The Agent (An Isabella Rose Thriller Book 3)

by Mark Dawson

  Coogan unfolded the paper. It was a copy of a bank transfer. The names of the remitting and receiving companies were unknown to him, although the reference – TRACTOR NAIL – was the kind of meaningless designation that he was used to seeing when the Pentagon wished to play hide-and-seek with its budgets.

  The amount that had been transferred was large: just short of a billion dollars.

  Coogan was still looking down at the paper when his cell phone rang in his pocket.

  ‘That’ll be Senator Lennox.’

  Coogan glanced at the screen.

  ‘Better take it.’

  Coogan accepted the call and put the phone to his ear.

  ‘Jack?’ the voice on the other end of the line said.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘It’s Jim Lennox. How you doing?’

  Coogan found that his mouth was dry. ‘I’m fine,’ he managed to say. ‘It’s late. What’s going on?’

  ‘Look, I don’t want to drop this on you like this, but I’ve got some news I wanted to get to you before you hear it from anyone else. I’m stepping down from the subcommittee. Between you and me, I had a heart attack a month ago. Not a big one, but enough for me to decide that I want to take things a little easier from now on. That means there’s going to be a vacancy in the chair, and I can’t think of anyone better qualified to take it up than you.’

  The senator didn’t like Coogan. He’d always made that very plain.

  ‘I’ve recommended you to the party,’ Lennox went on. ‘They agreed. I’m going to make the announcement tomorrow. I’d like you to be on the Hill so we can make the announcement together. Sound good?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I can do that.’

  ‘Great. Swing by my office at midday. We’ll do it then.’

  The call ended.

  Coogan looked across at the man in the cap.

  ‘Believe me now?’ the man said.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’

  He waved the question away. ‘Your first act as chair of the subcommittee will be to establish an emergency oversight hearing into the work that Daedalus is doing. We’re going to provide you with evidence that will demonstrate that elements within the US government are responsible for providing significant funding to private projects of absolutely fundamental importance to what it means to be human.’

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘They’re building monsters, Senator. And we are going to stop them.’

  PART TWO:

  Skopje

  Chapter Three

  Vivian Bloom had taken a room in the Marriott at Plostad Makedonija in the middle of Skopje.

  Bloom had been to Macedonia before, back when he was based at Moscow Station. He had visited the city under the pretext of negotiating the import of agricultural equipment. Western businesses had not been as prevalent in the city in the eighties as they were now, and he remembered that the building that now housed the hotel had once been a dowdy department store that had been notable only for the paucity of goods on its shelves. Times changed.

  It was nine in the morning. He looked down from the window of his room on the fifth floor. Rain poured down from iron skies, and the men and women on the pavements of the main square hurried about their business, sheltering beneath umbrellas. The Old Bazaar was within easy walking distance and, just visible through the sheets of rain, the bulk of Mount Vodno loomed over everything. Bloom had hiked to the top of the mountain the last time he had visited. He was in his forties then, fit and hale, but he was older now and clambering up the path to the top was something he knew would be beyond him.

  It had been a difficult couple of days. Bloom had been in New York to attend a debriefing on the Italian operation.

  The senior participants in the project wanted answers to explain why events had not proceeded as they had intended. ‘Help me understand why this went so badly wrong,’ was Jamie King’s typically passive-aggressive instruction at the end of the conference. There had been impatient references to loose ends and balls that had been dropped. Bloom had requested the assignment of a Daedalus asset to eliminate the surviving members of Group Fifteen, but that request had been parked while they worked out what had gone wrong in Montepulciano.

  This all meant that they had lost a rogue agent and a fifteen-year-old girl somewhere in the Indian subcontinent and that he had a handful of dangerous men and women in a stood-down programme who might start to ask difficult questions.

  So, yes. It had been a very difficult few days.

  He had flown from JFK into Alexander the Great Airport the previous afternoon and had been picked up there and driven to the hotel in a bulletproof SUV by a driver who made no attempt to hide the pistol that was secured in a shoulder holster beneath his jacket. Bloom had looked out of the window as they had made their way into the city and, to his eye, not much had changed. The government’s recent construction spree had provided new museums and other municipal buildings, but no amount of extravagant fountains and statuary could hide the poverty that was always just below the surface.

  The staff spoke excellent English and the room, utilitarian and businesslike, could have been found in a similar chain in any other city of the world. The familiarity should have alleviated some of Bloom’s trepidation, but, as he stared at the cars sluicing through the surface water on the road below, he found that it did not.

  He was nervous.

  He had slept badly and had had just a cup of black coffee for breakfast.

  He looked at his watch.

  Nine fifteen. He was due to be collected at nine thirty.

  He went and sat on the edge of the bed and switched on the television. The hotel subscribed to CNN, the BBC and Sky News, and Bloom flicked between them. The same story was being covered on all three channels: the shooting down of the British Airways passenger jet bound for New York as it took off from Heathrow. Sources within the investigation were reporting that it was now confirmed that the incident was being treated as Islamic terrorism, a brutal coda to the attack on Westminster that had left hundreds of dead and wounded.

