The Isis Covenant

by Douglas, James

  Normally, he took a taxi to his work, but today he drove the car, a BMW X-5 with blacked-out rear windows, and parked it as close as he dared. He walked past the main entrance, a high wooden gate topped with spikes that provided vehicle access and was opened either automatically from inside by one of Oleg’s fleet of limousines or by Gerard, who would be watching on the security camera that constantly scrutinized the area. Along the roadway beside the faceless security wall with its wired top, and round the corner to the staff entrance. Smile into the camera for Gerard. The slightly over-long pause that was meant to irritate him before the door clicked open to reveal Vince’s mocking, disinterested eyes and the barrel of the MP-5 carelessly pointed in his general direction.

  ‘Morning, Vince.’

  ‘Somebody said you were sick.’ The American made it sound like an accusation.

  Dornberger shrugged. ‘You know how it is. Miracle recovery. The boss wouldn’t thank me for taking an unnecessary day off right now.’

  ‘Sure.’ Vince led the way to the security door at the bottom of the stairs.

  Dornberger wore his normal business uniform of suit and dark cashmere overcoat and carried his briefcase in his left hand. As he entered the enclosed stairway, he used the briefcase to shield his right as he dipped into the custom-made inside pocket of the long coat. There was no rush. Just let it happen. His father had always planned for the possibility that Oleg Samsonov might need to be liquidated. He had played out this scene a thousand times in his mind. Practised it over and over again in the basement of the big, rambling house. The door at the top of the stairs clicked open. Kenny was in his usual position to the left of the entrance, with Gerard at the security screens just inside the door at the top of the stair. Gerard barely glanced up as Dornberger walked into the space between them. Kenny grinned and opened his mouth to say something. Dornberger calmly raised the silenced pistol from behind the briefcase and shot the Australian through the eye. In the same movement he turned as Gerard reacted to the sound and shot him in the head before his hand could get anywhere near the Glock on the desk. Blood, bone and brains spattered the wall and the former SAS man slumped over his keyboard. Kenny’s body had fallen with an audible thump. Dornberger waited by the doorway connecting the security centre with the guards, living quarters, but there was no reaction. Satisfied, he opened the door and scanned the corridor. Empty. He walked swiftly across to the door of the living quarters, took a deep breath and walked through. Three of them, as normal. They were so used to him going back and forth to get his morning coffee that none showed any sign of suspicion. One on the bed and two at the card table. The two at the card table wore their pistols in shoulder holsters, while that of the man on the bed hung from a peg on the wall above him. Only the man on the bed glanced up. Dornberger walked towards the kitchen. He had planned for a dozen different scenarios, but they made it easy for him. When he was level with the back of the closest card player he lifted the pistol and shot his opponent between the eyes over his right shoulder, adjusting instantly to fire into the back of the nearer man’s skull. He could hear the man on the bed scrabbling for his weapon as he turned, but by the time the guard’s hand reached the pistol Dornberger had placed two slugs through his spine. As he fell back, Paul stepped forward and put a bullet in his brain. The temptation was to linger and admire his handiwork, but he forced himself to concentrate on his next move. Quickly. They’re dead. Don’t waste time checking. The timetable was set to allow minimal time for imponderables to intrude on the operational matrix. If he stuck to it, there was less chance of something going wrong. He walked out into the corridor, changing to a full magazine as he approached the offices. Mary, Samsonov’s secretary, looked up as he entered, a frown on her face that would remain there forever as he brought the pistol up and shot her through the head at point-blank range.

  Up the stairs, taking his time now. The only threat left was Vince at the gate, and he wouldn’t leave his station without being relieved. Even if he tried to contact Gerard and received no reply, his first assumption would be that his comms were down. Irina appeared at the head of the stair. ‘Paul.’ Her face broke into a smile that turned into a frown as she remembered he shouldn’t be in the house. He brought the pistol up and shot her in the left breast. The bullet threw her backwards and she fell, clawing at her chest. Without breaking stride he aimed the cylindrical barrel of the silencer between her eyes, but it seemed a sacrilege to mar that beautiful face and some impulse froze his finger on the trigger.

