Sood turned, putting down a soldering iron, and glared at him. Tired and guarded, out of his rich man’s clothes and in an ordinary robe, he looked his age. There was a collapsible bed in one corner of the workshop and Macanay wondered idly if Sood had slept there last night while the warlord had taken the man’s rooms for his own. He had toppled the king from the throne in his own palace, made Sood his servant. That amused Macanay greatly.
‘My wife –’ Sood began.
‘Safe,’ Ramaas said, before he could finish his sentence. ‘For as long as she keeps her silence.’
‘I will tell her.’
Ramaas shook his head. ‘She has already learned that lesson.’ He jutted his chin toward the workbench. ‘The only concern for you now is to make me what I want.’
The bench was littered with colour photographs and complex blueprints, all of them showing every component and element of the Russian nuclear device in exacting detail. At the centre of it all, one of the steel cases sat open beneath a powerful lamp, and inside it there was a cluster of metallic components and hardware that were identical to those shown in the pictures.
‘How many of these do you want?’ Sood said wearily.
‘I’ll tell you when it is enough.’ Ramaas glanced around. ‘They need to be perfect.’
Sood scowled. ‘Without any radioisotopes to forge a reading, it won’t be enough. This will be nothing more than a giant paperweight.’
‘I have that in hand,’ said Ramaas. A container of medical-grade iodine-125 bound for a radiology ward in Malaysia had already been hijacked for exactly that purpose. Ramaas pushed the old man out of the way and examined his handiwork.
‘Where is . . . the original?’ Sood licked his dry lips.
‘I keep it close,’ Ramaas deflected. ‘And secure.’ He studied the old man. ‘Do you need people to assist you with the work?’
‘No!’ Sood snapped. ‘You force me to do this, fine, I will. But let me do it as I see fit!’
Ramaas shook his head and beckoned Macanay. Anticipating violence, the other man smirked and came over, slipping the Uzi off his shoulder. ‘I want to make sure you are not deliberately stalling.’ He nodded to Macanay and started walking. ‘Bring him.’
They left the workshop through a set of glass double doors at the back, and emerged on the wide sun deck that surrounded the mansion’s great oval swimming pool. Wooden panels on elevated frames, bleached white by the desert sun, cast grids of shade over the water.
Five black shapes lay on the bottom of the pool, the bodies of men in dark suits weighted down with chains from the workshop. The filtering system was still labouring to rid the water of the pink cast from the wounds of the corpses. Sood’s security detail put up a good fight, but Guhaad killed them all in a matter of moments, doubtless eager to remind the warlord of his expertise in that area.
Sood grimaced at the sight and looked away. ‘You have already made your point,’ he muttered.
‘I don’t think so.’ A middle-aged Filipino woman – a household maid – was being walked out toward them by Bidar. She blanched as she saw the bodies in the water and fought back the urge to cry. ‘I think you are going to stall. It is the kind of man you are, Jalsa Sood. You will feel the need to be defiant in some way. I want to show you why that is a foolish idea.’ Ramaas nodded toward Bidar, and he shoved the maid in the small of the back.
She cried out and stumbled to the edge of the pool, blinking in the harsh sunlight. Bidar did not hesitate, and shot her in the back of the head with a silenced pistol. A jet of red burst from her mouth, and she spun and tumbled into the deep end.
Sood shouted out a curse and took a step toward the maid, but Macanay pulled him back. ‘Why did you –?’
‘This will happen every day,’ said Ramaas, his tone hardening. ‘Someone will be brought here and executed. The faster you work, the fewer people will die.’
‘I said I would do it!’ Sood shouted. ‘I give you my word! But it will take me several days, even at the fastest pace!’
Ramaas nodded. ‘And so several people will die. One for each day you work. As long as you work to my satisfaction, I will let you pick who dies. If not . . .’ He let his gaze drift up toward the windows of the trophy wife’s bedroom.
Sood jerked out of Macanay’s grip and shook his fist at Ramaas. ‘You are an animal!’ he roared.
