Something to Die For

by Will Jordan

  Anya didn’t need to be reminded of that. She remembered all too well.

  ‘But Marcus believed in you. Right up until I showed him your KGB file. The look on his face was… tragic.’ He sighed, feigning sympathy. ‘No rescue for you.’

  Leaning forward, Anya jammed the muzzle of her silencer into the flesh wound at his thigh, eliciting a growl of pain and a fresh surge of blood. Nearby, Alex looked away uncomfortably.

  ‘It was you,’ she snarled. ‘You convinced him to call off the rescue.’

  ‘I did,’ he said, gritting his teeth.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We thought you had betrayed the Agency, gone back to your Soviet handlers. We assumed the whole thing was a trap to lure in the rest of the unit.’

  Anya released her grip, leaning back in her chair as her mind raced. Cain hadn’t abandoned her willingly. He had been forced into it, in the mistaken belief that she’d betrayed him. The traumatic, life-changing event that had driven a permanent wedge between them had started in a way she hadn’t understood.

  What else did she not know or understand about the man?

  ‘You and I both live in a world of lies,’ Qalat went on. ‘It’s the life we chose. But somehow… it never makes it any easier when we’re the ones being lied to.’

  Enough, Anya told herself. Whatever had driven Cain’s decision to abandon her in Afghanistan all those years ago, it didn’t change who he was now. And it certainly didn’t change her mission here.

  ‘If you know me as well as you claim, you know I was captured by the Russians a second time,’ she said, refocussing her mind on the interrogation. ‘Eight years ago, they found me again.’

  ‘I know this,’ Qalat confirmed grimly.

  ‘Then you also know of an Israeli agent named Russo,’ she explained. ‘He told me that Pakistani operatives coerced him into selling me out. Operatives answering to you, Vizur.’

  Qalat had once again fallen silent. She could tell he was thinking fast, weighing up how much she knew and what he might say in response.

  ‘It was Cain who handed you that mission, wasn’t it?’ she pressed him. ‘He wanted plausible deniability. He used you and your men to locate me, so he could sell me out to the Russians. Tell me the truth, and I’ll let you live.’

  She expected him to break in light of such damning evidence, expected him to confirm that everything she’d said, to vindicate her anger and justify her betrayal. But instead, to her utter dismay, the man shook his head and chuckled softly to himself.

  ‘You still don’t understand, do you?’ he said, still chuckling to himself. ‘This is bigger than Marcus Cain, bigger than you or I. We are simply pawns in a much grander game.’

  Clenching her jaw in anger, Anya pressed the silenced automatic against his other leg and pulled the trigger. Qalat’s chuckling, mocking amusement was suddenly replaced by screams of pain as he slumped forward, straining against his bonds.

  ‘Enough!’ Anya shouted, grasping his hair and yanking his head back just as she’d done with that deer ten years earlier, forcing him to look at her. ‘This is no game! Give me answers, or I will torture you until you beg me for death, Vizur.’

  ‘Anya—’ Alex began, his voice edged with alarm.

  ‘Stay out of this, Alex!’ she warned him. ‘Tell me why I was betrayed!’

  ‘I told you… we live in a world of lies,’ Qalat said between ragged breaths. ‘Even Marcus.’

  ‘Anya!’ Alex repeated, more urgently now.

  ‘What is it?’ she demanded, furious at the interruption.

  His attention was focussed on the laptop computer beside him. ‘The motion sensor’s been tripped. Someone’s outside.’ He looked up at her then, his face tight with fear. ‘They’ve found us!’

  Chapter 45

  Washington DC

  ‘Once we’re tied into Cain’s comms, we’ll know where and when he’s going to make his move,’ Drake went on, ‘and where to make ours.’

  ‘It’s just over ten miles from Langley to the Capitol Building,’ Mitchell said. ‘About twenty minutes in normal traffic.’

  Drake nodded. ‘That means twenty minutes of vulnerability.’

  ‘Yeah, but look at the map, Ryan. There are a hundred different routes he could take,’ the former CID officer pointed out. ‘We can’t set up an ambush like this on the fly. Even if we know when he’s moving, we also need to know where.’

