2 weeks to go…
The girl sat up and opened her eyes.
She could see nothing and it was disorientating. Which way was up and which way down? One minute she had been in a bar on a blind date and the next minute, she was here.
Her senses strained into the dark. Night air warm on her face, traffic far away, a feeling of space above. A wide, open sky. She was sitting on hard ground. A hint of a breeze rustling long grass and leaves on trees.
Why was it so dark?
Her hands flew to her eyes, scrabbling at the lids. Lashes fluttered under her fingers. There should be some light. Even in the middle of the night, London never got completely dark. She had heard you could see the sodium from space.
Nothing.
Her heart thudded as the panic hit.
She lunged out and her fingers hit something hard. Stone covered in leaves. Ivy. She could smell its bitterness. There was carving on the stone. Old writing. The ivy was growing right over the top.
A gravestone.
Instinct forced her body still, choked the scream rising up her throat. She froze, listening to the rustling in the trees, the far away traffic, the hammer, hammer, hammering of her heart. And something else. A sound like a blade on a whetstone. A slow rhythmic scrape.
She felt the echo of something long known and only just recognised. The shape of a familiar story. She was part of a narrative that had played out a hundred times before.
The sound like a blade on a whetstone stopped.
She fumbled at her pocket and her fingers touched the smooth screen of her phone. A while ago, when she had started internet dating, she had downloaded the ICE app – the ‘In Case of Emergency’ panic app. One press and a message was sent. She had never had to use it before.
She jabbed at the screen in the pitch dark. She could make out nothing, not even the glimmer from the home page. Had her phone run out of battery?
Someone was standing in front of her. She could feel them in the air.
‘Who’s there?’ she said. ‘Who are you?’
‘I am Firestorm.’ The voice sounded like her date.
Fear held her stiff.
She knew Firestorm. Everyone did.
Even though she had heard the words, she still couldn’t make sense of them.
‘Someone has taken out a contract on me?’ she whispered. She couldn’t believe it. Who cared enough to want her dead?
‘No,’ said the voice. ‘You are an experiment. The first of twelve; now we are entering the final countdown.’
She could make nothing of this. What countdown? Her frightened brain skittered back to the question.
‘Who are you?’ she said again.
‘I am the Guardsman.’
12 days to go…
In Paris, a Judge sat down heavily on the toilet in the end cubicle of the Judges’ bathroom and wondered what a life spent in perpetual fear was doing to his insides. He had grown up with stories about Falcone and Borsellino, the selfless Italian magistrates who had stood up to the Sicilian mafia. As a young man he had been fired with the spirit of emulation and developed a burning ambition to follow in their footsteps.
Now he had got his wish and the reality was not glorious or heroic. It was terrifying.
He sometimes wondered what his old heroes would make of organised crime now. More powerful than any country and backed up by the might of the Firestorm website. An assassination market that had moved off the dark web and gone mainstream.
The Judge remembered seeing Firestorm for the first time and staring while his colleagues laughed.
Welcome to Firestorm
Cheating husband? Bitch wife? Hate your Boss?
Let Firestorm take care of your problem.
Safe. Anonymous. Cheap.
The Judge hadn’t laughed – he had been too busy considering the implications.
By its first birthday, Firestorm had chalked up more than fifty thousand contracts and a whole new industry had been born. It passed a hundred thousand a few months later and by then its potential for intimidation had been realised. If you care, your enemies have all the leverage they need, and one by one the Judge’s laughing colleagues had turned into shaking, twitching Firestorm shadows.
The Judge knew he should be glad that his parents were long dead and that he had no wife or children to be afraid for, but he felt alone and tired and fearful. He was afraid for himself and that made him ashamed, but no less afraid.
The Guardsman will find you soon, he had been told.
He looked at the grey, industrial toilet partition and the grey, hard-wearing floor and wondered what would happen if he never came out. The Guardsman could probably find him, even here, in the Judges’ toilets, in the Palais de Justice.
The Judge thought about the Guardsman, Firestorm’s most celebrated contractor, one of the Holy Trinity. Apparently, his page on Firestorm got more than a million hits a day. He was just a man, the Judge told himself, just an ordinary man. And that was part of the problem. No one knew what he looked like. The Guardsman could walk into a bar and order a drink right beside you and you would never know. The knife in the back you never saw coming.
The outside door to the corridor creaked.
The Judge sat very still, listening in the suddenly full silence.
