Traitors

by Alex Shaw

  The fifth member, the man they believed to be responsible for the attempted assassination of Baptiste, had vanished. All that remained of him were a few blurry images captured by CCTV cameras placed at the exit to the park. Facial and gait recognition software had set upon this in an attempt to back-trace the suspect’s movements. As yet, this had not yielded any tangible result, neither had Minister Ignace’s decision to go public with the killers’ identities.

  It occurred to Grillot that none of the team had been top-notch; they had been professional, dependable and yet disposable. It was almost as though they had been specifically chosen for the task so that they could be knowingly identified. Was that what was really behind the personnel choice? Was it another ploy by the broker’s client, as if to say, ‘You have identified the killers and look – they have no link to us?’ The more Grillot thought it through, the more this made sense. It was a tactic straight out of the Russian Hybrid-War playbook, plausible and sustainable deniability. But was their deniability sustainable? For the moment it seemed to him that it was. With the team’s details having been splashed across innumerable newspapers and TV reports, he imagined their broker would be hiding under a well-insulated rock.

  Although Grillot believed it was Russia who had ordered the operation, proving it was another matter and both his boss and Minister Ignace wanted that proof. None of the assassins had any direct link to the Russian authorities. Finding the broker responsible for offering the individual killers their contracts was the first issue; getting him or her to talk was the second. Finding any material link between the broker and their client was the third and finding a connection between the client and Russia, if indeed that was who had sanctioned the operation, was the fourth. But then what? Would France officially prosecute whoever was responsible for the assassinations? Of course they would not. And accusing Russia of a crime of any sort, Grillot knew, was like pissing into the wind; you may feel relieved at first but then you realise you are covered in piss.

  However, it was not his ultimate decision what his country did. It was a cycle of violence without end. He felt deflated.

  A knock at the door dragged Grillot back from his dark thoughts. ‘Come in.’

  Racine entered. He pointed to a chair. She sat. Since the attack, on his orders, she had been hidden in what Grillot viewed as one of the safest facilities in all of France – the Paratrooper Specialised Training Centre, Cercottes. The centre was where the DGSE trained and tested its clandestine operatives and as such any assault on it would be a suicide mission.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m fine. How is Baptiste?’

  ‘No change.’

  Racine looked down, took a deep breath then met his steely gaze. ‘I want to put in a request to return to active service, sir.’

  ‘Of course you do.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘A week is a long time in our business, it is true, but would you not be better off staying here for a while? Becoming an instructor to the new intake, passing on your skills?’

  Racine frowned. ‘Am I being punished?’

  ‘No, you are not.’

  ‘Am I being held accountable for what happened?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I am accountable. I didn’t check all the entrances and exits. If I had done so, the woman would not have been able to get the drop on Henri and Jacob. She would not have been able to kill them.’

  ‘It is not your fault. You must not torment yourself.’

  ‘Sir, it’s a simple fact, black and white. I made a mistake and I want to put that right.’

  ‘By doing what exactly? Killing everyone responsible?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see – and where would you stop?’

  ‘I wouldn’t.’

  ‘You’d even assassinate, say, the Russian President?’

  ‘I would.’

  ‘I believe you.’ He exhaled slowly. ‘I know you were close to Maurice Jacob, close to Jean Baptiste Moreau. You want justice for them but—’

  ‘With respect, sir, that is not it.’

  Grillot wet his lips. ‘Tell me what is?’

  ‘They tried to kill me. I want to kill them all, but I can’t.’ Her gaze hardened. ‘I have to end the hold they have on me, this circle of violence. Either I do this by killing them all, every single last one of them including their superiors so there is no one left to come after me, or I end it by accepting that what they did cannot be changed. And I move on. Revenge cannot beat them. Revenge is what they are expecting. Revenge fuels them, it feeds them, and it recruits others who follow them.

