Rat Poison (16 page)

A large open space lay before us, a pitiless indoor landscape of sand, shingle, phoney boulders and rocks, some of which were huge, and a lot of dead branches with camouflage netting draped over them which could conceal anything. What looked like the entrance to a ‘cave' was on the far side. The ‘roof' was just a blackness with a few tiny lights like stars and some kind of hidden illumination that gave the impression of moonlight. I risked a glance high up into one corner and spotted one end of the control centre, a structure with a wide curving bulletproof glass window. I have been inside it and, to me, the instrument panel looks as complicated as the cockpit of a jumbo jet.

‘Is Ken still in charge here?' I whispered when we paused momentarily in the comparative cover of an overhanging ‘rock' after dashing across the first open space. Ken was difficult to forget: a fine marksman, the mind of a slightly sadistic genius, hair like a full-blown marigold. His and Patrick's rivalry went back years.

‘No idea. Possibly,' Patrick snapped, concentrating.

A shot pinged off the metal underpinnings of our rock, scattering us with bits of what were probably fibreglass. Then the world went mad. A thunderflash went off seemingly right behind us and, regrettably, my instinctive and first reaction to this was to bolt. This was severely curtailed by my husband grabbing a handful of spare tracksuit material between my shoulder blades, hauling me to a standstill and then back.

‘Think!' he bellowed right in my face through the smoke.

‘That was a grenade,' a disembodied voice said silkily. ‘You're both dead. Two lives left.'

In the next moment there was another bright flash and deafening bang but we were already moving and travelling at speed to the left towards another rock. A shot kicked up the sand at out feet.

Patrick carried on shouting. ‘He's supposed to be firing high!'

Another dead target later and we were making our way, bent low around the base of the rock which turned out to be the first in a group of three. The farthest was very large and had a tumbledown shack of sorts leaning up against it, constructed out of planks and what looked in the dim light like a piece of tarpaulin. It appeared to be a very safe way of reaching the cave entrance somewhere on the far side of it.

Patrick picked up a small rock, real, and hefted it. It landed somewhere on top of the structure with a crash and the whole thing went down like a pack of cards in a cloud of dust and bits of rotten wood.

‘I demand lost lives back!' Patrick yelled. ‘For breaking rule ten by making something likely to cause real injury.'

No response.

‘Right,' he muttered, getting another target in the head. ‘War.'

Secretly, I thought he was getting a bit too exercised by everything but, after all, he had written the original set of rules.

And with that we got the equivalent of a bathful of cold water tipped over us.

The shock was enough to make me forget, for a moment, where I was and what I was supposed to be doing. My hand was grabbed and we went like hell, jumping and scrambling over and through the remains of the shack and then out across an open sandy and stone-strewn space towards the entrance to the cave. A target popped up in the entrance – how could a mere slab of cardboard, a SAPU, a Small Arms Pop-Up, engender such alarm? – which Patrick slew on the run and we carried on, crashing past the holed target into the dark space beyond.

‘It must be a dead end,' I gasped. ‘It always is.'

‘Then goody we've gone the wrong way,' Patrick responded.

Someone jumped on him, a tall, broad someone who got him around the throat with a crooked arm. I did think this time, jumped out of the way so Patrick could work some rather dirty magic and when the man flew through the air and thumped down on to his back I sat on him hard enough to hear the rest of the breath leave his lungs.

Lights suddenly blazed, dazzlingly, and there in the cave entrance was another target. From my seated position I got it at the second attempt and then scrambled up and ran to where I could see Patrick going down a passageway off to my right. As soon as I entered it the ceiling fell in on me. It was only made of large polystyrene blocks but that did not stop me from tripping over some of them and being buried by the rest. I fought my way out and, slipping and sliding over the squeaky and unstable pile, tried to carry on in the direction I wanted to go. It was hopeless. There was a much larger amount than one ceiling's-worth: a small mountain of it.

So be it. I had one shot left and I had not been given any more ammunition. Patrick had started off with seventeen.

