Shredder (15 page)

Five o'clock. I had to do it. Somehow I had to kill the Guvnor, or Zoe would die horribly. And I would have to do it without getting caught, and without getting killed, because the Turk wouldn't bother sticking to a deal made with a dead man. He wasn't sentimental, and didn't lie awake at night fretting about his personal honor, but if I did what he asked, Zoe would at least have a chance. Now I felt that familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach, the adrenaline pumping through my system. My opponent was in the ring, waiting, slapping his gloves together, limbering up.

It was growing dark outside…already? But it wasn't night falling—thunderclouds were gathering, shifting and towering overhead, thick and purple and heavy and menacing. I heard a distant rumble, then something else in the distance—a siren? London has sirens like most towns have birdsong, but this one was growing really loud, really quickly, not in fits and starts like ambulances do as
they maneuver round traffic and slow down for red lights. Now the siren was mingling with the squeal of car tires and the roar of engines, and shoppers in the street were looking about, half excited, half scared, to see what the commotion was and where it was coming from.

Up the side street leading down to the mini-roundabout a shiny black hatchback swerved into view, going far too fast for this busy suburban precinct. It fishtailed along the middle of the road as if the driver didn't know which side he was supposed to be on, then accelerated towards the traffic roundabout between me and the flat, clearly not intending to give way to anyone else. An instant later I could see why—a police patrol car came screaming round the same corner in the hatchback's wake, sirens blaring, blue lights piercing the gathering gloom. It cornered smoothly, moving at speed but under perfect control, seconds behind the black hatchback.

Mere moments had elapsed since we'd first heard the siren, but already everyone inside the café had stopped talking and was jostling at the window for a better view of a real-life car chase. For an instant I thought the driver of the black car was going to lose control and come smashing through the plate-glass
window where I sat, but he cornered hard on the roundabout, nearly clipping the curb closest to us, and I could see him hauling on the wheel the same way Patrick had when he'd driven away the night before. He threw the screaming hatchback into a U-turn and gunned it back the way he'd come, hoping to speed straight past the police pursuers, but the cop car veered across its path instead, and kept coming when the hatchback tried to swerve round it. The two vehicles collided with a metallic bang and an explosion of shattered headlamps, the hatchback skewing and rocking to the left, the cop car jumping up in the air momentarily before slamming down onto its wheels again. There was a vast collective gasp from everyone watching, a moment of stunned silence, and then the shouting and yelling began, and passersby came running to help.

The thin afternoon traffic had already seized up and car horns were blowing. A crowd of people—of all races and all ages—clustered around both cars, checking to see if any of the occupants had been injured. The doors of the hatchback were pulled open and I saw two people checking out the driver, a black guy, who from his bloodied mouth and nose seemed to have bounced his face off the steering wheel at
the moment of impact. His three passengers, also black, hadn't fared much better, judging by the way they were staggering groggily out of their wrecked hatchback. It clearly had no airbags, but the cop car did, and the cops had to struggle past the huge white sagging cushions before they could climb out of their vehicle.

The cops were young and lean and hard—one a shaven-headed white guy, the other a wiry Asian—and they seemed to expect the crowd to stand back while they arrested the four suspects. But that wasn't happening; instead the crowd blocked their way—darting fingers at the cops' faces and shouting angry defiance. From inside the café I couldn't hear what was said, but it looked like the cops were being accused of risking people's lives with a high-speed pursuit in a shopping precinct, of racism, and harassment and just being there. The cops had already pulled handcuffs from their belts, and it looked like they intended to make their arrests regardless of what the crowd thought, but sensing that the crowd's involvement might offer them a chance to escape, their suspects refused to be arrested, snatching their wrists away from the cuffs and joining in the shouting and protests.

