"What's the Dubai connection? Why are we here?"
He regarded her eyes and his lost their playfulness completely.
"The Scorpion is connected with BlueWatch," Crane said as calmly as he could. "Which is headquartered here."
Her eyes glowed at this information. "The security company. Yes . . . Tell me more."
"Their--and presumably the Scorpion's--interests currently involve India and Pakistan."
"And what are those interests?"
"I don't know that. I don't."
The reporter was now showing fear. She wondered if he'd start to cry.
"I'm asking you again: Do you know anything more about his identity?"
"No, I swear. Please, Jana . . . "
She believed him. "Another question: In the limo that night outside Paris, who were those men?"
"I thought you knew. You tried to kill them."
"I tried to kill them because I didn't recognize them. Tell me."
"I was led to believe one of them was the Scorpion. I was wrong. They never identified themselves other than that. They were trying to get information out of me, I assume. They sent me to Middleton's flat in London. But I don't know why."
His tone and delivery convinced her that he was being truthful.
Crane gave a weak smile. "Now I've done my part. Your turn to answer some of my questions." He reached for a towel to cover his nakedness.
She knew instantly this was a feint--his submissive pose gave him away. So she was fully prepared when he flung the towel in her direction and leaped forward in what must have been some classic karate move, swinging his long arm and knife-like flat hand directly at her throat.
She only had to step back two feet and pull the trigger several times.
The recoil was negligible.
10
JENNY SILER
Something was happening, Harold Middleton thought, listening to the muffled sounds emanating from the world beyond the cracked plaster walls of his cell. After so much uncounted time in solitary confinement, Middleton was like a blind man, his senses as finely tuned as the strings on Felicia's beloved Szepessy. He had learned to distinguish the various footsteps in the hall outside his door and what they meant: whether his meal of rancid soup would be served with an angry smirk or merely an apathetic one; if there was a purpose to the questions about to be posed to him or if the impending interrogation was merely a way of passing the time.
But this was different. There was an urgency to the raised voices and hurried movements that he had not heard before. From somewhere outside the boarded windows came the faint but steady thrum of an engine and the unmistakable hint of diesel fumes.
They were getting ready to move him: Middleton was almost certain this was the case, though why was less clear. Had one of the factions interested in him finally placed a winning bid? Or had the Russians grown impatient and decided to wash their hands of him--permanently? Given the circumstances, neither possibility boded well for his survival. If he was going to get out of this alive, Middleton decided, he would have to act now.
Quickly, he glanced around the room, searching for anything that might function as a weapon. His eyes lit on the ancient space heater and he lunged for it, kicking the cover with the sole of his boot, feeling the rusted screws that held it to the wall give way. Another kick and the cover swung open to reveal the glowing heating element, a crosshatch of naked metal. Sharp and hot, Middleton told himself as he delivered a third kick, knocking the element free in a shower of sparks. He could only hope it would be more effective in his hands than at its intended purpose.
There was a flurry of footsteps in the hallway just outside the door and Middleton recognized the voice of the sad-eyed Russian who'd visited him earlier. Pulling the sleeve of his jacket down over his hands, he picked up the red-hot element, slipped it into his pocket and hastily kicked the heater closed, praying the man would be in too much of a hurry to notice the mangled cover.
Almost instantly, the door swung open and his inquisitor, accompanied by a shorter, beefier and decidedly meaner looking compatriot in a black leather jacket and stiff jeans strode into the room.
"Out!" the brutish man commanded, producing a pistol from the waistband of his pants, motioning toward the door.
"What's going on?" Middleton demanded, taking note of the man's choice of weapon--a Russian military issue Yarygin PYa.
The sad-eyed man took a black cloth bag from his pocket and handed it to Middleton. "If you could be so kind as to put this on," he crooned in his cultured accent.
Middleton hesitated, feeling the weight and heat of the metal in his pocket, contemplating his options. If they were, in fact, moving him to another location he'd do better to wait until they were outside to use his makeshift weapon.
