Hangman

by Daniel Cole

  Rouche was released from the chokehold and gasped for air, staggering two strides forward so that Edmunds would be able to see him in the open doorway.

  “Excellent work,” the man told the two brothers. “But I think you owe Damien here an apology, don’t you?”

  “Sorry,” said the taller man, staring at his toes like a chastised child.

  The man who had restrained Rouche, however, turned to face the wall. He began punching it as hard as he possibly could.

  “Whoa! Whoa!” said the doctor, taking hold of his damaged hands. “Nobody’s angry with you, Malcolm. I was only asking you to apologize to Damien. It’s polite.”

  The man couldn’t meet his eye: “Sorry.”

  Rouche waved off the apology graciously, despite still being bent over struggling for breath, and seized the opportunity to remove the earpiece from his pocket.

  “You take a moment,” said the doctor, resting a hand on Rouche’s back. “When you’re ready, find yourself a seat.”

  Still bent double, Rouche glimpsed Edmunds in the lobby, phone to his ear, as the heavy doors between them were pulled together and locked, sealing him inside.

  The doctor walked away.

  Forcing himself upright, Rouche re-dressed himself, quickly poking the two-way earpiece into place while taking his first proper look around the hall. In comparison to the depressing venue across the street, the room felt modern and light. He quickly counted the number of chairs in the back row and the number of rows standing between him and the stage to estimate the size of the audience. The stage itself stood perhaps five feet above the floor, with a large projector screen hanging down as a backdrop. The doctor who had permitted him entrance climbed the steps in the center to join two other people whom Rouche did not recognize.

  “I’m in,” he mumbled. “Between thirty-five and fifty suspects.”

  He spotted a vacant seat toward the end of a row and sidestepped his way through, facing the rear of the room. Just as he reached the chair, everybody around him got to their feet and he found himself staring into a sea of faces.

  His first instinct was to run, even though he knew he had nowhere to go, but then they broke into rapturous applause.

  Alexei Green had taken to the stage.

  Rouche turned around to see the long-haired man waving to his adoring audience. To make his entrance a little more memorable, he had dressed in a sharp suit with a metallic-blue sheen and, perhaps more importantly, had projected behind him an enormous photograph of the Banker’s suspended body set against the New York skyline.

  Rouche joined the applause, conscious that he was somewhere within that photograph, one of the indistinguishable crowd of emergency-service personnel staring up at the corpse from the safety of the bridge.

  “Obs on Green,” he almost had to shout over the cheers and intensifying applause as the image changed: a crumpled black truck replaced the Banker, its back end protruding from the entrance of the 33rd Precinct like the handle of a knife.

  Rouche recalled seeing what was left of Officer Kennedy’s body in the morgue, a good man by all accounts. He remembered the dirty rope still wrapped around his right wrist from where he had been bound to the hood before being driven through the wall of a building populated with his friends and colleagues.

  Rouche clapped harder.

  “All teams: move into position,” Chase ordered into his radio.

  “Thirty-five to fifty people in the audience,” Baxter told him.

  “Between three-five and five-zero perps,” Chase helpfully translated into American.

  Baxter moved away from the mobile surveillance unit to resume her other conversation:

  “Edmunds, evacuate the lobby. They’re coming in.”

  Edmunds looked around the crowded space in concern: “Yeah . . . No problem.”

  “Do you need any help?” she asked.

  “No, I’ll be all right. I’ve got Fi—”

  Finlay shook his head, having joined Edmunds a few moments earlier.

  “I’ve got things covered,” he corrected himself before hanging up.

  “She’d only fret if she knew I was in here,” Finlay explained. “Let’s just get these people out and she need never know.”

  Edmunds nodded. They split up and began shepherding people outside as quietly as they could through one set of doors as the armed officers rushed inside through another.

