Dying Breath (Cobra Book 2) Read online

  At the top we found a passage. It was similar to the one we had seen below, but this one had just four doors: two opposite each other at the beginning, and two opposite each other at the end. That meant bigger rooms, maybe labs.

  We were three steps from the top. We lay down, paused and waited in total silence.

  Nothing happened. We heard no sound. But some part of my mind was back in Sulfur Springs, lying in the shade of the pines, watching the shadows in the woodland. I had known the bull elk was there, just like I knew now that there were men here. They were there, still, silent, listening for us in the dark, waiting for us to move in closer. Waiting to kill us.

  I looked over at Scotty. He was looking at me and he didn’t need to tell me he was thinking the same. He pointed at the nearest doors and I agreed. That would be the obvious place for an ambush. Had they known we were coming? Had they been told by somebody? Or had they simply reacted to the blackout?

  I made a crouching, silent run to the nearest door, hunkered down beside it and reached for the handle. I counted out three with my fingers, so Scotty could see it, yanked hard and pulled the door open. Then I rolled away and lay flat with my hands over my ears because I knew what was coming next. He didn’t wait. His grenade launcher coughed twice, and twice there was the clatter of metal on tiles. Then there was screaming and shouting, and the tramping of feet, but too late. The blasts were violent and shook the walls, and next thing Scotty’s Tavor was spitting fire through the open door in controlled bursts of five and six rounds. Rounds that ricocheted off the walls inside the room, killing anyone who might still be alive. Nobody came out.

  I put the rifle to my shoulder and covered the second door. It suddenly exploded violently outward and a stream of men burst out the dark portal, screaming and showering the passage with reckless, blind gunfire. Burning lead spattered the walls, tore at the open door opposite, gauged showers of plaster from the concrete, and suddenly the landing was swarming with men.

  In the black and green madness of the night-vision goggles it was hard to estimate how many there were. It might have been six or it might have been ten or even fifteen. They were all running, jostling, screaming and pushing against each other in a frantic panic.

  I was on my belly and I knew that Scotty was lying on the stairs with his weapon laid flat on the landing. In the hail of molten lead it was just a matter of time before we were hit by a ricochet. So I opened up, and Scotty opened up too, and we caught them in a deadly crossfire from which there was no salvation. It lasted no more than five or six seconds during which the wretched bastards jerked and twisted in a grotesque, morbid dance. The last man slipped on the bloody floor and went down. And silence washed in like a black tide.

  I waited a few seconds, then got to my feet and ran to the door from which they had emerged. I went in, with Scotty covering the entrance. It was empty, like the rooms downstairs.

  I stepped out and snarled, “There isn’t a goddamned thing in here!”

  We ran down the passage. Scotty took the door on the far side and shouted, “Clear!”

  I opened the door on the near side and froze. In the weird, green light it was easy to see what it was; what it had been. Scotty came up by my side and said, “Shit…”

  “A lab.”

  I reached for the switch and flipped it. After a couple of seconds dull neon light flickered, hummed and held the room in its depressing glow. I said, “It’s simple, basic. This is not a research lab. This is a simple lab designed to produce something.”

  Scotty snarled, “Ay, but there are no fuckin’ chemicals here. There are no wee colored fuckin’ bottles. There are no fuckin’ petri dishes. There’s nothin’ here but fuckin’ equipment! And no’ much of that!”

  “Which means we’re too damned late. This whole damned place has been cleaned out and these guys were left here as a reception committee for anyone who came looking.” I stepped out into the passage and flipped the switches there. A limpid yellow light rained down from the lamps overhead, revealing twelve dead men sprawled, twisted and torn, saturated in their own blood. They wore sandals, Bermuda shorts and flowered, short-sleeved shirts. They were amateurs, street punks hired for what they thought would be easy money, to take out some foreign pain in the ass.

  I glanced in the first room, the one Scotty had hit: another eight men in there, dismembered, sleeping in their own gore.

  “She knew you were here, Harry, and she closed down the operation.”

  I shook my head. “No, she hasn’t closed down the operation. She has taken it into its final phase. She closed it down from Morocco, when she thought I was dead. And she came here to wrap it up. This is what happens when you build an operation on too little intel. God damn it! She has moved to execution! I need to go to her apartment. I need to go there now.”

  I ran. Scotty was right behind me. I barked her address over my shoulder, wrenched open the rear door and threw in the rucksack.

  “I’m going into the apartment block. Cover the exit. She’s about six foot, slim, black, Afro hair. Hard to miss. If she leaves, snatch her!”

  I floored the pedal all the way back to Bangkok. By the time I got there dawn was barely an hour away. Once in the city I stuck to the speed limit, with Scotty right behind me. The last damned thing I needed right then was to be pulled over by the cops, with an arsenal in my car and an EMP in Scott’s.

