by Will Jordan
Then something else caught his eye. A faint patchwork of scars criss-crossed the otherwise unmarred skin of her back. It was like a spider’s web, countless strands all going in different directions.
They were old scars, long since healed and faded, yet they had obviously been inflicted with great pain. In fact, they looked almost like whip lashes …
She turned to look at him, and he glanced away uncomfortably, angry at himself for gawking at her. What was he – a fifteen-year-old trying to peer into the girls’ locker room?
‘You can look at me, Drake,’ she said, amused by his reaction. ‘I won’t have you arrested.’
By the time he turned back, she had pulled on her jeans again and was buttoning up her shirt.
‘Do I make you uncomfortable?’ she asked, curious.
‘Are you trying to?’
Her eyes flashed. ‘You didn’t answer my question.’
‘And you didn’t answer mine.’ He held out the takeaway box. ‘Here. Your feast awaits.’
Dinner consisted of sirloin steak, barbecue ribs, fries, corn cobs, salad and more pots of coleslaw, mayonnaise, garlic butter and ketchup than he could keep track of. Just one of them looked as if it could feed a whole platoon. Drake was full before he even got halfway through his, though Anya showed no signs of slowing down. He couldn’t blame her.
‘Mind if I ask you something?’
‘Of course.’
‘Those scars on your back. Did you get them in Khatyrgan?’
For a moment she stiffened, and her eyes darkened as an old memory resurfaced.
‘No,’ she said, distracted. ‘They are from a long time ago.’
‘What happened?’
‘When I was in Afghanistan the first time …’ She glanced away, and he saw the muscles in her throat moving up and down as she swallowed. She shook her head, banishing the memory. ‘It doesn’t matter now. It’s in the past.’
She wasn’t going to say anything more. Deciding not to press the issue in case she clammed up altogether, he fished out one of the bottles of Corona and held it out to her.
‘I don’t drink,’ she said. When he popped the lid and downed a mouthful, she added, ‘You shouldn’t either.’
‘Duly noted.’
She eyed him critically. ‘I could smell drink on you in that holding cell in Alaska. Your hands were trembling. Do you often drink like that?’
He shrugged, trying to appear nonchalant. ‘Depends how bad my day’s been. Today, I think I’ve earned one.’
She leaned forward a little. ‘In my experience, men drink to forget things. Failures, regrets, mistakes … Tell me, what are you trying to forget, Drake?’
He laid his half-finished box aside, no longer hungry. ‘I’m not here to swap life stories. Right now, I want to know about your source in the Iraqi government. Who was he?’
Again he saw that faint, enigmatic smile. She had scored a point, exposed a chink in his armour. That was enough for now.
‘He would not tell me his name.’
He eyed her dubiously. ‘All right. What division did he work in?’
‘I don’t know.’
He was starting to feel uneasy. ‘So what do you know about him?’
‘You don’t understand, Drake,’ she said. ‘Men like him don’t just give you their name and address. I made contact with him through a broker, and after that we communicated through anonymous email accounts.’
‘Who was the broker?’
‘An Israeli Mossad agent named Russo. I had worked with him before, and he had contacts all throughout the Iraqi government.’ She shook her head. ‘But I will not approach him again. He has close ties with the Agency. He may even be the reason I was captured four years ago.’
It was hard to fault her logic there. Frowning, he turned the situation over in his mind. ‘Any chance your source is still checking his emails?’
A blonde eyebrow rose a little. ‘There is only one way to find out.’
Reaching into his pocket, Drake handed her Munro’s cellphone. It was the latest generation BlackBerry with full Internet and email access. She eyed the device curiously, then looked up at him as if expecting an explanation.
It took a moment or two for Drake to understand her confusion. The world of technology had moved on since her imprisonment. ‘You can access your email account from here,’ he explained, taking it back and enabling the Internet connection.
She said nothing, though she didn’t look happy. He suspected she wasn’t pleased at having her ignorance exposed.
