‘Who is May Haas, Eva?’ MacLean asked.
May Haas is… ‘ Eva tried to take a breath but failed. Her head fell to one side.
MacLean laid her gently down on the floor and closed his eyes for a moment. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he whispered.
MacLean stood up and tried to think rationally. The opposition must be on their way to his hotel. In fact, they would probably be there by now. What would they do when they found out he wasn’t there? The answer seemed clear enough. They would wait for his return. They would have no reason to suspect that he’d been on his way to Eva’s apartment. They would be waiting for an unsuspecting Keith Nielsen to return from wherever.
MacLean saw two options. He could go straight to the airport and, with a bit of luck, be out of the country by the time the opposition got fed up waiting at the hotel. Or he could go back to the hotel and even up the score for Jean-Paul and Eva. The element of surprise would be on his side because the hunted were under the mistaken impression that they were the hunters.
The warning voices of Doyle and Leavey whispered to him. ‘If you let it get personal, you can start digging your own grave.’ Was that what he was doing? Was he thinking purely of personal revenge or was there some advantage to be gained from going to war with Eva’s killers? The objective: he had to remember the objective. He was here to get Cytogerm for Carrie.
MacLean poured himself a glass of cold water in the kitchen and gulped it down. He’d come so close to finding out where Von Jonek and Cytogerm were but it had all gone horribly wrong and all he was left with was a name, May Haas. She was the only link he had to go on and he would have to find her on his own. On the other hand the opposition knew that a man named Nielsen was interested in the X14 project. They did not know that Nielsen was really Sean MacLean but to all intents and purposes, it would now be as dangerous to travel under the name Nielsen as it had MacLean.
It didn’t look good but that part of the opposition who knew about Nielsen were currently sitting outside his hotel. They would have gone directly there after leaving Eva’s apartment so there was a chance they hadn’t yet reported back to their employers. If he could get to them first, Keith Nielsen’s identity would be safe and he could continue using the name while he searched for May Haas. It seemed like a good reason to go to war.
He searched the flat for anything that might be useful in the coming conflict. He couldn’t hope to find a gun, which was what he really needed, but kitchen knives were better than nothing. He selected two and started a little pile to which he added scissors, a screwdriver, pepper, matches, a candle and a tube of superglue. A cupboard under the sink yielded two butane gas cylinders for a camping stove and some plastic tubing from a home winemaking kit. A torch and some clothes pegs completed the inventory. He packed the lot into a plastic bag and left the apartment, closing the door quietly behind him. He hailed a cab to take him to a hotel which stood about half a kilometre from his own. Making a show of entering the hotel for the driver’s benefit, he turned as soon as the man had driven off and started out on foot for his own hotel. He used the shadows intelligently, flitting in and out of doorways, circling, criss-crossing and approaching in turn from both sides to see what he could see. He did not know how many men he was looking for and he didn’t know whether they would be waiting for him inside the hotel or outside.
MacLean’s attention came to rest on a black Mercedes estate car. It was parked in a narrow lane opposite the hotel in the perfect position to observe comings and goings. He could see two men sitting in the front of the car but his view of the back was obscured. He would have to circle round behind the car to see if there were more in the back. He back-tracked and entered the lane from the far end, moving swiftly and quietly from doorway to doorway until he could see that the Mercedes, which was parked with its nearside wheels up on the pavement, held three men. There was a third man sitting in the middle of the back seat. All three were watching the hotel entrance. Two were smoking.
MacLean felt sure he was looking at the opposition but how best to tackle them? They would be armed and he couldn’t hope to take on three armed men with a couple of kitchen knives. He decided that the car was their weak point. All three were sitting down and close together; they were vulnerable and unawares. But first he had to make sure they were the killers. He decided to offer himself as bait. He moved away from the car and retreated back down the lane. He ran down the neighbouring street until he neared his hotel and stopped, knowing that when he moved on a few steps, he would become visible from the lane. The men in the car would be bound to see him.
MacLean gambled that they would not rush him. There would be no point in creating a commotion in the street when they could deal with him quietly in his room in the hotel. He steeled himself to take the next step and prayed that the men in the car saw it that way too.
He walked on, making sure that they got a good view of him by pausing under a street light to pretend to check something in his plastic shopping bag. He walked up the steps of the hotel to the entrance and into the hall to collect his key from Reception. He got into an elevator but got out again on the first floor and ran quickly back down the stairs to keep watch on the hotel entrance through the glass panel of the door leading to the stairs.
He did not have long to wait before the three men from the car came casually through the front door and asked the Reception clerk something. They walked over to the elevators and got into one which had just been vacated by four people who were laughing and joking as they crossed the hall to the exit.
The elevator doors slid shut and MacLean ran quickly across the hall, using the four laughing people as a shield between himself and Reception. He did not want the desk clerk to see him leave. Once outside, he sprinted across to the Mercedes in the lane and prayed that it had been left unlocked. It had.
The question now was, did he have enough time to booby trap the car with what little resources he had at his disposal? The men would get no answer at his room and find the door locked. They would check with Reception that they had the right number and try again before finally forcing the door. MacLean reckoned that he had five minutes max.
He got into the back of the Mercedes and emptied the contents of his plastic bag on to the seat beside him. The butane cylinders were going to play a starring role in this production. He forced the length of plastic tubing from the wine kit over the nozzle of one of the cylinders and then cut off half to fit on to the other one. He then used a kitchen knife to cut an opening into the base of each of the front seats.
The cuts were just large enough to permit the insertion of the ends of the tubing. The cylinders themselves he pushed out of sight underneath the front seats. He wanted a reservoir of gas to build up in the car but it would have to be contained in some way so that it was not flushed away when the doors were opened. The seat squabs would prevent this.
Next, MacLean needed to find the car’s flexible fuel line. It was an estate car so there was a chance he could reach it from inside the car providing he could pry off the side panels in the rear luggage space. He pulled one of the rear seats forward so that he could climb through the gap into the back. Unfortunately the backspace wasn’t empty and he had difficulty finding enough room to kneel down and turn round. There was something under a tarpaulin, which was awkward to push to one side. He struggled to get both his arms under the bundle and froze suddenly when it made a sound. Sweat broke out on MacLean’s brow; he recognised the sound. It was the sound a corpse made when trapped air was expelled from its lungs.
With his heart thumping in his chest, MacLean withdrew his arms slowly from beneath the tarpaulin and pulled it back. The bloody face and staring eyes of Jean Paul Rives looked up at him. MacLean swallowed and replaced the tarpaulin. He steeled himself to carry on.