Christopher Brookmyre (51 page)

She withdrew on swift feet but waited for the return volley to cover her intentions. When it came, after a long few seconds, she levelled both guns at one of the windows and tore it away in a million twinkling jewels, the sound of the helicopter becoming immediately louder.

'
For Christ's sake, hurry. Rebekah's waiting and the entire hotel security staffs
on its way up there.
'

Jane stepped through the gap and found herself only three feet from the edge. She tried not to look down, but she had come out on one of the inlandlooking sides, where the play of street lights and the glow of distant buildings conveyed an unavoidable sense of altitude. She looked to her right, saw the access stairs about twenty yards away, only a low balustrade, barely waisthigh, hemming her in from the drop. There was no further gunfire from inside. Bad sign. They were on the move. She got her head down, focused her gaze on where she was putting her feet and concentrated on putting one rapidly but carefully in front of the other.

The access stair was more like a ladder, just an inclining column of steel steps. Jane was almost at the top of it when Bett warned her that Dirlos's accomplice was about to step out on to the ledge. She turned around and loosed off three shots as he emerged through the aluminium frame. He was spun by the impact, his feet slipping on the treacherous carpet of glistening shards, before he tumbled over the low barrier, his falling cry swallowed by the sound of the chopper.

Jane hauled herself over the edge and on to the roof. Air Bett was ahead, the cockpit door beckoningly open. She saw Rebekah looking anxiously towards her, both hands on the controls.

Jane noticed the wheels drag as she ran towards the helicopter, its weight not quite borne by them as the blades strained impatiently to lift the craft away. It lurched a couple of feet as she reached to climb in, causing her to take a step back. Then she turned and looked behind, figuring that this close to the noise, she might not hear Bett's warning if Dirlos was on his way up the ladder. Facing forwards again, she threw herself at the gap and clambered aboard.

'And she's outta there!' Lex exclaimed with delighted relief. However, when she looked to Bett for his reaction she found him still concentrating on the monitors.

'Not yet,' he stated gravely.

They watched Dirlos open a black case, one of a pile lying on the floor of the suite, and pull a long black tube from within. He removed another object from the container - cylindrical but tapered at one end - and placed it inside the first.

'Oh, fuck,' was Lex's revised opinion.

Bett's voice screeched from the cockpit radio.

'
Dirlos is on his way to the roof with a Sam. Acknowledge: Incoming Sam.
'

'Incoming Sam, acknowledged,' Rebekah replied, lifting the chopper away from the concrete.

'What's a Sam?' Jane asked.

'Surface-to-air missile.'

'Jesus Christ. Get us out of here.'

'I can't.'

'You
what
?'

'We can't get out of range. We fly off right now, we're an easy target.'

'So what the hell are we going to do?'

Jane felt her stomach lurch as the chopper swung around, barely moving in space but turning to face the access stairs she'd ascended. She looked at the automatic she'd taken from Denis. It would be more effective than the PPK

from that range but she couldn't remember how many rounds she'd fired and she wasn't feeling lucky. Nor could she remember how many she'd fired from the Walther, but at least she did have spare ammunition for that. She pulled her last spare clip from her calf, ejected the current mag and reloaded.

'I'm getting out,' she announced. 'Put us down. I'll wait until he sticks his head up and blow the fucking thing off.'

'Go for it,' Rebekah hailed, gently lowering the aircraft. Jane reached for the doorhandle, estimating ten feet from touchdown, but as she looked out through the side window, she saw Dirlos dead ahead, already emerging from a different access stair on the coastal side of the building.

'Oh shit, we're too late,' she shouted. 'What do we do?'

Rebekah looked too. Dirlos was getting to his feet, picking up the missilelauncher and hefting it to his right shoulder.

'Turn on the wipers,' Rebekah growled, hauling at the joystick. The helicopter banked sharply and suddenly, swinging at speed towards Dirlos as though on a pendulum. There was a disturbingly minor variation in the hum of the rotor and a feather-light sensation of impact, a fraction of a second before the windows were sprayed with red.

Rebekah picked up altitude and velocity, taking them out to sea and out of sight, though not before turning on the wipers.

A Basque tale (old as time?)

