SKELETON GOLD: Scorpion (James Pace novels Book 3)

by Andy Lucas

  ‘Maybe we should rustle up some hot food and then take advantage of these summerhouses to grab some sleep.’ Even though it was still only mid-afternoon, the shock was beginning to drain from their systems and everyone, except Baker, felt exhausted. ‘Who fancies being the cook?’

  Baker excused himself and returned to the security dome. Hammond decided to join him, to see if he could get anything else out of Doyle McEntire, which left Sarah and Pace to hit the kitchen. To their delight, one section of a huge freezer was filled with individual ready meals so they did not have to bother preparing anything. Sarah pulled out four sausage and mash meals, which microwaved in 5 minutes each, so within half an hour they had all eaten well, which made them feel even more fatigued.

  News from the outside world was better by the time they had finished eating. McEntire wanted them to stay in the safe house for a few more hours and then return to the London headquarters under cover of darkness.

  ‘What about the people who tried to kill us?’ Sarah asked. ‘If they realise we are still alive, won’t they try again?’

  ‘At the moment, we don’t know who they are,’ answered Baker. ‘The recovery teams have a set procedure when they clean up a scene. Bodies are searched, photographed, fingerprinted and blood is taken for DNA analysis before they are quietly cremated. There is a two hour time limit, to ensure any evidence is disposed of quickly. What will be happening at the moment is the follow-up investigation. Police DNA database checks for starters.’

  ‘We tap into systems in most countries of the world, not just here in the UK,’ added Hammond. ‘Within three hours, we will know everything we possibly can about these attackers, if they exist on record anywhere.’

  ‘Which is why my father wants us to stay put for a while,’ nodded Sarah, understanding. ‘He is hoping to have a better idea of what we’re up against by then.’

  Safe, deep within their underground fortress, there was no need for anyone to stand guard. They all agreed to get some sleep, including Baker, who wanted to be fresh and alert for their overnight run back to the McEntire building in Liverpool Street.

  Sarah led Pace into a nearby summerhouse, closing the door behind them and snuggling into him on a surprisingly comfortable king-size bed. Niggling discomfort from their lacerations and bruises was eased with some aspirin liberated from one of the medical kits. Pace held her closely, revelling in the feel of her warmth. As sleep crept up on him, his final waking thought was one of determination to find out who had just tried to kill them, and to make them pay.

  18

  Josephine was not used to failure in anything she did. To have two failures in the same day knocked her for six and had served to put her in a vile temper.

  What should have been a triumphant discovery within the newly rediscovered science laboratory had, in fact, been a total anti-climax. Apart from three old corpses, now mummified by a century in the dry, virtually airless environment, her great dream of finding a stockpile of the biological agent had been crushed.

  It was clear that this had once been a top laboratory, fitted out with the best equipment of the day. An industrial refrigerator in a locked room at the back was racked out to hold multiple vials but the rack was empty. The agent had been removed, long ago, and could be anywhere now.

  Although the blood from the last person she had murdered was still warm, she was angry enough to kill again. Fiona sensed the danger and moved to ease the tension. The hired help wouldn’t stay if their people kept being murdered.

  Back in the air conditioned confines of the helicopter, now whisking over the dunes at a thousand feet, its blades scything the hot air, she poured a chilled glass of champagne and handed it to her incensed boss.

  ‘I know you’re upset,’ she smiled, ‘but we knew it was a possibility. They made a batch of the Scorpion agent, crated it up and delivered it aboard the submarine. That’s where we will find it. The base was a long shot but one worth trying.’

  ‘I know we will find it,’ agreed Josephine, gripping her fine crystal glass so tightly that her knuckles turned white. ‘In a few days, the salvage ship will arrive and we can start searching for it. Then we will have both the gold, and Scorpion.’ Changing the subject, she sipped at nerd champagne. “Now, I want to know what the fuck just happened in England. Well?’

