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  He did as I said, speaking, as he turned, in a strong South African accent. “Look, friend, I don’t know what this is about. I heard a scream and came to help…”

  I studied his face and decided I’d never seen him before. “Cut the crap, Philips. Is that your real name?”

  A flicker of surprise. “Yes, of course it is. But how did you…?”

  “Turn around and get on your knees.”

  “Now look! This has gone far enough!”

  “Right now you have two options, Philips. I shoot you in the face or you turn around and get on your knees so we can have a conversation.”

  The fear in his face was no act. He turned his back on me, but paused before getting on his knees. “Look here, mister. I don’t know what idea you’ve got into your head, but I was just going for a walk when I heard a scream. I came to help, and find you brandishing a gun at me.”

  “What were you doing parked outside my house last night?”

  “What?”

  “I am not the most patient man in the world, Philips. Stop bullshitting me. You’re not doing yourself any favors.”

  “You live on Concord Road?”

  “Come on, Philips!”

  He was swallowing hard and his skin had gone a pasty gray color. “I was shagging a hooker. I picked her up in Boston. It’s impossible for a man to get laid out here! I phoned and picked her up. I couldn’t take her back to the bed and breakfast, could I? So I shagged her in the Range Rover.”

  “What the hell are you doing out here anyway?”

  He almost turned to face me. I snapped, “Stay put!” and he stopped, but he was craning his head over his shoulder.

  “You fucking Americans! I’m sorry, but seriously! Where else on the face of the planet is a foreigner held at gunpoint because he is a tourist in a place where you don’t get many tourists? What fucking century are you in? This is one of the most beautiful places on the planet. I am here because I want to see it, try the seafood, wander in the woods! And what do I get for my troubles? Some gun-happy fucking Yank pulling a gun on me! And why? Because I am visiting a remote part of his country! You are a real piece of work, friend! I came here to help you because I thought you were hurt!”

  “So you’re not tracking my GPS?”

  He half turned again. His face was creased with incredulity. “What?”

  “So if we walk back to your truck now, we will not find a tracker locked onto my cell phone?”

  “Friend, you seriously need help. I’m not being facetious. You are seriously paranoid. I mean it.”

  “Take your jacket off.”

  He went very still. “Why?”

  “Because if you don’t, I’ll shoot you in the leg and take it off you myself.”

  “What is wrong with you?”

  “I don’t like people trying to kill me, Philips. Now take your jacket off before I run out of patience.”

  He was good. The movement was smooth and fluid. He didn’t fluster and he didn’t fumble. He took hold of his lapels, like he was about to take off his jacket, then his right hand slipped in under his arm and simultaneously his left leg slipped back and across to the right, so that as his Glock came out of his holster, he had already spun and was facing me. He was too good. He didn’t give me a chance to wing him or wound him. I double tapped and both slugs went through his chest. He winced and coughed, his legs failed and he crumpled to the ground.

  I knelt beside him and felt his pulse in his throat. He was dead. I searched his pockets for his ID and found a passport and a driver’s license in the name of Mark Philips, but no other personal information. I kept his driving license, picked up my phone and left.

  The call came forty-five minutes later, as I was stepping out of the shower.

  “Yeah, Walker.” I wiped the water from my eyes with my fingers.

  “Lacklan, it’s Jim. I’m on a burner, but I don’t want to stay on too long. How did you get on with your stalker? Any news?”

  “We didn’t get to talk.”

  “OK. Cape Coral. Book into an hotel. Day after tomorrow I’ll call you. We’ll meet and talk.”

  “Cape Coral. Florida?”

  “Is there another?”

  “You said Seattle?”

  “And if anybody was listening in, that’s what they are thinking right now.”

  “OK.”

  “Drive, and use something less conspicuous than that machine from hell you usually drive, will you?”

  “See you in a couple of days, Jim.”

  I hung up and began to towel myself dry.

