The Asset: Act II (An Isabella Rose Thriller Book 2) Read online

  Nothing.

  “I have no control,” he shouted. “Take it!”

  Hosler fought her own redundant control column. More warning sirens sounded and lights flashed. The hydraulic systems were venting their fluids into the air, the pipes and lines ruptured by the peppering of shrapnel from the explosion of the missile.

  There came the sound of frantic screaming from behind the cockpit door.

  Wilkes yelled into the radio, “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Speedbird 117.”

  “What’s happening?” Hosler shouted at him.

  “Missile, I say again, missile attack!” Wilkes yelled into the radio.

  He craned his neck to look back through his window. His view of the aircraft’s left wing was limited, but he could see that the number one engine was engulfed in flames ferocious enough to hold their own against the slipstream. He saw the trailing streaks of smoke and pieces of debris that were breaking away from the jet. The cowlings were missing completely. The wing was badly damaged, shreds of skin flailing in the three-hundred-mile-an-hour airflow, everything disintegrating as he watched.

  “Speedbird 117, Mayday acknowledged.”

  “Get the nose up!” Hosler cried. “Get the nose up!”

  The flight controller radioed again. “Speedbird 117, you have flames—repeat, you have flames behind you.”

  Wilkes saw the tailplane assembly as it detached and fell away. There was nothing he could do. It was hopeless.

  He looked forward again and saw the fields for the second time that morning. They filled the entire front windscreen.

  Mohammed allowed himself the luxury of watching as the Igla’s engine left a fiery trail across the darkened sky. The jet banked hard, but there was nowhere near enough time for it to take effective evasive action. It wouldn’t have made any difference if the pilot had been given an additional ten or twenty seconds to turn away; the jumbo was big and slow, and its exhaust plumes presented the infrared seeker with a target that it couldn’t possibly lose. The missile changed its course ever so slightly, a tight curl that ended when it detonated just short of the jet. The Igla was armed with a fragmentation warhead, and thousands of pieces of shrapnel were ejected in all directions at high speed. The jet, with its flimsy fuselage and delicate engine parts, would be shredded.

  He waited for another five seconds, long enough to see the streamer of fire that ejected from the left-hand wing. The jet was close enough, and there was enough of the dawn’s light, for him to watch as the tail assembly tore away from the main body of the plane and plummeted to the ground. The rest of the 747, powered by three of its four engines, flew on. But that could only be a short-lived state of affairs.

  The launcher tube was much lighter now as Mohammed lowered it from his shoulder. He went back into the living room, closed the French doors and put the tube back into the aluminium case. He fastened the clips to close the case, grasped the handle and picked it up. He looked around one final time to ensure that he hadn’t left anything that could be traced back to him, and went into the hallway.

  There was a woman waiting next to the door that led to the downstairs cloakroom.

  Mohammed stopped, the heavy case dangling from his hand.

  She was dressed all in black: black boots, black trousers, black jacket.

  She was holding a suppressed pistol in her right hand. It was aimed at Mohammed.

  “Who are you?”

  The woman didn’t answer.

  Mohammed looked at the woman’s face. It was blank, without expression. He saw no empathy there. No pity. No emotion.

  He saw nothing at all.

  “Who are you?” he asked again.

  The woman fired twice, each report muffled a little by the suppressor. Both rounds found their marks in the centre of Mohammed’s torso. He stumbled back against the door to the living room, bumped it open and fell down onto his backside. He let go of the case and put his gloved hand to his chest. He held it up; the blue latex was stained with red. He tried to draw breath, but he felt a sharp pain in the right-hand side of his chest. At least one of the rounds had penetrated his lung on that side. Air was rushing into the cavity and collapsing it. He was simultaneously being choked for air and bleeding out.

  The woman followed him into the living room. Mohammed tried to scrabble away from her, raising his left hand and holding it up in entreaty. He looked up into the woman’s face, still absent of expression, and knew that an appeal for mercy would be pointless. Mohammed had been involved in killing all of his adult life, and he recognised a killer when he saw one.

