Better Off Dead: (Victor the Assassin 4) (16 page)

Victor left Gisele with the Russians and performed a circuit of the warehouse. It was a huge space but almost entirely empty. He took his time, searching for anything out of place; any signs of intruders or danger. He didn’t envision Norimov’s enemies launching an attack, but he couldn’t rule out that they were aware of the warehouse. He was confident he had not been followed since his arrival in London, but he couldn’t say the same for Norimov’s men.

He cleared the first floor of the office annexe, and then the floor below and finally the warehouse proper. As expected, there were no signs of any forced entry.

Upstairs again, he found Gisele sitting in the darkness on an old office chair.

‘Where have you been?’ she asked.

‘Checking the perimeter.’

‘Why?’

He stopped himself from launching into an explanation of the dangers of operational complicity, and instead responded: ‘Habit. Why aren’t you with the others?’

She shrugged. ‘Needed some me time. Those guys can be pretty intense. Are you going to join us?’

‘I have to call your father.’

‘Stepfather. Tell him to go to hell from me.’

He waited until she had gone back into the boardroom, then called Norimov.

‘She’s safe,’ Victor said.

For a moment, there was silence on the line. He pictured Norimov holding the phone away from his face, perhaps pressed against his chest, while he controlled his emotions.

When Norimov spoke, his voice was full of happiness. ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’

‘You don’t need to. I did this for Eleanor, not you.’

‘I understand. I do. Regardless, you will for ever have my gratitude.’

‘Keep your gratitude,’ Victor said. ‘It’s worthless.’

Norimov sighed. ‘I guess I deserve that. Put Gisele on the phone, please.’

‘She doesn’t want to talk to you. She doesn’t like you very much. Can’t say that I blame her.’

There was a long pause. ‘This horrible business will push her even further away from me.’

‘No doubt.’

‘Thank you for not placating me.’

‘I wouldn’t begin to know how to,’ Victor said.

‘I know I have wronged you, my boy, and when you return to St Petersburg with Gisele I will do my very best to get back into your good books.’

Victor said. ‘I’m not coming with her.’

‘Right,’ Norimov breathed. ‘Of course. Your task is over. She’s safe now. So I guess this is goodbye.’

‘It is,’ Victor said.

He hung up before Norimov could say another word and stood in the semi-darkness of the room. His reason for being in London was over. Norimov’s men could take over from here. He could hear laughter coming from the boardroom at the end of the corridor. One of the Russians was telling a story about when Gisele had been a child. Victor stood, looking at the closed door framed by lines of light.

He turned away and approached the nearest staircase. Within a couple of hours he would be on a flight to mainland Europe. By tomorrow, he could be anywhere in the world. He pictured a tastefully decorated hotel room, crisp white sheets, far away from anyone who knew anything about him.

Behind him, the boardroom door opened. Dmitri.

The Russian caught up with him. ‘There’s something you need to see.’

He waited.

‘The electrical box,’ Dmitri explained. ‘I think it’s been tampered with.’

Victor didn’t hesitate. He wanted no reason to stay, but he was not prepared to leave Gisele if anything was unaccounted for.

‘Show me.’

Dmitri led him to the far end of the corridor and into a room full of pipes and cables.

‘Over there,’ he said.

The box was fixed to a wall, two metres from the ground. Victor opened it up. It took him a second to realise it hadn’t been tampered with. A second later he heard the three other Russians enter the room behind Dmitri.

He faced them. Dmitri stood a little ahead of the rest. They occupied the other half of the room with their combined massive bulk, forming an impenetrable wall of muscle by virtue of just standing there, side by side. The door was behind them. Yigor was the only Russian not present, but he hadn’t returned yet with food.

They were silent, but words could not have added to what their body language told him. Victor knew he should have seen this coming, but he’d believed they cared more about Norimov and his daughter than their pride. He realised he should have known that a wound to a Russian’s pride took far longer to heal than any physical injury.

‘We don’t need to do this. I’m on the next plane out of here.’

Dmitri said, ‘Not until we’ve settled our differences.’

‘This is a bad idea.’

There was a vicious smile. Russian pride.

Dmitri shook his head. ‘No, it’s not. We have Gisele. She’s safe.’

