by Vogel, Vince
“I guess I’ll have to do without.”
“Here, sit down,” she said, scooting over to one side of the bed.
Alex took a seat at the end and picked up the container, grimacing slightly as he surveyed the supposed food inside. He’d eaten worse. Much worse.
“They were open early,” Chloe explained, opening up her container and shoveling a handful of chips and meat into her mouth. “So I thought why not.”
“You shouldn’t have left here.”
“It was only round the corner. Plus, no one knows me in around here.”
“That’s not the point. Anyone could be watching.”
“Sorry,” she let out softly with a gentle shrug.
Dorring picked up a piece of steaming gray meat in his fingers and shoved it in his mouth. He chewed it up and found it surprisingly tasty.
“So this morning, right,” Chloe began between bites, “I saw you unpack a rather large gun out of that suitcase over there, before putting it into the bag you just brought in.”
“You haven’t tried to open either of those suitcases, have you?”
“Of course not. I only had a look at them.”
“Keep it that way. Those suitcases are rigged to an internal battery that will give you a 10,000-volt pulse shock if you try to get into them with the print identification. Only myself and four other men have access to the contents.”
Chloe suspiciously eyed the suitcases at the back of the room.
“I’m glad I didn’t try,” she muttered. Then turning back to Alex, she added, “So, are you like a hit man or something?”
Dorring pondered the question as he chewed more meat.
“You could call me a hit man,” he said. “I kill under orders and am paid to complete those orders. So in a way I’m directly paid to kill. Like a hit man. But I supposedly only have one boss.”
“Who’s that?”
“MI6. The United Kingdom. Her Majesty’s government. Maybe even Her Majesty herself is giving the orders from her throne while stroking a corgi. Perhaps none of them at all.”
Chloe gave him a bewildered frown.
“Well, that clears that up, then,” she said sardonically, taking another mouthful of chips and meat.
They both sat in the dank little room for a minute or two, performing no other action than scooping more of the greasy food into their mouths, their ears filled with the sounds of chewing jaws and the gentle patter of rain on the little bay window.
“So what did you do with the gun, then?” she finally asked.
“Stoked up the fireplace,” Alex answered cryptically. “See if I couldn’t get things burning a little brighter.”
“Do you always talk in riddles? I asked you a simple question.”
“Sorry, Chloe. I’m not used to talking so much. I spend most of my time on my own. If you really want to know, I shot a man in the woods and caused some other men to kill each other. Half of these men belonged to the Earles Crew, as it’s named, and the others belonged to the Doyles, including brother David.”
“My God!” she exclaimed. “You’ve started a war.”
“With luck. If I can’t find out who killed my sister yet, I’ll have a little fun with swine while I do. Plus, they have history with my family.”
“What history?”
Dorring tilted his head forward and looked into her eyes.
“You do like to ask a lot of questions, Chloe Casper.”
“It’s my nature. My mother always told me off for asking questions all the time. But my dad used to encourage me. He said it made me inquisitive, and inquisitiveness was a sign of intelligence.”
“Where are your parents now?”
Her cheerful expression instantly descended into darkness. Her hand froze, holding a piece of dangling meat about an inch from her lips, and her eyes gave the impression that they were gazing out into an abyss of nowhere. It was as if Alex’s question had thrown her into a well of bad memories.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “If it’s too—”
“They’re dead,” she muttered, becoming animated all of a sudden and shoving the meat into her mouth.
Alex decided not to press her further on the subject. He always hated to talk of his own father’s death, and Chloe appeared to have two dead parents. They carried on eating the contents of the containers and listening to the echo of the raindrops outside.
“You know we have to move places once we’re finished,” he said as they did.
“Why?”
“We have to keep moving. They’ll be tracking us.”
“Who? The Doyles?”
“No. The government.”
29
Philip Foster was an efficient man. He didn’t like mess. And what was staring at him now was one great pile of steaming mess.
Foster had worked at MI6 for thirty years—twenty in intelligence and then another ten as an agent handler. He’d never killed a man but had designed the deaths of many. Seven years ago, he’d personally chosen and then trained Alex Dorring, Agent 192. Dorring had only been in the SAS for a year and a half by that point, but his superiors raved about him. He’d been captured in Lebanon during a botched assassination attempt on an international arms trader doing business with Hezbollah. Everyone in his unit had been killed except him. Alex had survived after he’d held out in the minaret tower of a local mosque, knowing that it would be sacrilege to his pursuers to blow up a religious building for the purpose of killing one infidel. In that stone tower, he’d blockaded himself in and spent fourteen hours picking off Hezbollah militia. It was reported that he killed over fifty men that day before finally being injured by a sniper on a neighboring roof. Capturing him half-alive, instead of finishing him off, the militia took him to a local hospital and had him patched up. Their medical hospitality, however, wasn’t anything to do with their good hearts. No—on the contrary, it was to prepare him for torture.
It was here that Dorring truly impressed Foster.
