The Isis Covenant (41 page)

Jamie had noticed the distinctive metal compartment beyond the stand holding the sunflowers, but he found it difficult to take his eyes off the canvas. His mind was a whirl of conflicting emotions: despondency at their failure, anger at the pointless deaths of the billionaire and his guards, fighting with the art lover’s joy of having a piece of pure genius more or less all to himself.
Snap out of it, Saintclair
. He shook his head to clear it.

‘It looks that way. Why don’t you see if you can put that racket off so we can hear ourselves think? I saw some sort of space-age sound system across in the corner that might be responsible.’

She opened her mouth to argue, but the look on his face changed her mind and she moved past him. He continued to stare at the painting and a few minutes later the music stopped abruptly.

‘It’s over then.’ Her voice sounded sharp-edged
and
loud in the silence. ‘We can’t just walk away.’

‘No.’ He was thinking that the boy was out there somewhere with the man responsible for all this. Responsible for how many deaths now? Why would he take the boy? Of course. The words came back to him.
You must spill the blood of a first born of good family beneath the first light of the sickle moon. Only then will the gateway to the next life open
.

He looked out of the window at the fading light. When was the new moon?

‘Oh Christ.’

‘What is it?’

‘The boy, how—’

A long drawn-out groan emerged from the woman draped over Oleg Samsonov.

‘She’s alive.’

XLIV

THEY TOOK IRINA
Samsonov between them and gently turned her over. One look was enough to tell them it was too late for the billionaire’s wife. Blood oozed slowly from the wound in her left breast and the shadow across her pale features could only mean one thing. But somewhere deep inside Irina’s indomitable Russian soul fought to keep her alive for another few moments. Her lips moved, but Jamie had to bend low over her to hear the words.

‘My son,’ she whispered. ‘He has taken Dimi.’

‘Who has taken him, Mrs Samsonov?’

‘Paul … Paul Dornberger.’ A tear rolled down her cheek. ‘We trusted him. My husband paid his father’s hospital bills.’ With her last breath she whispered the name of the private hospital.

‘How far?’ Danny demanded.

‘We don’t know for certain he’s gone there.’

‘Paul Dornberger has the Eye, he has the Crown and
he
has the boy, Jamie. It all adds up now. Where else is he going, unless it’s to be with his father?’

Jamie fought to fit the name of the hospital to an area. When it materialized he realized there was still hope. He started for the stairs. ‘Not far. It’s on the other side of the park. Let’s go.’

‘We can’t just call a cab.’

She followed him downstairs and along the corridor to the guards’ living quarters where he remembered he’d seen a board with car keys on it. His hand hovered over a set with the prancing horse of the house of Ferrari on it, but eventually he picked one from a mass of Mercedes keys. When he’d made his choice he laid the MP-5 on the work surface and replaced it with the pistol from the nearest guard’s shoulder holster, adding an extra magazine just in case. Common sense said the security men must have some sort of direct access to the garage area and they soon found the back stairs beyond another door from the kitchen. When they emerged into the underground garage they were faced with dozens of luxury cars all parked in rows and at least half of them were Mercs.

She glared at him. ‘Which one is it, Sherlock?’

For answer he pressed a button on the main key and a black limousine in the front row beeped and flashed its indicators.

‘That one, I’d say.’

When they were inside the car, he ran his hands over the controls. His knowledge of automatics was thin, but
someone
had told him they were easier than driving a manual. What could go wrong? He found out when he put the car into ‘Drive’ and his foot instinctively searched for the clutch, which turned out to be the brake. He heard Danny Fisher groan in frustration as they were hurled forward into their seat belts.

‘Maybe I should drive?’

He bit back a comment about what had happened the last time she’d been at the controls of something and drove directly at the garage door.

‘Er, shouldn’t we open it first?’

‘We’re billionaires. We don’t open things. They open for us.’

The door rose automatically and they drove out into the dull light of a November afternoon. The same happened at the main gates, which moved silently inwards as the big Mercedes S-Class approached. They drove onto Regent Park’s outer ring road and Jamie hesitated.

‘What’s the problem now?’

‘Right or left. Either way we’re eventually going to hit heavy traffic at this time of day.’

‘Go left. We’ll worry about it when we hit it.’

