Read The Martyr's Curse Online
Authors: Scott Mariani
The inner containment chamber was empty. No sign of Lindquist. ‘Fine,’ Streicher said. He racked the slide on the Beretta, clicked off the safety and went looking for him.
Lindquist wasn’t far away. Streicher found him next door, in the adjacent lab where the test animals were housed. Still wearing his PPPS suit, the Swede was standing watching a black-and-white monkey in a cage. The animal was resting on its haunches, munching on a slice of apple. At the sight of Streicher, it threw down the food and gripped the bars of its cage, screeching loudly. Lindquist turned in surprise. He was pale with exhaustion, both from lack of sleep and the prolonged terror of his ordeal, but he was suddenly very much awake and his eyes opened wide at the sight of the gun in Streicher’s hand.
‘A man’s trust is a precious thing, Anton,’ Streicher said. ‘Especially mine, as your life happens to depend on it. You promised to deliver. Your time is up.’
‘Jesus Christ, you can’t come in here without protection,’ Lindquist rasped behind the suit visor. ‘The monkey – it’s infected.’
Streicher took a step back, whipped a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it over his nose and mouth. He gazed at the table near the cage, on which was a small amber-coloured bottle and a pack of disposable syringes. ‘Is that what I think it is?’
‘The antitoxin,’ Lindquist said. ‘I finished it sooner than expected. But the test isn’t complete. I only administered the drug to the monkey ninety minutes ago, alongside the live bacteria.’
The monkey was still screeching wildly inside the cage. Streicher hated monkeys, mainly because they were too similar to humans. He pointed the gun at it. ‘Make it shut the hell up.’
‘I don’t know how.’
‘Is it sick?’
‘It’s just afraid of you,’ Lindquist said. ‘These aren’t disease symptoms.’
A surge of elation stabbed through Streicher’s heart. ‘Then the antitoxin’s working. It’s been ninety minutes. You said the first symptoms appear within an hour.’
‘Generally. But ninety minutes isn’t long enough to be certain.’
Streicher considered, but only for a second. Triumph was blazing through him like a river of fire. He couldn’t wait any longer. ‘It’s good enough,’ he said, grabbing the bottle and syringes from the table. ‘Will this provide doses for everyone?’
‘Plenty,’ Lindquist said. ‘But—’
Streicher pointed the pistol at him. ‘Take off your suit.’
‘What?’
Streicher aimed the gun carefully at Lindquist’s side, where the silvery material hung loose and baggy. He squeezed the trigger. The gunshot was deafening in the hard-surfaced lab. A nine-millimetre hole appeared in the loose folds of the PPPS suit. Passing straight through with no resistance, the bullet smashed a computer screen on a bench behind where Lindquist was standing. The monkey screamed even louder, and shook hysterically at its bars. Streicher swung the gun and fired again, and the monkey was blown against the back of the cage, crumpled and silenced, its fur bloody.
‘Take off your suit,’ Streicher repeated. ‘It’s useless to you now, anyway.’
Lindquist gaped at the hole in the material where the bullet had passed within two inches of his flesh, then turned and gaped again at the dead monkey. He clawed at the neck fastening of his headgear and removed it, pale and shaking. Then undid the fastenings of the rest of the suit and let it slip to the floor. He was mouthing the words he didn’t dare speak out loud. ‘You’re fucking insane.’
Streicher tossed him the antitoxin bottle, then the syringes. ‘Do you trust it?’ he said.
‘I-I did everything right. I know I did.’
‘Then take a shot. The test is over. The operation starts here.’
Lindquist’s hands were fluttering so badly that he could barely get the needle into his arm. He winced as he pressed the plunger.
‘Good,’ Streicher said. ‘Now my turn.’ Drawing a fresh needle from the pack, he administered his own dose without a flinch. Lindquist was staring at him, unable to speak. ‘You did good work, Anton,’ Streicher told him with a smile. He sounded like a benevolent schoolteacher after scoring a breakthrough with a recalcitrant pupil. ‘Your contribution will go down in history. It won’t be forgotten.’
Streicher left the lab and went striding rapidly down the corridor. Suddenly remembering what the Swede had said about the nausea and headaches that might come on as side effects of the antitoxin, he took a detour through the bunker and went to his personal office. He knew what would fix the side effects. Couldn’t be seen throwing up and acting all weak and pathetic in front of the others. Not even in front of Hannah. It wouldn’t become a man of his stature.
