“I saw the flag,” he ventured. “I know who you are.”
Martedi’s voice was salesman smooth. “Do you now?”
“KLA. You are Kosovars. You know the World Court will acquit him, so you have decided to dispense your own brand of justice.”
Konstantin knew this wasn’t remotely the truth, he was giving them the chance to laud their superiority over him, and Martedi, right on cue confirmed it. “You see David? They know nothing. In fact, they believe exactly what we want them to believe.”
Habersham remained unconvinced. “I don’t like this. How do we know he’s telling the truth?”
“It is the most plausible explanation,” Martedi countered. “Relax, David. This is for the best. We were always risking exposure by using your villa. Now, there will be nothing to lead back to us. This is a good thing. Believe me.”
Konstantin sensed that the interrogation was drawing to a close. He didn’t want that. He had to keep them talking, keep them asking questions, otherwise he’d never learn anything. So he asked, “You...you aren’t KLA?”
Martedi chuckled. “Of course not. There is no more KLA. But when Kristijan Pavic dies very publicly, the world will believe that they still exist. More importantly, Serbs will believe it.”
Any satisfaction that Konstantin might have felt for tricking Martedi into making the admission was overshadowed by the revelation itself. So that was their game; a false flag operation, designed to light the powder keg of latent ethnic hostility in the Balkan states. Not good. Not good at all. “Why?”
“The world has changed, my Russian friend. Last time, the Western nations came to the aide of the Albanians and gave them their independence. The Serbs haven’t forgotten and they haven’t forgiven. When Pavic dies a martyr’s death, they will seek revenge. And who will help the Kosovars—the Albanian Muslim Kosovars?
“Not the countries of the West. They are sick to death of Muslims and their endless obsession with violence. Sick of sending their young men to defend, to liberate—” Martedi’s Italian accent amplified the contempt with which he spoke the word—“thankless, godless barbarians. They will wash their hands of Kosovo. And so it will fall to the Muslim world to look after their brothers.”
Konstantin knew that the Muslims of Eastern Europe were as culturally far removed from their fellow worshippers in the Middle East as night and day, but if Martedi’s prediction proved true, if the Western nations turned their back on Kosovo, it would be the final straw—damning proof that peaceful coexistence between the West and Islam was impossible.
It would mean war.
Not just random acts of terrorism carried out by extremists, but open war between nations.
The next world war.
“Why?” Konstantin repeated, no longer playacting. “Why would you want that?”
“It should not concern you. Your people stand to benefit, that is all you should care about. I’ve said more than intended.” Martedi chuckled. “It is fortuitous that you stumbled into this. Perhaps your death at the hand of these barbarians will stimulate your politicians to enter the fray?”
Konstantin felt the hood tugged down once more, the last chink of light stolen by the brutal gesture. “Who is the horseman?” he asked.
There was a cold silence, and for the first time since waking he could hear the muffled hum of jet turbines.
Habersham broke the spell. “Lorenzo? If he knows that...”
“He knows nothing.” Konstantin felt hands grip his shoulders, and when Martedi spoke again his voice was cryptic, almost reverent. “‘And there went out another horse that was red, and power was given to him to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another. And there was given unto him a great sword.’”
The hands patted his shoulders. “Soon, everyone will know the horseman.”
Martedi had said all he was going to say.
The death sentence was par for the course, but Konstantin felt a new sense of urgency as he tested his bonds. His hands were cold and numb from the loss of circulation. There was no slack in the plastic zip-ties. Somewhere beyond the confines of his hood, the whine of the engines intensified. He heard the noise of wing flaps being extended in preparation for landing.
He breathed another curse.
He’d finally found the answers he’d been looking for, had grasped the true ambition of the Four Evangelists.
And there wasn’t a damned thing he could do to stop them.
18 Sanction
Rome—0506 Local (0406 UTC)
FROST REACTED INSTANTLY.
He threw himself flat on the floor.
He spider-crawled away even as Denison’s lifeless body pitched forward and what little remained of his face thudded wetly on the tabletop.
Heads were turning around him; the half-dozen patrons of the cybercafé had heard the crack of the bullet punching a neat hole through the window, but didn’t yet understand what they’d heard. It would be a few seconds more before they realised that a murder had occurred right in front of them, and longer still to grasp why Frost was crawling around on the floor.
There was another crack. He heard it after a second hole appeared in the window: the difference between light and sound across distance. A sniper. Frost felt a pulse of heat and pressure as the round passed through the place where he had been sitting less than one second earlier.
He kept moving, angling closer to the wall directly below the perforated window, trying to get out of the sniper’s line of sight as quickly as possible.
Long years of training had thrown him into a sort of defensive autopilot.
Keep moving.
Keep out of the crosshairs.
He’d worked out the angles almost reflexively; the shots had come from outside, probably from the roof of a building on the far side of the piazza.
Stupid! I should have made Tony take a seat away from the windows...
