The safe point was exactly where he had been told to find it, and once he had made certain the warehouse was sanitized, the gunman took up a position to wait.
His estimate was four hours. Long enough to be considered thorough, long enough that any stragglers would make themselves known. But he hadn’t expected any survivors. It went against his ordered view of the world. The 40mm high explosive shells he had fired into the truck were enough to hobble a military APC. He had not seriously considered that any members of the British support team would be resilient enough to live this long.
He kept his careful aim with the Sig Sauer. The gunman did not like extraneous details. They irritated him.
“I will ask you again,” he told the agent. “Who is with you?” If there were others, it would be necessary to deal with them as well.
The reply came after a long moment. “I’m alone,” said the other man. “You did your job,” he added bitterly. “You killed them all.”
There was anger and desperation in those words. They did not sound like a lie. Despite himself, the gunman allowed a small smile. “Move to the rear of the car. Open the trunk with your right hand.”
The other man obeyed cautiously, and the gunman followed him, staying at his back. The Fiat’s hatchback rose to reveal the empty boot. As a matter of course, the gunman had lined it with thick sheets of polypropylene.
The agent balked at the sight of it, understanding immediately. The plastic worked admirably in insulating a vehicle from blood traces. The gunman already had a location sighted and prepared for dumping any bodies, a spot just off one of the service canals near the harbor. The agent’s corpse would be found within a day or so.
“Turn around,” he demanded. The gunman moved slightly. He wanted to improve the angle of the kill shot and lessen the risk of a messy through-and-through trajectory.
“What, so you can look me in the eye when you do it?” The agent’s voice was tight with tension. The gunman had heard the same thing a hundred times before.
“Yes,” he said mildly. “Turn and face me.”
* * *
Everything around Marc seemed to narrow in that moment, his focus drawing close until there was nothing else but the thunder of his heart in his chest. He had seen the steel-black shape of the suppressed pistol, distorted by the windscreen reflection into a hooked talon emerging from the German’s fist.
In his mind’s eye he saw the moment unfold. The cough of the silencer, the impact of the bullet cutting into him, slamming him back into the car. Falling into darkness, spinning and turning …
And suddenly Marc was remembering another moment like this one, a point of balance on the edge of death.
Two years earlier, low over the South China Sea on a night exercise, the Lynx’s rotors howling against a vicious storm front that had rolled in from out of nowhere. A blinding flash of white searing his eyes as a lightning bolt cut the air, the smoky crash as the helicopter took the hit, power dying across all the boards. The pilot lolling semi-conscious at his controls, Marc straining from the observer’s station to reach the stick. The inexorable pull as the Lynx turned in toward the wave tops, spinning through auto-rotate, falling toward death and darkness …
He remembered what he had felt in that moment; it wasn’t fear. There was no panic then, no paralysis by dread. No, what Marc Dane recalled most clearly from the crash that almost killed him was his anger.
His fury peaked in that moment. He refused to die because of something so random, without cause or purpose. He had to know the reason. There had to be an answer to it.
He would not die now, ended by a bullet from a nameless assassin.
He saw the killer shift his stance, moving to line up his shot. He was heavy-set and broad across the shoulders, easily Marc’s superior in terms of muscle and power, even without the matter of the semi-automatic pistol in his hand.
He didn’t have a plan. There wasn’t any training he had gone through for a scenario such as this one. But he had no other choice.
Marc turned, putting his left foot out to push off the Fiat’s rear bumper. He pressed all his strength into the motion and used it to propel himself up and backward toward the gunman.
The other man grunted and got off a single shot, but the action did the trick, catching the gunman by surprise. A line of fire ripped across Marc’s left forearm, but he was already colliding with the assassin, and the two of them went down hard, crashing to the ground in an untidy heap.
Marc brought up his arm and then drove the elbow into whatever was beneath him. He felt something buckle and heard a faraway noise, like the snap of a stick of damp wood. The gunman’s hand spasmed and the pistol was gone, spinning away across the concrete.
