‘No, Yuri, it’s the way that’ll get your wife and baby butchered in front of you, and then Shikov’s men will put a bullet in your brain. It’s not going to work. But I can offer you a deal that will. Your uncle’s going down, along with his whole organisation. I’m going to take him down.’
‘I don’t want to go to jail.’
‘You won’t. Not if you help me.’
There had been a long, wary silence on the line. Ben could sense the cogs turning furiously in the man’s mind.
‘You have no other options, Yuri. You said so yourself, and you wouldn’t have called me if you did. Now listen carefully, and I’ll tell you exactly why you need to trust me, and exactly what we’re going to do.’
In the silence of the study, Grigori Shikov stared in disbelief at the scattered corpses of his men. He still didn’t move from behind the desk. His face was as bloodless as a waxwork’s. Yuri Maisky stood watching his uncle with an agonised expression.
Ben stepped around one of the dead bodies and faced Shikov across the desk. ‘You weren’t the only person to get my message,’ he said to the old man. ‘Yuri and I had a long talk. He’s decided he doesn’t want to work for you any more. He wants a life. Consider this his resignation.’
Maisky tossed down his gun. ‘Uncle—’
Shikov’s face turned from white to red as he glowered at his nephew. ‘Yuri. This cannot be true.’
‘Yuri wants to cut a deal with the authorities,’ Ben said to Shikov. ‘Nobody knows your organisation better than he does. He can deliver it to them on a plate. Names. Addresses. Deals. Contacts. Locations of dead bodies across Europe. Details of everything you’ve been doing for decades. Enough shit to lock everyone away for ever.’
‘You will die for this, Yuri.’
‘No, he won’t,’ Ben said. ‘He’s going to be just fine. He and his family will have a new identity and a new life far, far away, courtesy of a British government witness protection programme. All he needed was someone like me to help make it happen for him.’
Shikov stared at Ben in bewilderment. ‘But—’
‘I know what you’re thinking, Ben said. ‘I’m not an agent, I’m not a cop. Yesterday I was an outlaw, wanted for murder. Where does a fugitive get the bargaining power to turn round and dictate terms to the law? Let’s just say things are a little different now. Thanks partly to your pal Tassoni, I have a bit of an edge I didn’t have before.’
A strange keening sound came from Shikov’s throat. His whole face was trembling. His hands were splayed out flat and white against the leather desktop.
Ben kept the Colt pointed at him. ‘As for you, Shikov, I promised myself I’d kill you for what you did to Donatella and Gianni Strada and all the other people who died at the Giordani exhibition that day. But now all I see is a weak, sick, sad old man who’s going to spend the rest of his life in jail.’
Shikov suddenly drew in a gasp of air. His body seemed to convulse. He clawed at his jacket pocket, ripping the seam to get at the tube of pills inside. With a trembling hand he scattered the pills across the desk, grabbed two of them in his fist, shoved them in his mouth and swallowed them dry, choking and spluttering.
‘The pills aren’t working any more, uncle,’ Maisky said. ‘You need help. I can see to it that you are well looked after.’
Ben watched as the old man slowly recovered from his coughing fit. He flipped on the Colt’s safety and let the gun dangle at his side. ‘Yuri says you’re dying of congestive heart failure. Says that, at best, you’re looking at a year. If it was up to me, I’d leave you to rot in a dungeon. But I promised your nephew that you’ll spend whatever time you’ve got left in reasonable comfort. That’s part of the deal.’
‘I promise this is all for the best,’ Maisky said.
Shikov stared in hatred.
‘And by the way, Shikov,’ Ben said, ‘I want you to know that your precious egg was dug up and sold on before you were even out of your teens. You’ve wasted your whole life looking for it. The Arab sheikh who paid millions for it in 1955 might not even have it any more. Who knows? And who cares? It’s lost to you. Always was, always will be.’
Shikov seemed to subside internally as he heard the words, like a building rigged with demolition charges that were detonating in slow motion and collapsing it to the ground. He crumpled slowly to the desktop, sinking down in his chair, clutching his chest. His breath came in great gasps, drowning in the fluid on his lungs.
Then his hand darted to the desk drawer in front of him. Before Ben could react, the Russian’s stubby fingers had hooked around the drawer handle and wrenched it open, dived inside and came out clutching an ancient Mauser pistol. Ben hit the floor at the same instant the shot went off. A display cabinet shattered behind him. Shikov swung the barrel of the Mauser towards Maisky—
And Ben shot him through the forehead.
Grigori Shikov’s eyes and mouth opened wide in surprise. Blood coursed down his face from the hole in his skull. The Mauser tumbled from his big hand. A long, whistling, bubbling breath hissed from his lungs, and then his bulk went slack in the desk chair.
Yuri Maisky stared at the dead body of his uncle. Ben turned to him. ‘You OK?’
Maisky ran his fingers down his cheek, nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I’m OK.’
Then his head exploded.
Ben whirled around, his ears ringing from the huge gun blast that had come from just a few metres behind him. Spartak Gourko was standing in the study doorway. There was a thick dressing where his right ear had been, and a Russian military Saiga-12 shotgun in his fists. Its fat muzzle was pointing right at Ben’s stomach.
Ben’s hand tightened on the Colt, the muscles in his gun arm flexed ready to go into the rapid aim-fire motion that he’d practised a million times. Half a second was all he needed to hit his mark. But Gourko didn’t need that long just to flick a trigger, and at this range the Saiga-12 would separate Ben’s torso from his legs and smear him across the far wall. That would end things pretty quickly.
Ben let the Colt hang at his side. ‘You’re hard to kill,’ he said.
Gourko’s eyes flickered away from Ben to gaze at the corpse of his former employer. ‘You did that?’ he asked Ben, motioning with the shotgun. His hand had slackened on its pistol grip. Not much, but enough to make a difference.
Ben nodded.
‘You do my job for me,’ Gourko said. ‘I should thank you. The old man was weak. It was time for me to take over. Now
‘Do I get a prize?’
Gourko grinned. ‘You are my prize.’
Ben saw the scarred knuckles tighten on the shotgun’s grip. Saw the first joint of the index finger curl itself across the face of the trigger. The fingertip flattening and whitening around the nail as the pressure of the squeeze drove the blood from the tissues. A trigger break of maybe six pounds. Gourko had five and a half on it as Ben threw himself backwards over the broad desk with all the speed and strength he could muster. Knocking Shikov’s chair over and spilling the corpse to the floor, he used his momentum to overturn the desk with a crash.
Gourko’s shotgun roared, blasting a massive chunk out of the upturned desktop. Ben tumbled to the rug in a storm of flying splinters. His Colt whacked into Shikov’s fallen chair as he scrambled for cover, and went tumbling out of his grip. Laughing, Gourko flipped a lever on the receiver of his shotgun. Ben knew what it meant. It meant the world was about to come apart at the seams.
In full-automatic mode with a high-capacity magazine loaded with solid slugs, the Saiga-12 was probably the most destructive thing in the world at close range, shy of a nuclear warhead. The room exploded into an orgy of
