by Blake Banner
He loomed over me and pushed me. I couldn’t resist and fell on my back. He knelt and slid some kind of package, like a cushion under my head.
He was saying, “It’s a paralyzing agent, as I am sure you know, but this one is not lethal. Not like the concoction you prepared for me. This one will wear off in about ten minutes. Sadly,” he laughed, “in seven minutes this incendiary bomb will go off under your head. It will burn slowly but very hot to start with. Then it will explode. It will of course destroy any evidence of our having been here, and all the evidence the police need to associate the foundation with this operation. It will also provide you with an extremely slow, painful death.”
He stood. “Unfortunate for the patrons and the management, but the insurance will pick up the tab, and the hotel had become a little too hot to handle.”
I shifted my eyes to look at the colonel. She was staring at me and weeping. Cavendish kept talking.
“You thought you could sneak in and kill me, and stop our operation, but you are so, so wrong. Nothing can stop us now. It is too late. This is just the beginning of the New World Order. It would have been useful to find out who you work for from your own lips, but I have no doubt the colonel will be able to tell me all I need to know.”
He crouched down beside me and leered into my face. I tried to call out. But I hadn’t the strength and only a soft moan came from my throat. Panic thrashed inside me, but I couldn’t use it. I frantically wanted to live and feel, but it was like I was dead inside. I looked into his gloating eyes and felt the cold steel of the fighting knife on my fingers. With the tiny strength I had left I took the knife and pushed it into his belly. It was so sharp it barely required any strength. It slipped in and he tottered a couple of steps, then collapsed.
I lay in stillness, trying to cry out to the colonel. I saw bodies move, hurrying, heard feet shuffling. I saw the colonel being pulled to her feet by anonymous men in black suits. They took her past me and down the stairs.
The device was hard under my head. My heart was pounding high and hard in my chest. I needed to get to the colonel. I didn’t want to die like this, numb, unable to fight. I could not die like this, allowing them to do what they were doing to break the colonel into submission. I battled furiously inside to overcome the paralysis, but I couldn’t. My body was not my own. From the corner of my eye, I could see the digital timer. There was a minute and fifty seconds left. My heart was pounding hard, but I couldn’t feel, and I couldn’t move.
A minute and twenty seconds, nineteen, eighteen... There was a figure standing over me, motionless. I tried to shout, to call out, but all I could produce was a soft murmur in my throat. The figure moved away and disappeared. Panic gripped me, churning my insides, but still I couldn’t make a sound, nor a movement.
A minute and five seconds.
Fifty-nine seconds and hands gripped my ankles. Then I was sliding along the floor, the device was left behind me. I rolled down the steps and somebody ran and clattered beside me. Then I was being dragged again, through a door, and suddenly there was thick, billowing smoke. I saw a flash of white-hot light reflect off the wall and a few seconds later the walls shuddered. Hands grabbed at my shoulders. I grunted and realized there was some feeling in my fingers. Somebody heaved at me and I tried to stand.
Then there was an arm under my shoulders, and a voice in my ear. “Come on! Fight, for Christ’s sake! Stand!”
The smoke was getting thicker and I started to cough. I tried to stand. My legs buckled. I tried again. He’d said ten minutes. Only seven minutes had passed. But then Harry Bauer was the meanest son of a bitch in the valley, right? I heaved, roared and pushed with my legs, and managed to get to my feet. Arms wrapped around me, holding me up, guiding me toward the door and the stairs. Behind me searing flames began to roar.
We squeezed through the doorway and began to stumble down the steps at a half-run. I whispered, “Alice…”
She said, “Shut up. Don’t talk now. For Christ’s sake just run!”
We burst through the door at the bottom of the stairs and plowed into the heaving bodies and the blasting music. The club was heaving. Nobody knew. Nobody had the faintest idea. We pushed and elbowed. Slowly my strength was coming back, but the noise and the airlessness were splitting my head and making me feel nauseous. I searched for the entrance in the gloom. It seemed a million miles away, a small amber rectangle dancing in a swarming, sweating mass of crazed people. In my ear Araminta’s voice kept repeating, “One more step, one more step… Come on you old bastard, just one more step,” and then we were at the door and out into the blessed, cool night air, staggering through the parking lot toward a car.
“No,” I said, “the Mustang. The girls. We have to help them.”
