Davidson had decided to send him undercover. Whether those records would be altered to reflect the truth of his situation now that there really was a warrant out for his arrest on firearms charges was another matter entirely. All Bronson could hope was that Georg wouldn’t decide to probe any more deeply.
“So you’ll know that I have no love for my former employers,” he stated. “And Georg should also have told you how I came to meet his group in the first place.”
Marcus smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Doing a bit of minor vandalism at the Olympic sites. Hardly the Great Train Robbery, Mr. Bronson, was it? And then you attacked that bulldozer with a hammer, a somewhat inadequate weapon if you were being serious.”
“That was about all we had to hand,” Bronson said defensively. “And you can do a lot of damage if you know how. I probably smashed it up enough to write it off.”
“Bravo,” Marcus muttered ironically, “so the sum total of your efforts to disrupt the London Olympic Games amounts to the possible financial destruction of one piece of earthmoving equipment that might at some point have been used on the site. Obviously there’s no way of telling, because all the major construction work was completed some time ago. Not particularly impressive.”
“I did what I could,” Bronson replied, then decided that perhaps attack was the best form of defense. “And as far as I could see, Georg and his merry men weren’t doing much better, and there were about a dozen of them.”
Marcus nodded. “Actually, they were doing exactly what we wanted them to do. They were just providing a diversion, making the police think that the biggest threat to the Games was this kind of minor vandalism.”
That tied up with what Georg had told Bronson earlier, and implied that the German was planning something else, something darker and much more dangerous.
“So you’ve got something else in mind?”
Marcus shook his head. “Before we decide to share that information with you-if we ever do, that is-we need to be sure exactly where your loyalties lie.”
“I would have thought I’d established that by now. I’m wanted by the British police for assault and whatever other charges they’ve been able to drum up against me. If I go back to England, there’s a strong chance I’ll be arrested as soon as I get there and then spend several years in prison. I’ve no option but to throw in my lot with Georg and the rest of the group in their campaign against the Olympic Games, and that’s why I’m here now.”
Marcus nodded patiently. “I know, but what you don’t understand is that we really don’t care about the Olympics except as a convenient vehicle for what we intend to do. And if you are going to play any part, however small, in our operation, then, as I said a few moments ago, we must be certain of your loyalty.”
“And how are you going to achieve that?” Bronson asked.
“A simple test, that’s all. You’ll be performing a small service for us, but one that will satisfy me that you can be relied upon.”
Again, this echoed what Georg had said to him back in England, and Bronson didn’t like the sound of it any more the second time round. But there was nothing he could do except go along with whatever Marcus had planned.
“Follow me,” the German said.
Marcus gave a slight nod, then turned away and began walking toward a set of double doors at the far end of the room, the two men who had accompanied Bronson following on behind. Bronson was led down a flight of stairs, and then down another flight, by which time he was certain that they were below ground level. At the end of a short corridor was a steel door, standing partially ajar.
As Marcus approached, the door swung open to reveal a brightly lit room, the walls and ceiling painted brilliant white, in which about half a dozen men were standing waiting. But unlike the opulent surroundings Bronson had just left, this chamber was almost bare. The floor was gray-painted concrete, and the only objects in the room were bright lights-almost like floodlights-set in each corner, and a heavy wooden chair, the back, arms and legs fitted with leather straps, bolted to the floor in the center, the area around it scuffed and discolored with dark stains. A professional-looking movie camera was positioned at one side of the room, its lens pointing directly toward the chair.
Bronson was walking into what looked like a film studio intended for a very particular type of action, and he had a sudden, disturbingly clear idea about exactly what Marcus intended.
21
23 July 2012
Marcus stopped inside the room and gestured for Bronson to approach him.
“The test we’ve devised is very simple, and will only take a couple of minutes. Afterward, as long as you’ve passed it, I’ll decide exactly how much I should tell you about our operation.”
He turned away and made a gesture to one of the men standing beside the wall. The man nodded, then strode across to another door a few feet away, opened it and barked a command.
Two other men appeared from the open doorway, half carrying, half dragging, a third figure, another man wearing only a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, both garments heavily bloodstained. His face bore the unmistakable marks of a severe beating, and even from where Bronson was standing it was clear that several of his fingers had been broken, and his arms were covered in what looked like acid burns. Whoever he was, he had clearly suffered appalling torture, either as punishment for some infraction or, probably more likely, to extract information from him. He was muttering almost incoherently, in great pain, and the only words Bronson could make out were nein and bitte.
The man was hustled roughly across the room to the wooden chair and forced down into it, the straps tightened around his waist, arms and legs to secure him in place. The two men then maneuvered a heavy wooden frame into position directly behind the chair. The front of the frame was fitted with long, wide and thick strips of heavy rubberized material that were attached at the top. Bronson knew exactly what the device was, though he’d never seen a mobile version before. A short distance behind the rubberized strips there would be a heavy-duty steel plate, or perhaps even a sheet of Kevlar.
Marcus looked on, a slight smile playing over his lips. “This organization is small but we try to be as secure as possible,” he said. “We run what you British call a tight ship, and there are two things that we simply do not tolerate. One is failure, and the other is breaching our security. This man”-he gestured toward the bound figure-“was guilty of both. About a week ago we discovered from monitoring his phone calls that he was in contact with a member of the Berlin police force, and was preparing to pass information to him in exchange for a promise of immunity from prosecution and a substantial pay-off. Knowing the Berlin police as I do, I suspect he might have got the former, but certainly not the latter. So he breached our security, and you could also say that he’d failed, because he breached it in such a clumsy way that we were almost certain to find out about it.”
Marcus glanced back at the bound man, then looked again at Bronson.
“We’ve managed to persuade him to disclose everything of value that he knew, and now he’s of no more use to us. Or to anyone else, in fact. As you can see, our questioning had to be somewhat robust to persuade him to tell us what we wanted to know. He’s obviously suffering and your test, your initiation, if you like, is to ease his pain. We want you to kill him. Right here, and right now, in front of the camera.”
Marcus reached into his jacket and took out a clear plastic bag, much like the evidence bags used by the police, inside which was a semi-automatic pistol. He handed the bag to Bronson.
The weapon was an early model Walther P99, with the green polymer frame which was a characteristic of that pistol. He could tell immediately by the weight and balance of the Walther that either the magazine was empty or it wasn’t fitted at all. He quickly glanced down, half turning the weapon in his hand until he could see the base of the grip, and the empty black oblong that showed that the magazine was missing.
Bronson looked at the man in the chair, and then back at Marcus. The German seemed utterly unconcerned that he was ordering the death of another human being. If anything, he seemed slightly amused, and for the first time Bronson caught a glimpse of the kind of dispassionate and callous efficiency that had characterized the German administrators of the horrendous concentration and death camps of the Second World War.
As far as Marcus was concerned, the murder of the anonymous figure strapped to the wooden chair was of
