Read The Martyr's Curse Online
Authors: Scott Mariani
They got the driver to stop eighty yards short of the place. ‘We might be a while here,’ Ben told him. ‘Maybe an hour, maybe more, maybe less. You sit tight.’
The driver had no problems with that. He had his radio, his cigarettes and a paper to read. Ben said nothing about the possibility of the quiet street erupting into a violent firefight sometime in the next few minutes. He could only hope the guy wouldn’t just scram at the first sign of trouble.
Ben lifted the green bag out of the back of the Mercedes while Silvie handled the holdall. They exchanged nods and started walking down the street. He looked at her. He could see the edginess in her step and in her face and knew her heart was thumping fast, but she was doing a fine job of containing it.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘For what?’
‘For being on my side.’
She smiled. ‘Just being a good little hostage.’
‘Best I’ve ever had,’ he said.
‘Then you’re still glad you didn’t have to shoot me?’
‘You don’t have to come in,’ he said. ‘Things could get hairy in there.’
‘That’s the whole point of having someone on your side, isn’t it?’ she said.
Ben took out a Gauloise and his Zippo, and lit up. The evening gloom was slowly beginning to fall, lights coming on one by one in the windows of the neighbouring houses. The street was empty. No traffic. Streicher’s safe house was sixty metres on, all in darkness. Which could have been as much of a strategic precaution as a sign that the place was empty. If they ventured much closer to the front entrance, they risked being easily spotted by anyone lurking behind those unlit windows.
‘What are your thoughts on how we do this?’ she asked.
‘We get as close as we can without being seen,’ Ben said. ‘Then we find a way in and kill everyone who tries to stop us. With any luck, then we get to Streicher. Then we kill him too.’
‘That simple,’ she said.
‘Probably not,’ he replied. ‘What are yours?’
‘I don’t know. Seems quiet,’ she said. ‘Aside from Breslin’s Nissan there’s usually at least one vehicle parked outside, more often two or three. One of the black Range Rovers we used to cross the border, or the white BMW with the dented right wing. That one’s Torben Roth’s. But I can’t see anything. Maybe they’re parked around the back.’
‘You can get around the back?’ Ben said.
She nodded, pointed to a gap between the buildings, forty yards down on the left. ‘Through that alleyway.’
‘That’s our way in,’ Ben said.
The bare-brick alley was one place the anti-graffiti death-squad patrols obviously hadn’t inspected. It was just wide enough for a single car to squeeze down, until it opened up into a distinctly un-Swiss no-man’s-land with tufted weeds, litter and building rubble and a row of big-wheeled garbage bins. A rickety fence ran along the back yards of the houses.
‘No vehicles,’ she observed.
‘Doesn’t make the place empty,’ Ben said. ‘Not with that many of them living there.’ He motioned to Silvie to dump the holdall. He dropped the green bag to the ground next to it and crouched down. Unzipped the holdall and lifted out the FAMAS rifle and Omar’s Kalashnikov AK-47. ‘Can you handle one of these?’ he asked her.
‘Like a violin,’ she said, taking the AK-47 from him. He watched her slim, small hands flit smoothly over the controls, extending the folding stock into place, dropping out the curved magazine to check it, snicking it cleanly back into the receiver, racking in a round, flicking on the safety.
‘You know how to sweep a house out?’
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Think I haven’t been on raid duty before?’ Her breathing was coming slightly faster as the pre-operational adrenalin kicked in. He tossed her one of the Glocks from the green bag, and she caught it and stuffed it into her jeans waistband, behind the right hip. Ben took one for himself, as a backup to supplement the Browning Hi-Power that was already nestling under his belt. Finally, he switched the part-used magazine of the FAMAS for a fully loaded one, clicked it firmly home with a slap of his palm and cocked the bolt. They were as tooled up as they could reasonably be. Four weapons, eighty-six rounds of ammunition between them.
He flicked away his cigarette stub. ‘Last chance to change your mind.’
‘Get fucked,’ she said, and grinned at him.
They broke in through the back door. Ben felt the flimsy lock give under the pressure of his shoulder. He stood back with the rifle shouldered, safety off, and counted
one – two – three
. No alarm or sudden yelling voices from inside. No twelve-gauge shotgun blast from the hallway. Nothing. He kicked the door open wider and marched into the murky hallway with Silvie one step behind.