  Rouche risked a glance around the room, expecting Chase and his men to be joining them imminently. There were three exits, one on either side of the stage and the large double doors through which he had entered. He had already warned Baxter that there were two makeshift security personnel on each exit, none of whom appeared to have heard the arrival of the tactical teams, who were undoubtedly mere inches away from them behind the wooden doors.

  He returned his attention to Green as the psychiatrist jogged down the steps at the front of the stage to join his followers, his floppy hair held in place by the headset microphone. Rouche had to hand it to him—he was a charismatic and charming public speaker, exactly the sort of magnetic personality suited to inspire the impressionable.

  “Our brothers and sisters have made us so, so proud,” he told the room passionately, his voice cracking.

  He appeared to be set on meeting every eye in the audience as he roamed up and down the aisle. A woman at the end of a row wrapped her arms around him as he passed, falling out of her seat as she wept in delight. Rouche noticed one of the doormen moving in, but Green held up a hand to signal that he was fine. He stroked the woman’s hair and then lifted her chin to speak directly to her.

  “And we, in turn, are going to make them equally as proud.”

  The room applauded the idea enthusiastically as he continued: “And one very fortunate person, sitting in this room right now, just a little sooner than the rest of us.” Green smiled, finally able to detach himself from the woman.

  Rouche used the comment as an excuse to take another look around the hall as the audience searched the faces of their neighbors for their unidentified champion. By the time Rouche turned back, Green was at the end of his row. Just two people sat between them. He was three meters away at most.

  The police would breach at any second.

  Rouche wondered whether he could reach him.

  Green must have noticed him staring because he was looking right at him. His eyes flicked down to Rouche’s soiled shirt, but he did not falter:

  “Two days, my friends. Just two more days to wait!” he shouted, firing up his audience as he continued up the aisle, out of reach, to the sound of thunderous applause.

  On seeing the looks of adoration on the faces around him, Rouche understood the necessity for this risky final meeting: these people worshipped Green. There was nothing they wouldn’t do to earn his approval, even dying for him, and in return all they asked was that he love them back. They had needed to see him this one last time.

  And now, they were entirely his to command.

  “Do not breach. Do not breach,” Rouche mumbled, hoping that Baxter was still listening. Green voluntarily offering up his plans would be a far more reliable way of extracting them than the defiant silence or self-preserving half-truths of an interrogation. “Repeat: do . . . not . . . breach,” he said again, raising his voice.

  The tapping of rain against the skylights transformed into a sudden shower of hailstones to complement the applause.

  “Each of you already knows what is expected of you,” Green told the room, his tone now serious. “But know this: when the eyes of the world fix on Piccadilly Circus and witness our glorious victory for themselves, when they carry their dead up out of the ground to be counted, that is when they will finally take notice. That is when they will finally understand . . . that we are not ‘damaged.’ We are not ‘afflicted.’ We are not ‘weak.’”

  Green shook his head dramatically before raising both of his arms up into the air:

  “Together we . . . are . . . strong!”

/>   The room was on its feet once more, the roar from the crowd deafening.

  Chase and his handful of FBI agents were in position at the two sets of doors adjacent to the stage and therefore adjacent to Green. He was in the middle of a whispered argument with Baxter.

  “For Christ’s sake, Chase. Just give him a minute longer,” she said.

  “Negative,” replied Chase, able to raise his voice a little as the applause continued inside the room. “He’s eyeballed Green. We’re going in.”

  “He said not to breach!”

  “Goddamn it, Baxter! Keep this channel clear!” he snapped. “We’re going in. All teams. All teams. Breach! Breach! Breach!”

  The ovation faltered as the three sets of double doors shook fiercely against their metal locks. It was Green who reacted first, backing away toward the stage, where his alarmed colleagues were getting to their feet. The fear on the faces of their leaders spread through the crowd like a contagion. Rouche started shoving his way out into the aisle as, behind him, the main doors yielded.

  The crowd surged.