‘It upsets you that I kill innocent people?’ The warlord walked to him, his dark and damaged eye glistening. ‘You? How many lives have your bombs claimed, old man? The false ones as well as the real? You judge me?’
‘Why should I do any more for you?’ Sood said, his flash of anger fading. ‘Life is cheap to you. When I give you what you want, I will die and so will Kawal!’
‘You are too useful to murder,’ Ramaas replied, as if he were considering the possibility. ‘The boy, not so much. Consider that.’ He walked away. ‘And work faster,’ he added, throwing the comment over his shoulder. ‘Or don’t. It is your choice.’
*
Malte brought the Peugeot off the main highway past the village of Stare Kiejkuty and on to a narrower two lane road that sliced through the frost-covered Polish countryside. To their right, a double fence of chain link topped by razor wire followed the line of the road for miles. A few metres past the fences, a wall of thin, towering evergreens screened the facility beyond from passing observers.
Marc looked up as a faded yellow-orange sign flashed past, bearing warnings in four different languages that the far side of the barrier was a military base where trespassers would be shot. He adjusted the thick-rimmed spectacles balancing on his nose and turned back to his laptop. ‘Okay, Kara, we’re coming up to the entrance now. Light the blue touchpaper and stand well back.’
‘Copy that, I think,’ said the voice in his inner ear. Kara’s words were coming to him through a contact pad on the end of the arms of the fake eyeglasses. Hair-fine circuits threaded through the frames of the spectacles formed a distributed short-range radio transceiver that gently vibrated signals through his skull. Marc was essentially his own antenna, and the bone-induction communicator meant no-one could overhear the incoming signal. He could respond with subvocalised replies, but it had the unpleasant side effect of making his jaw ache.
He opened and closed his mouth a few times to shake it off. ‘Here we go,’ he said aloud. ‘Commit to the hack . . . now.’ Marc tapped the enter key on his laptop, and the computer sent a wireless ping back to a satellite transmitter in the truck, which was parked outside a motorway service station half a kilometre away. In turn, that ping shot a packet of spoofed data up into space, where it would begin a few milliseconds of bouncing around the world until it homed in on an isolated server farm in Jakarta.
Marc heard the throaty snarl of a motorcycle engine and from the driver’s seat, Malte spoke a terse warning. ‘Company.’
He looked up again. Inside the fence line, a pair of ZiD scrambler bikes in olive drab were paralleling the car, each one ridden by an armed man in black tactical gear with forest-green flashes. On their shoulders each had a white-on-black patch in the shape of a vulture, and the word ALEPH. Marc did his best to appear indifferent to them, but he knew that the patrol riders were already radioing back to the front gate up ahead, warning them that an unknown vehicle was approaching.
Like Rubicon’s Special Conditions Division, Aleph were a private military contractor, but that was where the similarity ended. Far larger than the SCD, and with a reputation for thoroughness, they operated forces in dozens of developing countries and worked with national interests as protective details in places where the real military didn’t want to get involved. The base at Stare Kiejkuty was one such location.
First built for the SS during the Second World War before it fell into the hands of the Red Army, the base eventually became the property of Poland’s intelligence agency in the 1970s and quietly served as a training centre. But after the 9/11 attacks on New York City and the advent of the War on Terr
or, that changed. Hard facts were difficult to come by, but it was known that teams from the CIA had been resident at the facility, apparently using it as a covert prison for unlawfully rendered terror suspects. Public attention finally hit Stare Kiejkuty in the mid-2000s and the black site was shut down.
Or so the world believed. Far from letting it fall into disuse, the CIA had simply chosen to put distance between themselves and the Polish facility. Reopened sometime after 2012, the site was now privately managed by the Aleph PMC. Who paid Aleph and what the current function of the base was were questions a lot harder to find answers to.
Marc checked the progress bar on the laptop as it hit 100 per cent and held his breath. The Aleph Corporation’s core server in Indonesia worked on an architecture he was familiar with from his time at MI6, one with an existing zero-day exploit in its software that was going to get them inside. The data packet that was now infiltrating the distant server would temporarily add two identities to the base’s lists of security-cleared visitors.
