Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing (39 page)

She couldn’t bear hearing her own words. She jumped out of the van and walked around it, stretching cramped legs and back, needing to move, to pace, to plan. How could it all have gone so terribly wrong? Why hadn’t she thought of a Naltrexone implant for Steve earlier? Why didn’t he think of it himself? How could Fayed have turned what seemed to be their unassailable position of strength into a threat, and one that was only too easily carried out? The questions whirled in her mind as the storm seemed to gather strength. He’d get away with this murder as he’d got away with others. He didn’t have to deal with other criminals like the Litchfield family. He didn’t have to make alliances at all. Was it possible he was big enough and powerful enough to crush any other rival, even if he were exposed as a police dog?

She returned to the van.

‘I have to go in,’ she told Mike. ‘At least that way, I can get to Steve. There’s a chance I can get him out safely.’ She turned to him. ‘If I can’t .
 
.
 
.’ Her voice faltered. Naltrexone might defend her against the effects of a hit, but it was no magic shield. If the dose of heroin was large enough, it would depress her system and kill her. It would be the end of her life and Steve’s too. She didn’t want to think about their two bodies lying in Fayed’s fortress. But maybe that’s what it would take to bring Fayed down.

‘What I mean is that with two of us found overdosed,’ she said, ‘Fayed’s far less likely to get off a murder charge. One death might be “accidental”. But two deaths is evidence in a successful murder trial.’

‘Noble but crazy,’ said Mike. He looked up from the screen of his laptop. ‘Listen, Gemma, if you’re determined to go in, I must go in with you. The second you operate that door code, they’re going to come after you.’

‘That’s why you must stay here. I need you to create a diversion to cover me. Something that won’t endanger Steve.’

‘Anything I do could be dangerous,’ Mike said. ‘You know Fayed’s paranoia.’

‘The storm,’ she said. ‘Make it look like the storm is interfering with his security system. Can you blank out his screens for a while from out here?’

Mike looked as if he was about to argue with her, but he agreed. ‘Okay. It’s crazy but it’s worth a try. Let’s have a closer look at the layout.’

So now she was crouched down on the floor of the passenger seat with Mike in the driver’s seat, the Glock sitting in the small of her back. She hardly dared breathe. She and Mike had roughed out a map of the internal layout, matching up the doorways and the corridors, using the furnishings as navaids and landmarks. They had studied the changing views until Gemma felt she had some understanding of where Steve was in relation to the rest of the space.

‘That room where Steve is,’ said Mike, ‘doesn’t appear to be up with the living areas. My bet is that it’s underneath the second and third storey, at street level, with the parking area and the machine shop. The flooring looks to be the same substance—heavy-duty cement with some sort of finish.’

Gemma listened to the rain on the roof of the garage.

‘We have to move now,’ she said. ‘The storm will start losing intensity.’

Mike started the engine and Gemma swallowed hard. He had given her the numerical code to the roller door in case she needed it again and the numbers were branded in her memory. She swayed a little as the van turned out of the garage, slowly making its way back towards Fayed’s huge bunker. Mike turned the corner, and parked the van out of the sight line of the fortress building.

‘The next big lightning strike,’ he said, ‘I’m going to use a broadband video jammer. I can splatter the bastards with a noise attack every time there’s lightning. Their security screens will go scrambled eggs. Pray that they think it’s connected to the storm. But I can only make it last a few seconds, otherwise they’ll get suspicious. So you’ll have to get in fast and move around fast with every crash of thunder. Then presume that all the cameras are live again. We don’t want them thinking there’s more than electrical interference involved. Okay? You’ve got a few seconds after the lightning flashes. It’s not much, but if you can move fast, you’ve got a chance.’

He pulled out and drove slowly down the street as if he were going to drive right past, but at the last moment, slowed briefly.

‘The minute you see I’ve got Steve safe,’ Gemma said, ‘start sending a live feed of what’s going on in this place to the police Intranet, attention Ian Lovelock.’

She slid the door of the van open. Rain chilled her face and Mike touched her arm.

‘I’d say break a leg,’ he said ‘but you’ve already done that.’

