The Lynx Assassin (The Society Book 2)

by Karen Guyler

  “Can you find out where he’s based?” Eva asked. “Has he taken any deliveries from Denmark? I’d bet a lot of money Rubin sent him something to appease him. He told us he has a lot of weapons coming on line. What if he’s using Shah to do a test for him?”

  “Heads up,” Iago said. “Carl Rubin just died.”

  The PM wouldn’t be happy.

  “Now we go to battle stations,” Gordon said, “straying or not.”

  47

  “Ready?” Gordon asked Eva as they turned into Whitehall.

  Not so much. She trotted beside him past the row of well-maintained Georgian buildings exactly the same as each other. The gold plaques on either side of the Cabinet Office doorway signposted where they were expected.

  “They’re not going to like that I’m here seeing as I just got fired.” Eva pointed out.

  “I only have your word for that. I haven’t had anything official so I’m playing the see no evil, hear no evil card. You okay with that?”

  “Of course, but—”

  “You’re the one who made the connection. You deserve to take that credit.”

  Even if she’d rather not.

  “Anna,” Outside their meeting room Gordon stopped to talk to a blonde woman in her fifties who made Eva feel underdressed and would make Nora look under-groomed.

  “You stepping outside your lane?” She asked Gordon, then looked at Eva. “What are you doing here?”

  “Eva Janssen, Anna Bailey, Director General of MI5.” Gordon made a clumsy introduction. But she’d already dismissed Eva, splitting her attention between Gordon and anyone else approaching the COBR meeting room.

  “Is it true,” she asked, “about Carl Rubin?”

  “We’ve only seen corroborating evidence so far, nothing to disprove that actuality.”

  “The PM’s going to be so pissed.”

  “Has he been anything other since he took office?” Gordon asked.

  Anna almost laughed. “The deal with Futura Energy was his crowning moment as Foreign Secretary, probably what pushed so many to vote him into the top job.”

  “More than the India/Pakistan accord?” Eva couldn’t help herself.

  “That’s Six’s area, not on my radar.” Anna Bailey dismissed her again, asking Gordon. “So why is she here?”

  “Eva discovered Rubin’s side business, she saved hundreds of lives yesterday at the SSE Arena.”

  Anna studied her harder. “You’re the one who’s got number ten all riled up? If you have to poke at the hornets’ nest, best you have a long stick and fast running shoes.”

  As they joined the line of attendees filtering into the room, Anna added. “I should probably thank you for turning the PM’s eyes away from Five. And you being here means this promises to be the most interesting COBR ever. I’m glad I came.”

  Eva wished she hadn’t heard that.

  The meeting room was almost full when they entered. The screens that covered the end wall acted as one at that moment to show the date and time of the meeting, white text on a grey background. Most of the seats down each side of the polished wooden table that took up most of the room’s floor space were taken, three of the five at the top remained empty. Eva guessed the ones at the foot of the table wouldn’t be used as they were so close to the wall of screens.

  “You’ll have to stand, I’m afraid,” Gordon said. “They’re out in droves, love a good fight.”

  “Is that what this is?” she asked.

  “Don’t worry, the PM rarely shows, even when they’re needed. Stand opposite me so I can direct you, behind me you won’t see.”

  Eva did as he suggested as he sat down and shook hands with the man next to him, Sir Hugo Welch. Eva focused on the screens, hoping he wouldn’t notice her, call out that she shouldn’t be there.

  “All right, everyone,” Mo Banerjee, the new Foreign Secretary, called the meeting to order. “Thank you for coming at such short notice, this could be extremely time sensitive. I’ll hand over to the Director of MI6 as it’s his fault we’re all here.”

  “Thank you, Mo,” Sir Hugo Welch ignored the jibe. “I know you will have all read the briefing packet and so appreciate the urgency of this meeting and why it’s priority one.” He looked around the gathering of esteemed people, up at Eva— no negative reaction, Gordon’s call to him had apparently worked—back at the screens. “An update, Gordon if you would, as this is very much a moveable feast.”

