by Mick Herron
you fuck, you bastard
stop shut up I shoot you now I shoot you
don’t
boys
mummy
ungh
everybody down!
everybody down!
Everybody down . . .
The door got no nearer because an arm had wrapped around Judy’s waist, so her legs stopped propelling her forward – they wheeled crazily above the floor like a car-toon woman’s, and then she was tumbling backwards, not screaming but shouting – ‘You fuck, you bastard’ – and her fall was broken by Jaime’s body, though that was neither safe nor comfortable, because his arm shifted, his hand was at her throat, his gun pressed to her temple.
‘Stop! Shut up! I shoot you now! I shoot you!’
‘Don’t!’ Ben shouted. He’d raised his hands, stepped away from the wall; the only one there who knew what was going to happen next.
Eliot Pedlar said, ‘Boys,’ and hugged them closer . . .
And both boys, that same moment, said, ‘Mummy’ . . .
Only Louise had nothing to say. She opened her mouth, but all that came out was ungh. It was the noise she’d have made if punched in the stomach, and made as much sense as anything else she might have come up with.
And then the door burst open, and sudden light framed a black-clad man, and a second, and a third, each with ugly sticks in their hands which made no sense because sticks weren’t allowed inside, except for nature-table purposes . . . They weren’t sticks. They became guns as Louise watched, and one of them covered the hostages against the wall as the other two trained on the motionless pile on the floor that was Judy and Jaime.
‘Everybody down!’
‘Everybody down!’
Everybody down . . .
In the moment that followed there was silence in the annexe, but for the squeaking of the wheel in Trixie’s cage. Maybe something about the sudden noise and movement had convinced the hamster that life was back to normal; maybe this was more the sort of thing she expected. Children were huge, and wielded toys. Big men with guns weren’t such a departure. It was a matter of degree.
The wheel squeaked. Round and round she ran, getting nowhere.
‘Everybody down!’
Ben dropped, followed by Louise. Eliot crouched, pulling his children with him until they began pulling him: attempting to squash themselves into the floor; to make themselves a puddle that could soak through the boards, reassemble in the earth beneath, then edge into the freedom of the outside air. They liquefied in his embrace. And he wanted to find words that would com-fort them, but the only word in his head was the one they’d just banished him with: Mummy.
Everybody down . . .
‘Target is on the ground, repeat, target is on the ground.’
‘And has a hostage,’ Ben said loudly. His hands were on the back of his head – he knew what you did; you made yourself a non-combatant. Guns plus excitement equals accidents. A friendly bullet ripped exactly the same size hole in you. And a hostile one would punch through Jaime’s head, smearing whatever he knew, or thought he knew, across the boards of a nursery floor.
‘Be quiet!’
‘And has a hostage,’ Ben repeated loudly. ‘Call them out. He’ll kill her.’
‘Target is on the ground. He has the woman.’
A faint crackle from a headset; a question relayed from a hundred yards away.
‘No.’
Do you have a clear shot? Ben translated.
‘They can’t shoot without hitting the woman,’ he said clearly.
More crackle.
‘Be quiet!
’ More crackle.
The hamster wheel squeaked, slowed, squeaked . . . stopped.
There’d be instructions flowing through those headsets, but things weren’t going right. The annexe should have been crawling by now; the innocents dragged out to freedom; the gunman disarmed and either docile or dead. Instead there was a new stand-off, and unless someone made a decision soon, someone else was going to be dead. More crackle . . .
‘Pull them out.’
‘They’ve just got in!’
‘Pull them out. They’ve lost the moment. Whistler’s say-ing they can’t shoot without – ‘ ‘Whistler is not part of this operation!’
‘He’s the only one keeping his head. How old are those kids? Pull them out.’
But for another few seconds, Fredericks hesitated.
Peter Craven was twenty-seven, stood just over six foot; had recently asked Tasha to marry him, and was spend-ing more free afternoons leafing through colour swatches than booting a football around South Parks – just reach-ing that point, in other words, when the difference between training and the real thing kicked in. So here he was, real weapon in hand, real sweat on his forehead, real villain in front of him, gun to the temple of the hostage on top.
Another hostage saying, Call them out. He’ll kill her.
All very different from the practice runs.
‘Target is on the ground. He has the woman.’
Do you have a clear shot?
Did he have a clear shot? On the training ground, there was only one answer, and it was always yes, even when it should have been no. Can you hit the target from here?, said target being the size of a peanut. But yes was the right answer, because you never let anyone know there were things beyond you, not if you wanted to earn your stripes, climb the ladder, make Tasha proud. So you said yes and took the shot and the worst that happened was the wrong dummy lost its head . . . Well, not quite. The worst that happened was the bawling out you got for being too stupid to know the difference between yes and no.
That’s your plan, is it? the instructor had said. Cross your fingers and hope for the best? If you can’t manage the shot, you can’t manage the shot. Life or death means precisely that. Life. Or. Death.
‘They can’t shoot without hitting the woman,’ the hostage said clearly.
Who’s speaking?
‘Be quiet!’
