by Zoe Sharp
“We don’t know, and we’ve had no confirmation from our agent. Indeed, they are ignoring our requests for clarification on this matter.”
“And you think, therefore, that they’ve been turned?
He nodded, a single, stiff jerk of his head, and raised one hand, briefly rubbing his thumb across the tips of his fingers. “These deals are worth millions of dollars. Anyone could be…tempted.”
“What are the consequences?”
“It would be disastrous for peace and stability right across the Middle East region and Europe.”
Don’t overstate it, Epps, whatever you do.
“And what is it you want from me?”
“I need to insert another operative—one who is completely unknown to our agent—to keep a watching brief on the situation from the inside.”
“What else?”
“If, indeed, it seems that dealings have been resumed and chemical weapons—of whatever type—are about to be delivered—then I need to know about it in as much detail as possible.”
“And?”
“That is all I need from you.”
I shook my head. “Oh, come on. Are you really trying to tell me that, with the whole of the security services to draw from, you’ve come up empty and have to coerce some displaced Brit to do your dirty work for you?”
“This agent has worked on a number of different inter-agency operations in the past. They led courses at Langley, Quantico, Washington. If we put in another agent from almost anywhere, there’s a chance of him—or her—being made.”
I picked up on the unconscious emphasis on gender and was silent for a moment. Then I said, “I seem to remember you once telling me you didn’t approve of using female operatives for undercover work. That we weren’t temperamentally suited for it.”
“Times change.”
“Don’t they just,” I muttered.
And just when I thought he’d finally dragged his dinosaur mind-set kicking and screaming into the twentieth century—if not quite the twenty-first—he went on, “The timeframe necessitates moving quickly. It would be difficult to put in place a legend for anyone else that would stand up to extensive…pressure testing. Not in the time we have available.”
“So, what were you planning to do for me by way of a cover story?”
“Nothing is required. This is why we’re having this conversation right now. Your history with Armstrong-Meyer is already out there and has the advantage of being one hundred percent genuine, as far as anyone is aware.”
I glanced at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, Ms Fox, that while there is no suggestion that you jumped ship before you were thrown overboard, as it were, there’s enough uncertainty surrounding your departure from that agency to allow room for manoeuvre.”
“Thanks, I think,” I muttered. “If I agree to do this—and it is only an ‘if’ at this stage—how will it work? How do you intend to get me in?”
“We have covert surveillance in place on the organisation. I’m confident there will be no difficulty in creating an opening.”
The driver took the tightening turn for the W 178th Street exit and Yeshiva University and we plunged into the cluttered shadows beneath one of the flyovers, all industrial steelwork pockmarked with rivets. He was smooth through the bends, progressive with brake and accelerator. No doubt he was also deaf, dumb, and blind when his boss required him to be.
“If I get inside and if they accept me at face value, what exactly do you expect me to do?”
“Watch and report. No more than that.”
“One last thing—who is this agent?”
“That’s strictly need-to-know,” Epps said. “And you don’t.”
I stared, smarting as much from the dismissive tone as the implication. “How the hell can I be expected to tell if anyone has gone native if you won’t tell me who it is so I can distinguish your agent from the genuine natives?” I demanded. “That’s absurd.”
“Don’t get your panties in a wad, Ms Fox. Withholding that information is a purely practical, operational decision.”
In other words, what you don’t know can’t be tortured out of you.
He didn’t say the words out loud. Then again, he didn’t need to.
8
“If you’ll pardon me for saying so, dear, you don’t look like much, but I guess in your line of work that’s a blessing.”
The speaker had just been introduced as Kincaid’s personal assistant, Mo Heedles, and if there was a certain irony to her statement, she didn’t appear to be aware of it. Because, to be honest, she didn’t look like much, either.
