Dark Heart

by James Phelan

  •

  Harvey called Krycek.

  “I’m twenty minutes from landing,” Krycek said.

  “They’ve made contact with a CIA officer in Annapolis, and the Agency is responding.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “They have their protocols to follow.”

  “Which are?”

  “A tactical team from the Maryland PD is activated to be first responders. A CIA security detail will be not long behind them.”

  “Response time of the police?”

  “Soon. They’re already moving. Maybe ten minutes.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “We can’t stop them, so just keep yourself handy and get to Annapolis. If there’s an arrest, I want you to get there and pull rank.”

  •

  Hassan’s eyes darted back to Walker, and then, because either he saw them as an immediate threat, or because he really did sell out the joint-agency taskforce in Syria, he decided to react—Hassan had opened the door, seen them and gone through the motions of responding—all inside two long seconds.

  Hassan used his left hand to grip the edge of the door and started to push it closed. The way he moved, the way his body was pivoting across as though his right shoulder was moving backward, told Walker that his right hand was reaching for something on his right hip or behind his back to the right.

  Which told Walker: pistol.

  A 9-millimeter of some kind, probably a Beretta or Glock, since they were common and affordable. Walker hoped for the Beretta; it had a manual safety, and whether it was on Hassan’s hip—though it seemed unlikely he would carry a pistol in a visible holster in the family home—or behind his back, to draw and thumb down the safety and point and shoot would take around two seconds, if Hassan was good. Three seconds if he wasn’t. Then again, he may not have the pistol safetied, which would be crazy, not just because stuffing a loaded and cocked pistol down the back of your pants was stupid, but the guy had kids around the house. If it was a Glock, with its two-stage trigger safety system, then the time could be closer to one second from drawing to pulling three-point-five pounds of pressure to bear on the trigger and blasting through the door.

  So, Walker gave himself a second. Better to err on the side of caution when going up unarmed against a person drawing a firearm.

  There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who think that a second is a long time, and those who don’t. Walker was the former. He’d done a lot of things inside a second, and this situation called for that kind of reaction time. It was innate: you either had it or you didn’t. Pro baseball batters had it—they were able, in a split second, to see the ball out of the hand, make a calculated judgment on its trajectory and spin and curve, make a choice as to how to dispatch it, and react—with the goal of hitting the ball over the fence. Honing that kind of ability came down to training, something militaries handed out in spades so that their fighters could retain their lives while taking the lives of others.

  Ordinarily Walker’s instinct would have called for him to make two movements in this situation—one forward, hands and arms up toward the threat, and another backward, with a swift kick to push Muertos away—but that wasn’t going to happen today.

  He knew he wasn’t a hundred percent. He put himself at around ninety percent, overall. Less, if the action in question required the speed and power of his wounded leg. He now put that appendage at seventy-five percent capacity. So, in theory, he had only three-quarters of a second to raise and kick out with his wounded right leg, which would in turn catapult Muertos off the porch and down the stairs four feet below Hassan’s shooting angle. The impact of that was unknown—how would the pain involved alter his other actions, directed toward the threat? So, he was not going to make two movements, front and back.

  Just a frontal assault. A reaction at the threat, to neutralize it, all inside a second.

  He started with the hand on the door. Walker’s right hand gripped over Hassan’s fingers and squeezed. At the same time, his right leg took a step forward and up, onto the step that formed the threshold of the doorway. That was a half-second, and the remainder of the time was taken up with brute force and hand speed.

  Walker pushed the door, extending his right arm out as hard and fast as he could, basically a right-hand jab while squeezing Hassan’s hand around the edge of the door, Walker craning forward on his right leg. The door hit Hassan and pressed him hard against the hallway wall. There was a satisfactory cracking noise as the solid timber connected with Hassan’s face; the crunch of cartilage and bone and the eruption of blood from the nose. Hassan let out a noise that Walker would describe as a whelp.

  At the same time as the whelp came a clatter to the ground of a pistol. No round went off, and judging by the sound Walker figured it was probably a polymer-framed Glock with a round in the chamber but a multi-stage safety trigger.

  “Coming?” Walker asked Muertos as he bundled up Hassan and pinned him face-first against the hallway wall. Muertos stepped inside the house, hesitant. Walker picked up the pistol—a Glock 17—and tucked it into the waistband at the back of his jeans. “Lock the door after you.”

  15

  Walker had Hassan seated on a sofa in the front room of the house. Hassan’s Glock was all the persuasion he needed to use. He’d checked the bullets in the clip and saw that it was loaded with Hydra-Shok rounds. Illegal in the military but used by police and civilian shooters all over the country. Decent stopping power for a small round, making the 9-millimeter punch above its weight. There was another option for persuasion, if it came to it, but it was one that Walker had never used, no matter how dire circumstances had been a few times in Afghanistan: the child.

  Hassan had a small girl in the house, his daughter, around five years old. She had cried, “Daddy!” when she saw her father’s smashed nose running with blood and Hassan had pulled her into a tight embrace; they now sat together on the couch. There was no one else in the house—Muertos had checked upstairs and out the back. Hassan said his wife was out at swimming practice with their other daughter.

