The Persona Protocol

by Andy McDermott

  Adam used his arm to shield his eyes from the whirling pigeons. The empty SIG was a few feet away.

  He still had a spare magazine.

  He scrabbled for the gun. He grabbed it, about to drop the umbrella and take out the new mag . . .

  Khattak had retrieved his own pistol.

  The wood and wire of the pigeon loft would not stop a bullet, and the cover of the stairwell was too far to reach in time. But the roof’s edge was just a few strides away.

  The agent ran for it. Khattak turned, gun raised—

  Adam plunged off the roof as the terrorist fired, the bullet whipping above his head.

  Khattak stared in amazement before a brief, disbelieving ‘Hah!’ escaped his mouth. Toradze, or whatever his real name was, had just committed suicide. Even if the four-storey fall hadn’t killed him, the landing would have broken his legs, leaving him a helpless and immobile target below.

  He swaggered to the edge and looked down.

  The other man was on the ground. But he was neither dead nor crippled. He was standing, the open umbrella a discarded black flower at his feet as he slapped a new magazine into his SIG-Sauer and took aim—

  The bullet went through Khattak’s right eye, punching out of the top of his skull in a spray of blood and fragmented bone.

  He collapsed, toppling forwards and falling. His body hit the ground with a horrific crunch, limbs splayed at unnatural angles. Blood oozed out from his head.

  A good shot. A good kill.

  Adam returned his gun to his coat, then dragged the broken corpse against a wall beside a pile of trash, using a flattened cardboard box to conceal it as much as possible. ‘Holly Jo?’

  Her reply was hesitant. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes.’ He glanced down at his chest. There was blood on his shirt, but not enough to concern him. ‘Tag this location. There’s another body for Imran’s people to clean up. It’s next to a pile of garbage under some cardboard. Tell Tony that you can start packing up your gear. I’ll make my own way to the airport. Out.’

  Before Holly Jo could say anything else, he tapped a spot behind his right ear. There was a small bulge beneath the skin – a control for the implanted radio. The touch switched it off. He fastened his coat to conceal the blood and picked up the umbrella. The shaft was made from kevlar and steel, the spokes ultra-strong carbon fibre able to support his weight on parachute-grade nylon. The device, which could slow a person enough to survive a thirty-foot fall unharmed, had inevitably acquired the nickname ‘Mary Poppins’.

  Adam’s landing from a greater height had not been painless, but training had taught him how to roll to absorb most of the impact. He raised the umbrella over his head, then set off down the back street, limping slightly. Behind him, the rain slowly washed the splattered blood into the gutter.

  ‘Hey, hello? Can you hear me?’

  Malik Syed slowly opened his eyes to see people looking down at him with concern. The closest, a man, patted his cheek a few times. ‘Can you hear me? Are you okay?’

  ‘He’s waking up,’ said a woman behind him, relieved.

  Hands helped him to his feet. Syed looked around in bewilderment, his neck aching. Where was he? An alleyway – he had been lying amongst plastic sacks of garbage at its end. ‘What . . . what happened?’

  ‘I think you were mugged,’ the man said. ‘I saw someone run out of here and came to see what was going on.’

  Syed hurriedly checked his pockets. His phone had gone, as had his wallet. The latter was only a minor inconvenience, as the identity card in it was a fake and he could easily get hold of a replacement as well as more money, but the phone was more of a worry. While he didn’t keep the numbers of any of his al-Qaeda contacts in its memory, it still held a record of its most recent calls, which the authorities might be able to use against the group. ‘Did you see who did it?’

  ‘I didn’t get a good look, but he was just a kid. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. He had a spanner or something in his hand – he must have hit you with it and pulled you down here.’

  That was, oddly, a relief; it was unlikely that the police or counterterrorism agents would use street urchins to do their dirty work. He checked the rest of his belongings. His mugger had left his watch, a cheap Casio. Several minutes had passed since he last remembered checking the time . . .

  What was the last thing he remembered? Thanking his benefactors, he stepped out on to the street. He wasn’t far from the market. He had gone through it to shake off anyone who might have been following him, but then . . . nothing. He frowned.

