by Tom Wood
But now there was no gun pointing his way he rushed forward to tackle Victor, but Victor had one hand free and one was enough. He smashed his left elbow into the man’s face, his own forward momentum multiplying the force of the impact as Victor’s elbow connected with the nose, crushing cartilage, shattering bone, opening a tap of blood that exploded from the nostrils.
The man’s eyes flooded with water; pain and shock detonated through his brain. He collapsed forward, not enough awareness left to stop his forehead smacking into the asphalt. He went limp.
The squat Turk had both hands gripped over Victor’s right to control the gun and keep it pointed skyward, his own arms angled upwards to do so. He was leaning forward, his torso stretched because he was half a foot shorter than Victor and all his weight was on his forward right foot.
Victor kicked him in the side of the load-bearing knee – not with enough force to break the joint but hard enough to take the leg out from underneath him.
He dropped, and Victor eased his hold of the gun just enough to allow the man to wrench it away as he went down.
The Audi had already stopped and the driver’s door was opening and the grey-haired leader was climbing out of the car, fast because of the circumstances, but awkwardly because the last time he had got out of a car in a hurry he had weighed forty pounds lighter.
Victor, unarmed, outnumbered, dashed across the street, and sprinted at the chain-link fence. He leapt up but lost his grip and fell back down. The Turk was back on his feet and his face was twisted with rage. Light reflected off a knife in the grey-haired man’s hand. They both rushed Victor’s way.
He couldn’t scale the fence before they reached him. He turned and hurried down the steps leading to the public toilets.
CHAPTER 12
Berlin had some of the world’s cleanest public restrooms. This one was no exception. It was large and bright, with white and black tiled walls and floor. Along the right wall was a long mirror above a row of porcelain sinks, a pair of shiny hand dryers and a paper towel dispenser. Opposite the washbasins were urinals and four stalls. The three stall doors were open but the farthest door was closed.
The Turk with the flat nose entered first. He had a gun, held out before him in both hands. It was a cheap Russian Baikal, probably decades old, but the bullets in the eight-round magazine wouldn’t be. The grey-haired fifty-year-old followed behind him. He had no gun. In his left hand he had a cell phone. In his right he clutched a small knife. It was a kitchen utensil, not a fighting weapon, but it was sharp and pointed and flesh was always weaker than steel.
The door fell shut behind them. Their movements were jerky because they were high on adrenalin, but slow because they were cautious. They weren’t scared. Neither had Victor’s Five-seveN so they had seen it was empty, and they knew Victor was now unarmed because no one used an empty gun in an ambush if they had a loaded one in their pocket. The squat Turk limped on his injured right knee, but he could still move well enough.
The tall young guy would still be lying face down on sidewalk outside after hitting his head. He’d been too dazed from the elbow in his face to break his fall, but he hadn’t fallen from a steep enough angle to break his neck. He would recover within a few minutes, because the forehead was the strongest part of the body, but for now was out cold.
The leader stood directly behind the guy in the ill-fitting suit. He tapped him on the shoulder and gestured to the farthest stall. The Turk nodded but didn’t look back. They had the gaze of predators, eyes fixed forward, ready to kill their prey. The squat guy stepped forward, creating a little space between them, but not quite enough.
They didn’t have to be here. Victor wasn’t their target. Deák was. But they couldn’t go after Deák while Victor was nearby, ready to intervene a second time or make a call to warn Deák of their approach. Victor was a problem that needed to be dealt with first, and could be dealt with. After failing to escape by scaling the fence, he’d fled here, stupidly, and trapped himself underground, where his phone wouldn’t get reception.
Easy work. Two against one. Gun against no gun.
The man with the grey hair hung back and let the Turk approach. When he was in the middle of the room, ten feet from the last stall, the Turk bent over to look beneath the stall door. He couldn’t squat because of his knee, but he managed to see a pair of shoes. They were black Oxfords, polished, but not overly so. They had a thick, treaded sole. No socks protruded out from them. The shoes were at strange angles, as if they’d been slid there from some distance.
