The Lost Relic. Scott Mariani

terror and she whimpered.

      ‘Let’s find somewhere nice and private we can get better acquainted,’ he said, dragging her to her feet. The girl’s mother began to howl and tried desperately to hang on to her daughter. Gourko knocked her back with a hard stamping kick to the chest, and aimed his gun at her father with a look that said, ‘Go on, make my day.’ The other hostages were silent, apart from Donatella who stared at the two Russians and muttered something under her breath.

      ‘Maybe when I’m done with this bitch I’ll come back for that one,’ Anatoly chuckled. Gourko’s lips twitched into a faint smile. Anatoly hauled the girl away from the others and dragged her, screaming and writhing, towards the gallery.

      While Massi and Garrone headed up a backstairs that doubled as a fire escape, Rykov and Turchin stalked the main stairs to the first floor. On the landing was the body of the old guy who’d died there earlier, his blood soaked into a wide area of carpet. They stepped over him as though he were roadkill and made their way through the maze of corridors. Every door they came to, they kicked open, ready to blast anything the other side of it. They found storage spaces, lecture rooms, classrooms. All empty.

      Pushing through a set of fire doors, they came to a short flight of steps and then to what looked like a ceramics department with a couple of large workshops flanking the corridor. One of them had display units filled with clay pots and vases, and long benches covered in materials and tools. The other room contained a row of heavy-duty iron kilns, like gigantic ovens with sturdy deadlocks to seal their doors tightly shut and thick layers of insulating material to protect the wall and nearby surfaces. Fat metal flues disappeared into the heat-discoloured wall.

      The Russians took a brief glance around the workshop, just long enough to ascertain that the guy they were looking for wasn’t hiding under a table or in a cupboard. Satisfied, they were just about to turn to leave when they heard the soft voice behind them.

      ‘Hey.’

      The Russians spun around.

       Chapter Twenty

      Ben had often wondered if you could improvise a silencer out of an empty plastic bottle. He’d never quite got around to experimenting, until now. The litre Pepsi bottle had been left in a waste bin, and he’d used some Sellotape he’d found to fix it to the muzzle of the Steyr. From the doorway of the workshop, he aimed down at the floor and let off a short flurry of muffled shots, sweeping left to right. The two men dropped their weapons and crumpled to the floor, shouting out in agony, clutching their feet.

      Ben ripped the burst remains of the Pepsi bottle from his Steyr as he walked over to them. ‘That’s not bad, is it?’ he said, kicking away their fallen guns. The guy on the right let out a stream of obscenities in Russian. Ben silenced him with a kick to the throat and he went straight down on his back. He clubbed the other over the head with the Steyr, and suddenly the room was quiet again.

      Crouching beside them, he checked them for hidden weapons and then relieved them of their radios. He stood up and swung open the door of the nearest kiln. It was all blackened inside, with metal grille shelves like those in a domestic oven, only much larger. He pulled out the shelves, tossing them aside with a clatter. There was plenty of space for both men in there, as long as they weren’t expecting comfort. He dragged each one inside in turn, kicked their legs out of the way of the door, then clanged it shut and rolled the heavy deadlock into place.

      There was a big red power-on knob and a thermostat control on the bottom panel of the kiln. Of course, he was far too nice a guy to turn it up full blast and roast these bastards like turkeys inside.

      Their lucky day.

      Unless things went badly and they’d harmed more of those people down there. Then, he’d be back and things would be warming up.

      Ben stepped over to the doorway, peered left and right and listened hard for a few seconds, then pressed on, running lightly and silently through the corridor. No sign of the cops yet. Of course. But maybe, just maybe, as long as he could maintain the element of surprise and keep taking down the gunmen two at a time, he could stop this thing.

      That plan fell apart within twenty seconds when Ben rounded a corner and almost ran into another pair of masked thugs. One was a giant mastiff of a man. He was clutching an AR-15 military rifle at hip level, two thirty-round magazines taped back to back the way it used to look cool in mercenary movies. The other was lean and tough as rawhide, with a short black shotgun in his hands.

      For an instant they all stared at one another. The big guy’s eyes were locked on Ben’s, and in that suspended instant of frozen time Ben noticed that his pupils were different colours, the right one dark brown and the left one hazel. It was a minor anomaly that most people would have missed, but Ben was so practised in taking in the physical details of any situation he found himself in that he spotted it right away.

      But he didn’t have time to linger over it, because in the next half second the big guy’s teeth bared in a snarl and his fists tightened around his AR-15. The rifle muzzle lit up with strobing white flame and the deafening roar of automatic gunfire wiped out all thought. By then, Ben was already in mid-air, diving to avoid the high-velocity blast that ripped a snaking trail of devastation just one inch behind him.

      One thing Anatoly Shikov valued was his privacy. He could have just flung the crying girl down on the floor of the art gallery and done her there – but not with Spartak Gourko and the others watching. That would just be barbaric. He dragged his struggling trophy out of the gallery, through the glass walkway and out into the old part of the house, looking for somewhere suitable. Across the hallway, a door lay open and the room beyond looked perfect for what he had in mind. Tightening his grip on the girl’s arm, he hauled her inside.

      The room was a library or reading room. The walls were lined with high shelves of old books, the furniture was plush and the carpet was soft. There was an elegant marble fireplace, and in the corner was a velvet chaise longue. Anatoly dumped the girl on it. She brushed the tangle of blond curls away from her face and gaped up at him as he stood over her and pulled off his mask. Gourko’s knife dangled loosely in his other hand.

      ‘My name’s Anatoly,’ he said in his best Italian. ‘What’s yours?’