by John Connor
The girl started moving again, but walking slower now. She was smiling to herself. She had earphones in, snaking away to a phone or music device. That accounted for the singing out of tune. But her voice had sounded … what? He realised suddenly that he was shaking. Her voice had brought to him a tiny little piece of her personality. What she was like, what she sounded like.
The singing of children. He had no children and rarely thought about them. Viktor had no kids either. Kids were not a part of his life. But the singing. It had caught hold of something in his chest, pulled a smile onto his face. That was why he was shaking. His arms were shaking, his legs, his chest. He had to get control of it.
She was still walking, oblivious. In a few moments she would be out of the zone he could aim within, hidden by the spur of land where the road curved. He tracked her movement, slipped the sights a little ahead of her, ran through the calculations. She was moving so slowly that hardly any adjustment was needed. Suddenly she stopped singing and stood still, looking down at either her phone or the music player. He slid the cross hairs over her head again. But the gun wasn’t steady now. The trembling in his limbs was getting transmitted down the stock. He thought, instantaneously, No, I would not have shot the boy, and something inside him paused.
This was the story they had written for her, for both of them – someone else’s plot. His part was to pull the trigger and end her life.
But he had a choice.
He took a long breath.
She started moving again, no longer singing. He slipped his finger off the trigger and his eye off the scope. He couldn’t do it. He didn’t know why, but he couldn’t do it. He didn’t want this girl to die.
Looking down the barrel, he watched her walk right past the kill zone, then brought his knees up, rolled, shook the mud and branches off and thrust himself out of the dirt and bushes, like some giant grub being born. The sun blazed in his eyes. He looked down at her from his exposed position, now behind her. Standing up he was high enough to see straight over the spur of land where the road turned. He saw her approaching the bend with the house just beyond it. He could see the sun reflecting off the swimming pool, see the red roof tiles.
They would try to kill her without him, he knew, the guy on the ridge opposite was probably already reporting to Jones. No matter what he did she would probably be dead within twenty-four hours. A six-man team meant lots of back-up options. He had a useless thought – that he should shout at her, warn her. But right then he saw the flash at the house. He ducked automatically, knowing instinctively what it was. He saw the roof of the house lift at one end, then explode outwards and up, debris showering into the sky. There was a massive crack echoing off the valley sides. He dropped to one knee and watched a coiling fireball burst upwards in a cloud of black smoke. In an instant it was subsiding into a high column of swirling dust. He could hear the noise of alarms going off, tiles and bricks raining over the hillside.
5
Rebecca still had the headphones in when she saw the flash, above the rocks right in front of her. She was about seventy metres from the house, at the curve in the road, with a steep wedge of land between herself and the drop down to their plot – the house itself was out of sight. She stopped immediately, then a split second later heard the bang, even above the noise of the music. She pulled the earphones out, let her school bag slip off her shoulder to the ground. Tiny bits of stone started to drop all around her. Some pieces struck her head. She could hear alarms, see smoke rising into the air.
Without thinking, she started to run, coming round the bend to a cloud of dust, still billowing outwards. Her house was somewhere behind it. She had no idea what was happening but her first thought was that a car had come off the road and crashed down there – the Italian’s car, maybe, if he had one. In town she had once seen a car crashed into the wall of a building, on fire – there had been a lot of smoke. She kept running, going towards the smoke and dust, flapping her arms in front of her to clear it.
She was about fifty metres down their driveway before she could see a corner of the house. There was a car buried in a wall that had collapsed there, it looked all white with dust, she couldn’t tell what kind of car it was. It wasn’t her mother’s, it might be her dad’s. But her dad couldn’t have crashed here, because he hadn’t passed her on the road, and he wouldn’t be here already – her mother had told her that he would come back at the normal time. The house alarm was going off, very loud, and something was on fire, crackling behind the broken front wall; she could smell the burning, really sharp in her nostrils, but she couldn’t see what it was. There was glass all over the road – her feet were crunching on it. The car alarm was shrieking too, on and off.
A wind stirred the smoke and she saw more of the house, all of the roof caved in, bricks and tiles all over, and something that looked like tiny shreds of paper, floating through the air. The smoke was coming out of the hole where the roof had been. That was her house. She stood mouth open, staring at it.
Now she saw the damage she thought it must have been a gas leak. What else could it be? They had two big, metal gas cylinders in the kitchen. She thought, I have to get to my bedroom, get my things out. She wasn’t running any more, just walking slowly, in a daze.
She was about thirty metres from it, past the gateposts, in the yard where the cars were normally parked, when she heard someone shouting, and thought it must be someone inside the house. She kept going, feeling frightened, then realised it was coming from behind her – someone shouting out at her, telling her to stop.
She turned to see a man coming down the hill towards her, running. He was carrying a backpack, and something long, shouting at her very loud. She had never seen him before. He was very tall, with blond hair and was wearing some kind of plastic suit or overall – a crinkly thing like she had seen the police wear at crime scenes on TV programmes, except his was black and the police suits were always white. There was a thing like a gas mask hanging around his neck. Still, she thought he must be police. He was running very fast, so he reached her before any other options could occur to her.
