Lethal Profit (32 page)

She stood, raised her arm and aimed the gun at the man in the white shirt. Time had run out.

She fired.

Leon, surprised by the shot, turned his head towards Eva as the man who had been choking him from behind fell back lifelessly to the floor. Then a look of confusion crossed his face because the other man had also fallen away and was screaming, blood pouring from his left hand. The knife he had been holding tumbled noiselessly to the floor and, as it fell, Leon noticed the flash of the blade. He looked from the blade to the gun in Eva's hand. Had she shot them both? Eva stared at the situation in front of her, completely confused. Suddenly the platinum-haired woman stepped fully into the cabin, an industrial-sized knife in her left hand, wet with blood.

Without any warning she flew at the man who had held her down on the floor only ten minutes earlier, once again stabbing at him with the enormous knife. He screamed like a child as the blade sliced into the tender flesh of his thighs and he tried to throw her off, but she dug long nails into his left arm and held on, stabbing out with the knife in her right hand.

‘Stop! What are you doing?' he cried out in shock as she stabbed him again in the other thigh, the serrated edge of the sharp knife cutting through the expensive fabric of his suit like butter and tearing agonisingly at the tissue and skin of his legs.

She screamed and she stabbed out again. ‘
You bastard
.' Another huge fountain of blood spurted up into the air as she severed the femoral artery in his thigh.

Recovering from the shock of the attack, the man suddenly found the strength to punch her in the face and the woman reeled back, stumbling as she fell out of one of her vertiginously high heels. But she was back upon him again in seconds, her bloodied face twisted into an expression of utter hatred.
‘You fucking worthless bastard
,' she spat, baring her teeth like a wolf and lunging at him once again.

He held his arms up to protect himself from the huge blade she was wielding and she took the opportunity to push the knife underneath his raised arms and stab him straight through the heart. Shocked at the strength of the tiny woman as the blade went right through him, the man stared at her unbelievingly before slumping back against the wall and sliding down onto the carpeted floor. He made a grab for the gun in the waistband of one of his fallen men, but his life was ebbing away.

He slid further down the wall of the aeroplane and the woman advanced towards him. She raised the foot on which she was still wearing her one remaining shoe and just before he fired the gun at her chest, she brought the spiked heel down hard, piercing him straight through the eye.

Suddenly the cabin was silent.

Eva and Leon stared, shocked at the bloody scene before them. Eva ran to the side of the dying woman but it was too late. She gently shut the woman's eyes and then pulled herself into a seat as her head was spinning. She closed her eyes; she could hear Leon checking the other corpses, using the huge knife to make sure no threat remained. She felt the bile rise in her throat.

For several minutes she sat in the darkness listening to the butchery. When she opened her eyes, Leon was gone. Eva looked around and noticed the curtain through to the front of the plane was drawn back. The door to the cockpit was open.

She looked at the silent figure leaning on the back of one of the two empty seats and looking out of the small cockpit window. ‘Where's the pilot?'

Leon indicated back into the cabin and Eva turned and suddenly noticed blue and gold epaulettes on the white shirt of one of the men lying in a pool of his own blood.

Vertigo suddenly engulfed Eva's brain. They were 40,000 feet in the air.

‘The autopilot is flying the plane,' said Leon quietly.

‘Can an autopilot land a plane?'

‘Some can.'

‘And this one?'

Leon turned and looked at her. ‘I hope so.'

Eva leaned against the wall of the plane as nausea threatened to overwhelm her once again.

‘It depends on the Instrument Landing System equipment that this plane has and it depends on where we are going,' added Leon as if to try and provide some comfort.

‘Do you know where we are going?'

‘We are almost there.'

‘Where?'

‘Paraguay.'