It was one of those townhouses that are narrow from side to side, but deceptively deep and tall, on three floors with a converted attic at the top. They swept through the ground floor first, turning on lights as they went, covering each other at every entrance. Back hall, living room, dining room, kitchen, utility room, front hall, a downstairs shower room with cracked tiling and a dripping tap. The place felt cold and empty. There was no smell of cooking in the kitchen, no crockery or cutlery lying about, no lingering coffee aroma in the air, none of the subtle effects of human presence that Ben’s sharp instincts had been trained to detect. But those same instincts told him never to trust an empty house until he’d covered every square inch.
He led the way up the stairs, rifle at his shoulder, finger on the trigger, senses fully alert. There were no guns poking into the stairwell. At the head of the stairs, he motioned to Silvie to go left, while he went right. Doorway to doorway, moving silently, nudging open the door to one empty first-floor room after another. Nobody in any of them. Beds had been stripped. Wardrobes and shelves laid bare. The place was cheaply and minimally furnished, as if most of the stuff had been picked up in second-hand or junk shops. Streicher might be a wealthy man, but he obviously didn’t believe in luxurious accommodation for his faithful cohorts.
The first floor was clear. Five minutes later, the second floor proved to be too. Three more bedrooms, spaced out around a galleried landing. Ben moved fast from one empty room to the next.
The second was a bedroom that had been adapted into a recreation room, furnished with two mismatched sofas and a pine table in one corner surrounded by plain wooden chairs. There was a well-thumbed back issue of
American Rifleman
lying on the table, next to the half-eaten remains of a takeaway meal for two that had been consumed straight out of its packaging.
Ben walked over to the table. Four silvery aluminium trays, two more or less scraped empty and two still three-quarters uneaten. In one of those, the leftover noodles were slowly drying and going hard and crusty. The other was full of some kind of dark, congealing sauce with bits of what was presumably meat inside. He picked up the foil container, lifted it to his nose and sniffed. Smelled like chicken in oyster sauce. Or maybe alley cat in macerated fish paste. He dipped a finger and dabbed it against his tongue. It was virtually uneatable, but not because it had been sitting there rotting for days. Ben’s guess was that it had been pretty uneatable to start with, and only about twenty-four hours old. When you spent some time in the British Army, you got to be a decent judge of things like that.
The white paper bag the food had come in was lying rumpled on the table. Ben straightened it out and saw the name of the takeaway, with an address printed on one side.
The house sweep was almost done. Ben left Silvie to check the last bedroom while he trotted up the final staircase to the attic space at the top of the house. He knew it would be empty before he got there. Turned on the light and looked around him. It had been converted into its own self-contained flat, with a single bedroom and a kitchenette and living space combined. No sign of habitation, not within the last few days.
‘They’re gone,’ Silvie said from the stairs. ‘Shit.’
‘They must have been alerted when you and Breslin never returned,’ Ben said, walking down to join her. He let the rifle hang loosely in his hands, the safety back on now that the danger was past.
‘Then that’s it,’ she said. ‘We’re nowhere again.’
‘Which room was yours?’ Ben asked.
‘The small one on the second floor. Breslin was next door.’
‘Who used the upstairs flat?’
‘Streicher and his girlfriend, when they were around. Never longer than a single night at a time.’
‘What about the rec room?’
‘It was a spare they used as a spillover living room when we had a full house,’ she said. ‘Or when Streicher was using the lounge downstairs for one of his private conferences with the inner circle. Torben Roth, Holger Grubitz and some of the other guys tended to use it as a drinking and chow den.’
‘Chinese?’
‘Pizza,’ she said. ‘There’s a takeaway joint just up the street where they’d go for a quick run out.’
‘Is it an okay kind of place?’ he asked.
‘I’ve had worse. Don’t tell me you’re hungry again.’
‘Not exactly. Let me show you something.’ Ben led her back into the rec room.
‘Yuck,’ she said, pulling a face at the sight and smell of the half-finished food. ‘You’d have to be desperate.’
‘Super Delight,’ Ben said, pointing at the paper bag.
‘Who are they trying to kid, with a name like that?’
‘It didn’t come from this neighbourhood,’ Ben said. ‘The address is in Ouchy, wherever that is. The cab driver will know, if he hasn’t buggered off already.’
