Zero kill, p.17
Zero Kill, page 17
She pulled Saint back into the living room. ‘The police are here.’
‘Go out the back,’ Roberta said in a shrill voice. ‘Just get out!’
But Elsa didn’t trust Dougie’s wife not to run screaming out the front as soon as they did. There was a door in the kitchen that led to a small utility room, where a freezer, washing machine and dishwasher were plumbed in. She pushed Saint inside, and grabbed Roberta. ‘In here.’
‘I’m not going in there with him!’
‘I promise he won’t hurt you.’ All the energy had drained from Saint, who leaned heavily against a counter, his head dropped to his chest. ‘And if you don’t get inside and keep quiet, I’ll kill you myself.’
Saint’s shaggy head lifted and, opening one eye, he put a finger to his chapped lips, Sssshhhhh.
Elsa threw in the dressing-gown cords Saint had used to tie Roberta and Dougie to the chairs and slammed the door shut. The last thing she heard Saint say to Roberta was, ‘You’ve got a very nice house.’
The doorbell rang.
The room was still a complete mess. There was nothing they could do about that now.
Standing at the front door, Dougie sweated with fear.
‘We’re man and wife,’ Elsa said. ‘Got it?’
Dougie’s eyes lit up. He attempted to take her hand, but she shook him off. When he opened the door, two police officers – a man and a woman – stood looking at them enquiringly.
‘How are you folks doing?’ asked the male officer.
‘Fine, thanks,’ Dougie said with unconvincing jollity.
The woman officer frowned. ‘Everything okay, sir?’
‘Hunky-dory, officer.’ Dougie’s voice trembled. ‘Bit late for a house call, isn’t it?’
The male officer stepped forward. ‘One of your neighbours heard screaming coming from the house.’
‘I’m sorry about that. Roberta and I,’ said Dougie, ‘were having a… sex game.’
‘An argument,’ said Elsa quickly.
Dougie put his arm around her and pulled her close, his fingers roaming too far down the curve of her lower spine for her liking. ‘But we’re fine now, you know what they say…’ He winked. ‘The best part of an argument is always the making up.’
Elsa kept a smile plastered on her face. The male officer looked at her hoodie and leggings, her dirty trainers, and at the suitcases Dougie and Roberta had wheeled inside when they arrived home.
‘Are you going somewhere, sir?’
‘Just back from holiday, in fact,’ said Dougie. ‘We had a lovely time, but we’re both a bit frazzled.’
The woman officer’s radio burbled on her shoulder and she leaned into it. ‘Just checking now, control.’
‘If there’s something either of you can’t tell us…’ The male officer lowered his voice. ‘Just nod your head.’
Dougie and Elsa both frowned in confusion.
‘If there’s someone in the house,’ said the officer softly. ‘If you’re being held against your will.’
‘There’s no one,’ Elsa said. ‘It’s just us.’
The officers gave each other a sceptical glance. ‘May we come in?’
‘I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible,’ said Elsa. ‘We were just going to bed.’
Dougie looked at her eagerly.
‘Just to take a look round, reassure ourselves you’re okay,’ said the woman officer. ‘It won’t take a moment.’
‘Come in, then.’ When Dougie stepped aside, Elsa could have killed him. The two police officers walked past them into the kitchen, where it opened out into the large living room, and looked doubtfully at the mess.
‘Had a party before we went away,’ said Elsa quickly. ‘We’ll clear up in the morning.’
The female officer looked at the knife, placed on the counter, that Saint had used to threaten Dougie and Roberta.
‘Just about to make a late-night snack,’ Elsa explained, walking past her towards the male officer.
He smiled at her pleasantly, but beneath the bright kitchen spotlights her gaze lifted to his cap – she tensed.
The officer’s smile vanished.
Dougie screamed. Elsa saw the glint of the knife at the edge of her vision and ducked just as the woman officer stabbed it sideways towards her throat. Elsa grabbed her wrist as it passed above her head, and twisted viciously.
