Anything that might change her appearance enough to avoid detection.
There had been three of them, she thought, eyes continually scanning the street—the familiar sight of one of London’s double-decker buses off in the distance.
At least three, maybe more, fanning out across the platform in an effort to intercept her. And she had seen it their eyes.
They weren’t there to follow her. They were a kill team.
It was like being back in Belfast all over again—more than one officer of Five had fallen there, been found lying face-down in a ditch, brains blown out.
But there she had known why people were trying to kill her. Why, and who. Here…
It was Ismail Besimi, she thought, joining a crowd of Japanese tourists leaving the station, weaving in among them as they crossed the street. The information she had uncovered in the intercepts from Cheltenham. It had to be.
He had been set up, just as she’d suspected.
And yet—she stopped stock-still in the middle of the crosswalk, frozen by the realization. The only person she had told about the problem with the intercepts was MacCallum. Alec.
Nichols’ voice, suddenly echoing through her mind. “You have a mole.”
A Japanese woman bumped into her from behind and Mehreen started moving again, walking faster this time. As if trying to escape from the reality. No.
It was as impossible to believe Alec was the mole as it had been to believe Ismail was a traitor.
But if he was—if anyone at Thames House was—she glanced up full into the eye of a surveillance camera and ducked her head quickly, realizing the danger.
She jerked her Security Service mobile from its pouch on her hip, fingers working feverishly to pull off the back, extract the SIM card. Another moment, and both phone and card fell from her hands to the pavement, to be crushed underfoot only moments later.
Still, it was only going to be a matter of time until they were after her again. London wasn’t safe, not anymore.
London. She stopped again, her mind racing. Remembering one of the last things MacCallum had said about Ismail Besimi. “He won’t be there much longer. They’re moving him to Paddington Green tonight.”
They hadn’t hesitated to come after an MI-5 officer in the middle of a city station. Besimi wouldn’t stand a chance.
She ducked into the doorway of a closed shop, pulling out the burner Nichols had given her. She had to get in touch with Roth. If anyone could help, it was him.
9:24 P.M.
MI-5 Regional Office
Leeds, West Yorkshire
Having the Americans did help.
Even Darren had to admit, however grudgingly, that Parker and his team had been an asset. With the escalation of violence since the bombing in London, the local Security Service team was overwhelmed, never mind assisting Darren’s people with tracking targets and the continuing search for Tarik Abdul Muhammad.
It didn’t mean he liked giving them this level of access, he thought—moving out of the SCIF into the main part of the office. It was becoming ever harder to firewall them off from sensitive information, and he suspected that was exactly what Jimenez had intended.
The Agency station chief was always working an angle. Always.
But then, nothing came free in this world. His mobile buzzed in his pocket and he opened it, not recognizing the number. “Roth here.”
“Darren.” It was Mehreen’s voice, nearly obscured by traffic noise. He could almost feel her pause, as if uncertain of her next words. “I need to ask you to do me a favor.”
He glanced at his watch. “We’re just about to rotate teams, Mehr, and I’m trying to keep a close eye on the Americans. If it’s something I can manage—of course.”
“I understand,” she began, a strange urgency in her tone. “Ismail Besimi—he’s being transferred by Special Branch from Leeds to Paddington Green. What time are they leaving?”
“They just did. Five, maybe ten minutes ago. I supervised the hand-off myself.”
Dead silence from her end of the line, broken only by the horn of a passing vehicle. “Mehreen?” he asked finally. “Are you still there?”
“Yes,” came the reply. Slow, hesitant. “Thank you, Darren. One more thing—two, if I might. I need the map of the route the transport is taking to reach London.”
“Why do you need something like that?” The question was instinctive, alarm bells going off inside his head at her request.
A long pause. “Something is going on down here, Darren—I’ll read you in when I can. We’ve worked together for years, and I’m going to have to ask you to trust me. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t need it.”
It was his turn to hesitate, looking back along the corridor to the office where he had set up shop for the duration of this operation. They’d both served their country for a exceedingly long time and Mehreen Crawford had given more in its service than most could even fathom. If she couldn’t be trusted…well, no one could.
“All right,” he said, reentering the office and throwing his coat over the chair. “Just give me a moment, I’ll send you what you need. And the second thing?”
“I need the list of Thames House personnel who have accessed the route files.”
He tapped in his log-in access, opening the route data in a separate window. “That’s strange. There’s only one name, Alec MacCallum.”
9:27 P.M.
London
“Thank you. That’s…all I needed.”
MacCallum. Mehreen shut the phone, heart pounding against her chest. She had wanted to trust Roth—wanted to tell him everything, enlist his aid.
But if Alec could be compromised, so could anyone else. Even one of Nick’s old mates. Moscow Rules.
The watchword of British spies long before her time. Anyone could be suspect.
If she wanted to save Besimi—if she wanted to save herself, she was going to have to work outside the system.
And that was going to mean placing faith in someone she couldn’t begin to trust—turning to the last man she wanted to rely on. Nichols.
