For surely it was. And his young eyes shone with an unholy fervor as they scanned down the screen, burning the address into his memory.
The hour was at hand.
6:24 P.M.
Thames House
London
No asset was ever 100% reliable—that was the first thing you ever learned as a case officer. People were wrong. People lied.
Which was it with Harry?
“Marsh wants to see you in his office,” were the first words that greeted Mehreen as she walked back onto the floor of the Centre. The tone of MacCallum’s voice betraying the strain they all were under.
She responded with a nod in his direction, too consumed by her own thoughts to muster a reply. Which was it?
Impossible. She ran a hand across her forehead, struggling to shut out the emotion.
To distance herself, analyze the situation objectively.
The worst of it was that she needed to trust Nichols—had to, if her plans to extricate her nephew were to proceed. And yet, deep down, she knew…the odds of him being wrong were much worse than of him having lied.
He was a spy, after all.
6:26 P.M.
The M40 Motorway
North of London
Run. Farther and deeper into the night, voices echoing in the darkness of his mind. You always tried to escape your past, but it was like trying to outrun a tsunami, a towering wall of water growing higher with every step you took.
Come crashing down to sweep you away.
He was driving too fast, far too fast and he knew it, the speedometer needle of the stolen Audi pegged at almost ninety miles per hour. Harry put the wheel over hard, knuckles white, sliding around a utility van as he moved into the far right lane of the motorway. Slow down.
He caught a glimpse of his own face in the rear-view mirror above his head, the red brake-lights of a car ahead casting a hellish reflection into empty eyes.
Trying to outpace the demons. Knowing the futility of it.
He could feel the bulge of the Sig-Sauer under his jacket, knew all too well the consequences if they were stopped.
Consequences. It seemed impossible that they could be any worse than for what he had already done. Sins for which there was no atonement to be found.
“Don’t call,” he said abruptly, a faint electronic glow warning him that Flaharty was looking at the screen of his phone.
“Easy there, lad—I wasn’t plannin’ on it.”
It was the first words Flaharty had spoken since the bus in London, since Harry had laid out the harsh truth of what they were facing. He could see the pain in the Irishman’s eyes, the searching for answers.
Betrayal.
“Do you really think you’re right?” Flaharty asked after another long moment, wincing as he shifted position in the passenger seat—tucking the phone back into the pocket of his jacket.
Harry eased off the gas finally, marking the time on the Audi’s dashboard clock. “We’ll know in a few hours, won’t we?”
“Aye,” the Irishman replied, running a hand across the lower half of his face. “That we will.”
Another few moments passed, the noise of the traffic the only sound as the motorway flashed past in the night.
Then Flaharty cleared his throat. “So what happened to you back there?”
Silence.
6:31 P.M.
Thames House
London
The TV was on in Marsh’s office—the audio a dull murmur, flames flickering on-screen, footage of an unknown scene of chaos.
“Birmingham, forty-five minutes ago,” the DG intoned by way of explanation, his eyes never leaving the screen as he stood there in the half-darkness of the office. “Someone threw a Molotov cocktail onto the front seat of the No. 9 bus as it was taking on passengers. The driver didn’t make it out—over a dozen others are being treated for serious burns.”
She whispered a curse under her breath, the darkness seeming to close around her—thick and oppressive.
“We’ll be liaising with West Midlands on the investigation,” Marsh continued without appearing to notice, “but all they have right now is uncorroborated eyewitness reports of a group of Asian youths harassing women at the bus stop in the minutes before No. 9’s arrival. Metro’s searching for three gunmen in Hammersmith—found one man shot dead in the midst of what bystanders are calling a ‘gun battle.’”
“What are we looking at—retaliation for the attack on the worshipers at Madina?”
“God knows,” he responded, a bitter edge to his voice. “And we’d all best be praying one exists. Hashim Rahman eluded his surveillance team an hour ago—used a decoy to get out from under.”
