Paris, France
Iron sipped at his coffee and watched the crowds milling past him along L’Avenue des Champs-Élysées. The blue, Gauloises branded, umbrella under which he was sitting, fluttered in the pleasant evening breeze which gusted down the hill from L’Arc de Triomphe.
No sign yet.
His table, nestled in amongst the other locals and tourists, was ideally placed at one end of the sizeable pavement cafe. He’d picked a different table tonight. Maybe some of that training shit would be useful? It had certainly helped him during his evening soirees into the suburbs. The Clio was filling up nicely. Fair brimming with precious metals. A nice little bit of smelting, somewhere quiet, and he’d be well set. ‘Maybe I’ll head off to the Costa del Sol to start with?’ he thought to himself. A bit of sunshine would be nice. Perhaps he should get himself a pad down there? First though, he needed to get this job done.
Iron looked at his watch. His target should have appeared by now. What if the little piece of shit had moved on? Had he pissed off, out of Paris?
The worries vanished in a sudden flush of excitement as he spied a little olive-skinned man ducking in and out amongst the ambling tourists in the distance. The dude was a short-f*cker, only about five-foot high, and he tended to drift in and out of sight as he came wandering down the street. It had been the same each evening for the last two nights and made it tricky to keep an eye on him, but Iron knew his target was heading here, to this little cafe. His little, bald, friend made a habit of coming here. This would be the third evening on the trot.
Iron’s tip-off had been a brief message on his cell, “Be at the top of the Champs-Élysées.” Yes, since then, his little mate had made a terminal habit of coming here to eat. He seemed to have several bad habits. One of them was that he always had snails to start with.
Iron grimaced at the thought of eating something so disgusting. ‘Well, the little brown slugs can sleep easier tonight,’ he thought. ‘This geezer ain’t gonna be a threat to them for much longer.’
The target vanished again amongst the pedestrians. Where was he?
Iron casually reached into his light sports jacket and grasped the hand grip of the piece he’d been given by his dopey employers. Unmarked, they’d said. Untraceable. Low calibre but hollow-point ammo. Nasty.
“Don’t waste the killing rounds while you’re practicing with it,” the white-haired geezer had said.
Well, he hadn’t wasted anything practicing. Not even a minute of his time. It was a f*cking gun, wasn’t it? Point and pull. Practicing was for queers. He was just going to pop this guy and leg it in the panic that would follow. He’d be out of the city in no time. A proper hit. No pratting around.
The target appeared again. Really close and, for some reason, looking straight at him.
Wanker... Go on then. Have a good look, you arse-hole.
Iron stared back and the target suddenly crouched to tie his shoe laces.
The milling crowds split like the Nile before Moses and flowed around the small human obstruction. Iron loosened the pistol in its holster. Got ready to pull it out and send this f*cker to whatever afterlife he may or may not believe in. F*ck the crowds. F*ck secrecy. It was time to get this stupid job done. What would those f*cking amateurs know about a hit? Yeah... that’s it: f*ck all!
For a second the crowds thinned. Then were gone.
His target was still stooping down.
Iron leapt to his feet, his aluminium chair clattering to the ground behind him, and started to pull the pistol from its holster.
The little dude’s arms were crossed, held out just in front of his crouched chest. He was holding something long in one of his hands.
It was pointing at him.
Iron saw a flash and his last conscious perception was of a small coughing noise as his brains erupted out of the back of his head and the shattered remnants, of whatever small intelligence he’d had, sprayed themselves violently into the fabric canopy above him.
~~~~~
“In the middle of the CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES!” Greere sounded apoplectic, even given the muffling effect of the encrypted cellphone transmission.
