by James Phelan
He spoke in English: “You brought them here to arrest me?”
Nix held up his hand for him to stop advancing, and the guys in the kitchen used it as their cue to raise their AKs.
The kitchen windows shattered, and three men fell before they could get a shot off, spraying the entire far wall with a whole new kind of wallpaper. One twitched and gurgled, and Top popped him in the head with a round from the nine mil as he and Nix backed away.
The remaining three men wore the gore of their comrades. They seemed in another world as they took in what had just gone down: an unseen force outside in the dark of night, two tooled-up Americans here in the living room of their friend.
“Put your weapons down!” Top yelled at them. Two seemed to consider it but the third, the closest and oldest-looking, didn’t budge. Nix knew the look in his eyes—it was hatred, and revenge wasn’t far away.
The mother started to scream and got down on the floor; she crawled over to her son on her hands and knees, started to beg and plead with him.
“Anna, tell your brother—”
He stood there facing them, his mother clawing at his legs. He slowly brought up his AK to fire at them from the hip, and let loose a few rounds.
Top took two in the vest as he moved to his right to cover Nix and Anna, returning fire and shooting the brother in the shoulder.
A whistling sound was heard as a soundtrack to the gunfire now coming their way from the three men as they backed away through the front door. Then the truck outside was hit with a 120-mm mortar round, the force shattering the front windows of the house.
Top doubled over and was blown backwards at the same time, the kinetic force of several more AK rounds having knocked the stuffing out of him. Nix reached forward but his Sergeant was up and on the offensive as he backed towards them, a protective wall, his M4 on full auto at the three guys standing in his sights.
“Come on, get out of there…” Mac willed his fellow soldiers in the house, his rifle still sighted on the large smashed-out window that revealed the kitchen and living room illuminated from the inside. He kept his eye trained on that; didn’t look at the bright flaming wreck that was the truck.
Nix slapped another MEC-GAR magazine into his pistol and fired rounds in double-taps every second as they headed towards the back door. Two guys backed out the front door for cover; both crumpled to the ground within the same second, both head shots spraying the front door.
The mother screamed.
Nix had his left hand on Anna’s back, pushing her to lead the way out the back door, his right stretched behind him with the M9 and the back collar of Top’s Kevlar, pulling him backwards, guiding his sergeant out so the man could continue firing his M4.
“No!”
He heard Top yell, then felt the awful dead weight of his friend slump against him.
79
AMRITSAR, INDIA
Fox yanked Amar’s coat-sleeve with him as he dived away from the noise, into the traffic.
KLAPBOOM!
Thomas’s Land Cruiser exploded into flames behind them, the concussion winding Fox. He could hardly breathe …
Automatic gunfire tore the air around them. People screamed and shouted and wailed. Fox felt hands on his shoulders: it was Brick, dragging him free.
Amar lay on his back on the road, the side of his jacket smouldering under the intense heat of the fire.
Brick dragged Fox away, but Fox fought against him and went to Amar.
The man was almost dead. Dark blood ran from his mouth, yet he looked peaceful, like a child. Fox whispered into his ear as his eyes closed, then let himself be half-carried away by Brick as the gunfire petered out.
80
AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS
Kate took the tram home. She usually walked but it was raining and her cheap umbrella had broken. She walked into her apartment very late—she had gone to the office and then out for dinner with a friend, and then drinks, which had turned into dancing …
She put her bag, keys and mail on the small dining table, hung her wet coat on the back of the front door, took off her boots. She checked the time, then her phone messages—none. She shut the blinds, went to the bathroom and switched on the towel heater, then flicked on the news on the small TV in the bedroom and removed her jewellery and clothes. She walked naked into the kitchen, pulled a bottle of vodka from the freezer and poured a double measure into a glass, added a slice of lime and some soda. She sat and drank it at the dining table while flipping through her mail. Then she poured another.
A letter from Jacob: his familiar handwriting made her smile, its content made her cry. She walked into her bedroom and sat, hardly recognising the stuff she had accumulated from local stores and flea markets.
She looked at the few photos littered around the room—recent photos of her with new friends—and wondered why she had to have her life reset like this. Her thoughts drifted to her parents, then to Fox. Did Lachlan think about her in times like this? She went into the bathroom, a little uneasy on her feet, and rinsed her face with warm water. She pushed back her hair and inspected the small scar running along her hairline; then she let her hair fall back over the scar—this new hairstyle hid it well. Lighter, shorter, with more volume. She lifted her hair again, leaned in to the mirror—it didn’t look too … it was awful. She let her hair cover it and turned away from the mirror.
She didn’t miss her old job; working as a lawyer in a US government department was not what she had planned for her life, the kind of job that slowly kills you. As a college student she’d had a point when she wanted to bring down the government, and she’d been corralled into thinking she just might have a chance to do something about it, to take out what she saw was a problem with it … only to be played like a pawn in a bigger game. She had a quiet life here, and with that came a quantum of happiness, but it was the same or worse in ways. Memories were killing her, despite all the Eckhart Tolle she read; the pain was still there, it lived in her, a shadow that would not budge, bruises that would not heal.