I felt another rumble resonate in my chest, but was that the thunderstorm approaching or something else? Even from inside the café I could sense the shift in the mood of the crowd as the confrontation built up, smell something in the air—an intangible toxic cloud of anger and frustration and indignation that was seeping into the pores of everyone watching, like nerve gas. The hairs rose on the back of my neck. I'd felt this before somewhere, years ago…. More passersby, who up until that point had been watching the confrontation from the pavement, muttering disgust and dissent, started drifting closer—not only young black men like the guys in the hatchback, but Asians and white guys and even a few women, all young and overheated and pissed off, seizing the moment and the safety offered by numbers to have a go at authority figures in uniform.

I jostled my way past through the café's customers and staff, who by now were lined up at the window watching in a haze of fear and uncertainty, and hauled open the café door. Stepping outside, I slammed into hot wet air and tension as solid as a concrete wall, and with every second the furious buzz seemed to be drawing in yet more indignant twitching teenagers from streets away. The men the
cops had been trying to detain had vanished, absorbed by the crowd, and now at last the cops saw that they were way out of their depth. With barely a glance at each other they started to back off, tucking their handcuffs back into the pouches on their belts and heading back towards their patrol car—not so fast that it looked like they were panicking, but not too slowly either.

Wrenching open the doors, they clambered back in, beating down the deflated airbags, clearly praying their vehicle hadn't been too badly damaged by the collision to get them out of there. But before they could even start the engine the furious crowd had ringed them in, open palms and clenched fists slamming onto the bodywork. The angry voices were rising to shrieks, demanding apologies or explanations, or simply spouting threats and abuse. The cops fired up their siren and flashing blue lights, hoping to drive the crowd back with sheer ear-piercing racket and dazzle, but that seemed to aggravate the protestors even more.

From the fringes of the crowd I caught movement upstairs at the window of the Turk's apartment: a net curtain twitched and was pulled aside. I couldn't make out which of the Turk's men was watching,
but suddenly I saw a possibility—a gamble on odds so long it seemed insane. But they were better odds than any I'd faced so far. The blasts of the cop car siren were making my eardrums rattle, and beyond its whooping and the angry shouts of the crowd I could hear more sirens in the distance, shifting and phasing. Police reinforcements were weaving their way through the stalled traffic and the clogged-up streets to back up their colleagues. It was now or never.

I looked around for something to use and saw nothing except cemented-down signposts and plastic litter bins bolted to the pavement. But stranded in the traffic a few cars back from the junction stood a Dumpster truck, its horn blaring, its driver with his head out the window of the cab, banging on his door and shouting insults and complaints at anyone within range, demanding they shift their cars and get out of his bloody road. Turning away from the angry crowd at the junction, I ran down past his truck on his blind side to check out the contents of the Dumpster he was transporting, thinking, Please let it not be empty, please let it not be full of polystyrene blocks and flattened cardboard. I hooked one hand onto one of the massive pneumatic arms that
hauled the loads on and off, planted a foot on the truck bed and heaved myself up, grabbing the lip of the Dumpster to look in.

It was loaded with hardcore rubble and scrapped scaffolding poles, piled so high the end of one pole nearly poked me in the face. I grabbed that one, twisted it and pulled. It didn't budge. I chose a second, stubbier pole and tried again, heaving at it, and this time it shuddered and squealed in my fist, sliding out from under shattered bricks and lumps of concrete until it swung free and heavy in my hand. It was a steel tube about a meter long and twice the weight of a baseball bat, and it was just what I needed.

By the time I'd jumped down and started back for the junction other bystanders had already started to scurry down the street, away from the shrieking knot of chaos and the whooping police vehicle—pensioners hobbling along as fast as they could, mums with kids overtaking them in strollers, all of them clearly afraid that everything might get a lot worse at any second. I was hoping it would; in fact, I was planning to make sure it did.

I kept the scaffolding pole low, dangling it loosely from my hand as I pushed through the fringes of
the crowd. By now the cops were reversing, slowly and steadily, straight towards me, trying not to run anyone over, but all the same forcing the protestors behind them to step aside. I stepped aside too, took a firm grip with both hands on the scaffolding pole, and slammed it into the cop car's rear windscreen.

