The Tied Man

Nat stared at me.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’

‘Jolly good.  Well gentlemen, it would appear that we have approximately twelve hours until the grand unveiling, so I suggest we make a start with the tidying up.  Gabe, would you give Henry a hand in getting these delightful people to their accommodation?’

‘Sure, as long as he tells me where they’re meant to go,’ Gabriel said, plainly relieved at being given something to do in the midst of this madness.

Henry began to roll up his sleeves.  ‘Don’t worry, lad.  I’ve got a list of luxury suites lined up.’

Gabriel took his dinner jacket off and threw it over the nearest chair.  ‘Right then, Henry, my good man.  Head or feet?’

‘Find Coyle and start with him, would you?’ I asked.  ‘I’ll feel so much better knowing he’s behind a locked door.  And watch your backs when you’re lifting him.’

‘Yes ma’am!’ Henry gave a particularly cheerful salute, and he and Gabriel left to start their labours.

‘Right, I’d better fetch the rest of my kit,’ Nat said, once he’d surreptitiously checked the pulse at Maxwell’s throat.  ‘And a sweater or three;  I’d forgotten the delights of the great British winter.  I’ll be back in two minutes.’

Finn waited until he’d gone, then limped over to Ellis and Chester.  He stood above them in silence, his hands clenched into fists.

‘Finn?’ I called, but he didn’t move.  ‘I’m going to get us both some warm clothes and something for your knee.  When Nat gets back, I need you to take him up to Blaine’s study.’

‘Do you not trust me with the clean-up, then?’

I looked down at the two unconscious men, both of them impeccably groomed and dressed to kill.  Just the scent of their aftershave threatened to make me heave.  ‘Do you really think that either of them deserves a painless death in their sleep?’

‘Fair play.’ To my relief, Finn finally turned his back on them and gave me the tightest of smiles.  ‘Wonder how they’d feel, knowing Lilith Bresson just saved their miserable lives?’

Chapter Thirty One

Lilith

The study looked misleadingly cosy.  The fire in the hearth had been rekindled, giving the room a warmth and soft glow it didn’t deserve, and Nat was working by the light of a green glass desk lamp.   By the time I got there he had switched Blaine’s computer on, and was busy adjusting the office chair to his satisfaction.

I set down an ice bucket and an armful of blankets, tracksuit bottoms and sweaters onto the coffee table and joined Finn on the divan, where he had already lit his first cigarette.  He was as edgy as hell.

Nat  had his washkit with him and emptied the contents out onto Blaine’s desk.  He held up a small tube of toothpaste and a pack of razorblades to show me.  ‘Memory stick and external hard drive.  Pretty cool, huh?’

‘What, that’s it?’ Finn asked.

‘That’s it.’ Nat pulled the lid off the toothpaste to reveal a USB connector.  ‘All I need for a brute force attack.  I’ll be feeding millions of passwords through an encryption algorithm…’

‘And again, in English?’

‘Just think of it as bludgeoning down Blaine’s front door.’

‘Now that I can imagine.  But it just seems kinda… insignificant for what you’re goin’ to have to do.  There’s no way she would want this stuff leaking out into the world.  If this thing doesn’t work…’  Finn’s anxiety was an entirely unneeded reminder of what was at stake, and I doubted that any of his concern was for his own skin.

If Nat was in the least nervous about the role he was playing in our scheme, he hid it beautifully.  ‘Look, from what Lilith’s told me, and what I’ve seen so far, Blaine’s a collector.  Which means she’ll want to be able to look through that collection whenever she wants, yeah?’  He adopted the same laid-back tone he would use in Santa Marita, when discussing which bar we might go to.  ‘Think of it as her own virtual gallery.  She’ll reckon that her IT guy’s some kind of genius – which, hey, he might well be, but he’s nothing compared to me.  Anyway, it’ll make her believe that anything that goes on behind the wall can be as sick as she wants it to be.’

‘Sounds familiar,’ I said.

Nat plugged the disguised memory stick into Blaine’s desktop. ‘So once I’m in, I can pretty much guarantee that everything I’ll need is going to be laid out in front of me, probably in alphabetical order with a nice, handy index.’