Thunder (7 page)

“We’ll have to wipe the entire cover entity,” Greere muttered angrily to himself. “Idiot squaddies. Start winding up that safe house. I’m not sure we’ll need anything else round there for a while. What about the other two?” The look on Ellard’s face didn’t inspire confidence. “Well?”

“Iron is in Paris but I’m not sure how he got there.”

Greere looked more hopeful. “Well that’s good, isn’t it? The Con seems to be doing what he was told to do?”

“Except I’ve also found out that a French police investigation has recently been initiated, due to a robbery from a mansion at the foot of the valley near the safe house,
and
, when I had a look at the pictures from the latest satellite sweep of the area, a private car has vanished from the neighbouring chalet’s driveway.”

“You don’t think?” Greere asked.

Ellard stared accusingly up at his boss.

“Hmmm, maybe you had better get over there then. If Iron is leaving a nasty trail behind him, we’d better be ready to deactivate him.”

“His target is already in Paris too.”

“Even better. It would be a shame to loose another cover company with no result. You can deal with Mr. Sticky Fingers after the hit. Where’s Tin?” Greere smiled to himself. “I do like that code-name. Sometimes you’re a genius, Ellard. Cocky Special Forces guys like him need to be put in their place now and again.”

“Presumably on his way to Madrid,” Ellard replied flatly. “Still using his initial cash allowance – there have been no withdrawals or purchases. The cleaning company I engaged, for that apartment we’d put him in, wrote back to me asking if I’d given them the wrong address.”

“Why?”

“They said the place was spotless. Didn’t look like it had been lived in for ages...”

~~~~~

Barfold

Forty-seven. Forty-eight...

“That’s great, Nick! Come on, push!”

The chatty nurse – called Steve, as it turns out – is panting next to me on the leg press. His weights are set several kilos higher than mine but, then again, I’m also having to lift my casts which are currently rising and falling in front of me.

We train together now. He says he’s never been fitter. Me: I’m throwing myself into this. I’m not just training my upper body for the bow; I want to develop all my muscle groups. When I’m fit enough, I might even restart the Taekwondo. Steve says he’d be interested in taking it up. Says he’s always wanted to try a martial art.

I grunt a bit. “Cum ’n,” is what I hope I’ve managed to say.

“Yeah!” Steve exclaims. “Yeah! Come on!”

Fifty-six. Fifty-seven.

The steroids are helping to build muscle all over me. Not only in my throat. Even now, after just a few solid days of training, I feel like I’ve never been so honed. I was always kind of straight up and down. One of the thin ones who could eat just about anything and get away with it.

Well, that’s all changing.

Sixty. Sixty-one...

~~~~~

Paris, France

Iron sipped at his coffee and watched the crowds milling past him along L’Avenue des Champs-Élysées. The blue, Gauloises branded, umbrella under which he was sitting, fluttered in the pleasant evening breeze which gusted down the hill from L’Arc de Triomphe.

No sign yet.

His table, nestled in amongst the other locals and tourists, was ideally placed at one end of the sizeable pavement cafe. He’d picked a different table tonight. Maybe some of that training shit would be useful? It had certainly helped him during his evening soirees into the suburbs. The Clio was filling up nicely. Fair brimming with precious metals. A nice little bit of smelting, somewhere quiet, and he’d be well set. ‘Maybe I’ll head off to the Costa del Sol to start with?’ he thought to himself. A bit of sunshine would be nice. Perhaps he should get himself a pad down there? First though, he needed to get this job done.

Iron looked at his watch. His target should have appeared by now. What if the little piece of shit had moved on? Had he pissed off, out of Paris?

The worries vanished in a sudden flush of excitement as he spied a little olive-skinned man ducking in and out amongst the ambling tourists in the distance. The dude was a short-fucker, only about five-foot high, and he tended to drift in and out of sight as he came wandering down the street. It had been the same each evening for the last two nights and made it tricky to keep an eye on him, but Iron knew his target was heading here, to this little cafe. His little, bald, friend made a habit of coming here. This would be the third evening on the trot.

