Kingdom of Darkness (5 page)

The new road was one-way, with no oncoming traffic, but it was also narrower than the last street. The Escalade swerved wildly to thread between other cars. Blaring the horn, Eddie did the same. Anguished creaks of metal came from the roof behind them. Nina glanced back. ‘This thing’s gonna come apart any minute,’ she warned. At least the fire was dying down as the alcohol fuelling it was consumed.

Eddie didn’t reply, eyes fixed on the fleeing pickup. The sirens grew louder – the police were closing in.

No sign of them yet, though. For now, he was the only person who could stop the assassin. Ahead was Rodeo Drive. Traffic waited at the intersection, parked cars on each side blocking any way around. The Cadillac’s brake lights flared as it was forced to slow.

This could be his chance. Foot to the floor—

The Escalade swerved abruptly to avoid a small van backing out of an entrance on the right.

Eddie hauled at the wheel, but the crippled Hummer was reluctant to turn. The word
CHANEL
filled his vision—

The H2 smashed into the van, sending it spinning like a top. Its rear doors burst open, and hundreds of perfume bottles flew out, exploding like scented grenades. Litres of Chanel No. 5 sluiced over the bifurcated Hummer . . .

And ignited.

Choking and wiping her stinging eyes, Nina heard a deep and very menacing
whoomph
behind her. She turned to see the limo’s entire rear end ablaze, the dying flames given a new and highly flammable source of nourishment. ‘Shit! Eddie, we’re on fire! Again!’

Eddie too was gasping for air. Perfume was fine in small doses, but by the gallon it was more like the chemical attack training he had been forced to endure in the army. Blinking away streaming tears, he searched for his quarry. The Escalade had barged a car out of its way to make a skidding left turn down Rodeo Drive. He followed it. Metal shrieked as the H2’s flaming back end swung wide, tearing the overstressed roof like paper.

He spun the steering wheel, just barely countering the flailing oversteer in time to stop the limo’s trailing half from ripping free. But the vehicle was now held together only by a thread . . .

The engine misfired, sputtering. The fuel line under the floor had finally been severed.

He looked down Rodeo Drive. The Escalade was pulling away. The chase was over.

Wait
 . . .

Flashing red and blue lights some distance ahead. The police were setting up a roadblock.

The assassin reached another intersection and started to turn, only to swerve sharply back on to his original course as he saw that the cross-street was also barricaded. He continued past the junction before braking hard, slewing around on trails of black rubber and lurching to a stop.

‘They’ve trapped him,’ said Nina. ‘Okay, you can stop now!’

But Eddie didn’t slow. The Escalade’s door had opened, the driver jumping out, gun in hand.

He aimed it at the onrushing Hummer—

Nina dropped with a yelp as a bullet shattered what remained of the windscreen. Eddie hunched down as more shots clanged against the radiator and engine block. If he turned to escape down the cross-street, he would expose the limo’s sides to the gunman – and the thin sheet steel was no protection against even a pistol bullet.

Instead, he aimed straight at their attacker.

The man instantly changed tactics, switching his aim to the Hummer’s left front wheel as the limo reached the intersection. Two bullets struck the H2’s bumper – then a third blew out the tyre.

The steering wheel jolted in Eddie’s hands. He tried to hold it steady, but the limousine veered at the central divider, where a chromed statue of a human torso stood on a plinth. Instead he yanked the wheel to the left, stamping on the brake to hurl the Hummer into a skid—

The limo hit the plinth side on and was sliced in half, its burning rear end finally ripping loose and bowling down Rodeo Drive . . .

Straight at the gunman.

The scar-faced man’s eyes widened in fear, and he ran—

The flaming wreckage smashed into the Cadillac. Pedestrians fled as gasoline sprayed from the Hummer’s ruptured fuel line . . .

