“If I were afraid,” Harry responded, an amused smile creasing his lips, “I wouldn’t have spent the last week working with unstable explosives while you remained in Liège. But that was a necessary risk.”
“As is this,” Belkaïd said, cutting off Marwan’s angry retort with an upraised hand. “Men don’t give money in exchange for nothing. We need to know what Said bin Muhammed exchanged for his money. And the only way to do that now is to meet with those who gave it to him. If they are security services, we will know before going in.”
“How?”
Belkaïd responded to Harry’s question with a searching glance, then, “Why don’t you join me outside? Both of you.”
The cloying, humid air of mid-summer already hung heavy in the air when they emerged into the farmhouse’s rude courtyard—flanked by Belkaïd’s armed bodyguards as the black market trafficker moved to the back of the nearest SUV, throwing open the rear door and extracting a large, hardened polymer case from within.
Unsnapping the latches with a practiced motion, he threw open the lid. . .revealing within the various components of a large quadcopter UAV, disassembled for transport.
Harry heard Marwan’s sharp intake of breath, knew in that dangerous moment just where the young man’s thoughts had gone. The potential of what lay before them.
“You wondered, perhaps, how I maintain my security?” Belkaïd asked, smiling at them. The smile of a man in control. “For meetings like this one—like our exchange with the drug smugglers in the Ardennes?”
So he had, Harry thought. The reason for Belkaïd’s confidence in his security becoming suddenly apparent.
“This is the answer. The latest in commercial drone technology, the Guardian was designed for Western oil companies who need to. . .maintain surveillance over their oil fields in places where they might be vulnerable to attack. To sabotage. It boasts a payload of eight kilos, and a flight time of more than ninety minutes, when burdened only by the camera system. And above five hundred feet, the Guardian is noiseless. If anyone is waiting for us at the meet tomorrow night, we will know.”
9:08 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
Kranemeyer flipped open the cover sheet of the transfer request, scanning down the list of names before him, each with its brief, attached bio.
There was no reason to linger—his decision had been made, even before the request had been placed on his desk. His review, a formality—nothing more.
He reached over and retrieved a pen, scrawling his signature quickly across the bottom.
“Approved,” he said, looking up into the obsidian-black eyes of the former Marine standing in front of his desk. “You’ll have the men you want.”
Jack Richards nodded, his hand extended as Kranemeyer handed back the clipboard. “Thank you. They’re good men, all of them—they’ll make a fine team.”
“I’m counting on it,” the DCS replied, leaning back in his chair. “How long before you’ll be able to go operational?”
“Two-three months, max, I should think.”
“That long?” Kranemeyer raised an eyebrow. “There’s only so long we can sustain our current op-tempo with a team down, Jack. You know that. And the missions aren’t going away.”
“It takes time to train a team to operate together,” Richards countered, not backing down an inch. “Even if they’re all experienced officers—if they haven’t worked together, if they don’t know how the guy next to them is going to handle himself in the field—you don’t have a team. And if you don’t. . .you’re going to lose people out there.”
Kranemeyer smiled as the Texan paused, seemingly exhausted by the flow of words. It was an impressive effort for the usually taciturn officer. He was growing into the role. As Kranemeyer had known he would.
Being a leader meant more than just commanding men in battle. It meant protecting them—not just from the enemy, but from pressure exerted from above. And Richards was up for that job.
“It’s your team,” the DCS observed quietly, rising from his chair to clasp the Texan’s hand. “Go make it happen.”
The door closed behind Richards as Kranemeyer once again took his seat, absently rubbing the fabric covering the knee of his prosthesis as his eyes returned to the screen of his computer, and the notes for the upcoming House Intelligence Committee hearings, now only five days away.
Leadership. It was about protecting your people.
Whatever that took.
4:56 P.M. British Summer Time
HMP Belmarsh
Thamesmead, Southeast London
The lights. They were exhausting after so many hours. . .countless hours—days?—since he’d first been brought into this room.
Simon Norris lifted his manacled wrists from the table, placing his hands over his eyes in a desperate effort to shut them out, but it was futile. Madness.
That’s what he was being driven to—or perhaps—perhaps he was already there. Had been there, before all of this. His betrayals themselves. . .acts of insanity.
He heard a metallic click as the door opened behind him, the lights dimming as a new presence entered the room. He didn’t open his eyes, waiting in painful silence as the footsteps rounded the table.
“Nikolai Andreyevich,” Phillip Greer’s voice announced, harsh and unforgiving—Norris’ eyes opening to find a glossy, 8x10 photograph placed on the table before him. The face of a young man not ten years his senior, staring back at him. “Andrei Vladimirovich.”
Another photograph, another face.
“Ekaterina Ivanovna.” A woman, this time, somewhere approaching middle age—kindly eyes looking out at the camera. Kindly eyes, somehow full of reproach.
Norris closed his eyes again, his manacled hands clasped in front of him—his head bowed, the tears beginning to flow down as his body shook in silent, pathetic sobs.
“Look at them!” Greer bellowed, his usually measured voice suddenly filling the narrow confines of the room. “They’re dead—all of them. Because of you.”
