The Storm Protocol (54 page)

He motioned Tony to
get back behind the wheel and slid into the rear, next to his right hand man.

‘You look pleased with yourself, but in a slightly depressed kind of way.’ said Ben, half statement and half question.

‘Let's just call it a matter of life and death and leave it at that,’ said David mysteriously.

Ben looked at him strangely, but he didn't seem to be joking.

‘Leave it Ben,’ added David. ‘Maybe I’ll tell you over a glass of whiskey someday. At the moment we have other things to concentrate on.’

‘True,’ said Ben.

They journeyed the rest of the way in silence; one of them thinking about the implications of success and the other thinking about the implications of failure. Ben looked at his watch. They were about five minutes early. David made no move to get out, so neither did Ben.

‘We’ll wait for them in the car,’ said David. ‘We can all go in together then.’

They sat in silence for another minute or so.

‘Do you have everything you need? You brought it all with you?’

Ben placed his briefcase on his knees and patted it in a self satisfied way.

‘I always carry it with me; all of it. I don’t trust the safe to something this valuable.’

David glanced across and then lapsed into silence again.

‘Someone’s coming,’
interrupted Tony suddenly.

They all watched as a large black limousine pulled into the business park, slowly negotiating the roundabout before pulling up outside the building. David looked at his watch. It was five pm exactly; an impressive display of timekeeping. They watched for two or three minutes. There was no movement of any kind from the dark Mercedes.

‘Looks like we’ll have to make the first move,’ said David. ‘Tony, would you do the honours?’

Tony grunted and got out of the car. He proceeded to Ben’s side and opened his door first. As Ben slid out, Tony stepped around the back and repeated the procedure
on the other side.

Ben waited at the front of the car, briefcase in hand
, as David joined him. They walked over to the waiting car, both of them feeling a tiny bit foolish and more than a little exposed.

They waited, each holding their breath as the tension built.

Suddenly, the passenger door flew open, causing them to both jump slightly and then exchange mildly uncomfortable glances. As they watched, an enormous man got out and regarded them inscrutably for a few seconds.

‘Antonio?’ ventured Ben hesitantly.

The big man nodded. He moved to the back and opened the door. He bent down and they heard low voices. Then two men stepped out in quick succession and turned to face them.

Ben and David approached the two older men slowly, heeding the warning in Antonio’s eyes. To David, they looked like ordinary old men. He didn’t have a point of
reference really, as his father had been pretty young when he’d died, but he had been expecting them to have more of a presence. Granted, with their sharp suits, piercing eyes and slicked back hair, they did look like the archetypal mobsters, but even so; he’d been expecting Al Pacino.

‘David McCabe?’ asked
one, and David immediately revised his opinion. This was a voice used to command; used to getting its own way.

‘Mr Mancini,’ acknowledged
David, walking forward and taking a surprisingly firm handshake.

‘Guido, please,’ said the man, in a harsh New York brogue. ‘And this is my brother
, Ernesto.’

‘Pleased to meet you both,’ said David
, shaking the other hand.

He indicated Ben.

‘You both know my associate, Ben Collins; well, you’ve spoken on the phone at least.’

They nodded and more handshakes took place.

‘Well,’ said David, ‘shall we go in?’

He indicated the main entrance and they were about to go through, when a car came screaming into the estate. David noticed the small Hertz sticker on the rear window as it braked to a halt in a shower of small stones.

‘Who’s this joker?’ asked David, as Bill came rushing over.

Ben could see the security guard instinctively reaching
under his jacket for his weapon and motioned him surreptitiously to hold off for a second.

The stranger walked up to the group of men, laughing quietly to
himself.

‘What’s this?’ he asked. ‘Guido, did you not tell your hosts that I was coming?’

#

I kept the glasses trained on the entrance. When the BMW arrived and the three men got out, I passed the glasses to Dale and then Roussel.

‘That must be David McCabe and Ben Collins,’ said Roussel.

‘A reasonable guess,’ I said.

