Guillaume read it too. He fixed Dad with a look of direst threat, then extended his arm full length to level the Glock at him.
Ross swallowed, shaking his head faster: Please, Dad, don’t do this.
Guillaume cocked the hammer, sweat trickling down his forehead. Dad’s nostrils flared, an unmistakable Fuck You, then his lips formed.
Please no, Ross wordlessly implored.
‘WE’RE HERE!’ Dad shouted, the words barely out before the first gunshot sounded.
Ross couldn’t close his eyes before the hammer fell. He witnessed Guillaume’s arm rear up as five bullets ripped through the walls and into his chest. Their jailer was knocked back like a reeling boxer, matter exploding from his body with each blow, then he fell backwards to the floor.
Dad was down too, howling ‘Ah, Jesus,’ as he clutched his right forearm, where Guillaume’s single erratic bullet had lodged.
The door flew open from a kick and a black-clad figure filled the frame: some futuristic cyber-soldier; black goggles around the eyes, stick-mike and earpiece wired to the mothership, wet black hair swept behind the night-scope, black Kevlar armour hugging the trunk, black rubber covering the skin from neck to toes. The figure stepped forward into the cabin, both hands extending a nine-mill, advancing to stand over Guillaume. The gun fired twice more, two to the head, end of.
Four more shots reported from the corridor, then ceased.
The figure turned to survey the prisoners, staring for what seemed an age.
‘Who …’ Ross began to ask, but was stopped by the figure – he now thought, surprisingly, that it might even be a woman – holding up a hand and hissing, ‘Shh’. He thought he heard a crackle of transmission in the earpiece, confirmed when she said: ‘All the way around. Roger. On it.’
She knelt rapidly and picked Guillaume’s gun from his dead fingers, then positioned herself in a crouch, looking towards the far end of the room as though there was someone standing there.
‘Get down,’ she told him. ‘Now.’
Ross didn’t argue. He dropped to the floor and watched her cross both weapons at her wrists, her gaze and her guns tracking along the wall like she could see through it. Then she opened fire again and he realised that this was because she was seeing through it. She directed ten or twelve rounds upwards through the partition in a mercilessly rapid syncopation: fingers gripping, hammers alternating, kickback compensated by the crouch and the cross-over. Somewhere amid the final shots of this salvo he heard a thump from beyond the wall. She paused, held her pose, guns still pointed but now silenced.
Ross was in awe. The men who’d held him had been the real deal, not some bunch of minimum-wage security guards with a Mussolini complex; but these guys, whoever they were, were something else entirely; and this woman, this cyber-assassin, was just the baddest of the bad.
‘Hostiles four and five eliminated,’ she reported. ‘Prisoners secure but Tom has been hit. Somboon, we need that boat here soon as.’
Her accent was Scottish, her voice just about the most reassuring sound he’d ever heard; reassuring, in fact, to the point of familiar, unnervingly so when she said Dad’s name. No. Slow down. Knowing names meant nothing. They’d have been briefed. His emotions were running away with him. He didn’t even know yet whether he could trust these people. But there was something about … no. Get it together, man.
She stood up again and turned to face the two of them.
‘It’s okay now, Ross, it’s over,’ she said. ‘Tom, are you all right? Is it just your arm?’
‘I’ll be fine as soon as I get off this …’ Dad’s reply petered out in confusion, perhaps down to his pain and disorientation, as surely he couldn’t be entertaining the same bizarre delusion that he knew that voice.
‘Who are you?’ Ross asked, his register falling to a bewildered whisper. ‘Why are you here?’
She seemed to start at this, as though surprised by what he considered the most natural questions he could possibly have asked at that moment. Then she muttered ‘Oh, the mask,’ and took off her goggles, at which point very little in Ross’s world continued to make much sense. For a horrible moment he thought this meant he was about to wake up in the same cabin and find himself still a prisoner, but the smell of cordite and the thumping in his chest were unmistakably real.
