by Alex Howard
I wonder what it’s like?
Couldn’t hurt to try.
All the twos, thought Huss. She keyed the numbers in and heard a click. There was a red light and it changed to green to indicate occupancy as she opened the door.
She was curious to experience what forty degrees below zero would feel like. Perhaps it would numb the pain in her back. She was already uncomfortably over the recommended dosage of the ibuprofen she had in her handbag. Here was her chance.
The door swung fully open and Huss gasped aloud in shock and disgust at what was inside. It was horrible. She stared for a moment to make sure it was what she thought it was, not that there could be any doubt. And then she closed the door.
She heard a low growl behind her.
She turned around slowly.
Muller and the Presa were at the top of the stairs, looking down at her.
‘Du liebe Zeit!’ said Muller softly.
Huss gasped, but it wasn’t the bodyguard and the dog that caused it.
Georgie Adams’s face appeared from behind Muller’s body as she arrogantly emerged from behind her gigantic colleague.
‘In English that means, “Dearie, dearie me!”’ She shook her head sorrowfully, her eyes narrowed with triumphant dislike. ‘Oh dearie, dearie me, DI Huss.’
43
Hanlon rolled over Serg’s naked body and checked her phone. She sat up and pushed her hair back from her face. Serg ran his fingertips down her spine, tracing the beautiful outlines of the muscles on her back.
Sweat was drying on their bodies in the warm air of the FSB’s – the Federal Security Service, the KGB’s replacement and Serg’s employers – safe house.
‘So how did you know I’d be in Stuttgart?’ she asked.
‘I’m in Germany a lot,’ said Serg, ‘and I work in military intelligence. I know many things. I thought I’d surprise you.’
‘Well, you certainly alarmed me.’ She stood up and walked to the window on Panoramastrasse. The street was well-named. It lay high above the city and the lights of the centre glittered down in the valley below.
He pushed himself up on one side. He had a long, lean gymnast’s body, the muscles sharply defined.
‘You have an amazing backside, Hanlon.’
‘I know,’ she said.
She turned round. ‘What the hell did you think you were doing, Serg, following me like that? I was just about to severely hurt one of your men. He was about to lose all his front teeth.’
‘I was looking after you.’
‘Oh were you? I’m capable of looking after myself.’
Serg propped himself up on one elbow in the rumpled bed. ‘I know. But you have powerful enemies, Hanlon. Belanov for one. And now you’re mixed up with Neu Schicksal.’
‘So you’ll know what I’m doing here in Stuttgart?’
‘Not precisely, in general terms. Neu Schicksal and Wolf Schneider are obviously of concern to the Kremlin. That’s what brought you to my attention when I looked for your name, when I started wondering what you might want that for.’ He nodded at the container he’d brought in a plastic bag for her. He grinned. ‘Most women want chocolates... Your half-assed English anarchists aren’t really my concern.’
‘And Al-Akhdaar?’
‘I’m more concerned with the growth of IS in Georgia, and its allies in Chechnya and Dagestan, but you could have guessed that, Hanlon.’
‘I did.’
She walked over to the bed and sat down by Serg’s side. She leaned forward and stroked the fine, almost oriental hair on his head. His mother had been Tartar and Serg’s green eyes had a slight Mongolian roundness. He had a kind of half-breed beauty that she found irresistible. Her fingers rested on a patch of scar tissue above his hip about the size of a playing card.
‘That must have hurt.’
‘A souvenir from Vladikavkaz in Ossetia... Twelve years ago.’ Serg propped himself up on one arm. Hanlon ran her hand over the taut biceps. She listened to his sonorous English as he told her of the firefight. The dilapidated dacha near the Tsey Valley. A semi-automatic in his hand, eighteen rounds in the magazine. The brilliant red of blood on pristine white snow. The explosion and the fireball, a running figure, the impact of the round in his side, knocking him over. Sprawled on the ground. Two two-round bursts from his gun. The fleeing man collapsing as if knocked over by a giant invisible hand.
