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“Sorry to call you so late, sir,” Seve apologised when his call was finally answered, “but we’ve got a problem here.”
“What sort of problem?” Diego asked, an unpleasant, cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. “And where are you?” He reached for the watch on his bedside table to find out what the time was and was dismayed to see that it was almost three in the morning.
“We’re back at the hotel. One of Noir’s gunmen just turned up and we need to know what to do.”
“What did my friend tell you to do?” Diego asked. He pushed the covers back and got up to leave the room to avoid disturbing his wife.
“He told us to keep an eye on the hotel in case any of the group got away and came back here. If they did, he told us to watch and then follow them if they leave again. One of them, I think he’s the guy in charge, has just returned and we need to know what to do.”
“You do what you were told to do, wait and see if he leaves again, and if he does, you follow him.”
“What about your instructions to kill the men if we get a chance? Do you still want us to do that?”
“Yes,” Vega said after a moment’s thought. “If you can kill him without making a lot of noise or drawing attention to yourself, do so. If not, just watch him and wait for instructions from my friend.”
“What about the woman he had with him? Do you want us to kill her as well?” Seve asked.
“What woman? Where did she come from?”
“No idea. When he left the hotel, it was him and the three guys. Now, it’s just him and a woman, and he came back in a different car to the one he left in.”
“Describe her.” Vega hoped he was wrong, and he wasn’t looking at a catastrophe.
“Youngish, early twenties, slim, with long dark hair. She was too far away for me to see more. Oh, I don’t think she wanted to be with him. It looked like he was dragging her up the road towards the hotel.”
The description matched what he knew of Sofia Torres and Vega’s fear of a disaster increased. “Wait where you are, I’ll get back to you in a minute,” he said, fighting to keep calm. Ending the call, he dialled Cortez’s number to find out what was going on.
“Damn!” he swore loudly in the silence of his kitchen when he failed to get hold of Cortez after five minutes of trying. His inability to get hold of Cortez meant it was up to him to decide how to deal with the situation, and he dialled Seve’s number to give him his new instructions.
“Change of plan,” he said the moment Seve answered.
“Yes, sir.”
“Kill the guy and get the girl out,” Vega said. He uttered a silent prayer that he had made the right choice. As important as he was to Roberto Abrantes, he knew the wrong choice would put his life at risk.
“That could be a problem. We don’t know where in the hotel the man is, we only know he’s in there. Finding out and taking care of him could be noisy and attract attention.” Seve didn’t have a problem with killing the guy, he had killed before and would do so again if it were asked of him by Vega or Roberto Abrantes. Having been to jail, though, he didn’t want to go back if he could avoid it.
“None of that matters now, all that does is getting that woman away from him. I don’t care how noisy or messy you have to be, just get her to safety,” Vega instructed in a firm voice. “Mr Abrantes will clear up any trouble you get into, you have my word.”
“Yes, sir.” Seve reached under his jacket to loosen the gun he was carrying in its holster. “What do you want us to do with the woman, bring her to you?” He didn’t have a clue who the woman was or why she was so important, but that didn’t matter to him, all that did was that he knew what to do with her.
“No. When you’ve got her, take her to the nearest police station and drop her off. Call me when you’re finished,” Vega said in a tone that forestalled any questions before ending the call. He debated going back to bed but decided against it. Whether things went well or not he was going to be disturbed again, so he figured he might as well wait for the inevitable call.
“Okay, Cris, we’ve got to go in and kill that guy,” Seve told his partner. “The boss says he wants the guy dead, and he doesn’t care how we do it. The woman’s not to be hurt, though. Once we’ve got her safely away, we’re to drop her off at the nearest cop shop.”
Cristiano was a man of few words, but he did look questioningly at his partner when he heard what they were to do with the woman.
“Bugger knows,” Seve said in answer. “We’d better get on with it, though.”
Together they got out of the car and walked up the road to the hotel.
“Good evening, sirs, how can I help you?” the night clerk asked when Seve and Cristiano stopped in front of the reception counter.
“We’re after some information,” Seve told the clerk. “A short while ago one of your guests came in with a young woman. We’d like to know what room he’s in.”
“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t give out guest information, it’s against hotel policy.”
“I think you might want to reconsider that policy,” Seve said, taking out his gun. He figured that intimidating the clerk was the quickest and easiest way to get the information he was after. “What room is he in?”
The clerk swallowed nervously, his eyes going from the gun to the face of the man holding it. He didn’t doubt for one second that he would be shot if he didn’t cooperate, so he quickly turned to the computer. He hit the wrong keys several times in his haste, but he finally found the information he had been asked for.
“He’s in room fifty-four,” he said in a quavering voice.
“I wouldn’t tell anyone we were here,” Seve advised before turning away from the counter.
While the frightened clerk wondered what was about to happen in the hotel, Seve and Cristiano crossed the lobby to the lifts so they could ascend to the fifth floor.
“Security tapes,” Cristiano said as they were waiting for a lift to arrive, the first words he had spoken in hours.
It took Seve a few seconds to figure out what his partner meant, and when he did, he nodded. “Good thinking. Why don’t you go and get them. And while you’re at it, take care of him. Make sure he can’t talk to anyone. Do it quietly if you can, there’s no point making more noise than necessary. I’ll wait for you upstairs.”
