Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,7

that he took a bullet for the Prime Minister. Chalky had never realised that the true story how he got the scar was actually far more impressive than anything else he could come up with.

‘Why won’t you see her again?’ Archer asked.

‘My card got declined at dinner. She had to pay. Don’t think she was happy about it.’

‘You made her pay?’

‘I hadn’t checked my account in a while. But I’m skint. We don’t get paid for another couple of weeks, and you keep taking all my money with that stupid rifle.'

Archer laughed. 'Are you serious?'

‘That wasn’t just it,’ his friend continued. ‘She kept banging on about my name. You had to put your real name on the website, and she said she'd only call me Danny, or Daniel.’

‘Imagine that. That’s your name.’

He shook his head. ‘She said Chalky made it sound like I was a builder or plastered walls for a living. We’d only just met and she was already nagging me like we’d been married for ten years.’

Archer shook his head and laughed, his low mood evaporating, all thoughts of Katic and New York disappearing. His best friend’s real name was Danny White, but everyone apart from his mother called him Chalky, an ironic nickname given his dark features. He used to hate it, but had now got used to it, and he never used his first name anymore. He and Archer had met when they both joined the police at eighteen and had been inseparable ever since. They were a perfect foil for each other. Chalky's exuberant personality meant he often needed someone to keep him in line, which is where his best friend came in, but in return he had a knack for lifting Archer’s mood no matter how shitty he was feeling.

Across the range, there was another bang as Porter fired. This one went straight through the target’s torso, around where the liver would be, and the paper gently billowed from the impact of the bullet. A kill. Porter looked up and smiled as Fox swore, then racked the bolt and pulled the magazine from the weapon. As he inspected it and made sure it wasn’t loaded, Archer checked his watch.

‘Oh shit. We need to go, lads,’ he called. ‘It’s eight o’clock.’

Across the range, Porter finished inspecting the weapon, then applied the safety catch. He folded down the tripod and carried the weapon and the magazine carefully to a black equipment case, stowing them inside. He clicked it shut and lifting it, he and Fox walked over to join the other two men to return their binoculars and ear defenders to the racks.

Archer and Chalky rose, draining their drinks, and after tossing the foam cups in the bin, the four men headed to the exit, Fox pulling a ten pound note from his pocket with his free hand and passing it to Porter with a shake of his head as they walked.

Given the difference in time-zone, 8:00 am in London was 3:00 am in New York City. Although it was known as the city that never slept, it often dozed, and as it was the middle of the night on an early Thursday morning most of the city's eight million residents, spread out across the five boroughs, were fast asleep. Above the still-open bars and bodegas and shimmering lights that glowed all night down below, the high-rise apartment buildings of Manhattan housed the wealthier of those eight million people.

And one new member to this club was a dark-haired man in his early forties, a man who still couldn't believe that it had happened to him.

He worked as a bodyguard-for-hire, not normally a job that came with an impressive paypacket. Truth be told, it was typically shitty, thankless work which involved a lot of hanging around and unpaid overtime. But he was a solid professional, well-trained and good at what he did, and a year's worth of employment with an Arab oil Sheikh and a sequence of ever-increasing salary bumps had meant the man could finally move out of his old, beaten-down, two-roomed apartment in Brooklyn and take up residence in a Manhattan high-rise. He now lived in a comparatively luxurious place, on the twenty second floor of an East 41st apartment building overlooking the East River, Queens and his old neighbourhood in Brooklyn across the water. The apartment had two bedrooms, an en-suite bathroom, a lounge, kitchen and washroom. The building had a gym and a large roof-space available to all the residents, and he found