‘I want a lawyer.’
‘Later.’
‘Casper’, or whoever he was, had slipped into another room, and I was left with the guy who’d brought me in.
‘I have a right to make a call,’ I insisted.
‘This isn’t a game show. You don’t get to phone a friend.’
I protested loudly. When they took my phone I told them in the strongest possible terms that they had no right to keep me and promised to sue the arse off them. Inevitably, my voice ran out of road and I was bundled back upstairs.
Locked in a back room with boarded up windows, all I could do was count the second hand on my watch as it ticked by. In a couple of hours, my phone would ring and I would not be able to take the call. Nothing I could do about it. Even if I escaped there was no time to source a gun. Without a gun the rescue mission and McCallen were doomed.
I kicked the walls and the door with frustration and yelled. It didn’t raise a flicker of interest. They seemed to have so little on me and yet, in the absence of a more obvious lead, the security services had elected me for the role of public enemy number one. There was a weird irony that I was indeed guilty of murder, but not those of which I was now standing accused. Perhaps it was divine justice.
Noise penetrated the film of silence, the sound of three car doors opening and shutting followed by the throaty growl of an engine turning over and, next, the change of engine note, followed by the spit and crunch of tyres on gravel. It meant that some of them had more important matters to deal with than me. My mind simmered with possibility. How many men would they leave behind? Based on experience, I estimated that there was one man between freedom and me. And that one man, in all probability, had a gun, something I needed. Envisaging a ‘kill two birds with one stone’ scenario, I smiled.
Desperate measures.
I ripped off my jacket and, tearing off my shirt, unwound the bandage from my left arm. The wound was still a mess and the simple act of removing the dressing reopened it. Bracing myself, I messed with it and squeezed until the blood flowed freely. Smearing this around my neck, I let several large drops drip directly onto the wooden floor. Every nerve ending screamed in tortured protest. Sucking as much air into my lungs as possible, I let out a terrific, unholy scream and dropped deadweight onto the floor, making as much racket as I could.
Within seconds, a set of footsteps pounded up the stairs, the key plunged into the lock and the door flew open.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ the guy let out, squatting down, thinking I’d slashed my own throat.
I kept my eyes wide open, staring up to the ceiling.
As he bent over to put a finger to the pulse in my neck, I struck.
Shooting up, I grabbed his windpipe and squeezed the larynx hard and fast. Clamping both hands over mine, he clawed, eyes popping, throat choking, pain exploding through every pore in his body. I clung on and rolled him, pinning him to the floor, my knee on his chest. Still, he resisted, jerking and twisting in an attempt to dislodge my hold. Any increase in pressure could prove fatal and I had no desire to kill him, only to knock him out. It wasn’t easy. Needed balance. Tricky when someone is trying to rip the skin off the back of your hands. Maintaining my grip, I held on, vice-like, until I felt his body sag and the fight leave him. Finally, eyes rolled, he lost consciousness and keeled over.
After a quick check to make sure he was still breathing, which he was, I put him in the recovery position. Removing a Glock from his waistband, I ran my fingers through his pockets, removing first his phone and then my own. I assumed they’d trawled my phone history, yet Caspar’s line of questioning seemed to indicate that it was of minimal importance. Perhaps they hadn’t had time to decode it or, more likely, failed to fully grasp the significance of the contents.
Desperate, I tore downstairs, found a set of wrist-cuffs, probably the same he’d used on me, and returned to cuff him. Throwing my jacket back on, leaving the shirt in a bloodied heap, I locked the door and tore down the stairs and out under a baleful sky. A quick glance around me revealed that I was somewhere in a residential suburb, over a mile from where I lived and two and half from the car.
Would my place be staked out? I didn’t know. But I had to get back home.