Frost put him out of his misery.
The back of the man’s head exploded in a spray of blood and brains.
Frost squeezed off a second shot, taking one of the men sitting on the crates high in the forehead. His body jerked back, a crack opening above his right eyebrow as his eyes widened in shock. It was a comical expression caught between surprise and fear, not the kind of look you’d want to carry into the afterlife. The dead man slumped sideways, falling from his perch on the crate. His leg kicked out as he fell and twitched uncontrollably for a full thirty seconds before the last vestiges of life convulsed out of his body.
Frost didn’t wait for that to happen.
While the other two reacted, diving for cover from this unseen threat, he made a run for the stairw His boots clattered loudly off the metal gantry, his footsteps echoing through the confines of the warehouse. The report of a gunshot cracked. He neither knew nor cared how close the shot came. The bullet didn’t hit him. That was all that mattered. Another shot sounded. Frost threw himself forward, hitting the gantry hard and rolling on his right shoulder. This time he saw the puff of concrete dust as the bullet buried itself into the wall six inches from his head. He came up running.
The staccato cackle of machine-gun fire tore through the warehouse. Bullet wounds strafed the wall, ripping through the brickwork. Frost half-stumbled half-ran across the last few yards of the gantry to the stairwell. He felt the wind from the rush of bullets against his face and the sharp sting as one nicked his cheek.
He ignored the sudden flare of pain and dropped to his knees.
A second burst of gunfire ricocheted off the metal gantry, spitting sparks. Frost pulled away from them, slamming into the wall. He pushed away from it, throwing himself through the mouth of the stairwell. He was breathing hard. He was shaking as the adrenalin pounded through his system. Shouts chased where the bullets couldn’t follow. He realized the stupidity of what he’d just done as he charged around the first ninety-degree turn of the descent only to hear shouts from down below chasing up the stairs to meet him. He couldn’t exactly run back up the stairs, and there was only one place the stairs were going to emerge. He needed to mix things up.
They would be expecting him to come down shooting. In their place he would have placed shooters either side of the stairwell, covering left and right, with a good view all the way up to the first turn. There was no way he’d get down the last ten steps without being cut down in a hail of machine-gun fire, so there was no way he was going to go down those last ten steps.
As he reached the first-floor landing he stopped running. He leaned out, looking down through the mesh grill of the lowest gantry, then up at the glass ceiling. Each of the huge plate glass panels was more than twenty feet across by twice that long and slotted together with iron girders. He squeezed off three shots inside a second, each aimed at the weak point in the center of each sheet of glass. For a split second he didn’t think it was going to work, then the strain pulled the glass apart. The glass around each bullet hole spiderwebbed and splintered, each crack running deep. Then the first shard fell, and suddenly the hole it left undermined the fragile balance of the entire twenty-by-thirty sheet. And following a crack like brittle thunder a lethal shower of glass rained down. Amplified by the confines of the warehouse walls, the noise was incredible.
Frost didn’t wait to see what happened. Blowing out the glass would buy him a few seconds at best while the kidnappers took cover and shielded their faces. He charged down the final flight of stairs. One of the kidnappers lay sprawled out at the mouth of the stairwell, jagged splinters of glass buried in his chest and neck. A viscous black pool of blood spread on the concrete like some kind of mocking halo around his head. He appeared to be very dead. Frost didn’t take any chances. He put a slug in the middle of the man’s face and walked out onto the central floor of the warehouse, glass crunching under his feet.
He couldn’t see the final gunman.
He felt out the cut in his cheek. It wasn’t deep, but it was bleeding freely. He’d been lucky.
He scanned the warehouse quickly, looking for any sign of movement, any out of place shadow. Something that would give the last man away. A section of the warehouse floor was given over to forty- and smaller twenty-foot metal shipping containers. They offered plenty of places to hide. It wasn’t an exact science, but nothing in the spread of glass across the concrete floor suggested anyone had run across it so he turned his back on the containers. If he could take the last guy alive, great. If he couldn’t, he wouldn’t shed any tears. Frost licked his lips. He could taste his own blood on his tongue.