And Peter meant both of them, the headset and the hostage . . . Peter Craven, first through the door, was the only one with a prayer of a shot at the gunman, and he knew the difference between yes and no.
Do you have a clear shot?
It was a matter of life or death.
All AFOs with two-years’ plus experience to attend the refresher in Yorkshire . . . As of this moment, Fredericks had only one Authorized Firearms Officer on-site who’d actually worked a hostage situation.
This was what was meant by economies of scale.
‘Pull them out,’ he said.
Faulks relayed the order to the officers in the field.
Like one of those moments when the brain plays catch-up, Louise thought afterwards. When it files a recent event in the wrong folder; classes it as memory instead of ongoing event. Now, everything was happening backwards, as if her brain was re-spooling, undoing the noise and confusion of barely a minute:
everybody down!
ungh
mummy
boys
don’t
stop shut up I shoot you now I shoot you
you fuck, you bastard
And then they were gone, and it was just the seven of them again, with the door still open, and Trixie’s wheel silent in the background . . . Gordon whimpered. Timmy belched. Eliot looked at her, but with nothing in his eyes; he might have been trying to remember what everything looked like before she was there.
The outside world leaked in, carrying strange hints of upsets continuing elsewhere.
Ben Whistler rose, walked to the door, and closed it.
When Sam Chapman knocked on Louise Kennedy’s door, it was opened by a cop, but that was okay. The woolly-suits at the nursery had more to worry about than letting the strength know he was ignorable. He flashed his card, and the cop said ‘MI6?’
‘Don’t tell everyone.’
‘This is terrorism? I thought that was Five’s –’
‘It’s a foreign national with a gun, son,’ he sai
d quietly. ‘Is her mother in?’
Louise Ann Kennedy: b.1975 in Chester. Educated there and Sheffield University (PPE), then a PGCE (Oxford Brookes) before a stint in banking: DeJohn Franklin Moers. He’d collected this from Whistler’s BlackBerry; had read, too, the follow-up, which had come after Whistler had surrendered the gadget to Faulks. Current circumstances: single; mother on premises. They delivered the goods, the queens of the database, though their manner of expression tended towards the robotic.
The front door opened on to the living room. And there she was, the mother on the premises, in a straight-backed chair with her back to him; another cop opposite her, face carefully composed into an attitude of sympathetic concern. Unless that came naturally. You couldn’t always tell. The officer got to her feet, and the mother turned to see what was happening. The cop behind Sam mouthed spook, and the officer sat back down.
‘Is my daughter all right?’
‘As far as I know, Mrs Kennedy.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I work for the government,’ he said. ‘Security services. I wonder if I could have a word.’
He looked at the female cop. Who looked at the cop behind him.
‘We’re supposed to stay here.’
‘You can stay in the kitchen.’
‘Our orders –’ ‘Just changed.’
It wasn’t the card he carried – a lot of the time, it was anything but. It was the way he said it: years of experience plus attitude. It was okay if people ended up nursing a grudge; that was the basis of most of Bad Sam’s relationships.
When they were alone, he sat.
‘Your daughter’s alive. The more we know, the more likely she is to stay that way.’
People made the mistake of thinking older people weak. But you only got old by surviving. Things wore out, but the core got harder. And Sam was in a hurry; he had no time to pussy around.
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘Exactly what I say.’
‘This man broke in, he just chose a school. My daughter’s unlucky, that’s all.’
‘More than likely. But we have to explore the possibility that this isn’t random, Mrs Kennedy. We have to look at the background.’
She glanced toward the television, which was off. ‘They’re showing pictures. But nothing’s happening.’
‘Lots is happening. We can’t see it, that’s all. Time is of the essence – tell me about your daughter.’
All these people – how come there were all these people, when the only one involved was her?
Christine Pedlar pushed through the crowd like a blind woman crashing through a wood.
There were journalists, and locals, and way up above a helicopter buzzed like a demented mosquito. This would be filming the event – which is what this was: an event. And from that high perspective, its rotorblades trimming the undersides of clouds, an event no different from any other mass gathering; animal rights or football mob. One in which there was no telling anyone from anyone else, though really she should show up as the single splash of colour – a bright red anguished figure clawing through a black and white uncaring mass.
Her boys were in there. Her beautiful twin sons. In that building, around which armed policemen waited.
This information was too big for her head. Any moment now her skull would crack, and the horrible fact it held come screaming out, to shatter the daylight.
How did it happen? What caused this slippage in normality? Today should have been ordinary – different, but normal; she was visiting her old office, to discuss a return to work. Did she want to return to work? Not especially, but it had to be discussed, if only to keep Eliot quiet. But shortly after her arrival, something unexpected had tugged inside Chris, and she realized that she had missed this: the business of being at work, performing tasks that did not revolve around the needs of children. Christine had been a legal secretary; a good one. The solicitors she worked for could do with her return. And somewhere between being offered coffee and receiving it, this notion had come to seem not altogether far-fetched: perhaps, after all, it was what she needed. And it came with options attached – flexible working plans were mentioned. By the time the coffee was drunk, her former boss was acting like her future boss. She’d have to discuss it with Eliot, she reminded him. But something in his friendly goodbye hinted that he thought she’d made her mind up.
