Kill Four Page 14

  I burst through the door into a large hallway with white marble floors and an elegant staircase curling up to the next floor. Four men in suits were descending on the fleeing bodies, shouting instructions. Two of them grabbed van Dreiver and his huddled, fleeing group, and the other two came at me, pointing their weapons. Hot lead spat past my head and smacked into the wall. I dropped to the floor, squeezing the trigger. Plaster showered around me, spattering on the tiles. My first slug tore through the nearest guy’s grey cotton trousers, ripped into his thigh and sent a plume of blood showering out the other side. The second hit him in the groin, doubling him over and sending him writhing and thrashing to the floor.

  I slid onto my belly, still squeezing the trigger, and put two rounds through the next guy’s shin bone. His leg collapsed and folded and he went down screaming. I was already on my feet and putting a slug in the back of his head as he hit the floor. I ran up the stairs. Two shots hit the banisters and I saw the small group disappear along the landing. Behind me, I could hear shouts as men came storming in through the shattered French windows into the drawing room.

  I stopped, swung the AK-47 off my shoulder, aimed at the drawing room door and counted three as I heard the shouting voices and the tramping boots growing louder. The door burst open and I opened up in three short bursts, putting twelve rounds through the door. I heard screams of pain, shouldered the rifle and ran to the landing. Rage and frustration were beginning to mount in me and I fought to control them. Van Dreiver and his son were getting away, and there were too many men on my tail. I couldn’t focus and I couldn’t concentrate.

  I had seen the group go down a passage on the right and I made after them. As I rounded the corner, a door closed at the end of a red-carpeted corridor. I sprinted. I could hear voices behind me again and tried to make an estimate of how many men I had taken down. I figured ten or twelve all told. Which still left something in the region of twenty men chasing me, determined to kill me.

  I didn’t pause or hesitate. I blasted the lock, kicked open the door and spun away as a shower of lead smashed into the wall behind where I’d been standing. I dropped on my belly, leaned in and popped one of the bodyguards through the eye and the other through the throat. Then I was on my feet and through the door.

  Ruud was up against the far wall, punching frantically at a keypad on the wall. I knew it was the door to a panic room. Beside him, Jelle and the woman were screaming at him to hurry up. I shot him through the hand and shattered the keypad, then shot him in the back of the knee for good measure. He went down clutching at his leg and whimpering, “No, oh God no…”

  Outside I could hear boots—lots of boots—storming down the corridor. That was a bad mistake they’d made. Jelle and the woman were gaping at me. The other guy was frowning curiously. I ignored them, stuck the Sig in my belt, swung the AK-47 off my shoulder and stepped into the corridor. I knew I was going to die and I didn’t care. A kind of madness had gripped my mind and I was aware that nothing mattered anymore. This was my hell and I planned to leave it in flames.

  There were fifteen, maybe twenty men. I didn’t count them. They were all tightly grouped and storming down the narrow corridor. Only the front two or three could open fire because the rest risked shooting the guys in front. I remember thinking that was how Napoleon had lost against Wellington. I aimed at waist height and sprayed. It was carnage. The bullets tore through flesh and bone, erupted through chest cavities, tore through bellies and guts, ricocheted off walls, punched through limbs and skulls like a giant mincer tearing through body and limb, spraying the walls with blood and gore. It was a basic lesson in military strategy that these men had learned too late and to their cost: never charge in a column into a confined killing field.

  A more basic lesson was the one I overlooked: never turn your back on somebody who wants to kill you.

  There was a scream, not of terror and pain, but of rage, and a brick wall collided with me, sending me crashing to the carpeted floor, knocking the wind from my lungs. I tried to lever myself to my feet, but a heavy body pressed down on me and locked its arm around my throat, choking off my air. I clawed at his arm but found only the linen of Jelle’s jacket sleeve. I clawed at his face and head, but he shied away and kept squeezing. I couldn’t breathe and the pressure of blood was building up in my head.