He obeyed and gunned the big six-litre Maybach engine. As the car leapt forward he tried to explain. ‘You don’t understand. It could take us thirty or forty minutes and Dornberger has at least a thirty-minute lead on us. Whatever he’s going to do he could have done it by the time we get there.’

‘Well, get us close enough and we’ll get out and run.’

‘Too far,’ he said. ‘We need to find a shortcut.’ They reached a junction where a paved walkway crossed the road and he put the big limousine into a screaming right turn.

‘For Christ’s sake, Jamie, you’ll kill somebody,’ Danny screamed as they roared into the wide open spaces of the park.

‘In this weather it can’t be too busy, and, with any luck, in this car they’ll think it’s Prince Andrew out for a drive.’ He swerved to miss a shocked dogwalker and the driver’s side wheels spun on the grass, but the Mercedes had some kind of stability control and they easily regained the tarmac. Belatedly, he switched on the hazard lights. ‘Better safe than sorry.’

Off to their left was an odd-shaped flying saucer of a building on a low mound surrounded by cricket pitches. Jamie drove on, honking the horn at anyone who happened to be in the way while Danny waved apologetically at startled pedestrians oblivious of the fact that she was invisible behind the smoked-glass armoured windows. It was only a matter of time before some kind of park ranger spotted them, but soon they joined a wider walkway which led off to the right between an avenue of skeletal, leafless trees and within a few seconds Jamie swerved onto a roadway in a narrow gap between two cars.

‘Not bad, Saintclair,’ Danny said appreciatively. ‘Where to now?’

‘All I know is that the hospital is close to the Royal College of Surgeons, which can’t be far from here. See if you can work the satnav.’

She fiddled with a screen on the dashboard. ‘It says here the Royal College of Surgeons is miles away.’

‘Not surgeons. Try physicians.’

‘That’s better. It’s a little way to our right, on Albany Road.’

‘All right, punch in the name of the hospital now. We’ll park at the college and walk the rest of the way.’

The hospital was on a side street in a residential area not far from Munster Square. They passed a greengrocer’s on the way and Jamie bought a basket of fruit tied up with a pink ribbon.

‘What if it’s not visiting time?’

‘It’s a private hospital,’ he pointed out unnecessarily. ‘Very civilized. It’s always visiting time.’

They walked through the front door and up to reception with the bustling air of regular visitors.

‘Max Dornberger’s room, please.’

The nurse behind the counter smiled. ‘If you could wait a second, please, we’re just changing shifts.’ A few seconds later she produced a chart and ran her finger down a list of names. ‘Third floor, room eight. Who did you say you were?’

‘We didn’t. This is Mr Dornberger’s niece from New York, I’m her partner.’

Before the nurse could say anything else, the lift door opened and they stepped briskly inside. Danny took the
pistol
from her bag and pushed it in among the apples and bananas until only the grip was visible. She pressed the button for the third floor and took a deep breath.

‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away, huh? Well, not for Paul Dornberger.’

Jamie cocked the pistol he had taken from the dead guard and folded his hands behind his back.

‘We take no chances unless he threatens the boy.’

She stared at him. ‘You know he’s going to kill him anyway, don’t you?’

‘I won’t be responsible for that child’s death, Danny.’

The bell announced their arrival. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.’

They emerged into a corridor with the odd-numbered rooms on the left and the evens on the right. Room eight was the fourth door on the side overlooking the square. They stood side by side in front of the door. Danny’s hand found the cool of the pistol grip and she held the basket in front of her like a shield. They could hear the soft murmur of voices inside.

Jamie reached for the door handle. ‘There’s no easy way to do this,’ he whispered. ‘If the boy is clear and Dornberger makes a move, shoot him.’ Danny nodded. He noticed that she was holding her breath. ‘Three, two, one …’

As they burst in the door side by side, Jamie began bringing the pistol round. Danny’s finger tightened on her trigger. The occupants of the room were grouped by the bed and they whirled round at the unexpected
intrusion
, their expressions a mixture of surprise and shock. Danny’s eyes vainly sought the child she knew should be here and she was a millimetre from firing when her brain screamed that the man by the bed was wearing a blue overall and the person lying on it was female.

