The lobby, which stank of piss and was littered with cigarette butts and beer cans, was deserted. The walls were plastered with graffiti, and on the left-hand side there was a broken lift, whose door kept trying to click closed, but to no avail. Joe positioned himself at the corner of the entrance. From here he could see the Range Rover twenty metres away, and he also had a clear view left and right of the road in front of the block.
Five minutes, he told himself. It wouldn’t take a second longer.
The kids on the corner had been just that. Kids. They were neither old enough nor, underneath the bluster, streetwise enough to be in charge of their little operation. Joe knew how it worked. Stick the foot soldiers on the corners and let them do the dirty work. If the police came calling, they would have the incriminating merchandise or the money. But these enterprises had a hierarchy. Joe would have bet almost anything that the corner boys’ boss man would already be on his way to defend his patch. And he wouldn’t be doing that with a three-inch flick knife. He’d be altogether better prepared.
The lift clicked. Music from the flats above drifted down. Joe waited.
Three minutes passed. He heard it before he saw it: a screeching of car wheels and the roar of an engine. The vehicle that pulled up in front of the Range Rover was a BMW X5, also black, windows also tinted. And the man who emerged seconds later had murder in his eyes.
Sallow-faced and thin, he had short, bleached-blond hair and wide cheekbones. There was something Eastern European about his features. He had none of the hip-hop bling that the kids wore – just a slightly oversized tracksuit that had the effect of emphasizing his skinny frame. Joe noticed at once, however, that his right hand was tucked inside the zip of his tracksuit top. He might be skinny, but then he didn’t have to rely on his strength to get what he wanted.
The man looked round, his eyes wary, clearly looking for whoever had dared to muscle in on his patch. Joe emerged from the shadows of the entrance and, the moment the newcomer observed him, made a clicking sound from the side of his mouth and winked. Then he stepped back into the shadows, his ambush prepared.
He could hear the man’s footsteps approaching. They were swift and confident, the footsteps of somebody moving without fear. And Joe knew he was moving without fear because of whatever he had tucked inside his tracksuit. He held the flick knife lightly in his right hand, ready to attack the second he saw him enter the bleak lobby.
No words were spoken. There was nothing to be gained from delaying. The man was carrying a small handgun lazily by his side. Whether he meant to fire it or threaten with it didn’t matter. He was armed, which meant he had to be put down. The instant Joe saw him come round the corner he attacked, swiping the knife across the width of his face. Joe felt the blade slice into the flesh at either corner of the man’s mouth, and as he whipped it sideways there was a slight, spongy resistance as it cut into his tongue. The explosion of blood was sudden and shocking. It was accompanied by the clattering sound of the weapon falling to the concrete floor. The man threw his hands up to his face, but not before he had screamed loudly, a single word in a language Joe didn’t recognize. That was the worst thing he could have done. As he opened his mouth, the cuts on each corner ripped open like a seam splitting up the side of his face. The flow of blood doubled, and his hands were not nearly equal to the task of staunching it. He staggered back, his face a scarlet mess of horror.
Joe bent down to pick up his gun. It was a Smith & Wesson .38 snubnose – nothing to write home about but serviceable enough. It would fire a round, and that was the important thing. He opened the cylinder release to check it was loaded, then tucked the weapon into the front of his jeans and made sure it was hidden under his lumberjack shirt. Then, leaving his victim, who had sunk to his knees and had at least realized that keeping his mouth shut was a good idea, he walked back out into the open air. Nobody would be shedding a tear that a piece of shit like that had been cut up, and although Joe had hardly taken him on out of good citizenship, he couldn’t help feeling grimly satisfied with what he’d just done. No doubt some other twat would grab this corner in the blink of an eye once word got out about what had happened, but that wasn’t a reason not to sort the cunts out. You had to keep cutting the heads off the hydra even when they kept on growing back, otherwise the Regiment would have given up on the Taliban months ago.
The Regiment. He’d hardly thought about them since he’d been back in the UK. Had they heard what had happened? Was it being discussed in the squadron hangars of Hereford or ops centres of Bagram, Bastion and Kandahar? Were his mates ready to believe the worst of him? It wouldn’t be the first time one of their number had gone bad.
The black corner boy had returned to his position, clearly expecting Joe to have been warned off by the moron with his .38. His eyes widened as he saw Joe emerge unscathed, and for the second time he scrambled out of sight. Joe dug the keys out of his pocket and opened the Range Rover. Should he risk taking it? He reckoned so. The people he was robbing were unlikely to go to the police and besides, they had nothing to link the vehicle to him. At the very worst it would be just another car crime to add to the stats.
As he turned the ignition, the music blared out again. He silenced it, then checked his rear and side mirrors. There was no sign of the man he’d just cut up. Over in the playground, the kids were still playing on the ropes, the mums still ignoring them with no inkling of what had just happened. He removed the handgun from his jeans and laid it carefully in the glove compartment before pulling away, his mind already working through the detailed logistics of his next move, and wondering if Eva had been successful.
‘What is it, love? Birthday present for the fella? Into all this stuff, is he? Tell you what, we get them all in here.’
The military clothing store to which Joe had directed her, halfway between Mile End station and Stepney Green and just off the Mile End Road, was empty apart from her and the young man in his mid-twenties who broke off reading the Sun behind the counter. The wall behind him was plastered with pictures of short-haired, improbably good-looking men in camouflage gear and with paint smeared artfully on their faces. Eva was no expert, but she was sure they were more familiar with the catwalk than the battlefield.
‘Two hundred and fifty, that one.’ The young man indicated the helmet she was holding. ‘Real McCoy, that. Kevlar, special forces issue. Here…’ He turned his newspaper back a couple of pages to reveal a full-page spread with the headline ‘Inside the top-secret unit that killed bin Laden’. It accompanied a picture of a soldier in full military gear, each item labelled. The man jabbed a finger at the soldier’s head. ‘Same thing,’ he said. ‘Best there is. Full head and neck protection, so unless he’s thinking of getting shot in the face…’
The man laughed at his own joke as Eva quietly put the helmet on the counter.