In Cold Blood (19 page)

He shifted in his chair and looked down at his hands, idly rubbing the calloused skin. He looked back up at ‘C.’ He took a pipe from his desk and filled the bowl with tobacco from a pouch in his pocket. He tamped the bowl down, struck a match and lit it. Of course, smoking was not permitted inside the building, but there were rules and then there were rules, and some of them were ignored, depending upon whom was involved.

Stone finished the call with an exasperated, “Thank God for that.” He leaned back in his chair. “Sorry about that, Pope. Our friends in America are congratulating themselves on a job well done. I’m expected to pat them on the back and tell them how impressed we all are. I suppose we can allow them their moment.”

“How many people know about what happened?”

“The operational people. But they’re all pretending she wasn’t there.”

“The SEALs were on their way home when she brought the hostages out.”

“Yes, true, but like I said, we’ll let them think otherwise if it keeps them sweet, eh? It’s not as if she’s an official asset and we don’t want to be claiming credit for someone who burst into the room and executed two of the hostages. We can’t go claiming the credit for that, can we?” He screwed up his eyes without humour.

“No, sir. We certainly can’t.”

“There’s deniable, and then there’s Ms. Rose. That’s something else entirely.” Stone wrestled the headset off his head and tossed it onto the empty glass desk in front of him. “Foolish things,” he said.

There was silence for a moment. Pope glanced out of the window as a helicopter followed the line of the river, its engine silenced by the triple glazing. He looked back at ‘C.’ and searched his broad, wrinkled face for any clue that might have explained why he had wanted to see him in person.

“Look, Pope,” he said after a pause, jabbing the pipe in his direction. “I know you have a lot on your plate with rebuilding the Group after that nonsense in Russia, but I wanted to tell you that our mutual friend’s success has been passed up the chain right to the top. And I mean
right
to the top. The Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister have both been briefed on what she’s done and what she’s trying to do. The whole situation with Control was a monumental fuck up. I can’t emphasise that enough. If he was to be turned by one of our enemies, by one of our friends, even, it would make Philby and his chums look like a teddybear’s picnic. He knows enough to bring down the government. And that’s not an overestimation.”

“No, sir. I don’t believe that it is.”

“Everyone is in agreement that we are handling it the correct way. We don’t know where he is. Until we do, we will follow every lead we can that might bring us closer to him. It might be that the other four that Rose is after can shed some light on where he’s gone to ground. I’m assuming she is the persuasive type?”

“Yes, sir. She is.”

“Maybe she can work through them and end up with him.”

“So we continue to support her?”

“We do. Until I say otherwise, she’s our best hope at putting this whole sorry mess to bed.”

“Very good, sir.”

He drew down on the pipe. “You’re the cut-out on this, Pope. If it goes wrong, it’ll be your neck on the block. I know that’s unfair, but that’s how it’s going to have to be.”

“I understand, sir. That’s the job.”

“That
is
the job. Good man.”

Stone took a sheaf of paper from the tray on his desk and flipped it over to him.

“Might have something on the next chap on Rose’s list.”

“Duffy?”

He nodded. “Look it over. It’s up to you how you give it to her.”

The conversation was at an end. He got up and half turned towards the door.

“How good is she, Pope?”

“Rose?” He paused. “She’s good, sir. Very good. I know one thing for sure: I wouldn’t want to be the one she was coming after.”

THE MEDINA was as crazed and chaotic as it ever was as Beatrix Rose stepped out of the taxi. They were on Dar El Bacha and the driver was starting to grumble that he had taken her as far as he could. The traffic, he said, the people. Beatrix didn’t mind. She was happy to walk. She paid him his fare and set off on the last leg of her journey.

It had been a difficult exfiltration. The Lada had been wrecked and she had abandoned it. She had hiked onwards for five hours until she had flagged down a truck heading south. It was another smuggler, and she had been able to pay him for a lift in the back of a truck that was using the
panyos
to smuggle oranges and lemons past border patrol.

