Tuesday Falling (25 page)

The men and women coming up the tunnels to the station are a mixture of Metropolitan Police specialist fire-arms command and hardboiled criminal muscle. Each one of them is armed with a selection of assault rifles and handguns. Many of the criminals have killed before. Of the police contingent, each of them, to a greater or lesser degree, is corrupt. It had not taken Slater and his collaborator in the Met long to pull their little army together. Nor is it the first time they’ve done so. Over the years it had been necessary for Slater to have someone high up in law enforcement to facilitate his growing business interests. Doors needing to be opened, or kicked in. Borders needing to be crossed covertly. People difficult for him to get to needing to be retired, so to speak. Now, with Tuesday ripping up the criminal carpet from beneath them, the stakes were very high, and neither of them could afford any mistakes. Any leakage.

When the station lights go on ahead of them, the leader of each group holds up his hand, and converses with his equivalent by mobile phone. One group has just emerged from the Westbound tunnel of the Piccadilly line. It is obvious that one splinter of Constantine’s group has failed to neutralize the girl, as they are dead, lying on the platform. No matter. The people sliding out of the tunnel towards the station are not East London gang-bangers who think violence and attitude are enough. These boys and girls are professionals: hired mercenaries in the gang wars of the most diverse city in the world. They start to move forward again, slowly. They are not in a rush. The station is sealed from above, and with every step they make the cornering, and then killing, of Tuesday more of a certainty.

The tripwire, which is snapped as they make their way out of the tunnel and onto the platforms, is so thin that they don’t even feel it. Only when the green-brown gas starts to roll out of the blackness behind them do the hard-nosed, dead-eyed professional killing machines have any idea that something is wrong.

Five seconds later, as the gas envelopes them, it’s too late.

DS Stone and DI Loss start to hear the screaming as they scramble up the ladder in the ventilation shaft.

‘That’ll be the mustard gas, then,’ wheezes Loss. Even though he hasn’t smoked for three years the effects of all the years before make him short of breath and dizzy.

‘Bromide gas,’ Stone corrects him. ‘If she’d stolen mustard gas we really would be in sodding trouble.’

‘You know you swear too much, right?’ says Loss in between rungs. ‘You never used to swear this much, did you?’

‘Yes, sir. And sir?’

‘Yes?’

‘Could you hurry the fuck up, cos this is a ventilation shaft.’

‘What’s your point?’

‘Well, judging by the screaming, I’d say Tuesday has just let off her little weapons of mass destruction on the platform below.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, not to put too fine a point on it, sir, the gas has to go somewhere once it’s been released, and
this is a ventilation shaft
!’

Realisation dawns swiftly. Loss looks down past her. At the bottom of the shaft, but rising quickly, is a muddy brown cloud that even looks as if it’s bad news.

‘Shit!’ He shouts, quickly clambering up the last few rungs of the ladder. In front of him is a metal door with a simple sliding lock-bar keeping it shut. Loss throws the lever, kicks open the door and flings himself out onto the floor of the ticket office. He rolls aside to let Stone tumble out, and then slams the door shut.

Constantine and his remaining crew stumble up the escalators to the next level. They are half blind and retching, blisters erupting from any exposed skin. It was lucky that they were on the Northern line platform, as it is less deep than the Piccadilly one. By the time they reach the escalators below the ticket concourse the gas has thinned out. It now forms a swirling, viscous pool about their feet. Constantine is the least affected. When the canisters blew, and he saw the gas rolling towards them, he immediately drew his tee shirt up over his mouth and nose, and then he held his breath, and smashed a vending machine and snatched a bottle of water. Taking the cap off, he poured the water over the cloth round his mouth. After that, he grabbed the people with him, and pulled them off the platform and up the escalators. Behind them people stagger out of the tunnel, blind and firing indiscriminately. Constantine is amazed that neither he nor his crew are hit by random bullets as they stagger through the arch into the escalator hall.

They travel up the final set of moving stairs below the ticket concourse. The LED posters on the walls are showing scenes from the station below them. Tuesday must have set up remote cameras and patched them into the station network, thinks Constantine, one part of his brain grudgingly admiring. The screens show people lurching around, screaming, and firing at anything that moves. Down near the tunnels the gas is like a river, with the would-be murderers wading through it, scratching at their eyes, and shooting each other.