  Fiona knew she had no easy answers. They had received a coded message while inside the laboratory. Communication with their assault team had been lost and the media was running sensational stories about a would-be terrorist act in an English pub car park. A failed car bombing that had injured some customers with flying glass.

  The media should have been reporting a huge car bomb and the untimely deaths of James Pace, Max Hammond and Sarah McEntire.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Fiona admitted, guardedly, half expecting her boss to fly into a rage at any minute and subconsciously checking for any guns that might be laying around. ‘The last report had them at the pub, having planted the device. We’ve heard nothing more from them since.’

  ‘Communication problem?’

  ‘Unlikely,’ replied Fiona. ‘Their equipment is high quality. We have to assume they were discovered. They must be either in hiding, or they’re all dead.’

  ‘If they’re dead, it would be on the news,’ suggested Josephine, eyes burning into the fizzing bubbles.

  ‘Unless we are dealing with something a lot bigger than we first thought.’

  Josephine turned to regard her for a moment. ‘Like what? The McEntire Corporation is a huge company and they have high level security but they are just a business.’

  ‘Only someone with huge influence could cover up what we’ve done,’ explained Fiona. ‘Maybe McEntire has friends in very high places, perhaps even in MI5?’

  ‘Nothing tells us that, so we assume the team are hiding out and waiting for the right time to make contact with us again,’ decided Josephine flatly. ‘It grates on me that James Pace seems to be living a charmed life at the moment.’

  ‘Excuse me for saying so,’ Fiona pointed out, ‘but you had no need to try and have them killed. They came to the plant as representatives of the McEntire Corporation and they left having seen only what we wanted them to see. I agree that they had an agenda, and maybe it involves the gold, but ordering a hit was a risk. An unnecessary one,’ she added.

  Josephine knew her trusted assistant was correct but quietly weighed up whether her comments were meant to be supportive or insubordinate.

  ‘I cannot take the risk and their deaths would have resolved the matter.’

  ‘Not if McEntire does have influence with British security,’ argued Fiona, keeping her tone relaxed. ‘You have worked too hard, for too long, to throw it all away by getting hung up on these people. I’m just concerned about you, Josephine.’

  ‘This isn’t personal,’ Josephine lied. ‘James Pace is resourceful and we can’t take any chances. And if, somehow, he has managed to elude our hit squad, or even kill them, then he is even more dangerous than I’ve given him credit for.’

  ‘Taking on the McEntire Corporation is a mistake. Attracting that kind of attention when we are trying to pull the threads of the plan together is just crazy. Now is not the time to butt heads with anyone. That will come soon enough.’ Fiona’s protests fell on deaf ears. Josephine’s blood was up and she’d made up her mind.

  Flight time back to the desalination centre was a little over an hour, at a steady cruising speed. The pilot was reducing height as he made his approach, about ten miles out, when Fiona’s satellite phone buzzed in her pocket. She answered it quickly, listened for a moment and failed to stop a frown from creeping across her face.

  ‘Okay, good work. Put her in the conference room. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’ She listened again to the voice of her plant security chief, shaking her head. ‘No, for now I want her treated well. Give her something to eat and drink and leave her alone until I can speak to her.’

  Josephine eyed her speculatively. ‘More trouble?’r />
  ‘It appears that we have a breach of security at the plant. Some over-eager journalist has managed to sweet talk her way in and then give her guard the slip. She was found snooping around the private quarters.’

  ‘How far did she get?’

  ‘Not far, I am assured,’ replied Fiona. ‘There is nothing incriminating that she could have seen. She was nowhere near the sensitive levels.’

  ‘Any idea what she’s doing out here, in the middle of nowhere? Why would a reporter bother coming without an appointment. This is a tough place to get to, as an independent traveller.’

  ‘Yes, so it’s unlikely she came alone. As for what she’s looking for, your guess is as good as mine. I’ll find out when I speak to her.’

  ‘Did you get a name?’

  ‘Her name is Deborah Miles.’

