Zero kill, p.25
Zero Kill, page 25
The mission had been a farce. SIS and the other agencies had long suspected the operation was compromised, and were right to be suspicious.
The mission was a sleight of hand; Carragher had walked his team into a trap. Elsa had confirmed that the objective of the incursion had been accomplished and the data on the hard drive destroyed – if it had even been there in the first place. But she had been injured and treated for her catastrophic injuries. Given a life-saving blood transfusion, a small number of the blood cells containing a deadly secret, instructions on how to build a terrifying virus, had replicated in her body.
For all these years, Elsa had been walking about without a care in the world. Working, exercising, watching TV, dating, cooking, sleeping, showering, cleaning, washing, shopping, holidaying, eating, taking the kids to school, collecting the kids from school, paying bills, drinking coffee in the soft play area… and all the time she was going about her business, she’d been the most dangerous woman on Earth.
‘You were the best hiding place, Elsa,’ said Arkady. ‘We couldn’t have chosen anyone better to be the vessel for our secret. You were as fit as a fiddle; we already had your excellent physical assessments. Even more perfect, you were pregnant, and had already made the decision to settle for a life of cheerful obscurity, out of harm’s way. And if things went wrong in your life, there was an excellent chance you’d be able to survive until the day arrived for us to retrieve the data. As we have seen for ourselves.’
‘What if I had been killed on that mission, what then?’
‘You certainly gave us a scare. You were meant to get a flesh wound.’ Arkady placed thumb and forefinger close together. ‘Lose a modicum of blood, enough to justify a small transfusion. But the ammunition my men used had to be real, of course. One of them got carried away, and shot you in an artery.’ He shook his head. ‘Not a good place, very dangerous and messy. You bled out quickly. If you’d died, we would have had to transfer the data into Camille. But you survived, I’m glad to say. And your critical injury gave even greater credibility to the narrative of the ill-fated but successful mission. Our preference was always for a carrier who had no idea of the strange cargo inside of them, and for many years it made life simpler for us all.’
Elsa looked inside the biolab, where the boy lay dead, his father on the brink.
‘Why now, after all these years?’
‘A project like this takes careful planning and good timing. It’s always been a question of waiting for the right opportunity, for strange times such as these,’ Arkady said. ‘We’re living in a very difficult and unpredictable age, stumbling from one catastrophe to the next. And the situation is only going to get worse. As the climate rapidly collapses, the struggle for control of dwindling resources is only just beginning. The coming years will see a mass movement of people across the planet; violent conflict will increase. Many of the old ways of running things have proved inadequate. There are public figures – connected and influential; a loose affiliation of like-minded people – who believe that our priority is to remodel society into something more resilient and, yes, authoritarian. A system of government that will be able to meet the coming challenges more robustly. Introducing a virulent plague will be the shock cure required to finally put this weak and vacillating world of ours on the right path.’
Arkady joined her in front of the biolab. ‘I’ll be honest with you, Elsa, we don’t quite know for sure what the effects of releasing this virus will be. Millions will die, most probably tens of millions, or more. There will be chaos and civil disorder on a global scale – perhaps years of it. But in order to bring the disaster under control, we simply will not be able to continue the way we have. The world will need to become a completely different place. New laws introduced, long-cherished freedoms curtailed. A deadly plague will be the perfect device to introduce these measures. And then maybe, just maybe, this world will have a chance. You may not believe me a good man, Elsa, but I have the best of intentions.’
‘Okay.’ Pettifore slammed shut the laptop. ‘The pathogen is ready to go.’
‘You had better get changed, my friend,’ Arkady told Kieron, who stood waiting in his suit and tie. ‘Wear something casual, you’re going to a concert, after all.’
The man walked out of the room.
‘Kieron has agreed to be our vector,’ Arkady told Elsa. ‘In return for his sacrifice, I’ve assured him that his terminally ill wife will remain in my care, safe from the biological disaster that’s about to engulf the world, and she will receive the best palliative treatment.’
Noah Pettifore asked tensely, ‘My ride?’
‘You’ll leave with me when the helicopter arrives. We’ll go as soon as the virus is on its way.’
Watching the man writhe in agony inside the tent, Elsa tried to make sense of Arkady’s plan. Years ago her cells had been altered, a deadly sequence encoded into her DNA, her body weaponized without her knowledge, with the intention of causing untold death and devastation. It was vile, insane, beyond comprehension. She was so shocked, and so enraged, she could barely speak.
‘Where are you going? Let me guess, far away.’
‘Yes, obviously somewhere very safe. Releasing the virus is only the beginning, Elsa. There’s plenty to do in the coming months and years, a world to reshape.’ Arkady clapped Noah on the shoulder. ‘We have been on a long journey, you and I; you too, Elsa. We’re all coming to the end of that journey, and stand at the beginning of an exciting new one.’
She didn’t understand what he was talking about. ‘If Camille took the blood from me, why am I here?’
The tall man came over once again, and told Arkady, ‘They’re just arriving.’
‘Thank you, Anthony.’ The oligarch flashed her a big smile. ‘You’re about to find out. Come with me.’
