Ice Cold Kill (24 page)

An array of surgical tools had been provided for the doctor. He was told not to bother bringing his own, since Asher intended to have them destroyed once he was done.

On the first of two tables lay a plastic body bag, fully zipped up. The bag was bloated and looked vaguely like a mutant bean pod. Rabadeau reached out with one gloved finger and touched the bag. It undulated the way a bag half-filled with liquid will.

He slowly unzipped the bag a fourth of the way to reveal the head, neck, and shoulders of a cadaver, male, late thirties, early forties, short dark hair, aquiline nose, sturdy jaw. There were brown stains—dried blood—looking like rivulets running from his eye sockets, his nose, his ears, his mouth. His face was pallid, the color of old mushrooms.

“Total exsanguination,” Dr. Rabadeau whispered to himself, his voice unnaturally echoic inside the helmet.

In grease pencil, someone had stenciled the name
SACCHS
on the side of the bag. Below that were two entries of dates and times. Time of Infection and Time of Death.

He picked up a glass slide and a dropper, gathered a bit of the pooled blood in the partially unzipped bag, and dabbed it on the slide. He fit another slide atop it and slid the glass sandwich into a slot in the RNA analyzer Asher had imported from Finland just for this moment.

Rabadeau made a second blood-and-glass sandwich and slid this one into a high-powered microscope. It was impossible to get one’s eye close enough to the face shield of the helmet to look through a microscope viewfinder. Fortunately, his hosts had set up a digital camera and monitor, bypassing the oculars. Rabadeau activated the monitor.

He stared at the image.

“Mother of God,” he muttered.

“P-pl—”

The RNA analyzer behind him
dinged
.

Rabadeau shuffled his plastic slippers over to the analyzer, as data scrolled across its monitor screen. A series of four letters flashed across the screen: A, C, G, U, over and over again, in a never-ending salad of combinations. Georges Rabadeau couldn’t read the nucleic acid alphabet, of course. There wasn’t a human soul who could. That’s what the analyzer was for.

“Pl-please…”

The machine made another sound, and the four-letter novella was replaced by words in English. Rabadeau had studied medicine in England. He had no problem translating it.

He shook his head in wonderment, his helmet not moving. “Good lord.”

“Please … by … God … please…”

The nuisance from the second gurney was getting to Dr. Rabadeau. He straightened up from the RNA analyzer and turned.

The man strapped to the gurney, already in a body bag but not yet zipped in, looked directly into his eyes. The man was bleeding out from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. His skin was ashen. A roadmap of capillaries had burst inside his eyes. Rabadeau noted the petechial hemorrhaging, nodding to himself, unsurprised by the damage. It was consistent with his diagnosis.

Someone had scrawled on the body bag the name
VEIGEL.
Unlike the other one, there was only one time and date below his name: the moment of his infection. The time of death entry was blank.

“M-mercy…” the man rasped, and a ruby red bubble popped at the corner of his lips. “Kill … me…”

Rabadeau turned away, studied the analyzer again, then shuffled over to the tent’s revolving door.

*   *   *

Daria climbed down the wooden ladder into the building. She pulled the hood of the sleeveless sweatshirt up, tucking in her hair. She wished the undershirt wasn’t white; not ideal for skulking. She shoved the shirt sleeves up to minimize the glint.

At the bottom of the ladder, she paused to let her eyes adjust to the moonless gloom. She knelt and found distinctive boot prints in the thick dust, heading to her left. That was the way to go. She followed the footprints to a square opening sawed into the floor near the exterior wall. Horizontal, C-shaped lengths of rebar had been bolted to the wall to create a makeshift ladder. The centers of the rungs had been wiped clean of dust.

Daria slipped the Glock into her skirt, at the hollow of her spine, then pulled the sweatshirt over it. She took a deep breath, then gripped the rebar and climbed down.

This took her to the second floor, where someone had tied a red kerchief to one of the ladder rungs, probably to mark it as a safe route to and from the roof.

