The Dark Chronicles (36 page)

This was my first chance to examine the sniper at close quarters. He was a youngish man, in his mid to late twenties, wearing a black suit with a dog collar – so that was how he had managed to get into the cathedral. He was of average height, but well built: unsurprisingly, considering the acrobatics he’d just pulled off. He had a
wolfish look about him: a long handsome face, olive skin, thick shoulder-length hair, greasy with pomade or something similar, and a wild beard. The Christ-meets-Guevara look. No doubt it went down well with female revolutionaries, but he looked fake to me, like a fashion photograph. Despite the fixed smile he was sweating profusely, and I didn’t think it was entirely due to physical exertion – every couple of seconds the muscles in his jaw twitched. Was he injured somewhere? Got it: his jacket was torn just below the left shoulder, a sliver of half-dried blood just visible against the dark fabric. Probably where the rope had burned him – I wondered how his hands felt.

I looked around the carriage, and saw that most of the passengers were clutching banners or sheets daubed with slogans. They weren’t the students and flower children you typically saw on protests, but labourers and factory hands. A man in a boiler suit and boots caught my glance, and stared at my suit with open aggression.

‘Been on the march, ’ave you?’

I shook my head, and looked intently at the sniper.

‘’Ark at ’im!’ the man announced to the carriage. ‘’Is Lordship ’ere don’t want nothing to do with the likes of us.’

‘I’ve been at a funeral,’ I said coldly. The man went quiet and started looking at the toothpaste advertisements.

The sniper smiled softly to himself. If he were to show his gun, panic would ensue and it would probably be to his disadvantage: the train would be stopped, transport police would board. But he knew I would try to avoid him taking that route, so as long as he kept his threat discreet he had the upper hand. Perhaps I could pull the emergency cord – that would flush the bastard out. I thought better of it. The gun could end up going off. On the other hand, if it were an automatic it wouldn’t be able to cycle in his pocket, meaning that for the moment it would be a one-shot gun. I put it out of my mind: I had no idea whether it was an automatic or not, and one shot was too much to risk anyway.

I turned my attention to his intended targets. The man had a ruddy face, calloused hands and a broken nose: a docker, I thought. The boy, no doubt his son, looked like he’d already spent a few years on the docks himself. He was skinny, gangly-legged, with sunken cheeks and a glazed look in his eyes. At his age I had been wearing a tweed jacket and tie at boarding school. Father had been in Singapore then, and I’d never worn long sleeves before, let alone a jacket or tie, but I had soon got used to it…

I wondered what they were doing on the Underground. Perhaps the boy had been too weak to make it through the march? Then I noticed that the father was wheezing every few seconds. It wasn’t that he was looking after the son, but the other way round.

The fluorescent lighting panels in the ceiling started flickering – and then, just like that, they went out, and we were plunged into darkness. The train screeched to a halt, and there was a collective gasp from the passengers, followed immediately by groans of frustration and anger and the murmuring of voices. Someone near me swooned and a few people lunged forward to help them – Blitz spirit and all that. I didn’t have time to be chivalrous because the sniper might try to do something. He couldn’t open the doors, but he could move between the carriages.

I made to step forward, but as I did the lights flickered back on. The train started moving again and the carriage returned to normal. Someone gave the woman who had fainted a thermos flask and she took a drink from it, gulping it down.

I turned my attention back to the sniper. He didn’t look Russian, I realized. There was something about the way he was staring at me – he was enjoying it. There was also a bravado about him, and I put him down as a southern European. His enjoyment sent a fresh wave of anger through me. I had given Moscow more than two decades of my life, and now they had sent this thug to shoot me down like a dog. If he were taken in for questioning, he might reveal I had been his target, so I needed to kill him, and soon.

But first I wanted some answers.

The clacking of the train began to slow. The boy squinted up at the Tube map on the wall of the carriage, talking to his father. It looked like the incident with the lights had scared him, and they wanted to get off at the next stop. They started to busy themselves – they had a hold-all with them, presumably for drinks and sandwiches.

