Redeemer (10 page)

‘But, boss, the chopper—’

‘The chopper can suck my dick. There’s an RPG stash on the other side of the favela, in the safe house next to the hospital. The boys can take them. We’ll shoot that fucking thing down. And Carlos’ – Roulette clamped his fingers around the goon’s neck – ‘make it quick. I don’t want this bitch to escape.’

‘Sure, whatever. What about you, boss?’ asked the other goon.

‘I’m going to finish off that
Mexicano
cunt.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘By now Alberto should have finished on his hands and dick. See you in an hour.’

The goons departed.

From his position behind the wall, Weiss spied Roulette pounding the street. Heading in his direction. Weiss reached into his duster. His left hand was shaking. He gripped the wrist with his right hand to control it, and produced a syringe. A thought picked at his frontal lobe, vanished before he could seize it.

Roulette was twenty-five metres off. With his left hand uncontrollable, Weiss chomped the syringe between his teeth and ripped off the cap. His guts made a squelching noise, as if his stomach was seeping acid into his bowels.

Ten metres.

Weiss steeled his hand. The needle glinted.

Five metres.

Roulette’s shadow skated past.

Now.

Weiss swung around the corner and found Roulette almost on top of him. The Messenger leader collided with Weiss, who had to fight hard to stop himself toppling backwards. Roulette’s eyes, a couple of black poker chips, blinked their surprise at him, then lowered and inspected the needle as it punched his stomach.

Roulette took two steps back and tugged the syringe out. Foaming at the mouth and swaying on his feet, he seized up.

‘How does it feel?’ Weiss asked, as Big Teeth’s number two struggled for breath. ‘Really, I’m curious. Do you know what’s in your bloodstream?’

Roulette’s eyes ballooned. He sweated feverishly, making a supreme effort to shake his head.

‘I’ve injected you with Batrachotoxin. The name means nothing to you, naturally.’ Roulette grunted his agreement. ‘But perhaps you are familiar with the poison dart frog. The poison is the most deadly toxin known to man. It will attack your central nervous system first, paralyzing your muscles one by one. You’ll be in a state of helplessness as you lose control of your body. Your chest will feel like… like it’s crushed underneath a cattle stampede. Breathing will become impossible. And you’ve shit yourself, I see. This… this is what you get for trying to
fuck
with—’

Weiss spewed blood, spraying Roulette’s neck and shirt. He rested a hand on Roulette’s shoulder to stop himself from falling over and dear God, his kidney was on fire.

He looked at Roulette and forgot about his pain. The Messenger’s skin shifted pale blue. Many people panicked or cried in their last moments of life, and some even accepted death without complaint. But Roulette laughed. Weiss wasn’t sure why. His eyes narrowed to dead matchsticks, his face screwing up in amusement.

It was the laugh of a man who intended his to be the last.

Weiss left Roulette on his knees, floundering in a pool of his own shit, and dragged himself up the street. The street peaked. He saw the bodies first, spread-eagled and deformed. Messy deaths, the kind Weiss disapproved of. It seemed strange when he considered it, but Weiss hated the sight of blood. That’s why he used syringes.

The school. Nobody about. Decorated with bullet holes and cartridges, as if God had placed a storm cloud over Barbosa favela and made it hail brass.

He saw a Messenger fleeing from the north, running so fast his feet seemed not to touch the ground, and he knew instantly his destination.

The jungle.

That’s where he’d hit pay dirt.

1600 hours.

Gardner and Hands moved low amid the undergrowth. They stuck to the most impenetrable route through the jungle – Gardner’s idea, in case the Messengers picked up the chase again.

‘This is pointless,’ Hands moaned. ‘I’m telling you, we’re safe as bloody houses. You remember the crap insurgents in Basra? Shooting from the hip like they think they’re in fucking Hollywood. These guys are ten times worse, mate.’

‘I remember,’ Gardner said, ‘more than a hundred good soldiers died in Basra.’

‘Yeah, but you always get one or two.’

