Ice Cold Kill (28 page)

He ground his teeth. “Can we move this to your command vehicle, Colonel? I’d like to report this to our operational command right away.”

Trinh was a gifted poker player. “My vehicle is otherwise engaged, Mr. Thorson. Tell me what you know.”

Reluctantly, he began telling the colonel about Broom’s so-called Pegasus-B theory.

*   *   *

Dr. Georges Rabadeau’s eyes fluttered.

“Doctor? Doctor Rabadeau?”

His vision cleared. A woman’s heart-shaped face came into focus. She was beautiful, if bedraggled. Almond eyes, deeply tanned, her hair pulled back in a ponytail.

“Doctor?”

“You … didn’t leave me…”

The woman lifted a lidded plastic bottle to his lips and a tiny amount of water entered his mouth. He swallowed.

“Where … am I?”

Daria looked around. Almost two hours had passed since the battle for the factory in Paris. Belhadj had found a farm road off a minor highway, winding itself between scrubby hills and parallel to a national rail line. He’d found a small roadway bridge and a mostly unused road, and had parked the stolen command vehicle under the bridge’s cover. The moon was bright enough to cast lunar shadows.

Inside the truck, the doctor with the triaged tourniquet passed out yet again. Daria tapped his cheek softly.

“Doctor Rabadeau? Can you hear me?” She spoke French and gently shook his shoulder as his eyes fluttered. His breathing was shallow, his lips turning blue.

“My … leg…”

“Yes. I stopped the bleeding.” Daria saw no reason to tell the man he was still bleeding internally and that the wound was fatal.

Maybe he knew anyway. A tear trickled through his dust-encrusted cheek. “My God.”

“Sir? Asher Sahar. He hired you, yes? I need to know why.”

Belhadj had moved back and sat at one of the truck’s computer consoles, using a flash drive he had scrounged up to download data on the DCRI’s mission.

The doctor wet his lips. “He … confirmation.”

Daria fed him a little more water and he swallowed. “What did he hire you for? Confirmation of what?”

“He—” The Frenchman’s body shuddered, closing down.

Belhadj shook his head. “I’m amazed he lasted this long.”

Daria shook the frail man’s shoulder. “Doctor?”

“… flu.…”

“Sir?”

“He … he has a flu.”

Daria and Belhadj exchanged glances. Daria said, “Asher is sick? He has the flu?”

And, surprisingly, the dying man’s lips curled and he offered a dry husk of a laugh.

“He has … flu … from Soviets. It…”

“Doctor?”

“Re … combinant.”

Daria fed him another thimbleful of water. “Flu … hemorrhagic but … airborne. Targeted. Now … bonding … HLA surfaces … targeted.”

Daria cupped his sweaty cheek with her open palm. “What? What does that mean? Doctor?”

Belhadj, in one of the bolted-down swivel chairs, logged on to the Internet. He had severed all of the DCRI protocols so the Google search became just one of a million such searches globewide.

“HLA,” Georges Rabadeau gasped. His eyes were dilated.

“What does that mean?”

“Recombinant … harmless but to … Ash … kenazi…”

Daria’s entire body tightened. “Doctor? Sir, what does that mean? Doctor?”

“The author … so beautiful.” Tears glistened in the Frenchman’s eyes. “Craftsmanship. The … Tajik. Tuychiev. Recognized … signature…”

The man choked and gurgled. And died.

“Doctor? Doctor!” She shook him.

Belhadj said, “He’s dead.”

Daria turned to him, an insult curling her lip.

“Forget about him.” Belhadj stared at his computer console. “I looked up HLA while he was babbling. Human lymphocyte antigens. It’s the thing they test for if you donate blood. Or an organ. It’s what separates us humans biologically.”

Daria swiped grimy hair away from her face. She began burning with an anger that far surpassed her fatigue.

Belhadj peered at his screen. “What did he mean, ash can?”

“No,” she seethed. “He said,
Ashkenazi
. The Western Jews. The Jews of Europe.”

Belhadj sat up straight. He swiveled his chair, slowly, until they made eye contact. “I’m … what? I don’t understand. I am not schooled. What are you saying?”

Daria knelt by the dead man, her mind a spinning blender set on white-hot hate. Her vision fractured through tears.

