Into the fire, p.11
Into the Fire, page 11
The ambulance arrived ten minutes later. Wallace was taken to St Mary’s Paddington casualty unit. He was examined by an intern, who summoned a neurologist. Still he remained unconscious. Wallace was given a brain scan, received a tentative all clear, but only an hour later did he come round. Severe concussion. He would have to spend at least one night in hospital. He lay in bed, throwing up, trying, and failing, to get up and walk.
CHAPTER 22
Maldonado went out after breakfast.
‘Off on a dig,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back for dinner. We’ll have something special, a Peruvian treat. Make yourself comfortable in your little cottage. Ring Carmen on your intercom if you need anything. She’s on extension five.’
Helen heard a car start up, a door slam, then, save the chirping of the birds in the garden, all was quiet. She gazed around her, revelling in the warm air which danced against her skin. She thought of the chill air in London, the metallic rasp of pollution in her mouth. Here in the garden, the air tasted of jasmine. London, so immediate in the violence of the discoveries that had sent her here, seemed a long way away. She was conscious of having stepped from one world into another. Part of her felt she would pay a price for the deceptive ease with which she had moved between them, that the journey from now on would be through an untravelled world where there were no obvious pathways to guide her, save Maldonado. She felt the impatience rising within her. This man was the first signpost she had ever had on her long search for her father. But she knew instinctively she had to approach him with caution. She had glimpsed the convolution in his eyes.
She needed a plan. Her mind flickered back to Wallace and Rankin. She forced it back to Peru. There was nothing she could do about them now. She’d try to call Dai later, find out if there was any fallout from her ‘crime’ and disappearance. Perhaps she’d go into Lima to do it. She wasn’t sure of the wisdom of making a call from Maldonado’s house. Better not take unnecessary risks.
She put London away, a small compartment in her mind, nothing compared to the roaring in her heart at the prospect of being so close to her father.
She pushed the breakfast dishes out of her way and gazed out into the garden. Her eyes ranged over the contours of plants and flowers, dimmed by the scenery taking place in her own mind. She’d done her deal with Dai. First she had to suss out Maldonado, decide whether she could trust him enough to tell him who she really was, to ask him to help her find her father. No matter how much she wanted to pretend that he must be eminently trustworthy because she needed him to be, she swore herself to caution. She forced herself to engage her intellect, not decades-old dreams and yearnings. Approach it like a trade, gather all the information that you can, weigh up the risks, then cut or go for it. She knew even then she would never cut, no matter what the risks. This was something she had to chase till the end.
Best to start familiarising herself with her surroundings. Better start with the killer dogs. She armed herself with a couple of leftover rashers of bacon from her breakfast and set off in search of them. She found them in a pen in a far corner of the garden, close to the street.
Bitches, four of them, lined up at the edge of their pen, noses aimed like arrows. She began a low crooning. The Dobermans listened, soft ears flickering.
‘There, girls. I’m friend, not foe.’ The bars of their pen kept her safe. In a vivid flash of fear she imagined the animals loosed on her. Two of the bitches started to growl. Helen forced deep breaths down, trying to still her fear. As she calmed herself, the growling stopped. She walked slowly towards the dogs, letting them absorb her scent. They could smell the bacon, Helen could see their hunger as their eyes travelled from her face to her hands, and hovered, but they were too well trained to simper for it. Helen waited five minutes, until they showed signs of growing bored with the game of mutual scrutiny. One of them turned away and went to lie in a corner. Another followed. Helen kept talking until the third bitch, then five minutes later the leader, decided she was not a threat and turned their backs on her. Then she bit the bacon rashers in half, and threw in one piece. The leader bitch wheeled round and devoured it with one elegant shake of her head. Helen threw the other pieces in, aiming the rashers so that each dog got a piece. She smiled at them as they stood waiting.
‘No more. See you tomorrow, girls.’
She walked round the garden, back to her cottage. She washed her hands, then dug from her luggage a guidebook to Peru she’d bought at Heathrow airport. She pulled up a chair on the small terrace outside, and sat down to read in the shade of a flame tree. Each time she turned a page the faint scent of bacon rose from her fingertips.
