The Isis Covenant

XLIII

By the time they reached the Samsonov house it was close to midday. Jamie paid the taxi driver and Danny scouted the front of the complex, taking in the wall and the gates.

‘Maybe we should just knock,’ she suggested as Jamie joined her.

He studied the wires on top of the wall and the security cameras covering every angle of the approach. ‘The sign says vehicular access only,’ he pointed out. ‘It looks like they don’t encourage visitors who don’t have wheels. I have a feeling that if we walk up to that door on foot the only welcome we’ll get will be from the Russian equivalent of a Claymore anti-personnel mine.’

‘It would get their attention.’

‘Mm, but only for as long as it took to sweep up what was left into a plastic bag.’

‘Do you have a better idea?’

‘Not at the moment.’

He took her hand and led her across the road to the gate. Normally, there would have been some kind of speaker system where the visitor could talk to whoever controlled the entry but it seemed Oleg Samsonov, or whoever was protecting him, was a man of few words. The only sign of life was a blinking red light beneath the security camera covering the entrance. Tentatively, Jamie approached the door and knocked. He repeated the action, harder this time, grinned at the camera and pointed at the door.

‘Yeah, that should do it,’ Fisher said, but he didn’t think she meant it.

They stepped back and waited for a reaction, but the doors remained firmly closed.

‘It looks as if they’re not taking visitors today.’

‘There has to be another entrance.’

They walked parallel to the walls on the other side of the road.

‘Don’t you think it’s unusual that they haven’t come out to shoo us away?’

‘Maybe they get lots of visitors looking for a donation to the church Bring and Buy sale — like a yard sale,’ he said before she could ask. ‘Dear Mr Samsonov, the vicar and I wondered if you would like to contribute a couple of million to the spire restoration fund. Eventually they’d decide the best way is just not to answer the door at all. It works for me with Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons.’

‘If this is your way of putting me at ease, Saintclair, I think I prefer to be nervous.’

He took the hint and kept his mouth shut as they turned the corner and found another long stretch of wall that backed onto a road that ran along the outside of the park.

‘Do you see what I see?’

‘The camera?’

‘There’s one at this end and one at the other. The one in the middle can only be covering some kind of door.’

‘You think we’ll get a warmer welcome this time.’

‘If we don’t I may have to pole vault over that wall.’

‘Sure.’ She grinned, taking in the electrified razor wire along the top. ‘I’d like to see that.’

They stayed on the far side of the road and it was Danny who noticed it first. The door, a sort of modern postern gate, was set flush with the wall but a narrow line of darkness showed at the far edge.

‘Why would they leave it open?’

Jamie’s stomach turned to ice. ‘They wouldn’t.’ He glanced at the cameras at either end of the wall. ‘Just keep walking.’

They carried on until they were almost parallel with the doorway.

‘Maybe it’s on some kind of chain.’

‘Maybe.’ He took a deep breath. ‘There’s only one way to find out.’ He turned abruptly and walked straight towards the door. It was only open a few inches, so it was possible she was right, but he noticed something in the space at the bottom. At first he didn’t recognize it, but gradually his mind turned the jumble of angles and shadows into the sole of a shoe. He looked from the shoe to the eye of the security camera. If someone was watching him now, there was nothing he could do about it. But if someone was watching, why hadn’t they reacted to what was now becoming so obvious.

He felt Danny’s breath on the back of his neck and the moment she froze as she saw the foot that was blocking the door.

‘Stay here.’

‘When hell freezes over, Saintclair.’

He pushed the door a few inches to reveal the slumped body of a man lying where he’d toppled after the bullet that had cratered his head threw him back against the wall. By his side, just out of reach, lay the kind of fancy modern machine gun favoured by armed cops and the Special Forces. Danny Fisher rummaged in her bag and he thought he must be dreaming when she came out with a silenced automatic. The gun stirred a vague memory.

‘Where in the name of Christ did you get that?’

‘From the guy who tried to kill you.’ She shrugged. ‘I figured it might come in handy. Looks like I figured right.’

There were several things he might have said to that, none of them complimentary, but this didn’t seem the right time to mention them. Instead, he considered the door and what might be beyond it.

‘What would a New York cop do in a situation like this?’

‘She’d send in her partner to check out if the bad guy is still around?’

‘And if he is?’

‘Well, if things work out, I shoot him before he shoots you.’

Jamie took a deep breath. ‘I hope you’re a good shot?’