  I heaved my body sideways and crashed him against the wall. His grip was like a vise and kept tightening. I bent my leg, drew my knee up to my chest and wrenched the knife from my boot. Then slamming it into his thigh by my side, I stabbed ferociously six, seven times, heard him screaming in my ear, felt the warm blood spouting over my hand, but still he would not let go.

  Finally, I grabbed his wrist and thrust the blade of the Fairbairn & Sykes into the soft underside, slicing through arteries and tendons. His arm jumped and quivered and I staggered to my feet, croaking and coughing, gasping for air, as Jelle quivered and thrashed, bleeding out on the floor.

  I staggered into the room, feeling the blood dripping from my hands and face. The woman was goggling at me, her mouth hanging open. The man, in his early thirties, stood looking down at Ruud van Dreiver. As I entered, he looked up, studying my face with a frown. I roared at them both, “Get the hell out of here!”

  They didn’t need to be told twice. He took her hand and they left, hurrying down the corridor, past the blood and carnage, and down the stairs. I turned Ruud on his back and scowled down into his face.

  “Why did you send your men after me?”

  His big, blond face twisted with rage and hatred. “You have to be stopped! You are a disease, a cancer! You are insane. You are destroying everything we have worked for, the work of decades. All you do is kill, kill, kill and destroy…!”

  He sagged back. The blood was pooling under his leg. He was bleeding to death.

  “I had stopped. Mexico was my last job. You shouldn’t have come after me.”

  “You will never stop, until you are dead. But we must rise up again. Humanity, our survival, depends on it. You…” His face was distorted by hatred and contempt. “You will be the butcher of humanity. You will be the killer of mankind. If humanity is to survive, you must die.”

  “You’re out of your mind!”

  He pushed himself up on one elbow and screamed in my face. “You have to die!”

  I stood and backed away from him. “You would wipe out eight billion people…”

  “No! You fucking idiot! The plague must die! It is nature’s way! We let the plague take its course. We are trying to salvage what little of worth the species has created! But you, you fucking human animal! You keep killing and destroying and murdering…”

  I dropped on my knees beside him and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck. “Tell me! Ben, Ben Smith, is he alive?”

  He sneered. “Your brother.”

  “I killed him.”

  “Then why are you asking if he is alive, you stupid fuck?”

  “Is he alive?”

  “Fuck you!”

  I knew I was running out of time. Tried to focus on what Jim would need to know. “All right, Ruud, you get to choose. We can make this easy or we can make it hard. The fusion reactor, when is it due to go online?”

  His face hardened. “How do you know about that?”

  “Last chance. When is it due to go online?”

  “In a year to eighteen months. How do you know about it?”

  He had turned a pasty gray and his pupils were dilating wide. He had a minute at most.

  “What’s the plan? How do you plan to replace other sources of power? Is this a concerted plan? What about China? What about oil, coal, nuclear reactors…?”

  He smiled, then laughed. “You know shit. You’re too late. We will win, Walker. You can’t stop us. Humanity will survive and you can’t stop…”

  His eyes glazed, his throat rasped and he lay still.

  I stepped out of the room, feeling strangely defeated, and walked down the passage. I picked my way through the hal
f-dismembered bodies and went down the curving, marble staircase. I crossed the marble hall and went out the front door, into the night. There I stopped. From the front steps, I could see four sets of lights moving fast across the lagoon toward the headland. Cops? Omega? Both?

  I forced myself to move and ran at a steady jog down the path, feeling my heart pounding and the start of a grinding headache above my left eye. I made it down to the jetty in less than a minute, but my breathing was labored and I had a sense of tight panic in my chest that I was fighting hard to suppress. I looked out across the black water. The approaching lights were about halfway and moving fast. I wondered how much control Omega had over the cops in the area, and as the question entered my mind, I heard a twin engine plane overhead and looked up. It flew low over the house and descended across the lagoon. I could see the floats underneath the wings. It was a King Air 350 seaplane.

  It banked and circled, descending all the while, then hit the water away near the resort. The launches were closing in.

