by Blake Banner
The colonel asked, “What about him?”
“Where can I find him?”
She started shaking her head, making negative noises, screaming, “EEEE-EEE! EEEE-EEE!” which I took to be DC.
The colonel said, “Cadiz, in southern Spain. Calle Virgen de la Palma, number six, above the Bar Casa Fernando. That’s the field office. I don’t know where he lives.”
“The plane…”
“It’s got modified tanks. It will get us to Flores, in the Azores. I have a pal there. He’ll refuel us… It’s a seven-and-a-half-thousand-mile journey, thirty-six hours flying time. We can…”
“It’s fueled up now?”
“Yeah, she’s ready to go.”
I stood, then knelt beside him. With the Fairbairn & Sykes I cut his bonds, then slipped the Glock in my belt behind my back.
“Call your pal in Flores. Tell him to expect Mr. and Mrs. Jones and refuel the plane for them. You’ll pay for the gas and I’ll refund you.”
What little color he had in his face drained away. “What about me?”
“You work for me now. I need you to take a message to Langley, then get a regular flight to Jerez.”
His face cleared. “You’re with the Firm…”
“Don’t ask questions. Call your pal.”
He pulled a cell from his pants and made the call.
“Paolo, bom dia! Listen, change of plans, pal. Two friends of mine, Mr. and Mrs. Jones, they’ll be bringing in the Albatross. I want you to look after them. I’ll pay, like always…” He laughed. “I sure do, pal. I’ll see you in a couple of weeks, don’t you worry. Ciao, Paulo. You look after yourself.”
He hung up and spread his hands. I said, “Who’s Paolo?”
“Head of customs at Flores. Flores is tiny. You want to run anything in or out of Europe, first step is Flores, and Paolo is my man.”
“OK, good,” I pointed at Diana, “help me get this package onto the Albatross. I’ll put you down with a Zodiac near Copper Harbor, from there you make your way to Virginia. I’ll give you instructions, names and addresses of who to contact. I’ll see to it that you’re paid.”
“What about the NPP? You need me…”
I nodded. “Don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten that. That’s why you’re not dead.”
He nodded, hesitated, then nodded again. “OK.”
Between us we carried Diana, kicking and screaming as best she could, trussed like a turkey, out to the Zodiac. There she kept thrashing, only now she was more like a hooked marlin. The anger that had been smoldering in my gut for the past hour suddenly got the better of me and I grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and the seat of her pants and hauled her upper body over the side, and dunked her head in the water as far as her shoulders. I counted slowly to ten, by which time her kicking had become almost spasmodic. Then I hauled her out. She gave a small, screaming gasp. I grabbed a fistful of her collar and dragged her sodden face to within a quarter of an inch of mine. I spoke very quietly.
“Your stupid games have cost twelve men their lives in the last twenty-four hours. That means I do not like you. What is worse, your stupid games have almost cost me my life, which means I really don’t like you. A contract is a contract, Diana, but my life is not going to be the consideration for that contract. So wise up, because if I have to neutralize you to save my own life, believe me, I will. Get a grip and quit acting like a spoiled brat.”
I gave her a shove and she fell on her back with a small gasp. I jerked my head at the colonel. “Take us to the Albatross.”
The bird had drifted a couple of hundred yards and as we moved across the water toward it I eyed the colonel. Finally I said, “I was eight years with the Regiment. Iraq and Afghanistan mainly, but also Syria, Djibouti, Yemen, Libya. We were loaned out a couple of times too, Mexico, Colombia…”
He nodded. “I was nine, almost ten years with Delta. We had close ties with the Regiment. But we had a disagreement, Delta and me. They said I was overzealous in some of my methods. They also objected to some of my commercial activities. I sold weapons and I guess I wasn’t too fussy about who I sold them to. Then a village in Somalia was massacred by jihadists. They tracked them down and killed most of them, but they traced the weapons they were using back to me.”
