The Asset: Act II (An Isabella Rose Thriller Book 2)

by Mark Dawson

  The nearest airport, Dabolim, was forty-three miles away, and the nearest railway station, at Canacona, was not convenient. The tourists who arrived in search of a Goan paradise tended to travel to other destinations. Those who came for the local hashish headed for the hippie haven of Arambol in the north of the country. Younger travellers, visiting for beach parties and lost weeks of hedonistic excess, went to Baga and Calangute. Those few travellers who travelled south to Palolem came for peace and quiet, a chance to lose themselves in the heart-stopping beauty of their surroundings, somewhere to step off the grid and switch off from the rigour of their day-to-day lives.

  Local fishermen lived in the shacks and huts along the shore. It was more traditional here, with none of the new accommodation that sacrificed charm and authenticity for the speed with which it could be constructed. The little village had the laid-back, almost somnambulant atmosphere that must have been how things were fifty years earlier. The men and women still enjoyed a siesta when the sun was at its height; the doors to the houses opened wide again as the sun dipped down to the horizon. The men pushed traditional boats out into the shallows and paddled out to deeper water to fish while the women sat outside their huts and split raw mangoes into halves with cutters that they held between their toes.

  A rough path divided the beach from the rows of old buildings that comprised the village. Isabella continued along it, passing boats that had been pulled up onto the sand. She skirted the ancient stone well that provided water to the village; she saw a child, whom she recognised as the youngest member of a neighbouring family, sitting on the edge while working on a juicy jackfruit. The path climbed a little and she was able to look out over the roofs of the huts to the fields that made up the interior, green paddies that were harvested for rice. There was a pen full of cows that were too addled to do anything other than stand around, swishing their tails to discourage the flies and the birds that swooped down to peck at them.

  Their hut was at the far side of the village. She climbed down from the path, her sandalled feet slipping in the hot loose sand, and approached. The neighbouring dwelling was occupied by a young couple, a fisherman and his wife, and both of them were sheltering in the shade of a nearby cashew tree while they drank chai. Isabella said hello as the woman pointed, with a smile, at the flower that was still in her hair.

  Pope was lying on his bed. He had been asleep when Isabella had gone out, and the note that she had left to tell him where she was had not been disturbed. She stepped farther inside and closed the door. He was still asleep. She put the bag of groceries on the table, then put each item away, making as little noise as she could. He grunted once and then turned over, revealing the bandage that she had changed that morning.

  Pope had been very ill. He had become weak during the flight from Rome to Mumbai, but things had taken a turn for the worse aboard the southbound Mandovi Express to Panjim. He had become delirious, and, when she examined the wound in the bathroom, she saw the pus that was draining from it and the red streaks that led away from the raw entry hole. She could see the wound had become infected.

  She had decided that he needed urgent treatment. She had helped him to disembark at Kankavli and had taken him to a local hospital. They had been there for a week. The doctors had diagnosed sepsis, and had operated on the wound and then packed it with gauze and left it open to drain. A course of antibiotics lowered his fever, and the infection was eventually successfully treated. The doctors charged twelve thousand rupees per night for a bed; Isabella paid the bill with ten hundred-dollar bills that she found in Pope’s bag.

  She was going to cook fish recheado for them both that night. It was a Goan dish with a whole fish—in this case a mackerel—slit down the centre and then stuffed with a spicy red paste, after which it would be shallow fried. Isabella had prepared the recheado masala the previous night, grinding Kashmiri red chilies, garlic, cumin, peppercorns and tamarind into a smooth but thick paste using vinegar. The masala was versatile and could be used with other seafood dishes; she scraped the surplus into an airtight container, the vinegar in it acting as a preservative. She poured out enough water for the rice and set it to boil on the stove.

  “Isabella.”

  She turned. Pope was awake. “How are you feeling?”

  “Lazy.”

  “They said you needed to rest.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m feeling better. It’s not as sore as it has been.”

  “You can take as long as you need until you’re better,” she said. “It’s not like we have anywhere to go.” He winced, and she regretted what she had said at once. She hadn’t meant anything by it, but given what had happened, it was insensitive. “Sorry,” she said.

  “Have you been into town?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  She took out the printout that she had made at the Internet café. She gave it to Pope, helped him to sit and then left him to read it. She took a bottle of water from the small refrigerator and went outside. The sun was sinking beneath the horizon, a golden stripe reflecting across the dark, still water. Isabella hopped down to the sand and walked down to the water’s edge. She let the warm water run over her toes, staring out at the uninhabited island three hundred metres out from the beach. She intended to swim out there when Pope was better.

  She turned. Pope was sitting on the wall, wincing gingerly as he lowered himself down to the beach. She would have gone to help, but he was a proud man and she could see easily enough that he was already embarrassed to have had to rely on her. He dropped the last half metre and followed her footsteps to the water.

  “Anything?” she asked. She had sent an email for him yesterday and the printout was the reply.

  “My wife and children are alive. He doesn’t know where they are, but he said he’s had it confirmed that they are being looked after.”

