The Ice House (28 page)

52

Rebecca had to stop herself from banging on the door in a panic. She could scream and shout for them to let her out, but then they would know she was awake. Viktor had promised it wouldn’t be locked, but it was.

Now she remembered very clearly her mother’s voice on the phone. She had been crying, frightened. And she had told her to hide from him. The only reason she hadn’t done that was because she had been unable to move. That wasn’t normal. She had been very tired before, after sleepovers, but she had never collapsed.

She was scared now – just thinking about it made her ­tremble. What was going on? She thought that even the water she had been drinking in the car, before she got here, had tasted off. So had they drugged her? If she had a computer she could look it up on the Internet, find out if it was possible to put something in people’s drinks without them knowing. She went to the glass of water by the bed and sniffed it. She couldn’t smell anything, but the water didn’t look clear. There was a slight sediment at the bottom of the glass.

She started searching the room for somewhere to hide. There were empty wardrobes and cupboards, and the space under the bed, but that was all too obvious. In the bathroom she examined the side of the bathtub. She had seen her dad fix a pipe under their bath once by taking a panel off the side. Then one of their cats had wanted to hide there. There would be a big enough space under this bath for her to squeeze in, but she couldn’t see any way to get the sides off – there were no screws or loose edges. And even if she did – how would she get the panel back on?

She wondered where her dad was, and if he had been with her mum when she had spoken to her. Her mum had said nothing about him and she hadn’t heard anything in the background.

She was getting nervous now about Viktor coming to check on her. She didn’t want to see him again. The more she thought about him, the more sick she felt. He had been speaking very weirdly to her. And he had promised not to lock the door.

All the time she was in the bathroom she kept listening for noises from the door, through in the main room. Once she thought she could hear someone talking and ran through to the bed, jumping onto it to try to pretend she was asleep. But no one came.

Still, she had to do something quick. She parted the curtains and looked out of the big window, to see if anyone was out there. It was the same scene of snow and sunshine. The room was on the first floor, if you came in from the front, as she had, but the ground looked closer at this side, as if the land was higher here. The window had a big sill, more like a ledge – wide enough to sit on. She kneeled on it and took a more careful look.

The drop was straight down to the ground, a bit less than four metres. Not
that
high. Her mum once told her that when people did a parachute jump the last part of it was the same as jumping off a house. You just had to land properly, roll. She didn’t know how to do that, but her mum had told her it was possible, if there was ever a fire or anything.
Better than burning to death.
That’s what she had said. The ground below was deep in snow which might make the landing softer, or the drop further than it looked, but she couldn’t tell how deep it was. What if it was really deep and there was something spiky underneath, like a railing? But that didn’t seem likely.

After that where would she run to? There were trees and bushes down there, all bare of leaves, and maybe the outline of some paths. It was probably a garden in the summer. The land sloped away from it gradually, falling towards a line of trees where a really tall pine forest started. She couldn’t see any fence there. She could run straight into the trees. That wouldn’t take her long – it was sprint distance and she was one of the fastest in the entire Malaga area over that distance. Maybe there was a fence further back, though, deep inside, maybe even an electrified fence. What would she do then? She was less adept at climbing. In the gaps between the trees all she could see was darkness. Would it be colder or warmer there? It looked scary. But her mother had told her to hide.

She thought about that again, about what her mum had sounded like. She had never heard her like that before, so distraught – so it was serious. She didn’t have an option to just wait here. She had a sudden image of the house in Spain, the fire there, the dead policeman, the blood running out of his head. That was the kind of thing that could happen to her. She could remember running from him, hearing him shouting at her, then the cracks as he fired at her. She had almost wet herself. She had been really terrified for a moment, more than she was now. Carl had told her they were trying to kill her. She had trusted Carl, but he had vanished.

She had to do something.

She reached up and pulled the window handle. It was an old window, not double-glazed, a big single frame with four panes of glass. At the other side of it was another window in a thick wooden frame, acting like a kind of double-glazing system. The handle was very stiff, so she had to lean on it with both hands. Then it moved. She was sure the thing was going to be locked, but as the handle came down it sprang back. She moved off the sill and swung it open, then unhooked the catches for the second window. This one was in two parts that creaked outwards. She thought she would just be able to squeeze through one of them. As it opened the air was like ice in her face. She started to shiver at once, then went back to the bed where she had taken off the oversize leather jacket and fleece they had given her. She put them on, then leaned through the opening and looked down.

She thought she would be able to crawl through backwards then dangle, so that her feet were only two metres from the snow. Two metres was a safe drop. There was a stone ledge about ten centimetres wide running round the outside of the house. She could get her feet onto that. She looked to the left – craning her head out into the freezing air – and saw that it went along the wall under another widow, not in her room, then joined a lower part of the building with a flat roof. Could she walk along it, hanging onto the window ledges, then get to the flat part?

She heard a noise from behind the door. She wasn’t sure what it was. Someone walking out there? Maybe they were coming for her. Maybe when they saw she was awake they would really put her to sleep, force an injection into her, like they did in the hospital. She decided immediately. She was going to try it, she was going to go.

It took Carl fifteen minutes to skirt around the back of the ­stable block, keeping on the blind side of the hill. He went quickly, holding the MP5 with both hands, cocked, safety on, his thumb resting against the selector switch. He tried to keep his eyes moving, but thought he was going too fast to spot anyone crouching or stationary. The snow deeper into the woods was thinner, so he ended up making a lot of noise stepping through the sticks and mould. His breathing was loud too. But he had told Liz he would be an hour, so the clock was against him. He should have said two hours, then he could have moved more cautiously. But she wouldn’t have accepted that.

