The phalanx code, p.10
The Phalanx Code, page 10
The glass on the far reception window crashed when a smoke grenade came tumbling through. I immediately slipped into the back office, remaining low and avoiding my attackers’ line of sight through the window. Another smoke grenade came tumbling through the north window of the back office.
Because I had prior experience with aerosolized nerve agents and mind-altering drugs, I had added a small Avon M50 full-face respirator with dual filters to my shopping list. Retrieving it from my backpack, I fitted it onto my face and took up a position behind the counter where I had a line of sight to both doors.
My attackers’ obvious strategy was to smoke me out and have me come through one of the doors or windows, where I was sure they were casually prepared to riddle me with bullets or attempt to capture me.
At my knee was Laurent’s shotgun, which I checked. It was loaded with four shells of buckshot. Opting for my pistol, I remained motionless, listening to the hiss of the smoke canisters and muffled voices outside the cabin. Combat is sometimes like that old game we played as kids to see who could hold their breath the longest. The first to let go and breathe lost. The waiting game continued for another minute or so, and the smoke filled the entire office complex. Without my protective mask, I would be dead from smoke inhalation—which perhaps was what they were thinking when two men clad in black with balaclavas pulled over their faces opened each door. They stepped through the foggy haze of boiling smoke cannisters, moving long rifles smoothly in each direction. There were no Police Nationale markings on any of their clothing or equipment, not that it mattered to me. There was no difference in confronting the state or the technology company in today’s technofascist world. If they were attacking me and those I cared about, they deserved to die.
With that thought, I watched as the smoke rose and obscured their vision, leaving me enough visibility to target their torsos and below. I was unsure if they were wearing body armor, so I aimed just above the first man’s groin and snapped off two quick shots before spinning to the man approaching from the inner office and repeating the process. I was up and moving beyond them, expecting at least two more attackers outside. On my way I confiscated their Czech CZ-805-A2 assault rifles and radio earpieces.
One voice was saying, “Statut! Statut!” Status! Status!
“Tous est clair! Entrez!” I replied. All is clear. Come in.
Two men came barreling through each door. I waited until I had clear shots on them and used the 805 to kill the distant one entering through the back office and shoot the near intruder in the thigh. He doubled over at the waist, and I dragged him outside where I could remove my protective mask. I quickly gagged him with duct tape from my rucksack and used zip ties to bind his wrists and ankles.
“Fils de pute!” he muttered as I cinched the cloth tight on his mouth. Son of a bitch.
Leaving him there, I spent a minute circling the cabin, where I found Laurent similarly gagged and tied up with his hands behind his back next to his bike in the bushes. I took a moment to release him of his binds and said, “Get out of here. Continue the mission.”
“Mon Dieu, Général!”
“Go,” I said. “I told you there were some risks.”
“There were four men. Be careful,” he said. His eyes were wide with fear, but he jumped on his bike and cycled away as fast as he could. After completing a full recon of the area, I found four Voxan Wattman electric motorcycles, which would explain why we had never heard anything. These blue-and-gray machines were made in Monaco and clocked the fastest speeds of any motorcycle in the world at 455 miles per hour.
These guys had all the markings of one of Blanc’s Phalanx assassin squads. I walked through the cabin, which now had a few growing fires creeping up the walls ignited by the grenade sparks, to ensure the three men I had shot were dead. They were. Returning to my wounded prisoner, I figured I had a couple of minutes before some good Samaritan, or the police, arrived to check out the smoke. I removed my prisoner’s gag.
“Why come after me?” I asked him in English.
“Fuck you,” he responded in the same language. He was fluent, I presumed.
I held the blade of my Blackhawk CQD Mark 1 spear-point knife to his throat.
“You saw me kill your friends. No problem in doing the same with you,” I said, pressing the razor-sharp tip into his neck above his carotid.
“Attendez! Attendez!” Wait! Wait!
“No time, pal,” I said, pushing the knife deeper.
