by Blake Banner
Jacob pulled back the bolt on his rifle with a loud clunk, put it to his shoulder and trained it on my gut. Trent laughed out loud.
“Hell, no!” he said. “Why, that would be illegal, right, Jacob? And what the hell would we do with the body in this wilderness?” All the laughter drained out of his face, like it had suddenly been punctured. “Walk away, boy, before this gets ugly.”
I nodded. “Sure.” I pointed at the bull. “But the bull is mine. That arrow is mine.” I pointed at him. “And you owe me for that bull.”
He laughed, low and soft. “Yeah, city boy? Well you have your lawyer call my lawyer and we’ll see what we can work out.”
They both laughed loud at that, like he’d said something original and funny. But by that time I was already walking back the way I’d come. I thought about turning and skewering them both, but you can’t just kill people because they annoy you. You can’t even kill them because they threaten to kill you. Because if we all did that, society would fall apart, and it would be a world of anarchy ruled over by people like Rex Trent. Sometimes you just had to walk away and either forget, or choose your own time and place to visit them again on your own terms.
I got back to my camp a couple of hours later, and as I scrambled up the hill to where I had left my blanket and my rucksack, my cell buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out and knew it was the brigadier, Alex “Buddy” Byrd, head of operations at Cobra.
“Yeah.”
“Good morning. We need you back in New York. How soon can you be there?”
“Couple of days.”
“Good. Don’t dillydally. We’re in a hurry.”
“I’m on my way.”
I hoisted my rucksack on my shoulder and started down the far side of the hill. It was a half mile as the crow flies to where I’d left my truck, but over that terrain, along the weaving path, it took me over an hour to get there. I slung my stuff in the back of the truck and after that it was a four mile drive down a dirt track, following the course of the canyon, to the intersection with the I-70, and then another half mile along Route 6 to Sulfur Springs.
One there I paid up at the motel, loaded my stuff in my truck and drove back toward the intersection. As I passed the Roast Buck Eatery, at the exit to the town, I saw a white Ford pickup in the parking lot. It had a bull elk in the back with a feathered barb sticking out of its ribcage. I glanced at it and slowed, wondering about going in to settle matters, but dismissed the thought and accelerated away from the town.
At the intersection I turned right and east and hit the gas. I had two thousand miles to cover, and twenty-nine hours of driving to get through. With four hours’ sleep, make that thirty-three. And I still hadn’t eaten.
Chapter Two
I got to New York the following evening and went straight to my small, blue, clapboard cottage on Shore Drive, on the Eastchester Bay in the Bronx. I parked my truck down the side of the house and lugged my bags inside. With the door open, I paused a few seconds in the small entrance porch, to smell the air and listen. It was a habit. But the house felt and smelt as it had when I’d left it a couple of weeks earlier. I hung up my jacket, kicked the door closed, carried my bags into my living room and dumped them on the floor.
In the open plan kitchen, separated from the living room by a breakfast bar, I leaned on the sink and spent a moment gazing across my neglected lawn at the dark bay. In the distance, a couple of ghostly, narrow sails bobbed and leaned, white on the black water.
I opened the freezer, pulled out a couple of burgers and threw them in a hot pan. While they fried I cracked a cold beer and thought about nothing in particular, except for wondering what was wrong with me, that even in my spare time I needed to kill. I had come from hunting animals to relax, to hunting people for work.
I dropped my burgers into a couple of buns with some tomato sauce and carried them upstairs with my beer and my bags. I opened the window onto the dusk and set about eating the burgers while I unpacked my bags.
By the time I’d finished, dusk had turned to evening, and small lights were glimmering over the dark water. I went to drain my bottle but it was empty.
Then the doorbell rang.
I took the plate and the bottle and descended the stairs. As I came down into the living room I could see the silhouette of a man against the glass in the door, backlit by the orange streetlights outside. I pulled my P226 from the drawer in the dresser and slipped it into my waistband behind my back. Before letting go of it I called out.
