Alex Howard - Time to Die

Jesus, now she really did feel terrible. All she wanted to do was curl up on the loo floor but that simply wasn’t an option. Dimly, she heard the phone start to ring in the kitchen.

‘Oh, go away!’ she groaned.

In Stuttgart, in her comfortable room at the five-star, quietly luxurious Althoff Hotel, Kathy let the phone ring five times and then hung up. She enjoyed staying in hotels. She liked the solitude and anonymity. Annette must be busy, she thought. She had promised Peter she wouldn’t phone him anyway — ‘It’s like you’re checking up on me, Mum.’ He’d be fine. She undressed and got into the shower. It was roomy, spacious and had a large, powerful jet, much better than the one at home. She turned the heat up to the maximum her body could bear, revelling in the sensation. A shower after a journey, she thought, what could be more fun than that. The bathroom gleamed and shone through the transparent shower screen. She felt intensely happy.

The only thing she didn’t like about business travel was eating alone. It was particularly unenjoyable in hotel dining rooms where many of her fellow diners tended to be single businessmen who would surreptitiously stare at her speculatively as she ate, a book or a Kindle propped up on a cruet set in front of her.

Tonight would be different, though. Max was taking her out to dinner and she was determined to enjoy herself.

Peter Reynolds had regained consciousness and was lying on his back, taking stock of his surroundings. He felt remarkably calm, considering. He was feeling very weak and he could feel the hypo coming. This meant his blood sugar was very low and he knew he was not far off fainting. Despite the panic and fear he was feeling at his abduction, he knew he had to get some sugars into his body before he collapsed. He felt in his pockets for his blood-testing kit to check how low he was, then remembered it was in his schoolbag. His blood sugar had to be below four, he thought, the danger level. Four’s the floor. He patted his pockets again, hoping to find a sweet, but it was no good. There was nothing there.

He had no way of knowing what time it was but he guessed, judging by the way he was feeling, it was probably late on Friday night. He breathed deeply and looked around him again.

It did not take long to complete an inventory. He was in a small, bare windowless room. The walls were smooth brick, painted a battleship grey. It was lit dimly by a recessed light covered with a grille. The metal door of the room was painted a dull green, with two square hatches, one at shoulder level, the other at floor level, and an eyehole. The room was about the size of his bedroom at home, he guessed. It wasn’t very big but the lack of furnishings made it seem larger than it was. A metal toilet was bolted to the wall, no seat, with some toilet paper next to it. There was a small washbasin, also metal, with a mixer tap, some soap and a plastic cup. In one corner of the room was a fixed shower head and mixer tap, with a drain below it set into the floor. He was lying by the far wall opposite the door on a thick, blue padded plastic mat, rather like they had at school in the gym, with a thin pillow that his head was resting on and a neatly folded blanket by his feet. In the ceiling corner above the door was a CCTV camera so he could be observed. That completed the inspection of the room, apart from one thing that made his misery more bearable. By the door was the dog in its cage.

Peter carefully got to his feet, rubbing his head, and opened the cage door. The dog flinched in fear. Its brown eyes were troubled and it trembled slightly. The boy put his arm slowly into the cage, allowing the dog to smell his hand to reassure it, and spoke soothingly to it. The animal let him stroke its head and when Peter withdrew his hand the dog crept nervously out of its cage and came to him. It lay down in front of Peter as he stroked its warm fur. It was still trembling. Peter could sympathize. The dog licked his hand and Peter kissed its head. As he did so, he heard footsteps that stopped outside his cell and felt he was being observed through the spyhole. He lifted his head.

‘I’m diabetic and I’m about to go into a coma unless you give me the emergency glucose that you’ll find in my schoolbag. And get me some orange juice.’ He spoke loudly at the blank, metal door. He paused, his head ached so. The coma was no idle threat. ‘I’ll need my blood-testing kit too. I’d hurry if I were you.’

The footsteps on the other side of the door started to move away, much more quickly than they’d arrived. A couple of minutes later he stood up as he heard the bottom hatch in his cell door being opened, and he moved forward to take the two cases that contained what he needed. Then the hands of the unseen person — a man’s hands, he noticed, so not the woman who had kidnapped him — passed him four individual cartons of orange juice. He noticed that the hands of the unseen man were furred with coarse, dark hair and heavily and intricately tattooed with Gothic lettering; the words weren’t English.

Quickly he sat down and tested his blood. He raised his eyebrows. God, he was low. He drank the juice and crunched three of the dextrose tablets between his teeth. He could almost feel the palpable relief in his body as his sugar levels rose. He felt a bit happier now. ‘At least I’m not dead,’ he whispered to the dog.

He sat back on his mat and the dog climbed into his arms, and Peter buried his nose in the animal’s fur for reassurance. Above him the light shone remorselessly and the camera watched over him like a malignant, vigilant eye.

The Shapiro Institute was discreetly housed in a small side road off Marylebone High Street. The area was extremely fashionable and, for the residents, reassuringly expensive. As well as its ten minute proximity to the good end of Oxford Street and Bond Street, it was very close to Harley Street, destination of the wealthy ill or those in need of cosmetic body upkeep. Although he lived in London, Whiteside hadn’t been to this part of the city for years and had forgotten how attractive it was, with its red-brick facades, the windows neatly edged in white stuccoed stone, and village-like feel. He thought, it probably doesn’t have much crime, except tax evasion. It was homely, with everything on a reassuring scale, unlike parts of London built to impress, like, say, Regent Street, or built to overawe, like the City.

He walked up the small flight of steps to the entrance of what had been a narrow, three-storey town house, looked up at the camera over the door that mutely returned his stare and pushed the buzzer. The intercom crackled into life and he gave his new name to an unseen woman. The door swung open. So far, so good, he thought.

As he walked through into the building, he gave a professional glance at the door, which was unusually — several centimetres — thick. He noticed it was a kind of sandwich. It was made of sheet steel between laminated wood with no obvious hinges. They must have been recessed into the wall. You’d need a bazooka to break it down.

Inside the doorway to the street was an entrance room with an airport-style security gate and an X-ray machine for any hand luggage. This was manned by two hard-faced men, one of them wearing a yarmulke, who Whiteside guessed would probably be Israeli ex-forces. Then again, he thought, almost everyone in Israel is in the military in one form or another.

Ex-military usually have a certain air about them. They had it. They eyed him professionally in an unfriendly way. The guards examined Whiteside’s credentials and ID with a far from impressed air. Perhaps Gertler had fired them from embassy security, he thought. As one of them patted him down, a dowdy woman in her late thirties, wearing a tweed skirt, cardigan, thick brown tights and sensible shoes, came down the staircase.