The Isis Covenant

XXXVI

Paul Dornberger stared at the impenetrable steel door of the safe and felt a surge of fury. Hartmann and his two house guests were inside, he was certain of that, there was nowhere else they could be. The question was did the thief have the diamond with him, or had he used it years ago as collateral to fund his lavish lifestyle on two continents? No, he had to believe Hartmann still had the stone. It was here. He could feel it. He paced the room, avoiding the pile of six bodies sprawled in the pool of blood by the wall: the four Hartmann bodyguards and the two mercenaries who had been cut down during the assault. Dornberger knew he didn’t have time to attempt to open the safe, even if he had the expertise. In fact, he’d prepared for this outcome the moment he’d realized what Hartmann had done. That was why the bodies were here and two of his men were outside siphoning gasoline from the thief’s cars. If, by some miracle, Hartmann survived, he would go into deep hiding and take the diamond with him. That couldn’t be allowed to happen.

‘Burn the place, and be thorough. I don’t want one stick standing on another.’

The diamond would not be damaged in the safe, although its occupant certainly would. In the days after the fire, perhaps posing as insurance assessors, he would bring in a team of experts with the equipment to open it. This room would be buried by the floor above. Because it was cut into the hillside, sealed off by debris, it was unlikely the corpses would be discovered in the immediate aftermath. The cars would be made to disappear, making it seem the house had been empty.

The only thing that bothered him was why an intelligent, and, yes, cunning man like Hartmann should choose to lock himself into a trap. But he consoled himself with the thought that Berndt Hartmann knew exactly what kind of people he was dealing with, and that made his choice very logical indeed.

He walked away as the first flames began consuming the dead.

Jamie gazed across the broad expanse of gravel separating the garage from a fine white house by the lake shore. Water streaked by the last shreds of golden fog. A shallow bay with a long jetty.

And …

‘Is that yours?’

Danny Fisher forced her way to the door and looked through the crack at the white float plane anchored in the bay two boat lengths from the end of the jetty. Bernie had recovered sufficiently to join them. He held a set of keys in his hand. ‘It’s mine.’ He nodded sadly. ‘But I’m afraid it’s not much use without Rolf to fly it.’

‘I can fly it.’ The two men turned to Danny, varying degrees of disbelief written on their faces. ‘It’s been a while, but I can fly her,’ she insisted. ‘She’s a Cessna. Not too much different from the Beaver I piloted for a couple of seasons up in New York State. Plenty of take-off room. All we have to do is haul her in, start her up and we’re out of here.’

‘Couldn’t we just jump in a car?’ Jamie said warily.

‘I’m afraid this is all I have, Mr Saintclair.’ Bernie handed Danny Fisher the keys. ‘If you fly north-east for the Bodensee, I have a mooring near Eriskirch south of Friedrichschafen.’

Paul Dornberger heard the roar of the Cessna’s engine above the Zodiac’s muffled 75 horsepower outboard and some sixth sense told him instantly what had happened. He screamed at Sergei to turn the Zodiac towards the sound and cocked his machine pistol. By now the mansion house was well alight and thick smoke billowed across the lake, covering the approach of the plane.

Sergei gunned the engine and followed by the second boat they curved southwards.

Danny Fisher ignored the impatience of her two passengers and methodically went through her pre-flight checks. It had been ten years since she’d flown a plane like this and though everything seemed familiar enough she didn’t want to take any chances. When she was ready, she opened the throttle and nudged the Cessna into motion. The propeller transformed into a spinning wheel of black bars and she worked the flaps to get a feel for them as the twin floats cut through the placid surface of the lake. Gradually, their speed increased and the plane began to buck, because although the waves were small, they existed and they were solid things. Gently, she twitched the wheel to compensate. She sensed Jamie glance at her.

‘If you want to fly this thing, Saintclair, why don’t you just take over?’

Second by second the engine sound built up to a roaring crescendo, the black bars of the props turned into silver discs and the trees began to rush past in a blur.

‘What’s that?’ Bernie Hartmann squeaked from the rear seat as he struggled out of the bulky bullet proof vest.

A band of white rolled across the lake to their front.

‘A fog bank?’

‘You don’t get fog banks on the lake, just a covering in the morning.’

‘Christ!’ Jamie followed Bernie’s pointing finger. The Hartmann house was bathed in a red glow, with fire swirling from every window.

The plane rushed towards the wall of smoke at a hundred knots, but they were only halfway into their run and Danny knew she still didn’t have enough take-off speed.

‘What should I do?’

