Shredder (11 page)

Unknown to the cops at the safe house, Zoe had taken her mobile phone with her into protective custody. For safety's sake, she kept it switched off, but she'd promised to switch on at six each morning for fifteen minutes so I could contact her if I had to. And now I had to. I punched her mobile number into the keypad of Richard's burner. I told myself I was calling to let her know I was all right, but deep down I knew that was just an excuse; I wanted to hear her again, however briefly, to remind myself why I'd been going through all this. As the connection clicked through and the ringing tone warbled, I could already imagine her voice in my ear, husky and half asleep. I heard an electronic bleep—she'd picked up.

“Zoe? It's me, it's Finn,” I said.

“Hey, Finn,” said a male voice. My mouth went dry and my pulse pounded in my ears.

“We need to meet,” said the Turk.

The instructions the Turk gave me were straightforward enough: walk south for five minutes, wait by a certain bus stop outside a burger joint, and give my phone to the guy who turned up to meet me. At this time on a Sunday morning the streets were still half asleep; a few partied-out revelers were shuffling home past traders setting up their stalls for a street market, and the only traffic was a clutch of cyclists in lurid shirts and shades taking advantage of the empty roads to bomb through red lights without even slowing.

I found the burger joint, and through its tinted windows I watched the staff getting ready to open up. A kid my age in a dirt-colored nylon uniform was wiping down tables with pink disinfectant and a rancid gray dishcloth. He had a long sweaty day ahead, I knew, in a boiling kitchen, flogging greasy
junk food to ungrateful punters—and for a moment I envied him. Then I remembered Andy, that fake-tanned skid mark I used to work for at Max Snax, and I realized I'd rather be back in Trafalgar Square getting shot at.

In the window's reflection I saw a white van pull up at the curb behind me. The driver hadn't been dumb enough to park on the bus stop itself and risk being photographed by twenty-four-hour traffic cameras. It was Dean, I saw now, at the wheel, and when he smirked at me his nicotine-yellow grin seemed more crooked than ever. I smirked back, looking hard at his wonky teeth so he'd know what I was thinking—
I did that
. He didn't get out, but merely held out his hand through the driver window. I tossed the phone to him.

“In the back,” he said, as he stripped the handset down.

It was a run-of-the-mill white Ford van, a few years old, the sort a plumber or decorator might use. I glimpsed the ghost of signwriting under the patchy paint job, but I didn't stop to try and read it: I hauled open the rear door and clambered in. The rear compartment was separated from the front by a plywood board and the floor was bare metal,
dented and stained, with nowhere to sit and nothing to hang on to. When Dean abruptly pulled away from the curb, I slid backwards and slammed into the door I had just shut, but luckily both doors held and I didn't tumble out into the road, as Dean had clearly been hoping I would.

Another mystery tour. The rear windows had been whited out with emulsion at some point, but even though the paint was scratched through in some places, I didn't bother trying to peer out and track our route; I just leaned up against the steel wall, spread my legs to brace myself against the van's movement, and tried to figure out what to do next.

Was the Turk looking for vengeance? Because I'd saved the Guvnor from the sniper, and the Guvnor's kids from Richard? I knew how the Turk repaid anyone foolish enough to oppose him or betray him or just disappoint him, and I wondered if I should have run instead of meekly climbing into this van, but that had never really been an option. If the Turk had Zoe's phone, he had Zoe too, and if she was still alive, there was a chance we might survive this. Might.

Twenty minutes later the van pulled to the left and stopped, its engine running. I heard a chain rattle and the deep screech of a huge metal roller door
being hauled open, and suddenly we were off again, bumping up a short ramp and into a vast building, judging by how the roar of the van's engine echoed. The ride was smooth and steady—no more potholes: we were in some sort of factory or warehouse with a concrete floor. When the van drew to a halt and the doors were pulled open, I saw a huge barn of a place, with steel pillars supporting a high sloping roof of wrinkled tin, and bare walls lined with wheeled metal hoppers piled high with pulverized metal and plastic. Suspended from the roof gantry were sodium lights the size of dustbins, bathing everything below in cold white.

As I climbed out I noticed the man holding the van door open: I hadn't seen Kemal close up in a while, but his mustache was still long and bushy and streaked with gray, and his huge muscular hands still glittered with studded rings, worn less for show than for the impression they made when he punched you in the face. His eyes were black and unblinking and cold; when last we'd met I'd split his bald scalp and tried to break his knee, but he looked at me with no emotion, the way a cat's owner might inspect a flea before cracking it with a thumbnail. He nodded to indicate the way I had to go.

