He had seen the look Lainé and Ryan had exchanged. The G2 officer had been gone for some time. Had he and Lainé spoken while he was upstairs? Lainé had made his dislike of Ryan clear to Skorzeny. Had they had some sort of confrontation?
No matter, there were more immediate concerns.
Such as why no one guarded the building that held Hakon Foss.
As he drew closer, Skorzeny saw the door stood ajar, a slash of light from within. And the toe of a boot lying inside the gap. He quickened his step.
“What’s that?” Ryan asked.
Skorzeny reached the door, pushed, found it blocked. He pushed harder, and again, forcing the dead man’s legs away from the opening.
“Merde,” Lainé said.
One of the guards, a neat hole at the centre of his forehead, two more in his chest. Skorzeny stepped over his body, avoiding the blood that pooled around him.
The rage in Skorzeny’s belly threatened to rise up like a dragon, burn all reason from his mind. He quelled it.
Hakon Foss remained in his seat, hands still strapped to the table, feet awash with his own urine. He reeked of faeces and sweat. But he was alive.
Skorzeny approached the table, mindful of the foulness on the floor.
“What happened here?”
Foss cried. “Men came. They shoot.”
Skorzeny leaned on the table. Ryan and Lainé kept their distance.
“Who?”
Foss shook his head, mucus dribbling from his nose and lips. “I don’t know. I ask them to let me go. They don’t answer.”
Skorzeny slammed his fist down on Foss’s splayed right hand, felt the metacarpals give under the force.
Foss screamed.
“Who were they?”
Foss swung his head from side to side, saliva and mucus spilling from him.
Skorzeny brought his fist down again. Foss’s voice cracked, turned from a scream to a whine.
“Tell me who they were.”
Foss’s lips moved, mouthing words no one would ever hear.
Skorzeny reached down, grabbed Foss’s devastated hand in his own, squeezed, felt the bones grind within the flesh.
Foss’s eyes fluttered, his consciousness failing. Lainé appeared at his side, a knife in his hand, plunged it into Foss’s neck, tore it across his throat.
Skorzeny stepped back as the deep red fountain burst from the Norwegian, splashing across the table. “What are you doing?” he asked.
Lainé tossed the knife onto the tabletop. It skittered through the red. “He should die.”
Foss choked, his eyes dimming.
Skorzeny’s rage bubbled up. “Not before he told me what he knew.”
“He would not talk.” Lainé wiped his hands on his coat. “He was more strong than that.”
Ryan’s voice from behind. “He knew almost nothing, anyway.”
Skorzeny turned to the Irishman. “What do you mean?”
“He was the informant,” Ryan said, a new hollowness in his eyes. “Catherine Beauchamp told me before she died. He knew nothing about them. He never saw their faces. They gave him money. He gave them information. That was all.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
Ryan put his hands in his pockets. “I would have if you’d given me the chance. Besides, don’t you have bigger things to worry about right now?”
Skorzeny looked to the body on the floor. He pushed past Ryan, stepped over the corpse, and kicked the door aside.
The light from the halogen lamp scorched everything within its reach. Fire all around him. The rage coming up like a shark from the deep.
“Come!” His mighty voice echoed through the trees. “Come for me now! If you have the courage, come for me now! If you are men, come and face me!”
He roared at the night until his voice could bear the force of his anger no more.
CHAPTER THIRTY SIX
The sky edged from black to deep blue as Ryan found himself outside Buswells Hotel. A bristling hush hung over the city, like a breath before a word, the streets about to wake.
The night porter opened the door. Ryan told him the room number and waited for his key. As the porter handed it over, he gave Ryan a sly smile and a wink. Had it not been for the fatigue, Ryan might have wondered why.
He climbed the stairs, each step dragging at his feet, his body getting heavier as he rose. It seemed an age between the key settling in his palm and slotting into the hole in his door. He turned it, let the door swing inward, saw the warm light the bedside lamp cast around the room.
Seconds passed before he made sense of the shape curled on the bed.
“Celia?”
She jerked awake, fear and surprise followed by recognition. “Albert. What time is it?”
Celia turned to the window, saw the creeping dawn. She had used her coat for a blanket. It fell away, revealing bare freckled shoulders. The pale smooth skin, the lamplight reflected like a halo.
“It’s early.” Ryan closed the door. “What are you doing here?”
She propped herself up on her elbow and rubbed mascara across her cheeks. “I wanted to see you. The night porter let me in.”
Ryan wanted to cross the room to her, but his feet seemed locked in place.
“Won’t Mrs. Highland be worried?”
Celia smiled, lazy creases on her face. “She’ll be having kittens. I didn’t think you’d be so long.”
“There were … problems.”
“I don’t want to know,” she said. “Come and sit.”
Ryan hesitated, then walked to the bed, sat down. Her body swayed with his weight. He saw the shape of her as the dress stretched across her breasts, indecent and beautiful. Her faded perfume laced with her own scent, flowers and spices and the faint warm tang of woman.
She turned her eyes to the window. “I don’t know what you must think of me.”
A dozen answers flitted through Ryan’s mind, not one he could utter without shaming himself. Instead, he kept his silence.
“I was never a pretty girl,” she said.
He swallowed, a loud click in his throat. “That’s not true.”
“Oh, it is,” she said, the seriousness of her expression denying any other notion. “I was skinny and awkward and gangly, and this frightful ginger hair. Like a lanky boy. Then one day, all of a sudden, I was different. And men noticed me, like I’d been hiding in plain sight. My father’s friends, their sons, all saying, my, how you’ve grown, and aren’t you blossoming. But when I looked in the mirror, I still saw the same gangly girl, all elbows and knees and buck teeth.
“I told you about Paris, and that artist coming up and asking me to model. I acted offended when I told him no, but I went back to the little apartment I shared with the other girls, and I looked at myself in the mirror, and I asked, am I pretty?
“That very same week, a man came to see me in the consulate and asked if I would do something very special. He asked if I would go to a party and strike up a conversation with a particular gentleman. An attaché at the British embassy. See if I could get him to ask me to dinner. And he did. And he was dreadfully dull, talking about trade missions, and policies, and which countries had the most to invest, and I thought I’d fall asleep in my soup.
“But the man came back to the consulate — Mr. Waugh, his name was — and I told him what had been said, and he was very pleased, and I got a weekend in a very swanky hotel in Nice and a very, very generous bonus. And so it went. A clerk, a diplomat, a businessman. Sometimes even an Irishman. No one got hurt, the gentlemen had a pleasant time, and I was terribly well paid. Mr. Waugh always took care of things.”
Celia sat up, put a hand on Ryan’s shoulder.
“What I’m trying to tell you is, I thought this would be the same. We’d have a nice time, we’d talk, and I’d tell Skorzeny what you’d said. I never thought there would be anything more to it than that. Anything … bad.”