He spun around and stood straight up to look at his boss, to pass on the information, to warn, and saw a blur of motion in the long mirror above the washbasins.
Victor, shoeless, noiseless, had already darted eight feet from where he’d been standing on the other side of the door, hidden when they’d pushed it open, waiting for at least one of the two to be preoccupied.
The squat Turk couldn’t shoot because Victor was directly behind his boss, but he managed to scream a warning that reached the grey-haired man’s ears too late for him to react in time to prevent Victor’s left hand pushing against the back of his neck where the spine met the skull, fingers spread out across the back of his head to brace, palm pushing against the top of the spine while his right hand reached around to grab hold of the cheek and jaw and wrench clockwise.
The second and third cervical vertebrae of the man’s neck broke and transected the delicate spinal cord. The loud crack echoed off the walls.
Brain death was instantaneous. The lifeless body collapsed straight down into a pile of slack limbs before Victor’s feet.
He continued his momentum, leaping over the corpse before the squat guy could process the events unfolding before him and react accordingly. His tactical know-how may have been almost non-existent, but the Turk with the broken nose was a fighter. His instincts were sharp and his reflexes were fast. He let go of the gun before Victor could disarm him and took advantage of Victor’s exposed position to punch him with a fully powered left hook that generated torque all the way from the firmly planted feet, building through the legs, swivelling hips, twisting torso, dipping shoulder, through the rotating arm and finally out of the big clenched fist that connected against Victor’s ribs on his right flank.
Victor gasped, all the air in his lungs expelled in a single agonising exhale. He lost his balance and stumbled, expecting his enemy to bombard him with more thunderous blows, but the man went for the dropped Baikal instead, his injured knee slowing him down enough for Victor to sweep the weak leg out from under him.
He went down, hard and heavy, landing on his back and in doing so kicking the gun away so that it skidded across the tiles until it rebounded off the far wall and came to a halt by the toilet door, spinning in slow circles.
Victor rushed for it, sliding to a stop because his socks had no traction on the tiled floor. He scooped it up, turned and aimed it at the squat guy, who’d managed to get back to his feet and cover half the distance.
He stopped and held up his hands. He was breathing heavily. His face was slick with sweat. He was fast. He was powerful. But he was unfit.
‘Knife,’ Victor demanded.
The man took one from a pocket – a folded butterfly dagger – slowly, indignantly, and held it out for Victor to take from him. He didn’t blame the guy for trying, but Victor wasn’t going to fall for such a basic move. He motioned for the guy to throw it. He did. It ended up near Victor’s foot. He toed it into a corner.
‘Who wants Deák dead?’
He had no intentions of protecting the Hungarian indefinitely, but if someone wanted Deák dead enough to set another crew after him before Farkas reached Berlin, Victor needed to know about it.
The Turk in the ill-fitting suit didn’t answer. Like the tall guy had been outside, he was angry at himself for being in this position. If Victor had been lured into an ambush by an empty gun he would have been equally furious at himself.
Victor adjusted his aim and s
queezed the Baikal’s trigger. The gunshot was excruciatingly loud in the subterranean room. A hole tore through the collar of the man’s shirt. He flinched, inhaling sharply, fear replacing anger in his expression.
‘Who?’ Victor demanded. The tang of cordite filled his nostrils.
The man shrugged and clicked his cheek as though it wasn’t important. He said, ‘His employer in Budapest.’
‘Farkas?’
The man nodded.
‘Why?’
He shrugged again. ‘I don’t know. Why would I know? What does it matter?’
Victor didn’t answer. He was just curious. It didn’t matter to him why Farkas wanted his own man killed now he knew Deák’s death wouldn’t stop Farkas coming to Berlin. He should have considered it as an option, but even if he had, he would have still had to follow through with this course of action to be sure.
