The Last Red Death (A Matt Wells Thriller)

by Johnston, Paul

  Mavros looked at his mother again. What she had told him about the manuscript Dearfield submitted to her had fallen into place.

  ‘Ach, Geoff,’ moaned Veta. ‘That accursed memoir. Why couldn’t you have left everything undisturbed? Why did you have to leave me those pages to read?’

  The old man was staring at her, as if he had suddenly woken from a deep sleep. ‘Leave you pages to read? I didn’t—’ He looked at his wife. ‘How is it that you know about all this, Flora? Have you been meddling with my papers?’

  ‘Your wife is good at meddling, old man,’ the assassin said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Dearfield asked.

  She was gazing at him contemptuously. ‘Sit down, you old fool,’ she said, stepping forward. ‘You know nothing about me. You have never taken the trouble to look beneath the surface of my life. Did you really think I was fulfilled only by studying history?’

  ‘What…? What…?’ The old man slumped on to the sofa. ‘Why didn’t you let me leave earlier?’ he asked, then looked up again. ‘My God, you knew he was coming.’

  Flora moved closer to the terrorist and his captive, showing no fear. ‘I was the one who put the pages under your covers, Veta.’

  ‘But why?’ the politician asked. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she is the one who directed Iraklis to you,’ Mavros said, standing up slowly and addressing himself to Flora Dearfield. ‘What are you? His leader? The one who controls him?’

  The woman’s face had remained pale. ‘What do you know of such things, young man? Your father was weak. People like him were responsible for the defeat of the Left. You yourself are nothing but a lackey of the rich.’

  Mavros looked at the assassin. There was a weakness about him, a sadness that seemed to be taking him over. ‘So why don’t you explain to me, Kyria Flora, explain to my mother and my sister, what you and your pet gunman have achieved that Spyros Mavros didn’t?’ He raised a hand to keep Dorothy and Anna quiet.

  Flora Dearfield glanced at Iraklis, then inclined her head towards Mavros. ‘Very well. I will make things clear to you and to everyone else.’ Then she began to speak, in the style of a lecturer who was certain of her subject beyond all possibility of doubt.

  In the saloni of the Palaiologos house, Flora saw the puzzled expressions of the people around her. Her husband had never heard her talk about her childhood with so much candour. The terrorist was staring at her, the black pistol pressed loosely to Veta’s head. And young Mavros, the hound who dug up information to use against people, he was watching her avidly, no longer paying the slightest attention to the American bitch he was working for. She heard herself speaking, but deep down she had gone back to her childhood, back to the day that had made her what she was…

  Eight years old and the life she had known slipped away from her, quicker than a fish from fingers clutching in the shallows. It was early spring, the clear sky cut by trails from aircraft. She had been out on Snow White, taking her over the low jumps laid out in the meadow below the house. She ignored the glass of lemonade that the butler offered, running up the ornate staircase to her mother’s room, anxious to tell her how well she had ridden.

  ‘Mama!’ she called, opening the heavy door. ‘Mama, Snow White has—’ She stopped when she saw the blood on the bed. It took her a while to realise that her mother’s body was there too, so hard was it to make out the alabaster skin below the slick of crimson. She went closer, watching for a movement of the chest. There was none. Then the object in her mother’s right hand glinted at her dully. It was a razor like the one the old groom used to shave Snow White’s mane.

  Little Flora opened her mouth but no sound came out. She brought her lips together, feeling the breath coursing through her nostrils and aware of a warm, metallic smell. The realisation that she was the only person in the house who knew about this scene gripped her, seemed to give her a new kind of power, greater than the one she had become used to exerting over the servants. She looked at her mother’s death-bed for the last time, then turned away and marched downstairs to her father’s study. Normally he locked it when he was working, but she was sure he would let her in this time. In the wide hall downstairs she saw the butler. He was talking in a low voice to a damp-eyed man holding a briefcase tied together with frayed string. When she walked past them towards the study, they tried to stop her. But she was too quick for them, evaded their arms and reached the door. The gilt handle turned and, to her surprise, the great oak panel swung open. ‘Baba!’ she cried self-importantly. ‘I have something to tell—’

  Her father had his back to her, his trousers round his ankles and his heavy behind bare. He seemed to be exercising himself over the armchair in front of his desk, his arms supporting his weight. At the sound of her voice, he froze. Then his face, sweat drenching the loose cheeks and carefully sculpted moustache, appeared over his shoulder.