  Walker took a dining chair and straddled it opposite the seated Hassan. “You need to talk.”

  Hassan was silent. He held a kitchen towel to his face. His daughter went back to her tablet computer, occasionally looking up to her father.

  “You recognize her?” Walker gestured to Muertos.

  Hassan didn’t respond.

  “What happened in Syria last week?” Walker asked. “And don’t lie to me.”

  Hassan was silent.

  “Why weren’t you where you said you’d be?” Walker asked. “At the meet? Why?”

  Walker watched Hassan as he waited for an answer. The guy’s eyes were hard. Like he was never going to answer. Like all he had to do was wait Walker out. And Walker knew why he had that kind of confidence. The clock was ticking.

  “Keep an eye on the front,” Walker said to Muertos. He saw her out of his peripheral vision as she headed for the lace-covered windows of the lounge room, which faced the street. “Okay, Hassan. Your time to set things right is now. Tell me what happened.”

  Hassan remained silent.

  Walker said, “Tell me about Tareq Almasi.”

  There was something then in Hassan’s eyes. A tell. It was all Walker needed.

  “Right,” Walker said. “Your time’s seriously up. You need to tell me who you sold Muertos and her team out to. Five of her team died there. One of my oldest and closest friends died there. You tell me what I need, and then we leave. No more pain, no one gets hurt, I’ll leave it be with that nose bleed there. You tell me who, and we’re gone the next minute. That’s the best deal you’re gonna get.”

  “You think this causes me pain?” Hassan said, his voice nasal through the now blood-soaked kitchen towel. “This is nothing. You are nothing. There’s nothing you can do. Either of you. This is too big. Bigger than some State Department crap. Even if I wanted to talk, I can’t.”

 
“I’m not going to hurt your kid,” Walker said after a moment’s silence, standing, taking a small cushion off a lounge chair. “But she doesn’t have to see what’s going to happen to you. This is your choice, okay?”

  Walker put the cushion on Hassan’s knee, then pressed the Glock’s barrel down against it, hard.

  “This will stop some of the mess getting on me,” Walker said. “But it’s going to be loud, and it’s gonna hurt, and you’re going to scream, and you’ll probably fill your pants. And your daughter’s going to have nightmares for years about a big bad man kicking in the front door and shooting her daddy’s knee out. I’ll count to three, to give you a chance to consider it all.”

  “Who are you?” Hassan asked.

  “One.”

  “You’re State Department, like her?” Hassan said. “You know the kinds of hell that will come your way for doing this? I’m CIA!”

  “Two.”

  “You’re nothing.” Hassan smiled through bloody teeth.

  Walker pulled the trigger.

  16

  The 9-millimeter Hydra-Shok round went off with a bang. The cushion absorbed the muzzle flash and some of the noise. Bits of stuffing filled the air with a cloud of fine particulate in front of Walker. The little girl was screaming, the sound like a high-pitched jet engine. Tears were flowing down her cheeks. Hassan pulled her into his embrace again, buried her face into his chest and rocked her back and forth, making a slow, murmuring sound that might have been a song.

  Walker had shot a little wide. The bullet cleared Hassan’s leg and burrowed through the floor between his feet.

  Hassan looked to Walker with fire in his eyes. “Okay.”

  It was the girl that did it. If it wasn’t for her, Walker would have grazed Hassan’s leg with the bullet to get him to talk. He knew they didn’t have long here, and things had to move quickly.

  “I was ordered out of the meet,” Hassan said, looking over Walker’s shoulder to Muertos. “That’s all there is to it, okay? I was ordered not to be there.”

  “Who ordered that?” Muertos asked.

  “Who do you think?”

  “The CIA?”

  Hassan gave an exasperated smile and shake of the head.

  “They have no sway there,” he said. “These people, up the chain—they’re not doing the smuggling for money. It’s all about power. They’re nationalists, see? They want Syria to remain in the status quo. They want to be there ready to rebuild, ready to rule. That is the power they want. They are playing the long game, something I’ve learned that the Agency, as it stands, is not interested in.” He looked across to Muertos. “The other day, when your people died? That was nothing. Just another couple of dozen lives lost—just a drop in the ocean.” Muertos shook her head. Hassan looked to Walker. “An ocean where hundreds die every day. But it’s what’s coming that will shock you. Mark my words. There are plans, and they will pay off, a long time from now, in a significant way.”

  “What do you know about that?” Walker asked.

  “Only that it’s coming,” Hassan replied.

  “What is?”

  “Something catastrophic. What, I don’t know. I swear. But it’s coming. Because the State team got too close, and it was clean-up time.”

  “Who ordered you out?” Walker asked. “Who told you to keep away?”

  Hassan searched Walker’s face and found no comfort there. The man was conflicted, despite the threat in his home. He kept his daughter close. She was silent but had turned her head and peered out at Walker. Striking blue eyes against tan-colored skin and sand-colored hair.

  “The CIA had to be in on this,” Muertos said to Hassan, taking a few steps toward the seated man. Her jaw was clenched tightly when she wasn’t speaking. Her fists were balls of tension and fury. She wanted to lash out, beat the information out of Hassan, and let go of some grief in the process. “Because here you are, Hassan, still all nicely tucked up in middle-class America, even after things went to hell.”

