The Path of the Bullet

by M C Jacques

  Burrows marched across to McKay’s Scimitar to speak with the Scenes of Crime Officers. He stood in front of the fibreglass bodied car’s long engine compartment.

  “Have you lads found anything?” Burrows was soon to regret the form of his question. Out from what had been a crouching position between the front passenger seat and the dashboard of the Scimitar emerged, rear first, one of the ‘lads’. In actual fact, this lad, to all intents and appearances, would have appeared to be a leggy and remarkably curvaceous brunette with sparkly eyes.

  “Ah! Hello, miss; I didn’t think…!”

  “Exactly, Inspector! Now why am I not surprised by this!” The girl’s Russian accent was faint, barely detectable, in fact.

  “Well, er, now, wait a minute! It’s Anna, isn’t it?”

  “Anya, Anya!” The young lady spoke quite calmly, but with a note of firmness. “So, you ask if we have found anything, Inspector. Well yes, of course we have found something. I think what you meant was, have we found something interesting, yes?”

  “Well, yes, of course…” The Inspector was beginning to fidget awkwardly as the other officer peered round the elevated rear hatch around which he was conducting his own scrutiny. Burrows, who suspected that he may have perceived a faint smirk on the face of the second officer, had, in fact, already noted ephemeral steams of warmed breath expiring inches above the level of the open rear hatch.

  “In a word, no. But something that is quite interesting is that some form of receiver/transmitter device has been installed under the driver-side of the dashboard, very discreetly. It is professionally wired in, and is, so I am informed, MOD restricted issue and, therefore, its signal will be heavily encrypted. Quite a serious bit of kit, you might say, Inspector.”

  Burrows was taken aback, albeit briefly. Then, rubbing his hands together in a naive bout of gaiety, emitted a shudder whilst chuckling away, apparently to himself. Straightening a little, he replied cheerfully, “So might you, Anna, so well you might!” He bid her a brief farewell and set off.

  Burrows commented, “It is getting chilly now out here, isn’t it, my word?” Then he added, “By the way, give that Ford Focus in the corner the works, once you’ve done with this old jalopy. Good lads!”

  With that, the burly DI turned away from his now scowling colleague and resumed his brisk walk towards the main building and into warmth. “That’s why he persists with that old heap of a car! Now I see.”

  Back inside the generous Reception foyer, Brad Winters who was, it appeared, fully trained as a ‘first-aider’ himself, had made the waning Jay Gould most comfortable on a maxi-settee in a side room. Indeed, warmed by tiers of tartan woollen blankets, fortified with hot brandy, the American technician had rallied and a relative air of calm greeted the apprehensive Burrows as he pounded into the squat, pale-walled room.

  Aside a glass, about half full of still piping-hot spirit, a black and grey box, about the size of a larger cigarette packet, caught Burrows’ eye. Before he could speak, Sutton spoke up. “Sir, good news! Mr Gould has put a bug on who we think may be Sarah Millar.”

  Gould turned to his left, away from the wall, awkwardly, painfully, and looked up at the Inspector. “This is a transceiver. An advanced one. But it needs charging and the gear is in my car. Get one of your boffins here, or on the phone! We should be able to get a fix on that freak of a woman.” He slowly angled his right arm behind his head and rubbed his neck, grimacing with each staggered and agonising movement.

  “He has explained to us, sir. Shall I get the stuff from Mr Gould’s car? It may save some time.” Burrows nodded, his eyes anchored on the visible injuries of the badly beaten technician; badly grazed eyebrows and cheeks framed a profusely bloodied nose. He had taken his eye off the ball and it could prove costly… especially for McKay.

  “Well, Mr Gould, you’ve sustained one savage and vicious assault. Why on earth would any good citizen wish to inflict all this upon you? From the start, please. Right from the start. Get someone to take it all down, Sutton. Better follow procedure to the letter with this. Then we’d better dash – we need to catch up with the boffins at Parker’s Piece. It’s hard to countenance, but it looks as though things may yet turn even nastier still!”