The part where he’d killed fifty odd men had intrigued the military men. But not Foster. What impressed Foster was the three months Alex had spent locked in an underground compound being tortured by every conceivable technique. They’d waterboarded him and found that apparently he didn’t mind drowning. They’d electrocuted him and, though they’d done it to the point where Alex had soiled himself, found that tens of thousands of volts every hour did nothing to change his reticent attitude. They even tried chemical compounds that attacked his mind, placing him in a sealed water tank while his brain was overwhelmed by psychotropic drugs. He’d reported in debriefing afterward that he’d actually found the sessions somewhat therapeutic. His captors quickly saw that this man was willing to suffer endlessly, so they prepared to execute him. And they would have if it hadn’t been for Mossad agents attacking the underground compound on the eve of his execution. They rescued Alex along with several of their own people and got him across the border into Israel.
As soon as he found out about this, Foster went to find Alex and offered him recruitment into a clandestine assassins wing of MI6 known as Uriel. During Alex’s training, Foster and his colleagues were witness to an impeccable machine working in total efficiency. Alex was proficient in every martial art imaginable, was in complete control of his body, was a perfect shot with both long-range and short-range weapons, explosives of different types, and every knife imaginable. But what really impressed them was Alex’s complete lack of family and friends. Dorring socialized with no one, not even members of his own squadron. They respected him and placed their lives wilfully in his hands, but never really knew him. He spoke little and had no baggage. No wife. No kids. No family who he kept in touch with. He could just as easily fade out of view completely. And that’s what Foster did to him. Faded him out.
Then came the problems.
His first year had been exceptional. As easily as he’d faded out of life, he blended into places. His ability to pick up languages in only a few weeks, including dialects and accents, was
remarkable, and the polyglot sunk into any environment. In that nascent stage of his career in Uriel, Alex killed over twenty highly sensitive individuals around the world, men who threatened peace and harmony in the West. He did his duty, as the old goats at Legoland said. (Legoland being the nickname given to MI6’s white-and-blue children’s block headquarters on the banks of the river Thames).
But then he got into trouble. Alex’s emotions, which Foster had felt previously assured were dead, came into play and he did something stupid. This caused him to disappear off the grid for five years and cause a shitstorm back at HQ. He’d killed the brother of a Russian double agent and disappeared into the wilderness with the man’s wife. Alex Dorring went up in smoke.
Foster spent a year trying to find him but eventually gave up and officially registered 192 as retired. Then, five years later, Foster received a tip-off from a friend of his in Russian intelligence, stating that a certain Russian arms trader, the double agent, had hold of his man, Alex Dorring, in the Crimea. Foster quickly found out where and sent an extraction team. He put his neck on the line to get 192 back. God only knew why. Perhaps because he’d had several failures with recent recruits and wanted the real deal back. Perhaps.
When the extraction team got to Alex, he was barely alive. His captors had been slowly starving him to death. He was naught but bone covered in a viscous film of dirty, blistered skin. Many of his teeth had fallen out, and the pitch-black cell they’d pulled him out from had two badly decaying bodies in it with him, other prisoners possibly—192 never would say who they were.
As physically sick as he was, it hadn’t been the state of his body that worried them at Uriel; it was his mental one. When they took him out of that dark hole, Dorring didn’t speak for three months in the psychiatric infirmary at the Pit. When he finally did, it was in broken sentences, and he appeared to be talking to other people in the room that no one else could see. Foster was on the verge of having Alex cast into the Pit forever when he suddenly woke up out of it and began making sense. Three months later, he was assessed as fit to return to the field, and Foster did just that, putting his best hunter back among the beasts.
In the last year, 192 had killed many more men threatening something or other, and Foster had felt glad that he’d pushed back against all the others who said that 192 was a wild card.
Now, with Dorring once again AWOL, Foster felt depressed by it all.
Yesterday, an agent was sent to track him down using data from 192’s tracker. When he did, he found a quiet little suburb in Richmond and a family that had recently arrived home from their holidays. Posing as a detective investigating local break-ins, the agent got inside the house and managed to retrieve the tracking bug from a child’s rucksack. This was clear evidence that 192 had run.
Foster stood at security check-in at Legoland, waiting to be carried up to Sir Terence Golding’s office in the elevator and be torn a new asshole, as the Americans say. “Dorring is your man,” Golding had warned when Foster had convinced him to bring 192 back into the fold. And now “his man” was missing and armed. It, of course, hadn’t escaped their notice that 192 had visited one of the weapon and tech caches in London and withdrawn two suitcases full of it—enough to go to war.
Foster collected his watch, wallet, phone, and belt from the other side of the metal detectors and made his way across the shiny marble floor to the gold doors of the elevators. In the lift, he was pressed up against the back by the horde of people that clambered inside after him. They were all chatting as the elevator climbed up the building, but Foster heard nothing of their morning exchanges. He was too worried about his new asshole, and the higher the lift climbed, the more worried he got, as though he were suffering from a kind of nervous vertigo.
