by Robert White
Des, hidden by the stairs, saw him run and fired in a prone position toward him. I saw each bullet dig into the tiled surface around the blond man’s feet. Somehow, he was protected. Somehow, he reached the door. Somehow he was gone.
Rick left his cover to give chase. It was foolish. He moved too soon. Des had not yet got into position to cover him.
Two armed men remained on the balcony. One leapt down the steps toward Rick, arms outstretched, police style. A semi-automatic pistol pointed to kill.
Rick only had eyes for the blond man.
The man on the stairs had a clear shot.
Not as clear as mine.
I fired.
The gun kicked in my hand. The first time I had ever fired in anger, I instantly knew I had killed a human being.
The round hit him in the centre of his chest, just how Des had taught me. Somehow I saw it. He looked surprised. Then fell. Despite my impaired hearing I heard a hard slapping sound, as his bare flesh hit the cold steps.
His body slid downward one step at a time until he was ten feet from me. Over the gunfire, I heard his breath escaping and saw his lifeblood seep from under him.
Rick ran in front of me without a second glance. His body crouched against the fire from the single remaining man on the balcony.
Like the blond man, he was gone from my sight.
Des was there before I knew it. He pushed me backward and fired two bursts toward the balcony.
The final man fell and suddenly there was silence.
A door to my left opened and Des twisted violently to cover the threat.
He dropped his weapon as he heard Rick’s pissed off voice say,
“He’s fuckin got away.”
Rick staggered back into the hall, his chest heaving for breath. Looking at me, he saw death at my feet.
Something inside me gave way. Rick strode forward but stopped short of holding me, and I fell to my knees and wept. Great hacking sobs filled my head and covered the high pitched ringing in my ears.
Within seconds I was lifted back onto my feet by two strong arms. Des pulled off his hood and looked me firmly in the eye. His spectacular blue gaze dragged me back to reality.
“You okay?” He gave me a ‘thumbs up’.
I think I gave it back.
“You injured in any way?”
I shook my head. At least I didn’t think I was injured.
He shot a glance at the man I had just murdered.
“Good job,” he chirped. “Just like I showed you, hen, eh?”
I cried even harder.
Des grabbed my chin with a gloved hand. It hurt, he was deadly serious and his eyes were like ice.
“Lauren! You did well! You hear me? You did exactly what we asked of you. You covered us just as we planned! You saved Rick’s life, for fuck’s sake!”
He was covered in white plaster dust, his hair was stuck to his head with sweat, but he gave me the biggest smile, tapped me neatly on the cheek and said, blasé as you like, “Part of the team now, babe.”
Somehow, and don’t ask how, but I felt his strength flow into me. I felt steel that I had never felt before. I dried my tears with my sleeve and holstered my pistol.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” I said.
Des shook his head, then, gestured toward the open doorway.
“No, sweetheart, I’m going help Rick and you’re going to lose all that vomit outside so you don’t leave a pile of DNA for the cops.”
He tapped the side of his nose knowingly.
“Then we are going to get on our toes.”
At that he strode off.
I stepped over my victim and went to find a bucket and mop.
Those were the last tears I ever shed for a dead man.
Rick Fuller's Story:
I was seriously fucked off that I’d lost the Dutchman, but I had to get over it and get on with the job. It was already pear-shaped of course. Laughing boy would soon have all our cards marked. Even though he was wearing nothing but his skids, he would soon have Mr. Stern out of his bed and in a very nasty mood indeed. I’d left Lauren and Des having a heart to heart on the rights and wrongs of shooting someone. I figured that she would get used to it, knocking about with the likes of us. I’d never been good with crying women. How my wife ever put up with me, I’ll never know. She brought me out of myself somehow. She taught me how to express my feelings, how to deal with emotions. But she was never able to help me deal with tears. When she cried, I just stood there helplessly, frozen to the spot. If her tears needed comfort, she was the one forced to seek me out and hold me close. That was in that previous life I told you about.
Time was of the essence. We needed to look for anything interesting, and preferably, Joel’s old computer. Joel and the two old geezers that were his staff were obviously no longer of this earth.
The yearning to meet the Flying Dutchman was as great as anything I’d felt since Cathy. I needed to meet him again and settle that old score. First though we had to get to Joel’s office and hope his computer was still there; anything to give us a Scooby where to find Stern and Susan.
I went straight to Joel’s office and it appeared untouched. I found his safe, opened it with the combination I had acquired in my previous role as his collector and dropped the contents into a plastic bin liner.
There was a lump of cash and documents, together with a semi-automatic pistol. There would be time later to find out exactly what.
I was quickly joined by Des, who started to remove the hard drives from Joel’s computer which mercifully remained.
Des took the cover from the tower and Lauren burst into the room holding a mop.
“I think you need to see this,” she said.
We followed her in silence to a room on the west face of the house. When I had visited Davies previously, it had been a games room, with a snooker table and tacky trophy cabinets.
It had been transformed into a communications centre.
I don’t mean a couple of phones and a computer. I mean ‘Houston, we have a problem’.
Des let out a low whistle.
“This is fuckin’ CIA, pal.”
