A Silent Death Peter May (i read book TXT) 📖

to take them on to the next stop of this hopeless quest. And the next. And the next. If there was one thing worse, he thought, than people who dealt in drugs, it was those who trafficked in people. Pedlars of misery and the cruellest of false dreams. And it was, he knew, only going to get worse. More and more criminal gangs were abandoning the lucrative but dangerous traffic in drugs in favour of people smuggling. People were a cheap, reliable and endless source of revenue, the authorities spent less time and effort in trying to prevent the flow of illegal immigrants, and the consequences of capture were far less punitive.

From somewhere far off in the building he heard a woman scream. He froze, listening intently, only to become aware of every eye in this hellish place turned in his direction. He hesitated for just a second before sprinting back through the rubble, and along the hallway which had brought them here. On the landing he stopped, gasping for air, and strained to hear above the sound of his own breath echoing back at him off cancerous concrete. He heard a clattering of footsteps from the next floor up and took the stairs two at a time. Only to have his heart very nearly stop. Two teenage boys came hurtling down and parted only at the last moment to stream either side of him. Like water around a rock. Then they vanished into the night.

Mackenzie stood breathing hard, trying to recover his composure. No point in going after them. If Cristina was anywhere, she was on the next floor up. And so he continued the climb, playing his torchlight on the stairs ahead of him.

On the next landing a mirror image of the hall downstairs opened off into a corridor mired in darkness. A crude door had been fixed to the hinges of the first apartment on his right. It stood ajar, and light fell into the dark. Grit and detritus crunched beneath his feet as he moved towards it, one careful step at a time. He reached out and pushed it open with the flat of his hand. Candles and an oil lamp burned in here on a table pushed up against the far wall. There were several chairs around it, one tipped on to its back. Several plates of unfinished food had been abandoned, and a cigarette still burned in an ashtray. Three old metal bedsteads stood side by side against the right-hand wall, makeshift mattresses thrown across rusted sprung frames, tortured sweat-stained sheets lying crumpled on each. But there was no one here.

Mackenzie turned quickly back towards the stairway and heard a muffled cry from the top floor. He shone the beam of his torch ahead of him as he climbed into darkness, becoming aware that there were no longer any walls around him. The tower that housed the stairwell, and what would have been the lift shaft, was completely open to the elements on three sides. Moonlight flooded in now, casting oblique shadows across the steps. Out there, where stars shimmered in the night sky, seemed a world away, and the ground below a dangerous drop into the dark.

As he stepped out on to the topmost level he realized that there was nowhere else to go. An unfinished doorway to his left led on to a small square of roof terrace. Turning to his right he stepped on to the top landing, dusty concrete laid on four sides around a square opening intended to house the lift mechanism. Concrete pillars at each corner supported the roof above.

A gathering of three men and a stricken Cristina stood with their backs perilously close to the drop at the far side of the empty shaft. One of the men held her from behind, his hand over her mouth, the barrel of her SIG Pro pushed against her temple. He was dangerously thin, wearing a torn singlet and filthy sneakers. A soiled red bandanna wrapped itself around greasy hair that fell to his shoulders. The other two dangled scarred baseball bats from arms that bulged beneath stained white T-shirts. They faced off to Mackenzie across the gap, and he could see the terror in Cristina’s eyes by the light of the moon that angled in across his shoulder.

He realized that having light behind him gave him an advantage, and he raised the beam of his torch to shine directly at the group opposite. He would barely be visible to them, but could see almost every pore on the unshaven faces of Cristina’s captors.

In what seemed to Mackenzie like a stage whisper one of them said to the man holding Cristina, ‘What do we do?’

‘Has he got a gun?’

‘Can’t see.’

And Mackenzie realized it wasn’t Spanish that they spoke. But Arabic. He relaxed a little and started moving cautiously around the perimeter of the lift shaft towards them.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘We don’t have to do this the hard way. No one has to get hurt here.’ And he registered their surprise. This strange pale Caucasian was speaking to them in Arabic.

Cristina’s fear morphed into confusion as Mackenzie appeared to engage her captors in conversation. A language that she didn’t understand. He seemed unnaturally relaxed as he and the man pressing the gun to her head swapped several short exchanges. Then to her astonishment she felt the hand around her mouth relax its grip, and as her captor let her go he stepped forward to lay the SIG Pro carefully on the concrete floor.

Mackenzie approached along one side of the opening, and all three men moved warily along the facing edge. When Mackenzie stooped to pick Cristina’s gun from the floor, they made a break for the stairs. She heard their footsteps clattering down into darkness and thought she was going to faint with relief. But Mackenzie was there with a hand on her arm to steady her. He smiled and handed back her gun.

‘You should be a little more careful about