“Bob? Bob? Sitrep!” Her anguished voice is muffled through my fleece.
I roll over on my side, breathing hard, and reach for my phone. My right upper arm is a searing ache, an old injury coming out on strike in sympathy. There’s a siren in the distance, then another. The phone screen is shattered where I fell on it but it’s still working. I’m gasping for air, skin clammy, and my hands are shaking. “It was a hit. Shots fired, three down, UXB on site, I’ve been, I’ve been”—I reach up and fumble at my hood—“shots missed me, but get me backup right now.”
It’s one thing to go into a fight expecting it, another thing entirely to come through a hit by the skin of your teeth and not lose self-control. Pram woman missed me but one of her shots punched a neat hole in my hoodie, missing my carotid artery by about five centimeters. There’s a wall beside the shuttered corner shop and I roll again and sit up halfway, then lean against it, feeling gray and dizzy. If I hadn’t been moving towards my other attackers, turning and ducking, she’d have landed a double-tap in my center of mass. It’s as much as I can do to listen to the sirens getting closer, keep a weather eye open for signs of a follow-through, and concentrate on keeping what’s left of my shit together. I don’t want to lose control: I could accidentally shred the souls of everyone in all the buildings around me if I let myself slip.
It’s going to be a long night.
*
Time speeds up and everything seems to move very fast for a while once the real police arrive on scene, which they do, mob-handed, within five minutes. I have my warrant card out when they get officious in my face, which short-circuits no end of shit until they get the message that I’m a Victim of Crime. But at that point they turn all checklist-solicitous in a very unhelpful way. About two minutes later the real police arrive: an Armed Response Unit with the new kit—ward-inscribed body armor, mirrored helmets, and scary-looking automatic weapons, issued at short notice from some depot or other where we’ve been sitting on a stockpile of heavy kit. I resist the urge to say where were you when shit got real on my doorstep because that sort of thing really isn’t constructive, and anyway, it’s not their fault. I finally start to unwind once I’m sitting in the back of an ambulance, clutching my messenger bag, and surrounded by machine guns pointing outwards. Which is a sign of how bad a turn my life’s taken recently, if you think about it.
The ambulance crew check me out on the way to A&E and verify that I have a minor graze on the right side of my neck and a scraped knee, and that I’m uninjured but showing signs of shock. They think it’s because I’ve nearly been shot, but I know better. Either way it’s enough for them to light up the Christmas tree on the roof and drag me off to a hospital where I can expect to spend six hours sitting on a bench watching an endless stream of heart attacks and drunken party animals take priority. I try to argue, but they’re firm: discharging a patient who subsequently goes into cardiogenic shock is really bad for their customer performance metrics, sorry guv’nor. I am considering pulling my warrant card on them, regardless of whether it’s bad form or not, when my phone rings again. It’s Mo, and she’s got her shit together.
“Where are they taking you?” she demands. I tell her which hospital. “Right. Go with the flow and I’ll have a car pick you up at the Acute Receiving Unit door. The DO’s lining up a secure safe house and I’ll get the on-call doctor to visit you there. I’m on my way back to the office right now to audit the lockdown, but I’ll come visit as soon as things settle down.”
“Why, what’s going on?” I ask, weak and shivery and somewhat slow on the uptake.
“Someone tried to kill a senior member of staff,” she says drily. “Do pay attention, we take a dim view of that sort of thing. Sit tight and I’ll send you a babysitter.”
Mo’s idea of a taxi service for her husband, in the wake of a snatch attempt, is an SO19 sniper team. The heavily armed cops are lurking around the hospital entrance when I arrive, scaring the crap out of the smokers clustered under the awning. Nor did she mention in her call that the DO’s “secure safe house” is an entire floor of a terrifyingly luxurious apartment block in the East End (upstairs from a bulletproof lobby with a very comprehensive security system). Apparently it belongs to the Sovereign Wealth Fund/Oil Sheikh equivalent of Airbnb. It’s so heavily warded that I can’t sense any minds in the flats above and below me—it’s almost like we’re alone in the building—and there are more armed police in the lobby. It reeks of diplomatic passports and numbered bank accounts.
I’m dizzy and so tired that I’m beyond surprises as I enter the safe apartment’s front door and shuffle along a hand-woven Adraskan rug that’s probably worth more than I earn in a year. I assume it’s ’Seph’s bolt-hole; it’s far too luxurious for normal agency business. At the end of the hallway I find myself in a living room the size of an aircraft hangar, if aircraft hangars came furnished in Louis Vuitton with a view of the Thames. The bobbies with bazookas are camped outside the apartment door; I gather they have orders to start World War Three if anyone without a warrant card tries to get in. I plant my bag on the sofa, then for some reason I decide to make myself useful and set out in search of the kitchen in order to make them a placatory cup of tea, but I get about as far as a Louis XIV chaise in purple crushed velvet and gold leaf before my knees turn to water and I sit down, just for a minute.
I’m still there a quarter of an hour later when Johnny McTavish bounces in.
“Wotcher, cock!” he says cheerily. “How’s life treating you?”
“I’m fine,” I try to say, but it comes out as an inarticulate gurgle.
“Heh!” He looks amused. Johnny is about two meters of special-forces-surplus muscle in stonewashed denim, despite which, he’s not dumb. You don’t get to be Number Two in the Hazard Network by being dumb; the monosyllable is Johnny taking time out to evaluate me. The entryphone buzzes. “That’ll be the flying doctor service for you, I’ll bet,” he says helpfully, and disappears. He returns with a medic in tow. Fussing and blood pressure monitoring ensues. One adrenaline shot later (and a sermon on the side about bed rest, fluids, and not overdoing things) and I’m feeling a lot perkier. “Well then,” he says, pulling up a gratuitously ornate chair and crunching onto it. “What’s all this about? ’Ave you picked up some new fans from bein’ on TV?”
I stare sullenly at the nighttime London skyline, the stench of rotting minds catching in the back of my throat. “It’s those fuckers from Denver. They had a Claymore mine.”