Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (11 page)

Ray stopped on the bridge, again hoping the guy would at least overtake. He didn’t want to have to hurry his trip, and he hated walking too close to people.

The river looked worthy of the name for a change, the water even high enough to cover the shopping trolleys and bike frames. Ray glanced to his side, where the guy in the sweatshirt was tying his shoe laces. It was the kind of thing that he knew ought not to make him nervous. If the bastard was planning to mug him, what was all the fannying about for? Foreplay? Or was he waiting until he’d bought his curry so he could rob that?

Daft.

Daft, but still, but still. It had been a freaky enough day already. He decided to pick up the pace and hope the guy went the other way once they were over the bridge.

The not‐
jogger resumed walking as soon as Ray did, which prompted a serious internal dialogue as to the dignity versus security issues of breaking into a run. He compromised on walking faster, and vowed not to look back. The trainer‐
cushioned footfalls remained behind him, but he couldn’t tell whether they were gaining ground. His vow lasting a good four seconds, he glanced back, ready to sprint if the response demanded it. However, the guy wasn’t looking at him, he was looking past him. Ray faced the front again and saw what he was looking at.

The people carrier was heading towards the bridge at speed, having made the loop to the other side of the river via Langside Drive. Ray turned to look at the not‐
jogger, who was pulling up his sweatshirt to reveal an automatic pistol taped to his stomach. He tore the tapes away and began screwing a silver‐
grey silencer to the muzzle. Up ahead, the people carrier slewed across the end of Cartside Street and its driver jumped from the door, also holding a silenced pistol.

Ray blinked, closing his eyes tight for a moment. Chronically knackered and unprecedentedly stressed, he’d already been seeing things that weren’t there today. Dead people at the airport and now double‐
trigger assassins on the Southside. Granted, the latter weren’t unheard of these days, but they generally didn’t bother with silencers any more than they bothered with English teachers. When he looked again, the driver had reached the far end of the bridge, and he most definitely was carrying a weapon. He stood with his feet apart and raised the gun in both hands. Five yards behind Ray, the not‐
jogger was doing the same thing.

This wasn’t possible. It wasn’t even plausible. Then Ray remembered a story about a student in Dennistoun answering his front door and getting kneecapped by two neds who were supposed to be hitting the bloke upstairs, a hash dealer who shared the unfortunate student’s surname.

He threw his hands in the air like a bank clerk in a cowboy picture.

‘I’m the wrong guy,’ he shouted. ‘Fuck’s sake, don’t shoot, I’m the wrong guy.’

‘Raymond Ash?’ the not‐
jogger asked, clearly and slowly, in the clipped, precise English of a fluent but nonnative speaker. Ray turned to face him.

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘No, I think Raymond Ash.’

Ray tried to swallow, but it felt as though his throat was blocked. He should have had a dozen questions, but could only think of Martin and Kate. The not‐
jogger slid the lever on his automatic, chambering a bullet. Ray heard the action repeated at his back.

Martin.

Kate.

The names, the faces gave instinct a kick in the arse. He dived for the railings, expecting the lethal blows to cut him down as the first muted shots sounded in his ears. Somehow those impacts never arrived, but the next one was guaranteed. He hit the water before he could think of all the junk he was likely to impale himself upon, and instantly became the first Glaswegian grateful for the summer rain.

Sheer instinct had taken him from the line of fire, but the same reflexes put him right back there when he automatically surfaced, seeking his breath and his bearings. Above him, both gunmen were leaning over the railings, scanning the opaque and rain‐
dappled river. They opened fire as soon as they saw him.

Ray ducked under again, hearing bullets zip past him through the water. His feet found the bottom. It was only about a metre and a half deep, but he was invisible as long as he stayed below. The zipping sounds ceased, the assassins biding their time, saving their ammo. Ray could feel the current pulling at his clothes. He was pretty sure he’d pissed himself, but it was hardly a concern now. The river bent sharply amid thick cover of trees just twenty or thirty yards downstream, next to the playing fields. Unfortunately it also got wider and shallower around the same stretch, but it was the only chance he had. He tucked his hands around his ankles, curling himself into a ball, and then lifted his feet from the riverbed, letting the flow carry him along in small, bouncing movements.