Dean had parked the van with its nose pointing
towards a massive metal cube raised on steel stilts, with a conveyor belt running underneath. I thought it was another waste container until I saw how, at the top of the cube, the four walls splayed outwards to make a square vertical funnel. Along one side of that funnel ran a metal walkway, and I felt Kemal's hand in the small of my back shoving me, almost gently, towards the metal staircase that led up to it. I was suddenly reminded of an old engraving I'd seen, of the public gallows that once stood at Marble Arch; of the thousands of ghouls who gathered to stuff their faces with mutton pies and watch men and women being dragged to the scaffold, draped with nooses and dropped through a trap to dance and twitch. I cursed myself inwardly for coming so obligingly to this place, but there was nothing I could do about it now. I wasn't going to face death sniveling, and if it did come to that, maybe I could take a few of these bastards with me. I grabbed the handrail and took the steps two at a time, aware of Kemal's heavy tread stomping steadily up behind.

As I'd expected, the Turk was waiting on the walkway, in a cream linen suit and a crisp white shirt that was open at the neck. No bling, no gold teeth, no oversized designer watch; he didn't need to advertise his status. He had his arms folded, and in the
crook of his right elbow lay a young cat with ginger and white fur. The Turk was tickling it behind one ear, for all the world like some cheesy Bond villain, but from what I could see the cat wasn't happy with its role; it looked desperate to spring from his arms but could see nowhere to go. On one side was a sheer drop to a concrete floor, and on the other the metal funnel gaped, leading downwards, I could see now, to four massive interlocking camshafts of hard, dull steel. This was an industrial grinder, I realized—the sort that could reduce an engine block to shreds of tinfoil in the blink of an eye.

“I wanted to show you something,” said the Turk, without ceremony. I didn't see him make a signal, but somewhere below a piercing bell rang out, and with a grinding metal roar the machinery underneath us shuddered into life. The four metal camshafts started to spin, each in the opposite direction to its neighbor; raised spurs on the massive metal discs swept towards and past each other, steadily and implacably. Not so fast that they blurred: this machine was all about power, not speed. The Turk glanced down into the massive metal maw and grinned, and with one swift, fluid movement he grabbed the cat by the fur at its neck and tossed it into the funnel.

Tense as the cat had been, the Turk had taken
it by surprise, and it didn't even get a chance to lodge its claws in his sleeve. I felt a jolt of horror as it flew through the air, almost in slow motion, but I knew better than to turn my head away. The cat twisted in flight to land, as all cats do, with all four paws downwards, but that did it no good; almost instantly its legs were caught in the rotating cogs, and it barely had time to struggle or screech before it was dragged downwards into the interlocking camshafts, to disintegrate in an explosion of blood and guts and fur. From the corner of my eye I could see Kemal's massive shoulders shaking with laughter; with an immense effort I kept my own face impassive and my eyes locked on the shredder's roaring toothed wheels, smeared now with gore and clotted hair. Had the Turk done this as a warm-up? To intensify the terror I'd feel before it was my turn? As horrible as the cat's fate was, for a grown man it would be worse—maybe a whole minute of terror and agony and vain struggling to escape before the machine sucked me down, mashed me up and finished me off.

But somehow I sensed that wasn't going to happen, not right now, not today. If the Turk wanted to kill me this way I reckoned he'd do it slowly—have
me lowered into the grinder on a rope or a chain while he looked on. But there was no sign of any chain, or any hoist. And he'd kill me in front of Zoe, to double the fun—but there was no sign of Zoe here either. Whatever the Turk had in mind for me today, I decided, it wasn't death: nothing so simple. This had merely been a demonstration of what was in store if I dared to defy him again.

Still smirking, the Turk caught my eye and jerked his head towards the steps. He didn't try to shout over the roar of the industrial shredder, but his meaning was clear enough. He crossed—behind me, he wasn't stupid—to the stairway and skipped lightly down; I followed, all the while closely watched by Kemal.

