by Chris Ryan
Bald lowered the Smith & Wesson. He turned his back on the screams and raced towards the Civic. What they would do to Antonia was unthinkable. So Bald decided not to think about it. He didn’t stop.
He came to the roadside. Pools of blood stained the dust. Burned lead and brass particles tickled his nostrils. He knelt down beside the bastard he’d slotted. Still fucking breathing, blood sloshing about in his lungs like he was sucking with a straw at the bottom of a milkshake.
‘Mátame,’ the guy said through the crack in his lips. ‘Kill me.’
Bald fished the car keys out of the prick’s pockets and left him weeping into the dirt. Then he sprinted to the Nissan and fetched the gym bag. The sirens had shape as well as voice now. Bald ID’d the cars on the horizon. Their lights were cracking and popping. Less than a hundred metres distant. Bald marched back to the Civic, dumped the gym bag in the passenger seat and gunned the motor. The Civic could hit 100 kilometres per hour in under seven seconds. And that was all it took for the bodies to shrink to cockroaches and the sirens to fade into the sky. Bald cranked the Civic all the way to 160. Five kilometres down the road he was entering San Hernando when the burner shook angrily into life.
Cave was calling.
seventeen
1512 hours.
San Hernando was in full-on siesta mode. Bald passed ramshackle villas painted pink and turquoise and red. Stacks of old tyres lay in overgrown front yards. The gardens were tangled knots of weeds. Wild dogs roamed the streets, licking at sweet wrappers and steaming puddles of raw sewage.
Bald let the phone ring a few times before tapping the answer key. He liked the idea of that cunt Cave sitting behind his polished oak desk, unable to get hold of him.
‘John.’
‘Danny, old boy,’ Bald replied.
‘Don’t take the piss, you Scottish bastard. I’ve just received a distress signal from Antonia. What the bloody hell’s going on down there?’
‘She walked into a trap. There was nothing I could do.’
The line broke up for a second, amid furious crackling. ‘She was one of the best handlers we had. Jesus fucking Christ,’ said Cave.
‘I tried to save her,’ Bald said, ‘but—’
‘Where are you now?’ Cave cut in.
‘In San Hernando. Where the fuck do I meet this Nelson guy?’
‘Head to San Bernardo church. He’ll be waiting for you there.’
Nicolas Guerra fed into Xicotencatl and then Emiliano Zapata. Street names aside, Bald couldn’t tell the fucking difference. Each slab of road told the same pitiful story of breeze-block homes with black-box windows, rusting chain-link fences warped by the relentless sun. Long-haired greaseback weasels scurried among the garbage. Every street carried a canal of litter. The stench was vicious. Christ, thought Bald. Ten minutes in this fucking hellhole and he could understand why everyone was so desperate to try their luck in America. Washing dishes for some rich arsehole in California had to be better than this.
He looked at his watch. 1530 hours. Fifty-one hours to go to kill the sleeper.
‘There’s something else that’s come up,’ Cave continued.
Bald looked down at his jeans, spattered with blood. Drops of it were on his arms too. He could feel it on his neck, dried like scabs. He felt a powerful need to wash it off.
Cave hung up.
‘I’m all ears,’ said Bald.
‘The Agency want in on this.’
Bald said, ‘I thought they wanted their hands clean.’
‘They do. You’re still the one who has to take Laxman down. But they want a pair of eyes on the ground while you’re there. To make sure nothing goes wrong.’ Cave paused, then quickly went on, ‘Now before you get all premenstrual on me, listen. Her name is Rachel Kravets. She’s one of the best the Agency has to offer.’
‘Great,’ Bald deadpanned.
Cave ignored the comment and went on. ‘She used to be Miss Florida. Actually entered for the Miss World competition last year. She’ll rendezvous with you in Clearwater. She has some extra intel on Laxman that you may find useful. Do me a favour and check your email when you get the chance.’
Bald listened to the vanilla drone of the dial tone. Fucking great, he thought.
