Witness X

by Mark Dawson

  “We’re cooked,” Ten was saying. “Best call this in. Control will want to know.”

  “No,” Duffy said. “Not yet.”

  “What, then?”

  “Shh.”

  Duffy was drinking in every inch of his surroundings, searching for clues, inspiration, or whatever scrap of knowledge might lead out of this impasse.

  And then he found one. Or more precisely, two, both of them connected. They were lying on the carpet next to the desk in Bell’s study.

  Duffy knelt and examined his discoveries without touching. The first was one of those permanent black Sharpie markers, its cap removed and lying nearby. Which might have been only slightly peculiar in itself, without the addition of the second item. Next to the pen lay a business card. Duffy recognised the corporate logo of Rush Laboratories on the front. Below was printed Tony Bell’s name and his position: Senior Project Manager.

  Duffy took a moment to glance around the rest of the study. It was almost exactly how he’d seen it before, immaculately shipshape down to the last paperclip. The only difference was that the neatly folded tweed jacket that had been draped on the back of the desk chair was now gone.

  Duffy returned to studying the card. Face up on the spotless carpet, slightly crumpled like a bit of litter accidentally dropped from a pocket. A blot on the landscape of an otherwise perfectly orderly room. More than orderly: compulsively neat, the way only a tidiness freak like Bell could stand to have it.

  “No way,” Duffy murmured to himself, still gazing down at the card.

  “No way what?” Ten said.

  If Duffy had been inclined to explain himself to his colleague, he might have said, “No way that a neat freak like Bell, a guy who can’t even bear a crinkle in his rug even when he’s just found out his wife has suffered a disfiguring injury, would have left such litter lying about the place other than as a deliberate marker.”

  As it was, he didn’t describe his thoughts out loud to Ten. Instead, he slipped the knife from his sleeve and used its needle-sharp tip to carefully spear the business card and pick it up for closer examination. Aside from the Rush Laboratories logo and Bell’s name and title, the only printed text anywhere on the card was the address in Epping Forest. Nothing especially unusual about it except for one detail.

  The address had been circled in black ink, by someone with a very shaky hand and very much in a hurry.

  Which partly explained the presence, and function, of the Sharpie marker. Duffy closed his eyes for a moment and ran the scenario through his mind, letting it play like a movie clip.

  He saw Bell, flustered and startled by the most unexpected and unpleasant appearance of his visitors. Bell jumped to his feet as they walked in, almost knocking over his empty gin glass. He stared in terror at the semiautomatic pistols pointed at him and the hard expressions on the faces of the men holding them. He would know what was happening. He would have known that they’d come to collect on their deal. And he would have known the cruel, cold, inhuman brutality these men were capable of.

  Duffy had seen it before, in moments with his victims before he completed his mission. It was at such times that a fearful man will clutch at any straw, however tenuous. A man without a shred of hope that a living soul is coming for him will still try to cry or signal for help. In those most desperate moments, when all other chances have been and gone, even a hardened atheist may get down on his knees and pray for a divine miracle.

  Perhaps Bell thought that a guardian angel would watch out for him. Maybe he thought someone would heed his distress call. Or maybe he just needed to leave a trace, a clue, for posterity, in case he didn’t survive this day, in case his odd and sudden disappearance left people wondering.

  In case anyone gave a damn, once he was gone.

  Duffy concentrated on the scene once more. The North Korean hitters wagging their pistols at Bell, telling him to move, telling him to hurry. Duffy imagined Bell telling them to hold on, that he was coming, that he just needed to get his things. He would have hustled into the study, reached for the folded tweed jacket draped across the back of the desk chair, and, in a moment of clumsiness that could have been real or feigned, letting the jacket slip to the floor, along with the loose business card and Sharpie that fell from its pocket. Duffy imagined Bell squatting down to gather his things as the Koreans stood there barking orders from the doorway and, in a moment of pure adrenaline-fired instinct, managing to fumble around for enough precious seconds to circle the address on the business card and leave it lying there for his imaginary saviour to find. Perhaps he’d have written more if he’d had time, a clear distress call instead of the most cryptic of clues.

