He turned and began walking toward the door of the Majority Leader’s office, Ellis’ voice calling out after him as he went. “You’ve already changed parties once, Roy. You’ve alienated every ally you’ve ever made in this town. Where are you going to go now?”
Coftey paused with his hand on the doorknob, a curious smile playing across his lips as he looked back at the Senate Majority Leader. “Home, for starters.”
1:08 A.M., Central European Summer Time, June 26th
The apartment
Sint-Jans Molenbeek, Belgium
Leave. That single word, repeating itself over and over again through his mind as he lay there, flat on his back—staring up through the darkness to the ceiling above.
Just turn and walk away, Harry thought, shifting restlessly on the couch. Walk away. Just like he had so very many times before.
It was the first lesson you learned working for the Agency, that you couldn't save the world. That even trying to. . .wasn't in your job description.
Your job was to carry out your orders, to the best of your ability. Get the intel you were sent to collect. Keep your people alive. And try to make it through with some fragment of your soul still intact. That last part, entirely optional.
But now. . .there were no orders. No one to collect for. No one to report back to. No one to keep alive. No one at all, except himself, his own survival all that hung in the balances.
Weighed and found wanting. Every part of him worth living for, already dead. Back in Las Vegas on that hellish December night.
On the docks of Aberdeen.
He closed his eyes, seeing Carol standing there once more before him as she had that night in the Bellagio, so much of her father’s determination visible in her in that moment. Fierce and raw. Everything he’d loved about her.
“You thought I was going to leave you?”
And yet leave him she had, even as the air around them became tinged with the smell of camphor—soman nerve gas—the two of them stepping out the doors of the resort. . .and into the abyss awaiting them just beyond.
A rifle bullet, piercing the night. And his own heart. The future, shattered with a single shot. What might have been.
And even as he watched, her face seemed to fade away, becoming more indistinct by the moment until it was gone, beyond hope of recovery. Replaced by that of another. A woman’s dark eyes gazing at him through the steam rising off a cup of Darjeeling. Regarding him with suspicion. Fear.
Mehreen’s voice echoing in his ears, the way it had sounded on that fateful night he’d found himself sitting in her flat there in London—the photograph of her dead husband on the end table just a few feet away, bearing mute witness to all that was to come. The betrayal of all once held sacred.
“You’re here to kill a man, aren’t you, Harry?”
And she was right, as she had so often been. His quest for vengeance upon the man who had attacked Vegas—killed Carol—ensnaring them both, dragging them down into the abyss.
“Those who seek to take that which belongs to the Lord of Worlds. . .do so at their peril.”
The voice of a man he had killed, as surely as if he had pulled the trigger himself. Words of a truth he'd chosen to blind himself to, until it was all far too late. Lives shattered, all about him, worlds in ashes.
It was said that one who set out to take vengeance must dig two graves, one for his enemy and one for himself—but for him, two graves had been nowhere near enough. To cover his sins.
The moment when you glimpsed a murderer through the mist, moved to stop him. Unsuspecting that he would turn at the last, revealing his face to be your own.
Driving home the realization that to strike him down would be to end yourself. Survival itself, cold and primal, all that stayed your hand.
He'd been lying awake for hours, unable to get Reza's words out of his head. “I tried to go to Syria, a year ago—but was turned back at the Turkish border. And I was discouraged, I thought that somehow Allah had rejected me, that I was unfit for His struggle. When I saw the caliphate begin to crumble, I wept, fearing that I had missed my opportunity. That I had failed. And then you entered our lives, and I began to believe once again. . .”
All his worst fears, confirmed in that instant. Confirmed? No. Revealed to be breathtakingly insufficient.
And now here he was again, trapped in a snare of his own making, searching for an exit that would allow him to escape. . .without damning all those left behind to certain destruction. Innocent blood, once more staining his hands.
No way out.
12:48 A.M. British Summer Time
A pub
Central London
Russia. It still seemed impossible, Marsh thought, staring across the table into the empty chair across from him. More so with each passing drink.
He’d spent his last few years at Five watching it. The tentacles of Russian influence, spreading across the continent with the plodding inevitability of a glacier—infiltrating groups across the political spectrum, elevating voices from far beyond the mainstream. Subverting Western democracy from within.
Sowing the seeds of chaos, to be reaped at a later date. The gradual return of an old familiar enemy—once thought vanquished.
Perhaps men like himself had always known better. Too jaded, too cynical to have harbored any faith in the narratives which had permeated the West’s political leadership after the fall of the Wall. The idea that the Iron Curtain had been ripped away to reveal an eager world just waiting for freedom on the other side. A new Russia.
He and his colleagues had known the truth, watching with mounting concern as political pressure and constricting budgets inexorably forced the Western intelligence community to avert its eyes from its oldest foe.
The truth that for every student out in the streets, eager for liberty—whatever that meant in reality—and rapprochement with the West, there was someone else, older and wiser, behind the scenes. Someone who had benefited from the old system and wasn’t about to let go of their hard-won power. The grim recognition of which of those forces was going to win out, in the end.
