Blood Moon Rising (A Beatrix Rose Thriller Book 2) (18 page)

He heard firing from the other side of the room. He saw muzzle flash, neat and regular, every three seconds.

Aim and shoot.

Aim and shoot.

Aim and shoot.

The Sig fired out:
blam, blam, blam
.

Rose was good.

Every shot found its mark.

Better than good. She was
unbelievably
good.

She stopped firing, ducked back to reload.

There were two Manage Risk guards nearer to him than to her. They were still stunned, just turning in the direction of the sound of Rose’s gun, their backs to him. He pressed the bullpup into his shoulder, squeezed off a controlled burst, aimed again, squeezed off another burst.

The first man went down.

The second man went down.

He ducked back into cover to allow Rose to fire. She did, and the final operative hit the deck.

“Clear,” Rose shouted, no need for the radio now.

“Clear,” he confirmed.

“Let’s get moving.”

Rose changed magazines as they hurried out into the hot night. The Freelander was parked around the block. Faulkner reached it and turned. They were lagging behind him. West must have been struggling.

And then he realised: it wasn’t West.

It was Rose. She was moving awkwardly.

“Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine,” she said irritably. “Start the car. We’re taking too long.”

Chapter Thirty-One

T
hey drove back to the foundry.

Mackenzie West sat in the back.

“Who are you?” he asked finally.

“Friends.”

“Sent by who?”

Faulkner turned in the seat to look back at him. “You have something you want to say about what happened the other day, don’t you? The riot?”

“Yes, sir. I do.”

“We’re going to make sure you get the chance to say it.”

“Who sent you?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Not the government.”

“Not
your
government, Mr West. I think they’d rather you were quiet, don’t you?”

“I don’t care what they think.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“You’re getting me out of the country?”

“Yes,” Beatrix intervened. “We’re just picking up some friends first.”

They had left Faik and Mysha in a twenty-four-hour café attached to a gas station on the edge of town. They had dropped them there earlier, and after two short jabs of the horn, they emerged. They looked frightened and vulnerable. Beatrix felt a catch in her heart as she watched the girl reach out for her brother’s hand and lead him across to them.

Beatrix got out. “Are you alright?” she asked when they had reached them.

“We are fine,” Mysha answered for her brother.

“Who is that?” Faik asked, pointing at West.

“His name is Mackenzie. I was sent here to bring him out of the country.”

“Why?”

“He worked for the contractors.”

Faik’s face flashed with anger as black as his bruises. “Then what is he . . .”

“He’s going to give evidence against them. He was there when your mother was shot. He wants justice for her. For her and all the others.”

The lights of a car that Beatrix didn’t recognise swept into the sandy lot.

“Who is that?” Faik said fretfully.

Beatrix turned to Faulkner. “Pope?”

“I think so.”

“You
think
?”

“Who is it?” Faik repeated.

“It’s your ride out of Iraq,” she said. “It’s fine. We’re here. We’ll make sure you get away safely. Stay here, alright? I’ll be back.”

She turned to Faulkner and indicated with her eyes that he should stay with them. He nodded his understanding.

She stepped up to the car. It was a Toyota Camry, slathered in dust. The headlights burrowed into the darkness and made it
difficult
for her to see any details beyond a black silhouette.

The door opened, and a man stepped out.

“Turn the lights off.”

The man bent down and killed the lights.

“Hands where I can see them,” she called out.

“Easy!”

She raised the pistol and aimed. “Hands up, right now.”

The man did as he was told.

He stepped forward so that she could see him.

“Easy. It’s me.”

It was Pope.

“You think maybe you might have told me that you were going to come out here, too?”

“I wasn’t planning on it. I didn’t think you’d be planning something as stupid as a jail break.”

She glowered at him.

He indicated the al-Kaysis. “These the two?”

“Yes.”

“And West?”

“In the car.”

“Duffy?”

“Yes,” she said.

