The Isis Covenant (2 page)

He walked up to the mirror and whipped the shotgun out from under the coat.
Do you feel lucky, punk?

Jamie Saintclair groaned as the alarm on his bedside clock beeped mercilessly. Christ, why did he keep doing this to himself? He rolled over and fumbled for the button. Don’t snooze. If you snooze, you’ll never get up. He forced himself out of bed. Sarah would have been up by now, bouncing about like a demented rubber ball and getting dressed in her running gear. He liked to move at a more sedate pace. No Sarah. Not for three months. Off back to the Land of the Free to find herself. At least that’s what she’d said. He struggled into his Lycra shorts – not cold enough for the long johns yet – grabbed his T-shirt. It was the one with Picasso’s
Guernica
on it that he’d picked up at the museum in Madrid for nine euros – five minutes later he’d seen it in a back-street shop for three. Running shoes, Nike, but in need of replacement. Not quite awake, but ready.

He ambled blearily through the flat to the front door and took the stairs down to the street. Kensington High Street. Not deserted at this time of the morning, but not
far
off it, thank Christ. He didn’t start running immediately, just a brisk walk interspersed with vaguely effective stretches that made him look like an idiot. At last, the park. He took his usual route on the long diagonal up past Round Pond. Slowly at first, letting the blood loosen the muscles, easing his way into the run. Breathing a little laboured, but that would soon ease off. The rhythm came to him without conscious effort and his mind switched. That was the thing about running at this time of the morning: you could do it in your sleep. The thought made him smile, and smiling made him think of Sarah, which made him stop smiling. He hadn’t done a lot of smiling since she’d gone. Don’t. Think. About. Sarah. It must have worked because the next thing he knew he was up at Lancaster Gate, and making his turn down past the ornamental ponds to the path beside the Serpentine. Did he really need to do this every day? He was young – thirtyish was still young, wasn’t it? – and fitter than he’d ever been, thanks to Sarah’s early-morning runs and the fencing classes. Anyway, an art dealer didn’t need to be a marathon runner. He needed to be a networker. Maybe if he did some early-morning networking instead of jogging he’d make more money?

‘Crawk!’ He swerved sharply as the raucous cry from the lake and the flutter of large wings announced a decidedly pissed-off heron.

‘Sorry for disturbing your breakfast, old chum,’ he muttered as he ran on into the trees.

* * *

From his concealed position in the killing ground, Myron heard the distant crunch of gravel. He shifted so that he had a better view up the path between the trees. It wouldn’t be doing to shoot the wrong jogger, would it? He glanced up to see a dull leaden cast to the sky. Almost dawn. The path was still artificially lit, but the way the cocaine made Myron feel he could probably have seen in the dark. Not that he was nervous. No, just excited. He hated rich people and this spoiled white boy was rich. He’d watched him go every day from his fancy Kensington flat to his fancy Bond Street office. The white boy had everything. Well, Myron was going to take everything away from the white boy.

The rhythmic sound of running feet came closer and he noted the neon flash as tiny panels on the running shoes were reflected in the pathlights. Closer. Closer. Exactly as he expected. A runner in a dark T-shirt. Head down, deep in thought, but the right height and the right build. Mr Man. His breathing quickened. Closer, still. So close that there was no way he could turn and run. Mr Man. Dead man.

Myron stepped out into the pathway, raised the shotgun so it was pointing at the target’s heart and squeezed both triggers.

Jamie almost stopped when the man lurched from behind the bronze statue of Peter Pan into his path. His first instinct was to swerve, but when he saw the twin barrels of the shotgun sweep up to aim directly at him
he
knew he had nowhere to run except straight at his ambusher. He was going to die, that was fairly obvious, but he wasn’t going to die without trying. He screamed, the way the Army had taught him to scream, and launched himself at the man in the trench coat.

Myron couldn’t believe that the fucking gun hadn’t fired. As the wailing banshee with the face from hell bore down on him, he scrabbled at the trigger in desperation. Nothing happened. It was fortunate for Jamie that the seller hadn’t told Myron about the safety button behind the trigger and that Myron had been so excited about the potential of his new toy that he hadn’t bothered to ask. More fortunate still, because, as he found a second later when he smashed into Myron’s chest and forced the barrels skywards, the safety button doesn’t always stop the gun firing. The simultaneous twin blasts deafened them both and in his fright Myron dropped the shotgun, leaving him at the mercy of his annoyed, dangerously scared and belligerent target. Myron was only nineteen and five foot six. Jamie was a well-built six foot odd who’d boxed for Cambridge and been trained in unarmed combat by people who killed other people with their bare hands. It was over in thirty seconds.

