Talulla Rising (23 page)

I gave Cloquet Madeline’s number.

‘You’re not serious?’ he said.

‘If they survive they’re going to need their own kind. I know you’ll look after them, but you’ll need help. Madeline’s not a bad person. Trust me, I know. Plus, you know... who knows, right? She could be good for you.’

‘This is—’

‘This is necessary. Don’t argue. Now you’re sure you know what you’re doing with the formula?’

I’d packed, if you could call it that. IDs, cash, cards, Lorcan’s birth certificate, a toothbrush, three changes of underwear. Jake’s last journal. I wanted not to be ready until the car came. I wanted to have to leave in a hurry and not have to think of anything to say. I wanted not to be able to hold Zoë for more than a moment.

To kill time I went into the en suite and put on some make-up. Flossed. Rinsed my mouth with toothpaste. Sat on the toilet for what seemed a long time after I’d peed. Found myself taking in the bathroom’s details they way you would if it was your last few seconds before being executed. The vast mathematical silence was here, in the white porcelain and delighted halogens. Again I imagined moving through the field of long dry grass with no weapons in my hands – and my hands in reality felt as if half their mass had gone. I bent over the toilet, convinced I was going to throw up. Nothing happened. I straightened, trembling.

The room phone rang.

‘Car’s here,’ Cloquet called.

He had Zoë in his arms when I came out of the bathroom. I took her, quickly, held her, looked at her. Felt everything I wasn’t entitled to like a contained quivering tidal wave. Her face was hot from a nap, lined on one cheek where a crease had pressed. She went cross-eyed focusing on me. Quick, before the falling away into nothingness, quick, quick. I kissed her, smelled her head, held my face against hers for a moment, began inwardly
I’m sorry, angel, sorry for everything –
then stopped. It rolled darkness down over the winking lights of her future. It softened Pharaoh’s heart and I thought I can’t leave her which immediately sent me into the sickening fall away from her because who was I? Who was
I
? When I put her back in the bassinet the transfer of her weight from me pulled at my insides, a gentle evisceration. Turn away right now or you’ll never be able to leave. Right now. Right
now
.

Cloquet was suddenly full of realities, all his denial and postponement mechanisms failing. His face was frank with fear. I hugged him, quickly, mumbled ‘Don’t say anything.’ His arms came up around me. I knew if I let him establish a proper embrace it would be a long labour to extricate myself. ‘I have to go,’ I said, pulling away. I grabbed my backpack, crossed the suite and opened the door. I imagined my mother standing behind me like a talisman saying, quietly: Don’t look back. Don’t look back. Don’t look back.

So I didn’t.

31

At Falconara we picked up a Land Rover and a Mercedes saloon. To Walker’s visible relief there were weapons in the trunk of the SUV: four pistols with a clip each and two Lancaster Tactical AK-47s with one thirty-round magazine apiece. Which still left one person unarmed. With Walker and Konstantinov were three other ex-WOCOP agents – Hudd, Carney and Pavlov (all on Murdoch’s death-list) – none of whom would countenance going in without hardware. ‘I guess that means I get the prize,’ Walker said. ‘Presumably no one will object if I bring up the rear, with my lethal kung-fu skills?’

Hudd was in his early thirties, squat, demonic, muscled, with a shaven head and a black goatee. Carney was younger, tall and thin, with a blond crew-cut and a gentle blue-eyed face. Put him in half-mast jeans and a check shirt and a straw hat and he’d be the likeable village idiot. The third renegade, Pavlov, was mid-forties, with straight, shoulder-length greying red hair and a placid, broad-cheekboned face. Narrow hazel eyes full of such amused nihilism that he couldn’t possibly be here for anything other than money. Don’t get ahead of yourself, I kept telling myself, but I had love for them, such a wealth of warmth for them piling up, ready, in case they were the men who helped me get my son back.

We left the airport just after noon local time and headed southwest, Walker, Konstantinov (driving) and me in the Mercedes, the others in the Land-Rover. It was cold. Blue sky and shreds of white cloud. Konstantinov had a calmness and precision of movement that spoke of terrible potential.

‘It’s not far,’ Walker said to me. ‘You should have another look at the visuals.’

