Rogue force, p.17
Rogue Force, page 17
Troy nearly laughed. Had she noticed the Jaguar when they pulled in here? Maybe not. The shock of the evening had worn off the more wine she drank.
“Thank you,” he said.
This was interesting. She seemed to have anything and everything a man could want. He might as well take a stab in the dark here.
“Do you have any guns?” he said. Her eyes widened and he raised a hand. “No, I won’t hurt your brother. But he might have henchmen with him, and I might have to deal with them first.”
“I hate guns,” she said.
“That doesn’t really answer my question, does it?”
She paused for a long moment. Then she seemed to make up her mind. “In the castle. The ancient keep. It’s full of guns. I’ll bring you there.”
* * *
“I don’t like it,” Mariem Dubois said.
Her voice echoed off the high ceiling, sounding childlike to her own ears. She stood in the formal dining room of the house. The room was cavernous. Hence the echoes. They reminded her of the gymnasium at her school when she was very young.
She held her mobile phone to her ear, waiting for her call to go through to the Special Investigations Unit office. It seemed like the call was taking forever to connect. She lowered her voice, mindful of the acoustics. She didn’t want the Willems woman to overhear.
“We’re already in an awkward position. We kidnapped that woman…”
“We saved her life,” Stark said.
Mari watched him. He was a big man, and very handsome as men went, she supposed. He was too confident for his own good. Was it his looks? Were good-looking men prone to being overconfident? Or maybe he was just a psychopath. He had killed a man tonight, shot him in the head with no hesitation at all. Yes, it had ended the crisis of the man holding a knife to Aliz Willems’s throat. But it was so sudden. Afterward, he had seemed to feel nothing about it at all. He had simply dumped the body in the woods as if it was some trash left behind.
And he had been confident! Confident that he was right, that it was the right thing to do. How could a man take a life so cavalierly?
She imagined it would take her months to recover from that one act. What about the man he had killed on the street?
The phone rang and rang.
“I need to talk to Miquel,” she said. “If that woman has information about her brother, and he may be involved, then we should bring her in so she can give a formal…”
Stark shook his head. “No. I got no time for that.”
And rude. He was rude. It was nearly impossible to finish a sentence in his presence. Mari had been identified as gifted and talented at a young age and had gone to schools reserved for the upper classes most of her life. Manners were important at these schools. Her parents were civil servants who had met in Senegal, her father French, her mother Senegalese. They valued decorum, respect for tradition, patience with bureaucratic processes - the wheel grinds slowly, but it does grind if you let it.
Troy Stark valued none of these. He spoke English in a garbled torrent of tortured syntax. He interrupted. He was sarcastic, almost caustic at times. He beat people. Instead of interviewing subjects, he put guns to their heads. He ended tense standoffs, what might even be considered a hostage negotiation, with a bullet to the brain.
“I just need to go there, check the place out. She says it’s about two and a half hours away. If I leave soon, I can be there before dawn.”
Over the phone, someone finally answered. “Hello?”
Mari raised a hand to Stark.
“Miquel, it’s Mariem Dubois.”
Miquel sounded far away somehow. “Mari. It’s good to hear from you. We’ve seen the video. Much of Europe has seen it.”
“This phone rang and rang,” she said. “I think the phone might be compromised.”
“Jan re-routed the office phone to my own mobile. He encrypted the calls and made mobile phone calls bounce around the world to mask their locations. He did in case you called. We can speak freely, and no one will know where you are.”
It was a curious thing. “Why? I don’t understand.”
“I am under investigation,” Miquel said. “They sent an Internal Affairs man up from Lyon. I was confronted by the Europol Deputy Director. Someone from the Dutch National Police was there, and someone else who chose not to identify himself.”
“Oh, God. Miquel.”
“It’s fine. This has been coming. You’re a good agent, Dubois. I told them you returned to Lyon this evening. If you don’t turn up at Interpol tomorrow morning, you will probably have some difficult questions to answer, but as of now there’s no talk of you being investigated or suspended. Merely reprimanded, if that. You saved Aliz Willems. You did an exceptional job under intense fire. In normal circumstances, you would receive a commendation. You might still.”
Mari took a breath. Miquel was her mentor. She had spent her entire career at Interpol under him. If he were fired…
“You should produce the woman unharmed, as soon as you can. Is she still…”
“Alive?” Mari said. “Yes.”
“Did she have any information to offer?”
“She denies involvement. She thinks it may have been her brother. His name is Lucien Mebarak. He’s really her half-brother, the bastard child of her father. He’s been a drug dealer and maybe an arms dealer. He has ties to organized crime.”
“If so, he’ll be in the database.”
Mari nodded. “Yes. But there’s more. She told Stark…”
“Stark will be deported from any European Union country back to America, as soon as he’s apprehended. He should know that. In fact, I told the investigators that he is already gone.”
She looked at Stark. He was looming there, staring at her. It occurred to her that he was still wearing his tuxedo. Outside of the blood stains splattered on it, it looked good on him. The fit was excellent.