  ‘Mitchell’s right,’ Dietrich agreed. ‘We need to prepare our ground in advance for this to work.’

  That much was certainly true, Drake conceded. Taking out an armed Agency motorcade with the resources available would require every advantage they could muster. The attack, when it came, would have to be hard, fast and highly coordinated.

  ‘Holy shit, Dietrich. You’re actually agreeing with me?’ Mitchell quipped.

  ‘Don’t get used to it.’

  ‘We can’t get to Cain, so we make Cain come to us.’ Drake pointed to the map, where the city was bisected by the meandering curve of the Potomac river. ‘No matter which route he takes, he still has to cross the Potomac.’

  Jessica’s eyes lit up. ‘The bridges.’

  He nodded. ‘There are three possible crossing points – the Key Bridge in the north, the Thomas Jefferson Bridge in the centre, and the Fourteenth Street bridges off to the south.’

  ‘What about this one?’ Jessica asked, pointing to one crossing that lay between them. The Arlington Memorial bridge.

  Frost shook her head. ‘Unlikely. The main highway from Langley runs right underneath it,’ she explained, pointing to the road the motorcade was most likely to take. ‘He’d have to double back on himself to cross there.’

  ‘That leaves us with three likely candidates,’ Drake concluded.

  ‘Not bad, Ryan,’ Dietrich agreed. ‘No buildings nearby, not many civilians on the sidewalks. All we’d have to worry about is passing traffic.’

  ‘It narrows down our options, but we still can’t be in three places at once,’ Mitchell reminded them. ‘How do we make him go where we want?’

  Drake looked up at his German comrade. ‘That’s where you come in, Jonas.’

  Fort Totten Waste Disposal Site

  ‘Fucking place stinks,’ Dietrich muttered as he strode across the vehicle storage depot, passing lines of bulky dump trucks, loaders and tracked excavators. All of them silent and motionless in the early morning gloom, waiting for the first shift of the day to arrive.

  ‘It’s a landfill, Jonas. What do you expect?’ Mitchell replied, though she had to admit the stench of rotting garbage hanging in the air was not a pleasant one.

  Dietrich ignored the quip. ‘Ever wonder why we get landed with the shitty jobs?’

  ‘Because Ryan doesn’t like you.’

  ‘The feeling’s mutual,’ he snorted, slowing as he approached one garbage truck in particular, taking note of the license plate in the sickly orange glow of nearby security lights. ‘This is the one.’

  Mitchell nodded. ‘Get on it. I’ll keep watch.’

  Clambering up to the cab, Dietrich tried the door on the off-chance it might have been left unlocked. Stranger things have happened, but not in this case. Instead, Dietrich retrieved his lock picking gear and set to work.

  As he attacked the lock, Mitchell touched her comms unit. ‘Keira, sitrep?’

  On the other side of town, the young technical specialist sat hunched over her computer. Having easily hacked the depot’s surveillance system and routed the feeds to her terminal, she now had a decent view of her two comrades.

  ‘Smile, you’re on candid camera.’

  Mitchell smirked. ‘How’s my hair look?’

  ‘Great. Local security feeds are running on a loop, so they can’t see you on CCTV. Might want to make this quick, though.’

  ‘Copy that.’ She glanced up at Dietrich as he fumbled with the lock. ‘I’d like to say we’ve got our best man on it, but…’

  ‘I heard that,’ Dietrich muttered. Moments
later, the door lock clicked as the lock disengaged. ‘You were saying?’

  She smiled innocently. ‘Never doubted you for a second.’

  Dietrich disappeared from view as he set about stripping the ignition system to hotwire it. Hollywood makes it look easy; in reality, itis much more technical, and more time consuming.

  ‘Hate to interrupt you two lovebirds,’ Frost said, her tone urgent, ‘but you’ve got incoming.’

  ‘Hey, you guys over there!’ a voice called out from further down the line of vehicles. ‘What you doin’? First shift doesn’t start for another hour.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Mitchell said under her breath, pasting on a fake smile as she turned to face the man striding over. He was in his mid-fifties, his close-cropped hair bristling like a scrubbing brush, his stout frame straining against his night watchman’s uniform.

