Blood Moon Rising (A Beatrix Rose Thriller Book 2) Read online

  She resolved to overwrite it with other memories.

  There was a plaza on Mohammed V Avenue that was full of clothes shops, and Beatrix drove them there. They spent two hours walking between high-end establishments, buying whatever took their fancy. Money wasn’t a problem; she still had plenty from the remission she and Milton had extorted from Control before he tried to double-cross them. The riad was paid for, and there would still be enough for Isabella when she was gone, too.

  Beatrix smiled happily as Isabella pointed to dresses, jeans and shoes that she liked, and then she bought all of them for her. Isabella relaxed once she had satisfied herself that this was really happening. All the untimely maturity that had been forced onto her by her disjointed childhood fell away, and she became exactly what she was: an excited thirteen-year-old girl.

  There was a spa in the plaza, and to her surprise, Isabella grabbed her hand and dragged her through the doors. She was not one for places like that, but Isabella insisted.

  “You always look tired,” she said. “You should do something nice for yourself.”

  It had been ten years since Beatrix had allowed herself the luxury of a treatment. Her initial reservation when she arrived in Hong Kong had been that she didn’t deserve it, then that it was frivolous, and then, as she chased the dragon into oblivion, that everything else was superfluous to her next hit. She would have denied herself the extravagance now, too, but Isabella was adamant.

  “Come on,” she said, tugging her hand.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ve never done anything like this before,” Isabella said.

  Beatrix frowned. “Never?”

  Her daughter looked at her bashfully. “No,” she said, a shy smile on her face. “Of course not.”

  That gave Beatrix pause. No, she reminded herself. When would she have had the chance? Her childhood had been a litany of institutions and foster parents.

  That was all the reason she needed.

  “Come on, then.”

  She paid for twin massages in the clinic’s luxurious hammam, and as she lay down on the heated table and felt the masseuse’s strong hands begin to knead away the hard knots of tension in her shoulders, she was overtaken by fatigue and quickly fell into a deep sleep.

  There was a photo booth next to the entrance to the arcade. Isabella took Beatrix’s hand and tugged her over to it.

  “What?” Beatrix said.

  “I don’t have any pictures of us together.”

  Beatrix had avoided photographs for as long as she could remember. She had to remind herself that this was safe.

  “Can we?”

  “Of course we can. That’d be nice.”

  They dumped their bags next to the booth and squeezed inside. Beatrix put thirty dirhams into the slot and then grimaced at the blank screen. She could see her awkward reflection gazing back at her.

  “Smile, Mummy. It won’t kill you.”

  Isabella reached across and took her mother’s hand.

  Beatrix exhaled and smiled.

  They went outside and bought coffees. They took them back to the booth as they waited for the photos to develop. Beatrix looked at her daughter and wondered, yet again, whether she was doing the right thing.

  Her focus, her aims, the training.

  Was it right?

  Was it moral?

  Was there an alternative?

  Isabella sipped the coffee, a young girl trying to look older than she was, and Beatrix settled on the fact that she was doing the best that she could, doing what she thought was best, in a situation where there was no perfect answer. If the goal was Isabella’s safety, then the end justified the means.

  The booth whirred and deposited the strip of photographs. Isabella took it from the slot and tore it in two. She handed half to her mother and kept the other half herself.

  Beatrix looked at the pictures: she was smiling, but it was to her daughter that her eye was drawn. Isabella had her arm around Beatrix’s waist and her head was angled slightly against her mother’s shoulder, her smile big and natural, easy. There was love in her eyes.

  Beatrix felt her determination, freshly reinforced, waver yet again.

  She touched the photographs, folded the strip nearly down the middle and slipped it into her pocket.

  She steeled herself.

  These were hard choices.

  There was no right and no wrong.

  It had to be done.

  Chapter Seven

  She had two appointments that afternoon. The first was with Johnny, the tattoo artist she had used for the two roses that had adorned the skin of her left arm. He was waiting for her in the salon not too far from the Jemma el Fnaa square.

  “You ready for the next one?” he asked as she climbed the steps down into the basement.

  “I am.”

  She took off her shirt and flexed her arm so that she could see the work that he had already done.

  The first rose was for Oliver Spenser.

  The second was for Joshua Joyce.

  They had both been in her house when, nearly ten years ago, her husband Lucas had been shot and Isabella had been stolen away from her. The eight black ink bars that she had tattooed down her ribcage on the left-hand side of her chest recorded the years that she had been separated from her daughter.

  The roses were beautiful: blood-red petals and twisting stems that prickled with thorns. She had explained to Johnny what she’d wanted done, and he had come up with a design that matched her intentions perfectly.

  She said she wanted a design that would accommodate six roses. There would be blooms on her shoulder, on her bicep, others on the inside and outside of her wrist. When she was done, there would be a whole sleeve of them.

  Halfway there.

  Lydia Chisholm would be the third.

  Bryan Duffy would be the fourth.

  Johnny swabbed her arm and inspected the two roses that were already there. “These have healed nicely,” he said. “Look good, too. You pleased with them?”

