like it. What do people think we have visiting hours for? I’m calling security.’
As Bennett reached for the phone, the tall man on the left snatched a pillow out from under the sleeping man’s head. He awoke immediately, his eyes wide with surprise and then, as he blinked at the two men looming above him, fear. His mouth moved to speak but whatever sound he might have been trying to make was smothered as the pillow was roughly pushed down on to his face. Helpless, his arms and legs flapped limply like a goldfish that had leapt out of its bowl.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Bennett gasped, his voice now a whisper. He jammed the phone to his ear, the white plastic slippery against his sweaty skin. Hearing nothing, he tapped the hook switch a few times, before locking eyes with Laura. ‘It’s dead.’
On screen, the tall man nodded to his companion, who lifted a black bag on to the bed and reached in. The teeth of what Bennett instantly recognised as a surgical bone-saw sparkled in the light. Deftly, the figure slid back the man’s left pyjama sleeve and placed the blade on his arm, just below the elbow. The man jerked his arm but to no avail, what little strength he had left clearly ebbing away in his attacker’s strong grasp.
Bennett glanced at Laura. She was standing with her back to the door, her hand over her mouth, her eyes glued to the monitor.
‘Don’t make a sound.’ His voice was thin and choked. ‘We’ll be fine as long as they don’t know we’re here. Just stay calm.’
The saw sliced through the skin and muscle in a few easy strokes before it struck bone, the main artery gushing darkly as it was severed and the blood pressure released. In a few minutes the arm had come free, the limb expertly amputated at the elbow. The stump oozed blood. Abruptly, the struggling stopped.
Working quickly, the figure wiped the saw on the bedclothes then returned it to his bag. The arm, meticulously wrapped in a towel snatched from the foot of the bed, soon joined it. The victim’s face was still masked by the pillow, the bedclothes knotted around his legs like rope where he’d kicked out and got himself tangled up. The heart-rate monitor showed only a flat line, an alarm sounding belatedly in the empty nurses’ station down the corridor.
The two men moved away from the bed, across the room, careful not to touch anything. But as he was about to shut the door, the tall man suddenly looked up into the far corner, into the camera lens, straight into Bennett’s eyes, and smiled.
‘Oh my God,’ Bennett breathed in slow realisation. ‘They’re coming for the tapes.’
He jerked his head towards the other monitor. The thin man was walking slowly up the corridor towards them, the blade of the knife in his hand glinting like a scythe in the sun.
Laura began to scream, a low, desperate, strangled call that grew louder and louder as the image on the screen drew closer.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke
Pinkas Synagogue, Prague, Czech Republic
2nd January – 10.04 a.m.
The shattered glass crunched under the leather soles of Tom Kirk’s Lobb shoes like fresh snow. Instinctively, he glanced up to see where it had come from. High in the wall above him white sheeting had been taped across a window frame’s jagged carcase, the plastic bulging every so often like a sail as it trapped the biting winter wind. He lowered his gaze to the man opposite him.
‘Is that how they got in?’
‘No.’
Rabbi Spiegel shook his head, his sidelocks bumping against his cheeks. Although smartly dressed in a dark suit and white shirt, he was thin and frail and the material seemed to hang off him like loose skin. A faded black silk yarmulke covered the top of his head, firmly clipped to a fierce growth of wiry grey hair. His face was hiding behind a wide spade of a beard, his watery eyes peering through small gold-framed glasses. Eyes that burned, Tom could see now, with anger.
‘They came in through the back. Broke the lock. The window…that was just for fun.’
Tom’s face set into a grim frown. In his mid-thirties and about six feet tall, he had the lithe, sinewy physique of a squash player or a cross-country runner – supple yet strong. Clean-shaven and wearing a dark blue cashmere overcoat with a black velvet collar over a single-breasted grey woollen Huntsman suit, his short, normally scruffy brown hair had been combed into place. His coral-blue eyes were set into a handsome, angular face.
‘And then they did this?’ he asked, indicating the devastation around them. Rabbi Spiegel nodded and a single tear ran down his right cheek.
There were eighty thousand names in all – Holocaust victims from Bohemia and Moravia, each painstakingly painted on the synagogue’s walls in the 1950s with family names and capital letters picked out in blood red. It was a moving sight; an unrelenting tapestry of death recording the annihilation of a whole people.
The bright yellow graffiti that had been sprayed over the walls served only to deepen the unspoken weight of individual suffering that each name represented. On the left-hand wall, a large Star of David had been painted, obscuring the text underneath it. It was pierced by a crudely rendered dagger from which several large drops of yellow blood trickled towards the floor.
Tom walked towards it, his footsteps echoing in the synagogue’s icy stillness. Up close he could see the ghostly imprint of the names that had been concealed under the paint, fighting to remain visible lest they be forgotten. He lifted a small digital camera to his face and took a picture, a loud electronic shutter-click echoing across the room’s ashen stillness.
‘They are evil, the people who did this. Evil.’ Rabbi Spiegel’s voice came from over his left shoulder and Tom turned to see him pointing at another piece of graffiti on the opposite wall. Tom recognised it as the deceivingly optimistic motto set above the gates of all Nazi concentration camps: Arbeit macht frei – work sets you free.
‘Why have you asked me here, Rabbi?’ Tom asked gently, not wanting to appear unfeeling, but conscious that anything useful that the rabbi might have to tell him could soon be lost in the emotion of the moment.
‘I understand that you recover stolen artefacts?’
‘We try to help where we can, yes.’
‘Paintings?’
‘Amongst other things.’
Tom sensed that his voice still had an edge of uncertainty to it. Not enough for the rabbi to pick up on, perhaps, but there all the same. He wasn’t surprised. It was only just over six months since he had gone into business with Archie Connolly. The idea was simple – they helped museums, collectors, governments even, recover stolen or
