Scarecrow (16 page)

The MicroDot charge that Rufus had detonated on the turnaround area had released an aerosol cloud of about a billion MicroDots over the area.

‘The Demon, his men, his vehicles and your girl are all covered in MicroDots,' Knight said. He pulled a jerry-rigged Palm Pilot from his belt. It bristled with home-made attachments and antennas, and looked a little chunkier than a regular PDA, as if it were waterproof.

On its screen was a map of the world and superimposed on that map, over Central Asia, was a set of moving red dots.

Demon Larkham's team.

‘We can trace them to any point in the world on this,' Knight said.

Schofield started thinking, tried to order his thoughts, to weigh up his options so he could arrange a plan of action.

Then at last he said, ‘The first thing we have to do is find out why all this is happening.'

He pulled out the bounty list, analysed it for the hundredth time.

Mother and Book II read it over his shoulder.

‘The Mossad,' Mother said softly, seeing one entry:

11. ROSENTHAL, Benjamin Y.   ISR    Mossad

‘What about it?' Schofield said.

‘That Zawahiri guy said something about the Israeli Mossad down in the mine, before he lost his head. He was crazy, shouting about how he'd survived Soviet experiments in some gulag, and then the US cruise-missile attacks in '98, and then about how the Mossad knew he was invincible, since they'd tried to kill him a dozen times.'

‘The Mossad . . .' Schofield mused.

He keyed his sat-comm. ‘David Fairfax, you still there?'

‘
So long as there's coffee around, I'm still here,
' came the reply.

‘Mr Fairfax, look up Hassan Mohammad Zawahiri and Benjamin Y. Rosenthal. Any cross-matches?'

‘
Just a second
,' Fairfax's voice said. ‘
Hey, got something already. A match from some US–Israeli intelligence swap. Major Benjamin Yitzak Rosenthal is Hassan Zawahiri's “katsa”, or case officer, the guy who monitors him. Rosenthal is based in Haifa, but it seems that only yesterday he was recalled to Mossad's London
headquarters
.'

‘London?' Schofield said.

A plan was beginning to form in Schofield's mind.

And all of a sudden he started to feel alive.

He'd been on the back foot all morning,
reacting
—now he was getting
proactive
.

‘Book, Mother,' he said, ‘how would you like to pay Major Rosenthal a visit in London? See if he can shed some light on this situation.'

‘Be happy to,' Mother said.

‘Sure,' Book II said.

Aloysius Knight watched this exchange casually, uninterested.

‘
Oh, hey, Scarecrow
,' Fairfax's voice said, ‘
I was going to mention this before but I didn't get a chance. You remember that US Army Medical Research and Matériel Command paper I mentioned earlier, the “NATO MNRR Study”. Well, that thing is out of my reach from here. It was deprioritised two months ago and deleted from the USAMRMC's files. An archive copy exists in some warehouse in Arizona, but otherwise all other copies have been shredded or deleted.

‘But I did find something on the two guys who wrote it, those two fellas on your list who worked for Medical Research Command: Nicholson and Oliphant. Nicholson retired a couple of years ago and is now living at some retirement village in Florida. But Oliphant quit USAMRMC only last year. He's now chief physician in the ER at St John's Hospital, Virginia, not far from the Pentagon
.'

‘Is that so?' Schofield said. ‘Mr Fairfax, would you like to be a field officer for a day?'

‘
Anything to get out of this office, man. My boss is the biggest asshole on the planet
.'

‘When you get a chance, then, why don't you go down to St John's and have a chat with Doctor Oliphant.'

‘
You got it.
' Fairfax signed off.

‘What about you?' Mother said to Schofield. ‘You're not going to stay with this bounty hunter, are you?' She shot Knight a withering glare. Knight just raised his eyebrows.

‘He says I can go wherever I like,' Schofield said. ‘It's up to him to protect me.'

‘So where are you going?' Book II asked.

Schofield's eyes narrowed. ‘I'm going to the source of this bounty hunt. I'm going to that castle in France.'

Book II said, ‘What are you going to do? Knock on the front door?'

