by David Barker
Sim grunted something in reply and closed his fingers around the keyring, shifting it to his pocket as he stood. Maybe he’d be able to keep working on this case after all.
The most dangerous report that Wardle had seen in years was now hovering above his desk glass as innocent as a kite. Some budgetary committee in parliament was questioning the need for a separate Overseas Division. The World War for Water – hyperbole at the best of times – was a faded international crisis. Surely the UK government could revert back to its regular intelligence services? It seemed that Wardle’s department could be shut down on the whim of the mandarins in Whitehall. The pen truly is mightier than the sword, he mused to himself.
Yes, it was true that water shortages were becoming less acute. A better understanding of the situation had helped to reduce consumption. And improved technology was bridging the gap to supply. But his department was still stretched to the limit, dealing with incidents across the globe. How many were directly related to conflict over water, and how many were the knock-on effects: economic poverty, displaced people, food shortages? It was always hard to tell. Wardle suspected that the accountants took a dim view of loose connections. And some of his team’s successes were too sensitive to even appear on the audit trail.
Hmm, Overseas Division could do with a high-profile result, and soon.
Wardle took a bite from a BLT sandwich and walked across his office to the holo-globe sitting on its virtual plinth. The red dots showing the location of all his active agents still included one in Texas. Sim Atkins. There was no mission assignment that required him to be there. But the Director of Overseas Division had cut him some slack, it was the least Sim had deserved after the success of the lunar mission. But the sojourn had been going on too long. Atkins was needed back here, delivering results. Wardle sent a priority recall message.
A file pinged onto his desk glass, glowing orange. A field report. It was from Freda Brightwell, Sim’s old partner. Wardle ignored the rest of his in-box and selected this one straight away. It must be good news. Surely the rescue from Russia had succeeded.
After making contact with the undercover agent, it had taken Freda, Gopal and Rabten another couple of days to cross the Russian border. They were now travelling by train and car from Uzbekistan towards Nepal along a branch of the resurrected Silk Road trading route. Afghanistan, Pakistan then India. Slow but sensible to be keeping a low profile. Wardle knew the checkpoints in that part of the world. They were more interested in checking for smuggled water than fake IDs. The Division’s network of local helpers would see the three agents safely back to Kathmandu.
But Freda’s report contained a worrying hypothesis. The nature of their arrest a couple of weeks ago at the Russian border was not bad luck. There was nothing wrong with their ID cards. Somebody must have had a tip-off about their presence. And that probably meant a security breach or, worse, a mole in Overseas Division. Wardle swiped the file closed immediately, as if somebody might be peeping over his shoulder. He buzzed the intercom.
“Feinberg, get in here now.”
After a few minutes the Israeli appeared, a roll tab under his arm.
“Not letting the precious thing out of your sight?”
David shook his head. “I don’t even want to risk another person touching it in case some internal alarm gets triggered. Like I said before, this was very tough to break into. It could be the best chance we’ve had in years of cracking open the TF network.”
Wardle gestured for his colleague to sit down. “If this office had been bugged by some outside group, would we know about it?”
“There is a full sweep done of every room in the building once a week. If we were unlucky, maybe six days before the device was detected and removed. Assuming they could get it inside the building in the first place.”
“Humour me, and get a sweep done of this room. Immediately.”
David wrinkled his nose. “OK, boss.”
Two hours later, he rushed back into the office.
“You found something?” asked the Director, closing down the report he was reading.
“No... Yes.”
“But nobody’s even come into the office to check, yet.”
Feinberg shook his head. “The nanobots have been crawling all over this place ever since I left you. They found nothing to report. Except that empty bottle of scotch in your drawer.”
“It’s not scotch. It’s 18-year old Balvenie. Was. Anyway, it’s none of your business.”
“No, sir. But the roll tab has brought up some interesting results. Something about the TF using an artificial iceberg as a base. It’s been abandoned now, but might be worth checking out.”
