‘You’ll do what I say,’ Mitchell growled as he lifted Wilms off his feet and across to the window.
Outside the room, Mitchell heard the thunder of boots running down the corridor as MJ-12 bodyguards rushed to the room where the gunshots had been heard. Somewhere in the distance across the city, Mitchell could already hear wailing sirens closing in on the Upper East Side.
‘I can find you, anywhere,’ Mitchell went on, twisting the pen this way and that. ‘I can hunt you down and kill you at leisure, so don’t you ever tell me what to do again. Those days are over. You will gather Majestic Twelve here in the city with LeMay among them. He will be the patsy, the reason that MJ-12 is exposed to surveillance, not you. Do this and you will be immune to prosecution. Fail, and I will find you.’
Mitchell slammed Wilms’ head against the wall with enough force to knock him unconscious. Carefully, he laid the old man on the ground and then opened the window. Outside, the sirens were growing louder and he knew that the MJ-12 bodyguards would not linger and await the arrival of law enforcement that had most likely been called by the panicked owners of the hotel upon hearing gunshots upstairs. Mitchell pulled his cell phone from his pocket and took a single picture of Wilms lying on the floor at his feet.
Moments later, he heard the bodyguards leaving, hurrying down the corridor outside again to avoid being caught on the scene. As he had figured, they also used the stairwell. Mitchell glared at the two captives, both of them stricken with terror as he approached them and opened the man’s wallet, which had been left on the bedside table. He slid a credit card into the wallet and closed it again.
‘You’re in no danger and if you do as I say you’ll never see either of us again,’ he assured them both. ‘This man is an enemy of the state and highly dangerous. If he wakes up and is able to identify you, he will have you killed. On that card is an account containing fifty thousand dollars. It’s yours, if you check out of this hotel this very minute and say nothing to anybody about what’s happened.’ Mitchell leaned close to them as he loosened their bonds, his dark eyes burrowing into theirs as he drew the pistol from his waistband. ‘But if you fail to comply with my demands, guess who’ll you’ll be seeing again?’
The guy, faced with a dilemma, forced a look of heroic and reluctant defiance onto his face. The girl simply stared at the gun for a moment and then at the wallet, already spending the money inside it. Mitchell let them think about the gun for a moment longer, and then he stood up and moved to the open window. Room
37
faced to the north east, as opposed to the entrance to the hotel on the south west side. Mitchell climbed out of the window and hurried down the fire escape and onto an alley between the hotel and a small shopping mall.
Moments later, he vanished into the crowds heading north.
*
A swarm of police hazard lights flashed in the street as Lopez stood alongside the pool car with Vaughn and watched as two bodies were carried from the hotel in body bags.
‘We can’t walk in there with all of the police around,’ Lopez said into her cell phone as they watched from afar. ‘It looks like Mitchell met with this Wilms and then must have got bounced by MJ-12 agents or something. Both the agents are dead, Mitchell’s missing and they’re releasing the hotel’s residents one by one.’
Doug Jarvis’s reply came back over the line.
‘Police radio reports are suggesting an argument gone wrong between two men,,’
he said.
‘Nobody’s mentioned anybody else in conjunction with the attacks matching Mitchell’s description.’
‘He’s gone,’ Lopez snarled as she clenched her fist in exasperation. ‘He must have fled before the uniforms arrived and somehow Wilms must also be gone, if he was here at all.’
She was about to curse again when her cell beeped and she looked at the screen. An image had appeared, that of an old man lying on a carpet, perhaps dead, perhaps unconscious. The message had been sent from Mitchell’s cell phone, the one handed to him by the DIA for tracking purposes. Beneath it was a message from Mitchell.
STAY ON HIM. I WILL BE CLOSE BY
‘Wait one,’ she said to Jarvis as she accessed the picture and showed it to Vaughn.
‘Who is he? Wilms?’
Lopez looked at the picture for a moment longer and then up at the hotel. Moments later she saw a smartly dressed man walk out of the foyer, his face identical to that of the image on her cell phone. She watched as the old man strode along the sidewalk toward a smart SUV parked on the opposite side of the street. He crossed toward it and a door opened to let him in.