The lift was almost empty when it pinged at the floor he wanted. When the doors opened, he hesitated, and the two women also in the elevator turned to look at him. With a groan and a shrug, he left and walked along black marble to Golding’s office at the end. The receptionist, a neatly dressed woman in her midthirties with straight brunette hair, stood the second she saw him and told Foster that Sir Terence was expecting him. This was ominous. Foster hadn’t called to say he was coming; he’d merely found out indirectly that the MI6 director would be in the building this morning. But the bastard had clearly anticipated Foster coming and, therefore, knew what he had to tell him regarding 192.
The receptionist opened the door, and Foster walked straight into the spacious corner office with its large oval window looking out over the murky waters of the Thames. He always hated coming here. It was never good when he did.
“Mr. Foster,” Golding said, getting up from behind his desk.
Golding was one of the real dinosaurs of MI6. He was seventy-six and showed no signs of retirement. He’d been a part of things during the Cold War, first with MI5 and then with MI6. He’d celebrated the end of that war with the beginning of a new one: the fight against international jihadi. Secretly, he yearned for the clear logic of the Cold War. This current war appeared to change its rules every step of the way. Today’s allies were tomorrow’s enemies. And even the enemies didn’t stay the same. At least with international communism, it was an ethos that each person stuck to and allied themselves with. But now you had each faction turning against one another at the drop of a hat, everything morphing and changing all the time, the sides always seeping into one another. Even at home they suffered attacks from their own citizens, and the enemy was everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. International jihad didn’t explain the half of it. It was merely a convenient term. Something to call it.
Yes, Sir Terrence Golding longed for the good old days of spy versus spy Cold War–style.
“Take a seat,” Golding said as he sat back down, a latticework of thinning white hair on his old liver-spotted head and a stern look on his weather-beaten face. He was dressed in a navy blue pinstriped suit, with a matching waistcoat and tie over a white shirt.
When Foster sat, he glanced to his left where there was a small leather sofa in the far corner of the office. Like always, another man sat there. Golding was never alone. The other man was stretched out on the sofa staring straight at Foster. He was midforties, graying brown hair neatly trimmed into a side parting, and wore a black suit. Golding never introduced his guest, and Foster felt that this implied he shouldn’t ask.
“So what is it you have to say?” the old man of MI6 said calmly in his haughty best Carlton Club English accent.
“It’s one of my agents,” Foster said, getting straight to the point. “He’s gone AWOL.”
“I’d say he’s gone a little further than that, Mr. Foster.”
Golding grinned and took a sideways glance at the man on the sofa, who was chuckling quietly to himself.
“Then I take it you know that yesterday at eight thirty in the morning, Agent 192 came into Heathrow,” Foster put to him. “However, he didn’t come immediately to the liaison point. This isn’t unusual, as you know, sir. We give around two to three hours’ leeway. Get something to eat, that sort of thing. However, several hours later, he’d still not come and we…”
Golding waved his hand at Foster and made a face as though someone had just offered him a plate of dog shit.
“I know the details, Mr. Foster. I know he removed his tracking device. Pretty messy business to pull one’s own eyeball out. I know he placed it on a civilian. But it’s the other two things I know that bother me.”
“And what are those, sir?”
“Firstly, that while he was off radar, so to speak, our man 192 popped into one of our caches”—Foster squirmed in his seat—“and withdrew a large quantity of tech. It got me thinking why he’d need weapons. And that’s when I came to the other thing I found out. His bloody sister’s just been killed right here in London. Now why didn’t I know this immediately, Mr. Foster?”
“I didn’t think it was relevant.”
“It’s looking pretty fucking relevant now, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t think that 192 would do anything stupid. I called him into London as a precaution. To get him back so we could keep an eye on him.”
“And why did you want to keep an eye on him?”
“Because of what happened—”
“Because of what happened in the Crimea,” Golding finished for him. “Because your man, as much of the cold bastard killer as he is, has already fucked up. Only that time it was in another country and it wasn’t risking British lives. Now he’s on our doorstep and running around with military-grade weapons. We’re supposed to stop the terrorists, not be them, Mr. Foster. It rather defeats the object of an intelligence service put in place to keep British citizens safe if its people are running around killing them. Doesn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. However—”
“However bollocks! I’ll tell you how it is. I let you have your way with this man once before, and I told you then that it was on your head. Well, now it’s on your head, Mr. Foster. The axe is on your head, moments away from splitting it open and spilling your brains.”
“But I couldn’t perceive his sister being killed.”
“His sister being killed shouldn’t have come into it. Our field agents are robots. Their only thought is the one we give them. They live on orders and nothing more. What’s this I also hear about 192 shooting half the clientele of a Tripoli brothel?”
“That was a successful mission. The target was eliminated.”
“But the mission had been called off last I heard. Too much risk of exposure.”
“But 192 and I—”
“Again, bollocks, Mr. Foster. It just keeps on pouring out of your mouth like a tap of human shit. I’ll tell you what happened. 192 decided to go ahead with the mission even though his handler—you—had called it off. That would imply to me that 192 thinks very little of you. I’d almost go as far as saying he thinks about as highly of you as I do. But I don’t think even he could get that low.”