His last bounce ran him aground just as his breath gave out, the water still deep enough to cover him but not enough to keep him afloat. He gasped in the air and looked up. The bridge was out of sight, but through gaps in the bushes he could still see parked cars up on Cartside Street. The gunmen were bound to be up there somewhere.

He scrambled to the bank and threw himself flat among the trees, where he lay still and listened, but his waterlogged ears heard only his own heavy breaths and the sound of blood pumping round his head.

Simon had barely walked the length of the room and hung up his jacket before he heard a knock at the door. Damn sharp service: the British hotel industry had benefited immeasurably from being largely bought over by the Yanks and the French and generally having as little local management input as possible. Some might whine about cultural imposition, but he hardly thought it a great loss to the national sense of identity that it was now in attendants and waiting staff’s job descriptions to actually do what they were fucking paid for and not look like they were being anally raped while they were about it.

The bellboy carried his case inside and set it down on the rack, then gave him the textbook room‐
features breakdown, a service particularly useful to those travellers who hadn’t yet worked out what the light switch was for, or were perhaps planning on using the telephone to dry their hair. Ostensibly it was a courtesy, and a chance for the guest to make any enquiries he or she might have; but the true purpose was to hang around long enough for you to get hold of your wallet. Simon slipped him a couple of quid, opting as always for a decent but not over‐
generous tip. Too mean or too ostentatious and they were more likely to remember your face.

The TV was on, as per, displaying the hotel’s welcome message and menu over a soundtrack of Vivaldi, the Muzak of the corporate age. He looked at the name addressing him on the screen, different almost every time he checked in somewhere. This trip, he was Gordon Freeman. He’d chosen the Christian name to sound inconspicuously Scottish; while the surname was an indulgence, a celebration even. He’d been back before, of course, but never on business, and that was what made it so special. That Friday feeling, folks, and it was only Wednesday. Break out the Crunchies.

Talking briefly to the receptionist downstairs, it had been strange to hear himself speaking in his old accent, something he had found himself doing before he realised it. He seldom spoke English anymore, and when he unavoidably had to, he rendered it as Euro‐
neutral as he could. None of the people he worked with had ever known his nationality (or former nationality), and he insisted that they didn’t enquire or speculate about each other’s either. They spoke French – the international language of their profession unless circumstances required otherwise, as was the case now. But for this op, codenamed Mission Deliver Kindness, all communications, at all levels and across all media, were to be in English. He ordered them even to think in English, particularly those assigned ‘speaking parts’, who had each been on a satellite‐
fed diet of specific British soaps for the past two months: some on Corrie, some on Brookie and the rest on Stenders, poor cunts. The benefit of this was to roughen up the edges of their word‐
perfect pronunciations and ground them in regional colloquialisms so that they didn’t sound like a bunch of homogenous Euro‐
twats. It seemed to have worked too, and apparently without any of the feared side effects. As far as he had noticed, Deacon’s occasional Estuary English inflections hadn’t come at the price of a complete failure of dress sense or a tendency to fend off sorrow with the aid of a singsong round the old Joanna, while Taylor had been pig‐
ugly before his introduction to the time‐
warped and genetically deficient world of Weatherfield. May, being an explosives expert, was bound to feel at home with the unfeasibly combustible environs of Brookside Close, though Simon had no way of knowing whether he’d been prone to bouts of depression prior to his concentrated immersion in Scouse misery.

The accent he would be using, he told them, was learned from a show called Taggart. He feared all these years of speaking French might make him sound as Glaswegian as deep‐
fried foie gras, so he had to come up with an equally unauthentic source just in case someone was nosey enough to check it out.