And so they were, he thought, beginning the litany once again as Norris wept. “Konstantin Grigorevich. . .”
Name after name, running together. Faces, blurring like ghosts in the mist. Men and women, now dead or disappeared—vanished forever into a prison network which had lost none of its ominous terror since the bad old days.
The worst single disaster in the history of British intelligence, perpetrated by the pathetic, sniveling figure before him. Something less than a man—and yet no less dangerous, for all that.
It could be so easy to underestimate your opponents—so easy to forget that even the weak, the impotent, could deal death blows.
Vauxhall Cross had made an effort to get their people out, but they didn’t begin to possess the resources necessary for an operation of that magnitude. He had stood in their operations room, waiting and watching as British officers in Kaliningrad waited for an asset who never materialized.
A woman, a television presenter for a Russian news network who simply. . .ceased to exist, from that night forward. Her seat on-screen, filled without a word of explanation.
Terror. That’s what was being spread, emanating outward from each victim like a mutating virus.
There would be no more walk-ins—no more casual recruitments, not in the wake of this devastation. The knowledge that there was no protection for those found spying for the British. That to do so, was as good as a death sentence.
British intelligence was blind now in Russia, and would be for a generation. Perhaps longer.
He had come to interrogate Norris, but he found himself unable to master his emotions for the effort—rage and sadness playing in Greer’s eyes behind those thick glasses. He threw the rest of the photographs on the table before the chained man. . .the now-anonymous images spreading out like a macabre fan as he walked out, closing the door behind him.
Let him keep company with the ghosts, a while longer.
6:39 P.M. Central European Summer Time
Port de Lille
Lille, France
It felt as though he were walking into a trap, Grigory Stephanovich Kolesnikov thought, looking up at the massive heaps of coal, gravel, and ballast stone mounded up on the quay on both sides of him as he walked out toward the sluggish waters of the Deûle, the rest of the port of Lille stretching out along the banks of the river to the west—the sound of cranes and trucks backing up a discordant clangor in the distant.
The taxi had let him out nearly two kilometers from the port, an easy walk in the late afternoon sun. A chance to stretch his legs after the last few days’ confinement in the hotel room—waiting on Moscow. Waiting on Belkaïd.
He was waiting no more.
His suit jacket was out of place here in the rugged atmosphere of the port, the young man thought—glancing down at the grey fabric—the stylish black dress shirt beneath the jacket. The gold chain bearing his icon of Our Lady of Vladimir visible in its open throat.
But it was a calculated impression. At times, it suited one to be underestimated.
Times like this one, the young FSB officer thought, catching sight of the small knot of men tucked in between two towering heaps of dark coal, gathered around their motorcycles.
And there they were.
“He is known to us,” the burly, close-to-middle-aged leader of the bikers acknowledged, nodding his head grudgingly.
The man had identified himself simply as “Maxim”, but Kolesnikov had seen his file. Knew the man’s history probably better than he knew it himself—from his first imprisonment in the old days of the USSR, to his rise to prominence as a captain in the Night Wolves, the Russian motorcycle club which had grown out of those waning years of the Cold War. Each step along the way, recorded in the tattoos that sleeved the biker’s arms, and covered most of the rest of his body. In the colors of his cut. And his name wasn’t Maxim.
“Is that going to be a problem?” Kolesnikov asked quietly, glancing from Maxim around at the half-dozen bikers clustered around them, most of them leaning on the handlebars of their Harley Davidsons. These men weren’t here of their own free will—the Night Wolves answered to Moscow, only slightly less directly than he did.
And he didn’t know what, exactly, had brought them here—it was rare to see the Night Wolves this far from Eastern Europe. But they were all here now, serving the same master. Or so he hoped.
“Maxim” shook his head slowly, running a pair of weathered fingers over his wisp-thin, silvery mustache. The rest of the older man’s hair hidden under a black skullcap bearing the image of Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. “Gamal Belkaïd is a man it would be unwise to underestimate. And we have had. . .business dealings with his network in the past. But our orders were clear.”
He smiled—a contemptuous, patronizing smile bordering on a sneer as his eyes swept over Kolesnikov’s slight frame. “Have no fear, friend. . .we will keep you safe.”
Kolesnikov smiled back, pretending to ignore the implied insult.
“Spasiba, tovarisch.” He looked around at the group. “Are you all armed?”
“Maxim” raised a suggestive eyebrow. “What do you think?”
Kolesnikov glanced coldly back at him. “In the future, Nikolai Timofeyevich,” he said, watching the man’s eyes open suddenly wide at the use of his real name and patronymic, “you would do well not to answer my questions with questions. Am I understood?”
Another grudging nod. “You are.”
“Good,” Kolesnikov smiled. “Then we will rendezvous tomorrow night in Mons, and proceed to the meeting together.”
“How will you get there?” One of the bikers asked from Kolesnikov’s left and the FSB officer looked over to see the man sitting there, his long, curly hair flowing back over the colors of his cut as he leaned over the ape hangers of his Harley. “Ride? On what?”
He made an obscene gesture and began to laugh loudly, the other bikers joining in.