Two low shapes burst from the smoke away to their right to answer her question. Men lay in the bows of each and she could see the twinkle of muzzle flashes as the assault boats turned towards the Cessna. Calmly, she opened the throttle as wide as it would go and the plane thrust forward. If the water had been any choppier the Cessna would have been in danger of yawing off line and flipping over, but it was a chance she had to take. Her course took her at an angle away from the boats and for the moment they hadn’t got her range. Now, it depended on just how fast and how good they were. A line of water spouts appeared in front of the nose and a bullet spanked off some part of the plane. Belatedly, Jamie remembered he still had the Uzi and grabbed for the side window.

‘You won’t …’ Danny shouted.

But someone, probably the late Rolf, had foreseen just this situation and removed the screw that locked the window in flight. It lowered easily. Jamie knew he had little chance of hitting anything, but no one liked being shot at and it might put them off their aim. He let off a burst with the distinctive buzz-saw rip of an automatic weapon. The boats were at the outer limits of the Uzi’s effective range, and at an angle of about seventy degrees, but he was pleased to see his bullets strike twenty metres in front of the first boat, which swerved and lost ground.

Paul Dornberger cursed at Sergei to resume the chase and tried to line up the plane in his sights. The target was ten times the Zodiac’s size, but, if anything, his chances of hitting it were lower than Jamie’s in a bucking assault boat with the angles changing with every passing millisecond. All he could do was fire bursts in the general direction and hope for a hit that would disable the plane. The gunfire confirmed that Berndt Hartmann was aboard. Dornberger still couldn’t understand how he’d escaped the house. However he’d done it, the crafty old bastard must have moored the plane within a few hundred metres, probably with the crew in residence. Spray half-blinded him, but when it cleared he had a good view of the plane in profile. If they were going to bring it to a stop it was now or never. He lined up as best he could on the window where the firing was coming from and in an instant of freeze-frame clarity the features behind the gun came into focus.

‘Cease firing.’ He signalled to the second boat to cut its engine.

Jamie whooped as he saw the assault boats slow in the water, but Danny only had eyes for the smoke. From where she was sitting it looked like a solid wall and she knew that at this speed if anything was hidden in its depths they were all dead. As they hit the cloud, the cabin filled with the stink of burning. For a moment she feared the plane was on fire before she remembered the hammer of Jamie’s Uzi.

‘Shut that goddam window.’

As she spoke, the smoke cleared and they were through and unscathed, with the lake stretching ahead of them cobalt blue in the winter sun. She pulled back on the control column and the bumping gradually faded as they took to the air.

‘Bernie?’

Danny heard the fear in Jamie’s voice and her heart came close to stopping. She half-turned to see the old man slumped forward with his eyes closed. Jamie unbuckled himself and forced his way through the narrow gap between the seats. At first, he could see no obvious wound and the only indication of Bernie Hartmann’s plight was the grey shadow across his face and the shallowness of his breathing. It was only when he pulled back the dark jacket that he saw the red stain spreading across the old man’s shirt. It took him a second more to find the tear in the silk and the wound six inches below Hartmann’s right arm. At first he was encouraged that it was too small to have been caused by a bullet. Then he saw the splash of light where the round had entered the fuselage sending splinters of metal through the plane at lethal velocity. The bullet had missed Bernie and exited out of the far side, but one of the splinters had carved its way through flesh and bone. Only God knew how deep.

‘We have to get him to a hospital,’ he told Danny. ‘He needs help and quickly.’

She nodded. By now they were passing over Zurich and she brought the plane round back towards the lake.

With a gasp of pain, Bernie Hartmann raised himself. ‘No hospitals,’ he hissed. ‘Bernie Hartmann’s been shot before. He’ll be okay. You head Constance. Maybe see a doctor there.’ They looked at each other, but before they could make a decision, the old man barked: ‘Whose fucking airplane is this, anyway, huh?’

Reluctantly, Danny set a course for the Swiss-German border, putting the plane into a climb. Jamie wrapped his jacket around the old man and settled in beside him for the flight. ‘Hold on, you tough old bastard,’ he whispered.

They flew on in silence for a while until they hit turbulence and the plane bucked like a rodeo pony, making Hartmann cry out.

‘I don’t like this, Jamie,’ Danny said softly. ‘What do we do when we get to the lake?’

‘I suppose we do what he says. Find a doctor and get him fixed up. Then try to get back to London.’

‘I tell you what to do.’ Bernie Hartmann had been listening to every word. ‘You go back to England and you settle with Bodo Ritter, once and for all.’ Despite his weakness, he managed to give the final four words special emphasis and it confirmed something that had been burrowing away at Jamie’s brain since their discussion the previous evening.

‘You knew, didn’t you? About the Crown of Isis and what it can do? You talked of the Eye and you couldn’t have known about the Eye unless Ritter told you about it.’