‘But did it hurt? Not really, a bit. Now, this is another reason I was following you, to keep you safe from her.’
Serg sat up with easy grace and reached for his laptop.
He entered a password and tapped away then showed Hanlon the screen. She looked at Georgie Adams.
‘What’s she doing here? I thought you didn’t have any interest in half-assed British anarchists.’
‘I don’t. But she shows up on the files. She has Perm Mafia connections. Belanov has the same friends. Caucasus heroin mainly; that and prostitution. The anarchist stuff is just a front.’
Hanlon frowned. ‘How would that help?’
Serg said, ‘Your intelligence services regard them as a joke, a bunch of idealistic idiots, and most of them are. So, if they attend a rally abroad they’re not going to be checked rigorously or searched because they’ll scream it’s political persecution, so you can bring in coerced sex slaves to work in London brothels and say they’re here for a conference, and you can more easily bring in drugs and money.’ He shrugged. ‘Adams is the sort of person that officials respect, you know that. She’s of the establishment. We know they have links with student bodies in London.’
‘So Adams is a criminal, plain and simple?’
‘Sure, she’s just using Eleuthera. I have no doubt that most of them haven’t got a clue how the organization is financed. Or care. She’s a very nasty piece of work, though, implicated in several killings and torture and intimidation of women.’
‘That lying piece of shit, Hinds,’ said Hanlon bitterly.
‘Trouble?’ asked Serg.
‘No, not really,’ Hanlon said. ‘My colleague will be a bit disappointed, that’s all. She was led to believe that Eleuthera were some kind of international conspiracy with connections to major political parties, not some bunch of idealistic idiots being played for fools by a drug smuggler and general gangster. She’ll feel let down. I can’t have a printout of any of your paperwork, can I, make it official?’
‘I’m sorry, no. It is a confidential police document, but now you know it exists you can do a police to police request, it’ll just take a couple of weeks. Let me know when the paperwork is sent and I’ll take it from there. Without me, you’d never get it, not in today’s climate. I’ll authorize it, make sure it gets done.’
‘Thanks,’ said Hanlon. She thought Melinda Huss would be gutted to know that her conspiracy theory was just that, a mere fantasy. That Eleuthera were not connected with the Al-Akhdaar killings at all.
‘Anything else I can help you with?’
Hanlon looked at his body, the clock, calculated flight check-in, travel time to the airport. She slid on to the bed. Her mouth covered Serg’s as her tongue sought his tongue and her body straddled his.
‘There was just one thing,’ she breathed.
The laptop screen reflected their sweat-drenched interlocked limbs as Hanlon wrapped her legs round him beneath the inscrutable gaze of Georgie Adams, the sun glinting on her pierced nose ring.
44
Huss, under the threat of the Presa and the enormous bulk of Frank Muller, found herself bound to the treatment table. While they had been securing her they kept up a conversation in German of which Huss understood nothing at all. What she did understand, chillingly, was their lack of concern. It was obvious that they felt perfectly capable of being able to deal with her.
The Velcro restraints that were usually used to hold the guests in position whilst their chakras were realigned, healing stones balanced on healing nodes, and to keep them passive during ayahuasca shamanic healing ceremonies so they didn’t
trip over and hurt themselves whilst tripping on hallucinogens or whatever modish mumbo-jumbo was flavour of the month, held her firm. Adams brutally slapped a piece of gaffer tape over her mouth.
‘Hang on a minute,’ said Georgie. Muller and the dog halted. Neither he, nor the dog, spoke English but they both understood what was a command, and there was no doubt as to who was in charge. She leaned over Huss and quickly, professionally, patted her down. Then upended her handbag and took Huss’s mobile phone and car keys from the assorted things in there.
She turned the phone off, pocketed the keys and swept everything else back into the bag.