  The anchors spoke over the footage that had initially been uploaded to YouTube by a member of the public who had unwittingly recorded the moment of the attack on the dashcam of his car. The surface-to-air missile could be seen streaking from the ground on a straight diagonal that intercepted the jet as it climbed from the runway. The explosion of the missile and the breaking up of the jet were all recorded; subsequent footage from Heathrow’s observation lounge showed the separate pieces of the jet plummeting to the ground.

  Bloom watched the footage with dispassion. He had seen it many times before – it was constantly being replayed, after all – and it had quickly lost any shock value that it might once have held. He regretted that it, and the Westminster assault, had been necessary, but he was certain that they were.

  Bloom had become convinced. Something was required to disturb the public’s numbing complacency so that they became aware of the threat that they faced. The failed British military campaign in Iraq was now seen as a terrible misadventure, a shameful moment in history that had wrecked the reputations of the politicians involved. It had created a parliament of craven isolationists and made it almost impossible to entertain a situation where they might sanction a similar expedition. Pacifists decried those who were calling for further intervention in Middle Eastern affairs as murdering crusaders, even as ISIS rampaged across borders and committed genocide in the name of Islam. Thousands marched on the streets in opposition to war, even as the death cult threatened to export its poisonous dogma to Europe and beyond. Bloom was privy to the classified governmental reports that set out the threat in apocalyptic terms.

  Chemical weapons released in subways, killing thousands.

  Dirty bombs spreading radiation across whole cities, rendering them uninhabitable for decades.

  Bloom did not enjoy the success of the operations he had overseen. He regretted the men and women who had lost their lives. But they
had been sacrificed for the greater good. Far better a few hundred deaths than the tens of thousands that would be lost if they did nothing.

  His conscience was clear. The motives of some of the other players in their illicit coalition were less pure, but he had no trouble sleeping at night.

  He collected the jacket of his tweed suit and his overcoat and, folding both garments over the crook of his elbow, he left the room and made his way to the elevator.

  Chapter Four

  Bloom waited in the reception. The rain hammered down, rivulets churning along the gutters and overflowing the drains so that sheets of water spread out across the street.

  A car pulled up outside and flashed its lights. It was the same SUV that had delivered him to the hotel and, as Bloom hurried through the downpour beneath the umbrella that the doorman had offered him, he saw that the driver who opened the door for him was the same man as before. He was a blandly anonymous American who, Bloom suspected, most likely worked for Manage Risk, the private military contractor that provided the local security for the project.

  There was another man waiting for him in the back of the car.

  Jamie King.

  ‘Morning, Vivian.’

  ‘Good morning, Jamie.’

  King was the CEO of Manage Risk, the largest private military contractor in the world. He was an ex-military man, still wore his hair close to his scalp, and he kept himself in good shape. He had the leonine cocksureness of a man worth several billion dollars.

  ‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ Bloom said.

  ‘Last-minute change of plan. I want to know what really happened in Italy.’

  ‘I’m more than a little curious about that,’ Bloom said.

  The botched operation to eliminate Pope and Isabella in Italy had been on Bloom’s mind since he had received the report. Pope and the girl had served their purpose. They had successfully planted the evidence that implicated Salim al-Khawari in the London bombings, allowing them to draw a line of responsibility that led back to ISIS. But al-Khawari had kidnapped the girl before the Americans could take him and had fled with her and his family to Lebanon. They had been forced to land in Turkey and then had been abducted themselves by an ISIS snatch squad. The family and the girl had been taken to Syria. Pope had found them again and that, in turn, allowed for Bloom and his co-conspirators to conclude the job. That was the end of Pope’s usefulness. He should never have been allowed to leave the country. That he and Isabella had escaped was of concern to Bloom. They knew too much.

  ‘What about Pope?’ he asked. ‘Any news?’

  ‘Like we said, we lost them when they got to Mumbai.’

  ‘It’s a mess.’

  ‘I know, Vivian. It’s a fuck-up. A complete fuck-up. And it’s concerning. But we’ll get to the bottom of it. On the plus side, we have your man’s family. He’s not going to do anything as long as they’re in play.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  King waved his hand. ‘Riga. An old CIA black site. Place like this. We’ll keep them on the move. There’s no need to worry. And we’ll flush him and the girl out. It’s been almost three weeks. They can’t stay hidden forever.’ He shone Bloom one of his dazzlingly white pop star grins. ‘Now, then. You said that you were concerned. You were worried with how the short-term projections were looking. You want to tell me why?’

  ‘My intelligence is suggesting that the prime minister’s appeal for assistance won’t be answered. There was a CNN poll today. Did you see it? Seventy per cent of Americans are against getting involved.’

  ‘None of this is a surprise. Once bitten, twice shy. No rational person would support sending troops back into that hellhole. It took long enough to get them out the first time. But we anticipated that, Vivian. Like I said in New York, we have a contingency.’

