Ratlines (21 page)

“
Non
,” Lainé said, backing away.

Ryan locked his gaze on him. “I know, Célestin. You’re the informant. What did they pay you?”

Lainé slapped Ryan hard across the cheek. “You lie.”

Ryan closed his eyes, savoured the heat and the sting. “You hate Skorzeny and everything he has. His money, his car, this house. You hate him for it. So you sold him out.”

Lainé’s hand lashed out again. Ryan’s head lightened.

“How much, Célestin? Hundreds? Thousands?”

Once more, Lainé’s hand slashed at Ryan’s face, but this time Ryan blocked it, grabbed Lainé’s throat, pushed him back towards the far wall. Lainé croaked as Ryan applied pressure to his windpipe.

“You know what Skorzeny will do to you when he finds out.”

Lainé struggled in Ryan’s grip, tried to throw him off. Ryan increased the pressure on Lainé’s throat until he stilled.

“You know what he’ll do. He’ll tear you to pieces. That’s why Catherine killed herself, because she knew he’d torture her. He’ll do the same to you.”

Once more, Lainé bucked in Ryan’s grasp. He tried to spit in Ryan’s face, but the saliva only dribbled down his chin.

Ryan pushed him again, harder against the wall. “Listen to me. Skorzeny doesn’t have to know.”

Lainé’s body softened.

“You do as I say, Skorzeny will never find out you betrayed him. Do you understand?”

Ryan loosened his grip on the Breton’s throat enough for him to take a breath.

“How to I believe you?”

“You have no choice,” Ryan said. “Either you tell me what I want to know, or I go to Skorzeny with the truth. And you will suffer.”

“I do not trust you.”

“All right, I’ll give you something. I’ll tell you something Skorzeny doesn’t know. Their leader is Captain John Carter.”

Lainé’s eyes widened.

Voices came from downstairs, the guests milling in the hall.

Ryan stepped back, releasing his hold on Lainé.

“I want to know where they are. And what they want.”

The sound of laughter just below, a door opening, a cool draught.

“I’ll give you the night to think about it. I’m staying at Buswells Hotel. Call me there tomorrow or Skorzeny will know everything. Understood?”

Lainé’s teeth glittered as he smiled. “Why should I not kill you?”

Ryan returned the smile. “Because then you’ll never know why I didn’t hand you over to Skorzeny.”

R
YAN DESCENDED THE
stairs to find Haughey and his companion standing with Celia and Skorzeny by the open door.

“My guests are saying goodnight,” Skorzeny said, “but you will stay. We have business to discuss.”

Ryan looked to Celia. “I need to drive Celia home.”

“The minister will take care of your friend.”

A shadow of fear crossed her face.

“I’ll take her,” Haughey said. “Come on, sweetheart.”

Haughey draped Celia’s coat around her shoulders.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Ryan said.

Celia gave him a resigned smile and allowed Haughey to lead her outside. Ryan and Skorzeny watched from the doorway as the three of them climbed into Haughey’s Jaguar, Celia in the back, his companion in the front, and drove away into the darkness.

Skorzeny handed Ryan his jacket and tie. Ryan pulled the jacket on and stuffed the tie into his pocket.

“You gave a good match,” Skorzeny said. “The best I’ve had in this country.”

Ryan said, “What do you want to discuss?”

“Our informant.” Skorzeny turned to the boy who stood half sleeping against the wall. “Esteban, go upstairs and fetch Monsieur Lainé.”

The boy stirred, nodded, and ran up the staircase. He returned two minutes later, Lainé coming behind, buttoning his overcoat. His eyes met Ryan’s as he reached the hallway.

“Come,” Skorzeny said, and led them out into the night.

Ryan and Lainé followed in silence, across the gardens towards the outbuildings and the halogen lamp that burned there.

As they walked, something tugged at Ryan’s mind. He looked at the trees around them, searching the pools of darkness.

“Colonel,” he said.

Skorzeny halted, looked back to him.

Ryan asked, “Where are your guards?”

CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

O
TTO
S
KORZENY HAD
never submitted to fear or threat. Not as a boy, and certainly not as a man. Even as a student, duelling with sabres at the University of Vienna, his padded tunic stained deep red, he had fought on long after others had conceded. He recalled a photograph, his smile broad and bloodied alongside those of his brethren, a tankard of beer in his hand, all of them toasting yet another brutal tournament.

