Seek and Destroy

by Alan McDermott

  A couple of times recently he’d referred in conversation to his experiences in Africa and elsewhere. It was only the following morning that he’d realized how stupid he’d been, but by then the damage was done.

  Soon after his last transgression, he’d gone to a hardware store and purchased a safe with a time-release locking mechanism. Whenever he felt the urge for a drink, he would throw his house keys in the safe and set the timer for eight hours later, then grab a few from the fridge and sit in the apartment with only the television for company.

  He still ventured out now and again, but usually only for lunch in one of the chic restaurants in the area. In the evening, he cooked. Not the egg and sausages from days gone by, but what he now liked to call proper food. He’d invested in an array of kitchen equipment, from blenders and mixers to a sous vide water bath, and after many hours watching reruns of MasterChef on TV he could produce meals that he would have happily paid good money for in a restaurant.

  Within a couple of weeks of his new routine, he’d stopped buying beer at the supermarket. He wasn’t programmed to sit alone and wallow in despair, so he’d upped his exercise routine instead. His morning jog became a five-mile run, followed by three hours at a gym and daily swimming. It was the perfect complement to his new healthy-eating lifestyle, but while it was good to get the endorphins flowing, life still didn’t feel complete.

  He missed socializing. Specifically, being around his friends, sharing tales, swapping jokes.

  What he really craved, though, was action.

  He’d been a soldier for most of his life, and only really felt alive when the bullets were flying. He’d been fortunate enough to have seen his fair share of battles and emerged unscathed, and the job he’d had for the last few years, working for Tom Gray, meant he’d gotten to play with guns to his heart’s content.

  When Gray had made the decision to liquidate Minotaur Solutions, a part of Sonny had died. His role as training officer had given him immense pleasure over the years, allowing him to evaluate the new recruits while keeping his own skills sharp on the range. Nothing in civilian life, he knew, could ever possibly compare.

  Eva’s message, though, gave him a new lease on life. Strange how the direst emergency could feel like a life preserver. At least to a dyed-in-the-wool soldier like Sonny Baines.

  He checked the map on his phone and saw that the drive from Milan to Geneva would take him four hours. Eva would likely have sent him an address by then. If not, he’d find a hotel and check in for the night.

  It didn’t take long to pack what he needed. Within fifteen minutes of receiving the news, Sonny was in his car and heading west.

  CHAPTER 5

  Henry Langton stood in the control room of his mansion, overseeing the next phase of the operation. Willard Eckman, with his white open-necked shirt and cropped hair, had been tasked with tracking down Eva Driscoll, and would be the one to issue orders, but everyone in the room knew that Langton was in charge.

  Not that they knew him by that name. The plastic surgery he’d undergone a few months earlier had changed his appearance enough that barely anyone would recognize him from the few photographs available. As far as the world was aware, Henry Langton had died of a heart attack the summer before. To the people in this room, the seventy-year-old man standing with them was an ex-NSA official by the name of Charles Danby. But this mission wasn’t government-sanctioned, and they knew it. If it had been, they would be operating out of a facility in or near Washington, DC, not on an island in the middle of nowhere. The only people with an interest in killing Eva Driscoll were the ESO, but for the money they were getting, no one in the room cared who they were working for. All that mattered was that Driscoll and her team were on the loose once more, and it was their job to track them down and eliminate them.

  “Nest, this is Eagle One. I have eyes on.”

  “Roger, Eagle One,” said Eckman. “We have visual.”

  The camera carried by the operative using the call sign Eagle One showed a weary-looking Farooq Naser walking through the arrivals hall at Lyon–Saint Exupéry Airport. He was carrying just one bag as he made his way to the exit, following the signs for the taxis.

  “Stay with him, but not too close. We don’t want to spook him.”

  One wall of the control room had a sixty-inch monitor mounted on it, and it showed Naser joining the line for a cab. Surrounding that were six smaller screens displaying the profiles of Driscoll and her friends. The images had been burned into Langton’s memory months earlier, but some of the people under his command were new to the mission. The mug shots were there as a constant reminder of the people they were hunting.

