by Will Jordan
‘Kristian is not a paper merchant,’ Anya assured him. ‘He’s a case officer.’
‘You’re having a laugh, right? I mean, he’s about the most boring guy I’ve…’ Alex trailed off, realizing at last the trap he’d fallen into. Kristian hadn’t been testing the company security system that day; he’d been testing Alex and Arran, vetting them for future work. And Alex, in his arrogance, had fallen for it.
‘Oh, shit,’ he said quietly.
‘He would not be a very good spy if he advertised his profession,’ Anya observed. ‘In any case, he recommended Loki to me nearly a year ago, said he was a skilled computer expert who could back me up with no questions asked. He was right in that respect. Loki has been useful and proven his worth to me, so he was my choice to break into the Agency’s system.’ She let out a faint sigh; a modest but telling expression of regret. ‘Maybe I asked too much of him.’
‘Do you think he’s still alive?’ Alex asked, not sure if he wanted to know the answer or not. ‘I mean, they wouldn’t just kill him without getting information from him, right?’
He saw a shadow pass over her then, and her eyes took on a faraway look. It was the look of one who had long ago learned harsh lessons that Alex could scarcely imagine.
‘The Agency would have no problems doing both,’ she said at length, then turned her eyes on him once more. The look in them was almost sympathetic. ‘I wouldn’t hold out much hope for your friend.’
Alex let out a breath and bowed his head, feeling like he’d just been punched in the guts. He’d always known that the chances of seeing Arran again were slim at best, but he’d clung onto the notion anyway, refusing to give up on his friend. To hear the harsh reality laid out in such stark and uncompromising terms was almost more than he could take.
‘And what about me? Am I going to end up like him too?’ Alex asked, deciding he might as well get all the bad news out of the way at once. ‘No matter how this ends, I’ll be a wanted man for the rest of my life. What the hell am I supposed to do?’
‘Your situation won’t improve until we find the information I need.’
‘Really,’ he said, picking up on her vague and evasive answer. ‘What exactly is this “information” that’s so important to you, anyway? Must be something pretty serious, considering the CIA are ready to kill anyone who even gets near it.’
At this, Anya merely shook her head. If it were possible, he could have sworn she looked uncomfortable. ‘You’re in enough danger already. It’s better that you don’t know any more.’
‘What, you think I could be any deeper in the shit than I am already?’ Alex scoffed, almost laughing with grim humour at her attempts to protect him. ‘Arran and the rest of Valhalla 7 could be dead already because of this. My life might depend on this fucking thing. I at least have a right to know what it’s all about.’
Whatever brief softening of her demeanour he’d experienced during their earlier conversation was well and truly gone. Now the walls were back up, the defences at the ready.
‘You have a right to know what I tell you; nothing more,’ she said, her tone dangerously cold. ‘You are alive because I chose to spare your life. Your only task is to do what I tell you to do, so don’t think for one moment that you can demand anything from me. Do we understand each other?’
Alex said nothing for several seconds, startled by the change that had come over her.
‘We do,’ he said at last.
The brief confrontation over, they lapsed into uncomfortable silence, each preoccupied with their own thoughts. Alex in particular was deeply unsettled by his companion. He might have understood her instructions, but the will behind them was a complete mystery to him.
Chapter 12
CIA field station – Menwith Hill, North Yorkshire
Olivia Mitchell groaned, her mind stirred from the depths of sleep by the harsh buzz of her cell phone. She blinked a few times, eyes adjusting to the weak daylight filtering in through the drawn curtains, then glanced at the alarm clock on her bedside table – 06:32.
‘Christ,’ she said, her voice husky and her throat dry. Having served more than a decade in the US Army before her posting here, she was no stranger to late shifts and early starts, but this was the first day off she’d had in nearly two weeks. She’d been hoping not to regain consciousness before 10 a.m.
Whoever was calling, however, had other ideas.
The phone carried on ringing and vibrating, moving an inch or so across the hard table surface with each surge. With her mind still fogged by sleep and the pounding ache of a hangover, she reached over and snatched it up.
‘Yeah?’ she mumbled, eyes still closed against the sunlight filtering in through the half-drawn curtains. She arched her back, feeling the vertebrae crack satisfyingly as they realigned themselves.
The voice that addressed her was male, focussed and uncharacteristically serious. Vincent Argento, a young but very ambitious officer with the CIA’s Security Protective Service, whom Mitchell had been sent here to mentor. One old has-been whose career was on the slide grooming one of the Agency’s next up-and-coming stars.
That wasn’t exactly how they’d sold it to her, but that’s what it amounted to. In any case, she hadn’t been in much of a negotiating position when they’d offered her the job.
‘Olivia, it’s Vince,’ he began. ‘Don’t hang up.’
‘Give me a reason not to,’ she replied sourly, dragging herself up to a sitting position and running a hand through her dishevelled hair. It felt tangled and greasy. ‘Unless the president’s been murdered or we’ve gone to war overnight, it’s officially not my problem.’
She reached for the tab of Alka-Seltzer by her bed and dropped two tablets into a glass of water, watching as the effervescent solution went to work. The bottle of wine she’d polished off last night was still standing on the sideboard on the far side of the room, the sour aroma of fermented grapes drifting across to her.