“What? What did he mean?”

“Asher. He has a flu that…”

“Gibron?”

“He has a designer flu. A superflu. One designed to … it targets Jewish people.”

“Is…” Belhadj scrambled for a response. “I’m sorry. Is that even possible?”

Daria knelt, fists pressed against her thighs, eyes hot with tears, a pool of the doctor’s blood spreading around her bare right knee.

“It’s Asher,” she said, her voice tight with rage. “He’s the God of Mischief’s most ardent acolyte. Fuck his soul. Of course it’s possible.”

Twenty-one

It was well after 3:00
A.M.
French time. Owen Cain Thorson and the CIA strike team code-named Swing Band had reported the information regarding the assault on the French factory, the official identification of Daria Gibron at the scene, and the discovery of a biological weapons program inside the factory.

The consensus at Langley was that the Group of Eight Summit in Avignon was elevated to Likely Target Number One. Heads of state were expected from the United States as well as the United Kingdom, France (this year’s host), Spain, Japan, Germany, Russia, and Italy. The European Union would be represented but was prohibited from hosting. The participants represented the world’s eight greatest economies—except, of course, they didn’t, since neither China nor Brazil was invited. Politics by definition isn’t fair.

All summits like this one have preplanned beta sites and gamma sites: Plan B and Plan C.

The call went from Swing Band to Nanette Sylvestri, and from her to Stanley Cohen, and from him to the White House Chief of Staff, and from her to the United Nations. And within thirty minutes of Thorson’s first call, summit organizers began to upstake and move the whole event to Majorca, the third, or gamma, site. The media was not yet informed, and most of the world leaders would hear about the new venue while en route.

Meanwhile, Colonel Céline Trinh’s people had maneuvered the arachnoid robot with its long, flexible gooseneck cameras into the factory. They transmitted low-light images of medical equipment, body bags, and a sophisticated metal canister and cooling element. Numbers and letters on the tank were written in Tagalog, one of the primary languages of the Philippines.

The Pegasus-B superflu became the primary focus of every law enforcement, military, and intelligence agency in Europe. And all of it began to vector on the international conference on the Mediterranean island of Majorca.

France, The Countryside

Belhadj drove them to a farmhouse and reconnoitered while Daria knelt in the back of the DCRI van, next to the dead pathologist, hands on her thighs. She fell asleep vertical; a trick she had learned in urban foxholes in Gaza and Beirut.

When Belhadj returned to the van, Daria awoke fully a second before he touched the door; the auto in her fist before the door opened.

She still looked like death on a tough day.

Belhadj studied her, kneeling by the cadaver. He jerked his head. “Come.”

The farm was barely visible from the highway and isolated from all other homes. A two-car garage sat empty and there were no lights on. Belhadj led her into the farmhouse, carrying his messenger bag.

“Where are we?”

“South. We passed a cutoff to Dijon twenty minutes ago. I looked around while you slept.”

Belhadj had reconnoitered and determined that the family was on vacation, caravanning around North Africa. The house was cluttered but clean. The family had a PC on a side table in the dining room with an ancient, pin-feed printer tucked beneath it. The Syrian plugged in the French intelligence flash drive and began printing out the data from the command vehicle.

Daria stood, still half asleep. Her left leg was tacky with the pathologist’s blood. She found the bathroom, turned on the shower, and stared into the mirror until it fogged over. She couldn’t remember ever being so tired, not in boot camp, or even during her time undercover. She stripped and stepped into the shower. The pathologist’s blood ran pink off her legs, followed by the grit and dust of the factory and the mud of the railroad culvert. She leaned into the stream, letting the hot water pour off her hair.

She lathered up, rinsed off, and repeated the process. She still felt dirty.

Asher Sahar had an influenza virus that targeted the Ashkenazi: Western Jews.

Growing up in Israel, Daria had taken the requisite “Who Are the Jews” classes. She was no expert, but she roughly remembered that the Ashkenazi of Central Europe were culturally different from other groups, such as the Mizhari Jews of North Africa and the Middle East, or the Sephardic Jews of Spain and Portugal. And, she dimly remembered, each group had differing genetics, too. How much different? This, she couldn’t remember. Enough that Asher’s flu could pick out one from the other? Maybe.

