The Heretics Treasure

Chapter Seventeen

It was after one when Ben found the place, a sad-looking tenement building right next to a breaker’s yard. Everything was marked with neglect. A cat darted out of the doorway as he approached, carrying a struggling rat in its teeth. He walked through an entrance hall that smelled of stale urine and was dimly lit by a flickering bulb. Climbed the stairs to the fourth floor and came to the door he was looking for.

It wasn’t even locked. He walked right in and the stink of the place hit him. He paused, letting his eyes adjust to the blackness. Ahead of him was a short passage, littered with junk. He made his way along it and opened the inner door.

The room he walked into was bathed in the dull glow of a sideboard covered in flickering candles. Wax dripped down the wood, hardening on the floor. Somewhere in the shadows, aggressive rap music blared from a tinny stereo. The air was oppressive, thick with the mixed odours of stale booze and smoke and sweat-the smell of a space whose inhabitants didn’t care about their own lives.

A bare mattress lay on one side of the room and Ben could make out the shapes of two sleeping bodies in the candlelight. A man and a woman, both naked, arms and legs entangled, half covered by a rumpled sheet.

Across on the other side, nearer to the candle-glow, was a table. Ben took in the razor blade, the rolled-up banknotes, the little mound of white powder and the half-snorted line of it that the table’s single occupant hadn’t managed to finish before he passed out. He was slumped on a low stool with his arms spread across the table, his forehead resting on the glass. Ben watched him for a moment. He was breathing slowly, deeply. He looked young, early twenties, scrawny with a patchy beard.

A yard from the table, a second woman was lying sprawled, her bare legs kicked out on the rug. Ben stepped over to her and crouched down to take a look at her. She was maybe twenty and looked European, with dirty blonde hair and what could have been a pretty face if it hadn’t been pressed down against the floor of a dingy drug den. She was just as out of it as her friends. She was wearing some kind of lightweight blazer, striped cotton that had ridden up to reveal her skimpy knickers and an angel tattoo across her coccyx.

Something about the striped garment looked very familiar. Ben reached for a candle and brought it closer to inspect. He was pretty sure it was the same one Morgan Paxton had been wearing in the photo.

He flipped on a light switch. The room was suddenly bright, but that didn’t do much to stir its occupants. The girl on the rug seemed to sense something, and lifted her head a couple of inches. The naked couple on the mattress didn’t move, and neither did the young guy at the table.

Ben turned off the shrill music and walked back over to the table. He leaned down so that his face was just a few inches from the glass. He took a deep breath and blew hard, scattering the white powder into clouds of dust.

That got the attention of the young guy. He suddenly woke up, eyes snapping wide open. He lurched unsteadily to his feet and made to grab Ben by the shirt, shrieking in Arabic, ‘You fuck! You fuck!’

Ben twisted his wrist into a lock and threw him back down. There was no strength in the guy’s wasted arms. He slumped sideways and rolled off the stool, gasping.

The girl on the floor slowly dragged herself across the rug and started burying her face in it, snorting up the fallen coke. Ben hauled her to her feet, moved her to an armchair and lowered her into it. He stripped the blazer off her. ‘Don’t hurt me,’ she pleaded in English.

‘I’m not here for that,’ Ben said. He stuffed the blazer into his bag and took out the pistol. The girl started screaming, and it woke the two on the mattress. The naked woman was suddenly alert, staring at Ben in horror and pulling a sheet around her.

‘Get some clothes on,’ Ben said to her. She nodded. Stood up, legs trembling, and started pulling on jeans and a loose top.

‘Now get out of here,’ he said. ‘Don’t come back.’

The women left, staggering out of the door.

Now it was just Ben and the two guys. He stepped over to the one who was still lying slumped on the floor, muttering to himself. Grabbed a fistful of the guy’s hair and dragged him kicking and hollering over to the mattress. He dumped him down next to his friend, who was coming around, struggling into his trousers and groping for his shirt.

Ben stood over them. Pulled back his left sleeve and saw their half-open eyes flicker to the gold Rolex that he was wearing alongside his own Omega.

‘Recognise this?’ he said.

No response, but there was a glimmer of understanding in their faces. Now they knew what this was about. The younger one glanced away nervously. His hands were shaking.

Ben walked to the door and peered out into the corridor. The women were long gone. He shut the door, locked it and put the key in his pocket. He checked the window. It was barred, and there was no balcony or fire escape. He glanced back down at his two groggy, blinking, mumbling prisoners. Satisfied that they weren’t going anywhere, he did a quick search of the flat.

