Elad fought to control the bile creeping up his throat. This was a nightmare. The amnesia had been bad enough. Then to discover he’d been a terrible person responsible for the deaths and torture of all these people…
He wanted to collapse. To throw up. To scream.
Skylar was staring at him, disgust and anger filling her expression. He had never felt more ashamed.
“Look, I’m normally not this forgiving, but if you’ve got Mossad convinced, you might still be useful,” Ballard said. “Especially since I know we can erase your memories again with a generous dose of the Ring of Solomon.”
Elad opened his mouth to speak, but Ballard put a hand up to silence him. “You still stand to make more money than you can dream of. This technology can do everything we wanted to accomplish and more. It can quash violent protests, render entire military units useless. In a way, we’re actually saving lives. Think about it.”
Elad did. “I still don’t like it.”
“I’m confident you will change your tune,” Ballard said. “I need someone in Mossad to keep an eye on their activities. You’re all we got for now. Together, we can achieve our goals. No more spies. No more wars. Just peace.”
“You don’t achieve peace by enslaving people’s minds,” Skylar said, voice shaking.
“No?” Ballard looked her up and down, his eyes lingering on her prosthetic leg. “How did you lose that? I’m guessing you had a military career. When you lost that leg, how many others lost their lives? Your brothers and sisters in the military, gone.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that. Imagine if we could have pacified your enemies with the Ring of Solomon. They wouldn’t have fired the rocket or planted the IED that hurt you.”
“Bullshit,” Skylar said.
“Think about the issue of collateral damage,” Ballard said. “If you launch a drone strike at a building with a suspected terrorist, you kill everyone in that building. You get your target, but maybe also his kids, his wife. Parents. Cousins. The man walking down the street running to the market with his children. You commit a war crime—and you give new fodder to the next batch of radical terrorists.”
“Are you trying to tell me that your goal is really world peace?” Skylar asked.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Ballard said. “Instead of a drone, we douse that building with the Ring of Solomon. Make everyone go catatonic, then we send in a team to sort through the bastards until we find our man.”
Elad was beginning to see how he had been seduced by the power of this technology. But the thought of inflicting this type of control over people repulsed him to his core.
“We have evidence that shows you distributed these technologies to terrorist organizations,” Skylar said. “And here you are trying to pretend you’re all holy.”
Ballard massaged his temples. “We had to fund this research somehow. I don’t need to tell you that sometimes the ends have to justify the means. But we’re here now. Ready to realize our potential. And if you don’t want to be a part of that, I’ll be happy to use you in our demonstrations as well.”
“Screw you,” Skylar said. “You—”
With a nod from Ballard, two of the guards waiting nearby descended on her. One slammed the stock of his rifle into Skylar’s stomach. The other stuffed a gag into her mouth.
Ballard turned away from her. “My friend, I’m offering you a chance to redeem yourself. To build the world you and I dreamed of.” He tapped the side of Elad’s head. “Reconsider my offer with your newfound perspective on life. And if the noble pursuit of replacing weapons of war with nanoscopic particles that can prevent unnecessary resistance isn’t enough, maybe this is.”
Ballard traced his finger over the tablet then showed the screen to Elad.
“This was going to be your share of our upcoming deal,” Ballard explained. “Of course, it will be adjusted to compensate for your transgressions, but I think you’ll find the amount more than satisfactory.”
Elad nearly choked on his own saliva. The money Ballard offered was a sum that would buy an entire small country or two of his own. And this was the money after he had split the total with Ballard.
Even if he got a fraction of that money, it would be life changing. He could safely retire somewhere off the grid where he didn’t need to worry about being chased by anyone anymore. Where he wasn’t a part of an international conspiracy.
He thought back to that dog in Wadi Musa. Why not use all the money to adopt a whole bunch of strays to live with him on some tropical island? Then at least he could do some good and get away from all of this madness. Put all this behind him for good.
The door to the chamber cracked open. Five men in suits entered.
