OTHER TITLES BY KEVIN WIGNALL
Individual Works
People Die
Among the Dead
Who is Conrad Hirst?
The Hunter’s Prayer
Dark Flag
A Death in Sweden
The Traitor’s Story
A Fragile Thing
To Die in Vienna
When We Were Lost
Short Stories
“The Window”
“Retrospective”
“A Death”
“Hal Checks Out”
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 by Kevin Wignall
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542000000
ISBN-10: 1542000009
Cover design: @blacksheep-uk.com
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Acknowledgments
About the Author
One
Garrett and Norah hadn’t arrived until just after midnight, exhausted by a day of travel delays, so the next morning they were eager to get out immediately after a late breakfast and see Granada. It was the second stop on their tour of Spain and Portugal, and this two-week vacation was their first overseas trip since spring break the previous year, so they were determined to soak up every minute of it.
The hotel was tucked away in the Albayzín, but a little distance from the busiest tourist streets. So as they climbed the stepped paths between white-walled houses, the morning stillness remained undisturbed by the few other visitors they encountered.
They had in mind to walk up to the Mirador de San Nicolás for the view over the Alhambra, but before they were even close they chanced upon a peaceful little square with a couple of cafés, a handful of people sitting at the tables of the one nearest them. It had the air about it of a refuge from the day ahead, from the heat that was already building in the pristine blue sky, from the hordes that would descend on the city over the next hour or so.
They didn’t even need to discuss it. Norah looked at the café, glanced at Garrett, he nodded, and they took a table. There was an elderly English couple next to them, chatting quietly; a woman with a small boy sitting in comfortable silence; a young man with a bomb in the backpack that lay at his feet; a woman writing a postcard.
A waiter strolled out and they offered a “Hola,” before lapsing back into English and ordering iced coffees.
Once he’d gone inside, Norah said, “This is so beautiful,” her voice hushed to match the surroundings. The English couple had fallen into silence. Behind them, the little boy sucked at the straw in his drink and produced a slurping noise that made both him and his mother giggle.
A fair-haired family came into the square, a couple with a boy and girl of about nine or ten, and stopped in exactly the same place where the café had managed to snag Garrett and Norah. They seemed to be engaged in an inaudible discussion about whether or not to stay for a drink.
Garrett looked across at them but turned back to Norah when she said, “I could eat an olive right now. Is it too early for olives?”
He loved that she asked questions like that.
“Not unless they’re in a martini.”
She laughed, never dreaming those were the last words she would ever hear him say.
“Yeah, I think I’ll have some olives.”
Her words tumbled gently into the silence. The family continued its mute deliberation, the children patiently awaiting the decision. All was stillness around them, not even any noise from the café. Some olives. She would have some olives.
They had no real awareness of the explosion. A flash, almost lost against this overexposed morning. The instantly deafening bang. The pummeling of the air. The sense of everything hurtling in and flying away at the same time, of being crushed even as the world broke apart and scattered.
Garrett’s physique, enhanced by two years of college football, didn’t protect him, but it did protect Norah, shielding her from some of the blast. The old English lady survived for two days, the deliberating father for a week. The others were killed instantly, all hit with such flesh-rending force that it would be three days before the final death toll was firmly established.
Norah would lose her left leg just above the knee and suffer burns and other disfiguring injuries to her head, face, and right arm. For a week she would be kept in an induced coma, and it would be two more weeks before she was told that Garrett had died in the attack, though by that time she’d know it anyway.
And it would be two years before Norah O’Brien started to live some sort of life again, two years before she slowly began to accept her good fortune, that of the eight people in the café and the four standing nearby on that fine early-summer morning in Andalucía, she alone had survived.
Two
“Do you ever think about the people you killed in southern Turkey?”
“Which people?”
“The people in the helicopter you shot down.”
Most of the prisoners had group therapy. Wes was the only one whose first language was English so he got a one-on-one, as did some of the other non-French inmates.
The previous psychiatrist, Dr. Haddad, had retired just over a month ago. This was Wes’s second session with the new one, Dr. Leclerc, who was young and slight and had a mane of glossy black hair—he was only a turtleneck sweater away from being the stereotypical French intellectual.
And now Leclerc was looking at him as if he thought Wes might be in denial about his reasons for being here. But at the risk of reinforcing that belief, Wes had to clarify one point.
“I didn’t shoot it down. I mean, I killed them—I supplied the PKK with the weapon and the targeting information, and sure, I was there—but I didn’t actually pull the trigger.”
The clarification was received blankly.
“So how do you feel about that? Do you feel guilt, responsibility?”
