by Rob Jones
“Call out and you’re dead before you hit the water, yes?”
The man nodded, his eyes wide open with fear and surprise. “Ja – Ich verstehe.”
“Good. Where is Kiefel?” To help things along, Scarlet pushed the gun harder into the man’s cheek.
“Oberstleutnant Kiefel is on the rear deck with the President.”
“Excellent – and where is the weapon?”
“The weapon is being fitted to a helicopter drone on the helipad as we speak – directly above us here on the top deck.”
Scarlet moved the weapon and pushed the rim of the suppressor into the man’s chest.
“Nicht schießen! Ich habe Kinder... I have children!”
“Wrong,” Scarlet said. “Sie hatten Kinder – you had children.”
The man opened his mouth to scream, but Scarlet discharged the weapon before he could make a sound. His dead body slumped onto the deck, and Hawke and Doyle lowered him into the water to get him out of sight.
“I had no idea you spoke German,” Hawke said, impressed.
“Picked it up in Bielefeld.”
“That’s right – I forgot the army spends so much time in Germany. Maybe that’s where you got your sense of humor?”
Scarlet smiled. “Maybe you should start collecting better jokes?”
“Like your collection of medieval bollock daggers you mean?” Hawke said.
“How do you know about that?” Scarlet said, raising an eyebrow.
Doyle stepped out of the shadows. “I hate to break up the obvious sexual tension, but I want everyone to remember that we are not to move against the President until we have secured the weapon. If Kiefel gets wind of this operation before we can disable the drone and secure the canister, all he has to do is push a button and that thing’s airborne over Manhattan and we’re all dead, clear?”
“Clear as daylight,” Scarlet said.
“Good. Let’s move out.”
They divided into two units, as planned. Hawke and Scarlet made their way up the steps to the top deck and the helipad while Doyle moved toward the stern where Kiefel was holding President Grant.
It was time to end Kiefel’s assault on America.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Seeing Taobh na Gréine for the first time in so many years brought back some serious memories for Lea Donovan. It didn’t take her long to work out the last time she had set foot on the property. It was the day she and her mother had locked the place up after her father’s death. Her mother had vowed never to return and she had kept to her vow. She was good at sticking to a vow.
Lea didn’t have to try so hard. She was only a young girl, and did as her mother told her. Then when she was older she joined the army and left the county. She needed no vow to stay away from Taobh na Gréine.
“So, are we going in or are we going to stand here all damned night?” She turned to see Danny Devlin at her side. The sea breeze was ruffling his greying hair and part of his face was obscured behind his trademark up-turned coat collars.
She nodded. “Of course we’re going in. We’ve got to go in. I want to know why someone murdered my father, and the answer’s in this cottage.”
Now it was Devlin’s turn to nod in understanding. “So, you have a key?”
“Dad always kept one under that pot over there by the garage – where he used to keep his motorbike.”
Lea walked across the drive, her boots crunching on the loose gravel chips. She shivered and pulled her coat up around her as she knelt to tip up the pot. Spending so much time in the Caribbean she always forgot how cold Ireland could get sometimes, even in the summer.
“Sod it.”
“Not there?”
She shook her head. “Stupid to think it would be here after so long. Mum probably took it somewhere. She hated the place after Dad died.”
“So how are we going to get in?”
Before Lea could reply, they all heard the sound of breaking glass. Lea stood and turned to see Mikey grinning at them. “By the way, I just put a brick through the kitchen window.”
“A genius solution,” Devlin said.
Lea reached inside the shattered window and flicked open the lock. “And so stealthy, too.”
Inside now, they began the search. Mikey and Kyle took downstairs while Lea and Devlin searched the bedrooms upstairs. Luckily, her mother had removed most of their belongings over the years, so the ghost-count was lower than Lea had feared, but there were still occasional items that transported her back in time – the rocking chair by the window, the smell of some leftover linen in the airing cupboard… the pencil marks on the back of the door where her father had measured her height when she was growing up.
She felt a flood of relief that whoever had killed McNamara hadn’t known about the cottage or they would have destroyed this place as well. She thanked God her mother had bought it in her maiden name before the marriage.
After clambering down from the loft hatch, Devlin announced the whole place had been searched from top to bottom, and when Mikey and Kyle emerged through the bedroom door, they concurred.
“Wait a minute!” Lea said. “There’s somewhere we haven’t tried yet – when I was a kid, me and my brothers used to play hide and seek here. I used to hide in a secret place I thought only I knew about. They never found me when I hid there, but Dad must have known about it.”
“Where is it?”
“Downstairs in the kitchen – there’s a hatch in the larder floor leading to a small cellar where they used to store meat in the old days when it got too hot.”
They hurried downstairs and Lea opened the hatch with bated breath… this was the moment that her entire journey hinged on. If it wasn’t in here then it was lost forever.
“Is it there, Lea?” Devlin asked, trying to look over her shoulder.
Lea smiled, then her eyes filled with tears. “I think so, Danny… I hope so.”
