Aggressor

by Andy McNab

  It was as quiet as Tengiz’s grave now – quieter, probably, if the knitting circle were still gobbing off right next door to it. The only sounds were the old disco-dancer’s manic breathing and the distant ticking of the clock, and once or twice a vehicle in the distance.

  He finally removed the fibre optic and leaned towards me. I got my mouth into his ear. ‘How long do you reckon?’

  He rolled the fibre optic into its piece of towel, and replaced it in the satchel.

  That was a good sign; you never leave anything out that you’re not using; it gets packed up straight away in case you have to do a runner.

  ‘Piece of piss, lad. The day lock is warded, and the combination, well, it’s a combination. Anything up to four hours. Don’t worry, there were loads like this in Bosnia.’ He paused and I knew there was a funny coming. ‘Any longer than that and I’ll let you blow it.’ This time I could see the grin, even behind the nylon. He shoved the key-ring torch back in his mouth, taking the mask with it.

  He was right; the ward lock, at least, was going to be easy. It was basically a spring-loaded bolt into which a notch had been cut. These things had been around since Ancient Roman times. The key fitted into the notch and slid the bolt backwards and forwards. It takes its name from the fixed projections, or wards, inside the mechanism and around the keyhole, which prevent the wrong key from doing the business.

  Charlie tucked the fibre optic away and unwrapped a set of what looked like button-hooks, fashioned from strong, thin steel. All being well, one of them would bypass the wards and shift the bolt into the unlock position.

  In next to no time I heard the deadlock clunk open, and Charlie’s head swayed from side to side in triumph as he packed the hooks away.

  The combination cylinder was next. This time, the lock would be released once an arrow on the left-hand side of the dial had triggered the correct sequence of numbers. Our problem was that there was no way of telling when the tumblers had reached their correct position; the only noise we’d hear was when the lever finally descended into the slot, once the right combination had been dialled.

  Charlie started rotating the cylinder left and right. He may have been trying Baz’s number plate first, or running through the Russian factory default settings.

  Once he’d exhausted the obvious ones, he would have to go through every possible permutation. In theory there’d be about a million of the little bastards, but the good thing about old and low-quality cylinders like this one was that the numbers didn’t have to be located precisely; up to two digits either side of true and the lock would still open, which cut the possible combinations down to a mere 8,000 or so. It wasn’t what Charlie might call a piece of piss, but even with his hands wasting away he should be able to rattle through them in a few hours. He told me once that he really never thought about what he was doing; he just switched onto autopilot.

  He leaned over to me. ‘DOB?’

  He hadn’t asked me for it since my trip to the bookshop because there was no need. If I hadn’t found Baz’s date of birth, I’d have told him.

  ‘Twenty-two ten fifty-nine.’

  His hands started to turn the cylinder: 22 anticlockwise . . . 10 clockwise . . . 59 anti-clockwise . . .

  For some reason, that was the most commonly used sequence of movements.

  I realized I was holding my breath.

  Nothing. No sound. No falling lever; no question of simply turning the handle and hearing the bolts slide back into the door.

  Charlie played with the three number sets in sequence, but varying the direction of rotation.

  After a dozen or so other attempts, he tried 22 anticlockwise, 59 clockwise, 22 anticlockwise.

  There was a gentle clunk from inside the door.

  Charlie picked up his torch and shone it round the floor to make triply sure that he’d left nothing lying around.

  I could have opened the safe while he did so, but there was a protocol to be observed at times like this. That honour belonged to Charlie.

  He turned back when he was satisfied everything had been packed away. He pulled down the handle. The bolts retracted from both the hinged and the opening side, and it swung open with a small metallic creak.

  Charlie still had the key-ring torch in his mouth, and his head was inside the safe. I leaned over him. There was a shelf in the middle, and it held just two items: an open box of antique jewellery, maybe his mother’s, and a blue plastic folder.

  Charlie didn’t need the camcorder to remind him how the folder lay; he lifted it straight out and handed it over. A quick sweep of the Maglite revealed about twenty pages of handwritten Paperclip.