‘You were out playing past your bedtime, son,’ his mum said, tears in her eyes. ‘I had to come and get you.’
One last bullet
Jane gave Ross a tight, lingering hug of the kind she’d reliably embarrassed him with down the years, and then finally let him go to board the chopper. Nicholas Willis was already on board, having completed his business with Bett. He looked tired and rather ruffled, like he hadn’t had the quietest time of it of late either, but he seemed, for all of that, very calm. There was something of the eccentric but absent-minded schoolmaster about him, and Jane found it hard to imagine him playing hardnose with the types she had encountered at the Reine d’Azur. Willis had flown to Nice in person to escort Ross back to Marledoq, a touch she had admired, but perhaps further evidence that he was, sadly, a bit of a walking anachronism.
Alexis was on board too, up front with Rebekah. She’d seemed a little jumpy since they got Ross back to ‘Maison Blah’, as she called it, more so when Willis arrived this morning.
‘This job began at Marledoq, and I won’t feel it’s done until it ends there too,’ she’d explained when Rebekah asked why she wanted to tag along.
‘It began at Chassignan,’ Rebekah corrected. ‘That’s where the apartment was.’
‘Whatever.’
Ross climbed aboard, then Alexis hopped out and slid the cabin door closed. Alexis stepped back into the cockpit and a few minutes later they took off.
Jane watched the bird shrink towards the horizon, wishing she could have had a little longer with her son, but aware that there would be time – there would be plenty of time.
She made her way back inside the house and eventually tracked Bett down to the kitchen, where he was making coffee with his grand contraption.
‘Any chance of a cappuccino?’ she asked.
‘Certainly, Mrs Fleming,’ he answered, opening the fridge and pouring milk into a stainless-steel jug.
‘You can knock that off now. Ross is away and Tom’s going to be in the hospital another couple of days.’
‘And then what?’ he asked, his voice becoming quiet to the point of timid.
Jane looked away, didn’t answer, didn’t want to.
‘How did your meeting with Mr Willis go?’ she asked, self-consciously changing the subject. ‘I take it everyone’s satisfied they’ve plugged the leak, otherwise Ross wouldn’t have gone back.’
‘Following up your lead, Willis uncovered a slew of emails between this man Segnier and OSE.’
‘Ross had never heard of him.’
‘He works for Phobos, the parent company, based at their premises in Lyon. That was why he didn’t have direct access to the data. I should say, “worked” for Phobos. He’s been fired and a criminal investigation is pending.’
‘Still, the information is out there. What steps are they taking to ensure someone doesn’t just kidnap Ross all over again?’
Bett placed a wide mug of espresso in front of Jane and poured frothy milk into it until it reached the brim. He left the jug on the table, handy for a top-up.
‘That game is all but over. With Ross no longer up for grabs by underhand means, it’s been back to business for the companies interested in the Gravity Well.’
‘And they all just act like nothing happened?’
‘Officially, nothing did. The auction never took place, and all of the evidence we garnered about who was bidding was illegally obtained. But the bottom line is, Willis has secured a more than adequate compensation for what they were attempting. He’s concluded a highly lucrative arrangement with British Defence Engineering and their Italian partners CMK.’
‘Phobos is selling off Deimos, then?’
‘No. It’s an investment deal. The Brits and Italians will put, or should I say torrentially pour, vast sums into Deimos’s research and development, in exchange for a share in all resulting technologies, though obviously there’s only one resulting technology they’re really interested in. Deimos is in the money, and not a moment too soon, considering the size of invoice I’m about to hit Willis with.’
‘You’re worth every penny,’ she said, placing a hand on his.
‘We’ve got a temporary apartment organised for you,’ Willis told him. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d want to go back to the old one, and it’s your choice, but given everything that’s happened, it might be best if we kept you somewhere under wraps until this deal is finalised. I’m so sorry about what happened, I really am.’
