SKELETON GOLD: Scorpion (James Pace novels Book 3)

by Andy Lucas

  ‘So what you’re telling me is that there wasn’t time for the bubonic form to mutate into the pneumonic form?’ He didn’t contradict her. ‘Or for the typical pneumonic form to then have time to infect everyone?’

  ‘This is something new, and terrifying. Immediate pneumonic plague, somehow triggered by bacteria that targets the lungs immediately. A new strain, it appears. Absolutely lethal.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘I have saved the worst for last,’ he grimaced. ‘Initial tests on the bodies suggest that they didn’t even survive for a day, which is the time we’d need to get antibiotics into them. Autopsy data is terrifying.’

  Deborah gave him an encouraging smile. ‘How can it be any worse than what you’ve just told me?’

  ‘Because these poor, unlucky souls appear to have died within twelve hours of exposure. Healthy to dead in half a day.’ His voice grew choked with emotion. ‘That isn’t enough time to save anyone.’

  The next couple of hours were spent together. She didn’t feel guilty being with him now. Any thoughts of renewed passion were shelved, they had a serious situation and he needed her skills more than he knew. Her silence she would give him, for now, but they needed to track down where this new killer disease had come from and, for that, he needed a ruthless sleuth.

  Which was how she’d ended up in her current situation. She didn’t have to wait too long before she was joined by a powerful, muscular woman who introduced herself as Fiona Chambers, PA to the CEO. The woman wore a smile but Deborah was a keen judge of character, as every good journalist had to be. She sensed a malevolence behind the calm, professional grey trouser-suit that Fiona had hurriedly changed into upon landing, which made the reporter grow immediately focused.

  ‘What is a small-time newspaper reporter doing out here, in the emptiness of the desert, trespassing on private property and being caught rummaging through private quarters?’ Fiona’s tone was cutting, her lips pressed firmly together.

  ‘Small-time?’ Deborah queried, careful not to let her irritation get the better of her. ‘I came here to investigate some unexplained animal deaths near here, for my paper. It seems there has been some kind of deadly outbreak that has spread to a nearby village, with human fatalities. Acheor, do you know of it?’

  Fiona retained a calm expression but kicked herself inside. She knew all about the poor villagers. The animal tests had been so successful, using what little bacteria could be replicated from the old vials. Josephine had then ordered a test on humans, just to check its potency. Nobody had expected it to be as lethal in people as animals, and definitely not as fast.

  ‘Look,’ Deborah threw up her hands in explanation. ‘I went off wandering by myself and got lost,’ she said. ‘The big dunes really confused me and then the wind got up and there was a nasty sandstorm. I tucked myself behind a small rock but by the time it died down, I didn’t know where I was. So I started walking, and here I am.’

  ‘Bad luck? You expect me to believe that? Lost in the desert and then lucky enough to stumble upon our facility, is that it?’

  ‘It’s not a very sexy story, I’ll grant you,’ admitted Deborah. ‘But it is true. I spotted a glint of the ocean between two dunes and just headed for it. As I came out onto the shore, you can imagine how relieved I was to see this place rising up out of the sand, barely a mile further along the beach.’

  ‘How did you get here?’ Fiona changed tack. ‘And who are you with?’

  ‘If you’re offering to find them for me, that would be wonderful,’ Deborah gushed. ‘They will be worried about me.’

  ‘Who will be worried?’

  ‘The government rangers that I came with, about a dozen of them. Some are scientists, the rest are our guards. There is a camp somewhere near here but I can’t tell you where.’ She added. ‘I walked for a few hours but I might have been going in circles for all I know. Can’t be more than a few miles away, I’m sure of it.’

  Fiona Chambers has already checked the reporter out online and knew a lot about out her. Her last assignment was listed as covering the African League Conference in Nairobi, so she had every right to be in Africa. The biggest concern was the mention of dead animals and that a link had been made back to the ARC facility.

