The Lucifer Network

by Geoffrey Archer

  Behind them Sam heard the landlord remonstrating.

  ‘Got any money?’

  ‘Some,’ Malcolm answered.

  ‘Give it to me so I can pacify mine host. Then get in that damned car and see where Schenk runs to.’

  Malcolm thrust a wad of notes into Sam’s hand, then left, jangling the car keys.

  ‘Sit down a sec, while I sort this out,’ Sam whispered, helping Julie to a chair.

  He apologised to the landlord in the best German he could muster and counted out notes until the man was satisfied. Then he asked about taxis and was told there were usually a couple waiting fifty metres down the road.

  He took Julie into the street, and found one. He helped her onto the back seat and slid in beside her, ordering the driver to take them to the Marriott.

  ‘Tell me you’re all right,’ he croaked, putting an arm round her shoulders.

  But she told him nothing. Instead she stared blankly ahead, stunned by the fact that the world as she knew it had irrevocably changed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sam, helplessly. His prime concern was to ensure she was okay, but at the same time he was desperate to know if she’d learned anything useful. ‘I heard Max say he hadn’t met your father. You think he was telling the truth?’

  She still didn’t answer. He had the feeling she wasn’t registering what he was saying.

  She couldn’t stay at the Marriott tonight, he realised. Not with Schenk running amok. He thought of ringing Collins to ask if he and his wife had a spare room they could let her use, but remembered the station chief’s insistence on being kept out of play.

  ‘Look, it won’t be safe for you at the Marriott tonight.’ He shot her a glance. She blinked. The first indication that she was hearing him. ‘I’ll find you some other hotel, okay? I’ll ring round.’ He began to think of the modalities, wishing he had a mobile with him. ‘Or there’s the pension where I’m staying,’ he suggested cautiously. ‘They may have a room free. If not you could use my bed. I’ll sleep in a chair.’ She blinked again. Then after a few moments’ consideration nodded her assent.

  Julie didn’t look at him again during the rest of the time it took to drive back into central Vienna. Her eyes were wide open but they weren’t seeing anything. Nothing except the black misery of knowing at last how abjectly she’d been used.

  ‘Do you want to see a doctor?’ Sam asked, suddenly fearing Schenk had done her some serious injury that he couldn’t see.

  She shook her head.

  They turned onto the Ring. The Marriott loomed ahead.

  ‘Give me your key card and I’ll get your things.’

  She didn’t respond at first, her mind in turmoil.

  ‘Julie? D’you have the key card?’

  When at last she turned her puffy red face towards him, he flinched at the hurt he saw in her eyes.

  ‘Give me your key card and I’ll collect your things from the room,’ he repeated.

  She pointed to the blazer he was holding.

  ‘In the pocket,’ she whispered.

  It took him a little over five minutes to pack her case and check with the front desk that the bill was being settled by Dr Max Schenk. Outside by the car again, the taxi driver took the suitcase from him and slipped it into the boot.

  The Pension Kleist was unstaffed at night, which Sam was grateful for. Arriving with a bruised woman would have brought the police round. Inside the hotel, when they got into the small wood-panelled lift, Julie kept her eyes averted. Sam assumed she was blaming him for what had happened.

  When they reached his room he asked her again about her readiness to make do with his bed. She nodded, then made straight for the bathroom. He heard a stifled sob as she saw for the first time what had happened to her face. When she emerged, her hairline was wet from the water she’d splashed on her swollen cheeks.

  ‘This place doesn’t run to minibars,’ Sam apologised. He was in bad need of a drink and imagined she was too. He kicked himself for not raiding the fridge at the Marriott.

  She ignored him, walking towards the bed. She slipped out of her shoes, then lay down on her side, pulling a pillow over her head.

  Sam watched her shoulders begin to shake, telling himself it was good for her to cry. He sat on the edge of the bed, and put a hand on her arm, but withdrew it when she gave no sign of wanting it there. He got up, moved to the chair by the dressing table and flopped into it. It had been a good plan this evening, he told himself. The fact that it had gone wrong and produced nothing was bad luck. The same bad luck that had dogged his whole fucking life since the death of Harry Jackman.

