  ~~~~~

  Murat Nagpal scuttled left along Rue Washington, through the underpass to Rue de Monceau and onward until he was a safe distance away from the Champs-Élysées. Then, in a little deserted backstreet, he slipped behind a couple of communal dumpsters and withdrew his arm and the Makarov nine-millimetre pistol from where it was hidden inside his sports jacket. He carefully kept the weapon obscured by his coat while he unscrewed the silencer and slipped it into one side pocket. The gun went in the other to balance the weight out.

  With a quick glance up and down the street, he casually strode out onto the pavement and made his way along until he came to a solitary pay-phone in front of the whitewashed glass window of a closed-down patisserie.

  A glance into the window’s ghostly reflection assured him that there were no followers, so he punched a nondescript German landline number into the phone’s keypad and waited until the answering machine cut in...

  “It’s me,” he said calmly to the machine in Turkmen. “They’re close. Watch your backs. I just had to put one down here. It’s messy. They may be tracking the cellphones – switch them all off. We change to Exit Plan Delta and meet me at Rendezvous Location B.”

  He put the pay-phone’s handset down and, with extreme caution, headed to the Place de Cichy Metro, and then south to Maison Blanche and the Parisian YMCA, to collect up his always-ready backpack. It would be fastest if he caught a train from Gare du Nord, but to get there would mean he’d have to almost identically retrace his steps, back across the city. No. He’d head south to start with, and find some way to cut across to the east later on. Gare du Lyon was walkable from here.

  ~~~~~

  Ellard searched the hotel room. There were several bags scattered around, all stuffed full with local loot. One of them was a plain-black Salomon snowboard bag which, when unzipped, revealed the silverware reported missing from the mountain chalet.

  A sudden buzzing noise, from near the unmade bed, startled him and he span round with his gun drawn, but it was only the moron’s mobile phone tucked into the bedside cabinet’s inner shelf.

  “Looks like you did one thing right,” Ellard muttered as he recovered the device from its crevice and re-holstered his weapon. The phone was just restarting itself so with his gloved fingers he worked through a few of the icons, including the picture files, to make sure it was clean. It was. It buzzed again in his hand. Some random text from one of the UK Network Operators about charges whilst in France and then again, from some French number, a list of names and phone numbers. He left the phone on the text screen and chucked it onto the middle of the mattress.

  Carefully and quietly he went over every inch of the room. No other telltales.

  He grabbed the board bag, ducked quietly back out of the sash window, and then drew the glass gently down until the window was neatly closed behind him.

  He found the Renault Clio parked a couple of streets away. It was the right car, even though Iron had apparently swapped the number plates at some point. Ellard checked it quickly for booby traps – none – lifted the hatchback door – empty – and threw in the board-bag. As with the clumsily screwdriver-forced door locks, the interior of the car betrayed Iron’s thievery with the wiring loom hanging as a confused tangle from the steering column. Fortunately the regularly used, stripped back, starter motor wires were easy to spot.

  Ellard started the car and drove off, out of the city, in search of somewhere safe to get rid of it.

  ~~~~~

  Barfold

  Grey Beard is back. And Dad. And you. And Elizabeth.

  I don’t mind you and Lizzie coming to see me.

  I can just about put up with Dad.

  But, Grey Beard, come on! I’m having enough trouble sleeping without your gruesome visage cropping up every night. Leave me alone. Please! I’m very sorry you’re dead. I’m sorry you’re all dead...

  I can see your sweet lips moving, my darling Iuli. So are Dad’s. And Grey Beard’s... You all seem to be mouthing the same thing. Silently. Over and over again. “Do the right thing... Do the right thing...”

  Lizzie waves her little hand.

  I wish I was dead too.

  ~~~~~

  Berlin

  Jeyhun Farhad Ebrahimi sat on his solitary metal chair and stared nervously at the light blinking on top of the answering machine. The machine sat, oblivious to his undivided attention, on top of a battered wooden desk which – apart from a mouldy mattress, a crumpled sleeping bag, Jeyhun’s backpack, and a solitary chair – was the only furniture in the huge shadowy loft-space. Dusty light struggled in from a single, circular, glass window set into the gable-end wall of the abandoned warehouse. The rest of the loft was bathed in semi-permanent darkness.

