Assassin

42

He was standing at the foot of the marble ramp that ran up the side of the opera house to the roof. On this side of the building, the ramp widened as it rose, flaring away from the glass core. Up its outer edge, marked by foot-level lights, ran a stairway made from stone whose shallow steps were rough and stippled for extra grip. The main ramp was covered with smooth marble, but was still walkable, as the occasional figures dotted about it proved. This would provide the most direct route to the top. Carver started up it, settling into a slow, grim, arm-pumping run.

He'd gone about a quarter of the way up when he looked back over his shoulder. Tyzack was standing at the foot of the slope, speaking into a mobile phone. His two goons had already begun their ascent up the ramp towards him. Carver kept moving. The next time he looked back, Tyzack, too, was heading his way. From where he was, Carver couldn't see the far side of the building. But he was willing to bet that the other three pursuers had taken the ramp that went that way. He was counting on it, in fact.

Close up, Carver could see that the ramp – apparently a single upward sweep – was in fact a series of fractionally crimped and angled surfaces. Its colour was not pure white, as it had seemed from a distance, but a very pale hint of grey. Above his head, the late-evening sky had clouded over so that it was now a virtual match for the marble on which he stood. He felt disconcerted, almost disoriented; running over a surface that was constantly shifting beneath his feet towards a barely perceptible horizon at which stone and sky became one; a monochrome world as cold and alien as an Arctic icefield.

A few paces back, he'd passed three teenage girls coming downhill, arm in arm and giggling, making a game out of trying to keep their feet. Now he heard the tone of the voices change, a shriek of alarm and a jumble of words in which he only understood one: 'Pistol!'

He stopped and looked back down the slope. Tyzack and his men had drawn their weapons, which they held at their sides, pointing down, as they walked. They knew that he was not armed. There was no need to make a show of it. But the girls' words had had an effect. People were turning to look, then backing away from the men when they saw that they were armed. There were more shouts of alarm, a scurry of movement as people tried to get off the ramp and the roof above, looking for a safe way down.

The three men paid no attention to any of it. They were indifferent to everything and everyone except Carver.

He was almost at the top now. Ahead of him were two towers, the lower one about twice his height and faced with pale grey metal tiles covered with raised dots, like Braille. The taller tower, marble-covered like the rest of the building, rose to his right, above the core of the opera house. The other three men would be somewhere beyond and below it, coming up the other side of the building.

The two towers were arranged diagonally to one another – kitty-corner, as Americans say. As long as Carver stood behind one or other of the towers, he would be invisible to anyone on either ramp. He'd reached the shelter of the low tower now. No one could see him. But there was a gap of about three long strides between the tower's two nearest corners. The moment he tried to cross that, the men behind him would spot him at once.

And he needed to cross the gap. His survival depended upon it.

Finally he had a stroke of good luck. Behind the low tower, at the very far end of the roof, the surface fell away about eighteen inches to a path that ran along the edge of the building, below a parapet.

Carver sprinted the last few strides and flung himself on to the path, wincing as his knees and elbows cracked on the marble. He ignored the pain, wriggling forward on his stomach until he reckoned he must have gone far enough to be in the lee of the bigger tower. Then he jumped to his feet and dashed towards it.

As he ran he glanced back across the roof. He could see Tyzack creeping around the low tower, his gun in both hands now, held up to his right shoulder, ready to bring to bear. He was approaching one corner of the tower. The other two men would be round the far side, expecting to catch Carver cowering in its shadow. None of them would be looking in the direction he had actually taken. Not until they discovered he was gone.

He reached the side of the bigger tower and pressed up against it. Now he looked towards the far side of the building, looking for the other trio. They hadn't come into sight yet. They must still be on the ramp. That would place them below him, on the far side of the edge of the central core. How far away, Carver didn't know. But they must be close to the top now. He forgot his pounding heart, oxygen-starved lungs and bruised ankles and ran flat out towards the side of the roof.

At the very edge his path was blocked by a waist-high parapet. He skidded to a halt, placed his hands on the top of the parapet and then vaulted up on to it.

Now he could see the three men below him on the ramp. They were just to his left, their backs towards him, almost at the top. Two of them held pistols; the third had a sub-machine gun, a Belgian P90 by the stubby, futuristic look of it.

They hadn't yet seen him. But Tyzack and his men, away across the roof by the lower tower, had spotted him silhouetted against the pearl-grey sky. There were more shouts and then a couple of sharp cracks of gunshot. Carver's immediate reaction was relief. At that range, if you lived long enough to hear the shots, the bullets had missed.

Then he realized that he wasn't the target. The shots had been an alarm call to the men on the far ramp.

They looked around, trying to work out what was going on. One of them pressed a finger to his ear, trying to hear a message amidst the confusion. Another turned, looked up and saw Carver. He brought his gun up to fire.

But Carver was no longer on the parapet. He was in mid-air.

The two men collided before a shot was fired. Carver's target had long hair combed over a bald spot and gathered in a ponytail. As they fell to the stone, Carver reached for the ponytail with his right hand, twisted it round his fist and then used it as a handle with which he smashed the man's head into the stone: two sharp blows that left him barely conscious.

Carver's left hand was gripping the man's right wrist, his thumb pressing hard into its flesh, trying to loosen his grip on the gun. With his feet, he lashed out in the direction of the other two men, aiming for their shins, connecting with one of them.

Still holding on to the man he'd attacked, Carver flung himself back down the ramp, away from the other two, the two bodies tumbling down the grey-white stone. But Carver's opponent was not yet finished. As they came to a halt, the man's free hand whipped round and punched Carver in the temple, sending a sickening shock of pain through him.

Carver blinked away the fizzing, detuned television blur from his eyes, tightened his grip on the ponytail and put all his strength into one last downwards slam.

The crack of splintering bone and the sudden smear of red blood on the snowy marble told him he would not need another. He prised the gun from inert, slack fingers and rolled away from the corpse, his arms stretched out beyond his head, firing as he moved, hearing other shots crack into the ramp around him.

He came to a halt by the green glass wall of the opera house which ran along one side of the ramp. The other two men were hardly any distance above him. They would have taken evasive action, too. Now it was just a matter of reaction time.

Carver looked up. As he'd expected, the two men had thrown themselves to opposite sides of the ramp, which was much narrower on this side of the building. A stone parapet ran up the outside edge, just as it did on the roof. One of the men was crouched against it, already bringing his pistol to bear. The other was directly above Carver, pressed against the glass. The way he'd thrown himself, he'd got his gun hand stuck slightly behind him, between his body and the side of the building. It would barely take a second to free his weapon, but that was enough.

Carver didn't hesitate. He dealt with the immediate danger: the man by the parapet. Carver put two rounds into his chest, then swung the gun round and shot the other man in the head. He'd just managed to free his gun hand and was bringing it up as Carver fired. They were so close that Carver could see the look of surprise in his eyes.

A little over five seconds had passed since Carver had jumped down on to the ramp. In that time he had halved the odds against him. But the survivors still outnumbered him three to one. He might not get lucky again.