The Operative s-3

by Falconer, Duncan

  ‘Skender, listen to me!’ Stratton shouted, his desperation coming through. ‘I don’t want to do this but I will if you force me. Once I start this there’ll be no turning back. I’ll kill you, Skender. Today you will die, believe me – unless you give me back Josh. Then I’ll give you your life.’

  ‘Stirring stuff. Now get lost,’ Skender said before disconnecting. He looked back out of the window at the increasing build-up of cop cars, a couple of fire trucks and what looked like some military personnel in a camouflaged Hummer. He accepted, based on what Hobart had said, that Stratton’s threat was not entirely empty and that he had planted some kind of explosive device in the building. Perhaps Stratton was trying to flush him out of the penthouse and down to where the device was. Whatever, Skender felt comfortable at the top of his building and would remain there until this little incident was sorted out.

  He stepped out of the kitchen, put a hand on Josh’s shoulder and guided him along the corridor. ‘Let’s go upstairs and see what we’ve got to eat. You could eat something now, right?’

  Josh nodded.

  Skender walked to the fire exit where his two guards were waiting and they all headed up the stairs. Josh and Skender went into the penthouse while the guards remained in the stairwell.

  37

  Stratton hung the payphone back on its cradle and took a moment to muster his thoughts. This was it. He was going ahead with the plan. There was no turning back now and no point in delaying it further since Hobart knew about the manufactured explosives. A search of the building was no doubt imminent.

  He buttoned up the Yankee baseball jacket that he had found in the trunk of Grant’s car where he had left the rest of his equipment and pulled the baseball cap down low over his face. Then he headed across the road past a television news crew preparing for a stand-up report.

  The attractive female correspondent held a microphone in front of her while the cameraman focused the camera. ‘We’re just around the corner from the new Skender Square in Culver City,’ she announced seriously, ‘where police have set up roadblocks to keep people back from the brand new Skender business centre which was to have had its grand opening ceremony today. Reports are unclear at the moment but what we do know is that the building has been evacu ated, apart from some security guards. There are rumours of a bomb inside which, as you can see, police are taking very seriously.’

  Stratton made his way past the news van into an alleyway that paralleled one side of the square. Halfway along it he turned in through the door of a building, past a large kitchen, along a narrow corridor and into a restaurant that was empty but for a man sitting behind the bar and reading a newspaper.

  ‘We’re closed,’ the man said as Stratton walked through without acknowledging him and opened the front door. ‘Ain’t no one s’posed to go out there. Cops say there’s a bomb.’

  Stratton let the door close behind him and paused on the doorstep. He had approached the building from the side opposite to where he had been arrested and, seeing the square was now empty, he set off across the road. He stepped onto the square and as he crossed a flower bed to reach the side of the building a voice called out from behind him. He ignored it and continued around the corner.

  He headed for the concourse, scanning in all directions, glancing quickly over his shoulder to check that he was not being pursued. As he approached the front of the building he unzipped his jacket to reveal the complex radio transmitter hanging from its strap around his neck.

  Stratton stepped onto the marble concourse, flashed a look in the direction of the doors in the entrance portico to see that they were closed and made his way to Skender’s heavy bronze statue. He stepped between the outstretched arms and looked up to see the glass face of the building sloping all the way up to the pinnacle. As he extended the antenna of the transmitter, movement and a sound in front of him caught his attention. His gaze flashed to one of the heavy Indian doors as it slowly opened. Stratton’s hand flicked to the power switch and turned it on, a small red LED light glowing to indicate that it was operational. His stare stayed fixed on the door.

  It opened just enough to let Hobart step through before it closed to leave the FBI man standing alone.

  Stratton stood perfectly still, staring at the man who had arrested him a short time ago who was now looking seriously beaten up.

  Hobart paused to take a breath and gather his strength. As he took a couple of hesitant steps forward he saw Stratton standing between the outstretched arms of Skender’s statue and stopped.