He shrugged. It was an oddly sad gesture. Like he was looking at his own dead humanity. He wanted to care, and didn’t know why he didn’t. The dinghy slapped over the small waves and the dim fan of luminous spray spread out behind him.
“I don’t see that what I did was any worse than what the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations had done before me, selling weapons to the Saudis, right? We follow the money, do the job that has to be done.”
We pulled up beside the plane, and he helped me to wrestle Diana into the cargo bay. She had gone quiet since her dunking. I rolled her to one side, into the shadows, and turned back to the colonel. He was still in the Zodiac and looked up at me.
“You want to pull the dinghy in?”
I pulled the Glock. “No.” I saw him swallow. His hand moved toward the Colt in his holster at his side. I ignored the movement and went on. “The thing you never understood, Colonel, is that it is not up to politicians to hold us to their moral standards, or we would all be like you, cutting each other’s throats and feeding off each other’s carcasses. It is up to us to hold politicians to our moral standards. The way I see it, Colonel, you are responsible for the deaths of the men, women and children of that village, and probably many more. That makes you trash.”
It was an odd moment. His hand fell away from his holster, as though he agreed with me and had resigned himself to a punishment that had been too long coming.
“Just tell me something,” he said. “You’ve seen a lot of death, like I have. Is this it? Do we get a second chance? Or do we just go to hell? Or Valhalla?”
I had often wondered. All special forces guys wonder at some point. I didn’t know the answer, but I said, “I think we get another chance.”
“Who are you?”
“I take out the trash. Compose yourself, and take my advice. Promise yourself you’re going to do it differently next time.”
He nodded and closed his eyes. I made it quick and painless, through his forehead. Maybe it was more than he deserved, but I wasn’t there to punish. I was there to clean up.
I slid the bay doors closed, then hunkered down beside Diana.
“I am going to let you sit in the copilot’s seat. This is going to be a long flight in a very noisy, uncomfortable plane. You are going to behave and do as you’re told. Or I am going to put your lights out and you are going to spend the entire thirty-seven hours trussed like a turkey in the cargo bay.”
She didn’t respond in any way other than staring at me through stringy wet hair. I cut her loose and she ripped the gag from her mouth and slammed it on the floor of the plane.
“You are in so much trouble, mister! I am going to make sure you…”
I wasn’t in the mood and I cut her short.
“Keep giving me attitude, Diana, you’re going to spend the most memorable thirty-seven hours of your life. Now shut up, strap yourself into the copilot’s seat and let’s get the hell out of here.”
Ten
It was a seven-thousand, five-hundred-mile flight all told.
Thirty-seven hours at a cruising speed a little over two hundred miles an hour. The colonel had submitted a flight plan via Flores in the Azores to Cadiz, but even so I kept the Albatross low and avoided bleeping on any radar screens until we were out over the Atlantic. I hadn’t counted the money in the hold yet, but I was pretty sure my original estimate was about right at a hundred grand, and I wasn’t keen to get hauled in with a hundred grand in stolen drug proceeds and a stolen plane whose owner was going to turn up pretty soon on the shores of Lake Superior.
So I followed his flight plan back into Canadian airspace, out of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the southern tip of Newfoundland. That took seven hours, and it was a
bright morning, with the sun sparkling on a vast, black sea by the time we left the American continent behind.
That was when I called the brigadier to give him the good news.
“Where are you? Are you alone?”
“No, I am not alone. I am climbing to twenty thousand feet over the North Atlantic, east of St. John.”
He was quiet for a surprisingly long time. Eventually all he said was, “I see. With whom?”
“Our client, Diana. She is sitting next to me in the copilot’s seat, immersed in the view.”
A loud sigh. “What are you doing over the North Atlantic? Please don’t say, ‘Flying east.’ I want to know why. The understanding was that you would bring our client to Washington.”
“Yeah, see? That’s the risk when you keep your operatives in the dark about important information.”
His answer was quick and sharp. “What information?”
