by Frank Tayell
He turned down the volume on the walkie-talkie, put it into his pocket, slung the RPG and its bag of ammo, checked the safety on his submachine gun, the mace at his side, and went off to war.
Sorcha Locke wondered how long it would take Chester to realise he had no choice but to run. Probably not until the alarm was raised. For all his past guile, and perhaps because he was so determined to become a better man, the Londoner hadn’t realised how this would play out. The moment she made contact, the guards, or their leader, would make contact with all of the other sentry posts. When that group by the road didn’t respond, people would be sent to check. They would see the boot prints and realise that she hadn’t come here alone. The hunt would begin, and Chester would have to run. The RPG would give him some cover, and he would hopefully realise he had to keep one grenade for the fuel store at the airport.
Equally obvious, it was the cartel who who’d taken those fire engines to the airport. That had been clear to her the moment Tuck had alerted them to how much fuel was in the underground tanks. The only reason anyone would have left so much behind is if they had some other cache of fuel. And they did, here. When this supply ran out, they would resort to the aviation fuel at the airport, and so both depots had to be destroyed.
Across Europe, there were thousands of far more suitable fortresses, some built of ancient stone, others of modern concrete. All of which, with their equipment, the cartel could have held against the undead, could have built something better. Except they hadn’t. No, these gangsters had remained here, not just because of the fuel, but because of an old-world plan. It told her almost everything she needed to know about them. Almost. And it confirmed that, when they felt threatened, they would panic. That would be her chance. Whether she succeeded didn’t matter nearly so much as the last question she had to have answered, the question of who was leading these people. She was almost certain it wasn’t Lisa. Almost. But she had to know.
Rationally, it didn’t matter. Within an hour, in success or defeat, she would be dead. That left only one last debt to be paid. Not a debt to Chester, certainly not to Lisa, nor Tamika, but to Sean, to Loretta, to Ida, to Corrie, and to all the others who had unwittingly been caught up in the nightmare, and been sacrificed as a result.
She couldn’t have stopped Lisa from the course she’d set herself on all those decades before. Tamika had tried and failed. Where Sorcha had failed was in not persuading Lisa to bring forward the confrontation with their enemy. Lisa had been so determined to utterly destroy them, she’d waited too long. Had they acted even a week before, the world would now be a very different place. Perhaps they would have still failed, but millions might have survived rather than a paltry few thousand. That was her regret. That was her burden. And it had grown so heavy it was time to finally set it down.
She detoured around a ragged hedgerow growing wild around a fallen tree trunk.
Her final act wouldn’t bring safety to Bill Wright’s people. It would merely remove the prospect of an imminent war. It would level the field on which the future would play out. And that, in the end, was all Lisa had wanted; if the worst happened, if the nuclear war began, those who survived would face an equal chance without the threat of politicians in their bunkers or gangsters in their lairs.
She picked her way through the fallen trees. After someone had taken a chainsaw to this small copse, they had left the wood to rot. The felled trees slowed her progress as she made a long loop to the southwest of the complex, and to the main access road. The butterfly meadow was flooded, marshy, with jutting limbs showing where it had been used as a dumping ground for corpses. Anger was growing when the barricaded entrance came in sight, but she pushed it down and forced a smile onto her face.
The roadway was blocked with a wood and wire fence. Behind it was a flatbed truck. A heavy-duty cable ran from a crudely fitted tow-bar into the car park, to a winch at the front of an armoured car. An incomplete and ineffective barrier, certainly, but from the unburied corpses dotted along the verge, these people had relied on guns rather than walls to keep the undead at bay. The machine gun was still mounted on the armoured car. As she approached, a head appeared in the turret, swivelling the barrel to point at her. She raised a hand in greeting, and left her submachine gun slung, as she walked the last few metres to her final destiny.
A woman stepped out of the sentry post, a shotgun in her hands. In her early twenties, with short dark hair, a clean face if not clean clothes. Locke didn’t recognise the face, but she recognised the clothes. They were the blue and gold uniform she had helped design.
