The Templar Prophecy (23 page)

FIFTY-THREE

Lenzi Hofmeier wasn't happy at all. He couldn't understand why Udo had detailed him for boring guard duty, whilst he'd allocated those two no-hopers, Jochen and Sibbe, glamorous international courier jobs.

The pair of them had been warned by Udo, on pain of excommunication, not to mention anything at all about what they had been ordered to do, but Lenzi was a past master at winkling titbits of information from otherwise recalcitrant parties. He'd soon learnt all he needed to know about their first-class air travel, their free days in a foreign capital, the exotic whores they would be tasting, and the slabs of stupid jelly they would be transporting.

Was this some kind of a joke? Had he put Udo's nose out of joint somehow without realizing it? Because here he was still pulling nightshift duty when he could have been out drinking with his friends and contemplating a little international travel. The whole thing stank to high heaven. Surely it
was he, Lenzi, who was Udo's star ‘apostle', and who truly deserved any sinecures going, and not that pair of dorks? It was he who was always at the forefront of any race attack. He who reconnoitred Turkish-owned businesses and decided when best, and how hard, to hit them. He who thought up new ways to make non-German Germans feel uncomfortable and unwanted.

Lenzi had hated all foreigners since his mother had been attacked and nearly raped by an Algerian in an abandoned building site fifteen years before. It was only his mother's quick thinking in inviting the man home to her apparently empty house that had saved her from being violated at knifepoint. She'd known that Lenzi and his father were at home, and had counted on male vanity to do the rest. When Lenzi's mother, pretending to unlock the front door, had shouted out their names, the Algerian had fled, closely pursued by Lenzi's father – with the ten-year-old Lenzi following some way behind.

Lenzi had arrived at the building site just as his father was smashing in the Algerian's teeth with a brick. His father had handed the brick over to him.

‘Choose your spot. Then belt him with it.'

Lenzi had hesitated.

‘This man was going to hurt your mother. You only get one shot at this sort of thing, boy. Do it or don't do it. Your choice.'

The Algerian was keening through his broken teeth.

Lenzi smashed his nose with the brick.

Then his father kicked the man's head in.

Now Lenzi was sitting in his car watching Effi Rache's chemical factory through some sort of night-vision device that Udo had foisted on him. He'd finished his Vollkornbrot and salami sandwiches, eaten his marzipan chocolate bar, drunk all his coffee, and now he wanted to go for a piss. But Udo had warned him that under no circumstances must he get out of the car, even with all the interior lights switched off. He must piss in the thermos if he had to, and call for reinforcements if anything out of the ordinary occurred. All the burglar alarms and automatic floodlights had been switched off to avoid involving the police. He was in sole charge of security.

So Lenzi unscrewed the cap of his thermos, slipped his cock inside, and began to piss. Only he'd drunk so much coffee and Coca-Cola that the thermos threatened to overflow. Cursing, Lenzi threw open the car door and shunted his hips to the edge of the seat, so that the excess urine stream would run off down the storm drain he'd parked beside. It was at this precise moment that he heard the sound of breaking glass. If he'd stayed in the car he wouldn't have caught it.

Lenzi thanked Christ for his full bladder. Now was his chance to shine. Zipping up his flies as he went, Lenzi hurried down the hillside towards the back of Effi Rache's chemical factory, forgetting both his phone and Udo's instructions in the process.

FIFTY-FOUR

Amira lay flat on her stomach on the hillside overlooking Effi Rache's factory. She wished she had the Swarovski NC2 night-vision glasses that she'd lent Wesker. Instead she'd have to make do with the pair of Silva portable binoculars she always carried in her kit. But the moon was high and getting higher. The light was as good as it ever got at night. Even better where it reflected off the lake. It was curious that the security lights weren't on, though. Might they be on an automatic switch? Would the whole place light up like a Christmas tree if she ventured beyond the periphery?

She focused her glasses on the buildings. They were odd too. The factory looked pre-Second World War vintage, with metal-framed windows, a brick outer shell, and a partially corrugated asbestos roof covered in lichen. The place looked unloved, like a fat boy in a playground wearing hand-me-down clothes. The only modern thing in the vicinity was a fifty-foot jetty jutting out into the lake, with a brand-new
plankboard boathouse tucked in alongside it. An electro-boat and a rowing skiff were tethered to the end of the jetty, and a sailing boat with its masts shipped was moored thirty feet beyond it.

Amira wondered what Effi Rache kept in the boathouse. A hovercraft? A motorboat for waterskiing with? A fold-down seaplane? Anything was possible when you had that amount of money at your disposal. She forced her attention back to the factory. It was an odd thing, but when one compared it to the renovated splendour of Effi's house, it was almost as if she wished the factory to merge into the background and become invisible.

