Tempest Read online

  Navarro clutched the receiver, his index finger resting on the transmit button, trying to make the call. He knew this was the pivotal moment: the whole operation, from tracking PROSPERO down in Hong Kong, to losing him in Repulse Bay, to following MIRANDA here… it all came down to the call he would have to make in the next few seconds.

  “What do you want us to do?”

  Logan had forced his hand.

  “All units,” he barked, “take them.”

  82

  Melissa saw the man come out from the junction and start toward them. Her attention was drawn to him; he was jogging, coming straight down the street, and it looked as if his arm was pointed at them.

  The woman on the motorbike swore. She was looking in the opposite direction and, as Melissa turned to follow her gaze, she saw a second man coming toward them.

  Carlos reached into his jacket and pulled out a pistol. He didn’t have a chance to use it. She saw a puff of smoke, heard the crack of a gunshot and felt a warm spray across her face. Carlos fell. She touched her face; it was slicked with a mist of his blood.

  She screamed.

  The woman on the bike pulled a gun from her jacket. She aimed and fired; the noise was deafening so close to her.

  Melissa panicked.

  She started to run.

  “No!” Logan called.

  Melissa ignored him. The sound of the gunshots echoed off the church, seeming to follow her as she tried to get away from what she had just seen. She gasped for breath, looking desperately for somewhere she might be able to take shelter. She saw a house with a light on in the porch. Maybe she could shelter there. Maybe she would be able to get inside, and whoever lived there could lock the door until the police arrived.

  Maybe…

  A car screeched out of a nearby street and aimed right for her. She stopped and lost her balance, her feet sliding out from beneath her as she fell back. The car swerved at the last minute, coming to a stop just a few feet in front of her. The rear door opened and a man got out; he hurried over to her, grabbed her roughly under the arms, and dragged her to the car. He lifted her up, shoved her into the back and then slid in next to her, shoving her over so that there was space for both of them to fit. He slammed the door shut and shouted to the driver; Melissa was too confused by what had happened to hear what he said, but the engine revved, the tyres squealed, and the car jerked away.

  83

  Beatrix watched as Logan’s man went down.

  Headshot. He was done.

  Melissa ran.

  “No!” Logan yelled.

  A black Mercedes careened out of the side street and raced toward Melissa. She stumbled, and Beatrix thought that the Mercedes was going to mow her down until the driver swerved aside and hit the brakes, drawing to a stop just ahead of where she had fallen. The rear door opened, a man got out and, with brutal efficiency, collected Melissa and shoved her inside. The door slammed shut, and the Mercedes sped away, laying rubber across the road as the driver spun the wheel and raced off in the direction from which he had appeared.

  Logan fired, two shots in quick succession. Beatrix looked back; the shooter who had taken out Logan’s man was in cover.

  They had to move. She ran to the bike, shoving the cassette back into her pocket as she straddled the seat and cranked the throttle.

  “Get on,” she called.

  Logan froze.

  There came the sound of another gunshot, the round whistling through the space between them and cracking into the side of the church.

  Your funeral.

  Beatrix pulled the clutch and put the bike into first. She was ready to pull away when Logan—who must have concluded that he was a dead man if he stayed—straddled the bike behind her. Beatrix twisted the throttle and the Harley jerked ahead, the back wheel sliding in and out until she got it under control.

  She roared ahead, running perpendicular to the side street into which the Mercedes had disappeared. She raced through a sharp right-hand turn and ran parallel to the car, observing it on the next road across through gaps in the buildings that separated them.

  The two roads bent toward one another and merged. The Mercedes was ahead, but not by much, and Beatrix opened up the throttle all the way. Logan had both arms around her waist and was holding on as tightly as he could.

  They approached a junction. The Mercedes braked and then swerved right, the driver spinning the wheel and sliding around the corner. Smoke billowed from the wheel arches as the rubber bit against the asphalt; the car found its grip and jerked forward once again. Beatrix raced after it, narrowly missing a slow-moving truck that approached from the right and a taxi that was coming from the left; she sliced between the two of them and, with both drivers sounding their horns, she opened the throttle again and started to close.

  “Shoot it!” Beatrix yelled.

  The noise of the engine was loud, and she didn’t think that Logan had heard her. Surely, he would realise that he would need to do something, that all she could do was keep pace?

  Beatrix closed on the Mercedes until they were level with the front of the car. The driver swerved at them; Beatrix avoided contact by turning across a patch of rough ground to the left of the road. She squeezed the brakes, turned the handlebars back to the right, and left the rough ground to regain the asphalt once again.

  “Shoot it!”

  Logan must have heard her this time. She felt his right hand disengage from around her waist and then felt something against her back as, she guessed, he reached for a shoulder holster. He didn’t get the opportunity to fire. Beatrix closed in once more, but, before Logan was able to take aim, the rear window on the opposite side of the car slid open and a man emerged from it.

  He turned so that he was sitting on the sill and looking over the roof at them.

