by Gary Haynes
He found both her words and demeanour strangely unnerving, and placed the plastic plate on the floor, glad that it had been agreed not to give her cutlery.
“Eat it. When you do, I’ll bring you some water.”
She didn’t respond.
“Did you hear me?”
She ignored him.
Proctor suddenly felt the urge to shock her into a response. The bitch’s silence was condescending, and as a teenager from a public housing estate in the north of England, who’d joined the army as a private, he’d had his fair share of that in his life. Despite his military expertise and the fact that he’d learned to speak fluent Arabic and fly a helicopter, his past still made him feel insecure at times. Swiss, the man who’d hired him for the task, had phoned him when he’d gotten back to his office in Arlington County after the incident at the warehouse, and had told him about the secretary’s head of security. He decided to use the info to get to her.
“Tom Dupree will be dead by now.”
She didn’t flinch.
“Tortured in ways you can’t imagine and shot in the head.”
With her head still down, she said, “He was the bravest man I knew.”
“He was a little man; a flunkey.”
“I know that by showing your face, I’m likely to be killed.”
“Killed, yeah. In style. Just as it said on the video.”
This time she looked up, her eyes defiant. “I’m ready.”
“Sure you are. You want to know why?”
“What difference does it make?
Her composure riled him. “You, missus, are a catalyst, the dictionary definition of which is a person or thing that precipitates an event.”
“I know what it means.”
He crouched down, so that he was level with her. “I suppose someone who has had a hand in sending thousands to their deaths finds it difficult to understand that they themselves can become a victim. I get that. But here’s how it’s going to appear. The Leopards won’t get what they’ve demanded. The Iranians won’t step in to save you. And after that, the people I work for won’t lose billions in military contracts. You are the catalyst that will ensure that that happens. If the US Secretary of State can be murdered, the US public will feel as safe as a seal pup surrounded by great whites.”
“You’ll all rot in hell,” she said.
“I got some living to do first,” he said, easing himself upright.
He turned and left.
Walking down the basement corridor, he decided to shave his head again, as he always did before going into combat. A habit. A superstition. He had killed fifty-two men in war. In preparation, he felt no emotion, his mind fixed on wind speed, drag force and air pressure, calculating the bullet’s trajectory over the given distance. By the time he squeezed the trigger, he might as well have been firing at mannequins. Poleaxed by a silent bullet from an unseen source, most of his targets were dead when they hit the ground. The aftermath involved filling out a report rather than digging a grave. It had been clinical.
But it will be different this time, he thought.
77.
Back at the diner, Lester was still absent, making his call, and Tom saw Karen looking at him disapprovingly.
“Lester’s a sweet man and he loves you like a brother,” she said.
Yeah, but he’s got another side to him, Tom thought. They’d been in a bar fight down in Louisiana a couple of years after he’d dragged Lester out of the rubble in Nairobi. Some redneck with racoon shit for brains had started it after he’d accused Lester of making eyes at his girl. After Lester had taken out the redneck and three of his buddies, he’d looked disappointed that it was over. Lester lived for the action and that was a dangerous trait. Money, too. Maybe I’m getting too paranoid, Tom thought, even for someone trained to be so.
“Tom. You okay?” Karen said.
“What?” Tom said, shaking his head.
“You okay?”
“Sure.”
As Lester came back and sat down he said, “We got transport.”
“That’s good, man,” Tom said.
Karen, looking now at her laptop screen, said, “There’s only one chateau close to the airbase you mentioned, Tom. It’s called Chateau Asean. Looks like it’s used by parties of tourists and business types for small conventions.”
Then Karen pulled up a basic layout of the chateau from a plan on the site, followed by overhead satellite maps. They spent the next five minutes or so studying them together.
“Likely to be CCTV cameras on the walls,” she said. “Either already there or fitted by Swiss’s men after they took over the place.”
If they did, Tom thought.
“I got that covered,” Lester said.
“You have?” asked Tom.
“Trust me.”
“What’s the contact number?” Tom asked Karen.
Karen scribbled down the number and handed it to him.
