Ice Cold Kill (19 page)

Daria unscrewed the bottle and toppled it.

The acidic liquid spilled onto the Algerian’s face and he hacked a panicky cough, spitting out alcohol.

Belhadj took another step back to avoid the bubbling alcohol from hitting his boots.

Daria looked up. “Give me your lighter, please.” She spoke in Arabic.

LeClerc reverted to high-pitched Arabic. “Please, no! For the sake of God, no! Please!”

The alcohol bubbled onto his face.

Daria looked up. “Your lighter. Now.”

The man on the floor coughed and sobbed.

Daria shook him. “There’s an Israeli team in Paris. They are working with the Viking. Have they contacted you?”

“Please stop!”

Daria snapped her fingers. “Lighter!”

“Yes! The Viking is flying them in! Using his airplanes! They arrive tonight! Stop, please!”

Daria looked up at Belhadj, whose eyebrows rose.

“Who is running the Israelis?”

“I don’t know! The thin man! The scholar! Glasses!”

Daria felt her chest tighten.

“Did you hook them up?” She referred to the Algerian’s famed countersurveillance equipment, which was a must-have for covert intelligence operations in France.

“Yes! But I don’t know what they are doing! They tell me nothing! I swear!”

Daria’s smile held a predatory glow. “I believe you. I do. But French intelligence upgrades their surveillance protocols regularly. You have to be able to warn the Israelis if that were to happen. Yes?”

*   *   *

Twenty minutes later, LeClerc sat in a chair in the back of his shop, rocking slightly, holding a cool cloth against his eyes, bloodshot from the cleanser, those same eyes never straying far from Daria’s legs. He refused to look up or to make eye contact with her. He made no show of recognizing her from her previous visits to his shop.

Daria found a minifridge with a walnut-sized knot of indeterminate cheese and a Spanish apple. She began devouring the food.

“Will the Israelis contact you?” Belhadj went to his haunches and asked softly in Arabic.

“No. I told them I could provide a patch, if the DCRI changes their cyberprotocols.” That sentence didn’t translate well, so LeClerc reverted to French.

Belhadj glanced up at Daria.

“
Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur.
French interior intelligence.”

The Syrian nodded. He turned back to LeClerc. “So you can contact them, but they are unlikely to contact you?”

LeClerc wiped snot off his nose with his sleeve. He nodded.

Belhadj scrounged around the cash register desk and came up with a well-chewed pen and the final few pages of a notepad, a half-inch wall of gummy substance marking the top of the sheets. “The number?”

LeClerc told him.

Daria said, “Their frequencies?”

LeClerc glanced at her long brown legs, still not making eye contact. He nodded, then recited numbers. Belhadj wrote those down as well.

Daria, starving, gobbled the Spanish apple. “And their emergency backup freq—”

“Yes! All right!” LeClerc gave up that frequency, too. Belhadj jotted it down.

Daria sighed with the contentment of a cat and licked apple juice off her fingers.

The Algerian dabbed at his red eyes. He spoke to the floor. “Whatever you are doing, this is not my business. Yes? You come, you go. The Israelis, the president, the Viking, I am not caring. I just want to earn the living.”

Belhadj, kneeling, became very still. Daria maintained a serene face while cursing the stupid Algerian and all of his bloodline.

Belhadj drew his handgun, but did so in a way that did not appear threatening. Daria had no idea how anyone did that. “I appreciate what you said,” he told LeClerc. “Discretion is important.”

“Of course. Discretion is my business. I don’t speak to—”

Daria swiveled, weight on one leg.

Belhadj reacted like lightning, putting distance between them, his gun rising.

Daria’s boot connected with the spot directly beneath the left ear of the hapless Algerian. His body seemed to shudder, then collapse in on itself. He fell straight back off the stool, arms outspread as if in supplication to his god, his lower legs propped up on the stool.

Belhadj aimed the Springfield at Daria’s sternum. Daria finished the apple, just staring emotionlessly at the Syrian.

The Algerian made a choking noise. His muscles quivered and became still.

Daria studied Belhadj’s slate eyes. His right eye was lined up perfectly with the barrel sites of the Springfield. She said, “If my goal had been to kick you…”

Belhadj released a few ounces of pressure off the trigger. “The idiot knew about the president, about the circulars.”

