Tim Stevens - Severance Kill

She’d seen the target, Calvary, come through the window like an aquatic creature bursting through the smooth surface of a lake. Had seen him roll and gain his feet and take off. She had yelled in Lev’s ear and pointed and he’d swung the Audi round. Too late. The first of the escaping diners were surging across the road. Lev couldn’t dodge them, not even by veering on to the pavement. The surge turned into a flood. The Audi sat in the road, hemmed in by bodies.

‘He’s heading east.’

Krupina said, ‘Gleb?’

‘Here. I’m free. I’ll make a loop round the back, head him off.’

In the rear view mirror, past the frantic crowd, Krupina saw Gleb’s Toyota peel away at the end of the street.

A hand slapped her window. She saw Arkady and jerked her thumb at the door behind her. He pulled it open with difficulty, squ fze="eezed in.

‘What happened in there?’

He was out of breath. ‘Gunfire. Target got away. Looked unharmed.’

‘Got away from whom?’

‘I don’t know. But before I got out, a group of flash-looking types were being hustled down from the balcony and out the back. Young, rich. Gang types. They looked hurt.’

Gang types , again. Blazek’s men.

She didn’t know what the connection was. Couldn’t waste time thinking about it now.

The road ahead was clearing and Lev began to ease the Audi forward.

‘Yevgenia, talk to me.’

*

Nikola answered at once.

‘I’m on the corner of — ’ Calvary did his best with the Czech pronunciation. ‘Four, five blocks from the restaurant.’

‘What happened — ’

‘Just get here. And don’t call Jakub. Don’t answer any calls from him.’

He rang off before she could ask why. Because he may have set us up. Because the Blazek reinforcements got there too quickly. They must have been tipped off beforehand.

He huddled in the alley, watching the road. The shouting was distant now, but the sirens were getting louder. An ambulance flashed past.

He pulled out the wallet he’d taken off the gunman. Cheap, imitation crocodileskin. Four credit cards in shades of gold and platinum, a wad of high-denomination koruna notes.

A business card with a name — Marek Zito — and a mobile phone number.

He pocketed the items. Focused his thoughts on the big problem. The looming one.

Set up . He ran through the possibilities.

Nikola and Max had tipped off Blazek. Hardly feasible. They’d rescued Calvary earlier. Why not just feed him to the wolves back then?

Jakub, the unknown quantity. This was more likely. But why? Was he one of Blazek’s men, working undercover inside the guerrilla newspaper? Calvary couldn’t believe it. The paper was too minor and irritant for Blazek to bother with, surely. And even if he was threatened by it, there were more direct ways a man like him would deal with the matter.

A third possibility was surveillance. Calvary, Nikola and Max might have picked up followers on the way to the restaurant. But he doubted Blazek’s crew had th ks city wase skills to track him such that he failed to spot them. They weren’t trained intelligence operatives, from what he could gather. Also, how had they got on to the Fiat in the first place?

Surveillance.Trained operatives.

The realisation punched a cold fist into his gut.

Calvary shut his eyes. He’d been so stupid that he deserved to get caught.

*

He started with the collars of his shirt and coat, running his fingertips underneath them. Nothing. He pulled the coat off, felt along the arms, ran his palms over the back.

Delved into the pockets. And found it deep in the lint of one of them.

It was the size of a pinhead with an array of hooks radiating like curved limbs. Light from a street lamp winked off it. Calvary imagined that if he looked at it under proper illumination he’d see writing in Cyrillic.

The Russian on the tram, the squat one who’d been shot. Calvary had been standing behind him, thinking he was undetected. But the Russian had been aware of him, had dropped the bug in his pocket. Probably when the hijackers boarded and it became clear the Russian wasn’t going to get near Gaines.

Calvary threw the bug deep into the alley, beyond a heap of bins. He peered out into the street. A few cars, passing at speed, not looking for him. He emerged and loped across the street to another alley almost directly opposite.

Less than a minute later two cars appeared from opposite directions, pulling to a stop facing each other. An Audi and a Toyota. The Audi’s driver stayed put but his passenger stepped out. A woman, a finger in her ear, her lips moving. The man in the back climbed out, too, as did the driver of the Toyota.

The two men walked down the alley at a crouch. From the way they held their arms before them, Calvary knew they had handguns.

The woman stayed at the mouth of the alley. There was something familiar about her. As she turned to look down the street, Calvary stared at her profile and realised she was the old woman he’d seen in the car as they’d been leaving the office. She wasn’t all that old, he realised. But there was something… wrong about her.

The two men emerged from the alley. The woman jerked her head to one side, her mouth set in frustration.

They glanced about, the three of them, as though they might through an immense stroke of luck see their target loitering nearby. They conferred, briefly. Then they got back into the cars and pulled away.

Russians. He was certain of it.

*

The Fiat turned into the road and he was on the back seat almost before it came to a stop. Max gaped at him.

‘Jeez, dude, you’re bleeding.’

Calvary touched his face, felt the congealing stickiness. ‘It’s nothing. Drive. Anywhere, for now.’

He updated them in terse sentences. They’d been aware of nothing until Blazek’s reinforcements had started piling into the restaurant, shortly before the shooting started.

Max said, ‘I got some pictures. Unknown guys going in. We’ll run them through the database later.’

Calvary said, ‘You need to ring Jakub. Tell him to get out of there. The Russians tracked me to the office, they know about it.’

‘Damn.’ Max slapped the dashboard. ‘He’ll have to wipe the hard drives, bring the laptops with him.’

Max made the call. On the wheel, Nikola’s knuckles were ivory.

She said, ‘Russians, again.’

‘Yes. It doesn’t make sense, unless they’re working with Blazek in some way. But his men killed the Russian on the tram. So that theory doesn’t hold, either.’ He was beginning to come down off the adrenaline high, to feel fatigue hit him in a series of slow blows. ‘We have to assume there are two hostile parties looking for us. Blazek’s people, and the Russians.’

‘We’re going to pick Jakub up. He’s making his way to the Old Town,’ said Max. ‘Then where the hell do we go?’

*

Bartos used his palms, their meaty weight the equivalent of a smaller man’s fists. Janos’s head rocked left, right, left again. Blood from his split lip slashed the wall.

‘Again,’ roared Bartos. ‘ Again. Not once, not twice, but three times .’

Janos raised an arm to fend off the blows at last but the move only stoked Bartos’s fury.

‘Don’t you put your hand up to me,’ he screamed. He put his boot in his son’s chest and shoved. Janos and the chair he was on were sent tipping back against the wall. Bartos kicked the chair’s back legs away and the younger man bounced off the floor. He curled into a ball and lay there, shuddering.

Bartos raised his boot to stamp down. Stopped himself.

He looked at the blood on the walls and the carpet of the summer house. The smashed furniture.