Death in High Places

Chapter 15





AT FIRST SHE DIDN’T STRUGGLE because she thought it was all part of the pantomime. She tried to look frightened—it wasn’t difficult, surrendering herself to the hands of a man who killed for money would have made anyone nervous—and hoped her father would give in before she got a stiff neck. She wondered about squealing a little, or whimpering, but she was afraid of over-egging the cake. She always felt Mack didn’t really know her well, but he knew her better than that. She wasn’t a whimpering sort of girl. She was a knee-in-the-groin sort of girl. A climber. Maybe not in the same class as Patrick and Nicky Horn, but a climber nonetheless.

Which is how she came to be in the courtyard. Hanratty’s man hadn’t broken in and got her: she’d climbed down, from her room beside William’s, above the lockdown. While McKendrick was in the hall she couldn’t raise the shutters, but that wasn’t a problem for someone who knew how to rappel and kept her old ropes coiled in a rucksack at the bottom of her wardrobe.

She could have waited. Like Horn, she believed that a professional would breach any security sooner or later. But she also believed, like McKendrick, that the longer the hit man could be kept at bay, the greater the chance of something happening to alter the balance of power. Her father was pinning his hopes on it. Beth wasn’t willing to take the risk.

So she dropped herself easily down the side of the castle, bringing her rope after her. Later, she knew, Mack would want to know why. The best she could come up with right now was that she’d seen a chance to get past the waiting man and taken it, only to find herself trapped. Mack might wonder about her motives, but she was hoping he’d be so relieved when the siege ended without any harm coming to his family that he wouldn’t inquire too deeply.

A quick confab with Hanratty’s man out of sight of the remaining cameras, then they took their places in the courtyard and waited to be noticed. As she waited, Beth pictured the scene inside the hall. Mack would be watching the screen intently and racking his brains. But she was confident he wouldn’t think of anything that would enable him to rescue her and keep Horn safe. She had only to stay calm, avoid doing anything stupid, and wait. Wait for the security shutters to rise and the front door to open.

Though Beth didn’t expect her father to sue for peace as soon as he saw what had happened, Hanratty’s man seemed to. He hissed in her ear, “What are they doing in there?” and she sighed and said, “Arguing, probably.”

“About whether your life is worth more to him than Horn’s?” The man was obviously shocked.

“About whether there’s another way to handle this. Mack hates being beaten. He won’t give in to threats until he’s convinced himself there’s no alternative. He was never going to fling the door wide as soon as he saw I was in trouble.”

The man shook his head in a kind of wonder. “Other people’s families…!” As if he considered himself a pillar of society except for the minor detail of being a hired killer.

“Give him time. He’s arrogant, not stupid. When he sees he has no choice, he’ll do what he has to.”

They weren’t exactly whispering, because there was no sound pickup on the security cameras. They were talking without moving their lips.

“In my business,” the man said grimly, “time is a luxury. Scream.”

Beth sniffed disdainfully. “I don’t do—”

The first she knew he had a knife was when he drew it down her cheek, letting the blood out.

She still didn’t scream. She hadn’t been lying about that: screaming was not a McKendrick family trait. But she sucked in a gasp of sheer astonishment as she felt the skin part and the silky, cool caress of her own blood on her face. “Wha’…?!!!”

“Sorry,” said the man, apparently quite sincerely. “Needs must.”

“You’re working for me!”

“No, I’m not. I’m working for the man who pays my wages.”

“Who wouldn’t have known Horn was within a hundred miles of here if I hadn’t told him!”

“I know. And I’m sure he’s grateful. But the bottom line is, he’s paying to get a job done and this is what I need to do to finish it.” He drew another line in blood down her face.

* * *

“You said she was in on this!” Horn’s voice vibrated with horror and accusation. His eyes were bottomless with guilt.

McKendrick didn’t even look at him. “She is.” His tone was short, clipped; as if he had more important things to do than explain it all to a carpenter. He still didn’t dive for the door. “But she isn’t in control of it. She thought she’d be calling the shots, but events have got away from her. She didn’t allow for just how much Hanratty wants you dead.”

Horn didn’t give a toss for McKendrick’s analysis, right or wrong. Horn didn’t care that the girl on the monitor hated him enough to throw him to the wolves. The man behind her was holding her by her hair and drawing a third bloody tramline down her paper-white cheek.

Nicky Horn couldn’t bear to be responsible for any more pain. He reached for the keypad. “Which button?”

McKendrick slapped his hand aside. “That door is the last line of defense. For all of us. We’ve seen his face and we know who hired him—how can he let any of us live now?”

“You can’t let him keep doing that!”

“That’s for show. It’s for our benefit. He’s hurting her, but he isn’t doing her any real damage. Once he has you, it’ll be a bullet in the brain for the rest of us too.”

