Shredder (20 page)

I remembered the first time I saw McGovern kill someone. “Don't mess about, don't make speeches,” he'd said. “Just do it.” And he was doing it now, while I looked on, as useless as a shop-window mannequin.

Steve started to sag; his knees were going. With all the strength he had left he wrestled his right wrist free and brought his gun up in his father's face and
fired a shot, but at the very last second McGovern tilted his head, so the bullet just nicked his ear and shattered the glass wall behind. The pane fell to shards in a discordant clatter that was all too familiar now, and under that racket I heard a tiny
crunch
, of Steve's windpipe collapsing, and his eyes bulged from his purple face. His arm dropped and the gun dropped and his whole body deflated.

His father released his grip and Steve fell in a heap, while shouts and running feet from the hallway downstairs told us the Russians were coming back. McGovern stared down at the crumpled heap that had been his son and I couldn't tell what he was thinking. Last time he'd killed someone in front of me, he'd held a gun to my head until I'd convinced him I wouldn't tell anyone what I'd witnessed. This time he seemed so appalled—at what he'd learned, or what he'd done—it was like my presence didn't matter one way or the other. Pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket, he held it to his bleeding ear, then checked the bloodstains to see how badly he'd been hurt. His shoulder was soaked in red, but the bleeding was already stopping; he was probably in more pain from the powder burns to his face than from the wound.

It was Longhair and Baldy who burst back into the room, holding machine pistols. Taking in the scene, Longhair cursed under his breath and barked an order in Russian to Baldy, who turned and hurried out again, presumably to fetch someone.

McGovern stooped, picked up Steve's pistol and checked the action. I tensed, wondering if I would be quick enough to dodge when he turned the gun on me, but instead he stood up and tucked it into his waistband at the small of his back.

“He didn't speak to me for years,” said McGovern abruptly, without looking at me. “After I left his mum. After she died he comes back. Said all that was in the past, we were family.” He rubbed his hand down his face, held it over his mouth. “I tried to help him. He wasn't the brightest kid in the world, but…” He turned to me with a crooked, wry grin, tinged with something that looked like shame. “It's like whatsisname, innit? Oedipus. Wanted to screw his mum, kill his dad. I knew it, I knew he still hated me, deep down. Just didn't want to see it.”

Longhair was watching both of us calmly, his gun hanging loosely in his hand, pointed at the floor. I didn't know how much he understood. Come to that, I didn't know how much
I
understood. Longhair
looked relaxed, but I noticed his finger was stroking the trigger, and I suddenly wondered which of us he saw as the threat. McGovern was oblivious. He stared down at Steve, blinking rapidly. “He was a great kid,” he said, his voice suddenly hoarse. “A real rascal.” He blinked. “It was me who screwed up. Some dad, eh?”

Did he expect me to argue? He was standing over the strangled corpse of his firstborn son. But I felt compelled to say something. “Kelly's a good kid,” I said. “And Bonnie. It's not too late.”

“You think?” said McGovern, and his cold gray eyes settled on Longhair, still standing there with his pistol swinging free. Was the Guvnor asking me for reassurance, or…? There were more footsteps on the staircase outside, slow and steady ones, and when I saw Longhair stiffen and straighten up I knew who he had sent Baldy to find.

Through the glass door I saw Dimitri's white-haired head appear, one step at a time. Today he wore a lemon-yellow shirt with glinting crystal cuff links. As before, it was unbuttoned to the chest, where his gold medallion glinted from a nest of bristly gray hair. I didn't see any diamond in his teeth this time, because he wasn't smiling; his lips were
pursed tight. He pushed the door open and stood in the doorway, taking in the scene.

“I found our mole,” said McGovern. “We need to change the plans. He'll have told Karakurt everything.”

Dimitri sighed and nodded, sucking his teeth. “Then house too is compromised,” he said. “We move.”

That seemed obvious to me, but McGovern was silent a moment as if he was thinking something through. “The warehouse,” he said.

Dimitri looked at me.

“I should go,” I said.

“Too late for that,” said McGovern. His next words were directed at Dimitri. “We need to sort out this piece of shit as well.” He nodded at me. “He's been with the Turk from the start.”

My stomach dived and twisted.