She sighed and dumped me against the side of a cream Range Rover. “Your girls made off with your Mustang about twenty minutes ago, Galahad. Now get in the damned Range Rover before I whip your ass.”
She heaved me into the passenger seat and folded my legs in after me and closed the door. After a moment of silence the driver’s door slammed too and Araminta was by my side. The engine growled and we pulled out of the lot, turned left to the main drag and then merged with the traffic. Behind us flames started to lick out of the top floor windows of the Garden of Eden, and screaming crowds began to spill out of the doors. But I didn’t see any of that.
I looked at Araminta. “He got away, and he took the colonel.”
“You did your best. Try to get some sleep. We’ll try and intercept him at the airports.”
I shook my head. “There is something wrong with the colonel. I need to see the brigadier.”
“The brigadier is on his way.”
Slowly feeling was coming back into my limbs. I reached in my pocked and dragged out my cell.
“Harry!”
“They took her.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Cavendish is dead.”
“I know that, Harry. Are you hurt?”
“No, now he is really dead.”
Araminta took the phone from my fingers.
“Sir, he is badly hurt. Cavendish was not dead, he is now. The colonel has been taken.”
She was quiet for a while, driving and listening to the phone. Then she said, “OK, I’m on my way.”
I looked at her and frowned a bleary frown. “Where?”
“To the brigadier’s villa in Marbella.”
“What for?” I asked stupidly.
“To patch you up and send you off again. Something is badly wrong with the colonel, Harry, and you have to bring her home.”
I nodded. “There are things I don’t understand.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Armitage,” I said. “Campbell, and she wouldn’t move. It was like it wasn’t her…”
“Close your eyes,” she said as we pulled onto the freeway and headed west toward Marbella. “Wait for the brigadier to debrief you. He’ll tell you what you need to do.”
I didn’t close my eyes. I kept them focused on the dark road ahead, and as the lights raced toward us, my mind drifted into dreams, dark dreams.
The colonel was gone. Jane was gone.
Let Me Help
As I mentioned before, I love writing. Because of this, I end up writing new books at a much faster rate than most other authors—typically one a month (sometimes more).
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What'd You Think?
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Excerpt of Next Book
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One
“Vengeance is mine,” he said, and Araminta dropped with a splosh into the turquoise cool of the swimming pool. “I will repay, saith the Lord. Romans, chapter twelve, verse nineteen.”
I glanced at the brigadier, then returned my gaze to Araminta’s liquid form warping like a fish beneath the water in the brigadier’s Marbella villa. I spoke absently.
“You’re quoting from the Bible?”
“Deuteronomy, the Fifth Book of Moses, originally from the Jewish Torah, but also the Old Testament. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, all branches from the same monotheistic tree. I was brought up an Anglican, obviously. I have since become more of an agnostic.” He sighed and gave a slow, reluctant shrug. “There is something of an evidential issue. But, that said, there is much in the Bible that is worthy of thought and reflection.”
I watched him while he spoke. Wondering what he was driving at. “Yeah?”
“You may be familiar with the maxim in Budo, ‘Look not into your enemy’s eye, lest you become your enemy.’”
I nodded. “Sure.”
“‘Vengeance is mine’ runs along similar lines. The idea is that vengeance belongs to God, not to man. Once you seek revenge, you have looked too deeply into your enemy’s eye, and you risk becoming the very thing you seek to punish.”
Araminta erupted from the water, blowing fine spray from her lips, and pushing her wet hair back from her face. My words were for the brigadier, but I was watching the sun reflecting off her wet skin.
“Where does that leave Cobra?”
“That is precisely the point I am trying to make to you, Harry. We are not about vengeance. We are about cleansing. When you take the rubbish from your kitchen out to the bins in the street, you should not hate the rubbish, or wish to punish it, because you would become emotionally and mentally unstable. It is the same with what we do. In order to decide who is ‘good’ and who is ‘bad,’ you need to be a god, an ultimate moral arbiter or judge. Humans are not up to that standard, but we can decide who is a detriment to human society, by a series of objective criteria. Cavendish had to go, not because he was ‘bad’ and we hated him, but because he had committed acts that meant he was harmful to human society. Harmful, in simplistic terms, means caused more pain than pleasure.”
I arched an eyebrow at him. “Seriously?”
