by Shah, R D
Chapter 24
The golden light of the rising sun seeped across the city skyline like a welcome guest, washing away the darkness of the night before, and illuminating the face of the man standing by the side of the road. He closed his eyes and allowed the warmth to fill every pore in his skin, before slowly breathing in a lungful of the crisp, moist air and relishing the sweet smell of fresh dew. His senses felt heightened, and in that moment the sound of birds chirping the arrival of a new day gently vibrated in his ears.
The man slowly opened his eyes and looked across the road, his vision blurry at first, to the Ford Sierra and the glint of sunlight reflecting off its white paint. The windows were dark but as his vision became focused they lightened and he raised his hands and waved to the blonde woman sitting in the driver’s seat, as behind her a small girl with blonde braided hair flicked her tiny palms back and forth, desperate to get his attention.
The man slowly waved back, and now the little girl’s eyes widened excitedly in acknowledgement, and she pressed a furry white unicorn up to the window and waved its hoof before shrieking in laughter as the woman glanced back at him with a loving smile.
The man lowered his hand and took a single step forward, but then hesitated as the little girl’s face began to contort and her smile now transformed into a look of terror and she screamed. Behind her flames began creeping forward until they lapped up the side of the window, and although the man attempted to leap forward he found his feet fixed to the pavement. With his arm raised outwards a single word screamed from the girl’s mouth before her face was consumed in a burst of flames.
“Daddy!”
“Ethan!” A voice called out from the gloom. “Munroe!”
Munroe’s eyes flipped open to see Sloan leaning towards him.
“You all right?” she asked, and after few moments to get his bearings he acknowledged her with a grunt and then sat up as he rubbed his eyes.
“Sounded like you were having a nightmare,” she said, and then reached into her trouser pocket and pushed something into his face. “Stick of gum?” Sloan asked, holding out the yellow strip of Juicy Fruit pinched between her fingers.
“I don’t know. I never remember my dreams,” Munroe replied, taking the piece, unwrapping it and folding it in to his mouth.
“Personally I prefer Hubba Bubba, but it’s all we’ve got,” she said before returning her attention to the disassembly of her silenced M9A3 handgun which both of them had received as part of McCitrick’s care package on board the C-130 Hercules. Except for the two pilots, they were the only passengers on the cargo hauler and apart from another inflight refuelling a few hours ago the trip had been as uneventful as expected. Munroe’s discovery back in Brazil had left him feeling troubled. Even though he was able to put the horrors of what those children must have gone through to one side, to compartmentalise the knowledge, it had left him with a sour feeling in his bones. It had also given him a conflicting viewpoint of Icarus. This in itself was unsettling given everything the man had done, but nonetheless he was caught between empathy for the child the killer had been, and the psychotic depraved killer the man had become. Jax, on the other hand, appeared more pissed off that she had not been involved in his Brazilian excursion, and although she had made no vocal complaints he could tell she felt left out of the loop. Perhaps it made her feel out of control, and that was the feeling that those in their position abhorred the most.
Munroe had left Silva to check out Dr Ferreira’s ‘school’ building alone, and although he had heard nothing back as yet he figured no news would be good news. Daedalus had a good track record of cleaning up after themselves and despite allowing their escape he guessed this was not the last time he would cross paths with Hans Bauer.
Bauer.
He’d only just met him and Munroe already despised the man. Self-righteous, trustworthy as a snake, and an honest-to-God modern-day Nazi to boot. The man was a turd, pure and simple, but they did have one thing in common.
They both wanted Icarus.
Had Bauer let slip that Daedalus were also looking for him by mistake, or had his ego told him they would never live to tell anyone about it? Either way it gave some context to Icarus’s actions, and with no one to turn to he had made a call to Munroe. But why still wasn’t clear, although his invite to New Orleans could soon fill the gaps. Or get Munroe killed.
He’d already contacted McCitrick and debriefed him on the situation and the section head had agreed that they should go alone. Such was the DS5 ethos, but more importantly they couldn’t afford to scare him off, and with the three kings now waging full-out war on Daedalus it was a lead they could not screw up.
“If he wants you then let’s give the man what he wants.” McCitrick had said bluntly. His only stipulation was that Jax back him up.
Munroe looked over at Sloan, and he was glad to have her at his side. Upon take-off the conversation had been light and he had dozed off as Sloan had set about disassembling and then reassembling her Beretta multiple times. Some people might have seen it as nervous repetition, but he saw it for what it was… focus.
Munroe chewed on the gum and attempted to remember the dream he had been having. Although it had already faded from his mind he knew it had not been pleasant. He snapped back into reality and focused on his colleague and her continuing obsession with the firearm. She was doing it to pass the time, but he couldn’t help think it was more of a cathartic affair for the captain.
“I think it’s in perfect working order,” Munroe said, loosening the tight muscles in his shoulders with a stretch.
“Thanks, Ethan, but I knew that after the first time.”
