TimeSplash (24 page)

Yet as he stood outside his flat, he couldn’t help feeling buoyed up and excited. The feeling lasted until he swung the door open.

Cupboards were open, their contents strewn on the floor. The doors to the bedrooms were open. Beyond the entrance hall, he could see upturned furniture in the sitting room. In an instant, without even thinking about it, he had his department-standard Glock 18 in a two-handed grip, muzzle down, safety off, just as he had been trained. He moved swiftly and quietly down the hallway, checking each room as he passed until he reached the sitting room. A quick left-right glance showed it was empty. He stepped lightly across to the kitchen counter and checked behind it. Nothing. No one.

Yet someone had been in his apartment, ransacked it, and left. Had Sandra been here when it happened? There was no blood anywhere, which was good news. Had someone got her? Taken her?

“Jesus, what a mess.”

He whirled around, gun up, to find Sandra standing in the doorway, looking at the devastation of his belongings with big serious eyes. He struggled to control his breathing, his heart hammering in his chest. “Christ! I nearly shot you!”

“What, again? Maybe you should keep it in your holster.”

Jay took a couple of deep, calming breaths and put his gun away. Whoever had been here was long gone. “Is it going to be like this every night when I come home now? ’Cause if it is, I don’t think my nerves can stand it.”

Sandra straightened a chair and sat down in it. “Put the kettle on, would you?”

Automatically, Jay did as he was asked. In his mind the possible reasons for what had happened were already chasing each other round and round. “It was lucky you weren’t in when this happened.”

“I was in,” she said. “The lucky thing is I was taking a nap in the bedroom.” Jay put down the cups he was holding and stared at her. “I heard them in the hallway while they were working on the lock. I barely got out in time.”

“But how could you get out? There’s only one door.”

She grinned at him. “The same way I got in yesterday, of course. Through the bedroom window. The rope was still there. Neither of us had removed it. And the window is still broken. I just climbed out and climbed up the rope to the roof. Then I pulled the rope up after me.”

“But it must be twenty metres to the roof from here!”

“Nah, not that much. It wasn’t so hard—except for the last bit. That was tricky.”

“Jesus.”

“Anyway, I stayed on the roof until they’d gone and watched them go back to their car. Two men, late twenties, early thirties, short hair, casual clothes, nice car. They came at about three o’clock.”

“And you’ve been on the roof ever since then?”

“Yup. What do you think they were after?”

A man’s voice said, “You, love.”

They both looked toward the door where a short-haired man in his early thirties, wearing casual clothes, stood with a Russian PP2030 submachine gun, with silencer, pointed at Sandra. Behind him, in the hallway, was another similar man, similarly armed. Jay reached for his own gun, but the muzzle of the PP2030 swung his way before his hand was halfway there. “Don’t be stupid,” the gunman said. “We just want the girl.”

Then all hell broke loose.

With the gun off her, Sandra shot out of the chair, delivering a flying kick that took the gun right out of the man’s hands. Before Jay had even had time to gasp in surprise, she had landed and whirled around to slam the man in the stomach with a straight-arm punch that sent him staggering back open-mouthed into his companion. The other man pushed his partner roughly aside and brought his gun to bear on Sandra. Like a cat, she crouched low and dived to the side as flame and noise erupted into the room. For all that the weapon was silenced, it made an ear-splitting clatter as it spat bullets into the apartment at ten rounds a second. Furniture, floor and walls exploded into fragments as the stream of bullets ripped across the room.

Sandra disappeared behind a cloud of smoke and dust, scrambling for nonexistent cover. The destruction followed her until a rapid series of explosions from Jay’s handgun stopped it dead. The gunman, two bullets in his torso and one in his head, fell to the ground in a bloody heap. By the time Jay had turned to take aim at the other intruder, the man was already running down the corridor. Jay let him go.

As the dust and smoke cleared, he saw Sandra sitting on the floor against the far wall. She was panting heavily and there was blood all over her left calf. He holstered his gun and ran over to her, jumping over the fallen man.

“Did he hit you? Are you okay?”

Sandra pulled up the leg of her jeans and studied her wounds. She shook her head without looking up. “It’s just splinters—bits of concrete from the floor, I think.” She gingerly pulled a small grey shard from her ankle, setting off another trickle of blood. “Hurts like hell though.”

Jay inspected the cuts. None of them looked too deep. “God, you were lucky. I’ll get some water to clean you up. Stay here.” He went back to the kitchenette, stepping over the body again, grabbed some disinfectant and put some warm water in a bowl. Once more, he stepped over the body on his way back to Sandra.

“You’ll have to do something about him,” she said.

She looked pale but otherwise seemed to be all right. Jay’s hands had a slight tremor as he cleaned Sandra’s many small cuts. He had often wondered if he would have the nerve to kill a man if he ever had to. In the event, it hadn’t been the moral dilemma he had expected, just a simple matter of necessity. In fact, he had wanted the man dead very much in that moment and had felt nothing but satisfaction when he saw him fall. He still felt nothing except gratitude that the stranger was dead and not Sandra.

He got up and fetched some Band-Aids from the bathroom. As he was sticking them on, he felt Sandra’s hand on his cheek and looked up at her for the first time since the shooting. She wasn’t smiling but there was an intense tenderness in her eyes that made him catch his breath.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.” And then she leaned forward and gently, slowly, kissed his lips.