‘Well at least the fucking dub music has finished,’ Constantine mutters, pushing his men onto the final escalator. He waits till they’re a third of the way up, gets on, then lies down on the cold, metal steps.

All things considered, I think it’s gone rather well. After I’d said bye-bye to the boys on the Piccadilly line, I scoobied up to the ticket concourse and waited for the fun to start. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I get pleasure from the death and destruction of those who want to kill me. Just because they’re murderers, rapists, peddlers of drugs and despair, and all-round soulless deadheads, it doesn’t make it fun. What makes it fun is they’re so fucking shit at it. They think they’re something special, with their guns and power.

Well, look at them. They’re not fucking special; they’re just dying, and dying badly. In fact, if they weren’t dying, they should just blow their brains out in embarrassment, for being made to look like playschool tossers by a girl.

I look at my tablet. I can see from the phone tags on my screen that some of them have made it to the escalator in front of me.

Clap clap.

I pull the 1934 Russian PB 9mm silenced pistol from my thigh holster and point it at the top of the escalator, feeling very
Resident Evil
. Didn’t find that one did you, Professor?

As the first hoodlum comes in sight, appearing like a toy on a fairground game, I shoot him through the mouth. I don’t want him screaming to his baby-killing cronies. The only noise from the gun is a tiny
phutt
. As the first one falls to his knees the second one comes into sight. I shoot him in the heart while he’s still rubbing his eyes, trying to get the bromide sting out of them, wondering what the hell is happening. I walk over to the top of the descending escalator and crouch down between the scarred metal sides. The machinery driving the stairs is old and in need of a service. With no other ambient noise going on I can hear the grating and the grinding of it. I crouch there and wait for the third bad boy. There is a whining in my head and the snow storm behind my eyes is at full blow. There is a slight possibility that I may be losing it a bit. As he steps over his dead buddies, gun held out in front of him pointed at where I was, I shoot him in the side of his head.

Bang bang. Everyone’s dead. Boo-hoo. All that’s left is the metal stairs, grinding their way to forever.

I get up and walk back to where my bag is. I sense rather than hear something. Maybe a slight difference in the tone of the escalator as it turns. Maybe a shadow, or a shadow of a shadow. I’m spinning round and pointing the pistol but I’m too late. Of course I am. In my head I’m three years too late, but right now I’m just too late, period. I can see him lying on the metal floor of the escalator, cloth round his mouth and a big, never-wake-up gun extended in front of him. I see him squeeze the trigger and I feel something punch me in the shoulder. I know it’s a bullet but it doesn’t feel like a little slug of metal. It feels like a sledge-hammer. There’s no sound accompanying the shot, but I don’t know if that’s because he has fitted a silencer, or the detonation is so fucking loud I’ve gone deaf. It doesn’t matter. I’m spun round, and then suddenly I’m spun round the other way as a second bullet hits me in the leg. Nice shooting, fuck-face. I fall down and stay down. Not on purpose. I just can’t move. I can feel my heart accelerating, giving my body adrenalin to keep it working. To stop it shutting down and dying. The man points his gun at me a bit longer, to see if I’ve got anything left. His arm is extended past the end of the escalator, and his shoulders are where the flattened steps disappear into the heart of the machine. Then he gets up and walks towards me.

No. No, I haven’t got anything left.

Nothing at all.

Constantine steps over the three dead bodies of his gang members and walks towards Tuesday. She is still on the floor, her body looks like a thrown doll. Her legs are splayed out, blood seeping from her left thigh, and her right shoulder is just plain wrong where the bullet has shattered the bone. She is breathing quickly, but with no depth. Constantine keeps the gun pointed at her, but he can tell she’s got nothing left. Nothing left inside her. Now she’s just a little girl, trying to stay alive. Constantine smiles.

‘Hello, Tuesday. We’ve had some fun today, haven’t we?’ He walks over, kicks her gun out of reach, and body-searches her. He is not gentle as he pats her down. He takes her tablet out of the pocket of her pilot trousers. It takes him a little while because there are so many pockets. Amazingly, the tablet is still working. Constantine notes the GPS glympse tags of all the people down in the station, stumbling about in the bromide fog, and the unmoving tags of the gang boys six metres away.

