The Lost Testament (25 page)

No part of the man’s body was clearly visible from behind Stebbins. Bronson knew he couldn’t shoot until the other man moved.

“I have to admit that we didn’t expect to see you here, Bronson—you are Bronson, I presume?” the man said in fluent but accented English. “I admire the fact that you managed to track me down. How did you do it, by the way?”

Bronson kept his pistol pointing toward Stebbins, waiting for the opportunity to fire the shot that would end the stalemate. But the other man was taking great care to ensure that he was completely shielded by the body of the bound man.

“I got somebody to hack into the mobile phone records and trace your location. It wasn’t that difficult, Pere. I’m assuming that’s who you are. Why didn’t you shoot me when I walked into this room?”

The other man smiled.

“You’re right. I could have killed you a couple of minutes ago, but I don’t want you dead, Bronson—at least, not yet. First, we want the relic. Hand that over and you can take this man away with you, and the two of you and your wife can fly home as soon as you can book seats on a plane. You’ve proved to be resourceful, and I’m prepared to ignore my most specific orders to bury you both. You’ve already caused me quite enough trouble.”

He gestured toward the still shape lying on the floor on the opposite side of the office.

“Who gave you those orders?” Bronson asked.

“It’s a business arrangement. The organization I work for has been retained by the people who own the relic. It was stolen from them decades ago, and they want their property back. I’m sure that by now you’ve guessed who they are.”

“I have a good enough idea,” Bronson said. “But what exactly does the text on that parchment say which is so dangerous to Christianity?”

The other man shook his head.

“I have no idea,” he replied. “The instructions I was given included a photograph of the parchment so I could be sure that we had identified and recovered the correct relic, but not what was written on it. Don’t you know what it says?”

“No. The writing is too faded and indistinct to read it all.”

Pere gave what looked like a shrug.

“It’s not important, at least not to me. To me this is just a job. But you can walk away from here if you do what you’re told. You have to realize that you have absolutely no chance of getting away with that parchment. My organization is simply too powerful and too widespread for that to happen, with adequate resources in every nation in Europe. My group of people here in Madrid is only a small part of the forces we’ve mobilized against you, and even if by some miracle you did manage to get out of here in one piece, there are others waiting to hunt you down.”

“So who are you?” Bronson demanded. “The Mafia?”

“No. We never make the headlines like that organization, but we’re bigger and more deadly,” Pere replied. “Now, the choice is yours. As I just said, if you give me the relic you can walk away. I’ll tell my contact in England that you handed over the parchment in a public place somewhere and I was unable to eliminate you and your wife. Once the relic is back in Rome, where it should be, the two of you will at least have a chance of living normal lives, because there’ll be no proof that the parchment ever even existed. Any photographs you’ve taken can be dismissed as clumsy forgeries if you were stupid enough to try to publicize them.”

The man shifted position very slightly, but still Bronson didn’t have a clear shot at him.

“This is the endgame, Bronson, and it’s your move. Agree to hand over the relic right now or George Stebbins will die and I’ll make sure you and Angela Lewis are hunted down and killed within days. So what’s it to be?”

As far as Bronson could see, there was only one option open to him.

“You can have the relic,” he said. “Too many people have died already over that scruffy piece of old parchment. It’s in my pocket. You can have it now.”

The man crouching behind Stebbins didn’t move, but Bronson guessed he was smiling.

“I thought you’d see sense,” the man replied. “Now, drop that pistol onto the floor and kick it away from you. Then you can put the relic on the desk behind you and just walk away. And don’t try anything stupid, or I’ll shoot you down where you stand.”

Bronson nodded, bent his knees and carefully lowered the Beretta to the floor, then kicked it a couple of feet over to his right, his movements stiff and controlled.

“The parchment?” Pere said. “Where is it?”

“My right-hand-side jacket pocket,” Bronson replied.

“Good.” Pere’s smile grew broader. “Now I know where to shoot you without damaging the relic.”

Bronson knew that either his gamble was going to pay off or he was going to die. As far as he could see there were no other possible outcomes.

And as those thoughts coursed through his mind, Pere swung the pistol round to point directly at him rather that at George Stebbins’s head.

