by James Quinn
Grant thought the young man had the look of a soldier about him; and this was confirmed when the blond made an aggressive sweeping motion with one arm and, reaching inside his long black coat, drew out a medium-sized black tube that Jack Grant immediately recognised as an Uzi. It was fitted with a barrel-shaped suppressor to keep the noise down. He saw the man raise the weapon and fire, a sputtering noise coming from the weapon.
The man must have fired too high because the bullets impacted above their heads, shattering the glass of the restaurant window. Grant didn't even pause. He had all the information he needed about what was happening. He grabbed Katy by the arm and shouted, “RUN!” And even as he was pulling and dragging her away from their outside table, through the body of the trattoria and out through the kitchens to the rear exit, Grant could hear the familiar clatter of gunfire and the screams and panic and terror that he knew from a former life. A life that he had thought he had left behind for good.
They ran, pushing their way through the clutter of the kitchen, ignoring the staff and heading towards the exit. It was chaos behind them, but Jack Grant wasn't looking backwards to see the details. He had Katy tucked in front of him and, in the manner of the bodyguard, he was giving her valuable body cover in case an assassin's bullet should take her. They made it to the rear exit and a hefty kick from Grant sent the door flying open and they exited onto a dirty alleyway that ran parallel to the main street.
“This way,” ordered Grant. “We need to find a car. Now, move!”
He didn't wait for her response; the time for talking was over and the time for forward action was very much here! They pounded up the alleyway, their feet clacking against the cobbles, and just as they reached the corner that led onto the main street, Grant became aware of the impact of rounds hitting the wall above their heads. He turned in a crouch and saw at the other end of the alleyway the blond assassin who seemed to be hunting him, the Uzi clutched in one hand and a fresh magazine in the other. The assassin completed the reload and pointed the Uzi back at his target of Grant and his daughter.
Grant pushed Katy in front of him. “Just keep running,” he roared. Another twenty feet and another corner, but behind him he could still hear the stomping footsteps of their would-be kidnapper or killer. Grant turned the corner first and… there it was, their saviour; a clapped-out and beat-up Fiat Panda.
He looked in through the dusty driver's window. It was a shell, poorly maintained, but he could hot-wire it in seconds. It was all they had and they would have to make it work. Good fortune was on their side as the door opened easily in his hand and, in seconds, they were both in. A quick fumble underneath the steering column, a spark of wires and the engine coughed into life. Grant put his foot to the floor and the car lurched forward at speed, its tyres squealing. Katy screamed and held onto the seat tightly and then… the squeal of brakes as the car halted.
A bread delivery van had blocked their way. Grant stared about him, thinking at lightning speed. Ramming it would only slow them down and would achieve very little. The side door opened and two men in black clothes and masks exited, ready to launch themselves at the Fiat's flimsy doors. A quick glance in his mirror and Grant saw the blond running up the hill behind them; whoever he was, he was fit and powerful, the gun ready in his hands.
Grant threw the car into reverse and aimed it back down the hill, towards an escape route and towards the blond gunman. If he aimed it right, he would probably take him out as well. Two birds with one stone. The engine whined as the speed increased, the steering wheel wobbling in his hand as it became unwieldy. They hit the apex of the narrow entryway and then…
The blond jumped, missing the potential impact of the rear of the car. Grant heard a thunk and, for a brief, happy moment, he thought he had hit him and killed him. It was an illusion. Fingers grasped the side of the window and the blond was half on, half off the roof, but he was still holding on, not letting his quarry disappear. Christ, thought Grant, he's like a bloody super-soldier.
The car continued to reverse at speed, the blond killer hanging on for dear life, but when they reached the natural curve in the road, Grant spun the wheel and the car completed a perfect J-turn. That lost the blond his Uzi, as it clattered away into the street.
And then a face appeared in front of Jack Grant through the prism of the windscreen. The man was half hanging off the roof of the car! For a perfect moment, Jack Grant got to see up close the face of the man who was trying to kill him and his daughter. The sunglasses had been lost in the turmoil of the car reversing and now, instead, he saw a strong, solid face, handsome even. The blond hair, almost white, was streaked with sweat that gave it an almost translucent quality. But it was the eyes that held Jack Grant. For while the face was composed in concentration, it was the eyes that blazed with a barely contained fury. The eyes were the eyes of the zealot.
Grant noticed that the man had on SAP gloves, sand-filled knuckles, and he was starting to punch the windscreen to get to his targets and slow down the car. Grant pressed his foot to the accelerator but it was on the third punch that the glass shattered over them and a hand reached through the hole to grab Grant's jacket. Grant sped up even more. He knew exactly what he was going to do.
“Die Zeit der Abrechnung ist hier, Gorilla Grant!” growled the blond man, his face now contorted in rage, as he spat the words through the aperture in the glass. Their eyes locked for one moment more and then Grant stomped down hard on the brakes of the Fiat. The effect was instantaneous. The blond assassin was thrown like a rag doll into a pile of boxes, bins and garbage; he hit the wall and then lay still, not moving.
