by James Becker
“You call it Ipse Dixit when you sent question on Internet. That is relic we come to collect.”
“How did you find out about it?” Mallory asked, his professional curiosity aroused.
“We have good monitoring of Web. Hand over relic now, and we leave.”
“And what about us?”
“All we want is relic. We no interest in you or girlfriend.”
The words were reassuring, and the man’s tone of voice neutral. But there was a veiled and lethal silent threat behind the dialogue that was quite unmistakable to Mallory, and when he glanced over at Robin, who had so far not said a word since the two men appeared, he was certain that she had picked up on it, too. He met her eyes and saw her give a barely perceptible shake of her head. It looked as if she was reading exactly the same subtext that he was.
“Where is it?”
At that moment, Mallory realized that the only possible weapon they had was the book safe itself, and he thanked whatever god watched over adventurous IT specialists that he’d decided to reset the antitheft device before Robin replaced the relic in her safe.
“It’s locked away in the safe in the corner,” Mallory replied, pointing at the square dark green metal box. “Mary—she’s my secretary—has the key.”
He nodded at Robin, though as she was the only woman in the room he didn’t think either of the two thugs would be in any doubt exactly who he was referring to.
The man immediately switched his attention to Robin and then pointed toward the safe.
“Open it,” he snapped.
Robin still had her apartment keys in her hand, and without responding she walked across to the safe, bent down in front of it, and unlocked the door.
The moment the door swung open, the other man slipped his pistol into his pocket, stepped across to her, pulled her upright, and shoved her roughly back toward the desk. Then he bent down to inspect the contents of the safe.
The biggest thing in it was the Ipse Dixit book safe, and he immediately pulled it out and read the faded inscription on the front cover. Then he spoke in rapid Italian to his companion, who gestured for him to place the object on the desk. Mallory picked up a name from the dialogue: it sounded as if the first Italian—he recognized the language they were speaking—apparently the leader, was called Giacomo.
Giacomo—assuming Mallory was right—issued another order in his own language, and the second man took out his gun again and aimed it at Mallory. Satisfied that the situation was under control, Giacomo slid his own weapon into his jacket pocket, then picked up the book safe and examined it carefully.
“What in it?” he demanded. “Scroll? Codex? Parchment?”
Mallory looked at him.
“If that object really had been stolen or taken from your employer,” Mallory asked mildly, “surely you would already know what was inside it?”
“Answer question. I no have patience.”
“It’s an old scroll,” Mallory said. “We haven’t been able to decipher it, and we put it back inside the box for safekeeping.”
The Italian turned the relic over in his hands a couple more times, then held it close to his ear and shook it. The box safe was of course locked—Robin had done that after Mallory reset the antitheft device—and almost immediately he looked at Mallory and asked the obvious question.
“How you open it?”
Mallory again glanced at Robin before he replied, because he knew this was the only chance they were going to get, the only way they had any possibility of walking out of that room alive.
“There’s a small slot on the side of the relic opposite the spine. You have to slide a metal object inside it and then push firmly to unlock it. You need something like this letter opener.”
Mallory took a step forward and stretched out his hand toward the pen holder on Robin’s desk, but immediately the man raised his arm.
“No touch,” he said threateningly.
Mallory stepped back and just waited, because now there was nothing else he could do.
“The mechanism is stiff,” he said, “so you need to push quite firmly.”
The Italian nodded, then leaned forward and picked up the paper knife, a flat steel blade with a wooden handle. He looked closely at the book safe, slid the point of the paper knife into the slot opposite the spine, took a firm grip on the relic with his left hand, and then pushed the blade firmly home.
16
Dartmouth, Devon
There was a faint metallic click, followed almost immediately by a heavy thud, and then a brief moment of silence before the Italian started screaming as the medieval booby trap was triggered for the second time in twenty-four hours.
Half a dozen of the metal spikes slammed through the palm of his left hand. And as a brutal bonus, the blade of the letter opener was so short that three of the spikes on the opposite side of the book safe drove deep into his closed right fist. At least for a few moments, the man was completely incapacitated, both hands pinned to the ancient relic.
As Giacomo’s scream echoed around the small room, Mallory took two quick strides forward to where the other Italian was standing, his mouth open in shock, his pistol now pointing toward the floor.
But then something totally unexpected occurred: Robin beat him to it.
“Get the other one,” she said urgently, and then moved.
She stepped towards the second Italian, pivoted on her left foot, and lashed out with her right. The sole of her shoe—she was wearing a pair of comfortable pumps—connected violently with the Italian’s right wrist and there was an audible crack as something broke in his arm. The gun went spinning across the floor to land under the desk. She continued her fluid and well-practiced movement, landing on her right foot and swinging her left leg around in a short and lethally targeted arc, her heel slamming into the left side of the Italian’s face. He crumpled to the floor in an untidy and unconscious heap.
