Welcome to Britain, land of opportunity. ‘So that was why Dragan came to this country, to cut his teeth and learn how to be a real criminal? How come you tagged along with him?’
‘What else was there for me to do?’
‘So now Dragan plans on taking Nick’s manuscript to Zarko in Belgrade?’
‘If it is worth a lot of money, Zarko will want it. He will be pleased with Dragan and maybe take him into his gang. That is what Dragan is hoping.’
‘I’m so impressed by your dear brother’s enterprising talents that I’d like to congratulate him myself.’ Ben drained his wine glass and looked at his watch. ‘I think it’s time to pay a visit to Blackbird Leys. Give him a call.’
Lena’s eyes clouded with anxiety. ‘What should I tell him?’
‘Tell him there’s nothing good on TV, you’re bored and in the mood for a party, and you’re coming over to spend the evening with him and the gang.’
‘What about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘I have to ask if it is okay that I am bringing a friend along. How else can I explain it when I turn up there with a strange man? Dragan will not like this.’
‘Say nothing. Do not mention me.’
She didn’t look convinced. ‘He will know something is up.’
‘You act out fantasy roles for a living,’ Ben said. ‘So act. Sound natural. Use the landline – that way I can listen in on speaker. Stick to what I told you to say. And remember, I understand Serb.’
The phone was in the hallway, perched on its base unit, which had a separate keypad and a speaker covered with a wire mesh that was furred with dust. Lena looked nervous as she stabbed a number on the keypad with a pointed blue fingernail, then pressed a button to put the call through the base unit’s speaker. She chewed her lip in agitation as the dial tone pulsed for several seconds. When someone answered, Ben could hear the boom – boom – boom throb of loud music thumping in the background, distorted and metallic-sounding over the speaker.
‘Yeah?’
‘Dragan, it’s me,’ Lena said in Serbian, shooting an anxious look Ben’s way as she spoke.
‘Hey, sis, whassup?’
Lena repeated it more or less exactly as Ben had told her to. ‘You partying tonight? I’m on my own, nothing to do. How about I zap round there?’ Her manner sounded relaxed, she was forcing herself to smile, and Ben didn’t pick up on any note of suspicion in Dragan’s tone of voice.
‘Yeah, sure, we’re having a good time, come on over.’
She glanced again at Ben, hesitated and said, ‘Is Radomir there with you? I’d like to see him.’
Ben frowned. Radomir?
Dragan paused, then replied, ‘Oh yeah, he’s coming round later. He’ll be glad to see you, too.’ Dragan laughed. ‘I’ll be expecting you, sister.’
There was a brief snatch of unintelligible conversation in the background, then Dragan hung up.
Lena put the phone back on its cradle. ‘What?’ she said to Ben.
‘I thought we agreed to stick to the script. What was that about Radomir?’
‘He is one of Dragan’s friends. I had to say something, or else Dragan would wonder why I am coming over just like that. If he thinks I have crush on Radomir, it makes it more okay.’
Ben looked at her. He could see no lie in those clear blue eyes.
‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘Let’s get it done.’
Chapter 30
Night had fallen by the time they set off towards Blackbird Leys. This time, Lena drove. Ben sat in the passenger seat with his bag containing the foil-wrapped shoebox on his knees. The mixture inside was now fully hardened and ready for use. His bag also contained the other items he’d purchased from the garden centre. If Lena wondered why he was bringing them, she kept it to herself.
Ben had no doubt that the housing estate looked a lot better by night than it did in the daytime, the amber glow of the sodium lamps and the lit windows that spangled the high-rise blocks managing to soften the edge of the brutish architecture. Still, the place gave off an aura of decay that would have suited the set of a post-apocalyptic zombie movie.
Lena pointed out Dragan’s squat six-storey block as she pulled up in a parking area surrounded by a wire fence. ‘He is on the top floor, on the right. See? Those are his windows.’ They were curtained, chinks of orangey light shining through the gaps. Ben could faintly make out the thump of the music even from forty yards away, inside the car. He slipped the Tokarev from his belt and checked it over. Hammer on its half-cock safety notch, a round in the chamber, eight more in the mag. The steel was warm from the heat of his body.