It imploded instantly, sending glass showering in silver crumbs into the car. I saw the cops inside duck instinctively and the car leap on its springs as the driver stamped on the brake, and the crowd roared around me, and I felt the massed adrenaline surge and catch flame. In that instant the crowd became a mob, and their shouts became a cacophony—the massed screeching of a demon with a thousand heads that had scented human blood.

The cop car's engine roared, and it jolted forwards in a hard turn, this time knocking two people off their feet, but not stopping. I glimpsed the officer in the passenger seat screaming into his radio, head sunk into his shoulders and body hunched forward as from nowhere a brittle rain of bottles came down: milk bottles, beer bottles, water bottles—some smashing, some bouncing off the roof and hood. Then a massive lump of concrete—from the Dumpster truck?—shattered the patrol car's light bar, and
soon rocks and bricks were thundering on the bodywork and bouncing off into the crowd, sending us scattering. As the mob fell back, the cop driving saw his chance, spun the wheel and gunned the engine.

At that instant beside me a stocky kid my age with a faceful of acne grabbed one fallen rock and pulled his hand back to hurl it through the crumbling ring of glass that had been the rear windscreen, right at the back of the Asian copper's head. In the chaos no one saw me knock the rock from his hand and kick his feet out from under him. It was the least I could do—these stupid cops weren't the target, as far as I was concerned.

That reek I'd smelled earlier—of frustration and resentment and sheer mindless fury—I remembered it now. It was the stink of a rabid, unpredictable monster that lurked under the city pavements, and now I'd set it free.

Riot
.

A few years back, while the world prepared to visit London for the Olympics, buses had burned in the streets, shattered glass had piled up on the pavements like drifting snow, and looters—their attacks coordinated on smartphones—had carried their booty away in vans. Hordes of hoodied teenagers
with scarves for masks had run amok, chucking rocks at anything that moved and setting fire to anything that didn't. I remembered all of it, because I'd been there. Back then the cops, bewildered and outnumbered, had fled, sealing off the perimeters and waiting for the fury to burn itself out.

These cops were doing the same. The patrol car had pierced the gap in the crowd and was speeding away in the same direction it had come, trailing a battered rear bumper, its shattered lights flashing white and its siren blaring—only to very nearly collide head-on with a police van speeding round the same corner in the other direction, half full of blue uniforms but utterly unprepared for the frenzy that greeted them.

Both vehicles screeched and swerved to a halt, rocking on their springs for a few seconds, but in those seconds the mob roared and rallied and raced up the road towards the vehicles, hurling more bottles and rocks and bricks that showered down in a lethal hail, crazing two of the van's side windows before the crew inside even had a chance to drop their wire-mesh windscreen protector. The fleeing patrol car swung past the van and sped away round the corner; the driver of the minibus slammed his
vehicle into reverse and screeched backwards after them, away from the crowd and clear of the flying rocks, round the corner and out of sight, knocking the wing mirrors off two parked cars in his haste.

Now that the police had been vanquished, the mob surged and spun and seemed to hang motionless, the way I'd seen a tornado pause in one of those videos taken by kamikaze stormchasers…and I remembered that when the vortex appears to be standing still, that means it's headed right for you.

This one exploded all around me.

Abruptly rain started coming down in hot torrents, soaking everyone, and to the crowd it was as refreshing and exhilarating as sprinklers going off at a rave. Windows shattered all along the street—the first targets were the shops selling booze—and the air quickly filled with shrieking sirens and clattering bells of burglar alarms, mingling with screaming and shouting and mad laughter and the roar of car engines as drivers trapped in the middle of the maelstrom tried to pull out of the stalled lines of traffic and somehow get out of there. One or two succeeded, bumping over traffic islands and even up along the pavement in their haste, while other drivers simply abandoned their cars in the street and ran.

