Zero 22, p.16
Zero 22, page 16
part #8 of Danny Black Series
‘What do you mean?’ asked the grey-haired gunman. He pulled Parsons out of the lift and threw him against the wall next to Hunter.
The manager stumbled over his words as he crept out of the lift. His blinking was off the scale. It made him look shifty. ‘Please, it is nothing serious. These gentlemen are from the telephone company. They would like to check the line coming into Mr Rostropovic’s apartment.’
The man sneered. ‘Why didn’t you fucking call in advance? You know rules.’ Each word sounded like he was spitting.
‘I . . . I apologise, sir. I’m assured it will only take a few minutes.’
The two guys didn’t seem to be listening to the manager. As he jabbered away, they started roughly patting down Hunter and Parsons. Hunter caught a glimpse of a pistol holstered under the brown-haired guy’s jacket. The guy clearly saw him noticing. ‘Wh-what . . .’ Hunter stuttered. ‘Is . . . is that a gun?’
The guy didn’t answer. He just kept patting him down. When the two guards were satisfied that neither Hunter nor Parsons were armed, the brown-haired guy looked askance at the grey-haired guy. Something passed between them. The grey-haired guy looked at Hunter and pointed at the canvas bag that was still in the lift. ‘Get it,’ he said.
Hunter entered the lift and retrieved the bag.
‘Empty it, short-arse,’ said the grey-haired guy. The insult sounded almost comical in his Russian accent. ‘All of it.’
Hunter leaned over and emptied the contents of the bag on to the ground. Screwdrivers. Wire cutters and crimpers. An electrician’s multimeter. A cable finder. Nothing that a telephone engineer wouldn’t be carrying. The brown-haired gunman poked at it with his foot. ‘Put them back,’ he said.
Hunter crouched down and did as he was told. The brown-haired guy was standing over him, but the atmosphere had changed a little. The guards were less tense. ‘Bloody hell, mate,’ Hunter said as he crammed the tools back into the canvas bag. ‘I nearly peed myself when I saw that –’ He made a vague gesture to indicate the pistol. The brown-haired guy with the burn mark sneered at him. Hunter’s act had done the job. The guards obviously thought they had a right couple of wimps on their hands. I’m going to fucking do you later, Hunter thought to himself as he stood up and maintained his pretence.
‘Five minutes,’ said the grey-haired gunman. ‘You speak to no one in apartment. You ask me before you enter any room. Are you understanding me?’
‘Whatever, mate,’ said Hunter. ‘We’ll be in and out. It’s no biggie.’
‘Yeah,’ Parsons said. ‘We don’t want any trouble.’
‘Please,’ said the manager. His brow was damp with sweat and he was obsequiously wringing his hands. ‘This way. Please, this way.’ He started off down the corridor.
The brown-haired guy peered into the lift. Hunter noticed him glance upwards at the ceiling and for a tense moment thought he might investigate further. But then he stepped back into the corridor and pressed the call button. The lift doors slid shut. ‘Move,’ he said. ‘Go on. Move!’
Hunter and Parsons followed the manager along the corridor.
Cunningham flicked the override switch on the secondary control panel immediately after hearing the lift doors slide shut. He and the others remained absolutely still and silent. He had his head cocked slightly, listening for the sound of disappearing footsteps, but he could hear none.
A minute passed. There was a noise in the cavity above them. Something flapping around. A bat, maybe. Cunningham ignored it and refocused all his attention on any sound he might be able to discern outside the lift. There was none. He turned to the others, nodded to indicate his intention, then pressed the green button.
The lift descended, but only a couple of metres. Cunningham removed his finger from the button as soon as the top of the lift was in line with the bottom of the penthouse doors. It shuddered to a halt. He unclipped the metal tool from the side of the control panel. He identified a notch halfway up the line where the doors met. The end of the tool fitted into it precisely. All he needed to do was twist the tool and the doors would open silently. He nodded at the others again. Hobbs and Moore raised their handguns. Cunningham held up three fingers.
Two.
One.
The doors slid open.