Wardle looked like he had stepped in something unpleasant on the pavement. “Your timing is fucking impeccable. You know that, Feinberg?”
Wardle climbed the stone steps as the low sun cast long shadows down Pall Mall. He nodded to the doorman, trying to ignore the ridiculous outfit the man was wearing. The head of Overseas Division fingered his collar. He had chosen his cheapest, gaudiest tie in the hope that it would pass the dress code but still offend the members of this absurd club. He knew he shouldn’t let it get to him. Wrenshaw had set the venue for the meeting, almost certainly to emphasise his own membership and Wardle’s status as an outsider.
“Ahh, good of you to trot down from Birmingham, old boy.” The head of MI6 held a large brandy glass in his pudgy fingers. He swirled its contents around and took a sip, before motioning for Wardle to sit in the green leather chair opposite him.
The head of MI6. C. Wardle knew what the consonant stood for. Another man appeared at Wardle’s side and took his order for a Balvenie. There was silence for a few moments after the waiter had disappeared. Wardle’s chair squeaked as he tried to make himself comfortable.
“How can I help?” he asked.
“Made a bit of a mess of things, hmm?”
Wardle tried not to react. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Oh come now, old chap. The iceberg assault? Three men dead, no terrorists caught. A very expensive operation. I’m sure you’ve seen the auditor’s report on all of our budgets. Don’t you think it’s time to call it a day?”
“You think I should fall on my sword, just to protect your own precious budget?”
“Departments come and go. You remember MI9?”
Wardle shook his head.
“Neither does anybody else. Your lot had its time when the world war for water was at its peak. You fulfilled your duty, just like department nine did, and now it’s time to step back. What about your fishing? When did you last get up to Speyside?”
“Too long. Water’s rather peaty at this time of year, puts the salmon off the take.”
Wrenshaw took another sip of brandy and then patted Wardle on the knee. “Let us do our job properly. Without interference.”
For a moment, Wardle’s resolve had been crumbling. But that last sentence had stiffened his spine. “I’d rather use my own testicles for bait. If you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to HQ and do some proper work.”
CHAPTER 9
Aktobe, Kazakhstan
A car, driven by the woman who had helped Freda and the others escape from Russia, pulled up outside a cheap-looking office. The headlights switched off as she killed the engine. The sparse street lights cast a watery yellow sheen across the road and up the sides of the buildings. A solitary figure walked past the car and disappeared from view. The driver looked again. There was nobody else around at this hour. She opened the car door and stood up. A hand gripped her throat, with enough power to hurt but just soft enough to let her keep breathing. A voice whispered in her ear.
“Don’t do anything stupid.”
She could feel something sharp in the palm that gripped her. It pressed against her skin.
“Tell me where you took them.”
She managed to rasp a question of her own. “Who?”
The point of a needle pressed into her neck and punctured
the skin. The pain was not as bad as the fear of what might come next.
“Don’t mess me about. I know you helped three people escape. Two men, one woman.”
No reply.
“If you don’t tell me, I squeeze. The needle in your neck releases a toxin. And you die. So, no sudden movements. Talk.”
There was a noise off to their left. The woman’s eyes darted towards the sound, hoping for a witness or a distraction. But the tall man’s grip remained tight. He used his spare hand to pull a gun and pointed it towards the side alley. A black cat emerged from between two buildings. Unlucky for some.
A tear formed in the woman’s eye. “You think you can make me talk? You can go to hell.”
“Probably,” he said. “But you will get there first, I think.” He squeezed the capsule, releasing the toxin, and the woman’s body began to convulse. A few moments later, he let the corpse fall to the ground. The man holstered his pistol and straightened the ski hat on his head. He got into the woman’s car, shifting the driver’s seat back for his long legs. The on-board computer asked for voice print identification. The man pulled a small device from his pocket and pressed some buttons on the screen. The machine analysed the few words of the woman’s voice it had just recorded. It spoke to the car in a perfect match for her speech patterns and the engine started up. The tall man called up a log of the car’s recent journey and set off.