‘Clock is running,’ said Kara, seeing the same data stream he did. ‘Estimate ninety minutes to burn. Don’t stop to smell the roses.’
‘Copy that.’ Marc’s throat was dry and his reply came out husky.
The car slowed and Malte turned off the main road and into the approach at the unmarked main gate. Another two guards in Aleph uniform were waiting for them, and one peeled off to approach the car while his colleague held a G36 assault rifle up and at the ready.
Closing the laptop, Marc rolled down the window and offered two high-quality fake IDs to the guard. ‘Agents Cahill and Durant,’ he said, affecting a passable American accent. ‘We’ve got priority clearance to interview an asset here.’
The guard was wearing a digitally enabled headset and he scanned the passes with its built-in camera without replying. From the corner of his eye, Marc saw Malte’s hand drop to the gearstick, ready to slam the Peugeot into reverse if they needed to make a fast exit – but then the guard was nodding, handing back the IDs. The gate opened and the car rolled forward into the treeline. The two ZiD bikes fell into flanking positions as Malte drove up a long, snaking road toward the base proper.
‘You sound Canadian,’ said Lucy, joining the conversation for the first time.
‘Bite me, eh?’ Marc replied, examining the pass cards. His own face looked back at him, with his beard now neatly trimmed and a pair of thick-framed hipster glasses across his nose.
The IDs were good enough to pass muster on a cursory check, but he didn’t want to push their authenticity, no matter how many assurances Delancort had made.
To create brand-new identities would have taken time they didn’t have and opened up more opportunities for something to go amiss. Appropriating the names of existing CIA agents was a smarter play, but it came with a different set of risks. In less than two hours, Aleph’s central computer would send its regular scheduled update to the CIA’s central database and register that two new arrivals had entered Stare Kiejkuty’s Strefa G compound – and then both systems would realise that agents ‘Cahill and Durant’ could not be in two places at once.
Another guard waved the car into a parking zone next to more ZiD patrol bikes and the blocky shape of a Bearcat APC. Nearby, Aleph contractors walked the perimeter with dogs, constantly on watch – but they were looking outwards, not inwards. It was the one weakness in the facility’s set-up that Marc had been able to determine – Strefa G had originally been built to keep people from getting in, not out, and everything that had been retro-fitted to it to make the place a prison was built on that flawed foundation.
Getting behind the fence had been straightforward enough. Now the hard part was beginning.
Lucy must have known what Marc was thinking. ‘Simple in-and-out,’ she said over the comms. ‘Remember, we don’t need to make good on anything here, so promise that asshole whatever he wants as long as you get the intel.’
Malte glanced over his shoulder and raised an eyebrow. ‘Your show,’ he said.
Marc nodded and blew out a breath. ‘Not a problem,’ he lied.
*
Although Jadeed Amarah had no clock, no way to reckon the passing of the days apart from mandated times for sleeping and eating, he had a grasp of the regularity of his interrogations. At first they had been daily occurrences, soon after they had flown him through the night to this cold and unknown place. Then the interval slipped to months and finally to nothing.
He bore the scars that his refusal to speak had earned him, carried them as if they were his badge of honour. The Americans and their lackeys had done much in their attempts to break him, but he had held true.
This was the lie he told himself. The fact was, he had talked. But nothing Jadeed had revealed was of any consequence to his brothers and mentors among Al Sayf. He offered up a few morsels of information, but they were falsehoods one and all – part of the group’s training was to give each of their warriors a cluster of lies to tell any interrogators, blind leads and fake facts that would waste the enemy’s time and energy.
The other things he had told them, the real things, he salted in among the lies. The truth he told about the men who had betrayed his brethren, this cadre of Western elitists who called themselves ‘the Combine’. He had no qualms about doing so. He owed them nothing.
It had been the Combine who promised Al Sayf their greatest victory, who had provided them with the tools to set the streets of America running red with blood. It had been the Combine who ultimately failed them, betrayed them. His hate for them was boundless. Those men were still free while Jadeed rotted here.
