He was in better shape than I’d hoped. Ling had been right. They’d needed to keep him fed and healthy so there would be no suspicion that he wasn’t the fourth operative. We’d be able to make a run for it . . . Only Bob got a puzzled look on his face, stumbled, and had to put one big hand on the counter to steady himself.
“You’ve been hit.” Shen stated.
“Yeah.” Bob turned until I could see his left side. There was a black hole right through his bicep and his white shirt was covered in blood. “But did you stop Blue?” Despite the shock of beating a man to death, getting shot, and being rescued, Bob didn’t mess around. It was that crazy focus that had made him into Majestic’s mortal enemy to begin with.
“Valentine’s on his way to the train station now.” I picked up a kitchen towel from the counter and stuck it against the wound to slow the bleeding. The bullet had gone clean through, but the exit wound was nasty.
Bob winced at the pain. “Valentine’s here, and you know about Evangeline. Thank Goodness.” But then Bob got a stricken look on his face. Whatever he’d just thought of was much worse than the gunshot wound. “Hang on. If Anders is pulling me out now, that must mean some of the nukes are already in transit.”
“What do you mean some of the nukes?”
Chapter 15: Project Blue
VALENTINE
North of Paris
Ling was driving again, flying down French highways as fast as she could without getting us arrested. Even going way too fast, Evangeline was still at least twenty minutes north of the chateau. Thankfully, at this time of night, the highways were fairly deserted, but we did blow through more than one traffic camera. Had our van’s plates been legitimate, we would be getting some huge fines later on.
I was in the passenger seat, talking to Tailor on the phone. I had interrupted his beauty sleep. I stopped to read a text message from Reaper. Lorenzo was too busy to communicate but there had been a lot of gunfire and explosions. The Calm was wavering and I was tired. Focus.
“Val?” Tailor asked. “Did I lose you?”
“No, I’m still here.” I put him on speaker phone.
“You did what?”
“Raided one of Kat’s holdings in the country.”
“You weren’t supposed to make any moves without us! Son of a—”
“Shut up and listen, I know where the bomb is.”
“No shit? Where?”
“A train station near Amiens called Evangeline. We should have known.”
“There’s like fifty thousand things in this country with that name. Hang on. I’m pulling it up . . . It’s just a little place, but it’s a hub. A bunch of lines converge there.”
“That’s where Hunter stored the nuke, and I bet they’re going to deliver it to its target by train.”
“And immediately after detonation, Bob would have been conveniently shot to death at the launch point by helpful local police,” Antoine said from the back.
“Evangeline isn’t close to anything vital. What’s the target?”
“That I don’t know.”
“Wait, there’s a G20 summit in London right now!” Tailor said, the realization creeping into his voice. “They just put in a new line that is a direct shot to the Chunnel, for that new super train, Paris to London. Holy shit, Val.”
Holy shit was right. Leaders from all over the world were going to be there. London was clogged with functionaries, visitors, security, and protestors. The President of the United States, the British prime minister, and French president, and God-only-knew who else was going to be there.
“That is the most reasonable target,” Ling stated flatly.
“Look, Tailor, I don’t care what you need to do. I don’t care if you have to go around your boss on this, okay? He’s been really hesitant to break your stupid rules, but I have no idea if we’ll get there in time. You need to alert the French government and tell them you have a credible threat of a weapon of mass destruction on one of those trains.”
New Tailor would probably want evidence before causing an incident, but old Tailor had always been ready to shoot someone in the face. “I’ll alert the authorities on the way. My boss will cut through the red tape, trust me, he’ll call up GIGN.” That was France’s premier counterterrorism force. “Hell, he’ll get the Foreign fucking Legion if we have to, but don’t wait up for me! Go kill those assholes!” Luckily, I got old Tailor.
“Will do. I’ll keep you posted.” My phone beeped. It was Lorenzo. I switched over to him.