  He aimed a pistol in their direction.

  He fired.

  Bang, bang, bang.

  Beatrix squeezed the back brake, locking the wheel. The rear end jerked left and right and then left again, and then the front wheel caught. The back end bucked and Beatrix was thrown off, flipping through one hundred and eighty degrees before she crashed down again on her back, hard. The breath was knocked out of her and the helmet cracked against the road, the visor shattering. She tumbled over again and again, sliding across the asphalt and eventually bouncing off a parked car.

  She lay still for a moment. She heard a single high-pitched note, but, as she blinked her eyes, the note widened and became more: she heard the sound of her own breathing, the shrill blare of a car alarm, glass falling to shatter on the ground, and then something that might have been a voice.

  She felt something tight around her head, something removed, then the humidity of the torpid night air.

  And then the voice again.

  “Get up.”

  She groaned.

  “Get up.”

  She opened her eyes and looked up into Logan’s face. He was bleeding from a scratch that started up around his scalp and ran down his cheek to the top of his neck. He was leaning over her, her helmet in both hands.

  “We need to get out of here,” he said.

  He set the helmet down on the ground and helped her to her feet. She looked down at her body to see that the leather jacket was scuffed and the trousers were torn, a gash in the right leg through which she could see her bleeding skin.

  Beatrix looked for the Harley, only to find that the impact from the crash had caused damage to the front forks. It wasn’t going anywhere.

  Logan found a stone at the side of the road and used it to smash the window of the car that Beatrix had crashed into. He reached through, opened the door and got into the cabin.

  Beatrix felt her strength return. Logan had opened the passenger door and she got in, slumping back against the seat. The car was an old Fiat, and Logan prised off the plastic cover that contained the wiring.

  Beatrix heard the sound of police sirens.

  “Fuck,” Logan muttered as he struggled with
the wiring.

  Beatrix reached up to the sun visor, pulled it down and caught the keys that had been hidden there.

  “Here,” she said.

  Logan started the engine, slammed his door, and pulled away just as Beatrix saw the strobe of blue lights behind them.

  84

  Logan drove them out of town, following the coast road north. Beatrix closed her eyes and assessed herself for damage, deciding that she was winded and scratched but otherwise unhurt. She had been fortunate.

  “You okay?” he asked her.

  “I’ll live. You?”

  “Same.”

  Beatrix reached for her head before remembering that the helmet was gone. Logan could see her without a disguise; there was nothing that she could do about that now. She wound down the window to let the air in and smelled the salt on the breeze. The coast lay ahead. Lights marked a handful of ships out at sea; large transporters and tankers at anchor a mile out, with smaller craft moving slowly across the black.

  Logan was staring down the road. The scratch on his face was still weeping blood, and she saw that his shirt was ripped.

  He turned to glance over at her. “You want to tell me who you really are?”

  “Not really,” she said.

  “I know you’re not MI6.”

  “Think whatever you like.”

  “I asked,” he said. “They don’t have anyone who looks like you—like the way you looked before—in HK.”

  “They also don’t have anyone who can deliver Danny Nakamura’s evidence to you.”

  “Think you can still do that?”

  She stared dead ahead. “I don’t know.”

  They raced on in silence for another minute.

  Logan exhaled. “What happened?”

  “I was hoping you might be able to tell me.”

  “Were you followed?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Well, they were on someone.”

  “They were on you,” she said. “How have you been running this?”

  “I had her in the Saratoga,” he said. “Her and Carlos. Shit.” He paused. “Carlos. He got shot.”

  “In the head,” Beatrix added. “You can forget about him.”

  “Fuck.” Logan slapped his palm against the wheel. “Fuck.”

  Beatrix looked down to her ripped leathers and saw that her leg was bleeding. She ignored it. “How did Navarro know she was coming to Cuba?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  She turned to look at him. “How good is your OpSec?”

  “Good,” he protested.

  “You’re sure? Are you absolutely sure you haven’t been compromised?”

  Logan paused, and, in that moment, Beatrix knew that she had to be more careful.

  “I don’t know. Carlos picked her up in Miami. He was careful. No sign of anyone there.”

  “What did she bring with her?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Luggage, Logan. What did she bring?”

  “I don’t know. Carlos was with her.”

  “If she has a suitcase, I’d take it to bits. I bet you find a beacon. If you ask me, they were sitting on her house. You missed it, they followed them here, and now you’ve lost her.”

  Logan tightened his grip on the wheel. Beatrix waited a moment, thinking about what she was going to do next. She didn’t trust anyone—distrust had been a useful insurance policy for years—and she most certainly did not trust him, now even less than before.

  “Look, Logan,” she said. “Danny’s not doing this unless you get his daughter back.”

  He slowed the car and pulled in at the side of the road. He cranked the window down and warm air blew into the cabin, heavy with salt from the sea.

  “There might be a way,” he said.

  “To do what?”

