The Paris Betrayal

by James R. Hannibal

“Sometimes the act of shepherding a man is physical. Sometimes it is psychological. Jupiter told you all you needed to hear to get the job done. And as I said. He is pleased with your work.”

  “I’m glad.” Duval dropped his gaze to the rocks at the cliff base far below. “I . . . uh . . . could use a new position, so to speak. My pursuit of Calix cost me my job.”

  The woman nodded, signaling she already knew this. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  A good sign. Duval breathed a little easier. He liked Spain. Warm winters. Cheap housing. Better beaches than France. Things were looking up. “So, what’s our next move. When do we grab Calix?”

  “He’s on his way. But you shouldn’t worry about that either.” She turned to face him again, now holding a gun. Duval hadn’t seen her reach for it.

  What was she playing at? He laughed—nervous. “I see. A joke for the new guy. Very funny.”

  But she didn’t laugh, or even smile. The woman walked around him, putting herself between Duval and the path.

  He backed up, heels at the cliff’s edge. “I don’t understand. What is this?”

  “Why, Mr. Duval, this is the end.” She put the barrel to his head and fired.

  50

  Ben ran and hopped over the giant blocks of stone piled against the seaside walls of the Port of Valencia’s channel barriers. A paved access road topped each barrier, but he needed to stay clear of the light during his approach to the main piers. He saw too many eyes up there.

  From what he could tell, Sea Titan dominated the port. The big shipping corporation owned half the piers, and five looked custom built, all secured by one big perimeter fence. The sign above the primary gate read SEA TITAN MAIN—as in the tallest mast on a ship or the Spanish Main. The killer running this place had a decent sense of humor.

  Most cargo docks were shared. Gaining extra time and space over the competition took serious political maneuvering. Ben had to wonder how many truckloads of cash it took for Sea Titan to convince Valencia to let them have their own private section—an ideal arrangement for a large-scale criminal enterprise.

  The sheer number of craft with the Sea Titan serpent emblazoned on their hulls might have seemed daunting in a search for a specific vessel, but Ben had no trouble finding his target. The Behemoth, the largest container ship on earth, rested proudly against the seaward side of Sea Titan Main’s giant outer pier. He crawled up the stone blocks to the spot where the container stacks sat closest to the chain-link fence and settled in to watch the guards make their rounds.

  No wires ran along the fence. Not surprising. Sensors and electrification required too much maintenance so close to salt water. He dug a set of wire cutters out of his pack.

  Two security guards patrolled the stacks. No dogs. Good. And the guards kept mostly to the landward side, watching the road running down the pier’s center between the cranes and a six-story office building. While clipping the links, Ben counted the seconds between his sightings of each guard. A rhythm emerged. He picked his moment and pushed through.

  What he saw as he crept to the edge of the stacks made his heart sink.

  Everything Ben had learned so far left him convinced Leviathan had developed a weaponized version of the plague and planned to use the Behemoth to deliver that weapon to its target—most likely the United States. He needed to get on board, not just to prove his theory, but to gain hard evidence he could pass to authorities. But Ben saw no viable path onto the Behemoth.

  Sea Titan ran a tight ship, so to speak.

  A security man checked IDs and faces at the gangplank’s foot. Another stood watch above him at the ship’s rail. In his current state, and after the stunt he’d tried to pull in Rotterdam, he’d never get past them. The cranes were no help either, loading tanks set in rectangular steel frames the size of shipping containers. The open frames offered Ben no place to stow away without being seen. He considered hanging on to the outside of one, but only for a moment. Each of the six active cranes had two spotters with high-powered flashlights. He’d never make it from the dock to the ship without being seen.

  Climbing the mooring lines, scaling the hull from the seaward side—none of it looked remotely possible, thanks to the vessel’s sheer size. If Ben had special equipment and a Company team, maybe he could make a reasonable covert assault. But he had no equipment, and his team had abandoned him.

  The pier’s administrative offices looked more accessible, especially with the day staff gone for the night.

