“Ah, the ways of mortal man — or woman — on the path to Mammon,” Marks said. “My mum read the Bible to me till it came out of my ears. You can’t serve two masters. Both Luke and Matthew wrote it in their gospels.”
DeCamp had smiled inwardly. His mother, on the other hand, had only ever cared for a few things: where her next bottle of booze or fix were coming from and occasionally what particular man she was going to allow between her legs and why.
Only Martine had ever really cared.
DeCamp drove inside the garage and took the ramp three levels down, switching off the headlights before he reached the bottom, and holding up at the end of the lane that went directly to the penthouse parking slot and private elevator.
Marks had promised that the guard, normally stationed in a dark blue E-class Mercedes four positions on the right from the elevator, would be away from the building for exactly sixty minutes starting at 2:00 A.M.
The only other cars were a black Mercedes Maybach and a ten-year-old white Lamborghini Countach that had been totally restored at the factory in SantAgata Bolognese, belonging to Anne Marie, and a smoke silver Mercedes SL 65 AMG Black, belonging to Wolfhardt.
DeCamp drove the rest of the way down the lane and backed the Land Rover into the empty fourth slot. Shutting off the engine, he got out, reversed his jacket, screwed the silencer on to the end of the Steyr’s barrel, and walked to the elevator. He moved on the balls of his feet making absolutely no noise as he listened for a sound, any sound to warn him that he had been betrayed and that Marks had sold him out. But there was nothing.
The elevator car was there, which meant that the last person to use it had come down from the penthouse. Possibly the guard who’d left his post for whatever reason.
Moving to the side so as to be out of the line of fire, he pushed the call button and as the door slid open he swept his aim across the interior of the empty car.
One of the old jokes from the Battalion days was that if everything was going according to the operational plan, you were probably heading into a trap. The men didn’t care that special forces just about everywhere had the same jokes, Murphy’s Laws, because they fit.
The elevator stopped only at the lobby and the penthouse apartment and required a key card, which, as Marks had promised, was in its slot, ready to be swiped, and once again DeCamp paused. The setup was too easy, the information too pat, and every instinct was telling him to turn around and get out while he could. But then he remembered the look on Martine’s face when she knew that he was leaving again, and he could feel and taste her body when they made love, her exotic scent still in his nose.
He swiped the card, pressed the button for the penthouse, and the car headed up. At the most there should only be three people in the apartment: the Marinaccio woman, possibly one of her personnel security people, and Wolfhardt. The house staff did not live on site so there would be no danger of collateral damage, though for DeCamp that consideration had always been meaningless.
At the top the elevator slowed to a halt and the doors slid open onto a marble-tiled vestibule, an ornate Italianate fountain softly spewing water from the penis of a small boy.
Marks had given him a simple sketch diagram of the floor plan. The living room, dining room, conservatory and beyond, the kitchen and pantries were off to the left, while the five bedrooms were straight ahead and to the right. At this hour the woman would almost certainly be in her bedroom at the end of the hall.
He switched the elevator off, and gingerly stepped out into the vestibule as a dark figure came down the corridor from the left.
“Phillipe, what the hell are you doing up here?”
DeCamp turned, catching the image of a short, wiry man in jeans and a white T-shirt standing in the middle of the corridor five meters away reaching for something, and he shot him twice in the middle of the chest, driving him backwards with a soft grunt.
The sounds of the silenced shots, though muted, seemed loud even over the noise of the water fountain, and DeCamp waited for a full ten seconds to make sure that no one else was coming to investigate. But the penthouse remained quiet.
DeCamp went to the downed man to make sure he was dead, careful not to step in the blood, then hurried to the end of the hall where again he stopped for a moment to listen at the door to the woman’s bedroom suite before he went in.
The large sitting room was straight ahead, the sliding glass doors open to the night breezes off the Persian Gulf. The bedroom, walk-in closets, powder room, and bathroom were to the left.
Anne Marie’s head appeared over the back of the couch, and DeCamp almost shot her on instinct.
“We were expecting you, Mr. DeCamp,” she said, apparently completely at ease.
DeCamp stepped back into the deeper shadows by the door, trying to detect where Wolfhardt was hiding, checking firing angles and lines of sight.
“Gunther’s not here at the moment, and I have to assume that you have already disposed of my bodyguard Carlos, so it’s just you and me. May we talk, or do you intend to shoot me right now?”
“Why was my house destroyed and why was Martine murdered?” DeCamp asked. He’d almost said “my woman” instead of Martine.
“It was a dreadful mistake, believe me,” Anne Marie said. “I merely wanted your house leveled so that you would understand that I can’t countenance failure. We thought Ms. Renault was in Paris, and that when you returned you would first find her a safe house, and then come here. I don’t want the money returned, it’s yours to keep. But I was hoping to offer you redemption. I still am, if you are willing to lower your weapon and hold out your hand.”
Wolfhardt was close. DeCamp could almost feel the man’s presence like an approaching low pressure system bringing with it a storm. But Wolfhardt had been one of Sergeant Marks’s sources at the behest of the other source, Abdullah al-Naimi. Money indeed.
“Who killed her?” he demanded.
“It wasn’t Gunther himself, if that’s what you thought. He hired a pair of small-time hoods from Marseilles, and when he found out that they’d bungled the job he killed them both. It’s the only blood on his hands.” Anne Marie shrugged. “On my hands, too, I’m willing to admit. But then yours are none too tidy.”
“But you ordered it.”
“The house, not the woman,” Anne Marie said. “And now I want to make it up to you.” She stood up and came around the couch, dressed in a nearly sheer negligee, her legs outlined in the dim light coming from outside.
“How?”
“I’m worth a great deal of money—”
“How will you bring Martine back to life?”
“My dear boy, that is quite impossible,” Anne Marie said, almost laughing but stopped. “There are other women. The world is full of us.”
DeCamp had learned dispassion from Colonel Frazer and later it had been drummed into his head in the Battalion. The man who kills with precision but without passion is the man who will live to walk from the battlefield. But at this moment the blackest of rages that he’d ever imagined could hit a human being threatened to blot out nearly everything he’d ever learned on and off the battlefield.
Anne Marie, sensing some of this, raised a hand. “Don’t be a fool. Think of the money you’d be throwing away by killing me. Fabulous money beyond your wildest dreams.”
“Beware the anger of the legions,” DeCamp mumbled before he raised his pistol and fired one round, catching Anne Marie in the center of her forehead, driving her body backwards onto a glass coffee table that shattered.
“Well done,” Wolfhardt’s voice came from a speakerphone across the room. “She was telling the truth, it was an accident. And she was telling the truth about the money. May we talk?”
DeCamp stepped away from the door. “Where are you?”
“In the bedroom to your left. May we talk?”
“Yes.”
“Toss your pistol straight ahead over the back of the couch.”
DeCamp hesitated for just a second but did as he was told.
