by Dawson, Mark
Four men, at least.
Not going to be easy.
But nothing worthwhile ever was.
He paused and looked back. Milton had followed him inside. He moved confidently, as if he knew exactly what he was doing and where he was going, as if he had important business to attend to, as if he belonged here. He looked like a doctor, although Pope knew that the pretence would fold under even the most nominal scrutiny. They would have to hope that didn’t happen.
Milton walked straight to the elevators.
Pope followed and, checking that he was unobserved, opened the door to the stairs. A flight of concrete steps went up; another flight went down.
There was an emergency panel fitted to the wall next to the door.
Pope covered his fist with his shirt sleeve and listened for the sound of Milton’s elevator ascending the shaft.
Here we go.
He counted to ten, smashed the glass and, his finger still covered by the shirt, activated the alarm.
All Control wanted to do was sleep, but there was a noise, a ringing, that faded in and out of the narcotic fugue. He closed his eyes and let his head settle back into the soft pillows. The pain flashed again, and he pressed the trigger near to his hand to administer another dose. The morphine dripped into the line in his arm, a narcotic feed that wrapped him in its warm, fuzzy embrace and encouraged his dreams and memories.
The ringing faded away.
The pain, too.
He closed his eyes and found himself transported back to years earlier. He was in his old office, with the wide view of the Thames. The water was green and the sky gunmetal grey. The red buses that ferried to and fro on the other side of the water looked hyper-real, a glowing crimson rather than the usual dowdy red.
Control had Beatrix Rose’s file spread out on the desk in front of him. A vacancy had arisen, and she had been proposed. She had been a rising star in the military back then, destined for high rank, but he had other plans for her.
He picked up one of the photographs that had been taken during the week-long surveillance that was a crucial element of the vetting process. There was a coldness in her face, a clinical aspect that he would come to admire, but beyond all that, she was beautiful. Very beautiful. Long, straight blonde hair, alabaster skin, extraordinarily blue eyes.
The haze shifted, became grey and dense, and when it cleared, he was still in the chair behind the desk, but now she was sitting opposite him.
“Hello, Miss Rose.”
“Hello, sir.”
“Thank you for coming to see me. Do you know why you’re here?”
“Only vaguely, I’m afraid.”
“I am responsible for a classified government agency. I say ‘government’, but it’s not something that could ever be acknowledged outside these walls. If what we do in the name of the state ever came to light, it would be . . . well, it would be particularly uncomfortable.”
“Like I said, sir, I’m a little in the dark.”
“What have you been told, Miss Rose?”
“Just that there’s a chance I might be offered a transfer. A new position. That’s all, really.”
“Yes,” he had said. “That’s right. A transfer.”
“A transfer to what?”
“Let me ask you a hypothetical question. If you were given an order to kill someone, would you do it?”
“What has this person done?”
“That’s irrelevant.”
“They might not think so.”
“You don’t know anything about them.”
“Are we at war?”
“No.”
“Who gave me the order?”
“Let’s say I did.”
“Your orders would be that I had to murder someone?”
“That’s an emotive word.”
“But that’s what it would be. Killing in peacetime. Murder.”
“I’d prefer to call it employment.”
A thin smile.
“Would you do it without question, without hesitation, without doubt?”
She looked at him, sizing him up.
“Would you do it, Miss Rose?”
He remembered how she had paused, fixing him in that lizard gaze, the eyes that held no emotion, and he knew then with utter conviction, that she was perfect for the purpose to which he would put her.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “I would.”
The clouds washed up again like surf breaking across a beach, drowning his memory.
When it faded, and he opened his eyes, Beatrix Rose was sitting in the chair next to the bed. She had one of her wicked throwing knives in her right hand, the index finger of her left hand stroking its razored edge, a thin cut on her fingertip already filling with blood. She was looking at him, her glacial blue eyes passionless and pitiless, and as he stared back, his insides turning molten, sweat soaking his bandages, he thought he saw the beginning of a smile curling up at the edges of her ashen lips.
He fumbled for the button to call the nurse, to call security, to call anyone. His fingers crabbed across the linen, questing for it, but his wrists were restrained and the range of his finger was curtailed, and as he looked back up again in terror, he saw that the chair was empty again, and he realised he was still suspended in the kaleidoscope of opiate dreams.
He breathed in and out, his heartbeat slowly returning to a normal rate.
Beatrix.
She had been an incredible agent. His most valuable asset then.
Only John Milton could have competed with her.
And he had erred with both of them.
The consequences of his error had been sadistic and remorseless.
Beatrix and five other agents with whom she had served were dead.
Was it his fault?