Inside the car was a mixture of crying and panting. He looked in the rear view mirror. The kidnap team were heading back to the van in the hope that they could catch them. Grant didn't even wait. He threw the little car into first gear and roared off out of the alleyway and out onto the main road. Unless they had an extensive search team or surveillance group, the little Fiat would be lost in moments in the bustle of a busy Rome day.
“Katy. Katy – are you okay? Have you been hit?” He had one hand on the wheel and one hand on her shoulder, to comfort her. “Katy, sweetheart, talk to me.”
She was crying, she was shaking, she was in shock, but Grant could tell just by looking at her that she hadn't been hit by a stray bullet. He turned his concentration back to the road, dodging the traffic, speeding up and slowing down as and when he had to and trying to put as much distance as he could between them and the attack at the trattoria. There was so much to process, so much confusion. But above all else, the thing that terrified him was the look of the blond assassin and the words that he had spat out, in German, through the windscreen.
“The time of reckoning is here, Gorilla Grant.”
The Blond stood and dusted himself off. By the time he had focused his eyes, the Fiat was just a plume of smoke in the distance. He smiled to himself and then reached for the compact two-way radio inside his jacket. He turned it on and heard the bleep-bleep tone of the signal. He smiled. The tracker that a member of his team had deftly slipped inside the girl's clutch bag earlier that day on her way to the trattoria would lead him – eventually – to his target.
Chapter Two
“Who was that?”
“Katy, I don't know,” said Grant, frantically turning the steering wheel.
“What just happened?”
“We were attacked… targeted,” he replied, his eyes flicking from the mirror to the road in rapid succession.
“Why? Is this something to do with your old job for the government?”
“Katy, I don't know!”
“Dad – they tried to kill us!”
“Katy, I know. Just stop for a second and let me think! We're safe for the moment. No one is catching us. Not today.” Grant hoped he was right and he hoped he sounded convincing enough, for Katy's sake.
But her question, the one that dug down deep; was this to do with his old job? The attack was definitely targeted against him
; Katy would have just been in the way, a nuisance, collateral damage. It had all the hallmarks of a professional hit; weapons, tactics, resources. This wasn't some random terrorist attack nor was it a case of mistaken identity. They had been hunted through the streets. There was a motive behind it. What it was, he wasn't sure yet. But the fact that the blond assassin had called him by his name – no, worse, by his old work-name – meant that hidden forces were moving against him and he had to find out why. But first, he had to get them both into some kind of protection.
“What are we going to do?” she asked. He could feel his daughter's eyes burning into the side of his face as he drove.
“Well, love, we can't go back to my hotel, or your apartment, come to that. If they knew we'd be at the restaurant, chances are they'd been following one of us for a day or so,” he said.
“You mean following me, don't you?”
Grant shrugged. He was experienced in hostile surveillance so knew the telltale signs, but Katy… maybe not so much, so he chose to remain silent.
“Okay, so they were following me. But why?” she asked.
“I don't know yet, Katy, but I am going to find out,” he replied.
That much was true. He hoped the shoot-out at the trattoria would have alerted the Carabineri and spooked the kidnappers… assassins… whatever they were, causing them to go to ground, thus giving Grant and Katy some time to escape. He hoped so, anyway.
They crossed the Ponte Palatino, across the Tiber, and drove into the Trastevere area of the city. The confused, warren-like backstreets of Trastevere would offer them some kind of protection and Grant reckoned they had about another forty-five minutes' grace before they had to move again.
“So what should we do, Dad?” asked Katy, her eyes glazed over in shock. God, she hated herself for sounding so weak, like a stuck record. Get a grip of yourself, she thought.
He thought for a moment, then the answer came to him; old skills, old habits. “We need to get off the street. Dump the car, go underground. I know a man who can help us, maybe? But I need to make a phone call first…”
They dumped the Fiat outside a side-street residential block and simply walked away. The little car had saved their lives and outlived its usefulness.
The streets were maze-like, the same as in any city – Marseilles, Paris, Barcelona, Tangiers – and only the locals knew the routes in and out like the back of their hands. Tourists were tolerated, but they did not belong. The heat of the afternoon had thinned the crowds, potentially making it easier to spot any kind of surveillance, but, in all honesty, it was just guesswork. Grant had no real idea who he was up against yet and what the resources of the enemy were. To do that, he would need to rest and think, and to do that he needed to know that Katy was safe and protected.
They found a bar open in Piazza S. Calisto, ignored the outdoor tables and went into the relative safety of the air-conditioned bar area. They were operational-aware; wall to their backs, escape route out the kitchens on their left – steak knives in a tray by the serving hatch. It wasn't perfect but it was the best they had. Grant ordered them two cappuccinos to nurse and then made his way to use the payphone in a little booth by the coat-stand.
He scrabbled in his pocket for loose change, hoping that he hadn't tipped too well that day and still had enough to make a decent length phone call. Then he breathed, calmed his mind and from his inside jacket pocket he took out his small diary that he took with him everywhere, flicking through the pages until he came to several sheets at the back. To the casual observer, it was a jumble of numbers and letters, code of course, but a one-time code that only Jack Grant knew the key to. It contained the phone numbers of all of his trusted contacts all over the world. He just hoped that it was still up-to-date.