Iron’s tip-off had been a brief message on his cell, “Be at the top of the Champs-Élysées.” Yes, since then, his little mate had made a terminal habit of coming here to eat. He seemed to have several bad habits. One of them was that he always had snails to start with.

Iron grimaced at the thought of eating something so disgusting. ‘Well, the little brown slugs can sleep easier tonight,’ he thought. ‘This geezer ain’t gonna be a threat to them for much longer.’

The target vanished again amongst the pedestrians. Where was he?

Iron casually reached into his light sports jacket and grasped the hand grip of the piece he’d been given by his dopey employers. Unmarked, they’d said. Untraceable. Low calibre but hollow-point ammo. Nasty.

“Don’t waste the killing rounds while you’re practicing with it,” the white-haired geezer had said.

Well, he hadn’t wasted anything
practicing
. Not even a minute of his time. It was a fucking gun, wasn’t it? Point and pull. Practicing was for queers. He was just going to pop this guy and leg it in the panic that would follow. He’d be out of the city in no time. A proper hit. No pratting around.

The target appeared again. Really close and, for some reason, looking straight at him.

Wanker... Go on then. Have a good look, you arse-hole.

Iron stared back and the target suddenly crouched to tie his shoe laces.

The milling crowds split like the Nile before Moses and flowed around the small human obstruction. Iron loosened the pistol in its holster. Got ready to pull it out and send this fucker to whatever afterlife he may or may not believe in. Fuck the crowds. Fuck secrecy. It was time to get this stupid job done. What would those fucking amateurs know about a hit? Yeah... that’s it:
fuck all!

For a second the crowds thinned. Then were gone.

His target was still stooping down.

Iron leapt to his feet, his aluminium chair clattering to the ground behind him, and started to pull the pistol from its holster.

The little dude’s arms were crossed, held out just in front of his crouched chest. He was holding something long in one of his hands.

It was pointing at him.

Iron saw a flash and his last conscious perception was of a small coughing noise as his brains erupted out of the back of his head and the shattered remnants, of whatever small intelligence he’d had, sprayed themselves violently into the fabric canopy above him.

~~~~~

“In the middle of the
Champs-Élysées
!” Greere sounded apoplectic, even given the muffling effect of the encrypted cellphone transmission.

“Yes, sir,” Ellard could imagine Greere waving his arms around, bug-eyes bulging even further out of his face. Sometimes spittle formed round the edges of Greere’s mouth when he went off on one. That spit could fly in any direction. Ellard had taken to keeping well clear during rants. Here, in Paris, heading swiftly yet casually up the aforementioned avenue toward Place Charles de Gaulle Étoile and its towering pale stone archway, was about as close to his boss as he wanted to get right now. “I was in another cafe on the other side of the road. Watching him. I’d assumed he was looking to tail the target. I planned to intercept him when he started moving. He didn’t clock me, even though I was in the wide open and paying him more attention than an underemployed hooker on rent day.”

“He hadn’t cased the local environment?”

“Nope. The street is busy, as usual for this time of the evening. I had no idea he was going to try something here, in the middle of the city. He couldn’t have picked a worse or more public spot.”

“Where is he NOW?” Greere almost screamed the question.

“Most of him is next to the table he was sitting at, surrounded by gendarmes.”

“FUCK! Dead?”

“Very. It was a clean head-shot to his face. Blew him straight backwards and his brains are all over the place. The target got up, cool as a cucumber, and wandered off down toward Place de la Concorde in the surrounding mêlée. I’m not pursuing.”

“FUCK!”

“I’m going to find his stolen car and try to get this cleaned up a bit, before the gendarmes start sniffing around and try to trace him backwards. With luck, no-one will connect the target to the shooting. Looks like a clean kill from here. The target was keeping himself obscured amongst the sightseers and shoppers. I don’t think they’ll get much, even from CCTV.

“My plan is to get to his hotel room,” Ellard continued, “to stick some of Iron’s local thievery in there and then to find and dump the car. Can you send the wipe code to his mobile – the idiot might be carrying it for all I know – and also an anonymous text with a few local gangsters names and numbers in it? There’s every chance, sir, that we can make this look like a simple gangland hit or, if not, we can at least make them waste valuable time chasing the false leads.”

“Good thinking, Deuce. I’m checking the recent DCRI Flash Reports right now. I remember seeing the names of a couple of French
Most-Wanteds
in them. Let’s see if we can give our colleagues over there an unexpected break.”

Ellard nodded as he listened. As far as he was concerned, there was no harm in trying to stitch up some other bad guys.

“But Iron’s mother will have to rot,” Greere continued. “Regrettable, after what she’s already lived through.” Greere didn’t sound all too bothered.

“Erm, no need for conscience there either, sir.”

“Why?”

“His story’s been bugging me for a while, so on the way over here I put a ‘concerned neighbour’ call in to the local plod in Hastings. I kept it deliberately vague, then watched out for any reports.”

“And?”

“It was posted this morning. Plod got no response at the house, checked round the place, checked the neighbours – who of course denied all knowledge of the tip off call – checked again and could just make out what looked like someone, sitting in one of the front room chairs. They said there was a rotten stink around the place too. So, they broke down the front door and found good old mummy sitting there, dead for at least three months. It’s good to know that us Brits keep an eye out for our old people, eh?”

“Him?”

“Probably. Same M.O. as the old couple from his last robbery: head caved in with a heavy object. The body was too far gone for any meaningful analysis but Plod makes mention that there’s not a brass farthing left in the place. Stripped clean. Sounds familiar, huh?”

“Fuck.”

“Oh, and one other thing. Decomposed or not, I don’t think Plod would have written: ‘She was dressed normally: shoes, trousers, blouse and cardigan’, if she’d had no legs...”

“FUUUUCKKKKINGGGG BASSTTTTAAA...”

Ellard clicked off the call – he’d put it down to a bad connection if he had too. Then dropped the phone into his jacket pocket and headed up an alleyway to the small backstreet hotel’s rusting iron fire escape. With luck, it would get him into the lying bastard's hotel room...

