The man with the broken nose who’d started the fight, had armed himself with a jagged glass. He was shouting something in Polish, which Nikolas spoke, but muffled by blood and snot, his words were incomprehensible. He didn’t even have time to use the makeshift weapon before Nikolas knocked his head into the bar.
Every piece of furniture in the place was broken. Nikolas heard a voice and vaulted over the bar. The barman was on the telephone. He raised a tyre iron and jabbed it ineffectually. An elderly female librarian had swung one of those at him with more enthusiasm. He kicked at the bartender’s head and the man dropped to the sticky linoleum without even a grunt. Nikolas picked up the phone and listened for a moment then replaced the receiver. He was puzzled. “We need to leave. Now.”
They piled out of the pub, expecting any minute to hear wailing sirens, but it was oddly silent. Nikolas swore again, then suddenly commanded Ben, “Take them to the back of the church. I’ll join you in a minute.” Ben nodded and ushered the others over. Samuel was on his knees, his shuddering breaths noisy and panicked. Ben hoisted him over his shoulder and ran, the other three following.
Five minutes later, Nikolas emerged from the side alley of the pub with a backpack. He ran over to where the men were waiting. He pulled out a key fob and clicked it. A car in the street flashed its lights and clunked as the locks opened. They piled in with difficulty and Ben drove off. He glanced at Nikolas then at Samuel. Nikolas nodded. They had no idea where to find a hospital and had to stop and ask at another pub, getting a drawn map. By the time they found it, Samuel was shivering badly and rambling, and his wrist was black, purple and yellow.
They were directed to the seating area. Nikolas explained they had a badly injured friend going into shock, but the receptionist waved uninterested at the chairs. Nikolas turned. They were full of bleeding, broken, vomiting, groaning and shocked citizens of a night out in Burnley. One man appeared to have put his hand into a meat grinder—the appendage swathed in bloody bandages until it was the size of a watermelon. Another in filthy clothing was lying across four seats and there was a pool of vomit on the floor beneath him. There were five men wearing togas for some reason, each of them bloody and battered.
The six of them sat at the back of the row of seats, shell-shocked. Nikolas glanced at his watch and swore violently when he saw it was broken. He then remembered the broken nose, which had started the fight, and smiled privately. He took Ben’s wrist. It was eight o’clock. They’d been out two hours. Good date so far.
He suddenly remembered the backpack he’d liberated from the pub. With a flourish, he brought out a bag of crisps and handed it to Ben. Cheese and onion, which he knew was Ben’s favourite. Ben took it reverently then eyed the others guiltily. Nikolas huffed and tipped a pile of crisps and peanuts onto the floor.
It was seven hours before Samuel got seen. They were all asleep. Ben was lying across a row of plastic seats—possibly the most uncomfortable furniture ever invented by man, which is why they employed them in waiting areas such as A&E—his head in Nikolas’s lap. Nikolas was the only one who woke with Samuel when the nurse came up to them. He gave a brief account of what had happened and she led Samuel away. Three in the morning. It was not a good time to be awake yet still exhausted. Nikolas felt tiredness like a drug taking him down, dulling his thoughts.
What the fuck? It kept repeating in his head.
What the fuck was going on?
They’d been set up…deliberately sent to that pub so something like this would happen. Did any psychologist seriously think being raped with a pool cue would count as effective therapy?
He looked down. He’d been unconsciously stroking Ben’s hair. There was glass in it, and he carefully groomed it out. Ben’s eye was blackening, and his lip swollen and split. Nikolas’s hands were torn and bleeding, and his weak wrist—the one he’d broken a while back and had pinned—was sore again. He supposed he ought to stop hitting people.
Injured people were still staggering in. The place resembled a battle zone. Nikolas wondered idly where the men from the pub would be taken. They hadn’t appeared in this hospital A&E yet. Which was good—but odd. How many hospitals were there in Burnley? This was as strange as the barman not calling the police. When Nikolas had listened in to the call there’d been a man shouting, asking what had happened. Not the police, he was fairly sure. Pondering these mysteries reminded him of what else he’d collected from the pub. He rummaged in the backpack and pulled out the wallets he’d liberated from their unresisting owners. He extracted any forms of ID they had—one had a library card, which amused him—and stashed them carefully in his pocket. He counted the money—a little over fifty pounds. He’d spent more on getting his shoes shined. He then worked his way through the phones until he found one that wasn’t password protected and called Kate. She answered very groggily, as he’d expected.
