by Dawson, Mark
When she dared open her eyes, she saw streamers of deep scarlet blood twisting and twirling against the bright white porcelain.
A curtain of darkness fell across the edge of her vision.
She gasped for breath, trying to stay one step ahead of the darkness, but it was coming over her faster than she could manage. She lost her grip on the edge of the bowl, her left hand stabbing down onto the cold tiles to hold her upright. The strength was sucked away and replaced by a swirling, seething well of dizziness. She fell into it, the blackness washing over her in a ceaseless tide.
Chapter Six
Control watched from the back of the armoured sedan as his driver, a former Navy SEAL, turned off the main road to Chesapeake and into the access road that delved deep into the expanse of the Great Dismal Swamp where Manage Risk had its facility. The company had purchased a vast tract of the swamp ten years earlier. The land was cheap because it could be used for very little, but it served the company’s needs particularly well. It offered acres of land for training and battle proving, but more than that, it offered seclusion and security. The nature of the work that Manage Risk undertook made the company a prime target for the governments and terrorist organisations that would have cherished the chance to give it a bloody nose. The swamp, and the wide defensive cordon that it permitted, made it impossible to mount any sort of effective assault from land. Of course, some of their enemies had the wherewithal to make an attack from the air, but, as the sedan passed a battery of MIM-104 Patriot ground-to-air missiles, Control knew that they had that eventuality covered, too.
They called the facility The Lodge and the grounds around it The Site. The latter comprised several ranges, a half mile that had been furnished with cabins and buildings to simulate an urban environment, an artificial lake and two driving tracks. It was the largest privately held training facility in the world. As they drove through it this morning, Control looked out of the window of the car and watched as two big Grizzly APCs were put through their paces, ploughing through deep tracts of undrained swamp, throwing parabolas of spray and mud in their wake. Their big engines rumbled, loud enough to be audible in the back of the car.
As they drove closer to The Lodge, they passed through a twelve-foot-high electrified fence. The guards in the gatehouse watched vigilantly as they shouldered their M-16s. The car stopped, and the driver lowered his window.
One of the sentries approached.
“Morning.”
The driver held out his credentials.
The man held a barcode scanner to the document, waited for the green light that signified that the credentials were legitimate and handed the papers back.
“Drive on,” he said.
Control scrubbed his eyes. He was tired. He had transferred by helicopter from the Mary Jane, picking up one of the company’s Gulfstreams at Marrakech and flying directly back to Philadelphia. He hadn’t been able to sleep properly. Beatrix Rose was in his dreams, an avenging angel that would keep coming, relentless, until either she had finished him or she had fallen.
She had a list. There had been six names on it.
Five of those names could be erased.
One left.
His.
He closed his eyes and let his thoughts drift back. He thought of London, of his old office near the Thames, the position at the head of Group Fifteen that had seen him dispatch his agents across the world like his own personal angels of death. He remembered the power. It had been intoxicating.
One assignment was closer to the surface of his memory than all the others.
It was nearly ten years ago. He had been trapped, all of his options circumscribed until there was just one course open to him. He had sent five of his best agents to the small house in East London where Beatrix Rose lived. They had been given very clear, very specific orders. They were to eliminate her and any witnesses. But the assignment, unambiguous and simple as it was, had been hopelessly botched. Rose’s husband had been killed in the mêlée, and she had been wounded, but not badly enough to stop her from plunging a letter opener into the throat of Number Five and shooting Number Ten in the knee. Only the abduction of her daughter had stopped her from attacking the other agents.
It had been a stalemate.
She had disappeared.
A decade had passed, and he had almost forgotten about her.
But things had changed.
John Milton had returned Isabella to her.
The shackles of the threat to the daughter that had restrained the mother had fallen away.
All of his old security became worthless.
And he had remembered her again.
The only impediment that had stopped her from coming after them all had been removed.
And Control had never been this frightened in his life.
They reached the first of the buildings that made up the facility, and the driver swept up to a stop.
“Here we are, sir.”
“Thank you.”
“Not a problem. I’ll see you this evening.”
Control walked into the main building and climbed the stairs to his large office. It was furnished minimally, with just a few pieces of furniture that each cost thousands of dollars: a glass-topped table, an ergonomic chair, a table with a sand-blasted glass top, leather armchairs. He stood at the picture window and looked out over the barren landscape, pockets of morning fog still floating over the boggy ground. He watched as another black sedan slowed to pass through the fence. There was another one half a mile down the road behind it. There was a board meeting this morning. The directors of the company were all inbound.
Every man on the management council had a gold-plated military, intelligence or government heritage. Jamie King, the founding director, was a former Navy SEAL. Reece Lines, one of the vice-chairmen, had been director of the CIA’s counterterrorist centre. The other vice-chairman, Richmond Dodd, had been the government’s coordinator for counterterrorism with the rank of ambassador-at-large. Other board members included the former head of the CIA’s Near East Division, an ex-attorney general, a former White House counsel, a retired admiral and the former vice-presidential chief of staff.