  I threw the AK-47 in the water and slipped the Sig into my waistband. I hung my boots around my neck, pulled on the flippers, the mask and the air tanks, and fastened the weight belt around my waist. Then I slipped into the water and sank gratefully beneath the surface as the launches started to arrive. I swam deep and made for the inlet to the lagoon, where the waves were thundering and crashing over the reefs. It was slow and difficult to negotiate the inlet, but the cold water was soothing and helped to calm the panic I was feeling inside.

  Once out of the mouth of the lagoon, I swam for forty or forty-five minutes, south into the ocean. Eventually, I surfaced to look around and saw the dim, glimmering light of a lantern and headed toward it. It was a small fishing lantern, hung over the bow of my friend’s fishing boat. The boat was at anchor, but he was not in it. This was something he did not need to be a part of. He had made his own arrangements to return to his village, as I had told him, but he had left his boat for me, as a small beacon, a way home from the dark ocean of the night.

  I slung the air bottles over the side and clambered aboard. Then I killed the lantern and noticed for the first time that there was half a moon rising in the east. I searched the boat and, in the dark, I found that he had left me a blanket, some dry clothes and a package with hot soup, rice and fish in it. There was also a bottle of whiskey. I ignored the food, but drank the soup and followed it up with a few stiff shots, then made my way under sail, back to Goukamma.

  By the time I got there, it was past two in the morning. I pulled the boat up on the sand as far as I could, left no trace of my presence, and carried my stuff silently to the back of his house. There I removed the nets from the Audi, put my stuff in the trunk and climbed behind the wheel.

  A wave of deep exhaustion washed over me. I was having trouble adjusting to the fact that I was alive. I took another shot of whiskey and put the bottle in the glove compartment, then I opened the windows, fired up the engine and rolled slowly down the track, toward the N2.

  At the intersection, I stopped and was gripped by a fit of hysterical laughter, leaning my head on the steering wheel, which threatened to turn to convulsive weeping. I had another slug of whiskey and steadied myself, then found a pack of Camels in the glove compartment and lit up. After a couple of drags, I turned west, toward the Boland Mountains, Cape Town and the Northern Cape. It was going to be a very long night, and tomorrow was going to be a long, exhausting day.

  I drove for an hour, letting the cold night air batter my face. I kept thinking about the seaplane, wondering who was in it and why they had flown in. It was too much coincidence that it had arrived at the same time as the cops were closing in, just after I had killed Pi and Ro. But who had called them? My gut told me beyond a doubt the occupant of the plane was Omega. It was the only thing that made sense of the timing. But who in Omega, if I had killed them all?

  As I left the N2 at Swellendam and started to climb into the Boland Mountains, toward Worcester, I pulled out my cell and called Njal.

  “Fuck me,” he said without feeling. “You still alive.”

  It was good to hear his blunt, Norwegian voice. I said, “I’m as surprised as you are. It’s done. I’m on my way back. Expect me in ten or twelve hours, maybe a little more if I sleep. Anything to report?”

  “Yeah. I got mail from home. I tell you when you get here.”

  “Everything cool?”

  “Everything cool.”

  I hung up and sped on into the blackness of the mountains.

  FOURTEEN

  I stopped after three hundred and sixty miles, when I realized I had been asleep at the wheel and didn’t know for how long. I pulled into a Wimpy fast food diner at a village called Klawer, in the middle of the desert. It was three o’clock in the morning, but the place was still open. I had a pint of coffee which I laced with whiskey, and ate two burgers. Then I went out to the parking lot and slept for four hours before driving on.

  I arrived at our site at just after eleven AM, leaving behind me a conspicuous trail of dust lingering in the still air. There was nothing I could do about that, except hope that nobody noticed it and conceal the Audi beside the Land Rover under the overhanging rocks. Njal clapped me on the shoulder as I climbed out of the car, gripped my hand and told me I looked like shit. Then he pointed at the vehicle. “Cops are looking for this pile of German shit?”

