“And this is Cole Mason.” Drake indicated the big man on his right. “He’s the reason the Agency mobile units lost us in Istanbul.”
Mason at least offered a wry grin. “Always happy to smash things up.”
“I’m grateful for what you did. All of you,” Mitchell said, not sure how else to express herself. An hour ago she’d been resigned to spending the rest of her life in prison at best, or being executed at worst. She still wasn’t sure she was safe from either prospect. “But I don’t understand what you want from me. Who are you? Why are you doing this?”
“First, we need some answers from you,” Drake countered.
“Like what?”
“You came to Turkey against Agency orders and got yourself shot. What happened?”
Mitchell said nothing, suddenly struck by the feeling that this was all a little too good to be true. Drake and his band of saviours show up just when she’d expected to be handed over to Agency custody, whisk her out to some deserted location with promises of safe passage out of Turkey, and ask in return only for her to tell them everything she knew.
“Don’t you know already?” she asked.
Drake folded his arms, clearly not pleased by her defiant tone. “I want to hear it from you first. The Agency had an armed extraction team on site ready to lift you, which means they were willing to take a big risk to get their hands on you. Tell me why.”
Despite the pain, she met his piercing gaze without flinching.
“You can talk to us, or we can hand you back to the retrieval team,” Drake said simply. “Your choice.”
“How do I know you’re not working for the Agency yourselves?”
She didn’t expect such a question to be well received, and she was right.
“Listen lady, we risked our lives to get you out of that fucking place,” Frost snapped, her simmering dislike flaring up into real animosity. “A good friend of mine got killed trying to help your dumb ass. The least you can do is tell us what happened.”
“What did you say?” Mitchell asked, struck by her words.
“Vince Argento,” Frost said, speaking the name slowly and clearly. “Don’t pretend you don’t know him.”
Mitchell froze. Argento had been part of her investigative team and a good friend who, disobeying orders, had accompanied her to Istanbul on little more than a hunch. His reward for this display of trust and loyalty had been death at the hands of a CIA black ops team, sent to cover up the conspiracy the pair had inadvertently unearthed.
“I know him,” Mitchell said, replaying the terrible moment when her good friend had been murdered before her very eyes.
And suddenly another memory resurfaced in her pain-addled mind. A memory of a conversation with Argento just a few days ago, where he had shared the revelations that had brought them here.
*“I managed to remove the hard drive before we left, and sent the contents to a friend of mine back at Langley. Her name’s Frost – she does a lot of technical work with the Shepherd teams there.” *
*That said a lot about her credentials, Mitchell thought. *
*“How the hell do you know someone like her?” she couldn’t help asking. *
“Let’s say she owes me a favour or two,” Argento went on, the look in his eyes hinting that there was more history there than he was prepared to get into.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” Mitchell said at length, turning her gaze on the young woman. “You were the Shepherd operative he went to for help.”
Frost nodded grimly. “I was his friend. Now he’s dead, and you’re still alive.”
Mitchell was starting to understand where the animosity stemmed from.
“Take it easy, Keira,” Mason cautioned her, quietly placing himself closer to Frost as if he feared she might suddenly attack Mitchell. “Don’t make this personal.”
“Fuck that,” Frost spat. “Argento died for you. I want to know why.”
Drake exhaled slowly, sensing that Mitchell’s resistance to his questions had just crumbled away in the face of his comrade’s revelation.
“Give us some room, please.”
“But—”
“Now, Keira,” Drake said, a sharper edge to his voice now.
Reluctantly the others backed off, leaving Mitchell alone with Drake, though he caught McKnight’s arm as she was leaving and spoke quietly to her.
“We can’t afford to stay here long. Let me know when our extraction’s ready, yeah?”
Giving Mitchell a brief glance, McKnight nodded and moved off.
Popping the trunk on the Volkswagen, Drake laid a set of civilian clothes beside Mitchell. Jogging pants, trainers, a t-shirt and jacket. Hardly high fashion, but comfortable, practical and easy for a person with a gunshot wound to slip into.
“Had to guess your size,” he said by way of apology.
“Like I’m in a position to complain.” She picked at the hem of her bloodstained hospital gown, noticing absently that she was still wearing her medical bracelet, then quickly stripped it off and pulled on the clothes he’d given her. He had the decency to turn away while she dressed, not that she cared much by this point. After everything else she’d been through, the prospect of being seen naked by a stranger was hardly shocking.
Once she was finished, Drake eased himself down onto the edge of the cot and looked at her for a moment or two. “You don’t trust us,” he observed. “Can’t say I blame you. In your position, I probably wouldn’t either.”
“The past few days haven’t given me much reason to,” Mitchell agreed.
However, she did feel a certain easing of tension around Drake, despite herself. Whatever his motives, there was no denying that he’d sprung her from that hospital and out of the Agency’s grip. For now, at least.
“I don’t suppose you’ll give me your life story, but I’d settle for knowing who you’re working for.”
Drake sighed. “I was sent here by a woman named Anya.”
