Embrace the Fire (Shadow Warriors Book 3)

by Stephen England

  “Do you think Kranemeyer would have sent me if I couldn’t?” he asked, referencing the Director of the Clandestine Service.

  The CIA station chief shook his head, replacing the cap on the bottle. “No, I don’t…but Kranemeyer is three thousand miles away. And you’re operating in my bailiwick now. So how about it?”

  “I’ve been down this road a time or two before as you well know, Carlos,” Thomas replied, drawing himself up. Looking the Marine in the eye. “It’s not going to be a problem.”

  Jimenez searched his eyes for another long moment, then reached for both of the shot glasses.

  “I can drink to that,” he said, handing one of them to Thomas. “Devil’s Cut—just got the bottle in from the States.”

  He smiled easily. “You wouldn’t believe what can fit in a diplomatic pouch.”

  Thomas almost didn’t hear him, looking down at the drink in his hand. Torn. He knew what he should do, what he had to do. Knowing and doing were two different things.

  “There a problem?” Jimenez asked, pausing even as his own shot glass touched his lips. “You take your bourbon neat, as I recall.”

  He laughed. “I remember that time in Kabul back in ‘09—the two of us, that brunette lieutenant, and the only bottle of liquor in the whole godforsaken country. What a party.”

  Yeah. He remembered that night, a few hours’ respite in a war without end. A faint smile touched his lips at the memory.

  He could feel the station chief’s eyes on him, knew the questions which would come. Questions with no answers…or none that he wanted to give. Knowing the alternative to those questions was defeat itself.

  And he raised the glass to his lips with a rough motion, feeling the whisky slide down his throat, the fire mellowed by notes of cinnamon.

  Surrender…

  7:03 A.M.

  The flat

  Ealing, London

  The couch on which he’d slept was empty when Mehreen came out of the bedroom, its cushions cool to the touch. He’d been gone for hours.

  Where…she had no idea.

  She pulled her mobile from the pocket of her jeans as she moved into the kitchen, gazing down at the luminous screen in the semi-darkness.

  Knowing what her job required her to do, knowing that she should place the call. Any contact with a foreign—even friendly—intelligence officer was to be reported. No exceptions.

  And yet something held her back. There’d been something different about Nichols, something she’d sensed since the moment he had entered her flat.

  He had changed.

  She knew his history almost as well as she knew her own. The Security Services were very particular about that sort of thing. Nichols had entered the employment of the American Central Intelligence Agency in the years before 9/11, back in the old days of the Directorate of Operations.

  A paramilitary operations officer, that’s what he was. Or had been, assuming his story of leaving the Agency was true. One of the men out at the sharp end—fighting in the shadows of a war most people didn’t even know was being waged. Like Nick.

  She’d always known the work that he did—that they did. They were hunters. Hunters of men. No sense in evading that reality.

  But last night had been different, and for the first time she had felt it, seen its dark presence in his eyes. Death. A fatalism she had never seen him exhibit before.

  He hadn’t asked her not to make the call. Hadn’t even mentioned it, though he knew full well the protocols that were in place. Just left the decision to her, without judgment. Without reproach.

  It was trust, alien though that was to a man like him.

  Mehreen paused by the refrigerator, looking at the photo of her and Nick hanging there. A casual shot, his shirt off, a sinewy arm wrapped tightly around her shoulders—the white sands of Sanna Bay stretching out behind them.

  Nichols had taken the picture.

  She closed her eyes, remembering the moment as if it were yesterday. The men had just come back from a run on the beach, a hell-for-leather footrace. Come back laughing like boys, slapping each other on the shoulder and flinging insults like the friends they were. Brothers in all but blood.

  Nick had knelt down beside her as she lay there on the beach blanket, raising her hand to his lips. Laughed and told her she was beautiful, brushing her dark hair back from her eyes. The war forgotten for that moment in time.

  Eleven months later, he was dead.

