The Newsmaker (Volume One Book 1)

by Tom Field

  There were a number of reasons why things could or would have changed. It could be that maybe the bomb makers finished their work quicker than they had anticipated or that Fulken had decided to bring things forward, or even that they had decided to move things to a different location.

  He checked along the street and confirmed it was still empty and quiet, and with his Glock in his hand, walked up to the entrance door of the garage and fired one shot which blew the lock out.

  He stepped into the garage and saw what he expected to see. Nothing at all. It was completely empty.

  He walked back out onto the street just as Gilligan was finishing his call and they stood in front of the door.

  “They will be here in fifteen,” Gilligan said looking at his watch, “It’s meeting time and no one has shown, I think we are twenty four hours too late.”

  “I know,” Ward said, “We are going to have to find out who this source is from Walker.”

  “You want to go back now?” Gilligan asked dejectedly.

  “No, we are done for today,” he replied. “There is nothing much we can do now. They have moved the bomb, it will take preparation and planning to get it ready and we will stop it before it goes off anyway so let’s call it a day.”

  “How are you so sure that this bomb won’t go off?” Gilligan asked, “You have said from the moment we started that you know who is behind it and we keep getting close, very close to catching Fulken, and yet he always seem one step ahead of us.”

  “That’s how I know.”

  “Well maybe it is time that you explained to me what is actually happening, because to be honest, the way you are so laid back about finding this bomb is really unsettling me.”

  Ward thought about this. Gilligan was right.

  He was so used to keeping people in the dark and operating to his rules, all alone and trusting in his judgement one hundred per cent, that he never shared anything with those he worked closely with until things were finished.

  He thought back to earlier and how Gilligan had saved him from being shot on the stairs, and how he had sacrificed family time to stand shoulder to shoulder with him from the moment he had picked him up.

  “OK,” he said, “There was one thing about the Paris and London bombs that was wrong, and the moment I saw the footage of them both, I knew what was happening. I’m still struggling to fit one last little bit together though.”

  “What bit?” Gilligan asked.

  “Why? A contact in London told me why, and I know he is right, but I can’t tie everything together just yet,” Ward replied.

  “You are still talking in cryptic sentences,” Gilligan said, “Just hit me with the basics.”

  “Right, here’s how it all fits in together, ready?” he asked calmly.

  His composed expression promptly turned to disbelief because Gilligan wasn’t ready.

  At the moment that Ward had finished his last sentence, a shot rang out and echoed down the street and Gilligan’s whole body jerked to the side, like he had been hit by truck, and he hit the concrete floor, landing hard on the right side of his face.

  TWENTY FIVE

  Ward hit the ground immediately and rolled forward to take cover behind a silver BMW ‘X’ series, which was parked on the kerb, just as a second shot rang out, and he heard the bullet whistle past his ear before smashing into a road sign.

  Whoever was shooting was to his right.

  He looked across at Gilligan and he could see a pool of blood seeping from the left side of his chest from his motionless body.

  He adjusted himself so that his left foot was flat on the floor and he knelt on his right knee, ready to spring into action.

  He raised his head slightly and looked to the right and saw nothing. No movement at all. He scanned up down, around and along the street and saw nothing.

  The woman who he had spoken to earlier from apartment number two came out and put her hands over her mouth as she saw Gilligan and gasped. She then glanced at Ward with his gun drawn, crouched behind the car and froze.

  “Get back inside,” he shouted, “And call the paramedics.”

  The woman turned and ran back inside.

  He then looked back in the direction of the shot and still saw nothing.

  By now, at least ten people had started to come out from their buildings to see what was happening, and three of them started running towards them to see if they could help.

  Even in that frightening and dangerous situation, he thought how remarkable New Yorkers were, and why he felt this was his real home. With no fear of consequence, here were three people with no thought for their own safety, just wanting to help.

  Nine-Eleven had strengthened these people, and all they saw was someone who needed help, and they felt an obligation to do something.

  He sprinted over to Gilligan just as the first of the three guys reached them.

  “My wife is calling the paramedics,” the guy said breathlessly. Another man reached them and he heard him say into his cell phone,

  “I need the police now, I’m on Hubert Street, and a guy has been shot.”

  He knelt down, Gilligan’s eyes were open and he was semi-conscious.

  There was a gargling noise to his breathing, and Ward knew that the bullet had pierced his lungs. He rolled Gilligan over onto his side and supported his head on his knees,

  “Hold on buddy,” he said to him, “You will be fine, help is coming.”

  Gilligan looked up at him. He looked petrified.

  “Don’t you die on me Marvin,” Ward said.

  He looked down and Gilligan’s shirt and jacket were soaked in blood, and as much as he pushed against the wound, he was unable to stem the flow.

  “I need a towel,” he said to the first guy who had got there, and the he promptly turned and sprinted back in the direction of his apartment.

  By now, a group of about fifteen people had gathered, at least ten of them were on their cell phones calling for help.