The office was a large room, with an oriental rug and leather chairs and a fine teak desk at which he often sat to gaze at the bank of security monitors mounted in a double row on the wall above a control panel, showing constantly switching high-definition images from inside the bunker and various points along the perimeter. He ignored them at this moment, because he had more pressing business on his mind.
Laying the antitoxin and needles on the desk, he opened a drawer and took out a plastic sachet of cocaine, a credit card and a short straw. Scattered fine white powder on the desktop, shaped it into three generous lines with the credit card, then bent over the desk and snorted them up in quick succession.
He straightened up, gasping at the sudden heady rush and dropping the straw. Coloured lights spangled in front of his eyes. His whole being tingled with a champagne fizz and a grin wider than a piano keyboard spread over his face. He breathed out with deep satisfaction and felt as if he was already king of the world. Which he already was, of course. His destiny was assured now. Nothing was going to—
That was when he happened to glance at the security monitors and something caught his eye that wiped the grin off his face.
The pair of intruders were standing at the fence and peering through the wire into the compound, filmed from above and to the side, clearly unaware of the miniature camera concealed overhead in the branches of a tree. Both carried automatic weapons. The man was blond and lean, about forty. Looked tough and able to handle himself. Streicher had never seen him before, but he knew the woman, all right. He’d have known her anywhere.
Michelle Faban.
Fury rose up inside Udo Streicher with volcanic intensity, fuelled by the cocaine rush.
The bitch.
The traitorous, treacherous, lying piece of shit bitch!
He stared enraged at the monitor for nearly two full minutes. The intruders were talking to one another, making him wish he’d installed microphones into his surveillance system. They seemed to be conferring. They seemed to be alone. As he watched, they drew back from the fence, but he could still see them lingering among the trees, on the edge of his screen. He reached to the control panel and nudged a stubby lever below the monitor that looked like a miniature joystick. The hidden camera panned a few degrees, bringing the concealed figures back to the centre of the screen. The bastards were obviously planning something.
Streicher tore at his pocket and snatched out the radio handset. He barked into it in a furious gabble.
‘Wolf, we have a security breach in progress near Perimeter Gate Seventeen. The Faban woman is out there with some guy. I know why they’re here, and they have to be stopped. Do you hear me, Wolf? I want you to take a four-man team out there and deal with it, right this very minute. I’ll be watching from the monitors. I want them
dead
. I want that bitch’s head personally delivered to me on a
plate
, five minutes from now. Understand? Over and out.’
Wolf Schilling dropped his radio and ran along the corridor to the rec room where Dominik Baiza, Riccardo Cazzitti, Silvain Chavanne and Stefan Ringler were stretched out on sofas and armchairs watching a favourite post-apocalyptic thriller movie on the fifty-inch Panasonic.
‘Where are the others?’ Schilling said, standing in the doorway.
Baiza looked up from the sofa. ‘Zwart’s taking a shit. Lindquist’s still in the lab. As for Wokalek, he was working out in the gym last time I saw him. Hannah’s off somewhere, doing what Hannah does. What’s up?’
‘Situation. I’m picking a four-man team to join me out there. You guys are elected. C’mon, on your feet. Work to do.’
‘Watching the movie, man,’ Ringler groaned.
Wolf Schilling clapped his hands. ‘Shift your arses, people. Go, go, go. Cazzitti, run to the armoury and break out the MP5s. You should be pleased, Ringler. Faban’s back and you get to do what you want with her. Let’s move it!’
Once they were fully tooled up, the hit squad raced through the tunnels in three electric buggies and came out through the hangar. The boss had reset the six-digit bunker entry/exit code again that morning. It was hard to keep up with all his frequent changes.
Inside the hangar, the five jumped out of the buggies. Wolf Schilling activated the control to lock down the bunker, then aimed the remote towards the steel shutters and stabbed the green button. With a jerk of steel cables followed by an electric whirr, the lower sill of the shutter rolled up just far enough for them to slide under, scraping their weapons as they went. The shutter whirred down behind them.
Keeping close to the building, they darted around to the far side to cut across the grass unseen from Perimeter Gate 17. They ran to the fence and Schilling undid the padlock on the nearest gate, allowing them access to the surrounding ring of woodland. The intruders were nearly a quarter of a mile away on the far side of the perimeter, so they had to move fast.