Someone was standing right outside his cubicle. He could hear them breathing. It was strange there hadn’t been any footsteps.
There was a tap tap tap. The kind of sound made by metal not knuckles. The kind of sound a blade might make if it was tapping lightly on a thin partition door.
‘Hello?’ he said.
The cubicle door crashed open, shattering the feeble lock. The door bounced off the partition wall and closed again.
No shoes, that explained the silence.
The door creaked slowly open again.
It wasn’t going to be in the back.
8 days to go…
A man walked into a bar.
The barmaid checked him out as she worked the pump. Women were always checking him out. Up and down went her lashes, her mouth pursing as she finessed the head on a pint.
A flick of brown hair across the room caught his attention. A woman on her own. Desperate. He could read it in her body language. She was on the phone, laughing too loudly and sending flirty little glances around the bar.
Easy, the man thought.
She was Australian and it didn’t take more than two martinis to have her spilling her life story, crossing and uncrossing her long legs on the bar stool. She had come to London as a student and never left. Her skirt rose mid thigh as she shifted again.
The man laughed. He could feel his knife, newly sharpened, pressing into his side.
‘Because of our fabulous weather,’ he said.
‘Because of the fabulous men,’ she replied.
And he knew it was a done deal.
She didn’t mention her husband but that was fine because the man already knew all about him and in fact had had a long and detailed exchange with him in Firestorm’s online contract room.
He glanced at the TV above the bar, it was showing a city in flames. It could be any one of a dozen cities in North America – New York, Chicago, LA. They were all burning. The man couldn’t have cared less. He checked his watch. No body the husband had stipulated and that was fine too. The woman’s face fell. She put her hand on his knee.
‘D’you have somewhere you need to be?’
He could see her nipples through her thin blouse. He could taste her eagerness. She touched her hand to her ring finger, unconsciously rubbing the skin.
He opened the door to the rented house and breathed in deeply. The smell of old houses got him hard. He might start off outside, but, in the end, this was where he always brought them.
The woman hung on his arm, oblivious. She giggled as she stumbled on the hall carpet. She laughed as he closed the front door. He could smell apple martini on her breath.
His heart rate was accelerating. He looked at the metal door at the end of the hall.
Just a little bit further.
He could feel his blade under his jacket, against his ribs. It pricked through the thin shirt, pricked against his skin. He knew when he took his jacket off there would be tiny specks of blood on the white.
Now his hand was on the metal door. The room beyond was in darkness. She stumbled again and giggled again and then she was over the threshold and he slammed the door behind him.
Then he hit the lights.
Plastic sheeting draped the walls, taped high and covering the floor, filling the room with the chemical smell of cellophane. A couch and a chair stood in the middle at exactly the right height.
He would cut her first and take her from behind while he watched her bleed. He pulled the knife from its sheath and watched the light play on the serrated blade, little dancing beads of brilliant white. This was his favourite bit. It was all good, but this bit, when they realised, was the best.
He looked up.
The woman stood leaning up against the far wall. She put her hand to the top of her head and pulled at her hair. A wig. Her real hair was as blonde as his own.
‘God, that thing is hot,’ she said, and her Australian accent was gone.
The man stared.
The woman tossed the wig aside and put her hands in her pockets. When they came out they were wearing knuckledusters.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘My name is Winter. Welcome to the last night of your life.’
I soak in the Guardsman’s surprise. Fill myself up with the delicious, perfect shock of it. The most feared contract killer in history. Firestorm’s top contractor. A cutter. A knife specialist. His body vibrates with halted momentum, the jolt of a gap where a step should be. Light reflects along the blade in his hand. His adrenaline is going full throttle. Only surprise is keeping him standing and that won’t last long.
I’m not worried. I may be all alone but if I can’t take an armed opponent one-on-one I have no business being Head of Field. Not that I am unarmed. I just want to use my fists. For all of GCHQ’s technology, I have been punching air.
Until now.
Until I booked the Guardsman for a hit on myself.
I would like her to suffer, I had told the Guardsman, posing as my own husband in Firestorm’s online contract room.
It will be my pleasure, he had replied.
I lever myself off the wall by my shoulder blades.
The Guardsman stares at me, confounded and confused.
A picture of a girl, bleeding out in a dusty graveyard fills my head.
Her name was Lucy.
