Better Off Dead: (Victor the Assassin 4) (18 page)

Victor had to assume Dmitri’s car was disabled or covered. At the very least reaching it would put them both at risk. Instead, they ran. They headed away from the warehouse, steering clear of the main roads, sticking to alleys and side streets. He stayed behind Gisele, both to shield her from any pursuers and to better listen out for them, guiding her with his hands, forced to move slower as a result but he couldn’t risk it the other way and her falling behind or taking a bullet in the back. Sirens blared in the distance.

She was fit but already slowing under the pace Victor was pushing her to. After a few minutes she was breathing hard and stumbling as much as running, but they had covered a lot of distance.

‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Catch your breath.’

He pulled her into an alleyway before she could rush past.

‘Okay?’

She nodded but couldn’t speak for a moment because her heart was racing and she’d lost her fine motor skills.

‘Are… we… safe?’ she managed to ask between gasps.

Suppressed gunshots echoed off the buildings, answering for him. Brickwork crumbled at the mouth of the alley.

‘
Move
.’

There was no crack from the bullets so they were subsonic, but the muted bark from the muzzle wasn’t the distinctive click of an MP5SD. It was louder, duller. A handgun. Whoever was behind them weren’t part of the assault force who’d stormed the warehouse. They had probably been watching the perimeter or providing surveillance or backup and had chased them the whole way or were sweeping the area and found them.

He risked a glance behind – seeing two men – and pushed Gisele onwards, knowing their enemies were catching up with every step. Alone, he could outrun them, but she limited his pace and enabled their pursuers to stay close enough that he knew they would never create enough distance to hide.

‘That way,’ he hissed, and pushed her down a bisecting alley.

At the end was a chain-link fence on top of a low wall. He slipped ahead of Gisele and interlaced his fingers, palms up.

He didn’t have to tell her what to do. She understood and used his palms as a step as he propelled her upwards. She was no athlete, no climber, but she caught hold of the top of the fence and pulled herself over. No hesitation. No asking for aid.

Victor followed, leaping, grabbing hold, hauling himself up and over, dropping down to the other side a split-second behind Gisele and pushing her to the ground because he knew their pursuers were right behind them and lining up their sights.

The twin gunshots were louder in the alley’s confines. Gisele flinched, but they were already lower than the wall. A bullet hit a fence post and made the chains rattle and sway.

Victor waited until he could hear the scrape of feet running before pulling Gisele up and away. They were on a railway track siding, overgrown and uneven. He led her over the tracks, not looking out for trains because it was easy enough to hear a hundred-plus ton locomotive. On the far side of the tracks stood a number of train carriages, stationary and disused, covered in graffiti and stinking of rust and decay. A bullet pinged off the exposed frame of a carriage, far enough away that Victor had no immediate concern, but a reminder that their pursuers were relentless and had lethal intent.

He came to a stop and ushered for Gisele to follow suit. He pointed. ‘Get on your stomach and shuffle under that carriage and crawl so you’re hidden by the wheels.’

She nodded. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Don’t get out under any circumstances, unless it’s me telling you to. Anyone who tries to crawl under the train after you, wait until you can see their face and go for their eyes. Okay?’

She nodded again and dropped to her stomach and did as he instructed.

He stood and moved to the corner of the carriage, settling into the darkness, waiting for their pursuers to follow.

The two men hurried across the train tracks, arms out, eyes peering along the barrels of their handguns. Unlike the others who had assaulted the warehouse, these two wore civilian clothes. They’d lost sight of their targets but knew where they had to be. The abandoned train carriages formed the only concealment. The two men would have seen them had they tried to make a break for it along the tracks. The alternative was a nine-metre drop that would surely kill them. No one was that stupid.

Communicating with hand signals only, they split up, one going left while the other went right, intending to approach the rusting carriages from either flank. They had no concern for the woman. She was a civilian. Which meant there was only her protector who offered any threat, and he couldn’t ambush them both if they split up. They were cautious because they were professional, but neither was scared.

The thrill of the chase was strong in both.

They lived for moments like this.

