Ice Cold Kill (22 page)

Although it seemed odd that the guards were looking toward the factory, not away from it.

More patience led to the discovery of movement on an adjacent roof. His binoculars picked up a blur of a human leg in fatigues, ducking behind a ventilation shaft. He also caught sight of a Renault delivery truck, which passed within a block of the factory not twice, but three times inside a forty-minute window.

That’s when it dawned on him: this wasn’t Asher Sahar’s outer line of defense.

This was French military surveillance.

*   *   *

Daria watched as a car pulled up to the factory and flashed its lights: one-two. A pause, then once more.

Two men emerged from the car and walked to the front door of the warehouse. It opened from inside. The brute of a man who opened the door stood aside to let the newcomers in. Even without binoculars, Daria could identify him. He was the size of a bear, six foot six, with a shaven head and a skull oddly shaped like a bullet, protruding upward in the back, making him look half-alien.

Eli Schullman. Former Mossad agent. He had been Asher’s most trusted confidant and friend for years. She had known the truth since hearing Asher’s voice over the cell phone in the Algerian’s shop. But seeing Schullman confirmed everything.

Belhadj, that Syrian son of a whore, hadn’t been lying. Asher Sahar truly was behind everything that had happened.

*   *   *

Eli Schullman stood aside and let two people in through the factory door. He nodded to one of his men, the Bosnian Croat who had been on the scene in Manhattan. “Stay here. Watch the street.”

Schullman led the two men inside. One was a bodyguard from the Ivory Coast.

The second man was smallish and wore a nice suit under a calf-length cashmere coat, with gloves, a scarf, and a Russian-style woolen hat. He skin was smooth and a little bit pink, with a bulbous nose that dominated all other features.

The Ivorian bodyguard was the opposite, a man so thin and grisly he looked like a suit of wet clothes hanging from a wire hanger. His eye sockets and cheekbones were deeply concave and his skin so black as to be nearly purple in the low light.

Inside the factory door, they brushed aside long, vertical strips of heavy plastic that hung from a curtain rod. Beyond that, Schullman opened a seam in the white cube room, held together with magnets. He and the newcomers entered the clean room. The newcomers squinted at the bright lights, set up strategically to eliminate almost all shadows.

Asher rose from his chair in one easy move, sliding the yellowed aviation novel back into his coat pocket, gracefully crossing the rickety wooden floor to the newcomer. He held out a hand and the small man shook without removing his kid leather gloves. Between them, they looked like academics greeting each other at a symposium.

“Dr. Rabadeau. A pleasure.”

Dr. Georges Rabadeau smiled politely and nodded. “Good evening.” They both spoke in French, Rabadeau’s a gentile and lyrical blend that suggested a wealthy upbringing and the best schools. He studied the clean room, nodded his approval.

“I trust you were not inconvenienced overmuch, being awakened at this hour?” The question was purely polite conversation. Asher knew any inconvenience had been quickly subsumed by the very large increase in the Frenchman’s offshore bank account.

“Think no more of it,” the man almost purred. “I am here to serve.”

“Splendid.” Asher waved an arm theatrically around his sparse, clean, dust-free cube. Plastic sheeting had been stapled down over the aged floorboards, made of the same white plastic material as the walls and ceiling of the room. “Will this do?”

“It is sufficient.” the Frenchman nodded.

“And here, your work space?”

Asher’s gesture revealed the tent, painted in camouflage colors of greens and golds and grays. It looked like the kind of sturdy tent a hunting party might use, with aluminum pipes creating a frame and the painted canvas pulled taught against them. It was the room within the room within the room. Dr. Rabadeau recognized it for what it was.

The tent featured no open seams. The entry wasn’t a flap, but a vertical tube, six feet high, with a flat panel that rotated on its vertical axis like a revolving door. By standing against the panel and pushing, you could enter the tent with just the air that surrounded you. Negative air pressure and powerful fans on the other side of the canvas would assure everyone that precious little air—or anything else—could escape the tent.

Georges Rabadeau had worked in tents like these before. It had been during his stint with the World Health Organization, at a field station in the northern Democratic Republic of Congo. When he had served as a pathologist on the banks of the Ebola River.

