Tim Stevens - Severance Kill

He watched the mirror. The bald man jerked his head at his partner who stepped behind Gaines, grey and expressionless on the sofa. Put a gun to his head.

The bald man disappeared beyond the periphery of the mirror. Calvaryirrd t moved forward to adjust the view he had of the downstairs room.

This move saved his life because an instant later a shot blasted past his left ear, so close that he could feel the flick of the bullet’s slipstream against the lobe. Calvary spun. Before he could complete the turn he saw that the second bedroom door was open and the man he’d shot through the door was sitting in the doorway, his gun levelled, blood streaking his face and arms.

Calvary became aware of punctured viscid screaming from below. He understood: the shot meant for him had hit one of the injured man’s associates instead. He took aim at the sitting man and pulled the trigger. It wouldn’t go back, the first or the second time. It had jammed, Swiss precision engineering letting him down. Calvary dived forward and grabbed the base of the banister, swung himself round so that he was rolling down the stairs even as the sitting man fired again, this time striking the mirror which erupted above Calvary and sent knife-like shards of silvered glass showering across the staircase.

Calvary hit something with his back, an ornamental statuette of some sort, at the bottom of the stairs. Then he was up on his knees, pointing his useless jammed gun at the room. At his feet was the shaven-headed man, on his back, his throat blown away, his limbs jerking like a marionette’s, his acrid urine boiling on to the carpet and stinging the air. Ten feet away Gaines sat on a leather sofa, watching Calvary. The other man squatted beside him, jamming a pistol muzzle into his right temple. Killian looked wan but unhurt physically.

Calvary threw himself forward as the dying man upstairs let off another shot, but it didn’t even make it downstairs this time. He rose to his feet on the carpet in the middle of the floor, aiming at the face of the man beside Gaines.

‘Shoot him and I’ll kill you,’ Calvary said, in English. The man wouldn’t have seen him trying to fire his jammed gun upstairs and would assume it was in working order.

Calvary watched his eyes. They blazed, dark and malign. For an instant they flicked to the staircase and then back. Calvary said, ‘Forget about him. He’s no use now.’

He hoped he was right.

Calvary was five or six feet from Gaines. With his arm extended, the barrel of the gun was less than a yard from the man’s face. He raised it so that he was looking down it. There was sweat, Calvary observed, on the smudged pouches below the man’s lower lids. As he watched he saw a tiny flicker of muscle leap in the man’s cheek.

It was a problem, his being so jumpy. It meant he might pull the trigger as a reflex, in response to a sudden movement or sound.

As if on cue a mobile phone rang somewhere. Calvary saw the man’s eyes move first, jerking to one side, saw the tightening of his finger on the trigger.

Calvary began the pressure that would squeeze the trigger of his own gun, believing as he did so in magic, that the gun would miraculously unjam itself.

The man got control of himself at the last moment, fished the phone out of his pocket. He pressed the muzzle of his gun — another SIG Sauer — harder against Gaines’s head for emphasis and spoke quickly and softly into the phone, his eyes rne,preemaining on Calvary’s. He listened, mainly, except when he rattled off a burst which Calvary assumed was his updating the caller on the situation.

The expression in his eyes had changed from hate to fear.

He folded the phone away. Calvary eased himself forward, barely moving his feet, putting most of the motion into a lean until the barrel of the SIG was less than a foot from the man’s face. He could see the tension in him, feel it lashing off him.

The problem Calvary had created for himself by moving so close was that he no longer had an adequate view up the stairs, which were behind him now. He heard stirrings from above, a low groaning punctuated by a thump. He glanced at Gaines’s face. He was looking past Calvary. His eyes swung up to meet Calvary’s. Barely perceptibly his head shook. Calvary nodded. It was clear behind him, for the time being at least.

A second problem, also of Calvary’s own making, was that the longer he continued his bluff the higher the risk that the man would call it. He would soon start wondering why Calvary hadn’t shot him, would start thinking that he hadn’t the nerve, even if he didn’t work out that the gun was jammed.

‘Lower your gun,’ Calvary said, ‘or I’ll shoot you.’ He repeated it in Russian.

The man didn’t move, didn’t appear to react at all. Calvary pushed the muzzle forward so that the metal was an inch from his forehead.

‘I’m not joking,’ Calvary said. ‘I’m here to get Gaines. I’d prefer it if he were alive, but I’ll take him even if he’s dead. The difference is, if he dies, you die. If you let him go I promise you I will not kill you.’

There was something in his eyes, then a change. Calvary said, ‘Oh, bloody hell, have it your way,’ and pulled back as hard as he could on the trigger.

The man didn’t have time to notice that it was jammed because he did what Calvary had suspected he would do and moved the pistol away from Gaines’s head to aim it at Calvary. It was an extremely fast move but Calvary had been expecting it. He swiped his useless gun hard against the back of the man’s hand and felt the metal connect with the brittle bones. The man screamed, his fingers loosening. At the same time Calvary headbutted the man in the face. The man let go of the gun and Calvary prised it free. He stepped back, Gaines dropping sideways off the sofa, free of his captor.

The man launched himself at Calvary, his other hand coming out, a blade flashing.

Calvary shot him in the face. It stopped his forward dive in mid-air, flinging him back against the sofa into the crimson spray his blood and brain had made an instant earlier.

Gaines sat on the carpet, his expression dazed.

Calvary said, ‘Wait here.’ He went up the stairs swiftly, ready to fire at the first sign of movement. The man was crumpled on the landing, prone but for one leg bent under him. When Calvary had fired through the door he must have hit him in the left shoulder and in the chest because there were exit wounds in the backs of both. His head was turned sideways. Calvary could tell from his open dulled eyes and the way the blood was no longer gouting from his wong ds unds that he was dead.

Calvary moved back downstairs. Gaines had risen, was staring down at the bodies, the man sprawled on the sofa and his bald associate, throat-shot at the foot of the stairs.

‘How many of them?’ said Calvary.

Gaines didn’t respond at first. Calvary shook his shoulder.

‘How many?’

‘Four.’ His voice sounded as if he hadn’t used it for a while, throaty and quiet.

Only four. There would have been more, previously, but most of them would have been drafted in for the rendezvous at the park. Some of the survivors would have fled, some would be trying to find the Russians and their boss. But some would be heading back here, to protect the prize.

It would have to be quick.

Calvary stepped away from Gaines, aimed the gun at him at arm’s length.

He said: ‘On your knees.’

The Kodiak had changed species. Had squealed like a pig.

That was how some would see it. Bartos didn’t agree. He hadn’t betrayed anybody, hadn’t dishonoured himself or anybody he respected.

They’d allowed him to sit up, were over at the far end of the cellar, ignoring him, it seemed. He slumped forward, his shirt and trousers sodden, his ham hands massaging his throat. Impossibly, he was breathing once more. Air, dank underground air that was purer than anything an Alpine meadow might offer, was actually passing through his windpipe.