Gemma jumped at the next rolling peal of thunder and flattened against a wall, cold, wet and scared stiff, watching the tail lights of the van disappearing. The only thing that kept her going was the thought of Steve lying in there, already doped to the eyeballs. She heard the rumbling of the metal roller door and silently blessed Mike. As soon as it was opened sufficiently, she rolled under it. Already, it was descending again and she prayed that Mike had crashed their screens for that moment. She crawled through the dim garage, ducking behind one of several black Mercedes. The roller door was home again. She crouched, keeping in the shadows, between the three parked cars. Cautiously, she made her way to the small partly enclosed machine shop at the right-hand back wall of the underground parking area. She hunched near the door, knowing that there was a camera angle that picked up this area, waiting for the thunderclap that would give her a little free time to move.

She could hear footsteps. Gemma closed her eyes in dismay. It didn’t work, she thought. They know I’m here. She flattened herself in the dim corner, willing herself invisible. The footsteps were louder now as the two men ran into the parking area. Too scared to move, Gemma listened. Were they searching for her, moving from one area to the next, finally coming in here, to find her shaking with fear near the workshop?

She waited. Then she heard the sound of car doors slamming, the rumble of the roller door as it went up. She breathed a sigh of relief. A black Mercedes drove out, leaving the stink of engine and hot metal behind. She heard it take off in the same direction as the van and prayed that Mike had taken the necessary evasive action and hidden both himself and the van with its precious documentation of the Fayed family’s domestic epicentre.

Now she tried to orient herself. Mike had thought the room in which Steve lay was further underneath the house, to the left of the roller door, in the bowels of the building on this level. Pressing herself against the walls, and desperately trying to remember the camera angles and how to avoid them, Gemma eased her way out along the back wall. She crawled along in the semi-darkness until she came to a security gate. She pressed the same numbers Mike had demodulated for the garage. Nothing happened for a second, then she was rewarded by an electronic hum and the sound of the gate unlocking. She pressed it open, trying to keep as close to the wall as possible, remembering the bank of monitors somewhere upstairs, and the man who sat under them, keeping an eye on the inner and outer worlds of George Fayed.

She was in a narrow corridor, lit only with a weak naked globe hanging from the ceiling a little way ahead of her. On her right was what seemed to be a wall of black glass. She was reminded uncomfortably of the black faceted meteorite of her nightmare. She tried to look through its shiny surface, but all she could see was her own outline, and the edges of her face reflected. She moved past the black window towards a lit area further down the corridor. Her mouth had become very dry and she didn’t know if it was because of the action of the Naltrexone in her system or the fear that seemed to bang her heartbeat through her head. She strained to listen for any clue, or sound that might let her know where Steve was. Upstairs, she heard the scraping of a chair. Then she heard the clatter of boots on polished floors. She pressed up against the wall, and the hard edges of the Glock were a comfort. The sound of running was getting louder. It was too late to concern herself with being cautious, Gemma realised. Already, they must have seen her on the interior cameras. She broke into a run, crashing down the hall, aiming for the relatively open space of the underground garage and the machine shop where there was some cover.

But the security door she’d previously opened was closed, and no longer responded to her keyed-in digits. She swore, not knowing what to do. Lie low somewhere, she thought. Keeping low, and praying that the cameras would miss her, she pressed onwards until she came to a closed door. This door had a conventional door and handle. Maybe a storage area, she thought. Slowly, she turned the handle. It wasn’t locked. She peered in. The heat and the smell hit her in the face the second the door opened and she bit back a scream.
Shit!
She’d almost walked into George Fayed’s snake room. For a split second, Gemma was paralysed. Dozens of glittering eyes targeted her. Heads raised, they twined, some escaping, some darting forward until she’d slammed the door shut. She recalled the puzzling heat map that had glowed on Mike’s screen in the van. Had it been a heat picture of the snakes?

