Packer stuffed the gun under his belt and followed. He found Ryderbeit bending over the gunman, his hands feeling under his coat. ‘First blood, soldier. You killed him.’ He glanced both ways to make sure the road was clear. ‘Quick — get his legs.’ He was already lifting the body under the arms, and Packer grabbed the ankles, and they began to stagger with quick sideways steps back towards the truck.
They carried the body round to the rear where Ryderbeit let his load drop; there was a dull clonk as the gunman’s head hit the tarmac; then Ryderbeit had both panel doors open, slid the body in feet first, and slammed the doors.
Packer was already in the driving seat; and only then did he remember that the Rhodesian had shot out both headlamps. He climbed down and rejoined Ryderbeit, at the Fiat. ‘No lights, Sammy.’
‘No sweat,’ the Rhodesian answered cheerfully. ‘We’ll drive on sidelights.’
‘Like hell we will. Any idea what the Swiss police are like on traffic offences? And that’s all we need — picked up for driving without lights, with a corpse in the back.’
‘You law-abiding sod! But maybe you’re right. We’ll stash our gear in the truck, then back up round the bend and find a quiet spot where we can lie low till first light.’
He unlocked the boot and they began groping for their luggage. Ryderbeit hauled out his great case and started to lug it across to the truck, while Packer checked the inside of the Fiat and removed the plastic folder containing the hire car documents and insurance, made out to M. Cassis, resident of Liechtenstein. Then he locked all the doors and carried his grip-bag over to the lakeside, where he paused to throw the car keys into the black water. But instead of a splash, there came a muffled bang from inside the truck.
He dropped his case, grabbed the gun out of his belt, and, crouching down, began to zigzag forward towards the nearside of the truck. He was close enough to distinguish the shape of the bonnet with its two blind headlamps, when he heard a quick step ahead, then Ryderbeit’s voice. ‘Packer, you bastard! What are you doing — having a crap?’
Packer ran round to the rear of the truck, still holding the gun in both hands. The panel doors were open, and above the red glow of the rear lights he could see Ryderbeit’s case resting on the body of the gunman.
‘There was a shot,’ Packer said breathlessly.
‘Yeah, there was a shot. Now get your case — we’re moving.’
‘But the shot —?’
Ryderbeit looked at him with a crooked sneer. ‘Get your stuff. I’ll explain when we’re aboard.’
Packer fetched his case from beside the lake and slung it in beside the dead gunman, then slammed the doors. ‘Any idea where we can hide up?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, there’s a layby just back behind the bend.’ Ryderbeit grinned and pointed at his good eye. ‘Awake or asleep, drunk or sober, an old hunter never misses anything.’
Packer nodded. ‘You lead the way, behind the truck, to warn any traffic.’ He got up into the driving seat, his frozen fingers fumbling along the dashboard, and found there were no keys. He switched on the inside light, climbed over the seat, and dragged Ryderbeit’s bag off the body. If the keys weren’t in the ignition, they must be in someone’s pocket — it was just a question of whose pocket.
The man lay on his belly, his head turned towards the side of the truck, his arms stretched stiffly beside him. In the cramped space Packer had some difficulty rolling the corpse on to its side. He found the keys in the man’s overcoat pocket. Feeling the tension subside, he had just rolled the body back on to its stomach, when he noticed a smear of blood along the rim of the man’s collar. He looked closer, and saw that the short black hairs at the back of the neck were matted and wet.
He leaned over and began prodding carefully, like a doctor. The wound was just behind the man’s ear. It was only a small hole — a hole made by a .22, at the most. A lady’s gun.
He climbed thoughtfully back into the driving seat, switched off the interior light, and started the engine. There were no reversing lights, so he had to move slowly, guided by Ryderbeit’s tall figure waving him impatiently on. Beyond the bend was a short path leading up to a clearing surrounded by trees: evidently a layby for picnickers wanting to enjoy a view of the lake. The ideal spot. While darkness lasted they would be invisible from the road — unless someone were looking for them.
