SEVERANCE KILL (8 page)

EIGHT

Bartos shovelled carbonara into his face, an early supper on a heated outdoor restaurant terrace where his status guaranteed him a degree of privacy. Across the table was his brother, Miklos. Thinner than him, with more hair. But not the boss.

‘Want me to take over?’ Miklos fingered the stem of his wineglass, the fidgeting betraying his craving for a cigarette. Bartos didn’t allow smoking within ten feet of him and certainly not at the table.

Bartos sucked up a tube of penne. ‘Not yet. Let’s give the kid a chance to prove himself.’

‘So what’s he doing?’

‘Checking the hospitals with his guys, to see if this umbrella asshole’s turned up in any of them. He got hit by a tram according to them.’

‘Long shot.’

Miklos was next in line for the top job in the family, unless Bartos hung on in there long enough for his own firstborn, Janos, to become a contender.
Then
there’d be a battle, and it would be something to behold. Bartos liked Miklos, knew the family and the business would be in safe hands with him in charge. But not yet. Still, he spoke more freely with his brother – about business as well as personal matters – than with anybody else, even Magda.

‘So when are you going to approach the Russians?’ Miklos signalled to an invisible waiter behind Bartos:
it’s on me
. 

Bartos finished chewing and swallowing before he answered. ‘Haven’t decided yet. I’d like to find out what’s so important about this Gaines guy, this Brit. Why they want him so badly.’

‘The Worm has no idea?’

‘Says he’s working on it. Meantime, I want to do my own investigating. I’ve got a feeling this umbrella guy has something to do with it, is involved somehow. If you believe Janos and his boys, this wasn’t just some wannabe hero who jumped a bunch of hijackers. He was a pro, armed with a shiv, who put down one of Janos’s men, injured another and almost stopped them getting away.’

‘The Russians will be looking for us, too.’

‘Fuck the
Rusáks
.’ He glowered at his empty plate. It was true, though. He didn’t care much that a civilian had been shot in the crossfire on the tram. Shit happened. But the Worm said the man had been SVR. Russian intelligence. They didn’t drop it, when you’d killed one of theirs. Now his bargaining power would be limited. He’d demand a high price for Gaines. But he’d also have to insist on the Russians staying off his back in future.

His phone went off. Bartos listened.

‘On my way.’

He put the handset away, was already rising. ‘Son of a bitch. They’ve spotted the umbrella guy.’

*

The man Bartos Blažek called the Worm was at that moment sitting with his eyes closed, picturing Calvary.

A British agent, sent to capture or kill an expatriate Brit who was wanted by Moscow. Was wanted so badly that the unofficial SVR was in charge of taking him.

The Worm didn’t enjoy his dealings with Blažek. He found the man’s coarseness revolting, his arrogance a character flaw of such magnitude that it would surely bring him down one day. But he paid well. Paid magnificently, in fact. And however much Blažek might despise the Worm in turn – and it was obvious that he did – it was clear that he valued their association.

The Worm’s information had led to Blažek’s interception of the product – the Brit, Gaines – but the problem was that neither the Worm nor Blažek knew why Gaines was so important to Moscow. The Worm had the better chance of finding out, but even he would struggle. Until Gaines’s precise value was established, Blažek couldn’t enter into a transaction with the SVR.

Couldn’t, or wouldn’t. The Worm found the man’s stubbornness infuriating. Gaines was of critical importance to the Russian state, of that there was no doubt. Blažek would be able to command an astronomical price even without knowing the full details. But Blažek was a businessman, as he never failed to remind the Worm. And a good businessman never did business without being fully aware of the stakes. Blažek had made clear, furthermore, that until he’d sold Gaines to the SVR, the Worm wouldn’t see a penny of his payment.

So the Worm had his work cut out.

*

The hospital was a modern structure of glass and steel, the emergency department obvious even to someone like Calvary who didn’t read the language: a large forecourt crowded with ambulances arriving and departing, a steady flow of pedestrian traffic through the main sliding doors. It was southwest of the Old Town, fifteen minutes’ walk.

