Ben had seen enough. He was turning away from the dead woman when he heard a noise from another part of the house. He froze. Listening hard. There it was again. The soft but unmistakable sound of someone moving around upstairs. A moment later, the muffled thump of a door slamming, followed a few seconds after by footsteps. Ben closed his eyes to focus on their rhythm and decided they were those of two people. In the next instant he heard a voice mutter something he didn’t catch, and another in reply.
He stepped out of the bedroom with the shotgun clenched against his hip and finger on the trigger, in time to see two men reaching the bottom of the spiral staircase at the far end of the mezzanine landing. Both wearing dark trousers and black lightweight bomber jackets zipped up to the neck. Both armed with chunky black pistols. One was carrying a backpack over his shoulder. The two of them were smiling like a pair of buddies enjoying a joke. They had just murdered three people, and they were smiling.
Ben wanted them alive. But he knew well enough that things often didn’t work out that way.
The jokey smiles dropped as both men simultaneously saw Ben emerge from the bedroom door. They were professionals. Well drilled. And their response was instant. The pistols came up in unison and they both opened fire at once, fast and furious, in a rattling blamblamblamblam that sounded like a blast from a machine pistol. But Ben’s own responses were honed smoother and even more second-nature instinctive. Even as their weapons were swinging up to take aim at him and he read the hard looks of intent in their eyes he gave up on the idea of taking them alive.
He let off the right barrel of the shotgun. The shattering blast filled the air like a bombshell going off and the gun kicked ferociously in his hands. As the incoming swarm of gunfire smacked into the plaster and punched through the bloodstained wood of the open door next to him he ducked back inside the bedroom without seeing where his shot had gone, and dived over Emily Bowman’s body to take cover behind the bed. A bed wasn’t ideal protection from large-calibre gunfire but it was better than a flimsy partition wall. Ben cracked open the shotgun and flicked the empty, smoking hull from the right-hand barrel. He quickly slid in another shell in its place, thumbed back the hammer and ducked his head down lower as another staccato burst of shots rattled from the landing, sounding closer. They were firing randomly through the wall in the hope that at least one bullet would find its mark. One of them smacked into Emily Bowman’s body with a meaty thud. Another smashed an antique glass Tiffany lamp by the bedside and toppled it over.
In a lull between shots Ben heard the soft thud and oiled-metal clack of a pistol having its empty magazine being ejected and dumped to the floor, and a fresh one being quickly, expertly rammed in. He levelled the shotgun over the top of the bed towards the area of bedroom wall behind which the sound had come, wrapped his index and middle fingers around both triggers and let off both barrels at once.
Not something you could do with a modern shotgun. Twice the noise, twice the recoil. And twice the downrange destruction. The blast blew a ragged round hole in the wall, the size of a marine porthole. Chunks of plaster and splintered bits of stud battening flew in all directions.
Ben’s ears sang from the deafening explosion, but he could hear well enough to tell that the gunfire from the landing had stuttered to a halt. Peering through the hole in the wall, he could see no movement outside. He quickly reloaded his empty gun with his last two cartridges.
Just then, he saw a dark shape scurry past the bullet-riddled bedroom doorway. He leaped to his feet, vaulted over Emily Bowman and the bed and ran out onto the landing in pursuit. Glancing left, he saw one man down, lying inert near the foot of the spiral staircase, the front of his bomber jacket ripped up. To Ben’s right, the second guy was escaping towards the stairs, still carrying the backpack over his shoulder and moving with a pronounced lurch in his step. He was hit and leaking blood in his wake, but still in the game. He was also Ben’s best remaining chance of finding out who these killers were, and who they worked for.
Ben pointed the shotgun at him and could have cut him down in his tracks. Instead he held his fire and yelled, ‘Stop! Toss the weapon!’