‘Okay,’ Victor said. ‘Let’s work this out.’

‘There’s nothing to work out. We’re going to beat the shit out of you.’

‘I don’t think so.’

Dmitri laughed. The others didn’t join in. They were too pumped up and focused on violence to find any humour in the situation. ‘Don’t worry. We’re not going to kill you. Just hurt you like you hurt us. Make things right.’

‘I understand,’ Victor said. ‘But I didn’t know you were so selfless.’

Dmitri smiled, then frowned. He hesitated for a moment, then asked – as he had to – for an explanation. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘There’s four of you,’ Victor said. ‘And you’re all a lot bigger than me, so we all know you are going to win.’

‘Yes…’ Dmitri said.

‘And you almost must know that the first of you to enter my reach is the one I’ll be able to kill before the other three put me on the floor.’

Dmitri said nothing.

Victor continued: ‘As you orchestrated this little revenge mission, these guys will expect you to make the first move. So you must be prepared to sacrifice your life in order to let the others have their revenge. Like I said: I didn’t know you were so selfless, Dmitri.’

He said, ‘You won’t have time to kill me.’

‘There’s only one way to find out.’ Victor turned his attention to the other three men. ‘Unless there is someone else who wishes to die in your place?’

He held their gaze, one at a time, until each had looked away. Then he stared back at Dmitri.

‘Well?’

The door opened. Gisele entered the room, saying, ‘There you all are. What are you guys doing in here without me? I thought I was supposed to be the guest of honour.’

Everyone looked at her. No one responded. She read the tension in the air. ‘What the fuck is going on?’

Before anyone could answer, the lights went out.

A single small window let in some ambient light from the streetlamps outside. The Russians were slow to react, faces a mix of shadow and orange glow, looking to one another for an explanation; for someone to take the lead. Victor pushed through them and dragged Gisele to the floor, below the level of the window.

‘
Hey
,’ she said. ‘What are you doing? You’re hurting me.’

Victor stayed quiet for a moment, to listen. He heard nothing.

Gisele pulled her hand free of Victor.

‘Stay down,’ he said.

‘Okay, okay. You could have simply asked, you know?’

Dmitri said, ‘What’s happening?’

Victor gestured at the window and the orange glow filtering between the aluminium blind slats. ‘We’re the only ones who have lost power.’

‘Then it’s a circuit breaker,’ Dmitri said, but without conviction. He stepped closer to Victor – further away from the window – and squatted.

‘Please,’ Gisele said. ‘What’s going on? Why are we on the floor? What does it matter if we’ve had a power cut?’

Victor didn’t answer. He didn’t yet know. Maybe it was nothing, but he didn’t believe in coincidences.

One of the Russians – Ivan – stepped towards the window, curious; investigating. No tactical sense.

Victor said, ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’

He glanced back, an incredulous expression contorting his face for a second before it exploded.

Blood and tissue splattered against the far wall. Shattered glass from the window flew across the space and rained down over the floor, pelting Victor as he shielded Gisele. The shot Russian dropped into a heap, the left side of his face missing, blood quickly pooling around him.

Gisele gasped and some of the other Russians yelled in surprise or horror. Victor paid no attention as he concentrated on listening for the sound of the shot, to work out how far away the shooter was positioned. It never came.

A suppressed rifle then, shooting subsonic ammunition from enough distance for the city to swallow up the noise, but with a heavy round to inflict that kind of damage. Victor pictured the shooter across the street, maybe one hundred metres away, on the roof of the building on account of the difference in height between the hole in the window and where it had struck the target. Any further, and the slow round’s inaccuracy would have made such a shot too problematic to take.

Regardless, the sniper was an excellent marksman to have made a headshot from a cold bore with a slow round when the target had only just appeared and had been partially concealed by blind slats.

Dmitri and the others dropped to the floor to join Victor and Gisele. She kept her palm over her mouth as she breathed in huge, panicked breaths. Victor avoided the growing pool of blood draining from the exit wound in the dead Russian’s head and took the pistol from his coat along with the spare magazines.

‘What do we do?’ Dmitri asked, eyes wide in the darkness; a brave man but one succumbing to panic.

‘First thing: calm down. Second: we have to defend the staircase outside this room. That’s the best place to assault. Come on. We don’t have long.’

