Severance Kill

by Tim Stevens

  Severance Kill

  Tim Stevens

  Tim Stevens

  Severance Kill

  ONE

  Calvary went backwards through the window in a sunburst of glass, the fragments fanning and spinning on either side of his field of vision. The force of the kick had been great enough to propel him slightly upwards as well as backwards so that he felt for an instant as though he was hanging motionless, four floors above the courtyard.

  Better this way, he thought.

  He twisted slightly in midair, because without visual data his chances of survival would drop from minuscule to nonexistent, and craned his neck. Four storeys down, the concrete floor of the courtyard lay like a morgue slab, lit by a sheaf of late-afternoon sun. Clinging to the wall of the building was the wrought-iron creeper of the fire stairs.

  Better that he puts up a fight.

  Already he was plummeting, the cold beginning to bite, and the pain from the kick. By contracting his stomach muscles he was able to jackknife so that his backwards momentum was offset. He lunged closer to the wall, shot out an arm, felt his fist bounce off hard metal. It meant he was within reach of the fire stairs. His grip clamped round a step. Suddenly, jarringly, he stopped falling.

  His legs flailed at the air. His shoulder burned from the shock of the impact. Above him his fingers inched towards the edge of the step, slipping on a slick of sweat. He forced his legs to be still.

  Between Calvary’s feet, two storeys down now, the concrete beckoned.

  He didn’t try to peer up at the window beyond the fire stairs. There was no point. Either the Songwriter would be coming down the steps already, or he’d have left the flat by the no

  By focusing all his attention on the arm gripping the step, so that for an instant he became his arm and nothing else, Calvary launched himself upwards, both hands reaching this time so that he got a solid grip on one of the steps higher up. He swung his legs sideways, for a second letting go his grasp, managing to achieve purchase on the banister above. His palm slid down its smoothness but he caught hold with his other hand.

  The Songwriter’s heel slammed down hard on his fingers, grinding them against the steel.

  Calvary’s hand spread in agony and dropped away. The movement swung his centre of gravity outwards across the drop once more. His other hand was going to be next and that would be the end, so he braced himself on the arm that was still clinging to the banister and sprung his body upwards as though he was pogoing on an invisible cushion of air. The move didn’t give him quite the momentum he was hoping for but he managed to regain a two-handed grip on the banister. This time he dragged himself over it and up on to the stairs.

  The Songwriter’s kick came hard at his face. Calvary jerked his head aside at the last moment. The blow caught him on the taut triangle of muscle between neck and shoulder and he rocked back across the banister and arched, arms wheeling, before regaining his balance.

  The Songwriter hadn’t followed up on his attack, but had retreated back up the fire stairs. Calvary watched his legs disappear back through the wrecked frame of the window.

  It meant one of two things. Either he’d been quick to understand, from the way Calvary had survived his assaults, that he was likely to come off second best in a hand-to-hand fight, and was making good his escape. Or, he was going for a weapon.

  Calvary drove himself up the stairs three at a time, the separate pains in his hands and his shoulder and his chest from the kicks and wrenches ignored for the time being. A knife: that would be nasty, close up, but if he could get on level ground with the Songwriter with enough room to spare between them — perhaps ten, twelve feet — he’d be able to gauge the man’s proficiency with a blade and work out an approach that might succeed. A gun, on the other hand… A distance of ten feet would render him utterly helpless.

  Through the ragged window frame he went, vaulting through the tooth-like shards in a ducking motion and hitting the floor at a roll and springing upright in the afternoon gloom. The Songwriter was crammed against the far wall, a weapon in his right hand, his mouth moving.

  The weapon was a phone.

