by Dana Haynes
Still, if the French forces did move on Sahar’s redoubt, Belhadj might be able to provide them with a little assistance. And if they remained none the wiser, well, all the better.
Belhadj lay on his stomach on the iron-grid balcony of the grain elevator, put the folded-out stock of the rifle against his right shoulder (wincing a little). He spotted the sniper-watcher on the roof with his own eyes before closing his left eye and lining up his right eye with the gun-mounted scope.
He began squeezing the trigger.
But a glimpse of motion, a swirl of brightness in the background behind the watcher, made him pause. Were there two roof snipers? Was it a shift change? If so, he could kill two of the mercenaries before the military rained hell down on the men inside the warehouse.
Belhadj used the green-light scope to check the source of the movement. His eyebrows rose toward the hair that hung over his brow.
A hooded figure flared into view. The figure turned in his direction, facing the moonlight. Belhadj’s mouth fell open.
“My God,” Belhadj whispered in Arabic.
* * *
Daria had never seen a roof like this. The tar paper surface rose and fell like frozen waves of water. In some places it seemed solid enough; in others, she could make out ragged black holes.
She also noted a watcher, one of Sahar’s men, lying on a coarse blanket, sixty meters ahead of her, with cardboard boxes leaning this way and that to obscure him from casual passersby. He had binoculars and a sniper rifle, plus a canvas messenger bag. The man wore dark olive clothes. He lay on his stomach, elbows propping him up.
Daria scanned the roof, trying to determine a safe route between them. One false step and he would hear her. Worse yet, her leg could drop through the badly aged roof, leaving her off balance and possibly trapped.
She drew the Glock. She didn’t want to engage in a shoot-out up here. Asher’s people inside the warehouse would hear it for certain.
She studied the tar paper surface in the moonlight, looking for footprints to define the watcher’s path of safety. She spied the roof’s trapdoor and saw an array of waffle-soled boot prints running in both directions between the door and the watcher’s coarse woolen blanket. The surface was spongy beneath her weight. She stepped gingerly, slowly, until she was at the trapdoor. Then she followed the boot prints, the gun in her left fist.
When she reached the edge of the blanket, roughly even with the watcher’s knees, she shifted the Glock to her right hand, holding it by the barrel and not by the black polymer grip. She raised her right arm far back and, in one scything motion, swung the gun around and down.
The grip and the metal bottom of the magazine smashed into the watcher’s neck. The blow pulverized two of his discs. The man’s head flopped forward as his elbows gave out.
Daria knelt and gripped his hair and turned his head. She heard crunching noises coming from his neck. His eyes remained open but unfocused, lifeless glass orbs.
She recognized him as a former Mossad agent, assigned to Asher Sahar’s black ops team from before. Yadin? Something like that. She let his head drop to the blanket.
Daria shoved back her black hood and frisked the body.
* * *
Belhadj watched it all through his night scope. But he wasn’t the only silent observer.
The French military crew of Le Tigre kept a watch on her as well, but from a full two kilometers away.
Le Tigre, an Aérospatiale gunship, hovered at five hundred feet. Even under a full moon, its flat, black paint made it impossible to detect from the factory, and difficult to see had it been hovering straight overhead. Its audio signature had been dampened, as had its radar and infrared signatures.
She hung in the air like a ghost, the 500X forward cameras on night-scope mode, the heads-up display on the cockpit windshield showed Daria rising from a jumble of what looked to be cardboard boxes and other, unidentified detritus at her feet. She slid a messenger bag over one shoulder, the bag resting on her opposite hip.
The gunner, sitting right-flank rear, reached forward to tap the pilot on his well-padded shoulder. “That’s her. The American.”
The pilot disengaged his ship-to-land radio and said, “She’s not American. She’s Israeli. And her ass is officially in the crosshairs.”
He reactivated the radio. “Ah, base. Daria Gibron sighted. She is on the roof. Requesting permission to shoot. Over.”
