Spiral (13 page)

The game is larger than I realise.

Carter rubbed at his tired eyes; it was a fucking circle and he was treading his own footprints, following his own tail. He threw down the pad and sank back into the sofa.

‘I don’t know,’ he said softly, closing his eyes.

Outside, the wind howled and Carter, in almost unconscious response, threw a log on the fire. It was Feuchter who worried him more than anything - the hard look in the man’s eyes, the glitter of those cold, cold orbs when the unwavering gun muzzle was pointing straight at Carter ... something in Feuchter made Carter’s soul go cold. There was something different about the man. Something
strange.

And Natasha...

Natasha had set him up with the gig. She had known Feuchter a long time ago, worked closely with him on the QIII early implementation and development drawings. And if they had wanted
him,
Carter, dead, then— Then Natasha had to have known.

Carter felt suddenly miserable. Cold inside.

He loved Natasha; and knew deep down that she loved him.

But the facts were staring him in the face.

She was a part of it. Integral. A cog in the machine.

She
had
to be...

Carter knew; he would have to be careful. He would have to be prepared. He would have to watch Natasha like a hawk - and if she stepped out of line?

Then Kade would be waiting.

Carter stepped over his snoring Labrador and moved to his study. Entering the book-lined room, he moved to the sixteen feet of desk and the five computers, all open-cased and showing a myriad of circuit boards, processor-fans whirring, monitors showing a colourful spinning collection of humorous screen savers.

He sat down at the master system and initialised the OS. Entering the shell, he switched to his house and land defences, bypassed the encryption, and logged in—

Nothing.

He scanned all monitors for a two-mile radius. Nothing had been tripped or tampered with, the current and voltage meters had not been broken or hacked. He had designed and programmed the system himself, in 68000tz machine code. It had been a challenge and he had enjoyed the steep learning curve, although he still stood by his inherent hatred of mathematics.

He finished the scan.

Nothing. He scratched his chin, and lit a cigarette. The machines purred around him and he flicked through a variety of hidden match-head cameras but could see nothing suspicious.

Just because it doesn’t look suspicious, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

Carter was tempted for a while to start messing about with the equipment; it had a soothing effect on his soul, the swapping of components, the improving of performance by processor and memory enhancement. He checked his watch. Natasha would be due in a few hours and he would need to be ready.

He walked down the hallway and pulled on his boots, lacing them tightly. Then he moved down the stairs and punched a sequence into a pad; a section of wall slid smoothly back and he stepped into the brightly lit armoury. It smelled slightly of gun oil, and he moved to the locked cabinets and pulled free his Browning HiPower 9mm. He checked all the magazines and strapped them about his body. Then he pulled free an automatic sniper rifle chambered for the .338 Lapua Magnum round and slotted a scope to the weapon with a precise
click.
He checked the magazine, placed a spare one in his pocket, then dropped the rifle into a sacking bag and pulled tight the drawstring. With the gun under his arm, he locked up the room and returned to Samson, tapping the dog with his boot.

‘You coming with me, pal?’

Samson grinned his dog grin.

‘Safer with me than in here, I think. Come on, I have a real bad feeling about Natasha’s impending visit. Let’s check she isn’t being followed by big perps in suits with machine guns.’

Carter locked the front door and armed the trip meters. Then, breath pluming and snow settling like a shroud across his head and shoulders, he started across the grey-lit fields so free of war and violence in this distant part of Scotland, and up past the edge of the lane towards the sanctuary of the beautiful shaded woods.

Carter was cold.

His hands, protected by gloves, clasped the semiautomatic rifle stock and he sat shrouded by trees and bushes, staring down at the lane. A straight of one mile led away from him and he targeted the scope down the lane, picking out leaves on the trees and the fluttering of snowflakes: and he grinned. The lane made a good killing ground, and was one reason why he had purchased the house. If he was ready for danger, then this made a good spot - for raining fire from Heaven upon the Infidels.

Samson, at his feet, was restless. He’d wandered away for a while, sniffing, but had returned to nuzzle at Carter, to whinge at the man with his whimpers of boredom. ‘Shhh,’ he soothed, rubbing the dog’s ears. ‘We shouldn’t be long.’

He heard the engines, echoing up from the valley, before the car swung into view. And swing it did, slewing with churning tyres around the bend and smashing into the embankment with a thud, bouncing the back of the vehicle violently onto the uncleared road as the engine howled and tyres spun and the BMW 740i shot towards him—

Carter licked his lips and lifted the scope to his eye.

Natasha was coming - and it appeared she was in trouble.

The BMW accelerated madly down the lane—

A black Mercedes spun around the corner, gripping better due to its tyres’ snow chains. It must have been waiting for her, ready to attack the snow; it accelerated down the lane and began to catch the BMW.

Carter sighted smoothly. The cross-hairs crawled up past the Mercedes grille, up the bonnet. He could see five shapes inside the vehicle - large men in dark coats, some with dark glasses. One window was down, allowing snow to blow inside the car - a gun appeared and began firing—

The
cracks
echoed up into the woods.

Carter trained on the driver; the Merc slewed left and right and Carter cursed, the figures inside the car bobbing madly, unsteady targets—

He breathed out. Squeezed the trigger.

The report was deafening to his ears, the stock punched his shoulder with a kick, and he saw the windscreen shatter like a crazy spider’s web; the bullet missed the driver and took one of the rear passengers in the chest, merging his body and blood with the Merc’s seat. With a scream of gears and engine, the Merc swerved left, smashing into the embankment and then righting itself; the front bumper was torn free, was crushed under the frantically spinning wheels—

The lane - and Carter’s killing ground - was running out.

