The Martyr's Curse (40 page)

‘That’s the problem with these things,’ Ben said, lowering the pistol. He rested it on his knee. Clicked on the safety. ‘They’re all or nothing. There’s no middle ground with them. Even if I shoot you in the legs, you’ll be in shock and bleed out too quickly to be of any use to me.’

‘Bluffer,’ Donath said. ‘I knew it.’

‘I don’t need a gun to make you talk to me,’ Ben said. ‘And you will talk. Even if I have to hurt you. Do you understand that?’

Donath’s satisfied little smile broadened out into a grin. ‘You think you can hurt me, prick?’

‘I get it,’ Ben said. ‘You’re a proper tough guy. The real deal. You’re not scared of a little roughing up, because you’ve been through all that and you were taught how to handle it, back in the day. RTI, we used to call it. Resistance to interrogation training.’

Donath’s grin slackened off into a sour grimace. He spat. The shark eyes watched Ben.

‘I’ve been through it myself,’ Ben said. ‘Not much fun, but you get over it. It teaches you a lot of useful lessons, too. About yourself. About human frailty. Because no matter how tough we are, we’re all human and there’s a limit to what each and every one of us can take. Even you, Miki. Don’t kid yourself about that. Or about who I am. Not for one second. It would be a serious error of judgement.’

‘Why, who the fuck are you?’ Donath growled.

‘I’m the guy who knows where the limits are,’ Ben said. ‘Trust me, I’ll drive right through them and break you into a hundred pieces without thinking twice. I’ll feel absolutely no remorse afterwards. Just like you, after what you and your friends did to the little girl.’

Donath said nothing.

Silvie stepped around the chair to face him. She rested a hand lightly on Ben’s shoulder and bent down so that her face was at the same level as the German’s. ‘Miki, listen to us, please. You don’t have to stand up for Streicher. He’s not your friend. He could have used this opportunity to get you out of jail, but he didn’t. If he releases this plague, you’re just another victim as far as he’s concerned.’

Donath’s face worked for a few moments as he turned that thought over. He shook his head. ‘Go play your mind games somewhere else, bitch. Think I’m a retard or something?’

‘Last chance,’ Ben said. ‘Where is he?’

Donath shook his head again and clamped his mouth shut, turned his head away and stared resolutely into the murky corner of the room. Silvie stood up, biting her lip, and looked at Ben, as if to say, I can’t talk to this guy.

The clock was ticking. Every moment that passed, Udo Streicher could be getting ready to drop his bomb on hundreds, thousands, millions of innocent people.

‘Nobody just disappears,’ Ben said. ‘Not while they’re still alive. But you will. Take it from me. So answer me. Where’s Streicher hiding out?’

Donath turned his gaze back on Ben. The shark eyes seemed to twinkle for a moment. ‘Somewhere you’ll never get to him, that’s for sure. He’ll know you’re coming. One whiff of your stink from a mile away and he’ll lock down and stay buried for as long as it takes. He can stay down there a year if he has to.’

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Ben said. ‘I’ll be there waiting for him when he sticks his head out of whatever foxhole he’s cowering in. And you’re going to tell me where to be standing.’

‘You’re so fucking stupid. Nobody’s going to stop him. He’s been waiting for this all his life.’

‘I know what impatience feels like,’ Ben said. ‘I’ve been waiting since this morning to start breaking bones, and now I don’t think I can stand the suspense any longer. I won’t ask you again. Where is he?’

Donath tossed his head and snapped out a defiant, ‘
Fuck
you.’

‘I give up,’ Ben said. ‘This isn’t working. I see I’m going to have to let you go.’

The prisoner’s eyes gave another victorious little twinkle. Ben stood up. Slipped the Browning back into his belt and took the handcuff keys from his pocket. Silvie gave him an incredulous look as he walked around the back of Donath’s chair and unlocked the cuffs. The linked aluminium bracelets hit the bare floorboards with a thump.

The German’s arms fell loose down the sides of the chair. He sighed with relief and rolled his shoulders to loosen the stiff muscles.

Ben turned to Silvie. ‘Maybe you’d like to get some air. It stinks in here.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said, catching his look and returning it with a questioning raised eyebrow.

