by Rob Sinclair
Grainger let out a cry. Her finger twitched on the trigger.
Logan wasn’t sure whether she would actually do it. In the end, it made no difference. Logan was already moving. His balled fist caught Grainger in the gut as he lunged forward and she exhaled painfully, doubling over. Logan sent a blow to the back of her neck and Grainger collapsed.
‘I’m sorry, Angela,’ Logan said, looking down at her.
He reached down and grabbed the gun from her limp hand and strode back to Evans. He kicked him hard in the groin, then stood on Evans’s injured ankle, grinding his boot into the bloody mess. Evans’s mouth gaped open, his head shook, his eyes bulged, looking like they would pop right out of his head. He let out a long, silent scream.
When it looked like Evans was on the brink, Logan took his foot off. He wanted to punish Evans, but he couldn’t let his need for revenge get in the way of what was still left to do: he had to find Lindegaard. Tom Grainger too. He had to finish this. And Evans might be the only man who could help him do that.
Logan kneeled down on top of Evans and pushed the barrel of the handgun into Evans’s shoulder.
‘Talk,’ Logan said.
Evans panted and gasped but didn’t say anything.
Logan pushed the gun down harder and Evans’s face creased up.
‘I can do this all day,’ Logan said.
‘You can’t stop it now,’ Evans shrieked. ‘It’s too late. Grainger was right. You have to die, Logan. It’s the only way.’
‘Where is Lindegaard?’
Evans pursed his lips, a show of defiance.
‘Tell me where he is!’
‘Don’t you get it, Logan?’ Evans said, managing to laugh in between his pained breaths. ‘I’m just like you. I was trained just like you.’
And Logan did get it. Evans wouldn’t talk. Not like this. And Logan didn’t have the luxury of time.
‘You’re nothing like me,’ Logan said.
‘It doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not. I won’t help you. I’m dead already. I know that.’
‘Fine by me,’ Logan said.
Yes, he wanted to hurt Evans. He wanted to hurt him badly. But Logan knew that once the anger had subsided, he would get no real satisfaction from having made Evans suffer. He wasn’t a sadist.
Logan stood off Evans and cocked the handgun, then pointed it at Evans’s head.
‘Wait!’ Evans begged. ‘Wait.’
Logan hesitated but didn’t say a word.
‘Don’t you want to know why?’ Evans said. ‘Don’t you want to know why I did this?’
‘No,’ Logan said.
‘You killed my father!’ Evans screamed.
Logan wasn’t listening. His finger was already pulling the trigger. Evans’s words hadn’t even registered before the bullet tore through his skull, leaving a small, dark hole in his forehead.
And just like that, he was dead.
Chapter 51
‘Angela, come on, get up.’
She opened her eyes groggily and closed them.
‘Wake up, Angela,’ he said.
She opened her eyes again and fought hard to keep them from shutting. Logan was standing over her. Winter was at his side.
‘Come on,’ Logan said, putting his hand under her shoulder and hauling her to her feet. ‘It’s time to go.’
It took a few seconds for her to take her own weight. When she had properly come around, she shrugged Logan off.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, looking down.
‘Yeah, I know,’ Logan said, sounding less than convinced.
There was an awkward silence. Grainger didn’t know what to say. A small part of her was surprised she’d woken up at all. It wasn’t beyond comprehension that Logan might have pulled a gun out and shot her for what she’d just done.
Really, did she deserve anything more?
‘We know where Lindegaard is,’ Winter said to her.
Grainger said nothing but looked down at Winter’s leg. A torn piece of cloth was tied around his thigh.
‘I’ve got Logan to thank for that,’ Winter said. ‘The bullet took a good chunk of flesh out of my leg, but I guess I fared better than that lot.’
He pointed over toward the bodies lying on the ground. Grainger glanced at them. At Evans. He’d been alive, screaming at her to kill Logan, just minutes earlier. Now he had a hole in his forehead that was dribbling blood. She quickly looked away again.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ Logan said.
