Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [104]
Fifty. Mancuso had never let him forget it. She moved the rocker switch on her gun to its third position. The light went from amber to red. The digital readout above the magazine read full.
Thirty. Twenty. Ten.
Mancuso was up and moving. Past shelves of Jim Beam and Cutty Sark. Past the smoking section. Bright packets of tobacco, diamorphine and alkaloid. On the other side of a pillar were rows and rows of mineral water in glass bottles. A man was running between the rows, from the far side of the mezzanine, running parallel with her. Breen. Exactly on time. He wasn’t McIlveen, but he wasn’t bad.
There were twin freight elevators at the back of the mezzanine, behind the checkout terminals. Dead ahead. One elevator had its doors open and boxes of bottles stacked inside. One man stood inside, organizing the stacking. A man and a woman passed cartons in to him. A second woman stood by the terminals at the checkout, supervising things. She had some kind of blunt small‐barrelled submachine gun slung on a strap from her shoulder. She was wearing an antique military tunic with epaulettes and big brass buttons. The submachine gun looked like a Weber, or a clone of one. The man inside the elevator had a similar weapon, set on top of a stack of cases beside him. The others either had concealed handguns or nothing.
It was the man inside the elevator who saw them first.
He didn’t even bother shouting a warning. He just turned, scooped up his Weber and began firing. The two carrying the packing cases screamed and ducked out of his way, throwing themselves on to the floor. The woman supervising fumbled for her gun, trying to drag it up across her body, and the strap snagged on a button on her tunic.
The man in the elevator was firing single rounds now, deliberate and carefully aimed. Breen popped up from behind a display for Tanqeray showing a hologram of a boar’s head and fired once, holding his pistol in a two‐handed grip. It was about twenty metres to the man in the elevator. The man went down, wounded in the shoulder, his Weber switching to automatic fire as he fell, blasting wildly all around in the confined space of the elevator, shredding packing cases and blowing apart bottles.
The woman on the floor in front of the elevator shouted something and jumped in among the cartons, trying to wrestle the gun away from him. The woman by the checkout had freed the strap from her buttons and was raising the Weber when Mancuso fired a long burst that tore the checkout terminal in half and shredded the plastic countertop beside her elbow. The woman dived clear of the exploding plastic.
Inside the elevator the other woman had grabbed the other Weber from the wounded man and was fumbling to change magazines. Outside the elevator the man with the boxes was lying flat on the floor, clamping his hands over his head. The woman from the checkout leapt over him and into the elevator. She knocked the other woman aside just as she was reloading the Weber. The wounded man was lurching forward, clutching his shoulder, blood flowing down his tee‐shirt. He let go of his shoulder and hit the freight elevator button with his good hand. The doors began to close and the man outside on the floor scrambled forward, throwing himself in among the others, elbowing aside the kneeling woman just as she loaded the Weber and was trying to take aim. The metal doors were sliding closed. Breen and Mancuso were both up and running. The woman with the Weber finally got it sighted and pulled the trigger. Mancuso fired from the hip as she ran. Ricochets screamed off the steel doors. The woman in the elevator fired wildly through the narrowing gap as they closed. A fluorescent tube imploded with a blue flashbulb pop above Mancuso. Delicate small fragments of glass snowed down on to her shoulders. Behind Breen a shelf rocked with the impact of a blast. Then the doors were shut and the elevator was heading down.
Mancuso’s ears were ringing in the sudden silence. Colourful liqueurs flowed smoothly out of pierced plastic bottles on a shelf by Breen, running