  It didn’t look much, but it was obviously worth two hundred thousand US to someone.

  He hardly had time to shrug before the door burst open and the lights came on.

  6

  There were two of them, hollering at us in Russian or Paperclip. They were both carrying suppressed pistols with big, bulky barrels; we raised our hands very slowly, so they couldn’t fail to notice that, unfortunately, we weren’t. I kept my left elbow slightly bent, to try and hold the CO2 canister in place.

  They were in their early thirties; short black hair, jeans and leather jackets, lots of gold rings and bracelets, and both looking confused about the situation.

  Their faces weren’t masked, and that was bad news. They didn’t care about being identified. One was dark with stubble; the other had bloodshot eyes. I wondered if he’d stopped by the Primorski on the way over.

  Their yells increased in volume, and reverberated around the room. Just having our hands up obviously wasn’t enough.

  It looked like the one with the bloodshot eyes was in charge. He glared at me and opened his leather jacket repeatedly with his spare hand. I got the message. Keeping my right hand up, I unzipped my bomber very slowly with my left. My boots dropped onto the carpet. Charlie followed suit.

  They now knew that neither of us was carrying, but that didn’t stop the shouting. I didn’t know what else they wanted, and I wasn’t going to ask. I didn’t want them to know we were Brits. I shrugged my shoulders and twisted my hands.

  They gobbed off at each other, very quickly and aggressively, then Red Eyes moved towards Charlie, pistol steady, while Stubbly covered him. He waved his free hand again, shouted, gesticulated at the floor.

  Charlie got it: the boy was after the folder.

  He reached down and picked it up with his left hand, keeping his right in the air. Red Eyes took a step forward, grabbed it, and jammed his weapon into Charlie’s neck. I could see Chinese characters engraved along the barrel. It was old and really well worn, but that didn’t matter. It would still fuck Charlie up if he pulled that trigger.

  Keeping the muzzle right where it was, Red Eyes bent down and reached into the safe. The jewellery found its way into his jacket pocket with the speed and precision of a conjuring trick. For a finale, he yanked off Charlie’s mask, then gave me the same treatment.

  He took a couple of steps back to survey his handiwork. They both stood there for several seconds, one each side of the doorway. Red Eyes muttered something to his unshaven friend, placed the folder on the desk and started to flick through its contents. Stubbly kept moving the muzzle of his weapon from my head to Charlie’s and back, just in case we hadn’t got the message.

  They barked stuff at each other as Red Eyes turned the pages. I didn’t know what to do next. I had been in the situation enough times myself to recognize the look and sound of uncertainty. Finally he looked up, glowered at the two of us, and pulled out a cell phone.

  I glanced over at Charlie, who was studying the floor so closely he appeared to be trying to memorize every fibre of the carpet. I knew that look. He was wondering how the fuck to get us out of here. I hoped the silly old fucker would come up with something before these boys got permission to top us.

  There was a series of rapid beeps as Red Eyes punched in the number. Whoever was at the other end answered immediately. Red Eyes stu
died each of us in turn, giving what sounded like a description, then picked up the document and quoted a couple of chunks from it. Then he looked at us again. I didn’t understand what he was saying, but I got the drift. Whatever problems they’d expected to have to deal with in the house, they now had two extra ones, and they were less than happy workers. As if I was.

  There was nothing we could do to help ourselves immediately, so I studied Stubbly’s weapon instead so I’d know what to do with it when I got my hands around the pistol grip. The power of positive thinking.

  His finger was on the trigger and the safety was off; the lever on the left-hand side of the grip was down. These kinds of suppressed weapons normally had both a single-shot and semi-automatic capability. With the one, you loaded manually, pulling back the top slide and letting it go forward to pick up a new round from the magazine each time you fired. With the other, the top slide wasn’t locked in position, so you just kept firing until the magazine was empty.

  I didn’t know what setting Stubbly had gone for, but something told me it wasn’t single shot.

