Edward Langton stopped in the doorway and turned to face Huff. “Wait in the car.”
“I think it might be wise—”
“If you did as you were told.” Edward turned on his heel, knowing the doorman would prevent the bodyguard from following. Huff might be good at his job, but he was hired help, and that didn’t grant him a place at the big table.
Langton entered the meeting room and took his usual seat. Pots of fresh coffee had already been prepared, and two members of the group were already in attendance.
“Joel, George.”
Harmer and Carson both nodded as Edward poured himself a cup.
“I take it you had an uneventful journey this morning,” said Joel Harmer.
Harmer’s role as head of security didn’t extend to protecting the ESO members themselves, for which he was grateful. A failure of that kind would cost him his life. Harmer’s focus was, instead, on the international front, fomenting unrest in areas of the world not yet controlled by the ESO, then coordinating with the joint chiefs and State Department to ensure America’s interests were promoted.
“I think she realized that trying to get to us is a waste of time,” Langton said. “She had the perfect opportunity to strike today. My best guess is they’re halfway around the world by now. I’ll speak to Bill Sanders and get him to alert all embassy chiefs to be on the lookout for them. Sooner or later, one of them will slip up and we’ll have them.”
Before the others could offer their opinions, the door opened and Alexander Mumford strode in.
“You made it.” The man responsible for the ESO’s finances smiled at Langton.
“I was just saying, Driscoll is no longer a personal threat, but we still need to silence her as soon as we can.”
“That means finding a replacement for Anton West,” Mumford pointed out.
“The most experienced member of West’s team, Willard Eckman, has assumed control until we can find a permanent replacement. I was thinking of giving the job to Carl Huff.”
“Isn’t he the maverick West was complaining about?” Harmer asked.
“A clash of personalities, nothing more,” Langton assured him. “Huff knows Driscoll inside out. He should have been in charge from day one.”
“The benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight,” Mumford said.
“Yeah, well, as I was saying, we’ll focus the manhunt abroad. I—”
All talking ceased when Henry Langton entered the room. He threw his coat over the back of his chair, then slammed his briefcase on the table with such force that even the coffee pots jumped.
“Why did you disobey my orders?” He glared at his son, who flinched at his father’s anger like a scolded teen. “You were supposed to draw her in and finish this, but no, you had to screw that up too?”
Edward had spoken to his father a few times while holed up in his mansion, but this subject had never come up. No doubt the old man had waited until now in order to embarrass him in front of the others.
“It wasn’t anything I did.” He tried to remain calm, but it came out as a half shout. “We all agreed on the plan, but Driscoll saw through it. I brought in someone who knows her, Carl Huff, and he correctly guessed that she’d abandoned the surveillance of Gray Rock. I have no idea what spooked her, but Huff told us where to look and we found the remains of her setup.”
“So where does this expert think she is now?”
“Gone,” Edward said. “Probably out of the country by now, but unless she’s in North Korea, there’s nowhere to hide.”
“She can still do damage from the other side of the world,” his father said. “That is, if she’s even left. She doesn’t strike me as the quitting type.”
“She’s gone,” Edward insisted. “If she tries to revive the story, we’ll kill it again.”
He looked at Alexander Mumford, who nodded in agreement.
Henry Langton slapped the desk with more force than any of them could have imagined. “In the last two weeks I’ve heard could, should, can, and will—yet she’s still out there! This started as a simple hit on Rees Colback and now we’re looking for at least five people—who are looking for you! At least tell me you’ve identified the two men she recruited.”
All heads bowed, each person suddenly engrossed by the table’s highly polished surface.
“That’s just great. We’ve got access to every security service database in the world but we can’t put names to these guys?”
“Willard Eckman, West’s replacement and the man in charge of pursuing them, only got a brief glimpse of one of them. We have CCTV footage too, but all they could determine was that one was bigger than the other.”
“Brilliant! Just fucking brilliant! Instruct all law enforcement agencies to be on the lookout for two men who aren’t the same height! We’ll have them in no time!”
Henry launched into a coughing fit as he slumped into his chair. He was purple in the face from his exertions, and a casual observer might have expected him to keel over at any moment, but Edward had seen many such outbursts in the past. That didn’t make them any more welcome. Experience told him to remain silent and let his father get it out of his system, and the others in the room clearly had the same idea. No one spoke until Henry Langton broke the silence.
“We’ve tried subtlety and it didn’t work. Colback and Naser have sisters, correct?”
“That’s right,” Edward confirmed. “We’ve got people watching them in case they try to get in touch.”
“The time for watching is over. Use them to smoke out Driscoll and her friends.”
“How?” Edward asked. “We can’t exactly call Colback and tell him we have his sister.”
“I’m not asking you to think. Or even try. I’m telling you what to do. Just follow my instructions. To the letter. You understand?”
Edward hated being spoken to like a child, especially in front of the other ESO members, but until he could replace his father, he’d have to put up with it.
