by Blake Banner
Njal didn’t answer, he kept thumbing his screen until finally he put down his cell and sat. Then he looked at me across the table. “Jim has equipment at the university that uses genetic algorithms to match synthetic irises to real ones. I sent him a film of Timmerman’s iris. By tomorrow, he can send us an image you can either use from the screen or print, that will be recognized by the laser scan. All you need now is the thumb print and the password.”
Timmerman said, “Are you going to take my thumb?”
I shook my head. “No, only the print. We’ll paint your thumb with Latex LD, let it dry, peel it off and turn it inside out; wear it like an invisible glove.”
Njal showed me his blank face. “You got latex LD?”
“We can pick some up in any art shop.”
“OK, so all you need is the password.”
I bit into my sandwich. “Is that going to be a problem?”
He sounded exhausted. “You know it’s not.”
“What is it, Jean-Claude?”
He laughed. “I doubt you would ever have guessed. It is a shame I am not a braver man. Capital ‘K’ for Katrina, small ‘a’, capital ‘O’ for Omega, small ‘m’, and then phi, the golden mean.”
“What?”
He sighed. “The golden mean, the divine ration, so many names. It is a number: one point six one eight. Ka Om one six one eight. It is a number that occurs in nature, in mathematics, music, architecture.”
“That’s wonderful. How do I get to the basement?”
He explained in detail. I finished my sandwich and drained my coffee while he sat huddled and shivering, sipping from his cup. When I was done, I said, “Jean-Claude, if everything you have told me is true, tomorrow we will fly to Luxembourg. You will wait with Njal at a hotel. When I have finished the work I have to do, you will be reunited with your wife and children, and you will never see us or hear from us again.”
“But Omega will kill me.”
I shook my head. “I told you that would not happen, and it won’t.” I turned to face him. “But be in no doubt that if you have lied to me, what happened here today…” I shook my head. “It will be nothing.”
“I have understood, Mr. Walker. You can stop threatening me.”
I nodded. “Good. Go upstairs. Get some sleep.” I looked at Njal. “There are sedatives in the first aid kit. You want to take him up?”
He stood without saying anything, helped Timmerman to his feet and supported him up the stairs, through the door at the top and disappeared toward the bedrooms. I poured myself another large whiskey, cleaned my knife and put it back in my boot, then went and sat on the doorstep, lit a cigarette and sat thinking and allowing my adrenaline and my heart rate to ease up.
The afternoon was hot and still. Far off, a dog was barking like the world was coming to an end, but the sugarcane on the riverbanks ahead of me just sighed and swayed gently in what little breeze there was. Over in the eucalyptus trees, the cicadas were loud, but they didn’t seem to disturb the stillness of the afternoon. They amplified it instead.
Tomorrow we would be gone. Tomorrow we would be in Luxembourg. It was too easy. It had all gone too easy. I told myself it was like the Celts storming down through Italy and sacking Rome. Rome had been overconfident, prepared for everything except the simplest attack. That was what we had done. We had done the one thing they never had expected, they couldn’t have expected. I told myself that they didn’t know I had the list, they didn’t know I knew who the head of Omega Europe was. I told myself it had been a perfect plan and a perfect attack. That was why it had been simple.
The Regiment were used to their operations seeming too simple, for those very reasons: good, meticulous planning, striking where least expected, and efficient execution.
And yet.
It was too easy.
Njal came down and joined me. He had the bottle and a glass. He filled his glass and I gave him the cigarettes and the Zippo.
“How is he?”
“Yuh, he’s OK. We go to Luxembourg tomorrow?” I nodded. “The plan is going well.” He sucked on his cigarette and breathed out smoke through his nose. “Maybe too well.”
“I know, but hard as I try, I can’t find the flaw.”
He was quiet, but after a moment, he gave a slow, guttural laugh. “We find out soon enough, huh?” He offered me a slow grin. I smiled. He added, “Just remember to duck when the shit hits the fan.”