“Yes, sir,” Ellard could imagine Greere waving his arms around, bug-eyes bulging even further out of his face. Sometimes spittle formed round the edges of Greere’s mouth when he went off on one. That spit could fly in any direction. Ellard had taken to keeping well clear during rants. Here, in Paris, heading swiftly yet casually up the aforementioned avenue toward Place Charles de Gaulle Étoile and its towering pale stone archway, was about as close to his boss as he wanted to get right now. “I was in another cafe on the other side of the road. Watching him. I’d assumed he was looking to tail the target. I planned to intercept him when he started moving. He didn’t clock me, even though I was in the wide open and paying him more attention than an underemployed hooker on rent day.”
“He hadn’t cased the local environment?”
“Nope. The street is busy, as usual for this time of the evening. I had no idea he was going to try something here, in the middle of the city. He couldn’t have picked a worse or more public spot.”
“Where is he NOW?” Greere almost screamed the question.
“Most of him is next to the table he was sitting at, surrounded by gendarmes.”
“F*ck! Dead?”
“Very. It was a clean head-shot to his face. Blew him straight backwards and his brains are all over the place. The target got up, cool as a cucumber, and wandered off down toward Place de la Concorde in the surrounding mêlée. I’m not pursuing.”
“F*ck!”
“I’m going to find his stolen car and try to get this cleaned up a bit, before the gendarmes start sniffing around and try to trace him backwards. With luck, no-one will connect the target to the shooting. Looks like a clean kill from here. The target was keeping himself obscured amongst the sightseers and shoppers. I don’t think they’ll get much, even from CCTV.
“My plan is to get to his hotel room,” Ellard continued, “to stick some of Iron’s local thievery in there and then to find and dump the car. Can you send the wipe code to his mobile – the idiot might be carrying it for all I know – and also an anonymous text with a few local gangsters names and numbers in it? There’s every chance, sir, that we can make this look like a simple gangland hit or, if not, we can at least make them waste valuable time chasing the false leads.”
“Good thinking, Deuce. I’m checking the recent DCRI Flash Reports right now. I remember seeing the names of a couple of French Most-Wanteds in them. Let’s see if we can give our colleagues over there an unexpected break.”
Ellard nodded as he listened. As far as he was concerned, there was no harm in trying to stitch up some other bad guys.
“But Iron’s mother will have to rot,” Greere continued. “Regrettable, after what she’s already lived through.” Greere didn’t sound all too bothered.
“Erm, no need for conscience there either, sir.”
“Why?”
“His story’s been bugging me for a while, so on the way over here I put a ‘concerned neighbour’ call in to the local plod in Hastings. I kept it deliberately vague, then watched out for any reports.”
“And?”
“It was posted this morning. Plod got no response at the house, checked round the place, checked the neighbours – who of course denied all knowledge of the tip off call – checked again and could just make out what looked like someone, sitting in one of the front room chairs. They said there was a rotten stink around the place too. So, they broke down the front door and found good old mummy sitting there, dead for at least three months. It’s good to know that us Brits keep an eye out for our old people, eh?”
“Him?”
“Probably. Same M.O. as the old couple from his last robbery: head caved in with a heavy object. The body was too far gone for any meaningful analysis but Plod makes mention that there’s not a brass farthing left in the place. Stripped clean. Sounds familiar, huh?”
“F*ck.”
“Oh, and one other thing. Decomposed or not, I don’t think Plod would have written: ‘She was dressed normally: shoes, trousers, blouse and cardigan’, if she’d had no legs...”
“FUUUUCKKKKINGGGG BASSTTTTAAA...”
Ellard clicked off the call – he’d put it down to a bad connection if he had too. Then dropped the phone into his jacket pocket and headed up an alleyway to the small backstreet hotel’s rusting iron fire escape. With luck, it would get him into the lying bastard's hotel room...
~~~~~
Murat Nagpal scuttled left along Rue Washington, through the underpass to Rue de Monceau and onward until he was a safe distance away from the Champs-Élysées. Then, in a little deserted backstreet, he slipped behind a couple of communal dumpsters and withdrew his arm and the Makarov nine-millimetre pistol from where it was hidden inside his sports jacket. He carefully kept the weapon obscured by his coat while he unscrewed the silencer and slipped it into one side pocket. The gun went in the other to balance the weight out.
