And Ben found himself sitting across a broad desk, face to face with Grigori Shikov.
The old man wore a light grey suit that was stretched too tightly across the bulk of his shoulders and broad back. His large, rough hands, like a manual worker’s hands, were curled into fists on the leather desktop. His eyes were set far apart, hooded underneath scowling brows and boring into Ben’s. To Shikov’s left stood a younger man, late forties, balding, wearing a suit, glasses and a nervous frown.
The big, broad, grizzled old man stared at Ben for a long time. Ben returned the stare, while in his peripheral vision he’d already counted the other men standing in the room in a loose semi-circle either side of him. In addition to the two heavies who’d accompanied him on the jet, there were the other two from the Humvee and another pair he was seeing for the first time. As far as he could tell, all the men were carrying concealed pistols. The Kalashnikov rifles were more obvious, and two of them were pointed right at Ben’s head. He sat very still.
‘You know who I am,’ Shikov grated.
‘I know who you are,’ Ben answered.
Shikov motioned to the man at his side. ‘This is my associate, Yuri Maisky.’ Then he turned and cast a heavy glance at Ben’s bag, which had been turned upside down and left sitting on a chair across the room. ‘It seems you are travelling light, Mr Hope,’ he rumbled.
‘We’ll do this the way we discussed on the phone,’ Ben said. ‘You give me half the money up front. Then I take you to where I left the egg and we exchange for the rest.’
Shikov let out a long breath, with the look of a patient teacher speaking to a slow-witted child. ‘I could have these men extract whatever information I need from you.’
‘I’m sure it wouldn’t be the first time you’ve had a man tortured,’ Ben said, glancing over at Maisky, whose frown had deepened as he stood listening. ‘But if anything happens to me and I don’t make a phone call sometime in the next couple of hours, my colleague will know something’s wrong. The only place you’ll ever see that egg then is in your dreams.’
Shikov’s eyes bored deeper into Ben, as if scanning the contents of his mind. Ben maintained eye contact. After a few seconds, Shikov nodded slowly. ‘Very well. Show him, Yuri.’
Maisky motioned for Ben to get up. With the rifles still trained on his head, Ben followed the man across the room to a marble-topped sideboard, where an attaché case lay closed on its side. Ben stood facing Shikov while Maisky rolled the combination locks on the case.
‘I counted it personally,’ Maisky said. The latches flipped open. Ben pulled the case towards him. Slowly raised the lid. Ran his eye across the bound stacks of banknotes neatly arranged inside. He took out one of the bundles, then another, riffled them with his fingers.
‘Well?’ Shikov said, breaking the silence. ‘This will do just fine,’ Ben said. He nodded at Maisky. Then reached into the hollow space among the stacks. His fingers brushed cool steel. His fist closed on the grip of the big Colt .45 automatic pistol hidden inside. It was cocked and locked and he was just going to have to trust there was a round in the chamber. He thrust the muzzle of the pistol against the inside of the attaché case lid and squeezed the trigger.
The gun jolted in his hand and the boom of the shot filled the room like an expanding wave. The heavy bullet ripped through the case and caught the nearest of Shikov’s riflemen in the chest. By the time the man had gone pitching backwards across the study, Ben was already dropping into a crouch behind the antique sideboard and bringing the Colt to bear on the second rifleman.
A wonderful thing, the element of surprise. Even with his Kalashnikov lined up and ready to go, the guy didn’t have time to compute what was happening quickly enough to squeeze the trigger before Ben’s second round punched through his skull and sent him sprawling to the rug. Two down. As the room erupted in chaos, pistols were being pulled and a lot of bullets were about to start flying.
But Ben wasn’t alone. Yuri Maisky had reached into the pocket of his suit and brought out a compact handgun. He took wild aim and the little gun barked. The guy who’d driven the Humvee went down.
The Colt in Ben’s hand boomed three times more in quick succession.
Maisky snapped off two more rounds of his own.
Then, in the space of a heartbeat, the room fell from deafening mayhem to dead silence. Shikov’s six men were scattered lifelessly across the floor. The hole in the attaché case lid was still smoking.