  ‘Get out,’ he ordered. ‘Get out, you little fool.’

  But Flora stayed, she drew closer. She had seen the pair of thin legs, one outside each of her father’s, the feet in scuffed and ill-fitting shoes. She went to the side of the chair and looked round her father’s bulk, briefly aware of a thick rod with a sticky red head as he pulled back. The girl was sobbing, her blouse parted to reveal the bumps of undeveloped breasts, her skirt above her waist. Flora put out her hand to the thin wrist that lay on the armrest, looking into the ravaged eyes in the second before her father’s hand slapped the side of her head and sent her flying across the tiles.

  The girl’s shrunken frame was no bigger than her own.

  The room was quiet, only the muffled noise of the two girls’ sobs audible. Mavros glanced at Grace and then at his mother. Both returned his gaze, their faces damp with tears.

  ‘Why—why did you never tell me about this?’ Geoffrey Dearfield stammered. ‘What has this to do with—’ he looked at Iraklis ‘—with this murderer?’

  Flora shook her head at him. ‘You still don’t understand, do you? Maybe it’s something in the British soul—take everything at face value until you know otherwise. Was that a regulation in your stupid army?’ Her eyes were wide now, her lips glistening.

  ‘I don’t get it either,’ Grace said. ‘Your mother committed suicide and your father was a child-molester, right? Are you telling us that’s why you got involved with terrorism?’

  Flora turned to the assassin and gave him a knowing smile. ‘You see? I always told you that we had to make our own rules. Everyone else is blind.’ She glanced back at Grace. ‘You understand everything and nothing. That’s the curse of your country. You have the best universities and research centres in the world, but you destroy every country you touch with your uncaring foreign policy, your wars and your filthy capitalism. Yes, of course I rebelled against my family after that day. Of course I wanted to destroy everything my father stood for. He was a dedicated collaborator, he operated in the black market, he exacted payment for debts in the form of underage girls. Rebelling against him and his degenerate class wasn’t difficult.’

  ‘But you never joined the Party,’ Dorothy said sharply. ‘You preferred to operate secretly, like a thief in the dark.’

  Flora glared at her. ‘And your husband didn’t operate that way all those years when the Party was banned?’

  Mavros was studying her. ‘You couldn’t have set up a group like Iraklis on your own,’ he said, watching the terrorist out of the corner of his eye. ‘You must have had outside help.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ the historian said. ‘I had outside help, all right.’ Her eyes were on Dorothy again. ‘Not that your husband and his squabbling comrades knew anything about it.’

  ‘The Soviets,’ Mavros said, putting his hand on his mother’s arm to restrain her. ‘They financed you separately from the main party?’

  ‘At the beginning. Though I also had my inheritance to give to the cause. I sometimes wish my father had survived the assassin’s bullet to see what I did with my dowry.’ She looked at Grace. ‘Now perhaps you can
understand why your father was a target, a legitimate target. The Americans supported the right-wing regimes who persecuted the Left for decades after the war and those regimes contained many men like my father.’

  Mavros saw that his client’s jaw was hanging loose.

  ‘And you,’ Flora said, turning to her husband, ‘why do you think I encouraged you to write your guilt-ridden, self-pitying memoir? I needed the material to convince Iraklis to come back for one last, devastating strike.’ She snorted disdainfully. ‘You poor fool, Geoff. You wrote that book to absolve yourself of guilt and all it did was lead to more deaths. Even this afternoon when we walked down to the old citadel and I hinted at my real life, you were too self-obsessed to pick up the thread.’

  The terrorist roused himself, giving Geoffrey Dearfield a surprisingly sympathetic look. ‘How did you find out about my parents, Comrade Tiresias?’

