Quantum Kill (Cobra Book 4) Read online

  The next four-hundred-and-fifty-mile stretch would take me deep through dense forest and remote farmland in a large arc, north and then west and south to the tiny village of Nipigon, on the northernmost tip of Lake Superior. By then it would be about midnight and I would need four hours’ sleep after a long day.

  That would leave me another seventeen or eighteen hours of driving the following day: three six-hour stints broken up by two short rest periods at roughly eleven AM and five PM, arriving at around eleven PM in the evening. I was going to get pretty sick of the Eagles, Credence and Led Zeppelin by the time I got there.

  It is hard to follow anybody without being noticed on the Trans-Canada Highway. Aside from the fact that the traffic is too light for anybody to hide behind, the damn thing is fantastically long and straight, so you can’t really duck into a side street and come back out a little farther down the road. You’re going in a straight line on a practically deserted road, and that’s all there is.

  I had kept my eyes on the road behind me, and on the sky, and I was pretty sure, as day one came to a close, that I did not have anyone on my tail. That was something, at least. Even so, when I arrived at the motel I paid cash at reception, parked the Range Rover out of sight behind the building and slept with the blind pulled down.

  I rose at five, and by five thirty I was on my way again. I drove the first mile with my lights off, scanning the sky for choppers, but didn’t find any. At shortly after eleven I stopped at the Hell’s Kitchen on 18th Street in Brandon, and drank coffee and ate apple pie among a bunch of Hells Angels who carefully ignored me. Six hours later I stopped again at Piapot and had more coffee and pie at the Guesthouse & Saloon where extremely large men with hands like slabs of granite eyed me sidelong and spoke in quiet voices while they smiled wryly, like life had taught them just about everything worth knowing, and I had been wasting my time in the smoke.

  Maybe they were right.

  The next stretch of the journey took me into the night, past Medicine Hat and finally to the outskirts of Calgary. There, eleven miles past Strathmore, I took Exit 70 for Drumheller, where the road ran long and straight and dark, through endless fields where lights from distant farms winked, icy in the inky night. Until eventually the few, scattered lights of Irricana rose out of the blackness ahead on my left.

  At an intersection with no signposts my GPS told me to turn left off the main road. Another mile through the darkness and I came to another intersection without signposts. This time my GPS told me to turn right. It was like the opposite of peeling off onion skins. I felt I was crawling ever deeper into layers of remote darkness. Another mile and a half, or a little less, and I found myself outside a cute, green and white house with a whiter picket fence and a green lawn in the front yard. Dim light filtered through the closed drapes. It was flanked, right, left and at the rear by tall trees that stood stenciled against a translucent sky with more stars than you’d think possible.

  At the front there was a concrete drive and a garage door, but there was no car. So I pulled in and killed the engine and the lights. I sat waiting for a while, looking in my mirrors and from side to side for any movement. Nothing happened till the door opened and a male silhouette stepped out, bringing a momentary glow of yellow with him. He closed the door and shut off the glow, then walked across the lawn toward me.

  I slipped the Maxim 9, internally suppressed semiautomatic from the glove compartment and laid it on my lap. I knew who this guy should be, but I didn’t know who he was.

  As he drew closer I saw he had nothing in his hands. He leaned those hands on the roof over my window and grinned down at me. He was a Swede the brigadier had recruited from Delta.

  “Zey giff me a pass wort, but I forgot zee fucking sing. What do you sink about zat?”

  “I think you’re out of your mind, Jan. You should have let me get out of the car before you came out. I could have been anyone.”

  “Oh, yah!” He laughed. “Zat is obvious, but I vos votching you all zee vey along zee road wiz zee telescopic night vision on my HK416. I knew it vos you, or you were dead meat ten minutes ago, my friend.”

  I smiled. “OK, I should have known.”

  “Vot is zee saying, Harry? Don’t teach zee old bitch to suck zee testicles?”

  “No.” I laughed. “Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs.”

  “Sank you, same thing.” He jerked his head at the house. “Zis one is a crazy bitch. Be careful. I don’t know vot Buddy is doing, but he is playing wiz fire. She is crazy as a box of frogs.”

  He banged the roof of the car and walked away into the dark. A moment later I heard the engine of a car start up, then watched two red taillights fade into the black.

  I climbed out, took my bag from the backseat and crossed the lawn to the front door. The porch light was on. I rang the bell.

  The woman who opened the door had steady blue eyes. She had an oval face with a cupid’s bow mouth and straight red hair. She had all the features she needed to be a knockout, but somehow it didn’t work. There was an expression on her face that said she just didn’t care. She didn’t even care enough to not give a damn what you thought about her.

  She said: “Yes?” and sounded considerably less human than Siri. After close to thirty hours driving, it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I searched my memory banks for the password the brigadier had given me. I found it and said, “I wonder if you can help me. My car has broken down and I need to telephone to my son, Graham, who is an aeronautical engineer, to see if he can help me.”

