The Isis Covenant

by Douglas, James

  ‘You never knew what would happen when you surrendered. Sometimes they’d just shoot you outright, because they had no idea what to do with you. Sometimes they’d ask you a few questions and pop you when they’d got as much as they could out of you. If you were unlucky, they’d kick you to death or bash your head in with a rifle butt. They were very unpredictable, the Ivans. They could give you vodka and be laughing with you one minute, then shoot you because they were bored the next. You didn’t want to surrender to no Russian women soldiers, know what I mean?’

  Jamie had a feeling he did, but didn’t want to think about it too much. He nodded.

  ‘Anyway, I’m pretty much shitting myself when I walk towards this checkpoint with my hands up. An officer with blue shoulder boards and a few men, ragged and dirty with tired, lifeless eyes; maybe a dozen rifles on me all the way. They stand me against the wall, search through my clothes and slap me around a little, just for the fun of it, making my skull bounce off the brick. Eventually, the officer waves them away and begins to question me in pretty good German, considering. “Where your unit? Any tanks nearby? How far to Big House?” Big House was what they called the Reichstag. I told him everything I could. Said my unit was wiped out. Told him about two broken-down tanks dug in somewhere around Potsdamer. But by now I’d seen the feet, maybe six pairs, lying side by side and just visible by the corner of the truck. All the time the officer has been questioning me, he’s been smiling, but now the smile is replaced by a look almost of regret and his hand inches towards this big Tokarev pistol at his belt. Bernie, I says to myself, if you don’t do something quick, you’re a dead man. Now, while this guy has been interrogating me I notice something, without realizing what it is. Then it dawns on me, like a what-ya-call-it? An epiphany. He may look tough, but Comrade Tokarev is a crook. Comrade Tokarev is just another Bernie, trying to get through the war without too much inconvenience. A crook with a sense of humour. Very carefully I bring my hand down between us and I rub my thumb and forefingers together, like this.’ He demonstrated the international sign for money. ‘Maybe the Ivans do it, maybe the Ivans don’t, but this Ivan knew what I meant. He gives me the look. You know, that long look that says, If you fuck with me I’ll have my boys cut your balls off? Then he says, “How much?” “Diamonds,” I say, “jewels, gemstones. A million.” I don’t know how much he understood, but his eyes opened when I said million and he gave a look at his men that I recognized. I’d seen Bodo Ritter give our guys the same look when he was about to rip them off. “Not far,” I says. “I show you.” He takes out the big Tokarev and points it between my eyes. “Bang,” he says, just in case I don’t get the message. With a nod of the head we’re off, back the way I came, and he’s shouting at his men that it’s okay and probably that he’s going to shoot me somewhere quiet, which was prophetic, if you like. He pushed me ahead of him, crouching down, wary, so some sniper couldn’t shoot past me to get him. After five minutes we reached the street where I’d hidden and scrambled through a bombed-out house to get to the garden. The whole place was wrecked, with piles of rubble all around, and I had trouble getting my bearings. Was this the right block? The right garden? Eventually I realized we’d come in on the opposite side. I saw the bush and I pointed to it, making a digging action. It was only then I saw that he was as nervous as I was, with big drops of sweat running down his face onto that big nose. Why didn’t I try to take him, or at least make a break for it? I never gave it a thought. This was a big man, with a big gun, and he knew what he was doing. I’d have been dead before I could move. He motions with the gun and I go to the bush. Take two steps right and point to the ground. He liked that. Not the bush, but a certain distance from the bush. “You dig,” he says. I’d dug the hole with my bayonet, but it was easy to do the same with my hands in the disturbed earth. I pulled up the sod and it took me about ninety seconds to find the old can I’d put the diamond in, wrapped in a rifle-cleaning cloth. When I pulled it out, he waved at me to put it on the ground and back off. When I was far enough away he walked forward, still pointing the gun at me, picked up the can with one hand and emptied the contents on the ground. His eyes were a little wild when he looked at me, but they changed when he shook the cloth and saw what was in there. I heard a muttered curse in Russian and his hand was shaking when he reached to pick up the stone. I started to back away. The gun came up, but he smiled like I was his biggest pal and waved at me to go. I turned and slowly walked away in the opposite direction from where we’d come. I think I got to the top of the rubble before he shot me.’

