Aggressor

1

So far, we seemed to have been right about the light-and-camera motion detectors, if that was what they were; they covered the front of the house and the courtyard area between it and the gate. The two on each corner of the building swept the narrow alleyways between the house and the perimeter wall. We hoped we wouldn’t need to check out the set-up at the rear.

Only one aspect of the security arrangements didn’t make sense. The wall the far side of the courtyard, facing us as we came through the gate, didn’t seem to be covered at all. It didn’t take us long to decide it was our best route to the front door.

We edged along, Charlie ahead of me, our backs against the decaying brick wall. It was still very muggy, and the inside of my ski mask was soon clammy with sweat and condensed breath.

The only sounds up until now had come from the club and the occasional passing nutcase, but there was a sudden flurry of footsteps on the pavement by the front wall. There were at least two people out there; one of them was coughing and sniffing his way towards us.

He stopped just the other side of the gates for a good old spit; I could see the silhouette of his shoes at the centre of the two-inch gap beneath them. I hoped he didn’t decide to pop inside for a piss. I edged further back into the shadows. There was a burst of raucous French mockery from his companion. I didn’t speak much French, but enough to know that our throat-clearing friend had left a trail of snot down the front of his shirt.

They moved on, and so did we, working our way round to the corner of the house. The camera focused on the gate was mounted on the wall above us, with the motion detector immediately beneath it. We had to assume that it was angled towards the porch, so the light would go on when Baz went into or came out of the house. We’d have to make it think we were part of the floor this time, rather than the wall.

As we eased ourselves downwards, the Primorski band switched into Johnny Cash tribute mode, which must have put a big smile on the faces of the men in black. While they walked the line, we started to kitten-crawl the last four or five metres. Hugging the ground, we pushed ourselves up, as slowly as possible, on our elbows and toes, just enough to move forward, an inch or two at a time, along the cracked wet concrete path. We moved our eyes, not our heads, to see what lay in front of us; mine were already aching from the strain of keeping them right at the top of their sockets.

Charlie had to nudge the satchel ahead of him before he got to move himself. He finally got his head level with the three tiled steps leading up to the front door, and stopped dead, checking for any sign of a motion detector inside the porch. We hadn’t seen one through the binos, but we’d had to plan on the assumption that there was one.

He lay there for another fifteen seconds or so, then started to slide the bag forwards again. Slowly, and with infinite care, he and the satchel moved up the steps and out of my line of sight. All I could hear was his laboured breathing, punctuated from time to time by the click of high heels and the occasional peal of laughter heading in the direction of the club. Didn’t anyone sleep in this place?

I sucked in a lungful of air, lifted myself on my toes and elbows, and moved forward another four inches. I breathed out as my wet jeans and thighs made contact with the concrete once more.

There was a burst of applause at the Primorski as the band performed the closing bars of the Georgian version of ‘Jumping Jack Flash’, and in the momentary silence that followed I sensed rather than heard another sound, like something being dragged, from much closer by.

It felt as if it had come from the window above me, but I didn’t dare move my head to check. I held my breath, mouth open to cut down any internal body noise, and listened.

I raised my eyes as far as I could towards the porch. There was no sign of Charlie. He would have been doing the same: stopping, listening, tuning in.

Whatever it had been, it didn’t happen again. The only sounds now were distant laughter and the music of the night.

I breathed out, breathed in, kept my mouth open, and strained to pick up even the slightest vibration. Still nothing. Had it come from the window? Impossible to tell.

I waited another thirty seconds or so. If someone upstairs had spotted us, surely they would have done something by now.

I started to edge forward. We had no option but to treat this like an advance to contact. If you stopped every time you heard a gunshot, you’d never close in on the enemy. If there was someone in the house, or we’d been seen, we’d know about it soon enough.

2

My head eventually drew level with the bottom step. I resisted the temptation to take a shortcut and rush the last few feet. That’s always the time you get caught.

Charlie was on my right, the side the door opened. He’d pulled up enough of his mask to be able to press his ear against the wood.

I finally made it inside the porch, and sat against the rotting brickwork. I didn’t know which felt worse: the sweat on my back or the residue of rain-soaked concrete on my front. Charlie’s left knee was on the doormat. He would have checked underneath it for a key — well, you never knew your luck — and that it didn’t conceal a pressure pad. He moved his knee off the mat, pointed down at it as he kept listening.

I pulled the rubber up and saw that one of the four-inch-square tiles had no cement around it. I lifted it, and it appeared Baz had scraped out enough concrete to hide a set of keys very nicely. But of course they weren’t there. Maybe Baz had switched on a bit since coming up with that one. Why do people think no-one else would ever think of looking just by the door?

I slid the CO2 canister from my bomber-jacket pocket and slipped it up my left sleeve. The elastic cuff would hold it in place. Having it up the right sleeve, ready to drop into your hand when required, was just film stuff. You rarely got a good grip on the thing, even if it did fall conveniently through your fingers.

The two keyholes were a third of the way down the door, and a third of the way up it. The handle in the middle wasn’t attached to either of them.

There was no need for any discussion about what came next; we’d both done this enough times, from Northern Ireland to Waco. Charlie shone his key-ring torch inside the lower of the two locks and had a good look at what he was up against. I hoped his hands had calmed down. I didn’t want to have to take over again.

I pulled his mask back down over his ear, then leaned over above him and pushed slowly but firmly against the top of the door to test for give. If it didn’t budge, chances were it was bolted, and that would be a nightmare because we wouldn’t be able to make entry covertly. Worse still, it would mean that Baz was inside, or that he’d left by another exit, and we would have to run the gauntlet of the motion detectors to find it.

