by James Easton
Seven of them inside. She assumed all were armed though she’d only seen five handguns. All with body armour and new ski masks. Weapons all in good condition, SIGs and Glocks. Models she’d trained on. Five men in the kitchen. Others moving through the rest of the house. More men outside. A small army.
She’d caused their deal to go wrong. This was the result. It was on her. And on them.
Haim’s eyes flicked to Nieto. She heard Nieto mouth something at him, an empty whisper. A guy stepped in front of her and turned her around. He frisked her, took the switchblade out of her pocket. He missed the skewer in her sleeve.
“To the table, all of you.” Haim used his free hand to point. A guy moved to each end to cover the table before they sat down.
Haim put Ignacio at one end, Anders at the other, Carolina he made go around the back, next to the wall and sit in the middle of the bench. Eva with her back to the room next to Miguel on the bench and Ignacio at the head. Haim stood behind them. Carolina’s guts coiled up seeing his weapon near them.
Speaking Spanish under her breath, Eva said, “Don’t let them take him.”
“English only!”
Eva held up a hand. “I’m sorry.” She looked at Carolina, saying it all with her eyes now: do not let them take him.
Ignacio nodded at Carolina as he shifted his weight on the chair. Miguel was the red line. She thought Berg would accept that. His cheek had swelled up, and he tilted his head away from it, trying to stop the bleeding.
One of the men cleared the table, stacking the full serving platters and carrying them back to the kitchen counter. Haim tore some kitchen paper off for Anders and Eva.
Miguel looked terrified, glazed, barely seeing and feeling what was taking place.
Carolina checked her breathing, the beats in, and out. She saw her phone go into a refuse sack. She assumed the land line had been cut.
“Hands and forearms on the table. Nobody moves.”
Rafa Nieto walked over to Ignacio, who looked at the table for a second, willing something on himself, before meeting Nieto’s eyes.
“You and I need to talk, Álvarez. May I?” He kept to English.
Ignacio nodded. Nieto sat at right angles to him, his back a metre from Eva.
One of the men came in from the corridor, gave Haim a signal scanner. He studied the screen. Carolina took him in. Dark body armour over a padded outdoor jacket, a circular scarf up around his face over the ski mask, and a baseball cap with a hood over it. He was in his element. You could see it in the movement, the awareness he projected.
She looked at the position of the three men guarding the room. One behind Anders to her left, one behind Eva opposite her, one behind Ignacio, to her right. Haim controlling the men. Nieto doing the talking with Ignacio. He wore leather gloves. He rested his right hand on the table.
Sweat, you piece of shit, sweat. You’ll leave fingerprints.
“Soon, Álvarez, I am going to show you a deal between us. You will see the name of a holding company in the detail. I assure you that you won’t find the beneficial owner of that firm, but you are going to put money into it in the form of a loan.”
Ignacio looked at him and nodded, then looked down, his chin in his chest like he was considering it, as if this were a normal business conversation.
“I understand.”
“I’m afraid you will not see the loan funds again. Nor will you see the interest the loan technically accrues.”
“Show me the deal. May I read it?”
“Don’t take too long.”
The room settled as Ignacio read the document. His hands were steady. Carolina saw the tension in his torso as he hunched over, but he seemed to focus on the papers. It took him about five minutes.
“It’s crude, but it works. The lawyers have pre-signed. How do I know they are real?” he said.
“You don’t. You know how it is with shell companies.”
Ignacio scratched his nose. “Very well. I need to call my banker in Madrid, and my bank in Zurich. I don’t have ten million in cash lying around”.
Nieto nodded. “Will you organise a loan?”
“I don’t think we will get approval, at this short notice. What they will have to do is a stock sale from my portfolio. As European markets are closed it will have to be over the counter with New York based dealers. That will take a little time.”
Nieto gave him a phone. “Get on with it.”
It was smart. A legal transaction. The cash would be long gone and offshore quickly. Was this all they were doing? An elaborate stick up?
Eva spoke to him in Spanish. “Don’t risk our boy.”
