Calypso Directive (40 page)

The speed was ludicrous. Will knew this because the loose fabric of his chinos stung his thighs as it flapped violently in the wind. He kept his eyes shut, pretending like a small child that what he couldn't see wasn't really happening. A terrible jolt, followed by a skid caused Will to instinctively open his eyes. Bright red taillights swept by in a blur. Tires squealed as drivers in passing cars slammed on their brakes. Will squeezed his eyes closed, for fear panic would cause him to fall off the bike. Behind, he could hear the whine of another street motorcycle. But no sirens. He assumed the worst—one of the thugs from Prague was in pursuit. He cringed. For one motorcycle, the chase was certain to end badly.

Kalen panted inside his helmet. Evasive driving was exhausting. Exhilarating. Hot pain shot through his right knee. He grunted, but his concentration did not waver. He had clipped something—a fender, a bumper, a small dog. It didn't matter, the pain was a reminder. With Foster on the bike, he was severely hampered. Like a gymnast trying to compete with a lead weight strapped to one foot, maneuvers he could normally perform with ease were impossible with a passenger. His pursuer had no such handicap. Time to level the playing field.

K. Immel—
RS:Physical
: “This jerkoff on my ass is starting to piss me off. Give me the count.”

C. Remy—
RS:Coordinator
: “Three minutes forty seconds—seventy seconds past the evacuation timeline. Physical, you need to escalate your evasion tactics.”

K. Immel—
RS:Physical
: “No shit, really. The problem is I've got a two hundred pound gorilla on my back. I can't cut for shit. I'm shredding my tires.”

C. Remy—
RS:Coordinator
: “Be advised, the police have just issued a pursuit call on the police band to units in your vicinity.”

K. Immel—
RS:Physical
: “That's just fucking great. I need real time routing.”

C. Remy—
RS:Coordinator
: “Standby for routing. . . . In four hundred meters execute a U-turn. Three hundred. Two hundred. Standby for the turn. Mark the turn.”

K. Immel—
RS:Physical
: “Turn executed. I think I . . . ooooh, that's a four, no five-car pile-up in my wake.”

C. Remy—
RS:Coordinator
: “And your bogie?”

K. Immel—
RS:Physical
: “Checking . . . he made it through. Still on my ass.”

C. Remy—
RS:Coordinator
: “In five hundred meters execute a left turn. Three hundred. Two hundred. Standby for the turn. Mark the turn.”

K. Immel—
RS:Physical
: “The light is red, do you have traffic cameras? Can I burn it?”

C. Remy—
RS:Coordinator
: “Negative, take the sidewalk.”

Kalen braked the bike hard and turned left onto a sidewalk just before the cross street of the busy intersection. A twist of the throttle and he catapulted the bike forward on the new vector, blowing past 100 kilometers per hour in three seconds. Kalen bobbed and weaved between potted trees and shrieking pedestrians on the sidewalk like an alpine skier negotiating the flags on a downhill run.

Udo braked late, wrestled his bike through a skidding turn, and scraped along the side of a parked Audi as he recovered his balance. He accelerated in pursuit of his quarry, electing to drive against the flow of traffic in a narrow gap between a row of parked cars and on-coming vehicles in the right lane. Horns blared and tires squealed as drivers reacted to the reckless motorcycle racing past.

Kalen jumped the curb back onto the street; the rear tire squealed as it grabbed asphalt. Udo shot through a gap across two lanes of ongoing traffic, a red blur, and merged into the southbound flow behind Kalen and Foster. Three police cars were now in pursuit, dodging and weaving clumsily behind the more agile racing bikes. Kalen took up a position precariously piloting the divider line, overtaking two lanes of moving traffic between the cars. Udo followed two hundred meters behind, steadily closing the gap. The light at the upcoming intersection was green.

K. Immel—
RS:Physical
: “Shit, I still have my bogie. . . . I need a blocking fullback. Where the hell is Bavarian One?”

C. Remy—
RS:Coordinator
: “Bavarian One is in egress with Bio and Social. Do you want me to reroute?”

K. Immel—
RS:Physical
: “Shit . . . umm, hold on.

Kalen glanced to his right, looking down the cross street, checking the flow of traffic. The front cars were crossing, but the lagging cars were slowing.

The light ahead changed to yellow.

K. Immel—
RS:Physical
: Never mind, Coordinator, I have a crazy idea.”

This was his chance—the transition—the two-second period when the intersection was vacant between the switching of traffic flows. He would need to time the maneuver perfectly. If it worked, he would trap the police cruisers behind the blockade of stopped cars at the light and peel his bogie off into the grill of a crossing vehicle moving into the intersection. If his timing was off, or if some bastard ran the light, then it would be him and his precious cargo that the EMTs would be scraping up off the pavement.

Kalen twisted the throttle, accelerating toward the column of cars ahead slowing at the intersection. The space between the doors of adjacent cars was just wide enough to permit the clear passage of a motorcycle and rider, provided, he maintained a perfectly straight trajectory . . . and nobody opened a car door.

One hundred meters to the intersection.

The light changed red.

Braking was not an option.

Kalen clenched his teeth.

Headlights flashed.

Someone was about to die.

“
C
HECK HER,” RAIMOND ZURN
ordered Stefan.

Stefan walked over to the chair where Julie was bound. Her body sagged, like a wet paper doll. Only the duct tape they'd bound her with kept her from sliding off the seat onto the floor in a heap. Stefan leaned over at the waist and put his right cheek next to her nose and mouth. Her faint warm breath caressed his smooth, boyish skin.

“She's alive, and still unconscious,” Stefan said.

“Wake her.”

“How do you suggest I do that? The chloroform is still in her system.”