“That's not true,” I said. “I came here to help.” I tried to keep my voice as calm and steady as I could—the shriller I got and the more defensive I sounded, the less they'd believe me. Steve's voice had climbed an octave before his dad had grabbed his throat. But when Dimitri looked at me and shrugged, I knew it would make no difference what I said or how I pitched it.

“Not in here,” grunted Dimitri. “Outside.”

Was he worried about his white rug? Did he want to save his men the effort of lugging my corpse out of the house? No, I realized. If they were abandoning this place, they wouldn't want to leave bloodstains and DNA behind. The delay might offer me a few precious seconds—what if I grabbed Dimitri as a shield? I'd heard machine pistols sprayed bullets in all directions…but how would I get out of this house, or clear of this place, dragging an uncooperative old man?

In the time it took me to think about this and not come to any conclusion, Longhair had stepped forward and grabbed my arm, hauling me towards the door. Yes—I'd let them take me outside, then I'd run. There was no way any of these chain-smokers would catch up with me, and they wouldn't dare to start blasting away in the open—the noise of their guns would carry for miles, and nobody would mistake the racket for a car backfiring.

As Longhair marched me down the stairs the house was already bustling with activity. Some of the guys I'd seen patrolling earlier were packing weapons into black duffel bags, while others ran upstairs past me carrying what looked like a body bag: I wondered idly how many of those they kept
in stock. The interior was no longer gloomy—the high ceilings were lined with halogens that flooded the room in a wash of cold, stark light, because night was falling.

Outside three Mercedes sedans had pulled up in a line before the front door, headlights burning. Bags were thrown in the trunk, and though the evening was warm, Baldy brought Dimitri a camel-hair coat and helped him shrug it on, as tenderly as a young mum dressing her toddler for nursery. I flexed the muscles in my legs, checking for a gap in their lines, waiting for the moment when Longhair's attention would be distracted. When I noticed the short guy standing off to my right carrying what looked like a hunting rifle, my heart sank. One shot from that wouldn't draw anyone's attention, even out here in the suburbs—and one shot was all it would take.

That decided it; I'd run straight at that guy and take him down before he had a chance to open fire. I wouldn't grab the rifle, but keep running—by the time someone else picked it up, I'd be two hundred meters away in the dark. And it was getting darker all the time.

McGovern emerged, shrugging on a lightweight blazer over his bloodstained shirt, and he didn't
even throw me a glance. Coolly he tugged out his shirtsleeves and tripped down the steps to the first Merc in line, heading for the rear passenger seat, but the Russian waiting to open the door—a guy of around twenty, with black teeth and pitted cheeks—shook his head.

“You sit front,” he said. “Boss in back.”

McGovern shrugged, and Black Teeth opened the front passenger door for him. Now McGovern turned to me, with a sardonic grin. Too late I remembered Amobi's warning about how the Guvnor could turn on anyone, even people who'd thought they were his friends. “Ta-ta, Crusher,” he said. “Thanks for trying, eh?” What the hell was that supposed to mean?

From the corner of my eye I watched the short guy with the hunting rifle. He was facing the line of cars, his weapon poised and ready for action, but when the cars moved off he'd be watching them, not me. I tensed my muscles, ready to let rip. Black Teeth shut McGovern's door and stood back. There was a brief pause, as if everyone there was waiting for a signal from Dimitri, but he said nothing—he just fished in his breast pocket to check he had brought his glasses. I needed a distraction, and I was running out of time.

But something was happening, in the Guvnor's car. There'd been a swift, shadowy movement from the rear seat, and now McGovern was pulled back hard against his headrest, clutching at his throat. Through the glass I saw him shudder, and writhe, and kick—he pulled his foot clear of the footwell and braced it against the dashboard, trying to push his seat back, but it was useless. At first I couldn't comprehend what I was seeing, but eventually I understood: the Guvnor was being garrotted, and all the people he'd counted on as friends and allies were standing around watching, waiting for the end. His agony seemed to go on forever, and in the gathering dusk I even thought I could hear the last of McGovern's breath hissing through his nostrils as he fought for life. The whole car shook and bounced on its springs as the Guvnor thrashed and writhed and fought for life, and then abruptly, all movement stopped.

A few moments of stillness later the shadowy figure in the backseat slid out of sight again, and the Russian crew relaxed and turned to light each other new cigarettes. With a hum and a rustle of gravel under its wheels the front Merc moved off, carrying the Guvnor's wilted body away to God knew where.