  Why circle the address?

  A grim smile came to Duffy’s lips. It looked like Bell might just have a guardian angel after all. Not that he deserved one.

  “So?” Ten said. “What is it?”

  Duffy held out the card for Ten to see. “That’s where they’ve taken him.”

  EPPING FOREST

  18

  Duffy weaved the Opel Omega through the sluggish weekend London traffic, fist on the horn, foot to the floor. While he drove, he explained to Number Ten how he saw things.

  “Control was right,” he said over the roar of the car’s engine. “Looks as though Kang and his crew hadn’t yet got all they needed from Bell. That’s why they’ve taken him to the lab. There must be some last piece of information that he’s got to deliver to them before their scientists can make the new rockets work.”

  “I don’t get it,” Ten said, clutching his seat as Duffy screeched around another corner. “Why couldn’t he just have emailed it or stuck it on a flash drive?”

  “My best guess? Bell probably couldn’t email or copy it without setting off a security alert. Maybe that’s what gave him cold feet and made him try to back out of the plan—maybe he thought he might get caught. I’ll bet they’re going to do it the old-fashioned way: pull the stuff straight off the hard drive. Or maybe even snatch a computer or two and take the whole lot away, lock, stock and barrel.”

  “You think he knows what they’ll do to him once they’ve got the data?”

  “He knows what kind of people he’s got himself in with,” Duffy said. “Whatever they’ve got in store for him, he has it coming. I think he knows that, too.”

  Then Duffy swore as he saw a snarl of traffic congestion up ahead. The whole street was a mass of blocked cars and black London cabs. “I hate Sundays,” he said.

  “We’re going to be too late,” Ten said.

  Duffy shook his head and gritted his teeth. “Not if I can help it.”

  He surged straight towards the field of red taillights up ahead. Ten’s eyes opened wide. Then, at the very last moment, Duffy twisted the wheel, sliced the Omega through a gap in the parked cars and motorcycles at the kerbside, and mounted the pavement with a crunch. Terrified pedestrians scrambled out of his way as the Omega bore down on them, its horn blaring. Duffy carved past the knot of traffic, battered down a railing and then regained the road, tyres slithering for grip as the rear of the car fishtailed left and right.

  Duffy kept going. He burned through a red light, then three more. A car came out of a side street, dawdling in his path, and he slammed it out of his way, leaving a trail of broken headlight plastic and bits of bumper. A chorus of horns sounded angrily. Duffy put his foot down and surged onwards.

  19

  The October sun was shining through the trees that surrounded Rush Laboratories, right at the heart of Epping Forest, in the last splendid blaze of autumnal golds and reds. The building complex centred on a long, low steel and glass wedge presumably intended to be postmodern in design. Pretty landscaped gardens extended to the side and rear. The leafy car park was mostly empty apart from a trio of modest vehicles presumably belonging to the underpaid weekend security personnel. There was also a large shiny black Audi SUV that looked like it belonged to an executive of a much higher pay grade.

  Or, maybe, Duffy thought, t
o a crew of North Korean assassins hell-bent on procuring rocket technology secrets.

  The Audi was parked closest to the entrance, sitting at a peculiar angle.

  Duffy killed his engine and coasted in neutral to a halt forty yards from the building. He and Ten got out. Duffy reached back inside, put his hand beneath the Omega’s driver’s seat, and pulled out the twelve-gauge shotgun that was tucked in neatly under there. It was the most compact production pump-action made, no bigger than a bank robber’s sawn-off with its six-and-a-half-inch barrel. It was illegal in the UK, and Duffy normally kept it hidden under the floorboards of the flat he used as his London bolthole. From the car’s glove box, he grabbed a couple of handfuls of extra buckshot cartridges and dropped them into his pockets.

  “Haven’t seen a cannon like that for a while—what is it? Serbu?”