Squeezing past the ‘dead' targets in the entrance I gazed around outside. No one was in sight. Soaked through and shivering, my hair plastered to my head, I trotted off to the right, moving along a mock rock-face in what I hoped was a roughly parallel course to the one Patrick had taken. The ‘moonlight' was even dimmer now and, yes, I really was thinking. When I had fired my last shot and in order not to lose any more lives by not being able to shoot at targets I would have to catch up with him. I had wasted one shot already.

Incongruously, I came to a door. No fizz, no electric shock either. Just locked. I shoulder-charged it and someone opened it just as I got there leaving me staggering in another dark space, finally crashing into the door opener who wasn't Patrick as he was not wet and anyway smelt of very cheap, handy for drains, aftershave. I got a bit cross with him, took a wild swing in the dark and smacked him hard around the face, which startled him sufficiently enough to call me a bitch.

‘I can get a lot bitchier than that!' I yelled at him. ‘This is supposed to be target practice, not dungeons and effin' dragons!'

Gut feelings told me that the effin' dragon was about to try something else so I ran back to the opening and when he followed me outside tripped him so he bellyflopped with a loud ‘Ooof!', hopefully getting a mouthful of sand. Only a little twerp after all. I dashed back through the door, slammed it behind me and then made for a corner from which faint light was emanating. This proved to be yet another tunnel and when I was around ten yards inside it a target slid into place at the end of it. I got it in the head, turned right into a side passage I had not previously noticed but quickly came to a dead end. I was now out of ammo.

There were then three shots in quick succession, not all from the same weapon, impossible to tell exactly from which direction but not alarmingly close by. I decided that the first had been fired by a Glock and ran back and out through the door into the Lawrence of Arabia scenario, which I was beginning to loathe. No, hang on, I'd loathed it right from the start.

There was another shot, seemingly from above and a ricochet whanged off something. Half-crouching I scurried along the mock rock-face which curved away and then sloped steeply upwards. Damning all men I raced, slithering, up the sand and gravel with which it was surfaced and emerged at last and on all fours on a flat wooden platform just above a roof of sorts over the maze, tunnels and cave complex. Again, it was very dim and the platform rocked and swayed, appearing to be suspended on ropes. Crawling, I started to make my way along it.

‘I'm here,' said a voice somewhere to the rear of me.

As soon as he had spoken a target jumped up in the darkness ahead. I flattened myself, pronto, and there was a shot which made such a good job of it that the SAPU actually fell over, something in the mechanism smashed. I wriggled backwards for quite a distance from the point where I had reached the platform.

‘It is Ken,' Patrick said, stretching out a hand to touch me in order to further inform me that I had arrived. I turned around to see that he was sitting down, very still.

‘What's wrong?' I asked, seeing the expression on his face.

He handed me the Glock. ‘You must be out of ammo.'

‘Patrick, what's
wrong
?'

‘He seems to be taking it a bit too seriously.'

‘Are you hit?'

‘He's wrecked my right ankle joint. Firing low, utterly forbidden.'

‘Then let's stop this!'

‘I think Ken's finally lost it.'

Memories returned. The computer geek with the wild ginger hair, the obsessive whose brainchild this set-up had partly been and whose mental state some years ago Patrick had been very, very worried about.

A voice boomed out. ‘You're getting seriously close to the time limit. One minute left.'

‘That's not Ken's voice,' I said.

‘No, I spotted him out on the upper gantry by the control room – he's only supposed to be firing safe but disconcerting shots at us.'

‘It might have been an accident.'

‘It wasn't. He's just about the finest shot in the country and we're talking about a deliberate attempt to cripple.'

‘Are you
sure
it was him?'

‘You can't miss that ginger hair.'

‘But there's possibly a bent cop with red hair mixed up in the turf war.'

His mind was on other things. ‘I'm sorry, I'm completely useless.'

‘Then stay here where you're reasonably safe.'

‘I simply can't dodge around quickly enough,' Patrick raged.

I blew him a kiss.

‘For God's sake, be careful. I simply can't believe you're in the equation but shoot him if you really think he's gone raving mad.'