“Hello,” Locke said. “My name is Sorcha Locke. I am Lisa Kempton’s deputy, and this is one of my homes. Who are you? You wear my clothes, but I never hired you.”
The woman lowered her shotgun, though she didn’t remove her finger from the trigger. “Kempton?”
“Indeed,” Locke said. “I am here for my people. I would advise you fetch whoever is in charge before you end up in more trouble than you can imagine.”
“Eine moment, bitte,” the woman said with perfunctory civility. Locke turned away. The woman had spoken in German, not French, and not Danish. It was an interesting factoid, probably not important, but a distraction from what was to come next.
Her gaze tracked upwards. The clouds were moving fast across the sky. Their speed had been increasing all day. The weather was changing again. That no longer mattered to her. She turned her eyes back to the road ahead. Another minute went by, and she was losing her patience. Another minute. She was running out of time before Chester might act, or the bodies by the nature reserve were discovered. Before she acted first, she saw a trio of figures approaching from the main building: one was small, two were large.
As they drew nearer, she realised the lead figure wasn’t that small. It was just that the other two were massive. A man and a woman with near identical physiques. Muscled beyond any practical purpose, with veins bulging on necks, chests wider than barrels, arms stouter than bollards, and legs broader than I-beams. It was a physique she’d not seen since the outbreak, and then mostly on-screen. She wouldn’t want to fight either, but they would be easy enough to outpace. How many calories a day must they consume to keep that shape? Ten thousand? More? And how much of the day was spent eating and working out? Most of it. Pointless. Wasteful.
She’d been so distracted, she’d not properly seen the woman they were walking either side of, not until she was so close there could be no mistake.
Locke knew her.
“Nicki?” she asked.
“Sorcha Locke,” the woman said. “But here, I go by Dominique. Except everyone else knows to call me Madame Cavalie.”
Eight Years Before
Chapter 32 - Lisa Kempton and the Sisters
Beverly Crest, California
As the plane came to a rest, the engines began to wind down.
“We’re here,” Lisa Kempton said, unbuckling her seatbelt. “Do you wish to change your mind?”
“It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?” Sorcha Locke asked, unbuckling her own seatbelt. “And the time to change my mind would have been when you hired me. Now we’re sitting on the runway, I’d say it’s about seven years too late.”
“And where are we, and why are we here?” Kempton asked, stretching in the long corridor of the nearly empty cabin. There were only four chairs, and the other two had remained unused during the long flight. To the front was the pilot’s cockpit where Rampton and Jackson, two other members of the inner circle and Kempton’s personal air-chauffeurs, were running through the post-flight checklist. To the rear was a galley, then the empty cabin sometimes used for freight, occasionally for people, but there were none of either aboard.
“Sorcha?” Kempton prompted.
“We’re in Burbank, California. And we’re not meant to know where we’re going next, but it’s to a mansion up in Beverly Crest. We’re meeting with the sisters in a sixty-million-dollar mansion that they’re borrowing for the day. They’ve flow
n in to meet with you, presumably so we don’t meet them on their home turf, and we’re to discuss their human trafficking routes.”
“That is the what, not the why,” Kempton said, crossing to the bulkhead adjacent to the cockpit door. She opened a narrow door revealing a full-length mirror, and peered at her appearance, smoothing down the rumpled lines in the jet blue tracksuit trimmed with yellow thread. The tracksuit, like the sneakers, came off the rack from one of the factories she owned. Cheap, durable, sustainable, and comfortable. She opened a small drawer and withdrew a sapphire necklace worth more than the plane. She was dressed as the eccentric billionaire was expected to dress, while Locke wore the designer-label suit of a professional assistant. With no small measure of envy, Locke pulled on the high heels she’d removed during their long flight.
“The why is to find out who owns the mansion,” Locke said. “Whoever they are, they think they’re so rich not even the FBI will trouble them. With that kind of wealth, they’ve got to be near the top of the rotten pyramid. Are you sure the sisters didn’t buy the house themselves? They could afford it.”