I can see her now, hunched, half lying against a gravestone, the ICE app lit up on her phone. I can see myself running through the dark, tearing down the overgrown paths. I can feel her, sticky in my arms, feel the grass, dry as straw, feel the dust beneath me as I hauled her onto my body, trying to get her off the ground, trying to lessen the contact between dirt and missing skin.
She was alive. Alive long enough for me to find her. ‘The Guardsman,’ she said to me, and something else, and then she died.
It took three burly ambulance crew to prise me away from her. They put me in the back of an ambulance with a blanket. They pressed some hot sweet drink on me like I was a civilian and through the open door I could see her lying between the graves, abandoned in the dirt, and I broke away from the gentle hands and lurched out of the ambulance and gathered her in my arms again, while forensics screamed and scene of crime officers cursed my name.
I clench my fists and clench my jaw and the blackness rises. I breathe it in, draw it around me, wrap myself in it like a mantle.
His mouth opens. Here it comes. What will it be?
Who are you?
What’s going on?
‘Did the Guardsman send you?’ he says. ‘Is this some kind of test?’
‘What?’
‘Who are you?’ he says. ‘Are you a contractor? Do you work for the Guardsman?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I really don’t.’
We stare at each other. I can see his brain ticking. His lips move as if he is working something out. His face twists in confusion. Something is wrong and indecision makes him rock like a metronome. Smart would open the door and run like hell. Stupid would carry on as if nothing has changed.
I can already tell which way he is going to go.
This is not Firestorm’s top contractor. This is not the person I booked. Where is the Guardsman?
He tenses with coiled momentum, telegraphing his move.
Behind him, the door slams open, smacking him in the back.
What the hell?
The contractor staggers forward and a slim Chinese girl strides into the room. She is wearing dungarees, Doc Martens and a murderous expression. She sizes the contractor up through narrowed eyes then swings sideways and lands a stinging heel strike on the back of his neck. He keels over face first.
The newcomer kicks the fallen cutter. Plenty of welly.
I blink.
‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘I am here to save you. You are going to be fine.’
‘Great.’
‘I would’ve been here earlier,’ she says. ‘But I dropped my bus pass in his front garden.’ She pats her huge pockets as if to check she still has it.
Priceless.
I kneel down beside the body. Two fingers on the jugular. Nothing. I pick up the wrist. Still nothing.
Shit.
‘Blimey, will you look at this place?’ she says, taking in the specialist décor. She pulls at a dungaree buckle, the strap is slipping off her shoulder.
I roll the body over. Blue eyes stare at the ceiling.
‘What are you doing here? Were you following me?’
She nudges the body with her boot. ‘I knew he was on a job.’
I am up and in her face before she can move. ‘You hacked Firestorm?’
She shrugs. ‘And?’
I get her by the scruff of the neck and haul her out the door, along the hall and into the front garden. ‘And, I want to talk to you,’ I say.
Simon glares at me. His gaze sweeps the Chinese girl then returns to me. His hair looks like he just got out of bed but then it always does. He folds his arms. As the orange street light catches his face, I see his lips tight over his anger. It is a familiar look. My quartermaster; my biggest supporter and toughest critic.
The night is quiet. Traffic from the nearby Lewisham High Road. Maybe the odd fox, otherwise nothing.
‘He’s dead?’ he says to me.
My eyes slide across to my would-be rescuer. ‘Self-defence.’
‘Entrapment.’ Simon glares some more. ‘Are you honestly expecting the Met to believe you just bumped into this guy?’
Somewhere, a fox shrieks.
He scowls. ‘Please, Winter. I understand, but we talked about this. You have to stop doing this alone.’
I pat my quartermaster’s arm. ‘It wasn’t him anyway.’ An image of Lucy bleeding out in a dusty graveyard fills my head. Disappointment soaks through me. I push it away. Close it down.
Simon’s scowl deepens. ‘Are you out of your mind?’ he hisses. ‘You tried entrapment on the Guardsman?’
It is my turn to scowl. Does he think I’m not up to the Guardsman? We glare off under the orange street light. A siren sounds in the distance, getting closer.
Both of us have forgotten my rescuer. She looks from Simon to me and back again, her eyes tracking to and fro like she is watching tennis. Her cute oval face is baffled. She puts her hands in her outsize pockets.
My head aches. Weeks of monitoring the police channels and the ICE app are catching up with me.
‘So,’ I say. ‘Tell me about hacking Firestorm. The website we have teams and teams of analysts trying to take down.’
‘I didn’t exactly hack it,’ she says.
‘I never thought you did.’