T
HE
CEO
WATCHED
AS
THE
SMALL
plane taxied to a halt on the private runway he had built in the tri-border region of South America. He had specifically chosen this strange, uncivilised area in between the land masses of Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil because it had a reputation for lawlessness, attracting smugglers, terrorists, drug traffickers, arms dealers, and organised crime figures from across the world. But it was also large enough to become lost in, which is exactly what he had done. A year ago he had sold March Properties, a company he had used as a cover in Paris, staying on as director for twelve months, meeting clients, going to the office to maintain his profile and monitor the company he had anonymously set up – Bioavancement S.a.r.l.. March Properties had rented to Bioavancement S.a.r.l. the Parisian land on which the company was based – making it a client of March Properties – so it was quite normal for him to be on the Bioavancement S.a.r.l. premises.

With the money from selling March Properties, he had found this plot of land just east of Ciudad del Este on the Argentinian side of the border, far enough away from any populated areas to discourage trespassers but close enough to take advantage of weak government and pervasive corruption in these South American states. He had paid a series of bribes to the authorities for the land and bought influence among leading legislators, police, criminals and judges to secure his privacy. Then he had built himself a low, highly fortified cattle ranch that went deep underground, positioning the buildings on the surface so that they were surrounded on all sides by thick green foliage, virtually invisible from the air. Inside, the ranch had the feel of a gentlemen's club and hunting lodge with a high tech specification, although the décor changed considerably the further down the levels one went. On the scorched dusty brown earth of his ‘back garden' was his own runway, big enough for the two Global Express XRS long-range jets he had bought with the money he had accumulated during four years siphoning off from March Properties and which he used to ferry him to and from Europe. One of which he was now staring at with a creeping sense of unease.

He signalled to the head of security he employed, who had taken up a position near the small building that had functioned as an airport terminal for the arrival of the small, elite team of mercenaries and ex-agents the CEO had been instructed to purchase and train for situations such as this. The man nodded and, moments later, ten black-clad figures had taken up positions around the plane. The pilot had not responded for the past two hours. It could be that everyone on the plane was dead and the autopilot had made the landing; or it could be something else. Either way, something wasn't right. The CEO stared into the thick heat of the sultry air as the plane remained motionless. It was another pitch black Paraguayan night. In the distance they could hear the thundering from the Iguaçu falls, or Yguazú as the locals called them, 2.7 kilometres of 270-feet-high falls created when an angry god sliced the river in two after his lover ran off with a mortal, condemning the lovers to eternal falling. The CEO liked the swift and merciless justice of the story and admired the ruthlessness of the god. If only the exercise of power and revenge really was that simple.

On the runway, everything was still and they waited. Finally, the stairway opened and a figure appeared at the top of the stairs, a woman wearing a tight, ripped dress.

He was about to request her identity from his security head when she suddenly seemed to raise a dark object that looked a lot like a gun and instantly one of the CEO's well-trained agents put a bullet between her eyes.

Inside the plane, Eva jumped back as the woman's body slid and then landed heavily at their feet on the floor of the plane.

She looked at Leon. He had lashed the woman loosely to a hostess trolley they had found in the hospitality area and wheeled her to the open door to see what kind of opposition they faced. It had been a useful move but one that had sickened Eva. As if her body hadn't been abused enough.

Leon leaned carefully back into the cockpit and looked out of both sides of the angled windows, then returned and shook his head. ‘They're clearly armed and uncompromising. I could see at least five armed men out of the cockpit and there must be more out front as well.'

‘So what do we do?'

‘We capitulate.'

‘Are you serious? We don't even know who we're capitulating to.'

‘If we go waving a white flag we have some chance of survival.'

Eva stared at him.

‘Think about it, Eva,' he said quietly, taking a step towards her and looking down into her dark eyes. ‘They must have brought us here for a reason or they would just have killed us in London.'

Eva had already thought of that. ‘Yes, but what for?'

‘Obviously it's something to do with the information we had.'

‘But neither of us has the information any more. It doesn't make sense.'

