He drove carefully but fast, avoiding the main arteries and making every effort to keep his anger reined in, but that was hard. When they sent a man to do this kind of job, they always tipped off the police first. Routine. High on the “To Do” checklist. But this time Albert was on his own.
The phrase Fox had used, “Security overload,” meant they had reason to be afraid of leaks. Albert was disclaimable.
Hampstead coming up … he forced himself to review his reconnaissance of the area.
After the meeting with Redman he’d spent the afternoon idling his way around Hampstead, guidebook in hand, to all intents and purposes an ordinary tourist. Kleist’s house was halfway up a short hill. Trees, grass, big imposing houses set well back. Tiresome about the red boxes, each residence (he had somehow stopped thinking of these sprawling properties as mere houses) had a burglar alarm prominently displayed.
Trees in the street. Trees in the small front garden. More of them visible over a first-floor gable, around back. Great cover. An Edwardian pile, all bricks and red tiles, with fresh-looking white paint, privet hedge, a mixture of healthy yellows and greens, to the left, close-boarded fence to the right, no gravel to worry about, unlike Eddy Clapham’s ait.
Plenty of other things to worry about, though. Burglar alarms …
While still some yards short of his destination Albert switched off the engine along with the lights, allowing his car to roll until at last he was parked in the spot he had marked down earlier. No more planning, no hesitations, just get in, target, penetrate.
He slipped through the darkness, a liquid, elemental part of it, flowing in silence around to the front of Kleist’s house. The front garden was long, no other part of London offered such priceless facilities to nocturnal intruders, and that of course was why he now had to deal with a professionally installed alarm system.
He did not pause for breath until he had skirted the side of the house and reached an area of shadow at the back. Albert looked up. No lights. Perhaps the housekeeper had gone out for the evening, it wasn’t yet ten o’clock. Check it out.
He found a tenace, onto which opened a pair of French windows. Albert risked a burst of light from his torch and made a face: metal shutter gates on the inside. But almost certainly there weren’t any pressure pads. Another flash showed him only black rectangles, unmarred by the telltale white rubber circles. Risk it. No choice, anyway. Risk it.
He had passed the SAS regiment’s Advanced Lock Neutralization course and he came better equipped than most burglars, but this part of the job was child’s play. Mushroom-shaped blob of putty on the outside of the pane, a glazier’s blade for the circle, one smart intake of breath, a tap … and there was a hole large enough to admit his hand.
No alarm went off. Albert smiled. People always thought they had done enough. They did not know it, but they had never done enough. It was only a matter of time before someone finally got away with the Mona Lisa.
Instinct made him turn his head. Behind him, the back garden—dark and peaceful. Beyond that, another house framed against the dim lighting in the street where he had parked. Upstairs, a single window was lit. Albert knew himself to be horribly exposed. What if the night owl behind the window chanced to look out? … don’t think about that. No time.
The hole he had made was above the lock of the metal shutter gates but he couldn’t see a keyhole on the outside. Fortunately Albert’s hands were small; he managed to insert two fingers through one of the diamond-shaped gaps between the struts. The shutter lock yielded at his third attempt with the skeleton key and the fastening of the French doors themselves was a cinch.
He had started to sweat and he did not know why. He looked over his shoulder. Nothing. Only the house beyond the wall, where that light still burned. That ominous light.
Albert stepped back, wiping beads of perspiration from his face. What kind of alarm was this? He increased the odds in his favor by removing one entire pane of glass from the right-hand door, enabling him to pass through easily when the time came. That left the metal gates, unlocked but still shut, to circumvent.
Now he was tingling all over. He jerked his head around. Everything seemed the same. No it didn’t. Someone stood at the illuminated first-floor window in the house behind. Seconds ticked by, but the silhouette remained motionless. Was the person looking out, or did he have his back to the window?
Ignore him.
Since when have you ever ignored your instincts? The police don’t know about this. Yet! Stay alive!