She looked up suddenly, her attention caught by movement. A man appeared from round the side of the main house, a hundred yards away. He was walking towards her, swinging one arm, holding a shotgun in the other. She froze, but as he came closer to her, he casually changed direction, moving off towards the far end of the garden. He walked slowly, checking left to right. Another armed man appeared from behind the bushes at the far corner of the garden. The two men nodded, stopped for a brief talk, then moved on. Helen’s nerves were eased only slightly by their apparently calm patrolling, the sense that the men belonged. She watched them until they disappeared from view. It took a long time for her racing pulse to slow. Maldonado might have warned her, or were armed guards such a normal part of everyday life here that they escaped comment? Her latent sense of fear began to grow. The garden was a paradise, guarded by attack dogs and armed men. What was the threat? Whom did Maldonado fear, and why? What the hell kind of place had she stepped into?
CHAPTER 23
At eight that evening, Carmen came knocking at the door. She led Helen to the main house. Everything looked so different, so alien. Eyes bright with curiosity, Helen scrutinised the house. She and Carmen walked along a marble hallway, their footsteps echoing through the silence. Low-wattage spotlights in the ceiling cast a dim orange glow on the white walls. There were paintings of thick-set, high-stepping horses with proud eyes.
Closed doors flanked the hall at intervals, but they stayed closed, and Carmen paused only at the final one which was darker, heavier, and more intricately carved than the others. She opened the door, nodded to Helen to go through, and closed the door behind her. The table was laid for two, but Maldonado never appeared. Helen drank, and ate alone. She started with a pisco sour, poured by a smiling butler. It tasted like a serious version of whisky sour, something wickedly strong steeped in lime juice. Went down easily. She had three, grew merrier with each one.
By nine thirty she had finished a three-course dinner of chicken broth, fried pork with crackling, roast potatoes and asparagus, followed by a deliriously sweet rice pudding. She sat for a few minutes after she had finished eating, alone at this foreign table, tipsy, feeling almost amused at her situation. She got up quietly, slipped out of the dining room, and, emboldened by the pisco sours, went exploring. She tried the first door to her left. The handle opened to reveal a marble bathroom, with old, well-leafed copies of The Spectator of all things stacked on a small table. She tried the next door. It opened into a study. Helen walked in, flicked on a light, closed the door behind her, and sat on a leather chair behind a mahogany desk. She glanced around quickly, and pulled open a few drawers. Stationery, pens, correspondence, a letter headed Banco de Panama. Helen should have put it away but in some spirit of mischief she couldn’t resist studying it. Her eyes flicked over an account number and the balance in the account: four million dollars.
‘Shit!’ Well, Dai had said the Maldonado family was rich. Her eyes lingered on the letter. Her mind, compulsively hungry for figures, automatically memorised all the numbers. She heard a distant squish-squashing sound of soft-soled shoes walking down the marble corridor. She stashed the letter away, rushed out of her chair, switched off the light. The footsteps passed by and she heard a door opening. She cracked open the study door, peeked out. The dining room door stood open. She slipped out of the study, closed the door silently behind her, then opened and closed the adjacent bathroom door loudly. She walked back into the dining room, humming a tune. Carmen wheeled round.
‘Ah, Carmen. Baňo.’ She pointed down the hall. ‘Pee pee.’
Carmen nodded in comprehension, then silently escorted her back across the garden to her cottage. She said, ‘Hasta maňana’, and disappeared back to the main house.
Helen fell asleep listening to the rhythmic whirring of the fan and the calling of the night owls, terrifying their prey out into the open to swoop down and destroy them.
CHAPTER 24
Andy Rankin woke groggy, hungry and depressed by the prospect of work after three days off. His only consolation was the bacon sandwiches he planned to devour as soon as he arrived in the City. He kissed his sleeping wife goodbye and made for the street. Dawn had broken, but at 6 am nothing moved, save a black cat which scurried out of his way. He froze as a black-clad figure stepped into his path.
