The Excalibur Codex (35 page)

‘Well, you might look a bit cheerier about it. You’ve done it, your lordship. I didn’t think you had it in you, but our master is wetting himself with excitement and the money is in the bank. Who knows, Charlotte might even let you have your wicked way with her.’ He nudged the younger man in the ribs and Jamie managed a tired smile and rubbed a hand over the several days’ stubble that had accumulated on his cheeks.

‘Actually, old chum, all I want to do is have a shave and a shower and a bit of kip, and not even Charlotte could wake me up. Where is she, anyway? I thought she’d be at the airport to meet us?’

‘She’s putting the final touches to the export arrangements. The boss doesn’t want any loose ends and his precious sword stuck in customs for six months. We do this by the book, just like we agreed.’

When they reached their hotel, Jamie carried the tube containing the sword up to the fourth-floor room Charlotte had booked for them, while Gault handed over their passports at the desk. Before he reached the check-in the former soldier switched one of the passports in his hand with another in his pocket. Just why Adam Steele wanted the young art dealer checked in under a different name wasn’t clear, but Gault had learned not to argue with his employer.

Three hours later he shook Jamie awake. ‘It’s all set up. I have to meet Charlotte, I take the sword to her and she’ll deal with it from there.’ He laid a slim metal briefcase that had been waiting for them in the room on the bed. ‘Don’t let this out of your sight.’

‘What’s in it?’

‘My laundry, what do you think? It’s a laptop and a few other electronic gizmos I asked Steele to send along for the trip in case they were needed. The problem is they’re not exactly legal and if anybody else gets hold of them we could end up in jail. What time to do you have?’

Jamie looked at his watch and yawned. ‘Around five forty-five.’

‘I mean exactly.’

‘Five forty … six p.m.’

‘Good. Unless you hear otherwise, at precisely six thirty you will call Adam on the satellite phone and tell him the deal is done. Got that? Normal procedure. Speed dial two.’

Jamie felt the hair bristle on the back of his neck. ‘I’m not an idiot, Gault. Stop treating me like one.’

‘Keep your shirt on.’ The other man shrugged. ‘I’m only passing on the instructions. One way or the other it’ll soon be over and we don’t ever have to see each other again.’

The tube lay by the window and Jamie picked it up, reluctant for a moment to part with the contents. But this had been the whole point of the mission: to get the
sword to Adam Steele. Gault noticed the hesitation and looked at him curiously as they carried out a gentle tug of war. Eventually, he persuaded the stubby green cylinder from Jamie’s hands and pulled on his jacket. He shook his head. ‘This thing drives people crazy. I hope it was worth all the effort,’ he said before the door closed behind him.

Jamie waited till he was gone before picking up the briefcase and studying the combination lock. His fingers hovered over the dials for almost a minute before he placed it beside the sat-phone and lay back on the bed. It would wait.

Their hotel was just off Washington Square in Greenwich Village, and Gault walked through the park and along 5th Avenue before taking a right into East 9th Street. He was entirely unselfconscious about the burden he carried. He’d been in New York often enough to know that nothing surprised the inhabitants. As long as you minded your own business you could wear what you liked and do what you liked. He’d once seen two men carrying a stuffed horse, for Christ’s sake. The building he sought was another small hotel set slightly back from the street of high-rise apartment blocks. He walked past it once and carried on for another hundred paces before turning back abruptly, checking for any unnatural reactions in his fellow pedestrians. Retracing his steps, he tried the side door to the block’s underground garage and
found it unlocked as he’d been told. With a last scan to make sure he was alone, he slipped inside and closed the metal door behind him.

The garage was a place of shadows, with dimly lit bays alternating with patches of darkness, but nothing in the air said he should be nervous. Besides, this wasn’t the first time he’d been here. He walked slowly down the centre of the concrete roadway between the bays, checking each one as he went, his hand close to his waistband and the butt of the pistol he carried. Reaching the end of the row, he took the slipway down to the lower level. He caught a whiff of a familiar perfume and smiled. Charlotte was waiting where she said she’d be, in the fifth bay down, the slim figure silhouetted against the light and standing by the open trunk of the anonymous hired Ford. He walked towards her.