  “Very pleased,” she said.

  She sat down on the couch as he finished sterilising her skin. He sat on his chair and kicked away from her, rolling on its castors across the room to his laptop. He pressed play, and “The Ecstasy of Gold” by Ennio Morricone started to play out through the speakers.

  “You like Westerns?” he asked her.

  “I’m not much into films.”

  “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Fucking brilliant, man. Tell me you’ve seen it?”

  “Never have.”

  “You gotta.”

  She closed her eyes as the music faded out to be replaced by the brutal riffs of Metallica’s “Creeping Death.”

  Johnny Ink fired up his tattoo guns and went to work.

  The second appointment was with her doctor. Abdeslam Lévy had his surgery in the exclusive Palmeraie district of the city. One of the benefits of paying his eye-wateringly high fees was the ability to see him on short notice. She sat in the waiting room and stared blankly at the abstract art on the wood-panelled walls. The morning with Isabella had been wonderful, but now that she had dropped the girl back in the medina, the pain had crept back into her bones.

  It was always there, when she stood and when she sat, a reminder that the days she had left to her could be measured.

  Everyone was going to die, but ignorance meant that the inevitable could be processed as an abstract concept.

  She didn’t have that luxury.

  Beatrix’s previous career had made her more familiar than most with the certainty of death, and she had been sanguine about the possibility that it might end with a bullet or the point of a knife. She could fight those. She could pit her skills against those seeking her end, and so far she had found that she was the equal of them all.

  But t
his assassin couldn’t be fought.

  It had crept into her body when she was too broken and beaten to fight it. Now that she had something to live for, and the money to treat it, it was too late. The cancer sat there, deep inside her cells, mutating. They could slow its progress, but they could not stop it.

  Lévy had estimated that she had a year. The way she was feeling now, she wondered whether that was optimistic.

  The receptionist smiled politely at her and said that the doctor was ready.

  She went through into the consulting room. It was tastefully and expensively decorated, a reminder that the bill for even this visit would be for three hundred dollars.

  “How have you been feeling, Beatrix?”

  “Not great.”

  “The pain?”

  “Bad. Worse.”

  “On a scale of one to ten?”

  The usual question. “Seven.” Her answer was usually four or five.

  “We might need to look at the pain relief plan, then. How are you getting on with the morphine?”

  “I’m nearly out. I need more.”

  Lévy frowned and looked at his screen for her records. “Really? I gave you enough for a month ten days ago. How many have you been taking?”

  “Enough so that I can cope.”

  “Two or three a day?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I’d much rather you didn’t. You can take too much, Beatrix.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “There are side effects. Dizziness. Confusion. Mood changes. Low blood pressure.”

  She laughed bitterly. “That would only be relevant if I had a future to worry about.”

  He looked at her with disapproval. “We need to have a look at how we are managing the pain.”

  “The morphine works. Just give me some more.”

  “No, I don’t think so, Beatrix. I’d rather we have a look and see if we can’t find something more suitable.”

  “I don’t have time to do that today.”

  He sighed. “Then we need to fix a time when you do have time.”

  “I’ve only got two more tablets. I need something now.”

  He frowned again. “I’ll give you a script to get you through the next few days, but I want you to come back in so we can talk about this properly. I’m not comfortable with the amount you’re taking, Beatrix. Not at all.”

  He printed out the prescription and passed it across the desk.

  “I understand,” she said. “Thank you. I’ll make an appointment.”

  Two days?

  If she felt like this, it would be difficult to even travel to Iraq, let alone do what she needed to do.

  Two days.

  Two days was nowhere near enough.

  Chapter Eight

  The pharmacy she had in mind was in an upscale neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city. She often filled her prescriptions there, and she could remember enough of the layout to know that she would be able to get inside without too much bother. The windows and doors were secured by discreet metal bars, but she had no intention of gaining access that way. There was a narrow alleyway that bisected the block, with the pharmacy on one side and a boutique hair salon on the other. She passed into it, was quickly swallowed by the darkness. The row of shops were only a single storey high, and when she got to the end of the alleyway, there was a dumpster that, when she vaulted atop it, allowed her to reach up to the lip of the flat roof. Wincing from the lightning bolts of pain that lit up her nerves, she scrambled her feet up the wall and hauled herself onto the roof.

  She lay there for a moment, staring up at the yellowing rind of moon as she tried to capture her breath. This weakness was so out of character for her that sometimes she wondered if she had been transplanted into the body of another, weaker, woman. There had been a time when she would have been able to make the jump to the roof without the dumpster. But that prospect now? It was a bad joke.

  She rolled over onto her belly and then pushed herself to her hands and knees. There was a skylight directly in front of her. It was protected by a cage, but the padlock was cheap and flimsy. She unslung the rucksack that she was wearing over her shoulder and removed the set of short-handled bolt cutters that she had taken from the armoury. She pressed the teeth around the lock and brought them together. The arm of the padlock snapped, and it fell away.

