‘You insult me,’ said the terrorist. ‘When the sword falls, all who meet its edge are taken.’
‘It would make you look weak in the eyes of your extremist cousins, wouldn’t it? If it were known your group took money to fake a death instead of actually doing the deed. You were supposed to kill him, but he bought you off.’ Marc glared at the other man, his temper rising. ‘Tell me, who made the deal with Sood? Was it you, wanting to earn a little more cash on the side? Or was it your noble commander, Omar Khadir? Did you use the money to fund the bombing you supervised in Barcelona?’
‘Dane.’ Lucy’s voice resonated in his skull, a clear warning in her tone. ‘Stay on point.’
Amarah’s confusion slowly shifted, becoming annoyance and suspicion. ‘There is no way that the Central Intelligence Agency would suspect that Jalsa Sood is anything other than a corpse. We were thorough.’ And then a slow smile emerged on the prisoner’s face. ‘So you are not CIA. I should have guessed that the moment I saw you.’ He leaned toward Marc and behind him, Malte unfolded his arms, ready for violence if it came. ‘Yes. I know who you are.’
*
‘Oh, shit.’ Kara unconsciously backed away from the monitor registering the audio pickup from Dane’s glasses. ‘He’s caught us? How did that –?’
Lucy shot her a hard look and put her finger to her lips. ‘Wait.’ At that moment, she wanted very much to have eyes in that interrogation room as well as ears, but they were taking a risk as it was sending an unauthorised radio signal out of the Strefa G compound. A video stream would have meant more bandwidth, and more chance that it could be detected or jammed outright.
She could hear Dane breathing steadily. ‘Get ready to abort,’ Lucy told him. Suddenly the air in the back of the truck was close and stifling.
‘You reckon so?’ Lucy couldn’t be sure if Marc was answering her or responding to Amarah.
‘Did your masters send you to kill me?’ demanded the terrorist. ‘To silence me? How will you explain that away? A suicide?’
All at once, a critical moment of understanding flashed through Lucy’s mind. Kara was right, Amarah wasn’t bluffing, and he had seen through the false flag they were flying – but more importantly, he was making a serious mistake in the process. ‘He thinks you’re with the Combine.’
Over the audio link, Lucy heard something like a wry snort. ‘That’s what you think?’ Marc dropped his false accent and continued. ‘I’m sorry to tell you, you’re not that important to us. But what you know about Jalsa Sood is. So talk. If you want to live.’
‘Oh, shit,’ Kara repeated. ‘Well, I guess we’re off-book now.’
*
Amarah turned around and glared at Malte. ‘Nothing would give me more pleasure than to watch you leave here with empty hands.’
Marc watched his bravado falter a little, even as he spoke. A year in solitary confinement would do that to you, he thought.
‘What do you want with Sood?’ continued the terrorist.
He considered the fate he wanted for Amarah and his cohorts. ‘We’ll do what you failed to.’ Marc found it surprisingly simple to slip behind the mask of a Combine operative. It was a simple matter of remembering to subtract any humanity from every word he spoke. ‘Tell me where he is.’
‘Your masters like to make deals,’ Amarah said accusingly. ‘That is all the world is to them, like a game to be played.’ He shook his head. ‘We will make a deal, then. I will deliver Jalsa Sood to you. I know where he is. But it must be done in person. I know his new face. I will take you to him, in exchange for my freedom.’
‘You’re a prisoner in a black-site holding facility surrounded by armed guards, dogs and fences . . . and you want us to bust you out? Right now?’
Amarah nodded briskly. ‘You asked me what I wanted. I am telling you.’
Over the other man’s shoulder, Malte was glaring at Marc and shaking his head.
‘Pull the plug,’ said Lucy. ‘We’re not set up for anything more than stealth infil and exfil, and the clock is down to less than an hour now. A brig break is a no-can-do.’
‘All right,’ said Marc, ignoring Lucy’s warning. ‘We’ll have to improvise.’
‘Are you out of your damned –?’
He took off the glasses and put them down on the table, pinching the bridge of his nose. If they walked out of here with nothing, then any chance to track down Ramaas and his bomb was gone. Marc snapped his fingers at Malte. ‘Give me your phone.’
