The Ultimatum--An International Spy Thriller Read online

  “Atti alaolwyeh! Atti alaolwyeh!” The soldiers’ shouts were in Arabic, confirming that this was almost certainly the Bahraini military.

  Don’t be a hero: the rule pounded in Bianca’s head with the same staccato rhythm as her pulse.

  Keeping her face down as she edged around the periphery of the crowd, she stopped in front of what she thought, from the smell, must be a fishmonger. She was now directly across from the garbage truck, doing her best to see inside the dark cab while her stomach twisted itself into a pretzel.

  “What do we do?” Sidling up beside her, Doc almost made her jump. His voice was low, but he was speaking English. A wary glance around told her that nobody was likely to overhear. There was so much noise—the chattering crowd, the shouting soldiers, the throbbing engines of the stopped vehicles, the rush of the tide—that anything short of a screech was probably safe. And with his dark coloring and black suit, Doc blended in well enough visually.

  “I told you to wait by the bike.”

  “I thought you might need help.”

  That was actually kind of sweet. Doc’s particular skill set wasn’t really suited to the occasion, but she appreciated his loyalty and willingness to put his own safety on the line for the team. As the newest member of the group and the only one she and the others had never worked with before, Doc was still a largely unknown quantity. At this point, with no payout forthcoming and a whole boatload full of trouble crashing down on their heads, he could have just cut and run.

  Before she could reply, another truck roared up, passing the convoy at speed. Once on the other side of the garbage truck and the jeeps holding it at bay, it executed a neat one-eighty and positioned itself so that it was in front of and facing the garbage truck. Maybe a dozen armed soldiers jumped out of the back and advanced on the garbage truck, rifles pointed threateningly at the windshield.

  “Holy shit.” Doc’s voice went high-pitched.

  Two uniformed officers got out of the newly arrived truck’s cab and walked toward the garbage truck in the wake of the advancing men. One of them yelled through a bullhorn, “You in the truck! Put up your hands and step out!”

  She registered that he was speaking English. Her heartbeat quickened as she realized what that had to mean: the soldiers, and thus the prince, knew exactly who was in that truck.

  Don’t panic, Bianca told herself as she felt the prickle of cold sweat breaking out around her hairline. It was possible that her father was even at that point working some kind of angle that would lead to the trio’s deliverance. A con man to his bone marrow, Richard wouldn’t submit to capture without at least attempting to save himself.

  Don’t be a hero. Don’t be a hero. Don’t be a hero.

  To hell with it. She couldn’t just do nothing.

  “I’m going to create a distraction,” she said under her breath. “You go back and wait by the bike. I’ll meet you there in a few.”

  Doc gave her a worried look. “What kind of distraction?”

  “Go back to the bike.” Bianca was already on the move. Her plan was to steal the truck that had just arrived. She’d watched the soldiers jump out of the back and the two officers exit the cab, one through the passenger’s door and the other through the driver’s door. Chances were high that the truck, and more to the point the cab, was empty. The engine was still running. She would jump in, slam the transmission into Reverse, make a one-eighty of her own and floor it out of there. That should create enough of a diversion to give her father and the others a little bit of time when the focus was not on them. Time to do what? That was up to them. Bottom line was, escape.

  “Hands up! Get out of the truck!” The officer in charge—Bianca assumed he was the officer in charge because he was the guy giving the orders—boomed through the bullhorn.

  The garbage truck was angled in such a way that until that point she hadn’t been able to see anything inside the cab. A spotlight switched on—it was mounted on the hood of one of the jeeps—and by its blinding glare Bianca was finally able to make out the three men inside: Findley, dark and compact, was behind the wheel; wide-shouldered, bald Grangier was in the middle; and her tall, silver-haired father was on the far side.

  She couldn’t see their expressions, but she knew they had to be grim. She was feeling pretty grim herself.