‘Стрелять!’ the woman shouted, as she and Elsa spun around the kitchen, both grappling to control the knife twirling above their heads. But the ballistic vest the woman wore wasn’t enough to stop the bullets fired at point-blank range by the man when Elsa used her as a human shield.
The knife clattered to the floor, followed by the woman, and Elsa flew at the other officer, grabbing his gun hand and propelling him backwards into the living room and over the back of one of the sofas.
His finger trapped against the trigger by her grip, the handgun went off again, making the blinds jump and cracking the glass in the sliding door, as they rolled across the carpet, their torsos coming to rest at a diagonal beneath a low glass coffee table.
Trapped beneath the heavy glass, Elsa’s head loomed close to his snarling face as she tried to wrench the gun out of his hands, but the man was strong and she was exhausted. It was only the last of her ebbing strength that kept him from pointing the barrel directly into her face. He thrust his arms up, and with a cry of rage lifted her body, smashing her head and shoulders against the underside of the table, trying to knock her cold.
‘Yбью тебя!’ He jerked her up into the glass again, making the heavy table lurch above them, and giving him enough space to twist the gun towards her head.
She tried to stop it, straining every muscle, but she was trapped. The barrel trembled close to her ear, edging ever closer towards her temple and forehead.
‘Oтстань от меня!’ Elsa hissed, banging her own head and shoulders against the glass now, trying to heave the heavy table off, to find space to move. ‘Saint! Help me!’
As she crushed her thumbs over the man’s fingers, the gun went off next to her head. The blast was deafening. Her ear shrieked, the sound like a nuclear detonation inside her skull. The world shimmered in her vision, a riot of shape and noise.
She should be dead, but she wasn’t; didn’t understand why the assassin hadn’t taken advantage of her agony. When her eyes began to clear, she saw him blinking furiously and thrashing his head. Thick chunks of glass had fallen onto the back of her head, but also into the assassin’s face. A sharp wedge of glass was embedded in the corner of his right eye.
‘Saint,’ Elsa shouted again, or thought she did, because she couldn’t hear her own voice, only the scream of a thousand car alarms.
The man heaved her over so that she lay trapped on the blanket of broken glass beneath him, blood dripping from his face onto hers, using his brute strength to turn the gun towards her again. Elsa resisted, the gun shaking in both their hands, but it came closer. Then he yanked it from her grip and hit it hard into the side of her head, and her perforated eardrum.
Now she’d lost her grip on the weapon, he’d blow her brains out – where the hell was Saint when she needed him? She slammed the heel of her palm into his right eye, hammering the shard of glass deeper. He shuddered as she rotated her thumb, mashing the glass into his eyeball.
It was the assassin’s turn to roar in pain and Elsa used that split second of opportunity to flip him over, so that he faced away towards the ceiling. She snapped open her thighs, clamping her adductors around his waist, and squeezed hard. Trapping his gun arm, pulling him tightly to her.
Hunching below him, she locked a forearm around his neck and pulled the wrist with her other hand. Squeezed with all her strength. Unable to hear a thing except for that piercing wail in her head, she strained every muscle, letting all her rage and pain fuel her effort.
The man struggled in her grip, legs thrashing against the floor, his one free hand plucking uselessly at her forearm. Within a minute he lost consciousness, and within two he was dead.
Elsa rolled the guy’s body off her and staggered to her feet. She cupped her wailing ear, trying to hear anything. In the corner of the room Dougie was shouting soundlessly, throwing his arms around and pointing at the door. She tensed, expecting more intruders, but realized he was telling her to get out.
Elsa stumbled to the utility room and opened the door. A terrified Roberta peered at her from one corner. Saint was curled up asleep on the counter.
‘Saint, get up.’ Her own voice sounded like it came from the end of a long tunnel full of noisy machinery. ‘We have to go.’
She had introduced carnage into Dougie and Roberta’s home. If she stayed any longer, more would follow. As she pulled Saint across his kitchen, Dougie stared in shock at the dead people dressed as police.