  Oleg Samsonov must have heard something because he emerged from the gym area wearing a tracksuit and with a towel around his neck.

  ‘Paul?’

  Dornberger ignored him and allowed the pistol to slide towards the round-eyed presence that had appeared to his right. Dmitri.

  ‘I’ll give you one chance, Oleg. Get me the diamond or I’ll shoot him in the guts and we can listen to him scream.’

  Samsonov’s eyes flicked between the boy and the gun. Dornberger saw the questions going through his mind. Where were the guards? What had happened to Kenny and his men? The billionaire’s screaming brain struggled to come to terms with what he was seeing. Outrage, fear and fury fought for supremacy, but it was fear for his son’s safety that triumphed. The victor’s instinct that made him the man he was told him to fight, but he knew he had no chance of reaching Dornberger before he shot Dmitri. The gunman’s eyes told him everything he needed. They were the eyes of the hired killers who never left the Chechen Mafia bosses’ side. He saw those eyes every day when Kenny gave his daily briefing. This was a different Paul Dornberger from the smiling aide who anticipated his every need. A moment of puzzlement intruded when he wondered how Dornberger had known about the diamond, but he thrust it aside. The only thing that mattered was Dimi and at the first sign of a threatening move Dmitri would die.

  ‘Stay still, Dimi. Do not move.’

  Dmitri didn’t need to obey his father. He was frozen to the spot.

  ‘The diamond, Oleg.’ Dornberger moved so that he could cover father and son with the gun.

  Samsonov edged his way towards the panic room. He formed half a plan to risk grabbing Dmitri and hauling him inside, but Dornberger preempted him by stepping forward to take Dimi by the arm. He reached the door and raised a shaking hand towards the keyboard.

  ‘Careful.’ Dornberger knew that if the wrong combination was entered an alarm would go off at the local police station. Oleg swallowed and carefully punched in the correct numbers.

  ‘Good,’ Dornberger said soothingly. ‘Now the stone.’

  The billionaire slid past the Van Gogh that had been his pride, but which now seemed to mock him. The painting half shielded him from Paul Dornberger’s gun and he knew he could probably reach the door and take refuge either on the top floor or the floor below. Dornberger was unlikely to kill the boy while the father was free. But he couldn’t take the chance. He would not leave his son alone with a psychopath.

  He pressed a button on the wall that raised the safe to chest level and at the same time released a keypad on the side of the shining metal pillar. When he punched in the number the top of the pillar opened up in a series of smooth movements to reveal the prize within. The Eye of Isis.

  For a moment he swayed in the glare of the Eye’s brilliance. He remembered standing by his father’s death bed as the old man had related the story in the same words the German prisoner had used. The Eye and the Crown. The passage to eternal life. His father, an old and hardened party man had laughed at the tale even as he coughed away his existence. It had never occurred to him to try to find the Crown, because to do so would have threatened the life he had created in Soviet Russia. But Oleg had been captivated by the possibility. Even then, he already had everything the world could offer. Yet he was a Russian, and as his own father’s life slipped away he was presented with a vision of his own mortality. One day, he too would be lying on his death bed with his lungs filling up and his heart ready to explode. No amount of money wo
uld change that. Yet now he was presented with the possibility, however unlikely, that the moment could be delayed indefinitely. He had never told another living soul about the diamond, or the myth that made it so prized, but from that day on he had used his resources to try to reunite the Eye with the Crown. It occurred to him now, as he contemplated his own death and that of his son, that all the years of effort had been wasted. How could a man choose to live for ever when it meant he would watch the passing of his wife and children, and their children, for all eternity? It would take a harder and more flawed man than Oleg Samsonov to make that choice.

  The diamond’s seventy-five facets twinkled at him in the artificial light. It had a beauty and a depth that always moved him. Yet at this moment it was nothing more than a commodity. A commodity that he would use to buy his son’s life. He picked up the egg-shaped stone in both hands and walked back out into the room.

