Dying Breath (Cobra Book 2) Read online

  Then she was half-running across the room in her heels. She pulled open the door, closed it with a “clack!” and she was gone, leaving a vacuum of silence behind her.

  I stood a while, looking at the closed door, thinking, running things over in my mind. Then I went and showered for twenty minutes in piping hot and freezing cold water. Toweled myself dry and dressed in jeans and boots. After which, I went down for a breakfast of rye toast and strong black coffee.

  With breakfast done, I went to the concierge and said, “I want to hire a plane.”

  “A plane, monsieur?”

  “Yeah, a small Cessna or something. I have a license. Sometimes I like to take up a kite. The views along the coast must be spectacular.…”

  “Indeed. A kite, monsieur?”

  “Yeah, a kite, a plane. It’s a hobby. I like to take up a plane sometimes and fly around. I have insurance, I have a license. If there’s a club in Casablanca…”

  “I will make inquiries, monsieur, and let you know as soon as I have found somewhere.”

  I slipped him a twenty and thanked him. Then I returned to my room where I opened my email and found an encrypted file with satellite pictures of the desert around Lamharra. They weren’t great.

  The first couple showed a building, or a complex of buildings, roughly a mile and a half north of the P2108, about four and a half miles east of Commune Lamharra. The next couple of pictures were closer in, magnified, but they were grainy and the detail was blurred. They showed an L-shaped building, probably four stories high, with the long section running west to east, and a fat “foot” section running from north to south. Contained in the angle of the “L” was a concrete parking lot. Across the lot, to the east of the main building, there was a long, low, blue nave or hangar with a red, gabled roof; and some fifty yards or so to the south, there were what looked like four large tanks or reservoirs, sixty to seventy feet across and maybe eighty to a hundred feet long, lying in a straight line and filled with a deep, green liquid which might have been water. I could see vehicles, mainly Jeeps and Land Rovers, but no people.

  The third set of two photos showed close-ups of the building. The quality was better but still not good. There was the blurred image of a person crossing the parking lot toward the outbuilding, but it was impossible to identify anything about the person, even whether it was a man or a woman. It was pretty much what I had expected at short notice. Aside from giving me some very basic information about the location and shape of the place, whatever it was, it offered me no useful information at all. I could not even be one hundred percent sure this was the lab May Ling had spoken about. And if it was, there was no sign of guards, armed or otherwise.

  I went down to the hotel gym and spent an hour training, and by the time I’d finished in the sauna and was making my way back to my room I got the call from the brigadier.

  “Can you speak.”

  “Yes.”

  “The woman you picked up, Rachida Ait, she doesn’t show up on any databases. We’ve made an informal request to the Moroccan authorities and all they have is that for the last five years she has been living in Casablanca, working as a high-class prostitute.”

  I punched the button for the elevator. “That fits with what she told me. Where was she before that?”

  There’s no record of her before that, Harry.”

  “None at all?”

  “Nothing, but they tell me that is not unusual. There are a very large number of unregistered births there, and many, especially among the remote desert villages, who only ever register their children with the local mosque.”

  I grunted. “She claims she was seven years in London with a sugar daddy who kept her in style and had her taught English and English literature, a kind of Professor Higgins who turned her into a knockout he’d be happy to take to meet the Queen. Her English is flawless and she is very smart. You’d be forgiven for thinking she was the product of a good university.”

  “That doesn’t mean much. Given the right conditions, intellect will rise to its own level, Harry. She may be exactly what she claims to be. Don’t get sidetracked.”

  “OK.” The elevator doors opened and two men and two women emerged laughing and talking loudly in Arabic. I stepped in, pressed my floor and the doors closed. It began to rise.

  “Listen, the satellite pictures are pretty much useless. They tell me there is a four or five-story, L-shaped building with a big outhouse and three water reservoirs. Nothing else.”

  “I know.”

  “I can’t even be sure it’s the place.”