It gave. No problem.

Charlie turned his attention to the top lock, and I gave the bottom of the door the same treatment. It, too, yielded. That wasn’t to say there wasn’t a bolt midway, but we’d find out soon enough.

A helicopter rattled across the sky on the far side of the river and the band sparked up with a jazz number to send it happily on its way. Charlie pointed to the top lock and gave me the non-disco-dancing version of the thumbs-up. That was a bonus. Then he pointed at the lower one and did the thumbs-down, and got busy with the wrench.

I left him to it and sat back, knees against my chest, wet denim stinging my thighs and sweat going cold on my back. It was always better for the one working on a lock to do everything himself. If I held the torch, I’d be throwing shadows in all the wrong places, and we’d just get in each other’s way.

The only problem was, it gave me a little bit too much time to think. Why did Baz use just one of the locks? Had he decided to have a quiet night in? Had he just nipped out for a swift half at the Primorski? Or was he just a lazy fucker, and in a rush? It wouldn’t be the first time. I’d carried out CTRs on houses and factories protected by some of the most sophisticated alarm systems in existence — or they would have been if anyone had bothered to switch them on. Whatever, the quarry tiles were starting to numb my arse. Charlie was taking far too long.

I leaned forward. Even in the gloom, I could see his fingers were going nineteen to the dozen. Fuck that. I slipped across and put my hands over his, to stop him going any further.

Charlie held the tools out like chopsticks to try and convince me everything was fine. I took the torch and shone it on his right hand. It was trembling like an alcoholic with the DTs.

He sat wearily back against the wall and put five fingers in the torch beam, opening and closing them twice.

I nodded. I’d give him ten minutes, maybe fifteen. He wanted to do this, he had to; not just because it was what he was being paid to do, but because we both knew it was his very last time out of the paddock.

I understood that, but we didn’t have that much time to fuck about. It would be first light just after 6.30, and we needed to have filled the DLB by then.

I decided to make the most of it. At least it gave us a chance to listen out for anything that might be happening the other side of the door.

Time well spent tuning in, I kept telling myself. It didn’t sound any more convincing this time than it had the first.

3

I waited for the full fifteen, but by the end of it Charlie had defeated the bottom lock. Still on all fours, he packed the picks and wrenches away before easing the door open a few inches, so it didn’t creak or bang tight against a security chain. He waited a moment to see if any alarms kicked off, then poked his head through the gap to have a quick look and a listen.

It was time for me to get my boots off, ready to do my bit. The ski mask was clammy round my mouth, the back of my neck was soaked with sweat, and the rest of me didn’t feel much tastier, but fuck it, we’d be done with this by first light, and knocking back a couple of beers on the plane by midday.

I shoved my boots down the front of my bomber jacket and zipped them in, then liberated my Maglite and the CO2 canister.

Charlie crawled back to where I’d been sitting. He’d get his own boots off, prepare the camcorder and wipe the porch dry with one of the towels I’d nicked from the hotel. When Baz got home, there mustn’t be the slightest trace of our visit. The subconscious takes in everything; when the mat isn’t at exactly the same angle, when the dust on the table has been inexplicably disturbed, little alarm bells start to ring. Most of us don’t hear them because we’re not smart enough to listen to all the things our brains are trying to tell us. But some people do, and Baz might just be one of them.

I peered round the door. The place reeked like every auntie’s house I’d ever gone into as a kid, of over-stewed tea, old newspapers and stale margarine.

I held my breath, opened my mouth, and cocked my ear. The only sound was the gentle ticking of a clock, off to my right. The opening of a door at night changes the atmospheric pressure in a house ever so slightly, but sometimes just enough for even a sleeping person’s senses to pick up.

I let go of the door and, keeping control of it with my left shoulder, stepped inside. I hooded the lens of the Maglite with my fingers, leaving just enough light to see there was a staircase rising steeply along the external wall to my left and a longish hallway dead ahead with two doors on either side of it.

A strip of flowery carpet ran down the centre of what looked like a parquet floor. The parquet was the first piece of good news I’d had since we made it through the front gate; it wouldn’t creak. The walls were bare, apart from a couple of framed pictures above a wooden chair with some coats thrown over it.

Baz didn’t seem like much of a homemaker, at first glance, but he was certainly keen on security. As I flicked the Maglite to my right, a floor-to-ceiling, steel-barred gate glinted in the beam, hinged to swing across the main entrance but opened flush against the wall. There were two receptors each side of the door and flat bars lying on the floor with a pair of padlocks.

I checked Baby-G. It was 2.28. We still had to find the safe, let alone defeat it. At this rate, we might be here for hours — and we only had about four and a bit left until first light.

Charlie made only the faintest of sounds as he shouldered the satchel and came in behind me. I was going to be in charge of the next phase, the room clearing; he would keep control of the noisemaker, the bag.

I covered the torch lens with a finger so that just enough light came out for us to move, leaned back and spoke softly into his ear. ‘Let’s just check for another exit. We need to concentrate on finding the safe.’

Charlie thought for a second, glanced at his watch, then nodded. I moved off, keeping to the nine-inch-wide strip of parquet at the right-hand edge of the carpet, so as not to disturb the pile, and trying to avoid rubbing against the walls.