The floorboards at this level were in disastrous shape, with jagged, gaping holes here and there. Again, she knelt to study dusty footprints, letting her enemy do the work for her. She followed a zigzag course toward the far end of the wide-open second floor, toward what appeared to be a set of stairs heading down.

*   *   *

One of Asher’s men sprayed down the pathologist’s Tychem moon suit with water and chlorine, then helped him remove the oxygen tank and the helmet.

The mercenaries and soldiers stood in a half circle, watching.

Georges Rabadeau stepped out of the biohazard suit and slipped his feet back into his loafers. He shrugged into his suit coat, straightened his tie, shot his cuffs. Only then did he make eye contact with Asher Sahar, who stood, quiet, arms folded so his hands held his biceps, as if hugging himself, light glinting off his round, wireless glasses.

“Yes?” Asher said simply.

“I did not think it possible but … yes.”

The pathologist wiped his brow with a handkerchief from his breast pocket. “The times written on the body bag. Are they accurate?”

“They are.”

Rabadeau’s hands trembled. “Incredible. May I wash up?”

Asher made eye contact with the Ivorian bodyguard. “This way,” the thin man said, and led the pathologist away from the tent and toward a makeshift bathroom.

The big, blue-eyed American, Will Halliday, lit up the white cube room with his grin. “Told ya.”

“By God,” Eli Schullman marveled. “We did it.”

“Well”—Asher offered a self-deprecating shrug—“we
stole
it. We didn’t splice the unholy thing together. And we have Agent Halliday to thank for helping us acquire it. Will.”

He shook the American’s hand. Will Halliday beamed. “I knew it’d work.”

Eli Schullman shook his hand, too. The ex–Secret Service agent grinned like a kid at Christmas. “I’m gonna check the perimeter.”

He headed toward the door.

Schullman waited until he was out of earshot. “I don’t mind saying it: I had my doubts about him. I was wrong.”

Asher nodded. “Mr. Halliday was a gamble. But he lost many friends in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has learned to hate well.”

Schullman said, “Well, we could never have done it without him.”

“True.”

Schullman looked around the white, plastic room. “We’ll leave his body here?”

“With the canisters, yes. As far as the CIA is concerned, the trail ends in Paris.”

Schullman nodded.

*   *   *

The pilot of Le Tigre toggled his communications array. “The Israeli has descended into the factory. Still no sign of the Syrian.”

Unlike most conventional gunships, in Le Tigre the pilot sits forward and to the left, the gunner in back and to the right. This configuration gives the gunner an unobstructed view out the front windshield.

The pilot turned as far as his five-point seat restraints would allow. “Can I get thermal imaging? Let’s see what they’re up to.”

A heads-up display projected onto the windshield showed the factory, but via infrared. Oval orbs of light moved about.

The gunner’s voice came back through the pilot’s helmet. “We have … I estimate ten, maybe twelve hostiles, on the ground floor. That blob up there is the Israeli now on the second floor.”

The pilot relayed the tactical information to the command vehicle.

*   *   *

Colonel Céline Trinh wasn’t happy about losing visual on target number one, particularly when target number two had yet to be located by anyone on the ground or by her eye-in-the-sky.

“Colonel?”

She turned as one of her communications techies doffed a headset. “The Americans are halfway across the pond.”

He meant the CIA strike team heading to Paris in their modified 757. Trinh understood the subtext of the message: If the Americans were close enough to Europe before the colonel’s team was ready to make its move, the Americans would request a weapons-hold status until they arrived. They also would put pressure on the Defense Ministry and the Interior Ministry and on Parliament and on the damned wife of the president, if necessary, in order to take over operational command.

Colonel Trinh was not having any of that.

She moved her voice wand closer to her lips. “Ground units. Move in.”

*   *   *

Belhadj watched the military-intelligence surveillance teams, and from his perch, a hundred meters up the side of a grain silo, the change from hold to go was dramatic. Agents in vehicles and on foot began moving as if directed by an invisible choreographer. His trained ear heard the first sounds of a helicopter drawing closer. It was not a commercial bird. It was a raptor.

*   *   *

On the second floor of the warehouse, Daria slid the Glock out of her skirt waistband. She stepped gingerly forward, her boots falling silently on the fresh boot prints of Asher’s team. She was halfway to the stairs when one of the second-story windows, on the north side, shattered.

