by Anton Gill
Now, the prisoner was chained and gagged on the floor in the back of the car.
He had arrived a little early and the minders he was expecting to meet him hadn’t yet arrived, but it was still before dawn and the streets were empty. Not far away stood the dilapidated apartment block, a leftover from the bad old days of the German Democratic Republic, which would be his cargo’s final destination.
He’d been distracted by the parking business and, after all, this was a routine delivery, he’d done five or six over the past year, never asked questions, just took the wad of euros at the end of the day and went off to the betting shop and his favourite Irish pub.
So it took him completely by surprise when he heard the clink of chain somewhere close to his left ear, and then felt cold metal links wrapped round his throat and pulled tight.
Graves had been instantly and heavily drugged the moment the Porsche SUV had roared away from the hotel parking lot in Istanbul, and when she had awakened in a featureless, windowless room, harshly neon-lit when the lights were on and pitch dark when they were not, she had no idea where in the world she was. She had only the vaguest memory of travelling any distance at all, though she could remember the rhythm of a small plane; but that might have been anything from between a week and a year ago. She hadn’t seen her attackers, and only remembered a glimpse of a European couple, a man and a woman. She could hardly be sure even of that.
But they’d left her alone in the room, after throwing ice-cold water over her and kicking her around a little, just to bring her to her senses. Much later, they’d brought in a heavy wooden stool with holes in its seat through which they ran nylon ropes in order to bind her to it. After that, the hooded and anonymous men – she knew they were men, from their smell and their strength – had covered her head with a thick sack, tied it close around her neck, and left her.
She was terrified. She thought she would tell whoever it was who had abducted her everything she knew, just for the sake of a glass of water. There’d be no need to torture her, she told herself, surely they wouldn’t think of doing that.
When the interrogators came into the room they did so very softly. She thought she heard the door click open, and felt the faintest breeze on her ankles where her jeans had ridden up over her ankle boots – they hadn’t stripped her, that was something, and they had allowed her to perform her natural functions, so she was in no physical discomfort, apart from the ropes cutting into her arms and legs. She was fully conscious and her head was clear, but that was small consolation for no longer being able to see. She could only hear tiny sounds from an indeterminate number of people, which seemed to come from all around her.
Without warning, the stool was brutally kicked over and she fell helplessly with it, banging her left arm and leg on the concrete floor, and grazing her temple through the sack. Someone grasped her head and hauled her and the stool upright, twisting her neck and making her ears ring. A voice with an unrecognizable accent whispered close to her ear, speaking English:
‘Where is it?’
Before she could answer, someone struck her across the head with a baseball bat, just hard enough to topple the stool again. This time she fell on to her right side.
The assault went on for a long time, and with such intensity that the inner core of her mind, which had so far managed to keep her sane by remaining detached from what was happening to her, began to cave in.
The same question, the only question they asked, was repeated over and over again. Bleeding, weeping despite herself, and running her tongue round her mouth to reassure herself that her teeth were still intact, she found herself finally let alone.
The door clicked open, someone left the room, and it clicked shut. But she was aware that she was not alone. After an hour of silence, in which she could only hear the breathing of the other people in the room and the pages of a magazine being turned, the door opened and closed and immediately a murmured conference took place, in which she could distinguish a new voice, calmer and more cultivated than the others.
The language spoken was German. She didn’t understand much of what was said, but she thought that at least some of the conversation came from people who were not native German speakers.
Finally the new voice silenced the others. ‘She knows nothing,’ it said impatiently. ‘Dispose of her.’
37
There was a good deal of activity then. Graves was untied, and the blood in her veins stung as it found itself able to circulate freely again. She stretched her buckled legs and tried to set her mind in operation, to calculate, to assess, as she had been trained. It was true that she hadn’t had enough field experience, but her training had taken such situations into account, and she should be able to cope with it. She pretended to be weaker than she was – not a difficult task – and allowed them to chain her up without offering more than the token resistance which they might have expected.
They did not remove the hood from her head, but she’d noticed that the string which held it in place had loosened slightly during the course of her torture and, though bruised and shaken, she took note that her body was not badly damaged. They hadn’t broken any bones.
She was still wearing the clothes she’d had on when they’d kidnapped her – jeans, shirt, boots and a sweater – though her short leather jacket and her shoulder-bag were gone. Jack Marlow would have retrieved her laptop and other luggage from the hotel and he would have alerted Haki and INTERSEC. But nobody knew where she was – she herself had no idea. Unless …
They laid her on the cold floor and went away, returning moments later dragging something which rustled. The next minute she was being zipped into a body-bag.
They carried her through the door and into a lift, which took an interminable time to finish its journey. Inside the bag, in addition to the fact that she could see nothing, she felt claustrophobic, and had to fight down panic. She realized that she did not even know whether it was day or night and, within the bag, she had no sense of temperature either, so she only knew that they had left whatever building they’d been holding her in.
