by Mark Dawson
She wedged the can of pepper spray into the back of her trousers, the cylinder pressed into the small of her back, the aluminium cold against her hot skin.
He stooped down to collect the shotgun. ‘You ready?’
She nodded.
Pope removed the chair from the door, opened it and stepped outside. He paused in the doorway, looked left and then right and then indicated that she should come out, too.
She did as he asked.
He held the combat shotgun in his left hand and rested his right hand on her shoulder.
All of the bulbs in the corridor had blown, and the only illumination was what penetrated the dusty windows at either side of the building. Pope impelled her forward, towards the stairs. They started down, Isabella going first with Pope close behind, his hand still on her shoulder.
They crossed the landing to the floor below and saw four police officers working the doors, knocking on one after the other, with the families who had already been disturbed watching them as they knocked on the other doors and searched the flats behind them. Pope and Isabella kept going down, following the stairs down through the fourth, third and second floors.
They reached the main entrance. Daylight blazed in through the open doorway and Isabella had to blink until her vision corrected itself. She could see the silhouettes of the men who had been left outside to guard the entrance. She had seen four of them before she had climbed the side of the building; she could see the shapes of two men now. Pope had seen them, too: she felt the tightening of his grip on her shoulder.
‘Stay close,’ he said quietly and, at her tiny nod of acknowledgement, he pushed her forward and through the door.
One of the guards was at the door and the other was talking to an elderly female resident, who was angry that she was being prevented from going inside.
The man at the door turned as Pope led Isabella out into the bright sunshine. Pope gave him a firm nod of his head and marched her ahead.
The blacked-out SUV was directly ahead. They had only taken a handful of steps when two men emerged from the car. They were dressed in jeans and shirts and they had black sunglasses pushed back on their heads. One had cropped blond hair and the other was bald. They stepped forward and put themselves between Pope and the street.
The bald man spoke first, in English. ‘Is that her?’
Pope nodded.
‘Where’s the man?’
Pope angled his head in the direction of the building.
Isabella felt the buzz of adrenaline. Pope was trying not to speak; he knew that his accent would betray him. They had to get away from here. The longer they stayed, the harder it would be to maintain what was, even at its best, a rickety deception.
The blond man stepped up. ‘Take it off,’ he said, pointing to Pope’s balaclava.
Pope shrugged.
The man laid his hand on the butt of the Glock that was in a holster on his belt. ‘Take it off. Right now.’
Pope squeezed Isabella’s shoulder.
That was the signal.
Pope took his hand away.
Isabella was young. It made little difference how well briefed these men were, how much they had been told of what she was capable of, the details that they had been given of her heritage and her training and the outrageous things that she had already done. She was fifteen years old, and she looked it. There was an instinctive response to that knowledge that distracted from the details in her file. Isabella knew that to be true and knew that it gave her a significant advantage.
Pope was slowly removing the balaclava, their attention on him. They didn’t notice as Isabella reached around and slid the can out of her trousers.
Pope took off the balaclava.
They were both turned to face him as Isabella brought the can around and pressed down on the plunger. The bald man was closest to her, and it was easy to spray the aerosol into his face. The blond man noticed what was happening and raised his arm to block the spray when Isabella turned it on him.
It didn’t matter.
Pope flipped the shotgun and clubbed the man in the side of the head with it. He sprawled over on his side.
The policemen at the door turned at the commotion.
Pope flipped the shotgun around and covered them both.
‘Turn around.’
Pope brandished the shotgun to urge them along and they did as they were told.
‘Put your hands on your head.’
They did as they were told.
‘Kneel.’
Pope didn’t take his eyes off the policemen.
Isabella took the pistol from Pope’s belt and turned to the road.
‘Check the car for the keys,’ he said.
Isabella crossed to the big SUV. The door was still open and, as she climbed inside the cabin, she checked for the key fob that would need to be inside before the engine would start. There was no sign of it. She pressed down on the brake and pressed the starter button, but nothing happened; wherever it was, the fob was not close enough for the engine to start.
‘It’s not here.’
There came the clamour of angry voices.
Isabella looked back at the entrance: two more armed police officers were in the lobby. They saw their colleagues with their hands on their heads, kneeling on the pavement.
Pope sprang back, aimed the shotgun and fired a warning spread into the ceiling. Plaster tumbled down. The armed officers dropped beneath the line of the door, out of sight.
‘Run,’ Pope said.
Chapter Seventeen
They ran into the slum with two policemen following them.
Isabella led the way. She was smaller and more agile than Pope, and she was an accomplished distance runner. She settled into a steady stride, ducking in and out of small spaces, gaps between the slow-moving vehicles and the men and women who swarmed around them. She turned back, saw that Pope was losing ground on her and slowed down so that he could catch up. The policemen were still following them, doggedly pursuing them into the sprawl. They were thirty feet behind Pope, but he was gasping for breath and they were gaining.