It took twenty seconds or so to bring up Hotmail. Using the tiny keyboard with some difficulty, Anya searched for her old email account. It didn’t take long to discover that it had long since been deleted due to inactivity. With no other choice, she set up a new account under the name Jane Lynch and composed her first message in four years.
Greetings from an old friend. It has been a long time since we last spoke, but I am prepared to honour our previous agreement if you will meet with me. Please respond as soon as possible.
Her brief missive complete, she addressed it to [email protected], prayed she had memorised the address correctly, and clicked send.
And just like that, it was done. She had played her last hand.
She tossed the phone back to Drake. ‘There is nothing more we can do. Now we must wait.’
Chapter 41
‘I DON’T KNOW what the fuck happened,’ Marshall Davis groaned, his normally deep voice rendered thin and nasal by the splints in his broken nose. ‘One minute I was at the gas station minding my own business, the next … I was getting the shit knocked out of me.’
That didn’t look like an easy task. Davis was a big man, tall and broad shouldered, with big square hands calloused from hard labour. According to his file he was a construction worker, twenty-eight years old, with a previous history of violent encounters, mostly bar-room brawls. A strong man in his prime, used to handling himself in a fight, now laid up in a hospital bed.
His face was a bruised and swollen mess, cut in places, with massive discolouration spreading out from his shattered nose. His right arm was in a plaster cast, the wrist snapped like a twig, while his ribs were heavily bandaged up.
‘Can you describe the man who did this to you?’ Dietrich asked. It was late, and they’d had to fight with the doctors to be allowed in, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He’d spent a long and uncomfortable hour in an Air Force chopper just to get here tonight.
‘Man? It wasn’t no man who did this,’ Davis corrected him. ‘It was that crazy bitch he had with him.’
Dietrich could feel Frost’s eyes on him. She’d had her own encounter with Anya, and harboured no love for the woman. ‘Tell us what happened,’ she prompted.
Davis clenched his jaw for a moment, clearly uncomfortable. ‘We’d just stopped to fill up and we saw her standing at the pump next to us.’
‘What did she look like?’
‘Tall, blonde hair. Good-looking, I guess. She spoke with a foreign accent, maybe Russian or something. I don’t know.’ He shook his head, as if such things were a mystery to him.
Dietrich wondered if the stupid bastard had ever been outside Virginia.
‘Anyway, we tried to talk to her, real friendly like, and she just ignored us. Made me think maybe she had something to hide, so I tried to approach her, then she just snapped. Went crazy, broke my wrist and my nose. My buddy Hooper tried to help me out, and she did the same to him. Crazy bitch could have killed us both.’
That certainly sounded like the Anya he knew. The more he learned about her, the more he relished the thought of taking her down.
‘And you didn’t do anything to provoke her?’ Keegan asked, dubious.
Davis glared at the older man. ‘If making conversation is provoking someone, arrest me now.’
Dietrich was keen to keep the conversation on track. ‘What happened after that? Do you remember?’
He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t
see real good, but I remember shouting. The other guy came out and told her to get in the car. He had an accent too – English, I think. She must have listened to him though, ’cause a few seconds later they tore ass out of there. That was the last I saw of ’em.’
Dietrich nodded. He didn’t think Davis had anything else useful to say, and there was already more than enough to keep him occupied.
‘We’re done,’ he said, standing up.
‘Hey,’ Davis called after him. ‘You find that bitch, you let me know. I’ll feel real good knowing she’s behind bars.’
Dietrich said nothing as he left the room.
An officer from the Greensville County Sheriff’s Office was waiting for them in the corridor outside. He was a tall man in his fifties, skinny as a rake, with thinning grey hair and a bushy moustache. The tag on his uniform said his name was Merritt.
‘Y’all get what you needed from him?’
Dietrich nodded absently, still mulling over everything he’d heard.
‘He was lying about one thing,’ Keegan chimed in. ‘He wasn’t just trying to make conversation when she attacked him.’
