straining to make out his surroundings through the hood. He heard the doors opening, and the men hauled him out of the vehicle. They walked him across a stretch of paving, then shoved him through a door into a cool, airy building. Down a corridor, and into another room that smelled of antique leather and gun oil. He was thrust into a chair. Voices all around him. A whiff of foul breath as someone stepped up close to yank the hood off his head.
And Ben found himself sitting across a broad desk, face to face with Grigori Shikov.
The old man wore a light grey suit that was stretched too tightly across the bulk of his shoulders and broad back. His large, rough hands, like a manual worker’s hands, were curled into fists on the leather desktop. His eyes were set far apart, hooded underneath scowling brows and boring into Ben’s. To Shikov’s left stood a younger man, late forties, balding, wearing a suit, glasses and a nervous frown.
The big, broad, grizzled old man stared at Ben for a long time. Ben returned the stare, while in his peripheral vision he’d already counted the other men standing in the room in a loose semi-circle either side of him. In addition to the two heavies who’d accompanied him on the jet, there were the other two from the Humvee and another pair he was seeing for the first time. As far as he could tell, all the men were carrying concealed pistols. The Kalashnikov rifles were more obvious, and two of them were pointed right at Ben’s head. He sat very still.
‘You know who I am,’ Shikov grated.
‘I know who you are,’ Ben answered.
Shikov motioned to the man at his side. ‘This is my associate, Yuri Maisky.’ Then he turned and cast a heavy glance at Ben’s bag, which had been turned upside down and left sitting on a chair across the room. ‘It seems you are travelling light, Mr Hope,’ he rumbled.
‘We’ll do this the way we discussed on the phone,’ Ben said. ‘You give me half the money up front. Then I take you to where I left the egg and we exchange for the rest.’
Shikov let out a long breath, with the look of a patient teacher speaking to a slow-witted child. ‘I could have these men extract whatever information I need from you.’
‘I’m sure it wouldn’t be the first time you’ve had a man tortured,’ Ben said, glancing over at Maisky, whose frown had deepened as he stood listening. ‘But if anything happens to me and I don’t make a phone call sometime in the next couple of hours, my colleague will know something’s wrong. The only place you’ll ever see that egg then is in your dreams.’
Shikov’s eyes bored deeper into Ben, as if scanning the contents of his mind. Ben maintained eye contact. After a few seconds, Shikov nodded slowly. ‘Very well. Show him, Yuri.’
Maisky motioned for Ben to get up. With the rifles still trained on his head, Ben followed the man across the room to a marble-topped sideboard, where an attache case lay closed on its side. Ben stood facing Shikov while Maisky rolled the combination locks on the case.
‘I counted it personally,’ Maisky said. The latches flipped open. Ben pulled the case towards him. Slowly raised the lid. Ran his eye across the bound stacks of banknotes neatly arranged inside. He took out one of the bundles, then another, riffled them with his fingers.
‘Well?’ Shikov said, breaking the silence. ‘This will do just fine,’ Ben said. He nodded at Maisky. Then reached into the hollow space among the stacks. His fingers brushed cool steel. His fist closed on the grip of the big Colt .45 automatic pistol hidden inside. It was cocked and locked and he was just going to have to trust there was a round in the chamber. He thrust the muzzle of the pistol against the inside of the attache case lid and squeezed the trigger.
The gun jolted in his hand and the boom of the shot filled the room like an expanding wave. The heavy bullet ripped through the case and caught the nearest of Shikov’s riflemen in the chest. By the time the man had gone pitching backwards across the study, Ben was already dropping into a crouch behind the antique sideboard and bringing the Colt to bear on the second rifleman.
A wonderful thing, the element of surprise. Even with his Kalashnikov lined up and ready to go, the guy didn’t have time to compute what was happening quickly enough to squeeze the trigger before Ben’s second round punched through his skull and sent him sprawling to the rug. Two down. As the room erupted in chaos, pistols were being pulled and a lot of bullets were about to start flying.
But Ben wasn’t alone. Yuri Maisky had reached into the pocket of his suit and brought out a compact handgun. He took wild aim and the little gun barked. The guy who’d driven the Humvee went down.
The Colt in Ben’s hand boomed three times more in quick succession.
Maisky snapped off two more rounds of his own.
Then, in the space of a heartbeat, the room fell from deafening mayhem to dead silence. Shikov’s six men were scattered lifelessly across the floor. The hole in the attache case lid was still smoking.
Ben looked at Maisky. Until the moment he’d opened the case, he hadn’t known whether he could really count on the Russian’s help. The man stood uncertainly, the adrenalin tremor making the gun shake in his hand. Ben could see from the look in his eyes that he’d never shot a man before.
Shikov hadn’t moved from his desk. His jaw hung open as he stared from Ben to Maisky and back again.
‘I’ll bet you’re wondering what the hell just happened, Grigori,’ Ben said.
The truth was that, back in Monaco the night before, Ben had lied to Darcey about Shikov calling him back after getting disconnected. Ben’s conversation with the mafia boss hadn’t lasted any longer than it had needed to, and had left him unsure whether he was doing the right thing.
When the phone had rung a second time moments later, it had been someone else responding to the message he’d left on the numbers from Gourko’s mobile. Someone Ben hadn’t been expecting to hear from.
In a tight, terse-sounding Russian accent, the man introduced himself as Yuri Maisky. ‘Grigori Shikov is my uncle. I work for him.’
Ben had sat on the edge of the bed, cupping the phone, waiting for more.
‘You say you have the Dark Medusa.’
‘Right here in front of me,’ Ben had said.
‘You are crazy if you think my uncle will deal with you. He will have you tortured and killed.’
‘I’m a careful guy.’
A hesitant silence. The sound of someone teetering on the brink of an irreversible decision. ‘I can offer you another way. Split the Dark Medusa with me, and you can survive this.’
‘What about Shikov?’
‘I will convince him to let you go.’
‘Just like that?’
‘I have a lot of information. A lot of secrets.’
For the next couple of minutes, Ben had listened as Maisky described some of them. The things the man knew were enough to obliterate Shikov and his whole empire forever.
‘And you’d threaten to spill this to the authorities, just to make him call the dogs off me? Why?’
‘Because I want out,’ Maisky had said. ‘Out of this whole thing, before it is too late. I have a wife and a three-month-old daughter. I want the money to take them far away, somewhere safe. A new life for us all.’
Ben had stood up and started pacing the bedroom as he listened. The guy sounded genuine. More than that, he sounded desperate.
‘Shikov’s worth, what? Tens, hundreds of millions? Why wait for this opportunity to come along? You could have blackmailed him any time. Your freedom, in exchange for his.’
‘You don’t know him,’ Maisky had insisted. ‘He would never have given me the money. He would have found a way to fuck me.’
‘I believe it. If it took him the rest of his life. Whichever way you do this, he’s going to hunt you down. There’d be nowhere safe on this planet, for you or your family.’
Maisky had swallowed. ‘It is the only way.’
