The Evolution of Fear (Claymore Straker #2) - Paul E. Hardisty Page 0,130

into the van, and handed her the icon on the other side of the glass. She held it in both hands, the splinters of her fingers searching over the wood, caressing, fondling, finding the nail hole, penetrating. She looked up. Her eyes were aflame, feverish. She gasped, closed her eyes. Then she reached back behind her and flipped a switch. Dialysis lights flickered and died, pumps spun down, fluids stalled in tubes.

‘The Judas who killed my brother,’ she said. ‘Give him to me. Two million as we agreed.’

Clay hung his head. Money being thrown around like empty beer cans at a Battalion piss up.

‘Keep it,’ said Crowbar, grabbing Clay by the hair, pulling his head back, putting the Beretta’s muzzle cold against his temple. ‘Let me have him.’

Uzi was to Clay’s right, the shooter just beyond, still at the wire, but facing them now, watching them, the muzzle of his rifle pointing away from Rania.

Medved sat fondling the icon, staring out at them from across the glass. Clay kneeling in the road, Crowbar’s handgun pressed into the side of his head, Rania still out there, blind and unable to move.

Then Medved coughed into a handkerchief, gazed down for a moment at the issue and raised her eyes. ‘No,’ she said, voice like iron on old splintered wood. ‘No.’ Then she twisted her head and faced the driver. The movement was surprisingly quick. ‘Kill her,’ she said.

50

The Blind and Ruthless Levers

Evolution never stops. Its time is measured not in seconds or centuries, but in generations – sex and death the blind and ruthless levers. Can a man evolve, or can he only put his hope in those that follow him, in those that he may cause to follow?

As Claymore Straker knelt in the pale illumination of the headlights, his fingers reaching for the grip of the loaded Beretta hard and clean against the base of his spine, hearing Regina Medved’s muffled words projecting through the cool night air, watching the van’s driver register those words and turn his head towards his colleague standing by the wire at the edge of the minefield, the moon pale and thin above the Pentadactylos in the distance, he knew that in himself evolution was retrograde. Inside him, a lower order had emerged, purer, shorter-lived.

The man by the wire turned to face Rania, started to raise his rifle.

The gun was in Clay’s hand now, coming forward. Uzi had seen what was happening and had started to react, was raising his weapon. Koevoet, too, was moving, bending into a crouch, his Beretta coming up, Medved there behind her ballistic polycarbonate laminate, fondling that amputated arm-end of crucifix, finger-fucking the hole, those eyes burning with a fervour almost divine, anaerobic, watching all of this unfold before her like some Macbeth of the mind.

Clay fired first. The shooter by the wire spun, fell just as Crowbar’s 9mm erupted behind Clay’s right ear. Uzi piled into the ground, a gaping hole in his chest. Clay was already on the move, sprinting towards the wire. Behind him, the muffled sounds of gunfire, the bark of an AK, car doors slamming, tyres spinning on gravel, headlights jerking across the road, over the fallow minefield. The second car, the Mercedes, was backing away now, engine screaming. Someone was leaning from the passenger window firing a handgun. Clay could hear the pop-pop-pop, see the muzzle flashes, was even aware that the bullets were intended for him. But he was indifferent to it all. He was at the wire now, the shooter immobile on the ground, the AK’s muzzle hanging oblique on the lowest strand of wire. Rania standing dark in the empty, moon-grey field, thirty metres away. More firing now, Crowbar banging away at the retreating vehicles, muzzle flashes in the darkness. A round pinged from the steel fencepost beside him. And then, from the far side of the buffer zone, a loud whoosh and a thin line of grey smoke rising into the night sky.

‘Rania,’ he shouted. ‘It’s me, Clay. Crouch and hide your eyes. Now.’

It was all he had time to say before the flare ignited. Clay crouched, the phosphorous burning above him. The ground at his feet lit up white, shadows lurching and tottering like drunks across the barren landscape. He scanned the ground for footmarks, any sign of the path Rania had taken as they’d forced her through the minefield, but there was only the hummocky ground scattered with thousands of jerking shadows. And then, from the Turkish lines, the