The Armageddon Protocol

THIRTY-SEVEN

Baupin was at the controls, and Zoey sat beside him and stared out across the top of the clouds. Harry and Lucia sat behind them over the wing, and at the back were Maja and Niko, who after a brief moan about leg room was now slumped down in his seat and snoozing.

It was full night now, and the gentle glow of the instrument panel shone up and lit their faces in a low, amber light. They rarely spoke over the hum of the air-cooled six-cylinder piston engines, and when they did their voices were thin and distorted through the aviation headset mics.

After skirting around the west of Geneva they soon ascended into the clouds and didn’t break out of them until passing eight thousand feet as they crossed into the French department of Jura. Now they were in a new world, just the six of them in their tiny aircraft, speeding north above an ocean of bubbling clouds lit purple in the startling light of the full moon.

In the silence, Harry turned to Lucia and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. “Feeling okay?”

She turned to see him, startled for a moment by the question. Then she nodded once and tried to return the smile. “I think so, but I’m not sure.”

“I know,” he said, noticing for the first time since Madrid what a beautiful woman she had grown into since her punk days. The ink-black eyelashes and the pale brown, sad eyes behind them. She wore the bitter experience of her youth behind a veil of measured confidence and dazzling good looks, and not for the first time he cursed himself for being stupid enough to let her fly out of his life all those years ago. “You’ve been through so much these last few hours it’s enough to drive anyone insane.”

“We all have,” she said, turning away from him to glance out over the moonlit clouds. “Finding Pablo like that, where we had shared so any good times, and then being chased around Madrid and Paris were enough of a nightmare, but then seeing Andrej killed in such a terrible, painful way right in front of our eyes…” her words broke up and she moved her hand away from his to dab the tears running down her cheeks.

He felt the impulse to put his arm around her and give her a comforting hug, and then a greater impulse again to kiss her, and make things like they were when they were young. He stopped himself from going further and turned in his seat to face the front. As if she needed that right now on top of everything she’d been through, he told himself, cursing once again his own thoughtlessness.

Lucia rested her head on his shoulder and drifted to sleep, and with the sound of Zoey begging Baupin to teach her a series of eye-popping swear words and insults in argot, Harry also began to drift away just as the Baron was crossing the Derak waypoint. Baupin turned the plane a few degrees to the west and then Harry was gone.

Deep inside the Caves of Hercules a woman screamed out for his help. “Help me, Harry!” The caves were a popular tourist attraction in Cape Spartel, a few miles west of Tangier, but they flooded at high tide and were dangerous. Some even said they were bottomless.

Harry Bane strained to see her in the darkness. Her voice was terrified, and drowned out by the sound of the Atlantic waves as they smashed into the limestone walls of the cave’s gaping, rocky mouth.

He struggled through the icy water, fear for her life coursing through his system like an intravenous drug. Desperate to reach her before the sea swept her away, he called out in the darkness. “I’m coming! Hold on!”

Then he heard a terrible, scream of despair as the ocean claimed her young life and he burst awake from the nightmare, covered in a film of sweat. He swivelled his head to find her, but she was gone… she was never there. It was just a dream. The same dream. His heart felt like a jackhammer in his chest and he took a few low breaths to calm himself down, careful not to wake Lucia who was still sleeping beside him.

He focussed his eyes on Baupin in the pilot’s seat. It looked like Zoey was asleep now too. “Where are we?”

“Over your homeland,” he said, and jutted his chin out the front window. “We crossed into British airspace twenty minutes ago and now we’re over London.”

London. Not home, but close enough and he knew it better than anyone. His sister lived here, for one thing. He rubbed his eyes and peered through the window. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he heard the woman from the cave as her screams echoed into the night and tried hard to clear his head as he concentrated on the view outside.

Only the tops of London’s tallest buildings were visible as Baupin flew the small Beechcraft Baron into the city’s busy airspace and prepared to land. The great bulk of the sprawling metropolis was concealed beneath a thick fog which had rolled in from the North Sea a few hours earlier.

Due to the conditions, Baupin was now landing the aircraft in accordance with IFR, or instrument flight rules, as was the law both at night or when external visual reference was impossible. Now, as the Baron plunged through a broken layer of clouds, the French spy was carefully setting the flight management system and chatting calmly with one of the controllers at London City Airport.