Bernie shook his head, but his eyes didn’t open. ‘Not knew. Guessed. Even Bodo couldn’t always live with the things he did. He was like two different men. The Devil who was capable of any torture or cruelty reigned within him, but occasionally another man would appear, brooding over what he’d done. The second Bodo would drink to forget. Usually it didn’t affect him and he would sit there with eyes that haunt me to this day. Eyes filled with the accumulated terror and pain of his victims. If there is one thing that sustains me, it is that for men like Bodo Ritter there is always a reckoning. But sometimes the brandy would anaesthetize him against his horrors and he would become voluble and almost friendly. A rattlesnake with a smile. And on those occasions he would choose Bernie as his friend. One night, after some butchery or other, he began to play the What If? game. What if you could live for ever, Bernie? What if you possessed something that would make death an irrelevance? Then he said something even more odd. How can I, who has stood beside popes and kings and matched minds with Machiavelli, be reduced to a mere butcher and a leader of thieves? I dismissed it as a crazy man’s fantasy. A Crown and an Eye. He was clearly mad. But gradually I realized that his madness and whatever was in the surgeon’s bag were linked. He never let it out of his sight until those final days and when he thought he was alone, he spoke to it as if it were listening to him. It sends a shiver through me even now. But I never believed it had power, until I saw it for myself.’

‘Not something you would give up lightly.’

‘No. He would have killed me there and then, Captain Tokarev, if I hadn’t told him the rest. I don’t think he believed me, but he was intrigued enough to take me to the place where I’d hidden the stone.’

‘And then he tried to kill you?’

‘It was the chance you took.’

‘So apart from you and Bodo Ritter, one other man knows the potential of the Crown of Isis, and that man has the Eye.’

Bernie Hartmann nodded weakly and coughed. Small bubbles of blood appeared between his lips.

‘Can we go any faster? I think he’s been hit in the lung.’ He didn’t need to say what effect the wound would have on a man Hartmann’s age.

‘I’m doing what I can,’ Danny insisted testily. She had another, more pressing, problem. They had started out with a full load of gas, but now it was less than a quarter full and draining fast. The only explanation was a bullet through one of the tanks, or more likely a lucky shot hitting a fuel line. If that was the case, they were fortunate to be still in the air, and not a ball of fire hurtling towards the ground, but time was running out with every drop of aviation fuel they lost. She studied the map on her knee. Lake Constance was still twenty miles away. No hope of reaching there. She altered course northwards. If she couldn’t get to the main lake, maybe she could reach the leg of the upper lake which eventually became the Rhine.

Jamie noticed the change of direction and leaned forward between the seats. ‘Change of plan?’ She pointed to the fuel gauge. ‘Shit.’

‘Right on the money again, Sherlock. We need to find somewhere to put down. Fast.’

He studied the ground from the plane’s windows. ‘That might constitute a problem …’

‘Seeing how this is a float plane …’

‘And I can’t see any water. How long?’

The answer was she had no idea. Minutes, but possibly less. The low fuel light came on but she had no idea how much range it gave her. All she knew was she had to land the first chance she got. She dared a glance at the map again. Her eyes locked onto two barely visible blue spots a few miles south of the point where the Rhine flowed from the upper lake.

‘Get him strapped in. We’re going down.’

‘Where?’ he demanded.

‘There.’ She pointed to what looked like a silver coin in the landscape about two miles ahead.

‘It looks like a puddle.’

‘Well, it will have to do. How’s Bernie?’

Jamie felt pressure from the fingers holding his hand. ‘He’s still with us, but I’m not sure how long he has.’

He bent over the old man to fasten his seat belt. With an enormous effort Bernie Hartmann lifted his head and his eyes opened. Jamie saw his lips move, but the words were less than a whisper and he had to put his face next to the old man’s to hear what he was saying.

‘You remember what I said,’ he wheezed. ‘You find Bodo Ritter and you kill him. Tell him Bernie Hartmann will be waiting for him in hell.’

With the final word, the fingers on Jamie’s hand tightened convulsively. Bernie Hartmann gave the weary sigh of a man who has suffered enough and was gone.

‘He’s dead.’

Danny nodded distractedly, already concentrating on her descent. The lake looked like a postage stamp from up here. Ideally, she would have banked and come in from the east, where there were fewer trees, but the fuel gauge read empty and she couldn’t take the risk. She guessed it would be just wide enough to squeeze the Cessna in, but guesswork wasn’t the best criteria to fly by. ‘You’d better get over here and belt up. This could be a bumpy ride.’

Jamie clambered into the front to take his place beside her. He hadn’t realized just how small the lake was until now.