  The coffee was cold by now, but Bernie Hartmann didn’t seem to notice as he took a long drink from the cup. There was an orange cast to the grey beyond the window, but he didn’t notice that either.

  ‘The Tokarev’s a big pistol and when the bullet hit me in the small of the back, it punched me forward about six feet. At the same time, my head seemed to be in a red haze and I felt the strangest feeling, as if my neck had exploded. There was no pain, but my mind told me I was dead, so that didn’t matter too much. I think I was out before I hit the ground.’

  He saw them staring at him and his face broke into a gentle smile.

  ‘So this is the first time you’ve met a dead man. I congratulate you. When I regained consciousness, it must have been an hour later, because my face was welded to the rock by dried blood. I can be fairly certain Captain Tokarev came over to make sure of me, he was that kind of man. But when he saw the mess my head was in, he must have decided not to waste a bullet. It was one of these curious ballistic irregularities, you see. We wore leather ammunition pouches on harness that crossed in the centre of the back. I didn’t even know there was a buckle, but that’s what deflected the bullet, so it penetrated the skin, but not the bone, and shot up my back taking nicks out of ribs along the way, before blowing a fucking great hole at the junction of my neck and shoulder. A hole that left a flap of bloody flesh over the base of my skull. He would have believed he had aimed a little high, but the result had been the same. Bernie was a goner. My arm was useless, blood leaking everywhere, and I wandered in a nightmare through burning Berlin, by some miracle was given succour, and by a greater miracle survived. So there you have it. The life and death of Berndt Hartmann. Ah, just in time.’

  He walked to the window, where the rays of the rising sun had just clipped the top of the low mountains on the other side of the lake. As they watched, the land seemed to welcome them, and the slope was bathed in a patchwork of greens and browns of every hue, but it was the lake that drew them.

  ‘Yes,’ Bernie Hartmann encouraged. ‘Enjoy.’

  The temperature of the water and the air had combined in some natural meteorological phenomenon to carpet the entire surface of the water in a milky band of fog two metres thick. As they watched, the sun’s rays raced across it, turning the white expanse into a sheet of molten gold, like the very centre of a volcano, or the heart of a raging inferno; a swirling, ever-changing canvas that no artist could ever emulate. Danny gasped and Bernie Hartmann turned to her.

  ‘Yes, a spectacle only God could fashion, and from the simplest of elements. Light and air.’ A low hum intruded on the silence. Bernie tutted. ‘Fishermen. As if anyone could catch fish in a fog.’

  He was quiet then for a long time and Jamie tried to hide his disappointment as they prepared to leave. But the shadow was closing in and Bernie Hartmann’s face mirrored the shadow’s power.

  He turned to Jamie. ‘Death brought you here, and it seems the possibility of my death concerns you, Mr Saintclair. But you have no need to fear for me. I have lived a lifetime that should have ended sixty years ago. Every second lived since has been stolen from God, and, as a thief, I find that quite satisfying. However, you must know what you are dealing with. You think of Bodo Ritter, or whoever is carrying out these murders, as a man, but you are wrong. Bodo Ritter was the Devil incarnate, and his creatures will carry his stamp. Let me tell you one last story.

  ‘We went to a concentration camp.
Dachau, I think. This happened a dozen times. A hundred.’ The tone has become matter-of-fact, as if only by distancing himself from his subject can he bear to put words into it. ‘A Jewish family, some sort of collector. A relic, who knew what? Another Spear of Destiny or a Torah that talked. Whatever it was, it was lost, but Bodo Ritter didn’t believe that. He jokes with the children. Tells the family, Let’s go for a walk. To the furnaces.’ The words are now bound in iron, so controlled he can barely get them out. ‘Where is it? he asks. I don’t know, says the father. Ritter’s smiling as he picks up the boy and tosses him alive into the furnace mouth. Just a kid, maybe five. You ever heard somebody burn alive? You hate God for not striking you deaf. Ritter picks up the girl …’ His eyes turned puzzled as a high-pitched alarm sounded. ‘What …?’