‘Who the hell are you?’ He couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman. The eyes of the balaclavaed face seemed to be smiling at him.
‘I’m a friend of Helen’s.’ The voice was female, savage and low, muffled by the balaclava.
‘What the—’
‘This is payback time.’
Rankin had a sudden inkling of what was coming, felt a frisson of fear, unbelievably, from this woman. He raised his arm to strike. The black-clad figure moved into him, flung both his arms away from his body to one side, gripped his head and his right arm. He just had time to register the speed, the force holding him, then he felt himself spinning, pivoting over his arm, pain searing up his shoulder. He heard a sickening crack and the pain turned into a flood. His arm was broken before he crashed down on the pavement, head first. For a few seconds he just lay there struggling for breath. Rage pushed him up, made him lash out again.
‘Fucking bitch.’
‘You ain’t seen nothin’, big boy.’ Joyce jumped out of range. She stood for a moment, watching him, seeing in her mind all the damage she could do, frightening herself with her capacity for violence. Put him out now, quickly. Mark his face. Make them wonder. She waited for him to lunge, caught his good arm by the wrist, doubled it back to the armpit, in sankyo, heard the scream of pain. She held him powerless in her grip, then she threw him, head first, into a parked car. He slumped to the floor, bleeding. Joyce jogged away. She rolled off her balaclava, turned down a side street, and slowed to a walk in Kensington Church Street. Her breathing eased. A few yards ahead, a smartly dressed man in his thirties clattered down the steps of his house on his stud-soled shoes. Joyce formed her lips into a smile as she passed him. The man smiled back uncertainly. With her halo of blonde hair, her rosy cheeks, and the terrible gleam in her eyes, Joyce looked like a darkling angel.
CHAPTER 25
Paul Keith arrived at the office at five past seven. He set down his briefcase and removed the lid from the styrofoam cup of coffee he’d bought at Birley’s. Three days away from Goldsteins had been heaven. Now he was sick with nerves to be back, and had forgone his usual bran muffin. He took a tentative sip of coffee, opened his filing cabinet and reached down to take out Hull’s book on derivatives. It was then that he saw the splintered wood of Rankin’s desk. He pulled open the drawer, and saw rows of empty holders where files should have been. The bile rose to his mouth as he looked round frantically for Wallace or Rankin or Helen. He checked Helen’s desk. Splintered. He checked Wallace’s, forced. He sat, in shock, waiting for the others to arrive. Seven thirty came and went and he watched a stream of traders arrive at their desks. At seven fifty, there was still no sign of the others. He wanted to go and warn someone that they hadn’t come in, but he knew that Wallace and Rankin would give him a bollocking for letting on to anyone else that they hadn’t been there to cover the desk.
The desk’s trading lines began to ring. They soon became a braying chorus. He tried to answer one or two but he couldn’t keep up.
By eight thirty, his panic threatened to overwhelm him. He began to wonder if the whole desk had done a flit. He took out the Goldsteins home directory, rang Helen, Rankin and Wallace. No answer.
At eight forty-five, the worst possible person on the entire trading floor, the one person in the world he least wanted to see, appeared. He swore he could feel the floor trembling, and the air pulsating with the force field that seemed to surround her, before he looked up with dread to see Zaha Zamaroh sashaying towards him, lipstick gleaming. She took in Keith sitting at the trading desk frantically fielding calls. She stopped and fixed him with a Medusa stare.
‘What are you doing alone on the desk? Where are the others?’
Her voice had the natural carrying power of a leader used to addressing thousands of teeming followers in ancient squares. She could shout from one end of the trading floor to the other, but now she spoke quietly, in the perfectly enunciated English taught as a second language in Britain’s best boarding schools. A trace of accent remained, a slight hissing on the sibilant letters.
‘They’re not here.’
‘I can see that. Where are they?’
‘They haven’t come in.’
‘Are you trying to tell me that Wallace, Jencks and Rankin are all off the desk on the same day?’
‘Er, yes.’