I took two paces and stopped to give Charlie room to come in. He was already taking IR film with the camcorder, but handed me two rubber doorstops as he went past. Thank fuck his brain hadn’t been in ‘Oh I forgot’ mode when he wrote down his kit list.

I closed the door softly behind me, and shoved one immediately below each of the two lever locks. If Baz came back unexpectedly, they would buy us a bit of time to play burglar. If he was already upstairs asleep and tried to do a runner, they would help make sure he didn’t get outside in a hurry, and start shouting for help.

Charlie switched the camcorder to standby. The plan was to record the layout of the place wherever we went, then check it on the way out to make sure we’d left everything exactly as we’d found it.

The doors off the corridor were all open, and I headed for the first one on my right. It was a living room, and by the look of it, Baz’s answer to Mrs Mop hadn’t been too energetic with her feather duster recently, though she had remembered to wind the grandfather clock. The dark wooden furniture and faded wallpaper somehow matched the smell.

Black-and-white pictures of a couple on the mantelpiece. His parents, maybe. Pictures of him as a little lad. Magazines littered across the floor, some quite recent ones in Russian, some in Paperclip.

The first phase of a house search is always a quick once-over. It would be pointless doing a detailed inspection of every room in sequence, only to find what you’re looking for smack in the middle of the very last room, three hours later. It’s on phase two that you start moving sofas, lifting carpets, looking up the chimney.

The two picture frames in the hallway held large, sepia photographs of the house during happier times. There were no bars on the windows, no other buildings in sight, and no wall, just a three-foot-high fence to keep the horses from munching the grass that had predated the courtyard.

We reached the door at the far end. It was hinged inwards on the left and open about an inch. I shone the torch round the frame to check for telltales. I couldn’t see anything. I signalled to Charlie and he filmed the gap.

I nudged it open with the end of the canister. It didn’t take long to realize this was the kitchen. The smell of margarine and old papers was so strong here it nearly made me gag, even through the ski mask. More old furniture; a wooden table and a couple of chairs. The cooker looked like Stalin might have done his baked beans on it. Had Whitewall pointed us at the wrong place?

I opened the door fully and found myself facing the external wall. Set into it, directly ahead of me, was what would have been the back door — if it hadn’t been covered completely by a large steel plate, bolted firmly into place.

I turned to Charlie and nodded. We were in the right house.

4

I shone the torch around the kitchen from the doorway, picking out dented old aluminium pots and pans hanging from hooks over the cooker, and a half-drunk bottle of red wine on the table next to an open newspaper. A fly-screen in the corner seemed to lead to some kind of larder. Jars and cans glinted behind the mesh.

I stood and listened for another three or four seconds, but the only noise was the ponderous ticking of the clock. I turned back up the hallway, tapped Charlie on the shoulder, and aimed the torch at the door to our right, about three paces ahead. The small red LED on the camcorder began blinking again.

It was only just ajar. I checked for telltales round the frame, then gave it a gentle push. There was a window opposite, protected by an external grille, but completely filled by the perimeter wall.

It looked like I was in somebody’s sewing room. A Singer treadle sat in the far corner, next to a wooden bench top, but there were no half-made clothes or swatches of material. There were no cupboards. Swirly carpet covered most of the wooden floor, apart from a couple of feet around the edges. The fireplace looked like it hadn’t been used for years, not since the last time the pictures hanging either side of it had got within reach of a duster.

I walked round the edge of the carpet and checked the pictures for telltales, intentional or otherwise. The one on the left was of a bunch of flowers in a vase. There was nothing behind it except a paler square of wallpaper. There was no safe under the one of a mountain, either.

I made my way back into the hallway and signalled to the door opposite; Charlie was right behind me, recording.

This was much more promising. It was obviously Baz’s office; what looked like Bill Gates’s very first prototype was sitting on a desk in front of the window. Files and newspaper cuttings were strewn all round it, and on the floor as well. The shelf along the wall to my right had bowed under the weight of too many books. There was a cupboard in the far corner — a light oak veneer, flat-pack job, rather than somewhere Uncle Joe might have hung his uniforms.

I moved out of the way to let Charlie past. He panned the camera left to right before we started moving stuff around. Using the torch to make sure I didn’t step on any of the paper on the floor, I headed first for the desk, in case there was a number on the phone. There wasn’t.

We had better luck with the cupboard.

Having checked for telltales, I pulled open the door and bingo, we’d found what we’d come for.

I stepped back to let Charlie see the prize. He filmed the whole thing inch by inch, every bit of chipped grey paint, every word of Russian Cyrillic, no doubt proudly announcing its manufacture by royal appointment to the Tsar. It was about two foot square, and solid. The door was hinged on the right, with a well-worn chrome handle on the left, then a large keyway, and a combination cylinder dead centre. Once Charlie had the position of each on film, he handed me the camcorder, tested the handle, shrugged, and fished inside his bag.

I shoved the canister back up my sleeve and let him get on with it.

He brought out a towel and laid it in front of the safe. The bag was wet and he didn’t want to leave sign.

5

Charlie knelt on the towel in front of the safe, the bag to his right, and carefully unrolled the fibre-optic viewing device from a strip of hotel towel. Every item in the bag had been wrapped to prevent noise or damage.

I fired up the camcorder and went over to Baz’s desk, filming everything on the top first, then the positions of individual drawers. There were about ten of them each side, designed to hold a thin file or a selection of pens. Some were slightly open, some closed; some pushed further in than they should have been.

I lifted the telephone, but there was nothing taped underneath. There was a small wooden box beside it, loaded with pens, pencils, elastic bands and paper clips. No joy there, either.

