Chapter Twenty-Two: Part One
Silvio eased his quiet hybrid electric car along the dark and deserted alley without headlights. Earlier in the day, he had pulled the bulbs from the interior light fittings to avoid attracting attention when the doors opened. He selected a spot where the shadow was deepest, parking with his passenger’s side right up against a solid brick wall so it wouldn’t inadvertently block another vehicle and be noticed if one happened to come through. Silvio grimaced as he stood, taking a moment to let the pain from his groin settle before awkwardly picking his way on foot to the next cross alley. He turned and followed that narrow laneway to a point where he could covertly observe Alberto’s front door from just across the road, with almost no chance of being noticed.
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A ragged figure moved stealthily up the alley, pausing behind an industrial bin to shed his bulky overcoat. He held his night vision goggles up to his face one more time before setting them aside with the overcoat. He silently covered the remaining thirty metres to Silvio’s car and eased the door open, thankful that it was unlocked and quiet. He worked on the bomb for a few moments before locating and turning off Silvio’s mobile phone, slipping it into his pocket. Less than ninety seconds later, he pressed the car door closed with his hip before retracing his steps. He shrugged the rancid overcoat back on and climbed into the heavy steel industrial bin. Juan-Carlos touched behind his ear and said, ‘Two plastic fuel cans with the lemon, all taped up tight.’ Lemon was the military nickname for the M26 grenade. He wedged the heavy steel lid of the bin open slightly with a piece of packaging he’d found inside the bin and settled in to wait, taking the opportunity to remove the sim card from Silvio’s phone.
After almost thirty minutes, he heard via his radio that his friends were arriving at Alberto’s. Peeking out from under the almost closed lid of the bin a few minutes later, he watched Silvio walking awkwardly back to his car and slowly ease himself into the driver’s seat. As Silvio reached across for his crudely assembled but deadly firebomb, Juan-Carlos closed the angled metal lid over himself and ducked deep into the protection of the thick metal industrial bin. Squatting on some discarded packing material inside, he closed his eyes, covered his ears and opened his mouth…
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Watching the restaurant, his patience was rewarded. Seeing everyone arriving with smiles, laughing and heading into the restaurant, Silvio was becoming increasingly livid. They weren’t even breaking routine, as if they expected him to just tuck his tail and run away. It was all that bitch’s fault! She was taunting him. Every image and every lie she told from the business and social pages was her way of disrespecting him. The lying bitch even blamed him for her own weaknesses! That lying slut, prancing about with some rich pretty-boy as if she was something special! How dare she think she was equal to him? Tonight, she would learn to respect him, her and her arsehole friends, all of them. Tonight, they will all learn, and they will know that they fucked with the wrong man. Especially that cowardly bitch who kicked him from behind. He smiled, thinking about how much he was going to love seeing the looks on their faces when they realised that he was their better and that they had lost. As if they could ever hope to match me! They were still laughing at their temporary victory… he could hear them laughing at him from where he hid. Soon they will learn, and they will burn and die with his face and his victory in their feeble and despairing little minds.
Still shuffling to reduce the pain from his swollen testicles, he left his concealment to retrieve his bomb. Throwing the thing was going to hurt, but he would use the pain to make him stronger. He lurched towards his car, wishing there was a breeze to clear the air as his nose wrinkled at the smell of an industrial bin. As if he would let them get away with treating him like that. That coward who let a woman fight for him had said it’s arsehole season. Well arsehole, I’m about to show you who’s the lion and who’s the hunted. How dare they even dream they could get away with treating him like that?
He climbed gingerly into his car and sniffed, still smelling the pervasive odour of the bin. Never mind… they were in there, all of them. He grunted and smiled. It was time to make things right.
He reached across, carefully feeling for it in the dark. It was still on the floor on the passenger’s side, right where he’d left it. He closed his door to push against with his knee, and repositioned himself twice until he could shift his weight enough to lift it without too much pain from his swollen groin. Making sure he had a solid grip, he lifted and hauled it onto his lap in one smooth movement. A question started forming in his mind, wondering if he’d actually heard or imagined a metallic ‘ting’, like something bouncing off the passenger’s window. It was the very last thought that Silvio Schivello had.
The M26 fragmentation grenade has a lethal range measured in metres. Silvio’s grenade was less than thirty centimetres from his nose and taped to twenty litres of high-octane fuel in his lap when it detonated, obliterating him. His existence had already ceased long before his eyes had enough time to even start registering the flash of the exploding grenade. At that close range, everything that had been Silvio Schivello was instantly pulverised and incinerated. Propelled and spread by the grenade’s explosion, and its thousands of annihilating fragments, the burning fuel that filled the car ensured the totality of the destruction. The inferno consumed everything in the car, including the cord that had secured the loosened pin of the grenade to the underside of the passenger’s side seat.
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