The Armageddon Protocol

THIRTY

Chamonix was high in the French Alps, only a few short miles from both the Italian and Swiss borders, and Alain Baupin turned out to be everything Leo had said and more. Standing well over six feet in height and with a prominent Roman nose he walked conspicuously through the snow on the side of the street. His hands were pushed deep in his ski jacket pockets and he wore a bright red bobble hat on his head. His chin was buried inside the folds of a thick scarf and partially obscured his long, tanned face.

After checking into a hotel in the early hours, they had all slept badly until first light when Harry had left Zoey and Niko in the safety of their room. Now he was following Leo’s instructions to the letter and holding the carnations in his right hand. When Baupin saw them he crossed the road and stood beside the Englishman and pretended to read the menu in the window of the café.

“These are for you,” Harry said under his breath, and wiggled the flowers casually at arm’s length.

“Leo said you were a good man, but really… you shouldn’t have.”

“I see the French sense of humor is alive and kicking.”

Baupin turned his mouth down and gave a shallow shrug. “Meh…”

“Leo told you what’s going on?”

“Of course.”

“And you have the information I need?”

Baupin leaned in to the menu. “The pain beurre confiture is very good here.”

“I said…”

“Walk with me, and lose the flowers.”

Harry thought this was a great idea, and offered them to the first woman who walked past him. She told him to get lost, so he handed them to the second woman who took them with a blush and a lavish merci beaucoup, monsieur.

“Smooth,” Baupin said with a suppressed smirk. “I see the famous English charm is alive and kicking.”

“Meh…” Harry said, and both men shared a brief laugh.

They walked across the square and crossed the tiny bridge that spanned the River Arve. Fed by the glaciers in the Chamonix Valley, the river flowed the length of the town until meeting up with the Rhône in Geneva just over the Swiss border.

“So where do I find Zalan Szabo, Alain?”

Baupin sighed, and winced as he looked up into the sky. For a few moments the sun appeared in a break in the clouds but was quickly spirited away by yet more of the heavy grey storm clouds. “Are you sure you want to find him?”

“He kidnapped some people I was supposed to be looking after, so yes.”

Baupin stared at him for a moment and then buried his chin back in the scarf. When he spoke his voice was muffled by the wool. “So you are sure.”

Harry nodded. “And I need to know in a hurry. Tell me everything you have.”

“Very well. He’s Hungarian originally, born in a small town to the south of Budapest. He did national service in Hungary and then went off the grid for many years, resurfacing in Vienna. Recently he built a hotel here in France. He has a great deal of money.”

“How much?”

“Too much.”

“How did he make his fortune?”

“We don’t know.”

“And why is he on your radar?”

“Money laundering mostly, but he covers all the bases. We’ve never even got him near a court, never mind got a conviction.”

“How so?”

“Friends in high places.”

Harry nodded. A familiar story. “Sounds about right.”

“But the question, Harry, is why is he on your radar?”

“I told you, he kidnapped some friends of mine.”

“Oui, but why did he kidnap your friends?”

Harry took a breath. He would trust Leo with his life, and Leo said that he would trust Alain Baupin with his life, but still he wondered just how far he could trust a man he had known all of ten minutes. He watched some clouds circling around the peak of Mont Blanc for a few seconds and decided to go with his heart. “We think he’s planning some kind of terror attack.”

Baupin stopped in his tracks and lifted his chin from the scarf. “Quoi?” His voice was too loud and he immediately lowered it, glancing over his shoulders to see if he had caught anyone’s attention. “Why didn’t Leo tell me this?”

“Because I never told Leo.”

“Bon sang, Harry! This kind of intel has to be shared. Where is the target?”

“We don’t know.”

“When?”

“We don’t know that either.”

Baupin sighed. “What do you know?”

“We think that Szabo is part of some kind of secret organization that calls itself the Ministry, and that they have developed the mother of all WMDs.”

Baupin looked at him sharply. “What kind of weapon?”

“It’s cutting edge nanoparticle technology that involves some kind of weaponized smart dust. It enters the human bloodstream and travels to the brain where it can then take over control, including shutting down essential functions like breathing.”

“You mean a system that allows people to be hacked like a computer?”

Harry said nothing, but gave a gentle nod.

“My God…”

“And worse than that, they can control the dust — expand it, change its direction, you name it.”

“How do you know this?”

“A turncoat named Andrej Liška.”

“Turncoat?”

“Traitor, only this time he betrayed the bad guys and crossed over to us. He used to work for the Ministry as one of the lead scientists on the project, only he claims he thought he was working for the Swedish Government at the time.”

“You believe him?”

“I have no choice. Think of him as a trustworthy double agent.”

“Is this one of the people Szabo is holding captive?”

Harry nodded his head. “Yes. Liška worked with another scientist named Pablo Reyes — real name Gabriel Ramirez — and the two of them worked on the nanodust project together. The other person Szabo snatched was his girlfriend, Lucia Serrano. She is also a physicist.”

“And Ramirez?”

“Murdered in Madrid in his own apartment while Lucia was in the shower. His death is what started all of this.”

“But this Ministry did not kill her?”

Harry shook his head and looked at Baupin. “No.”

“Suspicious?”

“I don’t think so. I think we can trust her.”

“Good — Szabo has many political connections, and since he built this new place here in the mountains, he has entertained many politicians from all over Europe here. Last week the French Minister of Foreign Affairs and his wife spent three nights there on a skiing holiday.”

