The Pretender's Gold

by Scott Mariani

  She was inside the biggest dining room she’d ever seen. Her reflection in the vast gilt-framed mirror on the wall looked tiny and horribly vulnerable. One cheek was smeared with blood. She could still taste it on her lips. She spat and wiped her face, and looked around her. The room had a long, wide dining table set for sixteen and draped with an embroidered satin cloth that hung nearly to the floor. At one end stood a marble fireplace almost half as tall again as she was; at the other, sumptuous floor-length curtains framed a bow window overlooking the grounds. Outside in the dimming afternoon light the snow was plummeting down like crazy, erasing from her mind any thought of fleeing the castle. She wouldn’t survive long out there in that blizzard.

  She dropped to her knees and crawled under the dining table, blinking in panic, breathing hard, and tried to focus her scattered wits.

  Now what?

  Chapter 58

  Hacker was in a bad state. On his way upstairs to his quarters he passed out twice and thought he wasn’t going to make it. But in the course of his career he’d been shot, stabbed and burned enough times to know from personal experience that it could have been worse. It was a peripheral injury, he told himself. No way was he going to let a poxy little 9mm bullet wound take him out.

  His reason for dragging himself up here was the kit bag he kept in his room. Inside was a little box of tricks that came in useful at times like these. After he’d dosed himself with two syrettes of morphine and snorted a couple of hits of crystal methamphetamine, he reached for a syringe device that was designed to inject small, expandable cellulose sponges into a gunshot wound, soaking up blood flow and plugging the hole like a flat tyre. It was only meant as a temporary battlefield measure. His left arm still wouldn’t work. But with two million pounds coming he was willing to get the job done first and worry about it later.

  By the time he’d finished patching himself up as best he could, he still had a few minutes left to find the Kirk woman before his reinforcements arrived to join him in the task of cornering Ben Hope. Now the meth and the morphine were kicking in nicely and he felt a ferocious buzz of energy course through his veins as he hurried back downstairs from his quarters to the buttery room. Stuart had vanished; Hacker didn’t give a damn where to. Graham’s body would have to be cleared up, but that could wait too.

  Hacker tracked the trail of footprints from the buttery doorway. Half an hour had now passed since Graham had alerted them to the woman’s escape, and the bloodstains on the ground were already drying russety-brown. They led up the passage and around a corner. After a few dozen yards the trail was beginning to fade out; but then he spotted a partial print on one of the steps leading towards the stone arch and the residential part of the castle’s ground floor. Hacker knew there would be more blood tracks to follow. After escaping the slaughterhouse mess of the buttery room, she wouldn’t just be trailing it on her shoes. It would be spattered on her clothes, her hands, her hair, her face. Sure enough, a few yards on he came across a sticky red palm print on the wall where she’d gone racing around a corner.

  Okay, bitch, he thought to himself with a grim smile. The effects of the meth and morphine were spiking inside his brain. He was burning with elation and as micro-focused as a fighter pilot. He drew his pistol, clutching it in his one hand and ready to spray lead at anything that moved. She had to be somewhere in the castle, searching for a place to hide rather than take her chances out there in the cold. He walked slowly further up the passage, his footsteps clicking on the marble floor.

  That was when he spied the red smear of blood on the brass handle of a door up ahead. It was a room Hacker had entered only once before, Stuart’s formal dining room where he liked to treat his dickhead corporate pals to orgies of food and champagne.

  Hacker’s grim smile spread into a crocodile grin. He pressed an ear to the dining room door, listening for sounds of movement inside. Then pushed the door open and quickly stepped inside the room. In a taunting, singsong voice he said, ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are!’

  Hacker gazed at the table. The satin cloth hung down almost to the floor, like a tent under there. He moved quickly over to it and lifted up a corner of the cloth, bending down to peer underneath with the gun pointed.

  She wasn’t there. He let the cloth drop. Looked over at the window, and the heavy floor-length curtains either side. Of course. He walked over to the right-hand curtain and jerked it abruptly aside. Nothing behind it but sumptuous wood panelling. Then he tried the other. Same result.