He shut down the part of his brain that was generating the recriminations. Self-flagellation was low on the list of priorities.
Keep moving. Stay alive.
Return fire.
Snipers didn’t work alone. There would be a spotter, and in this environment, the spotter would need to be close to verify the kill.
He scanned the awestruck patrons around him without really seeing them. He didn’t need to study their faces or gauge their reactions; he knew what he was looking for and it wasn’t here.
Outside then.
He sprang up from a crouch and hurled himself at the exit door, slamming it open and bursting onto the street. Frost immediately veered to the right, moving at speed.
There were only a handful of people in the piazza—a jogger, a few early risers out for a walk and a coffee before beginning the workday.
No one appeared to have noticed what was happening.
The sound of another bullet’s impact ricocheted around him. He saw a spray of concrete chips as the round pockmarked the cobbles of the pavement less than a metre in front of him.
He spun around changing course to prevent the gunman from filling him with lead, zigzagging with every few steps as he marked his mental map with the probable location of his attacker. Then he saw something else.
Several of the pedestrians saw his strange behaviour, but like any public place, they made a visible effort to pretend they hadn’t.
A man standing near the fountain stared directly at him.
He followed every move Frost made.
Frost didn’t recognise him, but his dark blue anorak was very familiar.
It took him a second to place it: this was one of the men that had chased them through Kensington Gardens.
Frost looked away, hoping that the man hadn’t caught the glimmer of recognition, and veered right, hard, running out into the piazza, before angling back to the pavement.
He repeated the manoeuvre again, closing the distance between himself and the spotter.
Then, when the fountain was only about thirty metres away, he broke in
to a full sprint.
The man’s eyes widened as he realised what Frost was doing and he reached under his jacket, for a semi-automatic pistol.
He managed to bring the gun up.
Before he could get off a shot, Frost was on him.
They slammed together like rugby players in a ruck.
The man outweighed him by at least ten kilos, but Frost had momentum on his side. For the fleeting second they came together that made all the difference.
His shoulder hit the big man’s abdomen and sent him sprawling backwards into the fountain.
Even as he went down, the man managed to wrap his arms around Frost, pulling him with him.
Frost felt the chilly water close over him—bringing back the plunge into the flood trap below the sacellum—but with the added threat of someone trying to kill him.
They grappled like wild animals.
Any advantage Frost might have had disappeared in the face of his opponent’s superior strength. He quickly found himself on his back, with the man’s hands gripping his shirtfront, sheer brute force holding him under the surface as he spat and kicked and tried to break free.
Frost struggled against the oppressive weight, trying to wrestle free of the man’s grasp, but no amount of writhing or twisting helped.
He flailed blindly, trying to strike the man’s face or chest, anywhere that might grant him a momentary reprieve from drowning.
It didn’t help.
The blurry visage of his opponent continued to leer down at him, the hands that held him as unyielding as the roots of an oak tree.
As his initial primal fury began to subside, Frost knew that he’d underestimated this man, and his error was going to cost him his life.
The realisation was strangely calming.
Frost suppressed the aimless instinct to survive, and instead seized on the desire to win. It was different. Winning demanded a different kind of thinking. He stopped struggling; let his arms and body go limp beneath the surface.
His assailant wasn’t fooled.
The man was evidently smart enough to know that Frost hadn’t been under nearly long enough to have succumbed to asphyxia, but what he couldn’t know was that the deception wasn’t Frost’s primary goal.
He was trying to focus on the indistinct face hovering above his own.
He stayed that way for several seconds, fixing his gaze on the man’s lower jaw, and then put all of his might into a single punch that rammed like a sledgehammer into the man’s chin.
The blow landed square, driving the man’s jawbone up into his skull with a crunch that vibrated all the way to Frost’s elbow.
The big man’s head didn’t snap back; his neck, like his arms, was thick with muscle and absorbed the energy of the punch, but his prodigious strength could not prevent Frost’s fist from driving his jawbone straight back into the mandibular nerve cluster—what professional fighters called ‘the knockout button.’
Frost didn’t believe for a second that his single punch had rendered the man unconscious—it would have been a million to one shot—but he felt the intensity of his opponent’s grip relax, and that was all he’d wanted.
Frost seized the opportunity.
He threw his arms up out of the water and caught hold of the man’s head, drawing it down to his chest, and in the same motion, twisted savagely as if he might, through raw fury alone, rip the man’s head from his shoulders. Something snapped, a sound that reverberated through Frost’s body like a gunshot, and the man instantly went limp, settling on top of Frost like a sandbag. A dead weight.
Desperate for air, Frost shoved the corpse aside and broke the surface, gasping.
For a moment, the craving for oxygen superseded all other concerns, but he didn’t have the luxury of catching his breath.
He ducked down again, trying to use the bulk of the fountain for cover without knowing precisely where the sniper was hidden.
The towering figure of the merman partially eclipsed his view of rooftops. He felt exposed. Pinned down. He rolled over the concrete lip surrounding the pool and pressed himself flat against the warm pavement.
