Mambo (2 page)

Pagan didn't answer. Ruhr blinked his very pale eyelids and said, “Personally, in your position, I would have a second column somewhere close at hand. Perhaps even a third, although I would put that one on the motorway, I think, and have it travel at high speed. Then my friends – assuming I have any – would be very confused. ‘Where is Gunther? Where can he possibly be?'” The German was silent for a second. “Of course, deception's a highly personal thing,” and here he smiled, as if he were making some polite little joke for Pagan's benefit. But there was a supercilious quality in the look that caused Pagan to bunch his hands tightly in the pockets of his overcoat and turn his face back towards the street. Ruhr was partly correct. A decoy convoy was travelling in the vicinity of Paddington and Marylebone, but there was no third parade.

“Your voice gets on my bloody nerves, Ruhr,” Pagan said, then immediately regretted this unseemly display of hostility because it gave Gunther Ruhr obvious satisfaction, which took the form of a smile as crooked as his bad hand.

There was a miserable silence inside the car, broken only by the hiss of the radio and the message
Nine-twenty, all clear. Proceeding due east on Elm Avenue
. Ah, the dear banality of Elm Avenue, with its dim shabbiness, a small broken-down corner of what had once been another England. Now heroin and crack replaced tea and crumpets of an afternoon.

Pagan opened the window a half-inch, releasing some of Hardcastle's smoke. The small houses were misshapen by moon and shadow. The occasional pub or fish and chip shop looked unnaturally bright.

“You are so very tense,” Ruhr said in a soothing voice. He might have been a physician calming a nervous patient. “Surely you don't expect somebody is going to rescue me, do you?”

Pagan said nothing. It was best not to be drawn, to stay aloof. There were levels to which you could descend, places where all you ever encountered was your own worst self, and Frank Pagan had no desire to slip that far down. His temper had a sometimes abrasive edge and he was getting a little too old to keep cutting himself on it. Do the bloody job, get this scum to Luton, go home. But just don't let it get personal. You hate a man like Gunther Ruhr, and you loathe the forced intimacy of this small car, and breathing the same damned air is repulsive – but what did feelings, those expendable luxuries, have to do with it?

“Such people would have to be mad,” Ruhr said. “Or very clever and daring.”

Pagan shut the window. Ron Hardcastle turned in his seat and glared angrily at the German. “Just say the word, Frank, and I'll do this bastard for you. Be a right fooking pleasure.”

There was a generous quality in Masher Hardcastle's offer of violence, and Pagan didn't doubt that big Ron would enjoy inflicting physical damage on Ruhr. Despite some temptation, it was a sorry equation all the same. Pagan couldn't see Ruhr's taste for violence matching with that of Ron Hardcastle, law enforcement officer and former wrestler. There was increased tension in the car now, as if it had found its way in from the darkened street like a thin vapour. It had a name, Pagan thought: impotence. You might want to unleash the snarling dog inside Hardcastle, you might even want a piece of Gunther Ruhr for yourself, but the laws
Die Klaue
flouted so viciously afforded him some protection from brutality.

Pagan put a weary smile on his face and looked at the German. It was an amusing consolation to think of the circumstances of Ruhr's apprehension in Cambridge, how the elusive terrorist, whose newspaper reviews had called him “the man without a shadow” and “the phantom beyond human needs and desires”, had been captured in a bedroom in a lodging-house near St Andrew's Street. The memory was a perfect diversion from stress.

“I've got you, Gunther,” Pagan said quietly now. “And that's what it comes down to in the end.
I've got you
, and all because you couldn't keep your pecker in your trousers.” He waited for Ruhr's expression to change to one of discomfort, perhaps even wrath, but Ruhr was too good at this game to give up control of that awful white face. He merely looked at Pagan with a raised eyebrow.

“Was she worth it, Gunther?” Pagan asked. “Was she worth the risk? Or can you only get it when you pay for it? Too bad she didn't want to go the rest of the way with you – you wouldn't be here now if she'd kept her mouth shut, would you? You wouldn't be here if she'd been a sicko like you.”

If these were low blows, if they were supposed to vent some of Pagan's annoyance, they certainly weren't causing the German any pain. Ruhr, whose hands were cuffed in his lap, laughed and said, “I never have to pay for anything, Pagan.”

