Safa aims for the exit door that leads into the drawing room, approaching it from an angle. A quick glance back. Everyone is out of the corridor. She pushes on to charge through the door and spots the eight kneeling figures looking into the atrium lobby. More attackers beyond them. Glowing red laser sights in the air.
Miri spots them next and notices their identical appearance to the people in Berlin. Ben’s eyes widen. His hand falling towards the pistol on his hip. Harry comes last, taller than the others and seeing over them to the soldiers in the room ahead. Roland screams out. Susan gasps. Ria flinches from the noise. The trailing operative turns quickly to check his route behind. He’s only a Three. Fresh out of basic training and his heart is already going like the clappers; now it thunders and booms as he spots Safa in the lead lifting her pistol to aim.
‘CONTACT . . .’ the young Three screams. Operatives start spinning round, aiming their guns.
Safa pauses as a voice inside remembers the police rules of engagement. She sees a threat, but not an immediate risk to life. Miri senses Safa’s lack of killer instinct and thinks this mission will end right here. She checks her watch, muttering the minutes to herself.
Red lasers flash through the air. Men and women screaming the word contact out to repeat and relay. The heli outside and the amplified voice thundering ‘PEOPLE IN THE HOUSE . . . LIE DOWN . . .’
Wide stance. Double-grip on the pistol. Face a mask of focus and aim. Safa overcomes the internal reasoning and fires once. She twitches the aim. Fires. Twitches the aim and fires a third. All three rounds gain kills. All three find their mark as three corpses fall dead on the floor with brains blown out.
Miri blinks, stunned, not expecting the perfect placement of shot from Safa, who aims at the door and fires steady rounds to send the rest of the attackers scattering.
‘HARRY, WITH ME . . . BEN, GET THEM THROUGH . . .’
Harry is already surging forward, using his bulk to push through into the drawing room. Shots come back, designed to suppress. The house fills with gunfire and the ping of rounds ricocheting off walls.
Safa holds for Harry to join her, then goes forward. The pair side by side firing single shots one after the other through the doorway. All concerns about drugs, fast heart rates, trembling limbs now forgotten. They stride to the door, firing again and again. Ben glances at them as he drags Bertie across the room towards the door being wrenched open by Ria.
‘Magazine,’ Safa says calmly. The one in her pistol drops away as the fresh one comes up in her spare hand to be rammed in. She looks back to see Ben staring at her. ‘Go,’ she says, just as calmly.
‘Magazine,’ Harry says, remembering the lesson from Safa that people now say magazine when they run out of bullets. What’s wrong with I’m out is beyond him, but he does it anyway.
‘FLASH-BANG,’ Safa yells, seeing the object fly through the door. She drops and turns, squeezing her eyes shut. Harry copies her a fraction of a second later. The grenade detonates as Ben turns away. A blinding explosion of light and a huge booming noise that makes his bones shake. Miri is through the door, grimacing as she grips Bertie and drags him up the stairs.
‘IN IN IN . . . ALPHA WANTS THEM ALIVE . . . GET IN NOW . . .’ a voice from the hallway bellows, urging the agents to go forward.
‘Ben, go!’ Safa screams, her head swimming from the sensation of the flash-bang.
Ben hesitates at the door. He closed his eyes before the flash-bang detonated, but the retina burn still got through his eyelids. Colours and stars flash in his vision. His hearing muffled. His head spinning. He looks up to see Miri dragging Bertie, then back to see attackers steaming into the room towards Harry and Safa, both still rising from the floor.
His hand draws the pistol before his mind can assess what he is doing. That same hand lifts, flicks the safety off and fires the pistol at the doorway as he strides across the room.
Time slows like it has done before. Everything in perfect clarity. No panic now. No concerns. He tried to fight back at Holborn, but he didn’t know how to fire a gun then. He didn’t know to compensate for the recoil or the sensations and noise. Now he knows.
He empties the magazine into them. Twitching the aim to send rounds through the centre of mass. Bodies drop, screaming. Submachine guns return fire. Ben dives to the side as Safa and Harry both do the same. All of them taking to the floor to roll and snatch what shots they can in the close-quarters firefight.
The attackers fall back, scrambling from the room as the pistol shots slam into the frame and door. More bodies lie dead. Blood smeared and splashed across the ivory sofas, and armchairs now puckered with bullet holes. The thick rugs ruined. The floor scuffed and dented. A surreal second of awareness as the thought of insurance flits through Ben’s mind and the idea of someone from his old firm coming to assess the damage. So exactly how did the massive gunfight happen again?
‘Back . . . back . . .’ Safa scrabbles up and runs, lurching to grip Ben’s arm, heaving him up as Harry rises to fire a few more rounds through the doorway.
Safa pushes Ben towards the door, then drops to kneel and cover Harry falling back. The three of them get through and start up the wooden stairs. Ears ringing. Chests heaving. They change magazines as they go, with Safa once again leading them to the top to see Miri looking at the watch on her wrist.
‘We need to go,’ Miri says. Her tone flat. Her eyes hard. ‘Door ahead.’ Miri points up a short distance to a plain wooden door. ‘Girl says we go out, turn hard right and through the next door for the last flight of stairs. You take point.’
‘Move,’ Safa says, forcing the others back against the walls to let her squeeze past.
‘We should just surrender now,’ Roland begs. ‘Ben, tell them . . . see sense . . .’
‘They’ll kill Bertie,’ Ria says, staring at her father, with disgust and shock etched on her face.
‘They might not . . .’ Roland says weakly. ‘Why don’t one of you run back and get Malcolm or Konrad to change the coordinates to here?’ he suggests with a flash of brilliance only a true coward could summon at such a time.
‘Dead,’ Miri says bluntly.
‘What?’ Susan gasps. ‘You brought Malc and Kon back?’
‘You did what?’ Ria asks, the disgust growing by the second.
‘I needed their help,’ Roland sputters.
‘You said you did it on your own,’ Ria says. ‘You said it was just you doing everything . . . We could have seen them.’
‘I’ll go and talk to them,’ Susan says, trying to draw composure, despite the abject fear gripping her insides. She holds Ria and Bertie close. Nodding to herself. ‘I’ll go down, okay? I’ll . . . Let me talk to them . . .’
‘Mum, no,’ Ria says, the tears falling fast down her cheeks. ‘They want to take Bertie.’
‘Is that true?’ Susan asks, looking round to everyone apart from her husband, who cowers back in his own state of panic.
‘It is,’ Ben says. ‘They’ll probably kill him if they can’t take him.’