The meticulously crafted engine of the Range Rover purred into life as Jack was still deep in thought. It was such a quiet and pleasing sound that at first Jack didn’t even notice it. Nor did Jack notice when the back door to the vehicle closed with a gentle click after Barry pulled Robert’s limp body onto the back seat. As the engine powered up Jack quickly got to his feet. He raised his gun and he took aim in time to see Barry driving past with a wide grin on his face. The vehicle weaved through the concrete pillars as Barry took the most direct route out of the parking lot. Barry was not making any effort to avoid being shot at by Jack. As Jack took aim he wondered why Barry was so confident. The very question was enough to make Jack change his mind. Jack slid the gun into the waistband of his trousers and then he followed the Range Rover out of the parking lot on foot. As he made it out onto the street in front of the building the car was pulling off into a side street a few hundred yards along the main street.
Frustration and anger pulsed through his body. Once again he had put his life on the line only to have his efforts count for nothing. Once again his own government had let him down badly. The team from the Embassy should have been at his side a long time ago. There was still no sign of them. Jack went back into the building, with anger and retribution playing on his mind. He knew that there were protocols to follow and he knew that the South African government would not take too kindly to British agents using their country as a battlefield, but he also knew there were always ways around such problems and that he was left alone was a decision made by someone very senior. At the very least they should have sent a small team, lightly armed, to provide him with an escort back to the safety of the embassy.
He took the elevator back up to his office. The building was completely deserted. The street outside was completely deserted. The city was accustomed to gunfire in the middle of the night but the fierce battle that had just taken place in the office building should have alerted someone to the fact that this was something a little out of the ordinary. It was a city of gangsters and drug lords who played their power games out in the mean that the everyday whenever something out went off earlier that day it was only a matter of minutes before the police were on the scene—even if they kept strictly to office hours when open with guns and bombs, but that didn’t decent folk were too afraid to call the police of the ordinary took place. When the bomb they did arrive. They may have made a dog’s dinner of securing the crime scene but at least they showed up. Where were they now? Who was ordering them to stay away? Who would have that kind of power? None of these questions could be answered in a way that would provide Jack with any comfort, and so he tried to concentrate on what his next move should be—a task made more difficult given the death and destruction which surrounded him. The uneasy feeling that this was the final act in some deadly game was something that he could not shake. There was a lot more going on here than he could comprehend and if he didn’t get his head around it soon then he would be lying on the ground with blood streaming out of a hole in his skull.
As Jack looked out of the window of his office onto the empty street a chill ran along his spine. He felt extremely lonely and vulnerable. The latter of those two feelings was something that he was not used to. It was as if the city was holding its breath in expectation of something even more terrifying than the gunfights that Jack had just endured. As the minutes ticked by and his thoughts turned to the fate of his PA, he wondered where it would all end. He sat in the chair behind his desk and he waited. He waited, and waited and waited. No one came. This was more than a simple red tape issue. Not only had someone ordered the team from the embassy to wait for clearance, but they had ordered the team to stand down altogether. Jack banged his fists on the desks. The Irish, the South Africans, the Russians and now the British—was the whole world turning on him?
As he left the office and headed towards the stairwell one thought was racing through his mind with brutal clarity. He had been hung out to dry by someone on his own side. Until he knew who that someone was and what they wanted then he had little or no hope of moving against his foreign enemies. To take out the bad guys and save the girl he first needed to return to his own side to carry out a bit of housework.
better at a
And there was no one in the entire service who was spot of house cleaning than Jack. He would have the answers that he sought or he would die trying to get those answers. Ammunition from the dead Russian was used to reload Jack’s gun and a silver BMW from the eighties graciously allowed him to start it without a key—like everything else from that decade it was all flash and no substance—it looked the part but it lacked even the most basic
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security. He didn’t know what he would find when he got there. He didn’t know who would be waiting for him or if they would be in a kill first, ask questions later kind of mood. But one thing was certain— one truth was close to revealing itself, and the answer to all of Jack’s questions could only be found in the one building in the city. It was a building that he never in a million years would have considered looking for such an answer—before that night, at any rate. The further he drove from the office building the more traffic he encountered. The feeling of isolation began to lift and it was quickly replaced by razor sharp determination.