“Until now,” Pagan said. Christ, he was feeling vindictive and petty.

“
Die Reise ist nicht am Ende bis zur Ankunft.
” Gunther Ruhr spoke quietly. Pagan, whose grasp of the German language was poor, recognised only a couple of words. He had no way of knowing that Ruhr's phrase fully meant
the journey is never over until the arrival
, nor did he intend to ask for a translation. He wasn't going to give Ruhr even the simplest kind of satisfaction.

There was a pub on a corner, a place called The Lord Nelson. A voice came over the car radio.
Proceeding west along Mulberry Avenue. All clear
. Pagan looked at the pub, then saw some modern blocks of flats rising beyond, where thin lawns and stunted trees grew under pale lamps, many of which had been vandalised and cast no light. It wasn't a good place. It looked wrong and it smelled wrong and the extended reaches of darkness bothered him. He sat forward in his seat, anxiously studying the unlit areas and thinking how vandalism was a way of life in a neighbourhood like this. Public phones, shop windows, anything that was both motionless and fragile was a target for a kid with a stone in his hand and nothing in his mind save breakage. But then the high-rise buildings receded and there were more streets of 1930s terraced houses and the voice on the radio was saying
Proceeding due east along Acacia Avenue
and Pagan felt the quick little tide of unease ebb inside him. If there was going to be an attempt made to rescue Ruhr, the dark places back there would have been eminently suitable. Acacia Avenue, narrow and comparatively well lit, was benign by contrast.

He sat back again, observing the parked cars along the kerb, and hearing the sound of what he took at first to be a light aircraft. But it was louder than that, and close, a throbbing that had its source two or three hundred feet above the rooftops. Ron Hardcastle turned his big red face around to look at Pagan questioningly.

“What the bloody hell's that?” he asked.

Pagan tried to see through his window, but his angle was bad. Then the voice came over the radio again:
There's a helicopter above at approximately one hundred and fifty feet and descending rapidly
.

The sound of the low-flying chopper became thunderous now, deafening, vibrating with such intensity that the car shook as if it were travelling over ruts. Pagan leaned forward and shouted into the radio. “What the hell does it want?”

The pilot won't identify himself. I've asked for ID three times and he doesn't bloody answer, Frank
.

Pagan had briefly entertained the hope that the chopper might belong to Scotland Yard, something the Commissioner had finally decided to add to the convoy at the last moment. Now he was worried. He looked at Ruhr, who shrugged and said, “I know nothing about it.”

It was a statement Pagan didn't have time to question, because suddenly the darkness was transformed. What had been nothing but slight menace and an unidentifiable anxiety was suddenly changed. Pagan saw the leading van, fifteen feet ahead, catch fire as flares were dropped on it from the sky. The shape of the helicopter was visible for a second, but in an unreal way, like an after-image on a retina. The Ford Escort braked just as an enormous column of unruly flame roared out of the van, and streaked up and died in a vast series of starry sparks.

And then everything was ablaze in the most spectacular way. All the cars parked along the kerb exploded and burned as if they'd been timed to ignite simultaneously. Acacia Avenue was illuminated by flames as bright as daylight. Pagan opened his door, his first shocked instinct that of rushing towards the burning van in front of him because he thought he heard somebody scream inside the wreck, but the heat thrust him back at once.
Dear Christ
, it was a force of nature, seeming to melt his skin and weld it against his bones. He couldn't move any closer, nor did he hear the screaming again. Who could survive that inferno? Those four poor bastards would have been charred almost at once. The rear van and the other two sedans, also fire-bombed by the helicopter – which had wheeled away, whirring up toward the moon and disappearing – were alight too, their occupants scrambling out into the street, shadowy figures desperately trying to avoid the flames surrounding them. Confusion and chaos and smells sickeningly intermingled – burning rubber, smouldering upholstery, kindled shrubbery, scorched flesh. Gunshots too, as policemen fired upward in the general path of the chopper.

Pagan did the only thing he could think of. He grabbed Ruhr by the shoulders and dragged him out of the Escort because no matter what, no matter the extent of the calamity, it was still his job to secure the German. The Ford, stalled and engulfed by smoke, wasn't going anywhere. The only possibility of movement now was on foot.