The space in front of the lift was empty. The sound of voices drifted towards them. Cunningham lowered the door opener and jabbed a finger forwards. Hobbs and Moore exited and turned to the right, weapons raised, ready to fire. Cunningham drew his own weapon and stepped outside. The corridor was empty.
They advanced.
The room outside the main lift, with the art on the wall and the orange sofa, was a kind of lobby area. It was gaudy and over the top. There were two marble statues of naked women at either end of the sofa. Against one wall there was a life-sized model of a snarling tiger. There was just one heavy wooden door that led into the penthouse apartment itself – Hunter knew that from his study of the plans. No windows. Subtle lighting, pooling from recessed spotlights. The two guys took up position about five metres from them, facing the door, which meant they couldn’t see anyone approaching from the corridor. The manager was standing behind the guards. Good thing too. He looked like he might wet himself. He was blinking so frequently that his eyes looked more shut than open. Hunter took the cable finder from the canvas bag. ‘We might be able to do it all out here, avoid disturbing them inside,’ he said. He pointed to a section of wall about three metres from the main door and handed Parsons the cable finder. ‘You want to see if you can locate it?’
Parsons was making a very good pretence of being scared. Give that man a fucking Oscar, Hunter thought. His hand trembled artfully as he took the cable finder, and he glanced with feigned anxiety at the two guards. He put the cable finder to the wall and switched it on. There was a piercing, high-pitched tone. Parsons rotated a dial to get rid of it. Hunter turned to the two guys. They had clearly decided that Hunter and Parsons were no threat because their body language was slack and relaxed. ‘It’s just noise on the line,’ Hunter bluffed. ‘If we can trace the cable back . . .’
The guards weren’t even listening. Hunter could tell. They were distracted – still facing him, but not looking at him or Parsons, at least not properly. The brown-haired guy had his phone out. He scrolled down and said something to his companion in Russian. They seemed impatient, as though they wanted these two technicians to do their job and then get the hell out of there. That suited Hunter just fine. Because he knew that behind them, advancing round the corner, were the others, their footfall completely silent. They would each have their handgun in their right hand, and their tasers in their left. Each taser had two sharp prongs and the guys would be holding them at shoulder height; a quick, silent way to put the guards down without killing them.
It might have gone smoother if the manager hadn’t whimpered. Hunter glanced in his direction. The manager was two metres behind the guards and the other guys were approaching, three abreast, a couple of metres behind him. It was involuntary, no doubt, but when the SAS men were about three metres from their targets, the manager let out a half moan, half sigh, that immediately alerted the two guards to the fact that something wasn’t right. It was the grey-haired guy who reacted quickest, spinning round to see what was wrong. He had Cunningham bearing down on him but his reflexes were fast. As Hobbs slammed his handheld taser into the shoulder of the brown-haired guy, his mate reached into his suit jacket and pulled out his pistol.
But if the grey-haired guy was fast, Hunter, crouched by the wall he was pretending to examine, was faster. Having identified him as the dominant shooter, he was ready to attack him from behind. He sprang up and covered the five metres between them in an instant, colliding with the guy a bare fraction of a second before he released a round from his handgun. Cunningham, coming at him from the other direction at great speed, slammed the taser into the grey-haired guy’s neck. His body jolted violently and collapsed heavily to the floor. He hit his head badly as he fell and was knocked unconscious. But then there was vicious screaming. The manager was gripping the upper part of his right arm and blood was pissing through his fingers. He must have been clipped by the bullet.
