Detonator (31 page)

He nodded. ‘Ring me at the office. If I’m not there, your call will be forwarded.’

All the lights were now off in the store apart from the ones in the rear corridor. At the end of it I could see a door with a push bar to enable a swift exit if there was some kind of health and safety drama.

I gripped Luca before he opened it. ‘What happens outside?’

He turned. ‘An alleyway. Then the street.’

‘Lit or unlit?’

‘Unlit.’

‘And how often have you used this place before?’

He shrugged. ‘Three or four times, perhaps. But not regularly.’

So, we weren’t as deep in what Luca called the shadows as he believed.

‘OK, I’ll go now, and turn left. If there’s anyone out there, I’d rather they followed me than fucked you over and took the laptop. You call a cab, and tell the driver to run you around for half an hour before taking you to wherever you need to go.’

I peeled off a note and handed it to the boy. ‘Tell him it would be best for him to wait another twenty before leaving.’

The kid seemed well pleased.

I gave him a grin. ‘Yup, you
should
be smiling. A euro per minute beats the shit out of the minimum wage where I come from.’

I didn’t aim to go straight back to the car. Not because I was in the mood for sightseeing: I just needed to check whether Luca had been followed from his office. He was clearly well able to take care of himself, but maybe his anti-surveillance skills weren’t as highly developed as mine.

As soon as I emerged from the mouth of the alley, two guys with shiny heads turned away from me and got very busy ordering pizza at the takeaway on the opposite side of the street. Too busy. I’d seen their faces clearly enough to be sure that neither was Elvis. Now I was about to find out whether they were run-of-the-mill Neapolitan muggers or something a bit more switched on.

By the time I’d moved half a K to the west, and travelled twice the distance in the process, I knew they weren’t just out for a good time. No one orders pizza, then doesn’t wait to collect it. Or turns three corners to walk back on themselves. Unless they’re stupid Brit tourists holding their map upside down.

But was Luca their real target, or were they after me?

I was moving west, a few hundred north of the Romeo. The sea about a K to my left, the rest of the town sloping up to some kind of castle on the hill in front of me. I lengthened my stride so that I could increase my speed without breaking into a run. The gap between us stayed the same.

I slid my UZI out of my pocket, held it in my right hand and twisted out the nib. I thought about turning towards the docks and taking them down there, or going the Gucci route and holing up in the Romeo, but they’d already thought of that. One of my pursuers was waffling urgently into a mobile phone, and when I glanced left at the next junction, so was a guy on a moped, moving purposefully up the cross street towards me.

I tightened my grip on the UZI and kept aiming for the high ground.

Thirty ahead and to my half-right was a steep flight of stone steps, which looked like they curved up to a church. As I reached them, the clouds obliterated the moon. That suited me fine. I climbed them two at a time, mostly staying in the shadow of the high wall to my right. They seemed to go on for ever.

The moped’s engine shrieked in protest as its rider throttled up and sped further along the street I’d just left. I heard footsteps below me. I gulped in a couple of lungfuls of warm, damp Neapolitan air and quickened my pace. It felt like a storm was coming.

I reached the stretch of level paving that led to the church door and thought about taking them on there, but only for a nanosecond. I legged it past, aiming for the next set of steps. I could still hear movement below, and the odd curse. I hoped the fuckers were leaking. I was. I felt sweat prickle at the base of my spine and the back of my neck.

I was level with the tops of the fourth or fifth tier of buildings now, and could see streetlamps above me, and the occasional sweep of vehicle headlights. I was closing on the upper road.

The balustrade that bordered the steps was lower on this flight. I glanced swiftly over each side of it in case there was an opportunity for an early exit.

There wasn’t.

Just a sheer drop.

Nothing to grab on to.

Nothing to break a fall.

I spotted a point a hundred or so to my left where one corner of the flat roof of a massive yellow block of flats edged close to the parapet. Close enough for me to jump.

I kept low as I approached the road. When I got to it I didn’t bother to stop, listen and look. What was the point? I already knew I had two behind me, and at least one in front.