The word that sprang to mind when I looked at Mo was…brown. Dark brown hair, neatly styled into a single-length bob level with her pale jawline, brown suit, dark leather slip-on shoes. Even her jewellery—a ring on her right hand and a pendant on a slim chain around her neck—was decorated with pale brown amber. The only thing about her I could see that wasn’t brown were the frames of her Wayfarer-style spectacles. They were grey.
She had an aged-yet-ageless look that meant she could have been anywhere between a haggard fifty and a youthful seventy-five, and was almost undoubtedly the smartest person in the room. I bet both Eric and Helena Kincaid loved her—for very different reasons.
As for her opinion of me, she clearly had yet to be convinced.
“A little convenient, wasn’t it?” she said. “That you just-so-happened to be driving along that particular road, at that particular time?”
“You think so?” I shrugged. “I’ve been out here looking after Frank and Lorna’s place for a month. It’s the same road I took whenever I needed to go into town for anything. I’m not sure there is another route.”
She eyed me shrewdly and didn’t respond.
In truth, I’d worried about that aspect of the whole operation myself. The insertion point was always going to be the weakest spot. It relied entirely on apparent coincidence rather than the coded tip-off I’d been waiting three weeks to receive. Even so, I’d had no concept of the situation I’d be walking into—or driving into, in this case.
If the men who’d ambushed Helena Kincaid were part of some covert government team at Epps’s disposal, I didn’t want to think of the consequences I might face for having killed one of them and seriously injured two more. Was the threat of chemical weapons falling into the hands of the Syrians really worth that?
Taking a life was bad enough but, under fire, it had been a clear-cut choice of him or me. I remembered again the way those rounds had ripped into the headrest of my seat. There was making it look good, and then there was playing for keeps. The guy I’d run down with the pick-up had not been fooling around.
I’d been expecting questions about that at some point, but not from such an unlikely source. Kincaid’s bodyguard, Schade, struck me as a far more likely candidate for giving me the third degree.
Kincaid sent him over with a car on the morning after Frank and Lorna Stephenson returned from Europe, without me having to make contact. Either he knew the Stephensons’ schedule or he’d been keeping an eye on me.
I’d seen Kincaid—with Schade in tow, of course—just once in the intervening period, to sign contracts of both employment and confidentiality. The former was in standard legalese almost unintelligible to normal humans. The latter was brief to the point of being lip service only. When I queried this, it was Schade who answered for him: “Well, all it really needs to say is that if you shoot your mouth off about any of Mr Kincaid’s affairs, I’ll be paying you a visit.”
I eyed him for a moment, then switched my gaze back to Kincaid himself. “And how’s that working out so far?”
His smile answered for him.
Now, though, as I faced Schade and the formidable Mrs Heedles in her office, I wasn’t sure which of them might be scarier.
“OK, children, time for you to be someplace else. Go get her geared up, Mr Schade, and stop disrupting my schedule.” She flapped her hands at
him. “Go on—and get your butt off of my paperwork. Shoo.”
Schade grinned at her, uncoiled himself from the edge of her desk and rose. He was maybe an inch or so taller than me, and then only because he was wearing heavy duty boots with Cuban heels.
“After you,” he said.
“I don’t know the way, so…after you.” I smiled. “I insist.”
“Oh, just go do your job, the pair of you. She’s hardly going to shoot you in the back on her first day, Mr Schade. She doesn’t know you well enough yet to hate you that much.”
“And she doesn’t have a gun.”
“Exactly. Maybe you should take care of that,” she said pointedly. “And then maybe she’ll take care of you.”
He was still laughing as he led me out of the office and to the doors of an elevator just along the hallway. We were in the opposite wing of the house from the private sitting room where I’d first met Eric Kincaid and been formally introduced to Helena. The décor was more restrained here, bland and anonymous like an office block or a hotel.
“So, is Shade your real name?” I asked.
“’Course. Only, my family’s from Germany, so you spell it with an S-C-H.”
The elevator dinged and the doors opened.
“Ah, as in Schubert?”
