His opponent was down, but not out, and Bronson couldn’t take any chances. He slammed the butt of the Beretta M92 into the side of the man’s head. Instantly, the figure went limp as unconsciousness claimed him.
Bronson stood up and looked all around, just in case someone else had followed the man out of the building, but there was nobody in sight, and the pedestrian door was still standing wide open.
Quickly, he bent down and searched the unconscious man. Any doubt he might have had that the man was an innocent employee of a blameless company was quickly dispelled when he discovered the leather shoulder holster he was wearing, and the Glock 17 that was tucked into it, plus two spare magazines, both fully charged. Getting it off the man was awkward because he was a dead weight, but inside a couple of minutes Bronson was able to pull the holster over his shoulders, attaching its base loop to his own belt and shrugging on his jacket over the top of it. He checked the Glock was loaded, with a round in the chamber, and then replaced it in the holster.
He looked into the boot of the car and saw a couple of cardboard boxes inside it, the tops undone. One man carrying a cardboard box, Bronson realized, probably looks very similar to any other man carrying a cardboard box.
He leaned forward, picked up one of the boxes and turned it upside down. A number of anonymous brown-wrapped packages cascaded down from it into the boot. He pushed the boot lid closed, placed the box on the roof of the car, then reached down and dragged the unconscious man alongside the vehicle so that he would be completely hidden from the view of anybody looking out of the building.
Then he picked up the cardboard box, holding it in his left hand, supporting its underside with his right forearm, which meant that the bulk of the empty box completely concealed the Beretta pistol he was holding in his right hand.
He took a final glance around, then strode confidently across the parking area to the pedestrian door.
81
As he reached the camera’s field of vision, Bronson lifted the cardboard box up high so that it obscured his face, strode quickly forward to cover the last few feet, and stepped inside the warehouse.
He altered his grip on the empty cardboard box so that he was holding it solely with his left hand, and held the pistol in his right hand behind it, ready for instant use. But the room he was standing in — a small square space occupied by a couple of desks and chairs — was devoid of human presence. At the back of the room he could see another door standing open and leading to a short passageway that was illuminated by a single fluorescent tube on the ceiling, which obviously ran down one side of the building.
Bronson strode across the room and glanced up the passageway, but neither saw nor heard anybody. About halfway down the passage was a door on the left-hand side bearing the universally recognizable symbol of a male and female figure separated by a vertical line. He checked it anyway, just to make sure that nobody was taking a toilet break.
At the end of the passage a flight of steps ascended to the next level. Still holding the box in front of him — if his basic disguise worked, then whoever was waiting on the upper floor of the building would be expecting to see a man carrying a box — Bronson climbed up the staircase.
At the top he paused for a moment and looked in both directions. There was another lavatory almost opposite the top of the staircase, and a couple of offices down the passageway to his left, but both doors were open, and no lights were burning, so he discounted them. To his right was another and slightly longer passageway, again lit by a fluorescent light, and at the end of that a door stood partially ajar, illuminated by lights from inside the room.
If George Stebbins was anywhere inside the building, that office or room was where Bronson expected to find him.
But as Bronson began to head down the passageway towards the door, it was suddenly flung open and a figure appeared there and shouted something at him in high-speed Spanish. Bronson didn’t understand more than a fraction of what the man was saying. But having delivered his tirade, the man stepped back into the room. It seemed that Bronson hadn’t — at least up to that point — been recognized as a threat.
He continued down the passage towards the door, clicking off the safety catch of the Beretta M92 in his right hand as he approached the end. But he’d only taken two or three steps when something hard jabbed him in the back.
Somebody had appeared behind him completely soundlessly. And whoever it was had a loaded pistol in his hand.
82
In a situation like this, speed is everything.
Bronson reacted instantly, dropping the cardboard box to the ground in front of him and spinning to his left as quickly as he could, slamming his left arm down and backwards to knock away the weapon that his unseen assailant was carrying.
As the side of Bronson’s hand smashed into the assailant’s arm, the man’s weapon discharged, the noise deafening in the confined space. The bullet ploughed into the concrete floor of the corridor before ricocheting away somewhere down the passageway. Bronson was determined that the man would not be able to fire a second time.
He continued to turn, forcing the man’s gun hand away from his body and at the same time bringing his own right hand, the solid lump of the Beretta pistol giving it extra weight, on a collision course with his attacker’s left ear.
Less than a second after Bronson had felt the barrel of the pistol jammed into the small of his back, it was all over. The moment the butt of the Beretta crashed into the man’s head, he collapsed in a heap on the floor, instantly knocked unconscious.
But that, of course, was only the start of Bronson’s problems. The sound of the gunshot would obviously have alerted everybody else in the building. He had just seconds.
He reached down with his left hand and grabbed the automatic pistol which the man lying on the floor had dropped, then took a couple of steps forward before easing himself into the doorway of a room on the left-hand side of the passage. For a few seconds, he waited, the Beretta held steady in his right hand, the muzzle aimed squarely at the open door.
But nothing moved. There was no sound from inside the office, no indication that anybody had even noticed what had happened in the corridor.
That left only two possibilities. Either the man who’d attacked him and the man he’d seen at the end of the passage were one and the same person, which he didn’t think was possible, or there was another way out of the room at the end, a fire escape perhaps, and the other man had already left the building.
Then a third possibility occurred to him, and he quickly moved two steps back into the office and dropped flat on the floor. Under a second later, two shots rang out, the bullets tearing jagged holes through the thin partition walls precisely where he’d been standing. Because in that instant he’d noticed the closed-circuit TV camera positioned above the office door at the end of the corridor, the lens pointing directly at him. The man or men in the other room didn’t need to actually look down the passage: they could watch him on the building’s internal security system.
He’d have to do something about that, and quickly.
The gunman wouldn’t know whether or not either of the two shots had hit him, because Bronson had moved out of sight of the CCTV camera, but the moment he stepped out of the office his position would be obvious. He had to destroy the camera, and try not to get shot in the process.
He didn’t risk standing up, instead opening the office door wide and lying on his stomach on the floor, presenting the smallest possible target to the unseen gunman. He crawled slowly towards the open doorway. The moment he could see the side of the camera he took careful aim with the Beretta, eased out another few inches and squeezed the trigger twice.