Merritt gave a wry smile. ‘Young Mr Davis in there likes to throw his weight around. We’ve had him in the county lock-up a few times for fighting – nothin’ serious, just bar fights and suchlike. According to the gas station attendants, he was givin’ the female suspect a hard time.’
‘Asshole,’ Frost grunted. She had no love for Anya, but men who preyed on women were beneath contempt as far as she was concerned.
Dietrich didn’t care about the man’s history. ‘Did you manage to pull any surveillance footage?’
The old sheriff nodded. ‘Got the whole thing on tape. Makes for some interesting viewing, let me tell you. I could use someone like her as a deputy. Anyway, they took off in a silver Ford Taurus, heading south.’
‘What about the licence plate?’ he pressed. ‘Did you get it?’
‘Of course. We put out an APB to all highway patrols.’
As far as Merritt was concerned, this was little more than a petty brawl. An All Points Bulletin was a standard response in cases like this, but all it really did was advise other cops to be on the lookout for a suspect or vehicle.
It was far from a guarantee of an arrest.
He turned to Keegan. ‘Call this in with Franklin. Get that licence plate out to all agencies as soon as you can.’
‘The fight happened hours ago,’ Frost reminded him. ‘They could be in Alabama by now.’
Dietrich glanced at his watch. It was just past midnight. ‘They would have found a place to hole up for the night,’ he decided. ‘Somewhere that doesn’t ask for ID. Can you bring up a list of motels in the area?’
‘How big of an area?’
He did some quick calculations in his head. ‘Say … two hundred miles. Concentrate your search to the south.’
‘How do you know he carried on south?’ Frost asked. ‘Wouldn’t it make more sense to change direction and throw us off?’
‘Yeah, it would.’ Keegan was starting to catch on. ‘That’s what we’d expect him to do. He’d know that.’
Dietrich turned his attention back to the sheriff. ‘We need to start calling round those motels.’
Merritt gave him a hard look. ‘Y’all gonna tell me what this is about?’
‘It’s a matter of national security,’ Dietrich evaded, too weary for a more detailed response.
‘So I heard. That shit doesn’t wash too well with me, son. I’m too old, too tired and too ugly for that cloak-and-dagger bullshit.’
Dietrich swallowed down his irritation with some difficulty. ‘We were promised full cooperation from your Sheriff’s Office,’ he reminded the older man. ‘Are we going to have a problem?’
Merritt glared back at him from beneath bushy grey brows. Despite his slender frame, there was a wiry toughness about the man that many would have found intimidating.
Dietrich was not one of those people and therefore met the man’s hostile stare without hesitation.
‘No,’ he said, making little effort to hide his scorn. ‘No problem at all.’
As he walked away, Dietrich closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. His head was pounding and his leg throbbing.
‘Fucking rednecks,’ he mumbled in German.
Anya’s mood was somewhere between elation and trepidation at the thought of making contact with Typhoon again. She had risked everything to find this man four years ago, and had paid a heavy price for it. She had no wish to repeat the experience.
Yet the secrets he held just might make it worth her trouble.
The moment Drake mentioned him, an idea had begun to form in her mind; an idea spurred on by her desperate desire to claw back what she had lost. It was the same reason she had abandoned her fruitless mission in Afghanistan to pursue Typhoon four years ago, the same reason she had risked her career and her very life on a desperate gamble.
Redemption.
Her standing within the Agency had suffered greatly after the debacle with Munro, and the conflict that had torn her unit apart. Indeed, she had grown so disgusted with the whole affair that she resigned her position and disbanded what remained of Task Force Black, spending almost a year in virtual isolation while brooding on her mistakes.
Only the September 11 attacks and the subsequent US-led invasion of Afghanistan had been enough to lure her out of her self-imposed exile. But even then, she’d known she would never regain the prominence she’d once held, would never stand as high as she had on the eve of Munro’s treachery.
