Страница 106 из 106
‘Uhm, sir, it’s just. The shooting down there. Well, we arrived sort of in the nick of time, sir, so it was a bit rushed. Just trying to get them off you, you know.’
‘Yes.’ His voice still wasn’t working properly. It had taken him whole minutes, lying there on the concrete, to make sense of the thunder, the screams of men dying and then the urgent voices of the tacs as they circled him. The ring of concerned faces peering down. ‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘Yes, well, uhm. Thing is, a firefight like that, you don’t always get everyone dead centre, and now it looks like at least a couple are going to live. I, well, I assume you’re going to be pressing charges, sir.’
‘Yes, alright.’
‘Well, I’ll need a number for you, sir. For the statement. Obviously, we can get you at Shorn, but we like to provide a full personalised service in cases like this. Victim support, one-to-one interviews, we can come out to you any time. And I’m the officer assigned, so. Do you, uh, have a home number, sir?’
Chris closed his eyes briefly. ‘No, not really.’
‘Oh.’ The tac looked at him for a moment, puzzled. ‘Well, anyway. I’ll get you at Shorn, then.’
‘Yes.’ He tried to curb a flooding tide of impatience. He wanted to be gone. ‘Is that all you need?’
‘Oh. Yes sir. But, uh, you know, congratulations. The duel and everything. My whole family were watching it. Well done. Fantastic driving. Uh, my son’s a huge fan, sir.’
He fought down the urge to cackle. Hid it in a cough.
‘That’s nice.’
‘I expect you’ll be on the screen a lot the next few weeks. Probably even get an interview with that Liz Linshaw, eh?’ The tac saw the look on his face and stepped back. ‘Anyway, I’ll. Let you go, sir. Thanks.’
‘No problem.’
He let the Saab roll forward. People got out of the way. He moved past Louise Hewitt and then Jack Notley, gathering speed. By the time he passed the last of the uniforms and the parked police vehicles, he was closing on ninety. The Saab took the curve on a rising growl. He hit a pothole, but the suspension and the onset of the painkillers damped it out. He reached for the phone, jabbed it on. Winced only a little this time as his cracked ribs jarred. He placed a forward call to Joaquin Lopez in Panama, ten minutes ahead. Then he dialled Shorn’s priority client operator and told them to get him Francisco Echevarria immediately.
They didn’t like it. They didn’t know if—
‘Tell him it’s a national emergency,’ Chris suggested.
It took a couple of minutes, but Echevarria grabbed the call. He wasn’t pleased. Chris got the impression the ride in the last week had been bumpy.
‘Bryant? That you? Now fuckin’ what? What national fuckin’ emergency you talkin’ about?’
‘The one that’s going to put you in front of a fucking firing squad, you piece of shit. This is Chris Faulkner.’
Strangled silence, then fury. ‘You motherfuckin’—‘
‘Shut up and listen, Paco. I don’t know what line of shit they’ve been handing you in my absence, but things just changed for the better. Mike Bryant is dead.’
‘You’re lyin’.’
‘No, I’m not. I killed him myself. With my bare fucking hands. So I’m now junior partner at Shorn Conflict Investment, which means executive partner for the NAME account. Which means you, Paco. And I’m telling you, I’m going to have Vicente Barranco in the streets of Bogota by the end of this fucking month. So if I were you, I would gather up as much of your father’s stolen loot as you can get in a Lear jet, and I would fuck off out of the NAME right now, while you can still walk to the plane.’
Echevarria lost English in the storm of his fury. Spanish washed down the line, beyond Chris’s ability to follow. He cut across it.
‘You’ve got forty-eight hours, Paco. That’s it. After that, I’m sending Special Air to put a bullet in your face.’
‘You ca
This time, Chris really laughed. Across the pain in his broken ribs, across all the pain. The drugs were numbing him nicely.
‘You still don’t get it, do you, Paco? From where I’m sitting, I can do whatever the fuck I want. Men like me, there’s nothing you can do to stop us any more. Understand? There is nothing you can do any more.’
He killed the call.
Fed power to the Saab and watched as his speed climbed.
Gave himself up to the snarl of the engine, the spreading numbness of the drugs in his system, and the onrushing emptiness of the road ahead.
THE END