The truth that Russia was far too old to change.
But this. . .the idea that Russian money could have been behind the attack on Her Majesty, it seemed absurd. So alien a departure from all that which had characterized their efforts at direct action in the past.
And what part was Greer himself really playing in all of this, the former director-general found himself musing, the question forcing its way to the fore. The counter-intel officer’s words playing on repeat in his head as he filtered through them again and again, searching for nuance, subtext—anything left hidden, just below the surface.
“Sod your clearance, Julian. You being out doesn’t change the reality that you’re still one of the only men I trust.”
But whom could you trust, really? He’d known Phillip for decades, but the man’s loyalties—like his own—were first and foremost to the Service.
“You still have contacts, Julian—from the old days. I need you to shake the tree, see what reaction that gets us. Find me something to go on.”
Was it all a lie? Meant to force him into the open, expose his own network? Reveal whom he had maintained contact with, even after his resignation from Five?
Perhaps. Marsh shook his head, hearing approaching footsteps from off to the side—the back of the pub near the lavatory. It was a risk he was just going to have to take, the threat to the Service if Greer’s suspicions were true. . .far too serious to be ignored.
The footsteps halted at his table, a woman near his own age sliding wordlessly into the booth across from him—her face half-veiled in shadow, but no less recognizable for all that.
“Thanks for agreeing to come meet with me, Margaret,” Marsh said, the faintest of smiles touching his lips. “My apologies for the hour.”
2:13 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time
Vienna, Virginia
“You're still up?” Coftey heard a woman's voice ask,
somewhere in the darkness behind him, the glowing screen of the laptop perched on his knees providing the den's only illumination.
He clicked “end turn” on the strategy game he was playing before answering her, watching the AI cycle through its calculations, acting and reacting to his own decisions as he placed the laptop on the end table—leaning back in his recliner. “Yeah, couldn't even begin to think about sleeping.”
“Ellis?” his secretary Melody asked, moving into the circle of light. Her blonde hair tousled hopelessly around her face, sleep still visible in her eyes, her pajamas rumpled as if she had just gotten out of bed.
She was young enough to have been his daughter, something that probably should have bothered him more than it did. The latest—and longest—of the string of relationships with young women on the Hill he'd formed in the years since his wife had passed away from Lou Gehrig's, nine years into his career in the Senate.
Jessie. He'd married her right before leaving for Vietnam—a war bride in the truest sense of the word, in an era when marrying a soldier wasn't the most popular thing to do. Even in rural Oklahoma.
And she'd stayed true to him, all through the years at war. And all that followed, as he uprooted both of them from the place of their birth and moved to D.C. to pursue his career. Until she'd been slowly stolen away from him in the end, piece by piece—bit by bit—by a disease whose very name he had come to hate.
Burying her back in that cemetery in Oklahoma, five miles from where he'd been born, he'd sworn he would never love again.
And he never had. Until now. Melody's arrival in his life, changing so much. Different, somehow, than all the women who had come and gone before.
He smiled, shaking his head in answer to her question—shifting his weight to one side of the recliner as she slid in beside him, her warm body molding itself against his. Leave the politics at work.
That had always been their pact, ever since the first night—perhaps the secret of why their relationship had worked when all the others had failed.
Their bed, a sanctuary against all that lay without—the treachery and double-dealing that characterized Washington. A haven.
“A storm is coming,” he said softly, her head nestled against his chest—his arm wrapped around her body, holding her close. “And it's going to break upon us all too soon. I want to get away from. . .all this, before it does. Get myself grounded, once more, back where I belong. I want to go home.”
“Oklahoma?” she asked, her voice a murmur in the semi-darkness.
He nodded. “I plan to leave Monday—spend a week on the old homestead, back in Chandler. And I want you to come with me.”
8:04 A.M. Central European Summer Time
The apartment
Sint-Jans Molenbeek, Belgium
“Sit down,” Harry ordered, hearing Yassin enter the kitchen of the small apartment behind him, a draft of cold air washing across the room as he pulled open the refrigerator.
“I have to get going, Ibrahim—there’s a possibility of work at a bakery just a few blocks from here. I don’t want to be late, and miss the chance—”
“Money?” Harry turned to look at him then, his blue eyes flashing fire as he cut him off. “That's what is important to you? Sit down.”
Yassin hesitated for only a moment, then did as he was told—likely knowing what Harry did, that for one job there would be several dozen applicants, many better qualified than himself. Hopeless. The chair scraping against the floor as he pulled it out, taking his seat across from Harry.
Reflexively rubbing his throat even as he did so, as if remembering the night before. The fire burning in Harry's eyes as he'd shoved him up against the wall.
When his fingers came away from his throat to rest on the table top, Harry saw that they were trembling. Good.
He didn't acknowledge it, didn't speak—just sat there, his eyes locked with Yassin's. The silence growing, building—swelling between them. Don't blink first.