He took another step forward and squinted at her. “Are you
alright?”

“What do you mean?”

“You look dreadful.”

“It’s been a long day,” she said, waving his concern off.

“Beatrix . . .”

“I’m fine,” she said sharply. “Get back in the car. You need to get them out of here.”

“Has he given you anything about Control?”

“No,” she said. “Not yet. Please, Pope. Get going. You don’t have time to wait.”

Pope walked to the Toyota and got back inside.

Beatrix went to the Freelander and opened the rear door.

“That’s your ride south,” she said to them all, but she was
looking
at Mysha.

West and Faulkner got out.

“Thank you,” Mysha said. “Again.”

“Hurry,” Beatrix said. “You need to get going.”

The girl slid out of the car.

“Look after her,” Beatrix told Faik.

“I will.”

“You’ll be alright.”

“I know,” he said. He offered her his hand, and she took it. “Thank you.”

“Go.”

Mysha came around the car and fell into her arms for the
second
time that day. Beatrix hugged her close, her face buried in her neck, and for just a moment, she thought she could smell the scent of Isabella’s hair. Her heart felt swollen and her eyes stung. She
disentangled
herself, stood and laid a hand on the girl’s cheek.

“Good luck, Mysha.”

The girl smiled up at her through a curtain of grateful tears. Beatrix withdrew her hand, smiled a sad smile back at her and turned away.

Chapter Thirty-Two

B
eatrix sat in the back, and Faulkner drove them farther out into the desert. They followed Pope for a few miles before reaching a turn in the road and branching away from them. She watched the red glow of the
t
ail lights
in the darkness of the early morning, fainter and fainter as the cars sped away from one another. Beatrix thought of Faik and Mysha in the back of the car. They would be safe now. Pope would get them over the border and deliver them to their family. She had done all she could for them.

She took out the burner phone and called the Manage Risk
facility
at Energy City. She explained to the operator that Mrs 
Sascha
Duffy, the wife of Bryan Duffy, could be found locked in the walk-in refrigerator in the canteen of a foundry on the edge of town. She gave the woman the exact location, made her recite it back to her and then ended the call. She ejected the micro-sim, snapped it in two, and then tossed it and the phone out of the 
window
.

Faulkner was quiet, his attention on the road.

Beatrix sat quietly, too, thinking about her list and what she still needed to do.

The cough, when it came, took her by surprise. It started as a tickle in her throat and then worsened, a whooping bark that took thirty seconds to subside.

Faulkner slowed the car.

Beatrix waved him off, and after examining her in the mirror, he gently accelerated again.

“Jesus,” he said. “What was that?”

“Sand in my lungs. I’m fine.”

“If you say so.” They picked up the speed that they had lost. “Where do you want to take him?” he asked.

“Keep going. Somewhere
no one
will see us.”

She stared out the window. She concentrated on her breathing, keeping it even, focussing on it, trying to detect anything that was out of the ordinary. Any new symptoms.

The terrain dipped down between sand dunes, and the lights of Pope’s car winked in and out and then finally they disappeared.

They drove for an hour. It was two in the morning when they
eventually
arrived at a wide
-
open stretch of desert that offered views of the road in both directions for several miles. There would be no chance of anything coming across them unexpectedly.

“Here,” Beatrix said.

Faulkner slowed and drew up to a halt on the margin of the road.

He took the FN F2000 from the passenger seat, stepped out and opened the back. Duffy was crammed into the compartment, his feet resting on one of the wheel arches. Beatrix prodded him with the Sig, and he rolled out, stumbling a little as he did. She took her knife and sliced through the tape around his ankles. She pushed him into motion, setting him off into the dunes.

The three of them walked for five minutes until they were about two hundred yards from the Freelander.

They stumbled down into a shallow depression, the sand rippling down after them.

“Far enough,” she said.

He stopped.

She pulled the hessian sack over his head, tore the tape from his mouth and pulled out the rag that was stuffed inside.

