Kill Four Read online

  It is a little known fact that bullets disintegrate on impact with water, and the higher the power of the round, the less it penetrates before it disintegrates. I fell. The last thing I saw before I sank into the wet blackness was the flaring fire of the weapons as they opened up. I dragged my aching body deep into the cold, soothing water and swam: one big pull, another stroke and another, a third and then a fourth, until my lungs were screaming for air; and then I kept going a little farther. Finally I broke the surface, wiped the water from my eyes and looked around. I could hear voices screaming, shouting, distant. I could hear splashing and thrashing. But I could not see the plane. I turned and found myself staring at the port float, five feet from my head. Then there was Njal’s voice hollering at me, “Get up, they are coming!”

  I looked up. He was on the float, reaching down for me. I grabbed his wrist and he mine, and he hauled me up. Then the door was open and we were clambering in. Bullets were smacking the fuselage, whining out into space, and my brain, body and my hands went into automatic. The engine was coughing, the props were turning, the plane was shaking and vibrating and we were moving down the black snake of the river, accelerating, churning up great waves of white foam. Njal was hooting like a cowboy on steroids and then the tone of the engine dropped, we lifted and suddenly all about us was the darkness of space and the stars as we rose up, higher and higher, banking south. We were flying.

  I did one circle above the enclosure, its bright lights and the burning buildings now obscured by the massive, spreading cloud of dust. Then I turned to starboard and we rose, up into the pre-dawn sky, away from the carnage and the inferno, heading north, for home.

  I looked at the fuel gauge. It told me she was full. I looked at Njal. He had his head thrown back and his eyes closed.

  “If we’re lucky, we’ll get two thousand miles out of this crate.”

  He opened his eyes and looked at me. “That will get us to the Gulf of Guinea.”

  “It will get us to Cameroon.”

  “You got a friend in Cameroon.”

  I nodded. “Billy.”

  I pulled my cell out of my pocket and dialed the number Ian had given me. It rang three times and a voice that sounded like Hugh Grant at a vicar’s tea party in Oxford said, “You’d better have a bloody good reason for phoning me at five in the fucking morning.”

  I smiled. “Good morning, Billy. What the hell are you doing in bed at this time? It’s almost midday.”

  “Good Lord! Is that you, Lacklan? Ian said you might call. Given that you have, I assume things haven’t gone according to plan.”

  “There was no plan.”

  “Super.”

  “In about three hours we’ll either be landing in the jungle in Cameroon or ditching in the sea in the Gulf of Guinea. I await your instructions with interest.”

  “Judging by the racket, you’re flying.”

  “King Air 350.”

  “How far can you get?”

  “I could probably make it to Nigeria, but then we’d crash.”

  “Good. No, don’t do that. The Nigerians don’t take kindly to Western soldiers crashing into their country. Put her down at sea, just outside the Baie de Malimba. I’ll make a call so you don’t get shot down, and come out to meet you in the yacht.”

  “That would be very kind of you.”

  “Where are you headed after Cameroon?”

  “Boston.”

  “By way of…?”

  I tried to think, but my brain ached. “London, I guess.”

  He made a discouraging ‘Hmmm…’ sound, then said, “OK, I’ll see what I can do. I can probably get you as far as Spain, or Morocco.”

  “That would be very much appreciated, Bill.”

  “What friends are for, old chap. What’s your ETA?”

  “About three hours.”

  “Of course, you said. Super. Nice to hear from you. Glad you’re back on the scene.”

  He hung up and I turned to Njal. “I don’t suppose you rescued the whiskey from the Land Rover?”

  He answered without opening his eyes, with his head still thrown back like he was sleeping. “Yuh, I did. I grabbed it from the glove compartment as I was being propelled out of the windshield. Because, I thought, Lacklan is gonna ask me for this as we are flying over the fucking Namibian desert.”

  He opened his eyes and turned his head. “We left everything, man. I ain’t complaining. We got out with our lives, which I did not expect to do. But we left behind the Audi, the weapons, the Land Rovers… You got your papers?”