  Stratton noted the pain that Hobart’s movements seemed to be causing him and could only assume the man had received an unexpected and unwelcome reception from Skender. But he could not even imagine why.

  Hobart continued walking slowly towards Stratton, keeping stiffly upright and doing his best to maintain his dignity, and stopped several feet away. He saw the device with its complex panel of switches slung across Stratton’s chest, one of his hands hovering over it. Though Hobart knew little about electronics he knew enough to figure out that the box and its antenna were related to the explosive device.

  ‘Move on,’ Stratton said. ‘You’re all done here.’

  Hobart looked into the man’s eyes, the resolve in them obvious. But more interesting was the similarity to the eyes he had looked into a short time ago before their owner had beaten the hell out of him: a dark madness, perhaps, or simply an unharnessed ruthlessness. The Albanian and the Englishman might be very different animals but there were parallels – most notably, they were stubborn and tenacious to the point of self-destruction. Skender was the egotist and king of a ruthless empire who could not comprehend an individual’s challenge to his will. Stratton, on the other hand, was a human cruise missile and once launched would weave past all obstacles until his objective was reached.

  Hobart could see ways out of this madness for both men but they themselves could not see beyond their own needs. They were on a collision course and nothing now was going to stop them, certainly not Hobart. The ultimate loser would of course be the boy, wherever he was. Hobart appreciated how Stratton had little choice, though his solution was extreme to say the least. But above everything else it was Skender’s last words to him that echoed in Hobart’s head: the threat to him and his wife. Hobart would never admit it to anyone but he hoped Stratton succeeded in destroying the man if for no other reason than his own survival.

  ‘I’ll give you a minute to get clear,’ Stratton said. ‘Make sure no one is anywhere near the square.’

  Hobart stared at Stratton, reminded of a failed suicide bomber he’d once seen in a jail. But that man had planned nothing on this scale, of course. He glanced up at the building behind him, his contempt for it and its owner impossible to hide, then back at Stratton. ‘Blow him to hell for all I care,’ Hobart said. Then he moved off painfully, past the statue and towards the edge of the square.

  A movement caused Stratton’s gaze to flick to the balcony above, where Klodi and another of Skender’s thugs had arrived to look around. Klodi looked down onto the concourse and at the statue. The two goons were about to move on when the signal finally reached Klodi’s brain that someone was standing between Skender’s statue’s arms. Then he recognised who. Klodi disappeared instantly and Stratton ran his fingers along the transmitter to the first of four buttons. They hovered above it while Stratton drew the jacket across his body to hide the device from view.

  Hobart crossed the street at the corner of the square towards the roadblock, moving faster, despite his injuries, than when he’d left Stratton. He was thinking of the remaining seconds of the minute that Stratton had given him that were ticking away.

  Hendrickson hurried through the roadblock on seeing Hobart hobbling towards him. ‘Sir, are you okay?’ he asked, falling in alongside his battered leader.

  ‘Get these people back out of sight of the square. Now!’

  ‘Stratton’s escaped, sir. I tried to call you—’

  ‘I know!’ Hobart shouted,
hurting his ribs in the process. ‘Get these people out of here! Tell the cops the bomb’s going off any second!’

  Hendrickson ran off towards the chief of police who stood surrounded by his officers and members of the fire department on the other side of the checkpoint. They were immediately goaded into action. Seaton appeared alongside Hobart who had stopped to lean against the wall of a building and was glancing around the corner towards the pyramid at intervals.

  ‘You okay?’ Seaton asked dryly.

  Hobart looked up at him in between clearing some congealed blood from his nostrils into his handkerchief. ‘I will be in a minute,’ he said to Seaton who was unaware of the irony.

  ‘What about Stratton?’

  ‘What about him?’ Hobart asked.

  ‘Any idea where he is?’

  ‘Take a wild guess,’ Hobart said, looking back around the corner.

