by Chris Ryan
It was clear that the Cadre had lost the initiative but it would have been a miracle if things had turned out any other way. From the moment that Manderson – fuck him – had refused to let them buy Eve’s safety with the tape, a shoot-out had been a dangerous probability. Grabbing Branca had been their best chance of avoiding a blood-bath, but the gamble had failed.
A half-second glance confirmed the general picture for Slater. Ahead of them, some fifteen metres away, was a concrete roof-support pillar. Ten metres to its right was its twin. Two steel desks and a steel filing cabinet were grouped around the right-hand pillar, and these were providing cover for the three Serbs. The fourth, dead, lay between one of the desks and the right-hand window.
If Slater could get behind the left-hand pillar he could draw the enemy fire and perhaps snipe at the RDB team from the side.
‘Swap places,’ he whispered to Chris, and she clambered over him so that she was next to Andreas.
‘OK, cover me.’
Jumping over the still-shaking form of Branca he sprinted for the pillar, wrenching down the blinds from the window as he went. Behind him he heard the double-cough of aimed shots from Andreas and Chris and longer bursts from the Serbs. With all of the weapons silenced the smack of impact and the scream of ricochet was made hideously evident. Brick and plaster chips careened from the walls and pattered to the carpet. The air was thick with dust.
Slater made the pillar. As he ran he got a brief impression of the arena of battle: one Serb behind a desk, one behind a filing cabinet, the third behind the opposite pillar to his own.
Silence.
A bluish smoke hovering at shoulder-height.
The soft click as one of the Serbs unlocked his empty magazine.
Now, thought Slater. The plastic shroud that provided the Uzi’s foregrip was still cool in his hand. Stepping sideways from behind the pillar he fired a pair of aimed shots at the filing cabinet at head height. The response was a volley of rounds cutting the air past his face – one of them so close that he felt the wind of its spinning flight.
As Slater swung back behind the pillar the RDB man who had fired at him raced towards the desk covering Andreas and Chris. Standing, leaning hard into the submachine gun as if he was on the range at Pontrilas, Andreas took off the top of his attacker’s head like a boiled egg. Cartwheeling to the floor with his finger on the trigger and his selector on automatic, the RDB man fully and lengthily discharged his magazine. Four of the 9mm rounds punched through, respectively, Andreas’s carotid artery, windpipe and second and third cervical vertebrae – snapping back his head and flipping him, all but decapitated, against the back wall.
Not yet dead, Andreas’s RDB attacker kicked lazily on the carpet. Behind the desk, her movements icily controlled, Chris fired a double-tap through the open top of his skull into his exposed brain. The kicking stopped.
As the dead body of his friend slid bloodily down the wall, Slater forced himself to remain in control. No one, it was clear, was going to come out with their hands up. The Department’s single bargaining card – Branca – was bleeding to death, and thus no longer negotiable against Eve.
As he considered his options, he saw Chris lean round the end of the upturned desk and fire a long, exploratory burst with her Uzi in the direction of the remaining two RDB men. Slater couldn’t see them, but he heard their grunts as the rounds screamed and ricocheted around them.
The two exchanged breathless comments in Serbian, and an MP5 magazine slid across the carpet between them. Then one of them gave a hoarse and urgent shout and an instant later a door opened at the far end of the warehouse.
Another RDB man came out – a man they hadn’t seen. In front of him, still dressed as she had been in the forest, was Eve, gagged. The man had the fingers of one hand knotted in her hair and with the other was holding to her throat a small rubber-handled automatic that some card-index in Slater’s brain recognised as a NAA Black Widow. The man was short and broad, and his head and body were almost entirely concealed by Eve’s.
‘Come out, please, or I shoot your woman.’ The voice was nervous — dangerously so — but undoubtedly sincere. ‘I count to three, OK, then I’m killing her. Yes?’
Slater said nothing. He was in plain sight of the man holding Eve. If he tried to move out of the RDB man’s firing line he would become visible to one of the others.
‘One!’
No one moved. Chris waited behind the desk, taking her lead from Slater.
‘Two!’