He had dropped her just across the line and, after a three hour walk to the Garissa Road, she had managed to flag down a UN bus loaded with refugees for a ride into the camp at Dadaab. She had collected her Land Cruiser from where she had parked it and had driven for eight hours on the battered old route A3 to Nairobi.

From there, it had been an Emirates flight from Nairobi to Dubai, a connecting flight to Casablanca and then a final connection with Royal Air Maroc to Marrakech. She had been travelling for another twenty four hours by the time she had disembarked from the taxi and she was dog tired. She had taken more ibroprofen than was safe, but there had been no easy way to get morphine and she had needed something to deaden the pain. And what did it matter, in the grand scheme of things? Her liver, after all, was the least of her worries.

She followed the maze of ever-narrowing passageways until she reached the thick wooden door of
La Villa des Orangers.

She banged on it.

Mohammed opened up after a few seconds, his face blending from one of happy surprise to one of concern. “Madam Beatrix,” he said, “my heart is glad to see you.”

“Hello Mohammed,” she said.

“Forgive me, but you look dreadful.”

“I could sleep for a week,” she said, although she thought, as she said it, that it was not true.

Physically, she could.

But practically?

There was no time for a prolonged recovery.

She had to keep moving.

Perpetual motion.

Like a shark.

He helped her inside.

“How’s Isabella?” she asked him.

“You should see for yourself,” he said.

“Where is she?”

“On the range.”

SHE HEARD the silenced pistol as she crossed the courtyard. Her daughter was at one end of the range, as far as she could get from the target on the opposite wall. The distance from wall to wall was fifteen metres. That was plenty for the purposes of sharpening up her aim. She wouldn’t be using her secondary weapon for a target farther away than that, anyway. That was why you carried a long gun. Beatrix intended to introduce that into her training when she was satisfied that Bella had mastered a pistol. After that, if they had time, there would be knives and grenades and then, if they were lucky, tradecraft.

Isabella took aim and squeezed off each shot at an interval of a second, just as she had been taught.

Beatrix waited until the girl saw her.

“Mummy!” she said.

She hugged her daughter to her, forgetting the pain in her bones in the warmth of her embrace.

“That looked pretty good.”

Beatrix watched as Isabella ran to the bottom of the range, tore out the perforated target and brought it back.

The target was an outline of a man with a Kalashnikov. Isabella had put all ten rounds inside the cartoon head.

“Can’t do much better than that.”

“I’ve practiced every day, like you said.”

“Good girl.”

“I want to try a full auto. Can I?”

“Soon. I’m going to stock up. I’ll get something you’ll be able to manage.”

Another wave of fatigue washed over her and she had to brace a hand on the windowsill to maintain her balance.

“Are you alright?”

“Just tired, darling. It was a long trip.”

She pointed up to her head. “What happened to your hair?”

Beatrix raised her hand to her head and felt the burnt ends prickle across her palm. “There was a little explosion. I was a bit closer to it than I would have liked.”

“And your face?”

She meant the tens of tiny cuts from the glass shards that had showered over her after the windshield was blown out.

“Scratches.”

“So you’re alright?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling. “I’m fine. No damage done.”

“How did it go?”

“It went well.”

“You got him?”

“I did.”

“Two down.”

“That’s right. And four to go.”

“I’m pleased you’re home, mummy.”

“I’m pleased too, sweetheart.”

Beatrix took the Glock and ejected the dry magazine. She handed it to her daughter.

“You know why I want you to practice as much as you can, don’t you?”

“You want me to be good.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re coming.”

“That’s right. Because they know I’m coming. And they’re going to do everything they can to stop me.”

“And we can’t hide from them.”

“No, we can’t. They’d find us, eventually.”

“So we’ve got to be prepared.”

“I want you to practice and practice and practice, so that when someone comes through that door with a gun or a knife, you won’t be scared when you have to pull a gun and put a nine millimetre round right through his eye.”

“Wouldn’t be scared now,” she said, thumbing another ten rounds into the magazine.

“No, baby doll,” Beatrix said. “I don’t think you would.”

She replaced the target with a fresh one and stepped to the side as her daughter raised the suppressed Glock and fired off another round.