With a quick glance up and down the street, he casually strode out onto the pavement and made his way along until he came to a solitary pay-phone in front of the whitewashed glass window of a closed-down patisserie.
A glance into the window’s ghostly reflection assured him that there were no followers, so he punched a nondescript German landline number into the phone’s keypad and waited until the answering machine cut in...
“It’s me,” he said calmly to the machine in Turkmen. “They’re close. Watch your backs. I just had to put one down here. It’s messy. They may be tracking the cellphones – switch them all off. We change to Exit Plan Delta and meet me at Rendezvous Location B.”
He put the pay-phone’s handset down and, with extreme caution, headed to the Place de Cichy Metro, and then south to Maison Blanche and the Parisian YMCA, to collect up his always-ready backpack. It would be fastest if he caught a train from Gare du Nord, but to get there would mean he’d have to almost identically retrace his steps, back across the city. No. He’d head south to start with, and find some way to cut across to the east later on. Gare du Lyon was walkable from here.
~~~~~
Ellard searched the hotel room. There were several bags scattered around, all stuffed full with local loot. One of them was a plain-black Salomon snowboard bag which, when unzipped, revealed the silverware reported missing from the mountain chalet.
A sudden buzzing noise, from near the unmade bed, startled him and he span round with his gun drawn, but it was only the moron’s mobile phone tucked into the bedside cabinet’s inner shelf.
“Looks like you did one thing right,” Ellard muttered as he recovered the device from its crevice and re-holstered his weapon. The phone was just restarting itself so with his gloved fingers he worked through a few of the icons, including the picture files, to make sure it was clean. It was. It buzzed again in his hand. Some random text from one of the UK Network Operators about charges whilst in France and then again, from some French number, a list of names and phone numbers. He left the phone on the text screen and chucked it onto the middle of the mattress.
Carefully and quietly he went over every inch of the room. No other telltales.
He grabbed the board bag, ducked quietly back out of the sash window, and then drew the glass gently down until the window was neatly closed behind him.
He found the Renault Clio parked a couple of streets away. It was the right car, even though Iron had apparently swapped the number plates at some point. Ellard checked it quickly for booby traps – none – lifted the hatchback door – empty – and threw in the board-bag. As with the clumsily screwdriver-forced door locks, the interior of the car betrayed Iron’s thievery with the wiring loom hanging as a confused tangle from the steering column. Fortunately the regularly used, stripped back, starter motor wires were easy to spot.
Ellard started the car and drove off, out of the city, in search of somewhere safe to get rid of it.
~~~~~
Barfold
Grey Beard is back. And Dad. And you. And Elizabeth.
I don’t mind you and Lizzie coming to see me.
I can just about put up with Dad.
But, Grey Beard, come on! I’m having enough trouble sleeping without your gruesome visage cropping up every night. Leave me alone. Please! I’m very sorry you’re dead. I’m sorry you’re all dead...
I can see your sweet lips moving, my darling Iuli. So are Dad’s. And Grey Beard’s... You all seem to be mouthing the same thing. Silently. Over and over again. “Do the right thing... Do the right thing...”
Lizzie waves her little hand.
I wish I was dead too.
~~~~~
Berlin
Jeyhun Farhad Ebrahimi sat on his solitary metal chair and stared nervously at the light blinking on top of the answering machine. The machine sat, oblivious to his undivided attention, on top of a battered wooden desk which – apart from a mouldy mattress, a crumpled sleeping bag, Jeyhun’s backpack, and a solitary chair – was the only furniture in the huge shadowy loft-space. Dusty light struggled in from a single, circular, glass window set into the gable-end wall of the abandoned warehouse. The rest of the loft was bathed in semi-permanent darkness.