  I turned into Ton Son Alley as the sky was starting to turn gray in the east. I parked opposite the exit and Scotty pulled in slightly ahead of me. I didn’t pause. I climbed out of the car and crossed the road at a run. I went past the barrier and through plate-glass doors into a brightly lit lobby. There was a porter in uniform behind a desk who saw me and frowned. I guess I looked a bit like a man who had just massacred two dozen men. He stood and, without pause, I vaulted the desk, rammed my right fist into his solar plexus, dragged him wheezing and gasping to the floor and rammed the muzzle of the P226 into his mouth.

  “Sorry, pal. I have no time to explain. Mary Jones, tall, black, gorgeous, big hair. Which apartment?”

  His eyes were watering and his mouth was trying to work around the gun. I removed it and repeated, “Where?”

  “Six fifteen, please, not hurt me.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you.” I dragged him to his feet and knocked him back over his desk with a moderate smack on the tip of his jaw that put his lights out. Then I was running up the stairs, keeping an eye on the elevator in case she left while I was on my way up. I reached the sixth floor. Two minutes later I had found apartment fifteen and blown out the lock with the Maxim 9.

  There was a short passage. The lights were off but the gray light of dawn seeped in. Immediately on my right there was a door open onto a small kitchen. Ahead the passage opened out into a comfortable living room with sliding glass doors onto a large terrace. The door was open and a gentle breeze was coming in off the gardens beyond the balustrade. The sky was paling and there was a cacophony of birds.

  She was sitting in a bamboo chair on the terrace, watching me like Black Emmanuelle. I checked the room, then peered into the small bathroom and the bedroom. We were alone. I stepped out onto the terrace. She said, “You’re too late.”

  “For what?”

  “To stop it.”

  “Stop what?”

  A slow smile dimpled her cheeks. I was struck forcefully again by how beautiful she was.

  “I could tell you you’ll have to wait and see.”

  “Then I’d have to blow your kneecap off.”

  She shook her head. “I am not good at tolerating pain.”

  “You’re pretty good at inflicting it.”

  She shrugged. “I do what I have to do to survive. Just like you.”

  “I know who you are, Mary.”

  Her eyes widened and her eyebrows arched. “Really? You’re smarter than you look.”

  “I’m here to kill you. But I am willing to give you a chance. I know what you’re doing involves a virus and a vaccine�
��”

  “How do you know that?”

  “That doesn’t matter. Agree to work with us and I’ll spare your life. Otherwise I will kill you, right here and right now.”

  She sat chewing her lip, looking out across the gardens. Eventually she said, “What do you want to know?”

  “The diary and notebook I recovered from your stand-in’s room in New York. Are they yours? I know you’re the Black Dragon.”

  She gave a small laugh. “My, you are a clever boy, aren’t you. Yes, they were mine. I suppose you have experts analyzing them now. They won’t get far. The shorthand is my own. Only I can decipher it.”

  “So what have you done? You’ve bred a strain of bacteria, or a virus…”

  “A virus.”

  “And you have created a vaccine for that virus…”

  “That much must have been obvious.”

  “So where is the vaccine? Why wasn’t it at the facility at the port?”

  She stared at me for a long moment, then said unexpectedly:

  “You ditched in the lake, Barrage al Massira. But when you were rescued by your friends—by the way, I still have no idea who you work for.”

  “Finish, and I’ll tell you.”

  She sighed. “When you were rescued, you were seen and I was informed. Our project was pretty much finished by then anyway. Those poor men you killed in the lab in Morocco, they were just glorified salesmen, closing the deal. Anyway, we were pretty much done, so I had them wrap things up here.

  “One of my men followed you to Spain and then to the airport. I knew by then that you were coming here. And, Guy, or whatever your name is, you were very careless when you sat outside my apartment block. I did see you, you know.”

  “Where is the vaccine?”

  “On a container ship which has already left port, headed for China.”

  “And you have become fabulously rich selling licenses to Padraig O’Hanlon, Hans Grinder, Ruud van Dreiver and Michelle des Jardins, Gutermann, Goldbloom and Browne.”

  “Oh my dear Guy.” She smiled, then threw back her head and laughed. “You are so delightfully small-minded and naïve. The United States government was falling over itself to buy concessions to manufacture and distribute the vaccine. They have known we were working on it for the last three years. And so has the European Union. The concessions have been agreed and sold, and you are quite right, I have become obscenely rich. But that was never the purpose of the game, Guy.”

  “What was the purpose of the game? Enlighten me.”

  “This is the dawn of the twenty-first century. You know each century begins fifteen to twenty years in, don’t you? The twentieth began with the Russian Revolution and the First World War, the fall of Germany and the rise of Russia. The nineteenth with the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the fall of France and the rise of Britain…”

  “Cut the crap, what are you talking about?”

  “The beginning of the twenty-first will be marked by the great plague, a virus that will sweep across the world, claiming millions of lives…”

  She was smiling, but there was something in her eyes, an amusement that went beyond what she was saying, an amusement that said she knew something more than what she was telling me. I shook my head.

  “No, that’s not enough to define a century…”

  “Really? It only takes a few thousand deaths, Guy. It only takes a few thousand deaths to spark a panic.”