Mitchell couldn’t hide her surprise at the name. Anya, a dangerous and enigmatic former Agency operative, had been at the centre of the deadly confrontation that had seen her own partner killed. She had very nearly followed him.
“You work for her?” Mitchell asked.
This seemed to inspire a certain amusement. “Not exactly. But we’re on the same side… more or less. She seems to think you might be on our side, too.”
“So who’s on the other side?”
Drake leaned in closer, his voice low and grave. “There’s a cancer in the Agency, Mitchell. Maybe in the wider government. Bad people are doing worse things, and nobody even knows about it.”
“What else is new?” she snorted. “Next you’ll be telling me politicians are corrupt and The Simpsons isn’t funny anymore.”
“This isn’t a game. There are a group of people highly placed in every branch of the US government who are working to manipulate world events outside of anyone’s control. Men and women with the power and resources to start wars, crash economies, overthrow governments… you name it, they can make it happen. They’re called different names by different people, but most seem to know them as them the Circle. Whatever they call themselves, we ran into them in Libya and barely got out alive. Other people weren’t so lucky.” She saw a flicker of pain when he mentioned this. “We think you might have stumbled into another one of their operations here in Turkey, so we need to know what you know. And we need it fast. It won’t take them long to figure out where we are.”
Mitchell looked at him with a growing realisation of his implied threat. “I get it. I don’t give you anything, I get left behind. Right?”
Drake’s expression gave little away. “I’m hoping it won’t come to that.”
“Okay,” she conceded, leaning back a little in the cot. “What do you want to know?”
It would’ve been wrong to say she trusted him completely, but what the hell. She was thin on friends these days, and if this man was who and what he claimed to be, he was likely her best shot a
t survival.
Drake nodded. “Tell me how you ended up in Istanbul.”
Chapter 7
“I think I’ve got something!” Rogers called out, leaning close to his laptop.
Wheeler, who had been hovering nearby since Rogers had started his work, was beside him in seconds. “Show me.”
Rogers duly brought up grainy security camera footage. “This is the traffic cam at the north intersection, leading to the tunnel. See the Volkswagen hatchback passing by?”
Indeed he did. An old model Golf by the looks of it, cruising past the lights at the intersection, with only the driver onboard.
“I scanned the footage at the southern intersection from the fifteen minutes after that car passed. Nothing. Until…” Grinning, Rogers advanced the playback to later in the evening. “…Thirty seconds after we lost contact. See this?”
Wheeler scrutinised the footage presented to him. Sure enough, the same Volkswagen Golf was now driving back the way it had come, heading northwards. Only this time the car was full – two up front, two in the back. The angle made it impossible to get a positive ID on the occupants, but judging from their headscarves, the two in the rear were women.
“And there’s no other route this car could have taken?” Wheeler asked, needing to know for sure.
“Unless he drove over a couple of hundred yards of unpaved waste ground, and a hill, no way. This is the same car.”
Wheeler slammed his fist down on the table, then looked at his technical expert with genuine respect. “Good work, Rogers. Get a copy of the license plate back to Langley and have them search every goddamn camera in the country until they find that car.”
“Already done. They’re plotting a route as we speak.”
Gulping down a cup of coffee, Wheeler gave him a nod. “Remind me to recommend you for a bonus this year.”
“Count on it.”
* * *
Drake listened while it all poured out: Mitchell’s assignment to help capture a wanted computer hacker, the discovery that he was working with a disgraced former agent, the team’s pursuit of the pair to Norway, and the sudden appearance of a shadowy operative named Stryker with his own very different agenda.
“This hacker… What was he looking for?” Drake asked.
“He called it the Black List.” She shook her head. “Way above my pay grade, but if he was right, it’s a classified directory of all unsanctioned Agency operations. The worst of the worst. The kind of stuff they could never allow to be made public.”
Drake frowned. “So what did Anya want with it? Blackmail?”
“I wish I knew. You’d have to ask her.”
The look in his eyes told her he intended to, but clearly that was a conversation for another time. Instead, he chose to concentrate on another aspect of her story that didn’t add up.
“What about this man Stryker? What can you tell me about him?”
“The guy had some serious backers in the Agency. He was given total authority over the mission, and whatever resources he needed were made available. You didn’t have to be fucking Einstein to work out he wasn’t there to arrest some low-grade computer hacker. The man was part of a kill team sent to take out Anya.”
Drake said nothing, clearly chewing on that.
“And his real name wasn’t Stryker,” she added, almost as an afterthought. “It was Hawkins.”
* * *
It was nearly midnight when the breakthrough came.
“I think we’ve got them,” Rogers began, visibly bristling with excitement. “NSA were able to follow them on traffic cams after they left the tunnel. They were heading north, but they soon turned east and joined the main highway heading out of the city. That was when they lost sight of them.”
Wheeler frowned, failing to see why his specialist was so excited. “So we’ve got nothing?”
“Not quite. Our friends at the National Reconnaissance Office have come through for us. One of their satellites was overhead shortly after we lost contact, and they were able to pick up the trail. The car continued on until it reached an abandoned cement works just outside the town of Hereke, about fifty miles up the coast. That’s where they stopped.”
