“Because I saw Bernard Hautcret coming out of your apartment, the day you were flying to see him in, where was it? Alaska somewhere. I always thought you shouldn’t have given him a key.”
“But that’s not possible!”
“It’s definite.” Pat poured the boiled water onto the aromatic coffee,
“Was he alone?” Benadir was starting to sense something.
“He was the first time. But a day later I’m sure I heard your door open — and two sets of footsteps. I kind of assumed it was you.”
“I only got back yesterday.”
“Jake would have seen them. And if he didn’t they’ll definitely be on the CCTV.” Pat saw Benadir and me swap a weary glance as she brought up Jake’s name.
“What?”
“Jake wasn’t around when we came in just now.”
“Weird. Come on, let’s find him.” Pat, despite her size, jumped to her feet as the landline rang.
“You guys go.” I picked up the phone. “Hi, this is Lucille.”
“Is that 222 6549?”
“No...” It was a wrong number.
Or was it?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Jake still wasn’t at his desk when Pat and Benadir emerged from the elevator. And there was no notice saying where he’d gone.
“He always leaves a note.” Pat led the way to the staff door to where the apartment block’s utilities buzzed away. No sign of Jake in the CCTV room, computer office, staff restroom, kitchen or utilities area. She was fraught.
“Perhaps he’s outside.” Benadir ran to and pushed at the exit door. It didn’t budge.
“Allow me.” Pat jumped at it.
The door caved in.
Benadir headed straight to the huge, iron garbage bin and threw open the lid. Jake was there trussed up in duct tape, eyes screaming, mouth sealed, hands and legs immobile.
Pat jammed her foot against the wheels and flipped the bin onto its back.
Benadir clicked and slid on her iPhone.
“Ted, we need you here — porter’s kitchen behind the lobby.”
With painstaking care Pat and Benadir eased Jake out, turned the door into a stretcher and, Pat leading with her back, marched him into the staff kitchen.
“Lots of soap and water.” Pat rushed to the dishwashing liquid to help ease the tape from Jake’s mouth.
Ted burst into the kitchen.
Jake gasped for air.
Pat grabbed a cup and hurriedly filled it with cold water and splashed it into Jake’s open mouth.
“Scissors?” Pat’s eyes pleaded. Benadir nodded.
Carefully, Benadir and Ted cut away the tape from Jake’s arms and legs, rubbing them back to life. Jake’s breathing slowed.
So did Pat’s. “Let’s get you to a sofa.”
“Who did it Jake?”
Jake shook his head, unable to bring himself to speak to Benadir.
“Lucille’s Bernard?” Jake nodded to Pat, short, sharp as if his memory had been stung.
“Alone?”
Jake shook his head.
Benadir clicked open the iPhone’s photos and proffered an image of Durand at Jake.
Whose eyes narrowed as his head nodded yes.
“Durand.” Benadir slid the home key, clicked her favourites, clicked Doc.
“Durand’s in town — you get anywhere?”
*
Dame Marion Palfrey’s dark blue business suit exuded authority as she entered the tenth floor dining room at the UN Headquarters.
Marion knew most of her UN hosts well. The three she knew best were:
Aurangzeb Sohail, a Pakistani with swept-back, silver-grey hair, easy confidence and immaculate UN dress code — dark suit, white shirt, silk tie — worked at the Department of Disarmament Affairs. He extended a very firm handshake and fixed her with a warm smile.
Department of Humanitarian Affairs representative, Davin Lochlann, offered a definite, but gentle, handshake. His young, round, Irish face that rightly suggested a well-fed frame camouflaged by a tailored tweed jacket, jeans and a matching blue button-down shirt, set off by a bright red tie. All of which hid a fierce intelligence.
And last Marion’s most influential UN acquaintance, Rabyn Machkarin, who accepted three pecks on the cheek, a give away as a Russian. But her elegant black suit and deceptively made-up, carefully emotion-free face gave nothing away, as was entirely appropriate for the most senior UN person present — the Director of Political Affairs.
Four more UN section chiefs had turned up. And everyone in the room had cancelled long-standing diary appointments at their PAs’ vigorous insistence. Very few people in the world could ensure that.
