The schoolmaster released him and gestured at the bench, sheltered by a wooden awning. “Have a seat, kid. Let’s talk.”
41
Clara’s foot tapped an erratic beat on the yellow-painted asphalt at the ticket booths. Who in their right mind went to the zoo in winter? The answer was an American family of eight, and they were hogging the only open window. The father wanted to haggle the price of every extra attraction the zoo offered.
“The special white lion exhibit—how much is that again?”
His wife, rolling a double stroller back and forth to rock her twins, offered Clara an apologetic shrug.
Clara answered with a curt smile. Her foot never stopped tapping.
The security guard singled her out for a random check. Of course—because why stop the small army rolling a miniature troop carrier through the gate and carrying enough supplies to last until spring? He found nothing. She’d left the SIG in the truck with Otto. Getting detained by zoo guards and arrested by the polizei wouldn’t do her or Ben any good.
The army, with its stroller troop carrier, marched south from the hub inside the gate. Clara chose east, if only to escape the whining and bickering. She needed to concentrate.
Find Ben.
She doubted Sensen could get a sniper rifle past the gate, even a zoo gate. A rifle is a rifle. But now that she had a confined area to search, she didn’t need to track down Sensen or bash him over the head with a potted plant—the only viable weapons in sight. If she found Ben, she could get him safely out of there.
“Ben?” Clara shouted up the path.
A young couple, barely out of their teens, watched her with worried looks. The girl caught her elbow. “Hast du dein Kind verloren?”
Clara didn’t speak German.
The young man held his hand waist high. “Dein Kind.”
They thought she’d lost a child. What was she supposed to say? No, I lost my spy.
“Uh . . . Yes. Mein . . . kind. Ben. He’s always wandering off and getting into trouble.” She waved away their worried looks. “No problem. I’ll find him.” She reinforced the declaration with a nod.
The girl nodded back, adding an unconvinced smile. Her husband pulled her onward, mumbling to her in German.
Maybe she shouldn’t shout Ben’s name—for many reasons. She hurried on.
“Where are you?”
Why were all zoos laid out like a maze on a child’s cereal box? Clara began to think she’d have to search every path and every building. She came to a broad plaza-slash-junction with camels, paired together in little thatch-roofed hothouses all around the space. A camel spa. She half expected to see them wearing towels and lounging on teak benches. Ten camels in all. No Ben.
She plopped down on a circular bench to think. Some spy she’d turned out to be. The nearest camel stopped roving his tiny space and stared at her. Clara stared back. “Do you think Ben expected a sniper to interrupt his meeting?” The camel absently chewed something she hadn’t seen him pick up. “You’re right.” She slapped the bench. “Ben let his opponents choose the meeting point. How desperate is that?”
The camel wandered off. Clara looked to her right to see a little boy gazing at her, mouth slightly open. His mother pulled him away.
The Company chose the location, one meant to favor their sniper. And with security checking bags at the entrance, a sniper would need to shoot from beyond the zoo walls.
Clara’s eyes drifted uphill to a glass geodesic dome rising from the trees. Turning her head, she saw the FIFA headquarters building, the highest structure on the Zürichberg hilltop. The rooftop offered a clear view of the dome—a clear shot for a sniper. A sign on the junction’s north side pointed the way, identifying the place as the Masoala Indoor Rainforest.
Clara left the bench at a run.
42
Ben watched a bright red macaw wheel past the platform to land atop a mushroom-shaped baobab tree, the enclosure’s centerpiece. Beyond the treetops and the glass panels, snow-covered slopes rose from Lake Geneva to a dozen or more rocky peaks. “Quite the sanctuary you found.”
“You wanna talk about the scenery or business?” Hale sat heavily beside him, resting his hands on the worn knees of his jeans and glaring out at the mountains. “I cut a trip to Venice short for this.” He lolled his head over to fix his glare on Ben. “I’m retired, kid. Remember? I left the game a week before you graduated from the schoolhouse. We had a party and everything.”
No matter what security measures the zoo had in place, Ben knew a Glock was hiding under Hale’s gray canvas jacket. He grabbed for it.
