Remote Control (16 page)
Authors: Andy McNab
I found the fire extinguisher on the wall by the elevators. I quickly unscrewed the top of it and removed the carbon dioxide cylinder, a 9-inch black steel tube. I put it in my jacket and walked back to the room.
I put the three spare magazines for the Sig .45 in the left-hand pocket of Kev’s jacket and decided I was going to keep the USP in the room. I hid it in the cistern. A weapon can stand getting wet in the short term. I just didn’t want Kelly to find it and start putting holes in herself.
I dozed some more, woke up and dozed again. By 7 a.m. I was bored and hungry. Breakfast was included in the room price, but to get it I’d have to go downstairs to reception.
Kelly started to stir. I said, ‘Good morning. Do you fancy something to eat?’
She was all yawny, sitting up and looking like a scarecrow because she’d gone to sleep with wet hair. Straight away I put on the TV for her because I didn’t really know what to say. She looked down at her clothes, trying to work it out.
‘You fell asleep,’ I laughed. ‘I couldn’t even undress you last night. Hey, it’s like camping, isn’t it?’
She liked that. ‘Yeah,’ she smiled, still sleepy.
‘Shall I go and get you some breakfast?’
She didn’t look up, just nodded at the television.
‘Remember, you must do this every time; you never, ever open the door. I’ll come back using the key. Don’t even open the curtains, because the cleaning ladies will think it’s OK to come in, and we don’t want to talk to anyone, do we? I’ll leave the Do Not Disturb sign, OK?’
She nodded. I wasn’t sure how much of it had gone in. I picked up the tray the ice bucket was on, put on my glasses and went down to reception.
It was already fairly packed: people with camper vans, who couldn’t be arsed to sleep in them, and salesmen looking clean, fresh and straight out of the ‘appearance counts’ section of the manual.
The breakfast area was made up of two or three tables by the coffee flasks under the TV. I took three packets of cereal, bagels and muffins, some apples, then two cups of coffee and an orange juice.
The corn child had just finished her shift and came over. ‘I hope everything goes well with your passports and all,’ she smiled, helping herself to a bagel.
‘I’m sure it’ll be fine. We’re just going to concentrate on having a good holiday.’
‘If you need any help, you just come and ask.’
‘Thanks.’ I walked over to the desk and picked up a complimentary
USA Today
. I also helped myself to a Roadies Inn book of matches from a whole bowl of them and a paper clip that was in an ashtray full of elastic bands and office bits, and went back to the room.
USA Today
. I also helped myself to a Roadies Inn book of matches from a whole bowl of them and a paper clip that was in an ashtray full of elastic bands and office bits, and went back to the room.
Ten minutes later Kelly was munching on her cereal and glued to Nickelodeon.
I said, ‘I’m going out for about an hour. I’ve got stuff to do. While I’m away I want you to have a wash and be all nice and clean for when I get back, and have your hair brushed. Are you going to be all right on your own, with your big-girl haircut?’
She shrugged. ‘Whatever.’
‘What are your favourite colours?’
‘My favourite colours are pink and blue.’
‘Well, we’ve got the pink.’ I pointed at the coat hanging up with her shoes sticking out of the pockets. That had been a bit of luck. ‘Now I’ve got to get you something blue.’
I gave my glasses a quick clean with toilet paper, put them back in their case and into Kev’s jacket, then put my long black raincoat over the top, checking the pocket for the cylinder. I emptied my pockets of loose change – I wanted to cut down on noise and always felt better anyway with as little as possible dragging around my clothes.
I had my Kangol hat in my hand and was all ready to go.
‘I won’t be long. Remember, let no-one in. I’ll be back before you know it.’
It had stopped raining, but the sky was still grey and the ground wet. The road was choked with cars heading into downtown DC. It’s a people town and the sidewalks were busy, too.
I walked briskly to keep pace with the office workers, all with their ‘got to get up, got to get on’ expressions, all the time looking for the ideal place to make some money quickly and get back to the hotel before Kelly started panicking.