  This woman, whoever she was, was a killer.

  Somewhere outside but reasonably close at hand, there came the rolling boom of a huge explosion.

  The woman aimed the pistol for a third time.

  Mohammed closed his eyes.

  The Asset’s codename was Maia. Her real name didn’t matter. She had several identities, assumed as easily as pulling on a fresh set of clothes at the beginning of a new day. For the months since she had been placed in London, she had lived the life of Lisa Katich, a businesswoman from Pensacola, Florida, engaged in the buying and selling of medical supplies. She rented a pleasant two-bedroom property in Pinner, a suburb in the north of London, and travelled in to her central London office every day. She conducted her business there and returned home. A dull and predictable routine. The perfect disguise.

  She did not mind the drudgery. Her training, which had lasted all of her life and had been almost sadistically thorough, had included extensive modules that taught her the benefit of glacial patience. She would hold in place for as long as was required until she was reassigned or activated.

  And she had been activated two days ago.

  The fringe of dawn light that was visible above the tree line to the southwest had been lent an unearthly red and orange glow. Maia had heard the explosion, and she knew what it was: the main body of the stricken jet had fallen to earth and the fuel tanks had exploded. She paused at the door to the house and watched as a layer of dirty cloud filled the cold morning sky, a roiling pall of black and grey that stretched higher and higher. She estimated that the fire was five or six miles away. The area would become thick with activity as the police and military rushed in; the clean-up would have to be quick and efficient. She needed to be as far away from here as possible.

  She had brought a tightly folded plastic package with her. She collected it and went into the living room. Mohammed was on his back, his sightless eyes staring up at the ceiling. Maia took the plastic bundle, unfastened the ties that held it together, and spread it out on the living room floor next to the corpse. It was a body bag made from vinyl material and with heat-sealed seams to prevent leakage. There were cleaning products inside the bag, together with towels and a mop with a folding handle. She took them all out and laid them on the floor.

  Maia put her arms beneath Mohammed’s shoulders and moved him until he was lying atop the splayed-open body bag. It had envelope-style heavy-duty zippers with dual pulls, and she drew them together so that the bag was sealed tight. She grabbed the padded handles and dragged the body into the hall.

  A pool of blood had gathered where the body had fallen. The floor was a smooth laminate that was designed to look like wood, and Maia mopped the blood off it, rinsing the mop out in the kitchen sink. She took a bottle of Domestos Spray Bleach, sprayed the floor and then wiped it down with the towel until all traces of the blood were gone. She took the bleach and sprayed the sink, too.

  She stuffed the wet mop head and towel into the body bag, opened the door and checked outside: there was still no sign of anyone. She opened up the van, transferred the body inside and then hauled it all the way to the front. Her motorcycle was parked next to the van. She stepped down, wheeled the bike to the rear doors and, with strength that would not have been credited to so slender a woman, lifted the front wheel into the van and then lifted and pushed the rest inside, too. She rested the bike on the floor and went back into the house for a fin
al check. She stooped down to collect the brass casings that had been ejected from her pistol and put them into her pocket. She checked the living room and the garden one final time, collected the launcher and its case, switched off the lights and went back outside to the van. She slid the case inside and shut the doors.

  Maia got into the driver’s seat, started the engine and pulled away. The sun was up now. She could hear the sound of sirens when she wound down the window to let in some fresh air, and as she drove beneath the flyover for the M3, she saw the flashing blue lights of an emergency vehicle as it raced overhead. She followed the ramp onto the motorway and started to accelerate.

  The line of trees that screened the motorway to the left petered out, and Maia was presented with a hellish vista. Large pieces of debris were scattered over the fields for hundreds of yards, some of them still burning. She saw the houses of a village perhaps half a mile away, some of the buildings on fire. Beyond that, the thunderhead of black smoke that must have marked the spot where the bulk of the jet had come down had taken on monstrous proportions, a mushroom cloud that was unfurling higher and higher into the otherwise blue sky.