The boy helped his father up and they moved to a spot in front of the door. The sniper took a step back, but kept his aim fixed on the boy, at his midriff. I glanced at his face: he was watching me watching them. In some situations I might have tried to rush him, counting on the fact that he would hesitate before killing an innocent child. But this was not such a situation: this man had just killed the head of the Service in a very public place, and would stop at nothing to get away from me. The boy was expendable to him, and I had to act with that in mind.

We came into Barbican, and the doors opened. People rushed forward to get off the train. I made to move, but the sniper was fixing me with a frantic gaze, his nostrils flaring. The father and boy were oblivious to the danger, and were not moving. Had they simply got up a stop early to prepare? No, the father was leaning down to adjust the hold-all – it wasn’t entirely closed.

He stood up, and as the boy held out his arm to help him off the train, the sniper made his move. He leapt onto the platform and took the boy under his arm, then started running, dragging the startled boy with him. There was a shout from the father, from others on the platform. For a moment, I froze. Then I jumped forward, too, but the doors were already closing. I squeezed through and onto the platform, but the two of them had disappeared among the passengers emptying from the other carriages, and I pushed past people, furious with myself for reacting so slowly. A mother was trying to get her pram off before the doors closed and people were helping her, blocking off the entire width of the platform. By the time she had made it out I had lost several valuable seconds. I looked up the platform. There they were, at the far end of it, the
sniper running towards the tunnel we had just come through, the boy’s head cuffed under his arm.

I followed, but then the sniper did an extraordinary thing – he let go of the boy and ran down a ramp at the end of the platform and
into the tunnel
. For a moment I thought it was suicide, but then I remembered that there was some space next to the tracks for the Underground staff to use. As I reached the end of the platform, I could see that he was running down it. The boy was standing there, frozen in shock. I told him not to worry, to stay where he was and his father would reach him soon, and then ploughed down the wooden ramp and into the tunnel, following the sound of echoing footsteps ahead.

I had been running for only a few seconds when I stopped. The bastard had disappeared again! Up ahead, I could see the tunnel curving away towards Farringdon, but he couldn’t possibly have reached the bend already. Was he hiding somewhere in the tunnel, waiting for me? I peered into the darkness, but all I could see were occasional pillars and columns at the side, and the faint glimmer of the tracks running down the middle.

Then I heard footsteps again. They were distant, but recognizably the same rhythm. He was running down a tunnel, but it wasn’t this one: he was
parallel
with me. I ran back a few yards and searched the walls. There it was: another train tunnel leading off to the left, the entrance a dark chasm. I jumped over a fence at waist height and started running down the tunnel. The sound of footsteps became louder. There was hardly any light at all here, and the walls felt clammier, the air staler. The tunnel was clearly disused, but where did it lead? I put the question out of my mind and kept running, peering ahead to see where the sniper was heading. But now I couldn’t distinguish any movement or sounds apart from my own breathing and the crunch of my shoes on the gravel. Had he taken another tunnel?

I registered the glint of metal a fraction of a moment before he kicked. I tried to move but I had no chance, and he caught me full
square in the stomach, sending me flying to the ground. I couldn’t see straight but I knew I had to keep moving whatever happened because the glint was the gun and he intended to shoot me at close range. I rolled into the wall, scratching myself against something, and screamed as loudly as I could, hoping to distract him even fractionally, because a fraction could make all the difference.

This tactic seemed to work, because he fired blindly. The shot nearly deafened me and sent a great scatter of dust and debris and Christ knows what into my eyes, but I was alive, and I had a sliver of time on my side. He was still dealing with the recoil when I grabbed his wrist. I had to get the gun away from him, because I might not be so lucky a second time and now we were very close to each other and it was very dangerous, so I didn’t scream because I didn’t want to panic him. I wanted him alive a little longer – I needed to know who he was and why he had been told to kill me, so I kept the pressure on his wrist and fended away his other arm as he tried to punch me, and eventually it was too much for him and he jerked free. The gun fell to the ground and I tried to follow its trajectory but it spun into the darkness, and the sniper stumbled away and the chase was on again, only now I was closer, and my blood was up, and I felt I could get him.