Rebekah flew them out low over the blackness of the Mediterranean to disguise their direction, before banking to follow the coastline for a few miles and finally heading back inland. The journey took ten, maybe fifteen minutes, but Jane was barely aware of it. She was still back in that suite, back on those steel steps, back on that rooftop. She was aware of her pulse only now in the aftermath, the same as often happened at the gym, the thumping syncopation only noticeable now that what caused it had ceased. There was something else coursing inside her too, an energy that made her feel tiny pinpricks over every inch of skin, tingling in her fingers, lifting hairs from her scalp. It was like a heightened state of being, not something you came down from easily. No drink and no drug was going to let her sleep tonight, she was sure. When they landed back at Maison Rla an Tir, Rebekah had to give her a nudge to bring her personally back to earth. She didn't know how long she might have sat oblivious in the cockpit otherwise, disconnected from her immediate surroundings. As she hopped down on to the grass, the sight of her reception committee reconnected her fast. Bett was standing waiting on the gravel, arms folded, wearing an expression that might be familiar to anyone who ever worked monitoring dials at Sellafield or Dounreay. Alexis stood close by him, offering Jane a look that implied her attendance was an act of solidarity. Rebekah was still busy in the cockpit, flicking switches and ticking boxes on a chart. It was no doubt an important procedure, but Jane couldn't help wondering whether she was merely hiding out until this confrontation was over. Jane stood her ground, facing off wordlessly with Bett for a few seconds.

'I'm fine, I'm doing all right, thanks for asking,' she eventually said, underlining that he hadn't.

'More by luck than judgement,' he countered. 'I told you directly not to--'

'I got the name. I think that says my judgement wasn't too far off.'

'You abandoned all protocols, all safeguards. You took enormous risks that could have seen the entire mission--'

'I had one chance and I took it,' she insisted, controlling the volume in her voice but powerless to repress the indignation. 'Risk/benefit, remember? I 293

was the one who was there. It was my call, my risk.'

'You disobeyed direct orders, repeatedly. I told you--'

'And I told you, I'm not one of your subordinates. I don't take orders from you, Mr Bett.'

Rebekah finally emerged from the cockpit and stood a few yards off, she and Alexis uncomfortable but compelled observers.

'When you're in the field, yes, you do take fucking orders from me, because the moment you set foot inside that hotel, you did it as part of a team. In the field, you respect the chain of command, because when you don't, nobody knows where the hell they stand. When you went off the reservation tonight, it wasn't your risk to take, because what you did could have got you
and
Rebekah killed.'

Jane looked to Rebekah, who was biting her lip apologetically, like she was sorry to have been used as the trump card in Bett's argument. But if Jane had to lose, she decided she wasn't going to do it with grace.

'Don't forget about your expensive helicopter,' she said. 'You could have lost that too, another of your possessions. And that really
would
have been a tragedy.'

'Jesus Christ, do you honestly think . . . '

Bett let his words falter and looked from Jane to Rebekah, then lastly, perhaps longest, to Alexis, these three women ringed around him beneath the night. The rage seemed to fall from his face like a retreating wave, revealing a sadness beneath it. Jane thought she noticed him nod to himself, the smallest of movements but the involuntary outward signal of some resolution within.

He turned and walked away, saying no more.

Rebekah allowed him a respectful distance and then headed for the house also. 'I seriously need a drink right now,' she announced. Alexis stayed where she was, turning to watch Rebekah leaving as though to underline the fact that she wasn't. When she turned back, her expression was troubled, indicating 'we need to talk' but clearly not looking forward to it.

'You okay? Really?' she asked quietly.

Jane nodded. 'I'm okay, my head's clear. I don't think it's ever been so clear, in fact. If there's any personal demons going to haunt me about what I did tonight, then they're in a holding pattern right now. I should probably apologise to Rebekah, though. Old grumblebaws is right about that. Always right and never satisfied with what you do. You must love working for him.'

Alexis looked away towards the house for a moment, that strained expression still tugging at her features when she returned her gaze to Jane.

'He's not right, not tonight,' she said. 'You did great in there. Your judgement calls were bang-on and they were your calls to make because you were the one on the spot. You made the plays and you got the name. More than the name: you got the Marledoq insider too. You can say thanks to Rebekah for getting both your asses out of there, but you've nothing to apologise to her for.'

