Pay Off (24 page)

'It's all right, David, you'll soon be home,' I said loudly, still walking, now passing the first vat, the hand holding the briefcase clamped tightly shut, eyes taking in as much as I could.

The girl was standing six feet to the right of David and 194 Sammy, in the space between the left and centre lines of vats. She was about five feet two with close-cropped red hair and an elfin face with a crop of freckles around her pert nose. In thigh-length boots and green jerkin she could have passed for Peter Pan, but she was wearing a green waterproof anorak zipped up to the neck and blue jeans and in her right hand hanging by her side was a large black handgun.

She took a cigarette from her lips with her left hand, dropped it to the ground and moved to stamp it out, but it fell through the wire mesh in a shower of sparks to the room below. 'Well now, just in time,' she said, glancing at her wristwatch. 'And with the money, too.' Hers was the voice on the phone.

She smiled and turned to her partner, tall, thin with a mane of black curly hair and a long, hooked nose. He was standing at the end of the corridor I was walking along, but slightly to the right so that the lower part of his body was obscured by the last wooden vat in the right-hand line.

He was wearing a similar anorak, but his was open to the waist showing a white crew-necked pullover underneath and he had on grey herringbone trousers instead of jeans. They both wore blue and grey training shoes and could have passed for students hitching around Europe, if they'd had a couple of rucksacks and if they hadn't both been carrying guns.

His was black and seemed bigger than hers and from sixty feet away it looked like a revolver, but the lamp was tied with a piece of wire to the girder which crossed the room directly over their heads so it shone straight down on them, and it was hard to judge exactly what they had in their hands other than to see quite clearly that his was pointing at my stomach.

The door clicked shut behind me and I whirled round in a panic because I'd left it open. Ronnie Laing was there, leaning against the wall, arm across the door, a lazy smile 195 on his suntanned face, every strand of his blond hair in place, blue eyes watching my every move with cold amusement.

He wasn't carrying a gun, with two professional killers on tap he didn't need one. He rubbed his long tapered hands together, smoothing them like a concert pianist about to play to a packed Albert Hall. The smile grew wider.

'So glad you could make it,' he said softly, the spider to the fly. 'I was almost hoping you wouldn't come and I'd be able to play with Sammy.' The eyes behind the greenframed glasses blazed with evil intent and I knew full well that unless I came out on top he would get to play with her and that she'd die screaming while he stood over her, smil- inB his lazy smile.

I was surrounded, but two had guns and one didn't so it was no contest. Laing would have to wait.

I turned my back on him and began walking again. I swung the case slowly backwards and forwards in time with my feet and started talking, not concerned with the words or the sense, just trying to keep their minds off the case and what it contained and my mind off what was going to happen and what could happen if it all went wrong. Mouth in overdrive, brain on auto-pilot, I was back in my father's study in front of his desk, reciting poetry.

'The money's all here,' I said, and I was surprised at how steady my voice was. My throat was dry and my tongue felt twice its normal size and I couldn't swallow. 'Just keep calm,' I said. 'There's no need for anybody to get hurt.'

The girl smiled at that and she moved to the right, away from David and Sammy, and stood behind the penultimate vat in the middle line about six paces away from her partner who moved to his right and stood in the corridor facing me.

She raised her gun in both hands and pointed it at my chest and my skin crawled as I saw that she was still smiling, eyes flashing like a flirtatious teenager.

Now I'd passed the second vessel and the third was only three steps away, left, right, left and then I was swinging the briefcase up in a relaxed, fluid motion across my body and onto the wooden lid of the vat in front of me.

The man's gun was pointing down towards the floor and I hadn't seen him take off the safety catch but that didn't mean anything because the chances were it was already cocked and ready to fire. They'd both moved forward and their faces were in shadow, the lamp shining behind them giving them halos around their hair like two wayward angels.

The case came down on the lid with a dull reverberating thud and I saw Sammy jump. She stayed low beside David and put her arms protectively around his shoulder, hugging him to her. Our eyes met and instinctively I realized that she knew exactly what was going to happen next. She half smiled, a brief flash of her perfect teeth, and she nervously reached up to brush a strand of loose hair away from her face. As my hands moved towards the case she shifted her body, putting herself between David and the two killers, watching me over her shoulder, muscles tensed, a cat ready to spring.