A strange thing had happened to Bald since he’d come back from the dead in the backwaters of Central Europe. It wasn’t merely the migraines. It was something more troubling. At certain moments he had started to see things that weren’t there. He hesitated to call them hallucinations, because that’s what crazy people had. And whatever fucked-up shit was going on in his head, Bald was sure he wasn’t crazy. They were more like echoes. Echoes of the violence he had witnessed. The first time it happened, six months ago, he’d been sitting in a bar in Pimlico enjoying a beer with a Russian stunner he’d pulled, when out of nowhere he experienced a strange buzzing noise in his ears. He looked up and saw that half her head was blown off. Bits of brain matter were bobbing on the surface of her Long Island iced tea. Another time he was in the back of a black cab ferrying him across town when the driver turned around and asked where Bald wanted to be dropped off. His lower jaw was hanging off, attached by only a few thin cords of muscle, his upper teeth leaching blood.
The echoes would last for a few seconds or a few minutes. Then they were gone.
He had never mentioned it to anyone. Didn’t feel that he could. He was a Blade, and Blades didn’t talk about their problems. They talked about the relative merits of the .45 ACP round and they laughed about the time Warrant Officer Paul Mundy terrified a stripper by whipping out his horse-length cock and telling her to finish the job.
Bald spied a crumbling Spanish Colonial-style church. Barren fields to the north, mountains of rubble and metal. To the south a bunch of excavated homes that looked to have long been abandoned to the weeds. San Bernardo church, he figured.
Slinging the gym bag over his shoulder, Bald approached the doors of the church. They were constructed from alder and stood four metres tall. Bald tugged at the black iron lever. The door was heavy and Bald had to pull hard to open the fucker.
The church looked derelict on the outside, but the interior, with its tall white columns breaking up the star of aisles, seemed well looked after. The only people present were an ancient man and woman sitting side by side on the rearmost left pew. They whispered prayers to the gold-leafed Virgin Mary adorning the pulpit.
Bald wandered up the nave, veered right where the aisles crossed, and entered the transept. He found himself in a six-metre-square enclosure facing a richly decorated statue of Jesus Christ. A man was praying on his knees in front of the statue. The man stood up. He was shaven-headed and not exactly fat, just big all over: big head, big shoulders, big hands. He wore black vestments and from his neck half a dozen gold necklaces dangled, beneath which a white clerical collar was visible.
‘I’m Nelson,’ he said, turning to greet Bald and speaking in the lowest of whispers. ‘You must be the one called John. I have been expecting you.’
The priest was six inches taller than every other Mexican Bald had seen, and about six inches wider too. His forehead was lacquered in sweat and he looked like Marlon Brando after he piled on the pounds. He thrust a nicotine-stained hand at Bald and said in a voice that was so thick it could tarmac roads, ‘Do you believe in the light and word of Jesus?’
‘I believe in the light and word of a Colt Commando,’ said Bald. ‘After that, everything’s up for grabs.’
‘Perhaps I can show you the Truth.’
‘The route across the border is good enough for me.’
Nelson peered at Bald’s face the way posh wankers study a piece of art in a gallery. He looked concerned. ‘Yours is a troubled soul, my son.’
‘I’m not your fucking son.’
‘I see violence in you. And trauma. You seek peace. Let me help you.’
‘Is that what you say to all the boys?’
Nelson smiled at Bald, showing that the jibe didn’t bother him. He
wiped sweat off his gleaming dome with his chubby fingers.
‘We must leave now,’ he said.
He darted out of the transept and back down the aisle leading to the entrance of the church, beckoning to Bald to follow. Despite his girth the man was fleet-footed. ‘The transport is at the market three blocks north of here. Everyone else is waiting,’ he said.
‘Everyone else?’
Nelson gave a sinister chuckle. Bald suddenly worried that Antonia had hired the wrong fucking man. This guy was like a snake-oil salesman.
‘There are other migrantes waiting to cross,’ Nelson said, looking at Bald across his shoulder, his gold-ringed hands making gestures the Scot couldn’t fathom. ‘You’re not the only one trying your luck in America tonight, my son.’
Outside, they hurried round the church and entered the graveyard at the rear. Suddenly Nelson slowed his steps until his fat feet were making a heavy pitter-patter on the dry earth. They were now picking their way through ornate tombs and gravestones.
‘A woman was supposed to be accompanying you here,’ Nelson said without turning round. ‘Where is she?’
‘Don’t know,’ Bald lied.