‘Hang on,’ said Roussel. ‘What’s this?’

We saw a large limousine sweep around the roundabout and into the car park. I clicked my fingers impatiently at Roussel
, who reluctantly handed the glasses back.

As I focussed
, I felt the familiar flip in my stomach; Antonio, Guido and Ernesto. They had been my friends and colleagues, and dare I say it, family for many years. I still felt the conflicting emotions.

‘Is it the Mancini’s?’ asked Dale excitedly.

I nodded slowly. Then I saw another car scream into the car park.

‘Who’s that?’ asked Roussel.

As he got out of the car, he looked around him. The last time I had seen those eyes had been on the other side of the window ledge in my mother’s house, framed in plaster dust.

‘This is starting to get interesting,’ I murmured. ‘Our double dealing CIA f
riend is back; the one from my mum’s house. He must be the mole.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Roussel.

I nodded absently without replying. I had seen a flash of movement across the fields. I swung the glasses over and saw four men crouching behind a stone wall. They were talking quietly, and as they moved I saw the glint of sun on blue steel.

‘Looks like things are really starting to heat up now,’ I said.

I tapped the holdall beside me.

‘Good job we have some means of cooling things down.’

23
rd
May 2011 – Thirteen days after the Storm.

Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live. When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory. – Sun Tzu.

Bill watched the
executives
entering the building with a mixture of amusement and contempt. Who were they kidding? He knew what they did, despite the elaborate subterfuge.

He was similar to
someone who worked in a brewery or a cigarette factory. You didn't have to like smoking or drinking to work there, but it paid the bills and he had to admit; this job really did pay very well.

He thought of his daughter
, struggling to forge a normal life with cystic fibrosis. When he thought of her, his qualms were easy to dismiss.

Ben had told him
that they had special guests coming this evening, so he’d stepped up the security accordingly. Normally, there were only two, this evening there were seven. He’d also rostered himself on to manage and coordinate.

Bill let a polite interval elapse before he followed his employers and
their guests back through the front entrance.

‘Hey c
hief,’ said Vinnie, the guard behind the desk.

Another ex soldier, he was almost impossibly cheerful
, almost all of the time.

‘Hey Vinnie,’ said Bill. ‘Can you tell me what zones are alarmed at the moment?’

Vinnie checked the panel behind his head, squinting over the top of his reading glasses.

‘All zones alarmed except the upstairs offices and the reception area,’ said Vinnie.

‘Okay, switch off the zones on the main production floor,’ said Bill, ‘but keep all the external access points alarmed.’

‘You got it, chief,’ replied
Vinnie.

‘You going out for a fag?’ asked Bill, extracting his pack and his lighter.

‘It’s awfully tempting, chief,’ he said, ‘but I’ve been off them since Good Friday. I really want to give it a go this time.’

‘Wish I had your willpower,’ said Bill with a smile.

‘So do I,’ said Vinnie, with an answering smile.

Bill walked back
the way he had come in, out through the reception doors, and felt the cool West of Ireland breeze fresh on his face. They were near the sea and he could feel the salt hanging in the atmosphere. He inhaled deeply, a large lungful of the fresh life-sustaining elixir. He put a cigarette in his mouth, thinking how ironic it was that he was just about to deliberately pollute the pure clean air of his last breath.

He cupped his hand around the lighter and pressed the switch, but the wind blew the flame out immediately. He swivelled until he felt the wind on his back and then clicked the switch again. As he did so, he saw a flicker of movement.

It took him a couple of milliseconds to register the gun that the crouching intruder was holding out in front of him. A couple of milliseconds more and he had identified the fact that there was a silencer screwed into the barrel.

He saw the muzzle flash and felt the small stones kicked up against his legs
, as the bullet impacted between his feet. The cigarette dropped from his lips and the lighter dropped from his hands as he dived sideways, reaching under his jacket as he did so.

In his mind, he was immediately transported back to the Lebanon and some Arab terrorist was trying to kill him. He fell heavily and winded himself, partly because of his age and partly because his hand was inside his jacket
, probing for the gun.