‘The best.’ She moved back, bringing the 9 mm up in a two-handed grip ready to cover him. ‘Stay low, Sherlock, and be fast.’ But he was already on the move, blasting through the door and throwing himself right in a shallow dive that took him across the body of the dead guard, picking up the sub-machine gun by its carrying sling as he went. A forward roll took him to the base of a cherry tree in the landscaped grounds and he brought the already cocked weapon to his shoulder ready to fire. The stubby barrel of the MP-5 quartered the surrounding area. Nothing. The ground floor of this side of the house was windowless, but the floors above seemed to be composed entirely of glass. A path led from the doorway he’d just come through to another in the wall of the building.

‘Clear,’ he called.

Danny moved cautiously through the door, pistol at the ready and her eyes alert for any movement. ‘You all right, Sherlock?’ she asked without looking at him.

‘Now I know what it feels like to be a duck in a fairground shooting gallery. What do you think?’

She thought about it for a moment, sniffing the air like an Indian tracker in a cowboy movie. ‘I think this is all wrong. We should be surrounded by now. Where are the rest of the guards?’ She moved back to the body and checked the throat for a pulse. When she was certain, she rummaged in the dead man’s pockets and threw a second magazine to Jamie. ‘We have a dead guy here who’s been gone for at least fifteen minutes. Why didn’t they react when he got hit? We have two gun-totin’ nobodies running around playing soldiers among the flower beds of a Russian billionaire who likes his privacy. Why aren’t we already dead or lying on the grass with the barrel of a Glock 17 in our ears?’

Their eyes turned simultaneously to the door at the end of the path. Fisher reached it first and studied the keypad set into the door jamb. ‘We don’t have the combination and this has got to be alarmed. Maybe we should try round the front?’

‘Too late to worry about that,’ Jamie said. ‘Stand back.’

Puzzled, she did as she was told, jumping as the unexpected staccato rip of the MP-5 announced that Jamie had decided on a more direct approach. It was a heavy door, constructed of wood and metal, but not armoured. The gun had been chambered for.40 Smith & Wesson rounds and twenty heavy bullets chewed through the approximate area of the lock. Jamie took his finger from the trigger and in time-honoured fashion put his boot to the door.

Danny stepped past him with her pistol at the ready and pointed at the top of the enclosed stairway in front of them. ‘Next time you try that, it would be nice to warn a girl, so she doesn’t have to change her underwear.’

The first thing they noticed was music, so loud that it assaulted their ears. Some sort of brash classical symphony that Jamie vaguely recognized, but couldn’t put a name to. They moved fast up the stairs to the second door. Jamie changed magazines and cocked the MP-5, but Danny Fisher pushed the door with the barrel of her pistol and it swung invitingly inwards. In front of them was a desk with a bank of monitors and an explosive pattern of blood on the wall beside it that told its own story. Jamie went first, taking in the body lying to his left in a pool of blood before Gerard came into view, his shattered head lying on the keyboard that controlled the monitors. It was obvious both men were dead.

‘Don’t touch anything,’ Danny warned unnecessarily, forced to shout over the rising tempo and volume of the music.

‘Tchaikovsky,’ Jamie shouted back.

‘What?’

‘The music. It’s Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. The one with the cannons.’

Danny glanced at the spattered remnants of Gerard’s brain on the wall. ‘As if this wasn’t already fucking insane enough.’

Beyond the second dead man a corridor led off towards the main part of the building. But there were more rooms that had to be checked before they could take it. When they reached the guards’ living quarters Danny stared at the bodies.

‘These guys are pros, but whoever did this took them out without blinking. The way I figure it is that the killer has got to be one of their own. It’s the only thing that fits. The guys at the top of the stairs were hit before they could even twitch. Looks like these two,’ she pointed at the men at the table, ‘didn’t even have time to go for their guns. The guy walks in. He smiles and heads for the kitchen. He reaches just about here.’ She turned and brought the gun up. ‘Pow, pow. By now the guard on the bed is reacting, but he’s not quick enough, or maybe it’s just that our guy is quicker.’

‘What about the guard at the gate?’

She took her time to think about it and eventually came up with the answer. ‘He didn’t hit him on the way in. He hit him on the way out.’

‘Then he already has what he came for.’

‘We don’t know that until we check, Jamie.’