“I said you were clever, Bronson,” he snapped, “but actually you’re a bigger fool than I took you for. Why on earth did you think I would let you walk out of here alive?”

And that was the gamble. It all depended on what the Spaniard did next.

Pere slowly straightened up from behind the bound man and stretched out his right arm, still smiling as he aimed his weapon directly at Bronson, relishing the moment.

“I understood that you’d had a spell as an officer in the British Army, and that you’re now a police officer. I’m frankly surprised that you learned so little in your training for either organization.”

Bronson raised his hands in a gesture of surrender.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“The first rule of close-quarters combat. You never, ever give up your weapon, no matter what the odds or the circumstances. I thought you would have known that. You certainly should have done.”

“I do know that,” Bronson agreed, “but in any combat situation you have to make a judgment as to whether whatever rules you’ve been taught really apply. And I decided that they didn’t, because I needed you to make a mistake, which you have done.”

“I don’t think so. You’re unarmed, and I have both a pistol and a hostage. I’m going to live, and you’re going to die.”

Bronson nodded, and tensed his body.

“In fact, that’s two mistakes you’ve made,” he said.

A puzzled frown appeared on Pere’s face.

“What mistakes?” the Spaniard demanded.

“First, you’re standing up.”

Bronson had known that he’d never be able to get the pistol out of his shoulder holster before the Spaniard shot him down. But before he’d entered the room he’d decided to give himself an ace in the hole. He’d buttoned the neck of his shirt, and then tucked the second Glock, barrel downward, into the top of the garment behind his head. Since then he’d been careful to move slowly so as not to dislodge it.

Now, with his arms raised, his right hand was a bare six inches from the butt of the weapon.

Pulling the trigger of a pistol fires the weapon immediately, and nobody can outrun a bullet. But the brain still takes a finite time to send the message to the finger to tell it to squeeze the trigger, and that was what Bronson was counting on.

With a movement so fast that Pere had no time to react, Bronson slid his right hand behind his head, seized the Glock pistol and swung it forward and downward, squeezing the trigger twice as he did so.

The first bullet slammed into the Spaniard’s right shoulder, spinning him round and immediately making him drop his weapon, but it was the second one that did the real damage, tearing into the left side of the man’s chest and knocking him backward. He was dead before his body hit the floor.

“And your second mistake,” Bronson muttered, “was assuming that I was unarmed.”

Once he’d checked the whole of the top floor and ensured there was no further danger, Bronson approached George Stebbins. He had assumed that the man was out cold, but in fact he wasn’t, just rendered immobile by the plastic cable ties that secured him to the chair and made speechless by a gag taped over his mouth. He was also plainly terrified, a fact attested to by the spreading damp patch on his trousers where he had wet himself, and in a lot of pain, with three of the fingers on his left hand bent and broken out of shape.

But at that moment, even as Bronson reached into his pocket to take out a knife to cut Stebbins free, he heard the unmistakable sound of approaching sirens, and realized he had no time left. Angela must have blown the whistle.

“Can you hear me, George?” he asked urgently.

The bound man raised his head to look at his savior and nodded, his eyes imploring.

“The police are on their way,” Bronson told him, “so I’m leaving you here. When they free you, tell them you were kidnapped by this gang and then there was a violent argument which ended up with two of the men shooting each other. Have you got that?”

Stebbins nodded, looking thoroughly upset and confused at what was happening to him.

“Right,” Bronson said, and set to work to try to create the scenario he had just outlined.

He took a handkerchief from his pocket and did what he could to rub his fingerprints from the trigger and handle of the Glock he’d just used to shoot Pere, then stepped across the room and placed the gun in the hand of the first man he’d shot, closing his fingers around it. He picked up the pistol lying beside that body, then strode across to Pere, retrieved his weapon as well, and then repeated the cleaning operation on the Beretta automatic he’d been carrying when he’d walked into the room and placed that pistol in Pere’s right hand.

It was the best he could do in the circumstances. At the very least he had now positioned the weapons in the appropriate places, and the forensic examination of the scene that would surely follow would show that the bullets that had killed the men had come from the correct pistols. Bronson frankly doubted that any halfway intelligent police officer would be satisfied that that was what had actually happened, but he had no time left to do any more, as the increasing volume of the approaching sirens confirmed.