It was too early for a shopping mall, since they didn’t open until tenish, and I wasn’t in an area with a lot of hotels – they were all further downtown. There were fast-food outlets, but they normally had just one way in and out, and too much toilet traffic, so they wouldn’t be a good choice. A service station would do, so long as it had an outside rest room that could only be opened by a key obtained from the pay desk.
I’d been walking around for maybe twenty minutes. I walked through a couple of filling stations that were busy enough, but they were modern, with inside toilets.
Eventually I found what I was looking for, an outdoor toilet with a sign on the door that said, ‘Key At Paydesk’. I checked to ensure that the door was locked, then I walked on.
I was looking for two things now: for somewhere natural to watch the forecourt from, and for my escape route. Further up, on the other side of the road, was a run of lawyers’ offices, credit unions and insurance brokers, in wonderful 1930s detached brick houses; in between were what looked like well-used alleyways. I crossed over, walked down one and came out onto the parallel road; turning right, I followed the road to a junction, turned left, then right again up another alleyway. The whole area was perfect for angles and distance. I made my way back to the filling station by a different route.
There was a bus stop across the street about 100 metres away. I strolled along to it, stood in a doorway and waited; it had to look natural, I had to have a reason to be doing what I was doing. There were two or three people waiting, then the queue gradually got longer, a bus came and we were back to two or three again. I looked at the destination board of each bus as it approached, looked fed up that it wasn’t the one I wanted and got back in the doorway.
People don’t carry much cash with them nowadays, especially here in the land of the credit card. The ideal target is always a tourist – they tend to carry more cash and traveller’s cheques – but there weren’t likely to be many in this part of town.
Over a period of about thirty minutes there’d been four or five possibles going in to fill up their cars, but unfortunately it seemed that none of them was in need of a shit. I thought about Kelly; I hoped she was sticking to the script.
A white guy in his twenties drove onto the forecourt in a new Camaro. It carried thirty-day plates while waiting for the new registration. He was wearing a baggy shell suit that was red, blue, green, orange and six other colours, and basketball shoes to match. His hair was shaved at the sides with the rest pointing skywards. The sound system was booming out bass that I could feel vibrating from across the street.
He filled up with fuel and went in to pay. When he came out he was carrying what looked like a small lump of wood. He turned left towards the toilet. This was my boy.
I stepped out of the doorway, turned up my collar and headed across the road. He was putting his wallet into his shell-suit top and doing up the zip. I’d already checked the garage surveillance cameras and they wouldn’t be a problem: they were focused on the forecourt to catch driveaways, not on the gable end of the building to catch toilet-paper thieves.
As I left the doorway I was a man who needed a piss and couldn’t wait any longer for his bus to arrive. It was unlikely to register with anybody at the bus stop; first thing in the morning people are brooding about the day’s work ahead, or about their mortgages or kids or the wife’s headache the night before; they’re not going to worry too much about a guy going into a toilet. I walked towards the door with just enough spring in my step to look like the man with the world’s fullest bladder, and went in.
The room was about twelve feet by twelve, fairly clean and reeking of bleach blocks. Dead ahead were two urinals, with a basin and a wall-mounted paper-towel dispenser. My boy was in one of the two cubicles to the right.
I could hear the sound of zips being undone, the rustle of a general sorting out and a little cough. I closed the door behind me and jammed in the two door stops with my shoe. No-one would be getting in or out of here unless I wanted them to.
I stood at the urinal and made it look as if I was taking a leak. My hands were in front of me, but holding the steel cylinder. I’d keep my back to him until he came out to wash his hands.
I stood there for three or four minutes. I heard him pissing. It stopped, then nothing. This character was taking too long. I swung my head to the right, as if to look out of the small barred window, but carried on with the motions of pissing in case he could see me and, for some reason, was being hesitant about leaving the cubicle.