But the certainty grew as they made their way through to the offices. The music had reached a quieter interlude and somehow their breathing and their steps slowed to match it, as if the reverence of the composer for his subject was reaching across the centuries. At first it appeared the offices were empty but the headshot that had taken out Samsonov’s secretary had left its telltale pattern on the wall and they found her body lying beside her desk.

‘Samsonov?’

‘This must be where he works. The rooms where he lives will be up those stairs.’

Jamie went first up the broad wooden stairway, with Danny covering him from a few steps behind. With every step he took, the music gained volume as it lifted towards a new crescendo and with it rose the level of his foreboding. If the killer was still here, this was where he would hit them, when they were out in the open. And if he did, Jamie knew he was as good as dead. This man was a marksman with the reactions of a striking cobra. He would hit what he fired at. Maybe Danny would get him afterwards, but Jamie doubted that. For a fleeting moment he wished the bullet-proof vest that Shreeves had sent him wasn’t sitting in a drawer in his flat. But he knew that he would have insisted Danny wear it even if he had brought it. As he reached the last few stairs the room opened up above him like a cathedral. It was vast. He crouched down, his eyes at floor level. A hundred hiding places in a space you could have played a football match in, and with room to spare. He reached forward with his left hand on the top step to steady himself and recoiled as his skin touched something cold and sticky. His fingers came away red. The view to his right had been obscured by the ornate carved banister and it was only now he registered the cube that dominated the centre of the floor and which corresponded with the one on the floor below. The only difference was that this one appeared to be open. Instinctively, he kept low and moved towards it.

The crash of a cannon made him flinch and he turned with his finger on the trigger of the MP-5 to find himself staring into Danny Fisher’s wide eyes. The music was everywhere around them, coming from a dozen speakers, possibly more than twenty all over the house to which it must be being somehow streamed. The killer could step up behind them and shout ‘boo’ in their ears before he shot them and they’d never hear a thing.

He angled his approach so that he was shielded from the open door of the panic room. In front of it, a big man whom he recognized as Oleg Samsonov was lying on his back with his eyes open in a wide pool of darkening blood that had poured from the gaping hole in his throat. Beside him, with her head on his chest, lay the body of a woman who must be his wife. Jamie felt Danny Fisher’s presence beside him, her body radiating the same conflicting emotions of rage and sorrow that racked him as he watched over a man and woman united forever in death. Belatedly he remembered that the couple had a young son, and he winced at what he might find in the safe room. He signalled Danny to stay back and stepped round the door with the MP-5 at the ready.

‘Bloody hell!’ His surprise was loud enough to compete with Tchaikovsky’s artillery barrage.

‘What is it?’ Danny demanded.

But Jamie found he couldn’t speak.

She joined him at the door. ‘There are enough dead people here to start our own funeral parlour and you’re excited about an old bunch of flowers?’

‘Not any old bunch of flowers.’ His voice was almost wistful, as if the golden glow of the Van Gogh had cast a spell on him. ‘If you want to join the world of the filthy rich all we have to do is pick up that painting and walk out of here. I know a man who would pay half a billion dollars for it, no questions asked.’

‘Snap out of it, Saintclair. If I wanted to be a crook I’d have done it years ago. The diamond’s gone, huh?’

Jamie had noticed the distinctive metal compartment beyond the stand holding the sunflowers, but he found it difficult to take his eyes off the canvas. His mind was a whirl of conflicting emotions: despondency at their failure, anger at the pointless deaths of the billionaire and his guards, fighting with the art lover’s joy of having a piece of pure genius more or less all to himself. Snap out of it, Saintclair. He shook his head to clear it.

‘It looks that way. Why don’t you see if you can put that racket off so we can hear ourselves think? I saw some sort of space-age sound system across in the corner that might be responsible.’

She opened her mouth to argue, but the look on his face changed her mind and she moved past him. He continued to stare at the painting and a few minutes later the music stopped abruptly.

‘It’s over then.’ Her voice sounded sharp-edged and loud in the silence. ‘We can’t just walk away.’

‘No.’ He was thinking that the boy was out there somewhere with the man responsible for all this. Responsible for how many deaths now? Why would he take the boy? Of course. The words came back to him. You must spill the blood of a first born of good family beneath the first light of the sickle moon. Only then will the gateway to the next life open.

He looked out of the window at the fading light. When was the new moon?

‘Oh Christ.’

‘What is it?’

‘The boy, how—’

A long drawn-out groan emerged from the woman draped over Oleg Samsonov.

‘She’s alive.’