The Apocalypse Fire (Ava Curzon Trilogy Book 2)

by Dominic Selwood

  By the time the helicopter came down in a secluded arable farm just east of Nuremberg, there was an armed German police escort ready to ferry them to the freshly improvised roadblock on the northbound section of the E51.

  The Bavarian authorities had insisted that they would make the arrests. They would then hand the Russians and the Shroud over to the British, who would be given clearance to fly them to the British Army facility at Sennelager, an hour and a half north, where Swinton would join them.

  Now, parked up on the wide tree-lined Autobahn beside the roadblock, Ava was watching attentively out of the large riot van’s grille-covered window, taking in the lengthening queue of cars.

  She was acutely aware that she did not know a great deal about modern Russian forces. After her experiences in Ethiopia, she had been content to let others specialize in Russian affairs, leaving her free to focus on the Middle East. The only small concession had been during her first year at MI6, when she had spent two months with the Russia desk, as a compulsory part of learning about the Firm’s work.

  The attachment had been an eye-opening time.

  She had discovered that, despite the end of the Cold War, relations between the West and Russia were permanently strained, and the Russia desk was as active after the fall of Communism as it had been before. As a linguist, she had quickly mastered the Russian alphabet – enough to read names on files and maps – but had not taken it any further. In no time, the two months were up, and since then her knowledge of Russia was pretty much gleaned from newspapers and television.

  Nevertheless, she was under no illusions about the current hair-trigger diplomacy between Moscow and Europe. Relations were at breaking point, with heavy weaponry being deployed by both sides across Eastern Europe and Syria. Tensions were genuinely high, even if the politicians played them down. And now, here was a team of Russian Special Forces soldiers pulling off a lethal operation in the heart of mainland Europe.

  She looked around. The roadblock was not exactly a hi-tech affair – just a series of red-and-white-striped barriers with the word ‘POLIZEI’ in large letters, narrowing the traffic to one lane. Behind the barriers, parked up around her, were a handful of police vehicles and bikes.

  She watched as the cars on the northbound section of the road slowly approached the improvised checkpoint, where armed German police commandos were stopping any suspicious vehicles.

  Before landing, the SAS unit leader had briefed Ava fully. This was a baby-sitting operation, he explained. The orders were to take charge of the Russians and deliver them to Sennelager. If, for any reason, things ‘got noisy’, Ava and Mary were to keep out of the way and let the men from the Regiment do their job.

  Before disembarking the helicopter, all six of them had put on tactical ops waistcoats, and radio headsets tuned into the designated Bavarian police net for the operation.

  As Ava watched the three lanes of crawling traffic through the window, she suddenly heard things kicking off.

  Bike riders from the German police commandos were several miles to the south, surveying the incoming traffic. They had spotted and positively identified the black Mercedes with its four occupants as it slowed to join the queue for the roadblock.

  “Ihre Papiere, bitte.” The policeman’s voice was coming over Ava’s headset loud and clear. “Your papers, please.”

  There was a momentary silence, broken suddenly by the shrill sound of screeching tyres, followed by four rapid gunshots.

  Ava’s heart missed a beat.

  What the hell was happening up there?

  The SAS corporal leaned forward and thumped the padded shoulder of the policeman at the van’s wheel. “Move!” he ordered. “Now!”

  Ava blocked everything else out and was listening to the scene of chaos unfolding in her earpiece. Multiple voices were shouting in German, and it was not possible to tell what was happening.

  Which side had started the shooting?

  She tugged her seatbelt to lock it tight as the van accelerated hard, squealing up the Autobahn’s hard shoulder.

  She had no idea how far ahead the Russians were, but judging by the howl of the van’s engine and the speed at which the cars in the lanes on the other side of the barrier were blurring by, she suspected the distance to the Mercedes was diminishing rapidly.