  If I act like them, I am them. If I am not driven by the past, I am not controlled by their actions. I cannot change the past because I no longer live there. But Deputy Director Jacob and I once did. That was our mistake. He ordered me to kill our past, and that is what killed him. If I am allowed to move on, I am free to act, to seek out danger. I will become the incarnation of danger itself. Colonel, the DGSE needs me to be dangerous.’

  *

  Le Fin

  ***

  If you loved Traitors, keep reading for an exclusive extract from the first thriller in the Jack Tate series!

  When the lights go out, the war begins …

  Order your copy now!

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  Prologue

  Washington, DC

  The co-conspirators stood on their balcony at The Hay-Adams. The White House was less than four hundred metres away. The balcony afforded them a grandstand view. Within minutes Maksim Oleniuk and Chen Yan, the founders of Blackline PMC, were going to launch the largest attack on the United States of America since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, perhaps the biggest attack ever on the country. Maksim Oleniuk certainly hoped so. He looked down and smiled at the Chinese oligarch who had funded his dream of striking the US. It had been her finances – billions amassed from minerals and electronics, in partnership with his access and expertise as a former Russian Military Intelligence Officer, which had created this paradigm-shifting moment. Oleniuk found his partner highly attractive but understood she was the very last person in the world he should approach. He sipped his chilled champagne and wondered if she could read his mind.

  ‘What are you thinking of?’ Yan asked, surprising him, making his face colour in the gloom. Her American accent was flawless, perfected whilst she gained an MBA at the New York Institute of Technology. It put Oleniuk’s Russo-British accent to shame.

  ‘I am just thinking that never have parents given birth to such a powerful child.’

  She inclined her head, a stoic expression on her face. ‘Our child will live and die in the same instant, yet leave an eternal legacy.’

  ‘Legacy,’ Oleniuk repeated. It was something he had strived to create and the perfect word for the occasion.

  They stood like expectant parents, the former GRU officer rocking from foot to foot and the Chinese billionaire stock-still, but both were nervous, excited and scared of what was to come.

  The timing of the detonation had been mandated to utilise empty airspace, or airspace as empty as it ever could be over the continental United States. The location was hugely symbolic; the US seat of power deliberately selected, politically central rather than geographically so. Oleniuk’s scientists had stated the risk of damage to the retina was small yet did exist if they were to stare directly at the epicentre of the detonation with the naked eye. For this reason, Oleniuk and Yan wore wrap-around sunglasses with specifically engineered lenses shielding their eyes. They gazed out over the balcony at the empty air a mile above the floodlit White House.

  At exactly five a.m. there was a flash so quick that if the pair had not known exactly where to look it would have been missed, then a silent, purple detonation flowered. It bloomed like a monstrous, inverted Fourth of July firework. Its petals spread earthwards and then faded to be replaced by a mauve glow, creating a spectral false
dawn.

  Oleniuk felt the tingling sensation he had been warned to expect wash over him, as each individual hair on his body stood up on end. At that very moment, as if choreographed, every single light around the pair vanished. The White House lights disappeared, the floodlights on the lawn were no more and the stately residence of the President of the United States of America was plunged into darkness.

  The glow started to fade; the night sky now taking on the appearance of the bruised eye of a heavyweight boxer, before it gradually became black once more. The co-conspirators removed their protective eyewear. They had delivered a form of vengeance like no other the modern world had ever seen and, ignoring ancient, fanciful tales of vengeful gods, the single most powerful.

  Oleniuk put his arm around Yan. ‘We have done it.’

  She did not reply; however, she did give him a sideways glance. Oleniuk quickly moved his arm. ‘I am sorry. I was overcome with emotion in the moment. I do apologise.’

  ‘It is understandable, given the circumstances.’

  They continued to gaze at the capital city of the United States – dark, silent but not dead. The majority of the population were safely asleep and those who weren’t would interpret the loss of power as a citywide outage, a total blackout.

