Fightback (12 page)

The Beeches was a smart, well-lit cul-de-sac lined, unsurprisingly, with beech trees. Kier could tell by the high walls and the size of the houses that this was an expensive area. Unless garages and taxi firms were suddenly doing incredibly well, McIntyre was obviously making his money from other, more lucrative interests.

Kier parked the car behind some roadworks, stood next to a canvas workmen's shelter and checked his phone for messages. There was only one, a text from Jackson which read:
Update required
.

He deleted it and tried Saskia's number again, but there was still no reply. Slipping the phone back into his pocket, he jogged along the street and checked out the house numbers: 18, 20, 22 …

Number 26 stood right at the end of the cul-de-sac and was, by some margin, the grandest house of them all. Spanning the width of the street, it was fronted by a pair of wrought-iron gates and
surrounded by three-metre-high walls topped off with razor wire and broken glass. Through the gates, Kier could see a gravel drive bisecting neatly cut lawns and sweeping up to the stone pillars of a mock-Tudor mansion. On either side of the house he could just make out several figures dressed in dark clothing. They stood in the shadows, scanning the grounds and making sure that everything was as it should be.

McIntyre, it seemed, was not a man who liked visitors.

Kier moved away from the gates and looked around. He could see the old stumps of trees that had been deliberately removed from this part of the street and knew he wasn't getting in that way. He stared up at the wire and glass on top of the wall, then ran his fingers over the brickwork searching for some grip. But the surface was too smooth, even for him.

Kier hammered his fist against the wall in frustration. Saskia was here, she had to be. And if McIntyre's employees were anything like the ones at the taxi firm, she was in serious trouble. But there was no way he was getting over that wall any time soon. And he guessed they wouldn't be in a rush to open the gates for him either.

Kier took the phone from his pocket, finger
hovering over the 9. If he called the police now, she might still have a chance. But then he remembered Jackson saying,
Best not to involve them
, and guessed he had his reasons. Besides, a call from some kid on a Pay As You Go would hardly be enough to have them storming the place. Particularly when they found out it was the same kid who'd knocked out one of their officers and stolen one of their police cars.

Kier leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes.

What would Chiang do?

The answer was obvious, of course. Chiang would never have got himself into this mess in the first place.

But as he looked down the street and listened to the breeze rustling the leaves, it reminded him of the sea. He thought of a sun-baked gorge, a silent monastery and the sweetest water he had ever tasted.

We should not let unexpected hardships remove us from the path. If we learn to be patient, to endure, then the things we seek will be sweeter in the end …

Kier opened his eyes.

He took a slow, deep breath.

Then he began to run.

Ten metres from the car, Kier pulled the keys from
his pocket and unlocked the doors, still running. When he reached the car, he wrenched the driver's door open, jumped inside and started the engine. Noticing a book of matches stashed in the cup holder, he hurriedly picked them up and put them in his pocket. If the petrol tank burst, he certainly didn't want them flying around.

Revving the engine, he threw his arm over the seat and reversed back up the road, narrowly missing a small dog that came yapping from the shadows.

When he reached the far end of the road, he stopped and tapped the gear lever into neutral. He wiped his forehead and checked that the pavements were empty.

This was it.

It was now or never.

A sudden knock on the side window made his heart skip a beat and he turned to see an old man waving at him.

‘What?' mouthed Kier, exasperated.

The man was signalling for him to roll down the window. As the glass slid away he asked, ‘Can you take me to Cromwell Street?'

Kier shook his head.

‘Not right now, I'm afraid.'

‘Why not?'

Kier thought for a second.

‘Because this car's going in for repair.'

The old man frowned.

‘It looks all right to me.'

‘Give it a couple minutes,' said Kier.

Then he wound up the window, slotted the gear lever into place and floored the accelerator.

