The terminal was air-conditioned, pleasantly cool, encouraging passengers to linger at the many shops. Like the Fantasy Line desk, most of the shops had closed for lunch. Those open were virtually empty today, but for bored clerks.
Kincaid headed for the ladies’ room. She heard a hand drier roaring inside. Good. No need to go in. She veered across the echoing lobby into the drugstore and bought a box of Marlboros and a cigarette lighter, then asked the woman at the checkout register for an instant cold pack. She found it among the ACE bandages and braces for sprained wrists and paid for the cold pack and a Spanish newspaper. Then she went to the ladies’ room. The woman who had been drying her hands was just leaving.
���Perdón.”
“No hay problema.”
Kincaid checked that all the stalls were empty and that she was alone, wadded a piece of newsprint into the sink drain to act as a stopper, and filled the sink halfway with cold water. Ignoring the instructions not to open the cold pack, printed in five languages, she tore it apart and poured its ammonium nitrate crystals into the water to dissolve them. She soaked a sheet of newspaper in the solution, let the excess drip, and held it in front of the hand drier. The wet paper tore easily, so the drier blew it apart in her hands. She tried again, got the trick of it standing farther back from the warm air flow, and dried it completely. Dry, it was even more fragile, threatening to crumble in her fingers. To prevent that, she laid it on a sheet of dry newsprint and then she folded them tightly into a rectangle a foot long, an inch wide, and half an inch thick.
She put it in her bag, strode quickly from the ladies’ room, across the lobby and out to the pier. She walked slowly to her car, while looking around like a tourist, opening the Marlboro box, pocketing the sealing string of cellophane, tamping the tobacco down on her free hand, pocketing the inner foil, and tapping loose a cigarette.
She saw no one watching from any of the boats in the slips. None of the parked cars seemed to have an occupant. No one seemed to be peering down at her from the ship, though they could be.
She scoped the area as she would if she were installing Lambda Team. She would put marksmen in the palm trees nearest the center, marksmen on the roofs of the buildings behind them, a marksman in a stalled truck on the overpass. For her own position she would take the lighthouse that marked the channel around the outer breakwater. A long shot with the water effects and sea breeze to adjust for, but the hit would be hers.
If there were snipers, she would be dead by now. If there were snipers, there would be no heavy guy hiding in her car, making it sit a hair lower on its springs.
She was a woman; he could be a scum rapist. But damned few rapists could break into a locked Audi without setting off the alarm. And the fact that the Audi was still where she had parked it confirmed that whoever was inside was not trying to steal it. He was waiting for her.
She had noticed something else, subconsciously, as she walked out of the terminal, a discrepancy that hadn’t fully registered but had heightened her awareness: The rigger who had been atop the sailboat mast had left his rope ascenders attached to the halyard he had climbed. To retrieve them he would have to climb back up with another set, which made no sense unless he’d had a reason to come down real quick, such as to break into her car.
It had to be about the doctor. Dr. Flannigan was the only reason she was in Cartagena. The guy in her Audi had to be an operator who had come to meet the
Varna Fantasy
for the same reason. Somehow he must have connected her to the doctor.
Woman or not, she could not call the cops. Janson Rules: no innocents in the cross fire. She had to assume that the operator was a professional. The poor cops would never know what hit them.
She stepped closer to the car, put the cigarette between her lips, shielded the lighter by turning her back to the wind, still looking for the guy’s partners. If he had them, they were invisible. The marina was thick with boats. They could be watching from inside one of the cabins.
She gazed around the marina like a visitor reluctant to leave a pretty place. Still holding the lighter, she pretended a lazy drag on the Marlboro and walked along the edge of the pier, gazing down into the cockpits of several sailboats as if admiring the polished chrome and varnished brightwork or dreaming of sailing away. She hadn’t had a cigarette since she was sixteen and the hardest part was not coughing on the toxins.
She spotted things she could use in the cockpit of the boat the rigger had been working on. She turned around and stepped closer to the car. She crouched in a swift, sure motion, slipped the folded rectangle of ammonium nitrate–impregnated newspaper under the car, thumbed the lighter, touched the flame to the newspaper, and rose as quickly.