  ‘Are you okay?’ the man asked again. ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘I’ll be all right.’ He squinted down the road, mentally trying to retrace his steps, but the memory would not come.

  ‘He might have hit you on the head,’ said the man. ‘Maybe you should see a doctor.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Syed said irritably. He turned in the other direction and strode away. He was already dismissing the incident as bad luck, falling victim to an opportunistic thief, rather than anything sinister. If Pakistani or American intelligence agents had been behind the attack, he would be on his way to a torture cell by now.

  The other onlookers dispersed, leaving the man alone. He watched until Syed was out of sight. The earpiece that had been in his pocket while he ‘helped’ the terrorist was returned to his ear. ‘Tony, it looks like Syed bought it,’ reported Lak. ‘He doesn’t remember what happened. Now,’ a sigh, ‘where are these bodies we need to clean up?’

  7

  The Schizoid Man

  Pakistan had been left far behind as the private jet crossed over the Kazakhstani border into Russian airspace, heading north on a trans-polar route back to the United States.

  Adam had been undergoing a debriefing – at times, almost an interrogation. Malik Syed was only a relatively small cog in the terrorist organisation, and as such his knowledge of its overall activities was limited, but even so there was urgency to the questioning. Part of this was due to the desire of the American agents to obtain the most vital information as quickly as possible. Lives, after all, could be at stake.

  The other part was a matter of neurochemistry. The process that had transferred Syed’s memories into Adam’s mind was only temporary.

  Tony was conducting the debriefing in a small cabin at the rear of the jet, Holly Jo recording everything. The field commander had a long list of questions: names of contacts, meeting places, phone numbers, email addresses, past operations, future targets. Adam’s answers often led to tangential but equally valuable queries, stretching out the process. They were almost four hours in, and barely halfway down the list.

  And getting an answer was not always straightforward.

  ‘Who gave Numan Aaqib’s location to Syed?’ Tony asked. Five weeks earlier, the safe house where a double agent who had infiltrated an al-Qaeda cell was being debriefed had been attacked. The informer and four agents from Pakistani and US intelligence were all killed. The safe house was supposed to be top secret; there was almost certainly a mole within the Pakistani government.

  ‘I won’t—’ Adam began, defiant anger in his voice before he regained control. More calmly, he spoke again. ‘I don’t know the name of the mole, but Syed was given the address by . . .’ He stopped again, faint twitches of his facial muscles betraying the internal conflict as he forced out the information. ‘By Mohammed Qasid.’

  Holly Jo typed the name into her laptop. A file appeared on its screen after a few seconds, the machine connected via satellite link to the US intelligence network’s enormous database. ‘Qasid,’ she read. ‘He’s . . . wow. He’s one of Muqaddim al-Rais’s lieutenants.’

  ‘Al-Rais?’ exclaimed Tony, surprised. ‘You mean Syed’s only two steps removed from the head of the organisation? No way we got that lucky on the first go.’ He looked back at Adam. ‘Did Syed ever meet al-Rais?’

  The younger man shook his head. ‘No. And he only met Qasid once – he came with Syed’s usual contact
.’

  ‘Sloppy security,’ Holly Jo commented. ‘A cell leader at Syed’s level shouldn’t ever have come into direct contact with somebody that high up the chain.’

  ‘Bad for them, good for us,’ said Tony. ‘Who did Syed normally deal with?’

  ‘A man called . . .’ Again, it took a moment for the name to emerge, the other persona within him not wanting to give up the secret. ‘Hanif Fathi.’

  Another, much shorter file came up in response to Holly Jo’s request. ‘Not much on him, not even a photo. The Pakistanis might be able to give us more.’

  A sour note entered Tony’s voice. ‘Assuming they haven’t been completely infiltrated by al-Qaeda sympathisers. Okay, go back to Qasid. Did he tell Syed anything else we can use? Names, future plans?’

  Adam thought about it. ‘Nothing specific, they didn’t spend much time together, but . . . there was something. A code name. Qasid called it “Operation Lamplighter”.’

  ‘Lamplighter?’ Holly Jo echoed as she entered the name into the laptop. A list of possible meanings appeared. ‘None of the hits look relevant.’