“Valentine, I’ve got Bob. Shen and Skunky are okay. We’re on our way out.”
Ling smiled at the news. “Ha! Excellent!” Antoine shouted.
“Don’t celebrate. We’ve got a huge problem.”
“I know, the bomb could be moving already, Reaper told me.”
“No, damn it, listen to me. There are four bombs!”
Ling’s eyes went wide. “What did he say?”
“There. Are. Four. Bombs!” Lorenzo repeated, each word a forceful statement.
My heart dropped into my stomach. I felt like I was going to throw up.
“Valentine! Are you still there?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m here,” I stammered. “I copy, four bombs.”
“Bob says Blue doesn’t have one target, there’s four. The Alpha Point was just the staging ground. He doesn’t know what the targets are, but Blue was designed to decapitate the Illuminati in one move. Four simultaneous detonations to wipe out their power base forever, blame it on terrorists, and Majestic has one less competitor.”
“Where else do trains from Evangeline go?” Ling asked.
“Christ, all over Europe!”
Antoine had pulled up the information on his phone. “The north-south line goes through the Chunnel to London, and down all the way to Rome. The east-west line goes through Frankfurt, all the way to Prague. The line’s not done yet, eventually it’s supposed to go all the way to Moscow.”
“So basically anywhere could be a target.” If we knew where they were going, Tailor could get the authorities to intercept them. But there was no way we could figure it out in time. “Antoine, call Ariel. Fill her in. It’s up to her to guess where the targets are.”
“Give your angel her puzzle pieces but don’t count on her,” Lorenzo muttered. “Stop those bombs, Valentine. We’ll catch up.”
LORENZO
After telling Reaper and Skunky to extract, and updating Valentine, I’d gotten us out of the chateau. If any more of Stokes’ men were still in the fight, they were keeping their heads down. Not that that was a comforting thought. They could be waiting to ambush us, but we had no choice except going out the front. Bob had lost a lot of blood, and Shen’s just a scratch had turned into a bad limp. We weren’t going to be running across any fields.
Luckily, nobody took any potshots at us when Reaper drove through the open gate. He’d picked up Skunky on the way. As soon as the rest of us piled into the back of the sedan I smacked Reaper’s seat and shouted “Drive! Drive!”
With all of us pointing guns out the windows, Reaper flipped the car around in a spray of gravel, and got us the hell away from the smoking ruins of the chateau. I kept waiting for a bullet to shatter the back window for a tense few seconds, but we were clear. It was a tight fit, especially since Bob was huge and squished between me and Shen. Skunky was in the passenger seat, still wearing a ghillie suit made out of layers of tattered burlap and covered in local weeds so it looked like Reaper was sitting next to a bush. Inside the Audi it was hot, and smelled like blood, sweat, and gunpowder.
“This remind you of anything?” Bob asked.
“I’m having a flashback to Quagmire.”
“Only that time it was your little buddy who got shot in the arm, not me. By the way, good to see you again, kid.”
“You too.” Reaper was way too focused on the country road to look back at my brother. He was doing the best he could, but as soon as I was sure we were clear, I was going to make him pull over so I co
uld drive. No offense to Reaper, but his video-game driving skills didn’t translate over to real life worth a damn, we needed to get our asses to Evangeline fast, and he would be way more useful on a computer figuring out how to stop those trains.
There were headlights just off the side of the road ahead of us. It was the Land Rover that had peeled off to pick up Stokes. It had crashed into a ditch on the way back. “I went by that on the way in,” Reaper said. “I didn’t see anybody alive.”
“We haven’t cleared it.” Skunky warned. “I put a magazine through the windows as they were coming back.” Skunky’s rifle was too long to maneuver in the confines of the car, so he’d drawn his Beretta. As we got closer, I could see the mess of bullet holes in the SUV’s windshield. That was some damned good shooting. “Movement.” Skunky said as he angled his pistol out the window.
