The Rock (6 page)

Gill had his fingers on the brass threshold in the bathroom doorway when Gardner gave him the good news, grabbing hold of a clump of his thinning hair and yanking his head up. Then he brought it down to the floor. Hard. Again. Three, four, five times. Six, seven. Until the carpet was a Sangria stain.

Gill launched a hand at Gardner’s face, fingers crawling over his neck and mouth like angry spiders. Then Gardner saw he had something in his other hand – a four-inch Sebenza blade. He crunched Gill’s wrist with his Timberland, forcing him to release the knife.

‘Stupid cunt,’ he breathed into the guy’s face.

But he’s not going to give up, a voice warned him. It’s him or you.

He kicked Gill in the face to daze him, then hauled his body into the bathroom, the fucker clawing at his legs. A year of being forced to rely on his right arm for heavy lifting had strengthened Gardner’s biceps, triceps and flexors on that side, but he still found Gill a heavy load. Steroid-pumped muscles surrounded by several inches of boozy fat made it feel like dragging a two-ton truck. Gardner was breathless by the time he dumped Gill by the toilet. As he sucked in air he felt the entire valley of his ribcage sting.

Gill wasn’t stupid: the old Para could see what was coming as Gardner stunned him with an elbow to the jaw. Lifting the toilet seat, Gardner thrust him head-first into the can. Forced him down far enough that his face was submerged in piss water. Pressed a boot to the nape of his neck and nailed his head in place. Gill thrashed about. But Gardner’s control was total. He held his stance and listened to the life gurgle out of the man’s mouth.

Gill’s hands flapped wildly in mid-air. His legs kicked back and forth. Gardner stayed firm. The bowl water reddened.

After a minute, Gill shit his pants.

Gardner was getting impatient.

‘Fucking die,’ he shouted.

Gill gargled furiously.

Two minutes and his arms flopped by his side. His legs slowed.

At the three-minute mark, Gill was dead.

Gardner hoisted his leg clear from the toilet. Hit the flush button. His foot was drenched with piss and bloodied water, and the air stank of shit and citrus. For a moment he stood numb in the bathroom, staring at the corpse as a torrent of water splashed over the back of his head. By now the stinging pain in Gardner’s ribcage was sounding a high-pitched note that drilled holes in the sides of his skull.

No time to waste. You’ve got to follow John. He’s got – what? – four minutes’ head start on you? Maybe more. Got to find him.

Then something caught his eye. Across his right shoulder he noticed the shower cubicle for the first time. The frosted-glass door was closed, but a pink blotch lingered behind, like a cut of stained glass.

Gardner opened the door. Fought the urge to vomit.

He’d seen his fair share of dead bodies in his time. The Wren in the cubicle, however, was worse than anything the Taliban or insurgents did to their women. A cavity existed where her face was supposed to be. A gorge of bones, torn lips and eyeballs sunk in the middle. Her neck, chest and arms were branded with purple bruises. Dried blood on her wrists like wax seals. The woman squatted in an inch of her own blood; the plughole blocked with clumps of hair ripped from her scalp.

Fucking hell, John.
What have you done?

He had no time to be shocked. Police sirens carried through the open balcony. You need to bug out, and fast.

Bald must have jumped, he figured. That meant he was out in the streets. Exposed. And what, another voice said, if Bald
hadn’t
survived? They were on the third floor, a good sixty metres off the ground on a steep slope.

Get downstairs now. If you’re quick, you might be able to trace him.

He scooped up the Sig, nabbed Gill’s Glock for good measure and tucked it into his jeans, then made a beeline for the emergency exit.

No time to lose.

The door opened before he got to it.

A figure thrust out from the stairwell.

2300 hours.

Gardner reckoned the guy was the hotel manager. Well over six foot tall, blue-suited and with carefully managed stubble and rimless glasses, he looked every inch the officious thirtysomething with a corporate pension plan shoved up his arse.

Then Gardner’s eyes scrolled down from the single-breasted black jacket and clocked the crowbar in his right hand.

