by Blake Banner
“Meaning that you will tell me what you want me to do, and I will agree because I have no choice.”
She turned a smile that had become icy on me.
“Quit whining, soldier. You’re alive and you’ve got your PPK. It could be worse. Incidentally, shouldn’t you be using a man’s gun?”
We drove fast, weaving through the traffic, but after the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge we took a circuitous route, turning back on ourselves several times through the city. We finally crossed the Harlem on the Henry Hudson Parkway, and after that we took the toll road and headed north, past Yonkers for a little more than half an hour, until we came to Pleasantville, in Westchester. We drove through the town and then, weaving through quiet, leafy streets, took the Bedford Road and after five minutes turned into Apple Hill Lane. A couple of minutes after that we rolled through a large, iron gate into sweeping parkland and apple orchards, along a winding gravel path that took us finally to what looked like a genuine Jacobean manor house, gables, tall chimneys and all.
The chauffeur and his pal got out first, scanned the area and opened the doors for us. Then they escorted us to the gabled portico over the front door: a massive oak affair that looked like it would probably withstand a direct rocket strike. She slipped an incongruously small Yale key into the lock, opened it and went inside. The door closed behind us.
We were in a stone-flagged hallway, about ten foot square. The walls were stone too, and directly in front of us there was another, massive wooden door. This one had no lock, but there was a steel box beside it. Colonel Harris opened it to reveal a screen and a keypad. She punched in a code. An electronic voice said, “Please stand closer for face and eye recognition.”
She took a step closer and six green lasers scanned her face and her eyes. Then the voice said, “Please state your name.”
“Colonel Jane Harris.”
There was a metallic clunk and the door swung smoothly inward.
I followed her through into a large lobby with high ceilings supported on wooden rafters, a checkerboard floor and an elegant staircase sweeping up to the next story. To right and left there were closed doors which I imagined led to drawing rooms, libraries and a study that smelled of pipe tobacco.
Colonel Harris spoke over her shoulder as she crossed the lobby toward the farther door on our right. Her voice and her steps echoed among the shadowy rafters above our heads.
“You should know, those two doors we just went through are made of two-inch steel plates, sandwiched between oak. Get trapped in there, and you’re dead meat.”
“Good to know.”
She didn’t pause. She reached the door and pushed through into a study that smelled richly, as I had imagined, of pipe tobacco. Two gabled, leaded windows and a set of French doors in the far wall overlooked sweeping lawns, a pond and woodland. A large fireplace on the right gave warmth to a nest of burgundy chesterfields. The floors were polished boards, strewn with Persian carpets in oxblood red and a deep, rich blue. The walls were paneled in dark oak, and floor-to-ceiling bookcases occupied every available space. On the far left there was a sizeable oak desk, and behind it a man in his early sixties. He looked youthful and vigorous. He was slim, handsome, tough and wiry, with eyes that were sharp and ruthless.
I knew him. I knew him well.
“Brigadier Alexander ‘Buddy’ Byrd.”
He stood and smiled at me, and held out his hand. His voice, when he spoke, was what the Brits call cut glass.
“Bauer,” he said, like he was welcoming me to a dinner party, “Good to see you again. Good of you to come. Please, sit.”
He gestured me to a black leather chair across from his own and the colonel and I sat. My mind was racing, trying to make sense of what was happening. Before I could say anything, the brigadier had started talking again.
“You’re probably surprised to see me here, Bauer. Our last meeting in Afghanistan was more like a farewell.”
I nodded. “Yes sir. I was arrested in New York by the FBI, handed over to a colonel, in plain clothes, from an unnamed unit and have been brought before a British brigadier, whom I last saw when he ejected me from the Regiment. I’d say I’m a little surprised, sir.”
He nodded, like he agreed with me, but offered no explanation. Instead he said, “Shame you had to leave the Regiment. I always considered you an asset. Remind me, what was it, exactly, that happened?”
“Sir?” I frowned.
“In Helmand, in the caves. I never really got your version of the events. What happened?” I hesitated and he smiled. “We only ever heard Captain Hartmann’s version. According to him they rescued Ben-Amini from you, because you were about to assassinate him.” He gave a small shrug. “We always assumed it was an American ruse to get hold of Amini.”
“I told you when you gave me the option to resign…”
“Only briefly. Remind me.”
I sighed. “We, the troop, had witnessed what Ben-Amini had done in Al-Landy just over a week earlier. You get used to seeing atrocities, but this was something special. It went beyond anything any of us had ever seen before. He raped, tortured and murdered an entire village, because the coffee shop owner had encouraged them to club together to buy a TV. Children, little girls of four or five, begging for mercy for their parents...” I shook my head. “I don’t want to remember that. But they come back to me in the night. Every night. The images, the memories, the dead. And worse than the dead are the dying, and those watching them die.”
The room was very silent, very still for a moment. Outside I could see the tops of the trees swaying slightly, silently under the pale sky.
“We moved into the cave, neutralized his men, and he was lying on the floor, curled into the fetal position, weeping. I knew we were supposed to take him alive if we could. We were all mad that he was going to be given some kind of amnesty in exchange for cooperating and providing intel. We thought he should be punished. There was no plan or conspiracy, we all intended to do our jobs, but when I saw him...”