‘Shut him up!’ Cunningham hissed at Hunter, as he and Hobbs advanced on the door, tasers away, weapons raised. Hunter hurried over to the manager and slammed one hand over his mouth, muffling the screams. Moore removed a bunch of cable ties from his ops vest and threw them to Parsons, who immediately rolled the grey-haired guy’s unconscious body on to his front before fastening his wrists behind his back. Blood was pumping from the manager’s wound, smearing itself over Hunter’s BT uniform. It was flowing fast, bright red, arterial. He was going to bleed out in a couple of minutes without intervention. Hunter didn’t need to make the request; Moore chucked a tourniquet his way as he advanced with Cunningham and Hobbs towards the door. Parsons was tying up the brown-haired guy with the burn mark. Hunter had a call to make. Should he remove his hand from the manager’s mouth to apply the tourniquet? Tightening it around the wound would be agonising. It would make him scream even more. Would it distract the guys? Alert the targets? They’d have already heard the gunshot. Hardly fucking ideal. The manager’s eyes were rolling. Hunter reckoned he had a minute of consciousness left. Cunningham was by the door, tapping the manager’s key fob to a pad on the right-hand side, ready to open it. Hobbs and Moore were standing two metres from it. Hobbs had his handgun raised, two-handed, forefinger resting on the trigger. Moore was holding a flashbang grenade. It was about to go very noisy. Hunter elected to hold off for just a few more seconds. He kept his hand clasped over the manager’s mouth and tried to ignore the warm blood seeping through the material of his uniform.
Cunningham held up three fingers.
Two fingers.
One.
He yanked the door open. Moore hurled the flashbang inside.
It didn’t matter how often you trained with a flashbang. You never totally got used to the shock and awe. Good thing, too. They were designed to disorientate. As the grenade exploded inside the apartment, the shock waves physically jolted Cunningham, rocking him on his feet. His eyesight was protected by the door from the worst of the flash, but there was still a hint of retinal burn. ‘Go!’ he said. Weapons raised, Hobbs and Moore rushed into the apartment. Cunningham followed.
A wide, ornate corridor, fifteen metres long. Wood panelling. Small statues of armless figures on plinths. Big oil paintings of boring-looking men in suits. A chandelier. At the end of the corridor was the dining room, doors wide open, apparently empty of people. A large dining table. Silver candlesticks. Three doors on either side, five of them shut, the final one on the left-hand side slightly ajar, light spilling out. Noise from everywhere. Outside the apartment he could hear the manager screaming hoarsely, an absolutely agonising sound, and he knew Hunter must be pulling a tourniquet as tight as possible above his bullet wound. From a room to the right, more screaming. But different screams. Screams of fear. Cunningham could discern three voices: two kids, one adult female. Up ahead, from the dining room but out of sight, male voices. Russian. Shouting at each other. Also scared, but with an edge. Like they were about to take action.
Parsons entered, his handgun raised. Cunningham nodded in the direction of the door behind which the kids and woman were screaming. Ordinarily they would search the apartment room by room, but the direction of the voices gave them an indication of where everybody was. Parsons approached the door to the right as Cunningham, Hobbs and Moore advanced further along the corridor towards the dining room. Moore had taken a second flashbang from his ops vest. He rolled it along the corridor into the dining room. It came to a halt just in front of the dining table, then detonated. Cunningham closed his eyes to protect them from the flash. As the explosion ripped through the apartment, physically jolting him for a second time, the team advanced. The shouting and screaming was louder from all directions now. The manager. The woman and kids. The guys up ahead. Chaos. Cunningham cut through it, focused, mind on what was important. So, when a figure appeared ten metres ahead in the wide-open doors of the dining room, arm extended, holding a gun, eyes half closed because of the flash, Cunningham didn’t hesitate. He released a single round, to wound, not kill. It slammed into the figure’s shoulder, throwing him backwards so that he hit the table at an awkward angle and went down with a heavy thump. The team continued to advance, Cunningham at the point of their triangular formation, Hobbs and Moore behind him. Cunningham kept half his attention on the man he’d just shot. He was an older guy, maybe sixty. Tufts of hair on either side of his otherwise bald head. A hawkish nose. It was Rostropovic, Cunningham surmised. He’d dropped his weapon and was too busy clutching his wound to be reaching for it. Thank fuck he wasn’t screaming. It was like a lunatic asylum in here and there was still no sign of Poliakov. Couldn’t Parsons shut those kids up?
They entered the dining room. Broad, floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the Thames. Expensive furniture. An artificial fireplace. More statues – whoever decked this place out had a liking for naked marble women. There was a big oil-painted portrait of Rostropovic over the fire. A second guy was cringing behind a metre-high plinth moulded like a Greek column. He had his back to them and looked like he was dialling on a mobile phone. Cunningham approached him quickly, leaving Hobbs and Moore to deal with Rostropovic. He freed one hand from his weapon, moved round so he was facing the suspect, then bent down and grabbed him by the scruff of his shirt. He hauled him to his feet, spun him and slammed him against the wall, knocking a painting askew as he did it. The phone went flying. He examined the man’s face. Short black hair. A mole on his left cheek that sprouted three tiny hairs. A thin nose. Stubble. It matched the picture of Dmitri Poliakov that the ops officer had provided that morning.
