Sidney Sheldon's Reckless

by Sidney Sheldon

  Dimitri screamed, a child’s wail of terror. Then suddenly, arms were around him, under his shoulders, dragging him into the control center.

  “You’re OK.” Apollo’s voice was firm and calm. Dimitri clung to him like a life raft.

  “They’re going to kill us!” the boy screamed.

  “No they’re not. We’re going to kill them.”

  Dimitri watched as Apollo pulled the pin out of the hand grenade with his teeth and lobbed it toward the men who had just killed his friends. As they were blown into the air, their legs came off.

  “Here.” Apollo handed him a grenade. “Aim for the choppers.”

  INSIDE THE CABIN, HUNTER Drexel cowered under a table.

  The noise of the Chinooks was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.

  They’re here! They found me!

  Even the gunfire, the all too familiar pap pap pap pap of machine guns he remembered from Iraq and Syria sounded soothing to his ears, like a lullaby, or a mother’s voice.

  Boom! The cabin door didn’t so much open as explode, shards of wood flying everywhere. Smoke filled the room in seconds, disorienting him. Hunter’s ears were ringing and his eyes stung. He heard voices, shouts, but everything was muffled, as if he were hearing them under water. He waited for someone to come in, a soldier or even one of his captors, but no one did. Crawling on his belly, Hunter began feeling his way towards the space where the cabin door used to be.

  Outside, he quickly got his bearings back. Stars up. Snow down. The Americans—presumably?—were mostly in front of him and to the right, directly facing the camp. To his left, what was left of Group 99 had taken up position in the two breeze-block buildings and were firing back. Gunshots flashed in the blackness like fireflies. Occasionally a strobe or flare would illuminate everything. Then you could see men running. Hunter watched as three of the American soldiers were gunned down just feet in front of him. His captors were clearly not giving up without a fight.

  A whimpering sound to his left, like a wounded animal, made him turn around.

  “Help me!”

  Crawling towards the sound, Hunter found the English boy codenamed Perseus sprawled out in the snow. Hunter had a particular soft spot for Perseus with his skinny, chicken legs, cockney accent and thick, dorky glasses. Hunter had nicknamed him “Nerdeus.” They often played poker together. The boy was good.

  Now he lay helplessly on the cold ground, his eyes wide with shock. A deep crimson stain surrounded him. Glancing down, Hunter saw that both his lower legs had been blown off.

  “Am I going to die?” he sobbed.

  “No,” Hunter lied, lying down next to him.

  “I can’t feel my legs.”

  “It’s the cold,” said Hunter. “And the shock. You’ll be fine.”

  Perseus’s eyes opened and closed. It wouldn’t be long now.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I never meant for . . . all this.”

  “I know that,” said Hunter. “It’s not your fault. What’s your name? Your real name.”

  The boy’s teeth chattered. “J-James.”

  “Where are you from, James?”

  “Hackney.”

  “Hackney. OK.” Hunter stroked his hair. “What’s it like in Hackney?”

  The boy’s eyes closed.

  “Do you have any brothers and sisters, James? James?”

  He let out one, long, fractured breath and was still.

  Hunter felt his eyes well up with tears and his body fill with anger.

  Not anger. Rage.

  James was his friend. He was just a fucking kid.

  “NO!” He started to scream, all the pent-up fear of the last few days erupting out of him in one wild, animal howl of fury and loss. In that moment he didn’t care if he died. Not at all. Stroking James’s cold, dead forehead tenderly, he stood up and ran towards the light of the Chinooks.

  That’s when it happened.

  One of the helicopters exploded, sending a fireball hundreds of feet high shooting into the air like a comet. Hunter watched it in shock. It dawned on him then that the Americans might actually lose this battle. This wasn’t the clean rescue they’d intended. It was all going wrong. Soldiers were dying. Group 99 were fighting back, fighting for their lives.

  Hunter kept running, because really, what else was there to do? He would run until something happened to stop him. Until his legs blew off like James’s, or a bullet ripped through his skull like Bob Daley’s, or until he was free to write the truth about what had happened tonight. The truth about everything.