  “Thank you, Sir Hugo.” Gordon consulted his laptop, where Eva knew Iago was uploading everything as it happened. “Gordon Stamford, MI6, Do we have eyes on?” He asked the man at the end of the row whose bearing gave away a military past, despite being dressed in a dark grey suit rather than a uniform.

  “We’re tasking a satellite now, eyes on in,” he consulted his watch though the time in London, Moscow, Washington and Beijing was displayed at the opposite end of the room on red LED screens, “two minutes.”

  Enough time for Gordon to give a run down on Rubin’s public persona. “He came to our attention during a different mission as his true self, namely as an arms dealer. A very successful and profitable one, as we’re learning.”

  “The bird is tasked; we have picture lock.” The military man said. “The Indian Pakistan border.”

  Grey backgrounds melted away and the screens showed what could have been a prison compound exterior wall, tall struts of concrete laden with barbed wire. The clarity of the resolution was astonishing. The shot moved over what looked like newly built bridges, dense vegetation.

  “I’m not seeing much here in the way of infra-structure or people to worry about.” A man on Eva’s side of the table said.

  Gordon nodded at Eva.

  “Can we see the Wagah border post?” She asked. “It’s where they hold a ceremonial taking down of both sides’ flags every day. It’s a huge tourist draw.”

  “Getting co-ordinates.” The military man advised.

  “You don’t believe that’s the target?” The Foreign Secretary asked.

  “We don’t know for certain but knowing tensions in the region—” Of course it was, the Afghani proverb, ‘The wound of the sword or gun will heal, but not that of the tongue’. Eva nodded, underlining her certainty. “Yes, it is the target.”

  “What are you saying?” He asked.

  Gordon gave Eva that small nod again.

  “The arms dealers using the weapon are Pakistani.” she said.

  “What have we got on the Indian border?” Someone said.

  “No,” Eva interrupted, “no, it’s the Pakistani side which is in danger.”

  “You’re saying they’ll target their own people, that’s ridiculous.” The man was well-spoken, sure of his opinion.

  “Why? We have to think about what they’re looking to gain here. Only China supports the Pakistanis in their bid to rewrite the border with India. If they can accuse India of attacking their side, it gives them a sympathy vote. If it happens again and again, the number of dead and injured rise enough that it starts a movement, especially on the back of the accord that the Prime Minister got them to sign. India will be seen on the international stage to be breaking their word. Any casualties in the area can be written off to the ongoing tensions, but the damage to the accord that they’ve signed, they’ll never trust each other again. At the very least more conflict is more business for the gun runners.”

  “We can’t do anything without the say so of the PM.” Another man noted.

  “We’ve tracked the likely courier to a small town within easy reach of the border on the Pakistani side.” Gordon said. “He arrived this morning giving him plenty of time to travel to the border and ready the weapon.”

  “Which is?” Banerjee asked.

  “We don’t know.”

  “It’s all a bit vague, isn’t it?” Someone else noted. “I don’t understand the urgency when we don’t have a full picture.”

  “The urgency,” Anna Bailey was a surprising ally, “is clear. A weapon’s in
situ, your proof there, Gordon, is incontrovertible?” He nodded. “The courier will want to be out of there as soon as possible. The strike will probably be today, the longer it’s in play, the more likelihood there is of discovery. What time is the ceremony?” She asked.

  “Four pm local time,” Eva felt everyone turn with her to check the clocks on the wall. “in around twenty minutes.”

  48

  “I can’t believe you called a COBR for this.” The hook-nosed man said. “There aren’t any British interests here. We should just let them spat; they’ve been at it for years.”

  Eva stared at him. “But now they’re both nuclear powers, this border is more of a tinderbox than it’s ever been, especially after the Indian Government changed the law in Kashmir. It’s in no nation’s interests for them to wage war on each other.” She felt the stares of everyone in the room on her. “A spark like that could cause World War III.”

