by Andy McNab
He froze, and I bit down harder in an attempt to close my bite completely. Blood oozed into my mouth; warm, metallic. My top teeth scraped down the side of his cheekbone. If they met their mates, they’d take a big chunk of skin out of him. He knew it, too, and so did the guy above me. He got to work, punching hard and fast into my head and shoulders. There was urgency about it: they had to resolve this situation. We were just fifteen metres from the South Circular.
And then the punches stopped as suddenly as they had started. A second later, he toppled onto my legs.
Rio stood with a knife in his good hand, seven inches of KA-BAR Tactical.
He brought down the knife once again and I saw a blur towards the side of a thigh below me. I heard it make entry, with a sound from him like a muffled squeak.
The body went rigid as the pain swept through it. He tried hard not to scream but he couldn’t help it. ‘Fuck!’
Even if sirens didn’t sound immediately, I didn’t want to have to start dragging bodies about and planning how to dispose of all the evidence. I unclenched my teeth and pulled myself away from the face. ‘Don’t kill ’em! Don’t kill ’em!’
We might have been in the middle of a major drama but death would bring us all into the real world. Dead bodies on a walkway can’t be ignored for long.
Rio waggled the knife and yanked it free. It must have embedded itself in bone.
I spat blood as I kicked myself free of the bodies and grabbed hold of Rio’s shoulders. ‘We’ve got to go, mate.’
The front door of the house was still open and light spilt out of the hallway. On the first-floor landing there was movement.
I hobbled to the door, my body not yet recovered. Number Three saw me: tall, short blond hair, side parted, taking the first steps down towards the door, hands full of wires and, behind him, the fuse box ripped apart.
I slammed the door. ‘Rio! Keys!’
He joined me, offering them up before holding his KA-BAR at the ready.
I snatched them from him and shoved in the first lever key. It was the wrong one and Rio knew it.
‘Fuck sake.’
I broke it into little stages, concentrated on what I was doing. I got the next key in just as the blond with the side parting got to the door and grabbed the handle. I locked it.
‘Let’s go. On me.’
8
Rio might live there now but this had been my turf since I was a kid. I was leading us towards a dark pool of safety in the middle of London. The council always used to close it at dusk to stop the druggies, doggers and generally fucked-up people having their own play space at night. They all went there anyway, so we’d just do what they did and jump the fence.
Rio was never more than a stride or two behind me as we sprinted down an alleyway. My legs were getting their lives back with the help of adrenalin. It wasn’t just about getting as much distance as we could between ourselves and the drama that might still be following us. It’s never about straight lines. I wanted to put in as many angles as possible. If we could come to a junction with four options, it would make their job more difficult: they’d have a larger area to cast about in and would have to split forces.
As soon as I got to the end of the alleyway I was going to chuck a left or a right, I didn’t know which yet, and run as fast as I could until I hit another set of options.
We took the left at the end, then dived down another alleyway to the right.
Rio was lagging. ‘Nick, hold up.’
We were between a couple of three-storey blocks of 1960s flats, and I took the chance to lean against the wall that made up the end of the terrace and bend down, arse against the brick, hands on knees, grabbing as much oxygen as I could. My face leaked sweat to mix with the blood around my mouth and chin.
Rio still had the knife in his hand. He grabbed a discarded Greggs bag and wiped it clean.
I pointed at the blade. ‘What the fuck?’
‘South London, mate. Every council-tax payer should be issued with one of these round here.’
He folded the paper to produce a clean bit and handed it to me. Sirens sounded in the distance, no doubt heading for whatever drama was left at the front of the house. If the two stabbed lads had a couple of brain cells between them, they would have dragged themselves into whatever they’d arrived in and made distance, just like us two. The blond one in the house would have switched the lights off and sat it out, unless he’d already jumped out of a first-floor window. His choice.
Rio had managed to get his breathing back to irregular rather than gasping. ‘What the fuck they doing in the house?’
