handful of suds and massaged them into her arms. She slid down so the water rose up over her face, holding her breath while she counted to twenty in her head, then came up, shaking the suds out of her hair like a dog. She popped her ears, working the water out of them with her little finger. Then she soaped herself thoroughly, just enjoying the feel of the lather forming on her skin. Again she submerged, letting the water rinse her clean. When she came up again the song had changed. Duran Duran were “Hungry Like The Wolf.”
Then she heard someone moving about in the other room. Her first instinct was panic. She knew she had locked the door. But then she remembered the laundry. The maid service had master keys. She shouted above the music, “The clothes are on the bed!”
She lathered shampoo in her hands, then worked it into her hair, massaging it in all the way down to the roots, then slipped beneath the surface again. She worked her fingers through her hair over and over while she held her breath. The lather formed a film on across the surface. She came back up for breath, then submerged again.
Something had been bothering her ever since she left the toad’s office. It wasn’t just that he’d taken the liberty of booking her a room in the Dan Tel Aviv. That could have been old-fashioned human kindness. It was something else. She couldn’t say what it was, just that something, some nagging doubt, chipped away at the back of her mind. Something he had said or something he hadn’t. She rose to the surface again, letting the breath leak out of her mouth and nose. She inhaled and exhaled five times, slowly, then went under again. It was like one of those elaborate finger puzzles that had been popular when she was younger, where you put your fingers in at either end, and the harder you tried to pull them out, the more stubbornly the trap clung to them. She worried away at it, but her mind refused to make the connection.
Then it hit her: how could Gavrel Schnur know so much about this Mabus character? He was good, but was he that good? Was it possible? Schnur had said that even those recruited to the Shrieks were limited in their knowledge. They only knew two others within the entire terror cell-the man who recruited him and the man he recruited. Schnur had looked at the photograph of Solomon-only Solomon, he hadn’t even given the man a second name-and recognized him. Had he simply fed her the lines about Mabus and his terrors, she might have believed it; after all they knew about Mabus. His name had come up again and again, but they didn’t have a face to put to the name. He was a ghost. Like the toad had said, that was how he worked. No one knew who he was, not the real man behind the codename.
She shook her head at her own stupidity. She thought she had been so clever, holding out on the toad. She had been so preoccupied with not letting on what she knew she hadn’t listened to what he was saying. That the toad recognized Solomon as Mabus meant he had to be the man above or the man below in the food chain. There was no other way he could know him. He’d told her as much when he said he sympathized with their cause. He’d outlined their beliefs in detail. He’d even put a silver shekel on the table between them. Judas had supposedly been bought with Tyrian shekels.
“I am an idiot!”
He hadn’t just taken the liberty of booking her a room, he’d tried to put her somewhere where he would be able to find her when he needed to. A hotel room was more comfortable than the average cell, but that’s exactly what it would have been.
Orla decided to get out of the bath.
As her head broached the surface she saw a masked face leaning down over her. Leather gloves fastened around her throat and pushed her under the water. She lashed out, kicking and flailing and swallowing water as she tried to scream. As she felt the fight draining out of her body the masked man hauled her up out of the water and slapped her across the face, forcing her to breathe. She coughed up a lungful of water. Without a word he pushed her back under the water. She tried to grab his wrists and pull them away from her throat, but he was too strong. She splashed up water, kicking frantically. She slapped at the surface, spraying bubbles, then slipped down the length of the tub. Her head hit the bottom.
Orla opened her mouth to scream for help instinctively and choked again as her mouth filled with soapy water.
She slapped helplessly at the side of the tub, trying to reach something, anything.
The masked man hauled her up again. She coughed water, spluttering and trying to see through stinging eyes. She couldn’t focus on anything in the room. There was steam, and in the steam there were shadows, blurs. She could have been seeing three masked men or one.
“Were you really stupid enough to think you could hide from us anywhere in this city?” She didn’t recognize the voice. The accent was thick, heavy, but that could have been the water and the fear distorting what she heard.
She was helpless. She was naked. She reached up for the man’s face. She wanted to see him. Her fingers barely touched the wool of his balaclava before he grabbed her wrist and twisted, using his grip on her wrist to push her under the water again. As she went down she heard someone behind him say, “Don’t break her.”
She tried to push her head back above the water. She couldn’t. The masked man reached down, his hand closing around her throat, and kept her under.
“The boss wants the bitch alive.”
She knew that voice.
She knew it because she’d been listening to it all day.
She knew it because she had been stupid enough to trust it.
Uzzi Sokol.
The toad’s man.
19
Sir Charles Wyndham made the call at close to midnight. The ring signal was broken on the third cycle. A sleepy voice demanded, “This better be good.”
“If the bald man has a chain through his tongue, how can he sing?” Sir Charles said, careful to enunciate every syllable clearly. It was a stupid opening gambit. Anyone monitoring the line would be immediately curious.
“Say that again,” the man on the other end of the line said. The old man could almost hear the sleep slipping from his effeminate voice.
“If the bald man has a chain through his tongue, how can he sing?”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, do you have any idea what time it is?”
Sir Charles had no sympathy for the man. He had become safe, comfortable in his life. Like so many others in the upper echelons of the trade he’d come to think that the nine-to-five daily grind was his right. Late night calls, safe words and clandestine meets were for the grunts doing the leg work.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“We are talking.”
“The line isn’t secure. Meet me at Fagus sylvatica. First light. There are things we need to discuss that can only be said face to face.”
He hung up before the other man could object.
Max, the old man’s butler, pushed his chair through the soft wood chippings of the bridal path known locally as Rotten Row. The name was more colorful than the reality of the path. The birds were up, the dawn chorus breaking out all over the city of London. The neatly trimmed grass of Hyde Park still glistened with diamonds of dew. The air was crisp and clean. It was one of the few hours of the day when London didn’t feel like it was suffocating under the smog of pollution.
A little way ahead riders from the Household Cavalry were giving their mounts a run out. The drum of horse’s hooves shivered through the ground beneath them. Sir Charles felt it through the steel frame of his wheelchair. He had a blanket folded over his lap and a newspaper folded over the blanket. A few early morning joggers crisscrossed
