by Will Jordan
‘I want to take a look at the tracks,’ she decided instead.
Pausing only a moment, Argento led her outside.
It wasn’t hard to pick up the trail, especially for Mitchell. She’d done her share of tracking in the military, and one set of prints in particular was easy to pick out.
‘Nike trainers,’ she said, indicating the distinctive brand symbol that had been imprinted into the soft ground at regular intervals. The steps were awkward, the trail winding, and in one or two places she noticed a disturbance in the undergrowth where someone had blundered right through it. ‘That’ll be Yates.’
‘You noticed, huh?’ Argento remarked with a smirk.
‘Even you could follow these tracks,’ she countered without looking up.
The other trail however couldn’t have been more different.
‘His friend’s a whole other story. They had a real serious ghost-walk going on,’ Mitchell carried on, creeping forward with her eyes firmly fixed on the ground.
In her mind she could already imagine Yates stumbling through the darkened woods, trying to keep up with a far more confident and capable accomplice.
‘Weight distributed to the outside of the feet, even pressure with each footfall, minimal ground disturbance...’ She paused a moment, struck by a sudden realisation. ‘Whoever she is, I bet she’s had military training.’
Argento glanced at her. He hadn’t missed the gender she had assigned to Yates’s mysterious rescuer. ‘And you know it’s a woman, how?’
‘Because I know what to look for. Shorter stride length, smaller boot size, lower weight.’ She nodded to herself, her conviction growing by the second. ‘Our killer is a woman.’
Chapter 14
Darkness had fallen by the time Alex and Anya sighted the faint lights of land in the distance. Aside from several more bouts of nausea on Alex’s part, the voyage across the North Sea had been largely uneventful, their only sighting of another vessel being the gas flare of an oil rig on the northern horizon.
They continued on for another ten minutes or so before Anya finally killed the engines and allowed the vessel to drift to a halt. A small fishing trawler like this was unlikely to attract much attention, but even so, she was unwilling to risk a closer approach.
‘So what now?’ Alex asked, surprised by how quiet it was without the constant rumble of the engines down below. All he could hear was the lapping of the waves against the hull, and the occasional creak and groan as the vessel’s timbers flexed with the movement.
‘Wait here,’ Anya instructed, clambering down the hatch to the vessel’s lower deck.
It was several minutes before she returned, during which Alex began to perceive a gradual change in the trawler’s motion. It wasn’t easy to pin down at first, but he was left with the impression that the vessel wasn’t riding the swell in quite the same way as it had earlier.
He glanced down as Anya emerged from the bowels of the small ship, then pointed to a large plastic container fixed to the deck outside. ‘I’ll need your help with that,’ she explained calmly. ‘I don’t want it to be caught in the rigging as we go down.’
Alex blinked, taken aback by her remark. ‘Wait. What?’
The woman let out a faint breath; a small but noticeable show of impatience. ‘The boat is sinking, Alex. I just opened the water intakes. There’s nowhere to dock around here, and it will attract too much attention if we beach it. We’ll paddle ashore in the life raft. Now, come on.’
Without waiting for an answer, she opened the door and strode out onto the deck. Alex followed a few moments later, pulling his oversized coat a little tighter against the chill night air. The deck was listing noticeably beneath his feet now.
Opening the container fixed to the deck, Anya hauled out a bulky inflatable life raft. Alex moved forward to help, and together they carried it over to the vessel’s starboard side. It was surprisingly heavy, requiring both of them to manhandle it over the gunwale.
Grasping the inflation toggle, she gave him a single nod, indicating that he should let go. As the survival raft tumbled into the water, there was a loud hiss as the compressed gas cylinder inside went to work, causing the roughly octagonal lifeboat to unfold and inflate in a matter of seconds. Much to Alex’s relief, there were no obvious defects; it appeared the raft was in far better condition than its parent vessel.
