The Bones Of Odin (Matt Drake 1) (28 page)

But Drake was back, and he was ready. With supreme skill he
let go
of his rope, locked away the intense vertigo, and caught it two foot further down. Alicia sailed harmlessly by above him, stunned by his move, still flailing.

Drake leapt up the rope a foot at a time. By the time his adversary realised what he had done he was above her. He stomped hard on her head.

Saw her fingers let go of the rope. She fell, but only for a few inches. The hard-nut within her kicked in and she regained her grip.

Frey bellowed from above. “No good! Die, you English unbeliever!”

Then, in less than a heartbeat, the German whipped out a knife and cut Drake’s rope!

*****

Drake saw it all in slow motion. The glint of the blade, the wicked shine of the cutting surface. The sudden unravelling of his life line - the way it started to bulge and wriggle above him.

The immediate weightlessness of his body. The frozen instant of terror and disbelief. The knowledge that everything he had ever felt and everything he might have done in the future had just been eradicated.

And then the fall . . . seeing his arch enemy, Alicia, climbing hand over fist to get back on top of the Sarcophagus . . . seeing Ben’s mouth twist into a scream . . . Kennedy’s face turning into a death-mask . . . and through his peripheral vision . . . Dahl . . . what the . . ?

Torsten Dahl, the mad Swede, running, no
sprinting
across the platform, safety harness strapped to his body, literally
launching
himself out into the black pit just as Drake himself had done a few minutes before.

The safety harness unravelling behind him, anchored around a pillar in Odin’s niche, held tightly by Hayden and Wells who had braced for maximum effort.

Dahl’s crazy dive . . . bringing him close enough to grab Drake’s arms and hold on tight.

Drake’s rush of hope quashed as both he and Dahl fell together, safety line playing out . . . then the sudden, painful jerk as Hayden and Wells took the strain.

Then the hoping. The slow, painful strokes of rescue. Drake stared into Dahl’s eyes, not speaking, not emitting an ounce of emotion as they were hauled inch by inch to safety.

The chopper pilot must have received orders, for he began to rise until he was ready to fire a third missile, this one out of the mountain, designed to widen the gap enough to fit the sarcophagus through without risking it being damaged.

Within three minutes Odin’s coffin was gone. The chopper’s thudding rotor blades a distant memory. As now were Ben, Kennedy, and Parnevik.

At last, Dahl and Drake were dragged over the rocky edges of the precipice. Drake wanted to rush off in pursuit, but his body wouldn’t respond. It was all he could do to lay there, letting the trauma absorb into him, re-routing the pain to a cordoned-off part of his brain.

And as he lay there, the noise of the chopper returned. Only this time it was
Dahl’s
chopper. And it was both their means of rescue and pursuit.

Drake could only stare into Torsten Dahl’s exhausted eyes. “You are a
God,
mate,” and the significance of the place they were in was not lost on him. “A true God.”

FORTY-ONE

GERMANY

Every time Kennedy Moore so much as shifted her ass around in the hard seat, Alicia Myles’ sharp eyes noticed. The English bitch was an uber warrior blessed with that cop’s sixth-sense of constant anticipation.

They had stopped only once during the three-hour flight from Iceland to Germany. Early on, only ten minutes after they had exited the volcano, they had winched up and steadied the coffin and brought everyone on board.

Abel Frey went immediately to a rear compartment. She had not seen him since. Probably greasing the wheels of theft and industry. Alicia had practically thrown Kennedy, Ben and Parnevik in their seats, then perched next to her boyfriend, the injured Milo. The chunky American seemed to be clutching every part of his body, but chiefly his balls, a fact Alicia seemed to find alternately amusing and worrying.

Three other guards were on the ‘copter, flicking their watchful eyes between the captives and the odd companionship that existed between Alicia and Milo - in turns sad, then meaningful, and then brimming with fury.

Kennedy had no idea where they were when the chopper began to descend. Her thoughts had drifted throughout the last hour - from Drake and their adventures in Paris and Sweden and in the volcano, to her old life at the NYPD, and from there, inevitably, to Thomas Kaleb.

