Betrayal

by Will Jordan

  The look of absolute, cold-blooded hatred in her eyes was enough to give even Drake pause for thought. He didn’t doubt for a moment that she meant what she said. And with the resources of the FSB to call upon, she was more than capable of making it happen.

  ‘Speaking of which, how did you find this place?’ she went on.

  ‘We backtracked traffic-camera footage of the freeway attack,’ he said, deciding to leave out the part about his meeting with Anya. ‘Lucky for you, we’ve got some good people working for us.’

  She took another sip of her coffee, surveying him in thoughtful silence for a long moment. ‘And you, Agent Drake? How is it that a British CIA man finds himself rescuing hostages on American soil?’

  Drake sighed. ‘Long story,’ he said truthfully. ‘The short version is, my job is to find people who go missing. I didn’t expect to be doing it on my way home from work tonight, but that’s life.’

  His brief explanation seemed to satisfy her, for now at least.

  ‘There is one more thing,’ Miranova said, her voice softening a little now. ‘I did not get a chance to say this to you before, but … thank you. All of you. If you had not found me …’

  She trailed off, seeing no need to finish that line of thought. Drake wasn’t too inclined to ponder it either. Instead he simply nodded acknowledgement, glad that something good had at least come out of today.

  Beyond the open van doors, O’Rourke and two of his teammates emerged from the lock-up, wary of contaminating the crime scene before forensics could analyse it. In reality they just wanted to get away from the gory spectacle within. O’Rourke reached into his trouser pocket for a pack of cigarettes, likely needing something to take the edge off.

  Miranova was apparently of like mind, and stared at him until she made eye contact. ‘Can I have one?’

  Without saying a word, he tossed her the pack, then fished a lighter from his pocket.

  ‘My first cigarette in eight years,’ she said as he lit it for her. She took a long, slow draw and breathed deeply, managing to hold it a few seconds before coughing a little.

  Drake couldn’t blame her. She’d earned it today.

  ‘Yeah, well, you never really quit,’ O’Rourke acknowledged as he lit up his own. ‘You just go a while between smokes.’

  Further off, they heard Cartwright call out to one of his comrades. ‘Hey, Charlie, I can’t see shit in here. Switch those overhead lights on, will you?’

  Drake was just turning back towards Miranova when a blinding flash suddenly illuminated the drab storage yard around them, followed a moment later by a thunderous explosion that knocked them both flat on the rain-slick concrete.

  Stunned and half-deafened by the blast, Drake shook his head and looked over at what remained of the lock-up. Smoke and flames from the Chevy’s fuel tank were billowing from the shattered roof, impervious to the rain that was still falling steadily all around them. The heat was causing his skin to prickle at such close range.

  The lock-up must have been rigged with explosives linked into the mains lighting circuit. The moment they’d flicked the switch, it had set them off. Only sheer luck had found Drake and the others outside when the bomb went off.

  Beside him, O’Rourke and his two teammates were rising unsteadily to their feet, staring in disbelief at the raging inferno that was all that remained of the storage lock-up, the van, Demochev and their unlucky comrade.

  Drake turned away, preferring not to look at it. Only now was he starting to realise what they were up against, the war they had become embroiled in. This evening was rapidly going from bad to worse, and he had no idea where it was going to end.

  Samantha McKnight was lying curled up on her living-room couch, a half-empty glass of white wine and a weighty leather-bound copy of Dostoyevsky’s Demons resting side by side on the coffee table before her. Outside, wind-driven rain and sleet lashed against the window of her apartment, the cold winter night making her all the more glad of the warm, snug apartment she now called home.

  The book was a gift from her grandfather; part of the complete set that lurked menacingly on the top shelf of her bookcase. An avid reader, he had given her the daunting stack of books on her sixteenth birthday, making her promise to read them all. He hadn’t lived to see it, but she was slowly making good on her promise.