Hutchinson had broken protocol when he’d relocated her—he had gone into her Washington DC apartment armed with a list of items she wanted as keepsakes of her life, and loaded them into a gym bag. Today, those few things—pictures of her family, a few letters, a couple of books, an iPod nano Fox had given her preloaded with a playlist—were usually shut away in a drawer in her dresser. She muted the TV, plugged the iPod into her Bose system and hit play: Radiohead’s ‘No Surprises’ sounded out through the speakers. She remembered how he had left the iPod with her parents after he had brought her home from Russia, when he had saved her life …
She showered for five minutes, washing her hair under hot water that steamed up the little room, then dried off watching Letterman do his top ten. The iPod was on shuffle; it was still Radiohead, ‘Fake Plastic Trees.’ Fox was right about Radiohead, they were special—but did it seem louder since she’d switched it on? Maybe that was just her hangover arriving early.
She stepped into a robe and wrapped a towel around her hair, went out and turned it down—the volume had gone up … Must be playing up. She turned to get her cell phone from her handbag, almost slipping on the parquetry, and caught herself on the back of a chair.
There was water on the floor. She looked at her coat, thinking it must be dripping and pooling … Instinctively she picked up her keys from the table.
There were wet patches leading into her apartment.
Footprints.
A presence. She couldn’t breathe. Her chest was tight—an arm around her throat. Something was pressed onto her face …
Kolesnik felt her go limp in his arms, and her keys clattered to the floor. He nodded at the two men in the spare room, who came out with a large wheeled bin like the laundry ones used in hotels. They slid her into it, bending her knees and folding her legs up. He put a blanket from the back of the sofa on her before closing the lid.
Th
e drugs would keep her out for two hours, by which time he would have her loaded onto a private jet and drugged again … Or not, he would wait and see.
81
AMRITSAR, INDIA
The gunfire ceased. The crowd stopped screaming—open faces, watching, listening, present in that moment, participating in it. There was a beckoning silence as Fox picked up Amar’s body.
Across the road he handed Amar over to his brother. Thomas looked at Fox, at his battered and now burned hands, touched the cut on his head that streamed blood down one side of his face. He finally looked like he accepted what Fox had come to achieve—not the death, but something far nobler. The body seemed weightless in his arms.
“What did you whisper to Amar as he died?” Thomas asked.
Gammaldi was pouring water over Fox’s face and the back of his hands, which were red-hot but not blistered.
“I told him,” Fox said, cringing at the stinging in his eyes, “that he was immortal.”
Thomas nodded and looked down at Amar. He had died with a content smile, one that spoke of knowledge.
“Gurmukhi,” Thomas said. “Thank you, Lachlan. That he died here, in Amritsar, by our temple, it is destiny.”
It was Fox’s turn to nod, humbled. A brother carried by a brother. A family resolved, in some way, with the ultimate cost.
An ambulance and a police car screeched to a halt near them. Bystanders remained hushed. Sikhs from the temple stood sentry, providing the FBI men and Thomas, Fox and Gammaldi space. Fire-trucks arrived.
“We should go,” Gammaldi said as a couple of paramedics rushed towards them with a trolley.
“My friend will take you all to the airport,” Thomas said, signalling to a Sikh man the size of a small house. “Jo Bole So Nihaal, Lachlan Fox, you are Khalsa—you are pure, you are truly one of us.”
The fire crew had their hoses out, hitting the line of blazing cars with water and foam. Thomas leaned in close to Fox and Gammaldi.
“By means of water,” he said quietly, “we give life to everything.”
“Who said that?” Fox asked. “One of your gurus?”
“No. It is from the Koran.”
82
FORT EUSTIS, VIRGINIA
“It’s over, buddy,” Hutchinson said.
The man shackled to the chair had spent the past few hours in an aircraft, most of them drugged. After flying a circuit over the Atlantic, the government-contracted Gulfstream jet had landed, and Army personnel had shepherded him, hooded and in arm and leg braces, across a concrete tarmac, where he had been forced into a Humvee and driven over several miles of track, and then taken into a windowless concrete room and shackled to a steel eyelet fixed to the floor. The whole effect was made up to look and feel like he was now somewhere in the Middle East.
In the World of Warcraft he went by the avatar name SwordsmanM. In person, he had once been a hard-ass Marine and still looked pretty tough at forty, with a shaved head, and some serious scars that said he’d gone through some plate glass. He was dressed in coveralls and had a diaper on underneath.
Hutchinson stood a few paces in front of him. The guy wasn’t showing any interest. The room was lit by a single recessed bulb above them, and there was a card table with some documents on it. A small camcorder in the corner took in everything.
“You’re fucking sloppy,” Hutchinson said, showing him the printouts of the game’s mail transcripts, intercepted by a team in the NIA’s Open Source Centre. “We tracked this back to your computer and ISP … sloppy. And you’re selling out your country. How did that happen?”
Resolute. Silent.
