Dying Breath (Cobra Book 2) Page 14

  She turned her head to stare at me. Her expression was one of exhaustion and her left hand found my thigh and stroked it. Unexpectedly she smiled.

  “You’re a hell of a lover, you know that? We wouldn’t be bad together, you and me…”

  “Cut it out.”

  “Come on…” She squeezed my leg and leaned toward me, grinning. “Don’t pretend it hasn’t crossed your mind. You and me, we could clean up. And the fun we’d have…”

  Her hand crept up my thigh toward my hip. I snapped, “Cut it out!”

  “Why, don’t you like it? You sure seemed to enjoy it in bed. Come on, what couldn’t we do together. It would be wild…”

  I saw it too late. It was just a glimmer in her right hand as her left hand gripped my crotch. Then I felt the piercing bite of a sharp blade stabbing hard into my thigh. The pain was an intense, maddening thing. I screamed through gritted teeth, only half aware that she was turning the knob to thin the mixture in the fuel with her right hand, while she twisted the knife with her left. I clawed at her hand and she wrenched the blade from my thigh, then pulled hard on the yoke and the plane began to climb. I screamed at her, “What the fuck are you doing?”

  She snarled back, “Hit the gas or we’ll stall!”

  I tried to force the yoke forward, but the knife stabbed twice at my thigh again, biting deep. I could feel the warm blood oozing down my leg, saturating my jeans. I screamed at her to stop. She leaned in and screamed in my face, “Climb! You motherfucker! Climb!”

  I hit the gas, biting back the pain. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Climb!” She rammed the blade down to my inner thigh and drove the point through my jeans until I could feel it tearing the skin. “Just give me a fucking excuse and I’ll cut your arteries and leave you to bleed out in this flying, fucking coffin!”

  I watched the needle climb to two thousand five hundred feet while she reached under her seat and pulled out the parachute. With the knife still pressed into my inside thigh, she slipped her right arm through the strap. Then, with no warning, she rammed the knife hard up and back into my chest. I felt the blade crunch through my second and third intercostal. The pain was like nothing I had ever felt in my life and for a second I thought I might black out. I stared down and saw the bright red handle of a Swiss Army knife poking out of my chest. I heard myself say, “Jesus…!” and looked at Rachida.

  She had slipped her other arm into the parachute and snapped the buckle. I saw her right hand open the door and freezing air battered my face. With her left hand she snatched the knife from my chest. Warm blood flooded out, down my belly, saturating my shirt.

  “Bye, Guy. I’ll never know who you were, but if you’re dead, it doesn’t matter a whole lot, does it? Bleed out, motherfucker!”

  And then she was gone.

  The air slammed the door shut again. The engine droned. I could feel my consciousness ebbing away, out of my chest and my savaged leg. With fumbling fingers I pulled my cell from my pocket, easing down the yoke, blinking at the control panel, trying to blink unconsciousness from my eyes. My hand was shaking, I struggled to focus on the screen. Pain throbbed in my chest. My heart raced. The phone slipped in my fingers and fell to the floor with a clatter. The light was slipping from my brain and I bellowed at myself to stay awake. I shouted, “Hey, Siri!”, fighting to raise my voice above the drone of the engine.

  “Hi, I’m listening.”

  “Call the brigadier!”

  “I’m sorry, I’m having trouble understanding. Tell me again…”

  “Call the fucking brigadier!”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t have bucking brigadier as a contact…”

  “Call—the—brigadier!”

  Silence, then…

  “OK, calling the brigadier…”

  The cockpit was filled with the sound of ringing. My eyes were tired, heavy, closing. A voice in my head kept telling me I needed to sleep.

  Then the brigadier was talking, saying, “Harry, where are you?”

  I shouted, “I’m in a Cessna, somewhere above Barrage al Massira, badly injured and coming down. Get off the fucking line and I’ll send you my location…” The line went dead. Suddenly I didn’t know if I had got through to him or not. I could feel I was losing the plane. The nose was going down and I could not control it. I shouted again, “Hey! Siri!”

