The Bach Manuscript

Chapter 41

‘Move it, English,’ growled the big guy with the swastika.

Ben asked him, ‘Would it help my case if I told you I was only half English?’

‘I’m so gonna enjoy watching you get squished.’

They were almost at the head of the paternoster shaft. With each step Ben could feel the vibrations thrumming through the old floorboards more strongly. The hidden mechanism that kept the rising and falling lift platforms on a perpetual loop was juddering and thrashing away in the background, drive belts slapping, pulleys turning, cables creaking. Like a giant industrial meat grinder or some kind of fiendish mangle that could chew you up and spit out the bones.

Ben let his step falter as they got close, and the big guy bumped into him from behind. That much mass took more effort to stop. Momentum that could be used in all kinds of ways.

Ben put an elbow in his left upper abdomen, hard enough to rupture the spleen and too fast for anyone to react. Then the big man was sprawling towards the shaft mouth and tumbling over onto his face, crying out in pain and surprise and fear all at once as he went sliding on his belly over the greasy floorboards, scrabbling desperately to halt himself. His head and shoulders went into the open shaft, poking in between the platform that had just come rumbling past and the next one rumbling down ten feet behind it. A lightweight, nimble man might have been able to get out of the way in time, but this guy stood no chance. He saw it coming and knew what was about to happen. A shriek burst out of his mouth and was cut short.

Ben turned away, not because he was squeamish at the sight of a man getting his head squashed like a ripe pumpkin, but because the Skorpion submachine gun that had been poking in his back a second ago was now in his hands and he was swinging around to open fire on the swastika guy’s two astonished comrades before they hit their triggers first. He mowed them down left to right with a sweep of full-auto fire that filled the narrow passage with deafening thunder. They crumpled without a sound or a shot fired, and their bodies collapsed in a mountain of flesh with their weapons under them.

Smoke oozed from the muzzle of the Skorpion in Ben’s hands. He turned back towards the paternoster. It was making all kinds of different sounds now as the mechanism had suddenly jammed up solid. The part of the swastika guy’s body that wasn’t snarled up between the underside of the descending platform and the lower edge of the shaft entrance was convulsing in its death throes on the greasy boards. The old machinery didn’t have the power to shear through that much flesh and bone. Hidden driveshafts and pulleys were clattering and banging and rattling as if the whole contraption might explode at any second.

‘More than one way to get squished,’ Ben said.

A sound behind him made him wheel around. Alek had heard the shots and was racing to the scene with a gun of his own. The AKM assault rifle was much, much louder in the confined space. It was also much more powerful. Ben threw himself down and rolled behind the heap of the two dead guards to use them as cover, like sandbags.

Alek opened fire. Ben felt the impacts slamming into the heavy flesh of the dead men, and the little wet splashes on his face as their blood spattered him. Their bulk might absorb most of the rounds, but an unlucky bullet could easily carve its way out the other side and find a path to Ben. Not a good place to be. He pointed the Skorpion up over the top of the mound and rattled off another burst without looking to see where he was shooting. That was enough to drive Alek back down the passage. It was also enough to empty the Skorpion’s magazine. The perennial problem with these greedy little machine pistols was keeping the damn things fed.

Alek was back an instant later and hosing bullets down the corridor. Ben had the unpleasant realisation that he was no longer fighting Dragan Vuković’s morons. He couldn’t get to the dead guards’ weapons because they were buried under a ton of bullet-riddled meat. It was time to get out of here.

There was a sudden pause in the gunfire as Alek ejected the empty mag from his smoking assault rifle and slammed in another one. Ben used the brief lull to roll out of cover. The paternoster would have been the perfect escape route, but now it was blocked solid and making terminal noises. He saw a door and crashed through it, with no idea what was on the other side and no time to worry about it.

He found himself running blind into a storeroom stacked full of drinks crates. The only light in the room was filtering through the grime-filmed windows from the Rakia’s blood-red neon sign outside. By the same light, Ben could see the silhouette of the iron fire escape the other side of the glass, bolted to the outside of the building.

Behind him, Alek was bursting into the room waving the AKM. Ben shoulder-slammed the window and his leather jacket saved him from being badly cut as the glass burst out in an explosion of shards. Bullets punched through the window frame an inch from his head. He dived through the shattered hole and latched onto the rough, rusted steel of the fire escape and he began to race downwards. The fire escape zigzagged down the side of the building with a plate-steel landing every twenty feet. Ben was two steps from the first landing down when Alek appeared at the window above and let off a rattle of shots that cracked out into the cold night air. The bullets kicked sparks off the fire escape. As Ben darted out of sight and hit the iron landing with a clang, he saw Alek take out a radio handset and start yelling orders into it.

The fire escape landing had a service door leading back inside the building. Ben booted it hard and it burst inwards. He ran through it, vaulted some garbage sacks near the entrance, sprinted for an internal door and wrenched that one open. The heat and noise of the nightclub hit him like a slap, even though he was still only one floor closer to the riot happening on the ground.

Over the beat of the music, he could hear screams and gunfire. He was pretty sure that was an unusual sound, even on a typical night at the Rakia. Now he knew the answer to the question he’d been asking himself, whether the shooting on the top floor would have been audible down below. It was. What he was hearing was Osmanović reacting to what he must have taken to be Ben’s signal. The plan was coming apart even faster than Ben had feared.

Ben muttered, ‘Shit.’ He ran on, tried a door that opened into a stinking toilet, tried another and found that it led to a bare-brick stairwell going down. He raced down the stairs three at a time, heading towards the chaos below. The gunfire down there seemed to have stopped, but he could still hear plenty of screaming. Maybe Osmanović and Nidal had realised the plan had gone south and fled the building. Or maybe they were already dead.

As he rounded a corner between floors a stairwell door flew open and Ben found himself staring face to face at the big man he’d first encountered outside in the street. The one with the forest beard and steel girder arms. At the sight of Ben a look of puzzlement flashed over his hairy face, then quickly turned to fury. He was carrying a Skorpion subgun identical to the one Ben had used upstairs, except this one was still loaded. He wrestled it off his shoulder and pointed it Ben’s way, an operation that took half a second longer than it took Ben to spin a roundhouse kick that caught his right forearm and sent the weapon clattering down the stairwell.

The kick should have broken his arm, too, but the giant just scowled.

Ben backed away a step, like stepping away from a tall building to be able to see all of it. This wasn’t someone he would have chosen to get into unarmed combat with.

But you seldom got a choice in these matters.