  “Yeah, I got my papers. You?”

  He nodded. “I always keep my papers on me. But everything else, man.”

  “They’ll trace us.”

  “I know, but we destroyed the fuckin’ reactor, you killed the cabal, and we got out alive. That’s good. We did good, man.”

  “Yeah, we did good.”

  But I was thinking about the hallucinations I’d had in the chamber, when I was setting the bomb, and about the guy I’d seen in front of the truck at the river. “I want to know who arrived in this plane.” I looked at Njal. “I want to know who it was. He arrived at Knysna when I killed Pi and Ro, and he arrived at Goodhouse when we destroyed the power station. It’s too much coincidence. I want to know who it was.”

  “You say that like you think you know already.”

  The plane droned on. Outside the window, the horizon was turning gray and, far below, we moved over the Namibian shoreline and out over the south Atlantic, where small, luminous white crests appeared as though by magic on the tiny waves as they broke in the dawning light.

  “I don’t know,” I said at last. “There was something familiar about him.”

  “You OK?”

  “I’ll live.”

  He jerked his head at the controls. “Put it on autopilot. I stay awake for a couple of hours. You sleep. I want you awake when you bring this thing down.”

  I nodded, put the crate on auto and staggered back into the fuselage. There I found a sofa, lay down and passed out.

  * * *

  It seemed I had only been sleeping for a few seconds when Njal shook my shoulder. I opened my eyes and wondered if I was going to be able to move. My body felt ossified and everything hurt a little more than everything else. He handed me a cup and I sat up and took it.

  “I found a coffee machine and a minibar. Good morning.”

  I took the cup and drained it. “Is there more? What time is it?”

  “Eight. We have not much fuel left. We are approaching the Gulf of Guinea.”

  I dragged my leg back to the cockpit and climbed behind the controls. It was a bright morning and I could see the coast of western Africa over on my right, and a few miles away, the broad mouth of the Wouri Estuary and the southern headland of the Baie de Malimba. I began my descent.

  Long before we had hit the water, I had already spotted his yacht speeding toward us. It was a blue and white Princess Y88 motor yacht. We hit the surface of the ocean in a shower of foam, skipped three times and began to slow. The yacht slowed too and came about to keep pace with us, and as the engines died and we came to a halt, the yacht began to close in.

  I could see Billy on the flybridge, dressed in white with a peaked sailor’s cap, and that was Billy Beauchamp all over. He waved to us and a couple of guys on the main deck dropped a dinghy on the waves and powered over to us. They pulled alongside the starboard float, one of the guys stayed at the wheel and the other, a big hulk with a broken nose and a cockney accent, called up, “Come aboard, I’ll take care of the crate for ya!”

  We clambered down, he swung up into the cockpit, and while we were ferried over to the yacht, the engines roared into life and the plane took off, flying east toward the coast.

  As we staggered aboard the yacht, filthy, bruised and bleeding, Billy came down from the flybridge, smiling genially as though we had just arrived at his cocktail party. “Lacklan, my dear fellow, how are you? Come and sit down, have some coffee.” He tu
rned to Njal and held out his hand, “Bill Beauchamp, how do you do?”

  They shook and he led us inside to a comfortable lounge where coffee was laid out on a table set before a sofa and two leather armchairs. We sat and as he poured, he spoke.

  “Ian just gave me the sketchiest of details. Obviously, I have had to pass them on to Her Majesty’s Home Office. That’s the name of the game at the moment, I’m afraid. I can take you to Malaga, which will take us about five days, and from there you can make your way back to Blighty, L.A., Boston or wherever you need to go. But HMG would like to hold onto the plane, and they’d also like me to debrief you.”

  Njal’s eyes were hooded. “What if we don’t want to be debriefed by you?”

  “Then the best I can do, old chap, is ferry you ashore to Douala, offer you some cash and food and a place to sleep for a few nights.”

  I spoke up before Njal could answer. “I have no problem telling you where we’ve been and what we’ve done, but I need to know who you’re going to tell about it.”