  Her handbag was on the end of the bed, together with the blazer she’d been wearing and the bits of equipment he’d retrieved from the tavern bedroom floor. To occupy himself, he began to reassemble the pieces. It wasn’t long before he realised the back-up recorder was missing. He felt inside the jacket where it had been taped, running his fingers along the lining in case it had slipped. Eventually he found it and turned it over in his hands, examining it.

  Julie seemed to be withdrawing further and further into herself. She had her knees tugged up and her arms wrapped round them. Sam was beginning to think she was making a meal of it. Turning a crisis into a drama.

  Then, it dawned on him that her extreme distress could have been caused by something that had happened in the couple of minutes between Schenk ripping out the antenna and his bursting into the room. A couple of minutes’ conversation he hadn’t heard. He peered at the credit-card-sized recorder, trying to work out how to play it back. It was Malcolm who was the expert on the gear, and Malcolm was chasing Schenk’s car. Turning it over, he found a socket for a headset and a cluster of tiny control buttons. He plugged in the phones from the Walkman and put them on. Then, holding the device under the dressing table light, he began prodding at the controls with the point of a pen.

  It began to play. The first part of the recording was disjointed, the in-built, voice-activated mike only cutting in when words spoken in the Audi rose well above the background noise. Two minutes from the start of the replay they were at Stammersdorf. Car doors slamming. Schenk’s steel-tipped heels on the pavement. Stilted, awkward words spoken. A hard edge to Schenk’s voice, nervousness in Julie’s. There was the noise of them entering the tavern, Julie pointing out a nook where they could sit in private. Then Schenk telling her to follow him. More footsteps, clumping on wooden stairs. Julie saying she wanted to sit in the Stube, Schenk telling her the room upstairs was paid for and the champagne chilled.

  Then came the conversation Sam had already heard. He listened again to the way she’d led Schenk down the path that he’d asked her to pursue.

  The slaps to her face when they came had a digital crispness, as did her cries for him to stop. He heard Schenk ripping into the blazer lining, the snap of the transmitter wire, the straining to pull the microphone from its cable.

  ‘Why you do this? Who is this for?’

  Another slap when she didn’t answer.

  ‘You will tell me . . .’

  Julie gasped as Schenk did something unspeakable to her. She began to cry, then between gulps spat out her reply.

  ‘For me! It’s for me, Max. I was going to blackmail you. For money . . .’

  Sam closed his eyes in admiration and humility. She could so easily have said that she’d been forced into it, but instead she’d covered up for him.

  Two more smacks followed.

  ‘You greedy bitch.’ Schenk’s voice was acid-edged. ‘Greedy like your shit father . . .’

  The words hit like a punch to the stomach. Sam stopped breathing.

  ‘My father,’ Julie gasped. ‘So you did . . .’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it was your father who told me all about you.’

  Sam stared at the crumpled figure on the bed and understood her despair.

  ‘He gave you to me. You can have her, he said. I will help you get her.’

  Sam put his head in his hands.

  ‘You
remember those conference papers?’ Schenk’s relentless voice continued. ‘You leave them in the restaurant when you have dinner with your father and Linda. After you go upstairs he comes looking for me in the bar and gives them to me. Play your cards right and she’ll do a number for you, he said. His words, Julie. His own words. Your own pimp father.’

  ‘No . . .’ she whimpered. ‘This isn’t true . . .’

  ‘He said you look for a new relationship. Something uncomplicated with an older man with money who will be nice to you. He tell me about your past affairs. All those useless young men. He tell me what you didn’t like and what you did. He told me what interest you.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Julie moaned, but Sam could hear that she did. ‘Why?’ she howled. ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘Business, Julie. As I just tell you. You and me, our relationship has always been business, nothing more. He . . . your father – I was buying something from him. His price was too high. I make him come lower, but not low enough. Then he say he will fix it for me to have you as my mistress. As part of the deal. Like the salesman gives you the sun-roof when you buy a car.’