Ballard cracked a smile. “Before you answer, it looks like our guests from Archon have arrived.”
Skylar’s eyes went wide at the word “Archon,” and she thrashed against her chains. She tried to yell, but her words were muffled by her gag.
“You know them?” Ballard asked. “Interesting.”
Ballard waved the men over to him. As they walked toward him, he turned back to Elad.
“Now keep your eyes on your friends during the demonstration,” Ballard said, “because I’m about to show you what happens if you refuse me.”
-32-
Frederick, MD
The door to Kasim’s office banged open, and he looked up over his reading glasses. When they were done with this mission, he needed to have a talk with his team about how to politely enter a room.
“Who’s the man?” Morris demanded, breathless.
“Did you find something?” Kasim asked.
Morris set down his laptop on Kasim’s desk and dropped into a chair. Words came flying out of his mouth. “Oh, I found it. A connection between Cruz, and even better, where they took her. Probably. Maybe. We can send Wolfe to find out. I think I found it, Kasim. I think this is it.”
“Slow down and tell me.”
“Okay, so first I found an image of Skylar. She was with Elad Luria and David Friedman from Mossad in Beirut.” He showed Kasim a grainy picture of the trio.
They were running alongside a fourth man.
“That’s Ballard,” Kasim said, pointing at the man. “So Mossad was right. He was in Beirut. Do we know why?”
“No clue. He went with the other three to an apartment. Problem was, we never saw them leave.”
“You’re saying they’re still there?” Kasim asked.
“Not at all. Mossad already cleared the place. No one was in there. But there was a back exit.”
“Where’d they go then?” Kasim asked.
Morris clapped his hands together. “This is where I had to use a bit of creativity. I found a flight out of Beirut just twenty minutes after everything went south in Martyrs’ Square. Private flight. Straight from Lebanon to Stavanger, Norway.”
“Morris, I need the connection. There are a lot of flights in and out of Beirut.”
The analyst took a deep breath. “Okay, following that first flight, there was a second about an hour later.”
“Still waiting.”
Morris scratched at his goatee. “I know, I know. Here’s the thing. That second flight was chartered by a group of Archon representatives traveling from Iran.”
“Archon?” Kasim asked. “Those bastards seem to keep popping up. They’re more than a simple mercenary group.”
“No kidding,” Morris said. “We intercepted a contractor from Gadriel who mentioned a demonstration of the wares they were selling. That was supposed to happen today, man. In Lebanon.”
“Beirut was the demonstration?”
“It seems that way,” Morris said. “And maybe they’re going back to sign the deal.”
“To Stavanger? Why?”
Morris pulled up a map on his screen. “Four years ago, Gadriel Defense Systems bought an oil platform in the middle of the North Norwegian Sea. Supposedly, it was left vacant. But our friends in Mossad have been busy tracking all air traffic fr
om Beirut, looking for our missing friends. They saw two helicopters with flight paths that took them right out toward that oil platform within an hour of each other. Boom, roasted!”
“Okay, okay,” Kasim said, holding up his hands. He’d been awake for almost twenty-two hours straight, and Morris’s voice was like a reflex hammer straight to his aching head. “Assuming you’re right, how do Cruz, Friedman, Luria, and Ballard fit into this?”
Morris’s expression turned dour. “I think Ballard’s the big bad.”
“What are you talking about?” Kasim asked.
“Your friends in Mossad really pulled through, man. Wolfe and Arnon too. According to them, Elad Luria bought the original nanoparticle technology from Smadi. But Luria wasn’t operating alone.” Morris pulled up what looked to be an email on his computer. “This was sent by Dr. Smadi to another contact. A man by the name of Lawrence Black.”
“Who’s that?”
“No one. The guy doesn’t exist,” Morris said. “On paper, if you dig deep enough into all the shell companies operating around Gadriel, you’ll find he appears to have access to most of the foreign bank accounts related to the company. And he moves around a lot of money. I won’t bore you with all the transaction details.”
