A revving engine made me glance back over my shoulder. I’d come maybe a hundred and fifty metres from the ambush site, and already the fog was making the view back dusty and faint. I slowed, jumped over a fallen trunk, and crouched down behind it. As I watched, another of the school Audis slithered to a halt behind Craddock’s car and Blakemore and O’Neill jumped out of it. O’Neill was holding another Beretta twelve-bore. He hung the gun round the front of the Audi and pumped three fast rounds into the front end of the Peugeot. The tyres blew out immediately and the car collapsed down onto its rims.
The four gunmen must have realised by this time that the balance of power had begun to swing against them. The arrival of the second shotgun tipped it altogether. One of them jumped back into the car and tried to start the engine. Blakemore, Todd and Rebanks started pouring shots into the front screen, while Figgis and O’Neill pounded the engine bay with the Berettas.
Within moments there was a small explosive woof as leaking fuel was ignited by the spark from the car’s own ignition system. The driver abandoned his efforts and dived out as the flames started to lick around the edges of the bonnet. The four of them fled into the forest.
The other three must have gone in the opposite direction, but I didn’t see where. The driver, on the other hand, was heading straight for my location, pausing every half a dozen strides or so to rake the trees behind him with automatic fire.
I ducked down out of sight, adrenaline coursing through my body, shouting at me to get out of there, fast. It was much harder to stay put than to run, but right now I was fairly well hidden and I knew it was my best option. That didn’t mean I had to like it. I glanced round, and my eye lighted on a weighty branch close by. I carefully eased it within reach, and waited.
Blakemore came pounding through the forest on the driver’s tail, unheeding of the bursts of fire splintering the trees around him. I was reminded strongly again of Sean. That head-down sheer bloody-minded determination.
Blakemore was firing as he ran, keeping the SIG out in front of him. Even so, it was luck more than judgement that he winged the driver in the right arm as he hurdled a pile of logs. I suspect that he was aiming square for the centre of his body.
With a yell of pain the driver let go of the machine pistol and stumbled, going down on his knees less than ten metres from my position. Before he could rise again, Blakemore was on him.
He lifted the man off the ground and slammed him back against the nearest tree.
“What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?” he demanded.
When the man didn’t answer, Blakemore reached down and gripped him hard round his bicep, digging in cruelly to the leaking wound with his thumb. I saw the driver’s body twist with pain, but still he wouldn’t speak.
Frustration bloomed across Blakemore’s face. He brought the SIG up and shoved the barrel into the other man’s mouth. The driver’s eyes widened as his head was forced back, smacking into the trunk behind him. The raised foresight dug into his palate, burning him, drawing blood.
“You’ll speak now or you’ll never speak again,” Blakemore hissed.
Something in his eyes told me he wasn’t kidding. The instructor had the flat cool eyes of someone who could take a life without sweating over it and still look himself in the mirror every morning afterwards.
I knew what it was to take a life, but there wasn’t a day went past when I didn’t wish the circumstances had been different. That didn’t mean I couldn’t do it again, but I wouldn’t go deliberately looking for the opportunity, either.
I stood up. Blakemore’s head snapped round to face me, and didn’t relax when he saw who it was.
“Charlie,” he said, not shifting the SIG from the driver’s mouth. “Get out of here.”
I knew what he was telling me to do, but I wouldn’t play. Instead I stepped over my protective log and moved forwards to pick up the man’s machine pistol from where it had fallen. It was surprisingly lightweight and with the stock retracted it seemed shorter than the nine-mil SMGs I’d fired in the army. I settled the gun in my hands and pointed it in Blakemore’s direction. He didn’t look surprised about it.
“Either let the police deal with him, or let him go,” I said. “I’m not going to stand by and watch you commit murder.”
Blakemore snorted. “What do you think this bastard and his mates were trying to do to you?”
I didn’t answer, just stood there and kept the gun steady. After a moment Blakemore removed the SIG from the driver’s mouth, looking disgusted with himself that he’d been manoeuvred into doing so, and straightened up.
The man didn’t need telling twice that this was his chance. He started to scrabble away, but before he’d got far Blakemore leaned down and grabbed his coat collar, pushing his face close and speaking in fast, almost garbled German. Then he shoved the man aside and moved towards me, not even bothering to watch the driver’s frantic, lurching escape into the mist-shrouded trees.
Blakemore took the machine pistol out of my hands carefully, as though he still wasn’t quite sure if I was going to shoot him with it. I let him take it because my brain couldn’t think of a good enough reason to stop him. I jerked my head to indicate the rest of the instructors.
“You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?”
He sighed. “Come on,” he said, side-stepping my question. “We need to find the others. Make sure nobody’s hurt.”
I stood for another few seconds, my feet rooted, then I followed his lead. All the time I was searching through little-used areas of my memory, piecing together a ragged translation of Blakemore’s rapid words to the driver of the Peugeot.
My German vocabulary came back to me with painful slowness. When I thought I’d got all the words I didn’t believe the sense I’d made of them, so I went back and checked them again.
By the time we were back at the crash site I knew I hadn’t made a mistake about what Blakemore had said.
The other students and instructors gradually congregated near the three remaining Audis that were relatively undamaged. I could tell straight away the ones who’d been under fire before. They were taking the whole thing much better than those who’d been civilians all their lives.
O’Neill was one of the last to regroup. He came sauntering in with the Beretta resting on his shoulder like a machete. He nodded at the machine pistol Blakemore was holding. “Did you get one of them?”
Blakemore flicked his eyes momentarily in my direction. “No, he got away,” he said. “At least I tried.”
O’Neill didn’t respond directly to that, just turned and walked away. Blakemore watched him go, not looking any more cheerful than he had done when I’d forced him into releasing the driver.
I barely listened to the exchange. I just stood on the outskirts of the crowd watching the Peugeot burning, but didn’t see any of it. My mind was too full of what I’d heard in the woods.
If my translation was correct, I thought, then I now knew what had happened to Kirk, how he’d died, and who had killed him. But that didn’t mean the whole thing was solved and over.
If anything, it had just become a whole lot more complicated.
Thirteen
“No,” Sean said. I heard his breath escape in a sharp hiss. “No way, Charlie. You’re not going to convince me that Gilby’s mob are a criminal gang who recruited Salter – a man they’d only known for a couple of weeks – and involved him in the kidnap of Heidi Krauss.”
“Is it so far-fetched?” I argued. “Heidi’s bodyguards said they fired at the kidnappers as they fled the house. They could have hit somebody and that somebody could have been Kirk. Gilby gets him away, but he dies on route and they dump the body. How else would they explain it? I know what I heard Blakemore say to that guy—”