She heard a car door open. The bag was unzipped – it was too bulky to fit between the front and rear seats where they now crammed her, the space so narrow that she could barely move, though once they had left her alone she managed to squirm into a more comfortable position. She could now smell the plastic-and-petrol interior of the car, and she could hear more clearly again, but she still had no clue about where she was, or about the identity of her abductors, whose communications with one another now were monosyllabic and guttural.
The driver’s door slammed. The car drew away. She was sweating, and she could smell her own body, stale and a little rank after her days of captivity. She longed for a shower and squirmed some more to see how much she could move – her limbs longed to be able to stretch – and as she did so realized that the chains were looser than she’d thought, and that her own sweat, even within her clothes, made her able to slide a little within the hold her bonds had on her.
She experimented, infinitely slowly, infinitely carefully, for she knew that too much movement and too much sound would alert the driver. But she also knew that she was alone with him.
There wasn’t much traffic. The car was moving smoothly along, though they weren’t going fast. She had no idea how much time she had before they reached their destination. She had to be free by then.
After what seemed an age she had worked one arm loose.
38
She hadn’t finished by the time the car drew to a halt. Her legs were still trapped, but she had both arms free and had managed to rid herself of the hood and work herself into a position where she was half sitting on the floor. If she rose any higher, the driver would see her and realize what had happened. She concentrated on her timing. After the car had stopped, she waited a full twenty seconds. She didn’t dare wait any longer, whatever the consequences might be. In one movement then, she hauled her torso upright and swung the free chain over the dri
ver’s head and round his neck, hauling it tight with all her strength, and keeping a desperate pressure up until the man, who bucked and pulled, went limp at last.
Graves looked around through the car’s windows but through the entire 360-degree spectrum she saw no movement at all. There were three lorries parked end to end some way down a bleak treeless street which could have been anywhere. Tall, cheap apartment blocks built in the late 1950s stood back from the street, fronted by frozen, sandy patches of soil in which a few sparse areas of grass grew, and clumps of stubborn weeds. The blocks looked deserted.
Graves pulled herself up on to the rear seats and hurried to free her feet of the chains. She kicked them free, glad that they had let her keep her boots, and looked up and around again. Then she noticed three heavy-set men in overalls emerge together from the nearest block, a hundred metres away, making their way towards the car.
Graves saw that the driver was still in a sitting position behind the wheel, but she didn’t know whether she had killed him or not. There was no time to find out now. She wriggled across the seat to the offside door, unlocked it and opened it, half falling out and trying to stand on legs which trembled and all but refused to support her weight. She forced herself to stand and went into an immediate half-crouch.
She wondered if she could run. Peering above the window’s rim, she saw now that the men had noticed something amiss and had broken into a shambling run. It was now or never. Gritting her teeth against the shooting pains in her legs, she hurled herself in the only direction she could go – away from them.
39
She didn’t look back and, as she got into a rhythm, her circulation returned quickly. She picked up her pace and developed it into an even lope. She was lighter and, she guessed, fitter than her pursuers, but they weren’t light-headed from hunger, they weren’t parched by thirst and, above all, they knew where they were.
The street ahead was endless, and there was no cover, but at last it debouched into a square where there were a few people about and, by the grace of God, a large, gleaming, yellow bus. She read the indicator: Hauptbahnhof.
Central Station.
She looked over her shoulder. The men had reached the other side of the square, still perhaps fifty metres from her. They hadn’t slackened their pace, and one was reaching into his overall pocket, bringing out a small dark metallic object which glinted in the first sunlight of the day. An automatic.
She had no money. Her mobile phone was long gone. She looked as if she’d spent long nights sleeping rough. She had no idea where she was. But she knew that, wherever it was, it was a German-speaking country. Which meant she could get by without drawing too much attention to herself. The bus door was open and passengers pushed past her to get on.
There was only one hope, but it was slim. There was no use depending on it.
The men were closing in. Just as the doors began to hiss shut, Laura leapt on to the platform.
She moved down the bus and hoped that the driver wouldn’t notice that she hadn’t stamped a ticket in the machine. She took a seat near the back and looked behind her in the direction of the receding square. The men had come to a halt and were conferring. They’d know the route the bus took.
She needed to get somewhere central – somewhere she could get her bearings. If she could make it to the main station, she might be able to blend into the crowd; buy time.
At the third stop, one of her pursuers got on. He didn’t look at her and took an available seat two rows behind her. The bus was filling up, and soon there were no places left.
They were travelling down a wide boulevard when Graves decided it was time to get off. She had a plan.
She made her way up the bus past where the man was sitting on an aisle seat, near the exit doors. She manoeuvred herself behind him and, digging the tips of her index fingers hard into the hollows behind the base of his ears, jabbed hard. The man didn’t have time to register surprise before he slumped forward. Graves pushed through to the door. She was on the street before anyone on the bus had noticed what she’d done.