Marc’s forearm felt like it had been dipped in acid, the stinging, burning pain making his fingers tremble. He tried to roll away, but the gunman was too quick to recover. With a grunt of effort, the other man threw him off and Marc tumbled, bouncing off a support pillar. Constellations of pain exploded behind his eyes and he gasped in a breath of dusty air.
The gunman did not hurry. He picked himself up and walked over to where the pistol had fallen, gathering it in his hand. Marc was back on his feet as the gun tracked toward him.
He broke into a headlong sprint as the other man held his position and fired after him, pivoting to follow Marc between the pillars. The gunman emptied the rest of the Sig Sauer’s magazine, seven more rounds snapping at the crumbling brickwork as he ran for the line of benches. Marc vaulted over the worktables and vanished from sight.
* * *
The gunman muttered under his breath in terse German, and came after him. As he walked, slow and careful, favoring his right side, he thumbed the ammunition release and the magazine fell away with a hollow rattle. He fished a fresh one from a pocket in his jacket and slammed it home, cocking the slide in a single motion.
At the benches, the gunman reached out with his free hand to the closest of the collapsible tables and yanked it upward. The plastic trestle spun and tumbled, knocking down the others on either side of it. “Do not prolong this,” he warned, searching for his target. “I will make you regret it.”
Marc’s attack came from his blind side, in a wild and clumsy rush. From out of the shadows, the British agent swung the yellow-and-black pole of a work-light rig like a two-handed sword, striking the gunman squarely in the chest with the cluster of lamps at the upper end. Glass and plastic shattered against him, hardened halogen bulbs popping and sparking, disconnected power cables snapping through the air like whips. The gunman staggered backward, his balance failing, and Marc swung back the other way, this time catching the assassin across the face with the splayed metal legs of the work-light tripod.
The gun went away again, and the killer fell against one of the collapsed benches. Marc tried to pin him with the rig, but he shouldered it aside, using his body mass to deflect the blow. He was coming back up, his face and chest a mess of tiny, bloody scratches, and the cool detachment of before was melting away, replaced by icy ferocity.
* * *
Marc threw punches, first to the jaw, then a hard double to the gut, but it was like hitting a wall of leather, dense and heavy. The gunman shook it off and came at him with surprising speed. He barely got his hands up before the gunman’s thick, meaty fingers found their way to his throat and gripped tight.
Hot chugs of breath gusted from the assassin’s mouth as he applied pressure to Marc’s trachea. The gunman’s eyes were a striking cornflower blue, and utterly dead. Marc could not break the assassin’s gaze as the air in his lungs soured, the inexorable pressure around his neck increasing even as he fought against the other man’s grasp.
He flailed and punched at the gunman’s chest, trying to find the place where he had heard the rib snap before.
The color began to drain from his vision, his head swimming as the interior of the warehouse turned into shifting lines of shade. Dull sparkles gathered at the edges of his vision, closing in on him.
The ceaseless hissing of blood pressure became the only sound in his ears. The gunman was inching it out. He would end Marc with his own hands to be absolutely certain of the kill.
Dizzy and unfocused, Marc managed to bring his fingers up. He clawed at the assassin’s cheeks, tearing blindly at the deep cuts that were already there, trying to draw some kind of reaction from him, anything at all, anything that would for one brief moment ease the relentless constriction about his throat.
He found the soft tissues around the gunman’s right eye and with all the force he could muster, Marc pressed his thumb into the socket and twisted it. A growl built in the killer’s throat as Marc pushed and pushed, compressing the organ into the back of the skull cavity. The gunman pressed harder, trying to end the contest before it could slip out of his favor.
Marc’s head swam, his skull aching and throbbing as if it were filled with a slick of slow oil laced with needles. He was aware of blood streaming from one of his nostrils, but still he pressed on, pushing and pushing, losing himself in the action until there was no conscious thought behind it.
