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The Templar Prophecy

Page 23

by Mario Reading


  She had no one to blame but herself. Hart had been the perfect lover. Tender and considerate – if a little wayward when the mood took him, but then you can’t have everything. He had left Amira in peace most of the time to get on with her life, wasn’t in the least possessive, and was always there on the occasions when she most needed him. He was also brave, ridiculously protective of her, and a five-star alpha male. As an alpha female herself, Amira couldn’t have borne less in a man. It was her getting pregnant that had destroyed their harmony.

  She’d always known that Hart was catastrophically tender-minded. As a tough-minded individual herself, she’d admired that about him, whilst assuming that it wouldn’t apply in his dealings with her – except when it suited her, of course. She’d been taking the pill, after all. And she’d always made it clear that she wasn’t in the least family-minded. Hart had appeared to go along with that.

  But whilst they were on the island of Lamu, having a rare holiday together, she’d developed cystitis – probably from too much sex. The last thing she’d wanted at that point was to put up any barriers against intimacy, so she’d paid the maid who cleaned their bungalow to get her some off-prescription antibiotics. No one had told her that they could interfere with her birth-control pill. And, being Amira, she hadn’t bothered to read the small print on the packet.

  In retrospect her biggest mistake had been in ever telling Hart about the pregnancy. She should have kept her trap shut and sorted it out for herself. But she’d done it in a weak moment – hormones, probably, post-Lamu – when they’d found themselves working together on a piece about the Gambia. She’d been on a deadline. Which meant that she didn’t have time to research either abortion clinics or the attitudes of the predominantly Islamic medical authorities in Banjul to terminations. And when a colleague blindsided her with the fact that the agreement of two independent doctors would probably be needed before anything could be done, she became even more reluctant to chase the matter up herself and risk being lectured to by religious bigots. Hart was the father. He could bloody well do it.

  The outcome had been a disaster. It had never occurred to Amira that Hart might be temperamentally and emotionally incapable of okaying an abortion. Instead, from the very first moment she had told him about the pregnancy, he had marshalled every argument in the book to persuade her to keep the child. She’d not taken him seriously, of course – after all, modern men were renowned for not being paternal, weren’t they? Look at baby fathers.

  She’d hurried to a Marie Stopes clinic on her first London stopover after Banjul. The baby hadn’t been that far gone. Twelve weeks, maybe. Where was the harm? Hart would get over it, just like all men did. Just like she did.

  But Hart didn’t get over it. The Gambia had been the very last occasion they’d made love. By the time the Syrian crisis occurred, Amira was in full-blown denial that their affair was at an end, whilst Hart was still in emotional meltdown at the loss of his child. Amira had always assumed it would be the other way round. But it wasn’t.

  Now, with her head still churning out images of Hart and Effi in bed together, Amira ran through the factory car park and round the side of the building facing the lake. If the security lights came on, they came on – she would simply carry on running. If anyone stopped her she would say she’d fancied a jog under the full moon. What the fuck. If it was Zirkeler, she’d Mace him. On principle.

  She reached a rear door topped with roofing glass. She looked around. The path to the lake was waymarked with whitewashed stone. She selected a stone she could lift and wrapped her Ascari bomber jacket round it. Then she smashed the stone against the door panel.

  Time was everything in such cases. You had to get in and out quickly.

  The safety glass made surprisingly little sound when it gave way. Amira was fairly confident she hadn’t been heard much beyond a fifty-foot radius. She’d be long gone by the time the watchman made his rounds again. And, at the very least, by leaving a shattered door behind her, she might have succeeded in tossing a spark into the LB woodpile.

  Using her bomber jacket as protection, Amira straddled the doorframe and eased her way inside the building. She checked around for a burglar alarm or flashing lights, but nothing was visible. Which didn’t mean to say that an alarm wasn’t going off in a distant office somewhere. If the police turned up, so be it. She’d make a dreadful stink, and still get her story. But somehow she suspected they wouldn’t. The LB were not the sort of people who courted that kind of publicity.

