Andy McNab - Brute force

I wiped the blood from my face as the car weaved with the road.

I sat up as it began to narrow. Lynn made few concessions. I caught sight of his expression in the glow of the dashboard: eyes narrowed, jaw clenched, concentrating with every fibre of his being on the tunnel of light thrown by the headlamp beams and framed by the high hedges either side of the road.

The rev counter gradually fell from the red. Without as much as a sideways glance, he smiled for the first time. Fuck me, I was sharing a getaway car with Stirling Moss in stripy pyjamas.

'Where's the nearest ATM?'

'Holt. About fifteen minutes away.'

Life had to change now. I could no longer leave a trail behind me. With every new direction I took, I needed to shed my skin. First job was to draw the max from my two accounts, then bin the cards. No more money trail. Then we had to get some clothes and get the fuck out of the land of Country Pursuits.

The lane became a blur as Lynn forgot to relax his right foot again. I checked behind and saw no lights.

'Bit slower…'

I didn't want to end up in a ditch now we'd got this far.

Despite the gash I'd left on his pate and the streaks of mud on his dressing gown, he was completely unruffled, and so typically English it was as if we were slightly late for dinner.

'Who are they, Nick? Anyone we know?'

I shrugged. 'The Firm's still top of my list, though that doesn't totally explain the leatherwear. I was in Ireland yesterday. A device was shoved under my car. By them, I reckon; that's why they had no weapons. We've all come straight off the ferry.'

Another corner was coming up fast. He dipped the lights to check if anything was coming the other way, then switched back to full beam.

My feet kicked against some shit in the foot well. I looked down and saw a sliver of light. I reached down and recovered a laptop with a mobile phone connected to it by a cable. Sellotaped to the lid was a sheet of A4, a printout of a video grab. It was a close-up of my face from Pete's Basra footage. Would the Firm need to rely on that? They'd have far better mug shots of me on file – but maybe none that were quite so up-to-date.

I opened the top and tapped the keys to take it out of screensaver. A Google Earth map came up. The cursor hovered on the road where I'd parked the Merc, at more or less exactly the location of the lay-by.

'Has to be the Firm… The device wasn't the only thing they put in my car.'

'Tracker?'

I nodded. They'd probably slipped it behind the Merc's bumper or under the chassis, held in place by a strong magnet, maybe even connected to the car battery. Fuck it, who cared? Lynn, maybe – it meant both of us were targets. They were trying to kill him as well.

I pulled the mobile away from the laptop and threw it out of the window as Lynn missed the apex of another bend, confirming that the only thing he really knew how to drive was a desk. My own mobile swiftly followed.

I asked him about the Leptis message, but all I got was a blank stare. 'Why would Vauxhall Cross need to use you to lead them here? I draw a pension; they know where I live. So why not just hit you and me separately? Why the message?'

We screamed through another village. I couldn't stop myself doing some phantom braking as he narrowly missed a couple of parked cars.

A sign for Holt flashed by. The dashboard clock said nearly 2 a.m. Lynn went straight across a raised roundabout on the edge of town.

'OK, slow down. We're out of the shit, at least for the time being. Drive normally now. I need an ATM, not a fucking ambulance.'

We reached Holt and parked up outside Lloyds on the main street.

'Wait here, engine on.'

It was a nice, well-to-do town: lots of candle shops, cafes and estate agencies. That meant people around here probably liked to be nice too.

I got?400 out on both my cards and was back in the car asap, now in the front passenger seat. I snapped my cards in half.

'Where's the charity shops?'

We went down the High Street and into a small square. Lynn drove slowly while I ran backwards and forwards between the car and the shop doorways and threw the nice people's bags of cast-offs into the back of the car like it was a rubbish cart. I didn't care if any CCTV saw us. We'd be shedding another layer of skin soon.

'OK, out of town now, towards Norwich – and slowly. How far is that?'

'About twenty miles.'

As we headed back into the darkness I hit the interior lights and ripped open the bin-liners.

'What about your family? You'd better phone them and get them out of the way.'

He shook his head and a muscle twitched briefly in his jaw. 'No need.'

'OK. So now we get dressed and cleaned up. Then we dump the car and train it to London.'

'I don't know what we can-'

'Need to know, Colonel, remember?' I grinned. 'And you don't need to know anything until you need to know it. Don't want you giving away the game plan.'

I gave him the once-over. The blood on his head had dried a little and the swelling had begun. It wouldn't have been that noticeable if he'd had any hair to cover it. 'Right now we need a nice quiet stretch of river so we can clean ourselves up, then we're going to need to find you a hat.'

He seemed to relax again and pointed at the rear-view. 'You're no oil painting yourself, Stone. If I need a hat, you need the full shemagh…'

His foot went back on the pedal.

'And slow down,' I yelled. 'We don't want to get stopped.'

We had to dump the car once we got into the city – somewhere it wouldn't stick out and get pinged too quickly. Main streets and multi-storey car parks were out, because of the CCTV, but we couldn't leave it anywhere too isolated either – it would stick out like a sore thumb.

'When's the first train?'

Lynn finally lifted his foot off the gas.

'Not sure; it used to be some time before six – to get into London for the start of the working day.'

The clock on the dash read 02.38.

Norwich 0334 hrs I kept about two hundred behind Lynn as we walked into the city centre. It was bitterly cold. His breath hung in clouds behind him. The streets were well lit, so it was head down all the way, hands in pockets. My ears and nose were numb, and my hair was still wet from the river. It would have nudged me into hypothermia if I hadn't kept moving.

I must have looked pissed. The shoes the Red Cross shop had provided were plastic, and skidded on the icy pavement. Their jeans were two sizes too small; the zip only did up halfway. At least the jumpers fitted. I had two of them on over a T-shirt, and a shabby black raincoat.

There'd only been one hat, a fake-leather Russian thing with ear muffs which I'd given to Lynn.

Now that we'd shed another skin – the car – we needed to get out of here asap. We'd parked it near some council houses, opposite the entrance to the city airport. I'd left the keys in the ignition. With luck, it would be nicked. It was only about a mile to the station, but each step felt like Scott pushing for the Pole.

The roads narrowed as we got closer to the city centre. Lynn had suggested we RV by the skips behind the Big W, the warehouse to a general store a couple of hundred from the station. He said I wouldn't be able to miss it.

He wasn't wrong. The massive metal and concrete block had the world's biggest yellow W shining out over a stadium-sized car park it shared with Morrisons.

The recycling area was piled high with folded cardboard boxes and overflowing skips. Lynn wasn't the only one to suggest it as an RV. Crushed beer cans and empty vodka bottles were strewn across the greasy concrete. The smell of vomit and cigarettes probably meant it was a hang-out for kids rather than dossers.