The moment Mallory realized that Robin was perfectly capable of handling the second man, he switched direction and dived around the desk. The other Italian—Giacomo—was still screaming, still trying to pull his hands away from the spikes, but the noise stopped moments later when Mallory’s right fist, driven by all of the considerable power of his right arm, and given added impetus by the combination of fear and rage that he was experiencing, crashed into his chin.
Once he was certain the man posed no further threat to them—at least until he woke up—Mallory looked over to his right.
“Are you okay?” he asked, though even as he formed the words he realized the question was superfluous.
Robin was not only okay, but had already turned the Italian onto his face and pulled both his arms behind him.
“Perfectly,” she snapped. “Now don’t just stand there gawping. In the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk you’ll find a handful of plastic cable ties held together with an elastic band. Fish them out and let me have them, please. And another thing,” she added, “much as I appreciate your chivalrous action in pretending to be me, if we find ourselves in the same kind of situation again, can you please think of a more attractive name for me than Mary?”
“First name that came into my head,” Mallory replied, stepping back around the desk and opening the drawer. “It was my mother’s name, actually, or the first part of it, anyway. She was called Mary Anne.”
“Sorry.”
It was, Mallory thought as he rooted around in the drawer, a somewhat surreal conversation, bearing in mind what had just happened in the room over the last few seconds, and he had a number of obvious questions he wanted to ask, but they could all wait. He found the bundle of cable ties and tossed them over to her.
The second Italian was still lying unconscious on the floor, but they had no idea how long that convenient state of affairs would last. Robin stripped a cable tie out of the bundle, looped it around the uncon
scious man’s left wrist, and pulled it tight. Then she dragged his right arm close to his left, threaded the second cable tie under the first, and pulled it tight around his right wrist. For good measure, she took two more of the ties and repeated the process, then lashed his ankles together in a similar fashion, pulling each plastic tie as tight as she could. When the Italian did finally wake up, he would be completely immobilized.
Giacomo was also still unconscious, and the first thing Mallory did was reach into his jacket pocket and take out the automatic pistol that the Italian had threatened the two of them with when they arrived at the apartment. He searched his other pockets as well and pulled out a cheap mobile phone, a spare magazine for the pistol, fully loaded, and a suppressor to screw onto the end of the barrel. That simply reinforced Mallory’s belief that he and Robin had not been intended to survive the evening. He placed the weapon and equipment on the desk, removed a slim wallet from the Italian’s inside jacket pocket, and then turned his attention to the man’s hands.
They were, not to put too fine a point on it, a mess. Six of the needle-sharp spikes had been driven right through the man’s left hand, and the wounds were bleeding steadily. In fact, there was rather less blood than Mallory had expected, probably because the spikes themselves were to some extent plugging the wounds. He couldn’t tell for sure whether or not any of the spikes had shattered the bones in the man’s hand, but he reckoned that was quite probable. He certainly wouldn’t be playing the violin any time soon.
There was no such doubt about the injuries on Giacomo’s right hand. He had obviously been holding the paper knife firmly in his closed fist in order to push the knife into the lock mechanism, and three of the spikes had been driven deep into his hand, one into the web between his forefinger and thumb, and the other two had slammed through the bones of the knuckles of his first and middle fingers.
“That looks really painful,” Robin said, with not an ounce of compassion in her voice, as she leaned over Mallory and looked down at the Italian’s hands.
Mallory nodded.
“Your hands and feet are often the most difficult parts of the body to repair, because they’re full of small bones. He’s going to have serious problems sorting out his hands.”
“Shame. You do know they were going to kill us, don’t you?”
“That was my guess. Where the hell did you learn to kick like that?”
“I’ll tell you another time,” Robin replied. “First, I want that book safe back, so you’re going to have to pull his hands off the spikes, and the best time to do that is right now, while he’s still unconscious.”
Together they turned Giacomo until he was lying on his left side, and then Mallory trod firmly on the Italian’s left wrist, seized both ends of the book safe, and pulled, trying to slide the spikes out of the man’s hand. The Italian moaned in pain, but didn’t come round, and with a sudden jerk the ancient relic came free.
Robin bent down, looped a couple of the cable ties around his wrist, and pulled them tight.
“Two birds with one stone,” she murmured. “As well as acting like handcuffs, these will also function as a tourniquet.”
When the spikes had pulled free, they had both noticed that the flow of blood from the wounds increased significantly.
Mallory rolled the unconscious Italian onto his right side and tried to repeat the process, but because two of the spikes had been driven deep into the bone of the knuckles, he couldn’t simply pull them out.
“I need a lever,” he said, “something to use to free the spikes.”
The letter opener was still sticking out of the slot in the side of the book safe, and Robin bent down and pulled it out.
“Here,” she said. “Try this.”
Mallory slid the steel blade into the narrow gap between the edge of the book safe and the bleeding knuckles of Giacomo’s right hand and then levered firmly.