‘Stay there,’ he panted, in English, when he got beside her. ‘Don’t go further.’ He wasn’t looking at her, but over her, at the house. For a moment he was very out of breath. He bent suddenly, so that he was actually lower down than her. ‘Do you understand English?’ he asked. ‘Can you understand me?’
She nodded. ‘I speak English,’ she stammered. ‘My mother is English.’
He looked at her properly for the first time. She realised only then that she didn’t know him, didn’t know where he had jumped out from, didn’t have a clue what was going on. All her mother’s words came back, all the warnings. Her hand closed around the mobile in her pocket. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ she said, her voice wavering. She should turn and run, she thought. He was speaking English to her, but the police here spoke Spanish. ‘That’s my house,’ she said.
‘It was an explosion,’ he said, looking past her again, squinting towards the smoke.
‘Like a gas explosion, you mean?’
He looked back at her and his eyes met hers. She was shaking now. But his eyes looked OK, she thought, his face looked OK. But her mum had said things about situations just like this, had warned her.
‘A gas leak …’ he said vaguely. ‘Maybe.’ He stood up. ‘Wait here. I have to go and check.’ He glanced behind them. ‘Better still. Wait over there.’ He pointed to the rocks up by the start of the lane down from the main road, where he had just run from, about thirty metres back, behind the gateposts. ‘Get behind those rocks and don’t do anything,’ he said. ‘Just wait there for me. Keep your head down – in case it happens again. OK? You understand that?’
Had he just been driving past, maybe? She looked down at the long thing in his hands. It was a gun. Maybe he was one of the hunters who went after the wild boars, up in the scrub. But whatever he was, if he h
ad wanted to hurt her he wouldn’t suggest leaving her alone. She nodded again. She would walk up there, call her mum, right now.
6
Carl waited until she was behind the rocks, just past the gates. He saw her move behind and then wave to him, to signal she was there. She speaks English, he thought. Her mother is English. He thought her mother must be in the house somewhere. Suspicions aside, he hadn’t known the girl’s nationality, or anything else about her, just her name and age. In the normal course of things he wanted to know as little about the target as possible, consistent with getting the job done, neither the personal details, nor the reasons for the hit. That was meant to be a feature of the anonymous contract system – that it distanced and protected him, as well as the client and the cartel.
She had done well to mention the gas leak. He hadn’t been thinking about that at all. He’d been thinking about another bomb, a secondary – she had been walking towards it and he had wanted to stop her. He was still thinking about that possibility, thinking very quickly. There was the guy on the ridge and the policeman too. Both within range. And the gas thing. If they had gas bottles in there, or a gas main, then that might blow now. There was fire inside the building somewhere. A fire or burglar alarm had been ringing as he came down the hillside, but it had stopped now.
He had to get in there, check for life, do it quickly. Both her parents were inside – through the spotting scope he had watched a car, a Nissan, returning earlier with two occupants – a man and a woman – one of the two cars that had left the place that morning. Jones hadn’t told him who else was on the list, but her parents had been his first guess. Unless the bomb had been planted to get the girl, as a back-up, if he failed to make the shot. In which case they had fucked it up, triggered it too early. The car alarm was still sounding intermittently, coming from the Nissan. The girl hadn’t realised about her parents, he assumed, hadn’t worked it out yet.
He started to walk quickly forwards, then stooped and placed on the ground the gun and the backpack with his ammunition and kit. He checked back, but couldn’t see her. She would be behind the rocks, out of the line of a direct blast. She had been lucky to be just around the bend in the road when the bomb had detonated. He thought the guy up on the ridge must have detonated it, or it was on a very long timer. He had been in the valley since well before dawn, and had seen no one come up the road except the policeman, and he hadn’t been carrying anything, so they must have planted the thing yesterday sometime.
He kept his hand up in front of his face and skirted round the walls of the place. It was a single-floor villa, typical Spanish style, but modern, built mainly from breeze blocks, with a light brick cladding. The bricks had exploded all over the place. It was built onto the hillside, just below the main valley track, with terraced levels which were gardens, and a pool. The water there was coated so completely with a layer of floating dust that it looked like a solid surface, perfectly still now. There was a low perimeter wall about ten metres past the pool, then past that he could see the side of the valley dropping away, heavily forested with some kind of low, deciduous tree.
The blast wouldn’t have needed to be huge to demolish a house like this. Parts of two of the outside walls had collapsed, one onto the car, the other, further round, next to the swimming pool. He stepped up towards the place and could smell the burning, but still couldn’t see any fire. There was smoke coming through a hole in the roof, further back where it had collapsed inwards. He couldn’t interpret the layout through the wreckage and the smoke, couldn’t see where a front door would be, so near the pool he picked his way over the fallen masonry and went through a wide hole in the wall. He was listening for people calling out, buried, but couldn’t hear anything. His heart was beating very fast now. Fear and adrenalin. If they triggered a second blast he would get it full on.
