The Guardian

by Christopher Kenworthy

  Carver waited until Dark started shouting again and told him:

  “All right, all right, I’m coming!”

  He walked slowly out into the sun, holding the gun by its trigger guard above his head.

  “That’s far enough!” shouted Dark from the shadows. “Put down the gun and put your hands on your head!”

  Carver bent his legs and squatted, making each movement as slow and deliberate as he could. He laid down the Desert Eagle on the cobbles and slowly stepped away from it.

  The chuckle that came from Dark as he did so sounded less than sane.

  “So now at last I have you where I want you,” said the big man, stepping into the yard. “This is going to give me a great deal of pleasure, you interfering bastard!”

  He turned towards Irene.

  “First, the brat! Are you watching, Carver?”

  As he turned the Uzi towards her, Carver reached back and drew the pistol he had taken from the dying bodyguard.

  His first shot hit the Uzi and smashed it out of alignment. The machine pistol went off, sending bullets whining round the yard, but Dark lost his grip on it.

  Carver fired again, but Dark was already moving across the yard towards the dungeon entrance. The bullet missed, and as Carver fired a third time, the round stovepiped and the gun jammed.

  Carver gave a frightful shout and threw himself towards the Desert Eagle, but by the time he had grabbed and cocked it, Dark was disappearing into the dungeon complex.

  The Desert Eagle went off with a report like a howitzer and there was a strange tom-tom thump as it did so.

  Carver was halfway across the yard, running like the wind despite his injuries. But Dark was already out of sight in the stairwell.

  Irene was following Carver, but he screamed at her: “No! Get a car out of the garage and start it up! He’s got grenades down there!”

  He threw himself into the stairwell, with the big handgun extended in front of him, and saw Dark emerging from the control room, with a bag in his hands.

  Carver fired again and missed, but the big man tripped and fell down the stairway, losing his hold on the bag which fell after him. Carver winced as it bounced free and fell down the central shaft, but nothing happened save that Dark picked up the bag again as he recovered himself at the bottom of the stairs.

  The steel gate in front of the big lower door was already retracted into the doorway, and as Carver watched, Dark hurled himself on the door and dragged it open. Carver fired again as he disappeared, and there was a startled squeal from inside the exercise room, and then a hoarse shout.

  Carver ran down the stairs, and grabbed the door as Dark started to pull it closed. Beyond, he could see Kiti struggling with her former master, and while her weight was nothing to the bulky man, her martial arts training made her dangerous.

  She distracted him enough for Carver to haul the door partially open, and then Dark, desperate to rid himself of the clinging weight, pulled her off his arm as a man would tear a teasel from his sweater, and hurled her with all his strength against the wall.

  Kiti’s head snapped round at an impossible angle and she fell like a pile of rags against the foot of the wall. Blood came from her ear and nose, and Carver could see that her neck was broken.

  At the same time, Dark grabbed for the bag he had dropped and fumbled for a grenade.

  Carver stepped back, slammed the door and threw himself against it. The door heaved, but remained closed.

  He looked round furiously for some sign of the gate mechanism, and found it recessed in the wall beside the doorway, where the door would conceal it when open. There was a brass twist lever and a socket in which one could put a crank to raise the gate, he guessed.

  He twisted the lever and jumped aside as the gate dropped into place, then flinched as the door, rammed from the inside, clanged against the gate. There was a couple of inches’ clearance, he recalled, between gate and door, and it just might be enough to squeeze a grenade through.

  He made for the stairs at a flat run, clearing them two at a time and, inevitably, tripped as he reached the first landing.

  For just a second his face was by the floor, and he smelled a strong, familiar odour as he breathed in, recovered himself and ran on.

  He was nearly at the top of the steps when he smelled it again, this time overwhelmingly. For a moment, he was puzzled, and then the hairs on the nape of his neck prickled as he realised what it was.

  Gas! Butane gas, flowing like water down into the dungeons.

  He emerged from the top of the staircase, and burst into the yard, past the white bulk of the gas tank there.

  For the first time, he saw where his first bullet had gone. In the bottom of the tank near the dungeon doorway was a gaping hole, ripped by the big slug on a ricochet. From it, invisibly, the gas, heavier than air, must be flowing downhill into the dungeons behind him.

  He had heard of boat accidents where the craft had been ripped apart by the explosion of gas in the bilges from the tiny cylinders used in their cooking stoves. What this amount of gas might do when it went off, he could only imagine.

  By the gate Irene was waiting in one of the castle pickups. He tore across the courtyard, his back prickling with horror at what might happen if the vehicle backfired and ignited any stray wisp in the yard.

  “Turn off the bloody ignition!” he gasped, as Irene goggled at him. “Gas!”

  She turned the key in the lock, and then helped him push the little open car across the drawbridge and over the brow of the approach road. As it began to pick up speed on the downward slope, they both hopped aboard and he juggled with handbrake and wheel to keep it on the track.

  “How long have we got?”

  “As long as it takes for that madman to try blowing the gate open with one of his grenades,” he said, swinging into the last bend of the road and hauling up on the brake with all his force.

