Pace, pace, pace, pace. The paving slabs flew beneath de Clerk’s feet as he ratcheted up the tempo, smiling as his legs took the burn. He emerged by the Oval Cricket Ground. It was dawn and the sky behind the stadium was fractured into lilac and blue, like torn strips of paper pasted across the heavens. At this hour a few chancers lurked by the stadium, but they left the runner alone. Six miles so far, and he had barely broken a sweat.
There wasn’t much in de Clerk’s life apart from work and computers, but he did have his fitness. It took discipline to shoehorn a jog into a twenty-hour working day; yet as he ran the spook felt a relaxation sleep could not achieve. His flat was nearby and it would be a short stroll to Vauxhall for his shift.
A scream interrupted his trance.
De Clerk paused, jogging on the spot. And there it was again, echoing from a nearby cul-de-sac. The shady characters had moved on; the council estate was impassive; the only witnesses were the seagulls, circling the Kennington gasworks.
“Help me! Please! Somebody!”
De Clerk was wearing running shorts. His phone was in the flat. He had to deal with this alone. He rounded the corner in a spurt of acceleration – to find himself in a row of graffiti-strewn lockups. There were no streetlights, but through the gloaming de Clerk could make out two men pinning a woman against a garage door. They were diminutive, teenagers perhaps. Youths stabbed each other on a daily basis in London; this was dangerous. But he had to do something.
“Leave her alone,” he shouted.
The assailants turned and de Clerk saw they were not teenagers, but Chinese guys in their thirties, tattooed and wiry and mean.
Oh, flip.
But when de Clerk looked at their victim his jaw dropped: it was Jenny Frobisher.
“Edwin? Edwin! What are you doing here?”
One of her assailants stepped forward. “You. Go!”
De Clerk knew enough about the Etruscan operation to recognize this for what it was: a Chinese snatch squad.
“Please …” begged Jenny. “Help me, Edwin.”
His heart twanged to see her, but rather she was in a British jail than a prisoner of the Chinese Embassy. Jenny was a tough cookie, but de Clerk doubted she could withstand torture. She had gone rogue and it was his duty to bring her in.
“Go,” the man commanded a second time. A dagger was in his hand; the blade shone dully in the immature light.
De Clerk stood his ground. This was it.
All those years of training and now it was really happening. He cut a nerdy figure with his pale skin and wispy hair, a bulbous head that somehow recalled a clove of garlic. But he was very fit. And like many MI6 officers he’d been trained in close combat – krav maga, the Israeli system. There were two of them, and they had a chance.
The violence, when it came, was swift and invigorating.
Both men advanced on de Clerk, daggers extended. Jenny saw her chance and charged one of the knifemen, leaping on his back and grabbing him by the throat. The pair went to ground, grappling for the blade – now de Clerk could fight one attacker alone. He had to defeat his opponent before Jenny was overpowered, before it was two on one again.
The pair circled each other testily. The knifeman held his weapon pointing downwards, thumb on the hilt, jabbing out like a stinging insect. De Clerk assumed his knife stance. He stood sideways on, one elbow raised to protect the face and eyes, the other arm covering his exposed armpit, gateway to the chest. At each thrust of the blade de Clerk leaped backward; the evasions riled the knifeman and he hissed and spat. Suddenly he lunged for de Clerk’s throat with a downward motion, as if wielding an ice pick. It was the opening the spy had been waiting for. He sidestepped and grabbed the knifeman by the wrist. In the same movement he swung his left arm into his opponent’s jaw, hard, using the outside-lower forearm where the bone is shaped like the shaft of a hammer. He grabbed the knifeman by the hair, pulling his head in a downward arc. Then he kneed him in the face.
Now De Clerk had him by the hair with one hand, by the wrist with his other – like he was riding a Harley Davidson. The arm with the knife was turned inside out, elbow skyward. His attacker was bent double, dazed, facing the ground. The move had gone exactly as it did in training and de Clerk experienced an instant of wonder that krav maga worked in real life. He let go of the man’s head and struck him just above the elbow, where the nerves are exposed. Again he used the bone of the forearm, clenching his fist to increase the power. It must have been agony – but still the knifeman clung on to his weapon. De Clerk began to pull the man’s wrist upward, applying pressure on the spot above the elbow. He was the stronger man, he could feel it; the knifeman was yielding, yelping in pain. He increased the pressure. Much more of this and the arm would break at the elbow.
Bang!
De Clerk saw points of light that vanished when he tried to focus on them. He had been hooked in the jaw. Somehow he kept the knife locked. The points of light dissipated. His attacker tried another hook. De Clerk blocked, just about. Another hook, another block. It was stalemate.
The pair rotated on the spot like Siamese twins at the tango, the blade trembling in its vice.
De Clerk saw how he could win.
He had to outman his opponent, use his superior strength and size. He leaned into the arm-lock, straining every sinew to it, his opponent’s wrist bent to breaking point.
“Aaaaah,” said the knifeman. “Aaaaah ….”
The dagger tinkled across the tarmac. The Chinese agent tore himself from de Clerk’s lock, diving after the weapon. His fingers closed on the hilt. But he had misjudged the distance between them; de Clerk was closing in fast. The knifeman’s head turned and there was panic in his eyes as he realized he was about to be kicked in the face. De Clerk gave it everything. The knifeman was knocked into oblivion, flying flat on his back with his lips twitching. The second agent prepared to charge. Jenny was slumped behind him. De Clerk seized the abandoned blade, and for the second time he danced that wary dance.
I’m going to have to kill this man.
The realization flooded through de Clerk’s brain, drowning out the cold morning air and the cries of the seagulls above. The only thing left was the face of his foe – bobbing up and down, isolated in his vision, as though a high aperture lens had blurred the world around it.
There was movement behind the knifeman.
Jenny was on her feet – bloodied but closing on her intended victim with alacrity – and before he could react she brought a brick down on his head with a dismal crack. The agent’s eyes rolled back into his skull, he fell to the ground and was still.
“There may be more of them,” Jenny gasped. “We need to get off the street.”
“My place,” de Clerk said. “It’s round the next corner. We can shelter there while we” – and the realization he had to detain her throbbed in his head – “while we work out what to do.”
They dashed up the path of his flat, de Clerk fumbled a key into the lock and the door closed behind them, shutting out the pale blue world and all the imagined enemies flitting through it.
*
For the men de Clerk fought weren’t Chinese agents. They were the managers of the Camden martial arts club where Jenny studied wing chun. When she offered them a grand each for their assistance they were happy to play along with her deception. Jenny knew de Clerk was a jogger, she knew where he lived, and she knew he was a creature of routine. She had staked out his house until she learned his route and then chosen a spot for the theatrics. One of the people loitering by The Oval had been Jake, on the phone to Jenny to tell her when to scream. The daggers were blunt. And the two martial artists could control the ebb and flow of a fight as if turning a tap. For authenticity de Clerk got a blow to the head, but they had let him triumph, as a kitten overpowers a human hand. Jenny felt a touch of professional pride at her chicanery as she was led into de Clerk’s flat.
‘The bump’ had gone perfectly.