The Doomsday Testament

XV

‘We have what we need. The package is no longer required.’ The disembodied voice crackled in their earphones.

‘About time.’ The younger of the two Chinese men parked in a blue Ford across the street from Jamie’s flat reached below his seat and fitted a silencer to the pistol hidden there. The driver put a hand on his arm.

‘Wait.’ He punched a number into the hands-free phone on the dashboard in front of him. ‘Please confirm.’

‘Are you questioning my order?’

The driver, Li Yuan, who used the work name Charles Lee, was a senior operative of the Second Bureau of the Chinese Ministry of State Security. He bit back the comment that threatened to get him into further trouble. Who was this pup they’d parachuted in from Beijing to treat him like one of the waiters in the upmarket Cantonese restaurant he ran? Lee had been trained in assassination and covert operations, but his primary function was intelligence gathering, and ten years of work was in danger of being compromised by this cowboy from the Fourth Bureau. It was a measure of the importance of this mission that they were even prepared to consider what they were about to do, but if he was going to terminate this Saintclair he wanted to be certain.

‘Seeking clarification. If the subject is making progress, perhaps—’

‘Perhaps he will help others make progress?’ The voice had grown sharper. ‘He is attracting too much attention. We have a location and we have far greater resources to find what we seek than a second-rate salesman of paintings of dubious provenance. There are other lines of inquiry with which you need not concern yourself. We no longer need Saintclair. Confirm, please.’

The driver shrugged. Idiot. ‘Confirmed.’

His passenger grinned and clicked off the safety catch on the silenced automatic.

The older man shook his head. ‘No, not that way. Better if it’s an accident.’

Jamie didn’t notice the blue Ford with the tinted window as he left the building to go to his office later that afternoon. Neither did he notice the young Chinese in the leather jacket who dogged his footsteps on the way to the Tube.

At this time of the day more people were coming out of Kensington High Street station than going in and Jamie quickly made his way through the ticket barrier and down to the platform. As he stood among the crowd on the platform edge, his mind was on the breakthrough he had made and what his next step should be. He now knew where the original of the symbol was located, but what should he do about it? Yes, it was a potential link to the Raphael, but how much time could he afford following a trail that was sixty years old and likely to lead nowhere? He had his grandfather’s story. Maybe he should just be happy with that? But then there was the not knowing. Not knowing whether Matthew Sinclair had been a war hero or some callous gun for hire. The latter didn’t seem possible, but the moment he’d opened the journal Jamie had entered a world where the certainties of the past no longer existed. Anything was possible. And what if the Raphael was just beyond his fingertips? In his mid-teens Jamie had become obsessed with discovering the identity of his father and he felt the same compulsion now. He needed time to think. He needed to take a good look at what resources he had. Did he have enough money to give a month of his life to this mad quest? He did if the house sold, but the market was dead and didn’t look as if it was going to get any livelier for a while.

‘Sorry.’ Someone nudged him in the back, but he couldn’t identify who because he was surrounded by commuters. He looked to his left, where the train would be arriving and six feet along the platform his eyes caught those of a slim young woman — a girl? — with distinctive red streaks in her dark, shoulder-length hair. She returned his gaze and he could have sworn he saw a twinkle of amusement, even recognition. He smiled and turned away. It was strange how you grew accustomed to the suffocating proximity of other people. Up there, in the natural light, you fought for your personal space. Down here, in the dusty, ill-lit depths, breathing in lungfuls of chewy, overused air, you spent an hour with some big Romanian housewife camped in one pocket and an African busker in the other and were happy to pay for the privilege. The big digital counter at the far end said the next Circle Line train was due in forty seconds. He moved nearer the edge of the platform.

Nobody talked, but it was always noisy; the echoing halls of one of Tolkien’s cavernous subterranean cities. A muted dragon’s roar and the familiar change of pressure told him the train was approaching. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. The movement at his back increased as people nudged forward in anticipation and he soaked it up, his toes inching a little closer to the edge. Something, he wasn’t quite sure what, made him smile. The lunatic optimism of a man standing in a grubby London Tube station who thought he was about to discover one of the world’s great missing masterpieces? The feeling that old Matthew was up there somewhere daring him to follow the trail he had left? Maybe this was all a delayed reaction to his death. A sort of pre-mid-life crisis. The roar changed to a demonic, rhythmic clattering of steel on steel as the train approached along the tunnel.

He never felt the push. One moment he was on the platform, the next he was in the air, falling and twisting, his eyes wide open and the postered walls spinning. A freeze-frame moment when a female face gaped at him from the opposite side of the track, the mouth torn by a silent scream. At her side a dapper man in a dark suit and a red tie wore an annoyed frown, as if a demented circus performer had leapt out from nowhere to spoil his lunch break. Jamie knew he should move his arms to cushion his fall; do something. But they might have belonged to someone else. His shoulder struck first with a sickening crunch that sent a fireball of pain through his left side, but at least it absorbed most of the impact. When his cheek bounced off concrete with a rattle that loosened his teeth, he knew it could have been worse. A steel rail shone two inches from his eyes. Only now did it register where he was and what was about to happen. His feet. His legs. Where were they? Terror engulfed him like quicksand, forcing its way into his eyes and his mouth and his ears. He lost any sense of self, any control of body. He didn’t hug the concrete, it absorbed him. After a millisecond the lights went out with an explosive whoosh of whirling air that threatened to pick him up, buffeted him as if he was head down in a wind tunnel, tugging at his clothes and tearing at the bond that held him to the oily concrete. He screamed, louder than he’d ever screamed before, fighting with the sound of a million nails being scraped across a million blackboards, magnified a million times. Then it stopped. Dead.