by Leigh Barker
Truth is like a landed fish; it’s awkward and flaps about until something is done about it.
“It is just possible that I was—”
“Hoodwinked?” Annie suggested. “Set up. Fooled. Tricked. Made—”
“Thank you, you’ve made your point.”
“Have I?” Annie said, hopeful.
“Perhaps I should give Harvey an opportunity to explain.”
“Yes,” Annie said, smiling, “you should. I’ll fix it up.” She reached for the phone.
“Whoa!” Margaret said, almost panicking. “Not so fast.”
“There’s no time like the present,” Annie said. “Strike while the iron’s hot, I always say.”
“No, you don’t,” Margaret said. “You always say, I’ll do it later.”
39
Shaun squinted out through the car windscreen, but all he could see was darkness and his reflection looking back. Billie Holiday singing “Summertime” drifted quietly from the radio, and he leaned forward and turned up the volume a little. “How can she make a happy song so gut-wrenchingly sad?” he said, almost to himself.
“Dunno, but can’t you find something a little less wrist slashing?” Danny said, shifting his feet among the cans and junk in the footwell. “Why couldn’t we have used my nice clean car? Jesus, how can you live like this?”
“Like what?”
“Like a pig, for chrissakes, with crap all over the place, and why do you keep all this shit on the dash.” He raked the rubbish with his fingertips. “Burger boxes, coke tins, last week’s coffee.” He pulled a face as his fingers touched something soggy. “And what the hell is this? No, stop, don’t tell me. Some things are best left to die quietly.”
Shaun looked up to heaven for guidance, but God was doing his nails. “Here,” he said and swept the junk into the footwell to join the rest. On Danny’s side.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Danny lifted his feet as cold coffee ran into his super-polished shoes and splashed his trousers. “Jesus, man, this is my best suit!”
“Nothing a dab of soda won’t get out,” Shaun said, leaning down into the footwell and retrieving a soda can. “Yeah, thought I’d left some.” He offered it to Danny, but he was too busy swearing under his breath and dabbing at his trouser leg with a white handkerchief.
“Hey,” Shaun said, “use that rag to clean the windscreen, we’re all steamed up now with all that heavy breathing.” He shook the soda can and downed the remains.
Danny’s mouth was open as he gave him a long, hard look. His brain looked for somewhere to file the image, but failed and dumped it. “I mention that I hate stakeouts?” he said, wiping the misted windscreen with his handkerchief.
“Every time,” Shaun said. “And this isn’t a stakeout.”
“No? Well, it feels like a stakeout, and it smells like a stakeout, so it’s a stakeout.”
“Nah, we’re just waiting on ol’ Mr Junior Brown to show up so we can say hi.”
“Our luck, he’s gone away for the weekend,” Danny grumbled, as he was prone to.
“He’ll be here.”
“Says who?” Danny said, putting his feet back gingerly into the junk.
“Says me,” Shaun said, leaning forward and wiping his patch of windscreen with his hand. “Because here he is.”
Danny sat upright and squinted through the smeared windscreen into the darkness and saw headlights flash as a car bounced onto the wharf. He watched it come down onto the quay and pull up in front of Junior’s storage unit, which turned out to be a badly converted boathouse. After a few seconds, two heavyset black guys got out of the front of the Range Rover and looked around slowly before one of them opened the back door while the other kept scanning the area for hidden foes.
Junior Brown got out of the car, his full-length leather coat billowing as it was designed to do. It was just so cheesy, Danny almost laughed, but Shaun interrupted his humour.
“Come on,” he said, opening his door, “let’s go ask him about the guns. Seems like a nice chap.”
Danny looked over at him and wondered if they were looking at the same guy. He opened his door and swung his legs out. Sometimes he wondered if Shaun—
The empty coke cans cascaded onto the stone quay and rolled away with a clattering noise that sounded ten times louder than it actually was, but no matter, it did the trick.
Junior ducked back into the Range Rover, and the two bodyguards opened up with Steyr TMP machine pistols, without even waiting to see if it was friend or foe. Every window in Danny’s car exploded, and the bodywork thumped with incoming rounds.