‘Nothing will happen to you,’ Elsa said, conscious that she was shouting. There was no keeping this a secret now. ‘Just… tell the police the truth.’
She could hear what he said. ‘Who are they?’
‘Russian, I think.’
Practically every security agency on the planet was after her, so it was hardly surprising that the SVR, GRU, or whatever state agency employed this pair, had turned up.
‘How…’ Dougie gawped. ‘How did you know?’
Elsa picked up the woman’s cap where it had fallen beside the kitchen island.
‘The badges on their caps are wrong. Look, they’ve got the Essex Police crest on it. They should be Metropolitan Police officers.’
When Roberta saw the bodies on the floor and screamed all over again, Elsa left quickly.
28
Elsa called Camille on the phone she’d been given as she pushed Saint through the empty streets.
‘We said six,’ said Camille in surprise.
‘Unexpected visitors. What did you find on the images I took from the computer?’
‘I’ll tell you when I see you.’ Camille directed them to a nearby park. ‘Sit tight, and I’ll come as soon as I can.’
They headed there, trying to stay out of sight of CCTV cameras atop streetlamps and on shopfronts, and the proliferation of doorbell video cameras that could identify their location. There were probably satellites searching the urban sprawl for her as they moved above the earth in silent low orbit – Elsa didn’t know how sophisticated they were, or what kind of image they could pick up at night – but there was nothing she could do about that.
Sirens wailed in the distance, just about discernible among all the other howling sounds assaulting her damaged eardrum, which hurt like hell. The police would already be at Dougie’s house. He would be telling incredulous officers what had happened, Roberta would be crying, and someone would be calling SIS about the two dead Russians. Spooks were probably already piling into a car.
The park was a small square of green surrounded by tall buildings. Saint collapsed on one of the benches, stretching along the length of it. Wrapping her arms around her chest, Elsa tried to make herself comfortable on the other bench, but it was chilly. Her feet were still damp, as were her bum and the backs of her thighs in the thin fabric of her leggings. Saint was awake and looking at something, a piece of paper that had been folded and unfolded so many times it was almost falling apart; the edge of one quarter was shiny with ancient sticky tape.
‘What’s that?’ she asked, and he handed it to her.
It was a faded image of a clapboard shack beside a white beach, a sea of azure blue; his dream home she remembered seeing as they flew into Buenos Aires. Despite everything that had happened to him, he still carried it all these years later.
‘Found it yet?’ she asked him.
‘Don’t look likely now,’ he said, closing his eyes.
‘You’ll get there one day. You’ll walk down that beach, feel the sand between your toes and lift your head to the sun.’
He blew out his lips. ‘I’ll be dead first. Ain’t no way out for people like us, Elsie. We think we can leave the life behind any time, but we can’t. If I ever do get to walk on that beach, all I’ll be able to think about is all the bad things I did to get there. It may be paradise, but it’ll be the same old hell in my head.
‘People like me and you, our lives ain’t never going to be all pensions and slippers, quiet days in front of a roaring fire. We’re made to be knocked down like skittles. The good ones like you – and me, back in the day – just keep getting up. We keep going, we walk through walls and along the seabed and over mountains, we just keep fighting. We think we can let it go, the life, but all we’re wired to do is keep fighting. And as soon as we stop, the nightmares start, so we may as well just keep going. Fighting and falling down and getting up again, on and on.’
Elsa flapped her arms, trying to keep warm. She had a home now, a job and a family. ‘That’s not me any more.’
‘Yeah?’ His puffy eyes were two pinpricks of light. ‘How’s that working out for you?’
And, of course, he was right, because the so-called normal life Elsa had magicked out of the air for herself was over, probably for good. All these years later, people still hated her enough to want to kill her, and the only way out of the situation she found herself in was to accelerate into the centre of the shitstorm.
She’d spent much of her life doing the bidding of invisible masters, turning a blind eye to the motives of whatever side RedQueen was working for, and this was where she’d ended up… everyone wanted her dead. And she still had no idea whether it was because she was one of the good guys, or one of the bad.