Gardner took no notice of Hands and his spiel. He had spent fifteen years of his life hyper-alert and sticking to the cardinal rule – never underestimate your enemy – and he wasn’t about to give up now. The jungle air was damp and moist, his clothes drenched, sticky. A trickling noise reached his ears, like coins jangling in his pocket. It came from the north-west. Energy coursed through him. He could hear the blood rushing through his head.

All the while he was keeping one eye on Hands. The man wasn’t moving with care, snagging his Bergen against branches, trampling on tall grass and generally leaving the kind of sign that would make David Stirling roll in his grave.

‘Been what, four, five years?’ said Gardner.

‘Five years, eight months and twelve days. Not that I’m counting.’

‘So what’s the buzz?’

Hands was quiet for a beat.

‘Down here helping John. What’s it fucking look like?’

Gardner raised an eyebrow. ‘With BOPE?’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘I didn’t know you and John kept in touch.’

Hands was silent again, as if they were talking over a bad phone line. ‘Well, you know, we didn’t for a while. He was doing this, I was tied up in a bit of that… You want the truth, Joe? No one fucking talked to me after, after – it. Not one fucking Blade. Not Pitman, not Grant, not even fucking
you
.’

He had turned on Gardner like a Rottweiler, eyeballing him ferociously. Gardner returned the compliment. Backing down wasn’t in his DNA.

‘Spare me the self-pity act, Dave. You fucked up the moment you tried to sell the drugs. Ten thousand ecstasy tablets, for fuck’s sake. Once you made that choice, you deserved everything that came your way. And here’s another thing. I don’t give two shits whether you think it was me or any of the other lads who set you up with that undercover copper. Because, you know what? You made your bed. You fucking lie in it. There’s no one to blame for what happened but yourself.’

‘You can be a real dick sometimes, Joe,’ said Hands, stepping into Gardner’s face. ‘Just because not everyone goes around licking Regiment arse, you think you got a right to fucking judge me.’

Gardner was suddenly conscious of the Colt by Hands’ side. His finger paused on the trigger.

All alone, middle of nowhere, it would be so easy…

‘And yeah, I got caught.’ Hands’ voice was becoming scratchy. ‘No argument there. But I paid a heavy fucking price. Years after that, I couldn’t get work wiping the shit off someone’s arse. You don’t know what I went through. No fucking idea. We all make mistakes, mate, but some of us take a harder fall. Know what I mean?’

Hands lifted his finger off the trigger. Then he smiled and extended his left hand. ‘But I always say, past is past. I ain’t got no grievance with you no more.’

Gardner shook hands with his prosthetic.

‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘Everyone deserves a second chance. If John’s willing to trust you, that’s good enough for me.’

He said it to put Hands at ease, not because he truly meant it. Hands, he knew, was prone to losing his cool. He’d once stuck his gun in the face of a guy who tried to overtake him on the A3. Threatened to shoot the driver and his bird on the spot. The CO of D Squadron, 22 SAS, Major Neil Buckie, severely reprimanded him, but Hands didn’t shape up.

Then the drugs bust left Buckie with no choice but to give him the boot. And, in the years since, Regiment gossip had reached Gardner’s ears of the dodgy dealings Hands was involved in. Pornography distribution, including kiddie porn and bestiality; counterfeit passports and credit card scams; drug dealing.

So why’s John working with him? Gardner wondered, but he backburned the question.

They burrowed on through the jungle, Gardner’s arms and legs in pain, his body cannibalizing its muscle for energy. Adrenalin supercharged his veins.

Two hundred metres further on, Gardner realized the origin of the jangling sound: up ahead, a fast-flowing creek running downhill along the basin of a pocked ridge.

‘Home sweet home,’ Hands said.

Everything clicked. The tracks at the camp. The fire. It wasn’t laziness. ‘The campsite,’ Gardner said. ‘No self-respecting Blade would leave such a mess. It was deliberate, wasn’t it?’