  “Turn off the engine! Get out of the truck!” The commands thundered over the bullhorn. “You have until the count of five! One—”

  She didn’t dare run. She didn’t dare make a beeline for her target. Keeping her head down and sticking to the fringe of the crowd, she moved toward the truck she meant to steal as fast as she could without giving herself away.

  “Two!”

  She could almost hear her father saying, as he did before every job, that if the situation went south, it was every man for himself and they’d meet back at base.

  “Three!”

  Wait, this was going down too fast. Maybe forty feet of open space separated her from the truck. Bianca looked around to make sure no soldiers stood between her and it, gave up on being careful and sprinted toward it. No time for anything else. No one seemed to be paying any attention to her, thank God. Everyone was focused on the drama playing out with the soldiers and the garbage truck. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the driver’s-side door of the garbage truck open. No, wait, stay where you are, she wanted to scream at Findley as he started to emerge. Then she thought, Maybe this is Dad making his play. The inside of the cab was completely illuminated now as the interior light came on. She could see her father saying something to Grangier—

  A weird whistling sound sliced through the air.

  Boom!

  The explosion almost knocked her off her feet. A blast of heat, a burst of blinding light, the concussive force of a wave of intense energy slammed into her. Thrown backward, she fetched up against the truck she’d planned to steal, caught herself with both hands against the grille—and then flung herself forward again, desperately.

  Only to stop, swaying, because there was nothing she could do.

  Except stare in horror at the raging fireball that the garbage truck had turned into.

  Dad.

  She screamed it internally, but not a sound emerged from between her shock-parted lips. The truck was totally consumed in flames. They shot skyward, reaching at least three stories high. Their brightness lit up the night, painted the street and the sky and the gulf and the surrounding buildings and the faces of the shouting, shoving, running onlookers orange. The soldiers who’d been surrounding the truck were on the ground now, blown back by the explosion. They were bathed in the hellish orange light, too.

  “Aidhyn ’atlaquu alnnar alty?” the officer with the bullhorn bellowed. She automatically translated the Arabic: Who fired that shot?

  If there was an answer, she missed it.

  Some of the soldiers on the ground staggered to their feet. Two more raced from the convoy toward the burning truck with fire extinguishers. Futile, she could tell even before they tried shooting foam at the flames. Even from where she stood, she could feel the heat, intense as sunlamps turned on high. The roar of the fire was punctuated by a sharp crackling. The horrible smell of burning rubber—of burning something—was everywhere.

  Screams. Through the roaring and shouting and all the other sounds—sirens wailing in the distance, coming closer fast; the incessant blare of a boat horn; pounding feet—Bianca thought she could hear screams.

  From the men in the truck.

  Her father.

  Oh, God, please.

  Her blood turned to ice in her veins. Her pounding heart seemed to freeze. It was as if she were watching everything happen in slow motion, as if she were trapped in a nightmare, as if—

  A wave of dizziness hit her, stronger almost than the concussion from the blast. Inside her head, a burst of memor
y detonating through the fog that shrouded her early childhood nearly dropped her to her knees: another explosion, another fireball, other horrific sounds, smells, screams.

  The long-ago screams she was hearing were hers.

  Mommy.

  For the first time in her conscious recollection, she remembered how her mother had died. It spun through her head in a lightning flash of terrible illumination.

  No, no, no.

  Her legs buckled. Pain twisted her insides, skewered her heart. She dropped to her knees on the uneven, baking-hot cobblestones and with a tremendous effort of will managed to thrust the hideous memories aside.

  While she watched with tortured disbelief as her father died before her eyes.

  It was, she realized as pain turned to soul-wrenching agony, the first time in a long time that she had been sure she loved him.

  Mentor, teacher, taskmaster. Ruthless disciplinarian. Despot. Her constant in an uncertain world. Con man. Thief. Dad.

  Oh, God. This was why she was always so cautious about letting herself love anyone, anything. It always went wrong, and when it did, it hurt too damned much.

