Shredder

by Niall Leonard

  Tense as the cat had been, the Turk had taken it by surprise, and it didn’t even get a chance to lodge its claws in his sleeve. I felt a jolt of horror as it flew through the air, almost in slow motion, but I knew better than to turn my head away. The cat twisted in flight to land, as all cats do, with all four paws downwards, but that did it no good; almost instantly its legs were caught in the rotating cogs, and it barely had time to struggle or screech before it was dragged downwards into the interlocking camshafts, to disintegrate in an explosion of blood and guts and fur. From the corner of my eye I could see Kemal’s massive shoulders shaking with laughter; with an immense effort I kept my own face impassive and my eyes locked on the shredder’s roaring toothed wheels, smeared now with gore and clotted hair. Had the Turk done this as a warm-up? To intensify the terror I’d feel before it was my turn? As horrible as the cat’s fate was, for a grown man it would be worse—maybe a whole minute of terror and agony and vain struggling to escape before the machine sucked me down, mashed me up and finished me off.

  But somehow I sensed that wasn’t going to happen, not right now, not today. If the Turk wanted to kill me this way I reckoned he’d do it slowly—have me lowered into the grinder on a rope or a chain while he looked on. But there was no sign of any chain, or any hoist. And he’d kill me in front of Zoe, to double the fun—but there was no sign of Zoe here either. Whatever the Turk had in mind for me today, I decided, it wasn’t death: nothing so simple. This had merely been a demonstration of what was in store if I dared to defy him again.

  Still smirking, the Turk caught my eye and jerked his head towards the steps. He didn’t try to shout over the roar of the industrial shredder, but his meaning was clear enough. He crossed—behind me, he wasn’t stupid—to the stairway and skipped lightly down; I followed, all the while closely watched by Kemal.

  Someone shut off the power to the shredder, and the whining roar of the engines that powered the camshafts lowered in pitch and volume and finally sank into silence, leaving my ears ringing. Not far away, in a space uncluttered by waste hoppers, a table had been set up, the sort you might find in any canteen—a laminated surface mounted on slim gray metal legs. Two standard gray plastic stacking chairs stood facing each other on either side. As the Turk approached the table, Dean pulled one chair back and stood aside, in a scruffy imitation of a butler. The Turk settled into his seat, shuffled it forward and gestured for me to sit in the one opposite.

  I plonked myself down, Kemal looming behind me. The Turk was leaning back slightly, one hand on the table, the other on his lap, utterly relaxed; I forced myself to relax too, slouching in my own chair to mirror his posture.

  “Where’s Zoe?” I said.

  The Turk grimaced and smiled at the same time, as if I’d barged straight to the point without observing the necessary formalities. I had, on purpose: I knew he’d wanted me to ask about the shredder—whose it was, whether he’d often used it on his enemies. He wanted me to haggle and bluster and plead, but I wasn’t going to play that game. He couldn’t mention the shredder now without making it sound like a clumsy threat, and he fancied himself as too cool for that. He claimed he wasn’t vain, but I knew that was just another aspect of his vanity…although the way things had been going for him, he had plenty to be vain about.

  “You were required to deliver a message,” said the Turk. “That was all. Instead you decided to choose a side. The losing side.” I tried in vain to place that mid-European accent of his, but it was like trying to nail down smoke. “I know you are not as stupid as I first thought,” the Turk was saying, “but I really cannot see what you were hoping to achieve.”

  “If you’re talking about that meeting,” I said, “someone started shooting at me. I didn’t have time to think it through.”

  “He was not shooting at you,” said the Turk. “Kemal was the finest sniper in the Hakkari Brigade. In Kurdistan, for a bet, he shot a baby off its mother’s breast from two thousand meters. He would not have missed McGovern if you had not intervened.”

  Christ. My guess had been right—it had been Kemal up on that rooftop looking down at us through a sniper scope. Why hadn’t he taken his shot while we crossed the square? I supposed that with McGovern in that Panama hat and sunglasses, Kemal had to be sure he wasn’t a decoy. If only the Guvnor had been that subtle.

  “I had no way of knowing that,” I said. “I was trying to stay alive. It was kind of an accident I kept the Guvnor alive while I was at it.”