He waited a moment, watching me. “What happened?”
I told the Sarge...”
“Bradley?”
“Yeah, Bradley. I told him to go take a leak, I’d keep an eye on Mohammed. I told Skinner and Jones to do the same.”
He smiled and shook his head. “No, you didn’t. They were with you. It was Jones who told him to piss off. Don’t lie to me, Harry.”
“I don’t remember it that way, sir. Either way, Captain Hartmann turned up, said he had instructions to take the prisoner, and said he would report me for attempted murder.”
“Would you have killed Ben-Amini, if Hartmann had not turned up?”
“If Sergeant Bradley had gone to take a leak, sir, yes, I would have.”
“Good.”
“What’s this about, sir? I was invited to leave. If I left, I would not face a court martial. And, with all due respect, you have no jurisdiction here.”
“Don’t worry, Bauer. You are not on trial. And, as it happens, it was my intervention that scuppered the court martial. I told them to give you the option of resigning.”
My frown deepened. “Why?”
He stood, glanced at the colonel beside me. “Jane, drink?”
“G and T, please, Michael.”
“Bauer? Scotch, wasn’t it, neat?”
I nodded with narrowed eyes and an arched eyebrow. Brigadier Byrd laughed and opened a cabinet, from which he extracted glasses and bottles and fixed three drinks. He handed the colonel her G and T and gave me a whisky, keeping another for himself.
He sat.
“You know what happens when politicians get involved in war.”
“I thought politicians were always involved in wars.”
“Politicians cause wars, Bauer, but sometimes—increasingly—they also get involved in running the war. And when that happens, nobody ever wins. Everything results in compromise and shared profit. And people like Mohammed Ben-Amini go free and are actually rewarded, instead of, as you
say, being punished for what they have done.”
He spread his hands, then laced them over his belly as he leaned back.
“And it’s not just the compromises they make. There is also the question of jurisdiction.
“When you were about to execute Ben-Amini, you were under the jurisdiction of the British Army, but whose jurisdiction was he under? And Captain Hartmann, whose jurisdiction was he under? And how about the cave? It gets awfully complicated. And in the end, all too often, the bad guy gets away scot-free.”
He held my eye for a long moment. Finally I said, “Why am I here, sir?”
“Because,” he said, “we want to offer you a job.”
Chapter Seven
I took a pull on my whisky, savored it and sighed.
“Yeah, I’d got that far, sir. But it sounds like you want me to assassinate somebody.”
He shook his head. “That’s only partly true, Bauer. Let me explain.” He thought for a moment, chewing his lip, then reached for his glass and took a sip.
“In the 1980s and ’90s the world changed, a lot. Thanks to the Thatcher-Reagan alliance, Socialism around the world began to implode, the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War became more of a tepid dislike. But, ironically, as the polarization of world power fell apart, so our enemies around the world began to multiply. Instead of being ‘over there’”—he gestured east—“they were suddenly everywhere.”
“Our? Who’s ‘us’?”
He stared at me for a long moment, then shifted his gaze to his glass and frowned.
“That’s harder to explain. For now, let’s say it’s a loose alliance of Western democracies, the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.”
“The Five Eyes.”
“Yes, an associated project. These five nations—and we are not talking about the acting governments at any given time—found that we have certain common shared interests that are based on a common view of democracy, free trade, rule of law...” He made an “and so on” gesture with his hand. “Values that are not always shared by other Western democracies. So, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the proliferation of hostile nations and organizations that followed, these five Anglophone nations, with common roots and values, came together to form Cobra.”
“Cobra?”
“It was actually the brainchild of Russell Bertrand. He is still the director. Exactly how he got the governments of these five nations to agree is something of a mystery. Some theorize that he had damaging information on most of them and threatened to use it. Whether that’s true or not, he managed to swing it, and Cobra was founded.”
“What is Cobra?” I asked.
“Cobra, to borrow an Americanism, takes out the trash. We are not officially recognized, but we sit uneasily within the gray area of national security, where the executives of the member nations have special powers. We identify targets that we feel should be eliminated, we propose them and, usually, we eliminate them. Sometimes member governments come to us and ask us to take out a particular target. Our criteria for elimination is that the target in question should be truly and unambiguously evil beyond any doubt, they should be a significant threat to other human beings, and must have committed a crime, or be, demonstrably, about to commit a crime, that is truly and unambiguously evil.”
I snorted. “You’re insane. Who decides what is truly and unambiguously evil?”
He gestured at me with an open, upturned palm. “You, for one, in the caves in the Sulaiman Mountains.”
“I am not an organization funded by five states. I was a man acting in hot blood.”
He gave a small laugh. “I fail to see how that makes it more justifiable. We have a growing body of literature, from academics and judges, who define for us what ‘truly and unambiguously evil’ means. You are welcome to read it. Mohammed Ben-Amini would fit very comfortably into that definition. Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, countless more I could list for you that, under any rational view, would benefit the world by not being in it.”
I was shaking my head. “That is what Delta Force, the Seals, the SAS and the SBS are for. They operate within the law and they are accountable to...”
