The Martyr's Curse (32 page)

‘Take two,’ she said. ‘Let’s do it.’

They got out. Ben opened the Mercedes’ boot. ‘Doesn’t look like there’s any back way in this time,’ Silvie said.

‘Then we’ll just walk right in the front door,’ he said. He pulled the rifles out of the holdall and passed her the AK-47.

She stared at it, then at him. ‘Are you nuts? We can’t go strolling down the street with assault rifles on open display.’

‘This is Switzerland. Everybody has them here.’ He left the bags in the boot of the car with the lid open, to shield what they were doing from the driver’s rear-view mirror in case the guy panicked and took off. Checked his weapon. Same routine as before, a round in the chamber and the safety on. Browning and Glock in his belt, fully loaded and ready to go.

‘Let’s get to work,’ he said.

It was only at the moment he was kicking in the front door that he was hit by a tiny doubt that they might have the wrong house. Parking spaces seemed to be at a premium. The BMW could have been parked three doors up, three doors down or on the opposite side of the street. But as the door frame gave way with a splintering crack, it was too late for second thoughts.

Ben and Silvie burst inside the hallway. A dingy carpeted stairway lay ahead. A doorway to the left. The ground-floor room with the light on. The hallway was narrow and in two strides he was at the door. The third stride landed midway up the panelled wood, level with the handle. The door smacked open. He shouldered through, gun first.

It was a living room, lit by the glow of a lopsided standard lamp in one corner. Cheaply and minimally furnished. A plain coffee table in the middle of the room. On it, an opened can of Stella Artois and a copy of
Guns and Ammo
, lying open to reveal glossy images of the latest offering in bolt-action tactical rifles. Next to the magazine and the beer can, a Smith & Wesson Military and Police Model automatic pistol lay on its side with its muzzle pointed towards the door.

That was when Ben knew for sure he was in the right house.

Three feet beyond the coffee table was a wing armchair upholstered in faded brown corduroy, and in it sat a man. He was perhaps thirty-eight or forty years old. Coppery hair cropped short, military-style. His shoulders were broad and the arms revealed by his sleeveless T-shirt were muscled and stringy. The right side of his face had been mutilated long ago. The scar was pink and white, like a spider’s web of thickened, sclerotic flesh that stretched from the corner of his eye to the corner of his mouth and made him look as if he was scowling.

He’s got the look of a killer. Doesn’t say much. Face is messed up by a bullet.

Torben Roth. Streicher’s man. The mercenary.

At first Ben thought he was asleep. But Roth was conscious, sitting upright in the chair with his eyes open. His gaze drifted up to meet Ben’s, then drifted down to stare impassively at the loaded battle rifle that Ben had aimed at his centre of mass.

Through the open doorway behind him, Ben heard the light patter of Silvie’s footsteps racing up the stairs.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ he said to Roth, anticipating that the guy was about to lunge forward in his chair and make a grab for the pistol. He took a step forward, the rifle trained steady on the mercenary’s chest. At this range it would blow the man’s spine out through the back of the chair. Overkill, but Ben wasn’t taking any chances faced with an experienced and dangerous opponent.

Roth didn’t move. Didn’t make any attempt to reach for the gun. Ben took another step closer, and now he could see how pallid and grey Roth’s complexion was. A sheen of sweat filmed his brow. His eyes looked blank and expressionless. Maybe he was drunk. Ben kicked over the coffee table and sent the pistol tumbling away over the thin carpet. The Stella can hit the floor and rolled, beer sloshing out of its keyhole spout. If the guy was drunk, he must have got started earlier.

‘On your knees,’ Ben said. ‘Hands behind your head.’

Roth still didn’t move.

Ben took another step towards him and clubbed him across the left temple with the rifle barrel. Not hard enough to inflict damage, but enough to galvanise him a little.

‘I said, on your—’ Ben started to repeat.

But he didn’t finish the sentence. Roth slumped out of the chair as limply as if someone had filleted every bone from his body. He collapsed to the floor. Landed on his face and lay absolutely still.

Ben could hear Silvie moving about from room to room upstairs, doors opening and closing.