“Slap her, yell at her, use the smelling salts, I don't care. Just wake her!” Raimond yelled.

Stefan tensed. He was not accustomed to seeing his brother Raimond in such a manic state. Then again, fieldwork was rare for Stefan, so it was possible that Raimond was always this way in the field. Stefan preferred to stay behind in Munich, functioning as a one-man computer command center for the brothers' assignments. He left the wet work for his two older brothers; they seemed to enjoy it immensely. Stefan did not have the stomach for it. Tooth and nail were not his weapons of choice; the pain Stefan inflicted on his victims was in the form of ones and zeros. The anonymity of his firewall was his shield, the software hack his blade.

Stefan stared at the American woman. She was completely vulnerable, oblivious. He had never held a position of power over a woman like this before. Stefan Zurn had been dominated by women his entire life, starting with his mother and then followed by every woman he had encountered ever since. Women were an enigma—enchanting and enraging—and Stefan was a boy of a man. Even at age twenty-four, he had yet to know a woman. Now, at this moment, he had the sudden urge to strip this woman of her clothes. Make her naked, while he stood over her, clothed. Dominant. Erect. Powerful.

“Stefan!” Raimond yelled, startling his brother out of his trance. “Wake her up. I'm not waiting for Udo any longer. I want answers.”

“Yes, I'm sorry. I was just . . .” Stefan stammered.

He pulled a tiny sealed container of pungent smelling salts from his pocket. He unscrewed the black cap, held his breath, and wafted the open container beneath Julie's nose.

Her head jerked once, but her eyelids did not open.

He repeated the process, this time letting the open vial linger beneath her nostrils several seconds longer. Stefan was not sure if smelling salts could wake a person from drug-induced unconsciousness, but he had no intention of arguing with Raimond about the point. She would wake up as soon as her body metabolized the sedative compound in her bloodstream, and not one second before. Until that time, he would appease his brother by trying his damnedest to wake her.

After several attempts, she made a gurgling noise and pulled her face away from the source of the piquant odor. Her eyelids opened a crack, and then quickly shut again.

“Julie Ponte. Julie Ponte, wake up,” Stefan said in her ear, shaking her by the shoulder.

“Sleeping,” Julie moaned. “I want to sleep.”

Stefan put the salts under her nose again. This time her eyes popped open.

The warehouse where they had taken Julie was empty. Once a storage facility for a plastics company, all that remained inside were rows and rows of barren metal shelving. Each storage rack was ten feet tall and stretched off into the darkness. Julie sat, duct-taped to a decrepit metal chair. The only light in the warehouse emanated from the headlamps of the van, parked ten feet away and facing Julie. Raimond had cut a rusty padlock from one of the loading dock doors, and Stefan had pulled the van completely inside so they could not be seen.

“Hey!” Raimond snapped at Julie, annoyed at his brother's ineffectiveness at such a simple task. “Wake up!”

Her head bobbed; she was still in a fog.

Raimond slapped her across her cheek. “Wake up, bitch!”

The slap sent adrenaline pumping through her veins, and she regained consciousness. The shadow in front of her moved, letting the headlights from the van blind her. She tried to raise her hand to shield her eyes, but it was securely lashed to the frame of the chair. Panic set in.

“This is an interrogation, Ms. Ponte. Before we begin, I am going to explain the rules. Listen very carefully. I ask you questions. You answer them truthfully. If you answer truthfully, you will live. If you try to deceive me, I will torture you until your death,” said a voice from behind her. “Do you understand the rules?”

The last thing she remembered was watching Will across the street at the Café Sacher meeting with Agent Nelson. Something went wrong. Someone had grabbed her from behind. She had no memory of the events that transpired afterward. She had no knowledge of her captors, their motives, or where they had taken her. One thing she did know was that her life was in grave danger. She looked left and then right, trying to catch a glimpse of her interrogator.

“I said, do you understand the rules?” Raimond repeated, growing more and more agitated by the second.

“I understand the rules,” she mumbled.

“Good,” he replied.

“What is your name?”

She paused. He already knew her name; he had said it earlier. This was a test, she told herself.

“My name is Julie Ponte.”

“What were you doing at the Wiener Staatsoper?”

He was setting her up. Baiting her to lie so he could punish her and begin the process of breaking her. She had never been interrogated before, but her instincts told her this was no time to be coy. Every answer was a high-wire crossing. One misstep, and she would pay.

“I was watching a meeting take place across the street.”

“Where was the meeting?”

“At the Café Sacher.”

“Who was at the meeting?”

“You already know the answer to all these questions,” she said.

“Don't test me. I
will
hurt you if you break the rules again. This is my promise to you,” he said quietly.

“It was a meeting between a man named Will Foster and a man calling himself Agent Nelson.”

“Agent Nelson? What kind of agent?”

She took a deep breath. The easy part was over now. She was at the crossroads now. She had to make a choice: tell the truth and risk him not believing her, or lie, and risk him seeing right through her. She knew what she had to do.

“He's not a real agent. It was all part of the plan.”

“What plan?”

“Meredith Morley's plan to get Foster back.”

Raimond took a step backward. “What are you talking about? Who do you work for?”

“I work for a company called Vyrogen Pharmaceuticals. Mr. Foster was enrolled in a drug pilot program at my company involving highly infectious diseases. A few days ago, he broke out of our research facility in Prague. Mr. Foster is an extremely dangerous individual. I have been trying desperately to bring him back into quarantine. But at the moment . . .” she said, wiggling her bound hands at the wrist, “you are making my assignment extremely difficult.”

Raimond locked eyes with his brother. Stefan motioned for Raimond to follow him, away from Julie, so they could talk in private.

“We fucked up, Raimond, She works for Vyrogen,” Stefan whispered, with a hint of panic in his voice.