by Rob Jones
“My real name is Maja Eklund, and I’m a former Swedish National Task Force officer from Gothenburg.”
“Who are they?” Zoey asked.
Harry said, “They’re a special operations unit who operate inside the Swedish police’s National Operations Department.” As he spoke, he took off his jacket and wrapped it around Lucia.
“I’m impressed,” Maja said.
Zoey was harder to convince. “One false move out of you, Abba, and I’ll beat you like a rented donkey.”
Maja didn’t break eye contact with her. “That, I would like to see.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“But why are you here?” Baupin said, moving into the gap between Zoey and Maja.
“Zalan Szabo has been monitored by agencies within the Swedish Government ever since he set up his laboratory in Södermanland.”
“Yes, I remember what Andrej said about that,” Harry said. “He said he and Pablo had been working somewhere in Sweden.”
Maja nodded. “Yes, in Kolmården Forest. The laboratory they used was a relic from the Cold War – an old biological weapons testing center in the middle of nowhere. Naturally he had paid off the relevant authorities but there are many factions in the government. Someone didn’t like what was happening and decided to order a surveillance package on the Södermanland site.”
“And that’s where you come in?”
“Jag, that is where I come in – but we cannot stand around here talking about the past. All of that we can talk about later. For now, we have to stop Szabo and his men.”
“I’ll buy that for a dollar,” Zoey said.
Harry and the others pounded up the basement steps and made their way back into the ground floor of the hotel. They ran to a nearby window only to see Szabo’s Bentley skidding out of the compound and disappearing into the Chamonix night.
“Damn it all!” he cursed, and slammed his fist into the wall beside the window. “They’ve got away.”
“Have you any idea where they’re going, Maja?” Baupin said.
“Not at all. He trusted me as a bodyguard but no more. Only Steiner was brought into those conversations, and even then only on a need to know basis.”
“Hang on,” Harry said. “We know that he wants to wipe out cities where the population is very dense, so London is the obvious choice in Europe anyway – that or Paris maybe.”
“That’s not enough to go on,” Baupin said, turning to Maja. “Is there any other way?”
Maja nodded. “Yes, György Tóth. He’s Szabo’s chief financial officer and the man behind the money laundering. He also has many contacts in intel agencies and Szabo uses him to run ID checks on prospective staff. He’s in the penthouse now and he’s not due to fly out until midnight.”
“Hell… how are we going to get information out of an accountant?” Baupin said, glancing at Harry and winking.
“Let’s go!”
*
The ‘wellness retreat’ was not exactly humming with guests, so they made their way silently to the staff elevator and took it to the penthouse. Maja opened the door with her key and they found György Tóth warming his toes in front of Szabo’s plush fireplace. He had a glass of cognac in one hand and was waving his other hand in time to Bartók’s third piano concerto. Beside him was a large bowl of fruit and several magazines. All very cosy. He was in his fifties, thin and with a thick shock of silver hair, and Harry recognised him as the man he had seen lurking in the other room when Aleksi Karhu had closed the door.
Baupin moved forward and grabbed him, causing him to cry out for help and try and wriggle free. Harry tore down a pull cord from the crushed velvet curtains at the far end of the room and then padded casually back over to the Hungarian accountant under the strict gaze of Lucia, Zoey and Niko.
Above the mantelpiece was a painting of a terrifying being emerging from a raging fire. It was not exactly the sort of comforting image most people enjoyed having in their living spaces. The picture was entitled simple Ördög.
“That’s awful,” Lucia said.
“Ördög…” Niko said. “I’ve seen that word before somewhere.”
“It’s the old Hungarian god of the underworld,” the sweaty accountant said, trying to connect with the gang of people now standing around him.
It took Harry an unsettlingly short amount of time to tie the man into the chair and then he dusted his hands off and crouched down so they were eye-level. Then he said, “Hello, György. You might not know it yet, but you’re here to help us,” he said, gently pushing a poker into the glowing coals. “You see, my associates and I seem to have run out of ideas and we can’t for the life of us work out where we need to go to stop your psychotic employer from committing the worst genocide in history.”
“I know nothing.”
“That’s not true, is it?” Harry said, turning the poker iron around a few degrees to ensure it was evenly heated. “You know, for example, what will happen when this red-hot fire iron gets pushed into your face. Am I right?”
Tóth’s eyes widened as he watched the former English spy crouch down and carefully extract the poker from the roaring fire and study its glowing tip. Behind his back, Lucia and Zoey exchanged an uncertain glance, but Maja showed no emotion.
“I’ll ask you one more time,” Harry continued. “Where is Szabo’s target city?”
Tóth stared in horror as Harry brought the poker up to his face. It was so close now he could already feel the heat radiating from the searing iron. “It’s London,” he said, his voice now dry with fear and cracking up at the edges. “London!”
“London,” Harry repeated. “Good. Now… where is the launch site?”
Tóth licked his lips in fear and kept his eyes locked on the red-hot poker as Harry casually swung it back and forth in front of his face. “I have no idea.”
“Now, now…” Harry said. “And we were doing so well, too.”
“I swear it!”