“What’s up?” Davin Lochlann closed down the small talk as soon as they were all seated around the oblong table.
Marion quickly explained how twenty of the world’s super-rich had apparently joined up to finance a massive, solar power satellite system. She outlined how it would collect the free, constant supply of flood energy flowing from the sun then pump it down to Earth via microwave beams where it would be converted to electricity.
“The down beam would be so low in density that it wouldn't even feel warm to birds flying through it or animals and humans walking through it. The collection points on earth could be fed into existing power grids on land, ships at sea and airlines in the sky.”
The two huge barriers had been bureaucracy and cost. And that’s where the League of Enlightenment came in. Working in the shadows, none of the super-rich wanted glaring publicity; they appeared to have agreed to put up the cash for the project as a philanthropic gesture. The capital costs would not need to be recouped. Those in the developing world, especially Africa where energy was in critically short supply, needed it most. This lack of energy led to poverty and created a natural feeding ground for extremists like Al-Quaida.
“What’s the catch?” Rabyn Machkarin knew Marion wasn’t here to provide good news.
Davin Lochlann jumped in. “Who are these twenty philanthropists?”
François Édouard was the first name Marion proffered.
“He’s a prominent member of the Démocratie Libérale. We met recently in Paris. Old family. I found him refreshingly honest.” Rabyn Machkarin sounded puzzled.
“Gagan Setty — India?” Marion waited for Aurangzeb Sohail to respond and wasn’t disappointed.
“Wouldn’t trust him further than I could throw him,” he said with disdain.
“I smell Indian prejudice,” countered Rabyn Machkarin. “We’ve found nothing wrong with him.”
“Viktor Marcel Schobinger.” Marion was going down a list.
“Based in Geneva. We’ve deep-checked his banking arrangements. Clean as a whistle.”
“Frank McGee.”
Again Rabyn Machkarin jumped in. “Owns Green Funnel. We’ve checked it out. Their green credentials are real. They conserve far more fuel than any other shipping line operating under the American flag. If Frank McGee is a typical Enlightenment member I’m curious about the bad news.”
“Frank McGee was also the owner of Dusk Shipping which sails under a Panama flag.”
“By ‘was’ you mean he’s now sold it?” Rabyn Machkarin threw the question down on the table.
“By ‘was’ I mean Frank McGee died when the League of Enlightenment’s CEO, Jean-Pierre Durand, helped himself to a GR7 Harrier jump jet from Boscombe Down, flew it to Brett Hall, where I was debriefing McGee, and fired an AIM-9M Sidewinder rocket into my dining room.” Marion couldn’t help savouring the instant attention and complete silence that greeted this statement. “We ran to the Fish Tank, McGee rather unwisely declined to accompany us, thinking he’d escape.”
“I had no idea.” Davin Lochlann was dazed.
Rabyn Machkarin, as Marion had intended, was chastened. “I get the impression you have more bad news,”
“A day earlier Durand, bluffed his way into a test flight from Milan to London in my D-Jet, hijacked it and kidnapped Sofia. She e
nded up in what can only be described as an old-fashioned torture chamber in the grounds of François Édouard’s Chateau Grand Mote. And before you ask, François Édouard was there and fully aware of Sofia’s predicament.” Dame Marion wanted there to be no confusion now.
“You’re sure?” Davin Lochlann was asking a rhetorical question to allow his and others’ brains time to take this in.
“Yes. And there’s more. Victor Schobinger’s daughter, Lucille, was on her way to Nome, Alaska to see her boyfriend when she was kidnapped and flown to a former gulag in Siberia.”
“Where?” Rabyn Machkarin’s tone was significantly more curious.
“Eighty kilometres from Pevek.”
“Chaunskoy Bay? That was one of our worst — a uranium mine, closed down in 1956.”
“And now fully operational again. Over a thousand workers exist in a netherworld there.”
“A thousand?” questioned Aurangzeb Sohail. “That’s impossible — we’d have known.”
“Agent Max Fedorov is there now. There is not a shadow of doubt.”
