Chapter 3

At least the goons didn't want to cause any civilian casualties, Benji thought as he was making his way down Oxford Street. The sound of gunshots ceased, as soon as he was out of the alleyway and into the crowded street, however they were still on his heels. Any illusion that it might not be so, was instantly destroyed by the agitated shouts of shoppers behind him. And surely they were catching up. Riding in Benji's wake, they had an easier time getting on than the agent, who had to fight his way through the dense crowd.

Benji tried not to think about that as he forced his way through the mass of people, with the use of elbows, when necessary. In front of him, men and women were jumping out of the way, pulling aside dogs and children as he ran past, alternately shouting "Excuse me!" and "I'm sorry!". He knew that he had virtually no chance of escaping them. If he stayed on Oxford street they would eventually catch up with him, that was only a matter of time. But if he turned into one of the smaller side-streets again he would be shot as soon as they would reach the corner of the street, and he couldn't be sure they wouldn't shoot to kill.

He was just thinking that it most likely would be better to be captured alive than to be shot dead when he suddenly saw his chance for escape, which came in the shape of a road-sign. It was the sign of Oxford Circus underground station that was looming over the crowd as if someone had put it there just for him. Taking two steps at once, he raced down the stairs, where the crowd was gradually getting lighter. That of course not only helped him but also his pursuers, whose steps he could already hear at the top before he had cleared the staircase. As he didn't want to give them the chance to get a clear target on him, Benji took the last of the steps in one leap and didn't slow down one bit as he ran straight for the trains. He didn't bother to pull out his ticket and simply jumped over the gates, much to the dislike of the station staff, but that was something he didn't care about just then. He didn't even consider taking the escalator as it was meant to, instead he used his forward momentum to get onto the middle part between the two stairs, turning it into a slide.

During his rather uncontrolled ride, Benji was gathering a little more speed than he was comfortable with, however, he did not try to break his fast descend, especially not when someone started to shoot at him from the top of the escalators. The agent tried to make himself as small a target as possible and when he reached the end of the slide, he lunged forward in a move that under other circumstances he would have called insane, which was followed by a roll that carried him sideways into the cover of the next corridor. Not trusting the quiet that evolved shortly afterward, he instantly got up again and fell back into his run right away, ignoring the bruised parts of his body that were protesting about his crazy stunt.

The corridor, of course, led onto a platform where, much to Benji's delight, a train was just waiting, ready to depart. The doors-closing alert was already bleeping when he literally jumped through the doors that snapped shut behind him. Breathing heavily, he looked around. He could see the smaller, brown haired man inside the corridor he had come out of, as the train rushed out of the station. With a sigh of relief, the technician stiffly sunk into a seat, and waited for his pulse to normalize as the train cart raced through the tunnels underneath the city. He did not notice the phone that was silently buzzing in his pocket.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

The knock on the door sounded practiced, short and polite, just loud enough to be heard, but not so much it would be intruding. "Come in," a voice called from inside and Brandt opened the door.

In the crisp light of a clear Oslo winter sky filtering in through the window, Elaine was sitting up in the hospital bed, dressed in a loose-fitting blue sweater. The blanket was spread over her legs, on it a book lay open in her lap. She was looking good, Brandt thought, but still the IV in her left arm, the drain bottles hanging next to the bed and the fact that she was leaning back heavily against the almost vertical headrest pointed to the contrary on closer inspection.

"Hi," he greeted her, closing the door. Slightly awkwardly he placed a vase with flowers and a box of chocolates on her nightstand. "How are you doing?"

"Alright so far," she replied with a relatively broad smile. "Wasn't expecting visitors."

Brandt pulled a chair closer and shrugged. "Well, what else am I gonna do with my vacation?"

Elaine chuckled. "Don't know? Vacation maybe?"

"Yeah, right," Brandt muttered and sat down. They sat in silence for a while, looking at each other unsure what to say.

Elaine was thoughtfully chewing her lip. "I'm sorry I took off like that," she finally said. "I know it was only a nightmare, but I freaked out and overreacted."

Brandt nodded compassionately. "It's okay. I mean I know how it is," he said haltingly. He knew he had surprised her, but now she had thrown him into the deep end. "They can be pretty scary. If you want to talk about it..."

"Not right now," Elaine admitted. "I just wanted to tell you. And, well..."

She broke off, not really knowing what to say. Or rather how to say what she wanted to say. Finally, she simply shifted slightly more towards him on the bed, reached one arm around his head and gently pulled him into a kiss.

She drew away again almost as soon as their lips had touched. Brandt felt confused and surprised but in a very positive way. He looked at her for a long second, her watery gray eyes mirroring the silent apology. Then he just kissed her back.

He was very careful, aware of her injuries, but after not seeing her for over two weeks, every kiss felt like a secret stolen moment and very satisfying. Until his phone rang.

With a sigh, Brandt sat up straight and fished it out of his coat pocket.

"I thought you have vacation?" Elaine chided.

"So did I," he muttered, then raised an eyebrow in surprise. "It's Luther."

Elaine looked at him expectantly, while he accepted the call.

"Yes?" he answered. There was a long pause, and his face grew dark. "Have you...? Alright... I'll be there."

"What's going on?" Elaine asked when he put down the phone after hardly a minute.

"I don't know. But Benji and Skye might be in trouble," Brandt answered with a deep frown.

"Then what are you still doing here?" Elaine replied.