Ben looked at Maisky. Until the moment he’d opened the case, he hadn’t known whether he could really count on the Russian’s help. The man stood uncertainly, the adrenalin tremor making the gun shake in his hand. Ben could see from the look in his eyes that he’d never shot a man before.
Shikov hadn’t moved from his desk. His jaw hung open as he stared from Ben to Maisky and back again.
‘I’ll bet you’re wondering what the hell just happened, Grigori,’ Ben said.
Chapter Seventy-Four
The truth was that, back in Monaco the night before, Ben had lied to Darcey about Shikov calling him back after getting disconnected. Ben’s conversation with the mafia boss hadn’t lasted any longer than it had needed to, and had left him unsure whether he was doing the right thing.
When the phone had rung a second time moments later, it had been someone else responding to the message he’d left on the numbers from Gourko’s mobile. Someone Ben hadn’t been expecting to hear from.
In a tight, terse-sounding Russian accent, the man introduced himself as Yuri Maisky. ‘Grigori Shikov is my uncle. I work for him.’
Ben had sat on the edge of the bed, cupping the phone, waiting for more.
‘You say you have the Dark Medusa.’
‘Right here in front of me,’ Ben had said.
‘You are crazy if you think my uncle will deal with you. He will have you tortured and killed.’
‘I’m a careful guy.’
A hesitant silence. The sound of someone teetering on the brink of an irreversible decision. ‘I can offer you another way. Split the Dark Medusa with me, and you can survive this.’
‘What about Shikov?’
‘I will convince him to let you go.’
‘Just like that?’
‘I have a lot of information. A lot of secrets.’
For the next couple of minutes, Ben had listened as Maisky described some of them. The things the man knew were enough to obliterate Shikov and his whole empire forever.
‘And you’d threaten to spill this to the authorities, just to make him call the dogs off me? Why?’
‘Because I want out,’ Maisky had said. ‘Out of this whole thing, before it is too late. I have a wife and a three-month-old daughter. I want the money to take them far away, somewhere safe. A new life for us all.’
Ben had stood up and started pacing the bedroom as he listened. The guy sounded genuine. More than that, he sounded desperate.
‘Shikov’s worth, what? Tens, hundreds of millions? Why wait for this opportunity to come along? You could have blackmailed him any time. Your freedom, in exchange for his.’
‘You don’t know him,’ Maisky had insisted. ‘He would never have given me the money. He would have found a way to fuck me.’
‘I believe it. If it took him the rest of his life. Whichever way you do this, he’s going to hunt you down. There’d be nowhere safe on this planet, for you or your family.’
Maisky had swallowed. ‘It is the only way.’
‘No, Yuri, it’s the way that’ll get your wife and baby butchered in front of you, and then Shikov’s men will put a bullet in your brain. It’s not going to work. But I can offer you a deal that will. Your uncle’s going down, along with his whole organisation. I’m going to take him down.’
‘I don’t want to go to jail.’
‘You won’t. Not if you help me.’
There had been a long, wary silence on the line. Ben could sense the cogs turning furiously in the man’s mind.
‘You have no o
ther options, Yuri. You said so yourself, and you wouldn’t have called me if you did. Now listen carefully, and I’ll tell you exactly why you need to trust me, and exactly what we’re going to do.’
In the silence of the study, Grigori Shikov stared in disbelief at the scattered corpses of his men. He still didn’t move from behind the desk. His face was as bloodless as a waxwork’s. Yuri Maisky stood watching his uncle with an agonised expression.
Ben stepped around one of the dead bodies and faced Shikov across the desk. ‘You weren’t the only person to get my message,’ he said to the old man. ‘Yuri and I had a long talk. He’s decided he doesn’t want to work for you any more. He wants a life. Consider this his resignation.’
Maisky tossed down his gun. ‘Uncle—’
Shikov’s face turned from white to red as he glowered at his nephew. ‘Yuri. This cannot be true.’
‘Yuri wants to cut a deal with the authorities,’ Ben said to Shikov. ‘Nobody knows your organisation better than he does. He can deliver it to them on a plate. Names. Addresses. Deals. Contacts. Locations of dead bodies across Europe. Details of everything you’ve been doing for decades. Enough shit to lock everyone away for ever.’
‘You will die for this, Yuri.’
