The Lost Testament

76

‘So what do we do now?’ Angela asked. ‘Have you had any good ideas?’

Bronson didn’t reply for a few moments, just stared at the map of Madrid.

‘Right now, Angela, I don’t know what’s a good idea and what isn’t. But I do know that striking early is generally a good tactic. Think about it from the other side of the problem for a moment. The people who are trying to kill you and recover the parchment absolutely know that they’ve got us on the run. OK, there was a bit of a fiasco as far as they were concerned at the café. Unfortunately for them, I was there as well. But that didn’t really even slow them down. They tracked us to our hotel and sent along another hitman to finish off the job. We were lucky, because we’d already left the room and were on our way to the car when he identified us.’

He paused for a moment and glanced at Angela.

‘Given that all that’s happened today, I’m prepared to bet that the bad guys are still out combing the streets of Madrid looking for us, and they’ll be doing their best to make sure that we can’t leave the city. They’ll have a watch in place inside both the airports, and at the main railway station, and they’ll be looking out for the first sign that we’re on the move. In other words, they’ll be doing whatever they can to lock the city down tight, and they seem to have the resources necessary to achieve that.’

‘So you mean that if we try to go anywhere, they’ll find us?’ Angela asked.

But Bronson shook his head.

‘Not necessarily. My guess is that they’ll be expecting us to try to leave town. But they don’t know about Billy the Kid, and what he managed to do with a wireless network, a laptop computer, a handful of programs and some pretty dammed awesome hacking skills. They won’t have any idea that we know where they are. And even if they did have the slightest inkling of that, I think the last thing they would expect us to do is take the game to them.’

‘Attack is the best form of defence?’

‘Exactly. I think we should get out to this location that Billy managed to identify for us’ — Bronson tapped the map for emphasis — ‘and see what we can do there. At the very least,’ he finished, ‘that’ll be the last place in Madrid where they’ll be looking for us.’

Angela glanced at her watch.

‘Just one question,’ she said. ‘How do we get out there?’

‘I’m not sure we should be going anywhere. I’d far rather you stayed in the hotel. They can’t possibly have found out that we’re staying here, so you’d be safe.’

Angela shook her head.

‘I’ll make this really simple for you,’ she said. ‘If you’re going out, then so am I. There’s no way I could just sit here in this hotel room waiting for a knock on the door, hoping it’s you and dreading that it isn’t. And if you don’t come back, then what the hell would I do? No, if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it together, whether you like it or not.’

Sometimes wisdom lies in recognizing a fait accompli when you see one. Bronson knew that Angela was one of the most determined people he had ever met. And, in truth, in many ways he would rather that she was with him — in previous sticky situations she’d always proved a competent partner.

‘OK, if that’s what you want,’ Bronson said.

‘It is. So how do we get out there? Use the hire car?’

‘We’re not going anywhere near that car. If we drive around in that there’s a good chance we’ll be spotted by one of the bad guys out looking for us, or maybe even stopped by the police, because that car’s missing two windows and there’s a gouge in the roof where I scraped it when we drove out of the hotel garage. We’ll have to hire another one.’

‘Right then,’ Angela said. ‘Let’s go. What about the parchment and our stuff?’

Bronson glanced round the room.

‘I think we have to leave it here. There’s no paper trail linking us to this hotel or this room, so it should be safe enough. And we’ll need to come back here afterwards.’

Bronson spent a couple of minutes using a cheap multitool he’d bought at Madrid airport to remove the plastic side panel from the bath, and then Angela slid the metal-lined briefcase into the space this revealed. Bronson replaced the panel and then fiddled about with some oversized paperclips he took from his computer case, bending them into different shapes.

‘And they are?’ Angela asked, as he slid them into his pocket.

‘Door keys, of a sort. Just some rudimentary lock-picks in case they’re not obliging enough to have left a door open for me.’

Finally, he checked the Beretta pistol. It was the M92 model in nine-millimetre Luger, the end of the barrel threaded to take a GemTech Trinity suppressor. Bronson checked the magazine.

‘Definitely a professional,’ he murmured.

‘What?’

Bronson showed her the magazine.

‘This holds fifteen rounds,’ he said, ‘and the man who shot at you fired twice, but there are fourteen bullets left. That means he fully loaded the magazine, then chambered the first round, took out the magazine and placed another round in it. So he had one round in the breech and ready to fire, and a full magazine in the butt. That’s the mark of a professional. You were very lucky.’

Angela gave a shiver.

‘You don’t have to remind me,’ she said. ‘I can still see that man in my mind’s eye.’

Bronson slid the magazine into the pistol, pulled back the slide and released it, to load the first round, then removed the magazine and placed it in his pocket. Then he inserted the full magazine, giving him a maximum of sixteen shots. The suppressor made the weapon far too bulky to be concealed, so Bronson removed it and slipped it into another pocket on his jacket. He tucked the pistol into the waistband of his trousers, made sure that it was invisible under his jacket, and then glanced across at Angela.

‘Right,’ he said, then echoed her statement of a few minutes earlier. ‘Let’s go.’