Two sharp puffs of disturbed air broke the silence, followed by the sound of a body falling to the ground. A pair of shadows detached themselves from the deeper darkness of one of the unlit bays twenty paces away and manhandled the still warm body into the trunk of a second car.

‘Hello?’ The hand that gripped the mobile phone was slightly damp, and there might have been a hint of regret in the voice. ‘He’s here. You will find him in room 408 of the Washington Park Greenwich Hotel.’ The words were in Pashto, the language of Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. When the message had been
confirmed, the speaker programmed the Ford’s satnav for JFK and moved the car into gear.

Jamie Saintclair lay fully dressed on the bed. He looked from his watch to the satellite phone for the twentieth time and felt the adrenalin coursing through his veins like pure heroin. It had all begun to come together in his mind on the way back from Reno. Tiny snippets of conversation, a scrambled detail from a news bulletin, a few words out of place while a man had been trying to kill him, and all the odd little coincidences that seemed to follow them around Europe and the USA. He reached for the briefcase, then changed his mind yet again. His suspicion that something wasn’t right had hardened earlier, while he’d been pretending to doze, when Gault had left the room for more than an hour. Instinct told him the SBS man had been replacing the gun he’d lost at Marlette Lake. Why? All right, men like Gault didn’t take any chances and it was patently clear he felt naked without a weapon, but all he had to do was deliver the tube. Why would Gault need a gun to walk four blocks? Was he right? He couldn’t be sure, but he had to make a decision. He looked at the watch again: six eighteen. Twelve minutes.

He got up and marched to the window, studying the traffic on the street below. How long could he wait? The door drew his eyes. What if Gault walked back through that door now? Would that change anything? His brain urged him to relax because everything was
fine and Gault knew what he was doing. The SBS man’s travel case was still in the wardrobe where he had placed it, alongside Charlotte’s. The plane tickets were on the table beside the phone. Three First Class flights from JFK to Heathrow at ten the next morning. Hell, they’d be drinking champagne for breakfast. Six twenty-two. His fingers twitched and he reached out and drew the satellite phone and the case to where he could comfortably reach them. The street outside was bathed in shadow. He picked up the bottle of water beside the bed and took another drink, but his mouth seemed to absorb the liquid like a patch of desert and he felt no benefit. He thought of Abbie, and her last cryptic message, and Sarah Grant in the dank East Prussian forest –
Whatever your friend Steele is up to it isn’t just about money or an old sword.
Six twenty-four. He closed his eyes, counting the seconds in his head. Not yet. Not yet. Six twenty-five. How in the name of Christ had he got into this? His hand closed on the sat-phone and he looked at the face. The 2 button seemed to scream at him. Still five minutes to go. No, four minutes.

It was as if a series of tiny levers inside his head clicked into place.
Too many coincidences
. He scooped up the briefcase on the way to the door, which he opened slowly, checking the corridor beyond. Christ, hurry. He could feel the seconds ticking in his head as he rounded the corner to the lift area. The stairs were situated beyond the lift and he made his way quickly towards them, not quite running. Ahead of him a maid’s trolley sat outside
one of the rooms, blocking half the corridor and covered in sheets and pillows. The lift was to his left and as he passed it the soft double beep of the car arriving at his floor almost gave him a heart attack. Behind him the doors began to open and he dropped softly behind the maid’s cart, his heart pounding in his chest. He’d look an idiot if he was wrong and some tourist couple walked past on the way to their rooms. But he knew he wasn’t wrong.

Three or four sets of feet on the carpeted floor. A whispered conversation that his imagination told him was not in English. He waited, certain the harsh scream of his breathing would give him away. Now. Without looking back he made a dive for the stairs and descended, taking two at a time. When he reached the ground-floor entrance to the lobby he slowed to compose himself and checked his watch. Fifty seconds. Still time. He opened the door and walked briskly across the lobby. As he headed for the hotel entrance he noticed a nervous-looking brown-skinned man sitting on a chair to his left studying him with startled eyes. Then he was in the street.

Upstairs, outside Room 408, the leader of the four-man hit team nodded to his comrade with the pass key and the man slipped it into the lock and turned the handle. Drawing their pistols, they burst into the room. At the same moment, in the hotel lobby below, the dark man reached for his phone.