  “Super-Shorty,” Duffy said with a nod.

  “That’s not in the armoury.”

  “A drug dealer I ran into had it. I liberated it from him.”

  “You don’t just want to shoot them, do you? You want to splatter them.”

  “Better overkill than underkill.”

  They moved quickly across the car park. Duffy paused to touch the bonnet of the Audi. It was still warm.

  He nodded to Ten.

  Ten drew his Springfield.

  Duffy jacked a twelve-gauge round into the chamber of the Serbu and topped up the tube magazine with a cartridge from his pocket. They stepped towards the front entrance. Its steel and glass doors were lying wide open and unguarded. They led through into a plush lobby with gleaming black granite flooring and a long, curved reception desk made of some exotic hardwood. Very handsome, apart from the splatter of fresh blood streaked across its polished surface.

  The uniformed security guard who had involuntarily donated the blood was lying spread-eagled on the granite floor, leaking pints more of it over the black tiles. Fresh kill. From the position and angle of the body, it looked as though he’d been standing at the reception desk when Bell had turned up with his unannounced guests. The guard had walked about five steps towards the entrance. Duffy imagined that he would have challenged Bell, at which point one of the Koreans had pulled out a pistol and drilled a nine-millimetre hole in the security guard’s forehead. One-shot kill, classic through and through, very accurately centred. Neatly done.

  But then, it was no hard feat to murder some poor schmuck who was just doing his job and not shooting back at you.

  Just like it was an easy deal to slosh acid in the face of an innocent woman.

  Kang.

  Duffy tightened his grip on the shotgun.

  Two more dead guards lay splayed out on the floor in the passage beyond the lobby, below a sign with an arrow that said LABS. Both guards had been killed the same way. Three for three. Clean and professional.

  “How many?” Ten muttered quietly.

  “Minimum of two,” Duffy said. “Probably more.”

  Duffy and Ten spread apart as they entered a wide and brightly lit corridor, following the sign that said LABS. By hugging opposite walls, they made themselves harder targets and widened their own field of fire in case the enemy should suddenly appear. There was no sign of them yet.

  20

  Duffy and Ten entered the lab area, a large open-plan space filled with desks and computer terminals. Big windows offered pretty views of the sculpted gardens all around. The centre of the room was dominated by a large plinth on which was mounted an imposing scale model of a sleek spaceplane: the LightWing II. But extra-atmospheric tourism wasn’t Duffy’s primary concern at this moment and he barely glanced at it.

  He motioned to Ten.

  Tapped his own nose with a finger.

  Ten nodded. He could smell it, too.

  Someone within the building had recently lit up a cigarette. Someone who probably didn’t care too much about flouting a few rules any more than they did about setting off smoke alarms or stealing protected data. Or killing and maiming folks.

  At the far end of the computer room was a partitioned-off area away from the other workstations. That was where the scent of tobacco smoke was wafting from. Duffy and Ten stayed low as they weaved between the desks. Getting closer to the partitioned area, Duffy saw the figures clustered around the computer terminal. One was seated at the keyboard, hunched over and feverishly tapping keys as the others stood very closely around him.

  Bell was sitting.

  The one standing over him with the cigarette was Kang.

  Duffy recognised him immediately from the photo and video footage he’d been shown at the briefing. Kang’s body language exuded calm, while Bell was wound up like a steel spring. Even from this far away, Duffy could see that Bell was sweating buckets as the Koreans watched every click of the keys under his fingers.

  Duffy’s hunch had been right. They were not copying data to a remote hard drive or another machine, for the same reason Bell couldn’t just have emailed them the documents. They were doing it the old-fashioned way and printing it, page by page. Reams of paper spewed from a nearby printer. One of the Koreans was busy stuffing the sheets into a cardboard box as they spooled out of the machine. They were probably going to take the printouts back to wherever they were hiding and then fax the information to a contact overseas. Old school. Once the data had been transmitted, there would be no bringing it back.

  Kang spoke. “How much longer?” His accent was thick and guttural.

