Death in High Places (23 page)

“
You'll
sort it out?” hooted Horn. “A man who uses other people as a fire wall between him and his own genetics is going to have a quiet word with another man who had only contempt for his son when he was alive and, when he was dead, sent a hit man after his best friend. And then everything will be all right, will it? Tommy Hanratty will send me a Sorry I Tried to Kill You card and a nice bottle of wine; his hit man will quietly pack up his arsenal and go home; and your crazy daughter will stop blaming me for the fact that Patrick wanted me in his bed and not her!”

McKendrick's voice was like gravel—cold, sharp and gray. “What you don't understand, Nicky, is that, finally, everything comes down to money. If it's going to take blood money to get you out of this, I'll pay it.”

Nicky Horn was born a physical being. He was up on his feet and, yes, climbing long before anything recognizable as words were coming from his mouth. At school he excelled at sports, dragged his feet through everything else except woodwork. Even the job he did depended, to an unusual degree in these mechanized days, on the strength of his muscles and the skill of his hands.

In spite of that, he was never a violent man. Perhaps he'd always known that if you hit a man with a fist made of fingers that could, jammed into a crevice of rock, hold the entire weight of your swinging body, he was going to stay hit. A few years ago, before fear and exhaustion took their toll, he'd been quick to anger, too ready with a hot retort. But he'd never used his fists.

There's a first time for everything. He'd never have a better excuse; indeed, he might never have another opportunity. Maybe he wasn't firing on all cylinders, but he put everything he had behind his strong left arm and had the satisfaction of seeing Robert McKendrick stagger backward across his hall with an expression of utter amazement stamped on his face and blood spurting from his nose.

“You
arrogant
bloody man,” he snarled while McKendrick sprawled on the floor, groping for a piece of furniture that would help him to rise or at least remind him which way was up. “You really think that everything can be bought, don't you? Everything can be paid for. Which makes you no better than Tommy Hanratty, or even any different. You both think you're entitled to anything you want, to use people any way that suits you. At least he's an honest thug—he doesn't pretend to be anything else. He never lied to me. He said he'd get me one way or another, and that's what he's done. He never pretended to be my friend. He never pretended that he wanted to help me.”

Despairing of finding his handkerchief—of even finding his pockets while his head was swimming like this—McKendrick smeared the blood from his mouth with a sleeve. His voice was thick, with shock and contempt.

“Grow up, Nicky. Yes, I tricked you—but, God, you made it easy. Did you really think a total stranger would risk his own life to save you? Look at you—you're nothing. You weren't much before Patrick died, now you're an itinerant workman living just one step above the gutter. No one will even notice if you disappear. Hanratty won't have policemen beating down his door and reporters camped outside his gate. Fifteen years down the line someone making a documentary about death in the mountains might wonder what happened to you, but even he won't go to much trouble to find out. You're not important, not to anyone.

“I could have given you a better life than that. I still can. Sneer at my money if you want to, but be honest—the only people who claim money doesn't matter are those who haven't got any. I have a lot. I can use some of it buying your freedom. I can find someone Hanratty respects, or fears, or owes something to, and buy his help. I can pay off the contract and make sure Hanratty doesn't take out another one. I probably can't make him like you, but I can stop him killing you. With money.

“The deal is what it always was. I have money to spare, and you have time. You want to do a trade? But think carefully before you hit me again. I can find someone else to do what I need doing. And I don't think you can.”

Horn went on staring hotly at him, but his fists stayed by his sides. He was used to being out of his depth. He hadn't touched bottom since that night on Anarchy Ridge. Even the sensation of going down for the third time was nothing new. But he hadn't known, until just now, how very differently the other half lived. Whatever McKendrick thought, it wasn't the money that separated his world from Horn's, it was the way those who lived there looked at things. Everything had a price, and nothing had much value.

