Shredder (16 page)

My gamble had failed, horribly. I'd thought the mob might smash the place up—it made no sense to torch it. But then I should have known that nothing rioters do makes any sense. They don't set fire to shops and cars as a protest or as a tactic to block the streets—they do it for the fun of watching things burn. The five armed men upstairs were going to panic and clear out, and either they'd bring Zoe with them—meaning I'd have to take on all five at once—or they'd leave her behind, tied to the bed. It was one thing to escape from a burning building—I'd managed that a few weeks ago—it was another to get into one and get out again.

They weren't going out the back, I was sure—the yard gates were still locked. That meant they'd come
out the front door, and they'd do it quick, before the stairs caught fire. I skirted the bonfire, feeling the heat from the flames scorch my skin and singe the hair on my arms, and climbed out through the shattered window. There was a knot of rioters across the street, attacking a jeweler's shop that had somehow resisted every attack so far, thanks to heavy steel shutters and pavement bollards designed to foil ram-raiders. I ran across to mingle with them, planning to hide in plain sight so the Turk's men wouldn't spot me the moment they emerged.

The door to the apartment opened, and the guys I'd nicknamed Popeye and Blue Shoes appeared. Flames were starting to gush from the ground-floor shop, lapping at the windows of the flat above, veiling the façade in black choking clouds. Gray smoke billowed out the door that led up to the flat—it looked like the stairs were already burning. The two men hung around the doorway, glancing up and down the street as if waiting; and when I followed their look I saw what they'd been waiting for.

The Merc with the tinted windows was back, cruising through the chaos, weaving among the stalled and burning traffic as coolly as a battle tank. It pulled up in the street between the mob and the
apartment, and the rear passenger door opened, and Kemal got out. He beckoned to the men at the apartment door, who turned and yelled up the stairs. They were evacuating Zoe, and I had only seconds to stop them.

“Cops!” I yelled. “Cops!” The mob around me ducked as if they'd been shot at, and looked around in every direction. At any second, I knew, they might panic and scatter like birds, and I had no way of stopping that—all I could do was wade in and hope they'd follow. I dashed out into the road, swung the pole and slammed it into the tinted windscreen of the Merc. It bounced clean off—I hadn't even chipped the glass. Kemal saw me, and his gaze narrowed in fury, and from the corner of my eye I saw the crowd around me watch, and tense, and I felt their collective mood seething and swirling like volatile chemicals mixing in a tank. “They're undercover,” I yelled. “They got cameras!”

Kemal lumbered round the car towards me, and I braced myself and hefted the scaffolding pole. It wasn't the cocky, macho Dean I was facing now: Kemal was one hundred and twenty kilos of cold flint, with fists like sledgehammers, and he was relentless.

He was halfway round the car when there was a single
crack
and everyone ducked. I glanced towards the flat's doorway, and saw Blue Shoes with a revolver in his hand. He had fired a shot—in the air, or at me, who knows?—to drive the crowd back, and that was the catalyst. The crowd didn't disperse, they boiled over. A hail of projectiles came flying down on the two guys at the apartment door, and a few were hurled at Kemal himself. He was still behind the Merc when a brick slammed into the side of his face, splitting the skin, and he barely had time to turn before two hoodies were onto him, hacking away with the crowbars they'd been using on the jeweler's shop.

Kemal grabbed one attacker's arm, twisted and snapped it like a twig. The injured guy screamed and fell to his knees, but two more rioters took his place, one grasping a broken bottle, the other a chain, and Kemal flinched as the first guy's crowbar bit into his scalp, and in that instant the broken bottle was stabbed into his neck. In another instant the crowd was all over him like jackals crowding on a lion, ripping, tearing, yowling—was it them screaming, or Kemal?—and as he slowly sank to his knees they rained down kicks and punches and broken bricks.
Vomit rose in my throat—the mob attacking Kemal seemed something less than human, as if I'd conjured up serpents from the hottest depths of hell. But it was too late to stop them, even if I'd wanted to.