“What did you want?” the young man asked finally, his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed hard, seemingly unable to bear the tension for another moment.
Harry waited another long moment before replying, his eyes never moving. People couldn't take silence—he'd learned that years before, interrogating enemy combatants on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. The emotional pressure far too strong for the untrained to resist without cracking. Without giving themselves away.
“I want to know,” he said finally, tapping a long forefinger against the table, “who proposed the idea for this attack. Was it you and Reza? Or was it this boxer. . .this Marwan fellow?”
Yassin shifted uncomfortably in his seat, not meeting Harry's eyes. His body language giving Harry the answer, as plainly as if he had spoken the words. “I don't remember, I—”
“It was Marwan, wasn't it?” Harry pressed, knowing the answer and forcing him to say it. To confront the reality of what he had done. They were in danger here, they all were.
“Fine, it was Marwan, I think,” he spat, shaking his head in frustration and anger, “but I don't see how any of this matters, Ibrahim. It doesn't—”
“It matters because this is exactly how they work!”
7:09 A.M. British Summer Time
The terraced house
London, England
It had been some time since he’d woken up with a hangover this bad, a blinding headache pounding against the inside of Julian Marsh’s skull as he rummaged in the cupboard—finding his canisters of salt and sugar and dumping roughly equal amounts of each into a tall glass of water.
Years. Perhaps not even since Berlin—alcohol had been a staple back then, pushing one’s way through the dark German winter. Trying to stay one step ahead of the Stasi and seeming to fail more than one succeeded.
“You can call me ‘Maggie’, Julian, you know that. The way you all did back then.”
Back then. He smiled despite himself, so many of the old memories coming back. Margaret Forster—‘Maggie’, as they’d called her back in the day—had always been a formidable woman, a highly successful M.I.-6 case officer in an era when that field had been dominated almost exclusively by men.
Operating in the denied space that had been Moscow in the ‘80s, running assets under the nose of an enemy which dismissed her as a secretary, a functionary—unworthy of their notice. An underestimation they’d made at their peril.
Maggie Forster had handled some of Six’s most valuable assets behind the Iron Curtain in those days—could have gone far in the Service herself, had she chosen to.
But the Cold War had come to an end, the old enemy vanquished—or at least so everyone wanted to believe at the time—and she’d wanted a husband, a family.
A life beyond the Service. And she’d been smart enough to know that you couldn’t have them both.
Unlike him, Marsh thought morosely, glancing around the starkly appointed kitchen of the flat. At least for her, the first half had come true.
“‘Maggie’, then,” he’d said, smiling sheepishly at her in the dim light of the bar, her greying hair framing a weathered, weary face. The years hadn’t been kind to either of them. “I regret getting you out at this hour.”
“Don’t, Julian. I wouldn’t have been asleep anyway,” she’d replied, dismissing his apology with a wave of her hand. “As Richard’s. . .illness has worsened, he’s up at all hours, more at night than during the day. I left him in front of the telly.”
Early onset Alzheimer’s, which had begun to claim her husband seven years earlier at the far too young age of fifty-six.
“I’m sorry,” he’d said, wincing despite himself. “Will he—”
She’d shaken her head, reaching forward to cover his hand in hers. “He’ll be fine, Jules. He’s not going to go anywhere or hurt himself—we’re not at that place yet, even if he does sometimes think that I’m the housekeeper. So tell me, why did you ask me here tonight?”
It had been a long moment before Marsh replied, weighing h
is words as if he somehow thought the decision hadn’t already been made. The moment he picked up the phone.
“There are forces which have been set in motion in this country, Maggie,” he’d said finally, his eyes locking with hers as she raised her drink to her lips. “You can see their effects every night on the telly. But who set them in motion, and why, those are questions I don’t have the answer to. Yet. I need someone with contacts in Moscow, from back in the old days—people who can tell me who’s at the levers of power now. Who’s pulling them.”
She hadn’t reacted, not at first. Not perceptibly. Taking another long sip of her drink before responding, her fingers trembling ever so slightly as she set the glass back down. “Those questions, Julian. . .just how sure are you that you want them answered?”
He hadn’t known what to tell her, and even now, this morning—as he drained the last of his water, grimacing at the mixture of sugar and salt, he didn’t have a better answer.
But he suspected it was one Rubicon which had already been crossed. No way back—for either of them, now.
Alea iacta est.
8:11 A.M. Central European Summer Time
The flat
Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, Belgium
“This is how they entrap young Muslims all across the West,” Harry said, seemingly struggling to control his voice as he rose to his feet, the anger boiling over. “Seeking out the faithful, those receptive to the call of God's struggle. Luring them in, to a web of their own design, imprisoning them for their beliefs.”
The way the FBI had done so successfully in the States, in the years since 9/11. Controversial as all the rest, but since when had defending one's country ever been simple? Or morally clear.
“It isn't that way,” Yassin said, looking up at him—denial written across his face. “I know Marwan—I've prayed beside him, I know his heart. He would never betray us, would never turn his back on the faithful.”
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