Ryderbeit joined him in the passenger seat and tapped out a cigar. Packer nodded towards the back of the truck. ‘What made you think he was still alive?’ he said casually.
Ryderbeit bit the end of his cigar and spat out the leaf. ‘It’s like with certain animals, soldier — snakes in particular. You think you’ve killed the little bastards, then half an hour later they come twitching back to life.’
‘So you shot him?’
‘I shot him.’ Ryderbeit leaned back and grinned over the flame of a match. ‘Something troubling you, soldier? Your conscience, maybe?’
‘Yes, something is troubling me. But it’s not my conscience — though it does have something to do with our friend back there. I don’t like his having been alone.’
‘Shit, if he’d had anyone with him, he’d have shown up by now.’
‘Now just think for a minute, Sammy. We’ve run into a carefully staged ambush, timed to the second —’ he pointed to a large metal box under the dashboard, beside Ryderbeit’s knee — ‘using a powerful UHF R/T, certainly strong enough to pick up Klosters. Even in the mayhem of the avalanche, someone must have seen us leaving, while they probably had a “lamplighter” — “watchdog” to you — back up the road to signal our approach. And our friend in the back knows how long it takes for a car to get here, and he has the Fiat’s full description, waits till we come round the bend, then chucks out his spiked chain.’
‘What the hell are you getting at?’ Ryderbeit drawled. ‘I’m not a babe in arms — I can figure how an ambush is set up. I’ve set up dozens myself.’
‘Alone?’
Ryderbeit was silent for some time, sucking steadily at his cigar, which gave off a dull glow, like the cockpit lighting of an aircraft at night. ‘So what do you figure?’ he said at last. ‘You’d think that if the Ruler’s boys had rumbled us back there in Klosters, they’d have done better going to the Swiss police? Or maybe the Ruler’s fussy about other people clearing up his own shit?’
‘The Ruler’s dead,’ Packer said.
Ryderbeit’s eye flashed at him. ‘Yeah. And he’s not got a long arm, but it reaches out from under the winding-sheet!’
There was another pause. ‘All I know,’ said Packer at last, ‘is that you don’t set up an ambush with an elaborate radio link-up, on a busy international road, with just one man against two.’
‘What do you expect from a bunch of wogs? The Ruler’s people may be getting fat on oil, but they’re still a load of desert rats with crabs up their arses. They don’t have the same refined techniques as you and me, soldier.’
‘Hell they don’t. Their Intelligence boys were trained by the West, only without Western scruples. They certainly know enough not to set up an ambush with odds like this one.’
Again Ryderbeit was silent. During the drive up to the layby, Packer had had the heater turned on full; but now the engine was off, it was growing bitterly cold. He climbed over into the back again and got his anorak, gloves, and an extra sweater out of his case and put them on. Then he paused, looking down at the half-hidden body of the gunman; took off his gloves and began going through the dead man’s pockets.
There was very little: a crumpled packet of Swiss cigarettes and a ‘cricket’ lighter, a cheap plastic wallet containing a few hundred Swiss francs, and a cracked, dog-eared photograph of a stout woman standing beside a small boy. He searched the wallet again, but it was unnaturally empty, like that of a man preparing for suicide. Packer removed the money, stuffed it into his trouser pocket; then returned to his seat.
‘Who was he?’ said Ryderbeit.
‘Nobody. No passport, credit card
s, driving licence — nothing.’
Ryderbeit yawned. ‘Well, at least we’ve knocked off one of the biggest bastards of them all. That’s a nice thought to sleep on.’
He stamped out his cigar, then curled up like a cat with his head on one side and his good eye closed, while his glass one stared at the dashboard.
Packer could not sleep. His body was stiff with cold, and the gruesome events of the last half-hour became a blur, giving way to a parade of provocative images: dinner by candlelight, fondue bourguignon, plump shiny men in dinner-jackets, fragile women with sharp eyes and brittle voices. He looked at his watch. It was going to be a long night.
He tried again to unravel the puzzle of the ambush: the speed and ease with which he and Ryderbeit had been picked up in Klosters, despite the confusion following the avalanche. Then this solitary gunman, operating in the dark against two targets, without knowing whether they were armed or not.
