Inexorably, he was pushing the barrel of the Beretta into line with Solomon’s head, degree by degree.
Grasping the frame of the weapon, Solomon tried to put a finger behind the trigger to stop it moving, or jam his thumb into the gap between hammer and strike plate, but Khadir was uninjured and he was stronger. The killer was taking his time with this, playing out the conflict between them. He was savouring it.
That arrogance could be used against him. Solomon found the pistol’s magazine release button and crushed Khadir’s finger against it, earning a snarl from the other man. The ammunition magazine slipped out of the gun and tumbled away, leaving only the single round still in the pipe. Solomon ducked back and squeezed with all the force he could apply, and the gun went off. The bullet hummed past his ear, hornet-loud and searing, but the weapon’s slide locked back and he let go.
Khadir cursed and hit him with the butt of the empty pistol, then jabbed him in the belly with the sharp edge of the frame. Blinded by pain, Solomon threw a wild punch and scored a lucky hit, striking Khadir in the neck at his brachial plexus.
They disengaged momentarily, and Solomon collapsed back against the wall. He grasped at the splintered bricks for support, reaching for a light switch at shoulder height. The switch box had been forced open, and jump leads salvaged from the garage repurposed to turn it into an on-off control for the gasoline-powered generator outside.
More cannibalised wiring snaked away, out to the forecourt beneath the sheets of tarpaulin. The far ends of the wires were looped inside powder-filled jars that had formerly contained nuts and bolts. Now they lay beneath a buried service hatch, which in turn led to the half-empty storage tank under the petrol station’s forecourt.
Half-empty, but still filled with enough gasoline and fumes to be dangerous.
Solomon flipped the switch, and the jury-rigged circuit buzzed and spat. Marc had told him that it would take a few seconds for the improvised electric detonator to heat up enough to trigger the chemical reaction. The mix of volatiles he had brewed from the supplies in the garage would combust, and the contents of the big tank would go with it.
There’s enough time to get out, Marc had told them, as they waited for the helicopter to arrive. Whoever does it, just flick the light switch and run like hell.
Solomon leaned back and let the wall take his weight, breathing unevenly.
‘What have you done?’ Khadir saw the switch, the wires, and cast around in alarm. ‘Answer me!’
Solomon’s face split in a smile, and although it was becoming difficult to speak, he did so.
‘That . . . is not your concern.’
*
Malte moaned as Marc dumped him in the back of the jeep.
‘Where’s Solomon?’ Lucy was in the driver’s seat, with the engine running and her hand on the stick-shift, ready to floor it. ‘He should be here!’
‘Back there,’ Marc gasped, twisting to point in the direction of the buildings. ‘We need to go get him—’
The explosion lit up the night with searing orange colour, the contents of the buried storage tank erupting out of the ground in a ball of fire that rose high over their heads.
The roaring shock wave slammed Marc against the side of the vehicle and he saw the buildings framed by the inferno. The fire roiled and churned upwards, but the force of the blast was a hammer blow, and it flattened everything. The petrol station, the overhead awning, the garage shack, sheds and outhouse beside it – all came down in a long, rolling peal of thunder.
‘No!’
Marc shouted the word into the bitter wave of dust that rose in the wake of the collapse. He pushed away from the jeep and ran into the choking cloud, as burning debris came down around him from out of the sky.
He tried to take a breath to call out, but his mouth filled with displaced soil and thick smoke. He stumbled and wheezed, squinting into the haze.
Where the building had stood, there was a great heap of fallen brickwork and rubble, slumped into a blackened crater where the fuel tank had been buried. Fires burned everywhere, the dry scrub caught alight by the explosion. Marc heard the sizzle and crack of superheated metal, and the thick carbon stink of spent petrol was lead-heavy in his lungs.
‘No . . .’
The denial was all he could manage, all he could muster against the destruction. He staggered to a halt, unable to process it. Rage and sorrow and dread spun through him in a terrible surge.
