The Isis Covenant (8 page)

The girl behind the counter frowned and checked her own computer before turning to an old-fashioned ledger. She shook her head. ‘I thought so. The database hasn’t been updated yet. This title was reported missing three weeks ago. Stolen. You’d be amazed how often it happens.’

He thanked her, hiding his frustration, and turned away.

‘Oh, hang on,’ she called. ‘Yes, I thought I was right. We actually have another copy of
Myths and Legends
, only it’s in our foreign-language section. Would that be of help?’

When he was certain he had what he was looking for he returned the books and walked across the Great Court and through the pillared entrance onto Great Russell Street. Normally, he would have taken the Tube to Bond Street, but instead he decided to walk back to the office to give himself time to consider what he’d found. His route took him across Tottenham Court Road, and a few minutes later he reached Oxford Street. The quickest way was straight on, but somehow the thought of forcing his way through hordes of damp shoppers didn’t appeal, so he turned down towards Soho Square
and
then west, letting his feet find the way. It wasn’t until too late that he realized he was being followed. Two of them, in jeans and what the kids called ‘hoodies’ – thick sweatshirts, with all-encompassing cowls that hid their faces. The one on the right was in blue and the other dark brown. Jamie cursed himself for not taking the more obvious route and felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. Idiot. How could he have lowered his guard like this?

He glanced back a second time and confirmed his first suspicion. Young men, lean and hard, their fitness apparent in the way they carried themselves. If they’d been muggers they would have walked with a certain amount of aggressive swagger and tried to distract him with some sort of diversion. These men were like Cruise missiles locked on to their target. They were less than twenty paces away and keeping in step with quick, purposeful strides. Fight or run? He looked around for an escape route, but they’d caught him in the perfect place, a narrow street of bars and nightclubs whose shuttered fronts wouldn’t be opened for hours yet. Run then; he was certain he could stay ahead of them until he reached the relative safety of one of the busier streets. But even as he made the decision he saw it was too late. Two more appeared at the end of the road, hands hanging loose by their sides and making their way directly towards him. He crossed the road, just in case he was wrong, but they mirrored his movement and he knew that behind him the followers would be doing the
same
. His heart rate increased and he fought to control his breathing. He wasn’t frightened, not yet, only prepared. The world slowed and he knew it would stay that way until it was over. He slipped his hand into his pocket and about-turned so that he was walking directly towards the men who’d been following him. Their faces were just visible in the shadow of the hoods, and he could see the consternation on them. The fact that there were four aggressors was oddly reassuring, because you didn’t need four people to shoot somebody in the back of the head. A few paces separated them now. The thought occurred to him that he might be wrong, and that they were going to let him pass, but the man on the left went for his pocket and then there was no going back.

The sock full of damp building sand had been sitting uncomfortably in Jamie’s pocket all day. He swung it backhanded at full extension so it took brown hoodie on the point of the jaw. For the victim, it was like being on the wrong end of an uppercut from Mike Tyson. His head snapped back with a horrible crunch of breaking teeth, and he went down with his eyes crossed as his legs collapsed under him. Even as his man was falling, Jamie continued his spin, reckoning that the element of surprise would have frozen blue hoodie in place. He didn’t have time to worry about the men behind him, but he heard a shout that told him they weren’t far away. As it turned out, blue hoodie was quicker than he looked. By the time Jamie faced him he was inside the
most
effective range of the improvised sap with a knife in his right hand and coming in at a crouch. Jamie blocked the knife thrust with his left wrist in a way that would have made his close combat instructor proud and raised his right foot and brought his boot down on the inside of his attacker’s left knee, drawing a satisfying cry of agony as blue hoodie joined his friend on the concrete. But the clock in his head told him his time was almost up. He spun to face the new threat, flailing with the sock even as some kind of spring-loaded blackjack landed on the nerve midway between his shoulder and his neck. Even cushioned by his overcoat’s shoulder pad, the numbing shock ran down his right arm and the sock fell from his nerveless fingers. At the same time an explosion of agony swamped his body and filled his brain with red light. He was already going down as his legs were kicked from beneath him and he twisted his head to avoid smashing his face on the rough concrete.