  The glass-sectioned doorway led into what appeared to be an old-fashioned clerk’s office. In fact, the entire interior of the factory was curiously old-fashioned, as if it had been preserved in aspic as a sort of shrine. The windows were of the wartime Nissen hut variety, the floors were covered in 1960s linoleum, and the strip lighting resembled the sort they’d used in the Loftus Road football ground when she’d visited it with her father as a child.

  Amira switched on her torch, shone it briefly around, and then switched it off again. She hurried across the floor to the main inside door, trying to keep the mental image of where everything was situated in her head. At the door she switched the torch on and off again. This one wouldn’t be quite so easy to crack. She tried it first for give. Non-existent. She cast around for another possible entrance. None.

  She thought for a moment, and then made her way to a desk situated in a nearby corner. Filtering the torch through her handkerchief, she checked through all the drawers. No keys. She took the drawers out. No keys taped underneath the drawers either. She walked back to the door. There was a filing cabinet situated an arm’s length from the entrance, with a space left between its back and the wall. Amira cupped her ears and listened out for any extraneous noises. She realized she was sweating. She brushed the damp hair away from her ears and tried again. Nothing. No noise.

  She inserted her hand deep into the gap. A key was hanging on a nail about six inches below the top of the cabinet. She rolled her eyes and tried it in the lock. Twisted once. The door opened. It never ceased to astonish her how lazy people could be in terms of security.

  The smell of chemicals was stronger in this new room. Amira could see cardboard boxes piled high to the ceiling. Some had pictures of swimming pools on them. At the far end were bigger boxes. These were decorated with pictures of jacuzzis, Turkish baths and saunas. She was in a warehouse. No outside windows to give her away.

  She began using her torch with impunity now, focusing on each section of the building in turn. But the part of her brain concerned with Hart wouldn’t leave her alone. Did she still love him? Yes, she did. She’d admitted as much to him in England, but he’d been so resentful of her by that time that she wasn’t sure he’d fully taken it in. Did she want him back? That also. Though not by any rational choice. More by emotional necessity. She couldn’t get him out of her head. Whenever she thought about him, the image came to her of how he’d thrown himself across her body in Syria in an attempt to shield her from the bullets.

  He’d been prepared to give up his life to protect her, even though they were in the process of breaking-up. Maybe she had been a little ungracious in her response to his heroism? Her feminism lever was set to the default position, and always had been, which got her into all sorts of trouble with male colleagues. Maybe she should just have said thank you, and left it at that? Rather than berating him for patronizing her, as she had done.

  Amira sliced open a few of the cardboard boxes and checked inside them. Each one contained exactly what it said on the packet. She began to lose heart. Maybe she was on a wild goose chase? Maybe she was trashing a perfectly innocent chemical factory? She continued on her desultory rounds of the warehouse, her torch beam bobbing in front of her.

  As she walked the length of the depository, she began speculating on how she might get her lover back. Simply appealing to his better nature wouldn’t do it. Hart was a proud bastard at the best of times – all Aries were. Well then, how else? By proving to him that Effi R
ache was pulling Zirkeler’s strings, that’s how. That she was a murderess as well as a whore. All Amira’s instincts told her this was the case, but she would need to confirm it beyond a reasonable doubt. And way beyond Effi Rache’s ability to sue her and the newspaper for libel – or soft-soap Hart into falling yet again for her Marlene Dietrich eyes and her gooey protestations of innocence.

  Udo Zirkeler was the key, then. Amira had done her homework on him. She understood his psychology. Thugs like him seldom, if ever, acted alone. They needed the support of their peers. They needed someone to give them orders. Someone to look up to. Someone to work for. And that person, she was convinced, was Effi Rache. All she needed to do was to gather her facts together and publish them. Then Hart would come running back to her. And this time she’d find a way to make him stay.

