by Zoe Sharp
This old faithful had probably come from India, not in the first flush of youth, but plenty reliable and accurate for the job in hand. Plus it was sturdy enough to clout someone over the head with if I ran out of ammo. All points in its favour.
I loaded thirty rounds into each magazine rather than topping them off, slotted one into the receiver, and nestled the gun back into the top of the holdall where I could reach it easily if I left the bag partially unzipped. Then I changed into a selection of the shapeless clothes Zak had provided. Somewhat disturbingly, the smell of their last owner still lingered.
Two flights up, the fifth floor had largely been taken over by those hardy or desperate or unbalanced enough among the press contingent to still be in-country. I passed a couple of obvious ex-squaddie contractors who were supposed to be guarding the corridor, but who let me through without a second glance. Black marks all round.
When I banged on the door to the room number as per the briefing, there were signs of rapid movement inside. Shadows came and went behind the Judas glass. Eventually, a man’s voice called out curtly, “Who is it?”
I sighed and slid my passport, face down, beneath the door. It was yanked out of my fingers before it was halfway under. For my own safety, I’d brought nothing to identify me as working for Parker Armstrong’s New York City close-protection agency. If a Brit ID wasn’t enough to convince them, it would just be me and Zak heading for the border tomorrow.
Eventually, the door opened a crack and a narrow section of a woman’s face stared out above the chain. She was small and blonde and totally wired. I recognised the slightly freaked-out eyes of someone who is only keeping it together because they don’t quite believe what’s happening is real.
“Alison Cranmore?” I said, not adding "I presume" because she didn’t look like she’d appreciate the Livingstone joke. “I’m Charlie Fox.”
The eyes flickered in something that might have been dismay. She closed the door without a word, opening it again a second later, the chain removed. I stepped past her and waited while she fumbled with the chain and lock. I reached into the holdall and picked out another item that had been on Zak’s procurement list – a simple wooden doorstop. I slid the narrow end under the door and kicked it into place with the toe of my boot. When it comes to flimsy hotel locks, you can never be too careful.
When I turned, I found Alison had moved back to sit on the bed as if her legs had given out on her, and was staring at me again. She was pretty but not to the point of frivolity, with good bone structure that came across well on camera. Since she’d been in-country, she’d acquired a leaned-down slimness, as if long exposure to heat and stress had stripped her of any excess weight.
The male voice I’d heard belonged to the only other person in the room, a gaunt man sprawled in a chair over by the curtained window. His hair was pale almost to white, and he had the high cheekbones and startling blue eyes that made me think instinctively of Scandinavia.
“You’re Charlie?” Alison said at last, her voice blankly incredulous.
I looked from her to the man. He was eyeing me with flat amusement, as if his luck had been bad for so long he expected nothing else, and the only recourse left to him was to laugh in the face of it.
“You were expecting some hulking great grunt like that pair outside,” I said, jerking my head towards the corridor.
“Too right!” Alison shot back. On the news reports I’d seen her deliver, her voice had a carefully cultivated classlessness, a neutrality designed to convey the information without you noticing the person behind it. Tension made it ragged. “Where are the others? We were told there would be more of you – three or four at least.”
I smiled. “Sadly, what you see is what you get.”
The blond man spread his hands and shrugged, reminding me of Zak. He’d obviously been in-country a long time. “We are going to die, for sure,” he announced, his accent Swedish.
“Not for sure,” I said. I reached into the bag and pulled out the SMG, hefted it. “Do you honestly think – if I looked like the gorillas out there – I would have managed to walk in here carrying this?”
***
We talked for a couple of hours. At least, Alison and I talked, while the blond guy – who turned out to be a freelance cameraman called Nils from Stockholm – drank cheap vodka and smoked cigarettes down to the knuckle.
At the end of it, I knew more than I wanted about the injustices going on inside the country, and less than I needed about the situation we were in. I was already aware that the president was a poster-boy for corrupt dictators the world over. The current unrest was being generated by his former right-hand man, who had somehow managed to survive being purged to mount the first viable opposition in years. Beyond that, I didn’t need to know the details.
“So,” I said. “What’s stopping you going out the same way I came in – via the airport on the first commercial flight to just about anywhere?”
Nils harrumphed into his shot glass – no easy feat. “This is what they are waiting for,” he said.
I glanced at Alison. “You think the government would try to prevent you leaving?”
It was Nils who answered. “No way,” he said. “It is their dream that we go – get us out of their head.”
I was pretty sure he meant ‘hair’, but I didn’t correct him. Mainly because his English was a hell of a lot better than my grasp of Swedish, which was limited to mild obscenities and ordering beer.
“So,” I repeated, “what’s stopping you?”
“They’ll let us go, but not the story,” Alison said.