She read his mind. ‘If I tried to put this thing down on one of those ploughed fields down there we’d be joining Bernie before he even reached the Pearly Gates, and they wouldn’t need to dig our graves, because we’d already be six feet under.’ The water was flat calm and wind conditions good, but they were the only things in her favour. She came in as low as she dared, using a red farmhouse as her aiming point. As soon as she was over the trees she knew she was too high and coming in too fast. Jamie gripped the door handle with one hand and the seat with the other and braced himself for the impact. The plane was already at maximum flaps and she instinctively throttled back to get the lowest possible landing speed. The effect was to make the Cessna land tail down and instead of cruising forward and being slowed by the water she bounced and gained speed. Somehow she managed to regain control, but when they landed a second time she knew it was already too late. The trees on the far side of the lake hurtled towards them.

‘Brace for crash.’

Jamie had the impression of the world turning a somersault at the same time as gravity tried to tear him apart. The safety harness cut into his stomach and chest as the floats smashed into the bank and the Cessna went up on its nose. Suddenly the engine was screaming and shards of propeller flashed past inches from his face, accompanied by the sound of tearing metal as a tree branch penetrated the tail and came within six inches of taking off his head. All his weight was being carried by the strap and everything movable in the cockpit fell past him.

A momentary silence, as if the whole world had decided to stand still, was replaced by the creaking groan of crumpling aluminium alloy, and the ticking of red-hot engine parts. ‘Get out!’ Danny’s shout startled him into motion. The Cessna had settled upside down and slightly on its side, and he noticed his door had burst open. He hit the quick release on the belt to drop nose first onto the roof of the plane and scrambled clear through the opening. He hesitated a few feet from the wreck, waiting to help if she became trapped.

‘Don’t be an idiot. She could blow any minute. Get the hell out of here.’ The Cessna’s tanks were close to empty, but the vapour from aviation fuel is more combustible than the fuel itself and ruptured gasoline lines and red-hot engine parts do not make a good combination.

‘Bernie …’ Jamie turned back towards the plane, but Danny knocked the feet from under him just as there was a soft ‘whump’ followed by a fireball that engulfed the Cessna, igniting the tree branches above and generating enough heat to singe the hair from his forearms.

‘Jesus …’

‘Let’s hope so,’ Danny said, staring at the burning aircraft. ‘But with Bernie it’s kinda difficult to know for sure.’

They scrambled away from the wreckage and sat against the base of a tree, hypnotized by the flames that consumed the Cessna and the earthly remains of Berndt Hartmann; thief, safecracker, SS veteran and millionaire philanthropist. Smoke billowed through the trees and up into the heavens. Jamie found himself hoping it was carrying the diminutive German’s soul to be with his God, but part of him couldn’t escape the image of smoke from a crematorium chimney. He shivered as the sound of a child’s scream split the air, but when he looked up all he could see was a passing gull.

When he turned to Danny, tears were rolling down her cheeks. They reached for each other and he tasted the salt on her lips. ‘If we hang around here, we’re going to have to explain this,’ he said as gently as he was able. ‘They’ll keep us for days, maybe weeks, and when we finally get out those guys back in Zurich are going to be waiting for us.’

‘Maybe that would be a good thing?’ She stifled a sob. ‘It’s odds-on that the men who killed Bernie are the same ones who murdered those people in New York and London. If we can persuade the Swiss authorities …’

He shook his head. ‘You saw the kind of firepower they had. If they wanted us they’d get us and they wouldn’t worry about who they shot along the way. The only chance we have is to fight them on our own ground and at a time of our own choosing. We’ll get another chance, but enough people have died already. I think we should walk away. Act like a couple who’ve lost their way. We’ll eventually find a bus or a cab.’

She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. It wasn’t much of a plan, but for the moment she couldn’t come up with anything better. ‘All right, there’s nothing to connect Jamie Saintclair or Danny Fisher to the plane. It’s going to be days before they figure out why there’s only one piece of charcoal in there. We can go back to London. Regroup.’

‘Not London.’

‘But you said—’

‘I know, but I think I’ve had one of those epiphanies Bernie mentioned. What’s this all about?’

‘The Crown of Isis,’ she said without hesitation.

He shook his head. ‘It’s not about the Crown. The Crown is nothing without the Eye. This is about the Eye of Isis. And what’s the Eye?’

He read the anger in her eyes, but he persisted.

‘The Eye is a diamond.’

‘Exactly and if you want to know about a diamond, you go to the experts.’

‘Won’t the opposition have done that already?’

‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘But maybe they don’t have access to the experts I have.’

‘So where do we go?’

‘Where else but the diamond capital of the world? Antwerp.’