The Pleasures of Autumn (11 page)

It looked as if Bertrand had been involved with Lottie. Fuck the bastard. Niall wanted to pound him to a pulp.

Apart from the single red hair in the spare room, there was no evidence that Sinead had ever been here. He looked around the bathroom and an elusive trace of fragrance teased him. It was the twitch of his cock that jogged his memory. It was the oil he had used when he was in Sinead’s bathroom in Geneva.

Something tightened in his chest. By god, she might be a scheming, manipulative, lying little bitch, but he needed to know she was safe. And it was clear that she was not.

A ruby worth $50 million was missing. Sinead had stolen it. Oh, she denied it, but all the evidence said that she had stolen it. Niall picked his way over the shattered crystal glass in the kitchen, searching for clues and furious with himself for ignoring the obvious.

Every bad guy in Europe – hell, in the world – would want a crack at the Fire of Autumn. And that meant taking a crack at Sinead O’Sullivan.

His phone rang. ‘Moore. What have you got?’

Andy’s voice was cheerful. ‘Good news. Her phone went on for a good ten seconds. I’ve got a fix. Fancy a trip to La Courneuve?’

The metal floor of the van was painful against her cheekbone, but not as uncomfortable as her wrists. The men had tied her hands behind her back with something thin and plastic and it hurt like hell. Beside her, Gabriel was still unconscious. She winced at each bump as his head bounced on the floor. A cut under his eye was livid against his skin. She wondered where the men were taking them.

She tried to focus, to figure out why she was in a van, but her mind refused to work. She felt drunk, and not the chatty drunk she hit after two glasses of wine. This was a horrible, earth-spinning-and-about-to-throw-up kind of drunk. One spot on her arm throbbed nastily. Had one of them injected her with something?

She knew why. Of course she did. She couldn’t quite remember at the moment. A thump when the van climbed the footpath jolted her. Oh yes, that damned ruby. She had told them that she didn’t have it, but the one with the dark hair didn’t believe her. And Gabriel’s beautiful apartment – they had smashed everything while they searched.

Gabriel had helped her, and she had brought him nothing but trouble. She wished that she had never come to Paris and that she had never heard of the stone.

‘Take the next right and it’s the last container on the left,’ the tall one said. He sounded English. There was quite a little UN convention of nastiness in the van. Sinead clamped her eyes shut and pretended that she was still out. She had to fight to keep from slipping into unconsciousness for real.

The van screeched to a halt and the door slid open.
They took Gabriel first. Sinead gritted her teeth as an un-oiled hinge grated.

‘Be careful with the woman. We need her.’

Well, thanks a bunch for that.
They hadn’t seemed to care when they took them from their beds earlier. She opened her mouth experimentally and flexed her jaw. There was nothing broken. Yet.

She opened her eyes into slits and through her lashes she saw a man appear in the doorway, blocking the light. He put his arms beneath her and lifted her with a grunt.

‘What’s up, Max? Not back to fitness yet?’ a voice asked.

‘Fuck off.’

Max carried her from the van. She struggled to lie limp in his arms although her arm was caught at a painful angle. He wore too much cologne and she battled the need to cough. Keeping her lids lowered Sinead observed her surroundings as he carried her into a big storage container, one that looked like a lorry body. His footsteps rang out on the metal floor and then she was placed on a low camp bed. The blanket smelled new.

‘How much of that stuff did you give them?’ The dark-haired man asked the question.

‘Enough,’ Max said. ‘They’ll be out for a while longer.’

‘Good. I need coffee.’

Sinead lay still until they moved away. She heard an electric kettle boiling and caught the scent of coffee. An occasional word of conversation filtered through but not enough to make sense.

Wriggling, she tried to free her hands but it was no use. Her phone was in the pocket of the workout pants she had borrowed from Gabriel. She had turned it off earlier
to save the battery. But if she could switch it on, maybe she could make an emergency call. Niall would find her. Niall was good at finding things.

She couldn’t reach the phone, but it sometimes made handbag calls to her friends. If she could apply enough pressure, it might dial random numbers from her contacts. She gritted her teeth and rolled over. It was her only hope.

Sinead wasn’t sure how long she lay there before the door opened and she heard chairs scraping against the metal floor. ‘It’s time to go to work, gentlemen.’ The voice was cool and authoritative.

She didn’t like the sound of that. She kept her eyes closed but could smell Max’s cologne as he loomed over her.

