Embrace the Fire (Shadow Warriors Book 3)

by Stephen England

  And then he saw him, through the half-open door to the parlor. A man sitting there in a chair, half-facing away from him. Looking out the window.

  He eased the door open with his foot, training the Walther on the target’s head as he barked, “Get on the floor! Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  “Conor Hale,” came the familiar voice of the American, the hairs on the back of Hale’s neck prickling with the warning of danger as the man rose to his feet, calmly turning to face him—his hands held out from his sides.

  He saw the man’s face, remembering him as the man at Flaharty’s side the night they had secured the weapons shipment. But the voice. The final pieces falling into place—a ghost from a past thought long-forgotten. His gaze falling to the man’s jacket, unzipped and gaping open to reveal the all-too-recognizable wires of an armed suicide vest.

  The man smiled. A grim, cold sight that chilled him to the bone. “You could start running now, Conor, and you’d never get out of the blast radius in time. So why don’t you just put down that gun and we’ll have a talk.”

  2:16 P.M.

  The CIA off-site facility

  City of London

  “Sir.” David Lay turned to see Carlos Jimenez standing there in the door of the conference room, the station chief’s face unreadable.

  “Yes?”

  “We just received word from Yorkshire—they’ve positively ID’ed the body found at the estate. It’s Hashim Rahman. He was shot, execution-style. A single bullet to the head.”

  No. Lay swore loudly, levering himself to feet. This was spinning out of control. They had created a dangerous man—sent him out into the night. Never even considered the possibility that one day he might not come back.

  That they might find themselves facing off against a man they had trained. “Is that all?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Jimenez hesitated before going on. “Final results will have to await the coroner, but the initial conclusion of the ranking constable is that he was severely tortured before being executed. Perhaps over the course of days.”

  My God. The CIA director shook his head, remembering the last time he had seen Nichols. Standing there alone by Carol’s grave as the last mourners left, a silent, haunted figure. Their eyes meeting for a moment, frozen in time—and only Death staring back.

  “I’m assuming word of this has already been conveyed to Julian?”

  “It has—Norris just left for Thames House and word is that Marsh will be briefing the Home Secretary later this afternoon. Once it’s in her hands…”

  There’s no stopping it. A British citizen, tortured to death on UK soil by an American intelligence officer. They had lost their chance to control this.

  “Enough of this,” Lay said after a moment, pulling himself together. “Your mission hasn’t changed. Find him.”

  2:17 P.M.

  The farmhouse

  Harrogate, North Yorkshire

  Harry could see the fear in the man’s eyes—much as he was trying to hide it. He’d met brave men over the years, fought alongside many of them. Killed more than a few. But a bomb was different than a bullet, somehow. More impersonal, more terrifying. The idea of being ripped into raw meat. Deprived of humanity, along with life.

  Not even the strongest could endure that thought for long.

  “You’re bluffing. You wouldn’t,” Hale responded, swallowing hard—the pistol in his hands still aimed at Harry’s head. “You don’t have it in you to—”

  “Trigger the vest? You’re probably right,” Harry responded with a shrug. “Which is why I took the precaution of leaving the detonator in the hands of a ‘friend.’ And unluckily for you, about the only person he hates more than you—is me. He’s not going to think twice.”

  He reached up to adjust his earpiece, his eyes never leaving Hale’s. “You there, Flaharty?”

  The man took a step back at the mention of the name, the Walther’s barrel wavering for the first time.

  “On my mark, Stephen,” Harry continued, his voice calm, almost conversational, “I’m going to count down from ten. When I reach one, you trigger the vest. If I’m cut off at any point…you trigger the vest. Ten…”

  “You’re sodding insane.” Hale shook his head, the blood seeming to have drained from his face.

  “So I’ve been told,” Harry responded, watching the man’s eyes. “Nine…eight…seven…”

  “Enough,” the former SAS man swore, lowering the Walther to his side.

  “That’s a start.” Harry beckoned with his hand. “Drop your weapon and kick it over here.”