Jamie took ten paces up Washington Place and at
exactly six thirty pressed the 2 button and put the phone to his ear.

He wasn’t sure what to expect, but he was looking directly at the hotel window when the explosion punched the front of Room 408 into the street, a bright blossom of flame with a flat-screen TV and a blackened truncated starfish shape that had once been human at its centre. The blast almost knocked him off his feet and he hunched down, partially deafened, as windows shattered all around and a hail of burning wreckage tumbled onto the people and cars below. As his hearing returned, a woman’s hysterical screams split the unnatural silence and a hubbub of disbelieving voices grew and spread even as the sound of the first sirens reached them.

Men and women ran past towards the hotel to help the casualties, but Jamie didn’t join them. Instead, he carefully removed the SIM card from the sat-phone, placed the phone on the ground and crushed it under his foot. When he was satisfied, he picked up the smashed casing and crammed it into his pocket before walking away in the opposite direction.

Still stunned by what he’d witnessed, Jamie walked in a daze for what seemed like hours before his survival instinct kicked in and he found a public telephone booth on the corner of 17th and Broadway just past Union Square. Panicked fingers dug into his pockets for the card that just might save his neck, discovered another that made him pause, then settled on the initial card and dialled the number. He allowed it to ring for almost a minute without an answer. Eventually, he closed his eyes in frustration and hung up. A sour-looking Hispanic woman eyed him through the perspex and he reluctantly stepped away, giving her access to the phone. She took his place without saying thank you, which he found surprisingly irritating in the circumstances.

While he waited he tried to evaluate what had happened. He knew he was still in shock, but he must clear his mind. Whoever planted the bomb in the hotel could still be looking for him. Maybe it had been the men he’d
heard coming from the lift? What they called an own goal. But it had happened at precisely – he remembered Gault’s sneer: ‘I’m only passing on instructions’ –
precisely
six thirty p.m. Coincidence? There had been too many coincidences. Everywhere he went they seemed to follow him. He relived the blackened starfish cartwheeling across the street and a wave of nausea threatened to overwhelm him.

Gault had set him up. There was be no another explanation. And if Gault had set him up, that meant Adam Steele had set him up. His legs went suddenly weak and he staggered onto the pavement. ‘Hey, pal,’ someone said, and he realized he’d walked into their path. They were all around him. People. Anonymous faces of brown and black and white and every shade in between. Uncaring eyes of brown and green and black and blue. Potential enemies. He clutched the briefcase to his chest. Any one of them could blow him away and there wasn’t one thing he could do about it. He was alone in an alien city. He had no weapon and no friends. A passport and a few hundred dollars in his pocket were his only link to the world he had formerly inhabited.

The woman was still talking, a hundred-mile-an-hour one-sided conversation in Spanish; something about her son needing to find a job. Who in the name of Christ used pay phones these days? Desperate people. He battered on the perspex and met her glare with one of his own. ‘Excuse me, ma’am, but I don’t have all day.’ Her eyes narrowed, but she uttered a few words into the
handset and handed it over with a poisonous glance. When he put it to his face he could smell her sour breath. He hesitated before dialling the number on the card. It was the last thing she’d given him before he’d left the castle.
If there’s anything else you need just call.
But why should she help him? The sword was gone. He’d failed. But there was something about her that made it worth a try. He punched in the number.

‘I hadn’t expected to see you quite so soon, Mr Saintclair.’ The tone was businesslike, but not unsympathetic. Jamie wearily raised his head and found Helena Webster looming over him, with Carl hovering protectively a few paces in the background. Jamie had spent the night moving about the city, trying to stay out of the way of the cops who’d by now know the name of the room’s occupiers and at the same time in constant fear that he might be being followed. By the time he returned at dawn to the rendezvous she’d specified he was cold, hungry, exhausted and irritable. Would she help him or not? That’s all he needed to know. But her next words held only faint promise.

‘You’re fortunate I left for New York not long after you and your friend did.’ She joined him on the bench and studied him for a few moments. ‘Carl? I think Mr Saintclair might benefit from a cup of coffee from the booth over by the lake. I’ll have one too.’ She waited until the guard had left. ‘You said you needed my help, but I’m a
little perplexed. I gave you what you came for. What more can you expect of me?’