  “Shit this hurts,” Gilligan said, wincing as he regained a level of consciousness which allowed him to speak, but also enabled him to feel the pain which was stabbing through his body with a greater intensity with each passing second.

  “You just hold on, you will be fine,” he lied.

  He knew what a dying man looked like better than almost anyone. Gilligan would not be fine.

  Someone behind him handed him a towel and he pulled Gilligan’s jacket back and lifted his shirt.

  There was a hole about two inches in diameter and blood was pulsing out of it each time he took a deep breath.

  Gilligan was drowning in his own blood.

  He pressed the towel down hard against the bullet hole and Gilligan screamed in pain. It was a high pitched scream which didn’t fit with this giant of a man lying on the sidewalk.

  “Sorry pal,” he said.

  “I’m dying.”

  “You just hold on, you will be OK.”

  “You look after my boys and my wife,” Gilligan pleaded.

  There were tears in Gilligan’s eyes.

  He knew he was dying and Ward felt an emotion he had never felt before.

  It was a choking sensation in his throat.

  “You look after them yourself when you are better,” he replied once he had regained his composure.

  “Don’t bullshit me man, I’m dying and you know it. You just look me in the eyes and swear you will take care of them,” Gilligan begged.

  “I swear,” he replied, staring deep into Gilligan’s eyes.

  He knew the towel was not stopping the flow of blood. The guy, who had run to get a towel earlier, came back and handed it to him, and he duly swapped them over.

  Gilligan’s blood was running down both of his arms and over his trousers.

  A slight woman in her forties leant forward holding a medical kit and said,

  “I’m a nurse; let me see what I can do.”

  She softly gripped Ward’s hand and slid it away from the towel he was hold
ing.

  He supported Gilligan’s head while the woman started to unravel bandages from her medical kit.

  “You promise me, you owe me,” Gilligan said again, his head tilted back on Ward’s lap, his sad eyes looking up at him.

  “I promise.”

  Ward didn’t know what else to say.

  When he usually looked into the eyes of a dying man he knew that they deserved to die and felt nothing, and even enjoyed knowing that they were terrified as he spoke the last words they would ever hear.

  But here, looking down into the eyes of a guy he cared about, who he trusted and who he admired, he couldn’t think of anything to say.

  The sound of sirens started to fill the air and an ambulance rolled into view behind him.

  Two paramedics jumped out of the truck and ran over to them. One of them put his hand on his shoulder and said,

  “We will take him now, Sir,” as he placed his hand under Gilligan’s head and knelt next to him, shuffling him out of the way as he did so.

  Gilligan’s head rolled to the left and his eyes fixed onto his,

  “You promise me,” Gilligan said and then his eyes closed.

  Ward rose to his feet and looked down at himself. His whole lap and arms, from the elbows down, were soaked in Gilligan’s blood and he watched as the paramedics attached a portable defibrillator to Gilligan’s chest.

  To his right he saw two cop cars speeding down the street, sirens screaming, and he started to step back away from the crowd.

  Both cars screeched to a stop about twenty feet back from the ambulance rear doors.

  He watched almost in disbelief as the paramedics lifted Gilligan’s lifeless body onto a stretcher and started to wheel him towards the ambulance.

  Two cops got out of each of the cars, almost in tandem, and he decided to leave.

  He did not need to be sitting in a police station for a couple of hours refusing to speak until Centrepoint had sorted things out and got him released.

  He walked past the rear doors of the ambulance and as he did so, he heard one of the paramedics say;

  “It’s no good, we’ve lost him.”

  He crossed the street and did not look back. He knew that the crowd watching events unfold would be talking to the cops right then and maybe even pointing at him as he walked down the street towards Pier 26. He called The Old Man.

  “About time,” he answered in an agitated tone.

  “Gilligan’s been killed. I need someone to come and get me now and make a call to the cops saying that I am not to be detained urgently,” he said.

  “Where are you?” Centrepoint asked.

  “Just heading towards Pier 26 from Hubert.”

  “I’m on it, two minutes, but you call me as soon as you get away.”

  Ward hung up the phone.

  As he reached the end of the street he turned and saw two cops jogging down the street towards him.

  He crossed over the street towards the water and stopped by a litter bin. He looked urgently for his transport but the road was completely empty apart from a cyclist. As the two cops got to the end of Hubert they stopped and pulled their guns.

  He kept his palms open and his hands elevated slightly from his sides so that they could both see he was unarmed. They were both in their late forties, short of breath and out of condition.

  One was a really short white guy who looked seriously round and the other was a big black guy, around Gilligan’s size, but it was probably twenty years since he had a physique remotely similar to his dead friend’s.

  “Stop where you are and do not move,” the white cop shouted, and then took about five deep breaths, trying to reclaim the oxygen that the jog had taken out of him.

  Ward stood still and looked at them.

  The black cop started talking into his radio almost immediately and then Ward saw a black Range Rover with tinted windows appear on his right from the direction of Pier 25.

  “Do not move,” the white cop shouted again as he looked up and down the road preparing to cross.