For a moment, he was happy just to let her kiss him, but then a wave of passion surged in him and he grabbed her shoulders and pulled her to him, crushing her mouth with his, letting loose the desire that had been building in him. In response, she held his head in her long fingers and opened up to him. When it was over, they drew apart. Jay stared into her eyes, open-mouthed, the feel of her lips still on his, his breath shallow and his heart pounding. “I—” he said, feeling he ought to say something, but all he could think of saying was how much he loved her. Like a cloth being yanked away to reveal the light, the horrible reality of the situation flooded back into the moment. He blinked, remembering the shooting, the gunmen, the dead body behind him.

“We need to get out of here, right now,” he said, jumping to his feet. “Can you walk? It won’t be long before they’re back. And the police will probably show up soon too. We’ve got to be gone before they get here.”

They left the flat, pausing only to pick up the two submachine guns and to check the dead man’s pockets. There was no ID of any kind on him, but they found two ammo clips in a back pocket.

They left the building through an emergency exit at the back and kept moving until they were several blocks away. Sandra was limping a little, but her leg seemed okay and the bleeding had stopped by the time they got into a taxi on Westferry Road. They headed for the West End, for want of anywhere specific to go, and got out of the cab when Jay spotted an electronics shop that was open. Jay grabbed a dozen prepaid compads—the poor man’s compatch—from a bin, and bought the lot using cash.

“What are you doing?” Sandra demanded when they were outside again.

“I need to make a call and I’ve had to disable my compatch.”

She looked down at his wrist. “What?”

“They can trace an active compatch. So if we need to make a call, we use these.” He gave her a handful and she put them in her jacket pocket. They started walking up the street, still heading west.

“Who can trace a compatch? The police?”

“No. Well, yes, they could, but it’s not the police I’m worried about. Look, who do you think sent those guys after you?”

She shrugged. “Sniper. Who else?”

“I don’t think so. How did Sniper know where you were?”

“I don’t know. Someone must have told him they’d seen me. Then he had me followed…”

Jay shook his head. “The only people who knew exactly where you’d be are the people in my office.”

“But you work for…”

“Yes, I do. And that’s how they can trace my compatch. And that’s why I’m going to call them using one of these.” He held up a compad. “One call on each and then we throw it away. Got it?”

“Call them? Are you mad? Didn’t you just say they tried to kill me?”

“I don’t know if that was the plan. They came to get you but, maybe if you hadn’t started kicking the crap out of them, that’s all they’d have done.”

“They seemed pretty trigger-happy to me.”

Jay had to admit she was right. Whoever sent them to collect her clearly hadn’t cared if they delivered her in one piece. “I need to call Five. They can take possession of the body, keep the police off my back. Otherwise I’ll be on the run too and I need to be on the inside on this or we’ll never find out who’s doing what—and we’ll never stop Sniper.”

She stepped away from him and stopped. “So you’re just going to hand me in? Just like that?”

“No, of course not.” He moved toward her but she stepped back. “I’m going to find you somewhere safe to stay. Then I’ll tell them you ran off and I lost you.”

“I’ve got somewhere safe to stay.”

“No, you haven’t. Five has your address. I spent most of the day briefing them about you. They know everything I know.”

“Well, that’s not much.” She was being petulant and sulky, but at least she had stopped being hostile. She closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sky. “Why did I ever trust you in the first place?”

“I’ve got kind eyes.”

“What?” She looked at him to see if he was joking.

“My mum told me. I have kind eyes.”

Despite herself, she started to smile. “Do you know somewhere safe?” she asked.

“Not really, but I know a man who does. Come on.” They set off walking again. “We need to get on a tube as soon as we can.”

“Why’s that? No one’s following us.”

“You looked up at the sky. If they just happen to have a spy satellite over the area, your face will be lighting up every alarm in GCHQ right now.”

Sandra grinned at him and pointed up at the gathering cloud. “I think we’re safe on that score.”

* * * *

A sudden summer storm pelted fat raindrops at the French windows. Sniper sat in an overstuffed armchair facing the dreary weather. His head hung down and his breathing was slow and steady. Little flecks of blood spattered his bare chest.

He muttered and swore to himself in German, sometimes clenching his big fists, sometimes shaking his head angrily. “It’s all coming apart!” he wailed to the empty room. Everything was screwed up. Everything was wrong.

The girl in the gym was dead. He’d taken it too far in the end. Long after she had stopped enjoying it, long after he had, she had spat out a final litany of invective against him and died. Just like that.

It had shaken him. Not because the silly cow had died, but because, after the first hour or so, he had taken so little pleasure in it. Her degradation and torture had been almost automatic, a compulsion he had endured because he needed to do it. Needed to, like some pathetic addict jacking up just so he could get through the day, all pleasure gone, all meaning lost. He’d given Camilla the job of organising the disposal of the body. She had told him just what she thought of his recklessness and stupidity. She’d been very specific about what she thought about his mental health. She had described in detail what would happen to him if his inability to keep himself under control brought the police to their door. And he’d let her rant and curse at him. As long as she got that mess cleaned up, he didn’t care what she said.

“Just like Berlin,” he said aloud. The rush of insight made him gasp with surprise. It was just like Berlin. They were within days of the lob. Everything had gone so smoothly, but then he’d pulled that stunt with the stolen switches. Had he been deliberately trying to sabotage the timesplash? It hadn’t seemed so at the time. He just needed to do something exciting, to make himself feel alive, something his damned Yank paymasters wouldn’t like. It had driven Klaatu away. Maybe the kid had seen something Sniper hadn’t?

Was that what he’d just done with the girl, set out to wreck the lob again? Could he really be trying to fail? Was he such a coward? The biggest damned splash of all time was waiting for him. Wasn’t that what he wanted? Wasn’t that his destiny?

“You’re my big brave boy. Such a big strong boy.”

He spun around looking for his mother.