‘We’ve got a Tempest Red.’
Mitchell stopped, the hangover and the fizzing glass temporarily forgotten. Those two words were more than enough to get her attention.
Tempest Red was a coded message; one of many used by Agency personnel when talking on unsecured phone lines. Tempest was the code word for CIA field operatives, while in broad terms red meant ‘murdered, killed or otherwise taken down’.
‘Go on,’ she prompted, sitting up a little straighter.
‘One of our field teams was sent on a high-priority recovery op late last night,’ Argento explained. ‘They didn’t report in as scheduled. You can guess the rest.’
Indeed she could. What she couldn’t yet comprehend was how three highly trained field operatives could have been taken down, particularly in a friendly country like the UK. Was it some kind of Al-Qaeda hit, or even the IRA taking a pop at them? Whatever, she knew she wasn’t going to get answers on an open line like this.
‘Okay,’ she acknowledged, reaching for the glass of Alka-Seltzer and forcing herself to swallow a mouthful. ‘What do you need from me?’
‘It pains me to say this, but we could use your help down here,’ Argento admitted. ‘We need everyone with field experience running the scene.’
All thoughts of sleep were forgotten – Mitchell’s mind was firmly in work mode now, hangover notwithstanding. She might not have been part of the Langley club, but even she recognized how critical the deaths of Agency field operatives were.
‘All right, I’m on my way.’ She closed down the phone without waiting for Argento’s response. She would get the location of the crime scene and other details from her superiors, who were almost certainly all over this by now.
‘Rise and fucking shine, campers,’ she mumbled, downing the remainder of the Alka-Seltzer and throwing the bed covers aside before making her way to her dormitory’s cramped shower room.
As she stripped off and waited for the water to heat up, she surveyed her reflection in the mirror with a critical eye. Mitchell was a couple of ye
ars shy of forty, and although she was still in good shape as far as it went, a combination of late nights, early mornings and liberal doses of alcohol were taking their toll. Her eyes were outlined by dark rings of fatigue, her face drawn and pale, her mouth, eyes and forehead marked by faint worry lines that hadn’t been there a few years ago.
On second thoughts, she reached out and turned the temperature control all the way to minimum. Taking a deep breath, she forced herself beneath the frigid jet of water, letting out a pained gasp as it stung her skin and chilled her all the way to the core. Still, it did the trick. Whatever remaining fog still lingered over her mind, it was well and truly gone now.
Murder before breakfast, she thought, as the water sluiced down around her. What a hell of a start to her day.
Chapter 13
In the end it took Mitchell nearly two hours to find the small, isolated farm compound where the three operatives had been killed. Despite having a top-of-the-line GPS stuck to her windshield, she had twice gotten lost on the winding no-name country roads, much to her frustration.
One thing she would never understand about the UK was the ridiculous road system, which seemed to have been dreamed up by some lunatic a thousand years earlier and had remained unchanged ever since. She supposed the rolling fields and hedges interspersed with small stretches of woodland must have made for pleasant Sunday driving, but it was a nightmare for anyone trying to get somewhere in a hurry.
Her mood wasn’t helped by the pounding headache that still plagued her, though she did her best to push it aside as she pulled her car to a stop outside the barn that seemed to be the centre of activity.
Security teams had already established a discreet but airtight perimeter around the entire area, sealing off every road in or out, and posting operatives on vantage points overlooking the surrounding farmland. Nobody would get near this place without them knowing.
There were no British police or security forces present. They knew that an incident had occurred here last night, just as they knew about most Agency activities in the UK, but the parties usually operated on a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ principle. They didn’t ask what went on in places like this, just as the US government didn’t ask what the Brits did at similar sites in North America.
It was a mutually beneficial arrangement that neatly skirted the uncomfortable issue of both countries sanctioning the kidnapping and torture of their own citizens.
She had barely killed the engine when a young man in civilian clothes emerged from the barn and approached her car with the long, purposeful strides of someone used to having things happen his way. Vincent Argento, her junior comrade in the Agency’s criminal investigation team, looked every inch the Italian-American poster boy. Tall, lean and good-looking, with jet black hair and olive-coloured skin, he walked with the confidence that only handsome young men in their prime seemed to possess.
‘Christ, you stop for breakfast on the way?’ he asked as Mitchell emerged blinking into the bright sunlight. In stark contrast to her dark mood the weather was annoyingly good – a rare enough thing in England.
Mitchell gave him a harsh look. ‘Remarks like that won’t get you in my good graces.’ She glanced towards the barn, guessing the bodies were inside. ‘Tell me what you’ve got.’
He led her towards the cavernous structure, giving her a brief overview as they walked. ‘Three men – one in the truck, the other two on the ground nearby. All experienced operatives and all armed, killed at close range with the same bladed weapon, most likely a field knife. No sign of their killers, or the man they were sent to recover.’
Mitchell frowned. Anyone who could take out three armed Agency field operatives at close quarters was clearly not to be fucked with. A team working in close cooperation might have accomplished such a task, but why use knives? Knives were messy and unreliable – certainly not an efficient means of killing people.