The mob—blokes of any and every race, most of them in their twenties, plus a scattering of women,
plus scores of kids barely into their teens—swirled and clustered and scattered again, seeking targets, egging each other on, swarming over the abandoned cars, dancing on their roofs, raking the interiors for anything stealable—GPS units, sunglasses, CD players—only to dump their loot in the street and run on to their next target. One big shiny four-by-four, brand-new by the looks of it, the looters didn't even bother to ransack—they just ripped off its wipers, snapped and smashed its wing mirrors and crazed its windows and hacked at its bodywork with rocks and bricks and broken bottles and anything hard that came to hand. It was one of those huge ostentatious expensive cars whose only purpose in London was to inspire envy, and it was working all too well on this crowd.

The Dumpster truck too had been abandoned, with both its doors hanging open, but now black smoke was drifting from the cab, and I could see an orange flicker from the footwell refracted in its windows. Someone had set it on fire. Other rioters were clearing its load of poles and rocks to use as ammunition. All of them were soaked and none of them gave a damn; even the fire seemed to blaze away more brightly in the rain.

I held back, fighting down the feelings of sickness at the chaos I'd unleashed, trying instead to focus on how much time I had before the cops tooled up with riot gear and returned in force to drive us off the street. Last time it had taken them days; this time they might well decide to come back hard and fast, to snuff the riot out before it spread.

I had an hour maybe, at most.

All along the street shopkeepers were abandoning their premises, the braver ones risking the wrath of the rioters to haul down steel shutters in front of their windows; others—like the staff of the café I'd been sitting in earlier—merely bolting their doors, switching off all their lights, and retreating into the gloom at the back, presumably to escape through the service exits.

I was counting on the Turk's crew to panic too. Nothing could have prepared them for being stranded in a sea of burning vehicles and looted shops and flying rocks, and there was only so much they could find out by peering through their net curtains. Keeping the pole in my hand low and inconspicuous, I ran across the street, treading carefully among the lumps of rubble the size of my fist that already dotted the tarmac, and stationed myself in
the doorway next to the one leading up to the Turk's apartment. Pressing myself back against the door, I waited.

I'd barely got into position when the door next to me rattled—at least two locks by the sound of it, heavy ones—and opened, and Dean emerged, looking around in amazement as if he'd stepped into a nightmare. I waited a beat to see who else came out, but he reached back and pulled the door shut behind him.

He was wearing an anorak with a hood pulled up against the rain. It restricted his peripheral vision, so although he had turned in my direction he still hadn't seen me before I stepped forward and drove the end of the pole hard into his belly. He doubled over with a gasping yell and I swung the pole up and over and down, hard on the back of his head—not hard enough to kill him, but enough to lay him out.

He dropped in a soggy heap of arms and legs, and in the chaos and the racket and the driving rain and the drifting acrid smoke nobody noticed us and nobody came to help, even when I bent over and started going through his pockets. A smartphone, a bunch of keys, a wallet thick with twenties, no gun. Those had to be the keys for that front door…but
how much good would that do me? There were still five men inside, whose nerves would by now be strung as taut as piano wire, with their eyes locked on the front door while they waited for Dean to report back.

When I realized what I had to do next I cursed, wishing I'd thought of it earlier. It's hard to lift a full-grown man who's out cold and lying slumped on top of his own folded legs. Setting the pole aside, I stooped, grabbed Dean by his armpits and heaved, straightening my legs so they'd take the load instead of my back. More teenagers in hoodies, caps and scarves raced past me to join the riot, cackling and yelling, and jostled me so hard I nearly dropped him. But I gritted my teeth and kept going, and Dean slowly unfolded, leaving a shoe behind as I hauled him down the curb and out into the road, among the abandoned cars.