Daria thought she had plumbed the depths of his mania. She thought she had seen him at his worst. Asher, whom she had once loved as a brother, had new levels of perversity she had yet to discover.

That left her trusting … who? Certainly neither the CIA nor French intelligence. The alphabet soup of agencies she had assisted—FBI, DEA, ATF? The Manhattan imbroglio with the CIA clouded all of those relationships, at least for now.

Khalid Belhadj?

At some molecular level, Daria assumed stranger things had happened. Just none she had ever heard of. Belhadj was a Syrian soldier and spy. He was an avowed enemy of Israel and the West. He was the avowed enemy of Daria. Plus, she had shot him. And electrocuted him. Neither of which lends itself as a firm foundation for friendships.

All true.

But he also had bested Daria in unarmed combat—the list of people who had done that was short. And he’d brought down an attack helicopter with nothing but a rifle. Not unimpressive.

He’d fired a tight cluster of shots at the factory roof to warn Daria about the imminent French assault. And he’d stolen a French intelligence command vehicle and had come back to save her.

He hadn’t needed to do those latter things.

She stood, watching her own fatigued reflection, mind running in circles.

My enemy, my ally? Nonsense. It didn’t work like that in the real world.

She rummaged through drawers and found an old-fashioned straight razor, which scissored into a steel handle. The handle was embossed with a symbol and the word
Sevilla.
Spanish steel, she thought. She tested it on a washrag and the cotton slit easily. It was sharp.

Her collection of stolen clothes was filthy. She dried off and padded naked outside to dump them in a garbage can, the straight razor in her right hand. She stood naked, blade in her hand, and stared up at the stars. The crystalline hoarfrost crunched under her bare feet and the stinging, icy cold air in her lungs revived her.

She reentered the farmhouse. She rummaged about and found a boy’s denim shirt. She set down the razor to button it on. Her hands cramped so badly from lifting the spanners and hauling the pathologist that she barely managed one button and gave up.

She returned to the kitchen and dining room. The computer desk was empty but the printer basket beneath it was full. She crouched and thumbed through the pin-fed pages sideways—they were connected top to bottom as one long scroll. She saw the DCRI letterhead over and over, along with the faux stenciled
TOP SECRET
—English had slipped into the French lexicon in such strange ways.

Daria stood and poured the last of the coffee, holding the coffee cup more for the heat on her palms than for the additional caffeine. She tucked the straight razor behind the coffeepot. She padded silently into the living room. It was dark and quiet.

She moved to the master bedroom. Belhadj lay atop the blanket, on his back, in his canvas trousers. His gun rested by his thigh. He woke immediately as she entered and blinked at her, but his fatigued brain registered her as nonhostile and he was asleep again in seconds.

Nonhostile?
Daria marveled at the concept.
What’s a girl gotta do?

He’d removed his boots and socks, his sapper jacket and shirt. His upper body was taut, muscled, and well scarred. Her own contributions—an entry wound under his pectoral, two angry red pinpricks near his shoulder—were hardly the only images of violence on the canvas of his torso.

His breathing deepened. He began to snore gently, mouth open. Daria wondered how many days had passed since Belhadj had gotten any decent sleep.

He lay on the right-hand side of the bed. Daria climbed onto the left-hand side and sat on the pillows, knees up, ankles crossed, hands holding the cup that radiated healing heat. She watched him sleep.

His breathing grew even and deep. The farmhouse gave out the kinds of midnight creaks and moans that older houses will. Daria heard the sounds of a train far in the distance.

She whispered in Arabic. “Why did you come back for me?”

His breathing remained deep and sonorous.

She waited.

“Thought I lost you…”

Daria blinked in surprise.

Belhadj’s breath stopped and his eyes popped open. His fist found the handle of his gun. He rose on one elbow, scanning the dark, confused. He saw Daria sitting on the pillows. “What?”

Daria gathered her thoughts by pretending to blow cool air over the coffee. “You were asleep. I asked: ‘Why did you come back for me?’ And you said—”

“Sahar. I thought I lost Sahar.”

Oh, he remembered all right. He quickly brushed a hand through his already mussed hair. He lay back down, stared up at the ceiling but otherwise didn’t move.