The Armageddon Protocol

THIRTY-SIX

Harry searched the room for a weapon but aside from Szabo’s caviar tins there was nothing he could use to fend off the fury of a full-scale Uzi attack. He took a step forward and put himself between the gun and Lucia, Zoey, Niko and the wounded Frenchman.

“Just think about what you’re about to do,” he said as he locked onto the Swedish woman’s blue eyes.

“I know exactly what I’m doing,” she said as she swung the door full open. “I’m releasing you, so you’d better hurry up and get out of there before you freeze to death.”

Harry and the others exchanged a confused glance. “You’re releasing us?”

She nodded.

Zoey narrowed her eyes. “If this is some kind of insane trick to extend your pleasure in killing us, you’re one sick freak.”

“Here,” she said, handing Harry the Uzi. “This should prove I’m serious.”

Harry took the Uzi with a frown. “Who are you?”

“My real name is Maja Eklund, and I’m a former Swedish National Task Force officer from Gothenburg.”

“Who are they?” Zoey asked.

Harry said, “They’re a special operations unit who operate inside the Swedish police’s National Operations Department.” As he spoke, he took off his jacket and wrapped it around Lucia.

“I’m impressed,” Maja said.

Zoey was harder to convince. “One false move out of you, Abba, and I’ll beat you like a rented donkey.”

Maja didn’t break eye contact with her. “That, I would like to see.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“But why are you here?” Baupin said, moving into the gap between Zoey and Maja.

“Zalan Szabo has been monitored by agencies within the Swedish Government ever since he set up his laboratory in Södermanland.”

“Yes, I remember what Andrej said about that,” Harry said. “He said he and Pablo had been working somewhere in Sweden.”

Maja nodded. “Yes, in Kolmården Forest. The laboratory they used was a relic from the Cold War — an old biological weapons testing center in the middle of nowhere. Naturally he had paid off the relevant authorities but there are many factions in the government. Someone didn’t like what was happening and decided to order a surveillance package on the Södermanland site.”

“And that’s where you come in?”

“Jag, that is where I come in — but we cannot stand around here talking about the past. All of that we can talk about later. For now, we have to stop Szabo and his men.”

“I’ll buy that for a dollar,” Zoey said.

Harry and the others pounded up the basement steps and made their way back into the ground floor of the hotel. They ran to a nearby window only to see Szabo’s Bentley skidding out of the compound and disappearing into the Chamonix night.

“Damn it all!” he cursed, and slammed his fist into the wall beside the window. “They’ve got away.”

“Have you any idea where they’re going, Maja?” Baupin said.

“Not at all. He trusted me as a bodyguard but no more. Only Steiner was brought into those conversations, and even then only on a need to know basis.”

“Hang on,” Harry said. “We know that he wants to wipe out cities where the population is very dense, so London is the obvious choice in Europe anyway — that or Paris maybe.”

“That’s not enough to go on,” Baupin said, turning to Maja. “Is there any other way?”

Maja nodded. “Yes, György Tóth. He’s Szabo’s chief financial officer and the man behind the money laundering. He also has many contacts in intel agencies and Szabo uses him to run ID checks on prospective staff. He’s in the penthouse now and he’s not due to fly out until midnight.”

“Hell… how are we going to get information out of an accountant?” Baupin said, glancing at Harry and winking.

“Let’s go!”

The ‘wellness retreat’ was not exactly humming with guests, so they made their way silently to the staff elevator and took it to the penthouse. Maja opened the door with her key and they found György Tóth warming his toes in front of Szabo’s plush fireplace. He had a glass of cognac in one hand and was waving his other hand in time to Bartók’s third piano concerto. Beside him was a large bowl of fruit and several magazines. All very cosy. He was in his fifties, thin and with a thick shock of silver hair, and Harry recognised him as the man he had seen lurking in the other room when Aleksi Karhu had closed the door.

Baupin moved forward and grabbed him, causing him to cry out for help and try and wriggle free. Harry tore down a pull cord from the crushed velvet curtains at the far end of the room and then padded casually back over to the Hungarian accountant under the strict gaze of Lucia, Zoey and Niko.

Above the mantelpiece was a painting of a terrifying being emerging from a raging fire. It was not exactly the sort of comforting image most people enjoyed having in their living spaces. The picture was entitled simple Ördög.

“That’s awful,” Lucia said.

“Ördög…” Niko said. “I’ve seen that word before somewhere.”

“It’s the old Hungarian god of the underworld,” the sweaty accountant said, trying to connect with the gang of people now standing around him.

It took Harry an unsettlingly short amount of time to tie the man into the chair and then he dusted his hands off and crouched down so they were eye-level. Then he said, “Hello, György. You might not know it yet, but you’re here to help us,” he said, gently pushing a poker into the glowing coals. “You see, my associates and I seem to have run out of ideas and we can’t for the life of us work out where we need to go to stop your psychotic employer from committing the worst genocide in history.”

“I know nothing.”

“That’s not true, is it?” Harry said, turning the poker iron around a few degrees to ensure it was evenly heated. “You know, for example, what will happen when this red-hot fire iron gets pushed into your face. Am I right?”