‘I was expecting—’
‘If you’re expecting a fuck, forget it. She doesn’t put out.’
The priest had stopped in his tracks. Bald could hear the man’s breath, gravelly and slow.
Nelson swung round and Bald found himself staring at the business end of an ageing M1911 single-action semi-automatic. The priest’s eyes boiled as he aimed the handgun at Bald’s forehead and rasped, ‘Now, you tell me where my daughter is.’
eighteen
San Antonio, Texas, USA. 1544 hours.
The Ruby Ridge indoor gun range announced itself with a ranch-style billboard in the shape of a cowboy hat, off the I-10 near Sunny Slope on the east side of town. ‘GUNS & OUTDOOR. KIDS WELCOME,’ the billboard promised. Hauser parked his GMC Yukon Denali in the gravel parking lot and retrieved an orange Pelican box from the passenger seat. It was forty degrees in the open and twenty-two in the air-conned bliss of the Ruby Ridge Armory and Survival Store. The store manager, a guy with a rustbelt beard and a beer gut with its own gravitational pull, greeted Hauser as he walked up to the counter. There was an impressive array of Glocks and Sig Sauers on display in the counter and a stuffed moose head framed on the wall behind the manager. The guy was forty or thereabouts. All that fat, it was hard to tell.
‘I’ll take a booth,’ said Hauser.
‘Sign here,’ the manager said, gesturing to a pad of blank forms next to a stack of paperbacks entitled The Essential Texas State Gun Law Handbook. Hauser wrote down a false name, address and social security number.
‘And here.’
Hauser ticked a box declaring that he was not mentally ill. With the State of Texas satisfied that he wasn’t going to randomly kill anybody, Hauser was free to spend a half-hour on the range.
‘See anything you like?’ The manager waved a hand at the Sigs and Glocks. ‘Got a special on the Rugers at the moment, if you’re looking.’
‘I’m not.’
Hauser patted his Pelican box.
‘Brought my own piece.’
‘Change your mind, let me know,’ said the manager, his voice the colour of mild disappointment. He handed Hauser a pair of protective glasses and earmuffs. Hauser strapped on the glasses but didn’t bother with the muffs. He lugged the Pelican box down an egress corridor to an airlocked door at the end. Limped into the gun range.
The air stank of lead. The newer ranges had sophisticated ventilation systems that blew smoke and lead particles down the range to the sloped bank. Not here. Hauser could feel a greasy film of lead powder forming on his face and neck. He chose the second booth from the end. On his right a forty-something woman with a shock of peroxide-blonde hair was popping rounds out of a ridiculously big revolver. Hauser couldn’t make out the brand.
Three rednecks were having themselves a whale of a time at the booth to his left. They were all wearing a uniform straight out of the Ranger Joe’s catalogue. The youngest was decked out in an ACU pattern T-shirt and desert-brown fatigues. With his flat-top crewcut and bowling-ball biceps he looked like a lifesize Marine Corps action figure. The second guy was thin as a strip of beef jerky, with a face that looked like it had been marinated in Jim Beam. His ponytail poked out like a skunk’s tail from underneath his Texas Rangers baseball cap.
The two dumbfucks looked on approvingly as the third guy unloaded a clip from a Ruger SR40 semi-automatic. Emptying the last round at the paper target hoisted fifteen metres ahead of him, the guy lowered the firearm as Rangers hit the red button on the wall mount and the target whirred back towards the booth.
Marine Corps plucked the target off the clips. ‘Hell of a punch that point-forty packs. I mean, look at this shit, Rudy.’ Marine Corps was poking his pinkie through one of the bullet holes ripped through the target. Wiggled it about like a little dick.
Rudy, the shooter, laid the Ruger flat on the booth table and examined the hits for himself. He was wearing digi-cam combats and a pair of weathered combat boots. A black T-shirt hung down over his moobs with the words ‘OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM VETERAN’ humped over his neat little beer belly. Hauser figured the closest this guy had got to Iraq was looking it up on fucking Google Earth.
Rudy rubbed his grizzly-bear jaw and nodded at the target.
‘Like I told you, dummy. You put Hector and his fajita-eating buddies down with one of these babies, and he ain’t for getting up. And you know what you call a dead beaner?’
‘One step in the right direction.’