"I have other ways of asking that are not so nice," the Russian reminded him.
Reluctantly, Middleton took the bag and slipped it over his head.
A hand grabbed him roughly by the arm and he felt himself propelled forward, out the door and down the corridor, then down a narrow, twisting flight of stairs. In his blind state, he stumbled on a riser and pitched forward, his shoulder slamming painfully into the wall.
"Up! Up! Up!" the man with the Yarygin yelled, cursing Middleton in Russian, prodding him with the pistol. He smelled of fried onions, cheap tobacco and the saccharine stink of half-metabolized vodka. In the confines of the stairwell, the stench was overpowering.
Trying not to retch, Middleton staggered to his feet and resumed his hurried descent. He could hear more voices now, urgent shouting in Russian. Hurry! Hurry! and that engine again, louder and closer. Then, suddenly, there was a blast of frigid air and they were outside.
Middleton took a deep breath, trying to gauge exactly what was going on around him. Dim early morning light filtered in through the mask. The air was heavy with the odors of fast-food grease and industrial pollution. From the movements around him, he guessed that there were at least four men, possibly more, no doubt all armed. Still, if he could get the Yarygin away from his captor he might stand a chance. It was now or never.
Slipping one hand into his pocket and grabbing the heating element, Middleton reached up and pulled the bag off his head.
Before the Russian could react, Middleton whirled around, jamming the jagged end of the metal element into the man's eye. The makeshift weapon found its mark with a sickening thwack, lodging itself firmly in the guard's upper cheek.
The man groaned in pain. Middleton caught his gun hand and wrenched it backward. Delivering a sharp blow to the Russian's ribs with his free elbow, he pried the Yarygin free, then pivoted to face the others.
A split-second was all the time Middleton had to survey the situation, but it was long enough for him to realize that he was seriously outgunned. He'd been right about the five armed men, who were loosely gathered around a battered Niva, a low-rent Russian version of a Range Rover. What he hadn't anticipated were the other four guards manning the tall iron gate that blocked the entrance to the villa's courtyard. All were carrying light machine guns, Israeli Negevs from the looks of them.
One of the men by the Niva fired first, initiating a hail of gunfire. Fueled by a jolt of adrenaline, Middleton dove for the only cover available: the doorway he'd just come out of. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the beefy guard hit the ground, his chest riddled with bullets.
Crouched in the darkness, Middleton briefly considered his dwindling options. Fighting his way out of the courtyard, he knew, would be tantamount to suicide. The men had just shot one of their own; they'd kill him as soon as he stepped out the door. The only alternative was to head back into the villa, though this didn't seem any more promising. Already he could hear footsteps above him. Desperately, he rose up on the balls of his feet, willing himself to act.
But before he could do so, a deafening roar filled the air. It was a sound Middleton knew all too well, the unmistakable snarl of an incoming RPG. There was a flash of white-hot light and a
single, thunderous clap. The force of the blast knocked Middleton off his feet, slamming him into the wall behind him, showering him with plaster. The villa shuddered, swaying and pitching like a boat on a swell. There was a sickening snap as one of the beams holding the ceiling up gave way. Then, in an instant, everything went black.
"Can't sleep?"
Leonora Tesla turned from the glowing screen of her laptop to see Charley Middleton framed in the doorway to the hotel suite's bedroom. "Looks like I'm not the only one. You should try, you know."
Charley smiled weakly. "So should you," she retorted, padding across the room, settling herself on the sofa. "Besides, it's morning."
Tesla glanced at the clock in the bottom corner of her screen and was surprised to see that it was almost five. "Barely," she said.
"What are you doing?"
"Just following a hunch."
"You want to fill me in? I'm not going anywhere."
The Queen Elizabeth Hotel, with its friendly, lived-in atmosphere and compliant staff, was a charming cage if ever there was one, but it was, for the time being at least, a cage nonetheless. After their confrontation with the well-dressed Brit, they were reluctant to venture outside the walls of the hotel. If that man could find them, Tesla knew, others could as well.