The doorway to the flat was now empty and dark, and the smoke pouring out of it was lit from within by fire—Blue Shoes and Popeye had vanished. Up the street furious rioters were racing, pursuing someone, yelling threats and curses—was that where the two men had gone? The Merc's engine roared and it jolted into gear, ready to reverse, but the crowd behind the car was still thrashing and stamping on Kemal's slumped body, and the door Kemal had left open was still gaping wide. Someone in the rear seat reached out to pull the door shut, only to be grabbed by the arm by a rioter who tried to drag the passenger out into the street.

Leaping onto the Merc's hood, I scuttled across and jumped down on the driver's side. Whoever was in the back could wait—I didn't want this car going anywhere. I rammed the end of the scaffolding pole against the driver's window, near the frame, where it was weakest. The glass crazed into a mosaic, and the next swing of my pole punched a hole clean through it and connected with the driver's head. He
recoiled, but he couldn't escape—he was strapped in—and when I followed through with a fist into the side of his face he sagged and fell forwards over the wheel like a crash-test dummy.

A sudden deafening bang, and my face was sprayed with fragments, scorching my eyes and sending me reeling backwards. I ducked, my ears ringing, and tried to blink away the pain, vaguely aware that the passenger in the back had shot at me. I stumbled round the front of the car, staying low to keep the engine between me and the shooter while I tried to clear my eyes. His shot must have hit the headrest—it had stopped the bullet but blasted burning crumbs of leather and padding into my face. I heard another shot, and high-pitched screeches of pain, and the yells of the crowd redoubled, and rocks and bottles started slamming into the Merc's bodywork. Forcing my eyes open, I found I could see OK, though my head was ringing and my eyelids were on fire. I peered round the hood.

The shooter had emerged from the backseat. It was the Turk, and he held a massive chrome-plated pistol in his right hand. The guy who had tried to drag him out of the back of the car lay balled up
in fetal position on the wet tarmac, whimpering in agony—he'd been shot in the belly.

For the first time ever I saw that the Turk's catlike calm had deserted him—he had lost control and he'd lost his crew, and now he clearly feared he faced the same fate as Kemal. In his free hand he clutched a slim briefcase, the same one I'd seen earlier that day, and as rocks bounced off the roof of the Merc and past his head he held it up as a shield, looking around for the best direction to run in. Part of me wanted him to run, so I could focus on going in after Zoe, but another part of me wanted to grab that briefcase—if he was so keen to keep it, it had to be worth taking from him.

He decided to head towards the blazing Dumpster truck, now just an empty metal shell consumed by flame. Raising his gun, he fired two more shots into the mob, almost at random, and now the crowd yelled in panic and anger, ducked and scattered in all directions. The Turk wasn't looking in my direction, but in the two seconds it took me to reach him he could turn that gun on me.

I stood up and hurled the stump of scaffolding pole at him, using all my strength. It caught him at an angle, right between the shoulder blades,
glancing off the back of his head. He staggered and fell, and the briefcase went flying—not far, but far enough for one foolhardy kid in a greasy tracksuit top with a smoke-stained bandanna round his face to dash over, grab it and run off whooping. The Turk scrambled to his feet, waving his gun, but more bottles exploded on the tarmac around him, and a massive lump of concrete missed his head by a couple of centimeters. He stood up and ran. I let him go and doubled back.

The kid in the bandanna hadn't gone far—he'd taken shelter in a shop doorway and was fumbling with the straps of the briefcase to see what was inside. Just as I reached him he'd pulled out a folder full of papers and a slim laptop computer. The folder he threw away, its pages fluttering wildly to join the rest of the garbage scattered across the street, and he was just about to check out the laptop when I yanked it out of his grasp. He spat and swore at me, unleashing a flurry of punches that sort of connected with my face and head, so badly thrown it was like being attacked by a flock of moths. I smacked him in the face with the laptop—not hard enough to damage it, but hard enough to knock him backwards through the broken window. As he went down he cracked his
head on the corner of a stripped display shelf and knocked himself out cold.

The crowd had closed in on the stranded Merc, and they were piling into it the same way they had gone for the four-by-four—dancing on the roof, wrenching off the wing mirrors, ripping away the windscreen wipers like crazed baboons in a safari park, while the shot rioter's friends gathered around him and hauled him to his feet. They dragged him away, semiconscious from pain and loss of blood, with his sneakers trailing behind him along the dirty wet tarmac, leaving the driver still slumped over his wheel.