She got ten feet away before the smoke bomb ignited.
The Audi suddenly disappeared in a whirlwind of thick white smoke. Kincaid jumped down into the sailboat’s cockpit and scrambled back to the pier carrying a Halotron fire extinguisher and a six-foot-long boat hook.
The rigger was a big man. It took him a moment to untangle himself from the backseat. He threw open the back door on the passenger side and stumbled out coughing in the acrid smoke.
Kincaid dropped the boat hook.
She shouted, “Fire! Fire!”—staging a quick-thinking-passerby performance for the benefit of potential witnesses—and aimed the extinguisher at his face. He had removed his sunglasses and even as she blasted him with the pressurized heat-absorbing liquid she recognized him as the commando who had conducted the brilliant rearguard action that enabled President for Life Iboga to escape from Isle de Foree.
He was just as cool here, a highly trained, lightning-fast operator who, despite being half-blinded by the smoke bomb and the sweet-ether-smelling stream of Halotron stinging his eyes, whipped a Tavor Micro TAR-21 assault rifle from his tool pouch and thumbed the fire selector level to fully automatic mode.
Kincaid knew instantly what he was going to do. Taken by surprise, unable to see who was attacking him and how many they were, he would spin in a circle and pull the trigger, spew the entire 30-round shot magazine in a rapid burst of deadly fire, slam a fresh magazine from his bag into the weapon, and gun down anyone still standing, whether attacker or innocent bystander.
Kincaid dropped the fire extinguisher and scooped the boat hook off the concrete. The hook end consisted of two blunt studs for pushing off, which were rounded to minimize the risk of tearing sailcloth; the hook for snaring lines was similarly rounded and curved back toward the handle. The pole was made of aluminum sheathed with vinyl. It was too light to stagger as big a man as she was facing or even knock the gun out of his hands.
Kincaid hurled it like a javelin.
She aimed for his eyes.
He was amazingly fast, with the reflexes of a cobra and the fighting instincts of a Spanish bull. He raised a big hand to block the boat hook, brushing it slightly off-course, and turned away. The hook missed his eye but bashed his temple. The stunning blow would have dropped most men. It hardly slowed him. But Kincaid had achieved her first goal of keeping his finger off the trigger.
He lunged at her.
He outweighed her by a hundred pounds. He spread his long arms to bear-hug her between his empty hand and the gun. He was thinking he could smother her with his weight, a common football-clod mistake. Kincaid backpedaled and drew from the sheath hidden under her compact shoulder bag a carbon-fiber scalpel.
She slid the razor-edged blade inside the crook of his elbow. She ripped it the length of his forearm. He kept coming and Kincaid kept slicing, down his wrist and through the heel of his hand. As his hand opened convulsively, releasing the gun, she continued cutting, crossing his palm, opening the flesh from his elbow to his fingers.
The Micro TAR-21 fell to the pavement. It was made of plastic and bounced. Kincaid caught it on the hop. Backing away before he could grab her, bobbling the weapon around to point the business end his way, she tucked it close to her body, rotated the selector lever to semiautomatic, and demanded, “Who the hell are you?”
He raised his bloody arm. His face had gone chalk white with shock, but it was contorted with rage. He pointed a red-dripping finger at her face. “You are dead meat.”
“
Me?
I’m not bleeding like a stuck pig. I’m holding the gun.” She aimed it at his knee. “Who are you?”
“Fuck you,” he retorted. If the shock and awe she had already blitzed him with would not make him answer her, the fear of her shooting him in the leg wouldn’t, either. Kincaid went at his ego instead, tearing into it with the same ferocity with which she had slashed his arm.
“Fuck me? Fuck you. Where’d you learn to fight? Kindergarten? Nobody taught you to lead with bone? You shoulda blocked me with your radius. You made me a present of your soft side.”
It worked. Crouching there dripping blood like a wet-behind-the-ears recruit, he had to prove to the 130-pound woman who had taken him out that he was important. He spit out a word that sounded like, “Sar.”
“Sar?” she shouted back. “What the fuck is sar?”
“I’m sar. You’re dead meat.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you already told me that. What is sar?” She gestured again with the gun.
