The Black Knight Page 16

  ‘Visual,’ Vaughn said. ‘He’s here.’

  Lopez was mildly surprised to see Mitchell walking down the street on the far side, his hands in his pockets and a sepulchral air surrounding him. Other pedestrians gave him a wide berth as though he were carrying concealed weapons, somehow subconsciously aware of the barely contained violence within.

  ‘This is a bad idea,’ she insisted as she watched him stride into the hotel. ‘First chance he gets, he’ll bolt.’

  ‘He could already have done that,’ Vaughn reminded her, ‘the moment he escaped from the facility in Colorado.’

  Lopez continued to watch the hotel as she replied.

  ‘That doesn’t mean he hasn’t got a plan. What I want to know is what the hell he’s got in mind.’

  *

  Aaron Mitchell walked into the hotel and bypassed the reception desk, heading instead for the stairwell. The elevators were closer but Mitchell never allowed himself to be completely cornered: elevators had cameras, advance warning for anyone with the wherewithal to monitor the feeds and prepare for his arrival.

  He climbed the stairs two at a time and faster than was necessary, deliberately pushing himself physically. It was a hard habit to break, to continually test himself in even the smallest things. He felt once again a pinch of mild pain from his ribs where, a year ago, Ethan Warner had fractured them during a bitter fight in Nevada. Healing was slower now, pain from injuries plagued him for longer, and he knew that his time as an effective field agent was finally coming to an end. He could not afford for this to go wrong.

  He left the stairwell on the fourth floor and turned right onto a corridor. Plush red carpets and soft lighting, pictures on the walls. Rooms were numbered in brass, and as he reached room number 37 he knocked without hesitation.

  There was a moment’s pause and then he saw the light from the peephole blocked as somebody approached from within. The door opened and a young guy of about thirty with lank brown hair peered out at Mitchell.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mitchell replied, and slammed his body weight into the door.

  The younger man was thrown back in surprise and Mitchell all at once surveyed the room in a single glance as he strode in. Double bed, a young girl asleep on it, wine bottles and beer cans strewn about the room, expensive suits tossed across the backs of chairs and the stale smell of cigarette smoke. Probably an after-office party, or an affair, or just some guy got lucky at a bar downtown.

  The guy’s protest and angry expression was silenced as Mitchell’s left fist flicked out and struck the man on his temple. The impact snapped the man’s head back long enough for Mitchell’s right fist to roundhouse against his jaw with a loud crack. The man’s eyes rolled up in his socket as he slammed down onto the bed and fell silent.

  The girl awoke and sat up in bed for a brief moment, just long enough for Mitchell to loom over her and wrap one hand over her mouth as the other arm wrapped around her neck and squeezed, pinching off the flow of blood to her brain. The girl fought for only a few moments before she slumped unconscious in his arms, her low blood pressure from being so recently asleep hastening her collapse.

  Mitchell released her and spent a moment or two securing the pair, binding them to the bed before borrowing their room key. He ensured that all of the room’s windows were sealed before he turned and exited the room. Moments later, he stopped in front of room 43 and knocked.

  The door opened promptly and two armed men with close-cropped buzz cuts and plain gray suits confronted him.

  ‘Are you alone?’ the first asked.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Are you armed?’

  ‘I am not.’

  One of the men kept a pistol aimed at Mitchell as the other patted him down and waved a wand designed to detect listening devices across his body. Satisfied, they allowed Mitchell into the room and closed the door behind him. Mitchell walked into the room and saw Victor Wilms standing beside the window, looking out over the Manhattan skyline to the south. Wilms turned and gave Mitchell an appraising look.

  ‘Well, Aaron, I’ll admit that I’m both relieved that you called this meeting and equally surprised. There was some concern that you would start a war against us.’

  ‘I still might.’

  ‘Oh come now, you know how foolish that would be,’ Wilms said. ‘You could not hope to succeed. The government has been trying to eradicate Majestic Twelve for decades and has failed. What could you possibly hope to gain?’