‘Up to you,’ Ben said. And then he grabbed Donath’s left hand and twisted it sideways and down, and felt the joint fail under the sudden violent pressure. There was a crackle of cartilage and a muted snap, like the crunch of a stick of celery breaking. Donath cried out sharply in pain.

Ben could feel Silvie’s horrified look, but he didn’t look back at her. ‘There are three hundred and sixty joints in the human body, Miki. We don’t have all day, so I’ll just stick to the major ones to save time. Wrists, ankles, elbows and knees for starters. Then we’re on to hips and shoulders. Then spinal vertebrae. I’ll even let you choose. So, next wrong answer, what’s it to be?’

Veins stood out like tug ropes on Donath’s neck and forehead. His eyes were bulging with agony as he nursed his broken wrist.

‘You prefer surprises,’ Ben said. ‘That’s fine by me.’ Before Donath could twist away, he stepped around the right side of the chair and took hold of the man’s right wrist. Cupped his other hand tightly around the bicep and pulled back, hard, and simultaneously drove forwards with his knee with a slamming impact that punched right through the joint and caved it in the wrong way.

Donath’s piercing scream didn’t quite drown out the sickening crack of bone. Ben felt the arm go floppy in his hands. There was nothing except a strand or two of muscle and some torn sinews connecting the humerus above the joint to the ulna and radius below it. Nothing except a lot of catastrophic damage that was going to require intricate surgery and months of healing to repair. Maybe an artificial elbow joint to replace the shattered original. Ben let go, and the useless arm flopped into Donath’s lap. Donath was beating his head from side to side, snorting and groaning and gnashing his teeth. Mucus and drool were running down his chin.

‘Ben—’ Silvie started.

‘You can make this stop whenever you want,’ Ben said, ignoring her.

‘Go – and – fuck – yourself,’ Donath managed to say in between gasps.

It was hard not to admire his courage. Donath was tough, all right. Ben looked at him for a moment, then kicked over the chair and Donath went toppling sideways. Ben stepped over him. He took out the SOG tactical blade and slashed the tape binding Donath’s right ankle to the chair leg. He flicked the knife down at the floor, where it stuck point-first in the boards, quivering. Caught the man’s freed leg as it began to kick and thrash, and held the foot by the toe and ankle, ready to start twisting.

‘Ben, please,’ Silvie said. ‘Not like this.’

‘Do you hear that, Miki? Agent Valois would like me to treat you with more human empathy. Just like your friends treated mine.’ Ben twisted the ankle, hard enough to threaten the joint and put serious secondary strain on the knee. Donath squirmed and tried to snatch his leg away, but Ben’s grip on it was tight. He twisted a little harder, just to the point of breaking, but no more. ‘But there’s a difference between me and your friends,’ he said. ‘I don’t enjoy this one bit. Them? Pain and suffering is what they’re all about. They’re even worse pieces of shit than a child rapist like you. They’re not worth putting yourself through this. So I’m asking. I’m begging. Answer the question, while there’s still a chance that a surgeon can put you back together again.’

Ben’s heart thudded as he waited for Donath to defy them once more. If that happened, things were going to start getting properly ugly. Once you crossed the line, you couldn’t go back. You just had to live with it for the rest of your life. Ben had enough to live with already.

Two long seconds passed. Then three more, then five more.

It didn’t happen
.

Every man has his limit.

And, to Ben’s immense secret relief, Donath’s had finally been reached. Sweat beading in huge droplets from every pore of his face and his chest heaving with tortured breath, the German told them everything.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Silvie was very quiet as they drove away from the ruined cottage. ‘That was awful,’ she breathed at last, barely audible over the rumble of the Hummer’s engine.

Ben nodded. ‘Yes. It was.’ He reached the bottom of the track and turned left, back towards the little town they’d passed through on their way here.

Silvie watched the road for a minute, deep in thought, then turned to look at him with questioning eyes. ‘There was no other way, was there?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really.’

‘Are we bad people?’

‘Maybe,’ he said.

Saving the lives of the innocent is not something of which you should be ashamed,
Père Antoine had said to him that day. But Ben was. He felt tainted by what he’d had to do. He knew he’d always feel that way. Because things weren’t about to get any better. The door was open now, and only darkness lay beyond it, waiting to swallow him up.