The driver warily complied. ‘What are you doing?’ he said quietly.
‘Like I said.’ Marc worked the laptop’s keyboard. ‘Improvising.’
*
‘He’s not responding,’ said Kara.
‘Obviously,’ Lucy shot back. ‘Damn. He’s going to wreck the whole operation.’
‘Actually, I think he’s trying to salvage it . . .’
Lucy glared at the other woman. ‘Don’t take his side.’ She switched channels on the headset she was wearing, keying into a different encrypted frequency. ‘Static calling Sky, ears on?’
‘Sky, responding.’ Ari Silber’s voice sounded as if it was reaching them down a tunnel of distortion. ‘Go ahead, Static. I’m guessing there’s a problem?’
Lucy didn’t bother to tell Silber he was right. ‘We need to move up the timetable. How soon can you be on loiter?’
‘Twenty minutes and change, if I don’t spare the horses. Is that what we’re doing? Because if I commit, there’s no do-over.’
‘I am well aware,’ Lucy replied, her lips thinning. ‘Start your approach now, but be ready for an abort. In case this blows up in our goddamn faces.’
‘Understood, Static. Sky out.’
She looked up and found Kara watching here. ‘So what do we do now? I mean, the plan was to ditch the truck and –’
Lucy cut her off. ‘It’s out of our hands now.’
*
Dane pressed the Rubicon-issue smartphone back into Malte’s hand and he looked down at it. Framed by featureless black anodised metal, the handset’s screen now displayed a simple GPS direction finder and a scrolling text block that read FOLLOW ME. Dane had connected a short USB cable to a port on the bottom of the device, and dangled it freely like a stubby tail.
Malte eyed it, and moved the phone around experimentally. The dart-shaped GPS indicator moved with him, keeping its target bearing.
Dane shot a look at Amarah, then typed something into his keyboard. There was a pinging sound and the scrolling text changed to DO WHAT I TELL YOU. Malte scowled. He disliked the Englishman’s attitude and he certainly wasn’t happy about putting his life in Dane’s hands, but no other option was open to them, apart from admitting defeat and exfiltrating before their false identities expired.
Dane banged on the door of the interrogation room and the Aleph guard outside opened it. ‘My colleague needs to make a call,’ he said.
At length, Malte gave a nod and left the room, walking out into the corridor. The dart shifted, pointing him back toward the main entrance to the Strefa G compound. GO OUTSIDE, it instructed. He sighed and started moving.
*
Marc glanced at Amarah once more, and then went back to his computer. The prisoner lounged back in his chair, glaring at him. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.
‘You want out. I’m making that happen. Sit there, shut up and let me concentrate.’ Inside a partitioned ghost sector of the laptop’s hard drive, Marc had hidden a dozen files showing internal schematics of the Stare Kiejkuty facility. They dated back to the mid-eighties, part of a packet of data stolen from the Russian military by anti-government hacktivists who had been more than happy to sell them for a princely sum of bitcoin to any anonymous buyer.
Marc’s fixation with operational prep bordered on the obsessive, and it was part of the reason he had been so good at his job with MI6’s OpTeam programme. His changed circumstances forced him to lose some of that single-mindedness, but at times it still came through – and now he was glad that he
had gone the extra mile in studying every possible aspect of the facility.
The Strefa G compound was close to the base’s administration block, a few hundred metres away across an open parade ground that doubled as a helipad. Having paired his computer to Malte’s smartphone through an encrypted wireless link, he could now map a series of digital waypoints directly to the other man’s device. A video window in the corner of his screen showed blurry images from the phone’s internal camera, the picture bouncing as Malte held it tightly in his hand as he walked.
Marc became aware of Amarah staring fixedly at him. ‘What?’
The terrorist leaned closer. ‘The Combine failed us in America. If it happens again, I’ll kill you.’
‘Don’t throw your weight around just yet, mate.’ The tension Marc was feeling expressed itself in a flash of annoyance. ‘You don’t even know what bloody country you’re in. Without us, you’re stuck here.’ He turned back to the keyboard and issued the next set of instructions.