‘It seems there has been a misunderstanding.’ Victor gestured to the corpse. ‘And there’s no need for you to join your boss if you’re not the kind of man who holds a grudge.’
Confusion passed over the Turk’s face.
Footsteps on the stairs leading down.
The squat man screamed, ‘HE’S BEHIND THE DOOR.’
It flung open, hard, hitting Victor in the right shoulder and outstretched arms, knocking him to the side and the gun out of his grip.
The tall German was through the door before Victor regained his balance. No traction on the tiled floor. The skin of the young guy’s forehead was frayed and bloody from the collision with the sidewalk, but his skull had to be Neanderthal-thick for him to recover so fast. His whole face was a mess – the fall hadn’t done the recently broken nose any favours and it was now worse than the Turk’s had ever been; blood coated his lips and chin and was smeared across his cheeks where he’d tried to wipe it away with a sleeve.
He wrapped his arms around Victor’s waist, lifted his feet from the floor, and powered him backwards into a wall and the hand dryer protruding from it.
The collision knocked the breath from Victor’s lungs for the second time and sent another earthquake of pain through his ribs.
He pushed a thumb into the hollow behind the German’s right ear, where the jawbone converged with the skull, and applied force on the pressure point known as Triple Warmer 17. Pain was instantaneous and horrific.
The tall young guy howled and released Victor to scramble away.
The Turk had gone for the gun, but was slow on his injured knee, and by the time he had it in hand and pointed Victor’s way, Victor was already hyperextending his wrist.
The gun clattered on the floor as the tall German launched himself at Victor from behind – size, strength and momentum driving Victor towards the stalls. He threw his arms up and they slammed painfully into the side of the first stall but saved his face from the same fate.
He was momentarily pinned in place, the German’s arms wrapped around him, his own pressed between his face and the stall wall. He was trapped, but so was the guy holding him there.
Victor threw a backwards headbutt. Nowhere near the same power as one going in the other direction, but the back of his skull struck an already broken nose, already exposed nerve endings. The pressure pinning him instantly lessened. He pushed himself off the stall wall, twisted one hundred and eighty degrees and shoved his dazed enemy away to create room for another headbutt to take him out of the fight, but the Turk, fast and experienced, came at Victor, who pivoted to dodge the incoming punch, momentarily presenting his back on the young guy.
The edge of a forearm found its way under Victor’s chin and pressed into his throat. At the same time a hand braced the top of his head.
The chokehold wasn’t applied well enough to close his carotids, but his windpipe contracted under the enormous pressure. His medical knowledge told him he would pass out after about a minute, but experience told him he had no more than thirty seconds before he’d been denied air long enough to never recover.
He grabbed the forearm at his neck in his left hand, for leverage, and kicked the Turk in his injured right knee as he closed to take advantage of Victor’s immobility. The man grunted and hopped away on his good leg before he could be kicked again.
Victor, face reddening and lungs desperate for air, tried another backwards headbutt, but the young guy had learned and kept out of range. But in stretching his head away his torso was forced close enough to Victor for him to slam an elbow back into his attacker’s ribs. The first blow scored a glancing hit, but the second found its mark.
The elbow caught the vulnerable floating rib at the bottom of German’s ribcage. It cracked, which was painful, but dislodged, which was agony. A high-pitched wail followed and the strength of the hold on Victor’s neck disappeared.
He dropped out of it, faced the biggest threat, the squat Turk, who had grabbed his boss’s knife as it was closer than the gun, and attacked.
The slash had a limited arch because all his weight was on his good leg and Victor easily stepped clear and grabbed the guy’s hand, but let go without disarming him when he heard the scrape of metal on ceramic behind him.
He turned in time to see the German, on one knee because the pain from the dislodged rib had put him there, every square inch of his contorted face drenched in blood from the injured forehead and twice-smashed nose, levelling the Baikal in Victor’s general direction. But he couldn’t find his aim with eyes full of his own blood.