‘No. Leave her. Wake the other one first.’

Her stomach heaved with a mixture of fear and relief mingled with guilt. They didn’t want her yet, but it was her fault they had taken Gabriel. What were they going to do to them?

The sound of a hand striking flesh startled her. ‘Wake up, buddy. We need to talk.’

Gabriel groaned. They slapped him again, harder this time. ‘Wakey wakey, Frog.’

‘Uhh.’

Sinead heard a chair being dragged across the floor.

‘We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Understand?
Comprenez-vous
?’

Gabriel groaned again. Sinead winced as she heard another slap.

‘
Oui. Oui.
’

‘That’s better. Now where is the stone? And don’t bother lying to me. We know your lady friend took it.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’ A punch this time, then a second and a third until she lost count; each one was punctuated with a grunt of pain.

‘Where’s the fucking stone?’

Oh god. They were hurting Gabriel. She wanted to be sick. The punching stopped and there was silence except for the wheezing gasp of air being dragged into his lungs.

‘I don’t think he’ll talk, boss.’

‘Oh, he will.’ The voice had the quiet confidence of a man who had done this many times.

Sinead bit down hard on her lower lip. Please don’t let them kill him. Don’t let them kill him. Somehow the silence was worse than what had gone before.

Gabriel’s anguished shriek was torn from his soul. Sinead struggled against her restraints, torn between wanting to put her hands over her ears and wishing that she had a gun, a knife, anything that would stop them. What were they doing to Gabriel? She couldn’t listen any longer.

She rolled over onto her back. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of him, strapped to a chair, blood streaming down his face. His T-shirt was torn.

‘Stop,’ she screamed. ‘Stop hurting him.’

The blond one approached her. ‘Welcome back to the land of the living, Red.’

Sinead shivered under the cold gaze that raked her from head to foot. ‘Pretty little thing, aren’t you? But your boyfriend’s not looking so pretty right now. Is he?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. Keep him talking. While he was talking he wasn’t hurting Gabriel.

He fished in his pocket and produced a pack of
cigarettes. Clamping one between his lips, he lit it and inhaled, before blowing a puff of acrid smoke in her direction. ‘Let’s make a little deal. You tell us where the stone is and we’ll stop.’

The tip of the cigarette glowed orange as he inhaled again, waiting for her response.

‘I don’t know. I didn’t take it. I came to Paris to find the person who did. You have to believe me. Please don’t hurt him any more. He doesn’t know anything.’

Cocking his head to one side, he stared at her with narrowed eyes. ‘Is that right?’

Sinead nodded frantically. ‘Please believe me. He knows nothing.’

‘Well, that’s a damned shame.’

He sucked another lungful of smoke and exhaled quickly before examining the cigarette between his fingers as if he couldn’t understand how it got there. ‘My mom always told me never to doubt the word of a lady and if that’s what you’re saying, well, it must be true.’

His smile didn’t reach his eyes. He didn’t believe her.

‘It’s a little-known fact that the tip of a cigarette can reach between 400 and 700 degrees centigrade. Did you know that, Red?’

She shook her head. Terror welled up, freezing her insides. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t possibly do that to another human being?

‘Maybe we should ask your boyfriend?’

Dread churned in Niall’s guts. The journey from Montparnasse to La Courneuve had taken years off his life. He
wouldn’t have believed that traffic could move so slowly. He had wanted to get out and push the fucking slow trucks that clogged the roads on the way. Or ram them.

‘It’s all right, boss, we’ll be in time,’ Andy said. He checked the reading on his computer again.

Niall took his eyes off the road long enough to glare at him. ‘Easy for you to say. You’ve never run into Hall. And it’s not –’ He stopped abruptly, aware that anything he could say after that would be far too revealing.

Sinead O’Sullivan was a job. Nothing more. She was not personal.

Andy hooted derisively, but wisely said nothing. ‘Brief me on Hall,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen him since those military games on Brona.’

Niall wanted to spit. ‘Nothing much to add to what you already know. Bastard. Former SEAL, where, as far as I can tell, he got in on the basis of good genes, a bad attitude and family connections. I’ve met guys he worked with and they all hated him. He took brown-nosing to new levels, but gave the men under him shit.’

Andy grunted. They’d both met men like that before.

Niall overtook a lorry full of bleating sheep on the way to market by squeezing in between it and an oncoming bus of tourists. The gap was so small that the Jeep lost a layer of paint.

