One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night (38 page)

‘Oh dear,’ Vale said quietly. He sounded as though he’d just read a slightly disappointing cricket score. All things being relative, Davie took it to be a very grave sign.

The intruders walked out of the camera’s line of sight.

‘Where have they gone?’ Gavin asked. ‘Get them back!’

‘Looks like they’re heading for the Carlton,’ Vale murmured. He tapped the tab key again. The gunmen reappeared at the corner of the new image, moving closer to a group of four more bad guys in front of the darkened hotel building. ‘I’d guess that must be where your guests have gotten to. I wonder how they managed to elude these individuals in the first place?’

‘They didn’t,’ Catherine stated. ‘The terrorists went straight in the front of the Laguna, all guns blazing, by the sound of it. We heard screams coming from the ballroom. They couldn’t
all
have escaped. There were about fifty of them, for God’s sake.’

Vale opened a second window, retaining the previous video‐
feed in the one beneath. Using the track‐
ball, he placed the cursor on the new window’s blue bar and keyed ‘hotela/
func1/
levg’, then hit Return. After a moment’s pause, the interior of the Laguna ballroom appeared in the frame.

‘As you can see, there’s no‐
one around,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’ Davie asked, pointing to part of the screen. ‘Can you zoom in closer?’

‘No. The software isn’t speaking properly to the cameras, I’m afraid. I can blow up the image we do have, though.’ Vale’s fingers tickled the track‐
ball and a dotted square appeared around the area Davie indicated. He clicked on an icon at the side and the window filled with a fuzzy blow‐
up of the highlighted section. The image definition was badly reduced, but they were nonetheless able to make out that there was a masked man lying motionless under the buffet table.

‘No‐
one, but not no
body
,’ Davie observed. ‘That, to me, looks very much like a dead bad guy. Question is, who got him?’

‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ muttered Vale. ‘Maybe he tried the cold meats. You didn’t get them from that James Barr fellow I read about, did you, Gavin?’

Their decreasingly gracious host simply glared.

‘Only joking, old chap. No, this one died from something far more acute. And I think he may not have been alone. Does that look like a leg just behind his head, there?’ he asked Davie. It did.

‘Make that two dead bad guys,’ Davie confirmed.

‘Which might explain the subsequent haemorrhage of hostages from the vicinity. Let’s see what else we can find.’ Vale delicately fingered the tab key again. More corridors, more walkways. Lifts. Restaurants. Bars. Bowling lanes. Cinema auditoria. Rows of empty shopfronts. He was about to tap the key once more to dismiss the current image, when some movement stirred in the current picture, staying his hand.

‘More baddies,’ Davie mused, looking at the silhouettes of two armed figures, their backs to the camera. The pair then scurried across the hall and crouched for cover in a shop doorway opposite, their unmasked faces now clearly visible. And very, very familiar.

Davie’s surprise at seeing Matt Black squatting there, determinedly gripping an Uzi, was matched only by Gavin’s at recognising the shotgun‐
toting woman beside Matt as his own wife. Both of these, however, were thoroughly eclipsed by Gavin’s appalled astonishment as he watched the pair exchange a brief but unmistakably affectionate kiss.

‘I’m sure that was just for luck. A heat‐
of‐
the‐
moment thing,’ Vale offered, with gleeful insincerity.

‘What the hell are they doing?’ demanded Gavin, as they made a dash to the next corner and disappeared from the frame. Vale opened another window and tiled all three frames on the screen, keying a location shortcode into the blue bar above the newest one. Another row of shopfronts appeared, but no people.

‘Damn,’ he muttered. ‘Wrong one.’ His fingers rattled the keyboard, cycling through different images in two of the windows. Matt and Simone became visible again a few seconds later, by which time they were positioned in opposite doorways, firing their weapons towards one end of the hallway. Spent cases were cascading around Matt’s ankles like popcorn, while Simone pumped and fired, pumped and fired on the other side. Ahead of them, glass was shattering in surreal silence, spraying all over the tiles in front of the ravaged window‐
frames.

‘Oh my God,’ gasped Catherine. ‘Oh my God.’

Davie was silent, Gavin speechless.

Vale continued to toggle the spare window, trying to find a view of who or what they were shooting at. After two more stretches of empty mall, he revealed another scene of flying glass and splintering debris, another Uzi‐
blazing gunman at its centre, madness in his angry eyes.

