Outside the rain stopped and the sun began to shine.
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Chapter Sixty Three
Oxford, England
Wednesday 14th Dec 10.30am
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He felt terrible. His throat was dry and his tongue stuck to the back of his throat. When he tried to sit up his brain seemed to remain on the bed, and a dull nauseating pain washed over him.
He was thirsty. He tried to stand and was surprised by just how much effort it took.
“Ouch…!” The side of his head was throbbing more than it should for an ordinary hangover and he glanced round at himself in the mirror above his bed. There was dried caked blood on the side of his face, and as he reached up to touch it he had a vague memory of falling over the night before and banging his head on the edge of the door.
“Shit…I’ve got to stop doing this to myself!”
Mike didn’t know how long he had been drunk for. It could have been a day, or a week, he had no recollection of time. The rejection from Louisa when he had seen her last had just been too much, and the only friend that had been waiting to comfort him when he got home had been the bottle of whisky beside his bed.
He had drunk until the tears had turned to laughter, and then to sleep, and when he had woken he had gone to the corner shop and bought three more bottles of whisky. One by one they had disappeared. He had broken the promise to himself to stay sober, and he didn’t care. He was pathetic and he knew it.
He couldn’t remember if he had eaten in the past couple of days, but he was ravenous now. He picked up two black bananas from the kitchen and slumped in his favourite chair in his front room, he scoffed them down heartily. The milk in his fridge had just started to turn a little sour, but he drank it down quickly. His mouth tasted so bad, that anything else tasted good in comparison.
Mike had established a good survival routine for bad hangovers, which he followed automatically whenever he felt so bad he couldn’t really think for himself.
The next thing to do was to make himself as strong a cup of coffee as possible, and run himself a long, deep bath.
He lowered himself slowly into the hot water and for the next hour he lay there, as if trying through a process of osmosis to absorb as much of the water as possible back into his body through the pores of his skin. He would lie there until the water became so cold that he began to shiver, then he would go out and buy some fresh eggs, bacon and orange juice.
As the day wore on he knew he would feel increasingly worse, until about four o’clock when at last the hangover would start to reverse itself and he would slowly begin to feel better. Then come the evening, he would eat a large meal and he would feel human again. He knew his body well, and he knew exactly how it reacted to all the abuse he had given it over the past few weeks.
As he ate the eggs and bacon he sat in front of the television, and was mildly surprised to hear the news presenter say that it was Wednesday afternoon.
“Oh God, what have I done?” He asked himself, suddenly realising how his five day drunken blackout might have endangered Louisa’s life. There was no question about it. Louisa would now be in mortal danger. Mike had failed to report in to the Ambassador in London as ordered, and he knew for sure that by now their superiors in Washington would have sent in another agent to complete the job. It was Wednesday…that meant that the other CIA agent could already be here! A trained assassin! Without doubt, it also meant that Mike’s name would have been added to those already on the assassin’s list.
Knowing that he had now become the hunted, Mike experienced the first twinges of fear. In response, the adrenaline pumped around his system, strangely counteracting the effects of the hangover. He found himself feeling surprisingly better. Almost normal. That was good. He needed to be able to think.
The first thing he had to do was find his gun, and load it with ammunition. After that he needed to get round to find Louisa as soon as possible and follow her.
It would be too dangerous for him to stay in his own house now. He had to find somewhere else to stay for a few weeks, and he had to be mobile.
Suddenly Mike realised he felt alive again. With a smile on his face he realised just how ironic it was that although he had practically tried to drink himself to death, now that someone else might be trying to kill him, he felt scared of dying. And with it came the instinct to survive, and his years of training came flooding back.
He had to protect Louisa at all costs. The hunt was now on. He knew that ultimately the only way to protect her was to go on the offensive: he had to kill the assassin first, before the assassin managed to kill them.
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Chapter Sixty Four
Oxford, England
Wednesday 14th Dec
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On the second day after its ‘conception’ the G-clone embryo was still growing well, in fact if anything the cell growth was ahead of schedule.
The cells had continued to divide rapidly for the first five minutes after the initial cell division, but had then settled down to multiplying at a more normal rate, drawing ‘nutrients’ from a chemical and genetic bath the Haissem team supplied in a specially prepared and controlled environment. The cells seemed to be thriving, and due to the rapid growth within the first minutes of the G-clone’s ‘creation’, its progress was well ahead of schedule.
On the second day, Jason and the Professor conferred and decided that the prudent thing to do would be to transfer the embryo into the surrogate mother’s womb as soon as possible.
Jason called Maria and the team together that afternoon, and over coffee and jam and chocolate donuts, they all agreed to proceed with the transplantation. Maria was as excited as you could expect any expectant mother to be. Loudon, their doctor, agreed to conduct the medical procedure later that afternoon. With everyone else waiting like a bunch of expectant fathers in the ante-room, the procedure was performed in the dedicated medical theatre next to the lab on the third floor.