  Flora smiled at him. ‘I have been going through the records that began to appear after the so-called national reconciliation in the eighties. They were misleading and incomplete. Scum like Dhragoumis and Palaiologos who took part in atrocities made sure their names never appeared. But it turned out that my own husband held the key to your past. And he thought I wasn’t reading what he wrote.’ She gave Dearfield a pitying look, then turned back to the terrorist. ‘You understand what I did, don’t you, Irakli?’ she said, now slightly less certain. ‘You understand that I had to delve into your family’s past to bring you back. You must agree, this woman is the perfect choice as your final victim. Execute her leech of a husband, too, if you like.’

  Iraklis straightened his upper body with what looked like a great effort and moved his head forward to signal his assent. Then he pressed the automatic harder against Veta’s head. ‘That’s enough of the past.’ He sounded almost exhausted. ‘It is time for my last victim to—’

  Before he could complete the sentence, the butler appeared at the door from the hall where he’d been keeping watch. ‘There’s someone outside,’ he said, ‘a man, and I think he’s armed.’

  The assassin drew himself up. His languor disappeared. ‘All right,’ he said resignedly. ‘If that’s the way they want it…’ Then he hauled Veta Palaiologou to her feet and dragged her to the door. ‘If any of you moves, she will die instantly.’ He glanced at Anna. ‘Now, more than ever, daughter of Spyros Mavros, you must keep still.’

  Motioning to the butler to lead the way, Iraklis went out with the politician, closely followed by Flora. The rest of the company sat motionless, their faces paler than a hunter’s moon.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Jane Forster said, lowering the phone from her ear. ‘He’s moving in. Finn’s moving in.’

  ‘What?’ Peter Jaeger gasped. ‘Why? Did he end the transmission?’ ‘He said he’d scoped a secure access point. Apparently there’s been no movement inside for fifteen minutes. He said he was concerned that innocent people were in danger.’

  ‘Finn’s concerned about that?’ her superior said, swerving past a lorry on the Argos–Nafplion road and accelerating hard. ‘I don’t think so. Finn’s taking the initiative when he shouldn’t. Re-establish contact and tell him to stay the hell out of there till we arrive.’

  Forster ducked her head as a car flashed past them, its horn blaring. She pressed buttons and raised the phone to her ear again. ‘Nothing, sir,’ she said after a pause. ‘He’s not responding.’

  ‘Fuck!’ Jaeger yelled. ‘Try Tiresias.’

  Jane Forster pressed more buttons and listened. ‘No answer there either, sir.’

  ‘Jesus. Why is Flora still at the house? That wasn’t the plan. We should be there in five minutes. If the idiots screw up the operation, I’m not authorising any fucking pension payments.’ Jaeger glanced at his subordinate. ‘Prepare your weapon, Ms Forster. This could get bloody.’

  The lights on the ancient fortifications of Tiryns were visible now, spreading over the green canopy of leaves in the orange groves between the citadel and the hill inland. Jane Forster slapped the clip into the grip of her automatic and racked the slide. She’d trained for this moment for years, swallowed the insults of drill masters who thought she was a fader, conquered her emotions over and over again, and still she didn’t feel ready. The fact that her boss was leading her into some weird alternative dimension that only he seemed to understand didn’t help at all.

  Mavros got slowly to his feet when he saw the terrorist’s party clear the immediate vicinity. He went over to Anna and carefully removed the metal tube from her grasp.

  ‘Let’s hope there isn’t a timer in it as well,’ he muttered to her, smiling to show that he didn’t think there was. He glanced around and saw a pot containing a spider plant. He went over and, ascertaining that the earth was reasonably soft, slid the device in with the bottom half obscured. ‘As long as no one knocks this pot over, we’re all right.’

  ‘Where have they gone?’ Grace said, joining him.

  ‘That’s what I’m going to find out,’ he said. ‘Everyone stay here. I’ll be back when the coast is clear.’ He kept his eyes off his mother and headed for the door.

  ‘I’m coming too,’ Grace said.