The car leapt forward in a squeal of burning rubber and Kier let the revs build up just the way Frankie had shown him, allowing them to howl all the way to the limit before changing gear and repeating the process. Halfway down the street, with tyres and motor protesting, he changed up again and watched the speedometer hit fifty. As trees and houses shot past in a blur, he kept his foot planted firmly on the accelerator, gripping the steering wheel tightly in both fists and keeping his eyes fixed on the pair of wrought-iron gates ahead.

‘Keep going,' he told himself as the gates rushed towards him. ‘You'll be fine.'

Then the front wheels hit the pavement, the tyres burst and sparks flew from the rims before the front bumper smashed into the gates and the bonnet crumpled, the windscreen splintering in a screech of metal and broken glass. For a moment the world seemed shocked into silence, punctuated only by the hiss of steam from the cracked radiator. Then
Kier noticed some white rubber draped across the steering wheel and realised he had just been punched in the face by an airbag.

Staring through the shattered windscreen he saw that he had not, as he had hoped, broken through the gates. Instead they had buckled inwards and the front of the car was now wedged firmly between them. As if that wasn't bad enough, dark figures were running at full pelt towards him and his plan of creating a diversion while he escaped into the shadows of the garden was in definite need of a rethink.

Kier thumped his shoulder against the buckled driver's door and tumbled out on to the pavement. For a moment he looked at the gap between the gates and thought about trying to squeeze through. Then a big-muscled guy with a baseball bat arrived on the other side and Kier decided against it.

‘Hey!' shouted the man, pointing the bat at Kier. ‘Stay where you are.'

As the man tried to force his way through the gates, Kier struggled to his feet and saw the neighbourhood curtains starting to twitch. He felt bruised and battered, as if he'd been through a tumble-drier full of boulders.

‘I said stay where you are!'

‘Yeah, I heard you,' said Kier, limping away.

Two more men approached the gates and Kier knew he'd blown it. The crash had hurt a lot more than he'd expected and he knew he didn't have the strength to take all three of them on. As the man with the baseball bat squeezed through the gate, he considered just giving in to it all; just letting the world come and do whatever it was going to do.

‘Wait a minute,' said the man. ‘You're that kid, aren't you? The one who's been causing all the trouble.'

Kier shrugged.

‘Probably,' he said, walking further along the wall.

The man thumped the baseball bat into the palm of his hand.

‘Well, how about that? We were just gonna start teaching your little friend a lesson, and then you go and turn up.'

Through his pain, Kier felt a spark of anger crackle in his veins.

‘What little friend?'

‘Oh, don't tell me you don't
know
. I'm talking about your little girlfriend. She's real pretty, ain't she? But she don't say much.' The man smiled. ‘I guess that'll change once me and the boys get started.'

‘Don't touch her,' said Kier, imagining the other
men would already be climbing through the twisted gates. ‘Don't you
dare
touch her.'

‘Oh, I'm sorry,' said the man, ‘are you threatening me? Cos if you are, we can start this right now. How would you like that, huh?'

Kier glanced at the wall and took off his jacket.

‘I think,' he said, ‘I would like that a lot.'

The moment he swung the bat, the man knew something was wrong. The problem was, his mind had become used to the way the world worked. It had become used to the idea of cause and effect, which said that when you swung a baseball bat at a fourteen-year-old kid, the kid went down faster than a henhouse in a hurricane. But in a sudden movement which he couldn't follow or understand, all his ideas got ripped up and blown away; there was a blur, a sharp pain and then he couldn't remember his name or how his legs worked.

As the man fell against the wall, Kier ran up his back and – using his head as a step – threw his jacket over the razor wire and pulled himself up. He watched while the other men squeezed through the gates, then retrieved his jacket and leapt down into the darkness.

Kier could hear the men on the other side of the wall slapping the guy's face and asking him where in hell the boy had gone.

‘I don't know,' the man kept saying. ‘I just don't know.'