“Been looking out for you for a while now,” Hutchinson said. “We lifted your DNA from the house of Ira Dunn, former Deputy Director of the NSA.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Doesn’t matter. He’s dead now, he won’t mind that you forgot him already,” Hutchinson said. “Like I said, your DNA was found in his house, the day our lab guys went through the place. Traced the drug in Dunn’s glass back to a particular strain of poison developed and used exclusively by the CIA. I take it you didn’t break into their lab and take it and poison this guy at random? But that doesn’t matter, not today.”
He looked up at Hutchinson, there was intrigue there. Good. Hutchinson took a file from the table, opened it.
“Prior to Iraq you were posted as an embassy guard?”
“That’s what it says.”
Hutchinson nodded, pulled out a colour photograph from the file and showed it to the guy.
The guy’s eyes gleamed with recognition.
It was a clear headshot of an attractive young woman.
“You had a relationship there with this woman.”
Sucker-punched. He looked at the ground, shook his head.
“Most guys would have done the same,” Hutchinson said, looking at the picture. “Bet she was worth it, too.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“She blackmailed you.”
He looked like he pitied Hutchinson on this course of questions.
“Clayton J. Lonetree, a Marine Sergeant embassy guard in Moscow, was entrapped by a female Soviet officer in 1987,” Hutchinson said to him. He leaned down, spoke into his face. “He was then blackmailed into handing over documents when he was assigned to Vienna, becoming the first US Marine to be convicted of spying against the United States. He didn’t even know what he was doing, and he got thirty years.”
No reaction.
“It’s all right, it’s not really my concern, just thought I’d bring it up,” Hutchinson said. He leaned forward again, holding up the photo. “You are aware that she was a CIA agent?”
The guy laughed—then the sound petered out, his eyes clouded.
“It’s called a honeytrap. Old-school espionage. She’s actually Mossad, the Agency just uses her as a contractor. Mossad are better than us at this type of thing, you see. She’s been very good for them and us over the years.”
Hutchinson put the picture of the woman back in the file, and pulled out the guy’s Department of Defense file. All his service records were there: he had seen duty in pretty much every conflict the US had been involved in since the late eighties.
“You know what Jay Bybee and John Yoo did for us?” Hutchinson asked. “Yeah, you know. They wrote those torture memos for Bush. Been kind of useful for us. Of course, that’s just the grey-area legal stuff. We can do all sorts of shit in places like this to people like you, but you know all that already…”
He flicked through the ex-Marine’s file. It seemed he had never done much of anything special; didn’t rise quickly, didn’t achieve any sort of rank to be proud of. Had some close calls, was well liked. Got some heat for some drunken shit that got out of hand in Iraq. Family: divorced while away during the first Gulf War.
“Your ex-wife and kid live in Dover—where’s that, Delaware?”
“Fuck off.”
“Sorry?”
“Fuck off from my family.”
“It says here they’re not your family anymore.”
“I pay support.”
“Yeah,” Hutchinson said, looking up from the file. “What is your job?”
He went back to looking at the floor.
“Your daughter’s on a waiting list—”
“Fuck off from my family!” His face was red, veins big and tight in his tattooed neck.
Hutchinson moved closer, right in front of him. Checked his watch. “The information I need, I need in a hurry,” he said. “I’m going to walk out that door in five minutes unless you start telling me what I want to hear.”
The ex-jarhead laughed.
“If the information you give me doesn’t check out, if it’s wrong in any way, I won’t be coming back to question you again,” Hutchinson explained. “If it checks out, you get cut loose, and you get legit work within three months—and I’ll have a federal probati
on on your ass for the next five years.”
The guy laughed again.
“I know you don’t care about the Marines I’ve got outside the door—guys who view you as a traitor to their kin, guys who are just hanging to say hi to you,” Hutchinson said through a smile. “I know you don’t care that you’re in Jordan, either.”
The guy looked up at him. Hutchinson checked his watch.
“You’ve got three minutes,” Hutchinson said, watching him. “Two minutes fifty-five. For what it’s worth, we’re not going to waterboard you or fuck around with broomsticks, because you’re not worth the time. I want the names of your game friends—Darkshadow would be a good place to start. You give me that, great, we can deal. If not, when I’m gone you’re going to rot here in a dark cave while we build a multi-life sentence against you—and we’ll get a conviction that can’t be appealed. And I’ll spend my waking hours and use every power I have as a Federal Agent to make sure your family is fucked up for life.”
He struggled against his shackles, which grated through the large steel eyelet embedded in the concrete floor at his feet.
“Two minutes thirty…”
Ten minutes later Hutchinson walked out the room with what he needed to get to the next step, all recorded on the camcorder he carried.
But first, he had an apology to deliver, and a good man to bring well and truly onside. As he walked to his chopper his BlackBerry chimed.
A Quantico number, a female agent who wasn’t making sense to him.
“Sorry,” Hutchinson replied to her, “I don’t see why you’re calling me.”
“I’m calling from Protective Services—”
“And I haven’t looked after any—” Then Hutchinson knew, and he tasted bile. He had only ever placed one person in witness protection.