Huss lay in the darkness of the lodge’s wellness centre. She had heard selective noises filtering down from above: the sound of the car alarm; footsteps from running feet; the banging of the front door.
In her state of heightened awareness where every sound could have vital significance, she felt almost psychically attuned to what was going on. Whether or not this was simply imagination or reality, her five senses keyed to a pitch they never normally had to work at, she didn’t know. Maybe it was like the sensation when you have a car crash, that everything is happening in slow motion.
She thought with excitement, It has to be Hanlon. If it were her colleagues there would be an awful lot more activity, not least calls for the occupants of the lodge to emerge. None of that. She sensed disturbance, urgency, and then she heard voices, calm now, measured tones, and her heart sank.
She thought sadly of Marcus Hinds, his handsome face and tousled dark hair casually shrouded in a bin bag, and she remembered too the sadistic glee in Georgie Adams’s eyes.
She had no doubt now that Adams was involved in this not for any money – her wealthy Scottish family were more than capable of buying her anything she could have wanted. In an idle moment, back at the station, she had googled her father who was, as Templeman had said, a prominent lawyer in the corporate world and non-exec director of several firms.
Georgie Adams was doing this because she liked hurting people; more than that, thought Huss. She liked killing them. She thought of Adams, going to Russia as part of her university studies, getting drawn into the shady Russian bizniss world where crime and capitalism and politics meet. No, that was wrong, Adams wasn’t the sort of person who would be drawn in, she had gone there to deliberately find the kind of lawless, amoral thrills that she craved. Sex, power, money, crime.
It was all there to be had.
And what a find for the Russian Mafia, what an envoy. Posh, rich, British student, no suspicion attaching to her. And studying politics, of course she could meet people like Kellner, she had perfect cover.
And she had brains and organizational ability and, with a face and a body like that, the most amazing hold over men. And the awful thing was she would probably get away with it. Muller would spirit the bodies of poor Arzu and Hinds away. Both of them killed to take the blame for murders that they hadn’t committed.
She would die and the non-existent Al-Akhdaar would take the blame and Schneider’s popularity would rise another few percentage points.
She lay in the darkness and thought that in a way it was significant that Adams had stage-managed the crucial killings of Gunther Hart, Christiane Hübler – both of whom had been on the verge of exposing Schneider – to look like the work of an IS splinter group. She was a kind of Jihadi John figure for whom the main attraction was not ideology, but death.
And death would come to her soon. That much she knew.