Both vehicles exploded, the blast shattering the front windows of the Louis Vuitton and Bulgari stores and setting palm trees ablaze. The cops at the roadblock dropped behind their vehicles as wreckage showered around them. Car alarms wailed, parked Ferraris and Range Rovers reacting in pain to the barrage.

The Hummer’s front half ground to a stop at the bottom of the arcing pedestrian boulevard of Via Rodeo. Shoppers and tourists regarded what was left of the smoking limousine with shock and amazement, phones and cameras clicking.

Eddie sat up painfully, a smear of blood from a fresh cut slowly oozing down his forehead. ‘Ow, fuck . . .’ he grunted, adding a wincing ‘Christ!’ as a drip of perfume ran into the wound like an acidic bee sting. ‘Nina, you okay?’

‘I think so.’ His wife had ended up in the Hummer’s footwell. She blinked blearily at him, then sniffed her clothing. ‘Oh, that’s . . . strong.’

‘Macy won’t need to visit the Chanel shop after all – she can just wring out your sleeve.’ He was about to open the door – then froze.

The assassin had been knocked down by the explosion, but he was still alive, crawling through the licks of flame dotting the street towards a metal object.

‘Shit,’ Eddie gasped. ‘He’s going for his gun. Get out!’

Nina pulled at the door release, but it refused to move. ‘It’s stuck!’

He tried his own door. It too was jammed, the frame twisted. The assassin had almost reached his goal—

‘Police!
Freeze!
’

Two uniformed officers emerged from behind a shrapnel-dented SUV, weapons pointed at the crawling man. He looked at them in alarm, then back at the object in front of him . . .

And kept moving, one hand stretching out to grab it.

‘I said
freeze
!’ one of the cops screamed. ‘Stop or I fire!’

Eddie saw desperation on the killer’s face as he finally clamped his fingers around the gun – only the Englishman now realised it
wasn’t
a gun, but some sort of container, a flask—

Four gunshots echoed around the street, both cops opening fire. The man on the ground jerked and twitched, then fell still. Blood pooled around him. One of the cops ran up and fixed his gun on the unmoving figure as his partner kicked the container out of his hand. It
was
a flask, about the size of a paperback book, and looking for all the world like something an alcoholic would keep in his hip pocket.

But the assassin’s attempt to retrieve it had cost him his life. Whatever was in the flask, Eddie realised, it was more than mere whiskey or vodka.

Running footsteps caught his attention. He hurriedly raised his hands. ‘Ay up,’ he warned Nina as she clambered out of the footwell. ‘Beverly Hills Cops.’

More officers rushed to surround the battered limo. Nina regarded the guns pointed at her in alarm. ‘So much for our vacation,’ she sighed.

4

‘So, ah . . . what are you in here for?’

Nina suspected that the nervous young blonde had wanted to ask the question since being brought into the cell twenty minutes earlier, but something had put her off; possibly the redhead’s dishevelled appearance, or more likely the overpowering miasma of Chanel No. 5. ‘Me?’ she said. ‘Take your pick: grand theft auto, reckless endangerment, destruction of property and vehicular homicide. Oh, and,’ she sniffed her sleeve, ‘air pollution.’ The girl’s mouth slowly dropped open. ‘What about you?’

‘I, uh, tried to take a bag from Versace.’

‘Riiight.’ They sat in silence. ‘Of course, there were mitigating circumstances,’ Nina eventually said.

The blonde perked up. ‘Oh, same with me! I don’t suppose you could . . . help me think of some?’

Nina was spared from further conversation by the arrival of two cops at the cell door. ‘Wilde!’ one barked. ‘Nina Wilde. Come with us, please.’

The ‘please’ was something new; her status with the Beverly Hills Police Department had apparently been upgraded. Had her phone call finally gotten results? She stood and waited for the cops to unlock the cell, then went with them to an office on a higher floor. A sunset sky was visible beyond the slatted blinds.

Eddie was already there. ‘Oh, thank Christ,’ he said as she entered. ‘You okay?’

