In Dragan’s wake came Lena, pale and coughing and retching from the smoke, and two more of her brother’s associates, both of them variations on the same muscles-and-ink hardman theme. Danilo and Miroslav, Ben supposed. One of them had his fists locked around the hilt of a long, wicked-looking samurai sword. The other had an Uzi. One long thirty-two-round magazine protruding from its pistol grip, and another sticking out of his jeans pocket.
The sword was one thing. Ben was more worried about the Uzi.
The hippy guy was either too far gone from his evening’s beer drinking to recognise the gun for what it was – or else maybe Serb gang heavies toting Israeli-made 9mm machine pistols were such a common sight on the Blackbird Leys estate that residents barely noticed any more. For the moment, he didn’t seem that worried about the dog, either. ‘What the fuck are you bunch of fascist fuckheaded nutters doing in there? Lighting a fucking barbecue?’
Dragan Vuković had more pressing matters to deal with than complaints from his hippy neighbour. His quick eyes, red from the smoke, were scanning the darkness of the corridor beyond the hippy’s doorway, searching for the assailant that his sister must by now have described to him in plenty of detail. He was looking right at Ben but couldn’t see him, or the pistol in Ben’s hand whose sights were trained right on Dragan’s centre of mass.
But Dragan must have sensed the presence in the darkness. He jerked on the dog’s chain and yelled in Serbian, ‘Go, Demon! KILL!’
He let go. With a savage yowl, the dog instantly flew down the corridor, straight towards where Ben was standing hidden in the shadows.
Chapter 32
Ben didn’t want to harm the animal, but he didn’t want to get his flesh ripped from bone either. He adjusted his aim towards the charging pit bull and prepared to fire, knowing he’d have to pump half a magazine into the dog to stop its frenzied attack.
He didn’t need to pull the trigger. The dog’s mad eyes locked onto the hippy guy standing there, and it veered off course like a heat-seeking missile to go for the closer target instead. The hippy guy let out a shriek and went staggering backwards through his doorway, tripped and fell.
The dog launched itself at him with a roar, still trailing its length of chain. Its alligator jaws closed on a trouser leg and began shaking its head viciously from side to side, the way it would to kill a rat, cat or other dog by breaking its neck.
The hippy screamed and wriggled, trying to hit the dog with his beer bottle and kick it in the face as it mauled him. His foot glanced off the dog’s head and caught the edge of the open door; the door swung shut and his cries and the dog’s crazed barking were muffled behind it.
‘Fuck that retard!’ Dragan yelled in Serbian from behind the towel over his mouth. He turned to Danilo and Miroslav. ‘Find this other bastard for me! I want his fucking head on a plate!’
Whichever of the two he was, the thug clutching the Uzi reached forward to grasp the cocking bolt knob on the top of the receiver. That was the instant Ben realised, as he watched from the darkness, that the gun wasn’t yet in battery and ready to fire. That gave him a split-second advantage, and he took it.
He stepped forward into the smoky light and pointed the Tokarev.
‘Dragan.’
All eyes snapped onto him. Lena’s were pink and puffy, and still streaming tears because of the irritation of the smoke. She let out a cry seeing Ben approaching, but her voice was drowned by the shrill alarm.
Ben advanced another few steps, past the closed door of the hippy guy’s apartment. Dragan’s friend with the Uzi stood frozen in mid-movement, his hand still on the cocking knob. Ben swivelled his pistol sights onto him and said, ‘Drop the weapon. Now. Or die.’
Dragan’s guy quickly made his choice. The uncocked Uzi clattered to the floor.
Dragan Vuković stared at Ben with eyes more crazed and brimming with hate than those of the dog he’d beaten and goaded into a becoming a vicious pit fighter. ‘Who the fuck are you, man?’ Switching to English, his accent was thicker than Lena’s.
‘I’m the part of your plan you didn’t account for,’ Ben said. ‘The guy you didn’t reckon on having to deal with. Now here I am.’
‘You think I am fucking scared of you?’
‘Yes.’
Ben didn’t blink as he watched Dragan through his gunsights. The Tokarev’s trigger sear would break at around seven pounds, typical of a clunky military sidearm of its time. Ben’s finger was applying six pounds of pressure on it at this moment, and he was thinking about what might make him want to lay on the extra pound.