  Isabella was about to say that it was like what had happened to her when she had been abducted and used as leverage to stop Beatrix from going after Pope’s predecessor as Control, but the symmetry was obvious and she let it pass. It hadn’t worked out so well for the previous Control. It had ended with Isabella standing beside his hospital bed, a pistol held against his chest, a bullet fired into his heart.

  “What about what she said? About my mother?”

  Pope shook his head. “He doesn’t know.”

  Pope rested his hand on her shoulder as they set off along the beach together.

  “What do we do next?” she asked.

  “We get some answers.”

  Epilogue

  New York

  Vivian Bloom took Virgin Flight 111 from London Heathrow to JFK. He travelled in the Upper Class cabin and took the opportunity during the eight-hour flight to read the classified report from Maia’s ultimately unsuccessful operation to eliminate Michael Pope. It was not a particularly long document and had been written with the assistance of the scientist responsible for the Prometheus project. It was couched in defensive language, the man very patently aware that the asset, the spawn of a billion-dollar R&D program that he had helmed for fifteen years, had been made to look foolish by one man and a fifteen-year-old girl. He was right to be defensive. It was a farce.

  Bloom put away his iPad and enjoyed the three-course lunch—Waldorf salad, chicken biryani and a caramel sponge, together with a glass of an excellent South African white—before indicating to the steward that he was ready for them to turn his seat into a bed.

  He lay down and got some sleep.

  They landed at a touch before four in the afternoon. Bloom used his diplomatic credentials to pass through immigration and was met by a luxury towncar for the drive into Manhattan. He stopped at his hotel at Madison Avenue and 42nd Street to drop off his bag and then continued on. He felt a strange mixture of emotion as they carved a route through the glass-and-steel canyons: frustration that it had been necessary for him to attend the meeting; anxiety that so many loose ends had been left untied; and a little trepidation, generated
by the reputations of the other attendees who had gathered in New York. Bloom was more used to inspiring disquiet in the people he summoned to meetings with him. He was not used to the shoe being on the other foot.

  The meeting was being held uptown in a bland corporate building, a fifty-storey glass and steel skyscraper that thrust up into the sky between similar buildings that housed accountancy firms and legal practices. The blandness continued inside, with a sterile lobby and floor upon floor of identikit offices. The chrome sign on the front of the building referred to it as ‘The Spire,’ a proud boast rendered inaccurate by the fact that it was dwarfed by the taller buildings that shouldered upward on either side. It was owned by an unendingly complex series of off-shore companies and trusts, their own shareholdings obfuscated by labyrinthine arrangements that would have given most forensic taxation specialists migraines were they to try and untangle them. That was by design. There was no reason for the building, or its owners, to be investigated, but it was a useful blind should that ever become relevant.

  As Bloom stood in the lift that sped him up to the fiftieth floor, he considered that the building was owned not so much by any particular corporate entity as by a purpose. It was the physical space—one of several around the world—that housed the conspiracy, a place in which the plans and stratagems that would mould the future of the west could be planned and executed.

  “Vivian!”

  Bloom stepped into the conference room and saw that he was the last to arrive.

  He looked at his watch. “I thought we were starting at six?”

  Jamie King gave him one of his million-dollar smiles. “We are. We haven’t got going yet.”

  Bloom hated the idea that they might have begun without him, and he hated Jamie King, too. The man was the founding director of Manage Risk, the world’s largest military private contractor. He was a former Navy SEAL and still had that overbearingly loud and clubby personality that characterised so many of the American military men that Bloom had met during his decades in intelligence. King was among the worst of them. The bleached smile, the hail-fellow-well-met attitude, the permanent tan, the unnecessarily firm handshake—it all epitomised the kind of snake oil salesman that Bloom despised. Bloom looked at King now, leaning back in his chair with his hands laced behind his head, and reminded himself that it was necessary to do business with men like him in order to serve the greater purpose that had drawn them all together. The ends justified the means, regardless of how unpleasant he found them.

  There were just four of them in the room, a subcommittee of a much larger organisation that numbered several dozen men and women who were drawn from various military, industrial and political organisations. The larger body was a grand coalition that was derived from the United States, the United Kingdom and a handful of other European countries. There were representatives from national intelligence agencies and international finance, as well as political influencers. There were vested business interests, too, including, most prominently, emissaries from the defence industry.

  ‘The larger body.’ Bloom shook his head at his euphemism. He found that the more correct ‘conspiracy’ caught on his tongue, although he knew very well that that was precisely what he was involved in. A conspiracy of common interests that found perfect alignment in the pursuit of a particular agenda. A criminal conspiracy? Yes, when judged against the standards that regulated the norms of everyday behaviour. Murderous, brutal and immoral? Undoubtedly, and Bloom regretted that. Driven by greed and the advancement of an elite? Yes, for some of the participants, although Bloom was not motivated by those base desires. For Vivian Bloom, the conspiracy was justified. It had been founded by far-thinking individuals who foresaw that unless decisive action was taken, civilisation would be thrown back into a grubby dark age from which it might never emerge.

