The Pandemic Plot

by Scott Mariani

  Ahead, the man around the corner ducked back out with his shotgun pointing from the hip and squeezed off a shot, missing Ben and Brewster but blowing a wall lamp into pieces. Ben popped two more fast shots back at him, so fast that the snapping reports sounded like one, and this time the man didn’t duck back around the corner fast enough. Blood flew up the wall. He stumbled and slipped and went down.

  Four men dead, seven rounds left. It was a dangerous balance. Keep moving. Ben kept an iron grip on Brewster’s wrist and jerked him along behind him. The guy on the floor wasn’t quite dead yet, sliding around in his own blood and trying to get to his feet. He wouldn’t last long. Not worth wasting another bullet over. Ben trampled him brutally, dashed his head against the floor and moved on. Around the corner, the way ahead was clear. The front entrance hallway was in sight. But several more rooms lay to their left and right, before they could reach the door.

  There was no going back now. Ben strode fast up the passage. A door to the left flew open; a figure stepping out to block his path; the big fat O of the shotgun muzzle ready to rip loose a deadly blast. Ben could no longer afford the luxury of double- and triple-taps. When the pressure was on, you just had to be faster and more accurate. His sights locked on target and he fired once and the forty-calibre bullet smacked the man in the dead centre of the forehead and he tumbled back, crashing into a wall and leaving a red streak down the flowery wallpaper as he slid to the floor.

  Five men down for thirteen rounds gone, only six remaining. Getting close to the entrance hall now. Then they were at the door and bursting through to the outside. Ben was ready to confront more attackers appearing from any direction, but there were none. Had he got them all? It was too risky an assumption to make, but despite himself he felt a stab of relief and triumph penetrate the adrenalin-charged battle mist like a shard of sunlight.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Brewster mumbled. ‘This is my home! I’m not leaving!’

  ‘Shut up and keep moving,’ Ben told him. They hurried past Brewster’s Volvo, and around the side of the house towards the gate. Just the other side of it, a black van was parked. The attackers must have rolled up to the house in neutral with the engine off, or Ben would have heard them coming. These were professionals. But professionals paid by whom?

  The keys were still in the van’s ignition. Ben reached in the open window and plucked them out and hurled them over a hedge into the neighbouring field.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Brewster gasped. He was clutching at his chest and having trouble breathing.

  ‘To my car.’

  ‘Please, stop, I can’t run any more.’

  Ben bent at the waist, pushed his shoulder into Brewster’s middle and wrapped an arm around the man’s thighs and hoisted him up into a fireman’s lift. He’d carried plenty of men like this before, when they were injured in battle or training. Those were big, burly comrades in peak physical condition and full kit; Joe Brewster was a spindly little guy with barely a scrap of muscle on him. Ben ran for the Alpina. Still no sign of anyone coming after them. Maybe there really was nobody left to come after them. Still, Ben didn’t want to put it to the test. He reached the car, blipped the locks and tore open the back door and bundled Brewster inside.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘Somewhere safe.’

  Ben ran around to the driver’s door and jumped in behind the wheel. Instants later the engine’s throaty howl rasped loud, the tyres bit down hard into the dirt and sprayed mud and grass into the air as the Alpina took off like a missile.

  They were away clean.

  And then, suddenly, they weren’t.

  As Ben accelerated away from the house, three men burst from the roadside bushes just ahead of them and sprinted into the road. They’d skirted around the side of the house in an attempt to head him off. Planting themselves in his path like a human roadblock. Bringing their weapons to bear on the speeding car.

  Ben yelled at Brewster to get his head down and did the same, ducking down behind the dash and driving blind as he rammed his foot down and hurtled straight towards the men in the road. A ragged series of blasts hit the front of the car like hammers and the windscreen above Ben’s head dissolved into an opaque web of cracks. Then the nose of the Alpina ploughed into the legs of one of the men with a grisly thump before he was able to get out of the way, and his body rolled and cartwheeled up over the bonnet and the roof. The white windscreen was painted red. Then he was tumbling lifelessly to the ground in their wake. His two companions had managed to sidestep the impact of the car and delivered their point-blank blasts into its left flank as it surged by them, blowing out the side window and what was left of the windscreen.