If he’d encountered Dragan Vuković and his cronies in the remote forests and hills of their own country, he would not have hesitated for one instant to gun down first Dragan, then Danilo and Miroslav, right there on the spot. He would have ended their worthless lives without a second thought, and left them where they fell, for the foxes and wolves to feast on, and for the crows and the worms to finish what the animals didn’t eat.
But Ben wasn’t stupid enough to openly commit a triple murder in urban Britain, the most heavily-surveilled European police state since East Germany. Not with half his movements throughout that day recorded on CCTV, and a smart cop like Tom McAllister already aware of his involvement in the hunt for Nick Hawthorne’s killers.
No, Dragan Vuković was not worth going to jail for – but that was where Dragan was headed himself, and his cronies with him. Three square meals a day, and all the leisure time they could cram in at the UK taxpayer’s expense. At least, once locked behind bars, they wouldn’t be free to enjoy themselves by throwing more innocent people out of windows.
Dragan spread his hands, trying to look casual. ‘What you want with us, man? It’s about that guy, right?’
‘That guy,’ Ben said.
‘Look, we did not mean to hurt him.’
‘You mean, you didn’t realise he couldn’t fly?’
Dragan smiled. ‘Just one of those things, you know? We can square this up. You want some money to go away?’
‘I want you, Dragan. You and your pals here are coming with me.’
‘I am thinking you want my sister too, huh?’
Ben shook his head. ‘I have no quarrel with her. She can go on whipping perverts’ arses the rest of her life, for all I care.’
‘Fuck you,’ Lena yelled.
‘Walk away, Lena. That was the deal I promised you when you sold your brother out to me, remember?’
Dragan’s eyes flicked in Lena’s direction.
She gave a quick headshake. Nervous. ‘He’s lying.’
‘It’s over, Dragan,’ Ben said. ‘Let’s go.’
The alarm was still shrilling. Smoke was still roiling from the doorway of Dragan’s apartment. The muffled barking of the dog and the cries of the hippy could be heard from the closed door of the other apartment, to Ben’s back. Dragan said nothing. His expression was as hard as the steel in Ben’s hand, but Ben could see in his eyes that he knew he was done.
Then everything suddenly changed.
The apartment door behind Ben flew open and the hippy guy came bursting back out into the corridor. His trousers and T-shirt were hanging off him in tatters and his hands and face were bloody. ‘Call it off!’ he screamed. ‘Get the fucking thing off me!’ The dog appeared in the doorway, fire in its eyes, pink drool foaming from its gnashing jaws. It stiffened as it saw Ben for the first time. Recognising him as a threat to its master, it instantly forgot all about the hippy guy and charged the new enemy instead.
Ben wheeled around, shifting his point of aim from Dragan’s crew to the dog and ready to shoot.
Dragan yelled, ‘Demon, attack!’
The dog raced towards Ben. The steel chain attached to its neck snaked along the floor behind it. Ben was about to shoot when the end of the chain snagged under the bottom of the open door of the hippy guy’s apartment. The dog’s charge was suddenly checked. It roared and strained on the end of the chain, eyes rolling, snapping like a landed piranha fish.
 
; The two seconds that Ben had been distracted by the attacking pit bull was enough time for Dragan’s friend to make a grab for his fallen Uzi and rack the cocking knob. Like a slowed-down audio replay, over the noise of the alarm Ben clearly heard the metallic crunch of the action working, the bolt snapping forward, a nine-millimetre cartridge chambering from the long thirty-two-round stick magazine. Not a good sound to hear when the enemy has the drop on you and is about to unleash hellfire on you from just a few steps away.
If Ben had tried to get his pistol back on target and snap off an accurate shot, he’d have been dead. Instead he did the only thing he could, which was to move, and move fast. He dived back, dodged the teeth of the trapped pit bull, hit the floor and rolled towards the dark end of the corridor.
At the same instant, the Uzi in the thug’s hand fired with a deafening continuous thunder that drowned out the shriek of the alarm, and a bright strobing muzzle flash that lit up the smoke like a magnesium flare.