‘Positive ID!’ he shouted. ‘We’ve got him.’
FOURTEEN
19.00 hrs, Amman.
The General was kind of charming. Bethany had to give him that. He didn’t indulge in the usual tired chat-up lines or talk ad nauseum about himself. He seemed – or pretended – to be interested in her. He listened to her responses and laughed at her jokes. That didn’t mean Bethany didn’t cringe at his outrageous flattery, but she understood how a powerful guy like him would have success with women; his technique made them feel even more important than he was. ‘I bet you get all the scoops,’ he said, when she told him she was a journalist. ‘I bet the guys give you all their secrets.’
‘Men have secrets?’
‘Not from you, I’m willing to bet.’
‘Do you have secrets?’
‘Why don’t I buy you another glass of champagne and you can try to find out.’
Bethany rewarded the General with a smile – the kind of smile that she knew made guys weak – and accepted his offer of a drink.
Fair play to the guy, Danny thought. He was putting the work in. He watched their reflections in the mirror behind the bar, saw the effect of Bethany’s smile. The General’s eyes gleamed as brightly as his expensive brogues. And well they might. The smile was artful. It filled her expression with promise. She reached out and brushed the General’s elbow with her right hand as she said something that made him laugh. A tiny gesture, but Danny knew it would be electrifying for O’Brien. He felt a pang of jealousy. Under other circumstances, he wouldn’t mind being in the General’s position right now. A minute later the General returned Bethany’s gesture. A little more clumsily, perhaps, but Bethany didn’t shrink away when he touched her knee. She smiled at him again.
Something grabbed Danny’s attention. He had been aware of the chit-chat around him. It had almost exclusively been in Arabic, although he had tuned in to the occasional sentence in American-accented English. Now he heard a different language. Russian, he was certain, even though he didn’t speak it. He glanced over his shoulder. Two men were sitting at a nearby table. One had sandy hair and wore a grey polo neck underneath a tan leather jacket. The other had black hair and a Tom Selleck moustache, and had on an open neck shirt. They had shot glasses of colourless liquid on the table in front of them and were talking quietly. Nothing overtly suspicious, but Danny made a mental note of their presence.
He turned back to the bar. Bethany had one hand on the General’s knee. In Danny’s eyes, he was as good as dead.
17.03 hrs, GMT.
Rostropovic was being a pain in the arse despite his gun wound. Hobbs was patching him up and he was screaming at him in Russian, with the tone of voice of a man accustomed to being obeyed. Fair play to Hobbs, he was keeping calm, but Cunningham could tell he wanted to shut him up. The rest of the guys had checked there was nobody else in the apartment and now he could hear the police officers, summoned from the basement, talking to the woman and kids in firm, measured voices. Keeping them separate from where the Regiment team was doing its job.
Cunningham turned his attention to Poliakov. On jungle training, he had once caught a fer-de-lance snake. It was nearly two metres long, its body thick and brown. Cunningham had pinned it to the forest floor by the neck with a forked stick, and that snake had hissed and writhed violently in the few seconds it took for him to remove his knife and hack its head off. Poliakov reminded him of that snake. He was face down on the floor, cheek to the carpet, hands behind his back, wrists plasticuffed. Cunningham had one heavy boot between his shoulder blades to keep him on the floor, but Poliakov still kicked and wriggled and hissed and spat in Russian. He seemed to think Cunningham himself was Russian. Flecks of saliva showered from his lips. Cunningham didn’t know what he was saying. Nor did he care. In one hand he had Poliakov’s phone and a money clip containing Russian and British currency. His own phone was in his other hand, up to his ear and on the line to Hereford. ‘We got him,’ he said.
‘Roger that. Patching you through to Vauxhall.’