‘I’m fine,’ she replied as they embraced. She held him for a long moment, then eased her grip as she realised they had company: two stone-faced men in dark suits. ‘And you guys are . . . ?’

‘Special Agent Daniel Beck of the FBI,’ said the older of the pair. He gestured to his companion. ‘This is Agent John S. Petrelli. Dr Wilde, we’re glad you and your husband are okay.’

‘
We
are, an’ all,’ Eddie told him with a humourless grin as the cops exited. ‘So, now that Nina’s here, maybe you can finally tell us what’s going on?’

Beck seemed uncertain himself, which did not fill Nina with confidence. ‘Firstly, all the charges against you have been dropped. We’ve been ordered to take you back to New York. A . . . situation has arisen.’

‘No shit,’ said Nina impatiently. ‘A man gets murdered right in front of me, then the killer tries to shoot me too? I’d call that a situation as well.’

‘Who told you to take us home?’ Eddie asked.

‘The order came direct from Washington,’ Petrelli told him. ‘From the State Department – but it was approved by the White House.’

The Englishman turned to his wife. ‘You must’ve done a good job with your phone call. Who did you ring?’

‘Seretse, at the UN. From what that young guy said just before he got shot, I figured the IHA needed to know. I never imagined Seretse would be able to pull strings all the way up to the White House, though.’

‘You got better results than me, then.’

‘Why, who did you call?’

Eddie looked sheepish. ‘Macy. Only person I could think of in LA.’

‘What about Grant? Or even Marvin?’

‘You’ve got Marvin’s business card, so I didn’t have his number. And would you really want Grant having the paparazzi follow him down here?’

‘Good point. Is Macy okay?’

‘Yeah, she’s fine. A bit shaken up, but seeing someone get killed right in front of you’ll do that.’

‘I know,’ she agreed gloomily. ‘I thought I’d left this kind of thing behind me. I’d hoped I had.’

‘Maybe you should’ve let more people know you’d left the IHA. That kid might have given his conspiracy theory to someone else. What was in those papers, anyway?’

‘Something about the dig in Alexandria. I didn’t have time to see much, but he’d definitely got inside information – there was a plan of the outer tomb with specific archaeological notations on it.’ She turned to the FBI agents. ‘Where are the papers now? Some of them got burned up in the limo, and the cops took the rest from me.’

‘They’ve already been taken away for analysis,’ was Beck’s reply. ‘They’ll be brought to you in New York.’

The couple exchanged glances. ‘Okay, what’s going on?’ Eddie demanded. ‘We blow up half of Beverly Hills, and then get to walk away as if nothing’s happened? You said there was a situation –
what
situation?’

Beck passed a photograph from a manila folder to them. ‘Is this the man who tried to kill you, Dr Wilde?’

Nina stared at the picture. Though the printout was new and glossy, it was clearly from an old source, the image a grainy, dirt-specked monochrome.

The face on it was instantly recognisable, however. Glaring into the camera was her would-be assassin, the scar across his face clearly visible. He was younger in the photograph – she guessed it had been taken about fifteen years earlier – but it was definitely the same man. ‘Yes, it’s him.’

Eddie nodded in agreement. ‘That’s the ugly bugger, yeah. Who is he?’

‘His name is Maximilian Jaekel,’ said Beck. ‘There’s a standing arrest warrant on him from all international and US law enforcement agencies.’

‘Why?’ Nina asked. ‘What did he do?’

‘He’s a wanted war criminal,’ Petrelli told her. ‘He got into the country undetected, but when the Beverly Hills police took fingerprints from his body to check his ID, they were immediately red-flagged.’

‘So what did he want with me?’ Neither agent had an answer.

Eddie looked more closely at the photograph – not at the subject’s face, but his clothing. Only part of it was visible, the image cropped near the base of Jaekel’s neck, but the top of a dark raised collar still showed. ‘You said he’s a war criminal,’ he said slowly. ‘
Which
war?’ To Nina, it sounded as if he already knew the answer.