  Ahead of them across the bottom of the only route down from the castle was a barrier of police cars. Parked neatly in a line at the side of the road was the most expensive selection of limousines in France, in which the slave buyers were sitting, fuming.

  Further back along the road, Carver could see the faces of the erstwhile slaves peering from the windows of a bus.

  Armed men in boiler suits and helmets surrounded them and one man with a brassard on his arm jerked his head meaningfully.

  “Sortez!” he said. “Vite!”

  From behind the barricade came a French police sergeant in uniform, with two civilians. One of them was dressed in a suit in which a restless bear appeared to have spent the night.

  Morning, Carver,” said Lovegod. “I got here as soon as I could.”

  “Hi,” said Carver, climbing from the car and patting his pockets in the manner of a man seeking a smoke. The uniformed sergeant produced a packet of yellow Gauloise, and Carter accepted one gratefully, surrendering his Desert Eagle as he did so. The CRS NCO accepted it, ejected the clip and cleared the barrel carefully, treating the big gun with exaggerated respect.

  “Where’s Dark?” asked Lovegod. The civilian stepped forward, hand outstretched, and Carver shook it.

  “Christian Rouanet,” explained Lovegod. “He’s my opposite number over here. It was through him that I hoped to put you in touch with Amy Varzon.”

  “Now dead,” said Carver.

  “Not dead,” said Rouanet. “But badly hurt. She will never again walk without a limp. She was hit by a car which did not stop.”

  “The day you arrived in Paris,” supplemented Lovegod. “By the time I found out it was too late to contact you again.”

  “And when I contacted you, it wasn’t polite to let on?” asked Carver.

  “You seemed to be doing all right and when you said you were with Amy, I wondered what game you were playing,” said Lovegod blandly.

  “Sometimes, I have wondered that myself” said Carver. “Have you come across any pretty girls climbi
ng down the rock face here, by the way? I lost one.”

  Lovegod turned to Rouanet with raised eyebrows and the Frenchman shrugged.

  “I will ask the Brigadier,” he said, and called to the custodian of Carver’s Desert Eagle.

  The NCO sent a couple of his men off round the base of the rock to search, and Carver glanced at his watch.

  “What’s the trouble?” asked Lovegod.

  “I was expecting...” Carver began, and suddenly he saw an orange glow flicker in Lovegod’s eyes. He turned towards the castle and saw, like a fumarole, a jet of flame flaring from the cliff face.

  “Hit the ground!” he roared, pushing Irene and Lovegod towards the bus. “Get under the vehicles! That’s just the start of it! There’s...”

  There was a thud which shook the ground they stood on.

  The cliff face directly under the keep, which was some distance away to their right, bulged undramatically outwards and the keep itself began majestically to topple towards the valley.

  Under the foot of the Rocher de Bram were mercifully, only crops. For onto those crops the Château Bram began to deposit itself in small packages.

  French policemen and newly freed slaves outpaced one another in making for the parked vehicles. Carver saw Rouanet fall to the ground and roll at a frightening speed under a brand new Peugeot, onto which a rain of fist sized pieces of rock began to pelt.

  Through the crazy tympani of the shower he could hear Rouanet shouting abuse.

  “His new car?” he asked Lovegod. The policeman nodded and winced as a large rock hit the window of the bus above them. Irene cried out as a stone the size of a fist smashed into tiny pieces next to her head, showering her with splinters.

  Through the deadly hail, three figures came running down the road. There were two CRS men in dungarees and one dark headed, long legged figure apparently dressed entirely in rags.

  “You were asking me who I was with,” said Carver to Lovegod, who was lying, livid faced, next to him. “I was with her.”

  Lovegod shifted his position and watched as the trio hit the dirt and slid under the Renault Carver had lately parked.

  “Who’s she?” he asked.

  “She’s Amy Something,” Carver told him, “and she changed sides last night at the very last moment.”

  “Why?” said Lovegod.

  “Because it seemed like a good idea at the time,” said Carver drily. “You pick up Arnold and that bastard Johnson?”

  “Of course,” said Lovegod. “As soon as I got your message. How did you know? She tell you?”

  “Oh, come on,” said Carver irritably. “It had to be someone at the McWhitty. Johnson was the obvious one. Then there had to be a policeman turning his back. Thought it was you at the kick-off, and then when it wasn’t you, it had to be Arnold.”

  “Thanks a bunch,” said Lovegod, sourly. “What changed your mind?”

  “The man who was turning his back wouldn’t have sent me off to find Sigmund Dark in France. But he might have sent me off to get killed in France.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “About Arnold?”

  “No, about me.”

  “You never mentioned her bum,” said Carver.

  Lovegod stared at him, and then he turned his head. Under the Renault, Amy’s tattered but well filled skirt was easily visible.

  “I see what you mean,” he said.

  “Not yet you don’t,” said Carver. “But the next time she wriggles, you probably will.”

  Lovegod fixed his eye on the view and said absently: “By the way, what was that?”

  “What was what?”

  “The bang. The explosion.”

  “Gas leak,” said Carver, straight faced. “Just a plain and simple old gas leak. PLUS a man name of Dark who probably chose a very silly way to open a door. Like, with a hand grenade.”

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