  “My superiors at the Home Office, obviously. Aside from them, nobody.”

  “The Home Office is a big place, Billy, with lots of departments.”

  “MI6, African Office.”

  “You got a cook on this excuse for a boat?”

  He raised an eyebrow at me. “Uncouth American, could you not have taken after your mother, instead? She is a fine woman, you know? Yes, I have a cook. What do you want?”

  “Bacon, eggs, mushrooms, kidneys, toast and a gallon of coffee.”

  Njal was nodding. “Yuh, for me, too.”

  He sent the order to his onboard chef and called the skipper to instruct him to set a course for Malaga. Then he said to me, “So, Lacklan, what have you been up to?”

  “You ever hear of Omega?”

  He shrugged. “Rumors…”

  I reached down and pulled my knife from my boot, then cut away the leg of my jeans. The bandage Njal had applied was caked with blood, which had seeped out and run down my leg. I saw Njal wince. Billy Beauchamp was too English to show much emotion, but he raised an eyebrow and said, “You need a hospital.”

  I shook my head. “I need you to listen carefully, and I need you to make your superiors listen carefully to you. This…” I pointed at the caked blood. “This is not rumors. This is fact. I got this stealing a two kiloton nuclear device from the Russian Mafia, so I could plant it under what was going to be the world’s first fusion reactor, on the border of Namibia and South Africa, at a town called Goodhouse, on the Orange River. The device detonated nine hundred feet below the surface and destroyed the building. That much you can get your techs to confirm. Now, get comfortable, Billy, and I will tell you a story that you are not going to believe…”

  I told him the whole story, warts and all, partly because I trusted him as much as I trusted Njal, and at least as much as I trusted Jim, but also because I wanted MI6 and the British Home Office to know about Omega. I wasn’t sure why yet, but I knew it was important. While I was talking, he got his first aid guy to clean my wound and dress it, and check me over generally. After I had finished my story and he had finished cleaning me up, I walked in a kind of trance to my cabin, fell on the bed and slept like the dead for the next twelve hours straight.

  For the next five days, Njal and I did little other than eat, drink and sleep, and in between discussed Omega, and how all that was left was Omega 5 in China, and the remains of Omega 4 in Africa. Njal was convinced we had not done enough yet to destroy them. And I found that increasingly, I didn’t care.

  On the fifth day, we sailed through the straights of Gibraltar at dawn, with the sun rising over the eastern Mediterranean, and as we stood on deck drinking coffee, Bill asked me, “You and Njal have your tickets?”

  I nodded. “He’s going back to L.A. I’ll go via London and Oxford.”

  “Marni?”

  I nodded again.

  He sighed. “You always were besotted with her. I don’t know why you’ve taken so long to act on it.” I didn’t answer, so he went on. “I can’t promise you what HMG will do with this information, Lacklan. There may well be representatives of Omega in the department, you appreciate that?”

  I nodded. “I’d be surprised if there weren’t.”

  “You needn’t have told me everything, Lacklan. Why have you? What are you hoping to achieve?”

  I thought about it. “A year ago, Omega was the favorite to win the race for global power. Anyone seeking power would have been wise to back them. Now they are crippled, in disarray. If Western governments, like the U.K., become aware of them now, instead of backing the winner, maybe they’ll hunt down and destroy the loser.”

  He nodded. “A tad cynical, but probably true.” He frowned, and after a moment asked, “But what of their predictions? What of their concerns about overpopulation, climate change…?”

  I looked up at the looming mass of Gibraltar, towering over the ocean. Three hundred years earlier, a handful of Royal Marines had snatched it from the might of the Spanish empire and held it till now. Sometimes, I told myself, the Davids of the world won against the Goliaths.

  “I don’t know, Bill. I don’t understand it. Western alliances can mobilize a million men to go to war against a dictator who snatches a few oil wells from his neighbor, and will invest trillions of dollars in such a war. But faced with a crisis that threatens to cause famine and death on a global scale, they sit and talk, question the validity of the evidence, discuss economics and blame, have conferences and recommend recycling plastic bags…”

  “You sound like a spokesman for Omega.”