‘One step in the right direction,’ Rudy concurred.
Marine Corps, Rudy and Rangers snickered like three schoolkids who’d just discovered a hole in the wall of the girls’ changing room.
‘Not bad,’ Hauser said.
Rudy pulled the plug on his laughter. Rangers and Marine Corps fell into line and did their best to look severely pissed. Rudy turned around. Slowly, as if giving his rage time to properly boil up inside of him. Hauser whistled ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’ as he busied himself with springing open the Pelican box.
Rudy said, ‘What did you say, friend?’
‘I meant what I said. You’re not a bad shot. But you’re not a good one either.’
Rudy pointed a finger at a spot between Hauser’s eyes and said, ‘And who the fuck are you?’
‘Someone who shoots better than you.’
Rudy blazed up like petrol. He shaped clumsily to swing a punch at Hauser but Marine Corps and Rangers wisely grabbed hold of him and held him back. Rudy looked like he was shitting out a cannonball. Hauser removed the components of his gun from its box and laid them on his booth table. The weapon’s smooth polymer surface had four light-grey buttons dotted above the trigger mechanism and an anti-friction layer tapering at both ends of the grip. In the middle of the grip was a seal encircling a regal ‘N’ and ‘F’. Running down the side of the barrel were the engraved words ‘FN HERSTAL BELGIUM’.
‘An FN Five-Seven,’ said Rudy, folding his arms across his chest. ‘Big fucking deal. Those things have been on the market for years.’
‘The civilian version, sure,’ said Hauser. ‘But not this model.’
Now Hauser removed a box of ammo from the Pelican box and placed it on the table in clear view of the rednecks. He began thumbing rounds into the clip. Each cartridge was roughly the height of two quarters and bottlenecked at the tip like a spear. Rudy swapped glances with Marine Corps and Rangers.
‘This is a 5.7x28mm FN round. Notice the lack of the hollow point on top of the round. As I’m sure you know, you can’t buy these rounds commercially.’
Rudy said, ‘I hear them things can punch a hole through forty bulletproof vests.’
Hauser said, ‘You heard right.’
He loaded the last cartridge into the clip, then slid the clip into the pistol grip. Now he fastened a red-mil-dot laser sight to the underside
of the barrel and punched the numbers ‘5’ and ‘0’ into the target range-setter. The fresh bullseye target whirred away and came to a halt a few metres short of the rear bank.
Rudy was about to say something but Hauser discharged the first round from the chamber. Flames spewed out of the muzzle. The recoil was barely noticeable. With some guns the recoil was so bad it was like wrestling the hind legs of a dog. But not the Five-Seven. Hauser kept his grip steady and his support firm and casually emptied all twenty rounds of 5.7x28mm ammo. When he was done he palmed the red button on the controls. The target zipped back to the booth. Hauser left it clipped to the rail while he removed the laser sight and ejected the spent clip. He could feel the rednecks closing ranks around him.
‘Holy shit,’ said Rangers. ‘That’s some fucking shooting.’
Twenty holes were crowded around the bullseye in the centre of the target. Every single bullet had struck within a quarter of an inch of the bullseye.
Rudy nodded with his bottom lip. Grudging acknowledgement of Hauser’s shooting skills. He looked at him in a different light. ‘You know, a man who can shoot shouldn’t let his talent go to waste. He ought to put it to good use.’
Hauser continued packing his Five-Seven into the Pelican box.
‘Lemme ask you a question,’ said Rudy.
‘Ask,’ said Hauser.
‘Do you love America?’
Hauser’s eyes pinballed from Rudy to Marine Corps to Rangers. All three were staring at him. ‘That depends,’ he said.
‘On what?’
‘Which part you’re asking me about.’
‘How about I’m asking you about the whole damn thing?’
‘I like free speech and low taxes. I like my fuel cheap,’ Hauser said. ‘But I don’t much care for big government. Or Arab-loving, pro-lifer faggots. And I sure as hell don’t like having a president who’s not even American.’
‘Fuckin’ A.’ This from Marine Corps.
Hauser gently clipped the Pelican box shut while Rudy broke out into a full-on smile that fractured his skin, like a dried-out riverbed. He gave Hauser an ironclad handshake. ‘Name’s Rudy.’