After the CIA had taken him, he resigned himself to becoming a martyr, at first believing that he could be a potent symbol in his incarceration. Perhaps, a figurehead that others might rally around and in whose name the war might be fought. But that hope of bitter triumph had faded against the harsh light of cold reality.
He was suffering the worst fate a revolutionary could experience. He had been erased from the world, his deeds unwritten and ignored. Amarah was a forgotten man, rotting here, valueless even to his enemies and . . . Dare he think it? Forsaken by his commanders?
So when the guards came for him, it was a shock. Hidden behind their masks, the figures in black marched him to an interview room where two white men were waiting, both of them dressed in suits. One, with glasses and a beard, sat in front of a laptop computer and looked as if he would rather have been anywhere else. The other was expressionless, moving to stand behind Jadeed as he sat down. The second man’s presence was supposed to unsettle him, but Jadeed had played this game before. He rested his hands on his lap, the metal cuffs uncomfortable about his wrists.
As the masked guards left the room, Jadeed looked around. At length, his gaze settled on the bearded man and he cocked his head, drawing up some defiance. ‘What is it that your worthless nation wants of me today, American?’
The man glanced at his wristwatch. ‘Actually, I’m here to ask you what you want.’
*
Marc kept his hands flat on the table between them, partly to avoid any hint of nervousness, and partly to stop them from tightening into fists. Across from him, a man who had led a group of teenagers-turned-weapons into a crowd of thousands of innocents sat indolently glaring, a sneer playing on his lips.
Marc had seen first-hand the horrors that Amarah and his cohorts in Al Sayf were capable of, and his blood chilled to imagine how much more damage they could have done, had he and Ekko Solomon’s team failed to stop them a year earlier. It galled him to think that this terrorist could still be alive after everything his cadre had been responsible for, but the CIA had made good on their promise to bury Amarah in a deep, dark hole and make the world forget he had never existed.
As much as the Combine, Al Sayf shared the blame for taking the lives of people close to him, and for a moment Marc entertained the fantasy of launching himself across the table to wrap his hands around the terrorist’s throat and choke the life from h
im.
Something of that intention must have flickered in his eyes, because the prisoner blinked and drew back, pulling his orange jumpsuit straight. ‘You have taken much from me,’ Amarah said, after a moment. ‘It will take for ever to repay it all.’
‘Let’s start small. How about a better cell?’ Marc concentrated on letting a change wash over him. On the way to Poland, he had rehearsed this conversation a dozen times before realising that he was approaching it wrongly. A lifetime ago, it had been Marc Dane sitting on the wrong side of an interrogation as men from his own agency had pushed him to admit guilt for a crime he had not committed. Now he reached back to that memory and took on the same tone, the same arrogant manners that had been used against him. ‘Maybe we can get you a nice pot plant.’
Jadeed frowned and spread his fingers. ‘I want my misbaha. They were taken from me and I want them back.’
‘Prayer beads.’ Kara’s voice was quiet in his ear. ‘Like a rosary . . .’
‘That can be arranged.’ Marc saw the opening and pressed on. ‘And more besides, if you’re willing to assist us with something.’
‘I’ve already told you every story I know about the Combine,’ Amarah snapped.
‘Tell me a different story,’ Marc insisted. ‘One about how you killed a man called Jalsa Sood in Libya.’
Amarah was momentarily wrong-footed and he gave a shrug to cover it. ‘I have removed many impediments in the course of the work.’
‘Except you didn’t that time. You didn’t murder Sood with a car bomb, like you said you did.’ Marc opened his laptop to show Amarah the digital photos of the bombing’s aftermath. ‘A bunch of ordinary people walking to market – you killed them in the blast zone. And some unlucky stiff who was probably paid to drive Sood’s car. But not the man himself. You let the Baker fake his own death.’ When he said the nickname, Amarah’s failure to hide his reaction to it told Marc he was dead on.
Exile Page 21