When I was far enough out to be seen from the Turk's apartment, I let him fall, facedown onto the soaked tarmac. I wasn't worried about being recognized by the crew upstairs; only Dean knew me, and I doubted he'd given them my description. In fact, I hoped one of them would see me—that was kind of the point—but I didn't glance up to check.

I simply stood back, took a deep breath and thought about how Dean had helped to wreck my life and hurt my friends, and about Zoe tied to that bed, writhing, while he and his greasy-fingered friends felt her up, and raw fury flared up inside me. I raised my foot and brought it down hard, once, twice, three times on Dean's right kneecap, driving it down with all my weight and strength until I felt the joint crunch and the ligaments tear under my foot. Then I stood back. Dean would walk again without a stick, someday. Not soon. I turned and ran up the road, a mugger done with his victim.

Come and get him
.

Further along someone had rammed the front window of a phone shop with a stolen van, stoving in the steel grid shutter and ripping through the laminated glass beyond. The shelves inside had already been stripped, the locked cupboards forced open and emptied, and now the last of the looters were squeezing out under the wrecked grille, wading through glass fragments and discarded dummy handsets. I veered towards the mêlée as if to join in, then doubled back along the pavement, staying tight against the shopfronts so that no one watching from the flat would see me return.

I'd seen this tactic in a war movie: a German
sniper injured an Allied soldier, leaving him lying out in the open yelling for help, waiting for his colleagues to come to his rescue so he could pick them off. It was sick and sadistic, but in the movie at least it worked. Dean was lying crippled and unconscious in the street—it would take at least two of the Turk's crew to drag him back inside. I retrieved the scaffolding pole from where I'd hidden it, took up my former position next to the apartment entrance and waited.

And waited. The rain was easing off; the riot was intensifying.

No one came out. They must have seen him lying there, but it looked like the Turk wasn't paying his men enough to risk their lives on a rescue, and they didn't care enough about Dean to do it for nothing. They might have tried to dial 999, but that wouldn't have done them much good—all the emergency phone lines would be jammed by now, and even if they got through to the ambulance service the paramedics would take their time coming. In a riot nobody is safe and nothing is sacred. Paramedics, firefighters, news crews, all of them risked being beaten and robbed and pelted with bricks. The mob was a rabid animal, unpredictable and merciless.

Two more guys jogging towards the riot stopped
by Dean and stooped over him. One was twenty-something, the other a teenager, both mixed-race, one with big Afro hair, the other with dreadlocks. I half expected them to rifle Dean's pockets and lift his wallet and phone; instead, the dreadlocked one pressed a finger to Dean's neck and said something to his mate, who turned and ran back the way they'd both come. What the hell were they up to? I wasn't going to have to rescue Dean from them, was I?

Only when the younger guy reappeared, dragging a door that had been ripped off its hinges, did I grasp what they were planning, and all I could do was stand and watch. I knew mobs could be unpredictable, but…As all around us more windows shattered and more wrecked cars burst aflame and more shops got looted—in one spot the pavement was strewn with musty old blouses and wrinkled shoes from a charity shop—these two rolled the unconscious Dean onto the splintered door, took a firm grip of each end, counted to three, lifted, and carried him off the way they had come, vanishing into the pall of greasy black smoke that billowed from the burning Dumpster truck. I was stuffed, and Zoe was stuffed, thanks to those two noble, compassionate, interfering assholes.
Now what?

A huge fat Indian guy in a sodden T-shirt and baggy tracksuit trousers suddenly jogged past me, hefting a fire extinguisher. I thought it might be another vigilante until he stopped in front of the electrical shop, planted his feet wide, pulled the extinguisher back and slammed it into the window. The first time it bounced off; the second time the plate glass shattered with an earsplitting crash, sending razor-sharp shards falling like guillotine blades. Dropping his extinguisher, the fat Indian guy danced back, dodging the fragments—the idiot was wearing flip-flops—and before he even had time to regain his balance the looters were stampeding past him, grabbing everything vaguely valuable in sight—toasters, microwaves, cordless vacuum cleaners—whooping and shrieking in excitement like contestants on some TV game show where you got to keep anything you could carry.