  Red Eyes was still waffling into the phone and riffling through the papers when we heard a metallic rattle from the direction of the street. He stopped in mid-sentence. There was a loud creak as the front gates swung open.

  Red Eyes closed down the conversation by running out into the hall.

  He was back in less than ten seconds, and not at all happy. He rolled up the folder, thrust it into his jacket, yelled a couple of instructions at Stubbly and disappeared again.

  Stubbly stood his ground and raised his weapon a few inches.

  There was no time to think.

  I lunged at him, aiming my shoulder at his gut. He tottered backwards under the impact, hit the wall, and before he could recover I dragged him down with me, my hands flailing. I didn’t really care if they made contact, as long as they got in the way of him controlling the weapon. With any luck I’d bang against it myself.

  I felt Charlie’s legs pushing against me, then heard a sound like a watermelon hitting a pavement. He’d given Stubbly’s skull the good news with his CO2 cosh.

  I let go and kicked myself away. It was Charlie’s call; he could climb aboard him if he needed to.

  I scanned the floor for the weapon, but couldn’t see it immediately, and didn’t have time to search.

  I ran out of the room, shoving my right hand into the left sleeve of my bomber jacket as I went. Red Eyes was ahead of me, throwing out the stops. The door swung back and the hall was flooded with light.

  The gates into the street were open.

  Baz’s Audi swept into the courtyard.

  I sprinted along the carpet as Red Eyes half ran, half tumbled down the porch steps.

  There was a shower of glass as he emptied his magazine into the driver’s window and he pirouetted like a matador as the vehicle coasted past him, into the wall.

  I took the steps in one, canister in hand. Leaping up before he had a chance to collect himself, I swung the heavy metal tube down onto the top of his head. The weight of my body coming back down to the ground gave the hit enough force for me to hear his skull crunch.

  He dropped like a cow under a stun gun and I followed suit, brought down by my own momentum. His weapon skidded across the wet concrete. I grabbed it, turned and fired into his skull. The third time I squeezed the trigger, nothing happened. The top slide stayed back, waiting for a fresh mag to reload.

  Fuck closing the gate. I dropped the empty weapon and ran back into the house in case my disco-dancing mate needed a hand.

  There were gunshot wounds in Stubbly’s chest and just below his right cheekbone, and a pool of dark, deoxygenated blood spreading across the carpet. Charlie was as cool as a cucumber. He’d slipped his mask back on, and was hoisting the satchel over his shoulder. ‘Give me five,’ he said. ‘I’ll try and find the CCTV monitors. There might be tapes.’

  I grabbed my own mask off the floor and pulled it over my head as I legged it back to the front door.

  7

  I went straight to the gates. Fuck checking outside, I just slammed them shut and got the bolts down, then carried on struggling to put on the mask. I only had one eye uncovered. I must have looked like the phantom of the fucking opera.

  There was a big drum roll and a clash of cymbals from the Primorski, followed by a round of applause. If I hadn’t been so knackered, I’d have taken a bow.

  Broken glass, spent brass cases, wet concrete and two pools of blood glinted in the courtyard lights. Fighting to get my breath back, I ran over to the car.

  It looked like someone had thrown a bucket of red paint across the car’s interior. The driver’s body was slumped, face sideways, over the central console. It was Baz all right, and he didn’t look good. He’d taken rounds in the head, neck and shoulder, and his once-grey hair was crimson.

  I checked the front end. The bumper had absorbed most of the punishment, and one of the headlamps was cracked, but I reckoned the Technik was still Vorsprung. I pulled the door open, grabbed hold of Baz’s arm and dragged him clear.

  By the time I returned to the house, my throat was as dry as sandpaper.

  ‘Charlie!’

  ‘Up here.’ His voice came from the landing.

  ‘Dead body. Bring some bedcovers down, anything. Got to cover the car seats.’

  I ran into the office and grabbed my boots. No time to do them up properly; I shoved the laces under the tongue so I didn’t trip up. Speed was everything; we had to get out of here.