It was too dark for cameras up here and I was not sure if there would be any mikes to hear me raising the alarm. I crawled back to the top of the incline and slid down it on my behind back into the desert area. A shot was immediately fired at me that probably did not miss by much.

‘Oi!' I yelled. ‘Stop this now! My husband's been shot in the leg!'

Someone laughed. ‘They can't hear you, ducky – I've turned all the mikes off. Shouting will get you nowhere.'

He fired again and I got the distinct impression that the bullet whistled just above my head.

This was not Ken, the voice was quite different.

How to raise the alarm? How to get up on to the gantry without being spotted by this bastard? I raided all recollections I had of the place and remembered an iron staircase, like a fire escape that was at one end, the end farthest from the control room. But surely I could draw someone's attention to what was going on. What about all the
other
people here, for God's sake? No doubt job done they had probably gone off for their tea break.

No, whatever he was after I was not going to play this man's game.

Jinking, I dashed squelchingly across the sandy area, using the rocks as cover, hearing shots fired at me but, hey, this wasn't Ken and he wasn't so good. The door on the far side was still open and I hurtled through that and then along the corridors, somehow finding my way back to where we had come up through the hole in the floor. The steps had gone so I sat down with my legs dangling through the aperture and then dropped. All my body protested at the impact: you're too old for this, woman. I could not remember two passageways but there were now and I initially chose the wrong one, ending up in a dead end. Reduced to swearing now I went back, ran around the right-angled bend and then the dark tunnel loomed before me.

A kind of stand-by-your-man madness came over me and I tore through it, almost slithering over and into the water on the slippery floor where I had first landed on the pile of cardboard. Patrick had said he had come down steps and through a door. I found it, or at least what seemed to be a doorknob in the wall, but although it turned the door would not open. I fought with it but it would not shift.

With the steps gone I was trapped down here as there was no possibility of climbing up the chute down which I had arrived. Forcing myself to be calm I examined the walls of this dank little room for other exits but found nothing. Then I heard footsteps approaching, descending stone steps on the other side of the door. They came to a halt and a key turned in the lock. I retreated to stand in the mouth of the tunnel.

He opened the door, entered and, detecting my presence, chuckled. He then walked forward and there in the thin beam of light shining through the hole in the ceiling, as though under a spotlamp, stood the man referred to as Red: short, thin and with ferrety eyes, who had been photographed entering Brad Northwood's house here in London. He was still holding the sniper's rifle but not aiming it directly at me.

‘Ever fired one of those before?' he enquired, nodding in the direction of the Glock, which was pointing at him.

‘No.'

‘Just familiar with the Smith and Wesson?'

‘That's right.'

‘Your husband, who I shall go and find after I've done with you, will have put on the safety catch before handing it over. Know where it is, eh?'

‘No.'

‘And you wouldn't be able to find it in the dark.'

‘Probably not.'

‘That's a real pity.'

‘If you say so.'

‘For you. It means I've plenty of time to kill you before you suss out where it is, haven't I?'

He began to swing the barrel of the rifle towards me, taking his time, enjoying himself.

‘No,' I said.

‘No?' he whispered with a big smile, very relaxed about it all, the rifle coming to a halt. ‘Are you begging for your life?'

I said, ‘The Glock's three safety mechanisms are automatically disengaged when you squeeze the trigger.' Which I did.

Patrick always tells me never to shoot to wound an armed man: ‘It'll be the death of you one day.'

I had never shot to kill.

Until now.

‘So was he naive, or what?' Michael Greenway demanded to know. ‘Didn't he know about Glocks, even though he appears to have been familiar with arms?'

‘I think he was trying to get me all flustered just in case I did pull the trigger,' I said. ‘But was complacent to the point of stupidity.'

The man now in a body bag had been wrong in that he had only succeeded in switching off the microphones in the desert mock-up area. This meant that the conversation between the two of us had had been recorded, every word of it. Needless to say, an inquiry into the breach of security and other lax operational practices had been set up as well as frantic enquiries into the dead man's identity.