Kaleb - the serial killer she had freed to kill again. Memories of his victims assailed her. The crime scene she had walked a few days ago –
his
crime scene – remained fresh in her memory like newly-spilled blood. She realised she hadn’t seen a news report since.

Maybe they had caught him.

In your dreams . . ..

No. In my dreams they never catch him, never get near him. He kills and kills and taunts me and my guilt rides me like a damn demon until I give it all up.

The chopper dropped fast, yanking her out of a vision she couldn’t bear to face. The private compartment at the rear of the chopper opened and Abel Frey strode out, issuing orders.

“Alicia, Milo, you’ll be with me. Bring the prisoners. Guards, you will accompany the coffin to my viewing room. The custodian there has instructions to contact me as soon as it’s ready for viewing. And I want it fast, guards, so don’t dally. Odin may have awaited Frey for thousands of years, but Frey doesn’t wait for Odin.”

“The whole world knows what you’ve done, Frey, you lunatic,” Kennedy said. “Fashion designer, my ass. How long do you think you’ll stay out of jail?”

“American self-importance,” Frey snapped. “And idiocy makes you believe you can speak out loud, hmm? The superior mind always triumphs. Do you really think your friends made it out? We set traps in there, stupid bitch. They won’t make it past Poseidon.”

Kennedy opened her mouth to protest, but noticed Ben’s brief head-shake and snapped her mouth shut.
Leave it. Survive first, fight later.
She silently quoted Vanna Bonta –
I would rather have an inferiority complex and be pleasantly surprised, than have a superiority complex and be rudely awakened.

Frey couldn’t possibly know their chopper had remained hidden at a higher altitude. And pride reassured him that his intellect trumped theirs.

Let him think that way. The surprise would be all the sweeter.

*****

The chopper landed with a jolt. Frey marched forward and jumped off first, shouting orders to men on the ground. Alicia rose to her feet and made a motion with her forefinger. “You three first. Heads down. Keep moving until I say otherwise.”

Kennedy jumped off the chopper behind Ben, feeling the ache of exhaustion in every muscle. When she looked around, the surprising sight made her forget her tiredness for a minute, in fact it took her breath away.

One look and she knew this was Frey’s Chateau in Germany; the designer’s den of iniquity, where the entertainment never stopped. Their landing pad faced the main entrance - double oak doors inlaid with gold studs, framed by Italian marble pillars that led into the grand entrance hall. As Kennedy watched, two expensive cars rolled up, a Lamborghini and a Maserati, from which four ecstatic twenty-somethings rolled out and tottered up the steps into the Chateau. The heavy beats of dance music drifted through the door.

Scaling up above the doors was a stone-clad facade topped by a row of triangular turrets, and two taller towers to either end, giving the vast structure the whole Gothic Revival appearance.
Imposing,
Kennedy thought, and a little stunning. She fancied being invited to a party at this place would be an upcoming model’s dream.

And so Abel Frey had preyed on their dreams.

She was shoved towards the doors, Alicia watching them carefully as they bypassed the purring supercars and walked up the marble steps. Through the doors and into an echoing entry hall. To the left, an open, leather-bound
gate
led into a nightclub complete with upbeat music, multi-coloured lights, and cubicles that swayed above the crowd where one could prove how well they could dance. Kennedy stopped immediately and screamed.

“Help!” She cried, staring straight at the patrons. “Help us!”

Several people took a moment to lower their half-full glasses and stare. After a second they began to laugh. A classic Swedish blonde raised her bottle in the universal
cheers
sign, a dark-skinned Italian male started giving her the eye. The rest went back to their disco inferno.

Kennedy groaned as Alicia grabbed her hair and dragged her across the marble floor. Ben cried out in protest, but a slap to the face almost felled him. More laughter rang out from the party guests amidst several bawdy comments. Alicia flung Kennedy against the great staircase so she banged her ribs, hard.

“Stupid female,” she hissed. “Can you not see they are enamoured of their host? They will never think badly of him. Now . . . walk.”

She gestured upwards with the small gun that appeared in her hand. Kennedy considered resisting but judging from what had just happened she decided to just roll with it. Up the stairs and to the left they were marched, towards another wing of the Chateau. Once they left the staircase and stepped into a long, unfurnished corridor – a bridge between wings – the dance music died and they could have been the only people alive at that moment in time.