  He was suddenly pinned against the wall as the people at the end of the rows were thrown into him, the audience moving as a single entity. Green had reached the stage by the time the exits either side of him finally burst open.

  “FBI! Get down! Get down!”

  Rouche was fighting desperately to break free of the crush as the crowd moved as one again, swelling toward this fresh opening. The wave of bodies crashed over the FBI agents, the audience not dispersing in all directions as expected but concentrating on a single point.

  The crowd swallowed up two of the armed officers as the first shots were fired. But still they pushed on. Rouche could see Green, surrounded by his entourage, making a beeline for the open doors. Shoving someone over, Rouche managed to break free of the herd. He clambered over rows of seats, positive that the overwhelmed officers had not spotted Green heading toward them and were in no position to intervene even if they had.

  There was the crack of a gunshot.

  The man in front of Rouche dropped to the floor, leaving only open space between him and a panicking officer. The order to use deadly force had evidently been given once the police started losing control. He could see that the officer had not recognized him, that amid the chaos, and in his self-mutilated state, he appeared no more than another of Green’s fanatical followers.

  The officer took aim, the heavy gun clicking in anticipation.

  Rouche froze. He opened his mouth to say something but knew he would never get the words out in time . . .

  The assault rifle fired just as a swarm of people engulfed the officer, wasting the gunshot into empty air. The man was shoved onto the floor. Rouche was trying to reach him when a second wave of people, flowing into the path of least resistance, swept him up, trampling the floored man.

  He was carried through the doors and into the corridor outside. The majority of the audience stampeded toward the lobby, but then Rouche spotted Green climbing through an emergency exit at the far end of the hallway.

  The glass had been smashed. He climbed out through the jagged pane and into the service area at the back of the hotel. Beyond the Armed Response vehicle, Green was running toward the main road.

  “Baxter!” Rouche shouted, pushing the earpiece hard against his skull. “Green’s outside. On foot towards Marble Arch.”

  He was unable to decipher her distorted response.

  He sprinted around the side of the building and onto the street, where people were huddling together beneath storefronts and doorways. The frozen raindrops felt excruciating as they struck his burning chest.

  Rouche thought he’d lost him, but then Green tore across the road in front of the three grand archways, his coiffed long hair now dark strips stuck to his face.

  “Oxford Street!” Rouche yelled as he rounded the corner, unsure whether Baxter was even still receiving his comms in the deteriorating weather.

  Green was putting more and more distance between them as Rouche’s body started to fail him, no longer able to ignore the damage to which he had subjected it. The hail felt more like ball bearings striking him, his painful breathing returning.

  Green was confident enough to pause and watch as Rouche slowed to walking pace, every last drop of adrenaline spent. He scooped his hair out of his eyes, laughed, and started walking away.

  Rouche was on the verge of collapsing when Baxter’s Audi sped past.

  The car mounted the pavement meters ahead of Green and made contact with the wall of a building, cutting him off. Caught off guard, Green deliberated between the busy road on one side and the lingerie shop on the other when Rouche tackled him from behind, the metallic suit tearing as he dragged him to the ground.

  Baxter rushed out of the car and contributed a knee to the back of Green’s neck, pinning him to the pavement as she secured the handcuffs.

  Utterly exhausted, Rouche rolled onto his back, the sleet easing into the first graceful snowflakes as he stared up into the blank sky. He was gasping for breath, holding his chest, and yet, for the first time in as long as he could remember, he actually felt peaceful.

  “Rouche?” shouted Baxter. “Rouche?”

  He could hear her speaking to someone.

  “Ambulance . . . 521 Oxford Street . . . Yeah, it’s an Ann Summers shop . . . Police officer injured. Multiple deep lacerations, severe blood loss . . . Please hurry.” Her voice became louder. “They’re on their way, Rouche! We got him. We got him! It’s over.”

  He slowly turned his head to watch as she pulled Green up onto his knees, somehow managing a smile . . . but then his eyes grew wide.