  The lights grew brighter. Blinding. Hunter thought he was past Group 99’s control center now but he wasn’t sure. Just then a second Chinook roared back into life, its blades turning full pelt just a few yards from where Hunter was standing. Hunter watched camouflaged men leap into it one by one as it hovered just inches above the ground. Bullets flew over his head. Then, right in front of him, a hand reached out in the carnage.

  “Get in!”

  The American soldier was leaning out of the Chinook, reaching for Hunter’s hand. He was younger than Hunter, but confident, his words a command, not a request.

  Hunter hesitated, a rabbit in the headlights.

  He thought about the story that had gotten him kidnapped in the first place.

  About the truth, the unpalatable truth, that so many people wanted to suppress.

  Once he got into that helicopter, would he ever be able to tell it? Would he ever complete his mission?

  He looked behind him. Scores of corpses littered the charred remnants of the camp that had been his world for the last few months. It had all happened in minutes. Bad men and good men and naïve young boys lay slaughtered like cattle. Just like poor Bob Daley had been slaughtered.

  And now a confident young American was holding out his hand, offering Hunter a way out. It was what he’d been praying for.

  Get in!

  Hunter Drexel looked his rescuer gratefully in the eye.

  Then he turned and ran off into the night.

  CHAPTER 4

  WHAT DO YOU MEAN, ‘he ran’?”

  President Jim Havers held the phone away from his ear in disbelief.

  “He ran, Sir,” General Teddy MacNamee repeated. “Drexel refused to get into the helicopter.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Fuck,” said the president.

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘he ran’?”

  The British Prime Minister rubbed her eyes blearily.

  “I don’t know how many other ways to say it, Julia,” the President of the United States snapped. “He wouldn’t get in the chopper. He ran into the fucking forest. We’re screwed.”

  Julia Cabot thought, You mean you’re screwed, Jim.

  Her mind raced as she tried to figure out the best way to play this.

  “I’ve already had the Bratislavan president on the line, screaming blue murder,” President Havers ranted on. “The UN secretary General’s asked me for a statement as a matter of urgency.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  “What will you tell him?”

  “That Drexel wasn’t there. He’d been moved. But that they successfully took out a bunch of terrorists.”

  “Good,” Julia Cabot said.

  “I can count on your support?”

  “Of course, Jim. Always.”

  President Havers exhaled. “Thank you, Julia. We need a joint intelligence meeting. To figure out where we go from here.”

  “Agreed.”

  “How soon can your guys be in Washington?”

  “I think, under the circumstances, Jim, it makes more sense for your guys to come to London. Don’t you?”

  Julia Cabot smiled. It felt good to have the upper hand with the Americans for once. Right now she was the only friend Jim Havers had in the world and he knew it. She must play her cards for all they were worth.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Jim Havers said gruffly.
>
  “Wonderful.” Julia Cabot hung up.

  EXACTLY ONE WEEK LATER, four men sat around a table in Whitehall, eyeing one another warily.

  “Good of you to come, gentlemen.” Jamie MacIntosh rolled up his shirtsleeves and leaned forward, smiling amiably at his American counterparts. “I know you must both have had a difficult week.”

  “That’s an understatement.” Greg Walton of the CIA looked desperately tired. He resented being summoned to London, especially at a time when his beloved agency was being ripped to shreds by Congress back home. But he made an effort at politeness. Unlike his FBI colleague, Milton Buck.

  “I hope you have something important to add to this operation,” Buck snarled at Jamie MacIntosh. “Because frankly we don’t have time to waste on handholding you Brits.”

  Sitting beside Jamie MacIntosh, Frank Dorrien stiffened. “Well, quite,” he said sardonically. “After the mess you made of what should have been a perfectly simple rescue mission, based on our entirely accurate intelligence, I imagine you want to devote as many man-hours as possible to training your own men. Heaven knows they need it.”

  Milton Buck looked like he was ready to throw a punch.