Kolesnikov turned quickly toward the man, closing the distance in two swift strides—reaching him almost before the laugh had died away—lashing out with a vicious kick that connected with the man’s kneecap. Unbalancing him, a scream of pain escaping the biker’s lips, his eyes opening wide with fear as the FSB officer shoved him, hard.
The Harley tipped over, carrying the biker with it as it crashed sideways to the gravel of the port, accompanied by the satisfying crunch of bone. Incoherent, sobbing screams filled the air as Kolesnikov reached for the handlebars, pulling the Harley off the broken body of its former owner. Throwing his own leg easily over the saddle.
He turned toward Nikolai Timofeyevich and the rest of the bikers, taking in the shock, fear, and anger playing across their rough features. Good.
“Now,” he said, the smile never leaving his lips as he casually brushed a fleck of dust from his black shirt, “I believe I am understood.”
6:54 P.M.
The farm
Outside Liège, Belgium
Harry set the bucket back down gently, his arms and shoulders weary from the day’s exertion, eyeing the trace amounts of white, crystalline powder remaining around the bucket’s rim. A weird smell, something akin to grapefruit, filling his nostrils.
TATP. Enough explosive—just there—to kill him, if he didn’t exert the utmost care.
Him. Or someone else, he thought, glancing from the bucket over to where Marwan stood a few feet away, mixing together the hydrogen peroxide with the acetone.
The look in the young man’s eyes when Belkaïd had unveiled the drone had been a dangerous one—both of them clearly grasping in that moment its potential for a use far more dangerous than that for which the black market trafficker was employing it.
And if they did. . .there was no sense in dwelling on that. He only had to stop Marwan. Ensure that his ideas died with him.
“I need a break,” Harry announced suddenly, rising to his feet from beside the bucket—his muscles protesting against the day’s exertion. He was growing stronger with each passing week, but still nowhere near where he needed to be. And the constant presence of the chemicals filling his lungs wasn’t helping. “This stuff gets to you after a while.”
Marwan acknowledged his words with a curt nod—he wasn’t the most sociable of lab partners, the hostilities of their first acquaintance still simmering there beneath the surface.
“You likely should as well,” Harry offered. “Your senses need to be razor-sharp working with these materials. If they’re not—boom!”
He pantomimed an explosion with his hands, smiling at the younger man’s reaction. “See? That’s what I mean. You need a break, habibi.”
“I’ll be fine,” Marwan replied, a sharp edge to his voice as he turned away from Harry. “I’ll take one after a bit. But you go on ahead.”
“All right.” Harry turned back with his hand on the door. “Once you finish that, empty the rest of the powder into the drum.”
“You’re sure?” He hadn’t allowed anyone else to do it for the last week, making sure to be the only one handling the explosives in their most delicate state.
A nod. “Just be careful with it, okay?”
The sun was already beginning to sink beneath the trees when Harry emerged from the shop, taking deep breaths of the humid air as he made his way toward the farmhouse—glancing back toward the shop even as he did so.
It was so hard to calculate what would be a safe distance. The explosive power of TATP, ever imprecise.
He saw one of Belkaïd’s men posted up along the entry road—a rifle leaning against the stone wall beside him. The trafficker himself had long departed, but he had left them with extra security.
Reza was standing near the farmhouse’s old well—a rough, circular parapet of stone crumbling from age and disuse. He shifted away guiltily at Harry’s approach, only then revealing that he wasn’t alone—Nora adjusting her hijab about her face as she pulled away from him.
“Salaam alaikum,” Harr
y said as he came up, pretending not to notice the intimacy of their posture—the color flushing the young woman’s cheeks.
“Wa’ alaikum as-salaam,” Reza murmured uneasily, his glance shifting from Harry to Nora, seeming unable to look either one of them in the eye. “I should probably go check in on Marwan.”
“I just left him,” Harry replied evenly. “He’s fine.”
A quick, nervous nod. “I know, but I had told him that I would come help—he’s probably wondering where I am.”
And there was nothing more to be said, Harry realized, a dark fear gnawing at his heart as he watched the young man turn away toward the shed. Unable to say anything more to stop him. His fate now in God’s hands.
Insh’allah.
“Are you all right, sister?” he asked quietly, looking over into her face, shadowed by the overhanging trees. Nora was beautiful, no one could deny that—a beauty dimmed only by the unfathomable sadness, ever-present in her eyes.
She nodded wordlessly, seeming—like Reza—to avoid his eyes.
“If there is a problem,” he began once more, pressing gently. “If Reza has not respected your—”
“No,” she responded fiercely, the words coming out with sudden passion. “Reza is everything to me. He was there for me when no one else was—there to show me the way. Without him, I would never have found the true path.”
“Alhamdullilah,” Harry whispered, smiling at her and receiving a smile in return. One of the first real smiles he had seen from her.
“You know that you need a shower, non?” she asked, her nose wrinkling at his closeness to her. “That. . .stuff stinks.”
“One of the prices we pay,” Harry replied, smiling easily, “that our world itself may be cleansed. It will take more than a shower to remove this smell.”
“You were right, Ibrahim,” a new voice interjected—Harry turning to find that Marwan had come up on them quietly. “I needed a break.”
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