  Ben straightened up behind the wheel, glass fragments cascading off him, yelling, ‘Brewster? You okay?’ No reply from the back. Brewster was still hunkered down low in the space between the seats.

  Ben yelled, ‘Hold on tight!’ as he stamped on the brake and threw the car into a sideways skid so that it howled to a halt broadside across the road, tyres smoking, rocking violently on its suspension. The two shooters were coming on with their weapons raised, pumping shot after shot into the Alpina’s flank.

  If there had been just one man left standing, Ben would have dearly wanted to turn the car around and go after him, run him down and take him alive to find out who the hell he was working for. But not two; and now it was too late because it was just a matter of time before one of the shotgun blasts ended him. Ben extended his pistol and rattled off all six of his remaining bullets, rapid-fire. One man went down, then the other. And then there were no rounds left in Ben’s pistol, and nobody left to shoot at.

  Now Ben saw a car coming down the road, from the direction of beyond Brewster’s house. It was still several hundred yards away, but it was approaching fast and in less than thirty seconds it would reach the slaughterhouse scene with dead bodies strewn about the middle of the road. Ben had no intention of being around when that happened. He stamped on the gas and took off again, leaving black ribbons behind him. Fifty miles an hour; the needle climbing to seventy; to ninety. The wind blast from the glassless screen filled the car like a hurricane, making tears stream from his eyes. He drove like a wild man for two miles along the empty country roads, then pulled over and twisted around in his seat to look into the back.

  ‘Brewster?’

  That was when Ben saw the gaping gunshot wound in Brewster’s neck.

  Chapter 32

  They say that dead men don’t talk. But Joe Brewster had one last piece of information to offer from beyond the grave. When Ben checked the mobile phone he found in Brewster’s trouser pocket he discovered among his contacts list a number for someone called Miles Redfield.

  Miles, the former Galliard Group employee whose girlfriend Suzie had been killed in a possibly suspicious car smash. Miles, the person Brewster had described as ‘the real expert’ on the dubious practices of the company, whatever those might be. Were Galliard behind this whole thing, rubbing out anyone who threatened to get too close to their secrets? Was that the trail Carter Duggan had been on? What had Brewster meant when he’d said that Duggan was too interested in money? And how did any of this connect with the memoir of Violet Bowman and the unexplained death of her husband Wilfred almost a century ago? Trying to figure out the puzzle felt like walking into a mind maze that could trap you forever and drive you crazy for lack of answers.

  Ben was banking on Miles Redfield having those answers. But it wasn’t something that could be done over the phone. Before he could go any further, he needed to find alternative transport. The Alpina looked exactly like a car that had been in the middle of a furious gun battle, and with a dead body in the back Ben preferred to avoid drawing too much attention to himself.

  Ben wasn’t sentimental about motor vehicles. Nobody who’d destroyed as many of them as he had, by various means, could afford to get too attached. But the prospect of getting rid of the car presented a challenge. You could burn it; you coul
d bury it; you could dump it in the sea. Or you could simply abandon it and hope nobody would ever find it. All of which alternatives were either wishful thinking, practically unfeasible or completely useless. He was going to have to improvise.

  The opportunity came five miles further down the road when Ben skirted by a village and saw a sign that said RICK’S SCRAPYARD. The place was just beyond the edge of the village, surrounded by ragged wire mesh fencing and filled with heaps of rusted-out bodyshells and axles and tyres and old gearboxes. Ben liked scrapyards. They were great places to make things disappear. At the centre of this one, visible from the gates, was a crane with a magnet the size of a tractor wheel dangling from four chains. Next to the crane, some kind of giant machine was rumbling and gnashing and grinding. A car crusher.