“I think he probably already assumes that,” she said. “Willems gave him some intelligence on an old convent in champagne country, near Reims. She thinks her brother uses it as a hideout.”
“No one is going to use our intelligence,” Miquel said. “If the Willems woman has intelligence to offer, she’s going to have to come in, and deliver it to Interpol or Europol directly, and in a formal setting.”
“Stark wants to go there now.”
There was silence over the line.
“Miquel?”
“I agree with him. Given the circumstances, I would say that we are not highly valued at this moment. Our mandate is on hold. Even if she wants to come in, it could be some time before anyone sees fit to interview her. By then…”
“Should I go?” Mari said.
It was a strange question to ask Miquel. It put him on the spot. Should she risk her life to follow the lunatic Stark into battle one more time? To what end? It wasn’t even clear that all of this had produced anything of value. Men had died last night, Miquel was in trouble, the Special Investigations Unit was disregarded, and the best they had come up with was a woman who thought her brother might be involved in some manner, and he might be hiding at an old convent in northern France.
“I think you should,” Miquel said. “I think you and Stark are on to something. You are at the edge of acceptable behavior, but if this woman is correct and you stop the next attack, it will be the right thing, no matter what the career rewards or punishments are. You just have to approach it carefully and stay safe.”
Had he seen the video? A shooting war had erupted in the middle of a fundraising gala. It was probably too late for careful and safe. The next one was liable to be worse.
“I would do it, if I were you. And I would stay dark until it’s done. Don’t talk to anyone. I don’t know how long Jan will be able to hold this encrypted line of communication open. Interpol will probably notice it soon enough. If you tell a soul, it could be leaked.”
She looked at Stark now. He was making hang-up gestures with his hands. Now he was slicing a hand across his own throat. Kill it. Okay, okay.
“I will do that,” she said.
“Good,” Miquel said. “You’re a good agent, Mari. Exceptional.”
“Thank you.”
She hung up.
“Are you gonna come or not?” Stark said.
“My boss is under investigation by Interpol Internal Affairs.”
Stark’s brow furrowed. “Ouch. Because of what we did?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
He sighed and shook his head. “In that case, why don’t you go home before you get into more trouble? You’re probably a good cop. You definitely have a lot of skills. If you come back into the fold now, I’m sure all will be forgiven.”
“What about you?” she said.
“I don’t work for Interpol. I’m not on the chopping block. I’m going all the way with this. If you continue, you’ve gone rogue and you’re risking your career. If I continue, I’m doing what I was sent here to do. My superiors don’t want me to stop. They don’t want me to ask for permission.”
“You’re going to get killed if you go by yourself.”
He smiled. “I doubt it.”
“But you don’t know for a fact.”
His smile faded, and for the first time, he looked very tired. “No. I don’t.”
“In that case,” she said, “I’m coming with you.”
* * *
“Take this,” Aliz said.
They stood in the courtyard between the house and the stone steps leading up to the castle. Aliz held a small lantern, that made a circle of weak light around them. She held something out to him, which flashed in the light.
“That’s to the Porsche. It’s on the far left as you walk in.”
Troy looked at what she had put in his hand. It was the electronic fob to a car. He glanced at the doors of the garage where he had stashed the ruined Jag. There had been a few other cars, but they were covered with showroom drapes. Besides the Cayenne, he had no idea what kind of wheels she was sitting on.
“Walk this way, please,” she said.
She held the lantern aloft. Troy and Dubois followed her up the winding stone stairway, which was hewn into the side of the hill. They passed through a low tunnel, the lantern sending shadows crazily against the walls.
They reached a tall, heavy wooden door, rounded at the top.
“We keep it locked, so that vandals and squatters cannot come in. Parts at the top are open to the elements, and so they could come in that way. But they would have to climb the walls to reach such a place.”
She had a large key in her hand. She stuck it in the lock, cranked it, and pushed in the giant door. It swung easily. They kept the place maintained. Because of course they did. They were Willemses, were they not?
Now they moved through the old castle, following the lantern down dark hallways and then down a long, narrow flight of stone stairs. They were delving deep into the mountain. With each step, Troy felt like he was traveling further back in time, to the time of knights on horseback.
They came to another door, much smaller than the entryway.
“This is it,” Aliz said. “This is the ancient keep.”
She opened this door the same as before, with a heavy key, and this door swung inward easily as well.
“You would not believe the craftsmanship to make a working door that fits this doorway from so long ago.”
They all ducked to step through the doorway. She held up her lantern to reveal a rough rectangle of a stone room, extending backwards into deep darkness.
“There are guns here,” Aliz said. “Also, other supplies, which you will not need.”
The place was some kind of apocalypse fallout shelter. There was a long gun rack, with rifles and shotguns slung along it. There were shelves with more guns, boxes of ammunition, and various types of non-lethal grenades - stun grenades, smoke and tear gas grenades. There were numerous bulletproof vests hanging like coats - old school heavy vests, not the more modern Kevlar or dragon skin body armor. Moving along from there, down the wall, there were shelves with hundreds of cans and packages of food, those boxes of irradiated long-lasting milk, bottles of whiskey and vodka, dozens of cartons of cigarettes, pallets of water on the floor, all of it disappearing into the darkness.
