Revenger (10 page)

Adams paused. He looked out at the hall, scanning the stands so that thousands of people out there would be convinced that he had made eye contact with them personally, and then continued with a steadily rising intensity as he declared, ‘We are the United People’s Party. We don’t answer to anyone but the people. And if we do any favours, we do them for the people!’

Once again, Adams had to wait to let the cheers and clapping die down.

‘Now, some of my opponents don’t like the way I’m taking
power
back to the people. They moan that I’m some kind of fascist . . . a neo-Nazi . . . a right little Hitler. Mostly it just makes me laugh. I know the only reason that the major parties and their toadies in the media keep slandering me and this party is because they’re scared. They know they’ve been found out. They’ve got us all into this mess. They haven’t got the first idea how to get us out of it. And they’re terrified that someone else has.’

Now Adams started pacing again, as though there was something eating away at him, making it impossible to stay still. ‘But sometimes . . . sometimes . . . I can’t help but get angry at the lies they tell. I’ve gone to war for this country. I’ve risked my life to defend freedom . . . to stand up for the values of tolerance, decency and fairness that make Britain great. So when I am accused of betraying those very same values by the cowardly . . . corrupt . . . incompetent . . . dishonest . . . money-grubbing pack of stinking sewer-rats currently occupying the Palace of Westminster, well, that just makes me want to take their lies and their slanders and their accusations and stuff them straight . . . back . . . down . . . their throats!’

Listening to the roar that greeted those words, looking at the rapt, ecstatic expressions on the faces all around her, Alix began to worry. Adams might deny that he was a little Hitler, but the fever he was stirring up reminded her of the images she’d seen in countless documentaries of the Führer working his followers into a frenzy at his night-rallies in the Berlin Sportpalast; the Soviet officials greeting Stalin with rapture at this or that party congress; the massed ranks of uniformed followers roaring their allegiance to China’s Chairman Mao, or any one of North Korea’s endless succession of Kims. Adams had an astonishing ability to arouse and manipulate emotion, and if he could somehow use that ability for good he might actually be the saviour his followers were praying for. But if that power was used for ends that were evil, well, then he might just be the demon that his enemies insisted he was.

20

THE LONGER MARK
Adams spoke, the angrier Kieron Sproles became. He could feel his guts tying themselves in knots as Adams kept blathering his mindless, meaningless slogans. ‘You, me, all the people who are sick of seeing our country falling apart around our ears . . . We’re going to get UPP on our feet, roll UPP our sleeves, and get this great nation moving on UPP in the world again!’

They were cheering, the idiots. Couldn’t they see he was lying? Couldn’t they recognize bullshit when they smelled it? Well, he’d had enough. Adams had come right to the front of the stage. He was standing almost close enough for Sproles to reach out and touch. Except that he wasn’t going to touch him, he had something else in mind.

Kieron Sproles reached into his jacket.

He pulled out the Glock.

He pointed it.

And at the very moment that the woman next to him noticed what was in his hand and screamed out, ‘Gun!’

He fired.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Carver shouted as he heard the shot and saw Adams fall to the floor.

Nicki Adams screamed – a wail of animal pain as she saw her man go down.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Cameron Young, almost casually, as if he were far too sophisticated a player to be shocked by anything.

Kieron Sproles kept firing.

All around him there was total panic as people tried to get away from the gun.

The security men in their fluorescent yellow waistcoats were all cowering behind the barrier that separated the crowd from the stage. No way were they going to charge an armed man.

And then Mark Adams got to his feet. Even as Sproles was blasting the last two shots in his magazine, Adams was standing, stock still, in front of him. And then, when the trigger clicked on an empty magazine, Adams walked very calmly to the edge of the stage. He stepped over to the barrier until he was right opposite the gunman, who was standing motionless, looking dazed, as though his brain had been emptied like his gun.

Adams held out his right hand. ‘Give me the gun,’ he said, very calmly, and because he was wearing a radio mike, the whole hall heard him.

All the people who had been rushing for the exits stopped and turned, staring back at the stage or up at the images on the video screens as Adams repeated, ‘I said, “Give me the gun.”’