‘What is your plan?’ Lena asked, looking at him with liquid, anxious eyes.
‘You know what my plan is.’
‘Do not kill my brother.’
‘Whatever happens here tonight is all up to him, Lena. He brought it on himself.’
‘You do not have to do this.’
‘I’m afraid I do. And so do you.’
They got out of the car. Ben took the key from her, blipped the locks and put the key in his pocket.
‘Now what?’ she asked.
‘What you came here for. Walk over there and go and see your brother. I’ll catch up with you in a minute.’
Lena flashed him a last nervous glance, then began walking towards the building with quick, tense steps. The entrance to Dragan’s block was a pair of grimy glass doors that led through to a neon-lit stairwell. One of the neons was flickering as though about to die.
Hanging back in the shadows near the car, Ben could see half a dozen figures hanging about the stairwell, young white guys dressed in the usual hoodies and tracksuits with loud sports logos, smoking, laughing among themselves, one slouching on the concrete stairs, another leaning against the door, the rest just loitering about in that shambolic, round-shouldered, can-kicking way of young guys going nowhere.
From the way their conversation seemed to falter when they saw Lena approaching, and the one leaning against the door peeled himself off it and yanked it open to let her through, Ben could tell they knew her. Which signalled to him that these weren’t just any old kids hanging tough. They were sentries, posted by Dragan’s guys to scout for trouble, or rival gangs, or maybe the police.
The one holding the door open nodded a greeting at Lena. Even from this distance Ben could see the kid had watchful, wary eyes too old for his face. They scanned past Lena, peering into the darkness, not spotting Ben.
But Ben knew they already knew he was there. Dragan’s people had been alerted to the situation the moment Lena had phoned him. Ben suspected that the giveaway had been that bullshit line about Radomir, which was probably a prearranged code for ‘we’ve got trouble’. There might have been no visible lie in her eyes when he’d quizzed her over it, it didn’t mean she was being truthful. He could see the lie in other ways, like her nervy body language on the way over here, and the whole vibe of anticipation she was giving off. She couldn’t wait for Ben to walk right into the trap. The moment she reached the sixth floor she was going to spill the whole story about this guy who’d carjacked her after work that day, pointed a gun at her head and tried to coerce her into betraying her dear sibling.
Ben was neither surprised nor disappointed. If it was a choice between handing Dragan over to justice and luring him, Ben, to his death, she was never going to give up her brother. In her place, Ben would have done the same. But if they’d thought he was just going to walk in there like an idiot and let himself end up like Nick Hawthorne, they didn’t know who they were dealing with.
They soon would.
Ben slipped on the latex gloves, then shouldered his bag and hopped the wire fence. He began making his way around the side of the building in a wide loop, staying in the shadows. They would be watching from the windows, but see nothing.
It took him six minutes to complete his flanking manoeuvre of the block, by which time he knew that Dragan and his boys upstairs would have had a d
etailed description of him from Lena, and would have gone into full alert mode expecting trouble to kick off soon.
A concrete path ran up between a row of dismal shrubs and the side of the building. As Ben crept carefully along the dark alley he triggered a movement sensor and a light above him flashed into life. Quickly, he reached into his bag for the rubber mallet and smashed the light, plunging the side of the building back into darkness.
He waited, breathing shallow, listening hard, then moved on. A few yards further, he came to a ground-floor window and peered inside. The room was dark, but by the faint strip of light shining under its door he could see it was a boiler room. He slipped the Tokarev from his belt, pressed its muzzle against the windowpane with one hand and gave the butt of the pistol a sharp rap with the other. It poked a tennis-ball-sized hole in the glass, big enough for him to reach his arm through and undo the window latch.