*
The arrow pointed Malte toward a low two-storey building with the word Administracja written across the entrance. He kept his pace quick and steady, projecting the impression of someone who knew exactly what he was doing, even if that was far from the truth. Malte wasn’t comfortable being treated like an avatar in some game, walked around by the invisible hand of a player sitting out of harm’s way behind a keyboard.
Inside the building’s entrance, an Aleph guard was standing sentry in front of double doors that led deeper inside. The arrow directed him to proceed through them and into the corridor beyond. Malte found the false identity pass and handed it to the guard, just as the phone gave off a low ping.
PASS WON’T WORK THERE, said the text box.
‘Perkele,’ Malte cursed under his breath. The guard was already reaching for a collapsible baton on his belt and saying something negative.
The phone pinged again. PUNCH GUY, it suggested helpfully. TAKE HIS.
Malte let reflex take over and he threw a lightning-fast palm strike into the guard’s solar plexus with enough force to make him choke and drop the baton. With his other hand, the driver grabbed a handful of the contractor’s hair and pushed him down to meet his upcoming knee. The guard’s nose broke with a wet crunch and he staggered back, dazed. Malte stepped in, slipping his hands and arms around the man’s throat. He squeezed him into a sleeper hold and counted off the seconds until the guard went slack.
Malte dropped the unconscious man out of sight behind the reception desk, and snatched the guard’s pass from its lanyard, moving quickly through the doors.
A corridor extended away from him, lined with offices and storage rooms. Malte glanced at the phone and the message changed again.
A334.
At first he wondered if Dane had mistyped, but then Malte noticed that each door had a four-character code stencilled on it. He started forward, scanning left and right.
Behind him, a side door opened without warning and another guard in Aleph’s black-and-green uniform appeared, catching sight of Malte. He called out, closing the distance between them in two quick steps.
The guard got a hand on to Malte’s shoulder, but even as it tightened, the driver was dropping and pivoting. Malte swung his arm down and put an axe-blow strike into the middle of the guard’s forearm. Bone broke cleanly and tore a yell of pain from the man. He tried to disengage, but Malte grabbed the side of his head and slammed it into the wall, once, twice.
The driver finished him off with a hard cross that dropped the guard to the floor, his body slumping down against door A334. Malte kicked it open and dragged the injured man inside before anyone else could appear.
The room was noisy with the humming of air conditioners and the constant clicking of electronics. A quartet of computer servers stood before him, red and yellow LEDs blinking in complex but meaningless patterns along their flanks.
He held up the smartphone to his face as it chimed again. CONNECT PHONE + CABLE TO A SERVER, it told him. THEN EXFIL.
Malte weighed the device in his hand, considering what he was letting himself in for if he obeyed. Finally, he pushed aside his doubts and put the phone atop the nearest computer stack. There was a socket close by and he fitted the USB connector into it, uncertain what was supposed to happen next. The phone’s screen instantly blinked black and a torrent of programming text scrolled across it.
The lights on the front of the server turned crimson, and Malte heard the ringing of distant alarms.
*
Contact.
Marc allowed himself a grin. It was starting to look as though this might actually work. In a few seconds, Malte’s smartphone bridged the distance between Marc’s computer and the air-gapped systems of the base’s main servers. He fired off a bombardment of pre-programmed intrusion macros that landed like the digital equivalent of heat-seeking missiles, blowing open a hole in the mainframe’s security firewalls that he could exploit. It was a crude, blunt-trauma hack that would make a mess of things, and Marc had already set up a timed self-destruct subroutine to make the phone short-circuit its own battery and catch alight. But before that happened, he gatecrashed the base’s emergency functions and threw the virtual switches on every fire-warning subsystem in Strefa G. From the outside, the black site would have been a tough nut to crack for any covert-ops strike team – but from within, the protection was thinner and there were enough exploits open for Marc to cause chaos.
He paused to button his jacket and turn up the collar. Amarah gave him a quizzical look. Marc tapped the enter key and his reasons immediately became clear, as fire alarms started shrieking and the overhead sprinkler system gushed into life.
