The Isis Covenant

XXIX

Dancing flurries of snow drifted through the smoke and sparks to melt in the flames from the burning building.

‘Are you sure this is it?’

Jamie couldn’t drag his eyes away from what had been the SS drinking den.

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

They stood on the edge of a big crowd that had crammed into the alley to watch the fun from behind a police barrier about fifty metres away. Firemen appeared with a hose and began to spray the roof and windows, but it was already much too late. The flames had eaten away at the roof joints and super-heated slates exploded in batches, cascading in shards onto the street. A few minutes later the roof collapsed into the building below with an audible ‘whump’, sending a new eruption of flame and spark high into the Hamburg sky.

‘What are we going to do now?’

It was a question Jamie had been asking himself, but, fortunately or otherwise, it had answered itself. Or that was the message he was getting from the gun barrel being screwed painfully into his armpit.

‘Come with me.’ He half turned, but the boy who had frisked them jammed the pistol all the harder. ‘I said come with me, that doesn’t mean anything else.’

Danny was close enough to understand what was happening. Jamie saw her tense, but he shook his head. Whatever went down, the only way they were going to find out was to play this hand as it fell. Downstairs this time, to a basement bar where the SS patriarch sat behind a table with four other men. The white mane lifted and his pale eyes fixed the newcomers.

‘This is your doing?’

The boy was still somewhere behind them and there had been another man in the shadows through a beaded curtain that led only who knew where. This time Jamie understood for certain that if he said the wrong thing they would never leave the bar alive.

He shook his head. ‘I think it might be the people who are also looking for Hartmann. Men who want to see him dead. They must have tracked us to you somehow.’

The mouth set like a steel trap and he watched the calculations working through the old soldier’s mind. This wasn’t the first time this man had pondered the life and death of a fellow human being. Jamie just hoped he’d made it a bit more difficult. The expression didn’t change, but at some point a decision was made.

‘You find out who these people are, you tell us and we deal with it.’ It was an order, not a suggestion. A moment’s hesitation and an envelope passed across the table.

‘Maybe he will, maybe he won’t and maybe he’ll kill you.’

‘Zurich?’

‘It looks like the address of some kind of lawyer’s office. Forchstrasse.’

He recognized the look.

‘It’s just another step. A link in the chain. But if we don’t go we’ll never know.’

‘Okay, but my time is running out, Jamie. I can’t afford to go running around Europe on a wild-goose chase.’

Jamie stared at her. It wasn’t what he wanted, but he had to make the offer. ‘Maybe it would be more sensible if I went alone?’

She thought about it and shook her head. ‘No. Not yet. One more step, and then maybe … but not yet. I’ll book the flights.’

‘Better if we get the hotel to organize a hire car,’ he suggested.

‘Are you nuts? It must be what … five hundred miles from here to Switzerland. Maybe six. Two hours on the plane, a full day by car. Two if we get lost up the wrong Alp.’

He went to the window and studied the streets and canals below. ‘The people who killed that girl and burned down the club are still out there. If we take the plane they can put someone on it, or have someone waiting at the other end. Driving will take longer, but if it’s six hundred miles, that’s six hundred miles of road we can use to lose them. We don’t have to put a destination on the form, all we need to say is that we’re touring Germany.’

Two hours later they headed south, with Jamie at the wheel of the hired Audi. He deliberately kept his speed erratic, driving so leisurely that it brought intimidating blasts of the horn from the lorry drivers who were their fellow users of the slow lane, then pushing the accelerator to the floor so the German countryside flashed past in a blur. Danny searched the road for cars trying to match their speed.

‘Anything?’

She shook her head. ‘But that doesn’t mean they’re not there. If they’re pros there could be as many as four or five chase cars, switching positions to make sure we don’t get a make on ’em.’

Just to be certain, they left the autobahn after Frankfurt and they spent twenty minutes on country roads until they found a gasthaüs where they stopped for a beer and sausage.

‘So what happens when we get to Zurich?’ she asked while they were eating.

‘We make contact. We tell …’ he picked up the sheet of paper the former SS man had given them. ‘… Herr Kohler a story — not the true story, of course, much too outlandish, but something suitably urgent — a relative who must know if Hartmann is still alive. A legacy, maybe.’

‘You think a lawyer is going to buy that? A Swiss lawyer?’

He ignored the snort of incredulity that accompanied the words. ‘Maybe the simple mention of Hartmann’s name is all it will take? There’s no point in making assumptions.’

They’d been on the road for nine hours when they entered Switzerland north of Basel and crossed the Rhine, turning east to follow the line of the Swiss-German border, then south through the gently sloping wooded hills of Aargau. They passed small, immaculately maintained towns that made Jamie wonder if there was a law against allowing your paint to peel or your grass to grow in Switzerland, but the closer they got to Zurich the more urbanized the landscape became. The road crossed and re-crossed the same river several times before entering the city proper. Jamie was tired, but he was relaxed and confident that no single follower could have stayed with them without being spotted. What neither he nor Danny knew was that the surveillance team that had been tracking the hired Audi since Hamburg consisted of a fleet of four anonymous German saloons with a Mercedes SUV as command car. In the mid-town traffic they had the Audi bracketed. The man in the Mercedes calculated he could have made the hit at any one of five places — kill or capture — but he had his orders.

‘I think we should be on the other side,’ Danny pointed out helpfully.

Jamie grunted and tried to navigate his way round another fiendishly complicated system of one-way streets, avoiding trams and buses that seemed to have priority over everything else. ‘You don’t say.’