  Since following her hunch that there was a story by sticking to Solomon Munambe, a few days previously, Deborah’s life had descended into a nightmare. As a journalist, she had chosen to ignore the risks, and pursue her scoop.

  That was why she was now sitting in a bright conference room, in the ARC desalination plant, waiting to be questioned. She wasn’t too concerned about it, after all she was dealing with a reputable company. They were going to be pissed at her for trying her luck but they would just kick her out and she would be free to get back to London.

  Her liaison with Munambe, and roused suspicions linked to the McEntire Corporation, had led her to leave the conference as soon as she found out that Munambe was returning to Namibia a couple of days earlier than scheduled. It was very rare for any delegate to up and leave in the middle of such an important continental meeting, which made her even more determined to discover the cause.

  She had no intention of letting Munambe become aware of her interest, so she grabbed the first available internal flight from Nairobi to Windhoek, the Namibian capital. Once there, she checked in to a reasonably-priced tourist hotel and set about her research. Internet access was surprisingly reliable in the hotel and most of her initial digging was done in cyberspace.

  Within a day of her arrival, she knew everything that was possible to learn about Munambe, and his role in charge of tourism for the developing country. Gaining independence from South Africa in 1990, after the Namibian War of Independence, the income from tourism formed a huge, and growing, part of the country’s economy. Blessed with unspoiled savannah, national parks teeming with wildlife and the infamous Skeleton Coast, Munambe’s job was a vital one within the government.

  Deborah wasn’t a spy, or an agent with years of training in covert surveillance, and she was realistic enough about her limited skills to dismiss the idea of following Munambe, or tracking him to his home. What she had done, which she was very proud of, was to plant a small tracking bug in the battery compartment of Munambe’s mobile phone, while he had taken a shower after their passionate encounter in his hotel room. It was a fairly cheap device that she had ordered off the internet a year before and kept in her purse, hoping to be able to use it one day.

  The tracker, sold by a company called BugIt, uploaded its location via the nearest Wi-Fi, piggy-backing off any unsecured signal that was available. The information was then simply checked at the company’s website, by logging in with a password.

  The internet sales blurb had promised three months continuous use due to amazing internal battery technology but, after switching the tiny tracker on and implanting it in the phone, Deborah fully expected it to prove a waste of time.

  Sitting in her small, single-bed hotel room, she almost fell off the bed when she logged on to the website and the tracker showed a clear position in a local government building, a few blocks away. This made her rethink the option of following Munambe. While the tracker held out, maybe she could keep tabs on him after all?

  For two days, Munambe’s signal did nothing more than travel between his office and another location on the outskirts of the city; his home Deborah assumed. The hours at the office were lengthy but the city seemed normal and the local media made no suggestion of a crisis.

  The one hard-learned lesson she lived by was to be patient. The best stories came to those dogged, determined journalists who committed time and energy to a potential story, waiting until they could find an explosive link between a seemingly unconnected series of events. At the end of the second day, though, she was beginning to feel disheartened when everything turned on its head. Her phone rang. It was Munambe.

  Deborah had given him her number as a courtesy, never expecting him to use it. He was married, with children, and in a high government office. Their moment together had been little more than a cynical ploy on her part to extract information from him. Now, in the darkening gloom of late afternoon, his voice was suddenly in her ear.

  Gathering her wits and subconsciously flicking her hair, she forced her breathing to calm and listened.

  ‘Dear Deborah,’ he began. ‘It is so good to have the chance to speak with you. How have you been?’

  ‘Fine,’ she stammered, taken aback. ‘I have been thinking about you.’

  The voice on the other end chuckled. ‘I bet you have.’

  ‘Why are you calling?’ Deborah went for the jugular, pouring sugar into her tone. ‘I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.’

  ‘I need your help,’ Munambe admitted slowly, the tension in his words plain to hear.

  ‘Really? What do you need?’

  ‘First, I need you to get up and open the door of your hotel room.’