As the embryo was placed in Maria’s womb there were only three people in the operating theatre. Loudon was a well-qualified doctor, with years of experience, and was fully able to perform the transfer into the surrogate mother by himself. However, to assist in case of any slight complications, Louisa stood alongside him.
In itself the procedure was a simple one, and one which Loudon had performed many times before for the Professor in the institute.
Maria lay on the operating table, lightly sedated. Louisa was holding her hand and Dr MacIver was checking her pulse and her vital statistics. The implantation went well. When the sedation wore off he would send her home, to rest in bed with as little movement as possible for the next few days. He would visit her regularly, and if all was going well, in a week's time they would make some unobtrusive observations with ultra sound and NMR scanning, to check that the embryo had taken to its new home within the womb. But the early indications were looking good. Dr MacIver had been very pleased with the excellent state of health Maria was in, which would significantly add to the chances of a successful pregnancy.
Maria smiled in her sleep. She felt good. Very good indeed.
That night, the Haissem project team swarmed en mass into Browns to celebrate the success of the project. Only Maria was absent from the celebration. Sleep was the best medicine for her at this stage.
The doctor had provided her with a paging unit, which she only had to press once and he would be summoned instantly. A home nurse would be visiting her first thing in the morning and caring for her over the next two weeks, and the doctor would be visiting her three times a day for the next ten days. All in all, she would be looked after very well indeed. Don had offered to sit with Maria in her house and watch over her, but on her insistence and approval from the doctor, Don had agreed ‘not to fuss’ and he went off to celebrate with the rest of the team.
After Browns everyone went back to the Professor’s and drank far too much champagne. Jason and Don played snooker together on the Professor’s full size table,
and Louisa and the Professor sat at the bar in the corner of snooker room, talking and laughing and commenting every now and again about what a good shot one of the boys had made.
When the champagne ran out, and Don and Jason couldn’t hit any more straight shots without possibly ripping the felt on the table, the boys had shared a taxi home, leaving Louisa and the Professor to talk about the meaning of life, and why women loved to go shopping so much. It was a quarter to five in the morning before Louisa left, taking with her memories of a fantastic evening out and the makings of an enormous hangover for the next day.
“Oh…” the Professor muttered to himself as Louisa’s taxi pulled out of his driveway, swaying slightly in his doorway and reaching out to steady himself against the wall. “…tomorrow we’re all going to suffer a lot...” Then he stumbled back into his house and searched for the Aspirin in preparation for the morning.
He was going to need them.
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Chapter Sixty Five
Oxford, England
Thursday 15th Dec 01.30 a.m.
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Mike had stocked up the orange Volkswagen Camper Van with everything he would need. He had bought it second hand earlier that afternoon from a dealer in Summer Road. It was a good choice, and he knew that until he could catch the assassin it was an acceptable alternative to finding somewhere else to stay. He would be totally mobile, and like a little snail he would be able to drag his home around with him, wherever he went. The best part about it was that he would be able to park it in the street outside Louisa’s house and sleep in it, without the neighbours getting suspicious. Louisa’s road was full of student houses, and his van was a very ‘student’ sort of thing to drive. He noticed there was even another one already parked further down the road. He felt sure that if he had just slept in his car, eventually someone would have reported him.
He had bought a new, incredibly warm eider down sleeping bag, and a portable radio, along with an ample supply of fresh fruit, food and soft drinks. It reminded him of the early days of his training, when he once had to find and stake out a suspect in Chicago, without being noticed. Okay, so he had been spotted and 'captured' on the third day, but those were the early days...
The problem was that Mike knew that he couldn’t cover both Louisa and her house at the same time. He just couldn’t be in two places at once.
The danger to Louisa would be twofold. Either the assassin would kill her outright in the street, or he would assassinate her inside her house. It was unlikely that he would try anything when she was in a group, so after Mike had followed her from the restaurant to the Professor’s house, he decided to drive back to her house, and watch it, and to make sure that the assassin didn’t try to break in there to booby-trap her home.
He knew that the Professor would send her back in a taxi, and the only real danger would be when she got home. In fact, the more he thought about it, he felt sure that the assassin would try to kill her in her own home. And, if he were the assassin, he knew he would try to do it at night, when the streets were empty and the victims would be at their lowest ebb and least able to respond or fight back, maybe even asleep.
He didn’t expect that Louisa would be back for another hour or two, but he had to keep alert, watching the street for any signs of the assassin’s arrival. With his gun cocked and ready for action, Mike put his head back and settled down to listen to Oxford F.M. He might have a long wait ahead of him. It could be tonight, the next night, or in a few days time, but he knew the assassin would come soon. And when he came, only one of them would be left standing.
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04.15am
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Little Johnny was getting pissed off. He had been sitting waiting in the street for hours and still there was no sign of his target. Something was wrong. Where was Jason? It was getting really late and his plan was in danger of falling apart and unravelling at the seams.
