Dying Breath (Cobra Book 2)

by Blake Banner

  I smiled and shrugged and made a “watchagonnado?” face.

  “It’s been nice, but I have to go. Please, my clothes, mi ropa, por favor.”

  They looked at each other, shook their heads and muttered something that sounded rude and involved my ancestors. Then the nurse brought me my clothes and the doctor brought me a document to sign in triplicate, absolving the hospital of any responsibility if I dropped dead from an injured thigh and a very nearly injured heart. I signed, dressed and hobbled painfully down to the lobby where I had the Andalusian girl on reception, who was five-foot-two and had beautiful black eyes and hair, call me a taxi.

  I limped out onto the seafront. It was like Los Angeles, only with even less soul. I watched a nine-hundred-year-old woman in a pink tracksuit, with peroxide hair and vibrant red Botox lips, totter by with the world’s smallest, ugliest dog on the end of a pink leather lead. Her path crossed with that of Mr. Universe on a bicycle. He was dressed in nothing but Bermuda shorts and green and red Havaianas that flapped on soft, pink feet as he pedaled his bike. His face, under his flowing blond hair, evoked a song in my half-doped mind: “I Only Have Eyes for Me.”

  Sitting on the low wall that separated the Paseo Maritimo from the beach was a fat guy in a straw hat and shorts, reading a local newspaper.

  I limped and hobbled to the corner, where my cab turned in from the Avenida Severo Ochoa, and pulled to a halt. I leaned in the window and the driver said, “’Arry Bauer?”

  I said, “Yeah,” and did some more limping, this time linguistically: “Por favor, Avenida del Naranjo, number, um…veinte y tres, Nueva Andalucia. Gracias.”

  He gave me the thumbs-up and said, “OK, Macay!”

  I climbed in the back of the cab with difficulty and, as we pulled out onto the main avenue and headed north and west toward the A7, Autovia del Mediterraneo, and Nueva Andalucia, I noticed absently that the fat guy with the straw hat and the shorts was behind us on a moped.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Brigadier Alexander “Buddy” Byrd had a large villa at the end of the Avenida del Naranjo, just off Pleiades Street, not a stone’s throw from Oxford Street. Nueva Andalucia was nothing if not universal in its naming of streets.

  The house was a large, sprawling, three-story affair on several levels, with a variety of orange, corrugated tiled roofs. It had whitewashed walls and arched doors and windows. It also had colonnades, fountains, palm trees and poplars. It was remarkable that, being an actual, real, authentic Spanish villa, it managed to look fake. This, I reflected as I looked at it, was the genius of Marbella. And it was another way in which it echoed Los Angeles. It gave everything a veneer of shallow impermanence. Even the luminous green lawn, the luminous turquoise pool and the luminous burgundy tennis court.

  A guy with a French accent, a white jacket and white gloves let me in and called the brigadier. The brigadier appeared, frowning, and told the guy with the French accent, whose name was Jacques, to take me up to the large guest room and then make some chicken stew. Both sounded like excellent ideas and I followed him upstairs. Behind me I could hear Colonel Jane Harris making small hissing noises, presumably in the brigadier’s ear.

  The redoubtable Jacques introduced me to a large, double-poster bed, opened the windows onto the lawn and the pool, showed me where the en suite was and left, wishing me a good rest. I dragged off my clothes, climbed into the bed and sank quickly into sleep, with the gentle twitter of birds in the background.

  I slept for eighteen hours straight. At one point, it may have been a dream, I opened my eyes and saw the moon hanging over the pool, and thought about Rachida, falling from two thousand feet into the blackness of the night, over the Barrage al Massira lake. I imagined her, with her mass of black tight curls, and her long arms and legs, crashing into the crystal turquoise of the pool. That made me smile and I drifted off to sleep again.

  I awoke with the sun streaming through the open window and the lace curtains moving gently on the morning air. The birds were still singing and there was the sound of water not quite splashing, but sploshing, as someone moved about in the swimming pool.

  I pulled myself out of bed and winced a few times as I limped to the bathroom, where I showered and shaved; and finally I dressed in clothes I found unexpectedly, folded on my chair.