‘Where are they?’
‘I don’t know. I tried them at home and no one answered. I think they went skiing. Glacier skiing. Perhaps the weather was bad. Couldn’t get back.’
‘They would have rung in then. Keep calling them at home. When traders ring, apologise, say there’s no one on the desk yet. Expecting them later. When they deign to show their rancid faces, send them to me.’
Zamaroh turned on a stilettoed heel and strode off. Keith answered the phones, said his piece, eyes searching the floor, praying every minute that the others arrived before Zamaroh exploded.
Zamaroh reappeared at eleven thirty. Paul Keith sat alone at the desk, staring at the flickering screens. The remorseless phones had finally fallen silent as counterparties came to the conclusion that Rankin, Jencks and Wallace had all awarded themselves sickies.
‘Well?’ asked Zamaroh, as if Keith were responsible for the empty desk.
‘Nothing. I’ve been calling them at home all morning.’
‘Not one of them is home?’
Keith shook his head.
‘And you have no idea where they might be?’
‘No.’
‘They didn’t leave contact numbers?’
‘Only Helen and Andy were going away. And they didn’t leave numbers.’
Zamaroh’s face went rigid with control.
‘Stay on the desk. Keep up the story that they’ll be in later.’
Keith nodded, stared at the floor, cleared his throat.
‘Er, before you go, there’s something else.’
Zamaroh took a step closer, towering over Keith.
‘Three of the desks have been broken into. And it looks like some files are gone.’
Zamaroh’s eyes widened like venus fly traps. The noise of the trading floor drained away. For a few moments, all Keith could hear was the blood pounding in his ears.
‘Show me,’ hissed Zamaroh.
Keith pointed out the splintered wood.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about this immediately?’
Keith tried to speak. Zamaroh cut him off.
‘Have you told anyone else about this?’
‘No.’
‘Keep it that way. Total security. Any idea who might have broken in?’
‘Er, no, not really.’
Zamaroh gave him a searching look, then turned and stalked back to her office. She picked up her telephone and called James Savage.
‘James, it’s Zaha. We need to talk.’
‘Zaha. I’m expected for lunch at the Bank. Can’t it wait?’
‘No. It can’t.’
Savage gave a sigh of annoyance. ‘Come up.’
Savage was gazing out of the huge window of his corner office when Zamaroh entered. As usual, the chief executive was wearing an immaculately cut suit, evidently Savile Row. But there was something rakish, not quite establishment about it. Perhaps it was the richness of the navy blue, unfaded, uncreased, seemingly new, like all his suits, or else it could have been that the pinstripes were just a tad too wide. Maybe it was just the thick silver hair, swept back, Tarzan-like. There was a power to the man that filled the room, even when his attention was apparently directed to the skyline of the City of London.
Savage turned slowly, gave Zamaroh a brief smile. Strange, she thought, Savage’s tendency to keep his eyes almost completely closed. It was as if he wanted to keep the world out. Odd in someone who was so tangibly a man of the world; sophisticated, knowing, cynical. Perhaps too cynical, perhaps he’d seen too much. Savage approached slowly, his lizard eyes on Zamaroh. He was one of the few people in Goldsteins who was not intimidated by her.
‘What is it?’
‘Three members of the derivatives desk didn’t turn up for work this morning. A trainee’s been ringing them all morning. There’s no reply at their homes.’
‘Three out of one hundred. Undesirable, but hardly remarkable. What’s your point?’
‘Hugh Wallace, Andy Rankin and Helen Jencks. They all sit together in a kind of triangle with Wallace at the apex. Incestuous, don’t mix so freely with the rest of the desk.’
‘Are you suggesting they’ve defected?’
‘Each of their desks has been broken into. Several files are missing.’
Savage winced, stared at Zamaroh through the narrowest of slit eyes. ‘Who knows about this besides you?’
‘Just the trainee who reported it, Paul Keith. He claims not to know what’s going on. Seems shellshocked.’
Savage called to his secretary. ‘Evangeline, get Michael Freyn in here.’
