SEVERANCE KILL (12 page)

He dived straight at the window.

The pane gave in a cascade of fragments that flashed brilliantly in the neon vista outside as Calvary burst onto the street and hit the pavement hard, rolling on his shoulder. He sprang to his feet, feeling the tiny insect-stings of shards in his cheeks and neck. In the heat of the moment it was difficult to tell if he had been cut badly.

Passers-by reeled away in astonishment and the part of the clientele that had barged its way through the exit shouted and pointed. He turned left down the street and ran without looking back. He was aware that he was more exposed out there than he had been in the restaurant.

Calvary pounded along the pavement, at one point cannoning off a stout man in evening wear and catching his angry shout in his slipstream. He suddenly veered off the pavement on to the road and although it wasn’t particularly busy he managed only by a few inches not to get his knee smashed by the bumper of a taxi cab. Then he was dodging cars in a maelstrom of horns and contorted faces until he made it to the other side and dived right down a narrow sidestreet. The narrowness of focus was almost exhilarating. Nothing mattered now,
nothing
, except that he get as far away from the restaurant as possible.

Finally Calvary ducked into an alley and leaned with his hands on his knees and sucked long, gulping breaths, his face stinging and his hammer-blow heart threatening to pound a hole in his chest. He took stock.

He was alive. He had a wallet belonging to one of the enemy. An extra gun.

And he knew he’d been set up.

THIRTEEN

‘Target has left the building.’

Yevgenia’s voice in her ear pulled Krupina back from the sight on the pavement. The doors of the restaurant had been broken off their hinges by the press of bodies. People were spilling and sprawling out.

Sirens cut the air, high above the hubbub.

She’d seen the target, Calvary, come through the window like an aquatic creature bursting through the smooth surface of a lake. Had seen him roll and gain his feet and take off. She had yelled in Lev’s ear and pointed and he’d swung the Audi round. Too late. The first of the escaping diners were surging across the road. Lev couldn’t dodge them, not even by veering on to the pavement. The surge turned into a flood. The Audi sat in the road, hemmed in by bodies.

‘He’s heading east.’

Krupina said, ‘Gleb?’

‘Here. I’m free. I’ll make a loop round the back, head him off.’

In the rear view mirror, past the frantic crowd, Krupina saw Gleb’s Toyota peel away at the end of the street.

A hand slapped her window. She saw Arkady and jerked her thumb at the door behind her. He pulled it open with difficulty, squeezed in.

‘What happened in there?’

He was out of breath. ‘Gunfire. Target got away. Looked unharmed.’

‘Got away from whom?’

‘I don’t know. But before I got out, a group of flash-looking types were being hustled down from the balcony and out the back. Young, rich. Gang types. They looked hurt.’

Gang types
, again. Blažek’s men.

She didn’t know what the connection was. Couldn’t waste time thinking about it now.

The road ahead was clearing and Lev began to ease the Audi forward.

‘Yevgenia, talk to me.’

*

Nikola answered at once.

‘I’m on the corner of –’ Calvary did his best with the Czech pronunciation. ‘Four, five blocks from the restaurant.’

‘What happened –’

‘Just get here. And don’t call Jakub. Don’t answer any calls from him.’

He rang off before she could ask why.
Because he may have set us up. Because the Blažek reinforcements got there too quickly. They must have been tipped off beforehand.
 

He huddled in the alley, watching the road. The shouting was distant now, but the sirens were getting louder. An ambulance flashed past.

He pulled out the wallet he’d taken off the gunman. Cheap, imitation crocodileskin. Four credit cards in shades of gold and platinum, a wad of high-denomination
koruna
notes.

A business card with a name – Marek Zito – and a mobile phone number.

He pocketed the items. Focused his thoughts on the big problem. The looming one.

Set up
. He ran through the possibilities.

Nikola and Max had tipped off Blažek. Hardly feasible. They’d rescued Calvary earlier. Why not just feed him to the wolves back then?

Jakub, the unknown quantity. This was more likely. But why? Was he one of Blažek’s men, working undercover inside the guerrilla newspaper? Calvary couldn’t believe it. The paper was too minor and irritant for Blažek to bother with, surely. And even if he was threatened by it, there were more direct ways a man like him would deal with the matter.