Someone shut off the power to the shredder, and the whining roar of the engines that powered the camshafts lowered in pitch and volume and finally sank into silence, leaving my ears ringing. Not far away, in a space uncluttered by waste hoppers, a table had been set up, the sort you might find in any canteen—a laminated surface mounted on slim gray metal legs. Two standard gray plastic stacking chairs stood facing each other on either side. As the Turk approached the table, Dean pulled one chair back
and stood aside, in a scruffy imitation of a butler. The Turk settled into his seat, shuffled it forward and gestured for me to sit in the one opposite.

I plonked myself down, Kemal looming behind me. The Turk was leaning back slightly, one hand on the table, the other on his lap, utterly relaxed; I forced myself to relax too, slouching in my own chair to mirror his posture.

“Where's Zoe?” I said.

The Turk grimaced and smiled at the same time, as if I'd barged straight to the point without observing the necessary formalities. I had, on purpose: I knew he'd wanted me to ask about the shredder—whose it was, whether he'd often used it on his enemies. He wanted me to haggle and bluster and plead, but I wasn't going to play that game. He couldn't mention the shredder now without making it sound like a clumsy threat, and he fancied himself as too cool for that. He claimed he wasn't vain, but I knew that was just another aspect of his vanity…although the way things had been going for him, he had plenty to be vain about.

“You were required to deliver a message,” said the Turk. “That was all. Instead you decided to choose a side. The losing side.” I tried in vain to place that mid-European accent of his, but it was like trying to
nail down smoke. “I know you are not as stupid as I first thought,” the Turk was saying, “but I really cannot see what you were hoping to achieve.”

“If you're talking about that meeting,” I said, “someone started shooting at me. I didn't have time to think it through.”

“He was not shooting at you,” said the Turk. “Kemal was the finest sniper in the Hakkari Brigade. In Kurdistan, for a bet, he shot a baby off its mother's breast from two thousand meters. He would not have missed McGovern if you had not intervened.”

Christ
. My guess had been right—it had been Kemal up on that rooftop looking down at us through a sniper scope. Why hadn't he taken his shot while we crossed the square? I supposed that with McGovern in that Panama hat and sunglasses, Kemal had to be sure he wasn't a decoy. If only the Guvnor had been that subtle.

“I had no way of knowing that,” I said. “I was trying to stay alive. It was kind of an accident I kept the Guvnor alive while I was at it.”

“And his family? Was that too an accident?”

“No,” I said. “But I wasn't going to stand around watching Richard slit their throats. Why did you order that? Those kids were no threat to you.”

“In war,” said the Turk, “it is not enough to kill
a man. You must first enter his house, eat his food, defile his wife and slaughter his children, while he watches. When he knows that he has lost everything, then you have won.” He sounded like one of those billionaires who keep working even when they own so many yachts and mansions and tropical islands they can't ever visit them all. Such possessions are just trophies—what those guys really enjoy is the business; and the Turk's business was butchery. “Thanks to you,” he went on, “that pleasure has been denied me.”

“Richard was going to kill me too, wasn't he?” I said. “So he would have someone else to pin the blame on.”

“What can I say?” The Turk shrugged. “You're dispensable.”

“Not anymore, obviously, or you wouldn't have brought me here.” The Turk smiled, as if he was enjoying the banter. I wasn't—I just wanted him to get to the bloody point.

“You are telling me you are not on the Guvnor's side?” he asked.

“I don't think it matters what I tell you,” I said. “But no, I'm not on his side. You two can kill each other for all I care. And the sooner the better.”

“But he thinks you are on his side. You saved his children. He trusts you now.”

“He knows I'm not on yours. Apart from that, he doesn't trust anyone anymore.”

“That will be enough for my purposes,” said the Turk. “Go back to him. Tell him I have threatened to kill you for saving the lives of his children. He owes you a favor, and he pretends to be a man of honor, so he will say yes. And shortly after he takes you in, you will kill him for me. I will forgive your…interference, and you and the lovely Zoe can go free.”

Free for the sixty seconds you'd let us live, I thought. “And if I fail?” My glance must have strayed to the massive shredder behind him, because he grinned in satisfaction.

“If you fail, I won't punish you,” said the Turk. “McGovern's people will kill you. And Zoe…Zoe I will hand over to our old friend Dean. He has disposed of one or two people for me already, but frankly”—he grinned at Dean, who looked uncomfortable at being singled out—“he lacks…finesse. He needs to learn how to prolong the pleasure, how to make each moment more exquisite than the last. He can practice on your girlfriend. And if he…peaks early, well—so much the better for her.”