I checked for telltales on each drawer, and went through them one by one. I found sheet after sheet of paper in Paperclip and Russian, but no key to the safe, or anything scribbled down that resembled a combination.

I looked over at Charlie. Torch clenched between his ski-mask-clad teeth, fibre optic inside the keyway, he was manipulating the controls like a surgeon performing arthroscopy — except that he was doing it on his hands and knees, with his arse in the air. He was attacking the day lock first, in case it was the only one being used.

It was decision time. Nothing had turned up on this sweep, and I could spend all night searching this place for the key or any hint of a combination, and the more I looked, the more I would disrupt the area. I called it a day and went and knelt down on the towel, waiting until Charlie was ready to speak to me.

It was as quiet as Tengiz’s grave now — quieter, probably, if the knitting circle were still gobbing off right next door to it. The only sounds were the old disco-dancer’s manic breathing and the distant ticking of the clock, and once or twice a vehicle in the distance.

He finally removed the fibre optic and leaned towards me. I got my mouth into his ear. ‘How long do you reckon?’

He rolled the fibre optic into its piece of towel, and replaced it in the satchel.

That was a good sign; you never leave anything out that you’re not using; it gets packed up straight away in case you have to do a runner.

‘Piece of piss, lad. The day lock is warded, and the combination, well, it’s a combination. Anything up to four hours. Don’t worry, there were loads like this in Bosnia.’ He paused and I knew there was a funny coming. ‘Any longer than that and I’ll let you blow it.’ This time I could see the grin, even behind the nylon. He shoved the key-ring torch back in his mouth, taking the mask with it.

He was right; the ward lock, at least, was going to be easy. It was basically a spring-loaded bolt into which a notch had been cut. These things had been around since Ancient Roman times. The key fitted into the notch and slid the bolt backwards and forwards. It takes its name from the fixed projections, or wards, inside the mechanism and around the keyhole, which prevent the wrong key from doing the business.

Charlie tucked the fibre optic away and unwrapped a set of what looked like button-hooks, fashioned from strong, thin steel. All being well, one of them would bypass the wards and shift the bolt into the unlock position.

In next to no time I heard the deadlock clunk open, and Charlie’s head swayed from side to side in triumph as he packed the hooks away.

The combination cylinder was next. This time, the lock would be released once an arrow on the left-hand side of the dial had triggered the correct sequence of numbers. Our problem was that there was no way of telling when the tumblers had reached their correct position; the only noise we’d hear was when the lever finally descended into the slot, once the right combination had been dialled.

Charlie started rotating the cylinder left and right. He may have been trying Baz’s number plate first, or running through the Russian factory default settings.

Once he’d exhausted the obvious ones, he would have to go through every possible permutation. In theory there’d be about a million of the little bastards, but the good thing about old and low-quality cylinders like this one was that the numbers didn’t have to be located precisely; up to two digits either side of true and the lock would still open, which cut the possible combinations down to a mere 8,000 or so. It wasn’t what Charlie might call a piece of piss, but even with his hands wasting away he should be able to rattle through them in a few hours. He told me once that he really never thought about what he was doing; he just switched onto autopilot.

He leaned over to me. ‘DOB?’

He hadn’t asked me for it since my trip to the bookshop because there was no need. If I hadn’t found Baz’s date of birth, I’d have told him.

‘Twenty-two ten fifty-nine.’

His hands started to turn the cylinder: 22 anticlockwise… 10 clockwise… 59 anti-clockwise…

For some reason, that was the most commonly used sequence of movements.

I realized I was holding my breath.

Nothing. No sound. No falling lever; no question of simply turning the handle and hearing the bolts slide back into the door.

Charlie played with the three number sets in sequence, but varying the direction of rotation.

After a dozen or so other attempts, he tried 22 anticlockwise, 59 clockwise, 22 anticlockwise.

There was a gentle clunk from inside the door.

Charlie picked up his torch and shone it round the floor to make triply sure that he’d left nothing lying around.

I could have opened the safe while he did so, but there was a protocol to be observed at times like this. That honour belonged to Charlie.

He turned back when he was satisfied everything had been packed away. He pulled down the handle. The bolts retracted from both the hinged and the opening side, and it swung open with a small metallic creak.

Charlie still had the key-ring torch in his mouth, and his head was inside the safe. I leaned over him. There was a shelf in the middle, and it held just two items: an open box of antique jewellery, maybe his mother’s, and a blue plastic folder.

Charlie didn’t need the camcorder to remind him how the folder lay; he lifted it straight out and handed it over. A quick sweep of the Maglite revealed about twenty pages of handwritten Paperclip.

It didn’t look much, but it was obviously worth two hundred thousand US to someone.

He hardly had time to shrug before the door burst open and the lights came on.

6

There were two of them, hollering at us in Russian or Paperclip. They were both carrying suppressed pistols with big, bulky barrels; we raised our hands very slowly, so they couldn’t fail to notice that, unfortunately, we weren’t. I kept my left elbow slightly bent, to try and hold the CO2 canister in place.

They were in their early thirties; short black hair, jeans and leather jackets, lots of gold rings and bracelets, and both looking confused about the situation.

Their faces weren’t masked, and that was bad news. They didn’t care about being identified. One was dark with stubble; the other had bloodshot eyes. I wondered if he’d stopped by the Primorski on the way over.

Their yells increased in volume, and reverberated around the room. Just having our hands up obviously wasn’t enough.

