by Dan Latus
That seemed pretty clear. We were talking about that part of Ukraine where there’s been so much trouble since Russia occupied Crimea and engineered de facto secession in other areas.
‘What do they want?’
‘The usual. Power, control — money, too. Independence from Kiev, and possibly reunion with the motherland, although that’s a distant prospect at the moment.’
‘And you have, or know, things they want?’
He nodded and added, ‘My head, for one.’
I had to work hard at keeping my patience. We were just inching forward — or going round in circles. Getting blood out of a stone? Something like that. All the old clichés came to mind.
‘You going to tell me more?’
‘Not just yet.’
That seemed to bring us to a full stop. He seemed to tire of the subject, and the conversation.
For my part, I was wondering if I was wasting my time here. Harry was off his bloody rocker. Not for the first time, I decided it was a shrink he needed, not me.
‘Look, Frank,’ he said suddenly, ‘you’re going to have to stop quizzing me about what I’ve been doing and what’s going on. I can’t tell you. It’s as simple as that.’
‘National security?’
He nodded.
‘You can’t even tell me why you’re in such a jam?’
He shook his head. Now I was annoyed. How the hell could I help if he wouldn’t tell me what was going on?
‘Maybe it’s time I went home, Harry. I’m not doing any good here. I’m just a spare part. I can’t carry on like this.’
He looked a bit stricken when I said that.
‘Whatever made you tell Henderson to get me, Harry?’
‘I needed a person I could trust, someone I could rely on to watch my back — and not leak to the enemy.’
‘And you felt that person was me? I wonder why. You must have met a great many better qualified people than me over the years.’
‘Precisely. I have. And I can’t trust any of them! Oh, I’m not saying they’re all bad. I’m saying I don’t know who the bad guys amongst them are. So, I can’t trust any of ’em. That’s the simple truth.’
I shook my head. Either he worked with some lovely people or whatever department it was that Henderson ran had more holes in it than the proverbial sieve.
‘Perhaps you can tell me this, Harry. Are you still on the active list? Is Henderson still your boss — your controller, or whatever the correct term is?’
He shook his head. ‘I quit. I’m retired now.’
‘So you’re on your own?’
‘Yes. They’re supposed to provide a certain level of protection for retired agents like me, but I don’t want it. I’m better off looking after myself.’
I think it was the admission that he really was on his own that stifled my anger and persuaded me that perhaps I still had a job to do here. But I had to know something more about the threat he faced.
‘I appreciate that there are things — plenty of ’em no doubt — that you can’t tell me. But I have to know more than you’ve told me so far about who you think is coming after you. Otherwise, I’m wasting my time and doing you no good at all. I simply don’t know what to look out for.’
He mulled it over. ‘OK,’ he said reluctantly. ‘I appreciate what you’re saying. I can accept that.’
He took a deep breath and started to explain. ‘The outfit coming for me are Russian hitmen from eastern Ukraine. You know about the Donbass region?’
I nodded.
‘There’s a contract out on me there, and they’ve picked it up.’
‘That’s where you were operating, eastern Ukraine?’
‘Latterly, yes.’
‘Hitmen, you say? So, they’re professionals, not agents of the Russian government?’
‘Professionals? Well, I don’t know about that. But they’re a tough bunch. Nothing to do with the Russian government, though. Not directly, at least. It was some of the separatists in eastern Ukraine who put out the contract. One militia group in particular. Basically, they want information I hold, and they want to see me dead.’
‘Why the fall-out with Henderson and the resignation?’
Harry thought long and hard about that. It probably went against his better judgement, and the habits of a professional lifetime, to confide in anyone, but I was putting him on the spot. He knew he had to tell me something if he was to keep me with him. I’d made my position crystal clear.
