Tim Stevens - Severance Kill

He came through the window after you. You should have been expecting that.

He rounded a corner into a blaze of sunlight, but that wasn’t why he recoiled. A car was he. A afading towards him, breaking the rules, riding across pavement and chipping flint off bollards. He dodged left, finding himself hard up against the cold of the wall. The car slammed to a stop behind him and he ran on, aware of two presences at his back now, the lean man and whoever had come out of the car.

Nikola , he thought. Where are you? Did you get out?

He had the address where Gaines was being held. It was what he’d been seeking ever since the job had started to go wrong. He was close, he was so close . It couldn’t play out like this. He refused to let it.

Ahead he fancied saw the car park where they’d left the rental VW. It was unlocked with the keys tucked above the driver’s mirror. He just had to reach it, climb in, grab the keys and take off. Lose them, then circle back, find Nikola.

Then get Gaines.

The first blow crashed into the backs of his legs, dropping him into a kneeling position on the pavement. The second lashed across the back of his head, knocking the world into a grey, sickly haze. At some point he turned, felt his head crack the concrete. Saw two faces swimming over him. He punched out, hit something soft, saw one of the faces rock away. Then fists, battering his visual fields, crowding all else out.

It wasn’t supposed to play out like this.

The final blow landed and the daylight reversed itself into night.

*

Krupina reeled away from the window. She’d lost them, Calvary and Arkady, round the corner.

To the policeman’s confounded and terrified face, she said, for show: ‘My Embassy will expect a full explanation of how this was allowed to happen.’

She stormed out of the ward into the corridor. Gripped her phone, stared at the screen.

Calvary. Slipped away like quicksilver.

As though responding to some psychic communication of hers, the phone vibrated. Arkady.

‘We’ve got him.’

She closed her eyes.

*

The kid was scared, no question about it. But he hadn’t pissed himself yet.

Bartos brought his face close. This one wouldn’t spit.

‘You heard the shot.’

The kid tried to avoid his gaze, but couldn’t.

‘Your friend — Jakub, was it? Yesb, an›

Bartos had barged through the door a few minutes earlier. He’d noted Miklos’s quick shake of the head and had known the young man — Max, he’d admitted to — hadn’t said anything.

‘Brainy guy, that Jakub. And how do I know this? Because his brains, lots of them, are painting the walls of the room next door.’

For a moment Bartos wished Janos was there. His deadbeat son hadn’t been good for much, but he shared his father’s sense of humour and knew when to appreciate a joke.

‘So I ask you once more, Max. How do we find your friend, Calvary? An address, a contact number. A car licence plate. Any of them will do.’

The sweat beaded on the boy’s forehead. His mouth quivered.

Bartos sat back on his heels. ‘Who are you, anyway? You and your late buddy Jakub? Do I know you? Has Bartos Blazek ever had anything to do with you before?’ He chewed the inside of his cheek, watching the wide eyes. ‘And how are you connected to this Calvary guy?’

The silence stretched between them until it was close to breaking point.

*

Blackness shaded to slate like dawn in a stormy sky. The aural veil began to lift as well: a miasmic slurry of sound gave way by degree to human speech, then distinct voices.

Calvary had been aware, intermittently, of travel. The ragged rumble of a vehicle’s chassis under his back. Hands beneath his armpits, lifting him. A supported propulsion forward and downward, his partially suspended feet tripping over steps that receded beneath him.

By the time his vision cleared entirely and he was able to be certain of what he was seeing around him, rather than experiencing it in some sort of dream, his overwhelming sense was of nausea.

He was in a windowless room of some kind, lit only by a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling by a cobwebbed flex directly above his head. By angling his eyes downwards he could make out flagstones. The sour, winey smell suggested he was in a cellar.

He was seated in a steel chair with one leg shorter than the others. His legs were secured to the chair with plastic ties around the ankles. Thin, tough cord lashed his waist and chest to the back of the seat. His arms, curiously, were free. He flexed his elbows, rolled the shoulder joints.

He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious.

Somewhere off in the darkness, fluid dripped in an intermittent rhythm.

The uniformity of the shadow shrouding his immediate environment was torn open as a shape detached itself and stepped forward. A woman. The woman. Fiftyish, or past seventy. Of medivenetached itum height, dumpy, ungainly. The flesh hanging off her like peeling wallpaper. Blue ribbons of smoke twined towards the lit bulb from the cigarette between her fingers.

‘Mr Calvary. You’re awake, I see.’ She spoke English, her accent heavy.

His eyes were beginning to adjust to the gloom. He could make out the horizon where the far wall and the ceiling joined. Over to the right, beyond the woman, sacks packed to splitting were piled man-high.

To the left, he made out a small wooden table. An orange lead curled from a wall socket up to the surface of the table.

The lead ended in a grey appliance, scarred and dull but instantly recognisable.

An electric hammer drill.

The young man, Arkady, peeled out of the shadows beside the woman. In his right hand he bounced something. He tossed it at Calvary.

Calvary caught it, left handed. He didn’t need to look at it to know what it was. A squash ball.

He dropped it.

So it was going to be the hand.

Arkady had thrown the ball to see which hand Calvary used to catch it, reflexively, and thereby establish which one was dominant. They would think he’d have more to fear from damage to the hand he used the most. Calvary had anticipated this and used his left, non-dominant hand. This way his right hand might be spared.

The woman raised the cigarette to her mouth. From behind Calvary’s right shoulder a second man emerged. Bigger, older. Possibly the driver of the car that had cut Calvary off outside the hospital wall. He grabbed Calvary’s right arm and forced it round behind his back. Then he seized the left hand. Secured them together with a plastic tie.

It wasn’t going to be the hand, then. That had been a bluff, to get Calvary to relax a little. To make him feel as though he was in control.

The man moved behind Calvary once more. Calvary turned his head. He could see the man pushing forward something heavy. A workbench of some kind, with an iron clamp protruding past the edge.

The man’s hands forced his head round so he was facing forwards again. He felt the wooden edge of the bench against the back of his neck, felt cold metal press against his temples, smelled machine oil. Felt the jaws of the clamp tightening, compressing his head.

He tried an experimental shake of his head, found he had no range of motion at all in any plane. All he could move were his eyes.

Still the woman watched, the only movement her hand rising to her mouth to draw on the cigarette.

The big man stepped into Calvary’s field of vision. He took up the drill. Hefted it. Thumbed the switch.

The whine was ragged, as though the motor had done battle with hard d the swsurfaces scores of times before. The confined walls and ceiling of what Calvary assumed was the cellar amplified the noise.