It looked like the one with the bloodshot eyes was in charge. He glared at me and opened his leather jacket repeatedly with his spare hand. I got the message. Keeping my right hand up, I unzipped my bomber very slowly with my left. My boots dropped onto the carpet. Charlie followed suit.

They now knew that neither of us was carrying, but that didn’t stop the shouting. I didn’t know what else they wanted, and I wasn’t going to ask. I didn’t want them to know we were Brits. I shrugged my shoulders and twisted my hands.

They gobbed off at each other, very quickly and aggressively, then Red Eyes moved towards Charlie, pistol steady, while Stubbly covered him. He waved his free hand again, shouted, gesticulated at the floor.

Charlie got it: the boy was after the folder.

He reached down and picked it up with his left hand, keeping his right in the air. Red Eyes took a step forward, grabbed it, and jammed his weapon into Charlie’s neck. I could see Chinese characters engraved along the barrel. It was old and really well worn, but that didn’t matter. It would still fuck Charlie up if he pulled that trigger.

Keeping the muzzle right where it was, Red Eyes bent down and reached into the safe. The jewellery found its way into his jacket pocket with the speed and precision of a conjuring trick. For a finale, he yanked off Charlie’s mask, then gave me the same treatment.

He took a couple of steps back to survey his handiwork. They both stood there for several seconds, one each side of the doorway. Red Eyes muttered something to his unshaven friend, placed the folder on the desk and started to flick through its contents. Stubbly kept moving the muzzle of his weapon from my head to Charlie’s and back, just in case we hadn’t got the message.

They barked stuff at each other as Red Eyes turned the pages. I didn’t know what to do next. I had been in the situation enough times myself to recognize the look and sound of uncertainty. Finally he looked up, glowered at the two of us, and pulled out a cell phone.

I glanced over at Charlie, who was studying the floor so closely he appeared to be trying to memorize every fibre of the carpet. I knew that look. He was wondering how the fuck to get us out of here. I hoped the silly old fucker would come up with something before these boys got permission to top us.

There was a series of rapid beeps as Red Eyes punched in the number. Whoever was at the other end answered immediately. Red Eyes studied each of us in turn, giving what sounded like a description, then picked up the document and quoted a couple of chunks from it. Then he looked at us again. I didn’t understand what he was saying, but I got the drift. Whatever problems they’d expected to have to deal with in the house, they now had two extra ones, and they were less than happy workers. As if I was.

There was nothing we could do to help ourselves immediately, so I studied Stubbly’s weapon instead so I’d know what to do with it when I got my hands around the pistol grip. The power of positive thinking.

His finger was on the trigger and the safety was off; the lever on the left-hand side of the grip was down. These kinds of suppressed weapons normally had both a single-shot and semi-automatic capability. With the one, you loaded manually, pulling back the top slide and letting it go forward to pick up a new round from the magazine each time you fired. With the other, the top slide wasn’t locked in position, so you just kept firing until the magazine was empty.

I didn’t know what setting Stubbly had gone for, but something told me it wasn’t single shot.

Red Eyes was still waffling into the phone and riffling through the papers when we heard a metallic rattle from the direction of the street. He stopped in mid-sentence. There was a loud creak as the front gates swung open.

Red Eyes closed down the conversation by running out into the hall.

He was back in less than ten seconds, and not at all happy. He rolled up the folder, thrust it into his jacket, yelled a couple of instructions at Stubbly and disappeared again.

Stubbly stood his ground and raised his weapon a few inches.

There was no time to think.

I lunged at him, aiming my shoulder at his gut. He tottered backwards under the impact, hit the wall, and before he could recover I dragged him down with me, my hands flailing. I didn’t really care if they made contact, as long as they got in the way of him controlling the weapon. With any luck I’d bang against it myself.

I felt Charlie’s legs pushing against me, then heard a sound like a watermelon hitting a pavement. He’d given Stubbly’s skull the good news with his CO2 cosh.

I let go and kicked myself away. It was Charlie’s call; he could climb aboard him if he needed to.

I scanned the floor for the weapon, but couldn’t see it immediately, and didn’t have time to search.

I ran out of the room, shoving my right hand into the left sleeve of my bomber jacket as I went. Red Eyes was ahead of me, throwing out the stops. The door swung back and the hall was flooded with light.

The gates into the street were open.

Baz’s Audi swept into the courtyard.

I sprinted along the carpet as Red Eyes half ran, half tumbled down the porch steps.

There was a shower of glass as he emptied his magazine into the driver’s window and he pirouetted like a matador as the vehicle coasted past him, into the wall.

I took the steps in one, canister in hand. Leaping up before he had a chance to collect himself, I swung the heavy metal tube down onto the top of his head. The weight of my body coming back down to the ground gave the hit enough force for me to hear his skull crunch.

He dropped like a cow under a stun gun and I followed suit, brought down by my own momentum. His weapon skidded across the wet concrete. I grabbed it, turned and fired into his skull. The third time I squeezed the trigger, nothing happened. The top slide stayed back, waiting for a fresh mag to reload.

Fuck closing the gate. I dropped the empty weapon and ran back into the house in case my disco-dancing mate needed a hand.

There were gunshot wounds in Stubbly’s chest and just below his right cheekbone, and a pool of dark, deoxygenated blood spreading across the carpet. Charlie was as cool as a cucumber. He’d slipped his mask back on, and was hoisting the satchel over his shoulder. ‘Give me five,’ he said. ‘I’ll try and find the CCTV monitors. There might be tapes.’