“Blanc. We are with Blanc,” he spat.
“Too late,” I said, as the blade nicked his artery and blood began to course along his neck.
I dragged him into the cabin where the smaller fires had gathered and were beginning to engulf the entire building. A phone dropped from his pocket, but I was too busy grabbing a Beretta pistol and keys to one of the motorcycles from another attacker. As I reached for the phone, the ceiling collapsed sending embers in every direction. Unsuccessful, I escaped from the inferno to where the four blue-and-gray bikes lay on their sides about fifty meters away just off the trail. I put the pistol under the seat and tossed the Czech rifle, though it had treated me right. I grabbed two helmets and snapped the extra one to the seat frame.
The bike was easy enough to start and made no noise as I eased onto Boulevard de la Plages which took me to Boulevard de Mer and onto Rue d’Haitzart, where I laid the bike down in the tall shrubs near a gulley running up from the beach north of the lighthouse. Across the street were large, gated mansions. These homes had unobstructed views of the Atlantic Ocean from their rockbound perch a hundred meters above the sea.
After cinching my backpack tight around my shoulders, I slid down the slick ravine and scoped out the paths, or lack thereof, before climbing back up. It was almost 8:00 A.M. now, and the sun was shining everywhere except on the sheer cliffs I was scaling. Once back on the road, I picked up a natural jogger’s lope, as if I were casually bounding onto the West Point baseball field, and continued my reconnaissance.
I was reminded of the old army television commercial that had a young paratrooper completing a jump and firing some artillery in the early morning hours when the narrator said, “In the army, we do more before 9:00 A.M. than most people do all day.” Already, I had killed four Phalanx operatives, burned down a cabin, and conducted route reconnaissance to find a kidnapped friend.
Indeed, the ad’s narrator had a point.
There was no question that Blanc knew I was in France or that I was looking for Evelyn. I had lost the element of surprise if I had ever had it. I needed to find Evelyn quickly, and the only clues I possessed were Drewson’s tip about a secret chamber beneath the lighthouse, which was connected to the Hôtel du Palais by a tunnel, and his odd emphasis on her having one of Coop’s dog tags. Of course, I held the other one, which Drewson had given me prior to departing with a vague reference to “smart dust.” I lifted the slender piece of metal from my chest as I walked across the street.
Sliding my hand across the surface, I felt a rougher texture than the shiny surfacel might otherwise produce. I thought about how Mahegan, Misha, and Drewson had all referenced smart dust in the last twenty-four hours.
Then it hit me.
I retrieved my phone, which Drewson had provided, and studied the few apps on the screen. One of them was a game called Damsel in Distress with a blond-haired cartoon character shouting from a lighthouse window. I looked up and saw the Phare de Biarritz a quarter mile away. The cartoon was an exact replica of the lighthouse, which was a forty-meter-tall white cylinder with a black cupola and beacon perched thirty meters above the ocean floor.
Clicking on the app, it connected to the local French Orange wireless phone network and a globe spun until it was showing me standing on the road in real time via an Optimus satellite. A blinking red dot appeared about three hundred meters to my ten o’clock.
Evelyn.
I pinched and pulled at the screen until it was large enough for me to see that her beacon was transmitting from the west side of the peninsula upon which the lighthouse sat. I studied the area for a moment. It was a crisp, sunny morning and by now several bundled-up locals were walking their dogs and exercising along the path to my front. Looking back at the screen, I registered in my head where she might be and then began a light jog across the street onto the asphalt path.
The firefight at Pignada Forest and the quick recce into the north ravine had consumed some energy. I was breaking a sweat as I casually trotted above the waves ripping across the rocky beach.