He had hunches but no choices, and Albert found himself cursing Fox. He lacked an alibi, resources, time … a minute passed. Too long. Use the shadows, just penetrate!
He made himself get on with the job. There were the wires! At the top of the gates, two of them, one at each side, which meant more glaziery and the removal of the other pane of glass. Albert took a closer look. The wires ended in square metal contacts, one male, one female, which linked when the gates were closed. Break the contact, and …
The wires extended right and left along the gates at the height of a man’s mouth. They were attached to the struts by metal brackets. Screwdriver, some fancy double-jointedness on the part of Albert, who caught each bracket as he prized it loose, and the wires, still joined, hung in loops. Now, when he slid the shutters open, the struts moved independently of the wires, leaving the electric contact solid.
Behind him he heard a window open and a voice called “Who’s there?”
Albert immobilized himself.
“Who is that? I can see you.”
Long pause. The voice belonged to a man but it was high-pitched and quavery. Old? No, not old, but … something weird about it.
Albert ground his teeth, eyes flickering between the French doors and the window of the house behind. Now it was open, a shadow leaned out, probing the gloom. Albert did calculations with the speed of light. No alternative.
One last potential obstacle remained: contact pads under the rug beyond the windows.
Acrobatics. Crash dive!
He retreated a dozen paces, took a deep breath, and launched himself forward. As he reached the hole where the glass had been he was traveling horizontally, diving beneath the coiled wires, over the rug, to land on his stomach halfway down Gerhard Kleist’s living room.
He was into the trap. And now he had bare seconds in which to work his way out of it.
Albert knew all the places where people keep burglar-alarm control boxes. They have to be near an entrance, so that when the owner comes back to an empty house he can shut down the system within forty-five seconds of entry. Most householders, worried by the thought of arousing neighbors and police unnecessarily, keep them mounted by the front door. Albert sprinted along the hallway and discovered that Kleist was the norm. Another skeleton key, into the control box, twist, safe.
He had been in the house for thirteen seconds.
Cut the phone. Junction box on the skirting board, one kick, two kicks, done.
Den, kitchen, dining room, study, each room got two seconds and a burst of light, nothing, up!
Waiting room, consulting room, yes. What was happening outside? Had the watcher called the police? Was he wasting time trying to phone Kleist’s housekeeper?
Filing cabinets. Two seconds, burst the locks. Suppose the late-night watcher was making his way around to the front of the house right this instant, don’t think about that, don’t meet trouble before it comes, ten seconds, Lescombe, under L … no. Shit! Five seconds, E for Elwell … two thick, dog-eared cardboard folders, one orange, one a faded green. He opened the orange one, glanced through the first half dozen pages, yes, yes, yes!
Penetration exactly one minute old, time to go.
He pulled his black polo-neck shirt from out of his waistband and stuck one file up the back, the other up the front, before once again tucking the shirt back in. Not comfortable, not wholly secure, but it left his hands free.
The voice had been pounding inside his head almost ever si
nce his entry. Now it suddenly became a roar, a chorus. Get out. Don’t stop to think, don’t wait, don’t plan. Out, out, out!
He was leaving the consulting room when he heard the start of a furious knocking on the front door, accompanied by the bark of a dog, dogs, more than one. Then another sound caught his attention. Above. Second floor. Steps, coming downstairs.
Albert retreated into the consulting room while the fracas below steadily increased in volume. Two voices. Female, shrill, frightened. And a man who seemed to be mad, spitting a mixture of strangely accented English and a sibilant language suddenly identifiable as Japanese.
Albert opened the door a crack. “… working late, I see this man, he break, he smash, ka-cha, ka-cha! I watching, let’s go, pow-eeee!” He recognized the voice that had challenged him in the garden. Now it was the woman’s turn to speak in querulous tones too low for Albert to catch.
“Yes, yes, po’liss, po’liss, you cor, I rook.”
Again the woman; this time Albert got the word “dangerous.”