The morning rush-hour had started and the shops were raising their shutters. She made her way in what she thought was an easterly direction and crossed several other streets before she came to what she was looking for, since by now she’d gathered that, wherever she was, it was a city of some importance and size. A metro station. Over its entry staircase, its name: Tiergarten. And not far away, the instantly recognisable tall column of the Siegessäule in the middle of the park.
I am in Berlin.
The next thing was to make her way to the INTERSEC contact point but, because of international cutbacks, some of the agencies had been re-defined, or closed down altogether. Berlin had been a prime location during the Cold War, but times had changed, and focus had shifted. INTERSEC’s presence in the city had been reduced to one official representative within INTERPOL.
She had no idea what day of the week it was, even. But she could orientate herself now.
She jogged painfully down Strasse des 17. Juni and had just reached the Brandenburger Tor at Pariser Platz when exhaustion hit her. She bent down, resting her hands on her knees, steadying her breathing. One last push, she told herself. But as she straightened up she saw three men dressed in black tracksuits and trainers emerge from behind the line of trees on the north side of the avenue she’d just left. They started running towards her.
Oh, shit, she thought, forcing her body forwards once more. She crossed the broad square to the east of the triumphal arch and set off along Unter den Linden. There were plenty of people about now, but Laura knew that her pursuers wouldn’t be deterred by the thought of shooting in a crowd. She kept going.
Up ahead she saw a red neon sign on one of the new office buildings. MAXTEL. A glimmer of hope lit up in her. She knew she wouldn’t be able to make it to the safety of INTERSEC now, but MAXTEL might spell some kind of safety.
The three men were closing in fast, and the glimmer went out. She knew she didn’t have a hope of making it to the office block.
At that moment, as she drew to an exhausted halt, a blue Mercedes CLS 63 AMG shrieked to a standstill at the kerb next to her. The driver leaned over and pushed the passenger door open.
‘Get in!’ he ordered.
Graves did so, fast. Behind her, her pursuers had drawn their automatics. The car screamed off, to an outraged fanfare of car horns.
Graves turned to her rescuer, shocked and relieved as she recognized him.
The thin hope had paid off.
Jack Marlow smiled at her. ‘You’re safe now,’ he said.
40
New York City, the Present
‘Your timing was almost perfect,’ Graves told him later.
She hadn’t had much faith in the chip they’d implanted in her upper left arm before the Turkish operation had started, and they’d explained that the system wasn’t foolproof, but, safe back in New York now, she had reason to be grateful. If Marlow had arrived even a minute later, she would have been dead meat.
‘We lost the signal on GPS several times, and then when they took you to a second-level sub-basement it went altogether, but we’d pinpointed you to Pankow, though where you were before that, we don’t know. Maybe they’d second-guessed us and were able to put a block on the signal. We picked you up again when you escaped and I shadowed you from there. I’d have picked you up sooner but we lost you again on the bus. I’d noted the route, however. Picked you up again when you got off, though it took a while to reach you then.’
‘Why Berlin?’
‘That we don’t know.’
‘I saw a sign for the MAXTEL offices just before you rode up in your shining armour.’
Marlow shrugged. ‘Doesn’t mean anything. Adler was most anxious to locate you too – offered all the help he could.’ He shook his head. ‘Not out of sentimentality, though – he wants to know what happened to his three missing archaeologists just as badly as we do – he thinks his reputation’s on the l
ine.’
‘Why’s he involved in this anyway?’
‘It’s his project. MAXTEL put a million dollars into the Dandolo Project through MAXPHIL, and that gives him a right to be more than a concerned bystander,’ Marlow replied, but he didn’t sound comfortable. ‘He’s clean, anyway. Cleared with Sir Richard and God knows who else higher up the chain.’
Leon Lopez had entered the office as Marlow was speaking, a sheaf of papers in his hand. ‘He’s probably funding INTERSEC too,’ he said. ‘Practically everything else is privatized now – why not us?’
‘He’s a businessman. It’s second nature for him to want to know what’s happening to his money,’ said Marlow.
‘He’s not the only one,’ said Graves.
Marlow turned to her. ‘I want you to think again. Can you tell us anything more, anything at all, about these people?’
‘If you’re still thinking along the lines of a group like al-Qaeda, no. I think there was a European couple there at first, and I’d also say the methods these people use aren’t typical of terror groups. There remains that question they kept asking me. Over and over again.’ Graves shuddered at the memory.
She rubbed her bruised arms. She’d been back in New York three days now, she’d just been released from INTERSEC’s hospital wing, and she’d been warned that it’d be a month before she was fully recovered.
‘If they are the people who got to the tomb first – if they are the people who picked our scientists’ findings clean and then disappeared Adkins and the others – they must know we haven’t found anything they might have overlooked,’ said Lopez.
‘That doesn’t follow,’ said Marlow. ‘Whatever it is they’re after, they’re desperate to locate it. We have to assume that Adkins, Taylor and de Montferrat haven’t been able to help them, or they wouldn’t have come after Laura. But they have no guarantee that we – or Haki’s people – haven’t found what they want.’