‘No, he won’t,’ Ben said. ‘He’s going to be just fine. He and his family will have a new identity and a new life far, far away, courtesy of a British government witness protection programme. All he needed was someone like me to help make it happen for him.’
Shikov stared at Ben in bewilderment. ‘But—’
‘I know what you’re thinking, Ben said. ‘I’m not an agent, I’m not a cop. Yesterday I was an outlaw, wanted for murder. Where does a fugitive get the bargaining power to turn round and dictate terms to the law? Let’s just say things are a little different now. Thanks partly to your pal Tassoni, I have a bit of an edge I didn’t have before.’
A strange keening sound came from Shikov’s throat. His whole face was trembling. His hands were splayed out flat and white against the leather desktop.
Ben kept the Colt pointed at him. ‘As for you, Shikov, I promised myself I’d kill you for what you did to Donatella and Gianni Strada and all the other people who died at the Giordani exhibition that day. But now all I see is a weak, sick, sad old man who’s going to spend the rest of his life in jail.’
Shikov suddenly drew in a gasp of air. His body seemed to convulse. He clawed at his jacket pocket, ripping the seam to get at the tube of pills inside. With a trembling hand he scattered the pills across the desk, grabbed two of them in his fist, shoved them in his mouth and swallowed them dry, choking and spluttering.
‘The pills aren’t working any more, uncle,’ Maisky said. ‘You need help. I can see to it that you are well looked after.’
Ben watched as the old man slowly recovered from his coughing fit. He flipped on the Colt’s safety and let the gun dangle at his side. ‘Yuri says you’re dying of congestive heart failure. Says that, at best, you’re looking at a year. If it was up to me, I’d leave you to rot in a dungeon. But I promised your nephew that you’ll spend whatever time you’ve got left in reasonable comfort. That’s part of the deal.’
‘I promise this is all for the best,’ Maisky said.
Shikov stared in hatred.
‘And by the way, Shikov,’ Ben said, ‘I want you to know that your precious egg was dug up and sold on before you were even out of your teens. You’ve wasted your whole life looking for it. The Arab sheikh who paid millions for it in 1955 might not even have it any more. Who knows? And who cares? It’s lost to you. Always was, always will be.’
Shikov seemed to subside internally as he heard the words, like a building rigged with demolition charges that were detonating in slow motion and collapsing it to the ground. He crumpled slowly to the desktop, sinking down in his chair, clutching his chest. His breath came in great gasps, drowning in the fluid on his lungs.
Then his hand darted to the desk drawer in front of him. Before Ben could react, the Russian’s stubby fingers had hooked around the drawer handle and wrenched it open, dived inside and came out clutching an ancient Mauser pistol. Ben hit the floor at the same instant the shot went off. A display cabinet shattered behind him. Shikov swung the barrel of the Mauser towards Maisky—
And Ben shot him through the forehead.
Grigori Shikov’s eyes and mouth opened wide in surprise. Blood coursed down his face from the hole in his skull. The Mauser tumbled from his big hand. A long, whistling, bubbling breath hissed from his lungs, and then his bulk went slack in the desk chair.
Yuri Maisky stared at the dead body of his uncle. Ben turned to him. ‘You OK?’
Maisky ran his fingers down his cheek, nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I’m OK.’
Then his head exploded.
Chapter Seventy-Five
Ben whirled around, his ears ringing from the huge gun blast that had come from just a few metres behind him. Spartak Gourko was standing in the study doorway. There was a thick dressing where his right ear had been, and a Russian military Saiga-12 shotgun in his fists. Its fat muzzle was pointing right at Ben’s stomach.
Ben’s hand tightened on the Colt, the muscles in his gun arm flexed ready to go into the rapid aim-fire motion that he’d practised a million times. Half a second was all he needed to hit his mark. But Gourko didn’t need that long just to flick a trigger, and at this range the Saiga-12 would separate Ben’s torso from his legs and smear him across the far wall. That would end things pretty quickly.
Ben let the Colt hang at his side. ‘You’re hard to kill,’ he said.
Gourko’s eyes flickered away from Ben to gaze at the corpse of his former employer. ‘You did that?’ he asked Ben, motioning with the shotgun. His hand had slackened on its pistol grip. Not much, but enough to make a difference.