  “We saw that with the AIDS epidemic…”

  “But AIDS was spread by intimate sexual contact, Guy. What if the virus was spread on the air, or as simply as touching the same surfaces as somebody else? What if the virus was spread by standing close to somebody in a supermarket line? What if all you need to do is pick up a book in a bookstore that somebody else had been holding five minutes before? What if the virus spreads by touch and by breathing?”

  I frowned. “You can’t be serious. Then you would be talking about hundreds of millions of deaths worldwide. You would lose control of it. It would be a pandemic that nobody could stop…”

  She laughed a little more. “What measures would we have to take, do you think?” I shook my head and she went on. “The whole of the Western world would have to go into quarantine, Guy. It would spread like wildfire and the whole of Europe and the USA would have to go into quarantine until a vaccine was found.” She sat forward, with her elbows on her knees, a smile of triumph on her face. “Can you imagine the impact on the Western economies? Every place of business where people came into close contact with each other would have to close: shops, bars, restaurants, libraries, schools, offices, factories…”

  “They would be crippled. Entire industries could collapse.”

  “The entire industrial economy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is built on manufacturing and distribution. And both of those will grind to a shuddering halt. The entire Western economic system will implode.”

  “But surely, so will China. How could you stop it…”

  She cut across what I was saying. “Not if it starts there, in one city, and is rapidly contained and that city is quarantined. Not if China has a vaccine. And besides, China does not want the West totally annihilated. Only severely weakened. It will be discovered, too late, that it is not as virulent as it at first seemed, that many people develop natural defenses to it. But by then it will be too late. The damage will be done.”

  She sat back. There was gloating in her beautiful eyes. “The West will recover, but it will never quite be what it was. This will be a new age, dominated not by America’s imperial Anglo-Saxon culture, but by China. Prepare for change, Guy. It is coming.”

  I felt sick, and for a moment the world seemed to rock under my feet. There was an unreality to the situation. I remembered my own words to the brigadier.

  “So the twenty-first century will be defined…”

  “By China’s rise to become the world’s number-one, undisputed industrial, military and economic superpower. That was the game, all along.”

  “Jesus, this has been years in the planning…”

  “Oh yes, Guy. It has. And it is too late. The virus is on its way, and the vaccines are too.” She must have seen the look in my eyes because she laughed again. “I should mention that you are infected, Guy. The factory was full of it, and my door handle was smothered with it. You have about two weeks.”

  “Why? Why would you do that?”

  “It’s called insurance. You were supposed to be killed in Morocco, twice, and you were supposed to be killed at the factory here. But you seem to be hard to kill, like a cockroach. I will be picked up here by a car in about twenty minutes. It seemed prudent to me to have an insurance policy in case you showed up again.”

  “How is my being infected an insurance? What’s to stop me killing you right now?”

  “The cure, Guy. Only I have the cure and the vaccine.”

  I nodded. “Stop calling me Guy, will you. My name is Harry, Harry Bauer, and I work for Cobra.”

  The smile slipped from her face. For a second there was something tragic about it. She knew what it meant. She knew what my telling her my name and who I worked for meant. It could only mean only one thing. She frowned.

  “Harry? But the virus…”

  I shot her between the eyes and she leaned back in her chair, staring up at the top of the sliding-glass doors. I don’t kill women or children, but Mary Jones was not a woman in any meaningful sense of that word. She wasn’t even human. I went over and looked down at her.

  “I died a long time ago, Mary. Your cure can’t save me. I’m living on borrowed time. You? You have to go now.”

  I watched her a moment longer. She didn’t look quite so beautiful now. I guess beauty really is just skin deep.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I found what I was looking for in the bathroom. I wiped my prints off anything I might have touched and ran down the stairs calling the brigadier as I went.

  “Mary Jones is dead.”

  “Where ar
e you?”

  “Leaving her apartment block now.”

  The porter was still out for the count as I walked past the reception desk and out into the gray morning light. I jerked my head at Scotty and mouthed “Go!” as I walked past him toward my car. All the while I was speaking into my cell.

  “You need to listen. There is a container ship that left the harbor at Rayong in the last few hours. It’s carrying large amounts of a vaccine. You need to stop that ship as soon as it is in international waters and take possession of the vaccine.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Harry?”

  I filled him in as I climbed into the car. Ahead I could see Scotty pulling onto Rama I. The brigadier was quiet for a long while as I pulled away and headed back toward the hotel. Finally he said, “So, are you infected?”

  “No.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “For a start her story was bullshit. They want the epidemic to start in China, where they can control it and confine it in one place before it spreads across the country. It has to start in China so they can legitimately claim they got a head start on creating the vaccine. Obviously it can’t get out that the vaccine was created before the epidemic. If she started recklessly spreading the virus in Thailand instead of China, it would make a mess of their plan.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “I am. I’m pretty sure I was spotted in Marbella, leaving the hospital, so two gets you twenty she knew I was here. The operation was finished and the factory was cleaned out, so she led me there to walk into an ambush. She was sure I would not survive, and if Scotty hadn’t been there maybe I wouldn’t have. So when she saw me turn up, she panicked and made up the first story that came into her head. She was cool and convincing, but the story didn’t hold water.”