‘Oh, God help them,’ Catherine breathed. ‘He looks like a maniac.’

‘Quite,’ Vale agreed, a degree of surprise detectable even in
his
phlegmatic tone. ‘I’ve come across a few armed lunatics in my time, but I must confess, I’ve never seen one in tartan pyjamas.’

Oh yeah, plus murder, mayhem, hijackers, machine guns, power‐
tools, dismemberment, disembowelment, destruction, horror, terror, insanity and lots and lots and lots of bullets. Thanks a fuckin’ bunch. Wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Let’s do it again soon. It’s been very.

Matt shook more tiny nuggets of glass from his hair, grateful that the panes had been shatterproof, otherwise he’d have been either impaled or flayed alive by now. The tinkle of the falling fragments subsided eventually, a few moments after the last volley of machine‐
gun fire from down the hall. The sound of his own breathing seemed deafening. He could see neither Simone nor the enemy, just wrecked shopfronts and piles of glinting glass. Their own private Krystalnacht.

He was supposed to have provided covering fire while Simone made a run for the other side of the mall, part of a zig‐
zagging retreat strategy they had devised to get themselves out of this potentially non‐
metaphoric dead end. The most impressive aspect of his weapons‐
handling so far had been that he hadn’t shot himself, so it was no surprise when the Uzi jammed after two rounds, with Simone only a few paces out of the doorway, caught in no man’s land. The trigger clamped stiff against the stock and refused to release, nothing doing at the business end.

There’d been a slow‐
motion pause for one eternal, infernal moment as all three parties sussed what had just happened. Simone must have responded a fraction of a second before the bad guy, or maybe she was merely lucky that the bad guy initially aimed towards the doorway from where Matt’s truncated burst had issued. Whatever, she blew out the window opposite with her shotgun and dived through the gap, out of sight.

The bad guy’s continuing volley seemed to go on and on, completely demolishing the two semi‐
hexagonal frontages that jutted out in front of where Matt was crouched. The enemy was positioned somewhere inside a shop at the end of the corridor, where it formed a T-junction with the adjoining stretch of vacant lots. Matt was, it appeared, just outside his angle of fire, but he could do nothing more than cower there with his arms around his head and wait in hope for the shooting to stop.

He glanced across towards where Simone had disappeared, looking for movement, any sign of where she was. There was nothing, only more shattered glass, and shadows beyond where the lights of the mall reached into the darkened shop. He had to get over there. She could be injured, unconscious, out of ammo, anything. There was ten or twelve feet of open floor to cross, but he felt he had no option. The danger seemed temporarily outweighed by the need to get to her, the need to know she was all right. It was an unaccustomed emotion, this selflessness. Blame it on extreme circumstances, he told himself, nothing else.

He dropped the useless Uzi to the ground and pulled the pistol from his belt. Holding it in both hands, he leaned out of the doorway and began firing in distraction, preparatory to making his move. The pistol jammed, same as the Uzi, after two rounds.

Matt threw himself back against the double doors as a retaliatory burst issued from down the hall. He examined the handgun, trying to think of what they did on telly when their weapons jammed, then remembered with a shudder that the answer was usually: get shot.

‘Fuck,’ he grunted, looking down at the ugly hunk of metal. It offered no clues, as all the lettering on it was Cyrillic. He then felt his stomach lurch for the hundredth time that evening, and quickly realised that this was because he was actually falling backwards. The double doors had opened suddenly and he tumbled through them, before being grabbed under the oxters and dragged further inside the shop. He attempted to struggle, but the man, whoever he was, had already loosed his grip and scuttled swiftly forwards to retrieve the discarded machine gun. Going by the lack of a ski‐
mask and the fact that Matt was still alive, he was able to deduce that the newcomer was on his side.

‘Are you—’ Matt’s voice had caught whatever disease he’d given both guns, jamming after two words. He cleared his throat. ‘Are you Jackson?’

‘No, Tim Vale’s the name, surveillance and security consultant. Delighted to meet you, Mr Black.’ He offered Matt a hand to shake. ‘I’m a friend of Simone’s. Where is the good lady, by the way?’

Matt pointed across the hall, through the empty windowframes. ‘She’s over there. I’m not sure how she’s doin’. How did you know we were here?’

‘Trade secrets, old chap. All in good time.’

