Breath of Hell (Harry Bauer Book 8)

by Blake Banner

  “Have you compromised me? Are you serious? On Koufonisi Marianne almost had me gutted by four of your lover boy’s goons!”

  “Marianne, not me!”

  “On your information!”

  She stood, her face flushed, stabbing her finger at me in the air. “No! On the bloody noise you make every time you make a hit! Yushbaev, who is not stupid by a very long shot, knew that you were coming after him and probably me! He used me as bait so that you would follow! You blundered right into his trap and started spouting about the Cavendish kill and how you suspected it was murder. They laughed at you, Harry! They laughed at the way you were chronically incapable of not boasting!”

  “Boy, you really admire this guy.”

  “I do not admire him and he is not my lover boy! Why can’t you get over your gigantic ego for two minutes and listen to me? He used me as bait! Can’t you see that? Even today he was using me as bait!”

  “So talk! This guy is so damned brilliant and he was one step ahead of me all the way, using you as bait! How could he not be with you in his pocket drooling at his feet and telling him everything he needed to know?”

  “Oh, God damn you, Harry! You are so obstinate! How many men did they send?” Before I could answer she held up her right hand with her thumb concealed. “Four! They sent four men! Seriously, knowing you the way I do, how many goddamned men do you think I would have sent if I wanted you dead? You asshole!”

  She made a gesture like she was going to hurl her glass at me, but drained it instead and sat back down on the sofa. Then she waved her finger at me.

  “No! Not six, not eight! Because you are such a damned savage you’d find a way to blind and maim them all and you would come out of it, covered head to foot in blood and gore, none of it yours! No, if I had wanted you killed I would have had Marianne kill you. Or I would have had them bring you to me on the yacht, fed you a goddamn sob story, and I would have poisoned you. But I didn’t, and as far as I am aware, in all the time Gabriel Yushbaev has had me in his power, Cobra has not been compromised, neither have you and neither has the brigadier.”

  My head was reeling. It wasn’t just that what she was saying made sense; I knew, just from looking at her face, that she was telling the truth. I exploded, “Then what the hell are you doing, Jane? What the hell are you playing at?” She just shook her head. I pointed savagely toward the docks. “I saw you at the mosque talking to that guy in the leather jacket. I saw him give you something!”

  “A shopping list of weapons.”

  “I saw you negotiating with those guys at the club, you have admitted that’s what you were doing, and I saw you, goddamn it, kissing that bastard on the cheek!”

  She nodded. “Yes, Harry, you saw all of that.”

  “Explain it, Jane! Tell me what the hell you are doing!”

  “Please, Harry. It would take too long, and you probably wouldn’t believe me anyway. You have to let me go. Just trust me, Harry!”

  I shook my head, feeling a hot knot in my belly that told me I was making a mistake. “I can’t. How can I?”

  “All right, we’ll do this the slow way, then. I will tell you everything that happened from the moment you dropped me at the hotel. And then you have to help me, Harry. You have no idea what is at stake, and there is no time to do things by the book.”

  “OK, so tell me.”

  I was about to sit opposite her when there was a rap at the door. I called, “Who is it?”

  “Your meal, sir.”

  And I went to open the door.

  Sixteen

  The kid set the table, opened the wine, poured it and left, ten bucks richer. The colonel rose from the sofa and carried her cognac glass to the table, where she sat. I sat opposite her. She sagged back in her chair.

  “What I am about to tell you will finish me forever. Left to my own devices with Yushbaev, I could have redeemed myself and proven my loyalty to Cobra, but what you are forcing me to do will rob me of that chance.”

  “I’m sorry, this is the only way.”

  “Yushbaev is blackmailing me.”

  “Blackmailing you how? What the hell could he have over you?”

  “You don’t know everything about my student years, do you?”

  “No, I know practically nothing about you or your student years.”

  She picked up her knife and fork and paused a moment before cutting into the steak.

  “I was not always such a prudent, well-behaved girl.”

  I had to fight to repress the smile. “Really?”

  “Really. I dropped out of college for a couple of years, hooked up with a Hell’s Angel in California and rode with the gang for almost two years.”

  I was frowning hard, trying to see it. It wasn’t as hard as I might have expected. “You’re serious?”

  “Yes, for two years I was a one hundred percent biker bitch. I wasn’t just his old lady, I did the whole thing. We grew marijuana in the basement of his house, sold coke…” She shook her head. “You name it, I did it. I had a crazy two years. My parents had no idea where I was or what had become of me. They must have gone through hell.”

  “So you smoked some dope and snorted some coke…” I shook my head in disbelief. “It’s a shame, but in our culture these days a lot…”

  I stopped because she was shaking her head. “No, Harry, I did not smoke some dope and snort some coke. I crawled out of bed every morning at eleven or twelve and rolled two joints, one for me and one for Bull, and probably smoked a dozen more before I crawled into bed at four the next morning. I was permanently drunk on beer, whiskey and vodka, and for every ounce of coke I snorted, we sold a K to some pusher. We used to drive down to Arizona to collect the stuff, then take it back to California and sell it.”