“Do you smoke?” Troy said.
“The cigarettes and hard alcohol are for trading,” Aliz said. “Some things are always in demand.”
“Is this your getaway, in case the world ends?” Dubois said.
Aliz shrugged. “This part of the castle has survived for nearly two thousand years. A hundred years after Christ is said to have walked the earth, this was here. It outlasted the Roman collapse, the Dark Ages, wars, plagues, and into the modern era. It’s where my grandfather and great-grandfather hid Luxembourg Resistance members and re-supplied them with weapons in World War Two. They crossed into Germany three kilometers from here, carried out guerrilla attacks, and came back. Many of them died in the fighting, but the Nazis never found this place. Societies come and go, the centuries pass, and this suite of rooms has remained. If that day comes, yes. I will hold out here.”
She gestured at the gun rack, and the table.
“Please. Outfit yourselves.”
Now she was talking his language. Troy skipped over the rifles and the shotguns. He noticed that Dubois did the same. He picked an Uzi submachine with three 32-round replacement magazines. He took a couple of semiautomatic pistols of unknown vintage. He looked through the grenades. He took a couple of stun grenades and a couple of smoke grenades.
He glanced at Dubois. She had chosen two handguns and was mounting two holsters on her belt.
“Is that all?” he said.
“Before tonight, I never fired a gun on duty in my life. I rarely even carry one.”
Troy nodded. It didn’t matter. She was a decent partner. She was fast, she was light on her feet, and she didn’t fall to pieces when the action started. She had those karate kicks. She could fly an airplane. She didn’t have to shoot, and she didn’t have to kill anyone. He would do it, if it came to that.
He looked through the heavy vests and found the smallest one. He picked it off the rack and held it out to her. “Wear this, though, if you don’t mind.”
She held it, apparently surprised by its weight.
“Just because you don’t shoot, doesn’t mean they won’t.”
Now Troy looked around the room again. A new thought occurred to him. Aliz was sending them somewhere a few hours away. She was willing to give them a car and guns. But she didn’t want Troy to hurt her brother.
What if she was setting them up?
What if she wasn’t setting them up, but got cold feet after they left and warned her brother they were coming?
What if she did something else that he couldn’t predict?
He didn’t like it.
Several meters down from him, there was something like a living area arrangement. There were three upright leather chairs, a sofa, and a table. He figured if you were going to live through the end of days, you might as well have somewhere to relax.
He went over and tried to lift one of the chairs. It didn’t budge. He looked down at the legs. They were bolted to the stone floor. All the chairs, the sofa and the table were like that. There must be a rationale for it - earthquake?
No sense trying to figure it out. The ultra-intelligent and ambitious Willemses had their reasons.
“Aliz?” he said. “Can you please come here a moment?”
As she approached, he reached into his pocket and came out with the zip ties he’d had ready for the fundraising event. He hadn’t found a need for them, until now. He separated two of them out from the bunch.
“Yes?” she said.
He gestured at one of the chairs. “Can you sit in that chair a moment? I want to see something.”
Her smile said she was confused. That was good. Confused people often did things that weren’t necessarily in their own interests.
She sat down. Instantly, he seized her right wrist, fastened a zip tie around it, then attached the other end to the arm of the chair. By the time she began to stand up again, he had secured her arm to the chair.
“What are you doing?”
He raised a hand and gently pushed her back down into the chair.
“Shhhhh,” he said.
He crouched and quickly fastened her right ankle to the leg of the chair. Now she wasn’t going anywhere.
“Stark?” Dubois said.
He raised a hand to Dubois. “It’s okay. This has to be done.”
He got up and went over to the food shelves. There was an immense quantity of items to choose from. He took two bottles of water, a large canister of mixed nuts, and a package of tea cookies. He brought them over and set them on the table in front of Aliz.
She was squirming in the chair, grunting, and groaning. It was sort of funny, but he didn’t laugh. It had been a long night, and there was still more to go.
“I’m going to scream,” she said.
He shook his head. “If you do, I’ll friction tape your mouth shut. You don’t want that, and I don’t want to do it. So don’t scream. Okay?”
She began to breathe heavily, hard eyes staring up at him.
“Listen,” he said. “I can’t have you calling anybody right now, least of all your brother. So you’re just going to have to stay in here for a little while.”
“I told you where I think he is. Why would I call him now?”
Troy shrugged. “Because you told me where you think he is. And I’m coming for him. After I leave, you might change your mind about my visit. Now, I’m not going to hurt him, because I promised you that. But I’m not going to let him hurt me, either. And I’m not going to let any goons he has around hurt me, or Agent Dubois. So you stay here for a little while, and once we conduct our little visit, someone will be by to let you out.”
She stopped squirming. Maybe even she could see the wisdom in this. If she succumbed to temptation and warned her brother, she could find herself with big problems.