Isabella skirted a table and chairs that had been set up outside a cafe where grizzled men were drinking chai and darted around a small lorry that was unloading the ubiquitous blue drums in which the locals stored their water. She slowed to look back again and saw Pope and then the two policemen, the three blue uniforms easy to pick out amid the colour of the slum. Pope looked back, too, and missed the emaciated dog that scurried out from the open door of a nearby hut. He tripped and fell, crashing to the ground and sending up a cloud of dust.
He glanced up at her as he scrambled back to his feet. ‘Go!’
The policemen had closed in. They were fifteen feet away now, close enough for Isabella to see the sweat on their faces and their open mouths as they gasped for breath.
She set off again with Pope behind her. They reached the narrow lane of Rajendra Prasad Chawl and forced their way through a scrum of people. It was barely two and a half yards across, and Isabella was almost able to touch the buildings on both sides by extending her arms. She ran on, deeper and deeper into the heart of the slum, the clamour of the voices around them changing as they rushed through districts that were populated by those who spoke Hindi, then Marathi, then Telugu and then Tamil. They passed a series of tiny businesses: a stall selling sizzling fried food, a small recycling plant with the sound of plastic being shredded within, the clatter of sewing machines and the tinkling of cutlery against pots and pans.
Isabella pulled away. She saw a junction up ahead and she darted to the left and turned into it. She was approaching a public toilet, a noisome stench crawling out of the open door. There was a pile of garbage pushed up in a drift at the side of the road and the walls were marked with obscene graffiti. She sprinted for the door, throwing herself inside and then pressing herself against the wall, able to look back into the road without giving herself away.
Pope came first. He was panting hard a
nd, as he looked for her and realised that she was out of sight, his expression became heavy with concern.
He slowed.
The policemen came next, both of them rumbling around the sharp junction together.
Pope backed away from them.
They had abandoned their shotguns, but both men had sidearms.
Isabella held her nerve, waiting for them to clear the doorway of the toilet.
The area was quieter than it had any right to be. She heard the melodic sound of devotional singing and then the rush of water as a standpipe was opened. One of the residents had opened her hose to wash down the lane as her husband stood in the doorway to brush his teeth.
‘Stop,’ the leading policeman said.
Pope paused. He looked ready to give in. He was still weak, his recovery leaching all his strength from him, and he was bent over and gasping for air.
The first policeman went by the doorway.
Isabella drew the pistol that she had taken from Pope’s belt.
The second policeman paused right in front of her.
She held the pistol in her right hand and the can of pepper spray in her left.
The first policeman drew his weapon and took aim at Pope’s midriff. ‘Put your hands up,’ he called out.
The second policeman took another step, far enough to clear the doorway. Isabella could see the back of his head now. He wouldn’t be able to see her.
‘Where’s the girl?’
She slid out of the doorway and took a step towards the man at the rear.
Pope saw her, but didn’t react.
‘Where is she?’
‘I have no idea.’
Isabella extended her arm with the can of pepper spray in her hand.
‘Hey!’ she called.
The officer turned and Isabella doused him in the face. He exclaimed with the shock of sudden discomfort.
The first man turned and looked into the barrel of the pistol in Isabella’s other hand.
‘Drop it,’ she said calmly.
The second man dropped to his knees, pawing at his streaming eyes.
‘Drop it,’ she said again, indicating the first man’s pistol.
He didn’t get a chance. Pope advanced on him, reached for the man’s arm, pinned it back and took the gun from him. Isabella stepped back and covered the man she had incapacitated. Pope went to work quickly, taking the cuffs from the first policeman’s belt and clipping one of the bracelets around the man’s wrist. Pope dragged him so that he was next to his colleague and put the other bracelet around that man’s ankle. He disarmed that man and put the gun into his own belt.
‘Come on,’ Pope said to Isabella. ‘They won’t be the only ones. We need to get out of here.’
Chapter Eighteen
They made their way through the slum.
Pope stripped off the body armour and dumped it into an overflowing trash can, then undid the first few buttons of the shirt. He was soaked through with sweat and there was a little patch of blood at the top of his right sleeve. The exertion had almost been too much for him. He had thought that he was almost recovered from his stabbing and the debilitating infection that had followed, but the chase had proven otherwise. He doubted that he would have been able to lose the two cops without Isabella’s help.
They emerged from the western edge of the slum. There was no sign of the police, nor any indication that they were drawing attention amid the hundreds of other men and women going about their business on the busy street. They found a bus stop and took the first bus into the centre of the city. They transferred on to a second bus that was going to Chhatrapati railway station and got off two stops before the end. It was likely that their enemies would have people watching the train station and the airport. They would leave another way.
There was a large parking lot south of the station. Pope led the way to a quiet section, away from CCTV, and, as Isabella stood sentry, broke into a Nissan Altima and hot-wired the engine.
‘Where are we going to go?’ Isabella said as they pulled out of the parking lot.
‘I’m not sure,’ he admitted. ‘We’ll work it out on the way.’
He had given some thought to their destination as they had ridden the bus away from the slum. They couldn’t go south again, back to Palolem or somewhere else in Goa. They had been discovered in Mumbai. He had no idea how, and he had no idea where they had been compromised. It wasn’t safe to return to somewhere they had been before.
