The House of Cards Complete Trilogy (114 page)

They chose a small square window that led into the darker recesses of the Lodge, on the side farthest away from the fire.

The Lodge, their target, had been designed more than a hundred years before by a French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, while still in his twenties. He was a man of rich experience for his few years, a life dedicated to indulgence, drinking, and bawdy conversations, which he supported through his activities as a gun runner, explorer, trader, man of letters—and architect. His building design, however, was utterly commonplace, the Lodge owing its survival more to the stoutness of its stone than to its beauty or practicality. The kitchen, in particular, was a miserable affair, narrow and dark, so at a later stage it had been modified by adding a small extension for storage, and light for that extension was provided by a small window. It was out of character with the other windows in the Lodge, which were mostly tall with a pretense at elegance. This window was scarcely two feet square. It was also the only window into the Lodge without shutters.

They knew precisely where the hostages were held, in the sitting room at the far end of the house from the kitchen. They suspected that there were at least an equal number of the Bishop’s men guarding them and another three, including the Bishop, were stationed at windows keeping watch on the progress of the fire. With luck, they could account for them all.

Captain Rupert Darwin had been placed in charge of the assault squad. Aged thirty-two, infantry, he was a man of endeavor and experience rather than notable achievement who had served in Ulster and Oman as well as United Nations duty in strife-torn Nigeria. He had also been to the same school as the Air Vice-Marshal—they were distantly related—but it was his two tours of duty on rotation with the Special Air Service in Northern Ireland rather than blood ties that in all probability had accounted for his selection to lead the assault on the Lodge. Six ordinary but experienced riflemen plus the captain, one for each hostile body, armed with the short SA80 rifle, smoke grenades, and thunder flashes. With faces blackened they had approached the Lodge from the side farthest away from and up-mountain of the fire, their camouflage smocks providing more than adequate cover among the smoke-strewn trees.

They had come to within twenty yards, each footstep sending telltale rivulets of pine needles creeping down the steep slope. They lingered behind the fissured boles of the pines until it had been confirmed that the three lookouts posted in the outbuildings had been taken out—without even a curse, as it later transpired, so distracted had they been studying the progress of the fire. Their task could only get more difficult. With a final glance at the shuttered windows and fearing a spying eye and angry muzzle behind every one, Darwin and his men had swarmed from behind their pines and tumbled down the final stretch of slope to the wall of the kitchen extension. No cry, no shout of alarm, nor sound of shot—nothing but the pounding of rotor blades that even from the far side of the building made it sound as if they were standing in the middle of an avalanche.

Darwin edged to the window, his back pressed flat against the wall. He could feel the trickle of sweat along his backbone. Now was the worst moment, when it all started, the point of no return in the operation when your life was about to depend upon the lessons squeezed from a thousand years of military history. That and a whole pile of luck. The time when you swallowed the fear, prayed it was your day to survive. He took a deep breath, knowing it might be his last, and spun to face the window.

The kitchen was empty—of course, who would want coffee at a time like this? His luck was holding, already he felt better. But they could not risk the sound of shattering glass. They taped and cut out a section of windowpane, carving a hole with a glass cutter through which the latch could be released. In less than thirty seconds the window had swung open. In another thirty Darwin and two others were inside, the rest of the men following in quick order.

The galley kitchen was narrow, no cover, no place to run or hide, a killing field if but one of the Bishop’s men confronted them in such confined quarters. They needed to get out of it as rapidly as possible. But they were through, into the dining room with its dark, formal furniture. There were dirty plates on the table, cheese and bread crumbs, fruit, several empty bottles of wine, screwed-up cigarette packets, and on the sideboard two submachine guns and boxes of ammunition. The eyes of Makarios, dark and somber in oils, stared down upon them, but no one else.