Wheeler’s eyes were wide as this information sank in. “So they’re still there?”
“The bird’s no longer overhead, but as of five minutes ago… yeah.”
Wheeler needed no further prompting. “Get the chopper ready,” he said, before raising his voice to address the other operatives in the room. “All right, everyone. We have a location on Drake. Gear up, we leave now!”
As the agents went to work packing up gear and checking weapons, Wheeler laid a hand on Rogers’ shoulder. “Get me any plans or blueprints you can find for that cement works. I want to know everything you can tell me about the place.”
* * *
Mitchell never could have imagined the impact her words would have on Drake. In an instant, he had snapped out of whatever thoughts he’d been entertaining, his near-unshakable composure visibly rattled. “What did you say?”
“I said his name was Hawkins,” she repeated. “Jason Hawkins. Argento tried to run a background on him, but the guy was a ghost – his service record had been redacted.” She was watching him shrewdly. “Why? That name mean something to you?”
“Ryan, we’re almost ready to go,” Mason called out. “Transport’s inbound. We need to get to the extraction point.”
“Not yet,” Drake insisted, by now totally focussed on Mitchell. Even to her untrained eye, it was clear Drake was deeply troubled by what he’d just heard. “Tell me what happened when Hawkins took over the operation?”
Mitchell swallowed and nodded. “The man was sharp as a razor, but a goddamn liability as well, killing civilians to try to get to Anya. He was even prepared to call in a drone strike on foreign territory without authorisation. When I started questioning his methods, he had me relieved of duty and ordered to return to Langley. I knew he was trying to cover something up, and the deeper I dug, the more rotten the whole thing seemed. So I came to Istanbul looking for Anya and the hacker, hoping I could figure out what they were really after.” Her hands curled into tight fists, the knuckles standing out hard and white against the skin. “I thought I’d lost Hawkins, left him behind. I was wrong.”
* * *
Clutching the safety harness holding him in his seat, Wheeler glanced out the open hatch at the darkened landscape sliding past dangerously close beneath them. He had to fight the urge to recoil as a stand of pine trees whipped past so close that he could have sworn he heard the rustle of their branches against the underside of the aircraft.
The chopper had angled northward after clearing the airspace over Istanbul, allowing them to approach their target through the winding valleys that criss-crossed the mountainous terrain. The geography would help to mask the sound of their rotors, as long as they stayed low, hopefully buying them the element of surprise. Of course, the downside was that the only thing preventing them flying right into the side of a mountain was the skill of their pilot.
It was not a comforting thought.
“Pilot, what’s our ETA?” he asked, turning his thoughts back to matters he could control.
“We’re three minutes out, sir. We’ll drop you on the north side of the compound. There’s a pretty good clearing, according to satellite images. From there, we’ll try to linger close by and act as spotters.”
“Don’t take any chances,” Wheeler said firmly. “Drake and his team may try to target you. The last thing I need is you getting shot down.”
Their chopper was a civilian variant of the Sikorsky S-76 transport. It was fast and manoeuvrable, and its crew compartment provided plenty of room for Wheeler and the six other field agents he’d brought with him, but carried no weapons and no armour. If it started taking ground fire, the prospect of being shot down was all too real.
“Wasn’t planning on it, sir.” Wheeler couldn’t see, but he was quite certain the man was grinning with
the kind of reckless bravado he’d come to expect of chopper pilots.
Moments later, Rogers’ voice crackled over the radio net. “Mobile units are on their way as backup. They’re about fifteen minutes out.”
A lot could happen in fifteen minutes, Wheeler knew. For as long as it mattered, he and his strike team would have to handle the situation by themselves. “What about satellite recon?”
“The next bird is due overhead in twenty-six minutes.”
Wheeler stifled a frustrated grunt. “This just gets better and better.”
“I don’t control the laws of orbital physics,” Rogers reminded him.
“Just keep calling out those ground units.” Switching to intercom, Wheeler looked around at the six armed field agents sitting with him in tense silence. “All right, it’s almost time to deploy. You all know what to do. The enemy we’re up against is almost certainly armed and should be considered extremely dangerous, but he’s also overconfident. He didn’t expect us to find him here tonight, and that’s the advantage we need. We go in as a team, we take Drake down any way we can, and we come home as a team. Anyone got a problem with that?”
Not a word was spoken.
“All right. Get ready to deploy!”
* * *
“I should have seen it coming. Hawkins was lying in wait for us with his own black ops team. He knew we were up to something, that we could lead him to Anya, so he let us go and followed us to Istanbul. That was when he moved against us. When we tried to resist, he… he killed Vince. Just executed him right there and then.”
Mitchell could feel her throat tightening, her voice growing high and strained as she relived that terrible moment. With survival having to take priority over grief at the time, she knew she hadn’t really dealt with his death, hadn’t allowed it to sink in.
“It was my fault,” she said, staring into the darkness. “I led him into that. I got him killed. It should have been me instead.”
Second Chances Page 5