Frost saw the dead man’s discarded pistol—a semi-automatic, equipped with a sound suppressor—half a metre away, and snatched it up.
He sprang to his feet and sprinted out into the piazza.
He didn’t zigzag this time; doing so might have prevented the sniper from anticipating his movements, leading him the way a hunter leads a flock of birds, but it would also have increased the amount of time spent in the open, and right then it was all about time. The gamble paid off; no shots were fired.
Frost reached the front door seven seconds after crawling out of the fountain.
He burst through the door and found himself in a foyer with a flight of stairs directly ahead and an intersection of halls going left, right, and deeper into the interior of the building. Frost took the stairs, bolting up them two and at a time, the gun held out in front of him.
He narrowly avoided slamming into a woman coming down as he rounded the landing to the second storey, but he kept going.
A litany of colourful and decidedly unladylike curses followed him.
He didn’t give a shit.
He reached the third floor, and kept going, then the fourth.
One more flight of stairs continued up from the fourth storey landing, but the way was blocked by a chain that stretched between the handrails. Frost was just about to climb over the barrier when someone stepped into view at the top of the flight.
He froze in place and stared up at the man.
He was younger than Frost, but not by much.
Fit, though it was hard to be sure since most of his upper body was concealed beneath a nylon windbreaker. His right hand was empty, but his left held the handle of a long, rectangular case—it was about the right size and shape to hold a guitar.
Or a rifle.
Frost saw a flash of recognition in the man’s eyes.
And put a silenced bullet directly between them.
The man pitched backward and sprawled like a whore on the stairs.
The case slipped from his fingers and skittered down the steps, brushing past Frost. He made no effort to get out of the way. His attention, like the business end of the pistol, was focused on the landing above.
Five seconds passed. Ten. Thirty seconds. No one else appeared. The sniper had evidently been alone on the rooftop. If there were any more members of the hit team left, they weren’t in this building.
Frost slowly lowered the gun and then turned and sank wearily onto the steps as the adrenaline tide finally began to ebb and the weight of what had just happened crashed over him.
He felt no satisfaction at having avenged his old mate’s death.
Revenge wasn’t a dish worth serving, hot or cold.
The skirmish was nothing but a coda: a bitter postscript to a long night that had ended with him accomplishing exactly nothing.
Denison had asked only one thing of him, and he had failed.
Tony was dead, the Crocea Mors was lost, and Lili was....
Lili.
Frost shot to his feet, clambered over the chain, and raced up the steps to the body of the fallen sniper. He rifled through the man’s pockets, finding a pistol—the same model as the one he’d taken from the dead man at the fountain, and two spare magazines, which he stuffed into his pocket.
Then he found what he was really looking for.
He activated the man’s mobile phone, and hastily punched in a number that was still fresh in his memory.
19 Contact
Nonesuch Manor—0411 UTC
I
t wasn’t until the generic trill of the prepaid burner phone startled him awake that Sir Charles Wyndham even realised he’d dozed off.
His blood was a churning stew of caffeine and anxiety, but in the absence of information—it had been more than five hours since he’d last heard from Khavin—worry and stimulants couldn’t stave off exhaustion indefinit
ely.
Lethe fielded the call, switching it over to speaker mode: “Hello?”
“Lethe, that you?”
There was no mistaking the voice with its Irish burr.
“Frosty!” Lethe almost shouted, his relief obvious.
The old man looked at him, thinking Dear God, it actually worked. “Are you all right?” Sir Charles asked.
There was a noise like a cough, or maybe it was a bitter laughter, that crackled from the speaker. “Not remotely, boss.”
Sir Charles heard the weariness—the sense of utter defeat—in Frost’s voice, and felt an overwhelming sense of grief. He’d done this to him. He’d left him out there, alone. He’d betrayed him. But no matter the reasons, he’d left him to an uncertain fate, left him hanging in the wind, and while he knew of no one more capable, it in no way lessened his self-loathing. “I don’t know where to begin, my boy, I’m so very—”
Frost cut him off. “I know. Forget it. Look, I think I know what’s been happening, but right now I need Jude to do something for me.”
“Name it,” Lethe said.
“I need you to look up the list calls that went to my mobile, one of the last one’s Denison’s. I need to know the calls he made and received over the last few days.”
“Roger that, Frosty,” Lethe replied confidently. In fact, he’d already made that inquiry earlier in the evening at the old man’s behest, hoping that it might provide some way of reaching Frost without alerting MI6. He brought the information up onto the wall-mounted plasma screens.
“What am I looking for?”
“Look for an overseas number, country code for Kosovo...or maybe Italy.”
“Kosovo?”
“The phone belongs to Lilijana Pavic,” Frost went on. “Right now I’m praying to every fucking heathen deity she was lying when she told me she didn’t have one.”
Sir Charles interrupted before Lethe could relay the number: “Ronan, there’s something you need to know.”
WarGod Page 18