  Josephine was not going to like this, Fiona thought, which meant that Deborah wasn’t going to enjoy the next few hours either. As a life-long hater of both solicitors and journalists, she found it hard to keep the amusement out of her tone.

  Her humour faded a little when she learned that Deborah had been telling the truth about being part of a government field survey.

  At that moment, one of her security managers called her outside. One of several security drones, despatched to check the surrounding desert, had beamed back crystal clear images of a sizeable group of tents about five miles inland. Two large trucks showed how the team had drawn so close to the facility without triggering an alarm.

  ‘Why trucks?’ she asked the journalist, upon her return to the room. ‘There are no main roads nearby. Why did the government not use helicopters?’

  ‘Maybe they wanted to save money,’ Deborah retorted sharply, growing tired of the questions. ‘There is a decent sand trail about thirty miles inland from here and those trucks are built for desert terrain. It was an easy trip,’ she lied. It had actually been a nightmare of heat, bumps, flies and jarred, aching bones. Munambe had been determined to keep the survey as low-key as possible.

  The drone still hovered on station about five hundred feet to the west of the camp. A further whispered update by the same security manager, moments later, told her they were looking for their lost reporter. At least two search parties were spotted leaving the camp, heading out into the desert.

  So how had Deborah really ended up there, all alone? That was down to bloody-mindedness and a sense that the ARC facility was somehow involved with the lethal outbreak of this new strain of plague.

  The ride down to Acheor had taken three days, collecting key personnel along the way. When they finally arrived, the empty village greeted them with a mournful echo from a host of restless spirits, carried on a warm desert breeze. The corpses had already been gathered up and hastily cremated in huge pyres built at the northern end of Acheor, which still smoked slightly although all the ash and bone had since been transferred to a communal burial pit a few hundred metres further away into the desert scrub. The once thriving community had vanished.

  When she’d learned that the ARC facility was close by, her natural distrust of big business had kicked into overdrive. Her mind had begun with the simple premise that ARC would have something to gain by infecting a local community. Not having access to the internet, as the connection through her satellite phone was intermittent at best, she had resorted to logic and cynicism. She made the decision to investigate ARC directly.

  ‘Do you use chemicals here, to desalinate the seawater/’ she asked Fiona bluntly, seizing her chance. ‘Is there any possibility that this infection might be linked to ARC?’

  ‘We do not use dangerous chemicals here,’ came the curt reply. ‘If you even dare to suggest that we are linked to such an issue, you will be sued,’

  ‘You know what?’ Deborah lowered her tone to a hushed whisper. ‘Every guilty organisation, with something to hide, always throws out threats of litigation when a reporter hits a raw nerve. I didn’t say you were involved,’ she repeated. ‘I just asked if it was possible.’

  This situation was becoming awkward, Fiona knew. Josephine would be foolhardy to simply dispose of this meddling journalist, as her government friends were looking for her and ARC relied on government good will, naturally well-greased with bribes, to operate in Namibia. But her boss was prone to rash actions at the moment, like the murder of dozens of paid excavation workers. Coming on top of her attempt to murder the McEntire team, while they were in the UK, Fiona needed to calm things down quickly.

  She made her excuses to Deborah and hurried out of the room, heading for Josephine’s p
rivate quarters, arriving just as her employer was finishing up in the shower.

  Their brief business meeting, held in the centre of the bedroom, would have looked odd to anyone else. Fiona was dressed smartly while her boss stood in front of her, stark naked and still dripping wet, as they discussed the problem of the journalist and her colleagues.

  Josephine Roche’s initial anger, and knee-jerk reaction to simply have Deborah killed and dumped out at sea, was finally brought under control by her trusted assistant’s reasoning.

  Very aware of her own complicity in multiple murders, Fiona Chambers needed Josephine to regain perspective before she met Deborah, who would doubtless needle her immediately. Purely out of a need for self-preservation, she offered Josephine a bathrobe and poured a couple of glasses of gin from a nearby bar.

  Adding tonic and ice, she settled down for a long conversation.

