The Isis Covenant

XXXV

It was like moving through a sea of gold. The sun-kissed fog swirled around the two Zodiac assault boats as they slid silently through the water towards the bank, landing with a soft bump against the gravel on the lake shore. Instantly, two of the four men on each inflatable leapt ashore to form a defensive perimeter while the others secured the boats and shifted their gear ashore. They were dressed in black ski masks and overalls and each man carried a silenced Heckler & Koch MP-7 machine pistol with a thirty-round magazine, plus four spares. The MP-7 was superior to the MP-5 in that it fired a round capable of penetrating body armour. Paul Dornberger had witnessed Jamie Saintclair’s miraculous resurrection and learned from it. When Berndt Hartmann’s bodyguards went down they would stay down.

A shadowy figure emerged from the fog. ‘One exterior guard,’ Sergei whispered, ‘standing two metres to the left of the garden-room door.’

Dornberger nodded and gave the hand signals for one man to follow him while the rest prepared to breach the house once the road was open. The plan of the house was etched on his brain and he moved to his right, keeping low as he scuttled silently along the lake front, before dog-legging left past a boarded-up summer house. His course brought him to the corner angle of the main building, and to the bodyguard’s left. A single guard was lax, even careless. It meant Hartmann had been in this cushioned Swiss bolt-hole so long that he wasn’t taking his security seriously. One man to distract, one to neutralize. He motioned his partner forward with his left hand. Dornberger moved swiftly along the line of the wall towards the doorway. A slight sound caught the guard’s attention. He was just a shadow in the mist, but Dornberger saw the barrel of an automatic weapon move to cover the garden area towards the lake shore. Moving swiftly and silently, he took two paces forward and looped the steel piano wire around the man’s head. His hands took the strain on the wooden toggles and the guard dropped his assault rifle and clawed impotently at the awful steel vice that had instantly closed his windpipe and crushed his voice box. Now he could feel the sting of it cutting into his flesh. With a single tug, Dornberger could have ended the man’s agony, but that was not his way. He liked to feel them struggle, the way a fish struggles at the end of the line, thrashing and kicking but entirely reliant on his tormentor’s mercy. He knew it was a weakness and that the only way to remove the guilt was to punish himself for it when he returned to London, but for the moment all that counted was the life slowly ebbing away under his hands, the soft bubbling choke as the wire severed the windpipe. Careful. Careful. Just the right amount of pressure so the carotid artery stayed intact. That would be too quick. Too messy. It would be soon, anyway, the legs were starting to kick and he could smell the soft stink of voided bowel. With surprising suddenness the head flopped forward, Dornberger maintained the pressure until he was certain before allowing the body to slump to the ground. He unlooped the wire, wiped it with a cloth and coiled it tight before re-stowing it in a custom-made pocket in his overall. He turned to find the other man staring at him, his eyes the only things visible in the dark mask. What did he read there? A mixture of fear and puzzlement, but did he also detect a hint of contempt? He would deal with that later. For the moment he gave a soft whistle that set the assault team in motion. In almost the same instant a high-pitched alarm began to sound. Not so lax, after all. Someone had tripped a security beam. He’d hoped to make his entry by stealth, it would have been neater. But that didn’t matter now.

‘Blow the door,’ he ordered. He ran the plan of the house through his head. Beyond the door was the garden room with a bar and changing rooms for guests who wanted to swim in the lake. To the right were the stairs that led up to the main floors of the house.

Sergei moved forward and fixed the charges to the security door. Three of them, precisely weighted and exactly placed to take it off its hinges. They exploded simultaneously with a sharp crack.

‘Go.’

Everyone froze at the sound of the alarm and Jamie looked on bewildered as Matthias and a man he hadn’t seen before rushed to the stair carrying sub-machine guns. At the same time the third man who had released them from the vault ran into the room carrying a bullet-proof vest, which he proceeded to strap on to Bernie Hartmann.

‘Don’t fuss, Rolf. It’s probably another deer.’