Alexis's voice became quieter, as though to stress a humble meekness to her subsequent suggestion. 'But maybe,' she said, 'if your head's as clear as you say, you might find a conciliatory word to offer Bett.'

'Bett? Why?'

'Well, if it wasn't that I considered it such an improbable concept, I'd be tempted to say I think you just hurt his feelings.'

Jane pictured his face, that look around at the three women, the anger subsiding, the nod of . . . what?

'You're not telling me a guy like that's going to take a piece of petulant nonsense to heart.'

'I think it was the sender, more than the message.'

'What does he care what I think? He doesn't even trust me. He was telling me to bail out before I'd even left the bar tonight.'

'You're new to this. He was trying to protect you.'

'Ach, rubbish. You know fine that Bett uses people without concerning himself about what he's getting them into. He was worried I'd blow the mission by getting into something I couldn't handle.'

Alexis nodded. 'Okay, that was bullshit,' she conceded. 'He wasn't trying to protect you, but not because he doesn't care and not because he doesn't trust you. He does trust you: he had no doubts that you knew what you were doing or about how far you were prepared to go. That was the problem. He was protecting himself: he was the one who couldn't handle it.'

'Handle what?'

'What he might have been forced to watch.'

'Oh, don't be daft. I can't see Bett getting suddenly squeamish about being the voyeur when--'

'I was with Bett in the operations room,' Alexis said. 'And believe me, when you kissed Parrier . . . ' She left the sentence unfinished, a memory tapering off into the half-light.

Jane sighed. 'I should have a wee word,' she said.

'Better leave it a while. He'll be off sulking in the forbidden zone.'

'I killed people tonight, Alexis. The word "forbidden" doesn't mean a hell of a lot to me right now.'

Jane marched up the stairs, intent on taking the proscribed left turn, and feeling more defiant than she was conciliatory. It seemed absurd that this man could be so commanding, to the point of tyrannous, and yet run off to feel sorry for himself because he didn't like something that was said. Quite simply, she wasn't having it. If he had issues with her, he should be big and scary enough to have them out.

She walked along the corridor, her footfalls not cushioned like the last time, but echoing off the tiles and plaster, intended to draw him forth and to hell with his self-important ire. All of the doors remained closed. When she stopped walking, stilled the clatter of her steps, she heard no sound from behind any of them, though light was visible from beneath two. It reminded her of Ross in his teens. When he was in cream-puff mode, he tended to brood in self-indulgently contemplative silence. Michelle opted more often for slamming doors and cranking up the record player.

The thought made Jane that bit less defiant about the prospect of barging in, remembering how counterproductive any confrontational action tended to be. With a light touch learned from calming a thousand tantrums, she delicately twisted the nearest doorhandle and slowly inched it forward. Provoking no response, she pushed it open just wide enough to pass, and stepped inside. She found herself in a room lined with bookshelves, hundreds of volumes filed along two sides, tall three-paned windows dominating the outer wall. She wasn't sure what she'd been expecting; perhaps something as gloomy and austere as the corridor. Instead she saw a place of solitude and reflection, somewhere she could imagine sitting on a rainy afternoon, losing herself in infinite lives. But she had need of escape to a more exciting life when she picked up a book; who would want to escape from Bett's? Did he read tales of being a housewife, complete with Tom Clancy-style technical details of the latest state-of-the-art vacuuming hardware?

She ran her eyes along the spines, found many of them to be in French. There were English ones too, the mix of titles so eclectic as to defy any attempt to draw even a shallow impression of taste. It was a collection testifying only to decades of a life.

In the corner, beneath one window, there was a cabinet, three sides glass, standing a little less than waist height. It drew her eye but she caught only a glimpse of its contents before forcing herself to look away. She saw a toy car, grey metal, missing one front tyre; a model aeroplane, perhaps a Spitfire or a Hurricane, green on one side but scorched on the other as though it had come through a real dogfight; and a dog-eared paperback copy of
Kidnapped
. It was tempting to examine them closer, but Jane felt reluctant to look again, like it was some kind of sin, much worse than reading someone else's diary. They were remnants of a childhood, frozen in time behind glass, preserved but untouchable.