He had thought about how to handle this all the way since the border, whenever they weren’t talking. At first he had been inclined to rely on his instinct that Viktor wouldn’t be able to hurt him, if it came to a direct confrontation. Viktor had already had plenty of opportunities to do something himself, had he been capable. Instead, he had hired people. He had felt the same intuition about Rebecca, until a few hours ago – that Viktor wouldn’t be able to harm her. It was a particular kind of person who could look a little girl in the face and shoot her. That wasn’t Viktor, he’d thought. But Viktor had broken all the rules, so Carl was far from sure about these assumptions now. Maybe Viktor was sick, seriously mentally ill. Could he be otherwise, to have dreamed up a scheme whereby his own brother was contracted to kill his daughter? To have paid so much to pull it off?

And then there was the question of who Viktor might have with him. That seemed the most important thing right now. Whatever he might think about dealing with Viktor, if he had with him a team of trained security guards then Carl was going to have to go back up to Liz and suggest alternatives. The police were out of the question, but she had some leverage with their uncle – Mikhael Ivanovich, or ‘Michael’, as she called him – due to the fact that she had undoubtedly saved his life ten years ago. Michael had got her out of Spain, so it might be better to try to persuade her to get his help again. She had expressed some doubts about whether Michael wasn’t in on all of this, whether he wasn’t a part of the deal Viktor had spoken of, but Carl couldn’t see that. Viktor and Michael had been on bad terms for over two years. And what Viktor had done wasn’t something Michael would sanction. It was like twenty years ago, bandit country – eventually it was going to attract the kind of official attention people like Mikhael Ivanovich spent most of their time trying to avoid.

He was making a line to get down to where he remembered the perimeter fence might be, when he heard something off to his right, back in the direction he had come from. He stopped and crouched low, letting his breathing settle. The forest floor was almost bare of undergrowth here, so there was no chance of cover. The big padded coat he’d taken from Viktor’s cloakroom, however, was predominantly off-white, with a big black stripe running diagonally. So when he was sure he couldn’t see anyone near, he dropped down to his belly in the snow and listened. He had thought he was making too much noise to hear anything. Since starting he had seen movement twice, out of the corner of his eye, but both times it had been crows taking off for the treetops, and he had seen them before he heard anything.

He let his eyes focus in the general direction of the sound. What had it been? Someone talking, maybe even laughing. As his breath fell to normal the forest seemed very silent. He got back to his knees, pulled the binoculars from beneath the coat. They were a powerful set he had taken from the house in Gumbacka, not the cheap pair Liz had brought with her.

He scanned carefully, slowly, methodically. Within seconds he saw he was much further forward than he had thought. Through the lenses he could clearly see the perimeter fence, about one hundred and fifty metres to his right through the dense mass of tree trunks. As he watched he picked out movement on the other side of it, and at the same time a voice floated over to him.

Because of the folds of the land he could only see the head and shoulders. He got to his feet, braced the binoculars against a tree trunk and watched. It was a man, walking just the other side of the perimeter fence, perhaps two hundred metres distant, heading up the hill Carl had just descended on the blind side. He had his hand to his ear and was talking either into a mobile or a radio. Carl started to move at a forty-five degree angle from him, closing on the fence. He paused frequently to check he could still get a visual on the man.

Within a few minutes he was at the fence. It ran right through the forest at head height in a dead-straight line, overlapping layers of chain-link suspended on concrete posts. The top strand was electrified, but there was no razor wire and considering its general condition Carl had a feeling the electric circuit wouldn’t be working. This fence had been there when he was last here, if he was remembering properly. He followed the line and saw many places where trees grew directly through it, or over it, branches crossing the top strand. He could see no
CCTV
fixtures.

Mikhael Ivanovich had given this place to Viktor, the story went, a couple of years after Zaikov’s son tried to hang him here. After that he hadn’t wanted to ever set foot in the place again. The expectation had been that Viktor would sell it. But Viktor had set it up as some kind of hospitality package instead, a place he could fly prospective business partners during the summer months for luxury weekends in the middle of nowhere. Viktor rarely visited himself, and when he did there would usually be the standard security entourage at his side. The function of this fence, then, was just to mark the boundary of the property. Carl put a gloved hand out and gripped the top strand. It was dead.

He forced the chain-link down about midway between two posts and pulled himself over with ease. As he came off it he heard it twang with a metallic vibration that would run the length of it. He got down low and kept still, watching to see if the man walking alongside it in the distance would hear anything. He didn’t react. Carl was close enough to see him without the binoculars now, on a path that had been cleared beside the fence. He was about a quarter of a kilometre from the stable building. He had a rifle slung over one shoulder.

He got the binoculars up again and followed the fence round the back of the stables. He could see no sign of Liz. But if she was waiting in the car then she was only about two hundred metres back from where this man was going to walk, assuming his role was to cover the perimeter. He would be there in about ten minutes. That made Carl nervous. It would have been better to have got her to drive the car back down the road, well out of range.

He got his phone out – a new one taken from Viktor’s office – and saw there was a signal. But he had neither of her numbers. He had spent some time much earlier, whilst she had done a spell of driving, trying to extract the numbers from the phones, without any luck. Calling his phone from them hadn’t worked either – somehow, the number hadn’t been communicated: one of them had come from Viktor, the other from an employee of Mikhael Ivanovich, a man called Drake. Either it was the models or they had set them up like that, as a precaution.

He turned his attention from the man and examined the land ahead. The forest fell into a small valley where he remembered there was a stream in summer. From the other side he would come out into the gardens to the rear of the main building. From there he would have a good clear view of the property. He could get there in a couple of minutes, check out as much as he could, get back to Liz twenty-five minutes after that. It was either that or follow the guy walking the perimeter, make sure he didn’t come into contact with her.