  “And his family? Was that too an accident?”

  “No,” I said. “But I wasn’t going to stand around watching Richard slit their throats. Why did you order that? Those kids were no threat to you.”

  “In war,” said the Turk, “it is not enough to kill a man. You must first enter his house, eat his food, defile his wife and slaughter his children, while he watches. When he knows that he has lost everything, then you have won.” He sounded like one of those billionaires who keep working even when they own so many yachts and mansions and tropical islands they can’t ever visit them all. Such possessions are just trophies—what those guys really enjoy is the business; and the Turk’s business was butchery. “Thanks to you,” he went on, “that pleasure has been denied me.”

  “Richard was going to kill me too, wasn’t he?” I said. “So he would have someone else to pin the blame on.”

  “What can I say?” The Turk shrugged. “You’re dispensable.”

  “Not anymore, obviously, or you wouldn’t have brought me here.” The Turk smiled, as if he was enjoying the banter. I wasn’t—I just wanted him to get to the bloody point.

  “You are telling me you are not on the Guvnor’s side?” he asked.

  “I don’t think it matters what I tell you,” I said. “But no, I’m not on his side. You two can kill each other for all I care. And the sooner the better.”

  “But he thinks you are on his side. You saved his children. He trusts you now.”

  “He knows I’m not on yours. Apart from that, he doesn’t trust anyone anymore.”

  “That will be enough for my purposes,” said the Turk. “Go back to him. Tell him I have threatened to kill you for saving the lives of his children. He owes you a favor, and he pretends to be a man of honor, so he will say yes. And shortly after he takes you in, you will kill him for me. I will forgive your…interference, and you and the lovely Zoe can go free.”

  Free for the sixty seconds you’d let us live, I thought. “And if I fail?” My glance must have strayed to the massive shredder behind him, because he grinned in satisfaction.

  “If you fail, I won’t punish you,” said the Turk. “McGovern’s people will kill you. And Zoe…Zoe I will hand over to our old friend Dean. He has disposed of one or two people for me already, but frankly”—he grinned at Dean, who looked uncomfortable at being singled out—“he lacks…finesse. He needs to learn how to prolong the pleasure, how to make each moment more exquisite than the last. He can practice on your girlfriend. And if he…peaks early, well—so much the better for her.”

  There was nothing to say in reply that would not have sounded like empty threats and bravado, so I said nothing; I simply stared at the Turk. In the past it had sometimes felt as if he could read my mind, and right now I was counting on that, and thinking hard about what it would be like to stamp on his face until it caved in—the sound it would make, and the mess.

  I was pleased to see the Turk’s eyes widen, and his self-satisfied smile flicker slightly. He licked his lips and sat up with an abruptness that bordered on irritation, and I saw him collect himself before he pulled something out of his pocket and tossed it onto the table. It was a memory stick, and it lay there between us like a gauntlet.

  “Something extra to motivate you,” said the Turk. I didn’t move.

  “She is counting on you, Finn.” His smug smile was back. “I told her what I would ask you to do. She knows you are the only one who can save her. That little flame of hope is the only thing keeping her going.” He
leaned across the table towards me. “Honestly?” he said. “Part of me wants you to fail. To see the look on her lovely face when I tell her you are dead, and that her hope was all for nothing. Before I give her to Dean and Kemal.” He pushed the stick towards me.

  “You have two days,” he said.

  —

  Back home—in the desolate empty house that passed for home—I plugged the memory stick into a laptop. It held a single video file; my hand hesitated on the trackpad, afraid of what I was about to see, but I knew I had no choice. I double-clicked on it.

  The footage that first appeared I’d seen before, on the Turk’s phone: Zoe pulling her bike down the steps of her house, with a bagful of books bustling across campus, gossiping in the canteen with a friend. The camera zoomed in so close at one point you could see the stud glinting in her nose, but she seemed blissfully unaware and utterly unself-conscious. Maybe with her looks she was so used to being stared at and ogled she didn’t even notice anymore; for once I wished she hadn’t been so blasé and laid-back, that she’d been paranoid enough to look about her. If she’d spotted the surveillance guy she could have gone to the cops, had him picked up for harassment, told her friends, taken precautions….