The guard behind her grabbed her hair and jerked it. “English. OK?”
It was over too quickly for anyone to react. Eva apologised. Carolina felt Eva’s need to reach out for Miguel. She was suffering greater stress than the rest of them.
Haim had gone out of the room.
Ignacio, on the phone, said, “Francisco? Yes, all is well. How is your family?”
She felt the energy in them. Violent, but held in for now. Almost finding reassurance in the normality of Ignacio’s conduct. They could taste the money that it would bring to them.
“I need to arrange funding for a transaction. I am lending money to a film production company and will have an interest in the profit stream going forward. We’ll need to get into the stock book.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Jean looked around the place, getting his bearings. It wasn’t that smart. Below the standard of where he and Robin had stayed. He found the bedrooms. Went into the Spanish woman’s room. He checked her things for weapons. She was tidier than Robin.
He went back to the lounge and called Max.
“Alright, they’re secured. The guy is moving the money, not stalling as far as I can see. It will take a bit longer.”
“OK, we’re good out here. Roads are quiet. I’ve called Chedan, the guy I left at our place. All under control.”
Jean called Emile. Emile said Robin was working on her laptop, it seemed on the film he’d made with her.
It was going well. He went into the lounge. The moon was out, and the view over the hills at the back made him think about what Robin had seemed to say about the future. Odd to think about it on a job. But it felt right. He’d need as much money as he could get. That meant the gold. It meant every last penny from this job. He thought of her. Cannes, Morzine. Where next?
He called Max again. “We’re taking the kid. Alverez just parted with ten mil without blinking.”
They talked it through, and then Jean checked over the rest of the house and went back to the kitchen. The guys were in their positions, weapons held properly, fingers away from trigger guards, not aggressive but alert. Rafa checking something on a phone screen with Álvarez, tugging at the ski mask that was bunching at his neck. Jean noticed the oven was still on. The little meat skewers looked good, but he didn’t take one.
Henri looked at Eric, then at Chedan.
Chedan was eating a second meal of pâté de campagne and toast with cornichons and ketchup, washed down with black tea.
Eric had spent a lot of the last hour looking up at the picture rail and, it seemed to Henri, daydreaming. Henri thought of something he’d not had a chance to discuss.
“Eric, you hired the car outside?” he spoke quietly. Chedan didn’t look up.
“Yes.”
Henri thought a little more. “You came back for me. You could have left. But you came back for me,” he said.
“Ok. It’s true.” Eric gave a soft, brief, laugh. “I got up on the hill, and the road led out of Morzine. But I turned back.”
“Why?”
“As you said about your personal life, it’s complex.”
Henri smiled. His phone buzzed. He asked Chedan if he could check it because it was a text from his wife. Chedan agreed and noshed another open sandwich, pork fat like dandruff on his moustache.
Henri read it, put the phone down, and p
ut his head in his hands.
“What is it, my friend?” Eric’s voice deeper now, not as excitable as it usually was.
“My wife gets in tomorrow morning, and wants me to go to Morzine to warm our place there up so she and the kids can join me for three days.”
They both laughed. Henri in a bitter way, observing his own dreadful numbness. There was no panic. He’d have to tell his wife everything. He was screwed. The natural culmination of all his mistakes.
Eric said, “Well, then.” He got to his feet. Chedan looked at him. Eric spoke to him in that strange language, fluently, it seemed to Henri. Chedan looked surprised but waved his hand.
Eric stretched his legs.
“You speak their language. What did you ask for?”
“I want to have a stretch.”
Eric thrust his arms out, then touched his chest, then bent forward and put his hands on his knees, his legs together, and rotated them. Touched his toes. Touched his forehead to his knees.
“Where did you learn that? You are so flexible,” said Henri.
“Circus.”
“Seriously?”
“Tumbler. I was the one they catapult to the top of the tower. Chedan here was the one who held everyone up.”
Chedan looked over.
“Not literally,” said Eric.
He shook his head and neck. “Henri. I want to thank you.”