Slater bent down, placed his Uzi on the floor. Let go, he told himself. Let go of reason, let go of fear, let go of everything. Enter the zone.
The man holding Eve nodded, waiting for Slater to straighten and walk out unarmed.
Enter the zone. Access the physical memory of those hundreds of hours in the killing-house. Let the body do the thinking, not the brain. Let go of everything but instinct. Become that instinct. Let the body speak.
Slater straightened. But his hands were no longer empty – they held the Sig Sauer, which had somehow become part of his body, a taut and deadly extension of his gaze.
Chris, describing the events to Ray and Debbie a fortnight later, would say that things seemed to freeze at that moment – that there was an instant of pure motionlessness. And in that split-second, she would tell them, there was time for certain details to strike her – the painful-looking twist of Eve’s neck, for example, and the way that the RDB man had to twist his stubby fingers in her hair to retain a grip of her, and even the entirely irrelevant fact that he was carrying the Black Widow in his left fist.
And then the Sig Sauer swinging upwards, stretching the moment to unbearable length. Time hurtling on.
‘Three!’
Slater’s first shot – double-handed, arms at full reach – smashed through his target’s left elbow, reducing the joint to a shattered hinge of bone, cartilage and synovial ligament. As the RDB man’s forearm twitched spastically, fingers fanning into a last fluttering dance, the Black Widow spun off behind him. He seemed to half-turn after it, and then the air briefly reddened as Slater’s second and third shots drove through his right temple. Dying, his hand involuntarily clenching in her hair, the RDB man dragged Eve down to the carpet.
One of the remaining Serbs screamed to the other, and poured a volley of fire towards Chris. Grabbing his Uzi, Slater leaned round the pillar and fired a burst at her attacker. The RDB man fell sideways, hit in the upper body, and Chris finished him off with a double-tap from behind the desk.
The last man charged at Slater, firing as he came.
Slater swung sideways to evade, but felt the rounds slam into him. Fuck, he thought, more in irritation than fear. I’ve been hit. Adrenaline kept him on his feet for a moment, but then another jackhammer blow dropped him to the carpet. His body stopped responding to his will.
So this was how it was. No pain, no fear, just the red card. Just disappointment at not being allowed to continue.
Your time’s up, whispered a voice he almost recognised. And I’m coming to get you, like I always promised I would. Above Slater, an RDB man who bore a curious resemblance to his father was preparing to shoot him in the face. Time had jammed again.
He heard the tiny plink of window-glass an instant before the damped crack of the distant Dragunov. Leon, ever the conservative, had opted for the chest shot, and the heavy 7.62 round drilled neatly through the Serb’s sternum before exiting his back in a grapefruit-sized wad of loose tissue, bone and lung. Dead on his feet, the RDB man hit the floor like a ton of condemned beef.
Silence, except for Branca’s shivering gasps. Five men dead and the place a blood-hosed slaughterhouse, dense with smoke, rank with death. Everywhere on the carpet – now a sodden red-black – the yellow-metal casings of expended nine-mm ammunition.
Slater on his back, helpless, the black wetness spreading beneath him, the carpet a warm marsh, feeling nothing.
Eve face-down twenty feet away, waiting for the next exchange of
fire, with a dead man’s fist stiffening in her hair.
Andreas motionless against the wall in a clotted puddle, his eyes sightless, his neck bonelessly and horribly twisted.
And finally movement. Quiet footfalls as Chris runs through the blood-stink and the brick-dust from Serb to Serb, levels her Uzi at each man, delivers the formal double-tap where necessary – a quick tubercular cough — and hurries on.
Finally she makes her way to Eve, briefly squeezes the other woman’s shoulder and whispers her name, works the dead man’s hand from her hair, finds the keys for the plasticuffs in his pocket.
Eve, looking up with stunned eyes, clambering stiffly to her feet.
Chris moving on to Slater. Touching his neck for the pulse. Exhaling.
‘Chris to all stations. Come in. Over.’
Her voice shaky, but procedure holding her together.
Eve seeing Andreas’s body, noting Branca Nikolic bleeding to death beside the desk, falling to her knees beside Slater. The sight of the blood coursing from his shoulder returning a sense of purpose to her movements.