Like everyone else on board, Harry’s view of the world was no more than a dazzling white-out as the small aircraft zoomed through the cloud and fog, buffeted about by turbulence from time to time. Being a former Pathfinder, he was no stranger to flying in rough conditions and it looked like Maja was unconcerned too, but one glance at the faces of Lucia, Zoey and Niko told him they weren’t sharing his relaxed view of the landing.

But Baupin was a pro, and brought the plane down neatly on the runway with a gentle thud of the tires on the damp tarmac. Moments later the controller was directing them to a parking slot, and Harry peered through the front window at the two white tunnels that the plane’s forward lights were making in the fog.

Looking up, he could make out the main airport building, looming in the damp darkness like some kind of maximum security prison. This part of London was flat and the famous skyline was too far to the west to be visible from the ground. Harry saw nothing in the sky now except the glow of the old city reflected in the cloud base a few hundred feet above them.

They pulled up beside a much larger Gulfstream jet, parked up on the apron with its lights off and nobody home, and moments later they were clambering out of the small plane and emerging into an evening of rolling fog and damp, cold air. The main building looked much larger now they were right in front of it, and several airport workers were strolling over to the Beechcraft as Baupin activated the parking brake and shut down the engines.

“Sort of how I imagined it,” Zoey said, peering into the gloom.

“Come on,” Harry said, ignoring her. “We have to get through customs and meet up with Leo. We don’t have much time.”

Leo Hilton was waiting for them in the onsite car park on the south bank. It had been a few years, but Harry recognized his old friend at once — he was leaning casually against the hood of an impressive black Range Rover Velar with his arms crossed over his chest.

As they approached the luxury SUV, Leo straightened up and wandered over to them. He and Harry shook hands. “You remembered where the Big Smoke is then?”

“How could I forget?”

“You seem to spend most of your time pissing your money away in dodgy foreign casinos these days.”

Harry turned to Lucia and grinned. “A gross overstatement.”

Zoey stepped forward and held out her hand. “Woah — are you a model or something?”

“Sorry, no. Just a plain old has-been spy who freelances very boring security issues here and there.”

Zoey gave him another long look. “But you model underwear on the side, right?”

Leo laughed, blushing a little. “No, I do not model underwear on the side.”

“Swimwear maybe?” She got up close to him now.

Leo turned to Harry. “Where do you find these people?”

“It’s a talent I have. The more I try and repel people, the more I get in my life.”

Leo laughed and blipped open the Range Rover’s doors and the six of them climbed in as he fired up the engine and switched on the lights. Seconds later they were skidding out of the car park and racing west through the streets of Silvertown.

“So where’s the fun tonight?” Leo asked.

“The Shard,” Harry said, giving him an anxious glance.

“Really?”

“Yes,” Lucia said from the back. “And we have to hurry!”

As they drove, Leo made a call to a contact in the anti-terror unit and arranged to meet him at the Shard. He disconnected the call and turned to Harry. “I was hoping we’d have time to catch up,” the former MI5 man said. “Go round to my place in Pimlico maybe… have a few Champagne cocktails.”

“Pimlico?” Harry said. “I thought you wanted to get away from Five — that’s less than half a mile from Thames House.”

“It has its advantages. So why the Shard?”

“Zalan Szabo has a penthouse office suite there, and we think he’s going to use it to launch the nanodust weapon over London.”

“Bloody hell!” Leo said. “And it’s New Year’s Eve — there are literally millions of people milling around all over the city, most of them right here waiting for the fireworks!”

“Waiting for the fireworks is about the right way of putting it,” Niko said. “If this dust is released London will be known as the City of the Dead for hundreds of years.”

Leo raced the Velar through Canary Wharf and crossed the Thames on Southwark Bridge. He swung the SUV left onto Southwark Street and the first thing they saw was the Shard, lit up in the night and towering in the clouds.

Harry shifted in his seat and prepared to get out. “Somewhere up there Zalan Szabo and his goons are preparing to annihilate London.”

Leo nodded. “So let’s get up there and end this.”