I caught sight of the assassins immediately. There were two of them, both dressed from head to toe in black, with flat caps on their heads and scarves pulled over their faces. They were standing purposefully in the aisle, no more than fifteen feet away, each armed with a silencer-equipped pistol that was pointed in my direction.
I scrambled backwards in the narrow space between the rows of seats, trying to make myself as small and as difficult a target as possible, but Pope's legs blocked my retreat. At the same time, I desperately worked to manoeuvre my.45 up into a firing position. One of the gunmen fired, a flash of light shooting out of the silencer, but the bullet ricocheted up off a seat and pinged into the ceiling.
A second bullet hissed above my head and there was a dull thwack as it hit Pope. Then the two gunmen were making for the door.
Sitting up as fast as I could, I pulled the trigger on the.45 before realizing that I was only holding it one-handed. There was a deafening explosion as the bullet roared out and the gun bucked dramatically in my hand, the kick from the shot surging right up to my shoulder with a pain that made my arm feel like it was on fire. A huge white hole appeared in the far wall of the theatre as the bullet struck it, way above the heads of the fleeing assassins, sending bits of plaster flying off in all directions. One of the punters cried out in panic.
Ignoring the pain in my arm, I pulled myself to my feet, which was the moment I saw the shock of blond hair sticking out from under the cap of the assassin nearest the door, just before he disappeared from view.
The man who'd claimed to be Pope. Blondie. Like a bad penny, he kept coming back.
But how the hell had he known we were here?
No time to think about that. I took aim, two-handed this time, and pulled the trigger as the second gunman reached the doorway.
There was another deafening blast of noise and the gun kicked wildly, but now I was better prepared and I held it steady. I heard the second gunman yell and stumble, his hand going up to his left shoulder. I'd hit him but not with a direct shot because he kept on moving and was gone from sight before I could fire again. But even a graze from a.45 calibre bullet would be enough to slow him down.
On the screen, the action was building to a noisy finale, but unfortunately it was being played out without the participation of the audience, who'd all sensibly hit the decks, not wanting to get involved.
Pulling the cap down over my face, I hurried along the seats to the aisle and ran in the direction they'd taken. You have to take snap decisions in a situation like this. There's no time for thinking things through. The shooters might be waiting to ambush me in the foyer, but if I went through slowly, listening out for them, I'd risk giving them time to get away, and I couldn't have that – not now my main lead was missing most of his brains. So I yanked open the door and charged through. To my right, the proprietor with the cardie and the big glasses was sprawled back in his seat, spindly arms hanging limply by his sides, a bullet hole slap bang in the middle of his head. Aside from him, the foyer was empty.
I hit the street at a run, almost slipping on the pavement's slick surface, and spotted them straight away, running out of the passageway and into Rupert Street. They rounded the corner and disappeared from view before I could fire and I ran after them, knowing that if they got away then that was it, I was back to square one.
As I came out the end of the passageway, I saw that the trailing gunman – the one I'd hit – was clutching his shoulder, although he still had hold of his weapon. He must have heard my pursuit because he swung round, the scarf still covering his face, and saw me stride out into the road, the.45 raised to fire.
He pulled the trigger first and I heard a loud female scream from somewhere behind me, but he was running and he was injured, and that put him at a serious disadvantage. He missed. He fired again and missed with the second bullet too, though not by so much this time.
It's strange to recount, but I had no time to feel fear as I stopped, took aim and pulled the trigger for the third time in less than a minute. In that sort of confrontation, when everything begins and ends at such speed, you've got no time for anything bar the physical actions needed to stay alive. And mine, it turned out, were more effective than his.
He was maybe two yards from the junction with Brewer Street when the bullet hit him somewhere in the upper chest, lifting him off his feet and sending him spinning out of control.
Blondie, now right at the corner, swung round and fired off four rounds in quick succession, moving his arm in a careful, controlled arc.
A window shattered behind me; someone screamed again and I threw myself to the pavement, managing to get off another shot from my hip as I did so. It was inaccurate, hopelessly so, and I could tell this because it hit a garish blue-and-pink neon sign saying 'JOE'S ADULT VIDEOS' at least ten feet above Blondie's head. The sign exploded in a shower of sparks and the lights went out. Blondie took this as a cue to make good his escape, disappearing onto Brewer Street, where, as far as I could see, all the pedestrians were huddled in the doorways of the various establishments, taking shelter from the battle in their midst.
From somewhere in the distance came the inevitable sound of police sirens. Knowing that time was short, I got up and ran over to where the first assassin lay motionless, rifling through the pockets of his leather jacket with one hand while clutching the.45 with the other, trying to ignore the sound of my heart hammering in my chest.
Nothing. Not a thing. I stopped to look around me and saw the woman from the clip joint had come out from her kiosk and was now at the bottom of the passageway, staring over at me, eyes wide. There was a big bloke in a suit with her who looked like he might be going to do something, so keeping my face as obscured as possible beneath my cap, I pointed the.45 straight at him and the two of them jumped for cover into separate doorways.
The assassin's scarf had come loose and hung limply round his neck. His mouth was open and a thin trail of blood was leaking out the side of it. He was young – no more than late twenties, at a guess – and wearing a plain black sweater and trousers of the same colour. I patted the trouser pockets hurriedly. Keys in the left, nothing else.
Something in the right, though. It felt like a wallet. I pulled it out. It was.
Thrusting it into my pocket along with the gun, I got to my feet and began to run down Rupert Street as fast as I could, in the opposite direction to Blondie, heading for Shaftesbury Avenue and the crowded safety of Piccadilly Circus.
But if I thought that was the end of the evening's drama, I was sorely mistaken.
21
Twenty-five minutes later, I called Emma Neilson from a backstreet off the King's Road. I was exhausted. I'd run and walked a long way across the West End and by my estimations I was well over a mile from the scene of the gunfight. I wasn't taking any chances. It wasn't so much that I was worried about being caught in the net that the police would be throwing across the whole area; I was far more concerned about the prospect of CCTV cameras getting a decent shot of me and being able to pinpoint my route of escape. London's teeming with CCTV cameras and I knew the police would spend dozens of man-days going through the available film in an ever-increasing circle in order to find out where I'd gone and whether I'd used a getaway car.
Only when I was confident that I'd covered enough ground to make checking every camera a logistical impossibility for my former colleagues in the Met did I finally stop and catch my breath. It was raining hard and I was pretty sure that the street I was on – a run-down residential area in the shadow of a Sixties council block – wasn't going to be covered by Big Brother. There wasn't a lot worth covering and there was so little street lighting that they wouldn't have been able to pick up anything of use anyway.