  “All right, that’s enough.” Jamie MacIntosh glared at Frank Dorrien. “None of us have time for chest beating. Let’s leave that to the politicians. We’re here to combine our resources and share information on Group 99 and that’s what we’re going to do. Why don’t I start?”

  Greg Walton leaned back in his chair. “Great. What have you got?”

  “For starters, we’ve got a name for Captain Daley’s killer.”

  Walton and Buck looked at each other in shock. “Seriously?”

  Frank Dorrien pushed a file across the table.

  In the top left-hand corner was a photograph of a handsome, dark-skinned man with a strong jaw, long aquiline nose, and hooded, distrustful eyes. There was a detached air about him and a certain watchful hauteur, like a bird of prey.

  “Alexis Argyros,” Jamie MacIntosh announced. “Codenamed Apollo. One of Group 99’s founder members and a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work. Grew up in foster care in Athens. Possibly abused. A high school dropout but brilliant with computers and obsessed with violent video games from his early teens. Hates women. Sadist. Narcissist. All this is from his social worker’s reports.”

  “Criminal record?” Greg Walton asked.

  “Oh yes. Petty theft, vandalism, arson. Two years in youth custody for rape. And he was suspected in a hideous case of animal cruelty where a cat and kittens were burned alive.”

  “You only get two years for rape?” Greg Walton asked.

  “The Greeks can’t afford to run their prisons,” Jamie MacIntosh said matter-of-factly. “Not since austerity. Anyway, we believe Argyros was the man who pulled the trigger in Daley’s execution video. He was running the camp you raided, and his star is on the rise within Group 99. For months now he’s been trying to steer the group towards more violent methods, battling against the moderate elements within 99. Argyros appeals to disaffected young males in the same way that the jihadist groups groomed boys in the west after the Syrian war. He offers them a purpose and a sense of belonging, wraps it all up in a pretty parcel of social justice—”

  “And then murders people,” Greg Walton interrupted.

  “Precisely. We are fearful that Captain Daley’s death may mark the beginning of a new era of global terror. It’s an enormous pity you didn’t kill Argyros when you had the chance.”

  “How do you know we didn’t?” Greg Walton asked.

  This time Frank Dorrien answered.

  “Because we’ve picked up internet traffic between Apollo and an unknown contact in the U.S. Alexis Argyros is alive and well and he’s out there looking for Drexel, just like we are. Make no mistake. Group 99 want Hunter Drexel dead.”

  “And you know all this how?” Milton Buck demanded sourly. A stocky, handsome, middle-aged man with dark hair and what ought to have been a pleasing face, Buck successfully concealed whatever charms he may have had beneath a thick veneer of arrogance.

  “Our methods are none of your concern,” Frank Dorrien snapped back. “We’re here to share intelligence, not tell you how we came by it. Now, what do you have for us?”

  Milton Buck looked at Greg Walton, who nodded his approval. Buck pulled out an old-fashioned Dictaphone voice recorder and put it on the table.

  “While you’ve been unmasking the monkey,” the FBI man sneered, “we’ve been focused on the organ grinder.”

  Jamie MacIntosh sighed. He was starting to find Milton Buck’s posturing deeply irritating.

  “Your man Apollo may have pulled the trigger,” Buck went on, “but he was following orders from above.”

  He pressed PLAY. A woman’s voice filled the room. It was American, educated, soft and low and the sound quality was excellent, as if she were sitting right there with them.

  “Is everything ready?”

  A man’s voice answered. “Yes. Everything has been done as you instructed.”

  “And I will see it on live feed, correct?”

  “Correct. You’ll be right there with us. Don’t worry.”

  “Good.” The woman’s smile was audible. “Have him deliver the speech first.”

  “Of course. As we agreed.”

  “And at nine p.m. New York time precisely, you will shoot him in the head.”

  “Yes, Althea.”

  Milton Buck hit STOP and smiled smugly.

  “That, gentlemen, was the authorization for Captain Daley’s execution. The woman on that tape, who goes by the codename Althea, is the real brains behind Group 99. We’ve been tracking her for the last eighteen months.”