  ‘It’s not true . . .’ she repeated, so low Sam could barely hear.

  ‘I didn’t believe it also,’ the Austrian answered in a bitter chuckle. ‘I thought it was a joke. Or some trick and you were part of it. Then when we talk in the bar, I realise how innocent you are, Julie. So naïve. Everything he tell me about you was right. He made it so easy for me. You were so ready for someone like me. You remember how long it was before we went to your room? Forty minutes, Julie. Forty minutes after we first speak we have our first fuck.’

  Sam bit his lip, willing her to have the strength to ask the vital question – what it was that Schenk had bought from Harry Jackman.

  But a new sound began to swamp the recording. A thin, high howl like an animal in pain. The awfulness of what her father had done had broken through. Then came the clatter of a fight. Schenk firing off German expletives. More smacks. Grunts and stifled screams, then finally the crash of the door breaking in and Sam’s voice shouting.

  He pulled off the headset.

  Julie knows.

  She did now. Knew that the man who’d been her lover for the past twelve months had done business with her father. And something far worse than that – she’d learned the depths to which her father would sink to achieve his ends.

  Sam looked up and let out the breath that he seemed to have been holding for ever. Julie had raised herself onto one elbow and was staring at him, her eyes blurs of bewilderment.

  ‘Julie,’ he croaked. ‘I heard it, love. Heard it all.’ He walked over to the bed and sat on the edge of it. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Sorry. A useless word. Always inadequate. A word with no power to reveal the feelings behind it.

  He tried to think of something to say which might ease the pain of discovering that the man she’d spent a lifetime trying to please had sold her like a bag of sweets. But, if such words existed, they weren’t in his vocabulary.

  Slowly and stiffly, Julie swung her legs round until she was sitting next to him. She turned to face him, her eyes begging for answers.

  ‘Am I really worth so little, Sam?’

  He took hold of her hand. It was feverishly hot.

  ‘No, Julie. You’re worth millions,’ he told her. ‘The whole fucking bank.’

  He moved closer and touched his mouth against her swollen lips. She flinched from the pain, but hooked an arm round his neck, resting her forehead against his.

  ‘Could you please turn the lights out,’ she whispered. ‘I’d prefer it if you can’t see me.’

  They sat without moving, digesting the thought of what was about to happen.

  ‘I will,’ he answered eventually, ‘but you’ll have to let go of me first.’

  Reluctantly she uncurled her hand from the back of his head. He turned off the switch by the door, leaving the room bathed in the soft orange glow of the street light that was filtering through the net curtains.

  When he returned to the bed she was lying on it. He knelt beside her and she took his hand and slipped it under her shirt.

  ‘Will you show me, Sam? Show me what you think I’m worth?’

  He leaned down and kissed her neck just below the mole that was half hidden by the lobe of her ear. Then as he freed her from her clothes piece by piece, he kissed the rest of her feverish body until it began to move and sway like a field of corn.

  18

  Vienna. Schwechat Airport

  Friday, 09.00 hrs

  AT VIENNA’S INTERNATIONAL airport the departure hall was seething. Sam stood to one side of the check-in desks, studying every face within pistol range as Julie presented her ticket. First thing, he’d switched her to an earlier flight from the one Schenk had booked her on. He was taking no chances. The last thing in the world he could allow to happen was for the killers who’d eliminated two of those who’d known about Jackman’s sinister deal to turn it into a hat trick.

  Julie’s suitcase disappeared down the conveyor and she returned to Sam’s side with her boarding pass in her hand and her handbag over her shoulder. Thick make-up covered her bruises. They walked without speaking towards the Departures sign. She’d been lost in thought that morning, hardly exchanging more than a dozen words with him. Just before the barrier, she stopped and touched his arm.

  ‘There’s something I want to say,’ she whispered, turning to him. Her eyes were as dead as stone and stayed focused on the middle of his chest.

  ‘Okay,’ he replied. But nothing came. She seemed to be trying to pluck up the courage. ‘What is it?’

