The Lost Labyrinth (29 page)

‘What do you say to a division of labour?’ suggested Iain. ‘You check out this place, try to crack that code. I’ll take the valley and the hills. After all, if he’s found a Minoan site, it won’t be in here. And with your ankle and all…’

‘Makes sense,’ agreed Gaille.

‘Good,’ said Iain, rubbing his hands in anticipation. ‘Then let’s rustle up some breakfast and go to it.’

Alexei Nergadze dropped his cup as he saw the armoured personnel carriers charge out of the forest fringes down the hillside towards the castle. He saw them but he couldn’t take them in. It wasn’t possible. Not here. No way could they have driven those vehicles up here without being spotted and reported by lookouts in the villages. Not unless they’d bypassed the villages with transport helicopters.

But that would mean…

He heard the chunter of distant rotor blades, turned to see a pair of white swans taking off from the lake, leaving their reflections on its rippled surface, and a moment later a formation of helicopters appeared over the woods on the far bank and sped low across the water, fanning out and
weaving as they grew close. This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t be. But it
was
. Their shitbag president had decided to pre-empt the elections. And he, Alexei, had just given them their excuse. He looked with utter hatred down at the antiquities policeman lying at his feet. ‘You’re dead,’ he told him. He pressed the stock of the shotgun into his shoulder and aimed down at the man’s face. ‘You’re fucking dead.’

He didn’t hear the sniper’s bullet that killed him, supersonic as it was. His shotgun clattered to the ground. A moment later, he’d joined it.

An empty water bottle in the back of the van rolled back and forth across the floor each time they took a corner. The noise got on Edouard’s nerves, but he didn’t stamp on it or pick it up, because looking at it gave him an excuse not to look at Knox, lying there balled up, his wrists bound behind his back, a roll of duct-tape making a merman of his legs. His mouth was taped too, and he was breathing fast and hard through his nose, as though suffering a panic attack.

They passed through Kifissia out into the open country. Gravel crunched beneath their wheels as they turned up Mikhail’s drive, then stopped
outside the house. Davit came around to open the rear doors, not meeting Edouard’s eyes, as though he felt just as ashamed, but didn’t want to acknowledge it. He picked Knox up, slung him easily over his shoulder, then carried him inside and dropped him on the front of the settee, so that he spilled onto the floor.

Nadya was still cuffed to a downstairs radiator, just as they’d left her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she wept, when she saw Knox. ‘I’m so sorry.’

He paled when he saw her pulped hand. He shook his head, perhaps to tell her that it wasn’t her fault; perhaps to deny the brutal reality that faced him.

Mikhail sat on the settee and smiled politely down at Knox, a surgeon meeting his next case. He ripped the tape free from Knox’s mouth, scrunched it up into a ball that he tossed aside. ‘I wanted you to see your friend Nadya,’ he said. ‘I wanted you to know she’d betrayed you. It’s okay, you understand, to betray things. Unless you want to tell her differently.’ Mikhail had been through Knox’s pockets on the drive here. He held up his mobile phone, the photo Gaille had sent him on its display. Then he opened the red-leatherette box and showed everyone the ring inside. ‘Planning to pop the question, are you?’

‘Those are mine,’ said Knox. ‘Give them back.’

‘Or perhaps you already have, and she said no.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘I wouldn’t blame her for saying no, if this is the best you can afford. I bet that’s why she fucked off to this Agia Georgio place. Or maybe she’s got a hankering for a new man. I enjoyed our little tussle in the lift. I think she did too.’

‘She thought you were a creep.’

Mikhail’s expression tightened. He set the mobile and ring-box down on the glass table, picked up the pliers instead. ‘You and I are going to spend a little quality time together now,’ he said. ‘If you’re disrespectful to me, if you hold out on me, if you cause me excessive trouble, it won’t only be you who pays. Your girlfriend will too. I’ll make sure of it.’

‘There’s no need for this,’ said Knox. ‘Whatever you want, just ask.’

‘What a hero! No wonder she said no.’ He leaned closer. ‘She’ll say yes to me, all right. I bet she’s already thinking about it.’ With the sole of his boot, he pushed Knox onto his front, so that he could get at his hands. Then he separated his left thumb from his other fingers and took it between the jaws of his pliers. Knox braced himself for the pain, he cried out in anticipation.