  Her breath rasped in her throat. She felt like her lungs were being crushed, like a heavy stone had been dropped on her chest.

  “Jennifer. Jesus.” Doc was there, hunkering down beside her, dropping an arm across her shoulders. He called her Jennifer because that was the only name for her he knew. His voice, his presence, the solid bulk of him, steadied her. It broke through the pall of horror that held her rooted to the spot. It reminded her of reality, of her own danger and his.

  “We have to go,” she said and stood up. It took every ounce of strength and determination she possessed. Fire trucks raced up the street, screaming to a stop beside the flaming truck. Firefighters jumped down, ran to connect their hoses to hydrants along the plaza.

  Useless. Everyone in the truck was dead. There was no possibility of saving them.

  The scene shimmied before her eyes.

  Doc rose, too. “But we can’t just—”

  “Yes, we can. We have to go,” she repeated more strongly and grabbed his arm. Her tone turned fierce as Doc stared at her without moving. “We can’t help them. We can stay here and die with them, or we can save ourselves.”

  People were coming from everywhere now, bursting from their buildings, running up the street, spilling from the alleys. More leaned out of windows and gawked from the decks of boats. They were yelling, calling out to each other. The officer with the bullhorn was still shouting, still giving commands, but she was no longer capable of translating anything.

  Every moment that they stayed increased their risk of discovery.

  “Move,” Bianca ordered, giving Doc’s arm a hard yank as she started to walk and he didn’t. “Now. We’ve got to get out of here while we can.”

  As he moved off with her, finally, she was relieved to discover that her brain was regaining its ability to function. If she and Doc were to survive, she needed to make cold, clear, careful plans, and to hell with her bleeding, crying wimp of a heart.

  9

  Twenty-four hours later

  The Four Seasons Seareinersma Bay Hotel was one of Manama’s newest, and its finest. Built on a man-made private island in the most exclusive section of north Manama, it was a high-rise tower overlooking the lush gardens and swimming pools of the hotel grounds as well as the beautiful calm waters of the bay in which it stood. The city of Manama filled the skyline on all sides. At night, which it currently was, the garish neon lights of the newest skyscrapers lit up the sky and the smooth black surface of the bay with a kaleidoscope of colors: Vegas by way of the Middle East.

  Driving from the city across the causeway to the hotel for this meeting a short time earlier, Colin Rogan had looked at the steel-and-glass column thrusting sixty-eight stories straight up from the tiny island toward the sky and been struck by the imagery. It was as if the hotel itself was giving the finger to the investigators who had worked long and hard to bring the man Interpol called Traveler to justice.

  He personally was suffering from two burn marks on the back of his neck, the mother of all headaches and a bad case of the I-can’t-believe-you-were-that-stupid’s for letting himself get taken down by a babe in sexy underwear with a hot line in kisses. Especially since said babe was his ticket to Traveler and the multimillion-dollar reward being offered to anyone who brought him in.

  The only saving grace was that no one besides himself and the girl knew. By the time he’d regained consciousness and staggered out of the restroom, Traveler had been cornered down by the docks and the rush had been on to take him into custody.

  An endeavor that had failed spectacularly.

  Rogan turned away from the window of the top floor conference room as the last member of the quartet who had been summoned to this meeting knocked briskly before being admitted by one of the support staff, which consisted of security officers and a pair of administrative assistants.

  “Kemp.” Interpol’s Laurent Durand greeted the newcomer, John Kemp, deputy head of covert operations for the American CIA, with a handshake. In his early sixties, average height and weight, Kemp was solid and still muscular, a gray-haired, granite-jawed bureaucrat in a suit.

  “Durand.” Kemp looked past Durand at Rogan and then at the young, dark-bearded man in the Bahraini military uniform already seated at the far end of the conference table that was the centerpiece of the room. The table had a smooth wood top and chrome legs, and half a dozen black leather chairs were pulled up to it. Except for a credenza holding bottles of water, a coffeemaker and a selection of snacks, it was the only furnishing.