The lurching, limping figure wasn’t ready to give up the fight just yet. At the sound of Ben’s voice he wheeled around with his own and his dead associate’s pistols in both hands and delivered a wild volley of shots. An alabaster statuette on a plinth blew apart three inches from Ben’s elbow. Ben thought You asked for it, stood his ground with bullets burning past him and fired off one barrel as the guy crashed through the last door before the stairs. The door frame disintegrated into spinning splinters and dust, but thanks to Ben’s hesitation the guy was marginally ahead of the curve and made it through into the room. Ben raced for the doorway, bracing for more shots punching back at him through the wall.
The other side of it was the airy, graceful bathroom that Ben had checked minutes earlier. He rounded the edge of the shattered door frame just in time to see the injured man lurching past the Victorian bathtub and shoving hard through the drapes against the tall window. Before Ben could do anything to stop him, there was a tinkle of smashing glass as the window crashed violently open; then the man was through and leaping into space.
Ben hurried across to the broken window just in time to see him slithering and tumbling down the slope of the roof, dislodging tiles as he went. As he reached the overhanging edge the man tried to grapple for the guttering to break his fall, missed, and dropped out of sight. Then he was gone.
Chapter 17
For all Ben could tell, the guy had gone plummeting to his death. Ben had no intention of following him there. He swore and backed away from the window, ran out of the bathroom, pounded down the stairs, sprinted past the body of the housekeeper still sitting in the chair, and burst outside.
At a sprint he rounded the side of the house towards where the man had fallen. He looked up at the roof: it had to have been a twenty-five-foot drop, high enough to break bones or possibly kill you if you landed badly on the kind of hard paving that skirted the house walls. Ben was half expecting to see a broken-necked corpse, but what he found instead left him with mixed emotions. Partly positive, because dead men don’t talk and he wanted this one alive – and he was, because all there was of him on the paving was some blood. And partly negative, because now Ben had no idea where he’d gone.
He scouted for a blood trail, but it was scanty and then vanished altogether. The guy was hurt but he wasn’t bleeding to death, and he was probably putting pressure on the wound to cover his tracks. Ben found one small red spatter on the gravel, the size of a penny, and decided that the man must have gone down the avenue that separated the house from the indoor pool building next to it.
Ben ran the length of the gap and emerged from the other end. There was no sign of the man anywhere to be seen. The pool house was all windows, and peering through them Ben could see he wasn’t in there either. Ben now found himself standing at a T-junction where the path forked right and left: to his left, Emily Bowman’s tennis court and an area of lovely garden with a small apple orchard; to his right, the large horse paddock Ben had seen on his approach to the house. One way or the other, he had to choose. If he picked the wrong one, there was every chance that his man would get away.
If in doubt, turn left had been Ben’s watchword for years. If it came down to a coin toss, that was the way he’d go.
That was when he noticed the horses.
There were five of them, two bays, a big, handsome chestnut and a pair of greys, one of them just a foal. That morning Emily Bowman’s little herd had all been lazily grazing at the lush summer grass. Now they had moved off to the far side of the paddock and were milling nervously over by the fence, snorting and neighing loudly. The sounds of gunfire from inside the house might have spooked them, but Ben’s instinct told him the animals had taken fright at something that had happened more recently than that. Something from just moments ago. Horses were extremely sensitive and could read human body language
even better than a dog. When people behaved erratically or angrily around them, their natural prey animal’s self-preservation instinct kicked in. If a hurt and desperate man had come running past their paddock just now, the horses would have picked up on the furious vibes he was giving off, and they’d want nothing to do with him.
Ben was suddenly certain that his quarry had gone that way.
Trusting his instinct, he turned right and sprinted past the paddock fence. The big chestnut saw him and wheeled around, whinnying. Ben ran on, one eye to the ground, searching for more blood spots but seeing nothing. Past the edge of the paddock was a stable block, and beyond that again was a long, large wooden barn. It had tall double doors to allow large machinery in and out, but those doors were padlocked. Whereas the smaller person-sized door inset in one of them was cracked open a few inches. Ben saw the small blood splash a few feet from the entrance and a red smudge on the door handle, and suddenly knew that his instinct had been right.