He heard a woman’s scream and realized the last gunman had gone for the hostages. He didn’t stop, he didn’t think, he ran. He wasn’t about to lose anyone-not now, not when he was this close.
The gunman stood in the doorway. “You!” he yelled, waving the muzzle of his machine gun around threateningly. “Here!”
Over his shoulder Frost could see the terrified face of the woman he had spoken to through the window. She stumbled toward the man, eyes wide with fear.
The man grabbed her and pulled her close, then started to turn. He was trying to use Annie as a human shield.
“Let her go,” Frost said, keeping his voice calm and reasonable.
The kidnapper shook his head wildly. His eyes bulged, filled to bursting with the blood pumping too fast through his body, driven by his racing heart. His fear was palpable. He started to bring the snub-nose of the MP5 up toward the side of the woman’s head. Frost took a step toward him, and another, even as the man shook his head. He didn’t look like evil incarnate. He looked like an everyday Joe. Unremarkable. Unmemorable.
“It doesn’t have to end like this,” Frost said.
Less than ten feet separated them. He could smell the man’s sweat. It was rancid, like he hadn’t washed in days. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe there were no replacement guards. Maybe he and his dead friends had been the only ones involved after all. He stank every bit as badly as the hostages he had kept penned up in that tiny room for a week.
“Back! Stay back!” His voice broke on the last syllable.
Frost ignored him, taking another step toward him. Nine feet.
“I’m serious! Get back!”
Frost took another step. He made no pretense of offering peace.
“I’ll kill her! I’ll kill them all!”
“Then I’ll kill you,” Frost said, quite matter-of-factly.
Seven steps.
“Truth is, it doesn’t matter what you do, I’m going to kill you. You know that, don’t you?”
Six steps.
“I’m going to kill you for what you did to her son,” he nodded toward Annie. “I’m going to kill you for what you did to their fathers and their husbands. I’m going to kill you because you deserve to die. Make it easy for me, go on,” Frost urged. “Make a move. Pull the trigger.”
Frost raised the Browning. The muzzle rested less than five feet from the center of the man’s face. The madness of fanaticism blazed in his eyes.
“I’m not going to miss from here. And no matter how quick you are with that thing”-Frost’s eyes drifted toward the MP5-“I promise you, I am faster with this.”
He expected the man to beg for his life.
He was disappointed when he didn’t. The man stared at him belligerently.
“Tell me who’s giving the orders here,” Frost said.
“Go to hell!” the man snapped. He shook his head. He was wired. Every muscle trembled beneath his grimy skin.
“You’re not the man here,” Frost said. There were three steps between them now. He could taste the man’s halitosis and see every pore opening as the sweat came. “You’re the muscle. You’re a goon. You didn’t plan this. Who do you answer to? Who’s your boss?”
“Do you think I will tell you?” the man sneered. “Are you really so stupid?” He shook his head.
Without breaking eye contact Ronan Frost lashed out with his l
eft hand, grabbing a fistful of the man’s greasy hair and pulling down hard. The move dragged him off balance. Frost pressed the gun into the center of his forehead. “Last chance. Talk.”
“I will never betray my people.”
“That’s all I wanted to know,” Frost said, pulling the trigger.
The man’s head jerked back and his body went limp. Frost’s grip on his hair stopped him from falling. A ring of powder burn circled the entry wound. There was surprisingly little blood and almost no damage. The back of his head was a different matter. The exit wound was a mess of bone fragment, brain tissue and blood. Frost pushed the dead man aside and holstered the Browning.
Behind Annie, the women and children were looking at him as though he were some kind of avenging angel-they needed him, they knew that, but he scared them. He smiled at one of the older girls. She sobbed, a great heaving breath that stuck in her throat, and then as the tide of relief swarmed over her, started to cry. Her entire body shuddered. One of the women walked over to her and just held her. The sense of relief in the room was palpable.