  Her backseat view through the armoured windscreen was partially obstructed. But in what seemed less than a few seconds the driver was shouting, and she braced herself as he pulled the handbrake up hard, spinning the van ninety degrees, sending it skidding to a halt sideways across the hard shoulder.

  The SAS team had the doors open before the vehicle had stopped. They were pouring out, weapons drawn, and converging on the Mercedes, which had squealed to a halt to avoid the inevitable collision.

  Ava had her gun in hand and her own door open a fraction of a second later. There was no way she was going to remain a target in the van. She preferred her chances down on the road.

  She hit the ground hard, landing on the rough tarmac in a prone firing position, the SIG aimed at the scene up ahead. As a stream of loud machine gun fire raked the front of the vehicle, something heavy crashed into her legs. She looked back, and saw Mary beside her, a chunky Beretta in her hand, also trained on the chaos up by the car.

  The Mercedes’s doors were open, and Ava could already see one of the Russians slumped dead at the wheel. The others were taking cover behind the stranded car, while the SAS team was closing in from a variety of directions.

  Ava thought she would feel something on seeing Russian soldiers again – some desire for revenge or closure for what had happened in Addis Ababa. But she did not. These were different men. And it was a different time. They were not even in uniform.

  It was pandemonium, with members of the public panicking and screaming in their slow-moving vehicles only yards away as the contact escalated.

  Glancing back, Ava saw Mary take careful aim and fire. Up by the Mercedes, one of the Russians doubled over as the round ripped a hole in the front of his shoe and tore deep into his foot.

  “Which part of the Vatican did you say you were with?” Ava shouted, not quite believing what she had just seen.

  “The bit they don’t teach you about at Sunday school.” Mary grimaced, squinting to take aim again.

  Another burst of submachine gun fire hit the van, sending a fresh spike of adrenaline into Ava’s system. She knew she was now a sitting duck where she was, and needed to take cover behind the line of stationary cars up ahead.

  Scrambling up, she ran crouching as low as she could. To her surprise, she could hear Mary putting down covering fire.

  Ava dived behind the nearest car. A fraction of a second later, three rounds bit into the tarmac immediately behind her, kicking up puffs of debris.

  She moved forward again, drawing level with a red Saab. One of the SAS men was up by the front wheel. He was positioned low, firing in the direction of the Mercedes.

  Ava’s heart was hammering as the intensity of the gunfight increased.

  Her mind returned to her earlier conversation with Swinton, when he had reminded her of the last operation she had been on. It had ended here, in Germany, with her staring straight down a barrel as a rabid neo-Nazi prepared to execute her.

  The middle of the night flashbacks came later.

  She blinked the memories away, and focused on just one thought.

  Her job was to find the silver suitcase.

  The soldier turned and smiled briefly, motioning for her to stay down where she was, at the rear of the car.

  She crouched even lower, head down, and the next moment heard a crack and a soft thumping sound. She looked up, and her stomach turned as the large SAS man toppled backwards, glass eyed, an ugly ragged bullet entry hole just above his left eyebrow.

  Something inside Ava kicked into autopilot.

  She scrambled forward and took up a firing position where the soldier had been, aiming between the cars in the direction of the Russians’ aban
doned vehicle.

  A bullet flew past her head so close she felt the wind whipping her face. A millisecond later, she heard the ping as it ricocheted off a car close behind her.

  She returned fire, but the Russian had moved back to a position of safety on the other side of the Mercedes.

  Behind her, she could hear more armed Bavarian police arriving on motorbikes.

  The noise of the shots coming from all directions was deafening.

  Up ahead, a Russian appeared from behind the Mercedes. Without hesitating, she took careful aim, firing two rounds at the same time as she heard others opening up on him. He dropped instantly, his machine gun spraying rounds over the queuing cars as he toppled.

  Then, as suddenly as it had all started, it was over.

  There was an eerie silence.

  Two Russians lay on the road by the car, and one was slumped in the driver’s seat. The other had fallen further away, behind the car.