“No dangel, we have dogs. Hai, hai!”
But the woman must have instilled some caution into him, for next the man shouted, “Oh yes, then I ret the dogs go, dey fine him okay.”
Albert heard the click of claws on polished wood and his throat tightened. He’d known Kleist didn’t own a dog; he had come without gas or poison, who would have predicted a mad Oriental neighbor?
The dogs wasted no time on the downstairs rooms, but bounded straight up the stairs, lured inexorably by the intruder’s scent. Albert closed the door, no key, damn! Then came a heavy thud, and claws began to work against the panels.
Find a weapon, anything. He flashed his torch around. A wood carving table … there must be a knife, a bradawl, something with a point to it. Steel files, they’d do.
But there were two dogs. Even if he managed to neutralize one, the other would get him. Keep the door shut. Which left … out the window, jump, run for it.
As Albert tugged the curtains aside, however, he looked down and saw a figure march around the side of the house, human, carrying what looked like a club.
The clawing at the door rose to a crescendo. Albert prepared to open the window, regretting the operational necessity that awaited him beneath. As he did so, however, the door gave under the weight of the dogs and sprang open.
Two black shapes bounded into the room. Albert shone his torch. Alsatians, big, bouncy dogs. Animals with body weight and teeth. Christ Almighty, how could he have failed to close the door properly …?
He held out the brace of steel files, waiting for the brutes to home in. It took them less than a second. All the while his brain continued to function, as it had been trained to do in any crisis, analyzing data, forecasting possible outcomes, percentages, worst scenarios. Whatever happened, this was going to leave marks. If Kleist’s housekeeper was in league with him, he would certainly know he’d been rumbled after this night’s work. Catastrophe, disaster, obliterate!
Negotiate the dogs, negotiate the people downstairs, seal the house, run, buy maximum time, execute!
All this was processed in the instant it took the leading dog to stop, turn, and leap for the motionless person by the window.
He knew what to expect. They would have been trained to go for the throat. He forced himself to stand perfectly still until the first dog was within feet of him and already launched into its spring. Albert, both hands full and without light, judged his thrust as best he could, going low, underneath the beast’s belly. He lunged upward, hoping for the stomach, but the point of the file glanced against bone and slipped sideways instead. The dog shrieked. Albert kept pushing, twisting, gouging, until his hand was suddenly showered with invisible wetness and a dead weight bore down on his hand, carrying him with it.
He expected the second dog to jump, so he kept his free arm up to cover his throat. He could sacrifice his forearm. As long as he kept the use of his hands and his legs, he could sacrifice any part of himself.
Things didn’t work out like that. Instead, he felt long hard needles drive through his left hand; the agony was a mixture of having his skin doused in scalding oil and the electric shock of a deep cut from a razor. Albert dropped the second steel file. His jaws locked. Grenades were going off inside his head, he couldn’t hear, think, move, but he must not cry out.
He knew what had happened. This dog could smell meat, best-quality steak. Albert had the blood of recent butchery on his hands and the dog wanted it.
He fought to separate himself from the corpse of the first Alsatian, but it was heavy and lay on his forearm. The second animal was tearing at Albert’s left hand. He felt something give inside, a tendon; pain took him to the borders of unconsciousness and he knew he had to end this now or go under. Somehow he managed to yank his right hand free, still holding the file. The other dog growled rabidly; if he hadn’t been starving, desperate for the blood left on Albert’s hands, he would have torn out the intruder’s throat long before. As it was, Albert had mere seconds’ respite. He raised his one good hand and drove the steel file down into the back of the dog’s neck with all his remaining strength.
Go, go, go!
Albert came upright, still holding the second metal file, and slid over to the window. The French doors through which he had entered were open, allowing light to stream onto the lawn. Through the flashes that tore across his vision he could see a middle-aged woman, her hair in curlers, hugging a lumpy pink dressing gown around her body. She was saying something, but her words were smothered by the noisy antics of a second person.
