The Secret of Excalibur

Mitchell’s directions led Chase to a small staircase at the back of the house. He quickly climbed it. If the mansion’s uppermost floor were off limits, there would be a guard. The question was, how would he respond to an unexpected visitor? The party was after all being attended by Russia’s most rich and powerful people; being threatened by a goon wouldn’t be appreciated.

If the guards were under orders to be polite but firm, that would give him an advantage. They wouldn’t be expecting gate-crashers . . .

‘Okay, I’m about to go in. I’ll call you back in a minute,’ he whispered into his headset before removing it and shoving it into his jacket. Earphones and a mike would raise the suspicions of even the most half-witted security guard.

He took a breath, then opened the door.

As he’d expected, there was a guard in the hallway, who hurriedly jumped up from a chair. Chase gave him a bleary look, pretending to be drunk and lost. The guard approached - then unexpectedly smirked.

Chase tensed, not knowing what had brought on the response.

Had the guard somehow recognised him? Then the man touched a finger to his lips. Chase did the same, and found a smear of sticky red lipstick on his fingertip. No wonder the guard had been so amused. He looked like a geisha.

He smiled back - then punched the man in the stomach. The guard doubled over, wheezing. Chase whipped out his Desert Eagle and clubbed him on the back of the neck. He collapsed face first on to his chair with such force that his head ripped right through the rattan seat. He fell to the floor, the chair round his neck like some strange angular horse collar.

Chase dragged the unconscious man to the top of the stairs, closing the door behind him, then put his headset back on. ‘I’m in.’

‘Was there a guard?’ Mitchell asked.

‘Yeah, but he’s sitting it out. So now where?’

‘On the security plans, there was a room with extra systems, probably for a safe.’

‘Wait, I’m supposed to crack a safe?’

‘Not if Vaskovich’s already opened it. Head for the front of the mansion.’

Chase got his bearings, then proceeded down the hallway. ‘Eddie,’ Nina’s voice hissed through his headphones, ‘that bitch who killed Bernd and Mitzi is here. So’s the big guy, Bulldozer.’

‘Do they know you’re there?’

‘I hope not! I’m staying as far from them as I can.’

‘Any sign of Vaskovich?’ Mitchell asked.

‘No, but I’m kind of keeping my head down.’

‘He could still be upstairs, then,’ said Mitchell, sounding hopeful. ‘Which means you’ve got a chance of catching him, Eddie.’ The American issued more directions, Chase following them and arriving at a turn in the hallway.

He cautiously looked round it. A set of double doors a few metres away were half open, another guard standing outside them. His attention was more on the voices coming from within than on the corridor, curiosity having got the better of him.

Chase marched round the corner, gun aimed at the guard’s head. The man took a moment too long to react, first caught by surprise and then involuntarily freezing in fear at the sight of the huge weapon pointing at his face. By the time he overcame his paralysis, two kilograms of hard steel had cracked against his skull, dropping him to the carpet as effectively as one of the Desert Eagle’s bullets.

Barely breaking stride, Chase stepped over the fallen guard and kicked open the doors.

Standing before him were three startled men: Kruglov, Vaskovich and a third he didn’t recognise. There was no mistaking what lay on the table between them, however.

Excalibur.

‘Ay up,’ said Chase, his gun locked on to Kruglov. ‘Remember me?’

‘Chase!’ hissed Kruglov. His eyes narrowed. ‘That bastard Mitchell. He got you in here, didn’t he?’

‘He’s around. The sword’s here,’ he told Mitchell, before flicking the gun towards Vaskovich. ‘Hi there. You don’t know me, but I know you. You killed someone I cared about, and a lot of other people besides.’

‘I didn’t kill anyone,’ said Vaskovich, eyes flinty behind his glasses.

‘You didn’t pull the trigger, but they’d all be alive if you hadn’t told fuck-face here to get you this sword. Now me?’ He thumbed back the Desert Eagle’s hammer for emphasis. ‘I pull my own trigger. If I’m going to kill someone, at least I’ve got the balls to take the responsibility myself.’

As he’d expected, Kruglov didn’t react at all to the purely psychological effect of the hammer-click. Vaskovich flinched, but otherwise remained composed. The third man, however, gasped in fright before overcompensating with bluster. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘How dare you threaten me! I am Felix Mishkin, Deputy Defence Minister of the Russian Federation!’

‘I don’t care if you’re Yuri fucking Gagarin!’ Chase told him. He aimed the gun at him; Mishkin instantly cringed back. ‘Sit down and shut the fuck up.’

‘I’m airborne,’ said Mitchell over the headset, the whine of a helicopter engine partially obscuring his words. ‘I’ll be there in four minutes.’

‘So how is Nina?’ asked Kruglov. Chase whipped the gun back round at him. Vaskovich’s eyes betrayed a flash of comprehension at the name, but Chase, his attention focused on the former KGB man, didn’t notice.

‘Better than you’ll be in a couple of minutes,’ Chase snarled.

A very small, calculating smile crept on to Kruglov’s lips. ‘What are you waiting for, Chase? Why not just kill me now?’

‘You in a rush?’

‘No, but you have us, you have Excalibur. There is no reason for you to wait . . . unless your escape route is not yet ready,’ he concluded, the smile broadening. ‘Go ahead and shoot.’ Mishkin gabbled disbelievingly in Russian. ‘He won’t fire,’ Kruglov told him, still speaking in English for Chase’s benefit. ‘Everyone in the building will hear the shot. He will never get out of the mansion, never mind the grounds.’

‘You keep telling yourself that. In the meantime . . .’ Chase stepped up to the table, gesturing for Vaskovich and Kruglov to back towards the open safe set in one wall. ‘I’ll be having this.’ He picked up Excalibur.

‘You are making a mistake,’ said Vaskovich. ‘Whatever Jack has told you about why I need the sword, it is a lie.’

‘Well, it’s funny, but after the experiences I’ve had with billionaires in the past, I don’t believe a fucking word they say any more.’ Chase stepped back, starting to feel vulnerable. Mitchell was still over three minutes away - and as long as he was holding the sword, he would be forced to fire the heavy Desert Eagle with one hand, reducing his accuracy. He would also have to drop the sword if he needed to reload with the spare magazine attached to his holster strap.

And there was something else, a growing feeling of wrongness. While Mishkin, now sitting, was trembling in fear, both Vaskovich and Kruglov were almost visibly growing in confidence as he watched. He glanced at the doors. Nobody there but the downed guard, no sounds of movement. But—

‘Jack,’ he said, voice taking on urgency. ‘Those extra security systems in here - were they just for alarms? Or was there anything else?’

‘I’m not sure,’ came the reply over the helicopter noise. ‘There might have been some data lines.’

‘Data? Like to a computer?’ He looked more closely at the yawning safe. ‘Or from a camera?’ There was a small circular hole in the top of the frame, only exposed when the door was opened.

He was being watched.

The men in the mansion’s security centre had seen the whole thing - and to protect their boss would have ordered others to the room without raising a general alarm . . .

Chase looked through the doors. There was a very slight shadow being cast on the unconscious guard, someone pressed against the wall outside—

He snapped the Desert Eagle round and fired at a point two feet to the door’s side. The noise was almost deafening, the recoil kicking his whole arm up and back as a hole exploded in the wall - followed by a pounding