Pulling on his jacket and keeping to the shadows, Kier crouched low and ran around the side of the house. He reached a courtyard with a large van parked in it. On the side of the van were the words:
Exotic Entrances Ltd – Doors with a Difference
. The back had been left open and, as he peered inside, Kier could see piles of wooden doors stacked across the width of the van. Each door was decorated with brightly coloured paintings of parrots, vines and exotic flowers.

Weird
, thought Kier.

McIntyre was obviously a man with his fingers in many pies.

Behind him he could hear movement inside the
house and shouts from the front garden. On the far side of the courtyard there was a long brick building with a flat roof. There were blinds on the windows and the place was in darkness. Kier guessed it was a reasonable place to start. But he didn't have much time.

Running across the courtyard, he tried the door but it was locked. Towards the far end, however, he could see a small window that had been left open for ventilation. It wasn't much, but it was enough.

He took off his shoes and socks and felt the cool stone against his feet.

It was good to be barefoot again.

It reminded him of Chiang.

Pulling out the laces, he tied them together and made a loop with a slipknot at one end. Then he climbed on to the ledge, slid his arm through the open window and let the shoelace drop until it was level with the main window catch.

Behind him the voices were getting closer, but Kier took a deep breath and concentrated on allowing his heart rate to slow, calmly moving his hand until the shoelace hooked over the catch and he was able to pull it sharply upwards.

The main window opened inwards and Kier heard something fall and shatter in the darkness. As he lowered himself into the room he became aware
of a sweet, chemical smell which caught the back of his throat, reminding him of the pear drops he used to buy from the corner shop when he was younger.

Reaching into his pocket, Kier pulled out his phone and switched on the torch. The shattered remains of a glass jar glistened in the light and a pool of liquid was spreading out across the floor. Wooden doors lay on top of benches draped in dustsheets, like some kind of ghostly art installation.

As Kier moved closer, he saw that the sheets were covered with tiny curls of wood shavings. A number of aluminium cheese graters were lying around, apparently having been used to scrape the top layers of paint and wood from the doors. Kier stared at the nearest door, which had had most of its top surface removed, leaving only a few painted leaves and a rainbow in the top left-hand corner.

Kier frowned. It didn't make any sense. Why would someone buy a whole load of exotically painted doors only to scrape the surface off again?

He picked up a handful of wood shavings and put them in his pocket. Then he swept the torch around the room and saw that, at the far end, a long bench had been set up with an electric heating plate, on top of which was a large glass flask and a series of tubes leading to a smaller flask in a bath of cold
water. It reminded Kier of an experiment they had done at school to separate salt from seawater.

But Kier guessed McIntyre wasn't studying for his GCSEs.

So what kind of experiments was he carrying out here?

A faint noise made Kier spin around and he swept the torch beam across the dustsheets, looking for any sign of movement.

There it was again.

A muffled sound from somewhere in the corner.

Something was moving beneath the sheets.

Kier picked up some wood from the workbench, held the phone between his teeth and crept slowly towards the corner of the room. Raising the piece of wood above his head, he pulled back the dustsheet, ready to strike. But, to his surprise, he found himself staring at the gagged face of a young girl, bruised and blinking in the glare of torchlight.

‘Saskia!' he gasped, ripping off the tape that was plastered across her mouth.

Saskia sat up and coughed into her hand.

‘You got my message then.'

‘Yeah, I got it,' said Kier, untying the rope around her wrists. ‘What happened to you?'

‘Taxi driver tasered me,' said Saskia.

‘He
tasered
you?'

‘Yeah. You know.' She made her fingers into the shape of a gun. ‘Zapped me with a stun gun.'

‘
Ouch
.'

‘Yeah, ouch is right.' Saskia wiped dust from the corner of her eye. ‘Took the curls right out of my hair.'

‘What happened to your face?'

Saskia rubbed her wrists.

‘That was Mr Mac and his mates. They wanted to know where you were and who I was working for.'

‘What did you tell him?'

‘I told him you were a figment of his overactive imagination. Don't think he believed me though.'

