The Final Minute (6 page)

There were a million more questions I wanted to ask but I knew that now wasn’t the time. ‘Sure. I’m on it.’

‘If you can’t find Alison, leave her. We can find her later. And be quick. We haven’t got much time.’

He rang off and I put down the phone, going over what he’d just said. I remembered it pretty much word for word. The irony was that I had a great short-term memory, but on its own, it wasn’t going to help me find out why I was being treated like some hugely valuable commodity – a man with priceless information I didn’t even know myself.

I was still pondering that as I approached the bedroom door, gun in hand.

And that was when I smelled it.

Smoke. It seemed like someone was already ahead of the man on the phone in deciding to torch the place.

I yanked open the door and jumped to one side, just in case someone was waiting there to ambush me. But the landing was empty and the air acrid. I could hear the angry crackle of burning wood as I ran over to the top of the stairs. Smoke was pouring down the hallway from the direction of the front door, while flames gouted through the open lounge door. Unfortunately, there was also a thick black cloud of smoke billowing out of the kitchen as well, effectively trapping me up here. I cursed myself for leaving Pen alone down there. She must have regained consciousness and, rather than tackle me now that I had her gun, decided to burn me alive.

Already the smoke was making it hard to breathe, and Jane’s house was all wood panelling, so it was going to go up like a tinderbox.

Putting a hand over my mouth, I ran back to my bedroom. At least I knew I could get out that way. I shut the door behind me, cutting off the worst of the smoke, and went over to the window I’d sneaked out of earlier. Someone had been up here and shut it, so I opened it again quietly. I took a quick look out into the night and didn’t see anything untoward, so unscrewed the gun’s silencer and chucked it on the bed, before shoving the gun down the front of my jeans, saying a silent prayer for it not to go off accidentally, and climbing out the window, leaving my bedroom and the only life I really knew behind, for ever.

This time I didn’t hang about but dropped immediately to the ground, rolling over in the grass and gritting my teeth silently against the pain of the impact.

Still I didn’t see anyone. I could make for the safety of the trees and wait for my pursuers to leave, because they were going to have to now they’d set the house on fire. Even in an isolated place like the peninsula the fire would be seen for miles around, and already the flames were beginning to take hold. But the thing was, I didn’t want to be anywhere near this place when the police and fire brigade turned up, because I’d have a lot of very awkward questions to answer and no real means of answering them. It seemed best then, now that I had the keys to Jane’s BMW, to make a getaway on wheels. I knew I could drive. I had plenty of vague memories of being behind the wheel of a car and I’d got Jane to let me have a go in the BMW with her in the passenger seat a couple of weeks back (even though she’d taken a lot of persuading). I could remember what to do perfectly.

I got to my feet, pulled the gun from the front of my jeans and moved across the grass in the direction of the detached garage on the other side of the house, listening out for any signs of danger. As I rounded the corner, the garage appeared in front of me twenty feet away. I looked round quickly, then ran across to the door, keys in my spare hand, unable to stop my shoes from crunching on the gravel. I found the right one, unlocked the door and, as quietly as possible, lifted it up on to its runners. At that moment, I didn’t want to look round, just in case someone was creeping up on me, gun in hand, ready to put a bullet in my head. It was almost better not to know.

But I did look.

And saw the big man in the shadows of the burning house, maybe fifteen yards away. In his black clothes he was almost invisible in the darkness and smoke, but it was definitely him. And he was definitely pointing a gun at me, his arm perfectly steady. I couldn’t see Pen anywhere, but knew she wouldn’t be far away.

‘Stay where you are and drop the gun,’ he called out, because he knew I’d seen him and I assumed he needed to get closer to get a better shot at me. This was the first time he’d spoken and, like Pen, he had an American accent.

For a second I didn’t move. Then, as he took a step forward and called out the words ‘He’s here’ over his shoulder, I leapt into the welcome darkness of the garage, swinging the gun up behind me and giving the trigger a hard squeeze. The gun kicked as I fired three times in his general direction, hoping to put him off balance, before fumbling for the car key. I knew Jane pressed a button to turn off the central locking but it was hard to tell which one it was in the darkness and I could hear rapid footsteps on the gravel.

