Protocol 7 (18 page)

“You think they’re giving up?” Andrew said, craning his neck to watch the chopper slide through the air above them. “Or narrowing the search?”

“I have no idea,” Simon answered. He gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turned white. He forced himself to keep his speed under the legal limit, matching the other cars in the increasingly busy highway. They can’t know who we are, trying to convince himself. We’re just another vehicle on a crowded road in a crowded town. Just keep it slow. Concealed in the chaos of traffic.

* * *

Takara studied her little satellite display. She watched the hysteria from over four hundred yards in a small cavity between two buildings, hidden by the shadows. She had fulfilled her promise to Jonathan. She knew she would find him. Now he was one of her victims. She felt no remorse as she slipped through the shadows and disappeared into the night.

* * *

He drove for ten minutes with no real destination in mind; there was a dead man and a paralytic in the back seat, and his other companions were silent and in shock. Finally, he activated the safe phone. He punched the icon Andrew had programmed into the phone as he focused his eyes on the road.

Ryan answered almost immediately. “Sorry, Simon, there’s just so much to do. I had to reschedule my classes, and all of the family business, and Sabrina—”

“So you haven’t left yet?”

“No, but I’m half out the door, I swear—”

“No. Just stay there.”

“What? Why?” He sounded absolutely bewildered.

Simon didn’t have the time or the energy to explain. “Just stay. We’ll come pick you up.”

“But—”

“Stay,” he said, tired of playing the game. He disconnected before Ryan could ask any more questions.

At least now, he thought, they had a destination.

At that moment, he had no idea he was signing someone’s death warrant.

Hayden could barely open his eyes, but he knew the worst was over. He could feel a gradual warming sensation; his muscle control was slowly coming back. At first, the interior of the car was a haze of dark colors and blurred textures, but it was making more sense, one small bit at a time. He struggled to gently open his mouth. Speak, he ordered himself. Speak, you idiot.

The massive iron gate outside Ryan’s estate opened as the Land Rover approached. Simon had been talking—almost shouting—at Ryan over the safe phones for the last ten minutes. They were expected…or at least he hoped so.

The rain poured down in an unending torrent, but Ryan and Sabrina were standing on the covered porch, waiting for them—and arguing. It was clear even at a distance that things were not going well for either of them. Sabrina had her arms tightly crossed; there was a small case sitting at Ryan’s feet—all that he would need for the trip in one small bag.

“Let me deal with this,” Simon told the others and reluctantly stepped out of the Rover as it rolled to a stop.

“Quickly, please,” Andrew said. “We gotta get outta here.”

Simon walked the thirty feet from vehicle to porch, hunched over in the rain, hating to be there. He heard Sabrina speak as he approached.

“You’re going,” she said.

Ryan nodded. “I have to.”

And you can’t even tell her why, Simon realized, ashamed to be watching the exchange at all. The more you tell her, the more danger she will be in—and you know that.

“I don’t want you to,” she said simply. Her eyes were huge and brimming with tears.

“I don’t want it either,” he said, “but I don’t have a choice.”

“They can’t make you,” she said, casting a hateful glance at Simon, past Ryan’s shoulder, cursing the others with a single look. “They can’t force you to do what you don’t want to—”

He put up his hand, palm out, pushing to make her stop. “Sabrina,” he said. “Don’t. Please. I have to do this, and I can’t explain why. You’re just going to have to trust me a bit.”

Her pretty, carefully made mouth fell open at that. “A bit?” she paused. “Trust you a bit?”

She shook her head as she stared at him. “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t.”

She turned away and opened the door to the estate without another word. Simon saw her shaking her head—no, no, I can’t—as she stepped inside and closed the door behind her.

Back in the car, there was a sudden, unexpected shifting in the back seat.

“Hey,” Hayden grunted from the back seat, sounding slurred but determined. “You got anything to drink in this crate?”

Samantha turned suddenly in her seat, hysterically relieved to hear him. “Hayden!” she said, holding back tears. “I’m so glad you’re okay!” She reached back and gently placed her hand on his knee.

