Red Crystal (52 page)

Gabriele considered the alternatives but there were none. The knowledge resssured her. She was only doing what any commander would do when covering his retreat. A matter of logistical necessity.

It would have to be done in the cellar, so as to be out of the way. Just in case a casual caller came to the house.

She hesitated; she hadn’t thought
that
possibility through. What would happen if someone came? The risk was slight, and yet – if someone did come they might find the attorney-man. Then the disposal people might dismantle the explosive before the deadline ran out and then she’d have nothing to negotiate with. That mustn’t happen. No one must discover what was in the cellar.

Turning on the cellar light, she examined the door again. Apart from the lock there was nothing wrong with it. It must be possible to seal it in some way. She’d look into it when she’d dealt with the girl.

Yes: first things first.

‘Get up!’

The girl looked at her in terror. Gabriele thought: She knows.

She repeated furiously, ‘Get up!’

The girl got unsteadily to her feet, her face very white.

‘Get in there.’ Gabriele waved the gun towards the cellar.

The girl walked slowly across the hall and started down the steps. Gabriele followed. A sudden spasm of nervousness hit her. She wished Giorgio or Max were here. Yet it shouldn’t be hard. Everyone had told her it wasn’t. Provided you didn’t look them in the eye when you did it. She would turn her head as she squeezed the trigger. And then, once it was done, she would close her mind to it and everything would be all right again. A logistical necessity.

She reached the foot of the steps and ran her tongue across her lips. The girl was staring at her again. Gabriele blinked and, raising the gun, took a step forward.

Something caught her eye. A movement from the far cellar. It was the attorney-man, lifting his head out of the box.

Then, suddenly, the germ of an idea came.

Gabriele gave it a moment, letting it develop. She looked up to the cellar door and then the idea crystallized.

Of course
. Simple. She smiled a wild ragged smile. The girl’s jaw dropped open.

Gabriele turned on her heel and ran up the steps. She called down to the girl, ‘Stay right there or I’ll blow your head off!’

The holdall was still in the kitchen. She scooped it up and went back to the cellar door. Putting the Skorpion down, she sat on the top step and thought for a while. Then she removed some plastic explosive from the bag, cut off a small section and placed it in an empty fuse box – a small container of hard plastic. Burying a detonator in the centre of the putty-like explosive, she wired it to a small 1.5-volt battery and, keeping the positive and negative separate, led the wires out through a hole which she made in the lid of the container. She put in a safety device: the usual clothes peg with a stiff piece of card in between the contacts, and a length of strong thread attached to the card.

She was rather enjoying herself. She had never made anything quite like this before.

Now to set the whole thing up.

She chuckled with excitement. Better and better.

She looked down at Victoria and beckoned. ‘Come here.’

The girl advanced uncertainly up the steps.

‘Arms in front of you.’ Gabriele tied her wrists together with wire, then passed the wire round her waist, so that her hands were held firmly in front of her. Then she taped the plastic box with the wires hanging from it on to Victoria’s back. The girl staggered slightly. Gabriele snapped: ‘Don’t move!’

Now for the interesting bit.

Gabriele fixed the wires to a simple pressure release switch. Now only the card caught in the clothes peg prevented the device from being live. She passed the thread from the card loosely under the half-closed door.

Leaving just enough room to squeeze through the door, she turned the girl round and pulled her down on to the edge of the top step. She taped the pressure release switch on to the stone step, facing upwards.

She squeezed through the gap in the door, out into the hall and pulled the door closed, leaving Victoria on the other side.

She called. ‘Sit right back against the door!’ Through the crack under the door she saw the girl’s shadow move as she obeyed.

‘Can you feel something on the step? Are you sitting right on it?’

There was a silence, then the faintest, ‘Yes.’

‘Well, you’d better be, otherwise you’ll go up with a bang in a minute. Understand?’

The girl groaned.

The adrenalin shot into Gabriele’s veins. This was it then.

