The Martyr’s Curse

by Scott Mariani

  The first floor was clear. Five minutes later, the second floor proved to be too. Three more bedrooms, spaced out around a galleried landing. Ben moved fast from one empty room to the next.

  The second was a bedroom that had been adapted into a recreation room, furnished with two mismatched sofas and a pine table in one corner surrounded by plain wooden chairs. There was a well-thumbed back issue of American Rifleman lying on the table, next to the half-eaten remains of a takeaway meal for two that had been consumed straight out of its packaging.

  Ben walked over to the table. Four silvery aluminium trays, two more or less scraped empty and two still three-quarters uneaten. In one of those, the leftover noodles were slowly drying and going hard and crusty. The other was full of some kind of dark, congealing sauce with bits of what was presumably meat inside. He picked up the foil container, lifted it to his nose and sniffed. Smelled like chicken in oyster sauce. Or maybe alley cat in macerated fish paste. He dipped a finger and dabbed it against his tongue. It was virtually uneatable, but not because it had been sitting there rotting for days. Ben’s guess was that it had been pretty uneatable to start with, and only about twenty-four hours old. When you spent some time in the British Army, you got to be a decent judge of things like that.

  The white paper bag the food had come in was lying rumpled on the table. Ben straightened it out and saw the name of the takeaway, with an address printed on one side.

  The house sweep was almost done. Ben left Silvie to check the last bedroom while he trotted up the final staircase to the attic space at the top of the house. He knew it would be empty before he got there. Turned on the light and looked around him. It had been converted into its own self-contained flat, with a single bedroom and a kitchenette and living space combined. No sign of habitation, not within the last few days.

  ‘They’re gone,’ Silvie said from the stairs. ‘Shit.’

  ‘They must have been alerted when you and Breslin never returned,’ Ben said, walking down to join her. He let the rifle hang loosely in his hands, the safety back on now that the danger was past.

  ‘Then that’s it,’ she said. ‘We’re nowhere again.’

  ‘Which room was yours?’ Ben asked.

  ‘The small one on the second floor. Breslin was next door.’

  ‘Who used the upstairs flat?’

  ‘Streicher and his girlfriend, when they were around. Never longer than a single night at a time.’

  ‘What about the rec room?’

  ‘It was a spare they used as a spillover living room when we had a full house,’ she said. ‘Or when Streicher was using the lounge downstairs for one of his private conferences with the inner circle. Torben Roth, Holger Grubitz and some of the other guys tended to use it as a drinking and chow den.’

  ‘Chinese?’

  ‘Pizza,’ she said. ‘There’s a takeaway joint just up the street where they’d go for a quick run out.’

  ‘Is it an okay kind of place?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve had worse. Don’t tell me you’re hungry again.’

  ‘Not exactly. Let me show you something.’ Ben led her back into the rec room.

  ‘Yuck,’ she said, pulling a face at the sight and smell of the half-finished food. ‘You’d have to be desperate.’

  ‘Super Delight,’ Ben said, pointing at the paper bag.

  ‘Who are they trying to kid, with a name like that?’

  ‘It didn’t come from this neighbourhood,’ Ben said. ‘The address is in Ouchy, wherever that is. The cab driver will know, if he hasn’t buggered off already.’

  ‘It’s a district of the city,’ she said. ‘An old port, a few kilometres to the south of here.’

  He looked at her. ‘I thought you said you didn’t know the area.’

  ‘History nerd, remember? October, nineteen-twelve. Signing of the First Treaty of Lausanne in Ouchy, between Italy and the Ottoman Empire, spelling the end of the Italo-Turkish War.’ She smiled sheepishly. ‘What a team, huh?’

  ‘Nobody drives several kilometres for slush like Super Delight dishes out,’ he said. ‘Not when they’ve got a reasonably decent pizza joint close by. Which makes me think I’m right.’

  ‘Right about what?’

  ‘Where did they all go in such a hurry?’ he said. ‘My guess is they used a couple of cars to ferry everyone out, plus all their stuff. Maybe took them two or three trips. Which would suggest they didn’t drive that far. The two guys driving could have picked up the food locally on their way back, for a quick snack before heading off. Except one of them didn’t appear too keen on it. Maybe a sign of good taste.’

  ‘Another safe house?’

  ‘You said yourself, Streicher’s rich enough to have properties all over the place.’

  ‘Ouchy,’ she said. ‘It’s worth a try.’

  ‘It’s all we’ve got,’ he said.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  The taxi driver turned out to be still there waiting for them, slouched in his seat and half asleep behind his paper. He jerked upright when he saw his fares walking back towards the car, cranked up the engine and turned on the lights. Ben put their gear in the boot, got in the back with Silvie and tossed the crumpled paper bag into the driver’s lap.

  ‘You want Chinese food?’ the guy said. ‘I know a better place than that.’

  ‘It’s Super Delight in Ouchy, or nothing,’ Ben said. ‘Let’s go.’ He leaned back and closed his eyes. Didn’t open them again until twenty minutes later, when he felt the Mercedes slow and pull in at the kerb.

  ‘Here it is,’ the driver said. Super Delight was situated halfway down a residential street of terraced houses, all lit up and clearly doing a reasonable trade that evening. Ben shook his head and wondered what the world was coming to. ‘Keep going to the end of the street,’ he told the driver. ‘Nice and easy.’

  Ben looked out of the left-side window and Silvie out of the right as the Mercedes rolled slowly down the street. Both kerbs were lined with parked cars. Neither a white BMW with a dented wing nor a black Range Rover was among them. They reached the end of the street and came to a three-way junction. The driver said, ‘Now what?’

  If in doubt, bear dead ahead. ‘Straight on,’ Ben said.

  The next street looked just the same as the last. The house they were looking for could have been any single one of them, left or right. No white BMW. No black Range Rover.

  ‘Damn it,’ Silvie muttered. ‘This isn’t going to work.’

  ‘Now what?’ the driver said impatiently as they reached another three-way junction. Left, right, or dead ahead.

  ‘Left,’ Ben said.

  ‘You sure about that?’

  Ben said nothing. He wasn’t sure at all. He was getting that hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach and a bitterness in his mouth that wasn’t just the aftertaste of stale alley cat in fish sauce. The taste of failure.

  The taxi took a left at the junction. Its headlights gleamed in the windows of the terraced houses and shone back at them in the reflectors of the vehicles parked nose to tail on both sides of the narrow street. They rolled onwards at a steady speed, the clattering sound of the Mercedes’ diesel engine reverberating back at them off the houses. Some of the windows had their curtains drawn, the glow of TV screens flickering through the gaps. Others didn’t and Ben saw people moving about inside their homes or sitting in their living rooms, settling down for the evening. In one house a party was going on, music blaring out into the street.

  No white BMW. No black Range Rover. No safe house.

  This wasn’t going to work.

  Then Silvie spoke up urgently and pointed, her finger jabbing the inside of the taxi’s rear window. ‘There.’

  Ben followed the line of her finger and saw what she’d seen. Parked in the tight line of vehicles on the right side of the street.

  A white 3-series BMW with a dented wing.

  The house it was parked in front of had lights in one curtained downstairs window and one first-floor window
. Someone was at home.

  ‘Pull in fifty metres ahead,’ Ben told the driver.

  ‘No spaces,’ the guy protested.

  ‘Then double-park, genius.’

  The driver resentfully double-parked fifty metres ahead. Ben and Silvie exchanged nods. ‘Ready?’ he said.

  ‘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.