The Dragon Factory (19 page)

“No, but we’ll do a MindReader search on it. Hard to search for something without more to put in the search argument. Otherwise I’d Google it.”

“
Did
you Google it?”

He ignored the question.

There was a soft
bing!
and I heard Hanler’s voice: “Buckle up, Captain. We’re making our descent.”

“Mission objectives?” I asked Church.

“Your first priority is to locate and secure whatever the Haeckel family stored there. Secondary mission is to locate Jigsaw Team.”

From the bitter lines on his face I could tell that he didn’t like the order of priorities any more than I did.

Church said, “We’re operating without support here. I’d prefer to have you met by SWAT, HRT, and the National Guard, but those are calls I can’t make under the present circumstances. You have Sims and Rabbit. I was able to get a technical support vehicle out to them, which means you’ll have weapons and body armor but no advanced equipment. And we have no other boots on the ground.”

“Three of us on a mission in which a dozen operators went missing? Swell.”

“It’s asking a lot of you, but believe me when I tell you that this is of the first importance. There may be opposition that we don’t know about.”

“If we have a new enemy, boss . . . they may have some opposition
they
don’t know about.”

Church gave me a long, considering look.

“Good hunting, Captain,” he said.

Sandown Park Racecourse—Surrey, England

Nine weeks ago

Clive Monroe looked nothing at all like what he was, but he looked exactly like what he had been. He wore a gray city suit with a chalk stripe, polished brogans, and a bowler hat. His clothes at least looked the part of an investment banker down from London to have a flutter on an afternoon of jump races at Sandown. He even had an umbrella in the car and a precisely trimmed mustache. He could have been on a poster for British business.

A casual passerby might have made that mistake, but everyone who caught Clive Monroe’s eye changed their opinion. His eyes were dark brown and utterly cold. Not emotionless, but rather filled with a calculating and deliberate cold. Ruthless eyes. When he smiled, the humor never reached those eyes, and they were never idle or inattentive. When Clive Monroe took your measure you knew that he could value you to the last penny. Not just in the expected business sense, but in every sense. You believed that he knew enough about you that he could predict what you’d do, what you’d say.

It was a fair enough assessment.

Clive Monroe had been an investment banker for twenty years, and his eyes and his assessing coldness made him a formidable opponent, whether over the details of a portfolio of holdings or over a round of golf.

Twenty-one years ago he had been a different man in a different job, and in the years before that his ability to assess a situation or a person had kept him alive when others around him fell.

Monroe walked past the oddsmakers in Tattersalls, heading for the stairs to the reserved boxes where he was expected for drinks between the third and fourth race. Monroe never placed bets on the races, though he amused himself by reading through the form books, reading the history of each horse and weighing their breeding against the weather conditions and the orientation of the field, the number of jumps, the angle of the incline run to the winning post. If he was a betting man, he
would have made money on two out of three of the races run so far that day. When he spent a whole day at the track he would mentally calculate his theoretical wagers and winnings. Last year he would have been up thirty thousand pounds, even taking into account a horse he would have backed in the Two Thousand Guineas who’d fallen on the third fence and taken down two of the other favored runners.

He climbed the steps to the row of glass-enclosed boxes where he was greeted by Lord Mowbry and three conservative members of Parliament who were well known for their love of horses. Mowbry himself was seldom away from the jump-racing world and conducted nearly all of his business between races.

They shook hands and a white-liveried waiter brought Clive his usual: gin and tonic with extra tonic. Even though Clive took pills for the malaria he got in the fetid swamps of West Africa, he still favored the quinine-rich tonic. Old habits.

They toasted and settled into leather chairs.

“So,” said Lord Mowbry as soon as the waiter was gone, “have you considered our offer?” His tone was brusque.

Clive sipped his drink, shrugged.

“Is it the money?” asked Sheffield, the most senior of the MPs.

“No, the money’s fine. Very generous.”

“Then why the hesitation, dammit?” Mowbry demanded. He’d been the head of a wealthy family and owner of so many companies that he’d long ago lost his deferential air. Clive understood that and never took offense.

“I’m comfortable where I am,” Clive said. “I’ve been at Enfield and Martyn for a long time. I can retire in two years with my full pension and spend my sunset years going to the races.”

“You could make more money with us,” insisted Sheffield.

“If it was just about the money, Cyril, I’d be down there having a flutter on Blue Boots in the fourth.”

“That’s another thing,” said one of the other MPs. “You come to the races, but you never bet. Where’s the fun in that?”

“Everyone finds amusement in their own way.”

“And that’s beside the damn point,” snapped Lord Mowbry. “He’s already said that money wasn’t his motive.” Mowbry glared at Clive with piercing blue eyes over a hooked nose and a stern patrician mouth. “We need you in this venture, Monroe. You know the way these people think. No one pulls the wool over your eyes. That’s why we sought you out for this. This whole scheme hinges on having a man with actual experience in this sort of thing.”

It amused Clive that neither Mowbry nor the others would actually put a name to what it was they were planning. Clive appreciated the circumspection while at the same time mentally labeling these moneyed and powerful men as amateurs. It was one thing to make fortunes in trading currencies as Sheffield had or in genetic animal husbandry as the other two, Bakersfield and Dunwoody, had, or in agriculture, as had Mowbry’s family for the last five hundred years, but the men were stepping out into very different territory here. Their scheme, at its simplest, was to purchase bulk genetic research from bankrupt companies of the former Soviet Union. Millions of man-hours of research was lying inert in various public and private businesses throughout Russia, Tajikistan, and Latvia. Much of it was badly out of date, having been abandoned in the financial crash following the dissolution of the Soviet state, but Mowbry and his overseas partners knew that whole sections of this material could boost existing research for their client companies. The key was to acquire the data and use modern networked computers to separate unexplored or underexplored areas of research from the chaff of commonly known information. Soviet scientists were often radical in their research, bypassing or ignoring international prohibitions on certain aspects of human and animal research.