I grabbed my own mask off the floor and pulled it over my head as I legged it back to the front door.

7

I went straight to the gates. Fuck checking outside, I just slammed them shut and got the bolts down, then carried on struggling to put on the mask. I only had one eye uncovered. I must have looked like the phantom of the fucking opera.

There was a big drum roll and a clash of cymbals from the Primorski, followed by a round of applause. If I hadn’t been so knackered, I’d have taken a bow.

Broken glass, spent brass cases, wet concrete and two pools of blood glinted in the courtyard lights. Fighting to get my breath back, I ran over to the car.

It looked like someone had thrown a bucket of red paint across the car’s interior. The driver’s body was slumped, face sideways, over the central console. It was Baz all right, and he didn’t look good. He’d taken rounds in the head, neck and shoulder, and his once-grey hair was crimson.

I checked the front end. The bumper had absorbed most of the punishment, and one of the headlamps was cracked, but I reckoned the Technik was still Vorsprung. I pulled the door open, grabbed hold of Baz’s arm and dragged him clear.

By the time I returned to the house, my throat was as dry as sandpaper.

‘Charlie!’

‘Up here.’ His voice came from the landing.

‘Dead body. Bring some bedcovers down, anything. Got to cover the car seats.’

I ran into the office and grabbed my boots. No time to do them up properly; I shoved the laces under the tongue so I didn’t trip up. Speed was everything; we had to get out of here.

Back in the yard, I rolled Red Eyes over and pulled the folder from his jacket. Charlie jumped down the steps with two multicoloured bedspreads dragging behind him.

‘Any luck with the CCTV?’

He shook his head. ‘Could be anywhere — on that PC, for all we know. Let’s just fuck off and get on the flight. You OK with that? Or stay and look some more? I’m up for it if you are.’

I stood by the car. He was right. Why waste time on a blood-filled target, with three dead bodies for company? ‘Let’s go.’

We threw the bedspreads over the front seats.

Charlie dumped the satchel in the back and I jumped into the driver’s side. I knocked the remaining shards of glass out of the window frame while Charlie checked the road.

The moment the gates were open, I hit reverse. Charlie secured the gates as well as he could, and jumped in beside me, lodging his pistol under his thigh. We started uphill, towards the blinking red lights of the telecoms mast.

As we passed the left to the Primorski, two stretch Mercs were picking up a crowd of very young women and very old men.

At last we were able to pull off our masks, and Charlie started to giggle. ‘Well, you fucked up there, didn’t you, lad?’

‘Heads up, we got police.’

Ablue-and-white had turned into our road, heading downhill towards us. It was slow, taking its time. I checked Charlie — did he have blood on his face? He checked me — if I had, it was too late. We passed them; they looked over and two red spots of heat between their lips got brighter as they sucked.

Charlie nodded at them. ‘Evening.’

They passed Baz’s house without stopping.

‘Evening? If they’d heard you they’d’ve stopped us just to investigate that accent.’ I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. It wasn’t the joke, it was pure relief.

Wind gusted through the driver’s window. I took a hand off the wheel and slid the folder out of my jacket. It was looking a bit the worse for wear but at least there were no bullet holes in it.

Charlie scanned the streets for blue-and-whites. ‘They must already have been in the house, waiting for Baz to come home, make him open the safe, get whatever it was we’ve got here, then drop him.’

‘I thought Whitewall said he was away at some national park or something, till the morning? And since that was bollocks, where does it leave us with everything else?’

I swung the wheel right and left, weaving between the potholes. ‘Maybe they were waiting for him to turn up in the morning. They’d have seen us coming into the yard. That must have been what we heard — those fuckers in the front room. When we opened the safe for them, they must have thought it was Christmas.’

I took a left, up towards the cemetery. ‘I knew I should have looked in the larder…’

‘If you had, they might have just dropped us.’ He started to laugh again. ‘But hey, we’re still here, aren’t we? A quick trip to the DLB and then it’s bye-bye Georgia.’

We bounced over the open ground opposite the cemetery. There were still quite a few cars parked around the place, and Charlie pointed under a tree, where the ambient light from the petrol station finally gave up trying to penetrate the darkness.

I switched the engine off and killed the lights. I sat there, just looking and listening. ‘You OK?’

‘I’m fine. But the old hands are wobbling a bit. Maybe you should do the drop-off at the DLB. I’m not sure I’m in the slab-moving business any more.’

‘Done.’ I smiled. ‘Then it’s back to the hotel for a shit, shave and shower. Thank fuck it’s Sunday. With luck, Baz won’t be missed till tomorrow.’

8

Charlie wrapped the batch of paper in a plastic bag. ‘Every page is numbered, mate, there’s a signature block on the last one, and anything that’s been crossed out has been initialled. I reckon it’s a statement.’

‘So who were Red Eyes and Stubbly?’

‘Fuck it, who cares? Let’s just dump the gear and get out of here.’

‘You got any rounds left?’

He pulled the pistol from under his thigh and pressed the magazine release on the left of the grip. ‘Two in here.’ He pulled back the top slide. ‘One in the chamber.’ He let the slide go again, replaced the mag, set the safety catch and passed it to me. ‘That’s made ready, safety on.’

I double-checked the safety catch before shoving the pistol down the front of my jeans and the plastic bag into my bomber pocket. As I got out of the Audi I gave myself the once-over. We still had to make it back to the hotel tonight, and pass muster with the night staff. Even in Tbilisi, they didn’t like their guests covered in other people’s blood.