  TWO

  I booked an apartment at the Westin, a holiday complex on the Glover Bight, and drove down in my Zombie, despite Jim’s request that I leave it behind. The Zombie 222 is, as he described it, a beast from hell. The chassis is an original 1968 Mustang Fastback, in matte black, but under the hood it has twin lithium ion batteries that deliver eight hundred horsepower straight to the back wheels. It will accelerate from naught to sixty in about one and a half seconds with enough G-force to spread your face like a pancake across the rear windshield. It has a top speed of two hundred miles an hour, and because it runs on lithium ion batteries, it gets there almost instantly, and in absolute silence.

  It was a twenty-two hour drive from Weston to Cape Coral, but I don’t sleep much—I figure I’ll have plenty of time to sleep when I’m dead—and with the help of the Zombie, I got there in just under eighteen hours, at five thirty PM on the following day, nineteen hours after I had spoken to Jim on the phone in my study.

  I parked the car in the parking garage beneath the apartment block, checked in to my apartment at reception and rode the elevator to the fifteenth floor. There I threw open the terrace and stood a while under the Florida sun, taking in the view of the Glover Bight, Sanibel Island and, beyond it, the immense sweep of the Gulf of Mexico, wondering when Jim would show, what he would have to tell me, and where and when the Omega story would end.

  If it would ever end.

  After that, I dumped my case on the bed and stood under the shower for fifteen minutes, switching from scalding, steaming water to cold and back again, trying to wake myself up and wash away the long drive from the north. Then I toweled myself dry, called down for a Martini and dialed Jim’s burner. He answered as I dropped into a chair on the terrace. He didn’t waste time on preliminaries.

  “You’re there already?”

  “I just checked in. I’m at the Westin, Cape Coral.”

  “You either flew or you drove down in that machine from hell.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m on my way. I’ll be there in the morning. I’ll pick you up from Pier Two at nine AM. Forgive me for asking the obvious, but were you followed?”

  “I’m pretty sure I wasn’t.”

  “OK, get a good rest after your long drive.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  He laughed noisily and hung up.

  I sat a while and watched the evening gather in the sky above the sea, wondering why it’s so much easier to be decisive about killing and destroying than it is about offering peace and creating life.

  My bell rang and I opened the door to admit a young man in a burgundy uniform with a tray holding a bottle of Martini, Beefeater gin and a dish of olives. He mixed me a cocktail, I gave him twenty bucks and he left. I took my cocktail out to the terrace, sat and called Marni in Oxford.

  “Lacklan… I didn’t expect to hear from you.”

  “Everything OK with you?”

  “Sure…” She was hesitant. “Why?”

  “Just touching base.”

  There was a pause, then the hint of a smile in her voice. “It’s nice to hear from you.”

  “How’s life? Any news?”

  “Like what?”

  “Career, love life…” I let the words hang in the air and heard her laugh softly at the other end of the line.

  “Well, since I gave Gibbons his marching orders, my career has been pretty much at a standstill,
and since a certain party gave me my marching orders, my love life has been pretty much at a standstill too. So, no, no news to speak of.”

  I nodded, as though she could see me. “Well, sometimes no news is good news.”

  “Yeah, sometimes. Lacklan, why are you really calling?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to ask my analyst.” She laughed and I smiled, allowing it to show in my voice. “I might be going over to England in the next couple of days. I’d like to see you, if you’re free.”

  She didn’t answer straight away, but when she did, her voice was warm. “I’d like that.”

  “Marni?”

  “Yes, Lacklan…”

  I hesitated, indecisive. My head was crowded with things I wanted to say, but in the end I just said, “I have to go, but if anyone approaches you in the next few days, anyone who might come into your life, please treat them with caution.”

  “Oh…” Her voice had hardened. “Does that include you?”

  “No.”

  “I thought you were touching base.”

  “I was—I am. I just don’t want you to get hurt. I wouldn’t be much of a friend if I didn’t give you the heads up, would I?”

