‘You’re so fucking stupid. Nobody’s going to stop him. He’s been waiting for this all his life.’
‘I know what impatience feels like,’ Ben said. ‘I’ve been waiting since this morning to start breaking bones, and now I don’t think I can stand the suspense any longer. I won’t ask you again. Where is he?’
Donath tossed his head and snapped out a defiant, ‘Fuck you.’
‘I give up,’ Ben said. ‘This isn’t working. I see I’m going to have to let you go.’
The prisoner’s eyes gave another victorious little twinkle. Ben stood up. Slipped the Browning back into his belt and took the handcuff keys from his pocket. Silvie gave him an incredulous look as he walked around the back of Donath’s chair and unlocked the cuffs. The linked aluminium bracelets hit the bare floorboards with a thump.
The German’s arms fell loose down the sides of the chair. He sighed with relief and rolled his shoulders to loosen the stiff muscles.
Ben turned to Silvie. ‘Maybe you’d like to get some air. It stinks in here.’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, catching his look and returning it with a questioning raised eyebrow.
‘Up to you,’ Ben said. And then he grabbed Donath’s left hand and twisted it sideways and down, and felt the joint fail under the sudden violent pressure. There was a crackle of cartilage and a muted snap, like the crunch of a stick of celery breaking. Donath cried out sharply in pain.
Ben could feel Silvie’s horrified look, but he didn’t look back at her. ‘There are three hundred and sixty joints in the human body, Miki. We don’t have all day, so I’ll just stick to the major ones to save time. Wrists, ankles, elbows and knees for starters. Then we’re on to hips and shoulders. Then spinal vertebrae. I’ll even let you choose. So, next wrong answer, what’s it to be?’
Veins stood out like tug ropes on Donath’s neck and forehead. His eyes were bulging with agony as he nursed his broken wrist.
‘You prefer surprises,’ Ben said. ‘That’s fine by me.’ Before Donath could twist away, he stepped around the right side of the chair and took hold of the man’s right wrist. Cupped his other hand tightly around the bicep and pulled back, hard, and simultaneously drove forwards with his knee with a slamming impact that punched right through the joint and caved it in the wrong way.
Donath’s piercing scream didn’t quite drown out the sickening crack of bone. Ben felt the arm go floppy in his hands. There was nothing except a strand or two of muscle and some torn sinews connecting the humerus above the joint to the ulna and radius below it. Nothing except a lot of catastrophic damage that was going to require intricate surgery and months of healing to repair. Maybe an artificial elbow joint to replace the shattered original. Ben let go, and the useless arm flopped into Donath’s lap. Donath was beating his head from side to side, snorting and groaning and gnashing his teeth. Mucus and drool were running down his chin.
‘Ben—’ Silvie started.
‘You can make this stop whenever you want,’ Ben said, ignoring her.
‘Go – and – fuck – yourself,’ Donath managed to say in between gasps.
It was hard not to admire his courage. Donath was tough, all right. Ben looked at him for a moment, then kicked over the chair and Donath went toppling sideways. Ben stepped over him. He took out the SOG tactical blade and slashed the tape binding Donath’s right ankle to the chair leg. He flicked the knife down at the floor, where it stuck point-first in the boards, quivering. Caught the man’s freed leg as it began to kick and thrash, and held the foot by the toe and ankle, ready to start twisting.
‘Ben, please,’ Silvie said. ‘Not like this.’
‘Do you hear that, Miki? Agent Valois would like me to treat you with more human empathy. Just like your friends treated mine.’ Ben twisted the ankle, hard enough to threaten the joint and put serious secondary strain on the knee. Donath squirmed and tried to snatch his leg away, but Ben’s grip on it was tight. He twisted a little harder, just to the point of breaking, but no more. ‘But there’s a difference between me and your friends,’ he said. ‘I don’t enjoy this one bit. Them? Pain and suffering is what they’re all about. They’re even worse pieces of shit than a child rapist like you. They’re not worth putting yourself through this. So I’m asking. I’m begging. Answer the question, while there’s still a chance that a surgeon can put you back together again.’
