The Scorpion Signal

16: SHOOT

He fired six rapid shots at short range into the spine and the impact pitched my body forward in a series of jerks as the chips of bone and cartilage from the shattered vertebrae were forced out through the rib cage in an explosion of blood and plasma. As my face hit the snow I thought Schrenk you bastardI hope they burn you for this.

Have to do better. Gut-think wouldn't help me.

I listened to his footsteps along the corridor behind me. I estimated the distance at something like six feet, not nearly dose enough to do anything in safety. We kept on walking towards the door leading to the car park at the rear.

He fired directly into the back of the head and the brain matter burst and splattered against the walls in a welter of skull fragments. There was no more time for conscious thought, even of Moira, even of roses: life was simply present, then absent. Executive deceased.

Have to do much better, yes. A normal reaction to awareness of imminent death with the imagination running wild but gut-think useless and dangerous: survival possible only through rational thought, brain-think.

Man in a worn brown overcoat and horn-rimmed glasses. 'Good evening, comrade.' Ignatov.

'Good evening. They say it's going to snow again.' 'Surely we've had enough!'

A chance, obviously, to move extremely fast and get the man in the brown overcoat between me and the gun, but Ignatov might have fired precipitately and shot him by accident.

'Keep walking.'

I quickened the pace a little. He had the gun in the pocket of his coat; otherwise the other man would have seen it. He couldn't take accurate aim like that but it didn't make a lot of difference: at this range he could hit me lethally with three or four shots, shifting the aim according to the visible point of impact. I didn't know if he'd handled firearms before but it seemed likely: Schrenk wouldn't leave me in the hands of an amateur.

'Open the door.'

His voice was heavy, its tone entirely changed by his possession of a killing instrument. There had been no power in his voice before, no authority; now there was both, and something else, something like anticipation. I'd pictured the end of the world for him too often, with his three children asking Galya where Daddy had gone, and now he had the end of my own world in his hands and he was impatient for it. Once the eight lumps of spinning metal had gone burrowing into me he would be safe again, and go home to Galya and the children. You could see his point.

The night air was freezing.after the heat of the apartment. The heavy door slammed shut behind us.

'Over that way.'

He was closer, I thought. Or it might simply be that the wall of the building was projecting his voice forward and making it sound louder. I would have to watch things like that.

His mud-brown Syrena was obliquely to our right, not far from the entrance to the car park and facing this way. I hadn't locked it after I'd got him out. The street lamps cast a sick greenish light across the area and the albedo was high, the reflections bouncing off the cellulose of the parked cars and the blanket of ground snow. Shadows were sharp.

Pyotr. If he makes any attempt to get away, shoot at once, and to kill.

But he was going to do that anyway as soon as we reached his car so I didn't have much to lose.

He fired into the neck and I felt the spine explode -

Steady.

One, two, three… twelve cars. In the far corner, a pick-up truck. Thirteen objects of good cover, but too far away, the nearest car at least twenty feet from where I was walking: we were crossing an open space. No one in sight. A long way off, the drone of a tram. No sound of other traffic: the evening rush hour was over and in this city by night the streets are almost empty.

What would she do with them?

'Make for the car. The Syrena.'

Authority in his tone, the authority of death itself.

Five hundred were an awful lot: they'd fill the whole flat and what could she do with them afterwards, change the water every day, sit and stare at them, what pretty roses?

I listened to his footsteps on the snow behind me. I seemed to be crunching more than he was: perhaps he was walking in the hollows I was leaving, putting his feet exactly where I had placed mine. It would look rather comic, like a couple of ducks on their way to the pond, picking their feet up and putting them down at orderly intervals. But there was no one here to see. He would be the last person on earth I was going to see, a dough-faced plodding man with a wife and three little children and a gash on his temple and a gun in his -

'Keep walking.'

The sound of his voice jarred my nerves. Why had he said that? Had I been slowing? I must have. Perfectly understandable, as Schrenk would have said, squinting through the cigarette smoke: you don't run to your funeral.

'Which is your car?' I asked him.

'You know which one it is. It's the brown Syrena, near the entrance.'

I nodded and walked on.

Just sit and stare at them for God's sake? After twenty-four hours she wouldn't even be able to stand the smell, because it would remind her of what had happened. She'd go out and get stinking, that was all she'd do, or take her Lotus up the Mi flat out in the dark with the headlights swallowing up the night and everything she could ever remember of me, and when she got back to the flat she'd just think oh my God what am I going to do with all these bloody roses.