  ‘What a surprise.’ Mavros slipped his head round the door and saw that the hall was empty. Further down another door was open, a cold breeze blowing through it. ‘Looks like they’ve gone outside.’ He moved forward cautiously and entered a long, well-equipped kitchen. The external door at the far end was the source of the draught.

  ‘I can hear voices,’ Grace said.

  Mavros crouched down, moving past cupboards and the oven. As he approached the door he could make out words from beyond.

  ‘…gun down,’ said a male, the accent American.

  ‘Don’t be foolish,’ replied Iraklis. ‘You see where I’m pointing it? In case you’re not aware, this lady is a senior politician.’

  ‘I know who she is and I know who you are, pal. Drop the gun and we can all walk away from here.’

  ‘Kill her,’ said Flora in Greek. ‘Kill her, Irakli.’

  ‘Finn!’ Another American male.

  Mavros looked at Grace. He didn’t have a clear idea of what was going on. The latest voice had come from across the compound. His client was looking equally confused.

  ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ The new voice was closer.

  ‘That you, Jaeger?’ said the first speaker. ‘I mean Ahab.’ He gave a dry laugh.

  Mavros nodded slowly when he heard the name of the embassy official. He watched as Grace registered it too.

  ‘Who the fuck do you think it is? Back off, you lunatic, Milroy. This isn’t the way it’s meant to be.’

  ‘Things are well out of control here. I thought—’

  ‘You thought you’d get involved, huh? Well, screw you. This isn’t the time for you to play the masked fucking avenger.’ There was a pause. ‘Ms Forster, keep your pretty head down and cover me.’ He didn’t sound confident that the woman he was addressing was capable of that.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Mavros heard the terrorist whisper to Flora. They were gathered in the space outside the kitchen, their feet visible from the door. Veta Palaiologou was pushed up against the wall by Iraklis, her legs splayed.

  There was no reply from his controller.

  ‘Well, well,’ Jaeger said from nearby. ‘This is your man, eh, Flora?’

  ‘Keep your distance,’ Iraklis said in English. ‘I’ll blow the politician’s head off.’

  ‘Wish you would,’ came the reply. ‘Tell you the truth, I was kinda hoping you’d have done the deed already.’ He laughed. ‘That was our deal, wasn’t it, Flora?’

  ‘What?’ The assassin’s voice was hoarse. ‘What is this he’s saying? Who is he? CIA?’

  Another laugh. ‘Tell him, Flora, why don’t you? It’s about time he found out how you’ve been playing him.’

  ‘Talk,’ Iraklis said in Greek, his tone iron-hard. ‘Talk now, comrade.’

  During the silence that followed Mavros moved closer to
the door, feeling Grace’s presence behind him. He could see a pair of upright forms, a male and a female, about five metres apart in the garden, both with handguns raised. Further towards the covered pool, a shadowy form behind a palm tree was in a crouch, holding a weapon in both hands.

  ‘I… Oh very well,’ Flora replied. ‘I have been working with Peter Jaeger on this operation.’ Her words were rushed. ‘Yes, he’s CIA. The Athens station chief. I… We decided to entice you back with the material I had learned about your parents. We wanted to use you to destabilise the government. That’s a reasonable aim, isn’t it? One that’s in line with the original aims of the Iraklis group. To destabilise regimes, whether democratically elected or not, to facilitate the rise of a true government of the people.’ She stopped to catch her breath.

  ‘So Milroy here took out the two investors,’ Jaeger said, ‘in your style. They were obvious enough targets for left-wing terrorists. And the lady you’re holding now is an even more logical victim—conservative spokesperson, shipping-family heiress, wife of a prominent businessman.’ He gave another empty laugh. ‘What are you waiting for, Irakli? Or should I call you Iason Kolettis? Or Michalis Zaralis?’

  ‘Kill the Palaiologou bitch,’ Flora pleaded. ‘Kill her before it’s too late.’

  After a brief silence the assassin spoke: ‘Too late? It is already far too late. You have duped me, and by doing so you have betrayed our group and all we have fought for.’