  “You’ll have to do a recce. Do you need backup?”

  I thought about it while the elevator slowed to a stop, then shook my head. “No. Not yet, anyway. I’m going to hire a plane and do a flyover.”

  I stepped out and made for my room, knowing what he was going to say.

  “You know what I’m going to say. That will alert them…”

  “Yeah, it will alert them, but they won’t know to what. And by the time they act on it, it will be too late.” I opened my room and went in, walked to the window and stood looking out. “There is one thing I need to know, sir. One thing above all others, and I was hoping Rachida would be able to tell me, but she wasn’t.”

  He was ahead of me. “Where Heilong Li and Yang Dizhou are, and when they will arrive in Casablanca.”

  “Yeah. I’m pretty sure they aren’t here yet. Have they left New York?”

  “The intelligence we have is that Li and Dizhou left New York bound for London Heathrow eighteen hours ago…”

  “So they touched down in London about eleven hours ago.” I glanced at my watch. It was twelve noon. “One AM. Morocco time is the same as the UK. Two gets you twenty they chartered an air taxi and they are here in Casablanca right now. You have an operative here?”

  “No, but we have a couple of PIs we can use. You want the Trans Arabian Transportation Company watched?”

  “Of course. There should have been a man on it twelve hours ago, sir.”

  “There was. Keep your knickers on and let me finish. They touched down by air taxi in Casablanca International at five fifteen this morning. They were followed to the Casa Diamond where they checked in and have not emerged yet.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m glad you approve. Now, are you still listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “The group she told you were attached to the European External Action Service, Padraig O’Hanlon, Hans Grinder, Ruud van Dreiver and Michelle des Jardins. They are not employed directly by the EEAS, they consult for them.”

  “Convenient, they provide deniability.”

  “Precisely. They are independent researchers of an extremely high academic caliber within the field of biochemistry. Ostensibly they are on a mission from the EU to liaise with China in the field of research and cooperation. Our analysts believe that they are instructed to buy this vaccine, or more precisely the right to distribute it within the EU area.”

  “Your analysts are right.”

  “Yes, and it would be very interesting to know precisely which company or companies would get to benefit from that arrangement.”

  “More interesting even than that, sir, would be to know exactly what this vaccine is for: a vaccine against what?”

  “We have advised the CIA to dispatch agents to western Africa to investigate those outbreaks and see what caused them…”

  “Yeah, that’s great, but I think I may have a quicker way.”

  “I’m quite certain you have, but don’t tell me about it, Harry. Just give me the results when you have them. Soon, please. Either way, Harry, you are not to consider these people targets at this point. Understood?”

  “OK. Sure. Listen, have your private eye contact me as soon as Heilong Li is on the move. Have him follow them wherever they go, except if they head out south along the A7. If they do that he is to call me immediately and liaise with me.”

  “Fine. What is your plan?”

  �
�Track them to the lab. Fly over, do a recce, establish where they are. Go in, kill them, destroy the research and leave.”

  “What about the plane?”

  “When I leave the lab compound I will report by radio that I can see smoke in the vicinity of Lamharra. There will be nothing to tie me to the killing. By the time they make the connection, if they ever do, I will be long gone.”

  “Good, go ahead. Focus on Heilong Li and Yang Dizhou, forget about everybody else for now. Contact me when you’re done.”

  “Ten four.”

  I hung up and called down to reception.

  “Oui, Monsieur Patinkin?”

  “Did you manage to get me a plane?”

  “Oui, Monsieur Patinkin! I was just about to make you the telephone call. I give you now the details of the plane and the location of the airfield, and you can go anytime to sign the papers and take the aero-plane for the flying. They, naturally, require your identity and your pilot’s license. ’Aving this, voila! The plane is yours!”