Even though he was almost breathless,
he kept rolling. He knew it was his only chance to evade the bullets. His hand closed around the butt of the weapon and still he kept rolling. He could hear the sound of the silencer in a measured beat, the whistle and whine of the bullets as the words of his training ground instructor came back to him.

‘Always a moving target son,’ he’d shouted at the top of his voice. ‘You always need to be a moving target!’

The sound of silencer and bullets ceased and he heard the unmistakable sound of a clip being loaded. He took a chance and stopped rolling, turning onto his back. His own weapon cleared his jacket and he aimed and fired almost simultaneously, just as his assailant’s barrel came up. The report from his weapon drowned out the small
phut
of the silenced round. He felt a stinging pain in his shoulder, but at the same time he heard a cry of agony. He rolled again and the pain in his shoulder intensified.

He tried to ignore it, instead focusing all his energy on staying alive. As he turned onto his back again, he held the gun in front of him. Cautiously, he inched his head up off the ground to look ahead and saw his assailant sprawled
between clumps of rough grass and heather.

Bill levered himself up with difficulty and walked slowly towards the shooter. His army training had always instilled in him the need to go for the big targets. By a combination of luck and design, he had hit the man squarely in the chest. By the look of it, his heart was gone. The stranger’s eyes had rolled up into his head and he was scrabbling weakly at the ground.

‘You shot me, you bastard!’ shouted Bill.

It was all he could think of to say.

Suddenly his legs buckled. At the same instant, he felt a terrible pain in his chest as he sank to his knees. He looked down in surprise to register the fact that his crisp white shirt was turning red with blood. The shock of the discovery seemed to drain the strength from his body and the gun slipped from his powerless fingers. His vision started to cloud. He lifted his head with difficulty and saw the outline of a man framed against the sun.

‘So did I,’ said a voice in heavily accented English.

By the time Pavel heard the silenced report of his second shot echo off the hills behind him, the impact of the actual bullet had knocked Bill backwards in a messy twisted heap of limbs. Pavel walked up and spat on the blood soaked body and then savagely kicked it. He hadn't been expecting to encounter any resistance, let alone lose a member of his team.

His earpiece barked into life. He transmitted his reply. Two of the targets had been neutralised
, but were alive. Bill had also been neutralised, but he had not been so lucky.

Pavel was not happy. As he walked into the main reception, he was not in the mood for chit chat. Vinnie looked up, not yet registering anything except surprise.

‘Hey,’ he shouted. ‘You can’t....’

He hit the desk with a loud thud. Two shots to the head; Pavel couldn’t be bothered messing around trying to disarm people any more. Vinnie was stone dead, even before his head
slammed into the front desk.

Pavel walked around the desk
, grabbed the prone guard by the collar and dragged him to the floor behind the counter where he wouldn’t be casually spotted. Turning his attention to the Alarm panel, he opened the front cover and studied it implacably for about a minute. He seemed to come to a decision. He took a spare clip from his inside pocket and reloaded. Whipping the gun up suddenly, he emptied the entire magazine into the panel, which duly exploded in an electrical cacophony of hisses and crackles. He closed the front cover to hide the devastation.

He hit the transmit button on his headset again.

‘Team one in position, all objectives achieved,’ he said.

Black Swan and Dave heard it from their place of concealment.

‘Roger that,’ said Dave. ‘Teams two, three and four, I want you to standby for further orders.’

Eoin grabbed Dave’s shoulder.

‘I want all the major players taken alive and unharmed,’ he said. ‘I repeat; David McCabe, Ben Collins, Guido and Ernesto Mancini and the rest of their colleagues must remain unharmed. Other collateral damage is permitted; I won't cry about the security personnel, but the main players must be unharmed, do you understand?’

Dave nodded.

‘Unharmed,’ said Eoin again, to emphasise his point.

‘Okay, Teams two, three and four, you are a go. Secure the perimeter and then secure the building. No injuries other than to security staff. I
repeat, no injuries other than to hired security.’