  ‘Now you must allow Dmitri to leave.’

  Paul Dornberger laughed and shot him in the throat.

  XLIII

  BY THE TIME they reached the Samsonov house it was close to midday. Jamie paid the taxi driver and Danny scouted the front of the complex, taking in the wall and the gates.

  ‘Maybe we should just knock,’ she suggested as Jamie joined her.

  He studied the wires on top of the wall and the security cameras covering every angle of the approach. ‘The sign says vehicular access only,’ he pointed out. ‘It looks like they don’t encourage visitors who don’t have wheels. I have a feeling that if we walk up to that door on foot the only welcome we’ll get will be from the Russian equivalent of a Claymore anti-personnel mine.’

  ‘It would get their attention.’

  ‘Mm, but only for as long as it took to sweep up what was left into a plastic bag.’

  ‘Do you have a better idea?’

  ‘Not at the moment.’

  He took her hand and led her across the road to the gate. Normally, there would have been some kind of speaker system where the visitor could talk to whoever controlled the entry but it seemed Oleg Samsonov, or whoever was protecting him, was a man of few words. The only sign of life was a blinking red light beneath the security camera covering the entrance. Tentatively, Jamie approached the door and knocked. He repeated the action, harder this time, grinned at the camera and pointed at the door.

  ‘Yeah, that should do it,’ Fisher said, but he didn’t think she meant it.

  They stepped back and waited for a reaction, but the doors remained firmly closed.

  ‘It looks as if they’re not taking visitors today.’

  ‘There has to be another entrance.’

  They walked parallel to the walls on the other side of the road.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s unusual that they haven’t come out to shoo us away?’

  ‘Maybe they get lots of visitors looking for a donation to the church Bring and Buy sale – like a yard sale,’ he said before she could ask. ‘Dear Mr Samsonov, the vicar and I wondered if you would like to contribute a couple of million to the spire restoration fund. Eventually they’d decide the best way is just not to answer the door at all. It works for me with Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons.’

  ‘If this is your way of putting me at ease, Saintclair, I think I prefer to be nervous.’

  He took the hint and kept his mouth shut as they turned the corner and found another long stretch of wall that backed onto a road that ran along the outside of the park.

  ‘Do you see what I see?’

  ‘The camera?’

  ‘There’s one at this end and one at the other. The one in the middle can only be covering some kind of door.’

  ‘You think we’ll get a warmer welcome this time.’

  ‘If we don’t I may have to pole vault over that wall.’

  ‘Sure.’ She grinned, taking in the electrified razor wire along the top. ‘I’d like to see that.’

  They stayed on the far side of the road and it was Danny who noticed it first. The door, a sort of modern postern gate, was set flush with the wall but a narrow line of darkness showed at the far edge.

  ‘Why would they leave it open?’

  Jamie’s stomach turned to ice. ‘They wouldn’t.’ He glanced at the cameras at either end of the wall. ‘Just keep walking.’

  They carried on until they were almost parallel with the doorway.

  ‘Maybe it’s on some kind of chain.’

  ‘Maybe.’ He took a deep breath. ‘There’s only one way to find out.’ He turned abruptly and walked straight towards the door. It was only open a few inches, so it was possible she was right, but he noticed something in the space at the bottom. At first he didn’t recognize it, but gradually his mind turned the jumble of angles and shadows into the sole of a shoe. He looked from the shoe to the eye of the security camera. If someone was watching him now, there was nothing he could do about it. But if someone was watching, why hadn’t they reacted to what was now becoming so obvious.

  He felt Danny’s breath on the back of his neck and the moment she froze as she saw the foot that was blocking the door.

  ‘Stay here.’

  ‘When hell freezes over, Saintclair.’

  He pushed the door a few inches to reveal the slumped body of a man lying where he’d toppled after the bullet that had cratered his head threw him back against the wall. By his side, just out of reach, lay the kind of fancy modern machine gun favoured by armed cops and the Special Forces. Danny Fisher rummaged in her bag and he thought he must be dreaming when she came out with a silenced automatic. The gun stirred a vague memory.