He shrugged as we stepped inside. “Close enough, although he was Austrian. More like Robert Schumann.”
I flicked him a sideways glance. “There are no bonus points for showing off.”
“Oh, there are always points for showing off.” The elevator doors slid shut behind us. The smile was gone. He was all business. “OK, let’s talk weapons. You got any preference?”
I shrugged. “I like the SIG P226, if you have one, but as long as it goes bang when I press the trigger, I’m not too fussy.”
“I believe we may be able to accommodate you on that.”
The doors slid open again. We’d gone one floor down, or maybe two. There was no lurching start/stop and no indicator lights. We were in another corridor, this one even more utilitarian than the last. Bare walls in institutional cream with scuff marks nobody had bothered to paint over.
Schade stretched a set of keys from his pocket on a retractable chain and unlocked a reinforced door. When he pushed it open, the smell of gun oil and powder filled my nostrils.
Inside, the room was lined with lit gun racks displaying assault rifles, handguns, machine pistols and shotguns. A scarred steel workbench stood along the back wall, a vice clamped to one end and shelves of tools above. Schade moved over to the bench, started opening drawers and pulling out gun cases.
“OK, here’s your basic P226. Here’s one with a DAK trigger, if you want to try that.”
I glanced at the SIG with the double-action-only Kellerman trigger, but reached for the standard double-action/single-action weapon instead. “I’ll stick to something I know I can shoot.”
He nodded again, as if I’d passed some kind of test. “Okey-dokey. We prefer to standardise with 9mm—you’re more likely to get a reload when you need it—although we got ’em in .40 and .357 if you can’t live without?”
“Interesting choice of words,” I said. “No, I’m happy with 9mm.”
“Cool. There you go, then. All yours. Just do me a favour and don’t name it.”
“Name it?”
“Some of the guys like to name their guns. It gets kinda personal.” He put up a hand to stop me cutting in. “But if that’s your thing, I won’t ask.”
“Really?” I raised an eyebrow. “Well, some guys like to name their dicks as well, and I definitely don’t ask about that.”
“Yeah, there are some clubs you are just never gonna be allowed to join, huh?”
I picked up the SIG, worked the action, checked the chamber and dry fired it. It was smooth, predictable and familiar. Both weapons had a barrel threaded ready to take a suppressor, which was an interesting modification for Kincaid’s armoury to offer right from the off. It made me wonder exactly what my role as Helena Kincaid’s latest bodyguard might entail.
Schade put down two fifteen-round magazines and a Kramer belt-scabbard holster.
“You cool with the Kramer rig? Designed for chicks to keep the grip at low-waist level, rather than riding so high it interferes with your”—he gestured to my chest with palms facing upwards, fingers cupped, before coming out with—“personalities.”
The holster looked already worn in, which was a good thing. Brand new, the leather tends to be so stiff I would have needed both hands and a chisel to pry the gun from it.
“Yeah, I’m cool,” I said, straight-faced. “And just for the record, I don’t name my ah, personalities, either.”
“Good to know. Now we move on to the fun stuff. How are you with tactical shotguns?”
“It’s a blunt-force instrument. I’ll take whatever you’ve got handy.”
“You’re gonna love the Mossberg 500. Nine-shot pump for when things get real up-close and personal.”
“Things were fairly up-close and personal back there on the road last week,” I said as Schade lifted the Mossberg out of the rack. “Why didn’t Helena’s driver and Illya have a couple of those?”
I’d asked him about Illya’s ongoing condition on the way over to the Kincaids’ place. “Stable” was the most he would say and I didn’t push him for more.
“They did,” Schade said shortly. “Had ’em in the trunk. May as well have left ’em at home. You can’t access a weapon when you need it…well, it’s like Mark Twain said: ‘The man who doesn’t read has no advantage over the man who cannot.’”
“Profound.”
“For Ellis—the driver—it turned out to be just that, huh?”