It took Henry Langton a few minutes to spell out his plan. Based on the level of detail, Edward was sure he’d been working on it for some time—it wasn’t the kind of idea that just popped into someone’s head, not even his father’s. It certainly wasn’t the kind of thing that could be discussed over the phone, which was why he’d waited until now to share it.
“That’s a lot of collateral damage,” Mumford noted.
“More die when we instigate a regime change,” Langton replied. “A lot more.”
“But we’ve never done anything like this on home soil,” Edward pointed out.
“There’s a first time for everything.” Langton’s tone declared the matter settled. “You have your orders.”
Langton picked up his briefcase and coat and walked to the door. With his hand poised on the handle, he turned and fixed his gaze on Edward.
“Don’t fuck this up.”
CHAPTER 39
“That’s the guy I saw at Gray Rock right before we cleared out.”
Eva looked from the screen to Sonny. “Are you sure?”
“Positive. I got some photos.”
“I take it you know him,” Smart said.
“I did,” Eva admitted. “A long time ago.”
Eva had thought she’d seen the last of Carl Huff, but fate obviously had other ideas.
She watched the video once more, seeing him emerge from the limo after Edward Langton and look around confidently. A decade might have passed, but he looked no different than he had during training. His hair was a little neater, if the shaky video could be trusted, and time had been kind to him.
“His name’s Carl Huff. At least, that’s the name he adopted when he joined the CIA. We were . . . involved for a while.”
“Looks like he went over to the dark side,” Sonny said.
“We were always on the dark side, we just didn’t know it. When we signed up, we were sold a dream. America’s invisible protectors, keeping the country safe from enemies foreign and domestic. Certain peop
le couldn’t be taken to court for fear of exposing secrets vital to national security. It was our job to make those problems go away.”
“Only it wasn’t America’s problems you were eliminating, it was Henry Langton’s.”
“It’s obvious once you know the full story,” Eva admitted.
An uneasy silence fell over the room. She’d told Sonny and Len about her involvement in the death of Adrian Holmes, and she was glad they didn’t bring it up now.
“Does it change things, Huff being around?”
“He thinks like me, so he’ll be able to anticipate my moves. That’s going to make planning tricky.”
“More so for him,” Smart said. “It’s clear they want to draw you in, though Huff knows you won’t take the obvious options. But—and it’s a huge hairy but—he’ll have to plan for the obvious too. He has to cover all bases while still giving you a window of opportunity.”
Eva thought about Smart’s statement. “That’s only true if he knows that I know he’s on their side.”
“He knows,” Sonny said, and went to get the camera. He hit a few commands, then scrolled through the images in the Canon’s memory.
“Here,” he said, handing it to Eva. “He’s looking straight at the camera. He’s even smiling.”
Eva studied the photograph. It did indeed look like Huff was posing for the snap.
“It’s like he knew exactly where we would be,” Sonny added.
“And given all the possible locations for an OP, that makes him as good as you suggested,” Smart told Eva. “He’s confident you know he’s on the case, so how do we play it?”
“Good question.”
How indeed.
No matter how audacious her plan, Huff would have contemplated and covered it.
“We might still have the advantage,” she said. “He’s expecting us to try to get to Edward Langton. He might even see Henry Langton as a possible target and have him covered too, but there are more than two people in the ESO. Let’s stick to the plan and find the weak link.”
“And Carl Huff?”
“His time will come.”
CHAPTER 40
Sonny Baines kicked open the lid of the cooler and leaned in to get a bottle of water. The food he’d brought with him the previous day was gone, the last sandwich polished off for breakfast at five in the morning. For the next few hours, he’d be reduced to a liquid diet. He looked at his watch: 177 more minutes until Len was due to relieve him at midday.
A pigeon startled him as it flapped noisily onto the ledge outside the open window, and he resisted the urge to shoo it away. It wasn’t interfering with his view of the entrance to the Calico Club, six stories down and ninety yards to his left on the opposite side of the street.
The bird viewed Sonny from a variety of angles, and with no threat detected, began to peck at unseen morsels. Sonny watched it for a few moments, until movement outside the Calico caught his eye. The fifth limousine of the morning pulled into the no-parking zone in front of the huge red awning. Sonny put his eye to the tripod-mounted camera and snapped off a series of shots as the driver opened the rear door for the passenger.
Sonny couldn’t tell if it was Henry Langton, but it was the closest match they’d had over the last three days. He was the right stature, but the fedora prevented Sonny from catching his face. He’d have a better view when the subject left the building, and then he could compare the man’s face to the photograph he had on his phone.
Sonny desperately wanted it to be Henry Langton. His son Edward had arrived twenty minutes earlier, accompanied by Carl Huff, so it made sense for the other members of the ESO to turn up too. While it was nice to be earning good money for sitting in a rented office taking photos, Sonny wanted to see some action.
He’d said the same to Len Smart on the last handover, but his longtime friend had begged to differ. Smart could hold his own against the best, even though he was no longer in his prime. The few extra inches around his waist meant he wouldn’t be beating endurance records any time soon, but his responses were still razor-sharp. The pair regularly practiced at Minotaur’s training facility and were equally skilled in close-quarters combat. The main change in Len was that he’d mellowed over the years. While Sonny never felt more alive than when he had a weapon in his hands, Smart’s idea of a good time was a glass of red wine and a book.