Jaqueline Sloan was an interesting soul and, despite the mostly cold demeanour, Munroe liked her. She spoke little but always seemed ready to go at a moment’s notice, from what he had seen of her so far. What he did know about her, which was not a lot, was that her grasp of situations was solid, and she was able to think outside the box. Just what a unit like DS5 needed. She was, though, a tough nut to crack when it came to personal information. It was understandably an important trait given the clandestine and secretive nature of the Disavowed, which she wore with pride, but it wasn’t the reason she had remained so quiet, and Munroe knew it. Before falling asleep he’d been conducting something of a test to see if she would crack first under the boredom of the flight and disclose some, any, personal information, but it seemed she was staying true to her word. She was a woman that kept to what she said, and expected the same from others. After so many hours of near silence he decided to end the deadlock. “So, do you finally fancy telling me about yourself?”
Sloan slid the firing pin spring back into the Beretta’s slide and then looked up at him blankly.
“I don’t fancy saying anything. Like I told you back on the Elizabeth, you first.”
Munroe noted a slight curving at the corner of her mouth and he could tell she felt she’d won the waiting game, and he was now happy to oblige her. “Fair enough,” he said, settling into his seat. “I spent most of my life in the military, and most of those years embedded with special forces. The SAS was always the pinnacle of my dreams as a kid. The excitement, danger, and knowing what you do has meaning. That’s the thing with growing up as an orphan, you have a need to belong from a young age. To something… to anything. For some people it develops into anger, resentment at not having the usual parental bond, but for me I wanted to seek out my place in the world, and I did. The military gave me that home.”
Sloan stopped assembling her handgun; she was now watching him intently as Munroe continued, and there was no hint of sadness in his voice, only a matter-of-fact confidence in the decisions he had made.
“For any grunt in the forces the belief in serving for Queen and country is only a half truth. The deeper reason is they do it for their family and those they love, that’s the driving factor. They play out the most rudimentary of human traits. To protect our families. But for me my family became the country and all s
he stands for.”
“That’s a very mature and philosophical way to look at it,” Sloan noted, delivering the sentence with a friendly sarcasm.
“That’s the hostage negotiator in me. Negotiating is a battle of wits with potentially deadly consequences, but it wasn’t an art I’d fully realised when still in the forces. I met my wife while serving with the SAS. She was working with the Red Cross in Afghanistan. Our paths crossed and a year later we were married. Nine months after that and our daughter was born.”
“What were their names?”
“My wife’s name was Natalie, and our daughter Lucy.”
“Lucy’s a pretty name. Good choice,” Sloan replied, continuing her reassembling of the Beretta. “So what happened?”
Munroe hesitated, and though Sloan noticed the change in him she didn’t say anything until he began to talk again.
“Do you remember the bombing in Edinburgh town centre a few years ago?”
“IRA?”
“Yes,” he replied bluntly. “More accurately the ‘Real IRA’ as they call themselves. The group that formed after the peace process. Extremists are only afraid of one thing in this life, and that’s peace.”
Sloan said nothing but she gave a solemn nod in agreement as Munroe continued.
“Parked car full of explosives. Killed eight civilians, including my wife and little girl.”
“Christ, Ethan. I’m sorry.”
“Went to get fish and chips for us all and the bomb went off as I was heading back to the car. The blast knocked me out cold and I woke up in a hospital bed to a policeman telling me what I’d lost.”
Munroe appeared to become momentarily lost in the story, the pain still raw despite the years past, but he then cleared his throat with a cough and was back in control. “Spent a couple of days in hospital and after the funeral I threw myself back into my work. I hoped it would give me something to focus on, and it did for a while, but I had an incident that convinced me I wasn’t cut out for that type of stuff anymore, and I was granted an honourable discharge.”
“It was the incident part I was curious about. McCitrick was tight-lipped about that. What happened?”
That Sloan had skipped over the tragedy of his family told Munroe one of two things. She was either colder than he had taken her for, or smart enough not to want him dwelling on such things. Munroe was sure it was the latter.
“My team were tasked with gathering intel from a small Afghan village in Helmand Province. Usual seek and reap. We were embedded with a Royal Marine unit at the time and after a series of contacts from the Taliban we made it inside, but not before we lost two soldiers along the way. That’s the problem with that kind of warfare, you never know who’s a civilian and who’s the enemy. We ended up interrogating a man after finding a buried arms cache and it was clear he didn’t know anything. Guy was shit-scared and just trying to protect his family, but a couple of the marines were pretty riled up and convinced otherwise.” Munroe paused momentarily and then shook his head. “You can train a soldier to deal with most anything, but dealing with seeing your friends blown apart is not one of them. As you can imagine, things got out of hand, and they went off the deep end. One of them placed a gun to the head of the man’s daughter and threatened to shoot her if he didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.”
Munroe glanced down at the floor pensively and visualised in his mind what had come next. “First time in my career that I snapped. The soldier was wrong to do it, war or no war, but all I could see was the fear on that girl’s face. She was terrified, and in that moment her expression was somehow… so familiar.”
Sloan now put down the Beretta and leant towards him humbly with her hands together. “She reminded you of Lucy.”
“She really did. I’m not sure why, but her face and that look of fear still haunts me to this day.”
“What did you do?” Sloan asked, and Munroe gazed up at her and blankly.
“I shot him.”