He glanced past her toward the terminal and relief crossed his face. “People. Go ahead and shoot.”
Kincaid was already watching them from the corner of her eye. Middle-aged couples strolling her way, still distant, but drawing closer. Too far away to hear the sound-suppressed Tavor, but they would certainly hear him scream. He used the distraction to whirl in a swift, smooth motion and dive straight off the pier exactly as he had done at Porto Clarence. He speared the water with barely a splash, slick as a dolphin.
Kincaid raced after him. This time he wouldn’t have anyone stationed under the pier to help him escape. She balanced on the edge, eyes sweeping the surface for his bubbles to see where to propel herself into the water, soles clenched to push off the concrete rim. The Tavor was waterproof. She could put a slug in him underwater if she could get close enough. There! She dug in her feet to push off hard. Suddenly she heard Paul Janson’s voice in her head. Loud, like the boss was sitting on her shoulder.
Never get in the wrong fight.
She had no business rassling an operator his size in the water, not a powerful swimmer who speared the surface without a splash. He’d use his superior weight and strength to drag her under like a raccoon drowning a coonhound.
The couples were closer, exclaiming. They had seen him dive or they saw the smoke. She was still holding the TAR-21, tucking it tight to her body. She slid it under the nearest car, scooped her handbag off the pavement, and palmed her knife into its sheath. Then she picked up the fire extinguisher and made a show of spraying the last tendrils of smoke under the Audi.
They came running as fast as they could in holiday sandals, shouting in Spanish, gesticulating wildly. Kincaid gesticulated back, pretended not to understand Spanish, pulled out her keys, climbed in the car, smiling.
“Gracias, gracias.”
She started the motor, lowered the window to clasp the nearest woman’s hand. “
Gracias.
Thank you. I’m okay.” She made eye contact, squeezed the plump, sweaty hand reassuringly, waved a casual
adios
to the rest of them, and drove off the pier, following the signs on the Paseo de Alfonso XII that would take her to the AP-7 Autopista del Mediterráneo and out of here, hoping she had jollied them out of calling the cops.
She saw a million Traffic Group patrol cars on the limited-access toll road and a ton of radar traps. She stuck to the 120-kilometer limit and none took notice of the Audi. Home free. No one had called the cops.
Halfway to Valencia she pulled into a busy rest stop. Hungry as always after a fight, she piled a cafeteria tray high with asparagus, artichokes, mushrooms, and sardines and wolfed them down while texting Janson.
Doc jumped ship mayb Dakar.
She paused to reflect. The M-TAR-21 assault rifle, “Micro” as it was, was still a mighty big gun to wave around in public. There were two reasons a professional would risk carrying it: Its high rate of fire on automatic made it a deadly defense weapon in the event the operator had to fight his way out of a jam, but it was also extremely accurate and extremely quiet, the perfect rifle to single-shot Flannigan from the sailboat mast as he stepped off the ship.
In other words, she resumed texting Janson,
Porto C diver hunting doc to terminate.
She went back for dessert, chose two dishes of flan and a double espresso. Returning to her table, she sent another message:
PC diver dove again. Unit called ?sar? Iboga friend—doc enemy.
She spooned up the flan and stirred sugar into the espresso. Then she thumbed into her phone:
?Next?
W
here next, Boss?” Mike asked.
The Rolls-Royces were whining down to stop as Ed parked the Embraer outside Jet Aviation���s fixed base operation terminal in Zurich, Switzerland.
“Leave the aircraft here and have it serviced. You guys fly home commercial. Catch up on your sleep.”
“Home? Wouldn’t mind seeing the house, mow the lawn.”
“Spray the roses,” said Ed. “Pat the cat—when do you want us back?”
“Quintisha will find you.”
Janson’s pilots knew better than to ask where he was going.
All week Paul Janson had been calling in markers from former friends and foes from his long years at Consular Operations. Spies, bankers, state ministers, criminals, and law officers owed him favors and often their lives. Ironically—and very conveniently—there was much overlap between the CatsPaw Associates corporate security consulting business and the Phoenix Foundation. His two organizations fueled each other.