"I found out more about what your father was telling us about Sikari's younger days," Tesla said. "When he was a teenager, he was chosen, along with two other boys, to go to school in England. The whole thing was financed by an anonymous source. Six years at boarding school, then Cambridge. And after they graduated they were each given start-up capital. We haven't been able to figure out why, but we think it was some kind of social experiment. All three boys were Hindu, but one was Pakistani, one was Indian, and one--Sikari--was Kashmiri."
"Social experiment sounds kind of ominous," Charley remarked. "What makes you think it wasn't just plain old philanthropy?"
"That's what we thought before we found out that Sikari was the only one of the three still alive. The Indian, a man named Sanjiv Das, drowned in New Delhi twenty years ago, and the Pakistani, Santash Grover, died after drinking bad well water a few years later. Are you starting to see a pattern?"
Charley looked skeptical.
"That's not the only thing," Tesla continued. "Guess what all three studied at Cambridge?"
"Don't tell me."
"You guessed it: engineering, energy and hydrology."
"So who's the source?" Charley asked.
"There doesn't seem to be one. So far all Wiki's been able to find is an impressive collection of shell companies. But that's not what I'm interested in."
"No?"
"There's been so much focus on Sikari that no one's bothered to find out about the two dead men," Tesla explained. "I figured it wouldn't hurt to do some poking around."
Charley Middleton sat forward on the couch, propping her chin on her palms. "And? What did you find?"
Tesla scowled. "Not much so far. But then I don't have a lot to work with."
Charley pointed at black and white photograph of a group of people displayed on the screen. "What's that?"
"It's a ground-breaking ceremony. Some project Santash Grover's engineering firm was working on. I just pulled it up from the Daily Dawn archives." She pointed to a slim man in a western suit holding a shovel. "That's Grover."
"Who's the little girl?" Charley asked, leaning closer to get a better look at the lithe teen who stood slightly apart from the group. The intensity of her expression was disarming.
Tesla squinted to read the caption. "That's odd . . . "
"What?"
"This says she's Grover's daughter, Jana. But nothing else I've found so far has mentioned anything about him having a child. His obituary in the Dawn didn't list any survivors."
"Maybe it's a mistake."
Tesla looked from Grover to the child and back again. The girl's curly hair and mostly Mediterranean features were distinctly out of place in the predominantly South Asian crowd. But at the same time, her resemblance to Grover was uncanny. They both had the same high forehead, the same full lips.
"Or just maybe she's gone to great lengths to conceal her identity."
"What are you looking at?" Jana snapped as she ducked into the back of the limousine outside Le Bourget airport in Paris. Her young Moroccan driver had not been able to take his eyes off of her since they'd met outside customs, but now he quickly averted his gaze, looking down at the tips of his cheap dress shoes.
Normally, Jana might have welcomed the flattery, even from a mongrel like him, but she was in no mood for it this morning. She was furious she'd been forced to kill Crane and hadn't able to interrogate him further.
She'd spent hours trying to learn what she could about the connection between the Scorpion and the BlueWatch security company. Curiously, despite her considerable talents, she'd been able to find out very little; the company was shrouded in layers of corporate disguise, like a Russian matryoshka doll. Fortunately, though, one of the reasons she hadn't made much headway was that many BlueWatch employees had left the U.A.E. for a big mission. This in itself was an important find--all the more so when she learned that the flight plans had taken them to Mumbai and New Delhi.
She wasn't sure what to make of this yet. But she had some ideas.
She fought exhaustion. But in just two days, Jana reminded herself, she'd have all the time in the world to sleep. But for now it was imperative that she focus on the task at hand. She and Archer agreed to follow one lead that Crane had provided: Jana would fly to Paris and take Charlotte Middleton, preferably alive, to neutralize any danger from her father and find out what information the man had. She'd convinced Archer that Middleton was indeed a threat. At the very least, she could kill the woman; her death would distract Middleton and perhaps make him give up his mission altogether.