I pulled out my phone and switched it on. ‘I’ll call when I’m done. If you see any dramas coming in, just give us a call, OK?’

Charlie nodded as he slid into the driver’s seat. His job was to keep the trigger on the entrance.

‘I’ll need your torch as well.’

He handed it over.

‘See you in a bit.’ I headed straight for the open gate. There was no time to lurk about in the shadows. It was just a case of straight in, get it done, and back to the hotel before first light.

I checked the phone for a signal as I hit the main path between the burial plots. The glow from the petrol station was doing its best to bathe everything — headstones, benches, tree trunks — in BP green. I had no complaints; it meant I could see where I was going.

Acar drove past the entrance, sounding like its exhaust was bouncing along the road behind it. Apart from that it was quiet. Even the knitting circle had called it a day.

My marker bin loomed out of the shadows. The four guys on Tengiz’s headstone were still gazing at the heavens. I couldn’t make up my mind whether they were doing it out of sheer admiration, or just waiting for an answer that never came. I shone the beam along the wrought-iron fence to get my bearings, and then picked out the bench. I moved across the plot and tried to slide the top slab away from the base. I only needed a one-inch gap, but this was one chunk of marble that looked as though it wasn’t going anywhere tonight.

I bent down and gave it a second shove, this time with my shoulder. There was a low, grinding noise as it moved, and a quick flash of the torch confirmed I had the gap I needed. In went the bag of papers, the torch went back in my pocket, and I started to pull back the slab.

There was a crunch of feet on gravel behind me.

I spun round. A figure closed in on me, arms raised, blocking out every shred of ambient light. This boy was huge.

I stepped to my left as the arm came down, trying to check it in mid-stride. I was lucky. Steel clattered against stone as something very unfriendly fell from his hands.

I grabbed the bottom of my bomber jacket with my left hand and pulled it up, trying to grab the pistol grip with my right. But he was ahead of me. He yelled and lunged, hands the size of grappling irons gripping my arms and trying to wrench them from their sockets. I stumbled backwards over the low fence and we crashed onto the pathway.

My shoulder hit the kerb and my attacker fell on top of me, crushing the air from my lungs. I arched my back, kicking, bucking, struggling to get my hands down, trying to get him away from me so I could draw down.

The top of his head pushed hard against my chin. My teeth weren’t clenched and I bit my tongue.

Eighteen, maybe nineteen stone of him pressed down on me, keeping my arms pinioned above my head.

‘Charlie!’

I could feel the blood spurting from my mouth as I shouted. I bucked and kicked, but his body was still moulded to mine, pressing against the weapon.

‘CHARLIE!’

He let go of my arms and decided to throttle me instead. Massive fingers closed around my throat and I felt his saliva spray across my face as he strained to push my Adam’s apple out through the back of my neck. My head felt like it was going to explode.

There was nothing I could do but kick and writhe like a madman. I managed to get my hands round his neck as well, but his muscles simply tensed like steel hawsers under my fingers. I shifted them down to grip the lapels of his jacket, using them as leverage to dig my thumbs into the soft, fleshy area between the collar bones, at the base of his throat.

He was going to have to use his hands to deal with mine. If he didn’t, he’d choke to death. Unless I did first.

My face swelled to bursting point under the pressure of his grip.

He pushed down his chin, tensing his neck even more. Fuck, he was big. His stubble took two layers of skin off my hands.

My head pumped, my eyes blurred.

I dug harder and he lifted his head.

His hair flicked against my face. I felt his bristles rasp across my cheek and smelt his sourly alcoholic breath. I knew he was going to try and finish this with his teeth.

9

I shook my head, trying to keep it moving, hoping I’d have a chance to get in there first.

When his nose was only inches away from mine, I got my chance. I lunged, and my teeth caught him just on the bridge. I bit down on the hard bone above the cartilage and kept on going. He flung his head from side to side in an attempt to shake me off, but I was like a terrier hanging on to a stick.

At last his grip slackened on my neck and his hands moved up my face. I managed to screw up my eyes before he got there with his thumbs. He pressed them into my sockets, but I just bit harder. Blood spurted over my face.

He went berserk with pain, thrashing about like a game fish under a harpoon.

I let go of his throat and threw my hands round the back of his head, pulling it towards me so I could get a better purchase with my teeth. Then I bit as hard as I could, working my head from side to side as I did so.

My jaws closed and the bone collapsed like a peanut shell. His sinuses exploded.

Blood and snot spurted from the hole in his face and he let out a scream of rage and pain.

I pulled away from him, kicking and punching, trying to get him off me. But he still held on.

I managed to turn us onto our sides, and force my hand down between us until it could close around the cold metal of the pistol grip. I brought the muzzle up beneath his armpit, released the safety, and squeezed.

He took the round full in the chest.

I squeezed again.

Nothing.

There hadn’t been room between us to allow the top slide to move backwards and forwards fully enough to reload.

I pushed myself away from him, scrabbling at the top slide with my fingers until I got enough grip to rack it and release it.

I lay on my back for a moment as he writhed beside me. Then I rammed the muzzle into his chest and squeezed the trigger twice.

I crawled away and sat against Tengiz’s stone. The only sound louder than my choking attempts to regain my breath was another car passing along the road. This one seemed to have parted company with its exhaust entirely.

My tongue had swollen to the roof of my mouth. My Adam’s apple felt like it had been kicked right against the back of my throat. I sat there, gobbing out blood between my jumper and my sweatshirt, trying to leave as little DNA as possible on the ground.

