The Alchemist

55

Ben didn’t take his eyes off Usberti’s as he pressed the button and heard the fast bleeps of the speed-dial sequence.

Six remote receivers scattered around the Gladius Domini building responded instantly to the phone signal. They were wired to six miniature Instantaneous Electrical Detonators, which in turn electronically activated their six fist-sized packages of PBX plastic-bonded explosive.

Less than half a second later, the massive combined blast rocked the building. Masonry ruptured into pieces, walls burst outwards. Fire tore through the underground car park, turning every vehicle into an incendiary device in its own right. The plush reception area was ripped to pieces as a huge fireball unfolded itself and poured down corridors like a sea of blazing liquid. Men staggered screaming, ablaze. On the first floor, every window exploded in a lethal burst of flying shards as the blast destroyed the laboratory, hammering science equipment and computers into scattered debris.

Upstairs in his office, Usberti was transfixed with terror as the floor under their feet lurched with the deafening explosion. The shockwave knocked the air out of the room. Ben was up on his feet and rushing at the panicked Italian. But then the guards burst into the room from the smoky corridor, waving their machine pistols. Ben grabbed one of the tubular steel chairs and killed the nearest one with a thrust that drove a leg through his soft palate and into his brain. His Skorpion clattered to the floor. A burst of fire from the second guard shattered the glass top of Usberti’s desk. Ben rolled and threw out his arm for the fallen machine pistol. He fired, slashing 9mm holes across the wall and the guard’s body. The man crumpled, his face contorted.

Usberti was gone. Behind a curtain, a glass fire door was still swinging. Heavy footsteps rattled down the steel fire escape outside.

Ben tore himself away. Roberta was what mattered. He ran out into the corridor and headed for the lift, punching a second number into the phone as he went. As the lift glided downwards to the basement he jumped up and hooked his hands around the steel frame of the hatch in the middle of the ceiling. He hung there for a moment, then flipped up the hatch cover. The small kit-bag he’d left was still there. He dropped down to the floor, opening the bag as the lift juddered to a halt. He stepped out and pressed the call button on the phone. At the other end of the building a smaller charge of PBX took out the main fuse. The whole building blacked out.

Ben took the Browning out of the bag, cocked it and switched on the underbarrel LED torch. He headed for the cellar, sweeping the light this way and that in the darkened corridors.

It had all happened exactly as Ben Hope had said it would. The simultaneous explosions had been over in an instant. Suddenly they heard a smaller blast, no more than a muffled thump, and the building went dark. Only the orange flicker of flames could be seen from the ground below.

At Simon’s signal the police tactical units emerged from the cover of the wooded grounds and stormed the building. In their black entry vests, hoods and goggles the armed units swarmed through the chaos. A few scattered men fired blindly at them in their panic. The police shooters were much faster, much cooler and much more accurate. They only shot the ones who were an immediate threat. Those who tried to run or threw down their weapons were quickly trussed up on the floor with their wrists and ankles bound together and MP-5 machine carbines pointing at the backs of their heads. Down in the science lab, technicians crawling dazed, blackened and bleeding among the smoky wreckage were jerked to their feet and marched out at gunpoint. In less than five minutes the police had secured the whole place.

Usberti thought his heart was going to give out. Explosions rattled the building and he could hear yelling and the crackle of small-arms fire from inside as he ran around the side of the wall. His chest heaving, breath rasping, he staggered into the grounds. He leaned against a tree, bent double with wheezing, trembling with shock and rage.

Ben Hope had pulled the rug out from under him. For all his appreciation of the man’s skills, and for all his own cunning, he’d managed to underestimate him disastrously. He still couldn’t understand what the hell had just happened.

‘You there,’ said a voice. ‘Put your hands behind your head.’ Usberti rolled his eyes up to see two men in black uniforms standing a few metres away in the darkness pointing guns at him. A radio fizzed. Slowly, he moved away from the tree and lifted his arms. To be caught, like this…

One of the men reached back to his belt for a set of cuffs.

But then the two officers were lifted off their feet like straw men. They flew into one another and their heads smashed together with a dull, meaty crunch. They dropped to the ground without a noise.

Usberti’s face split into a wide grin of relief as he recognized the tall figure standing over the slumped bodies. ‘Franco! Thank the Lord!’

Bozza drew out his knife and quickly, efficiently, cut the throats of the two men. He picked up one of their radios and a fallen MP-5. With a glance over his shoulder he calmly took his archbishop by the arm and guided him through the trees into darkness.

It was a half a kilometre across the woods to the road. Bozza helped Usberti down the leafy bank to the tarmac. He saw the approaching lights of a car in the distance. Letting go of Usberti’s arm, Bozza stepped out and stood in the middle of the road, bathed in the headlights as the car came closer. As it came near, he pointed the MP-5 at the windscreen. The car squealed to a halt diagonally across the road.

There was a young couple inside. Bozza ripped open the driver’s door and dragged the man out by the hair. He sent him sprawling across to the edge of the road and casually fired a fully automatic burst into his chest. The man crumpled bloodily into the leaves.

Inside the car, the girl was screaming hysterically. Bozza pulled her bodily out through the open window, looked coldly into her face and snapped her neck in a single twisting movement. The Inquisitor dragged their bodies into the ditch and covered them with pieces of shrubbery.

‘Good work, Franco,’ Usberti said. ‘Take me away from here.’

Bozza helped him into the back seat and then they were gone, heading for the airfield.

The last item Ben had packed in his kit-bag earlier that day was a small armour-piercing shape charge. He pressed the connected blobs of plastic explosive against the steel cellar door, stuck in the two electrodes and quickly retreated back down the corridor before thumbing the button on the phone. The percussive detonation ripped the air, and when the smoke cleared the door looked as though a giant mouth had taken a perfectly oval bite out of it. The edges around the hole glowed faintly red. Ben stepped through into the smoky cellar, gun first.

The one cellar guard must have been standing near the door when the charge went off. Ben shone the pistol light on him. He was on his back, blood running from his ears and nostrils. A triangular shard of steel protruded eight inches from his chest. Ben grabbed the ring of keys from his belt and ran down the cellar steps into the huge smoky room. He called her name.

‘Ben!’ Roberta shouted, recognizing his voice through the high ringing in her ears that the sharp explosion had set off. ‘There’s a boy over there.’ She pointed to the next cell along. Ben flashed the light and saw Marc’s drugged, slumped figure. He opened both cage doors. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ he said quietly, gently avoiding her embrace. He stooped and lifted the stirring boy over his shoulder.

The puzzled officers found Marc Dubois lying in the back of one of the police cars ten minutes later. ‘Where the hell did he come from?’ asked one. ‘Beats me,’ said his companion. It was a while before it dawned on them that he was the kid on the Missing Person posters.

Simon watched, deeply satisfied, as his men brought more than thirty coughing, spluttering, smoke-blackened personnel out of the shattered building. Six bodies had been recovered so far, and enough weapons and ammunition to lay serious criminal and terrorism charges against the whole organization.

Speed, Aggression, Surprise. He’d heard that that was the unofficial motto of a certain British Army regiment. He grinned and shook his head.