A long, painful groan from the trawler’s wooden frame reminded him it was sinking beneath them, the heavy engines and fuel tanks causing the bow to slowly rise up as the stern settled lower in the water.
‘You first,’ Anya said, holding a single line to keep the raft from floating away.
Gingerly Alex clambered over the gunwale and looked down, very much aware of the dark undulating waters all around. He could swim to a reasonable standard, but in freezing water and burdened with a heavy sweater and overcoat that would inevitably pull him down, he didn’t fancy his chances if he missed the raft.
In any case, he was spared the difficulty of having to make the leap over the side, as a single hard push between his shoulder blades sent him tumbling through the air. He let out a startled cry as he fell, convinced he was about to land in the sea. Fortunately for him, the trawler’s gradually sinking stern had reduced its height above sea level to mere feet. Landing more or less in the centre of the life raft, he bounced once on the flexible surface before coming to rest.
He looked up, about to voice his anger at Anya’s decision to push him over the side, only to see the woman leap down beside him. She landed with graceful ease, twisted around before she’d even come to a stop, and unfixed a collapsible paddle from the side of the raft.
‘You could have warned me,’ Alex remarked with sour grace.
‘Yes. I could have,’ she acknowledged. ‘Now help me paddle. We don’t want to be dragged down with the trawler.’
Already water was sluicing in through the stern deck scuppers, forcing the bow higher into the air. The complex masts and rigging overhead could easily come down on them as the vessel sank, dragging them down with it. Seizing a spare paddle, Alex attacked the water below in an effort to propel them away. Their efforts were oddly unbalanced, with Alex creating more spray than momentum, but after a minute or so they had put enough distance between themselves and the stricken vessel to halt for a moment and watch it sink.
There was nothing very dramatic about it; no great crashing of gear coming loose inside, no frothing sea or cracking timbers. The stern dipped below the surface, water rushing in through the open hatch to the engine room below, and the trawler quietly slipped away, heeling over to starboard as it vanished beneath the waves.
And just like that, they were alone. Two people in a rubber life raft, with hundreds of miles of open sea behind them and the darkened coast of Norway an unknown distance ahead. As a chill breeze sighed in from the north, Alex caught himself hoping it wasn’t too far. He was tired after paddling just fifty yards from the sinking trawler.
‘There’s a swell building up,’ Anya said, gauging the raft’s movements. ‘We should get ashore before it gets any worse.’
Alex wasn’t about to argue. Seizing his paddle again, he was about to resume his efforts when a thought suddenly crossed his mind. Despite everything, despite the ordeal he’d been through and the unknown dangers that lay ahead, he couldn’t help but chuckle in amusement.
‘You know, I might be up shit creek,’ he said, then held up his paddle. ‘But at least I’ve got a paddle this time.’
His remark was met with stony silence.
‘You don’t go in for humour much, do you?’
Somehow he couldn’t imagine her stretched out on the couch with a tub of ice cream and Comedy Central on the TV. Then again it was hard to imagine what, if anything, a woman like Anya did when she wasn’t stealing top secret files, killing people and commandeering fishing trawlers.
Without looking at him, she dipped her paddle in the water and began pulling with slow, deliberate strokes. ‘I suppose i
t depends on what you consider humour.’
There wasn’t much Alex could say to that. Together the two of them resumed their advance towards the shore. It was slow going; the raft was designed with stability rather than speed in mind, and their efforts weren’t helped by Alex’s lack of experience. Still, even he seemed to get the hang of it after a while, encouraged by a few terse words of advice from Anya, and before too long he spotted a rocky coastline up ahead.
Their paddling, plus the incoming tide, carried them into a relatively sheltered bay between two spurs of tree-covered land. Alex’s arms were aching when at last he felt the raft grate against solid ground.
Gratefully throwing down his paddle, he clambered over the edge and onto a narrow pebble-covered beach. Up ahead, thick stands of spruce and pine trees crowded close to the shore, their thick coverage blocking out the night sky above.