Kier squeezed her hand.

‘That was brave of you.'

‘Nah, not really. After a few kicks there was a big commotion outside and they all went running off to find out what it was. I don't suppose that had anything to do with you?'

‘I owed you one,' said Kier. ‘Remember?'

Saskia got to her feet and looked around.

‘We should go,' she said. ‘They were mad before. But now they're going to be
really
mad.'

‘Wait,' said Kier. ‘We still need to find out where they're stashing the stuff. If we can do that, we've got him.'

‘Kier, it's going to be like a wasps' nest out there,'
said Saskia nervously. ‘They'll be buzzing around all over the place. And believe me, that McIntyre is evil. We have to go, Kier. And we have to go
now
.'

‘Wait.' Kier picked up the flask from the bench and sniffed it. ‘This is really bugging me. It smells like cleaning fluid or something. But why would McIntyre be cleaning doors?'

‘I don't know,' said Saskia, ‘and right now I don't care. Let's just go, OK? We can't do anything if we're dead.'

But as Kier replaced the flask on the worktop there was a sudden click and the room was flooded with light.

‘Stay where you are,' said a voice, and Kier turned to see a middle-aged man standing in the doorway.

The man's thinning blond hair was slicked back with gel and his shirt was unbuttoned beneath a dark suit, revealing a thick, expensive gold chain around his neck. He wore a smaller, matching chain around his wrist which jangled when he moved.

All of these things Kier noticed in the first couple of seconds.

But the thing he noticed most of all was that the man was holding a .357 Magnum revolver loaded with bullets that could punch a hole through toughened glass.

Kier decided he really didn't want to find out what the bullets could do to him.

‘Who are you?' Kier asked, still having enough presence of mind to put the phone back in his pocket and press
Record
.

‘My name's McIntyre,' said the man, ‘and either you take your hand out of your pocket or I'll shoot it off.'

Kier did as he was told and stared in surprise. He had expected McIntyre to be the man from the photograph but – quite obviously – he wasn't.

‘I'm guessing you must be Kier West. Am I right?'

‘Congratulations,' said Kier. ‘You win again.'

The man smiled. ‘I always win,' he said. ‘Just ask your dad.' His smile grew wider. ‘Oh, that's right. You can't, can you?'

A chill ran through Kier's blood.

‘So it
was
you,' he whispered. ‘You killed my father.'

McIntyre nodded. ‘Enjoyed it too. Easy as shooting a rat in a barrel.' He screwed up his face and Kier saw hatred glitter in his eyes. ‘But the other rat got away, didn't it? And now it's come sniffing around, ready to go squeaking off and telling the world my business.'

‘Your business,' said Saskia, ‘is nothing but living off other people's misery.'

‘Maybe it is,' said McIntyre, ‘but then everyone has a choice in life, don't you think? And if they happen to choose what I offer, then that's up to them.'

‘My father didn't choose to die,' said Kier bitterly.

‘He chose to get in my way,' replied McIntyre, ‘which is the same thing, as you are about to find out.'

‘Don't be stupid,' said Saskia nervously. ‘The police are going to be here at any minute.'

‘I know they are, because I called them.' McIntyre smiled. ‘Or rather I called my friend, Chief Superintendent Tyler. Just like I called him about all the other scum on my patch.'

McIntyre saw the surprise on their faces and his smile widened.

‘That's right. Chief Superintendent Tyler knows the value of teamwork, you see. I scratch his back, he scratches mine. Perhaps that's why he has the highest crime clear-up rate in England. In fact I hear he's in line for some sort of award. Kind of ironic when you think about it.'

Kier remembered the police's early arrival at the bank robbery, McIntyre getting tipped off about the hotel incident and the fact that the police didn't seem particularly interested in pursuing him. Suddenly everything fell into place.

‘You set up the bank robbery?'