Ross looked across the cabin at the old man. It had taken him a while to recover from the mind-buggering jolt of his mother having turned into Carrie-Ann Moss, but once he had resumed accepting what was before his eyes as fact, certain of those facts had started to form a pattern.
The first clue was that it was this guy Bett and his people who were behind the rescue, the same outfit as Willis contracted for the Tiger Team exercise and security overhaul. The second, as he’d suspected all along, was written all over the face of that girl Alexis, who’d been insinuating herself into every room, every conversation and who was even now on board this flight. She was the one who stole the files, but Bett didn’t know, and she was shitting herself in case Ross made mention of it; hanging around him so that if he did tumble her, she’d at least know when the cat was out of the bag.
And then the big one, the thing that pulled everything into focus: Willis nailing BDE and CMK for a combined investment of nearly two hundred million euros.
‘You leaked it, didn’t you,’ Ross said, a statement rather than a question.
Willis gazed out of the window for a moment, procrastinating. Then he turned back to Ross and nodded.
‘I did.’
‘There is no Segnier.’
‘No.’
‘And you never really asked Bett what that girl Alexis was doing with my computer that night, did you?’
‘No.’
Ross shook his head.
‘If I hadn’t seen enough violence of late, I’d be kicking your fucking head in right now, you know that?’
‘I do, and I am truly sorry, Ross. I had no idea it would work out this way.’
‘They came after my family, for Christ’s sake, not just me. That’s what you exposed me to.’
Willis nodded, taking his licks, but Ross didn’t have the energy to dole out too many of them. They sat in silence for a while, listening to the muted sound of the rotorblades and the engines. Then Willis sat up straighter and folded his arms, the penitence erased from his expression, replaced by a piercing stare of which Ross would never have imagined him capable.
‘You’re right to be angry, Ross, absolutely right. But I’m not the only one with a confession to make, am I?’
Bett pulled his hand away rather stiffly, using it to lift his mug as an attempted disguise for his discomfort.
‘How is your husband?’ he asked, by way of emphasising the source.
Jane sighed, folding her arms.
‘He’s okay. They had to operate to remove the bullet. The operation went fine, but he was still unconscious when I left. They’re going to keep him there for observation.’
‘You speak to him much before he went under?’
‘Yeah, as much conversation as I’d normally have out of him in a month; once he was convinced he wasn’t hallucinating from the pain, that is. Shit, that reminds me, he gave me something to give to Ross and I forgot about it.’
‘What?’
‘Weird. He thought he was hallucinating and I thought he was delirious. He said it was something Ross had given him to be used as a last resort, which he wouldn’t be needing any more.’
‘And what was it?’
She paused, realising how crazy it was going to sound.
‘A tube of lip balm.’
Bett’s face remained admirably free of mirth. He seemed curious, in fact.
‘Lip balm? Can I see it?’
‘Sure,’ she said, and reached into her jacket pocket. She handed it to him. He examined the tube as it lay flat on his palm, then opened it and twisted the end to project the pearly white shaft.
‘As I said, Tom could have been havering; after all, he …’
She broke off as Bett snapped the soft cylinder and revealed something metallic to be concealed underneath. His fingers pulled the clinging balm away in chunks until they were left holding a solitary bullet.
‘Tom said Ross wouldn’t tell him what it was, for both their protection. I don’t get it. It’s just a bullet.’
‘Less baffling than lip balm, granted,’ Bett said. ‘But I must confess I’m at a loss.’
He placed it gently upright on the table, pinched between his thumb and forefinger. She saw a tiny twitch furrow his brow, then he lifted his hand. The bullet jumped from his grasp of its own accord and hit the milk jug with a clang, eliciting a small shriek of fright from Jane.
Bett picked the bullet off of the side of the jug, exerting some force to do so, then looked at it closer. ‘It’s magnetised,’ he said, sounding perplexed. ‘Except, as we discussed the other day, you can’t magnetise lead. This slug is made of steel. Wait a second. I think … Come on,’ he said, getting up.
‘Where?’
