by David Caris
Kovac checked the street again, then went up onto tippy toes. He cupped his hands to the frosted glass. He looked into a brightly lit foyer. The frosting on the glass wasn’t too severe, and he could make out more inside than he had expected. There was a staircase at the center and two mailboxes off to the right. The lower mailbox was empty, while the top one was overflowing with what looked to be junk mail. To the left of the foyer area, there was an internal ply door. This led into the downstairs apartment, and Kovac felt he could safely assume there was a matching ply door upstairs.
He took a step back and considered his options. He could go round back, but that would inevitably lead to climbing, and climbing always came with a risk of falling. Falling produced injuries – and not the honorable type. More like the self-inflicted, stupid type. Kovac couldn’t afford to end up in hospital for any reason right now. Megan would work to protect his identity following the bombing at the soccer stadium, but sooner or later he was going to end up a wanted man, hunted by police and the media alike.
Falling while attempting a break-in with a Glock and knife wouldn’t help with that…
He reached out and hit the buzzer for the apartment upstairs. And waited.
There was no answer.
He hit it again.
This time it clicked. There was a cautious, ‘Hello?’.
Not drowsy, Kovac noted.
It was a female voice.
So his shortish woman, not his tall man.
‘Samantha Griffin?’ he asked. ‘I’m really sorry to bother you at this late hour, but I’m here on behalf of Curzon International.’
There was a pause. ‘You work for Curzon?’ She sounded skeptical, perhaps on account of the hour.
‘Same as you, that’s right. As you know, we’re facing a bit of a situation. I’ve been told you volunteered information which might be able to assist us with our inquiries…?’
He heard a muted ripping overhead and figured someone was pulling the cardboard clear to get a look at him. He moved back to the knee-high brick wall and waved up. He managed a glimpse of Samantha Griffin before she vanished and the cardboard was pushed back into position.
A moment later she was back on the crackly speaker. ‘How do I know you’re not lying?’
Kovac nodded to himself. A perfectly reasonable question… ‘Well, I know your name for one. I know where you work. And I know you’re trying to help us, which we very much appreciate by the way.’
‘Is that your car?’
‘Which car?’
‘The expensive sportscar there. Open it. Make it light up.’
Kovac took out the fob. He unlocked the Superleggera then locked it again.
‘Okay,’ Griffin said. ‘We can talk down where you are. Wait there for a second, I’m coming down.’
Kovac waited and she arrived a moment later in overly tight jeans and a cardigan. She was barefoot and making adjustments to the cardigan as she unlocked the main door and edged it open. Kovac smiled hello and held up the bottom of his shirt to reveal the pistol, simultaneously putting a foot in the door. Seeing the gun, Griffin pushed hard on the door, which alerted her to Kovac’s foot. It prevented her shutting him out, but she didn’t protest or panic. She simply spun and started sprinting back up the stairs.
She wasn’t a light or particularly fit woman, and Kovac didn’t have to move fast to keep up. He withdrew his pistol as he followed her and had it out and in his right hand when he arrived at the top of the stairs.
Here, he encountered something he hadn’t anticipated. Griffin was locked out of her own apartment. She was trying the metal handle with obvious confusion – confusion that quickly turned to anger.
‘What’s his name?’ Kovac asked, gesturing with his little Glock for Griffin to move aside.
As expected, the door leading into the apartment was light and flimsy. Kovac kicked it in without any real effort. The wood splintered and Griffin pulled back and cowered, half crouching and raising her hands above her head. ‘You first,’ Kovac said, disappointed to see that his tall man hadn’t been hiding behind the door.
Griffin led Kovac into the apartment, still not saying a word. He followed, gun up. His phone started buzzing but he ignored it as he systematically cleared the bathroom, bedroom and living room.
The place was filthy. The entrance hallway and bathroom smelled of urine, and the living area smelled of cigarette smoke. The floor was a mess of fast food packaging, electrical cables and cigarette cartons. There was an upright fan, a couch acting as a bed, and a wonky table with a fish tank.
Only, no fish. It had snakes.