“Morning.”
He turned with a start. Jamie King was standing in the doorway.
“Shit, Jamie.”
“Sorry. Did I make you jump?”
“I didn’t hear you. Good morning.”
Jamie King might have established the company, but it was Control’s contacts and guidance that had developed it from an upstart collection of mercenaries into what it had become: the world’s preeminent and most dangerous private army. He had been passing classified information to King for a decade. Once his role in the murder of Anastasia Ivanovna Semenko had been exposed by Milton and Rose, and he had known he had to flee the United Kingdom, King had offered him safe haven. He had been flown into the country under false papers and was smuggled into The Lodge. His role in the company could not be publicised, but he had spent the last year working with King to build it up even more. His contacts had helped to secure the oil contracts in Iraq, for example.
King sat down in one of the room’s generous armchairs. He was, by nature, a serious man, but his expression was especially sombre this morning.
“What a fucking disaster,” he said.
Control paced. “I know.”
“What happened?”
“She had mines on the roof. It was one big kill zone, took out the second team just like that. The others got stuck at the bottom of the building. She took them out one by one. She knew we were coming.”
“Those weren’t Girl Scouts we sent in,” King said.
“Doesn’t matter who they were, Jamie. She killed them all. She’s very good. I told you that.”
“Yeah, you did. What about Connor English?”
Control stopped at the window and
glanced outside again. “The housekeeper told me. They took him out into the desert and shot him.”
King shook his head. “I’ve got to tell you, man. This bitch? She’s something else. I’ve never seen anything like her before. Shame you two don’t get along. I’d offer her a job tomorrow.”
“And she’d cut your throat the day after that.”
King laughed. Control didn’t find it particularly funny.
“The housekeeper give you anything else?” King asked.
“He doesn’t know where she is.”
“You’re sure?”
Control nodded. “He wasn’t lying. He didn’t know.”
“Past tense? You got rid of him?”
Control nodded.
“Alright,” King said, unfazed. “What did he know?”
“Connor English told her where I am.”
“Big deal. She would have guessed that anyway. Anything else?”
Control nodded, reached down into the briefcase at his feet and took out a sheaf of papers. He tossed them across to King. “She has cancer.”
He shuffled through the papers. “Really?”
Control sat down and exhaled. “He told me who her doctor is. We had someone pay his offices a visit last night, and he pulled her data. Stage four breast cancer.”
“Terminal?”
“Yes,” he said. “She’s done for.”
“How long does she have left?”
“Weeks, and that’s if she’s lucky. Could be days.”
King leaned back in the chair and spread his arms wide. “So there you go. She’s on borrowed time. You just need to wait her out.”
“That cuts both ways, Jamie. The other way to look at it is that she has nothing to lose.”
“What about her girl?”
“The housekeeper said she was with her grandparents. I’ve got two men going to check.”
“Good. If we can get hold of her . . .”
“Yes. That would change things in my favour. But I’ll believe she’s there when I see it. Leaving her there would be a big risk, and Beatrix is not in the business of taking risks.”
“And the housekeeper had no idea where she is?”
Control shook his head. “She’s doing what she was trained to do. Drop out of sight. Pick your battles when you want them. Where you want them. We won’t see her again until she’s ready to make a move.”
Beatrix was like a shark. You had a chance when she was on the surface; at least then you knew where she was. But when she submerged, slipped into the gloomy depths, the only warning of her presence was when she had already fastened her teeth around your leg.
And by then, it was already much too late.
His face must have given away his disconsolation.
“Cheer up,” King said. “Look out the window. If we keep you here, how’s she going to get to you? A swamp rat farts out there, and we hear it. There’s no way she can get through. No way. This is what we’re going to do. From now on, you stay on-site. We keep you here, locked up nice and tight.”
“I can’t stay here forever, Jamie.”
“You won’t have to. She either dies first or we get a fix on her. You told me yourself. She’s worked all the way through the six of you, and you’re the last one standing. She’s not going to give up, is she?”
There were a host of uncertainties, but not that. That much was for sure. “Never,” he said categorically. “Never ever.”
“And that’s to our advantage. If she wants you, she’s going to have to come here. On our patch. We’ve spoken to immigration. She’ll fly in to Philly, right? Border Control sees her, they bring her in. We’ve spoken with Homeland Security and the police department. Anyone matching her description in town, the same. She’ll be spotted.”
“And if she isn’t?”
“If she isn’t, assuming she makes it out here, she’s going to get taken out by a mine or a sniper. We’ve got two thousand men on campus, buddy. And there’s just one of her.”
Two thousand to one.
Those sounded like favourable odds.