He was moving very slowly, struggling to keep his eyes open, muscles twitching as he slowly regained control, grunting with the effort to move his body. Samantha opened the door and called out to Simon.

“Simon, it’s Hayden!”

Ryan gaped in surprise when Simon suddenly turned away and sprinted back toward the car. He watched in astonishment as his friend opened the back door and shouted with delight.

“Hayden! God, I’m so glad you’re okay!”

Hayden managed to give him a sketchy version of his usual scowl, “So am I,” he growled.

Then Simon looked past him and saw Jonathan’s body slumped in the seat, covered in blood. “We’ve got to do something about this.”

Hayden didn’t have to turn around to know what Simon was talking about—not that he could have managed the task quite yet anyway.

Simon turned abruptly and went back to the porch. The others watched as the two men had a short, clipped conversation—a quick, almost businesslike back-and-forth. Finally Ryan nodded, and the two of them ducked into the rain and approached the car.

“We’re ready,” Simon said swiftly as they reached the Rover. “Let’s go.”

* * *

We need to move, Simon told himself as they cruised out of the iron gates and bounced back onto the road. We need to get out of here. He could feel the black-clad mercenaries out there, looking for them. There wasn’t time for this.

“What now?” Ryan said, clearly appalled by the smell in the vehicle. He felt detached, somehow numb. He had never even touched a dead body before that day, and now he was staring at Jonathan. He shuddered and wondered if he could ever get the smell of it off his hands.

“You know the area,” Andrew said from the driver’s seat. “Hell, you own the area. Tell me where we can find a body of water—preferably slightly polluted or worse. We need to get rid of the body.”

Ryan stared at him. “Are you fucking serious?”

Andrew glared at him. “Does this seem like a good time to be joking?”

Ryan swallowed. “No.” He thought about it for a moment and then said, “Turn left at the next street you see. There is a small reservoir—really a pond that most people ‘round here use as a dumping ground. That may work.”

“Deserted, I hope,” Andrew said. “Wooded or invisible from the street would be nice, too.”

“As it happens, yes it is.”

“Good.”

Everyone was silent for a moment while the stormy afternoon grew even darker. Andrew had to turn on the headlights to see the road signs ahead.

“You may need to pull a few strings,” Simon said as they plunged through the storm. “You’ve got connections everywhere. You can see it already Ryan, we are going to need to get out of here—out of London and to Dad’s estate in Corsica, at least for a day. And it’s going to have to happen fast.”

Simon had already told him the plan and the unorthodox route he had worked out. They had spoken about alternate ways to travel, and Ryan had charted a route that would take them from the Island of Corsica to Chile and beyond to the southern continent undetected. The route had to be unorthodox. It had to be an atypical system of back roads and unregistered flights that would get them there. At least that’s what Simon and the others hoped.

“Well,” Ryan said finally. “It’s not as if any of us have a lot of choice, now, is it?”

Simon turned his head toward him. “No,” he confessed. “Not much.”

“Look at the bright side,” Hayden said sarcastically, keeping his eyes ahead, listening to the directions from Ryan. “At least it’s a beautiful island, even if it is for one day.”

Ryan absent-mindedly said, “Turn right. Half a mile, then take the dirt road.” He was running his hands through his hair as he said it, pulling at it, looking entirely distracted. “I just can’t believe it,” he said. “Riding around the countryside with a dead body in the back seat. Jonathan Weiss’ dead body. Someone just walked right up to the car and killed him. Killed—”

“Wait a minute,” Andrew said. A thought struck him so suddenly he almost hit the brakes. “Wait a second…”

He thought furiously as he drove the last half-mile. “How did they know where he was?”

“What?” Ryan didn’t understand.

“He was killed in this car. My car. Not his. If they were tracking him through his car, they would have lost him at the crash.”

Ryan just stared. “But they didn’t. They knew enough to either follow him or find him again…”

“…and waited until he was alone before they killed him.”

He took the last curve of the dirt road just a little too quickly, and Ryan was bashed painfully against the passenger door. “Hey!” he said.

“Sorry.”

They had arrived. As promised, it was a small, deep pond surrounded by a copse of threadbare trees. The shore was strewn with a random collection of blown-out tires and broken appliances. The water itself was so dark it was almost black; its surface, pockmarked by raindrops, wobbled with a faint, oily rainbow.