A third possibility was surveillance. Calvary, Nikola and Max might have picked up followers on the way to the restaurant. But he doubted Blažek’s crew had the skills to track him such that he failed to spot them. They weren’t trained intelligence operatives, from what he could gather.  Also, how had they got on to the Fiat in the first place?

Surveillance.
Trained operatives.

The realisation punched a cold fist into his gut.

Calvary shut his eyes. He’d been so stupid that he deserved to get caught.

*

He started with the collars of his shirt and coat, running his fingertips underneath them. Nothing. He pulled the coat off, felt along the arms, ran his palms over the back.

Delved into the pockets. And found it deep in the lint of one of them.

It was the size of a pinhead with an array of hooks radiating like curved limbs. Light from a street lamp winked off it. Calvary imagined that if he looked at it under proper illumination he’d see writing in Cyrillic.

The Russian on the tram, the squat one who’d been shot. Calvary had been standing behind him, thinking he was undetected. But the Russian had been aware of him, had dropped the bug in his pocket. Probably when the hijackers boarded and it became clear the Russian wasn’t going to get near Gaines.

Calvary threw the bug deep into the alley, beyond a heap of bins. He peered out into the street. A few cars, passing at speed, not looking for him. He emerged and loped across the street to another alley almost directly opposite.

Less than a minute later two cars appeared from opposite directions, pulling to a stop facing each other. An Audi and a Toyota. The Audi’s driver stayed put but his passenger stepped out. A woman, a finger in her ear, her lips moving. The man in the back climbed out, too, as did the driver of the Toyota.

The two men walked down the alley at a crouch. From the way they held their arms before them, Calvary knew they had handguns.

The woman stayed at the mouth of the alley. There was something familiar about her. As she turned to look down the street, Calvary stared at her profile and realised she was the old woman he’d seen in the car as they’d been leaving the office. She wasn’t all that old, he realised. But there was something…
wrong
about her.

The two men emerged from the alley. The woman jerked her head to one side, her mouth set in frustration.

They glanced about, the three of them, as though they might through an immense stroke of luck see their target loitering nearby. They conferred, briefly. Then they got back into the cars and pulled away.

Russians. He was certain of it.

*

The Fiat turned into the road and he was on the back seat almost before it came to a stop. Max gaped at him.

‘Jeez, dude, you’re bleeding.’

Calvary touched his face, felt the congealing stickiness. ‘It’s nothing. Drive. Anywhere, for now.’

He updated them in terse sentences. They’d been aware of nothing until Blažek’s reinforcements had started piling into the restaurant, shortly before the shooting started.

Max said, ‘I got some pictures. Unknown guys going in. We’ll run them through the database later.’

Calvary said, ‘You need to ring Jakub. Tell him to get out of there. The Russians tracked me to the office, they know about it.’

‘Damn.’ Max slapped the dashboard. ‘He’ll have to wipe the hard drives, bring the laptops with him.’

Max made the call. On the wheel, Nikola’s knuckles were ivory.

She said, ‘Russians, again.’

‘Yes. It doesn’t make sense, unless they’re working with Blažek in some way. But his men killed the Russian on the tram. So that theory doesn’t hold, either.’ He was beginning to come down off the adrenaline high, to feel fatigue hit him in a series of slow blows. ‘We have to assume there are two hostile parties looking for us. Blažek’s people, and the Russians.’

‘We’re going to pick Jakub up. He’s making his way to the Old Town,’ said Max. ‘Then where the hell do we go?’

*

Bartos used his palms, their meaty weight the equivalent of a smaller man’s fists. Janos’s head rocked left, right, left again. Blood from his split lip slashed the wall.

‘Again,’ roared Bartos. ‘
Again.
Not once, not twice, but
three times
.’

Janos raised an arm to fend off the blows at last but the move only stoked Bartos’s fury.

‘Don’t you put your hand up to me,’ he screamed. He put his boot in his son’s chest and shoved. Janos and the chair he was on were sent tipping back against the wall. Bartos kicked the chair’s back legs away and the younger man bounced off the floor. He curled into a ball and lay there, shuddering.

