‘Not a peep,’ a voice said behind him.
Sean turned again.
The AK was pointing at him, and in the reflection of the holed visor he saw a dagger sticking out of his shoulder.
Duff put the barrel of the AK to the tattoo on the guy’s forehead. Looked into his gawping, ugly features. His finger squeezed the trigger, just a fraction... He heard the hiss of his own breathing inside the helmet and his heart pounding beneath the somewhat too tight leather jacket.
‘Duff,’ Macbeth said from the club-room doorway. ‘Easy now.’
Duff squeezed the trigger a fraction more.
‘Stop that,’ Macbeth said. ‘It’s our turn to use a hostage.’
Duff let go of the trigger.
The man’s face was as white as a sheet. From fear or loss of blood. Both probably. His voice shook. ‘We don’t save—’
Duff hit him across the tattoo with the gun barrel. Leaving a stripe that for a moment shone white like a copy of Duff’s own trademark. Then it filled with blood.
‘You shut up, son, and everything’ll be fine,’ said Macbeth, who had joined them. He grabbed the young man’s long hair, pulled his head back and put the blade of his second dagger to his throat. Pushed him forward to the club-room door. ‘Ready?’
‘Remember Sweno’s mine,’ Duff said, making sure the curved magazine sat properly in the weapon, and strode after Macbeth and the Norse Rider.
Macbeth kicked open the door and went in with the hostage in front and Duff hard on his heels. Grinning and loud-mouthed, the Norse Riders were sitting at a long table in the large, open but already smoke-filled club-room. All of them with their backs to the wall facing the three doors that led from the room. Probably a club rule. Duff estimated there were twenty of them. The music was on loud. The Stones. ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’.
‘Police!’ Duff shouted. ‘No one move or my colleague will cut the throat of this fine young man.’
Time seemed to come to an abrupt halt, and Duff saw the man at the end of the table raise his head as if in slow motion. A ruddy porcine face with visible nostrils and plaits so tight they pulled the eyes into two narrow hate-filled straight lines. From the corner of his mouth hung a long thin cigarillo. Sweno.
‘We don’t save hostages,’ he said.
The young man lost consciousness and fell.
In the next two seconds everything in the room froze and all you could hear was the Rolling Stones.
Until Sweno took a drag of his cigarillo. ‘Take them,’ he said.
Duff registered at least three of the Norse Riders react at the same time and pulled the trigger of his AK-47. Held it there. Spraying chunks of lead with a diameter of 7.62 millimetres, which smashed bottles, raked the table, lashed the wall, carved flesh and stopped Mick Jagger between two gasses. Beside him Macbeth had reached for the two Glocks he had removed from the Norse Rider bodies on the quay. Along with their jackets, helmets and bikes. In Duff’s hands, his gun felt warm and soft like a woman. Darkness fell gradually as lamps were shot to pieces. And when Duff finally let go of the trigger, dust and feathers hovered in the air, and one lamp swung to and fro from the ceiling sending shadows scurrying up the walls like fleeing ghosts.
3
‘I looked around, and in the semi-darkness Norse Rider guys were strewn across the floor face down,’ Macbeth said. ‘Blood, broken glass and empty shell cases.’
‘Jesus!’ Angus shouted with a slur over the lively babble at the Bricklayers Arms, the SWAT’s local behind the central station. The glazed blue eyes looked at Macbeth with what seemed to be adoration. ‘You just swept them off the face of the earth! Holy Jesus! Cheers!’
‘Now, now, careful with your language, you priest-in-waiting,’ Macbeth said, but when many of the eighteen SWAT officers in attendance raised their beer mugs to him, he eventually smiled, shaking his head, and then raised his glass too. Took a long draught and looked at Olafson, who was holding a heavy Bricklayers Arms pint mug in his left hand.
‘Does it hurt, Olafson?’
‘It’s all the better for knowing that one of them has a sore shoulder as well,’ Olafson lisped and shyly straightened the sling when the others burst into loud laughter.
‘The ones who actually got things rolling were Banquo and Olafson here,’ Macbeth said. ‘I was just holding the light like some bloody photographer’s assistant for these two artists.’
‘Keep going,’ Angus said. ‘You and Duff had all the Norse Riders on the floor. What happened then?’ He flicked his blond hair behind his ears.
Macbeth gazed at the expectant faces around the table and exchanged glances with Banquo before continuing. ‘Some of them screamed they were surrendering. The dust settled and the music system was shot to pieces, so it was finally quiet but still dark, and the situation was rather unclear. Duff and I started checking them out from our end of the room. There were no fatalities, but a number of them required medical attention, you might say. Duff shouted that he couldn’t find Sweno.’ Macbeth ran a finger through the condensation on the outside of his glass. ‘I spotted a door behind the end of the table where Sweno had been sitting. At that moment we heard motorbikes starting up. So we left the others and charged out into the yard. And there we saw three motorbikes on their way out of the gate, one of them was red, Sweno’s. And the guard, a bald guy with a moustache, jumped on his bike and followed. Duff was furious, wanted to give chase, but I said there were a few badly injured guys inside...’
‘Did you think that would stop Duff?’ a voice whispered. ‘Bastards lying around bleeding when he could catch Sweno?’
Macbeth turned. The voice in question was sitting alone in the next booth, his face hidden in the shadow beneath the dart club’s trophy cupboard.
‘Did you think Duff would consider a few ordinary people’s lives when a heroic exploit was within reach?’ A beer mug was raised in the shadows. ‘After all there are careers to consider.’
Macbeth’s table had gone quiet.
Banquo coughed. ‘To hell with careers. We in SWAT don’t let defenceless people just die, Seyton. We don’t know what you in Narco do.’
Seyton leaned forward and the light fell on his face. ‘None of us in Narco quite know what we’re doing either, that’s the problem with a boss like Duff. But don’t let me interrupt your story, Macbeth. Did you go back in and tend their wounds?’
‘Sweno’s a murderer who would kill again if he had the chance,’ Macbeth said without letting go of Seyton’s eyes. ‘And Duff was worried they would escape across the bridge.’
‘I was afraid they’d get across the bridge, as the lorry had tried to do,’ Duff said. ‘So we jumped back on our bikes. We rode them as hard as we could. Plus a bit more. One miscalculated bend on the wet tarmac...’ Duff pushed the golden half-eaten crème brûlée across Lyon’s damask cloth, took the bottle of champagne from the cooler and refilled the other three’s glasses. ‘After the first hairpin bend at the bottom of the valley I saw the rear lights of four bikes and pressed on. In my mirror I saw Macbeth was still following.’
Duff cast a furtive glance at Chief Commissioner Duncan to see if his account was being well received. His gentle, friendly smile was hard to interpret. Duncan still hadn’t directly commented on the night’s stake-out, but wasn’t the fact that he had come to this little celebration an acknowledgement in itself? Perhaps, but the chief commissioner’s silence unsettled Duff. He felt more secure with the pale redhead leader of the Anti-Corruption Unit, Inspector Lennox, who with his customary enthusiasm leaned across the table swallowing every word. And the head of the Forensic Unit, Caithness, whose big green eyes told him she believed every scrap and crumb.