It was too much for Edouard to bear. ‘No!’ he blurted out.

Mikhail turned and drilled Edouard with his gaze. ‘I beg your pardon.’

‘Think about it,’ said Edouard, switching to
Georgian, lest Mikhail think he was coaching Knox on his interrogation. ‘Imagine you’re right about all this, I mean that this guy and his friend really stole the fleece and hid it at the airport. What if they don’t have lockers? What if they have one of those left luggage places where you have to hand your stuff in then show some ID to get it back?’ He nodded at Nadya. ‘How will it look if his hand’s like that? You know what security’s like in airports these days. They’ll be onto us in no time.’

Mikhail stared hard at him, trying to read the intent behind the words. But then a happy thought evidently struck him, for he smiled. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I know just the thing.’

Nina Zdanevich had barricaded herself and her three children into her room the night before, pushing her chest of drawers across her door in case anyone tried to pay a midnight visit. But no one had. She was heaving it back into its proper place when she heard gunfire on the battlements. The Nergadzes and their friends taking pot shots at the birds upon the lake, no doubt. They liked to shoot things, the Nergadzes, particularly things that couldn’t shoot back.

But this time they did shoot back.

Electrified, she rushed to the window. It wasn’t easy to see, because her room looked out along the line of lake’s bank, and everything was happening either to her left or to her right; but she could see a helicopter approaching so low over the water that its blades were ruffling its surface, and from the other direction armoured jeeps zigzagging down the slopes, making difficult targets of themselves. It took her a moment to understand what was going on. Because nothing had happened until now, she’d thought her husband had failed her. But he hadn’t failed her. By God, he hadn’t.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Kiko.

She was about to tell him and the girls something reassuring when machine guns ripped out a different answer, and helicopters thundered over the castle walls. She heard a soft thump and some unknown instinct must have recognised it from television, for she shrieked and turned and spread her arms to protect her children, just a millisecond before she felt the explosion pulse out from the castle wall, then the window blew out and sprayed glass like shrapnel across the room, dust and plaster falling on them like soft rain; while paintings fell from the walls and slammed into the floor, their frames shattering.

‘Over here,’ she cried, running to the wall. ‘Get down.’

Her children did as she ordered, bless them. She
grabbed the mattress off the bed and hauled it over them, began murmuring prayers that they all knew, holding each others’ hands in the darkness. A boot slammed against their door and it flew open. She risked a peek. A man with an AK-47 ran to the window, knelt and fired off a succession of short bursts before his fire was finally and emphatically returned, rounds spattering the walls and ceiling, ricochets whining against the mattress. He dropped his gun and clamped both hands to his neck. The blood seeped through all the same. He caught her eye as he turned and ran, and they shared a human moment, bafflement and fear.

The bullets kept on coming. Kiko was crying, Eliso and Lila were shivering and pale. They couldn’t stay here. The gunfire eased a moment. ‘Follow me,’ she cried. ‘Keep your heads down.’ She crouched as she led them into the corridor, a chain of held-hands. It was chaos outside, people running from their rooms, half of them still in their nightclothes, all fleeing in different directions, bumping into each other, no one sure what was happening or what to do. Another loud explosion; the windows overlooking the courtyard blew in, covering the floors with glinting shards. She looked down at her children’s bare feet. ‘Careful,’ she said, sticking close to the interior wall. ‘Tread where I tread.’

She saw through a window onto the courtyard
the shattered wooden gates hanging on their hinges, armoured vehicles driving over the drawbridge and into the castle. A helicopter set down in the courtyard, soldiers bulked up with bullet-proof vests charged out and took positions. Other helicopters hovered low overhead, shooting at the battlements. People began coming out of doors, arms raised in surrender, then lying face down on the ground while soldiers bound their wrists with flexi-cuffs. That was where she wanted to be, as near to safety as you got in situations like this. She reached the turret, set off down the spiral steps, met a man coming the other way, a rocket-launcher on his shoulder, his face exultant with battle fury. She reached the ground floor, stopped and looked out. Gunfire banged, splinters of stone flew. ‘I’m with children!’ she cried. The shooting stopped. She looked out again. A kneeling soldier in a flak jacket beckoned to her. She put up her hands and went out, her children following. The soldier pointed her to the grass, motioned for them to lie down. Kiko was wailing and crying; the girls were whey-faced, unsteady on their legs. But they did as they were told. Nina put her arms around them, protecting and comforting them as best she could. The gunfire went on and on, the crump of flash grenades, the yelling of soldiers living on their nerves; but suddenly it began to die away, and just like that it stopped.

