“His safe is behind that?” Harry couldn’t believe the killer had overlooked it, but then hiding safes behind pictures was so clichéd perhaps he had dismissed it as too obvious.
Lucia nodded her head. “Why?”
“It sold through an auction house I know, that’s all.”
“Yes, he bought it at Bonham’s many years ago.”
Harry gently took the Matisse off the wall and laid it on the leather sofa. As Lucia had said, behind it was a compact safe — a steel Burton Standard with an electronic combination lock that Harry was familiar with from his days working in MI6. He quickly tapped in the numbers from the book and tried to open the door.
“Well?” Lucia asked.
“Nothing. Whatever they are, they’re not the combination to this safe.”
Lucia sighed.
“Don’t worry — we’ll work it out, but we need to work fast. Whoever’s holding the police back won’t wait forever — plus the killer could return at any moment.”
“You think?”
“Like I said — they were looking for this,” he held up the small book. “Perhaps Pablo left them something easier to find that has led them on a wild goose chase. When they find out they’re going to come back again so we need to work fast.”
Harry paced the room again, stopping once or twice to peer through the curtains. A team of armed officers was snaking up the pavement and entering the apartment block. “Looks like we have company,” he said.
“The police?”
“And CNI I would guess — they’ll be in here in seconds. Damn it!” He turned and saw the old framed map of Italy on the adjacent wall. For a few seconds he said nothing, and didn’t move a muscle. It couldn’t be, could it?
“Harry, what is it?” asked Lucia.
More silence.
“Harry!”
The man appeared from the shadows of the hallway, lunging forward with a boning knife he’d snatched from the side. It still had meat on it from the meal Pablo had been preparing when he was attacked. He simultaneously swung his left arm back to strike Lucia in the face and brought the knife slicing down through the air towards Harry’s chest.
The Englishman raised his arm to block the wound but the blade slashed deep into his forearm. The blow to Lucia knocked her off her feet and sent her flying back onto the leather chair while the point of the knife missed Harry’s body by millimetres.
The former soldier’s training kicked in without thinking about it, and before he knew what had happened he’d returned fire with a heavy knife-hand strike and smashed the blade from the man’s hand. It clattered onto the floor butt-first. With the handle now wedged into a small gap in the floorboards the blade of the knife was sticking up into the room like a steel stalagmite.
As Lucia staggered back to her feet, the man spun around with the reactions of a ninja, striking Harry in the chest with a sharp palm strike and knocking the breath from his body. In the same move he brought his other hand around and back-slapped Lucia to the floor behind him once again.
Harry fell back onto the knife, stopping himself from getting impaled on it by pushing out his left arm and landing on his elbow a few inches from the sparkling blade. He knew he had to get away but before he could move the man launched himself toward the former spy, slammed his boot down on Harry’s chest and started to push him down onto the knife’s lethal meat-covered blade.
Harry felt the tip of the knife prick into his back as he fought like the devil to stay alive. All the weight of his body plus the force of the man’s boot pushing him down was now supported by his left arm as he used his right arm to twist the assassin’s ankle and push him away. He felt his elbow crunching down into the floorboards and the tip of the knife driving further into his skin.
Lucia was screaming, unsure what to do, but then she picked up a vase from the bookshelf and brought it crashing down on the man’s skull. The killer grunted in pain and collapsed to the floor at Harry’s side, giving the former soldier all the time he needed to spring away from the blade and get to his feet.
He wrenched the knife out of the floorboards and moved toward the man, but then the lights went out and they were plunged into darkness.
Lucia screamed again, and they both heard the assassin scramble to his feet and melt into the shadows of the apartment.
“They’ve cut the power,” Harry said, cursing the timing of it. “They’re about to raid the apartment. Bugger it!”
Then the front door burst open and a heartbeat later an anti-terror squad burst in from the hall and surged into the apartment. They were geared up with night vision scopes and assault rifles.
A wild cacophony of screams in Spanish ordered everyone to get on the floor and put their hands behind their heads, but then a muzzle flash in the darkness lit the room for half a second — just long enough to see one of the policemen collapse to the floor.
SEVEN
With the sound of the gunshot still in the air, Harry leaped at Lucia and rugby-tackled her to the ground behind one of the couches. She took the brunt of the powerful fall as she slammed back-first into the old, hardwood floorboards. She screamed out in shock but the air was pushed out of her a second later when Harry landed on top of her. The assassin had shot one of the policemen and Harry had anticipated the response in just enough time to save their lives.
Before either could speak, the police raised their guns and fired back, raking the plush apartment with nine mil bullets and blasting the furniture and bookshelves to smithereens. The bullets shredded through the couch above their heads and slammed into the bookcase behind them. Harry strained to see a way out but then realized they weren’t far from the door leading through into the kitchen and the back of the apartment.
“Think you can make it?” he asked, nudging his chin at the kitchen door.
Lucia nodded and struggled up to her elbows. “This is not what a physicist expects out of life!”
They crawled into the kitchen and slammed the door shut, then the guns fell silent and a woman’s voice called over from the door leading to the hall.
“She wants us to give ourselves up,” Lucia said. “Maybe this is a good idea?”
Harry considered Pablo’s corpse and the now the dead policeman. “I don’t think so.”
He caught some movement in his peripheral vision and saw the assassin clambering onto a small balcony outside the kitchen window. They ran over to the window just as the police began shredding the kitchen door with hot lead.
Harry winced and pulled his head in instinctively as the bullets drilled through the kitchen door and smashed it to pieces. “It’s now or never!” he said, and wrenched Lucia by the arm out of the doors and onto the balcony.
He looked below but knew it was no good — they were three storeys up and it was a straight drop to the pavement below. He thought he might just be able to make it down the drainpipe but one look at Lucia in the red dress and heels and he knew she stood no chance at all.
Looking up, the future got brighter. A sloping roof was reachable if they stood on the balcony rail and pulled themselves up, which thanks to a solid-looking cast-iron gutter looked like it might be possible.
“We’re going up there.”
“Where the killer went?” Lucia took one look at the roof and shook her head, wide-eyed with fear. “You have to be joking!”
“No joke, sorry.” As if to underline his point, his words were followed by another furious volley of gunfire which reduced the remaining parts of the kitchen door to nothing more than a thin lattice-work. “Unless you think they’re joking as well?”