  Brothers, she thought, their laughter echoing through her mind as she put the mobile back in her pocket. They’d have laid down their lives for each other, without a moment’s hesitation.

  And she knew, in that moment. There were trusts which could never be betrayed.

  7:07 A.M.

  Mortlake Cemetery

  Southwest London

  Robert Montfort. That was the name on the headstone, along with the dates 1898-1975. A granite angel keeping watch, head bowed in prayer.

  Two feet down. And a foot from the head of the coffin. Harry bent down on one knee in the crisp, powdery snow, using an entrenching tool to scoop out earth from the old grave.

  He’d taken the R68 bus to the cemetery, using the hat to shield his face as he climbed aboard. An hour’s ride, sitting two seats behind an elderly Sikh clad in the traditional clothing and turban of his faith, his face shrouded in a snow-white beard.

  Two young men had gotten on at the second stop, he remembered, a flashlight clenched between his teeth as he checked his measurements one more time.

  Street toughs, by the look of them.

  The older of the duo had sidled up to the Sikh, his breath reeking of liquor—opening his faded leather jacket to reveal a white t-shirt emblazoned with the blood-red cross of St. George.

  “Look, we’ve got us a bleedin’ Paki,” he’d heard him announce—laughing drunkenly with his mate as obscenities slurred from his lips.

  Leaning in close, a bony finger extending from his hand, only inches away from the Sikh’s face. “Done any little girls lately?” the thug had asked, his face twisted in intoxicated disgust. “You muzzies are all the same—paedos the lot of you. Don’t belong in our country.”

  He’d looked away as the verbal abuse continued. Looked away, when he could have stood up for the old man. Could have. Maybe should have—but he’d learned a long time ago that you couldn’t save the world.

  Then, as now, remaining the gray man was paramount. Staying in the shadows, unremarked.

  Unremembered.

  It meant turning a blind eye to a thousand wrongs. Dismissing them as…irrelevant. All so that the mission might succeed.

  The mission. He heard the entrenching tool strike metal, leaned forward to aim the flashlight down in the hole.

  He only had one mission now.

  The cold metal edge of a box touched his probing fingertips and he began brushing away dirt with a gloved hand, his motions hurried. Dawn was coming, and it was time for him to be gone.

  The box was twelve inches long—five wide, he realized as he lifted it from the hole. Smaller than he had hoped, much smaller. Secured with a rusty lock.

  He could only hope its contents, first buried for use in last resort by Agency officers back during the Cold War, were in better condition. He laid the edge of the entrenching tool against the lock, striking it a vicious blow with the palm of his hand. One blow, then a second—and the lock snapped open with a sound like a pistol shot, echoing off the brick cloisters of the nearby crematorium.

  The lid came up, revealing the old insulation that had sealed the box from the inside, keeping out the moisture in the nearly four decades since it had been placed in the ground.

  And there it was—a box of ammunition tucked into one corner of the box. Twenty rounds of .380 ACP hardball. Full metal jacket.

  Reaching in, he lifted an object wrapped in oilcloth from its resting place.

  The familiar shape of a pistol beneath his fingers.

  And the cloth fell away, the distinctive ou
tline of a Walther PPK revealed in the beam of his flashlight.

  He leaned back into the cold headstone, his shoulder pressed against the graven angel as he stared down at the pistol in his hand, his fingers trembling ever so slightly.

  It wasn’t fear, he knew that. Fear was the province of men who had something to lose—and he had already lost more than he cared to remember. Everything he had once held dear.

  It wasn’t nerves, those hesitations that came with the thought of killing a man. He knew those feelings…and he had killed many times before. The thought no longer gave him pause, a piece of his soul that had disappeared a long time before. Seared away in the fires of war.

  But this time was different. This time was personal. And he knew what it was he felt. Knew how dangerous it could become.

  Hate.

  Chapter 2

  8:28 A.M.

  Central London

  Returning to the city was always somewhat of a shock, and the longer he had been gone, the more alien it seemed. Was this home—or was home the desert he had left behind?