In the end, it took an hour before the man in the fedora reappeared. Sonny silently urged him to look up and show his face.
His wish was granted.
The target glanced up at the heavens as rain began to bounce off the sidewalk, and Sonny got a dozen decent shots before he disappeared from view, safely ensconced in the limo.
It was Henry Langton, no doubt about it. And if the head of the ESO was here, then the other members would probably still be inside. Langton was the first person to leave the club; the others would probably soon follow.
A month earlier, if anyone had tried to convince him that the ESO existed, he’d have told them to take a happy pill and have a nice lie down in a padded room. The days he’d spent with Eva Driscoll had changed that.
It wasn’t so much the stories she’d told, but the fact that she’d done their bidding. She hadn’t gone into detail about the individual hits, but they fitted neatly into the bigger picture she’d painted.
It was sobering to think he was going up against such powerful people. They controlled the government, security services, police, courts, and everyone in between. Still, there was a certain satisfaction in knowing he’d do his bit to bring them down.
Sonny had always been a soldier. He’d joined the Junior Leaders at fifteen and moved to the regulars a couple of years later. Four years on, he’d passed the grueling SAS selection course and had been straining at the leash to see his first action. He’d been prepared to put his life on the line to protect his country, but now he realized it hadn’t been the UK’s interests he’d been fighting for. The wars in the Middle East—dating back to the first Gulf War in 1990—had been fought for the benefit of a handful of people, all of them represented in the figure of Henry Langton.
Millions of people had died or been displaced in similar war zones around the world so the ESO’s interests would be protected. Gadhafi was ousted for daring to move away from the petrodollar in favor of a gold-backed dinar. Assad’s decision to block plans to build a gas pipeline through Syria—a move that would have threatened Russia’s domination when it came to supplying Europe’s needs—resulted in yet another long-running war aimed at installing a new leader whose ideals were more aligned with those of the ESO. All those years in uniform, thinking the people he killed were a threat to freedom and democracy, while he was simply furthering Henry Langton’s agenda . . .
Sonny was still dwelling on his role in a few such disasters when Len Smart turned up at midday to relieve him.
“Anything to report?” Smart asked as he placed a bag of groceries on the table.
Sonny caught a whiff of hot pastrami and his stomach reminded him that he hadn’t eaten in seven hours.
“Plenty,” Sonny said, reading from his notes. “Henry Langton finally showed, and so did his son. All in all, seven people arrived before Henry, and four of them, including Edward, left shortly after him. I’ve downloaded the images to my phone and I’ll send them to Eva on the way back to the RV.”
“Sounds like we’ve got the people we’re looking for. I’ll keep watching just in case we missed anyone.”
They chatted for a few minutes, until the smell of food forced Sonny to go in search of some sustenance of his own.
“I’ll message you if Eva wants you to come in,” Sonny said.
“No worries. I’m not going anywhere.”
CHAPTER 41
“This isn’t good.”
Eva was staring at the television screen. The news all morning had been dominated by the explosion at an elementary school in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The anchor was recapping what was already known: the bomb had gone off a
t 10:14 in the morning, and twenty-four children were still unaccounted for.
Images from the scene showed smoke still pouring from a two-story building as firefighters from half a dozen fire trucks dealt with the aftermath. At least ten police cruisers were on the scene, as well as a handful of people with “FBI” emblazoned on the back of their jackets.
“Those poor kids,” Farooq said for the fifth time in the past hour.
Eva felt for them too, but what concerned her the most was the speed with which the news networks had gotten hold of CCTV coverage. It was normally hours after an attack that such information was released, but the grainy image of the woman walking across a parking lot with a large canvas bag had hit the screen within eighty minutes.
The moment it played, she knew it was her.
“It’s Lee Harvey Oswald all over again,” she said.
Now, almost two hours after the explosion, she was waiting for the others to finish packing their gear. It wouldn’t be long before her face appeared on every news channel, and she wanted to be clear of the apartment before that happened.
Fortunately, she’d spent the last two days working on her appearance. Her black hair was now bleached blonde, and the makeup she’d applied in the last hour had darkened her complexion.
There wasn’t much the boys could do to alter their looks. Both had grown beards over the last couple of weeks and that would have to do.
“All set,” Colback said.
Farooq nodded that he was ready too. His shoulder injury had healed nicely after they’d cleaned it out and closed the wound with surgical glue, but he would carry the scar for the rest of his life.
There was little point in wiping the place down. If any of the neighbors recognized her picture, getting rid of any prints would serve no real purpose.
Eva opened the apartment door and looked up and down the second-floor landing. There was no one in sight, so she ushered the other two out and closed the door quietly behind her. They made it to the car without coming across anyone else from the complex, and Eva opted to drive.
“We should have joined up with Len and Sonny sooner,” Farooq said.
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