‘Henderson convened a meeting where I was supposed to report what I’d got from the militia I was working undercover with. It was in an out-of-the-way kind of place in the mountains in Slovakia, not too far from the Ukraine border. There was Henderson’s guy, a US agent and a couple of Ukraine local friendlies. Safe enough, Henderson — and everybody else — must have thought, and so it should have been.’
He hesitated, seeming to find it a bit of a struggle to go on.
‘Safe enough?’ I prompted him. ‘The location, you mean?’
He nodded. ‘Well away from the action, off the beaten track, yet Central Europe still, not London or Brussels.’
‘But?’
‘When I arrived for the meeting, the other delegates were all dead. Somebody had run a machine gun around the room. More than one, judging by what I saw.’
I grimaced. Somehow the understated way Harry had expressed it made what he had told me even more chilling.
‘How had you managed to avoid it?’
He looked at me and shrugged. ‘I’ve been doing this a long time, Frank. I’ve learned to expect things to go wrong. It’s something of a miracle if they don’t.’
‘So, you had taken precautions?’
He nodded. ‘One of them was not being there at the appointed time. Another was not staying in the same hotel as everybody else.’
‘So, what did you do?’
‘When I discovered what had happened? I dropped everything and got the hell out! It was a damned close-run thing as well. They were still looking for me. I didn’t go back to the place where I was staying. I abandoned everything there, including my car, and walked out. Walked twenty miles to the nearest big town, stole a car there and kept going. I didn’t call for help, not from Henderson or anyone else. I just made my own way out. The hit squad hadn’t given up on me, and I had some narrow escapes. But I managed to keep ahead of them.’
He broke off and grinned. ‘I even pinched a car off them! Used it to get to Vienna. I flew from there to Frankfurt, and then on to here.’
None of this was funny, really, but I had to smile. Pinched their car? How very Harry!
‘Then what?’
‘I’d had enough, more than enough. Things were not going well in the Donbass region. NATO, the West, had failed essentially. Russia had won, just as in Crimea and elsewhere — Georgia, Moldova, etcetera. Game over. Besides, my cover was blown now. I couldn’t go back to what I’d been doing. Kiev will just have to get over losing a couple of bits of its territory. It’s not a good situation when a major player on the world scene disregards international law, but nobody wants a full-on shooting war between the global heavyweights over it. It’s the same with China in the South China Sea.’
‘Appeasement, they used to call that strategy, didn’t they?’
He nodded. ‘That’s right. And the Czechs still remember it from way back in the thirties.’
I let Harry continue. Now I’d got him started, I didn’t want to interrupt the flow.
‘So, I decided to call it quits,’ he resumed. ‘There was nothing more I could do in the Donbass, or anywhere else for that matter. My time was over. I’d been working towards that decision for a while. Preparing for it, in a way. As I say, I’d had enough. Done enough. Experienced enough for one lifetime. And you can’t go on forever, doing what I’d been doing. It catches up with you eventually. Unexpectedly usually, perhaps somewhere like Caracas or Minsk, or some other godforsaken arsehole of the world. So, I told Henderson I’d quit, retired.’
&nbs
p; ‘Slovakia was the last straw?’
He nodded. ‘Pretty much. I came out here, where I’d had a place for a while. I wanted to feel safe, and to kickstart my life again in peace and tranquillity.’ With a wry smile, he added, ‘Some might say much good has it done me.’
Not me, though. He’d done the best he could. Some life he’d led.
After mulling over what he’d told me, I said, ‘Do you blame Henderson for what happened in Slovakia?’
‘Not him personally, no. I like the man well enough, and he’s good at what he does. But there was a leak somewhere. News got out about the meeting he had called. That’s the only possible explanation for what happened. And it was on his watch. In that sense, he is responsible — and accountable. Given that, I certainly didn’t want him and the department looking after my personal security. So I told him to keep well away from me. I would look after myself, thank you very much. I would have been the principal target at that meeting in Slovakia, which made me feel even more vulnerable. I’d been the one with something to say. The others were all there to listen and report back.’