“Why would they set up such a huge facility in Siberia?” Rabyn Machkarin knitted his eyebrows.
“Perhaps because it’s at the back door of both Russia and America. But it raises huge questions that none of you were aware of it until now. Is Chaunskhoy Bay the only gulag that’s been resurrected? How close is the League of Enlightenment to achieving their aim? Indeed what is their aim? Max has seen no sign of a solar power satellite system.”
Marion’s Blackberry vibrated — an email from Benadir.
Durand’s in town. Doc and I are now searching for him.
Alarm swept over Marion like a hot flush, betraying the anxiety of a mother.
*
Doc had his back to the site of the World Trade Centre when Benadir called him to confirm Durand was in town.
“He just left.” Doc’s tone was resigned, overwhelmed with that lump of disappointment that sticks in the craw when one misses the boat. In this case a Seattle 1000 luxury submarine that had arrived in Manhattan’s North Cove Marina last night, when he and Benadir had been making love in her apartment. It pulled out of the marina at about the time they’d left the apartment this morning.
Doc had just left the dock-master’s office and was now staring at the placid spot where the Seattle 1000 had berthed after its trans-Atlantic crossing and re- provisioned overnight. The berth was now gut-wrenchingly empty, the luxury, twin-deck sub, capable of remaining submerged for up to twenty days, could be anywhere.
“Wish she stayed a while longer, she was a beauty,” the dock-master had commented.
So did Doc, who had no doubts that this was the ship Frank McGee had referred to just before being incinerated by that Sidewinder rocket in Brett Hall — and the means of escape for Durand at Southampton docks.
“Stay put, be patient and scout.” Benadir ordered.
Doc’s leg spasmed.
Memories of the suicide bomber that had shredded it became mixed with haunting images of Nine Eleven where, just yards away from where Doc stood, two thousand seven hundred and fifty innocent people died in a co-ordinated suicide attack by hijackers affiliated to Al-Qaieda.
Nine Eleven, forever engraved on man’s collective mind, was the day when Doc had reached his decision to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and hunt down those mad megalomaniacs who believe it is their right to rule the world. People like Osama bin Laden, François Édouard and Jean-Pierre Durand.
Doc’s iPhone vibrated. Benadir appeared on his screen.
“Lucille’s not answering her cell.”
“Are you tracking her?“
“She’s heading up east towards Roosevelt Drive.”
“Plan C?” The worst they’d anticipated was actually happening. Lucille had been kidnapped.
“Have to be.”
“Am I cleared to the top?”
Doc knew that was the last thing Benadir wanted. “Yes,” she replied.
Doc sprinted to the World Financial Centre, dashed into the pyramid-topped skyscraper, waved thanks to the security guard who held open the elevator door and punched the 54th floor button.
“Go, go, go!” He hissed at the elevator through grinding teeth.
On the roof, the sirens and street sounds of Manhattan were distant, and a calm took over. The sky was bright blue, the clouds sparse, the shadows full of contrast, the air clear.
A perfect day for flying.
Doc unzipped his backpack, donned the black fabric wing, matching helmet and integrated goggles, which together provided hands-free communication once it was connected to his encrypted phone. He slung the backpack back over his shoulders clipping it on to the flying wing’s metal brackets, checking each fastener, each zip, each tie.
Satisfied, Doc perched on the rooftop. Unsure of where his prey was heading but confident he would find it.
And then Doc’s left brain grasped the inevitability of his actions, a rush of appalled anxiety swept through his veins, before his right brain, intuitive and holistic, retook control.
He filled his lungs with air, exhaled and filled again.
On the screen in his goggles a map of Manhattan and a blinking dot.
Lucille.
As the dot sped south down S Street towards the heliport Doc matched it to a Black Hummer. A chill ran down his back. Heliport? That wasn’t in Plan C. He fixed his goggled eyes onto it like the laser of a guided missile. And increased the magnification.
Doc gave a sigh of relief as the Hummer sped past the heliport, turned right into Whitehall, left into State Street, right into State Plaza, left into Battery Place.
Spot on for Plan C.