Milton had succumbed to doubts and demons. Control might have spotted that earlier, done something to prevent the escalation, but he couldn’t blame himself for another man’s weaknesses.
But Beatrix Rose?
Yes.
That had been his fault. That had been the fault of his greed.
It had been such a terrible shame that it had all gone so badly wrong.
He twitched involuntarily, and scraping his arm across the sheet, he reached for the morphine trigger again.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Cassidy and the other man had emerged from a door at the end of the floor. Isabella approached it and looked through the glass panel. A corridor reached back with four doors set into it. Two men stood at the end of the corridor.
Big men.
Big men with guns.
She slowed her step.
The men shifted, shuffled their feet. They were in front of one of the doors. There was no way to get past them.
She floundered.
Her plan had been to pretend to be the man’s daughter.
She realised now that wouldn’t work. She recalled the conversation she had overhead. They knew she was out there. They would be wary.
She suddenly realised that she did not know what she should do.
The fire alarm suddenly sounded, loud and shrill.
Isabella stopped, waiting for the alarm to stop.
A drill?
A mistake?
But it didn’t stop. It kept ringing.
One man turned to the other and said something. The other man turned, looked down the corridor to the door, saw her looking in through the glass panel, took a quarter turn in her direction, held her eye.
Isabella thought of her mother.
Her poor mother, torn away from her, sent into solitude for years because of the man in the room just a few feet away from her.
She was too far along the path to let fear distract her now.
They might be wary, but there was no way t
hat they could anticipate this.
Isabella reached into the bag and wrapped her fingers around the little Beretta. She pushed the door open and approached the guards. They were dressed in dark suits and white shirts with smart, well-polished shoes. They were tall and looked powerful. They looked like soldiers. Both had bulges beneath their left armpits. Isabella knew what those were.
The men turned to look at her. They had been told to be cautious, but, even so, she was just a young girl, a sweet and pretty young girl, and that brought a host of expectations. The idea that she might be a threat to them took a moment to process, and that moment was all that she needed.
“You can’t come in here,” one of them said, raising a hand. He turned to face her, blocking the way ahead, presenting a nice, wide target.
She stepped closer, pulled the gun clear of the bag and, with him just a handful of feet away, fired twice. The first round went through his upraised hand into his chest and the second hit him in the throat. He toppled backwards onto his backside, his eyes bulging with astonishment, pressing at the pulsating fold of skin in his throat, blood already running out of it, running through the hole in his hand.
The second man took a half step back, his hand fumbling inside his jacket and fiddling with the retention strap that held his weapon in its holster. It should have been a simple, practiced routine, the thumb flicking the strap before the fingers pulled the gun, but he couldn’t do it. The incongruity of what he had just seen had stunned the knowledge out of him.
Isabella took two steps to confront him.
And fired again.
He tumbled backwards into the room.
Isabella followed.
Control heard the noises from outside: a quick pop, something heavy dropping to the floor, scuffling feet, a second pop.
He opened his eyes just as a man’s body bumped open the door and fell backwards into the room.
A young girl followed the man across the threshold.
She was pointing a semi-automatic pistol at him.
She pointed down at him and fired once, cleanly and efficiently, and the man jerked once and then lay still.
The girl returned to the door and dragged the body of a second man into the room. He was much bigger than she, and she struggled. She hauled him inside far enough that she could close the door.
Control tried to move, thrashing his arms in sudden panic, but the ties around his wrists jerked tight, and all he succeeded in doing was pressing himself back into the bed.
The girl walked across the room.
She took a pillow and held it over his chest.
She pressed the muzzle of the gun against the pillow.
“This is for my father.”
She pulled the trigger.
Pfft.
It felt as if someone had punched him in the gut.
The morphine meant that he didn’t feel the pain. It felt as if he had been winded.
“And this is for my mother.”
She pulled the trigger again.
Pfft.
Another punch in the chest.
He gasped for breath that didn’t come. He watched as the girl looked over him, then followed her eyes as she glanced to the bank of medical equipment to the side of the bed. His blood pressure was falling even as his pulse spiked. A feeling of awful emptiness grew in his chest, and his breath came faster and faster. A curtain of darkness seemed near, just at the edge of his vision, and when he blinked and opened his eyes again, it seemed nearer still. He opened and closed his mouth, trying to speak. The words were irrelevant, just sibilant noises, and then it was as if he had been tipped over into that pit of blackness.
The last thing he registered was the girl, still standing over him.
Her eyes were wintry, icy blue, impassionate and unsparing.
His last thought, as the light leeched away from the edges of his vision, and the cowl of darkness started to descend, was that her cold blue eyes were just like her mother’s.
Isabella moved quickly.
