The Curse of Medusa

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Lea winced as the pulsing agony of the deep laceration on her head coursed through her temple and into her jaw. She felt the blood from the wound welling in her eye socket and for a moment she thought she was going to pass out again.

Only now did she feel the duct tape over her mouth and the cable-ties on her wrists behind her back. A weird stench of motor oil hung around her nostrils and a wave of nausea rippled over her as she struggled to see in the darkness, her arms now numb as the weight of her own body crushed down on them.

She didn’t know where she was. The last thing she remembered was trying to go back inside to pull Danny Devlin from the flames as they burned down her parent’s old holiday home. She never even got the chance to drag him from the fire and toxic smoke before one of the men had hit her in the head with his gun and then everything had gone black as night.

Wherever she was now, it was a small, closely confined space. For a dreadful second, she thought she was in a coffin, but then she realized her cheek was pushed against some kind of hard carpet, and as far as she knew, the interior of coffins weren’t usually carpeted.

She breathed a short sigh of relief before another wave of panic rose in her when she heard an engine fire up and then a familiar rumbling vibration — she was in the boot of car, and it didn’t take her long to work out which one.

The gunmen’s Audi A7.

Now it was all coming back.

She remembered what Lefevre had said about Mr Luk — was he really going to take her back to Hong Kong and hand her over so that psychopath could subject her to death by a thousand cuts? She felt sick at the thought, but she was given no time to think. The engine revved and she felt the car lurch violently forward, forcing her to the back of the boot and striking her head on the internal boot release. She cried out as the metal release catch dug into the fresh wound on her head, but her cry was muffled by the duct tape on her mouth into a pitiful moan.

She knew the roads around here better than anyone, and by following the turns of the car she knew where they were heading — south-east toward the coast, and that could mean only one thing. The men were taking her to Connemara Airport where they no doubt had some kind of aircraft fuelled up and ready to take her — and her father’s research files — to god knows where, but Luk rose in her terrified mind once again.

She heard an indistinct mumbling from the front of the car and then the leader of the two men started shouting. This was followed by a drastic swing to the left and the squealing of tires. Then the car went straight again and there was a rapid acceleration.

Her mind drifted to Joe Hawke, whom she had last seen in Egypt so many weeks ago. The former SBS man had saved her before, but not this time. This time he didn’t even know which continent she was on. Her only hope was the one man who knew where she was, but the last time she had seen Danny Devlin he had been half-dead from a bullet wound and smoke inhalation and was now unconscious and surrounded by flames.

Danny Devlin coughed the burning smoke from his lungs and staggered from the flames with his hand over his mouth. His face was smeared with soot and he stopped on the patio and violently threw up. He rushed his hands to his side and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the bullet had only produced a flesh wound — searing half an inch of his torso away and leaving what would be an impressive scar — but he would live.

He searched around him for any sign of Lea and the two men, but saw only the corpses of Mikey O’Sullivan and Kyle Byrne. He snatched up one of their shotguns, and prepared to fight. It was then he heard the sound of a car and looked up to the cliff road to see a pair of red brake lights rapidly receding into the stormy Irish night.

Lefevre must have taken Lea and the research files!

He searched Mikey for the keys to the Quattro and sprinted to the front of the property, but when he turned the corner he saw the classic Audi was on fire just like everything else. The gas tank had already exploded and now all that was left was a char-grilled shell of black, twisted metal with flames all over the remains of the bent chassis.

He cursed as his eyes crawled desperately over the property for another means of giving chase and rescuing Lea when he suddenly remembered what Lea had said about her father’s old motorbike in the garage, which had somehow escaped the attention of these maniacs and was thankfully untouched by fire.

The heavy wooden doors scraped against the gravel as he swung them open. There, in the corner was what could only be a motorcycle, concealed beneath an old brown dustsheet.

He wrenched the cloth away to reveal what he had been praying for — a motorbike, and not only a bike but a stunning black 1967 Norton Commando, just as Lea had described to him on their journey to the cottage.