Simon switched off the TV, probably the last time he’d see the name ‘Freeman’ in intended reference to himself. For the duration and execution of MDK, he would be ‘Mercury’. No‐
one in the team ever learned their comrades’ real names, an indispensable precaution in a world where loyalty only lasted as long as it took to pull off the job and trouser the greenback. They weren’t allowed to name themselves, either, as who knew what traceable elements might lie in their choice of handle. Simon gave them their names, and always used those of major‐
league rock stars: easy to remember and international enough not to betray a parochial and thus identifiable frame of reference. He was sure Shub would approve, master that he was of the art of self‐
obscuring.

Hotel rooms like this were a pleasure that never faded with familiarity. A lot of them were indistinguishable, and minus the logos, you could easily forget which chain name you had just checked into, but there was actually something comforting about that. Yeah, they all had the same features, but they were features he liked, so the effect wasn’t so much a home from home as a reason to be happy you were on the road. Two double beds, well‐
stocked mini‐
bar, room‐
service menu, desk in the corner, towelling gowns in the wardrobe, marble in the bathrooms. When his schedule allowed, he savoured the ritual relaxation of unpacking and undressing, before pouring himself a drink and having a long, slow soak, after which the stresses and cares of mass murder just washed down the plughole with the suds.

Tonight, however, the ritual had to wait. There was pressing business to attend to, an unforeseen complication that had to be incorporated into their plans. He placed his laptop on the desk and plugged the phonejack into its socket, then booted up and double‐
clicked an icon marked Assembly.bat. The program ran a number of executables, dialling to page the three command‐
rank members of his team, then connecting to a password‐
protected relay chat server that only the four of them knew the address of anyway. In what might accurately be called the Surveillance Age, there was no such thing as guaranteed privacy, but this came close. The server and all clients were firewalled out the arse, so there was no way of intercepting data going in or out, except as scrambled gobbledegook. The only flaw was that one of the participants could log the chat session and later toss it to the cops, but only if he really wanted to know what a power drill felt like inside his abdomen.

Deacon responded immediately, by way of an automatically generated text message, which meant he was still in the air and therefore unavailable. Taylor showed up in the chat session first, having pulled into a layby to do so, probably screeching the tyres now he had an excuse to crank up his new cellular modem. They all had them, but, for security reasons, Simon had rigidly restricted their use to these firewalled blethers and looking up pornow hack.com.

May joined the session shortly after that, dialling in from their temporary HQ.

The alteration to the schedule was in motion within half an hour. Deacon would be brought up to date when he reported in, but he wasn’t needed. May had it in hand, dispatching Joe Strummer and Mick Jones to go rock the little drummer boy’s Kasbah whenever he next exited his address, which was helpfully listed in the phonebook.

Simon closed the chat session, grabbed two Bourbon miniatures from the mini‐
bar, then turned on the taps in the bathroom. Now that its potential consequences were being capped, he could afford to reflect on what had happened at the airport, and was in fact having some difficulty thinking about much else.

What were the odds? Really, what were the fucking odds? Ha! Shorter than anyone might think.

There’d been a woman with a drooling toddler beside him on the flight; the comparative anonymity of economy class coming at the usual price to comfort, dignity and olfactory wellbeing. She’d been telling the pudgy little spawn about God, as precipitated by their being above the clouds and the gnome asking predictably stupid questions.

‘God is everywhere,’ Mummy had explained, enough sugar in her voice to rot every last milk tooth in the cretin’s chubby head. This being the case, God had to be a Glaswegian, because they were fucking everywhere too. It didn’t matter how remote a part of the planet you cared to explore, when you got there, you were bound to run into somebody you’d last seen on Byre’s Road or the Central Station taxi rank.

Actually visiting the place practically guaranteed an impromptu reunion with somebody, even if you were only passing through the airport. In fact, especially if you were passing through the airport. When he was younger, he thought it was just because everybody went on their holidays at the same time. Later in life he’d found that the time of year or even the time of day didn’t matter: if you flew in or out of Abbotsinch, you usually saw someone you knew. It was the funnel effect, skewing the probability, channelling all the city’s air travellers through one small space. Kind of thing you had to bear in mind in this game. Playing the percentages was negligence, no matter how well you thought you knew them: what comfort would it be as you bit the barrel of your own gun to know that you had been statistically unlucky?