They
were
coming.

She knew it.

But she was coming, too.

Beatrix Rose’s story continues in BLOOD MOON RISING. Here's an extract from the first chapter.

IT WAS THREE in the morning when Beatrix Rose finally reached the Wiltshire village where Lydia Chisholm had her house. She had been following her for two hours, all the way south from London. She turned the stolen Kawasaki off the A road, passed a cute village pub and then turned sharply behind it, following a gentle rise to a series of even prettier houses. Beatrix had extinguished the headlamp five minutes earlier and now she killed the engine, freewheeling to a stop. She flicked out the kickstand and rested the bike on it carefully. Chisholm’s top of the range BMW drove on, parking next to a dark blue Audi A3. Beatrix jogged along the road, keeping close to the thick verge of hawthorne, her rucksack bouncing up and down on her back.

Chisholm and her husband got out, locked the door and climbed the steps from the road to the front door. Chisholm went first, opening the door and stepping inside. Her husband followed. A hall light flicked on.

Beatrix edged closer to the house. Some of the nearby dwellings were thatched and all of them looked expensive. The mainline station was a ten minute drive away and London was ninety minutes by train from there. It was at the edge of a reasonable distance to consider commuting, and Beatrix guessed that the people who did travel in from the village were more likely to be senior staff who had the latitude to work from home. That supposition was borne out by the cars that were parked along the edge of the road: Range Rovers, Porsches, Jaguars, more BMWs. The houses had big extensions, manicured gardens, swimming pools. There was money here, and influence, too. But she had known that already.

Chisholm and her husband had been in town all day. Chisholm had been to a meeting of the board of private security contractors that she had established after leaving Group Fifteen. Manage Risk was a serious concern, with offices around the world, and it counted among its senior employees one of Chisholm’s old colleagues in the Group, Joshua Joyce. Beatrix had been in Somalia last week where she had reacquainted herself with Joyce. He had been assigned as security on a freighter that had been captured by al Shaabab off the coast. Beatrix had infiltrated the country and the town in which the terrorists had made their stronghold.

Joyce was an ex-employee now.

She had struck his name from her Kill List.

Beatrix had returned home to Morocco to find excellent news waiting for her. Michael Pope, the new Control of Group Fifteen, had provided her with the news that they had located Chisholm, too. Beatrix had immediately boarded a flight from Marrakech to Heathrow. She had followed Chisholm for two days and constructed the plan that was now drawing to its conclusion.

Chisholm’s house was a large square building, with broad windows on both sides of the porch, four or five windows on the first floor and a dormer on top. It looked as if it was in the middle of a refurbishment program. The stonework had been repointed and the lime render on the exterior walls was fresh. There was an alarm box beneath the eaves and a satellite dish positioned discreetly away from public view. There was a broad lawn to the right of the house with what looked like a tennis court behind it and an ornamental garden to the left. The land sloped up steeply behind the property with the deeper darkness of a copse of tall fir and oak providing a border to that side.

Beatrix waited until the downstairs light was switched off and then moved forward. A stone wall separated the property from the road and she slipped between it and the BMW, dropping down to her belly and slithering forwards. The car was still warm, the engine ticking as the temperature bled away in the coolness of the night. She removed the rucksack and opened it, taking out three pounds of Semtex and a disposable mobile phone that she had purchased earlier that day. The phone was wrapped around the detonator with gaffer tape and that, in turn, was wrapped around the plastique. She checked that the wire connecting the phone to the detonator was still in place, peeled away the adhesive backing and pressed the bomb to the underside of the car, right below the fuel tank.

She had a few hours to wait.

She made her way back to her motorbike and hid it in a nearby lane, beneath a railway bridge that boomed and shook as a late night goods train rumbled over it. She clambered over a nearby fence and negotiated a paddock and then a pig field until she had found her way to the large garden at the back of Chisholm’s house. There was a tumbledown shed next to the vegetable patch and it offered a decent view of the house, the BMW, and the road for twenty yards on either side. It was perfect.