  Fuck this rotten bitch. She had to be in here somewhere.

  —And she was.

  Grace had heard the approaching footsteps on the marble floor just in time to scrabble out from under the dining table and scurry desperately across the room to the only other place she could think of to hide. The huge marble fireplace stood over eight feet tall with a polished, ornate bronze chimney hood the size of a steam-train cow-catcher. The grate was stacked up with a mountain of logs and kindling ready to light. Grace clambered up on top of the woodpile, ducked her head and shoulders up inside the hood, stretched both arms above her and found a brick ledge to get a purchase on. At the same instant that she managed to hoist herself up inside the chimney breast and tuck her legs out of sight, she heard the dining room door swing open.

  ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are!’ said the sneering, mocking voice from inside the room. Grace had encountered a lot of meth and crack addicts when she’d worked the beat in the big city. This guy sounded off his face on the hard stuff, and that only frightened her more. She held her breath and clung on tight. Hanging there precariously in that dark, dirty, carbon-stinking space, terrified that the slightest movement would dislodge a cascade of soot that would alert him to her presence – or worse, that she’d lose her grip and come tumbling down out of the fireplace right at his feet. She could hear him moving around the room, searching here and there.

  After a few moments that seemed like for ever he snarled, ‘All right, bitch. But I’m going to find you. And when I do, I’m going to slice your fucking face off and have my guys wear it like a fucking mask while they’re taking turns banging you to death.’

  Then Grace heard the door open and close, and the sound of his footsteps disappearing up the passage. She waited another thirty seconds. When she was as certain as she could be that he was gone, she let out the biggest sigh of her life and lowered herself out of the chimney. Again, she caught a glimpse of herself in the huge gilt-framed mirror. Small, vulnerable, and a mess of black filth. But alive. She dusted the worst of it off her clothes and kicked away her shoes, scared of leaving a sooty trail out of here. She darted over to the doorway, peered cautiously out of the gap and saw that the coast was clear.

  So Grace swallowed a giant breath and ran for it. Not knowing where she was going. Losing herself in the maze of the rambling castle.

  A pair of armoured knights on plinths stood flanking a broad staircase that led up to the next floor, each clasping a long sword in its gleaming gauntlets. Grace clambered up onto the nearest plinth and yanked the weapon from its occupant’s clutches. The sword was nearly as tall as she was, heavy and unwieldy, but the first man who tried to slice her face off would get to watch his own guts spilling on the floor before he came within a yard of her. Grasping its hilt with both hands she ran up the stairs to a galleried landing. Left or right?

  If in doubt, always turn left, Ben had said. She took his advice. The landing narrowed to a corridor with magnificent burnished oak doors on both sides, any of which could burst open at any moment. With her heart in her mouth she scurried past two, three, four of them; and then saw a fifth that was open a crack.

  She paused and peered through the door into a luxurious empty bedroom. A large key protruded from the inside of the door lock. She slipped inside the room, closed the door and locked herself in. Feeling only slightly more secure, she looked around her for another hiding place. There was an antique wardrobe big enough for five people to huddle inside. A huge fou
r-poster bed she could crawl beneath.

  Then Grace noticed the dainty little bedside table next to the four-poster. And what was on it. The phone was a clunky, obsolete type of thing with a dial and a receiver connected by a cloth cord. Ancient technology. She hadn’t used one like it since childhood. She laid the sword across the bed, hesitated for a moment and then picked up the phone. Pressed the heavy receiver to her ear, inserted a blackened fingertip into the dial and forced herself to remember a direct number for the Divisional Headquarters of the Highlands and Islands police.

  When the voice came on the line she said urgently, ‘This is PC Grace Kirk from Fort William. I want to speak to Detective Chief Superintendent Allison.’

  ‘I’m afraid DCS Allison is in a meeting.’

  Grace chewed her lip. ‘Then let me talk to his deputy.’

  ‘I’m sorry, what did you say it was concerning?’

  ‘Just do it, will you?’

  ‘Hold the line, please.’