Bartos raised his boot to stamp down. Stopped himself.

He looked at the blood on the walls and the carpet of the summer house. The smashed furniture.

‘Clean this fuckin’ mess,’ he said, spittle flying. He barged out.

Miklos was waiting outside, his arms folded. The rest of the men were up at Bartos’s main house. They couldn’t be allowed to see family business being settled.

‘Little bastard’s finished,’ said Bartos.

Miklos had coordinated the evacuation of the restaurant, making sure Janos and his entourage got out before the police arrived. He’d taken statements, provided Bartos with a summary even before they’d arrived at the Kodiak’s home.

‘He’s jerked me off for the last time.’ Bartos stared off over the city’s lights. ‘This Brit guy.’

‘He has nothing,’ said Miklos behind him.

‘He humiliated me again.’

‘He took Zito’s gun. He has nothing else. Janos told him nothing. The other men confirm this.’

Bartos didn’t turn. After a few seconds he pulled out his phone.

The Worm’s phone was switched off. Bartos thought about leaving a message –
never turn your phone off on me
– but decided against it.

Thirty seconds later his phone buzzed. The Worm.

‘Couldn’t speak just then. What’s up?’

‘Who is this guy?’

‘Which guy are we –’

‘Don’t dick me around. The umbrella guy. The one who just got the better of six of my men, disarmed one of them. Shut down the
Restaurant Nebe
.’

‘I’m working on it.’

‘That’s not good enough.’ Bartos breathed deep. He knew if he started shouting, up at the house the twins would wake up. ‘If he’s some kind of undercover special forces agent I need to know about it. Need to know what kind of connections he’s got, what sort of backup.’

‘He doesn’t need any backup, by the look of it. Seems to me he’s doing a fine job of running rings round you on his own.’

Oh, you’ll pay.
The phone creaked in Bartos’s fist.

The Worm went on: ‘Look, Blažek. You need to get a grip. I feed you information, it’s up to you what you do with it. It’s not my fault you’ve let it go to waste, let this man slip through your fingers. At least you’ve got Gaines. I’ll let you know once I’ve found out why he’s so important. Till then, get off my back.’

*

The Worm cut the boor off in mid-shout, then opened his palmtop computer. There it was. The beacon, a different one. Calvary was still on the radar.

He’d wondered how much to tell Blažek about Calvary. Whether to tell him his name, and that he was a suspected assassin for the British government. In the end he’d decided to reveal nothing. The Worm didn’t think Blažek was a coward, but he did wonder if the big man would baulk at going after somebody with Calvary’s pedigree, or his suspected links. There was a risk he and his men might pull their punches, awed even if unconsciously by who they were up against, and that would be fatal when dealing with a man like Calvary.

The Worm looked at his watch. Twelve forty-five a.m. He needed to get moving.

*

Nikola drove parallel to the river. The view across was spectacular, the castle high above, soaring and brooding simultaneously. She’d taken a roundabout route and by the way she watched her mirrors, made unexpected turns, Calvary knew she had some experience shaking off tags.

A grand, ornate building was coming up and Nikola took an abrupt right and pulled in. Jakub climbed in the back. He didn’t look at Calvary. His face was grim.

‘We go to my apartment,’ said Nikola. ‘Even if they search the office, they will not be able to trace us there.’

On the way, Calvary checked the pistol he’d taken off the man in the club. A Glock 17. Modern, chunky, effective. The magazine was full. He passed it forward to Max, who flinched a little. Not a good sign.

‘Swap it. Give me the Browning,’ said Calvary.

‘Why?’

‘I’d prefer it.’

He didn’t tell them the real reason, which was that the Browning needed to be cocked before every shot. The Glock chambered a new round automatically, making it easier for a novice to use.

Assuming they ever needed to use it.

*

They navigated a warren of streets. After ten minutes’ silence, Calvary turned to Jakub.

‘Look. You don’t like me. You don’t like that I’ve brought Blažek down on your heads, when you were working on ways to get at him without being noticed. I’m sorry for you. But I can’t undo any of it. I need your help, and you sure as hell need mine. So let’s work together.’