‘Okay, people.’ Noah Pettifore placed a finger on an intercom button and told the remaining suited figures in the biolab, ‘Wrap it up, quick as you can.’
Arkady led Elsa back towards the reception area. She was conscious of Camille walking behind her the entire time, and of Arkady’s security men, who surrounded her as she walked outside onto the circular drive.
Elsa heard a throbbing noise and saw the trees sway furiously in the downdraught of a helicopter as it landed on the lawn.
‘I do love a reunion,’ Arkady shouted over the noise and the blast of air.
Several men in tactical assault gear jumped out of the vehicle as soon as it touched down. One of them reached back inside and lifted two children from the cabin.
Elsa felt rage and panic in her chest at the sight of India and Harley. Her first instinct was to run to them – maybe she could grab them and escape into the trees – but she felt the barrel of an assault rifle in the small of her back.
Arkady gestured for her to remain calm. ‘They have been through enough trauma, I think, without seeing their mother killed.’
She glared at him, but he nodded once again at the helicopter. Another man had jumped out, taking the hands of her children to pull them beneath the whirling blades.
Even before he took off his visored helmet, she recognized that big, purposeful walk, all these years later.
He dropped the helmet to the ground as he came towards them.
It was Steve Carragher.
40
Nigel Plowright was sitting in the back of a government car, phone clamped to his ear, as it had been for the past three days, the busy London traffic thickening around him.
‘Don’t think I’m going to take the fall for your incompetence,’ a Whitehall mandarin hissed in his ear. This man, along with several others, had called to unload his anxieties and fears onto Plowright’s already tense shoulders. ‘You’re clearly not up to the job, and never have been.’
Plowright couldn’t comment on the veracity of the second part of the statement, but the job had been a poisoned chalice from the beginning. As the consequences of failing to find and contain Elsa Zero became increasingly clear, his superiors jostled to distance themselves from the decision to put him in charge of the hunt. He’d just come from a very difficult meeting at the Joint Intelligence Committee, where nobody would look him in the eye. Come the inevitable public inquiry, he’d be the fall guy. Could he be held responsible in the eyes of the law, criminally negligent for the release of an apocalyptic virus in the UK and the deaths of thousands? Was it time to get lawyered up?
‘We’re chasing a very promising—’
‘I don’t care what you’re chasing,’ said the mandarin. ‘You’d better get this sorted, Nigel, or we’re all fucked. You, in particular, do you understand?’
To his relief, the ‘call waiting’ icon on his phone began to flash. ‘Sir, I have a very important call to take, and one that will crack this—’
But the mandarin had already hung up.
‘What’s the problem here?’ The car was stuck in traffic, and Plowright leaned forward to speak to the driver, one of the ancient pool of chauffeurs who had been carrying government officials around since God was a nipper, and who drummed his fingers on the wheel.
‘Some kind of diversion,’ the man said.
Plowright was going home, finally. He’d take a shower, change his clothes. He was also debating very strongly with himself about whether he should make sure Hugh left the country. Upstairs would come down on him like a ton of bricks if he did, but he was reaching the point where he was past caring.
He answered the call. ‘Have we got the kids? Tell me we’ve got them.’
Justine took a deep breath. ‘The situation is complicated.’
‘Shit, shit, shit,’ said Plowright with feeling. In the front, the driver didn’t bat an eyelid. He was used to hearing hissy fits from the civil servants he shuttled around town. ‘What’s happened?’
He heard the click of a door as Justine moved through the office. ‘Someone got to them before we did. There was an exchange of fire between them and the Zeros, and—’
‘Exchange of fire, what are you talking about?’
‘Zero’s parents attempted to stop the unidentified assault team, but the kids were taken.’
‘Are they dead? Howard and Greta Zero, I mean.’
‘They’re alive and unharmed.’ Plowright was surprised. ‘We’re bringing them in for interrogation.’
‘Bloody hell,’ said Plowright, with such feeling that even the driver raised an eyebrow. ‘All right, I’m coming back in.’
He leaned forward. ‘Take me back to Vauxhall Cross.’
The driver nodded and edged out of the crawling line of traffic to do a U-turn. Plowright was so tired he didn’t have the energy to keep track of the stream of updates appearing on the secure SIS app on his phone, despite the cascade of notifications. He tried to get comfortable and grab twenty minutes’ kip, but opened his eyes to find the driver watching him in the mirror.
‘Something I can help you with?’ Plowright asked in irritation.
‘It’s just funny.’
‘What’s funny?’
If the driver tried to make small talk, he’d report him; he’d take a few seconds off from trying to save the world to send an angry email to someone in Transport, just see if he wouldn’t.
‘The car behind.’ The driver nodded in the mirror, and Plowright realized he’d been looking past him. ‘It’s been following us for some time, it even turned round at the same time.’
Plowright looked over his shoulder to see a black Daimler with tinted windows a hundred yards or so back.
He cursed himself for not expecting something like this to happen. So many foreign agents had been pouring into the country, the border surveillance algorithm on the SIS mainframe had been pinging like a pinball machine for the last forty-eight hours. And with most of them unlikely to know how to go about finding Zero, it was hardly surprising if one of them decided to cut corners by attempting to intimidate someone who may have critical intel.