She and Muller disappeared up the stairs.
Adams halted at the top and turned and looked down at Huss on the table. ‘I’ll be back down to deal with you later,’ she said, ‘once I’ve moved your car.’ Then she turned and left Huss to her thoughts.
I’m going to die, I’m going to die, Please God, don’t let me die.
To avoid panic she focused on what she now knew. No more speculation.
Arzu.
The cryosauna was in full view. The mystery of Arzu’s hiding place was a mystery no more. It might well have been Arzu’s thumbprint that had opened the keypad but that hadn’t been Arzu’s decision. Arzu’s hand and forearm had been detached from his body. They were sitting now in a tray, on a shelf on the other side of the room, defrosting.
So, Arzu hadn’t killed Hübler. It had to be Schneider. Or the other two men, but it would have been Schneider’s decision. She wondered why. Audio memories of conversations, Hanlon’s face frowning as she had said, ‘I’m not even sure what her relationship with Schneider was, come to think of it. I thought they were having an affair...’
And all that talk of ‘loyalty’. Was it a crime passionel? Or had he done it to boost his popularity ratings?
Hübler.
Obviously not killed by Al-Akhdaar. For whatever reason, the Germans had done it, obviously aided by Georgie Adams. It very much looked, she thought, as if Eleuthera had been behind all the UK killings, Elsa and Kettering too.
Hinds.
Well, she finally believed that he was, as he claimed, a totally innocent dupe in all of this. That what he had said was true. He was now her only hope of salvation but, of course, as far as he was concerned the Germans were innocent and he would be thinking that right now protection officers would be quietly taking their positions up in the lodge.
Her only hope was Hinds.
Maybe he would get bored waiting for her and come and look for her. It was a slim hope, there was a warrant out for his arrest, after all, and he would be understandably nervous about encountering armed policemen, but it was a hope.
Or he’d meet Adams as she came to move the car and intervene. Would he have the guts to confront her, would he chicken out? If he did tackle her, would he win? Hinds was tough, but she was beginning to suspect that Adams was unstoppable.
She was like Hanlon, serenely self-confident, floating in a bubble of self-belief. An opinion bolstered by those around her.
But Hinds was still a possible source of salvation. When he saw Adams surely he would suspect something had gone wrong, or would he think that to act might be to disrupt Huss’s plans? Was he even still there?
He was all she had.
Apart from Hanlon. Where was she right now? In London probably.
Huss lay and looked at the ceiling.
Hopeless.
45
Hinds was getting bored in Huss’s car, waiting for her to get back from the lodge. He had a half bottle of brandy in his jacket but this was running perilously low. He toyed with the idea of going into the hotel for a drink but felt he simply wasn’t dressed for the Rosemount. He was expecting to be arrested and had dressed accordingly: old jeans and a sweater that had seen better days. Uncle Cliff had said he’d find out which nick he was going to be held in and would use contacts to brighten up his life inside.
Hinds was reasonably happy with the way things were going. The truth was, he had been doing very poorly as a freelance journalist. His family contacts, which he’d thought would be useful to differentiate himself from other freelancers, had proved too old-fashioned. The old London gangs were yesterday’s news. Readers wanted more relevant stuff. Cyber-crime, people trafficking. His flow of published work had all but dried up.
After he’d found himself in bed with Georgie Adams and got to know her friends, and after he’d seen the wave of revulsion and disgust at the Anonymous protestors in his local pub after some rally or other outside Parliament, he had thought, sod it, why not, and had constructed a conspiracy theory, throwing in references to the hard left and Islamic terrorists.
That’s got contemporary relevance, he thought.
He added a few non-actionable hints of contacts between the anarchist hard left and the Labour and Conservative parties (he wanted to be even-handed) of a disturbing nature, just to season the mix.
It was a brilliant and elaborate hoax. Two national daily papers and a Sunday bid for it. He added some photos of Georgie naked to excite them further. Sex, conspiracy, politics, Islamic terrorists, sex texts, pics, it had everything.