‘What the hell is going on?’

Jamie slipped his hand behind his back and hoped the male nurse hadn’t seen the gun that had been about to blow his head off. ‘Er …’ His voice sounded as if it came from a long way off. ‘We were looking for Mr Dornberger’s room.’

The man frowned in annoyance. ‘This room has been re-allocated to Mrs Gibson. Max Dornberger was checked out this morning by his son. You should have been informed at the front desk.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Danny apologized breathlessly. ‘We wanted to surprise him.’

‘Surprise? I don’t know about Mrs Gibson, but I almost had a heart attack.’

They withdrew, still apologizing. The woman on the bed raised herself to one elbow. ‘You could always leave the fruit, dear? I’m partial to a bit of pineapple.’

Danny produced a wan smile. ‘I don’t think you’d like this one. It’s almost gone off.’

On the way out, Danny sweet-talked the receptionist into giving them the address where Dornberger’s
medicines
were to be sent, so that she could visit her English ‘uncle’ at home.

The address she gave them was a small country estate out beyond the M11 in rural Essex. Danny punched the postcode into the car’s satnav and a disjointed voice directed them north-east, through Holloway and Finsbury Park, up to Seven Sisters, where they turned due east.

‘Can’t you go any faster?’

‘Certainly,’ Jamie replied reasonably. ‘I could stick the cruise control at thirty or forty miles an hour over the speed limit, but you can be the one to explain things when some traffic cop finds the guns we have no right to carry and the fact that this motor car is stolen from a Russian billionaire who just happens to have been slaughtered along with seven other people. That should go well.’

They were a few miles beyond Chigwell, crossing neat rolling countryside under a thunderous, threatening sky, when the voice ordered Jamie to turn right onto a country road, then onto a narrow lane. They drove for a further mile before it petered out into a mud track at a point where a surprisingly modern gate barred the way to a remote house. The estate was surrounded by a brick wall high enough to inform passers-by that they weren’t welcome, but not to deter anyone determined to get across it. Jamie didn’t see any high-tech security, but the apparent lapse was offset by the ‘Beware of the Dogs’ sign on the gate.

‘You think it’s real?’

‘If this is the guy we think it is, I’m pretty sure you could bet on it.’

‘In that case, you wouldn’t happen to have any drugged meat on you?’

She gave him a thin smile and checked the magazine of the silenced pistol.

‘We could call the police.’ It was something they’d discussed earlier. Danny had called in the Samsonov killings, but she had been curiously reluctant to let them know about the location of the country house.

She shook her head. ‘First, we don’t know for certain he’s in there.’ She looked at the brooding clouds racing across the sky. ‘Dark soon. If you’re right about the significance of the new moon, I doubt we have time. We go in, get the boy and get out again.’

‘It might not be as easy as that.’

She shrugged. ‘You gotta start somewhere, Jamie. If we wait for your cops the chances are that Dmitri will be dead by the time they get here. I say we go, and we go now.’

There was no point arguing. By the time they were out of the car, the rain was slanting down and a distant flash of lightning lit the western skyline. Jamie pulled the thin jacket he was wearing closer around him, but Danny clicked the boot of the Mercedes and found a top-quality padded waterproof. Without a word, she threw it at him and he grinned acknowledgement.

‘Okay, but I’ll go in first. I’ve done this kind of stuff
before
. OTC and the Brecons, and all that. We don’t know what’s on the other side of this wall, so when we go over, we stay together and we protect each other’s backs. We follow the line of the drive towards the main house. Once we get there we’ll have a better idea of where we go next. All right so far?’

For answer she cocked the pistol and jogged towards the wall. Thick foliage barred the way and by the time they reached it they were soaked. Jamie ran his hands along the top of the wall, checking for glass or razor wire, but there was none. He hauled himself up by the arms and straightened out, belly down along the top, keeping the lowest possible profile, before allowing himself to drop on the other side. Danny followed his example and they hunkered down in the shadow of the wall to get their bearings. The driveway to the house was off to their right, to their left was an open patch that seemed to be some kind of neglected garden. In front of them, covering the direct route to the house, was an orchard of ancient gnarled apple trees whose roots were hidden beneath the rough knee-high grass that carpeted the entire area.