by Andy Lucas
Doyle McEntire was in a similarly shrouded bed alongside Sarah’s.
The plastic sheeting was slightly opaque so he could only make out a blurred image of her face through it. A clearer view could be seen on a nearby monitor. She looked deathly pale and had been placed in a medically-induced coma by one of McEntire’s personal consultants; Mr Carter.
As soon as he had arrived at the McEntire HQ, and taken the elevator directly from the underground parking garage up to the medical facility, on the sixth floor, Baker and Hammond greeted him. Taking him to one side, they had explained everything they knew, which wasn’t much.
‘What we know is this,’ began Hammond calmly. ‘Sarah stopped at the set of traffic lights just across the street. While she was waiting for the lights to change, someone ran up to the driver’s door and smashed the window in with something heavy.’ Pace shot him a questioning look. ‘We don’t know what it was. Sarah did not see it. Before she knew it, the glass imploded all over her and someone was leaning in and grabbing her by her throat.’
Pace felt the fury boil up inside him as the words sunk in. Why had he decided to stay behind? If he’d been with her, he could have protected her.
‘Something was blown in her face and then whoever it was made good their escape on a moped. Again, she didn’t see anything but she remembered that the engine was very high pitched and whiny,’ added Baker. ‘Our people are reviewing all available CCTV from the area as we speak. We will find whoever did this.’
‘Okay,’ frowned Pace. ‘But she’s in an isolation tent and you don’t need one of those for being choked. What did they put in her face?’
‘We’re not sure at the moment,’ said Hammond evenly. ‘It wasn’t acid, or anything like that, and it wasn’t a powder either, so we can rule out anthrax or something similar. Sarah said it was a fine liquid, like a spray from an aerosol. She breathed it in, James, that’s all we know. Something is inside her lungs and the doctors are trying to find out what it is as quickly as they can.’
‘Who would do this?’ was Pace’s next question. ‘She wasn’t on an operation and she was no threat to anyone.’
‘She is Doyle McEntire’s daughter,’ explained Baker. ‘There are a lot of people out there with an axe to grind against the McEntire Corporation. Some have business gripes and some have been on the receiving end of the protection services we operate on behalf of the British government.’
‘And some people just hate him for being so successful. There are some fanatical anti-capitalists roaming the streets of London nowadays who would love to strike a blow against what they view as a pillar of capitalist society.’
Pace stole another glance towards the shielded door. ‘And Doyle?’
‘Sarah managed to drive into the car park. She used her security pass to ride the elevator straight up to her father’s office. He was up there alone, waiting for her. She collapsed in his arms and he raised the alarm.’ Baker’s explanation made sense. ‘Whatever she’s been exposed to, so has he. The doctors are treating them both but Doyle is showing no symptoms of anything yet.’
‘Wait,’ said Pace, suddenly struck by a thought. ‘You said that she collapsed in his arms. Why?’
Hammond and Baker exchanged a quick look, which was meant to be covert but Pace caught it.
‘According to Doyle, she was fine when she first stepped out of the elevator, just tearful and shocked. He gave her a glass of water and she told him what had happened, which is what we’ve been able to tell you,’ Hammond said. ‘Then she started to complain that she could not breathe. She began to vomit and choke.’
Pace felt any remaining colour draining from his face. He wanted to say something but a sense of numb despair suddenly gripped him and his mouth stayed shut.
‘He managed to get her into the recovery position and kept her breathing until the medical response team arrived. They stabilised her, got them both down here to the medical floor and set up an isolation area.’ Baker’s words helped calm Pace a little. But not much.
‘How long before we know what she’s been exposed to? Any idea?’
‘No,’ replied Hammond. ‘They have all the equipment they need to find out and to keep them both alive. There’s nothing more we can do for them. We just have to let the professionals get on with their jobs.’
‘Are they giving her any medication?’ Pace asked. ‘It would be sensible to try her on antibiotics. I mean, while they’re waiting, wouldn’t it?’