  ‘What!’ She whirled around at the sound of a gentle knocking on the wooden door. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘That isn’t important at the moment,’ Munambe stated, suddenly stern and officious. ‘I have sent my assistant, Kaoni, to collect you and bring you over to my office. We need to talk.’

  ‘How do I know this is genuine?’ She stalled for time, distraught at having been discovered.

  Munambe chuckled down the line. ‘Just get over here.’

  Twenty minutes later, she was ushered into his office, where he was seated behind a bow-legged wooden desk, pensively viewing the screen of a laptop. He flicked his eyes up to her in welcome then dropped them back down to the screen again.

  ‘Strange coincidence,’ she started, lamely. ‘Me being here.’

  ‘Please, sit down,’ he ignored her words. ‘You followed me back here because you are a journalist who can smell a good story. I should be upset, especially after finding this.’ He slid his mobile phone across the desk. It was face down, backless, with her tiny tracking device clearly visible. ‘That could get you a couple of years in one of our prisons,’ he continued. ‘But that would be a shame.’

  ‘I agree.’ She was not thrown by the threat. Imprisonment was often used to silence the voice of free speech. Deborah also knew that she would be sitting in a cell right now if he had any intention of making good on his threat. No, he genuinely needed her for something, as he’d mentioned on the phone. ‘Well, I’m not in jail so why don’t you tell me why you need the help of a foreign journalist?’

  Munambe beckoned her around the desk, sliding the laptop around so they could both see the secret video report that was playing. The sound was muted but she needed no aural explanation to help decipher the images. She failed to hold in a gasp as the camera swept around a large village, revealing at least two hundred bodies of men, women and children. All were covered in sores and bloody pustules, caked in bodily fluids and crusted with black river flies that erupted into angry clouds every time the camera strayed too close. There were no obvious wounds, no damage to property. This was clearly the result of a highly virulent disease.

  ‘Ebola?’ she whispered, shocked. Munambe shook his head, wiping a hand wearily across his temple.

  ‘No, my dear. Plague. Bubonic plague, or the Black Death as Western historians often call it.’

  Unlike most people, Deborah was well aware that plague still existed. She had adored history at school and was an avid reader, with a fascinatio
n for key events that had a huge impact upon human civilisation, like the Black Death which was thought to have killed a third of the population of Europe in the fifteenth century.

  But she also knew it was a disease that was mainly limited to animals and human outbreaks were rare, although she vaguely remembered there had been one in Madagascar and one in China in 2014.

  ‘These people all look like they died fast, almost where they stood? And the sores, and swollen lymph glands on the neck aren’t very pronounced.’ Her distaste was easing as she studied the images for clues.

  ‘They died from pneumonic plague,’ Munambe explained, leaning back in a creaking chair with a sigh.

  ‘But you just said it was bubonic plague? I don’t understand, sorry. I’m not a doctor.’

  ‘They were infected with bubonic plague, from infected flea bites, which then mutated to pneumonic plague when the bacteria reached their lungs,’ he said, patiently.

  The room had an old leather sofa in one corner and she automatically followed him as he got up from behind the desk and crossed over to it. They sat down in unison, side by side. She helped herself to a bottle of water on a small side table. Outside, the noise of the traffic filtered through the windows, providing an almost soothing background rhythm.

  ‘Does pneumonic plague kill very fast?’

  He nodded. ‘In the worst cases, within twenty-four hours.’

  ‘That’s why they have all died so quickly?’

  This time his head shook, his eyes darkening further. ‘The pneumonic cases tend to take a while to show, as the bacteria doesn’t always get to the lungs. Most of our outbreaks are ninety-eight percent bubonic, with only two percent becoming pneumonic. We’ve never seen such a devastating infection. All these people died from the pneumonic version, as though they’d caught it through the air and died almost immediately. Pneumonic plague is spread through coughs and sneezes,’ he reasoned. ‘In a way it is similar to how Ebola can be transmitted but you normally see a clear progression of infection between the two types. In this village, the flea bites that infected some of the victims are fresh, and not all have signs of bites.’