It wasn’t that Horn thought McKendrick was wrong. In fact he thought he was right: it was what he’d believed all along. But it was no longer relevant. Though there was nothing he could do to prevent these people dying, their deaths wouldn’t be on his conscience. But he could do something about the blood streaming in parallel lines down Beth McKendrick’s face, and that meant he couldn’t watch and not try. He began punching the keypad at random. “Which one? Which one?”

* * *

The security system had cost a fortune: the steel shutters in front of the kitchen door didn’t rattle as they rose, they gave a soft hum like a sleepy bee. For ten seconds nothing else happened. The other shutters remained in lockdown. Then the door opened and Robert McKendrick stepped stiffly out onto the back steps. “Please … stop…”

The man was still holding Beth by her hair, her head bent back over his shoulder, the knife—such a modest little blade—in his other hand, doing nothing for the moment but only the intention away from resuming its work. He watched McKendrick hesitate down the steps, unsure how closely he should approach. The door remained open behind him but no one else appeared.

“Spread your arms.”

McKendrick did as he was told. He was in his shirtsleeves and didn’t appear to be carrying a weapon. Even if he was, Hanratty’s man was among the best in the business—he didn’t expect to be outgunned by a merchant banker.

“All right.” Slowly, smoothly, the man put his knife hand behind him, and it reappeared cradling a gun. He let go of Beth’s hair. She staggered a little, then straightened up and just stood there, eyes stretched, too shocked to move away. Her arms spread in an unconscious echo of her father’s. She didn’t dare touch her face.

The man’s left hand disappeared for a moment, returned with a clean white handkerchief, which he pressed into her palm. “Sorry about that, miss. I’m sure Mr. Hanratty will make it up to you.”

McKendrick’s heart hit his diaphragm like a boxer’s glove. Until that very moment there had been the possibility that he’d read it wrong. That Hanratty’s instructions had precluded doing the safest thing, which was killing them all. But the man had named his employer in front of them. That wasn’t something he’d ever do if he meant anyone who heard it to live. In fact they knew already; and the mechanic knew that Beth at least had known when she phoned Hanratty. Still, as a matter of principle, McKendrick was pretty sure it was a no-no in the Paid Assassin’s Handbook.

“Where is he?”

McKendrick gestured jerkily toward the door. “In there. Looking…” He swallowed and tried again. “Looking for somewhere to hide.”

The man smiled. He wasn’t a lot younger than McKendrick—forty, maybe forty-five. Lean, fit, but not particularly big and not particularly powerful. Unremarkable. Nothing singled him out from a rush-hour crowd of accountants and estate agents and middle managers. And when he smiled it was almost possible to think he felt some kind of compassion. “That’ll work. Well, you probably want to leave about now.”

McKendrick had got close enough to put his long arms about his daughter’s shoulders. He held her tight. “Do you mean that?”

The man nodded. “Of course. You’ll want to get those cuts tended to. I don’t think they’ll leave a scar—at least, not much of one. Do you have your car keys?”

McKendrick nodded, still scarce believing what he was hearing.

“Go on then. By the time you get anywhere—by the time you call anyone and they get here—it’ll all be over and I’ll be gone. The best thing, from your point of view, would be to say you’ve no idea what it was all about.”

McKendrick made no reply. He steered Beth ahead of him, under the courtyard archway and across the gravel drive toward his car.

Hanratty’s man watched them go. He was also watching the kitchen door. His gun remained in a neutral position. Everything about his stance, at once relaxed and alert, suggested that the moment the weapon was needed, wherever it was needed, it would be there. But there was no sign that the McKendricks had refused his offer, so—still keeping one eye over his shoulder—he went up the kitchen steps into the house.

* * *

He’d been looking for Nicky Horn for eight months. It wasn’t the only commission he’d taken in those eight months, but it was the most important and also the only one he hadn’t managed to complete yet. Of course, neither had the man before him. Though he had a good excuse: he’d been shot dead in Saudi Arabia by a princeling who’d bought himself even better help than the princeling who’d hired him.

So Horn had been something of a thorn in his side. He’d been close on a number of occasions—close enough to draw a bead once, only to have a high-sided vehicle pass between him and the bus where Horn had taken a window seat. By the time the vehicle had passed, Horn had disembarked and vanished into the rush-hour crowd.

The mechanic consoled himself with the knowledge that it wasn’t lack of skill on his part. What kept Horn moving just slightly ahead of him was exactly that—his ability to keep moving. Movement is the best defense against an assassin. If he doesn’t know where you’re going to be, he can’t lay an ambush—and ambush is much the best way to hit a mark. You don’t follow him, you go to where he’s going to be and you wait. What usually happens is that sooner or later the mark gets tired, or complacent, and stops moving. He falls back into a routine. He takes the risk of visiting his sister or turns up at his grandma’s funeral. For a professional, one mistake is usually all it takes.