  Calvary moved in, his weight on blessed solid ground now. His left fist pinned the man’s phone hand against the wall by the wrist, the blow cracking the slender bones and triggering the inevitable reflex that sent the fingers splaying and the handset spinning and skittering across the parquet floor. In almost the same movement he pivoted on his left foot so that his right knee drove into the Songwriter’s flank, hard bone biting into tender kidney.

  st ›

  The pain of such a blow was so intense that it incapacitated the victim by inducing astonishment almost more than anything else. Calvary knew this, having been on the receiving end more than once. The Songwriter bent on one knee over his damaged forearm, looking crazily like a third-rate lounge singer reaching the high point of his act. Using all the force he could generate from his hip, Calvary pistoned his heel against the bent knee. The man howled and bounced splay-legged off the wall, cracking his head.

  Calvary took a step back and stood, arms hanging loose, allowing himself to breathe.

  The Songwriter sat against the wall, half sighing, half moaning, lids jerking over flicking eyes. He was tall and slightly built in a modest pale blue suit, a dark Rorschach blot staining the fabric between the stretched thighs. His shoes, the ones that had driven Calvary through the window and stamped on his fingers on the fire escape, were soft leather loafers, not the hobnailed boots they’d felt like at the time.

  The Songwriter could hardly have chosen his footwear that morning expecting someone to attack him.

  Priorities. Calvary glanced at the phone on the floor a few feet away. The screen was blank, dead. No connection. Either he hadn’t got through to whomever he’d been calling or they’d been cut off. Calvary watched the man, the dropped marionette, slumped against the wall. He watched for signs that the man was bluffing: tension in the upper limbs in preparation for a grab for a hidden gun, perhaps a.22 pistol in the sock, or a honed shiv in a holster up the sleeve.

  Nothing. Just a fluttering at the eyes, a creature on the cusp of consciousness. While the ammonia stink of his humiliation rose from his crotch.

  *

  Calvary picked his way across the detritus of the flat. There was damage, a lot of it. Unnecessary wreckage. He should have heard the man coming. He’d been expecting him and, God knew, he’d had more than enough time to prepare. But the photo had pinned him like a butterfly on a collector’s board, and even if he had registered the footfalls on the stairs he probably wouldn’t have been able to move any more quickly.

  He found the photo face down under a smashed coffee table, its glass face splintered. He’d been staring at it when the Songwriter had come through the door with amazing speed and hurled a vase at him, insignificant as a weapon but enough to make Calvary recoil and lose a precious second. The battering of the man’s fists and feet had driven him in surprise towards the window. The spinning kick to the chest had sent him through it.

  Stepping back over to the Songwriter he gazed at the photo. The boy and the girl were perhaps ten and seven. Both had their father’s deep black, almost purple hair, his thin face, and probably his tawny skin, though right now his face was the colour of putty.

  The Songwriter — whose real name was Abubakar Al-Haroun, and whose real profession was not writing lyrics but recruiting young men and women to build and detonate bombs — tilted his head back so that Calvary saw the bloodshot crescents of his eyes.

  Calvary gripped the frame of the photo, melding the image of the children on to his retinas.

  No illusions. No running away.

  He dropped the picture, crouched, and laid a hand on either side of the man’s face
. At the last, before the crack, the faintly smiling lips were moving, he supposed in prayer.

  *

  The north London street stretched ahead, suburban and dull, its terraced houses supporting one another wearily up a sluggish slope. Wads of early spring blossoms like discarded rags broke up the evenness of the pavement and clumped in the gutters.

  Llewellyn fell into step beside him. Calvary picked up his pace so that the other man was left trailing for a moment.

  ‘He got one past you, then.’

  Llewellyn was only an inch shorter than Calvary but his narrow shoulders and air of turning inward upon himself made him seem far smaller. Above his rumpled, cheerful Celtic face his hair was thick and startlingly bouffant.

  Calvary kept walking. He knew Llewellyn meant the swelling lip. The rest of the bruises he’d been able to conceal with gloves and scarf.

  He said: ‘Your intelligence was below par. He was a fighter. Unit 777 or something.’ The special operations outfit of the Egyptian Army.

  ‘It’s possible.’ Llewellyn was actually beaming. ‘Beside the point, now, though.’ He’d found his stride and was matching Calvary.

  After a beat he said: ‘Bit of a mess back there, it would appear.’

  ‘Nothing you won’t be able to handle.’