Amira crept closer. She squatted down in the lee of a juniper bush and tried to gee herself up for the job in hand. But she wasn't fully concentrating. Part of her was back at Haus Walküre, imagining Hart in bed with Effi Rache. She'd tried a dozen times to force the image from her mind, but each time she relaxed her guard it would come surging back. It served her right for making bitchy remarks to him over the phone.

A month earlier, if she'd been asked if she had a possessive or jealous nature, Amira would have scoffed at her questioner and quoted the line from her biblical favourite, the Song of Solomon, that ‘jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame'. She would have meant it ironically, of course, the implication being that it couldn't possibly pertain to her. Now she knew that it did.

She had no one to blame but herself. Hart had been the perfect lover. Tender and considerate – if a little wayward when the mood took him, but then you can't have everything. He had left Amira in peace most of the time to get on with her life, wasn't in the least possessive, and was always there on the occasions when she most needed him. He was also brave, ridiculously protective of her, and a five-star alpha male. As an alpha female herself, Amira couldn't have borne less in a man. It was her getting pregnant that had destroyed their harmony.

She'd always known that Hart was catastrophically tender-minded. As a tough-minded individual herself, she'd admired that about him, whilst assuming that it wouldn't apply in his dealings with her – except when it suited her, of course. She'd been taking the pill, after all. And she'd always made it clear that she wasn't in the least family-minded. Hart had appeared to go along with that.

But whilst they were on the island of Lamu, having a rare holiday together, she'd developed cystitis – probably from too much sex. The last thing she'd wanted at that point was to put up any barriers against intimacy, so she'd paid the maid who cleaned their bungalow to get her some off-prescription antibiotics. No one had told her that they could interfere with her birth-control pill. And, being Amira, she hadn't bothered to read the small print on the packet.

In retrospect her biggest mistake had been in ever telling Hart about the pregnancy. She should have kept her trap shut and sorted it out for herself. But she'd done it in a weak moment –
hormones, probably, post-Lamu – when they'd found themselves working together on a piece about the Gambia. She'd been on a deadline. Which meant that she didn't have time to research either abortion clinics or the attitudes of the predominantly Islamic medical authorities in Banjul to terminations. And when a colleague blindsided her with the fact that the agreement of two independent doctors would probably be needed before anything could be done, she became even more reluctant to chase the matter up herself and risk being lectured to by religious bigots. Hart was the father. He could bloody well do it.

The outcome had been a disaster. It had never occurred to Amira that Hart might be temperamentally and emotionally incapable of okaying an abortion. Instead, from the very first moment she had told him about the pregnancy, he had marshalled every argument in the book to persuade her to keep the child. She'd not taken him seriously, of course – after all, modern men were renowned for not being paternal, weren't they? Look at baby fathers.

She'd hurried to a Marie Stopes clinic on her first London stopover after Banjul. The baby hadn't been that far gone. Twelve weeks, maybe. Where was the harm? Hart would get over it, just like all men did. Just like she did.

But Hart didn't get over it. The Gambia had been the very last occasion they'd made love. By the time the Syrian crisis occurred, Amira was in full-blown denial that their affair was at an end, whilst Hart was still in emotional meltdown at the loss of his child. Amira had always assumed it would be the other way round. But it wasn't.

Now, with her head still churning out images of Hart and Effi in bed together, Amira ran through the factory car park and round the side of the building facing the lake. If the security lights came on, they came on – she would simply carry on running. If anyone stopped her she would say she'd fancied a jog under the full moon. What the fuck. If it was Zirkeler, she'd Mace him. On principle.

She reached a rear door topped with roofing glass. She looked around. The path to the lake was waymarked with whitewashed stone. She selected a stone she could lift and wrapped her Ascari bomber jacket round it. Then she smashed the stone against the door panel.

Time was everything in such cases. You had to get in and out quickly.

The safety glass made surprisingly little sound when it gave way. Amira was fairly confident she hadn't been heard much beyond a fifty-foot radius. She'd be long gone by the time the watchman made his rounds again. And, at the very least, by leaving a shattered door behind her, she might have succeeded in tossing a spark into the LB woodpile.

Using her bomber jacket as protection, Amira straddled the doorframe and eased her way inside the building. She checked around for a burglar alarm or flashing lights, but nothing was visible. Which didn't mean to say that an alarm wasn't going off in a distant office somewhere. If the police turned up, so be it. She'd make a dreadful stink, and still get her story. But somehow she suspected they wouldn't. The LB were not the sort of people who courted that kind of publicity.

The glass-sectioned doorway led into what appeared to be an old-fashioned clerk's office. In fact, the entire interior of the factory was curiously old-fashioned, as if it had been preserved in aspic as a sort of shrine. The windows were of the wartime Nissen hut variety, the floors were covered in 1960s linoleum, and the strip lighting resembled the sort they'd used in the Loftus Road football ground when she'd visited it with her father as a child.

