by Rob Aspinall
Why was there always so much running involved? Auntie Claire would have a fit if she could—
Then I remembered. Auntie Claire wasn’t here anymore. She was dead and the guy who pulled the trigger was the one chasing me. It was the wrong way round. I should have been putting a bullet in his brain and seeing how he liked it. A couple of blocks down from the hotel, I rounded a corner and planted my back against one of the high apartment walls, panting, sweating, listening to the beat of helicopters in the air and the sirens flashing across a junction further up the main road to my left. A goth girl leaned out of her ground-floor apartment window to see what was happening, an iPhone glued to her ear. I strode over and snatched it off her. She shouted and swore, so I choked her with my left hand while I scrolled through her phone with my right. I brought up Google Maps and entered the street name with my thumb, almost forgetting about the girl. I let her go and pushed her back into her apartment. I used the Google Earth setting to get a better idea of the street layout.
Good.
I doubled back on myself and stepped out into the street I’d just come up. Nathan was moving, circling, his rifle at the ready.
He turned.
I stood there and let him see me.
He fired a split second too late. I was dust, back around the corner, past the goth girl’s apartment window. I hung a left around the next corner. Another fast left took me into an alley. And left again out behind Nathan. One final left would put me hot on his tail, a full square lap around the block. I imagined jumping on his back. Ramming his head into the wall of the apartment building, over and over again until it was mush.
As I rounded the final corner, a rifle butt came out of nowhere. I slid to the floor and it skimmed the top of my head. Nathan flipped the weapon round in his hands, ready to fire. I swept his legs out from under him with one leg and kicked the gun from his grip with the other. He hit the pavement with a crack. I scrambled up and over him to get the gun, only for Nathan to catch me by the ankles and pull me back on my front.
Oh, man, the tit burn. I can’t tell you how much it hurt.
I twisted and threw the iPhone in Nathan’s face. It cracked him right on the nose. I reached out for the rifle. It was an inch away. He dragged me back again, took me by the hair and threw me through the goth girl’s open apartment window. I bounced off the sofa and onto the living-room rug. Goth girl was on the landline to the police in the kitchen. She froze and dropped the phone as she saw me get up to my feet. Some guy, a ghost with long greasy hair, played Guitar Hero with a joint dangling from his lips. I ripped the guitar controller out of his hands, jumped onto the sofa and out through the window. As Nathan bent achingly to pick up his weapon, I used mine, slamming the base of the guitar full in his face, once, twice, three times.
Trouble is, killing a man with a fake plastic instrument is hard work. I smashed the thing in two on the third blow. We both dove for the gun, but only succeeded in sending it sliding out into the road. We both got to our feet. I rolled over the back of a stooping Nathan and out into the road. I scooped up the rifle, only for an ambulance to come out of nowhere, speeding without its siren. I commando rolled into the other side of the road. A big, boxy white truck hurtled at me from the opposite direction. I flattened out in the centre of the lane, gun tight to chest, the bumper of the truck passing a hamster’s eyebrow above my head. The wheels rumbled either side of me like thunder, the dirty undercarriage just a blur.
I sprang to my feet and stepped onto the pavement opposite Nathan. I had him in my sights, the rifle primed and ready. Finger on the trigger. I’d killed already. So many, I was starting to lose count. But always out of survival. Never in cold blood.
I hesitated and Nathan sensed the weakness in me. “Come on, Lorna. Pulling that trigger won’t make an ounce of difference.”
“It will to me,” I said.
“There are plenty more like me,” said Nathan. “Do you think they’ll let you walk away just because you killed one little Operations Chief? I’m a cog in the machine, just like you.”
“You’re nothing like me.”
“Look, Lorna, I know we’ve had our differences,” he said.
“Differences?”
“But if you let me go,” Nathan continued, “I can make all this go away. You can have your old life back.”
I saw Auntie Claire dying in the barn again. I saw the smug, uncaring expression on his face as he pulled the trigger, point blank.
“What old life?” I said. “You took everything from me.”
My mind was made up. I put my finger on the trigger. “Now I’m gonna take everything from you.”
I was a lousy shot, but I wasn’t going to miss. Not this time.
42
The Bridge
Nathan knew what he was doing, keeping me talking.
And now I’d left it too late.
A convoy of bright-yellow sightseeing coaches flashed between us before I could take the shot.
One, two, three. The wind from each one rocking me back on my heels. By the time they’d passed on through, there was no sign of Nathan. Only an empty space where he’d been just seconds before. I looked up and down the street. He was gone.
Fuck!
I paced round in a circle, trying to deal with the frustration. Then I caught hold of myself. He’d be back with reinforcements. In the meantime, the place was crawling with cops. I had to ditch the gun and get out of there. I hurried to the nearest bin, slid the gun inside, but not before a police car shot past and slammed on the brakes. It reversed fast in my direction. Not more running, surely. I was close to a heart attack as it was. Still, I had no choice. I ran leaden-legged down the nearest side street out onto a main road. Another patrol car screeched across my path. I was trapped. And I could see the headlines:
Murderer.
Terrorist.
Sweaty-haired loon.
