Chris Ryan - Killing for the Company

The third shot, like the previous two, made barely any noise, but there was a sickening thud as it slammed into the top of Suze’s skull, ripping out a chunk of her head and throwing her about a metre backwards so that she clattered into the pews behind her. When her body came to rest, she was spread-eagled, her arms stretched out to either side, her back leaning against the edge of the pews and her face a bloody and unrecognisable pulp.

Luke dived to the ground, falling hard on his shoulder and turning on to his back to take in the situation. A few members of the choir had realised now what was going on. The music began to falter and suddenly there was a scream from one of the schoolboys in uniform — a little kid who couldn’t have been more than nine. The priest, who had been chasing Luke, was standing among the dead. His face had turned grey with horror and now he was looking directly at the assassin.

Luke hurled himself forward, diving over the child’s body to wrestle the vicar to the floor. But he was too late. The fourth round caught the man on the side of his skull just before Luke’s shoulder made contact with his legs. As Luke barged him to the floor, his blood sprayed an arch over the flagstones.

There was chaos now in the ranks of the choir. Panic echoed around the cathedral. Screaming. Kids and pensioners alike were running from their position in front of the main altar, seeking cover from the sniper in the shadows, while some of them looked around desperately for somewhere to hide. Others were frozen by fear. Why shouldn’t they be? They hadn’t been trained to keep calm under fire. Luke’s head rang with the shouts of terror rebounding off the stone walls and around the dome. He did what he could to ignore them.

Still on all fours in the aisle, and under the cover of the pews, he scrambled back to where he had dropped the bronze cross — his only weapon. Looking forward, he saw three old men who had formed a ring around five frightened kids. He grabbed the cross and scrambled along one of the pews to his right. He had to try to get his hands on the shooter, but that meant keeping out of sight until he was almost upon her.

It took him ten seconds to crawl the length of the pew. He emerged seven or eight metres in front of the small altar where he’d been talking to Suze. He kept low and peered round to his right, his eyes sharp for the woman in the shadow of the arch, ready to take cover again at the first sign of being in her line of fire.

He saw her, but it was fleeting: just the shadow of a black figure stepping over the cordon of the stairwell fifteen metres away and leading down into the crypt. Was that a dead end? She had made her first mistake. Luke jumped up from his hiding position between the pews and sprinted towards the stairwell, where he stopped.

The stairs were about two metres wide. He could count twelve steps but there were more out of sight. A dim light was flooding upwards.

Was she expecting him to follow? Was it a trap? Was she waiting, weapon at the ready?

Luke gave himself a few seconds to form a sitrep in his head. He was in an impossible tactical situation. If he walked down those stairs he’d be lit up, an easy target, dead before he got to the bottom. If he’d been tooled up, with men at his disposal, with weapons and body armour, they could have just chucked down a flashbang or a frag, laid down fire and gone in noisy. But he had none of that. Just a stupid fucking cross.

He hesitated. Fom beyond the walls of the cathedral, he heard the sound of sirens.

Police.

He looked around. The main body of the cathedral was empty, its occupants crushing round the main entrance to get out. Luke himself had spatters of blood over him from his proximity to the carnage. Was this a situation he wanted to explain to the Old Bill? To his OC?

Like fuck it was.

With a sudden burst of anger he hurled the bronze cross down the stairs and heard it clattering on the hard floor below. His only option was to disappear. Now.

Luke pulled his hood a little further over his brow and put his head down. Nobody, he calculated, would notice another frightened member of the public rushing to escape the carnage, and he was right. A crowd of choristers, visitors and clerics were huddled around the doors of the cathedral, pressing against each other, shouting, desperate to escape.

Luke joined them quietly. Just as it was his turn to leave, he glanced back over his shoulder, ignoring the way the last few stragglers were jostling to get away. He could just see them, the three bodies in the aisle, alone in the massive space of the cathedral. Nobody was anywhere in the vicinity. Nobody was paying them any attention. No churchman was ministering to them. They just lay there, gruesome in death, and alone.

He remembered the face of the little boy. Chet’s boy. Now dead, like his father. The thought was a needle in Luke’s soul as he pushed out into the open air. The sound of sirens was louder, the chaos intense. Luke hurried down the stone steps and disappeared into the night.

8 December.

The Manhattan offices of the Grosvenor Group occupied the top three floors of a skyscraper on East 43rd Street. From the penthouse the towers of the city were visible all around: the Chrysler Building, the UN, the Empire State. The two men talking there remembered the days when the Twin Towers loomed over everything. They’d been in this very building when the planes hit. Along with the rest of Manhattan they’d rushed from the city in panic; unlike the rest of Manhattan, the events of 9/11 had brought an upward trajectory in their fortunes. War was always good for business.

Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the East River was sparkling blue and the bridges and buildings glittered in the low winter sun. The airspace above the city was buzzing with helicopters. Some were giving tourists a bird’s-eye view of the island; some were ferrying wealthy businessmen to work or play. Some, of course, were there for security. These two men knew there was never a moment when a gunship wasn’t hovering above New York City. It was one of their subsidiaries who supplied it to the DOD, after all.

A bald-headed man with a shiny scalp and tanned skin sat in a comfortable executive chair with his back to the East River and his feet parked on the solid wooden desk in front of him. He listened calmly to the ranting of his colleague: a fat man, who sweated even when he wasn’t stressed out and whose voice had a strong South African accent. ‘The guy’s got us over a fucking barrel,’ he complained, waving his arms in the air to reveal dark patches of perspiration in the pits of his shirt. ‘He’s acting like some fucking Transvaal mercenary. I’m telling you, man, we shouldn’t be involved in this shit.’

The bald man smiled blandly. ‘You should learn to relax, Pieter. You ever get yourself a massage? I know this girl, comes from Stockholm, got a rack like a fucking balcony. I’m telling you — you could do Shakespeare off it.’

The suggestion only made Pieter more angry. ‘God damn it, Nathan. I’m not interested in your fucking hookers. You know what this could do to our company?’

Nathan swung his feet back down off the table, stood up and looked out over the East River. His bald-headed reflection smiled back at him. He knew his silence would infuriate someone of Pieter de Lange’s temperament. The pudgy South African CFO had a brain for numbers but a tendency to see shadows that weren’t there, or at least to see larger shadows than really existed.

‘I said,’ Pieter repeated, ‘do you know what this could do to our company?’

Nathan turned. ‘Sure I know,’ he said. ‘Double its market capitalisation value? Triple it, maybe?’

‘Ah, man,’ Pieter replied. ‘How much of that money do you think you’ll be able to spend in a Federal jail, eh? The only hookers you’ll find in there will be kaffirs with twelve-inch dicks.’