  Ben drove in through the gates. There was a hut that doubled as a reception office, but it appeared empty. The only person in sight was a kid who was perched up in the cab of the crane, yanking levers and preparing to demolish an ancient Toyota pickup. Ben stepped out of the Alpina and walked over, waving with a friendly smile. The kid waved back, grinning a goofy grin. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen, and looked inoffensive but perhaps not quite the full ticket. In a different setting he might have been sitting on a rundown porch wearing a backward baseball cap and plucking a banjo. Ben guessed that the machine couldn’t be that hard to operate.

  ‘Are you Rick?’ Ben yelled over the noise, knowing he wasn’t. The kid stopped what he was doing, paused the crane and shook his head. ‘He’s my dad. He’s not here.’

  Which was what Ben had wanted to hear. He reached for his wallet and shelled out five twenties that he held up towards the crane cab. The kid gawped at the money and said, ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘It’s yours, if you buzz off for ten minutes and don’t tell your dad I was here.’

  The kid considered this, poking out his tongue in concentration, then nodded. ‘Okay.’

  When he had disappeared inside the hut, Ben ran back to the Alpina and parked it next to the Toyota pickup, emptied all his things from inside, then clambered up into the crane cab. He ran his eye across the controls, quickly figuring it out. The crane grumbled and rumbled and rotated on its base until the giant magnet dangled from its chinking, rusty chains directly above the Alpina’s roof. A tug of a lever, and the magnet descended and clamped into place with a loud clang. Another tug, and the chains snapped taut and up came the car with its buckshot-riddled panels, its blown-out windows and its hidden back seat passenger.

  Ben swivelled the crane around until the car was suspended over the crusher, gently swaying. The jaws of the great hydraulic press waited below. Ben felt a slight pang, more for Brewster’s sake than for the car’s. It was a hell of a way to be buried. He wondered if he should say a prayer, but nothing appropriate came to mind. So he thought fuck it, bade a quick goodbye to the vehicle and its occupant, and pulled the lever that lowered the car into the maw of the crusher. At the press of a button the monster machine went to work with a terrible crumpling and crunching.

  By the time the kid returned from the hut, the D3 Alpina had been transformed into a cubic metre of compacted metal and plastic with a human body encased somewhere inside.

  ‘That your car?’ the kid asked.

  ‘Used to be.’ Ben jumped down from the crane cab, took his wallet back out and offered the kid another sheaf of notes.

  ‘What’s that for?’ the kid repeated, eyes bugging at the cash.

  Ben pointed at a line-up of old bangers that were awaiting scrapping. He said, ‘That’s for the keys to any of those that still runs.’

  Fifteen minutes later he drove off in his new acquisition, a twenty-year-old wreck of a brown Land Rover Defender with one red door, a rotted chassis, mouldy seats and a holed exhaust held on with a wire coat hanger. If the thing had a couple hundred miles left in it before it crumbled into a pile of rust, that was good enough for him.

  He called Miles Redfield from the road.

  ‘Joe?’ said the nervous voice on the line.

  ‘Joe Brewster is dead. Unless you want to wind up dead, too, you need to talk to me.’

  Chapter 33

  Miles Redfield sounded like a man living in fear. At first, he was unwilling even to talk, and Ben twice had to persuade him not to hang up the call.

  ‘Why should I trust you? I don’t know who the hell you are.’

  Ben spoke calmly and patiently. He repeated, ‘Someone with a personal interest in knowing what’s behind the murder of a man called Carter Duggan. I believe it’s connected to a company called Galliard.’ He added, ‘And the death of your girlfriend Suzie.’

  There was a long, heavy silence on the line, then a sigh. ‘She wasn’t my girlfriend. She was my fiancée. We were about to get married when they killed her.’

  ‘Then meet me,’ Ben said. ‘I need to know what you know.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if what you’re saying is right, these people are going down.’

  Miles Redfield asked, ‘And you’re going to take them down?’

  ‘Who else is going to do it? You?’

  ‘You’ve no idea what you’re talking about. Not the remotest clue who these people are, what they’re capable of.’

  Ben replied, ‘I think I have a reasonable idea. But I need your help, Miles. What’s it to be?’