Still in a crouch, he opened the door and stepped out of the room, Dmitri and the other Russians following him, making more noise than he would like but there wasn’t time to instruct them on better operational procedure. The warehouse was vast, but mostly open on the ground level. The first-floor office section was narrow, located on the building’s west side, accessible via two sets of stairs.

Victor whispered to the Russians, instructing them on the best positions to take to cover the nearest staircase. They nodded and spread out as they were told.

‘That’s their primary assault route,’ Victor told them. ‘If you hold your positions here, you’ll drive them back. You’ll have them in a crossfire.’

‘How do we know there are more?’ Sergei asked. ‘Maybe just one man with rifle.’

Victor looked at him. ‘If you believe that, go down those stairs and make your way outside.’

Sergei said nothing further.

‘What are you going to do?’ Dmitri asked Victor.

‘There are two staircases leading up, remember?’

He motioned for Gisele to come over to him. She did, walking as fast as she could while still crouched.

‘Where are you taking her?’ Dmitri demanded.

‘Out of the line of fire. If you and your guys can contain them at the first staircase, I can do the rest. Okay?’

Dmitri nodded. ‘Do it.’

With Gisele following close behind, Victor headed towards the furthest set of stairs at the far end of the office floor, straining to see in the darkness where the artificial ambient light failed to reach. A single corridor spanned the entire length, a staircase at either end, and doors leading off to offices, a kitchen, toilets and walk-in storage cupboards. He opened each door as he passed, improving visibility as the outside light seeped from the rooms’ windows into the corridor. The sniper had shot from the south. He couldn’t shoot through these windows.

Victor paused when he reached the open reception area at the far end of the corridor. The staircase lay out of sight around a corner. He listened. He didn’t know how many were out there. He didn’t know anything about their skill or armaments beyond the fact they had a sniper with a suppressed weapon who was a fine shot. He had to assume the others were as capable. They wouldn’t assault with sniper rifles though, but automatic weapons – sub-machine guns or assault rifles. His handgun would come off second in any firefight, but he knew the location better than any attacker and those attackers knew nothing about him.

Behind him, the Russians were nervous as they waited at the defensive positions he’d assigned them. They were gangsters now, not soldiers as they had once been long ago, but they had guns and he had no reason to doubt their ability or willingness to use them. Whether they would be able to repel whoever came up the staircase, he couldn’t be sure. But they would slow them down, and that’s all he needed them to do. He cared only about Gisele’s survival and his own.

He hand-signalled her to follow and whispered, ‘Hide behind that desk and keep down until this is over. Don’t come out. Okay?’

She nodded, breaths coming fast and quick. ‘Okay.’

He watched her get down to her hands and knees, then moved on. A floor-to-ceiling window covered the wall adjacent to the staircase. Victor saw no reflections of movement within. He gestured for Gisele to stay put, then hurried across the reception area, gun up and leading, sweeping around the corner as he stayed in partial cover. The staircase was clear. He heard nothing from below.

Victor checked Gisele was staying in her hiding place and then took up a position further into the room, from which he could cover the staircase. He felt no fear because fear was an emotional response to danger. The brain learned to fear before it learned how to solve problems. It was a survival mechanism: running from danger increased the probability of living through it. Emotion was older than thought, and stronger, but Victor had learned that the best way to survive was through cold logic and lateral thinking. He suppressed the part of his brain that wanted him to be afraid. He allowed no emotion to cloud his judgement and survived many times because no fear ever slowed him.

Behind him, the Russians waited in the darkness, breathing heavily and sweating. Their gaze passed over each other when they weren’t staring at the stairwell and its descent into blackness. They were tough, brave men but all were scared of what was coming. Adrenalin made them shake. Sweat shone on their faces. The thump of their racing hearts filled their ears. No one wanted to end up like poor Ivan with half a face.

They didn’t hear the shuffle of feet on the floor below, near to the staircase; didn’t see the figure that peered up from the darkness and made a swinging motion with his arm.

Something small and metal hit the polystyrene ceiling tiles above their heads, bounced off a wall and clattered and rolled across the thin carpet.

‘
What was that
?
’ someone yelled.

A second later, the grenade exploded.