Hammond nodded. ‘They’re both being given strong, broad-spectrum antibiotics and fluids right now. That’s all the doctors will risk until they know exactly what they’re dealing with.’
‘If Sarah had not deteriorated so fast, I might even have thought that it was a hoax,’ said Baker. ‘You know, someone out to make a splash in the tabloids with a fake attack like all those idiots who sent pretend anthrax packages to politicians a few years back.’
‘No,’ growled Pace. ‘This is for real and I won’t rest until the bastard who did it is in my hands.’
The conversation would have turned to one of mutual agreement about the guaranteed demise of Sarah’s attacker but events suddenly overtook them.
A disturbance erupted behind the curtained door, signifying a drastic change. The methodical, calm, soft-footed approach of the medical team switched into high gear. Shouted instructions rang around the room and Pace had to be forcibly held back from barging his way through the plastic veil.
Yet it was not Sarah who was the reason for the chaos.
Inside the room; overwhelmed with residual shock and fearing for his daughter’s life, Doyle McEntire had been seized within the vicious grip of a catastrophic heart attack.
4
‘It is a message,’ concluded Hammond coldly. Seated at the huge conference table in Doyle McEntire’s cavernous penthouse office, he directed his words at two equally dishevelled men seated opposite. Baker and Pace, like himself, had not left the building for the past two days. They all needed a shower and a fresh set of clothes but none of them was willing to step away from such a delicate situation, even for a minute.
Pace met his gaze squarely, nodding slightly. ‘At least we know what it is now and we know how to fight it.’
Baker rose from his chair wearily and moved across to a side table, where he poured them each a fresh mug of hot, black coffee. The dark liquid had been practically their only sustenance since Sarah’s attack but they were all grateful to feel its invigorating bite in their mouths once more. Once re-seated, he noted that the watery light of a London dusk beginning to settle over the great city, heralding the rapid onset of another night. The weather was cold and heavy rain hammered against the many windows, accentuating the sombre mood with its staccato rhythm.
‘I don’t know what she hopes to achieve with this attack,’ he opened. ‘She clearly understands that we have the resources to identify the agent used and treat Sarah. As a message,’ he glanced over at Hammond, ‘it seems self-defeating. She has no way of knowing the true nature of our business but she knows enough to recognise that she’s just signed her own death warrant.’
‘You’re talking about someone who kidnapped an innocent woman, then robbed her of her most sacred organs,’ replied Pace bitterly. ‘Who presided over the brutal murder of dozens of people so she could further her own ambitions.’ He paused, swallowing down useless anger for the hundredth time that day. ‘Maybe she’s just mad; a psychopath perhaps?’
‘Whatever she is, or whatever her intentions,’ interrupted Hammond, ‘I promise you, James, we will not rest until she is found and dealt with.’
Pace failed to suppress a wry smile. ‘I know, Max, I know. In time, we’ll find her and I will personally send her to hell, where she can spend eternity with that evil bitch she used to call her personal assistant.’ They all remembered the now-deceased Fiona Chambers; glad she was gone. ‘For now, let’s just focus on getting Sarah well.’
‘And hoping her father survives too,’ added Baker ruefully. Having worked w
ith Doyle McEntire for decades, he was struggling with the thought that his boss, and friend, was currently hanging on to his life by the thinnest of gossamer threads.
Life had a strange way of working out, Pace knew. If Sarah had not received such immediate, expert medical care, she might not have survived the first few hours. Similarly, such was the extent of Doyle McEntire’s heart attack that if he had been anywhere but in a clinical bed, surrounded by some of the best doctors in the world, he would already be dead.
Luckily, one of the consultants attending at the moment the attack struck was the heart surgeon who had been badgering McEntire to book himself in for a quadruple bypass procedure. Within five minutes, the surgeon had opened him up, throat to belly, at one point physically massaging McEntire’s heart until it began to beat again. A ten-hour operation had left him with long wounds to his legs, where veins had been stripped out for the emergency bypasses, as the medical team fought to keep their patient from tipping over the eternal precipice.