‘Look what the bastard’s done to Jimmy.’

A boot thumped in his ribs, but the pain barely registered amid the waves of agony still radiating from his injured shoulder.

‘Cunt!’

Someone kicked him in the stomach, knocking all the air from him, and he tried to struggle to his feet to escape the flailing boots. How could he have forgotten the cosh? This time it was his left side, and he might as well have been paraplegic for all he could do to defend
himself
as he fell back face first with the dirt and dog-pee smell of damp pavement in his nostrils.

He could hardly move a muscle. Even as the thought gelled, one of them – he thought it might be blue hoodie – took a half-hearted kick that grazed his cheek, but nonetheless hurt like hell.

A hand twisted in his hair and raised his head from the pavement.

‘The man says to back off.’ The voice snarled in his right ear, but it seemed to come from very far away. ‘You got that, fucker? The man says to back off.’

He tried to respond, but his brain struggled to make sense of what he’d heard. Back off? Back off what? Which man? Without warning his face exploded as his nose was smashed against the ground. Tears filled his eyes and he tasted iron in his mouth.

‘I said, you got that fucker? Nod if you understand.’

Somehow he must have managed to nod.

‘Cos if you don’t, next time we won’t be so fuckin’ gentle. In the meantime, here’s something on account. For Jimmy.’

XI

PAUL DORNBERGER STRAIGHTENED
his blue silk tie and walked up to the unassuming wooden door set into a ten-foot-high stone wall topped with electrified razor wire. As he reached it, he pressed the bell and looked upwards with a smile into the unblinking eye of the security camera. Inside the house, he knew Gerard, the monosyllabic Brummie, would be studying his face with those cold eyes of his and using the facial identification software to ensure he hadn’t been substituted by someone who’d had plastic surgery. With a soft click the door opened to reveal the tanned features of Vince, the former Delta Force sergeant. There was that moment – no day was complete without it – when Vince looked disappointed he couldn’t shoot him, but it quickly passed and the Californian lowered his Heckler & Koch MP5 and ushered him inside. It was unusual to see anyone other than an armed policeman carrying weapons in London, but this house had been designated an
outstation
of the embassy of the former Russian republic of, and now independent, Moldova and was diplomatic ground. What went in and out in the diplomatic bag was of no interest to anyone but Oleg Samsonov. The neighbours might have been alarmed at the amount of weaponry often on show in the gardens, but there were no neighbours, because the owner had bought both adjoining properties. Up the gravel path, accompanied by Vince all the way, past the cameras and between the sensors to the house, a huge modernistic cube of a place, all brushed steel and blast-proof mirrored glass. The main accommodation lay on the upper floors, with the ground and basement devoted to the kitchens, servants quarters and garaging for the owner’s ten-strong fleet of identical limousines and his sports cars, none of which, to Dornberger’s certain knowledge, he had ever driven. They approached a glass door set in the corner of the ground floor and Dornberger punched in today’s code. Again there was the click as it opened onto an enclosed stairway. Up the stairs, all twenty-four of them, safe in the knowledge that Gerard was watching his every move and at the first sign of suspicion he could isolate the stairway and fill it with incapacitating gas. Finally, he reached the top and another keypad, before the door opened onto the security area.

Gerard looked up from his monitors. ‘You’re three minutes late.’

‘And a good morning to you, Gerard. I was visiting the old man in hospital.’

Gerard nodded and typed the information into his computer, where every deviation in routine had to be recorded.

‘Mornin’, Paul.’ Kenny, the former Australian SAS man, gave him a grin that disguised the fact that he was the deadliest killer in a house full of deadly killers. ‘Any improvement in the old fella?’

Dornberger shrugged. ‘They’re doing their best.’

Kenny nodded sympathetically and opened the steel door to the main apartments.