“There was no need to kill him.”

“He’ll remember we were here.”

“That kick? He won’t remember his mother.” She turned slowly and tossed the apple core in a rubbish bin under the counter. She held her back provocatively unprotected against the unwavering barrel of the auto. Now it was a waiting game.

But not a long one. Daria heard the shush of the gun gliding into its holster. She let loose the breath she’d been holding, but slowly so he wouldn’t notice.

Belhadj knelt over the Algerian, rooted through his pockets, and withdrew a cell phone. He stood.

“That was insanely stupid,” he told her. He hit ten buttons, waited, then spoke into the phone. “Hallo? It’s me.… Yes.… No names, thank you. I need you to track down a cell tower for me. No, I mean right now. This second.”

He listened a moment, then read out the telephone number LeClerc had given them.

“You have it? I will place a call to that number in sixty seconds. Tell me where it goes. Call me back.”

He rang off, still glaring at Daria.

She donned the headphones that LeClerc had been fiddling with. She recognized the music as French rap. She knew little of the genre and turned off the music, tossed aside the headphones. She flipped through the mildewed record albums. “That wasn’t Syrian intelligence, on the phone. Your communications protocols aren’t that loose.”

Belhadj leaned his butt against the counter, his long brown hair falling forward toward his razor-straight eyebrows. He tossed a gesture toward the bear rug of a man now decorating the dirty cement floor. “You believe the world is better off because that fool isn’t dead?”

Daria flipped through the albums and pretended to read a couple of the liner notes. She knew that saving LeClerc’s life would make her look weak. Good.

“There are tactical reasons to kill,” she said. “There are strategic reasons to kill. There are emotional reasons to kill. I admit to you, occasionally, there are fashion reasons to kill. Culottes come to mind.”

“What in God’s name are you—”

“Not important. My point is: killing a Rene LeClerc? Please. His death would only cause further problems down the road.”

He studied her, clearly disappointed. A minute lapsed. He dialed the number the Algerian had given them. He put the phone on speaker.

A phone, somewhere, rang three times.

They both heard a hoarse whisper.

“Hallo?”

Daria felt the air rush from her body. She felt a flood of emotions and no emotions whatsoever. She felt serene and psychotic, assured and adrift. She felt it all simultaneously

That whisper. That voice.

Belhadj disconnected the line. He studied the phone in his calloused hand a moment, then turned blue-gray eyes on Daria. He watched her face.

“I assume I don’t have to ask…?”

The phone in his hand rang again. Belhadj checked the incoming number, then answered. He listened. He found LeClerc’s pen and the old notepad again.

“Yes … yes. Somewhere within that block?”

He placed a palm over the phone and turned to Daria. “They’re in Paris already.” He returned to the phone. “And you’re sure … I understand. Get back to work. We have not spoken.”

He disconnected, tossed the mobile phone on to the stomach of the prostrate Algerian on the floor. “Well. We—”

And that’s when Belhadj noticed it.

When the Algerian had fallen backward, his baggy trousers had risen up, revealing a fat, plastic holster strapped to his left leg.

A holster. But not a weapon.

Belhadj spun toward Daria just as she pointed an electroshock weapon at his chest. She had stolen it from LeClerc at the beginning—when she had tossed her empty gun to Belhadj, a little high, forcing him to step back and take his eyes off them.

Daria pulled the plastic trigger but Belhadj managed to twist his torso. The tines of the electroshock weapon caught his shoulder and his jacket, not the thin shirt over his chest.

He grunted, stutter-stepped back, right arm constricting in pain, right knee giving out a little.

The Algerian’s weapon wasn’t a Taser but a cheap, generic knockoff. Not only had the shock been insufficient to knock Belhadj out, but that single shock was all the shabby weapon could muster.

Belhadj, wobbly but still standing, braced himself for her follow-up attack.

Daria tensed, then turned and bolted, her clunky boots a blur. She brushed up lightly against the counter, rounded it, hit the door of the electronics store and pivoted, digging deep and running all-out, arms churning.

Belhadj drew his auto but his hand balked, the muscles clenching, and the draw was slow and shaky. He started running, his muscle coordination a little off, his hip pinging off a display of guitar amplifiers that clattered resonantly to the floor.