Chapter 33
Six hundred rounds a minute. One nine-millimetre copper-jacketed bullet spitting from the Uzi’s short barrel every tenth of a second, propelled by burning gas at a velocity greater than the speed of sound, every one of those bullets kicking the recoil of its acceleration straight back into the shooter’s hand. Even for an experienced operator, the beast was hard enough to tame. In the hands of a criminal thug who probably posed in the mirror with the gun every day but had never put in any range time, it was almost impossible to control.
And that was what saved Ben’s life. The Uzi’s wild full-automatic gunfire lifted its muzzle and stitched a ragged line of holes in a climbing zigzag. Dragan’s guy grappled to control the bucking weapon, his face twisted up in a crazy grimace as the whole corridor in front of him was peppered with a random shower of bullets. They shattered the overhead lamps and blew electric switches apart. Blasted the cheap acoustic tiling from the ceiling. Smacked through stud walls into neighbouring apartments. Drilled into the flimsy wood of the hippy guy’s open door. And slammed through the body of the hippy guy himself as he tried to stagger out of the way, not fast enough. The impact of multiple strikes jolted him back and slammed him into the wall. He bounced off, leaving a big bloody smear, then crumpled twitching to the floor.
Ben made it to the fire escape door by throwing himself down and sliding the last couple of yards, feet first. Bullets thunked into the heavy wood above his head as he battered the fire door open with the soles of his boots and slithered through. More gunfire shattered the reinforced window and showered him with glass. Even in the hands of an idiot, the Uzi was a deadly force. But like any other lethal storm, its fury couldn’t last forever. After just three seconds that felt more like thirty, the gun had shot itself empty and fell silent. Through the ringing in his ears Ben could hear the steady shrill of the smoke alarm, and behind that the sound of screaming and panic from other residents of the block.
He struggled upright and slammed back through the fire door at a sprint. Dragan, Lena and their friend with the samurai sword were already escaping the other way, along the L-shape of the passage in the direction of the main stairs.
The one with the machine gun was still standing in full view in the middle of the smoky corridor, now grappling with the weapon’s magazine release catch on the grip so he could load his spare. The twisted body of the hippy guy lay near his feet. The dog was still caught by its chain under the bottom edge of the door, and was going wild.
Ben raced along the passage, skipped once more out of reach of the snapping dog, and bodyslammed the guy with the Uzi into the wall. He tore the weapon from his hands and rammed its steel-box receiver hard into his face once, twice, three times. Blood spurted from the guy’s split lips and nose. Ben grabbed him by the neck, spun him up onto his feet and sent him sprawling towards the dog. The pit bull was so crazed with frustration and aggression that it no longer differentiated friend from enemy. The guy screamed as the dog’s jaws closed on his arm, ripping his flesh.
He wouldn’t be getting away in a hurry. Ben left him to his fate and ran after the others.
The smoke was thinning now. Ben reached the head of the stairs. The staircase wound downwards in a rectangular spiral with a minimalistic concrete shaft running up its centre. He glanced down and caught a glimpse of movement two floors below him. He could hear the echo of their footsteps clattering up the shaft. He gave chase.
Ben had reached the landing of the floor below him when the figure emerged from a recess and came at him. Something shiny and long glinted in the lights as it whooshed at his head.
Ben ducked low out of the path of the sword blade. It hissed over him, moving so fast and with so much force behind it that Dragan’s crony, clutching the hilt with both hands, couldn’t slow its momentum. The blade’s sharp point thunked into the wall behind Ben. Before his attacker could yank it out and swing it at him again, Ben knocked him away.
They circled one another. The guy was big and powerful, thick arms laced with spiderweb tattoos like the ones that adorned the sides of Dragan’s neck. Ben saw the punch coming before the idea for it had even formed in the thug’s brain. He rolled the big fist aside like deflecting a beach ball lobbed to him by a child, then used the guy’s speed and weight against him to trap the arm and break it.
The guy let out a howl of agony and staggered back, gaping down in disbelief at the jagged stick of bone that was protruding from the torn flesh of his arm. Ben hit him in the throat, not hard enough to kill. Then pitched him headlong down the stairs.
That might kill him, but only if he was really unlucky.