‘It’s a district of the city,’ she said. ‘An old port, a few kilometres to the south of here.’
He looked at her. ‘I thought you said you didn’t know the area.’
‘History nerd, remember? October, nineteen-twelve. Signing of the First Treaty of Lausanne in Ouchy, between Italy and the Ottoman Empire, spelling the end of the Italo-Turkish War.’ She smiled sheepishly. ‘What a team, huh?’
‘Nobody drives several kilometres for slush like Super Delight dishes out,’ he said. ‘Not when they’ve got a reasonably decent pizza joint close by. Which makes me think I’m right.’
‘Right about what?’
‘Where did they all go in such a hurry?’ he said. ‘My guess is they used a couple of cars to ferry everyone out, plus all their stuff. Maybe took them two or three trips. Which would suggest they didn’t drive that far. The two guys driving could have picked up the food locally on their way back, for a quick snack before heading off. Except one of them didn’t appear too keen on it. Maybe a sign of good taste.’
‘Another safe house?’
‘You said yourself, Streicher’s rich enough to have properties all over the place.’
‘Ouchy,’ she said. ‘It’s worth a try.’
‘It’s all we’ve got,’ he said.
The taxi driver turned out to be still there waiting for them, slouched in his seat and half asleep behind his paper. He jerked upright when he saw his fares walking back towards the car, cranked up the engine and turned on the lights. Ben put their gear in the boot, got in the back with Silvie and tossed the crumpled paper bag into the driver’s lap.
‘You want Chinese food?’ the guy said. ‘I know a better place than that.’
‘It’s Super Delight in Ouchy, or nothing,’ Ben said. ‘Let’s go.’ He leaned back and closed his eyes. Didn’t open them again until twenty minutes later, when he felt the Mercedes slow and pull in at the kerb.
‘Here it is,’ the driver said. Super Delight was situated halfway down a residential street of terraced houses, all lit up and clearly doing a reasonable trade that evening. Ben shook his head and wondered what the world was coming to. ‘Keep going to the end of the street,’ he told the driver. ‘Nice and easy.’
Ben looked out of the left-side window and Silvie out of the right as the Mercedes rolled slowly down the street. Both kerbs were lined with parked cars. Neither a white BMW with a dented wing nor a black Range Rover was among them. They reached the end of the street and came to a three-way junction. The driver said, ‘Now what?’
If in doubt, bear dead ahead
. ‘Straight on,’ Ben said.
The next street looked just the same as the last. The house they were looking for could have been any single one of them, left or right. No white BMW. No black Range Rover.
‘Damn it,’ Silvie muttered. ‘This isn’t going to work.’
‘Now what?’ the driver said impatiently as they reached another three-way junction. Left, right, or dead ahead.
‘Left,’ Ben said.
‘You sure about that?’
Ben said nothing. He wasn’t sure at all. He was getting that hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach and a bitterness in his mouth that wasn’t just the aftertaste of stale alley cat in fish sauce. The taste of failure.
The taxi took a left at the junction. Its headlights gleamed in the windows of the terraced houses and shone back at them in the reflectors of the vehicles parked nose to tail on both sides of the narrow street. They rolled onwards at a steady speed, the clattering sound of the Mercedes’ diesel engine reverberating back at them off the houses. Some of the windows had their curtains drawn, the glow of TV screens flickering through the gaps. Others didn’t and Ben saw people moving about inside their homes or sitting in their living rooms, settling down for the evening. In one house a party was going on, music blaring out into the street.
No white BMW. No black Range Rover. No safe house.
This wasn’t going to work.
Then Silvie spoke up urgently and pointed, her finger jabbing the inside of the taxi’s rear window. ‘There.’
Ben followed the line of her finger and saw what she’d seen. Parked in the tight line of vehicles on the right side of the street.
A white 3-series BMW with a dented wing.
The house it was parked in front of had lights in one curtained downstairs window and one first-floor window. Someone was at home.
‘Pull in fifty metres ahead,’ Ben told the driver.
‘No spaces,’ the guy protested.
‘Then double-park, genius.’
The driver resentfully double-parked fifty metres ahead. Ben and Silvie exchanged nods. ‘Ready?’ he said.