“How about the fact that the CIA are after her? When I arrived, they sent a four-man hit squad. That was then modified, and a nine-man team of mercenaries came after us, with instructions to take her back to Cadiz, in Spain, alive. And how about the minor detail that the ball everyone is chasing is an NPP. You know what that is?”
He grunted. “It’s theoretical. It can’t be made with current technology.”
“Then maybe your client has been working at Roswell or White Sands and she’s received some private tuition from the little green men, because Field Officer Frank Mendez sure seems convinced that she has one.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no? I have killed thirteen men in the last twenty-four hours! They weren’t hunting a theory, sir!”
He sounded impatient. “Well, she’s duped the CIA. It’s not impossible to do. It has been done before. What do you hope to achieve by going to Cadiz, apart from to eat superb fish and drink excellent wine at bargain basement prices?”
It was hard to keep the anger out of my voice. “Actually, sir, those two items were not on my agenda! I plan to find Mendez and put his head under the wheel of my rental car until he tells me what the hell gives with this dame, whose name is not Diana! And what the hell an NPP is!”
He sighed again. “Dame? Good lord. An NPP is a nano-particle programmer, and, as I have already explained to you, they are currently impossible to make. And it is a good thing too, because it would usher in a nightmarish world. However, thankfully, the technology simply does not exist. Your orders. Have you got a clear mind?”
“Of course.”
“Pay a visit to Mendez at the field office. Put Diana up at the Occidental. You’d better pose as a couple. Where are you refueling?”
“Flores.”
“Of course, the Azores. Are you dealing with Paolo Santos there?”
“I think so. Head of customs on the island. Bent as a four-penny bit, as you would say.”
“That’s him. He’ll hand you some documents. They’re good. You’ll be Mr. and Mrs. Ethelbaum… Peter and Louise.”
“Jesus, sir! Can’t we just be Brown or Smith?”
“Far too suspicious. After all, who on Earth would choose the name Ethelbaum?”
I didn’t tell him what I thought about that. I just said, “Fine.”
“So once in Cadiz, leave Louise at the Occidental and go and visit Mendez. Explain to him that there is no such thing as an NPP, that they are impossible to make with modern technology, and that he is to cease harassing her.”
“What if he tells me to go to hell? The CIA has just lost four men that he requested to go and hit her…”
He paused a fraction of a second, then said, “Explain it to him in a way he will understand, Peter. Then go and have dinner. It’s one of my favorite towns, Cadiz. I recommend the Taberna del Tío de la Tiza, absolutely superb. Then fly back directly to DC the following day.”
I sighed. Eight years in England, and I still couldn’t get used to the way they did things. All the clinical, ruthless efficiency of an android with the cozy good manners of Miss Marple.
I said, “I hear you.”
“Do you mean you understand me?”
“Yes, sir, I mean that I understand you.”
“Good. Keep me posted, but only where necessary.”
Diana had shifted her attention from the ocean outside the window to me. “Who the hell was that?”
“I have no idea.”
“He was British.”
“No kidding.”
“You work for the British?”
I felt a sudden pulse of anger and turned to her. “Who do you work for, Diana? Do you know how many times I have put my life on the line to save your skinny butt?”
Her face flushed. I ignored it and went on. “Thirteen times in the last twenty-four hours!” I pointed back, into the fuselage. “And those men I have killed, they were not daemons or monsters, they were men with wives and children, and I killed them to save your life! Why?”
“I can’t tell you…”
“No! I’ll tell you! Because you are too dumb, too self-involved, too vain and too damned stupid to realize that in order to help you I need your help!” I drew breath and charged again. “Those men did not need to die! If you had spoken to me, just given me the damned basics, those men could have lived. They died so that you could play your stupid games!”
She was silent and the plane droned on, seeming to crawl slowly over the sea far below, while Newfoundland slipped steadily behind us. Eventually she said, “I don’t work for anybody.” She looked down at her hands in her lap. “If I have made mistakes, I am sorry. And if people have died who didn’t need to die, I am sorry too.”