“Indeed,” Kempton said. “But if you ran one of the world’s largest narcotic empires, would you buy a mansion in Beverly Crest? Beverly Hills, perhaps.”
“Was that a joke?” Locke asked.
“Tamika would have laughed,” Kempton said.
Locke bit back on her sarcastic reply. She was in the inner circle now. Trusted, yes, but she was still an employee, even if she knew too much to ever quit.
“An intermediary with such a keen interest in conspicuous wealth can be bribed,” Kempton said. “They can be blackmailed. They could be useful. And what are you to do when we arrive?”
“I’m not to speak to the sisters,” Locke said. “If they talk to me, I answer politely with as few words as possible. I never make eye contact. I keep my head down. I show nothing but respect.”
“And if they offer you refreshment, you take it,” Kempton said.
“Are you sure? What if it’s poisoned?” Locke said.
“If they wanted to kill me, do you think they would do it here? No, we would be somewhere far more inconspicuous than the outskirts of Los Angeles. They wish to demonstrate their power by coming to America. In return, I only bring the girl from Ireland.”
“That’s what they call me? And it’s not you I’m worried about,” Locke said. “They might still kill me.”
“Indeed,” Kempton said. “And it is not too late to change your mind.”
“No, it is,” Locke said. “For both of us.”
A car was waiting for them, a limo with tinted windows, driven by a fresh-faced young woman with neat hair and wearing an ill-fitting suit. She smiled as she opened the doors, but said nothing.
“Thank you,” Locke said.
“You’re late,” Kempton said, climbing inside.
The windows weren’t just tinted, but blacked-out. The partition was up, and utterly opaque. But the interior was clean. Kempton smiled, leaned forward, and tapped a small steel plaque affixed to the side of the door before relaxing into her seat. The plaque was the name and number of the company the limo had been hired from.
Locke, following instructions she’d received from Kempton, from Tamika, and then from Tamika’s FBI-agent sister Loretta, said absolutely nothing. Instead, she looked at the name of the limo company, wondering why it gave Kempton such comfort. They knew the sisters had only recently flown into California. Of course they would have hired a limo. Perhaps Kempton assumed the sisters wouldn’t use a hire-car for murder. Since, only last month, their agents had gunned down a witness while he gave testimony in the dock, Locke doubted they were safe.
The car journey was spent in silence. Kempton said nothing, and neither did Locke. Nor did the driver, even after the vehicle finally came to a stop.
The door was opened by a man with poorly trimmed stubble, the tattooed head of a horse creeping up above his too-tight collar. His tie was as loose as his suit, which barely concealed the machine-pistol holstered under his shoulder. He didn’t smile as they got out. Nor did he speak.
She’d had a bad feeling about the mission since Kempton had proposed it. The wave of anxiety had grown on the plane, until it had become a rising tide she was wading through chest-deep. The house didn’t help calm her. They were at the end of a curving driveway, with a garage-block in front of them. White and boxy, it matched the house built next to it, though there the upper floors were walled entirely with glass. Curtains had been drawn behind the glass, and other than a pair of suited sentries, standing at-ease on the balcony, there was no one and nothing to see.
“Welcome, welcome,” a woman said, sweeping out from around the side of the building, and through a quartet of square planters, as white as the house, each with a perfectly sculpted spiracle tree. She was dressed in white, in a perfectly fitted thigh-length dress beneath a loosely tied knee-length jacket. Jet black stones hung from her ears, matching the pendent at her neck and her painted lips whose smile didn’t reach her eyes. “Ms Kempton, Ms Locke. Welcome. Please, call me Nicki. This way, please.” Her accent was French, her tone practiced. “What do you think of this place? Over the top, yes?”
She led them both around the planters, and along a neat path bracketed with more perfectly sculpted shrubs, and to the edge of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
“Ms Locke, would you mind waiting in the cabana?” Nicki said. “The sisters wish to speak to Ms Kempton alone.”
“Ma’am?” Locke asked.
“If it gets us back to civilisation any quicker, why not?” Kempton replied with scornful disinterest.
