Sabena glared at the blasted-out house still on the screen. An evil smirk erupted across her face.
“Did you know what hit you Mr. Kinley?”
Chapter 60
Maide had realized a long time ago it was an “egg-timer” mission. Kinley had used up every last grain of sand to protect and serve, but Maide knew he’d have to take that call one day.
“The whole family…” repeated Maide slowly, remembering the picture of Kinley’s daughter laughing, playing in a garden somewhere.
The head of MI6 station in Washington DC reviewed his notes.
“Yes, the whole family. No survivors. TV is already down there. Couldn’t blanket in time. Apparently a reporter lives a few doors away and was home at the time of the blast. Didn’t take them long to go live.”
“Understandable,” snapped Maide curtly. “Which channel?”
“CNN.”
Maide located the channel, but adverts were running. “Not on yet.”
“Keep watching. It’ll be on,” advised the Washington station head.
“I have to inform the PM.”
“Of course. Call me later. We can discuss next steps.”
Maide pressed a single number on speed dial.
“I’m sorry, sir. It’s over.”
At the other end, Ashton’s face ran white. Unlike Maide, he had naively believed Kinley was in there to make the final difference. He’d never fully accepted the recent intel that Al Nadir knew Kinley was a mole, despite receiving conclusive proof.
Now his hands shook. It really was over. Al Nadir would never let anyone get that close again. And all those deaths, what did they mean now?
“Do we know how?”
“Bomb. Wiped out everyone.”
“I want this chapter re-written. Understand?”
Maide knew what he had to do. “Yes, sir.”
Kinley never happened. Operation Snowdrop never happened. Kinley had chosen the name Snowdrop, remaining true to his idealist sensibilities. The snowdrop, the first flower to bud, signals the end of winter. Kinley saw himself as that snowdrop, breaking out of the winter Al Nadir had imposed across the world, to bring a new season of hope and rebirth. A new spring.
Maide swallowed deeply. Just another agent gone. At least if his men had taken him out, it would have been clean. No collateral damage. Wife and daughter would have been unharmed. Angela would have grieved, but she would have eventually moved on and met someone else. Lotte would have had a new dad. Kinley would have been relegated to just a blurred moment, a snapshot in time of someone who had barely registered in her life, and of whom she remembered with love. Yes, mother and daughter would have survived, albeit with a few scars.
Why didn’t he act sooner? Maide cursed himself. His clean-up team shouldn’t have given Kinley time. Fifteen minutes was fifteen minutes too long. He should have seen it.
“I want Sam on this. He needs to close this investigation.”
“And then?” asked Maide, awaiting the kill order on Sam. He was still connected to Snowdrop, and had incendiary information that could bring the whole UK government down.
“No more. This is it. He closes and we close. We now find another way. There are other options. Al Nadir are not indestructible. We’ll find another way.”
The assured stance the PM had taken reverberated inside Maide. He flicked back to the TV. Breaking news was now on, showing the scene of an Alexandria residential avenue, a visual horror story in the making.
Maide thought darkly about Ashton’s words. Those other options had better be found bloody quickly.
Chapter 61
Ellie listened to the rest of the news. God, everything is so depressing. What was happening to the world? It seemed to be getting darker and more horrible. Every bulletin was filled with terrorist attacks, murders, rapes, robberies and kidnappings. There never seemed to be any good news. In fact, goodness in general was an extremely scarce commodity.
At first, Ellie had thought it was her view of the world being a little skewed. Then she realized it wasn’t just her personal viewpoint. Thinking back over the last few months, people were getting more selfish and vacuous. A society already obsessed with celebrity had become even more fanatical about the rich and famous. Society had moved from a culture of “what you are” to a culture of “what you have.” And it was clear everybody was looking out for number one.
Ellie noticed that violence, in parallel, had also increased. Every day in London, there seemed to be someone, dead or seriously wounded, hitting the headlines. Spiraling personal debt made money a focal point in everyone’s lives. It seemed that friendship, loyalty and trust were words lost to the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, money talked louder than ever. Everyone had their price.