  “So it’s not over?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Lacklan, you can’t keep on…”

  “Not on the phone. I’ll come and see you at Oxford. We’ll talk about everything. But please, Marni, sometimes I feel it’s enough for me to give you some advice for you to go right ahead and do the opposite.”

  “I guess we’re more alike than we think.”

  “Maybe so, but I really need you to listen to me this time. Be careful, be smart. There are people out to hurt me, and…” I paused and sighed. “I guess you are my Achilles’ heel. I don’t know if they know that or not, but if they do, you’re at risk. That was the real reason I was calling.”

  She was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, “I’m your Achilles’ heel?”

  “Look, don’t…”

  “Say it again.” The smile had returned to her voice. I sighed. She repeated, “Say it again. What am I?”

  “You’re my Achilles’ heel.” I heard her giggling and stared up at the pink and powder blue sky. “Be serious, Marni.”

  “OK, I’ll be serious and I will be cautious, I promise.”

  “Thank you.”

  There was an awkward silence for a few seconds. Then she said suddenly, “I was sorry to hear about you and Abi. I know you were…”

  “It was for the best. She and Bat seem to be very close now. They seem happy.”

  “Bat?”

  “Friend of mine from the Regiment.”

  “So you’re alone now?”

  I felt a bitter twist in my gut and tried to suppress it. “Yeah, it’s the way I came in, it’s the way I’m going out, and apparently it’s the way I’m going to be in between too.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Listen, I’ll see you in a couple of days. I’ll drop you a line when I’ve booked my flight.”

  “Yeah…” We both hesitated, then she said, “Take care, Lacklan,” and hung up.

  I had a steak and salad sent up at seven thirty, then read for a couple of hours and had an early night. The next morning I rose at five-thirty, went for a run, trained for a couple of hours, showered and had a breakfast of bacon, pancakes and maple syrup, and at nine o’clock I was on Pier Two, smoking a Camel and looking like a tourist, scanning the area for Jim Redbeard. I didn’t see him, but at ten past nine I saw a launch approaching through the mouth of the bite, and when I saw that, I noticed the white schooner anchored about a mile out of Big Shell Island. I smiled to myself. That was Jim all over, advising me that my silent, matte black Mustang was too conspicuous and showing up in a shiny, white, one hundred foot schooner.

  Ten minutes later, I was sitting in the back of the launch and we were slapping over the small waves, with the gulls wheeling overhead under the blue dome of the morning. Soon the pitch of the engine dropped, we slowed and closed in on the steps that led down from the deck to the small boarding platform, just above the waves. Jim watched over the side, leaning on the gunwale, smoking a cigarette.

  I swung up onto the ladder and he met me at the top with a warm handshake and an embrace.

  “It’s good to see you, Lacklan. You look well, I expected you to be heavier, putting on a spread now that you’ve settled as master of the manor. Glad to see I was wrong. You still looking lean and predatory.”

  “The war’s not over yet, Jim.”

  He slapped me on the shoulder. “Come down to the lounge and have some coffee. Njal’s down there.”

  “How is he? Last time I saw him, he was dying of a chest wound.”

  “That guy’s an ox. He’s indestructible.”

  We crossed the deck to a small structure that covered a flight of wooden steps, which led down into a space that looked more like an old world club than an oceangoing schooner. The walls were paneled in mahogany, there were chesterfields and Persian rugs, bookcases and even a bar. A short flight of steps led to an enclosed cockpit where there were two large, leather swivel chairs, a helm, and a bank of computers and electronic equipment.

  Njal was sitting in one of the chesterfields, reading a book, and rose as we came in. He grinned at me, gripped my hand as though he were planning to Indian wrestle me and embraced me with his other arm.

  “You still alive, huh? We thought maybe you died of middle-age boredom. What you doing now? You become a farmer or some shit, huh?”

