Ben noted them down. ‘Got it.’
‘I don’t know what the hell you’re up to. Just don’t make me regret that I trusted you with my plane.’
‘Thanks, Ruth. I mean it.’
‘I don’t want your thanks. You’re an asshole, Ben. Just know that I feel like a real shit for helping you.’ And Ruth ended the call.
With his heart in his boots, Ben returned to the car and slumped behind the wheel. Roberta seemed to sense that he didn’t feel like talking. The journey resumed. Ben channelled his pent-up rage by taking it out on the poor little Citroën, for which this was destined to be a last voyage. By the time they reached the airstrip near Carentan a little over ninety minutes later, the engine was making terminal-sounding noises, smoke was streaming out from under the bonnet and the temperature gauge was deep in the red.
‘You’re a wrecker, Ben Hope,’ Roberta said, gazing sadly at the little car. ‘If you don’t smash them up, you’ll grind them down.’
‘It’s true,’ he replied bitterly. ‘Destruction. It’s the one thing I’m good at.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, realising how deeply her words had cut him. ‘I guess saying the wrong thing is what I do best, huh?’ But he didn’t hear her as he walked up to the airstrip’s mesh fence. To his relief, the Steiner ST-1 turboprop hadn’t been stripped to a skeleton by local scrap thieves, and was sitting unmolested and gleaming in the sun exactly where he’d left it.
Roberta appeared at his side. ‘So, to Sweden?’ she said.
He nodded. ‘To Sweden.’
Chapter Thirty-Two
Washington D.C.
Thirty-one days earlier
When Jack Quigley walked into the crowded diner just before half past seven, he understood right away why the mysterious contact calling himself Steve Carlisle had chosen this rendezvous spot. The heaving establishment, all decked out in a nightmare of chrome and neon and sporting gaudy murals of James Dean, Elvis, Monroe and other fifties’ idols, was more public than Disneyland and the least likely place imaginable for a covert assassination plot.
He waded through the throng and managed to secure a table near the window. He sat down and looked around him, wondering if Carlisle was already here, but all he could see were families, groups of friends, couples. This was probably bullshit, some idiot’s idea of a practical joke. After less than a minute he was already itching to leave, and he was about to get up when the waiter appeared at his table, thickset and gruff with a badge on his uniform that said ‘No Whining’. Quigley glowered at him for a moment, then relented and ordered a quarter-pounder burger with fries that he didn’t really want, together with a soda water. Twenty minutes, he told himself. Twenty minutes and I’m out of here.
The burger arrived within the first five, looking like a flattened turd in a bun. Quigley didn’t touch it and just sipped the soda water. Ten more minutes passed before a fat man in a rumpled suit with greying hair and a file under his arm bustled in through the glass doors and glanced nervously around the crowded room. His darting gaze settled on Quigley and he squeezed his bulk through the tables to get to him.
‘Mr Carlisle,’ Quigley said, not getting up. ‘And before you ask, no, I wasn’t followed.’
Carlisle settled his large frame into the seat opposite. He laid his file on the table. ‘Sure about that?’ he said, glancing nervously out of the window at the people and cars passing in the street. ‘It can be just about impossible to tell.’
Quigley caught a whiff of cheap booze off the man’s breath. ‘We’re alone,’ he assured him. ‘You’ve got my word on it. I don’t bullshit people. All I ask in return is that they don’t bullshit me.’
‘This is one hundred per cent on the level, I promise you. Everything I’m about to tell you, I can verify.’
Quigley nodded at the unopened file. ‘That the proof in there?’
‘Like I’d just walk around with it.’
‘Okay. I’ve no desire to hang around this place any longer than I have to, so let’s get into it. Basics first. Your real name would be a good start.’
Before Carlisle could answer, the forbidding waiter interrupted them with his notebook poised. Carlisle ordered corned beef hash and cabbage and a large Bud. Once they were alone again, he leaned his mass across the table and said in a confidential whisper, ‘Herbie Blumenthal. That’s my real name.’ He shoved the file towards Quigley. ‘My ID and credentials are all in here. Take a look. I’m kosher, honest to God.’ He let out a belch. ‘Shit. Sorry about that. It’s not me.’ He grabbed his beer and swilled a third of it down in a single swallow.