“Responsible, yeah, sure; I targeted the wrong helicopter. Guilty? Not really, though I guess I wish it hadn’t happened—I wouldn’t be in here, my wife wouldn’t have left me.”
“You think your wife left you because of shooting down
the helicopter? Or because you were sent to prison?”
“Does it matter?”
Wes smiled. It still amazed him that Rachel had been with him at all. They’d met at a security conference in Manama when he was twenty-eight and she was twenty-seven, and yes, he’d thought her beautiful, but more than that, he’d just enjoyed her company. They’d hit it off, but only as friends, and that’s how it had stayed for the next five years—occasional chance meetings, the same buzz whenever he saw her, no inkling that she might be more than just a great person to hang out with.
Wes had run small offices in Ankara and Baghdad back then, with another one-man office down in Mardin in southeastern Turkey, run by Davey Franklin. But as ISIL had started to take up more of their time, Wes had made the decision to close Ankara and move to the Mardin office himself, along with a couple of the other guys.
He’d been sitting there at his desk one day, looking out at the view over the pale plains stretching hazily toward Syria, when Rachel had walked in, just like that. She’d been sent from the embassy in Baghdad to liaise with Wes’s team.
You’re staying?
That’s the plan, she’d said. If you have no objections.
It seemed they’d both been pretty good at compartmentalizing, at treating what they had between them as purely platonic. Because the moment it had become viable they’d fallen for each other—and into bed—in a headlong rush. It had been pretty good for a while, too. For a while.
His smile fell away again.
“Why were you smiling?”
“I was smiling about something that’s absolutely none of your business.”
“Okay.” It was obvious from his tone that Leclerc didn’t think it was okay. “You’re in prison and your wife left you. Are there any other reasons you regret what happened?”
“Of course. The wrong people died, but it’s a volatile region—these things happen.”
“You still maintain that the helicopter you shot down was not your intended target?” Leclerc looked down at his notes. “Two French aid workers from a charity which had directly accused the CIA of illegal acts in the region, plus two journalists and a UN observer who were investigating those very claims.” He looked up again but Wes didn’t respond. “Who was your intended target, if not them?”
“You know I can’t answer that, Dr. Leclerc.”
“Naturally.” Leclerc glanced at his notes again but Wes suspected it was a feint. “So, if you targeted the wrong helicopter, was it in error or do you think you were manipulated . . . how you might say, set up? You know, you were a station chief—”
“I wasn’t a station chief.”
“But it’s in the court record.”
“No, it says I was running a team. It’s not the same. I was never a chief of station. I wasn’t even attached to a station.”
“I understand, but my point remains. You were in an influential position, experienced in your field, not the kind of man to make mistakes. So again, if that helicopter really hadn’t been your target, do you think you were set up?”
The smoke had still been rising from the wreckage, the PKK fighters still celebrating, when the call had come in to Wes from Harrod, telling him that there’d been some kind of mistake. Right in that moment he’d known in his gut it hadn’t been a mistake at all, that he’d been fed the wrong intel intentionally, that someone had wanted him hung out to dry. At first he’d imagined the Turks being responsible, or even Grishko, his friend and GRU counterpart. It had been another few weeks before he’d worked out that he’d been set up by one of his own team.
“I don’t know whether I was set up. It’s clear you think so, though I can’t imagine what that would have to do with this session.”
“Really? In fact it’s very interesting from a clinical point of view, that you express no feelings of resentment. And for what it’s worth, yes, if the wrong helicopter was targeted, I think a setup is possible, given the nature of your work—”
“You don’t know anything about my work.”
Wes was aware of an edge of irritation in his own voice, and Leclerc smiled, apparently seeing it as some kind of breakthrough.
“What I do know is that you’ve been here for three years, and yet in that time your government has made not one attempt to have you transferred to an American prison, no government representative has ever contacted or visited you—nothing. And still you express no feelings of being abandoned or betrayed . . .”
Wes didn’t respond, but Leclerc hadn’t given up yet.
“It would be natural, no? To use the correct term, you took one for the team, and yet it seems your government has deserted you.” Still getting no answer, he turned back to his notes for a few seconds, then looked up again. “This makes me concerned about how you’ll cope in two years when you’re released. Certainly, it doesn’t seem you’ll be welcomed with open arms.”
Leclerc was onto something, but still seemed oblivious to what would most likely happen when Wes got out of here. The radio silence of the last three years had removed any doubt from Wes’s mind. He was a liability now, and they would want rid of him. He was surprised they hadn’t tried while he was in here, but he guessed it suited Sam Garvey better to wait until Wes was forgotten before killing him.