Different noises now. Softer. Men whimpering and crying out, women sobbing, horses whinnying and crashing hooves against their stalls. People began emerging from the buildings, important people, people she recognised from the television, who she hadn’t even realised were guests here. There was a look in their eyes, as though they realised how little their wealth and status counted for right now. Ilya Nergadze himself was led out to a prison van. For a moment, Nina exulted, she even contemplated shouting something triumphant; but then she saw the murderous rage upon his face, and looked away at once, praying he hadn’t seen her.

A man in a shabby black police uniform walked across the grass towards her, holding a bloodstained handkerchief to his nose. He looked like nothing, except for the way everyone deferred to him. ‘You must be Nina,’ he said, his bloodied nose making him sound as though he had a cold. He squatted down and ruffled Kiko’s hair. ‘And you must be Kiko.’

‘Yes,’ said Kiko, wiping his nose and then his eyes. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Viktor,’ he said. ‘I’m a friend of your father’s.’

‘He called you?’ asked Nina.

‘Yes. He called me.’

‘All this?’ she asked, bewildered. ‘Just because he called you?’

Viktor laughed. ‘Let’s say he gave us an excuse.’ He stood to his full height once more. ‘Speaking of which, I don’t suppose any of you know about some gold being melted down, do you?’

Knox didn’t know what the man had said to save him from the pliers, but he was grateful, that was for sure. But then Mikhail smiled and barked out orders in Georgian, and the tame giant went outside and returned with a garden bench, its varnish sweating from a recent shower. ‘Put him on it,’ said Mikhail, switching to English, presumably because he wanted Knox to know what he was up to. ‘Strap him down tight. I don’t want him moving.’

Knox tried to fight, but it was hopeless, bound hand and foot as he was. The giant mummified him with duct tape, pinioning him to the bench, his wrists still tied behind him, jabbing uncomfortably into the small of his back. Mikhail walked unhurriedly away. Knox could hear him on the stairs. He came down a minute later holding a leather gag. Knox held out as long as he could, clenching his jaw tight, turning his face to the side, breathing through his nose, but Mikhail simply pinched his nostrils together and waited until he ran out of air,
then shoved in the leather bit, clasped it behind his head and tightened it until the strap gouged Knox’s lips and gums. Then he tightened it a little further, just because he could.

‘Let me go,’ pleaded Knox. But the gag made mush of his words.

‘Fetch me a towel, please, Davit,’ said Mikhail.

‘What kind of towel, sir?’

‘A hand-towel. Not too big.’

‘Yes, sir.’ He fetched a green one from a downstairs bathroom. ‘Will this do, sir?’ he asked.

‘Perfect, thank you, Davit,’ said Mikhail. He leaned closer to Knox, the better to confide. ‘All that talk of enhanced interrogation techniques while I was in the States. It makes a man curious.’ He folded the towel in half and placed it over Knox’s face. The fabric itched his skin. With it over his eyes, he could see nothing but the material itself, glowing faintly from the sun. Footsteps walked away from him, kitchen closets opened and closed. There was a jangling, as though someone had pulled out a nested set of saucepans, and rested them on the counter. A tap was turned on. Water sprayed on metal, a loud initial drumming that gradually quietened and deepened. Some vessel being filled, a large saucepan or a casserole dish, to judge from the time it took. The procedure was repeated with a second pan. Then the footsteps came back over.

Knox had heard about water-boarding, of course, but he hadn’t paid attention to the details, had never imagined it might happen to him. He didn’t know, therefore, the mechanics of it, or how to resist.

‘Lift his feet,’ said Mikhail. ‘They need to be above his head.’

The far end of the bench was picked up and held about a foot off the ground. It was an uncomfortable sensation in itself, blood flowing towards his head; but it was nothing to his fear of what was coming next. He took and held a deep breath just before the first saucepan was tipped over the towel. Most of it splashed away, but plenty more soaked through the towel into his mouth, held open by the bit, and trickled down into his throat. He had to fight the urge to cough.