Brandt smiled both in apology and thanks. "See you later," he said and on a hunch bent down to softly kiss her on the forehead, before he left.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

The train Benji was on was one of the Victoria line, northbound to Walthamstow. The most practical thing to do would most likely have been to get off at King's Cross / St. Pancras and from there take another train back to somewhere near the flat, however he didn't feel like walking through crowds with lots of people again, and so he stayed put as the train passed through the big station and waited for the smaller ones. Also, he didn't want to go back the way he had come.

Of course, the chance that his attackers were still around was small, but for Benji the possibility alone that at least one of them might be standing at Oxford Circus, waiting for him to return was enough. So he went up as far as Finsbury Park, where he changed trains to a southbound Piccadilly line service that would take him back to Leicester Square.

The adrenaline rush the chase had caused, slowly subsided, and he was quite calm again when he left the station at Leicester Square, through the ticket gates this time, like every other passenger. From the station, it was not far to the flat, and he was already hoping for a warm tea with a drop of Scotch and maybe an explanation for all this when a car came out of a side-street right in front of him. It was his subconscious that identified the black Mercedes with the peculiar scratch right above the left front tire and so he instinctively dived behind the advertisement board that stood on the sidewalk in front of a shop. Feverishly he thought about just where he had seen that car before, while bullets peppered the front of the board.

A moment later the salvo was followed by the sound of screeching tires, accompanied by a choir of honking car horns. When he carefully peered over the rim of his barricade, he saw that his pursuers had tried to do a not quite legal U-turn in the middle of the street, which had gotten them tangled up between a couple of other cars. Spotting his chance, Benji left his hiding place, and for the second time that day, he ran. In the chaos on the street, he went right across the road and onto Leicester Square, hoping he might be able to lose them there. However the driver did not only manage to somehow get out of the knot he had created, he also followed him onto the square. Of course, he didn't care that he actually wasn't allowed to.

Desperately Benji ran, ducking left and right into alleyways to evade his pursuers, but he wasn't able to shake them and soon ran out of small side-streets to hide in. So when he finally ended up on the corner of Pall Mall and Northumberland Avenue, that he was still alive was solely due to a lot of luck and the fact that shooting at a moving target from a moving car was somewhat harder than it looked in the movies, and now he was on a wide open street. Of course, he could have headed over Trafalgar Square and back into the small roads, but that hadn't worked the first time and he felt that his reserves were slowly used up. He needed another option, and he needed it quickly.

Desperate, the agent looked around for a bike, a scooter, anything that would give him the speed he needed to escape the car, and he almost didn't believe his luck when he saw what right then seemed to be a gift from heaven: A mail van was parked at the side of the street, keys in the ignition, while the postman had obviously gone inside one of the houses. Without thinking twice, Benji climbed into the driver's seat and started the small red truck. By then the Mercedes was level with the van's rear so that when Benji hit the gas, he pulled the van sharply to the right and shoved the black car right into the oncoming traffic.

In the rear-view mirror, he could see the Mercedes being hit right on by an Audi that came from the opposite direction. Both drivers managed to veer sideways, so it was not exactly a head-on collision, but it was enough to send them sliding sideways until both cars were stopped by a lamp post. Relieved, Benji let out the breath he hadn't noticed he'd been holding up to then, but left his foot on the gas, switching gears as he sped down the street towards the Thames. He knew that he couldn't be sure that his pursuers were as knocked out as their car, and sure enough, a moment later three men were climbing out of the car and pointing their guns at him. It was only a few meters to the crossroad and the agent had hoped that he would get there, take a straight left and with that move out of their range before they were ready to shoot.

But then, a delivery van of the Royal Mail was not a Ferrari, and although with the road sloping downwards towards the river it was picking up speed fast, Benji could hear the sharp clang of bullets hitting the metal rear of his vehicle. He flinched when one of them shattered his left mirror, but thanks to the closed cargo department, he didn't have to duck. Therefore he had a clear view out of the windshield and managed to just miss the biker who would otherwise have unpleasantly come into contact with his radiator grill. This brought him a little more to the right than he had wanted to get, but when Benji wanted to pull the van sharply to the left, the clang of bullets was joined by a strange exploding sound accompanied by a sharp hiss. At the same moment, he could feel the van suddenly sagging to the right. The agent desperately fought to somehow retain control of his car, but between his originally initiated steering left and the shot right rear tire dragging him to the other side, the inertia pushed the van further straight ahead.

The only problem was that, while there was a street going left and one going right, there was none up ahead. Stepping on the break, Benji furiously tried to stay on the street. As going left seemed to no longer be an option, he instead steered right, but all that happened was that the van was now sliding sideways instead of straight ahead, but still in the direction of the river. Orchestrated by the screeching of tires on wet asphalt and the honking of car horns, the van unsteadily slithered onto the sidewalk. For a moment the agent hoped, he might be stopped by the low wall that was designed to keep pedestrians from falling down onto the pier, however, several tons of mass together with the speed the car still had gave the vehicle enough momentum to carry it over the stone parapet.

As the van toppled over, Benji instinctively hid his head between his arms, still tightly clutching the wheel for lack of something better to hold onto. He got painfully aware that he had not had the time to fasten his seat-belt, especially in the short moment his back came into contact with the cabin roof when the van hit the ground. But before he could even worry about what he might have injured, the vehicle rolled over and he looked at something he was more familiar with than he liked: The view of a black, watery surface rapidly moving in his direction.