Why did Barry drive off with Robert? Was it a kidnap or was it a rescue? Was the Russian there on behalf of his own country or was he working with Barry or someone else? It wasn’t such a farfetched notion. As the USSR went into terminal decline one administration after another tried to save the country from bankruptcy. Unemployment rocketed as public spending was slashed, and the military had its budget decimated. Many agents were brought in from around the world to keep an eye on dissidents in their own country, but just as many were cut loose as the cost of bringing them home was too high. Those isolated agents did what they had to do to survive and a great number of them ended up working for large sums of money for the rich and influential all over the world as security advisers, or as active protection. For a time having your own former Russian spy as a bodyguard was the height of fashion amongst the super rich. But the dead Russian still had that pale skin of the Motherland—he did not look like someone who had been protecting the over-privileged offspring of some oil tycoon on a luxury yacht in the Mediterranean. Jack’s money was still on the Russian being an active agent, and that was not an easy truth to wrestle with. When the Russian government wanted someone dead then they had a way of making it happen. During his first mission he had watched as a KGB commander had executed one of her own men in cold blood, and she would have done the same to Jack had she caught up with him. A near death experience in the North Atlantic and a frantic rescue mission by the US Coastguard taught Jack early on in his life as a spy to always pay the Russians proper respect. Around that same time another Russian team had got very close to Jack’s family and by doing so they almost blew his
cover back in Ireland. It was a dangerous time but it was that constant danger that taught him the need for vigilance, and that no story could ever be taken at face value, no matter who was telling it.
The diplomatic quarter was well lit, heavily guarded, and watched from every conceivable angle by batteries of the most sophisticated surveillance equipment the intelligence community could lay their hands on. The lengths that the various countries went to to ensure the safety of their diplomatic missions was a sign of their power and importance in the world, and the UK was not going to be left behind. The British Embassy was located at the end of one of the larger streets. The mansion and its support buildings were set in almost twenty acres of wooded land. A high wall topped with razor wire surrounded the compound. Teams of armed guards patrolled the grounds on the inside of the compound while teams from the South African security forces patrolled the streets outside. The South African patrols were infrequent and easily evaded. The patrols on the inside however were numerous and almost impossible to evade.
Jack pulled the car over to the side of the road in fro
nt of the French Embassy. No one liked the French; least of all the South Africans. The security outside that building was bound to be lax. He turned off the engine and killed the lights. The men protecting the British Embassy from the inside were the best trained in the entire service. Jack knew that for a fact as he had trained many of them himself. As he got out of the car one last thought jumped into his mind and slapped him hard across the face.
What the bloody hell do you think you are doing, Jack? It was a sobering wake-up call, and it was a question that he really didn’t have a proper answer for. He knew that the answers were to be found behind those high walls; but a sudden death was a more likely outcome rather than enlightenment. He walked casually towards the British Embassy unaware that someone on the inside had already detected his approach.
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10
Rogue Agent
It had been a few years since Jack had acted as a consultant on security for the Embassy. It was an easy assignment—no bullets to dodge and nothing more pressing than which factor sun lotion he should apply to his face to worry about. It was easy to see why so many former spies went into the private sector once they left active service. They were an enjoyable few weeks and Jack was genuinely annoyed when the process came to an end. That process involved running every kind of scenario that he could conceive of—from an attack on the complex by a terrorist organisation, to the evacuation of the staff to a safe country in the event of civil war—a prospect that was more than simply a worst case scenario war game as elements within the old regime tried desperately to cling onto power. As the country settled into a kind of normality that few would have predicted, a job at the British Embassy was transferred from somewhere that a member of the Foreign Office would be sent to as a punishment, to a prized assignment. The Foreign Office could still send their wayward diplomats to Ireland if they didn’t toe the line. Jack and his fellow experts had prodded and probed at every vulnerability until the place was as safe as it could be; they only just stopped short of relocating the entire complex underground and fortifying it with a battalion of the British army. Jack knew only too well that a determined enough force could
breach even the more heavily fortified complex and besides keeping the common criminal element out, his efforts would not stand up to any real show of strength. But in many respects the common criminal element was the real threat—no side in any civil war would risk the wrath of the British government by attacking its sovereign territory, especially as many of the factions believed that the European powers were just waiting for an excuse to invade their country and solidify white rule for another generation. Against that complex political and social backdrop, Jack did his best.