We all fall down. A house of cards collapsing in upon itself, the dust and rubble obscuring the road ahead.
And the timing couldn’t have been worse. He looked at her finally, asking, “Ashton was a dry hole?”
“It was,” she responded. “My intel was…faulty.”
It was more than that, but it seemed the best way to describe what had taken place. The cleanest. “What do you need to me to do?”
“Right now?” Marsh threw a look back at her over his shoulder. “Go home, get some sleep. Roth has his people out scouring Leeds for Rahman, I’m going to need someone fresh to work on Besimi. He’s the last lead we have.”
9:42 P.M.
The flat
Failsworth
Home. The flat in Failsworth had been many things in the ten years since Flaharty had purchased it, but home had never been one of them.
These days, it was hard to even say where that was. Ireland? The land of his birth? He hadn’t dared return there in three years—his parents long dead, his older brother fallen years before in the Troubles.
Now…well, Davey was the closest thing he had to family. Brothers in all but blood.
Davey. There were lights on in the flat as Flaharty mounted the stoop, inserting his key in the lock.
He pushed it open, wincing as the movement of the arm pulled at his injured side.
The wound. He needed a stiff drink—and fresh bandages. In that order.
Footsteps from the hall and he looked up to see Malone standing there, pistol already drawn in the big man’s hand.
“Oh, it’s you,” the enforcer said, a strange shadow passing across his face as he lowered the weapon. “Glad to see you stopped arsin’ about and got back here—I was beginning to think something had happened.”
Flaharty gritted his teeth, shrugging the jacket off his shoulders and tossing it onto the back of a chair. “Bugger me if it didn’t, Davey.”
“Oh?”
“Things went completely pear-shaped…” The arms dealer shook his head. “I could use a drink.”
He followed Malone into the flat’s small kitchen, watching as his old friend took down the bottle of Bushmills from an upper cabinet, along with a pair of glasses.
“The whole thing was a sodding ambush,” Flaharty began, throwing back the shot of whisky. He felt the fire race down his throat, searing his vocal cords. “Like they knew we were comin’.”
Delay. It was a dangerous game he was playing, hard as it was to believe, even yet. He set the glass back down on the counter, pushing it toward Malone and gesturing for him to refill it. “I barely made it out of there alive—had to ditch the car and take a bus out of London.”
“And the American?”
Flaharty picked up the tumbler and turned, making his way back to the couch in the living room. “No idea—last I saw him was when the shooting started. After that, everything got muddled. Gets precious hard to keep track of everyone once the bullets start flying.”
“I bloody well told you he couldn’t be trusted. Doin’ business with him wasn’t worth the money.”
He stared down into his drink, his own reflection staring back from the whisky. “I don’t know. I’ve known Harry for a long time. Maybe he caught a bullet, maybe he was part of it. All I know is they’ve been staying one s
tep ahead the whole way—like they knew my every move before I made it. Even he didn’t know that much, so how?”
And that was the question, wasn’t it? How?
Flaharty tossed back the second shot of whisky, feeling the liquor begin to warm him—take the edge off the pain. “I think I could do with another, Davey…Davey?”
Silence.
He looked up to see Malone standing there, not five feet away. A drawn pistol in the enforcer’s hand.
Pointed straight at Flaharty’s head.
9:46 P.M.
A warehouse
Leeds
“Are you sure he will be here?” Aydin asked, hesitation in his voice as he moved over to where the imam stood near the edge of the room, checking the screen of his phone.
“Aye,” Rahman replied, seeming distracted. “He will be, insh’allah.”
Of course, the boy reminded himself, looking across the warehouse at the small knots of young men gathered together in conversation. As God wills it.
He had to be the youngest of those gathered, he thought—all the others in their early twenties, at least. College students, many of them. All wearing at least the semblance of a beard.
His own chin was painfully smooth to the touch as he ran a hand across his lower face, trying to hide the awkwardness he felt as he sized up his companions. The inescapable feeling that he couldn’t have been more out of place.