*   *   *

As the French pathologist examined his airtight work environment and the full-containment hazardous-materials suit, Asher Sahar stepped next to Eli Schullman and reverted to Hebrew.

“Have the Americans caught Daria and Belhadj?”

The big man reached into his shirt pocket for a packet of smokes and a lighter. “Not yet.”

Asher smiled up at the man. “May I ask a favor?”

“Anything.”

“Could you not smoke next to the massive tanks of superpressurized oxygen?”

Schullman cast a baleful look at the horizontal pyramid of tanks, eight high, that were stabilizing the air pressure both in the white cube room and in the incubation tent. “It’s a sad state of affairs when you can orchestrate an international military strike with global repercussions, but you can’t catch a smoke.”

Asher nodded. “Life is unfair.”

“You said it. Law enforcement, intelligence agencies, everyone’s still looking for Daria and the Syrian bastard.”

Asher nodded and shrugged as if it were no big deal.

Schullman rolled the unlit cigarette between the pads of his finger and thumb.

Asher’s personal cell phone throbbed. He pulled it out of his pocket, entered his security code. A text appeared on the screen.

Schullman held the cigarette under his nose and inhaled the faint smell of stale tobacco. “Trouble?”

“My foster parents.” Asher allowed himself a shallow smile and adjusted his bifocals. “They are vacationing in London. Mother wants to see West End plays. Father wants to bomb Parliament.”

“For a literature professor, he was always progressive. You have someone watching them?”

“Remember Aguirre? The mercenary from the Dominican Republic?”

“Sure. He’s good.”

“Hmm.” Asher smiled some more and scrolled through the text. His foster parents had visited four bookshops so far: his father’s idea of Disneyland.

Asher continued to smile softly, and anyone other than Eli Schullman would have missed the anguish behind his eyes.

“The Knesset plot. The one that got us sentenced to that hellhole prison. Without a public trial…” Schullman let his voice drift off.

Asher keyed in a thank-you text to the Dominican. “Without a trial, my foster parents never heard any news about me. Nothing about my arrest, the military tribunal, or prison. They believe I’m dead. Mossad told them I died overseas, in the service of my country.”

Schullman kept his counsel, waited.

“My parents sat shiva. Mother had been given a folded Israeli flag at the funeral. No coffin, of course. No body. I’m told she held it on her lap the full seven days. Today, they have a fireplace mantel that they’ve turned into a shrine. Photos of me in school, in the Air Force. Playing cricket. It’s nice.”

Schullman contemplated the dimly lit white cube room. “When Hannah Herself found you a foster home, she couldn’t have known you’d bond to them as if they were your real parents.”

“Hannah knew what she was doing,” Asher whispered. “Hannah knew. The Group knew. I’m grateful. Not many people like me have the luxury of parents to worry over.”

Schullman seemed to absorb this, nodding silently.

Asher smiled up at his friend. “I wish Daria had played her designated role in New York.”

Schullman rolled the cigarette back and forth. He kept an eye on the camouflaged medical tent. “You warned her. Didn’t you.”

Asher peered around at his men, spread out in the white-walled space.

“That’s why you were surprised when she tripped us up in Manhattan. You didn’t expect her to even be there. You warned her to stay away.”

Asher turned to his friend and the tripod lights glinted off his flat, round lenses. Schullman waited. He didn’t appear judgmental.

“I sent her a message at the New York airport, telling her she was burned. She didn’t take the warning. Then again, that one rarely follows a given script.”

Asher shook his head, smiling.

“God in Heaven, that was a risk. Why do it? The plan came from Hannah Herself.”

“Bringing Daria into this was a mistake. I told Hannah that from the very start. But I couldn’t talk the Group out of it. For all that, I couldn’t just let Daria walk into the CIA’s clutches, either. I owe her too much.”

“You spent almost four years in a secret military prison because of her.”

“And I shot her. I can’t ever forgive myself for that.”

Schullman rolled the cigarette between his fingers and kept his face neutral. None of the other soldiers could tell what he was thinking.