* * *
Five hundred feet straight down and two blocks north, Colonel Céline Trinh stood at attention in the DCRI command vehicle, watching Daria on her own green-hued monitor. The colonel wore silver-and-gray camouflaged fatigues and a black beret. Eurasian and only five-two, some people in the past had mistaken petite for weak. In her two decades in the French Air Force, only a handful of fools had ever made that mistake twice.
“Confirmed,” she spoke into her voice wand. “Permission denied. The Syrian?”
“No sign, base.”
“Hold position.”
Colonel Trinh had complete confidence in the gunship hovering over suburban France. Le Tigre sported a thirty-millimeter turret cannon up front, along with twin twenty-millimeter machine cannons on rotating inner pods, plus fire-and-forget, laser-guided Hellfire missiles on outer pods. Céline Trinh felt sure she could occupy a small city with one Tigre.
In addition, she had two dozen soldiers and airmen on the ground, in a wide array of support vehicles all vectoring toward the factory from the north, south, east, and west.
She knew about the dustup in Manhattan with the Syrian and the Israeli. She knew—didn’t everyone in intelligence circles by now!—about their theft of a CIA command vehicle, one much larger but similar in purpose to the one Colonel Trinh stood in now. She knew about their Plan A for Camp David, and she knew about the upcoming G8 summit in Avignon. If the G8 was the new target, then the threat extended not just to the American president, but to the leadership of the entire industrialized world.
Trinh’s orders were to wait until both targets had been visually identified, then to remove them both. The Americans had been all too clear. Taking the targets alive was not a priority. Colonel Trinh had permission to take any and all precautions necessary to protect the summit.
* * *
When Daria Gibron had appeared squeamish about killing the idiot Algerian hacker in his shop, Belhadj had interpreted that as the influence of living in America. He thought she had grown weak.
Apparently not, he mused, as she lifted, then dropped, the man’s rag doll head. Through the scope, he watched her rifle through the man’s messenger bag, then stand and pull the bag’s strap over one shoulder.
This woman was not among his favorite people. She had shot him a few years ago, and electrocuted him a few hours earlier. She was about to walk into a firefight between Sahar’s forces and the French military. She probably wouldn’t survive the onslaught. And, for the most part, Belhadj was okay with that.
Except …
If the cavalry waded in and started blasting the factory, there was a better-than-even chance that Sahar, with some clever exit strategy in place, would get away. Gibron, on the other hand, was in a foreign building for the first time. If anyone got caught in the crossfire, it likely would be that hellion.
Good. Great. What did he care?
Except …
If Asher Sahar were to skitter free …
The reasons why Belhadj needed Daria wouldn’t have changed. He’d still need her. He couldn’t turn to his own agency. He couldn’t and wouldn’t expect the Americans or their allies to trust him.
He would be on his own against one of the most agile, if sociopathic, minds on Earth. Daria Gibron matched Asher Sahar, insanity-for-insanity.
“Damn it,” he whispered to himself.
He shoved the stock of his sniper rifle hard against his shoulder, peered through the scope, and fired.
* * *
On the rooftop, Daria helped herself to a gulp from the dead guard’s water bot
tle, then tucked it into the stolen messenger bag. She glanced around the roof, trying to suss out the next logical move, when a subsonic bullet whistled through the air and snapped off the roof, twenty meters to her left.
Daria threw herself down hard, flat against the dead man’s body and amid the bramble of cardboard he had used as camouflage. She began prying his fingers off his rifle when a second, nearly silent bullet tore a rift in the tar paper roof. It hit precisely twenty meters to her left. Again.
When a third bullet landed exactly where the first two had, she quit struggling to pry loose the rifle.
Unless the sniper was monumentally incompetent, someone was trying to get her attention.
Grimacing, Daria righted herself on her knees. There was no question who it could be. She presented the back of one gloved hand into the night, first and second fingers raised and split: the British version of “fuck you!”
A fourth bullet dug another divot inches from the first three.
“Fuck me, indeed,” she muttered.
