Free The Isis Covenant by James Douglas Page B

he tasted iron in his mouth.
    ‘I said, you got that fucker? Nod if you understand.’
    Somehow he must have managed to nod.
    ‘Cos if you don’t, next time we won’t be so fuckin’ gentle. In the meantime, here’s something on account. For Jimmy.’

XI
    PAUL DORNBERGER STRAIGHTENED his blue silk tie and walked up to the unassuming wooden door set into a ten-foot-high stone wall topped with electrified razor wire. As he reached it, he pressed the bell and looked upwards with a smile into the unblinking eye of the security camera. Inside the house, he knew Gerard, the monosyllabic Brummie, would be studying his face with those cold eyes of his and using the facial identification software to ensure he hadn’t been substituted by someone who’d had plastic surgery. With a soft click the door opened to reveal the tanned features of Vince, the former Delta Force sergeant. There was that moment – no day was complete without it – when Vince looked disappointed he couldn’t shoot him, but it quickly passed and the Californian lowered his Heckler & Koch MP5 and ushered him inside. It was unusual to see anyone other than an armed policeman carrying weapons in London, but this house had been designated an outstation of the embassy of the former Russian republic of, and now independent, Moldova and was diplomatic ground. What went in and out in the diplomatic bag was of no interest to anyone but Oleg Samsonov. The neighbours might have been alarmed at the amount of weaponry often on show in the gardens, but there were no neighbours, because the owner had bought both adjoining properties. Up the gravel path, accompanied by Vince all the way, past the cameras and between the sensors to the house, a huge modernistic cube of a place, all brushed steel and blast-proof mirrored glass. The main accommodation lay on the upper floors, with the ground and basement devoted to the kitchens, servants quarters and garaging for the owner’s ten-strong fleet of identical limousines and his sports cars, none of which, to Dornberger’s certain knowledge, he had ever driven. They approached a glass door set in the corner of the ground floor and Dornberger punched in today’s code. Again there was the click as it opened onto an enclosed stairway. Up the stairs, all twenty-four of them, safe in the knowledge that Gerard was watching his every move and at the first sign of suspicion he could isolate the stairway and fill it with incapacitating gas. Finally, he reached the top and another keypad, before the door opened onto the security area.
    Gerard looked up from his monitors. ‘You’re three minutes late.’
    ‘And a good morning to you, Gerard. I was visiting the old man in hospital.’
    Gerard nodded and typed the information into his computer, where every deviation in routine had to be recorded.
    ‘Mornin’, Paul.’ Kenny, the former Australian SAS man, gave him a grin that disguised the fact that he was the deadliest killer in a house full of deadly killers. ‘Any improvement in the old fella?’
    Dornberger shrugged. ‘They’re doing their best.’
    Kenny nodded sympathetically and opened the steel door to the main apartments.
    His glass-fronted office was along a corridor lined with thirteenth-century Russian icons and just off an enormous lounge area. In the centre of the lounge stood a large cube of what looked like stainless steel, which Paul Dornberger knew rose to form the core of the top three floors of the building; a multi-storey panic room whose lock combination was known only to the owner and his wife and which was designed to survive the collapse of the building and anything but a nuclear explosion.
    On his desk a secretary had placed a list of the owner’s particular interests for the day and he spent an hour on the computer and the phone gathering the information he would need for his briefing to the world’s forty-first richest man.
    At precisely 10 a.m., he stood up and knocked on the door of Oleg Samsonov’s