  Every holiday season she took another crack at them, slogging through the heavy tomes with the dogged persistence of a marathon runner. It was one of the few times of year when she actually had the time and the motivation for such things.

  Today, however, neither the wine nor the book held her attention. She was focused instead on the TV on the other side of her living room, and the ongoing news coverage of the sniper attack on the DC freeway. Apparently an explosion had been heard at a storage facility on the east side of the city, believed to be linked to the sniper attack.

  She was just reaching for her glass when her cellphone started ringing. Abandoning the wine, she raised her head to glance at the caller ID and decide if it was a call worth taking.

  It was.

  She stretched out and picked up the phone, hitting the receive-call button. ‘Ryan,’ she began. ‘What can I do for you?’

  Her greeting wasn’t entirely effusive, and they both knew why. McKnight had left behind her dangerous but very worthy role defusing unexploded ordinance in Afghanistan to come and work for the Shepherd programme. She had relocated to DC, bought an apartment here, moved her entire life halfway around the world, and she had done much of it because of him. And yet she had barely seen him in the three months she’d been working here.

  One or both of them had often been out on active operations, making it difficult to meet up, but she’d sensed there was more to it than that. She felt as if Drake had been actively avoiding her these past few months, always finding an excuse not to see her.

  Much as she hated to admit it, she was beginning to wonder if she’d made a mistake coming here, and that doubt had soon manifested itself as frustration towards Drake. If he hadn’t wanted her here in the first place, why let her go through all the upheaval of switching jobs and moving home?

  ‘Sam, I’m sorry to call so late,’ he began, his voice urgent. ‘I need your help.’

  ‘Funny how that works, huh?’ she said before she could stop herself. Immediately she regretted both the tone and the words, not that they weren’t deserved.

  Drake hesitated, stung by the recrimination in her voice. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at length, his tone suggesting he was apologising for more than just the inconvenient hour of his phone call. ‘But I wouldn’t call if it wasn’t important.’

  That got her attention. This was no social call – he was very much in work mode. But wherever he was calling from, there was a lot of ambient noise in the background.

  She frowned. ‘Why can I hear police sirens?’

  ‘You been watching the news?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘There you go,’ he said, seeing little need to elaborate. ‘I’m at a storage facility in Capitol Heights. Or what’s left of one.’

  She glanced at the TV, and the ongoing coverage of the sniper attack, and immediately made the connection with the reported explosion on the east side of the city. She felt a knot of apprehension tighten in her stomach.

  ‘You okay?’ she asked, regretting her earlier censure even more now.

  ‘Not a scratch,’ he assured her, much to her relief. ‘But other people haven’t been so lucky. I could use your help down here.’

  It didn’t take a genius to see why. Samantha’s area of expertise was explosive-based weaponry; everything from field artillery to surface-to-air missiles to improvised bombs. If a device had just detonated down there, it was a safe bet that Drake wanted to know more about it – where it had come from, who might have manufactured it and where they could be found.

  ‘I need a full forensic sweep of the scene. Explosive residue, fragments of the detonator … anything that might tell us—’

/>   ‘You want to carry on telling me my job?’ she asked impatiently.

  A moment or two of uncomfortable silence greeted her.

  She managed to force calm into her voice as she continued. ‘Before we go any further, you mind telling me what the hell you’ve gotten yourself mixed up in now?’

  ‘Long story. The short version is that I want to know who was behind this attack, and why. And I need those answers discreetly.’

  She frowned. ‘This is off the shelf?’

  Calling her up on a Friday evening to summon her to the scene of an explosion was one thing, but doing it without any kind of sanction from the Agency was quite another.

  ‘For now,’ he admitted. ‘Look, I’m asking for your help, Sam. I need someone I can trust to work on this, and believe me that list is pretty short these days.’

  McKnight hesitated. That was enough to cut through any interpersonal issues she might have had. If he was asking for her professional assistance, she wouldn’t refuse.

  ‘Fine,’ she conceded. ‘What kind of device are we talking about?’