There were no lights, but my vision was adjusting and the tracks had a dull sheen to them. I didn’t dare move into the centre of the tunnel – I didn’t trust the sniper enough to know whether or not a train could come whistling down here and carry us both off to Never-never-land – but the walkway was becoming narrower. There was the sound of dripping water close by, but I could still make out the faint echo of his footsteps ahead of me, and I focussed on them.

I had been running for about five minutes when the darkness began to lift fractionally. Soon, I was entering a cavernous space, which I guessed had been some kind of goods depot. There were small trolleys and wagons filled with sacks, but everything smelled dank and part of one wall had fallen away. As I came through, I saw
the sniper at the far end, racing up a cobbled ramp. I reached it a few seconds later and as I did I realized where we were: Smithfield Market. He must have taken a tunnel that had been used to transport the meat here. The familiar open space of black and green ironmongery rose in front of me, almost like a cathedral itself, and the vista of the city’s life returned as I glimpsed white-coated butchers through the archways and pillars.

It was icily cold here, and I realized we had come out at an alcove away from the main body of the market – some sort of storage area. Frozen carcasses lay slapped on top of one another in metal trolleys, glowing under the neon lamps. The sniper was bounding ahead of me, but he seemed to be flagging now. He crashed into one of the carts, sending the contents flying, and I slipped on a carpet of livers and entrails. He took the opportunity and grabbed me, dragging me through the slops and the sawdust. In the distance, a butcher shouted out his last prices. But that was another world away.

The sniper kicked me several times, and then began to choke me, his hands sticky and warm. I started seeing double, Christ and Che swaying above me, and I knew that I had only a couple of seconds left before I blacked out. I had to get him away from my throat. I lunged desperately with my left arm, and caught him on the ear. His grip loosened for a fraction of a moment and I used the momentum to topple him and reverse the hold, so that I now had my hands clasped round his throat. He kicked beneath me, but I was in a strong position now and I kept pressing down. He was trying to grab something with his arm, and I realized we had moved closer to one of the metal trolleys. My eye caught sight of an object on the lowest shelf: an electric saw. I placed my knee over the man’s throat and reached out for the saw with my left hand. I flicked it on. The whine had an immediate effect on him, and the sweat started pouring off his face like a waterfall. I screamed at him to tell me who had sent him and why, loosening my grip the tiniest of a fraction for his response. After a few moments, he began
repeating the same words over and over. I leaned down to catch them.

‘
La prego non mi uccida…
’ he said, and his face was creased with pain. ‘
Madonna mia, non mi uccida, non mi uccida…
’

He wasn’t getting any further than that, so I slapped him, hard, and screamed at him again, but he couldn’t hear over the sound of the saw, so I switched it off and tried once more, directly into his face this time, but his jaw muscles suddenly tightened and then went slack and as I watched the fluid dribble from his mouth, I realized he’d bitten into a pill and I’d failed. His eyes froze. He was gone.

*

I searched his pockets, but found nothing in them. Dazed, I staggered out of the alcove and through the market until I came to the front gates, where there was a call box. I dialled the emergency contact number, waited for the pips and then thrust sixpence in the slot. Nobody picked up. The sweat started to cool on me, and I began to shiver. I tried the number again, and then the second number, but there was nothing, no answer, nobody home.

After a while I gave up and called the office instead, telling them to send a squad down and to look for the man in the storage area with a rifle strapped to his back. I left the booth and stepped into West Smithfield. It had begun to drizzle, and a newspaper vendor across the way was dismantling his stand. I looked up for the familiar sight, but it wasn’t there. Panicking, I ran down King Edward Street, desperately searching the skyline. It wasn’t until I’d reached the end of the road that I saw it: the dome hovering above the city, just as it had always done. For a moment, I’d thought it had disappeared.