Later, their conversation had grown more technical, with Inge probing Murdock’s thoughts on nuclear proliferation… especially now, with the old Soviet empire gone.
“We’ve been especially concerned about the possibility of radicals in the former Soviet states getting hold of nuclear warheads before they can be disassembled or shipped back to Russia,” she told him. “Even a so-called battlefield weapon, a tactical nuclear artillery shell, for instance, could kill tens of thousands of people, ruin a fair-sized city, and be extremely hard to track.”
It was, Murdock reflected, not exactly light dinner conversation, but it was a topic he was keenly interested in. “Everybody said the world would be a safer place with the collapse of Soviet Communism, that we could enjoy a ‘peace dividend’ with all the money we’d save cutting back on our military expenditures. Stupid idea that, fit only for liberal, anti-military politicians and other assorted half-wits. I certainly don’t want the Soviets back — never did — but at least they kept pretty good track of their nukes.”
“You believe the current owners of the warheads do not?” Murdock shrugged and kept cutting the steak on the plate in front of him. “There are just too damned many nukes, and too many people with reasons to sell them or steal them.”
Inge nodded thoughtfully. “It sounds as though the — what is the expression? The nuclear genie has escaped its bottle.”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“So,” Inge said. “What is the answer? How can we stop the proliferation? What will happen if we don’t?”
Murdock didn’t reply right away. Looking past Inge’s shoulder, he spotted MacKenzie, seated at a table across the restaurant with Lieutenant Hopke, and caught his eye. Mac nodded slightly but gave no other sign of having noticed Murdock. There was at least one other BKA team in the room too, Murdock knew, but they were good, and he hadn’t been able to spot them.
Good backup, just in case. Chances were, though, now that they were ready for them, the RAF wouldn’t try again, not in the same way, at least. The other patrons of the restaurant were going on with their meals, talking about weather or opera, the latest scandal in parliament or love, unaware of the topic being discussed at at least one of the tables.
“I really don’t know, Inge,” Murdock said. “Used to be, I thought the old nuclear balance of power would be enough. You know, they won’t nuke us because then we’ll nuke them. How do you nuke a terrorist group, though? You can’t. You can’t even nuke the country that sponsored the terrorists, because it’s their government that’s bad, not the people. Hell, most of the population of North Korea is one step removed from outright slavery.
“Later I thought SDI was the answer. You know, what the press called ‘Star Wars’? But then the Russians folded and it was peace-dividend time, and everyone in Congress was scrambling for the easy kills, looking for money for welfare and free health insurance. Hell, even if we had a perfect ballistic missile defense, chances are those terrorist nukes would come by way of freighter or submarine or even a moving van coming across the border from Mexico, not in the warhead of an SS-19.
“I’m very, very much afraid that things have simply gone too far. One of these days pretty soon now, we’re going to lose a city.”
“I never took you for the fatalistic sort, Blake.”
“I’m hardly that. I’ll fight as long as I can, I’ll fight whoever I’m told to fight to stop the holocaust. But I’m also a realist. In my line of work, you have to be.”
“I know what you mean. Working with Komissar, you can often begin assembling a larger picture in your own mind while you are still feeding the machine with the snippets and fragments. For a long time now, there have been, well, hints of something very large, some operation involving many of the old terror groups, and it has left me with a dreadful foreboding. Like knowing that something terrible is about to happen, and being unable to do a thing about it.”
Even with much of their conversation centering on what was for both of them shop talk, their relationship, their mutual feelings of camaraderie and comfortable closeness had deepened considerably by the time they reached Inge’s apartment again, at just past twelve-thirty in the morning. She asked him in to have a drink and he accepted, with Mac waiting for him in a rented car outside. After two drinks more, she asked him to spend the night. Murdock signaled MacKenzie from her apartment’s balcony with a flashlight, a quick-beamed longshort-short — not Morse for the letter “D,” but an old Navy whistle or horn signal meaning, “Cast off and stand clear.” MacKenzie replied with an affirmative flash from his headlights and drove off a few moments later.