The snow crunched under our shoes. I think one of my shoes was leaking, or some snow had got in over the top: my left foot felt wet. Useless enough sensory data, if you like. I began turning my head very gradually, so that I could trap the sounds from behind me in the auricle of the right ear; his footsteps loudened slightly. I estimated he was still a good six feet behind me, so that there was no chance of turning on him. But I kept my head slightly to one side, exposing the right ear to the auditory source for the left hemisphere to process. I could hear his breathing now; he was a heavy man, too well fed by his loving wife.

So in fact the rose thing wasn't really going to work out after all — it was just a grandiose gesture, a juvenile urge to make an impression from out here in the never-ending dark. It would have been subtler to send one rose, one sublime and perfect rose to remember me by, not an ostentatious barrowload. Ignatov, old boy, do you mind if I just phone Harrods before we wind up the evening?

Something like laughter, a long way down in the psyche, a neural reaction perhaps, while the slow cold wave went down the spine and the sweat gathered and ran, the reaction of the beast that smells the slaughterhouse: he was squeezing his finger at every step we took and I could feel the impact and hear the shrill jangling of the nerve system as the organism took the shock.

I believe I've got another thirty seconds to live. But there's nobody I can tell. We're born alone and we die alone and no one really notices.

Headlights swung across the facade of the building opposite and sparked light from the windows. Sound of a vehicle, smell of exhaust gas.

'The Syrena,' the man behind me said.

'Oh yes. Sorry.'

I hadn't meant to go off course; it was the organism again, not wanting to go near that particular car because it was a hearse. The headlights swung in a half circle and I saw the vehicle turning in from the street, a small dark Moskvich bumping over the ruts with its snow chains clanking and the bodywork rattling — a kind of mad toy that some joker had wound up and sent into the car park to raise a laugh. It obliterated the slight sounds Ignatov was making and of course I couldn't see him because he was behind me, and for a moment the idea came to me that he wasn't there any more, that I'd let my nerves get out of hand to the point where I'd imagined him. It was an enormous relief and I took a deep breath and remembered the reports of people who had come back from the edge of death; they all said the same thing: first you panic, then you try to do something about the situation, then when you realize it's all up you get the feeling of euphoria as the organism anaesthetizes the final awareness of death.

But I wasn't at that stage yet and I'd better wake up to the fact that Ignatov was in fact still behind me and all he had to do was stumble a bit on the frozen ruts and his finger would tighten and I'd be finished.

'Ignatov,' I said. 'You didn't understand what we were saying, did you, Viktor and I?'

'No.'

The little Moskvich rattled to a halt a dozen yards away and its lights went out.

'He offered me a deal,' I said over my shoulder. 'He said he'd let me leave Moscow if I gave him my word not to tell anyone where he is.'

'Don't turn round,' he said, and I could hear that he meant it. I suppose the Moskvich was worrying him: it might be a friend of Schrenk's or someone he knew, and they might come over for a chat.

'I refused the deal,' I said. 'But I think that was unwise. I'd like to reconsider.' I wanted time.

'The Syrena,' he said. There was a note of warning in his voice.

'If Viktor knew I was ready to accept the deal, he'd prefer it that way. We've worked together, you know. He must have told you.' More than anything I wanted time.

'He told me nothing.'

A man got out of the Moskvich and crunched across the snow. He didn't look in our direction. In the quiet of the night the distant tram went on droning. My senses had become finely tuned in the last few minutes and I was acutely aware of the environment.

'Viktor and I are good friends,' I said over my shoulder, 'that's why we all had a drink before we started talking. It's just that he thinks I want to stop this little protest he's going to make — you know, about Borodinski. You can quite understand how I feel about it now. I'd like to reconsider the deal he offered me. I want to talk to him again.'

My voice sounded odd in the silence of the car park, the voice of a man talking to himself. 'Viktor would come down very hard on you if he ever found out I was finally ready to do the deal with him.' Time. Give me time.

But it meant nothing, except that a drowning man was grasping at straws, worse, fabricating them out of thin air. Ignatov didn't bother to answer. The Syrena was twenty feet away from me now and I was walking straight towards it. With my head still turned I couldn't tell if he'd come any closer to me; I didn't think so; I think he was still walking in my footprints, hoping to keep the deep snow out of his shoes.

Fifteen feet.

Ten.

The car stood broadside on. The passenger's door was closed, just as I'd left it when I'd cut the scarf from his wrists and ankles and let him get out. The keys would still be in the ignition: I hadn't been concerned about them at the time because I'd seen that the man hobbling across the car park was Schrenk.

'Open the door,' Ignatov said from behind me. His voice faded a little as he spoke: he'd stopped, to keep a safe distance between us when I opened the door.