The chance to find proof of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had seemed like just the boon she needed to rebuild her reputation, to redeem herself in Cain’s eyes and prove she was still an asset to the Agency.
She had lost that chance once, yet here it was again.
It was part of the reason she had accompanied Drake this far. She could have escaped a dozen times already, taken him hostage or even killed him with ease. Instead she had chosen to stay with him, knowing he could lead her to Munro. He might even be useful in finding Typhoon.
If she delivered both Munro and Typhoon, perhaps, just perhaps, she could return to the Agency on her own terms. Perhaps she could serve again.
‘Tell me about Munro,’ Drake said.
Anya blinked. She was back in the cheap motel room again, and such dreams were, for the moment, far away. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘What really happened between you two?’
She flashed a grim smile. ‘I thought Cain told you already.’
‘I got his version. I was interested in hearing yours.’ He took a sip of beer. ‘How did you meet him?’
She sighed, thinking back to a time in her life when things had been very different. ‘I recruited him,’ she began. ‘My unit was short on manpower, and Cain kept pressuring me to bring in new operatives. I was against it. I didn’t want to bring in outsiders, but … Cain persuaded me. So I chose a few candidates, and one of the men I picked was Munro.’
Even now she could still picture Munro the first day she’d met him. He had been lined up alongside the half-dozen other candidates in a training hall in Camp Peary, Virginia, known within the Agency as the Farm.
Young, eager, and perhaps a little full of himself, he’d had an infectious grin and a natural charisma that others seemed to respond to.
‘Most of the others fell away during selection, but not Munro. He took everything I could throw at him and kept going. I had never seen a more dedicated soldier.’
She had gone through the same gruelling selection process a decade earlier, had endured every attempt to break her and force her to quit, and emerged stronger for it.
Wary of showing favouritism, she’d gone even harder on him, determined to test his mettle. But still he wouldn’t give in.
His perseverance had earned him the one thing that so few others had ever gained – her respect. She had sensed a kindred spirit in the young man called Dom
inic Munro, and knew then that she wanted him in her unit.
‘He was a brilliant tactician, a gifted soldier, an excellent operative in every way. He understood people and how to bring out the best in them. I taught him everything I could, and he never let me down. He helped bring more men in, oversaw their training, made sure they were put in roles where they excelled. Within a few years, Task Force Black had become more than just a paramilitary unit. We had our own intelligence resources, our own supply and logistics. And after a while, we even had our own funding.’
Drake frowned. ‘So what went wrong?’
‘I made two mistakes. I trusted Munro, and I trusted the Agency,’ she admitted. ‘By the end of the decade, Task Force Black had become so large and complex that it took all my time just to keep it running. I started to rely more and more on Munro to plan and carry out operations. I gave him free rein, and he used it.’
She swallowed, facing up to it at last.
‘I suppose that was when it started. The newer crop of recruits were trained and led by Munro. They were loyal to him, and him alone. Some of them even began to question why I was still in command. As for the others, they began to think I had abandoned them, that I didn’t care any more. If I hadn’t been so distracted, I would have realised it was starting to come apart.
‘I was back at Langley when Munro contacted me in the middle of an operation in Bosnia. He told me he needed to speak urgently, so I agreed to meet him in Sarajevo. That was when he tried to have me killed.’ She shook her head, remembering the horrific ambush on her vehicle as she drove through the muddy pine forests near the Bosnian capital. ‘My own men, the soldiers I had led into battle myself, and they tried to murder me. They almost succeeded.
’I couldn’t believe he would do such a thing. Not Dominic. But there was no denying it. He had planned it for a long time, carefully placing men loyal to him in key positions all throughout the task force, ready to act the moment he gave the order. He was trying to stage a coup.’ Even now she still felt the aching, gut-wrenching pain of his betrayal. ‘He assumed I was dead, and he ordered anyone still loyal to me to be arrested or shot. But I survived, and I managed to track him down.’