  “I’m nearly done,” Bell said. “There’s hundreds of pages of data. It takes a while. I’m going as fast as I can.”

  Kang puffed smoke and shook his head. “Hurry. Go faster.”

  Bell paused to wipe sweat from his brow.

  Duffy slid in behind a partition and watched as Ten did the same three desks over.

  Control had said he wanted to catch the Koreans in the same net. This was it. Red-handed. Bang to rights, together with all the evidence needed to nail them. A cop’s dream arrest.

  But Bryan Duffy wasn’t a cop. Never wanted to be, never would be. Arresting people wasn’t his remit, and he had his own ways of dealing with things.

  Duffy looked at Ten and drew a finger across his throat.

  Ten looked back and gave a nod to signal that he understood.

  Duffy held the shotgun in both hands and prepared to stand up out of cover. He would try to spare Bell, but the spray from the shotgun would be indiscriminate and he couldn’t guarantee that Bell would not be hit. Duffy wasted no time worrying about that. Bell had brought this on himself.

  Duffy glanced over at Ten and raised three fingers.

  He folded one away and then a second.

  He heard the squeak of a door opening on unoiled hinges.

  He swung his head around and saw a new man emerging from a bathroom on Ten’s side of the room.

  The man had a pistol in his hand. It was aimed at Ten.

  Duffy swivelled and raised the shotgun.

  Too slow.

  The man fired.

  Duffy fired.

  The buckshot peppered the man, spinning him around like a top.

  Duffy couldn’t see Ten as he spun back around.

  Kang’s expression had not changed. As casually as dipping into his pockets for cigarettes and lighter, he reached both hands crossways inside his black jacket and came out with a pistol in one hand and an Uzi submachine gun in the other.

  And then the serene workspace of Rush Laboratories was filled with the deafening blast of gunfire as Kang opened up. The gas blast from the machine gun’s muzzle sent printout sheets into the air like confetti. Duffy found himself being driven down behind the partition by a hail of nine-millimetre rounds that sent bits of shredded carpet up into his face.

  There was no return fire from Ten. Duffy assumed that the surprise newcomer had been successful with his reflex shot and had taken Ten out.

  The other Koreans all started firing.

  Kang dropped his empty pistol, grabbed Bell and hauled him off his chair a
nd onto the floor.

  Duffy was quickly up on his feet. Firing from the hip, he blew one of the Koreans off his feet with a single round of buckshot from the Serbu. He pumped in another shell and fired again, scattering the rest. Bullets were flying like a freak hailstorm. A plate-glass window behind Duffy exploded into a million pieces.

  But now the Koreans, taken by surprise by the attack, were beating a retreat and taking their precious asset with them. One of Kang’s henchmen went to grab the box half full of data sheets. More were still spewing from the printer, but there was no time to gather them up. He tucked the box under his left arm as he fired wildly with his right until an ounce and a quarter of Duffy’s 00 scooped his legs out from under him and smashed him lifelessly into another computer terminal, splashing blood. The box burst open and the air filled with fluttering paper.

  Kang pulled Bell away, his three remaining men pouring gunfire in all directions. Muzzle flash strobed. Spent brass showered over the floor, rolling everywhere. Duffy found himself pinned behind the partition, puffs of material flying left and right as bullets ripped through it. He scuttled to his right, changing his shooting position, jacked another round into the breech of the shotgun, and fired. The boom rolled around the room. One more went down.

  Duffy didn’t have time for a tactical reload. He let go of the empty twelve-gauge and whipped out his pistol. Tap-tap. The final Korean took off, weaving through the computer terminals, firing blindly in his wake. Duffy chased him with a flurry of shots until he retreated out of sight through a fire door.

  Duffy swore and ran over to where he had last seen Ten. He was on the floor, blood leaking out of a wound in his head. The words of reassurance and comfort you offer to a dying colleague in the middle of a running firefight: that was a speech Duffy was still perfecting even after years of this nonsense.

  In this case, he could save his breath.