Ben’s heart thudded as he waited for Donath to defy them once more. If that happened, things were going to start getting properly ugly. Once you crossed the line, you couldn’t go back. You just had to live with it for the rest of your life. Ben had enough to live with already.
Two long seconds passed. Then three more, then five more.
It didn’t happen.
Every man has his limit.
And, to Ben’s immense secret relief, Donath’s had finally been reached. Sweat beading in huge droplets from every pore of his face and his chest heaving with tortured breath, the German told them everything.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Silvie was very quiet as they drove away from the ruined cottage. ‘That was awful,’ she breathed at last, barely audible over the rumble of the Hummer’s engine.
Ben nodded. ‘Yes. It was.’ He reached the bottom of the track and turned left, back towards the little town they’d passed through on their way here.
Silvie watched the road for a minute, deep in thought, then turned to look at him with questioning eyes. ‘There was no other way, was there?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really.’
‘Are we bad people?’
‘Maybe,’ he said.
Saving the lives of the innocent is not something of which you should be ashamed, Père Antoine had said to him that day. But Ben was. He felt tainted by what he’d had to do. He knew he’d always feel that way. Because things weren’t about to get any better. The door was open now, and only darkness lay beyond it, waiting to swallow him up.
‘No,’ Silvie said resolutely, frowning and squeezing a fist, as if she was making a life-changing decision in which there was no room for self-doubt. ‘It just fell on us. It was our moral duty. You did the right thing, no question.’
Ben said nothing more until they reached the outskirts of the small town. They passed the pretty church and the first of the gingerbread houses, then came to the square where the flagpole stood, and next to it the three-pronged sign. Ben followed the direction for Ärztezentrum up a narrow, tree-lined street. The medical centre was a prim white cottage hospital, set off the road among neat lawns and trimmed hedges. Ben screeched the Hummer to a stop in the little car park outside and said, ‘Be right back.’ He jumped out, flung open the back and hefted Donath’s limp, unconscious form over his shoulder, carried him a few paces and dumped him on the grass within sight of the entrance. He walked back to the Hummer and they U-turned out of the car park with a squeal and a roar as the cottage hospital door burst open and two medical staff rushed out to attend to the unconscious man. The word ‘SCHWERVERBRECHER’, scrawled in marker pen across his forehead from temple to temple, was there to warn them that their patient was a dangerous criminal. But not even a tough guy like Miki Donath was going anywhere with two broken arms.
Driving fast through the little town, Ben made a ten-second call to Luc Simon, to tell him where the Swiss cops could find their missing fugitive. He could have told Luc where he was going from here, but had already decided that could wait.
Reaching the square, Ben checked the wooden sign again. This time, he took the direction for Bahnhof.
‘The railway station?’ Silvie said, turning to stare at him. ‘What do we need a train for?’
‘We don’t,’ Ben told her. ‘You do. This is where we part ways.’
She looked at him blankly. ‘Where am I going?’
‘Back to base. Home. Wherever you want, except where I’m going.’
‘Are you kidding me?’
‘I need to finish this by myself,’ he said.
‘You
can’t leave me hanging.’
‘I can’t be responsible for what happens to you.’
‘Don’t patronise me.’ Her jaw clenched, making her face look tight and hard. ‘This wasn’t the deal, Ben.’
‘There is no deal,’ he said. ‘There’s just me and Streicher.’
‘And upward of a dozen more Parati, tooled up and ready to die to defend him.’
‘They’d better be ready to die,’ he said. ‘Because that’s what’s going to happen to them.’
‘You go in there alone,’ Silvie said, ‘you’d better be ready to die too.’
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Many kilometres away, deep below the Swiss countryside, Udo Streicher walked down the white-tiled corridor and entered the laboratory. It consisted of an outer chamber, in which it was unnecessary to wear protective clothing, and a maximum-containment inner chamber from which it was securely sealed off by thick glass and an airlock chamber. The walls were bare except for a large clock. Down here where the generator-fed neon lights worked twenty-four-seven, you soon lost track of day and night.