That had been the moment to run, I realized, just then, while everyone was calmly watching the execution of the man who had once been the most feared gangster in Europe. But I had missed it—I had frozen in shock and disbelief, and now it was too late. I waited for Longhair to push me towards the second Merc, but first Dimitri turned to me.

“You work for Karakurt, yes?” he said.

I looked at him. I didn't know which answer would save me, so I gave him no answer.

He nodded, as if my silence had confirmed something. “Tell your boss we have deal,” said Dimitri. And turning, he walked slowly back into the house, Baldy shadowing his steps, watching the old man's feet in case he tripped.

“They killed him?” asked Zoe.

“He knew what was going to happen as soon as they told him to sit in the front of the car.”

We were lying together in the big brass bed. We'd kicked off the fancy lace counterpane and the white embroidered cushions, and they lay discarded on the floor, taking up the little space that was left between the bed and the walls. Longhair had dropped me at the nearest tube station and driven off without looking back, and I was so shocked and sickened and blindsided by everything that had happened I had barely registered the journey back to Richmond. When Zoe opened the door she'd tried to ask a question, but I'd piled in like a landslide, slammed the door behind me and grabbed her. We didn't even make it up the stairs the first time. She sensed my desperation and my need—she'd have to have been
carved from marble not to—and asked nothing more, until an hour or so later, when we lay tangled together, half covered by a damp and rumpled sheet. Then I told her everything that had happened since I'd left that afternoon.

“Sounds like he knew before that,” said Zoe. “That he'd lost, that it was only a matter of time. When he told the Russians you were working for the Turk, it was so they wouldn't kill you too.”

“But why did he even care?” I said.

“Because he liked you? Because you were the only one there who hadn't betrayed him?”

“I can't believe Steve sold him out,” I said.

“Not every child loves their dad as much as you did, Finn.” She spoke gently, trying not to sound superior, but I knew she was talking from experience. “You said McGovern left Steve's mum, for that younger woman, Cherry? Steve probably felt like his dad had walked out on him too. He probably hated the Guvnor's new kids.”

“Yeah…Karakurt must have found that out, and used it.”

“Just think, all these years, the cops and SOCA have been trying to nail the Guvnor,” said Zoe. “And the Turk took him down in, what? A fortnight?”

“Blitzkrieg,” I said. “You hit your opponent so hard and so fast they have no time to work out what's happening or how to hit back. And you buy off their friends with a promise of peace, and a big cut of the proceeds.”

“And always have someone on the inside.”

“Funny,” I said. “The Turk probably learned all that off McGovern. That's what he used to do, back in the 1990s, to anyone who got in his way. It's how he got to be the Guvnor.”

“He got old,” said Zoe.

“He got married,” I said. “He had kids. That's what makes you weak. Loving someone.”

There was a short silence, and I wondered if I'd said the wrong thing.

“Do I make you weak?” said Zoe.

“Every time I look at you,” I said, and I rolled over on top of her. She giggled, and slid her arms round my neck. She didn't make me weak everywhere.

The night was silent, except for the sound of Zoe's soft breathing. The riots had been snuffed out in thirty-six hours; the cops must have been stung last time by all those critics who'd wondered—from the comfort of their armchairs—why the Met had stood
by and watched London burn instead of piling in and cracking heads. This time round they hadn't made the same mistake. In the early hours of that morning I heard no more sirens—well, just one or two, a reassuringly normal number.

Except I wasn't reassured. The Turk had won his war, and the authorities had helped him by getting the police and the NCA to back off. Of course, if anyone accused them of taking sides, government ministers would deny it and call it an outrageous slur, and there'd be no written evidence to prove they were lying. And as long as the Turk helped them catch terrorists, and kept a low profile, the establishment would happily let him run the UK's crime network. Why not? Every other British industry had been taken over by foreign corporations.

But to the Turk, Zoe and I weren't just a loose end. I'd brought about the death of Kemal, who'd been the nearest thing the Turk had to a friend. I knew a gang leader once who'd had a favorite pit bull terrier, and I recalled how he'd wept when his dog was mauled in a fight, and what he'd done to the owner of the other dog…that guy was now in a care home somewhere, being fed pap with a spoon.

The laptop
. I'd forgotten all about it. I must have
gasped when I remembered it, because Zoe stirred, as if she hadn't been asleep at all, but just dozing.