He approached the door with the shotgun levelled and ready. In a strong, clear voice he called out, ‘Okay, I know you’re in there. Come on out with your hands on your head, and I won’t shoot. You’ve got five seconds. Four … three …’
But Ben never reached two. The roar of a loud-revving engine suddenly erupted into life from within the barn. In the next instant the tall double doors burst open and flew apart in a storm of ripping planks and flying splinters as a big utility tractor rammed through and came charging straight towards him.
Ben flung himself out of its path, dropping the shotgun. The tractor surged past and narrowly missed him. He rolled on the ground, sprang back to his feet and went to retrieve his fallen weapon, but saw that its barrels had been crushed flat under the tractor’s knobbly wheels. The man inside the cab grappled at the wheel as he brought the machine back round in a tight circle to try to run Ben down again. Its front end was crumpled from the impact, one headlight dangling. The tarpaulin it must have been covered with was trailing along behind, along with all kinds of tangled-up junk that had been piled up next to it – rolls of fencing wire, a reel of high-tensile steel cable that had got itself enmeshed around the front axle, an old horse blanket.
The tractor came roaring back at him. He waited until the last instant and then leaped out of its path a second time, and it smashed into the edge of the barn, ripping off the remnants of one shattered door and carrying away a corner joist with a force that almost collapsed the entire building. The tractor forced its way through the wreckage like a Panzer tank and kept going, coughing out a black cloud of diesel smoke as it accelerated hard away. Now it looked as if the man at the wheel had given up on the idea of squashing Ben to death, and was intent on making his escape. Somewhere close nearby, he and his accomplice must have had a getaway car hidden. If the man could get to it before Ben stopped him, he’d be gone.
Ben ran after the tractor, thinking that he could jump onto the dragging tarpaulin and grab a solid handhold so he could scramble up onto the rear of the vehicle. He managed to get one foot on the tarp, then the other. But the big rear wheels and bendy plastic mudguards gave him nothing to latch onto, and it was impossible to stay upright. He fell, and was instantly in danger of getting tangled up in the folds of the thick plastic and either mangled under a wheel or eviscerated by a trailing length of barbed wire. The tractor was gaining speed now as it headed away from the outbuildings. Thirty miles an hour felt uncomfortably fast when you were being dragged over the rough ground. Ben fought to disentangle himself from the tarpaulin and was suddenly free, rolling in the dirt. Then he was back on his feet, scraped and battered but mindless of the pain as he resumed the chase. As fast a runner as he was, the tractor was steadily drawing away from him. A heavy roll of fencing wire unsnagged itself from its undercarriage and Ben swerved out of its way as it came bouncing towards him. The cable reel being dragged along in its wake began to unravel. The high-tensile steel swished along the ground behind it like a silver snake.
Ahead, a closed metal gateway blocked off a compacted-earth path that ran parallel with a grassy bank. At the bottom of the slope was a large pond with lilies and ducks and an ornamental fountain at its centre. The path cut across Emily Bowman’s property to another gate in the distance, which Ben saw marked the perimeter. That was where the man and his accomplice had left their car. That was where he was desperately trying to get back to now.
The tractor veered towards the gate. Engine revving to the max, wheels churning up the dirt, oily black smoke pumping from its exhaust stack, the slinky silver cable tailing along in its wake. It smashed into the gate with a juddering crash. The gate was strong galvanised steel, hinged to a metal post embedded in concrete. It was bent and buckled by the impact, but still held. The tractor crunched into reverse, lumbered back a few feet and then came at it again. This time, the gate ripped off its hinges and the big wheels crushed it flat.
That was the moment Ben saw his chance. The tension had momentarily gone out of the steel cable as the tractor negotiated the gate. Fifteen yards behind, Ben snatched the end of the cable off the ground at the same instant that the tractor took off again. In another second it would be ripped from his hands. He raced for the ruined gateway. The gate was toast but the thick galvanised post was deeply enough embedded in the concrete to have remained intact. Ben very quickly looped the end of the cable around it, made it fast and stepped back as the slack was taken up and the braided steel rope snapped as taut as a piano string.