Quigley slipped on a pair of reading glasses that he hated wearing, and sifted quickly through the file’s contents. Forty-eight years of age, Blumenthal was an engineer by profession, had earned his degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and done postgrad work in System Design at MIT before being recruited to the Department of Defense’s DARPA agency eleven years ago.
‘There’s no mention here of you working for anything called Nemesis,’ Quigley said, scanning the text.
‘I told you, it doesn’t exist, not officially. Nobody at DARPA’s even heard of it, not until the guys in black turned up at the agency headquarters in Arlington one day and we were told that a select group of us were being taken over to the Pentagon. Me and these eight other guys were loaded into the back of two SUVs and they whisked us away under armed escort. It was spooky, man. They took us through checkpoint after checkpoint until we reached this place behind doors like a friggin’ bank vault.’
‘Okay,’ Quigley said, still deeply uncertain. ‘Go on.’
‘It was a four-hour briefing and we had two hours afterwards to decide whether to take the job. Either way, we couldn’t breathe a word to anyone. It was some serious business. I mean, with DARPA you’re already buried in a ton of non-disclosure agreements. But this was something else. They basically said, you talk about this, finito. Game over.’
‘But you’re talking to me.’
‘Yeah. Don’t make me regret it.’
‘What made you take the job?’
‘The pay was incredible. There’s a river of cash flowing into the program like you wouldn’t believe. Billions, I mean billions, of invisible funding. Plus the technology we were shown – it was only a taste, but for a scientist, it was breathtaking. At the time, I was just bowled over. The shit they’re working on—’ Blumenthal was talking fast but clammed up abruptly as the waiter returned with his order.
Quigley replaced the sensitive documents in the file, out of sight, until the waiter was gone. He gazed calmly at Blumenthal over the top of a mountain of corned beef and steaming kraut. ‘Let’s cut to the chase. What is the program about?’
‘It’s a weapons project,’ Blumenthal said in a hushed tone, barely audible over the buzz of chat in the diner. ‘One like there’s never been before. At DARPA I worked on the first HCV hypersonic cruise vehicle weapons system prototypes, part of the Falcon Project. But this just blows that into the weeds. I mean, they’ve had more engineers and physicists on the payroll over the years than NASA.’ He swept a huge pile of corned beef into his mouth and started chewing noisily.
‘What was Shelton doing for them? He wasn’t a scientist.’
‘Security management,’ Blumenthal said with his mouth full. ‘I only saw him a couple times. He wasn’t always on base.’
‘Where’s base?’
‘Wherever we happened to be,’ Blumenthal said enigmatically, forking up more dripping kraut. He was eating like a starving dog.
‘There wasn’t a fixed location?’
‘Yes and no.’ Blumenthal glanced anxiously all about him. ‘I’ll come to that later, okay? There’s so much to tell.’ He grimaced. ‘Christ, my guts are aching so bad right now.’
Quigley eyed the rapidly-disappearing mound of food and couldn’t refrain from commenting, ‘Maybe if you didn’t shovel it up like a hippo?’
‘I eat fast when I’m uptight, okay? I can’
t help it.’
‘I can see you’ve had a stressful few years,’ Quigley said, running his gaze over the guy’s large outline.
‘It’s no joke. I’m on so many pills for depression and anxiety, my innards are shot. They’re mulch. Basically fucked.’
‘You have my sympathies. Let’s get back on track. Tell me more about the weapons project. Are we talking nuclear, biological, or what?’
‘Nope. Nemesis is totally different. And it’s bigger and more scary than anything you ever imagined before. It’s like …’ – Blumenthal searched for an appropriate comparison – ‘like the fucking hand of God, ready to smite His wrath down on earth, you know? Except that now we tell God where to point His finger.’
‘I think you need to elaborate a little more than that.’
‘Disasters,’ Blumenthal said in a hoarse whisper that Quigley had to strain to hear.
‘What?’
‘That’s what I said. Earthquakes. Tsunamis. Hellfire and devastation.’