  48

  “Bogeys”

  The parking hold just beneath the Cambridge CID offices was frenetic. “Traffic picked up the red Toyota, sir, heading along Hills Road towards the city centre. It pulled off at one stage to refuel. They want to know if they should apprehend. Oh, and it seems that we’ve got that tracking gadget up and running already!”

  “Okay, Sutton, that’s good. Tell Traffic not to apprehend or to interfere. They’re to maintain discreet, that’s discreet, surveillance only. We want to find their lair! Spell it out to them!” He broke off to take stock. “Now, look, I’ve got to get back inside to brief Bolstridge. Take PCs Gill and Downham with you to Hills Road or wherever they end up – you and Downham have done the arms course, haven’t you?” Both nodded. “Okay, tool up, but the task is to avoid injuries of any sort. Remember, we don’t yet know exactly what’s going on, except it’s fairly clear that McKay is in deep water with these guys and we’ve already got a quite sufficient amount of dead bodies about the place. We’re not even sure of what, if any, Sarah Millar’s involvement is, so easy does it! Is that clear?” Both nodded. Burrows walked across and sat on the edge of the front seat in a nearby Mondeo.

  “Is the signal still strong, Apey?” David A P Jones nodded. ‘Apey’ had been termed the equivalent of a ‘geek’ at his co-ed high school some nine years back. Today, however, he had been hurriedly seconded from one of the more elite, specialised sectors of Cambridgeshire CID and had already, against all of the odds, successfully managed to interpret Jay Gould’s wearily disjointed stutterings over the phone, rich with technical – mainly electronic – directives and cautions which he had duly noted down into his Psion 3X before he had been scuttled into the rear passenger seat of the navy blue Mondeo.

  Apey nodded again, slowly. “It’s still there, boss, but it just took a little dip a minute or so back. My guess would be that they’ve just descended into a basement or cellar, possibly a parking lot. The signal’s been stationary since that dip. It’s steady – just a little weaker. We’d better get on – I’ve no idea what the battery life is on those devices.”

  Burrows climbed out of the car, having assured all that back-up, in some form, would be on its way. “Low tempo, low tempo! Leave it to the chaps in balaclavas! I’ll be following on behind,” were his parting words as he looked all around to check he was not himself under any obvious form of surveillance. The Mondeo went off from the station car park, turning right, eventually, onto Hills Road. In no time at all, Gill was looking about for an expedient place to park as the signal strength’s audible tone indicated that they should be drawing nearer and nearer to the subjugated McKay.

  The signal had led them, in fact, to what appeared to be a detached, obviously inhabited yet semi-derelict, building (with some of its windows boarded up), aside what must have been a spacious car park, now beset by and overrun with a number of generously sized shrubs, a couple of wrecked and rusting cars, with a liberal helping of weeds and turf in between.

  When he arrived at the Hills Road site a minute or so after them, even Burrows failed to notice the presence of two large men nearby, clad in a fusion of green and dark grey outfits. This pair had, with a considerable level of dexterity, successfully adhered to the cover of shadow; shimmying aside one wall, rolling across a pathway cloaked by another solitary vein of shade, until they had reached the rear entrance of the Old Plasterers’ Arms, a former public house. There they were. And they were waiting to strike.

  Indeed, each of the three young police officers could not possibly have been aware, at this stage, of what was actually happening either outside or inside the property as they awaited back-up and further instructions from their supe
riors.

  In fact, having been jabbed in the arm by one of his two captors already ready and waiting in Conference Room 8 at GR7, a dazed McKay had then been forcibly escorted out of the fire exit at the end of the corridor, and bundled into some sort of Japanese four-wheel-drive vehicle and had only properly returned to consciousness after he had been bound, but not gagged. When he came around he discovered he was quite alone; quite alone in a place dimly lit, dank, dour and moribund; boxes, crates, even a firkin aside a stack of ironmongery and horse brasses, bore testimony to the place’s previous trade.