  Apart from Langton and Eckman, there were four other personnel sitting at computers, each with three screens on the go. Art Barnaby was skinny as a rake, while Edwin Masters was the polar opposite. He weighed close to four hundred pounds, and always had either a chocolate bar or a squeezy toy in one hand. Marcus Granger was the youngest at twenty-five, half the age of navy veteran Dennis Turner.

  “Nest, Eagle Two. We see the target and are waiting to tail him.”

  Eckman acknowledged the report and asked Eagle Three for a status update. They replied that they were still four hours out from Lyon. No way they would make it in time.

  The minutes ticked past slowly, and Langton kept his eyes on the monitors. Either Driscoll was going to pick Naser up at the airport or meet him somewhere in the city. The latter was more likely, as he could see that Naser was nearly at the front of the line and there was no sign of her.

  “Check the drivers of those cabs. See if any of them are Driscoll.”

  Eckman passed on Langton’s order, and Eagle One started walking the line, pointing the camera in his briefcase toward the cars. One by one, the drivers were eliminated as suspects.

  “She’s not going to show,” Langton told Eckman. “Make sure you don’t lose Naser trying to spot her. He’s our only hope.”

  Once Langton had learned of the president’s decision to give Driscoll and her cronies new identities, he’d quickly put measures in place to uncover the false identities that they would be using. It hadn’t taken much money to convince a White House staffer to divulge the information, but to Langton’s dismay, only one of the six had decided to use the new papers. There had been no travel booked under their original names either, leaving Naser the only method of getting to the others.

  The operative in Hyderabad, Ali, had easily found which flight Naser had booked at the Emirates desk. Ali had bought a ticket on the same flight and followed Naser to Dubai, aware that he might be laying a false trail and intending to purchase another ticket to a different destination. That hadn’t been the case. Naser had continued on to Lyon as expected, and now he was about to get into a cab with a dozen eyes on him.

  Farooq Naser was exhausted. He’d never enjoyed flying and found sleeping on a plane impossible. He slumped into the back of the taxi and handed the driver a piece of paper with an address on it. His French was awful and he knew he would make a mess of trying to enunciate it.

  The cab pulled away, and Farooq closed his eyes for a few moments. He was tempted to sleep until he reached his destination, but he knew he wasn’t safe yet. Eva had sent him the address and asked him which ID he’d been using. He’d responded that it was the one President Russell had given him, and she’d told him to keep using it. No doubt that’s how the ESO had found him, and they were probably not very far away. He turned and looked out the rear window. There were no ominous black SUVs to be seen, but they could have learned their lesson and be using standard vehicles to follow him instead. The trouble was, everyone seemed to be heading into the city, and he wouldn’t be able to tell if anyone was tailing him until they got closer to the center of Lyon.

  After half an hour, they encountered a labyrinth of streets, all of them one-way traffic. The taxi came to a stop and the driver turned to give Farooq the price. A few euros changed hands, and Farooq got out and looked around. The driver wo
und down his window and said something that he didn’t understand, then started pointing down a street guarded by No Entry signs.

  Farooq thanked him and began walking, checking the shop names on the narrow street for one that matched the one Eva had given him. As he strolled farther, he heard a buzzing sound coming from ahead. It got louder, until a dirt bike screamed into view and powered toward him. Farooq was frozen like a rabbit caught in headlights, and the bike stopped a yard away, the rider looking straight at him. The figure was dressed all in black, and he couldn’t see the face beneath the tinted visor.

  When the mysterious figure took a pistol from inside the leather jacket, Farooq closed his eyes and waited for the fatal shot. But when the gun fired, he felt nothing. He wasn’t blown off his feet and felt no searing pain to announce the strike of the bullet.

  “Get on!” Eva shouted as she lifted the visor.