She held the image of the shack on the beach delicately; she didn’t want to be the person who caused it finally to fall to bits.
But Saint shook his head. ‘Bin it, I don’t want it.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ She folded the paper with meticulous care, as if defusing an unexploded bomb, and placed it in the breast pocket of his puffer jacket. ‘When this is over, we’ll find your beach.’
A vehicle came slowly around the edge of the park, and its headlights flashed twice.
‘She’s here,’ Elsa said. ‘Let’s go.’
Saint swung his legs off the bench and shuffled behind her to the car. This time, Camille was driving. Elsa climbed in beside her, and Saint collapsed in the back.
‘All right, Camille?’ he said, as if he’d last seen her yesterday, and she nodded warily in return, then glanced at Elsa, the state of him.
His eyes closed immediately; Elsa had no idea if he was awake or not.
‘What’s happening?’ she asked Camille. ‘What did you find on the computer?’
‘There’s been a change of plan; we’re getting you out of here.’
‘A change of plan?’ Elsa couldn’t believe her ears; not that her ears were currently much use. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘There was nothing in the file we pulled from the vault, no data, no information, so a decision has been made—’
Elsa held up a hand. ‘Wait a minute.’
‘A decision has been made,’ Camille told her forcefully, ‘to get you out of the country. Somewhere you and your kids will be safe.’
‘The only way I’ll ever be safe is by finding out what’s happening to me.’
‘And how long do you think you’ll last, racing around trying to put the pieces together? A day, a week? Even if we did have a lead, which we don’t, you’ll be placing yourself in danger.’ Camille didn’t take her eyes from the road. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘And what if I don’t want to go?’ snapped Elsa.
‘Then you’re on your own, RedQueen can’t help you any more. If we’re found to be harbouring a fugitive, the consequences could be dangerous for every single contractor or freelance we’ve used.’
‘Then let me out,’ Elsa snapped. The side of her head throbbed badly. ‘Drop me off and I’ll do it alone.’
‘You’re being reckless and unreasonable. Think of your kids!’
Elsa was shocked into silence. Camille had used the one line of attack she had no answer for. She was right, their safety was the most important thing.
Camille sighed and asked gently, ‘What happened at the house?’
‘Assassins happened.’
‘Jesus.’ Camille looked at her more closely as she drove. ‘You okay?’
‘I’ll live.’
‘It just proves there’s nowhere in London we can keep you safe. You must understand the reality of the situation.’
A sudden fierce pain flared in Elsa’s eardrum and she lifted a hand to the side of her head.
‘You had a lucky escape from the Russians tonight,’ continued Camille. ‘But tomorrow it could be Mossad, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or the Ministry of State Security.’
Elsa wanted to cry. Her children’s lives were ruined, she was a dead woman walking, and she still had no idea why. ‘You survived that mission, Saint survived, so why am I being targeted?’
Camille shook her head. ‘I don’t know, but you’re the only one of us who went into that apartment.’
‘SIS interrogated me about that. I was questioned about it time and again. There was a hard drive with a pulsing blue light. We blew it up, Steve was killed, I was nearly killed. That’s it, end of story. I’m not suffering from any kind of amnesia, Cam, there’s nothing I can’t remember about that mission.’
Elsa didn’t know where she was, the streets were dark and empty; she was disorientated; they could be heading anywhere.
‘Look,’ Camille said. ‘The plan is to get you out of the country until we can work out what’s going on. We’re already reaching out to various agencies, I promise you wheels are in motion, and we’re confident we can get to the bottom of whatever’s going on, find a way out of this mess. In the meantime, we really don’t want you getting killed, or God forbid your children harmed. We have a plane ready. You’ll be out of the country within the hour, somewhere safe by the crack of dawn. Nobody will know where, not even me.’
‘India and Harley…’
‘Contact your parents as soon as you’re in the air; we’ll pick up the kids and arrange for them to join you.’ Camille pulled the car to the kerb on a nondescript street and put it into park.
