The Martyr's Curse (12 page)

The air was filled with dust and smoke. Scorched, battered, stunned and blinded, barely knowing if he was dead or alive, Ben somehow scrambled to his feet and ran, utterly convinced that the whole rock tunnel was going to fall in and bury him down here for all eternity. But he kept running anyway, feeling the way ahead, blinking dust out of his eyes and coughing up the crap that filled his lungs, stumbling over the uneven ground, scraping his shoulders and elbows against the rough walls as he sprinted like a crazy man through the darkness. Showers of dust and stones rained down on him as he went. He couldn’t tell whether the ground was still shaking, or whether he was just unsteady on his feet.

He kept going. No fear, no restraint. No thoughts at all, just pure animal energy driving him forwards through the darkness, his muscles working like pistons and his heart thudding like a demented thing that threatened to burst out of his chest. And the ceiling didn’t come down to bury him. He made it through the twists and turns of the passage, and then to the fallen gold bar. This time he did trip over it, and tumbled headlong. He landed hard on his hands and heaved himself up with barely a pause, and kept running, upwards and upwards towards the light and the air. Then suddenly he could breathe, and see.

The glare of the sun hit him in the face as he reached ground level. Ben burst out of the doorway, caught it with his shoulder, spun and fell in a wheezing heap in the dirt. It took a few seconds before he fully realised that he’d made it out alive. Or just about. His hair was singed and the skin on his left cheek felt tender where the heatwave of the blast had scorched it, his hands were cut and bleeding and embedded with grit, and every muscle in his body was screaming in agony. He sat up and leaned against a wall, wiped the stinging dust out of his eyes and coughed up more of it that he’d swallowed. All the time, he was thinking furiously.

The killers had used a shaped charge to blow through the cavern wall, only to take what was inside and then plant a second, delayed, much bigger charge to seal the cavern off again.

Why would they do that?

Right now, he had no idea.

He rested five minutes, then another five, until his breathing had settled and he was convinced he had no major injuries. Just dozens of minor ones. Which was fine. He was functional, and that was all he needed to be.

Smoke was drifting from the doorway leading to the underground passages as he gathered himself up, dusted himself off and began walking back down the cloister. He was dizzy and nauseous, and a loud constant whine had set up in his ears from the explosion. He could see in his mind the faces of the dead. Roby, Père Antoine, all of them. He should have been able to do more for them. Many had been his friends, and many more he knew he’d have befriended if he’d been able to spend more time with them.

He couldn’t bury them. It would take him a month on his own with a shovel. The cops would have to deal with the clean-up. Ben felt obliged to call them in, but he didn’t intend to be here to face questioning when they turned up. Nor did he have a lot of confidence in their ability to sort out what the hell had happened here. Generally speaking, and for a variety of reasons that could be more or less summed up as professional differences, Ben and police officers didn’t mix well. It might have had something to do with the fact that he tended to obtain results, when they tended to fail. On occasion, it might also have had something to do with the kinds of methods he employed to get those results, which they didn’t always appreciate.

Ben limped back to his personal quarters, knowing he was seeing them for the last time. The first thing he did was use a rag to wipe down every surface he’d ever touched. Sooner or later, the monastery was going to be the subject of a major crime investigation, and the last thing he needed was for the cops to know he’d been here. With his past record, he was the perfect patsy for frustrated local detectives looking for someone to pin this on. Once he was satisfied that all his prints were erased, he gathered his few possessions and stuffed them inside his canvas bag, then slung it over his shoulder and left with a final glance at the rooms that had been his home.

After that, he headed back to the cloister where the dead shooter was still sitting exactly where Ben had left him, minding the two gold bars. Ben relieved him of them and put them in his own bag along with the rest of his stuff. The extra kilos hung uncomfortably from his bruised shoulder as he returned to the main yard, threading a path between the scattered bodies of the monks. The crow was back, continuing the meal Ben had interrupted earlier. He felt like flinging a stone at it, then reasoned that it had as much right to survive as anyone else.