  After that I winced my way downstairs to the patio, where the brigadier was eating breakfast and watching the colonel doing lengths in the water. He saw me approaching and rang a small brass bell. Jacques emerged from the house as I sat and I told him I wanted lots of black coffee, bacon, eggs, toast and mushrooms. He nodded with a sideways twist of his head and went away.

  “How did you sleep?”

  “Better than I would have in hospital.” I waved at the colonel but she ignored me. “Thanks for the clothes.”

  “That was Jane’s idea. It would never have crossed my mind, I’m afraid. She tells me you have a theory.”

  He said it as though having a theory was one of the more lamentable aspects of my existence.

  “Yeah, and the more I think about it the more convinced I am it’s not a theory. I can’t find any way around it.”

  He sipped his tea and regarded me over the bone china cup. “Oh dear. Heilong Li was not Heilong Li but merely a shield for the real Heilong Li, who is your Rachida, Lady of the Night.”

  “If I adopted that tone of voice I could make Newton’s three laws of motion sound ridiculous. I could make your breakfast sound ridiculous.” I mimicked his cut-glass English accent. “Oh dear. Eggs and bacon, toast and marmalade, and no doubt a cup of Ceylon tea.”

  “Very good, but my breakfast, and Newton’s laws of motion, actually exist in reality. Our intelligence was first class and there is absolutely no reason to believe that Heilong Li was not Heilong Li. And as for Rachida—”

  “Lady of the Night—”

  “Quite so, nobody has ever heard of her except Amin, who swears that she is nothing more than a high-class hooker.”

  “A high-class hooker who was at Heilong Li’s lab when she had no conceivable reason to be there, a high-class hooker who almost killed an eight-year veteran of the Special Air Service.”

  He sighed. “Growing up on the mean streets of Casablanca can teach you that kind of skills.”

  “A high-class hooker raised in the ghettos of Casablanca, who speaks English with a Valley accent, and Moroccan French like she learned it at university. That is some hooker. And since when does a bent Moroccan cop become a reliable witness?”

  He didn’t answer and I sighed and rubbed my face. “I grew up on the mean streets of the Bronx, sir. I know all about what the streets can teach you. That girl did not learn her skills on the streets, because that girl is upper middle class and well educated.”

  “Recruited by United Chinese Petrochemicals.”

  “Yes.”

  “Far-fetched.”

  “More far-fetched than the Russians planting honey traps for British and American officers?”

  “Yes.”

  “More far-fetched than the Russians building entire towns identical to American and British ones in order to train sleepers?”

  He hesitated. “No, granted.”

  “More far-fetched than having two hundred cages full of infected people? More far-fetched that Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen? Nothing is far-fetched when you throw power-hungry bastards with lots of money into the equation. Besides, once again, what the hell was she doing at the lab?”

  We sat in silence for a while. Jacques emerged from the house with a tray and silently set out my breakfast in front of me. He poured my coffee and withdrew. As I started eating the brigadier said:

  “I can think of a number of reasons why she was there, but I must admit none of them are very convincing.”

  I answered with my mouth full.

  “If we are supposed to believe that she is a high-class hooker, I can think of a number of reasons why she would be in his suite at his hotel. But I can’t think of a single reason
he would take her to the lab, eighty miles from Casablanca, where he was developing a biological weapon that involved keeping human beings in cages. There is no logical, feasible reason for him to do that that does not involve her being somehow involved.”

  After a while he nodded. “I have to agree.”

  He leaned back in his chair and we both watched the colonel climb out of the pool in her dark blue bikini. She didn’t look much like a colonel doing it, and it was a nice thing to watch.

  She picked up a towel from a brightly striped deck chair and stood drying her hair, then walked toward us wrapping it around her waist.

  “Good morning. Feeling better?”

  “Lots. Thanks for the clothes.”

  “Clearly you couldn’t continue wearing what you had on. It was a public health risk.” She sat and helped herself to coffee. “Are you discussing Rachida as a target?”

  “Yes.”