  He gave me the details. I memorized them and sat thinking for a while. Then I took my laptop, stuffed it in a rucksack, grabbed a few other things I was going to need, and went down to the street to look for a cab to take me to the Casa Diamond Suite Hotel.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Casa Diamond Suite Hotel achieves the near impossible, by being even more grotesque on the inside than it is on the outside. The main difference, apart from the degree of sheer bad taste, is that where on the outside it looks like a Soviet-era apartment block wrapped in neon spaghetti, on the inside it looks like a psychotic jihadist on a bad acid trip had tried to cram every conceivable piece of high-gloss marble, brass and glass into a rococo palace and score all of it with octagons.

  I stepped into this mind-boggling nightmare and made my way to reception. The concierge made an expression that hung like wet washing between a smile and a wince and wished me a good afternoon. I didn’t care if he had a good afternoon or not, so instead I said:

  “Call up to Dr. Stuart Chen and tell him Miss Rachida is here and needs help to carry up his gift.”

  The wince became dominant and he asked me, “And you are…?”

  “Miss Rachida’s driver. Anything else you need to know, pal?”

  He arched an eyebrow and shook his head all at the same time, then picked up the phone. I went outside and leaned against the khrushchyovka wall in the sun, with my cell in my hand, to wait and see if my long shot would pay off. It did.

  Ten minutes after I’d stepped outside, Heilong Li’s driver came out in a pale gray suit and stood on the sidewalk gazing this way and that, looking for Rachida and her driver. I didn’t wait. I set off at a quick pace, staring down at the screen of my phone. I collided with him, hard. He staggered back and I stumbled, grabbed at his jacket to stabilize myself, dropped my cell and fell to my knees grabbing at his legs and shoes as I went.

  He spouted a mouthful of Chinese abuse and even lashed out a kick at me as he stepped back and away. I held up both hands, apologizing profusely in English, grabbed my cell and got quickly to my feet.

  “I am sorry, so sorry. I apologize. Please, I am so sorry…”

  He gave me more Chinese abuse and, for good measure, spat at me and screeched, “You born from egg, fuckin’ snake!”

  I held up both hands, still apologizing, and backed away toward my Merc. I clambered in, hit the ignition and made a speedy exit. In my rearview mirror I could see him. He had stepped into the road and was watching me drive away. I wondered if he’d made a note of my license plate. I didn’t think I’d given him the chance.

  The airplane rental office the concierge had given me was located at the international airport, and I headed south now on the A7, driving fast and keeping my eyes peeled for cops. The last thing I needed was to get pulled over for speeding right then, but it was equally important that I was in position and ready when the call came that Heilong Li was on the move, headed for the lab.

  My plan had been crude, and I was well aware that my ruse to plant a bug in Heilong Li’s driver’s shoe could cause extreme suspicion. But it was a risk I was prepared to take. Because I was pretty sure of how it would play out.

  His driver would tell him what happened. They would check his pockets to see nothing was missing, and nothing had been inserted. They would find he was clean. They would contact Rachida about the alleged gift and she would, worst-case scenario, tell them about me.

  And right there was the billion-dollar question: what would she tell them?

  Two got you twenty I had convinced her that I was smart but incompetent. The way soldiers are who operate effectively under a good command, but are incapable of commanding themselves. It was odds on that she believed I was probably exactly what I said I was, a wannabe investigative reporter, and that would be what she told Li.

  But there was, in addition, another, deeper reason why she would play down my importance: if I was a real threat, and she had led me to them, then there would be a price to pay. A high price. So she would be at pains to downplay how serious a danger I really was. The incident with the driver would be put down to a bungled attempt to get his cell, or something of that sort.

  As well as that, I was curious to see how Heilong Li and Rachida interacted, and what the nature of their relationship really was.

  Aside from that, bottom line, as I had told the brigadier, once I was in that plane and I had done my reconnaissance, they would have had very little time to react before I struck. Death was on their doorstep, and they did not know it.