Within the house the bombardment of noise seemed still more remorseless, echoing between stone walls until the inside of their heads throbbed. There was no possibility of communicating through speech, all commands were given with a flick of the fingers to an order of battle orchestrated and meticulously scored in the hours before. Beyond the dining room they knew they would find a central hallway leading from the main door, and beside the door a half-open shutter where there should be a lookout. He’d been there all morning, damn him if he’d moved in the last ten minutes. Up the stairs from the hallway on the top floor they expected to find another lookout; the Bishop was reported to be on the middle floor, in the main bedroom with a view overlooking the fire. Beyond the hallway was the sitting room with four bound hostages and—they hoped—the four remaining hostiles. All accounted for. Perhaps. A man each.

The lookout positioned beside the main door was the key that, once turned, would open up the stairway and the approach to the sitting room. But they could afford no shots, no noise that might cause the lock to jam.

The paneled oak door from the dining room opened silently. Darwin smiled grimly. The theology student-turned-liberation fighter had been spending too much time on theory, his practical skills proving woefully inadequate. While he dragged at a cigarette his machine pistol lay on the chair a good pace away from the window, a pace he would never get the chance to take. Before he’d even turned a sergeant had the point of a bayonet pressed against the jugular and a hand forced over his mouth. The lookout froze, his eyes filled with fear, the bayonet point breaking the skin on his throat as he swallowed. Then he fell to his knees as though in prayer. One down.

In his heart, Darwin knew that the assault on the sitting room couldn’t be as simple. The position of the hostages was critical; if they were all set apart from their captors, an exchange of fire might be risked. He glanced through the crack in the door, cursed. One of the guards was seated directly beside the hostages, facing the window where, silhouetted against the bright light, standing shoulder to shoulder and struggling for a better view, two others stood. There should have been three.

The male hostages were tied in a row, also facing the windows, but the young woman was behind them and turned toward the door. One cheek was raw red and two buttons on her untidy blouse were missing, torn away. Yet there was a light in her dark eyes that ignited as she saw Darwin’s sooted face. He raised a finger to his lips; she closed her eyes, managed a small smile.

The rubber-soled boots made no distinguishable noise upon the carpet. The seated guard was felled with a blow from a rifle butt, offering nothing more than a low moan as he crumpled to the floor. Still there was no response from the men standing at the window, so overpowering and obliterating was the noise. Two soldiers stationed themselves as a wall of flesh between the guards and the hostages, another pair approached those at the window. Barrels to their backs. The captors stiffened in alarm. One accepted his fate in a flurry of raised hands and dropped weapons, but the other swung around, determined, hate in his eyes, his arm sweeping at the short barrel of the automatic rifle. All he got was the butt in his face, a blow that broke his nose and left him covered in blood. He fell to the floor, groaning.

The briefest of checks on the hostages assured Darwin that all were alive, although Martin in particular, captive for almost two weeks, appeared wan and exhausted. Any attempt to elicit from them the precise whereabouts of the Bishop and the other targets was frustrated; they didn’t appear to know, the noise prevented any useful exchange.

It was while he was questioning the High Commissioner that Darwin’s attention was aroused by the look of alarm that suddenly was drawn across the face of one of his men. He turned to discover that the freed woman had picked up one of the many small arms left lying around and was standing over the fallen guard with the busted nose. She kicked him to attract his attention. He stopped moaning, looked up, saw a special look in her eyes, held out a bloodied, pleading hand.

Elpída let him grovel until she could see fear stretched tight across his face like a piano wire. Then she fired and blew Dimitri’s right kneecap into a mush of skin and bone fragments. “Next time, you bastard, you’ll come crawling to me.”

Dimitri’s body began to jerk, trying desperately to get hands around his shattered leg while every movement sent a thousand volts of agony shooting through his body. He was screaming at the top of his voice.

As though she were handing out refreshments during a hot afternoon on the lawn of the Presidential Palace, Elpída gave the gun to Darwin and went to tend to her father.

The Captain felt sick. He’d lost control, the game plan was unraveling. It seemed certain that the gunshot and Dimitri’s cries of agony would have been heard by those still unaccounted for. He had the hostages secure, but the job was not yet finished. And he’d have to do the rest on his own.

