it?’ he said, kicking away their fallen guns. The guy on the right let out a stream of obscenities in Russian. Ben silenced him with a kick to the throat and he went straight down on his back. He clubbed the other over the head with the Steyr, and suddenly the room was quiet again.
Crouching beside them, he checked them for hidden weapons and then relieved them of their radios. He stood up and swung open the door of the nearest kiln. It was all blackened inside, with metal grille shelves like those in a domestic oven, only much larger. He pulled out the shelves, tossing them aside with a clatter. There was plenty of space for both men in there, as long as they weren’t expecting comfort. He dragged each one inside in turn, kicked their legs out of the way of the door, then clanged it shut and rolled the heavy deadlock into place.
There was a big red power-on knob and a thermostat control on the bottom panel of the kiln. Of course, he was far too nice a guy to turn it up full blast and roast these bastards like turkeys inside.
Their lucky day.
Unless things went badly and they’d harmed more of those people down there. Then, he’d be back and things would be warming up.
Ben stepped over to the doorway, peered left and right and listened hard for a few seconds, then pressed on, running lightly and silently through the corridor. No sign of the cops yet. Of course. But maybe, just maybe, as long as he could maintain the element of surprise and keep taking down the gunmen two at a time, he could stop this thing.
That plan fell apart within twenty seconds when Ben rounded a corner and almost ran into another pair of masked thugs. One was a giant mastiff of a man. He was clutching an AR-15 military rifle at hip level, two thirty- round magazines taped back to back the way it used to look cool in mercenary movies. The other was lean and tough as rawhide, with a short black shotgun in his hands.
For an instant they all stared at one another. The big guy’s eyes were locked on Ben’s, and in that suspended instant of frozen time Ben noticed that his pupils were different colours, the right one dark brown and the left one hazel. It was a minor anomaly that most people would have missed, but Ben was so practised in taking in the physical details of any situation he found himself in that he spotted it right away.
But he didn’t have time to linger over it, because in the next half second the big guy’s teeth bared in a snarl and his fists tightened around his AR-15. The rifle muzzle lit up with strobing white flame and the deafening roar of automatic gunfire wiped out all thought. By then, Ben was already in mid-air, diving to avoid the high-velocity blast that ripped a snaking trail of devastation just one inch behind him.
One thing Anatoly Shikov valued was his privacy. He could have just flung the crying girl down on the floor of the art gallery and done her there – but not with Spartak Gourko and the others watching. That would just be barbaric. He dragged his struggling trophy out of the gallery, through the glass walkway and out into the old part of the house, looking for somewhere suitable. Across the hallway, a door lay open and the room beyond looked perfect for what he had in mind. Tightening his grip on the girl’s arm, he hauled her inside.
The room was a library or reading room. The walls were lined with high shelves of old books, the furniture was plush and the carpet was soft. There was an elegant marble fireplace, and in the corner was a velvet chaise longue. Anatoly dumped the girl on it. She brushed the tangle of blond curls away from her face and gaped up at him as he stood over her and pulled off his mask. Gourko’s knife dangled loosely in his other hand.
‘My name’s Anatoly,’ he said in his best Italian. ‘What’s yours?’
The world erupted in a wall of noise. Ben hit the floor painfully on his shoulder and rolled twice as the hurricane of bullets and debris whipped all around him. There was no time to return fire. He lashed out with his foot, kicking open a fire door. Scrambling through it, he caught a glimpse of gleaming tiled steps spiralling steeply down below him in a tight square pattern. He realised he was on the landing of a fire escape stairwell.
In the next instant, the two gunmen crashed through the swinging fire door after him. Ben threw himself down the steps. The heavy boom of the shotgun resounded in the stairwell. A window shattered, showering Ben with broken glass as he went tumbling down the tiled steps. The next landing was just a few metres down. He hit it on his back and returned fire upwards, one-handed, feeling the snappy recoil from his Steyr twist his hand up and round. The three-shot burst caught the shotgunner across the chest and his knees buckled.
First kill. Ben hadn’t wanted it that way, but sometimes you didn’t get the choice.
The dead man came tumbling down the fire escape, carried forward by his own momentum, and landed on Ben with an impact that drove the air out of his lungs. The big guy straddled the top of the stairs with his feet apart and aimed the AR-15 down the stairwell. Ben knew all too well that those rifle bullets would punch effortlessly through car doors, toughened glass, even masonry. A human shield wasn’t going to slow them down much. He aimed the Steyr over the shoulder of the corpse and squeezed the trigger.
Nothing happened.
The whole problem with small automatic weapons was that they tended to shoot themselves dry in a matter of seconds. A twenty-round mag in a fast-cycling action like the Steyr’s didn’t last long at all. Worse, the spare he’d tucked in his jeans pocket had fallen out as he’d rolled down the steps. He could see it lying there halfway between him and the landing. No way to get to it in time.
But it wasn’t just Ben’s gun that had run empty. The big guy swore, released the taped-together mags of his rifle and reinserted them upside down. Before he could release the bolt and hose the stairwell with bullets, Ben had slid out from under the body of his colleague and was leaping down the stairs. He made it to the next bend before the big guy could get him in his sights again. Bullets hammered off the wall where he’d been a second ago. Leaping down the stairs, Ben spotted another landing with two doors leading off it. He made a split-second choice and ripped open one of the doors, praying it wasn’t a broom cupboard.
It wasn’t. A dark corridor opened up in front of him. Before the big guy could see which way he’d gone, Ben had slammed the door shut behind him and was sprinting hard down the corridor. He tore through another door, hit a fork in the corridor and took a right.
As he ran, he was getting his bearings. He was on the ground floor now, and had probably come down the same way the guys he’d locked in the kiln had come up. The second two must have come round the other way, heading him off in a pincer movement.
Moving more slowly and cautiously now that he’d managed to lose his pursuer, Ben wove his way onwards until he found himself in a familiar-looking hallway. To his left was the foot of the main staircase, ahead of him was the entrance to the glass walkway through to the gallery.
He stopped, listened. He could hear no movement from the gallery. Maybe everybody was dead already and the rest of the gunmen had escaped. Or maybe they were all watching him on CCTV, waiting quietly for him to walk in there so they could riddle him with bullets.
It was as he stood there figuring out his next move that he heard the cry from the half-open door on the far side of the hallway.
A woman’s cry. Someone in distress.
A vision of Donatella Strada leaped into Ben’s mind. He raced across the hall and slipped into the room.
Sprawled helplessly on her back across a chaise longue was a young girl of about fifteen or sixteen. A man stood over her with his back to Ben. The first thing Ben noticed about him was the long blond ponytail. He’d removed his mask, and thrown it on the floor together with his gun, a Steyr machine pistol identical to the empty weapon in Ben’s hand. The man’s gun was just a couple of steps out of reach. Careless.
Ben moved a little closer, and recognised the girl as the sullen teenager from the exhibition. Her hair was dishevelled, her face contorted and streaked with tears.
The next thing Ben noticed about the man was the six-inch double-edged combat knife that he was using to cut away the girl’s clothes piece by piece. Her dress was slashed up the middle and hung open. He had the blade up inside her bra and was sawing slowly through the middle of it, talking softly to her as he sliced the flimsy material.