When Murdock turned away from the window, Inge was waiting for him, beautifully, gloriously naked.
5
Saturday, April 28
0136 hours
Waterfront Rise
Middlebrough, England
The door banged open and Pak strode to the room, his anger tightly marshaled behind the impassive round mask of his face. The bedroom was cluttered with torn posters on the walls, empty beer and soda cans on the floor, and piles of laundry, cast-off clothing, and dirty sheets.
O’Malley lay naked in the bed with two naked women, the dark-haired one astride his hips, the other one at his side. As Pak stormed in, closely followed by Chun Hyon Hee and Gunther Weiss, both women screamed and rolled off the Provo man, clutching at the scattered sheets.
“What the bloody hell?” O’Malley shouted, heaving himself up from the pillow on his elbows.
Pak drew his weapon, a North-Korean-manufactured Type 68 automatic pistol equipped with a long, blunt sound suppressor.
“Kim!” O’Malley shouted, trying to scramble over the legs of one of the screaming women and onto the floor. None of the people here knew Pak’s real name, of course. “Kim, you son of a bitch, have you gone completely nuts?”
“Take them aside,” Pak told Chun, gesturing at the two women with the pistol. “By the wall. Keep them quiet. You!” He swung the pistol to aim it squarely at O’Malley’s head. “Out of the bed. Over there. Face to that wall and hands up!”
O’Malley complied, but his face was flushed dark red with a barely contained fury. “Kim, what the hell is this?”
“Who are they?” Pak demanded. The women’s screams had died down to broken sobs and whimpers now. Chun had them on their knees, hands behind their heads, and was standing before them with her own pistol out. Weiss stood guard impassively in the doorway with an unsilenced 9mm Browning Hi-Power.
“Huh?” O’Malley blinked. “Who?”
“The women, you fool! Who are they? Where did they come from?”
“Aw, fer the love of—”
Pak jammed the muzzle of his pistol hard into O’Malley’s left kidney. The man gasped and flinched. “Christ! Y’can’t just come in here and—”
“You would be surprised at what I can do,” Pak said coldly. “Now, for the last time. Who are these women and where did they come from?”
“Th’ brunette’s, uh, Sharon, and the blonde’s… what is it, honey? Patty?”
“P-Patricia Summers,” the woman said from the other side of the room.
Chun rapped her sharply in the side of her head with her pistol, and both women screamed again. “Silence!” Chun said. “He was not talking to you!”
“Where did you find them, O’Malley?”
“At a fuckin’ pub! God damn it, Kim, I jus’ brought ’em home fer a little—”
“You knew the rules. No contact with anyone outside the group until the operation was well under way!”
“But the operation is under way! C’mon, Kim! Lighten up, man!”
“Turn around. Keep your hands above your head.”
Slowly, O’Malley did as he was told. The man was scared, but Pak could easily read the anger still in his face. He needed to be broken, and quickly. “Weiss!”
“Yes, sir,” the German said.
“Come here.”
The man walked across from the
open door. “Sir?”
“Place your gun to O’Malley’s head. If he makes any move, any move at all which I do not first tell him to make, shoot him.”
“My pleasure.”
“Spread your legs,” Pak said, addressing O’Malley again.
“Huh?”
“Spread your legs apart! Do not make me repeat myself!”
The anger was nearly all gone now, drained away with the color in the Provo terrorist’s face. His eyes were very wide now, and sweat was beading on his forehead and along his upper lip. Slowly, bit by bit, he inched his legs to either side, his spine pressed against the wall at his back, until his bare feet were about three feet apart.
Slowly, Pak lowered his pistol down the centerline of the man’s torso. The man’s eyes squeezed shut and his breath came in short, hard gasps. With great deliberation, Pak pressed the muzzle of the sound suppressor sharply against O’Malley’s penis, which was still ludicrously encased within the glistening wet sheath of a condom.