He moved quickly, searching through the mess, coming into what must have been a bedroom. There was no roof but he could make out a bed – the wooden frame upturned, broken. There were bookshelves standing against a wall, perfectly intact, books still in them, everything coated in the white dust. He called out, shouting in English, asking if there was anyone there.
The far wall was still up, a picture hanging there, not even at an angle, but the wall next to it had caved in. A door was swinging on one hinge. There was a jagged pile of bricks, tiles and wood all over the ground, mixed in with fluttering paper and torn sheets, a metal bedstead poking up through the mess. He could see some flames licking through the smoke in the room beyond the collapsed wall. There was a light haze of choking smoke all around him.
He put his sleeve over his mouth and nose, then looked down. Right at his feet there was an arm protruding from beneath a wooden panel of some sort. It was poking out, the fingers closed on the palm. He bent quickly and tried to shift the panel. It was only the back of a cupboard, and came away easily, revealing a woman lying in a twisted position, a big puddle of blood all around her. He crouched and put his fingers at her neck, feeling for a pulse, but nearly all her head and face was a horrible ragged mess. He thought something large had hit her. The body was still as warm as his own, but there was no pulse. She had a light cotton dress on, spattered all over with blood. It would be the girl’s mother.
He stood, and shouted again, desperate to get out quickly. But then saw another body behind the pile of rubble: a man. He was just lying there, face up, eyes wide open, chest terribly still, the skin pale and mottled with the dust. There wasn’t any blood around him. Carl stepped through the broken furniture, over a mattress with the insides bursting out, and saw the body was naked. He couldn’t see a mark on it. But the eyes were wide open, the face rigid.
He had to get out. Now. He had been up close to the effects of a bomb blast once before. It also had been just like this, a random mix of devastation and safety. He had seen people dead like this too, without a mark on them, killed by compression. He started to cough as the smoke got into his lungs. He shouldn’t have left the girl alone. There were houses two kilometres away and the people there would have seen the smoke, heard the explosion. But the police were bought off, so maybe that wouldn’t deter Jones. There was the guy on the ridge. At least him. He could be closing in on her right now. It might even be possible to disable communications into a little valley like this – take out the GSM masts, cut the landline, giving them plenty of time. He stumbled back to the hole he had come through. He had to get back to her, quick.
7
Rebecca started a text to her mum but her fingers wouldn’t work properly – they were shaking, plus she couldn’t see properly, so it was really slow. She kept making mistakes and having to go back and start again. She was continually looking up as she was doing it, to see if he was coming back yet. She didn’t want him to see her doing it. She had no idea why, but knew she didn’t want him to know she had a mobile phone.
Normally she was really quick texting, much quicker than any adult she knew, but now it wouldn’t work. She had started it because she was frightened he would hear her talking if she actually called her mum. She stopped, looked up for him, then moved further behind the rock. She would have to call her mum, speak quietly.
She spoke her mum’s name almost in a whisper, so faintly the voice recognition didn’t register it, so then she had to speak it louder, move again to the edge of the road, look to see if he was coming out yet. There was still some smoke coming out of the roof. Would he call the fire brigade? she wondered. She held the phone to her ear and watched the house, waiting for him to appear. After a few seconds of complete silence she looked at the screen and saw she had no signal, no bars at all.
She cut the call attempt and felt a panic fluttering in her tummy. No signal wasn’t normal. There was a mast right on the hill opposite. She looked up to make sure it was still there and out of the corner of her eye she saw movement to the side of her, back along the road down the valley. She turned towards it.
There w
as a man there, coming quickly forwards. He was at the bend in the road, up above her – where she had been standing when the explosion had happened. When he saw her he stopped immediately. It was the policeman who had spoken to her, she thought. He looked young like that, in the same uniform. He had something in his right hand which, after a moment, she realised might be a pistol, though he wasn’t pointing it at anything. She thought she would shout out to him, warn him, or ask for help, but something stopped her.
As she watched, he crouched down on the ground near to one of the bushes edging the road. He peered across to the house then, before she could decide what to do, he shouted to her: ‘Come. Come to me now.’ In Spanish, same voice – definitely the man she had just spoken to.
She moved out from behind the rocks, took a step towards him. He was a policeman, so it must be safe.
‘Where is he?’ he shouted, again in Spanish, not looking at her, but down at the house. ‘Where is the man you were with?’ So he had seen the tall guy. She was about to tell him he was in the house, but again something stopped her. She took another step towards him though. Why was she uncertain?
‘The house is on fire,’ she shouted. ‘There’s been an explosion.’ She didn’t want to walk up to him. The tall guy had told her to wait behind these rocks, in case there was another explosion. She risked a glance back. There were wisps of smoke coming from the roof still, but no longer a big black column of it. Up above them, high in the air, the cloud was still hanging there. No sign of the tall man yet. ‘There was an explosion,’ she shouted again, still in Spanish. The policeman was about thirty metres away from her. Not far. She didn’t have to shout very loud.