A loud hissing and bubbling sound from the waterline told him that Anya had put her knife to work on the life raft, slashing its rubber hull and allowing it to sink from view. A few heavy stones laid on top were enough to finish the job.
Alex however cared little as he let out a relieved breath and sank to his knees, exhausted, seasick and thoroughly grateful to be back on dry land. He felt as if he could curl up right there on that beach and happily fall asleep.
‘Get up,’ Anya said, tapping his shoulder none too gently. ‘We have to move inland. If I’m right, the nearest town should be about twelve miles from here.’
Alex glared at her. ‘For fuck sake, don’t you ever stop?’
‘The people hunting you won’t. We can’t afford to either. Now get up.’
Alex closed his eyes and forced calm into his mind, reminding himself that he owed his life to this woman. Still, that didn’t stop him from wanting to punch her lights out at that moment.
Without a word, he struggled to his feet and began a weary trudge up the beach.
Chapter 15
With darkness falling, work at the farm crime-scene was winding down. Mitchell was busy typing out her initial report when the sound of a car pulling to a halt outside drew her thoughts back to the present. Turning towards the barn entrance, she saw a man climb out of a black BMW and head straight towards them.
One look at him was enough to tell he was a serious customer. Early forties, muscular build, short dark hair and with the kind of tanned, chiselled, weather-beaten face of a man used to spending time outdoors.
He was dressed in a dark business suit with an open shirt collar – the kind of outfit that was endemic back at Langley – but the veneer of corporate formality did little to disguise his dominant, almost aggressive posture as he approached. A field operative to be sure, possibly from a military background judging by his faint but noticeable swagger. Nobody swaggered quite like a soldier, as she had long ago learned.
The question was, what was he doing here?
‘Who’s the officer in charge here?’ he asked, forgoing any kind of greeting.
‘That would be me,’ Mitchell replied, meeting his piercing gaze evenly. Any show of weakness or hesitation at a critical moment like this would put her at an immediate disadvantage. ‘Olivia Mitchell, Security Protection Service. And you are?’
‘The name’s Hawkins,’ he replied. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Mitchell, but it seems like I’m your replacement.’
He handed over a single folded sheet of paper, which Mitchell was quick to read. Sure enough, it was a set of orders direct from Langley, informing her in no uncertain terms that Case Officer Jason Hawkins was taking over the investigation, effective immediately. Full cooperation was to be extended to him at all times and, bizarrely, there was a caveat stating that no official records of the investigation were to be submitted without his express consent.
‘Well, you’ve got my attention,’ she conceded. Faced with such a jurisdictional sledgehammer, there was little else that Mitchell could say.
‘Good. Now I need your cooperation.’
‘I’m listening,’ she prompted.
‘First up, I need everything you have on this crime scene. Every piece of evidence, every photograph, fingerprint dusting, forensics report and observation. I read the initial reports on the flight over, but every detail counts. Second, everything that happens with this investigation comes through me first. Every report, email and phone call. That applies to you and the rest of your team. Clear?’
Mitchell folded her arms, not sure whether to feel impressed or intimidated by his curt, no-nonsense demeanour. One thing was for sure; the man didn’t fuck around.
‘You’ve made it that way.’
A flicker of a smile showed on Hawkins’s lean, weathered face. ‘You’re pissed at me, right, Mitchell?’
Mitchell blinked, taken aback by his candour. ‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You didn’t have to,’ he assured her. ‘Hell, I’d be pissed if some asshole from Langley waltzed in acting like he owned the place and took over my investigation without a word of explanation.’
‘You’re very honest about yourself.’ She didn’t dispute his assertion.