  “Hi, what can I do for you?”

  “For fuck’s sake send my location to the brigadier!”

  “Would you like to repeat that? I am not sure I understood.”

  “Send - my - location - to - the - brigadier! Send my location to the brigadier!”

  Now I could see the luminous water of the vast lake rising up to meet me. Siri said, “Would you like me to send your location to the brigadier?”

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  Then there was an almighty smash and the world was full of wild, exploding foam. My body was rammed violently against the yoke and yanked back equally violently by the safety belt. Black water washed over the cockpit and I was engulfed by deep, black, wet unconsciousness. My last thought as I sank beneath the surface was, So this is how I end.

  Chapter Sixteen

  For a long time there was only blackness. The blackness was liquid, and it enveloped me on every side. At first there was panic. It thrashed in my belly and my chest like a spiked lizard. But finally it grew still, and I knew it was OK to breathe, to take the vast ocean of darkness into my lungs, and there would be peace. Death and peace must come eventually to the warrior in equal measure. Because the warrior’s moment of peace, is his moment of death.

  I thought these thoughts, and then darkness came and brought with it peace.

  But the peace was only temporary. Slowly, by degrees, pain returned, seeped in through blades of light in oblivion. I wasn’t aware yet of my body, of my limbs, so the pain was a generalized ache that permeated all of my being. It may have taken minutes, or it may have taken days or weeks, but gradually I became aware that the pain was in my ankle, it was tearing at the sinews of my thigh, it was in my chest, stabbing at my heart, and like three cancerous tumors these centers of pain sent tendrils throughout my body.

  Finally, I opened my eyes, and there was light.

  For a moment I had a sinking sensation of grief on realizing I was not dead. The fight, for me, was not over yet. There was more pain, more struggle yet to come.

  I was in a room, the kind of anonymous, cream and white room they have in hospitals. Slowly I took in the details. The foot of my bed was steel tubing, chromed. A clipboard hung from it. There was a sage, vinyl chair beside my bed. To the left of that was a door, and on the back of the door there was another clipboard.

  To my left, across a beige carpet, a double set of windows offered a view of the tops of palm trees, a strip of ocean and sky. A cloud moved silently across the glass, while the treetops tossed gently.

  A hospital.

  Then I slid into dark sleep for a while, interrupted by brief moments of consciousness: dusk through the window glass, a moon casting yellow light tinged with green in a translucent turquoise sky. For a while it seemed that the moon whispered telepathically to me through a holograph of reality, but that was a dream. Then, after deeper sleep, there was the gray pink of a new dawn, the dawn chorus of a million birds and cool air on my skin. Because the window was open, and the curtains were wafting on the morning breeze.

  Voices.

  The door opened and Colonel Jane Harris was there. Her hair was in a loose bun behind her neck. She wore a cream suit that did nice things to her legs, a blue blouse open at the neck and a string of pearls that made her neck look nice. She stood looking at me through expressionless blue eyes for a while, until I managed to smile at her. Then she said, “Good morning.”

  “I must be real bad,” I said, “I’m actually pleased to see you.”

  She raised an eyebrow and one corner of her mouth, then came and sat in the sage vinyl chair beside me.

  “How are
you feeling?”

  “They must have me pumped full of painkillers. I was in a lot of pain, but I don’t feel anything at the moment. Except sleepy.”

  “You were lucky.”

  “That’s nice to know. I didn’t see it that way till just now when you explained it.”

  “Always the contrary bastard. The knife wounds in your leg were ugly, but they missed all the major veins and arteries. And the wound in your chest was a full inch from your heart.”

  I gave a couple of slow nods. “I guess that is lucky.”

  “Who did it?”

  “Help me sit up, will you?”

  She stood and took my arm, and we struggled and fumbled in an awkward kind of intimacy for a moment, until I was sitting up with the cushions stacked behind me. Then I asked her, “Can you see my cell around anywhere?”

  She found it in a drawer in my bedside table, handed it to me and sat down again. “You going to tell me who did this to you?”