Lauren North's Story:
For the next ten minutes, I felt like the proverbial ham butty at the bar mitzvah. I’d cleaned my vomit from the steps of the house and collected all our spent cartridges as the boys had requested.
Rick and Des ripped all they could out of the control room. Each had a small toolkit with basic screwdrivers, pliers and stuff, and they were feverishly unscrewing covers from six computer towers.
I strolled from the room feeling strangely calm and walked into the now silent chequered hallway. I could see the outline of my victim at the bottom of the stairs. For reasons known only to my delirious mind, I was surprised to see he had not moved in any way. I stepped over him for a second time without paying him further attention.
Walking into the office where the guys had been earlier, I found it ridiculously green; carpet, chairs, curtains, horrible.
I walked around, not looking for anything in particular. Finally I strolled into a small hall.
My eyes were drawn to a framed document hanging in pride of place. A brass light fitting illuminated the gilt frame. This was a very important piece of paper to Mr. Davies.
I was even more intrigued.
As I moved closer I could see the document was framed with a delicate pattern. It was a marriage certificate. I lifted it down and read the names. I noted the date.
He and Susan had signed this paper, so had two witnesses.
Davies just didn’t strike me as the kind of man to be sentimental. After all, he paid Rick to top half of his own family.
If this was so priceless to Davies then the document was important to us too.
I didn’t realise at the time, just how important.
I tore the backing from the frame, folded the certificate and pushed it into the pocket of my overalls.
The first sirens brought me back to rea
lity.
Suddenly we were on our way. Rick and Des worked swiftly and effectively. I had been briefed on every possible exit plan. Each contingency arrived in my head in the correct order. I knew exactly what was coming.
Rick had repeated it over and over. It was no use getting in, if you couldn’t get out.
I stripped off my weapons, kit, boots and overalls and threw them into a holdall which Des collected. He handed me a pair of casual flat shoes and a hairbrush.
He led me quickly to the back garden and bunked me over the back wall. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, I brushed my hair as I walked, threw the hairbrush into a convenient skip. Even though I knew they were there, I checked my pockets for my mobile and money. Thirty seconds later, a full minute and a half before the first police car arrived, I was heading to the Metro and looking forward to a hot shower back at my hotel.
The tram was full of commuters dressed for the office or bank. A few, more casually attired folk appeared to be going shopping. Two obvious uniformed nurses hung onto the overhead rail to prevent them from staggering around as the tram lurched toward the city centre.
I felt a twinge of guilt as I remembered my own previous life. Life before Des and Rick; I hadn’t been able to contact Jane. It would have endangered her, just as much as me.
Nursing had been my life after my divorce and what had it offered? Graveyard shifts and crap pay, sore feet, lecherous doctors and the occasional night out with the girls.
Life was totally different now. I was in shock, yet I was full of excitement. There was no turning back.
One of the nurses caught my eye and smiled. I looked down at the floor.
No eye contact. It was another of Rick’s rules.
I spent the rest of my time staring out of the window and watching the Manchester landscape pass me by.
The suburbs had given way to Chinese wholesalers, car valets and boarded-up pubs. Then, as the real city got closer, fine penthouse apartments, coffee shops and vegetarian restaurants lined the route.
I got off at Piccadilly Gardens and strode across the square, past the fountains and into Starbucks.
I bought a latte and a blueberry muffin from a very handsome French guy behind the counter and sat scanning the Telegraph, secretly waiting for the text to say Rick and Des had made it away safely.
At 8.04hrs my phone vibrated in my pocket. I opened the text message. It read, Chop-Chop.
Back at the hotel I caught two hours’ sleep in my clothes and awoke feeling like I’d run a marathon dressed in one of those Disney costumes. My T-shirt was plastered to me and my hair was wet with sweat. I felt suddenly vulnerable. Switching on the television, I sat motionless on the end of the bed, feeling the chill of the air con drying my back whilst some morning game show numbed my senses.
My brain gave me an abrupt jolt as the news item appeared on the screen. I rooted out some headed notepaper courtesy of Ibis, found a ballpoint and began to scribble. Within twenty minutes I had left all my worldly goods to my sister and two men I’d known less than a season. I wasn’t sure if my scrawl would be legally binding, or indeed if I had anything of value to leave Rick or Des after Stern had his way, but it made me feel so much better.
I stood and stretched my back, feeling the tendons crack and the vertebrae open and close. Then I did the same for my legs and before I knew it, set about punishing my aching body with two hundred sit-ups, two hundred squats and two hundred tricep dips before a cold shower. I stood naked in front of the wall mirror in my plastic room and felt rather smug about what I saw. My muscles twitched from exertion and as I pulled on my clean clothes I felt a rush of self-confidence tear through my veins. The confidence my husband had systematically taken from me had been restored by Rick and Des in a matter of months. I almost bounced to the elevator.
Rick’s text was a little code we’d decided upon, just to be on the safe side. Even though the mobiles were unregistered pay-as-you-talk jobs, we didn’t take any chances.
'Chop-Chop' meant he was back at his hotel, everything was okay, and we were to meet at a pub called The Chop House at four p.m.