The problem did not resolve itself, but at least it concentrated his mind, and dulled the clear cruel workings of his imagination as it followed Sarah from table to table, candlelight to chandelier, drawing her admirers and pinning them down like butterflies. After her ordeal on the mountain today, she’d probably drink too much, and if there was someone in St Moritz with a little extra specious appeal, she might even go back and sleep with him. But not until she’d enjoyed the party. She wouldn’t be naked and writhing in some strange hotel bed until the party was over. She hated to miss parties. She’d wait until first light. Like us, Packer thought.
She was like a cat. She hated being touched, even in bed, unless she was in just the right mood, with just the right person. A cat, he thought: slow, soft-footed, stalking movements, coming closer. He whipped round in his seat, then ducked forward, cracking his head against the metal door. He started to yell something, when the air exploded round him like an enormous paper bag and he felt the tiny stings of broken glass against his neck and ears.
He snapped down the handle and flung the door open with all his weight behind it, knocking the man outside clean off balance; then sprang out head-first arms extended as though he were diving. One set of fingers collided with cloth, the other scraped a rough jaw. He had his feet on the ground now and his thumb in the man’s mouth, crooked back to avoid the teeth and tearing the flesh sideways, while the index finger of his other hand jabbed with a sickening squelch into an eye. The man folded up with a grunt that was little more than an apologetic cough.
At that moment Packer’s mind lost control, and his body — trained during months of discipline back at the camp in Wiltshire — flew into action. He lunged forward and seized a tuft of short hair; pulled it down and brought his knee up into the man’s still invisible face, then chopped his left hand down with all its might on to the man’s neck. His adversary, who was now kneeling, made no sound. Packer lifted the man’s head and felt something hard ram into his ribs.
He gave a yell of rage, for allowing his skills in unarmed combat to master his reason. The gun. He should have gone for that right from the start. But now the man had the gun in his ribs, and Packer knew — with a kind of timeless rationality — that he had a fraction of a second left to live. Instinctively, one hand reached under his anorak for the dead man’s gun, while the other slammed down towards the barrel pressing into him just below his heart. The shot came before he could reach either.
Packer was knocked backwards against the open door: though the impact came from no bullet, but from the weight of the man in front of him, whose whole body had collapsed to the ground. Packer felt dizzy and weak at the knees, and there was a warm sticky feeling round his nose and mouth. He licked his lips and they tasted sweet and salty. He was licking blood, but it wasn’t his own.
The light came on inside the truck and Ryderbeit slid down, the tiny gun folded inside his long fingers. He kicked at the body on the ground, then bent over it. The face was smeared with blood, but not enough to hide the little hole between the eyes.
Ryderbeit smiled. ‘You’re a brutal bastard, Packer-Boy, but that sort of fighting’s strictly back alley stuff. These boys may be tough, but they also use hardware. Or maybe you think that’s against the rules?’
‘Come on, get him into the truck.’
CHAPTER 23
Sarah had not entirely enjoyed herself.
She had drunk too many vodkas to start with, and too much champagne later on. Jocelyn Knox-Partington’s helicopter trip had been cancelled, and the drive to St Moritz had been perfectly hellish. She had ridden with DJ in his Jensen, behind the Knox-Partingtons’ Bentley; and after the snail’s pace down to Landquart, DJ had tried to make up time by taking the narrow icy road through Tiefencastel at reckless speeds, with at least two nasty skids; and the foremost terror in Sarah’s life was to be maimed or disfigured in a car accident.
She had arrived at St Moritz in an evil temper. They were late for dinner, and her humour was not improved by finding that she had less than half an hour in which to bathe, change, and prepare her face, in a large suite in the Palace Hotel which, she learned, had been taken by their host — DJ’s friend, Mr Steiner.