Eventually, they found a way to cross, and, after a twenty-minute detour, worked their way back into the city centre and a hotel close to the eastern shore of Lake Zurich in a district of broad streets, parks and beautiful old houses. Jamie had an impression of a city that was predominantly old, pretty and sprawling, where people minded their own business and would rather other people didn’t have cars. Unfortunately, it was too late to find out whether he was right, so they settled for a beer in the hotel bar before they retired to their room. They showered, made the slow, slightly distracted love of people with other things on their minds and slept, Danny dreaming of chase cars she might have missed and Jamie with the feeling that his life had gone wrong somewhere and he wasn’t certain how to get it back to where it belonged.

In the morning he telephoned to make an appointment with the lawyer.

‘First you must know that we have no record of a client named Hartmann.’

Danny and Jamie exchanged glances of disappointment. ‘Then it seems we have wasted our time and yours, Herr Kohler. I apologize for the inconvenience.’

They made to get up from their seats, but the lawyer, who spoke perfect, if rigidly formal, English, raised a hand.

‘Please, I am not quite finished. Although we have no Hartmann on our files I did receive a telephone call yesterday afternoon, warning me that a Herr Saintclair was likely to pay this office a visit.’

‘May one ask the source of this call?’

‘One may not. But the purpose of the call was to issue certain instructions in the event of such a visit. These instructions brought into action a long-established procedure, which to my knowledge has never been required before.’ He handed over a white envelope. ‘You should know that I am not aware of the contents of this envelope. Neither do I wish to be.’

‘Isn’t that a little odd?’ Danny asked.

The Swiss gave a thin smile. ‘I am merely a conduit, Fräulein Fisher, a transmitter of information, untouched and unaffected by what passes through my hands. I can assure you, in Switzerland this is a most normal situation.’ He pointed to a painting of a disapproving, stiff-necked man in a wing collar. ‘My grandfather, who founded this firm, would have insisted it was so.’

A secretary ushered them out of the office on to Forchstrasse, a long, wide street that split Zurich’s Eighth District. Jamie tapped the envelope against his palm.

‘Well,’ Danny said, her voice mirroring the frustration on her face. ‘You were right. Another link in the chain, but a goddam daisy chain that just goes round in circles. I am merely a conduit, Fräulein Fisher,’ she perfectly mimicked the lawyer’s stiff, grammatical English, ‘a transmitter of information. Jesus, I wanted to take him by his scrawny neck and shake him.’

‘Don’t knock it until we’ve seen what’s inside here,’ Jamie insisted. ‘He talked about a long-established procedure that’s never been used before. How long? Kohler’s law firm has been around for fifty or sixty years at least. Who’s to say that old granddaddy Kohler didn’t take the instructions from Hartmann himself?’

‘The only way to find out is to open the letter, so get on with it.’

Jamie studied the street around them. If someone knew they were going to be here, that someone was likely to be watching. He took her by the arm and led her protesting into a side street, taking random rights and lefts. He made her wait until they were in a tree-lined park just off the street and she was simmering just below boiling point when he finally tore at the seal and removed a single sheet of paper.

‘This doesn’t make sense.’

‘What doesn’t make sense?’

He handed her the letter. ‘Proceed to Facet Safes and Strongboxes, Forchstrasse 12, Zurich. Enter by the rear door and await further instructions.’

‘Somebody’s yanking our chain.’ Danny studied the park around them, but the only people in view were a young couple playing with a small girl at the base of a tree, while an older boy climbed to a bench that had somehow been fixed to the branches. ‘They’re playing with us. Maybe we should just walk away.’

‘I’d agree, apart from two things. The first is that this business is less than four hundred yards from here. The second is the name of the company.’

‘What about it?’

‘Facet has a couple of meanings. It can be a particular feature of something, but it’s usually only used for one object in particular.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘A diamond.’

As they left the park neither of them noticed the man who walked up to the front door of one of the houses overlooking the park. Or the fact that he took so long to find his key.

Facet Safes and Strongboxes occupied a large unit in a modern block of shops and flats where Forchstrasse met Kreuzplatz, a wide intersection crossed by tram lines. Four windows displayed an array of ultra-modern safes, alarms and other security equipment. The only lights were illuminating the merchandise and it looked closed for business.

Danny shook her head. ‘I’ll tell you one thing, Saintclair, if this has been around since the Second World War I’m Abe Lincoln. A little bell is ringing inside my head telling me to get the hell out of here. If you’ve brought that body armour of yours along, now would be the time to hand it over.’

Jamie ignored her complaints and they found an alleyway that led to a car park serving the residents of the triangular block of flats. Each ground-floor business had a small yard area for storage and deliveries, identified by a panel with the firm’s name.

‘Here it is.’ Danny walked through the double doors that had been left open to reveal the inner courtyard. On the far side, set into the wall, was a wide goods entrance, with a fire door to one side. Slowly, she walked towards it and pushed. ‘For a security company they sure have a strange way of keeping the bad guys out,’ she muttered as it swung back noiselessly.

They looked at each other. Danny took a deep breath, but when she was about to step across the threshold, Jamie put a hand on her arm. ‘I think in this case we’ll make it gents first.’

‘Be my guest, but don’t go trying to be a hero. The first sign of trouble and we are outa here.’

‘Couldn’t agree more, Detective Fisher. You wouldn’t happen to have a Glock 9 mm in that handbag, would you?’

‘Just about everything else.’ There was a smile in her voice. ‘But no, I left my Glock in Brooklyn. Even a cop can’t get away with carrying on a 747 jet these days.’

‘In that case, “Once more into the breach”.’