Tóth’s eyes widened as he watched the former English spy crouch down and carefully extract the poker from the roaring fire and study its glowing tip. Behind his back, Lucia and Zoey exchanged an uncertain glance, but Maja showed no emotion.

“I’ll ask you one more time,” Harry continued. “Where is Szabo’s target city?”

Tóth stared in horror as Harry brought the poker up to his face. It was so close now he could already feel the heat radiating from the searing iron. “It’s London,” he said, his voice now dry with fear and cracking up at the edges. “London!”

“London,” Harry repeated. “Good. Now… where is the launch site?”

Tóth licked his lips in fear and kept his eyes locked on the red-hot poker as Harry casually swung it back and forth in front of his face. “I have no idea.”

“Now, now…” Harry said. “And we were doing so well, too.”

“I swear it!”

Harry pushed the tip of the poker into the bowl of fruit on the table beside Tóth and grimaced as the red-hot tip effortlessly burned and sizzled its way through the thick green rind of the centrepiece — a large watermelon.

Tóth jumped with fear in his chair but Baupin pushed down on his shoulders and kept him in place. “I suggest you tell the man what he wants to know,” the Frenchman said. “Or you won’t need a pack of cards to have a poker face, if you understand what I mean.”

Tóth understood, but was fighting hard to control his fear in front of his captors. Harry guessed that the sort of punishment Szabo meted out to traitors would outweigh a hot poker in the face, but the difficulty was one of priorities.

“You have no idea how powerful Mr Szabo is.”

“Seems like a minor-league Bond villain with terrible taste in art to me,” Harry said.

“You have no idea…”

The red hot poker might be the lesser of two evils compared with Szabo’s depraved sense of justice, but this threat was immediate — literally in his face right now. Szabo’s retribution for treachery would be worse, but that was in the future. It was a simple decision to make, and the answer would be facilitated by the smell of burnt melon on the tip of a searing-hot fire iron held an inch from his eye, which is exactly what Harry Bane now did.

Tóth pushed his head back into the leather seat as far as it would go but bought only another inch at the most and the heat from the poker was still intolerable. Harry pushed it through the inside wing of the chair and it easily burst out the other side, covered in cotton batting popping and sizzling as it burst into tiny flames.

“Launch site,” Harry said, flatly. “Where is it? Last time I ask.”

“It’s from his apartment — at least that’s what he told me,” Tóth said at last. He breathed out and Harry watched him visibly collapse as he thought about how he had betrayed a man as dangerous as Zalan Szabo.

“Where?”

“The Shard.”

“You mean the building?”

Tóth nodded glumly, but Harry was pleased with the result.

“What the hell is that?” Zoey asked.

“It’s a skyscraper in London, right?” Niko said.

“It is indeed,” Harry said.

“Ah — I understand!” Lucia said.

“I understand too,” Zoey said.

“And me,” Baupin said, and gestured toward Tóth. “But does he understand?”

Harry pushed the poker back into the fire and struck Tóth with a single punch in the cheek, knocking him out cold. “He understands.”

Harry kept a steady eye on Maja Eklund as she drove Szabo’s Maybach through the deserted streets of Chamonix. He was nowhere near trusting her yet despite the gesture she had made by handing him the Uzi, and he wasn’t the kind of man to take unnecessary risks.

He turned and smiled at Lucia, but her response was hesitant. He had noticed the look she gave him back in the penthouse when he held the poker up to the Hungarian goon’s face, and perhaps she had been shocked by his actions. In a way, it had surprised him too — how easily his past had come back to the surface, how simple it had been to draw on his experiences as both an officer in the Pathfinders and an agent for MI6.

Easy, and disappointing. He had hoped to leave all that behind him and move on with a new life, but it was like a shadow. No matter how hard you ran it was always right behind you.

As she drove, Niko gasped from the back seat. “Something’s wrong!”

Harry turned in his seat. “What’s the matter?”

He was holding his cell phone in his hands and shaking his head. “I was trying to transfer funds from one account to another to pay for the aircraft fuel and I cannot access my account.”

“Eh?”

“Wait.” Niko made a call and pushed back in the Maybach’s seat as he waited for someone to answer. When they did, he explained the problem and gave his details. Moments later when he cut the call, he was ashen.

Zoey leaned forward and touched his arm. “What’s going on, Nikky?”

“They say they don’t know who I am. They say they have never heard of me.”

“There must be some mistake.”

“I’ve been banking with them for over twenty years.”

“This doesn’t sound right,” Zoey said. “Wait.”

She flipped on her phone and started to check some details, but less than a minute later she reported the same as Niko. “My accounts aren’t there anymore — nothing.”

Harry turned to Lucia. “What about you?”

But she had already checked. “Nothing — no access to my accounts at all, so I went to a forum I use to ask if anyone had a similar experience and all of my posts are gone and I can’t log in. It’s like I was never there.”

“Never on the internet at all…” Niko said, his voice trailing away.

“The Ministry,” Harry said. “I guess Andrej wasn’t joking when he said how far their reach goes.”

“But that’s more than reach,” Baupin said as Maja pulled into the small airport. “Who could remove all of us from the internet in a matter of hours?”

Harry clenched his jaw and tried to fight his anger back down. “That’s what we’re going to find out. In the meantime, we have to fill up a Baron or we’re not going anywhere. Cash anyone?”