Authors: Emlyn Rees
The bespectacled torturer watched the whole show. The light dying in the colonel’s remaining eye. The tiny blood vessels rupturing there. If he had been here alone, he would most certainly have filmed the sequence. He thought he might even have clapped.
‘He’s gone,’ he said.
‘What was it you told him?’ The blonde woman knelt down on the other side of the corpse. ‘What was it you whispered in his ear?’
‘That he didn’t have to worry about his daughter anymore. That she was perfectly safe and hadn’t been harmed.’
‘It’s probably more comfort than he deserved.’ The blonde woman unzipped a medical specimen bag. ‘But I suppose, yes, he did spare her life, at least.’ She glanced across at Danny Shanklin. ‘Now deal with him.’
As the torturer left her, she opened a black holdall and took out two red and white-striped tracksuits. She threw one to the torturer and pulled the other over the colonel’s suit, deliberately tearing his shirt and leaving both his suit jacket and the tracksuit jacket open to his waist. To make it look like someone had tried to help him after the onset of what would soon be diagnosed – thanks to the chemical cocktail the torturer had injected him with – as a fatal and entirely natural heart attack.
She swapped Zykov’s polished black leather shoes for a pair of bright white Nike trainers. Using a set of bolt cutters, she lopped off each of the colonel’s fingers, stuffing all but his right forefinger into the specimen bag. The forefinger she inserted carefully into a Petri dish of preservative jelly, which she then transferred into a dry-ice organ transplant container inside the holdall.
The blonde woman then set to work on Colonel Zykov’s face.
She used a surgical knife to cut a deep diagonal line down from the right side of his hairline and clean through his nose cartilage. She repeated the same stroke from left to right. She slashed at his face randomly then, reducing it to a bundle of shredded red flesh and white protrusions of cartilage and bone.
Cocking her head, she studied her handiwork. It was messier than she’d imagined. But it had been just as adrenalizing as she’d hoped. In fact, she now felt almost high.
The main thing was, her man would be pleased. She’d done a good job. The former military attaché to the Russian embassy in London was now barely recognizable as human. His face looked like butcher’s meat. ID-ing him would be impossible, until a DNA test had been performed and a corresponding database match secured.
All of which would buy the blonde woman and her friends more than enough time for what needed to be done.
She peeled off her bloodied gloves and dropped them into the specimen bag. Pulling its zip tight, she stuffed it into her holdall, along with the colonel’s shoes. Then she pulled on a fresh pair of gloves.
Her heart jolted at the clatter of automatic gunfire. It came in short, controlled bursts. From out on the balcony. She wished she could be out there too. She wished she could feel that rush.
Forcing herself to focus on her own work, she put a black balaclava and a pair of black shades on the floor beside the colonel. She gripped his hair, raised his head and hung a 4GB data stick round his neck.
She made sure to leave it half visible there on his chest, so that only a fool could miss it.
Inside his suit jacket pocket, next to his monogrammed pen, she put an unmarked white security swipe card. In amongst all that spilt ink. Again where it would be easily found.
Silence. The shooting was over.
She realized she was sweating.
From outside on the street came a scream. Then another. It was the sound of people dying, crying out for help.
Another burst of gunfire from out on the hotel room balcony.
Then footsteps. Heavy breathing. A muscular man in a tracksuit and balaclava knelt beside her.
Her
man.
She adored his strong wrists, the robotic way their tendons flexed as he carefully positioned his rifle beside the colonel. He rubbed the dead man’s palms between his own gloved hands.
She watched him, mesmerized, fleetingly remembering how they’d made love less than two hours ago. Through there in the bedroom, while the trussed-up colonel had twitched and whimpered on the floor until she’d taken measures to shut him up.
Being penetrated by this man was like being screwed by a machine, she always thought. Cold and ruthless and,
God
, yes, so pure. His touch made her feel elevated, like she was no longer human at all, but something much better instead.
As he kicked off his white Nike trainers and stripped off his tracksuit, she felt herself becoming so aroused that it was all she could do not to moan. He’d cut her off without regret, she knew, if it suited him. But surely the fact that he still tolerated her presence meant that he must still love her too? Oh yes, she’d do anything for this beautiful man. Anything to keep him hers.
Beneath his discarded clothes, he was wearing a well-tailored dark suit and white T-shirt. No logo. He accepted the polished English black brogues she gave him. Taking off his shades and balaclava, he stuffed them along with his tracksuit and trainers into her bag.