So when Luca Impelliteri made his threat, Skorzeny did not retreat.

Standing over the table outside a Tarragona cafe, he had held his ground, listened, his face expressionless.

“I will tell the Generalissimo everything,” Impelliteri had said, smiling up at him. “I will tell him you are a liar and a fraud, that your fearsome reputation is built on a propagandist’s story, and that he should not court your company.”

“And why should he believe you?”

“Francisco Franco is a careful man. He is always suspicious. He has not held his position for decades by being reckless. If there is doubt, he will remove you from his circle of friends rather than risk being made to appear foolish. Don’t you agree?”

“I do not,” Skorzeny said.

Impelliteri shrugged. “Even so, that’s how I see things. Of course, the Generalissimo need never know any of this. I am open to persuasion.”

Skorzeny waited for a moment, then said, “How much?”

“Fifty thousand American dollars to start with. After that, well, we’ll see.”

Skorzeny did not reply. He turned his back on the Italian and walked to the hotel. Once inside his room, he lifted the telephone receiver and asked for an international line. Within thirty minutes, he had made all the necessary arrangements.

Now this new threat, these murderous barbarians seeking to frighten him with the corpses of men he barely considered acquaintances. Whatever they sought, they would not take it from him by fear.

The absence of his guardsmen on this dark night did, however, cause him a moment of concern.

Skorzeny turned in a circle, scanning the tree line. His kept his expression calm, his voice flat. He said, “They’re patrolling the grounds, probably. Come.”

He set off towards the outbuildings again, unease slithering around his stomach with the pheasant and the
Rote Grütze
. The others followed.

He had seen the look Lainé and Ryan had exchanged. The G2 officer had been gone for some time. Had he and Lainé spoken while he was upstairs? Lainé had made his dislike of Ryan clear to Skorzeny. Had they had some sort of confrontation?

No matter, there were more immediate concerns.

Such as why no one guarded the building that held Hakon Foss.

As he drew closer, Skorzeny saw the door stood ajar, a slash of light from within. And the toe of a boot lying inside the gap. He quickened his step.

“What’s that?” Ryan asked.

Skorzeny reached the door, pushed, found it blocked. He pushed harder, and again, forcing the dead man’s legs away from the opening.

“
Merde
,” Lainé said.

One of the guards, a neat hole at the centre of his forehead, two more in his chest. Skorzeny stepped over his body, avoiding the blood that pooled around him.

The rage in Skorzeny’s belly threatened to rise up like a dragon, burn all reason from his mind. He quelled it.

Hakon Foss remained in his seat, hands still strapped to the table, feet awash with his own urine. He reeked of faeces and sweat. But he was alive.

Skorzeny approached the table, mindful of the foulness on the floor.

“What happened here?”

Foss cried. “Men came. They shoot.”

Skorzeny leaned on the table. Ryan and Lainé kept their distance.

“Who?”

Foss shook his head, mucus dribbling from his nose and lips. “I don’t know. I ask them to let me go. They don’t answer.”

Skorzeny slammed his fist down on Foss’s splayed right hand, felt the metacarpals give under the force.

Foss screamed.

“Who were they?”

Foss swung his head from side to side, saliva and mucus spilling from him.

Skorzeny brought his fist down again. Foss’s voice cracked, turned from a scream to a whine.

“Tell me who they were.”

Foss’s lips moved, mouthing words no one would ever hear.

Skorzeny reached down, grabbed Foss’s devastated hand in his own, squeezed, felt the bones grind within the flesh.

Foss’s eyes fluttered, his consciousness failing. Lainé appeared at his side, a knife in his hand, plunged it into Foss’s neck, tore it across his throat.

Skorzeny stepped back as the deep red fountain burst from the Norwegian, splashing across the table. “What are you doing?” he asked.

Lainé tossed the knife onto the tabletop. It skittered through the red. “He should die.”

Foss choked, his eyes dimming.

Skorzeny’s rage bubbled up. “Not before he told me what he knew.”

“He would not talk.” Lainé wiped his hands on his coat. “He was more strong than that.”