~~~~~

Murat Nagpal scuttled left along Rue Washington, through the underpass to Rue de Monceau and onward until he was a safe distance away from the Champs-Élysées. Then, in a little deserted backstreet, he slipped behind a couple of communal dumpsters and withdrew his arm and the Makarov nine-millimetre pistol from where it was hidden inside his sports jacket. He carefully kept the weapon obscured by his coat while he unscrewed the silencer and slipped it into one side pocket. The gun went in the other to balance the weight out.

With a quick glance up and down the street, he casually strode out onto the pavement and made his way along until he came to a solitary pay-phone in front of the whitewashed glass window of a closed-down patisserie.

A glance into the window’s ghostly reflection assured him that there were no followers, so he punched a nondescript German landline number into the phone’s keypad and waited until the answering machine cut in...

“It’s me,” he said calmly to the machine in Turkmen. “They’re close. Watch your backs. I just had to put one down here. It’s messy. They may be tracking the cellphones – switch them all off. We change to Exit Plan Delta and meet me at Rendezvous Location B.”

He put the pay-phone’s handset down and, with extreme caution, headed to the Place de Cichy Metro, and then south to Maison Blanche and the Parisian YMCA, to collect up his always-ready backpack. It would be fastest if he caught a train from Gare du Nord, but to get there would mean he’d have to almost identically retrace his steps, back across the city. No. He’d head south to start with, and find some way to cut across to the east later on. Gare du Lyon was walkable from here.

~~~~~

Ellard searched the hotel room. There were several bags scattered around, all stuffed full with local loot. One of them was a plain-black Salomon snowboard bag which, when unzipped, revealed the silverware reported missing from the mountain chalet.

A sudden buzzing noise, from near the unmade bed, startled him and he span round with his gun drawn, but it was only the moron’s mobile phone tucked into the bedside cabinet’s inner shelf.

“Looks like you did one thing right,” Ellard muttered as he recovered the device from its crevice and re-holstered his weapon. The phone was just restarting itself so with his gloved fingers he worked through a few of the icons, including the picture files, to make sure it was clean. It was. It buzzed again in his hand. Some random text from one of the UK Network Operators about charges whilst in France and then again, from some French number, a list of names and phone numbers. He left the phone on the text screen and chucked it onto the middle of the mattress.