She hesitated. This wasn’t the reaction she had expected from Logan at all. She’d just been pointing a gun at his head. He was acting almost as though nothing had happened.
Had she really intended to pull the trigger? She didn’t know. She just knew she had to do something to save Tom.
‘I didn’t know what else to do,’ Grainger said to Logan. ‘I was scared. Confused.’
‘I know. No need to explain. I’ll help you save him. Lindegaard is finished. I’m going to make sure of that.’
‘Why are you still helping me?’
‘If you’d really wanted to shoot me, you would have done. I know you, Angela. You’re an ace with those things. Your stance, the grip on the gun, the finger on the trigger. You’re a professional. What I saw when you pointed that gun at me was something else. That wasn’t you. I knew you wouldn’t do it.’
He certainly sounded a lot more confident about that than she’d felt.
‘What now?’ Grainger asked, her tone wary.
‘We think we know where Tom is,’ Winter said.
‘How?’ Grainger said, surprised.
‘While you were out of it, we found a phone on Evans’s body,’ Winter said. ‘There weren’t too many numbers on there. One of them was Lindegaard’s.’
‘You called him? You spoke to him?’
‘No. We debated it. In the end, we decided against it. But we did find a number of recent calls on the phone to a hotel in central Beijing.’
‘Lindegaard may still be there,’ Logan said.
‘We need to get out of here, head back to the city,’ Winter added.
‘Come on, we need you for this,’ Logan said, holding his hand out to her.
Grainger hesitated.
Her head was filled with confusion. She had been desperate. There was no other explanation for her actions. Of course she hadn’t wanted to shoot Logan, but it had seemed like the only option.
Twice she’d held a gun up at Carl Logan. Somehow or other, twice he’d forgiven her. If she was in any doubt about whether he was the right man for her, whether he was the right person for her to partner with on what was undoubtedly a troubled road ahead, that surely gave her the answer she needed.
She took his hand and he pulled her in, then wrapped his arm around her shoulders. The three of them headed back through the derelict building to the parked car outside.
Chapter 52
It was dusk as they made their way back into central Beijing. The traffic was still heavy and it was fully dark by the time they passed back into Dongcheng district. There had been little talk on the way. Logan’s mind was filled with thoughts as to what had happened and why. With both Grainger and Evans.
Despite his words of reassurance, Logan was left with a bitter taste in his mouth. He wasn’t sure whether it was from Grainger having pointed a gun at him or from his lack of remorse at knocking her out. Regardless, he felt he could understand the turmoil she had been in. She hadn’t wanted to kill him. She’d just wanted a way out. A way to make all of the torment stop. Killing him wasn’t the answer to that, though. He figured that deep down she knew that too. Despite what had happened, he still trusted her. He had to. It was the only way he could make sense of how he felt for her.
As for Evans’s dying words, they were still resonating in Logan’s head. He had barely heard them at the time, but he was now replaying them over and over again.
‘How did you find out?’ Logan said to Winter, who was sitting in the back seat of the car. �
�About Evans.’
Logan realised his question had been vague, but Winter seemed to understand what he meant.
‘It just took a bit of digging,’ Winter said. ‘It’s not the only family connection in this.’
‘No?’
‘Lena Belenov was Lindegaard’s niece. It was what tipped me off about Evans.’
Logan froze, almost losing control of the car as the words rattled in his head.
‘It was Lindegaard’s big secret,’ Winter said. ‘He’s been playing the agencies against each other for years. Lena was his way into the FSB. The two of them have been concocting dirty deals and tit-for-tat missions to exploit their power ever since she joined.’
Finally, everything that had happened started to make sense to Logan. The deal to hand him over to the FSB had been Lindegaard’s work all along. Logan had suspected it, but hadn’t been able to pinpoint why. Lena, who had become Logan’s nemesis during his time in the Siberian gulag, had been working with Lindegaard from the start.