  Armed guards and a ten-foot fence topped with concertina wire look scary, but a smart field operative always prefers a remote, guarded compound over a downtown corporate headquarters. Single-building facilities use compressed security—lobby guards, cameras, and motion sensors, all within a confined space. Compounds with a long perimeter fence are forced to spread their security thin, and once you’re inside, the structures and offices rarely have defenses beyond keypad locks or swipe cards.

  Ben hoped Sea Titan Main followed the usual security pattern.

  Two men argued in the corner office on the top floor, backlit by bright fluorescents. Ben’s best bet for finding incriminating evidence or a way onto the ship lay in there, but he’d need management to clear out first. He looked around for options.

  A forklift sat idle and unused only fifteen meters away.

  He bobbled his head. It might work.

  One guard strolled out of sight at the far end of the stacks. The other walked past Ben’s hiding spot, so close he could’ve reached out and tapped his shoulder. He didn’t. Ben let the man walk on several more paces, then made a silent run for his target.

  The diesel engine cranking up blended nicely with the other sounds of industry on the pier. But an instant later, a metallic crash sounded behind Ben—way behind, from the heavy equipment lot. The guard turned to look, gaze settling on Ben. Ben held his breath, trying not to show it, and moved his hidden hand to his Glock. With the other, he gave the man a curt wave. The guard answered with a nod and moved off to check out the other noise.

  Ben let out his breath. Some clumsy dockworker had almost gotten him caught.

  Shaking his head, he released the brake and drove down an alley between containers. A sharp turn brought his forks under the bottom container in a stack of five. He shoved the lift control lever to the maximum height marker and flipped the override toggle. The image of row after row of container stacks tipping and falling like dominoes flashed in his head, but Ben knew the little forklift had nowhere near the capacity for such mayhem. Its pump motors whined to protest the impossible task of lifting the containers. Ben bailed from the cab, leaving it running. He could already smell the hydraulic fluid heating up.

  A conga line of big rigs blocked the road between the cranes and the main office, ready to drive away with incoming cargo from the pier’s other berth. The gate guards had stalled the fleet, checking the lead driver’s paperwork. Ben ran straight across the yard and grabbed the rear bumper of the last truck in line, sliding underneath.

  He lay on his back, listening. No footsteps. No cries of alarm. No one had seen him. Ben rolled over and low-crawled forward, willing his lungs to keep working despite the exhaust fumes.

  Closer to the administrative building, he rolled out the other side and hopped up, dusting himself off. The glass door at the entrance swung open on his first pull, unlocked. And, as predicted, no guards watched the lobby. Most of the building looked dark. The staff had gone home for the day. Ben took the stairs to the sixth floor.

  The corner office stood open, with loud voices coming from inside. Ben pressed his body against the wall next to the stairwell exit with one finger holding the door open and listened.

  “Three hours,” a young man said—a New Yorker by the sound of it. “I want her moving in three hours. This shipment is Mr. Jupiter’s highest priority. I already told him we were on schedule.”

  An older voice with a Spanish accent fired back. “That is your mistake. Not mine. We are loading as fast as possibl
e. And the team you sent aboard to connect the tanktainers with hoses is slowing us down. What are the hoses for, anyway?”

  Ben heard an exasperated sigh. “We’ve been over this. The hoses are part of a pressure system to prevent nitrogen leakage during the voyage.”

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “Because you’re a dockmaster—not an engineer. How Sea Titan transports our goods is not your concern.” The New Yorker pounded on something. “Your job is to get it moving.”

  “Fire!”

  The cry, echoed by others, came from outside the building.

  A young man in a slick suit and a middle-aged Spaniard in dungarees ran to the elevators. The New Yorker grumbled and groused, repeatedly punching the button. Seconds later, the two were on their way downstairs.

  Ben slipped into the office. Through the big corner window, he saw smoke rising from the container alley where he’d left the forklift—an orange glow too. Nice.