‘No,' Schofield said. ‘I'm going to collect a bounty.'

‘A bounty?' Mother said. ‘I, er, don't mean to be devil's advocate, but don't you need a . . . 
head
 . . . to collect the reward?'

‘That's right,' Schofield said, looking at Knight's modified Palm Pilot, the mini-computer that depicted Demon Larkham's progress. ‘And I know just where to get some. And at the same time, I'm going to get Gant back.'

Over the next fifty years the earth's population will soar from 5.5 billion to more than 9 billion . . . 95 percent of the population increase will be in the poorest regions of the world.

From:
The Coming Anarchy by Robert D. Kaplan

(VINTAGE, NEW YORK, 2001)

The Camp of the Saints
, Jean Raspail's 1972 novel about an invasion of France by an armada of destitute Third World people . . . appears to have been prophetic . . . In the 19th century, Europe invaded and colonised Africa. In the 21st century, Africa invades and colonises Europe.

From:
The Death of the West
by Patrick J. Buchanan

(ST MARTIN'S PRESS, NEW YORK, 2002)

 

10. POLANSKI,  Damien G.   USA   ISS

BERLIN, GERMANY 22 OCTOBER, 2300 HOURS

He liked to fuck girls from behind, pumping like a jackhammer and calling out cowboy shouts. And he was an ass man, too. He loved young twenty-somethings with tight little bottoms.

She'd discovered these facts from the prostitutes of Berlin's red light district, whose services he engaged often.

Damien Polanski's career had seen better days.

An Eastern Bloc expert during the Cold War, he was now stationed in the ISS's Berlin field office, growing older and more irrelevant every day. His daring conquests of the '80s—the defection of Karmonov, the discovery of the Soviet ‘Cobra' files—long forgotten by an intelligence agency that didn't love you back.

An old dog in a new world.

She caught his eye easily enough. It wasn't hard. She was stunning to look at—long slender legs, muscular shoulders, small perfectly-formed breasts and those cool Eurasian eyes.

The Ice Queen, some called her.

She'd stood at the bar opposite his booth, dropped her purse, and bent over to get it, offering him a clear view up her black-vinyl mini-skirt. No panties.

Within 15 minutes, he was hurriedly taking off his trousers in a hotel room, thinking,
Giddy-up, baby! Giddy-up!

She emerged from the bathroom wearing nothing at all, her hands hidden behind her back. Polanski's eyes widened with delight. He dived onto the bed, and turned—just as the short-bladed samurai sword that she gripped in her hands sliced clean through his neck.

7. NAZZAR,  Yousef M.    LEBN    HAMAS

BEIRUT, LEBANON 23 OCTOBER, 2100 HOURS

Witnesses would say it was one of the most professional hits they had ever seen in Beirut—which was saying something.

They saw Yousef Nazzar, a senior HAMAS commander known to have been trained by the Soviets, enter the apartment building.

Not a moment later, two sedans skidded to a halt outside the lobby and eight commandos piled out of them, rushed into the building. One of them carried a white box with a red cross on its side.

One thing was common to all the witnesses' accounts: the guns the assassins used. They were either identified or described as VZ-61 Skorpion machine pistols.

And then suddenly the assassins were out and, with a squeal of tyres, were gone.

Yousef Nazzar's body was found later, spreadeagled on the floor of his apartment, the head missing.

8. NICHOLSON,  Francis X.    USA    USAMRMC

CEDAR FALLS RETIREMENT VILLAGE MIAMI, FLORIDA 24 OCTOBER, 0700 HOURS

The front-desk nurse couldn't have known he was a killer.

When she'd asked, ‘Can I help you?' he had replied politely that he was from the hospital, come to collect the personal effects of a recently-transferred resident of Cedar Falls.

He was tall and thin, with deep black skin and a high forehead. More than one witness would describe him as ‘African' in appearance. They didn't known that in the global bounty hunting community he was known by a very simple name: ‘the Zulu'.

Dressed in a white labcoat, he strode calmly through the home, carrying a white organ-delivery box in his hand.