‘Of course.' McIntyre shrugged. ‘Tyler needed something high-profile and some of his men were asking awkward questions. So I gave him what he wanted and he found his men something else to do. Not that they'd have uncovered anything. After all, there's no law against owning a pile of doors.'

McIntyre lifted the gun and pointed it at Kier's head.

‘Now remind me, what were we talking about again? Ah yes. Choices.'

Suddenly the smile was gone.

‘So go on. Choose.'

Kier swallowed.

‘Choose what?'

McIntyre ran his tongue over his lips, like a snake that senses its prey.

‘Who shall I shoot first? You or the girl?'

Kier knew McIntyre was a pro. He knew that, however quickly he crossed the room, McIntyre would still have time to squeeze the trigger and blow a hole in him. But then the smell of chemicals caught the back of his throat. He saw the liquid pooling around McIntyre's feet and he came to a decision.

‘You look like a gambling man,' said Kier, ‘so why don't we flip for it?'

McIntyre shook his head. ‘Don't think you're talking your way out of this one.'

‘Come on,' said Kier, sliding his hand into his pocket. ‘If these are my last few seconds on earth, then let's at least make them interesting.'

McIntyre's eyes narrowed suspiciously.

‘Take your hand out of your pocket,' he said. ‘Take it out now.'

‘Whatever you say,' said Kier. ‘You're the boss.'

As he pulled his hand from his pocket, Kier ripped a match from its cardboard book, scraped it along the rough striking panel and threw it to the floor. Before McIntyre had time to understand what was happening, the chemical solvent on the ground ignited, a ribbon of fire shot across the floor and then the pool beneath his feet erupted in a ball of flame.

For a few moments all was heat and chaos: McIntyre screamed as his clothes caught fire, the gun went off and the bullet blew out the light. Suddenly the room was plunged into darkness, lit only by the flames that were engulfing McIntyre.

‘Come on!' shouted Saskia. ‘Let's go!'

But although part of Kier wanted to see McIntyre burn for what he had done, another part of him knew he couldn't let that happen. His father had chosen not to kill McIntyre for the simple reason that he didn't want to become like him.

Love is stronger than hate, Kier
.

He couldn't betray his memory now.

‘Kier, leave him!' shouted Saskia.

‘No,' said Kier. ‘I can't.'

Pushing McIntyre to the ground, he threw himself on top of him and spread himself wide, desperately trying to smother the flames. The heat burned his skin as they rolled and struggled, the smell of smoke and scorched clothing filling the room. Then McIntyre twisted, rolled on top of Kier and pulled out a knife. And at that moment, Kier was afraid because he knew it was over and there was nothing he could do. But as McIntyre raised the blade above his head, Saskia's foot flashed through the air and the knife clattered off into the corner of the room. Still spinning, she kicked McIntyre hard in the chest, slamming him against the wall. As he slumped forward, Kier saw flames flicker across the floor and begin to lick at the legs of the benches.

‘
Now
will you come?'

As Saskia pulled him to his feet and kicked open the door, Kier ran back, grabbed the semi-conscious McIntyre and dragged him out into the courtyard.

‘Leave him!' shouted Saskia. ‘Just leave him!'

They were halfway across the lawn when they saw blue lights flashing outside the gates.

‘We've got visitors,' said Saskia.

Kier noticed that the van full of doors had been hurriedly driven into the shadows and was now half-hidden behind a tree next to the wall.

‘Damn it,' he said as he heard the sound of barking. ‘They've brought dogs.'

Two police officers were walking across the grass towards them, their torch beams criss-crossing in the warm night air. In front of them, two large Alsatians growled and strained at the leash.

‘Hey!' shouted one of the officers. ‘Stay there!'

Saskia looked at Kier.

‘What do you think? Should we run?'

Kier shook his head.

‘We'll never beat the dogs. But maybe McIntyre was bluffing – maybe the neighbours called them. Maybe we should tell them what we know.'

‘We can't, Kier, not without admitting who we are.' Saskia sounded desperate. ‘And we can't prove a thing.'