  Three months in Somalia, Darren Roth thought, glancing impatiently at the crosswalk sign, waiting for the symbol to flash. If he closed his eyes he could still hear it all, the bleating of goats in the villages, the rumble of a lorry’s engine. The crackle of small-arms fire in the night.

  Three months hunting an elusive enemy, militants loyal to Al-Shabab.

  A chill ran through the black man’s body as he pulled his jacket more tightly about his shoulders. It wasn’t cold, not really—but less than thirty hours had elapsed since he’d left behind the hundred-degree temperatures of the Somalian desert, and the air seemed to bite at his ears, at his shaved scalp.

  His eyes searched through the crowd surrounding him as he waited for the light to change, a mass of humanity halted for a moment there on that London street. Most of them were on their mobiles, head lowered like the slightly built girl beside him, her thumbs dancing over the phone’s small keyboard. Texting a friend, a lover.

  None of them would have lasted three days in Somalia.

  The symbol flashed and the crowd began to move, people jostling against him as he made his way toward the crosswalk. Ahead of him he could see the security guards, the massive archway of Thames House.

  The headquarters of the Security Service. MI-5…

  “Marsh is waiting for you in his office,” were almost the first words Roth heard as he walked into Five’s Operations Centre, stripping off his jacket and draping it over the empty chair at his desk.

  Or what had been his desk before he left.

  He raised an eyebrow, glancing over at the woman. “No rest for the wicked?”

  She smiled. “His orders were to send you in the moment you arrived.”

  Marsh. A legend in the intelligence community, Julian Marsh had been part of the Service for decades, ever since the twilight years of the Cold War.

  Roth looked back from the operations center toward the glass-enclosed room that served as the director-general’s office and nodded grimly. “Right you are.”

  “Come in,” Marsh announced at his knock. The director had his back to him, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his dress pants as he gazed out on the floor, but he could see the man’s reflection in the glass. A stern face surmounted by thinning grey hair staring back at him.

  Tailored grey pants, a matching vest, and a pale blue tie against a starched white shirt—that was the uniform of the day for Marsh. Always had been. His suit jacket was discarded over the back of a chair in the sparsely appointed office.

  “Moral of the story,” he began, still not facing him, “never loan one of your best field officers to Six. You may never get him back.”

  He turned, favoring Roth with an expression that was as close Marsh ever came to a smile. “Have a seat,” he continued with a small gesture of his hand. “How was Somalia?”

  “It went well, sir,” he replied guardedly. “Need to know” was ever applicable, even with someone of Marsh’s clearance. “I’m sure the notes from my debriefing with Six will be arriving on your desk presently.”

  “When Babylon-on-Thames gets around to it,” the older man snorted, referencing the nickname for MI-6’s ziggurat-style headquarters. He picked up a folder lying on top of his desk. “No matter…we have more pressing issues. Namely, Operation PERSEPHONE. Read this.”

  Roth took the folder from his hand, opening it in his lap and scanning through page after page of computer print-outs and surveillance photos. It seemed impossible, but there it was. All spelled out before him in black and white. “We’re running a joint surveillance operation with the CIA—here in London?”

  “We are,” Marsh responded. “And now you are. With the target finally located as of earlier this morning, I’m placing you in charge of liaising with our American cousins as we prepare to go fully operational.”

  “Why do you need me?” he asked, picking up the photo of their target, reading the name printed below. Tarik Abdul Muhammad.

  “For the same reason I petitioned the Home Office to have their request denied,” came Marsh’s acid reply. “But you know how that goes. Petitioning the Home Office is like mating with an elephant. There’s precious little pleasure to be derived from it, you’re liable to be squashed—and nothing will come of it for years.”

  If that had been meant as a joke, Marsh showed no signs of laughing as he continued, “The new American president made the request personally, and the PM was in an accommodating mood. Everything signed, sealed, and delivered, with the Security Service read in as a polite afterthought. And that’s why I’m bringing you in—the Americans are up to something, and I need you to find out what it is.”