Ben nodded.
‘You do my job for me,’ Gourko said. ‘I should thank you. The old man was weak. It was time for me to take over. Now I will be the Tsar.’
‘Do I get a prize?’
Gourko grinned. ‘You are my prize.’
Ben saw the scarred knuckles tighten on the shotgun’s grip. Saw the first joint of the index finger curl itself across the face of the trigger. The fingertip flattening and whitening around the nail as the pressure of the squeeze drove the blood from the tissues. A trigger break of maybe six pounds. Gourko had five and a half on it as Ben threw himself backwards over the broad desk with all the speed and strength he could muster. Knocking Shikov’s chair over and spilling the corpse to the floor, he used his momentum to overturn the desk with a crash.
Gourko’s shotgun roared, blasting a massive chunk out of the upturned desktop. Ben tumbled to the rug in a storm of flying splinters. His Colt whacked into Shikov’s fallen chair as he scrambled for cover, and went tumbling out of his grip. Laughing, Gourko flipped a lever on the receiver of his shotgun. Ben knew what it meant. It meant the world was about to come apart at the seams.
In full-automatic mode with a high-capacity magazine loaded with solid slugs, the Saiga-12 was probably the most destructive thing in the world at close range, shy of a nuclear warhead. The room exploded into an orgy of devastation. Flying plaster and glass and wood and dust and deafening noise filled the air. Only the heavy mahogany desk saved Ben from being blasted into jelly. The shotgun ripped through its thirty-round mag in just over two seconds. Ben saw his chance. He grabbed a big ornamental globe and hurled it through the window. He dived after it through the shattered pane, numb to the glass spikes that lacerated his arms and sides and legs as he tumbled through and hit the ground outside rolling.
He was in the grounds of Shikov’s home complex, a place he’d never seen before. The building he’d just escaped from was some kind of boathouse, right on the shores of a glittering lake that stretched all the way to the distant mountain peaks. The main house was a hundred metres away, long and low and rambling with flower gardens and trees. Between the two buildings was a concreted yard.
The black Humvee was sitting there next to a jacked-up Jeep Wrangler, just fifty metres away from Ben. He broke into a sprint for it. As he reached the parked Humvee, Gourko came storming out of the broken window after him, yelling in rage, gripping the shotgun. Another massive ripping blast chewed up the concrete around Ben’s feet and hammered the side of the vehicle, crumpling the gleaming steel panels as easily as stamping on a beer can.
But Ben had nowhere else to run. He ripped open the door of the Humvee and flattened himself across the front seats as the windscreen blew in and showered him with a hail of smashed glass. He groped for the ignition, praying his fingers wouldn’t find an empty keyhole. His hand connected with the dangling fob of the ignition key. Twisted it. Threw the automatic transmission into drive and kicked down hard on the gas.
The Humvee bellowed into life and charged forward. Gourko fired again, blasting one of its door pillars almost in half and blowing in the side windows. Driving almost blind from below the level of the dashboard, Ben kept the pedal to the floor and twisted the steering wheel hard. The Humvee pulled a tight skidding U-turn, crossed the yard and ploughed through a perimeter fence with a shuddering crash that tore down a ten-foot-high wall of wire mesh supported by concrete pillars. The vehicle bucked and lurched over the top of the wrecked fence and kept going, speeding away over the rough ground towards the forest.
Ben could feel the blood cooling on his skin as the wind roared in through the broken screen. Not all of it was Yuri Maisky’s. He ignored the pain from his cuts and drove faster. He had no idea where he was going. He just knew he needed to get away from Gourko.
In what was left of the wing mirror, he could see the man clambering in behind the wheel of the Wrangler and giving chase.
Ben powered the Humvee up a steep incline, unable to see anything but sky beyond its nose. Then the front of the truck dipped downward violently and he found himself speeding down a steep rocky valley into what seemed to be a huge stone quarry, a kilometre across from one steep wall to the other. It looked as though it had been put out of commission a long time ago and since put to other uses. In its centre, half-hidden behind tall wooden gates and barbed wire, a compound had been built consisting of a cluster of steel prefabricated buildings painted in military olive drab.
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