He moved over to the assault weapons, which I noted were Colt M4 carbines—as used by the men who’d ambushed Helena Kincaid.
“We tend to stick with the M4 as a kind of everyday item, across the board,” Schade said. “Reliable, durable, ammo and clips are interchangeable, and everybody knows where they are. Plus, it cuts down on showboating. And trust me, around here that is a plus.”
“My weapon’s bigger than your weapon, you mean?”
“Oh yeah.”
He took one down, dropped the empty magazine out and handed the carbine over. I checked the chamber was empty anyway, just out of habit, and gave the weapon a cursory inspection. One thing struck me immediately.
“The men who ambushed Mrs Kincaid’s Lincoln were using the M4A1 full-auto model,” I said, remembering the way I’d clicked the fire selector onto what I thought was three-round burst. Then I’d aimed for the guy’s lower legs and got more than I bargained for. “And they were using thirty-round magazines.”
“So?”
“So, where did they get them? You can’t legally buy that kind of weapon for civilian use, even in this country.”
The look Schade gave me was calculating. What I’d said clearly was not news to him, but the fact I’d pointed it out had either raised flags or won me brownie points. With him, it was hard to tell.
“We ran the serial numbers on the weapons they left at the scene—part of a batch that were apparently shipped out to ’Stan. As far as US Army records show, they’re still there,” he said after a moment. “Looks like some fat quartermaster has gotten himself an equally fat retirement fund sitting in an offshore account somewhere.”
“Any leads yet on who they were? Was it a kidnap attempt or a kill?” Either way, they botched it.
“Those are questions for Kincaid.” He nodded to the SIG and the waistband holster. “Soon as you’re dressed, I’ll take you up there and you can ask him yourself.”
9
Less than ten minutes later, I was sitting in a steel-framed leather chair on one side of the desk in Eric Kincaid’s inner sanctum. The room was huge and the furniture on a scale to suit. Artwork that displayed the wealth of its owner by the sheer amount of wall space it commanded, a ceiling twenty-odd feet up with chandeliers dangling from it. You could have played full-
size billiards on the surface of the desk and still had enough room left over for a cocktail bar and a finger buffet.
There were four large flatscreen TVs mounted flush to the wall opposite where I sat. They were tuned to various news channels with the sound off and subtitles on. The main stories centred round a European summit, a suicide bomber in Kabul, and the increasing humanitarian crisis in Yemen, cycling round and round in never-ending, depressing circles.
Kincaid sat in a high-backed black leather swivel chair behind the desk. The chair must have been designed with a Bond villain in mind. All he needed was a fluffy white cat and a wardrobe of grey Chairman Mao suits. To my surprise, he sat with his back to the window, which I assumed was some kind of anti-ballistic glass. It certainly had a film layer on it that probably helped shield against eavesdropping.
“So, do you have any intel on who those guys were?” I asked, glancing from Kincaid to Schade, who sat opposite. His seat was identical to mine, his stance more laid back.
“You’re asking the wrong question—or maybe the right question but in the wrong order.”
I had a feeling I knew what I should have asked first, but I wasn’t willing to reveal anything by admitting that so I played the game.
“OK, what should that question have been?”
Kincaid eyed me for a moment as if still expecting me to come up with the correct answer. He had a very direct gaze. Your first impression was of a total lack of guile. Followed shortly afterwards by the realisation you had absolutely no idea what was going on inside the man’s head.
He leaned back in the chair and rotated it gently from side to side a little. “The ‘who’ is not as important as the ‘how’.” He spoke to a point over both of our heads, more to himself than either Schade or me. “Whoever they were, how did they know exactly where Helena would be?”
I frowned, aware of a rushing noise inside my head as my adrenaline surged. This was not the first time I’d gone undercover, in one form or another, but nevertheless it was not something I’d been trained for. Not something, perhaps, for which I was particularly well suited. Ah, well…