Perhaps she had. And now was being punished for it.
So was that the way the world worked? Four years’ full-time devotion, and the first time you thought of blinking – bang!
She was pushing to the front now; was pushed back by those who thought she was just another rubbernecker at someone else’s car crash.
You don’t understand – my children are in there.
Words rocketing round her brain without finding an opening they could use.
This is not an event. This is my life exploding.
Hers was the kind of nature, if someone honked their horn at her, it wrecked her for half an hour. This: this could kill her.
But don’t use that word. Don’t use that word. It might give the world ideas.
Something flashed in her mind like a bulb in a cellar, and her darling babies splashed around the nursery floor. And with the image something else broke, because her vision swam apart, and all the black and white figures around her fissured into blurry messes, their edges foamy and transparent.
Someone touched her elbow.
‘Chris?’
She turned and tried to speak, but all she could do was burst into tears.
That was probably the most fucked-up hostage-rescue attempt since Tehran. Even allowing for scaled-down con-sequences – there was small chance Ronald Reagan would be re-elected – Fredericks could feel the backlash already: you don’t send a team in if they’re not up to the job.
‘It’s nobody’s fault,’ Faulks told him.
‘Guess who just got to be nobody?’
‘There’s only one point of entry. What were the chances he’d be underneath a hostage? I mean, underneath . . .’
‘You think the Mail will be that understanding? We put the team in, we pulled it back out. And nothing’s changed.’
‘Everyone’s still alive,’ Faulks said.
‘Only because I haven’t debriefed them yet,’ said Fredericks, and then both men fell silent, because there was talk in the annexe again.
‘Get up.’
She didn’t move.
‘Get up!’
Jaime shoved, and Judy rolled off him. And then he saw Ben by the door, fresh from closing it, and screamed: ‘You. Against the wall!’ and aimed the gun, his hand shaking so much, Ben would have had to be fibrillating hard to be in its way. ‘Now!’
Ben stepped carefully, hands in the air. ‘I was closing the door,’ he said.
Jaime was breathing hard.
‘They’ve gone, Jaime. But you saw how fast they moved.’ ‘I am still here.’
‘Because you got lucky.’
Ben, back at the wall, was the only upright body in the room. But Louise was pushing herself up, and Eliot Pedlar coming out of the crash position. The two small boys were still dead lions: not a happy association. Beside Jaime, Judy – the cause of the recent eruptions – was a badly filled bin-liner.
‘It’s just a matter of time, Jaime.’
‘Shut up.’
‘No. Keep talking. It’s the only way.’
‘They want to kill me.’
‘They don’t want to kill you. But that’s what they’ll do. Because you’ve got a gun, Jaime, and six hostages. Killing you is what happens next. Unless you keep talking.’
Jaime stepped away from Judy, and looked down on her. For a moment, Ben thought he was going to spit.
Instead he said, ‘You. Go back over there.’
After a moment, she stirred into life. She crawled, didn’t walk, back to the wall.
The squeaking from the hamster cage began again, slowed, then stopped.
Jaime looked behind him, at the door that could no longer be trusted. Then back at Ben.
Ben said, ‘Talk about Miro.’
‘Louise used to work for a City bank,’ Bad Sam Chapman said.
‘It was a good job. It paid well.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘But she worked long hours, weekends, everything. I never saw her.’
‘What made her give it up?’
‘Well, she trained as a teacher, you know.’
‘So I gathered. But it doesn’t pay as well, does it?’
‘Money isn’t everything,’ Mrs Kennedy said.
‘But it’s unusual to give up such a well-paid career so young.’
‘Louise has always done precisely what she wants to do.’ This with a tightening of the mouth, as if in memory of certain occasions when Louise would have done better to heed others’ advice.
‘So it was her own idea to quit?’
‘Which part of the security services did you say you worked for?’
‘I didn’t. Was it her own idea to quit?’
‘There was . . . trouble.’
‘What kind of trouble?’
‘She wouldn’t say. But I could tell. Amother always can.’ ‘Did they catch her with her hand in the till?’
Further mouth-tightening, and enough frost in the eyes to blind a windscreen. ‘Louise would no more steal than she would . . .’ A comparison failed her. ‘There was a man involved.’
‘And he was caught with his –’ ‘She had an affair. With a senior partner. And it’s always the woman who pays for that sort of indiscretion, isn’t it?’ Bad Sam had operated enough honeytraps to know otherwise, but had conducted enough interviews not to contradict. He said, ‘She told you about this?’
‘Not in so many words.’
He waited.
‘But my daughter is an ambitious woman. She crossed teaching off her career list once she found she could earn ten times as much doing something she was better at.’
‘And she wouldn’t have walked away if it hadn’t become necessary.’
‘Quite.’
‘There are other banks.’
‘Yes. But whatever happened hurt her. She wanted out of that world. That’s how I know a man was involved.’