His glass-fronted office was along a corridor lined with thirteenth-century Russian icons and just off an enormous lounge area. In the centre of the lounge stood a large cube of what looked like stainless steel, which Paul Dornberger knew rose to form the core of the top three floors of the building; a multi-storey panic room whose lock combination was known only to the owner and his wife and which was designed to survive the collapse of the building and anything but a nuclear explosion.

On his desk a secretary had placed a list of the owner’s particular interests for the day and he spent an hour on the computer and the phone gathering the information he would need for his briefing to the world’s forty-first richest man.

At precisely 10 a.m., he stood up and knocked on the door of Oleg Samsonov’s office overlooking the park.

‘Come.’

‘Good morning, sir.’

They spoke English at the billionaire’s insistence, but Paul Dornberger would have been perfectly at home in Russian or any one of several other European languages. Linguistic ability was only one of the reasons he had been considered for the job as Samsonov’s personal assistant.

‘What’s first for today, Paul?’

‘The usual overview of the world economy, sir. There’s a situation developing in Greece that might interest you.’

He saw the predator’s eyes brighten. Oleg Samsonov could smell weakness the way a big cat scented blood and his reaction would be just as deadly. The son of a high-ranking KGB official, before
perestroika
Samsonov had been in charge of importing computers for the Young Communist League. Where others saw the end of the system that had nurtured them for a lifetime, Oleg saw opportunity. He had foreign suppliers, a network of outlets, all he needed was import licences and the money to make it work. Using a combination of hard work, utter ruthlessness and his father’s contacts, he created a business empire within two years and had his own bank by the end of the third. But banking in post-Soviet Russia could be a dangerous business. Oleg’s rivals and business partners turned out to be remarkably accident prone and he could see it was only a matter of time before he joined them. His big chance came in 1995, when he used the bank as collateral to diversify into oil, gas and steel in the great auction of
Russia’s
state industries. By the time of the economic collapse that inevitably followed, the bank, now forced to default on its loans, was a millstone around someone else’s neck. Success didn’t make a man popular, especially success bought at the price of so many livelihoods. As the new millennium dawned he moved, with the blessing of his friend Vladimir Putin, to the heart of the world’s financial capital, where, for a member of the planet’s most exclusive economic club, he kept a relatively low profile. Others could have their football clubs and their super-yachts. Oleg Samsonov was just a man looking for his next billion and his next step up the ladder of the world’s rich list. In law-abiding London he could feel safe from disgruntled Kazakhs who resented the profits of their mines and their oilfields ending up in offshore banks, rather than being reinvested in their impoverished cities, and from his former friends in the
bratva
, who still didn’t understand that dumping them with a worthless bank was just a good piece of business. Naturally, he knew that the greatest danger came from those closest to him. Other Russian oligarchs valued the loyalty of their countrymen, but Oleg knew people who had been killed by friends they had known from childhood. The only loyalty Oleg Samsonov valued was the kind that could be bought at a price no other man could afford. That was why his safety was in the hands of a former SAS captain turned security adviser who chose his operators mainly from amongst the veterans of his old regiment, apart from a trusted few outsiders, like
Vince
, who he’d worked with in Iraq and Afghanistan. There were twenty of them and they worked round the clock in shifts of six.

The two men continued working until Samsonov called a halt and left to have lunch with his family in their private quarters on the floor above. Dornberger would return to his desk for coffee and a pastry. That was another of the things that endeared him to his employer. Like the security guards, he was unmarried and lived a monk-like existence that allowed him to devote all his energies to the man who paid his wages.

The billionaire turned in the doorway. ‘Oh, Paul, I almost forgot. How is your father?’

‘Still fighting on, sir.’

‘The hospital people are doing their jobs?’

‘Of course, sir.’ Samsonov wasn’t interested in the health of an old man, only that he was getting value for money. After all, he was paying for the treatment. ‘And thank you, sir.’

The Russian nodded.

A few minutes later a young boy darted into the office a few paces ahead of his harassed English nanny. The child launched himself into Dornberger’s lap and Paul smiled and ruffled the dark hair. He was a good boy, with his father’s quick intelligence and his mother’s fine-boned good looks, but like all boys of his age he had too much energy packed into that slight body.