  There was an empty chair next to King, and Bloom took it. Opposite him was Theodore L. Carington Jr. Bloom knew the man: he had been US defence secretary a decade previously, a hawkish presence in the government of George W. Bush and a key instigator in the involvement of US forces in the coalition to topple Saddam Hussein. He had served as Secretary General of NATO after his time in government, and after that, he had served as the US Ambassador to Afghanistan. Carington was chairing the meeting.

  “Thanks for coming, Vivian.”

  Bloom nodded his acknowledgment.

  “I’ll start by saying that we are as frustrated as you by what happened in Syria.”

  “Frustration doesn’t really cover it,” Bloom said, as diplomatically as he could manage. “I was told that the assets were infallible. I recall that my agents were described as analogue, while they were digital.”

  “Yes,” Carington said. “That was what we said.”

  “And yet—and please correct me if I’m wrong—it appears that one of my agents, together with a fifteen-year-old girl, was able to subdue Maia and escape. That does leave me rather exposed back home.”

  “Yes. I’m sure it does. And again, it was unfortunate.”

  Bloom turned to the fourth man in the room. He was tall and slender, with a shaven head and glasses that would not have looked out of place in the office of a Silicon Valley start-up. Bloom had met him only once, at a high-level conference in New York. His name was Dr Nikita Valeryevich Ivanosky, and he was one of the senior staff responsible for Prometheus. “Have you spoken to her?”

  “To Maia? Yes, she has been debriefed. Your Mr Pope was resourceful, but Maia easily had his measure. The girl”—he looked down at his notes—“Isabella Rose, surprised her. The girl had a weapon and Maia was stabbed. Maia assessed the situation and decided that the best tactical decision was to retreat.”

  Carington chipped in, “The assessment was influenced by the fact that she had already secured Mr Pope’s family. We don’t feel that there is any reason to be overly concerned. His hands are tied. He isn’t likely to do anything while they are at risk.”

  “Where are they?”

  “We’re moving them to one of our sites in Poland,” Jamie King said. “We can decide where to take them after that.”

  “What about Pope and the girl?” Bloom pressed. “Do we know where they are?”

  “They took a flight from Rome to Mumbai,” Carington said. “We have footage of them at the airport, but we lost them soon after that. Our coverage is spotty down there, at best.”

  “Do you have agents on the ground?”

  “Of course. We’re looking now. But it’s a big country with a lot of people in it. We might have to wait for him to surface.”

  “He will,” Bloom said.

  “And we will be ready.”

  Bloom sighed. Almost everything was contained. Mohammed was dead. Al-Khawari was dead. Everyone who could cause them difficulties had been removed. Everyone except Pope and the girl. But they had successfully collected Pope’s family. That much was true. Even if Pope could dig through the layers of sewage to the truth, it would end in stalemate. What would he be able to do?

  “Pope and the girl are footnotes,” King said. “Let’s not be held up by them. The good news is that the operation is having the effect that we hoped. The Westminster attacks were an excellent start, but they have been underscored by the shoot-down of the jet.”

  Bloom allowed a nod. “Polling has shown a change in public opinion,” he offered.

  “Polling is very last century,” Carington said. “We can do better. Our friends at the NSA have built data models based on search engine activity and reactions across social media, and we’ve seen a very striking shift. Before the Westminster attacks, the UK was indexing a strong negative attitude towards further activity in the Middle East.”

  “Once bitten, twice shy,” Bloom suggested.

  “Exactly,” Carington allowed. “The index shifted to a slight favouring of action after Westminster, but it took a big swing after Flight 117 went down.”

  King leaned back in his chair, flicking a hand as if to dismiss the information as something he
already knew. “That might be, but it’s not at that level here. I was watching CNN in the hotel. They were saying that this is a European problem. Strictly European. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are interested in getting themselves tangled up with it.”

  “Intelligence is suggesting that the British are going to invoke Article Five,” Carington said. “An attack against one NATO member is an attack against them all.”

  “Like that’s going to fly. The president will shut that down quicker than the babysitter’s boyfriend when Daddy’s car pulls up. Daesh isn’t an enemy state.”

  “Daesh might disagree with that.”

  “You think he’ll give a fuck about what they say? He’s running for a second term. He doesn’t want America to be in another war that doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “And we knew that was likely to be the position, didn’t we?” Carington said patiently. “We’re taking steps.” He looked down at his tablet. “We’re jumping ahead of ourselves, but we might as well touch upon it now, since you brought it up. Doctor—do you want to report?”

  “I won’t say too much,” Ivanosky said. “We’re running it out of Chicago Station. Mercury and Mithras are in the field.”

  “You’re not using a cut-out?” Bloom asked.

  “Like Mohammed?” King said. “No. He worked well for you, but we couldn’t find anyone suitable. And we don’t have time to keep looking. The moment is upon us. We need to act now. I don’t think it’s necessary to go into operational details, save to say that you’ll know it when you see it.”

  “When?”

  King looked at his expensive Rolex. “Forty-six hours. Multiple venues, multiple events. Public opinion here will be different by the time we meet again.”