  It was, he said, a bizarre enough explanation that nobody was ever likely to say it, but normal enough not to raise suspicion if I should say it to the wrong person. That was the brigadier all over. He spent time thinking about that kind of stuff.

  The woman’s face didn’t alter. Her blue eyes flicked over my features for a second or two, and then she stepped back, pulling the door open with her.

  “You can call me Diana,” she said. “I will call you John. No personal questions and no personal conversation, please.” She said it as she closed the door behind me. “You must be tired from your journey.”

  I nodded as I glanced around, taking her in along with her surroundings. The place had the feel of a comfortable safe house. The hall was about seven foot across, with a mirror and an umbrella stand and a door at either side, white walls and sage green wood. There was a staircase on the right and to the left of the stairs, twenty feet away, was a door I figured led to the kitchen.

  There was no change in her, still no expression in her face or her voice. She was about five foot two, in jeans, Converse sneakers, a violet T-shirt and a lime green cardigan. She had her hands clasped in front of her belly.

  I said, “Yeah, it’s been a tiring drive.” I was about to add that I could use a coffee and a sandwich but she cut in with, “So you won’t be much use protecting me tonight.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her and took a step closer, so I was looking right down at her. She raised her head to meet my gaze.

  “Diana, I don’t usually babysit women. That’s not my job. But not so long ago, after thirty-six hours without sleep, I killed eighteen men and then marched thirty miles through the jungle to an extraction point. All I needed then was a strong, black coffee laced with good Scotch whisky. And that’s all I need now, plus a couple of cheese and ham sandwiches. You think you can manage that?”

  “I can manage that.”

  “What about my bedroom?”

  “Mine is at the back, overlooking the yard. You can…”

  “No.” She frowned. It was the first expression I had seen on her face. I ignored it. “If anyone breaks in they are more likely to do it from the back of the house where they are less visible to neighbors. If they do try, better they find me than you when they come through the window.”

  “Oh…”

  She turned and made her way toward the kitchen door. I raised my voice slightly and said, “Oh, and, Diana?”

  She stopped and tu
rned back toward me. “Yes?”

  “As to no personal questions or information, that’s a decision for me. If I think I need some information for our security or survival, I’ll ask you for it, and I’ll expect to get it.”

  “That is not what I contracted for.”

  I nodded. “Me neither. But it’s what we got stuck with. You want to get to DC alive and in one piece, you follow my rules.”

  She watched me climb the stairs. Her blue eyes were the only part of her face that said anything. They said she wasn’t happy and she wanted to swap me for another model.

  I dumped my bag, checked all the windows, washed my face and went back downstairs. The kitchen was dark. I checked the back door and the window. They were both locked. I checked the rest of the house and found her finally in the living room, watching the TV. There was an armchair drawn up with an occasional table beside it holding four cheese and ham sandwiches and a mug of black coffee. There was also a bottle of Johnny Bauer on the table.

  I picked up the remote control and switched off the TV. She watched me sit and lace the coffee. I took a bite of the sandwich and said:

  “Here’s how it works. Until I hand you over in DC, you never open the door and you never look out of the window. Never means never. If I have to go out for anything and I leave you at the house, apartment, hotel, motel, whatever, we will agree on a code. The way you opened the door tonight could have cost us both our lives. Don’t do it again.”

  “The previous John told me it was you.”

  “Don’t explain. If you explain it means you’ll do it again. Don’t do it. Ever.”

  “Fine.”

  “When we are outside you ride in back. If we are walking you stay close, never more than six feet away.”

  “So much for social distancing.”

  I looked for a smile; there wasn’t one. “Ideally beside me. In the house you will stay in the same room with me, never more than fifteen to twenty feet away, except when you go to the can.”

  Her eyebrows rose. It was what she had instead of an expression. “What about sleeping?”

  “It takes less than a second to kill somebody, Diana. The time I waste getting from one room to another is the time it takes a pro to slip in, kill you and get out. I am a barrier between you and your killer. You are in the bed. I am on the floor, under the window.” I studied her face a moment. I’d have got more information from studying the wall. “These are going to be a couple of very stressful days.” I pointed my finger at her heart. “Your safety is my jurisdiction. And if there are people whose purpose it is to kill you, then we cannot screw around with social niceties and sensibilities. We do it my way without quibbling. You don’t like that, that’s fine. I get back in my car and return where I came from, and you can call the Mannerly Security Agency in Mayfair.”

  “There is no need for drama, John, and certainly no need for sarcasm. We’ll do it as you say.”

  I sat back in my chair and took a sip of coffee. It felt good. We watched each other for a moment. I was aware that her attention never seemed to waver.

  I took a sandwich, bit into it and asked her: “Who is trying to kill you?”

  She shook her head. “No. And besides, all you need to do is protect me. You do not need to know anything about them.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it. For a start if I know who they are I might have some idea of how they are likely to strike. I can get some idea of what resources they have. And, more to the point, I need to know if I can kill them. If they are Russian mafia, Chinese secret service or Sinaloa, then the gloves are off. But if they are CIA or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, then I have a bigger problem.”

