I don’t remember the hands that pulled me to the surface or unpeeled me from Oktane’s death grip. It wasn’t Freddie. After all, Freddie wasn’t even in the country. I had simply used a familiar name as a radio trigger.
The first contact I remembered was a young, female medic standing over me, wrapping a dressing around my upper arm. I tried to take in my surroundings, but she forced my head back down. I was on a stretcher, but raised off the ground, so probably a wheeled medical trolley of some description. I was mostly wrapped in a light, shiny metal blanket. I was cold, bloodless, the hand that I could see marbled with blue veins.
‘What happened to my arm?’ I asked through blubbery lips.
‘Bullet wound.’
Bullet wound? Then I remembered the shot as I dashed for the pillar. I thought he’d been firing blind. Maybe not. Or maybe the inrush of water, the disturbance of the air, had affected the flight of the round.
Oktane never misses.
Except when someone has blown a sea door nearby. Even so, why hadn’t I felt it?
I looked up at the dome above my head and the restless pigeons, unsettled by all this activity. I was on the ground floor of the casino. I was aware of other bodies moving around, and in my peripheral vision I could see men in combat gear with serious weaponry held at waist height. Well, I always guessed, no matter what had happened, the cops would turn up, most likely elite ones like these. What I didn’t expect was Tom.
He knelt next to my trolley and touched my face. ‘Hi.’
‘Hi,’ I said. And I began to cry; great sobs that caused the medic to tut. Tom hugged me as best he could and waited until the worst of it had gone. ‘How . . .?’
‘Bratislava,’ he said. ‘You told Adam you were going there, remember?’
I didn’t remember. It must have been a slip of the tongue. Careless. It was one of the gaps in my memory of recent events. There seemed to be quite a number of them.
‘Adam, in his own sweet time, told Freddie, Freddie put two and two together. Weapons training. She figured you went there to get tooled up and get your eye back in. So, she sent me out to see your chum Pavol. Who was very worried about you. Very.’
There was a lot of weight to that ‘very’. I kept quiet.
‘He told me about the weapons and that you had asked to see the plans for this building. I told Europol that there was a sex-slave auction here. They contacted the FBI . . .’
I sighed. My words came slow, deliberate so the chatter of my teeth didn’t distort them. ‘The FBI? Jesus. There’s no auction. It was all a . . . it was all a sick game. A ruse to draw me in.’
‘We know that now. The FBI has cyber-forensics on it. It was all a front: the auction, FOTB. He knew you’d come if he laid out the breadcrumbs properly.’
There was a question I was afraid to ask, but it came out anyway, escaping like a greyhound out of the traps. ‘Is there a body down there?’
‘Yes.’
My throat caught before I realised: of course there was a body down there. I created it. ‘No, no. Jess, I mean. Is Jess there?’
He squeezed my good arm through the blanket. ‘Not that they’ve found.’
The tears came again, hot, but as salty as that sea. ‘Oh, God. What have I done, Tom? To Jess. And he’s not here. Bojan. He was using a remote set-up. He got away.’ And I had to find him. I had to know whether Bojan was telling the truth about Jess or whether it was another of his psychological tortures. His games.
‘Shush. We’re taking you to hospital. You need to rest. Get checked out.’ Where had I heard that before?
The medic finished. Suddenly, after feeling like I was entombed in an iceberg, I was warm, but the sort of warmth you get from an electric blanket. Artificial. Not quite right. I’d been given drugs. I felt my head drop to one side. Bollocks, not now.
My words slurred, as if I was half a bottle of vodka down. I struggled to keep it slow and deliberate. ‘I need something. From downstairs. When they . . . when they pump the water out.’
‘What?’
‘There’s a projector or a computer. Something rigged up to show a short film. I need it. Don’t let the police take it. Don’t.’
‘It’s the FBI. They know what they are doing.’
‘The FBI means it’ll disappear for years. I need it now.’
‘Why? It’ll be water-damaged anyway.’
‘I want you to get it,’ I said with as much feeling as I could muster. I could feel a veil coming down. ‘Get it. Steal it if you have to. Bribe someone. Please.’
There was a commotion of clanging and groaning as another trolley was manhandled up the stairs. I swivelled on one elbow.
There was a body strapped to it. A body with a balaclava on his face.
One of the cops stepped forward and pulled it off. With a final push, I raised myself up further to see the face of Oktane.
Except it wasn’t Oktane.
Or maybe it was all along, and there had only been one of them from the get-go. Perhaps all that bullshit about the Phantom had been just that. Either way, the man I was looking at, as pallid as a dead fish on a slab, his neck disfigured by vicious sawing wounds, was Bojan.
I’d killed the one man who could tell me what had really happened to my daughter.