‘The firing range. I’ve got a hunch about something.’
She followed him, the pair of them all but running to get to the basement. Bett selected a pistol of the appropriate calibre and slid the bullet into the breech. He flipped a switch on the controls and sent the target dummy in front of him all the way to the back of the range. Then he held the gun in both hands and fired.
Bett nodded as soon as the shot went off – unusually quiet, Jane thought – then hurdled the barrier and began walking towards the target. Once he reached the dummy, he bent down to pick something up. When he stood upright again, he was holding the slug in his right hand.
‘It didn’t even penetrate the cloth,’ he reported. ‘Barely enough powder in the jacket to get it across the range. He must have had these specially manufactured, maybe even made them himself. I’m betting the dummy he used in the video was made of balsa, something you could rip to splinters with a pea shooter and a healthy pair of lungs. And that nailbomb – it wasn’t held together by cellophane just because it’s transparent, it was because cellophane wouldn’t need much of a charge for the magnetised nails to rip through it.’ Bett grinned, utterly delighted. ‘Your boy is even more of a genius than I thought.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’s pulled off a two-hundred-million-euro fake.’
‘It wasn’t always my intention,’ Ross told Willis. ‘In the beginning, when I first had the idea, I genuinely did believe it might be possible, that there might be some way, even if the technology was decades off. But by the time I’d accepted it couldn’t be done, I’d already envisaged the knock-on effects. I’d imagined how merely the knowledge that it was in the pipeline might scare people in the industry into thinking about other technologies, make governments, make everybody think about ways to defend ourselves that wouldn’t involve blowing holes in people. And in the short term, I’d envisaged how the project might make Phobos think they had a reason to keep Deimos as a going concern. There were always rumours that they were pulling the plug on us and you were going to retire. I thought if I could make you believe in the Gravity Well, it would protect all the other projects we’ve worked on.’
‘They were more than rumours, Ross. I was thinking about retiring; I still plan to, and soon. I’ve grown to hate this business. A little late in the day, you might argue, but I got there in the end. Once upon a time, perhaps it was diff … no, once upon a time, perhaps I was different. In recent years I’ve not been so easy with what we’re about. That’s why
I created Deimos. It was my brainchild, or rather the salve to my conscience, to back the parallel development of non-lethal enforcement weapons. Do you want to know how cynical this business really is?’
‘I think I spent the last couple of weeks finding out.’
‘In a nutshell, it can be summed up by the fact that when you mention non-lethal weapons to most people in this game, they understand it as a euphemism for torture devices. Truth is, I was kidding myself. I was never going to be able to persuade my fellow directors at Phobos to keep pumping money into Deimos, not the kind of investment it really needs. But then came your Project F.’
‘When did you suss it was a fake?’
‘Oh, fairly early, Ross,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Resistance Paradox Effect? You’re an inspired engineer and a brilliant designer, but a rotten physicist and an even worse liar. Our visions weren’t too far apart, however, or our methods: scare the industry into investing in new technologies – and that’s exactly what we’ve done.’
‘But once they’ve got access to Marledoq, it won’t take them long to find out the Gravity Well is just a fucking big magnet. And then they’ll close us down and asset-strip the place, not to mention suing Phobos out of existence.’
Willis was smiling, that newly revealed hardened edge to his apparent happiness.
‘No they bloody won’t. I’ve been negotiating this deal for weeks now, with several interested parties. OSE were never really in the frame, incidentally. They just thought they were, but I was using Parrier because I needed someone sufficiently greedy and corrupt to take the bait in the first place. I was never going to sell Deimos. BDE/CMK offered less than most but they got the nod because they agreed to the terms I was offering: an investment, not a purchase, and a ringfenced investment at that. They are investing in our development of non-lethal technologies. They get a corresponding share in the rights to those technologies and a very generous share in the back-end, but we retain control. Of course, the technology they’re really interested in doesn’t exist, but nor are they ever supposed to have heard about it.’
All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye Page 44