‘But how did you get in here?’

Vale pointed behind himself and Matt saw that the shop was S-shaped. Around the corner more light was streaming in from where a second entrance gave on to a parallel corridor.

‘We can stealth your friend along the hall here with a bit of a pincer‐
movement,’ Vale said. ‘But we’d better hurry, because with all the racket you’ve been making, the chaps upstairs are bound to take an interest at some point.’

‘What do you mean, at some point? Who do you think’s shootin’ at us?’

‘I honestly couldn’t say, but I’m rather sure he’s not one of them.’

‘How?’

‘As I said, all in good time. Which is somewhat of the essence at the moment, so, ehm, may I?’ he asked, indicating the handgun.

‘By all means,’ Matt obliged. ‘Be safer for both of us.’

Vale turned the weapon over in his hands. ‘Nagan automatic. Nice. I take it it’s not yours.’

‘I procured it earlier.’

‘Quite a heavyweight. Massey‐
Ferguson of the gun world. I’m sure its owner would have been disappointed to lose it.’

‘Aye, he was gutted.’

‘KGB assassination favourite, once upon a time. Those were the days. Now they’re all over the bloody place, since the Wall fell.’

‘It’s jammed. So’s the Uzi.’

Vale flexed his thumb and an empty magazine dropped from the pistol‐
grip. ‘No, just out,’ he said. He picked up the Uzi and did the same thing. A cartridge clattered to the floor.

‘I thought they went “click” when they were empty,’ Matt said sheepishly. ‘The triggers both stuck. I thought – never mind.’

‘Any more ammo?’ Vale asked. His tone was optimistic rather than desperate, as though Matt saying “no”
wouldn’t
be a total fucking disaster. The man’s calmness was almost disconcerting.

Matt reached into his jacket and handed Vale a mag for the Uzi, then fished a clip for the Nagan from one of his trouser pockets. Vale slapped the magazine smartly into the stock of the machine gun and offered it back to him.

‘You’d best stick with this one,’ Vale said, grinning. ‘Play the percentage game.’

Matt delicately placed the handgun clip upright on the floor beside him, freeing both hands to hold the Uzi once more.

‘Aye, fire off another couple of hundred rounds and I might even
fuck
—’

Vale’s eyes had suddenly gone from the glint of a smile to the glint of cold steel as he reacted to movement elsewhere in the shop. Matt saw him grip the Nagan by the barrel with his right hand and slam the squat stock down on top of the waiting clip, then flip the gun a hundred and eighty degrees with a flick of the wrist, simultaneously grabbing the slide with his left, slotting the first round into the breech. He pulled the trigger the first of six times almost before the slide had returned to cock the hammer.

In the time it took Vale to spot the intruder, load his pistol, prep it and prolifically ventilate the guy, Matt had just about managed to turn his head and watch the dead man fall. To his credit, he had also managed to pull the trigger on the Uzi, mainly by reflex, but less impressively, it was pointing at Vale at the time. Fortunately, once again, nothing issued from it.

‘Good thing for me you forgot to slide the bolt,’ Vale remarked, indicating a lever on the weapon’s right‐
hand side. ‘You’re lucky I don’t confiscate it until you’ve learned to use it properly. Fortunately for you, this fellow over here won’t be needing his any longer, so there’s one going spare.’

Matt stared open‐
mouthed. Up‐
close, Vale looked like some RSC thesp who’d played his last Dane and would now unavoidably be moving on to the Lears and Shylocks. But in action, Jesus. Schwarzenegger wouldn’t spill this guy’s pint.

‘Who
are
you?’

‘There isn’t time,’ Vale replied, stripping the dead intruder of his armaments. ‘I need you to do the talking. You look like you’ve had a more interesting evening than me so far, so why don’t you tell me about it. And quickly.’

‘All right,’ Matt said, mentally rewinding, still aghast at what was on the tape. ‘I’ll give you the edited highlights. I killed a guy named Booth and took his guns and radio. I’ve been listenin’ into the show ever since, and replyin’ to his messages. They know he’s dead now, but the fact that they bought my voice up until then suggests they’re not the best‐
acquainted bunch. I don’t think they’re terrorists. Nothing political’s been mentioned, and one of them said somethin’ about there being millions of pounds at stake, so my guess is they’re here to shake Gavin down: a ransom‐
for‐
hostages deal.