pain
I bit back on a scream, stuffed my arm into my mouth to hold it in, shaking, shuddering pain rocking through my body. It ran through the tight muscles of my neck, through my locked-up belly, down to my knees and exited through the throbbing soles of my feet. It originated from a bullet, low calibre and slowed by a silencer, but still a bullet, wedged in my right shoulder, in a bundle of nerves that shrieked their distress, shredding thought and blurring all other sense. In front of me Samir Chayet swayed, blinking in the dark. I pushed myself up on my left arm, heard blood roar behind my ears as Samir began to whisper the usual refrain of what, where, how, his voice rising as the panic began to bite. I slid on to my knees, fumbled at my chest, my trousers, my belt, until I found a small blade. “Wait,” I whispered, and my voice was cracked, and as Samir spotted the rapidly cooling corpse to his left he began to shout, to cry out, to lament without much direction or sense.
“Wait,” I hissed again, pulling the balaclava from my face. “Stay still.”
He gasped in air as I rested the blade against his back, managed to pull down a sob. I turned the knife against the cable ties that bound his wrists and, with a jerk that nearly took me to the ground again, cut him free. He fell on to his hands and knees, shaking, and I rested the blade against his throat.
He froze, an animal locked in place. “Listen,” I hissed, first in Arabic, then in French, remembering that the Samir I had played was not the Samir I had been. “I’m losing a lot of blood here. Touch my skin.”
Terror, incomprehension in his eyes. I turned the knife a little with my wrist, letting him feel the scrape of it against his skin. “Touch my skin.”
I let the blade track his throat as he leaned into me, hands shaking, and as his skin brushed against the side of my face I threw the knife into the darkness of the river and
switched.
My heart was racing, piss in my pants, sweat on my back, eyes burning with tears wanting to be shed, but blessed relief! With a cry Coyle fell back on the ground, clutching the hole in his shoulder, and I rubbed blood back into my hands and hissed, “Coyle!” I scrambled over to him, felt the blood hot on his shirt. “Do you carry medical supplies?”
“The van,” he replied. “In the van.”
“How far are we from a town?”
“Four miles, five–five!” His face twisted, legs kicked back against nothing as he writhed beneath me. Sometimes people writhe to get away from a thing that scares them, sometimes to remind themselves that they have a body beyond the pain. This was both.
“I can help you! I can get you away from here. Your own people have betrayed you–are you listening to me?”
A half-nod, a wheeze of broken bloody breath.
“I can get you out of here, get you medical attention, but you need to trust me.”
“Kepler?” Not much of a question, but he asked it anyway.
“I can help you, but you need to give me your call sign.” A half-laugh that quickly dissolved into the pain. “Coyle!” I snarled. “Kestrel–whatever your name is–they are going to kill you. I can keep you alive. Tell me.”
“Aurelius,” he wheezed. “My… call sign is Aurelius.”
I pressed my bare hand against his cheek. “If you’re lying,” I whispered, “we’re both dead.”
“You find out.”
“I need your clothes,” I said, reaching for his belt. His bloody hand pressed against my own, stopping it before I could undo the buckle. “I’ve seen it all before.” His hand didn’t move. “I need to hide my face.”
His hand fell away, and I pulled his trousers free one leg at a time. His shirt crackled like Velcro as I peeled it away from him. Beneath it he wore blue Lycra, the blood glistening, moving like a living thing as it filled the fibres. His trousers were too short, his jacket too tight, and I felt almost surprised. I slipped his balaclava over my face, smelt his sweat within it. I picked up his gun, checked the magazine, pressed my own discarded shirt against his wound, felt him flinch.
“You’ll be OK,” I murmured, and was surprised at how level my own voice seemed. “You’re going to make it.”
“You don’t know that,” he replied.
I pulled the magazine from my gun, threw it aside, buried my hands in my pockets so that no man might see the bare skin. I began to climb back up the muddy path, the crooked riverside made more treacherous by the rain, towards the light of the truck on the road above.
Chapter 72
I had counted eleven men who went to Saint-Guillaume to kill a cripple by the name of Janus.
Only three were waiting by the truck, parked on the roadside above a stream, its headlights burning white. Two of them had even begun to relax, their balaclavas off to reveal one man, one woman, cigarettes glowing between their bare fingers. Hard to strike a light when your fingers are muffled by wool and silk; harder still to enjoy a gasp when your face is hidden from view.
Perhaps they didn’t know the events by the river.
Perhaps they were to have been told that Coyle’s death was accident, not execution.
Perhaps they were only following orders.
My hands were in my pockets, and my face was covered by wool, and I was a familiar shape on a darkened night, and I was alone.
The man by the van turned as I approached, called out, “Herodotus?”
“Aurelius,” I replied, brisk and businesslike, then, “I think we’re going to need a hammer.”
Curiosity flickered on the face of the woman, but my words had been enough to carry me from the lip of the road to the back door of the van, an arm’s reach from the nearest man, and so, without further ado, I pulled my hands from my pockets, and before he could even register my bare flesh, pressed them against his exposed face and jumped.
An aluminium coffee mug fell to the ground, bouncing along the road and into the overflowing gutter; Samir Chayet staggered and blinked, hands rising to the unfamiliar balaclava against his skin, and I drew the gun off my hip and put one bullet in the thigh of the woman and another into the belly of the man who stood beside her. As they fell, I stepped forward, pulled their guns from their respective holsters and, having nothing better to do with them, tossed them down the ravine, listening to them clatter away in the dark. My weapon still raised, I shuffled round to the driver’s side of the van, and seeing no one inside, turned again to find Samir frozen in place, the balaclava limp in his hands.
“Hi,” I said. “You’re a nurse, yes? There’s a man down by the stream in a Lycra suit. I’d like you to get him for me. He’s been shot. These two have also been shot, though only time will tell if fatally. I’ll kill you, them and anyone else who passes by if you don’t do as I say, understand?”
He understood perfectly.
“Terrific,” I exclaimed with forced brightness. “I think I saw a torch in the driver’s compartment. I’ll watch for your light.”
Time moves more slowly in the dark.
A cheap plastic watch on my wrist glowed green, declaring the hour unsanitary for any reasonable thing. The sky’s enthusiasm for the night’s rain was fading to a thick sleepy mist that obscured the line where black cliff met starlight. I stood away from the headlights of the van, gun in pocket, torch in hand, and watched the tiny bubble of Samir’s light moving by the stream far below.
Of the two individuals I’d shot, the man with the belly wound had lost consciousness, a mercy, I felt, for all concerned. The woman was awake, her hands pressed over her thigh, her breath fast and ragged, eyes full of pain. The blood through her fingers and the blood on the tarmac was bright and thin where torchlight touched it, black and endless when the light turned away. I’d missed her femoral artery, as her continued ability to breathe demonstrated, though she seemed unwilling to thank me for this.