  Klodi hurried into the ballroom to find Cano briefing a dozen of his men, organising a search of the building. ‘He’s here!’ Klodi shouted.

  Cano looked up at him, knowing exactly who he meant, a rush of excitement coursing through him. ‘Where?’

  ‘Outside. By the statue. He’s just standing there.’

  ‘Cover him,’ Cano said as he hurried past Klodi and across the lobby to the main doors, followed by half his men. The others trotted up the stairs behind Klodi.

  Cano removed a large silver-plated semi-automatic pistol from a shoulder holster and pulled the slide back enough to expose a bullet in the chamber, making sure that it was loaded. He took a deep breath, adjusted his eyepatch, exhaled through flared nostrils, put his free hand on the door handle and paused a moment in thought, like a gunfighter about to head out of a Wild West saloon into the sunlight to face the sheriff.

  He turned the handle and pushed open the door, slowly at first, exercising caution. Then the statue came into view as he opened it further. Stratton stood in front of it as Klodi had described, staring straight at Cano.

  Cano kept his pistol held low as he examined the man for a few seconds before searching around for a trap of some kind. There was no obvious place in which to hide a bomb in the immediate area, no planters, alcoves, boxes – nowhere to conceal anything that would harm Cano and his men and not Stratton.

  Stratton’s stare remained fixed squarely on Cano. He was confident that an attack would come from no other source without the Albanian’s say-so and was counting on the man’s desire to kill Stratton personally.

  Cano’s one-eyed glare went back to Stratton, specifically to the hand inside his jacket that he assumed held a weapon, wondering why the Englishman was out in the open and blatantly facing what he knew would be vastly superior firepower. Perhaps it was desperation: the man had few other options and, Cano speculated, was so consumed with hatred that he had decided to go down fighting.

  Cano took a couple of steps outside as several of his men filed out through the door behind him, guns in their hands, moving either side of Cano to where they could get a clear shot at Stratton. Half a dozen more appeared on the balcony above to stand alongside Klodi. Some of them had sub-machine guns.

  Cano was beginning to feel more like a bullfighter than simply an executioner. He started to relax and enjoy the role, supremely confident that this was the end of his brother’s killer. There was no way out for Stratton now, not with over a dozen guns against him. Even if the cops were watching, Cano had been threatened with a bomb and was within his rights to defend himself. A smile spread across his face. ‘Come to die, Stratton?’ he asked.

  ‘Where’s the boy?’ Stratton asked calmly. ‘Hand him over now and I’ll let you live.’

  Cano’s smile spread further across his disfigured face before he burst into laughter, which spread infectiously among his men as those who could not understand English well enough heard the translation from others.

  ‘You got balls, Stratton. I’ll say that much for you,’ Cano said as the laughter subsided. ‘Forget about the kid. Mine is the last face you’re ever gonna see in this lifetime. No one shoot before me!’ he yelled as he raised his gun, aiming it at Stratton as his men did the same. ‘How d’you like my firing squad?’ he asked.

  Stratton’s finger pushed the first button on the transmitter. Less than a second later, the top of every lamp-post surrounding the square exploded with a thunderous crack and boom as six and a half thousand ball-bearings blasted from them, like a battery of howitzers primed with grapeshot firing simultaneously, the steel wall spreading as it screamed towards the glass pyramid. The massive shock wave travelled just ahead of the metal wall, covering the distance to the building in less than a second. It hit the palm trees first, shredding their foliage and banners and bending them towards the building as if a tornado had swiped them. Then the metal balls struck the back of the bronze statue of Skender, smashing away all minor details such as ears and fingers. Before Cano’s finger could finish squeezing the trigger of his gun the tiny steel spheres slammed through him and his men with such force that they were lifted off their feet and their butchered bodies slammed backwards into the building’s doors and walls, dead before impact. Every sheet of glass on the face of the pyramid from the ground to the twelfth floor exploded into fragments, filling the air like a crystal cloud before descending.