  Chapter 1

  Two days earlier

  Camden, Maine, United States

  The assassin was Russian, one of their best. He had to be to make the shot. His hide was in an elevated position on a hill, half a click away from the target. It was the closest he was prepared to go, given the timescale and his schedule. Three targets to hit in three consecutive days. A reckless order in the Russian Army and certainly an unheard-of contract on the private circuit. But he was the best, and he had accepted. And he was now on target number two.

  The ever-changing eddies and the elevation made the shot challenging. It was a job for a two-man team, a shooter and a spotter, but the assassin had always preferred to work alone. The assassin was not acquainted with failure; this was something that simply did not enter his thought process. Preparing to fail started with a failure to prepare, and Ruslan Akulov never failed to prepare.

  His target was on time. He tracked him in his crosshairs. The man exited the rear of the house through a pair of double-height patio doors, sipping his Pinot Gris, blissfully unaware of the Russian’s presence. Retired senator Clifford Piper lived in a sprawling mansion overlooking the town of Camden, Maine. The deck, where he stood now and would soon fall upon, commanded panoramic views of the harbour, West Penobscot Bay, and the evergreen islands.

  Akulov had seen mansions before, castle-like homes constructed for the rich and corrupt, which dotted the outskirts of Moscow like mushrooms, while the rest of the population lived in shacks or high-rise concrete boxes. Never before, however, had he encountered one in a setting as spectacular as this. He agreed the panorama was impressive, but the man was not. He knew all about Piper. He hated him. As a senator Piper had preached his own brand of American imperialism, damning all those who dared speak out against Uncle Sam. He was a hawk, voraciously attacking Venezuela, North Korea, Russia, and China. He threw his words like missiles from the safety of Washington, a coward who would not dare repeat his slurs in the face of the enemy.

  But, had he been punished for the innumerable deaths his rhetoric had caused or the hatred his words had incited? No. The senator had been allowed to retire to his mansion, and his three-million-dollar view. Not bad for a dacha, or as the Americans called them “vacation properties”. The Russian let a sneer form on his face. The property would be vacated soon enough. He had watched his target, and knew his routine well. Piper took a glass of wine at eleven o’clock each morning on his deck in order to appreciate his view. Akulov had also enjoyed the vista. The ocean – like him – was a contradiction. By turns calm and violent. Not that he was naturally a violent soul, but he employed violence in the defence of his country.

  The target was a widower, his wife having perished along with twenty-eight other Americans a year before, in a terrorist attack in Jakarta. But for the Jakarta team this had been a failure. Bitter fate had intervened in his employer’s plans, made the senator succumb to food poisoning and unable to leave his hotel suite to join the bus tour. The bus his wife was on, the bus that had been boarded by gunmen who slaughtered every passenger. Grief-stricken, the senator had resigned and retired. The Jakarta team’s failure ensured that Piper was added to the hit list given to Akulov, and Akulov did not fail.

  The maid appeared. She stood by her master’s side. She held his hand. Through open curtains, the Russian had observed the old man consoling himself by screwing her. It had not been at all arousing but Akulov had made himself watch, much like a wildlife photographer cataloguing the mating rituals of primates. Piper had grunted; the maid had not.

  Mercifully at that precise moment the pair were only talking. At this distance, in the open, he could not hear the sounds escaping their lips, but he imagined they were the sickening words lovers pass to one and other. It wasn’t his business. He didn’t care what was or was not being said, what was or was not being promised. But what about the late wife? Would she have wanted her husband to become a monk or would she have approved of his new bedfellow? Piper looked contented, and had done so each day the assassin had observed him. Even now he continued to sip his wine, oblivious to the fact that a single .338 Lapua Magnum round from the Russian’s suppressed rifle was seconds away from entering his chest and ripping out his heart.

  Akulov adjusted the scope of his German sniper rifle. In ordinary times, Piper’s death would be seen as a clear message to his country’s leader, but these were about to become extraordinary times. The senator’s death today would be ignored by tomorrow, and perhaps not be investigated until months after his death – if at all.