I bounded out on to the pavement and went immediately left, staying in the crouch, shoulder almost brushing the wall. It gave me good cover from the steps; less good from the streetlights. But why worry about what you can’t change?

Three-quarters of the way to my target, the night was torn apart by the world’s biggest lightning bolt, followed by a crash of thunder loud enough to drown the sound of the moped careering along the tarmac towards me. As soon as the rumble retreated, I heard it big-time. Fuck crouching. I went into Usain Bolt mode, fast and straight. If those lads were carrying, they were going to do more damage to the stonework at this range than they would to me.

Fifteen metres from the corner of the roof, the rain began. Not just a gentle shower, an Italian monsoon. Clear air one second, torrential the next. Moped man mounted the pavement five metres away and rode straight at me. I stood my ground, then jinked right and left and he lost it on the kerb. The engine whined as the tyres lost traction and the bike dropped with a clatter, trapping his left leg beneath it.

His mates appeared at the top of the steps as I took a pace towards him. The climb had slowed them down, but they weren’t going to hang about long enough for me to give this lad a smack and ask him what the fuck they were up to.

They were ten away when I leapt on to the wall.

The distance to my landing zone was further than I’d anticipated. I hate it when that happens. I barely had time to steady myself before pressing the launch button, but I was in the air long enough to wonder what the fuck would happen if I landed on the wet tiles that edged it instead of the flat red asphalt-coated expanse I was aiming for.

I soon found out.

I buried the UZI into the roofing felt and hung on, but the tiles were slippery as shit, and seemed determined to take me down. My arse was hanging in space. I didn’t even want to think about the distance between my flailing legs and the ground. It wasn’t as big a drop as it had been when I was trying not to follow the Nissan off the edge of the mountain, but it was far enough to be a one-way trip.

The only solid thing I might be able to grab hold of was a galvanized-tin chimney cowl with four legs and a lid the shape of a pyramid. But it was a metre out of my reach.

The asphalt coating was like heavy-duty sandpaper. I scrabbled for a grip on it but all I got in return was a set of bleeding fingernails. Apart from the UZI, the only thing keeping me up there was the slight ridge beneath my elbows, where the tiles began, and the friction of my jacket sleeves.

The rain was part curse, part blessing. It was drowning me, but it was also drowning the noise I was making. And though it was making my life difficult from the waist down, the weight of my wet clothes helped to glue my arms and torso to the rooftop.

I balled my hands into fists, wedged my elbows more firmly against the far side of the ridge and levered the top half of my body upwards until I was able to raise my right knee high enough to give it some purchase too. Then I used it to push myself forwards until, at full stretch, I could close my left hand around the nearest leg of the cowl.

I wasn’t dry, but I was almost home.

That was when one of the takeaway pizza team joined me.

He’d misjudged his jump too, but had me to hold on to.

He landed on my arse and right leg and I felt his chin dig into my lower back. He grabbed at my jacket to stop himself sliding back over the edge.

I tightened my grip on the cowl, but it wasn’t designed for this kind of shit, and snapped off its mounting. Which meant that if I didn’t do something fast, we were both fucked.

I managed to bring my right heel up quickly enough to hook it over the ridge as well as my knee. As my body rotated ninety degrees anticlockwise, I lifted my left elbow and drove it back as hard as I could into whatever bit of him was in its arc of fire.

I couldn’t see a fucking thing, but I felt it connect with the side of his head, like a ball hammer on an eggshell.

He didn’t make a sound. He didn’t loosen his hold on my jacket either. He tightened it instead. I could feel him trying to wedge his hands beneath me, trying to grip my thighs in a bear hug.

I slid sideways and back and felt the weight of him and his swinging legs taking me down. I twisted my left shoulder upwards and my head on to the asphalt and managed to bury my fingers in his hair – so it was Mr Moped, not one of his shiny-headed mates – and clamped them strongly enough to be able to bang his face against the tiles.

Another bolt of lightning confirmed that I’d already smashed his cheekbone into the roof of his mouth and taken some of his eye socket with it. He didn’t look happy.