  Mitchell did not entertain the conversation.

  ‘You have two choices,’ he said, his voice deep and his expression cold and uncaring.

  Wilms’ casual demeanor vanished and his jaw stiffened. ‘And what would they be?’

  ‘You surrender to the American government and reveal the names of every member of Majestic Twelve, along with everything that they’ve done, in return for immunity from prosecution on your part.’

  Wilms blurted out a laugh.

  ‘Then you’re asking me to commit suicide, Aaron, for such an act would never go unpunished. Even if the cabal were down to its last dime they would ensure they exacted a due and dispassionate revenge, as you have experienced yourself.’

  ‘Allowing the attempted murder of a former president was a strategic mistake by the cabal,’ Mitchell replied. ‘They have become too confident of their power, too arrogant. It only takes one whistleblower to bring their whole operation down.’

  ‘The FBI tried that route,’ Wilms pointed out, ‘and it came up empty.’

  Mitchell knew that the FBI had investigated documents purporting to elaborate on some elements of Majestic Twelve back in 2002, but that the investigation had concluded that the cabal was the imaginary creation of conspiracy theorists and fringe lunatics.

  ‘You will become the next whistleblower,’ Mitchell repeated.

  ‘What’s my other choice?’ Wilms asked, mildly amused as he glanced at the two agents flanking Mitchell, both with pistols drawn and aimed at him.

  ‘You die here and now,’ Mitchell replied. ‘A tragic fall from that window behind you, just like Stanley Meyer.’

  Meyer had been an inventor who had created a remarkable device known as a fusion cage which would have rendered fossil fuels irrelevant overnight, a drain on Majestic Twelve’s resources that they could not allow to reach the public and an act of homicide that Mitchell had bitterly regretted ever since.

  ‘You’re outnumbered,’ Wilms snarled as hatred twisted his features. ‘I have ten more men outside waiting for you. If anything happens to me in here, you’ll be nothing but a piece of damp bullet art the moment you walk into the street.’

  Mitchell did not move, his senses focused on the two men just behind him. He could hear their breathing, could smell their cologne, could sense their presence. Wilms took a pace closer to Mitchell and reached for a pistol beneath his own expensive suit.

  ‘You’re nothing, Aaron,’ he growled, ‘no matter how important you think that you may be. You’re a spent force, too old to be of use any more in the field. The only person who will die here today is you.’

  Mitchell nodded. ‘So be it.’

  The two guards had made a mistake that so many made, supposed experts in close protection who used their weapons and physical prowess to intimidate instead of common sense and good training to control a situation. Their mistake was in keeping their weapons with range of Mitchell’s long arms and vice like grip, even though they were behind his shoulders and technically out of sight.

  Mitchell whirled right as he dropped down into a crouch, his hands landing on the pistol barrel of the guard behind his right shoulder and twisting the weapon onto its side as he pulled it down. Mitchell twisted and grabbed the guard around the neck, putting his body between himself and the other two men in the room to foil their aim. The other guard tried to counter the movement and aiming for Mitchell’s head, moving to his left as Mitchell’s prisoner struggled.

  Mitchell’s hand was still wrapp
ed around the guard’s pistol as he slipped his finger over the guard’s trigger finger and pulled hard. The trigger closed and the gun fired as Wilms drew his pistol and rushed in.

  The shot hit the second guard in the chest and he staggered to one side as Mitchell flicked his right boot out and it impacted Wilms in the stomach with enough force to fold the old man up, his pistol still in his hand. Wilms’ breath rushed from his lungs in a wheezing gale as he collapsed to his knees.

  The fallen bodyguard tried to aim again, the 9mm in round in his chest not enough to stop him dead. Mitchell hurled the man in his grip toward his comrade and the bullets slammed into his body with a double thump that Mitchell felt in his own chest through the bullet-proof vest he wore as he threw the gunman to topple onto his companion. The guard’s weight slammed down to pin his companion on the floor and block his aim, his gun arm pinned pointing away from Mitchell.