The thump of an explosion and the sound of the door clattering into the room below put paid to any further optimism. Rolf dragged Hartmann to his feet and hustled him towards a door at the rear of the room. Jamie hesitated, drawn to the stairway to find out what was happening. A short burst of machine-gun fire on the floor below followed by a cry of agony gave him all the information he needed.

‘Come on, idiot.’ Danny Fisher grabbed his arm and hauled him in the direction Rolf and the old man had disappeared. A shout from the stairs froze them and Jamie turned in time to see Matthias firing his machine gun one handed as he dragged his comrade into the room. At the same time the wall above his head appeared to be mauled by a giant invisible woodpecker, creating a blizzard of brick and plaster. Matthias cursed and dropped the wounded man. He began to fire short controlled bursts at whoever was down below. The shots were answered by more eruptions in the walls and ceiling around him. Jamie shrugged himself free of Danny’s grasp and ran towards the injured man just in time to see his skull explode in a welter of blood, bone and brain as he caught the full force of a burst of fire. The bolt on Matthias’s gun clicked on an empty chamber and he clawed at his pocket for another magazine. He seemed to see Jamie for the first time. The dead man’s weapon lay at his feet and he kicked it towards the Englishman. Almost without thought, Jamie picked it up and cocked it. Some kind of very modern, cut-back version of the Uzi. From the corner of his eye he saw movement on the stair, heard the soft stutter of a silenced weapon and winced as the banister by his side exploded into splinters. The Uzi came up automatically, as if he was on the Barton Road firing range, kicking in his hands and raking the area where the dark figure had been. Matthias appeared beside him, the weapon reloaded. ‘Go,’ he ordered. Jamie had time to reflect that it was the first time he’d heard the bodyguard say a word before he sprinted for the corridor ready to cover the other man as he retreated. He saw Matthias crane forward to get a better shot before the back of the twin’s jacket shredded in a spray of red and he collapsed without a sound.

‘Come on, Jamie.’ Danny stood at the door of the room where they had originally met Berndt Hartmann. Feet clattered on the stair and he directed a quick burst on the run to slow the intruders down.

Jamie hurtled into the room between Danny and Rolf as the air around him buzzed with the sound of passing bullets. Danny had acquired a pistol from somewhere and she fired it left-handed round the door jamb, sending blind shots into the corridor.

‘Why in the name of Christ did we come here?’ Jamie’s voice sounded high in his own ears, but he didn’t care who knew he was scared. They were trapped. The only way out of the room was through the window into the garden and whoever their enemy was would have thought of that. No, they weren’t trapped, they were dead. Bernie Hartmann was fiddling with the keypad of the safe. What was the point? Whatever he kept in there wasn’t going to be any use to him now. It struck him that it might even be the Eye of Isis, but the thought didn’t give him any pleasure. He doubted that whoever was trying to kill them was going to stop just because Bernie threw them a billion-pound diamond. The only thing that would help at the moment was an RPG rocket launcher. Then again, maybe it would be just like Bernie Hartmann to keep a Panzerfaust around as a souvenir of the good old days. Danny reeled away from the door clutching her face and he felt a thrill of fear. He moved to help her, but she waved him away. ‘Dust in the eyes.’

The Hartmann house had been solidly built with brick partition walls and Rolf used the cover to fire aimed bursts that were keeping the attackers at bay for the moment. Jamie knelt by the window, checking for the flanking movement that would inevitably come when the gunmen realized they were stalled.

‘This way.’

Bernie Hartmann finally had the safe door open, revealing a small space about six feet square. A space that was entirely empty.

‘Are you crazy?’

‘If you don’t get in here you’re all going to die,’ the old man insisted, his voice surprisingly calm for a man with a houseful of vengeful assassins.