I fished out the mobile, gulping oxygen to slow down for Charlie to understand me. It rang just once before he answered.

‘Back the car up to the gate. Get the boot open. We’ve got a drama.’

He didn’t answer; he just closed down. He knew what was going into the back.

I rolled over and scrabbled about, trying to locate whatever the Hulk had been aiming to cut me into little pieces with. My fingers touched the cold steel of a gollock. No half-measures for this boy; he might have called it a machete, tree-beater, it didn’t matter. What did was that the thing wasn’t buried in my head.

Fuck that. I’d been lucky this time.

I crawled over to the bench, still trying to gulp in air, my mouth still filling with blood. I spat it into my jumper, and managed to heave the slab far enough to get my hand through the gap. I fished about until my fingers brushed against the plastic bag. The papers went back in my jacket pocket. Until the Hulk had turned up, I’d given Whitewall and whoever pulled his strings the benefit of the doubt, but I wouldn’t any longer. Charlie and I were being well and truly fucked over. No-one was getting this now. It was ours.

I groped around with the torch and found the pistol. I pushed it back into my jeans, and shoved the machete down the front of its previous owner’s trousers.

I grabbed his hands, and started to drag him down the pathway. We couldn’t just leave him here. The elderly are early risers, and for all we knew there could be a steady stream of widows from first light.

I could see Charlie bumping the Audi across the road, then turning and backing it up.

I reached the tap and started to wash myself down.

Charlie walked through the gate and saw the body on the pathway. ‘Fucking hell, lad.’

‘You’ve been stitched up, mate. Fucking Whitewall had this knucklehead waiting for you with a gollock.’ I pointed down at the handle sticking out of his waistband. ‘I’ve got to clean up, then I’ll give you a hand.’

I washed as best I could and pushed back my wet hair, trying to look a bit respectable for the hotel. I filled a couple of plastic drinks bottles that someone had left by the taps, and went back to the plot to rinse away the most obvious splashes of blood. I didn’t want the Sunday morning knitting circle to miss a stitch and call in the blue-and-whites.

Charlie and I somehow managed to heave the Hulk into the boot, torso first. For a moment the rest of him was hanging down across the Audi’s rear bumper, as if he was bent over, being sick.

There was rustling, and the crunch of gravel behind us. Bodies on the pathway.

No time for talk: I grabbed the gollock and ran back into the gloom. My eyes out on their stalks, I checked each side of the path as I ran to where I thought the noise had come from.

I stopped just past Tengiz, took cover behind a tomb, and listened.

More rustling, left of the path.

I ran for it between two plots. They heard me and took off. I headed for the shouts of scared Paperclip.

Jumping a low wall, I crunched over the gravel of a plot. I could make out two shapes, maybe two plots ahead, stumbling over fences and walls, trying to get away. I jumped again and fell onto plastic sheeting. A body was under it, moaning, not moving.

Gollock up, I kicked myself free and pulled the plastic away.

One of the shell-suit crew stared up at me, tourniquet still in place around his arm, not moving a muscle. The plastic was pulled between two plots to make a shelter. I shone the torch beam in his eyes, and his pupils remained fully dilated. If he was looking into the future, he didn’t have to look far.

The others were well gone now. There was nothing I could do but head back for Charlie and hope they’d been too fucked up to see anything. But I knew, deep down, that if they were, they wouldn’t have been jumping around as they had.

We each grabbed a leg and swung him in. I closed the lid and Charlie took off his jacket and jumper and started to wipe blood off the back of the car.

‘He was waiting for me,’ I said. ‘He knew you’d be here. Which means I wouldn’t mind betting those two at the house weren’t there by accident either.’

Charlie carried on with his cleaning while I checked the area for stray shell suits and any other machete-waving psychopaths.

‘I hope you got the full wad up front, mate. It’s a total fuck-up, but we’ll protect ourselves with the document. Whatever’s in it must be pretty important; every fucker seems to want to get their hands on it.’

The cleaning was taking too long. ‘Let’s just fuck off and sort everything out when we get back under cover.’

We got in the car, me behind the wheel.

‘I’ve got a problem, lad.’ Charlie looked like he’d just seen a ghost.

‘What?’

‘I’ve only got half.’

‘You what? What the fuck were you thinking of?’

Charlie raised a hand. ‘Hold on, everyone’s in the driving seat except for me. I had two choices. Take the job as it was, or leave it.’

I headed for the nearest area of darkness, the high ground towards the TV tower. I couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid. You always demand all the money up front. You never know who’s fucking about with you. I started shouting at him as we bounced back into the shadow of the trees. ‘Didn’t you think you could be stitched up? What the fuck was going through that wobbly old head of yours?’

He said nothing as we twisted and turned our way towards the darkness.

As I parked up, in what I supposed was a fire break in the pine trees that blanketed the mountain, he finally turned and faced me. It was his turn to shout, and I could feel the force of his soundwaves against my face as well as in my ear. ‘I’m fucking dying, remember? I need the cash. What would you have done? Assume Crazy Dave would come begging, and just walk away? Think about it.’

I’d known I was wrong as soon as I’d opened my mouth. ‘I’m sorry, Charlie. Fuck it, it doesn’t matter. Let’s get the kit in the boot, and then get the fuck out of here. As long as we’ve got that document, we’re going to be OK, I’m sure of it.’

‘Yeah,’ Charlie quipped. ‘If all else fails we can put it on eBay.’