  I stared at him for a long moment. He raised an eyebrow at me and I sighed. “That’s the real tragedy of this story, Bill. Nobody is wearing the white hat. There is no good guy, only bad guys and worse guys.”

  He grunted. “That’s why they invented religion.”

  I offered him a smile that was skeptical. “To teach people morals?”

  He laughed. “No, so that the worse guys could exploit the bad guys.”

  Shortly after that, Njal and I thanked Bill and disembarked at the port of Malaga. He promised me he’d visit me in Boston to tell me what he could about his superior’s reaction to the debriefing.

  Later, Njal and I sat in a café on the port and called Jim on the burner he’d given us. Njal put it on speaker.

  “Where are you?”

  “Malaga.”

  “Were you successful?”

  “In everything.”

  “Do you need help?”

  Njal glanced at me. I shook my head. He said, “What do you want us to do?”

  “Come to L.A. We’ll talk here.”

  I said, “I’m done talking, Jim. I’m going to Oxford and then I’m going home to Boston. I’m through with this.”

  “It’s not that simple, Lacklan. There is still China.”

  “You take care of it, Jim. I’m out.”

  “Let me know when you get back. I’ll come and visit.”

  I sighed. “Anytime, Jim. But you come as a friend and guest, not as a colleague. I told you. I’m done.”

  “OK, Lacklan. I’ll see you in a week or two. Take it easy.”

  He hung up and Njal and I sat in silence, not thinking about Jim or China or Omega, but feeling the warm sun healing our wounds and bruises, listening to the lapping of the sea in the harbor, the chatter and laughter of normal people, and the gulls wheeling overhead. It was good, therapeutic, but after a while, their cries became ominous. To my ears, it sounded as though they were crying war.

  I went with Njal to the airport. He gave me one of his complicated handshakes and grinned when I got it wrong. “You gotta learn this shit, man.”

  We embraced and as he turned to go I gripped his hand again, as though I were going to Indian wrestle him. He stopped. “What is it, Lacklan?”

  “Thanks, Njal. For getting me out of there. I was finished.”

  He shrugged. “What friends do. I’ll see you Stateside. B
e lucky with your girl.”

  I watched him till he was through security, then spent the rest of the day in town, replacing my clothes and killing time till my evening flight to Gatwick.

  NINETEEN

  I had called Marni from the airport to tell her I was on my way. She had sounded pleased and told me not to hire a car. So it wasn’t a surprise to see her waiting at arrivals, but it still gave me a kick. We stood for a long time just holding each other, with the crowds jostling and pushing around us, enjoying the closeness; enjoying being together.

  Eventually, we let go and stood a while smiling, looking at each other in a way that was probably nauseating for onlookers, but was nice for us. Then we walked, arm in arm, to the parking lot where we got in her Mini and she drove us through the long English summer twilight, to Oxford.

  We didn’t go to her apartment. It was late and we went instead to a pub on the high street that had a dining room at the back. There we had steak and kidney pie and good English beer, served as it should be, at room temperature. When we had finished the food and the waitress was clearing away the plates, I asked her for a cheese platter and two double Bushmills, no ice. When she’d gone, Marni reached across the table and took my hand.

  “You look tired.”

  I nodded. “I am tired.”

  “You want to go home?” She smiled. “I mean to my apartment.”

  “Not yet. I’m enjoying this. It’s the first day of the rest of my life.”

  She narrowed her eyes, but there was pleasure and amusement in them. “You say that as though it has a special meaning.”

  I squeezed her hand. “It has.”

  “That sounds serious.”

  “I’m done, Marni. I’ve told Njal, and Jim. This last job…” I shook my head. “It was too much. I’m not doing that anymore.”

  She sat forward and added her left hand to her right, holding mine. Her eyes were bright, but uncertain. “What are you telling me, Lacklan?”

  The waitress came with our whiskeys and a wooden board with a variety of English cheeses on it, and a basket of crackers. She set them down and gave us both a secret smile, like she knew what we were talking about and she approved.