“And if I wanted to give Monsieur Szabo a housewarming gift how would I go about it?”

“Let me give you the bird’s eye view.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

Harry followed Baupin through a few more of the town’s winding streets until they were at a beautiful Belle Époque era building. A pine forest stretched away behind it and led up to the enormous mass of Mont Blanc which loomed above them in the leaden winter sky like a solemn, silent giant.

“What is this place?” Harry said.

“Montenvers train station,” Baupin said. “We’re going for a ride.”

Zoey Conway was no stranger to trouble. What not even Niko knew was that she was an orphan, raised in an orphanage in the East Bronx. Life was not easy for her — she didn’t even know if her name was real or not. The home had given it to her when she was brought in on a rainy New York night. Abandoned outside the 46th Police Precinct, two officers had delivered her into the care of Those Who Knew Best, and there her new life began, days old.

She glanced outside the hotel room at the tourists as they sauntered hand-in-hand through the snow-dusted fairytale that was Chamonix. “From there to here in twenty-seven years, Chief,” she said to herself.

Why hadn’t she told Lucia any of this when the Spanish woman had told her about her own past in Seville on the flight to France? She didn’t know. She wasn’t ashamed of it, or the list of her criminal convictions as long as your arm, and yet something always stopped her from sharing her past with people… at least this part of it. Lucia’s childhood had seemed almost as bad as hers — a violent, drunken father and a life on the streets. Like Zoey, Lucia had been dealt a shitty hand, and cheated death on more than one occasion. Having such a thing in common would be the ultimate bond, and yet she had kept her lips sealed the whole time.

Maybe another time, Sister.

She cracked the mineral water and poured two glasses, turning on her heel in the plush pile and handing one of the drinks to Niko. He was busy watching the news on a plasma TV that was tucked away in the cabinet on the far wall. She returned to the window and put a hand in her pocket.

“Danke,” he said, taking a sip and sighing with relief. “I love a good mineral water.”

“That’s ’cause you’re a real rock star, Nikky.”

“Stop looking out the window,” he said, smirking. “He’ll be back when he’s done what he has to do.”

Zoey spun around and narrowed her eyes. “I’m not even thinking about him, never mind waiting for him.”

“Whom?”

“Harry Bane.”

“I never mentioned his name.”

“What are you, Columbo?”

“I’m nowhere near as cool as Columbo, but I think I could pull off Kojak.”

“I’m not sure he’d like that.”

“Huh?”

Zoey smirked and choked back a laugh before drinking more water.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing, just what you said kinda means two things in English.”

“What did I say?”

“Forget it, Nikky.”

She turned and looked out the window once again. Niko might not know every last piece of English slang, but he was no fool, and he had been right. Without even knowing it she had been worrying about the stupid Englishman. The tough street kid-turned-thief from the East Bronx was worrying about an arrogant burned-out English soldier and a failed spy. And worse than all of that he wore a suit with a god-damned silk pocket square in the jacket. James Bond he certainly was not, and yet there was something about him…

Jesus.

She shivered and opened the drinks cabinet. “I’m drinking that thought right back to where it came from.”

“What thought?” Niko asked. “Kojak?”

“No, but thanks for putting that image back in my mind.”

“What image!” he said, the frustration clear on his face.

“I said forget it, Nikky,” she said, pulling a miniature bottle of gin from the cabinet. “English gin… seems appropriate right now, somehow.”

“Appropriate? What are you talking about… oh — Heiliger Strohsack! You really do like Harry!”

“I do not!”

“You do so.”

“Well, maybe a little,” she said, cracking open the gin and knocking it back neat. She winced and coughed. “Gross. Tastes like perfume.”

“You never had gin before?”

“Hell, no. I’m a beer drinker.”

“I can’t believe you like Harry.”

“Better than what you want to do to Kojak,” she said under her breath. “Anyway, I do not like him. My brain just went AWOL, Chief, that’s all. My heart belongs to NYC and not some smarmy English toff.”

“If you say so.”

But now it played on her mind. “You think there’s a little something in the air between us?”

“Sorry,” Niko said. “I had an aloo gobi for lunch.”

“For fuck’s sake, Niko,” she said, sighing. “Can’t you take anything seriously? I meant between me and Harry.”

“Nein.” Niko shook his head and began flicking through the channels, but she couldn’t change the Harry Bane channel playing in her head anywhere near as easily. It was madness, she knew.

A few hours ago she was just minding her own business and breaking into the Saudi Embassy in Paris, but now she was on the run across Europe, hunted by two national police forces and her face was plastered all over the Interpol website.

She had watched Lucia Serrano snatched from the jaws of the Paris Catacombs by an Austrian psycho who made the Terminator look like Mrs Doubtfire, and for all she knew she was next, and all of this was thanks to Harry Bane. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Her head said cry, but her heart wanted to laugh and for a moment she nearly did, but stopped when she lifted her eyes to the mist-covered mountains looming above the hotel.

Somewhere in all that gloom was Harry Bane, and like it or not he was the only person who could get her out of this mess. She turned back into the room as Niko cheered loudly and relaxed back into the enormous bed.

“Why so happy?” she asked.

“I was just wondering if they had any Kojak episodes on — and look here… I found one!”

“Great,” she said. “I hope you’re very happy together.”

She sighed and looked back up at the mountain, not even knowing if Lucia and the professor were still alive.

Good luck, Harry, she whispered.