Both father and daughter remained in medically-induced comas, with Sarah’s prognosis looking a great deal brighter than McEntire’s.
When the doctors had diagnosed bubonic plague, more specifically; Scorpion, as the agent Sarah had inhaled, there had been an initial moment of sheer disbelief around the table.
But, after the shock had melted away, the reality took hold and they finally understood the reason behind Sarah’s attack. Revenge.
Josephine Roche, who had managed to slide out from under their very noses just before the bloodbath in ARC’s Namibian desalination plant, had exacted vengeance against the men she blamed for exposing her. Forced to flee for her life, and now vanished into thin air, she’d lost her company, her credibility and everything she had been scheming to build. Personal wealth and assets had been frozen by a dozen governments and she was being actively hunted by law enforcement agencies across the globe.
Pace had assumed, wrongly, that Josephine would lie low for a year or two; perhaps even forever, to avoid spending the rest of her life in jail or facing an African firing squad. Now, it seemed, she was behind the calculated attack on Sarah.
What she did not have known, however, was that the McEntire Corporation was not simply a powerful, international company. She could not have known of its darker underbelly, nor joined the dots to realise how self-destructive her fateful instructions to attack Sarah would be for her.
Josephine Roche understood that the McEntire Corporation was behind her downfall but she had assigned the blame to a few, overzealous, adventuring employees who just happened to have Doyle McEntire’s connections and wealth behind them; enabling a civilian outfit to bring down the power of both military and law enforcement crashing down upon ARC; destroying her dreams.
Unfortunately for all concerned, the damage had now been done and the clock could not be wound back. Like an angry viper, the McEntire Corporation’s covert resources were now coiled, quivering, watching and waiting to strike.
Its venomous fangs would be the heartbroken men sitting around the conference table.
5
The sun was dipping behind the majestic white crowns of the Himalayan horizon, casting long shadows across icy ravines, snow fields and exposed rocky chasms. The sky had been clear all day but now banks of heavy cloud were beginning to gather around the jagged peaks, sinking slowly down the mountainsides to envelope them in its frigid grasp.
Tucked inside the lip of a small cave, carved into the base of a cliff face by a long-vanished river, a pair of eyes scanned the terrain with practised skill. Walnut in colour, they read every twist and turn of the visible terrain before the storm finally broke and a heavy curtain of snow suddenly blotted out everything beyond the cave mouth.
Sompal Joshi huddled down into his thermal suit, pulled the hood more tightly around his ears, and pondered his existence for the thousandth time.
Given over to a monastery as a child, after his parents both died in an avalanche, he had spent years training with the monks, learning their ways and devoting himself to spirituality. Although eternally grateful to them, Joshi had become disillusioned with the whole concept of monastic life as hormones flooded his teenaged system and a yearning to discover the world outside began to take hold.
Leaving, at the age of fifteen, he had returned to the lower passes and the village in which he was born. With no living relatives, shunned by the villagers for showing such selfish disrespect to the monks, Joshi had been forced to move away and spend his later teenage years far from home, herding goats as a wandering labourer before eventually finding salvation within the bosom of the British Army’s Gurkha Rifles.
He had seen action all over the world, with a final posting in the boiling mountains of Afghanistan a few years before. In his forties by then, he had retired on a decent pension, supplemented by an injury compensation payment. The pay-out was for the serious bullet damage to one of his knees, suffered in a friendly fire incident in Helmand. The British had sent him in, with eight others, to clear a small compound; their team comprising a mixture of Gurkhas and SAS troops. The battle for the compound had been won without any casualties on their side.
Joshi had completed the victory by calling in an airstrike from Apaches gunships but a communication mix up over the airwaves had seen the fire command being given to slightly different co-ordinates. Instead of raining hell on the enemy, who were regrouping in a nearby dry river bed, the Hellfire missiles had targeted the compound itself.