“Very seriously. We are mere human beings, Harry. We are the accidental custodians of this planet, and until either a fiery chariot or a flying saucer settles in Parliament Square or on the White House lawn, it’s up to us to make the best decisions we can, based on objective criteria. How do we base our decisions on objective criteria?” He raised one hand, palm up, like he was showing me something. “Pain is harm, pleasure is good.”
I sighed. “If I had time for philosophy I am sure I could pick holes in that. I might ask you something about how sadists and masochists fit into your argument. But I haven’t got time for philosophy, and in any case I have a feeling you are telling me that when I go and bring the colonel back, I should not indulge in wanton revenge against those who took her.”
“A suggestion. You may not believe it right now, Harry, but you are extremely vulnerable at the moment, physically and emotionally. As Yoda would have it, you could easily be drawn to the dark side. Your job is not to seek revenge, but to clean out the trash.”
I watched Araminta backstroke across the pool with her eyes closed to the sun. I sighed.
“Do you believe that?”
“Just because it is difficult, Harry, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”
I grunted. “Well, sir, if it’s all the same to you, I am going to leave the philosophical, moral high ground to you, and when I get hold of the people who have taken the colonel, I am going to make sure that anyone who hears the story of what happened to them, will think very, very carefully before doing anything similar again.”
He arched his eyebrows and nodded. “I should hope so. But that is not revenge, Harry. That is just doing a thorough job. Take out the trash, and make sure the house remains clean. We do not kill to avenge, we kill to clean.”
Araminta pulled herself out of the pool and stood glistening and looking desirable in the sunshine, pulling her hair back from her face. Across the lawn, in the shade of the patio, a man in a white jacket with white gloves on stepped out through the sliding glass doors. He approached us and, as the brigadier turned toward him, he said, “Señor, the lonch is ready. Will the señores eat out here, or going inside?”
Araminta answered as she wrapped her head in a towel like a turban.
“We’ll eat out here, Sanchez. And I’ll have a Beefeater and lime first.”
He bowed, giving his head a little sideways twist, which made it somehow less servile, and he withdrew back into the shade of the house. Up in one of the palm trees a parakeet laughed at him. It was a harsh, ugly laugh.
After that Sanchez and a couple of cute Spanish girls with long black hair, big brown eyes and voices about as harsh as the parakeet’s went about setting up a table in the sunshine beside the pool, while Araminta sat and browned herself behind large, tortoiseshell sunglasses.
“Who’s dead?” she said suddenly, then answered her own question. “Captain Bill Hartmann, your arch enemy in the Ben-Amini affair[6], he’s dead. Raymond Hirsch, apparent leader of the ‘Find Harry’ department of the CIA, he’s dead. Captain
Seth Campbell, alleged Air Force Intelligence, but according to my research a CIA officer, probably attached to Hirsch’s ‘Find Harry’ team and, indirectly, working for Cavendish—” She paused a moment, having lost herself in her overly long sentence, then shrugged and said, “He’s dead too.”
I shook my head. “What I don’t get is, if Cavendish wanted me alive so he could interrogate me, why’d he send Campbell to kill me?”
She raised a hand to wag a finger at me. “I said indirectly working for Cavendish. As I understand it, after Panama[7] Hirsch didn’t really care much who you worked for. I think he bought your story that you were independent. One way or the other, he came to the conclusion that your employer was not the problem, you were. Hirsch and certain elements in the CIA collaborated with Cavendish—Cavendish pulled a lot of weight, but ultimately it was a collaboration—and Hirsch wanted you dead. Cavendish wanted to interrogate you but Hirsch was clear, he wanted you dead.”
“So Hirsch sent Campbell to kill me in defiance of Cavendish.”
“Defiance is probably putting it a bit strong, but yeah, pretty much.”
“And Colonel James Armitage?”
“Nothing to do with Central Intelligence or Cavendish. He is legit 25th Air Force.”
“Is he still interested in me?”
She shrugged, with her face still turned to the sun. “Irrelevant. He wants the colonel back, and you are going to bring her back, right?”
“Right.”
Sanchez had set the table with a white linen cloth, white linen napkins, silver cutlery and an ice bucket with two bottles of very cold white wine in it. Now he emerged carrying a huge paella pan full of sizzling yellow rice, mussels, prawns, squid and chunks of chicken. The girls followed him in a kind of improvised procession bearing olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, and baskets of fresh-baked spongy white bread. The brigadier smiled at me.