Carver

72

There was a small landing at the bottom of the stairs, with a single, duck-egg blue door, which had a round glass porthole. Carver took a look through it, then pushed it open with his shoulder, glancing back up the stairwell as he did. The sound of scurrying footsteps was clearly audible, coming from above them. The Chinese were on their way.

Carver raised his gun to cover the stairs as he gestured for Alix to go through the door. He followed her into one of Wimbledon’s underground service tunnels. The door was positioned close to a right-angled bend, so that the tunnel ran away straight ahead of them and to the right. The concrete floor was shiny and slick from the constant passage of feet and wheels. The walls were made of bare breeze blocks. A couple of doors, painted in the same duck-egg blue, were set into the right-hand wall. The nearest one had a sign next to it that read, ‘Ball Boys and Girls’. The one beyond it displayed one word: ‘Pilates’.

On the left, two massive black pipes ran all along the bottom of the wall, with metal racks above them that were used to carry countless, loosely hung strands of multicoloured wire. A number of smaller red-painted pipes were suspended from the ceiling, along with yet more wires. They were all held in place by metal frames like horizontal ladders, from which hung a line of harsh white neon strip lights that ran as far as the eye could see.

‘Let’s go,’ said Carver, running down the tunnel up ahead.

Alix followed him, her heels clattering against the concrete floor. As they rounded a left-hand corner Carver gestured at her to stop and get to the side of the tunnel, just behind him. He took up a position by one of the pipes, wishing that Schultz were down in the tunnel with him, instead of sitting on a bench by Wimbledon Common. Give the two of them a couple of sub-machine guns and a bunch of grenades, and they’d have the Chinese sorted in no time. Doing it solo was a little more complicated.

Carver was as close as he could get to the angle of the corner, leaning slightly out into the tunnel to get a view of the door from the stairs. It opened and one of the Chinese stepped through it, holding his gun out in front of him. He stopped for a moment, saw no one else in the tunnel, and lowered his gun as he relaxed a fraction, and that was when Carver stepped out and fired the two shots that killed him.

Carver put another two rounds through the porthole to discourage the men waiting the other side, then immediately turned — and almost ran right into a squat, white, open buggy that was coming down the tunnel towards them. Thanks to its electric motor the buggy was virtually noiseless. In fact the loudest sound coming from it was the music seeping from the earphones of the skinny, acne-faced lad at the wheel. He seemed lost in what he was hearing, his attention long since dulled by the constant repetition of trips up and down the same stretch of tunnel. He barely registered Carver’s presence until he was two metres away, and then his dull working day suddenly got a whole lot more exciting. He slammed on the brakes and came to a halt within a few centimetres of Carver, who simply put a foot in front of the buggy, leaned forward, and used one hand to shove his gun in the young driver’s face, while the other ripped the earphones from his head.

‘Get out, now,’ said Carver. ‘That way.’

The driver nodded frantic agreement, then scrambled across the seat towards the wall where Alix was standing.

‘Now hold out your hands in front of you,’ Carver told him.

From round the corner came the sound of the door to the stairs being kicked open.

Carver pulled a pair of the yellow plastic handcuffs from his trouser pocket and gave them to Alix.

Now a voice could be heard barking out orders in Chinese.

Carver nodded at the wall and said, ‘Tie him to those racks.’

There were distant footsteps, getting fainter — men running down the tunnel in the wrong direction. Then more commands.

Alix nodded and slipped one of the handcuff loops around the driver’s left hand, tightening it hard enough to make him wince.

More footsteps, coming in their direction.

Alex passed the cuff around the back of one of the upright struts that supported the wire racks, then took the driver’s right hand and secured it.

As she did so, Carver got behind the wheel of the buggy and executed a quick three-point turn, so that it was facing back the way it had just come. He slid across the seat so that Alix could get behind the wheel.

‘Floor it,’ he said.

The buggy trundled away, gradually picking up pace towards its top speed of sixteen miles per hour. Carver turned around in his seat so that he was facing backwards, half-kneeling with one knee on the seat, his weight pushed forward so that his thigh was braced against the vertical seat-rest. He reached around to the small of his back and took out his gun. Then he held it out in front of him, sighting at a point in the middle of the corner round which the Chinese were about to appear.

The footsteps got louder.

The kid tied to the wire-rack was darting his head from side to side like one of the spectators on the courts up above them, staring with terrified wide eyes at Carver, then back towards the sound of the approaching footsteps. He started desperately trying to clamber up and over the pipes to give himself a little cover.

‘OK,’ Carver told Alix, ‘hit the brakes.’

The two fastest Chinese came racing around the corner. The first almost skidded to a halt as he spotted Carver up ahead, aiming a gun directly at him, and there was almost a touch of slapstick about the way the next runner crashed into him, nearly knocking him off his feet. But that comedy moment saved the first runner’s life. It meant that Carver’s first shot missed him, and the second hit him high on his right shoulder, smashing into the joint between the shoulder blade and the upper arm. The impact knocked him backwards. He screamed in agony and his gun dropped from his limp, useless arm. But he was still alive.