He offered another prayer that the keys were still in it, as was her father’s habit, and they were. The holy trinity of prayers was completed when he climbed on top and switched it on. It roared to life and he sighed with relief when he saw there was at least a quarter of a tank of fuel in her.

Without wasting a second he slung the shotgun over his shoulder and raced out of the garage, spraying gravel chips up in the air behind him in a great sweeping arc as he skidded out of the drive and joined the coast road on his way to catch up with the fleeing Audi A7.

As he sped along the narrow, winding lane which followed the coast, his headlight illuminated the rainfall which the Atlantic westerly was driving into his face with terrific velocity. This, Danny, he told himself, is a real bloody stupid night to be chasing after a gimp like this Lefevre bloke.

He hit a straight and accelerated to sixty, confident that on a road like this he could easily catch up with a car on something like the Commando, but then the tiny red rear lights disappeared from view. Had they turned a corner or had Lefevre killed the lights?

Devlin knew you’d have to be insane to drive blind on roads like this on a stormy night with no moon, but then was that enough to rule out Lefevre? He wasn’t sure. All he knew was that he wasn’t going to turn his light off because that was a four hundred foot drop to a raging ocean just a few yards to his right. He scowled in frustration but all he could do was speed up and continue the pursuit.

He turned a shallow bend on the road and suddenly saw the red lights once again. He was gaining now, and the Audi was less than two or three hundred yards ahead of him.

“You see what?” Lefevre drawled in Belgian French.

“A headlight,” Devos replied. He nodded his head at the Audi’s rear-view mirror. “Maybe two hundred meters behind us. Must be Devlin.”

“Impossible. We killed Devlin.”

Lefevre leaned forward and peered into his own wing mirror. He cursed loudly and smashed his hand down on the dashboard. He narrowed his eyes as he stared once again at the approaching headlight of the pursuing motorcycle and pulled a Heckler & Koch USP from inside his jacket. He checked the semi-automatic pistol’s magazine and pushed down the electric window. A burst of rain blasted into the car but Lefevre didn’t notice. He simply released his seatbelt and turned to Devos. “Keep driving.”

Devos nodded as Lefevre swivelled in the seat and climbed halfway out the speeding car. To stop himself flying out, he anchored himself with his left hand on the grab handle while he calmly raised the USP and aimed it at the headlight of the pursuing bike.

He fired, and missed.

He cursed and wiped the rain from his face with his forearm.

He aimed again and fired a second time, but the bike was still behind them, and now it was swerving from side to side in an attempt to evade the bullets.

Romain Lefevre wiped the rain from his eyes again and aimed his pistol at Danny Devlin a third time. He wasn’t the kind who believed in giving up.

And now the bastards are shooting at you, Danny! he screamed into the howling wind.

Devlin blinked and rubbed the rainwater from his eyes as the Commando powered forward closer to the Audi. As if things weren’t dangerous enough he now had to swerve the bike violently to the left and right to avoid getting hit by their bullets. The risk was skidding on a patch of smooth asphalt and going for a short flight to an early death over the cliff-edge to his right, but he had no choice. It was that or take a bullet in the chest at sixty miles an hour.

Either side of him, the hedgerows raced by in a blur as he pursued his quarry. He wanted to return fire on the bastards with the shotgun — that would sort the wheat from the chaff — but he knew Lea was in the car and couldn’t risk hitting her with such an inaccurate weapon. His only play was to give pursuit until they got wherever they were going and then wing it. The Danny Devlin Masterplan.

The fact Lefevre hadn’t simply stopped the car and had it out with him right here meant that he was more interested in getting away with his prize than killing him, and that meant he’d decided not to take any risks tonight.

Whatever was in Harry Donovan’s research files was obviously of enormous importance to Lefevre — or more likely — to the person Lefevre was working for. In Devlin’s estimation, Lefevre didn’t seem the type to have either the inclination or funding to raid Irish cottages in the dead of night in search of decades-old medical research papers. No, he was definitely working for someone else, and that was why the killer was in such a rush to get to Connemara Airport.

Devlin revved the 750cc engine and increased to seventy miles per hour, storm, wind, rain and bullets be damned.

Lea Donovan was in that car.