Across the way, on a ghostly grain silo slightly darker than the surrounding night, a penlight flashed twice. Once she had Belhadj’s position—it appeared it be a landing halfway up a maintenance ladder—she dimly saw him climb to his feet. He seemed to wave to her. Why? she wondered.
She blinked and watched his arm gesture again. His wave wasn’t a wave. It was a signal.
Daria climbed to the edge of her roof. She gripped the cement and peered down.
It took her all of thirty seconds to spot, not one, but two surveillance units lying in wait.
The CIA? French military? Parisian police? An outer ring of Asher’s mercenaries? More Syrians? There was no way of telling from the roof.
All Daria knew for sure was that Asher Sahar—her Asher—was in this warehouse.
She wanted his scheme, whatever it was, stopped. She certainly didn’t want him dead.
In so many ways, she felt responsible for what he had become.
Daria thought about the bad options before her and, cursing, she chose the least worst. She left the sniper’s aerie, turned, and duckwalked back toward the hatch in the roof.
Seventeen
Asher Sahar, Eli Schullman, and the other ex-agents and mercenaries watched as Dr. Rabadeau methodically worked his hips, then his shoulders, into a Tychem biohazard suit that tucked into black rubber boots and black rubber gloves. The Frenchman knelt on his left knee, studying his right leg carefully. He stood, knelt on the other knee, and checked the other leg.
“What’s he doing?” Schullman whispered.
Asher cleared his throat and whispered. His old throat wound was bothering him today. “Checking for breaches in his suit.”
“Halliday flew that fucking canister across the ocean and he didn’t need a space suit.”
Asher shrugged. One of the mercenaries helped the pathologist put on the oxygen tank backpack and attach its hoses to the soft helmet.
“Nervous type,” Schullman said, rolling a cigarette he couldn’t light back and forth across the pads of his index finger and thumb.
Asher smiled up at his large friend. “I like nervous types. You’re a nervous type.”
Satisfied, Georges Rabadeau stepped up to the revolving door in the tent until his helmet faceplate nearly touched the plastic. He took baby steps forward, rotating the door with him, allowing an absolute minimum of atmosphere to enter, and exit on the nether side of the door.
Asher’s men had arranged low-heat lights atop tripods inside the tent, but it nonetheless was stuffy and humid. Rabadeau entered fully, making sure his uncomfortable oxygen tank didn’t get stuck in the rotating door. It felt odd, hearing himself breath inside the helmet.
An array of surgical tools had been provided for the doctor. He was told not to bother bringing his own, since Asher intended to have them destroyed once he was done.
On the first of two tables lay a plastic body bag, fully zipped up. The bag was bloated and looked vaguely like a mutant bean pod. Rabadeau reached out with one gloved finger and touched the bag. It undulated the way a bag half-filled with liquid will.
He slowly unzipped the bag a fourth of the way to reveal the head, neck, and shoulders of a cadaver, male, late thirties, early forties, short dark hair, aquiline nose, sturdy jaw. There were brown stains—dried blood—looking like rivulets running from his eye sockets, his nose, his ears, his mouth. His face was pallid, the color of old mushrooms.
“Total exsanguination,” Dr. Rabadeau whispered to himself, his voice unnaturally echoic inside the helmet.
In grease pencil, someone had stenciled the name SACCHS on the side of the bag. Below that were two entries of dates and times. Time of Infection and Time of Death.
He picked up a glass slide and a dropper, gathered a bit of the pooled blood in the partially unzipped bag, and dabbed it on the slide. He fit another slide atop it and slid the glass sandwich into a slot in the RNA analyzer Asher had imported from Finland just for this moment.
Rabadeau made a second blood-and-glass sandwich and slid this one into a high-powered microscope. It was impossible to get one’s eye close enough to the face shield of the helmet to look through a microscope viewfinder. Fortunately, his hosts had set up a digital camera and monitor, bypassing the oculars. Rabadeau activated the monitor.
He stared at the image.
“Mother of God,” he muttered.
“P-pl—”
The RNA analyzer behind him dinged.