Something soft and wet gave beneath Marc’s thumb, a sudden hot spurt of fluid, and the gunman released an animal scream. He threw his victim away and staggered forward, clutching at his face, dragging trails of sticky liquid from his ruined eye. Marc saw all this down a tunnel of gray, heard it through a woolly filter of blunted sound. He gasped and choked as his empty lungs seized in his chest, hungry for oxygen.
The gunman stumbled against the fallen work lamp Marc had struck him with and collapsed into the mess of cables dangling from the splayed tripod feet.
What Marc did next came from nowhere; later he would think back to this moment and search his recollection for the impulse that made him do it.
Marc threw himself at the gunman and snatched at the bunch of cables, curling them about his wrist with a savage tug. The power lines drooping over the assassin’s chest went taut and snapped up about the gunman’s throat before he could push them away. Marc shouted wordlessly and put all his weight into the motion. The cables tightened into a noose, biting into the other man’s bull-neck.
The gunman gasped, his face flushing cherry-red, his legs kicking as he tried to get free. All at once, hate and fury boiled over in Marc. Every iota of emotion that had been churning around inside him, the anger and the grief, the shock and the confusion, all manifested itself in a final, violent action as he jerked the cable as tight as it would go.
A drawn-out, sickly crackle emerged from the gunman’s lips as his neck twisted. The bigger man’s body went slack and dropped to the concrete floor.
Eventually, Marc let the cable go and rose unsteadily to his feet. His hands sang with abrasion burns and his joints ached with the release of tension. He took two wary steps away. The shiver of an adrenaline crash moved through him for the second time that day. It was hard to breathe normally.
He found an iron pillar and slumped down against it, glaring at the dead man among the mess of cables and debris. The gun was lying nearby, just out of arm’s reach, but he ached too much to stretch out to snag it.
Marc Dane was no stranger to death. He had been in the thick of combat, he had fired weapons that he knew had to have taken lives—missiles fired off a helicopter’s launch rail, submachine guns shot from the back of moving vehicles—but he had never been this close. Not hand to hand, face to face. Breath to final breath.
He had never looked a man in the eye and then ended him, until now.
Marc stared down at his hands, watched them as the tremors eased away into nothing. The sun marched slowly up the grimy windows of the warehouse and he sat there, watching the morning move on, his thoughts empty, the pain across his body slowly easing from a strident throbbing to a dull ache. He kept waiting for the moment to come, for some fraction of understanding to strike him, for some new insight to rise from the life he had taken.
But there was nothing, only a faint, enduring echo. A strange new kind of anger that didn’t ebb or wane, a drive that kept pushing at him to rise to his feet, to start walking. To find the people who had betrayed Nomad and murdered them.
Traitor. At the Cross. Sam’s voice sounded in his thoughts, so sudden and so clear that it was almost as if she were standing there next to him. He didn’t want to accept that she could be right, but the dead man lying across from him was all the proof he needed.
The Palomino had been one gigantic trap, laid to draw in MI6 and OpTeam Seven. The gunman, there to deal with any loose ends. They planned for the bomb on the ship to kill the tactical team, and the assassin was there to destroy the support element. Marc had broken that chain of events by going after Sam, by doing something foolish and human and outside the rules.
The gunman hadn’t tracked Marc, he had come here and waited for him. How could he have known where to find me? Marc finally rose to his feet, gathered up the gun and walked back to the dead man.
“You knew where to go,” he said aloud. “You were told.”
It made a chilling kind of sense. A traitor explained the looted kits, the reason why Nomad had been assigned to this operation when some of their number had been conducting an eyes-only investigation into … what?
This was more than just Al Sayf and their terrorist ambitions—this represented a penetration of MI6 at levels way over Marc’s pay grade. The enormity of it robbed him of his breath and he wiped beads of sweat from his brow.
Careful who you trust, Sam had told him, just before she said she was sorry.