"Avenue Pierre 1er de Serbie," Jana barked as the driver climbed in behind the wheel, giving him the street address of the Hotel Queen Elizabeth. The man nodded, then pulled away from the curb, merging with the gleaming black stream of corporate limousines leaving Le Bourget and heading into Paris. Jana pressed a button on her leather armrest and raised the partition between them.
A French breakfast was laid out on the small bar: a selection of pastries on a china plate, a thermos of cafe au lait, butter in the shape of a rose, tiny jars of lavender honey and apricot conserves flanked by delicate silver spoons. Enough to feed a small nation, Jana thought, the excess making her suddenly uncomfortable.
Ignoring the food, she reached under her seat and pressed a small and discreetly placed lever. Immediately, the armrest popped open, revealing a Hawlen 9mm with a matching silencer and a half a dozen spare clips. Jana took the pistol from its hiding place and fingered it lovingly. Here, at last, was a luxury she could appreciate.
Harold Middleton opened his eyes to a roiling cloud of greasy black smoke. He couldn't have been out for more than a minute or two, but in that brief amount of time the drafty villa had been transformed into hell on earth. The ceiling, where it still existed, was crawling with flames, the walls baking hot to the touch. The air smelled faintly of burning flesh.
Middleton struggled to his feet, trying to orient himself. He'd lost the Yarygin in the explosion, but that was the least of his problems. The stairway he'd come down just moments earlier was gone, replaced by a gaping hole. A burning beam lay across the doorway, his only exit. Moving quickly, Middleton sloughed off his jacket and tossed it across the beam, hoping to temporarily douse the flames and create a narrow passageway for himself. The tactic worked, if barely. Seizing the brief window of opportunity, he leapt over the beam and barreled out the doorway.
The situation outside was only slightly less dire. Looking around him, Middleton was reminded of the puzzles Charley had loved when she was a little girl: drawings where everything was slightly off, where you could look and look and still not see the man wearing the shoe on his ear or the bicycle wheel that was really a button. Bodies lay s
cattered across the courtyard, several of them burning, one missing its head, another an arm. The Niva was engulfed in flames. Shards of glass and other debris from the villa littered the ground. The tall iron gate at the courtyard's entrance had been blown off its hinges.
An ordinary explosive device couldn't have caused this much destruction, Middleton knew, his brain slowly beginning to function once again now that he was out of immediate danger. No, this much damage had to be the result of a thermobaric bomb.
As he picked his way through the debris, heading for the gate, Middleton listened for the sounds of approaching emergency vehicles. It was only a matter of time before the fire department arrived and he didn't want to be there to welcome them. But, strangely, he didn't hear any sirens.
In fact, he suddenly realized, he couldn't hear anything. Not the roar of the inferno. Not the howls of pain from the guard by the gate with the metal rod stuck in his thigh. The explosion had numbed his eardrums.
Fighting back a wave of panic, trying to focus on anything besides the fact that he was stone deaf, Middleton forced himself to put one foot in front of the other and keep moving.
"Wait here," Jana told the driver as they pulled to a stop outside the front door of the hotel.
The man reached for the key, but Jana stopped him. "Keep it running," she said, opening the door for herself, swinging her black leather boots out onto the curb. "I won't be long."
It was not quite six o'clock when she stepped into the Hotel Queen Elizabeth. Her timing, if not perfect, was propitious. Half an hour later and she would have had to contend with a doorman and a bellhop, but at this early hour there was just a lone receptionist behind the front desk.
"May I help you?" the man asked, glancing up from his computer screen as Jana made her way across the small but elegant lobby. He used the formal vous to address her, but the tone of his voice was pure contempt.
Jana knew exactly what he was thinking: What is this Arab whore doing in my hotel? He was about to find out.
"Give me the key to Charlotte Rosewald's room," Jana demanded, approaching the front desk.
The receptionist raised a single black eyebrow. "Would Madame also like the combination to the safe?" he asked, with caustic sarcasm.