It was watertight. Or as far as all the reports that he filed, it was watertight. There was one small crack in the impenetrability that Jack had left exposed on purpose. It was a vulnerability that he shared with the Ambassador at the time. He only mentioned it in passing and he gave the impression that it was not really a problem. That was intentional. If the diplomat ever found himself in the situation where the embassy was under attack and there was no possibility of rescue, then he, his family, and his staff, would all have to fight for themselves. With only minor weaponry located in the complex that fight would have to be waged at an intellectual level. With all the normal escape routes closed to them Jack situation the Ambassador’s tion he had with Jack. It was a long shot but Jack knew only too well that any building that was intruder proof could also be turned into an escape proof prison—American diplomats all over the Middle East went through that very scenario far too frequently, and even the British enjoyed the odd spot of siege warfare in countries like Iran and Sudan. Yet curiously, preparations for a siege was not something that Jack and his team were tasked with preparing for. It was probably the case that once the situation reached that level then there was very little that could be done, either on the ground, or from the centres of power back in Europe—threats of sanctions had little effect on people who were desperate and penniless. Going from a position of nothing to one of having less than nothing is an abstract
who are already starving. He wanted to give
concept to people
everyone in the
fighting chance, should the country go to hell, and if a the wall was the best that he could do, then so be it. He had been in many tight situations where a hole under a wall would have been
building a hole under hoped that somehow in the heat of the mind would think back to the conversa
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a welcomed sight. There was a second more personal reason why he had opted to leave a gap in the security of the complex. For several years the embassy had suspected that one of their own staff had been smuggling classified information out of the building. This situation did not alarm the staff in the Embassy at the upper levels as much as Jack thought it ought to have alarmed them. But theirs was a very different world to Jack’s world. governments down or lead to terrorist acts; the kind of secrets that made it as far as British Embassies across the world were assumed to be in the hands of the foreign countries from the moment they left the UK. The Embassies may have been swept for listening devices on a daily basis but in most instances the security staff carrying out the sweeps simply left the bugs where they were—it was simpler that way—no one had to beak back into the buildings to install new devices. When devices were being installed that is when there was real danger to the staff—that is when security guards got shot or when some innocent secretary had her throat cut. Such an attitude had alarmed Jack when he first encountered it, but as he spent more time in the Embassy talking with the diplomats he began to see that it did make a kind of pragmatic sense, even if he didn’t entirely agree with their methods. Still, as a matter of professional pride Jack was determined to stop the leak. With the heightened security in place that job had become almost impossible. The flow of information may have stopped but Jack wanted to find the guilty person one way or another—if he did a good job in South Africa then his masters back in Whitehall may have sent him to a few more exotic locations. Jack planned to let the staff know about the escape route one by one in the hope that the traitor would one day be tempted into using it. It would be much easier for Jack to keep a constant watch on one exit. Unfortunately he never did get a chance to put his plan into action. He was called back to London and then sent on a mission to Canada ahead of a State visit by the Queen—not quite as easy an assignment as it might have appeared on the surface—if a diplomat got killed because Jack screwed up then that would have been unfortunate, but if the Queen got killed because Jack screwed up then it would have been the end of his career, and possibly the end of his life.
Secrets in Jack’s world could bring mass loss of civilian life through
As he crouched down beside the wall next to the Embassy Jack hoped that the security teams that followed him were a lot less professional than him. As he walked around the outside wall of the complex searching for the way out, and his way in from all those years before he struggled to match the landscape from then to that of the present. Near the corner next to the main road grew a large oak—it was a landmark that had changed little since the last time Jack saw it. It had been planted in the last century by one of the first homesick diplomats sent to secure Britain’s rights in that part of the world. The climate suited the tree well and it thrived, with its thick branches and heavy foliage embracing the hot African sun. The rocky ground beneath the embassy complex was a bit less kind to the great tree and the condition of the soil meant that the larger grounding roots had to crawl along the surface rather than penetrating deep into the ground—the large buildings had served as effective windbreaks over the years and that made up for the inadequacy of the tree’s root system. One large root made its way under the wall to the other side, where it had perished in some previous decade. The small gap left by the decaying root was not large, but it was certainly big enough to allow a determined intruder into the complex, or a desperate diplomat
with an escape route. Although time had rotted the root a lot since the last time Jack had been there, the hole was still nowhere near as large as what he had remembered—it was another case of wishful thinking on the part of his brain. Had there been any other way in then that hole under the wall would have remained undisturbed for many years to come.
Deadly States (Seaforth Files by Nicholas P Clark Book 2) Page 15