  What was I saying? We had taken precautions—we’d gone to see Amobi. What had gone wrong with that safe house? Had she got fed up with the confinement and walked out on them?

  This footage had been cut, I noticed; it wasn’t just shots snatched by a smartphone and strung together. Beginnings and endings—the places you’d expect to see camera-shake or autofocus kicking in—had been edited out. There was more where this came from that they weren’t showing me, and I wondered why; had the cameraman made it look slick to impress the Turk, or to intimidate me?

  Suddenly I was watching footage I hadn’t seen before, and it wasn’t so slick anymore. The camera was in a dimly lit room and jumping about all over the place. I could hear labored breathing, and yelps of pain that sounded like they might be Zoe’s. The lens was vacuuming up shots of wallpaper and crumpled bed sheets, then a blurred close-up of a girl’s hand being roughly gripped, as her wrist was bound to a slatted bed frame with a length of cheap blue nylon cord. Whoever was filming this girl was also helping to restrain her.

  The person holding the camera stepped back; yes, it was Zoe, gagged and bound to a wooden bed in a corner of a dingy room—a first-floor room, judging by the level of the streetlights I could just make out through the net curtains. She was in a gray cotton T-shirt dress that had ridden up her thighs as she struggled and thrashed about; Dean stood by the bed, leering and winking at the camera, and he reached out to stroke her face. I heard him tell her, “Say hello to your friend Finn,” as he tugged down the bandanna tied tightly around her mouth.

  She snapped at him with her teeth instead, and when that failed she spat at him, “Screw you!”

  The watchers—three or four of them by the sound of it—jeered and tittered as she wrenched at the ropes, cursing. I could tell every move was agony for her, as the coarse cord bit into the flesh of her wrists. Dean giggled and hooted, and ran his hand up her thigh, pulling her dress up higher, over her hip, lingering on the hem of her panties—

  I pulled the memory stick out. I’d seen enough. In a corner of my mind I’d been nursing one tiny sickly runt of hope—that the Turk had been bluffing, that he didn’t have Zoe, that he’d been counting on me to panic and run to do his bidding. Now even that hope was dead. Why would he have bluffed, anyway, when I could call Amobi and find out the truth?

  But what was the truth? Zoe wouldn’t have walked away from the safe house—had the Turk’s people snatched her? There was only one way I was going to find out, and only one way I could get Zoe back safely.

  The landline in this house still worked, even though I’d never paid the bill. I dialed Amobi’s number.

  —

  It was about noon when I found the dead-end side street off a busy main road, a few tube stops from my house, where we’d arranged to meet. His unremarkable Ford was neatly lined up in a parking bay, and Amobi was a shadow behind the wheel. Even on a Sunday you had to pay to park round here; I noticed he’d bought a ticket and stuck it on his windscreen. He wasn’t the sort of copper to wave his officer’s ID at a traffic warden and tell them to sod off.

  I pulled the front passenger door open and slid into the seat. Although the cul-de-sac was narrow and shaded from the blistering sun, the air inside the car was rancid and clammy, and I felt myself break out in a sweat before I’d even shut the door. I’d grabbed the chance to change my clothes and shower before I came out, but already I smelled of exhaustion and desperation. Amobi had hung his suit jacket up on a hook over the seat behind him, but he hadn’t switched on his air-con or even opened a window, and when I saw his posture I decided not to ask why. He hadn’t spoken or turned to look at me when I got in; now his left hand lay in his lap, and with the other he rubbed his mouth as if to stop himself from blurting out something he might regret. It wasn’t hard to sense his anger.

  “Hey,” I said. “Thanks for coming.”

  Now he turned to look at me, then turned away again. “Yeah,” he said.

  I felt my own anger flaring up. Yeah? What the hell did that mean? When he’d answered his mobile his replies had been short, almost monosyllabic, but I’d thought that was him being efficient and businesslike. If he was just going to grunt at me now I didn’t know why he’d agreed to meet up.

  “I’m sorry about Trafalgar Square,” I said. He fixed me with a stare that suggested he thought I was mocking him. “I wanted to get in touch,” I said. “But McGovern’s people took my phone, kept me incommunicado—”

  “Forget it.” Amobi turned away again. “It’s all water under the bridge now.”