“It’s me.”
“Huh? It’s—”
“I know what time it is. I’m in Burnley. I believe we’re in the same time zone. I need for you to do some things for me.”
“Have you found Michael?”
Nikolas was tempted to say it was just as well for their errant friend he hadn’t, but just grunted in the negative. He outlined what he wanted doing and knew she was taking notes.
“How’s Ben?”
He hesitated. Did she usually ask about Ben? He concluded she always did, but he only replied, “I’ll contact you again in a few hours.” He clicked off and saw Ben was awake, watching him.
They had a moment of strange otherworldly connection. It had happened once or twice before to them, most remarkably just before the great tsunami wave had hit the boat they’d been in—he’d told Ben to climb an impossible jungle-clad hillside, and he had, without needing any other explanation other than complete faith in Nikolas. Once, Nikolas believed, Ben had spoken to him from inside a coffin. He’d believed him dead yet had also heard him speaking, telling him to keep hope alive. The sounds from the busy A&E department faded until all he could hear was Ben’s heartbeat, which was impossible, he knew, so it only added to the great truth of the experience for him. And for one moment, it appeared to Nikolas he was seeing through Ben’s eyes. He saw himself—bloody, bruised, dishevelled—but he didn’t see the monster he should have seen, the one he saw every day in the mirror in the few moments he couldn’t avoid looking at himself. Instead he saw something that more resembled a being of light and purity with tendrils of goodness attached that had come from a place of great beauty. He blinked, the moment passed, and he watched Ben’s eyes close again. Perhaps he’d not really woken fully and had been dreaming, a dream they’d shared for a fraction of a moment. Nikolas couldn’t say for sure. He was back in his own body and utterly exhausted, hungry, and coming down off the adrenaline kick of letting his monster out to play.
He glanced at John and Mathew, asleep sitting up, necks at impossible angles, at James, curled up on the floor, using his jacket as a pillow, and then back to Ben, and realised he was feeling something he hadn’t felt before—a sense of belonging. He’d saved many people in his life—fellow soldiers of course, as his duty and inclination dictated. He’d rescued their small group in the taiga, but not through his conscious choice. Left to his own devices, he’d have taken Ben, Emilia and her grandmother, and left the other men to care for themselves. He’d kept alive thousands in the Philippines after the tsunami, but now, for the first time, he understood he’d not done this through any great fondness for the human race. He’d done it because he could, because the inefficiency had annoyed him and the control he’d been able to impose amused him. And wasn’t it the same with ANGEL? Somewhere deep in his psyche, Nikolas knew he only did the work he did with ANGEL—giving away so much of his ill-gotten gains—so he could enjoy his extraordinary wealth. Ben, he knew, wouldn’t tolerate them living as they did unless they balanced the scales somehow.
Ben had neither any idea of just how much money Nikolas had nor how much he actually spent, enjoying that spending power. Occasionally pictures went up at home that Ben glanced at and pretended were nice. Nikolas wanted to tell him, he really did, but you didn’t get much at fine art auctions these days for under ten million pounds. Ben drank wine—which Nikolas discovered him drinking occasionally out of plastic cups—that cost three or four thousand pounds—for each glassful. Only last week, Nikolas had bought himself a watch, which at a little under a million American dollars sat well on his wrist. Of course, he’d not brought it here—and wasn’t that fortunate, as no scumbag deserved to have his nose broken with a million dollar watch…
But in A&E that night, perhaps fuelled by the odd vision he’d seen through Ben’s eyes, he saw a connection between himself and these men. It didn’t do too well for Nikolas to think back to his past. Guilt was redundant—where would he start? Murder, torture, betrayal…He’d swum in a sewer; he’d kept his head high; he’d breathed lightly and done what he had to do to survive.
His great moment of epiphany was halted though when he realised he was thinking exactly what this night had probably been designed to make him think.
Fuck that.
He grunted, shifted to try and get more comfortable, which woke Ben properly, and he sat up, rubbing where the plastic chair’s edges had dug into his kidney. “What the fuck? What’s the time? What fucking day is it? Fuck, Samuel, is he…?” He scrubbed at his face morosely. “What?”