  I arrived at the Moroccan Air Club twenty minutes later, left my car in the parking lot and went inside. Twenty minutes with a pretty girl in a blue blazer brought to light that my pilot’s license was British and had to be validated by the Moroccan Direction Generale de l’Aviation Civile. Two hundred bucks, a wink and a nudge took care of that, and half an hour later I had my flight plan submitted and I was settled in a Cessna 182 Skylane, rising above the vast patchwork of fields south of the airport, with the town of Berrechid sprawled out ahead of me.

  I climbed steadily to seventeen thousand feet and settled at a comfortable hundred and forty knots, roughly a hundred and sixty miles per hour, on a bearing fractionally east of south. The lab and the weapons stash were about eighty miles away, so my ETA was in half an hour, fifteen minutes after four PM.

  I opened my laptop, opened the tracking app and saw that Heilong Li’s driver, or at least his shoe, was still at the hotel in Casablanca.

  After Settat, the terrain became rapidly more arid as it started to climb toward the desert highlands. After fifteen minutes the vast body of water which is the Barrage al Massira appeared, glinting green in the afternoon sun, and slid gradually beneath me, to the steady drone of the engine.

  Five minutes after that I began a steady descent toward the shallow, sandy valley of Aracha. I came in low, looking for the intersection of the R206 and the P2113. I found it, did a low flyover, forty feet above the ground, saw there was no traffic in sight, turned back and touched down on the flat, level ground between the low dunes where I had buried the weapons. I killed the engine and came to a gentle stop just fifteen yards from where I had put the stone marker. Then I swung down from the cockpit.

  I worked fast in the intense heat, with the dust sticking to the perspiration on my face and chest. I moved the HK416, the ammo, the bow and arrows and, most important of all, the EPX 1 high explosives to the small cargo bay in the plane and stuffed them in the rucksack.

  Just as I was finishing my cell rang.

  “Yeah.”

  A voice I didn’t know answered with a strong French Moroccan accent.

  “Monsieur, your friends are driving on the A7. I think you are want to know this.”

  “Thanks.”

  I hung up and checked the laptop. The brigadier’s private eye was right. Heilong Li was on the move. He had left Casablanca and was on his way to the lab along the A7. It was just before five. He would be here just after six, a
s it was growing dark.

  In the burnished, dying light of the later afternoon, I taxied back to the dirt track that was the P2113, accelerated hard and took off steep, turning west and south in a sharp climb toward the big, blue dome of the sky. I kept climbing to the Cessna’s service ceiling at about eighteen thousand feet, and then turned southeast again to fly over the expanse of red, black and yellow earth where I knew the lab was.

  It soon came into view and, having located it, I began to descend for a closer look. From the first flyover, taking it steady, I could make out a perimeter fence, which covered about a quarter of a mile square. It didn’t look sophisticated, just barbed wire strung between posts, maybe six to eight feet high. I figured it was probably electrified, but it was impossible to tell from this distance.

  The lab complex itself was easier to see now than it had been in the photographs. It was four stories high, made of concrete and large sheets of pale green glass. It had a flat roof and as I flew over I could see two men there, motionless, probably staring up at me.

  I decided to come in for a low fly-past. It was, once again, a calculated risk. I was one, small, private Cessna. I didn’t believe that would be enough to send Heilong Li scrambling back to his hotel. From what I had seen of him, this guy was bold and aggressive, and supremely arrogant. And it would take more than a small plane to set him off course. On the other hand, it could provide me with invaluable intelligence if I rattled their cage right now, and that was what I intended to do—before Heilong Li arrived there.

  I turned into a steep dive, approaching from the south, like I was coming in to spray crops. Now I could see the wire fence, and beyond it the three large water tanks. The fence was simple barbed wire, but I could also make out a second set of cables that told me the wire was electrified. The fence was a good eight feet high, and would be difficult to get through without raising an alarm.

  I shot over the fence and saw now that the big water tanks were flat, at ground level and covered in some kind of transparent plastic sheeting. Before I could take in any details, they had passed and I was hurtling toward the building.