On the other side of the glass, Anton Lindquist looked like a spaceman inside the same model of BSL-4 positive pressure protection suit he’d worn during his days as a lab technician at the European Centre for Disease Control in Stockholm, the job he’d been in when Streicher had first recruited him to the Parati. He was hooked up to his air supply via a curly plastic hose long enough to allow him to move freely about the room, and able to talk over the speaker system via the mic behind his PPPS suit visor. He had his back to the glass, intent on working at a massive stainless-steel bench that stretched from wall to wall and was covered in a range of equipment whose purpose Streicher could only guess at, even if he had paid for it all. There were incubators and vaccine baths, a huge vacuum pump, a centrifuge, a microscope wired up to a computer screen, racks of container jars and Petri dishes and all kinds of assorted tools and gadgets strewn everywhere. Streicher wasn’t too interested in knowing what any of it did. The end result was his only real concern, and that end result was taking far longer to achieve than he’d initially been given to understand.
Streicher rapped on the glass. Lindquist didn’t hear because the rush of his air supply tended to drown out most background sounds. Streicher rapped the glass harder, and the figure in the moon suit suddenly stiffened and spun around like a startled rabbit.
‘You frightened me,’ he said, his voice sounding scratchy and metallic through the speaker in the outer chamber. His glasses were steamed up behind the visor. He’d been expecting this visit from his boss, only not so soon.
‘What progress are we making?’ Streicher asked, laying emphasis on the we.
‘Oh, er, some. I mean, we are. It’s getting there.’
‘It’s been days,’ Streicher said. ‘You promised me this wouldn’t take long.’
‘I’m on my own here,’ Lindquist replied, careful not to let the irritation show in his voice. The fear he could do nothing to hide. Back in his ECDC days in Stockholm, the most dangerous thing he’d ever had to work with was smallpox, which was technically classed Biosafety Level 3 because treatments existed for it. By contrast, this was like scaling the north face of the Eiger with no safety rope. If even a small needle punctured his suit, he might as well put a pistol in his mouth there and then, because at that point he was condemned to a horrible and irreversible death. He was sweating, hot and itchy inside the protective material. He couldn’t scratch, couldn’t go to the bathroom without getting fully decontaminated first; he was feeling dehydrated and hadn’t eaten for many hours.
But when Udo Streicher was your boss, you didn’t whinge and you didn’t stop for tea. You just kept going, and prayed that he wouldn’t be displeased with your efforts.
‘How hard can it be?’ Streicher demanded. ‘The bulk of the work has already been done for you. Surely once you have the material—’
‘This isn’t exactly first-year science,’ Lindquist explained, trying to remain calm. ‘It’s taken me long enough to process the raw samples to extract the pure bacteria and convert them into an aerosolised form. That part’s finished.’ He pointed at a row of unmarked aluminium canisters lined up inside a thick glass cabinet in the corner. Twelve of them, as Streicher had specified, to correspond with his much-revised worldwide list of cities that now comprised two targets in the United Kingdom as well as major centres all across mainland Europe.
All he needed was to confirm the dates, work out the travel itinerary and put the plan into action. It was just days away.
Streicher had to smile. Eight inches high, plain brushed metal, each no larger than a cocktail shaker, the canisters looked innocuous. Even he found it hard to imagine the lethal power of what was inside them.
‘Easy to deploy,’ Lindquist said with a nervous twitch. ‘Just remove the retaining clip and depress the nozzle to release the contents under high pressure. Dropping the canister on its nose does the job just fine. It’ll fill a large room in seconds. Or a concert hall, a cinema, a train, a dirty great ocean liner.’
‘Does it work?’
‘That would be an understatement,’ Lindquist said. Before he’d started testing, the secondary lab next door had housed sixteen rhesus monkeys in cages and thirty white rats in glass tanks. Most were dead now, and the manner of their death hadn’t been a pleasant thing to witness. ‘The aerosolised strain seems to attack the monkeys’ systems even faster than it does the rats’. Initial symptoms are coming on within the first hour after exposure to the gas.’
‘Survival time?’
‘Shortest recorded so far is five hours and forty-seven minutes. Of course, it could take a little longer for humans. Maybe an extra hour.’