  Calvary had phoned Llewellyn once he’d put several blocks between him and the Songwriter’s flat, which was in a quiet residential district on the far north-western fringes of the city. The rendezvous was set up for a few miles away. Calvary had taken the Tube, knowing that by the time he arrived at the meeting point Llewellyn’s crew would already be swarming over the flat, removing every trace of Calvary’s DNA.

  Do the fire escape, too, he’d said on the phone. Llewellyn had reproached him with silence.

  Wanting to be alone, Calvary turned down a side road, trying to shake Llewellyn off. It didn’t work, of course. In a moment Llewellyn murmured: ‘There’s another job.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I know it’s a bit soon. Sooner than it’s ever been before. But it’s really — ’

  ‘No. I mean, no. I’m not doing it.’ At last Calvary stopped, half turned to the smaller man. ‘Not now, not later. I’m finished.’

  I’ size="n the Songwriter’s flat, after the heaves had died away and there was no more sourness to be ejected from his belly and his throat, he’d stood gripping the rim of the sink and stared at himself in the spattered glass. Fair hair darkened by sweat and matted to his forehead, eyes muddy, stubble like buckshot. Thirty was a milestone he’d left behind him. Forty was, if not quite on the horizon, then no longer the imaginary, fantastical notion it had been ten years earlier.

  Enough, he’d thought. Not just thought; decided.

  Llewellyn was watching his eyes. After a moment he clapped Calvary on the shoulder and shook his head, grinning. ‘My manners. Look. Drinks and dinner, on me. Or if you’d prefer to get some rest first — ’

  Calvary stood where he was, resisting Llewellyn’s attempt to tug him along. ‘You’re not listening, Llewellyn. I’m out. I’ve had enough. I’ve done enough. This isn’t some knee-jerk response, something I’ll get over once I’ve had a few pints. No more.’ He turned, began walking back down the hill.

  Behind him Llewellyn didn’t call out, didn’t run after him — he never ran — and Calvary assumed he was standing there watching him walk away, trying to think of the right words before he disappeared out of earshot.

  Calvary’s phone buzzed and he fished it out of his pocket. A text message, from Llewellyn.

  Except there was no message, just a photograph.

  In it, Calvary, his face clearly distinguishable in profile despite the relatively low resolution, was emerging through the front door of the block of flats he’d vacated an hour earlier. The name of the block, Victory Gardens, was clearly displayed over the entrance.

  He’d disabled the CCTV cameras outside the block, so the picture hadn’t been taken by them.

  He hadn’t been aware that he’d stopped walking until he heard Llewellyn’s voice at his side.

  ‘So you see, Martin,’ he said gently, ‘it isn’t quite as simple as that.’

  TWO

  The branches flailed at him, competing with the squalls of rain that managed to slip between the trees. Calvary ignored them. His breath sawed and his thighs burned. The pounding his feet were taking from the knotty, stony floor of the woods would raise blisters. A year earlier, six months, there would have been none of this after only eight miles. He’d been letting himself slide.

  The forest lay on a ridge to the northeast of the city, a swathe of ancient woodland within walking distance of the flat where Calvary lived, alone. The soil under his feet was said to be riddled with bodies, victims of the East End gangs. Calvary couldn’t say he felt at home in the forest, quite; but he didn’t feel like an interloper there either.

  His watch, a sports model, said it was five in the afternoon. The flight was at six tomorrow morning. Plenty of time to force in himself through another few circuits, scald himself in the shower, exhaust himself before dropping into a sodden slumber. Do anything but think.

  He drove himself deep into the gloom.

  *

  Llewellyn had turned the tablet computer round to show Calvary.

  ‘Sir Ivor Gaines.’

  They were at a corner table in a tiny restaurant a few miles into the Berkshire countryside, west of the city. Calvary had never been there before but he assumed it was one used regularly by the Chapel for meetings such as this one. He assumed it had discreet, well-compensated staff and bug-free walls.