“Christ almighty!” Shaun shouted and rolled behind a pile of wooden cable reels. “Get down!” he called to Danny when he saw him crawling on hands and knees away from the car. Shaun stood up and emptied his gun at the two Jamaicans, but at fifty yards, they were right on the edge of the Glock’s effective range, and that was a hell of a long way to shoot a handgun, particularly in the dark, but it did the trick. The shooters changed their target from Danny out in the open, to Shaun, now well out in the open, standing under a nice little streetlight erected by the thoughtful council. He got the message as rounds ripped into the wooden reels and dived back down out of sight, took a moment to snap in another magazine, and then stood up again, his legs spread, his left hand supporting his right, and sighted on the shooter on the left, who was marginally nearer. He thought about the wind from the right, the elevation to cover that much distance — and how stupid he was. He fired, switched targets, and fired again. The results were spectacularly underwhelming. The two shooters climbed calmly into the Range Rover and drove away.
So, not like the movies. Shaun swore in disgust and walked back to what was left of the car. “I think I worried them with those last—”
Danny was lying dead still on the ground, his beautifully ironed shirt marking the flow of the dark red blood. Shaun knelt down and ripped open the shirt to expose the wound above Danny’s third rib on his right side, but the real problem was the sound of air being sucked into his chest. He placed his palm over the hole and sealed it, while he tried to get to his phone without moving his hand, and failing. The sound of approaching sirens fixed that dilemma, and he focused on releasing his hand a little in time with Danny’s ragged breathing to let the air out of his chest.
He looked around urgently, but they were as alone as automatic gunfire on a river wharf can make someone. A helicopter suddenly appeared overhead and flooded the area with brilliant light from its Nightsun searchlight, while its rotors blew junk and paper all over Danny. Shaun swore loudly and covered his friend with his body, while the dickhead in the chopper started shouting at him through a loudspeaker. He had to wait only a few minutes for more heroes to arrive and also start shouting. What was it with these people? If he really was the shooter, would he still be here? Not bloody likely.
Three overweight police officers ran up to him and began grabbing him and pulling him away. He snatched his arm back and shouted over his shoulder, but the helicopter was making too much noise as it hovered there for the best view. One of the officers reached down, and Shaun took his hand and jerked the man to his knees.
“We’re police officers, you dickheads!” he shouted into the sprawled man’s ear. “Get that damned thing off my friend!”
The officer looked up as though it was the first time he’d seen the helicopter fifty feet above them and still showering everyone with crap. He finally found his wits, got to his feet, and waved the chopper away. It was obvious that the other officers wanted to beat someone with their sticks, or shoot witnesses, or however they got their kicks, but their demeanour changed visibly when they learned that the wounded man was a brother officer, albeit one with brains — and less body fat.
Shaun turned back to Danny and listened to his breathing, now shallow and painful. “Don’t you do this to me,” he said, leaning forward to make sure his hand was applying pressure to the wound. “Please,” he said quietly. “Listen, God, I’ve ne
ver asked you for anything, you know that, but I’m asking you now. You let Danny here live, and I’ll do anything.” He closed his eyes. “You just say the word… anything.” Danny’s breath rattled noisily as he fought to get air into his collapsed lung. “I’ll be a better man,” he said as he released his grip to let the trapped air out through the wound. “I’ll do stuff. Look, God, you let him live, and I’ll clean myself up. Yeah, me, my place, the car, everything.” Danny was dead still, and his breathing was fading.
The police officers looked at each other and shook their heads in response to the unasked question.
“Come on, God,” Shaun said, looking up at the sky. It responded by beginning to rain. “Come on, don’t be an arsehole!” The rain soaked his face and pattered onto Danny’s bloody chest. “Please, God,” Shaun said softly, “I’m promising. Please!”
An ambulance bumped onto the quay and rolled slowly towards them. Danny groaned, and Shaun looked up to heaven. “Thanks, I owe you.”