The colonel trapped his wrist in an iron grip before his fingers got halfway to the target.
“Your reflexes are pretty sharp for an old retired guy.” Ben gave him a thin smile. “You and I have seen each other plenty since then. We both know Company agents never leave the game.”
Hale released him, pushing his arm away. “They do when they’re told to leave.”
“You mean me, right? Are you confirming this is a severance, a campfire horror story come to life?”
“I’m not the Director’s buddy, kid. He doesn’t tell me anything. But from where I’m sitting, this can’t be anything else.” Hale let out a breath and eased himself back next to Ben. “I received a briefing on my way here. I know about Rome, Brussels, Paris. I know about Leviathan and the man you call Massir. And Sensen told me you paid him a visit at his place in Luxembourg.” He chuckled. “You should take it as a compliment that he let you live.”
“He won’t do it again.”
“So I’ve been told.”
Ben could swear Hale made a slight tilt of his head—a minuscule movement, perhaps a shift of his gaze. Disturbing, but the need for answers kept him locked in his seat. “Tell me this. Did the Company analyze the case contents? Rome might have been a setup, but Dylan told me the case contents were genuine—the chemical foundations for CRTX explosives.”
“I might say Dylan knows his business, if I were privy to such information. Where are you going with this?”
“If the chemicals are real, we should still be able to backtrack the order, follow the money.”
Hale crossed his arms. “We does not include you anymore. Nor me, officially. But I have it on good authority the money trail led to a dead end. Those chemicals appeared from nowhere—a rabbit out of a hat.”
“Impossible. That only works if . . .” Ben fell silent, trying to let his thoughts catch up with his conclusions.
The flat line of Hale’s mouth threatened to turn upward into a teacher’s grin. “Go on.”
“Leviathan is synthesizing the compounds for CRTX in-house. But if they can do that, they can make tons of the stuff. We’re talking the explosive power of a nuke.”
“I wouldn’t worry. They’d still need a big rig to move a bomb that size. And frankly, CRTX shouldn’t concern you.” Hale shifted on the bench, stretching out an arm to touch Ben’s shoulder. “C4 is more your speed—the kind found in a standard Company demolition package.”
“So you know about Giselle?”
“Word travels fast when a team lead kills one of his people.”
“I didn’t kill her.” Of all the sins Ben’s friends forced him to deny committing, Giselle’s murder hurt him the most. But with Hale, he swallowed his anger. He needed to keep this civil. “Talk to Dylan.”
Hale drew his arm back and snorted. “You’re saying Dylan—little Dylan who doesn’t carry a gun and can barely talk to a woman like Giselle without stammering—turned into a cold-blooded killer and blew up her house.”
“Cottage.”
“Whatever. Let’s talk about that, and feel free to stop me when I run out of actual-no-kidding facts.” Hale counted each statement on his fingers. “You start a relationship with a teammate, a gross violation of Company rules. Your girlfriend buys a safe house off the books. You check out a demolition package, which goes missing. And not long after, the safe house blows up with said girlfriend i
nside.” He lowered his hand. “What’s the Director supposed to think?”
“He should give me a chance to tell my side of the story. I passed my demolition package to Dylan in Rome.” Ben showed him the detonator fragment. “And I found this at the scene. Either Dylan wanted to frame me, or the Company took her out with a similar package as part of my severance.” Ben tucked the fragment away. “Prove me wrong.”
“Not my job. I’m not the Company’s PR man. And the Director’s not the one on trial here.”
On trial. Ben should have laughed. He never saw a trial—never had the chance to stand in his own defense. The trial ended days ago, relegating him to the world’s longest and most painful execution. He needed a stay in view of an appeal. “Ask the Director to meet me, let me plead my case.”
“I’m not a messenger boy either.” Hale folded his arms and crossed one leg over the other, a false relaxed posture that Ben knew would put his right hand closer to his gun. “Look, kid. There are two reasons for a severance, and two reasons only. Either you turned traitor or botched something huge. You tell me which case this is.”
“I’m no traitor.”
“Okay. Say I believe you—”
“Say you believe me?”