Freda’s turn at the wheel had just begun. Gopal was asleep on the back seat and Rabten was riding up front, next to Freda.
“So, you can understand English, right?” she asked.
He nodded when she glanced across at him.
“Good. How about we try to get you talking some? Yes?”
“Yiz,” he replied.
“Repeat after me. My name is.”
“Namaste,” said Rabten.
Freda shook her head. “No. Listen. My. Name. Is.”
“My num iz.”
What had Gopal called Rabten’s language? A form of Tibetan that sounded like Dbus? She couldn’t even pronounce the name properly. Freda looked at the road stretching up and over the hills ahead of them. It was going to be a long drive.
It took three days to cross Uzbekistan. From Nukus to Dushanbe, Rabten’s English gradually improved. He had never learned to drive at the monastery, so Freda and Gopal had to share the driving between them. Three hours on, three hours off, half an hour for recharging. The electricity stations were always busy. Car batteries had improved greatly through the years, with longer ranges, in part thanks to regenerative brakes. And better recharging technology allowed a battery to be topped up in a fraction of the time it had taken when they first were used on the roads. But still, the bigger batteries were thirsty. And there was only so much could be done to force juice into a car. Thirty minutes at rest every 500 kilometres was not so bad.
“How are you so thin?” Freda asked.
Rabten looked up from his second plate of food and shrugged.
“If you ask me, he’s got worms,” said Gopal.
“Tajikistan should be a doddle,” Freda said.
“Whut is doddle?” asked Rabten.
“It means very easy,” said Gopal, mopping up the last of his soup with a bread roll.
“Plane easier.”
Freda shook her head. “We’re staying away from the airports. HQ says that our helper in Russia has been found dead. The Russians could still be trying to track us. C’mon. The battery should be full by now.”
The monk’s spoon scraped the bowl in double-time.
Gopal saw him looking at the food counter again. “I’ll get you something for the road,” he whispered.
Three hundred kilometres away the tall man with a ski hat plugged his device into a charging station. His software infiltrated the system controlling the charging points at the garage. It then burrowed through to the network of systems at each of the charging stations across Kazakhstan and cross-referenced vehicle identities to see which ones had traversed the country all the way from the Ural Sea to Tajikistan. Ten had made that journey in the last two days. An image of each vehicle flashed up on the screen of the man’s device. Six were HGVs, one was a motorcycle and three were cars. He zoomed in on the images of the cars. One had a single occupant. He pulled up extra images of the remaining two. One of them had the same passenger each time but between charging stations the driver kept changing gender. The tall man thought for a moment. A woman and two men travelling together. He breathed deeply and sniffed at the air, grinning. He got back into his borrowed car and headed out onto the road.
Tajikistan blinked past with just one recharge required. The road took Freda and the others briefly into Kyrgyzstan. Each border crossed was a risk. But there was nothing remarkable about a car on a dusty road, over a thousand kilometres away from the scene of a prison break-out. And their high-quality Overseas Divisions IDs were perfect forgeries. The border officials paid them little attention.
The three agents had a decision to make. Turn right for Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh, across the worst terrain in the most hostile regions of Pakistan and India. Or keep straight on and risk crossing into China, driving through Tibet and finally into Nepal. Neither seemed very appealing. Tibet was where the two men had first met Freda. They had helped to rescue her from a secret base built by the Chinese to steal the frozen water in the Himalayan glaciers. All three had lost a friend on that mission.
“I think we have to risk China,” said Freda.
“No like that place,” replied Rabten. “What they did to monastery…”
“I know. But Kashmir. The politicians could have closed the border. And even if it’s open, this car might not cope with the roads.”
“They won’t expect us to try the China route,” said Gopal. “And if they try to capture us, we go down swinging, OK, pal?” He smiled at the monk.