The answering machine’s wire trailed off the table, across an expanse of bare floorboards and continued, an ongoing straggle of cable, to the top of an iron staircase at the dim, windowless, end of the cavernous room. The cable disappeared into this hole and dropped, vertically and entirely unattached, three floors to the distribution box near the single back door. The local Deutsche Telekom telephone engineer had never had an easier installation: some young, well tanned, foreign man had met him by the door and had asked him to point out which pair of screw terminals the line was on, for a reel of cable and a socket, and then thrown him out...
Jeyhun pushed himself up from the chair, stomped three short paces to the table and pressed play again. “They’re close. Watch your backs...,” the recorded message sounded bad.
‘Come on Sergei, come on, you must call in,’ he thought as he roughly pushed his long black hair to one side and glanced at the copies of Bild stacked on the table. Copies of newspapers he’d bought shortly after the attack.
He pulled one nearer to him and, still standing, started turning the dog-eared pages. Time and time again he’d flicked through these copies. Looked upon the victims faces staring up from the pages. Read about the fury and anger directed toward them. Seen the news that their helpers, in the UK, had been arrested. Examined the pictures of the devastation in front of Victoria Station. Wondered whether his brother had known, any better than he had, what Murat and Azat had meant when they’d said they were putting together a glorious strike at the heart of his country’s enemies. A strike that they’d said would really put Khandastan on the map for all time.
Well, whatever he’d been expecting, it hadn’t been this.
The young man’s shoulders shuddered, his head dropped, and a teardrop splashed off the table edge beneath him.
~~~~~
Madrid, Spain
Jack stood up, flexed his stiff legs, grabbed his pack from the chair beside him and stepped off the train.
Passing swiftly, and inconspicuously, through the ticket barriers, he made his way out of the main entrance to Madrid’s Atocha Station, turned right and headed along the footpath. The grandiose façade of the Ministry of Agriculture building shone whitely in the hot sunshine. After a few hundred metres he stopped at an unoccupied phone box and made a call.
“I’m here,” he said, leaning closely into the small booth.
“Took your time, Tin,” came the response.
It sounded like his bug-eyed boss speaking. Code-named Ace.
‘The albino must be in the field for the slime-ball to be answering the phones,’ Jack thought to himself. ‘I wonder where?’ He glanced up and down the street again. He couldn’t see anyone suspicious.
“Whatever,” he said calmly into the phone. “And now?”
“Hold your position. Check into a hotel. Somewhere quiet. Keep your cell on. We’ll call you. Change hotels every few days.”
“Roger that.”
Jack hung up, swung his pack onto his broad back, and wandered off in search of lodgings.
~~~~~
Berlin
Jeyhun was curled up, on the edge of restless sleep, when a series of angry squawks from the answering machine made him leap up in panic. For a second or two, he wildly brandished his pistol around the loft space until he worked out what was making the noise. Now, he stood in the pitch-blackness, fully clothed, with his sleeping bag round his ankles, as he listened to the machine’s automated message playing out.
“Come on, Sergei,” Jeyhun whispered to himself.
He could hear a clatter of background noise coming from the machine’s tiny speaker. It sounded like a bar. Then a series of tones played out as the caller keyed the remote access code.
“You have one message,” announced the buff-coloured box. “Message one: ‘It’s me. They’re close. Watch your backs. I just had to put one down here. It’s messy. They may be tracking the cellphones – switch them all off. We change to Exit Plan Delta and meet me at Rendezvous Location B’... No more messages.”
Jeyhun instinctively leaned toward the machine as he strained to listen. For a couple of seconds there was nothing but the continued buzz of unintelligible chatter then someone closer to the phone yelled, “Dos cervezas, por favo...” The line went dead.
The call was from Spain. It was Azat, not Sergei. Jeyhun’s head dropped in disappointment and the machine plunged the room back into darkness.
~~~~~
London
“I think I’ve blown it,” she murmured sadly.
The muscular man heaved himself onto his side to face her. “What do you mean, Shaz?” he asked, surprised and concerned at her sudden melancholy.
“They’re going to get the little bastard off, because I clobbered him,” Sharinda replied.