  “These people . . . they have more power than the CIA.” Hassan shook his head. “Here in the US, the CIA do as they say.”

  “That’s crap,” Muertos said.

  “No.”

  “You’re lying!”

  “No. I am not.” Hassan leaned back and cradled his daughter in his lap. He used the back of his free hand to wipe blood from his top lip. “Sure, the CIA can hit targets around the world with its drones, they can kill who they like anywhere in the world, and they can throw millions of dollars around like it is nothing. They can do that day in and day out and until the end of time. But you know what? There are always new targets, just like there is always more money, so nothing will be achieved. But these people operating in Syria? They have true power. Influence. You see? It is life itself that they are trading in, and it’s ever perpetuating—it is the history, the present and the future—and unless you kill them all, they will never stop, they will never pack up and go away.”

  “Hassan, we need a name,” Walker said. He waited until Hassan was looking him square in the eyes. “The contact here in the US who called you out. Who was it?”

  Hassan looked from Muertos to Walker, then down at his daughter. He bit at his bottom lip, as though weighing the consequences of what he might give up.

  “Who ordered you to stay away from the meeting?” Muertos asked. “Who has more power than the CIA?”

  “The name I know, it is . . .” Hassan said finally, looking from his child and back to the intruders in his house. “The man there, at the meeting, who you thought was just a cog in the machine—well, he is not anything to anyone anymore. It was him.”

  “You’re talking about Almasi?” Muertos asked, looking from Hassan to Walker and back.

  Hassan nodded.

  Muertos said, “But you’re speaking like Almasi is dead.”

  “He . . . is alive?” Hassan asked. There was genuine shock in his eyes.

  “He got out,” Muertos said.

  Hassan’s face turned a shade paler. He used his free hand to pinch the bridge of his nose above the break.

  “You didn’t know?” Muertos said.

  “I heard they were going to clean up everything,” Hassan said.

  “Who’s they?” Walker asked.

  “The ones back here. I—I don’t have a name.”

  “But you received an order . . .” Walker said.

  “A spoken order, by a local courier, a messenger on a motorbike,” Hassan said. “The day before that meet—this guy, he passed me a picture of my family—from here, up there.” He gestured with blood-covered fingers to a glass cabinet on which sat dozens of framed photos. “They were here, in my home, while I was in Syria, working for the CIA. See? Their reach?”

  “What was it?” Walker asked.

  “It was a message—not just to stay away, but a message to me that they had reach, if I disobeyed. That they could get to my family at any time. They asked me where the meet would be, and told me not to turn up. So, I told the guy. I—I had to!”

  “They could have killed you after that,” Muertos said. “Once you gave them the information.”

  Hassan shook his head and looked at her, then shifted, tightening the embrace with his daughter. “Insurance. In case the meeting wasn’t where I said it would be. Or if I warned everyone about the threat. Keep me alive, just in case.”

  “They’ll contact you again,” Muertos said.

  “No,” Hassan replied. “That was it. That was the only group I’d infiltrated—you must know that.” He paused, composed himself and said, “Look, I’m out of all this now. No more field work for the US government. The CIA has offered me a different job, based here, stateside. My family will be raised with a father who is present, and they’re safe. That is all I can say.”

  Walker heard a noise. Out the front. He turned and looked to Muertos. She glanced out the window, through the lace curtain. Saw an armored van pull up. It carried a Maryland PD SWAT team, which started to pile out and set
up positions.

  “Company,” Muertos said. “SWAT team.”

  “Name,” Walker said to Hassan as he stood. “Make this right. Let us get justice against those who took American lives—against those who threatened your family.”

  “Almasi,” Hassan said. “That’s all I can think of. If he got out, there’s a reason. They’re keeping him on. Only he knows the American contact.”

  “Who’s they?” Walker asked again, backing toward the hallway but keeping his eyes on Hassan. “The people who tipped off the Syrian government forces?”

  “It’s all one and the same,” Hassan said. He glanced from Walker to Muertos and back again. “They’re cleaning house. The way I see it, no one was meant to get out of there alive. If Almasi did, well . . .”

  Walker heard boots on the footpath outside and led the way, fast down the hall toward the back door, Muertos in tow. They hustled outside, where he shouldered the back fence open and took to the laneway, Muertos close behind. The fine rain continued to mist down, and the air was still full of wood smoke from Sunday evening fires throughout the neighborhood. To the right would lead them to their car—but the end of the block was a long way off, at least a couple of hundred meters, and the SWAT team would clear the house and get through the back and get eyes on them before they rounded the corner at the end of the lane.

  So, Walker turned left. Toward the other end of the lane. He didn’t make it.

  17

  Walker was just five paces down the laneway when he realized that there was too much distance to cover—and then a third option presented itself. He took a hard right and dragged Muertos with him. They moved fast through a small, narrow easement between the row of houses that backed onto the other side of the lane. Tall timber fences either side, then house walls, the grass underfoot overgrown through patches of gravel and puddles of mud. He emerged at the street running parallel to where they had parked.