I glanced at her. There was still no expression on her face, but she managed to make that seem sincere.
“Mendez was determined to kill me. Those four men he sent after me, you saw what they did. They were professional assassins, and they had no compunction about killing me.” She raised her eyes to look at me. “I’m not exactly Rambo, and I have absolutely no experience in this kind of thing. I am just trying to survive.”
“OK,” I growled. “This is all very moving and tender, but how about we get down to brass tacks. Why does the CIA want you? More to the point, why does Frank Mendez want you?”
She cleared her throat and gazed back out of the window. I couldn’t keep the sarcasm from my voice. “What? Are you dreaming up a convincing story?”
She didn’t smile. She shook her head.
“No. Frank Mendez does not work for the CIA—not strictly. He is a field officer in the National Clandestine Service. He was detailed to investigate a laboratory in the Sierra de Malaga, where very advanced research was being carried out with a very low profile.”
“What kind of research?”
“It was a collaboration between the University of Malaga, which is desperately underfunded, the Centro Andaluz de Nanomedicina, which is equally underfunded, and the Mohammed ben Amini Memorial Foundation of New York, which has enough money to bankroll a whole new nation.”
I had gone cold and could feel my skin prickling on my arms and on the back of my neck.
“The Mohammed ben Amini Memorial Foundation?”
She frowned at me curiously. “Yeah, why?”
“I knew a Mohammed ben Amini once. He had a nickname. They called him the Butcher of Al-Landy.”
“I don’t know anything about that. All I know is that the foundation was providing the money—and plenty of it—for the research into very advanced nano-technology. Naturally, any products they came up with would become the property of Nano-Systems, a corporation owned partly by the Spanish government, partly by the University of Malaga and partly by the Centro Andaluz de Nanomedicina. Those three accounted for forty-nine percent of the shares. The other fifty-one percent belonged to the Al-Nabiin Corporation.”
“Cute.”
“What is?”
I listened to the drone of the engines for a while, letting my mind reach out and explore. After a while I said, “Al-Nabiin, it means the prop
het in Arabic. In Islam there is only one prophet—”
“Mohammed.”
“Islam is nothing if not clear. There is but one god, and Mohammed is his prophet. So what was your connection with this research?”
She puffed out her cheeks. “It was a complicated setup. Really, UMA—the University of Malaga—mainly took care of recruiting talent and presenting a respectable, Western front, so to speak. The Centro Andaluz de Nanomedicina were tasked with the medical application of the systems that were developed. And those systems were developed by a pretty much independent team that worked in virtual isolation near a tiny mountain village called Álora, high in the mountains behind Malaga. That lab was known simply as Nano-Systems, or Systems, and precisely what they did only they knew.”
“They and the Butcher’s heirs and assigns.”
“I guess.”
“And you worked for Systems.”
“You guessed it.”
“And by the sounds of it, Frank Mendez did more than just observe. He got involved. And when you did a bunk, he and his pals at the foundation thought you had only taken the information that was in your head, and as long as it was in your head, they could safely neutralize you. But then they realized you had taken something more, notebooks, disks, drives—or a prototype known as a stone. And whatever it was you had, had to be recovered before you were killed. That was when he sent the second team.”
“Got it in one.”
“What were you at the lab?”
“Junior research assistant. That’s why they always say, never trust a junior research assistant.”
“Is that what they say? So what is it exactly that you took?”
“Your testosterone buddy already told you. I took an NPP. A nano-particle programmer.”
“Which my boss tells me exists only in the theoretical world of theoretical physics.”
She sighed and raised her hands like she was beseeching the Good Lord to give her patience. “OK, to even begin to understand this, you need to go right back to Heisenberg.”
“Back to Heisenberg? I have never been to Heisenberg.”
She shifted around in her seat. Her eyes now seemed to have some life in them. “OK, everything is made of atoms, right?”