  “What happened?”

  She shrugged and made her first cut into her steak. “I woke up one morning with one suicidal hangover too many. Bull was sleeping like the dead, I rode my bike to the bus station, called the cops and told them where Bull’s stash was in the house, and went back home. I made up a story for Mom and Dad about where I had been. It was pretty much the truth, but I left out the drugs, and I made out like Bull had forbidden me to contact my family. They bought it, because it was the best possible version of the truth.” She gave another, smaller shrug. “I cleaned myself up, went back to college, and joined the United States Air Force.”

  “So how did Yushbaev come by this information?”

  “I don’t know exactly, but he and Cavendish, among others, were watching you, and they noticed that you occasionally had dinner with me. So they decided to investigate my background and they found that there were two years missing from my otherwise well-ordered life. They started digging and they found Bull.”

  I chewed on a hunk of steak, then drained my glass of wine. As I refilled it I asked her, “Why didn’t you tell the brigadier?”

  “Why would I? I had all but forgotten about it. But as I walked through the doors into the hotel, two men closed in on me. One placed a dark coat around my shoulders and the other showed me a photograph of me on the back of Bull’s bike. It was a photograph he had taken, which I would give a lot to destroy. I was in such a state of shock I didn’t know what to do. As they led me out I was praying you would still be there and do something, but you had already gone. They took me to a van, saying there was somebody who wanted to have a brief chat with me. The rest is history.”

  “Wait a minute.” I shook my finger at her. “That only goes so far. It does not explain how you have come this far without compromising the brigadier, me or Cobra,”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it, Harry. I just did exactly what you did in Panama. I told them I worked for the CIA’s Special Activities Center. They didn’t believe me—not entirely—but Yushbaev said it didn’t matter. If he gave me a loose enough lead, you would eventually come sniffing after me.”

  “So why did he run in Koufonissi instead of taking me out?”

  “Because he had just lost
four men and realized he had underestimated you. He decided to draw you to his home base. Again he underestimated you. Please don’t look smug. He thought you would try and come aboard and take me from the yacht.”

  I was skeptical, but the question I really wanted to know was more important. “OK, supposing I buy all that. There is one thing that just doesn’t make sense. Why are you so desperate to get away? Why are you compounding this by acting like you’re part of his gang? Like you have some loyalty to him?”

  She put both hands to her forehead like it hurt from battering it against my stupidity.

  “Because, Harry, you may have taken me, but he is still alive and his organization is in full working order. You haven’t rescued me, Harry you have captured me in very damning circumstances. And to compound that, he will now publish the information he has on me and send it to my commanding officers in the Air Force and, to put the cherry on the damned cake, the Air Force will now investigate me and could find my ties to Cobra.”

  I sat staring at her, thinking for a long while. Finally I said, “Yeah, a Colonel James Armitage has been chasing me chasing you.”

  “He is very good. Don’t underestimate him.”

  “Can you prove any of this?”

  “Of course, but I don’t need to. The FBI and, or, Air Force Intelligence will prove it for me, and they will then prosecute me to the full, punitive extent of the law, and the very best I can hope for is that I will be disgraced and lose my career. The worst can happen is that I will go to prison for the rest of my life. In either case, Yushbaev’s organization will come after me and kill me.” She heaved a heavy sigh and shook her head. “If you had just let me do things my way, I would have sorted this. You of all people should understand that.”

  “I should understand that? Perhaps. What I don’t understand is the kiss, living on his yacht like one of the gang…”

  “No? You don’t understand that? Well cast your mind back to one May Ling, or how about Rachida, AKA Mary Jones?[8] Or Diana AKA Helen[9]? Should I continue? If you had been spotted in your more intimate moments with those ladies, how do you think that would have looked, Harry?”

  “It was essential to the operation…” I trailed off because it sounded lame even to me.

  “The difference being that you were sent on a job, whereas I was abducted?”

  “If you had gone to the brigadier, or me…”

  “After I was abducted?”

  I sighed, feeling helpless. “If what you’re saying is true, we can work something out.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “All we can do now is wait for the storm, and when it breaks I will be disgraced, I will go to prison and I will then probably be murdered.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Your trust in the system is touching. Excuse me.”

  She stood and made her way past me toward the bathroom.

  Someone once told me, trust no one absolutely. It’s not fair on them. Nobody is that good that they can be trusted no matter what. But I guess trust is a hard thing to overcome. We all want to believe that particular person will be there for us, come what may. We all want to believe that that particular person will stand by us unconditionally, regardless of what life throws at them. We all need to believe that that particular person will not betray us, even when they already have. But the man was right. It is not fair to expect from somebody else a standard of honor and integrity no human can achieve.

  The pain—the physical pain in my head—lasted only a fraction of a second. My skull split open, there was a violent flash of white light and then blackness and stillness, and oblivion.

  Pain only exists in three dimensions, and as I returned from that shapeless, timeless place in my mind, so the pain returned. It came first to my head, sharp as shards of glass, it pierced my skull, and then settled to throbbing down through my neck and set about getting itself generalized into my whole body.

