Blood and Roses (A Beatrix Rose Thriller Book 3)

by Dawson, Mark

  It’s alright. I understand. I sacrifice myself for my daughter and my wife, and I do it gladly.

  She thought of the day that Isabella was born. She had been given extended leave (although she had only intended to take six weeks before she reported back for duty), and she and Lucas had camped out at their home in London’s East End. The pregnancy had seemed to take an eternity, and when Isabella had been a few days late, she had been anxious to move things along. They had gone for a walk in the local park. She remembered the reds and oranges and the smell of freshness undercut with damp and rot that presaged the change from late summer to autumn. She remembered the cramps that she had dismissed as false labour and then the sudden crescendo, the call for an ambulance that had arrived too late, and Lucas, calm despite it all, delivering their daughter, holding her in his hands, with a look of happy disbelief at this thing that they had done.

  She thought about the invitation to join Group Fifteen. That had been the pivot about which everything else had turned. Control had delivered the offer himself. He had been different then, or at least she remembered him differently. He was persuasive in the way that public schoolboys often are, a mixture of unshakeable confidence, innate bravado and the sense that an offer like this, when delivered by someone like him, was impossible to reject by someone like her.

  And perhaps that was right. Perhaps it was impossible.

  She could remember the smallest details of that day. She had returned to the barracks after a difficult patrol, and he had been there waiting for her. He had been wearing a blue-and-white-striped shirt and a suit despite the baking heat. His skin was fresh and bright, as rosy red and waxy as an apple, and he was wearing the same cologne that she would remember for the rest of her life, the scent that would haunt her darkest hours, instantly evocative, sometimes as strong as the smell of the opium she would eventually inhale to forget it.

  She had been younger then, with fewer responsibilities. The chance to join an elite team, off the books, with carte blanche to operate anywhere in the world, was intoxicating. She had grown up on the novels of Fleming and Le Carré, and here was her chance to inhabit those worlds herself.

  How could she have refused him?

  She could not.

  But she wished, how she wished, that she had.

  She opened her eyes.

  It was quiet. The only noises were the crackle of the flames and the sound of deep, relaxed breathing from the bedroom.

  Isabella.

  She remembered when she had been taken from her. The terror on her face. She had been three years old, barely more than a baby, and she had been next to her father as he had been shot. She had watched as her mother had ignored a bullet to the shoulder and stabbed a woman in the throat. Death and blood and then her mother abandoning her to strangers. How much of that did she remember? How had it changed her? Her innocence had been polluted that afternoon. The years that followed had tarnished it more, and then, despite all of her best intentions, Beatrix feared that the year they had spent together had destroyed whatever was left.

  Had there been a choice?

  Isabella would be on her own soon, and the world was a cruel and unkind place.

  She had needed to prepare her for it.

  Beatrix crept into the bedroom at five in the morning. It was still dark outside, the first light of dawn just starting to silver the horizon at the far reaches of the lake. She touched Isabella on the shoulder, and when she stirred, she gestured that she should come into the sitting room.

  Beatrix waited for her there.

  “I’ve got to go now,” she said. “It’s time.”

  Isabella didn’t reply.

  “We’ve nearly done it now. Everything that needs to be done. It’s close.”

  Isabella’s composure cracked as she tried to choke back a sob.

  “You understand, don’t you, Bella?”

  She nodded as tears slicked her cheeks.

  Beatrix felt as if her heart was being torn into a million tiny pieces.

  Isabella looked up at her through eyes filmed with tears. “Can’t you do it tomorrow?”

  “No, Bella, it has to be today. You know it does.”

  She looked at her with a heartbreaking clarity in her wet eyes. “Because you’re ill?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m weak. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to do what I need to do. I don’t have very long left.”

  Isabella wiped the back of her hand across her eyes and took a steadying breath. “I know you have to do it. I understand.”

  She told her what she would have to do next. She would have to stay with Cassidy for the rest of the day, and then she would leave her, still tied to the bed, and hike up to the main road. She would call a taxi from there and then head back to Philadelphia. She had plenty of money, and Beatrix had already bought a ticket to take her back to Paris. She would call Mohammed from the airport, and Mohammed would meet her at Charles de Gaulle. “You’ll live with him and Fatima from now on. They’ll look after you.”

  Isabella sobbed, choking it back again.

  “Ignore what they say about me.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you mustn’t stay. No matter what.”

  Isabella hugged her, arms around her chest, squeezing her tight. Beatrix dipped her head to her daughter’s shoulder and buried her face in her blonde hair. She filled her nostrils with her scent and promised herself that she would remember it for the few hours she had left.

  Isabella’s eyes were streaming with tears. “I love you, Mummy.”

  “I love you too, Bella.”

  She disengaged herself. She was crying now—there was no point in trying to stop it—and she turned and walked away to the car. She got in, biting her lip so hard that she tasted her own blood, the taste of copper, like old pennies, and she wiped her face on her sleeve.

  She turned the ignition and pulled away.