“Yeah.” My smile faded. “You think the information he gave us is good?”
He studied the tip of his cigarette. “Is hard to tell, Lacklan, but I think is good. He was pale, he turned yellow, his pupils were like plates. This is all from the autonomic nervous system. You can’t fake that. He was shitting himself with fear. You played it good. I think he told the truth.” He shrugged and studied me with inscrutable eyes. “He is just a man, in the end of the day, with a wife and two kids. You hit him where it hurts. He wasn’t prepared.”
“Like the barbarians in Rome.”
“Yuh, like that.”
He drained his whiskey. “I go to check the stew. You wanna book some tickets for Luxemburg for tomorrow? No trains, please.”
“Don’t worry, no trains. We’re chartering a private jet.”
“Cool. We travel in style, like James Bond. Also, find an art shop in Cadiz or Jerez.”
I followed him inside and sat staring at my phone for a while. Then I looked over at the chair, with the wood of the arm gashed and drenched with blood. I could still hear Njal’s voice in my head: He is just a man, in the end of the day, with a wife and two kids…
I put my phone in my pocket and went to the kitchen for a cloth, a bowl of water and some detergent. Sure, it had been too easy, for me. It hadn’t been easy for Timmerman.
FIFTEEN
I booked an air taxi for the following day at noon, flying out of Jerez instead of Seville, mainly because Seville was the obvious choice, but also because it was busy and there would be lots of cops there. People and cops were two things we wanted to avoid. I also found an art shop, not in Cadiz but in Torre de Olvera. It was a half hour’s drive, but it was worth it. They had liquid latex of a density suitable to the task. I bought a liter, brought it back and we made a mold of Timmerman’s thumb. Turned inside out, it made a perfect thumb glove, which we tested successfully on his iPhone.
After that, the afternoon went slowly. A couple of choppers flew over. One of them I heard, but didn’t see. The other was military, probably from the American base at Rota. I sat on the doorstep, smoking and watching it move slowly over the hills and thinking about the report we’d seen in Brussels, that Emanuel Van Zuydam, Theta, was the subject of a plot. That alert had been partly responsible for our being able to snatch Timmerman so easily, because all the focus of their attention had been on protecting President Van Zuydam. It was doubtful Timmerman would have had much more security than he did—he had no reason to suspect he was a target. But if security had not been quite so tight on Van Zuydam, there might have been more eyes on the Gare du Nord, and Njal and I might have been spotted. I found that interesting for several reasons, and one of those reasons was that it meant Omega trusted their source.
If the tip off had come from a new source they were not sure of, or whose reliability was in question, security would have been heightened generally. But their information had been very specific: it was Theta, President Emanuel Van Zuydam, who was threatened. They had received that information and taken it as gospel.
And there was only one place where they could have gotten that information.
Correction, I told myself. There were two places. And that was something I was going to have to deal with when I got back.
Right now, I was wondering just how far we had been compromised. When I had told Marni we were after Van Zuydam, that had been a deliberate plant, and it had worked better than I had imagined. But now, there was something else playing on my mind, watching the chopper moving slowly across the hills. It was following a gr
id pattern. It was searching, and in peace time, military aircraft don’t conduct searches over civilian areas, unless it’s under emergency conditions. I was wondering what Spanish or European emergency might have a single American chopper conducting a search across the Sierra de Cadiz.
Njal came and stood, leaning on the doorjamb.
“He’s looking for us.”
I nodded. “I’d like to know how the fuck he knows where to look. How’s Timmerman?”
“Weak. I give him some broth from the stew. He is not a young man.”
“Can he travel?”
“Now?”
“Tonight.”
He shrugged. “Depends how far. He needs rest. Maybe he gets a fever. That’s not a problem, but the fever leads to something else… I am not a doctor.” He jerked his head toward the chopper, which had suddenly banked and was disappearing west, toward the airbase. “D’Arcy has sold us out?”