Plowright wanted to tell his driver to do everything in his power to lose the tail. But, of course, the old-timer had probably never broken the speed limit in his life. If Plowright worked for the Agency, he’d have been given a dedicated secret service guy to drive him around, a man with a loaded automatic in a holster, tactical defence training and advanced evasive driving skills – good hair, too, probably.
But it was Plowright’s guess that the David Jason lookalike in front had never driven over sixty miles an hour, let alone reversed at high speed to complete a perfect, screeching 180-degree turn. A high-speed chase through the busy streets of South London was out of the question; Plowright had little doubt they would end up wrapped around the first lamppost they came to.
He sat bolt upright when they turned down a side street empty of traffic. ‘Why are we heading down here?’
The driver pointed to a sign. ‘There’s a diversion.’ But a moment later, the daylight at the end of the narrow street disappeared when a lorry pulled across the junction, blocking their path. ‘Now what?’
‘Reverse!’ Plowright shouted in panic.
The driver pulled the car to a gentle stop, and by the time he’d fiddled with the gearstick, the Daimler had come up behind them, blocking them in.
‘Are you fit?’ Plowright asked him.
The driver frowned. ‘Fit?’
‘Can you run?’
‘Run, with my knees?’ The driver made a face. ‘Not going to happen.’
‘Get away as fast as you can,’ Plowright said. ‘And don’t look back.’
‘I can’t leave the car,’ the driver protested. ‘My boss will have my guts for garters.’
‘Do you have grandchildren?’
‘Five, as it happens.’ The driver perked up a bit. ‘The smallest one is only three, and he’s a happy fel—’
‘If you want to see your happy little grandson again,’ Plowright snapped, ‘walk away now.’
The driver stared for a moment, then killed the engine, took the keys from the ignition, and opened the door; left it open, too, so that the alarm ping ping pinged.
The old driver moved at a good clip past the lorry – his dodgy knees didn’t seem so bad, in the circumstances – and turned the corner. When he had gone, two large men with cruel eyes climbed out of the lorry’s cab and walked towards the car. One of them climbed into the driver’s seat, and the other into the passenger seat.
Plowright swallowed down the fear he felt and reached for his phone, but one of the men plucked it out of his hands. Plowright knew he should really say something, who are you or how dare you climb into the car, or even you’ll be in big trouble for this! But what was the point, really? He’d only be hastening his own death.
A door in the back of the Daimler opened, and he heard footsteps coming along the road. When the door opened beside him, he was surprised to see an older woman wearing a lurid pink jumpsuit.
She gestured with fluttering, bejewelled fingers and long pink nails for him to move. ‘Budge up.’
Plowright slid himself over to allow her to climb in. She rubbed her hands together. ‘My goodness, it’s chilly.’
Plowright looked her up and down. At the tall heels and jumpsuit, the flicky Farrah Fawcett hair still beloved of a certain type of older woman. He hadn’t known what to expect, but it wasn’t one of the Golden Girls.
‘When’s Barbie going to want her wardrobe back?’ he asked.
‘Don’t be mean, Mr Plowright,’ the woman admonished him. ‘It doesn’t suit you.’
‘You do know you’re trespassing on government property?’
‘Yes.’ Looking around, she frowned. The Ford Sierra was small, and had seen better days. ‘I can see it’s government.’
She held out a smooth, manicured hand. ‘I’m Mrs Krystahl.’
He reluctantly took it. ‘Nigel Plowright.’
‘Boys, please,’ Mrs Krystahl said sweetly, and the two men climbed from the car.
‘My phone!’ Plowright spluttered. The man who had taken it tossed it back into the car, before heading back to the lorry.
When Mrs Krystahl smiled, the shiny skin on her temples and forehead tightened; but Plowright had seen worse surgery.
‘Mr Plowright – Nigel. Please tell me where Elsa Zero is.’
He snorted. ‘I don’t have the faintest idea.’
‘I ask in the spirit of reaching out.’
‘Reaching out? There are official channels for that. You don’t hijack someone’s car and terrorize them.’
‘You make it sound very melodramatic,’ she said.
‘I don’t even know who you are.’
‘I represent RedQueen, Elsa’s former employer. As I understand it, she’s currently the unfortunate recipient of a kill order, and it sounds like everybody is trying to get in on the fun.’ Mrs Krystahl studied him. ‘You people really are out to get her.’
‘I suppose it was RedQueen who aided Zero to get into the dead vault?’
She sighed. ‘And a fat lot of good it did us.’
‘Don’t think there won’t be repercussions for that. If we find a trace of your organization in our system—’
‘Don’t threaten me, Mr Plowright.’ Mrs Krystahl held an admonishing hand in front of his face. Despite the sweet, girlish voice with which she spoke, there was fierceness behind her eyes. ‘RedQueen is the organization the deep state is paranoid about, and rightly so, and I assure you we don’t leave our own behind. The elimination of one of our employees—’
‘Former employee.’
‘Well, yes,’ she admitted. ‘The elimination of one of our former employees will not be without repercussions.’