Amira switched on her torch, shone it briefly around, and then switched it off again. She hurried across the floor to the main inside door, trying to keep the mental image of where everything was situated in her head. At the door she switched the torch on and off again. This one wouldn't be quite so easy to crack. She tried it first for give. Non-existent. She cast around for another possible entrance. None.

She thought for a moment, and then made her way to a desk situated in a nearby corner. Filtering the torch through her handkerchief, she checked through all the drawers. No keys. She took the drawers out. No keys taped underneath the drawers either. She walked back to the door. There was a filing cabinet situated an arm's length from the entrance, with a space left between its back and the wall. Amira cupped her ears and listened out for any extraneous noises. She realized she was sweating. She brushed the damp hair away from her ears and tried again. Nothing. No noise.

She inserted her hand deep into the gap. A key was hanging on a nail about six inches below the top of the cabinet. She rolled her eyes and tried it in the lock. Twisted once. The
door opened. It never ceased to astonish her how lazy people could be in terms of security.

The smell of chemicals was stronger in this new room. Amira could see cardboard boxes piled high to the ceiling. Some had pictures of swimming pools on them. At the far end were bigger boxes. These were decorated with pictures of jacuzzis, Turkish baths and saunas. She was in a warehouse. No outside windows to give her away.

She began using her torch with impunity now, focusing on each section of the building in turn. But the part of her brain concerned with Hart wouldn't leave her alone. Did she still love him? Yes, she did. She'd admitted as much to him in England, but he'd been so resentful of her by that time that she wasn't sure he'd fully taken it in. Did she want him back? That also. Though not by any rational choice. More by emotional necessity. She couldn't get him out of her head. Whenever she thought about him, the image came to her of how he'd thrown himself across her body in Syria in an attempt to shield her from the bullets.

He'd been prepared to give up his life to protect her, even though they were in the process of breaking-up. Maybe she had been a little ungracious in her response to his heroism? Her feminism lever was set to the default position, and always had been, which got her into all sorts of trouble with male colleagues. Maybe she should just have said thank you, and left it at that? Rather than berating him for patronizing her, as she had done.

Amira sliced open a few of the cardboard boxes and checked inside them. Each one contained exactly what it said on the
packet. She began to lose heart. Maybe she was on a wild goose chase? Maybe she was trashing a perfectly innocent chemical factory? She continued on her desultory rounds of the warehouse, her torch beam bobbing in front of her.

As she walked the length of the depository, she began speculating on how she might get her lover back. Simply appealing to his better nature wouldn't do it. Hart was a proud bastard at the best of times – all Aries were. Well then, how else? By proving to him that Effi Rache was pulling Zirkeler's strings, that's how. That she was a murderess as well as a whore. All Amira's instincts told her this was the case, but she would need to confirm it beyond a reasonable doubt. And way beyond Effi Rache's ability to sue her and the newspaper for libel – or soft-soap Hart into falling yet again for her Marlene Dietrich eyes and her gooey protestations of innocence.

Udo Zirkeler was the key, then. Amira had done her homework on him. She understood his psychology. Thugs like him seldom, if ever, acted alone. They needed the support of their peers. They needed someone to give them orders. Someone to look up to. Someone to work for. And that person, she was convinced, was Effi Rache. All she needed to do was to gather her facts together and publish them. Then Hart would come running back to her. And this time she'd find a way to make him stay.

Amira stopped what she was doing. She canted her head to one side like a dog listening for the return of its master's footsteps. Had she heard something? No. It had only been the gurgling of a radiator. As she listened out for a repeat of the
noise, the beam from her torch skated across a thirty-foot-long span of insulated glass. Amira played her torch beam across it a second time. Odd. What was such a vast expanse of glazing doing in a warehouse, where any idiot could smash through it with a misdirected pallet or an out-of-control forklift? She hurried forward and directed her light through the glass.

Amira's heart caught in her chest. It was a laboratory. But this was no ordinary laboratory – she could tell that much straight off. Treble doors with what looked like airlocks sealed the laboratory off from the outside world. Amira manipulated the torch so that its beam fell on the first of the two self-contained compartments. It contained a disinfection unit with shower nozzles and chemical cleanser tanks. Hardly necessary for making swimming-pool chemicals.

She swung the beam a little further. A pair of protective suits, each with a self-contained breathing apparatus and an internal radio, hung on a frame just inside the entrance to the lab. The bottom halves were designed in the same way as a pair of waders, to cover and completely seal the feet, so that the individual using it would have no possible contact with the laboratory atmosphere. Amira directed her torch beam downwards. Below the dangling feet of the body suits, two pairs of steel-toed boots stood side by side, with chemical-resistant gloves stuffed inside them.

Amira took the phone out of her pocket and began taking photographs. The flash was overwhelming in the enclosed area, but she was standing in a self-contained warehouse with no outside windows. It was a risk worth taking.

When she got back to her car she would forward the pictures to her computer at the safe house. Then she would show them to Hart. He might think a little differently about his lover, after that.