I could feel Laing's eyes boring into my back and I fought the urge to turn and look at him. If I did I knew for sure that I'd be lost. The man and the girl were moving again, she walked round to the right and into the corridor next to him, he then shuffled across to give her room and the bottom half of his body was once more hidden by the last vat in the right-hand line.

I wanted to scream at them, to tell them to stand where they were. Stay calm. Stay cool.

'I suppose you'll want to count it but I'd be grateful if you'd get a move on because I want to get David home as soon as possible,' I said, as my hands moved to operate the locks on the case. I'd already set the combinations and the locks flew open as I pushed the gilt buttons either side, the 197 two clicks sounding like one.

The girl's gun was still aimed at my chest, the man's down at the ground. They turned to smile at each other as I raised the lid.

'You've no idea the problems I had getting the money together at such short notice,' I said. 'I almost didn't make it. And you didn't give me nearly enough time to drive up from Edinburgh, the roads can be vile at this time of night . . .'

I was talking too much but it didn't matter any more because the shotgun was in my hands and I stepped away from the open case. In one movement Sammy pushed David sideways onto the wire mesh floor and threw herself on top of him, using herself as a shield, a tigress protecting her young. But David wasn't her offspring, he was my brother, and she was still risking her life to keep him out of harm's way. Whatever happened I promised myself I'd never let Sammy down again, no way would I ever disregard the loyalty she'd shown, a loyalty I knew I didn't deserve. I held onto that one thought, blocking all else from my mind.

The girl turned first, her eyes opened wide and her mouth formed a perfect circle of surprise as she fought to unscramble the messages from her retina.

The man saw the look of confusion on her face and he stepped forward towards her and then began to turn. Her gun was pointing at my groin but she made no move to pull the trigger, and she frowned in confusion like a little girl trying to remember her nine times table and then I fired.

The shot ripped through her anorak and jeans the way it had shredded the blanket tied against the outbuilding back at Stonehaven, and the green and blue of her clothing was stained with red as she lurched backwards and slammed into the wooden vat behind her, mouth still open, face untouched because I'd aimed low. Behind me I heard Laing curse and scrabble for the door handle. I ignored him, he wasn't armed.

The gun dropped from the girl's fingers and rattled onto the metal floor and she groaned and pitched forward with her hands clutching her bloodstained stomach.

I turned the shotgun towards her partner but I knew I wouldn't make it because his gun was already levelled at my chest and the finger was tightening on the trigger and I still had to move through ninety degrees to stand a chance of hitting him, so I angled it upwards instead and fired at the lamp above his head.

The two bangs were simultaneous and the lamp went out. I heard it shatter and the pieces slam against the roof as the bullet from his gun caught me in the chest, lifted me off my feet and threw me backwards down the corridor. I hit the floor shoulders first and then my head crashed back and I felt it open and bleed, but the pain was nowhere as bad as the crippling numbness in my chest. The door behind me opened and closed as Laing fled the scene, footsteps clattering and echoing.

I could breathe only in short, halting gasps, like an engine starved of petrol, shuddering and juddering. My ribs felt as if they'd been hit with a sledgehammer and at least two were cracked or broken, but I was lucky that he'd gone for the chest and not tried a head shot or hit me in the legs because then the lightweight bulletproof vest that Tony had given me at Heathrow wouldn't have saved my life, and I'd be lying bleeding to death on the floor like the girl and not inching backwards to rest against one of the empty oak vats and groping around to find the shotgun in the blackness.

David started screaming and then his piercing yell was muffled as Sammy put her hand over his mouth and comforted him. 'Are you all right?' she called. 'My God, are you all right?' But I couldn't answer, I was still recovering my breath and, anyway, to have replied would have given away my position - horizontal, hurt and, for the moment at least, helpless. Sammy didn't call out again, though I could hear her whispering softly to David.

