Ivory Nation, Andy Maslen [e manga reader .txt] 📗

kill me. There’s money over there, in the safe. Take it. I can give you the combination. It’s—’

‘Shut up! We don’t want your money.’

Outside the door she could hear people shouting. Someone was hammering to be let in. Eli turned, flicked the fire selector switch to single shot and fired once into the very top of the door.

The hammering stopped.

She returned her gaze to Joshua.

‘Three questions. Three answers. Tell the truth, you live. Lie, you die.’

‘Sure, sure,’ he said, in a panicky voice.

‘The market in Vientiane. Address?’

‘It’s an old Catholic church on Tad Thong Road. By…’ he gasped, ‘by the river.’

‘Good. When is it held?’

‘First Monday of every month.’

Eli paused for a moment. That gives us a week.

‘What’s the security?’

‘I do not know what you mean. What security?’

‘Oh dear. And we were doing so well.’ Eli took a half-step closer. She pointed the AK at his stomach. ‘Goodbye, Joshua.’

‘No! Wait! The market boss is called John-Antoine Vong. You need a password. It’s…’ He hesitated. ‘Mekong.’

Eli stood.

‘There,’ she said. ‘That wasn’t so hard, was it?’

She stamped down hard on his right instep. He screamed and clutched his foot. She crouched in front of him.

‘Mekong? Really? Every fucking tourist in the place would be saying it.’ She got right in his face, so close she could smell his fear-sweat and the blood that was slowly congealing on his cheeks. ‘Last chance, Joshua. Password.’

‘I am looking for the Pompidou Centre,’ he grunted.

‘What?’

He repeated himself. ‘That’s what you say. Then the door guy, he says, “You’re a long way from Paris”. And then you say, “But Vientiane is cheaper.” Then you’re in.’

Eli stood. Satisfied. It was too random for him to have made it up.

‘Stel, you ready?’ she asked.

Stella was hunched over one of the dead guards.

‘Hold on,’ she said, then she stood up and turned to Eli.

Eli winced. Had Stella just taken a trophy? But there was no ear or nose clasped between her fingers. Just a couple of flick-knives and a small chrome revolver.

She held them out to Eli.

‘Leave the Kalashnikovs, but take these.’

Eli nodded. She collected the AKs and dropped out the magazines. These she stuffed into her bag.

‘Ready?’ she asked.

‘The window, I think,’ Stella said.

Eli nodded. Smart. She rammed one of the unbroken chairs under the door knob then bent and, with a grunt, lifted the unconscious door guy onto its well-worn seat.

She cleared the sharp glass teeth from the window sill with one of the AKs then dropped it inside as she scooched herself up and over and into the street. Stella followed, handing Eli one of the knives.

‘Let me have the gun,’ Eli said, holding out her hand.

‘Fuck off! It’s an Airweight. A Model .38? Believe me, I know how to use one of these.’

Eli grinned as some of the adrenaline began to leave her system.

‘OK, “Joyce”, but let’s be quick.’

Stella reached the front of the Oasis Lounge. So automatic gunfire clearly didn’t put off the usual crowd. The young man they’d paid to look after the Hilux was still there, with his friends, a bottle of beer in his right hand, his left resting on the hip of a girl in a white string vest over a fluorescent-orange bra.

‘Lively tonight, yes, Missus?’ he said, to caws of laughter from the crowd.

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘That’s Old Naledi for you,’ he said with a grin. ‘Best neighbourhood in G-City.’ He turned and pointed at the Hilux. ‘There’s your wheels. Just like you left ’em.’

‘And here’s your money. Just like I promised. You want to earn a little extra?’

‘Sure. What you want me to do?’

Eli pulled another fifty from her pocket. She held it up where he could see it.

‘If the cops arrive, tell them four white guys arrived in a white Range Rover and shot the place up. They took off that way.’

Eli pointed in the opposite direction to her route back to the hotel.

He winked. Plucked the note from her fingers and stuck it into the waistband of his Calvin Klein boxers, of which a good three inches showed above his belted jeans.

‘They were big guys, officer,’ he said. He held his hand flat about a foot over Eli’s head. ‘Up to here. Built like tanks. South Africans.’

She smiled.

‘Attaboy!’

As they regained the relative safety of G-City’s commercial district, a police car shot past them in the opposite direction, lights flashing, siren wailing. Eli turned to Stella.

‘Trouble in Old Naledi.’

‘I heard some South Africans have been running riot.’

Eli grinned. Stella grinned back. Eli swerved to avoid a pothole deep enough to drop a body into.

‘Shit!’

Half a block behind them, the Syrian watched their tail-lights weave for a second. His own lights were dark.

34

He estimated he had killed about eighty people. Of those, he had assassinated precisely fifty-eight. The approximation came from his exploits in uniform where his prowess with a heavy machine-gun had led to a large but unspecified number of deaths.

As he observed the two British women in the Hilux, tracking east along Kudumatse Road, he mentally revised his commercial total to sixty. Unprofessional, he knew, to count his chickens before they died in a welter of blood and tissue, but really. Two women, British women at that! Well, it was hardly a rough day at the office, now was it?

For this particular piece of wetwork, he’d selected a pistol. The scratched and dented but perfectly serviceable Colt 1911 was nothing fancy. No Picatinny rail housing a light or reflex sight. No suppressor or muzzle brake. No adjustable backstrap. No under-barrel laser. Just a couple of pounds of black steel housing seven .45 ACP hollow-point rounds in the magazine.

But they’d been made in their millions and found their way into the hands of criminals as well as soldiers and law enforcement professionals from Argentina to Zimbabwe.

In other words, the perfect disposable weapon that would point a million fingers, none of them at him. He’d bought it a week earlier from a dealer in Block 8, a sketchy Gaborone neighbourhood that made Old Naledi look like Manhattan’s Upper East