‘Hold this,’ she ordered him, pressing a crumpled handkerchief to the wound.
He winced, but managed it, and she began to unbutton his shirt.
When she got to the protective vest, her eyes widened. Three subsonic 9mm rounds had penetrated the vest’s Kevlar outer skin and flattened themselves against the perspex trauma-shield. Only the fourth round had actually penetrated Slater, and this had passed straight through the muscle overlying his collarbone.
Painful, but not fatal. Loosening the Velcro shoulder-straps, Eve removed the combat-vest and ripped open his T-shirt.
Slater’s chest looked as if a sledge-hammer had been taken to it. Where the rounds had struck the trauma-shield three mauve compact-disc-sized whorls covered broken ribs. Even as Eve watched the bruises were darkening and expanding – within hours they would be the lurid purple of rotten plums.
She shook her head in disbelief. ‘Well, it looks as if you’ve got that second chance you paid for. You’re not actually going to die.’
‘No?’
‘No. And don’t sound so disappointed. You look as if you’ve been kicked by a carthorse and there’s a neat nine-millimetre hole straight through your right shoulder – but no, basically you’re going to make it.’
‘Andreas?’ Slater asked, although he already knew the answer, and she shook her head.
‘Branca?’
‘I doubt it. She’s taken a round in the groin.’
He shook his head, and then winced, closing his eyes.
‘You saved my life,’ said Eve. ‘Or something very like that. I felt those rounds go past me.’
‘I honestly don’t know how I made that shot. I think it was something to do with seeing Andreas killed. I just . . .’ He shrugged, helpless, and winced again.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Eve. ‘You were old friends, weren’t you?’
‘We went back a few years,’ said Slater, his mouth twitching at a dim memory of Trooper van Rijn, as he had then been, baring his buttocks at a party of outraged Kuwaitis from the back of a commandeered Chevrolet during the aftermath of Desert Storm.
‘Well, we liked him too,’ said Eve, folding her arms tightly across her chest as her eyes filled with tears. ‘And I just can’t believe he’s dead. I mean it’s pretty pointless, isn’t it – his life for my life?’
‘You can’t think like that,’ said Slater. ‘It doesn’t take you anywhere.’
She nodded and stared at the floor. ‘So what happened to the disc?’ she asked eventually. ‘Did you bring it with you just in case?’
‘I sent it back to London,’ Slater said, avoiding her gaze. ‘Stuck it in a postbox at the Bastille in the early hours of this morning.’
She looked at him quizzically and then nodded. ‘Good idea. The sooner it’s processed and destroyed the better.’
Chris joined them, the Glock 26 hanging from her hand. ‘So,’ she said wearily.
She and Eve made their way downstairs to let in Leon and Terry. The priority now was to report to Manderson and get the hell out of France. When they had closed the door behind them, Slater attempted to get to his feet. The attempt was agonising – his broken ribs sent waves of white-hot pain lancing across his chest — but he made it to his knees.
A few metres away, Branca lay on the carpet, her lips moving uncertainly as if singing along to a song she only half-knew. Bright red arterial blood flooded the carpet beneath her.
Slowly, painfully, Slater made his way over to her. ‘I’m sorry, Branca,’ he said quietly. Reaching for a copy of Paris-Match which lay among the detritus of the upturned desk, he slipped it as gently as he could between her head and the carpet, and shrugging off his ripped T-shirt he pressed it to the bloody well at her groin.
She flinched, but her eyes thanked him. ‘We should not be enemies,’ she whispered, and Slater shook his head.
‘You’re a good soldier,’ he told her. ‘You played it well.’
She managed the shadow of a smile.
‘What is your true name?’ she asked him.
‘Neil.’
‘I think I’m dying, Neil. Yes?’
He nodded gently and took her hand.
‘No doctor coming?’
He met her fearful gaze. ‘No doctor, Branca. I’m sorry.’
She closed her eyes as a wave of pain overtook her. ‘Will you stay with me?’ she gasped, eventually. ‘I’m frightened to . . . to go alone.’