‘Very clever, little girl. You’ve done some truly amazing things over the last few weeks.’ He taps a few keys on the tablet, changing the screen to the control panel. He taps the buttons a few more times and the images that were on the LED posters cease. The station is now still, except for Constantine, who has stood up and is pacing back and forth. After a moment he stops and looks again at the broken girl lying at his feet.

‘You know I’ve been told not to kill you, don’t you, little girl? You know I’ve got to cut your hands off and then take you back to Mr Slater? The money and resources you’ve cost him, I think he might want to make an example of you.’ Constantine is clearly enjoying this. His pulls an elegant silver cigarette case out of his pocket and removes a black-papered Sobranie. He places the gold-tipped cigarette in the corner of his mouth and removes a Zippo from his pocket.

‘You’ll never get me out of here. The police will stop you,’ says Tuesday, panting slightly, spit hanging out of the corner of her mouth.

Constantine laughs, lighting his cigarette with the Zippo, which he fires up by flipping it open and scrimming the cog down his trouser leg. ‘Stupid girl! He
owns
the police! The amount of drugs and guns he deals in, he couldn’t do it
without
the cooperation of the police. Everyone knows that! Even the fucking school kids know that, Tuesday.’

‘Yeah, well. I guess he owns you too, blood.’

Constantine smiles, blowing a plume of white smoke towards the girl. ‘Nobody owns me, Tuesday. Or maybe everybody does. I’m just a gun for hire. Tell me, though. I’m interested. What did this man do to you to make all this happen? To fuck you up so royally? Oh, I know your baby died, and she died on a Tuesday. That’s why you took the name, yes? Like a respect thing.’

‘You’ve got no idea.’

‘No, I get it. I really do. Your baby dies, and so by calling yourself Tuesday you keep her alive.’ He taps his head gently. ‘In here.’

‘My baby didn’t just die, Mister I’m a gun-for-hire, too-hard-for-cancer.’ Tuesday spits on the floor. Her spit is flecked with red. ‘My baby was stolen, and then broken down.’ Constantine moves his head to one side, waiting. ‘For parts,’ she almost whispers.

For a while there’s no noise in the station. Just the sense of noise; sub noise, coming up from the tunnels below. Tuesday is finding it hard to breathe. There is an ever-growing pool of blood beneath her thigh. After a time, she continues. ‘The Refuge. The whole place was a scam. Not the nurses and shit, but the set-up. They’d take in runaway girls who were pregnant. Half of them were rape pregnancies from the gang-bangers in your mate’s little outfit.’

‘I told you, he’s not my friend.’ Constantine stubs the cigarette out under his suede desert boot.

Tuesday spits more blood onto the tiled floor. ‘Whatever. Anyway it had police protection, all the way up. Nobody found us. Nobody bothered with us. We just waited there and had our babies, thinking the state might actually have a good side.’ Tuesday laughs without humour. ‘What a fucking joke. The whole place was a cutting shop. They’d deliver the babies, then kill the babies, then break them down. Kidneys. Hearts. Everything had a price. They’d harvest the babies, then your boss would sell them on. What do you think of that?’

Constantine contemplates her words for a moment or two, clicking his teeth together repeatedly. The sound makes a sinister echo around the hall.

‘Poor girl. Sad little never-mother. That must have broken your mind, yes? Did you have to watch?’ His eyes are alive with dark merriment.

Tuesday is crying, but she is quite clearly bleeding away too. Constantine sits down cross-legged in front of her, placing the tablet on the concourse floor. Tuesday swallows hard, fixing him with her gaze.

‘But not everyone was in on it. There was this doctor, Suzanne, who sussed it all out. She told me her dad was in the police. The proper police. Not those fuckers in the tunnel. She told me that she was going to go to him, make it all end. But he never showed. They made
her
end, instead. They made everything stop.’ She pauses, either because she has no breath left since she has two holes in her body through which her life is bleeding out, or because the memories playing on the screen in her head make a horror film. ‘After they’d killed my baby and stolen her body I went blind, just white-ed out. They thought I was nothing, a street girl who was fucked up, but I grabbed a scalpel and followed him out. I was too late to save Suzanne, but I stopped his clock.’