Revenger by Tom Cain

properly – and expect a clip round the ear if I didn’t. Just because we weren’t posh didn’t mean we couldn’t have manners, or treat each other with respect. Then, when I was eleven, my whole life was transformed.’
    The image on the screen cut from the devastation of the old estate to an image of a very different world. Now Adams was walking across a school campus of clean, modern buildings grouped around a lawn on which pupils sat and talked in the shade of leafy, well-tended trees.
    ‘Without Leeds Grammar I’d be nothing. My parents were so proud. No one in my family had ever been anywhere near a place like this before – not unless they were a cleaner or a tea-lady . . . But you’ve heard enough from me. Time for the people who know me to say their piece.’
    A grandfatherly, silver-haired man appeared on screen. A caption read, ‘Edward Trower: former housemaster.’
    ‘Mark was always a bright boy,’ Trower began. He gave a fond, indulgent chuckle. ‘I wouldn’t say he was an intellectual, but he had plenty of brains in his head when he felt like using them. Of course, he loved his rugby and played for the school at every age-level. It was no surprise at all to me when he said he wanted to apply to become an army officer. After all, he was the head boy of Lupton House. He was a natural leader.’

16
    DONNY BAKUNIN WAS almost exactly the same age as Mark Adams. He had also attended a grammar school, albeit at the other end of the country. But no one had ever described him as a natural leader back then. He had countless intellectual justifications for his anarchism, but the simple truth was that he loved the idea of a political creed dedicated to smashing the kind of people who naturally ascended to positions of power. Only in middle age had he discovered that he had quite a taste for power himself.
    As he made his way down Stewart’s Road towards the Wandsworth Road, past the low-rise estate on one side and the close-packed light-industrial units on the other, Bakunin could have been any drab, insignificant Londoner. He was walking fast, as people tended to do in this damp, depressing weather, his duffel-coat hood was turned up to keep the rain off his head, and there was an increasingly soggy roll-up in the corner of his mouth. There was no one else on the pavement, but if anyone had been there to hear the words he was muttering they probably would have taken him for just another nutter – there were a lot of them around these days.
    Only if they had paid particular attention would they have realized that the hood of his coat concealed Bakunin’s Bluetooth earpiece, through which he was giving a series of orders to the forces now massing in the abandoned council estate. Even then, it would have taken a highly unusual, specialized level of awareness to have deduced that the commands related to a violent act of criminality that was due to begin in a little over twelve minutes. Bakunin was running a minute or two late. He upped his pace still further, almost breaking into a run. It made the rain hit him harder, so that his glasses became so covered in water that he could barely see where he was going. But that did not matter. Bakunin could not afford to be late.
    He wasn’t the only one on the move. In a deserted side street off Nine Elms Lane one of the men in the parked-up garbage trucks checked his watch. Then he turned to the driver next to him and said, ‘Time to go.’
    The truck’s engine fired up, the lights came on and it rumbled off towards the main road. The second truck was close behind. The man in its passenger seat was checking his reflection in the driver’s mirror. His name was Jordan Hayes, but his mates called him ‘Random’ because they never knew what he’d do next. He had an armoured motorcycle jacket with black plastic plates protecting his chest, back, shoulders, elbows and forearms. The plates were outlined in red and made him look well sick, he reckoned, like some evil