  Back in the yard, I rolled Red Eyes over and pulled the folder from his jacket. Charlie jumped down the steps with two multicoloured bedspreads dragging behind him.

  ‘Any luck with the CCTV?’

  He shook his head. ‘Could be anywhere – on that PC, for all we know. Let’s just fuck off and get on the flight. You OK with that? Or stay and look some more? I’m up for it if you are.’

  I stood by the car. He was right. Why waste time on a blood-filled target, with three dead bodies for company? ‘Let’s go.’

  We threw the bedspreads over the front seats.

  Charlie dumped the satchel in the back and I jumped into the driver’s side. I knocked the remaining shards of glass out of the window frame while Charlie checked the road.

  The moment the gates were open, I hit reverse. Charlie secured the gates as well as he could, and jumped in beside me, lodging his pistol under his thigh. We started uphill, towards the blinking red lights of the telecoms mast.

  As we passed the left to the Primorski, two stretch Mercs were picking up a crowd of very young women and very old men.

  At last we were able to pull off our masks, and Charlie started to giggle. ‘Well, you fucked up there, didn’t you, lad?’

  ‘Heads up, we got police.’

  Ablue-and-white had turned into our road, heading downhill towards us. It was slow, taking its time. I checked Charlie – did he have blood on his face? He checked me – if I had, it was too late. We passed them; they looked over and two red spots of heat between their lips got brighter as they sucked.

  Charlie nodded at them. ‘Evening.’

  They passed Baz’s house without stopping.

  ‘Evening? If they’d heard you they’d’ve stopped us just to investigate that accent.’ I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. It wasn’t the joke, it was pure relief.

  Wind gusted through the driver’s window. I took a hand off the wheel and slid the folder out of my jacket. It was looking a bit the worse for wear but at least there were no bullet holes in it.

  Charlie scanned the streets for blue-and-whites. ‘They must already have been in the house, waiting for Baz to come home, make him open the safe, get whatever it was we’ve got here, then drop him.’

  ‘I thought Whitewall said he was away at some national park or something, till the morning? And since that was bollocks, where does it leave us with everything else?’

  I swung the wheel right and left, weaving between the potholes. ‘
Maybe they were waiting for him to turn up in the morning. They’d have seen us coming into the yard. That must have been what we heard – those fuckers in the front room. When we opened the safe for them, they must have thought it was Christmas.’

  I took a left, up towards the cemetery. ‘I knew I should have looked in the larder . . .’

  ‘If you had, they might have just dropped us.’ He started to laugh again. ‘But hey, we’re still here, aren’t we? A quick trip to the DLB and then it’s bye-bye Georgia.’

  We bounced over the open ground opposite the cemetery. There were still quite a few cars parked around the place, and Charlie pointed under a tree, where the ambient light from the petrol station finally gave up trying to penetrate the darkness.

  I switched the engine off and killed the lights. I sat there, just looking and listening. ‘You OK?’

  ‘I’m fine. But the old hands are wobbling a bit. Maybe you should do the drop-off at the DLB. I’m not sure I’m in the slab-moving business any more.’

  ‘Done.’ I smiled. ‘Then it’s back to the hotel for a shit, shave and shower. Thank fuck it’s Sunday. With luck, Baz won’t be missed till tomorrow.’

  8

  Charlie wrapped the batch of paper in a plastic bag. ‘Every page is numbered, mate, there’s a signature block on the last one, and anything that’s been crossed out has been initialled. I reckon it’s a statement.’

  ‘So who were Red Eyes and Stubbly?’

  ‘Fuck it, who cares? Let’s just dump the gear and get out of here.’

  ‘You got any rounds left?’

  He pulled the pistol from under his thigh and pressed the magazine release on the left of the grip. ‘Two in here.’ He pulled back the top slide. ‘One in the chamber.’ He let the slide go again, replaced the mag, set the safety catch and passed it to me. ‘That’s made ready, safety on.’