“Black is Ballard?”
“He is,” Morris said. “Remember how most of the CIA records for Ballard were wiped clean? New evidence points to Ballard destroying them himself. There’s a whole mess over there about why anyone would wipe their personnel files. They assumed when he was compromised or kidnapped, the CIA didn’t want to be attached to him at all. Thing is, Mossad never erased their files. Lawrence Black, according to them, was an alias for Ballard. They found this out from when Luria was working with Ballard in the field. If he isn’t in charge of it, then Ballard is at least a major player in Gadriel.”
Kasim pressed his palm against his forehead. Double-crossed. By Luria and Ballard. This insanity didn’t seem to have an end in sight. “So maybe Ballard found out what Cruz and Friedman were up to in Beirut. He and Luria went back to Stavanger. But do you have any evidence that Cruz and Friedman are with them?”
Morris shook his head. “They could have been on the chopper that Mossad was tracking, but I wasn’t able to confirm it.”
Kasim felt sick at the possibilities of what had happened to Cruz. For all he knew, she’d been killed and her body discarded somewhere in the chaos that had swallowed Beirut.
But if Morris was right, if Ballard or Luria knew what had become of her, then there was only one thing to do.
“We’ve got to get on that oil platform,” Kasim said.
“Should we coordinate a full-out assault with Mossad and CIA Special Ops?” Morris asked.
“Have them on standby,” Kasim said. “We can’t risk sending in too many people. Gadriel is a defense company. They’ll be armed to the teeth with advanced weaponry. Going in with a full strike team is asking for an all-out war. Most importantly, if they’ve got hostages there, then we don’t want to give them any warning.”
“So what’s the plan, boss?”
“Tell Arnon and Wolfe that they’re going out to sea. Tell them to find Ballard and Luria and bring them down.”
Norwegian North Sea
Alex was in a jump seat of a Eurocopter Super Puma wearing a dry suit for scuba diving in waters that could kill a person with their icy temperatures. Next to him, Arnon was similarly outfitted. They had modified Israeli-made IWI Tavor assault rifles stowed in dry bags strapped over their buoyancy compensator vests. Each held a rebreather mask. By preventing a constant stream of bubbles rising to the water’s surface, the mask would help conceal their underwater travel from prying eyes.
Of course, that might not be an issue tonight.
Rain pelted the chopper, coursing over the cockpit and windows. Lightning spiderwebbed through the sky. Waves crashed together with violent force.
No one would likely notice a few bubbles anyway.
Alex couldn’t have hoped for better cover—or more dangerous diving conditions.
A crew chief at the side door of the chopper spoke over their headsets. “We’re almost there. Be ready to jump in five.”
Alex strapped his fins to his feet and made his way toward the side door, using the net along the ceiling for a handhold. Even though Arnon had almost twenty years on him, she moved with the grace of a ballet dancer in her cumbersome fins. He could only imagine what she’d been like in her glory days.
To any casual observer, a chopper flying in these parts wouldn’t be particularly suspicious. Crew exchanges, supply runs, and even medical flights to the oil platforms scattered throughout the sea were not uncommon.
But landing a chopper on the Gadriel-owned oil platform was out of the question. They couldn’t exactly do that stealthily. Alex guessed the platform would be armed against unauthorized landings. After all, Gadriel manufactured weapons. He would be more surprised if they didn’t find any defense systems or armed resistance.
Arnon’s team had chartered this chopper to take them out toward a grouping of oil platforms one hundred and fifty kilometers northwest of Stavanger, Norway. These platforms were key contributors to Norway’s immense economic strength. They were also as close as Alex dared to approach Gadriel’s stronghold by helicopter.
“Call us when you’re ready for a pickup,” the pilot said over their comms. “Give us at least thirty minutes if you can. We won’t exactly be able to land anywhere close.”
That was a subtle way of putting it, Alex thought.