  Farooq opened his eyes, still frozen to the spot.

  “Move!”

  Farooq snapped into action. He leaped on the back of the bike and Eva burned rubber as she pointed the machine in the direction it had come and gave it full throttle. He managed a glance behind him and saw a man lying on the ground, a gun in his hand. People were tentatively gathering around him, but the scene disappeared from view as Eva reached the main road and spun the bike right, then made a quick left. She gunned it once more, barely slowing at the next junction.

  They flew down the narrow street, then came to a major intersection. Eva fed the bike through a gap between a car and a bus, then flew around the next corner.

  “When we stop, you’ll see a black Audi,” Eva shouted above the whine of the engine. “Get in and keep your head down!”

  Farooq tapped her on the shoulder to acknowledge the order, then clung on for dear life as she braked hard to take a sharp right. Fifty yards later, the bike screamed to a halt next to an Audi. Farooq jumped off and dived in the open rear door as Eva sped away.

  “Get under the blanket and keep your head down,” Carl Huff said as he gently pulled the vehicle into traffic and drove in the opposite direction from Eva.

  Farooq was happy to do so. “What about Eva?” he asked from under the blanket.

  “Don’t worry about her. She’s got it covered.”

  “Man down! Man down!”

  Eagle One gunned the engine of the Citroën and gave chase. After seeing his partner gunned down and Naser climbing on to the bike, he knew it had to be Driscoll on the motorcycle. He also knew that losing her would be a bad career move.

  She was on the street paralleling his, and at the next junction he turned to intercept her. But she flew past his position before he got to the intersection, and by the time he was behind her she was gone again. He’d seen the way she’d gone, though, and sounded his horn as a pedestrian thought about crossing in front of him.

  “Nest, I’ve got Driscoll! She’s on a motorbike. I need backup, now!”

  Ten seconds later he took the same turn as the bike. He could still see her heading toward the end of the street, but there was no sign of Naser. Had he fallen off? More likely he’d jumped off and hidden somewhere, but he was of no interest now. Driscoll was the one they were after, and she was getting away.

  “Nest, Eagle One. I’m on Place Louis Pradel. She’s just turned left. Where’s Eagle Two?”

  “Two streets over. They’ll be with you in thirty seconds.”

  “Sir, if we can get the satellite overhead . . .”

  “No satellite,” Langton growled. He’d told Eckman that it had been tasked to an NSA mission, but in truth he simply didn’t have access to it anymore. It had taken a lot of his remaining influence—and a shit-ton of cash—to gain access to the databases of the NSA, CIA and FBI without the full approval of the ESO. The organization—one that his family had run for two centuries—wouldn’t have sanctioned his mission if he’d asked, which was why he hadn’t. He still had enough in the bank to buy whatever he wanted, with the exception of access to a few billion dollars’ worth of space technology.

  Eckman could follow his vehicles on the screen thanks to the on-board trackers, but the lack of satellite meant he had no imagery of their target. So his directions for Eagle Two—the aim being to get ahead of Driscoll and cut her off—relied on Eagle One’s best estimate of Driscoll’s location.

  “She’s just crossed the bridge,” Eagle One reported. “We’re closing in.”

  Langton saw the dots representing his two cars take the same direction, and wished he could at least provide video to help coordinate the chase. He rued not having it even more when the next call came in.

  “Shit! She’s gone off road!”

  Eva reached the end of Pont Morand just as the traffic lights on the far bank turned green. Instead of turning right on to the one-way street, she kept going straight and bounced the bike up the curb and into the park. She knew that the cars on her tail would have to take the long way around, by which time she’d be out of sight.

  She didn’t count on them following her.

  Metal screeched as a Citroën leaped into the air and crashed back down twenty yards behind her. Eva gave the bike gas as the car bounced once more before the wheels gained purchase. She zipped between two trees and across the grass, while the Citroën was forced to stick to the path, almost demolishing a flower stall as it raced parallel to her.