  The subject had come up at the conference. ‘You said it would be tomorrow.’

  ‘We’re pushing it back.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Timing’s not right.’

  Bloom didn’t reply and looked glumly out of the window as they raced into the countryside on the eastern fringe of the city. The operation should have taken place today – that was what he had been promised – and now it was being delayed. He had thought that they had a grip on the narrative, but with the loose ends left in Syria and now this, it seemed that their grip was slackening. Without a corresponding American operation, he risked being left out in the cold.

  ‘Cheer up, you miserable bastard,’ King said. He took out a tablet and scrolled through his emails. ‘You mentioned polls,’ he said, passing the tablet to Bloom. ‘You seen this one?’

  Bloom looked down at the tablet. The document being displayed was the top-line summary of polling that had been carried out in London over the course of the last twenty-four hours. The conclusions were heartening. Public opinion was now reported to be heavily in favour of direct military action in Syria, Iraq and Libya. Non-intervention was no longer seen as defensible. The events of the last few weeks had made it impossible to argue for pacifism.

  ‘This is good,’ Bloom said. ‘But we need the same thing to be happening in Washington.’

  ‘Will you please take it easy? It’s coming. We just got to do it right. It’s not something you can rush. And the Islamists aren’t going anywhere.’

  Bloom thought of what was happening back home. He knew that pressure was being exerted on ministers for a debate to now take place. A vote would be taken to decide whether intervention should be scaled up from the present tokenist gestures that had never been satisfactory to him and the others within the project.

  ‘We’ve got a thirty-minute drive,’ King said. ‘Read it all. It’ll cheer you up.’

  Chapter Five

  The Daedalus campus comprised a series of buildings, low slung and sleekly futuristic, surrounded by a neatly planted line of trees that obscured the electrified fence that was just within their curtilage. There were armed Manage Risk guards within the grounds, and the signs that had been fastened to the mesh warned that this was private property and that lethal force was authorised to be used against intruders.

  There was nothing to suggest the provenance of the facility; it had been provided to the CIA by Ion Eliade, the former President of Romania, as a goodwill gesture intended to smooth the way to the country’s eventual accession to NATO. There were sister sites in the Ukraine, Latvia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. Black projects like Prometheus required the discretion and latitude that could be provided in countries that were outside US territory and legal jurisdiction.

  The driver stopped the SUV at the guardhouse while their credentials were checked. Bloom found himself staring ahead at the building behind the fence, at its windows with their smoked glass that reflected the bleak landscape and the gunmetal grey clouds.

  The driver parked, stepped out and opened the doors. Bloom and King went through into the reception area. It was sleek, with a metallic desk that sat before a wall of smoked glass. They sat in the plush leather chairs that had been arranged on the other side of the room.

  ‘Relax, old man,’ King said. ‘You’re going to enjoy this. It’s going to blow you away, I guarantee it.’

  They did not have to wait long. A door in the glass wall opened, sliding aside with a gentle hiss to reveal a bright white room beyond. The man who emerged was wearing a white laboratory coat. He was tall and slender, with a shaven head and glasses that would not have looked out of place in the office of a San Francisco tech start-up. His name was Professor Nikita Valeryevich Ivanosky, and he was one of the senior staff responsible for Prometheus.

  He went straight to King. ‘Good morning,’ he said.

  ‘Nikita. You remember Vivian Bloom from the conference?’

  ‘Of course. I’m pleased you could come, Mr Bloom. Welcome to Macedonia.’ The professor’s voice bore the subtle Russian accent that had not been rubbed away by the years that he had spent in the United States.

  Bloom had studied the man’s résum�
� on the flight. He had graduated from St Petersburg State Pavlov Medical University in 1968 and had then been a resident doctor at the maternity hospital in Norilsk. He had returned to his alma mater, where he became Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology before taking up a similar position at the University Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He’d made contact with the US embassy and claimed asylum after a year in Africa; Bloom had seen his name and those of his family on the passenger list of the CIA flight that had taken him to Mozambique and then on to the United States.

  His history became a little more opaque after his defection. Everything was confidential, but the documents that had been provided to Bloom touched on the high points. Ivanosky had been responsible for the classified research that had cloned a sheep from an adult somatic cell. He had gone further, abandoning somatic cell nuclear transfer in favour of a new technique that he had pioneered that allowed him to derive pluripotent stem cells from differentiated adult skin cells, avoiding the need to generate embryonic stem cells. This had accelerated the speed of his research into genome editing and the genetic modification of human embryos and other tissues. That was his focus now.

  The professor’s pleasantries were perfunctory and he quickly disregarded Bloom in favour of King. He had a keen understanding of who was responsible for the funding of his work.

  ‘How was your flight?’ he asked.

  ‘Awful,’ King said.

  ‘And your hotel?’

  ‘Distinctly average. Still haven’t found one here that I like.’

  ‘Macedonia would like you to think that it is a civilised country, but it is a backwater. It is not the most comfortable of venues for our work, but there is a certain amount of discretion that can be bought. It is worth the inconvenience.’