The Killing Club (22 page)

‘You’re bloody … kidding.’

‘Come on, man! For God’s sake, they could be on us in seconds …’

‘You go …’ Quinnell inclined his head right, which action seemed to stretch open the glistening wound on his neck – it yawned, fresh blood trickling out. His attempted lazy smile became an agonised grimace. ‘You go …’

‘You think I’m going to leave you?’

‘It’s you … you they want … isn’t it?’

This had already occurred to Heck, but the Nice Guys didn’t have much of a live-and-let-live policy where witnesses were concerned. ‘Just get your arse up, you bloody lazy Welshman … imagine you’ve been clouted by some plug-ugly English wing-forward. How’d you feel about that?’

Quinnell grinned again, but his eyes had closed. ‘That’s … fighting talk …’

Heck had lost his radio; he had his mobile, but how long would it take to place a call, much less get someone to answer? Instead, he reached down, freed Quinnell’s seatbelt, grabbed him under the right arm and around the back, and cantilevered him up and out of the vehicle.

‘Owww … shit! Sarge … that’s killing me … and it’s wet …’ At six-three and seventeen stone, the bulk of it bone and muscle, the casualty slumped to his knees and then over onto his side, and there was nothing much Heck could do about it.

‘Scared of a bit of rain?’ Heck scoffed. ‘They don’t build you men of Harlech like they used to!’

Quinnell lay flat on the cobbles, sinking into unconsciousness again. Even in the downpour, he was drenched head to foot with blood. ‘Leave me … you go …’

‘Yeah!’ Heck said. Like he was just going to abandon a guy who he’d gone through so many doors with, who he’d burrowed through so much paperwork alongside, who he’d shared more than a few whiskey breakfasts with after coming off a difficult night-turn. The problem was that Heck could hardly carry Quinnell away. He doubted he could
drag
him and expect to stay ahead of their pursuers.

Quinnell’s head dropped to one side, mouth agape.

For a second the breath froze in Heck’s lungs. He fell to his knees, feeling at the undamaged side of Quinnell’s throat. A faint pulse denoted the carotid. Placing a flat palm to the mouth, he felt the breeze of a breath. It was weak and shallow, but at least it was there – yet now there was another problem. Heck heard the approaching growl of an engine, and the howl of tyres as they were rent to shreds taking corners they’d never been designed for. The bastards were still on the hunt. He glanced across the alley at the mountain of rubbish bags.

It wasn’t a nice thought, but there wasn’t much else for it.

Taking Quinnell by the collar, he lugged him around the front of the vehicle. There was another squeal of tyres. It was difficult to place the direction it had come from. With a grunt, he laid his burden down alongside the rubbish. The meandering, gory trail behind was already washing away. That was the good news; the bad news was that blood was still flowing. Heck crouched and yanked open Quinnell’s sodden shirt. Underneath, the right-hand side of the ribcage had all but collapsed, as though clobbered with a mallet. It was black and blue, and in the middle of it there was a clean, coin-sized hole from which blood was throbbing.

‘Shit, Gary,’ Heck said, glancing over his shoulder as gears screeched again. By the sounds of it, they were sweeping the entire district.

He fumbled in his pockets, locating a wadded handkerchief. It wasn’t fresh, but it was as clean as they could hope for. He twisted it around and poked it into the wound, before stripping off his own and Quinnell’s neckties and knotting them together into a single binding, which he swathed around the injured torso. Then he stood up and backed away. The rain was still teeming, hammering the Subaru’s mangled hull.

One by one, he lifted down the rubbish bags, and piled them over the prone figure. He’d all but finished burying the Welshman under a makeshift cairn, when an engine yowled again, this time
very
close. More bodywork was ravaged as it turned a sharp corner. A rising rumble drew steadily closer. Heck spun his attention to the right-hand passage, the one half-blocked by the skip. He dashed forward and glanced into it – and saw the red Alfa Romeo proceeding towards him at speed, crashing through boxes, slewing over a discarded mattress.

He turned and checked the left-hand route. It led fifty yards between sheer brick walls, before turning at a right-angle. Possibly it connected with the main road beyond that. He didn’t know, but there was no time to try and get the Subaru started. Besides, anything to draw the bastards away from Quinnell.

Heck took the left path, running for all he was worth. Behind him, the Romeo shrieked to a halt as it approached the skip. Doors thundered open.