Hale held up a hand. “Stick with me, kid. If you’re no traitor, then you must be an epic failure. In that case, think of this as getting fired. All you need to do is list your failures. I’ll document them as your intermediary, and everything’ll be fine.” He pulled an imaginary slip of paper from his inside pocket and offered it to Ben. “Here’s your pink slip. Sad. Sure. But not the end of the world. Try starting over. New city. New job. You’ve always had quick hands. I bet you could flip burgers with the best of ’em.”
“Pink slip? The Director sent a sniper to shoot at me. He froze accounts.” Ben pointed with both hands at his frostbitten face. “Look at me. We inflict this kind of punishment on petty dictators and drug lords—the truly wicked. I’m one of the good guys.”
“You were one of the good guys. So you say. But now, good or bad, you’re out. Take the severance and walk.”
Rain came pouring down in torrents. Ben looked up through half-closed eyelids to see streams of water shooting from sprayers near the dome’s peak. Rapid droplets pelted his face, unchecked by the wood pergola above the bench.
He heard the pop of an umbrella—felt the handle pressed into his hand. Hale tilted it into place to protect them both. “It rains on the just and the unjust, kid. And that’s no joke. I want to believe you’re not a traitor. But either way, you made some big mistakes. Unforgivable mistakes.”
“No.” Ben rubbed the rain from his eyes. It smelled of steel instead of clouds—unreal. None of this was real. He shook his head and repeated the denial with more force to make himself heard over the fake storm. “No. I made mistakes. We all do. But I don’t deserve this.”
Hale laughed. “Then why is it happening?” He pressed himself up to leave, stepping out from under the umbrella’s protection, as if an operative of his caliber didn’t need it. He snapped his wet fingers in Ben’s face—as good as spitting. “Wake up, kid. It’s over.”
Ben stood and grabbed his arm. “We’re not done.”
The colonel spun, landing a blow to Ben’s solar plexus with the heel of his palm, hard enough to drop him back against the bench. “I said it’s over.”
“But . . .” Ben wheezed, fighting to recapture his breath. “Leviathan . . . I have . . . new intel.”
Hale cocked his head. “What intel?”
Ben never got the chance to answer. They were interrupted by a cry from the rainforest. Not a macaw or a monkey cry, but a human voice—a woman’s voice, shouting a clear name. “Ben!”
43
Ben fought through his shortness of breath to regain his feet. He joined the colonel at the platform’s oak railing. Below, Clara ran up the path, amber hair matted to her head and shoulders by the downpour. Her head turned frantically left and right. “Ben! Where are you?”
Three men converged on her position. The young zoo guide in the blue shirt hurried in from a side path carrying two umbrellas, perhaps thinking this woman had freaked out after wandering into a man-made storm. Two others burst through the hanging vinyl strips at the entrance.
Ben recognized Duval and his partner. He cupped a hand to his mouth. “Clara. Watch out!”
She looked up, shielding her eyes against the rain. “You watch out. Sensen is here!”
As if he hadn’t seen that coming. Part of him had expected to die the moment he and Hale sat on the bench. “I know!” Ben pointed. “He’s on the FIFA rooftop!”
Hale rolled his head over to look at him. “Really, kid?”
Duval and his partner kept coming, but the guide with the umbrellas got in their way. The three collided. Clara ran into the bushes—safe, if only for a moment.
The French cops both had guns. Ben had left his in the go-bag, in the woods outside the gate. He needed a weapon.
Ben and Hale stared each other down. The colonel pressed his lips together, pushing out the salt-and-pepper gristle on his chin. “Don’t be stupid, kid. Sensen’s here to protect me, not kill you. Don’t give him a reason.”
They both made their moves. The colonel went for the Glock. Ben chose to use the weapon already in his hands. He thrust his open umbrella into Hale’s chest, stabbing him with the dull point and trapping his hand with the taut black fabric. The umbrella also obscured Hale’s view, and Ben took full advantage. Still pushing, he kicked a heel into the inside of Hale’s knee.
The colonel wouldn’t go down that easy. But Ben didn’t want him to go down. He needed a shield. With Hale off-balance, Ben steered him to the platform’s east rail, cutting off Sensen’s sightline from the FIFA.