Ryan’s voice from behind. “He knew almost nothing, anyway.”

Skorzeny turned to the Irishman. “What do you mean?”

“He was the informant,” Ryan said, a new hollowness in his eyes. “Catherine Beauchamp told me before she died. He knew nothing about them. He never saw their faces. They gave him money. He gave them information. That was all.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

Ryan put his hands in his pockets. “I would have if you’d given me the chance. Besides, don’t you have bigger things to worry about right now?”

Skorzeny looked to the body on the floor. He pushed past Ryan, stepped over the corpse, and kicked the door aside.

The light from the halogen lamp scorched everything within its reach. Fire all around him. The rage coming up like a shark from the deep.

“Come!” His mighty voice echoed through the trees. “Come for me now! If you have the courage, come for me now! If you are men, come and face me!”

He roared at the night until his voice could bear the force of his anger no more.

CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

T
HE SKY EDGED
from black to deep blue as Ryan found himself outside Buswells Hotel. A bristling hush hung over the city, like a breath before a word, the streets about to wake.

The night porter opened the door. Ryan told him the room number and waited for his key. As the porter handed it over, he gave Ryan a sly smile and a wink. Had it not been for the fatigue, Ryan might have wondered why.

He climbed the stairs, each step dragging at his feet, his body getting heavier as he rose. It seemed an age between the key settling in his palm and slotting into the hole in his door. He turned it, let the door swing inward, saw the warm light the bedside lamp cast around the room.

Seconds passed before he made sense of the shape curled on the bed.

“Celia?”

She jerked awake, fear and surprise followed by recognition. “Albert. What time is it?”

Celia turned to the window, saw the creeping dawn. She had used her coat for a blanket. It fell away, revealing bare freckled shoulders. The pale smooth skin, the lamplight reflected like a halo.

“It’s early.” Ryan closed the door. “What are you doing here?”

She propped herself up on her elbow and rubbed mascara across her cheeks. “I wanted to see you. The night porter let me in.”

Ryan wanted to cross the room to her, but his feet seemed locked in place.

“Won’t Mrs. Highland be worried?”

Celia smiled, lazy creases on her face. “She’ll be having kittens. I didn’t think you’d be so long.”

“There were … problems.”

“I don’t want to know,” she said. “Come and sit.”

Ryan hesitated, then walked to the bed, sat down. Her body swayed with his weight. He saw the shape of her as the dress stretched across her breasts, indecent and beautiful. Her faded perfume laced with her own scent, flowers and spices and the faint warm tang of woman.

She turned her eyes to the window. “I don’t know what you must think of me.”

A dozen answers flitted through Ryan’s mind, not one he could utter without shaming himself. Instead, he kept his silence.

“I was never a pretty girl,” she said.

He swallowed, a loud click in his throat. “That’s not true.”

“Oh, it is,” she said, the seriousness of her expression denying any other notion. “I was skinny and awkward and gangly, and this frightful ginger hair. Like a lanky boy. Then one day, all of a sudden, I was different. And men noticed me, like I’d been hiding in plain sight. My father’s friends, their sons, all saying, my, how you’ve grown, and aren’t you blossoming. But when I looked in the mirror, I still saw the same gangly girl, all elbows and knees and buck teeth.

“I told you about Paris, and that artist coming up and asking me to model. I acted offended when I told him no, but I went back to the little apartment I shared with the other girls, and I looked at myself in the mirror, and I asked, am I pretty?

“That very same week, a man came to see me in the consulate and asked if I would do something very special. He asked if I would go to a party and strike up a conversation with a particular gentleman. An attaché at the British embassy. See if I could get him to ask me to dinner. And he did. And he was dreadfully dull, talking about trade missions, and policies, and which countries had the most to invest, and I thought I’d fall asleep in my soup.

“But the man came back to the consulate—Mr. Waugh, his name was—and I told him what had been said, and he was very pleased, and I got a weekend in a very swanky hotel in Nice and a very, very generous bonus. And so it went. A clerk, a diplomat, a businessman. Sometimes even an Irishman. No one got hurt, the gentlemen had a pleasant time, and I was terribly well paid. Mr. Waugh always took care of things.”

Celia sat up, put a hand on Ryan’s shoulder.