This man stood not more than five feet two in his white socks and sneakers, wearing a tee-shirt and blue shorts that extended down past his knees. On his head, pushed far enough back to reveal an almost bald pate, was a fluorescent orange sunhat that produced a tiny trail of light whenever he moved, which he did frequently. In other circumstances, he might have come across as an eccentric, mildly amusing phenomenon, but he was holding a baseball bat in both hands and, as Albert looked down, he executed a series of Samurai-type sword exercises that were anything but funny. “Oh, God,” Albert muttered. “Oh, God.”
The Japanese lifted his head. He must have possessed remarkable night vision, for he caught sight of Albert’s face at the window and cried, “Rook!” Next moment he was running into the house.
Albert, too, was running.
He took the corridor in three strides, vaulted onto the banister and slid all the way to the bottom. The front door was still open. Before he could reach it, however, the frantic figure of the Japanese sped along the parquet floor to land in the opening, baseball bat raised ready to strike.
Albert came to a dead stop. He lifted his hands in the traditional attitude of surrender, and the Japanese grunted with satisfaction.
Albert lowered his hands. As he did so, he allowed the steel file, which he had kept concealed inside his sleeve, to drop into his palm. The Japanese waved the bat warningly, but Albert made a break for the open door.
His opponent, surprised by the sudden onrush, backed up a pace and found himself against the wall. He brought the bat down, aiming for Albert’s head as he skated past him. In the split second before it could land, Albert leapt into the air and spun around through a semicircle. The Japanese, impelled by the force of his own blow, floundered forward and fell. Suddenly he found himself rammed up hard against the banister, with Albert’s face inches from his own. Then a wet, sticky hand inserted itself under his chin and began to push his head backward, until Albert had a clean shot at the underside of his jaw. The steel point rose inexorably up, through the man’s tongue, through the roof of his mouth, into the brain, where Albert left it.
As he sped through the front door he caught the first blue flash from a police car’s roof light turning into the street. By now he was opposite the entrance of the house next to Kleist’s. He vaulted the wall and hid behind it, flat on his stomach. The car cruised up the street and came to a halt. Albert listened. Doors slamming. Two
voices. Footsteps, swiftly entering Kleist’s front garden. Any more in the car? Pray God not. He risked one look. All clear.
His sprint might have won him a place on the Olympic hundred meters team. He ran so fast that he was back in his car and rolling before he remembered that he had not stolen some precious object to give himself cover, and in a rage smashed his good hand down on the steering wheel, wishing with his entire soul that it could have been the Japanese man’s bald, fluorescent but now dead head.
CHAPTER
36
When Anna and Gerhard returned to the house on Sunday, it was to find that Barzel had reached a decision. He was no longer prepared to allow Anna to slink away as she pleased.
“Stay in the house,” he ordered her curtly.
“Tell me something.”
“Did you hear what I—”
“I heard. What have you done to my husband? Where is he?”
Barzel looked into her eyes. They were level, wide open, and glowing with independent spirit. He was afraid of the strength that gave this woman her iron spine, so straight and true, because it jeopardized his chances of returning to Berlin as did nothing else.
“How would I know?” he said, with a smile that was meant to be reassuring.
“He’s been trying to find me, hasn’t he?”
Barzel looked accusingly at Gerhard. When he did not reply at once, Anna shouted, “Hasn’t he.”
“Don’t lose your temper.”
“The hell with you! Tell me this one thing, where’s David?”
When he still did not reply, she swung her arm back, meaning to hit him, but Barzel was quicker on the uptake than Gerhard. He caught her wrists, first one then the other, and clasped them together, bringing his face to within inches of her own.
“Your husband,” he hissed, “didn’t know when to stop. So we stopped him.”
Anna held his gaze. Then, with a turn of speed that not even Barzel could anticipate, she kicked his right calf.
Krysalis: Krysalis Page 33