Hale fought back. He threw wild punches with his free arm. Ben blocked them all and kept him pinned against the rail. Within seconds, he had a hand inside the colonel’s jacket. He threw a final vengeful punch through the umbrella fabric into Hale’s solar plexus, and backed away, leveling the Glock. He crouched low, still wary of Sensen.
The grimace on his mentor’s face gave Ben a measure of satisfaction.
Both men blinked and squinted in the rain. Hale wheezed. “You said . . . you had intel.”
“Sea Titan Cargo. Valencia, Spain. Behemoth. Jupiter. Take a look.” Ben grabbed the rail and vaulted over.
A shot split the rain-soaked air. Birds and bats launched themselves from every tree. Ben caught the rope of the plank bridge under his armpits, body swinging, desperately holding on to the Glock. He dropped again. Branches whipped at his face. Another shot rang out. This time, glass shattered above. Ben landed with a painful splat in mud and rotting leaves.
“Calix!” Duval and his friend blocked the path to the exit, weapons up. Duval fired.
A broad leaf split to his right, and Ben rolled deeper into the dubious green cover. He felt a tug at his elbow. He swung a left, but pulled the punch when he saw Clara lying next to him in the dirt.
Rain dripped down her face. “You’re in danger.”
“I’m in danger? You’re the one in danger. I left you and that dumb dog in Luxembourg for a reason. Tell me Sensen didn’t order you to stay put.”
“Of course he did, at gunpoint. Come on. We need to go.”
She jumped to her feet, and Ben followed. He pushed her into a crouching run as a trio of bullets sliced the foliage around them. “Why didn’t you listen to him? You never listen. You never stay put.”
“But Sensen came to kill you. This is a trap.”
“My whole life is a trap.”
A plan formed. With all the bullets flying, Ben didn’t have time to hunt for the zookeeper access points hidden in the dome’s concrete foundation, and he didn’t want to. For once, he needed Duval. He grabbed Clara’s hand. “Run!”
They sprinted straight down the path toward the exit, with Ben firing the Glock the whole way. Ten rounds for two opponents might sound like good odds. They weren�
��t. Ben wished Hale had brought a bigger gun with a bigger magazine.
The zookeeper buried his head, and the French cops split, diving into the bushes. Ben kept shooting to keep them pinned, leaving a trail of cordite and sulfur hanging in the air behind him until the Glock answered his pulls with sickening, empty clicks. He chucked the weapon into a fishpond and pushed Clara ahead through the vinyl.
She went for the double doors, but he steered her back into the entryway’s corner and pressed a finger to his lips.
Clara shot him a glare for all the manhandling.
He mouthed, I’m sorry.
They waited.
Hot air pounded them from a stack of heaters—a flowing barrier to keep all the tropical creatures safe from the alpine cold. In the time compression caused by the adrenaline flowing through his system, it occurred to Ben that his presence had rendered the barrier useless. At least one glass panel had been destroyed in the gunfight, possibly by Sensen. How many birds and bats were now hurtling free into the frigid mountain air?
Duval came through the vinyl first, focused on the exit. Ben let him pass and threw a head-level elbow at the form coming through next. Crack. Duval’s partner screamed.
Ben let the partner fall, gasping and groaning, and wheeled a fist at Duval. The French cop spun, predictably, and caught the back of Ben’s knuckles with his face. A tug-of-war for the gun might send a stray bullet into Clara. Instead, Ben dropped his left fist hard onto Duval’s wrist, and the weapon fell. Ben kicked it away, out of sight beneath the heaters.
A knife came out. Duval was no slouch.
Before Ben could react, Clara moved in and grabbed the Frenchman’s arm. She gave it a twist worthy of the schoolhouse defense course and jammed the knife against the doorframe, knocking it from his hand. Nice. Ben let her do her thing and drummed the guy’s temple with three rapid rights. He saw Duval’s knees buckling.
“Enough,” he said, nodding for Clara to back off. He spun Duval around and locked an arm through both elbows. He needed a shield.
The Paris Betrayal Page 17