Only then did the hawk-faced man smile. She felt her heart swell with pride. So he’d done it. The shooting had been a success. She kissed him hard on the lips.
‘Now move,’ he said.
The balcony curtains had already been pulled shut. The torturer had Danny Shanklin’s body prepared. Positioned on a chair facing the balcony. Slumped rather than seated. A black balaclava and shades covered the American’s face. He’d been dressed in a red and white-striped tracksuit and bright white Nikes.
Shanklin’s own clothes were in a pile on the floor. The blonde woman scooped them into her holdall. The giant skinhead tossed her his trainers, tracksuit and balaclava. He too had been wearing a dark business suit beneath.
He rubbed his gloved hands all over Danny Shanklin’s, then carefully fitted his rifle into Shanklin’s arms, propping the weapon’s barrel up on the back of a chair that had been positioned in front of the American, so that he now appeared to be aiming its sight out through the window.
The skinhead joined the hawk-faced man and the bearded thief in the short corridor leading out of the suite. Only the blonde woman and the torturer now remained in the sitting room.
She stood to one side of the French windows before pulling their curtains open. A smell of burning drifted up from below. She wanted to look out and see for herself, but she resisted the temptation. She listened to the screaming instead. God, she felt so
wet
.
Crawling back across the room, so she couldn’t be seen from the street, she joined the three suited men in the hotel suite’s entrance corridor. They were now all wearing baseball caps and shades. The hawk-faced man led them out of the suite.
The blonde woman stayed. She took the Faraday case from the wardrobe.
‘Now,’ she told the torturer, who was crouched behind Shanklin.
The torturer sucked his lower lip in concentration. He shivered with pleasure, as he smoothly slid the needle of the syringe into Danny Shanklin’s carotid artery.
The torturer had killed several Americans before. Most times for money. Twice purely for pleasure whilst on holiday in the Florida Keys.
It would be interesting to see how this one would die. Would he put up a fight? Would he scream? Would he beg? The torturer
wished he could witness that now, and felt a temporarily crippling twinge of regret that he could not.
Then he pulled himself together, and pressed the syringe’s plunger down hard.
Awake.
Danny Shanklin woke hyperventilating, his heart trying to punch through his ribs. Opening his eyes, he recoiled. Bright light. Burning red. He twisted.
Got to get away.
Pain.
His right forefinger. It was caught in something. Left hand too. He tried to see what. Saw more burning red. Forced himself to keep looking. The red fractured into a blizzard of pink dots. The pink dots faded into blue.
A rectangle of blue. Right there. Dead ahead.
‘What the …?’ Danny’s mouth was dry as ash.
He felt something solid behind his back. A chair? Was he sitting? His neck throbbed like he’d been stung. He couldn’t slow his breathing. His heart kept hammering.
Where am I? What’s going on?
A scream in the distance. Muffled shouts.
The blue was the sky, Danny realized. The rectangle was a set of open French doors leading out on to a balcony. The buildings across the street lurched into view. Rows of windows glinted in the sunlight. A hot breeze blew in his face.
Danny tried to stand. Faltered. Whatever his hands were caught up in slid sideways with a thud. He felt cold metal in his right hand. His left was entwined in what felt like a strap.
Even before he looked down and the object swung fully into focus, he’d already guessed what it was.
A rifle. Its barrel was now aimed down at the floor beside him. His right forefinger was wedged through the weapon’s trigger guard. His left hand was bound up in its shoulder strap.
A Heckler & Koch G36 assault rifle.
But why am I holding it?
Heartbeat still racing. Muscles flexing. Buzzing now. Feeling crazed. Like he’d just been in a fight.
A voice inside him yelled,
Move
.
Tightening his grip on the rifle, Danny rose and spun. The short corridor behind him was empty. The door at the end was closed.
He kicked away the chair he’d been sitting on, then dropped to one knee and scanned the room. A glass table. A sofa. Expensive furniture all around. An open door led into what looked like a bedroom. No one in sight.
He glimpsed a flash of white on the ground. His own feet. He was wearing a pristine pair of Nikes he’d never seen before.
He couldn’t remember anything. Was he hallucinating? Was that what this was? Some kind of a crazy dream?
The sounds of shouts and car horns drifted in on the breeze. A siren wailed. Another scream.
Danny’s eyes locked on the sofa. Someone had been sitting there. He half glimpsed a memory. A mocking smile on a thickset,
hook-nosed
blond man’s face.