‘Right, you little bastard,’ Jamie growled when he’d manoeuvred his ambusher onto his stomach with both arms behind his back. ‘What the fuck is this all about?’

For answer he received a string of inventive curses, a few of which he’d never heard before. He switched
position
so his whole weight was on a knee in the centre of Myron’s spine and Myron responded with a satisfactory yelp of agony.

‘Look, my trigger-happy friend,’ Jamie whispered in the other man’s ear, ‘whatever happens you’re going to the police, the question is whether you go in one piece or not.’ He pinned Myron’s right arm with his knee and took the left wrist between his hands. ‘Now we have a choice here. I can break every one of your fingers one by one, which feels a bit like this.’ There was a sharp crack and Myron shrieked in genuine agony. ‘That, by the way, is only dislocated. Or I can go the whole hog and force your arm out of your socket and you’ll never be able to use it again.’ He put a little more weight on the arm and was rewarded by another shriek, followed by a whimper as he released the pressure. ‘So let me ask again. What is this about? Why did you try to kill me?’

‘Didn’t,’ Myron gasped. ‘Was just going to mug you. Was desperate. Wanted cash for smack.’

‘Dear, oh dear, you’re going to have to come up with something better than that. You must think I’m as dim as you are.’ He sighed and took a tighter grip on the arm. ‘One more time.’

‘Don’t!’ The would-be assassin cried. ‘Look, I’ll tell. I’ll tell. Some punter put a ten-grand contract on you. Kill and collect, no questions asked.’

Jamie almost let him go in his astonishment.

‘A contract?’

‘A contract, I swear it. Please don’t hurt me again.’

A hundred questions raced through Jamie’s mind, but only one of them really mattered. ‘First I need you to tell me who.’

‘I can’t.’ The voice was shrill with desperation and pain. ‘He’ll kill me.’

‘That’s a pity.’

‘He denies it, naturally.’

Jamie sat with his back against the gnarled bronze roots of the tree stump supporting Peter Pan as he listened to the plain-clothes detective.

‘Says he was minding his own business and you jumped out and assaulted him.’

‘The gun will have his fingerprints on it,’ Jamie pointed out.

‘Of course it will. But it would help if he didn’t have the injuries he has. That arm of his is a right mess.’

Jamie shrugged. ‘Man with a shotgun. Man in his shorts. A fairly obvious case of self-defence, I’d have thought, Inspector.’

‘I’d have thought so, too, Mr Saintclair, or you’d be up there in the paddy wagon with him. But you never know these days. Bastard lawyers and a liberal judge, anything can happen. Course, I didn’t say that.’

‘No, you didn’t.’

The detective pulled out his notebook. ‘One thing I need to ask? This contract, if it exists, can you think of anyone who might want to kill you?’

It happened that Jamie had been asking himself just that question. Neo-Nazi nutcases. The Chinese government. Mossad. The list was fairly extensive. Not to mention his enemies in the art world, who might have a more lethal dislike for him than he thought. But one suspect stood pony-tailed head and shoulders above the rest. ‘There’s a man in the United States I came across last year. We had a coming-together that cost him a lot of money. Howard Vanderbilt.’

The policeman raised an eyebrow and noted the name. ‘
The
Howard Vanderbilt?’

‘Is there anything I can do about it, in the meantime?’

‘The contract? We’ll send someone round to offer you some advice. Ten grand’s not really a lot of money.’

Jamie felt vaguely slighted. ‘Advice, that’s it?’

‘ ’Fraid so, sir.’

‘Maybe they’ll give up on it after this?’

‘You don’t really believe that, do you, sir?’

‘No,’ Jamie admitted. ‘I don’t.’

III

‘NO SCRAPS FOR
you here, Saintclair.’ The words were uttered with that peculiar mix of sneer, condescension and chumminess that takes even the biggest snob a lifetime to perfect. It was a week after the assassination attempt and Jamie Saintclair turned, tempted to mete out the same treatment he had to the currently indisposed Myron Deloite. Instead, he forced himself to greet the speaker with a smile.

‘Hello, Peregrine.’ He nodded, pondering regretfully how much a broken nose would improve the purple boozer’s face. But Sir Peregrine ‘Perry’ Dacre had recently been appointed an adviser to the Keeper of the Royal Collection and wielded an influence that was astonishingly well disguised by the shiny suit, smelly armpits and permanently vacant expression. Perry was a vicious, acid-dripping gossip with a reputation for groping lowly female interns, but in Jamie’s present parlous financial state he had decided, reluctantly, that
the
man must be humoured. They turned to study the seven-foot painting that dominated the wall of the London gallery where Dacre had peevishly agreed it could be included in an exhibition of Italian Baroque art.