Llewellyn would want a progress report later that evening. Calvary didn’t know when the first editions of the newspapers went to press in Britain, but suspected it couldn’t be much later than midnight. If he hadn’t found Gaines by then, at least he might have enough of a lead to persuade Llewellyn to hold off. A skim through the online news sites, British and international, had told him that either the Songwriter’s body hadn’t been discovered yet, or at the very least the press hadn’t got hold of the story. Calvary thought the Chapel had probably secured the man’s flat, had kept the police away.

Had opened the dead man’s eyes to increase the impact of the photograph.
God. Llewellyn was sick.

For a moment another pair of eyes stared into Calvary’s. Also dark brown. But not dead. Crucially, not dead.

The image, the memory, disappeared as the car cut up onto the kerb in front of him and the passenger door rocked open, the gun emerging first.

*

‘We’re going to lose him. I’m moving in.’

Bartos crashed through the restaurant, his bulk sending a canteen of cutlery flying, the phone jammed to his ear. ‘Who the hell else is nearby?’

Adam’s voice came through. The first one had been the driver’s.

‘Pavel’s on his way. I’d told him to meet me here before I saw the guy coming out the entrance.’

Bartos shoved down the steps past an elderly couple. A walking stick clattered to the ground. His BMW sat on a double yellow line outside, the driver already running the engine. ‘You keep after the guy. I’ll light a fire under Pavel’s ass.’

He rang off, speed-dialled Pavel’s number, and while it rang he yelled the name of the hospital at his driver. The car surged away, slamming Bartos back into his seat.

*

Use the environment to your advantage. Sometimes the best tools are to be found there.

The lesson was woven into Calvary’s fibres, his neurones. The man had made a stupid mistake, emerging over an open car door at close range, perhaps relying on the tendency of an opponent to step back from a gun aimed at his face. Instead of stepping back, Calvary leaped forward, both feet leaving the ground. He smashed the door into the man, catching his arm and his chest and making him cry out and drop back into the car. Calvary found his feet and kicked at the door again, pistoning his leg out, driving it against the man’s legs.

The driver was already reversing, the door swinging open, the man in the passenger seat drawing back inside. Traffic on the road squealed and veered around the reversing car, a Lexus.

Without the benefit of being at close range, Calvary was at a disadvantage. He glanced about, saw a sidestreet and ran round the corner, pressing himself against the wall of the building. The Lexus hurled itself across the pavement at the corner, the gear too low, and overshot. Calvary slipped back onto the main road and began running back the way he’d come.

People were milling on the pavement in confusion. He wove among them. As he ran he scanned the road. No other cars approaching. Perhaps the Lexus was alone.

He heard more horns, a scream of overworked tyres at his back, and he knew the Lexus was back on the main road.

He needed to get away, or at least out of range of the gun. But he didn’t want to get too far away, because one or more live captives would be worth a great deal to him.

The Lexus didn’t appear on the periphery of his vision as he was expecting. He chanced a look over his shoulder. The car was idling on the road behind him, keeping pace. The passenger with the gun was on the far side from him. The driver was watching him through the open window.

Evidently they didn’t want to open fire, risk a public battle. They’d expected to snatch him quickly, with a minimum of fuss, so that there’d be no clear eyewitness accounts. There was little chance of that now.

Calvary stopped running. He turned, stood facing the car across the road. Held his palms out.

Your move.

*

‘He’s stopped running. Standing there, waiting for us.’

Bartos stuck a finger in his other ear. ‘What? Can’t hear you.’

Janos repeated himself. Bartos said, ‘You hurt? What the hell just happened?’

‘I’m okay. He’s made us, though. He’s fast. Won’t get him on our own, now.’

‘Jesus.’ Bartos closed his eyes, clenched his teeth, counted slowly back from ten. Magda had recently given him an anger-management CD. He got to five and lost patience.

‘Keep him there. Don’t do anything unless he runs.’

‘Then go after him?’

‘No, dickhead. Sit there crooning Sinatra songs.’

He punched in Pavel’s number again. Pavel wasn’t all that smart, but he was big and ferocious. And he was nearby.

‘You there yet?’

‘Hospital’s ahead.’

‘He’s on the street. Janos and his driver are stopped or parked or whatever the fuck, across from him.’

In a beat: ‘Boss, I see them.’

*

The Lexus had pulled up onto the kerb to let the traffic flow past. Through the windscreen Calvary could just make out the man in the passenger seat, phone raised to his ear. Calling for backup.