Streicher had read every scrap of research ever published on weaponised plague. Such efficiency was rarely heard of in the scientific literature. ‘It’s aggressive.’
‘Terrifyingly aggressive,’ Lindquist said, with absolute sincerity. Even thinking about it made him sweat harder inside the suit. He was standing only a metre from the glass but he felt as if he were stranded all alone in the infinity of space, naked and vulnerable and very, very mortal.
‘And the antitoxin? How soon will you have it?’ Streicher’s impatience was gnawing at him. To release the bacteria without self-protection would be worse than amateurish. It would be plain suicide.
Lindquist puffed out his cheeks behind the visor. His suit crinkled as he shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m going as fast as I can, but it’s tough. The chromosome of Yersinia pestis carries about ten known toxin-antitoxin modules and two solitary antitoxins that belong to five different TA families, higBA, hicAB, RelEB, Phd/Doc and MqsRA—’
‘Yes, yes, yes. Talk in plain language, can’t you?’
‘In plain language, it’s a highly complex process. I’ve had to culture the organism in artificial media, inactivate it with formaldehyde and preserve it in nought point five per cent phenol. If I don’t get each step of the sequence exactly right, it won’t work. Or worse, we’ll end up injecting ourselves with the live disease, and it’s thank you and goodnight. The finished vaccine will also contain trace elements of beef-heart extract, yeast extract, agar, soya and casein.’
‘Why those?’
‘Do you really want to know?’
Streicher shrugged. ‘No, I don’t.’
‘The bad news is that it’s possible that not everyone will develop the passive haemagglutination antibody. Meaning I can’t guarantee that it’ll protect everyone who’s exposed to the actual toxin. There could be a five to seven per cent failure rate.’
‘It’s an acceptable risk,’ Streicher said with a dismissive gesture.
‘And everyone who’s injected with it will feel like shit afterwards,’ Lindquist said. ‘Headache, fever … nothing to worry about, but it won’t be an easy ride for a few hours.’
‘I think we can deal with that. When will it be ready?’
‘I’m tired. I really should sleep. I could
have an accident in here.’
‘Sleep when you’re done,’ Streicher said.
‘Twelve more hours,’ Lindquist said wearily. ‘Then we can start testing how well it works on what’s left of the animals.’
Streicher shook his head, slowly. He had that burning light in his eye that Lindquist had seen before.
Lindquist swallowed. ‘Okay, give me six more hours.’
‘You have three,’ Streicher told him. ‘Get it done.’ He smiled. Raised his right hand, extended his index finger and tapped his fingertip against the centre of his brow.
‘Or I’ll put a bullet in your brain,’ he added casually, and left the outer chamber.
Chapter Sixty
‘I’m the only one,’ Silvie said as he drove. ‘I’ll bet I am.’
‘The only what?’
‘The only woman who ever drummed any sense into that thick skull of yours.’
Ben looked at her. She was giving him that knowing smile again, the one she’d been giving him ever since she’d won the argument back at the railway station. ‘Don’t get all smug on me, just because I let you tag along,’ he said.
She cocked an eyebrow. ‘Tag along?’
‘I could have insisted,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want you here. Now you are. So keep your eye on the map and don’t distract me.’
‘Yessir,’ she grunted, smiling even more.
It had been a long, fast drive. Donath’s directions had taken them west, back past Geneva and into picture-perfect rolling green hills to the north. The Hummer was a useful motorway tool and its intimidating size and looks were the best thing for bludgeoning through city traffic, but it was at the limits of its handling abilities as Ben gunned it mercilessly along the narrow country lanes.
It was after five by now. The late-afternoon sun glittered over the ever-present mountain backdrop and shone golden light across undulating pastureland that was broken here and there by patches of serrated dark green pine forest. Cattle grazed peacefully in fields bordered by neat white picket fences, cowbells dangling from their necks. Isolated farmhouses appeared in the distance. Nothing that looked remotely like the hideout of a terrorist group intent on destroying civilisation. Ben ground his teeth and kept driving, trying to block out the nagging thought that Donath could have tricked them.
The Martyr’s Curse (Ben Hope, Book 11) Page 32