  “Yeah, but they’re looking for it in the Western Cape, not on the border of the Namibian desert.”

  He nodded once. “I make some coffee.”

  I followed him past the Land Rover into a hollow where he had made a comfortable camp. He’d even acquired some bacon, eggs and bread, which he had set out ready to cook. “Where the hell did you get these from?”

  “In the supermarket, where the fuck do you think?”

  We both laughed and he poured me a mug of coffee and laced it with more whiskey. Then he fried some bacon, eggs and bread. We ate in silence, and when I had finished, he debriefed me. It was a relief to talk about what had happened and explain it to somebody who was simply collating the facts, not judging my actions and my decisions. When I had finished, he said, “It was a risk to give Janine your real name.”

  “I know, but I was on the clock, Njal, and she was my only source of intel. Anything else would have taken time I didn’t have. I had to gain her trust and the only way I could do that was by opening up.”

  “You might have had to kill her.”

  “It paid off.”

  He nodded. “What are we gonna do with the fuckin’ Audi?”

  “There must be a mechanic in Steinkopf. We buy a dozen cans of paint. We change the plates, paint the car and it might just get us as far as Morocco. Morocco—hell! With a bit of luck, it could get us to London.”

  He grunted. “We got time to paint a car and steal plates?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me. What did Jim say? Also, we don’t need to steal plates, we just take them from the Land Rover.”

  He nodded again. “OK. Jim had the plans for the reactor analyzed. It is big, real big. It is like four city blocks at the base, as tall as a skyscraper.” He shrugged. “It’s a small city in one building. We’re not gonna bring that down with thirty pounds of C4.”

  “We knew that day one. So we need to place special demolition charges at key locations…”

  He was shaking his head. “Stop talking. Listen. That is not what instructions we got. Underneath, there is like an inverted pyramid, OK? So you got one pyramid sitting on top of another upside-down pyramid in the ground. You can visualize that?”

  “Yeah, I can visualize that.”

  “Good, so, then in the center, you got a big chamber shaped like a ball. They are just beginning to build that now, so it looks like a circle. That’s the big ring we saw, right? In that ball is where the reactor is gonna be.”

  “OK…”

  “All around that ball you got passages—a whole network of passages goin’ this way and that way, up and down…”
>
  “I get the idea.”

  “And then right at the bottom, at the lowest peak…”

  “The lowest peak?”

  “You know what I mean, man. The point of the upside-down pyramid, right there, there is a chamber, twenty foot across, and the whole fuckin’ weight of the whole fuckin’ structure is resting on that one point.”

  I frowned. “It also has the whole planet supporting it. That chamber is going to be about eight or nine hundred feet underground.”

  “Sure, but the structure, all the floors above, the pillars and columns, and especially the spherical structure that will hold the reactor, all of that is putting downward pressure on the walls of the building, and all of that pressure is meeting in that chamber. Don’t argue with the experts, man. These guys know their stuff. So that is where we put the bomb.”

  I shook my head. “That had better be one hell of a bomb.”

  “It is. It has a yield of one point five, maybe two kilotons.”

  “What? That’s…”

  “I know. And he ain’t gonna parachute it in, either. We have to go get it.”

  “How the hell are we going to transport a thing like that? How the hell are we going to get it in there? Has he gone out of his mind?”

  “Take it easy. It’s not that heavy. Maybe fifty kilos, one hundred and ten pounds…”

  I went cold all over and I felt the hair on my arms and head prickle. “It’s not that heavy…? One hundred and ten pounds…?”

  That could only mean one thing. He shook his head. “No, it’s not so heavy. It’s in a backpack. We have to go collect it.”

  “It’s a tactical demolition nuclear device. It’s the only thing capable of releasing that much energy that you could carry in a backpack.”

  “Yeah, that’s what it is.”

  “Where the hell did he get something like that from?”

  “That doesn’t concern us…”

  “Bullshit!”

  “We have to deploy it, Lacklan. Omega cannot be allowed to build this thing.”