  “We already knew about Althea,” Jamie MacIntosh said dismissively, to the FBI man’s visible annoyance.

  “But you didn’t know she’d directly ordered Daley’s assassination. Did you?” Greg Walton countered.

  “No,” Jamie admitted. “What else have you got on her? An ID?”

  “Not yet,” Greg Walton admitted, a little uncomfortably.

  “You’ve been tracking this person for eighteen months and you still don’t know who she is?” Frank Dorrien asked, disbelievingly. “What do you know?”

  “We know she channels funds to Group 99 through a complicated network of offshore accounts that we’ve mapped extensively,” Milton Buck snapped.

  “We have some unconfirmed physical data,” Greg Walton added more calmly. “Witnesses at various banks and hotels we believe she’s used have suggested she’s tall, physically attractive and dark haired.”

  “Well that narrows it down,” Frank Dorrien muttered sarcastically.

  Milton Buck looked as if he were about to spontaneously combust.

  “We know she orchestrated the attack on the CIA systems and the blackout of the stock exchange servers on Wall Street two years ago,” he snarled. “We know she personally arranged the kidnap and murder of one of your men, General Dorrien. All in all I’d say we know a hell of a lot more than you.”

  “How long have you had this recording?” Jamie MacIntosh asked.

  Greg Walton shot Milton Buck a warning look but it was too late.

  “Three weeks,” Buck said smugly. “I played this to the president the day after Daley was killed.”

  A muscle on Jamie’s jaw twitched. “Three weeks. And nobody thought to share this information with us sooner?”

  “We’re sharing it with you now,” Greg Walton said.

  Frank Dorrien slammed his fist down hard on the table. Everybody’s water glasses shook.

  “It’s not bloody good enough!” he roared. “Daley was one of ours. With allies like you, who needs enemies?”

  “Frank.” Jamie MacIntosh put a hand on the old soldier’s arm, but Dorrien shrugged it off angrily.

  “No, Jamie. This is a farce! Here we are spoon-feeding the Americans valuable intelligence, detailed intelligence, actually providing them with the exact location of their
hostage. And all the while they’re sitting on vital information about Bob Daley’s killer? It’s unacceptable.”

  Buck leaned forward aggressively.

  “And just who are you to tell us what’s acceptable, General? Has it occurred to you that maybe we didn’t trust the British with this intelligence? After all, your men have been dropping like flies lately.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Think about it. First a Greek royal dies on your watch, General,” Buck said accusingly, “a young man who just happens to be a personal friend of Captain Daley. Then, only days later, Daley himself is killed, which let’s just say is out of character for Group 99, up to this point. Now, you may say there’s no connection between those two events—”

  “Of course there’s no connection!” Frank Dorrien scoffed. “Prince Achileas died by suicide.”

  Milton Buck raised an eyebrow. “Did he? Because the other possibility is that Group 99 have someone embedded within the British military. Maybe someone at Sandhurst, or in the upper echelons of the MOD—also the subject of a Group 99 attack, if you remember.”

  “As were the CIA!” Dorrien shouted back. “Prince Achileas was gay. The man hung himself out of shame, you cretin.”

  “What did you call me?” Buck got to his feet.

  “That. Is. ENOUGH.” Greg Walton finally lost his temper. “Sit down, Milton. NOW.”

  Greg was the senior man here. He hadn’t flown thousands of miles to watch his FBI colleague and General Dorrien go at each other like a pair of ill-disciplined dogs.

  There was also something about the tone the general used to talk about the Greek prince that put Greg Walton’s back up. Greg was also a homosexual. He found the general’s lack of compassion for the dead boy both distasteful and disturbing.

  “Whatever has happened in the past, in terms of sharing information, has happened,” he said, looking from Buck to Dorrien and back again. “From now on we have direct orders from the White House and Downing Street to cooperate fully with one another and that’s what we’re going to do. This is a joint operation. So if either of you have a problem with that, I suggest you get over it. Now.”