‘I knew he was on a job.’ She fiddles with a dungaree strap.
I narrow my eyes. ‘How exactly?’
She looks round at the street, up to the cameras, down to Simon. There are cameras everywhere, even in this anonymous corner of South London.
‘I heard him on the phone,’ she says. ‘I was watching him outside the bar, before he met you. At first I thought he was nervous and then I decided it was excitement so then I thought he was probably waiting for a date. Then I heard him on the phone.’
‘Go on.’
‘So, I thought I’d better check it out.’
‘Why didn’t you just warn me?’
‘What if I’d been wrong? Awkward.’
‘You could have called the police.’
‘You’re joking? Under that kind of time pressure? Couldn’t find their butts with both hands and a sniffer dog.’
‘Right,’ I say, dealing with that mental image. It’s not like I disagree. I fold my arms. ‘So, let’s get this straight. You decided he was on a job and you thought you would just pop along and stop it?’
‘Yeah,’ she says.
‘What could possibly have gone wrong?’
‘It was only one guy. I could have taken him blindfolded.’ She thinks about this. ‘With my head in a bucket.’
I consider the youthful vigilante in silence.
‘Who the hell are you people anyway?’ she says.
‘I’m glad you asked me that.’ I look down at her. She reminds me of myself about a hundred years ago. She reminds me of myself when I didn’t care.
Her name is Xiu and she is third generation. Her grandparents ran a takeaway, her parents are doctors. She holds a black belt in karate and trains at the Xen-Do kickboxing centre in Finsbury Park. She is in her second year at the London School of Economics studying financial accounting and she is as bored as fuck.
Her words.
‘So, you want to be an accountant?’
‘Hell no,’ she says. ‘My mum wants me to be an accountant.’
I meet Simon’s eyes over the top of her head. She turned up to stop a hit with nothing but her fists and a bus pass.
‘What?’ she says.
‘Have you ever considered an alternative career?’
The Guardsman watched as the trainee contractor woke up on the cellar floor and put his hands to his face. The chains around the trainee’s ankles clinked.
‘Hello?’ said the trainee. ‘Is this another test?’ His head circled like he was searching for something.
No, it was not another test. There would be no more tests for this trainee; he had failed to meet the required standard and the Guardsman did not tolerate mediocrity. Luckily he fulfilled all the criteria for something else.
The trainee’s hands started to shake. ‘What have you done to me?’ he whispered.
The Guardsman glanced at the shipping buoys squatting against the cellar walls. In the dim light from the single bulb hanging from the ceiling, they almost looked alive.
‘You are an experiment,’ said the Guardsman, ‘the second of twelve. Now we are entering the final countdown. It is an honour.’
The trainee looked like he didn’t understand. Which was fine by the Guardsman. The open-air graveyard had been a success, giving new meaning to the phrase ‘blind date’ and the enclosed cellar had also been a complete success.
Which meant the trainee contractor was now surplus to requirements.
The Guardsman looked down at the knife and felt the anticipation rise.
Whetstone, then dry stone, then polish.
Was it sharp enough? Maybe it needed doing again. That was the problem with knife work. Sometimes you had to sharpen the blade three or four times during a job. Not that the Guardsman objected to that particularly.
The Guardsman stepped forward and smiled as the screaming started. There was purity in extreme pain. Who was it who said that? Was it Freud? Or was it Nietzsche?
There was a knock at the door.
‘We have a problem,’ said the voice behind the door at the top of the cellar stairs.
The Guardsman frowned.
There had been too many problems recently. Twenty-two failed contracts in eight weeks, and every day it felt like something was pushing, prodding, testing the Firestorm defences.
‘What?’ snapped the Guardsman sliding the bolt and opening the door to the man with the strange eyes.
‘Tonight’s job. The one you sent Contractor 159 to. You were right to be suspicious.’
The Guardsman followed the man with the strange eyes through to the room with the banks of screens and the moving red dots against a London backdrop. Eighty jobs within the M25 tonight. Eighty Contractors had punched in and, so far, forty had punched back out, uploading the required photographic proof of death.
‘The system has thrown up a partial facial match on the target.’
The Guardsman leaned forward and pulled up the live surveillance feed. A bar, as expected. Pale wood, widescreen TV, Contractor 159, the Guardsman’s go-to contractor, the lights shining off his golden hair.
The Guardsman hated being right.
The blonde contractor shifted slightly and the target came into view. The Guardsman stared at the woman with the brown hair. She didn’t look familiar.
