The Bach Manuscript

Chapter 32

Ben didn’t want to harm the animal, but he didn’t want to get his flesh ripped from bone either. He adjusted his aim towards the charging pit bull and prepared to fire, knowing he’d have to pump half a magazine into the dog to stop its frenzied attack.

He didn’t need to pull the trigger. The dog’s mad eyes locked onto the hippy guy standing there, and it veered off course like a heat-seeking missile to go for the closer target instead. The hippy guy let out a shriek and went staggering backwards through his doorway, tripped and fell.

The dog launched itself at him with a roar, still trailing its length of chain. Its alligator jaws closed on a trouser leg and began shaking its head viciously from side to side, the way it would to kill a rat, cat or other dog by breaking its neck.

The hippy screamed and wriggled, trying to hit the dog with his beer bottle and kick it in the face as it mauled him. His foot glanced off the dog’s head and caught the edge of the open door; the door swung shut and his cries and the dog’s crazed barking were muffled behind it.

‘Fuck that retard!’ Dragan yelled in Serbian from behind the towel over his mouth. He turned to Danilo and Miroslav. ‘Find this other bastard for me! I want his fucking head on a plate!’

Whichever of the two he was, the thug clutching the Uzi reached forward to grasp the cocking bolt knob on the top of the receiver. That was the instant Ben realised, as he watched from the darkness, that the gun wasn’t yet in battery and ready to fire. That gave him a split-second advantage, and he took it.

He stepped forward into the smoky light and pointed the Tokarev.

‘Dragan.’

All eyes snapped onto him. Lena’s were pink and puffy, and still streaming tears because of the irritation of the smoke. She let out a cry seeing Ben approaching, but her voice was drowned by the shrill alarm.

Ben advanced another few steps, past the closed door of the hippy guy’s apartment. Dragan’s friend with the Uzi stood frozen in mid-movement, his hand still on the cocking knob. Ben swivelled his pistol sights onto him and said, ‘Drop the weapon. Now. Or die.’

Dragan’s guy quickly made his choice. The uncocked Uzi clattered to the floor.

Dragan Vuković stared at Ben with eyes more crazed and brimming with hate than those of the dog he’d beaten and goaded into a becoming a vicious pit fighter. ‘Who the fuck are you, man?’ Switching to English, his accent was thicker than Lena’s.

‘I’m the part of your plan you didn’t account for,’ Ben said. ‘The guy you didn’t reckon on having to deal with. Now here I am.’

‘You think I am fucking scared of you?’

‘Yes.’

Ben didn’t blink as he watched Dragan through his gunsights. The Tokarev’s trigger sear would break at around seven pounds, typical of a clunky military sidearm of its time. Ben’s finger was applying six pounds of pressure on it at this moment, and he was thinking about what might make him want to lay on the extra pound.

If he’d encountered Dragan Vuković and his cronies in the remote forests and hills of their own country, he would not have hesitated for one instant to gun down first Dragan, then Danilo and Miroslav, right there on the spot. He would have ended their worthless lives without a second thought, and left them where they fell, for the foxes and wolves to feast on, and for the crows and the worms to finish what the animals didn’t eat.

But Ben wasn’t stupid enough to openly commit a triple murder in urban Britain, the most heavily-surveilled European police state since East Germany. Not with half his movements throughout that day recorded on CCTV, and a smart cop like Tom McAllister already aware of his involvement in the hunt for Nick Hawthorne’s killers.

No, Dragan Vuković was not worth going to jail for — but that was where Dragan was headed himself, and his cronies with him. Three square meals a day, and all the leisure time they could cram in at the UK taxpayer’s expense. At least, once locked behind bars, they wouldn’t be free to enjoy themselves by throwing more innocent people out of windows.

Dragan spread his hands, trying to look casual. ‘What you want with us, man? It’s about that guy, right?’

‘That guy,’ Ben said.

‘Look, we did not mean to hurt him.’

‘You mean, you didn’t realise he couldn’t fly?’

Dragan smiled. ‘Just one of those things, you know? We can square this up. You want some money to go away?’

‘I want you, Dragan. You and your pals here are coming with me.’

‘I am thinking you want my sister too, huh?’

Ben shook his head. ‘I have no quarrel with her. She can go on whipping perverts’ arses the rest of her life, for all I care.’

‘Fuck you,’ Lena yelled.

‘Walk away, Lena. That was the deal I promised you when you sold your brother out to me, remember?’

Dragan’s eyes flicked in Lena’s direction.

She gave a quick headshake. Nervous. ‘He’s lying.’

‘It’s over, Dragan,’ Ben said. ‘Let’s go.’

The alarm was still shrilling. Smoke was still roiling from the doorway of Dragan’s apartment. The muffled barking of the dog and the cries of the hippy could be heard from the closed door of the other apartment, to Ben’s back. Dragan said nothing. His expression was as hard as the steel in Ben’s hand, but Ben could see in his eyes that he knew he was done.

Then everything suddenly changed.

The apartment door behind Ben flew open and the hippy guy came bursting back out into the corridor. His trousers and T-shirt were hanging off him in tatters and his hands and face were bloody. ‘Call it off!’ he screamed. ‘Get the fucking thing off me!’ The dog appeared in the doorway, fire in its eyes, pink drool foaming from its gnashing jaws. It stiffened as it saw Ben for the first time. Recognising him as a threat to its master, it instantly forgot all about the hippy guy and charged the new enemy instead.

Ben wheeled around, shifting his point of aim from Dragan’s crew to the dog and ready to shoot.

Dragan yelled, ‘Demon, attack!’

The dog raced towards Ben. The steel chain attached to its neck snaked along the floor behind it. Ben was about to shoot when the end of the chain snagged under the bottom of the open door of the hippy guy’s apartment. The dog’s charge was suddenly checked. It roared and strained on the end of the chain, eyes rolling, snapping like a landed piranha fish.

The two seconds that Ben had been distracted by the attacking pit bull was enough time for Dragan’s friend to make a grab for his fallen Uzi and rack the cocking knob. Like a slowed-down audio replay, over the noise of the alarm Ben clearly heard the metallic crunch of the action working, the bolt snapping forward, a nine-millimetre cartridge chambering from the long thirty-two-round stick magazine. Not a good sound to hear when the enemy has the drop on you and is about to unleash hellfire on you from just a few steps away.

If Ben had tried to get his pistol back on target and snap off an accurate shot, he’d have been dead. Instead he did the only thing he could, which was to move, and move fast. He dived back, dodged the teeth of the trapped pit bull, hit the floor and rolled towards the dark end of the corridor.

At the same instant, the Uzi in the thug’s hand fired with a deafening continuous thunder that drowned out the shriek of the alarm, and a bright strobing muzzle flash that lit up the smoke like a magnesium flare.