  The next thing I was aware of was the cold, wet discomfort of water spilling from my face down onto my collar. I moved my face and wiped it with my sleeve, sending a few more shards of glass through my skull.

  I opened my eyes and looked up from the floor at the ceiling. There was a blurry face in the way, frowning at me, like it disapproved of my position, splayed on the floor. I agreed and tried to sit up. It was a bad idea, with painful consequences. I saw it through anyway and sat, groaning, and scowling at Colonel James Armitage of the United States Air Force.

  I managed to say, “What the hell are you doing here?” before I got to my feet, staggered to the bathroom and threw up.

  I rinsed my mouth and stuck my head under the cold shower for fifteen seconds, then went back to the suite, drying my hair with a towel. Armitage was sitting at the table with a glass of whisky in front of him, watching me. He managed a smile that actually contained some humor.

  “In answer to your question, Harry, I am not as stupid as you look right now.”

  “Thanks. Care to enlarge?”

  “I’ve been tailing you, as I have no doubt you know. After you got back to your hotel, I asked for you at reception. They told me you and your wife had checked out already and left the country. I knew that wasn’t true because I hadn’t seen you leave. Obviously you had paid to change your room and for the discretion of the hotel.” He shrugged. “It’s what I would have done.”

  I sat and reached for my glass. “That easy, huh?”

  He shrugged. “It was a good plan. It would have worked if I hadn’t been stuck to your tail.”

  I tried to think through the pain. “Colonel Harris, where is she?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “I don’t know. Presumably back to the Bucephalus.”

  I stared at him a moment. “How the hell did you know what suite I was in?”

  He gave a modest smile. “Combination of luck and deduction, Harry. I figured if you were looking for anonymity you’d have to pay more, not less. More meant a suite. This is a boutique hotel, there are only three suites. This was the second one I tried, the door was open, you were on the floor.”

  I tried to frame a question that made sense, but the pain in my head kept breaking it up. In the end I said, “Jane…”

  He handed me two pills. “I found these in the bathroom cabinet. It’s Panadol, they call it Paracetamol here.” I washed them down with the whisky while he kept talking. “She left the hotel while I was talking to the front desk. I didn’t recognize her to begin with. She was dressed in pants and a shirt that were much too big for her, and she had big black sunglasses on. She wasn’t so much trying not to be noticed, as not to be recognized. The penny dropped as she went out through the door. I went after her, but she was climbing into a cab, and by the time I reached my car she was gone. I assume she went back to the yacht, and the yacht will make off tonight. My hunch is they’ll leave somebody behind to deal with you. Probably tonight.”

  “How do you know about the Bucephalus?”

  “I told you, I’ve been tailing you.”

  “I didn’t notice you.”

  He smiled. “Yeah, well, the CIA isn’t the only organization that trains its operatives well. The Air Force does a pretty good job too.”

  I grunted. I was mad at myself. I had screwed up on Koufonisi and I hadn’t stopped screwing up since. This case was about as hard to understand as female logic expressed in Chinese algebra.

  I rubbed my eyes and took another pull on the whisky. The pain in my head and neck began to ease. “There are too many departments involved in this case, all pulling in different directions, and nobody has all the facts.”

  “I agree. I hope you’ll cooperate with us now.”

  I ignored his comment like I hadn’t heard it. “Nobody but Colonel Jane Harris.”

  “You think she has all the facts?”

  “I know it.”

  “She told you something?”

  “Yeah, some. How long have you known her?”

  “
A few years.”

  “You ever had any reason to be suspicious of her?”

  “Never. This whole thing has come out of left field.”

  “Let me ask you something, since she disappeared—I know it is not long—but since that happened, have you had any sign that 25th Air Force or any of its operations have been compromised?” He hesitated, looked away at the black glass in the window. I pressed him. “You want us to cooperate, but you want me to do all the cooperating. Is that the way it is?”

  He sighed. “No, but as you say, it is early days.”

  “Maybe, but I know Jane pretty well, and I don’t believe she’s working for Yushbaev or the Russian Mafia. She’s been with you a long time, and I am pretty sure, however hard you look, you will not find anything to suggest she was giving information to anybody, or sabotaging operations.”

  “Then what the hell is she doing with this guy? He’s letting her go around on her own, she’s kissing the guy on the cheek…” He shrugged and spread his hands. “What are we supposed to think?”

  I pointed at him. “You said it right. What are we supposed to think. We’re supposed to think the same thing he does. That she’s either gone over to him, or that she’s been working for them all along. But the question I am asking is, where’s the damage? Where is the damage she’s done us? Where is the payoff for Yushbaev and his gang?”

  He grunted. “So if she’s on our side, why did she crack you on the head with a vase and run?”

  “Because our intelligence community is so obsessed with compartmentalized security that no department knows what the other departments are up to. So when we went after her, to rescue her, we actually jeopardized her mission. Hell! I was going to arrest her. I imagine you were too.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “It also happens to be the explanation she gave me, and the only one that makes any sense.”

  He looked into his whisky and pulled down the corners of his mouth, like he was skeptical it was really whisky. “So who, exactly, is she working for?”