  19

  The McEntire building occupied a prime piece of real estate, close to Liverpool Street, in London. A fairly recent building, replacing a parade of old shops whose owners held out over their sale until a huge sale price had been agreed, it operated as the international hub for the company and all of its floors hummed with genuine business activity, conducted by thousands of dedicated, well-paid employees.

  Right at the top of the building, a two-storey glass pyramid housed the more sinister side of the business. Doyle McEntire had his office right at the top, as did his right-hand staff. Legitimate business still went on there, for example, Hammond was the company’s chief accountant and his office occupied one of the few purpose-built spaces on the lower floor, tucked into one corner, whereas the main floor was typically an open-plan office operation, buzzing with human chatter, ringing telephones and clattering fingers on keyboards.

  The very top floor, accessed via a set of security-coded stairs or the main elevator, housed only McEntire’s office, the inner door dutifully guarded by his efficient new assistant, Rachel Crown.

  Rachel had been carefully selected by McEntire himself to replace his daughter, Sarah, who had been his personal assistant for years before becoming involved with James Pace, finding out about the covert work, and having to be brought into the operational side. As his only child, McEntire had wanted her close by but he had never intended for her to get wrapped up in their national security work.

  Unlike Sarah, who ran her father’s diary and calendar for so long whilst being oblivious to the secret world the company inhabited, Rachel was well aware of the secret side, having been one of its top field agents for over a decade. McEntire trusted her and she had shown she was prepared to die to defend the company, and her country, on many occasions. She made the perfect assistant, and having a trained killer as his personal bodyguard was a bonus.

  The lift ride up, from the underground car park into which their car had swept at a little after two a.m. that morning, was uneventful. The unseen security cameras fed the images to highly sophisticated software that recognised their facial features and automatically allowed the internal lift to rise directly up to the restricted upper floor.

  The door slid open silently, the computerised voice software silenced due to the late hour. Pace, Sarah, Baker and Hammond stepped out onto a beautifully polished, reclaimed wooden floor. Rachel, who Hammond had known for years, was waiting for them. She ushered them inside, where Doyle McEntire was waiting for them. A fresh pot of coffee was a welcome sight and Rachel set about pouring them all a mug of the delicious, hot liquid while they settled into chairs around the large conference table.

  McEntire was pleased to see them all and stopped long enough to hug his daughter warmly before sitting down and starting the meeting. Unlike every other meeting that took place in the organisation, the ones that took place around this particular table were never minuted.

  Rachel finished handing out the drinks and quietly withdrew, slipping outside and taking up a sentinel’s position behind her desk, facing the lift door and the adjacent exit door that led to the stairwell. Instinctively, she pulled open the top desk drawer, withdrew a Sig Sauer P226 automatic pistol, and flicked off its safety.

  Unaware of the precautions taken outside the room, Pace and his team told their story, in as much detail as they could remember, including their journey from the safe house, utilising as many B-roads as possible.

  McEntire, looking oddly casual in dark jeans and a grey shirt, open at the collar and tieless, was furious that a hit had been made on his people, in his own country, especially his daughter. He knew it had to be linked to the old diary and their sniffing around at the ARC site. After learning of the attack, he had pursued his contact for additional information and managed to squeeze out a little more information, adding to his sense of unease. He said as much to his guests.

  Hammond nodded. ‘It makes sense, although we make enemies on a daily basis,’ he added. ‘There was nothing tangible when we visited ARC. Just a sense that something wasn’t right.’

  Pace was tired and irritable, despite a few hours in Sarah’s arms in one of the summerhouses. His eyes were feeling gritty and sore. The drive to London had given him plenty of time to think, even though he had insisted on doing the driving himself.

  ‘It is too much of a coincidence for ARC not to be involved,’ he growled. ‘What do we know about them?’

  Here was the interesting part and McEntire nodded. He pressed a small remote unit, plucked up from the table, and the table top slid slowly open, dropping away to the sides to reveal a large flat screen, which obediently sprang into life.

