Jake's face was ashen now. Earlier tonight he'd known more or less what to expect; even if he had only half-believed in it, still he had been doing a job. But at the time of his collision with the Mob, Castellano's people — that kind of monster — he had been… what, naive? Well, no longer.
Ben Trask knew it was time to step in, but more forcefully now. 'That's enough, Jake/' he said. 'You don't need to go into any further details. Why upset yourself) We've all heard enough and we're on your side. As for "justice" — the justice you received? — I might know a lot more about that than you do. So for now, let's skip that night at the villa.' But:
'That long, long night,' Jake husked, sweating and shivering at the same time, his skin almost visibly crawling. 'All of them, and that bastard Castellano watching it from the shadows. God, I still don't know what he looks like! But afterwards, oh, I remembered the rest of them in minute detail, would never let myself forget them. And their laughter, like jackals. And their jokes. The way they went at her, leaving no marks, no signs…'
'Skip it, Jake!' Trask's grating voice, shaking him out of it… Jake sat back and gulped at the air, gradually quit shuddering. Eventually a little colour returned to his face, and finally he was able to continue:
'I came to in the water. Underwater! My car's windows were half open and we were sinking like a brick. At first I was disorientated, didn't know what the hell was happening. I think I woke up because I couldn't breathe. Like when I was a kid: I'd come screaming awake thinking I was drowning, only to discover that my head was under the covers. But this time it was river water. And I was stupidly trying to push back the covers… I mean I felt stupid, drugged — which of course I was! But then, as I remembered what had gone down, I looked for Natasha in the passenger seat. She wasn't there, and I thanked God—
'—Thanked Him, as I somehow managed to wind my window down and drifted out and up and free. But as the car went down and I floated up, buoyed up in an eruption of big bubbles, I saw Natasha in the back of the car! Her face… her hair floating… her eyes wide open… her mouth gaping. And her spread fingers flattened and white, the hands of a corpse — I hoped! — against the curved back window.
'But dead? I didn't know, I still don't know to this day if she was dead or alive. But I've got to keep telling myself that she was
dead, because that's the only way I can bear it. And in any case, I couldn't have done a thing about it. Weak as a kitten, I felt half dead myself! My lungs were bursting — my ears, too — we were that deep. And I drifted up oh so slow, while the car went down, disappearing into the deeps. And this girl I had loved, still loved, Natasha disappearing with it…'
This time it was a while before Jake could go on. He was like a man apart from reality; he started and sat up straighter in his chair when the Old Lidesci coughed, and looked around for a moment as if wondering where he was. Then:
'Are you okay, Jake?' Liz asked him.
A nod was his only answer, until he was able to continue.
'Don't ask me how I got back to Marseille,' he finally went on. 'I can't for the life of me remember. But I did, and I laid low with a trusted friend. By then my earlier plans for revenge were firmly back in place. Before that, however, I actually considered going to the police. Then I remembered what Natasha had told me about the police being in Castellano's pocket and decided against it. I would wait it out, see what happened.
'I didn't have long to wait. It was in the newspapers, home and abroad. My car had been found in the Verdon River where it comes down from the Alps of Provence near Riez. Locals had been alerted by a hole in the wall of a stone bridge over a torrential gorge. Natasha was still in the car, also a quantity of illicit micro-drugs and other evidence that she'd been a bad lot. As for me: well with my past record I would have been a wanted man — her partner, obviously — except they assumed I was dead
'But I wasn't dead And now I had absolutely nothing left to lose. Also, I knew a few things about Castellano's people, where they hung out and who with, and I wasn't about to waste any more time…
'There was one thing I had been really good at during my couple of years with the SAS: sabotage. Sabotage, booby-traps, and demolition. And I still remember — and I cherish the memory — of the night I found Jean Daniel drinking alone in that discreet little bar that I knew so well. I was there, watching the place, when he arrived, and I was there when he left.
'It was a rainy night. As he got in his car in the alley, I stepped out of the shadows maybe twenty-five yards in front. I stood there with my legs spread like an inviting target, and I waved at him. And I started oh so slowly to walk towards him. He saw me; I saw him flinch, knew that he'd recognized me. Then he turned the key in the ignition, and I knew exactly what the bastard was thinking: that he would run me down.
'By then I'd turned my back and hit the deck just in case. But no, there wasn't much of a blast; what little there was of flying glass went over my head. So I got up, walked to his car and looked in through the shattered window. I knew pretty much what I'd see, for I'd been determined to make the best kind of job of it. And I had.
'I had taken a small hacksaw and cut halfway through the four spokes of his steering wheel close to the column. And I'd fitted a trembler to the high-explosive charge that I'd placed under the plastic casing where the column was jointed for adjustment. It was a hellishly sensitive mechanism, far too sensitive to ignore the vibrations of a revving engine.
'The blast had driven the steel core of the steering column through Jean Daniel's middle, stripping its plastic casing as it went. The core had broken his lower ribs and torn through his stomach, and done a lot more damage along the way. Yet somehow it had missed severing his spine. He sat there — alive but barely — pinned to his seat with this fat cylindrical rod right through him; sat blinking at me, the steering wheel still gripped in his spastic hands.
'"This is a different kind of rape, Jean Daniel," I told him, watching as blood filled his mouth, and his eyes began to dim, and his twitching gradually stilled. "My own special version." And then, just before the bastard died. "So now you know who hits the hardest
CHAPTER SIX More Of Jake's Story
Ben Trask, lan Goodly, and the old Lidesci were first away from the gutted, smouldering remains of the vampire enclave; Liz and Jake followed on behind Trask's commandeered transport in their own vehicle. They would be taking it easy, so it shouldn't be a problem that they'd lost the windshield. If they kept well back from Trask, the dust thrown up by his Land Rover wouldn't bother them. And the cool night air would be a definite bonus.
Just as they rolled onto the ramp cut in the steep face of the bluff, Jake slowed almost to a halt and looked back.
Apart from the smoke there was very little to show for the earlier activity. Several members of the team, dressed in fresh combat clothing but no longer armed or gas-masked, were hammering sharp signposts into the stony earth. One such post carried a legend only just visible in moon-and starlight:
HEALTH HAZARD! TOXIC WASTE! KEEP OUT!
E-Branch took no chances.
'What next?' Jake jerked his head to indicate the scene of recent devastation. 'For this place, I mean?'
Liz shrugged. 'The mine's sealed, there are no life signs.
Tomorrow the sun will come up and scorch the bluff clean.
Maybe they'll bulldoze the surface and dynamite the ramp, eventually. But there's no real hurry now. The main man was Bruce Trennier, as yet only a lieutenant but a would-be Lord.
If he had got away…' Again her shrug. 'Tomorrow they'd be back to tracking him down again. As it is, the operation was a complete success.'