  Grace waited. And waited. Tension locking her muscles as hard as wood. Staring at the locked door. Expecting the pounding and the rattling to begin at any instant. But then the waiting was over, and she was put through to someone who was neither the DCS nor his deputy, but an officer from Inverness CID who was still way up the chain of command from Grace herself.

  As calmly and quickly as she could, she told the senior officer what was happening. Her current predicament and location. The murders and the kidnappings. The payoffs to Macleod and Coull and an unknown number of their subordinates. The voice on the line sounded sceptical at first, but the more Grace told him the more concerned he became. ‘This is not a prank call,’ she assured him more than once. ‘I swear to you. This is real and I need urgent assistance.’

  Then the call was over. She’d done all she could and now she just had to hope something would happen. She replaced the receiver on its cradle and crept to the door, pressed her ear to it and listened. She could hear nothing outside, so she went over to the window. On a clear day she would have had a sweeping view of the hills and mountains in the distance. Nearly forty minutes had now passed since her escape from her would-be rapist, and the afternoon was fading fast into twilight. She could see snow coming down hard in swirls and flurries over the castle grounds, settling thick and deep everywhere.

  And she could see the headlights of three black 4x4s burning through the murk as they passed single-file into the courtyard and pulled up below.

  It wasn’t the police.

  Chapter 59

  Hacker was still ripping his way furiously from room to room through the castle when his phone rang again.

  ‘Oy, mate, where is everyone?’ rumbled the deep voice of Mikey Creece. ‘Some bleedin’ welcome committee this is. No way to greet an old pal.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Right outside the front fuckin’ door. Someone gonna let us in, or what? It’s taters out here and we’re freezin’ our bloody nads off.’

  Hacker paused for another snort of crystal as he hurried across to meet them in the castle’s great entrance lobby. Stuart was nowhere to be seen. Mikey Creece and the other nine members of his crew were all clad in heavy winter coats and boots. Five of them were carrying bulging black military holdalls whose contents Hacker didn’t need to guess at.

  Creece was a large, bulky man with the physique and flattened features of a backstreet prize fighter. His crony Phil Buckett was his physical opposite, scrawny and short and nervy with darting eyes. The others were a motley bunch of Devil’s rejects named Fish, Meeks, Colvin, Hardstaff, Biggs, Walker, Khan and Davies. If Creece was a big guy, then Fish was a monster, six-eight and made of solid muscle with a neck thicker than his head. Chaz Colvin had only one ear, and ‘Socket’ Meeks wore a patch over his left eye.

  Creece ran a hand over his scalp to wipe away the snowflakes melting into the stubble of his hair, and eyeballed the state of his old Dishonourable buddy. ‘Jesus H. Christ, pal. What the fuck happened to you? You’re all fuckin’ shot to bits.’

  ‘Me? Never better,’ Hacker replied. Kaleidoscopes of brilliant white light were spangling and blossoming inside his brain. He felt exhilarated and hyper-alert, and his useless arm seemed to belong to someone else. Who needed doctors and hospitals? ‘It’s good to see you, Mikey.’

  ‘Lucky we got here at all,’ Creece said. ‘Fuckin’ pilot was gettin’ jumpy about landing in this shit weather. Airfield was like an ice rink and these roads ain’t much better. But never mind us. Looks like you’re the one having the problems. Where’s Banks, Carter and Graham?’

  ‘They’re dead.’

  Creece was a calm and ruthless stone killer, and he accepted the news without a flicker of emotion. ‘Plus Kev O’Donnell. You saying one man did for four of our lads?’

  The drugs might be having weird effects on Hacker’s brain, but they hadn’t scrambled his logical capacity. To tell Creece that Stuart had murdered one of their brotherhood would amount to a death warrant for his boss. Not that Hacker cared, but he wanted his money first. He wasn’t prepared to tarnish Mitch Graham’s posthumous reputation in his comrades’ eyes by admitting that he’d been bested by a woman, either. He nodded. ‘Yup. Hope took out the lot of them.’

  ‘If you tell me this bastard ain’t here any more, then we’re gonna be mightily disappointed.’

  ‘He’s still here. And now that you are, we can nail the fucker.’