As they loaded Danny into the ambulance, Shaun promised God one more thing. He was going to hunt down Junior Brown and kill him.
Jimmy Detroit nipped the filter off his Marlboro and lit the bare cigarette with a match that he struck on the wall he was leaning against. If it was some sort of subconscious rebellion against diktats from tree huggers and health freaks, he wasn’t aware of it, but that’s pretty much the way with subconscious rebellions.
He watched the ambulance bounce down onto the quay and roll up to where the stupid cops had got whacked. What kind of bonehead play was that? Forty-fives against machine pistols at that range? These people really were plain stupid, no wonder they lost every shitty war they’d got themselves into and had to be bailed out by the US every single time. Shit.
He tossed the cigarette and reached into his pocket for his cell. He had intended to wait for the Jamaicans to go inside, but the keystone cops had screwed that up. He pressed the speed dial and looked up in time to see the boathouse walls turn to blazing tinder and fly out in all directions, followed an instant later by the roof. He put the cell away and strolled back to the car. With a little luck, and no more incidents with this crap of driving on the wrong side of the road, he might get to see the ball game on satellite. And that would at least be a distant view of civilization.
He sat behind the wheel of the stupid little rental and watched the flames rising from the remains of the boathouse that was being ripped by secondary explosions every few minutes, as Junior’s hidden armoury detonated. He felt nothing, no exhilaration, no sense of a job well done. Not like the early days. Maybe it was always like this at the end of a career, going out in a whimper after all those years of thinking you make a difference. He leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes. This was going to be his last job, he’d said that at the start, yet there had been a little voice, but that was silenced now. He recalled his days in Delta Force. And the men who’d become like brothers, yeah, all dead now, either in action or some bullshit illness from all the crap they’d been through. But he missed it, not the action, he’d had enough of that, all that stalking lowlifes through stinking mosquito-infested jungles, or lying in wait for hours in some hide in a shit hole South American country just to blow some unknown dealer’s stupid head off. He missed the… what? Too hard even to think it? Okay, he missed the feeling of belonging, yeah, belonging to a family. What he did now made more money than he would ever need, but it was just him, always just him. Sometimes he wanted somebody to bitch with, to blow off steam, get drunk, get laid — and still be safe. Last job for sure. Yeah, but then what? Whatever, but he was done with this shit, this—
He opened his eyes as two police cars raced past the stationary vehicle, but the voice in his head whispered on.
This… loneliness.
He gritted his teeth, irritated by his weakness, but knowing that his inner voice was right, as it always was, the only voice he trusted, because all the smilers and the back slappers and the way-to-goers were just out to promote their own agenda, to get whatever it was they really wanted. Yeah, this was the last job.
40
Harry had been summoned to MI5 by a polite female voice. He’d thought about telling the voice he’d got a bad back, or his granny was dead, but he’d been around authority long enough to know when a request wasn’t a request at all.
He arrived at Thames House exactly on time, which puzzled him a little, being the last person in the world to give a stuff about orders from suits. Except these suits had the power to make his life very unpleasant indeed.
He was taken to an office by one of these suits who didn’t speak and locked in. Now that was just rude. Yeah, write a letter to your MP.
A few minutes passed, and he was considering picking the lock to make his getaway. Problem being, he was in a secure building… and he couldn’t pick locks, but other than that, it was a sound plan. Before he could put the plan into operation, a young woman in an immaculate grey suit came in, sat at the desk without speaking, and pressed something that switched on the wall monitor. And there was Lupus, as large as life, exiting Heathrow arrivals.
He glanced at the young woman. “So, you knew what he looks like all along?”
She spoke. “We had a tip that Mohammed Rahman Ali was arriving on this flight.”
“So, why am I here?”
She watched him for a few moments, as if wondering the same thing. “We need you to confirm that this…” She pointed at the big screen. “This person is Mohammed Rahman Ali.”
No, you don’t, but okay, I’ll play along. “Dunno, but I can confirm that this guy is the Taliban commander I met on the roof.” He waited. “I can’t say whether it’s Ali or not.”