  XXXV

  IT WAS LIKE moving through a sea of gold. The sun-kissed fog swirled around the two Zodiac assault boats as they slid silently through the water towards the bank, landing with a soft bump against the gravel on the lake shore. Instantly, two of the four men on each inflatable leapt ashore to form a defensive perimeter while the others secured the boats and shifted their gear ashore. They were dressed in black ski masks and overalls and each man carried a silenced Heckler & Koch MP-7 machine pistol with a thirty-round magazine, plus four spares. The MP-7 was superior to the MP-5 in that it fired a round capable of penetrating body armour. Paul Dornberger had witnessed Jamie Saintclair’s miraculous resurrection and learned from it. When Berndt Hartmann’s bodyguards went down they would stay down.

  A shadowy figure emerged from the fog. ‘One exterior guard,’ Sergei whispered, ‘standing two metres to the left of the garden-room door.’

  Dornberger nodded and gave the hand signals for one man to follow him while the rest prepared to breach the house once the road was open. The plan of the house was etched on his brain and he moved to his right, keeping low as he scuttled silently along the lake front, before dog-legging left past a boarded-up summer house. His course brought him to the corner angle of the main building, and to the bodyguard’s left. A single guard was lax, even careless. It meant Hartmann had been in this cushioned Swiss bolt-hole so long that he wasn’t taking his security seriously. One man to distract, one to neutralize. He motioned his partner forward with his left hand. Dornberger moved swiftly along the line of the wall towards the doorway. A slight sound caught the guard’s attention. He was just a shadow in the mist, but Dornberger saw the barrel of an automatic weapon move to cover the garden area towards the lake shore. Moving swiftly and silently, he took two paces forward and looped the steel piano wire around the man’s head. His hands took the strain on the wooden toggles and the guard dropped his assault rifle and clawed impotently at the awful steel vice that had instantly closed his windpipe and crushed his voice box. Now he could feel the sting of it cutting into his flesh. With a single tug, Dornberger could have ended the man’s agony, but that was not his way. He liked to feel them struggle, the way a fish struggles at the end of the line, thrashing and kicking but entirely reliant on his tormentor’s mercy. He knew it was a weakness and that the only way to remove the guilt was to punish himself for it when he returned to London, but for the moment all that counted was the life slowly ebbing away under his hands, the soft bubbling choke as the wire severed the windpipe. Careful. Careful. Just the right amount of pressure so the carotid artery stayed intact. That would be too quick. Too messy. It would be soon, anyway, the legs were starting to kick and he could smell the soft stink of voided bowel. With surprising suddenness the head flopped forward, Dornberger maintained the pressure until he was certain before allowing the body to slump to the ground. He unlooped the wire, wiped it with a cloth and coiled it tight before re-stowing it in a custom-made pocket in his overall. He turned to find the other man staring at him, his eyes the only things visible in the dark mask. What did he read there? A mixture of fear and puzzlement, but did he also detect a hint of contempt? He would deal with that later. For the moment he gave a soft whistle that set the assault team in motion. In almost the same instant a high-pitched alarm began to sound. Not so lax, after all. Someone had tripped a security beam. He’d hoped to make his entry by stealth, it would have been neater. But that didn’t matter now.

  ‘Blow the door,’ he ordered. He ran the plan of the house through his head. Beyond the door was the garden room with a bar and changing rooms for guests who wanted to swim in the lake. To the right were the stairs that led up to the main floors of the house.

  Sergei moved forward and fixed the charges to the security door. Three of them, precisely weighted and exactly placed to take it off its hinges. They exploded simultaneously with a sharp crack.

  ‘Go.’

  Everyone froze at the sound of the alarm and Jamie looked on bewildered as Matthias and a man he hadn’t seen before rushed to the stair carrying sub-machine guns. At the same time the third man who had released them from the vault ran into the room carrying a bullet-proof vest, which he proceeded to strap on to Bernie Hartmann.

  ‘Don’t fuss, Rolf. It’s probably another deer.’

  The thump of an explosion and the sound of the door clattering into the room below put paid to any further optimism. Rolf dragged Hartmann to his feet and hustled him towards a door at the rear of the room. Jamie hesitated, drawn to the stairway to find out what was happening. A short burst of machine-gun fire on the floor below followed by a cry of agony gave him all the information he needed.