Apart from the main room, there was just a kitchenette with a greasy stove and a cockroach on the wall. Off that was a door to a tiny cubicle with a stinking toilet. On a chipped sideboard in the kitchen he found a knife. A very big knife. It had a tarnished brass hand-guard, like a sabre, and the broad blade in the leather sheath was twelve or thirteen inches long. It made him think about the brutal wounds on Morgan Paxton’s body. The kind of wounds that a heavy hacking blade like this would inflict.

He left it lying there. Stepping away, he felt a loose floorboard under his foot. It lifted up at one end when he stamped on it. He kicked it away, revealing a hollow space under the floor about eight inches high. There was a crumpled plastic bag stuffed inside.

He kneeled down next to the hole and used the gun to fish the bag out by its handle, then scattered the contents out on the floor and sifted them about with the pistol muzzle. There was a bundle of banknotes held together with an elastic band and a few other papers. Those didn’t interest him. What did interest him were the debit and credit cards in Morgan Paxton’s name, and his British Library membership card. Then among the papers he found a UK passport. He flipped it open with the gun and Morgan’s face stared up at him from inside.

He left the evidence where it lay. If there’d been a doubt in his mind, it was gone now.

As an afterthought he crouched down lower to the floor and stuck his whole arm inside the hollow space. It was a long shot, but these guys were such amateurs that anything was possible.

His fingers made contact with something that wasn’t wood or masonry. It felt rounded and smooth and plasticky He grasped it and felt it move. A few inches, and he could see it. The manufacturer’s logo in silver letters on black plastic. It was a small laptop computer.

He pulled the machine up out of the hole and set it down on the floor in front of him, resisting the temptation to flip open the lid and turn it on. No time for that now. He just stared at it instead. Was this Morgan Paxton’s laptop? The chances were that it was. Either the thieves hadn’t got around to selling it yet, or they’d fancied keeping it for themselves.

Ben grabbed the machine and carried it back into the main room. The two guys were still lying there, slumped against the wall. One of them was trying to say something. Ben laid the laptop carefully down on the glass-topped table. He stepped towards his prisoners, took the gun from his belt and pointed it at them.

‘Why did you have to kill him?’ he asked in Arabic. ‘Don’t you know what you’ve brought on yourselves, doing that? All for a line of coke. Is it worth it?’

‘I didn’t do it,’ the younger one blurted out, suddenly finding his voice. His face was twitching as he watched the gun. He pointed a finger at his friend. ‘He stabbed the guy. I told him not to. But he just kept sticking the knife in.’

‘You think I care which one of you put the knife in?’ Ben said.

The younger one was crying now. The other just stared in dumb terror.

‘What happened to the case and the papers?’ Ben asked. ‘I know they were there. You took them. Don’t lie to me.’

No reply. Just the quiet sobbing from the younger one. Then the older of the two guys spoke for the first time. ‘We burned the papers. Sold the case.’

Ben nodded. So be it. Now it was time to finish his job.

He stepped back from them. Two steps. Three. He raised the pistol and let the sights hover on their bodies. He moved his thumb up to the safety lever and nudged it until he felt it click to the fire position.

The two were squirming. The younger one put his hands out, as though he thought he could shield himself from the strike of a 9mm jacketed bullet moving at close to the speed of sound. A dark stain was spreading over the crotch of his jeans.

Ben felt the cool, smooth face of the trigger against his finger. All he had to do was shoot these two scumbags, pick up what was left of Morgan’s things and get out of here. Nobody would even know they were dead, until the rotting-corpse stink found its way under the door and out into the hallway. In the Cairo heat, maybe less than two days. But that was plenty of time. There was no way the two women were going to run to the police, either. He was home free. All he had to do was pull the trigger.

You owe this to Harry Paxton, he thought.

He let the sights settle on the older of the two. His friend was probably telling the truth-this one was the killer. He had a harder look about him, even facing death.

Shoot him first, then the other. The debt to Paxton would be paid. Ben could go home and forget the whole thing.

But staring down at the two pathetic forms through the sights of the Browning, Ben knew he’d never forget. He’d sworn that he was never going to do this again, and it would be a broken promise to himself that he’d never be able to forgive.

The gun wavered in his hands. He let out a long breath. Voices argued in his head.

They’re shits. They deserve it. Look what they did. You saw the photos.

But your days of killing to order are behind you. You’re not SAS any more.

Two bullets. Then it’s done. It’s not like it would be the first time for you.

No. You can’t.

I’m sorry, Harry.

He lowered the gun. The two men were staring at him, wide-eyed, following his every move.

He clicked the safety back on, let the pistol dangle at his side.

‘OK,’ he said to them. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do.’