held it in the palm of his hand and examined it. An inch-and-a-half long, brand name embossed in white on pale blue plastic. It was a computer memory stick.
‘Morgan’s research,’ Paxton said. ‘The file you sent me. Still encrypted, of course, but that’s your problem now.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Well, Major, I suggest you’d better get moving. You have seven days, starting now, to find Morgan’s treasure.’
It seemed absurd. ‘Seven days?’
‘You heard me,’ Paxton replied. ‘One week. I’m not a patient man, Benedict. I’ve waited long enough for this. Call it a challenge. You’ve faced challenges before.’
Ben hung his head. ‘You’ve got me. I’ll do everything you want.’ As he said it, he was thinking about the Browning in his overnight bag, just yards outside the front door in the Mini. It was a delicate matter of timing and luck-but if he could somehow get to it, he could end this quickly. Kill Berg first, then Paxton, then get Zara far away from here.
Paxton was watching him keenly. ‘I know you so well, Benedict. You could be my son. I know the way you think. Everything that’s going through your mind. You’re already working out ways to get out of this. You think I’m just going to let you walk out of here now, while I’m still inside?’ He shook his head, chuckling to himself. ‘You must take me for such an idiot.’ Still holding the SIG in his right hand, he reached inside his jacket with his left hand and came out holding a strange long-barrelled pistol.
Ben knew what it was. A CO2-propelled tranquilliser dart gun. His heart sank. No way out.
‘By the time you wake up, the three of us will be far away,’ Paxton said. ‘You’ll find everything you need on the desk. I wish you a very pleasant journey back to Egypt, and all the best of British luck.’ He smiled. ‘I’ll be keeping in touch for progress reports. Bon voyage, Benedict.’
He took his time aiming the dart gun. Ben tensed, waiting for it. He threw a last look at Zara, then the pistol coughed in Paxton’s hand and there was a sharp pain as the dart pierced his neck.
The blackness came quickly. His last sensation was a strange feeling of weightlessness, and his face thudding into the blood-soaked carpet.
Chapter Thirty-Five
It could have been seconds later that he woke up, or it could have been years. He felt himself rise up from the black depths, break the surface and bob up towards consciousness, and flickered his eyes open to a world of blurs and echoes. Nausea hit him like a bad smell, and with it the sick memory of what had happened.
He was still lying on the floor, but somehow it felt different, harder, colder. His left arm was flung out in front of his face. His eyes fixed on the hands of his watch and for a few seconds they meant nothing to him. Then, as the synapses in his brain started firing again, he understood that it was almost midday and he’d been unconscious for nearly two hours.
That thought gave him the burst of energy to jerk himself upright. One elbow on the floor. Then one knee, and he was staggering to his feet, shaking his head to clear the grogginess. He pressed his hand to his neck, feeling the sharp pain where the dart had punctured him.
The room around him was the same, but it had completely changed. He was standing on bare boards, just a few nails and bits of fluff around the edges of the walls to show where the carpet had been taken up. Of all the furniture, only the desk remained, and it had been stripped almost bare. The computer, cameras and surveillance equipment were gone. So was the makeshift table-and the dismembered bodies. There was no sign of what had happened there. Harry Paxton had covered his tracks one more time.
Ben could smell soap on his hands. They’d even sponged the blood from the carpet off him while he’d been unconscious.
The acrid stink of something burning outside drew him over to the window. The blind was drawn all the way down, and he yanked it open and looked out through the dusty glass at the back garden. It was overgrown and weedy, surrounded by a high wall. A big fire was burning itself out in the middle of the patchy grass, black smoke wisping upwards from the charred remnants of the rolled-up carpet and what was left of the furniture.
He turned away from the window and walked across to the desk. It wasn’t quite empty. Lying on its surface were two items.
The first was the computer memory stick that had been in his hand when he’d been knocked out. The second was a drawstring bag, tied at the neck. Ben weighed the bag in his hand, undid the knot and looked inside. There were two stacks of money in there, one larger than the other. He brought each one out in turn. Euros and Egyptian pounds-about a thousand of one and ten thousand of the other. Paxton really had thought of everything.
As the seconds passed, Ben became acutely aware of his predicament. All he knew was that he had to do what Paxton wanted. There was no choice. Paxton was no ordinary kidnapper. He was an ex-SAS colonel, and he knew Ben’s mind. He’d trained him, educated him, watched him grow into the soldier he’d become. There was no way to outwit him. The colonel had Ben sewn up tight.
Seven days to find something that had been lost for thousands of years, and he didn’t even know where to start. He picked up the tiny memory stick, held it in the palm of his hand and slipped it into his pocket, feeling his car keys still in there. He hefted up the drawstring bag full of money, slung it over his shoulder and left the house.
The street was empty outside. Ben walked over to the Mini, bleeped the locks and dumped the money on the back seat next to his overnight bag. Right away, he could see that someone had gone through his things. He checked. The Browning was no longer there.
He drove slowly, mechanically, back to his flat, parked the car in his usual spot in the underground lot, killed the engine and sat there at the wheel for a long time, staring blankly through the windscreen at the bare concrete wall in front of him. He knew he couldn’t bring himself to go up to the flat. Everything in there would remind him too much of Zara. The imprint of her head on the pillow. The rumpled sheets. Her damp towel in the bathroom. The lingering scent of her perfume. Her note, still lying there on the kitchen table.
He blamed himself. Why did you let her go?
He got out of the car and walked. He didn’t know where he was going. Up the ramp to street level, and he took a right and wandered up the alley. In a few minutes he was ambling numbly along Boulevard Haussmann, only vaguely aware of the people around him and the traffic streaming by. He kept walking. Crossed the boulevard and almost got mown down by a bus. He barely noticed it as it lurched to a halt a metre from him, horn blaring. He made it to the other side of the street and kept putting one foot aimlessly in front of the other.
As he walked, he put his hand in his pocket and held the memory stick tight in his fist. Somewhere inside the tiny electronic device, locked away behind an impenetrable curtain of secret codes and passwords and God knew what kind of techno-gimmickry, might be everything he needed to know. But there was no way in, no way to access it. He’d already tried. It was a dead end.
Unless…
He suddenly remembered. The slip of paper he’d found in Morgan’s blazer pocket. The grocery store receipt with the scribbled phone number. He’d completely forgotten about it, thinking it was unimportant. And maybe it was, but right now it seemed like the only scrap he had to go on.
But what had the number been? He struggled to bring it back. Forced his visual memory to cough it up. Nothing.
It was only when someone bumped into the back of him that he realised he’d stopped dead in the middle of the street. He stepped aside, muttering an apology.
He leaned against a railing. He felt sick, and it wasn’t just the after-effects of the tranquilliser drug. He watched as some pigeons strutted about the pavement, pecking in the dirt around a roadside tree.
Damn, the number wouldn’t come. It had been a British landline number-that much he could remember. But when he tried to focus on it, all he could see was Zara’s face in his mind. The knife at her throat. Berg’s impassive gaze. Paxton’s little smile.
The roar of traffic seemed to fill his head, making it feel as though his thoughts were being dissolved in a swirling mess of confusion. He felt feverish with it. His mouth was dry, his heart rate was accelerated, his hands were shaking. He was falling apart.