  ‘Does Syed know what it is?’ Tony asked Adam.

  He shook his head. ‘Just that it’s something major – al-Rais is handling it personally. Qasid only mentioned it in passing.’

  ‘No indication of dates or possible targets?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Something else for Langley and Fort Meade to listen out for, then,’ said Tony. ‘If it’s important to al-Rais, it’s twice as important to us. All right, so about Fathi—’

  He was interrupted by a knock on the cabin door. It opened before he could reply, Kyle leaning in. ‘Morgan wants to talk to you.’

  ‘We’re kind of in the middle of a debriefing,’ said Holly Jo.

  ‘He says it’s important. Wants everybody there. Like, now.’

  Tony checked his watch. ‘Okay, we’ll take a break. A short one.’

  The trio followed Kyle back through the main cabin. Midway along it was a bed, on which lay Albion. The big man was asleep, one of the plane’s flight crew – also a trained nurse – looking up as they approached. ‘How is he?’ Tony said quietly.

  ‘Stable at the moment,’ she replied. ‘I’ve done as much as I can. But he would have been far better off if he’d been taken to the US consulate. They have full medical facilities—’

  ‘This is a black operation,’ Tony reminded her sternly. ‘We couldn’t risk linking it to US civilian agencies.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.’

  His tone softened. ‘No need to apologise. I’m not wild about the situation myself.’

  ‘I sure as hell bet the Doc isn’t, either,’ Kyle added.

  Holly Jo was more rueful. ‘Or Mr Morgan.’

  ‘We’ll find out soon,’ said Tony.

  The group continued up the cabin. At its forward end was a small conference table. Baxter and his team were already seated at it. A large screen on the bulkhead displayed a live teleconference link. The screen was divided in two; Levon was on one side, his thick round glasses crooked as he rubbed sleepily at one eye.

  The other half held the image of Martin Morgan, Tony’s superior. Late forties, black, wearing a pair of slim silver-framed glasses that blended almost perfectly into his greying sideburns and hair.

  And not in a good mood. ‘Do you know what time it is here in DC?’ he asked, before the late arrivals had even taken their seats.

  ‘I’m guessing around six a.m.,’ said Tony.

  ‘That’s right. Which means that three hours ago, I was getting a preliminary report on the Persona Project’s first full mission with its new lead agent. Which means that one hour ago, I was getting my ass chewed off by the Admiral for waking him up to tell him there had been complications. Although that wasn’t how he described them. His terms were a lot more colourful. The main one started with the word “cluster”.’

  Kyle smirked. Morgan’s glower deepened. ‘Something amusing you, Mr Falconetti?’

  The smirk hurriedly vanished. ‘Uh, no, sir.’

  ‘Damn right it shouldn’t be. What the hell was going on over there? Shots fired, three people dead, the CIA’s local assets working in overdrive to clean up after you. You were meant to achieve your objective using stealth and subtlety, not this James Bond bullshit!’

  ‘With all due respect, sir,’ said Baxter, ‘the hostiles fired on us first. We were defending ourselves.’

  ‘And we did achieve the objective,’ Tony pointed out. ‘We successfully implanted Syed’s persona into Adam – we’re in the middle of debriefing him,’ he added, with emphasis, ‘and then put Syed back on the street without his realising what had happened.’

  ‘And when he finds out that three of his people have mysteriously vanished, then what?’ demanded Morgan.

  To everyone’s surprise, Adam answered – almost in Syed’s voice. ‘He will be suspicious, but will accept it as a natural risk of fighting the holy war. He has lost other members of his cell before. In Pakistan, people do sometimes just . . . disappear.’

  Morgan was faintly unsettled, as if he were being briefed by the terrorist himself. ‘Even three at once?’

  ‘It is the price of jihad. And there are many more to take their place.’

  ‘Well, that’s reassuring to know,’ Kyle muttered sarcastically.

  ‘As you can see,’ said Tony, ‘Adam’s got Syed’s knowledge on tap. So, if you’re going to chew us out, wait until we get back to DC so we can keep extracting it while we still have time. Once we’ve done that, then you and the Admiral can decide if the Persona Project is a success or a failure.’