Amarah recoiled in shock at the sudden indoor downpour. Marc was on his feet, snapping the ruggedised laptop closed as the guard burst in. Outside, water was sluicing down the walls and the alarms were deafening.
The guard had a pistol in his hand and a hard cast to his expression that told Marc he would shoot first and ask questions later.
He jabbed his finger at Amarah and shouted at the guard. ‘What the hell is going on? Get him back to his cell!’ The guard came forward and grabbed a handful of the prisoner’s jumpsuit, hauling him up out of the chair. He took his eyes off Marc long enough for him to move around the table and plant a savage kick in the back of the man’s right knee.
The guard crumpled and fell to the concrete floor, losing the gun as he went down. The weapon spun away across the water pooling beneath the table and Marc stooped to go after it.
Amarah rocketed out of his chair, seizing the chance to inflict violence having spent so many months unable to do so. His hands still cuffed together, he punched the Aleph guard in the face and then dove on him, using the frame of his handcuffs to press into the man’s neck and choke the life from him. The guard fought back, but Amarah’s pent-up hate was overwhelming him. Colour faded from the guard’s face.
Marc came back with the guard’s HK45 pistol and aimed it at Amarah. ‘Get off him!’ He shouted to be heard over the sound of the alarms. ‘We don’t have time for this!’
Amarah slammed the guard’s head against the wet floor with a splash and got back to his feet. ‘If you don’t have the stomach to kill him, let me do it.’
‘Get out.’ Marc grabbed Amarah and shoved him into the corridor. He aimed the gun in the direction of the semi-conscious man and fired twice. ‘Happy now? Go on, move!’ He forced him away and into the sheeting drizzle before the terrorist could see that both rounds had gone into the wall.
Keeping the other man in front of him, Marc marched Amarah swiftly along the hallway, holding the gun high against the prisoner’s shoulder. They passed access doors to more cells where the handful of other detainees in the black site were already being held in lockdown, and soon emerged in an open junction where three corridors met at a heavy metal security gate. The door was already locked down, and four more Aleph troopers were gathering there. Soaked through, they sported M4 carbines and hawkish glares.
‘How do you plan to get by them?’ Amarah hissed out of the side of his mouth.
‘Shut it,’ Marc retorted, then called out to the guards. ‘I got this one, but something’s going down in the cells.’ He shoved Amarah again, this time toward a branching corridor. ‘I’m gonna secure this prisoner,’ he added.
‘This passage doesn’t lead out,’ Amarah snarled.
‘I know.’ Marc marched him through another set of doors and they emerged out of the sprinkler downpour and into the bitter cold of the exercise yard. ‘Keep moving.’
Amarah ignored the order and halted, gesturing at a double stand of tall electrified fencing that walled in the yard on three sides. ‘Do you want me to dig, Britisher?’ He spat the words at him, starting to shiver. ‘Or am I to be shot trying to escape?’
Marc considered the weight of the pistol in his hand, and for a moment he wanted to make that happen. It would be easy to do. Two shots, centre mass. Watch Amarah go down to the dirt and bleed out. He deserved no better.
But that would solve nothing, help nobody. So help me, I’ll put you right back in here when we’re done with you, he vowed.
Marc shook off the moment. ‘Did you forget we have a bloke on the other side of that fence?’ He heard the low, heavy growl of a turbo diesel engine and turned to see a black slab of metal bounce up the grass verge beyond and collide with the compound’s barrier.
The big Bearcat APC smashed through both fences in a shower of sparks, the sheets of chain link rolling back like curtains, and it slewed into a fishtail turn. The driver-side door cracked open and Malte leaned out. He nodded toward the rear, his expression no different from the one he’d worn when picking up Marc at the Monaco heliport.
‘Ride’s here,’ said Marc, but Amarah needed no encouragement to scramble up into the back of the high-sided personnel carrier. As Marc followed the other man on board, the first shots whined off the armoured hull. ‘Floor it!’ he shouted.
Malte slammed the Bearcat into gear and the APC lurched forward, skidding across the frosty ground and back toward the distant treeline.
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