  Without pausing, the Bavarian police commandos scrambled to the dead bodies and disarmed them, while the three SAS men moved to the bullet-riddled Mercedes and began going over it.

  Ava ran to the driver’s side door, her gun still at the ready.

  By the time she got there, Mary was a few yards off, behind the car, kneeling beside the leader of the Russians. She had his slim mobile phone in her hand, and a similar-sized object with no keyboard pressed against it.

  Ava leaned through the open door and stretched across the dead driver – a large wet patch in his chest soaking his black robes.

  She pressed the dashboard button to unlock the boot, and heard the dull click as it sprang open.

  Moving round to the rear of the car, she lifted the lid fully.

  There, nestling among a selection of clothing and equipment bags, was the silver suitcase she had seen on the surveillance video from Turin Cathedral.

  She stared at it in amazement, feeling her breathing quicken, not quite believing that inside it, quite possibly, was one of Christendom’s most controversial relics – a treasure the Church never let out of its sight.

  Millions of diehard sindonistas believed it was the genuine burial shroud of Jesus – the cloth which wrapped his body as he lay in the tomb one Passover Friday sometime in the early first century AD. Others were convinced it was a medieval artefact, produced either as a pious artwork or a cynical fraud. And around the fringes of the heated debate were the conspiracy groups, who remained convinced it was the death shroud of the last Templar Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, or that it had been painted or photographed by Leonardo da Vinci, or some other whacky theory.

  She shook her head.

  People would believe anything.

  Reaching down, she took hold of the case’s handle, but without warning her hand was knocked away hard.

  Spinning around, she raised the SIG with lightning speed in an instinctive reaction, only to find herself staring into the face of the SAS corporal with the mutton chops.

  “Let’s be careful, shall we, ma’am?” he suggested, lifting the case free from the car. “Get the lads to check it for booby-traps before you open it?”

  She stared at him, wondering what kind of idiot would encase a priceless ancient cloth artefact with explosives. But she slowly nodded. There was no harm in being cautious.

  Suddenly, from the corner of her eye, she caught a rapid movement behind them as an engine accelerated aggressively. Her head snapped round in time to see one of the police motorbikes speeding off the wrong way down the line of parked cars.

  The rider was dressed in the black robe of a Russian monk.

  With no warning, a gun fired beside her.

  “Nicht schießen!” a policeman bellowed in her earpiece. “Don’t shoot!” But no one was shooting any more, as the motorbike was now scything its way between the two lines of stationary cars, and there was no clean shot without endangering the public.

  The SAS corporal slammed the boot of the Mercedes shut. He scowled at Mary, who was leaning against the car, the colour drained from her face.

  “He had at least two holes in him, and wasn’t moving,” she answered defensively, heading off the inevitable criticism.

  The corporal breathed out heavily, glaring at her.

  Up ahead, the other two were loading the body of their colleague into the van, ignoring a German policeman who seemed on the verge of interfering.

  Ava fell in beside the corporal as they headed to the van. “Sorry about your friend.”

  He blinked an acknowledgement before turning to his team mates. “Let’s get out of here,” he ordered.

  “Can you check the case?” Ava asked, climbing in.

  He nodded, putting the silver suitcase by his feet.

  “Right then.” Ava turned to face the group. “As there are no prisoners to drop off at Sennelager, let’s scan the case for explosives, then get it airborne and straight back to London.”

  Chapter 7

  Chelobityeva District

  Moscow

  Russian Federation

  THE SNUG-FITTING RUBBER earbuds were sending growling thrash metal blastbeats deep into Nikolay’s auditory canals.

  He typed quickly, embedding a path through a series of servers buried in the Deep Web, far below the internet’s surface, finally emerging into obscure militant chatrooms in Toulouse and Utrecht.

  He knew that the NSA would throw immense resources into tracking the origin of the video, so for fun he added an even deeper layer, taking the trail back to a technical academy in Guangzhou, South China. Finally, at the end of the chain, he mapped it to a server in Damascus.

