‘I love a good game of cat-and-mouse,’ Sigurd muttered. ‘Especially when I’m the cat, and I’ve found the mouse’s lair.’
He stepped out of the car into a pond of moonlight, leaked onto the soil through a gap in the trees, and went around to the boot of the car, from which he retrieved a shovel. He took out his phone again and checked some GPS coordinates to make sure he was in the right place, and then started digging. After about twenty minutes of labour his shovel finally clanged against steel. With a grin he took out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his brow, and then probed through the loose dirt, removing spadefuls of soil and pebbles from around the object he was uncovering: a metal door, leading down into the earth.
Eventually the entire door was exposed, so Sigurd tossed the shovel into the bushes nearby and then headed back to his car to retrieve a blowtorch and a welding mask. It didn’t take much effort to cut through the steel and get to the mechanism that kept the door locked from the inside. Sigurd took the blowtorch to the mechanism, and with an echoing clang the severed lock dropped out of the door and fell into the tunnel underneath – the secret tunnel that led into the heart of the mansion.
‘It makes the game so much more interesting when you have access to most of the country’s architectural blueprints, secret or not,’ Sigurd said to himself, an impish grin contorting his features into those of a medieval devil’s as he hauled open the heavy door. He strapped a headlamp to his head and flicked it on – for even with his polar bear eyes, the impenetrable blackness of the underground tunnel was too dense for him – and then he climbed down into it, shutting the door behind him.
Time was running short; he needed to get inside and acquire his target before the helicopter arrived. He hurried through the passage, keeping his footfalls light but swift, and wondered briefly whether Maksim knew about this tunnel. Glancing down at the thick layer of dust, which looked as if it had been undisturbed for decades, he surmised that the Ukrainian probably had no idea about the existence of this passage.
Within five minutes he had covered the kilometre between the tunnel entrance and the mansion, and he found himself at the foot of a ladder that went up a chimney-like passage leading to the centre of the old house. The time for battle had drawn near, and this knowledge caused a heat to infuse his blood with a stirring, primordial fire. With vicious anticipation hissing and bubbling in his diaphragm and stomach he ascended the ladder, and when he got to the top, he found himself peering through two slits in the stone into a darkened library. A door handle was built into the granite slab, and he cranked it with slow, gradual pressure, making sure that it did not creak.
It opened outwards, and he crawled through the opening, finding himself in a fireplace. He gave the room a quick visual sweep, making sure both that it was empty and that he was not being observed by any security cameras. When he was satisfied that all was safe, he crawled out of the fireplace and stood up, brushing the dust off of the knees of his suit pants.
‘And now the cat is amongst the pigeons,’ he whispered.
He unbuttoned his suit coat and reached inside it to loosen his Desert Eagle in its holster; he would most certainly be needing it before the evening was through. Still, though, he wanted to make use of stealth over and above anything else, and he only intended to bring out the pistol in the event of an emergency. Silence and shadows were powerful allies in this situation, and he intended to make maximum use of them.
To this end he reached into his trouser pockets, inside which he slipped his fingers through the knuckle-duster grips of two trench knives. He pulled the weapons out; one he held with the eight-inch blade extending up in an underhand grip, the other the opposite way in an overhand grip, with each grip offering a number of unique moves and attacks.
Sigurd pressed his back against a bookshelf, drawing in a voluminous breath as he prepared for battle. There would be at least ten guards posted throughout the building, enough to pose a serious challenge to him. It would have been easy enough to have told his Huntsmen allies of the situation and have them storm the building with their troops, eliminating the guards and the Rebel within at no risk to himself – but that would not have been in line with his purposes. In fact, he did not want them to know anything of this at all.
‘I know things that you fuckers don’t,’ he growled to himself as he contemplated all of this. ‘You Huntsmen think you’ve got the Ice Bear caged and declawed, you think you’ve pulled his fangs out with pliers, you think you’ve withered his muscles and have him on a leash like a fucking lap-dog. That’s what you think, you fucks … but I’ve got you pricks just where I want you.’
He grinned then, swiftly and maniacally. He wanted to cackle with self-satisfied laughter, but instead he held it in with the overriding calm, collected control that governed all of his actions, knowing with utter certainty that silence and stealth had to be maintained for the time being. After performing some breathing exercises, he bent and cracked his