The bar was on a one-way trip to his face.

His fighting instincts took control as he jerked his left arm up to protect his face. The crowbar connected with prosthetic tissue and, though he had no sensation in the myoelectric limb, Gardner felt a sort of shudder in his elbow on impact.

Shudder – but no pain. Mr Crowbar’s face lit up like a distress flare at the sight of Gardner remaining upright. No agonized cry. No recoil.

No second chance. With his fake hand Gardner swept the crowbar aside. He shaped to give the guy a Glasgow Kiss, arched his head back, tensing his neck muscles, tucking his chin into his neck – and flicked his head forward and up. The forehead nearest his hairline presented the thickest bone on his skull and made for a fearsome weapon. He directed it up towards the tip of the guy’s nose, a prime spot to land a knockout blow.

He heard the
snap
of a branch being wrenched from a tree. The guy’s nose looked as if he’d snorted a spark plug. He stumbled sideways, backwards.

But Mr Crowbar returned with a vengeance, nailing Gardner with a flat-handed strike to his face. It felt like someone had clipped a couple of jump leads to his cheeks as he stumbled backwards with the force of the punch and crashed into room 36. The door shrieked as it swung back on its hinges, and in the belly of the room a naked woman jumped out of the bed.
Both men had dropped their weapons in the struggle. The Sig and Glock were now five metres away, well out of reach of the combatants. The woman reeled away from the guns in horror, as if they were pythons.

A bloated, hairy-backed boyfriend took in Gardner, Mr Crowbar, the two guns – and locked himself in the bathroom, leaving his screaming girlfriend raging at the door.

Mr Crowbar shoved Gardner back, sending him on a collision course with a dinner tray. Glasses, knives and forks clattered.

For someone so tall, Mr Crowbar had agility to spare. He rushed forward in a stretched blur. Gardner had no time to protect himself.

Above the woman’s scream, Mr Crowbar’s counterattack was deadly swift. He delivered a groin kick to Gardner’s balls. Fists hard as kettlebells unleashed in an unbroken stream – a chisel punch to the trench of Gardner’s throat, a low blow to his knees. It seemed as if he were fighting an endless riptide.

But the guy seemed anxious about moving in too close. He encircled Gardner, kicking his knees. Lowered a straightened leg down on to his chest like the blade of an axe. Mr Crowbar’s heel collided with his ribcage.

Another kick. This time Gardner was ready. He chopped his right hand across the floor, cutting down his opponent’s standing foot. The guy slipped, tripped, fell. Gardner picked himself up and Mr Crowbar was back on his feet too.

Jesus, he’s not even broken out in a sweat, Gardner realized.

The guy adopted a defensive stance, protecting his head. That still left the rest of his body exposed, and Gardner wanted to make him pay. He readied himself for a front kick to the guy’s stomach, lifting his knee straight forward. Mr Crowbar blocked the move by forming an ‘X’ across his torso.

But then he lowered his hands, and played into Gardner’s.

Gardner went for the jaw. One punch. That’s all the opportunity you’re going to get, he told himself.

An inch from his face, Mr Crowbar somehow blocked the punch with the inside of his left palm. Gardner was left KO’ing air.

As the guy fired off a torrent of blows, Gardner felt his body weakening. If you go down again, you won’t be getting up. He’s too strong. You need a weapon.

The room service tray. Yes, he remembered now. The knives and forks. The tray was a metre behind him. He dropped with the next punch. As Mr Crowbar wound up for a kick, he reached behind him. Grabbed the handle of something, couldn’t see what, and brought the tool forward – and plunged a serrated steak knife into the guy’s knee.

Don’t let up. Finish the job.

As pain jarred through the guy’s body, Gardner forced his head down and wrapped his left arm around the neck. He locked tight, crushing his opponent’s head in his armpit. Placing his right hand on his shoulder, Gardner grabbed the guy’s wrist with his left hand. Keeping his legs spaced apart, he leaned forward and forced the guy to topple over, with himself on top. Now he flattened his body out, distributing the weight as evenly as possible to create a suffocating press.