‘Doug,’ she said into her cell, ‘I think we’ve got an eye on Wilms. He must have enough connections to get him out of trouble like this, the police are letting him go.’
‘Stay on him, don’t let him out of your sight.’
‘What about Mitchell?’ Vaughn snapped. ‘He’s nowhere to be seen.’
‘Leave him,’
Jarvis replied.
‘Wilms is the priority!’
‘Mitchell’s the key to everything! This could be a deception!’ Lopez shot back as she turned for their car.
‘Wilms can lead us to Majestic Twelve,’
Jarvis insisted.
‘If he does, Mitchell will no longer have any leverage over us! Get on Wilms and keep him in sight! I’ll have his identity checked out.’
Lopez cursed, and jumped into the car as Vaughn pulled out and followed the SUV at a discreet distance toward midtown.
***
XXVI
Antarctica
General Veer held onto the railings in the rear of the ATV as it slowed at the head of a convoy of eight vehicles, those that had survived the tactical descent onto the ice fields and the gunfight with the Navy SEAL team.
Before them was a long, low ridge that rose up off the glacier, churned ice and chunks of snow littering its banks. Veer could see as he jumped down off the ATV that the disturbance was recent and that the ski gliders had stopped nearby, their tracks in the snow clearly visible.
The other ATVs switched off their engines and his men dismounted, already down from their original hundred to about eighty five. Three had still been alive after the SEALs had dumped the C4 charges out on the ice fields, badly injured and in need of urgent medical attention. General Veer had ensured that they received the best possible care during a time of such urgency by personally executing them where they lay. Now his men stood and watched him in silence as he clambered up the ridge line and peered down into the shadowy blue depths of the chasm below him.
Rappel pins were still lodged in the rock hard ice, the lines descending down into the fissure and vanishing into the blackness far below. Several of Veer’s officers joined him on the edge of the ridge and peered down inside it.
‘No other way out,’ one of them observed. ‘They’ve taken a hell of a risk leaving us such a clear trail.’
Veer looked up across the plains.
‘They managed to conceal their vehicles though,’ he observed. ‘Send a few men out to find them. They won’t have gone around an obstacle this large, they wouldn’t have had enough time, so they must be under cover somewhere to the east of here.’
An officer immediately hurried down the ridge again and began giving orders as Veer crouched down on one knee and ran his gloved hand down his thick beard as another officer, a former Green Beret, spoke up.
‘Whatever the hell they’re looking for, it’s important enough for them to virtually guarantee their deaths here. They’re barely bothering to disguise what they’re up to.’
General Veer nodded thoughtfully. He had been contacted forty eight hours before by a man named Victor Wilms. Well connected and supremely wealthy, or at least his benefactors were, Wilms had made Veer an offer he simply could not refuse: raise a team of one hundred men, get them to Antarctica and recover an American satellite from rogue forces attempting to sabotage United States interests in the region. The price? Ten million dollars now to raise the group, a further ten million after successful completion of the mission. No taxes, no fuss and no questions asked.
It had taken all of Veer’s mental strength to demand fifteen million dollars or there would be no deal. He had got it without question and immediately wished he’d asked for twenty. Even at that early stage, he had wondered whether the mysterious object he was being asked to recover would not be worth more to him than the payment from Wilms.
‘They must have further support,’ Veer decided as he looked along the length of the ridge, which extended into the distance toward the south east. ‘The SEALs must be an advanced force, with maybe a Naval vessel or two on its way to back them up. We need to move fast or we’ll get boxed in and it’ll be us who are outnumbered.’
Veer stood and strode back down the ridge.
‘Bring me the prisoners!’ he boomed.
His officers hurried to the back of one of the ATV’s , in which lay huddled two hostages pulled from the wreckage of several ski gliders damaged in battle, both of them injured and bound hand and foot. The soldiers hauled them up onto their feet and dragged them out onto the ice.
General Veer could see at once that neither of the captives was a military soldier, which pleased him greatly. SEALs were notoriously tough and trained to be able to withstand interrogation techniques of all kinds, whereas the scientists that had evidently travelled with them were civilians, the weak link in the chain.