Beyond the corridor, they were marched into what might once have been a spacious ball-room. But now the area had been divided up into half a dozen separate rooms - rooms with bars on the outside instead of walls.

Cells.

Kennedy, along with Ben and Parnevik was hustled into the nearest cell. A loud clang signified the closing of the door. Alicia waved. “You
are
being watched. Enjoy.”

In the resounding silence that followed, Kennedy ran her fingers through her long, black hair, smoothed out her pant-suit as best she could and took a deep breath.

“Well-” she started to say.

“Hey
bitches!”
Abel Frey appeared at the front of their cell, grinning like the God of Hellfire. “Welcome to my party chateau. I somehow doubt you’ll enjoy the experience as much as my, umm, more affluent guests.”

He waved the suggestion away before they answered. “No matter. You don’t have to speak. Your words have little interest to me. So,” he made a pretend pondering gesture, “who do we have . . . well, yes of course, it’s Ben Blake. The pleasure’s all yours, I’m sure.”

Ben ran to the bars and wrenched at them as hard as he could. “Where’s my sister, you bastard?”

“Hmm? You mean the feisty blonde with the-” he kicked out a leg wildly. “Enter the Dragon fighting style? You want details? Well - okay, since it’s you, Ben. First night I sent my best man in there to take her shoes, you know, to soften her up a bit. She marked him, bruised a few ribs, but he got what I wanted.”

Frey took a moment to fish a remote control out of the pocket of the odd silk dressing gown he wore. He flicked it at a portable TV Kennedy hadn’t even noticed. The picture came on – SKY News – babbling about the U.K.’s widening national debt.

“Second night?” Frey paused. “Does her brother really want to know?”

Ben yelled, a guttural sound deep from his belly. “Is she okay?
Is she okay?”

Frey flicked the remote again. The screen switched to another, grainier image. Kennedy realised she was looking at a tiny room with a girl tied to the bed.

“What do you think?” Frey goaded. “She’s alive, at least. For now.”

“Karin!” Ben ran towards the TV, but then stopped, suddenly overcome. Sobs wracked his entire body.

Frey laughed. “What more do you want?” He made another show of thinking, and then switched the channel again, this time to CNN. Immediately a news report of the New York City serial killer – Thomas Kaleb – came on.

“Recorded this for you earlier,” the madman said to Kennedy with glee. “Thought you’d like to watch.”

She listened despite herself. Heard the dreaded news that Kaleb continued to stalk the New York streets, emancipated, a ghost.

“I believe you liberated him,” Frey said pointedly at Kennedy’s back. “Nice going. The predator back where he belongs, no longer a caged animal in a city zoo.”

The report flicked back over archive footage of the case – standard stuff – her face, the dirty cop’s face, the victims’ faces. Always the victims’ faces.

The same ones that haunted her nightmares every day.

“Bet you know all their names don’t you?” Frey taunted. “Their families’ addresses. The way . . . they died.”

“Shut up!”
Kennedy held her head in her hands.
Shut it out! Please!

“And you,” she heard Frey whisper. “Professor Parnevik,” he spat out the words as if they were bad meat caught in his mouth. “You should have stayed working
for me.”

A gunshot rang out. Kennedy screamed in shock. The next second she heard a body collapse and turned to see the old man hit the ground, a hole blown through his chest, blood leaking out and sprayed across the cell walls.

Her mouth dropped open, disbelief shutting down her brain. She could only stare as Frey turned to her one more time.

“And you, Kennedy Moore. Your time is coming. We will soon explore the depths to which
you
are capable of sinking.”

With a turn of heel and a grin, he was gone.

FORTY-TWO

LA VEREIN, GERMANY

Abel Frey chuckled to himself as he headed for his security section. An inventive few moments and he’d trodden those idiots into the ground. Broken both of them. And finally killed that old idiot Parnevik stone dead.

Wonderful. Now to even more pleasurable pursuits.

He opened the door to his private quarters and found both Milo and Alicia sprawled out on his sofa, just the way he’d left them. The big American was still carrying an injury, wincing with every movement, courtesy of that Swede, Torsten Dahl.