At the North Cove Marina, where the luxury sub should be but wasn’t, the Hummer stopped. A passenger door opened. A woman in a fur coat, Lucille, climbed out. A man was right beside another behind her. A sleek, mahogany launch was ready and waiting.
“Cavalry alerted?”
“Alerted, but not in place yet.” Benadir warned.
“If they were I wouldn’t need to fly.”
“Be careful.”
“The sun’s right behind me, right in the bastards’ eyes.”
“That won’t stop Durand.”
As the launch took off towards the middle of the Hudson River, Doc leapt from the pyramid roof of the 3 World Financial Centre.
Two Kevlar props, powered by batteries in his oversized prosthetic leg, flipped up above the billowing wing, allowing Doc to keep his height and move fast. His eyes were fixed on the motor launch, which was speeding towards the middle of the East River. One man steering, the other locked onto Lucille
And then he saw the launch’s target. The turret of a submerged Seattle 1000 submarine broke through the surface of the water just 250 metres ahead.
“That’s Durand!” Benadir had the image from Doc’s goggle’s camera on her screen.
Doc hissed into his mic. “I’m going in.” He angled himself at the launch, speeding headfirst like a Kamikaze plane, apparently with a similar death wish.
Just 20 feet to go and Doc yanked the emergency chute. His body flared upright, his legs pivoted down like an undercarriage preparing for a spot landing.
*
“You guys go.” I picked up the phone. “Hi, this is Lucille.”
“Is that 222 6549?”
“No...” It was a wrong number.
Or was it?
I was ‘miles away’ staring out of the kitchen window at Central Park trying to focus. Trying to fathom what was going on. I mean why on earth would anyone wipe out every image of me in my own apartment, stack everything in my father’s bedroom, and then restore it all.
A key was being slipped into the front door lock. I heard it, but didn’t, my mind still wandering in Central Park.
But the heavy, striding footsteps brought me back. Leather on wood. Bernard’s boots. I swung round and there he was, handsome as hell in his long Barbour coat and wide brimmed Acubra hat. His bearded face wa
sn’t smiling.
Nor was mine. “What gives you the right to just walk in here?”
“Your key.” He threw it into the re-cycling can. “But I won’t be needing it any more. You won’t either. Get your coat.”
I just stared at him with a mixture of contempt and horror.
“Now.” Bernard strode towards me, grabbed my arm like a vice and steered me towards the coat closet.
“It was you, wasn’t it?”
Bernard ignored the question. I pulled myself free and pounced for the front door. He grabbed my left arm again. Then the right and pulled me close to him.
“Let me go!”
“Would you like to see your father dead? Because if you would —just go ahead and scream. But don’t blame me when he’s dragged off to Siberia and buried alive in your favourite mine.” His final furious shake could have dislocated all my joints — I felt so weak.
“Father?” My disbelieving tone hit Bernard like iced water. His temper died.
“This is a lot bigger than just you and me, Lucille. I’m sorry, but it is.”
He let me go and grabbed my red, mink fur coat, which he’d always liked but I seldom wore.
This time I put it on, shocked into submission.
As the elevator reached the ground floor I tensed myself to scream, run, cause mayhem. To hell with him — Benadir, Jake, Pat would be there.
One of them, surely?
But they weren’t.
Bernard frog-marched me out onto Madison Avenue and into a waiting black Hummer with blacked-out windows. I heard the doors lock.
The drive to the North Cove Marina is a blank, getting out of the car, getting into the launch likewise. It was the wintry spray of the Harlem River being split asunder by the launch’s cutting bow that shook me back to the present.
As the water splashed my face I skewed round to avoid it and saw the Manhattan skyline fading into the background.
Out of the sun a paraglider was diving down.
My mind leapt to my own experience on a paramotor. It can’t land here I thought — it’ll crash.
Doc’s prosthetic leg was aimed like a battering ram at the driver of the launch. The man was flung into the sea like a rag doll and Doc crumpled into the cockpit as the force of the landing tore off his left leg.
Eternity's Sunrise (A New Doc Palfrey Thriller) Page 11
