It had to be now. JJ vaulted off the wall and threw his weight into the square of the other guy’s back, slamming him into the room, a crash of body, tray, coffeepot, cup. Without even getting a look at him, he took out the guy on the bed with one shot, still startled and bleary-eyed and a good few heartbeats away from thinking of going for his gun. It was Ian Wilson, someone he’d met a couple of times and knew something about.
The younger guy was thrashing around like a fish on deck, scalded by the coffee where it had gone through his shirt, his bearings scattered. He instinctively went for his holster, found it missing, seemed to come back to himself, and suddenly became calm, sitting up where he’d fallen on the floor. He stared at Wilson’s body twitching on the bed, then looked up.
“There’s a chair behind you. Why don’t you shuffle backwards and put yourself in it?”
The guy moved slowly, eyes dulled in submission. Once he was sitting JJ said, “Do you know anything about me?”
He tried to speak, found his voice constricted, and cleared his throat before trying again. “Not officially. Stuff he told me.”
“So you know that if I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead by now.” He nodded, noncommittal. “So relax, you’re okay. I just need one piece of information and once I’ve got it I’ll have no reason to kill you. In fact, you can take a message back for me.”
“What piece of information?”
“Who sent you?”
The guy made an attempt at looking puzzled and said, “London. I don’t know who. I don’t think Wilson knew.”
“How old are you?”
“What?”
“Who has the gun here? Just answer the question.”
“Twenty-nine.”
“But you’re new in.” He nodded. “So I’m guessing you were in the services before. British Army?” He didn’t nod this time but the guess was correct, the haircut as much a giveaway as anything else. “And it was you who interrogated my girlfriend.”
“Wilson killed her.”
“But you interrogated her. And now that I know this piece of shit was involved I know for sure you raped her too.” He was shaking his head, his face playing nervous games. “He’d have pushed you if you needed it, cajoled you into it, told you how good it was at breaking them down, but he’d have got you to do it because he always got off on watching it. Or didn’t you know that?”
“You’re mistaken. I ... look, I ...”
“Don’t lie to me. I know she was raped and I know it was you who did it.”
His face was pleading, on the verge of breaking down, his head moving nervously from side to side. It didn’t seem so much that he was scared, more that he knew it had been wrong and was regretting it now, regretting that he’d allowed himself to be swept into it, that he’d allowed his professionalism to be teased away from him by someone like Wilson. “It was just ... I didn’t know.”
JJ cut him short, his voice still calm though. “You didn’t know? Do you know what city you’re in? You raped her. That’s what you did, you raped her, so what I’m gonna do now is graze one of these bullets off your balls and when you come round I’m gonna do it again and keep doing it until you tell me who sent you.” JJ aimed the gun between his legs.
“Berg sent us.”
“Berg’s dead.” He fired, putting a hole in the seat of the chair. The guy let out a hollow wail, like all the air being sucked out of his lungs, and slumped, his head lolling to the side, the crotch of his trousers suddenly torn and bloody where the bullet had gone through.
Either Berg was dead or even Danny didn’t know what was going on. JJ got a bag from the bottom of the closet and started choosing clothes to go in it. And all the while he was thinking through the time scale, when it must have started, whether Berg could have ordered his hit before being hit himself. He couldn’t even think why Berg would have had any reason to hit him, so maybe it had been someone higher or not Berg at all but someone lower, someone like Wilson playing loose.
He’d almost finished packing when the guy in the chair moaned as he began to come around. JJ looked over, watched the guy’s head slowly lifting, then took his gun again and shot him from across the room, a clean finish. He looked at the two of them, one on the bed, one in the chair. The room would have to be redecorated, but maybe they’d deal with that when they came to remove the bodies. He didn’t know what the procedure was, but there was bound to be some department that dealt with it.
He was idly thinking about it when the phone rang, loud and shrill against the silence of the apartment and the early morning. He weighed for a second whether or not he should answer it, then walked into the living room and picked it up, reckoning it was his phone and he was there so what difference did it make?
“Hello?”
There was a pause at the other end, like the caller hadn’t expected an answer. Then an American accent came back at him, middle-aged, gravelly around the edges. “Could I speak to David Bostridge please?”
JJ took a second to place the name, Bostridge, the guy he’d hit a couple of years ago in Moscow, an intriguing choice in itself. “Only if you know a good medium,” he said, and the American seemed to sigh with relief before replying, “Thank God. You don’t know me, Mr. Hoffman. My name’s Ed Holden. I have some important information for you.”