Free Thunder by Anthony Bellaleigh

you did one thing right,” Ellard muttered as he recovered the device from its crevice and re-holstered his weapon. The phone was just restarting itself so with his gloved fingers he worked through a few of the icons, including the picture files, to make sure it was clean. It was. It buzzed again in his hand. Some random text from one of the UK Network Operators about charges whilst in France and then again, from some French number, a list of names and phone numbers. He left the phone on the text screen and chucked it onto the middle of the mattress.
    Carefully and quietly he went over every inch of the room. No other telltales.
    He grabbed the board bag, ducked quietly back out of the sash window, and then drew the glass gently down until the window was neatly closed behind him.
    He found the Renault Clio parked a couple of streets away. It was the right car, even though Iron had apparently swapped the number plates at some point. Ellard checked it quickly for booby traps – none – lifted the hatchback door – empty – and threw in the board-bag. As with the clumsily screwdriver-forced door locks, the interior of the car betrayed Iron’s thievery with the wiring loom hanging as a confused tangle from the steering column. Fortunately the regularly used, stripped back, starter motor wires were easy to spot.
    Ellard started the car and drove off, out of the city, in search of somewhere safe to get rid of it.
    ~~~~~
     
    Barfold
     
    Grey Beard is back. And Dad. And you. And Elizabeth.
    I don’t mind you and Lizzie coming to see me.
    I can just about put up with Dad.
    But, Grey Beard, come on! I’m having enough trouble sleeping without your gruesome visage cropping up every night. Leave me alone. Please! I’m very sorry you’re dead. I’m sorry you’re all dead...
    I can see your sweet lips moving, my darling Iuli. So are Dad’s. And Grey Beard’s... You all seem to be mouthing the same thing. Silently. Over and over again. “Do the right thing... Do the right thing...”
    Lizzie waves her little hand.
    I wish I was dead too.
    ~~~~~
     
    Berlin
     
    Jeyhun Farhad Ebrahimi sat on his solitary metal chair and stared nervously at the light blinking on top of the answering machine. The machine sat, oblivious to his undivided attention, on top of a battered wooden desk which – apart from a mouldy mattress, a crumpled sleeping bag, Jeyhun’s backpack, and a solitary chair – was the only furniture in the huge shadowy loft-space. Dusty light struggled in from a single, circular, glass window set into the gable-end wall of the abandoned warehouse. The rest of the loft was bathed in semi-permanent darkness.
    The answering machine’s wire trailed off the table, across an expanse of bare floorboards and continued, an ongoing straggle of cable, to the top of an iron staircase at the dim, windowless, end of the cavernous room. The cable disappeared into this hole and dropped, vertically and entirely unattached, three floors to the distribution box near the single back door. The local Deutsche Telekom telephone engineer had never had an easier installation: some young, well tanned, foreign man had met him by the door and had asked him to point out which pair of screw terminals the line was on, for a reel of cable and a socket, and then thrown him out...
    Jeyhun pushed himself up from the chair, stomped three short paces to the table and pressed play again. “They’re close. Watch your backs...,” the recorded message sounded bad.
    ‘Come on Sergei, come on, you must call in,’ he thought as he roughly pushed his long black hair to one side and glanced at the copies of Bild stacked on the table. Copies of newspapers he’d bought shortly after the attack.
    He pulled one nearer to him and, still standing, started turning the dog-eared pages. Time and time again he’d flicked through these copies. Looked upon the victims faces staring up from the pages. Read about the fury and anger directed toward them. Seen the news