Читать книгу Night Trap - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 13

Number 1743 was a nondescript office building put up sometime after the Great Patriotic War, vaguely influenced by Western designs of the fifties, so probably from the seventies. It had a central entrance and a guard who was nothing more than a presence—an aging man in two sweaters who sometimes had this or that to sell. He would be no trouble.

There were four men. Despite differences, they looked alike because they were all of the same age and they had all led the same life—former Spetsnaz. Three of the four needed a shave; none of them wore a tie or a hat.

The guard waved them to stop.

The first man put a hand on the old man’s chest and pushed him gently back while the others went past. Then the man told him to lie face down, showing him a pistol. The old man lay down. The young man shot him in the back of the head.

They trotted up the two flights of stairs and turned right and trotted to a door that said VENUX in English characters. Inside were fluorescent lights and head-height partitions in cheap beige fabric, a sense of modernity and busyness rare in that building, in that city.

The four men went through the door, took out silenced Type 51 Kalashnikovs and began firing through the partitions. They sprayed the room methodically, and when one ejected a clip he would drop it into a bag and slam home another and resume shooting. Men and women were screaming and trying to run away, and a man looked over a partition by jumping up and down until he was hit. Others were heroic and tried to shield the fallen, until they were hit, too.

Two of the men went from cubicle to cubicle, shooting each body in the head, alive or dead. The third man guarded the door, while the fourth took a device from his backpack, carried it to the center of the room, and, checking his watch, tripped a timer.

They trotted out one after another, covering each other, the first one firing at the horrified people in the corridor, and each one after him, firing as he ran, to the stairs, down the stairs, and they were gone.

The bomb blew and fire belched from the smashed windows.