Hobart could see ways out of this madness for both men but they themselves could not see beyond their own needs. They were on a collision course and nothing now was going to stop them, certainly not Hobart. The ultimate loser would of course be the boy, wherever he was. Hobart appreciated how Stratton had little choice, though his solution was extreme to say the least. But above everything else it was Skender’s last words to him that echoed in Hobart’s head: the threat to him and his wife. Hobart would never admit it to anyone but he hoped Stratton succeeded in destroying the man if for no other reason than his own survival.
‘I’ll give you a minute to get clear,’ Stratton said. ‘Make sure no one is anywhere near the square.’
Hobart stared at Stratton, reminded of a failed suicide bomber he’d once seen in a jail. But that man had planned nothing on this scale, of course. He glanced up at the building behind him, his contempt for it and its owner impossible to hide, then back at Stratton. ‘Blow him to hell for all I care,’ Hobart said. Then he moved off painfully, past the statue and towards the edge of the square.
A movement caused Stratton’s gaze to flick to the balcony above, where Klodi and another of Skender’s thugs had arrived to look around. Klodi looked down onto the concourse and at the statue. The two goons were about to move on when the signal finally reached Klodi’s brain that someone was standing between Skender’s statue’s arms. Then he recognised who. Klodi disappeared instantly and Stratton ran his fingers along the transmitter to the first of four buttons. They hovered above it while Stratton drew the jacket across his body to hide the device from view.
Hobart crossed the street at the corner of the square towards the roadblock, moving faster, despite his injuries, than when he’d left Stratton. He was thinking of the remaining seconds of the minute that Stratton had given him that were ticking away.
Hendrickson hurried through the roadblock on seeing Hobart hobbling towards him. ‘Sir, are you okay?’ he asked, falling in alongside his battered leader.
‘Get these people back out of sight of the square. Now!’
‘Stratton’s escaped, sir. I tried to call you—’
‘I know!’ Hobart shouted, hurting his ribs in the process. ‘Get these people out of here! Tell the cops the bomb’s going off any second!’
Hendrickson ran off towards the chief of police who stood surrounded by his officers and members of the fire department on the other side of the checkpoint. They were immediately goaded into action. Seaton appeared alongside Hobart who had stopped to lean against the wall of a building and was glancing around the corner towards the pyramid at intervals.
‘You okay?’ Seaton asked dryly.
Hobart looked up at him in between clearing some congealed blood from his nostrils into his handkerchief. ‘I will be in a minute,’ he said to Seaton who was unaware of the irony.
‘What about Stratton?’
‘What about him?’ Hobart asked.
‘Any idea where he is?’
‘Take a wild guess,’ Hobart said, looking back around the corner.
Klodi hurried into the ballroom to find Cano briefing a dozen of his men, organising a search of the building. ‘He’s here!’ Klodi shouted.
Cano looked up at him, knowing exactly who he meant, a rush of excitement coursing through him. ‘Where?’
‘Outside. By the statue. He’s just standing there.’
‘Cover him,’ Cano said as he hurried past Klodi and across the lobby to the main doors, followed by half his men. The others trotted up the stairs behind Klodi.
Cano removed a large silver-plated semi-automatic pistol from a shoulder holster and pulled the slide back enough to expose a bullet in the chamber, making sure that it was loaded. He took a deep breath, adjusted his eyepatch, exhaled through flared nostrils, put his free hand on the door handle and paused a moment in thought, like a gunfighter about to head out of a Wild West saloon into the sunlight to face the sheriff.
He turned the handle and pushed open the door, slowly at first, exercising caution. Then the statue came into view as he opened it further. Stratton stood in front of it as Klodi had described, staring straight at Cano.
Cano kept his pistol held low as he examined the man for a few seconds before searching around for a trap of some kind. There was no obvious place in which to hide a bomb in the immediate area, no planters, alcoves, boxes – nowhere to conceal anything that would harm Cano and his men and not Stratton.
Stratton’s stare remained fixed squarely on Cano. He was confident that an attack would come from no other source without the Albanian’s say-so and was counting on the man’s desire to kill Stratton personally.
Cano’s one-eyed glare went back to Stratton, specifically to the hand inside his jacket that he assumed held a weapon, wondering why the Englishman was out in the open and blatantly facing what he knew would be vastly superior firepower. Perhaps it was desperation: the man had few other options and, Cano speculated, was so consumed with hatred that he had decided to go down fighting.
Cano took a couple of steps outside as several of his men filed out through the door behind him, guns in their hands, moving either side of Cano to where they could get a clear shot at Stratton. Half a dozen more appeared on the balcony above to stand alongside Klodi. Some of them had sub-machine guns.
Cano was beginning to feel more like a bullfighter than simply an executioner. He started to relax and enjoy the role, supremely confident that this was the end of his brother’s killer. There was no way out for Stratton now, not with over a dozen guns against him. Even if the cops were watching, Cano had been threatened with a bomb and was within his rights to defend himself. A smile spread across his face. ‘Come to die, Stratton?’ he asked.
‘Where’s the boy?’ Stratton asked calmly. ‘Hand him over now and I’ll let you live.’
Cano’s smile spread further across his disfigured face before he burst into laughter, which spread infectiously among his men as those who could not understand English well enough heard the translation from others.
‘You got balls, Stratton. I’ll say that much for you,’ Cano said as the laughter subsided. ‘Forget about the kid. Mine is the last face you’re ever gonna see in this lifetime. No one shoot before me!’ he yelled as he raised his gun, aiming it at Stratton as his men did the same. ‘How d’you like my firing squad?’ he asked.
Stratton’s finger pushed the first button on the transmitter. Less than a second later, the top of every lamp-post surrounding the square exploded with a thunderous crack and boom as six and a half thousand ball-bearings blasted from them, like a battery of howitzers primed with grapeshot firing simultaneously, the steel wall spreading as it screamed towards the glass pyramid. The massive shock wave travelled just ahead of the metal wall, covering the distance to the building in less than a second. It hit the palm trees first, shredding their foliage and banners and bending them towards the building as if a tornado had swiped them. Then the metal balls struck the back of the bronze statue of Skender, smashing away all minor details such as ears and fingers. Before Cano’s finger could finish squeezing the trigger of his gun the tiny steel spheres slammed through him and his men with such force that they were lifted off their feet and their butchered bodies slammed backwards into the building’s doors and walls, dead before impact. Every sheet of glass on the face of the pyramid from the ground to the twelfth floor exploded into fragments, filling the air like a crystal cloud before descending.