  There was something there in the director’s voice, something veiled.

  “What are you telling me?”

  Marsh took a second, noticeably thinner folder and tossed it into his lap. “That’s the man the CIA sent over to take operational command of their half of the operation. Thomas Parker. In the years before 9/11, he was the highly successful manager of a Fortune 500 tech company—a company which went down with the World Trade Center Towers. Most of what we have on him is from those years—the final single-sided sheet is everything we’ve been able to gather through ‘channels’ since he joined the Agency. Draw your own conclusions.”

  Roth’s eyes scanned quickly down the sheet, connecting the dots. He was weary, the stress of the flight back from Somalia taking its toll.

  But not so weary as to miss the obvious.

  “He’s a paramilitary operations officer,” he announced, looking up from the dossier.

  “Exactly,” Marsh responded, extending a hand for the folder. “Ostensibly, the Americans are here for surveillance purposes and surveillance purposes alone…and yet they place a member of the Special Activities Division in charge.”

  “You’re thinking extraordinary rendition?” It would have been their best play, if an almost unbelievably audacious one. Grab the Pakistani and fly him out of the UK under the cover of night. Take him to Jordan, one of the last countries in the Middle East still cooperating with the CIA’s rendition program in the wake of the Arab Spring. Throw him in a cell in Amman, let King Abdullah’s Mukhabarat have a few turns at him. It could work.

  It had worked, many times before.

  Marsh just looked at him, unanswering, and it was in that moment that Roth realized the older man was contemplating the unthinkable.

  Assassination…

  8:53 A.M.

  The May Fair Hotel

  Central London

  The Agency did nothing by half measures, Thomas thought, closing the door behind him. They had secured the entire floor of the May Fair Hotel for their personnel, with armed officers of the UK Counter Terrorism Command standing guard at the elevators.

  A month in, and he still wasn’t sure whether that was for their protection…or just to keep an eye on them. Knowing the tenuous state of the “special relationship” these days, it
was probably more than a bit of both.

  And it certainly did nothing to lower their profile.

  He tossed his overcoat onto the bed, rubbing his face with a weary hand. Surveillance work wasn’t nearly as glamorous as the movies made it out to be—long nights huddled in the back of a van with bad heat, trying to take decent photographs from half a kilometer away.

  Only the very best could maintain their edge over the course of a long surveillance op. Only the voyeurs enjoyed it.

  He’d once been one of the best. Wasn’t sure about that—not anymore. Wasn’t sure about much of anything, these days.

  There was a sticky note pressed against the mirror in the suite’s bathroom, where he’d left it the preceding night, before heading out. It bore the words “nine days”, with a crudely drawn smiley face beneath it.

  It seemed to be mocking him now. Nine days dry. It was probably the longest he’d gone without a drink since he’d started drinking at the age of sixteen—a party after the junior prom at his upstate New York high school, if memory served.

  Nine days, and now the count started all over again. So damnably weak.

  The first step is admitting you have a problem. He could still hear his sponsor’s voice, half a world away now. The trouble with that when you were part of the intelligence community was not letting anyone else know that you had the problem.

  He’d always been known as a hard drinker—that was more common than not in the community, he thought, staring at his reflection in the mirror. But it had never affected his work. Ever. He was too much the professional for that.

  Or so he’d thought.

  He unbuttoned his shirt to reveal the ballistic vest underneath. The Brits were dead set against them carrying weapons, but body armor they were okay with. Couldn’t shoot, but maybe they’d survive being shot.

  Yeah, he mused sourly—that made perfect sense.

  Time to get some sleep. Four hours of it…and then it all started again.

  9:08 A.M.

  Thames House

  “Running late this morning, Mehr?” were almost the first words she heard as she slipped into her workstation, tucking her lunch down by her feet. Another day at the office.