Splinters of information pierced Danny’s mind. This was the Ritz Hotel, he remembered. Room 112. Third floor.
But what am I doing here?
More screaming.
Outside.
Danny turned to face the balcony. He took a step forward. Another. Then froze.
A pair of white trainers was sticking out from behind a low
wooden table. Worn by a dead man, Danny saw, as he slowly circled round. The man’s face had been slashed to shreds, his fingers cut off.
He was wearing a red and white-striped tracksuit. White Nikes. The same as Danny.
Another burst of memory. Of the blond man who’d been on the sofa. The one with
killer eyes
… Hadn’t he been dressed the same too?
More shouts through the window. More screams. The siren was getting louder now.
A second rifle. Identical to the one Danny was holding. It lay there on the floor, just beyond the dead man’s reach. Alongside it was a pair of black Ray-Ban Aviator shades.
Danny crouched down and checked the man’s pulse. Nothing. The man’s skin was warm. Not long dead.
Another scream.
Danny looked to the balcony. He didn’t want to go out there. Didn’t want to find out who it was who kept screaming. But he knew he had no choice. Out there was where the answers lay.
Keeping low, he edged through the open French windows and peered over the waist-high stone balustrade.
People were running wherever he looked. Away from the hotel. Into the street. Running awkwardly. As if they’d never done it before. Stumbling and tripping. In ones and twos. Hands above their heads. The further away they got from the hotel, the faster they ran. For cover. They were running for their lives.
Bodies were scattered across the tarmac. Broken and twisted. Twenty, Danny counted, at least. A scene from a war zone. Only these corpses were dressed in bright civilian clothes. And this was the centre of London. In the middle of a hot summer day.
Danny looked east and west along Piccadilly. The road was clear of vehicles for thirty metres either way. But then there was chaos.
Cars stood abandoned at crazy angles. Reversed and crashed. A red double-decker bus had slewed into a lamppost. A mangled motorcycle was half buried in a news stand that had mushroomed into flames. Further on, vehicles were still trying to slip free of the
gridlock. Juddering like bumper cars at a fairground. Everywhere Danny looked, he could see people running, crawling, hiding.
More sirens in the distance. Car horns. A swarm of flickering blue lights was gathering in the east, nudging through the traffic, cracking through it like icebreakers on a frozen sea – police and ambulances, trying to get through.
A siren whooped much closer.
Danny edged forward and looked down three storeys below.
A black limousine was parked up tight against the kerb outside the hotel’s main entrance. Its nearside tyres were ribboned, shot out. Black smoke billowed from its ravaged bonnet. Dozens of fist-sized holes had been punched through its roof. It looked like a tin can a kid had used for target practice with an airgun.
The driver’s door was open. Aman’s body lay draped over it like a forgotten coat. A blood trail led away from the car’s open
street-side
rear door to where a woman in a bright purple coat was crumpled in the middle of the street. Something was wrong with the shape of her body. Something was wrong with her legs.
The pattern of bodies … the black limousine was at its centre. Whoever had done this, the limousine had been their focal point. The limousine was what this was all about.
A police squad car had broken free of the gridlock. It was crawling along the pavement, hugging the nearside line of buildings to the east of the hotel. It angled into the kerb and stopped, blue light flashing.
The woman whose legs weren’t right … she started moving then. Slowly, uselessly, flopping on the ground like a baby bird fallen from a nest, trying to work out how to fly.
She was the one who’d been screaming, Danny realized. She was the one who now couldn’t stop.
The doors of the police car sprang open. Two uniformed police ran for her. They zigzagged, half-crouching. One of them lost his cap, but kept on going. He cradled his head in his hands like he’d just been slapped and was expecting the same again.
When they lifted the woman up, Danny saw that where her legs should have been there was only a bloody pulp. Her screaming
grew louder as the police stumbled away from the Ritz, and bundled her through the glass doors of the building opposite. Out of sight.
More shouts. Directly below. Several women spilt out on to the street. In black and white. Waitresses or maids, Danny guessed. Hotel staff. They ran screaming with their hands in the air.
One group of people remained motionless in the chaos. Conspicuous because of it, Danny saw. There were three of them, crouched down low in a shop doorway opposite him. Glass glinted up at him. Something one of them was holding.
A TV camera, Danny realized. He was staring at a TV crew. And they were staring right back at him.