I shook my head. “No. It’s not D’Arcy.”
“I am not compromised.” It was a flat, unequivocal statement.
I said, “I know you’re not.”
“So, they are tracking him, they are tracking the car or they are tracking you.”
“Not necessarily. We could have been caught on CCTV leaving Cordoba. The Guardias who came to the house know the make, color and model of the SUV.”
I knew that was unlikely and so did he. He said, “Yuh, so they can search the whole of the south of Spain, and maybe also Morocco and Portugal. You been keeping your cell switched off, right?”
“Mostly.”
“Now?”
“Off, since I booked the plane.”
He pointed at me. “Somebody has your number. Somebody has given them your number, and they are tracking your GPS. Keep it off now, Lacklan.” He was right and I knew it. I nodded. He went on, “We have to go. It’s maybe hour and a half to Cadiz.”
“They are looking for us in this area, Njal. But if you’re right and they are using my GPS, they can’t pinpoint us as long as I keep my cell switched off. We’re inside and the Toyota’s in the garage, there is nothing for them to see or recognize. But if we go now, in daylight, while they are still searching, the chances are high they’ll see us.”
He thought for a moment. “OK, so we go when is dark. Nine or ten o’clock. We dump the car in Cadiz and get a taxi to the airport.”
It made sense. I said, “What about Timmerman?”
“He is not so good. We should kill him. He is a liability and now he is expendable.”
“No, he’s not. If he lied about Luxembourg, about the entry code, about any of that, we need him alive.”
“Then we have to take him with us, Lacklan. If he gets sick, we cross that bridge when we get to it. We cannot stay here.” He looked at me with that blunt, no-bullshit Scandinavian directness and said, “If we stay here, we gonna die.”
“Yeah, I know. Give Timmerman a chance to recover for a few hours. Ten o’clock, we’re out of here. Will that satisfy you?”
He didn’t answer for a while, then he said, “We got two Glock 17s. We can’t make a stand. We got to be ninja, Lacklan. We got to disappear.” He gave the door a gentle thump with his fist. “I’m gonna get some sleep. I drive.”
He went upstairs.
He was right again. We were in violation of every most basic military principle: we were not choosing our battles, we were not drawing the enemy to our chosen battlefield, we had no firepower, no defensive fall back position, no offensive capability and no reinforcements; and on top of that, we were compromised by a leak. We had just one option, like he’d said, to go ninja. But with an injured, hostile EU dignitary on your hands, going ninja was not going to be so easy.
I had some chicken stew, then stretched out on the sofa to get some rest before the long night ahead. I didn’t sleep. Something you learn on long, covert operations in the jungle or in the desert is to relax your body and your mind so deeply that they seem to be asleep, whilst keeping your senses alert. It’s a skill animals have naturally, but which we have forgotten after too many centuries of civilization. In places like Afghanistan, Colombia and Mexico, it’s a skill that can save your life. It saved mine more than once. It saved mine that day, at fifteen minutes after eight.
Suddenly, I was wide awake. I had heard something, or smelled it. One or all of my senses had been alerted and I knew something was wrong. I moved to the door. Outside, the sun was setting and the light was dull and grainy, visibility was poor. I pushed the door closed and locked it, moved quickly to the kitchen and locked that door, too. Then I ran upstairs. Timmerman was snoring. I opened Njal’s door and said, “We have company.”
He was awake immediately and sat up, pulling his Glock from under his pillow. “What did you see?”
“Nothing yet. I think I heard something.”
I didn’t need to explain. He cocked the pistol and moved to the window, staying in the shadows. “I don’t see nothing.”
“You ready to move?”
“Yeah.”
“Get Timmerman up. I’m going to check downstairs.”
I took the steps three at a time, went to the kitchen, peered out left and right and headed back to the living room. That was when they opened up. It was a hail of bullets that smashed the shutters over the windows, shattered the glass into a lethal spray and punched splintered holes through the big, double doors. Lead slugs pounded into the walls in showers of plaster and white paint and ricocheted, whining around the huge, dark room.