  She had been dealt a bad hand, the worst hand, and this was the only way that she knew to play it. Isabella wouldn’t be safe if she lost her nerve. Her own death was a certainty, anyway. It couldn’t be avoided; it could only be deferred. She would end her life at a time of her choosing and, in the flames of her death, she would ensure her daughter’s future.

  That was a trade worth making.

  She would make that trade any day.

  And that would be her legacy.

  She dared not turn back, but she glanced into the mirror. Isabella was waiting on the veranda, watching, and she hadn’t moved as Beatrix turned the car into the gentle corner and finally put her out of sight.

  She drove on to Suffolk, eventually stopping on a side road where she was sure she was out of sight. She opened the trunk and poured the first two bottles of the nitromethane into the first tub of petrol and the other two into the second.

  The unfinished detonator was in the trunk, too. She took the nichrome wire and wrapped it around the casing, fastening alligator clips to the stripped wire and connecting them to the power supply. She left the detonator in the trunk and unrolled the wire so that it reached through to the front of the car. She plugged the 1/8" plug into the power supply, switched the toggle across so that it was unarmed, plugged in the battery, armed it and pushed the button. It worked. She switched it off, switched the toggle across so that the detonator was armed and rested it on the seat next to her.

  She put the car into gear and drove on. The sun was rising over the tops of the trees. She needed to hurry.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Cassidy was sitting on the bed, her back pressed up against the headboard. Isabella was sitting diagonally opposite her, able to see the door, the window and the girl without shifting in the seat. The little Beretta was in her lap, her fingers resting across it. They had been in the same position for two hours.

  “This is bullshit,” Cassidy said. She st
arted to stand.

  “Don’t,” Isabella warned, slipping her index finger through the trigger finger.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I’m not going to talk to you,” Isabella said. “I told you.”

  “I mean, come on, how old are you? Fifteen?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Seriously? Younger than that? Fourteen?”

  “I’m not . . .”

  “Thirteen? Jesus. You’re thirteen years old, and you’re pointing a gun at me? How fucked up is that?”

  Isabella glared at her.

  “You should be in school or something, right?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “You’re just going to sit there staring at me while your fucked-up mother tries to kill my father? You know what that means, right? It is clear to you? That makes you an accessory. To murder. You’re going to go to prison.”

  “It won’t be anything I haven’t done already,” she said quietly.

  “What?”

  Isabella shook her head. She wasn’t going to be drawn into a conversation with her. Her mother had warned against that. The distraction, taking your eye off the ball—that was what she had told her. She had to focus.

  Cassidy scowled angrily, and then, before Isabella could say anything, she stood.

  “Fuck this shit.”

  Isabella stood, too, aimed the gun, gestured with her other hand for her to sit. “Back down.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll shoot you.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “I’ll shoot you in the knee.” She lowered her aim. “You want to be able to dance after this, don’t you? How are you going to dance with a smashed-up knee? Don’t think I won’t.”

  Cassidy looked at her, and for a moment, Isabella thought that she was going to call her bluff. She sighed and shook her head and sat back down again.

  They settled back into the same pattern for the next half an hour. Cassidy turned on the bedroom TV, flicking through the TV channels with surly stabs of her finger, and sighed unhappily.

  She settled on an episode of Malcolm in the Middle.

  The episode finished and Cassidy stood again.

  “Sit down,” Isabella said.

  “No, seriously, this isn’t any good. I need the bathroom.”

  Isabella frowned.

  “What? I can’t go to the bathroom? What do you want me to do?”

  “That’s fine. You can go. But I have to come with you.”

  “You want to come in? Fine. Whatever.”

  Isabella approached her cautiously and unknotted the rope. Cassidy went around the bed to the bathroom and undid her belt. “So you’re coming in then?”

  Isabella relented. “It’s alright. I can see you from here.”

  She looked down at the gun in her hand as Cassidy sat down on the toilet. She felt the catch in her throat as she thought about her mother. There was a pain in her chest. An ache. She knew she wouldn’t see her again. Isabella was too observant to miss how ill she had become and how quickly it had overtaken her. She had known for weeks, from the way that Mohammed and her mother would stop talking when she came into the room, to the bottle of pills that she found on the dining room table when her mother had forgotten to take them with her. The internet had told her all she needed to know about them.

  She knew she was going to lose her mother, so soon after she had found her again, and she didn’t know how she was going to cope. She had spent so long holding her feelings to herself, compressing her hopes and fears into tiny packages that she could secret away from the foster parents that had come and gone throughout the unhappy years of her childhood that she didn’t know whether she would be able to find the words to express the way that she felt. She didn’t know to whom she would express herself, either. There would be Mohammed and Fatima, she supposed, but they were thousands of miles away. She was in a country that she didn’t know, and she knew, because her mother had told her, a lot of people would be looking for her very soon.

  She was still staring at the gun, her vision unfocussed, when the door to the bathroom slammed shut.

  Her focus snapped right back, and she pushed herself off the bed.