  The brigadier grunted. She said:

  “We are waiting on results from your suggested lines of inquiry. But there is another, arguably more pressing question.”

  I glanced at the brigadier because he had glanced away quickly, at the trees, like he was embarrassed.

  I said, “What?”

  Who should carry out the execution.”

  I felt a hot pellet of anger flare up in my belly. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  She gestured at me with her open hand and there was amusement and triumph alive in her eyes.

  “Look at you! You can hardly walk! Your thigh is torn to pieces. Do you know how many stitches they had to put in there? It was like a needlework workshop in that theater! And as for your chest, you’re lucky you’re alive!”

  “I’m fine! I just need a couple of days to recuperate. Hell, by the time you find somebody capable of carrying out the hit I’ll be fully operational!”

  She sipped her coffee, watching me. “What makes you think we haven’t already found someone? You’re not that good, Harry. You’re good, but there are people equally as good as you and better.”

  I looked at the brigadier. He was busy examining the cypress trees that bordered the property. I got no joy there so I looked back at the colonel.

  “Fine. You’ve got my nuts in a vice and now you are going to enjoy castrating me. I’m sure your daddy would be very proud of you. But leaving egos and dick measuring aside, this is a very difficult, dangerous hit and however good or mediocre I may be, I know the target and I have some experience of how she thinks and behaves!”

  “I am quite sure you do—assuming she is a target at all. I’ll discuss it with the brigadier. Meantime, you try to recover.”

  She stood and went inside. I stared across the table at the brigadier, who gave me an inscrutable look and said, “I shall be glad when you two stop sparring. It is not helpful.”

  “What am I supposed to say? She started it?”

  “Please don’t.”

  “This hit is mine, sir.”

  He nodded. “But you have to stop hobbling, and very soon. There is also the fact that the target knows you, which is a drawback.”

  I spent the rest of the morning resting and doing relaxation and visualization exercises to help heal my wounds. A lot of people believe the techniques are BS, but I’ve used them for years and in my experience—and there is a lot of it—a focused mind can have a direct impact on how fast and how well you heal.

  I had lunch alone because both the brigadier and the colonel had gone out after breakfast, and at six PM they returned in the brigadier’s Range Rover. They must have called Jacques from the car because two minutes after they had joined me on the lawn he came out with a tray of drinks: gin and tonic for the colonel, martini dry for the brigadier and me.

  It was the colonel who spoke first.

  “It seems I owe you an apology, Harry.” I watched her, waiting, but didn’t say anything. So she went on: “Our team in San Francisco ran Rachida to ground. That is…” She held up both hands like she was trying to stop me from doing something. “They found her records. They didn’t find her. She graduated summa cum laude in molecular biology from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, nine years ago, aged twenty-two. From there they were able to trace her back to Fountain Valley in LA. It seems she was a gifted child, and very beautiful, and things came easy to her. She left home at sixteen to go and live with an aunt in Detroit. There she gained admission to the University of Michigan and came to the attention of her tutors early on. One in particular, Oswald Chen, her molecular biology tutor, mentored her and put her in touch with Bio-Tech International, a research and development company which, you will not be surprised to learn, is wholly owned by UCP.”

  “United Chinese Petrochemicals.” She nodded. I asked, “What’s her name?”

  “Mary Jones.”

  I smiled. “What’s in a name, huh?”

  The brigadier sighed. “A rose by any other name… Her teachers at primary school and at high school noticed that she was gifted. Apparently she had emotional problems and saw the school psychologist on and off for several years. Dr. Shariff, at her high school, expressed concerns that Mary had a, and I quote, ‘…startling lack of empathy…’ which she would normally associate with a sociopath. Though Mary exhibited no other serious behavioral pathologies.”

  I shook my head. “Shrinks insist on thinking that evil is a pathology. It’s not. It’s a trait we need as a species in order to survive. The trouble with people like Rach… Mary Jones, is that they have nothing to balance it with. So where is she now?”

  The colonel answered. “She’s still in Morocco. She was seen entering the Trans Arabian Transport Company early this morning in a white 1970s Mercedes. She has stayed there all day. We will be notified as soon as she leaves.”

