The Martyr’s Curse

Chapter Forty-Six

She stared at him. ‘Do what?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ he told her. ‘Point the damn rifle at me. Do it now. Quickly, and like you mean it.’ He dropped to his knees in front of her and put his hands behind his bowed head with his fingers laced together.

Silvie hesitated, but there was no time and no choice. She pointed the AK-47 at Ben’s head.

‘How the hell did they find us?’ she asked.

‘Don’t speak to me,’ he said.

At that moment, SWAT officers came thundering down the passageway with their machine guns raised. They reached the open doorway and burst into the room. Suddenly it wasn’t just one gun pointing at Ben, but ten or a dozen. He kept his head down and stared fixedly at the floor. Heard Silvie identify herself to them as a DGSI agent. Heard the SWAT team CO congratulate her on her good work and tell her they were taking over from here.

Then Ben was shoved down roughly to the floor and had his arms jerked behind his back. His wrists were bound with a plastic tie. He said nothing, and did nothing to resist them. They stripped out his pockets and even took Père Antoine’s little tonic bottle, handling it as though it was liquid nitroglycerine. Next he was being marched back along the floral passageway and down the stairs to the hallway, and out into the swirling blue lights and the sea of police vehicles. He glanced up the street and saw the armed cops circling the taxi. They had the driver trussed up flat on his face in the road, squirming like a grounded turtle and surrounded by guns while the bags were being removed from the back of the car. It wouldn’t be long before the cops let him go.

Ben wasn’t betting on the same happening to him.

How the hell did they find us?

He had no idea. But he was pretty certain it wouldn’t be long before he found out.

Six officers hustled him to a black police van. Its back doors were open. The rear compartment was a windowless steel cage. He was shoved and jostled towards it. Standard arrest procedure. But something wasn’t right. Ben could see it in the faces of the cops emerging from the house. He could see it in the way they were barking into their radios. A tone of urgency that was incongruous with a normal crime scene. Something was happening.

He looked around for Silvie but couldn’t see her. Where had they taken her?

In the final fleeting moment before they slammed him inside the cage, an unmarked panel van came speeding down the street with its headlights blazing and concealed blues flashing from behind its radiator grille and its siren shrieking. It was white, not black. Police vehicles moved smartly aside to let it through. It skidded to a halt outside the house. Its side door slid open and four men got out. They weren’t armed and they weren’t wearing police or SWAT uniform.

They looked like astronauts clambering out of a moon lander. Clad in shimmering silvery-white from head to toe, bulky full-body suits made of exotic space-age materials capable of withstanding any kind of nuclear, chemical or bacteriological contamination. The swirling blue lights reflected on their protective clothing and the thick visors that covered their faces. They were clutching cases of equipment in their heavily gauntleted hands.

A hazmat team.

There was no way they’d had time to respond to a radio call. They’d either been on their way already, or standing by a street or two away waiting for the order to move in.

As if they knew something. Which was a damn sight more than Ben did, at that moment. Back in the day, he’d seen hazmat suits deployed in combat zones thousands of miles away across the globe, during actual or anticipated chemical warfare attacks. Here, in the middle of a quiet residential area in a peaceful lakeside Swiss town, they were a shockingly incongruous sight.

Three more identical white vans came roaring down the street and screeched to a halt, nose to tail. And as they moved in, the police and SWAT units were clearing out. Fast. The street was too narrow for them to U-turn out of there. Transmissions whined under hard reversing and tyres squealed as they reached the top of the street and wrestled their vehicles around and sped off as though a megaton bomb was about to explode. The taxi driver and his Mercedes had already been whisked away into the night. Eight more of the shimmering, visored figures piled out of the white vans. One of them was waving his bulky, padded arms at the remaining cops on the scene and mouthing something urgently behind his mask, as if to say, Get the hell out of here NOW!

Then Ben saw no more. The doors slammed and he was closed in darkness. He heard running steps and the sound of more doors, and then felt the floor under his feet lurch violently as the vehicle took off. He sat on the hard bench inside the cage, tried to get as comfortable as possible with his wrists tied behind his back, and waited for whatever was going to happen next.

It was a longer wait than he’d expected. The motion of the van told him they were driving through the city, constantly shifting speed, braking and accelerating, pausing at lights, turning one way and the other. Ben assumed their destination was the nearest préfecture de police. Which shouldn’t be a long trip.

But instead, the van just kept going. The stop-start, left-right motion died away to a steady tempo, telling him they were heading out of the city on the open road. The unwavering engine note and the thrum of the tyres resonated through the bodyshell and the steel cage bars around him. Ben sat quietly in the darkness, rocking gently to the sway of the vehicle, feet braced against the opposite bench, wondering where he was being taken.

An hour passed by, time that Ben used to try and make sense of what he’d seen back there. It had looked as if the hazmat team were intent on shutting the whole street down. Unquestionably, it had to do with the two occupants of the safe house. One dead, the other dying. Whatever had made them sick, it was something serious and infectious enough to spark off a major emergency response.

Then he went on to think about Silvie and what the next stage would be for her. No doubt she was in for a long night with her DGSI superiors, going over every detail of her undercover mission leading up to the point when she’d been lured away and taken hostage, and everything that had happened since. Ben wasn’t worried about her ability to handle herself through it all. He wasn’t even all that worried about himself. There wasn’t a lot he could do, so why waste energy on fretting about the situation?

