She was like a cat. She hated being touched, even in bed, unless she was in just the right mood, with just the right person. A cat, he thought: slow, soft-footed, stalking movements, coming closer. He whipped round in his seat, then ducked forward, cracking his head against the metal door. He started to yell something, when the air exploded round him like an enormous paper bag and he felt the tiny stings of broken glass against his neck and ears.
He snapped down the handle and flung the door open with all his weight behind it, knocking the man outside clean off balance; then sprang out head-first arms extended as though he were diving. One set of fingers collided with cloth, the other scraped a rough jaw. He had his feet on the ground now and his thumb in the man’s mouth, crooked back to avoid the teeth and tearing the flesh sideways, while the index finger of his other hand jabbed with a sickening squelch into an eye. The man folded up with a grunt that was little more than an apologetic cough.
At that moment Packer’s mind lost control, and his body — trained during months of discipline back at the camp in Wiltshire — flew into action. He lunged forward and seized a tuft of short hair; pulled it down and brought his knee up into the man’s still invisible face, then chopped his left hand down with all its might on to the man’s neck. His adversary, who was now kneeling, made no sound. Packer lifted the man’s head and felt something hard ram into his ribs.
He gave a yell of rage, for allowing his skills in unarmed combat to master his reason. The gun. He should have gone for that right from the start. But now the man had the gun in his ribs, and Packer knew — with a kind of timeless rationality — that he had a fraction of a second left to live. Instinctively, one hand reached under his anorak for the dead man’s gun, while the other slammed down towards the barrel pressing into him just below his heart. The shot came before he could reach either.
Packer was knocked backwards against the open door: though the impact came from no bullet, but from the weight of the man in front of him, whose whole body had collapsed to the ground. Packer felt dizzy and weak at the knees, and there was a warm sticky feeling round his nose and mouth. He licked his lips and they tasted sweet and salty. He was licking blood, but it wasn’t his own.
The light came on inside the truck and Ryderbeit slid down, the tiny gun folded inside his long fingers. He kicked at the body on the ground, then bent over it. The face was smeared with blood, but not enough to hide the little hole between the eyes.
Ryderbeit smiled. ‘You’re a brutal bastard, Packer-Boy, but that sort of fighting’s strictly back alley stuff. These boys may be tough, but they also use hardware. Or maybe you think that’s against the rules?’
‘Come on, get him into the truck.’
CHAPTER 23
Sarah had not entirely enjoyed herself.
She had drunk too many vodkas to start with, and too much champagne later on. Jocelyn Knox-Partington’s helicopter trip had been cancelled, and the drive to St Moritz had been perfectly hellish. She had ridden with DJ in his Jensen, behind the Knox-Partingtons’ Bentley; and after the snail’s pace down to Landquart, DJ had tried to make up time by taking the narrow icy road through Tiefencastel at reckless speeds, with at least two nasty skids; and the foremost terror in Sarah’s life was to be maimed or disfigured in a car accident.
She had arrived at St Moritz in an evil temper. They were late for dinner, and her humour was not improved by finding that she had less than half an hour in which to bathe, change, and prepare her face, in a large suite in the Palace Hotel which, she learned, had been taken by their host — DJ’s friend, Mr Steiner.
Dinner in the local restaurant — which had been taken over by their party — was too crowded, too noisy, with too much drinking, too many people shouting and laughing; and at the end some of the men had even started throwing rolls and butter pats at each other. Several of them had made clumsy passes at her, including DJ and Knox-Partington. She had resisted them all, not always with good grace, and later, while she was repairing her lipstick in the Ladies’ Room, she was joined by Mrs Knox-Partington, who remarked into the mirror, with acid humour, ‘I’d be grateful if you’d take Jocelyn off my hands this evening — in fact, for the rest of the holiday. He certainly seems keen enough!’
Then the King Club under the Palace Hotel, with its tables jammed together like furniture in a warehouse; a swirling kaleidoscope of coloured light cutting through a haze of cigarette and cigar smoke; the pounding, ear-numbing bombardment of half a dozen hi-fi speakers. Sarah had accepted a few dances, which had fortunately demanded no physical contact with her partners, and for the rest of the evening she drank. And the more she drank, the more she found