Carver didn’t have time to finish the first target off. The second was already steadying himself and bringing his gun to bear on the buggy. Carver went for a head shot. Two more quick-fire rounds hit their target, splattering a mess of scarlet blood and grey brain matter against the stark, bare breeze blocks.

Eight rounds used, seven left in the magazine. Three men down…

No, make that two.

The man Carver had wounded was struggling to his feet. He switched his gun to his left hand, and staggered forwards.

Carver winced as he killed him with a pair of shots to the chest, almost resenting his victim for forcing such a clinical execution rather than being smart enough to count himself lucky and stay down.

He pointed his gun up at the neon strip lights and fired off the rest of his rounds, throwing that section of the tunnel into semidarkness. Then he released the magazine, slammed in a new one and passed the gun to Alix. ‘Get round the next corner, then wait for me,’ he said. ‘If I don’t come for you, shoot whoever does.’

Carver got out of the buggy and she drove away. He jumped up and grabbed hold of the framework that ran along the ceiling, carrying the red pipes, wires and shot-out neon lights. Then he swung his legs up into the framework, and pulled his body up until he was lying flat alongside the pipes and wires, hoping that the thin metal struts that supported them would take his weight as well; hoping, too, that he had taken out enough lights to hide his presence from the other Chinese, who must now have realized that they had gone in the wrong direction, and be doubling back his way.

Carver reached down to his leg and slipped the knife from his ankle sheath.

More voices came, two of them, one higher-pitched than the other. Their words were indecipherable, but the questioning tone was clear. They were calling out for their mates, and wondering why there was no reply. Seconds later the owners of the voices came into view: a shaven-headed, thickset guy who looked like he could handle himself, and a slip of a girl in a sexy little mini. They both glanced at their dead comrades. The girl visibly flinched, then pulled herself together, advancing down the tunnel at a slow, steady pace beside the man. They had their guns in front of them, alert to the slightest sound or movement.

They were almost directly under Carver now.

Then there was a strangled cry for help, the sound of a man too terrified to be able to raise his voice. The buggy driver slid back down the pipe towards the tunnel floor and the two Chinese turned in his direction, presenting their backs to Carver. The girl swung her gun until the barrel pointed directly at the wide-eyed screaming driver, her face clenched into flint-eyed immobility as she put three shots in a tight grouping right in the centre of his skinny torso. They blasted bloody chunks out of his back as they passed right through him.

The sound of the firing was still echoing around the tunnel as Carver slipped down from his hiding place, his feet hitting the concrete directly behind the shaven-headed man. His left hand clamped over the man’s mouth as the knife in his right cut into the flesh of his neck and, in a single sweep from left to right, severed the windpipe and the carotid artery, sending a spray of blood pluming through the air in a downward arc. The man fell dead at Carver’s feet.

The young woman turned round to meet this unexpected threat, and Carver threw himself at her, reaching out for her gun with his empty hand and stabbing the knife up towards her guts.

The knife never got there. Carver felt the woman’s slim hand clamp against his wrist, her grip surprisingly powerful, crushing enough to cut off the supply of blood to his hand and weaken his grip. So now they were locked in a stalemate, each able to prevent the other from using their weapon, but unable to make an attacking move without releasing the grip that was keeping them safe. They stumbled into the centre of the tunnel, turning around in a fatal dance in which each partner was trying to kill the other. The woman was the first to make a move, bringing her right leg round in a scything kick towards the side of Carver’s left leg.

Carver evaded the kick, pulling the woman’s much lighter body with him and taking advantage of her fractional loss of balance to spin her around and then hurl her at the far wall. The woman’s skull hit the breeze blocks with an audible crack, stunning her so that she stood groggily, leaning back against the wall and presenting her body to Carver front on.

A second later the knife that Carver had thrown was embedded in the woman’s delicate, slender throat, and her body was sliding, stone dead, to the hard, cold floor.

Carver waited for a second to see if anyone else was coming, but there was only silence. He stepped across to the corpse and took the gun from the lifeless right hand. Then he sprinted down the corridor toward Alix. Less than a minute had passed since they’d entered the tunnel, and the only un-silenced shots had been the ones that had killed the buggy driver. They would actually serve to keep anyone else away: nowadays no unarmed security men, or even police officers, would advance towards a suspected gunman. The health and safety culture that put the reduction of risk far ahead of the doing of duty would see to that. But that would not prevent the authorities from setting up a security cordon. Unless he and Alix got out fast, they’d be trapped underground like rats in a blocked drain.

He was going flat out round the bend: so fast, in fact, that he slipped and went skidding and scrambling to the floor, accidentally saving his life as the bullets intended for his upright body slammed into the breeze blocks behind him.

Carver tucked his head into his shoulders, turning his fall into a roll, then got straight to his feet, his gun in front of him. He was just about to fire in the direction from which the firing had come when he caught sight of the shooter.

It was the sixth Chinese, the one in the black designer gear: the leader.

He was standing behind the buggy.

He was not pointing his gun at Carver.

He was holding it against the side of Alix’s skull.