Approaching the lighthouse, I checked my phone and saw that I was relatively adjacent to the pulsating red dot on the screen. Pocketing the phone, I slipped over the lip of the trail and onto the steep rocky cliff, now on the opposite side of the ridge from where I had dumped the motorcycle. My map recon on the flight had indicated the midway point of the cliff showed some man-made anomalies. Using my best climbing skills again, I found the midpoint, which had a minor trail etched along the side. Crashing waves beneath me billowed with salty spray that stung my face. The distinctive two-tone wail of French police vehicles pierced the air above me. Hopefully they were headed to the fire and not yet looking for me. As the sirens faded, I grew more confident.
I followed the trail some twenty meters above the beach. The going was treacherous with the previous night’s rain making everything extra slick. The running shoes helped me maintain my grip until the trail widened and I felt a distinctive flat wall instead of the rocky outcropping I had been traversing.
This was man-made, and I gained confidence that perhaps the rumors of an escape hatch were accurate. I felt my phone buzz in my pocket and answered it.
“Mon général, you are very well hidden, but I can see you and my sources tell me you’re very close to her. You have maybe ten minutes before others come, though. Blanc’s men are on high alert and have called in reserves. I have done my best at misdirection but must leave quickly. Keep going,” Laurent said. “She’s there.”
I looked across the beach and saw him standing on the balcony of the Hôtel du Palais. He nodded, put his phone away, and turned to walk in the other direction.
I moved another twenty meters and found a crease in the wall. It was a padlocked door with rusted hinges. Two swipes of the pistol and I had the padlock busted. I used my knife to scrape open the seams and pry at the lip of the door. A thumping from inside told me that someone was in there. If not Evelyn, who?
I felt the door budge, as if pushed from the inside. The lip moved enough for me to get my fingertips on the side and pull outward. Over my shoulder I noticed some commotion on the Hôtel du Palais balcony. Four armed men came pouring from the far door. They were scanning the ridge and pointing in my direction. Voices atop the high ground above me were shouting in French, as if directing or commanding others.
A shot rang out. Dirt blew into my face. I put my shoulder into the door, and it flew open as rappel ropes dropped from the cliffs above.
Evelyn Champollion was staring at me. “Took you long enough, Sinclair.”
11
I EMBRACED EVELYN TO pull her from Blanc’s lair, but her wrists were bound with medieval shackles that were chained to an anchor bolt in the floor.
The voices above us grew closer, as did the gunshots from the Hôtel du Palais balcony. Shouting from inside Evelyn’s chamber also joined the cacophony. We were trapped against the cliff with the only possible escape route into the ocean.
I fumbled with my rucksack as I removed a small UST ParaHatchet and landed two blows against the chains running through the cuffs.
They sparked and fell away as Evelyn scrambled through the door onto the ledge.
Two shots pinged against the stone wall behind us.
“I think I was safer before you got here,” she said.
“Good to see you, too, Evelyn,” I replied.
“Is the general getting sentimental on me?”
“Let’s try to stay alive.”
I grabbed Evelyn around her slender waist and leaped onto the beach as two men rappelled down from the street with MP5 machine guns. We landed in a sandy patch surrounded by high boulders, which protected us from the fusillade of gunfire. The only safe spot was north of the lighthouse, which was the direction in which we scrambled. I hadn’t been sure about Evelyn’s physical condition after she’d been detained, but she looked as fit and healthy as she had when I’d first met her, when she had run faster than me in the Sahara Desert as we liberated Zoey Morgan. I was confident she would at least keep up.
We were able to reach the point to the immediate west of the lighthouse, which was underwater until the tide ebbed for a moment, opening a narrow path before another wave crashed against the rocks. The hotel snipers were now out of range and the MP5-bearing rappellers were behind us on the beach.
With the terrain protecting us for the moment, I led Evelyn up the cliff along a trail that beachgoers used to sneak onto the private stretch of sand north of the lighthouse. It connected to the path I had scouted earlier. Hustling up the slippery incline, we grabbed vines and roots until we were atop the steep ravine. The motorcycle sparkled in the sunlight as we donned the helmets. I snapped my backpack onto the front handlebars as we simultaneously mounted the small, narrow racing seat. Her body was pressed tightly against mine, and she wrapped her wiry arms around my torso as we sped north toward Hossegor.