“O, Christ, oh, God, please, no, no, no…”
“I should simply shoot you,” Pak said quietly. “You appear unable to accept simple discipline, and your actions have endangered our entire operation.”
“It was a mistake, oh, God-Jesus-Mary please, don’t, it was a mistake—”
“On the other hand, I could simply hurt you in such a way that you would not break our rules in this manner again. Which punishment would you prefer?”
“Please, Jesus God, you don’t have to do this, please… ” The man was crying openly now, and his knees were threatening to give way.
“Stop babbling. Now, tell me what I want to know, or I will castrate you here and now. Who are these women? Where did you meet them?”
“I swear to God, Kim, they’re just a couple of whores! They don’t mean nothin’! I picked them up at the King’s Bull in town! I swear! I swear!”
“Prostitutes? How much did you pay them?”
“I ain’t paid ’em yet! But, but they said we could have a great party if I gave ’em a twenty each.”
“Forty pounds?”
“Yeah! Yeah, that’s right!”
Pak sighed. “No wonder you people can’t win your war with the English. You are so easily distracted. Did you approach them? Or did they approach you?”
“Huh? Hell, I don’t know. They were at the bar and I come up to ’em and started talkin’ ’em up, y’know? So yeah, I guess I approached them.”
“Did they suggest you bring them back here?”
“Uh, I, uh—”
He jabbed the muzzle of the gun forward, hard. “Tell me!”
“They wanted to go to a fuckin’ hotel, okay? But I said I had a place here! I thought it would be okay! That’s God’s truth, Kim! I swear it! I didn’t think it would be any harm, I swear to God I didn’t!”
Pak lifted the gun away from O’Malley’s genitals and took a step back. As he did so, the condom fell away with a wet plop, followed by a dribble of urine. Then the terrorist lost control of his bowels, and Pak wrinkled his nose in disgust. These filthy oegugin had no self-discipline at all.
“I believe you,” he said, and he squeezed the trigger. Pak’s gun jerked with a loud but muffled thud, as a neat red hole appeared just above O’Malley’s left eye, and a splatter of blood and brains exploded across the wall behind his head.
Behind him, the two women kneeling in front of Chun screamed again. Weiss gave Pak a leering grin. “So what are we going to do about these two lovelies, eh?”
Pak ignored him. “Kot hasipsiyo, ” he told Chun. “Do it now.”
Chun shot the brown-haired one, the sound-suppressed shot hitting her in the face, knocking her sprawling back against the wall with a scarlet splash of blood. With a flash of scissoring bare legs, the yellow-haired woman leaped up from the floor and bowled Chun aside, racing for the bedroom door.
“Stop her! ” Pak screamed. Spinning, he raised his pistol and fired twice, both shots missing the woman and punching neat side-by-side holes through the open wooden door. Beside him Weiss raised the Browning and snapped off another shot, this one explosively loud in the confines of the room. Chun was already racing after the fleeing prisoner. “Ai ch’am!” Damn it! Everything was coming apart, the situation completely out of control. “Don’t let her get away!”
* * *
Patty Summers sprinted for her life. Out the door as gunfire crashed behind her, down the stairs and to the right… down the stairs again. As she rounded the bottom of the flight, she heard again that horrible, chirping thud of a silenced gunshot, and the banister a few inches to her right shattered in whirling chips of varnished wood.
If she remembered the layout of this place right, she was still on the first floor up… but now she could hear the pounding of feet coming up the stairs from below, and she knew they were going to catch her before she could get anywhere near the front door.
Directly in front of her was a door, a big set of French double doors, in fact, with tall, curtained windows.
“You!” a voice bellowed behind her. “Stop right there!”
She leaped forward, propelled by all the terror that had driven her from that bloody room. Bringing her arm up to protect her face, she hit the flimsy door full-on, smashing through the windows in an explosion of shattering glass and splintering wood.