  ‘That’s why we’re here,’ she began, her tone confident and relaxed, almost to the point of boredom. She’d long since learned that if you look and act like you’re supposed to be there, most people will assume that you are. ‘Got a problem with one of your trucks. We’re here to take it in for an overhaul.’

  The night watchman frowned. ‘What kind of problem?’

  Mitchell made a show of inspecting the folder she was carrying, containing some hastily forged work sheets. ‘Says here you’ve got noises and vibrations coming from the front wheels. Probably a worn bearing. Pain in the ass to strip out, that’s why they sent us here early to pick it up.’

  ‘Keep him talking,’ Dietrich’s voice buzzed in her ear. ‘I’m almost done.’

  Approaching, the night watchman looked her up and down. She and Dietrich were dressed in the blue overalls and hard hats of vehicle mechanics.

  ‘That’s weird. Usually they leave an entry in the vehicle logbook,’ he mused, an air of suspicion creeping in now.

  Mitchell shrugged dismissively. ‘Hey, I don’t run things at this end. They tell us to come pick up a truck; here we are.’ She paused. ‘Whatever. Call it in if you want.’

  Hesitating, the man reached for his walkie talkie and put in a call to the security hut. ‘Hey Mike, you got a copy?’

  ‘Go.’

  ‘Yeah, I got a maintenance crew in here to pick up one of our dump trucks. You got anything on the job sheet for today?’

  ‘Wait one…’ A few seconds passed. ‘Nah, nothing on the log.’

  Mitchell felt her heartbeat surge, and thought of the weapon tucked into her work belt behind her back. She could fight her way out of this if need be, but the prospect of killing an innocent man was not an appealing one.

  ‘What about the computer log?’ the watchman asked.

  ‘They’ve seen your face. If this goes to shit, you know what must be done,’ Dietrich’s monotone voice warned her. He was out of sight for now, but she took his meaning well enough. If she didn’t drop the night watchman, he wouldn’t hesitate to do it for her.

  ‘Erm, yeah I got it here,’ the second security man confirmed. ‘One of the garbage trucks is down with bearing problems. A crew’s scheduled to come pick it up before first shift. Guess they forgot to fill in the paperwork.’

  Mitchell relaxed instantly. Frost had managed to insert a fake log entry. The ruse would likely be discovered before too long, but it wouldn’t matter. They had what they needed now.

  She gave the watchman a world-weary shrug. ‘Red tape, am I right?’

  He grinned. ‘You know it. Need any help getting this thing out?’

  In response, Dietrich sat up straight in the driver’s cab and rolled down the window. ‘No, we’re good to go here,’ he said, putting on a fake American accent.

  The watchman seemed momentarily perplexed, but Dietrich fired up the engine before he could question it further.

  ‘Have a good one!’ Mitchell called out over the rumble of the engine, clambering up into the passenger seat.

  Driving away hesitantly as he tried to get a feel for the clutch and transmission, Dietrich glanced at his partner in crime. ‘You’re a hell of a bullshitter, Mitchell.’

  The woman flashed a grin. ‘I learned from the best.’

  Chapter 46

  ‘Once you have the truck, your objective will be to cause as much chaos as possible and block off the southern approaches, leaving Cain with only one option.’

  Drake circled the Key Bridge, better known as the Francis Scott Memorial Bridge, the northernmost of the possible crossing points.

  ‘Once we’ve funnelled Cain’s motorcade into the kill zone, our final objective is to spring the trap,’ he went on. ‘This is where things get interesting.’

  ‘That’s one word for it,’ Frost remarked.

  Giving her a brief glance, Drake carried on. ‘The standard official motorcade for an agency director is three vehicles – one on point, one follow-up car behind, and the main limousine in the centre. That means about a dozen armed agents in total.’

  The CIA director wasn’t quite on the same level as POTUS, who travelled with a veritable army of Secret Service agents, police, White House officials, emergency doctors and dozens of other personnel to protect every aspect of his wellbeing. Nonetheless, it was an important government position, with an appropriately comprehensive security package.

  Springing the trap would be one thing. Making sure Cain was caught in it would be quite another.

