There was sound, then, from downstairs. Calvary picked up his gun and stepped over to the open door. Beyond was a landing with a wooden railing that overlooked the stairs. Light was coming up from downstairs. There were voices from below, but low ones, as though they were trying not to let Calvary hear.
The gun was a SIG Sauer. Checking the magazine would produce a tell-tale sound so Calvary didn’t do it, but from the heft of the weapon he could tell that it was loaded. On the floor behind him the man was breathing thickly, almost snoring. Calvary paused at the door, crouching, not moving out into the landing in case the floorboards creaked. He aimed the SIG at the top of the stairs and waited.
The door opposite him across the landing moved an inch. God, he’d been slow, because there was someone in there, in the other bedroom, waiting in the darkness just as the first man had been.
It meant that they had been lying in wait. It was an ambush.
Calvary fired off two shots in rapid succession at the door, which looked cheap and modern and not very strong. The slugs smashed through the wood and there was a cry of pain which he barely heard, because he was up and running at a stoop to the top of the stairs where he stopped again.
Halfway down, hanging on the wall, was a large mirror. Reflected in it he could see the living room at the foot of the staircase. Two men were moving quickly into position, guns raised.
Seated beyond them on a sofa was a small, molish man, head hung, eyes watchful behind dense glasses.
At last. Gaines.
*
Calvary hung back and aimed down along the banister into the room. As one of the men, shaven-headed and black-clad, came into his line of sight he fired. He was a fraction shy. A coffee table exploded in a rainbow of glass. The man lurched back as Calvary himself withdrew.
He watched the mirror. The bald man jerked his head at his partner who stepped behind Gaines, grey and expressionless on the sofa. Put a gun to his head.
The bald man disappeared beyond the periphery of the mirror. Calvary moved forward to adjust the view he had of the downstairs room.
This move saved his life because an instant later a shot blasted past his left ear, so close that he could feel the flick of the bullet’s slipstream against the lobe. Calvary spun. Before he could complete the turn he saw that the second bedroom door was open and the man he’d shot through the door was sitting in the doorway, his gun levelled, blood streaking his face and arms.
Calvary became aware of punctured viscid screaming from below. He understood: the shot meant for him had hit one of the injured man’s associates instead. He took aim at the sitting man and pulled the trigger. It wouldn’t go back, the first or the second time. It had jammed, Swiss precision engineering letting him down. Calvary dived forward and grabbed the base of the banister, swung himself round so that he was rolling down the stairs even as the sitting man fired again, this time striking the mirror which erupted above Calvary and sent knife-like shards of silvered glass showering across the staircase.
Calvary hit something with his back, an ornamental statuette of some sort, at the bottom of the stairs. Then he was up on his knees, pointing his useless jammed gun at the room. At his feet was the shaven-headed man, on his back, his throat blown away, his limbs jerking like a marionette’s, his acrid urine boiling on to the carpet and stinging the air. Ten feet away Gaines sat on a leather sofa, watching Calvary. The other man squatted beside him, jamming a pistol muzzle into his right temple. Killian looked wan but unhurt physically.
Calvary threw himself forward as the dying man upstairs let off another shot, but it didn’t even make it downstairs this time. He rose to his feet on the carpet in the middle of the floor, aiming at the face of the man beside Gaines.
‘Shoot him and I’ll kill you,’ Calvary said, in English. The man wouldn’t have seen him trying to fire his jammed gun upstairs and would assume it was in working order.
Calvary watched his eyes. They blazed, dark and malign. For an instant they flicked to the staircase and then back. Calvary said, ‘Forget about him. He’s no use now.’
He hoped he was right.
Calvary was five or six feet from Gaines. With his arm extended, the barrel of the gun was less than a yard from the man’s face. He raised it so that he was looking down it. There was sweat, Calvary observed, on the smudged pouches below the man’s lower lids. As he watched he saw a tiny flicker of muscle leap in the man’s cheek.
It was a problem, his being so jumpy. It meant he might pull the trigger as a reflex, in response to a sudden movement or sound.
As if on cue a mobile phone rang somewhere. Calvary saw the man’s eyes move first, jerking to one side, saw the tightening of his finger on the trigger.
Calvary began the pressure that would squeeze the trigger of his own gun, believing as he did so in magic, that the gun would miraculously unjam itself.
The man got control of himself at the last moment, fished the phone out of his pocket. He pressed the muzzle of his gun – another SIG Sauer – harder against Gaines’s head for emphasis and spoke quickly and softly into the phone, his eyes remaining on Calvary’s. He listened, mainly, except when he rattled off a burst which I assumed was his updating the caller on the situation.
The expression in his eyes had changed from hate to fear.
He folded the phone away. Calvary eased himself forward, barely moving his feet, putting most of the motion into a lean until the barrel of the SIG was less than a foot from the man’s face. He could see the tension in him, feel it lashing off him.
The problem Calvary had created for himself by moving so close was that he no longer had an adequate view up the stairs, which were behind him now. He heard stirrings from above, a low groaning punctuated by a thump. He glanced at Gaines’s face. He was looking past Calvary. His eyes swung up to meet Calvary’s. Barely perceptibly his head shook. Calvary nodded. It was clear behind him, for the time being at least.
A second problem, also of Calvary’s own making, was that the longer he continued his bluff the higher the risk that the man would call it. He would soon start wondering why Calvary hadn’t shot him, would start thinking that he hadn’t the nerve, even if he didn’t work out that the gun was jammed.
‘Lower your gun,’ Calvary said, ‘or I’ll shoot you.’ He repeated it in Russian.
The man didn’t move, didn’t appear to react at all. Calvary pushed the muzzle forward so that the metal was an inch from his forehead.
‘I’m not joking,’ Calvary said. ‘I’m here to get Gaines. I’d prefer it if he were alive, but I’ll take him even if he’s dead. The difference is, if he dies, you die. If you let him go I promise you I will not kill you.’
There was something in his eyes, then a change. Calvary said, ‘Oh, bloody hell, have it your way,’ and pulled back as hard as he could on the trigger.
The man didn’t have time to notice that it was jammed because he did what Calvary had suspected he would do and moved the pistol away from Gaines’s head to aim it at Calvary. It was an extremely fast move but Calvary had been expecting it. He swiped his useless gun hard against the back of the man’s hand and felt the metal connect with the brittle bones. The man screamed, his fingers loosening. At the same time Calvary headbutted the man in the face. The man let go of the gun and Calvary prised it free. He stepped back, Gaines dropping sideways off the sofa, free of his captor.
The man launched himself at Calvary, his other hand coming out, a blade flashing.