“Over there, please, Ms Locke,” Nicki said. “Refreshments will be brought.”
Locke nodded, but stayed where she was as the Frenchwoman led Lisa Kempton along the edge of the pool and to a second boxy-white building, only one storey tall, though with a terrace built on the flat roof. The terrace had a folded umbrella, a retracted awning, and another sentry in an ill-fitting suit.
Ill-fitting and newly hired, like the car. The sisters hadn’t expected the meeting to be somewhere like this. Somewhere on a hillside surrounded by other mansions, occupied by other curious, bored millionaires. How many of them owned a telescope?
Locke walked over to the cabana, and sat in the shade of its awning. The cushioned seats were comfortable almost to the point of decadence, and worn in a way that a lot of the house wasn’t. The swimming pool was full, and almost leaf-free, but when was it last used? The plants were sculpted, and clearly well watered, but how many of the rooms had been slept in? To put that another way, did the owner of this house live here alone? They had a name, of course, from the deeds. A name that led to a shell company, which led them to another. That wasn’t the name they wanted. They wanted to know who the sisters trusted to arrange the venue for this meeting.
The door to the single-storey opened. Nicki came out. She wasn’t alone. A man followed her, a tray in his hands. He wore a suit, but no tie. Either he was sufficiently high up the food chain that he could ignore at least some of the dress code, or so far down that he wasn’t expected to be seen by anyone, and thus hadn’t bothered.
“I bring refreshments while our employers talk,” Nicki said, as she swept into the cabana, swirling her coat around her as she fell onto the couch opposite Locke.
The man placed the tray on the table, and Nicki waved him away. Then she waved at the house. “Americans, yes? They have no history and so they make up for it with this. So inelegant.”
“This isn’t your house, then?” Locke asked.
“Mine?” She laughed. “I am like you, a visitor. But I am not like your boss. Lisa Kempton? To learn she is part of this, c’est incroyable.” She leaned forward and took the bottle from the tray. It was already open, a third already drunk. Nicki poured a stiff measure into each of the frosted glasses. “This belonged to Fidel Castro,” she said.
Locke took a glass, sniffed. “Rum?”
“Made in Cuba,
the first batch after their revolution.” Nicki swigged, and grimaced. “It is not cognac. It is not champagne. You cannot create history.”
Locke took a minuscule sip, then placed the frozen glass back on the table. “You don’t operate in this area?”
“Our business? No. Nor do you.”
“We operate everywhere,” Locke said, and instantly regretted it. She was meant to listen, to learn, not to give anything away.
“So I have read,” Nicki said. “I did not know you operated in the same business as us. Non, we are here to discuss a… a merger.”
“Ah,” Locke said. The sisters had arranged more than one meeting, but unlike with Kempton, which was a discussion between equals in wealth and power if not in influence, Nicki was a representative of a gang, presumably in France, or perhaps in Canada. And presumably, if she was outside, her boss was inside. Locke reached for the glass, to give herself another few seconds to think of a question whose answer might confirm it, but was stopped when the door to the one-storey opened. Two people came out. One was tall, broad-shouldered, with cropped hair. He wore a tight fitting black t-shirt, black combat trousers, and black boots. All were stained with blood. Presumably blood belonging to the second figure. The man was in the shredded remains of…
Locke clamped her mouth closed, letting no emotion show on her face as she forced herself not to throw up.
The second man wasn’t wearing a tattered shirt. That was skin. Flaps hung loose from muscle dripping blood. The black-clothed figure dragged the man by the forearm out towards them. After a dozen steps, pain got the better of the injured man and he collapsed. The black-clothed man swore, gave the prostrate figure a kick, then grabbed an ankle, and dragged the injured man towards the cabana, leaving a bloody trail in his wake. Ten metres from the cabana, the torturer gave up, let go of the leg, and gave the injured man a kick for good measure.
“Is he dead?” Nicki asked.
“Nah,” the man said. His accent was Australian. The tattoos on his arm were military, but Locke didn’t recognise the unit.