She picked it up and blew a heavy layer of dust from the box-file. “Oh my God… this must be it.”
She stared at the file for what seemed like forever, her eyes wide with anxiety. She pulled it from the small compartment and walked it out into the candle light of the main kitchen.
Devlin moved closer. “What’s the problem?”
“I… I’m scared of what I might find in here, that’s all.”
“Do you want Uncle Mikey to look first?”
She looked up, startled by O’Sullivan’s booming voice so close. He too was standing almost beside her, and Kyle a foot to his right. It seemed everyone was more than a little curious about the contents of Dr Harry Donovan’s enigmatic box-file.
Lea tried to smile, but it wouldn’t come. “No… this is something I have to do. Maybe this is where my whole life has been pointing.”
Lea walked to the table and took another moment simply to stare at the old, dusty box-file before her. She knew the last person to have touched it would have been her father, and that alone made her sad before she even opened it to see what he had been researching - what he had looked into that had cost him his life – what had caused some bastard to take her father away from her when she was so young.
“Jeez, would ya just open the thing already!”
“Can it, Mikey,” Devlin said, his voice suddenly all business. “She’ll open it when she’s ready. In the meantime, now we’ve found the fucking thing maybe you and Lurch over there could go outside and keep an eye out. It’s not like we had an easy time getting here. Whoever tried to take us out back in Dublin might not give up as easily as you two jokers.”
Mikey took the hint and he and Kyle picked up the shotguns and went outside the cottage where they stood either side of the door.
Devlin put a hand on her shoulder. “In your own time, Lea. They can wait. We can all wait.”
“I hope that’s a fatherly hand, Danny, and nothing else.”
He smiled, and removed the hand. “It’s a reassuring hand, Lea. That’s all.”
Lea managed an insince
re smile and opened the box-file.
Then she gasped so loudly she almost made Kyle Byrne jump out of his skin.
Mikey looked at Kyle and suppressed a chuckle. He leaned his head into the kitchen and lowered his voice. “What the hell is it, woman?”
Lea was silent for a few moments. When she spoke, her voice was trembling.
“It’s worse than I could have imagined.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Vincent Reno watched with admiration as Kim Taylor fought her way closer to the luxury pool house. It was a hard slog through half a dozen men paid handsomely by Kiefel to defend the drone.
In response, the French mercenary fired a non-stop barrage of rounds into the defensive positions held by Kiefel’s men and kept them pinned down, but he was also being kept busy by Angelika Schwartz and her impressive determination to blow his head off.
Vincent saw a chance to hit the drone and he started to fire. Pauling saw what was happening and ran for cover, leaving the canister behind. A second later Vincent hit the drone and it exploded all over the rear yard, sending a fireball into the night sky.
Then, using the cover of a row of California palms, he sprinted in the shadows until he was across the south lawn and finally joined Kim at the pool house. It didn’t take too long for a very dangerous and angry Angelika Schwartz to snatch the canister and join Pauling. A second later she had picked off another two of Kim’s men with startling ease and accuracy before ordering Pauling in broken English to retreat to the back room of the pool house.
She shoved the Australian through the door and walked backwards, firing lethal shots as she went, pausing only to tear some cloth off her shirt and stuff it into Pauling’s vodka bottle. She lit the end of the cloth with the burning cigarette in her mouth and tossed the bottle at the entrance of the pool house. It struck the arched doorway and smashed, spreading vodka all over the walls and pool chairs. Instantly the burning cloth ignited the spirit and moments later the front of the pool house was ablaze.
“Move forward!” Kim shouted, unperturbed by the flames. “They’re on the back foot.”
Vincent was the first inside, covering his face from the heat of the fire with the back of his arm. He moved forward, gun raised while Kim and her remaining men were just a pace behind. Somewhere in here, he thought, Klaus Kiefel’s West Coast operation was about to come to an abrupt end.
They reached the changing room – a large, expansive affair of polished teak floorboards and fluffy white towels hanging over the backs of wooden pool chairs. Vincent caught a fast movement in the corner of his eye and turned his head to see Angelika blasting the lock out of an external door at the rear of the pool house. She fired two or three shots at them blindly before the two of them exited the pool house and slammed the door.
Then they heard another isolated shot.
Vincent and Kim were there a second later, and while the Frenchman tried to open the door, the American agent used her palm mic to order more of her men to the rear of the building to cut them off.
“Is anyone reading this?”
“What’s the problem?” Vincent asked.
“No response. I think all my men are down. What’s the problem with you?”
“Damned door is stuck,” the Frenchman said. He tried to shoulder it open but it didn’t move an inch.
“They must have pushed something up against it,” Kim said.
Vincent frowned. “Step aside.”
When Kim was safely out of the way the former Foreign Legion man fired a long burst of bullets into the top panel of the door until it was reduced to matchwood. He then smashed out what was left with the butt of the gun and peered through the hole to see the problem.
Alan Pauling was dead and wedged up against the door.
“She must have shot him and used him as a kind of door wedge,” Kim said.