Beck hesitated before replying. ‘World War Two.’

‘What?’ said Nina, with almost a laugh of disbelief. ‘The war ended in 1945! This guy was late thirties, forty at most. Someone’s made a mistake.’

‘That’s what we thought too, at first,’ said Beck. ‘But the fingerprints are a perfect match to the ones on file, and everything else confirms it: dental records, the facial scar – even the SS blood group tattoo on his left arm. The body’s already en route to Quantico for further testing, but it looks like the results will be the same.’ His expression became more grim. ‘The man who tried to kill you today was a Nazi war criminal . . . and was over ninety years old.’

The flight back to New York brought Nina and Eddie into JFK airport in the early hours of the morning. A black SUV transported them and their FBI minders to the city.

Nina peered at the rising towers of Manhattan as they approached the East River. ‘I didn’t think I’d be back here so soon,’ she said. Her body was weary, but her eyes never tired of the sight. Even after all her travels, New York was still home.

‘Just hope we can get refunds for the flights we’d already booked,’ Eddie grumbled. They were taking the Queensboro Bridge to 59th Street; the United Nations complex came into view on the far bank, the glass tower of the Secretariat building alight even in the pre-dawn gloom. ‘And that we can get right back to what we were doing without any pissing about.’

There was a pointedness to his words, but she decided to ignore it. For now. ‘Is Seretse already at the UN?’ she asked Beck.

‘He’s there now, yeah,’ the agent replied. ‘He should be ready to meet you by the time we arrive.’

‘Good.’ She leaned back, rereading the file on the mysteriously youthful Maximilian Jaekel. ‘Did you look at this on the plane?’ she asked Eddie.

He nodded. ‘Nice guy, him and all his SS mates. France, Yugoslavia, Greece; they committed atrocities in all of ’em. Scumbags. Can’t believe that most of his unit managed to get away after the war.’

‘They bribed their way out of being sent to trial, apparently.’

A disgusted snort. ‘There isn’t any amount of money you could have paid me to let those Nazi bastards go. If I’d caught them, I would’ve shot ’em on the spot.’

Nina was a firm believer in the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, but in this case, with the benefit of historical hindsight, she could entirely sympathise with the former soldier’s viewpoint. ‘It’s a shame someone didn’t do that at the time. It would have saved that kid’s life. Have you found out anything more about him?’ she asked Beck.

‘The victim had a US passport under the name Volker Koenig,’ said Beck, ‘but it was a fake. An extremely good fake – it held up when he arrived at JFK – but it means we don’t even know if that’s really his name. Jaekel also had a fake passport, from the same source.’

‘Koenig came to New York first?’

‘And then travelled on to LA, yeah.’

‘Looking for you,’ Eddie suggested. The idea did not make Nina any more comfortable.

‘Jaekel had been tracking him – we found texts on his phone listing the flights he’d taken,’ Petrelli noted. ‘We’re trying to identify the sender, but it looks like they came from a burner. All we know is that they originated in Italy.’

They continued across the bridge into Manhattan, then headed to the United Nations. Nina expected them to go to the Secretariat building, home to the offices of both Oswald Seretse and the International Heritage Agency, but instead they stopped outside the much lower sweeping block of the General Assembly. The two FBI agents led the way in.

‘Wow,’ said Nina as she entered, stopping in momentary disorientation. The previous day she had been in a replica of the visitors’ lobby on the other side of the continent; now she was in the real thing. ‘It’s like I never left.’

‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ Eddie muttered.

Nina was about to ask him exactly what he meant by that when someone called her name. A tall figure in a blue suit strode towards the group. ‘Oswald!’

‘Good morning, Nina,’ said Oswald Seretse, shaking her hand. The Gambian diplomat, who in addition to his duties at the United Nations was acting as the IHA’s interim director following Nina’s resignation, was immaculately presented as always, despite signs of sleeplessness around his eyes. ‘I’m glad to see you again. Although obviously the circumstances are far from ideal.’