  Akulov had not entertained the idea of killing the woman, even though strategically it made sense. She was the only other person in the house and leaving her alive would mean the alarm was raised that much faster, but he had no desire kill her. She was an innocent, a civilian and that went against his code. Besides, he mused, her relationship with Piper was sufferance enough. The maid stepped away and walked back into the house. Moments later her rotund shadow crossed a kitchen window.

  Now Akulov steadied his breathing, watched the sway of the large trees dotting the property and the direction of the gulls as the grey-haired, potbellied Piper raised his wine glass to his mouth for the last time. Akulov made his final adjustments and calculations then gently squeezed the trigger. The .338 round rocketed towards the unwary enemy of Mother Russia, tore through his torso, punched out a fist-sized hole and kept going before it drilled itself into the timber-clad wall of the mansion.

  *

  Jack Tate didn’t see the blue flashing lights in his rear-view mirror immediately; he was lost in the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run”. As the song drew to a close, he heard the sirens and then saw the police vehicle gaining ominously behind him. Tate swore; he couldn’t believe that after all his years of training and active service, he’d made such a rookie mistake. He knew the drill; he pulled the Chevrolet Tahoe over on the shoulder, powered down the window, turned off the engine, and placed his hands in clear sight on the top of the steering wheel. As a police officer stepped out of the liveried Crown Victoria, the next song on Tate’s radio started. He tried not to laugh – it was the Eagles’ classic “Desperado”.

  The officer drew level with Tate’s window but stayed several paces back, as procedure dictated. He asked him to switch off his music and then hand over his driver’s licence and insurance documents. He spoke to Tate without checking them. ‘Is this your vehicle, sir?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who does it belong to?’

  ‘The rental company.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘So what did I do wrong?’

  The officer’s brow furrowed and he took a moment to form his next question: ‘You’re British?’

&nbs
p; ‘From London,’ Tate replied, as the warm August air overcame the lingering cold of the Tahoe’s climate control.

  ‘You were ten miles an hour above the limit back there. We’ve had a lot of accidents on this stretch of road over the years. People see the view, get too excited and then … well, it’s not a pretty sight.’

  ‘I understand.’

  The officer nodded. ‘And what is your destination today?’

  ‘Camden.’

  ‘Business or pleasure?’

  ‘Just a holiday.’

  ‘Holiday?’

  ‘Vacation.’

  ‘On your own?’

  Now it was Tate’s turn to frown; these questions didn’t seem to be usual for a traffic violation. ‘Yes, on my own.’

  The officer gestured with his left hand, the one holding Tate’s documents, whilst his right slid towards his belt and rested on the butt of his firearm. ‘This is a large vehicle for one person.’

  ‘The rental company was out of stock. They gave me a free upgrade.’

  ‘Stay in the vehicle, sir. I’ll be back in a moment.’

  Still holding Tate’s documents, the officer backed away to his patrol car, where his colleague had been talking on the radio. Via his mirror Tate saw a brief exchange between the two before they approached the SUV, each angling for a different side of the Tahoe, weapons drawn. Tate frowned. Every instinct he had, every part of his training, told him to hightail it out of there, put the car into drive and pull away, wheels spinning, leaving the officers choking in the dust … but he was on holiday, not on deployment, and these were police officers not enemy combatants.

  ‘Step out of the vehicle with your arms raised and place your hands on the vehicle!’ the second officer barked.

  Tate sighed. This wasn’t what he needed, and unlike the cops back home, they were armed. He had no choice but to comply. This was where mistakes happened; this was where he was putting his life in the hands of men in uniform he didn’t know, trusting them and trusting their training. It wasn’t the first time he’d had more than one loaded weapon pointed at him. Tate slowly opened the door and shuffled around the side of the SUV as the roadside dust danced at his feet and the sun warmed his back. He kept his eyes firmly fixed front and centre, and watched the armed men approach via their reflection in his window.