She took off the jumper and skirt and changed into the check shirt and Levis. She took out the red mesh cap and put it on her head, then dumped the first outfit in the bin by the sink.
She wiped the Beretta down, removing her prints, and dropped it into the bin, too.
She checked her reflection in the mirror above the sink. She straightened her darkened hair and dabbed a piece of moist tissue against the drop of blood that had found its way onto her cheek. She cleaned it away. Nothing was out of place.
She took a breath and opened the door. The corridor was empty. The alarm was still sounding. There was a patch of bloody blowback on the door. She returned to the room, collected a tissue and scrubbed it away. Then, satisfied, she walked briskly to the elevator lobby.
The nearest elevator pinged, and the doors opened. Two men, much like the two she had shot, emerged from the car and walked briskly towards the door from which she had just exited. They looked troubled.
A door to the right of the elevator doors was marked with a sign that said it led to the emergency stairs. Isabella pushed through it.
The flight of stairs headed down, but she found she couldn’t move. She felt dizzy, lightheaded and weak, and she had to put out a hand against the wall to steady herself.
She heard the sound of angry voices from the other side of the door, and then the noise of running feet.
She pushed herself away from the wall and started down the stairs. They suddenly looked too much for her to negotiate. She took a step, unsteadily, clinging onto the rail, and then another. She was almost at the half-landing when she felt the bile surge up from her stomach, burning up her gullet and filling her mouth. She vomited, dropping to the floor as the hot sick poured out of her mouth and pooled around her knees. She swiped the back of her hand across her mouth, trying to scrub it all away, but now her jeans were covered with it, and she still felt weak.
She had killed three men.
Killed them.
Murdered them?
Her mother hadn’t told her how it would feel.
She hadn’t told her it would feel like this.
She tried to stand, but the weakness washed over her again.
She couldn’t.
Couldn’t move.
Couldn’t.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The elevator doors opened, and the sound of the alarm, which had been muffled, flooded inside, loud and strident. Milton marched purposefully into the third floor lobby. He knew how to behave. How to look. You belong here. This is all second nature.
He had skirted the floor earlier, observing judiciously, setting everything in his mind’s eye so that when he returned he would waste no time orientating himself; the lobby, with the glass walls with automatic doors; the waiting area with the long leather couches; the picture window with the view of the Chesapeake skyline.
Milton went through the glass doors.
The space beyond was empty.
He walked quickly to the door that led to the corridor where Control was being treated.
The door opened.
A big man bustled out of it.
A second man was behind him.
Both of them were carrying pistols.
Milton started to change course.
“Hey,” the first man called out to him.
Milton stopped. “Yes?”
“Who are you?”
“Doctor Cromartie. Who are you?”
The second man slipped around them both and ran for the lobby.
“Have you seen anyone up here?”
“No,” Milton said. He gestured down at the pistol. “What’s going on?”
The second man disappeared into the lobby.
“Have you seen anyone?” the man asked again.
“I told you, no. I’ve
only just come up.”
Milton assessed: he had a minute, two if he was lucky.
No time to play it any other way.
He punched the man in the gut, as hard as he could. His eyes went wide as saucers as he bent double, folding over the blow. As his chin descended, Milton brought up his leg. His knee connected with the man’s chin, the impact sudden and unsparing. The man blacked out, unconscious, even before he had crumpled to the floor.
Milton stepped over him. He drew the Sig P226 that Pope had given him and, his finger on the trigger, pushed the door open and hurried into the corridor.
He cleared the rooms one by one.
Empty.
Empty.
Empty.
He reached the last door, pushing it open with the toe of his boot.
An identical room, same as the others. Bed, chair, medical equipment.
But two men were on the floor. Both of them had been shot. Blood still oozed from the wounds.
He looked up at the bed.
A man, swaddled in bandages, his wrists fastened to fabric ties.
There he was.
Control.
He stepped up to the bed.
Two entry wounds in his chest. The edges were cauterised. Powder burns. The gun had been fired at close range.
Milton had seen enough. He went back into the corridor, stepped over the unconscious man and made his way back onto the main area of the third floor. He flipped the tails of his doctor’s coat aside, shoved the P226 into the back of his trousers and let the coat fall over it.
Four men burst through the glass doors. They were all armed, weapons out.
“Help!” Milton yelled. “Help! In there!”
The men pushed by on either side and ran down the corridor.
Milton hurried to the elevators. The doors to the nearest one were closing. He reached into the narrowing gap, pushed them back and stepped inside.
Pope’s phone was on silent, and it buzzed urgently in his pocket.
He took it out and pressed it to his ear.
“What is it?”
“He’s already dead.”