Exit Wound by Andy McNab

the hotel or the golf club. They’d have to go themselves, or tell their mates to go and stake them out.
    There were other known locations. We’d been cruising round the old quarter; we’d visited the gold souk. Maybe they’d check Baghdad and the Indian place we’d eaten at last night.
    I sat right where I was as cisterns flushed either side of me and dads coaxed their kids to wash their hands. You didn’t have to be multilingual to understand what was going on out there.
    I checked my watch. I’d been there nearly half an hour. It was time to move or I’d miss the RV with Red Ken and Dex. I put my boots back on, replaced my shirt with the dark blue one in the plastic bag and shoved my purchases into my pockets. I put the flip-flops and cream shirt in the day-sack and left it hanging on the back of the door.
    I headed for Debenhams without glancing left or right, then down their internal escalator towards the ground-floor exit.
    I was surrounded by people getting into cars or cabs, some in burqa s, some in European summer dresses with half their tits hanging out.
    The sun was sinking but I didn’t want to hit the taxi rank yet. The Toyota was still out there. I ducked back towards the building. It was still only one up. The lads inside the mall would have to make their decision soon.
    The two shirts emerged. Checked was on his mobile, waving his free hand like a madman. White bollocked the driver, as if it was his fault they’d lost me.
    They jumped into the car and took off, and I joined the taxi queue.

26
    Last light
    I went straight into the toilet block without hanging about. Dex was lifting the Tata. Red Ken would meet me opposite the construction site to back him if things went tits up. A guy in dishdash and sandals bent over the sink, a finger blocking each nostril in turn while he snorted snot from the other into a trickle of water. I headed for one of the cubicles. Glossy marble and stainless steel it wasn’t, and the smell was indescribable.
    With my feet on the porcelain pads each side of the hole, I fished my docs and cash out of the dark blue Rohan trousers I’d chosen to match my long-sleeved shirt. They were wrapped in a hotel laundry bag. As soon as the snorter had left the block, I moved out and reached up to the ledge. My fingers found two more sets of docs up there, and the weapons gone. This was our final RV. We stored our means of escape here so we could go into the job sterile. All I had on me now was about six hundred dollars of on-the-run money.
    It didn’t matter what I felt about the job now. It was happening. If I let myself think too much about what might go wrong, I’d end up paralysed.
    I retraced my steps through the subway towards the Creek. I turned right as I came out, following exactly the same route as yesterday. Dhows were still tied up along the pavement, half a dozen deep. The Indian lads were still working their arses off in the dark.
    I chose the ill-lit side of the road. As soon as the construction-site floodlights came into view I waited for a break in the traffic and crossed back.
    Red Ken stood in the shadows by a massive set of roll shutters set into the wall of the fire station, fishing in his day-sack with rubber-gloved hands. ‘All right, son?’
    I gave him a nod as I put on my surgical gloves and slipped the head-torch around my neck.
    ‘Here.’ He handed me a Taurus, a Brazilian version of the Colt. 8 Special. ‘It’s loaded.’ He pressed a speed loader into my palm. ‘Spare.’
    I checked it. When I needed to reload, I would open the Taurus’s cylinder, push the bar, and the six empty cases would fall out. The speed loader had six rounds ready to drop into the chamber. All I had to do was press a button and the rounds would drop into position. I’d close the cylinder again and carry on firing. I slid the speed loader into a pocket in my Rohans and the weapon into my waistband. If we needed more than twelve rounds each to get out of the shit, we were