This time, the pain must have been far worse, because the Italian moaned and grunted, and then his eyes flicked open. He started to move, trying to roll onto his back, the movement pulling the book safe out of Mallory’s grasp.
Robin stretched her right arm around Mallory and, apparently quite gently, pressed the web of her hand against the Italian’s throat. Almost immediately he stopped moving and his eyelids flickered again before he slumped back into unconsciousness.
“Before you ask,” she said, “that was called a push choke, and he’ll be out for at least ten minutes, so you’ve got plenty of time.”
Mallory didn’t reply, simply grabbed hold of the book safe again, taking care to avoid the protruding spikes, placed his foot on Giacomo’s wrist to keep his arm steady, and redoubled his efforts with the steel blade of the letter opener.
It was messy work, the man’s hand sticky with the blood leaking out of the puncture wounds, but after another minute or so of levering and moving and pulling, there was a faint cracking sound and the book safe suddenly came free.
“I’ll take that,” Robin said, reaching down for the medieval relic and taking it from him, using a tissue to avoid touching the blood that had been splashed liberally over the leather cover. Then she dropped the bundle of ties beside Mallory. “Get another couple of these around his wrists,” she said, “and don’t forget to do his ankles as well.”
He rolled the unconscious Italian onto his side, pulled both his arms behind his back, and quickly lashed them together and then secured his ankles with another four cable ties.
As he did so, Robin placed the book safe on one end of the desk and then bent down to reach under it, stretching out her hand to retrieve the second pistol.
“Hang on a minute,” Mallory said. “Don’t touch it.”
Robin stopped, her outstretched fingers just inches away from the butt of the semiautomatic weapon.
“Why not?” she asked. “We can’t just leave it there.”
“I’m just thinking ahead. We don’t want to leave our fingerprints on that pistol. Use your cotton gloves and then put it on the desk, well away from the other one.”
“When you say ‘the other one,’ you mean the one you took out of his pocket using your bare hands? That one?”
Mallory grinned at her briefly. “That’s exactly what I mean, and before I did that I should have waited and thought it through.”
Robin stood up, pulled on the white cotton gloves she had been wearing earlier, then bent down again and retrieved the pistol, placing it at the opposite end of the desk to the one Mallory had already recovered. Then, still wearing the gloves, she searched the other man, removing his wallet, mobile phone, and a second suppressor and spare magazine: the two men had been carrying precisely the same hardware. She placed everything at the end of the desk, then slumped down in her chair and stared across at Mallory, who’d just finished immobilizing Giacomo.
“So, who the hell are these two comedians?” she demanded. “And what do we do now?”
17
Dartmouth, Devon
“Those are two good questions,” Mallory replied, sitting opposite her and glancing down at the two unconscious men lying on the floor of the small office. Then he looked back at Robin and noticed that, although her voice was steady, her hands were shaking slightly, obviously a physical reaction to what had just taken place.
“And have you got any good answers?” she asked, her glance straying toward Giacomo and the blood still pumping, albeit now more slowly, out of the wounds in his hands.
“Not right now, no,” Mallory said.
He paused for a couple of beats.
“Look,” he went on, “don’t feel bad about letting that man trigger the antitheft device. If we hadn’t, and the mechanism hadn’t worked, we might both be dead by now.”
“I know. It’s just that I’ve never had to react like that before. Up till now, I’ve only ever used martial arts in training, never for real.”
&n
bsp; That was shading the truth more than a little, but at that moment Robin didn’t feel like explaining herself in any detail. “It’s good to know I’ve got the skills,” she added, “but it’s still a bit of a shock to see what happens to somebody when I do it in a live situation.”
“Karate?”
Robin nodded. “I do Shotokan karate and aikido, mainly, and that was a mae geri followed by a mawashi geri, to be exact. A front kick and then a roundhouse kick.” She shook her head in frustration. “So, what are we going to do now? Call the police? Get that one to a hospital? He’s bleeding all over my carpet, quite apart from anything else. It’s not a very good carpet, but bloodstains certainly aren’t going to improve it.”
“I think,” Mallory said after a moment, “that the best thing we can do is leave, if we can.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s at least one other man waiting outside,” Mallory replied. “You were already climbing the staircase when one of these two signaled to somebody in an SUV parked about fifty yards down the road. The man in the driving seat must have a clear view of the back of this place and the staircase as well. What I’m not sure about is what he’s likely to do if we leave, what his orders are. These two were carrying pistols, so it’s quite possible that he is as well. And I’m not even sure it’s just one man. There could be two or three more of them in that vehicle, just waiting for us.”
“Oh God. I didn’t realize that.” She paused for a second or two, then continued. “Look, is there any good reason why we can’t just lock the door, call the police, and then wait for them to show up?”
“I think calling the cops is a really good idea,” Mallory replied, “but what I’m not so certain about is whether or not we should still be here when they arrive.”