Revenger

16

Donny Bakunin was almost exactly the same age as Mark Adams. He had also attended a grammar school, albeit at the other end of the country. But no one had ever described him as a natural leader back then. He had countless intellectual justifications for his anarchism, but the simple truth was that he loved the idea of a political creed dedicated to smashing the kind of people who naturally ascended to positions of power. Only in middle age had he discovered that he had quite a taste for power himself.

As he made his way down Stewart’s Road towards the Wandsworth Road, past the low-rise estate on one side and the close-packed light-industrial units on the other, Bakunin could have been any drab, insignificant Londoner. He was walking fast, as people tended to do in this damp, depressing weather, his duffel-coat hood was turned up to keep the rain off his head, and there was an increasingly soggy roll-up in the corner of his mouth. There was no one else on the pavement, but if anyone had been there to hear the words he was muttering they probably would have taken him for just another nutter — there were a lot of them around these days.

Only if they had paid particular attention would they have realized that the hood of his coat concealed Bakunin’s Bluetooth earpiece, through which he was giving a series of orders to the forces now massing in the abandoned council estate. Even then, it would have taken a highly unusual, specialized level of awareness to have deduced that the commands related to a violent act of criminality that was due to begin in a little over twelve minutes. Bakunin was running a minute or two late. He upped his pace still further, almost breaking into a run. It made the rain hit him harder, so that his glasses became so covered in water that he could barely see where he was going. But that did not matter. Bakunin could not afford to be late.

He wasn’t the only one on the move. In a deserted side street off Nine Elms Lane one of the men in the parked-up garbage trucks checked his watch. Then he turned to the driver next to him and said, ‘Time to go.’

The truck’s engine fired up, the lights came on and it rumbled off towards the main road. The second truck was close behind. The man in its passenger seat was checking his reflection in the driver’s mirror. His name was Jordan Hayes, but his mates called him ‘Random’ because they never knew what he’d do next. He had an armoured motorcycle jacket with black plastic plates protecting his chest, back, shoulders, elbows and forearms. The plates were outlined in red and made him look well sick, he reckoned, like some evil motherfucker out of Tron. Random had a black balaclava over his head with goggles covering his eyes. A tiny ContourROAM HD helmet cam was clipped to the band that held the goggles to his face. Random pressed the record button. From now on, anything he saw, the camera would see too. And he planned to see it all.