Hands nodded. ‘A decoy. John’s idea. Put any nosy fuckers off the scent, know what I mean? He reckoned you’d figure it out for yourself.’

Thirty metres from the edge of the creek, which was tucked in behind a thick web of vines and ferns, Hands stopped. Gardner spotted a figure. The man was shaded by a nearby kopak tree that towered over the land, fifty metres high and half a metre thick. The trunk was crowded with buttresses.

Gardner paced ahead of Hands. The guy was sitting on a toppled tree trunk. He had a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife in one hand, slicing the double-edged blade along a length of bark in his other hand, tucking the dry shavings into a small pouch on his lap. Four Bergens were propped up against the trunk, coloured in digital camouflage.

The man’s hands were black as soot, covered in welts and bruises. He was barefoot. A pair of brown socks hung from a long branch nearby. Gardner noticed that his right foot was swollen and purple, probably from where he’d been bitten by a spider or snake.

Gardner knew who he was, even before he stepped closer to him, when the jungle gloom eased and the face took on definition. His pale skin was masked by camo paint, eyes beaming like spotlights. He was bulkier than Gardner recalled, but still had the frown grooved into his forehead.

John Bald.

1633 hours.

He was close.

Weiss stumbled across the clearing and licked the air. It tasted zingy and heavy with topsoil. Like a bomb had gone off in his mouth. The battle that had raged in the clearing had occurred very recently, he figured. Smoke clung to his ankles, and the wounded had not yet died.

Make that ‘one of the wounded’, he thought as he approached the last survivor. The kid was not long for this earth. He was early twenties, a golden dollar-sign chain hanging from his neck, and a hole in his chest large enough to sink an orange.

Weiss squatted down beside him.

‘If you want, I can make it quick,’ he said, reaching a hand into his duster. ‘Tell me which way he went.’

The kid shuddered. It was a bitch of a choice for any human being to make: die now, or live longer and suffer. The kid chose death. He pointed a finger west.

‘Was he alone?’ asked Weiss, now feeling for the syringe.

The kid curled his thumb and index finger into a ball, leaving two fingers in the air. So, the target had company. He had all the information he needed. Time to honour his end of the bargain.

Weiss frowned. He couldn’t find what he was looking for. Pulling his coat wide open, he ran his peepers down the row of needles. He was missing a syringe, one loaded with a toxic alkaloid called aconitine. That’s too bad, he said to himself. You probably dropped it when you escaped from Rolex and Lakers. Aconitine was one of his favourite compounds, and he made a mental note to touch base with his chemist on his return to Ciudad Juárez.

The kid wanted a quick death, and Weiss obliged. He administered a high dosage of succinylcholine to the neck. Within seconds the kid’s muscles shrivelled up and he couldn’t breathe. Something flopped in his chest. He went over to the dark side.

Weiss moved on. He got about halfway across the clearing before he doubled over in agony and his guts contracted, as if someone was yanking at him with a bungee cord. He coughed up black goo; shivered in spite of the jungle heat. The tips of his toes were numb, his fingers likewise.

You’ve got a fever, he reasoned. After what Roulette and his goons did to you earlier, are you surprised? But don’t let it stop you. I won’t, but Christ, it hurts. He steadied himself, fearing he’d faint.

One glance west and he was on his feet.

He noticed the snapped branches and the crushed twigs. The footprints and the damaged undergrowth. Someone had beaten a path through the foliage and left evidence of their route. It was God’s will, he was sure of it. Thirty million dollars. So close now, he could almost smell the greenbacks.

Weiss ignored the fever and pushed on.

1701 hours.

John Bald looked at Gardner briefly, then went back to carving firewood from the wet bark. Crunching twigs sounded to his six o’clock. Hands drew near to him, and Bald put the bark to one side, knife dangling between his legs.

‘Took your time, man,’ Bald said.

Thinking the question was directed at him, Gardner made to answer. But Hands replied, ‘We got held up. Messengers had a little welcome party for us, yeah? Nothing to get your knickers in a twist about. Me and Jason Statham here gave them what for.’