  She pulled the cage aside, used the handle of the cutters to knock a hole in the glass and reached through to open the latch. The skylight pulled back on rusty hinges, and she dropped down into the dark room below.

  The cabinet where the drugs were stored was also locked, but that security, too, was not fit for its purpose. Unobserved, and with no alarms to concern her, Beatrix was able to pick the lock at her leisure. It took less than a minute.

  She pulled the door open and looked at the neatly ordered boxes of drugs inside.

  Morphesic SR.

  MXL.

  Zomorph.

  Sevredol.

  Oramorph.

  She opened the mouth of her rucksack and started to drop the boxes inside.

  By the time she had returned to the riad, the effect of the morphine had taken hold. It numbed the constant drill of the pain to a dull throb. It did not remove it completely, but instead held it in the shadows, where it remained, crouched and patient, gathering strength and preparing to return. She was in no doubt that this wasn’t anything other than a temporary reprieve.

  Mohammed and his wife, Fatima, were eating in the dining room. Mohammed got to his feet as he saw her crossing the courtyard.

  “Is everything alright, Miss Beatrix?”

  “It’s fine. Sit down. Finish your dinner.”

  “I’ve finished,” he said, waving her concern away. “When are you leaving?”

  “Tonight.”

  He gestured up towards Isabella’s bedroom. “We will look after her.”

  “I know you will.”

  “My friend came this afternoon. He thinks the riad can be made much more secure. He suggests cameras and motion sensors on the roof and several cameras outside. He thinks it will be difficult for anyone to get in without giving us fair warning. Would you like me to go ahead?”

  “Please. I trust you, Mohammed. Do what you think is best.”

  “Very good, Miss Beatrix.” He paused and looked at her with concern. “Can I ask how you are feeling?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, more abruptly than she intended. She spoke more gently. “You don’t need to worry about me.”

  “Be careful,” he said. “She only just got you back again.”

  Beatrix tried Isabella’s door. The handle turned, but only so much. It was catching on something. The room had a window that looked out onto the open corridor that ran around the riad and the courtyard below, and it was covered only with a thin gauze curtain. Beatrix looked through it and saw that a chair had been propped up against the door, jamming the handle. That was good.

  She was about to leave when she noticed that the gauze curtain was pulled aside at the other end of the window. She moved over to it and looked inside. Isabella was lying on her side, her face turned to the window. She looked peaceful and innocent, and Beatrix wondered again whether it had been selfish of her to remove her from the foster parents.

  But then she remembered the blank and emotionless mask that always fell over her daughter’s face whenever they had discussed her childhood. A peripatetic existence, moved from one unloving home to another, no structure, no purpose. She needed to be with her mother. And Beatrix would do everything that she could to make sure that she was safe.

  She was about to turn away when she saw that Isabella had something clasped in her right hand. She stared hard into the gloom of the room until she had identified the strip of photographs that they had taken that morning.

  And t
hen she turned away.

  If she didn’t leave now, she never would.

  Chapter Nine

  Pope had arranged for her to be flown under diplomatic cover from Marrakech to Kuwait City. They did not know how deeply Manage Risk was embedded into the security apparatus of southern Iraq, and so they decided to avoid having her name on the passenger manifest of a flight into the country. Instead, she would be driven across the border to Basra.

  It had been agreed that she would be equipped when she arrived in Iraq, and so the only contraband items that she was bringing, her throwing knives, had been stowed with the rest of her gear in the hold. She passed through security with a minimum of fuss and boarded the waiting jet. They kept their take-off slot, and Beatrix watched with melancholy regret as the lights of the city disappeared into the uniform bleakness of the desert that surrounded it.

  It was an unusual feeling.

  She presumed that she had felt the same way when she had flown out of London into exile, but she could barely remember those days. The cause was easy to identify: the time left to her was starkly finite, and every day that she spent away from her daughter hurt like a wound. She stared into the cloak of pure midnight darkness that arched overhead. Those absent days hurt, but they were necessary. She had to keep moving.

  They knew that she was back now, and they would be desperately trying to find her.

  They had used Isabella to protect themselves once before, and she was sure that they would try and repeat the trick.

  She would not let that happen.

  She had downloaded as much information on Manage Risk as she had been able to find, and as the plane levelled off and the cabin crew began the preparations for supper, she took out her iPad and started to read.

  Manage Risk had been established by Jamie King, a former Navy SEAL who had attended the Naval Academy and graduated from Hillsdale College. King sought to offer private security services to the governments and other companies operating in dangerous parts of the world. Its first major assignment was to provide thirty men with top-secret clearances to protect the CIA headquarters and staff engaged in the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Other clients included communications, maritime, petrochemical and insurance companies. The company had grown quickly and was organised into ten separate divisions, each dedicated to a separate area of business. It was registered in Mauritius, with minimal oversight of its accounts or corporate governance. Unsubstantiated rumours suggested it had contracts worth in excess of one hundred million pounds a year. Its website advertised its ability to provide “personnel from the best militaries throughout the world,” and its tasks ranged from “personal protection to large-scale stability operations requiring large numbers of people to assist in securing a region.”