He had decided to start with Jason, the leader of the group, and according to his notes the most important member of the team. He would shoot Jason first, and then drive round to the house of the woman Louisa, kill her and then take out the Professor and then lastly the guy called Don.
It was bloody cold. How could anyone live in a climate like this? Johnny had moved to Florida years before, and sitting in the car with his feet and fingers freezing to the bone, he longed to be back home, swimming in his pool and feeding the pet alligator in his garden. As he waited on the opposite side of the road outside Jason’s house he decided he didn’t like England. He hoped that Paris would be warmer.
A taxi drove past him, stopping twenty metres away, and a young man got out, standing for a few minutes beside the side of the taxi as he fought to find some spare change in his pocket to pay the driver. He was swaying from side to side, and Little Johnny was pleased to see that the man was very drunk. He recognised him immediately from the photographs he had been given, and from earlier that day when he had followed him and his colleagues to a restaurant in the city centre. As he looked at his target he cursed him for making him sit so long in the cold and wait for him to return. Where had he been for the past four hours? Earlier on Little Johnny had casually walked past the restaurant they were eating in and checked the sign on the door which had said that it closed at midnight. That was four hours ago!
“I’m freezing....” he swore to himself again. In his mind he psyched himself up for the kill, encouraging the anger within him, and directing it towards the target.
The taxi drove off, and Jason staggered towards the door of his house. For a moment he fought with the key in the lock, before the door opened and Jason stumbled inside. The door closed behind him and the light went on in the front room. Five minutes later, the light went out and the light went on in the upstairs front bedroom. Ten minutes later the light went out there too.
Little Johnny had been waiting patiently. He was very good at waiting. He knew that being so drunk, the target would probably fall asleep quickly, and that would make his job much easier. There would be no struggle. It was better to wait and let the alcohol Jason had drunk do half his job for him. He waited another five minutes, and then stepped out of his car.
He walked quickly down the street, carrying his little bag already opened in his hand. Little Johnny was an expert in lock picking. On the Monday evening he had walked past all the doors of his target’s houses and taken photographs of the locks on the doors. They were all simple mortise locks and would pose no problems. None of the commercial locks that people put on their doors really ever posed a problem to professionals...and he was the best of the best.
As he walked towards Jason’s door he pulled out a few picks and a little lever, which he’d had custom made according to his own specifications. He inserted one of the picks and the little lever into the lock, fiddled with the pick for two seconds, turned the lever and bingo…the door opened quietly in front of him. He stepped into the house and quietly closed the door behind him. He took the night-sight from his little bag and strapped it over his head, so that he could see clearly through the darkness with both eyes. His shoes had special soft soles on them, and as he stepped lightly through the house he made no sounds. He pulled out his gun, the silencer firmly in place and the safety catch off.
He looked quickly into each of the rooms on the ground floor, checking that Jason hadn’t come back downstairs in the dark, and then quietly Little Johnny climbed the stairs. There was a bathroom at the top of the stairs, and the water ran noisily from the cistern. For a second Little Johnny froze. The sound of the water in the tank could mean that Jason had just gone to the bathroom and flushed the toilet and the tank was refilling itself, or it could just mean that place needed its plumbing checked. He waited for a few moments. The sound didn’t change, just remaining a constant ‘whooshing’ sound. The water tank wasn’t refilling properly.
“Good…The plumbing just needs fixing. Jason’s still in his bed and he'll be out for the count …” he th
ought to himself.
There were two bedrooms on the upstairs of the house. Both the doors were ajar. From the street Johnny had seen the light go on and off in the room at the front of the house, and he guessed that was where Jason was sleeping. To be sure there was no one else in the house, quietly and quickly Johnny poked his head round the edge of the door nearest the bathroom. The room was a study, with a desk in it and a wall lined with bookshelves. A computer sat on the desk in the corner. There was no one in the room. Johnny took a step towards the other room, checking once more that the silencer on his gun was firmly attached. Outside the bedroom door he stopped for a second.
His heart was beating fast, and he could feel the adrenaline coursing through his veins. He savoured the moment. This was the part of the job that he loved most. The moment before the kill, the moment when he felt most alive, and all his senses were most alert. His sense of smell, and his hearing all peaked at this time, and he felt almost superhuman.
He could hear the sound of Jason breathing in the bed, the ticking of the alarm clock on the bedside cabinet, even the sound of the blood pumping through his own veins and arteries. The smell of yesterday’s meal wafted up from the kitchen and the smell of after-shave and aromatic shampoo came from the bathroom.
His body was tuned and ready to react to the slightest threat. He was a finely tuned killing machine, his senses alive like a wolf hunting in the forest at night, or a lion stalking his prey in the bush.
Little Johnny, born shorter and inferior to most people, was at these times a giant amongst men. These were the moments he lived for.
To him, killing was a drug, and in the seconds before he would pull the trigger he rode the wave of the ultimate ‘high’.
BOX SET of THREE TOP 10 MEDICAL THRILLERS Page 125