  ‘Where in the name of Christ did you get that?’

  ‘From the guy who tried to kill you.’ She shrugged. ‘I figured it might come in handy. Looks like I figured right.’

  There were several things he might have said to that, none of them complimentary, but this didn’t seem the right time to mention them. Instead, he considered the door and what might be beyond it.

  ‘What would a New York cop do in a situation like this?’

  ‘She’d send in her partner to check out if the bad guy is still around?’

  ‘And if he is?’

  ‘Well, if things work out, I shoot him before he shoots you.’

  Jamie took a deep breath. ‘I hope you’re a good shot?’

  ‘The best.’ She moved back, bringing the 9 mm up in a two-handed grip ready to cover him. ‘Stay low, Sherlock, and be fast.’ But he was already on the move, blasting through the door and throwing himself right in a shallow dive that took him across the body of the dead guard, picking up the sub-machine gun by its carrying sling as he went. A forward roll took him to the base of a cherry tree in the landscaped grounds and he brought the already cocked weapon to his shoulder ready to fire. The stubby barrel of the MP-5 quartered the surrounding area. Nothing. The ground floor of this side of the house was windowless, but the floors above seemed to be composed entirely of glass. A path led from the doorway he’d just come through to another in the wall of the building.

  ‘Clear,’ he called.

  Danny moved cautiously through the door, pistol at the ready and her eyes alert for any movement. ‘You all right, Sherlock?’ she asked without looking at him.

  ‘Now I know what it feels like to be a duck in a fairground shooting gallery. What do you think?’

  She thought about it for a moment, sniffing the air like an Indian tracker in a cowboy movie. ‘I think this is all wrong. We should be surrounded by now. Where are the rest of the guards?’ She moved back to the body and checked the throat for a pulse. When she was certain, she rummaged in the dead man’s pockets and threw a second magazine to Jamie. ‘We have a dead guy here who’s been gone for at least fifteen minutes. Why didn’t they react when he got hit? We have two gun-totin’ nobodies running around playing soldiers among the flower beds of a Russian billionaire who likes his privacy. Why aren’t we already dead or lying on the grass with the barrel of a Glock 17 in our ears?’

  Their eye
s turned simultaneously to the door at the end of the path. Fisher reached it first and studied the keypad set into the door jamb. ‘We don’t have the combination and this has got to be alarmed. Maybe we should try round the front?’

  ‘Too late to worry about that,’ Jamie said. ‘Stand back.’

  Puzzled, she did as she was told, jumping as the unexpected staccato rip of the MP-5 announced that Jamie had decided on a more direct approach. It was a heavy door, constructed of wood and metal, but not armoured. The gun had been chambered for .40 Smith & Wesson rounds and twenty heavy bullets chewed through the approximate area of the lock. Jamie took his finger from the trigger and in time-honoured fashion put his boot to the door.

  Danny stepped past him with her pistol at the ready and pointed at the top of the enclosed stairway in front of them. ‘Next time you try that, it would be nice to warn a girl, so she doesn’t have to change her underwear.’

  The first thing they noticed was music, so loud that it assaulted their ears. Some sort of brash classical symphony that Jamie vaguely recognized, but couldn’t put a name to. They moved fast up the stairs to the second door. Jamie changed magazines and cocked the MP-5, but Danny Fisher pushed the door with the barrel of her pistol and it swung invitingly inwards. In front of them was a desk with a bank of monitors and an explosive pattern of blood on the wall beside it that told its own story. Jamie went first, taking in the body lying to his left in a pool of blood before Gerard came into view, his shattered head lying on the keyboard that controlled the monitors. It was obvious both men were dead.

  ‘Don’t touch anything,’ Danny warned unnecessarily, forced to shout over the rising tempo and volume of the music.

  ‘Tchaikovsky,’ Jamie shouted back.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The music. It’s Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. The one with the cannons.’

  Danny glanced at the spattered remnants of Gerard’s brain on the wall. ‘As if this wasn’t already fucking insane enough.’