102

 

HIGHWAY 1, 7:35 P.M.

Dan lost the surveillance team with little effort. One car had peeled away, leaving just one vehicle following him. They weren’t first rate, but they weren’t bad either. He added that to the equation. How much time did he have before the intercept was listened to, acted on? A few hours, he hoped. Enough time to get into position. The darkness helped. He gave a grim smile. He had always been best in the dark.

He wished he’d had time to scope out the terrain; he wished he’d anticipated this. Too late for regrets. There was a small dirt track a few miles north of Hurricane Point. No one was tailing him. He had watched all the way, made sure, so he yanked the wheel, swung the Cougar off the road, bumped down the rough track, smiled as he saw the bend, followed it, out of sight of Highway 1. He came to the end of the track, maybe fifty feet above sea level, two hundred feet from the beach. He turned the car, parked tight against a huge bush, heedless of the scratches to his paintwork. Now the car was pointed ready for a quick getaway.

He got out his cell, rang Gwen’s house. No answer. He prayed it was because she wasn’t there. He shut off the engine, shut off the lights, rolled down his windows, listened and looked.

The wind roared, the rain hissed down, help and hindrance, but he heard nothing suspicious. It took two minutes for his eyes to adjust.

He stepped from the car, reached for his kit bag. Still scanning the night, he pulled out a pair of black, toughened leather gloves, thin enough to allow maximum feel for the trigger. He pulled these on. Next he took out his Kevlar knife. This normally came into its own in getting through airport security undetected. It worked well too. He bent down, strapped it to his lower leg under his jeans. He took out the single night-vision goggle, secured it in his jacket pocket. He ignored the Kevlar vest. It was too heavy to fight in effectively, and he reckoned the fighting would be close quarter, unless he were lucky.

Next he took out a stick of face camo. Roughie-toughie makeup his Brit friends in the SAS called it, so dubbed by their girlfriends. He dabbed the stick onto his face, rubbed it in streaks, secured it back in the kit bag. Last, he took out a condom, stashed it in his pocket. Then he locked the kit bag in his car. On a hunch, he grabbed Gwen’s pocketbook, slipped it into the large inner pocket of his rain jacket. Next he locked his car and zipped his keys into his jacket pocket. The rain had soaked his jeans already and slicked his hair to his head. It was cold and he shivered. He needed to get moving, but first he had one more job.

He moved into the undergrowth, gathered an armful of branches. The shoulder holster dug into him as he bent and stretched, but he found the pressure reassuring. He arrayed the branches over his car, starting with any areas that reflected light; windscreen, lights. Quickly he covered the Cougar. It helped that it was black. He would only ever drive black cars.

He straightened up, checked the job from a number of angles and distances, satisfied himself. The wind would blow off the branches sooner or later, but he’d done what he could.

The visibility was poor. Thanks to the cloud cover and rain, the darkness was almost total. A haze of light pollution from San Francisco and Monterey provided just a hint of light.

He unzipped his pocket, pulled on the single-eye night-vision goggle. He knew well enough the problem with NVGs was that if there were a flash of light, like from a gun barrel, he’d be blind for about four seconds. By choice, he always used a single goggle, leaving one eye uncovered.

No turning back now. If he were found by any law enforcement types who happened upon the scene he was beyond any doubt equipped to kill. He unzipped his jacket, took out his Heckler & Koch from the shoulder holster, opened the condom and slipped it over the barrel. He probably didn’t need it, the weapon wasn’t going to get submerged in water, but just in case …

He moved from the scrub, H & K held securely, an extension of his arm. Out into the open, he stopped, listened, and looked. Again nothing.

He had a rough idea of the topography. He should be able to walk an unimpeded course to Hurricane Point unless the tide were very high. He cast his mind back to the last time he had surfed, worked the calculations since, smiled. He headed for the beach. Luck was on his side; the tide was out. But when he walked onto the sand he thought he must have miscalculated. Huge waves were breaking and shuddering and racing up the beach. There was room to walk, but a rogue wave was a distinct possibility.

He hugged the contours of the cliff, not just to avoid the raging sea, but to stay hidden, to blend his own outline with the rough bushes that clung to the sloping land that edged the sand.