‘Who does the system think it is?’
The man with the strange eyes, blue on the left and brown on the right, closed the door and pointed at the life-size photo nailed to the back of it. There were holes in the picture like someone had been using it for target practice.
The Guardsman stared at the photo of the familiar face. The bright green eyes, the blonde hair, the distant stare. Public enemy number one.
Winter.
The name hissed out before the Guardsman could stop it.
The Government agent responsible for unmasking the Boss, eight weeks ago. All of a sudden, the weeks of sly prodding and testing were making more sense.
Winter.
Reckless, arrogant and unbelievably effective.
Rage rose along with frustration.
Winter was one of the few people on the planet with special protected status on Firestorm.
Untouchable.
Untouchable because the Boss wanted to do it himself. And he had to do it himself. Everyone knew she had tracked him down. He had to assert his authority. The world of organised crime was in crisis. North America was in open revolt and, thanks to Winter, Alek Konstantin was being hunted to the ends of the earth, not able to stay in one place for more than a few hours, not able to impose his authority where it was needed.
The Guardsman thought about Alek, forced to scrabble around underground like a mole in the dark.
There was sobbing coming up through the floorboards. It was getting louder.
The Guardsman turned to look at the picture of Winter. How the Guardsman would love to have her, right now, chained to the floor in the cellar, instead of some trainee.
A vein throbbed under the Guardsman’s eye. How could anyone think with all that sobbing going on? The Guardsman opened the door and went back down the cellar stairs.
The trainee contractor stopped sobbing at the sound of footsteps. His head jerked backwards and forwards like he was searching for something.
‘Please,’ said the trainee. ‘Just shoot me.’
The Guardsman frowned at the suggestion. Did the man know nothing? The Guardsman never used firearms, had never even held a gun.
The Boss, on the other hand, was all about guns. Quick, efficient and low risk. The thought of Alek Konstantin and his efficiency focused the Guardsman and a moment later the trainee contractor crumpled to the floor.
The Guardsman went back up the stairs, and back to the surveillance feed.
‘Get out,’ said the Guardsman, without looking round, and the man with the strange eyes hurried out, closing the door behind him.
Firestorm was a sacred trust and the Guardsman, as its Guardian and Administrator, was there to protect it.
Winter had challenged the Boss; she could not be allowed to do the same to Firestorm. Particularly not now, not when they were so close. Eight days away. The Guardsman turned to look at the picture on the back of the door.
It was time to meet her. You couldn’t really know someone until you looked into the whites of their eyes. Until you were close enough to feel their breath on your face.
The Guardsman stared at the live feed from the bar. Contractor 159 and his victim were heading for the door. Soon they would be arriving at the house with the metal door and the cellophane room. What to do?
Winter had to suffer, that was for sure.
One way or another.
7 days to go…
It is light and the air is already warm by the time I get away from the police and the cellophane room and the house with its secrets laid out under the forensic tripods.
It is properly hot, like the sun has been up for hours. 7 a.m. and I am alone and knackered and late as I arrive outside a grey office block on the fringes of Canary Wharf.
Late and baffled.
I couldn’t find his phone and I couldn’t find anything in the cellophane house to explain the missing Guardsman. The computer stood up to about ten minutes of direct attack before its security collapsed and it held nothing. Nothing that connected him to Firestorm.
What tipped the Guardsman off? He can’t have recognised me. He had already sent someone else by then. I put my hand to my jaw; my mouth is numb from yanking out the facial alteration kit. It is easy enough to change your appearance for a short time. For anything longer than a few hours you need surgery.
For about the hundredth time, I go over Lucy’s last words.
I am an experiment, she said, gripping my arm. In the final countdown.
What did the Guardsman mean by experiment? A death without a contract? Without being paid? If so, it is a weird way to put it. And will there be more experiments? The thought of finding another corpse like Lucy has driven me sleepless through the last week to the cellophane room and my showdown with the Guardsman.
And countdown to what? The world has already changed. Eight weeks ago I tracked down the man at the top of organised crime and the world exploded into violence.
The trees lining the dusty street are heavy with the dark green of summer. I look at the café across the way. Red awning down, already busy with bacon rolls and yoghurt and berries to go, the smell of coffee beans rich in the warm air. My stomach lurches, saliva pools. I slow my stride. Surely I have time? I don’t.
The office block is not shabby, it is not smart, it is just dull. Nondescrip. . .
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