Control wasn’t reassured.
He knew what Beatrix Rose was capable of.
Chapter Seven
They flew first class to New York. It wasn’t extravagance this time, but practicality. Beatrix was finding it more and more difficult to sleep, and the prospect of ten hours in a non-reclining seat was more than she could bear. The ache in her bones was constant now, and the morphine had little effect, at least not at the doses that she was prepared to take. She could have upped the tablets, no doubt, but she wasn’t prepared to go so far so that her edge was blunted. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibilities that Control might find her first, and, if he did, she would need her wits about her.
It was quiet and comfortable at the front of the plane, and they watched a movie together before the lights dimmed and the crew prepared the cabin for sleep. Beatrix helped Isabella to lower her seat, covered her with the blanket and then stroked her head until she was asleep.
She looked younger when she slept, as if all that premature maturity was just sloughed away. Beatrix thought of the training that she had made the girl endure for the last twelve months, and not for the first time, she regretted it.
Beatrix went back to her own seat and pressed the bell to call the steward.
“Yes, madam?”
“I’d like a whisky, please.”
“Certainly.”
“Actually, make it a double. Lots of ice.”
The steward smiled compliantly and went away to the galley.
Beatrix stared out the window as the North Atlantic glittered in the moonlight far below. She caught her own reflection in the reinforced plastic. She had a livid bruise on her temple where she had fallen against the toilet bowl. Isabella had heard her coughing, and then she had heard the thump as she hit her head and fell. Beatrix hadn’t locked the door, and so her daughter had seen her on the floor. She had helped her to get up and get into bed.
Beatrix couldn’t remember flushing the toilet, but the bowl had been clear the next morning.
Everything was tidy.
She tried not to think about what that must mean.
She closed her eyes. The constant thrum of the engines was hypnotic, and she felt her breath start to deepen. She knew this would be the last time she flew. There was no returning from the journey she was on.
One way or another, this was it.
A one-way trip.
No coming back.
Beatrix remembered the atmosphere of the city. She had travelled the world, almost every major city in every continent, and she had never found anywhere else that had the same hum of electricity in the air. She felt it as she disembarked and then as they traversed the airport, passing through immigration on their fake passports, but the full effect was only evident as they stepped out onto the taxi rank. It was indefinable, a frisson, a buzz that permeated the air like pollution, the conflation of taxis and buses and trucks and jets, of angry cab drivers, of a million arguments and a million reconciliations, the sound that eight million people make when they are pressed into a space that is only fit to hold half that number. Beatrix remembered it, and despite the ache in her bones, she smiled and turned to Isabella. Her daughter was smiling, too, her eyes shining in wonder.
“Welcome to New York,” Beatrix said.
They took a taxi to Manhattan. The lights of the city prickled and then multiplied, the skyscrapers stretching up into the night sky and their glow reaching up into its dark vault. The traffic was sparse at this hour, and they made good time. The cabbie was an Egyptian, garrulous for five minutes and then quiet as his attention was drawn to the commentary from the Yankees game on WFAN.
The St Regis was even more impressive than Claridge’s. Beatrix had booked them into the Imperial Suite
at a cost of four thousand dollars a night. They were accompanied up in the lift by a bellboy who made a show of opening the door and then standing aside to let them through. It was plush, with European chinoiserie and East Asian furnishings set against red tones with crystal accents. Mixed stylistic influences and an open floor plan lent a residential flow to the space, and deep window seats offered stunning views of Central Park, Fifth Avenue and 55th Street. The bathroom was fitted in Italian Carrara marble, with double sinks, a deep-soaking jetted tub and heated floors.
It was pure extravagance, completely unnecessary, and Beatrix didn’t mind a bit.
Isabella was excited. She had hurried to one of the wide windows, her face lighting up. “Look at the view,” she cooed.
“Like it?”
“I love it.”
Beatrix sat down on the bed and sighed with relief for the chance to take the weight off her feet, even if it was just for a moment. She would have liked to throw off her clothes and soak in the bath for an hour, soothe her aches and wash away the sweat and grime of their journey, but she didn’t have time. She would have liked to enjoy her daughter’s happiness for the evening, but there was no time for that, either. She was tired, but not crushed, and she had an errand to run that wouldn’t get any easier the longer she left it. Time was pressing. They couldn’t plan on staying here for long, and she needed to collect all the things that she would need.
“I’ve got to go out,” she said.
“Already? We just got here.”
“The sooner I go, the sooner I’ll be back.”
“Where are you going?”
“I have some things I need to find. Stay here, Bella. You can call down for room service. Whatever you want. Watch TV, rent a movie. Just stay here, alright?”
“How long will you be?”
“Two hours,” she said. She went to the girl and hugged her. “There’s a spa downstairs. Why don’t you go down and pamper yourself?”
