Hard Rain (40 page)

‘Cooper . . .’ Masters warned.

‘Shut you face,’ he said.

‘Who? Me, or her?’

‘Both. I will kill her if you do not do exactly as I say.’ He wrenched Masters’ hair so that her head was pulled back, then slammed it against the wall. Masters’ knees buckled for an instant, then recovered. She didn’t make a sound.

‘Hey!’ I yelled. ‘I’ve done it, okay – see?’ I wriggled my fingers above my head. ‘What next? What do you want?’

‘Up the stairs. Go!’

I took a step towards them, and he brought Masters around to face me, using her as a shield, keeping her between us. He was a well-drilled, sunglasses-wearing asshole.

‘Your name is Ari Shira,’ I said as I moved past them and commenced the climb. ‘They tell me you like ice-cream. I’m kinda fond of chocolate-chocolate chip myself.’

‘Shut you face.’

‘You’re Israeli, ex-Mossad. So is your partner, Yafa Fienmann. They kicked you out and so now you’re doing your best to give the Czech Republic a bad name. Okay, an even worse name.’

‘Keep walking,’ he said.

‘CIA knows all about you –’ I rounded the flight and saw Kevin slumped on the floor, coagulated blood trails from his mouth and nose and the air reeking of
that
smell. I recognised it now: chloroform. Kevin was either out cold or stone dead – it was impossible to tell. There were no gunshot wounds evident, so maybe he was lucky. Perhaps he’d wake up later with a killer headache and a real sore throat, though I didn’t like the odds on his luck being good. Yafa and this Ari character didn’t seem all that interested in temporarily knocking out the folks who got in their way.

The doorway at the top of the stairs was open. Yafa Fienmann suddenly stepped into it, a Barak held casually by her thigh. ‘Ah, so it
is
you. Have you brought your gorgeous partner?’ She craned her neck to look past me at her partner coming up the stairs. ‘Yes, she is here.’ The fruitloop clapped her hands – or rather her hand and gun – together with excitement. ‘Ari, do not hurt her. Not yet.’

‘Go!’ He yelled to get me moving. I reached the top of the landing and walked towards Yafa. ‘You and your beautiful friend. How do you manage it to stay alive?’ she asked. ‘Someday we will sit down and you will tell me.’ The way Yafa was talking, she could’ve been asking how Masters and I managed to match our drapes with the carpet.

Shira said something to Yafa in an unfamiliar language. I guessed Hebrew. She turned me around, pushed me against the wall and frisked
me with one hand while the other kept the pistol pressed into the base of my spine. She grabbed the fabric of my jacket, feeling for lumps of metal over the tops of my arms and then their undersides, my armpits, my ribs, belt line, small of my back, down the outside of my legs, the inside legs. The last port of call was my crotch, which she lingered over, with more interest than she needed to, looking for lumps of a different kind, cupping my testicles and then giving Little Coop a friendly squeeze. He wasn’t interested.

I went to turn around, thinking she’d missed the Colt.

‘Stay, big man,’ she said, her hand pushed between my shoulders, cold metal on the back of my neck. She went down the inside of my leg a second time, and found the pistol tucked into the top of my boot. She pulled it out.

‘Hmm . . . heavy. This is an old one, well used. A man’s gun.’ She rubbed my crotch again. Little Coop still wasn’t interested. Yafa flicked the weapon at me, indicating that I should move back and give her some room.

‘I haven’t searched the woman,’ Shira said.

‘Thank you, Ari. You have left the job to me. You are
so
considerate.’

He muscled Masters up the last couple of stairs and then let her go, pushing her at the wall. Masters wheeled about and glared at him while she straightened her jacket.

Yafa held my Colt in Masters’ face and said, ‘Turn around and face the wall, please. You will enjoy this.’

‘Get on with it, bitch,’ Masters spat.

Yafa put her through the same routine she’d just given me, only this search was conducted with her hands groping around inside Masters’ shirt and pants. Yafa sniffed her fingers, waved them under her nose and said, ‘I love your natural perfume.’

Masters said nothing.

Yafa shrugged. ‘Inside. Now,’ she said, gesturing at the doorway.