And it had been Lindegaard who had sold out Mackie too. He might not have pulled the trigger, but Mackie’s blood was on Lindegaard’s hands.
‘Lindegaard is trying to bring down the JIA,’ Winter said. ‘There’s a long trail of dead bodies following his moves. And right now, he’s not far off completing his mission.’
‘But why?’ asked Grainger.
‘Because we were too close,’ Logan said. ‘Too many cooks in the kitchen. With the work we were doing, it was only a matter of time before his link to Belenov was uncovered.’
‘Exactly. You crossed paths with him one too many times,’ Winter said. ‘We all did. And with you running amok in Russia, I think he panicked. He was quite content while you were in the hands of the FSB – which was his doing in the first place – but when you escaped, everything changed. That’s what kicked this all into action. He had to move fast before you tore apart everything he’d worked to build.’
‘What about all the other people who’ve helped him, though?’ Grainger said. ‘It’s not like he was working alone. They can’t all have been in on it with him.’
‘Maybe, maybe not,’ Winter said. ‘Evans certainly was. The others may have been dirty or just doing what they were told.’
‘So what did you find on Evans?’ Logan asked. ‘He said I killed his father.’
‘Well, I had the family connection with Lindegaard. So I wondered what Evans could have in his past. And if anyone had cause to want you dead, Logan, then Evans certainly did.’
In a way, Logan could relate to Evans’s cause. And he was sure Grainger could too. It was her scheme to exact revenge on the man who had killed her father that had first brought Logan and Grainger together.
He wondered what she was thinking now. Whether she had sympathy for Evans. Whether that very reason had convinced her to turn the gun on Logan.
‘Who was it?’ Logan asked.
‘John Webb,’ Winter said.
The name, one that Logan hadn’t heard for years, sent a rush of memories through his head of a baking rooftop in Marrakech.
A strange thought then occurred to Logan. In all the years that had passed since, all the water that had gone under the bridge, all of the troubles he’d been through and all of the changes in his outlook on life, he had never once asked Mackie why. Why Webb, a fellow JIA agent, had been a target.
But Logan had been a different man back then. At that time, as a young man in his twenties, he had revelled in the newfound responsibility he held.
The questions, the doubts, the chinks had come much later.
‘Who was John Webb?’ Grainger asked.
‘He was a JIA field agent,’ Winter said. ‘Like Logan.’
Logan winced. It was true. Webb really had been like Logan – the younger agent had even looked on his ultimate foe as someone to emulate.
‘You killed him?’ Grainger said to Logan.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
What could he say? The truth was, he didn’t know why he’d had to kill Webb. Logan had no way of justifying his actions that day other than he had done what he was told to do. He knew today he could never operate like that. He couldn’t pull the trigger now unless he knew he was justified in doing so. But his morality hadn’t always been so established.
‘Webb was a rogue agent,’ Winter said, coming to Logan’s rescue. ‘If Logan hadn’t killed him, chances were he would have had Logan killed soon enough.’
Winter’s qualification seemed to do the trick in pacifying Grainger’s interest. And the commander’s words were also more than welcome to Logan’s mind too, giving him a very belated justification for what he’d done all those years ago.
‘And then there was Venezuela,’ Logan said. ‘I killed two of Lindegaard’s agents there. One directly. That was my first run-in with him. In his eyes, I’ve been a marked man ever since.’
‘But what you didn’t know was that even then Lindegaard was working against us.’
‘What?’ Logan said.
‘Janet Ford, the CIA agent you killed. She wasn’t just extracting information from the cartel – she was passing it back too. That meeting you came across, the CIA were selling out Leo Pinilla. You know, what you did gave him a fighting chance of survival at least. And his death was certainly quicker and less painful than it would have been otherwise.’
Logan didn’t respond. Not for the first time in the conversation, he was shocked. Pinilla’s death had long been a dark cloud over Logan’s career, at least in his eyes.
