Eagle Strike

to be.
    Cray saw the defeat in his eyes. “Give it to me!” he demanded.
    “No.”
    “Start with the little finger, Yassen. Then we‟ll work one at a time towards her thumb.”
    Tears formed in Sabina‟s eyes. She couldn‟t hide her terror.
    Alex felt sick. Sweat trickled down the sides of his body under his shirt. There was nothing more he could do. He wished now that he had listened to Jack. He wished he had never come.
    He threw the flash drive onto the desk.

    Cray picked it up.
    “Welt that‟s got that sorted,” he said with a smile. “Now, why don‟t we forget all this unpleasantness and go and have a cup of tea?”

INSANITY AND BISCUITS

    Tea was served outside on the lawn—but it was a lawn the size of a field in a garden like nothing Alex had ever seen before. Cray had built himself a fantasy land in the English countryside, with dozens of pools, fountains, miniature temples and grottoes. There was a rose garden and a statue garden, a garden filled entirely with white flowers, and another given over to herbs, which had been laid out like sections in a clock. And all around him he had constructed replicas of buildings that Alex recognized. The Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum in Rome, the Taj Mahal, the Tower of London: each one was exactly one hundredth the scale of the original and all of them were jumbled together like picture postcards scattered on the floor. It was the garden of a man who wanted to rule the world but couldn‟t, and so had cut the world down to his own size.
    “What do you think of it?” Cray asked as he joined Alex at the table.
    “Some gardens have crazy paving,” Alex replied quietly, “but I‟ve never seen anything as crazy as this.”
    Cray smiled.

    There were five of them sitting on the raised terrace outside the house: Cray, Alex, Yassen, the man called Henryk and Sabina. She had been untied and the gag taken off her mouth—and as soon as she had been freed, she had rushed over to Alex and thrown her arms around his neck.
    “I‟m so sorry,” she had whispered. “I should have believed you.”
    That was all she had said. Apart from that she had been silent, her face pale. Alex knew that she was afraid. It was typical of Sabina not to want to show it.
    “Well, here we all are. One happy family,” Cray said. He pointed at the man with the silver hair and the pock-marked face. Now that he was closer to him, Alex could see that he was very ugly indeed. His eyes, magnified by the glasses, were slightly inflamed. He wore a denim shirt that was too tight and showed off his paunch.
    “I don‟t think you‟ve met Henryk,” Cray added.
    “I don‟t think I want to,” Alex said.
    “You mustn‟t be a bad loser, Alex. Henryk is very valuable to me. He flies jumbo jets.”
    Jumbo jets. Another piece of the puzzle.
    “So where is he flying you?” Alex asked. “I hope it‟s somewhere far away.”
    Cray smiled to himself. “We‟ll come to that in a moment. In the meantime, shall I be mother?
    It‟s Earl Grey; I hope you don‟t mind. And do help yourself to a biscuit.”
    Cray poured five cups and set the pot down. Yassen hadn‟t spoken yet. Alex got the feeling that the Russian was uncomfortable being here. And that was another strange thing. He had always considered Yassen to be his worst enemy, but sitting here now he seemed almost irrelevant. This was all about Damian Cray.
    “We have an hour before we have to leave,” Cray said. “So I thought I might tell you a little about myself. I thought it might pass the time.”
    “I‟m not really all that interested,” Alex said.
    Cray‟s smile grew a little thinner. “I can‟t believe that‟s true. You seem to have been interesting yourself in me for a considerable time.” “You tried to kill my father,” Sabina said. Cray turned round, surprised to hear her voice.
    “Yes, that‟s right,” he admitted. “And if you‟ll just shut up, I‟m about to tell you why.”
    He paused. A pair of butterflies shimmered around a bed of lavender.
    “I have had an extremely interesting and privileged life,” Cray began. “My parents were rich.
    Super rich, you might say. But not super. My father was a businessman and he was frankly rather boring. My mother didn‟t do anything very much; I didn‟t much like her either. I was an only child and naturally I was fabulously spoilt. I sometimes think that I was richer when I was eight years old than most people will be in their lifetime!”
    “Do we have to