‘Putting devices in. Maybe audio-visual. Who knows? But the third? He was trying to get them out when we turned up and compromised them. The first entry, when they tripped the tell-tales, was the CTR, the second was placing the fucking things.’
I’d done quite a few close-target recces to place devices over the years, and it was never as easy as it should have been. Hiding them was hard enough because people moved things, broke things and, if they were aware, would be actively looking. But even when a good location was found, there was the question of powering the things. Batteries needed replacing, which meant more CTRs and the risk of compromise. Wiring them into the mains took time and had to be recced. If possible, it was always best to get power from an external source like the next-door neighbour, slowly drilling through the wall to expose their power lines. An aware target wouldn’t moan about people not turning the immersion heater off at night because it was costing too much: they’d start looking for a device that was using power.
Rio still had a we’re-in-the-shit face on that I had to change in case it progressed to stage two: outright flapping.
‘But that’s a good thing, mate. It means the other two aren’t getting lifted. It’s all about information. It’s the Owl, it has to be, trying to find the memory sticks, not killing us. That would come after.’
As I wiped the blood off my face I could smell the greasy pastry or whatever had been wrapped in the bag. The raw skin of my knuckles stung like I’d stuck my hand in a wasps’ nest, but I’d sort them out when there was time.
Rio was thinking instead of flapping. ‘Mate, the best way is to cut through Brockwell Park, come out at Brixton.’
‘Great minds. Use the dark.’ From Brixton we could bus it, tube it or train it out of the area. ‘Then we call Gabe. We should meet up near Jack’s. All of us need to keep safe, keep together, start getting proactive on the Owl. It has to be him.’
Rio just nodded, wanting to save what oxygen he had in him for moving.
It felt strange having to articulate what was in my head, after so many years of working alone, but it wasn’t unwelcome. Maybe that was why I liked the three survivors. They understood the piss-taking, the vocab, and the mindset. The downside was having to be responsible for more than just myself – but if I got us all thinking the same way maybe it was an upside. Maybe it really was time to be part of something again.
The blue lights strobed the skyline, joining the rest of the light pollution over the rooftops around the area of Rio’s house.
I threw the paper bag at him and got moving.
Rio grinned. ‘I told you it was him, didn’t I? You gotta listen to me, mate. I know shit.’
‘That’s right.’ I grinned back. ‘Shit is all you know.’
9
We dodged through the Challice Way housing estate.
The mass of red brick had been thrown up after the Second World War, and the vans with ladders padlocked on their roofs and signs on the back saying they held no tools overnight gave a hint about who lived there now. From the range of cars parked up, satellite-dish installation paid well.
We aimed next for the Cressingham Gardens estate, on the south-west corner of Brockwell Park. Once there, and over the fence, all we’d have to do was head up and over the grass hill to the safety of Brixton and its public transport.
It took only five minutes to cover the ground, and i
t was easy to find a section of fence with lumps missing. It was obviously a bit of a rat-run for the nightlife. I waited for Rio in the semi-gloom and he wasn’t far behind. I held out a hand and he gripped it with his good one and scrambled over.
While we stood there for a few seconds catching our breath, I wiped my hands on the dewy grass to clean the grit out of the wounds and let the clear liquid gunge oozing out of my grazed knuckles do whatever it did to wounds. Straight away, they were back in the wasps’ nest.
The hum of traffic was perforated by an occasional scream or shout, just kids fucking about on the street. Then came a big hiss of air as a bus loaded and unloaded somewhere.
I gave Rio a couple more seconds to recover while I wiped my face clean with my jacket sleeve. ‘You ready, mate?’
‘Yep.’
‘Right, let’s go.’
I turned to cross the grass and pick up a path, but Rio grabbed my shoulder. ‘This way, Nick. It’s quicker.’ He pointed. ‘There’s a strip of park behind some houses that leads right onto Brixton Water Lane – piece of piss.’