  She took out her burner phone and dialled her handler’s number.

  “It’s done.”

  PART ONE

  The Nur Mountains

  Chapter One

  Isabella Rose sat quietly in her seat as the engineers attempted to fix the stricken Learjet. The lights in the cabin had gone out soon after they had passed over the coast of Turkey. She didn’t know what the problem was, but it had caused a moment of panic. The pilot had reported over the PA that the issue wasn’t serious but that they would have to land in Turkey. The panic dissipated, to be replaced by consternation and impatience.

  They had touched down in the early morning as dawn was just breaking over the terminal building. Antalya had been quiet then, with just the occasional smaller plane touching down, but now it was five hours later and the facility was thronging with activity. Isabella looked out the window. Nothing seemed to be taking off, but a lot of jets were landing, jostling and nudging into position at the terminal building.

  She had held her tongue for several hours. She had tried to speak before they had left Switzerland, and Salim al-Khawari had told her to be silent. When she had spoken again, he had slapped her across the face. And so she had been quiet after that and concentrated instead on taking in every last scrap of information that she could. Her mother had taught her that it was important to always know as much about your surroundings as possible. It was impossible to predict when your enemies might let down their guard. When that happened, she needed to know as much as she could so she could improve her odds of getting away from them.

  She replayed the last few hours. The helicopter that had taken them from the al-Khawari house had headed to the east. She remembered that there was an airport at Sion, and she had not been surprised when she saw it through the window, the illuminated runway cutting through the darkened countryside like a lance. They had landed on a private apron next to a Learjet, and she had been forced to board the aircraft with the rest of the family. They had very quickly taken to the air again. She had looked down at the fast-disappearing ground and then at the stars arrayed across the porthole window, and decided that they had headed to the south.

  The cabin was equipped with LCD screens fore and aft, and one of them was switched on mid-flight to show their progress. She was right: they were travelling to the south. Isabella had watched the tiny icon of the plane as it had then turned east and passed across the vast green swath of the continent. Her home, in Marrakech, seemed very far away from her now. Pope and Kelleher and Snow, who had been with her in Geneva, seemed very far away, too.

  As they had passed over the Turkish coast and headed on towards Cyprus, Isabella had felt very alone indeed.

  Beyond the information that she could assess from the map came the more intangible things. She had watched the family. Salim, the father, sat quietly at the front of the cabin. His face was a black cloud of anger and impatience, and he rebuffed all attempts at conversation.

  His wife, Jasmin, seemed more angry than anything else. Isabella had looked around the cabin and, on more than one occasion, had seen the older woman staring at her with an expression that was impossible to mistake for anything other than hatred. Isabella had been disturbed by Jasmin after she had planted a data-tap in Salim’s study. She had knocked the woman out and tied her up. Her anger wasn’t unreasonable.

  Khalil had been more difficult to read. There was shame and embarrassment and fear. He knew that he had let down his parents.

  Isabella could see that all of the al-Khawaris were confused. The raid on the property that had followed Isabella’s betrayal of the family had precipitated their hurried flight from the estate and the transfer to the Learjet. They were confused and frightened, and now they were on the run.

  She was in a tight spot, but she consoled herself with one thing: Mr Pope would not abandon her. Whatever had happened must have been unexpected, and it had caught him off guard. But she knew that he would come after her. The plane would have been tracked and Turkey was a NATO country. He would find her himself or alert the Turkish authorities to her plight. She just had to keep her head down and be ready for the moment when it came.