Des Cogan's Story:
I’d had a little drama exiting the house and had suffered a broken nose in the process.
Everything went to plan at first. I’d bunked Lauren over the wall, collected all her gear and within seconds climbed the same wall myself. A five hundred meter tab brought me to a safe area I had organised before the entry, where I packed my rifle, Lauren’s handgun and all the entry clothing into my Bergen. I then pulled on my old Parachute Regiment uniform, complete with red beret and marched off down the street, like a fuckin’ war hero.
Whenever you were home on leave as a squaddie, the coppers never bothered you when in uniform. It was perfect, Rick was a fuckin’ genius and I was home and dry, striding along the road with cop car after cop car screaming past me.
All would have been peachy had I not run into three Muslim brothers who took exception to a British soldier in uniform on the streets of Manchester.
I took the smack in the nose, and the embarrassment of the abuse, without retaliation. It was not a time to draw attention to myself. I’d never served in Iraq, too warm for my liking. I felt sorry for the fuckers that had to. I’m no racist. Live and let live, I say. Jesus, I’m a Scot, I’m from the most persecuted country in the Western world. The English have fucked us about for centuries.
The guys that punched me, spat on my uniform and abused me, were English born and bred.
No change for a Scot there, then.
Rick Fuller's Story:
I was at the Vectra before the first wooden-tops arrived. Our exit went far more to plan than our entrance.
Despite the drama, we had all been wearing hoods and balaclavas and so couldn’t be identified by Stephan, I felt confident we had fallen on a wealth of information. The hard drives we had recovered had the data that would lead us to Stern. I felt it in my bones.
It took me an hour to clean my weapons and reorganise my kit. When I was happy with my work I stored it all out of sight, leaving a loaded SLP under my pillow. Knowing Stephan was in town made me nervous enough. Having just wiped out a small part of Stern’s English empire made me doubly so. I lay on my bed and sent two text messages.
Then, I watched the news to see what coverage there had been on our Cheadle incident and got nothing. I picked up my pay-as-you-go and flicked onto the web browser and selected Reuters News. Again, zip. My hair started to do its standing up trick. An all-out gun battle in a sleepy upmarket suburb of Manchester should have been big news. The press ought to have been crawling all over it.
I turned up the volume on the small television and changed to BBC News 24. It had taken its time but the story had finally broken. The very attractive Indian woman reading the bulletin was stone-faced. Behind her beautifully styled hair was a still picture of Joel’s front door. It had a lone police constable guarding it. Across the image, red impact font screamed, ‘Mass Murder.’
The anchor had a clipped London accent, softened deliberately for her job. Her impassive face only deemed any hint of emotion necessary when totalling the body count.
“Residents of an upmarket Cheshire suburb were this morning in shock, as they awoke to the sound of gunfire. Armed police officers were dispatched to a usually sleepy Cheadle residence to find a scene detectives described as ‘sickening’.”
There was only one thing for it.
I rang Spiros Makris.
Not only was he the master of disguise when it came to documentation, but he had the IT knowledge that we needed.
His phone rang once.
“Hello?”
“Spiros?”
“Fuck me, Richard, you are supposed to be really dead this time, and I’m asleep.”
“It’s eight-thirty in the morning, you lazy Greek bastard.”
“It’s also Saturday, you malaka” (wanker).
“Spiros, I need total documentation for three people and I have seven hard dri
ves I need looking at.”
Makris was silent for a moment.
“Listen, my friend, even though my heart is now full that you are still alive, from what I hear, your old boss Davies is pushing up daisies, you know? Sleeping with the fishes? Dead as fuckin’ doornails?
“I gathered. So you watch the TV.”
Makris lowered his voice slightly. There might have been a hint of real embarrassment in his tone.
“I don’t want to be disrespectful, Richard, but I also hear your credit isn’t too good this month.”
I’d had enough of the posturing.
“Can you deliver, Spiros? Can you get us three sets of good docs, the new stuff, the biometric type?
“Sure, you know I can.”
“And the hard drives?”
“Maybe, depends on encryption and, well...”
“And what?”
“And one hundred thousand pounds, my friend.”
"Leave it with me."
I hit the end button. I could raise that kind of money but would it be worth it? This was no time to worry, I closed my eyes and slept for the first time in three days.
Within minutes I was back in Hereford lying in bed with Cathy. The dream, so realistic, so vivid, I could smell her hair on the pillow next to me. My face turned to hers as she slept peacefully and I felt myself smile, a real smile, full of genuine happiness. She stretched, still deep asleep, to reveal her tanned shoulders and breasts. We had just returned from the South of France and spent seven glorious days in the sun. I reached out to touch her, to caress her hair, taking great care not to wake her. I stroked her temple with my thumb. A sudden cold wetness covered my nail and dripped down my thumb to my wrist. Cathy’s beautiful tanned face was gone and an unrecognisable mush of blood and bone was in its place. I was flung through time and space by unseen devils, back to the garden of our house, to the open door, the pounding in my chest was unbearable and I knew that nothing could prevent me from reliving her death in full Technicolor. What was left of my conscious begged to wake, but it didn’t come and once again the tears flowed.