Andy McDermott - The Tomb Of Hercules

Chase shook it. “Look, about that… tell Nina that I want to talk to her, I do want to sort things out. But it’ll have to wait until after I get back. I have to do this.”

“I’ll tell her,” said Mac.

“I’ll be back in no time,” Chase assured him as he opened the front door and walked out. It closed behind him with a dull funereal thump.

Mac regarded the door for a moment, then spoke. “You can come down now, Nina.”

Surprised, she leaned over the railing. “You knew I was listening?”

“I know every sound in this house-I heard the bathroom door creak.” He looked up at her. “I’m sorry. I thought I might be able to persuade him not to go.”

“You could have just not helped him,” she pointed out sharply.

“In which case he would have gone anyway, and probably ended up being arrested trying to get through customs. Which, in the circumstances, you have to admit would be an even worse alternative.”

Nina was forced to agree. “Goddamn it!” she wailed. “Why does he have to be so stubborn?”

Mac let out a muted laugh. “I’ve known Eddie for a long time, and that’s one thing about him that’s never changed.”

“You mean there are other things that he actually is willing to change?” It was intended as a rhetorical question, with more than a hint of bitterness, and she was rather taken aback to get an answer.

“You’d be surprised. I’ve seen quite a lot of changes in Eddie in the years I’ve known him.”

“Really?”

“Really. But,” he went on, “if you want to talk about them, I think it would be better-certainly for my neck!-if we didn’t discuss them over a balcony like Romeo and Juliet, eh?” He indicated the door leading to the kitchen at the back of the house. “Come downstairs and I’ll get you something to eat. Then, if you’d like, we can talk about young Mr. Chase.”

The sun had set on London, buildings silhouetted against the dying glow of the western sky. Streetlights illuminated the Belgravia terraces with a salmon-pink cast.

That same light fell on a white van as it pulled up opposite Mac’s house. Ignoring the double yellow lines, its flashing hazard lights came on, the traditional cloaking device of any British driver wanting to park where it was prohibited.

There were three men in the front of the van, and four more in the back. All were young, large, trained, and dressed entirely in black. They were also armed, six of them equipped with ultracompact Brugger & Thomet MP9 submachine guns, and other weapons besides.

The seventh man lacked an MP9, but in some ways he had the most powerful weapon of all. On his knees was a laptop computer, and connected to it by a cable was an unassuming white box attached to a makeshift frame bolted to the side of the van.

“Switching on,” he said. The laptop’s screen came to life, a random swirl of grays and whites against a blood-red background quickly taking on form.

The interior of Mac’s house.

The white box was the antenna for a millimeter-wave radar, working on a frequency capable of penetrating Victorian brickwork with ease. The operator used a small joystick to direct the antenna, slowly panning and tilting through the house, looking for signs of life…

“Got them,” he announced.

Nina looked more closely at the photograph. “Oh my God, is that Eddie?”

“That’s him,” Mac confirmed. After they’d eaten Nina had changed into a pair of slippers and one of his shirts, which came almost to her knees. While she waited for her own clothes to dry, he had taken her on a brief tour of the house, ending up in a library on the top floor-though it was as much a private exhibition of the Scotsman’s past as a repository for books. One wall was filled with framed pictures from different periods of his military career.

“He’s got hair!” Despite Chase’s military crop in the photo, he still had more follicular coverage than his present-day counterpart. “How old was he in this?”

“That was taken ten years ago, so he’d be about twenty-five.” Mac was also in the picture, as were several other men in desert camouflage. “I think it was his third year in the SAS.”

Nina moved on to the next picture, which looked as though it had been taken in a restaurant or a pub. A group of men around a table all cheerfully toasted the photographer, whom she assumed to be Mac himself. “Oh, wow! Is that Hugo?”

Mac peered at the picture, which included Chase and Hugo Castille, the latter sporting a very unflattering droopy mustache. “So it is. Took it just after we got back from a NATO joint op in the Balkans. You knew him?” Nina nodded. “Good man. Obsessed with fruit, though.”

“Yes, I remember.” Also in the picture was someone she recalled much less fondly. “Oh. And that’s Jason Starkman.”

“Yes,” said Mac disapprovingly, “shame about him. Having an affair with a fellow soldier’s wife, that’s the sort of thing a man should be horsewhipped for.”

“Actually…” Nina began, before pausing, not sure if she wanted to discuss the topic. Mac’s quizzical look encouraged her to press on. “Eddie told me that Starkman didn’t have an affair with Sophia. She made it up to hurt him.”

Mac nodded almost imperceptibly. “You know, that doesn’t surprise me. I always thought Sophia had rather a cruel streak. She had an inflated sense of entitlement, and got quite nasty if anything wasn’t exactly how she wanted it. Not that Eddie noticed it until it was too late, the poor sod.”

“Didn’t you or Hugo think to, y’know, drop a hint?”

“What could we say? He was in love with a rich, cultured and very beautiful young woman. I don’t think there’s anything we could have done to change what he thought about her. Only she could do that…and it still took a long time for him to admit it to himself. The whole experience changed him quite a bit, unfortunately.”

So Chase wasn’t as immutable as he claimed, Nina thought. “Hugo once told me that Eddie used to be… chivalrous?”

Mac laughed. “Oh good God, yes! A true knight in shining body armor. Went out of his way to help women in need, and never asked for anything in return. That’s the kind of behavior that wins a man a lot of admirers.”

“He does seem to have rather a lot of, ah, lady friends around the world,” Nina said.

“And with good reason. A lot of people owe Eddie their lives. But he was also enough of a gentleman to see that they were just friends-until Sophia. Then after that, while he still always tried to help people, he’d also developed a rather tiresomely crass attitude.”

“A defense mechanism.”

“I suppose.” Mac gave Nina a look. “But somebody was clearly able to break through it.”

“For what it was worth,” she said unhappily.

“You’ve been together for, what, eighteen months now?”

“More or less.”

“Which is longer than Eddie was with Sophia.” He left Nina to consider that as he crossed the library, a dividing beam on the ceiling showing where two smaller rooms had been knocked together into one, and reached up to brush a speck of dust off a set of bagpipes mounted on a large shield-shaped plaque of dark wood.

“Can you play them?” she asked, taking the opportunity to change the subject.

Mac smiled wryly. “Not a note. My family actually left Edinburgh when I was ten and moved to Chingford. But soldiers are rather unimaginative when they buy retirement presents. Either that, or they take the piss. I’m not really sure which case this was. But it’s the feeling behind it that counts.”

He smiled again, more warmly, then left the bagpipes and went into an adjoining room. Nina followed, finding herself in a game room, a full-size snooker table occupying most of the space. Mac picked up a white cardboard box from the green baize, snooker balls rattling inside it. He toyed with it for a moment as if about to lay the balls out for a game, then turned to face Nina.