Somewhere in front of me the man moved, slowly and carefully because he was as blind as I was in the pitch-dark room, but he was fit and healthy while I was Iying winded on the floor and feeling as if an elephant had sat on my chest. And he had a gun in his hand.

He had seen where I'd fallen so all he had to do was to inch forward in the dark until he found me and then it would be over. I managed to pull myself sideways, dragging myself to one side and out of his way but stopped when he heard me moving, and then there was a flash and a bang about fifteen feet from me and a bullet tore a chunk out of the vat to my right so he knew I wasn't dead, but at the very least he must have thought I was in a bad way because he'd seen the first bullet slam into my chest.

A second shot hit the floor and the bullet screeched off the metal and ricocheted into the blackness. Then there was only silence and I tried to steady my breathing because in my ears it sounded like a steam engine puffing and blowing, and I could hear my heart pounding but there was nothing I could do about that.

I screwed up my eyes and then opened them wide but it made no difference, the darkness was absolute, no light at all in the room. Then my eyes started to play tricks and I saw greenish circles and spots of red which twisted and rolled, and white whirlpools swirling above my head as my information-starved brain produced its own signals to make up for the lack of stimulation from the optic nerves.

He moved again and this time he was creeping sideways, to my right, but I wasn't used to relying solely on my ears so I couldn't tell if he was ten feet away or twenty as the perspiration dripped down the back of my arms like blood from an open wound.

I reached into the pocket of the Barbour jacket and pulled out Tony's second going away present. They smelled of rubber as I pulled them over my eyes and pressed the ridged button on the right-hand side. The light intensifiers 200 flickered once and then I could see again, the goggles picking out details of the room and its contents in a greenish-grey hue.

They came from a consignment Tony was in the process of selling to a West African state. Manufactured by Ferranti, powered by a small nickel-cadmium battery, they were the perfect issue for infantry fighting at night.

Worn like a pair of ski goggles, they didn't have to be fixed to a rifle like the Nato night sight, and they allowed soldiers to move easily in the darkness with their hands free to shoot and fight.

From where I was sitting I couldn't see Sammy or David but the man was there, about fifteen feet away to the right, facing in my direction and creeping stealthily towards me, right arm holding his gun at waist height and his left waving in front of his chest.

He was pushing one foot forward, slowly, feeling along the metal floor so that as soon as he touched my body he'd know where to pump in the bullets. He stopped moving his left foot, transferred his weight over and then began moving his right. Two feet ahead of him was my shotgun and he was heading straight for it.

Reaching for it was out of the question, I could barely breathe never mind crawl to the gun before his probing feet found it, and once I had started moving he'd have a good idea where I was, and it wouldn't take more than a few random shots in my direction to hit me and this time I might not be so lucky.

My ribs felt on fire as I took a lungful of air and spoke. 'You're standing two feet to the right of a vat, your right foot is forward and you're holding your left hand out in front of your body. Unless you drop your gun I'm going to blow your balls off.'

Immediately the words left my mouth I rolled over twice, wincing with the pain as I got out of his line of fire.

He stopped dead in his tracks and in the grey-green image intensifiers he looked like a zombie with his arms out- stretched, his mouth open so that he could breathe shallowly with the minimum of noise and his eyes wide and staring, trying to pick out any details in the dark and wondering how it was that I could see him when he couldn't make out his own hand in front of his face.

He pointed the gun at where I'd been Iying and then what I had said sunk in and he dived to his left, thudding into the vat and falling to the floor where he scampered off in a panic on all fours towards the wall.

He disappeared from view but I heard another dull thud as he collided with something in his rush to get away. I managed to crawl to the shotgun on hands and knees, the metal mesh biting into my skin. I knelt with the gun between my thighs as I fumbled for a couple of fresh cartridges from my pocket, and as I slotted them into the breech I saw the man again, this time standing upright in the far corner of the fermentation room, face towards the wall with his arms outstretched, palms touching the whitewashed bricks. He was moving quickly crabwise, legs moving together and then apart, like a rock climber traversing a cliff face. He was heading for a door at the end of the corridor I was in, the twin of the entrance I'd come through from the mashing room.