Cristiano nodded and turned away from the lift as Seve stepped into it. When he reached the counter he found that the clerk had disappeared into the back room.
“Security tapes, where are they?” he asked in his unusually deep voice, surprising the clerk, who jumped violently, spilling the whiskey he had poured to calm himself.
“In-in the manager’s office,” the clerk said after a moment, pointing with a trembling hand to the door at the back, his eyes on the large, to him, blade of the knife in the hand of the man before him.
Watching the clerk in case he decided to try something foolish, Cristiano walked over to the door of the manager’s office, which he discovered was locked. “Open it,” he instructed.
“I can’t. The manager has the key, and he won’t be in ‘til morning.”
Cristiano was sure the clerk was telling the truth, he was too scared to lie, so he lifted his booted foot and slammed it into the door. Two kicks was all it took to make the door fly open and hit something behind it with a loud crash.
“Where’re the tapes?” he asked after looking around the office and failing to see what he was after.
“In there.” The clerk pointed to the door to one side of the office. “It’s locked as well,” he said, though he didn’t think another locked door would stop the man.
A single kick was all it took for Cristiano to get the second door open. The room on the other side of it was no bigger than a broom cupboard, with a quad of monitors and another quad of DVD-recorders on a table. He ejected the disks from each recorder and returned to the front office, where the clerk was looking around nervously, as if searching for some means of escape, though he made no move towards the open door.
“Is this all of them?”
“I-I think so, I don’t really know how the security system works.”
Cristiano walked towards the door as if to leave the room, but the moment he was past the clerk he dropped the disks and spun back to him. He stabbed the clerk in the chest, puncturing the heart and ending the man’s life instantly. When he pulled the knife free, the young man slumped to the floor, where he lay in a heap. Cristiano bent to wipe the knife clean on the clerk’s clothes and then he gathered up the disks he had dropped.
**
WHEN THE LIFT REACHED the fifth floor, Seve got out and went looking for room four, which wasn’t hard to find. He was tempted to burst into the room and kill the guy on his own. He didn’t imagine it would be difficult since surprise was on his side, but he dismissed the idea almost immediately. If all he had had to do was kill the man, he wouldn’t have hesitated, but knowing that he had to rescue the woman made him cautious.
Instead of kicking in the door, he took up a position a short distance from the room to wait for Cristiano to catch up to him, so they could enter the room together.
Barely a minute after he arrived, the door swung open, startling Seve. He recovered quickly and was pulling the trigger on his gun when the woman he had been told to rescue was pushed into the corridor, blocking his shot. He jerked the gun away and the bullet smacked into the wall further down the passage, making the woman scream.
“Let the woman go,” he ordered as he stepped sideways in the narrow passage to try and get a clear shot at his target.
Yves still hadn’t fully calmed down from the tensely alert state he had been in since leaving the hotel earlier that night. Because of that he reacted without hesitation to the shot and the order. Shoving his hostage in the direction of the gunman, he dropped the suitcase he was carrying and thrust his hand into his pocket for his gun. Drawing the weapon, he fired three times in quick succession, hitting the man in the chest as he stumbled backwards away from the woman and knocking him off his feet.
Cautiously, Yves approached the mystery gunman, His first thought was that he was a police officer, but he wasn’t dressed like one, and a cop wouldn’t have shot first without identifying himself, which made him wonder who he was and why he was there. He was tempted to search the man’s pockets for some means of identifying him, but decided against it when it occurred to him that the gunman might not be alone, and there might be other gunmen in the hotel.
When the gunman twitched as he was retrieving his suitcase, Yves put a bullet in his head to be sure he was dead, and then he shot his hostage as well. He had no further use for her, and he wasn’t about to leave her behind to talk to the police, not that there was much she could have told them about him.
Yves ignored the lift when he reached it and entered the stairwell next to it instead. The lift would have got him to the lobby quicker, but since he couldn’t be certain there wasn’t someone waiting to kill him, he thought it best to be cautious.
Slowly, and as quietly as he could, he opened the stairwell door when he reached the ground floor, his gun at the ready. He couldn’t see much of the lobby, but there was no sign of anyone, so he cautiously opened the door wider. When he was satisfied the lobby was empty, he picked up his case and left the stairwell.
With rapid strides, and eyes that darted everywhere, he exited the hotel.
**
CRISTIANO FOUND SEVE the moment he exited the lift, his body was less than twenty feet from the lift doors, as was the body of the woman they had been told to get out alive. He looked around for whoever had killed his friend but saw no sign of anyone; the fact that Seve’s body was not far from their target’s room told him all he needed to know, though.
Since it was obvious his friend was dead, he didn’t waste time checking for a pulse. Instead, he cautiously crossed to the open door of room fifty-four. Ready for anything, he entered and quickly determined that his quarry was gone, and the room was empty, of people at least. Personal items remained, but they were of no interest to him.
Once he had made certain the man he was supposed to kill wasn’t hiding somewhere, he left. He wanted to get as far from there as he could before the police, or anyone else, arrived.
On his way back to the lift he took out his phone. “There’s a problem, sir,” he reported when Vega answered.