The table, Kovac saw, also had an ashtray full of scrunched cigarette filters, and a collection of brand new laptops, hard drives, flash drives and phones. Kovac had been wrong about the TV. There wasn’t one. It was a computer screen, running some kind of first-person shooter. The character had a rocket launcher and was repeatedly walking into the same wall, over and over again, as if this time maybe it would give.
There was more computer equipment laid out in one incongruously neat corner of the apartment. A camera on a tripod in this same corner suggested Griffin had been filming something, the tighter frame designed to give the impression of a far nicer life than the one she was actually living. The wall was clear and clean, save for a cobweb in the topmost corner and a couple of small holes where picture hooks had once been. There was a green sheet lying scrunched on the ground, which Kovac figured was used to digitally edit out and insert backgrounds.
Kovac took all this in, but none of it was high on his priority list. Priority one was finding his missing tall man, who wasn’t in the bathroom, bedroom or living room. He wasn’t in the open kitchenette, either.
Kovac knew he wasn’t crazy. His tall man definitely existed. On the floor in the living room, there were a pair of Adidas sweatpants that would’ve been too long for a giraffe. There was a duffel bag with socks, underwear, T-shirts and deodorant, too. Men’s deodorant. Kovac figured Griffin and Tall Man were cohabiting, but not as lovers. Tall Man was on the couch, and Griffin was claiming the bedroom.
Tall Man hadn’t left. At least, not via the staircase. Kovac would’ve encountered him that way. A window maybe, but Kovac doubted that, too. Tall Man pushing open a window and jumping or climbing out would’ve made a lot of noise. Unless it had all happened as Kovac was coming up the staircase, he would’ve clued into it.
Even so, he had to be sure. He walked Griffin through the place at gunpoint again, slower this time, checking cupboards and furniture.
Still no Tall Man.
He checked the windows in the living room, then in the bedroom and bathroom again. All were locked from the inside. ‘Still nothing to tell me?’ Kovac said. ‘I mean, the son of a bitch locked you out of your own place…’
She tightened her cardigan and folded her arms huffily, so Kovac shrugged and said: ‘Fine. Let’s go with a process of elimination then.’ He searched the ceiling, but watched Griffin in his peripheral vision. She drifted towards the couch and casually shifted the duffel bag with one foot. ‘Don’t forget his sweatpants,’ Kovac said, keeping his eyes on the ceiling. He focused in on one ceiling panel. It was the same as the rest, save for one crucial difference. There was a chair underneath it.
Kovac pulled a power cable from the nearest socket and used it to tie Griffin to her own wall-mounted radiator. He put a single finger to his lips, indicating for her to be quiet. Then he crossed to the chair and climbed up onto it.
Griffin, watching this from her new, enforced fetal position, finally found her voice. ‘Run!’ she screamed.
Chapter 19
Kovac pushed at the ceiling panel.
Sure enough, it lifted. He flung it up towards the roof.
There was no shooting. No stabbing, either.
But there was something big and heavy up there, and it was suddenly on the move.
He decided to risk it. He gripped at the ceiling frame and – in one smooth, powerful move – did
a muscle-up into the crawlspace. It was dark and musty, but there was a shaft of moonlight from one corner. A skylight.
Tall Man was already leaving. He had opened the skylight and all Kovac saw of him was two legs with sneakers slipping up onto the exterior roof.
Kovac covered the distance from the hatch to the skylight in a crouch, making sure to keep his feet to the building’s frame. The last thing he needed right now was to drop straight back through the ceiling onto Griffin. It was hard going, because the crawlspace was full of shopping bags, which were in turn filled with… what? Too dark to see.
He got to the skylight just as Tall Man dropped it shut. For one short moment, the two of them were staring at one another – albeit through thick glass. Tall Man hovering overhead, looking down, Kovac crouched below, peering up.
Tall Man was white, with small narrow-set eyes that sat under broad eyebrows. His nose was big and badly bent out of shape, suggesting years of boxing, though he couldn’t have been a day older than thirty. Kovac memorized the face, down to the big lips, the small ears and the receding hairline. Then it was all gone.