“You’ve been here for six months, sending out stories all the time,” I said. “What’s special about this one?”
That’s when they began to act cagey. And shortly thereafter, I began to lose my patience.
Eventually, I returned to my room on the third floor, having told Alison and Nils to be ready to move as soon as curfew lifted in the morning. As I left, I suggested quietly to Alison that she try and separate Nils from his bottle of vodka before he hit the bottom – mentally and physically. Some people get maudlin when they drink. Clearly, Nils was one of them.
I tried not to let the cloak and dagger attitude irritate me. It’s not unusual for clients to try to keep you in the dark. I suppose they made the same assumption as Zak – that they’ve bought your services and so can anyone else, if the price is right.
The reality is that the close-protection business is all about reputation, and Parker Armstrong’s outfit had a name for utter reliability. With the rest of my team blown, the responsibility for maintaining that reputation rested squarely on my shoulders.
No pressure, then.
***
I woke in the middle of the night to find I’d rolled out of bed on a reflex and grabbed for the SMG which I’d left close to hand on the side table. I lay there on the floor, hard up against the side of the mattress with my heart hammering against my breastbone and my ears straining in the dark.
For a moment I wondered if I’d merely been in the grip of some weirdly realistic nightmare. Then the noise that had woken me came again. Incoming fire – close proximity.
Keeping low, I crabbed over to the window, slithered up the wall alongside it and peered out. Tracer rounds were arcing through the night from the south, aimed not for the city itself, but further east. I didn’t need GPS to work out they were targeting the airport.
Ah well, there goes that escape plan.
There had been plenty of collateral damage before the gunners got their eye in. Isolated fires were dotted all over the city, their flames licking up into the night sky until the underside of the clouds themselves seemed to be burning.
Through the single-glazed window I could hear the distinctive rattle of AK fire in the streets below. It was this development, I knew, that had penetrated my subconscious. The AK was the weapon of choice for all sides in this conflict, so it was hard to know who was shooting at what.
I considered our op
tions. The hotel itself did not seem to be a direct target. Moving in the dark would be ludicrous. Staying put was the only logical choice.
I wrapped myself in several layers of spare clothing and crawled to the far side of the bed, away from the window and possible shrapnel, with the holdall close to hand and the SMG cradled in my arms. If the worst happened and the building collapsed around me, the bed would not be squashed completely flat, creating a survival pocket alongside it. And if we received a direct hit, well, there wasn’t much I could do.
Either way, I didn’t intend to lose sleep over it.
***
On the grounds that you should never pass up the opportunity to eat, I was down in the lobby early the following morning in hopes of breakfast, only to find Alison and Nils had beaten me to it.
Alison gave me a wan smile as I sat down at their table.
“I never could sleep through a bombardment,” she said. And as if to highlight her point of view, another distant explosion rumbled in.
Nils looked the worse for wear, too, but that could simply have been down to fallout from the night before’s vodka.
“You might want to change before we leave,” I told him. He was wearing digital-desert pattern trousers and a khaki shirt.
“What for?”
I shrugged. Zak must be rubbing off on me, too. “You look like a soldier,” I said. “We’re going to have enough trouble getting out of here without both sides mistaking you for an enemy combatant.”
Nils grunted. He took a sip of coffee the colour and consistency of road tar, and said with a certain arrogance, “This is why we have you.”
“Actually,” I said mildly, “this is why she has me. You’re just along for the ride.”
Alison blinked. “But―?”
“It was your news agency who contracted us – Nils is freelance,” I told her, flicked my eyes across both of them and added with as much diplomacy as I could manage, “I’ll do my best to keep everyone safe, but if it comes down to it, I am bound to protect Alison first.”
“And I get to go fuck myself into a cocked hat,” Nils said morosely.
The intricacies of that manoeuvre were lost on me, but I got the gist. “That is your prerogative,” I agreed. “But it doesn’t mean I’m going to let you do the same to the rest of us.” I let that settle, then put effort and quiet force into my voice. “Now – go and change.”
The Swede sat for a moment, anger swirling behind his features, then he got up without a word and strode away towards the lobby. AK fire in a neighbouring street seemed to echo in time with his footsteps.
I’d noticed that the lobby area had been crowding up – it seemed we were not the only ones proposing to make a rapid exit in light of the collapsing situation. The manager didn’t look unduly upset by the exodus. I gathered that there would soon be a new influx of war zone junkies to replace those leaving. Not just news teams, but private military contractors, too. Some of them were legit, but some of them were just gun freaks who wanted a chance to take out a live moving target, without spending the rest of their life behind bars for the privilege.
Probably best to be gone before any of them arrived.
Alison leaned across and touched my arm. “I need Nils,” she said, low and urgent. When I raised an eyebrow, she flushed. “Not like that. I need him for this story. Without him, I have nothing. It’s just my word, you know?”