These were a half-dozen satellite images from Google maps showing the ruined house and grounds, an enormous square stone building with a castellated roof and broken turret in seven untended acres backed by a low hill and edged at its southern boundary by a narrow belt of deciduous woodland. There were three outbuildings in various states of collapse, and a small overgrown orchard maybe twenty metres from the eastern side of the main house. That was as close as we’d be able get before breaking cover. ‘We’ve got no silencers,’ Walker had said. ‘So once we start shooting we better know what we’re doing.’ We did have, thank God, communications kit. Believe it or not you’re allowed to take walkie-talkies or transceivers on commercial airlines as long as you don’t use them on board, so each of us was equipped with a mic’d headset. The plan was that Walker and Hudd would go ahead to scope the place and make sure we weren’t facing more goons than we’d been warned of. Although the fact is, Walker had confided to me, it isn’t going to make any difference to Mike. One way or another he’s going in. (Which means
I’m
going in, he didn’t have to add.) After that it was simply a case of eliminating the familiars, locating the captives and bringing them out.
Simply
a case of, Walker had repeated. That’s my idiom of choice for these things. No point being negative. An hour into the flight I’d wanted to make love to him.
Wulf
, naturally, kept up its come-rain-or-come-shine demand, mouth open, tongue lolling, eyes glinting with honest filth, but the big aching pressure came from my human, from my girl, who’d only just woken up to the nearness of death and felt a great tenderness for herself and her body and all the rich finiteness that would be lost. She wanted, one last time, to get as close to another human being as it was possible to get. But contrary to what the movies say, it’s not so easy to have sex on a plane. For one thing the plane was tiny. The cabin crew’s work station was practically
in
the bathroom. For another there was a permanent line of people waiting to use it. I sat there next to him not saying anything about it and feeling increasingly absurd and desperate and ultimately, since it was obvious it wasn’t going to happen, crushed. The flight’s other reality slap was that I’d given no thought to having suddenly stopped breastfeeding. By the time what would’ve been Zoë’s third consecutive feed had come and gone the unsuckled milk had started a knifey protest.
Look, I know we’re on a mission – but would you mind if we tried to find somewhere that sells breast-pumps when we land?
I did what I could to express a little manually in the bathroom, dropped a couple of ibuprofen and told myself it wouldn’t be long before I’d need the milk for Lorcan.

Along with the satellite images of the house was a Xeroxed portrait of Konstantinov’s wife, Natasha. All the guys have a copy, Walker said, so no one shoots her by mistake. The picture showed her looking straight into camera, not smiling, a slim-faced woman with dark hair pulled back and tied. No glamour, but black eyes there would be no deceiving.
She sees right through you
, people would say. She looked at least fifteen years younger than Konstantinov, yet I could imagine the two of them together. Same intensity. No fear of death – especially now they had love. If she was in a room with Madeline nine out of ten men would ignore her. Konstantinov was the one out of ten for whom there would
be
no one else in the room.

‘Okay,’ Walker said. ‘This is it.’

We’d pulled over on a narrow, chalky road that ran along the side of a steep hill. Trees going up the hill on our right, open farmland going down on our left. Around a bend some seventy-five yards ahead, according to the map, the road ran past the entrance to Casa del Campanile. We’d follow Walker and Carney to the south side of the orchard and wait for their signal to proceed.

‘Obviously the vamps will be below ground,’ Walker said, once we’d grouped a little way under the trees. ‘So will the prisoners. They’ll have someone watching the kid, so however many familiars we make above ground we should assume
at least
one more and probably two in the basement. Everyone good?’ Silent tense collective affirmation, a diluted version of what I’d shared with the Alaskan wolves. Carney gave a slow thumbs-up, and for no reason, while I watched him make the gesture, everything caught up with me and gathered in my body: the lack of sleep, the flight, the foreign country, the nearness of my son, the realisation that this place – smelling of fallen leaves and cold stone and dead wood and drying grass – was where I might die. Exhaustion was there but
wulf
dismissed it. Not because its child was near, but because there was something to be stalked and killed. Transformation was eighteen days away, but the human in hunt mode had dragged the ghost animal hot and shivering to the surface. I could feel her in my fingernails and feet, backbone and scalp. I could feel her frustration at what she had to work with. But thanks to her all five senses had been violently upgraded. Gladness went through my limbs like fast-acting booze. Plus, the pain in my breasts subsided.