  ‘Come on, idiot.’ Danny Fisher grabbed his arm and hauled him in the direction Rolf and the old man had disappeared. A shout from the stairs froze them and Jamie turned in time to see Matthias firing his machine gun one handed as he dragged his comrade into the room. At the same time the wall above his head appeared to be mauled by a giant invisible woodpecker, creating a blizzard of brick and plaster. Matthias cursed and dropped the wounded man. He began to fire short controlled bursts at whoever was down below. The shots were answered by more eruptions in the walls and ceiling around him. Jamie shrugged himself free of Danny’s grasp and ran towards the injured man just in time to see his skull explode in a welter of blood, bone and brain as he caught the full force of a burst of fire. The bolt on Matthias’s gun clicked on an empty chamber and he clawed at his pocket for another magazine. He seemed to see Jamie for the first time. The dead man’s weapon lay at his feet and he kicked it towards the Englishman. Almost without thought, Jamie picked it up and cocked it. Some kind of very modern, cut-back version of the Uzi. From the corner of his eye he saw movement on the stair, heard the soft stutter of a silenced weapon and winced as the banister by his side exploded into splinters. The Uzi came up automatically, as if he was on the Barton Road firing range, kicking in his hands and raking the area where the dark figure had been. Matthias appeared beside him, the weapon reloaded. ‘Go,’ he ordered. Jamie had time to reflect that it was the first time he’d heard the bodyguard say a word before he sprinted for the corridor ready to cover the other man as he retreated. He saw Matthias crane forward to get a better shot before the back of the twin’s jacket shredded in a spray of red and he collapsed without a sound.

  ‘Come on, Jamie.’ Danny stood at the door of the room where they had originally met Berndt Hartmann. Feet clattered on the stair and he directed a quick burst on the run to slow the intruders down.

  Jamie hurtled into the room between Danny and Rolf as the air around him buzzed with the sound of passing bullets. Danny had acquired a pistol from somewhere and she fired it left-handed round the door jamb, sending blind shots into the corridor.

  ‘Why in the name of Christ did we come here?’ Jamie’s voice sounded high in his own ears, but he didn’t care who knew he was scared. They were trapped. The only way out of the room was through the window into the garden and whoever their enemy was would have thought of that. No, they weren’t trapped, they were dead. Bernie Hartmann was fiddling with the keypad of the safe. What was the point? Whatever he kept in there wasn’t going to be any use to him now.
It struck him that it might even be the Eye of Isis, but the thought didn’t give him any pleasure. He doubted that whoever was trying to kill them was going to stop just because Bernie threw them a billion-pound diamond. The only thing that would help at the moment was an RPG rocket launcher. Then again, maybe it would be just like Bernie Hartmann to keep a Panzerfaust around as a souvenir of the good old days. Danny reeled away from the door clutching her face and he felt a thrill of fear. He moved to help her, but she waved him away. ‘Dust in the eyes.’

  The Hartmann house had been solidly built with brick partition walls and Rolf used the cover to fire aimed bursts that were keeping the attackers at bay for the moment. Jamie knelt by the window, checking for the flanking movement that would inevitably come when the gunmen realized they were stalled.

  ‘This way.’

  Bernie Hartmann finally had the safe door open, revealing a small space about six feet square. A space that was entirely empty.

  ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘If you don’t get in here you’re all going to die,’ the old man insisted, his voice surprisingly calm for a man with a houseful of vengeful assassins.

  Danny and Jamie exchanged glances. On the one hand it was only delaying the inevitable, on the other, any delay was preferable to being cut to pieces by flying lead. Whether they’d be thinking that in half an hour or so when they were slowly suffocating was another matter, but they could worry about that when it happened. Danny went to stand beside Bernie Hartmann inside the cramped space, then Jamie left his place by the window to join them. Bernie part closed the massive door so there was just space for a man to get through while Rolf continued calmly firing his weapon from the doorway. The bodyguard looked towards the safe, checking that they were inside and Jamie was surprised to see him grinning.

  ‘Now, Rolf!’ Bernie’s voice was shrill. Rolf fired one last burst and turned towards them just as the wall protecting him exploded into fragments. A DM11 bullet designed to penetrate twenty layers of Kevlar, plus 1.6 millimetres of Titanium alloy plate at a range of two hundred metres isn’t going to be stopped by a single layer of bricks twenty feet away, however Swiss and solid. By the time they tore through Rolf’s soft tissue, the three 4.6 millimetre rounds of copper-plated steel were mushroomed and misshapen, but had lost little of their velocity. The impact threw him against the far wall in a spray of blood and torn flesh and he was dead before his body hit the floor.