Harry pushed the tip of the poker into the bowl of fruit on the table beside Tóth and grimaced as the red-hot tip effortlessly burned and sizzled its way through the thick green rind of the centrepiece – a large watermelon.
Tóth jumped with fear in his chair but Baupin pushed down on his shoulders and kept him in place. “I suggest you tell the man what he wants to know,” the Frenchman said. “Or you won’t need a pack of cards to have a poker face, if you understand what I mean.”
Tóth understood, but was fighting hard to control his fear in front of his captors. Harry guessed that the sort of punishment Szabo meted out to traitors would outweigh a hot poker in the face, but the difficulty was one of priorities.
“You have no idea how powerful Mr Szabo is.”
“Seems like a minor-league Bond villain with terrible taste in art to me,” Harry said.
“You have no idea…”
The red hot poker might be the lesser of two evils compared with Szabo’s depraved sense of justice, but this threat was immediate – literally in his face right now. Szabo’s retribution for treachery would be worse, but that was in the future. It was a simple decision to make, and the answer would be facilitated by the smell of burnt melon on the tip of a searing-hot fire iron held an inch from his eye, which is exactly what Harry Bane now did.
Tóth pushed his head back into the leather seat as far as it would go but bought only another inch at the most and the heat from the poker was still intolerable. Harry pushed it through the inside wing of the chair and it easily burst out the other side, covered in cotton batting popping and sizzling as it burst into tiny flames.
“Launch site,” Harry said, flatly. “Where is it? Last time I ask.”
“It’s from his apartment – at least that’s what he told me,” Tóth said at last. He breathed out and Harry watched him visibly collapse as he thought about how he had betrayed a man as dangerous as Zalan Szabo.
“Where?”
“The Shard.”
“You mean the building?”
T
óth nodded glumly, but Harry was pleased with the result.
“What the hell is that?” Zoey asked.
“It’s a skyscraper in London, right?” Niko said.
“It is indeed,” Harry said.
“Ah – I understand!” Lucia said.
“I understand too,” Zoey said.
“And me,” Baupin said, and gestured toward Tóth. “But does he understand?”
Harry pushed the poker back into the fire and struck Tóth with a single punch in the cheek, knocking him out cold. “He understands.”
*
Harry kept a steady eye on Maja Eklund as she drove Szabo’s Maybach through the deserted streets of Chamonix. He was nowhere near trusting her yet despite the gesture she had made by handing him the Uzi, and he wasn’t the kind of man to take unnecessary risks.
He turned and smiled at Lucia, but her response was hesitant. He had noticed the look she gave him back in the penthouse when he held the poker up to the Hungarian goon’s face, and perhaps she had been shocked by his actions. In a way, it had surprised him too – how easily his past had come back to the surface, how simple it had been to draw on his experiences as both an officer in the Pathfinders and an agent for MI6.
Easy, and disappointing. He had hoped to leave all that behind him and move on with a new life, but it was like a shadow. No matter how hard you ran it was always right behind you.
As she drove, Niko gasped from the back seat. “Something’s wrong!”
Harry turned in his seat. “What’s the matter?”
He was holding his cell phone in his hands and shaking his head. “I was trying to transfer funds from one account to another to pay for the aircraft fuel and I cannot access my account.”
“Eh?”
“Wait.” Niko made a call and pushed back in the Maybach’s seat as he waited for someone to answer. When they did, he explained the problem and gave his details. Moments later when he cut the call, he was ashen.
Zoey leaned forward and touched his arm. “What’s going on, Nikky?”
“They say they don’t know who I am. They say they have never heard of me.”
“There must be some mistake.”
“I’ve been banking with them for over twenty years.”
“This doesn’t sound right,” Zoey said. “Wait.”
She flipped on her phone and started to check some details, but less than a minute later she reported the same as Niko. “My accounts aren’t there anymore – nothing.”
Harry turned to Lucia. “What about you?”
But she had already checked. “Nothing – no access to my accounts at all, so I went to a forum I use to ask if anyone had a similar experience and all of my posts are gone and I can’t log in. It’s like I was never there.”
“Never on the internet at all…” Niko said, his voice trailing away.
“The Ministry,” Harry said. “I guess Andrej wasn’t joking when he said how far their reach goes.”
“But that’s more than reach,” Baupin said as Maja pulled into the small airport. “Who could remove all of us from the internet in a matter of hours?”
Harry clenched his jaw and tried to fight his anger back down. “That’s what we’re going to find out. In the meantime, we have to fill up a Baron or we’re not going anywhere. Cash anyone?”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Baupin was at the controls, and Zoey sat beside him and stared out across the top of the clouds. Harry and Lucia sat behind them over the wing, and at the back were Maja and Niko, who after a brief moan about leg room was now slumped down in his seat and snoozing.
It was full night now, and the gentle glow of the instrument panel shone up and lit their faces in a low, amber light. They rarely spoke over the hum of the air-cooled six-cylinder piston engines, and when they did their voices were thin and distorted through the aviation headset mics.