  A moment later, the management kid and the dockmaster ran into view and joined the others heading for the fire. They’d be busy for at least several minutes. Ben’s gaze drifted to the Behemoth. From the elevated perch of the office, he could see the activity on the cargo deck. Teams of men and women moved and climbed among the thousands of tanks in container frames—tanktainers, the dockmaster had called them. The teams joined the top center of each tank to the bottom of the one above it with a short black hose. Longer hoses chained to the deck connected each stack. From what Ben saw, the hoses made the entire load one interconnected unit.

  “The bioweapon,” he said under his breath. “But where’s your protective gear?” The hose teams wore work gloves, nothing more. Did they know what they were handling? Or did they think those tanks were full of compressed nitrogen, as the tank markings said?

  The dockmaster and his very good friend were at the fire, and the pier’s response team seemed to have it under control. Ben had to move faster. He checked the computer. Locked, with no time to play password roulette. He scanned the desk. A thick manila envelope with a Sea Titan logo lay beside the keyboard, secured with an old-school string-and-button seal and marked BEHEMOTH PASSAGE PLAN. Ben unraveled the seal and slid out a thick pack of papers. The cover page listed the destination as a Sea Titan dry dock facility near Cartagena, not far down the coast.

  “Who loads up with cargo for a trip to the dry dock?”

  Weird—or incredibly suspicious.

  Ben sat in the dockmaster’s chair and thumbed through the pages. The charts mapped the short journey to the dry dock facility, backing up the cover page’s claims. But behind those were weather charts for the whole Atlantic. Why would the captain need Atlantic weather forecasts if he never planned to leave the Mediterranean? There were also notarized registration and licensing papers for a Jaspen cargo vessel called the Clementine.

  Voices. Ben heard the New Yorker bawling out the dockmaster, getting louder. They were on their way back—at the road by the sound of it.

  He tried to push the papers into the envelope again, but they stuck out a half inch, blocked by something inside, maybe a folded corner or a paper-clip. He tried tapping, blowing, shaking—nothing worked. Ben couldn’t abandon the envelope on the desk with documents sticking out, a dead giveaway that he’d been there. He pulled the whole stack out and turned the envelope upside down.

  A thumb drive dropped out and clattered on the desktop.

  “Huh.”

  He stuffed the drive in his back pocket and hurriedly shoved the papers into the envelope, retying the string seal. A quick check at the window gave no sign of the two men. They must already be in the building. He turned toward the desk but stopped when movement caught his eye. What Ben saw sent a bolt of electricity through his chest.

  Two men in coveralls dragged a woman through the parking lot—a woman with amber hair.

  51

  Keep your emotions in check.

  How many times had Hale spoken those words during Ben’s time at the schoolhouse? Spoken, whispered, shouted, screamed. Keep your emotions in check, recruit. Hale beat that drum in the field every time Ben showed a hint of frustration with a teammate, and in his interrogation resistance training the instant a bead of sweat mixed with a tear.

  No matter how much pain you’re in, or if an enemy interrogator just emptied a full magazine into your best friend. A good operative waits until the mission is done to lick his wounds. Wipe the blood off your face tomorrow. Mourn later. Emotions have no place in the field. Emotions cause mistakes.

  With Hale’s voice fresh in his ear from their Zürich meeting, Ben heard it again.

  Keep your emotions in check.

  The swell in his chest at the sight of her with those men—the urge to shout her name through the window—almost overwhelmed him. So many emotions. Hale’s voice shoved them all back into their box and shut the lid.

  Instead of shouting, he returned the envelope to the desk, careful to match the angle to the way he’d found it, and moved to the hall. The elevator dinged. With the New York kid’s angry voice growing louder, Ben slipped into the stairwell and eased the door closed behind him.

  Descending the stairs without jumping whole landings at a time took all of Ben’s self-control. Making a racket—getting caught—wouldn’t help her. And he knew without a doubt who he’d seen. Amber hair. A sweatshirt and jeans like those she’d worn in Zürich.

  “Clara.” The name escaped his lips as he checked the yard from the building exit. “You’re alive.”