And I piled right in there amongst them.

I pushed past two girls fighting over a hair dryer—one of them was the face-pierced waitress from the café up the road—headed past the counter to the door leading to the back room, and tried the handle. Locked. I stepped back, preparing to kick it in, praying the shop owners weren't hiding in there,
and wouldn't have a go at the looters if they were. I'd try to protect them if I had to, but even wielding a steel pole I would be as much use against a mob as a tinfoil hat.

The door flew open with one kick, and the room beyond was empty. Half a dozen looters followed me in, only to curse in disappointment; there was nothing in the little back office but a kettle, some mugs and a desk where an old video camera was lying in bits, awaiting repair. The rioters retreated in disgust—the rest of the shop had been stripped bare by now—but I headed for the rear exit.

The flat upstairs had two floors, which meant by law it had to have a fire escape, and that fire escape probably led down into the backyard. The door that led to the yard outside was huge and solid, reinforced with steel bars, but it had been designed to stop robbers from getting in, not rioters from getting out, and when I turned its two heavy latches and pushed, it swung open so readily I nearly fell face-first out into the backyard.

I'd been right—a black metal staircase zigzagged up the back of the building to a balcony that ran along the rear of the first floor. I wished some of the rioters had come with me—it would have helped to
intimidate the crew upstairs—but the mob wouldn't bother with private homes, especially when there were still plenty of shops to pillage. I took the stairs as quietly as I could; if I couldn't bring a crowd along, better to let the guys inside think all the danger was still out front.

The apartment's back door was a flimsy plywood number with a frosted-glass window and a tarnished silver handle. It opened inwards, so it would be easier to kick in, especially as it had just the one lock—the one built into the handle. It might be bolted on the inside…but then again, if there was normally no access to this door, would anyone bother? Sad gray net curtains drooped behind every window along the balcony, and that was a problem. The storm clouds were soaking up the sunlight but it was still plenty bright enough out here for me to be easily seen from inside, while the men inside the flat remained invisible. The windows were double-glazed, with modern PVC frames—hard to jimmy and nigh impossible to break. It would have to be the door. Should I stand back and kick it? No—stealth first. Find out if it's even locked…

I moved quickly, stepping past the door's rippled windowpane and flattening myself against the
redbrick wall beside it. The gutter overhead was overflowing, sending a steady trickle of muddy rainwater onto my head. That was bad—the water had been rattling loudly onto the steel balcony, and now it was splashing quietly, soaking into my hair. Anyone listening closely would have heard the change. I reached out, grasped the aluminum handle and turned it slowly.

The gunshot wasn't loud but it made me jump all the same. It was a short, muffled crack that punched a hole through the woodwork and sent a shower of splinters flying outwards. I snatched my hand back and froze; I'd been spotted. I waited an instant for a second shot, or for someone to open the door, but heard nothing, and I made a dash for it, my feet a blur on the stairs as I fled. If the guys inside were using live rounds, that meant they were as strung out as I'd hoped they'd be. It also meant that unless that nearby charity shop stocked secondhand Kevlar vests, I wasn't getting into that flat alive.

I'd wedged open the rear door of the shop downstairs with a chair, and now the smoke from the cars and trucks burning in the street outside seemed to be blowing right through and billowing out in my face. The ceiling smoke alarms inside were screeching away, but no one was listening.

When I got inside I realized I was mistaken—the smoke wasn't blowing in from outside, it was coming from a pile of cardboard boxes—some still full of unused appliances—heaped in the middle of the shop and set alight. Already wild orange flames were licking the ceiling, warping the tiles, and the laminate on the counter was blistering in the heat. I looked around for the fire extinguisher the Indian guy had used to smash the window, but it looked like he'd taken it with him when he headed for the next shop.