“Okay, folks, time to go home,” he said, holding out his hand. Annie took it. She looked at him with the most intense mix of grief, thankfulness and horror. Her two girls clung to her legs. Frost reached down and scooped one up and cradled her in his left arm. She clung with both arms around his neck. “What’s your name, sweetie?” he asked the girl.
She leaned in, pressing her lips up close to his ear and whispered, “Vicky.”
“Lovely to meet you, Vicky. In a few minutes I am going to tell you to close your eyes. You’ll do that for me won’t you?” The girl nodded. Frost smiled down at her. “You just screw your eyes up real tight and everything’ll be fine. I promise you.”
He drew the Browning and held it in his free hand. He wasn’t taking any chances.
He ushered the women and children out of their make-shift cell one by one. More than half of them had lost their shoes. “There’s a lot of broken glass out here; you might want to carry your kids,” he told them. They did what he said without a word. He led them through the ruined warehouse toward the huge green overhead door at the far side of the floor. He heard the devil dog barking before he saw it. “Close your eyes, sweetie,” Frost whispered in Vicky’s ear. He felt her scrunch up against his shoulder, burying her head in his collar. A moment later the Doberman came barreling around the shipping crates, claws scrabbling on the concrete as it ran. Its incredible gait devoured the distance between them in three seconds flat. Frost waited until the last moment, as it reared up to launch itself at his chest, jaws snapping, teeth ready to tear out his throat, and pulled the trigger three times. The bullets tore into the dog’s hide in a tight cluster, ripping through the muscle and bone to rupture the animal’s racing heart. The moment of its charge wasn’t stopped by death. Frost twisted sideways, trying to get out of the animal’s way. All he managed to achieve was presenting it with a smaller target.
The dead dog slammed into Frost hard enough to stagger him back three steps, and off balance, before he fell. The girl in his arms screamed. He realized she’d opened her eyes to see the wild glass-eyed stare of the dead Doberman inches away from her face. Frost covered her eyes with his hand and soothed, “It’s all right, it’s all right. It can’t hurt you now.”
He struggled to rise.
The fact that the dog had hit them here, inside the old warehouse, meant the night watchman couldn’t be far behind.
He had dropped his gun in the fall. Annie stood beside him holding it.
He saw movement in the periphery of his vision: the night watchman. The last man between them and their freedom.
“Give me the gun,” he said holding out his hand.
nnie didn’t seem to hear him. She only had eyes for the night watchman.
“You don’t want to do it,” Frost said, sensing what she was thinking. It wasn’t difficult. Here was a chance to strike back at one of the men who had ruined her life. Who wouldn’t want to kill him given the chance? The gun empowered her. Her arm trembled. Frost knew what was happening. It had happened to him the first time he had contemplated killing. Suddenly the gun weighed so much more than the sum of its parts, so much more than the metal and the polymer. It weighed a life. She wasn’t just pulling the trigger, she was pulling against the weight of all those unlived days, all of those unexperienced joys and sadnesses. “Let me,” Frost said, calmly. “This is what I do. You don’t want to live with his death inside your head.”
“I do,” Annie said. “I need to.”
She pulled the trigger and kept on pulling it until the man went down. The first two went wide, hitting the metal door and raising a shriek of echoes with their impact. The third hit him in the shoulder. The forth in the leg. Neither would kill him. The night watchman lay on the floor, screaming and begging.
Frost held out his hand for the gun.
This time Annie gave it to him.
He checked the chamber. There was a single round left.
It was all that he needed. He walked across the floor, his footsteps echoing, hollow in the funereal expanse of the huge old building. Frost stood over the bleeding man. “One chance,” he said. “Who do you work for?”
The man lay on his back, squirming in his own blood. Frost was wrong. He clutched at his thigh where Annie’s bullet had opened a major artery. That one would kill him.
“You’re already dead,” Frost said. “If I don’t kill you one of the Goon Squad will. And the only way I am not going to kill is if you give me a name. Now, who do you work for?”
The man gritted his teeth.