  She heard the click of the lock.

  “Open the door!”

  She heard the sound of frantic activity inside the bathroom.

  She tried the handle, but the lock held firm. She drove her shoulder at it, but her willowy frame was much too light to shift it.

  There was a bang, and then another.

  “I’ll shoot it open!”

  Isabella raised the gun and pointed it at the handle. Her aim wavered, uncertainly.

  There was a bang and then the sound that a sticky window might make as it was thumped open.

  Oh no.

  The window.

  At the back.

  She ran to the other side of the room and unlocked the front door, throwing it open to the cool day outside. She scrambled around to the back of the cabin, and there it was—the window, wide open. She turned to the undergrowth and thought she saw a flash of motion, squinted into the light at it, but then it was gone.

  She froze.

  The world was spread out before her, with its innumerable options, but it stopped her cold. She waited there, fumbling the gun beneath the folds of her jumper, uncertain of what her mother would want her to do and crippled by her uncertainty.

  She had failed.

  She had let her down.

  She ran back into the cabin again, took her bag and swept in her little purse, the money, her phone and the other bits and pieces that she had taken out during their stay. She saw Cassidy’s leather jacket and took that, too. She took the handles of her mother’s bag, lifting that with her own, and rushed back across the room. She pushed the little gun into her pocket and hurried outside.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Beatrix pulled off the road and rolled up to the entrance to the abandoned drive-in. It was a large, wide space, with the stained old screen faced by broad rows that were set aside for parking. Each bay was furnished with a metal post from which the speakers would once have hung. Some were still there, dangling from their wires, swinging to and fro in the light breeze. The area was encircled by a wire mesh fence, and signs fixed onto it by local realtors indicated that it was available for redevelopment. Beatrix revved the engine. There was a wooden shack ahead of her and the remains of the entrance barrier. The wooden arm had been broken off, and it lay impotently at the side of the road. She let out the brake and edged ahead.

  There were speed bumps every ten metres, and every fresh jolt sent a spasm of pain through her body. She felt terribly, awfully weak, as if every last scrap of humanity had been sucked out of her. It was as bad as she had ever felt. If any kind of physical exertion was necessary today, then she was finished. She knew she would be as helpless as a baby. Her arms felt like lead weights, and it was as much as she could manage to turn the wheel. Her fingers held onto it like claws.

  The access road encircled the main parking area, and it was necessary to circle around it to reach the secondary entrance. She edged around the road, looking out for any sign that she was driving into an ambush.

  The first sniper team was designated Hawk. They were established on the eastern side of the drive-in. The lot was set in a shallow bowl, its raised edges covered in overgrown scrub and unhealthy-looking shrubs and small trees. They had found a good spot while it was still dark. They were wearing ghillie suits, camouflaged expertly so that they practically merged into the vegetation.

  The car peeled off the main road and slowed as it approached the entrance to the drive-in. Scraps of discarded newsprint caught in the breeze, plastered up against the mesh fence.

  “Call it out,” the sniper said to his spotter.

 
; The second man held his binoculars to his eyes.

  “Target. Sector Alpha. Deep. Vehicle. Looks like an Impala.”

  “Range it.”

  “Four hundred yards and closing. Wind, one-half value, push one left.”

  “Passengers?”

  “Negative. Just the driver.”

  “On target. Call it in.”

  The spotter opened the channel. “Command post, command post, this is Hawk, over.”

  “We copy your traffic, Hawk. What have you got?”

  “Visual confirmation of target’s current position.”

  The radio crackled again as the second sniper team reported in. “Command post, this is Eagle, over.”

  “Copy that, Eagle. Proceed.”

  “Also confirming eyes on target. She’s just inside the perimeter. Only the driver is visible. Repeat, package is not visible in the car.”

  “Copy that. Hawk and Eagle, hold position. Fire only on my command.”

  The formation of helicopters swooped low and fast, the long muddy expanse of the Great Dismal Swamp just fifty feet below. Control was in the trailing chopper, a MH-6J. It was a fast two-man ship, used by the Border Patrol down south, and used by Manage Risk to ferry key staff around their vast facility. The second bird, an AH-64 Apache, was a twin-engine attack chopper that bristled with weapons. The company had purchased six of them from Boeing at a combined cost of $100 million. They were brought out only for special occasions, and this was one of them.

  Control was not about to underestimate what Beatrix Rose was capable of, and Jamie King was prepared to back his assessment all the way.

  The cabin was compact, and Control was not particularly comfortable. The body armour jagged into his ribs and prodded into his soft flesh whenever he so much as flinched.

  He could live with the discomfort when it might be the difference between life and death.

  They flew west. Cars headed north and south, into and out of Suffolk, and Control looked down on them with envy. People going about their daily lives. Dreary, early commutes into the office. All of that was very attractive to him now. He would gladly have exchanged his life for one on predictable mundanity. He knew exactly what he was flying into. It felt like he was voluntarily putting his neck in the guillotine.