‘I didn’t come here to be sold a crock of bullshit,’ Quigley said. Now he was ready to leave.
‘Please. This is real. Listen to me. Its reach is global. Stick a pin in the map, Nemesis can wipe that place off the map. Forget soldiers. Forget conventional weapons. Forget drones and hunter-killer robots. Those are outdated already. Warfare has a new future. But here’s the best part. It’s undetectable. Nobody even knows when a strike’s taken place, because there’s no way even a scientist can distinguish it from the real thing. See what I’m saying? You begin to get how clandestine this is? Why I need someone like you to help me blow the whistle on these bastards?’
‘Wait a minute,’ Quigley said, shaking his head and completely unsure about how much of this wild talk to believe. ‘Slow down.’
‘Oh, Lord. I need to go to the bathroom.’
‘Right now?’
‘I got the shits,’ Blumenthal said, levering himself out of his seat. ‘It can’t wait. When I come back I’m gonna tell you the rest. I know what those fuckers are planning, and it’s not pretty. I hope you got the evening free, cause it’s gonna take a while. I was thinking we should go someplace more private.’
‘Oh, sure. Then what?’
‘Then you and I have to start figuring out what we can do about this.’
Quigley watched in bewilderment as Blumenthal lumbered his way towards the bathroom. Had he heard right? Was this some kind of a joke?
He waited impatiently for the fat man to return.
In fact, Herbie Blumenthal had been telling the absolute truth, and was eager to tell more, as much as he knew. He waddled quickly into the men’s toilets and wedged himself into a cubicle as the rumblings in his guts grew acutely urgent.
Blumenthal was very much occupied by the time the tall silver-haired man strolled casually into the diner bathroom. His face was long and lean and wore a completely blank expression that would have unnerved the other bathroom users if they’d paid him any attention. A light sports jacket was stretched tight over his muscular frame. He was carrying a small leather document case on a strap around his shoulder. He joined the other two men at the urinal. One after the other, the two finished up and exited the bathroom.
Alone, the silver-haired man washed his hands at a sink. In the mirror he could see that all the cubicle doors were ajar except one, behind which he knew his target was sitting. When his hands were dry, he slipped a pair of latex surgical gloves from his document case and pulled them on, then took out a sign that said ‘OUT OF ORDER’ and a small rubber wedge.
The man’s name was Lloyd McGrath. He was a professional assassin of seventeen years’ experience who took great pride in the perfection of his tradecraft. He opened the door, peeked out and then hung the sign from the handle outside. He shut the door and jammed the wedge under the inside bottom edge with his foot. Walking back towards the cubicles, he reached into the case again and drew out a pistol.
The compact handgun was designed to shoot a dart, which it propelled very silently from a small CO2 canister inside the grip. Three darts were loaded in a rotating drum magazine, each hollow and filled with an extremely specialised, officially nonexistent form of poison. The dart would completely disintegrate on entering the flesh of its target, which it could easily do from a few paces away. The poison itself was designed to denature rapidly so as to be untraceable in an autopsy. All that was left was a tiny red dot marking the point of entry.
They didn’t use ricin umbrella guns any more. Things had moved on since the old days.
McGrath entered the vacant cubicle to the left of the occupied one. He stepped up on the toilet seat and looked impassively down over the top of the partition at the unprepossessing figure of Herbie Blumenthal sitting there in the next cubicle with his trousers rumpled around his knees.
Blumenthal glared up at him in red-faced outrage. ‘Whoa, what the fuck are you doing, asshole? You some kind of perv—’
He shut up as he saw the gun pointing down at him. He raised his hands in protest, eyes boggling, squirming on the toilet seat and completely vulnerable.
McGrath’s face remained still and impassive as he fired. The dart entered Blumenthal’s flesh just below the ear. There was a muted squawk and a brief thrashing around. McGrath didn’t need to see the rest. He stepped down from the toilet seat and slipped the gun back inside his document case. He walked calmly towards the door, collected the rubber wedge, then removed his gloves and slipped quietly out of the bathroom. Seconds later he’d exited the diner and disappeared into the night.