The crew chief opened the side door. Rain sprayed into the cabin. Everywhere Alex looked, they were surrounded by inky blackness. The sky seemed to meld right into the ocean, illuminated only by the occasional slash of white lightning.
Toward their west, a couple of lights blinked atop the Gadriel oil derrick. Those were the warning lights to ensure no ships or low-flying aircraft ran into it. But if there was any life aboard that platform, Gadriel had gone through great efforts to ensure it remained hidden.
Not a single other light glowed from so much as a porthole on the platform.
The chopper dropped altitude slightly, the sudden shift making Alex’s belly churn.
“This is as close as we can get,” the crew chief said. “You’re on your own now.”
“That is not a problem,” Arnon said. She secured her rebreather and mask. She turned back to Alex, speaking through her comms as the crew chief handed her a cylindrical device about half the size of a scuba air tank. It was a self-propelled SCUBAJET system. “Just try to keep up, Wolfe.”
Alex set his rebreather and mask into place. “You’re on.”
She stepped out of the chopper, and Alex thought he heard her stifle a rough laugh as the rain-drenched darkness swallowed her.
After getting his own SCUBAJET, Alex leapt out and succumbed to the pull of gravity. There was no way to tell how long he would fall or where the waves were until he slammed into them. Freezing water rushed around his body. Even through the dry suit, he could feel the cold squeeze of the Nordic waters looking for any small crack, any minute opening. If those waters penetrated his suit, hypothermia would take him before he could ever make it to the oil platform.
Disoriented and blinded by darkness, Alex hung suspended in the murky depths.
For a moment, he couldn’t tell which way was up and which way led to the seafloor thousands of feet below. His skin prickled at the thought of all the creatures that might be moving around him, unseen by his weak human senses. Monstrous beasts that had survived prehistoric times. Predators with rows of serrated teeth or tentacles that could drag him into the murky depths.
This was the primal fear ingrained in humanity that inspired tales of sea monsters and krakens. The terror of the deep.
He flipped the night-vision goggles fitted to his dive mask down and turned them on. What little light existed in these waters was amplified by the sensors in the goggles pressed against his dive mask. The choking darkness became
a scene of speckled blacks, whites, and greens. He appeared to be floating in a void with only a single white shape kicking toward him.
“You okay, Wolfe?” Arnon’s voice came over the comms fitted into their masks.
“I’m alive,” Alex said.
“Good,” she said. “Plan on staying alive at least until this mission is over.”
She turned on the SCUBAJET system. The device propelled her forward as she clung to the handles on either side of the underwater scooter system.
Alex followed. The small devices took them forward at just under seven miles per hour. On land, that was slower than a comfortable jogging pace. But underwater, it felt as though they were soaring through the dark, frigid depths.
At the fringes of Alex’s vision, he thought he could see movement. Curious fish, maybe even one of the ugly Greenland sharks that called these seemingly inhospitable waters home.
He tried not to let his mind wander, instead focusing on Arnon jetting in front of him. If he got spooked by a shark, she’d never let him live it down. For that matter, this woman would probably spook any shark before it even thought to bother them.
Eventually, skeletal white columns appeared in his vision. They stretched from the seafloor and pierced the water’s rough surface. Those were the legs of the oil platform. Almost there.
Alex prayed they were still in time to save Skylar.
-33-
Skylar searched the room for an exit. But the chain connected to the shackles on her feet wouldn’t let her get beyond three feet of the stanchion. She felt like a cow being led to slaughter, stuck here with the rest of the herd. Just waiting for a bolt to the head before she became hamburger.
Her only comfort was the fact that her head hadn’t been opened up like a goddamn tin of cat food.
That didn’t mean her companions were doing great. She looked over at Friedman. The blood from the gash on his forehead hadn’t stopped flowing. Red streaks stained the front of his shirt. His skin was pale, his curly hair matted down by sweat. The guy looked a little off. Probably dealing with a hell of a concussion.
Demon Mind (Vector Book 2) Page 29