  His partner started talking on the radio again and then said something to him and he lowered his gun.

  They both looked at him, not in a threatening way, more in curiosity.

  The Range Rover stopped by the kerb with the rear passenger door directly in front of him, and he extended his arm to open the door and climbed inside.

  There were two guys in the front, neither of them spoke, they knew that if Ward wanted to talk he would.

  Their ages were hard to gauge, as he could only see their side profiles, but looking at the muscles in their necks from behind, he guessed they were mid-thirties at most.

  “You have to make a call,” the guy in the passenger seat said without turning around.

  “Tell him I’ll call later,” he replied.

  The guy turned his head towards the driver and looked at him quizzically.

  “I think it’s really important, so you had maybe best call,” the guy in the passenger seat said.

  “And I really don’t want to talk, so tell him I will call him later,” he said firmly, assertion running through his voice.

  The guy turned and looked at him, only briefly, and then turned his stare back to the front of the car.

  He picked up his cell phone and mumbled something quietly, and then heard a response that clearly surprised him because he put the cell phone back in his pocket.

  Ward knew immediately that someone telling Centrepoint what he would and wouldn’t do, was unheard of to these guys and more strangely to them, the response of despair but ultimately acceptance on the end of the line, would have thrown this guy completely.

  “Where would you like to go?” he asked.

  “Take me to Washington Street.”

  On Hubert Street, the paramedics were frantically trying to resuscitate the giant of a man lying in their ambulance.

  “Try one more time,” the paramedic who had taken over from Ward said.

  They slightly increased the voltage on the defibrillator and tried one more time, more in hope than belief, and as the voltage shot through Gilligan’s body it jerked violently and then his body went limp once more. The paramedic looked at the monitor and smiled,

  “We’ve got a pulse,” he said, “Get us to the hospital now!”

  He was outside his apartment within fifteen minutes of being picked up.

  “Here will do,” he said when they reached the apartment building before his own.

  They pulled over and he opened the door.

  “Thank you for the ride,” he said as he stepped out of the car. He watched the Range Rover pull away and then walked the short distance to his apartment building. Two minutes later, he was in his apartment and closing the door to the outside world.

  He stripped all of his clothes off and threw them immediately into the garbage bin in his kitchen, and leant against the sink completely naked, his arms leaning on the taps for support.

  He looked down at his arms. They were caked in blood. Gilligan’s blood.

  He couldn’t get the vision of Gilligan begging him to look after his boys out of his mind, and he was struggling to hold back the rage that was building inside of him.

  He walked slowly and dejectedly through to the bathroom, opened the door to the enclosed shower unit and turned the handle onto ‘Full’, and stepped in.

  As the spray hit him, for a brief moment, he hoped that it would wash the sadness he felt from his mind, but as the water started to dilute Gilligan’s dried blood, the whole of the shower tray started to fill with light red water, and he saw Gilligan looking up at him yet again.

  With his eyes closed tight, for the first time since the bullet had hit Gilligan, he started to think about who could have fired it?

  He knew for sure that he was going to kill whoever it was, but he couldn’t see a clear picture, all he could see was Gilligan’s face.

  He told himself that he now owed it to Gilligan, and to his boys, to finish this, and that refocused hi
m immediately.

  He knew without a doubt that tomorrow this would end and that Gilligan’s death would be avenged. He was going to win, this time, not just because it was something that he had to do for himself, but because he now had to win for Gilligan.

  By the time he had finished his shower and stepped out, wrapping a towel around his waist, Ryan Ward was back, deadly and focused.

  He spent thirty minutes running things through in his head and finally got the list down to one of three people who would have tried to kill them, and why they would want them dead.

  He dried himself off, put on some jogging bottoms and a tee-shirt and called Centrepoint.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Yes.” he replied.

  “Any idea who shot him?” The Old Man asked.

  “I think they were trying to shoot us both,” he replied, “But the fact that he missed me tells me some things that help me narrow it down.”

  “What things?”

  Ward ignored the question and continued.

  “But it made me think that if he wasn’t that good a shot then he will make mistakes.”

  “What progress have you made with the bomb?”

  “I know who supplied it, who made it, where it was made and I will know by tomorrow where it is planned to go off.”

  “Then you need to tell me what you know.”

  “I’ll tell you after, as I always do. Do you trust me?”

  “You know I trust you more than any of the others. You know I tolerate your insubordination and lack of feedback simply because I trust you. Why do you ask that?”

  “Because when this nears a conclusion I have to know that every decision that I make is done so with your full support, even if you don’t know what I am doing,” he said.

  “That sounds ominous,” he replied, “Where is this going?”

  “I will tell you all about it after. But right now, I’m alone so I need something from you.”

  “He has been here two days waiting for you, why haven’t you called him?” Centrepoint asked.

  Ward had an incredible amount of admiration for Centrepoint. He knew that he would need The Optician’s help, and he would have been two steps ahead of him in knowing what he would need, in fact it seemed, two days ahead in this case.