Kovac was left staring up at moonlit cloud, though the man’s face remained in his mind’s eye for an instant. He was left with a vaguely apish impression. Like a freakishly tall Neanderthal, he thought, pushing on the skylight. He felt it lift, so he kept at it and dragged himself out onto a steep, tiled roof. It was a gable roof, with flat-topped dormer windows set at regular five-foot intervals.
The vertigo hit Kovac hard. It was probably only twenty feet to the little yard and brick fence below, but the roof was steep and the tiles were slippery thanks to the earlier rain. Kovac was back to worrying about dumb injuries and hospital beds.
His Neanderthal was running across the flat dormer windows sticking out of the larger roof, one flat little dormer roof per stride. This meant he had left Griffin’s building behind and was already three buildings on down the terraced row. But when he reached the third to last dormer window, he hit a snag. There was a dormer window missing, breaking the pattern that had enabled him to get a good rhythm going. He came to a stop, overbalancing, before imitating a butterfly swimmer.
There was only steep tile in front of him now. With one dormer window missing, the next dormer window wasn’t five feet away but ten. There was however a skylight just after it. ‘Even with those big long legs,’ Kovac yelled, trying to preempt surrender, ‘you’re trapped. You know it, I know it.’
It was true. The man had Kovac behind him, a ten-foot expanse of steep, slippery tile in front, and a twenty-plus-foot drop to the ground below. He wasn’t going anywhere.
Kovac peered over the edge, ignoring the spasm in his stomach. ‘Time to come back,’ he called out. ‘I just want to talk.’
The man swiveled to look at him, then looked back at the ten-foot expanse of tile. Like he was trying to decide, Kovac realized with amazement. He waited for him to reach the obvious conclusion, but the man reversed on his small flat section of dormer roof. ‘That’s not going to work,’ Kovac yelled, sensing the decision was going to go against him.
Sure enough, the man used the scant space available on the dormer roof to get a run-up, then launched himself up the tiles. Kovac had never seen anything like it. It reminded him of the special features section of a movie, where actors were flung around on elastic ropes. Only, there were no ropes. Somehow, his Neanderthal had generated all his speed from a dead start.
What was even more impressive, coming from a Neanderthal, was the exceptional grasp of physics. The man ran up the roof, but also forward, towards the next dormer window. This had two beneficial effects. One, when gravity started to kick in, the man was able to surrender height for distance. And two, when he inevitably slipped on the wet tiles, he was able to do so more or less directly above his target dormer window.
He slid straight down onto the distant dormer window’s roof.
‘Son of a bitch,’ Kovac mumbled. He was almost temped to applaud. It was a degree of courage and precision that defied belief, yet Kovac had just seen it happen. The man had somehow judged it all perfectly, so that his sneakers hit the dormer roof from directly above. How he hadn’t toppled over the front and down into the street, Kovac would never know.
The man righted himself. He looked back and gave Kovac a Neolithic sneer, one which seemed to say “your turn”. Then he tried the skylight.
Locked.
‘Now what are you going to do?’ Kovac whispered, asking himself the question as much as his Neanderthal trapped at the end of the roof.
The man-made a giant leap to the last dormer window at the end of the terraced row, but now he was out of dormer windows. And out of tiles. There was a street between the end of this terraced row and the beginning of the next. For all his acrobatics, he was still trapped.
Kovac decided to retreat. The chances of one man pulling off a stunt like the one he had just witnessed were infinitesimal, and there was no reason for him to prove it wouldn’t happen twice. Stairs, thank you very much.
He was slow making his way back down through the skylight and crawlspace: partly because it was a squeeze, but more because he caught sight of what was in the bags. They were full of cash: specifically plastic-wrapped Euros in wads of varying denominations. What the…
‘I’m not finished with you,’ he said to Griffin as he dropped back down into the living room.
Still tied to the heater, she just scowled at him.