Sod the truth, thought Hinds.
He rolled himself a joint on the back of his phone, wound the window down and shook the surplus weed and tobacco away.
He dropped the phone in the passenger door compartment, got out of the car and crouched in the bushes and lit his spliff.
Hiding in the bushes, he reflected on the amazing success of his deception. Finding himself on the run only added to the credibility of the whole outrageous fabrication. But who could gainsay him? Eleuthera could hardly claim they were being misrepresented. They did want violent global revolution.
Let them sue.
Another drag on his joint.
But then it wasn’t just the press who believed what he had to say, which was what he wanted, Eleuthera had got wind somehow of what he was writing and they believed it too.
That was the terrible thing.
He had invented a conspiracy involving murder and the complicity of Eleuthera and Al-Akhdaar and it had turned out to be true.
Georgie Adams and Mark Spencer thought he had stumbled upon a secret plan of theirs, God alone knows what that was, and what had turned into a game had now become some form of reality. They really were after him. There really was an Islamic connection. They really were involved in murder.
And he had thought it was just fictional.
His would be another death on their hands, but not a planned one, an incidental one. An incidental death.
He puffed away quickly, the grass fuelling his sense of dissociation from reality.
Georgie Adams had sent Mark Spencer and James Kettering to kill him. He had been attacked, he had defended himself, they had killed that anarchist fool themselves to frame him.
He couldn’t believe it had got so out of hand. And Georgie Adams was bloody dangerous.
It was no longer a game.
Footsteps scrunching on the shingle of the car park. He peered round the bush, was it Huss? A figure in combat trousers and a hoodie. The hands gloved. No, Jesus, thought Hinds, it was Georgie Adams. The person he feared most on earth. He had no doubt she would kill him on sight.
Think of the devil, and she’ll come.
He watched with a growing sense of dread as the woman got behind the wheel of the Golf and drove off.
Huss, he thought, oh my God!
Things had just got infinitely worse and they were already pretty bad. The only person who actually wanted to help him was in Eleuthera’s hands.
Get help? Who would believe him? The police that Huss had mentioned in the hotel would nick him the moment he approached them.
He had to find Huss himself. He wished he wasn’t so stoned, it was hard to think straight.
He started to jog down to where he knew the lodge lay, keeping in the darkness of the path behind the shrubbery away from the brilliantly illuminated lawn.
/> If Eleuthera killed Huss as well as Schneider, his prints would be all over Huss’s car. His phone was in it! They wouldn’t even need to frame him, he had managed it all by himself. He felt sick to his stomach. He was wanted in connection with two deaths, he had no doubt that absolutely nobody would ever believe him if Huss were dead.
He quickened his pace. There was the lodge, the front gate was open. Had Eleuthera taken the place over already? He had to know what was going on.
Hinds slipped inside and crept up to the window of the living room. There were two men in the room: an enormous, burly giant with a savage black beard like the French rugby player and a bald, fat guy with glasses and a huge, evil-looking attack dog. He could hear that they were speaking German. No sign of Huss.
The fat, bald guy got up and left the room. Hinds stayed where he was, desperately trying to think what to do.
What had happened to her? The Germans were obviously in no danger, Georgie Adams or that boyfriend of hers must have ambushed Huss. Hinds couldn’t think clearly any more.
At least Eleuthera weren’t here.
He had to warn the Germans before Adams killed them; the bitch was capable of anything, and doubtless he’d get the blame.
He couldn’t just bang on the door, he was wanted by the police. Besides, why would the Germans believe him? They wouldn’t have a clue who he was. He could be a terrorist for all they knew.
Where the hell was Huss?
He could feel a metaphorical noose tightening around his neck.
What was he going to do?
46
Huss heard the sound of the door at the top of the stairs open and craned her head round. Her heart sank.