‘I’ll stay with you,’ he promised, moving the damp strands of blonde hair from her eyes. ‘Don’t be frightened.’
Her skin was very pale and very cold. As he watched, she lost focus for a moment as the pain returned and then she seemed to gather herself, to draw down a last brief lease of life.
‘Please, Neil, do something for me.’
Her gaze was steady now. She knew she had very little time.
‘Tell me,’ he said.
SIXTEEN
Slater decided to take the slow road to Brighton, across the Downs. It was a warm day – alternatively bright and overcast as the clouds scudded across the sun.
No one, he thought – no one in the world – knows that I’m here. It was a pleasurable thought. Reaching up he pressed the sun-roof button, and the wind streamed easily into the car.
His shoulder hurt less now. There had been two bad days, but now the wound had subsided to a dull ache. His ribs, on the other hand, were worse. The service doctor who strapped him up in Paris had worked at Aintree for several years and treated the jockeys who fell and broke bones in the Grand National. So he had been less than impressed by Slater’s attempts at stoicism. ‘You’ll be back on the rugby pitch within the week,’ he’d said cheerfully, briskly turning down Slater’s request for pain-killers. ‘It might tickle a bit, but nothing that’ll worry a tough lad like you.’
Despite himself, and despite his screaming ribs, Slater had smiled.
They’d been back in England for ten days. After the firefight at the Rue de Coude, Eve had spent an hour on the mobile to Manderson, explaining the situation. Terry and Leon had kept watch, but the street remained deserted. The shots fired on the top-floor had all been silenced, and no trace of the mayhem had been discernible outside.
Manderson had ordered them to stay put, and after alerting the Paris station chief had flown in an MI6 cleaning team.
The cleaning team had worked all night, subtly rearranging the bloody tableau and planting certain artefacts and substances. By dawn they had vanished, leaving behind them clear evidence of a lethal firefight between members of an East European heroin importation ring.
The cleaners had thought it best to remove a coded notebook containing contact numbers for Branca’s various clients and lovers. Evidence that a number of prominent Parisians were being blackmailed by the RDB was felt to be safest in British hands. That their number included a French NATO official was considered of particular interest.
Andr
eas’s body was spirited away from the Rue de Coude in a sealed van, along with the rest of the team. They had raced out of Paris, and shortly before dawn, in a field near Cap Gris-Nez, a Puma helicopter had swung out of the mist and taken them on board.
The extraction was carried out by a special team seconded from the RAF. The flight had not been cleared with the French authorities, but then neither had Operation Firewall – hardly surprising given that it had cost the French arms industry many billions of francs in lost business.
By midday Andreas’s body had been cremated and a certificate issued to the effect that he had died of heart failure. His ashes were returned to an address in South London, from where they were collected by Debbie. In common with the other members of the Cadre, he had no immediate family.
Slater had been dropped off by the van at a small flat behind the British Embassy in the Rue du Faubourg St Honoré, where a service doctor had dressed his wound and strapped his broken ribs, administered a single dose of Volterol, and put him to bed.
Two days later he had been pronounced fit and driven to the Gare du Nord, where with the compliments of the MI6 station chief he had been handed a first-class Eurostar ticket and – with the compliments of the doctor – a half bottle of Laphroaig whisky ‘to help him sleep’.
He had been met at Waterloo by Eve, who drove him back to his flat. They barely spoke during the two-minute drive, but as soon as they were behind closed doors he dropped the bags and reached for her. She had responded hungrily for a moment but then had gently disengaged herself.
‘Ten days,’ she told him, placing a finger on his mouth. ‘For the next ten days it’s going to be all work. After that, though, there’s going to be a week’s leave. And then we can . . . escape. How would that be?’
A little unwillingly, Slater had agreed that it would be fine. He wanted her with every nerve and sinew in his body, but he also knew that she was right – that the only way things would work between them was if their relationship remained deep-frozen while they worked together. Any other arrangement would be destructive of the subtle dynamics of the team. They could not allow themselves to be more concerned for each other than for their colleagues, and they could not allow their colleagues to think that this was a possibility. There would be leave-periods, and there would be the odd night at weekends, but for the time being that would be the limit of it.