Paying the thread out through her fingers she moved away from the door and sheltered round a corner. Very carefully she pulled on the thread. She felt it tauten. She increased the pressure. The card was resisting. She jerked it slightly and felt it give a little. She swallowed nervously, then pulled again. Suddenly the cord was free. She pulled it until the card appeared under the door.

She allowed herself a moment of satisfaction. Very neat. Now only madam’s weight was keeping the pressure switch down. If anyone tried to get in, or if the girl tried to move, her back would be blown off.

Of course they might still get in
through
the door. She’d forgotten that. Her mind searched for a solution – she imagined herself in
their
place, imagined someone like Nick Riley looking for a way in.

Then she had it. Going into the kitchen she tore up a grocery bag and, using a pen from the holdall, wrote a message on it. She put the message in front of the cellar door.

Gabriele glanced at her watch. It was nine. Late. She must go. This place was a trap. Coming here had been a mistake, right from the beginning. Giorgio’s idea.

Giorgio – where the hell
was
he?

She hurriedly repacked the holdall and took it with the Skorpion to the front door. The telephone sat silently on the window ledge. She snatched it up, and referring to the slip of paper in her bag, dialled the number in Paris.

Eventually it connected and the number rang. She waited tensely. It didn’t answer. She dialled again. This time the call did not connect. Impatiently, she dialled a third time. It rang once more. There was no reply.

Angrily she reached down and pulled the cable out of the wall. She turned off the hall light. The house fell into darkness apart from a sliver of light gleaming under the cellar door. That light should have been turned off. She swore under her breath. There was nothing she could do about it now.

Taking the spare explosives and her Kalashnikov, as well as the Skorpion, she stepped out into the darkness and listened for a moment before closing the door quietly behind her. The atmosphere was eerie and still. She thought: How I loathe this place.

She set off up the drive, a cold dread pulling at her mind. High on the hill a breeze sighed softly in the trees. She quickened her pace.

Finally the van came into view and, beyond it, the hired Ford. She put the holdall and the gun into the car, and then approached the van. Apprehensive, she hesitated for a moment, then, opening the back doors, climbed in. She felt around with her hand. Then, impatient, she risked the interior light. Everything was there still: sleeping-bags, clothes, ammunition clips, spare explosive. Giorgio had not taken anything.
Strange
. She gathered some of her own gear.

She glanced over the back of the driver’s seat into the front.

She stiffened.

Giorgio’s Skorpion lay on the front seat. She stared at it for a long time.

Picking up her gear she turned off the light and went round to the front. The keys were in the ignition. She sat in the seat and tentatively turned the key. The starter whirred noisily, shattering the silence. The engine burst into life.

There was nothing wrong with the engine at all then. She put it into gear to make sure. The van leapt forward.

She turned off the engine and looked at the machine pistol again. Its presence worried her deeply.
He would never have gone anywhere without it
.

What should she do with it? Leave it in case he returned?

She couldn’t think. Part of her was filled with a deep foreboding. She had the feeling Giorgio would never return.

Picking it up, she got out of the van and stood quite still for a moment. The echo of the engine still rang in her ears and she strained to hear. Slowly the sounds of the night returned: the whisper of the woodland, the murmur of the wind. The faint hum of a car sounded in the distance, somewhere on the main road.

Making up her mind, she threw the Skorpion back on to the front seat and hid it under a sleeping-bag. Just in case. It would be terrible if he did come back, only to find it gone.

She ran to the Ford and drove quickly to the main road. It wasn’t until she was through the village that she began to relax her grip on the wheel.

As she neared the A4 the traffic gradually increased. She barely noticed the two Rovers that swished rapidly past her, one behind the other, going fast in the direction from which she had come.

‘Wake up.’

Conway’s voice. Nick opened his eyes and for a moment couldn’t remember where he was. He rubbed his aching temples. The sleep might have been a mistake. He wasn’t sure he felt any better at all.

The car was travelling fast through country lanes. They rounded a bend and, coming into a small village, slowed down.