I ducked down behind the car as a shot whistled past before ricocheting off the back wall. I pressed one button on the key, then another, and the lights on the BMW flashed. A second shot flew through the garage, dangerously close to my head, so using the car as cover I fired off another shot towards my attacker, forcing him to jump to one side, temporarily out of sight.

I threw myself inside the car. The driver’s seat was way too far forward and my knees were virtually hitting my chest, but that was the least of my worries. I turned on the engine, yanked the car into drive, thanking God that at least part of my memory was working, then accelerated out of the garage, grabbing the gun with my free hand and keeping my head down, tensing for the inevitable ambush.

It came almost immediately. As I shoved my foot flat on the floor and the tyres ripped up gravel, I saw the guy loom to my left, gun outstretched, already firing. Glass broke, and I actually felt the heat from the bullet as it passed just in front of my face. More bullets hissed through the car’s interior, their sound partially muffled by the silencer on his gun, but I had no time to be scared. Instead, I opened up with my own gun, the noise of its retorts tearing through my ears. He was barely ten feet away from me and he was a big target, so even in a moving car it was hard for me to miss.

And I didn’t. I wasn’t sure how many times I hit him, but I saw him fall, and then I was turning away and concentrating on where I was driving.

That was when I saw Pen running out towards me from the side of the house. Her face was a mask of pure rage, and she was holding something in both hands. I just had time to process that it was a stone statue and then she was hurling it at the windscreen with a force I really wasn’t expecting. I swung the wheel away from her reflexively but the statue still hit the windscreen on the passenger side, smashing a fist-sized hole in the glass before bouncing off across the bonnet.

The car skidded off the driveway and on to the lawn, and I swung it round as I came to the front of the house, giving Pen as wide a berth as possible, before accelerating towards the trees and the mainland. The car my assailants had come here in was directly in front of me, blocking the exit, so I drove through a flowerbed to avoid it, then slowed up, lowered my driver’s-side window, leaned out with the gun and put a bullet in their front tyre, grinning as it deflated with a fart-like hiss. I inched forward and pulled the trigger again, aiming at the rear tyre this time. But nothing happened. I was out of bullets. No matter. I’d slowed them down enough to put some miles between us. The gun was no use to me now so I wiped the handle with my shirt, remembering what the criminals did in all the cop shows I watched (or maybe from experience, I still wasn’t quite sure), and dropped it out of the window.

In my rear-view mirror, I could see Pen running round the front of the house, holding a gun herself this time, and moving at a good pace. I slammed my foot on the accelerator as she pulled the trigger, tearing up some more of the flowerbed before coming back on to the drive, and within seconds I’d put thirty, then forty yards between us, and then the woods opened up to greet me and I knew that, at least for now, I was safe.

There was something else too.

I felt good.

Six

Pen de Souza screamed a curse into the clear night sky as she watched the car, and their target, disappear into woodland at the end of the driveway.

There was no point trying to follow him. She’d seen him put the bullet in the tyre. She cursed again, knowing she should have put a bullet in his kneecap the moment he’d first walked in the door. After all, they’d only needed him to answer one question: ‘Where are the bodies?’

Neither she nor her partner, Tank, had any idea of the identity of the bodies in question, nor did they want to know. In their line of business, knowing too much made you dangerous to the client. They had been tasked to get exact coordinates of the bodies’ location, make a mental note of them (not write anything down), and when it was established that the target was telling the truth, kill him.

And they’d failed on all counts. Pen felt the bitter taste of it in her mouth. She wasn’t used to failure. In the five years she and Tank had worked together, no target had ever escaped them. The combination of planning and guile they used had ensured that. With her pretty, girl-next-door looks and ready smile, Pen could disarm the most suspicious of people – men and women – while Tank provided the brute force to back her up. Yet tonight it hadn’t worked, and Pen had been humiliated when the target had caught her off-guard –
her!
And in a choke-hold of all things! Thankfully, he’d been foolish enough to leave her alive and unsecured, which would end up being a mistake on his part. Far worse, though, was what he’d done to Tank. Her man.