He stared down at the man on the floor. Nudged him with his foot. No response. The blow hadn’t been anywhere near enough to knock the guy unconscious. He could be feinting, waiting for Ben to drop his guard and come close, so he could rear up at him with a knife in his hand. Very carefully, keeping the gun pointed where it needed to be, Ben crouched down and checked his pulse. It was weak and faint and irregular, like a coma victim. Like someone just barely clinging to life.

Then the body started heaving and thrashing and jerking. Roth’s spine arched and his arms went as taut as steel cables, every muscle standing out as if it was about to snap. The spasms went on for a few seconds and then the body went limp again.

He wasn’t faking it. Something was wrong with the guy. Something was
very
wrong with him.

‘Ben,’ Silvie’s voice called down from the top of the stairs. She sounded worried. ‘You’d better get up here fast.’

Ben stepped away from Roth’s comatose body. The man genuinely wasn’t going anywhere. He ran out of the living room and up the stairs. Silvie was standing at the top, her rifle dangling loose from one hand. Which Ben assumed meant she’d found nobody upstairs.

‘Just the one guy below,’ he said. ‘Roth. He’s in no fit state to give us any trouble.’

She shook her head. ‘Just two guys. Holger Grubitz is up here. And he’s in pretty bad shape too.’

He reached the top of the stairs and she led him along a half-lit passageway with peeling floral wallpaper towards an open door. Nodded through it. Ben walked into the room. It was simply furnished like the ones in the first property. Like a student bedroom, except this was a bunkhouse for wanted mass murderers. Just a chair and a junk-shop plywood wardrobe and a narrow bed with a sagging mattress.

The bed had a dead man lying on it. Ben didn’t have to get close to know that for certain. He didn’t particularly want to. It wasn’t the most serene-looking corpse he’d ever seen. The bed was rumpled and stained with sweat and urine. Grubitz’s body was all twisted up and contorted, as if he’d died thrashing about in feverish agony. No blood. No visible injury. Something else had killed him.

‘I don’t think it was the Chinese food,’ Ben said.

Silvie looked at him. She was pale. ‘Roth?’

‘Alive, but going the same way fast.’

‘What do we do?’

Ben shrugged. ‘Nothing. Let him suffer. He has it coming. Search the house for any clues as to where the others went. If there aren’t, we sit tight and wait for them.’

He’d barely finished speaking before the scream of sirens drowned him out. He ran to the window and saw a whole fleet of police cars and two SWAT team vans flood the street below from both directions. The walls of the houses became a swirling kaleidoscope of blue light.

The vehicle doors swung open. Armed officers in uniform and black-clad tactical response cops with submachine guns were suddenly all over the place. They knew exactly where to go. Within seconds Ben could hear them swarming into the hallway below. Rushing footsteps on the stairs. Radios crackling and fizzing. Agitated shouts of, ‘Police! Give yourselves up!’

‘What do we do?’ Silvie said, wide-eyed and even paler than before.

Ben turned away from the window. He let the FAMAS rifle drop from his hand and fall to the floor. Drew the Glock from his belt and tossed it away. Then did the same with the Browning Hi-Power.

‘Only one thing we can do, Agent Valois,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to arrest me.’

Chapter Forty-Six

She stared at him. ‘Do what?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ he told her. ‘Point the damn rifle at me. Do it now. Quickly, and like you mean it.’ He dropped to his knees in front of her and put his hands behind his bowed head with his fingers laced together.

Silvie hesitated, but there was no time and no choice. She pointed the AK-47 at Ben’s head.

‘How the hell did they find us?’ she asked.

‘Don’t speak to me,’ he said.

At that moment, SWAT officers came thundering down the passageway with their machine guns raised. They reached the open doorway and burst into the room. Suddenly it wasn’t just one gun pointing at Ben, but ten or a dozen. He kept his head down and stared fixedly at the floor. Heard Silvie identify herself to them as a DGSI agent. Heard the SWAT team CO congratulate her on her good work and tell her they were taking over from here.

Then Ben was shoved down roughly to the floor and had his arms jerked behind his back. His wrists were bound with a plastic tie. He said nothing, and did nothing to resist them. They stripped out his pockets and even took Père Antoine’s little tonic bottle, handling it as though it was liquid nitroglycerine. Next he was being marched back along the floral passageway and down the stairs to the hallway, and out into the swirling blue lights and the sea of police vehicles. He glanced up the street and saw the armed cops circling the taxi. They had the driver trussed up flat on his face in the road, squirming like a grounded turtle and surrounded by guns while the bags were being removed from the back of the car. It wouldn’t be long before the cops let him go.