Ellie shivered. She hated dark thoughts, and always tried to cancel them out before they ingrained into her mind. But now she felt thoroughly melancholy, and was unable to let go of the feeling. It was as if she had somehow been tainted by society’s growing darkness. In that instance, Ellie could sense the greed and cruelty in the world, and sensed it gnawing inside her like a lethal disease. With focused determination, Ellie pushed back the feeling and flicked over to another channel. The weather forecast.
“Sunday will be sunny with some scattered showers.”
Great, maybe we can go for a drive down south, thought Ellie. She was trying hard to brighten up. But she couldn’t help feeling like a misanthrope, angry at a world where love and kindness had been lost to hate and cruelty.
Chapter 62
Sam turned into Grosvenor Road. He couldn’t lose those surreptitious glances of Maide and Quentin from his mind. Their words had been disgusting and humiliating. It was clear Maide had seen him and Ellie last night. Sick fucker!
He still couldn’t understand why they’d put him under surveillance. He wished he’d swept the apartment. But seeing Ellie standing there, waiting, he never had a chance. The truth was sweeping for bugs was furthest from his mind. What did Kinley always drill into him? “Sweeping saves lives!” It would certainly have saved his dignity, if not his life.
Sam shot over the carriage way onto Chelsea Embankment. His mind wandered back to the encounter with Quentin and Maide. He’d read Quentin. It was obvious he hadn’t seen anything but was following the signals from Maide to engage. But what was Maide’s game? Was it really just because he’d mentioned Piccadilly? Or something else?
Sam knew mentioning Snowdrop had always been strictly off-limits, but Maide had just thrown in the towel by agreeing to remove Kinley. He’d even threatened to invoke ‘sign off’ if Kinley didn’t leave DC, which would place a kill order on Kinley to available wet workers in Alexandria. The whole business infuriated Sam.
It was like Maide didn’t value Kinley anymore. He viewed him just as a liability to be eradicated.
After all Kinley had sacrificed. What he’d done. What they’d all done.
Sam didn’t know the details of anything beyond what happened that day in Florence, the day Operation Snowdrop started. For operational purposes, Kinley had remained totally dark throughout the four years he’d been in Al Nadir. But Sam had an imagination. He knew what would have been expected of Kinley. He doubted he could have stepped over the line the way his friend had done.
Kinley, running under the alias of Stuart Kingswood, had risen within Al Nadir. Sam learned this through the encrypted comms web channel, Forever Flowers, that Kinley quickly accelerated from his initial position as global senior lieutenant to become the global commander for the Americas and Asia. His positioning meant he was fourth in line to Al Douri himself. As Kingswood, Kinley had secured top-level access. Through his covert work, Kinley had achieved exactly what he’d intended from the beginning. He’d identified money mounds in tens of billions buried within legitimate multi-national businesses. One such business was a huge technology company that was directly in the public eye. It had even been given massive lucrative contracts from global governments to manage their da
ta processing and analytics. Kinley’s work in uncovering this just over a year ago had enabled a coordinated attack by global intelligence communities on Al Douri’s money line, choking off almost a hundred billion dollars.
Governments around the world cancelled contracts. Suppliers put the screws on the company demanding payment. Suspected links to terrorist activities were leaked to Wall Street, affecting the share price as millions of shareholders dumped their shares. The share dump made way for hostile takeover bids, which made the company even more vulnerable. Al Douri had no choice but to put the reserves he’d ring-fenced for terrorist activities into keeping the company afloat, buying shares and bolstering market confidence. The financial attack pushed back his abilities and prevented at least twenty high-profile bombings that would have seen the accumulated death toll in millions.
Sam recalled the mechanics of the operation were ingenious, and all down Kinley’s amazing financial business mind. As so many agencies were involved, Al Douri never figured out who was the ringleader. At the time, he believed it had been a big rival tech company. Sam was certain, although he didn’t have actual intelligence, that Kinley had fueled that fire of suspicion. Unfortunately, the CEO of the rival firm was found in his Manhattan penthouse, split from head to toe, with a note in the middle between the two halves of his body, which said, ‘Thanks for a ripping time! S x’.