Mr Crowbar squirmed, pushing on Gardner’s shoulders, but the contortion of his body meant that struggling increased the pressure on his airway. Gardner had him pinned down in a classic figure-four chokehold. A woman’s arse fled the room, her wails carrying down the corridor.

‘Tell me your name,’ Gardner said.

‘Go fuck yourself.’

‘Who are you working for?’

‘Your mother’s a whore.’

‘Maybe she is, but I wasn’t asking you that.’ Gardner contracted his elbows. The guy gritted his teeth. His air passage dwindled to the thickness of a straw. ‘Talk.’

‘Suck your brother’s dick.’

‘I don’t have one.’

‘This conversation… is over.’

On the final word, Gardner suddenly felt himself rising. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Despite being fucked up and choked halfway to death, Mr Crowbar somehow had the strength to heave him off.

As Gardner flew through the air and hit the door, he saw the guy snatch the Glock. I’m fucked, he thought.

But Mr Crowbar glanced back down the corridor. Gardner could see along the corridor for about twenty metres. A security guard had come to check on the commotion and was shouting at Mr Crowbar to put his hands in the air. He might as well have told gravity to take the day off. Mr Crowbar pulled a five-inch combat knife out from his jacket and sank the blade into the guard’s groin. He stared dumbly down at his balls.

The lift rang its arrival just as Mr Crowbar fled down the stairwell. Gardner only had time to get up on one knee when the light of the doorway was blocked out by a scrum of men in uniform.

In an instant hands clamped his arms behind his back and slapped handcuffs on his wrists. Whoever did the cuffing fastened them extra tight. A pair of boots stood in front of him. Gardner was so weak he struggled to lift his head. He found himself eyeballing a portly guy with grey hair and a tan straight out of a home fitness catalogue. A badge on the breast of his immaculately ironed white shirt announced him as Lieutenant Colonel E. López. Doughy fingers rested on his utility belt. A forest of hair fluttered in his nostrils.

‘All right, easy on him,’ he said to the officer doing the cuffing. ‘This boy’s done giving grief. Look at the state of him.’

‘You should see the other guy,’ Gardner rasped.

‘I’m sure you’ve both got a story to tell. Been through the wars, my friend?’

‘A few of ’em.’

Two officers hoisted him to his feet, into the stationary police wagon.

0041 hours.

Time passed like kidney stones in Interrogation Room 3. López grilled Gardner in a voice that sounded as if he had loose gravel in his lungs. One thing was clear from the moment his deputy, Carlos Guerrero, cuffed Gardner to the metal table: they believed he was responsible for
both
corpses in room 39. López read out the accusations against him like a shopping list. Guerrero pulled faces and made not-so-subtle threats. Made Gardner almost miss the days when capture meant a hot date with crocodile clips and a piece of 2x4.

‘What were you doing at the King’s Hotel?’

‘I was there to protect a man called John Bald. He was the guy in the hotel room.’

‘Pull the other one. We’ve checked the hotel’s books. They’ve no record of anyone by that name staying in the hotel.’

‘He was there.’

‘We found her body, friend. You know who we’re talking about, don’t you?’

‘No comment.’

‘
You
headed to the apartment, where you found her sleeping with another man.
You
raped her, choked her, beat her to death and then slashed her wrists to make it look like a suicide. Then
you
killed her lover. That’s an evil thing to do, friend. Any jury in the world is going to send you to the prison up Windmill Road and tell us to throw away the key. You’ll be living on rats and maggoty rice for the rest of your days.’

‘No comment.’

Gardner had been batting away their questions for an hour or more when an officer barged in and breathlessly announced an urgent call. López and Guerrero left. The deputy flashed Gardner a smile, his small eyes disappearing into the fleshy folds of his face.

Thirty minutes passed. Neither man returned. Gardner could do nothing about his own predicament until he got a lawyer, so he tried to figure one or two things out.