Ryan, Chris - Zero 22

Hunter entered the lift and retrieved the bag.

‘Empty it, short-arse,’ said the grey-haired guy. The insult sounded almost comical in his Russian accent. ‘All of it.’

Hunter leaned over and emptied the contents of the bag on to the ground. Screwdrivers. Wire cutters and crimpers. An electrician’s multimeter. A cable finder. Nothing that a telephone engineer wouldn’t be carrying. The brown-haired gunman poked at it with his foot. ‘Put them back,’ he said.

Hunter crouched down and did as he was told. The brown-haired guy was standing over him, but the atmosphere had changed a little. The guards were less tense. ‘Bloody hell, mate,’ Hunter said as he crammed the tools back into the canvas bag. ‘I nearly peed myself when I saw that –’ He made a vague gesture to indicate the pistol. The brown-haired guy with the burn mark sneered at him. Hunter’s act had done the job. The guards obviously thought they had a right couple of wimps on their hands. I’m going to fucking do you later , Hunter thought to himself as he stood up and maintained his pretence.

‘Five minutes,’ said the grey-haired gunman. ‘You speak to no one in apartment. You ask me before you enter any room. Are you understanding me?’

‘Whatever, mate,’ said Hunter. ‘We’ll be in and out. It’s no biggie.’

‘Yeah,’ Parsons said. ‘We don’t want any trouble.’

‘Please,’ said the manager. His brow was damp with sweat and he was obsequiously wringing his hands. ‘This way. Please, this way.’ He started off down the corridor.

The brown-haired guy peered into the lift. Hunter noticed him glance upwards at the ceiling and for a tense moment thought he might investigate further. But then he stepped back into the corridor and pressed the call button. The lift doors slid shut. ‘Move,’ he said. ‘Go on. Move! ’

Hunter and Parsons followed the manager along the corridor.

Cunningham flicked the override switch on the secondary control panel immediately after hearing the lift doors slide shut. He and the others remained absolutely still and silent. He had his head cocked slightly, listening for the sound of disappearing footsteps, but he could hear none.

A minute passed. There was a noise in the cavity above them. Something flapping around. A bat, maybe. Cunningham ignored it and refocused all his attention on any sound he might be able to discern outside the lift. There was none. He turned to the others, nodded to indicate his intention, then pressed the green button.

The lift descended, but only a couple of metres. Cunningham removed his finger from the button as soon as the top of the lift was in line with the bottom of the penthouse doors. It shuddered to a halt. He unclipped the metal tool from the side of the control panel. He identified a notch halfway up the line where the doors met. The end of the tool fitted into it precisely. All he needed to do was twist the tool and the doors would open silently. He nodded at the others again. Hobbs and Moore raised their handguns. Cunningham held up three fingers.

Two.

One.

The doors slid open.

The space in front of the lift was empty. The sound of voices drifted towards them. Cunningham lowered the door opener and jabbed a finger forwards. Hobbs and Moore exited and turned to the right, weapons raised, ready to fire. Cunningham drew his own weapon and stepped outside. The corridor was empty.

They advanced.

The room outside the main lift, with the art on the wall and the orange sofa, was a kind of lobby area. It was gaudy and over the top. There were two marble statues of naked women at either end of the sofa. Against one wall there was a life-sized model of a snarling tiger. There was just one heavy wooden door that led into the penthouse apartment itself – Hunter knew that from his study of the plans. No windows. Subtle lighting, pooling from recessed spotlights. The two guys took up position about five metres from them, facing the door, which meant they couldn’t see anyone approaching from the corridor. The manager was standing behind the guards. Good thing too. He looked like he might wet himself. He was blinking so frequently that his eyes looked more shut than open. Hunter took the cable finder from the canvas bag. ‘We might be able to do it all out here, avoid disturbing them inside,’ he said. He pointed to a section of wall about three metres from the main door and handed Parsons the cable finder. ‘You want to see if you can locate it?’

