Shadow Conflict

by Shadow Conflict (epub)

  Something told him that Anya’s offer had been a suggestion to take his leave. He wondered what Anya had in mind, but knew that any attempt at eavesdropping would be unwise.

  In truth, he could do with getting out of the apartment and stretching his legs, not to mention grabbing some dinner. The apartment’s cupboards were as bare as its decor, and he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, which his stomach had been reminding him of increasingly loudly.

  ‘Fine,’ he conceded, laying down the taser and pulling on his jacket. ‘I could use a walk anyway.’

  Anya waited until he’d left before glancing at Yasin, who seemed to have lost some of his usual energy and was trying to stifle a yawn. ‘Yasin, take yourself to bed and get some rest,’ she commanded. ‘You look like you could use it.’

  Like any kid told to go to bed, the protests started right away. ‘But I—’

  Anya silenced him with a raised hand. ‘Remember our agreement.’

  He nodded sulkily and ventured deeper into the apartment, leaving the two women alone in the living room.

  Lauren watched her captor settle herself into the seat Alex had recently vacated, feeling an odd longing for his return. At least his company was more agreeable than Anya’s.

  ‘Well, here we are, alone at last,’ Lauren remarked, using sarcasm to hide her unease. ‘Might as well come out with it.’

  ‘With what, exactly?’

  Lauren tilted her head, eyeing the older woman with disapproval. ‘We both know you wanted to speak to me alone. So, are you going to get on with it or are you just going to keep staring at me? I hope not, because to be honest it’s kind of creepy.’

  She was expecting a reaction. Anya, though, seemed preoccupied and unsure of herself.

  ‘I was thinking about what you said earlier,’ she began at last. ‘What your father told you about me.’

  It was all Lauren could do not to roll her eyes. ‘Let me guess. This is the part where you tell me it’s all bullshit, that my dad’s a monster who took advantage of you? You’re going to list all his mistakes, every fault, every dirty little secret, so you can prove what a bastard he is.’

  She couldn’t have imagined what she was about to hear next.

  ‘No, I’m going to do none of that,’ Anya said in forlorn acceptance. ‘Because your father spoke the truth.’

  * * *

  Peshawar, Pakistan – 1 October 1988

  Cain said and did nothing for the next few seconds. He kept his weapon trained on the unexpected arrival, trying to decide whether this was some kind of ploy. Qalat simply stood there, waiting patiently.

  ‘Who sent you here?’ he demanded, taking a step closer so that the Colt .45’s barrel was less than a foot from Qalat’s face. ‘Carpenter? Simmons?’

  Qalat shook his head slowly, unconcerned by the weapon. ‘No one sent me. No one from the CIA knows I am here,’ he said. ‘I came of my own free will.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To stop you making the biggest mistake of your life.’ Again he waved the folder in front of him. ‘You can choose to believe me, or not. It makes little difference to me. But I’d advise you to at least hear me out.’

  Making his decision, Cain gripped Qalat by the arm and pulled him roughly inside, closing and barring the door behind him. Straightening his rumpled shirt sleeve, Qalat glanced at the satellite comms unit, the maps, the photographs spread over the table.

  ‘They are getting close now, yes?’ he remarked, making it plain he understood exactly what was going on. ‘They could be in position any time.’

  ‘And what would you know about that?’

  ‘I know they are walking into a trap.’

  An icy dagger of fear suddenly twisted in Cain’s stomach. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The young woman you are risking everything to rescue is not what she appears.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Cain snapped back.

  At this, Qalat laid the folder on the table, then stepped away, making way for Cain. ‘Please, take a look. You will find your answers in here, though you may not like them.’

  Cain took a step towards it, then another. With a leaden arm he reached out and flipped the folder open.

  * * *

  ‘He trusted me, he gave me a chance, showed faith in me when no one else would. And I betrayed his trust.’ Anya turned her head slowly. ‘I lied to him, Lauren. I lied about who I was, why I was there. And that lie almost destroyed us both.’