  I nodded as I went into Google on my phone. “I just want to make sure. Where are we? Casablanca?”

  “No, we’re in Spain. It’s a private clinic in Marbella.”

  I found what I wanted on the screen and smiled without much humor.

  “You figure we’re done in Morocco, huh?”

  She gave her head a little twitch to the side. “We don’t know. You destroyed the lab. There were a lot of dead bodies there. A lot! Heilong Li’s car was there… I’m hoping you’ll tell me they are dead and the job is done.” She gestured at my chest. “And who did this to you?”

  I ran through everything that happened, omitting no detail, up to the point where Rachida stabbed me and jumped from the plane. The colonel sat in silence for a while after I’d finished, and then gave a sly smile without malice.

  “That must have hurt,” she said, “on many levels.”

  I returned the smile and shook my head. “I am not that naïve. I know what a woman can do to a man.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” She took a deep breath. “So, the job is done.”

  “I don’t think so. You see, I don’t think the man I killed was Heilong Li.”

  She frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “He said something to me just before I killed him. At the time I didn’t pay much attention, but what happened after made me review it. I was mad and I asked him if he thought it was OK for him to massacre innocent people to make himself rich, and he answered, ‘No, no, you’re making a mistake…’ I told him I wasn’t making a mistake, and he said he could tell me something. Then he asked me if I was CIA, begged me to take him with me and insisted he had something to tell me. I asked him what it was he wanted to tell me and he said, verbatim, ‘It’s not what you think. It’s not a vaccine.’ He emphasized that: ‘It’s not a vaccine! It is an attack. An attack on the Western economy…’”

  She frowned. “He was bullshitting you to save his life?”

  “That’s what I thought to begin with. That’s why I killed him. But then I got to thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “About Rachida. I’d noticed early on, when I was having dinner with her at Rick’s Café, that there were things about her that just didn’t make sense. For a start she knew I drove a Mercedes, when she’d never seen my car. That suggested to me that she’d had someone check up on me. Why would she do that? When I challenged her she said that Amin, the brigadier’s tame cop, had told her about me and she had wanted my ‘profile.’ What the hell would she want my profile for?”

  She grunted. “Odd, but hardly compelling. Anything else?”

  “Yeah, then she tried to tell me that she had a mutual back-scratching relationship with Amin, and he had asked her to keep an eye on me. That was obviously bullshit because Amin already knew I was working for the brigadier. So that was two questions: one, why was she keeping tabs on me; two, why was she lying and trying to tell me it was Amin who was keeping tabs on me?”

  “OK…”

  “Also, she only appears in official Moroccan records five years ago. Buddy says that’s not unusual, and that may be so, but when you add to that the fact that her English is flawless, just tinged with a French-Moroccan accent, until she gets mad, and then she breaks into educated West Coast American, it starts to look decidedly odd. And besides…” I shook my head. “I just can’t buy her story that she was raised in a slum in Morocco. She has Ivy League written all over her. And if not Ivy League, a damn good university.” I paused, thinking, and added: “When I pressured her in the plane to give me an explanation, that was when she drove her damned Swiss Army knife into my leg and jumped. You don’t learn that kind of stuff at whore school in the back streets of Casablanca.”

  She closed her eyes a moment and sighed. “You sure have a way with words sometimes, Harry.”

  “Sure, but I’m not wrong, am I?”

  “No, you’re not wrong. But what is your point?”

  “She is one of three things, Colonel.” I held up three fingers. “She is CIA,” I closed one finger, “which I do not believe because I threatened to hand her over to Langley and she didn’t flinch. She is MI6,” I closed a second finger, “which I don’t believe because the Brits don’t operate that way and besides, when she gets mad she reverts to American English. Or, number three,” I dropped my hand in my lap, “she is the Black Dragon.”

  She laughed. “The what?”

  I held out my phone for her. She took it and frowned at the screen, then at me. “Heilong means black dragon?”