He gasped.

“On your knees,” she said.

“Rose. Let’s talk about this.”

“On your knees.”

“Come on, Rose. I didn’t do anything.”

“Really?”

“I was there, sure, but . . .”

“You’re all culpable.”

“Control said you’d gone over to the other side. He said we had to bring you in and search your place. That’s it. What happened when we got there . . . fuck, I swear, I had no idea that was going to go down. It’s Chisholm. She was in charge. It’s . . .”

“I don’t really care, Duffy. It doesn’t make any difference to me what you say. You and the others ended my life. You killed my husband. You made sure I missed my daughter growing up. Instead of happy memories, all I have is bitterness and anger. What do you expect me to do? Give you a free pass? That’s right, Duffy, it was all a great big misunderstanding. Right? You were just following orders.”

“I was Number Eleven. I was green. I didn’t know the first thing about the Group, and I didn’t know what Control was planning to do.”

“So we should just let bygones be bygones. That’s right, yes?”

“I don’t expect you to . . .”

She struck him across the face with the barrel of the pistol.
“Shut up
.”

He hung his head, and, when he looked back up at her again, there was fresh blood soaked into his wild beard.

“You have one chance, Duffy. You and the others, you’ve all got a price to pay, and you’re going to pay it, but it’s Control I want. You tell me where I can find him, and I’ll make it quick and painless for you.”

“That’s not an appealing deal.”

“It’s the only one you’ve got.”

He squinted up at her. “He’s with us.”

“With Manage Risk?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“North Carolina. There’s a complex there.”

Beatrix knew all about Manage Risk’s American training facility. The company was headquartered there, and all of its staff passed through its proving grounds. “What does he do?”

“He’s on the board. Him and Jamie King, back in the day, they practically set the company up. Someone like him, with his contacts, can you imagine how valuable that is?
No one’s
ever asked how it grew so fast. That’s how. He had so much intelligence, before anyone else, and amazing contacts. He could pitch for business before the companies and the governments even knew they had a need for it. And look at it now. A multi-million dollar company.”

Beatrix felt the cough coming again. “How did you get involved?”

“When it was obvious that you’d found out what he’d been up to with the Russians, Control got spooked. He cleaned house and went straight to Carolina. Me and the other five all got reassigned out of the Group, and then, after a few months, he had us all meet him in New York and told us he had an idea. He was working with King, full-time, doing it properly, and he said we should work with him, too. We all said yes. Joyce worked in the nautical department. I came out to this hellhole.”

“What about English? Where’s he?”

“Coming after you. Control sent him here. He might be here already.”

Beatrix coughed. Three hacking rasps that subsided just as soon as they started. Faulkner looked across at her. “How much does he know about me?” she asked when she had recovered.

Duffy looked back at her with a new curiosity. “He knows about what you did to the three of them, to Spenser, Joyce and Chisholm. He knows you’re coming.”

“Get on your knees,” she said, but then she suddenly found herself short of breath. There was no cough this time, no tickle in the throat. It was a gasping emptiness that came on quickly, with no warning, and she felt the compulsion to breathe more quickly to compensate.

She started to choke.

Duffy didn’t kneel.

He looked at her with a glimmer of feral cunning.

A wolf smelling weakness.

“Are you alright?” Faulkner asked.

“Knees . . .”

It felt like she had liquid in her lungs. She tried to cough, but it didn’t help.

Faulkner took a step toward her. “Beatrix?”

She took a step back.

She didn’t want sympathy.

She didn’t need help.

Her arm dipped, her aim dropping from Duffy’s head to his chest.

Not now.

I have too much still to do.

She raised her arm again. It was a struggle.

“Come on, Rose!” Duffy protested. “I told you what you wanted to know.” They were just words, meaningless, ways to spin the time out as he assessed his odds.

She coughed again, wheezing, assailed now by a battering wave of fatigue. The gun felt very heavy in her hands. She had the urge to put it down, to just lay it on the ground.