  I picked the olive out of my martini and examined it, like it was Mary Jones, aka Rachida, and it could tell me what her plans were, and what her destination was.

  “She’ll go east,” I said. Then I looked at the brigadier. “Who owned the twentieth century?”

  He looked surprised. “I beg your pardon?”

  I explained: “The British owned the nineteenth century. The twentieth century belonged to the Soviet Union and the United States. Who is going to own the twenty-first?”

  The colonel answered. “The USA and China.”

  “Correct, and the Chinese know that better than anybody. Now, I don’t know how, but they are going to try to destabilize and bring down the Western economy in order to establish themselves as top dogs. That is what this is all about.” I sat forward and leaned my elbows on the table. “You have to let me go after her. I understand her. You’ve seen that. She almost killed me. She will kill anybody else. She is mine, and I take her down.”

  The colonel’s face contracted into a scowl and she opened her mouth to answer. Before she could the brigadier snapped, “Agreed. But be aware, you have about forty-eight hours to get in shape. Then, ready or not, you go after her. And there is no room for failure here. You take her down and you take down whatever operation she is involved in.”

  The colonel’s cheeks flushed and her eyes were bright as she stared at the brigadier. She went to speak a couple of times but bit back the words. Finally she said, “We need to consider very seriously handing this over to the Agency—at least that part of it that relates to the operation. This goes well beyond our standard brief.”

  He shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t share your faith in the Agency, Jane. There are too many conflicting interests involved. We need Mary Jones taken out, and we need her project closed down, quickly, and as quietly as possible.”

  “Quietly? Really? The way the lab was closed down in Morocco?”

  I leaned toward her. “I didn’t do that and you know it. That was the Royal Moroccan Air Force. Somebody alerted the Moroccan authorities of what was going down. Chances are they had an informant at the plant. When I killed Yang Dizhou and the Heilong Li stand-in, they probably decided it was time to remove any evidence o
f their cooperation with Beijing.”

  She scowled at me a moment and turned back to the brigadier.

  “Alex, we have not got the resources to take on an operation of this size…”

  He pulled down the corners of his mouth. “I disagree, Jane. We are not planning to invade China. This is a surgical strike, and Harry is more than capable…”

  I interrupted. “Two gets you twenty the Agency are going to be there. I can take out Mary, and if I see that dealing with her project, whatever it is, is beyond our resources, I’ll call in the cavalry.”

  She made a big, elaborate sigh. “But, please, Harry. Let’s not make this about your manhood, your testosterone or your balls. This is about neutralizing a very dangerous woman and her work.”

  I regarded her a while with dead eyes, trying to keep my mouth shut. Finally I decided what the hell and said, “It’s a shame you didn’t explain that to me before—I wouldn’t have wasted everybody’s time by stealing Heilong Li’s diary, notebook and hard drive. And I wouldn’t have sent you on that wild goose chase to Michigan and LA…or taken out Yang Dizhou…”

  “Fine! You made your point, Harry. Let’s just try to keep it low-key.”

  I was going to answer her, but Jacques stepped out into the gathering dusk and said, “Dinner is ready, monsieur, will you eat out here? Or will you dine inside?”

  We decided to eat outside, under an early moon, with the pool lapping softly in the background. And while Jacques and a pretty maid set the table and brought out the food and the wine, the brigadier gave me a look that advised me to lay off Colonel Jane Harris, for the sake of continued peace. I gave him a look that said I would, for now.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Rachida, aka Mary Jones, did nothing for three days. At four in the afternoon on the third day, four bombs went off at different locations around Casablanca, one of them outside the building on Boulevard Mohamed Zerktouni that housed the Sureté Nationale and the Police Prefecture of Casablanca. They all exploded within two minutes of each other and cast the entire city into chaos. Every available officer was called in and, five minutes after the alarm was raised, an old, 1970s cream Mercedes-Benz, exactly like thousands of other old, 1970s cream Mercedes-Benz all over Morocco, rolled out of the offices of the Trans Arabian Transport Co. SL, and headed, sedately and completely unnoticed, out of the city along the N11 and then the A7.