Sam shuddered as the photos of the poor guy leapt into his mind. Without a doubt, Sabena’s hand had been on the other end of the machete.
And then there’d been Piccadilly. The lives of innocent citizens, both from the UK and across the world, had been taken that day. It had been state sanctioned murder by any other name. Kinley, Ashton, Maide and him, they’d all been complicit. All knew and accepted the path they were following.
Another memory flashed in.
The road in front of Sam was a blur as images flowed thick and fast. Florence, January 28, 2013. He’d been slammed against the wall between the lounge and bedroom. He’d glanced back and seen the lasers of the snipers. He’d yelled to warn his team. But it was already too late. Greg, Jim and Dan fell as the high-caliber, armor-piercing bullets tore through their Kevlar jackets. His team on the cover mission, Operation Aphrodite, were all massacred by Al Nadir. Only Sam made it out alive.
So much death had enabled Operation Snowdrop to bud. Now that bastard, Maide, wanted to shelve the whole thing.
Burning with anger at the injustice of it all, Sam hit the steering wheel.
He didn’t hear the first buzz. His anger blocked out his surroundings. He behaved so unlike his usual demeanor of cool and calculating. He just wasn’t keeping it together. He wasn’t thinking. Sam knew, where Kinley and Snowdrop were concerned, he possessed virtually no capacity for rational thought.
They’d all gone too far. But lives had been saved.
They’d all done their job.
For the greater good.
Sam’s phone buzzed again, and he clocked the caller on his dashboard. DC Station Head Atkins. He swallowed hard. Inside, a prescient flicker of dread rippled through him.
“Yes,” said Sam, and his voice recognition system picked up the call immediately.
“Sam?” The moment Sam heard the glimmer of a treble in Atkins’ voice, fear surfaced.
“Yes?”
Sam barely wanted to answer. He didn’t want to hear the next words.
“Kinley’s dead.”
Sam gripped the steering wheel so tight his fingers imprinted into the leather like a brand. He breathed deep and tried to focus on the road. He pressed hard on the accelerator and shot down Chelsea Embankment to his apartment.
For an instant, he couldn’t speak. Ice replaced his blood and he felt like he’d turned into a glacier. The station head didn’t talk either.
Silence loomed within the car.
“Sam,” ventured the station head finally. In his tone, he wanted to deliver the news and get the hell off the line. “It was a bomb. It took out him and his family.”
Sam listened. He wanted to vomit. Maide had been right all along. Kinley had been made. And Al Nadir had taken their revenge in their usual way.
Annihilation of the entire family.
Sam found his voice, and couldn’t, although he tried desperately, suppress a sob.
“Oh, God. Angie. Lotte!”
“My condolences, Sam. I know you guys were close.”
Station Head Atkins rang off the line quickly, leaving Sam with the echoing words.
Sam recalled his last meal with the family in Alexandria, some two months earlier. It was just before his operation in Rome. Angie had cooked tagliatelle e funghi porcini con tartufo and they’d drank a fine bottle of Sicilian Fiano. Kinley never spoke about Al Nadir. Their discussions, when in earshot of Angie, were kept to FCO business and any crossover with his work and Kinley’s in STEE. Out of earshot, they’d been on Six operations that Kinley, as a top agent, was involved in. Neither broke cover. Any surveillance by Al Nadir would have heard what was expected: two agents talking shop, whether in their cover jobs or on ‘the real stuff’.
Sam had been amazed at how Lotte had grown. He’d noticed that, at almost five, she’d become quite precocious, but still remained adorable. Angie had been attentive and lovely as ever during his stay. Kinley had snuggled up with his wife and daughter on the sofa. Sam had taken a large comfy armchair and the four of them watched ‘Frozen’ on television.
The memory shattered into pieces in Sam’s mind as he imagined the explosion taking their lives.
Motherfucking bastards!