A high-caliber bullet tore into a floorboard, twenty meters in front of her. What the hell?

She calculated the angle: From high, coming in low. It had to have come from Belhadj.

Translation?
Hurry!

Then all hell erupted.

Eighteen

Asher lifted a pack on to a sawhorse and unzipped it partway. It was as tightly packed as a parachute. It held two folded, white canvas sheaths: more body bags. Like the first two, there were places for names, infection dates, and death dates. Like the other two, the material had been picked because it would burn well once the interior of the pressurized infection tent was set ablaze.

Will Halliday had just checked the factory perimeter and sauntered back to the group. He saw Asher study the white bundle inside the pack. “What’s that?”

Asher studied the name tags, barely visible where the holdall was unzipped. They read
GEORGES RABADEAU
and
WILL HALLIDAY.
He carefully stuffed the white material back into the holdall and zipped it up. He looked up through his lenses at the big American and smiled.

“Stowing our gear. We’re moving out soon.”

Halliday nodded.

Eli Schullman casually worked his way around behind the blond American and slid a titanium hunting knife from its leather scabbard. He made eye contact with Asher, who nodded slightly.

Somewhere inside the factory, broken glass tinkled.

Schullman, sidling up behind the American, paused.

Asher pretended to brush dust off his palms as he turned 360 degrees.

Halliday had heard the noise. “You got rats, buddy?”

“We do. But they don’t generally break glass.”

Eli Schullman stepped back and slid his knife into its sheath. He reached for the ArmaLite with banana clip and vanadium barrel.

Halliday palmed a stubby, matte-black .9 mm Ruger and held it taut against his left thigh.

The Ivorian picked up the vibe next and positioned himself slightly ahead of the pathologist, whom he had been tasked to protect.

Dr. Rabadeau had missed the tensing up of the others. He refolded his pocket kerchief. “Remarkable bit of recombinant science, this. If I may?” He offered a clever smile and gestured toward the containment tent. “The Russian? Tuychiev?”

The rest of the solders were on guard now, picking up cues from their cohorts. Asher said, “You know Tuychiev?”

“Yes, yes. We have exchanged compliments from time to time. His recombinant RNA has a certain flair. I recognize his, ah, signature.”

“Ah. Fellow artists.” Asher listened for more sounds of trouble. “He’s an ethnic Tajik, you know. Tuychiev. Not Russian at all. These distinctions are important. To some of us.”

The doctor brushed lint off his shoulder. “Of course. And
fellow artists
may be overstating it. I am not in János Tuychiev’s league. He’s brilliant. But in my own humble way—”

A groan reached them from the street. It was a heavy vehicle on tractor treads. All of the soldiers came to a stop. They all knew the distinctive rumble. It was an armored war wagon. With the windows boarded over, pitch added between boards, and inside the white cube room, most street sounds were muffled. The fact that they heard this truck approach, then heard it rapidly decelerate, was telling.

Asher turned to Schullman and adjusted his glasses. “Exit, please.”

Dr. Rabadeau said, “Is there a prob—”

Just then, one of the boarded-over windows on the ground floor exploded.

*   *   *

Colonel Trinh believed in the strong opening gambit, especially against an adversary as infamous as the Syrian Mukhabarat. If the Americans were correct and this Major Belhadj had allied himself with the Israeli
trafiquant d’armes
, then it was best to assume he was well armed and well protected.

If the Gibron woman was in the factory, Belhadj likely was as well. Plus, one of Trinh’s advance teams had reported hearing sound-suppressed rifle fire from the general vicinity of the factory roof. No telling what that meant.

Given an armed and entrenched opponent, the urban assault vehicle was Trinh’s gambit of choice. Being smaller than a conventional tank meant it could accelerate and decelerate quickly, and could negotiate narrow urban streets. On her command, the small tank roared up the four blocks from its hiding point, the driver gunning the engine, then slamming on the brakes directly outside the factory with the dozen-or-so heat signatures clustered around the first floor.