Thought was becoming rarefied, and reality slipped out of focus: I nearly asked him who was going to drive. The Syrena looked bigger than it had before, a large brown container for the body, snow covering its roof like a white pall and a dead man's face in the window: my own reflection.

Take him out to your car and when he is inside it, shoot him dead.

The night was totally still. I could feel the cold creeping into my left foot, and smell the faint residue of the exhaust gas the Moskvich had left on the air. A long way off I could see the glint of a gold dome: one of the churches, with an illuminated red star at the tip of a spire. Beyond it the sky was black. In the immediate environment I saw my pale reflection in the window of the Syrena and Ignatov's crooked shadow across the bodywork. There was no one else in the car park, so he would have taken the gun from his pocket by now, in order to shoot accurately.

'Open the door,' he told me again. His voice was still heavy and authoritative, and there was something else there now, distinct but difficult to define. I think it was a kind of awe: my heightened awareness told me that he had never killed a man before.

I opened the door, and the snow fell away.

'Get in.'

I did as he told me. He was still six feet away from the side of the car and he wouldn't come any closer, in case I tried to attack him at the last minute. I was right: the gun was now in his hand, and I saw him lift it to eye level and hold it forward so that he could line up the sights.

'Wind the window down,' he said. 'Hurry.'

He wanted to get it done with before anyone else drove into the car park. I turned the cheap aluminium handle and the window went down in a series of jerks, sticking on the rubber flanges and then freeing.

'Shut the door.'

The keys were still in the ignition and I tugged them out as I dragged the door shut and flung them hard into his face and kicked away from the door to give me the impetus for a horizontal dive that took me clear of the steering wheel with my right fist punching the horn to provide sound shock and my left hand wrenching at the driver's door handle and the main force of the momentum sending me through the gap as the door burst open and the retaining strap broke and the panel smashed back against the bodywork. The first shot ruffled the sleeve of my coat and shattered the window: he'd shouted something, maybe a cry of alarm because of the horn, and the soft wet phutt of the silencer came an instant afterwards. I was into the snow and lurching on to my feet and losing balance and trying to find it again.

If I went underneath the car I'd be a sitting duck so I feinted to the right with my head and shoulders visible to him through the shattered window and dropped and span the other way with the sickening rush of a close shot fanning my temple. There was a row of cars immediately behind the Syrena and I went hard for cover and slipped on the snow and crashed down and dug my heels in and went forward again and reached the front end of a snow-covered Pobeda before he loosed the third shot and hit a headlamp and sprayed me with glass and fired again and hit my shoulder before I could use full cover. The 9 mm. Smith and Wesson had eight shots in the magazine and he'd used four and I'd have to remember to go on counting because that could become critical if I lived through the next few minutes.

He was taking it badly. He was a family man and too well fed and I'd been picking away at his nerves ever since I'd got him alone in the underground car park, threatening to pitch him out of the Syrena on our way here, so forth. The work I'd done on his carotid and medial nerves had worried him and the strike I'd used on him in Schrenk's apartment must still be giving him pain. He knew me well enough to realize that if he slipped on the snow and I got to him before he could aim and fire I might kill him out of hand. A professional hunter would have used this experience to his own advantage and move well away from the quarry and take careful aim before putting in the final accurate shot. This man was not a professional hunter: he was afraid of the creature he had to exterminate and his fear confused him. He'd already wasted four shots: half the entire magazine.

But of course he only needed one, even a lucky one, to drop me cold.

I'd lost sight of him and that was dangerous but he wouldn't know that. I was crouched under cover of the Pobeda and all he had to do was lie flat and take aim and smash one of my ankles to subdue me and stop me running but he hadn't thought of that: because of his fear he was thinking more about being attacked than attacking me. I was beginning to know him.

Then I saw his face and as the gun flashed my shoes slipped and dug in and I went sideways and then forwards, hurling myself towards the car immediately behind and feeling the bite as a bullet scored a neck muscle and smashed into the bodywork of the car alongside. I ran hard but it was open ground and my feet were slipping as the cold air pumped into my lungs and froze the neck wound as I lunged for the pickup truck in the corner and slipped again and hit the front wing and went down with one foot dragging and my back exposed. I could hear him following and I think he slipped once and went down because his breath grunted out and there was a scuffling sound; then I was behind the truck and moving towards its rear, backing and facing the way I'd come.

I couldn't hear him now.