Two seconds later, Belhadj burst out of the store, gun down and hidden by his jacket.

Daria was nowhere to be seen.

“Damn it!” he muttered to himself. He checked the streets, both directions. No passersby seemed to notice anything amiss.

Livid, he returned to the shop. He stopped to study the haphazard pyramid of cheap plywood amplifiers he’d toppled. He almost kicked them, but then didn’t, because he was a professional and professionals don’t—

Belhadj kicked the amps. They broke apart and skidded on the cement.

He waited for that to feel good. When it didn’t, he checked the floor behind the counter. LeClerc lay like the crucified, arms straight out, the phone resting on his concave chest.

Belhadj looked at the cash register.

The notepad was gone.

Airspace, Atlantic Ocean

Will Halliday, formerly of the Secret Service, and the two mercenaries he had dubbed “Sex” and “Violence” rode in a Beechcraft King, equipped with an extra fuel tank for the cross-Atlantic route. The plane had been provided by some Swede or Finn or whatever, whom Halliday had never heard of. He had to admit that the dude knew his business: the engine purred, the fake flight plan would pass the white-glove test, and the false registry numbers painted on the tail would have fooled anyone.

They were three hours away from arriving at a private airfield in France and almost five and a half hours behind Asher Sahar and his primary teams.

Before taking off, Will had insisted the Israelis store their handguns in a lockbox. He said it was standard aviation security.

Now, Will sat alone in the cockpit, whistling pop tunes off-key.

Sacchs lay in back on a foldout bench turned into a bed. Curled up in the fetal position, his skin glistened with sweat, he was holding his gut, while his elbows and knees and wrists and ankles all cramping horrendously. A thin white towel rested by his head, most of it saturated in the blood that ran in a steady stream from his nose and ears and mouth and even from his tear ducts. He twitched uncontrollably, partly from the pain and partly from the breakdown of his nervous system.

His fellow mercenary, Veigel, could do nothing to help. He sat at a padded bench across from his friend, holding another white towel over his own mouth, as his own nosebleed began.

Sacchs hacked a wet, bloody cough, droplets spraying Veigel’s pant legs and boots.

Veigel rose, unsteadily, hands shaking, and limped to the cabin door.

Will Halliday doffed his Mickey Mouse ears as the mercenary stepped onto the flight deck.

“How’s our guy?”

“Dying,” Veigel said, and spat blood into the towel he held. “The fuck is happening? I’ve got it, too.”

Halliday shrugged. “Damned if I know. Don’t worry, amigo. We’re heading to Asher. He’ll get us help.”

“Are you ill?”

“Me? Picture of health.”

“What did we steal from the Secret Service?”

“Printing plates and special paint, used for American currency.”

Veigel studied the big blond man for a while. Halliday kept his attention on the yoke and avionics displays.

After a moment, Veigel returned to his friend.

As soon as he was gone, Will Halliday adjusted the radio to a preestablished frequency. “Alpha Sierra, this is Whiskey Hotel. Over.”

A pause, and Asher Sahar’s cultured voice came back, very strong. “Whiskey Hotel: go.”

Halliday said simply, “Veigel is sick.”

Halliday waited as that news was absorbed.

“And he was never exposed to the canister?”

“Confirmed. He was exposed to Sacchs.”

“So it is airborne. You remain asymptomatic?”

Halliday grinned to himself. “I feel like a million bucks.”

Outside the cockpit window, he saw the first smudge of Ireland on the horizon.

“So it works.”

“Oh, hell yeah!” the American crowed. “You got yourself a flu you can aim like a gun.”

Fourteen

Paris

It took Daria no time to blend into the crowds coming and going in the eastward-facing railway station, Gare de l’Est. She ditched the long raincoat and the spent electroshock weapon. The crowds were hectic, the first hint of holiday throngs. She wended between clusters of tourists and businesspeople until she spotted a pickpocket and began following him from a discreet but close distance. The boy was good; deft, dexterous, and decent-looking. She liked the spit-shine cowlick; a nice, nerdy, endearing touch. Daria herself had been a better-than-average pickpocket when she had been much younger than this lad. She knew talent when she spotted it.