  Chapter Two

  They were on the ground for five hours. Finally, one of the engineers climbed the steps to the cabin and looked over at Salim with a rueful cast to his face. Salim crossed the cabin so that he could talk to him. Isabella was close enough to overhear fragments of their conversation. She heard the engineer apologise and explain that the problem was electrical. They had fixed it, but there had been a crash near Heathrow and, because of that, all flights had been grounded. They were unable to take off. Salim spat an angry denunciation, but after a short consultation with his bodyguard, he turned and announced that they were going to have to deplane and continue their journey by car.

  “Where are we going?”

  It was the first thing that she had said for hours.

  “Be quiet,” Salim said.

  “You need to tell me where we’re going.”

  “I don’t need to tell you a thing.”

  She made a show of being frightened and did as she was told. Jasmin and Khalil went first, stepping down into the bright sunlight beyond the subdued lighting of the cabin. Isabella was next, with the bodyguard close behind her. The steps led down to the asphalt strip. A silver Mercedes Viano was waiting for them twenty yards away. Jasmin and Khalil walked quickly across to the SUV and got inside. Isabella looked left and right. There was the wide expanse of the runway, with a chain-link fence just visible at the perimeter, and then a series of hangars where private planes were stored and maintained. She wondered, for a moment, whether this was her opportunity. She could run. She knew she would be able to outpace Khalil’s parents. She was confident enough that she would be able to outpace him, too, assuming that he would have the presence of mind to pursue her if she ran. She had just taken a lungful of air in readiness when she felt the big paw of the bodyguard on her shoulder, the man squeezing tight.

  “Don’t get ideas,” he said to her. “Just get into the car.”

  They walked on. Isabella saw that there was no driver in the car. The bodyguard split from the rest of the group and went around to the driver’s side. She wondered whether that might lead to an opportunity.

  Jasmin and Khalil got into the back of the SUV. Salim grabbed her around the arm, squeezed tight and hauled her to the side of the vehicle. There were two rows of seats in the back. Jasmin was sitting in the second row, on the far side of the cabin. Khalil was ahead of his mother in the first row.

  Isabella stopped. She turned back to Salim. “Please,” she said.

  The man’s face was hard and unyielding. “Get in.”

  Isabella started to cry. She looked down, willing the tears to come, and when they did, she looked back up at him and sobbed. “Please. I don’t want to be her
e. I’ve said I’m sorry. I just want to go home.”

  “Get in now.”

  He turned her around and pushed her into the back of the car. The distraction paid off. He was more concerned that she should be inside than where she should be sitting, so when she took the seat next to Khalil, his father did not protest. He climbed in after her, shuffled around to sit next to his wife, and slid the door closed.

  “Drive,” he called out.

  Isabella was next to the door. Khalil was to her right and his father was behind her. She was pleased about that. It would give her an opportunity.

  The man put the car into gear and they pulled away. He turned sharply, leaving the jet behind them, and headed towards a gate in the chain-link fence.

  She glanced over at Khalil. He still wouldn’t hold her eye. She knew why. He had thought that she was interested in him. She had led him on expertly, playing the part with an adroitness that had surprised her. He had swallowed her deception, and now what must he have thought? That she had tricked him so that she could get into the house and ransack it? That would have made him feel stupid, and he would not have been helped by his father’s tirade of abuse as they had flown away from the house. The boy was surly and aggressive toward her now, but that, she could tell, was to hide the truth of it.

  He was confused. His pride was hurt.

  Poor lamb. She had no pity for him. He was a spoiled, unpleasant brat, too used to flaunting his wealth and getting his own way, and now that he had been shown to be the fool that he was, he didn’t like it.

  A guard opened the gate in the fence and they drove through it, passing onto a narrow access road that bent around toward the terminal building and the confluence of roads beyond it. Isabella watched through the windshield, taking it all in. She was looking for Pope, half expecting to see him there. The concourse was busy, with new arrivals hauling their luggage out into the morning heat, in search of a taxi, and others barging through the crush to get inside. The crowd ebbed and flowed, bulging into the road in places, with the taxis that were waiting to pick up or set down their fares muscling through the commotion.