Horn had wanted to believe—on a good day,
had
believed—that there were decent people out there, people who did things because they were right rather than merely expedient, and that if he could stay ahead of Hanratty's money, one day he'd find people who'd help him without asking what was in it for them. Because even the life of a traitor shouldn't be bartered on the open market.

Last night, in the alleyway, he thought he'd finally found one of them. But like Tommy Hanratty, like Hanratty's hit man, all along McKendrick had been looking at him with pound signs in his eyes. What he could be bought for, how dear he could be sold. When he realized that, something died in him. Hope.

He wasn't even afraid anymore, or only in the generic way that everyone is afraid of death. It was that close, that inevitable. “Mr. McKendrick, I don't think I can afford to have you doing me any more favors. Open the door and let's end this farce.”

The older man recoiled as if Horn had spat in his face. “Don't be stupid. It isn't over. We know Beth's safe enough—she's Hanratty's informant. We have time to work out what to do next. Who to call. How to play this.”

It seemed to Horn that finally he saw Robert McKendrick clearly. Not as a savior, not as a monster—as a trickster. He played Monopoly with real money and forgot that for the people on the board it wasn't a game. There was no get-out-of-jail-free card.

“Play it?” Horn echoed. “What do you think this is, a hand of poker? Amateur dramatics? No one else is playing at anything. Your daughter wasn't playing when she phoned Tommy Hanratty, and the man out there isn't playing now. This is for real. You've spent too much of your life in boardrooms, where arrogant, greedy men make the kind of mistakes that bring countries to their knees and still walk away with their pockets full. You should have been climbing mountains instead. You make a mistake on a mountain, you're probably going to die. It focuses the mind wonderfully. It stops you thinking that, if things go wrong, you can always cash in your chips and start again.

“Well, I did make mistakes on Anarchy Ridge. I got a lot of things wrong. One was, I should have died there. That was the place I should have ended—clean and cold, with a mountain for a gravestone. Whether or not it was an accident, Patrick's fall wasn't the worst thing that could have happened. Only we should both have died that day. There was nothing for either of us anywhere else.

“I begged him. Beth asked me that and I denied it, but she was right. I begged him to cut the rope. I tried to pull him up, and when I couldn't I begged him to cut himself loose. So I wouldn't have to. I didn't know then and I still don't know if I could have done it. Maybe Patrick knew. Maybe that's why he cut it. He wanted us to die together. But maybe he hadn't realized how much I wanted to live. So much that any kind of a life, even the life of a coward, seemed worth having.

“But he was right and I was wrong. I've had four years that he didn't have, and there wasn't a day in all that time that was worth leaving him on the mountain for.” Horn sucked in a deep breath and straightened up. “Now open the door. I can't turn the clock back, but maybe that doesn't matter. I don't suppose time has much meaning for the dead. Patrick was right, and he's going to get what he wanted.”

Finally McKendrick was seeing Horn clearly too. Not a pawn but a human being: hurt, damaged, but still imbued with a kind of inalienable dignity. For the first time in years he felt ashamed of his behavior.

“Nicky, you don't know what Patrick wanted! You don't know what he did. All these suppositions, you've cobbled them together in the light of what happened and the guilt that you feel. But if he cared for you, why would he want you dead? And if he did, just fleetingly, just long enough to commit to one irrevocable action, he thought better of it. Even while he was hanging there. He cut the rope. That's all you need to know. He cut the rope. He didn't want you to die then, and he wouldn't want you to die now. He'd want you to keep fighting until you found a way off this mountain too.

“I can help you.” There was an intensity in McKendrick's tone that suggested he really meant it. “I know I can put the deal together. This is what I do, remember? I manufacture deals involving people with diametrically opposed interests, and I do it so well they all go away thinking everyone round the table had to compromise except them. I can get Tommy Hanratty off your back. I'm not going to watch you throw your life away when I know that all I need is an hour with the phone and we'll all be safe. Go back in the kitchen. Let me do what I do best.”