Simon, Andrew, and Ryan climbed out of the vehicle without a word. The downpour had relented, at least for the moment, to a thin but penetrating drizzle.

They dragged Jonathan’s body from the Rover and laid it on the ground, facedown, treating it with an unspoken respect. It was the last time, Simon knew, that this body would be afforded any dignity at all. He deserved so much more.

“I hate to say this,” Andrew said, “but we need to undress him.”

“Ah, shit, Andrew.”

“I know.” Grim but efficient, he squatted by the body and peeled the bloody, filthy clothes away with as much delicacy and speed as he could manage. As soon as he was done, he pulled a flat device from his wallet. It was no larger than a playing card and the color of mother-of-pearl; it vibrated very slightly in his hand. He passed it close to the body, scanning every inch from close in, barely an inch from the skin, checking the number that skittered along the device’s silvery surface.

It took Andrew almost fifteen minutes to find what he was looking for. Ryan and Simon remained silent the entire time.

“My god,” he said when he finally located it. “Somebody out there is a bloody genius.”

Simon felt as if he had been holding his breath the entire time. Now he let it loose and said, “What?”

Andrew took his Swiss Army knife from his pocket, flipped open the blade, and said, “Look away.”

Ryan was happy to. Simon did not. He only moved a bit to one side to block the view from the Rover completely.

There was no reason for anyone else to see this.

Sixty seconds later, Andrew straightened up and sighed with relief. “Will you look at that?” he said. Ryan turned back, and Andrew showed him a flat, flexible piece of metalized plastic about the size and shape of a dime, but much thinner. It was sticky with Jonathan’s coagulated blood.

“What the hell is that?” Ryan said, completely unable to keep the revulsion out of his voice.

“A locational tracker. No microphone, no GPS, just a tiny little ULF pulse generator.”

“‘ULF?’”

“Ultra Low Frequency Radio. Three hundred hertz to three kilohertz. Really low. Sends out such a tiny little informationless pulse that standard scanners would only detect if they were looking for it.” He shook his head and chuckled. “What a joke. I block their surveillance by going under it with my scramblers, and they go under me with this little bitch.”

“This is how they tracked Jonathan—and us,” Simon added, understanding it completely for the first time.

“Exactly,” Ryan said. “When he fell off the grid, when the CCTV cameras couldn’t see him, when even thread interrogation didn’t work, they started looking for this thing’s little ping, ping, ping. And they found it.” He crushed it in his palm, and for one instant, Andrew looked so filled with hate his eyes were nearly on fire. “They found him.”

Ryan just stared at it. “Why didn’t Jonathan know he was carrying it? He must have changed clothes, searched his—you know, himself.”

Andrew nodded. “They put it in a perfect place. Right here.” He cocked an elbow and pointed over his shoulder to the small of his own back. “The one spot on your body you can’t see or touch. Just under the skin, flat and flexible. Probably couldn’t feel it anyway. And powered with a micro battery, trickle-charged by Jonathan’s own bioelectricity.” He gazed at the device again, almost admiring. “It could have been there for months. Years. Since he started working for UNED.”

Simon started. “Battery? You mean it’s still working?”

Andrew shrugged. “Might be. Or it might have quit when he died.”

God, he thought, what a mess. Aloud, he said only, “Get rid of it. “

Andrew put the device in his pocket and then bent over the body one last time. Together, the three men carefully dragged Jonathan’s corpse to the edge of the water and rolled him in until it was entirely, if only slightly, submerged. Then they weighed the body down with a few large stones and a concrete block, gathered from the trash-strewn shoreline.

The wind and rain were beginning to pick up again as the last of the light drained away. Ryan had never felt so miserable.

“Won’t stay hidden forever,” Andrew said shortly. “But long enough. And the crap in the water, along with fish and vermin, should destroy any forensic evidence.”

Ryan wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stood there for a moment.

They were dumping a person’s body. Dumping it, as if they were the cold-blooded murderers. Ryan was speechless, rendered mute by all he had just seen.