With a painful effort, Ben hauled himself into the truck’s cab, dumped his heavy bag on the passenger seat and then started up the engine. It sounded quieter than before, but that was only because he was a little deaf after the blast. He forced the gearstick into first, touched the gas and the truck lumbered deeper into the yard. He brought it to a halt, crunched the stick into reverse and twisted the huge ship’s wheel to U-turn right around to face the gates, then straightened up the wheels and turned round in his seat to look out of the rear window as the truck backed up with a nasal transmission whine. He reversed as far as he could towards the buildings, careful not to let the knobbly tyres run over any of the dead monks. Leaving the diesel running in neutral, he jumped down from the cab, walked back to the dead shooter and grabbed him by the collar. ‘You didn’t think I was going to leave without you, did you?’ he said as he started dragging the body towards the truck.

It was a short drag and the guy wasn’t terribly heavy. Ben slalomed him in between the drying blood pools, then when they reached the truck he let go of the dead man’s collar and his forehead smacked limply to the ground. Ben undid the ties holding the tonneau cover down to the truck’s flatbed on one side, then turned back to the body. Rolled him over with his foot, bent over him and grabbed him by both arms to yank him into a sitting position before heaving him upright. The dead man’s knees kept giving way, and Ben supported him like a drunk carried from a wild party. He slammed him against the side of the truck’s flatbed and let his upper body topple backwards through the loose canvas, then bent down and grabbed his ankles and lifted both floppy legs off the ground, one after the other. With some twisting and heaving, he managed to get the body lying flat on the pitted wooden cargo bed.

Ben jumped up next to him. He looked at the rusty old tool locker bolted down behind the cab. Four feet long, two feet wide. The dead man wasn’t a huge guy. Ben raised the creaky locker lid, propped it up and lifted out the removable compartment full of crusty old spanners, which he shunted to the edge of the flatbed and let fall to the ground. The locker was empty now, except for the coil of old rope and the pair of bolt croppers lying in the bottom. But it wouldn’t be empty long.

‘In you go,’ Ben said. If he had to share the truck with a dead man, he’d rather not have the guy stinking up the inside of the cab. Besides, nosy cops had a tendency to spot dead men in the passenger seat quicker than they might check on-board tool lockers. With more heaving and twisting, he manhandled the dead man’s torso into the box, shoulders twisted diagonally, his left arm under him and the right folded across his chest. The guy’s head was up at an angle, as if peering down his body to see what was going on. Ben shoved him down deep inside the box with the heel of his boot. Not a big man, but not a midget either, and his legs wouldn’t fit. They overhung the edge of the locker, no matter which way Ben tried to squeeze them in. Which was easily remedied, by means of three or four judicious bone-crunching stamps to his knees that allowed them to be folded up sideways and crammed into the tight space.

People talked about having respect for the dead. Ben didn’t like having to break the guy’s legs this way. He’d much rather have done it while he was still alive.

Once the body was all tucked in, Ben covered him up with the lid and banged it down tight. Then jumped down from the flatbed, quickly fastened up the tonneau cover and climbed back behind the wheel. He crashed the lever out of neutral and into first, pressed down hard on the pedal and the truck lurched forwards with a dieselly rasp.

He didn’t look back as he steered it across the yard, towards the open gateway. The truck lumbered through the gates. He twisted the wheel to the right, heading in the opposite direction from his route to Briançon the day before. Leaving behind the dead bodies of his friends, and the place he’d called home.

He didn’t know where the road was going to take him. Not yet.

At this moment, he knew just one thing. That whoever had done this wanted blood.

And that blood was what they were going to get.

Chapter Eighteen

If she leaned her head close to the window and peered downwards, Hannah Gissel could see the shadow of the Bell 429 flicking and rippling over the picture-perfect pastureland below them as they flew northwards towards their destination. The roar of the rotors was muted in her radio headset. She turned and smiled at Udo Streicher, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder alongside her in the pilot’s seat, and gazed at him for a few seconds with a secret look of admiration. His face was set in an expression of concentration, his eyes hidden behind his aviator shades. He appeared outwardly calm, but Hannah could tell from the way he held himself that there was a bright twinkle behind those dark glasses, and that inside he was bursting with glee and leaping about like a lottery winner, pumping his fists in the air, roaring with laughter. She felt exactly that way herself, though like Udo she was far too restrained to let it show.