Another hour went by. The plastic cuffs were tight and chafed his wrists. His shoulders were screaming from the lactic acid build-up in his muscles. He breathed steadily through his nose and centred himself and managed to shut out the pain, but he couldn’t control the thoughts that kept flitting through his head. Memories of his time at the monastery. Playing chess with Père Antoine, feeding the animals with Roby. Something that Roby had said was nagging at him, but he couldn’t remember what or why. The memory hung there in the back of his mind, like a shadow, taunting him until he gave up trying to recall it. The mental tension just brought back the pain in his muscles. He closed his eyes, focused on his breathing and willed himself into a state of relaxation. Like a Zen master.

Except that Ben was no Zen master. But in time he settled and his muscles eased, his heartbeat slowed and he stopped thinking at all.

He was close to being asleep when the van finally reached the end of its journey. The rear doors opened and strong light flooded in, dazzling him after the long spell of darkness. He blinked at the two silvery-white-clad, visored figures who unlocked the cage and pulled him out. Six more were standing around the van, holding automatic weapons. The van had been driven inside a large empty space. Concrete walls, concrete ceiling, concrete pillars. A heavy-duty steel shutter had rolled down. Halogen spotlamps blazed from all around.

One of the men in hazmat suits stepped close behind him with a pair of cutters and snipped the tie binding his wrists while gun muzzles covered him from different angles. Then they closed around him in escort formation and marched him to a doorway in the concrete wall. Eight on one. He should be flattered. He rubbed his wrists and rolled his shoulders, felt the circulation returning to his stiff muscles.

The door led to a lift. Ben and his captors were whooshed up two, three, four, five floors. The lift glided smoothly to a halt and its doors hissed open to reveal a long, broad, bright corridor that definitely didn’t look like the inside of any police station Ben had seen, in any country. It looked more like a hospital, but one apparently with neither wards nor patients.

‘Where are we?’ he asked his escorts. No response.

He was pretty sure he knew the answer anyway. If it wasn’t a military establishment it was at the very least a government one. The kind of secure facility that was kept nicely quiet from members of the public; that was, until such time as their rulers saw fit to whisk them off at gunpoint in the dead of night too.

His guards walked him along the corridor, where they were joined by more men in identical suits but not carrying guns. Medical personnel, Ben thought, rather than security. They steered him towards a door with a sign that read DECONTAMINATION. One of them tapped a key code into a wall panel and the door slid open with a swish of hydraul-ics. They pushed him inside, and the door swished shut behind him.

The room was a tiled white cube, about two metres square. The outline of the doorway he’d just walked through was barely visible, as was the shape of another doorway opposite. Recessed spotlamps burned hot. The floor sloped gently down to a centre drain. As Ben gazed around him, a harsh voice from a hidden speaker ordered him in English to remove his shoes, his watch and his clothes. If there was a hidden speaker there was probably a hidden camera too, but Ben wasn’t bashful. His years of military service had removed those kinds of inhibitions. He kicked off his shoes, took off his jacket, then the shirt and jeans that Silvie had bought for him, then his socks, then his underwear. A sliding compartment opened in the tiled wall to his right. The same harsh voice ordered him to place the items inside. He did what he was told. There seemed little value in resisting. The compartment clicked shut.

A second later, a stunningly powerful spray of liquid showered down on him from a hundred concealed holes in the ceiling, making him gasp at its intensity and its coldness. It wasn’t water, but some kind of chemical wash that stung and seared his skin like ice. After five seconds, the shower stopped as abruptly as it had begun. He stood dripping and shivering, clutching at his sides. Then a concentrated hurricane-force blast of air hit him from all sides and pummelled him for ten more seconds. To his amazement, when it stopped he was totally dry, even his hair. The clothing compartment clicked back open. His things were gone. In their place was a hospital robe. The hidden voice told him to put it on. He reached inside and lifted it out. Clean, crisp cotton, soft and warm. He shrugged it over his head and let it fall down loosely around his body.

Then the opposite doorway hissed open. Ben took that as an invitation, and was happy to leave the white cube before it sprang any more surprises on him. He stepped through the doorway and it instantly hissed shut behind him.

He found himself in a strange kind of hospital room. The lights were bright and the air smelled of antiseptic. The room had a metal-framed bed made up drum-tight, a stand with bottles of drinking water and plastic cups in sealed bags, a wash unit and, in a nod to personal privacy that struck him as pretty insincere under the circumstances, a toilet with a wrap-around nylon curtain draped from a ceiling rail. Everything looked spotless and sterilised. The same gleaming white tiles covered the floor, ceiling and three of the room’s walls. The fourth consisted entirely of a panel of two-way mirror.

Ben immediately knew that every move he made was under constant surveillance.

He walked to the glass panel and rapped on it with his knuckles. It felt as thick and unyielding as armour plate. No point in trying to use the bed as a battering ram or ripping out the toilet bowl as a missile to smash his way out. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Where the hell am I? What’s going on here?’

No response.

Ben glared hard at the unseen faces he sensed were scrutinising him from the other side of the glass. Then he snorted in contempt and walked back to the bed and stretched out comfortably on it, figuring that he wasn’t going to give these people the pleasure of seeing him lose his temper or pace anxiously about the room like a caged tiger. He breathed slowly and let his muscles relax against the firm mattress. Closed his eyes.

The watchers remained silent and hidden.

They remained silent and hidden for the next twenty-four hours.