SEVERANCE KILL by Tim Stevens

in the process of rising to allow an elderly woman to sit down.
    For an instant, quite by chance, Gaines glanced in Calvary’s direction. Their eyes met. Calvary fought the urge to look away immediately, instead breaking eye contact at what seemed a natural interval. Had he seen something in the small man’s expression? Unease?
    Squat turned his head a fraction to the right to look out the window. Calvary saw the earpiece, like a tiny grey bead of flattened wax. The lips murmured. Calvary turned his own right ear towards the sound, leant in as close as he dared.
    No words were distinguishable. But the intonation, the sense that the speech was being formed thickly at the back of the mouth, told him that the language was Russian. As he’d suspected.
    He looked at the legend on the wall of the tram, trying to make sense of the route. It was more complicated than that of the Metro trains. Near the front, Gaines was checking his watch. Biting his lip. Calvary thought he had an appointment to keep, had dawdled in the beginning, walking instead of taking public transport, and was now running late.
    An appointment meant other people. He had to make his move before then. 
    The problem was Squat. He’d successfully ‘lost’ him, but couldn’t approach the target without immediately making himself known once more to the Russian. On the other hand, the Russian was alone on the tram. Calvary was fairly certain of that. The younger man, Parka, was far behind them in the street, and even if Squat had other colleagues, there was no way they could be keeping up closely enough to be able to come to his assistance quickly. If the hit on Gaines meant a confrontation with the Russian, then so be it.
    Five seconds, it would take, barging past Squat, shoving through the standing passengers, then the umbrella up, the point out and driven up into Gaines’s belly – he’d have to be turned a little first, one hand on the shoulder – and the driver would brake when he heard the screams. Calvary would force the doors open with the shaft of the umbrella and step out. The tram was moving at ten miles an hour, tops, and the brakes would have slowed it, so there’d be little risk in exiting. Then away, trailing chaos and screaming in his wake.
    The driver yelled something and the tram slammed to a halt. The passengers lurched as one organism. Calvary was sent sprawling into Squat, who staggered in turn against the woman in front of him. Squat turned and stared Calvary full in the face.
    Calvary looked past him because beyond the startled yells of the scattered passengers there was something happening at the front of the tram. The doors adjacent to the driver hissed open and men, their heads obscured by stocking masks, began to pour aboard.

SIX
     
    ‘What the hell’s going on...’
    The explosion of static and noise made Krupina flinch and knock a pile of papers off the desk with her flailing arm. Down the line there was shouting, female screams.
    Oleg yelled one word, that didn’t make sense – hijacking – and then he was drowned out.
    Krupina snarled, ‘Everyone. Find that tram. Go, go.’
     
    *
     
    There were three of them. Tracksuits, black stockings like cauls across their faces. Handguns drawn.
    The driver cowered, arms raised across his face. The screaming spread through the tram like flames. The crowd was beginning to turn, to press towards the back. Away from the guns.
    Gaines was blinking, dazed. One of the invaders grabbed him by the shoulder, jammed the gun against the side of his head.
    The surge of the crowd was going to reach critical mass in a moment, creating a wave Calvary wouldn’t be able to breach.
    With his right hand he jerked the nylon of the umbrella downwards so that the honed tip of the shaft burst through the gauze and flashed beneath the internal lighting of the tram. With his left he seized the horizontal handrail overhead. He contracted his abdominal muscles and jackknifed his legs and launched himself