  * * *

  Cain’s eyes darted across the pages, drinking in every terrible word, feeling his faith and trust crumble with every passing second. The documents were extracts from a KGB personnel dossier, written in Russian.

  He almost wished he hadn’t become fluent in the language, because the dossier dealt with only one subject – Anya, or at least the woman he’d come to know as Anya.

  In the top right corner was a photograph, degraded slightly from having been photocopied but still clearly recognizable. She smiled back as if taunting him. The same full lips, high cheekbones and straight nose, the same vivid, intense eyes. Beautiful and terrible all at once.

  A fantasy made real. A fantasy that he’d become caught up in.

  As he forced himself to read, the true story of her life began to take shape. Recruited aged 18 from a young offenders’ institution in Lithuania, her KGB handler’s name was Viktor Surovsky. Studied advanced infiltration and intelligence gathering skills between 1983–84, rated highly proficient in all subjects, particularly at reading attempted deception. Deemed an ideal candidate due to age, gender and physical attractiveness. Approved for operational deployment, 1985.

  Cain closed his eyes as the full magnitude of the dossier settled on him. Anya – his Anya – was a Soviet spy. She had been working against them the whole time. Working against him.

  ‘It does not make for easy reading, does it?’ Qalat remarked. ‘Knowing that everything you built your life around is a lie.’

  Cain whirled around, grabbed Qalat by the shirt and shoved him backwards until he slammed into the door. That was enough to shatter his air of patronising, infuriating self-control.

  ‘It’s not true!’ Cain shouted. ‘You forged this document to turn me against her, you son of a bitch!’

  ‘It is no lie!’ Qalat said. ‘One of my sources in Soviet intelligence recovered it for us after we turned him in Afghanistan. It is the truth, Marcus! The ambush wasn’t a search and destroy mission; it was a recovery operation! It gave Anya a pretext to leave the group without anyone realizing she’d been compromised.’

  Cain released him, taking a step back as if struck.

  ‘Do you not think it strange that she alone volunteered to stay behind, and she alone survived to be captured?’

  Cain didn’t say anything. Thoughts and memories were cascading through his head faster than he could process them.

  ‘She’s fought for us, killed for us, helped us win this war,’ he said, struggling to understand what he was hearing. ‘What spy would do that?’

  ‘Acceptable losses,’ Qalat said coldly. ‘More than worth it for the greater prize – proof that America has been fighting a covert war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Detailed information on the CIA’s plans, key personnel, ongoing operations in this part of the world… everything the KGB needs to cripple you for decades. It all rests with Anya.’

  * * *

  ‘Your father saw everything,’ Anya went on with the same look of bitter regret. ‘All the secrets I had been trying to keep from him since I arrived in America. My recruitment into the KGB, my mission to infiltrate the CIA, my handler’s name. All of it.

  ‘I should have known it would happen,’ she went on. ‘But I was young, and stupid, and I thought I was smart and fast enough to outrun my past.’ She shook her head. ‘I was wrong.’

  * * *

  It was at this moment that the satellite comms unit on the table crackled into life, as a transmission filtered down from the orbiting sat relay.

&
nbsp; ‘Come in, Vector. Repeat, come in.’ Even through the garbled mush of static, Cain recognized the voice as Romek’s. ‘Jurate is in position. All elements ready to move. We’re awaiting go command.’

  Cain stared at the radio, not moving, torn between it and the man who had just brought such devastating news with him.

  ‘If you send them in, you will be sending those men to their deaths,’ Qalat said, taking a step towards him.

  ‘Get the fuck away from me!’ Cain barked, drawing the gun on him once more.

  Qalat, always playing the odds, was smart enough not to push him. ‘Your team is walking into a trap, Marcus. The Soviets will be ready for them, and they will never find Anya.’

  ‘Repeat, Jurate is awaiting go command, Vector,’ Romek pressed, his voice more urgent. ‘Acknowledge this message.’