“For what?”
“For something I didn’t know I needed.”
“What is that? A few days in the country?”
Eric stopped exercising. “Well, yes. But also, a sense of something. It’s like I have been reborn here.”
He was really different now. Not an urban rat. A circus prince. Henri never thought of anything like that, something imaginative, but he did now.
“Max may kill us later. He is more violent than I thought. My apologies for that. He won’t want us knowing about what they are doing over the hill. He will decide to kill us after we have got his equipment back. And, of course, I have already taken his equipment and sold the main part of it. And our friend troughing pâté won’t let us leave.”
Henri found it all too much. He couldn’t process what Eric was saying. Then he stopped trying, because Eric was walking over to Chedan. Chedan looked up at him from the table.
“More tea?”
Henri hadn’t seen him pick up the teapot. Eric refilled Chedan’s cup and set the teapot down. There was a rasping sound, like a fishing reel being drawn. Eric held some kind of cord from the wrist of his sweater. He wound it around Chedan’s neck.
Chedan reacted in a driving rush. Shoving his chair back into Eric, fingers scrabbling at the cord. Eric was forced back, Chedan pushing with a desperation that told Henri the man knew he had seconds, the two of them teetering and pitching over. Chedan was out by the time they hit the ground.
“Stay there!” shouted Eric.
He lay with Chedan for a few minutes to make sure he was dead, then wound the garotte from Chedan’s neck and put it back up his sleeve. He climbed to his feet.
“OK, so we move Chedan to my car.”
Ignacio spoke Spanish to the guy in Madrid, German and English to the people in Zurich. Carolina had no real way of gauging the business matters herself, but sensed that they were surprised by the request because he had to explain things a few times.
Miguel had stopped crying. He looked at his mother a lot, and she gave him reassuring, pursed smiles that Carolina knew she did not feel. Berg kept looking over at her, a wad of kitchen towels held up against the now sticky blood on his cheek.
Ignacio put a little edge in his voice and said, “Ed, thank you, but the last time I looked, it was my money.” A pause. This could be a real problem. Ignacio tapped his fingers on the table, nervous. Then: “No problem. Please carry out the transfer.”
Her arms were stiffening as they rested on the table. Carolina pretended to catch a sneeze with her hands to make the blood flow and apologised when the guy to her left moved in. He had a SIG 232, in blued steel with a black polymer grip. She knew how it would feel in her hand. The weight, the kick, the action.
Nieto lifted his phone and made a call. He grunted, spoke Italian for a minute. He looked at Ignacio. “Sensible. All done.”
Haim came into the room. There was a brief exchange. Then he spoke to the prisoners around the table.
“Alright, this is how it works now. We have your phones, we have taken down the laptops and PC, we’ve taken out the cameras. You can’t communicate with the outside world. We have snipers in the hills and guns on the road. If you try to leave within forty-eight hours, we will take you out. If you stay in the house, you will be alright.” He laughed. “You have enough food. Some good wine. That money you sent is already in different places than where you sent it. Don’t be angry about it. It has gone. You have a lot left.”
Haim moved behind Miguel, and Nieto moved behind Haim, to his right. One of the men went to the yard door. Carolina watched him but studied Jean Haim’s position with her peripheral vision. There was only one reason to stand there.
She was covered by the guy near Berg, on her left. She pushed her right foot into the floor. Then relaxed. Pushed. Relaxed. Getting the muscles ready.
They could want him as insurance, or they could want ransom. They might let him go, or they might kill him if he became inconvenient. Miguel would take everything in, and they’d see him doing it. He was more of a risk to them than they thought.
Eva looked at Ignacio, then into Carolina’s eyes. Her instruction stood.
Haim looked at Carolina, her hands on the table, the scars on her left hand.
“How did you get these?”
It was a distraction. She looked back at him. The guy covering Anders to her left moved nearer to Carolina, coming around toward the back of the table a step. His weapon held down and to his right.