He interrupted me. “Are you saying that you were wrong to want to kill Ben-Amini?”
I hesitated. “It was illegal and the Regiment was right to sanction me.”
“I am not talking about laws and rules, Bauer. I am talking about morality. Would a person, any person, knowing what Mohammed Ben-Amini had done to the village of Al-Landy, be morally wrong to kill him?”
I sighed, closed my eyes, searched for words and reasoning that evaded me. Finally I shook my head. “No, they would not.”
“You have the training, the skill and the experience to do it. And we will pay you very handsomely. Also...”
He smiled at the colonel and she turned to me. “You get to keep what you took from Rusanov and Marku. We’ll even launder it for you. We figure you earned it. As a rule of thumb, if there are spoils from a job, you’re entitled to them, but we don’t sanction out-and-out theft.”
I rubbed my face with my hands and muttered, “Jesus! You want to hire me as a professional assassin.”
“Yes. But the difference between us and the CIA, for example, is that for us it is not enough that somebody is the enemy of a member state. They have to be truly and unambiguously evil for us to act.”
“I feel like I just stumbled into Alice in Wonderland meets James Bond by way of Star Wars.”
He chuckled. “The world is a stranger place than we might think, Bauer. Especially in the halls of power. What those chaps get up to...” He shook his head. “They are truly a law unto themselves.”
The colonel spoke suddenly.
“Don’t make a decision now. Spend a couple of days here, rest, enjoy the facilities. Ask us any questions you need to ask...”
“I only have one question.”
“What’s that?”
“Can I pick my first target?”
They exchanged a glance. She answered.
“That depends to some extent on who that target is.”
“Mohammed Ben-Amini.”
Byrd smiled. “He was the target anyway, Bauer. He is part of the reason we wanted to recruit you.” He sighed again and studied his drink, tipping it this way and that. “But it’s delicate...”
I interrupted him. “Yeah, he’s the US’s baby. They won’t be happy if you take it upon yourself to eliminate him.”
The colonel stood and walked over to the leaded windows. She was a dark silhouette against the brilliant green light from the lawn. “Correction. He’s the CIA’s baby. There were plenty in the administration and the defense community who wanted him eliminated. Al-Landy was not the first of his atrocities, and believe it or not, there are actually people in government who still care about things like that. But the CIA were persuasive that the information he had on the jihadist movements and targets was worth keeping him alive for.”
She turned to face us. “What they were less convincing about was why, having debriefed him, he should not go on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
I nodded a few times, thinking.
“So where is he?”
Again they glanced at each other. Again the colonel answered.
“We don’t know for sure. It’s not easy to get information out of the Firm, and when you can, you can’t be sure the intel you have is reliable.”
I looked at the brigadier. “That’s not a hell of a lot of use, then.”
“We’ve narrowed it down to two probabilities. He’s either in Paris or in Los Angeles.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
When the colonel spoke there was ill-concealed tension in her voice.
“Do you have some technique for getting viable information out of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mr. Bauer? If you have we would be very interested to hear it.”
I sighed. “Fine, point taken, Colonel Harris, but it’s ta
ctics one-oh-one that you do not mount an operation on unreliable intel; and ‘either Paris or LA’ is what I would call pretty unreliable intel. Which is it, Paris or LA? And the street address would be pretty useful too, as well as the plans to his house.”
“You’re right.” It was Byrd and he was nodding. “Of course you are. But that is going to have to be part of your mission. We have people in LA who are looking for him. We think he is more likely to be in Paris...”
“Why?”
“Because he was on the news in the UK and in the States after you captured him, and they would want him to be as anonymous as possible. In continental Europe he was practically unheard of. The chances of his being recognized there are far fewer.”
I grunted. My experience of the Firm was that they didn’t give a damn about that kind of consideration. “You’re thinking like a soldier,” I said. He looked mildly startled. I figured he wasn’t used to being spoken to like that. “The Firm will change your face if they have to. They don’t worry about that kind of thing, and with their budget they don’t need to. They’ll want him close at hand and easily accessible for debriefing, interrogation and consultation. And they’ll want him happy, too. He’s in LA, living large, believe me.”
The colonel sighed audibly. “Our analysts believe he is most likely in Paris, so if you accept the assignment...”
“I already told you I would.”
“Then you’ll be going to Paris, and the first part of your mission will be to track him down and brief us on his whereabouts. Then we’ll proceed to stage two, which will be the execution.”
“Keep going with that clunky military thinking, and the CIA is going to outthink you at every turn.” She looked mad but I shook my head. “You need to be a lot more fluid and hands off. I’ll go to Paris. If he’s there I’ll find him. And then I’ll kill him. After that I’ll tell you how I did it.”
Her cheeks flushed. “You will obey orders, soldier!”
I planted a lopsided smile on my face and showed it to Byrd, then I showed it to Colonel Harris.
“I am not a soldier, Jane. I got kicked out of the Regiment for wanting to assassinate this guy, remember? We tracked him across Helmand, across the desert and then up into the Sulaiman Mountains, to a single cave, where I was about to kill him. Isn’t what I did then, exactly what you want me to do now?