Parsons was making a very good pretence of being scared. Give that man a fucking Oscar , Hunter thought. His hand trembled artfully as he took the cable finder, and he glanced with feigned anxiety at the two guards. He put the cable finder to the wall and switched it on. There was a piercing, high-pitched tone. Parsons rotated a dial to get rid of it. Hunter turned to the two guys. They had clearly decided that Hunter and Parsons were no threat because their body language was slack and relaxed. ‘It’s just noise on the line,’ Hunter bluffed. ‘If we can trace the cable back . . .’

The guards weren’t even listening. Hunter could tell. They were distracted – still facing him, but not looking at him or Parsons, at least not properly. The brown-haired guy had his phone out. He scrolled down and said something to his companion in Russian. They seemed impatient, as though they wanted these two technicians to do their job and then get the hell out of there. That suited Hunter just fine. Because he knew that behind them, advancing round the corner, were the others, their footfall completely silent. They would each have their handgun in their right hand, and their tasers in their left. Each taser had two sharp prongs and the guys would be holding them at shoulder height; a quick, silent way to put the guards down without killing them.

It might have gone smoother if the manager hadn’t whimpered. Hunter glanced in his direction. The manager was two metres behind the guards and the other guys were approaching, three abreast, a couple of metres behind him. It was involuntary, no doubt, but when the SAS men were about three metres from their targets, the manager let out a half moan, half sigh, that immediately alerted the two guards to the fact that something wasn’t right. It was the grey-haired guy who reacted quickest, spinning round to see what was wrong. He had Cunningham bearing down on him but his reflexes were fast. As Hobbs slammed his handheld taser into the shoulder of the brown-haired guy, his mate reached into his suit jacket and pulled out his pistol.

But if the grey-haired guy was fast, Hunter, crouched by the wall he was pretending to examine, was faster. Having identified him as the dominant shooter, he was ready to attack him from behind. He sprang up and covered the five metres between them in an instant, colliding with the guy a bare fraction of a second before he released a round from his handgun. Cunningham, coming at him from the other direction at great speed, slammed the taser into the grey-haired guy’s neck. His body jolted violently and collapsed heavily to the floor. He hit his head badly as he fell and was knocked unconscious. But then there was vicious screaming. The manager was gripping the upper part of his right arm and blood was pissing through his fingers. He must have been clipped by the bullet.

‘Shut him up!’ Cunningham hissed at Hunter, as he and Hobbs advanced on the door, tasers away, weapons raised. Hunter hurried over to the manager and slammed one hand over his mouth, muffling the screams. Moore removed a bunch of cable ties from his ops vest and threw them to Parsons, who immediately rolled the grey-haired guy’s unconscious body on to his front before fastening his wrists behind his back. Blood was pumping from the manager’s wound, smearing itself over Hunter’s BT uniform. It was flowing fast, bright red, arterial. He was going to bleed out in a couple of minutes without intervention. Hunter didn’t need to make the request; Moore chucked a tourniquet his way as he advanced with Cunningham and Hobbs towards the door. Parsons was tying up the brown-haired guy with the burn mark. Hunter had a call to make. Should he remove his hand from the manager’s mouth to apply the tourniquet? Tightening it around the wound would be agonising. It would make him scream even more. Would it distract the guys? Alert the targets? They’d have already heard the gunshot. Hardly fucking ideal. The manager’s eyes were rolling. Hunter reckoned he had a minute of consciousness left. Cunningham was by the door, tapping the manager’s key fob to a pad on the right-hand side, ready to open it. Hobbs and Moore were standing two metres from it. Hobbs had his handgun raised, two-handed, forefinger resting on the trigger. Moore was holding a flashbang grenade. It was about to go very noisy. Hunter elected to hold off for just a few more seconds. He kept his hand clasped over the manager’s mouth and tried to ignore the warm blood seeping through the material of his uniform.