  Another long pause, another sigh. ‘All right. I’ll meet with you.’

  They arranged it for late that night. Miles Redfield lived in Tower Hamlets in London, and gave Ben directions to a supermarket car park. ‘If I think this is a setup, you’ll never see me,’ he warned. ‘And you should know that I’m armed.’

  It would have been a two-and-a-half-hour drive in an average car and under two in the Alpina, but the struggling Land Rover only just managed to make the distance in three. It was raining heavily as Ben reached his destination, using his phone GPS to navigate through the slick, wet night streets. He parked in the furthest corner of the supermarket car park, giving him a wide-angle field of view as he waited, smoking in the darkness and watching through the rainwater ripples that ran down his screen.

  The rendezvous was set for eleven-thirty. Twenty minutes before the appointed hour, Ben saw a Volkswagen Beetle that was in almost as terrible condition as his Land Rover pull into the near-empty car park and cruise slowly under the lights. Ben slid down in his seat and watched as the Beetle circled the whole car park as though searching for something, then retreated to the shadows of the opposite corner. Three minutes later, Ben saw a raincoated figure slip furtively out of the Beetle and skulk away to hide behind a row of recycling banks.

  Miles Redfield might have thought he was being cautious by turning up early and getting into a concealed position to spy from a distance, but he wasn’t very good at it. Not good enough to notice Ben’s ghostlike exit from the back of the Land Rover, if indeed he’d noticed the vehicle at all. And certainly not good enough to have any idea of what was coming as Ben spent a full fifteen minutes skirting the edge of the car park, methodically slipping from cover to cover, moving as only a person trained in urban covert operations knew how to move.

  The first Miles Redfield knew that he wasn’t alone was when Ben was standing right behind him, and reached out of the shadows to touch him on the shoulder. The guy jumped as though he’d been shot, crashed into the nearest of the recycling banks and almost fell over, grappling to wrench something from his jacket pocket and getting all tied up. He’d been right about being armed, for what it was worth. Ben snatched the plastic BB gun from his hands as it appeared. ‘Don’t be silly, Miles. I’m not going to hurt you. Now let’s go somewhere we can talk.’

  Ben followed the Beetle through the night streets as Miles Redfield reluctantly led him back to his place. He lived in a poky second-floor flat in a downbeat-looking estate that was all grubby concrete stairways and rusty iron railings and graffiti-sprayed walls. The rain was falling more heavily now. They were both dripping as
Miles showed Ben inside the flat and offered him a cup of tea. For once in his life, Ben accepted, just because it was warm and wet.

  They carried their steaming mugs from the minuscule kitchen into a tiny, dismal living room and Ben settled on a threadbare sofa opposite his nervous host. They sat in silence for a few moments, if the drumming of the rain on the windows, the aggressive thump of rap music, the howl of a baby coming through the paper-thin walls either side and the shriek of a police siren a few blocks away could be called silence.

  Ben glanced around him at the room. There was hardly a corner that wasn’t piled high with stacks of books and bulging files, periodicals and boxes of old newspapers. Papers and notebooks covered the floor and more sheets were stuck all over the walls. It looked like the room of a demented student swotting for impossibly difficult final exams or feverishly working on some abstruse PhD thesis. Miles Redfield obviously spent a great deal of time in here. But for what purpose? Ben was about to find out.

  Slowly, Miles Redfield began to talk. He apologised for the state of his home, which sadly reflected the level of poverty he was forced to endure. Because he lived under a false name he was reduced to doing whatever menial cash-paid day jobs he could find here and there. By night he blogged on the dark web, immersed himself in his studies and research, and had devoted himself to preaching the evils of the Galliard Group and its ilk. When he mentioned Galliard a blaze of hatred burned through the sadness in his eyes. At the root of it all was his bitterness over what he believed they’d done to his fiancée. He laid down his mug for a moment to fetch a framed photo from a side table. He clasped it lovingly in his hands, then held it out for Ben to see. ‘That was her.’ The picture showed a happy, smiling young woman with golden hair and vivid blue eyes.