I covered the distance in a couple of steps. It was a corner office – the boss’s office. The smell of chloroform inside was almost overpowering. It had a sofa. It had a matching lounge chair. In the matching lounge
chair sat a very large man. On the floor beside the chair and the very large man was another man in a suit, curled into a ball, blood leaking onto the carpet from a gut wound. He looked like the smiling guy in the family photo on the desk. I figured he was the boss at the facility, and now he was a loose end being tied. If I ever got out of here and pulled the boss’s financials, I suspected there’d be a very large sum of money deposited somewhere for at least one storage cylinder of HEX.

‘Cooper,’ said Stringer. ‘Nice of you to pay us a visit. Where’s your partner?’

Masters came through the doorway.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘We’re all together.’

‘You,’ said Masters.

‘Yeah, me,’ Stringer replied, trying to get comfortable in a chair a couple of sizes too small for him. ‘Don’t tell me you’re surprised.’

‘Not surprised, Stringer,’ I said. ‘We just don’t believe you’re the Mr Big – and I use the label figuratively, of course.’

Stringer gave me a crooked smile. ‘Were they armed?’ he asked, addressing Yafa and Ari.

‘Yes,’ said Yafa, handing him the Colt.

‘Lemme guess . . . Cooper, this is yours, isn’t it?’

‘Uh-huh.’ I noticed Stringer was wearing black leather gloves. There was enough hide in those gloves to upholster a car seat.

The CIA chief examined the Colt. ‘Nice weapon. Didn’t figure you for a traditionalist, Cooper.’ He popped the magazine, saw it was full, and snapped it back in. He fully cocked the trigger. ‘Just in case you get any ideas,’ he said. I saw his thumb interrogate the safety as he slipped the weapon inside his coat. ‘Where were we? Yes, me not being the Mr Big. I had motive, access . . .’

‘You were in Ankara the night Colonel Portman was killed,’ Masters said. ‘We checked.’

‘I had Special Agents Telopea and Blitz to help me out.’

‘I don’t think much of the CIA, Stringer, but those two weren’t special agents any more than their names were Mallet and Goddard. They were ex Mossad or Marine Recon or SAS . . . dredged up from the ranks
of the guys who lost it, or who never really had it to start with. Maybe Telopea and Blitz could put together a recipe for disaster, but not a lot else. One member of the team that killed Portman let himself into the house. He was known to the Air Attaché. This person had a key that had been stolen from the leasing agent along with a floor plan. After he’d entered the house and made sure Portman was alone, he subdued him with chloroform. Then Yafa and Ari arrived and went to work.’ While I talked, something clicked:
Damn!
I remembered the glass shard my boot had picked up in Portman’s courtyard. ‘To make it seem like they broke in and did the job without assistance, and perhaps so we wouldn’t find out about the leasing agency break-in and the stolen key, a windowpane beside the courtyard door was punched out
from the inside
.’

Stringer’s hands were clasped across his gigantic belly. I watched them rise and fall with his breathing.

‘You want more, Stringer?’

‘Depends on whether you want to go to your grave with it – might as well get it off your chest.’

‘You were interviewed at Langley, same as us. We told them Moses Adbul Tawal’s people killed Portman. While we didn’t mention them by name, we believed that to be Psychokitten and Ice-Cream Boy here. Only, these two also led the raid that killed Tawal, the guy we thought was their boss, so something major wasn’t adding up. While we didn’t give Langley specifics, we told
you
who we saw riding in the helo, but you chose not to pass anything on to Langley. And they never questioned us about it. Why not? Only one reason we could think of. Because if CIA and OSI believed the people who killed Portman were dead – killed along with Tawal on his barge – then the case would be complete. That’s what you told them, wasn’t it? And they bought it. So now the real Mr Big can continue with business as usual. In fact, why don’t you ask him to come on in and join us?’

Stringer didn’t have to. A side door opened and Ambassador Burnbaum walked in, drying his hands on a paper towel. He shook his head and said, ‘Spilt some of that chloroform on my hands. Damn near passed out cleaning it off.’ He walked to the desk and lowered himself
into it. ‘You know, Cooper, you and Masters have made this a lot more difficult than it had to be.’

‘You’re under arrest for espionage and murder, Burnbaum. You too, Stringer,’ said Masters.

Burnbaum picked up a paperweight, a six-inch-long graphite-coloured spike – a DU tank penetrator. The depleted uranium it was fashioned from had no doubt been extracted from the uranium hexafluoride stored in this very facility. Burnbaum examined it while he talked. ‘Yes, yes, of course I am. This is about Iran. In a very short period of time, Iran will be nuclear armed. We can’t allow that to happen.’

‘“We” being Israel,’ I said.