Leon shook his head. ‘Look, we need to move. If they don't shoot us on sight – which I don't think they will – then we still have a chance. The longer we stay on here the more likely they are to come in and get us, at which point it becomes a fight.'

Eva glanced to her left at the butchery they had created in the cabin. She'd had enough of all the corpses. ‘Fine.'

‘I'll go first.'

Before she could argue, Leon had dropped his weapon and stepped into the open doorway of the aircraft with his hands in the air. He started down the steps to the ground and was immediately thrown to the floor on his front as men in black secured his wrists, hauled him to his feet and then trained their weapons on to Eva.

As she reached the last few steps she was lifted off them by an arm on either side and propelled down to the bottom where she was also thrown onto the ground with her hands behind her back. She gasped as the rough tarmac peeled the skin off the end of her nose. As her wrists were fastened behind her back, she heard the click of expensive shoes on the runway and looked up to see the figure of a man walking towards her. She was dragged to her feet and held fast between her captors on either side but she couldn't help the exhalation when the moonlight illuminated the face in front of her. ‘You,' she breathed, looking up into a face she hadn't seen since her escape from the alleyway in Paris.

As it turned out, Legrand and Chard weren't the only ones to have noticed the link between the algae and the unexplained deaths that had been occurring in the UK. When they had arrived back at the station there had been a message about another death and a relative waiting for them. A man, the boyfriend of one Alana Srisai, a woman of Thai origin who lived in an area some thirteen miles west of London, in a frantic state of shock and grief. The man had received a distressed phone call from his girlfriend, left work and been forced to break down her door when she didn't answer it. He'd found her on her bed, her body twisted at an unnatural angle, an expression on her face that he described as ‘terrified'. Shortly after that had come the death of Dan King, a tall lanky youth who had been found by his mother in his death throes and rushed to hospital. It hadn't taken much digging for Legrand and Chard to uncover that both the victims had been a part of a clean-up operation the previous day, that both had been sent home early feeling unwell and that neither had been wearing masks.

‘This is terrible,' Chard said as they sat in his office waiting for a call back from the regional head of the Environment Agency that had organised the clean-up. ‘That stuff is fatal.'

Legrand nodded. ‘But where has it come from?'

The phone rang and Chard snatched the receiver, confirmed the caller as Don Porter and then flicked the phone onto speaker.

‘Don, I've got with me here a colleague of mine, Inspector Legrand from the Préfecture de Police in Paris.'

‘What's he got to do with this?' Porter sounded angry, exhausted and at the end of his tether.

Legrand ignored his aggressive tone. ‘Mr Porter, I have had several murders in my jurisdiction which I think may be linked to events that are currently occurring in yours.'

‘Oh?'

‘Yes. It relates to the algae, I believe the algae may be highly toxic.'

‘Have you told anyone?' A note of panic appeared in Porter's voice.

‘No. We needed to speak to you first.'

‘Why?'

‘Where are the algae coming from?' asked Chard, butting in and ignoring Don Porter's question.

There was a hesitation on the other end of the line. Porter was reluctant to admit how long it had taken him to figure this one out and that inefficiency would become obvious if anyone asked him why they hadn't yet taken action against the company in question. ‘It's an old waterworks in Sunbury, twelve miles west of London. Set up by a company called Bioavancement S.a.r.l.. No active clearances, no permits, nothing, they just appeared,' he exhaled crossly. ‘We only broke in there in the last forty-eight hours,' he admitted, ‘but we found huge pools – raceway pools I believe they're called – all filled with the stuff.'

‘And you think this is the source of it?'

‘Well, the source of it in my jurisdiction, yes.'

‘What do you mean?' Legrand was impatient.

‘This is not the only part of the country affected.'

‘Do you know the algae could be toxic to humans?'

‘Our tests haven't been conclusive about that so far.'

‘What did you learn about the locations of the algae?'

‘There are installations just like the one in Sunbury located in at least fifty other spots across the UK.'