He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
Manjeethra stroked her hand through the hairs on his chest and let her fingers run down into the softer fur near his groin. “We’ll see,” she muttered. “I feel really bad for the families.”
“You shouldn’t. You did your job. You can’t hold yourself responsible. It’ll tear you apart.”
“Says the voice of experience?” She stared deeply into his warm mahogany eyes and wondered what awful secrets they had witnessed over the years.
“Something like that.” He said and reached out to wrap his strong arms supportively round her naked shoulders.
~~~~~
Sermiers, France
Ellard squinted in the late morning sunlight as he lounged against the side of an old phone-box. “The car’s burned out, on some waste ground, just outside Paris.”
“The silverware?” asked Greere.
“At the bottom of some reservoir I passed.” Ellard replied matter-of-factly, whilst gently hefting the heavy Salomon bag which was hanging from his shoulder. “That stuff’s gone forever.”
“Good. So it’s all cleaned up then? No trail.”
“As best we can. Any chatter from the French?” Ellard was keen to find out whether he was being pursued.
“Nope. Looks like they took the bait and are chasing after our false leads.”
“I’m going to lie low for a day or so, then head for Berlin. After this mess, I want to check on Army Boy.”
“You’re not comfortable with this whole concept are you, Deuce?”
Ellard could sense more than a modicum of threat in the question. “I just want to check on things, sir,” he replied pointedly.
“Of course,” said Greere and hung up.
Ellard frowned, replaced the pay-phone receiver, and wandered over the road to the village’s solitary bus stop. As he walked, his tightly packed clothes neatly prevented his weapons from rattling against the valuables inside the board bag. It was about another thirty minutes by bus to his little French crash pad.
He was looking forward to spending a night there.
He needed to make sure his little pension fund was all still safely in its hiding place, and to introduce it to these latest new additions. ‘Best to make sure you regularly put something away for your retirement,’ his old man had always said.
~~~~~
London
Greere frowned...
Why had Ellard elected to use a landline, given that his cellphone was fully encrypted? What was he trying to hide...? Was the lazy bastard skiving-off somewhere...?
He picked up his desk phone and dialled one of the building’s many covert technical units.
“This is Brigadier Greere,” he announced. “Please get me an urgent location trace on Lieutenant Colonel Ellard’s secure cellphone. Mission in progress, so be very careful how you go about it. Report back only to me.”
He knew that, even with discretion, the chances were that the cellphone would need to be scrapped afterwards. Ellard’s device would currently be somewhere on one of France’s radio networks.
“Ah, and send me up a replacement unit for him.”
~~~~~
Berlin
Steel sat, cross-legged again, in front of the wall of glass. There were no knives being sharpened tonight. He sat motionless. Entranced.
All across the skyline, brilliant fireworks were rising from unseen fuses. Fizzing into the clear blackness, leaving wafer-thin trails of tiny orange and yellow sparkling ashes, before exploding into magnificent temporal flowers of coloured light. Huge red and orange bursts erupted in front of the penthouse. Great white and blue expanding dishes exploded further behind.
He didn’t know what the big event was, and he didn’t care.
He’d been told to hold position.
His target was here, somewhere in the expanse of humanity sprawled in front of him. When the target broke cover, Steel would be told. When the target broke cover, the target would die.
But Steel wasn’t thinking about his target right now.
He wasn’t even watching the fireworks.
His shoulders, arms, and feet are twitching. Jerking as his muscles clench in time with the bangs and whistles from outside.
His expression is one of pure fury.
His eyes are glazed with much more than a thousand-yard stare.
Steel is back on the battlefield.
A place his mind can never completely leave behind.
He has, of course, developed another convincing personality which he presents to the civilian world. He has, of course, learned to do this very well. Certainly, this façade has been effective enough to persuade Ace and Deuce to take him on. To get him back into action.
But deeper still, in the world where he really lives, his comrades scream in perpetual agony. Hissing FMJ rounds whistle past his ears. Mortar bursts fall closer and closer to his position.