Blood was seeping into the collar of my coat from the neck wound. The shoulder had been oozing and filling the sleeve but there was no artery hit or I would have weakened by this time; my left arm was still usable and there was no other damage. I stood in a half crouch, listening to the silence. He would be dose to the truck, on the other side: from here I could see the open ground I'd run across and he wasn't there. He had two more shots left in the magazine and he might be aware of that: he wouldn't like it but he'd now have to stalk me at close range and make sure of a lethal hit when he fired next. I didn't want to lie flat and sight for his feet underneath the truck because I'd be too vulnerable if he rushed me; I had to rely on auditory cues alone for information but they wouldn't be very strong: his breathing and the brittle sound of the snow when he moved. For the moment I heard nothing; the night was grave quiet.

The snow was fresh in the lee of the truck and I scooped it into my hands and compressed it, making a snowball, kneading it until it was heavy and iron-hard. I would need to blind him or hit the wound on his temple if I were going to do any good but there'd be no time to aim before he fired and he wouldn't fire until I was securely in his sights: he had learned from the uselessness of those six shots. I waited, with the snowball gradually melting through my fingers.

He was moving now: I heard the faint crunching of snow from the front of the truck. It was a risk but I dropped flat and sighted along the underside of the truck and saw his face and the blossoming flash of the shot and heard the fluting rush of air against my jaw as I twisted over and reached for the tailboard and pulled myself up with my left hand slipping because of the blood, my shoulder flaring with sudden pain as I flexed it: the bullet had lodged there close to the bone.

Seven. But I was scared now because he was getting close and he knew he'd have to make it for certain with the last shot. I lowered my feet to the snow again because he wouldn't shoot to maim at this stage. The snowball was resting on the surface and I picked it up and pressed it harder and put it on the metal footrest below the tailboard and stopped and made another one and held it ready, listening.

He didn't move. I thought I could see the top of his head, a dark patch in the corner of the truck's windscreen; but I was sighting through the rear window of the cab and the image was indistinct: it could be the driving mirror or the corner of a roof in the distance. The whole truck was sliding to one side and then lifting silently — watch it — and I fell forward against the tailboard and took a deep breath until the scene steadied, losing more blood than I'd thought, getting light-headed. I tried to drop flat again to see where his feet were but the scene started rocking badly and I straightened up and held the snowball against the neck wound to slow the bleeding.

Something below me and I looked down. Blood on the snow, black in the acid light of the street lamps. Nothing else to attract the attention, no sound from him. He mustn't know. He mustn't know about the blood because I couldn't do much to stop it until I was out of range and all he'd have to do was to wait it out until it left my brain, quietly draining, while the scene shifted and swung and turned over on me and I hit the snow and he came to stand over me, phutt… finis.

I would have to make him fire again for the last time. He hadn't moved yet, or I would have heard his shoes on the dry snow; he would be waiting for me to move first, waiting and listening. He was right-handed and if he moved he would circle the truck anticlockwise with his gun-hand leading; but he didn't move. It worried me. I made another snowball, a bigger one, black and white in the green unearthly glow of the street lamps, blood and snow, pressing it harder, the dark stain spreading across its surface as the truck tilted and went down, dipping and rising and oh Christ I'm leaving it too late, steadying, a deep breath, I would have to find him in the next sixty seconds while there was enough blood left to feed the brain, Ignatov where are you, the pain flaring again in the shoulder as I fell flat and stared into the narrow gap between the truck's chassis and the snow.

He wasn't there.

The ball of ice freezing my hand, the scene shifting again as I got to my knees and then to my feet. He wasn't there, that was all right, I could go now and try to get someone to look at my — watch what you're doing and think for God's sake think because he's -

Towering over me, stark against the street lamps with his feet on the step of the cab and the gun coming into the aim a short range, snowball, all the strength I had left and it flew upwards against the flash and struck his face but I was spinning round and going down again hitting the snow and bouncing with the pain bursting in the shoulder and the truck's angular shape rocking against the sky and the blood coming into my head again and bringing consciousness back, scaring me because there were sudden intervals of amnesia and I couldn't remember if that was the seventh or the eighth shot, but he didn't fire again and I managed to grab his foot as he dropped from the metal step and tried to start running. He came down full length and I put him out with a neck strike that would leave him alive because all I had to do was to stop him going to the nearest telephone before I could get clear.

The keys of the Syrena took a long time to find in the snow, two or three blackouts, the shoulder burning alive, but found them, the keys, all right.

I called the Embassy from the underground garage and got Bracken direct at Ext. 7. Speech code for Schrenk, Apt. 15 Pavilion, Baumanskaja, told him they'd have to be quick. And pick me up.

Then I walked through the concrete columns and up the ramp and found the Pobeda where I'd left it, got in and sat waiting, might hit something if I drove any more. I hoped they wouldn't be long, blood on the phone down there, whole trail of it, someone might notice. Dizzy and getting thirsty, singing in the ears, dark coming and going. Hurry.