‘Like I said,’ Winter carried on, ‘Lindegaard has been dirty for a long time. Way before he came to work for the JIA.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s about to come to an end,’ Logan said, gripping the steering wheel as tightly as he could, trying to channel the fury that was building inside him.
Not long after, they arrived at the deluxe, high-rise hotel. Logan pulled the car over and killed the engine.
‘Please tell me you have a plan this time?’ Winter said. ‘I’m not sure I can take being shot again today.’
‘Yes,’ Logan said. ‘This time I have a plan.’
Chapter 53
Logan explained the ploy to Winter and Grainger. Needless to say, Grainger was fraught with worry. Tom Grainger was nothing more than a pawn in a grand scheme of deception and betrayal. As far as Grainger was concerned, saving his life was now the goal. But Logan knew that whatever action they took from here was a gamble. They had to at least try, though. And one way or another, he would get Lindegaard. Of that Logan was certain.
He took out Evans’s phone and made the call. Lindegaard picked up on the third ring.
‘Evans, where are you? I was wondering what the hell had happened to you.’
‘Think again,’ Logan said.
There was a brief pause. Logan could almost hear the cogs turning in Lindegaard’s mind.
‘Logan. So Evans is dead.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think you don’t know when to quit.’
‘I could say the same of you. But no, Evans isn’t dead. What use would he be to me dead?’
‘We had a deal with Angela. It looks like poor Tom isn’t going to come out of this too well.’
‘You certainly know how to make a deal,’ Logan said, glad that Grainger couldn’t hear Lindegaard’s words about Tom. ‘How about a new one?’
‘What could you possibly offer me?’
‘Your life. And Evans’s life. In exchange for Tom Grainger.’
‘How do I even know Evans is still alive?’
‘You don’t.’
‘Put him on.’
‘No.’
‘Then I may as well just kill Tom Grainger now.’
‘No, you won’t.’
‘Logan, you’re annoying me now. Goodbye.’
Logan’s heart skipped a beat as he wondered for a split second whether he’d just signed Tom Grainger’s death warrant. ‘You put that phone down and I’ll never stop, Lind
egaard,’ he blurted out, thinking on his feet, hoping his forthright tone would keep Lindegaard’s interest. ‘You should have figured that out by now.’
No one spoke for a few moments, but Logan could hear Lindegaard’s heavy breaths so he knew his adversary hadn’t hung up. Tom Grainger was still alive – Lindegaard’s words had all but confirmed that. But unless Logan could keep Lindegaard on the phone and get him to agree to the plan, Tom was a dead man.
‘What’s the deal?’ Lindegaard said.
‘You give us Tom Grainger. You get Evans back. Everyone walks away.’
‘That’s it?’
‘What have you got to lose?’
‘Quite a lot, actually. But seeing as you’re still alive, it does seem like my options are running thin.’
‘I’m glad you’re finally seeing sense.’
‘Where and when?’
Logan gave Lindegaard the address for the bogus exchange. Logan had no intention of going to the place. It was simply a ruse to get Lindegaard into the open.
‘You and Tom come alone,’ Logan said. ‘You’ve already mixed enough people up in this. No point in adding any more bodies to the list.’
‘I’ll be there in an hour,’ Lindegaard said before ending the call.
Logan put the phone down on his lap, relief washing over him. He looked up at Grainger, whose expression told Logan that she wasn’t feeling quite as confident as him.
‘So what do you think?’ Winter said.
‘He’ll show,’ Logan said. ‘He thinks he’s smarter than you and me.’
‘But do you think he’ll be alone?’
‘Not a chance. But he won’t have time to call in additional people. So it’ll be him and whoever else he’s got up there in his hotel room.’
‘And what if he’s not actually here?’ Grainger said. ‘We’ve taken a leap there.’
‘It’s all we’ve got,’ Logan said.
Grainger huffed. ‘If Lindegaard’s not here, you may have just got Tom killed.’
‘We’re playing the odds,’ Logan said, sounding calmer than he really felt. ‘That’s all we can do now.’