She turned off the monitor, stood up and left, again without a word.
Okay, what was that about? Ah. They wanted to see if he blinked. So they still didn’t trust his story about the roof meeting and Lupus letting him go. There was a lingering suspicion that he… what? He’d made a deal for his life? Well, that shows how little they knew him. Maybe they thought he was in on the plot. And what plot was that? Jesus, Harry, you’re getting as paranoid as these spooks. Still, he’d past the test. Probably.
He stood and tried the door. It was locked. Well, doh!
The door opened before he returned to his seat, and the silent suit held it open for him to leave. And that was it. No thanks. No well done. Kiss my arse. Just here’s a picture. Are you in it with him? Now bugger off.
He was back in the rain before his hair was dry from his arrival. He looked back up the steps at the imposing doorway. Who’d be a spook? What a shit way to make a living.
An hour later, he had the photos Bob had taken of the books from Curly Sue’s safe spread out on Harvey’s coffee table and was studying one carefully when Harvey came home, tired but happy with another day righting wrongs and putting bad people behind bars.
“What a shit day,” he said, tossing his coat at the hanger and missing. “I swear I’m going to pack this in and become a missionary.”
“But you think God’s a figment of the uneducated man’s flaccid imagination,” Harry quoted, glancing over the top of the printed photograph.
“True,” Harvey said, crossing to the table and looking down at the photographs of pages of journals and receipts. “But the poor uneducated natives wouldn’t know that, would they?”
“And where’re you going to find these poor uneducated natives?” Harry said, tilting his head questioningly. “They’ve all got internet now, even up the Orinoco.”
Harvey grunted. Another plan down the toilet. Welcome to a truly shit day. He picked up a photograph and frowned. “Looks like someone’s planning a computer game.” He shrugged. “I don’t really see the point, but hey-ho.”
Harry’s smile was intended to be supportive, but came out as just patronising. “It’s a generation thing, Dad.” He took the photo from Harvey and froze.
“Yes, quite realistic, if you like those futuristic weapons,” Harvey said and
headed for the drinks cabinet.
Harry stared at the photo and let his breath out slowly. “Holy… shit!” He turned the photo sideways, as if that might make it less scary.
Harvey came back with two scotches and ice and placed one in front of Harry. “Aren’t you supposed to be looking for evidence, not admiring fantasy?”
Harry blew out his breath again, picked up the drink, and took a sip. “It’s not fantasy, Pop, this is real.” He pulled himself together. “These are CheyTac Intervention sniper rifles, deadly accurate up to two miles. The finest extreme long-range rifles in the world. They’re the things of nightmares, but not fantasy.”
Harvey shrugged, two miles didn’t seem that far. “Oh,” he said, and that would have to do on the shock-horror front.
“Okay,” Harry said, seeing his father’s indifference. “If a man set up this rifle on, say the London Eye, then he could kill you on the Embankment right outside here without any trouble.”
Harvey stared at him. “But that’s just impossible.”
Harry shrugged. “I could do it, and with the ABC, I wouldn’t have to be a particularly good shot.”
“ABC?” Harvey asked, still trying to get his head around such a shot over a distance that would take him forty-five minutes to walk.
Harry shrugged and began re-examining the photos. “Advanced ballistic computer,” he said absently. “Does all the calculations and takes the guesswork, and skill, out of the shot.”
Harvey sat down heavily in his armchair. “What on earth would anyone want with a weapon like that in London?”
“Two weapons like that,” Harry said and then caught his father’s questioning look. “Two CheyTac M200 rifles.”
Harvey tried to get his head round it. A new level of insanity in an increasingly insane world. But then it made sense, just like that. “The tripartite accord!”
Harry looked at him for several seconds, as his brain processed the enormity of it. It made absolute sense. An assassin would get off only one shot, maybe two, before the bodyguards smothered the target. Usually with their own bodies. And what kind of bloody insanity was that? Would he do that for some politician? No, but then he wouldn’t pass the psych test.