  Mitchell stepped forward and slammed his boot down on the guard’s face, a dull crunch echoing through the room as his skull was fractured. The other guard stared lifelessly into eternity as blood poured from his chest in copious floods across the carpet, one of the bullets having evidently pierced his heart.

  Mitchell turned to see Wilms valiantly try to lift his pistol. He took a single pace and grabbed the weapon, wrenched it from Wilms’ grip and then stepped back. The whole event had taken seconds, but now both guards were neutralized and Mitchell held the only available weapon. He held one finger to his lips as he looked at Wilms and then beckoned him to follow, knowing for certain that the room would have been bugged and that support for Wilms would be here within moments.

  Wilms, his guts convulsing, staggered to his feet as Mitchell pulled him along and out of the room. He closed the door to the room and dragged along Wilms behind him to room 37 and shoved him inside. The two young occupants were conscious now, their eyes wide with fear and their mouths silenced by gags as Mitchell stormed back in with Wilms and quietly closed and locked the door behind them.

  ‘You’ll never get away with this, Mitchell,’ Wilms spat above his pain.

  Mitchell slid the pistol into the waistband of his pants and grabbed a plastic biro pen from a shelf as he strode toward Wilms. One thick hand grabbed Wilms’ collar as the other drove the pen into his body.

  Mitchell knew all about pressure points, used to create excruciating pain with minimal effort. He clamped one giant had over Wilms’ face and drove the tip of the pen up under the old man’s ribs. Wilms’ face tightened and his eyes flew wide as he screamed in agony, the pen grinding against his innards without breaking the skin.

  ‘You’ll do what I say,’ Mitchell growled as he lifted Wilms off his feet and across to the window.

  Outside the room, Mitchell heard the thunder of boots running down the corridor as MJ-12 bodyguards rushed to the room where the gunshots had been heard. Somewhere in the distance across the city, Mitchell could already hear wailing sirens closing in on the Upper East Side.

  ‘I can find you, anywhere,’ Mitchell went on, twisting the pen this way and that. ‘I can hunt you down and kill you at leisure, so don’t you ever tell me what to do again. Those days are over. You will gather Majestic Twelve here in the city with LeMay among them. He will be the patsy, the reason that MJ-12 is exposed to surveillance, not you. Do this and you will be immune to prosecution. Fail, and I will find you.’

  Mitchell slammed Wilms’ head against the wall with enough force to knock him unconscious. Carefully, he laid the old man on the ground and then opened the window. Outside, the sirens were growing louder and he knew that the MJ-12 bodyguards would not linger and await the arrival of law enforcement that had most likely been called by the panicked owners of the hotel upon hearing gunshots upstairs. Mitchell pulled his cell phone from his pocket and took a single picture of Wilms lying on the floor at his feet.

  Moments later, he heard the bodyguards leaving, hurrying down the corridor outside again to avoid being caught on the scene. As he had figured, they also used the stairwell. Mitchell glared at the two captives, both of them stricken with terror as he approached them and opened the man’s wallet, which had been left on the bedside table. He slid a credit card into the wallet and closed it again.

  ‘You’re in no danger and if you do as I say you’ll never see either of us again,’ he assured them both. ‘This man is an enemy of the state and highly dangerous. If he wakes up and is able to identify you, he will have you killed. On that card is an account containing fifty thousand dollars. It’s yours, if you check out of this hotel this very minute and say nothing to anybody about what’s happened.’ Mitchell leaned close to them as he loosened their bonds, his dark eyes burrowing into theirs as he drew the pistol from his waistband. ‘But if you fail to comply with my demands, guess who’ll you’ll be seeing again?’

  The guy, faced with a dilemma, forced a look of heroic and reluctant defiance onto his face. The girl simply stared at the gun for a moment and then at the wallet, already spending the money inside it. Mitchell let them think about the gun for a moment longer, and then he stood up and moved to the open window. Room 37 faced to the north east, as opposed to the entrance to the hotel on the south west side. Mitchell climbed out of the window and hurried down the fire escape and onto an alley between the hotel and a small shopping mall.