Danny and Jamie exchanged glances. On the one hand it was only delaying the inevitable, on the other, any delay was preferable to being cut to pieces by flying lead. Whether they’d be thinking that in half an hour or so when they were slowly suffocating was another matter, but they could worry about that when it happened. Danny went to stand beside Bernie Hartmann inside the cramped space, then Jamie left his place by the window to join them. Bernie part closed the massive door so there was just space for a man to get through while Rolf continued calmly firing his weapon from the doorway. The bodyguard looked towards the safe, checking that they were inside and Jamie was surprised to see him grinning.

‘Now, Rolf!’ Bernie’s voice was shrill. Rolf fired one last burst and turned towards them just as the wall protecting him exploded into fragments. A DM11 bullet designed to penetrate twenty layers of Kevlar, plus 1.6 millimetres of Titanium alloy plate at a range of two hundred metres isn’t going to be stopped by a single layer of bricks twenty feet away, however Swiss and solid. By the time they tore through Rolf’s soft tissue, the three 4.6 millimetre rounds of copper-plated steel were mushroomed and misshapen, but had lost little of their velocity. The impact threw him against the far wall in a spray of blood and torn flesh and he was dead before his body hit the floor.

‘Scheisse,’ Bernie Hartmann muttered as he slammed the safe door shut.

For a few moments the little German seemed paralysed by what had happened. He stared at the inside of the door with a look of bemusement until the hammer blow rattle of armour-piercing bullets against steel brought him back to his senses. ‘We’re safe enough in here,’ he breathed.

‘Safe?’ Jamie was incredulous. ‘What’s the point of being safe until you suffocate?’

‘Safer than Rolf, or the Berger brothers, Mr Saintclair. Would you really rather be out there leaking all over my carpet?’

‘So we just wait?’ Danny demanded.

Hartmann gave her the look schoolmasters keep for particularly stupid questions. ‘You’re a policewoman, Miss Fisher; don’t tell me you’ve never heard of a panic room?’

‘Sure I have, Bernie,’ she studied their surroundings. ‘But most panic rooms I’ve seen tend to have a few more home comforts. Like a regular supply of oxygen.’

They were standing together in the centre of the safe. Whoever was outside had evidently come to the conclusion that he wasn’t likely to shoot his way into the safe, even with armour-piercing rounds, but in some ways the silence was more intimidating than the sound of bullets.

‘Excuse me.’ Bernie Hartmann put his hands on Danny Fisher’s arms and moved her so that he could see the rear wall of the safe. ‘Where is it? Ah, yes.’ He reached up to what looked like some kind of steel reinforcement and pulled. A second later the entire back wall slid silently to one side, revealing a narrow concrete passage complete with emergency lighting. ‘Would that be enough oxygen to satisfy you, Detective?’

For a moment his companions were too stunned to speak.

‘What is …?’

‘How did …?’

The old man led the way into the tunnel. ‘I have been preparing for this eventuality for something like fifty years, Mr Saintclair. As you may have gathered, I am something of an expert on safe design and security. It began as a necessity, became almost a hobby and it would have provided me with a very good living over the years, even without the help of Messrs Ritter and Himmler. When I bought this villa I carried out a number of modifications of which this is only one. It cost rather a lot of money and entailed the purchase of the neighbouring house but one, but I am a rich man and, although at times I wondered if I was merely indulging my paranoia, the thought of what would happen if Bodo Ritter caught up with me made the expense seem worthwhile. Our friends with the machine guns will now be wondering what to do, and while they are wondering we will make our escape. But I’m afraid Rolf’s death has affected my plans somewhat.’

Berndt Hartmann set a surprising pace for an old man, scuttling through the passage in a curious sideways gait that reminded Jamie of a land crab. It took them only two or three minutes to reach a metal door at the far end. Hartmann again fumbled with the keypad, muttering numbers to himself. The door opened inwards and they stepped through into the gloomy interior of what looked like a wooden garage, or an engineering shed. It was lined with tool benches, and the smell of engine oil and worked metal hung thick in the air. Facing them was a wide double door with a gap in the centre that allowed in a slanting shaft of light. The old man leaned against one of the benches breathing hard as Jamie and Danny ran to the door and Jamie put his eye to the gap.

‘What do you see?’