Entering the darkened space within, they were just in time to watch one of the victims being loaded into a black plastic body bag. His throat had been cut to such an extent that the windpipe had been completely severed, leaving behind a yawning gap of torn and bloody flesh. Mitchell said nothing to this.
Argento glanced at her, guessing her thoughts. ‘Not a pretty sight, huh?’
‘Never is,’ she remarked quietly, forcing her mind back into analytical mode. ‘Tell me about their target.’
Argento handed her a small dossier that had been prepared on the subject. ‘Alex Yates, twenty-eight years old. He’s a sales assistant based in London.’
Mitchell surveyed the file briefly. The picture on the front cover, likely lifted from Yates’s passport, depicted a distinctly average-looking young man in his mid twenties. Even features, scruffy light brown hair, pale complexion with a hint of stubble, and eyes that were somewhere between blue and grey in colour.
‘Why’s the Agency so interested in him?’
Argento flashed a brief smile. ‘Young Alex there used to be quite the cyber hell-raiser. Ran a software security outfit by day while hacking secure networks by night. Then he got caught by the Brits trying to hack a government database, did a couple of years inside before being paroled. Seems he’s back to his winning ways, because last night our cyber-crime unit detected him trying to hack into the Agency’s network. Local police arrested him without much trouble, and we sent a field team to bring him in. We know they made it as far as the police station where he was being held, but after that, they went dark.’ He gestured around them. ‘You can guess the rest.’
‘This one was off the books,’ Mitchell surmised, thinking about the long winding roads that had brought her here. The nearest village had to be a good two or three miles distant. ‘They didn’t want any tape recorders or witnesses.’
Argento arched a dark brow. ‘That’s against protocol.’
‘Depends whose protocol they were following.’
In reality this kind of thing went on more often than anyone was willing to admit. Mitchell herself had taken part in more than a few ‘field interrogations’ as an Army CID officer, either due to time constraints or because the subject matter was sensitive enough to warrant it. If these three men had brought Yates here to interrogate him as some kind of black operation, she was willing to bet they had done it on some higher authority.
Argento said nothing to that, and Mitchell didn’t follow it up. Such things were mere supposition at this stage; what she needed were hard facts and an understanding of what exactly had happened out here.
‘So they bring Yates out here and strap him to a chair so they can start their interrogation,’ she said, indicating the wooden chair standing in the centre of the concrete expanse, which she was quite certain hadn’t been placed there by chance. ‘Before they can finish, they’re hit by an unknown number of assailants who take out all three men, free Yates and evac him.’
The younger man nodded. ‘That fits with what we’ve found. Their trail leads outside, cuts through a small wood to a dirt track about half a mile from here. Seems they had a car waiting.’
‘Any idea of the make and model?’
‘Hard to tell, but the wheel spacing’s too small to be an SUV. Probably a hatchback of some kind. Tyre marks suggest a front-wheel drive.’
Mitchell pursed her lips, considering what he’d said. Such a vehicle was hardly ideal for the bumpy, uneven roads in this part of the world. Then again, a knife was far from a perfect weapon to take down three armed men either.
‘I want to see the bodies.’
With Argento close behind, Mitchell made her way over to the line of body bags, helped herself to a pair of surgical gloves from a box placed there by the forensics teams, then unzipped the first bag and bent close to examine the occupant. The sight of blood and death didn’t frighten her; she’d seen more than enough of both in her life to have become numbed to it. The only thing that concerned her was the manner of death.
There were three stab wounds that she could identify. The first two were in th
e upper abdomen, angled upwards to pierce the lungs without the danger of fouling the blade between two ribs. Either stab wound would probably have proven fatal as air from the torn lung filled the chest cavity, slowly suffocating the victim.
However, it was the third wound that had dealt the finishing blow. On the left side, just below the armpit. A single deep thrust, angled perfectly to slide between two ribs and straight into the heart, probably severing both the left and right ventricles and causing catastrophic damage to the cluster of vital arteries near the top.
This was no frenzied knife attack by a desperate killer, but a series of precise, almost surgical strikes calculated to cause maximum damage with the fewest number of thrusts. Not many people were that handy with a blade.
‘I can’t understand the MO here,’ Argento went on. ‘The killings themselves look like the work of a serial killer – all up-close and bloody – but an extraction like this had to be done by a pro. It’s like they’re trying to misdirect us.’
Mitchell wasn’t so sure. Most killings were a matter of necessity rather than desire, and somehow she couldn’t imagine a serial killer choosing to target a group of armed men. No, there was a more fundamental explanation for this.
‘Or they were forced to improvise,’ she suggested, the disparate pieces of information slowly coalescing into a more rational chain of events in her mind. ‘When Yates was lifted, they tracked him out here in whatever vehicle they had available, and took down the Agency field team protecting him. They used a knife because they didn’t have time to get their hands on a better weapon. Then they high-tailed it out of here in the same car.’
‘If they did all this as a scratch operation, I’d hate to think what they could do if they were properly prepared,’ Argento mused.
Mitchell preferred not to dwell too long on that.