  9:21 A.M. Eastern Time

  Fado Irish Pub

  Washington, D.C.

  “Hofstad on Appropriations,” Ian Cahill said, adjusting the volume on his Bluetooth headset as the former presidential chief of staff leaned back into the booth of the darkened pub, nursing his Guinness. “You’re going to need his support if you want to get it through without undue difficulty.”

  He listened for another moment, then, “That won’t be a problem. I’ll have a talk with him. There’s leverage, of course—he was involved with a prostitute a few years back. Girl was sixteen. Dennis claims not to have known, but…”

  His voice trailed off, the implication perfectly clear. He had helped the Minnesota senator out back then, and he could use that help to bury him now—if he didn’t play ball.

  It was the kind of thing that Cahill had become known for, ever since his early days, coming up back in Chicago as part of the Daley Machine. Just a cog in the machine, back then. And yet, it had been an education.

  In power.

  The kind of power he had come so dangerously close to losing, he thought, turning off his earpiece as he ended the call. With the fall of the Hancock administration. With Roy Coftey’s betrayal.

  Coftey. He grimaced at the very thought of the man, swearing softly to himself as he sat there, waiting for the arrival of his contact. The Oklahoma senator had once been one of their closest allies on the Hill, and so very nearly the undoing of them all. His misguided sense of “duty”—of “honor”—casting him athwart both his party and his President.

  Disloyalty. It was the unforgivable sin.

  He caught a glimpse of her then, her blonde hair flowing back over her shoulders—her hips swaying as she approached the booth.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said, sliding in across from him. “We’ve had a full schedule.”

  “Of course,” Cahill replied, smiling as he looked at her. “Thanks for coming to meet with me…Melody.”

  2:25 P.M.

  The farmhouse

  Harrogate, North Yorkshire

  “It was Lebanon, wasn’t it?” Harry asked, glancing back across the kitchen to where Conor Hale sat, bound with zipties to a sturdy wooden chair. A look of thinly-suppressed fury on the former SAS man’s face.

  “It was.”

  “July of ’06, as I recall,” Harry mused, coming back to stand beside the table. His jacket now off—the suicide vest removed and placed on the floor at Hale’s feet. Flaharty was on his way in, but that was going to take a while. “Just the three of us—you and me and Nick Crawford, jumping off the ramp of that C-130 and into the night. I’d never seen you before that night, but I knew if Nick vouched for you—you were good. And you proved it on that hill outside Bint Jbeil.”

  “We all nearly bought it that night.”

  He nodded, a grim smile touching his lips at the memory. The fire lashing the hilltop—the supersonic crack of bullets whistling through the air. “We did at that…so tell me, Conor. What went wrong? How did we end up here in this place? On opposite sides.”

  “It doesn’t matter, does it?” Hale asked, shaking his head. “You wouldn’t understand. The war you and I fought—it didn’t end. It’s never going to end. Until one side destroys the other. And no one has the will for that. Not anymore.”

  “You’re talking about precipitating a civil war—unleashing the kind of violence we both saw
in Tikrit, in Basra, here—on the streets of London.”

  The former SAS sergeant laughed. “You just don’t get it, do you—that war is coming, whether we want it or not. Whether we believe it or not. I only intend for it to come when we are prepared for it. Prepared to win, once and for all. To drive these anim—”

  Harry drew back his arm without warning, his fist hammering into the man’s stomach and driving every ounce of breath from his body.

  Hale doubled up, cursing fluently—struggling against the bonds securing him to the chair as Harry stooped down, his lips only inches from the man’s ear.

  “You’re right, of course. How, why—none of that really matters, in the end. Because I didn’t come here to reminisce about old war stories, Conor. I came here to get at the truth. And that’s exactly what you’re going to tell me.”

  “He talking yet?” Flaharty asked as Harry opened the door, letting him in.

  A shake of the head served as reply. “He’s not giving me anything operational.”