“Hmm?” she said.

“I meant to ask,” I said. “How's the hacking going?”

“Oh, shit,” she groaned. “I didn't tell you.”

“You wiped the hard drive?”

“
I
didn't wipe it. It was an automated security routine.”

I was sitting naked at the tiny kitchen table, staring at the Turk's sleek laptop, stabbing the power button like an idiot. Nothing happened; the machine was dead. I checked the power flex—the indicator light was on, so power was going in…but nothing was coming out.

“The Turk must have used a dongle,” said Zoe.

“A what?”

“Like a memory stick—it slots into a port, and when you log in it asks for a code from the user. If you enter the wrong code, or the dongle's missing, a program in the memory starts to format the hard drive. And this one's SSD—solid state—so it happened really fast.” She was leaning against the sink with her arms folded, angry at failing, but defiant too because she'd tried every trick she knew. She
was wearing her aunt's gold kimono, which looked good on her; I was uncomfortably aware of my bare bottom sticking to the vinyl of my chair.

“But you can recover data from a formatted drive, you told me, you've done it before—”

“Usually, yes, but it zeroed all the sectors—” Her shoulders drooped, and she gave up explaining. “I'm sorry, Finn, I got nothing. Just a few fragments from the cache before the power died.”

“What sort of fragments?”

Back in the bedroom she flipped open the laptop she'd taken from her aunt's safe, logged in and double-clicked a file on the desktop. A bright square of blue appeared, daubed with blocks of white text. I squinted, trying to make sense of it, but as usual the letters swam and shuffled as I looked at them, like hyperactive kids running amok in a playground.

“You know I'm dyslexic,” I said. “I can't make head or tail of this.”

“Nobody can, Finn,” sighed Zoe. “It's a memory dump in hexadecimal. It could be part of a photograph, or an MP3, or a program—anything. I've got dozens of these but there's nothing I can do with them.”

“What if it was just text?” I said.

“It could be, yeah, but there's no way of knowing.”

“All right, so if it is a photo or a program we're screwed. But why not try to open it anyway? With a word-processing program, or something.”

“It would just come out as garbage. The header's probably missing.”

“Probably? So you haven't tried?”

She glared at me, and I wasn't sure which irritated her more, my stupidity or my stubbornness. Clambering across the bed, she pulled the laptop away from me and propped herself up against the brass frame, tapping away at the keyboard. Her eyes flickered as she concentrated, slid one finger along the touchpad, and double-clicked. For just a moment she looked hopeful; then she signed in exasperation and tossed the machine back towards me.

“Garbage,” she said. “Told you.”

I pulled the laptop round so I could look at the screen. Now the characters were black on white, but they were still in garbled blocks: the whole thing looked like a picture a toddler might make if you offered them a stick of glue and a pot of spider's legs. Zoe was right; this was hopeless. “It might as well be in Arabic,” I said.

Zoe stared at me. “Which part of Turkey is he from, do you know?” she said. “Karakurt?”

“McGovern thought he was Kurdish,” I said. “The bit next door to Russia. But that might have been bullshit.”

Zoe dived forward and snatched the laptop back. Tapped on the keys again, slid and clicked. This time her eyes widened and her mouth fell open.

“Shit,” she said. “I was using the wrong character set. Fifty-one twenty-nine…?”

“What?” I said.

She showed me the screen. Now the text was in orderly paragraphs, and I could almost make out some words—except the letters weren't any shape I recognized. The
N
s were backwards and the
O
s had bars across them so they looked like 8s. I checked, twice: it definitely wasn't just me.

“I'm an idiot,” said Zoe. “I didn't try Cyrillic.”

“You can read this?” I said.

“No, you pillock. But I can read this.” She pointed to the middle of one line, where I saw a row of figures:
51°29:915″ 0°20:188.″

“What the hell does that mean?” I said.

“I think they're map coordinates,” said Zoe.

Night was falling again by the time I left the house; I needed darkness for what I had in mind. Zoe was still on the laptop. She'd spent most of her day at it—she thought that fragment we'd decoded might offer a clue to decoding the rest, but we must have been lucky the first time, because none of the others seemed to be text documents.