  Because of the prompt onset of weariness, McKay could not trust what he thought he had witnessed prior to his being doped. Mr Dickinson, he thought, had been already, prior to McKay’s arrival in the conference room, securely restrained and gagged. Seconds later, a tall, leggy and large-framed woman had appeared from his right side, arm-locking him from behind in a jiffy whilst the two men bound his wrists in some brand of tough nylon cord or twine. At some point, there had been a heated argument – partly in English, partly in Arabic – about whether to kill him or not. That must have been between Millar and Al-Salam, he now thought. Yet despite this, questions like, ‘But why are they allowing me to see this place?’ and ‘Why haven’t they simply got rid of me?’ went by, as yet, unanswered.

  It was, McKay had surmised, between fifteen and twenty minutes later when the statuesque form of Sarah Millar entered the cellar. The intensity of her glare alone assured McKay that there would be no escape from this episode unscathed. He was about to be proved correct.

  He observed her only faintly as she removed a grey drill jacket and flung it across a high chair at the far end of the room. But he did notice her stop and examine the back of the jacket, towards the left shoulder, and he saw her remove, unpick something small from the fabric and curse. Glaring across at McKay, she had thrown the small object against the wall with such force that it shattered into a few diamond-like fragments, shards, which ricocheted about.

  “So, you’re starting to come round, are you, you scum!” For one sad moment of pathetic misjudgement, McKay imagined that his sturdy adversary might even have been introducing a spot of levity, of wit, even of burlesque, as she took a couple of catwalk-esque strides in his direction.

  That delusion was abruptly and mercilessly shattered when, seemingly from nowhere, her long, powerful right arm propelled a pan-like back of hand chop to his left cheek, jolting his head back as far as the constraints of joints, bones and sinews would tolerate, and perhaps even a little further. His neck panged at once and the warming saline sensation of fresh blood began to circle his palate and then to trickle down his already parched throat.

  “Do you know how important my job was to me, you dumkopf? Well, do you?”

  “Access… access to papers and information,” muttered an ailing McKay.

  “More than you will ever know!” retorted his taut assailant. This time her malice was channelled through an unheralded and remarkably swift, forceful punch, directly to McKay’s midriff, delivered with her left, large and bony fist, completely winding its unfortunate beneficiary who hadn’t quite been able to tense his stomach muscles in time.

  On the outside of the old public house, meanwhile, the navy Mondeo had been dexterously parked by PC Gill some fifty yards or so away from the property on the opposite side of the road, itself sandwiched between a flat-nosed Honda pizza delivery van and a local Panther taxi which was just about to set off for Ely.

  The police radio had suddenly burst into life; it was ‘Records’. To distil the broken and ‘hissy’ contents of the broadcast into narrative form, the original Plasterers’ Arms had closed some twelve years ago. “In the white heat of Mrs Thatcher’s ‘economic miracle!’” interjected Sutton. The pub’s edifice had been purchased by a certain Dr Gerhardt Mueller of Nachsommerweg, Stuttgart – a chemist and occasional guest lecturer at the university’s Chemistry Department, who had spotted the ‘For Sale’ sign as he was being taxied back to the station. He had purchased and promptly converted the place into four flats and a couple of smaller apartments, now mostly unused, although a couple of the flats were still let to students, largely to North Africans, of various shades.

  It was less than a minute, and perhaps as little as thirty seconds, after the first broadcast, before the car radio hummed into active service again. This time it was Burrows from a nearby car. “Sutton, Downham, Gill, listen and listen well! McKay was right about Millar; there certainly is much more to that woman than meets the eye! Firstly, she’s not English; her name is Zara (with a zed) Mueller, and she’s been in a crack German army unit where she specialised in unarmed combat and where she soundly beat most of the men! Secondly, now we know who she is, we’ve established that she’s got definite and active connections with a terrorist group based in the Yemen, but with operatives in the Netherlands and over here. She’s already known to MI5 who, I must say, have been most helpful for a change! Thirdly, stay put and don’t get anywhere near her for now. There are likely to be some very unsavoury customers floating around. There are at least two chaps within this cell who are wanted as multiple murderers by Interpol and just about every security service in the Western world! And, just in case you still want to be heroes, let’s not forget about our friendly assassin, who’s been remarkably quiet of late!”

