Who were these men? Ben didn’t have much time to consider the answer, or to yell at Roberta ‘What the hell have you got yourself mixed up in?’. The shooters were halfway across the park already, running fast. Ben slithered back down the bank and rejoined Roberta.
She still appeared stunned from the suddenness and violence of the attack. ‘They’re coming,’ he said. ‘Let’s move.’
‘Where to?’ she gasped, looking around her wide-eyed. Once they left the shelter of the wall, there’d be nothing around them but open field. The nearest cover was the half-built housing estate a hundred and fifty or more yards away, shimmering like a mirage in the heat haze.
Ben had already decided that was the only place they could run to. He could only pray that the gate he could see in the eight-foot wire mesh fence surrounding the building site wasn’t locked. He took her hand tightly in his, and they set off at a sprint towards the distant buildings. The grass was long and lush, and tugged at their ankles as they ran. Roberta stumbled over a rut and went down on one knee. As Ben helped her back to her feet he saw the two men clamber over the wall, spot them across the field and give chase. ‘Move!’ he rasped, yanking her arm.
The chatter of sound-suppressed machine-gun fire sounded from behind. Dirt and shredded grass flew up in Ben and Roberta’s wake.
One thing Ben knew for sure – the gunmen weren’t interested in catching them alive. They were shooting to kill.
He let go of Roberta’s hand and shouted ‘Zigzag!’ She glanced at him in stunned terror for an instant, then understood and began to imitate him as he tore through the long grass in a crazily erratic weave, like a hare trying to evade a chasing lurcher. A desperate strategy. It made them a harder target to hit at this range, but it also gave them further to run than their pursuers.
The wire fence was coming up fast. Signs on posts read DANGER: KEEP OUT and HARD HAT ZONE. Beyond the wire were bare-block buildings, construction skips, cement mixers, enormous mounds of sand, portacabins for the building crews. Ben’s jaw clenched tighter as he saw the heavy chain and padlock looped around the mesh gates. He glanced behind him. In a few seconds the shooters would be close enough to take them down easily.
‘Climb!’ he yelled at Roberta. Without hesitation she hooked her fingers into the wire meshwork and started clambering up the fence. As she reached the top she swung her leg over, scrabbled frantically halfway down and then let go and hit the ground with a soft grunt. Ben was right behind her. He felt dreadfully exposed with his back to the shooters, hanging from the fence like a target on a board.
He heard the muffled bark of shots. A bullet struck sparks off the steel fencepost inches from his right hand as he climbed. He launched himself over the top of the wire and hit the ground the way he’d learned in parachute training, rolling to absorb the impact and leaping straight back to his feet in an instant run.
The buildings were clustered close together, some almost completed and clad in scaffolding, others still in the early stages of construction with bare-block walls just a few feet high. Roberta was already making for the nearest, a shell of a house with no roof and empty holes for doors and windows. She was limping.
More shots. A puff of dust off the wall to Roberta’s left as she staggered inside the building, clutching her leg. Ben was ready to feel a bullet in his back as he sprinted after her, but it didn’t come. He skidded through the doorway.
Roberta was pressed up against the wall, breathing hard, looking at him in alarm. ‘I told you,’ she gasped. ‘Now do you believe me? So much for the Paris cops and their bullshit. Serial killer my ass.’
‘What’s wrong with your leg?’ he asked, noticing the way she was holding it.
‘Twisted my ankle jumping from the fence. It’s fine, I can move it,’ she added with a wince of pain.
Ben quickly crouched down and tugged the left leg of her jeans up a few inches. He could see nothing bad, no swelling, no discolouration. ‘You’ll live. If you don’t get shot.’
‘Hell of a thing to say at a time like this,’ she replied anxiously. ‘What do we do, Ben?’
His mind was sharp, working fast and smoothly. Trained responses under stress were so deeply conditioned in him that even with adrenaline levels running through his veins that would reduce most men to a panicking jelly, everything appeared in slow motion. He stepped lightly across to the nearest window and peered cautiously out through the glassless hole.
The shooters had reached the fence. As Ben watched, they each aimed their weapons at the padlock on the gate and let off a flurry of gunfire that sounded like a lump hammer clanging against an anvil at impossible speed. The wrecked padlock dropped away, the chain parted and jangled loose. The men kicked the gates open with a metallic clatter and strode into the building site.
‘They’re coming,’ Ben said quietly.
‘Oh, my God. Who are they?’
‘We can talk about that later,’ Ben said. ‘For now it’s time to move on. Can you stand?’
She nodded. He took her hand. Put a finger to his lips and then pointed it through the house at the back door. ‘That way,’ he whispered.
Roberta hobbled after him as he exited the building. They skirted a low adjoining wall and crossed a patch of rubble-strewn ground to the house next door, which had its roof A-frames, beams and battens already mounted under a plastic covering that crackled in the soft breeze and darkened the skeletal rooms in shadow.
Ben thrust Roberta into a dim corner with a look that said, ‘Stay there’, and let go of her hand. He trotted to the window. Twenty yards away, the two shooters were stalking through the site with their weapons shouldered and ready, glancing left and right for any movement, any trace of their quarry. Their faces were steely and predatory. The older one signalled to his colleague and they split up out of sight among the buildings and construction machinery.
Ben glanced quickly around him, taking in the layout of their cover. Front door, back door, patio window, garage, other points of entry. Too many possibilities and not enough hiding places. The unfinished home reminded him with sharp discomfort of the dedicated ‘killing house’ that he and his SAS squads had used for live-fire room assault, hostage extraction and anti-terrorist combat drills at the regimental base in Hereford, back in the day. Nothing could escape the killing house without getting drilled full of bullets and buckshot by the Special Forces tactical teams.
If these two guys were even half that proficient at their job, this wasn’t a good place to be. Not a good place at all.
‘Ben!’ came a hoarse whisper. Roberta was peering at him worriedly from the shadows. ‘What are we gonna do?’ she hissed.
‘Stay put, for now,’ Ben replied softly. ‘You keep out of sight and keep quiet.’
‘I still know karate,’ she whispered. ‘I can fight.’
Now that the initial shock of the attack had passed, her expression was alert and focused. Ben remembered well enough that Roberta Ryder had always been a lot less squeamish about violence than the average female science academic. During their escapades together in Paris she’d used her Shotokan black belt skills to lethally defend herself against a knife attacker, wrecked cars, been drenched in blood and gore during a gunfight on the banks of the River Seine and later shot a man in the thigh with an automatic pistol. On that occasion she’d saved Ben’s life, not for the first time.
But here, today, they were going to need more than karate