She turned and ran back past the burning house to where Tank was sitting up on the grass, rubbing his chest. ‘Are you OK, babe?’ she asked, crouching down beside him and putting a hand on his shoulder, thanking Lady Luck with all her heart that he’d been wearing a flak jacket. She didn’t know how she would ever cope if she lost him.

Tank nodded slowly, giving her a tight smile. ‘Yeah, I’m all right. He got me twice in the chest – good shots too, especially for a guy moving. I’m lucky the jacket held from that range. I’m guessing you didn’t get him.’

She shook her head. ‘He got away. And he put a bullet in one of our tyres.’

Tank grunted. ‘The guy’s no idiot. He didn’t panic, he knows some good moves, and he can shoot straight under pressure. I didn’t think he’d be that good.’

‘Right now, I’m just glad you’re all right.’ Pen put her arms round him and hugged him close.

‘I’m always all right, baby, you know that.’

He kissed her hard on the mouth and she kissed him back, her breathing quickening, because he always did that to her. She was thankful that he didn’t blame her for the plan they’d used. It had been her idea to lure the target into the room with the two people they’d already killed, because she preferred to interrogate subjects when they were terrified but otherwise uninjured: it tended to be easier to get a proper answer out of them that way. Tank hadn’t been so keen, but he’d gone along with it, which was one of the many things she loved about him: he took responsibility for his actions, which was not a trait she’d found in many men over the years. Except this time the plan had backfired, and Pen swore to herself that she wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

Reluctantly, she broke away from the kiss and they both got to their feet, walking hand in hand back to the stolen Shogun they’d arrived in.

‘We’re not going to get him now, are we?’ said Tank, pulling the spare wheel from the boot, along with a box containing the equipment to change it with.

‘Oh, we’ll get him,’ said Pen coldly.

She looked back over her shoulder towards the house. Flames were sprouting from the windows now, and the fire was lighting up the night sky. It was a beautiful sight but one that, even out here in the middle of nowhere, was going to attract the attention of the authorities soon enough.

Pen took out the wheel brace and gave Tank a big smile. ‘And when we do, I’m going to tear him apart limb from limb for what he did to you.’

Seven

There was no way I could drive too far in a car riddled with bullet holes. The windscreen was still just about holding, but a spider’s web of cracks had spread out from the hole where the statue had hit, and I had a feeling it wasn’t going to last much longer. Also, I really didn’t want to draw attention to myself. I’d just shot a man, and left behind a burning house with two corpses inside. So I needed to come up with some kind of plan.

I was back on the mainland now, driving through a mix of fields and patchy woodland. The land here was still very rural, with only the occasional house popping up on either side of the road. I’d been down this way a handful of times when I’d gone clothes shopping with Jane in Pembroke, the nearest major town to the house, and knew there was a village somewhere along this road. A couple of minutes later it appeared on my left-hand side, a sprinkling of brick-built houses – some rendered grey, some white – nestled in the faint copper glow of streetlamps. Civilization. It filled me with a relief I really shouldn’t have been feeling. I was lost and alone. I had no past, and as a direct result, I had no future. I could hand myself into the authorities, but what would that mean? Life in an institution. Or maybe even life in prison if they didn’t believe my story of what had happened back at the house. I couldn’t tolerate that. I had to find out who I was.

But first things first. There was a pub across the road from the village, its sign lit up and swinging gently in the sea breeze. I turned in and drove round the back, parking the car in a dark corner under a large tree.

I sat back in the seat and closed my eyes, breathing slowly and steadily, allowing myself to calm down. My head still ached dully from where I’d been hit, but I hadn’t sustained any real damage. My hands had stopped shaking too, which surprised me. I’d almost died only a matter of minutes ago, and at least one of the people trying to kill me was still out there, but the shock I should have been experiencing simply wasn’t kicking in.