Dmitri staggered away from the wall, unable to see with his blinded eyes the blood that stained his shirt, but capable of feeling the intense burn caused by the two bullets in his chest. He reached one hand to the wall in an attempt to stay on his feet while the fingers of his free hand crept along his chest, touching warm, sticky liquid and ripped clothes. He coughed bloody foam.

Slowly, his own wheezing cries grew louder than the ringing in his ears and he realised he was lying on his back, the grimy ceiling tiles coming into view through the whiteness, but then strangely turning grey, as if stained, then black.

Victor waited in the darkness. London was too low-rise and built up for the night to ever be truly black. Even here, away from streetlights and other illumination there were varying degrees of gloom. This side of the carriage was in shadow, the primary ambient light coming from the buildings and streetlamps from the east, from Victor’s left. He crouched low, where it was darkest, listening to the quiet crunch of shoes on gravel and vegetation, noting when they broke apart and formed to separate sounds, one growing increasingly quieter while the other grew louder.

They had split up. A problem, but Victor never expected it to be easy. They were cautious footsteps, but they were not slow – they were still in pursuit. Wary, but still the aggressor. Still in charge of the situation.

That would soon change.

The first man leaned forward as he approached, lowering his eyeline in an effort to peer beneath the first carriage. Did something catch his eye? He wasn’t sure. It would be a stupid place for someone to hide – trapping themselves somewhere with no easy means of escape – but desperate people made mistakes. The thought of scaring someone to stupidity appealed to him.

He moved on, slowing as he reached the carriage, checking the ground ahead for anything that might make noise underfoot and give away his position. He kept close to the front of the container, brushing the weather-beaten metal with his shoulder, blending his own shadow that extended before him into the carriage’s own.

The gun rounded the corner first, moving fast but smooth, his hands and arms following as he turned through ninety degrees until he was facing along the shadow side of the carriage. His eyes had adjusted to the gloom, but the darkness was still dense.

He didn’t see the girl’s protector – crouched no more than two metres in front of him – until he was springing forward, coming up from below the pistol’s muzzle. By then it was too late to aim and get off a shot.

With both hands gripping the pistol, he had no way to defend himself after his attacker pushed the barrel to one side as he closed the distance between them and snapped out a straight punch to the man’s throat.

He gasped – airless and soundless – trachea crushed, and had no strength to resist as his attacker hyper-extended his right wrist, pulled the gun from his grip, and dragged him to the ground and held him there while he spent the last seconds of his life in silent agony.

Victor held him prone while he struggled. His mouth was wide open in a vain attempt to suck in air. A knee pinned his legs and a hand on each arm kept him from writhing too much and making more noise than could be avoided. At the far end of the carriage the silhouette of the second man appeared against a backdrop of overgrown vegetation. Victor watched the man, unconcerned, knowing that if the dying man hadn’t seen him at a distance of two metres, the second wouldn’t at twenty. Noise posed more danger of discovery, but every passing second meant the dying man grew weaker and struggled less.

When the man on the ground became limp, Victor released him. He checked the gun – a 9mm SIG Sauer – and the load. The magazine was full and a subsonic round was in the chamber. He made sure the suppressor was screwed on tightly, and stood.

The second man had already passed out of sight, moving between two carriages as he continued his search. Victor didn’t follow. Whether the man had seen him or not, he wasn’t prepared to funnel himself between the carriages, leaving himself exposed at both flanks as he emerged. There would be no way of knowing if the man had doubled back or was setting an ambush.

Instead, Victor stalked parallel, rounding a clump of long grasses and discarded oil drums until he was on the far side of the next two carriages. He peered into the darkness, but couldn’t pick out a human shape in the mix of shadows. He waited, focusing on the sounds reaching his ears, disassembling the ambient noise until he identified the quiet footsteps. Twelve, maybe fifteen metres away.

Then they stopped. Victor pictured the man waiting in the darkness, until he heard another noise – quieter, shuffling.

He realised his enemy was crawling under a carriage. But which one? He could be moving either to Victor’s left or right. No way to tell without moving himself, but it would be down to chance if he chose the right direction. He opted to stay put. He lowered himself into a crouch, scooped up a handful of gravel, and hurled it forward.

The gravel pinged off the metal hulls of some carriages and scattered on the ground.