And yet…
There was a noise from without, and he looked up to see the large black man from the mosque enter through a side door, his eyes sweeping those assembled with a suspicious glance.
Aydin’s eyes took in the long dark case strapped to the man’s back before spotting the second man entering behind him.
A man tall as a tree and slender as a woman—his form cloaked in a light windbreaker, a cap pulled low over his forehead.
But his eyes—blue and piercing—Aydin knew from the moment he gazed into them. They were the eyes of a prophet.
The Shaikh.
9:51 P.M.
The flat
Failsworth
“What in the devil are you playing at?”
“I didn’t want for it to end like this, Stephen,” Malone responded, a sad smile creasing his face. “So help me, I didn’t—but you’re not leavin’ me with any choice.”
“He’s sold you out—sold both of us out.” Nichols’ words, ringing in his ears. “It was you, me, and him. The three of us—the only ones who knew about the trackers.”
Even now, staring into the barrel of Malone’s .45, it didn’t seem real. “Why did you do it, Davey?” he asked simply, leaning back into the threadbare sofa—staring into his old friend’s face. “Was it the money? I thought you were better than that…we were brothers, you and I—went through the Troubles together. Back to back, the two of us against the world. I—”
“Oh, don’t act so sodding righteous,” Malone cut him off, anger flaring in the man’s eyes as he took a step closer, the pistol still trained on Flaharty’s head. “The Troubles were a long time ago—we both played our patriot game and found the pay piss-poor. But I believed…and you, you didn’t, did you? You saw the handwriting on the wall—knew what was coming for all of us—that’s why you turned tout, wasn’t it? Did you tell yourself it was better somehow because you sold out to the Americans? Washington, not London—as if they didn’t pass along every last thing you gave them to the Security Services?”
That was the way, wasn’t it? A long-ago admonition filtering back through his mind—the words of his parish priest back in Belfast. Be sure your sins will find you out.
He had been an altar boy back in those days—before his life had exploded into violence, before he had thrown the first flaming bottle of petrol at a British troop-carrier.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, he thought, recalling to memory the words of the Mass. Through my fault, my most grievous fault. Ideo precor beatam Mariam semper virginem.
I beseech the Blessed Mary ever-virgin…
A faith that had been forever lost in the fires of Bloody Sunday—thirteen unarmed boys and men gunned down in the street by the murdering thugs of the Parachute Regiment.
The Holy Mother hadn’t stopped the bullets on that day any more than she was going to stop this one—the hammer back on Malone’s .45, his voice trembling with fury as he continued.
“Gerry Adams and the bloody council surrendered and you sold out—so don’t you dare sit there now and preach to me of loyalty. Of betrayal. Not after all that you’ve betrayed.”
The big man paused, sorrow in his eyes as he gazed down the pistol’s barrel at Flaharty. “I didn’t want to believe it when they showed me the proof of what you’d done, Stephen. Didn’t want to have to kill you myself—for the memory of all the years. But maybe this is the way it was meant to be. Goodbye…old friend.”
The end of the road. His Kimber was only inches from his hand, but he would be dead before it could clear the holster. He saw Malone’s finger tighten around the trigger, closed his eyes in resignation.
Fate. The end of every man.
The next moment, a pair of suppressed gunshots rang out, the sound reverberating through the small flat.
He heard a strangled cry of rage and pain escape the enforcer’s lips, felt a bullet bite into the sofa between his legs.
His eyes came wide open just in time to see Malone crumple to the dirty grunge of the carpet, pistol falling from his fingers, his legs going out from under him—shot through both kneecaps.
The figure of Harry Nichols emerged from the semi-darkness of the flat behind Malone, the suppressed Sig-Sauer still in his outstretched hand.
“You took your own good time,” Flaharty swore under his breath, finding himself trembling as he staggered to his feet. “Thought you were never going to show up.”