Ben sprinted down the stairs after him, trampled over the top of the unconscious body and kept going. Down and down, until he reached the empty stairwell entrance where the youths had been standing guard earlier. Through the grimy glass doors he saw the shapes of Dragan and Lena under the sodium lamps of the estate, running full pelt away from the building, already sixty yards away. An Olympic sprinter couldn’t have hoped to catch up with them.
Ben instinctively brought the Tokarev up to aim, then thought better of it and lowered the pistol. To shoot meant to kill, unless he missed. To miss was to risk a stray bullet going through a window across the way, into someone else’s apartment, through someone’s baby as it lay gurgling in its cot. None of those were good options.
Ben had no choice but to let them run. Moments later he heard the rasp of a diesel engine, then spotted a battered white van tearing away. He had Lena’s car keys in his pocket, and thought about giving chase. He had as much hope of catching them in the underpowered Nissan Micra as he would on a bicycle.
Ben said, ‘Shit.’
He didn’t have much time before the police and fire brigade turned up. He rushed back up the stairs. The thug with the compound arm fracture was awake, and moaning loudly in pain as he tried to stand. Ben pinned him with a knee to his throat and shoved the muzzle of the Tokarev hard against his cheek.
‘Which one are you, Danilo or Miroslav?’
‘Miroslav.’
Then Danilo was still upstairs, serving as a dog’s dinner. Ben said, ‘Here are your options, Miroslav. You can either take a bullet in the head now, or spend a very long time in jail for your part in killing my friend. You don’t have a lot of time before the police arrive, so choose fast.’
Miroslav was breathing hard and in a great deal of pain. Sweat was pumping from the pores of his forehead and cheeks. ‘I don’t want to die.’
‘That’s what I thought. Then tell me where Dragan goes from here.’
‘He is going home.’
‘Home, as in, back to Serbia?’
Miroslav nodded and gasped, ‘He tell us tonight he is going back.’
‘He’s taking the manuscript to Zarko Kožul?’
Miroslav stared at Ben through the mist of his agony, as if wondering how this crazy guy could possibly know that.
Ben asked, ‘Where is Zarko?’
Now the look in Miroslav’s eyes was the same fear Ben
saw in Lena’s at the mention of Kožul’s name. ‘You don’t want to tell me? Fine.’ Ben pressed the pistol harder into the side of Miroslav’s face.
‘He have a nightclub in New Belgrade. The Rakia. You can find him there, many nights.’ Miroslav seemed to forget his pain for a moment, and gave Ben a little smirk of satisfaction. ‘But you should be careful what you wish for, my friend. You go looking for Zarko Kožul, you might find him. And then you will wish that your father had never met your mother.’
‘Enjoy prison,’ Ben said, and knocked Miroslav out cold with the butt of the Tokarev.
Leaving the limp body there, he ran up the remaining flights of stairs to retrieve his bag from where he’d left it near the fire escape landing. The pit bull had managed to wrench its chain free, and had escaped. That would be something for the police to worry about, when they got here.
Danilo lay in a pool of blood in the passage, a few feet away from the man he’d shot to death. There was nothing Ben could do for Dragan’s hippy neighbour. Danilo was at least still breathing, but the dog had torn him up pretty badly. Ben took the pack of plastic cable ties from his bag and used two of them to secure Danilo’s wrists and ankles, in case he made a miracle recovery and decided to leave the scene of the crime. The gunshot residue all over Danilo’s hands and his prints on the Uzi would quickly and easily tie him to the killing.
As for Ben, he planned to be out of here very soon. He used more cable ties to truss up the two of Dragan’s crew he’d knocked out with the rubber mallet, before returning down the stairs to Miroslav and repeating the same procedure on him. Then he left the building, his exit as unseen as his entrance.
Ben dumped Lena’s car keys down a drain outside, along with the latex gloves and the dismantled parts of the Tokarev. He was walking away in the darkness, just another shadow among the trees and buildings, when the first police armed response vehicles came screaming into the estate, flooding the night with swirling blue light. He had a feeling that, if he stuck around a little longer to observe, he might see DI Tom McAllister’s Plymouth Barracuda arrive on the scene, too.