It wasn’t meant to sound like someone moving to tempt his enemy to move back, but it would distract him and disguise the noise of Victor dashing to the right. He peered around the edge of the carriage, seeing and hearing no one. He grabbed another handful and threw it up into the air so it rained down on top of the carriage.

Again, he used the noise to disguise his movements as he hurried back to his previous position, reaching down to grab and throw more gravel, then to the left, moving fast because he now knew where the man had to be, rushing around the back of the carriage, into darkness, but seeing the man’s silhouette against the distant vegetation.

Victor squeezed the trigger three times and the silhouette dropped into the shadows.

He approached, walking fast, to check the man was dead as he hadn’t seen where the bullets impacted or even if they had all hit. When the man came into view he saw one had struck him high on the chest, shattering the clavicle, while another drilled a hole in his face through the left cheek a couple of centimetres below the eye.

The man was alive. The subsonic bullet hadn’t had the velocity to pass all of the way through the skull and blow an exit wound out of the back. Victor figured it had deflected as it passed through the cheekbone and followed the curve of the skull, missing the brain. A fatal wound if left untreated, but the man was in no immediate risk. He probably couldn’t even feel it. A miracle he was still alive, some might say. His good fortune would be short lived.

He lay on his back, breathing rapidly, arms straight by his sides, either not daring to move or believing he couldn’t. He wasn’t screaming, so the adrenalin surge hadn’t yet faded.

Victor walked closer.

‘Help,’ the man said. British accent.

‘You’re asking the wrong guy.’

‘Please.’

‘I heard you the first time.’

Victor squatted next to him and searched through his pockets. The man didn’t try to stop him. Unsurprisingly, he was clean. Operating sterile. A pro.

It took a moment of searching in the dark until Victor found something appropriate to his needs. He would have preferred a piece of wood, but the square of rotting cardboard would do. He folded it in half and then again. The man watched him.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me anything?’

‘In due course.’

Victor squeezed the cardboard in his hands, making it thinner and denser.

‘If you let me live,’ the man said, ‘I’ll tell you everything.’

‘You don’t know everything,’ Victor replied, compressing the cardboard one last time, forming it into a small plank about five centimetres wide by ten long, two centimetres thick. ‘And I don’t have the time to make sure what you say is truthful. We need to act fast, don’t we?’

The man swallowed. ‘I won’t lie to you.’

Victor held up the cardboard. ‘It’ll save me a lot of time and you a lot of pain if we make sure of that at the very start.’

The man shook his head. ‘We don’t need to make sure.’

‘Bite down.’ He lowered the piece of cardboard to the man’s mouth.

‘Please…’

‘Trust me, you want this.’

Breathing hard, the man opened his mouth. Victor lowered the cardboard between the man’s teeth. He bit down on the cardboard. A piece of wood would have been better, but it would do.

‘Ready?’ Victor asked.

He didn’t wait for an answer. He used the edge of his palm to strike the shattered collarbone.

The man’s scream was louder than even Victor expected. It was a high-pitched wail that echoed between the carriages. The man tensed and went into spasm.

Victor checked his flank while he waited for him to finish, then took out the cardboard. The man had bitten through it. ‘Are you going to lie to me?’

‘
No
.’

‘You see, now I believe you. What’s your name?’

‘Joe.’

‘Joe what?’

‘Forrester.’

‘What the fuck are you doing?’

Victor looked over his shoulder to see Gisele approaching. He said, ‘I’m interrogating him.’

‘You’re torturing him.’

‘No, I’ve tortured him. Now I’m interrogating him.’

She came closer. ‘I don’t think the distinction is important.’

Victor said, ‘I assure you that it is to him.’

‘I won’t allow it. It’s a war crime.’

‘I don’t suppose there is any point reminding you that we’re not at war here?’

‘You could have fooled me, and you’re being facetious. I won’t let you commit torture in my name.’

‘Fine.’ Victor rose to his feet.

He shot the man named Forrester between the eyebrows.

Gisele startled. She stood gasping, hand over her mouth. She glared at him, angry and disgusted despite the surprise and revulsion. ‘
What did you do that for?
You murdered a defenceless man
.
What the fuck is wrong with you?’

‘I’ll tell you all about it some other time. Right now, we need to get out of here.’