“Are you fucking channelling fucking Michael?”
Ben seemed to think about this then coloured. “Sorry. I was having a good dream. Didn’t want to wake up.” He didn’t elaborate and peered around more cognisant. “Samuel?”
Nikolas was about to reply he didn’t know yet, when a very sheepish and strung-out young man appeared from the treatment area. His wrist was in a cast. Nikolas knew how that felt and scratched at his own re-damaged wrist in unconscious sympathy. Samuel sat down, waking the others when the plastic chair screeched on the sticky lino. Samuel stared down at his feet for a moment. “I’m really, really sorry, chaps. I’ll make this up to you, I promise.”
Ben glanced warily at Nikolas, but to his evident astonishment, Nikolas only mock-cuffed the boy around the head. “Come, let’s get out of this place.”
John curled his lip faintly. “I think I prefer A&E to the course, to be honest.”
Nikolas thought about his phone call with Kate, pleased with himself, and murmured, “Who said anything about the course?”
He led them out to the entrance, where a couple of taxis were waiting for them. Puzzled, they climbed in. Five miles later, they were deposited outside a luxury hotel, which resembled a castle and boasted an attached spa. Bemused, the small ragtag group followed Nikolas into reception. “You have a block booking in the name of Stannis?”
The girl nodded. “We have, sir. Three double suites. We’ll start breakfast now, sir, and that should be with you in about half an hour.”
Nikolas made a mental note to thank Kate, nodded, took one key for himself and Ben, and tossed the others to John. “Anyone for a couple of days in a luxury spa?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Other than accepting Nikolas’s chocolate digestive earlier that day, Ben had rarely done a selfish thing in his life. It wasn’t in his nature. You didn’t join the army and then Special Forces if you were jack—someone out for yourself. Or if you did, you didn’t last long in that environment—a way of life that demanded selfless sacrifice to a shared ideal. Ben lay on the luxury bed. He thought about the vast bathroom, and he salivated over the thought of the huge cooked breakfast being prepared for him, but then he stood up and announced, “We have to go back.”
Nikolas was on the phone to Kate. He clearly heard Ben but finished his conversation and only then hung up. He pursed his lips for a while, staring out over the view from the bedroom window.
“If we don’t go back, they’ll know something is up, and we’ll blow it all—ruin any chance we have to find Squeezy or find out what’s going on. No way would Nigel Stannis pull this kind of stunt. He couldn’t afford it, for a start.”
Nikolas was about to answer when there was a soft knock on the door. Ben went to answer it, hoping it was the breakfast, which he could possibly consume before Nikolas agreed with him that what they were doing was breaking cover and therefore very dumb. It was John. He had James with him. Ben frowned but let them in.
John declared simply, “I don’t know who you two guys are, and frankly I don’t care, but thanks—for what you did for us tonight, and this, I guess. But I can’t stay here. I’m going back. I’m worried about Mark.”
James had been watching him and his hand went unconsciously to his face. “I have a few things I want to say to Dr Fergus. I’m going back with John.”
Before either Nikolas or Ben could respond, Samuel poked his head around the door and crowed gleefully, “Orgy!” Then he came in with Mathew. “We’re going back. Fuckers. Think they can scare us? This the best they can do?” He held up his plastered wrist. “I’ve had worse than this from my dad.” He toed the ground for a moment. “And I’m kinda worried about Noah—the fucker.”
Mathew just shrugged. “I don’t wanna waste my money. I think this therapy’s really working—What? What? What did I say?”
Nikolas sat on the end of the bed and regarded his small, militant flock. He closed his eyes for a moment. “We need to get our story straight. We didn’t come here. We took taxis from the hospital straight back to the course, yes?” They all nodded. He glanced very slyly to Ben. “However, they won’t know if we have a missing hour…I suggest we indulge with breakfast?”
§ § §
They all stayed in the one suite, variously sitting on the bed or at the table. The food was superb and limitless—more than enough for Ben—and even Nikolas indulged more than he usually would. He was astounded he not only found the atmosphere comfortable, he was actually enjoying the other men’s company.
It wasn’t long before their talk turned to their experiences that night and then in more general terms to the course. John was the first to say directly to Nikolas and Ben, “You’re not a florist, and he actually is ex-Special-Forces-expert Ben Rider.”