Killing for the Company

altar — it was fucking heavy — before turning and running after Suze and the kid.

The two of them were about five metres from the conductor and just turning to head back down the aisle when Harry tripped. He fell heavily on to the hard stone floor. By the time he’d scrambled to his feet, all arms and legs, Luke was there with them. If he could get them out of range…

‘Get down!’ he urged them, the choir ringing in his ears. As he spoke, he saw someone else approaching them up the aisle. It was the cleric who had greeted them, only this time his face was a lot less serene as his cassock flowed behind him.

‘Please,’ he said above the singing once he was just a couple of metres away. ‘This is a place of worship. I must ask that you keep silent…’

‘GET DOWN!’ Luke barked at Suze and Harry. ‘GET DOWN! ’ The priest drew himself up to confront Luke and was rewarded by the force of the Regiment man’s forearm against his chest, pushing him to the side of the aisle and towards the pews.

‘FUCKING GET…’

The gunshots were inaudible, clearly fired from a suppressed weapon. Their consequences, however, were there for everybody to see.

The boy was the first to go. The round hit him in the side of the head, just in front of the left ear. There was a spray of blood over the stone floor of the cathedral, but he didn’t fall fully to the ground because he was still being pulled along by his mother, who looked over her shoulder in annoyance that he appeared to be slouching.

One glance, however, and she realised what had happened.

By now Harry had crumpled to the floor and slid slightly along the stone, smearing the spatter of his own blood as he went. Luke saw Suze silently mouth her son’s name, her face melt into an expression of the purest horror and anguish. Then he heard her voice. ‘Harry! HARRY! ’ Behind him the choir, still oblivious to what had happened, soared towards another mighty climax.

‘Hit the ground!’ Luke bellowed at Suze. ‘HIT THE GROUND! ’

The shooter was standing in the shadows of the third arch along, and had her suppressed handgun pointed, ready to take another shot. Suddenly she was knocked sideways. An old lady appeared where the woman had stood, wearing a grey woollen overcoat and brandishing a heavy, old-fashioned handbag that she’d just swiped at the assassin. The have-a-go-heroine was clearly furious, but in an instant the barrel of the assassin’s gun was touching her head. There was a flash of blood and skull as the old lady’s body absorbed the cartridge and the propellant.

The shooter had turned again. Suze was kneeling in the aisle, cradling the body of her son. A dreadful, desolate moan escaped her lips. Luke had dropped the bronze cross with a clatter. As he ran towards her he sensed the vicar chasing him. He could see that the top three inches of Suze’s head were visible to the shooter above the pews.

The third shot, like the previous two, made barely any noise, but there was a sickening thud as it slammed into the top of Suze’s skull, ripping out a chunk of her head and throwing her about a metre backwards so that she clattered into the pews behind her. When her body came to rest, she was spread-eagled, her arms stretched out to either side, her back leaning against the edge of the pews and her face a bloody and unrecognisable pulp.

Luke dived to the ground, falling hard on his shoulder and turning on to his back to take in the situation. A few members of the choir had realised now what was going on. The music began to falter and suddenly there was a scream from one of the schoolboys in uniform — a little kid who couldn’t have been more than nine. The priest, who had been chasing Luke, was standing among the dead. His face had turned grey with horror and now he was looking directly at the assassin.

Luke hurled himself forward, diving over the child’s body to wrestle the vicar to the floor. But he was too late. The fourth round caught the man on the side of his skull just before Luke’s shoulder made contact with his legs. As Luke barged him to the floor, his blood sprayed an arch over the flagstones.

There was chaos now in the ranks of the choir. Panic echoed around the cathedral. Screaming. Kids and pensioners alike were running from their position in front of the main altar, seeking cover from the sniper in the shadows, while some of them looked around desperately for somewhere to hide. Others were frozen by fear. Why shouldn’t they be? They hadn’t been trained to keep calm under fire. Luke’s head rang with the shouts of terror rebounding off the stone walls and around the dome. He did what he could to ignore them.

Still on all fours in the aisle, and under the cover of the pews, he scrambled back to where he had dropped the bronze cross — his only weapon. Looking forward, he saw three old men who had formed a ring around five frightened kids. He grabbed the cross and scrambled along one of the pews to his right. He had to try to get his hands on the shooter, but that meant keeping out of sight until he was almost upon her.

It took him ten seconds to crawl the length of the pew. He emerged seven or eight metres in front of the small altar where he’d been talking to Suze. He kept low and peered round to his right, his eyes sharp for the woman in the shadow of the arch, ready to take cover again at the first sign of being in her line of fire.

He saw her, but it was fleeting: just the shadow of a black figure stepping over the cordon of the stairwell fifteen metres away and leading down into the crypt. Was that a dead end? She had made her first mistake. Luke jumped up from his hiding position between the pews and sprinted towards the stairwell, where he stopped.

The stairs were about two metres wide. He could count twelve steps but there were more out of sight. A dim light was flooding upwards.

Was she expecting him to follow? Was it a trap? Was she waiting, weapon at the ready?

Luke gave himself a few seconds to form a sitrep in his head. He was in an impossible tactical situation. If he walked down those stairs he’d be lit up, an easy target, dead before he got to the bottom. If he’d been tooled up, with men at his disposal, with weapons and body armour, they could have just chucked down a flashbang or a frag, laid down fire and gone in noisy. But he had none of that. Just a stupid fucking cross.

He hesitated. Fom beyond the walls of the cathedral, he heard the sound of sirens.

Police.

He looked around. The main body of the cathedral was empty, its occupants crushing round the main entrance to get out. Luke himself had spatters of blood over him from his proximity to the carnage. Was this a situation he wanted to explain to the Old Bill? To his OC?

Like fuck it was.

With a sudden burst of anger he hurled the bronze cross down the stairs and heard it clattering on the hard floor below. His only option was to disappear. Now.

Luke pulled his hood a little further over his brow and put his head down. Nobody, he calculated, would notice another frightened member of the public rushing to escape the carnage, and he was right. A crowd of choristers, visitors and clerics were huddled around the doors of the cathedral, pressing against each other, shouting, desperate to escape.

Luke joined them quietly. Just as it was his turn to leave, he glanced back over his shoulder, ignoring the way the last few stragglers were jostling to get away. He could just see them, the three bodies in the aisle, alone in the massive space of the cathedral. Nobody was anywhere in the vicinity. Nobody was paying them any attention. No churchman was ministering to them. They just lay there, gruesome in death, and alone.

He remembered the face of the little boy. Chet’s boy. Now dead, like his father. The thought was a needle in Luke’s soul as he pushed out into the open air. The sound of sirens was louder, the chaos intense. Luke hurried down the stone steps and disappeared into the night.

TWENTY-TWO

8 December.

The Manhattan offices of the Grosvenor Group occupied the top three floors of a skyscraper on East 43rd Street. From the penthouse the towers of the city were visible all around: the Chrysler Building, the UN, the Empire State. The two men talking there remembered the days when the Twin Towers loomed over everything. They’d been in this very building when the planes hit. Along with the rest of Manhattan they’d rushed from the city in panic; unlike the rest of Manhattan, the events of 9/11 had brought an upward trajectory in their fortunes. War was