  Cain ached to do it. Every fibre was telling him to order the strike anyway, to disregard Qalat’s warnings, throw aside his doubts and trust the young woman he remembered. Because the Anya he knew would do the same for him.

  The Anya he knew.

  But had he ever truly known her?

  ‘You may be willing to sacrifice your own life, Marcus Cain, but are you willing to sacrifice theirs?’ Qalat asked. ‘How many more people will you give up for a woman who never even existed?’

  ‘Vector, we are exposed here. We must attack now,’ Romek warned him over the radio. ‘If we don’t hear from you now, we will deploy ourselves.’

  Cain saw it happening. He saw himself stepping towards the table, saw himself reaching for the radio unit, saw himself raise it to his mouth.

  But it was a different man who spoke the next command.

  ‘This is Vector. Fall back. Abort mission right away.’

  Seconds of incredulous silence followed.

  ‘Say again your last, Vector?’

  ‘I repeat, abort the mission,’ he said. ‘Acknowledge abort code Giltine now.’

  ‘We are in position,’ Romek repeated, speaking slowly and clearly as he struggled to hold his emotions in check. ‘We can do this, Vector. Why are we aborting?’

  Cain felt hot tears stinging his eyes. ‘It’s a trick. Maras is not on site. I say again, Maras is not on site. We blew it, the mission’s over.’ He steadied himself. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Not as sorry as we are, Vector,’ Romek replied, voice darkened with anger. ‘Abort code acknowledged. Jurate is falling back.’

  Cain dropped the radio unit and leaned against the table as the full weight of betrayal and grief settled on him.

  * * *

  ‘I spent two months in that Soviet prison,’ Anya reflected. ‘Two months. I was a very different person when I managed to escape.’

  Lauren frowned, confused by what she’d just heard. ‘Escape? But you said—’

  ‘Pakistani intelligence were right that I came to America as a KGB agent,’ Anya explained. ‘But they drew all the wrong conclusions about me. What they didn’t know – what none of them could know at the time – was that I had turned against my Russian handlers long before I was sent to Afghanistan. From the moment the KGB recruited me, I did nothing but play along, tell them what they wanted to hear, learn everything they had to teach me so that one day I could use those skills against them.’

  ‘Why?’ Lauren asked, fascinated by what she was hearing. It was the most Anya had ever spoken about herself, and the more she learned, the more caught up she became. It was obvious that even after all these years a fire still burned deeply in her.

  ‘They killed my parents,’ Anya said. ‘They had identified them as a threat to the State, and they did what they always do to such people – made them disappear. I was a loose end to be tied up, but apparently they thought they could use me first.

  ‘That was why I volunteered to go to Afghanistan with Task Force Black. I wanted to fight back, take revenge, make them suffer as I had. I was young, and stupid, and angry. And I thought my old handler Viktor would never catch up with me.’ She shrugged. ‘I was wrong. That ambush was done for one reason – so Viktor could get his hands on me. He was willing to sacrifice anything to make me suffer, and he did make me suffer, Lauren. More even than I could endure.’

  Lauren tried to hide a shudder. Given the kind of woman Anya was, she could barely imagine the torments that must have been inflicted.

  ‘I don’t blame your father for what happened,’ Anya concluded. ‘Not really. He did what he had to do, and in his place I might have done the same. But it didn’t make it any easier to accept at the time.’ Her expression was deep and abiding, that of someone who has spent a lifetime reflecting on what might have been. ‘Neither of us knew it, but that was both a beginning and an end. It was the end of what we once had, and the beginning of the path that led us here.’

  Lauren stared back at her, stunned into silence. Never could she have imagined the scale and tragedy of the events that had torn this woman apart from her father.

  ‘Why?’ she finally managed to say. ‘Why tell me this now?’

