Silver (17 page)

14

Safe in Sorrow

Ronan Frost looked up at the huge painting of the girl in the red coat that dominated the side of the building. She dwarfed Frost, easily ten times his size. He didn’t understand how the urban artist had worked his art, but he appreciated the finished product. There was a certain sadness about her and the toys scattered around her feet, or so it looked at first glance, weren’t toys at all. They were all political statements, the broken constructs of state and society scattered around the spoilt child’s feet. Frost didn’t like the picture. It reminded him too much of the kind of disaffected street art that lined the Falls Road in Belfast, and that just brought back other memories he didn’t want to be reminded of.

Further down the street came the usual gang tags and swastikas spray-painted on the weeping walls. Beside the little girl in red there was something infinitely more infantile about the swastikas, like children playing at politics, shouting for the sake of shouting but with nothing to say.

Ronan Frost had found eight of the thirteen victims’ houses. The story had been the same at each of them. The places had been ransacked. There were signs of family but no actual family to be found, and in each place it looked as though they had left in a hurry. There was food untouched and moldy on the plates in front of the TV. The DVD menu in one house played the same mindlessly chirpy thirty seconds of music over and over and over again. Frost knew it had been playing like that for at least a week. It was a wonder the relentless happiness hadn’t driven the neighbors insane. Despite the fact that the houses had all been scoured, there were still things that linked them back to Israel. This puzzled Frost. If they weren’t trying to hide the links to Masada what
were
they trying to hide? What was the purpose of ransacking the houses if it wasn’t to purge it of any links to the dig? It was a good question.

Frost checked in with Lethe for the latest situation report from the others. It was difficult running an operation across four countries. The sooner they were back together, the better. Still, they had limited resources, the scarcest of which was manpower. They weren’t the Army. They couldn’t dispatch a dozen agents into the field. What they had was Lethe. Lethe gave him a brief rundown. Rome had fallen, meaning they’d been right in their interpretation of those first two targets, but from here on in they were running blind. Tomorrow it could be any of eleven cities.

Of everything Lethe said, it was the fate of Grace Weller, the MI6 agent who had ingratiated herself into the life of the Berlin suicide, that interested him the most. She was almost certainly dead, but she’d had the wherewithal to leave them a trail like Gretel following the witch off into the woods. The documents on that USB stick were her breadcrumbs. In other words Grace Weller was something tangible. She existed. She had a personal file. She had a desk, a home, all of the clutter of life. She might have spent years watching Grey Metzger, but that didn’t mean she had spent years without going home. He needed to know where she lived; he needed to know who, exactly, she worked for. He needed to talk to her contact here in the UK. He needed to know what she was doing out there in Berlin. He needed to know why Six had marked Grey Metzger as a person of interest. Was Metzger somehow at the center of this? Less a victim than an instigator?

He didn’t need to tell Lethe to keep on digging.

Come dawn they’d know everything there was to know about this Ghost Walker woman.

But it was still a long time until dawn, and he had a ninth house to visit.

He had talked to neighbors, trying to build up a picture of the victims’ last few days, but they were city people. City people kept to themselves. It wasn’t like even fifteen years ago when everyone knew everyone else’s business. Now the doors closed, and what went on behind them was anyone’s guess. Door-to-door inquiries were a waste of time. Even if they had seen something, people pretended temporary blindness. There was no sense of civic duty anymore. There wasn’t even a milkman doing a daily delivery anymore. Everything had become so anonymous.

Ronan Frost walked down the street. He pulled his jacket closer. The night was cold on his skin. It didn’t feel like spring had finally arrived. It felt like winter had killed any trace of warmth. Cars lined the side of the road, parked bumper to bumper. There were no expensive sports cars in the long snake of Fords, Fiats, Mazdas and Citroens. These were all functional vehicles. None of them were new. This was a part of the city where a new car came in a poor second to feeding the family.

Most of the houses had alarm boxes up above the doors. It was a good bet that more than half of them were dummies. It was that kind of place.

He looked for a twitching curtain, a Neighborhood Watch sticker in a window, anything that would suggest a nosy neighbor who might just have seen something out of the ordinary. But the curtains were drawn and the lights dimmed. People didn’t look out into the street because they knew what was good for them. Frost walked down the middle of the road, breathing in the city smell. He could almost taste the danger pheromones in the back of his throat. This place had more in common with the Belfast of his early 20s than just the graffiti.

He counted the numbers down until he reached the white door of the ninth house. The windows were dark. Weeds had grown up between the cracks in the pavement, and the bare bulb of the outside light was broken. It was the right street, the right house, but it was quite unlike any of the other eight he had visited. The others had all been in better parts of their various cities, more expensive houses in the up-and-coming suburbs if not the heart of the cities themselves, but not this one. This place smacked of poverty. He could feel the desperation crawling up and down his skin like mites.

Of course, the benefit of a street like this was, if the curtains didn’t twitch, he doubted very much if anyone would call the police either.