‘We’re about half a mile off,’ said Conway, shining a penlight at the map on his knee.

A few minutes later the car slowed to a crawl and turned left into the gateway of a field. The second car followed. They parked them both well back from the road, in the shadow of a hedge. When they had sorted out their gear they split up into three groups of two men each: one, including Conway, to stay with the cars and form the radio link with the nearest police HQ at Swindon; the second to go along the road and keep watch on the lane leading to the farmhouse; the third – Nick and a man called Williams – to go across the fields and do the recce.

Before setting off, Nick took a good look at the map, memorizing the layout of the farm and, as far as he could decipher it, the topography.

The sky was overcast and it was very dark. Nevertheless they made fast time across the fields and soon came to a belt of woodland which had been clearly marked on the map. Presumably Hunter’s Wood. Not far to the right was the lane that led to the farmhouse, but Nick wanted to stay well away from that. They looked for a path through the woods and found a small trail which started well but soon evaporated into a tangle of undergrowth.

They fought their way through with difficulty, then, reaching an area of more mature trees, the undergrowth thinned and they were able to press on. Through the pitch darkness Nick caught the glimmer of open sky ahead and, after negotiating one more dense patch of brambles and a barbed-wire fence, they were through into an open field. They now kept to the edge of the field, following the line of the trees. To the left the ground sloped down into a valley. Nick reckoned the farmhouse must be only a short distance away, a little further up the valley.

The outline of some fencing came up ahead, and beyond it a road: the driveway to the house. Nick whispered to Williams, ‘Better head off down into the valley and round.’ The other man nodded and they altered direction, going straight downhill. They crossed a narrow stream and climbed half-way up the other hillside before changing direction again to continue their journey along the valley.

Suddenly Nick put out a hand and they halted. Immediately below them, only fifty yards away, were the dark shapes of several buildings. The farm. But they had got rather close. Nick waved to Williams to retreat a little. Once safely out of earshot they took a long look through binoculars. There was no light showing, not even a glimmer. They had a hurried conference and decided to make a large circuit of the property, to examine it from different angles. Climbing higher up the valley side they passed behind the house and made a wide detour until they had reached the woodland immediately above the drive and overlooking the front of the house.

Nick took a long look through the binoculars and felt a deep disappointment.

There was nothing, not even a suggestion of life. No light, and as far as he could see in the darkness, no vehicles parked outside. There might be something parked in one of the outbuildings, of course. But somehow he doubted it: the whole place looked utterly lifeless.

His heart sank. Another dead end.

He took one more look, then made a large sweep with the binoculars from one end of the silent valley to the other. He examined the track in its long traverse from the farmhouse across the field immediately beneath him to the dark woods two hundred yards to his left, where the track disappeared into the trees.

He paused, took the binoculars away from his eyes and stared. There seemed to be something on the track at the point where it disappeared into the trees. A gleam … The suggestion of shape …

He nudged Williams and they walked cautiously along the treeline, keeping to the shadows. As they got closer they approached at a crouch.

It was a van.

They halted and watched it for a while.

A van. The Danby girl had owned –
still
owned – a van.

What was it doing here, Nick wondered. Abandoned perhaps? It was a funny place to park …

He remembered his orders not to approach the house. Well, this wasn’t the house, was it? This was a vehicle and it was clearly unoccupied. There was no risk of putting the wind up any terrorists just by taking a little tiny look.

He indicated to Williams to stay put, and crept forward. The van was parked at an odd angle, as if it had been left in a hurry. Nick felt a small spark of hope.

He listened hard, then climbed through the barbed-wire fence and went up to the van. He peered in through the windows, then tried the passenger door. It was not locked and the handle gave easily. He began to open it. There was a loud creak. He winced. Trying not to open it any further, he put his head in.

There was something lying on the seat. He couldn’t quite make out what it was and ran a hand over it. A bulky padded fabric. Something hard beneath. He slipped his hand under and grasped metal.