Marc’s legs twitched and he wanted to give in to the impulse to fall to his knees. The fire-smell engulfed him; he felt it like it was a part of him, a black shadow of loss and horror.
If he closed his eyes, he knew he would be back on that burning dockside in France, with the woman he loved dying in his arms; he would be on a hill in the savannah watching flames consume the shell of a downed airliner.
He was here now, and the fire was taking more from him. A friend, a mentor, a man he had admired and respected.
Marc felt Lucy’s hand on his shoulder and turned. Caked in dust, she looked like a wraith. Her eyes were wide and childlike, tears cutting lines through the dirt on her cheeks.
He had never seen her cry before. She looked at Marc and he knew she wanted him to tell her that the worst was not so, that Solomon had escaped this destruction. They could not lose another, not after Ari and Assim.
No more. The fight could not take any more from them.
But what they wanted did not matter.
All Marc could do was give a faint shake of the head, and draw Lucy to him.
*
Lau looked up as Esther McFarlane entered the darkened conference room, and for a moment she lost a step. The man seemed to have aged ten years in the past few days, as if the tension and the fatigue inside him had finally broken the banks of his self-control and flooded out. At her side, Henri Delancort was uncharacteristically muted, walking through the building with her in the manner of a man attending his own funeral.
And that was closer to the truth than McFarlane wanted to admit.
Lau eyed her. ‘What do you want?’ Before she could reply, he fired off a second demand. ‘Why are you still here?’
She stiffened. She wasn’t about to answer Lau’s questions, and a lifetime of being the only woman in a corporate bear-pit had taught her how to avoid being deflected from her purpose.
‘I’ve had a report from our financial analysis team. They’ve tracked a series of massive stock transfers to shell companies in Eastern Europe and Russia. A suicide run on shares across Rubicon’s primary and secondary divisions. We’re being cut up. Butchered like a fucking ox.’
Lau looked away, out of the window and over Monaco to the morning light across the bay. He appeared as if he had slept in that suit of his, and perhaps he had. There was no sign that he had left the Rubicon tower since this whole debacle had started.
‘The other board members – are they as coarse as you?’
Her lip twisted as she thought about Keller and Cruz.
‘They’ve gone running back to their own corners. Fighting their own fires.’ She stepped forward. ‘You used me, you duplicitous bastard. Somehow you got to Finlay, and he smoothed the way. I was so caught up trying to handle Solomon, I wasn’t seeing the bigger picture.’ McFarlane jabbed a finger at him. ‘Who do you really work for? It sure as shit isn’t Interpol.’
‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ Lau insisted. ‘What has happened here is the inevitable end result of the choices Ekko Solomon made,’ he told her. ‘You yourself saw it coming. Do not play the victim here. You had ample time to disengage yourself. But instead you remained tied to Rubicon because you liked the profits.’ He gave a low snort. ‘If you had displayed the courage of your convictions, you would be long gone. But now you are being pulled under, so do not pretend you do not know why.’
‘Now see here—’ she began, her native burr emerging.
‘Madame . . .’
Delancort broke in, reacting to something out
of her field of view and she turned towards a doorway leading into another part of the conference space.
Standing on the threshold in an immaculate steel-grey suit was a man that McFarlane knew only too well. Pytor Glovkonin was high up on her personal list of arseholes, the consequence of his many underhanded attempts in the past to brute-force the acquisition of her oil company for absorption into his energy conglomerate. But more than that, the Russian wasn’t only your garden-variety billionaire shitehawk. He was in deep with the Combine, and if the rumours were true, he was making advances up their ranks.
McFarlane was simultaneously anger-hot and sickly chilled by the man’s unexpected presence in the tower. He looked around with a barely concealed smirk, exhibiting the air of a conquering king in the palace of a defeated enemy.
And that, she realised, is exactly what he is.
‘Well, this explains a lot,’ she said. ‘Solomon warned us about you. I thought he was exaggerating.’
With difficulty, Lau rose from his chair and used his stick to support himself.
‘Come to check in on your investment?’ he said, shooting a look towards McFarlane and Delancort. ‘We can discuss matters in more secure circumstances.’
