After Lanky locked the door, the situation changed. Instead of moving away, he started talking to one of the other men – sounded like Pockmark – just outside. And this meant we had to delay taking action, because we’d be overheard.
At first, I strained to hear what the men were saying. Then, after gleaning no more than a few innocuous tidbits, such as the fact Jowls had started incinerating the bodies outside, I instead began reflecting on the task at hand.
I soon realized I was grinding my teeth with tension.
And the tension wasn’t helped when the two men then moved away from the door, only to return five minutes later – just as I was thinking it might be safe to make a move.
But I didn’t get frustrated. I began calmly plotting our counter-attack. And if one thing was clear, it was that the MP5 was the game-changer. Get our hands on that, and it made everything else irrelevant and—
All of a sudden, there was a disorientating burst of noise and a shot of adrenaline hit my bloodstream. I recognized the sound alright: a bullet busting the sound barrier.
My first thought was: whose gun? Because all the weapons I was aware of on the premises were subsonic.
The next instant, another noise: a garbled shout of pain emanating from out front. Jowls. He’d been hit.
Hardly had I thought this than there was a second urgent shout from just outside the door to our cell – ‘unlock it, unlock it’ – and a frantic scrabbling to work the locks. Then Pockmark and Lanky came careering in. Pockmark, carrying a Walther, sprinted past my cubicle, with the obvious intent to cover Ellen. Lanky, still holding the MP5, entered my cubicle, and kicked down the partition wall that blocked his view of the door to the room.
Lanky – red-faced, manic-eyed – leveled the MP5 at the door, and waited.
We all waited.
It’d been the sound of a Glock. A silenced Glock, because with an unsilenced Glock, you get a whole lot more noise.
Another bang from the other room – the front door getting booted off its hinges. Then the footsteps of a single person. A light, distinctive patter I’d recognize anywhere.
Vannevar Yeung. Armed with his gun of choice, a standard issue Glock.
But how?
Vann was moving slowly towards the door, and Lanky was staring at the threshold, his finger hugging the submachine-gun’s trigger. He was waiting for Vann to appear in the door-frame, because if he shot indiscriminately through the wall, there was as much chance he’d tip Vann off as stop him dead.
Yet Lanky was also edging closer to me as he tried to get the best angle.
Vann’s footsteps paused. Lanky blinked, exhaled, took a hesitant half-step towards me. A hesitant half-step into my range.
I had to act now.
I lashed my right leg into his kneecap, and he fell back with a startled cry, unleashing a terrifying silent shower of bullets into the ceiling.
‘Now, Vann,’ I shouted.
Vann appeared in the doorway, took aim with lightning reflexes, and put a bullet in Lanky’s head. He was dead before he’d hit the floor.
The MP5 was out of my reach, and a second later, Pockmark appeared before me, and took a shot at Vann. Vann dodged out the room, and the slug missed him by a whisker.
Pockmark, not willing to risk bending for the MP5, instead carefully withdrew a second Walther from his pocket, while continuing to cover the door with the first. He aimed the second Walther at my head, and flicked off the safety. Then he tore his eyes away from the door for a good second and studied me hard – and I knew he was weighing up whether to leverage my life, or rid himself of a liability…
A heart-beat later, he made a decision: one hostage was enough. His finger went to the trigger, the blood whistled in my ears, and I knew it was the end of the line.
But then a bolt from the blue. All at once, Ellen appeared, and – before I could process what I was seeing – she smashed the sharp edge of the table-leg into Pockmark’s throat, and a bullet escaped the gun he’d had on me, and punctured the wall above my head.
Ellen hadn’t put her cuffs back on. Ellen had continued unscrewing the wing nuts, and concealed from Pockmark she was free. And her recklessness had just saved my hide.
I retched – only just holding back the vomit – as I realized my face was covered in blood. But I immediately took myself in hand. The guy was dying, but we needed him.
‘Stop his bleeding, he’s our only lead,’ I said to Vann, who was now in the room.
Vann raced over, removed his leather jacket, ripped off the arm, and wrapped it around Pockmark’s neck, trying to stem the flow. But the blood just kept on coming – flooding over Vann’s hands and lap – and thirty seconds down the line, Pockmark went limp.
Vann turned to me: ‘He’s dead, Saul.’
We’d lost the only lead.
But while I should have been annoyed, I wasn’t. I was just glad it wasn’t me.