“I must hold position,” he mutters, twitching and jerking, with his hot breath misting the glassy panes in front of him.
~~~~~
Jeyhun stood at the circular window, watching the fireworks raging across the near-distant skyline of the city. He stood there, in the multicoloured darkness, until his legs got so tired that he had to go and grab the metal chair and drag it over.
He sat there all night.
Dawn crept back over the city and its feeble rays started to ease their lazy dust-strewn way into the loft-space. He hadn’t eaten since the call two nights ago, and his stomach grumbled noisily as he sat with his head in his hands.
The newspapers were sprawled in a huge arc on the floor around his feet. They started to become visible in the increasing brightness and he swept them angrily off to one side. Where was his brother? Was he dead? Why hadn’t he called in yet? Murat’s message had said that their enemies were close. Killing was happening. Had they already killed his only family?
Part of him felt as if he wouldn’t blame them if they had.
He had never imagined that they were going to kill so many people with their bomb. He had never imagined he wasn’t going to see Hossein again, after he’d driven off in the van with that mad-crazy look in his eyes.
Jeyhun had often thought that there was something seriously wrong with Hossein – a mad-crazy look had been the man’s most usual expression – but Jeyhun hadn’t known that the lunatic was heading for London that day. On a one way trip.
There must have been something else they could have blown up?
Why so many people?
He got up, walked over to the desk, and pressed the button on the answer-machine again. To check it was still working.
It was.
Where was Sergei? The guys were supposed to dial-in to this machine every other day – every three days at the most – to check for latest instructions and information. It had been four days...
As part of the original getaway plan, and even now under the revised protocols, Jeyhun’s task was to stay here and guard the box. He had to keep out of sight. To use cash – he had a large wad of Euros in his rucksack. To go out at night for provisions. To vary his buying locations and dump any trash in different bins whilst on the same journey. He was instructed to make contact with no-one. To draw no attention to himself.
“Easy,” they’d said.
“You’re the one of us with the lowest profile,” they’d said.
“You’ve only been with us for a little while,” they’d said.
“They’re not watching you,” they’d said.
“It’s an important role for you,” Sergei had said, before hugging him, clapping him soundly on the shoulder, and heading for his scheduled flight to Stockholm. “Remember: stay hidden until we let you know we’re clear and have reconvened at our assembly point in Budapest. If something happens, we’ll leave a one word message – ‘Icarus’ – which is your instruction to head immediately to the alternative rendezvous, as we discussed.”
He’d wondered, at the time, why they were all in so much of a hurry to get out of the UK. His plane, direct to Berlin’s Tegel airport, had left an hour and fifteen minutes later...
He missed Sergei so much.
He needed to speak to him about what they’d done.
He needed to understand why.
His brother would know. His older brother always knew the answers. He’d be able to explain.
If he wasn’t already dead...
Jeyhun rose swiftly from the table, rushed over to his pack and scrabbled around in it for his cellphone. He pressed the ON button and waited while it sprang back into life – his comrades had been very explicit: ‘Leave your phone off. We’ll use the machine to talk to you. Make sure you get one with a speaker,’ they had said.
His brother’s number was there, staring up at him, ‘TWENTY-TWO’. All of the phone’s numbers were labelled like this. One hundred of them, each named as a number: ONE +447865123879, TWO +442081114598. All but five of these numbers were entirely made up. One of these was now useless: its owner, and phone, atomised in a foreign land. One of them was his brother’s number. His heart was hammering in his chest as he pressed dial and waited, with perspiration beading on his dark forehead, until the ringing stopped.
“Yes?” His brother’s voice sounded alarmed, he only expected the most urgent of incoming calls.
“Sergei, it’s me,” he whispered quickly.
“What’s wrong, brother?” exclaimed his sibling. Jeyhun could hear a dull rumbling noise in the background. “Why are you calling me?”
“There’s a message,” he stammered. “I was worried... You haven’t called.”