After skirting around the west of Geneva they soon ascended into the clouds and didn’t break out of them until passing eight thousand feet as they crossed into the French department of Jura. Now they were in a new world, just the six of them in their tiny aircraft, speeding north above an ocean of bubbling clouds lit purple in the startling light of the full moon.
In the silence, Harry turned to Lucia and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. “Feeling okay?”
She turned to see him, startled for a moment by the question. Then she nodded once and tried to return the smile. “I think so, but I’m not sure.”
“I know,” he said, noticing for the first time since Madrid what a beautiful woman she had grown into since her punk days. The ink-black eyelashes and the pale brown, sad eyes behind them. She wore the bitter experience of her youth behind a veil of measured confidence and dazzling good looks, and not for the first time he cursed himself for being stupid enough to let her fly out of his life all those years ago. “You’ve been through so much these last few hours it’s enough to drive anyone insane.”
“We all have,” she said, turning away from him to glance out over the moonlit clouds. “Finding Pablo like that, where we had shared so any good times, and then being chased around Madrid and Paris were enough of a nightmare, but then seeing Andrej killed in such a terrible, painful way right in front of our eyes…” her words broke up and she moved her hand away from his to dab the tears running down her cheeks.
He felt the impulse to put his arm around her and give her a comforting hug, and then a greater impulse again to kiss her, and make things like they were when they were young. He stopped himself from going further and turned in his seat to face the front. As if she needed that right now on top of everything she’d been through, he told himself, cursing once again his own thoughtlessness.
Lucia rested her head on his shoulder and drifted to sleep, and with the sound of Zoey begging Baupin to teach her a series of eye-popping swear words and insults in argot, Harry also began to drift away just as the Baron was crossing the Derak waypoint. Baupin turned the plane a few degrees to the west and then Harry was gone.
*
Deep inside the Caves of Hercules a woman screamed out for his help. “Help me, Harry!” The caves were a popular tourist attraction in Cape Spartel, a few miles west of Tangier, but they flooded at high tide and were dangerous. Some even said they were bottomless.
Harry Bane strained to see her in the darkness. Her voice was terrified, and drowned out by the sound of the Atlantic waves as they smashed into the limestone walls of the cave’s gaping, rocky mouth.
He struggled through the icy water, fear for her life coursing through his system like an intravenous drug. Desperate to reach her before the sea swept her away, he called out in the darkness. “I’m coming! Hold on!”
Then he heard a terrible, scream of despair as the ocean claimed her young life and he burst awake from the nightmare, covered in a film of sweat. He swivelled his head to find her, but she was gone… she was never there. It was just a dream. The same dream. His heart felt like a jackhammer in his chest and he took a few low breaths to calm himself down, careful not to wake Lucia who was still sleeping beside him.
He focussed his eyes on Baupin in the pilot’s seat. It looked like Zoey was asleep now too. “Where are we?”
“Over your homeland,” he said, and jutted his chin out the front window. “We crossed into British airspace twenty minutes ago and now we’re over London.”
London. Not home, but close enough and he knew it better than anyone. His sister lived here, for one thing. He rubbed his eyes and peered through the window. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he heard the woman from the cave as her screams echoed into the night and tried hard to clear his head as he concentrated on the view outside.
Only the tops of London’s tallest buildings were visible as Baupin flew the small Beechcraft Baron into the city’s busy airspace and prepared to land. The great bulk of the sprawling metropolis was concealed beneath a thick fog which had rolled in from the North Sea a few hours earlier.
Due to the conditions, Baupi
n was now landing the aircraft in accordance with IFR, or instrument flight rules, as was the law both at night or when external visual reference was impossible. Now, as the Baron plunged through a broken layer of clouds, the French spy was carefully setting the flight management system and chatting calmly with one of the controllers at London City Airport.
Like everyone else on board, Harry’s view of the world was no more than a dazzling white-out as the small aircraft zoomed through the cloud and fog, buffeted about by turbulence from time to time. Being a former Pathfinder, he was no stranger to flying in rough conditions and it looked like Maja was unconcerned too, but one glance at the faces of Lucia, Zoey and Niko told him they weren’t sharing his relaxed view of the landing.
But Baupin was a pro, and brought the plane down neatly on the runway with a gentle thud of the tires on the damp tarmac. Moments later the controller was directing them to a parking slot, and Harry peered through the front window at the two white tunnels that the plane’s forward lights were making in the fog.
Looking up, he could make out the main airport building, looming in the damp darkness like some kind of maximum security prison. This part of London was flat and the famous skyline was too far to the west to be visible from the ground. Harry saw nothing in the sky now except the glow of the old city reflected in the cloud base a few hundred feet above them.
They pulled up beside a much larger Gulfstream jet, parked up on the apron with its lights off and nobody home, and moments later they were clambering out of the small plane and emerging into an evening of rolling fog and damp, cold air. The main building looked much larger now they were right in front of it, and several airport workers were strolling over to the Beechcraft as Baupin activated the parking brake and shut down the engines.
“Sort of how I imagined it,” Zoey said, peering into the gloom.
“Come on,” Harry said, ignoring her. “We have to get through customs and meet up with Leo. We don’t have much time.”