He walked up to the door, and taking the Browning from his belt holster, broke the small window with the butt of the gun. He knocked out the jagged glass teeth left behind and reached through for the lock. He had assumed the deadbolt wouldn’t have been set if the occupants had been bundled off in a hurry. He was right. The door swung open.

Frost stepped inside, closing the door behind him.

The first thing that hit him was the smell.

He gagged and had to fight back the urge to vomit, the stench was that intense.

He knew the smell. There was only one thing in the world that owned this odor: new death.

At least a week’s worth of unopened mail spilled across the mat, along with the newspapers. He knelt down and counted eight days’ worth of unread news. So, nine days ago the inhabitants of this small two-up two-down terrace in the middle of the wrong part of town had been taken. The feel of this place, even in the dark, was different. He didn’t turn on the light as he walked, trailing his fingers along the wall to make sure he didn’t stumble. He found the end of the balustrade and worked his way carefully up the stairs. The house was quiet. The higher he climbed the worse the smell became. Moonlight streamed in silver through an upstairs window, casting a long light slash through the shadows of the dark house. In the light he saw the swirls of wallpaper that had been hung back in the mid-70s. It felt coarse and heavy beneath his fingers.

He heard his own breathing and realized it had become shallower and sharper with each new step. He knew what was waiting up there. But that didn’t mean he could just turn his back and head off looking for house number ten. Indeed, the fact that he knew what was waiting for him meant it was all the more important that he face it. It was exactly what he had come looking for: proof.

His first thought as he reached the landing was that something had gone wrong. The open area didn’t feel right. It wasn’t Feng Shui. It was far more instinctive and predictive than that. People had a way of arranging the things in their life so that they were simple, functional. Furniture placement was repetitive. He could go into rooms blind and know even before he stepped through the door how a good number of those rooms were laid out. But the first floor landing was wrong. It was out of balance.

It took him a second to realize why. The chair that should have been in the right angle, where the balustrade met the immersion cupboard at the far side of the landing, had been dragged out so that it half-blocked the way into the bathroom. Its back was toward him. He tried to picture the struggle that would have turned it. On the opposite wall the blanket box had a thicker band of shadow on the side nearest him, meaning it hadn’t been pushed back up against the wall properly. In his mind’s eye Frost pictured someone on their back, thrashing about as they were dragged toward the stairs. They caught the chair and tried to hold onto it as it twisted away from the wall. They kicked out with their right foot, trying to get some sort of leverage as they lost their grip on the chair. It might not have played out exactly like that, but he knew it was close enough to make no difference.

The floorboards groaned beneath his weight.

He walked toward the first of three doors, to the smallest bedroom. He couldn’t tell what color it had been painted in the moonlight, but a mobile with elephants and toucans and other exotic animals hung over a cot, and most of the floor was cluttered with cuddly toys and stuffed bears. There was no sign of the baby. That, he knew, was the only moment of blessed relief he was going to have until he left the house. He was well aware of the numbers: ninety percent of all kidnap victims were dead within thirty-six hours of being taken. There weren’t going to be any happy endings in this house.

There was a body on the bed in the next room. She lay sprawled out across the bed sheets. Her blood had turned them dark. Dark specks crawled across her face, stomach and legs: flies. They would have started laying their eggs in her already. In another day or two her flesh would be crawling with maggots.

Frost covered his nose and mouth and moved into the room. Up close, the stench made his eyes water.

She hadn’t just been killed, she’d been opened up. Twenty, thirty, forty cuts—it was impossible to tell where one entry wound ended and another began. They had sliced into each other and across each other. Frost didn’t want to think about the frenzy that must have driven the attack. No one deserved to die in so much pain. He looked at her lying on the bed, stripped of dignity as well as life. There was no way she hadn’t suffered. She’d been fighting and screaming through each and every knife thrust until her system shut down in shock.

All he could think was that she might have been beautiful once, but not anymore.

He looked at the ruin of flesh that had been a wife and mother nine days ago, and he wanted to break something.

He continued to walk around the room. For the sheer amount of violence there was very little out of place in the room. There was no sign of the baby. Was that the leverage they’d used against the guy to make him burn himself? Murdered his wife and kidnapped his baby? Or did he think they were both still alive? Did he think that by burning himself he was saving them?

Of course he did. How else did you keep a guy compliant? Kill his wife and he’s going to be thinking all the time about how to hurt you, how to turn on you, even if his child’s life depends on it, because he isn’t stupid. He knows that if you’ve killed one, you’ll kill the other as soon as he’s given you what you want. So no, the guy had to think his wife and child were safe. The poor bastard went to his death thinking he was buying their lives.

The woman’s mobile phone was on the bedside table. He tried to turn it on but the battery had discharged. He cracked it open and took the battery out so he could get at the SIM card.

Frost pressed his finger against the headset in his ear and triggered the call-home auto-dial. Lethe answered on the first ring.