The back door of the SUV had opened, and a man had spilled out onto the grass. Before Skunky could open fire, Bob shouted. “Stop the car!” Bob wasn’t the one giving the orders around here, but with a command voice like that, Reaper automatically hit the brakes. We slid across the gravel, raising a great cloud of dust. “Let me out.”
I had no idea what he was doing, though I could tell now that the injured man who’d gotten out of the SUV matched our pictures of Aaron Stokes. Bob was a pro. Maybe this asshole knew something else important about Blue. “Make it quick,” I told Bob as I opened the door and got out of his way.
Bob grimaced as he got out, one arm dangling, slick with blood. Skunky took the opportunity to shrug out of his burlap-covered jacket, and went to check on Shen’s leg. I followed Bob over to the wreck. The engine was still running. The inside of the glass was painted red. The mercs who’d rescued their boss were either dead, or really convincing at pretending. Stokes was covered in blood, but I couldn’t tell how much of that was his, and how much was from the men Skunky had ventilated. As he slowly tried to crawl away, Bob followed after him.
Stokes was messed up, moving with that dizzy, disoriented, seasick-looking motion of somebody who’d just gotten a severe head injury. I didn’t know how much information my brother was going to be able to get out of him in this shape. “Hurry up.”
“This won’t take long.” Bob put his foot on him and kicked Stokes over onto his back. Even in his bewildered state, Stokes seemed really surprised to see Bob looming over him.
From the utterly terrified look on Stokes’ face, and the merciless, righteously angry way Bob was glaring at him, I realized this wasn’t an interrogation. This was an execution.
“Hey, come on, Lorenzo. I was just doing my job. I’m begging you, mate. You’d have done the same, if our situations were reversed.”
“No. I wouldn’t.” Then Bob lifted a stolen pistol and shot Stokes in the chest. Not just once or twice, but Bob just kept on pulling the trigger, over and over as Stokes jerked and twitched. He kept shooting until the gun was empty, and then I watched the pistol’s muzzle wiggle as Bob pulled the trigger uselessly a few more times.
“You done?”
He looked down at the smoking pistol. If he’d not been at slide lock, he would have kept going. For the first time since we’d found him, Bob actually seemed a little out of it. He was a professional, but even professionals can get personal. He took one last look at the perforated corpse then started toward the car. “I’ll be done when those bombs are stopped.”
We went back to the car. “Move over Reaper, I’m driving.”
VALENTINE
Gare du Evangeline
Gare du Evangeline consisted of a concrete and glass enclosure over a whole bunch of tracks. On the other side of that was a depot with several large buildings for maintenance and storage. The train station was quiet this time of night, but the doors were still open. Beneath the street lights, a couple of police officers were patrolling, as could be expected for any mass transportation hub these days. The problem was, there should have been a lot more. With a credible threat of a weapon of mass destruction this place should have been covered in cops.
“I thought your friend Tailor said he was going to involve the authorities,” Ling said. We were in our van, parked in the nearly empty lot on the north side of the station.
“They should be here.” I checked my phone, but I had no signal. That was odd. We weren’t exactly in the wilderness. It had been fine when we had spoken to Ariel a few minutes ago, and Reaper had been sending me information about the station up until about that same time. “Anybody else having a problem with their phone?”
Antoine tried. “I am getting a prerecorded message that the system is out of service.”
“Even our GPS says it cannot find a satellite.” Ling was scowling hard at the train station. “It must be a signal jammer.”
Even if the Montalbans were using a device like that, it wouldn’t stop communications outside of the jammer’s zone, where our help should have been coming from. “Tailor said help would get here, it’ll get here.” But even as I said that, I was worried that something had gone horribly wrong. “If Ariel can figure out the other targets, she knows how to reach him.”
“That is a lot of ground to search with only three of us,” Ling said.