Was she sorry because she had kept this from him, or sorry because she had been a part of it?
* * *
Marc waited out the day, using the time to clean up the disorder in the warehouse as much as possible. He stripped the gunman for what money he had on him, taking the Sig Sauer P220 pistol. The unwieldy MGL he dismantled and left in the car boot with the dead man’s corpse.
The last thing he did was to set a strip of rag alight and throw it into the Fiat’s passenger seat. The car was catching well as he left the warehouse, and Marc found his way out through the alleys of the industrial area. He made it to the main road as the first of the fire engines sped past in the opposite direction, and when he was sure no one was looking, he pulled the detonators from the remainder of the 40mm grenade shells, throwing the lot over the sea wall and into the Channel.
Marc walked south along the highway, out of Dunkirk, losing himself in the shadows at the road’s edge.
FIVE
From a distance, the collection of buildings appeared to be lying derelict. Concrete slabs were arranged in low blocks that huddled at the end of a dirt track, standing up against a forbidding, stony hillside. In the heat of the day they baked under skies sparse with clouds, and at night, when the temperature fell, they were traps for the cold winds.
The razor wire and the men with guns were what set it apart from other homesteads and farms out in the mountainous wilds. Anyone who came too close to the compound would be run off—or worse. Not that there was much cause for anyone to be out this far.
Halil wondered why anyone would ever want to come here of their own volition in the first place, out over the scrubland and the endless miles of sand and rock. It was nothing like the town where he had grown up, with the thronging masses of people and the constant pulse of life.
But that place was gone now, if he were to believe what the teachers had told him. Gone into rubble and fire, destroyed. Wiped out, as his father and mother had been, in the rain of bombs from the sky.
The sun was going down behind the mountains, and he judged the moment good enough to move out from the barracks to the shower block. Halil did it quickly, without looking back to see if his compatriot was keeping up.
Sometimes, Halil tried to remember the life he had lived before this one. It was hard, and it only came back to him in fragments. There were some days when he wondered if that old life had ever really existed. Was it a just a story he had read in a book? The life of some other boy who went
to school, who laughed and played until the day it all went away in screaming and fire.
Perhaps he had always been here. He didn’t know how old he was now—seventeen or eighteen? How could he tell without someone to show him?
He remembered many winters in this place, the frost crunching underfoot in the courtyard. It didn’t seem to make a difference to the teachers, though. Whatever the weather, they made them run the drills and do their chores, whether it was cleaning out the latrines, carrying packs of stones back and forth across the quad, or learning to dismantle a rifle. If they were not outdoors in the courtyard or running the track around the fence, they were in the classrooms learning from dusty textbooks or reading passages from the Qu’ran. But the cold-eyed men who led the prayers looked like no Imam Halil had ever known, and this place was no madrassa.
He was one of the older boys now. Halil was tall and wiry, and sometimes the others made fun of him because of it. That was part of the reason that he had made friends with Tarki. Tarki’s size was a mystery; stocky and thickset, maybe a year younger than Halil, the other teenager seemed able to maintain his weight despite the meager diet they were fed. He endured the mocking catcalls about his girth, and one time Halil had grown tired of hearing them, and stood up for him. So they were friends, after a fashion.
Tarki arrived next to him, and puffed out a breath, his moon face flushed with anxiety. “We should go back,” he muttered, in his peculiar accent.
Halil looked at him and shook his head. Tarki’s story was much like his. But where Halil had gone to a good school and lived a life of reasonable comfort, with books and television and food enough for his family, Tarki had come from a goat farm where running water was a luxury and reading was a skill out of his reach. Tarki had told him the name of the village he was born in, but it was meaningless to Halil. They spoke the same language, but they might have been from nations a world apart.
All they had in common—all any of them had in common—was that they had no one to miss them out beyond the razor wire. This place, this “orphanage,” as the teachers called it, was home to strays left behind by warfare.
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