Horn had been both lucky, if you could call it that, and smart. He had no friends left after what happened on Anarchy Ridge, and he’d cut himself off from his family. He’d had a variety of jobs, but they were the kind of jobs it’s easy to move on from and that’s what he did, all the time. Hanratty’s man had no great difficulty finding out where he’d been, even where he’d been quite recently. He was never able to anticipate where he’d show up next.

Until Tommy Hanratty called him on the special number and said where Horn was two hours ago. The mechanic had been an hour’s drive away—it was mere luck that it wasn’t farther—but that was all right because nothing had changed by the time he arrived. He knew this because he’d phoned Beth McKendrick before approaching the house.

So he knew that the girl was willing him to succeed, prepared to help him. It made it easy to set up the tableau under the courtyard camera, the one he’d left untouched for that purpose. Speaking without moving his lips, he’d told her how to stand, when to keep still, and when to squirm a little. He hadn’t told her what he intended to do if the shutters remained resolutely down.

Now the shutters were up—at least, the ones that mattered were—and the door was open. The man went inside, closing it behind him. The enormous iron lock had a six-inch key in it. The man turned the key and pocketed it.

Despite what McKendrick had said, he half expected Horn to be waiting for him, in the hall or one of the adjacent rooms, too proud to hide. He was mistaken. On reflection, he decided, a man who’d played footsie with death among the snow-topped peaks of the world probably wouldn’t await the inevitable in a club armchair, like an elderly aristocrat in the first-class bar on the Titanic.

What he’d do instead was climb. He’d be making for the roof.

* * *

Too proud to hide, too tired to run: all that was left was to fight. Horn didn’t expect to win. Almost, he didn’t care anymore. He had to do it for his own satisfaction, so that he’d know he’d tried and had gone on trying to the end. Somewhere in the back of his head he half heard the drone of generations of schoolmasters declaring, It matters not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. But they weren’t the sort of masters who taught at the local comprehensive where Horn was a pupil, and it wasn’t the sort of sentiment that appealed to climbers. There’s no such thing as coming a good second to a mountain.

He took the stairs. He didn’t take them three at a time, which he would usually have done, but a certain amount of energy was seeping back into his body at the prospect of action. Adrenaline, of course, and you can only go so far on adrenaline. But sometimes you can go far enough.

He hesitated on the landing outside William’s room; but the stairs kept climbing, up into the tower, and after a moment so did Horn. Instinct pushed him upward, told him that he had one possible advantage, only one, and to use it he had to take the fight into a realm where he was at ease in a way that most people weren’t. The stone steps narrowed and the windows turned to lancets, and looking out he saw the tops of trees. The rest of the little castle was out of sight below him.

He’d been this way when they hung out the Tablecloth of Truce. The turret, Birkholmstead’s equivalent of a lumber room, was the highest part of the castle, and a dead end. The only way down was the way up. In such circumstances, having outdistanced the hired killer below him was no particular comfort. Still Horn climbed, his mind racing, trying to remember what he’d seen up here, what there was that he could possibly use.

* * *

Hanratty’s man paused on the first landing, looking over his left shoulder into the Great Hall. For a moment he didn’t understand the rusty jumble in the middle of the floor. Then he smiled. God help them, they’d hoped to keep him at bay with castle wallpaper—with medieval weaponry hung up for display! They’d have done better arming themselves with the chef’s knives from the kitchen. Even those wouldn’t have delayed him long, but they’d have made more sense than three-meter pikes and jousting lances designed not, whatever Hollywood might think, for pushing an opponent off his horse but to break on impact.

Of course, these were the things Horn had left behind. The mechanic spared himself a moment to wonder what he’d thought worth taking—chain mail, a morning star he could barely lift, a double-fisted broadsword?—and chuckle. A man didn’t get that many laughs in his line of work.

Though he was as certain as he could be that Horn would make for the roof, he took the time necessary to check that the threadbare wall-hangings weren’t hiding more than a few damp spots. He trusted his judgment, but he never took any risks he didn’t have to. He didn’t want Horn creeping up behind him, or sneaking past him and finding his way downstairs. The result would be the same, but it would be tiresome having to round him up again.

No other rooms adjoined the Great Hall. The man returned to the stairs and climbed to the next landing where he found, and checked, a single large bedroom. A man’s room: McKendrick’s. Back to the stairs and up another level.

Here there were two rooms. He put his ear to the first door he came to, and though he heard nothing, he knew someone was behind it. He always knew. Whether there were microsounds that went straight into his subconscious, or a heat signature alerted some primitive part of his brain, or maybe that bowdlerized version of a scent organ that serves humanity as a nose was better honed in him and his kind and told him things that his fellow men would have missed entirely, he had no way of knowing. But he knew someone was behind the door.

He didn’t touch the handle until he was ready to go in. When he was, eyes and gun acting in unison, his left hand turned the handle and threw the door wide in one swift, smooth yet unexpectedly violent movement, and in the same instant he was into the room and pointing his weapon at the head of man he found there.