Vincent nodded his head thoughtfully. “Why can’t I find a woman like that?”
*
In the tense silence of the Oval Office, President Kimble waited anxiously for the telephone to ring. He was almost totally sure that Kiefel would call off the murder of Grant if it meant saving his own life.
Almost.
Now, he watched as the young woman brought the coffee into the room. Her name was Veronika Fischer, but it had become Veronica Fisher when Kiefel had arranged for her to apply for the job six months ago.
“Just put it down there,” Kimble said without a smile. A lot was riding on the next few minutes. If Kiefel didn’t comply he knew he would have to give the order to kill him.
Veronika gently placed the coffee on the small table either side of the couches in the center of the room. “Would you like me to pour the cream and sugar?” she asked in a faultless Maine accent. Her beautiful smile sealed the deal.
“Yes… thanks – one sugar only please.”
The former spy and mercenary gently poured the cream into one of the cups and filled the rest of the cup with hot, fresh coffee until it was almost at the brim. Then, with equally placid movements she spooned one rounded teaspoon of sugar into the warm drink and smoothly stirred until the grains had all dissolved and the coffee was ready for the President.
He watched her as she picked up the cup by the rim of the fine china saucer and stepped slowly over to him. She gave him another one of those smiles. He could get used to those, he thought.
Kimble continued to stare at the phone as she gently placed the cup and saucer on his desk. He barely noticed when she broke protocol and moved around behind him to return to the tray in the corner of the room.
He was about to ask what she was doing when she made things a little clearer by drawing her leather belt off her waist and slipping it around his neck, pulling it as tight as she could.
“Mit freundlicher Empfehlung von Herr Kiefel,“ she said with cold hatred.
Kimble spoke not a word of German, but he knew from the last word what was happening and he knew why – his attempt to blackmail Kiefel had gone badly wrong.
He kicked out against the heavy desk and reached up with his hands, but she was pulling the belt so tight he couldn’t even get his fingers beneath it to pull it away from his neck. It bit into the flesh on his throat and pushed down hard on his windpipe.
He tried to call out, but the constriction just wouldn’t allow it, and now he felt the blood pooling in his head, making him dizzy.
“Margot!” he croaked as the belt crushed down on his windpipe. “Margot, get help!”
With a final burst of energy he managed to stagger up from the chair and drag the woman halfway across the room, where he spun around and fell backwards. They both fell down, the woman first. Her back smashed into the coffee tray and the shattered crockery pushed into her back. She cried out, but never let go off the belt.
Kimble turned again, driven by the base instinct to survive and using his heavier weight to gain some superiority against the woman, but it was too little too late. They tripped back over and this time went forward with Kimble’s face smashing into the small coffee table. It collapsed under the weight of the two of them, its daintily carved mahogany legs buckling outwards and snapping into splinters.
“Margot! Call the Secret Service..!”
They rolled twice more, and Kimble was able to look under the couch through the open door leading to Margot’s office. He strained as he stared out into his executive secretary’s room and realized all hope was gone when he saw Margot’s dead body on the floor. A look of abject terror was frozen on her face by the nascent rigor mortis, and a telephone cord was still digging deep into the soft skin of her throat.
Now, he could feel the weight of the woman as she tightened the slim leather belt around his neck, her knees pushing into the small of his back and stopping him from moving. The blood rushed into his head as he strained for the final breath he would ever take, and then his world began to fade.
His last sounds were that of the woman whispering something in German… “Sie werden als Verräter sterben…�
��
Her words were drowned out by the sound of his own tortured breathing, and then the room began to go dark. At first, his cortisol-flooded brain told him the lights were fading, but then he realized with a last gasp of horror that he was losing consciousness.
His last sight was that of the Presidential Seal on the rug, now seen up-close with his face pushed into the carpet weave.
An ignominious way to die, he thought, and then it was over.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Hawke and Scarlet used the cover of night and the shadows caused by the beams supporting the radar arch above the helipad to move unnoticed toward Jakob. He was fitting the canister to a manned helicopter drone, and the Englishman moved silently forward and raised his silenced weapon, ready to shoot him.
Then a car backfired on the West Side Highway. Hawke cursed – another curfew breaker, or looters maybe.
Jakob spun around instinctively and saw Hawke and Scarlet in the shadows just a few yards from him. In a second the German bodybuilder leaped into the helicopter and raised the collective, slowly lifting it into the air.
Hawke and Scarlet fired at the chopper drone but realized with horror that there was a chain gun fitted to the front of it. They dived for cover behind a lifeboat when Jakob opened fire on them, holding the manned drone in a steady hover about fifty feet above the yacht. The downdraft from the blades lifted water from the pool and sprayed it all over them as the heavy duty rounds from the chain gun drilled into the deck, tearing up the polished teak and shredding the fiber-glass sides of the pool.
Inside the drone, Jakob was laughing hysterically.
“We have to stop him!” Hawke yelled. “The canister is attached to the bottom of the chopper. They’re obviously planning on flying through Manhattan and releasing it into the atmosphere there.”