  The hooked-nosed man harrumphed. “You’re being melodramatic.” Just like a woman, his tone implied.

  The military man answered for her in his quiet manner. “She could be right. If Pakistan are seen to be wronged by India in any grave way, they’ll call on their ally, China, who will call on theirs, North Korea, who would be delighted to have an excuse to take it out on their enemy, South Korea, who will, in turn, ask the West for assistance. It’s all very well having accords in place, memoranda of understanding between one nation and another but, in a situation like this,” he waved an arm at the screened wall, “it’s like dominoes. No one will be untouched. Of course, it could be the usual targeting of each other but we don’t want to be anywhere near the agenda of a Pakistani arms dealer.”

  Mo Banerjee crossed to one of the phones hard-wired on the wall under the clocks and requested Downing Street from the operator.

  Edward Markham appeared on one of the screens, interrupting the Foreign Secretary’s explanation as soon as he saw Eva. “You? What are you doing there?”

  “If I may, Prime Minister,” Sir Hugo beat Gordon to reply, “Ms Janssen is the person responsible for bringing this intelligence to our attention. She has an excellent case, we should listen.”

  “I had your assurance—”

  “Prime Minister,” the military man interrupted, “time is of the essence. We need to decide what to do regarding this credible threat.”

  “It’s hardly credible, the say so of one agent.” The hook-nosed man observed.

  Eva wanted to bang their heads together, shout at them all to stop being idiots.

  Gordon brought Markham up to speed using his favourite phrase ‘we have intelligence that’ more than once.

  “What kind of weapon is it?” Markham asked.

  Eva took a huge gamble, filling the expectant silence with her best guess. “Based on what else Carl Rubin has produced, it’ll be something unknown, unseen so far and very destructive.”

  The PM stared at a spot at the bottom of his screen. The room waited. Eva felt the changing of every red digit on the clocks as the tiny dashes of which they were made up shifted position to change from 8 to 9 to 0, a dance to destruction.

  She pressed her lips together, shuffled from foot to foot until she had to remind herself to stand still. She’d done what she could do, she had to trust they’d do the right thing.

  So much for being in the room, behind the cameras, one step closer to what was happening than an analyst usually got. And yet she’d never felt so helpless, such pressure. How she wasn’t exploding into tiny pieces, she didn’t know.

  “What’s your background in this area?” A man who hadn’t spoken yet asked her.

  “General.”

  “Specifically?”

  “I was on the Russian desk for—”

  “Shouldn’t you be more concerned about what happened in St Petersburg then? Shouldn’t you be wanting to expel Russian diplomats or whatever censure twenty-two British lives are worth?”

  “That was Carl Rubin’s weapon.” She said patiently. “It was his agenda to stoke tensions in the area. It’s an easy shot to get the world to blame and sanction Russia.”

  “And we’re here on your say so that a dead man’s agenda—”

  “As the only person in this room who’s been on the end of this man’s agenda, I think I’m more qualified than everyone else to know what he was thinking.”

  “Target acquired.” The military man clicked, and the satellite feed changed and now they could see a huge crowd of people congregated in seating and standing on either side of a continuous white line painted on the ground. “The Wagah border.”

  “Prime Minister, in case you weren’t aware,” Mo Banerjee said, “if this is a target, the timing will be during the ceremony which will begin at around 10:30.”

  In five minutes Eva’s mind screamed.

  “What can we do?” Markham asked.

  “It’s a benign satellite.” The military man commented to no one in particular.

  Shine a light on the truth, Evie. Her father’s voice came to her from beyond his grave. Except he’d have been there in the danger zone, drawing the world’s media to it.

  “Excuse me, Prime Minister.” Eva adopted the obsequiousness he seemed to respond to better. “As we can’t deploy troops and we don’t know how to stop this weapon, all we can do is show the truth of what’s about to happen. Can we record the satellite’s telemetry and broadcast it to the media? Pakistan and the rest of the world have to know it isn’t India who’s targeting them.”