Thirty seconds later, he was inside the building. The boiler room doubled as a cleaner’s storeroom, full of mops and buckets. He crept to the door and stood immobile for a full minute, straining his ears for the slightest sound from the other side, before he slowly opened the door and stepped into the passage beyond. A maze of corridors took him back through the building, until he reached the stairwell by an internal door. The six youths were still on guard at the entrance, all looking much more serious than before as they kept watch through the grimy glass doors.
Ben’s sudden appearance from inside the building took them completely by surprise. By the time they sensed him quietly stepping up behind them and turned round, the Tokarev was already in his hand and pointing.
Ben said softly, ‘Phones. On the floor. Now.’
The guards gaped at the gun, saw the look in his eyes, and quickly took out their phones and tossed them in a small heap at their feet.
Ben said, ‘Leave. Don’t come back.’
This time, there was no hesitation at all. The eldest one batted through the glass doors and the other five followed in his wake as fast as they could. Ben watched them sprint off into the darkness and knew they wouldn’t return in a hurry. They might go and find another phone to call Dragan’s crew on the sixth floor, but by then Dragan’s crew would already be too busy to pick up the call.
Ben picked up the phones and dropped them in his bag. Next, avoiding the main stairs, which were bound to be guarded at every level, he traced his way back through the maze of passages and found a fire escape that nobody had thought to watch. Clever, these gangsters.
He ran up the twisting flights of fire escape steps until he reached the top floor, then peered out of the reinforced glass window of the fire door that separated the stairway from the corridor beyond. It was a long, narrow L-shaped passage lit by bare bulbs on wall holders and had several apartment doors along its length. At its far end the passage branched off to the right, towards the main stairway.
Ben pushed silently through the fire door and stepped into the passage. He could smell the oversweet scent of sandalwood incense wafting from inside the apartment nearest the fire escape. The thumping music he’d been able to hear from down below sounded much louder up here. It was coming from the door at the far end, which tallied with the position of the curtained windows Lena had pointed out to him. Either this was a crafty diversion, or it really was Dragan’s apartment and these guys were even stupider than Ben had thought by drawing attention to themselves this way.
Clutching the pistol, Ben paced the length of the corridor, unscrewing each light bulb a quarter turn as he went, leaving only the one nearest the end door still burning. He returned to the darkness of the fire escape exit and waited.
A minute later, the end door swung open, the volume of the music was suddenly amplified, and a large man stepped out into the light of the remaining bulb. He was burly, tattooed and shaven-headed, but he wasn’t Dragan Vuković. He was clutching a double-barrelled shotgun that was sawn off at both ends, so it was little more than a chunky pistol. A favourite weapon of thuggish morons everywhere, as destructive as it was indiscriminate, but useless at anything more than across-the-room range. The guy looked around, saw nothing that made him want to start blasting, then stepped back inside the room and closed the door behind him.
Definitely Dragan’s apartment, then. And really not so smart. One thing was for sure, though: they were expecting company. Ben smiled to himself as he pictured Dragan inside the apartment, with Lena and the rest of the gang. Get ready, folks.
Ben stepped fast and lightly up the passage. He reached into his bag and took out the foil-lined shoebox and removed its covering. Took his Zippo from his pocket, thumbed the striker wheel and touched its flickering petrol flame to the acetone-soaked string that dangled from the side of the box.
The string began to burn ferociously. Eighteen inches of fuse wouldn’t last long, no more than a few seconds before the hardened mixture inside the box ignited, but that was all the time Ben needed.
He thumped loudly on the door, twice, then stepped quickly aside.
What happened next was exactly as he’d anticipated.
Chapter 31
With a muted crash, a ten-inch circle in the middle of the door suddenly exploded outwards in a swarm of splinters. It looked as if a giant fist had punched right through the wood. A sawn-off 12-gauge would do that, at close range; and the blast would have separated Ben’s upper half from his lower if he hadn’t got out of the way.