  “Rouche? Are you all right? What’s wrong?” she asked as he started crawling back over to them. “I don’t think you should move. Rouche?”

  He cried out in pain as he dragged himself across the freezing concrete. He reached up and ripped the rest of Green’s saturated shirt open to reveal the familiar word scarred into his chest:

  PUPPET

  “Shit,” gasped Baxter as Rouche rolled onto his back again. “Why would he . . . ? Oh shit!”

  Green smiled up at her triumphantly.

  “He was never the one holding the strings,” Rouche wheezed, his words turning to mist above him. “We haven’t stopped anything.”

  Chapter 32

  Sunday, 20 December 2015

  12:39 P.M.

  Chase was furious.

  His botched operation and subsequent failure to apprehend Green himself had, at least temporarily, countermanded the FBI’s claim to the prisoner. Baxter was all too aware that this situation would be short-lived with her spineless commander throwing the fight in her corner. As such, she had arranged to interview Green the moment he arrived at Homicide and Serious Crime Command.

  The rest of his followers had been distributed across a number of local stations based on a complex algorithm calculating current workload against predicted operational demand, written by a man in IT. A man who, as chance would have it, had been briefly mistaken for the Ragdoll Killer and unjustly robbed of his lunch almost eighteen months earlier. The officers on duty were conducting interviews based on a set of questions that had been written and circulated by Chase.

  Baxter had expected Green to delay proceedings by demanding a lawyer; however, to her surprise, he had made no such request, an ill-advised decision on which she intended to capitalize. With Rouche in the hospital, she had reluctantly asked Saunders to join her. As much as she disliked the loudmouthed detective constable, he was so vile that he had proven to be the unit’s most effective investigative interviewer time and time again.

  They made their way to the interview rooms, where the officer on guard opened the door to room 1. (Only new staff to the department ever used the pristine room 2.) Green sat patiently at the table in the center of the room. He smiled at them pleasantly.

  “You can wipe that shit-eating grin off your face for a start,” Saunders barked at him.

  Baxter
wasn’t used to being the good cop.

  For the first time ever, Saunders looked quite professional. He was still dressed in uniform from the operation and was holding a file full of paperwork in his hands, which he slammed down threateningly on the table as he took a seat. It was, of course, just a copy of Men’s Health he’d tucked inside a plastic folder, but she thought it was a nice touch.

  “If you think you’ve beaten us, you are sorely mistaken,” Green told them, tucking his hair behind his ears.

  “Is that so?” asked Saunders. “That’s strange, because I thought we’d arrested all your batshit-crazy friends, all of whom are spilling their guts to our colleagues at this very mome—”

  “How many?” Green interrupted.

  “All of them.”

  “How many precisely?”

  Saunders faltered over the question.

  Green smiled smugly and leaned back in his chair.

  “So, including however many escaped your poorly executed raid this morning, plus all of those I instructed not to attend, I’d say that makes you . . . fucked.”

  To buy himself a moment to think, Saunders picked up the file and flicked it open to appear as though he was checking something. It was, in fact, yet another article on how to achieve a six-pack in just six weeks, which in theory would have put the magazine out of business after a month and a half if any of them actually worked.

  Feeling instantly fatter, he closed the file and turned to Baxter with a shrug.

  “I suppose he’s right,” said Saunders, before slapping himself on the forehead theatrically. “Do you know what? I’ve done something really bloody stupid! I’ve already arranged to meet that woman on Tuesday. What was her name again?”

  “Maria,” Baxter reminded him.

  Green tensed.

  “And you’ll never guess where I’ve asked her to meet me.”

  “Don’t say Piccadilly Circus Underground Station!” Baxter shook her head in pantomime dismay.

  “See,” said Saunders, turning back to Green, “I figured, as your sister, she might recognize any ex-colleagues, friends, possibly even patients of yours. Legitimate request, I’m sure you’ll agree. She’ll be there all day.”