Ben wasn’t betting on the same happening to him.

How the hell did they find us?

He had no idea. But he was pretty certain it wouldn’t be long before he found out.

Six officers hustled him to a black police van. Its back doors were open. The rear compartment was a windowless steel cage. He was shoved and jostled towards it. Standard arrest procedure. But something wasn’t right. Ben could see it in the faces of the cops emerging from the house. He could see it in the way they were barking into their radios. A tone of urgency that was incongruous with a normal crime scene. Something was happening.

He looked around for Silvie but couldn’t see her. Where had they taken her?

In the final fleeting moment before they slammed him inside the cage, an unmarked panel van came speeding down the street with its headlights blazing and concealed blues flashing from behind its radiator grille and its siren shrieking. It was white, not black. Police vehicles moved smartly aside to let it through. It skidded to a halt outside the house. Its side door slid open and four men got out. They weren’t armed and they weren’t wearing police or SWAT uniform.

They looked like astronauts clambering out of a moon lander. Clad in shimmering silvery-white from head to toe, bulky full-body suits made of exotic space-age materials capable of withstanding any kind of nuclear, chemical or bacteriological contamination. The swirling blue lights reflected on their protective clothing and the thick visors that covered their faces. They were clutching cases of equipment in their heavily gauntleted hands.

A hazmat team.

There was no way they’d had time to respond to a radio call. They’d either been on their way already, or standing by a street or two away waiting for the order to move in.

As if they knew something. Which was a damn sight more than Ben did, at that moment. Back in the day, he’d seen hazmat suits deployed in combat zones thousands of miles away across the globe, during actual or anticipated chemical warfare attacks. Here, in the middle of a quiet residential area in a peaceful lakeside Swiss town, they were a shockingly incongruous sight.

Three more identical white vans came roaring down the street and screeched to a halt, nose to tail. And as they moved in, the police and SWAT units were clearing out. Fast. The street was too narrow for them to U-turn out of there. Transmissions whined under hard reversing and tyres squealed as they reached the top of the street and wrestled their vehicles around and sped off as though a megaton bomb was about to explode. The taxi driver and his Mercedes had already been whisked away into the night. Eight more of the shimmering, visored figures piled out of the white vans. One of them was waving his bulky, padded arms at the remaining cops on the scene and mouthing something urgently behind his mask, as if to say,
Get the hell out of here NOW!

Then Ben saw no more. The doors slammed and he was closed in darkness. He heard running steps and the sound of more doors, and then felt the floor under his feet lurch violently as the vehicle took off. He sat on the hard bench inside the cage, tried to get as comfortable as possible with his wrists tied behind his back, and waited for whatever was going to happen next.

It was a longer wait than he’d expected. The motion of the van told him they were driving through the city, constantly shifting speed, braking and accelerating, pausing at lights, turning one way and the other. Ben assumed their destination was the nearest
préfecture de police
. Which shouldn’t be a long trip.

But instead, the van just kept going. The stop-start, left-right motion died away to a steady tempo, telling him they were heading out of the city on the open road. The unwavering engine note and the thrum of the tyres resonated through the bodyshell and the steel cage bars around him. Ben sat quietly in the darkness, rocking gently to the sway of the vehicle, feet braced against the opposite bench, wondering where he was being taken.

An hour passed by, time that Ben used to try and make sense of what he’d seen back there. It had looked as if the hazmat team were intent on shutting the whole street down. Unquestionably, it had to do with the two occupants of the safe house. One dead, the other dying. Whatever had made them sick, it was something serious and infectious enough to spark off a major emergency response.

Then he went on to think about Silvie and what the next stage would be for her. No doubt she was in for a long night with her DGSI superiors, going over every detail of her undercover mission leading up to the point when she’d been lured away and taken hostage, and everything that had happened since. Ben wasn’t worried about her ability to handle herself through it all. He wasn’t even all that worried about himself. There wasn’t a lot he could do, so why waste energy on fretting about the situation?