She kept moving—only too aware that the kill team was still looking for her, that someone at Thames House could even now be tracing her position—doing her best to look like just another normal Londoner as she made her way down the street.
She raised the phone, hesitating for a moment before pressing speed-dial. Cursing her own uncertainty.
Under optimal conditions, it was scarcely more than a three-hour drive from Leeds to London.
There was no time to be wasted.
9:31 P.M.
The flat
Rochdale, United Kingdom
Nationalists, Harry thought, parking the car on the street down from the flat where he and Flaharty had spent the night before. That’s who the Irishman had said bought the weapons—members of the British far right who had apparently made the decision to move beyond political activism and demonstrations into the realm of the euphemistically termed “direct action.”
The same kind of people who had claimed responsibility for the bombing of the mosque in London.
The British far right. Tarik Abdul Muhammad. Sworn enemies. Or something, he knew not what.
It was the same feeling he’d had the previous December as the plot against Vegas unfolded, the sick sensation of being one step behind the pace. Only glimpsing a piece of the puzzle.
And people were dead because of it. Because of him. The guilt of failure.
He feared they were far from the last.
The flat was dark as he approached—shades pulled, no lights visible—but that wasn’t a surprise. Neither of them had been keen to announce their arrival in the neighborhood.
“Nearly thought you had scarpered,” Flaharty observed as Harry entered, letting himself in with the spare key. “And you with my brand new car too.”
“Right,” he responded, detecting the slur in the Irishman’s voice as he laughed at his own joke. “You’ve been drinking again, haven’t yo
u?”
“And why not?” came back the demand as Flaharty lurched to his feet from the sofa. “Man’s got to do something with his time. Nobody to talk to. Ah, whisky, you’re my darling.”
Another laugh, louder this time. Harry shook his head, about to respond when the phone in the pocket of his jacket rang. The burner.
There were only two people who knew that number connected to him. And with one of them standing before him—it had to be Mehreen.
“Yes?” He asked, ignoring the dark look of suspicion in Flaharty’s eyes as he answered the call.
“We need to meet,” she responded, careful not to use his name on the unsecured line. Burner it might be, but you still couldn’t be too cautious.
Now wasn’t the time. Not with so much hanging in the balance.
“Is this about your nephew?”
“No, it’s not. This is,” she hesitated, “more important. You were right about…Box.”
Box. The old nickname for the Security Service. His words to her about the mole.
“Go on,” he said, looking back at Flaharty and motioning for him to remain silent.
“I know who it is—and it’s no longer safe for me here in London,” she continued hurriedly. “An hour ago, three men tried to kill me in the middle of Westminster Station. And they’re going to kill another man tonight. A good man. A man who could be the key to all of this.”
He flinched as if he’d been slapped, surprising himself by his own reaction to the news of her peril.
There were so few people he had ever permitted himself to become close to—fewer still who were yet living.
He had betrayed the friendship they once had known from the moment he’d set foot in her door, and yet…she was still one of the few who meant anything to him.
For the memory of better days.
“Where do we meet?”
“At the old shooting grounds,” she responded cryptically. “In the woods north of the cottage. You know the place.”
And he did.
Harry shut the phone, sliding it back in his pocket as he turned away, gesturing to the Irishman. “Get yourself sobered up and ready to move—I’m going to need your help with this.”
“Boyo,” Flaharty began, his voice no longer sounding nearly as drunken as it had when Harry first entered, the look in his eye suggesting that it had been all an act.
He gestured toward the Sig-Sauer on Harry’s hip, just visible through the open jacket. “Where you’re going, you’ll need more than that. There’s an AK and a pair of NODs in the closet.”
10:57 P.M.
The fields off the M1
North of Leicester
Timing. That was going to be everything, Paul Gordon thought, stuffing the black balaclava back into the front pocket of his tactical mask.
He picked up the G3 assault rifle, one of a handful retained from the shipments by Hale for their own use, and moved out beyond the treeline to survey the road.
It had gone without saying that the Special Branch transport would stick to the motorway. Side roads in England were…less than well maintained.
A good plan—on a normal day. Today, it just made them more predictable. Not that it would have mattered.
He hadn’t asked Hale how he had such precise intelligence on the prisoner transfer—how he even knew it was taking place tonight in the first place. There had been enough for him to suspect that Hale had someone inside the Security Service.
“They’re going to bloody well let him go, Paul,” he had said, the anger playing across his features. “Years this man has been preaching hate against our country, and now with all this hell raining down around us, they’re just going to let him go.”
And that was the problem, wasn’t it? The British legal system had been letting these people go for decades—judges frightened of their own shadow, afraid of being accused of racism or anti-Islamic prejudice.
And yet to execute an unarmed man this way. To run the risk of a gun battle with the British officers guarding him. Of killing them, men with families just like he once had known.
Sisters like Alice. He had thought of refusing the order—of walking away from it all, the carnage of Madina still weighing on his soul.
Walk away. Somehow he knew his old comrade well enough to suspect that wasn’t an option.