I dropped and covered my head, starting to crawl back toward the kitchen. But there, too, I could hear glass shattering and bullets singing and whining as they hit pots and pans, smashed plates and glasses and tore up the walls.
Staying on my belly, I scrambled across the floor toward the wall by the front door while all around me, chairs danced and disintegrated, the whiskey bottle exploded and lead pellets of death bounced and sang off the walls.
Fortunately, the walls in question were four feet thick, and the hail of bullets was coming in only through the splintered door and the shattered windows. I figured we had thirty seconds maximum, and no plan. I bellowed:
“Njal! Come to the stairs!” The door opened and he came onto the staircase with Timmerman behind him. I said, “Front and back. We need to get to the garage.”
“Have you seen them?”
“No, but they’ll be coming through the back door in the next fifteen seconds. You cover this door. I’m going to greet them.”
I crawled across the floor and ran down the passage to the kitchen. The light was failing fast. I paused in the doorway to empty four rounds through the back door. Then I got on my knees beside the butane canister, pulled my knife from my boot and severed the hose that led to the cooker. The switch on top of the canister was in the closed position. I flipped my Zippo, lit it and waited, crouching behind the kitchen table.
I didn’t have wait long. There was the sound of running boots, maybe four pairs. They paused outside the door. Then there was a kick, the door bursting open. I waited two beats and then they came storming in. I flipped the switch on the canister, held the lighter to the hose and sprayed their legs with burning butane gas. As the flames enveloped them, they screamed. I stood and sprayed their chests and faces. They backed out into the gathering gloom like fire daemons from hell, thrashing, dancing and running. I turned off the switch, stepped to the door and shot them where they lay, twitching and smoldering in the dirt; released them from their hell. Then, I slung the heavy iron canister onto my shoulder, grabbed the other bottle of Jameson’s and ran back toward the bathroom.
The living room was under fire again. I figured they had intended to breach the house through the kitchen. They’d seen that that had failed and were now going to try a frontal assault.
I opened the bathroom door, going over the layout of the house in my head. The bathroom had to share a wall with the garage. I was certain of it. I put the canister against the wall, doused the floor with whiskey, opened the va
lve on the canister and stepped out of the bathroom, closing the door behind me. Still trailing whiskey, I threw myself on the floor at the entrance to the room and shouted to Njal, “Bring Timmerman down! Get behind the stairs!” and opened fire on the door. Just six shots while Njal dragged Timmerman down.
Then the door erupted. It was too soon for my plan. There were three of them that I could see. They wore camouflage jackets and ski masks and held assault rifles with flashlights attached. Two of them were kneeling at the front, and one behind them stood. I had no time to react. They opened up and sprayed the room with fire. I threw myself across the floor, behind the heavy chair where I had tied Timmerman that morning, as behind me, the wall erupted in dust and plaster.
I heard a cry of pain. The room was dark. The three guys stormed in, spraying left and right. I scrambled into the corner and lay flat. There was one guy in front of me. He had stopped firing and was directing the beam from his flashlight at the shattered rocking chair. Beyond him was another guy, shining his flashlight down the passage to the kitchen, and past him was a third, who I saw almost in slow motion, swinging around to where I knew Timmerman and Njal were. One thing was clear. Omega did not care whether they brought Timmerman back dead or alive. And that made him more valuable to me than to them.
I took aim and squeezed as I heard the kitchen door explode and boots storm in. My Glock spat and the far guy seemed to nod, once, emphatically and stumble. Then there were voices shouting in French and the kitchen passage was full of stamping boots and beams from flashlights fanning out across the room in the growing darkness.
The boozy smell of whiskey was strong in my nostrils. I flipped my Zippo and touched it to the floor. Ghostly, blue flames erupted from the tiles, licking at the wooden armchair and the shattered rocker, racing toward the kitchen passage.