The man was middle-aged and virtually bald, the other a young girl with bobbed brown hair who stood shivering on the ice. Veer had ordered their Arctic jackets removed to expose them to the bitter chill, which according to the read-out on his digital watch was a fresh minus twelve in the wind. He moved to stand before them.
‘I’ll make this simple,’ he said. ‘If you don’t tell me what I need to know, I will kill you both. It’s quite likely that your remains will still be here in a thousand years’ time, because I won’t shoot you – I’ll have you buried to your necks in the ice.’
Veer let that fact sink into their minds, let them dwell on how long they would spend being cold before hypothermia would finally lead to death. In truth it probably would not be long but Veer liked toying with the idea of prolonged agony.
‘Your names,’ he demanded.
‘Harrison,’ said the man.
‘Amy,’ the woman replied, her voice barely audible above the bitter winds.
‘Tell me why you are here with those soldiers.’
The balding man looked up at Veer with pleading eyes, his words stumbling from his blue lips as he tried to speak.
‘Please.., I have two children…, don’t leave us out here.’
Veer gestured to his officers. ‘Bury him over there.’
The balding man’s eyes flew wide and he screamed as he was dragged away across the glacier by several soldiers, all of them chuckling grimly at his protests. Veer looked at the young girl.
‘Last chance,’ he said, ‘to save yourself and your friend over there.’
‘It’s called Black Knight,’ the scientist gabbled, struggling to get her words out fast enough amid the freezing cold and the desperate cries of her colleague from nearby. ‘It’s a satellite that came down.’
Veer took a pace closer to her. ‘Now tell me something I don’t know.’
‘It’s not ours,’ she mumbled. ‘It’s not Russian, or anybody’s. It wasn’t built by humans.’
General Veer stared at the girl for a long moment and then looked at his officers. ‘That explains the rush to get down here.’
‘It’s been in orbit for thousands of years,’ the scientist went on, ‘and now it’s come down and we’re trying to retrieve it for the government.’
‘Whose government?’ Veer demanded.
She frowned. ‘Our government, the United States. We’re employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency.’
The general peered at the girl before him for a moment, and then he realized that she was telling the truth. If the Navy team was indeed working for the US Government, then that meant that Wilms had been…
Veer turned away from the scientist and walked out across the ice to where the other scientist was being forced to dig his own ice grave on the glacier, weeping and shivering as the soldiers around him waited impatiently. Veer strode up to the scientist and grabbed him by the throat, lifting him up onto his toes as he growled into his face.
‘Who are you working for?’ he demanded.
The scientist croaked his response, his eyes bulging. ‘Defense Intelligence Agency.’
Veer released his grip and the man collapsed to his knees on the ice as the general considered what he had been told. Wilms was a liar and had just spent ten million bucks on an armed force to recover his mysterious alien box of tricks for him under the pretence of Veer working for the government. The fact that FBI Director Gordon LeMay was in on the deal had convinced Veer of Wilms’s credentials, but now…
Veer looked at the ridge line. He had a choice: he had already pocketed four million of the ten million dollars he had been paid by Wilms, the cash squirrelled away in some off shore accounts for when he got back. He could have hired another twenty men with the cash, but he hadn’t reckoned on coming up against Navy SEALs so he’d figured
what the hell
. Wilms had promised him another ten million on completion, but Veer now wondered just how likely that payment would be. If Wilms was not working with the FBI, then who the hell was he working for and what were the chances of them honoring payment? If the scientists were right, and Veer had no reason to think otherwise seeing as their lives were in his hands, then such a device, an alien satellite, would be worth a hundred times what he was being paid.
Veer looked down at the scientist sobbing on his knees and was overcome with a sense of regret and compassion. He couldn’t let the father of two freeze in the ice alone out here.
Veer stepped back, drew his pistol and aimed it at the scientist’s head. Before the man could respond and beg for his life Veer fired. A spray of crimson blood splattered the ice behind the kneeling man and he toppled onto the glacier, his eyes staring lifelessly at the blue sky above as Veer holstered his pistol and strode back toward the remaining scientist.