The road lit up in the hazy green glow of the NODs as he raised them to his eyes, standing there on the knoll—the lights of speeding cars glaring brightly in the night-vision.
They were going to have to time this so sodding precisely.
11:14 P.M.
Outside St. Albans
“This the place?” Flaharty asked as the Audi rolled slowly down the narrow gravel access road, headlights piercing the darkness of the woods ahead of them.
Harry acknowledged the question with a terse nod. It was. He could remember it as if it was yesterday, coming to these woods with Nick and Mehr—a crisp fall weekend spent in the little cottage perhaps two hundred meters to their south.
The two men had gone out for pheasant, armed with a pair of old double-barrels borrowed from a friend of Nick’s.
Tramped all day through these woods, with not a bird to be found. Two highly trained warriors, and only empty bags to show for it when night came.
The old shooting grounds, as she had called them. A brief smile touched his lips at the memory, but it vanished as quick as it had come.
Those days…were gone forever. And now Mehreen was in danger.
The headlights picked out another vehicle parked on the access road—a dark blue Toyota Camry just sitting there, lights out.
He could feel Flaharty stiffen beside him. “Is that your contact from Five?”
Harry shrugged, shifting the Audi into park and unzipping his jacket as he reached for the door handle. “I guess I’ll just have to find out, now won’t I?”
Stepping out of the vehicle, he stripped off his jacket, tossing it onto the driver’s seat. He let the car door slam shut behind him as he walked out into the small clearing in the woods, arms spread open and away from his sides—allowing himself to be silhouetted against the Audi’s headlights.
“Harry,” a voice called from the darkness and he turned to see Mehreen walking toward him out of the woods from off to the side—in the opposite direction from the sedan. “Thank you for coming. I’m sorry I couldn’t say more over the phone.”
“You said more than enough,” Harry responded grimly. “Are you certain you weren’t followed here?”
She nodded quickly and he didn’t press any further. No question in his mind that if she had been, she would have known it.
But there was a haunted look in her eyes that he hadn’t seen before. “You mentioned the mole…what’s going on, Mehr?”
“We don’t have much time,” she responded, glancing at her watch. “There’s a prisoner transfer going down tonight—already en route—an old asset of mine, an imam named Ismail Besimi, is being transported from Leeds to Paddington Green on trumped up terrorism charges. He’s never going to reach London—the same people who tried to kill me are going to take him out on the road before Special Branch can deliver him.”
“How do you know all this?”
Mehreen hesitated, and he could see the anguish written on her face. The night seemed to close around them, the woods quiet but for the low hum of the Audi’s engine. “The mole—it’s a man named Alec MacCallum. My section chief at Five.”
Shades of Hamid Zakiri. He winced, shaking his head at the folly of it. Traitors amongst us, foes without.
Perhaps none of this meant anything, in the end.
But she was still speaking. “…Alec was the only person I told about my suspicions that Ismail Besimi had been framed. He said he’d handle it. Six hours later, I was targeted by a three-man team—former military, professionals—in the heart of Westminster Station. And I checked our systems remotely. His Thames House ID was used to access the route information for Besimi’s transfer. The only on
e to do so.”
A court would have called it circumstantial evidence, Harry knew that. Flimsy, even. Perhaps that’s precisely what the barristers at Old Bailey would argue.
But this…was no court. There was no jury to render a verdict, no judge to pass sentence.
Just the two of them, groping in the dark. And that would have to suffice. “So, you have Besimi’s route?” he asked, getting to the point of the matter.
“If they’re on schedule,” she replied by way of an answer, “they should be nearing Coventry now.”
“And if they haven’t already been intercepted.”
A grim, tight-lipped nod, the sadness in her eyes visible even in the night. “If.”
“Do you have a weapon?”
She gave him a look. “You know good and well that the Service doesn’t issue sidearms to its officers.”
“I do,” Harry replied, reaching into his waistband beneath his shirt for the compact H&K. “Thought Nick might have squirreled away a piece over the years. He never was much of a one for the rules.”
“You’re right,” she said, a sad smile creeping across her lips as he handed it over to her, butt-first, “he wasn’t. But I couldn’t return to the flat. Not with Five compromised.”
“Then it’s a good thing I came prepared.” He turned, starting to lead the way back to the car, his boots crunching against the wet, icy leaves, when he heard her come to an abrupt stop behind him.
“Who did you bring with you?”
He looked up to see Flaharty standing guard there beside the Audi, the Kalashnikov held loosely in the crook of his arm. “There’s nothing to worry about, Mehr,” he said, motioning for her to stand down. “He’s with me. The type of people we’re going up against, we can’t take them on by ourselves. I thought I would bring back-up.”
Harry gestured for the Irishman to step forward, his face becoming visible in the glare of the Audi’s headlights. “Mehreen, I’d like you to meet—”
“Stephen Flaharty,” she finished for him, eyes opening wide in a mixture of surprise and anger, the words exploding from her mouth in a hiss.
Embrace the Fire (Shadow Warriors Book 3) Page 34