  The men had dragged her toward the parking lot’s rear. Ben used a rolling truck as cover to conceal him from the guards and crane spotters on the other side of the road and jogged along the edge, Glock held low. Where had they gone?

  There. Brake lights from a blue Sea Titan cargo van. Before the driver could shift into reverse, Ben raced up to his door and threw it open, pressing the Glock to his cheek. “Shut it down.”

  Whether the man spoke English or not, he got the drift and turned the key.

  “Out.” Ben backed up to give him room and motioned to the man in the passenger seat, shorter and younger than the other. “You too. Hands where I can see them. Move around the hood.”

  He maneuvered both men until their backs were against the van’s side, out of view of the dockworkers and guards across the road. “Where’s the girl?”

  The driver didn’t answer. Neither did his buddy, but the shorter man’s darting eyes told Ben what he needed to know. “In the back, huh? For your sake, I hope she’s healthy.”

  A bundle of zip cuffs peeked out from the right breast pocket of the driver’s coveralls. Ben tapped the same spot on his own chest and pointed to the cuffs with two fingers. “Cuff each other.” He waited for them to do as they were told, then whirled a finger in the air. “Now turn around.”

  He couldn’t have them following him or crying out, and bashing their heads against the van might make too much noise. Ben reached into his go-bag and dug the cattle prod baton Hagen had used against him at the flat. He jammed it into each man’s spine, and they both fell, convulsing, and then went still. He regarded the weapon with new appreciation. “I’ve been lugging you around since Paris. ’Bout time you made yourself useful.”

  With one more set of zip cuffs, Ben bound one man to the other, then removed their boots and made gags from their shoelaces and sweaty socks. He waved a hand in front of his nose as he stood to assess his work. “Wow, that stinks.”

  He’d kept his emotions in check, done his job, been thorough, accounted for the threats. Now he hoped his patience would pay off. Maybe they’d shoved her in the back of the van alive. Maybe not.

  He readied his Glock and pulled open both doors. “Clar—”

  The face staring back at him shocked him into a long silence. Finally, he cocked his head. “Giselle?”

  52

  Giselle sat with her back against the front wall of the van’s cargo bay in a sweatshirt and jeans, hands and feet bound with zip cuffs, sneakers
lying on the floor beside her. “Ben? You’re alive.”

  He laughed—a quiet, almost giddy laugh. “That’s rich coming from you.”

  “How so?”

  Were they really having this conversation? “Because you’re the one who’s supposed to be dead. The cottage blew up.”

  One side of her mouth curled into the smirk he used to adore so much. “So did your flat.”

  She had a decent point, but then Ben shook the Glock. “No, no. My face was all over the news.”

  “As if I’ve had time to watch TV. And you must admit, you no longer look like yourself—to put it mildly. Perhaps try to look a little more happy than mad, yes?”

  “Sorry, I . . .” He let his voice fade. What could he say? How much had he wished for this in the hours after he watched the cottage burn? He should feel elation at Giselle’s survival, not disappointment that he hadn’t found Clara. “How did you get out? I saw the light come on in the kitchen before the explosion.”

  “Think, Ben. I use automated lights to deter intrusions in my absence. You know this. I was never there. But let’s talk the cottage later. Mission first. We are in a Sea Titan parking lot, after all.” Giselle inched forward and rolled up to her knees, holding out her wrists. “Do you mind?”

  “Right. Mission first.” Ben recovered his go-bag and found the wire cutters.

  When he tried to clip the flexicuffs, she dodged the cutters and draped her arms over his head to pull him close. “Well, mission second, yes?” she said, and kissed him.

  The kiss banished all disbelief. Ben knew her lips. He remembered the warmth of her breath and the scent of her skin. She’d come back to him. Why wasn’t he walking on air inside?

  He returned the kiss with passion, then pulled back. He needed to regain control of the situation and control of himself. Keep your emotions in check. He pushed her arms up to duck out of her embrace and snipped the cuffs at her wrists and ankles. “No. It’s like you said. Mission first.”