Time to make a move.

He scanned the windows on his side of the street. A bookshop caught his eye. He raised a hand to the Lexus and turned and pushed through the door.

The rule was usually, in a situation like this:
keep away from civilians
. The risk of some innocent being caught in the crossfire was normally unacceptably high. But Calvary’s impression was as before, that these men wanted to keep as low a profile as possible. There weren’t likely to be any hostage situations. And that would give him an advantage that would offset any numerical imbalance.

The bookshop was dark, cosy, populated by a handful of browsers and silent staff. Calvary moved across to the far end, near the cash registers, picked a book off a shelf and began paging. He watched the door.

Something changed in the atmosphere, a subtle shifting like the first hint of a storm. Keeping his gaze on the doors, Calvary groped for it with his other senses, trying to pin it down.

Damn it. A side entrance.

Over to his right, a man stood inside the door. Head shaven, torso wrapped in black leather like a hide. Without looking directly at him Calvary nonetheless sensed there was something wrong with his face. The man wasn’t moving, was just standing there, his stare boring into Calvary.

A minute later the doors at the front swung open and two men slipped in. One was hobbling a little. The passenger from the Lexus. The other was the driver.

They too made no pretence at subtlety, their eyes fixed on Calvary.

All right, if that’s the way it’s going to be.

He lifted his head, looked straight at each of the three men in turn. His eyes met theirs almost audibly, like swords joining battle.

NINE

The big one first. It was an axiom. Putting down the bruiser, the tough guy, gave your own morale a boost as well as denting that of whichever opponents were left.

Calvary walked between the rows of shelves towards the shaven-headed man, who didn’t move from his place at the door. Up close, he could see he’d been right about the man’s face. Scars crossed the mouth like stitching performed by a drunken surgeon. His left cheek was bone white, a continent of scar tissue. The eyes were black, small.

Another thing Calvary noticed up close was the man’s size. He was six feet four or five. Shoulders almost too wide to have fit through the door.

Calvary stopped three feet from the man. In a low murmur, in Russian, he said, ‘Over there’. He tipped his head to the right, where taller aisles curved away, floor to ceiling. It would afford more privacy.

The man glanced in that direction, nodded once. He looked past Calvary, over his head, and nodded again to the other two.

Calvary turned his back, brazenly, and walked over to the tall aisles. A scan of the shop suggested that nobody had noticed anything untoward, neither shoppers nor staff.

There was nobody browsing in the first aisle Calvary came to. It curved towards the wall and ended there, a cul de sac. There was room for perhaps two medium-sized people standing abreast.

The move relied entirely on position-sense, the instinct a fighter develops after years in the field for an opponent’s location in space. There was no time to confirm visually. Even a fraction of a second’s hesitation would blow it, would lose him the advantage of shock and surprise.

Calvary pivoted on the ball of his foot and kicked up into the place his position-sense told him the bald man’s crotch would be.

It was a kick with a leg that was almost straight, with the full power of his right hip behind it, with the blade of his shin bone rather than the ankle as the offensive edge. And his judgement, his sense of the man’s location, was pitch perfect. His leg slammed against soft tissue and bone, the impact jarring him almost off his left foot.

The man’s arms had been outstretched, ready to move in with a stranglehold, and they flapped against the twin towers of the shelves like broken wings. His breath came in a drawn-out
huff
, his eyes straining from their sockets. He staggered, doubling, and Calvary brought a half fist up at his throat.

The man turned his head at the last second and Calvary’s blow rocked off his jaw, snapping his head round further. Incredibly the man kept his feet, bracing his hands against the shelves on either side. Calvary took a step back, deeper into the aisle, and kicked again, a roundhouse, this time catching the man in the chest, not in the face where he wanted it. It sent the man barging against one of the shelves.

Behind him the other two were loitering, unable to pile in because of the lack of space and because a commotion would be inevitable. They seemed resigned to keeping watch.

The giant’s face was waxen, the rest of his skin now matching the tone of his scars, a damp sheen across his forehead like a caul. His breath hissed wetly between his clenched teeth. His tiny eyes glittered with pain and hate. With a grunt he pushed himself away from the shelf and bore down on Calvary.

