Curiously, now that the situation was drawn, everything seemed very quiet. The Saab had stalled out in the turn, and the BMW’s engine noise seemed almost inaudible past the distant ocean roar of his own pulse in his ears. The wind came and tugged at his hair, but gently. The sprawl of cordoned zone housing below seemed to be holding its breath.
He let Bryant come on for another second, then put the first shot into the driver-side half of the windscreen.
The familiar boom - he’d done a solid hour down in the armoury firing ranges, a final tuning of his earlier unexpected love affair with the long gun.
The BMW’s windscreen cratered and crazed. He saw the splinter lines.
No discharge of projectile weaponry from a moving vehicle. The parchment-dry conclusion of the legal board of inquiry after the Nakamura playoff. No substantial destruction to be inflicted with a projectile weapon. Provided these directives are adhered to—
Bryant’s windscreen was armoured glass. Even with the state-of-the-art vehicle shredder load the armourer had shown him, care of Heckler and Koch - the roadblock ammunition of choice for all your urban enforcement needs - even with that, at this range there’d be no substantial destruction.
He pumped the action, fired again. The spider-webbed screen resplintered, almost to opaque.
It was pushing the envelope, pushing it the way Jones and Nakamura had done, pushing it the way Notley liked.
The BMW came on. Behind the ruined screen, Bryant had to be almost blind. Chris pumped in another round, ran sideways to get the angle. Went after the leading tyre.
The shotgun kicked. The tyre blew into shreds.
No substantial—
The BMW slewed violently across the road, brakes shrieking protest, scorching rubber into the road and the wind.
Precedent, Chris. That’s what counts.
In the elite, you don’t get punished for breaking the rules. Not if it works.
The BMW careered past him, ploughed through the crash barrier and plunged over. It took less than a pair of seconds. Chris had time for one glimpse through the side window, Mike still fighting the wheel for control, then the big car was gone, and there was only the ragged gap in the barrier to mark its passing.
Breath held.
A flat, oddly undramatic metallic crump from below. Then nothing.
Done. Won. Finished.
Emptied out.
Nothing.
It coursed through him like current, that nothing. Emptiness, building to ecstasy. He threw back his head and screamed at the sky. It wasn’t enough. He couldn’t get it all out. He screamed until his throat felt ripped and his lungs locked up on empty. Until he gagged, finally, to a halt.
It wasn’t enough.
Echoes rippled out across the cityscape below, chasing each other off towards the cluster of glass and steel towers on the skyline.
Overhead, even the clouds seemed to hurry away from the sound.
Behind them, the sky was a flawless, vacant blue. Against all the odds, it was going to be a beautiful day.
Chapter Forty-Seven
You bring back their plastic.
Stranded atop the marching pillars of the Gullet, listening to his own pulse and the echo of his screams, Chris heard Hewitt’s words with hallucinatory clarity. It was as if the woman was standing next to him in the wind.
You go in and you finish the job. If you can, you bring back their plastic.
He peered down on the zone sprawl below. As far as he could tell, the BMW seemed to have fallen through the roof of a decaying commercial unit. He scanned the surroundings in both directions and spotted his access point. Fifty metres further along the Gullet, a caged staircase wound down around one of the concrete support pillars and came out at the end of a shabby residential street. It looked as if there might be a foot passage through from the street to the commercial units. With luck he could be in and out in ten minutes.
He jogged slowly along the road to the top of the staircase. There was an ancient padlock on the rusting iron cagework. He levelled the shotgun, remembered the jagged vehicle-shredder load and thought better of it. He reached for the Nemex and found an empty holster.
Fuck.
He remembered the way the gun had refused to clip in while he talked to Vasvik. Remembered tumbling out of the Saab with the shotgun. He looked back along the road to where the car was slewed. No sign of anything on the asphalt, but it could have skittered away under the belly of the vehicle. Or fallen while he was still inside.
Well, that’s it. You can’t get down. Have to leave it for the clean-up squad. Not like they’ll take long to get here.
The relief gusted through him. Duel etiquette forbade outside approach for a regulation fifteen minutes, except in medical emergencies. But they’d reel the situation in on satellite blow-up, see the way it had played out and be here pretty soon. All he had to do was sit at the edge of the road and wait.
But he knew what Hewitt would say. Knew how the whisper would run among the junior analysts on the floor below. Yeah, sure, Faulkner’s some natty driver. But the way I heard it, no stones when it comes to the consequences. Too soft to pick a corpse’s pocket.
Fuck it.
He locked on the Remington’s safety, reversed the weapon and pounded at the rusted lock until it gave. Dull clank of metal on metal. Orange flakes of rust scattered around his feet. The lock snapped and hung, severed. He levered the cage door open and picked his way down the steps.
At the bottom, it was the same story. Another grilled iron door, another rusted lock, this time on the inside, as if a retreating army had fought a rearguard action out of the zones and up onto the highway. Weeds had grown up to shoulder height on the other side of the grille, effectively hiding the bottom of the staircase from outside view. From the inside, you could barely see the twinned row of black brick-terraced housing beyond. Chris craned his neck and stared through the nodding heads of the weeds, listening, trying to get some sense of whether there was anybody nearby.
Nothing stirred.
He started hammering at the lock. Slipped a couple of times, scraped his hand on the rusting iron. It was hard to manoeuvre the shotgun in the confines of the cage, hard to get a working angle. When he finally stepped out through the weeds, he was sweating and sticky inside his suit.
The street beyond was empty.
He scanned the frontages - the only motion was the flap of plastic sheeting over a broken upper window. A wrecked and rusted Landrover, one of the late models modified to burn alcohol, was beached on its axles about twenty metres down the street. It was skeletal, stripped of everything that would come off, the frame scorched molotov-cocktail black where rust had not yet crept in. He spotted the passageway a couple of houses beyond on the left and moved cautiously out into the street. Unrepaired potholes gaped in the cracked asphalt, some of them wide enough to take the whole front end of the Saab.
He moved a couple of steps at a time, painfully aware of the windows looking down on either side, pausing to listen every two metres. Belatedly, he remembered the Remington’s safety and thumbed it off. Pumped out the last spent shell. The harsh metal noise it made shattered the quiet.
Suit and shotgun, he reasoned nervously. It ought to keep the flies off long enough.
He swung wide around the burnt-out Landrover, feeling slightly ridiculous as he covered the angles. He cleared the corner of the passageway. Moved down past high brick walls topped with broken glass. Detritus crunched under his feet. The passage came to an end amidst shallow mounds of weed-grown rubble and a clutch of leaf-canopied trees. He climbed the first mound with difficulty, burying his Argentine leather shoes to the ankle in little avalanches of sliding soil. From the top he saw the corrugated metal side of the commercial unit and a loading bay door, rusted open on empty square metreage beyond. In the gloom he could make out half of the BMW lying on its back. A qualified relief at his own navigational skills seeped—