Please.

Not now.

Just three more.

I’m only halfway done.

Faulkner put a hand on her shoulder. “Beatrix?”

Beatrix and Faulkner had both taken their eyes off Duffy for a moment.

A moment was all he needed.

He kicked down with his right foot and sent a spray of sand into their faces.

Beatrix was blinded, and as she raised her hands to her burning eyes, she dropped the Sig.

Duffy roared as he stretched his arms, hard enough to pop
tendons
as he stepped his feet over his wrists.

He burst out, barrelling into Faulkner and shoulder-charging him to the ground. He forced the assault rifle away to the side, and when Faulkner fired off a round, the bullets scattered harmlessly into the air. Duffy was big and fuelled by desperation, and Faulkner was blinded and
had
been taken by surprise. He squinted through the grit in his eyes as Duffy pinned his right arm beneath his right knee and then forced his left into a similarly constrained position. He prised the FN F2000 from Faulkner’s fingers, reversed it and used the stock to bludgeon him about the head. He grasped it between both taped hands, driving down into Faulkner’s face with all of his considerable strength.

One.

Two.

Three.

He looked demonic.

Faulkner stopped struggling after the third blow.

His body spasmed, his leg twitching.

Beatrix threw herself at Duffy, knocking him off Faulkner’s body and driving him into the desert. The FN F2000 fell and was kicked away as they struggled. He rolled as they hit the ground, both of them wrestling to be on top. Duffy was twice Beatrix’s weight, and she was already weak from coughing. He rolled again, forcing her beneath him. They had fallen near her discarded
pistol,
and he reached for it, his fingertips brushing the muzzle and then fixing around it as he stretched out. Beatrix elbowed him in the face, but he absorbed the blow, moulding the grip into the palm of his right hand and slipping his index finger through the
trigger
 guard.

There was no safety on the Sig; it just needed a firm squeeze of the trigger to shoot.

Beatrix wrapped the fingers of her right hand around his wrists and tried to keep the gun pointed away, but Duffy was heavier, stronger, and he had leverage on her. The taped hands were to his advantage now. He could use both arms.

He pushed the gun down on her until the muzzle was jammed up against her throat. Blood ran from his nose onto his beard and dripped onto Beatrix’s face.

He leered down at her. His eyes bulged with hatred.

Beatrix’s left hand broke away and swept across the desert floor.

“Want to know something?” Duffy said, grunting with the effort of holding her down.

Her questing fingers felt something, fastened around it.

“We all knew what we were doing that day. We were in on it. You had it coming to you, you sanctimonious . . .”

Beatrix crashed the rock in her left hand up against the right side of Duffy’s head.

A moment of stunned surprise replaced the loathing, and then that, too, winked out. His features slackened, and his eyes rolled up into his head.

He dropped onto her.

Beatrix shoved him aside and scrambled clear.

She hurried to Faulkner. He was unmoving. She took his chin in her hand and turned his head so that she could look into his face. It was a bloody mess, his eyes puffed over and glassy.

She searched for a pulse.

Pointless.

There was a groan and then the sound of scrabbling away to her right.

“You . . . fucking . . . bitch.”

Duffy was on one knee, forcing himself upright, the pistol
aimed at her.

He fired twice, both rounds missing by a solid yard.

Rose pulled out a throwing knife and, in the same motion, sent it spinning towards him.

The blade thudded into his right eye, and he jack-knifed from the waist, bent backwards with his arms splayed out as if he were embracing the moon.

He spasmed and then was still.

Beatrix fell to her knees. The enervating wave of lethargy rose up again, subsuming her, and she had to brace herself with both hands.

She coughed hard, a hacking rattle, and when she spat the phlegm out, it stained the sand with ribbons of blood.

She pressed down and got to her feet. She put one foot in front of the other, her boots disappearing into the loose sand, and slowly and methodically made her way back to the road.