There was a hypnotic certainty about the way he spoke. He had not raised his voice at all, but somehow he conveyed the message that his command was essentially a statement of fact. The gun would be handed over. No alternative possibility existed.

Kieron Sproles felt exhausted. The nervous energy that had sustained him through the past few days and sleepless nights
had
fled from his body, and the gun seemed to weigh so much that he couldn’t even hold it up any more. His right arm just hung limply at his side. It was almost a relief to do what Adams asked and hand over the Glock. Once he did the last shred of strength left him, and by the time the security men came to carry him away he was slumped, barely conscious, in his seat, and had no desire at all to resist.

Nicki Adams was in Alix’s arms, sobbing helplessly, unable to comprehend the evidence of her own eyes. Her husband had been shot dead. Then he had risen up without a scratch on him. It was all too much to take in.

‘It’s got to be a set-up,’ said Cameron Young, and not only did the two men in that Downing Street office agree with him, so did a host of bloggers and tweeters. Soon the arguments were raging back and forth between Adams’s supporters – for whom this was one more example of their idol’s heroism – and cynical critics who saw anything between a cheap stunt and a full-blown fascist conspiracy.

Donny Bakunin hadn’t been aware of anything that had happened at the O2. He’d been picked up by one of the garbage trucks on the Wandsworth Road as it made its way towards Netherton Street. They were only a couple of hundred metres away now. He spoke into his earpiece. ‘Five minutes. Get ready.’

At the bar of the Dutchman’s Head, Schultz had broken off negotiations with the barmaid and was frowning at the screen, trying to work out what the hell was going on. Carver laughed to himself as he lifted his glass in an ironic toast. ‘Nice one, you jammy bastard,’ he said to himself. He’d just worked out how Adams had done it.

21

MARK ADAMS GOT
back onstage and faced the crowd. Many of the seats were empty now, and the gangways were packed with people uncertain what to do next. His head of personal security was screaming at him, ‘You’ve got to get out of here – now! There’s a car waiting. Come on. Get out. Go!’

Adams ignored him. He knew he had a few seconds in which to find the right words to get everyone back in their places. If he could do that, if he could somehow get the show back on the rails, this might still be remembered for all the right reasons. ‘No!’ he snapped, and physically shoved the other man away from him. ‘I came here to give a speech, and I’m bloody well going to give it.’

A murmur went through the crowd. There were a few isolated cheers and shouts of encouragement, but nothing like the mass excitement that had been there just a minute or two beforehand.

Adams took a deep breath. He closed his eyes and ran a hand through his hair, aware that all his gestures were still being captured by the cameras and shown on the video screens. Then he opened his eyes again, nodded to himself and looked back out at
the
arena. He had to keep this very simple: direct words that would make sense to scrambled minds and senses.

‘Don’t worry. It’s all right.’ A rueful smile. ‘I’ve been shot at often enough. I’m used to it. And I’m not going anywhere.’

He could feel the atmosphere change a fraction. They were a little calmer. Another smile and a polite enquiry: ‘So . . . is everyone all right out there?’

There was a feeble, ragged response – no more than a smattering of assent.

Now Adams smiled like an indulgent father faced with a recalcitrant child. ‘Oh, come on, you can do better than that. Is everyone all right?’

This time the ‘Yes!’ that came back at him was just a little louder.

‘Do you want to hear what I have to say?’

‘Yes!’

‘Do you want me to carry on?’

The energy was coming back to them now: there were cheers and whistles as well as shouts of, ‘Yes!’

Adams was grinning now and there was a touch of pantomime knowingness as he asked, ‘Are you sure about that?’ And then, ‘I can’t hear you . . . I said: “Are you sure about that?”’

Now the noise was back and the hall was rocking again.

‘All right . . . that’s better,’ Adams said. Like all great performers he had made his audience feel that they were part of the show, so that they were cheering themselves now as much as him. For the next couple of minutes he coaxed them all back to their seats, picking out individual members of the audience, stopping for a joke or a quick chat, sealing the bond between him and them. Finally, when everyone was settled, he said, ‘Right then, we’ve got a job to do – all of us – so let me tell you just what it is.’