  ‘Right now, the Persona Project is dead in the water, Tony,’ Morgan snapped. ‘I don’t know if you’ve forgotten, but there’s more to it than just Adam. And the other man it depends upon took a bullet to the back!’

  Tony glanced back towards Albion’s bed. ‘I hadn’t forgotten.’

  ‘Good. Then I hope you also haven’t forgotten that he’s the only person who knows how to calculate the drug doses so they don’t kill the subjects. Without him, we don’t have a project. And his chances of going back into the field any time soon don’t look good.’

  ‘He’s currently stable.’

  ‘Stable isn’t the same as healthy.’ He looked down at something below the camera’s field of view. ‘I see from the mission transcripts that Ms Voss suggested using the pre-recorded emergency persona so that Adam could perform field surgery on Roger. That might have improved his chances – why didn’t you consider it?’

  ‘That was my decision,’ said Adam before Tony could reply. ‘Doing that would have erased Syed’s persona, and let his men escape. It would have cost us the mission.’

  ‘Not doing it might have cost us the entire project,’ Morgan countered. ‘Why wasn’t Syed’s persona recorded during transfer?’

  ‘We needed to get Syed back into play as fast as possible,’ explained Tony. ‘All the encoding and compression needed to record a persona would have taken too long. Also,’ he added, before his superior could respond, ‘doing that would have meant imprinting Adam with the same persona twice. You know we can’t risk the potential side effects.’

  Morgan was annoyed at being challenged, but acquiesced. ‘Okay. But I want recording of subjects’ personas to be standard operating procedure from now on unless absolutely necessary.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘That is, assuming there’s ever another mission. We can’t do anything without Roger to administer the drugs.’

  ‘There might . . . be a solution to that problem.’

  Everyone looked round at the weak voice. Albion was awake and trying to lift his head, despite the efforts of his nurse to keep him still. ‘Roger, you should be trying to rest,’ said Tony.

  ‘Rest is for babies and the idle,’ Albion replied, forcing a thin smile. ‘No, I’ve been listening; to some of it, anyway. I’m not sure what drugs this young lady’s given me, but they make me . . . drift in and
out. They are . . . rather good, though.’

  ‘I guess I haven’t given you enough,’ the nurse complained. ‘Please, lie down.’

  ‘In a minute. Look, Martin, I know someone who . . . might be able to stand in for me – to be my locum tenens, so to speak.’

  Morgan’s expression turned probing. ‘I thought determining the drug doses was too complicated for anyone but you?’

  ‘She has the necessary training to . . . assess the subject’s condition and make the appropriate calculations.’ Albion’s head sagged on to the pillow, to the nurse’s relief. ‘I’m sure I can . . . teach her.’

  ‘I’ll consider it,’ said Morgan. ‘But right now, you need to get some re— some sleep.’

  ‘I’ll see that he does, sir,’ said the nurse. Albion made a ‘Bah!’ sound, but settled back into the bed.

  Tony looked back up at Morgan’s image. ‘Are we done for now, Martin? Because I need to get back to the debrief. We’ve already found a connection between Syed and Muqaddim al-Rais—’

  ‘Al-Rais?’ Morgan interrupted. Baxter also reacted with surprise at the name. The Saudi was the most wanted terrorist in the world, the current leader of al-Qaeda – which ten months earlier had taken revenge for the loss of its previous commander, Mahjub Najjar, by detonating a massive car bomb in the Pakistani capital Islamabad. The explosion had not only killed over a hundred people, but also assassinated its primary target: the US Secretary of State, Sandra Easton. ‘How strong a connection? Anything that would give us his location?’

  ‘No – at least, not yet. But we do know that he’s personally overseeing something. “Operation Lamplighter” is what Syed says it’s called.’

  ‘It doesn’t ring any bells,’ said Morgan. ‘But I’ll pass it straight up to the Admiral so we can get the entire USIC on it. Anything that gives us a shot at al-Rais . . .’

  ‘I’d be happy to take the shot personally against that son of a bitch, sir,’ said Baxter.

  ‘I’m sure we all would. All right, Tony, get back to work on Syed. The rest of your chewing-out can keep until you get back to Washington.’ His image disappeared.