‘No,’ Silvie said resolutely, frowning and squeezing a fist, as if she was making a life-changing decision in which there was no room for self-doubt. ‘It just fell on us. It was our moral duty. You did the right thing, no question.’

Ben said nothing more until they reached the outskirts of the small town. They passed the pretty church and the first of the gingerbread houses, then came to the square where the flagpole stood, and next to it the three-pronged sign. Ben followed the direction for
Ärztezentrum
up a narrow, tree-lined street. The medical centre was a prim white cottage hospital, set off the road among neat lawns and trimmed hedges. Ben screeched the Hummer to a stop in the little car park outside and said, ‘Be right back.’ He jumped out, flung open the back and hefted Donath’s limp, unconscious form over his shoulder, carried him a few paces and dumped him on the grass within sight of the entrance. He walked back to the Hummer and they U-turned out of the car park with a squeal and a roar as the cottage hospital door burst open and two medical staff rushed out to attend to the unconscious man. The word ‘SCHWERVERBRECHER’, scrawled in marker pen across his forehead from temple to temple, was there to warn them that their patient was a dangerous criminal. But not even a tough guy like Miki Donath was going anywhere with two broken arms.

Driving fast through the little town, Ben made a ten-second call to Luc Simon, to tell him where the Swiss cops could find their missing fugitive. He could have told Luc where he was going from here, but had already decided that could wait.

Reaching the square, Ben checked the wooden sign again. This time, he took the direction for
Bahnhof
.

‘The railway station?’ Silvie said, turning to stare at him. ‘What do we need a train for?’

‘We don’t,’ Ben told her. ‘You do. This is where we part ways.’

She looked at him blankly. ‘Where am I going?’

‘Back to base. Home. Wherever you want, except where I’m going.’

‘Are you kidding me?’

‘I need to finish this by myself,’ he said.

‘You can’t leave me hanging.’

‘I can’t be responsible for what happens to you.’

‘Don’t patronise me.’ Her jaw clenched, making her face look tight and hard. ‘This wasn’t the deal, Ben.’

‘There is no deal,’ he said. ‘There’s just me and Streicher.’

‘And upward of a dozen more Parati, tooled up and ready to die to defend him.’

‘They’d better be ready to die,’ he said. ‘Because that’s what’s going to happen to them.’

‘You go in there alone,’ Silvie said, ‘you’d better be ready to die too.’

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Many kilometres away, deep below the Swiss countryside, Udo Streicher walked down the white-tiled corridor and entered the laboratory. It consisted of an outer chamber, in which it was unnecessary to wear protective clothing, and a maximum-containment inner chamber from which it was securely sealed off by thick glass and an airlock chamber. The walls were bare except for a large clock. Down here where the generator-fed neon lights worked twenty-four-seven, you soon lost track of day and night.

On the other side of the glass, Anton Lindquist looked like a spaceman inside the same model of BSL-4 positive pressure protection suit he’d worn during his days as a lab technician at the European Centre for Disease Control in Stockholm, the job he’d been in when Streicher had first recruited him to the Parati. He was hooked up to his air supply via a curly plastic hose long enough to allow him to move freely about the room, and able to talk over the speaker system via the mic behind his PPPS suit visor. He had his back to the glass, intent on working at a massive stainless-steel bench that stretched from wall to wall and was covered in a range of equipment whose purpose Streicher could only guess at, even if he had paid for it all. There were incubators and vaccine baths, a huge vacuum pump, a centrifuge, a microscope wired up to a computer screen, racks of container jars and Petri dishes and all kinds of assorted tools and gadgets strewn everywhere. Streicher wasn’t too interested in knowing what any of it did. The end result was his only real concern, and that end result was taking far longer to achieve than he’d initially been given to understand.

Streicher rapped on the glass. Lindquist didn’t hear because the rush of his air supply tended to drown out most background sounds. Streicher rapped the glass harder, and the figure in the moon suit suddenly stiffened and spun around like a startled rabbit.

‘You frightened me,’ he said, his voice sounding scratchy and metallic through the speaker in the outer chamber. His glasses were steamed up behind the visor. He’d been expecting this visit from his boss, only not so soon.

‘What progress are we making?’ Streicher asked, laying emphasis on the
we
.

‘Oh, er, some. I mean, we are. It’s getting there.’

‘It’s been days,’ Streicher said. ‘You promised me this wouldn’t take long.’