  I smiled. “Not dead, not a farmer. Just trying to stay out of trouble.”

  Jim laughed. “Don’t go lookin’ for trouble when trouble ain’t lookin’ to be looked for, huh? Only trouble is out lookin’ for you, Lacklan. Come and sit down.”

  We sat around a mahogany coffee table as a door under the stairs to the cockpit opened and Mioko, Jim’s Japanese companion, came out with a pot of coffee and three cups on a tray. She gave me a special smile, set down the tray and withdrew.

  As Jim poured, I said, “So what’s this about?”

  Njal answered for him. “We don’t know, but it stinks of Omega.”

  Jim handed me a cup. “It more than stinks, it is clearly Omega.”

  “You said that if I destroyed Omicron, Omega four and five would wither away.”

  He shrugged and handed Njal a cup. “Apparently I was wrong. Sometimes I am wrong. Not often, but sometimes.”

  “Good to know. So how wrong were you?”

  Again it was Njal who answered. “We got two bits of intel, with no obvious connection, until you dig a little deeper. First we got this building in the Northern Cape, on the border with Namibia. It is basically a pyramid the size of a skyscraper, on the Orange River, in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere. It is in the desert. The nearest town of any size is Springbok, which has about twelve thousand people and is sixty miles away as the crow flies, but at least a hundred by road. Forty of those hundred miles are on dirt tracks through the desert.”

  “I get the idea. It’s remote. But why connect it with Omega? It could be a secret government project.”

  Jim shook his head. “Wait and listen.”

  Njal continued. “Meanwhile, in parallel, almost simultaneous, we hear that Omega Four, who had been quiet for a long time, are arranging a summit. It’s too much coincidence, right? So Omega Four covers all of Africa, Middle East—except for Israel, which fell under Omega One—Iran, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan…”

  “I’m aware…”

  “OK, right down to Pakistan and India.”

  “I was the one who gave you that information.”

  “Breathe, drink your coffee, chill, listen. Their areas of competence, what they specialized in, were Islam, mind control through indoctrination, the economy of war, unregulated research and development, especially in weaponry, biology and chemistry. So we were trying to get some idea: if this is the areas of special competence of Omega Four, what the fuck is this giant pyramid, righ
t?”

  I shrugged. “Right. And?”

  “We still got no fuckin’ idea, man. But, at the Omega Four summit, we got Pi and Ro, father and son, Ruud van Dreiver and Jelle van Dreiver, both South African and both directors of the Van Dreiver Corporation. Ruud is the CEO, Jelle is his second in command. Then we got Sigma: Prince Mohamed bin Awad, resides between his Awadi palace, London and New York.”

  “I know him.”

  “Of course you do. Then we have Tau: Ameya Dabir, Brahmin woman of ancient lineage. If India was still a monarchy, she would be a princess. Her father was a very powerful industrialist, but she established her own business twenty years ago and made her way into the Forbes five hundred richest people on the planet. “And finally Upsilon, George da Silva, President of King Felipe, a small island republic in the Gulf of Guinea, between Cameroon and Nigeria, total population one hundred thousand inhabitants. All five of them are meeting in Knysna, South Africa, at the van Dreiver mansion on the Knysna lagoon, to eat fresh oysters and drink South African wine. What else they gonna do, we don’t know. But it is the first time Omega Four have got together in a summit for over two years.”

  Jim drained his cup and set it down on the table. “I can’t believe it is a coincidence that a hit man came looking for you at precisely this time.”

  “He was South African.” I pulled his driver’s license from my pocket and dropped it on the table. “It has his prints on it, I don’t know if you can do anything with that.”

  “Yeah, we can.”

  “So you are making the assumption that their meeting is connected with this massive construction.”

  Jim nodded. “You’re right. It is an assumption. Which is why we need to confirm it. We need to confirm it’s an Omega project, we need to confirm what kind of project it is, and then, if we are right about it, then we need to destroy it.”