‘Roger,’ Dave heard three times, from three slightly different voices.

The table was set and the pieces were now moving.

#

There was an awkward silence as they clustered around David McCabe's conference-room table.

‘Who is this arsehole?’ asked David eventually.

‘Let's just say that I am the provider of all your future bounty,’ said the stranger grandly.

‘What he means to say,’ said Guido disdainfully, ‘is that he is a double agent, the man who provided us with the opportunity to acquire Storm.’

‘Hey, don’t knock it,’ said the stranger. ‘You need people like me.’

‘I agree, you have your uses,’ acknowledged Ernesto sourly. ‘But a man without honour is not a man.’

‘Fuck you,’ said the stranger.

He felt Antonio bristle and Ernesto put a warning hand on his arm.

‘That’s right, keep your pet monkey at bay,’ sneered the stranger.

Antonio sat back and smiled. The smile told the stranger that if the opportunity ever presented itself, Antonio would not hesitate.

‘You need to be very careful Mr....’ responded Guido.

‘No names,’ said the s
tranger sharply, with the first hint of anxiety.

‘Whatever,’ said
Guido, ‘but let me just say Mr No-name, that you seem to have hurt his feelings, and Antonio has a very long memory.’

The s
tranger shrugged dismissively.

‘I’ll take my chances.’

Ben had been watching the proceedings carefully, waiting patiently for an opening. He took the opportunity and cleared his throat politely.

‘Ever the diplomat, eh Mr Collins?’ said the
stranger. ‘Let me guess. You want the missing piece of the puzzle, would I be right?’

Ben ignored the s
tranger.

‘Do you have the addendum?’ he asked Guido formally.

Guido snapped his fingers and Antonio placed a small attaché case on the desk in front of them. They all heard the familiar double-click as the latches were released and the lid was opened. Antonio extracted a twenty page document held together with a large paper clip. Ben and David exchanged a look of relief.

In turn, Ben slid a much larger document across the table.

‘Final contract for review,’ he said.

Guido clicked his fingers for Antonio to pick it up.

‘Our lawyers will look it over,’ he said disdainfully.

‘I expected nothing less,’ said Ben, trying to stifle a smile.

‘Can we see the production lines?’ asked Ernesto, trying to suppress his eagerness.

He was the operational one of the brothers; the one who understood project planning and logistics, and loved seeing the end product of both.

‘Certainly,’ said David.

He cocked an eyebrow at his colleague.

‘Ben?’ he asked enquiringly.

‘Follow me,’ said Ben.

He led the way, with the Mancini’s tagging directly behind. Antonio and the stranger brought up the rear, with David joined onto the end of the motley caravan.

Ben led them down the stairs and through reception. He flashed his badge at the proximity reader and entered his pin, and proceeded to hold the door open as the others filtered through.

This was Ben’s first mistake in almost six months of meticulous planning. In his haste and eagerness to please, he had completely missed the lack of security guard in reception.

It would come back to haunt him.

He walked over to the main lighting panel. Even though it was dark, he knew exactly where it was. He flicked all of the switches up and everyone blinked in the sudden harsh artificial light.

‘What was that?’ asked Ernesto suddenly.

‘What was what?’ asked Ben, as he walked back to the main party.

‘I thought I heard a noise,’ he said.

‘Must be just the wind outside,’ said Ben.

That particular second, a hundred yards away, one of the wires in the ravaged alarm panel gave up its desperate fight. The tensile st
rength of the individual strand, all that was left of the original siren wire, was not enough to overcome the natural inclination of the burnished copper to pull away from the panel.

The second the strand
gave way, the wire popped and the building erupted in a cacophony of sound. The sirens were so loud they hurt. The occupants had to shield their ears. David was livid, but as he glanced over at Ben he saw his friend’s jaw drop in astonishment. David followed the direction that Ben was looking and his expression hardened. Two security guards were walking towards them in handcuffs, being alternately dragged and pushed by four men armed with pistols.