The Martyr’s Curse

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Silvie was very quiet as they drove away from the ruined cottage. ‘That was awful,’ she breathed at last, barely audible over the rumble of the Hummer’s engine.

Ben nodded. ‘Yes. It was.’ He reached the bottom of the track and turned left, back towards the little town they’d passed through on their way here.

Silvie watched the road for a minute, deep in thought, then turned to look at him with questioning eyes. ‘There was no other way, was there?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really.’

‘Are we bad people?’

‘Maybe,’ he said.

Saving the lives of the innocent is not something of which you should be ashamed, Père Antoine had said to him that day. But Ben was. He felt tainted by what he’d had to do. He knew he’d always feel that way. Because things weren’t about to get any better. The door was open now, and only darkness lay beyond it, waiting to swallow him up.

‘No,’ Silvie said resolutely, frowning and squeezing a fist, as if she was making a life-changing decision in which there was no room for self-doubt. ‘It just fell on us. It was our moral duty. You did the right thing, no question.’

Ben said nothing more until they reached the outskirts of the small town. They passed the pretty church and the first of the gingerbread houses, then came to the square where the flagpole stood, and next to it the three-pronged sign. Ben followed the direction for Ärztezentrum up a narrow, tree-lined street. The medical centre was a prim white cottage hospital, set off the road among neat lawns and trimmed hedges. Ben screeched the Hummer to a stop in the little car park outside and said, ‘Be right back.’ He jumped out, flung open the back and hefted Donath’s limp, unconscious form over his shoulder, carried him a few paces and dumped him on the grass within sight of the entrance. He walked back to the Hummer and they U-turned out of the car park with a squeal and a roar as the cottage hospital door burst open and two medical staff rushed out to attend to the unconscious man. The word ‘SCHWERVERBRECHER’, scrawled in marker pen across his forehead from temple to temple, was there to warn them that their patient was a dangerous criminal. But not even a tough guy like Miki Donath was going anywhere with two broken arms.

Driving fast through the little town, Ben made a ten-second call to Luc Simon, to tell him where the Swiss cops could find their missing fugitive. He could have told Luc where he was going from here, but had already decided that could wait.

Reaching the square, Ben checked the wooden sign again. This time, he took the direction for Bahnhof.

‘The railway station?’ Silvie said, turning to stare at him. ‘What do we need a train for?’

‘We don’t,’ Ben told her. ‘You do. This is where we part ways.’

She looked at him blankly. ‘Where am I going?’

‘Back to base. Home. Wherever you want, except where I’m going.’

‘Are you kidding me?’

‘I need to finish this by myself,’ he said.

‘You can’t leave me hanging.’

‘I can’t be responsible for what happens to you.’

‘Don’t patronise me.’ Her jaw clenched, making her face look tight and hard. ‘This wasn’t the deal, Ben.’

‘There is no deal,’ he said. ‘There’s just me and Streicher.’

‘And upward of a dozen more Parati, tooled up and ready to die to defend him.’

‘They’d better be ready to die,’ he said. ‘Because that’s what’s going to happen to them.’

‘You go in there alone,’ Silvie said, ‘you’d better be ready to die too.’