Through the disintegrating door, she slammed into the iron railing of the balcony beyond and very nearly went over. She caught herself, though, just as a gunshot rang out from inside the house. The street twelve feet below was quiet, midnight dark save for the pools of illumination beneath the street lamps and the distant movement of traffic headlights on the main highway. The early April night air was bitterly cold on her bare skin, and for the briefest of moments, she hesitated.
Then she glimpsed movement on the pavement up the street, a shadow beneath a street lamp with an oddly shaped head. Was it?… yes! A bobby! Never, in her line of work, had Patricia Summers been so happy to see a policeman.
“Help me!” she shrieked. “Please!…”
Glass crunched underfoot behind her. Someone was coming through the shattered door to the balcony. Then another gunshot exploded close behind her, and she felt something like a red-hot wire sear through her flesh high on her right side. Without waiting for another shot, without even looking, she vaulted the railing. There was a dizzying rush of air past her body as she fell… and then she slammed into grass and soft earth with a thud that drove the breath from her lungs. She’d fallen about twelve feet, she guessed, and with a clumsy landing at the end of it, but at least she’d missed the wrought-iron fence topped by sharp spikes that lined the plot of earth where she’d landed. Quickly she scrambled to her feet, intending to run toward the policeman, only to have her ankle turn beneath her weight and pitch her to the ground once more.
“There she is!”
Rolling onto her back, she looked up at the balcony. The Oriental woman was there, looking as cold and as hard as ice. Beside her was a man with some kind of automatic weapon — she didn’t know what kind, only that it looked dangerous. He started to aim at her, but the Oriental woman held up a hand. Had they seen the bobby up the street?
The woman was aiming her silenced pistol.
Patricia screamed as loud and as hard as she could and rolled away from the fence, banging up hard against the building’s wall. She thought she heard the thump of the pistol, but she couldn’t be sure; this close to the building, though, she didn’t think the people inside could see her, and if they couldn’t see her, they couldn’t shoot her.
Her ankle burned like fire; she must have twisted it in her fall. Her side was burning where a bullet had scratched her, and she was bleeding from a dozen minor cuts she must have picked up coming through the window. Rising again, still screaming as loud as she could to attract attention, any attention, she began hobbling toward the street, leaning heavily against the wall. There was a gate in the iron fence ahead, a gate with a latch just opposite the buildi
ng’s front door, but to reach it, she would have to leave the relative shelter of the wall and run for the street.
At twenty-eight, Patricia Summers was a survivor. Her dad had walked out on a family of six kids when she was just five, her mother thrown out of work during the big recession in the seventies; Mum had struggled along on the dole for a while but eventually lost herself in a bottle. With no education beyond the fifth grade, Patricia had supported herself and the other kids doing what work she could find. The promise of a career as a model — as if you had a chance at modeling without going to school! — had turned out to be the come-on for a London “escort service.” It wasn’t long after that before she’d been exchanging sex for money.
She didn’t like it, but life was a bitch whether you liked it or not… and no matter what happened, she was not going to follow Mum into that bottle. Patricia knew how to do what had to be done, and she knew how to make quick decisions without second thoughts. The name of the game was survival.
Steeling herself, she took a deep breath, then lunged for the gate. The latch was stiff and her hand slippery with her own blood. She fumbled it twice… damn! Damn! Come on!…
With a grinding crack the gate swung open and Patricia dashed through. She could hear the lock on the front door of the house being turned. If only her ankle…
Shit! She was down again, on her hands and knees, but she kept crawling. Could they see her from the balcony? Were they shooting at her? She didn’t stop to look, but kept crawling.
“’Ere now, miss!” an authoritarian voice said from the darkness just ahead. “What’s the idea?”
It was the bobby, jogging toward her across the pavement.
Damn it, did all bobbies carry guns nowadays? She couldn’t remember. Once, back in gentler, more innocent days, the British police has never been armed, but in recent years that had changed, especially in the rougher parts of England’s cities.
But was this one armed? She desperately prayed that he was.
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