  “He’s got Zoe,” I said. “The Turk. If I don’t kill McGovern for him, his people will kill her.”

  “Christ,” said Amobi, and he closed his eyes and shook his head like he was trying to shake out the words he’d just heard me say. “Where are they holding her?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “A flat somewhere.” Amobi actually snorted. “He gave me this….” I held out the memory stick, but Amobi didn’t take it.

  “What do you want me to do with that?” he said.

  “I don’t know!” I snapped. “Analyze it—bloody look at it, at least—”

  “For God’s sake, Finn!” he snapped back. “I can’t get a sample of piss analyzed!” I’d never seen Amobi lose control. Part of me was fascinated, while another part of me wanted to grab his shiny tie and strangle him with it. “I told my people you would help me stop this gang war before it started. Instead, two men died, twenty tourists got injured—a police officer got shot, in the center of London!” He held up two fingers in a pinch. “I am this close to facing a disciplinary committee—”

  “A disciplinary committee? God, I’m so sorry,” I said. “What will they do? Shoot you? Throw you in a blender?” My own frustration was boiling over now. “Or will they just pull a few bloody buttons off your uniform?”

  Amobi turned away, trying to regain control of himself, and I saw the muscles in his face clench as he ground his teeth. He rubbed his face again, the other hand gripping the steering wheel till the color bleached out of his knuckles.

  “You told me you’d keep her safe,” I said. “You promised me—you promised her. What the hell happened?”

  “Orders happened,” snarled Amobi. But he couldn’t look me in the eye—he was ashamed of betraying Zoe, and I was angry for letting him, and furious at myself for ever taking the word of a copper. “After that shoot-out the word came down—shut the safe house, send Zoe back home. And what the hell could I tell them?”

  “You could have told them she was still in danger,” I said. “You could have told them she was the daughter of a copper you used to work with—”

  “I did tell them!” yelled Amobi. “Of course I told them! And they said none of that mattered, to shut down the operation dow
n, let the Turk and McGovern settle between themselves, without involving innocent passersby—”

  “Zoe and I are innocent!”

  “Look, the NCA has its hands full trying to shut down a terrorist network slaughtering people all over the UK. We need all the help we can get—” Amobi cut himself off abruptly, as if he’d said too much.

  “Help? What the hell does that mean?”

  “What it means,” he said, more quietly now, “is we’re way overstretched. We have to…make the most of our resources.” But he was avoiding my eye again, and now that he’d started spouting bureaucratic jargon, I knew he was hiding something.

  When I realized what it was, I gasped. “The Turk is helping you people? How?”

  “That’s not what I said!”

  “That tip-off you got the other day—was that from him?”

  “Finn, just stop with the questions, OK? This country is at war, and we need allies.”

  “But the Turk’s a gangster, a psychopath—”

  “And so is McGovern.” Amobi knew he’d as good as admitted it, and there was no point in any more evasions. “Right now we have to choose the lesser of two evils,” he said.

  “The Turk’s taken Zoe,” I said. “He says he’s going to torture her to death.”

  “I’ll try to help,” said Amobi.

  “How?”

  “I’ll make some calls.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Suddenly I understood what he meant, and it hit me like a bullet to the belly. “You can’t do anything, can you? That’s why we’re meeting in secret like this. Zoe and me are on our own.”

  “I’m sorry, Finn,” said Amobi, “I really am—”

  There was a sharp rap of knuckles on his side window. We’d both been so engrossed in yelling at each other we hadn’t noticed the two uniformed cops approaching. They’d parked their patrol vehicle across the neck of the alley so Amobi couldn’t drive off if he tried, and now they were standing one on each side of his car. All I could see was their midriffs—the white polycotton shirts tucked into black serge trousers, the stab vests and the belts groaning with handcuffs, truncheons and pepper spray. Amobi cursed and fumbled for the electric window switch. The window went halfway down, then stopped, jammed. Amobi stabbed at the button, muttering, but it wouldn’t budge any further. The copper at his door leaned down and peered through the gap, clearly suspecting Amobi of playing dumb.