Yes, Sam Garvey had set him up, he was sure of that now. Wes’s second-in-command, running the Baghdad office—supposedly his best friend too—but almost certainly rotten, removing anyone who became a risk or an obstacle. Wes had remained blind to it for so long, and yet from his current viewpoint, that blindness astonished him. Sam had set him up, and Sam would make sure he was a million miles away when someone else finally put a bullet in the back of Wes’s head.
“You know, what concerns me, Dr. Leclerc, from a clinical point of view, is whether you’re a prison psychiatrist at all, or if you’ve been sent in here by the DGSE to gather information on me and some of the other non-French prisoners.”
“Not at all! I’m shocked you would say such a thing.” Leclerc looked flustered rather than shocked. “I’m simply interested in exploring the absence of feelings I would expect to find in a case like yours, things like resentment or bitterness or—”
“I try to live in the moment, Dr. Leclerc. I’m in here for another two years—what good is resentment or bitterness to me? I did what I did, I am where I am. What other people have or haven’t done is irrelevant. Dr. Haddad considered that a healthy mindset to have, under the circumstances.”
“It can be. It can also be a sign of dissociation.” Leclerc’s doubts were evident, but then he sounded more positive. “But we’ve made good progress in this session. Perhaps next time we can explore the theme of denial.”
“Denial?”
“Yes. When I inquired about the people you killed, your automatic response was to ask which people.”
“Oh, that wasn’t denial. I was just asking you to be more specific. I’ve killed plenty of people, and quite a few of them in southern Turkey.”
“Then perhaps we need to talk about that.”
“I don’t think so. Don’t confuse the difficult job I did with the man I am. I’m just a normal person.”
“I’m not sure I believe that.”
“Well, Dr. Leclerc, your beliefs are among the many things over which I currently have absolutely no control.”
Wes stood, then picked up his book. He’d started taking along whichever book he was reading to his sessions with Dr. Haddad, and the old guy had ended up spending most of each session discussing literature or history rather than the state of Wes’s psychological wellbeing. In their first session together, Leclerc hadn’t even noticed the book Wes had with him, but this time he threw a curious glance at the cover.
“A history of the Qing Dynasty?”
“Yeah. I’m not sure why it interests me—maybe it’s all the plotting and intrigue, betrayal, revenge. The Chinese knew a thing or two about exacting revenge.”
Leclerc looked in danger of jumping out of his chair in exci
tement.
“I see, and does that appeal to your—”
“Relax, Dr. Leclerc, I’m messing with you. I’m not planning on revenge—I just like history.”
Leclerc smiled humorlessly. And yet Wes was telling the truth. He’d always been good at compartmentalizing, and one thing he knew for sure was that, for the next two years, thoughts of revenge were utterly pointless.
Three
They were painting in the garden, something they were managing more and more now that the weather was improving and summer was taking hold. As ever, for much of the time they worked without talking—they had enough daily opportunities for conversation that they never felt the need to fill the silences.
Wes looked across at Patrice’s canvas on its easel, then back at the view in front of them. He liked the way Patrice always managed to capture the scene while simultaneously making his paintings richer, lusher than reality, as if a part of him were seeing a garden back home in the Congo rather than the French one in front of them. He noticed too, for the first time, that something else was always missing from the paintings.
“You never paint the fence.”
Patrice looked at him, then looked forward, as if needing to be reminded that there was a fence.
“I like your paintings, Wes, but sometimes I think you paint only the fence.”
“Because it’s there, Patrice.” This was no ordinary prison, designed as it was to house war criminals and other special cases, but it shared that one key characteristic of prisons everywhere. “The fence is everything.”
“It’s there. But it’s not here—” Patrice tapped his head with a broad smile. “You see the fence, I see a Garden of Eden.” Wes couldn’t argue with that. They painted on for a minute or two, then Patrice added, “You know, Wes, we’ll both be out of here in a couple of years, and I’ll enjoy sitting in some nice place with you and some cold beers or even just coffee, somewhere even you won’t see fences.”
Wes imagined the two of them, living lives beyond this prison, meeting up occasionally to share those cold beers.
“I’d like that.”
He meant it, too, though he doubted it would be that easy, and it was pretty much all his own fault. Grishko had told him a few times that he thought one of Wes’s team was working with Omar Shadid, a Sunni strongman who specialized in trafficking drugs and weapons and people—people most of all. Wes had even begun to suspect it himself but he’d still never suspected Sam Garvey. As much as he’d liked Sam, he’d just never thought him that smart, and yet he’d outflanked Wes easily enough in the end. The lack of even a consular visit in the last three years confirmed something worse—that Sam had fooled everyone else, too.
The Names of the Dead Page 1