The idea had been Mowbry’s initially after he’d acquired a set of old hard drives in which he found unexpectedly useful data on transgenic salmon that led his small company to ultimately produce a salmon that was an average of 8 percent larger than the usual salmon. That 8 percent weight jump put millions into his pocket. Mowbry discreetly purchased other defunct research materials, most of which were wastes of time and money, but two years ago he found research on growth hormones
for cattle that was unlike anything in development anywhere. His cattle farms in South and Central America had become gold mines.

The problem was that the cat was out of the bag. Other buyers had started vying for the same research, and Russia itself was trying to claim ownership over much of it. The materials had to be gotten sooner rather than later, before a bidding war made the whole thing cost prohibitive. They’d gotten an extra window of a couple of years when the U.S. economy imploded in the fall of 2008, but now that biotech was universally viewed as one of the safest growth industries, a feeding frenzy was starting.

The real problem was that a lot of the best materials were only available on the black market or through brokers who were ex–Soviet military. Greedy, heartless, and ruthless men who did not follow the normal rules of business. Not even the accepted rules of under-the-table international business. What Mowbry and his colleagues needed was a man who spoke the same language, someone who had once swum in these shark-infested waters. Someone who was himself a shark. Someone like Clive Monroe.

“You say that money isn’t your motive,” said Mowbry quietly. “Let’s put that to the test, Monroe. We talked and we’re willing to provide an extra half-million pounds. Call it a signing bonus.”

Clive steepled his fingers and rested his chin on his fingertips.

A half million on top of the 3 million they were already offering. Though he didn’t let it show on his face, the figure made Clive’s pulse jump. When he’d left MI6 twenty years ago he’d left behind the spy game and the dirty intrigues that went with it. And yet he still maintained his network of contacts. Just in case. Until now he had thought he would need the contacts in case his country ever needed him again, but as the years passed he realized that the old Cold Warriors belonged to a different age of the world. Now his network was worth more to men like these and he was no longer a hero of the state but a commodity no different from the things Mowbry and his colleagues bought and sold every day. Even so . . . three and a half million pounds. Untaxable, deposited offshore.

“If I were to agree,” he said slowly, watching the predatory gleam in the eyes of each of the men, “then my name appears on no records. We don’t sign papers; I don’t sit on any boards; I’m not listed as an advisor. Essentially I’m a ghost. At most I’m a friend who meets some gentlemen once in a while at the races.”

“Not a problem,” said Sheffield.

“Second condition. The half-million
bonus
is matched by a similar fee at the other end. If I can get the bulk research packages from Chechnya and Vilnius—”

“And Kazakhstan,” added one of the other MPs.

Clive nodded. “Those three. If I get all three, then I get the second bonus.”

The partners exchanged looks, but Mowbry looked hard at Clive. “Very well.”

“Last condition,” Clive said.

“You want a lot,” Sheffield muttered.

“You ask a lot. This last part is not negotiable. I do this for you and then I’m out.”

None of the other men looked happy about that. Mowbry frowned and shook his head. “Can we agree that once this is over we can
discuss
other projects? You can decide on a case-by-case basis.”

Clive smiled. “My prices would very likely go up in that eventuality.”

“We’re not Arabs haggling over a rug, Monroe. We know what you’re worth, and if another batch of research comes up that we must have, then we’ll make you an appropriate offer.”

Clive Monroe thought about it for a full three minutes. Mowbry and the others held their tongues, each of them afraid to say anything to break the spell of the moment.

“Very well,” Clive said, and he stood up. The others stood as well and they all shook hands, clapping Clive on the back, congratulating one another.

“Time for champagne,” declared Mowbry. He plucked a chilled bottle of Bollinger from an ice bucket and held it up for inspection. “I knew you’d agree, Monroe. I knew I could count on you.”

Suddenly the champagne bottle exploded, showering them all with wine and bubbles and tiny splinters of glass. There was no bang, no hiss of troubled gasses from the bottle. It just disintegrated and showered the room, leaving Lord Mowbry holding the neck in which the cork was still firmly seated.

“Bloody hell!” cried Sheffield, pawing at his clothes and stepping back as if trying to back away from the mess on his suit.

Mowbry looked shocked and embarrassed. “Good lord,” he said, aghast, “the bottle must have been shaken or—”

He stopped speaking and stared at Clive, who was similarly spattered with champagne but who had a peculiar smile on his face, as if he’d just remembered something wryly amusing. His eyes has lost their calculating coldness and stared at the other men without focus.

“My dear fellow,” Mowbry began, tentatively reaching for Clive, afraid that the exploding bottle had cut him. “Your chest . . .”

Clive looked down. His tie hung askew and his coat unbuttoned. The crisp white of his shirt was dark with moisture, but not with the pale stains of wine. From the center of his chest a red flower bloomed, spreading petals of crimson that vanished under the folds of his jacket.

“I—”

His knees abruptly buckled and he dropped to the floor with a heavy thud of bone on carpet.

Sheffield looked from Clive to the broken bottle and then, driven by some premonition of horror, turned to the big picture window. There was a single hole punched through the reinforced glass with dozens of crooked cracks spreading out in a spiderweb pattern.

The second shot exploded the entire pane of glass and this time the bullet—unheard and unseen—punched a hole above Clive’s left eyebrow and blew out the back of his head. Bone and brain splashed the back wall of the box. The crashing of the thick glass and the terrified shouts of the four men muffled the sound of Clive Monroe’s body crumpling backward onto the carpet. The sound of the gunshot report drifted lazily toward them from far away.