Pagan pushed Ruhr forward in the direction of the pavement, seeking a space between burning cars, feeling his eyes smart and his nostrils fill with smoke. Nothing could be breathed here without searing the tissue of your lungs and throat. Conscious of Hardcastle at his back, and Torjussen moving just ahead, Pagan shoved Ruhr again, because the German was lagging, as if, like some demented bug, he wanted to linger close to the brightness of the flames.

“Move, bastard,” Ron Hardcastle said, and made one hand into a thick fist, which he smacked directly into Ruhr's spine. Ruhr gasped and his legs buckled as Pagan hauled him through the dense smoke to the pavement. This whole damned place reminded Pagan of old photographs of wartime London just after a heart-breaking air assault. People were screaming and hurrying out of their houses now, windows shattering, doors kicked open, a landscape of flame and bitter smoke and red-hot metal, total ruin made all the more appalling by the way it had bloomed so violently out of a commonplace night on a commonplace street.

Ruhr must have known, Pagan thought. He must have been waiting for this moment. He must have expected a rescue effort. In his own heart, Pagan had half expected it too. He just hadn't anticipated anything on this destructive scale. But who could have foreseen this? Who could have looked into the old crystal ball and come up with this fiery scenario? Pagan recalled raising the subject of air surveillance at one of the many meetings concerning the transportation of Ruhr, meetings complicated by the noisy extradition demands and political requirements of Spain and Greece and the United States, but the notion had been overruled as being too ostentatious, too obvious, by a committee of well-meaning men who thought the secret route to be travelled by Ruhr was perfectly safe, something that could never be penetrated. And wasn't stealth more appropriate than the high visibility of a police helicopter rattling the slates of suburban roof-tops? These were men who lived in a dream world. They weren't out here on the streets now. Besides, there was never a way to cover every possible occurrence. You could plan until your jaw dropped off, but in the end a man had to be moved, and, from the moment Gunther Ruhr had ridden out of Wormwood Scrubs, the risk had grown. Whoever wanted Ruhr free wanted him with an extravagant sense of destruction Pagan had encountered only once or twice in his lifetime.

Pagan shoved the terrorist quickly along the pavement, seeking safe passage through the furnace that devoured cars on one side, hedgerows on the other. The blast of heat was solid and crippling. He had the notion of getting to the next intersection, a place beyond the flames, and then commandeering somebody's house, calling in reinforcements and new vehicles. It was vague, more of an instinct than a plan, but he had to get Ruhr off the streets quickly. The perpetrators of this elaborate attack weren't about to go home empty-handed.

Hardcastle had his gun out now, and so did Torjussen, who was a step ahead of Pagan and Ruhr – a party of four locked in a fiercely hot dance amid the crackling of wood and the
whooshing
made by fuel tanks exploding. Smoke, thicker than any fog, blinded Pagan and scorched his face.

He saw the assault squad only briefly when a wintry breeze scoured the street and cleared the air.

Five, six men, he couldn't be sure how many. They wore ski or ice-hockey masks – it was another detail of which he would never be certain. They were dressed in camouflage and carried automatic rifles. Pagan was conscious of Gunther Ruhr throwing himself face down on the concrete and then Ron Hardcastle firing his gun in the direction of the squad, but smoke billowed in again, obscuring everything. There was more gunfire, much of it random and wild.

Ron Hardcastle fell. Torjussen disappeared somewhere and Pagan reached down to grab Ruhr and drag him back along the pavement, thinking there might yet be some safe corner of the world in which to hide his prisoner. Away from here, away from all this destruction, a small, safe place.

But the weather conspired against the plan. The wind came a second time. It whined over the houses and blew the length of the burning street and cleared the smoke. With his gun in his hand, Pagan faced the squad over a distance that might have been no more than a hundred feet.

Gunther Ruhr, who lay on the pavement, smiled up at Pagan in an odd way. Pagan raised his weapon, a Bernardelli, but he was cut down by gunfire before he could get off more than two shots in the direction of the group.

He'd known pain before. But he'd never felt anything quite like this, so crucifying and raw. It had no specific location in his body. It consumed all of him.