  She lowered her eyes and pursed her lips and sat like that for a while, looking at her two thumbs side by side. Finally she said, “They are not any official agency. The fact that you are taking me to DC to hand me over should tell you that. The people who are trying to find me and kill me are independent operators and have no legal or official standing.”

  She was real hard to read. “You don’t sound so sure.”

  “I am absolutely certain.”

  “So why can’t you tell me who they are?”

  “Because I don’t know. So there is no point in your insisting.”

  I barked a single laugh. “That has to be a first. Somebody has a whole organization out to kill them and they don’t know who they are!”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “OK, so tell me what their beef is and I can work out who they are.”

  “No.”

  “I thought we had an understanding.”

  “And so we have, but that is off the table. I made that clear to your company’s representative when we signed our agreement. The reason they are after me is out of bounds. It is enough for you to know that they want to kill me. Why they want to do that is of no concern to anyone except them and me.”

  I sighed heavily. “So you say…”

  Something approaching an expression made her eyes sparkle with anger.

  “To paraphrase your own words from a while back, if that is not acceptable to you, you are welcome to get in your car and go back the way you came. It’s a red line and we do not cross it.”

  I nodded once. “If I did that, how would you survive?”

  “I probably wouldn’t, but the red line stays.”

  “So you would sooner die than reveal why they are after you.”

  I asked it flat, with no intonation. It wasn’t really a question. She gave a small shrug with her eyebrows. “Draw your own conclusions.”

  I already had.

  Three

  We ate breakfast at six AM, standing in the kitchen, while I made a flask of coffee and she made sandwiches. I was thinking ahead, trying to cover all the angles, without enough information to do it.

  “Who set you up in this house?”

  “You did.” She saw my frown and added, “Your boss, your company.”

  I gave a single nod and started pouring the hot, black brew into the flask.

  “How long ago?”

  “The early hours of yesterday. About four in the morning. You people don’t sleep much. How come they didn’t tell you this?” She asked it looking at the butter she was spreading on her toast. I ignored the question and asked, “What about your phone?”

  “What about it?”

  “Did they check it? The GPS can be tracked.”

  She still didn’t look at me, laying cheese, ham and cucumber on the bread. “The GPS is switched off. I did that myself when I… When all this started.”

  I thought about it. She had been here twenty-four hours. Glass half full was they hadn’t found her yet. Glass half empty was, maybe they had and they were on their way.

  “Where did you start out from?”

  “No.”

  “Give me a break. They may have tracked you electronically. I don’t know if they have access to helicopters, planes or bicycles! I at least need to know how much ground they have to cover to get here! They have had twenty-four hours to catch up to you.”

  She put the sandwiches in a Tupperware box and closed it, glanced at me and put it in a bag. I could feel myself getting mad and tried to suppress it. Finally she said, “Forget it. I am not going to tell you where I came from or where this went down. I didn’t tell your boss and I am sure as hell not going to tell you. But I’ll tell you this. They’d have to cover a long distance to get here. It is not in this country. That’s all I am prepared to tell you.”

  “The States?”

  She shook her head. “Not this continent. If you keep asking I’ll stop talking.”

  I stepped outside. It was just after seven. The dawn chorus had started: a wild cacophony of chatter in the trees. It was still dark, but the horizon had just begun to turn pale. I scanned the street, saw nothing and climbed into the Range Rover, then backed it up across the lawn, as close as I could get it to the front door. Then I went around, opened the back and she came out, hunched, holding
her Tupperware boxes. She climbed in the back and lay on the floor, like I had told her. I locked the door of the house. All the lights were off. I put the keys through the letter box and went and got behind the wheel. I locked all the doors and, leaving the lights off, I pulled out of the drive.

  I drove at forty miles an hour with the lights off. I kept my eyes on the mirror as much as I did on the road. The lights of the small town of Irricana winked and receded. Nothing blurred them or moved across them. It seemed nothing was following us.

  At the first intersection I paused, scanned in every direction and finally turned left. I followed the road for a mile and came to the second intersection. The Trans-Canada Highway was now twelve miles south. I was retracing my steps from the night before, and so far I seemed to be alone. I leaned back.

  “We’re clear. You can get up on the seat if you want.”

  She clambered up, gathered her dignity and her Tupperware and sat behind the passenger seat. I said, “Still no lights till we get to the TCH.”

  “Isn’t that the active component in cannabis?”

  I sighed because I knew she wasn’t being humorous. “No, it’s the Trans-Canada Highway.”

  I made the distance in slightly over twenty minutes, and as I pulled onto the highway, headed east, I switched on the lights, even though the sun was now a deformed, warping glob of molten fire on the eastern horizon. Before pulling out I had checked one last time, and by now I was sure that there was nobody following us, on the ground or in the sky.

  After four hours we came to a rough truck stop on the right, and just past it an intersection. Right took me to Piapot, a mile south, where I had stopped a few hours earlier. I checked my watch. It was just after eleven and I figured we could use a rest and a bite to eat.