“I’ll get in touch with HQ,” said Freda. “Get them to fill in online paperwork for our permits. Pull in at the next station Gopal.”
They crossed the Chinese border at first light. The road hugged the outside of a promontory whose peak was adorned with an ancient fort. As the sun rose above the far distant mountains, the stone walls of the stronghold briefly turned orange as if some siege engine had set them ablaze. A hairpin bend forced the road almost back on itself and the fort dropped out of sight. Up ahead, the hexagonal tower of a modern castle appeared where the Chinese custom officials lorded it over passing traffic. As they pulled in for their passes to be checked, Gopal kept checking the rear-view mirror.
“Something wrong?” asked Freda.
“Apart from the sense of impending doom, going back into China, you mean? If you must know there’s a red truck been following us since we past Nur a while back.”
“Plenty of cars along this road, headed towards Kashgar.”
“Maybe. But it’s been going exactly the same speed as us. Always about four hundred metres back.”
Freda turned to look through the back window. “Let’s get through this trial first before we start imagining other problems.”
On the far side of border control, Freda was starting to get a sore neck. She kept turning around and sure enough, four hundred metres away was a big, chunky, red vehicle. It was still possible that it was merely going the same way as them. And a driver maybe who felt comfortable keeping another car in eyesight but not wanting to crowd them. Possible, but not likely. After another hour, the three OD agents pulled into a recharging station and plugged in their vehicle. They moved into the restaurant but chose a table next to the window so they could watch what the truck would do. Freda let out a deep breath when it sailed straight past them. Rabten ordered a huge bowl of rice and stir-fried vegetables and Gopal went for a pee.
An hour after they had set off again, Freda swore loudly. Rabten asked what the words meant, but she just pointed in the rear-view mirror. The red vehicle had re-appeared.
“I wish we had Lach with us,” said Gopal. His friend had helped them on the Him
alayan mission and was a crack shot with his sniper rifle.
“We got any weapons?” asked Freda.
“Only Rabten’s hands. They’re lethal enough.”
“If we can get the driver out of his truck.”
They continued to head East. The valley floor gradually widened as the mountains on either side shrank back. The fecund plain of Kashgar appeared as the shadows of a low sun started to stretch across the countryside. Hopes for a welcome night’s sleep were ruined by the flash of red on the road behind them. Like the echo of an unwelcome flare on tired retinas.
“Does that vehicle ever need recharging?” asked Gopal in a raised voice.
“Does the driver?” said Freda. “I say we stop for the night, somewhere busy in the centre of Kashgar. Take it in turns to keep guard, yes?”
“I stand guard,” said Rabten. “Just sat here all journey. Make useful, yes?”
Freda nodded. “OK, thanks.”
They shared a large twin room. Even with a martial arts expert sitting up all night, Freda found it hard to sleep. Her muscles tried to relax into the bed but she could not switch off her brain. Gopal’s snoring was not exactly helping. She had shared so much time, in close physical proximity to the other two agents, they were starting to feel like brothers. Privacy and embarrassment at bodily functions had been lost on the road many miles ago. But still. Listening to somebody sawing logs at 2am was excruciating. She threw a trainer at the other bed. The ex-Gurkha grunted and rolled over onto his side. The faint, comforting sounds of a hotel in a busy city filtered through the walls, until Rabten began to chant his quiet prayers. Freda screamed silently and pulled the pillow tight against her ears.
Freda was staring out of the window, grasping a mug of steaming coffee. She had given up trying to doze as soon as sunlight had crept across the hotel window. At 4am there had been few people around, but she had tracked down a pawn shop and banged on the door until the owner opened up. Inside, she had found an ancient revolver and tried to buy it. The contact from Russia had supplied each agent with a pair of gold sovereigns – untraceable and highly acceptable in every country in the world. The pawn shop keeper had wanted both sovereigns for the gun and when he had included a box of ammo, Freda had agreed. It was ridiculously over-priced but Freda just knew that their tail wouldn’t keep his distance forever.