The gun went off anyway, but Victor was already dashing clear of the line of fire. The round punched a hole in the mirror, creating a spiderweb of cracks.
The tall young guy stood as he swivelled to track Victor, but the fractured and dislodged rib slowed him and he was half blinded, and Victor was the fastest target he’d ever aimed at. Victor hit him with an open-palmed blow to the jaw.
The German flailed backwards and dropped the gun.
Victor caught it mid-fall, adjusted his grip, and shot the man twice in the centre of the chest. He collapsed into a washbasin, tearing it from the wall. Water gushed from a ruptured pipe.
Reflected in the broken glass of the mirror, Victor saw the squat Turk going for the door, half hopping, half stumbling, ignoring the pain in his knee in the hope of escaping.
Victor shot him in the back. He shot him again when the man fell to his hands and knees but kept moving, and again when he tried to drag himself along the floor with only his palms. The squat guy lay quiet, unmoving, but Victor shot him a fourth time. Just in case. Victor checked pockets to get keys, phones, IDs and any Golden Talisman chips that he found. He then grabbed a handful of paper towels from the dispenser and shoved them into a pocket. He took another handful and wet them in the spray from the ruptured pipe before heading for the exit.
Blood inched along the grooves between the floor tiles.
CHAPTER 13
It was 00.24 when Victor re-entered the casino bar. He’d used the crew’s Audi to drive away from the scene and scrubbed the blood from his hands, face and head. He’d had to discard his jacket. The phones, batteries removed, and IDs were in the Audi’s trunk along with his reloaded Five-seveN.
There were fewer people inside than had been earlier, and Anika was behind the bar, but Basayev was nowhere to be seen.
‘Go to dinner with me,’ Victor said before Anika could ask him if he wanted a drink.
‘I’m not sure it’s such a good idea.’
‘Most things in life aren’t a good idea.’
‘That’s not a reason to go.’
‘It’s also not a reason to not go.’
‘Look,’ she said in the universal let-down-gently tone, ‘you seem like a nice enough guy, but I’m just not interested in dating right now.’
He nodded. ‘Okay.’
She stepped away. Victor ran through scenarios in his head of what would need to happen next, now Anika would be leaving alone and Basayev had already left to wait for her, but stopped when he saw Basayev exit the bar’s restroom. He looked calm and relaxed and in con
trol.
Victor said, ‘Let me buy you a drink.’
‘How very kind of you. But I’m afraid I’m about to depart.’
Victor stepped into his path. ‘This will only take a minute.’ He gestured to an empty booth.
Basayev considered for a moment, his pale green eyes unblinking as they stared at Victor. There was no change in the calm expression, no shift in the relaxed body language. Eventually, he nodded and walked over to the booth, unconcerned enough by Victor’s proximity to give him his back.
Victor sat down opposite. He rested his phone on the table before him. Basayev’s gaunt face had deep shadows beneath the cheekbones from the overhead lights. His hands were visible on the tabletop. Victor kept his own similarly visible.
Basayev said, ‘I know what you’re about to say, so this conversation is needless.’
‘Then thank you for humouring me.’
‘You have two minutes. After that I’m gone. Consider those two minutes the kind of courtesy you’ve failed to show me.’
‘I meant no disrespect.’
Basayev’s lips turned upward in a small smile. ‘Yet here we are. Our goals do not overlap. They are not in opposition. But you are attempting to interfere with mine. So, before you say whatever it is you think will cause me to deviate from my path, I propose a compromise.’
‘What sort of a compromise?’ Victor glanced in Anika’s direction. She was looking at the clock, waiting for the exact second she was allowed to leave.
‘I have invested a significant amount of money and a greater amount of time in my current task. I have done this because the return shall be substantial. Perhaps I might offer you an incentive to’ – he paused to think of the correct expression – ‘stay on the sidelines.’
‘I’m not on the clock.’
‘I’m sure there are more comely women to purchase drinks from in this city.’