Haim grabbed Miguel under an arm and around his chin. Eva threw herself onto her son’s lap. Carolina rolled left under the guy’s gun arc, came up and rammed the brocheta into his eye, got two hands on the SIG as he buckled screaming, turned her back and levered it from his hands. Haim lifted Miguel and turned him toward her like a shield. His hand tightened round Miguel’s chin, his forearm sticking out at right angles. Carolina shot him in the elbow.
She rotated a few degrees, levelled on the guy covering Ignacio, fired twice, and knocked him into the wall. She dropped to a knee and shot Nieto in the chest, wheeled left, snapped onto the guy by the kitchen door, and put two into his head as he fired at her and missed. She shunted under the table. Nieto, bleeding, lifted his weapon. She shot him in the head, came out by Miguel, under Haim. Ignacio swinging at him. Eva holding Miguel’s legs still. Haim kicked Carolina’s shoulder, pushed Miguel at her, and ran into the yard. Two guys barrelled through from the back of the house and followed him.
She turned back to the guy she’d stabbed with the brocheta. Berg wrenched a weapon away from him and shot him in the head, point blank. Carolina saw the guy’s empty ankle holster. She said, “Down, down, DOWN!” She could hardly hear her own voice from the gunfire.
Dust and paint flakes fluttered from the ceiling where Haim had stood. And she saw bullet holes on the walls. She hadn’t been aware any of them firing at her except the one by the door. But they had. Her ears were ringing.
“Ignacio, Anders. Collect their weapons. Everyone into the corridor.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Eric, rinsing the mop in the sink, lifted his head.
“Did you hear that?”
“No.”
Eric said, “Gunfire. There’s a family there.”
He looked at Henri and went to the study. Then he opened the trapdoor and retrieved a black oblong shape. It reminded Henri of the case that held the flute his mother had wanted him to play when he was ten. What Eric assembled out of it seemed rather like a flute as well. A black flute, with fewer keys and then - as Eric screwed a shoulder stock in - not a flute at all. More
like a rifle.
“You are from the minimalist school?” said Henri, laughing crazily.
Eric held up something like a ski visor. “Latest tech. I’m not going to get close in, Henri, but this was a storage job. Not to provide basecamp for murdering a family.”
Henri said, “Let’s get Chedan’s pistol. I’m coming too.” He looked at Eric. “If I die, my wife gets the insurance. You’ll clear my debt?”
Eric shook his head. “It’s cleared now. Stay. You have a family. I never have.”
“I’m coming. Let’s get the pistol. I’ll bring some bandages as well.”
Eric smiled. “Badass Henri. Allez.”
Carolina was with Berg and Ignacio in the corridor next to the shower room, where Eva was holding Miguel. Carolina stuck a spare SIG226 and six magazines in her belt, saying, “There aren’t many houses around here. We can’t call or assume anyone heard the gunfire. They will come again.”
Both of them were composed. Miguel moaned. You could tell his face was buried in Eva’s shoulder from the sound as she hushed him.
Carolina said, “Ignacio, with this, cover the kitchen.” She gave him a Glock 19. It was easier than a SIG. “Sit on the floor, here. Anders, lie down next to Ignacio. Cover the garage door. She gave him his Pardini and another Glock and spoke quiet and strong to both of them. “Nail any of those bastards that comes in.” She stepped into the shower room. She held the Glock 17 Haim had dropped out to Eva. “Can you use this?”
“I am familiar, but I have never used one,” said Eva.
“Only if you have to,” Carolina said. “You know the Glock? No safety. You just squeeze through the trigger. Point and fire.” Their eyes locked. Eva held Carolina’s wrist, and Carolina gripped the back of her hand for a second before Eva took the weapon.
“Where are you going to be?” asked Eva.
“The other side of the house.”
Adrenaline took the pain out of Jean’s elbow. He ran behind the cars at the front and tapped the party line. “We got the money. That Spanish bitch killed Rafa and Dino. I’m hit in the arm. We’ve got to take these bastards out, or we won’t be far enough away when they raise an alarm. The sack with their phones is somewhere in there.”