  “To get her back. The tapes—they can help. There are people at the Agency who’ve got a lot to lose if we can bring a successful case against Lincoln. Some of Lincoln’s old SAD operators, for a start.”

  “Go on.”

  “Think about it. Maybe we let them know what we’ve got on Lincoln. We play them the tapes. We tell them that Lincoln is done, and that we’re going to go after everyone else who’s ever worked for him when we roll the whole thing up. Some of them have skeletons in their closets that we know about—we show them what we’ve got on Lincoln, what we’ve got on them, and maybe they start to wonder whether the stink on Lincoln might spread to them. Some of them would be looking at jail time. If we offer them immunity, maybe we can persuade them to cooperate. But I’ll need to show them what we have, or else it’s all hot air.”

  “You’re not having the tape.”

  “But—”

  Beatrix was resolute. “That wasn’t the deal.”

  “I brought his daughter.”

  “And then you lost her. No. There’s not nearly enough of a reason for you to cooperate if you have the evidence you want.”

  “Half the evidence.”

  “My point stands. We’ll never see Melissa again.”

  Logan drummed his fingers on the wheel and clenched his jaw; Beatrix saw a tic jerking in his cheek.

  “So, what do we do?” he asked.

  “You made this mess, Logan; you clean it up. Speak to Langley. Tell them you can deliver evidence against Lincoln. Persuade them. Do whatever you have to, but do it quickly. And then you call me when you know how to fix it.”

  85

  Melissa shifted her weight in an attempt to make herself a little more comfortable. It was a waste of time. The trunk was too small and her legs and shoulders were cramping badly.

  She had been in the back seat of the car for the first few miles. The man who had taken her from the street had a gun. He had told her that she would be fine if she just did what she was told. He saw how scared she was and told her to relax, that everything was going to be fine, that she would be released just as soon as they had what they wanted.

  They had driven out of the town and stopped at the side of the road. The driver had got out of the car and hurried around to pop the trunk; Melissa had been hustled outside and around to the back. The man with the gun had wrapped his arms around her torso, and the driver had taken her legs, and, between them, they had hoisted her up and deposited her in the compartment. The driver had put his finger to his lips and then, before she had been able to say anything, to ask them to reconsider, to let her go, they had closed the lid and plunged her into darkness.

  How long ago was that? She had no idea. She was wearing her watch, but she couldn’t see it in the darkness. She had no other means to judge the passing of time.

  Carlos had been shot. She put her fingers to her head and felt a stickiness there, the hair plastered together, his blood adhering it to her scalp. The thought of it made her feel nauseated, and, for a moment, she thought that she was going to vomit. She closed her mouth and breathed through her nose, waiting for the moment to pass, but it didn’t; the bile rose up her throat and filled her mouth. She spat it out, spitting out more of it until she was heaving up acrid phlegm. The trunk reeked of it.

  She didn’t know where they were taking her, nor even in which direction they were travelling. She listened for anything that might give her a clue, but all she could hear was the sound of the engine, the squeak of the suspension and the rumble of the wheels on asphalt.

  86

  Beatrix had Logan drop her off five blocks from the house. She took out her phone and called the number for Alfredo. It was very early in the morning—just after three—but the call was answered promptly and politely. Beatrix explained that she needed urgent assistance. The man on the other end of the line—it was someone other than Alfredo—listened to her request, said that they would be able to assist, told her to call if she needed anything else in the meantime, and ended the call.

  Beatrix conducted a quick dry-cleaning run to make sure that she wasn’t being followed. She walked in the opposite direction and then turned back,
looking all the while for any signs of pursuit. She was tired and her body ached, yet she was as diligent as ever, taking another illogical turn to flush out any unwanted attention. But it was early and this part of the city was quiet, and, as far as she could tell, there was no one with her.

  She arrived back on the street, checked for one final time that she was black, and let herself into the house. She leaned against the wall, waiting for her heart to slow down. She unzipped the scuffed jacket and dropped it onto the floor, then removed the holster and pistol. She took them with her as she climbed up to the first floor. She wanted to shower and then check herself more carefully for damage, but, before she could get into her room, she heard footsteps. Danny’s room was opposite her own, and he opened his door. He started to say something, saw her—the torn clothes and the blood on her face—and stopped.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “Looks worse than it is.”

  “What happened?”

  “Didn’t go as planned.”

  They went down to the kitchen. There was a first aid kit beneath the sink, and Danny fetched it as she told him what had happened. She recounted the rendezvous and brought him up to the point where he had been able to talk to Melissa on the phone. She explained that the meeting had been compromised shortly thereafter, that they had been attacked and, in the mêlée that followed, that Melissa had been taken. She told him how she had tried to follow, but that she had been fired upon and had had no choice but to abandon the pursuit.

  Danny was ashen-faced when she finished. “So who has her?” he asked.

  “Navarro and Lincoln,” she said.

  “Logan is okay?”

  “I think so,” she said.