  ‘Then it looks like we came to the right party,’ Creece said. He nodded to his men holding the bags. ‘Open them up, boys. Show him what we brought to play with.’

  Aside from mercenary work and related odd jobs, one of Creece’s more lucrative business enterprises was supplying smuggled Romanian full-automatic AK-74 battle rifles to organised crime gangs in London and Manchester. The unzipped holdalls contained ten of them, fitted with folding stocks and tactical lights and lasers, along with spare magazines amounting to over a thousand rounds of ammunition.

  ‘That ought to do it,’ Hacker said. ‘Okay, fellas. We’ve got work to do. Hope’s somewhere down below. Or was, until everything went tits up. My guess is that he’s loose in the grounds.’

  ‘If he’s loose in the grounds, then what’s stopping him from legging it the fuck out of here?’ Buckett asked.

  ‘Because of the woman,’ Hacker replied. ‘You can bet your arse that he’ll come back to find her.’

  Creece frowned. ‘What woman?’

  ‘She’s a cop,’ Hacker said. ‘Got herself mixed up with Hope, and now she’s somewhere in the castle. We’ve got to find her, too.’

  Which was all the information Creece and his men needed to know. As a rule, the Dishonourables had very scant regard for the police, and even less so for female ones. ‘She’s toast,’ Creece said.

  Hacker nodded. ‘And then some. But the boss wants Hope to be taken alive. That’s going to be the hard part.’

  ‘Why alive?’

  ‘Because the boss reckons he knows where there’s a ton of gold bullion hidden.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’ Creece said with great interest. And from the sparkle in his eye, Hacker immediately knew that Creece was seeing an angle here. If Hacker had believed in the gold, he’d have been quick to see it too. Get Hope, grab the loot, and then maximise profits by cutting all ties – including Stuart.

  ‘One more thing,’ Hacker said. ‘Just a detail. But there’s a second guy involved. A burned-out old fart, used to be SAS too, about a billion years ago. If he’s still breathing, he’s either dug in somewhere or he and Hope have hooked up together.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like a problem. The boss want him alive too?’

  Hacker shook his head. ‘He’s target practice.’

  ‘Works for me,’ Creece said. ‘Okay, boys, time to go hunting. But first, time for a nice warm cuppa.’

  For a second, Hacker thought he was having an auditory hallucination from the meth. ‘We’re on the clock here, Mikey.’

  But Creece was adamant. ‘Sorry, pa
l. Nothing gets done without we have a cuppa. We’re cold and we ain’t had a bite to eat since this morning. Right, boys?’

  ‘Right,’ came the murmur of agreement from Phil Buckett and the others.

  ‘Whatever,’ Hacker said resignedly. ‘Follow me.’

  He led them down to the castle kitchen, where the kettle was soon on the boil and ten mugs and enough biscuits to fatten the British Army were laid out on the steel worktop. ‘Nice gaff your boss’s got here,’ Creece commented. ‘Suit me down to the ground, this would.’

  ‘He’s rich.’

  ‘Lucky for some, eh?’ Creece slurped down his tea with gusto, smacked his lips and said, ‘Ahh. That hit the fuckin’ spot. Right, lads. Now let’s get to fuckin’ work.’

  The AKs were quickly unpacked from the bags and distributed among the crew. The kitchen resonated with the clacking of metal on metal as, brisk and businesslike, they slapped in loaded magazines and cocked their weapons ready for action. With only one arm, Hacker couldn’t handle a rifle and would have to make do with his pistol.

  Phil Buckett brandished his weapon with a psychotic grin plastered across his face. ‘Ready to rock’n’roll. This Hope prick might’ve got lucky so far but he ain’t got a chance against ten of—’

  But Buckett’s last word was drowned out by the sudden massive explosion that rocked the building.

  ‘What the—?’

  No sooner had the explosion stunned them all, but the ground under their feet seemed to shake as though from some powerful underground tremor. The surreal thought flashed through Hacker’s mind: earthquake. But it wasn’t. Instants later they felt and heard the crashing impacts of an aerial bombardment slamming into the castle. Plaster dust showered from the ceiling and they all ducked their heads in fear that it was about to cave in on top of them.