Calvary grabbed a hardcover book without looking, some kind of academic tome that weighed a couple of kilogrammes at least. He lashed out at the man’s kneecap with his boot and as the man sidestepped it, shoved the book into his face like a shotputter. He felt the crack as well as heard it, saw the gout of red spray sideways and spatter the spines on the shelves. 

Still the man kept coming on, driving Calvary back until he felt the wall press against him. He put up his hands to protect his face, used his feet on shins and knees, tried another kick at the groin. Then the man’s forearm slammed past his hands and across his throat.

The blow knocked the breath from him, but this was followed by panic because he couldn’t regain the breath, couldn’t get air through his compressed trachea. He brought both hands up to curl his fingers around the forearm, trying to pull it free. It was a mistake. The man punched a meaty fist into his exposed torso.

Calvary tensed his abdominal muscles in time but even so, the pain was colossal, like an extension of the man himself. Blurred waves eddied before his eyes, the man’s face rippling grotesquely. And all the time, the pressure built against his throat, threatening to cut off air and blood flow.

One chance. He raised his hands on either side, open-palmed, and slapped them together with all the force he could muster, against the man’s ears.

The move wasn’t so much painful as disorientating, the sudden overwhelming clap of noise directly against the eardrums producing a similar effect to a tiger’s roar, the pitch of which stuns its prey momentarily. The man recoiled, forearm easing back from Calvary’s throat. He brought a knee up this time, into the groin, and there was no way any man could cope with two strikes there in succession. Calvary turned his head aside barely in time to avoid the full force of the man’s vomitus. Some of it caught him on the shoulder; most painted the books and the shelves. The giant sagged against Calvary, who gripped him under the arms and lowered him to his knees.

Past him, beyond the entrance to the aisle, he could see the other two men half remonstrating, half apologising. Evidently a staff member had been alerted by the commotion, and the men were pretending they’d knocked a stack of books over. 

Using the collapsed man as a step, Calvary vaulted upwards, clambering up the wall of shelves and dropping down the other side, scattering volumes in a series of thunks and crashes. The sales assistant shrieked but he didn’t pay any attention, didn’t even look at her or either of the two men as he sprinted towards the side entrance where the big man had come in. He heard a yell behind him but didn’t pause, letting the door swing shut behind him.

Once more the cold blasted him after the warmth of the shop. The side street tapered to an end to his right, a wall with a locked-looking steel door blocking the way. He headed left, back towards the main street, put his head round, then took off to the right, back in the direction he’d originally been heading, towards the Old Town.

The car roared at him immediately from across the road, cutting diagonally across two lanes and causing other vehicles to brake and slew. Once again they were trying to block his passage along the pavement. At his back he could hear the shouts of the two men as they emerged from the front entrance of the bookshop.

Calvary stumbled, the blow to his gut and the precious seconds of compression of his windpipe taking their relentless toll. For a moment the pavement reeled towards him but he kept his footing, bit down hard on his lower lip, the pain like a slap across the face. The car, a high-end BMW, had mounted the kerb and he was perhaps ten yards from it. He couldn’t dodge it, nor could he turn back because the two men were close behind; he could feel them.

Calvary darted sideways, to his left, launching himself into the traffic almost without casting a glance at it. The cacophony was shocking, a disharmony of yells and horns and tyres on rubber. A saloon grew in his left visual field and instinctively he knew it wasn’t going to brake in time so he jumped, not forwards but straight up. As if detached, he observed his feet clear the bumper and felt his legs crash down on the bonnet. Felt the cold smooth slope of the windscreen against his shoulder, the side of his face. Saw another face, chalky, mouth distorted into a terrified O, through the glass. Then the roll carried him off the windscreen to the side and he was back on the road and lurching on, the far pavement within sight.

All he’d done was clear the way, slow the traffic so that the two pursuers could follow him; and the new car, the BMW would be turning, heading back across the road. He tripped at the kerb, absorbed the fall through his hands, stumbled upright. He felt the nearness of the car as it pulled up directly behind him, almost catching his heel. Hands grabbed at him, at his arms and his trouser cuffs, and he shook them off, the movement dropping him to one knee again.

Then, cutting through the noise and the surging in his ears, a woman’s voice, low and urgent. First in Czech.

Then: ‘Get in. We’re on your side.’