Kovac was only marginally faster getting down the staircase to the main door. When he arrived back in the street, he found it empty. But that was okay, because his Neanderthal was still on the roof, right where he had been three minutes ago. He obviously didn’t want to try his luck with the ten-foot stretch of tile again. ‘Out of ideas?’ Kovac called up, coming round underneath and tilting his head skyward.
That was when Kovac realized the man actually had one idea left. Kovac saw him leap, aiming at him like a landing mattress. It was the same courage Kovac had seen before, but now Kovac had a say in how things transpired. He just managed to jump back in time, and the man landed on unforgiving blacktop.
Gravity gave no quarter. After a lot of buckling and rolling, Kovac’s Neanderthal ended up flat on his face, motionless. Kovac almost felt sorry for him as he closed in and kicked the man hard in the head.
A kick like this would’ve ended most fights. Not this guy. It only rolled him over. Kovac saw the lights hadn’t gone out in those close-set, squinty eyes. They were open, shrouded under the big brow, tracking him. An impossibly long arm shot out and swept the ground in search of Kovac’s ankles, hitting home and taking him by surprise.
Coming off the kick, the scrappy windmill attack caused Kovac to stumble and almost fall. By the time he recovered his balance, he found his Neanderthal upright, albeit bent double and more squirting than spitting blood through clenched teeth.
He stood hunched, his big hands on his knees as he fought for air.
Kovac had holstered his pistol at the apartment’s skylight, not wanting it on full display in the street. But he now seriously considered using it. He settled on a compromise, and began to raise his shirt as a threat.
The man’s little eyes came up, taking in the gun. He straightened but simultaneously raised his hands. He took a wobbly step forward, his head down. Kovac said: ‘Good. Because I just want to talk and –’
He cut himself short when he realized the man was picking up speed. Far from capitulating, he was stooping again, beginning a charge. ‘Oh for God’s –’ Kovac tried to get clear, but next thing he knew there was something crashing down on his exposed jaw. An elbow?
Where the fuck had…?
Kovac stumbled back, dizzy and disorientated, before receiving what he guessed was a knee to the abdomen. Again, he had no idea where it came from. This Neanderthal didn’t fight like anyone he knew.
Kovac was back against the brick wall now, dazed, scared and completely winded. He raised one floppy fist to his head in desperate de
fense as he tried to get his Glock out with the other. He was panicking and perfectly willing to shoot blindly, but once again he was thwarted. He heard the man’s footfall ricocheting off the street’s otherwise silent walls.
The bastard had fled.
It was Kovac’s turn to spit blood and massage his jaw, to slump down choking and spluttering expletives.
Slowly, and in real pain, he hauled himself up. He blinked a few times to clear his vision, and saw his loping Neanderthal was nearing the dilapidated but floodlit housing estate. Kovac considered giving up. He could go back and interrogate Griffin. But something in the man’s escape made him suck down a lungful of air – the deepest lungful he could manage, which wasn’t very deep at all.
He took one step forward. This freak of nature was desperate to get away. Desperate enough to risk his life. That meant he was valuable, a prize. Kovac’s phone was buzzing again, but Megan would have to wait… He pushed off the wall and took another step, then another, until he was hobbling forward: a series of clumsy movements which he hoped would, if he could just stay upright long enough, coalesce into a grandpa-paced pursuit.
Chapter 20
Megan ended the call when Kovac didn’t answer. Her hundredth call to him…
She was still at her loft apartment, fighting down a growing sense of panic. Could she trust Kovac? Could she trust anyone? Bishop had now gone dark too and was no longer answering calls. And Juliette, far from making headway, was saying she had lost communication with three of her seven teams.
Megan had seen what the press was saying. She was already being portrayed as an absentee CEO, who had panicked then vanished. Maybe there was some truth in that, though she wasn’t sure what else she was meant to do. She felt isolated, vulnerable, nullified. And if this malware spread, she would be blamed for the global fallout. Journalists were calling it the “Curzon Hack”.
Compounding her stress levels, she was having to break God-only-knew how many laws to keep Kovac’s face-off TV screens across the nation. Police had arrived at her apartment twice tonight already, each time demanding footage from the stadium – footage Megan guessed was currently with Bishop.