The American shrugged coldly. “You wanted to know the truth. Now you do.”
“Well sod you,” Flaharty shot back, eyeing Malone as the man struggled to pull himself forward on the carpet, moaning from the pain of the shattered kneecaps.
Ignoring the pain in his side, Flaharty reached down, scooping up the FNX just before Malone reached out for it, a final, desperate gesture.
“Davey, Davey, Davey…” he whispered reproachfully, taking a step back as he aimed the weapon down at the man who had saved his life so many times. “What in the devil’s name has become of us?”
He glanced up, saw Nichols standing there. “Give us a moment.”
Harry’s eyes met with those of the Irishman—eyes filled with pain. Remorse. Over friendships betrayed.
Past sins.
After a moment, he nodded—tucking the pistol back underneath his leather jacket as he went out into the hall.
It was quiet outside as he gazed through the window, a thick layer of grime and automobile exhaust doing its best to obscure his view. No one visible in the street.
“Did he deserve to die?” Flaharty’s question of the early morning, only hours before—though it seemed like an eternity.
The unanswerable question, Harry thought once more, standing there in the darkness of the hall. He had spent over a decade watching men die. Good men, bad men—made no difference, they died all the same. No rhyme, no reason.
Just death.
Two minutes later, a single gunshot rang out from the living room.
10:35 P.M.
The warehouse
Leeds
“The spark has been lit,” the Shaikh announced, his voice low and trembling with intensity. His gaze sweeping the assembled men as they pressed forward—straining forward to hear every word that fell from his lips. “In the martyrdoms of Javeed Mousa, of Muzhir bin Abdullah and his companions, names which shall be forever remembered throughout the Ummah. And it will burst into flame here, in the midst of the house of war, spreading across the very land from which the crusaders first set forth.”
Aydin felt the eyes rest upon him, piercing his very soul. “And you,” the Sh
aikh continued, seeming to speak directly to him, “will be the spreaders of that flame.”
It was a moment before he realized that the Shaikh was beckoning to him. Ya Allah.
He felt everyone’s eyes on him as he took a step forward—saw the muscled black man at the side of the Shaikh bend down, unzipping the soft case and extracting a long, black rifle—its barrel gleaming in the harsh glare of the utility lights which illuminated the warehouse floor.
The Shaikh reached out a hand and took the rifle from his bodyguard, holding it up like a mujahideen would. Defiantly. Proudly.
“This and many more—the arms of the crusaders—brought into our hands by Allah’s aid, that we might finally take the fight to the khaffir. For too long the enemies of God have laid desolate the lands of Iraq, of Sham. Now, it is their own streets which will run red with blood.”
He reached out, motioning for Aydin to take the rifle as he continued. To stand at his side.
The rifle was heavy as the boy hefted it in trembling hands, cold and black as death itself.
Power.
But the Shaikh was speaking again, the index finger of his right hand raised as his piercing gaze swept the crowd of assembled men.
“One third of them shall flee,” he began, his voice washing over Aydin, holding him in thrall as he repeated the words of God’s Messenger, “And Allah shall never forgive them. One third will be killed; they shall be the best martyrs with God. And one third, shall conquer them, and never be afflicted with temptation.”
“Allahu akbar!” a young college student exclaimed, his eyes shining with fervor, his fist raised in the air. Then those around him began to join in the chant. “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”
And Aydin joined in, tears of pride streaming down his cheeks as he looked out at the men. His brothers.
For every man will be with those whom he loves. “Allahu akbar!”
Chapter 16
3:02 A.M., March 30th
A flat
Rochdale, United Kingdom
“You knew—you knew.” Carol’s voice so familiar, so reproachful. Haunting him even as the mists seemed to part—the figure of a blond woman kneeling there on the bloodstained tile, cradling a shattered head in her lap.
Embrace the Fire (Shadow Warriors Book 3) Page 31