  She bit her lip. ‘It’s this. I’m glad that my father’s dead.’ She said it without any emotion. A statement of cold fact. Slowly she lifted her head and looked him in the eye. ‘Glad because it means he can’t betray me any more. And,’ she added, letting out a long sigh, ‘if the same thing were to happen to Max . . . I wouldn’t mind at all.’ One of her thin eyebrows lifted, then she turned away.

  Sam swallowed uncomfortably. She was telling him that if he had after all orchestrated the death of her father and were to mete out the same treatment to Max Schenk, she would consider it a service to mankind. He reached out an arm, intending to put her straight, then decided there was little point.

  Julie glanced towards the passport check. Although eager to get away from Vienna, she was dreading saying goodbye to Sam. Having made him a part of her life last night, she had a horrible feeling he would lose interest in her now she’d delivered Max to him.

  ‘I’d better go through.’ She turned back to face him, taking hold of the hands that had caressed her back to sanity last night. ‘Do you . . . d’you know when you’ll be back in London?’

  ‘No.’

  She searched his eyes for some clue as to what he was thinking, but found nothing. The blank mask of a man who seldom gave anything away.

  ‘Will I . . . will I see you again?’ she asked plaintively.

  ‘Would you like to?’

  ‘What do you think . . .?’ She fingered the lapel of his jacket.

  He kissed her mouth, careful to avoid the part of her lip that was split. ‘Then you will,’ he murmured.

  ‘Au revoir, then.’ She backed away.

  ‘I’ll ring you. Take care of yourself.’

  Sam watched her disappear through the security barrier, then turned towards the exit doors. There was nothing more he could do to ensure her safety and he had to move on.

  Earlier he’d phoned Collins to alert him to the fact that Schenk had done business with Jackman. The station chief would soon be at the Embassy, wanting a full rundown on last night before he contacted the Austrian authorities.

  As he walked out towards the taxi rank, Sam was remembering the intensity of Julie’s hunger for him last night. The first sexual climax when they’d joined their bodies had been quick for both of them, a cathartic release of the tension that had wound them as tight as clock s
prings. Later, after they’d sated themselves further, Julie had clung on as if he were the only thing in her life preventing her from sinking. They’d fallen asleep bodies touching, but she’d stirred many times in the night, crying out unintelligibly.

  When they’d awoken this morning she’d been awkward with him, as if embarrassed at the weakness she’d shown in the face of Max’s revelations. She’d used the bathroom first, spending a while fixing her face. Some time later, when Sam emerged from it after shaving, he’d caught her looking through his file on Günther Hoffmann, which he’d left in his suitcase. The lid had been open. She’d turned quickly away, pretending not to have seen anything and he hadn’t pursued it.

  It was obvious she hadn’t wanted to talk this morning, so he’d turned the TV on, finding Sky News. The saga of the Albanian refugee family was continuing. The camera crew had followed them to Germany where they’d been received without much enthusiasm in some northern town whose name he didn’t catch.

  Outside the terminal there were half a dozen people queuing for taxis but no shortage of cars. He slipped onto the back seat of a cream Mercedes and gave the driver the Embassy’s address in Jauresgasse.

  Sam wasn’t at all sure what to make of Julie. A part of him was a little in love with her, another part felt pity. What he was certain of was that their coitus last night had fulfilled him in a way that he hadn’t experienced for some considerable time.

  St Stephen’s Hospital, Stepney, London

  07.40 hrs

  Considering that the ward had six empty beds in it, the night shift had been unusually busy for Sandra Willetts. It hadn’t helped that she’d been bog-eyed from lack of sleep when she’d arrived for work twelve hours earlier, nor that two of the patients had developed chest pains which wouldn’t respond to their angina medication. Now, just before handing over to the day shift, she’d finally managed to complete the toilet round.

  The one good thing about being so busy was that it had left her little time to think. But as she sat in the ward office updating the patient notes and preparing for the handover to the day team, her worries about Rob began to bite again.