The string fuse had about two seconds left to burn before the fizzling flame touched off the volatile mixture. Ben quickly stepped back to the door, shoved the box end-on in the hole and punched it all the way through so it fell inside the room. By then, it was too late for anyone to stop it.
Ben had long ago been taught the art of improvising munitions out of whatever makeshift ingredients an SAS unit might be able to lay its hands on behind enemy lines. It was amazing what you could find lying around in old barns. Certain agricultural chemicals, mixed with things like sugar, could be made to go bang to powerful effect. But the concoction he’d prepared in Lena’s kitchen wasn’t going to hurt anyone, unless they were already half dead with asthma. It was a smoke bomb, not as effective as the British L83A1 smoke canister grenade but pretty useful nonetheless.
In the final second between the box hitting the floor and going off, Ben heard pandemonium break out inside Dragan’s apartment, everyone thinking BOMB. If the guy with the shotgun had had either sense or reflexes he would have blasted the box to pieces where it lay before the fuse ran out. Instead he discharged his second panicked shot through the door, to lay waste to whoever might be standing the other side of it. The payload ripped another ten-inch bite out of the woodwork just above the first, turning an O into an 8.
Next, thick grey smoke started billowing out of the hole in the door. Within seconds, the yells of panic from inside were turning into guttural coughing and spluttering. Nobody would be able to see much as the smoke enveloped them, and it was very unpleasant to breathe. They had a dog in there with them. Ben could hear it barking frenziedly in fear and confusion. He felt sorry for the animal.
The door opened. A wall of impenetrable smoke poured out into the corridor, and from the smoke staggered the big guy with the shotgun. First-line troops, cannon fodder, an expendable footsoldier dispatched to tackle the threat outside. But he was so badly choked by the noxious fumes that he could hardly see. His face was a mess of tears and he was doubled over with coughing. Ben came at him out of the darkness and hit him a single hard blow to the forehead with the rubber mallet. The big guy’s eyes crossed, his knees folded and he hit the floor with the shotgun pointing at the ceiling.
One for one. Ben snatched the sawn-off from his hands, ejected the two live rounds, pulled the fore-end and barrels off and threw the bits away into the darkness.
He didn’t have to wait long for the next thug to come charging out of the smoke-filled apartment. This one was brandishing a machete and screaming at the top of his lungs. If the first was a big stupid bear, this o
ne was a mean little ghoul. He looked like he knew how to handle the machete, and had probably done damage with it in the past.
But not today. Ben sidestepped the swing of the blade and dropped the guy with a solid rap of his hammer to the crown of the head. Two for two.
By now, the smoke alarms all over the top floor of the building were screeching. The grey fog spilling from the doorway of Dragan’s apartment was thickening to a black pall, so much so that Ben could hardly see a thing himself. His eyes were burning. Maybe he’d overdone the baking soda. He retreated into the darkness once more, unshouldered his bag and waited.
Just then, the apartment door nearest the fire escape opened. A tall hippy guy in his twenties, with lank ginger hair and a tie-dyed T-shirt, stood framed in the light of the doorway, thrown into a panic by the whoop of the alarm. One thin hand was still holding the bottle of beer he’d been halfway through when he’d realised something was going on. Noticing neither Ben standing in the shadows nor the unconscious bodies on the floor, he saw the smoke billowing down the corridor, and his bleary eyes opened wide to stare as if it was a living mist creature coming to get him.
‘What the fu—?’
But the hippy guy’s yell died on his lips, because at almost the same moment Dragan Vuković appeared out of the dark pall swirling from his own apartment doorway. Dragan stepped over the slumped shapes of his men without a downward glance. In one hand he had a towel pressed over his nose and mouth. The other hand was tightly gripping one end of a taut steel chain, at the other end of which was a large brindled male pit bull. The dog had half an ear missing and its muzzle was laced with white scars from dog fighting. Strings of drool flew from its jaws. It was so wild with desperation to slip its leash and rip something apart that it was rearing up on its hind legs, all solid muscle and sinew, its teeth snapping like castanets over the noise of the alarm.