He shrugged, knowing it wasn’t entirely meant as a compliment. ‘Let me tell you something. I flew three and a half thousand miles in the middle of the night to be here, because I’m one of those people the Agency keeps on standby just for situations like this. You don’t hear about guys like me most of the time because it’s our job not to be heard about. It’s our job not to be seen or talked about. We fix problems and we do it quickly and quietly because that’s what we’re paid to do, and believe me, right now we’ve got a real big problem that needs fixing. What I’m asking from you right now is to be straight with me, and to trust that what I’m doing is in the best interests of all of us. You do that and I’ll be straight with you. Fair enough?’
It was tough to argue with that assessment. ‘Fair enough.’
He nodded. ‘Good. Now, I’d be obliged if you’d gather your team together. I’ve got a few things I’d like to show them.’
‘You said you were here to solve problems,’ she remarked. ‘What exactly are we up against?’
Hawkins looked at her for a long moment. ‘Someone that’ll make you glad I’m around.’
Mitchell wasn’t entirely sure there was anyone who could make her glad to have this guy around. Still, she decided to keep such thoughts to herself for now. If Hawkins knew something that could aid their investigation, she had little choice but to play along.
It took less than a minute to call together the small field team charged with policing the site, half a dozen men and women congregated around the rough wooden table in the centre of the barn.
‘Okay, listen up,’ Hawkins began, wasting no time on pleasantries. ‘First up, my name’s Hawkins and I’m taking over this investigation, effective immediately. Agent Mitchell will brief you more fully on this, but for now consider this your heads-up. Second, this is no longer a murder investigation. The details of this crime scene are locked down, on my authority. What we’re looking at here is a manhunt, plain and simple.’
Mitchell frowned, far from happy at the sudden change in emphasis. Much as she wanted to see those responsible for the deaths of three field agents answer for what they’d done, Hawkins made it sound like they were to be hunted down and executed like wild animals.
She caught Argento’s eye, sensed he was harbouring similar thoughts and that no comment was necessary. They would talk privately once the briefing was over.
‘We have two targets for this op.’ First, Hawkins laid a printed photograph of Alex Yates on the table before him. ‘The first is this man – Alex Yates. You already know as much about him as I do at this point, which isn’t a whole lot. He’s a civilian with no known training in escape and evasion, so he should be considered a soft target. However, he may still have information that’s valuable to us, so his arrest and recovery is high priority.’
He paused, as if momentarily undecided about what to say next. Mitchell could tell that h
e was weighing something up in his mind, perhaps judging how much to reveal to them. And then, just like that, he laid a second photo next to the one of Yates.
Curious, Mitchell leaned in closer to get a better look.
The image was clearly some kind of official ID photo; a head-and-shoulders mug-shot of the subject looking straight at the camera. In this case, it depicted a woman, probably in her mid-thirties, with short blonde hair, tanned skin and the kind of definite, finely chiselled features that came from living a life that was both active and difficult.
There was a vaguely foreign look in the shape and arrangement of the face, perhaps suggesting Scandinavian heritage. Wherever she was from, even Mitchell could tell that she was an attractive woman, with the kind of natural beauty that needed no make-up to enhance.
But it was the eyes that really caught her attention. Cold and blue, there was a piercing intensity to them that was obvious even in a photograph. It was the kind of look that Mitchell had seen before in the eyes of soldiers returning from the frontline; soldiers who had seen things that no human being ever should. With a chill of recognition, she realized it was the same look she’d seen in the man now delivering the briefing.
‘We have strong reason to believe that our second target is this woman. Her identity is classified, but she travels under any one of a dozen aliases that we know of, plus God knows how many we don’t.’ Glancing up from the photo, he surveyed each of the field operatives gathered around the table. ‘I cannot emphasize enough how dangerous this woman is. She’s highly trained, highly motivated and absolutely without anything approaching mercy or compassion. She’s wanted for a string of attacks against US citizens, both military and government, and we believe she may be using Yates to help plan another strike. It is imperative that we take her down before she has a chance to reach this goal.’
‘Excuse me, sir,’ Argento piped up. ‘You’re saying one woman did all this? Killed three armed field operatives with just a knife?’