As he contemplated the stairs, his mouth went dry and his finger stiffened around the trigger. He had little idea what to expect—Urquhart’s briefing had only extended as far as the ground floor—and there were too many doors leading off the landing, any of which could leap open in a blaze of gunfire. Like O’Mara Street near the river in Derry, a disheveled terraced house with peeling wallpaper and no carpet, on a miserable November day when he’d been sent to pick up an IRA suspect. At the top of a short flight of stairs there had been only two doors, but one of them had opened, just a fraction. He had hesitated—was it an innocent civilian, a child perhaps, coming from the bathroom? Or the suspect about to surrender?

The answer had come in the form of a 5.56-mm bullet fired from an Armalite that had sliced clean across his collarbone and through the throat of the corporal giving him cover from behind. They had both ended up at the bottom of the stairs, Darwin curled in a ball of pain, staring directly into the lifeless eyes of his fellow soldier. The corporal’s widow had got a pension, Darwin had got sick leave and a commendation, and the IRA murderer a sentence of life imprisonment when eventually he had given himself up. That was eight years ago; he could be paroled and out on the streets in less than another two. In Darwin’s dreams the eyes of the dead soldier had stared back at him for months afterward. That wasn’t going to happen again.

All the Bishop’s men with the exception of the still writhing Dimitri had had their hands wired behind their backs; he grabbed the nearest and thrust him forward. Up the stairs. A shield. Insurance.

They climbed, and Darwin’s senses were ringing; the nearer he came to the tin roof and the beating of the blades, the more insistent became the pounding inside his head. Even the wooden floor trembled. A sheet of metal roofing was working loose, beginning to bang methodically in the downdraft. Deafening. Like volleys of artillery fire.

Left at the top, the hallway dark and decorated like some Victorian boarding house. Prints, oil paintings, lamp shades with gently vibrating tassels, antique-stall bric-a-brac. And doors, too many bloody doors.

“You speak English?” Darwin had to shout directly into his prisoner’s ear.

“I have a master’s from Bristol University.”

“You want to die?”

The prisoner shook his head.

“Then you open the doors. Very slowly. And start praying your friends recognize you.”

He rebound the prisoner’s hands in front of him, and they crept along the corridor, Darwin pushing his human shield, until they reached the first door. Gingerly the brass knob was turned, the door swung open—to reveal nothing more threatening than a linen cupboard. For a moment Darwin felt a fool, until he reminded himself that at least he was a fool who was still breathing.

Onward. Behind the second door was a bathroom, behind the third an unoccupied bedroom. A sense of urgency grew; he had to get on with it. Darwin wiped away the sweat that was dribbling freely into his eyes.

The next door unlatched in faltering fashion, the prisoner’s damp and bound hand slipping around the polished brass. It opened a fraction, then a few more inches. And before them, back turned, looking out of the window in the pose of a statue dedicated to a Latin American warrior, stood the Bishop. Three respectful steps to his rear, attention also focused out of the window, was the missing guard.

They hadn’t heard a thing.

With rising confidence Darwin pushed forward behind his shield, ducking down for protection, but as they crossed the threshold his prisoner stretched out with a boot and caught the leg of a chair, enough to send it toppling. The guard near the window swiveled, his mouth opened to shout, his gun leveled. He saw the human shield, recognized his companion, and fired. As Darwin fired back, the man in his hands flinched, grew heavy, and slowly toppled to the floor. Darwin could see two bubbling craters in his chest and could feel the spatter of warm blood on his own cheek.

The Bishop had turned now, attracted less by the noise than the fact that his guard who had been positioned some way behind him was now slumped against the wall at the foot of the window, his heart blown wide open by a single round.

Theophilos faced Darwin, examined the two bodies on the floor with great deliberation. He sought for options; there were none. Inescapably, it was over. An adventure too far. He shrugged, expelled a great lungful of disenchantment and slowly raised his hands, the sleeves of his cassock slipping high up his arms to reveal his favorite Rolex and a white silk shirt. His arms outstretched in silhouette against the glowing light of sun and fire from the window gave the impression of a crucifixion.