Walker looked at Konstantinov. ‘Not long now, Mike.’

Konstantinov said nothing.

32

We waited, me, Konstantinov, Carney and Pavlov, for what felt like a very long time at the broken fence where the wood met the orchard. Then Walker’s voice came through, quietly. ‘You guys reading?’

‘Roger,’ Konstantinov said. ‘Go ahead.’

‘Okay, we’ve got two goons, repeat, two goons visible, both armed with machine guns. First goon just inside the front entrance wearing a navy blue soccer shirt and black leather jacket. Second goon doing slow circuits of the roof, green sweatshirt, dark glasses, black woollen cap. Acknowledge.’

‘Got it.’

‘On my Go, come ahead slowly through the orchard. Keep low and move fast and you’ll get here before the roof watch is back on this side.’

‘Roger that. On your signal.’

It took us less than two minutes, and when we joined Walker and Hudd the roof goon still hadn’t reappeared. ‘We’ve got to get a closer look,’ Walker said. ‘This is a big house. There could be fifty guys in there.’

‘Intelligence says four,’ Konstantinov said, without emotion.

‘Mike, you know we only get one shot at this.’

‘We need to get closer,’ Hudd said. His bald head and bulging eyes and black goatee made him look like a chaotic deity. All he needed was to stick his tongue out, Maori haka-style. ‘Ninety percent of this place we can’t see. There’s three floors, for fuck’s sake.’

I knew what Walker was thinking: even if they got closer and
discovered
fifty guys, it wasn’t going to stop Konstantinov going in.

‘Wait here,’ Konstantinov said – and before anyone could argue he was out of the orchard, going at an extraordinary low sprint across the open ground to the side of the house.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Carney said, quietly.

After so much stealth Konstantinov looked appallingly visible. For the few seconds he was exposed it was as if the sun had turned up its dial, desperate for him to be seen. But he made it to the end of the building and got his back against the wall.

‘It’s not so bad,’ Pavlov whispered, covering his mic. ‘The front door guy can’t see him from this angle, and the roof guy won’t see him unless he comes to the very edge and looks straight down.’

There was a window space – no glass – six feet from the Russian. He edged towards it. Got upright. In tiny increments stole a look inside. Signalled back. Empty. He moved quickly past the window to the building’s rear corner. Paused. Slipped around it.

A minute passed. Two. Four. Five. Heat came off Walker’s flank next to mine. The Dorchester seemed weeks ago. For the first time since the kidnapping I had a sense of what pure relief it would be to have my son back – but
wulf
scotched it: it got in her way. She was impatient. The scents of the four bodies close to her tugged, prematurely, at the hunger.

Konstantinov reappeared at the edge of the rear corner. He held up three fingers. Walker said: ‘Pavlov, guy on the roof, now.’

Pavlov stood, raised the AK-47, fired a short burst that seemed to splinter the sky. The man on the roof fell backwards. We heard his weapon clatter. ‘Go!’ Walker said – and everyone, including me, moved. Konstantinov swung himself up through the window into the house. The long grass was a maddening soft impediment. Carney tripped, swore, got up, felt a spray of bullets go past him and hit the turf. He looked at me with a face of mild surprise, as if being shot at was the last thing he’d expected. The three-second dash stretched, distended, took a dreamy hour. Pistol shots sounded from inside the house. Walker leaped through the window. Carney and Pavlov went around the back of the building, Hudd took position at the opposite corner for a moment, then he too disappeared. Another two shots fired. Then silence. Suddenly there was the Italian countryside in complete peace again.
Wulf
chafed and writhed in its human traps, the inadequate arms and legs, the laughably labouring muscles. I hauled myself onto the window-ledge and dropped into the big empty room on the other side.

33

Thirty feet across from me a doorway opened into the next room. Walker appeared in it, beckoned me to come ahead. The second room was bigger than the first. Daylight pencilled through several large holes in the brickwork. A precarious stone staircase ran along one wall to the upper floors. Konstantinov, Hudd and Carney were up there, going room by room. The soccer-shirted goon lay dead in the open front doorway. A second body lay by the stairs, and a third was visible, lying face-down in the adjoining chamber.