We reached the high ground and the whole of London unfolded below us. Bright lights burnt inside the Shard, the GPO Tower, the Gherkin, Canary Wharf and the Walkie-Talkie, the curved one the sun had reflected off, setting fire to the Jaguars parked nearby. Where we stood was like a location for spies to meet, rather than a couple of dickheads running for a getaway on a bus. Below us, millions of real people were heading home for the day or packing the bars. I wouldn’t have minded joining them.
We started downhill, towards the streetlights of Brixton and red and white lights of nose-to-bumper traffic. I hadn’t been to this bit of the park since I was fourteen or fifteen. My mates and I used to hang about the lido, one eye on the girls’ bodies, the other on their handbags. The place was minging back then, everyone covered with baby lotion for a quick fry-up, their dog-ends bobbing up and down in the water. Not that many went in: it was far too cold.
Rio led the way towards the rear of the lido. His route took us past a group of teenagers smoking, drinking and generally pissing about. They didn’t like the idea of two strangers invading their space.
‘Fucking paedos, fuck off!’
We let them have their little victory and kept going.
There was a narrow strip of grass with a pathway, wrought-iron gates at the end, leading onto Brixton Water Lane. A bus trundled past; the pavement was busy.
Rio came right up close to me and stopped. ‘Mate, I need to go and see the girls, tell them I won’t be around for a while. Taking them to school’s been working really well. I don’t want to screw it up by just disappearing. Mate, they’re only round the corner, I won’t be long.’
He had manufactured the route for us to be at this gate. ‘This where you bring them?’
He nodded – he knew that I knew.
‘No problem. Just don’t tell her anything. Remember, the Owl won’t do anything to the girls. It’s counter-productive involving the real world. And it’d turn you into a bigger problem, because then you’re pissed off and can’t be controlled, so neither can your memory stick.
‘We’d do exactly the same, yeah? We wouldn’t go out there and start involving the real world.’
A Polish truck’s air brakes hissed and its driver screamed at a bunch of hoodies on BMXs who’d stopped in front of him. They had decided he was a wanker and started shouting that he’d get kicked out of the country immediately after the referendum.
I got us back to our world. ‘So, where we going?’
‘The estate. Effra Parade, just up the road – you know it?’
I did, but I issued a health warning. ‘They’ll be checking known locations now they’ve lost us. You know that, don’t you?’
Rio was nearing another bit of rat-run fence, ready to jump over it. ‘Yeah, but they won’t hurt anyone but us, right?’
He’d take the chance regardless. Nothing I said would sway him.
10
This end of Effra Parade had never been as swanky as the name suggested, but as we went on, the houses that had been in shit state when I was a kid were now double-glazed and freshly painted. The corner shop next to the butcher’s had become a bathroom supplier with a roll-top tub in the window. People always moaned about a traditional area losing its character, but nine times out of ten they were the ones who’d taken the money and run.
Rio tugged my sleeve. ‘Mate, listen. Thanks for getting your bollocks out back there – fronting up so I could do a runner.’
Serious never sounded right coming from him. I pulled away before the tug became a full-on hug. Or, rather, half a hug. ‘No problem.’
He wasn’t giving up. ‘But you knew I wasn’t gonna leg it, didn’t you? You knew I’d back you, yeah?’
I nodded. ‘But you still fucked up. It was all about keeping one of our memory sticks safe. If it was the other way round all you would have seen was the soles of my boots.’
It took a second to sink in, then he laughed. ‘Yeah, fucked up there, didn’t I?’
We were approaching a three-storey brown brick on the right and Rio’s voice dropped to nervous. ‘Nick, I won’t be long – I can’t be. The missus won’t let me in the flat, and the boyfriend gets pissed off.’
He hit an intercom button and I held out a hand. ‘Give us the mobile. I’ll get hold of Gabe.’
He dug it out as a female voice answered suspiciously, ‘Hello?’
Rio leant into the grille. ‘It’s me. Listen, I’ve got to—’
‘You can’t just turn up here like this. You don’t live here any more.’
‘I know. I’m away for a while. I’ve got some work. I just want to see the girls, say goodbye. I’ll be five minutes. I can’t take them to school. Just five minutes. Please, Simone.’