  ‘Lot of guns,’ Mitchell mused.

  ‘The guns we can take care of. It’s the limousine that’s the problem.’

  With that, Drake spread a photograph on the table before them. It was a picture of an imposing executive limousine, snapped en route to some official function.

  ‘Say hello to the CIA director’s official vehicle,’ Drake began. ‘Bulletproof glass, run-flat tyres, fully armoured with Kevlar and ceramic plate. This is going to be a tough nut to crack.’

  ‘So what do you suggest?’ Jessica asked.

  ‘A hammer,’ Dietrich replied. Striding over to the panel van parked in the centre of the disused garage, he slid open the side door and hoisted out a large reinforced plastic carry case. After setting it down on the table with a heavy thump, he unlatched the catches holding it closed, glanced at the others like a magician about to perform his trick, and flipped the lid open.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Dietrich. Do you think you could have found something bigger?’ Frost asked, running her eyes over the heavy-calibre sniper rifle set within the case’s foam packing. It was far larger and bulkier than anything she’d handled before.

  Dietrich flashed a sardonic smile. ‘I suppose most things look big to you, little one.’ Hefting the weapon carefully, he lifted it out of its protective case for inspection. ‘This is an AS-50 anti-materiel rifle with integrated scope and collapsible bipod. Accurate up to fifteen hundred metres.’

  The AS-50 was a British weapon released by Accuracy International just a few years earlier, designed to take out armoured personnel carriers, low flying aircraft and other lightly protected vehicles. The concept was based on the anti-tank rifles of the first and second world wars, though the design was distinctly cutting edge, making use of an array of composite materials and recoil-absorbing mechanisms to create a weapon that was both powerful and usable without injuring the operator.

  He held it out to Drake, who accepted the heavy weapon and raised it up to his shoulder, testing the weight and balance. Even without ammunition the rifle weighed a good 30 pounds. Firing it while standing upright would be impossible; this was a weapon that needed to be emplaced in a prepared position.

  ‘Good,’ he decided, lowering the gun.

  ‘Damn right it’s good,’ his colleague snorted. ‘Had to call in a lot of favours to get that.’

  ‘Will it be enough, though?’ Mitchell asked.

  Dietrich flashed a wolf-like grin. ‘It will with these,’ he said, opening an ammunition box and holding up one of the AS-50’s formidable-looking cartridges. ‘Raufoss Mk 211 .50 calibre rounds. Armour-piercing tungsten tip with a high explosive incendiary c
ore. It’s got as much penetrating power as a 20mm round, but only half the size. Theoretically you could shoot down a Hind chopper with one of these.’

  Raufoss rounds were particularly nasty projectiles, able to punch through plate armour before detonating a high explosive incendiary element, killing or severely injuring anyone trapped inside a target vehicle.

  ‘It’ll be enough,’ Drake decided, laying the weapon down.

  The plan was simple. After disabling Cain’s limousine, he would pepper the stationary vehicle with Raufoss rounds, turning the interior into a killing zone. If direct fire or shrapnel didn’t kill Cain, the incendiary element would ignite the car’s interior and burn him alive. If he bailed out, Drake would be standing by to drop him.

  The other two vehicles in the motorcade would, at that point, be irrelevant. Cain and everyone else in the limo would be dead before they could do anything to assist. Such collateral damage would, Drake knew, weigh heavily on his conscience for a long time to come, but it was the only plan that offered a decent prospect of success.

  ‘Where will you be?’ Mitchell asked. ‘Where will you take the shot?’

  Drake turned his eyes to the map once more.

  ‘Here,’ he decided, circling a building on the northern side of the bridge. A well-known landmark amongst university students in the area, the 150-foot-high clock tower provided a perfect field of fire across the bridge below. ‘Georgetown University.’

  A silence descended on the group then as each of them stared at the innocuous-looking building marked on the map. That was where it would happen. That was where Marcus Cain would die.

  Chapter 47

  Islamabad, Pakistan

  Instantly Anya’s mind snapped back into the moment, her anger and desire for vengeance replaced by quick, calculating decision-making. Rushing over to Alex’s laptop, she surveyed the images from the wireless surveillance cameras installed outside.