  “Oh, he will,” the Irishman responded with a grim assurance. “Just let me have a go at him. I’ve done this once or twice, as you know, boyo.”

  Harry just gave him a look. No war was ever so vicious as that which pitted neighbor against neighbor, and the Troubles of Northern Ireland had been no exception, with the Provos knowing few rivals in the unspeakably brutal torture inflicted on men known—or merely suspected—of informing for the British.

  And Flaharty had been right there, in the midst of it.

  But to turn him loose against a man he had once gone into battle alongside…that was another matter entirely.

  Another dark line in his soul—crossed as if it were nothing. He hesitated for only a moment before turning to lead the way into the kitchen. “Follow me.”

  2:34 P.M.

  Thames House

  Millbank, London

  “…smoke fills the sky over Birmingham this morning as young Asian men, reacting to yesterday’s provocative rally on the part of the British Defence Coalition, set tires ablaze in the streets. Our local Sky News affiliate reports that the Marks & Spencer on High Street has been forced to close for business after gangs of looters taking advantage of the unrest broke into the store overnight—causing thousands of pounds in damages. Police called to the scene were unable…”

  The discovery of Hashim Rahman’s tortured body couldn’t have come at a worse time, Julian Marsh thought, staring out onto the floor of the Thames House operations centre.

  With the rioting overnight in Ipswich after the stabbing death of Ajmal Rafik, this was going to make for the second imam found dead in as many days. And they weren’t going to be able to keep a lid on this for long.

  Rahman’s wife—widow, the DG corrected himself—had already been reaching out to prominent civil liberties groups in the wake of what her lawyer was calling her husband’s “unlawful abduction by unknown government forces”, clearly a veiled reference to the Security Service.

  If they found out he had been tortured to death…Marsh swore softly. It could bring down the government.

  He reached for his tailored suit jacket and threw it over one arm. Time to brief the Home Secretary—make sure everyone was at least playing from the same sheet music.

  2:49 P.M.

  The farmhouse

  Harrogate, North Yorkshire

  Demons. Harry plunged bloody hands beneath the faucet’s cold stream, watching as the red-tinged water swirled in the basin beneath, draining away.

  There was something he was missing in all of this, something critical, but he found it impossible to put his finger on it—memories,

  voices from the dark shadows of his mind, clamoring for an audience.

  Hers, perhaps loudest of all. “You swore he would come to no harm.”

  What would Carol have thought of the deeds he had committed in her name? In her memory. It was one of the few questions he knew the answer to—knew all too well.

  She had been a good person, he thought, feeling the anger well up inside him once more—far better than he could have ever deserved. And now she was dead. Like so many others…taken before their time.

  There was no place for good people in this world.

  Only for people like him, Flaharty, Conor Hale—all of them too much the same—humanity stripped away, blindly clawing in the mud for dominance. Scarce able to even remember what they were fighting for in the first place.

  Justice. Redemption. Or just revenge. What you called it didn’t seem to matter anymore. All the same.

  He stalked past Flaharty, back to where Conor Hale sat—stripped to the waist now, blood oozing through his tattered bandages. He was bruised and bloodied, but his eyes glinted defiance at Harry’s approach.

  “You can make this all stop,” Harry whispered, leaning in close to the man—his eyes only inches away from Hale’s. “Can put an end to this…I just need you to give me the details of the attack on the Queen. A location for Tarik Abdul Muhammad. Give me that, and you walk out of here. A free man.”

  “Make it stop?” Hale asked derisively, laughing through the pain. He was overcome for a moment with a violent cough, recovering himself with an effort. “Like I would beg either of you for mercy? I’m not one of your boy-raping wogs, mate. I’ve seen worse than anything you could dream of dishing out.”

  “You’ve not begun to see what I’m capable of. A location for the Shaikh,” Harry repeated, his hand resting on Hale’s shoulder, bracing him against the coming impact.

  “Why don’t the two of you just go bugger each—”

  The man’s words were cut abruptly short, a raw scream of pain filling the old farmhouse as Harry’s fist slammed into his ribs, blood spurting from around his knuckles as he pummeled the wound.