  The red numbers seemed to have sped up.

  “Is that feasible?” Markham asked.

  The military man nodded, entering something on his keyboard. “We can sell it as a remote pass, a coincidence of a lifetime if there’s anything to see and report.”

  “So what now?” Someone asked. “We just wait?”

  “Yellowstone,” Eva breathed. Rubin’s agenda, too many heartbeats, culling the population. That’s what he was using there.

  Gordon caught it. “Go on.”

  “The super-volcano. Get those people out of there.” Eva shouted over the PM and Foreign Secretary’s back and forth of options. “Rubin talked about a weapon called Yellowstone.” She gabbled into the thorny silence. “If it’s anything like what it’s named after, we have to evacuate.”

  “There’s no having to do anything, that’s not our territory.” Markham reminded her.

  “There’s no confirmation there’s even going to be a strike.” Someone added.

  “We can’t do anything on one person’s guess.”

  The dissension around the table became a round robin.

  Eva shouted over all of them. “Rubin said he wanted to call this weapon Mars, after the god, the bringer of war.”

  “Satellite passing overhead, we can hold the view using a reverse shot.” The military man confirmed.

  “Do it. You are recording?” Markham asked.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “There’s still two minutes until the ceremony—” Mo Banerjee’s reasoning turned into a gasp.

  The image on the screens changed.

  The bickering in the room dropped into silence. On the screens a flash, an explosion on the ground probably, bloomed outwards becoming one, two, three, a daisy-chain of destruction that filled the screens. Even seeing it remotely from thousands of miles away from hundreds of miles above it, it was sobering.

  The military man broke the silence. “We have assets en route for assessment.”

  “We can have humanitarian aid in the area in a matter of hours.” The Foreign Secretary added.

  The dust didn’t take long to settle. There were no complex structures at the border, mostly flimsy seating, wooden fences, a couple of concrete huts, everything staged for posturing rather than practicality.

  “Humanitarian aid for what?” Someone asked.

  It was a good question. The Wagah border crossing was gone. There was no sign of any movement, no wounded, wandering around shocked, looking for survivors, for help. Apart f
rom the smallest scarring showed dark on the ground, the infamous white line that represented India and Pakistan’s divisions was barely touched but everything else was obliterated as if it had never been there.

  49

  “What’s the latest?” Eva went into Gordon’s office for their meeting.

  “It’s been a couple of very tense days on the ground. India and Pakistan are equally edgy, not necessarily a good thing, but it would obviously be worse if Tarik Shah had deployed a conventional weapon on just the Pakistanis. Evidence suggests he did exactly as you said, the first explosion was on that side. He perhaps didn’t understand how the weapon would function. It seems that first explosion fired another and another.”

  “Like a super-volcano,” Eva said.

  Gordon nodded. “Quite.”

  “So many people dead, if only we’d stopped the weapon being used at all. Any news on that?”

  Gordon’s turn to shake his head. “It’ll take time to get our hands on any of the wreckage for analysis. But having the recording from the satellite stopped the escalation we all feared. Plus, our having been able to show the weapon’s track into Pakistan. And we have you to thank for that. The PM’s rather enjoying playing the concerned best friend of both nations, that seems to be how the media are spinning it right now. So have you decided what you want to do? Whatever your decision there’ll be a review.”

  Eva smiled. “Isn’t there always?”

  “So it would seem.”

  “I don’t want to be an analyst again, though I thought I did.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Being in that COBR meeting felt so helpless, so remote. There was nothing I could do there to help any of those people.”

  “Sometimes it goes like that.”

  Eva looked at her hands, back at Gordon. “I want to become a full agent, to operate here in the field through S.”

  He had the best poker face Eva had ever known, but she caught his surprise. “Why?”

  “At the SSE Arena, in the midst of the madness, I could do something to make things better.”