  When the Yanki finally unravelled it, all fingers would point to Syria, just as he had been ordered.

  But what the NSA would never find was the rack under the window behind him.

  He turned to look at it, smiling – four independent blade servers, each linked to a bank of stand-alone routers, in turn wired into a phone switcher cycling between a cluster of pay-as-you-go numbers.

  The gear was new. State of the art. He particularly liked the part of the deal allowing him to keep it all afterwards.

  When he was done, he would only leave it running for two hours. That would be plenty of time for the video to be copied onto mirror sites by its adoring fans, shared on social media, and downloaded onto thousands of smart phones, where it could be passed around freely.

  Nothing would point back to him.

  He looked out of the dirt-caked window at the crumbling red brick buildings around him. This part of town was a decaying shell, but it served his purpose perfectly.

  He had leased the office in the former factory three days earlier. The area was never going to attract the glitzy businesses of Tverskaya Street. Instead, dozens of anonymous corporations came and went in the decrepit building every year, and that was just fine.

  Nikolay’s company, Volga Trading Solutions, did not exist, of course, except in the online register of the Russian Federal Tax Service. Hacking into their database and adding the company’s name had been a lot simpler than the bureaucratic nightmare of actually incorporating a company in modern Russia.

  Besides, he only needed the company for a few days, and it would take the tax authorities a lot longer than that to find his alteration to their digital records.

  The building’s dumpy leasing manager had made a copy of Nikolay’s forged electronic ID, scrutinized his shiny new business card, checked the tax register, pocketed the eighty thousand Roubles deposit and first month’s rent, and given him the keys.

  Easy.

  He was not planning on staying around. The manager would soon find the office empty, and simply strike Volga Trading Solutions off his list, before leasing the pokey room to someone else.

  As he drummed along nervously to the music on the stained beige plastic desk, he finally saw the confirmation he had been waiting for flash up onto his laptop screen.

  A wave of elation surged through him.

  He had done it!

  The White
House’s IT security was formidable.

  But he was in.

  He did not call himself ‘Apollo’ for nothing. Although the ancient Greek god was widely worshipped as the sun and as the patron of music and prophecy, he was also famed for his plague-tipped arrows.

  Nikolay had planned it carefully.

  There was almost no way to beat Washington’s mainframe security structure. But people, on the other hand, were something else. They disobeyed rules all the time.

  It had taken less than half a day to find out the e-mail addresses of eighteen ordinary White House employees: maintenance, secretaries, catering, and other non-political staff. Then he had the slightly more laborious task of mining personal information on each of them, like the names of friends, children, and pets. Fortunately, the internet was one big register of exactly such details.

  The rest was kindergarten stuff. Hack one of their friends’ e-mail accounts, then send the target an e-mail from the friend attaching what promised to be photograph of a child or pet.

  Despite all the warnings people endlessly received about cybersecurity, there was always someone who clicked, even when the e-mail was flagged up as potentially dangerous.

  On this occasion it was Jake Buckner, one of the White House’s head groundsmen, who was keen to see a picture of his beloved white boxer.

  Nikolay smiled. They had learned nothing since the President’s e-mails had been hacked in 2014. Also by a Russian.

  The moment after Jake clicked on the attachment, Nikolay’s code went live in the White House’s system, seeping into its petabytes of ones and zeros, allowing him to open up a temporary backdoor disguised as an SSL connection. From there, he eventually found his way to the White House’s public website.

  Timing was everything. The longer he remained trespassing, the more likely he was to be discovered.

  Typing fast, he queued the subroutines, then hit the worn Enter button, simultaneously publishing the film on the servers in Toulouse and Utrecht, and redirecting the front page of the White House’s public website to them.

  In a final step, he released the social media packet he had prepared, sharing the film simultaneously via a host of anonymous and sockpuppet accounts on the Dark Net, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and a range of other social and P2P media.