  “We can keep this up for days,” he hissed into Hale’s ear, taking a step back. “And sooner or later, you will break.”

  It was only then that he realized Hale wasn’t looking at him, but past him—a faint smile playing around his lips as he fought against the pain.

  He followed the direction of the man’s eyes over to a clock hanging on the wall…the realization hitting home with the impact of a rifle bullet. This was happening soon. Now, even.

  “But I don’t have days, do I?” he asked, glancing back to see that the smile had vanished from Hale’s face as quick as it had come. “It’s going down now—isn’t it?”

  He could feel the surge tide of anger rising within him, a murderous rage filling his body.

  This was Vegas all over again. Waking up to find yourself farther behind the pace than you’d thought. Too far to catch up.

  Too late to stop something that had become inevitable. “Then we’re out of time. Flaharty, give me the burner.”

  “What?” the Irishman demanded, startled. “What are you doing, lad?”

  “Just give it here,” Harry responded, taking it from him and walking over to where the suicide vest was laid out on the kitchen table, his thumbs moving rapidly over the keys as he began programming one of the apps. Time to play the only card left to him. Risk everything on a gambler’s throw.

  He pulled his own mobile from his pocket, holding it up so the screens of both phones were facing Hale, countdown timers clearly visible on each of them.

  “These are synced, Conor. One for me, one for you,” he said coldly, mastering himself with an effort as he stared into Hale’s eyes. “We’re going to take a step just outside—close enough to hear if you call, far enough to be out of the blast radius. If I haven’t heard from you by the time the countdown reaches zero, your phone places the call, triggers the vest. We were both in Iraq, I know you’ve seen what one these can do to a man.”

  “You’re not going to do that,” Hale murmured, shaking his head, sweat broken out in beads on his face. Defiance fading away like the mist. “If I die, what I know dies with me.”

  “And if you’re not willing to share it with me, it might as well.” He shook his head, exchanging a look with F
laharty.

  “Five minutes, Conor. Tick-tock. The end of your life…begins now.”

  Chapter 30

  3:02 P.M.

  The farmhouse

  Harrogate, North Yorkshire

  Three minutes. Harry looked off into the distance across the hills of Yorkshire, the sun already beginning its declining march across the western sky. Unable to escape the feeling that, once again, he had been too late.

  You could never save the ones you loved. And even avenging their deaths…he should have killed Tarik that day in the crowd on the train and had done with it. Anything would have been better than this. Watching him succeed once more.

  “You really going to let this happen, lad?” Flaharty asked, glancing over at the phone in his hand, its timer rapidly ticking away. 2:17…2:16…

  He nodded almost imperceptibly, his eyes still on the horizon. “One thing you learn from spending fifteen years with the Agency: there’s no margin in bluffing.”

  1:48…1:47…

  “And if he dies?”

  “Then he dies. And I contact Darren Roth again, give him what I have, let him run with it.” He saw the question in the Irishman’s eyes and immediately clarified, “One of Mehreen’s fellow officers. Thames House.”

  Flaharty shook his head as if in wry disbelief, cursing softly beneath his breath. “And you were planning on telling me this when?”

  “When you needed to know.”

  1:13…1:12…

  Suddenly, the silence of the surrounding countryside was broken by a muffled yell from somewhere inside the farmhouse. The voice of a man calling out for help. Flaharty turned toward the door, but Harry put a hand on his shoulder, holding him back. “Give him a moment.”

  Hale was nearly hyperventilating by the time they reached him, words spilling out of him like water over a cliff as Harry reached over to cut the timer off. 0:37.

  “The attack—the attack on the Queen. It’s—”

  “What about it?”

  “It isn’t on her motorcade outside Balmoral, it’s on the castle itself.” He hesitated, and Harry made as if to reach once more the timer. “No, no, no…don’t. Please don’t. The attack was to be launched at 1800 hours.”