Seventeen
Asher Sahar, Eli Schullman, and the other ex-agents and mercenaries watched as Dr. Rabadeau methodically worked his hips, then his shoulders, into a Tychem biohazard suit that tucked into black rubber boots and black rubber gloves. The Frenchman knelt on his left knee, studying his right leg carefully. He stood, knelt on the other knee, and checked the other leg.
“What’s he doing?” Schullman whispered.
Asher cleared his throat and whispered. His old throat wound was bothering him today. “Checking for breaches in his suit.”
“Halliday flew that fucking canister across the ocean and he didn’t need a space suit.”
Asher shrugged. One of the mercenaries helped the pathologist put on the oxygen tank backpack and attach its hoses to the soft helmet.
“Nervous type,” Schullman said, rolling a cigarette he couldn’t light back and forth across the pads of his index finger and thumb.
Asher smiled up at his large friend. “I like nervous types. You’re a nervous type.”
Satisfied, Georges Rabadeau stepped up to the revolving door in the tent until his helmet faceplate nearly touched the plastic. He took baby steps forward, rotating the door with him, allowing an absolute minimum of atmosphere to enter, and exit on the nether side of the door.
Asher’s men had arranged low-heat lights atop tripods inside the tent, but it nonetheless was stuffy and humid. Rabadeau entered fully, making sure his uncomfortable oxygen tank didn’t get stuck in the rotating door. It felt odd, hearing himself breath inside the helmet.
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.