Scott Mariani - The Armada Legacy

As she ventured away from the bed her legs felt weak and unsteady with the aftereffects of the dope. How long had the bastards kept her under? What had they done to her while she was unconscious? She was filled with helpless fury.

The room was in semi-darkness, just a line of sunlight shining round the edge of the window blinds. Brooke fumbled round for a way of opening them. They were metal and seemed to be electrically operated somehow, but she couldn’t find a switch anywhere. She turned on a lamp instead and looked around her.

The bedroom was the biggest she’d ever seen. Flowers were everywhere, orchids and heliconias and other exotic species whose names she could only guess at, spilling from vases and filling the room with their colour and perfume. The furniture was antique, the floor was white marble inlaid with lapis lazuli. On a beautiful ornate table had been left a neat stack of books, together with a collection of the latest fashion magazines and some CDs, all classical.

How thoughtful of her kidnappers to provide entertainment. She furiously dashed the lot on the floor, then overturned the table. The effort made her dizzy.

At each end of the room was a gleaming white door. Forcing herself to walk straight, Brooke stormed over to one of them and wrenched it open. It led to an enormous luxury bathroom that smelled of lavender, shelf upon shelf stocked with an absurd array of beauty products and perfumes. Gold-plated toilet roll holder, she thought. Great.

She slammed that door, crossed the room to the other and stepped through into a living room. Like the bedroom, it was shaded by metallic window blinds with no obvious means of opening them. She turned on a light switch.

The living room looked like something out of the grandest kind of hotel. Plush armchairs and sofas, rich Persian rugs, framed oil paintings on the walls. A bowl of fruit, a variety of gourmet snacks and a carafe of iced lemon water had been left for her on one of the two massive antique sideboards while she was asleep. Her eye was drawn to the ornate clock on the marble mantelpiece. Its hands read eight-forty. In the morning, she supposed. How long had she been here?

There was a set of double doors at the far end of the living room. She tried them: locked, naturally. She pounded on the doors and yelled a few times, but there was no response from outside. She raced to the nearest window and tried once more to find the switch for the blind. Nothing seemed to make them open – nothing, until she grabbed a heavy brass table lamp from one of the sideboards, smashed the shade away, ripped the wire from the wall and used the lamp like a hatchet to strike the blind repeatedly with all her strength until it finally came away from its mountings and crashed to the floor at her feet.

Golden light streamed into the room, making her blink. She shielded her eyes from the glare and looked out.

It wasn’t the freshly-painted black iron bars on the other side of the thick glass of the window that made her gasp. It was the landscape that lay beyond them.

‘Oh, my God,’ she breathed.

It damn sure wasn’t Ireland. And it wasn’t London, either. She’d never seen a place like this before, not for real.

Beyond a sweep of white buildings, gardens, hangars and roadways, all contained within the same high stone-walled perimeter, the tropical jungle stretched away to a seemingly infinite and lushly verdant horizon. Large birds more colourful than the flowers in her room wheeled and squawked against the unbroken expanse of pure, deep blue sky.

Brooke watched in amazement as one of them glided down to land on the roof of one the buildings just fifty feet from her window, folded its broad red and yellow wings and strutted along the ridge of terracotta tiles to scrape at a piece of moss with its huge nutcracker beak. It was a macaw.

‘I’m in South America,’ Brooke murmured to herself.

Chapter Twenty-One

Ben drove. He had nowhere to go, no destination in mind, no longer any plan to work to. He just kept moving because he needed something to do in order to prevent the black despair from swallowing him up.

He’d been so sure he was on the right track. Like a predator steadily closing in on its quarry, that single-minded certainty of purpose had been his only focus, the only thing sustaining him. It seemed ridiculous now, bitterly ridiculous and pathetic.

As he sat there mechanically going through the motions to keep the car on the road, he struggled to get his thoughts in order. But if he was hoping for some miracle of inspiration to strike him out of nowhere, it wasn’t happening. Smoking a cigarette often helped him think; he lit a Gauloise, but it tasted bad and felt self-indulgent, as if he no longer deserved such pleasures. After a few shallow puffs he flicked it out of the window.

He’d been driving aimlessly on and on like that for almost an hour when his phone went off. He had to summon up all his energy just to answer it.

‘It’s Kay Lynch,’ said the familiar voice on the line. ‘How are you holding up?’

‘What do you think?’ he muttered.

‘You don’t sound so good.’

‘I’ll be doing a lot better if you tell me you’ve found her.’

‘I wish I could do that, Ben. We’re still searching.’

‘Until Hanratty calls it off,’ he said.

‘He won’t. And even if he did, I won’t stop. I can assure you of that.’

‘Neither will I,’ Ben said.

‘Yeah, well, we talked about that, didn’t we? Where are you now?’

He didn’t even know. ‘I’m … on a road,’ he muttered.

‘In France, I hope.’

‘No. I’m still in Ireland.’

‘You sound exhausted, Ben. There’s nothing you can do. Go home. Get some rest before you burn yourself out.’

‘Is that why you called me?’ he said with a stab of anger. ‘To tell me to give it up and go home?’

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I was calling because I’d promised to keep you updated, and something’s come up. Thought you ought to know. It’s, well, it’s a little unusual.’

Ben was suddenly alert again. ‘I’m listening.’

‘Strictly between you and me, all right? My job’s on the line if you breathe a word of this to Hanratty or anyone else.’

‘Strictly between you and me.’

Lynch spoke fast as she filled him in. ‘All right. Forsyte’s and Samantha Sheldrake’s bodies were flown down to Dublin just after dawn this morning for autopsy because we don’t have enough facilities here. Top priority – the lab were at work on it by seven this morning. I’ve been waiting impatiently all day for them to feed back to us. Nothing until just a few minutes ago, when I finally got the reports faxed over. I have them here in front of me.’

Ben heard a rustle of paper over the phone, then Lynch went on: ‘No surprises with Sheldrake. It’s what it looked like, single large calibre expanding handgun bullet to the head, did a vast amount of damage and she didn’t stand a chance. The delay in getting the reports through was down to Forsyte. It’s taken them most of the day to figure out what kind of poison killed him. Turns out it was some kind of extremely rare venom. There’s a chemical analysis here, a whole list of stuff, like serotonin, 5’-nucleo—’ She tutted. ‘Sorry, excuse my lack of medical knowledge here, I’m reading this from the page. 5’-nucleotidase, phosphodiesterase, and it goes on. You still there?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘The first one, the serotonin, causes the victim extreme, unbearable pain. The other two are enzymes responsible for causing tissue breakdowns typical of the kind seen in stingray evenomations. Cause of death was a catastrophic accelerated necrosis of heart tissue, culminating in right ventricular rupture and fatal cardiac tamponade. I had to look that up. It means a massive and sudden accumulation of fluid or blood.’