‘No need,’ Glovkonin replied. ‘I believe in clarity, Mr Lau. Everyone involved must understand the realities of the current situation.’
‘You did this,’ said Delancort, his gaze fixed on the Russian. ‘It’s your way of paying us back for the SCD’s interference. To get back at Solomon.’
‘Ekko Solomon is dead.’
Glovkonin tossed out the comment with a casual dismissal that seemed too smooth to be real. He let the words lie there, enjoying the reaction they stirred.
‘Bullshit!’ snapped Delancort.
‘Anything but.’ Glovkonin’s eyes narrowed at the French-Canadian’s profanity. ‘The others too, most likely. Dane and the woman, the Jew pilot, the rest of them. I have confirmation from trusted sources. In due time, I imagine bodies will be recovered.’
The last information on Solomon had placed his private airliner on a southerly heading towards the equator. McFarlane was momentarily at a loss for words, and to her surprise, Lau appeared equally shocked. At her side, Delancort became unnaturally still, his gaze drifting away and turning inwards.
All of them shared the same thought: Impossible.
‘Solomon’s jet is a mass of blackened wreckage on a hill somewhere,’ Glovkonin added. ‘A terrible accident. Shot down by some trigger-happy fighter pilot. But then Ekko had shown such poor judgement in recent times. These accusations from Interpol, the video footage from Cyprus . . .’ He shook his head and made a soft tut-tut sound. ‘Solomon led his people to their destruction. Them . . . and now you.’
He nodded to McFarlane and Delancort.
She pushed away a jolt of fear and forced a note of control back into her voice.
‘Do you have what you wanted, Pytor? I’ll take a wild stab here, because this has your stink all over it – did you have your fun manipulating us into doing your dirty work?’
Glovkonin walked further into the room, with one of his brawny bodyguards a few steps behind him.
‘You allowed yourself to be manipulated, Esther. Because you thought it would bring you what you wanted. Ekko Solomon’s expulsion.’ He waved at the otherwise empty room. ‘Your wish has been granted. He won’t come back.’
She tried to find the words to snipe back at him, but the simple truth was Glovkonin was correct. Her focus had been so tightly set on ending the unchecked vigilantism of Solomon’s Special Conditions Division that she had opened a door to their enemies. Even as that bleak reality settled in on her, part of McFarlane – the dispassionate, analytical businesswoman – began to calculate the choices still open to her, counting the cost that would inevitably come next.
If the Russian was to be believed, the only man who could have defied him was lost. Glovkonin must have seen the shift behind McFarlane’s eyes, and he knew that he had won.
‘I am disappointed Solomon was allowed to destroy vital company materials before he fled. As your new majority shareholder, I would have preferred that data intact. But no matter, I will adapt to the circumstances.’ Glovkonin glanced at Lau, then away again. ‘By the end of the week, the Rubicon Group as an entity will no longer exist. The structure will be broken up, absorbed or sold. It’s for the best,’ he added. ‘With this negative news coverage, the brand has become rather soiled.’
‘We won’t let you do this,’ Delancort insisted.
His fists were tight, and he shook with emotion.
‘You don’t have a say in it!’ Glovkonin barked the reply in a sudden, angry shout, and McFarlane saw a brief glimpse of the real man beneath the studied mask. ‘I am going to take what I want from Rubicon and you are going to let me! Because you have no other choice!’
‘No . . .’ Lau was shaking his head. ‘No, this is not what was agreed. I made Rubicon . . . It is mine by right, I was there at the beginning—’
‘And you’re here at the end,’ Glovkonin snapped. His manner switched back to false good humour. ‘Lau, be realistic. A man like you, in control of this? Once upon a time, you could have had that life, but now?’ He gave a mocking laugh. ‘Tell me, truthfully, what do you really have except your need for revenge? As one man to another, admit it.’ The Russian prodded him in the chest. ‘In there, you are hollow. Empty and worn out. The only vigour in you came from wanting Solomon to suffer. That’s gone now. So what do you have left?’