In fact, her heart was thumping almost as fast as the helicopter rotors. They’d done it. They’d damn well done it. Even after the devastating setback of the failed North Korean attempt, she’d never doubted her man’s ability to pull this off. Now they were almost home and dry. Ready for the next phase to begin.

Then things would really start to get interesting.

Hannah twisted further around in her seat and looked at the eight white oblong containers secured inside the passenger space behind them. Securely locked, carefully strapped down to prevent them from tumbling about in flight. Their shiny white super-tough plastic shells gleamed in the bright morning sunlight that filled the cabin. The fruit of years of planning and sacrifice. Theirs at last.

Oh, yes, things were definitely going to start getting interesting from here on.

Before too long, the chopper overflew the twisting blue river that marked the western boundary of the hundred-acre organic dairy farm. Streicher gave a little smile of satisfaction as they entered what he considered his own airspace. Like all his real estate holdings, he owned this land in a company name that could never be traced back to him personally. It had been the best investment he’d ever made, even though he had absolutely no intention of ever selling it, and even less interest in organic dairy farming. All but a ten-acre chunk of the land had been leased for the last twelve years to a reliable, hard-working couple named Lili and Jens Mosman, who employed enough hands and did a good enough job of the day-to-day running of the farm to turn a reasonable profit. The Mosmans enjoyed a harmonious rapport with their landlord, whom they knew only as ‘Herr Schumann’, and who left them alone to do their thing, never interfering, seldom seen, and then only from afar. The one time they’d actually met face to face was to sign the lease on the farmland, years ago.

In return for Herr Schumann’s generosity and fairness towards them, the Mosmans never expressed curiosity about, and gave a wide berth to, the ten-acre patch that he kept for himself, circled by trees and securely fenced off from the rest of the spread. As far as they were concerned, it was just a convenient location for their colourful landlord to keep his helicopter and a few other of his possessions.

Which, as far as that went, was no word of a lie. At the heart of the ten-acre patch was the large hangar that housed the Bell when it wasn’t in use. A private road ran through the trees and between fields along the edge of the farmland; now and again the Mosmans might catch a distant glimpse of Herr Schumann and his wife, to whom they’d never been introduced but whose name they’d been told was Ulrike, zapping off in one of his collection of expensive motor vehicles. It was no longer much of a topic for discussion in the Mosman home. Herr Schumann was obviously wealthy and possibly slightly eccentric in his ways, but hardly nuts enough to warrant much in the way of speculation, let alone gossip. In any case, the Mosmans were not the most imaginative of folks, and generally too busy with the running of the farm to think about much else.

The chopper rattled over well-kept farm buildings and neatly fenced green pastures dotted with grazing cattle. Jens Mosman’s bright red tractor was cutting across one of the lower fields, looking like a shiny toy from high above. Soon after, Streicher dropped altitude as the circle of pine forest surrounding his personal acreage came into view. At its centre, the big hangar with its wood cladding and pitched roof looked archetypally Swiss. It was surrounded by an apron of concrete, connected to the perimeter fence and high gates by the private road.

Streicher activated the landing-gear controls. The helicopter sank gently downwards, treetops blotting out the view of farmland all around. It touched neatly down on the concrete apron and taxied towards the huge steel shutter that was the only entrance to the hangar.

Hannah pointed a small, custom-made remote control. It had a ten-digit keypad, and below it two coloured buttons, red on the right and green on the left. She pressed the green button with a manicured nail and the shutter instantly began to wind open. The rotors slowed from a roar to a lazy
whoop-whoop-whoop
and the whine of the turbine deepened in pitch. Streicher waited until the shutter was fully elevated, then taxied inside the wide rectangular entrance. Hannah pressed the remote again and the door began to close behind them.