“I’m okay, my brother. I’m hitching a ride across the Baltic on a very slow fishing boat but cut this call now and switch your phone off! I’ll dial in later when I hit port!”
“Oh,” Jeyhun felt his face flushing hot with sudden shame and embarrassment.
“Garashsyzlyk Khandastan!” his brother declared confidently. In English it translated to: Independent Khandastan. It was their private rallying cry.
“Garashsyzlyk Khandastan!” the teenager repeated automatically. Then, more quietly, he asked, “Did you know how many would be made dead?”
There was a short pause “My dear brother, you were always the kindest one.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Thanks for worrying about me. I love you, man...,” the line went dead.
~~~~~
London
Greere called Ellard immediately. “Got him,” he said simply.
“Berlin?” asked Ellard, who was driving toward the city in a rental car.
“Berlin. Are you there yet?”
“Yep. Nearly. How did the target reveal?”
“The idiot finally fired up his cellphone. Then rang one of the others. He used as many key words as he could think of. I’ll bet every agency on the planet has lit up like Christmas Trees.”
“His brother?”
“How did you guess? Steel needs to go in quickly, in case he realises his mistake and scarpers.”
“Or another agency moves on him.”
“Exactly. I’m activating Steel. I’ll send you the coordinates. Be ready to meet Steel afterwards...”
~~~~~
Berlin
It was almost midnight by the time Jeyhun picked his last fry from the bottom of the red cardboard carton. He’d been so hungry. Now finished, he stuffed the wrappers and paper into the brown paper bag they’d been served in, and made his way through the darkness to the top of the stairs.
~~~~~
In the black shadows at the rear of the deserted three-storey warehouse, Steel sprayed a quick burst of aerosol lubricant into the door mechanism, then gently tried the handle. It was unlocked.
Steel smiled to himself.
This was going to be an easy mission.
Gently, gently, he eased the door ajar. It opened inwards. Not a sound from the hinges.
He fed the spray-can’s straw into the frame and, using car noise from around the front of the building as cover, gave all three hinges a good spray.
The building was bathed in darkness. Maybe the target was out?
Maybe that was why the back door wasn’t locked?
He listened hard in the gap. Not a sound.
Moving quickly he eased the door open a fraction, squeezed his powerful body through and gently closed it again behind him.
~~~~~
At the top of the stairs, a new bin-liner waited patiently for Jeyhun’s rubbish. He rooted around in the darkness, with his hand, until he found the top of it and then dropped the crumpled paper bag inside. Whilst he was bent over, the briefest of flashes of streetlight, in the normally pitch-black depths of the warehouse, caught his eye.
What was that?
He edged to the decrepit iron railing which wound itself round the hole, and peered down into the blackness. In the dim streetlight which crept into the lower floors through the warehouse’s painted-out windows, he could just make out the white straggly line of the phone cable trailing downwards. Other than that he could see nothing.
He shook his head and made his way over to his mattress.
~~~~~
‘So then, where are you, little dead man?’ Steel thought to himself as he pulled down his night vision goggles.
A telephone cable led untidily from the open junction box next to the door, so he quickly broke the wires from the screw terminals and let the end drop silently to the floor at his feet. There would be no calling for help.
~~~~~
The answering machine made a single bleeping sound on the table. Jeyhun had never heard it make that kind of noise before?
He got up and walked, with the confidence of many hours of solitary occupation, back across the dark loft to the table. An odd little red light was glowing on the machine. He hadn’t seen that before either? The light was labelled: Battery Power.
Snatching up the receiver, he checked the line. Dead.
Shit.
The iron stairs creaked.
Only very quietly.
But they definitely creaked.
~~~~~
The telephone cable trailed across the floor and disappeared upwards in the middle of an old twisting iron staircase: presumably these stairs led to the upper floors. Steel placed one hand gently onto the staircase but the old metal creaked. Carefully he stepped back again. He’d sweep the ground floor first...