He wondered about following the coast north to Gujarat or perhaps east to Nagpur.
Nothing felt safe. Maybe the country was spoiled for them now.
It felt as if their options were limited.
The horizon was closing in.
‘You said someone called you this morning with a warning.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I don’t know who it was.’
‘You didn’t recognise them?’
‘No. The voice was distorted – as if they were using something to disguise it.’
‘The phone number?’
‘That was weird. It was your number.’
Pope drummed his fingers on the wheel. Someone had spoofed his number? They had very deliberately kept that information between themselves. He had no idea how anyone else could have found out about it. It shouldn’t have been possible.
‘Give me your phone,’ he said.
She reached into her pocket and handed it to him. He took out his own phone, opened the window and tossed them both outside. He didn’t understand what had happened. Better safe than sorry.
Pope was anxious. They were already caught up in something far bigger than themselves. Fresh layers of confusion were being added. They were even deeper in the hole than he had anticipated.
Pope had picked the simplest route out of the city.
He merged on to the NH3 and headed northeast, towards Nashik. National Highway 3 started in Agra and ended in Mumbai. It had four lanes, two on each side of the central reservation, and it was in reasonable condition. Pope followed it until Nashik and then turned due east, on to NH160.
It would take eleven hours to reach Nagpur from here.
He drove carefully, maintaining a steady sixty miles an hour. The last thing that they needed was to be stopped for driving too fast. The car would have been reported as stolen by now, and even the simplest check of the registration would betray them.
The day drained away as they put more and more miles between themselves and Mumbai. They stopped at an Indian Oil gas station on the western approach into Aurangabad to fill the empty tank. Pope took the opportunity to stretch out his arm.
‘Take off your shirt,’ Isabella said.
He did as she told him and held out his arm for her to check. She peeled off the dressing. It was soaked with fresh blood.
‘Does it hurt?’
It did, but he downplayed it. ‘Not too bad.’
‘Don’t lie to me.’
‘A little.’
‘Wait here.’
She went into the store to pay for the fuel and buy supplies, returning with a litre bottle of Coke, bags of chips and a plastic box that had been filled with aloo gobi. She carried a green plastic box that contained a motorist’s first-aid kit. She cleaned away the blood and redressed it.
Pope looked out at the vista as she worked. The forecourt offered a panoramic sunset, the brightness of the day dying in a cavalcade of oranges and reds and purples that stained the infinite horizon from the dusty plains to the peaks of a distant range. It was still stiflingly hot, the baked earth pulsing the heat back at them like the radiant warmth from an oven. Frequent traffic went by, tyres rushing across the asphalt.
‘There,’ she said. ‘Done.’
She reached into her pocket and handed him a plastic bottle.
‘You got the pills?’
‘Got them before I got the phone call.’
He opened the bottle and tapped it until two of the painkillers fell into the palm of his hand. He put them in his m
outh and swallowed them down with a mouthful of Coke.
They sat with their backs to the car, the metal warmed by the sun, and ate their food. They were both quiet. They were in shade, but even so, the air seemed to thrum with the heat.
Isabella dumped the garbage when they were done and they got back into the car.
‘Are you okay to drive?’ she asked as she turned the cap on the bottle of Coke.
‘I’m fine.’
‘I can do it,’ she said.
‘I know, but you need to be sixteen.’
‘I can pass for that.’
‘Maybe.’ He put the car into drive and pulled out of the forecourt. ‘But we don’t want to take any chances. We can’t afford to get pulled over. I feel fine. The pills will help. And I’ll stop when I’m tired.’
He looked over at her; she said nothing and stared out of the windshield as he merged on to the 753A to Jalna. It would take them another two hours to get there and then another seven to Nagpur. They would get there at around eleven.
Chapter Nineteen
Dusk faded into night, and the road was illuminated by the street lights of the occasional hamlets that they skirted and the glow of the other cars. Traffic was light and, although Pope was fatigued and his arm hurt, he felt alert enough to continue.
They were going to Nagpur because Pope had been there before. He had been given a bodyguarding assignment at the start of his career with Group Fifteen, a stint babysitting the CEO of a UK multinational. The man had received death threats from a local criminal syndicate whose nose had been put out of joint after the man had refused to cut them into the profits of a hydroelectric power plant that was being built across the Krishna River. The corporation’s Indian headquarters were in Nagpur, and Pope had been stationed there.
Mumbai had offered safety because of its teeming crowds. That safety had proven to be illusory, so he would try to find it in another city; smaller, perhaps, but one with which he had the benefit of familiarity.
He looked over at Isabella. She had taken off her jacket and bunched it up, shoving it into the crook of her neck so that she could use it as a pillow against the window. She was asleep, her legs drawn up to her chest. She was relaxed, inhaling and exhaling deeply. Her habitual expression was one of wariness, underpinned by a ready doubtfulness that was often expressed as scorn. She looked older than fifteen most of the time. The edge was gone now that she was sleeping. She looked younger now, more like her age.
