Revenger

71

Carver was still asleep when a police driver in a hurry, blocked by drivers who refused to clear a path for him, turned on the siren he had hitherto kept silent. It was only a short blast — five seconds, maybe: ten at most — and the driver killed it the moment that the first fractional gap appeared in the traffic in front of him, but it was all the alarm clock Carver needed. As he woke he was already processing the subconscious awareness that the noise had been getting closer. Seconds later he learned something else: the reason that the driver had turned on his siren was that he’d been left behind by his mates.

The MI6 flat was located on the top floor — the third — of a low-rise, redbrick development, a mix of flats and small terraced houses arranged in a rectangle around a central courtyard. The only way in by car was through an arched entrance. The bedroom was directly above the arch.

Carver heard the sound of an engine passing beneath him through the arch and stopping in the courtyard. Blue lights flashing thirty-five feet below danced across the bedroom ceiling. He could hear men piling out on to the tarmac, the sound of pounding on the outside door and a voice shouting, ‘Police! Open up!’ Lights were being turned on in windows all around the courtyard.

Downstairs the police crashed an Enforcer battering ram, otherwise known as a ‘big key’ into the outside door. When they smashed through that, they would have six short flights of stairs and the door to the apartment itself to deal with.

Now they were on the stairs.

Carver didn’t rush. He picked up his gun, walked out of the bedroom, turned right and went into the open-plan kitchen and living area where he’d been working earlier. There were windows either side of the room, facing towards the courtyard on one side and the slip road down to the entrance on the other. The courtyard was filled with police vehicles. Carver opened the window on the slip-road side and looked out. God bless the Plod, they’d not left anyone to keep watch from the road. He looked up: no helicopter. Not yet.

There was a crash from the door to the apartment. It had a steel frame and Banham locks top and bottom as well as the regular Yale. It wasn’t going to be broken down without a fight. Whatever the flat lacked in aesthetic appeal it gained in security. It was a safe house, after all.

Which begged the question… No, no time to think about that now. Concentrate on the job in hand.

Carver opened the window and climbed out on to the window ledge. A steady drizzle was falling, leaving a slick of water on the glossy white-painted ledge. There were two steel handholds, one above the other, hammered into the brickwork immediately above the window frame. Carver grabbed the cold, wet metal with one hand and used the other to close the window behind him. He pulled himself up: one handhold, then the other. He grabbed hold of the gutter above his head and it twisted a little in his hand, sending a splash of cold rainwater on to his head and down the back of his neck. Carver swung his legs up, scrambled for purchase on the gutter and pulled himself up on to the roof.

Perching low on the slate tiles Carver watched more police vehicles racing down the road towards the apartment block. In a few seconds they would be close enough to see him, even if the first arrivals had not. He made his way across the roof in a crouching, simian lope, turned the corner on to one of the short sides of the rectangle and stopped by the junction between the guttering and a downpipe. Another quick look around. The street below him was empty. Anyone living in the apartment block would have rushed to their windows on the other side of the building, overlooking the courtyard.

The far side of the street, directly opposite him, was dark and lifeless: a new development of luxury townhouses, abandoned half-built when the builders had gone bankrupt. There wasn’t much of a demand for luxury these days. Survival was the best anyone could hope for.

Carver climbed down the drainpipe and crossed the road. The development where he’d been staying had its own basement garage. The only cars left out on the streets were rusting, burned-out wrecks, little different to the ones in Netherton Street, relics of an earlier, long-forgotten civil disturbance.

A chain-link fence surrounded the abandoned construction site, but great holes had been punched in it. Several of the poles had been knocked down. Carver walked unimpeded into the site and then picked up speed, wanting to clear the area as soon as possible. He jogged between the hollow shells of the unfinished buildings, sticking to the shadows, staying alert to any signs of pursuit. The rain eased up a little, the clouds began to part. As he ran, Carver kept turning his head to look behind him, making sure that there was no one on his trail.

The site was littered with unused concrete building blocks. Carver wasn’t watching where he was going. He tripped on one of the blocks, catching his shin painfully on the edge. He uttered a sharp, quickly stifled gasp of pain, lost his balance for a second, half-fell on to the stony ground, stuck a hand out to support himself, and for a second found himself perched like a sprinter rising from the starting blocks. His head was up, his eyes looking down the path ahead of him, and at that moment a shaft of sunlight shone through a keyhole of clear sky and glinted off something bright and metallic up ahead.

Carver did not need to be told what that was. Even before the first shot had been fired he was flinging himself to his right, splashing in a puddle as he landed, and rolling towards the gaping empty doorway to one of the unfinished buildings while the gun made the characteristic hammer-tapping-on-metal sound of a suppressed .22 pistol, and bullets ricocheted around him. Somehow he survived unscathed for long enough to reach the shelter of the bare brick walls. He crouched beside a hole where a window should have been and looked out across the site. At first he could see nothing, but then a sudden movement caught the corner of his eye and he turned quickly enough to see the slender black flicker of a female silhouette darting between two buildings, topped by a streaming red mane of red hair.

Novak!

He’d had no idea she was still alive. Alix had told him about her fight with Novak at the Goldsmiths’ Hall, the night that Malachi Zorn had died, but he’d simply assumed that Novak had ended up as one of the unidentifiable bodies lying pulverized in the rubble. More fool him.

Carver scampered to the back of the building, looking for a way out. He was spoiled for choice: there were spaces for French windows and a back door. He got to the doorway, pressed his back against the brick beside it, moved his head fractionally into the opening to give himself a view of the surrounding area and then jerked it back again as the whipcrack of a passing bullet skimmed past his newly shaved scalp.

He couldn’t fire back. His Glock had no suppressor and the sound of it would bring the police racing over from Grantham’s flat with far more firepower than he could muster. He couldn’t get out of the building. Now what? Looking around he saw a rectangular hole in the ceiling, a little closer to the front door: the opening for an unbuilt staircase. If he could get some height he would at least be able to look down on the site and have a better chance of tracking Novak’s movements.

Carver sprinted across the bare concrete floor, jumped with his hands above his head and grabbed a bare joist intended to support the unlaid first floor.

For a moment he was suspended, full length, with his back to the kitchen door and French windows. If Novak came through them now, he’d be a sitting duck.