Then, casually looking right behind me, I saw something really bizarre. American public toilets have saloon-type doors with a bigger gap at the top and bottom than in the UK. Through the bottom gap I could see one foot, which looked as if it was his right foot, on the ground and facing the toilet, and his tracksuit bottoms weren’t bunched around his ankles. I thought, Weird position, but there you go. Then I noticed that the door was open an inch. He hadn’t locked it.
I wasn’t going to stop and puzzle it out. Clenching my right fist around the cylinder, and with my left hand out to protect myself, I started quickly but quietly towards the door. At the last minute I took a deep breath, dropped my shoulder and barged into it.
He banged up against the wall, screaming, ‘What the fuck! What the fuck!’ His hands went out to try to stop himself falling and the door held; his bulk was stopping the door from opening.
I had to barge it again. The hard and fast rule of mugging is to be exactly that: hard and fast. Putting all my weight behind the door I had him pinned up against the wall. He was a big boy; I had to be careful, I could get fucked over here. I grabbed a handful of his gelled hair with my left hand and pulled his head over to the left, exposing the right side of his neck.
You don’t just use your arm to hit somebody. I needed to get as much weight as I could behind the cylinder, like a boxer using his hips and the top half of his body to power the swing. Still pushing the door with my left hand, I brought the cylinder up in my right and swung my whole body round, as if throwing a downward right hook, and cracked him just below the ear. The idea was just to take him down, not kill him or give him brain damage for the rest of his days; if I’d wanted to do that I’d have cracked him over the head a few times. As it was, it wouldn’t be his best day out, but tough shit – wrong place, wrong time.
It had been a good hit. He groaned and went down. He was fucked and, without a doubt, he would have had starbursts in the eyes, that crackling and popping sensation you get when you go down semi-conscious. He’d just want to curl up and get under the duvet and hide. That was why I’d used the cylinder instead of a gun. You can’t predict people’s reactions to a pistol. He might have been an undercover cop with a gun himself, he might have been some kind of a heroic have-a-go citizen. Not that it mattered now. The old ways are the best.
He’d banged his head on the cistern and smashed his nose, and blood was pouring down his chin. There was a high-pitched, childlike moan coming from him. He was in shit state but he’d live. I gave him another one for good measure; I wanted him down and well out. He stopped making a noise.
I put my left hand on his head and held it facing away from me. I didn’t want him to be able to ID me. With my right hand I felt under his belly and twisted his shell-suit top round towards me, unzipped it and pulled out his wallet. Then I started to feel down his pockets in case he had another big wad stashed away there. My fingers closed around a plastic bag that filled the ball of my hand. I pulled out what looked like enough white powder to send the guy’s entire neighbourhood into orbit, all in neat little plastic wallets, ready for sale. No good to me; I left it on the floor.
It was then that I realized what he’d been up to while I was at the urinal. Wrapped tight around his left arm was a rubber tube and there was blood dripping from a small puncture wound. He must have had his left leg up on the toilet seat to support his arm while he was shooting up. I saw the hypodermic on the floor.
As I stood up my trousers felt wet and I looked down. He’d had the last laugh. I’d made him lose control of his bodily functions and he’d pissed himself. And I’d been kneeling in it.
I picked up the key from the floor. That, too, was covered in piss. He was starting to come round a bit and there were a few moans and groans. I got hold of his head and banged it against the toilet to give him the message to stay where he was for a while.
I stepped back from the cubicle. There was no time to try to clean my coat. I went to the main door, retrieved the wedges, put them in my pocket, came out and locked the door behind me. I tossed the key into some shrubbery.
I was out of breath and had a bit of sweat coming down the side of my face, but I had to make myself look calm and casual. If another customer happened to come round the corner to use the toilet I’d say it was out of order.
As I crossed the road I glanced left and behind me. Nothing. I wouldn’t look back again. I’d soon know if something was going on because I’d hear all the screaming and shouting, or the sound of people running towards me. Then I’d have to react – but at the end of the day I was the one with the big fucking gun.
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