  Amira stopped what she was doing. She canted her head to one side like a dog listening for the return of its master’s footsteps. Had she heard something? No. It had only been the gurgling of a radiator. As she listened out for a repeat of the noise, the beam from her torch skated across a thirty-foot-long span of insulated glass. Amira played her torch beam across it a second time. Odd. What was such a vast expanse of glazing doing in a warehouse, where any idiot could smash through it with a misdirected pallet or an out-of-control forklift? She hurried forward and directed her light through the glass.

  Amira’s heart caught in her chest. It was a laboratory. But this was no ordinary laboratory – she could tell that much straight off. Treble doors with what looked like airlocks sealed the laboratory off from the outside world. Amira manipulated the torch so that its beam fell on the first of the two self-contained compartments. It contained a disinfection unit with shower nozzles and chemical cleanser tanks. Hardly necessary for making swimming-pool chemicals.

  She swung the beam a little further. A pair of protective suits, each with a self-contained breathing apparatus and an internal radio, hung on a frame just inside the entrance to the lab. The bottom halves were designed in the same way as a pair of waders, to cover and completely seal the feet, so that the individual using it would have no possible contact with the laboratory atmosphere. Amira directed her torch beam downwards. Below the dangling feet of the body suits, two pairs of steel-toed boots stood side by side, with chemical-resistant gloves stuffed inside them.

  Amira took the phone out of her pocket and began taking photographs. The flash was overwhelming in the enclosed area, but she was standing in a self-contained warehouse with no outside windows. It was a risk worth taking.

  When she got back to her car she would forward the pictures to her computer at the safe house. Then she would show them to Hart. He might think a little differently about his lover, after that.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Lenzi saw the flash from the phone camera just as he was climbing through the shattered door panel. He had no idea what the intruder was photographing, but he knew one thing for certain – thieves didn’t take pictures during the course of a robbery.

  Each flash lit up the direction he needed to take very nicely. Lenzi hurried forward and hid himself behind a pile of boxes three feet away from the open doorway that whoever was in the warehouse would need to exit through.

  He felt in his pocket for his phone. Now was the perfect moment to text Udo, whilst whoever was in the warehouse was busy taking photos. Udo lived twenty minutes away. By the time he got to the factory, Lenzi would have everything under control. Maybe Udo would take him a little more seriously then?

  Lenzi slapped at his clothes. Jacket first. Then trousers, front and back. No phone. He must have left it in the car in his hurry to get to the break-in. Shit. That was typical. Bloody typical.

  He flailed around in his head for what to do next.

  Should he lock the door and run back to the car and get the phone? No. There might be another exit. Whoever was taking the photographs might slip out through there, and then Udo would use Lenzi’s head as a punch bag. An ambush, then? Lenzi grimaced. He didn’t even have a weapon. The crash of the broken glass had so excited him that he had left his pickaxe handle in the car.

  He stood by the exit and listened for the sound of the intruder’s shoes. Maybe if he toppled the boxes over onto them when they came through the door? That would give him the element of surprise, wouldn’t it? Then he could overpower them and tie them up. That way he could run back to the car, get his phone and send Udo a fake message, effectively covering his butt.

  Amira stepped through the exit before Lenzi had made up his mind whether to topple the boxes over or make a lunge.

  Lenzi shouted and made a lunge.

  Amira lashed back at him with her Maglite. She heard a satisfying crack as it struck home. Lenzi landed on top of her. She struggled to free herself from Lenzi’s dead weight.

  The rim of the torch had struck Lenzi on the upper corner of his right eye. Whoever was beneath him wriggled free and sprang to their feet.

  Lenzi threw out an arm and tripped them up. His eye was hurting abominably. He hoped it hadn’t burst in its socket. He hoped he wasn’t blind.

  He brought his fist down hard and struck flesh through clothing. Whoever was trying to pull away from him cried out.

  It was a woman.

  Lenzi grabbed the woman’s leg and attacked with renewed vigour. He probably outweighed her two to one. This was going to be easy.