22

NETHERTON STREET WAS
nothing special: typical inner-London. It was terraced on either side in a random mix of red- and grey-brick buildings, bay-fronted and flat. Some of them were painted in faded pastel colours or dirty white, others were rendered. For a block and a half the ground floors on either side of the road were occupied by commercial premises – at least a third of them empty – with flats on the first and second floors. The Dutchman’s Head stood on the corner of a block and was painted dark green.

Paula Miklosko used the street as a short cut, the kind of rat run every Londoner knows through his or her own neighbourhood. As she first turned into it in her Suzuki Swift she wasn’t aware of anything unusual. She was too distracted by the pandemonium on the radio, the shooting at the O2 and Mark Adams’s amazing response, to pay much attention to what was going on around her. But then the first flaming bottle went arcing through the air and crashed on to the tarmac in front of her, and suddenly there was nothing else in her mind but the fire on the road – a fire that blazed despite the falling rain – and the prowling, hooded figures that had suddenly
appeared
out of the darkness all around her. As she slammed on the brakes, Paula caught the glint of streetlights falling on the blade of a machete. She saw a man with a length of iron piping walking towards the stationary car and realized that the teeth behind his wolfish grin were gold. She suddenly felt horribly vulnerable, knowing that the locked door of her car offered no protection, no sanctuary at all.

She had to get out of here right away.

She put the accelerator to the floor and rocketed up the road, not slowing for anyone, feeling a couple of glancing impacts as bodies bounced off the racing machine, ignoring the explosions going off on either side of the street and the brick that smashed against the windscreen and sent a spider’s web of cracks through the safety glass.

She had almost reached the far end of Netherton Street. She was so close to safety. And then a huge black shadow crossed her field of vision, blurred and indistinct through the shattered, wet windscreen. It took her a second that seemed to last an age to work out that she was looking at a massive garbage truck. And this was no insubstantial shadow, but a solid mass of metal. She was heading straight towards it. And when she braked as hard as she could her tyres just skidded against the rain-slicked tarmac and she found herself sliding helplessly towards that huge, unyielding, deadly cliff of steel.

23

IT HAPPENED SO
fast. One second the couple inside the shop were just another couple of lowlife shoplifters and the lads outside were simply cocky, piss-taking teenagers, and the next the man Maninder Panu had taken for a pimp had a bottle in his hand. It hadn’t come from the Lion Market shelves. It had a rag stuffed into its neck.

The pimp was putting a match to the rag and now Ajay was grabbing the baseball bat, vaulting over the counter and charging at the man, bellowing in rage. The girl started screaming, but the pimp stayed quite calm and waited until Ajay was within two or three metres of him before he gently lobbed the bottle in his direction.

Ajay hurled himself to one side and his life was saved by a stroke of pure chance. There was a gap in the line of shelves at that point, and he didn’t hit anything more substantial than a free-standing promotional display for Haribo sweets, which gave way under the impact of his seventeen-stone bulk. He hit the ground, rolling away from the impact of the bottle as it exploded in a shower of jagged
glass
shrapnel and sent a mist of flame rolling across the supermarket floor.

Ignoring the fire licking at the shelves, Ajay picked himself up and chased after the couple, waving the baseball bat in their direction. They were heading for the exit, the pimp in the lead, leaving the girl to fend for herself. Ajay couldn’t bring himself to hit her with the bat, but he used the end of it to give her a sharp shove between the shoulder blades which sent her stumbling forward into the pimp.

They were right by the door. A brick smashed through the window from outside, landing between him and the girl. Just before she followed the pimp outside, she turned round, looked straight at him, her face twisted and ugly with poisonous fury, and shrieked a high-pitched blast of furious invective, and he caught the words, ‘Muslim scumbags!’

Now Ajay was shouting, but not at her, at Maninder: ‘Close the shutters . . . and hit the fucking fire alarm!’