I’d met her once, and she’d seemed okay to me. Switched on, as you’d have to be to put up with three kids, Rio being one of them. The intercom still crackled but nothing was coming back from Simone.
I powered up the safe phone.
She came back on. ‘Okay, five minutes. But you’re not coming in. Go to the balcony.’
Rio didn’t wait for her to change her mind. He jumped the fence and ran to the corner of the block. Simone’s flat was on the ground floor. A steel grille was screwed into the brickwork to keep the kids in and, more to the point round here, to keep intruders out.
I hit WhatsApp and texted away: You there, fuckhead?
I’d found it easy to fall back into the military world of piss-taking and insults. If Gabe didn’t open with an expletive, I’d be worried something was wrong. And, besides, I enjoyed it, a bit like running around South London this last couple of weeks. It felt like home.
‘Daddy! Daddy!’ The girls burst onto the elevated balcony. The grille between them made it look like a prison visit, except it was the girls who were caged up.
Simone stood guard in the doorway, keeping a wary eye on Rio, who was now on tiptoe to get level with the kids. Rio might be shit as a boyfriend, but he was one of the few men I knew who could instantly recall his kids’ birthdays. The girls were in the same class at school, and he knew the name of their teacher. How many dads round here could you say that about?
I kept my distance for two reasons. The first was that Simone hadn’t warmed to Rio’s new mate the one time we’d met. Her exact words were ‘You look like trouble.’ I hadn’t chatted much. I didn’t want her to find out I came from round there and had maybe even gone to the same school as her girls, in case she took them away from the area to stop them growing up like me. The second was that I wanted to stand back and keep my eyes open, in case known locations really were being checked.
WhatsApp came back to me. What you want, gimp?
Nah, it’s the other one. Call, but outside.
I didn’t have to wait long. ‘Listen – we compromised a CTR at Rio’s. They were placing a device. You okay?’
‘All good. Nothing’s happened here. I still can’t go to the
house so they wouldn’t have bothered with that. A hotel, any fucker can come in and out. But I never make calls in the room – the walls are like fucking paper.’
I could see past Simone and into the flat, where a sixty-inch flat-screen filled a wall. In front of it a human landfill was slumped on a sofa with a party pack of Walkers. His shadow alone would have weighed at least two stone. Maybe Simone liked him for his personality.
‘You still got your memory stick?’
Anything I ever said to Gabe was taken as an insult. ‘Fuck off!’
‘What about Jack? He all right?’
‘Of course he’s not. He sits there being arty with beer cans and thinking too much.’
‘You get hold of him?’
‘He knows we’re coming but doesn’t give a fuck. He doesn’t want to meet. But I’ll sort it. I’ll meet you two in that poncy pub. You remember?’
I did. ‘Don’t tell him what happened at Rio’s, okay? Let’s not freak him out any more than he normally is.’
I stayed back for the last couple of moments of prison farewells before we headed for the tube.
11
Elephant Hotel, Pangbourne
To Gabe the bar was poncy, but to the locals it was probably as perfect as a Sunday colour supplement. Perfect shops, perfect pubs, perfect boarding school up the road, perfect horses on pothole-free roads.
Rio sat the other side of the round pine table, guzzling his second bottle of Beck’s and third packet of sea salt with a dash of balsamic. It should have been a Blue this time of the morning but he wouldn’t hear of it. We’d finished breakfast a couple of hours ago.
We’d stayed there last night after catching the last train from Paddington. We travelled there separately on the tube, and from two different stations. We didn’t phone ahead to the hotel and we didn’t get a cab from the station. Gabe didn’t know it yet but he was paying for the rooms and, tactically, that made sense. It was better than drawing cash from an ATM, either here or back in Brixton, where CCTV cameras could have followed us all the way to Pangbourne. Until Gabe got there we had enough cash between us to buy a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush each as soon as the shops opened. We’d frittered away our last reserves on beer and crisps.