She hesitated outside the room, shaking, her mouth so dry she could hardly swallow. Steve where are you? she whispered silently. Almost in the same instant she heard something. Again, she tensed, not knowing what direction it had come from, disoriented by her recent fright and the musty closeness of the narrow corridor. Again came the sound. Someone was whistling. And she could smell cigarette smoke, fresh, as if someone was smoking quite nearby. She crept down towards the end of the corridor. Now she could see that the corridor she was in ended at a T-intersection and the sound she’d heard seemed to be coming from around the corner to the right. Gemma crept to the end of the wall and peered around. Another corridor, but this time, she could see a small table and chair halfway down the hall beside another doorway. A cigarette was smoking itself to death on an ashtray on the table. She moved quickly and silently towards the table and the door just beyond it. She heard the sound of a man cursing and in that second she knew it was Steve’s voice. Keeping a lookout for the owner of the cigarette, Gemma ducked into the room.

Steve was standing in front of a mirror, shaving.

‘Steve! What are you doing?’ she said. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

Steve put the razor down and wiped his face with the towel around his neck. He turned to her, his eyes raised casually to a point above her head.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he said in a low, toneless voice.

‘I saw you,’ she said. ‘I thought you were nearly dead.’

She looked around. The room they stood in looked very different from what she remembered. It had a bed and desk and through a sliding door, Gemma could see a small shower recess. It reminded Gemma of the self-contained units of hospitals or hotels where staff sometimes stay overnight. Gemma stood in shocked silence. Steve seemed perfectly at home here in the monster’s lair, whistling and shaving as if everything was quite normal.

‘That’s a camera up there,’ Steve said, pointing the razor at the top of the doorway. ‘They’ll be on their way down now. You shouldn’t have come in here. It was crazy.’

Behind his words, Gemma could hear the boots thudding upstairs.

‘Steve,’ she whispered. ‘Tell me it isn’t true. Tell me what I’m thinking isn’t true. Please.’

She was almost in tears. Now she could hear the shouting and the thudding getting closer and closer.

‘Gems, I’d like to be able to help you,’ Steve said, ‘but really there’s nothing I can do.’

‘You bastard!’ she cried. ‘You’ve done a deal with Fayed, haven’t you!’

He frowned. ‘I hope you’re not armed.’ He darted forward and as she dropped her hip and reached behind her for the weapon, he had her wrist in a crushing hold.

‘Drop it,’ he whispered. ‘Now.’

He wrenched the Glock from her fingers. Gemma stared in disbelief, her crushed hand helpless as he shoved the gun out of sight and turned back to the mirror. The footsteps thudded closer. Although it was useless, she looked around but there was nowhere to hide.

‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe that you could do this. I put my life on the line to come in and get you out of here. And you just—’ She was beyond words, beyond heartbreak.

Steve shrugged and affected a rueful look. ‘You shouldn’t have,’ he said. ‘I told you to stay away. I thought I made it very clear the other day at Lorraine’s.’

Gemma felt one last desperate surge of hope, that Steve was still true to her, and just playing for time.

‘Steve,’ she whispered. ‘Tell me what’s going on.’

But before he could answer, two huge men burst into the room and Gemma was grabbed, fingers bruising into her upper arms. She felt all the fight go out of her. It wasn’t just the overwhelming odds; it was the final blow—the defection of the man she’d loved and been faithful to, in her fashion, for years. All the while, Steve continued to shave, whistling as he did, barely looking around when a voice shouted down the corridor and George Fayed materialised at the doorway, smaller than he’d appeared on television.

‘Let’s have a look at what we’ve got here,’ he said, his voice aggressively Australian in its accents.

He wore a silver-grey bespoke suit and his heavy eyebrows hid eyes that Gemma couldn’t read in the dim light of the underground corridor. She stared defiantly at him, determined not to reveal how scared she was feeling, how her heart was breaking over her faithless man.

‘Let’s see what a licensed private investigator looks like. Of the female variety.’ He said the last words with withering contempt.

‘We look a damn sight better than you,’ she said.

‘I patted her,’ said Steve, turning casually from his shaving. ‘She wasn’t carrying.’

The lie caused pieces of Gemma’s heart to stir.

‘I don’t like people breaking into my place,’ Fayed said, moving too close, sharp jabbing fingers feeling around her body. He stepped back, satisfied she was unarmed. ‘You have absolutely no right to be here. Even the police try to find some reason for their pathetic warrants.’