  “This is Brigadier General Hamad bin Sequer Al Amiri of the Bahraini Royal Guard.” Durand made the introductions. He then nodded at Rogan. “Colin Rogan. At present he is working for me.”

  As a private contractor recruited to help bring Traveler in, Rogan finished Durand’s introduction silently. Kemp shook hands, then flung himself into a seat.

  “Why am I here?” Kemp addressed the question to Durand. He looked tired and harassed, and his tone reflected that.

  “If you will all excuse us,” Durand said to the support staff. As they filed out, his gaze singled out a slender, black-haired young woman in a skirted suit. “Samira, all I do is push the button?”

  “The touch pad,” Samira corrected, giving him a small smile. “Tap the touch pad. The image will come up.”

  “The touch pad.” Durand sighed. “Don’t go far, would you, please?”

  “I’ll be right outside,” Samira promised and followed the rest of the support staff from the room, closing the door as she exited. The four principals to the meeting were left alone.

  “I repeat, why am I here?” Kemp drummed his fingers on the table.

  “We have come across some information that we thought you might find of interest,” Durand said. “Does the name Mason Thayer mean anything to you?”

  Kemp’s fingers stilled. He gave Durand an inscrutable look. “The question is, what does it mean to you?”

  “We have reason to believe that Mason Thayer is Traveler.”

  Kemp stood up abruptly. The action thrust his chair back, causing its legs to scrape noisily over the floor.

  “Impossible,” he said. “You’ve had me fly halfway around the world to tell me that?”

  “We found a fingerprint. A partial fingerprint. On the inside of a rubber glove that was discarded in a Dumpster outside the apartment building where Traveler spent time preparing for this job. Surveillance leads us to believe that Traveler dropped the glove in the Dumpster.” Durand’s eyes were watchful on Kemp’s face. “We ran the partial, and the name that came up was Mason Thayer. One of yours.”

  By “one of yours,” Durand meant CIA, Rogan knew.

  “Impossible,” Kemp sai
d again. His voice was harsh. “Thayer is dead.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Dead twenty-two years. Sure beyond any possibility of mistake.”

  Durand walked over to a laptop that had been left on the table. Lifting the lid, he let his hand hover over the touch pad and tapped.

  “Ah,” he said with open satisfaction as an image appeared on the screen. He thrust the laptop across the table at Kemp. “If you will look at this.”

  This showed black-and-white footage of a man in a raincoat with a hat pulled down low over his forehead entering an alley on a rainy night. The footage, which Rogan knew was from a surveillance camera at an ATM across the street, was of poor quality and its efficacy was further marred by the falling rain. But the streetlamp on the corner provided light enough to see the man, and even read the address of the building he was passing in front of, which was affixed to the stone facade by a bronze plaque: 1801 Rue Saint-Honoré. Paris, he knew.

  The man was carrying a white plastic trash bag, and as they watched he turned slightly sideways to sling it into...something. The footage didn’t show the Dumpster, although that was where the bag, supposing it was the same bag, had been recovered. But despite the shading of the hat, that slight sideways turn revealed a partial profile: a long nose, firm, full lips, square chin.

  “Could that be Mason Thayer?” Durand asked as the footage ended. “From the man’s facial features, his size, the way he moves—are they consistent with what you know of him?”

  Kemp’s expression didn’t change. “You’re assuming I know what Mason Thayer looked like—twenty-two years ago.”

  “We know you worked with him on Cerberus.” Durand made an apologetic face as Kemp’s brows snapped together. The Cerberus Project was a top secret US government program. Rogan knew that but didn’t know the details. He wasn’t sure if Durand did. “We have our sources.”

  Kemp looked back at the image of the man, frozen now at the end of the video. “It’s difficult to say. Possibly. Except, and I repeat myself here, for the fact that Thayer is dead.”