‘How about now?’ I asked. ‘You’re still a target?’
Harry nodded. Then, looking directly at me, he added, ‘That’s why I need help — from someone I can trust. You, in other words.’
I decided to let it rest for the time being. In the morning there would be decisions to be taken. One of them would be whether or not I stayed. What Harry had told me didn’t explain everything or satisfy me altogether. Far from it. The idea of Russian hitmen chasing him across Vancouver Island — for what? — seemed pretty fanciful.
Also, I was still worried that whoever had been in the grey car earlier that day might have been innocent victims of Harry’s paranoia rather than dangerous hitmen hunting us down.
On the other hand, I hadn’t forgotten Henderson and his warning that enemies were closing in on Harry. I wondered where his information had come from. Surely not from Harry himself? Perhaps not, but I wasn’t going to rule that possibility out. Not yet.
More to reassure Harry than for any other reason, I suggested we took turns keeping watch during the night. Four hours on, four hours off. It was a suggestion he welcomed. He even insisted on taking the first watch himself.
‘You must be tired after all the travelling, Frank. Go get your head down.’
I didn’t argue. It might have soured the evening.
‘OK, Harry. Just don’t forget to wake me up.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Kiev, Ukraine. July 2018.
Keeping track of time was a problem. It came close to being the main one as the pain from her injuries faded, though it never actually left her. Somehow, she felt it was deeply necessary to know what the date was, if only to keep track of how long she had been in the cellar.
So, she resorted to a method long used by the incarcerated. She used bits of coal she found in a corner of the cellar to make marks on a wall, her own hieroglyphics, or runes. A short vertical line represented a day. After making seven such marks, she drew a horizontal line through them and started again.
She knew the date when she had left the flat in Kiev. So, her makeshift calendar allowed her to keep track of time through the weeks that followed, and to know how the season would be developing outside those four walls.
She tried not to think too much about Harry, or what he might be doing in their home on the island. She just hoped he had reached it. She knew he would be worried about her, but she was confident he would be coping. Always, these thoughts culminated in a determination to be with him again. Somehow.
And that always brought her back to the question of how to get out of here. Again and again, she made an inventory of her surroundings, each time hoping to find something she had so far missed.
The cell was built of concrete. Walls, floor and ceiling were all concrete, and looked like typical products of modern construction methods for high-rise buildings. That meant they would be thick and reinforced with steel rods.
Although the cell was dusty, it was reasonably clean and unstained by running water, creeping damp or chemical reaction. She believed that meant she was in the basement of a modern, relatively new, apartment block, probably on the outskirts of the city.
There were no windows in her cell, and only one door, which was grey and made of something thick, hard and heavy. Not wood. Some sort of strong, composite material, possibly covering a steel sheet. The dead sound her knuckles made when she rapped on it suggested the door was a good couple of inches thick. There were no openings on the side facing into the cell. She knew there was a lock operated by a key on the far side, but without access to a keyhole there was no possibility of picking it, even if she had had any tools to work with.
She inspected the floor and the ceiling. Like the walls, both were bare concrete. The only fitting in the entire cell was the ceiling light, which was protected by a heavy-duty steel cage let into the concrete, as was the wire feeding it. Otherwise, both ceiling and floor were bare of blemishes, let alone features.
Then there was the spartan furniture with which the cell was equipped. It comprised a small wooden table and matching chair, a thin foam mattress laid on the floor, a blanket, a toilet bucket and two bowls. One of the bowls was for water, the other for food.
That was it. There was nothing else. It was enough to make her weep.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Vancouver Island, September 2018.
Something woke me. I had no idea what, but I was fully alert in an instant. I lay still, listening, feeling, for whatever it was that had jolted me awake. What was it? What had changed? Something had. I needed to know what before I risked moving.
Moments later I heard it again. The sound of movement. Outside the cabin. Something, or someone, brushing along the timber wall. Wildlife? There would be plenty of it here. Bear, moose, elk, cougar no doubt — and all manner of things smaller.