“It could have been worse,” Schullman said. “Having Daria and that Syrian butcher in CIA custody would have been good. Having them lead the CIA on a romp through America is maybe even better. As long as they stay distracted for another day.”

Asher smiled to his friend, thankful that he hadn’t been lectured. It never dawned on him to wonder if Schullman would report this news to their superiors. There was no truer friend than Eli Schullman.

And as the big man said, warning Daria did make her more of a roving target for U.S. intelligence, and thus more of a distraction. But Asher couldn’t help wondering what mischief she and Belhadj could be up to.

He took comfort in the thought that, at least, they likely hated each other as much or more than they hated Asher himself.

Sixteen

Daria sat in the dilapidated hatchback and watched the darkened factory. From where she sat, she could see the walls had been liberally annotated with
WARNING! DANGER!
and
DO NOT ENTER!
posters.

“Attention psychotic ex-spies,” she whispered to herself. “If you lived here, you’d be home by now.”

Daria Gibron was not, by nature, a long-range strategist. Her plans tended to stretch out two, maybe three hours into the future. She had found Asher’s redoubt, which was as far as her planning had taken her.

She checked the Glock G17 that the young Asian girl had provided. The magazine was full. She slowly jacked the slide a half-inch and spotted the eighteenth round in the pipe. Good. The firearm weighed only about twenty-two ounces with a four-and-a-half-inch barrel.

Now she just needed to come up with a plan.

Being shot in the stomach by Asher Sahar years ago had been bad. But for an adrenaline junkie like Daria, the months it took her to fully recover and return to her fighting strength were worse. The FBI in America gave her unlimited access to physical therapists. They got her up and walking, and eventually jogging, then running.

To increase her upper body strength, Daria took an archery class at a local community college. She could have simply joined a gym and pumped weights, but closing one eye and peering down the range at the straw-filled target and imagining the face of Asher Sahar was oh, so much more fun.

For her lower body strength, she signed up at a gym favored by the Los Angeles FBI agents as well as local police. The joint was owned and operated by retired army sergeants, and was run with all the delicacy of boot camp. There, she took up and excelled at kickboxing. Like archery, it was much more fun than lifting weights and served as a splendid answer to release her pent-up aggression. Kickboxing and archery also had the advantage of being potentially useful in the field; Daria seriously doubted she would ever be called upon to bench-press an opponent to death.

But it was at the master sergeants’ gym that Daria picked up another exercise favorite: wall climbing, which supported strength as well as balance and dexterity.

She’d learned wall climbing inside the gym but had quickly graduated to climbing and bouldering around California in places like Williamson Rock, Malibu Creek State Park, and Boney Bluff in Point Mugu State Park—not all that far from where she’d once watched an airliner carrying Ray Calabrese pancake into the desert.

*   *   *

Ten minutes later, Daria stood in the darkened alley between the factory and the next abandoned building, the pitch-black hood over her hair, white sleeves of her undershirt pushed up past her elbows, tugging on the fingerless kid gloves with the tiny gold palm zippers. The alley stank of urine. Around her boots, discarded drug needles glinted in the dull light from the street. A padlocked Dumpster was pressed up against one wall. She studied the old factory with a critical eye. The detailed brickwork of the façade dated back at least a hundred years. It included a pattern of bricks that stood out from the vertical surface in an artistic pattern.

She shrugged, thinking,
The bastards shan’t see this coming.

The clunky boots had good, thick rubber soles that held a grip well. She bent at the waist, rubbed her fingertips over the asphalt of the alley, letting dirt and grit rub away skin oil and sweat. She hiked up the denim skirt and scampered up atop the Dumpster. It rolled a little under her weight and she realized it was empty. She lifted her left boot up atop a long-unused water pipe. Hoisting herself up atop it, she could reach two of the protruding bricks on the warehouse façade, one at shoulder height and the other a few inches over her head. Their surfaces were sooty but dry. The fingerless gloves were perfect for this. Daria brought her right foot up to a protruding brick near her knee. By turning her boot sideways, the ball of her foot took her weight on the brick and her left boot left the water pipe, seeking the next climbing purchase.