  “That’s what it looks like. It’s a hunch, but it’s a strong hunch. I think Rachida Ait is probably Sally Brown, Mary Sue Smith, whatever, Jane Doe, from Orange County, a chemistry graduate from UCLA, recruited long ago by some subsidiary of United Chinese Petrochemicals. Rachida Ait, the high-class hooker, was just a cover.”

  “That is one hell of a leap, Harry.”

  “I’m not saying it’s true. I’m saying that’s my hunch. It is very hard to explain her behavior otherwise. There is also the question I never got around to asking her.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What the hell she was doing there that night. In ancient China it was not unusual for a very powerful man, a mandarin or an emperor to have a double or a stand-in. My hunch is that what Heilong Li wanted to tell me was that he was not in fact Heilong Li at all, but a stand-in. It would have been a perfect cover for her. When I showed up, if Amin was her source in the Police National Judiciaire, he must have told her that I was interested in the Trans Arabian Transportation Company, and she must have wanted to know why. Obviously Amin could tell her only so much, because that was all he knew.”

  She thought about it a while then shook her head. “I don’t know how we would even go about testing this theory, Harry.”

  I shrugged. “You could start by running her through facial recognition databases in the USA. Meanwhile, how old is she? Thirty? She showed up in Casablanca five years ago, which would make her twenty-five at the time, recently graduated; allow a two-year margin of error either side. Start with leading Californian universities, but include East Coast Ivy League universities too. You’re looking for outstanding, first-class chemistry students. You’re looking for the highest-performing, award-winning graduates of their year. She is a girl and she’s black, she will stand out. If she is there, any decent investigator will find her.”

  “OK, I still think you’re jumping the gun. I think what you had there was a crazy, brilliant hooker who panicked, but we’ll check your angle.”

  “Good. How long do I have to stay here?”

  “I told you, you were lucky. You’ll be limping for a few days and you should try not to sneeze or cough too often, but the doctors here are satisfied you are out of danger. They want you in for another day, but tomorrow you can go home.”

  “Go home?”

  “Yes, go home. As it stands, you completed the mission.”

  I shook my head. “No. Heilong Li is still alive. I’ll tell you something else. Tha
t lab was a research plant where they were experimenting on human subjects with something very, very bad. Somewhere else, probably in the Far East, there is a production plant where they are producing a vaccine. But that plant in Morocco was producing the infection the vaccine is designed to stop. We need to have a meeting, you, me and the brigadier, today.”

  She raised an eyebrow at me again. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather it was just you and the brigadier?”

  “No, I want you on board. And, Colonel? We need to find out yesterday where Rachida has gone.”

  She stood. “I’ll alert our friends. And see if we can find out who she is.”

  “She won’t be in China, but maybe Indochina, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, maybe Indonesia…”

  “Based on…?”

  I took a deep breath, asking myself the same question. “Conveniently close to China, corrupt, easily bribed authorities, geographical locations that are hard to police, gut feeling…”

  She shrugged. “Fine. I’ll send a car for you tomorrow after breakfast.”

  “Where am I staying?”

  “Buddy has a villa here in Nueva Andalucia. You’ll stay with him.”

  “Give me his address.”

  “Do you know you’re a pushy son of a bitch?”

  “Yeah, my mother told me every time I asked for more porridge. What’s his address?”

  “Calle del Naranjo, 23, Nueva Andalucia. Happy?”

  I smiled at her. “Yes, thank you, Jane. I owe you a candlelit dinner.”

  “Go take a hike—soldier!”

  She stepped out the door and left. I sat a while staring at the wall, trying to think of ways in which I might be wrong. In the end I couldn’t think of any, so I gave up and called the nurse. She was an Andalusian, five-foot-two babe with black eyes and black hair who told me, “No, no, no!” and wagged her finger at me when I told her I was going home. I told her, “Si, si, si,” and she went to get the doctor.

  The doctor was another Andalusian, five-foot-two babe with black eyes and black hair who also told me, “No, no, no!” and wagged her finger at me. “You are injure,” she said, frowning with oddly attractive severity. “You muss estay in de be’! O’ you no get better!”