The admission hung in the air like a bad smell, and Sloan stared at him with curiosity. There was no malice or disgust in her expression, but rather one of sombre understanding as Munroe sought to set the record straight.
“He wasn’t killed, although after a gunshot to the knee he won’t be appearing on Strictly any time soon.”
It was strange that the captain showed little change in her demeanour upon hearing the man had survived, but Munroe didn’t put any weight in her reaction, or lack thereof, and he finished off his story as matter-of-factly as he could.
“I was arrested on the spot and brought up on charges, but the top brass took mercy on me and after some legal wrangling gave me an honourable discharge.”
“How did you manage that?” Sloan asked, now looking more surprised than shocked.
“With all the special operations I was involved in I think they decided it was better to let me go silently than open any potential can of worms, and so off I went. You know the rest.”
They both sat there silently for a few moments and then Sloan nodded softly. “Can’t say I blame you, Ethan, and given what you’d been through, and then seeing a trained marine putting a gun to a little girl’s head…” she let her breath release through her lips with a whistle. “That bastard should have been court-martialled himself. That’s no way for a soldier to act, I don’t care how dire the circumstances are.”
The comment relaxed Munroe. He felt the same way, but actually hearing it from someone else’s lips was reaffirming. “So, Captain,” he said, flipping the question back on her. “What’s your story?”
Sloan finished assembling the last piece of her gun and she slapped in the magazine and placed it down next to her. Whatever her story was, it was still a fresh scar for her and Munroe waited patiently until she began to speak.
“Born in Wiltshire to a nice family. Good parents but broke, and I joined the military to get a college education. Did my basic at Sandhurst before moving into army intelligence and then counterintelligence. I crossed paths with McCitrick and he saw something in me. Shortly after he brought me into DS5.”
Sloan’s history was brief, too brief, and Munroe could tell she’d left out huge chunks of it. “Seems nice and tidy. What really happened?”
There was no hint of emotion in her eyes but she stared at him for a few moments and then with a deep breath began to speak. “I was deployed to Iraq in 2015 and my team and I were tasked with providing intel on the continuing insurgence. We all knew Iran was sponsoring most of it, but we had intel on a deal to buy uranium from a Western seller. They may have been causing chaos in Iraq, but nuclear ambition has always been their goal, and where better to trade than within the fog of war? Through our network of informants we managed to nail down a time and date of the sale and a special operations team was sent in to retrieve both buyer and seller, along with the material. I went with them.”
Munroe looked unsure of the last part. “That’s unusual. An intelligence officer going in with the operations team.”
“Usually, yes. But we weren’t sure exactly what we were dealing with. My informant insisted I be the one to meet him, and only then would he provide the exact location of the sale. We were dealing with a tight timeframe and my superior gave the OK. Turned out to be an ambush, and all six of the operations team were killed. I was taken hostage and interrogated for three days.”
Munroe had more than a few questions but he let them lie, allowing Sloan to explain in her own time.
“I didn’t know it then, but the seller was a Daedalus operative, and he wanted to know everything we knew about the sale.” Sloan’s eyes drooped downwards and then she stared up at him, her eyes dulled. “When male soldiers are captured on the battlefield they can expect torture. But when it’s a woman, the word torture takes on a different meaning. Let’s just say after three days of that bullshit it’s unlikely I’ll ever be able to have children.”
Munroe wanted to wince at the idea but his expression remained static. This was not a woman who d
esired pity. “That’s tough.”
“That’s war,” she replied, showing no distress whatsoever. “On the third day, having not given up a single piece of intel except my name and rank, I used my feminine abilities on one of the guards, just long enough to take the AK-47 from him, and then I fought my out and managed to make it back to base. A little worse for wear, but I survived, and it was in the hospital that McCitrick visited me with an offer. I’ve been working for DS5 ever since, all of five years, and I won’t quit until Daedalus is taken apart, piece by little piece.”
To have gone through all that and still have the strength to escape was an impressive feat, and Munroe could understand why McCitrick had taken an interest in the young captain. The Daedalus connection had no doubt cemented it. “What happened to the operative, you couldn’t have known he was Daedalus at the time?”
“No, I only found out after McCitrick gave me the same speech he probably gave you, but that blonde-haired, blue-eyed bastard did die screaming. Being shot in the balls tends to produce that kind of reaction.”
Now Munroe did wince, but Sloan appeared to take it as a questioning of her actions. “When I got out of hospital, and on McCitrick’s induction, I made a promise to him and myself that I would never again take a life without good reason.”
“Sounded like a good reason to me,” Munroe said, but Sloan shook her head. “I didn’t have to kill the man, that was my choice, out of revenge, and it’s not one I would make again.”
“But it’s understandable.”
“Yes, it is. But as DS5 we have free rein to do what we need to do, and by any and all means necessary. Our moral decisions and those we make in the field have to be above reproach. Without that we’re just common gangsters, flouting the law. Power corrupts, Ethan, and people in our position are no different. The way you handled yourself back at Brest airport was all I needed to see. You could have killed that man but you didn’t, because there was no need to, and that’s something you understand. It’s why I gave McCitrick my approval to bring you in.”