Five more minutes went by, and Quigley was still waiting. Seven. Ten. People came and went. Laughter and conversation all around him. He sighed impatiently, then plucked his phone from his pocket and called Mandy’s number.
Mandy was twenty-nine and warm and beautiful and worked as a dance teacher. He still couldn’t believe his luck that someone like her would have looked at him twice. After nearly two years of dating, they’d been talking about her selling her apartment so they could live together at his townhouse. The notion of getting married, starting a family, seemed tantalisingly just around the corner.
Her warm voice answered after a couple of rings. ‘Hi, honey,’ Quigley said, smiling despite the troubling things Blumenthal had just told him and his mounting impatience to hear more. ‘Listen, I had to work late and it looks like it might take longer than I thought. Could you stop by the house and let Red into the garden? He’s been cooped up a while and I hate to stress him out.’
‘Sure, no problem. I’ll be right over in, say, five minutes. How late is late? Is it worth waiting for you?’
‘I should be back by ten-thirty. Hmm, make that eleven.’
‘I’ll be there with a bottle of that Chianti you like.’
‘What an angel. No wonder I love you so much.’
‘Love you too. See you soon.’
After the call, Quigley waited a little longer, until he’d had enough. Jesus, what was keeping the guy? He got up from the table and strode across the busy diner to the bathroom.
The ‘OUT OF ORDER’ sign on the door threw him. That’s odd, he thought. He pushed against the door and it swung open. He stepped inside and his nostrils twitched. Someone was in there, for sure. ‘Hey, Blumenthal, you going to be in there all night, or what? Blumenthal?’ He tapped on the cubicle door. No answer. ‘Blumenthal? You okay?’
Still no reply. ‘I don’t believe I’m doing this,’ Quigley muttered to himself. He crouched down, pressed his palms to the floor and lowered himself to peer under the cubicle door.
Blumenthal stared back at him, unblinking. His eyes were bulging almost out of their sockets. His face was purple. His tongue was protruding from his lips.
Heart attack. The fat sonofabitch had suffered a cardiac arrest right there on the toilet.
Quigley muttered a curse under his breath. There’d seemed to be so much more Blumenthal wanted to tell him.
He hesitated. Glanced over at the door. Nobody was coming. Quigl
ey might not have been in the peak physical shape he once was, but he was still agile. In one swift movement he sprang up, levered himself over the top of the cubicle door and landed quietly inside next to the dead guy.
He had to breathe through his mouth as he quickly went through Blumenthal’s pockets. The corpse had nothing on him except a ring of keys and a cheap wallet. Quigley riffled through it, finding a few bucks in cash, a few credit cards and driver’s licence, and a single crisp business card. He examined it. On the front was printed in bold the name MANDRAKE HOLDINGS, NEW YORK, with an address below. On the back was scrawled in messy handwriting the word ‘Triton’.
What could it mean? There wasn’t time to try to figure it out now. Quigley pocketed the card, then let himself out of the cubicle and went running out of the bathroom to alert a manager.
Soon afterwards in the quiet street in historic Shepherdstown, Mandy Fiedel parked her car outside the house in which she hoped soon to be living with her boyfriend. She killed her headlights and engine, got out and trotted up the steps to the front door.
She could hear Red barking from inside, which was a little unusual for him. Jack often joked that the Labrador loved people so much, if a burglar broke into the place Red would lick him to death.
Mandy had the house door key on the same fob as her own apartment key. She unlocked the door and stepped inside the dim hallway. Red came up to greet her, all beating tail and panting breath. He seemed agitated about something.
‘Hey, beautiful. You need to get out to pee, huh? Okay, okay, let’s get you into the back yard.’
Mandy reached out to turn on the hallway light. The switch clicked.
And she didn’t have time to formulate another thought before a massive explosion ripped through the townhouse, from the rear outwards, and engulfed her. The front door and hall windows, debris and a huge rolling fireball blew out into the street.
Car alarms shrieked. Flames crackled and smoke poured thickly out of the shattered house. In seconds, lights were coming on all up and down the street. A baby was crying somewhere. Neighbours began to emerge from their homes. Somebody screaming. Someone else yelling into their phone.