  Hobart and Seaton hugged the wall, squeezing their heads between their arms as the shock wave ripped down the street bouncing off buildings, trashing windows and tossing those police officers who’d remained on the corners to the ground like paper. The blast cut the tops off the lamp-posts, one landing through the windscreen of a police car, another a few feet from Seaton and Hobart on the sidewalk. Debris rained down everywhere and onlookers screamed, trying to find cover as the television correspondent slammed into her camera and both went rolling.

  The glass in the air around Skender’s building briefly held its upward and outward drive, then hung suspended for an instant before gravity took charge and it began to drop, much of it falling inside the sloped sides now devoid of protection. The rest fell onto the surrounding pathways and gardens like hail. Stratton pushed back into Skender’s statue’s arms, covering himself as the debris bounced around him, carpeting the concourse with tiny crystals. Within a few seconds, as the echoing boom subsided into the distance, it went contrastingly quiet except for the occasional chunk of loosened metal window frame dropping with a clang.

  Skender hugged the floor where he had dived when the force struck the structure several floors below. After the thunder and shaking had ceased he pushed himself up onto his knees, all his senses alert, wondering what on earth had happened. He shuffled to the window and saw wisps of smoke rising from each buckled lamp-post but due to the angle of the glass that his face was pressed against he could not see the damage directly below. He got to his feet and, stepping over items that had fallen from shelves, hurried through the glass doors to the other side of the building to find a similar picture.

  Skender came back to his desk, grabbed up the radio and found the send button. ‘Cano?’ he shouted into it. ‘Cano?’

  His guards came rushing down the corridor from the elevator and emergency stairwell looking as confused as their boss.

  ‘What happened?’ Skender shouted.

  ‘Don’t know, boss,’ one of them said.

  ‘I thought the friggin’ building was gonna fall down,’ said another.

  ‘One of you go down and find out what happened!’ Skender shouted. ‘And get Cano up here!’

  As the man ran off, Skender paused to think. It was obvious that the building had been struck by something and there had no doubt been some damage. But it had held, he himself was in one piece and that was the most important thing. He then considered the possibility that it might be a diversion of some kind. He went over to a cupboard built into a wall and pulled out one of a selection of semi-automatic shotguns, his preferred close-quarter weapon. But after calming himself and taking stock he felt certain that the planned attack was over. Though it had been violen
t and possibly destructive, he had survived it.

  ‘What are you standing there for?!’ he shouted at his remaining guards. ‘Cover the stairs and the elevators.’

  The men hurried back to their posts. Skender checked that the gun was loaded, then took a box of spare cartridges from a drawer and placed it on the desk.

  ‘Cano?’ Skender shouted into the radio once more. ‘Where is that prick?’ he muttered as he tossed the radio onto the table and went back to the window to look down onto the square. He then remembered a window in the kitchen that opened and hurried down the corridor.

  Josh was in the kitchen under a table, a sandwich on the floor in front of him where he had dropped it. Skender hurried in, opened the window and looked below. His jaw went rigid as he took in the sight of the shattered façade of his glorious pyramid. Every window from four floors below on down was gone.

  He stepped back in, thought for a moment and then looked down at Josh who was gaping up at him, wide-eyed and confused. ‘Come with me, kid,’ Skender said as he took hold of Josh’s hand, pulled him to his feet and urged him out of the room. The camel dropped from Josh’s pocket in the corridor and as the boy tried to retrieve it Skender yanked him on into the conference room, pulling him forward and over to the far wall.

  ‘Sit down and don’t move,’ Skender growled, any pleasantness gone from his tone. Josh obeyed, looking at the shotgun in Skender’s hand and wondering what was happening.

  38

  Stratton stepped away from the protection of the statue, his feet crunching on the glass as he walked towards the ornate front doors that were now dotted with small, splinter-covered holes. He paused to look down on Cano’s disfigured, lifeless body. It was covered in shards of glass, blood oozing from countless holes.