~~~~~
Jeyhun rushed over to his bedding and picked up his handgun. His heart was hammering in his chest. They were here. They were coming to get him. Somehow he had failed his simple assignment. He had let his comrades and his brother down. He was going to be captured...
He listened as hard as he could. The staircase was silent again and, other than occasional cars, passing the front of the building, there was no other noise from downstairs.
Had he been imagining things? Making ghosts where none existed?
He clicked the small eight shot magazine out of the ageing Makarov’s handgrip and checked it was full, then slotted it back in with a metallic click.
He wasn’t at all certain that he would be able to shoot anybody with it, but it was reassuring to have the weapon in his hands.
~~~~~
Steel crept amongst the scattering of crates, his rubber-soled shoes silent on the dusty concrete. Then he heard the faint but unmistakeable sound of a magazine being ejected and rammed home again.
He smiled.
The chicken was in the coop after all.
Upstairs.
The conspicuous telephone wire, snaking up into the darkness, would lead like a chalk line to his quarry. He made his way back to the winding staircase and gently started to climb: pausing and waiting for passing cars before each step.
~~~~~
So, why was the line dead? Maybe he hadn’t screwed the wires on tightly enough?
That would be it.
Something simple like that.
Jeyhun glanced toward the stairwell. He’d go down and check... in a little while...
Slowly he extended his arm and practiced sweeping the handgun across the darkened expanse of room. He moved his arm slowly, away from the stairwell, past the dark oblong of the table with the red-glowing machine perched on top of it, past the illuminated shadow of his empty chair, all the way to the circular window...
And then back: window, chair, desk, stairs...
And again: stairs, desk...
~~~~~
Steel eased his head out of the stair-hole on the top floor and could see his target sitting there, childlike, cross-legged, up against the far wall. The kid looked like some kind of green ethereal figure through his night-vision glasses.
The kid was holding a small handgun in front of him and slowly sweeping it back and forth across the space.
Steel watched until the seated figure started turning away from his position, then he began to move up into the loft-space...
~~~~~
...chair, window.
And, more quickly now: window, chair...
~~~~~
The kid was suddenly speeding up!
He was turning back already.
~~~~~
...desk, shadow?
~~~~~
F*ck.
~~~~~
A dark shadow was rising from the stair hole!
Jeyhun jerked backwards in surprise and the gun went off in his hand.
The muzzle of his weapon flared with bright flame and, amongst the deafening bang and sudden burst of acrid smoke, Jeyhun saw a huge alien monster leaping up out of the stair-hole. The creature had a strange mask on its face, with round eyepieces that briefly flared yellow in the splash of cordite-fire. Other than that, the monster was visible only as a sable pool of threatening blackness amongst the gloom.
He fired again.
And again.
And in each muzzle flash, the monster was coming closer.
~~~~~
The first bullet whizzed past Steel’s eardrum with the sound that only high velocity projectiles can make as they blast tiny holes through the air, and for a moment Steel was far away from this dark warehouse. He could see palm trunks and deep green foliage. Large, spreading, dripping, waxy leaves with new holes forming in them. Bullet holes.
Then the second shot from the young kid’s handgun jerked him back to the moment, and he rushed forwards across the space, bringing his weapon to bear.
The third shot from the kid clipped his trailing shoulder, and he roared in anger.
~~~~~
The monster roared.
Jeyhun Ebrahimi realised, with sudden ice-cold certainty, that he was going to die at the hands of this creature.
He pointed at the noise, both shaking hands gripping the gun, and kept on firing.
Sudden intense pain erupted in one of his legs, then his stomach, and then in one arm.
He was surprised at the excruciating sensation of the white-hot penetrations.
~~~~~
Steel’s night-sights flared over with every shot and his own weapon was now adding to the strobing.
He hit the kid in the leg and raised his aim a fraction.
The second bullet hit the kid’s midriff. The third shot hit his arm.
Suddenly Steel felt himself being punched hard in his midriff.
Twice.
Three times.
He started laughing and continued charging forwards.
~~~~~