Wolf Schilling unslung his Heckler & Koch MP5SD submachine gun. It was the sound-suppressed version with the fat silencer that completely shrouded the barrel, one of the specialised military items provided for the Parati by their old pal Miki Donath. The four other men were carrying the same model, all fully bombed up with EOTech red dot optics and C-Mag hundred-round magazines, enough to start and finish a small war. They moved through the trees at a loping stride, their footsteps silent on the mossy ground, and covered the quarter mile in just under four minutes.
As they approached Perimeter Gate 17, they spread out. Riccardo Cazzitti had learned more than just chopper mechanic skills in the Italian Parachute Infantry Brigade. He prided himself on being able to sneak up on anything that lived and breathed. Taking the outside flank, his alert gaze darted to left and right, the fat muzzle of the H&K moving instinctively wherever he looked and his trigger finger optically connected to his brain, so that all he had to do was lock eyes on his target and it would go down in a silenced purr of machine-gun fire. Fifteen metres to his left crept Dominik Baiza, who was strictly more of a vehicles man and less comfortable on combat detail. Fanning out from Baiza’s left, Schilling and Ringler and Chavanne spanned the remaining woodland. Nothing could escape them as they combed through the trees.
Chavanne reached the point of the fence where the intruders had been sighted. He gave a low whistle.
Nada.
Maybe the boss had been dreaming. Maybe this was just some drill he’d concocted to keep them from getting fat and dull watching movies all the time. He grinned at the thought.
Then something impacted the back of his neck very hard and his vision exploded white like a magnesium flare. He barely registered hitting the ground, and didn’t register the cold steel blade slipping between his ribs as more than a momentary flash of agony.
Then he knew nothing at all.
Stefan Ringler caught the movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to his left, frowning hard and pointing his weapon in the direction of where Chavanne had been just a moment ago. He couldn’t see him any more. He changed course, cutting ninety degrees towards the fence. The trigger pull on his MP5 weighed in at about six pounds, and he had about four pounds of pressure on it as he stalked through the trees.
Two metres closer. Still no sign of Chavanne.
Three metres closer. Where the hell was he? This was no time to nip behind a pine trunk for a slash. He opened his mouth, but knew he had to stay silent.
Stefan Ringler stayed silent for the rest of his life, which lasted less than four seconds. Technically, long enough to yell out and alert his teammates, but the black-clad forearm that whipped around his neck from behind and locked itself in a boa constrictor grip around his throat made any kind of sound impossible, apart from the thrashing of his legs as he was swiftly dragged to the mossy ground and the life choked out of him. Then, a terrible pain as his neck was twisted left and right and something snapped deep inside, and the lights went out.
Ben let the body fall limply away from him and got back on his feet. Silvie Valois was just a shadow among the trees, five metres away. He tossed Ringler’s MP5 and the shadow reached nimbly out and caught it without a sound. He pointed at her, then motioned past her through the trees, then tapped his watch and held up five fingers, and the shadow nodded imperceptibly in reply. He crept along the line of the fence as Silvie moved silently at a perpendicular angle away from him and curved round to her left to come up behind the wing man on the far side.
Ben counted down the last of the five seconds, heard the sharp metallic purr of suppressed gunfire twenty metres away through the trees, and then opened up with the submachine gun he’d taken from the first dead guy. The Heckler & Koch
Maschinenpistole
was even more familiar to him than the Browning Hi-Power. He’d carried it in deserts and jungles and urban war zones, fired it in snow and underwater and in total darkness. He was as proficient with it as it was possible to be.
But even for a novice shooter, the enemy were too close and distinct to be missable. That was all they were in that moment: the enemy. Not men, not people. Three remaining, and none of them had the slightest inkling what was happening until the angled crossfire of two shooters mowed them down, left to right, right to left. The MP5SD silencer was highly effective. He felt the gun judder in his hands and the muzzle try to climb under the combined recoil of fifteen nine-millimetre Parabellum rounds a second. Five solid seconds of automatic fire. A combined total of one hundred and fifty copper-jacketed bullets zipping through the foliage and clipping leaves and punching through vital organs and bone and soft tissue as the men crumpled and fell amid almost eerie silence.