He turned, then, instead of running as he should have, because it was so unexpected. Not just the fact that it was a woman, nor even the oddness of the comment. What was most jarring of all was that she’d spoken in English.

It wasn’t a BMW or Lexus or Mercedes, but a beaten-up camper van. Two faces peered at him through the driver’s window. The sliding door in the side of the van was drawn open. Calvary made a snap decision, dived in.

The door slammed shut under its own weight as a man’s voice from the front said, ‘
Go
,’ and the van took off.

*

‘Jesus, damn it.’

Bartos drove his fist into the dashboard, once, twice, popping the glove compartment open, not caring if he triggered the airbag. He reeled forward in his seat as the driver hit reverse. This time the front bumper clipped another car, glass from a shattered headlight arcing across the bonnet. Sirens were sounding somewhere not far away. Bartos didn’t think they belonged to ambulances.

The idiots, Janos and his crony, were trying to cross the road after the umbrella guy but were too scared of getting run over to do it properly. Bartos’s driver showed some guts, barrelling into the traffic, the rear of the BMW caroming off a sports car’s panelwork.

There was the guy, half kneeling by the kerb, pedestrians describing a wide arc around him as though he was radioactive.

Bartos had the gun out from under the dash, a stubby Ruger P95. Good American hardware, punchy and reliable. He held it low in a gloved hand in the footwell between his knees. Would ditch it out the window the moment the cops got near. His driver was braking already, drawing up to the guy on the pavement.

The van cut in so suddenly that for a second it looked inevitable that they’d tailend it. Bartos’s driver braked and banked hard to the right and the BMW’s front passenger wheel hit the kerb, jarring the car to a stop. The impact flung the gun from Bartos’s hand into the footwell. He ducked to retrieve it and when he lifted his head the van was leaping away, its door rolling shut. The guy was gone from the pavement.

The BMW’s engine had stalled. His driver’s mouth was set in a curve of fury as he fired it up again. He spun the wheel and the first few metres were half on the pavement, sending people scattering. The BMW cleared the three cars that had pulled into line behind the van and was once more behind it.

Bartos said, ‘Ram it if you have to.’

The van’s rear window was blacked out. The bodywork was covered with rust. Piece of shit hippymobile. Looked as old as the 1970s, too.

The driver muttered, ‘Brace yourself, boss,’ and put his foot down.

*

The rear seat was torn and bursting like a collapsed loaf. Calvary rocked and bounced off it as the van swerved.

He craned back. Through the rear window the BMW curved in off the pavement and was behind them once more. Two men, the driver and another. The passenger was big, wearing sunglasses.

Calvary said, ‘Got weapons?’

‘What?’ The woman. She was driving.

‘Guns.’

‘Not here. Back at base.’

Not much bloody use then, are they?
he wanted to snarl. He cast about among the junk at his feet. Newspapers, soft drink cans, stinking polystyrene fast food containers.

The man up front – young, his English American accented – peered round. ‘What’re you doing?’

‘Looking for something to stop them. You’ll never outrun them, not in this wreck.’

‘They’ll leave us alone when they see the cops.’

‘You willing to wait for that?’ Calvary snapped his fingers. ‘Come on. Something heavy. Anything.’

The impact threw him forward against the back of the driver’s seat, and the woman let out a cry. The collision shunted the van forwards and slightly sideways. Calvary crawled back on to the seat and looked back. The BMW had dropped away, its front bumper at an angle, its bonnet creased. But it was coming on.

‘They’re going to do it again,’ he said.

The woman had kept the engine running and she swung them back onto the lane. All around cars were veering away or simply stopping, allowing the madness to pass by. The young man was scrabbling in the glovebox, spilling detritus: road maps, tickets of various kinds.

‘Got this,’ he said, handing it back.

It was a torch, a chunky one. Metal with a rubber grip. Calvary hefted it.

The BMW rammed them again, then, and this time there was a bang and the van sagged and listed to the right. Its end fishtailed and the woman pulled at the wheel frantically. The stink of burning rubber added to the assortment of smells inside.

‘I can’t hold it,’ she yelled.

‘You’ll have to.’ In the swinging view through the rear window Calvary saw the BMW drop back again and then resume its pursuit. It too had taken some damage, the bumper skittering away across the road as he watched, one of the headlights completely stove in.