“Who is it?”
“Special delivery from Brigadier Byrd.”
I pulled the Sig from my belt again, held it behind my back and opened the door with my left hand. He was standing sideways on, wearing a trench coat and a fedora, like a character from a Bogart movie. He had a cigarette in his mouth and he was leaning into the flame from a match. He turned and raised an eyebrow at me, and spoke as he shook the match and released smoke from his mouth.
“Harry Bauer?”
“Yeah. Who are you?”
“Captain Russ White, US Air Force. May I come in?”
“You got some ID?”
He reached in his coat and pulled out a brown leather wallet. In the transparent flap was his Common Access Card. I took it, pulled it out and had a look. As far as I could see he was who he said he was. I handed it back and stood aside.
“Come on in, Captain.”
He stepped through the door, took off his hat and smiled. “Any objection to first names, Harry? I’m not big on formalities.”
“None. You want a beer?”
“Sure.” He grinned. “But I’d prefer a Scotch if you have one.”
I took his coat and gestured at a chair. “I have one. Ice?”
He lowered himself into the chair. “Two rocks.”
I went to the kitchen, took two tumblers and a bottle of The Macallan from the cupboard and filled a cereal bowl with ice. Then I carried the whole lot to the living room and set it on an occasional table between his chair and mine. I don’t like coffee tables. They are designed to trip you up and graze your shins.
I poured in silence, gave him two rocks of ice and had mine neat.
“Cheers.” He raised his glass and sipped, then smacked his lips and sighed. “The Macallan, a rare treat. A crime to put ice in it, but bad habits die hard.”
I nodded, gave him a moment and asked, “How can I help you, Russ?”
He took another sip and regarded his glass like he was particularly proud of it.
“Ever heard of Zak Lee?”
“No. Who is he?”
“Heilong Li, Westernized his name to Zak Lee. He’s a Chinese chemist, emerged from obscurity some five or six years ago to become head of viral research at UCP, that’s United Chinese Petrochemicals, an umbrella company that handles about fifty percent of Chinese chemical and medical research and development, under government control and supervision, naturally.”
“We don’t like him?”
“Not a lot, no. At a conservative estimate we figure he is directly responsible for somewhere in the region of one hundred and twenty thousand deaths in Africa alone: Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire, the Congo, Gabon, Angola, Namibia, and South Africa, possibly other places too. Women, children… Men go without saying.”
“What do you mean he is responsible for their deaths? How?”
He shrugged. “The west coast of Africa is like his personal testing lab. Testing on human subjects in China is not impossible, but it is difficult. It is a restrictive regime, not anarchic at all. President Xi Jinping is a man with a lot of power, and a lot of personal privilege, but his power comes from the system. The system is supreme in China and he must operate within it.
“So what UCP does, and the system turns a blind eye, is pay large bribes to West African regimes that are anarchic, where the system is simply an extension of the man in power, and they are granted permission to experiment on live human beings, whole villages and towns, where basically nobody gives a damn what happens to th
e people.”
I didn’t answer. I sipped from my glass while he rattled the rocks in his. He set his glass down and sighed. “He turns up, usually in person but sometimes it’s his students and assistants. They are supported by armed guards and they force an entire population to take a so-called vaccine, or a cure for some local disease.” He gave a dry laugh. “Of course the objective is not to kill these people. Labs don’t make money by killing their customers. The purpose is to establish what the side effects are of the products they are researching, before feeding them to people who do matter. So in some cases entire villages have died in a matter of a few weeks. In others the majority of the subjects have gone blind.
“In one case, in the village of Massonde, four hundred miles southeast of Luanda as the crow flies, five hundred and fifty by Angolan road—and the last fifty of those through dense jungle—these doctors, for want of a better name, were sent in, protected by armed thugs in uniform, to provide vaccines against the flu. Within forty-eight hours half the town had become psychotic, hallucinating, screaming, running naked through the village square…”
He shook his head. I said nothing, watching him, waiting. He pointed at the bottle and made a question with his eyebrows. I said, “Sure, don’t ask. Just help yourself. What happened?”
