The Paris Betrayal by James Hannibal (the dot read aloud .txt) 📗

dodged the cutters and draped her arms over his head to pull him close. “Well, mission second, yes?” she said, and kissed him.

The kiss banished all disbelief. Ben knew her lips. He remembered the warmth of her breath and the scent of her skin. She’d come back to him. Why wasn’t he walking on air inside?

He returned the kiss with passion, then pulled back. He needed to regain control of the situation and control of himself. Keep your emotions in check. He pushed her arms up to duck out of her embrace and snipped the cuffs at her wrists and ankles. “No. It’s like you said. Mission first.”

While Giselle kept watch, Ben dragged the two thugs to the van’s rear and dumped them into the back. As quietly as possible, he closed the doors. “We need to get out of here and regroup.”

“Wrong.”

Same Giselle. Always contrary. Always battling for dominance. He used to love that about her. He checked the magazine on his Glock and handed her Hagen’s electric baton. “What do you mean, wrong?”

“I mean we can’t leave—not yet.” She smacked him in the arm with the weapon and walked away, heading for the cover of the pier’s heavy equipment yard. “This way. Leviathan has a bioweapon.”

“I know they have a bioweapon,” he said, chasing after her. “That’s why I’m here. How do you know they have a bioweapon?”

“Remember Rome? The enemy agent who died? What do you think I’ve been investigating since the Company blew up my house?” She reached a row of tracked, mobile cranes and slowed to let him catch up. They walked down the line together, crouching and watching the activity at the ship. “This is a severance, Ben, for both of us. If we can help the Company stop Leviathan, perhaps the Director will forgive us for whatever he thinks we’ve done and let us back in, yes?”

“Yes,” he said softly. “Exactly what I was thinking.” Then he said it again with more confidence. “Exactly. So let’s make it happen. Here’s what I’m thinking. The Behemoth was a launch point for the Tokyo and Munich attacks. And tonight, those tanks they’re loading are all connected like one big bioweapon.” He tilted his head, scratching his ear. “There’s just one problem—”

“The workers aren’t wearing protection,” Giselle said, finishing his thought. “Odd for evil minions loading a plague ship, yes? You are meant to think this is a boatload of nitrogen, just as the tank markings say.”

He nodded. “It’s the obvious conclusion. And I’m struggling to find evidence to the contrary.”

She winked. “Forget your misgivings, mon chéri. The tanks are a weapon.”

“How do you know?”

“You investigated from the Leviathan angle, starting with their last known attack in Rotterdam. I started with our Rome clue—the plague. I looked for experts and found a Chinese microbiologist who vanished this summer and a Pakistani named Kidan who recently walked away from a dream job at Oxford. I tracked them both to Valencia. The first one, Dr. Xue, is dead.”

“What about the other one?”

Giselle grabbed Ben’s chin with two fingers and directed his gaze to the Behemoth’s gangplank. “Here he comes now.”

53

Kidan had parked his brand-new Jag in a second employee lot near the heavy equipment. Ben and Giselle waited for him in the shadows between a pair of high-capacity forklifts that made the one Ben had caught on fire look like a Tonka toy.

“That’s Kidan’s car,” she said, nodding at the Jag only a few meters away. “I stowed away in an equipment truck that followed him, under a pile of hoses.” She showed him a tear in the knee of her jeans. “I tripped getting out and knocked a crate of chains and fasteners off the truck bed. That’s how those thugs captured me.”

Ben remembered the crash he heard while stealing the forklift. He let out a bemused huff. “You almost got me captured too.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t mention it. But how do you know about the tanks?”

“I breached Kidan’s lab at a massive industrial compound owned by Jupiter Global Industries, not far outside Valencia.”

“Jupiter.” Ben said the name as he would speak the name of an unwanted ghost.

“Yes. The name with which your Algerian friend taunted you in Rome. Jupiter Global owns Sea Titan, although the trail of shell companies is hard to follow.” With her eyes, Giselle followed Kidan as he strolled across the yard, heading their way. “In his lab, I saw a mockup of the tanktainer design—a scale test. The tanks are filled with water vapor. Seed canisters push the bacteria into the first tanks, and it . . . infects the whole system, replicating on its own.”

Ben watched her. Same Giselle. Laser focus. Like old times. “Why didn’t you contact me?”

She kept her gaze on Kidan. “Focus, Ben. Remember what Hale used to say about emotions?”

“Yeah. I remember. What about the lab? You got inside. Did you get a look at his computer?”

She gave him a silent duh roll of her eyes. “I couldn’t crack the password.” Kidan had reached the parking lot’s edge, a few steps from his Jag. She gestured at the scientist, lowering her voice to a whisper. “That’s why I need him, yes? Come on.”

They ambushed Kidan at the vehicle.

Giselle hit him with just enough shock from Hagen’s cattle prod to put him down but not out, and the two dragged him back into the shadows between the heavy forklifts.

The left half of Kidan’s body woke up before the right. With a disturbing partial crabwalk, he scrambled back against an oversize tire. “Don’t shoot. I’m only a scientist.”

Only a scientist. Ben let out a sour huff and touched the man’s nose with the barrel of his Glock. “You scream. You die. The guards might come running, but it won’t matter for you, because your brains will be splattered all over this tire. Got it?”

Kidan nodded.

Ben nodded too. “And for the record, you’re not a scientist. You’re a death merchant with an advanced degree. Now”—he gestured at Giselle with his gun—“she’s got