Inside, hurt, pain and anger raged. The corners of his eyes pulled as he drove fiercely down the Chelsea Embankment. He tried to concentrate but he knew he wasn’t looking. Sam was driving at speed, but he wasn’t actually taking in anything at all.
All he could see was Kinley curled up on the sofa with Angie and Lotte, peaceful and happy.
Kinley had given so much for his country. He’d been the absolute patriot. He’d made the ultimate sacrifice.
Sam wasn’t going to let Al Nadir get away with it.
He wanted bodies.
And he wanted them falling from his own bloody hands.
Chapter 63
They would be safe.
That’s what they’d told him on the video call last night.
He’d arrived home. As he parked the car in his drive, he saw the door blown off its hinges. He’d leapt out the car, grabbing his mobile and about to call 911, when a video call came in.
He stared at his phone. The images he saw were tattooed on his mind.
His wife, Patsy, his daughter, Zoe, and his son, Peter, all blindfolded and held at gun point. He could see they’d been crying. Their dirty faces were tear-stained.
Patsy’s face was heavily bruised. Her jaw was swollen and there was a fresh cut just beneath her right eye.
Peter bit his lip. He was trying to stay brave. The left side of his face had a purple bruise snaking down it, and his nose was off center and bleeding badly.
Zoe’s sweatshirt was ripped down the front, partially exposing her breasts, and her legs were bare, with her thighs heavily bruised. Her cheek was swollen and cut, and her bottom lip was puffy and bled. Ross shivered on seeing her. He knew what had happened. He had to hold back from thumping the phone or chucking it away.
But most of all, he wanted to kill the barbaric animals who’d done that to his daughter.
Of course, he couldn’t do any of those things. He had to endure the transmission until he discovered what the bastards wanted.
A guy with a black balaclava and black T shirt came into view. Two other men, dressed the same, stood at either end of a shabby sofa with guns pointed at his family. Ross thought they were men by how they stood with their legs apart. They had broad shoulders and their automatics cradled a little but the muscles in their arms tensed. They were ready to press the trigger at a second’s notice from the head of the gang.
The man in view spoke. “This
is your family. If you want them returned to you, alive and unharmed, you do exactly what I tell you.”
Ross focused hard. He had to remember everything this man was saying and how he was saying it. His voice was thick like molasses, and Ross had to suppress a shudder. Just the way he sounded, he intoned the very elements of evil.
Ross couldn’t believe his family were at the mercy of that man.
“Ok,” answered Ross, pushing a quiet calm. But inside, he was breaking apart.
“Take the entire quantum compound and meet me outside Taco Express on 8th off Main at 10 a.m. tomorrow. Involve the police or fail to turn up…”
Ross heard gunfire and the screen went blank. His heart crumbled.
“No!” he screamed.
“Those were tests shot at the floor,” returned the molasses-voiced bastard. The picture returned to Ross’ family, too terrified to move.
“Fail me and the next ones will be at Zoe’s head.”
“I’ll get it. I’ll get you anything. Just don’t harm my family.” Ross’ composure had vanished. He’d seen what they’d already done to his family. He would agree to kill the president at that moment if it brought his family back.
With a smile in his voice, the molasses-voiced bastard answered, “I know you will. Until tomorrow.”
The transmission cut out and Ross was left staring traumatized at the screen.
Abruptly, Ross shook the images from his head. He needed to concentrate, and his family’s stricken, damaged faces only made him panic. Especially Zoe’s.
And right now, he had to focus.
The military officers took up guard outside the lab as Ross walked inside.
He looked at his watch. Less than fifteen minutes to the drop off. He glanced up at the guards outside the room. They appeared to be talking to one another and were not even looking through the glass wall. He was wide enough to position his body as a cover, so neither the camera to the right of him, nor the officers outside, could see his actions. He knew he couldn’t waste time thinking about if he could do it. Slipping out the plasticine and silver pen he’d bought from K-Mart that morning, he quickly switched them with the compound and pen device. Then, he shut the box and walked over to the safe.
The Trusted Page 18