He pushed the coins in and waited. He heard the burr, burr, burr of the connecting line and he waited.
Nothing.
He tried again and again and again. Still nothing. Finally, he returned to the table with his daughter and his cold coffee and he waited. He ordered two more coffees and waited some more.
Then the phone in the bar rang.
He ran. He picked up the receiver and he talked. Fast.
In some ways, her father was an open book to her. In others, he was a forty-two carat mystery. The forty-two carat thing was one of those times now. She watched him as he stood huddled in the phone booth, his white knuckles gripping the receiver, talking in a hushed tone but with a sense of urgency that made his body rack and his head flinch.
The man that she knew was a contradiction in human form. Absent, loving and caring, cold and also empathetic. For most of her life he had simply not been there and in retrospect that had been no problem. You never missed what you didn't have in the first place. Then he had been there and how wonderful that had been! To have a father, a dad… someone to give her a sense of herself instead of her auntie and uncle, God rest their souls.
But then the violence had come. Killers had come to their house. Her father had done things, terrible things so that she could live. She never saw it, only heard the horror and then very soon her dad had been gone again, working, away, never to return. Oh, there were schools and phone calls and trips away during her teenage years, but in many ways her dad was selfish, tired, over it all. It wasn't until she was in her twenties that they had started to regroup and find each other as a family again.
There were always parts missing, of course. Her dad's sadness, the mystery of her mother, but she learned over time not to delve too deeply. It was just too painful for everyone concerned. But just occasionally, a snippet of time, a memory of the past would claw itself to the surface in a long forgotten memory spike and she would revel in it. Usually it was when Dad felt the most comfortable and safe – no intruders, no interlopers and he would open up with all this information that she didn't understand. Most of it was vague, but welcome nonetheless.
She wiped away a tear and watched him as he came back from the payphone.
“We leave in five minutes,” he said.
“Where are we going?”
“Somewhere safe. It's better that you don't know.”
“Why? I want to know!”
“Katy, it's for the best. It protects you and it protects them,” he said.
“Protects me? But what about you? Don't you need protecting, too?”
“Stop it!” he growled, gripping her wrist tightly, before seeing the pain and releasing her. The shame was apparent on his face. “I'm sorry. Forgive me. Friends?”
She glared, then scowled, then smiled.
“I have to call back in five minutes,” he said. “So we will have to move fast depending on the information I get.”
“Can you trust them, these people, these friends?”
“Love, I trust them with my life.” And yours too, he thought.
Moments later, he returned to the payphone, dialled and listened, his head nodding as he took in the information. Then he was back at the table, leaving notes for their bill and he led her by the hand out of the bar and on to the street.
“Where?” she asked.
“Keep moving we don't have much time.”
“Dad – where are we going?” she repeated, her feet moving quickly on the cobbled streets.
“We have a meeting with an old friend, he can protect us. It's in thirty minutes in the Pantheon.”
Chapter Three
They walked out of the back streets and kept on going until they reached the main road along the banks of the river. As a survival instinct, they kept to where it was busy and where there were witnesses in case of another attack. To the casual observer, they looked like father and daughter taking a stroll in the afternoon sun, perhaps on their way home, but underneath that façade Grant was looking for any of the tell-tale signs of surveillance or traps. So far, he could see nothing that alarmed him.
They walked along the Lungotevere della Farnesina until Grant spotted a taxi that he could flag down. Grant gave the driver an address ac
ross the river that was five minutes away. When they were dropped off, they got out and walked for a while, then took another taxi and another, until they had completed a decent anti-surveillance detection run.
The final taxi dropped them off at the corner of Via deTorre Argentina and they walked casually down the crooked, narrow streets, avoiding the vendors, until it opened up into a piazza and they were greeted with the sight of the Pantheon.
The Piazza was a square with a magnificent fountain at its centre where the tourists where trying their best to keep cool from its spray. Small boys earned coins from filling water bottles for tourists from a spigot that provided clean, fresh water and around the edge of the square were a host of restaurants and bars. Over to the left, dominating the vicinity, was the Pantheon, its magnificent dome casting a shadow over the residents of the area. Built in 27 BC, it had once been a temple to the Roman gods before becoming a Christian church, but these days it was just another tick on the tourist sightseeing list.
“We're a little early,” said Grant, surveying the area. It was busy, as most tourist spots were in Rome, which could work for and against him in terms of anti-surveillance drills. “Let's order a drink and get the pulse of the place.”
They found a little café directly opposite the fountain and the doors to the Pantheon. A small, grey-haired man came out and they ordered two espressos. Jack Grant sipped at his coffee and from behind the anonymity of his sunglasses he scanned the crowds in front of him.
He studied the people who didn't appear to be doing anything, or at least have a purpose for being there. He appraised third and fourth storey windows in case he could see a hint of a static observation point and, above all else, he watched for a repetition in routine from men, women, families walking by. Had they been past before? Did that woman have a different jacket on from last time? He watched and he waited and he sipped at his drink, but he saw no new faces that had recently tried to have him stabbed and no blond assassins that had tried to riddle him with bullets.