Rabadeau shuffled his plastic slippers over to the analyzer, as data scrolled across its monitor screen. A series of four letters flashed across the screen: A, C, G, U, over and over again, in a never-ending salad of combinations. Georges Rabadeau couldn’t read the nucleic acid alphabet, of course. There wasn’t a human soul who could. That’s what the analyzer was for.
“Pl-please…”
The machine made another sound, and the four-letter novella was replaced by words in English. Rabadeau had studied medicine in England. He had no problem translating it.
He shook his head in wonderment, his helmet not moving. “Good lord.”
“Please … by … God … please…”
The nuisance from the second gurney was getting to Dr. Rabadeau. He straightened up from the RNA analyzer and turned.
The man strapped to the gurney, already in a body bag but not yet zipped in, looked directly into his eyes. The man was bleeding out from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. His skin was ashen. A roadmap of capillaries had burst inside his eyes. Rabadeau noted the petechial hemorrhaging, nodding to himself, unsurprised by the damage. It was consistent with his diagnosis.
Someone had scrawled on the body bag the name VEIGEL. Unlike the other one, there was only one time and date below his name: the moment of his infection. The time of death entry was blank.
“M-mercy…” the man rasped, and a ruby red bubble popped at the corner of his lips. “Kill … me…”
Rabadeau turned away, studied the analyzer again, then shuffled over to the tent’s revolving door.
* * *
Daria climbed down the wooden ladder into the building. She pulled the hood of the sleeveless sweatshirt up, tucking in her hair. She wished the undershirt wasn’t white; not ideal for skulking. She shoved the shirt sleeves up to minimize the glint.
At the bottom of the ladder, she paused to let her eyes adjust to the moonless gloom. She knelt and found distinctive boot prints in the thick dust, heading to her left. That was the way to go. She followed the footprints to a square opening sawed into the floor near the exterior wall. Horizontal, C-shaped lengths of rebar had been bolted to the wall to create a makeshift ladder. The centers of the rungs had been wiped clean of dust.
Daria slipped the Glock into her skirt, at the hollow of her spine, then pulled the sweatshirt over it. She took a deep breath, then gripped the rebar and climbed down.
This took her to the second floor, where someone had tied a red kerchief to one of the ladder rungs, probably to mark it as a
safe route to and from the roof.
The floorboards at this level were in disastrous shape, with jagged, gaping holes here and there. Again, she knelt to study dusty footprints, letting her enemy do the work for her. She followed a zigzag course toward the far end of the wide-open second floor, toward what appeared to be a set of stairs heading down.
* * *
One of Asher’s men sprayed down the pathologist’s Tychem moon suit with water and chlorine, then helped him remove the oxygen tank and the helmet.
The mercenaries and soldiers stood in a half circle, watching.
Georges Rabadeau stepped out of the biohazard suit and slipped his feet back into his loafers. He shrugged into his suit coat, straightened his tie, shot his cuffs. Only then did he make eye contact with Asher Sahar, who stood, quiet, arms folded so his hands held his biceps, as if hugging himself, light glinting off his round, wireless glasses.
“Yes?” Asher said simply.
“I did not think it possible but … yes.”
The pathologist wiped his brow with a handkerchief from his breast pocket. “The times written on the body bag. Are they accurate?”
“They are.”
Rabadeau’s hands trembled. “Incredible. May I wash up?”
Asher made eye contact with the Ivorian bodyguard. “This way,” the thin man said, and led the pathologist away from the tent and toward a makeshift bathroom.
The big, blue-eyed American, Will Halliday, lit up the white cube room with his grin. “Told ya.”
“By God,” Eli Schullman marveled. “We did it.”
“Well”—Asher offered a self-deprecating shrug—“we stole it. We didn’t splice the unholy thing together. And we have Agent Halliday to thank for helping us acquire it. Will.”
He shook the American’s hand. Will Halliday beamed. “I knew it’d work.”
Eli Schullman shook his hand, too. The ex–Secret Service agent grinned like a kid at Christmas. “I’m gonna check the perimeter.”