“Ariel said that this is a working station, but there’s another section that’s not open to the public yet. It’s for this new maglev that’s supposed to do Paris to London in record times, like the world’s fastest train. It’s still in testing, but she thinks that part is where the bombs would have been stored.”
“How come?” Antoine asked.
“The construction company that built it was owned by Rafael Montalban, and it went up around the time Hunter got killed. Kat owns the whole thing now. We’ve got to walk through the regular station, and head for the back.” Going in like a SWAT team would only end with us in a firefight with French police. “Ditch the tactical gear and long guns, go low profile. The longer we can look around without being spotted the more likely we are to find those bombs.”
I stripped off my load bearing gear and pulled a hoodie on over my armor. It was a little bulky, but from a distance nobody would notice. I had my .44 in a pancake holster concealed under my sweater, and had filled my pockets with spare speed loaders. The Taurus .357 snubby I’d had since the Crossroads was stuffed in my front pocket.
“This is it. Once inside, play it by ear.”
Antoine slid open the side door and got out. Before I could, Ling reached over and grabbed my sleeve. Normally at a time like this, Ling would be stone-faced, but right now her concern was obvious.
“What is it, Ling?”
“It’s . . . nothing. Let’s go.”
LORENZO
I was tempted to try and call Valentine again to get an update, but since I was driving as fast as I could, passing the other cars like they were standing still, it was probably better for me to concentrate on the road. Thankfully it was still early enough in the morning that the traffic hadn’t gotten thick. If we picked up a cop, they could just chase us to the train station.
“What else do you know, Bob?” I glanced in the rear view mirror. “Anything you can think of that might help?”
“Maybe.” Bob was gritting his teeth as Skunky tended the nasty hole in his arm. “Gordon’s plan was aimed at the Illuminati leadership.”
“Killing thousands to get to a handful of old men,” Skunky muttered as he kept wrapping gauze. He’d been busy back there. “Assholes.”
“The problem was the Illuminati leadership stays spread out on purpose. It’s hard to get more than a handful of the family heads in the same place at the same time. Every now and then, when they’ve got something really important to discuss, one of them can demand a big mandatory meeting and the whole council has to gather. It’s tradition, but it can only be called by a family head. That’s why Gordon originally approached Eduard Montalban. Majestic intel said he was the loose cannon and the most likely to sell out the others.”
“That’s why Dead Six killed Rafael Montalban, to put B
ig Eddie in charge,” I muttered.
“Only Eduard and Gordon Willis cut themselves a side deal instead. Gordon was paid to switch sides. Eduard would get a meeting called, Blue would blow it up, and the Montalbans would be the last family standing to inherit the whole damned thing.”
Eddie was a psychopath, and his little sister had taken his dream and made it her own.
“Oh, shit. Exodus cut a deal with an Illuminati boss named Romefeller. He called one of those big meetings.”
“Because of us hunting Katarina,” Shen said as he came to the same conclusion I just had. He was gray and sweating badly. Skunky had gotten the bleeding stopped from the gash on his leg, but Shen wasn’t looking good. “The actions of Exodus caused Blue.”
“If it wasn’t you, it would’ve been called for something else eventually,” Bob said. “That council is what they’ve been waiting for this whole time.”
“Wherever that secret meeting is being held is one of the targets.”
“I don’t know. They never said anything in front of me about that. All of this is working off of what I’ve overheard, my investigation from before, and a whole lot of time with nothing better to do than think about it.”
“Reaper, relay that to Valentine’s buddy. Tailor will know where that meeting is. He can at least get an evacuation started.” Not that I gave a shit about the Illuminati, but I felt bad for whatever city their little party was in.
Reaper was in the passenger seat, staring at a tablet screen and typing fast. I didn’t know what the hell he was trying to do, but it was important enough I was hesitant to interrupt him. He didn’t look up. “Something’s wrong, Lorenzo. Everything is falling apart.”
Alliance of Shadows (Dead Six Series Book 3) Page 36