With a rending crunch the strain wrenched the post to a forty-five-degree angle. But it held. So did the cable. You could have dangled a battleship from that cable. And the other end of it was solidly attached to the tractor’s front axle.
Something had to give.
And it did.
Chapter 18
The tractor’s rear wheels lifted off the ground and the vehicle flipped tail over nose and sideways at the same time, coming down with a rending crunch that flattened the roof and sent bits of debris flying in all directions. The front axle, together with suspension parts and steering linkages, was ripped clean away. One wheel went bouncing off down the grassy slope and hit the pond water with a huge splash, scattering the ducks that were dabbling there among the lilies. The dismembered vehicle rolled a couple more times, and its destructive momentum began to carry it down the embankment towards the water.
Ben’s heart was thumping as he sprinted after it. Invoking the forces of mayhem and devastation was an easily overdone thing, especially when you needed to keep your enemy at least alive enough to press information out of him. The man at the wheel might have been crushed to death by the flattened roof, or he might now be trapped inside the wreck as it splashed down into the pond and sank to the bottom. Either was a bad outcome; but then Ben saw the guy spilling out of the wreck as it rolled down the embankment, battered and bloody but still perfectly alive. He was still clutching his backpack as he staggered to his feet, fell and then struggled upright again, just as the tractor hit the pond with an explosion of spray like a depth charge.
The man broke into a limping, lumbering run and tried to escape towards the perimeter fence. He threw a wild-eyed look back over his shoulder, saw Ben rapidly gaining on him, jerked a pistol from his belt and pointed it. His aim was wild and the bullet missed his target by several feet. Ben flinched at the flat report of the gunshot but kept running.
The pistol was empty now, slide locked back. A surge of triumph burned through Ben’s veins. The man had just spent his last chance of getting away. And he knew it. With a shout of rage and frustration he hurled the dead weapon at Ben’s head. Ben ducked it and the missile sailed over his shoulder. The man kept running, but it was a hopeless effort. Ben was on him in the next three strides, and tackled him with a force that made him drop his backpack and go tumbling on his face.
The man fought him like an animal, with the desperation that comes with having nothing left to lose. Ben pinned his thrashing, kicking body to the grass and hit him hard in the face,
twice, three times, but still he kept on fighting. His mouth was streaming blood, red teeth bared in a grimace of hate. His clawed fingers raked at Ben’s face and tried to gouge his eyes and get a grip around his throat. Ben hit him again, but the man barely seemed to feel it. He bent up his right leg as though he was about to try to kick Ben off him – his right hand let go of Ben’s throat for an instant and shot down to his ankle – and suddenly there was a small boot knife in his fist, a leaf-bladed dagger that flashed towards Ben’s ribs with lethal force.
Ben writhed his body away from the blade and rolled over onto his back, and the man rolled with him, now riding on top and trying to plunge the dagger into Ben’s chest. The needle-sharp, double-edged blade was within three inches of his heart when he blocked the man’s wrist and twisted it hard and felt the crackle of ripping cartilage. The guy didn’t seem to care. He managed to get a hold of the knife with his other hand and kept on battling. No pain. No fear. Kill or be killed. Ben knew there was only one way he was going to disable this enemy. This was a fight to the death now.
Locked together, they tumbled down the embankment towards the pond, where the grass was all flattened and ripped up by the rolling tractor. Its rear end still jutted up from the muddied, rippling surface of the water. Over and over. Ben swallowed a gasp of air before the shock of the icy-cold water jolted him, and next thing the roar of the murky water was in his ears and his vision was clouded by weeds and lichen and bubbles, so that he could no longer see his enemy as the two of them sank deeper towards the mud at the bottom of the pond. If one of them didn’t win this fight in the next minute, they were both going to end up drowned.
The Pandemic Plot Page 11