I felt his grip slacken, so I did it again.

And again.

And one more time, for luck.

Then I realized that my hand in his hair was pretty much the only thing that was keeping him there. So I let go, pulled myself up with the UZI and rolled the rest of me into a secure position half a metre from the point he’d just disappeared. I didn’t hear him bounce off anything on the way down. Just the noise of a big sack of shit hitting some very wet ground.

I hauled myself up, dug out the UZI and stayed in the crouch for a moment, listening for any other sign of imminent threat above the driving rain, and looking back at the parapet I’d leapt from. One set of head and shoulders was silhouetted against the streetlamps. The other – along with arms, legs and body – was poised on the top of the wall.

As more lightning split the sky, I saw him measure the gap, then look down and not like what he saw.

I needed to build on that.

They both had blades, but neither was showing anything that might go bang. So I got to my feet and made it clear that I was armed and ready.

A stream of oncoming headlights appeared from further up the road, and seemed to convince the boys that they were on the wrong end of the risk-and-reward spectrum. They pocketed the blades. Going back to pick up those pizzas was suddenly a much safer option.

The one on the wall dropped on to the pavement and his mate picked up the moped and off they went.

I turned and scanned my immediate surroundings. Apart from three other cowls there was a matching skylight, which probably crowned a stairwell. I didn’t bother looking. I could tell from there that it was fixed. It wouldn’t give me access unless I dived through the glass.

To my immediate left was another L-shaped roof, five metres lower than mine, surrounded by a waist-high wall and three horizontal rails, which suggested that the residents came up there on a fairly regular basis, and therefore that the structure like a garden shed at the apex might provide the route in and out.

I got down on my very wet belt buckle and went over the edge feet first, slowing my descent as much as possible with toecaps and sleeves and fingers and my fistful of UZI until I had to let go. I landed more or less upright and legged it round the corner.

The shed wasn’t a way in. It was half glazed and filled with deckchairs; somewhere for people to sit and enjoy the view, or shelter from the rain. But behind it there was an access point with a sloping roof. And a door that had been very firmly locked and bolted, top and bottom, from the inside.

A sixth sense made me glance back through the rain-lashed windows towards the road. Now that I was five metres below my original landing zone, I no longer had a clear line of sight to the stretch of wall I’d jumped from. But I could tell that the headlamps the other side of it were stationary. And the lights on top of the two wagons now standing there were flashing, and blue.

Which explained why the remaining two-thirds of the takeaway team had fucked off, instead of waiting to see what I was going to do next.

A pair of mega-powerful torch beams sparked up and bounced across the level above me. Then they shifted ten metres to the right and began to quarter the one I was on.

A white stink vent stood proud of the rail at the far corner of the building. Keeping the access point between me and the torch beams, I moved towards it and looked down.

The rigid plastic pipe ran vertically down the side of the four-storey building, disappearing into the wall beside each of three unlit balconies on the way. I gave the top of it an experimental shove, which was enough to show me that the metal retaining brackets wouldn’t guarantee me a safe trip to the ground.

But it would be strongly bedded at every joint and, fuck it, I didn’t have a choice.

I couldn’t go back.

I couldn’t take the stairs.

I pocketed the UZI and slid between the top and middle rails. Closing my fingers around the bottom one, I lowered myself as far down the wall as I could. Paused for a moment to slow my breathing and blink the rainwater out of my eyes. Grabbed the pipe with my left hand and wedged the toe of my left boot between it and the wall, just above the fixing.

The pipe immediately bowed outwards, but the bracket held steady enough for me to complete the journey to the uppermost balcony. One glance through the window confirmed that nobody was home, so as soon as my feet were on firm stone I stepped back into the arched recess. It didn’t give me much shelter from the storm, but it allowed me to stay out of sight of anyone who might be above me, looking down, or below me, looking up.

Still facing the glass, my back to the handrail, I tilted my head up and, with infinite slowness, leant outwards from the waist until I could scan the length of the parapet, from the stink pipe to the opposite corner of the block.