  She was starting to wish she hadn’t drunk that glass of wine earlier. It wasn’t enough to intoxicate her, but the alcohol had slowed her normally sharp analytical mind at a time when she needed to be on the ball.

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine right now. All I know is that it went boom, and it was powerful enough to destroy a storage lock-up and everything inside.’

  Which told her nothing at all, she thought with the faint exasperation of an expert dealing with a layman. The only way she’d find anything of value was to get down there herself and survey the site.

  Rising from the couch, she looked out the rain-lashed window at the distant lights of central DC glimmering in the darkness of the winter night.

  ‘Okay, give me the address,’ she said at last.

  She heard a faint exhalation on the other end. ‘Thanks. I mean that.’

  ‘Don’t thank me yet,’ she advised. ‘I might find nothing at all. Either way, I expect to be told exactly what this is all about before the day’s over.’

  ‘You will be. I promise.’

  McKnight glanced down at the heavy leather-bound book on her coffee table. It seemed Demons might have to wait until next Christmas.

  She could live with that.

  Chapter 10

  CIA Headquarters, Langley

  Even if Drake hadn’t been personally involved in the events in central DC, a quick stroll down the corridors at Langley would have told him something serious was going down. Analysts hurried back and forth, some clutching sheets of paper hot off the printer, others speaking into their cellphones with hushed, urgent voices. All wore the same look of quiet panic that takes hold as a big organisation wakes up to a crisis unfolding around it.

  Drake now found himself in Franklin’s office on the third floor of the New Headquarters Building, having been summoned there shortly after arriving back at CIA headquarters to give his summary of events in central DC.

  He had little in the way of good news for his friend.

  ‘In short, they knew we’d track him down to that lock-up,’ Drake said, taking a deep pull of his coffee. ‘They left Demochev with that message carved into his chest because they wanted someone to find it, but they also didn’t want any useful evidence falling into our hands.’

  And in that respect, they had apparently succeeded. Several pounds of high explosive combined with an almost-full tank of fuel had done their work well, incinerating the contents of the storage lock-up and any evidence they might have yielded. There was little left for the FBI forensics teams to examine.

  ‘So it seems,’ Franklin agreed. Rather than sitting behind the polished mahogany expanse of his desk, he was standing by the window that overlooked the darkened woodland beyond the Agency perimeter. Drake knew why – back injuries sustained in the line of duty years earlier now left him with painful muscle cramps if he stayed seated too long. ‘And now we’ve got a major international incident to deal with. You can imagine our counterparts in Moscow aren’t too pleased with how tonight panned out.’

  Which brought them neatly on to something that had been bothering Drake ever since he’d seen those diplomatic licence plates.

  ‘What was that FSB delegation doing in Washington in the first place?’

  His friend glanced at him over his shoulder. ‘Believe it or not, they were on their way here, to Langley. They were supposed to attend a conference on strengthening cooperation between our two agencies. Joining forces in the War on Terror, all that good stuff.’ He snorted with grim amusement. ‘You can imagine how this looks – they spend five minutes on American soil and it turns into a bad day in Baghdad. And less than three miles from the White House to boot. The FBI, the Secret Service … they’re going apeshit over this.’

  Drake couldn’t blame them. An attack of this scale in the nation’s capital was enough to ruin anyone’s day, particularly if foreign diplomats were involved.

  ‘And all because of one woman,’ Franklin added with a pointed look.

  ‘Anya’s a soldier, not a terrorist,’ Drake said, refusing to countenance such thoughts. ‘She would never kill innocent people.’

  Franklin leaned forward. ‘You sure about that, Ryan? She’s a rogue Agency operative who spent four years in solitary confinement in a Russian jail. She could very well be psychologically unbalanced. At the very least she has a clear grudge against the Russian government, and the training and experience needed to act on it. And you said yourself she was at the sniping point. Think how this would look to anyone else.’