  ‘I am a killer, Lauren. I have killed more people than I can remember. Some deserved it, some didn’t. Some were just unlucky enough to get in my way. There was a time when I used to feel guilty about that, but now I feel nothing. That is who I am now, and I have made peace with it. But I wanted you to know that it wasn’t always like this. The things your father and I have done since that day, the choices we made… I wanted you to know where it began. We imagined a better future than the one we created. We imagined peace in our time.’ She almost laughed. ‘That was supposed to be our gift to the next generation. To people like you. But we failed.’ She shook her head, her final words coming out as barely a whisper. ‘The things we could have done together.’

  Silence descended on the room then.

  Anya rose slowly from her chair, looking suddenly weary and pained, as if the years sat more heavily on her.

  ‘Wait,’ Lauren implored, snapping out of her awed silence and jumping to her feet. ‘Don’t do this, Anya. Whatever you’re planning tomorrow, don’t go through with it. Taking revenge against my father, it’s not going to turn the clock back 20 years. Make this right.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Yes, you can,’ the young woman said, with desperate hope.

  Anya shook her head. ‘It’s too late for that. Too late for me.’

  ‘It’s never too late! If what you said is true, if…’ She bit her lip, struggling with what she was about to say. ‘If you and my father really did care about each other, then please stop this. Whatever you might think of him, he’s not an evil man, and… I know you’re not either. I know that now.’

  ‘You know nothing,’ Anya retorted, her voice strained and taut.

  ‘Either I’m wrong, and my dad’s the monster you’ve convinced yourself he is, or I’m right, and this war you’re fighting is all for nothing. Maybe you both made mistakes, but whatever happened between you two, let it go,’ she begged, putting her all into this final, impassioned effort. ‘You’ve wasted so much of your life regretting your past when you could have changed your future. You said you’re a killer, but you don’t have to be what they made you. Not any more. Don’t you understand? You can choose to be something else, something better. Isn’t that worth fighting for?’

  For the first time since she’d met her, Anya looked at Lauren not with contempt, not with simmering dislike or cold professionalism, but with fear. She backed away a step, staring as if she were a ghost risen up to haunt her.

  Lauren could tell her words were making an impact, that she was close to breaking through Anya’s layers of armour, finally reaching the person within. The proud, vulnerable, brilliant and flawed woman who had once dreamed of carving out a better future.

  Just a glimmer, a glimpse, and then that young woman was lost again. Despite everything, Lauren felt a great upwelling of sadness and pity for Anya.

  ‘Rest now,’ Anya said, her defences restored. ‘Tomorrow this will be over, and you can go on with your li
fe. I hope for your sake you make more of it than I did.’

  Lauren knew her chance had passed. That Anya was set on her course, and that nothing she could do would divert her.

  Part Four – Conflagration

  ‘Peace has its place, as does war. Mercy has its place, as do cruelty and revenge.’ – Meir Kahane

  Chapter 50

  It was a chilly spring morning in Berlin, with only light traffic on the roads and the early-morning joggers just visible through the fog.

  It was Anya’s favourite time, having risen early while others slept. A time to contemplate the day ahead, to focus on the challenges and dangers that stood in her path.

  The long journey that had brought them here was almost over. By the end of the day, she would either be reunited with Drake and what was left of his team, or they might all be dead. It all depended on whether she could make the exchange work.

  Kneeling on the damp, springy grass, she leaned forward until her face was almost touching the ground, and she could smell the rich loamy soil. Brushing her fingers lightly across damp stalks, she then drew them across her face, leaving drops of cold water on her skin.

  Sitting up with her eyes closed, she could feel the steady beat of her heart, the damp mist on her skin, the faintest breeze stirring her hair.

  When she opened her eyes, she became aware of a new presence nearby.

  ‘What is it, Alex?’ she asked.

  Alex was standing a short distance away, leaning against the trunk of a big oak tree with his arms folded. She had heard the rustle of his footsteps through last season’s fallen leaves, but hadn’t acknowledged him until she was finished with her ritual.

  ‘I didn’t want to disturb you,’ he said quietly. ‘I can leave if you like.’

  Anya shook her head. ‘I’m finished here.’