Police cars passed us in the opposite direction at high rates of speed. The fire from the Pignada Forest was now a gray plume of smoke as we throttled our way up A63 past Hossegor toward Bordeaux. It wasn’t lost on me that Drewson could track our every move with Evelyn’s locator and that Phalanx most likely knew the precise GPS locations of their motorcycle fleet.
“I know a guy in Bordeaux if we can make that far,” Evelyn said through the microphones of our Neotec II flip-up helmets with built-in Bluetooth communications systems. Her voice was surprisingly calm for a person having just escaped captivity from the most powerful tech assassins in the world. Why Blanc had not killed her immediately, as he was trying to do to me, I didn’t yet know. But I was eager to find out what Evelyn knew that the rest of us didn’t.
The charge indicator on the motorcycle showed we had another thirty minutes of power remaining. I was ready to ditch the bike anyway and get somewhere safe with Evelyn. I wondered if I should hang on to the phone or the dog tags. The chances that Drewson had only one form of tracking device on either of us were low, so I didn’t see the point. The motorcycle needed to go as soon as possible, though.
We zipped past rows of single and double échoppe homes, the staple of the middle class in the outer suburbs of Bordeaux, known for their workshops and stucco, brick, and timber construction. Evelyn told me to cross the Garonne River and take two lefts and a right, until we turned onto a dirt road that sliced between at least fifteen acres of vineyards climbing above the river. At the end of the drive stood an estate that looked a few hundred years old. Not a castle, but not a simple home, either. There was a courtyard and a circular drive around the fountain. It had arched windows and roofs with overlapping Spanish tiles diving at steep angles against the brown stucco façade.
I pulled the motorcycle to a stop and said, “This bike is probably being tracked by Phalanx. Anyone you care about here?”
“Just my brother,” she quipped. “Sometimes I can do without him.”
Ah yes, the Evelyn I came to know in the Sahara last year. Cool under fire with a quick wit.
An impossibly good-looking man stepped onto the porch, which was gray cement with at least fifteen beveled steps leading up to the landing. The man appeared to be in his mid-forties, well over six foot tall, with dark brown hair that was feathered behind his ears. His quizzical look transformed into a smile when Evelyn removed her helmet.
“Evey?” He pronounced it Eh-vee.
“Oui, Charles!”
He ran two steps at a time down to meet her. Two large black Labrador retrievers darted from the house and beat him to her. They had their massive paws on her lean frame and almost knocked her over when Charles came up to Evelyn and hugged her.
They rattled off a series of rapid-fire colloquial French that surpassed my basic skills, but the gist of it was: “My God, it’s so good to see you. Are you okay? We’ve been so worried. Normally we talk every few days. And who is this guy?”
Evelyn turned to me as I was removing my helmet and leaning the motorcycle against the fountain that had a cherubic boy peeing into the pool. Perhaps the entire Champollion family were comedians.
“Garrett,” Evelyn said. “This is my younger brother, Charles. He owns this vineyard and lives here most of the time. It’s one of our family estates.”
The dogs jumped up on me and began licking my face. Standing on their hind legs and with their paws on my chest, they were almost my height.
“Charles,” I said, maneuvering around the labs until they responded to Charles’ whistle and sat on either side of him. “Pleasure to meet you.” We shook hands, and before he could continue with pleasantries, I said, “This motorcycle is stolen property and the owners aren’t the nicest people. I’m sure it has GPS on it and so I’d like to take it somewhere unrelated to your family but it only has a few minutes charge remaining.”
He studied me a moment, perhaps upset with me for sprinkling reality on his happy reunion with Evelyn. He nodded at me with serious brown eyes.
“Oui. I can have Philippe, our handyman, take it somewhere. He knows how to do such things,” Charles said.
“I’m happy to do it if I can get a ride back,” I replied.
“Non. You will go to the wrong place. Philippe will know where to dispose of this item.”