‘I don’t see anyone else having the nerve to do what needs to be done.’

‘Why is an American spying for Israel?’ Masters asked.

‘I’m Jewish, Special Agent, as is Harvey here. American on the outside, Israeli on the inside. Perhaps what you’re really asking is why one ally would spy on another?’

Masters glared at him.

‘The US will stick by Israel only while there are common interests. And that’s the issue here, really: the US has no stomach for an attack on Iran, especially after the mess in Iraq. No, neutralising Iran – it might have been a common interest once, but now it’s off the table. For the nation of Israel, though, it’s a matter of pure necessity, of survival, of life or death. We’re looking down the barrel of genocide all over again. If we don’t stop the Iranians, they’ll do their best to kill us all as soon as they have the capability – they’ve said so time and again – which could be any time now.’

‘So this whole operation – the murders, the desal plant, the poisoning of the water – the whole filthy mess has been sanctioned by Israel?’ asked Masters, incredulous.

‘You should know better than to ask, Special Agent. And if the answer were no, would you believe it?’

Masters was furious. ‘What damn well makes the value of
your
life greater than anyone else’s? What about the children at Kumayt?’

‘You’re talking about the effects of the HEX . . . You know as well as I do that in this game, you have to use the tools available to you and some of them are blunt. However, we have to look at the positive side. We’re focused on the lives we’ll save. And, yes, they’ll be Israeli lives. We needed a facility like Kawthar al Deen. Reliable intelligence is a real problem. We can get a lot of it from the air and from shared intelligence links with Washington, but if we’re going to go in with ordnance – especially of the nuclear sort to surgically remove their assets – we need quality boots on the ground. And that means a base from which Special Forces can be launched at a moment’s notice.’

‘Why the orchestrated killing?’ I asked. ‘Why Portman, Bremmel, then Ten Pin?’

‘Well, yes, why indeed. Tawal was a businessman. He was to be awarded a bonus of twenty million dollars if he could keep the base at Kumayt a secret, at least until the strike. Incidentally, you and Masters should consider yourselves fortunate. Too many people knew you were paying Kawthar al Deen a visit. That meant Tawal couldn’t kill you while you were there, not without risking his bonus.’

I thought about the advice I’d given Doctor Bartholomew. I sure hoped the guy had taken it.

Burnbaum continued. ‘Portman was a problem. He figured it all out. He’d even uncovered the secret of the planted HEX cylinder. He talked to me about it, told me he was going to go public, and I passed that news on to Tawal. If Portman released what he knew, Tawal would have lost a lot of money, which had the effect of signing the Attaché’s death warrant. Tawal was looking for an excuse anyway. I don’t think he liked Portman a whole lot. And, ironically, if Tawal hadn’t become emotionally involved and hadn’t
insisted
on Portman’s elimination first, before those other two, Yafa’s plan to link their deaths with the F-16 upgrade might have been a little more convincing.’

‘We had to deal with Portman fast,’ said Stringer, chipping in, ‘before he talked.’

Burnbaum shrugged. ‘Well, there you are. The enterprise was flawed from the beginning. Might there have been a better way to achieve the
desired result? Quite possibly, but you pay people to do a job, in this particular instance to maintain security and buy time. And I’m happy that at least we’ve succeeded in that and time has been bought.’

‘Time for what?’ Masters asked.

‘Turn on CNN tomorrow and you’ll see some very nice smoking holes in Iranian soil. Oh, I forgot, you’re not going to be around tomorrow.’ Burnbaum smiled. ‘Stringer – kill these two.’ He indicated which two, as if he needed to, waggling the DU penetrator at Masters and me.

When I looked back at Stringer, the CIA station chief already had a gun in his hand. It was my gun, the Colt .45, and it was pointed at my sternum. From this distance he couldn’t miss. Even a bad shot would be fatal. Stringer’s eyes were calm and cold. I flinched, expecting the soft-nosed anti-personnel slugs I loaded it with to tear a hole as big as a –

BANG!
Something crashed behind me. I turned. It was Burnbaum, flung back from his seat and into the wall behind him. I watched him slide to the floor. There wasn’t much of the guy’s head left above his nose. The DU penetrator rolled slowly across the desk and fell with a heavy thud onto the carpet in front of me.

‘Yeah, like I said, nice weapon.’ Stringer bounced the Colt in his hand. ‘I like a piece with some weight in it. These nasty Glocks with all their polycarbonate just don’t do shit for me.’