‘You’re not kidding,’ said Eddie. ‘Hey, Ozzy.’

Vexation and amusement fought for dominance of Seretse’s expression, the latter just winning out. ‘Good to see you too, Eddie.’ The Englishman grinned and shook his hand.

‘Late night?’ Nina asked.

‘There was a Security Council meeting concerning the Iranian nuclear programme. As ever, these things do tend to drag on. I had to excuse myself to meet you.’

‘What happened to us must be a big deal, then,’ said Eddie.

‘It certainly is. If you’ll come with me, there’s an office where we can discuss matters.’ He headed back across the lobby.

Eddie looked up at Foucault’s Pendulum as they followed. ‘Got to admit, Grant’s version of diplomacy is more interesting than the real thing. Even if his writers know fuck-all about how bullets work.’

‘If you mean “interesting” in the Chinese proverb sense, then yeah,’ said Nina. ‘I’d rather real-life diplomats stuck to sitting at tables talking things out, though.’

‘I dunno, sometimes you just have to shoot a bugger.’

‘That would explain the enormous backlog of IHA incident reports prominently featuring your name that I inherited from my predecessors,’ Seretse said as they reached the security checkpoint. IDs were quickly checked, and they went deeper into the building. ‘In here.’

The windowless room was a secondary conference area, a place for the small print of treaties to be hammered out by functionaries while their masters argued the bigger picture in the far more impressive main hall nearby. ‘Before we start, Oswald,’ said Nina, ‘I want to thank you for acting on my phone call so quickly. If you hadn’t got the State Department to intervene, God knows how long we would have been stuck in a police cell.’

The normally unflappable diplomat looked uncomfortable. ‘I must make an admission, Nina. I did call the State Department after we spoke in the hope of intervening on your behalf, yes . . . but they still have not replied to me. I suspect that I had little, if anything, to do with your release.’

‘Then who did?’

‘I don’t know.’

Eddie regarded the FBI agents. ‘You?’

‘We got orders from the top,’ said Petrelli. ‘But who gave them . . .’ He shrugged.

‘Looks like we’ve got friends in high places,’ the Englishman mused. ‘Makes a change.’

‘So what else do we have?’ Nina asked.

Seretse took several files from his briefcase. ‘I can give you as much as I know so far. Firstly, concerning the apparent threat against the archaeological excavation in Alexandria: is this the plan you saw in Los Angeles?’

He slid a sheet of paper across to her. Nina recognised it at once as the illustration of the tomb of Alexander the Great that Volker Koenig had thrust upon her. ‘Yes, although the one I saw had annotations. In German.’

‘German, eh?’ said Eddie, raising an eyebrow. ‘There’s a coincidence.’

Seretse took back the plan. ‘This was sent to me by William Schofield in Egypt. It’s the most up-to-date survey of the outer tomb, made in preparation for the opening of the inner chamber two days from now. It has not been released to anyone outside the IHA or the Ministry of State for Antiquities.’

‘Somebody leaked it, then,’ said Nina. She knew most of the IHA employees on the dig personally, and couldn’t imagine any of them committing such a security breach.

‘So it would seem.’ He opened another file, revealing several sheets of creased paper in protective plastic sleeves. ‘These are the documents you managed to save after your limousine . . . caught fire and broke in half.’ The pause was accompanied by a faint sigh, though Nina wasn’t sure if it was disbelief at the outrageousness of the situation, or the same kind of ‘oh no, not again’ resignation that she herself had learned to adopt many years ago. ‘I had one of the UN’s translators read them. What you told me on the phone appears to be correct – they are part of a plan to raid the tomb.’

The archaeologist felt a chill. ‘Have you warned Bill and the others in Egypt?’

‘Yes, we did so immediately. Unfortunately,’ Seretse leaned back, steepling his hands, ‘we do not know
how
the raid is to be carried out. There are references to an entrance, but it must have been described on one of the pages that was lost.’