While she worried away at the task like a dog working marrow from a bone, I caught up on some urgent sleeping. Around midday I got up and ransacked the cupboards to see what I could use or we could eat, and managed to knock us up a meal of rice and tomatoes and artichokes that was almost edible. Neither of us wanted to leave just to go shopping for groceries, in case our presence was noticed by the neighbors. In a London street like this it was quite possible that none of the inhabitants knew each other well enough even to exchange hellos if they happened to pass on the pavement, but it seemed wiser not to take the risk.

After we ate I persuaded Zoe to take a nap with me, which didn't involve much sleeping. We had no idea what lay ahead, and we knew the Turk and his people were probably looking for us, and that the cops might well be looking for me; but for a few
hours in that little house we were safe and secluded and we were together, and that was all we wanted or needed.

I dressed soon after it got dark. She saw me to the door; we kissed goodbye quickly, she wished me good luck in a whisper, and she shut the door softly behind me. I walked briskly down the street, my head high as if I belonged there, but with my hood pulled up all the same to hide my face; at the end I turned west towards the river and the towpath and started to run.

The towpath wasn't the straightest route—the river curved and kinked back on itself in places—but it was the least conspicuous, and I fitted in with the other runners pounding along in the dark—almost all of them men, it had to be said. Few women felt comfortable along the river because woods and bushes grew so thickly, and so many stretches were unlit that at times it felt as creepy and menacing as London must have been two hundred years ago, when every shadowy alley teemed with tarts and muggers and the Thames at the Tower of London yielded a nightly harvest of corpses.

A few sprinters overtook me, and I let them—I wasn't there to compete and I knew I'd overtake
them again anyway a few minutes later, when their pace flagged. It was about two miles to the junction with the canal, and from there another mile north along the towpath before I'd reach my destination. I cleared my mind and just ran, hard and steady. No point in worrying what I'd do when I got there, until I got there.

Near its junction with the Thames the canal was a mass of chic new waterside apartments overlooking picturesque lines of narrowboats moored semi-permanently. The barges glowed from within; they looked as cozy and warm and welcoming as the house where I'd left Zoe, and I had to block those thoughts from my head and keep running north. Very soon the lights and the life faded away behind me, and the sleek granite paving of the waterfront gave way to the crumbling potholed tarmac of the old towpath. There were no designer apartments anymore, and few narrowboats; one white shape in the water turned out to be an old motor launch that had sunk, and now lay rotting and abandoned, three-quarters submerged in four meters of murky water. There were occasional patches of pinkish-yellow sodium light from the road that ran parallel to the canal, but soon even they died out, and the
only light was the glow of London itself to the east, reflected off high thin clouds. Plenty of stars, but no moon yet; another lucky stroke of timing.

When I came to an arched, narrow iron bridge I knew I was nearing my destination. Zoe and I had entered the coordinates into an online map and even reconnoitered the place online by clicking through to a street-level view, though half the images were obscured by passing trucks. There had been no pictures covering the side I was coming from, but that was an advantage; it was pitch-dark back here, and there would be no traffic to betray my approach.

The only building at those coordinates was an old industrial unit, standing by itself in the middle of a tarmac yard surrounded by chain-link fencing topped by barbed wire. The unit's rear perimeter backed onto the canal, about ten meters from the water itself. Between the canal and the fence was a sloping bank overgrown with butterfly bushes, sycamore saplings and brambles. Not so long ago these banks had been regularly trimmed, but then whoever ran the canals decided to let it grow unchecked—as a resource for wildlife, they said, but everyone knew it was to save money. As I ducked down and fought my way on hands and knees into the undergrowth,
the only wildlife I encountered was slugs between my fingers, and a stink of foxes so strong it made my eyes water.

I didn't know what the Turk was keeping in that place. Maybe more sex slaves? I knew one of his operations involved trafficking girls in from Europe—that beating the other week from Kemal and his pals had been payback for telling the police about their last warehouse—but somehow that didn't seem likely. The other place had been a mansion miles from anywhere with plenty of rooms; this was a crumbling industrial unit, surrounded by other industrial units. Too many witnesses would have noticed women being dragged in and out in chains, and whatever foreigners might think, the English are not so obsessed with privacy they'd ignore something like that. Then again, maybe his crew drove the cargo in and out in vans? I'd seen that before too. Whatever was in there, the Turk had gone to a lot of trouble to hide it by installing a self-destruct routine on the laptop, and risking the wrath of a mob to carry the machine with him out of a riot. If this place meant that much to him, I had to know what it was.