The Armageddon Protocol

THIRTEEN

Aleksi Karhu had watched the conversation between Harry, Lucia and the security guard with interest. Why had they come to the Prado? He knew it must have something to do with Reyes — maybe he had hidden what they sought so desperately here, in Spain’s most famous museum? If the old man’s heart hadn’t given out before he had finished interrogating him he would have been able to get this information first-hand and saved all of this trouble. But this was the best way now — allow this Englishman to work it out for him and follow him straight to the location of what the old man had stolen from them.

He made sure the puukko knife was out of sight by pushing it through his belt on the back of his trousers and walked casually to the entrance of the Prado. He took a cigarette out of his pocket and slid it onto his lower lip. Then he approached the door and pretended to be a little drunk. He tapped on the glass and waved at the guard.

“Get lost!” was the reply.

He tapped again and beckoned the guard over.

Miguel approached and spoke through the glass door. “Qué desea?”

“Sorry, no habla español.”

“What do you want?” he repeated in hesitant English.

“Just a light, that’s all,” Aleksi said in English. He took the cigarette from his mouth and waved it goofily in the air, dropped it, and when he picked it up swayed a little to indicate drunkenness. He wanted to put the guard off-guard, and it was working.

“Just wait,” the guard said, and unlocked the door, “I can give you a light, but then you go away or I call the police, okay?”

“Got it.”

Aleksi watched the guard move as he opened the heavy door. He was trained in assessing a potential enemy’s capability, and it took just a few seconds for him to work out that the guard was probably less than seventy kilos, and extremely unlikely to have any martial arts training. Plus he was young and had an air of innocence. That always made things easier.

The guard opened the door and stepped out into the night. Aleksi felt a rush of warm air from inside the museum rush over his face as the guard pulled a lighter from his pocket. Aleksi let things go this far because he wanted to know if the guard was right or left-handed.

There was a ten percent chance he would be a southpaw, but the odds were right again: the guard was right-handed. This could sometimes make a difference if his opponent just happened to know any moves, but in this case the guard knew nothing, and seconds later he was kicking out against Aleksi’s bear-like embrace around his neck in the doorway of the museum, his eyes bulging with terror and his face a rich purple with exploded blood vessels as he struggled against the much stronger man for his survival.

“Where is the security office?”

“Please!”

“Tell me where the office is — the office with the CCTV.”

“Please let me go!”

“Last chance.”

“On the ground floor — behind the main reception desk there’s a long corridor. It’s at the end.”

A moment later the guard was dead thanks to a violently broken neck. Aleksi dragged the dead guard inside and hid the body behind a large potted yucca plant in the corner of the entrance hall. He took his swipe card for the internal doors and made off into the museum on his way to the main security office.

A man in his line of work rarely saw such treasures as were to be found in a place like the Museo del Prado. All of this was a world away from his home village in northern Finland where he was raised by his mother after his father was killed in a hunting accident. That world was hard and unforgiving, and covered in snow and ice for at least half the year.

There, his father’s death had made him responsible for his mother and sister when he was just sixteen years old, and that is why he had joined the Finnish Army. His proclivity for hunting and killing quickly came to the attention of those training him and within two years he was transferred, upon request, to the Utti Jaeger Regiment, the Finnish Special Forces, where he excelled in long-range recon in Arctic environments and martial arts. But even that went wrong eventually, and only a year later he crossed an uncrossable line and was dishonorably discharged without a pension. That was where the old man stepped in.

All of that was a long time ago now, and the black and white landscape of the Lapland training ranges had been replaced with a bank of black and white CCTV images in the Prado which he now studied with care. In all, there were over a dozen monitors, all time and date stamped, each one relaying to the guards a rolling sequence of two or three images of various rooms and corridors around the enormous museum.

For a few moments they showed nothing but still images of empty galleries. There was a security guard on the ground floor of the Jerónimos Building where a temporary exhibit was installed, and another on the first floor of the Villanueva Building in the section housing the Spanish Paintings, but no sign of his prey. But then he saw them — two silent black figures walking briskly along a corridor on the ground floor of the main building, in the Italian Renaissance gallery.

He drew his puukko knife and stepped out of the security office. If they found what he was looking for they would both be dead in a matter of minutes.