The alley was ankle-deep in slimy water. He blundered and slipped as he raced along it and around the corner – only to find another passage, this one filled with rubbish, bricks and collapsed pipe-work from overhead. The massive skeletal remnant of a fallen fire-escape blocked off most of it. As he scrambled around and over these obstacles, shouts rang out behind him. That was when he saw that this second alley didn’t lead to a main road, but to a steel mesh fence maybe eighteen feet in height.

He charged on, knowing he wouldn’t be able to climb the fence – not in time. But just in front of it there was a door in the left-hand wall. It was featureless and had no handle, but he cast around, spying a broken strut hanging loose from the upper section of fire-escape. It flaked in his hands, but was still stiff, still heavy. If this wouldn’t serve as a pry-bar, nothing would. He jammed the strut into the gap on the left side of the door, and used a brick to bang it in several inches. Movement flickered in the corner of his eye. He glanced around. A masked figure in khaki had come into view at the end of the passage.

Heck didn’t look to see more, though he sensed other figures appearing – and a communal raising of firearms.

With manic grunts, he slammed the brick against the base of the bar, and from somewhere inside heard the
clunk
of a rusty mechanism fracturing. He threw his weight sideways against the bar, and the door broke open. With a strobe-like glare and cacophony of submachine-gun fire, shells clattered through the fire-escape, but Heck was already in the building, stumbling along a dank, black passage.

Faint exterior light spilled ahead through swirls of ochre dust, but didn’t prevent him toppling down the first flight of stairs he came to, tumbling over bare wooden treads, at last slamming into yet another door, which burst open on impact. Heck clambered to his feet, coughing and wafting at the rancid dust. Only the faintest trace of light penetrated down to this point, but it was adequate to show a wide, square room. Its floor was thick with greenish grime, but slippery. He fell again, his leather-soled shoes scraping away sufficient scum to expose yellow floor tiles. High on the wall facing him, a notice swam into view.

Assembly Area 2

Fleetingly, he wondered if he might have blundered into an old air raid shelter, but just as quickly dismissed the notion. More likely it was an old fire-evacuation chamber. These ruminations were shattered when he heard voices echoing down the stairway behind him. There was a tall, arched opening on his right. It was broad enough for two men to pass through, but led into inky blackness.

Again, Heck had no choice. He ventured forward into its depths.

Chapter 17

‘Fuck, mate … there were two of them,’ Brad Perkins said, hefting his TAR-21 and strapping a flashlight to the side of its barrel with duct tape.

He was a burly, broad-chested Queenslander, formerly of the Australian SAS. His rain-soaked denim jacket threatened to burst apart, it was so crammed with muscle. Now that he and the other two were in the privacy of the disused basement, he’d ripped off his ski-mask, to reveal a bull-neck, tanned, granite features, blue eyes and brown hair shaved in a stiff buzz-cut.

‘You sure?’ asked Shaun Cullen. He wasn’t as broadly built as Perkins, but was at least a couple of inches taller. He too had removed his ski-mask. His reddish beard, moustache and sweaty mop of long hair gave him a country boy air, yet his accent was solid Boston Irish, while his combat fatigues and the SIG-Sauer MX slung at his side proclaimed that anything he knew of the wilderness he owed to the US military, specifically the Navy SEALS.

Perkins nodded. ‘The other one must be back in the car.’

Cullen turned to the third member of the trio. ‘What is this place, Bruno?’

Bruno, real name Leon Fairbrother, was at least as strongly built as either of the others, and though of West Indian descent, he was a Hackney boy born and bred. His reputation as a fighter had extended from the mean streets of his youth into the Grenadier Guards, where he earned his nickname through his physical similarity to the former heavyweight champ. Bruno shrugged as he too taped a torch to his weapon, in his case a Sterling Mk. 5. ‘Tube, mate.’

‘Which station?’

‘Dunno. Feels derelict, but that should help us. One way in, one way out.’

‘Okay.’ Cullen pondered quickly. ‘Work your way through. Perk, take your lead from Bruno. Whatever it takes, find him. You know the RP?’

They nodded.

‘Good luck.’ Cullen scarpered back up the stairs. ‘I’ll find the other one.’

All Gary Quinnell knew when he came around was pain – and that he was drowning.