The incident left five dead and only one uninjured. Joshi's leg had been so badly hit that the surgeons at Bastion had nearly decided to amputate but managed, in the end, to save the leg. Joshi would always walk with a pronounced limp but the leg worked fairly well now.
Upon returning home, Joshi bought himself a nice house in Kathmandu, where he could afford to live very comfortably, albeit alone. The call of the wild was as strong as ever, however, and he spent an increasing amount of time in the highlands and lower mountains, searching for his destiny.
Joshi was a product of the modern world, despite retaining his deep spirituality; he happily embraced technology to improve his life. He wore the finest winter clothing and carried a modern satellite phone so that he was never out of contact with the few friends that he had; all made during his soldiering days and now living on every continent of the globe. He was perfectly able to live off the land and survive, if he had to, but he saw no reason to deprive himself of a few luxuries.
The cave was one of half a dozen that he used regularly, spreading out in a twenty mile radius from the end of the small track where he had parked his old Ford Ranger pick-up truck. Joshi was planning to spend a full week in the mountains this time. A heavy backpack, heaving with provisions, sat on the rocky floor next to him, as did a pristine SA80 assault rifle; a highly illegal parting gift from his army buddies.
The black metal and rugged, green plastic grips were all beautifully maintained. The very same gun had saved his life on more occasions than he cared to think about, in at least five theatres of operation. He loved the feel of it in his hands and he knew that nothing could hurt him as long as he carried it with him. It was a lethal weapon and he was damned good with it.
The assault rifle could be fitted with a bayonet but Joshi was a Gurkha, so had no need of one. In its trusty sheath, the traditional, much-feared, curved Kukri of the Gurkha warrior sat on his hip.
With night falling, he moved away from the cave mouth and descended a gently sloping rock floor for a few metres before reaching its slightly bulbous end. The cave end was small; barely larger than a four-man tent, but it was perfect for his needs. He had already set up a sleeping bag against the far wall but he could barely see it in the rapidly thickening darkness inside.
Joshi had no plan to light a fire. His dark blue snow suit and sleeping bag combined to provide more than enough heat retention to see him comfortably through the night. Slipping inside the sleeping bag, he adjusted the rifle so it lay close at hand and then lay back to sle
ep. Despite it only being early evening, he wanted to be up with the sun the next day and had little trouble dozing off.
He awoke with a start, some time later, and instinctively reached for the SA80, feeling immediately reassured at the gun’s familiar weight. Joshi was momentarily disoriented but he was an experienced soldier whose wits soon returned. The cave was quiet and his night vision was good after being asleep for a few hours. He could see the cave end was empty, save for himself, and the sloping tunnel now ended in a brightly starlit circle. The storm had passed at some point while he slept.
Joshi listened carefully; not just with his ears but with his soul. Trained by the monks to read hidden vibrations that most humans could no longer attune to, he often jokingly referred to it as ‘The Force’ after a popular science fiction franchise. His eyes told him that all was well, as did his ears. His soul, however, continued to clamour for his attention and a sense of foreboding strengthened within him. Something was outside the cave, very close by, and it knew he was inside.
Joshi slid out of his sleeping bag, keeping the gun pointed at the cave entrance as he moved. This part of the mountains was remote enough to deter all but the most determined hunters. A wide range of wildlife existed in the vicinity, including a healthy tiger population. He sensed a predator’s spirit and a deadly intent which ruled out any of the large herbivores.
He felt no fear of his unwelcome visitor. The SA80 was a very capable assault rifle and could easily take down a tiger. Strangely, however, the presence did not feel like a tiger. Joshi had run into the big cats several times over the years and this time, something felt different.
Although he could not say why, his soul detected an evil, vicious intent from the presence which was never there in other animals, even apex predators. Whatever waited outside the cave was not interested in him for food. It wanted to kill him for the sport. Joshi instinctively knew, for the first time, he was about to encounter a monster.