Andy gripped the door handle but knew better than to comment on his driving. ‘So why do you think he has Sinead?’ he said.

‘I did a quick check. Blackstone was hired by an Indian businessman to find the Fire of Autumn. He wants it returned to its ancestral home. If they are looking for the
stone, you can be sure Hall is looking for Sinead, and he’s prepared to be creative about whatever it takes to find her.’

Andy relaxed his grip on the door, only to grab the dash and brace his feet against the floor when Niall swerved around a Citroën 2CV full of teenagers.

Niall pushed his foot down even harder, trying to coax more speed from the creaking Jeep. ‘Anything?’

Andy shook his head. ‘No, her phone is dead now. But I got a fix.’

‘Are you sure?’ Niall couldn’t bear the thought of Sinead in Hall’s hands.

‘Sure as I can be with this crappy equipment. You need to upgrade. And why the fuck didn’t you plant a tracker on her?’

‘I didn’t think she’d run.’

An eternity later, they turned into an industrial estate. ‘Well?’ Niall demanded.

Andy pointed him over to a quiet corner that backed onto a chain-link fence. Even at 8.30 a.m. on a weekday morning, it was almost deserted. ‘That’s it, I think.’

‘You think?’ More than ever, Niall missed having Flynn by his side for this sort of thing. Andy was good, but Flynn was the best second-in-command he’d ever had.

They prowled around, searching for the source of the interrupted phone signal. The park was full of old warehouses and containers. The sun struggled to break through the clouds, and a light rain fell, changing the sound of the engines in the area. Sweat trickled down his back, despite the coolness of the air.

Finally he heard something as he approached a large,
unmarked container. A thump, followed by a female cry. He and Andy exchanged glances, and they both went cold. Combat ready. They crept up, ready to attack.

At the door of the container, Niall paused to check his weapons. He would have given his right nut for his H&K submachine gun. Or his Glock. Hell, even the crappy SIG Sauers that he was permitted to carry in England. Instead he was stuck with a fucking baton and a torch. Some use that was when they were up against god knows how many armed men and a former US Navy SEAL who was a walking one-man army. Damned EU laws.

Another female cry. A grunt of pain. He nodded to Andy and together they burst through the doors.

The inside of the 40-foot container had been set up like an interrogation room. A dark-haired man, who had probably once been handsome, was tied to a chair. Sinead, her distinctive red hair loose, and wearing a torn T-shirt and pair of baggy sweat pants, was tied to another chair. Tears tracked down her cheeks and dampened her chest.

The sight threatened to derail Niall’s calm. They had hurt her. They would pay.

He didn’t bother hitting the dark man bending over the battered prisoner. He grabbed him by the hair and jerked back. At the last second, he managed to stop himself breaking his neck. It would be bad PR. But he hoped the guy had whiplash that lasted the rest of his life.

Andy had taken out a second man, whipping out his extendable baton so that he caught him in the solar plexus. A quick kick to the nuts finished the job.

‘What the fuck?’ Niall didn’t hear the third man approach from behind until a blow like a slab of cement
caught him on the side of the head. He grabbed Sinead’s shoulder to keep from falling and managed to spin around in time to avoid another blow.

Hall. Fucking J. Darren Hall. And armed with a knife.

Niall gathered his reeling wits, ignored the throbbing from the blow on his head, and concentrated on Hall. He had to beat the bastard to keep Sinead safe.

Hall lunged.

Niall twisted, avoiding the knife and slicing down at Hall’s wrist. His hand was useless afterwards, but the knife fell and Hall swore.

Niall stepped in closer, ramming his shoulder into Hall’s chest.

Hall grabbed his hair, yanking back to expose Niall’s neck.

Foot out, hook and pull.

Hall went down, taking Niall with him.

Niall twisted, landing on top of Hall, and used his weight to hold the bastard still for long enough to jab upwards with a single punch that freed him. His numb left hand still had enough power to smash his nose.

Then Andy was there, dragging Hall’s arms behind him. ‘Yours,’ Niall panted, and turned to Sinead.

She was frozen, eyes and mouth wide with shock at the sudden violence.

He tried to talk and found he had to cough and spit out a mouthful of blood. He bent to untie her. ‘Are you okay?’

She nodded.

Niall turned to Andy. ‘Get that guy to hospital, and clean up this mess. I’ll take care of Ms O’Sullivan.’