Dinner in the local restaurant — which had been taken over by their party — was too crowded, too noisy, with too much drinking, too many people shouting and laughing; and at the end some of the men had even started throwing rolls and butter pats at each other. Several of them had made clumsy passes at her, including DJ and Knox-Partington. She had resisted them all, not always with good grace, and later, while she was repairing her lipstick in the Ladies’ Room, she was joined by Mrs Knox-Partington, who remarked into the mirror, with acid humour, ‘I’d be grateful if you’d take Jocelyn off my hands this evening — in fact, for the rest of the holiday. He certainly seems keen enough!’
Then the King Club under the Palace Hotel, with its tables jammed together like furniture in a warehouse; a swirling kaleidoscope of coloured light cutting through a haze of cigarette and cigar smoke; the pounding, ear-numbing bombardment of half a dozen hi-fi speakers. Sarah had accepted a few dances, which had fortunately demanded no physical contact with her partners, and for the rest of the evening she drank. And the more she drank, the more she found her mind wandering back to Owen Packer.
Poor Owen. He’d looked so tired when she’d left him. Not shocked or furious or desperate — just exhausted. It had been a moment she had been dreading for months now; for she knew — as he had known — that the relationship could not last. Yet when it had come, in that crowded bar at the Vereina, he had accepted it so mildly; all she could think of now was his poor tired face as he helped her out with her bags at the door of the Chesa.
She realized, with dismay, that she missed him.
She was bored — bored with this babbling gaggle round her; and for all his faults — his moodiness and social ill grace and sexual demands, Owen Packer had never exactly bored her. And as her mind became more fuzzy with champagne, she remembered a remark he had once made about her set of friends: ‘I don’t think much of their small talk, but I don’t think much of their big talk either.’
Tonight the small talk had been pathetic, terrible. There had been a lot of chatter about the avalanche, but mostly about the inconvenience it had caused; then the ski talk — endless, boasting, competitive ski talk, broken occasionally by the mention of an engagement back in England, the suspected break-up of a marriage, an impending bankruptcy, parties given or about to be given in Dorset and Scotland and Knightsbridge and Mayfair and Marbella and Cannes. Then back to the avalanche.
But not one mention of His Serene Imperial Highness, the Ruler of the Emerald Throne of the Hama’anah, and what had happened to him.
She was now sitting upstairs in the Gothic gloom of the main hall of the Grand Hotel. The walls, with their pitch-pine panelling and dark drapes, kept starting to revolve round her. She held herself very straight at the end of a leather sofa, with a glass of Cointreau perched on her knee. At a comfortable distance sat her host, Mr Shiva Steiner.
> He was a broad, well-proportioned man with dove-grey hair, small shrewd eyes, and pronounced Semitic features — although DJ had made a point of claiming that he was not Jewish. He had apparently built his fortune in South Africa, before moving to London where he had cashed in on the Australian nickel boom in the sixties, and was today a powerful figure in the oil world. Above all, Mr Shiva Steiner was eminently relaxed. He had been talking in a cosmopolitan voice which Sarah found pleasant and reassuring, while not actually listening to what he was saying.
It was after three o’clock; apart from a tired-looking huissier, they were the only people left in the hall. From under the floor came the boom of the King Club, like an underground train.
Mr Shiva Steiner was saying, ‘In point of fact, I still have a couple of seats to fill on the plane. And, if you permit me to say so, you would be more than a mere passenger — you would be a positive adornment to our party.’
She smiled back at him, still only half taking in what he had said, and sipped her Cointreau.
Steiner went on, ‘And if you will forgive a slight immodesty, I assure you that my house is most comfortable. On one side lie the mountains, on the other the blue waters of the Gulf.’
She said sleepily, ‘But won’t things have changed? I mean, after today?’
‘Today?’ His eyebrows tilted. ‘What is so important about today?’
‘But the Ruler —?’ Sarah’s lips parted and she stared dumbly at him.
‘Yes — what about the Ruler?’
‘He’s dead — isn’t he?’ she replied, in a small flat voice.
‘Dead? My dear mademoiselle —’ he gave a light laugh — ‘I sincerely hope not! It is a most inconvenient hour for me to have to start telephoning my financial colleagues. But wherever did you get such an idea?’
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