  One other table was occupied, by a young couple who were so engrossed in each other they barely spoke. Llewellyn himself had said little while he’d driven. Calvary had kept completely silent, staring out the window.

  ‘Age seventy-three. Former FCO, retired seven years ago. Career diplomat. Served in Hong Kong and Indonesia, and closer to home in Vienna, Prague and Berlin.’

  Llewellyn had ordered his usual Scotch and soda. He took a hearty swig. Despite himself, Calvary glanced down at the image on the screen. The picture was a sharp one, taken with a decent camera. Its subject seemed unaware he was being snapped. He looked younger than his years, small and molish and with sparse hair combed over his pate in the manner of a middle-aged rather than an elderly man. To Calvary he resembled an older Philip Larkin.

  Calvary drew a breath, grappled his feelings — towards Llewellyn, towards the situation he was in — until they were secured, then stowed them. Forced himself to concentrate.

  He said, ‘Spook?’

  ‘You’d think, wouldn’t you? Diplomat of his generation, posted to those particular fields. But no, surprisingly SIS never managed to recruit him. They tried, of course. Several times. He was never interested.’ Llewellyn sipped some more whisky. ‘Bit of a lefty, apparently.’

  ‘That’s odd, in a diplomat.’

  ‘It’s more common than you might realise. People spend time in the host culture, interacting with the other side, sometimes they go native.’ He raised his eyebrows as the food arrived. ‘You really ought to eat something.’

  Calvary ignored him. ‘How left wing was he?’

  Llewellyn jabbed his fork at Calvary in delight. ‘Exactly. You’ve got it.’ For a moment he seemed to be congratulating himself silently. ‘So left wing that, during his time in Berlin in the late seventies, Gaines was suspected of liaising with the KGB. Nothing too drastic, a few low-level documents that got leaked. And nothing that could be pinned on him. They tried the usual traps — feeding him false information to see if it made it across to the other side — but he was too good to fall for those. And he was a bloody good diplomat, so they were disinclined to sack him. They decided to keep him in place and watch what happened.’

  Llewellyn gave his lamb shank some attention, then went on. ‘He was in Prague nearly a decade later, just before the fall of the Wall. Ten more years of unblemished service as far as we know. Then, one
of SIS’s most highly placed agents within the StB, the Czechoslovakian secret police, fell under a train. Murdered, of course. Again, there was no proof, but he’d been an old friend and colleague of Gaines’s.’

  Llewellyn was becoming more animated now, starting to talk before finishing a mouthful. Calvary moved his chair back, pointedly, but Llewellyn didn’t seem to notice. Not for the first time the man’s curved face, the prominent chin and the peak of hair, made Calvary think of Punch.

  ‘Here’s the clincher. An old StB officer admitted last year that Gaines was the one who’d tipped them off about our agent. The StB chappie refused to go on the record, mentioned it out of the blue in a conversation with an SIS man in Prague who used him as an occasional source of information. But it caused quite a fuss, as you might imagine. Two days later the old StB fellow was dead. Heart attack.’ He lifted his shoulders, meaning: draw your own conclusions.

  ‘Gaines is living in Prague now. Loved it so much he retired there.’

  ‘Not Moscow.’

  ‘Good God, no.’ Llewellyn chortled. ‘Very few of those secret flagwavers for Mother Russia could actually stand living in the bloody place. Kim Philby did, but that was hardly by choice. Also, Gaines married a Czech woman, so he had ties there. She died.’ He signalled for another Scotch.

  Calvary said: ‘You want me to hit him.’

  Llewellyn’s eyes twinkled.

  Calvary breathed deeply though his nose. ‘Why go after him now? More than twenty years later? Even in the light of the new information this StB man provided?’

  ‘Justice? The notion that it applies to everybody, regardless of age or of how long has passed in between?’ Llewellyn was watching him in amusement, toying with him.

  Calvary didn’t bother answering. The Chapel had never been interested in justice or any such higher concept. Killing Gaines would have to address some issue to do with realpolitik, or they wouldn’t be involved, and Calvary and Llewellyn wouldn’t be sitting here.