  The answering machine’s wire trailed off the table, across an expanse of bare floorboards and continued, an ongoing straggle of cable, to the top of an iron staircase at the dim, windowless, end of the cavernous room. The cable disappeared into this hole and dropped, vertically and entirely unattached, three floors to the distribution box near the single back door. The local Deutsche Telekom telephone engineer had never had an easier installation: some young, well tanned, foreign man had met him by the door and had asked him to point out which pair of screw terminals the line was on, for a reel of cable and a socket, and then thrown him out...

  Jeyhun pushed himself up from the chair, stomped three short paces to the table and pressed play again. “They’re close. Watch your backs...,” the recorded message sounded bad.

  ‘Come on Sergei, come on, you must call in,’ he thought as he roughly pushed his long black hair to one side and glanced at the copies of Bild stacked on the table. Copies of newspapers he’d bought shortly after the attack.

  He pulled one nearer to him and, still standing, started turning the dog-eared pages. Time and time again he’d flicked through these copies. Looked upon the victims faces staring up from the pages. Read about the fury and anger directed toward them. Seen the news that their helpers, in the UK, had been arrested. Examined the pictures of the devastation in front of Victoria Station. Wondered whether his brother had known, any better than he had, what Murat and Azat had meant when they’d said they were putting together a glorious strike at the heart of his country’s enemies. A strike that they’d said would really put Khandastan on the map for all time.

  Well, whatever he’d been expecting, it hadn’t been this.

  The young man’s shoulders shuddered, his head dropped, and a teardrop splashed off the table edge beneath him.

  ~~~~~

  Madrid, Spain

  Jack stood up, flexed his stiff legs, grabbed his pack from the chair beside him and stepped off the train.

  Passing swiftly, and inconspicuously, through the ticket barriers, he made his way out of the main entrance to Madrid’s Atocha Station, turned right and headed along the footpath. The grandiose façade of the Ministry of Agriculture building shone whitely in the hot sunshine. After a few hundred metres he stopped at an unoccupied phone box and made a call.

  “I’m here,” he said, leaning closely into the small booth.

  “Took your time, Tin,” came the response.

  It sounded like his bug-eyed boss speaking. Code-named Ace.

  ‘The albino must be in the field for the slime-ball to be answering the phones,’ Jack thought to himself. ‘I wonder where?’ He glanc
ed up and down the street again. He couldn’t see anyone suspicious.

  “Whatever,” he said calmly into the phone. “And now?”

  “Hold your position. Check into a hotel. Somewhere quiet. Keep your cell on. We’ll call you. Change hotels every few days.”

  “Roger that.”

  Jack hung up, swung his pack onto his broad back, and wandered off in search of lodgings.

  ~~~~~

  Berlin

  Jeyhun was curled up, on the edge of restless sleep, when a series of angry squawks from the answering machine made him leap up in panic. For a second or two, he wildly brandished his pistol around the loft space until he worked out what was making the noise. Now, he stood in the pitch-blackness, fully clothed, with his sleeping bag round his ankles, as he listened to the machine’s automated message playing out.

  “Come on, Sergei,” Jeyhun whispered to himself.

  He could hear a clatter of background noise coming from the machine’s tiny speaker. It sounded like a bar. Then a series of tones played out as the caller keyed the remote access code.

  “You have one message,” announced the buff-coloured box. “Message one: ‘It’s me. They’re close. Watch your backs. I just had to put one down here. It’s messy. They may be tracking the cellphones – switch them all off. We change to Exit Plan Delta and meet me at Rendezvous Location B’... No more messages.”

  Jeyhun instinctively leaned toward the machine as he strained to listen. For a couple of seconds there was nothing but the continued buzz of unintelligible chatter then someone closer to the phone yelled, “Dos cervezas, por favo...” The line went dead.

  The call was from Spain. It was Azat, not Sergei. Jeyhun’s head dropped in disappointment and the machine plunged the room back into darkness.

  ~~~~~

  London

  “I think I’ve blown it,” she murmured sadly.

  The muscular man heaved himself onto his side to face her. “What do you mean, Shaz?” he asked, surprised and concerned at her sudden melancholy.