  Seconds later she was back on the road, heading the wrong way up a one-way street. Her hope was to prevent the car following, but traffic was light and the Citroën was still on her tail. It had the horsepower advantage, but the bike was all about maneuverability. Eva headed straight for a truck, then jinked right at the last moment. The truck slewed sideways, blocking three of the four lanes, but the Citroën sneaked past and stayed on her tail.

  A police siren sounded in the distance; the last thing Eva needed was more people on her case. She nipped down a side street, again heading into oncoming traffic. This road was narrower, only two lanes, and she soon opened up a gap between her and the pursuing Citroën as she squeezed between vehicles.

  No sooner had she lost one car than a second flew out of a side street and missed her bike by inches. She scooted ahead of the car’s fender and on to the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians as she searched for a way out. As the car turned to continue the chase, Eva opened up a sizable lead, turning on to a one-lane street and staying off the main road.

  She could still hear the sirens, but they were behind her now. She hoped the police would concentrate on her pursuers. She had a rendezvous to make, and falling into the hands of the police would be almost as bad as the ESO’s men catching her.

  Eva took a right and steered the bike on to a path toward Place de l’Europe, the bollards preventing any cars following her. A minute later, she doubled back on herself, then flew the wrong way across Pont Lafayette. She navigated the back streets until she came to the fountain at Place des Jacobins, where she stopped the motorcycle under a tree and dumped the helmet on the seat. She walked over to where Carl Huff had parked the Audi.

  “Any problems?” he asked as she got in beside him.

  Eva shrugged. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

  She glanced in the back seat at the partially blanket-covered Farooq. “Did you ditch your phone like I said?”

  “Yeah. Left it in the restroom at Dubai Airport.”

  “Good. Keep your head down until we’re out of the city.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To meet the others,” Eva said. “First Geneva, then Paris.”

  She put a cap on and sank into her seat as Huff drove north to pick up the main road to Geneva.

  CHAPTER 6

  Henry Langton had never been one to suffer fools gladly, though he could usually keep his temper under control. The incompetent performance he was witnessing was testing his patience to the limit.

  “She’s gone right on . . . Rue Duguesclin.”

  Langton saw the street highlighted on the map, and the two glowing dots trailin
g in the invisible Driscoll’s wake. She had clearly picked her route in advance and was leading them on a merry chase.

  “She’s gone off road. It says Place de l’Europe. We can’t follow. Where does it come out?”

  “Take a right on Cours Lafayette,” Eckman said over the comms.

  “Shit! We’ve got cops on our ass!”

  The situation was turning into a farce, and Langton was approaching apoplexy. He grabbed the mic from Eckman and pressed the Speak button. “Never mind the cops! If you lose her, you’re next on my list! Get that bitch!”

  He threw the microphone on to the table and fumbled in his pocket for his cigarettes. His hands were shaking as he lit one, and he glanced around, looking for someone who objected to the smoke. Sensibly, they all concentrated on their screens.

  “I’m on Cours Lafayette,” Eagle One announced. “There’s no sign of her.”

  “Eagle Two, report.”

  “We lost the cops, but no sign of Driscoll.”

  Langton picked up a coffee cup and threw it against a wall. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “We only had two units available at such short notice,” Eckman said, but Langton wasn’t buying it.

  “Bullshit! How many assets have we got?”

  “A hundred and twenty, sir.”

  “And you only managed to get four to Lyon in the last . . .” he looked at his watch “ . . . eighteen hours?”

  “With respect, we thought she would be in a non-extradition country. The likelihood of her being in Europe was slim. The majority of our people are in South America and Africa.”

  Langton had agreed to that assessment, but it didn’t change his mood. He certainly didn’t appreciate having it thrown back in his face. At the time, it had made sense to place his teams in regions where Driscoll would be most likely to show. Her file said she spoke fluent Spanish, making South America her most likely destination, but she’d always been unpredictable. He should have known she would throw them a curveball.