Frost raised his gun, aiming it squarely between the man’s rapidly glazing eyes.
Frost felt sure he was going to hold out on him aeft.
Frost put the bullet between his eyes.
He had a name. Mabus.
Frost holstered the Browning and walked across to the shutter. On the wall beside it was a large red button. He hit it. Gears groaned to life and the door began to rise slowly, the metal grinding as it was forced to turn.
Beams of light streamed into the warehouse beneath the metal shutter, throwing shadows across the concrete. The chill of the coming dawn raced in. Frost carried the girl out into the open air. The sun rose red over the city on the other side of the river. The lights were headlights. Six cars were pulled up outside the chain-link fence. He could hear voices shouting, but he couldn’t make out what they were shouting. He could barely make out the silhouettes of the men behind the headlights. One of them walked forward so that that he was back-lit by the cars as he reached the heavily padlocked gate.
Frost ushered the women forward.
They were hesitant at first, lost now that they were outside. The women seemed particularly wary, moving cautiously toward the light, like someone might suddenly snatch it away from them and force them back into that hellhole. When they realized the headlights were police cars they started to run toward the fence. Frost was less happy to see the boys in blue.
He thought about setting the girl down and trying to fade back into the shadows. There was a chance he’d find his coat and jacket and, in turn, the Ducati, but all he needed to do was look at the ground beneath his feet and the pool of light there to know that trying to make a break for it now was a dumb idea. Instead he walked slowly toward the gate, resigned to his fate.
By the time he reached it they’d cut through the padlock and were beginning to take care of the first women and children to reach them.
“I can take her, sir,” a WPC said, holding out her hands for the girl. She had a pretty smile but a harsh face. Frost handed Vicky over, ruffling her hair as she squirmed out of his grasp. Another officer walked over, and Frost thought he heard the gods laughing at him from on high. It was the short surly one of the pair he had talked to after getting out of the James house on Halsey Road.
The man made straight for him, and as Frost started to turnaway said, “Well, well, well, fancy seeing you here,” and
shook his head slowly, as though to say pigs really had started to fly as far as he was concerned. “It’s quite some coincidence, don’t you think? I feel like I am seeing more of you than I do my own mother. First you’re outside a murder house while all hell’s breaking loose, which, let’s face it, is worthy of a raised eyebrow all by itself. And now here you are rescuing all these women and children like some sort of superhero. You know, all that’s missing is the burning building to make the whole thing complete. So why don’t you start by telling me who the hell you are, Mister Superhero?”
Frost looked at the detective. It took him all of two seconds to have the measure of the man. He had Little Man syndrome. He was bitter, angry, and looking for a scalp. “Frost,” he said. He didn’t bother lying. “Ronan Frost.”
“Should I have heard of you?”
“I don’t see why you would have.”
“Well then, Mister Frost, let’s go for two for two. Who are you? I mean, you’re not one of us-you’re not police-that much is bloody obvious. So who are you? Government? Intelligence? Five? Special Forces? Counterterrorism? Justice League? Who are you?”
“I’m just a Good Samaritan,” Frost said.
“Bullshit.”
Frost said nothing.
“I’m not an idiot, Mister Frost.”
Again Frost said nothing.
“Okay, let’s try again. How did you find out about this place? How did you know what was happening here when no one else had the slightest clue?” He shook his head. “We’re still not sure, and here you are saving the day.”
“I suggest you stop wasting time asking questions I am not going to answer,” Frost said, “and start thinking about what happens in the next hour or so.” He looked toward the rising sun. “There are five bodies in there. Six if you count the dog. I know because I killed them. And no, you aren’t going to arrest me for it, before you starting getting any ideas. You said it yourself, I’m a bloody hero. Now, what is it, almost five? Anytime soon their reief are going to turn up, expecting to take over babysitting duties. I suggest you get someone in there to clean up, fix the damned gate you just broke, and think about bringing in the rest of this mob. So we can either stand here measuring our dicks, or we can shut these people down. Me, I know how well I’m hung. How about you?”
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