He couldn’t afford to linger, to move as slowly as he would have liked. Gwen could be at home right now with the killers closing in. He moved at a lope, long legs covering the ground. His kit was not as silent as he would have liked, but here the raging seas, the rain, and the rising wind were his allies. He moved through the dark, armed like a knight of old, and with the sole intent that the knights would have found worthy. He went in defense of someone he loved, futile though that love might be. It would be him against however many men Messenger or whoever was behind the operation decided to throw at them: four, five, maybe more. Certainly not less. Those weren’t great odds. He’d faced better. He’d faced worse.

He didn’t want to die, but like the Shuhada’, he was ready to if need be. Difference was, he knew there would not be seventy-two virgins awaiting him in Paradise. He didn’t know what there would be. A void, or a something … A Heaven or a Hell.… and with what he had done and seen, even if Heaven existed he doubted he would be admitted.

He ran on through the darkness. He slowed, stopped as a detail in the rock caught his eye. Mostly the beach was bounded by rough ground sloping down to the sand, but for stretches there were rocky cliffs. He stopped beside one now, noting the indentation, a cave of sorts. He moved in, out of the rain, glanced around. It was about fifteen feet deep. He filed it away, moved out and on along the beach.

He rounded a contour, saw above him the light shining in Gwen’s house. He felt his pulse quicken. He paused. No room for impulsive dashes, no room for mistakes. Now he had to slow, to move undetected.

He approached as close as he could on foot, veiled by the darkness, any slight noise he made covered by the waves. Then he had no choice but to fall to his stomach and leopard crawl, yard by yard, H & K extended in front, closer and closer, stopping, listening, straining all his senses to pick up anything human.

He got close enough to observe the front of the house. Gwen’s car was not there. He let out a slow breath of relief. He prayed she had some bolt-hole neither he nor the surveillance team knew about. No other car was there either, but then he hadn’t expected the killers to roll up and park in full view. He waited, watched. The rain sluiced down on him and the wind chilled him as the minutes ticked by, but he stayed where he was. He’d waited hours in far worse conditions. He’d forgotten the misery of it, told himself the special ops mantra: pain, discomfort of any kind, is just a sensation. It has no power beyond what you choose to give it.

Ninety-five percent of his mind was utterly focused on waiting, watching, on readying himself. The other five percent wandered. He froze suddenly. He had forgotten to turn off Gwen’s cell. He heard his trainers’ voices dripping scorn. Amateurs die. You cannot afford a single mistake. Feeling a flush of shame, he set down the H & K, reached into his pocket, took out the pocketbook, felt around for the cell phone. It seemed to have hidden itself. His fingers probed. In the night, all the senses were heightened in normal times, and as his fingers brushed over a stud, one in a row, larger than the others and out of sequence, his senses leapt. Keeping his finger in place, he pulled the bag up to his goggled eye, carefully wiped the rain from the lens, scrutinized the stud, smiled slowly. He let it go, found the phone, switched it to silent, as was his own phone. He rapidly made a new plan.

He picked up his weapon, turned, crawled forward until the scrub shielded him, then he ran at a crouch back down to the beach. It took him four minutes to get to the cave. He took Gwen’s pocketbook from his jacket pocket, stashed it in the furthest corner of the cave, then moved out, looking for cover closer to Gwen’s house.

If his calculations were correct, the tracker beacon he’d found in the bag would lead the killers straight to the cave. They might wonder what Gwen Boudain was doing in a cave, they might be suspicious, but they would have no choice but to check it out.

He found the perfect spot, another small cave about two hundred meters from where the pocketbook was stashed. He settled down just inside, lying on his stomach. He switched the goggle to the other eye so that he could just peek round the edge of the cave and watch the approach from the house. He felt fairly sure that the killers, when they came, would come that way.

He switched off all other thought, just focused on the night. He heard the surf roaring in. The tide was turning, he could hear it, could see the waves encroaching. They were getting bigger, propelled up and in by the growing wind, and by a storm, a bigger storm, far out to sea. Coming his way. He had maybe two hours before he would be forced to move. In his mind the images flooded back, the killing moves. He had tried for years to keep them at bay; now he called them up, reveled in them, felt the blood flow.