And Horn thought that finally McKendrick was being honest with him. Now that it was too late. “Beth…”

McKendrick shook his head. “Beth doesn't get a say in this. When it's all sorted, she and I are going to have a long discussion about what she's done. I don't know what came over her. I understand that she was hurt by Patrick's death, and again by finding you here, and some of the things you've said didn't exactly help. But to deliberately try to get someone killed … I don't know. Maybe she needs to talk to someone.”

Horn wasn't even listening. He was staring at the screen. Shock emptied his voice. “You said he wouldn't hurt her…”

When McKendrick realized what Horn was saying, he spun back to the monitor.

The man in the courtyard had finally run out of patience.

 

CHAPTER 15

A
T FIRST SHE DIDN'T STRUGGLE
because she thought it was all part of the pantomime. She tried to look frightened—it wasn't difficult, surrendering herself to the hands of a man who killed for money would have made anyone nervous—and hoped her father would give in before she got a stiff neck. She wondered about squealing a little, or whimpering, but she was afraid of over-egging the cake. She always felt Mack didn't really know her well, but he knew her better than that. She wasn't a whimpering sort of girl. She was a knee-in-the-groin sort of girl. A climber. Maybe not in the same class as Patrick and Nicky Horn, but a climber nonetheless.

Which is how she came to be in the courtyard. Hanratty's man hadn't broken in and got her: she'd climbed down, from her room beside William's, above the lockdown. While McKendrick was in the hall she couldn't raise the shutters, but that wasn't a problem for someone who knew how to rappel and kept her old ropes coiled in a rucksack at the bottom of her wardrobe.

She could have waited. Like Horn, she believed that a professional would breach any security sooner or later. But she also believed, like McKendrick, that the longer the hit man could be kept at bay, the greater the chance of something happening to alter the balance of power. Her father was pinning his hopes on it. Beth wasn't willing to take the risk.

So she dropped herself easily down the side of the castle, bringing her rope after her. Later, she knew, Mack would want to know why. The best she could come up with right now was that she'd seen a chance to get past the waiting man and taken it, only to find herself trapped. Mack might wonder about her motives, but she was hoping he'd be so relieved when the siege ended without any harm coming to his family that he wouldn't inquire too deeply.

A quick confab with Hanratty's man out of sight of the remaining cameras, then they took their places in the courtyard and waited to be noticed. As she waited, Beth pictured the scene inside the hall. Mack would be watching the screen intently and racking his brains. But she was confident he wouldn't think of anything that would enable him to rescue her and keep Horn safe. She had only to stay calm, avoid doing anything stupid, and wait. Wait for the security shutters to rise and the front door to open.

Though Beth didn't expect her father to sue for peace as soon as he saw what had happened, Hanratty's man seemed to. He hissed in her ear, “What are they
doing
in there?” and she sighed and said, “Arguing, probably.”

“About whether your life is worth more to him than Horn's?” The man was obviously shocked.

“About whether there's another way to handle this. Mack hates being beaten. He won't give in to threats until he's convinced himself there's no alternative. He was never going to fling the door wide as soon as he saw I was in trouble.”

The man shook his head in a kind of wonder. “Other people's families…!” As if he considered himself a pillar of society except for the minor detail of being a hired killer.

“Give him time. He's arrogant, not stupid. When he sees he has no choice, he'll do what he has to.”

They weren't exactly whispering, because there was no sound pickup on the security cameras. They were talking without moving their lips.

“In my business,” the man said grimly, “time is a luxury. Scream.”

Beth sniffed disdainfully. “I don't do—”

The first she knew he had a knife was when he drew it down her cheek, letting the blood out.

She still didn't scream. She hadn't been lying about that: screaming was not a McKendrick family trait. But she sucked in a gasp of sheer astonishment as she felt the skin part and the silky, cool caress of her own blood on her face. “Wha'…?!!!”

“Sorry,” said the man, apparently quite sincerely. “Needs must.”

“You're working for me!”