But whispering voices told me the wildlife was of the human variety. My pulse rate shot up. I slipped out of bed, put on my shoes and made my way to the open door of the bedroom, glad I hadn’t undressed when I lay down.
A small lamp alight in the living room showed me our watch keeper wasn’t up to it. Harry was asleep at the kitchen table, his head on his forearms.
I crossed the floor quickly, on the way collecting a heavy iron poker from the hearth-set in the fireplace and stood next to the entrance to the cabin. My movement had disturbed Harry. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him straighten up and start to get out of his chair.
I held out a hand, warning him to be quiet. In the dim glow from the lamp I saw a gun appear in his hand.
I put a finger to my lips and pointed at the door, and what was beyond. Harry got up and moved silently across the room to stand alongside me, on the other side of the doorframe. We waited and listened, tense and poised, as we tried to work out what was going on out there in the dark.
The light from the little lamp might be inhibiting whoever was on the other side of the cabin walls. They couldn’t be sure if we had turned in yet or not. Like us, they would be trying to work out what the situation was.
I thought about taking the initiative, opening the door and bursting out. But not for long. It was too risky. This was North America, after all, not my home patch.
I had no idea what we were up against, but I knew guns might well be involved, and we would be unmissable targets with the light behind us. There could be a machine gun or assault rifle out there for all I knew. Better to wait and react fast to whatever happened — if anything did.
Harry seemed to think the same way. He stood motionless, head cocked, listening intently. It crossed my mind that this was how it would have been for him for a long time. Ever alert for threat. The need for constant vigilance and readiness. What a life he’d led.
A minute or two passed. I began to wonder if it was a false alarm, and if whoever was out there had moved on. Perhaps it wasn’t us they were looking for after all. They could
even be innocents stumbling around in the dark.
I glanced at my watch. Close to 1 a.m. Late for drunks finding their way back to their cabin. And too early for hunters to be setting out for the day. My brief moment of optimism faded. Whoever was out there was looking for us. Stupid to hope or assume otherwise.
The heavy timber door was locked and bolted. The sneck lifted slightly, as someone on the outside tried the old-fashioned catch. I pointed it out to Harry. The door rattled as someone put pressure on it. The door held firm. It was going to take more than that to force it open.
They weren’t about to give up. I sensed brute force might come into play at any moment and raised the iron poker ready for action.
Even though I was expecting something, it was still a shock when it happened. I heard the thud of running feet and then the door crashed open, sending both Harry and me reeling. Someone had taken a flying leap, and with both feet had smashed the door off its hinges.
A man with a hideous snarling face came with the door, plunging through the gaping hole and trampling over it. Sprawling backwards, I glimpsed a big knife flash in his hand and brought the poker up in a desperate attempt to defend myself.
The force of his charge carried us both across the room. He landed on top of me as I hit the floor. But it did him no good.
He had run full-on into the poker. The heavy-duty length of iron had skewered through his throat and was sticking out of the back of his neck. If not already dead, he was bleeding out fast. I thrust him aside, rolled and scrambled to my knees.
A second man was following up closely, much too closely, and I’d lost my weapon. The poker was stuck in another man’s throat. I couldn’t get it out in time.
I let go of the poker and reached out desperately to grab some part, any part, of the second man. It was a reflex move, an instinctive attempt to use his momentum to throw him backwards over my head.
It didn’t work out that way. He hit me hard, and we both went down. Then I was aware of Harry coming in to help. That didn’t stop the man, but it did divert him.
He leaped to his feet and swung round to ward off Harry, punching with short, sharp blows that forced Harry backwards. That gave me the chance to heave the poker out of the lifeless body lying beside me. Still on my knees, I swung round and smashed it heavily across the shins of the man attacking Harry. Bone cracked audibly. The man screamed and collapsed to the floor in a writhing heap.