What were the charges for that kind of thing? Life? Death? I was in fifty shades of poop-a-scoop and I’d just binned the one thing I could have used to escape. Me and my beautiful brain. I stopped and caught my breath. I was sick of all the running anyway and the police getting out of the car couldn’t be any worse than JPAC. I sat down on the kerb, shoulders slumped in surrender.
But it seemed the game wasn’t quite over. I had one life left. A bonus weapon I’d forgotten all about.
An alloy wheel with the Range Rover logo skidded to a halt just inches from my feet.
As I looked up, the passenger door swung open. Philippe sat behind the wheel.
“You might want to get in,” he said.
With the crunching boots of the Berlin PD just a few feet away. I pushed up off the kerb and bundled myself into the passenger seat, swinging the heavy door shut.
“A little plush for you, this, isn’t it?” I said.
“Seatbelt,” he said, like he was my dad.
I buckled up as he pulled out into the road, the police turning and running back to their patrol car. We headed towards a main junction at breakneck speed with all the lights on red.
“You look like a pig shat you out,” I said, noticing the blood in his hair and on his clothes, the heavy bruising on his knuckles, neck and face. “What happened?”
“Clarence is a persistent man,” Philippe said, pulling a handbrake turn. “Was a persistent man,” he said, correcting himself.
I didn’t want to know the rest. Whatever it involved, it was probably something awful. We slid sideways across the junction, barely missing a stream of crossing vehicles.
Philippe shifted through the gears. “What about Nathan?” he asked, slaloming through traffic, until it thinned out.
“I screwed up,” I said. “I had the drop on him and he got away. All this was for nothing. Nathan’s right. It’s pointless.”
“You stopped a bomb today,” Philippe said. “A dirty one at that. It could have killed hundreds, maybe even thousands. School kids included.”
Philippe braked and weaved around a slow-movi
ng driver in a purple SMART car. He noticed me touching my broken lower lip with a finger.
“See that?” he said, pointing to my lip. “If you’re alive to taste your own blood, you’re winning.”
I licked my lip and tasted the warm copper tang of the cut.
“Tastes good, doesn’t it?” he asked.
It did, now that he mentioned it.
“Don’t expect miracles,” Philippe said, hanging a left onto a bridge across the river. “It’s one battle. The main thing is, we’re alive and we’re … oh shit.”
Philippe slammed on the anchors and we stopped halfway across the concrete bridge, arching gently over the beautiful blue Spree.
I turned to Philippe. “You were saying?”
Up ahead was a full police blockade on the far side of the bridge. Behind us, another wall of flashing blue lights. Above, a SWAT helicopter, hovering low. Either side, deep, cold water. And in between it all, me and Philippe in a stolen black Range Rover.
“So,” I said. “Any ideas?”
TO BE CONTINUED …
BOOK 3: WORLD WILL FALL
1
Deep Waters
Philippe wrapped one bloodstained finger after another around the chunky leather steering wheel of the Range Rover. I squeezed the padded door handle with one hand, the velour cushion of the passenger seat with the other. At both ends of the bridge, a stack of Berlin police cars flashed emergency blue. Yet, except for the heavy-metal beat of a chopper overhead and the faint echo of a police megaphone, all was quiet. The traffic had been diverted away from the area by the Berlin PD, who’d tricked us onto a stretch of road from which there was no escape. I breathed in the new-car smell of the Range Rover. Philippe’s right hand moved over to the gearstick. I heard the deep honk of a large white tour boat approaching the bridge from our left.
Philippe raised an eyebrow at me. “So what do you think?”
I looked at the boat. Long. Wide. Rows of blue plastic seats on the top deck, but empty of passengers.
“What the hell,” I said. “I’ve done stupider.”
Philippe put the Range Rover in reverse. He backed it up fast, gears whining. He slammed on the brakes. The boat glided under the bridge, not far ahead of us.
“Brace yourself,” Philippe said, slipping the gearstick into first.
I clenched everything there was to clench. Teeth. Bladder. Bum hole. You name it. The bridge squatted wide and low over the water, with a pavement either side. A large, rusty blue water pipe sat elevated above the road to the left – one of the many old pipes that seemed to run through the city like waterpark tube slides. A five-foot-high steel lattice barrier ran along the edge of the bridge. I hoped it had some give.
I was just watching the boat disappear underneath, weighing up the odds of survival, when Philippe stamped hard on the accelerator. The stolen black Range Rover revved and squealed out of the blocks. Philippe jammed the stick into second and spun the wheel to the right at the last nanosecond. We veered across the road and hit the kerb with a whump!
The Range Rover bumped up off the pavement, the front grille smashing through the barrier with a bang and flying off the bridge.
The impact knocked us forward in our seats, belts locking tight. The bonnet dipped as the boat emerged from the other side. We came down nose over wheels. Wrong angle; wrong timing; the sight of the tour boat replaced by a windscreen full of the frothing white water kicked out by its propellers.
Ah, fucknuts, we’d only gone and missed.
The Range Rover splashed heavily into the water. Another bone-jarring impact as the front grille plunged in. This time, I got a smack in the face from an airbag. The Range Rover began sinking without delay at a sixty-degree angle, water rising fast over the windscreen, flooding in through the footwells and air vents.