His aching body was ice-cold, but the heavy, waterlogged plastic slumped across his face was the main problem, not to mention the fluid trickling down his nostrils. He coughed and tried shifting to one side, but even small movements agonised him, his ribs in particular. It took several laborious efforts to shove a clutter of sodden, bulky objects off the top of him.

Initially, nothing made sense: the rain, the cobbles, the rubbish bags, pain and sickness akin to shattered bone and punctured inner organs.

And then it all came back – in a migraine-inducing wave of intense horror.

The Nice Guys, Heck …

Quinnell craned his neck to look up. There was no one in sight now. His Subaru stood alongside him, though even from this low angle it looked as if it had been through a wrecking machine.

‘B … bastards,’ he stuttered, the interior of his mouth filled with sludge. He spat out wads of clotted, purple blood. ‘Bastards …’

Slowly and dizzily, he dragged himself up – first into a sitting position, and then to his feet, but only by hooking his fingers into the bullet holes in the flank of his vehicle. The world swayed and tilted as he leaned against the car. He glanced down at his open shirt; much of his blood had congealed, but fresh streams seeped from a crimson rag bound to the side of his deeply bruised ribs.

‘Heck,’ he breathed again.

From somewhere nearby, he heard a banging and clanging – like someone clambering through rubbish.

‘Shit,’ he mumbled. ‘Oh … shit.’

Step after delicate step, he made his way around the front of the Subaru. At any second he thought he’d slip to his knees. But another clatter, another piece of rubbish being kicked over, goaded him to greater efforts. With breaths sounding like the rasping of a saw, and indeed feeling like rusty metal teeth chewing at the innards of his chest, Quinnell reached the other side of the car, bent down and slid himself through the open driver’s door.

He usually kept his mobile on a shelf under the dashboard. It puzzled him that it wasn’t there, but then he spotted it lying in the passenger side foot-well. He’d just reached feebly down for it when he glimpsed a red-bearded man emerge from the T-junction’s left-hand passage. Thanks to the shattered windshield, Red Beard didn’t glimpse him back – not immediately. Quinnell kept low, watching through blurred eyes as the menacing figure came forward, hefting a firearm under his unzipped khaki jacket, and halted five yards short of the Subaru, staring at the ground.

It was obvious what he was looking at: the blood-trail Quinnell had left coming back from the rubbish bags. Unlike the evidence of his outward journey, this would not yet have washed away. Even so, it took Red Beard several seconds, his eyes swivelling back and forth, to realise what he was seeing. As he glanced up, pulling a submachine gun from under his khaki, the Welshman turned the key and hit the gas.

He hadn’t been sure if the damaged Subaru would respond, but it leapt forward, smashing headlong into the gunman, its front fender impacting his knees with a bone-rending
crunch!
Red Beard slammed bodily onto the bonnet and was hurled backwards, his weapon bouncing across the passage to lie in a puddle some five feet from the driver’s door. Though all the pain in the world filled his body, his vision again darkening, Quinnell flopped out onto the cobbles. That impact alone almost killed him, but a sidelong glance at Red Beard, writhing on the floor with hands wrapped around his left knee, gave him new energy.

He got to the SIG-Sauer with time to spare, and swung it towards his target.

Unfortunately, focus was proving elusive as dizziness and nausea threatened to overwhelm him – for a few seconds Quinnell couldn’t even see the guy, but tried to bluff this out, gazing hard along the barrel. ‘Don’t move!’ he shouted.

Red Beard swam greasily into view, posed in a half-crouch, reaching slowly under his khaki, presumably for a second weapon.

‘Don’t fucking do it, boyo!’ Quinnell barked.

Red Beard paused, weighing his options.

‘I … I wouldn’t …’ Quinnell advised, but his voice was wavering, his world spinning, a kaleidoscope of blood, rain and brick.

The yowl of a siren made both of them flinch.

A uniformed patrol vehicle veered into the alley behind the Subaru. Quinnell was just sufficiently distracted by this – he half-glanced around, and Red Beard bolted, limping but still vanishing down the right-hand alley. Quinnell didn’t see him escape, simply heard the harshly whispered comment: ‘Next time, motherfucker!’ followed by the rumble of a car revving quickly away.

A split-second later, two uniforms were running in pursuit. A third, a female, dropped to her knees beside him, and gently attempted to wrest the weapon from his grasp. For no particular reason, Quinnell tried to resist this, but only for a few seconds – before he slid down into total oblivion.