I stared at her. “You mean you don’t have proof?”
“Oh, we have proof,” she said. “On digital video – Nils’s video. And without it, they’ll say I’ve gone completely off my rocker.”
“Couldn’t you have beamed it out by satellite or something, if it’s so important?”
“Nils won’t let go of it. He says that once it’s out there, anybody could steal it.”
“Better that than never getting the damn thing out at all.”
She gave an unhappy shrug, the reporter in her understanding Nils’s reluctance to let go of his baby for anyone to exploit.
I would have pushed her for more, but the Swede’s return made her clam up completely. His manner was one of sulky confidence, as if he knew exactly what Alison might have told me during his absence. Still, at least he had changed, into a flowered shirt and blue lightweight hiking trousers with the lower half of the legs zipped off to turn them into comically long shorts. He’d gone from looking like a weekend warrior to a bad tourist.
“So, when do we go?” he demanded.
That was a question I’d been hoping nobody was going to ask. Zak was late. Not just ‘delayed’ – even by the generally relaxed timekeeping standards of this place – but seriously, worryingly, late. Time edged round. Other breakfasters came and went. I began to think I might have to resort to Plan B, which was basically to steal an abandoned vehicle and make a run for it by ourselves.
About half an hour later, I spotted the two moustachioed watchers from the dented Merc, who slid into the lobby and were loitering conspicuously behind the drooping fronds of a potted palm. I swear hotels only include potted palms in their decor for exactly this purpose. I silently christened them Tweedle-Dumb and Tweedle-Dumber.
I tried not to read too much into their arrival. Maybe they figured it was safer here than out on the streets when they were so clearly aligned with the current regime. And maybe Zak’s alarm clock had failed to go off and he’d simply overslept.
Yeah, right.
***
Just when I’d begun to seriously consider luring the Tweedle brothers outside and nicking their Merc, Zak finally turned up, looking freshly showered. He was full of shrugs and bows and apologies as he led us out to his old Toyota, which also now glistened wetly in the morning heat.
“Please tell me you didn’t stop to wash your car,” I said.
He gave another of his voluminous shrugs. “Water cannon, yes?”
I gathered from the huge cracks in the windscreen and the sopping interior that he wasn’t joking. The front seats had taken the brunt. This made Nils even more grumpy when I pointed out that, strictly for propriety’s sake, Alison and I should ride in the back.
We loaded our gear. I’d transferred anything I needed from my original luggage to the holdall Zak had provided, and abandoned my old bag in my room for the cleaning staff to make use of or sell, as they wished. I’d left the bag carefully spread open on my bed – people were having a bad enough time here without adding an unnecessary bomb scare into the mix.
As we climbed into the Toyota, the Tweedles emerged and trotted towards their own car with much surreptitious glancing in our direction. People had been leaving since curfew lifted and the pair hadn’t taken much notice, which meant they had been specifically waiting for us.
Not good.
I leaned forwards and tapped Zak on the shoulder. “Do you have any friends you can rely on who might help us?” I asked.
He pursed his lips, torn between being paid for his own helpfulness and being forced to split whatever money I was prepared to spend. “Maybe yes, maybe,” he said at last.
“Call them,” I said. “Tell them to steal or borrow a car and be ready to move.” With reluctance, Zak dragged out an ancient mobile phone the size of a brick, and prodded in a number. As he waited for the connection, I tapped his shoulder again. “Oh, the car – make sure they take it from someone they don’t like.”
***
I don’t know if the antiquity of Zak’s phone had anything to do with it, but he was unable to get through to his friends. “Network is down,” he announced casually over his shoulder as we careered out into traffic. “We need to make side-show to go see them, yes?”
I glanced out of the rear screen. Beads of water still rolled down the outside of the glass, and every time Zak cornered both front seats squelched. The Merc had slotted in behind us as if on a long tow. The Tweedle brother in the passenger seat was talking on his own phone, arms waving wildly as he did so. Put handcuffs on half the guys in this part of the world and they’d be struck insta
ntly mute.
“Our watchers are back and they appear to be spreading the word.” I stabbed a thumb over my shoulder towards our tail. “I thought you said the network was down.”
Zak looked pained. “Civilian network is down,” he explained, twisting in his seat without regard for obstacles in the road like burning buses and strewn rubble from the occasional half-collapsed building.
Alison spun back from staring out of the rear window. We’d both covered our face and hair with local scarves, so all I could see of her was a pair of accusing eyes. “You knew you were being followed?” she demanded.
“Everyone is followed to the hotel,” I said. “Looks like they really don’t want to see you leave.” I unzipped the holdall, which sat alongside me on the rear seat, and brought out the SMG, keeping it below the level of the glass. “Do you know how to load a magazine?”