‘I . . .’ Lau struggled for an answer, but it was clear he could not find one. ‘I did what you asked. I am owed.’
Suddenly, the other man seemed so old and so small. The fire in his eyes that had been there when he first met McFarlane had become cinder and ash. With effort, he recovered a measure of his strength and spat back a reply.
‘After all that has been taken from me, I am owed!’
Glovkonin nodded towards McFarlane.
‘You’re just like her, my friend. You were a means to an end. But the similarity ends there. Esther is a consummate pragmatist, and she knows when a battle is over. She knows how to lose with poise and intelligence. But you?’ He snorted with derision. ‘You are like all soldiers. You believe that martial intellect makes you a match for men like me. But in the end, you are only a tool. Incapable of being anything more.’
Lau’s face creased in a snarling grimace and he let his steel cane drop, one hand flicking into the folds of his jacket, returning with a snub-nosed revolver.
‘I want my due!’
The bodyguard drew his own pistol, and McFarlane and Delancort shrank back at the sight of the guns, but Glovkonin appeared unimpressed with the threat.
‘You prove my point. In the end, hate is all you have. You need more than that if you are to succeed.’
Then, before Lau could speak again, Glovkonin gave his man the slightest of nods, and the bodyguard fired twice. Both shots were deafeningly loud in the soundproofed conference room, and Lau’s thin, angular body crumpled back over the wide mahogany table and spun to the floor.
McFarlane turned white, appalled by the shooting.
An execution, she told herself.
‘Tragic,’ said the Russian, shaking his head as more of his men came in to secure Lau’s body. ‘But inevitable. When a person understands that they are no longer of use, they react in extreme ways. But predictable ones.’
He turned towards McFarlane and she couldn’t stop herself from backing away another step, instinctively afraid that she and Delancort would be next.
‘Misha had no choice but to fire, of course,’ Glovkonin was saying, gesturing at the bodyguard. ‘I am sure you agree.’ He took their silence as affirmation. ‘Regrettably, we now need to discuss damage limitation.’
He snapped his fingers, beckoning an assistant in from the other room. A lithe young woman entered, carrying a digital tablet displaying contract documents, and she seemed completely undistu
rbed by either the gunshots or the dead man being gathered up by the Russian’s team. The woman handed the tablet to McFarlane and she read the first block of text at the top of the page. It was the framework for a G-Kor buy-out deal that would purchase her controlling interests in the Rubicon Group, and cut her company loose from the conglomerate.
‘It’s a generous offer, Esther,’ said Glovkonin. ‘I suggest you accept it while you still can.’
*
Marc sat on the bonnet of the jeep and stared blankly at the rough runway, looking but not seeing, his gaze lost and unfocused.
His fingers were still cracked and seared from trying to shift the rubble from the collapsed petrol station. It had been a pointless exercise, born out of frustration, and in the end they had to flee as the sound of approaching vehicles reached them. Simbarashe’s soldiers were hunting those responsible for their murdered commander, and they had called in reinforcements from every garrison of the militia.
Barandi’s outpost was exactly where Solomon had told them it would be: a worn-out and tumbledown airstrip to the east, in a forgotten corner of Mozambique’s coastline. His old comrade was heavyset and balding, with the stature of a fighter now gone to seed and all too aware of it. Barandi moved stiffly, revealing a crude metal prosthetic where his lower right leg should have been. The mark a landmine had left on him, he explained. Suspicious of them at first, he only changed his manner when Marc showed him the scratched and dented signet ring.
Ekko is dead?
Barandi asked the question, but he didn’t need any of them to answer. The shared silence from Marc, Lucy and Malte said enough.
He spoke about unpaid debts, and gave them the shelter they needed, but Marc could not find sleep and stayed outside, listening to the buzz and whirr of insects.
Each time he tried to pull himself back to the moment, Marc’s mind recoiled from the horrible reality of their situation. The grim truth sat like a stone in his chest, impossible to dislodge.
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