  “Okay, boss, read you. Any news on Mark, Mark McKay?”

  “Not a dickey bird, Sutton! Now just you stay focused on your task. Stay put and watch.”

  49

  “Two Little Boys”

  As the two other, as yet almost entirely unobserved, characters shimmied their way, stealthily, circuitously – but resolutely, with a quiet deathly resolve – towards their spoils in the dilapidated cellar of the Old Plasterers’ Arms, McKay’s plight had already been made considerably worse.

  To supplement the damage he had already attained to his jaw and stomach, Sarah Millar, whom we now know to be Zara Mueller, of course, had appended a straight finger blow to McKay’s rather exposed thorax region. The result of this lightning jab was an immediate swelling around the wind passage and a consequent reduction of his ability to breath. Being already in only a semi-conscious state, McKay was still of sufficient mind to deduce that Mueller was exacting some kind of slow excruciating revenge; she was killing him slowly, whilst savouring the power of being able to.

  Mercifully enough, an intense bout of grunting raps to his shins – administered simply because Millar had spotted the pub’s old iron poker jutting out from an old orange box – were unable to be registered by the now unconscious McKay.

  So, after a number of other powerful blows to the body and one to the forehead, she commenced what was to be her grand finale by placing the palm of her sizeable right hand across the mouth of the now virtually motionless and unmoving beneficiary. Her index finger blocked his left nostril entirely, her thumb, his right one and, as she almost effortlessly secured her pliers-like grip on his lower cranium, McKay’s nose was crushed, his head listing backwards, causing another surge of blood to gush down the already severely reduced aperture of his thorax.

  Had he been with it, mentally aware, McKay would have realised that he was now only seconds from choking to death, in any case. As it was, however, Mueller, removing her right hand from his mouth, decided that, as a crescendo, she would break his neck, too, to have done with him. Her right hand clasping the underneath of his chin like a vice, she then lowered his head forward first, then jolted it backwards with tremendous force and pushed and pushed, her tightly tailored cotton top straining to cope with her pronounced muscularity.

  But Zara Mueller, like a number of others of her type, ancient and modern, had been known to suffer bouts of over-confidence from time to time. She herself was actually aware of this fact, too, but had attributed such blips in efficiency to simple fits of over exuberance or enthusiasm which, in turn, she had attributed to simple naivety or youthful zeal.
In any case, it was just as she was indulging in such a self-gratifying act that matters began to change.

  Unbeknown to her, and undetected by virtually anyone else, save a trembling lady pensioner in a second floor flat overlooking the rear of the Old Plasterers’ Arms, the two human bloodhounds, having undertaken a heat-seeking survey of the old pub and its cellar, now balaclavared and with arms cocked, had slithered closer and closer still to their booty. First across and above a side window, to avoid a descent of the steps to the cellar flat which passed directly by the room in which Mueller was holding McKay, then a brief shimmy down the drainpipe, ‘old hat’ routine. “He’s there. I’ve got him in view,” whispered the first, slightly taller, slightly more slender of the pair. “Okay. As planned.”

  Mueller had no idea how it had happened, or how it could have happened. In the flash of a moment, the room was filled with a dyed, noxious gas. There was a crashing sound and, even before that had finished, she was seized, pushed prostrate on her back, disarmed, cuffed, and found her writhing, screaming self, in an instant, to be in no inconsiderable amount of discomfort.

  Before releasing his grip, Mueller’s queller muttered to her with venom, “You’re lucky! They want you. We don’t usually take prisoners.” He arose, issued a look of utter disdain whilst ignoring her interminable, retching threats of retribution, and faced his chum. “Ignore her expletives, Todd, and sod the drill. Let’s get him outside now. He needs air and A and E.” That being done, the taller one of the pair leapt the steps and rushed about the flat checking for what he would call a ‘nasty’ or an IED. None was to be found and at once, into a slim, discreet microphone, he announced, “Okay, location secured. Mueller bound inside. No other bandits. McKay is outside at rear, critically injured, repeat critically injured.”