‘Charles One had an eye for the ladies,’ the older man mused.

By Charles One, Jamie deduced that Dacre meant King Charles I, the monarch reputed to have added the painting to the collection. Clearly, rubbing shoulders with royalty gave you a familiarity denied lowly outsiders. But it was true. She was quite something. Dark of eye and pale of flesh, the young girl’s cupid-bow lips pursed as she looked up at the cherubic angel who had appeared miraculously from the ceiling, as if wondering whether to swat it or eat it. Although he’d clothed her in what looked like someone’s spare curtains, the artist had still managed to capture the rare beauty that had drawn the eligible men of Rome to her and had eventually led to her death. St Agnes was said to have marched cheerfully to her martyrdom and Jamie hoped that if it ever came to it, he would go with the same grace.

The opportunity came more quickly than he bargained for.

‘One of Domenichino’s finest, I’d say.’ Dacre’s nasal bray attracted attention from all around, which was exactly what he’d intended.

As it happened, Jamie agreed with him. It was
certainly
one of Domenico Zampieri’s best works and a near perfect example of what was called Bolognese classicism; all unaffected clarity, purity of line and subtle harmony of colour. Still, his only reply was a mildly perplexed ‘Hmmmhhh’.

‘You don’t agree?’ The piglet eyes narrowed suspiciously.

‘Oh, yes, Peregrine. It’s just …’

‘Just what?’

Jamie dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘It’s just that I was in the Vatican museum the other day. You know Genaro, of course?’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, I was talking to one of his assistants about the Sybils.’ Zampieri had painted two near identical canvases of the Cumaean Sybil, one of which hung in the Pinacoteca building in the Vatican, and the other in the Borghese Gallery. ‘It seems there’s talk of reclassifying one of them as “school of”, which could call into question some of his other works. I’m sure I heard a mention of poor Agnes.’ He waited just long enough for the wine-dyed skin of Peregrine Dacre’s face to fade to a pleasing pale pink. ‘Samantha, hi! I really must go, Perry; lovely to chat with you.’

He attached himself to a tall, blonde gallery assistant passing with a plate of canapés. She glared at him. ‘What are you up to, Jamie Saintclair? I’m not sure we’re talking yet.’ She glanced back to where Dacre was staring pop-eyed at the Domenichino. ‘Still, you seem to
have
taken the wind out of the Pink Baboon’s sails, so I suppose I might forgive you.’ Samantha stopped abruptly and turned to study him. He knew she was seeing beyond the dark hair that flopped untidily over the intense green eyes and the thin-lipped mouth with the determined set, to the last time they’d met. She was gorgeous and leggy – they all seemed to be gorgeous and leggy – and typical of her breed. A double first in some spired cathedral of learning, spent her winters skiing at Klosters, her summers on somebody’s yacht in the Med and popped in to work to say hello to her chums every second Tuesday. He’d thought it would be like making love to a piece of fine china, but she’d treated him to the filthiest four hours of his life and insisted it would only have been better if someone called Charlie had got involved as well. The memory made him groan inwardly and Sarah Grant’s face filled his vision. It had been her decision to go back to the States, but that didn’t make the guilt any less real.

‘You all right, Jamie darling?’

He grimaced and waved at the canapés. ‘A touch of indigestion.’

A lined, half-remembered face beamed at him from across the room, but Samantha steered him in the opposite direction. ‘You’ll thank me later,’ she whispered. ‘That dreadful little man bored me silly for half an hour about some grubby pieces of torn manuscript some other dreadful little man has found in Paris.’ To Jamie’s certain knowledge ‘that dreadful little man’
was
one of Britain’s most eminent Roman scholars, but he couldn’t get Sarah Grant and the Raphael out of his mind. For six all too short months Sarah had enriched his life and the Raphael they had discovered together in a lost Nazi bunker in the middle of the Harz Mountains had looked like making him rich. But eventually the American-born Mossad agent had realized that the Jamie Saintclair who had accompanied her halfway across Europe dodging bombs and bullets wasn’t the same man who had settled all too quickly into his old London routine. After a tearful farewell she’d left for Boston to think things over and, in his heart, he knew she wasn’t coming back. At the same time, the Raphael teetered on the edge of that permanent limbo the art world reserves for things it doesn’t quite understand, and all payments were put on hold.