  Amira lashed back with her torch a second time. Lenzi caught the blow on his forearm. In the same movement he brought his elbow down hard.

  The woman cried out again.

  Now Lenzi was on top of her. He knew where her head was. He remembered hitting the Algerian with the brick his father gave him. Remembered how sweet that had felt.

  He brought his fist down as hard as he could.

  FIFTY-SIX

  Hart no longer understood himself. Nor did he care to understand. One part of him was insanely worried about Amira. This part knew that he needed to get through to her – to persist in trying to call her until she had the sense to switch her phone back on and take his warning about Zirkeler and the heightened security at the factory seriously. The other part of Hart had drifted into the habit of making love to Effi at every possible opportunity. On top of tables. Up staircases. Under the shower. In the bath. In Effi’s private sauna. Even, on one notable occasion, in Effi’s car. This part of Hart felt a distinct sense of entitlement. And even though their shared bedroom might seem a little mundane, the night has its own laws, as Hart had discovered to his delight. And one of those laws was that goodnight sex had become de rigueur between him and Effi, given the particular tenor of their relationship.

  And Effi knew precisely which of Hart’s buttons to press. Which of his levers to pull. He had become like Punchinello to her doll mistress. Trilby to her Svengali. It took Hart less than the three-second span between the bedroom door and the bed to strip Effi out of her gold lamé dress and bury his head between her legs.

  Now, twenty minutes later, the rhythm of Effi’s breathing, just a few inches below the level of Hart’s chest, seemed at the furthest possible extreme from sleep – and even further from what Hart had originally intended when he had followed Effi up to the bedroom. Hart grasped Effi’s hair with one hand and her throat with the crook of his arm, and, using the frame of her body – which was splayed out on all fours in front of him, her rump in the air, her head cradled on the pillow – for support, he ground his hips between her legs until, to any remotely detached observer chancing upon their outline in the dark, there would have been little to tell between them. It was as if Hart wished to crawl inside her skin.

  Effi cried out as Hart tightened his grip around her throat. But her cry wasn’t fearful. It was full of joy. She wanted him to subjugate her. To force her to submit to his physical will. The sweetness of finally being allowed to give way – of being able to suborn oneself to a more powerful force, whilst at the same time trusting and knowing that that force would not abuse you – would not go beyond the irrational �
� was, for Effi Rache, the ultimate in sensual delight.

  ‘Stay in me, Johnny. Stay in me, you bastard. Don’t pull out yet.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  Effi collapsed beneath him. Hart lay on top of her for the next ten minutes, the sweat drying between them, his hips spasmodically thrusting, as if through the inherited echo of what had passed before – the culmination of a tragically diminished muscle memory. Inevitably, inexorably, he felt himself stirring again.

  ‘Can I pull out and go one higher?’

  ‘Just do it. Do anything. Anything you want.’

  ‘Has anyone done this to you before?’

  ‘No. Never. Make me do it. Force yourself on me, Johnny. Put all your weight on me. Crush me.’

  Hart eased himself out, tucked a pillow beneath Effi’s hips, repositioned himself, and started the pair of them on their next ascent. I am an animal, he told himself. I am responding like an animal. Thinking like an animal. Reacting like an animal. There can be no possible harm in this. This woman does something to me. She makes me mad. I cannot help myself. She is a part of me. Has always been a part of me. Will always be a part of me.

  He was matching Effi’s cries with his own now. Sometimes, at the most extreme moments, his breath caught in his chest and his heart strained in its chamber like a man under torture. You are my sister, he chanted inwardly. My wife. My daughter. My mother. You are all women to me. I want to be in you. Part of you. I want to inhabit you.

  Later, when Effi was asleep, Hart dragged himself downstairs to where he knew she kept the Holy Lance. He was exhausted – utterly spent. All he wanted to do was sleep, wake up, and fuck Effi again. He couldn’t see beyond that point. But there was no question of will involved in the action he was undertaking now. It was something he had to do.

 

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