  It was difficult to argue with that reasoning. Anya was certainly a ruthless and highly trained operative who wasn’t afraid to use both of those attributes when they were needed, but even he had difficulty believing she would stage an attack on a freeway packed with innocent civilians for no reason.

  ‘I know how it must look,’ he conceded. ‘But Anya’s no murderer – I’d bet my life on that. Whatever her part in this, she must have her reasons.’

  ‘And she hasn’t contacted you before today?’ Franklin asked. ‘She hasn’t made any attempt to send you a message or communicate in any way?’ Seeing Drake’s look, he added, ‘You know I have to ask.’

  Drake shook his head. He’d heard nothing from Anya since his return from Afghanistan four months ago. There had been no sightings of her, no activity, nothing. She had dropped off the face of the earth.

  ‘Does anyone else know she was there?’ he couldn’t help asking.

  Franklin raised an eyebrow. ‘You mean, has Cain found out?’

  Marcus Cain, the newly appointed deputy director, had once been Anya’s mentor, her handler and her sponsor within the Agency. But their relationship had long since turned sour, and the two former comrades were now bitter enemies. Cain’s restless attention was always on finding the enigmatic woman, and he had formidable resources to call upon.

  ‘Not yet,’ Franklin continued. ‘But don’t expect it to stay that way for long. Anya crossed a line tonight – the kind of line you don’t come back from. She killed innocent people, she took part in the abduction and execution of a major player in the Russian intelligence service, and she damn near caused a major international incident. Whatever she was before today, she’s now a liability. To the Agency, and to us.’

  ‘So what are you saying? We just hang her out to dry and be done with it?’ Drake challenged him. ‘Is that what she deserves?’

  ‘What she deserves?’ Franklin repeated. ‘Ryan, you’re lucky to still be breathing after what she’s put you through, never mind walking around as a free man. But sooner or later your luck’s going to run out. What Anya deserves doesn’t come into it. When are you going to realise that?’

  Drake hesitated, stung by his friend’s cold detachment. Somehow he was reminded of how Mason must have felt standing in Drake’s office as his hopes of resuming his career were crushed.

  ‘We need her. She’s the only one who can end this
.’

  For the past eighteen months Drake and his companions had lived with a sword hanging above their heads; a sword wielded by none other than Marcus Cain. It was clear the CIA deputy director would like nothing better than to bring it down on Drake’s neck, and sooner or later he’d find a way to do it.

  Only Anya possessed the knowledge and the resources to stop him. She was the key, the thread by which their fate hung. If they lost her, they lost everything.

  Franklin shook his head, chuckling with grim amusement. ‘You still don’t get it, do you? There’ll never be an end to this. Anya’s doing exactly what she was trained to do – build trust and dependency, manipulate her targets, expose their vulnerability, get them to take risks and sacrifice themselves for her. You go after someone like that, and you’ll wind up dead or in prison just like she was. That’s the only end waiting for you, and I’ll be damned if you’re taking me down with you.’

  At that moment, Drake knew he’d heard enough. It was as if something had snapped inside him, as if some dam had been breached and all the pent-up frustration and longing and guilt it had been holding back was unleashed.

  ‘You wouldn’t even have your precious career if it wasn’t for her, Dan. Let’s not bullshit each other – we both know how you landed this promotion, and it wasn’t through hard work and patience. What would happen if Anya exposed Cain for the lying piece of shit he is? Would he drag you down with him?’ he asked, his eyes narrowing. ‘Don’t give me that crap about trying to look out for me. This is about one thing: saving your own arse.’

  He’d gone too far, and he knew it right away. Slamming his fist down on the desk, Franklin rose up from his chair, ignoring the pain in his back as he glared at Drake. He was visibly struggling to contain his fury, but there was more than just that. There was pain and sadness in his eyes at his friend’s accusation.

  ‘As your boss, I should have you relieved of duty for that,’ he said at length, his voice now dangerously cold and clinical. ‘As your friend, I should beat the shit out of you. So you tell me now, which one will it be?’