He took one final glance around the office, checked both bodies to remove the spare magazines they were carrying, and made sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. Then he ran down the passageway, quickly searched the unconscious man still lying there and retrieved another two Glock magazines from his body, then made his way swiftly down the stairs and out of the building.

Outside, the noise of the sirens was very much louder, and he knew that Angela would already have driven away from the scene, so he ran in the opposite direction, covering as much distance as he could before the first of the police cars arrived.

There was another industrial building about two hundred yards away, and he ducked around the back of it just as the beams of the headlights on the leading police car swept across it. Bronson stopped for a few seconds and looked back, checking that he hadn’t been seen.

Once he was certain that nobody was heading in his direction, he crossed the road and began making his way between the various industrial units dotted about the estate until he reached the other road where he had asked Angela to wait for him. Almost as soon as he stepped onto the pavement, he saw the rental car parked precisely where he had expected to find it.

Less than a minute later, he pulled open the passenger door and dropped into the seat beside her.

The moment he sat down, Angela grabbed and held him for a long moment.

“I was terrified,” she said, a catch in her voice. “I heard the shots and I was sure I was never going to see you again. So I called the police and then drove here as soon as I heard the sirens. What happened? Was George there?”

Bronson nodded.

“He was, and he still is,” he replied. “He was tied to a chair, but as far as I could see he was unharmed apart from two or three broken fingers.”

“The bastards,” Angela muttered. “Why didn’t you bring him with you?”

“I didn’t have time to cut him free, and in any case he’ll need medical treatment for his hand. And there’s another reason. I left two dead men inside that building and another one with a really bad headache. I explained to George what he should tell the police, and I’m hoping that will satisfy them that nobody else was involved in there, at least in the short term.”

All the time he’d been talking, Bronson had been keeping a careful watch out of the car windows, just in case any of the police officers decided they needed to widen their search of the local area. He didn’t think it was likely to happen imminently, because he guessed they’d have their hands full at the crime scene. Once more cars and officers had arrived, they’d have enough manpower to cover the whole area, but Bronson intended to be long gone before that happened.

“You killed two men?” Angela asked, her voice barely more than a hoarse whisper.

Bronson shrugged, mentally reliving the sequence of events.

“It was self-defense,” he said, “and I only just got away with it. If I’d been just a little bit slower, I’d be lying dead on the floor of that office back there, and George would probably be looking down the barrel of a pistol as well. I really had no choice.”

Angela didn’t reply, and Bronson held her gaze for a moment, then looked ahead, through the windscreen.

“We can talk about it later, but now we really must move,” he said. “Are you OK to drive?”

Angela nodded, looking upset but resolute.

As they drove past the end of the road where the warehouse was located, they both glanced to their left. The flashing red and blue lights of the police vehicle were casting kaleidoscope patterns across the front of the building, but nobody was visible outside it. Bronson guessed that the police were still trying to make sense of the scene inside the office and, hopefully, summoning medical assistance for George Stebbins.

As if in answer to his silent thought, as they drove out of the industrial estate and turned back toward the center of Madrid, an ambulance screamed past in the opposite direction, siren blaring and roof lights pulsing.

“With any luck they’ll pump George full of painkillers before they splint and bind his fingers, and he probably won’t be in any fit state to answer questions coherently for a few hours. I just hope he remembers not to mention you, and especially not to mention me.”

Then another thought struck him, and he glanced over at Angela, who was concentrating on driving as quickly as the traffic would allow.

“What happened to that man I flattened outside the building?” Bronson asked. “The one who came out and obligingly left the door open for me?”

Angela glanced at him, then turned her attention back to the road.

“He stood up a couple of minutes after you’d gone inside. He looked pretty groggy, and kept on holding the side of his head while he looked around him. But then the shooting started inside the building and that certainly got his attention. He reached inside his jacket, but I guess you’d already taken his gun because he obviously didn’t find what he was looking for. He took a few steps over toward the building, then seemed to think better of it. He walked back to the car, got into it and then drove away. It was about then that I put the battery back in the phone and called the police.”

Bronson nodded.

“One minor mystery solved, I suppose.”

“So now that George is in good hands,” Angela asked, “can we go home?”

“I bloody hope so. I just have no idea how.”