Nobody was watching me, and the kid I had mugged for the laptop was still down for the count on a bed of broken glass. I stuffed the laptop into the nearest litter bin, burying it under a heap of greasy fast-food wrappers, and just at that moment four figures came tumbling out of the smoke-filled doorway, coughing and choking. One of them was Zoe, in that T-shirt dress and unlaced trainers, dragged along by Roly-Poly, who kept her right arm clamped in his big hairy left hand.

They turned left, heading away from me, Swarthy taking the lead, Blondie to the rear. I raced after
them. Blondie wasn't much good as a rear guard, being more concerned about where he was heading than what he was leaving: by the time he heard my footsteps behind him and started to turn I was already on top of him. His right hand plunged into his jacket, leaving him wide open to a haymaker to the jaw, delivered square on with all my momentum behind it. The impact nearly broke my fist, but it sent him spinning on the spot and falling in a stunned heap just as Dean had done.

Swarthy—ten meters up ahead—glanced over his shoulder and bawled something to Roly-Poly, but Roly kept going, shouting something back in what I presumed was Turkish. They hurried on up the street, away from the heart of the riot, straight towards an off-street car park.

I stooped over the comatose Blondie and pulled his right arm out of his jacket; his fingers were still curled round the handle of a gleaming black pistol, not as ostentatious as the Turk's but presumably just as lethal. I grabbed it. There was no time to go back for the scaffolding pole, and against two armed men it wouldn't be much use anyway. I checked for a safety catch but couldn't see one, and I scrambled up and after Zoe.

I caught up with them just as they approached a sleek BMW sedan a few years old. Roly-Poly was fumbling in his pockets—it looked like he was searching for his keys—but Zoe was wriggling in his grasp so hard he was finding it impossible to get them out. He released her with his left and tried to grab her with his right, but she dived under his grasp. He fumbled after her and snatched the neck of her T-shirt dress, pulling her up short.

“Let her go!” I yelled. I held Blondie's pistol out in front of me, two-handed, hoping it looked as if I knew what I was doing. The three of them looked round in amazement, just for an instant, and Swarthy reached inside his jacket for his own gun. I pointed mine at him and squeezed the trigger.

The bloody thing bucked in my hand—I'd known it was going to happen but was still completely unprepared for it—and the shot went wild, pinging off the rough stone wall a meter above Swarthy—but instantly his head jolted forward. He raised a hand instinctively to his head, where the ricochet had struck, before his knees folded and he fell on his face. All the while Roly-Poly had been cursing and wrestling with Zoe. He tried to drag her back towards him, but her dress stretched and started to
rip, and it gave her enough room to turn round and hurl herself at him, screeching like a rabid tigress and driving her fingernails into his face, aiming for his eyes.

Now it was Roly-Poly's turn to yell, and he pulled his head to one side and grabbed at Zoe's hands, pulling them free; he still had both his hands full of furious, writhing, spitting girl when I reached him. I tossed the gun away—I didn't trust myself with it when Zoe was so close.

He was a big man and I knew a blow to the belly would likely bounce off, so I went for the face, bending his nose sideways with a right and following through with a hard left that splattered it over his face. He yelled in pain and fury, dropped Zoe and came for me, swinging wildly and trying to grab me, while I ducked and dodged and came back, landing more blows to his face, splitting his lips against his teeth, knocking his jaw sideways—but the bastard wouldn't go down. It was like one of those arcade games with an end-of-level boss that just soaks up the damage and keeps coming, and I was wishing I'd kept hold of the pistol or even the scaffolding pole when my right foot went into a pothole and I stumbled backwards.

It was only for a second but it was all the time the
big man needed, and his fat right hand grabbed my shirt and held me steady while he cocked his massive left for a backhander, shrugging off my blows to his face as if I'd been swatting him with a duster.

There was a crack, and his fingers loosened—then a second crack and a third, and Roly-Poly looked puzzled and scared, and the blood flowing from his mouth and nose became a gush, and he toppled sideways like a tree, his short-bitten fingernails gouging scars in my skin even as I wrenched myself from his grip.