‘Fuck it,’ snarled Carter.

He flicked the rifle to automatic and squeezed off a four-round burst. Bullets slapped up the bonnet. Another four rounds, and the windscreen caved in and the car veered again—

Carter was not there to see it. He left the rifle in the snow and sprinted for the house and the turning circle in front of the steps. Arms pumping, he heard the Mercedes pass on the roadway below him, engine whining, more gunshots ricocheting. The huge Mercedes flashed from view and Carter ground his teeth, pushing himself through the snow, the Browning HiPower in his hand, sweat stinging his brows—

More gunshots rang out from up ahead.

Carter pounded across the ridge and the world opened up ahead of him, backed by mountains and a picturesque view of falling snow, an idyllic romantic scene punctuated with the harsh full stop of—

Violence.

Natasha had swung the BMW around to form a barricade behind which she crouched, gun out and resting over the raised boot.

As Carter appeared, the Mercedes howled straight towards the BMW; Natasha dived out of the way with a yelp as the two cars collided amidst tearing noises of screaming steel and metallic crunching; the BMW was ploughed into the front of Carter’s house, buckled and broken, one of the windows shattering; the Merc’s doors were opening even as the collision took place and men tumbled from the vehicle, automatics and sub-machine guns drawn—

Natasha rolled to her feet, firing - in seconds bullets smashed across the space. One of the men was punched from his feet with a bullet in his cheek, ripping his face apart and dropping him in a flurry of blood.

A line of bullets scythed across the trees, drilled across the clearing—

Three smacked into the embankment behind Natasha in quick succession, their impact making dull slaps in earth.

The fourth bullet smashed into Natasha, puncturing her flesh and flipping her backwards, up and over diagonally, legs kicking out. She landed in a crumpled heap, wedged against the embankment, face to the ground, legs propped up and twisted against tree roots and icicles.

‘No!’ screamed Carter.

H
eadquarters to the Spiral mainframes; a massive, awesome collection of machinery used to coordinate worldwide Spiral affairs, from DemolSquads to financial deals, from the buying and selling of land, weapons and military hardware to the masterminding of Wall Street economics. Battles had been and were commanded from Spiral_H. The Battle of Belsen. The Attack on Poland Ridge. The transport of festering tanker-borne bodies to Siberia after the Grey Death ...

Those who knew of Spiral, or who worked for Spiral, would often wonder about finance: how had this organisation become so big? And how did it fund such huge worldwide schemes and plans?

There were no simple answers. Spiral had fingers in many pies - Spiral had the controlling shares of a thousand financial institutions, owned a myriad of businesses from rubber plantations to petroleum refineries. If there was money to be made - good money - then Spiral would be in some way involved.

Spiral_H could not be seen from the air; it burrowed under the ground, a massive 500-metre-wide shaft that had been sliced vertically from the rock and layers of the world. Above Spiral_H were rows of shops, houses; normal London streets made less normal after the vicious and bloody London Riots ... but delving deeper, below the tarmac, below the howling traffic, below the bustling shoppers and camera-touting tourists and gun-bristling JT8s, below the subways and underpasses and below the insanely heavily guarded London Underground ... Spiral_H
existed
...

Deep deep down: an underground base, an underground world.

The entrances were masked; hidden; only the elite few who knew of Spiral knew of the access points. One entrance was a wide rotating glass door leading into an insurance company’s single-storey complex. On this particular morning, the door spun slowly to reveal a beautiful young woman. She was smiling as she emerged, her expensive suit crisp and clean and neatly pressed, her security badge masking an extremely high-tech access tool to grant her passage to Spiral’s underground HQ.

She glanced up at the gathering clouds, watched by a group of armed policemen at the corner of the street, their eyes admiring her long legs and polished make-up.

Her gloved hand reached up, touched momentarily at her gleaming red lips.

And then she was gone—

Replaced by a ball of gas and flame that roared from below the level of the land, smashed up into the heavens screaming so loud that it was beyond aural appreciation; as in the aftershock of a nuclear explosion, the houses and shops and buildings were disintegrated in an instant, were stomped kicked smashed up and out and down into oblivion. Steel and concrete and glass and disintegrated rooms and furniture and computers were pulped and pulverised and the occupants of the buildings and houses and
below the ground
the heart of Spiral, its core, its soul -all were vaporised in an instant as explosives smashed and fucked and stomped all shape and mass from a wide slice of the world ...

Dust billowed up in a huge cloud, a clenched atomic fist of concrete dust with a twisted Tube carriage caught and spinning in its centre, a fist that seemed to gather as if summoning strength, a blossom of disintegration, a bloom of detritus - and then exploded and rolled out in a huge booming concussion wave that encompassed the surrounding broken buildings and rain-smeared landscape...

The explosion could be heard a hundred miles away.

With the dust came a blanket of silence.

Soon the screams could be heard.

And the aftermath took an eternity.

Feuchter lay on a beach of black sand, dark waves of pain washing over him like the waves of the ocean. In fact, he could hear the sea; struggling, he forced his head to the right and could see crests of gleaming white foam on the black waters. Feuchter groaned, his whole frame shuddering. He forced up his head, gazed down at himself. He was naked - a hole, a crusted bloody eye, marked a bullet entry low down in his belly.

What happened? he thought sombrely.

And then the words; the words drifted to him as if from a million miles away, buzzing insect noises in his brain, merging with the sounds of the sea, hissing and rolling, surging and slithering across the sand—

— He must be in great pain ...

— We have removed the bullet, but there are still pieces of metal lodged inside; the bullet shattered on entry, bits of metal scything out in all directions. This man should be dead, I am amazed we’re looking down at him in a bed and not in a coffin...