He spoke as he poured. “The soldiers mowed them down. And anyone who showed symptoms was systematically shot. The town is now a graveyard.”
I nodded. “You said there might be other places outside Africa.”
“Sure, Latin America, other parts of Africa, remote parts of Mongolia, the Far East… We suspect, but we can’t be one hundred percent sure of our facts.”
“So you’d like me to pay him a visit.”
He smiled, gave a short laugh. “You spent a lot of time with the Brits, right?”
I returned the smile. “A bit, yeah.”
“You have their flair for understatement. Yeah, we’d like you to go and blow the bastard’s brains out.”
“Good. Consider it done. I’ll need all the intel you have, obviously.”
“Obviously. But it’s a little more complicated than that. He’s here in New York. So it’s important it looks like an accident, or at the very least a mugging or an act of terrorism…”
“You want deniability. That goes without saying.”
“Yeah, but there’s more, Harry. Zak Lee is here talking to a UN delegation, a delegation from the European Union, and there are US representatives meeting with him too. The brigadier would really like to know what they’re talking about.”
I frowned. “I thought that wasn’t our job. That’s what the Feds are for, or the Firm.”
“Sure,” he sipped, “but let me ask you something. When the big unknown here is China’s chemical warfare capability, and the man who’s responsible for developing it is in New York, at the United Nations, talking to American companies that are part of the military industrial complex, do you feel relaxed and comfortable leaving things to the CIA and the FBI?”
I nodded and sighed. “I guess not.”
“It’s a bit like having Dennis Rader break into your house, and you don’t do anything because it’s the cops’ job.”
“I get the point. So what does the brigadier want me to do?”
“He’s convinced, and some of his advisors agree, that Lee’s research has reached a critical point and he may be mobilizing resources to deploy it.”
“You mean he fears he’s preparing a dirty bomb?”
He shrugged. “That’s partly what we need to find out. A bomb is simply a means of delivery. The problem is, the brigadier fears he may actually have something to deliver. If he has, then we need to know what, and where, when and how he plans to deliver it. The consequences could be very serious.”
“And you say I have a gift for understatement.” I drained my glass and set it on the table. “OK, so I need to know who my targets are, their exact location and any other intel.”
“Your primary target is Heilong Li, Zak Lee, your secondary target is Yang Dizhou, no Westernization. He is Zak’s personal assistant. He is also a very accomplished scientist and was Zak’s student and disciple for many years, then became his assistant. He takes care of business for Zak. He has to go too.
“They’re staying at the Oriental Suite, at the Mandarin Oriental, on Columbus Circle. Chinese taxpayers to foot their comrades’ bill at fourteen grand a night, power to the people, comrade.”
“They don’t make Communists like they used to. So who else is on the list?”
“He has a number of meetings scheduled at the UN, plus a couple of private meetings with US scientists from Colombia at the hotel, which I suspect is just cover, and then a couple of dinners with bankers and industrialists from the petrochemicals industry. It’s a busy schedule.”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out a manila envelope which he handed to me. I opened it and inside were a couple of A4 documents stapled together. I examined them and saw that it was a list of times and dates showing where Lee was going to be, and what he was going to be doing while he was there. There were also a couple of photographs, one of Zak, the other of his assistant.
Zak was in his mid-sixties, bald as an egg, very thin, with hollow cheeks and large ears. He was tall, maybe six two, with a long, thin neck, long thin arms and big, bony hands.
Yang was shorter, thick set, with heavy, bottle-base glasses, receding gray hair and a pencil moustache. Somebody must have told him that was a good idea. I asked without looking up, “He in the same suite?”
“Yeah, and May Ling, the personal assistant’s personal assistant.”