  Moments later, he vanished into the crowds heading north.

  *

  A swarm of police hazard lights flashed in the street as Lopez stood alongside the pool car with Vaughn and watched as two bodies were carried from the hotel in body bags.

  ‘We can’t walk in there with all of the police around,’ Lopez said into her cell phone as they watched from afar. ‘It looks like Mitchell met with this Wilms and then must have got bounced by MJ-12 agents or something. Both the agents are dead, Mitchell’s missing and they’re releasing the hotel’s residents one by one.’

  Doug Jarvis’s reply came back over the line.

  ‘Police radio reports are suggesting an argument gone wrong between two men,,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s mentioned anybody else in conjunction with the attacks matching Mitchell’s description.’

  ‘He’s gone,’ Lopez snarled as she clenched her fist in exasperation. ‘He must have fled before the uniforms arrived and somehow Wilms must also be gone, if he was here at all.’

  She was about to curse again when her cell beeped and she looked at the screen. An image had appeared, that of an old man lying on a carpet, perhaps dead, perhaps unconscious. The message had been sent from Mitchell’s cell phone, the one handed to him by the DIA for tracking purposes. Beneath it was a message from Mitchell.

  STAY ON HIM. I WILL BE CLOSE BY

  ‘Wait one,’ she said to Jarvis as she accessed the picture and showed it to Vaughn.

  ‘Who is he? Wilms?’

  Lopez looked at the picture for a moment longer and then up at the hotel. Moments later she saw a smartly dressed man walk out of the foyer, his face identical to that of the image on her cell phone. She watched as the old man strode along the sidewalk toward a smart SUV parked on the opposite side of the street. He crossed toward it and a door opened to let him in.

  ‘Doug,’ she said into her cell, ‘I think we’ve got an eye on Wilms. He must have enough connections to get him out of trouble like this, the police are letting him go.’

  ‘Stay on him, don’t let him out of your sight.’

  ‘What about Mitchell?’ Vaughn snapped. ‘He’s nowhere to be seen.’

  ‘Leave him,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Wilms is the priority!’

  ‘Mitchell’s the key to everything! This could be a deception!’ Lopez shot back as she turned for their car.

  ‘Wilms can lead us to Majestic Twelve,’ Jarvis insisted. ‘If he does, Mitchell will no longer have any leverage over us! Get on Wilms and keep him in sight! I’ll have his identity checked out.’

  Lopez cursed, and jumped into the car as Vaughn pulled out and followed the SUV at a discreet distance toward midtown.

 
; ***

  XXVI

  Antarctica

  General Veer held onto the railings in the rear of the ATV as it slowed at the head of a convoy of eight vehicles, those that had survived the tactical descent onto the ice fields and the gunfight with the Navy SEAL team.

  Before them was a long, low ridge that rose up off the glacier, churned ice and chunks of snow littering its banks. Veer could see as he jumped down off the ATV that the disturbance was recent and that the ski gliders had stopped nearby, their tracks in the snow clearly visible.

  The other ATVs switched off their engines and his men dismounted, already down from their original hundred to about eighty five. Three had still been alive after the SEALs had dumped the C4 charges out on the ice fields, badly injured and in need of urgent medical attention. General Veer had ensured that they received the best possible care during a time of such urgency by personally executing them where they lay. Now his men stood and watched him in silence as he clambered up the ridge line and peered down into the shadowy blue depths of the chasm below him.

  Rappel pins were still lodged in the rock hard ice, the lines descending down into the fissure and vanishing into the blackness far below. Several of Veer’s officers joined him on the edge of the ridge and peered down inside it.

  ‘No other way out,’ one of them observed. ‘They’ve taken a hell of a risk leaving us such a clear trail.’

  Veer looked up across the plains.

  ‘They managed to conceal their vehicles though,’ he observed. ‘Send a few men out to find them. They won’t have gone around an obstacle this large, they wouldn’t have had enough time, so they must be under cover somewhere to the east of here.’