  Everyone leaned forward slightly as a grainy image of a young man filled their view. Obviously a scan of an old photograph, the colours were poor and resembled an old Polaroid snap. The man was strangely familiar to them all but nobody clicked why, so McEntire explained.

  ‘Everyone, meet Joseph Roche… again.’

  Pace recognised the features and nodded. ‘Ah, okay. Is this Josephine’s brother? Could actually be her twin?’

  McEntire shook his head. ‘Not her twin. Her.’ Before anyone could say anything, he told them all about the history of a tormented young man and his eventual surgical transformation into a woman.

  For her part, Sarah felt a little relieved. She could now attribute her inexplicable attraction to Josephine, when they had met, to an instinctive response to some underlying masculinity rather than any latent lesbian tendencies within her own psyche. In a similar way, Hammond chose to ignore his own attraction to Josephine, brushing it aside as unimportant.

  Over the next hour, they learned everything possible about ARC, from birth to its current global success. The most interesting element, aside from the vision of the CEO, was the financial position the company reported. McEntire explained that the business had huge potential but the potential could not be realised without serious investment. The company was not flushed with cash and the new facility had drained the coffers, necessitating several large bank loans.

  Baker queried the relevance, as did Sarah. She knew the McEntire Corporation had needed many bank loans in the early days, long before it became a multi-billion dollar business.

  ‘What is interesting,’ McEntire stressed, lifting the pitch in his tone in a way that told everyone that a bombshell was coming, ‘is that in the last month, ARC has repaid all its loans and injected another fifty million US dollars into its accounts, from sources as yet unknown.’

  ‘A private backer perhaps? Maybe Josephine is going to take on a partner?’ Pace commented on the revelation, wondering where all this was going and how soon he would be able to head home for a shower.

  Doyle McEntire frowned, touched the screen and a new image flashed up. This was someone they also recognised. Sarah gasped as the image of the man they’d pulled out of the ocean filled the screen.

  ‘Now I’m interested,’ said Baker, leaning in further to study the image. It showed the man, seated in a restaurant window, shot secretly by someone obviously outside. He appeared to be alone but the expensive drapes and guided w
indow frames spoke of an expensive eatery, despite the absence of its name. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘He was,’ McEntire corrected, ‘a very well connected, ruthless, international financier, by the name of Malcolm Lefevre, currently listed as missing. He was last seen visiting our friendly ARC facility, there to meet with Josephine Roche regarding a very substantial business investment aimed at, I understand, funding additional desalination plants and solar farms.’

  None of it made any sense to those assembled but it was clear that ARC had wanted Lefevre’s money initially, then suddenly didn’t need it anymore. Was that a good enough reason to kill him? If it was, then only Josephine Roche could have authorised the murder, which made her as evil a monster as Pace’s recent nemesis, Cathera.

  McEntire had scoured every source and he was confident that the attempt on his people was a one-off. He insisted that they keep their Colt .25 pistols on them at all times but, other than that, he was happy to let them leave.

  Baker stopped outside to speak with Rachel, leaving Hammond, Pace and Sarah to ride the lift back down to the car park. Selecting a silver Ford Ranger pick-up truck from the motor pool, all three of them headed for the safety of Pace’s new home. They arrived without incident and were soon securely tucked up inside.

  That night the rain persisted heavily, drumming on the roof of the habitation disc, the soft rhythm easing them all to sleep at different rates. Hammond opted to sleep on one of the control room sofas rather than take a spare bed in the dormitory section, leaving Pace and Sarah alone down below.

  Sarah, for all her fears, fell asleep quickly while Pace stared at the ceiling, unable to switch off his thoughts. The one thing he’d learned, both from the military and while running in the Amazon, was that danger never went away unless it was confronted. He was damned if he’d wait around for whoever tried to kill them to have another crack at it. The answers all lay at the bottom of the ocean, locked inside the wreck of a steam-powered Royal Navy K-class submarine. That was what he needed to find, and the sooner the better.