I glanced at him. “I don’t kill women or children. I’m funny that way.”
“Relax, that’s company policy. Besides, she’s not on the list.”
“So what about these delegates he’s meeting with?”
“OK,” he drained his glass and crossed one leg over the other, “that’s part of your brief.”
“What is?”
“Decide which ones to recommend for termination. You run your list by the brigadier, and the management decides which ones to execute.”
I nodded and looked back at the pictures.
“OK. This is going to be expensive. I’m going to need serious expenses. I’m going to need to get inside and recon this place. I need to be invisible…”
“Sure.” He reached in his jacket again and pulled out another, fatter envelope. In it was an expensive leather wallet containing five thousand bucks, a driver’s license in the name of Auberry Winchester, a Centurion Amex and a Black Visa. “You have absolute operational autonomy,” he said. “Do what you have to do. Keep the brigadier in the loop as much as you can, but he likes you and he trusts you, so you have pretty much a free hand.” He grinned. “Don’t let him down.”
“I won’t.”
He sighed, put his hands on his knees and levered himself to his feet.
“Thanks for the whisky. A rare treat.”
I let him out and stood smelling the damp, night air as I listened to his steps receding down toward Barkley Avenue. A few seconds after they had faded I heard the soft hum of a motor, which in turn blended into the night, leaving only the distant call of a foghorn, and the desultory chatter of a bird, fooled by the streetlamps into believing it was day.
I closed the door and went back inside. I picked up the papers he’d given me. Auberry Winchester. I smiled. It was like something out of Scott Fitzgerald meets P. G. Wodehouse. I’d have to go clothes shopping for blazers and cravats. But first I’d have to digest and memorize Zak Lee’s schedule for the next few days, and do some observing from a distance. My window of opportunity was small, and I was starting from zero, but it was as important to go slow and steady at this stage, as it was to act lightning fast when the time came.
Zak Lee’s first appointment was the next morning, Monday the 30th, ten fifteen at the United Nations building. I figured I didn’t need to follow him inside because there was no way I was goi
ng to make the hit in there, but I could follow him there and follow him back, see what route he took, what kind of transportation he used and what his security was like.
A guy like him might have real tight security, or he might choose to keep a low profile. He wasn’t exactly famous, and the people who might want to kill him were probably too poor to leave their villages, let alone their countries. Either way I didn’t want to make assumptions. It was better to keep an open mind. We’d see tomorrow.
I scanned his schedule again and saw he had a lunchtime engagement in his rooms with a Professor Moricone from Harvard, and then a dinner appointment at nine PM. This appointment, instead of being in his suite, was in the restaurant. That struck me as curious. Either he was not at all shy, or he had a purpose for arranging a public meeting. He must know there were people in the international intelligence community who’d be watching him. I filed that away under “answer later.”
So between lunch and nine I’d have a few hours to buy an expensive wardrobe, an expensive watch and expensive shoes. I figured I should get an expensive haircut, too. Expensive people notice that kind of thing. Finally I figured I should hire an expensive car for the week. That made me smile. What the heck, Cobra might need it again for another job in the future. It might be cheaper just to buy one.
This hit had definite pluses to it.
Chapter Three
I was up at six the next morning, went for a ten-mile run, spent an hour training in the backyard and had a breakfast of spelt waffles and honeycomb at nine thirty. Then I showered and dressed and went out to my old beat-up 1999 VW Golf GTI. It was the kind of wreck people made a point of not noticing, but under the dented, scuffed chassis, there was nothing wrong with the tweaked engine or the suspension. I had done some work and jacked it up from a hundred and fifty brake horsepower to two hundred and fifty by taking out the old engine and dropping in an Mk6. I’d had to tweak the suspension and the wheels too, but it had worked out nice. The 1999 model only weighed two thousand eight hundred pounds, compared with the three thousand four hundred of the Mk6, so with the extra power and torque it was doing naught to sixty in four seconds, which was nice.