“Um, weren’t we supposed to land, like, I dunno … on the boat?” I asked, as we ejected our belts and scrambled onto the back seat.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Philippe said. “I’ve never tried that before.”
We opened a door each and climbed out onto the rear end of the roof. Onlookers videoed the whole thing from the back of the tour boat and either side of the river. Police assembled on the centre of the bridge, the chopper pulling over to where we’d splashed down, hovering low, blowing circles in the water and my hair into my face. As we fast ran out of dry, rooftop-shaped land, I started to think of the icy water. Would I freeze to death instantly? Would I drown?
“Get ready to jump,” Philippe said.
“I’m not going in that,” I said. “Not until I have to.”
“No,” he said, grabbing me by the arm. “Look.”
A motorboat powered our way. White and navy blue. An outboard engine and a small German flag on the back. The owner was a man in his sixties wearing an orange life jacket, white hair under a grey baseball cap.
He brought the boat in close alongside us. “My God, are you okay?” he asked in German. “What the hell happened?”
“Satnav sent us the wrong way,” Philippe said, hopping onto the back of the boat as if it was easy.
He turned and reached out a hand, only a foot or so of rooftop left above water. I made the jump and Philippe caught me, easing me safely on deck. The Range Rover slipped quietly beneath the water, bubbles bloating and popping on the surface.
“Thanks,” I said to the owner of the boat, as we joined him behind the wheel.
“Don’t mention it,” he said, steering us away from the scene of the splash. “Good job I came along when I did. I’ll drop you off a little further down so the police can help you.”
“Oh no, don’t do that,” I said.
“It’s no trouble. Besides, your friend is hurt.”
“No, she means don’t do that,” Philippe said, digging his gun discreetly in the man’s side.
“The blood isn’t his,” I explained.
“Oh,” the owner said, the smile dropping from his face.
“Turn the boat around,” Philippe said. “I’m not going to hurt you. Just do as I say.”
We chugged around in a circle and cruised away, the police chopper following, patrol-car sirens blaring off the bridge as they tried to keep pace on the surrounding roads. How long before the river cops came our way? I wondered. Turns out we had bigger problems. A crack of gunfire. A hole in the windshield of the boat. Behind us, a grey speedboat fast approaching under the bridge. Bouncing over the water. Inge behind the wheel. Her JPAC BFF from the U-Bahn tunnel by her side. Never a shitting break.
2
Killing Spree
Philippe yanked the owner of the boat away from the wheel and pushed forward on the silver throttle lever. The sudden acceleration threw me back. Another shot rang out, but fell short. I was about to pull the owner of the boat down with me when Philippe threw him one-handed over the side. I watched the poor guy bob up and down in the river, clear of the chasing boat.
“What did you do that for?” I asked.
“He’s safer in the water,” Philippe said over his shoulder.
He wasn’t wrong. More bullets ripped into the side of the boat. I laid low as Philippe weaved left to right, the front end – whatever they call it – slapping off the water. The engine was pushed to its limit, kicking out diesel fumes and spray, soaking me through.
Philippe yelled over his shoulder, “Here, take the wheel.”
I staggered to my feet and switched places. No seat. Just a steering wheel and some basic controls. I hung on for dear life, keeping the throttle pushed forward all the way.
Philippe dropped to one knee and returned fire. A quick glance behind told me Inge was gaining in her super-sleek go-fast boat. I spun the wheel left and right, trying to shake them off, easing back the throttle into each turn. Up ahead, we had traffic – two tour boats passing each other in opposite directions, blocking off most of the river, only a narrow gap in between, shrinking with every second. I rammed the throttle handle as far as it would go and aimed for the gap. We bounce
d violently off the extra chop created by the two tour boats, barely a foot to spare either side. I turned to see Philippe shoot the JPAC stooge in the chest. It knocked him off the front of the speedboat and into the fizzing white water, where he was swallowed up by the drag of a tour boat. I looked ahead. The gap was almost non-existent.
Closing. Closing. And … through! Phew!
Another anxious look over my shoulder and I saw Inge in her leaner, faster, meaner boat just about squeezing through, too, scraping the paint of someone’s stolen pride and joy.
Philippe took a shot at her head. She ducked instinctively as the bullet pee-yanged off the front deck.
Modern glass buildings dominated the skyline as the river widened and curved to the left. Police boats sat idling by the side of the river, where a flat walkway ran low and close to the water. Armed SWAT jumped on board and they roared after us as a pair – high-powered speedboats with sirens hoopa-whooping. The SWAT looked ready to storm a hijacked plane, with ski masks, body armour and scary-looking rifles held across their chests. Two lay on the front of each boat ready to fire. Inge got smart and eased off, letting the police take up the chase in front of her.
“We can’t outrun them for long,” I shouted over my shoulder, as a rifle shot zipped overhead.
“This is your one and only warning,” said one of the police on the lead boat. “Slow down and pull over, or we will use lethal force.”
“What do I do?” I asked.
“Slow down, or they’ll gun us down,” said Philippe.
