“I swear it!”
Harry pushed the tip of the poker into the bowl of fruit on the table beside Tóth and grimaced as the red-hot tip effortlessly burned and sizzled its way through the thick green rind of the centrepiece — a large watermelon.
Tóth jumped with fear in his chair but Baupin pushed down on his shoulders and kept him in place. “I suggest you tell the man what he wants to know,” the Frenchman said. “Or you won’t need a pack of cards to have a poker face, if you understand what I mean.”
Tóth understood, but was fighting hard to control his fear in front of his captors. Harry guessed that the sort of punishment Szabo meted out to traitors would outweigh a hot poker in the face, but the difficulty was one of priorities.
“You have no idea how powerful Mr Szabo is.”
“Seems like a minor-league Bond villain with terrible taste in art to me,” Harry said.
“You have no idea…”
The red hot poker might be the lesser of two evils compared with Szabo’s depraved sense of justice, but this threat was immediate — literally in his face right now. Szabo’s retribution for treachery would be worse, but that was in the future. It was a simple decision to make, and the answer would be facilitated by the smell of burnt melon on the tip of a searing-hot fire iron held an inch from his eye, which is exactly what Harry Bane now did.
Tóth pushed his head back into the leather seat as far as it would go but bought only another inch at the most and the heat from the poker was still intolerable. Harry pushed it through the inside wing of the chair and it easily burst out the other side, covered in cotton batting popping and sizzling as it burst into tiny flames.
“Launch site,” Harry said, flatly. “Where is it? Last time I ask.”
“It’s from his apartment — at least that’s what he told me,” Tóth said at last. He breathed out and Harry watched him visibly collapse as he thought about how he had betrayed a man as dangerous as Zalan Szabo.
“Where?”
“The Shard.”
“You mean the building?”
Tóth nodded glumly, but Harry was pleased with the result.
“What the hell is that?” Zoey asked.
“It’s a skyscraper in London, right?” Niko said.
“It is indeed,” Harry said.
“Ah — I understand!” Lucia said.
“I understand too,” Zoey said.
“And me,” Baupin said, and gestured toward Tóth. “But does he understand?”
Harry pushed the poker back into the fire and struck Tóth with a single punch in the cheek, knocking him out cold. “He understands.”
Harry kept a steady eye on Maja Eklund as she drove Szabo’s Maybach through the deserted streets of Chamonix. He was nowhere near trusting her yet despite the gesture she had made by handing him the Uzi, and he wasn’t the kind of man to take unnecessary risks.
He turned and smiled at Lucia, but her response was hesitant. He had noticed the look she gave him back in the penthouse when he held the poker up to the Hungarian goon’s face, and perhaps she had been shocked by his actions. In a way, it had surprised him too — how easily his past had come back to the surface, how simple it had been to draw on his experiences as both an officer in the Pathfinders and an agent for MI6.
Easy, and disappointing. He had hoped to leave all that behind him and move on with a new life, but it was like a shadow. No matter how hard you ran it was always right behind you.
As she drove, Niko gasped from the back seat. “Something’s wrong!”
Harry turned in his seat. “What’s the matter?”
He was holding his cell phone in his hands and shaking his head. “I was trying to transfer funds from one account to another to pay for the aircraft fuel and I cannot access my account.”
“Eh?”
“Wait.” Niko made a call and pushed back in the Maybach’s seat as he waited for someone to answer. When they did, he explained the problem and gave his details. Moments later when he cut the call, he was ashen.
Zoey leaned forward and touched his arm. “What’s going on, Nikky?”
“They say they don’t know who I am. They say they have never heard of me.”
“There must be some mistake.”
“I’ve been banking with them for over twenty years.”
“This doesn’t sound right,” Zoey said. “Wait.”
She flipped on her phone and started to check some details, but less than a minute later she reported the same as Niko. “My accounts aren’t there anymore — nothing.”
Harry turned to Lucia. “What about you?”
But she had already checked. “Nothing — no access to my accounts at all, so I went to a forum I use to ask if anyone had a similar experience and all of my posts are gone and I can’t log in. It’s like I was never there.”
“Never on the internet at all…” Niko said, his voice trailing away.
“The Ministry,” Harry said. “I guess Andrej wasn’t joking when he said how far their reach goes.”
“But that’s more than reach,” Baupin said as Maja pulled into the small airport. “Who could remove all of us from the internet in a matter of hours?”
Harry clenched his jaw and tried to fight his anger back down. “That’s what we’re going to find out. In the meantime, we have to fill up a Baron or we’re not going anywhere. Cash anyone?”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Baupin was at the controls, and Zoey sat beside him and stared out across the top of the clouds. Harry and Lucia sat behind them over the wing, and at the back were Maja and Niko, who after a brief moan about leg room was now slumped down in his seat and snoozing.
It was full night now, and the gentle glow of the instrument panel shone up and lit their faces in a low, amber light. They rarely spoke over the hum of the air-cooled six-cylinder piston engines, and when they did their voices were thin and distorted through the aviation headset mics.
After skirting around the west of Geneva they soon ascended into the clouds and didn’t break out of them until passing eight thousand feet as they crossed into the French department of Jura. Now they were in a new world, just the six of them in their tiny aircraft, speeding north above an ocean of bubbling clouds lit purple in the startling light of the full moon.
In the silence, Harry turned to Lucia and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. “Feeling okay?”
She turned to see him, startled for a moment by the question. Then she nodded once and tried to return the smile. “I think so, but I’m not sure.”
“I know,” he said, noticing for the first time since Madrid what a beautiful woman she had grown into since her punk days. The ink-black eyelashes and the pale brown, sad eyes behind them. She wore the bitter experience of her youth behind a veil of measured confidence and dazzling good looks, and not for the first time he cursed himself for being stupid enough to let her fly out of his life all those years ago. “You’ve been through so much these last few hours it’s enough to drive anyone insane.”
“We all have,” she said, turning away from him to glance out over the moonlit clouds. “Finding Pablo like that, where we had shared so any good times, and then being chased around Madrid and Paris were enough of a nightmare, but then seeing Andrej killed in such a terrible, painful way right in front of our eyes…” her words broke up and she moved her hand away from his to dab the tears running down her cheeks.
He felt the impulse to put his arm around her and give her a comforting hug, and then a greater impulse again to kiss her, and make things like they were when they were young. He stopped himself from going further and turned in his seat to face the front. As if she needed that right now on top of everything she’d been through, he told himself, cursing once again his own thoughtlessness.