Outside the VW, the light was starting to fade, but at least the cloudburst had stopped. Lester said their destination was an isolated airstrip twelve miles inside the Virginia state border, and that he’d organized a small plane to fly them to Normandy. That was the call he’d made at the diner, he added. They would land at a private airfield there, which catered for amateur pilots and shifty types, who might not want to pass through regular customs.
Tom took out his cellphone and thumbed in the number, reading from the napkin that Karen had handed him in the diner. After five ringtones, the call was answered by an elderly woman’s voice. Her tone was businesslike. She told Tom that the chateau had been booked by a private party for a week. Tom asked if it was his American friends, his cover being that he had lost the address and didn’t have their cellphone numbers. He was glad that the woman was elderly. A younger person might have asked why he didn’t have his friends’ numbers in his cell. She replied in the negative. It was a party of mostly Frenchmen, or at least French speakers. Tom thanked her and disconnected.
“It sounds like we might have the right place,” he said, and relayed the conversation to them.
Twenty minutes later, Lester pulled off the highway. After passing through several residential neighbourhoods with white picket fences, well-kept yards and wide drives, he took a right onto a minor road that led them into open country, Davina’s voice guiding him all the way.
“We’re here,” Lester said, taking a left into a field.
The field was maybe five acres, surrounded by cedar trees and a grey-brown, stone-built wall. The runway cut a tarmac swathe through the middle, marked with white distance indicators and staggered stop-lines. Lester pulled into a small lot, linked to a timber-frame bungalow by an asphalt walkway. Beyond the bungalow was a green hangar and an outbuilding. A red wind cone flapped languidly against a steel pole between the bungalow and the hangar. Tom thought it looked more like a weekend flying club than an airport.
“Just gimme a minute,” Lester said, getting out and walking over to the bungalow.
Karen turned to Tom. “If something does go wrong over there and I don’t make it–”
“Don’t say that, Karen.”
“No, I know. But if I don’t make it, will you promise me something?”
Tom almost said he wouldn’t let anything happen to her, but stopped himself, feeling suddenly inept.
“Go ahead,” he said.
“My parents never wanted me to join the military. It scared them, I suppose. They felt it wasn’t what a girl should do. They’re old-fashioned that way. I love them, but they have always worried about how I earn a living. When I left the army, they thought I’d seen sense. Anyway, I couldn’t bear for them to see me dead on some news network, my face all bloody or whatever. I just couldn’t bear that. So, if something does happen, please, Tom, just cover my face, would you?”
She moved her hand down to his and held it gently.
“You’ll be fine.”
“Promise me.”
He nodded, slowly.
“Thank you, Tom.”
78.
Swiss closed the panelled door behind him, leaving the chair of the Senate Committee on Armed Services sitting in his congressional office on the second floor of a fifties office block in the Capitol Complex, The Dirksen Senate Office Building. A seven-storey structure faced in white marble. The senator was fifty-eight years old with balding grey hair, reddened skin and a solid paunch. He’d cultivated a past that hinted of old money, although Swiss knew he’d worked the nightshift four times a week at a fish-processing factory in order to put himself through Stanford, and had spent the summers on construction sites in San Jose, the city of his birth. But he had power. The kind of power that could ensure the reversal of the military cuts and that revenge was meted out to the secretary’s fabricated killers. The cutbacks would mean near-financial disaster for ADC, since it would hit mostly weapons-and-equipment procurement.
Swiss took the elevator down to the lobby. Outside, he stood on the sidewalk, away from the barrier and the black-metal security bollards, opposite the guarded parking lot. He watched his Range Rover pull up at the sidewalk on the other side of the road. He felt a chill go through him, put it down to the wind cutting across the intersection of Constitutional Avenue and 1st Street, and buttoned up his dove-grey overcoat. Grimacing, he took out a disposable cellphone and spoke in French to a guard at the chateau in Normandy, asking for Proctor.
After a few minutes, the Englishman said, “What’s wrong?”
“I’m not sure yet. But something is.”
“You want me to move her?”
“No. Besides, we don’t have time.”
“You want me to do it now?” Proctor asked.
“No. We have to proceed as planned. But when it’s over I have a new job for you back here, if you’re still for hire.”
“Could be.”
Swiss hit the disconnect button, thinking that he would get Proctor to work on the two-star general called Dupont. He’d find out what he knew and then order him killed.
Travelling in the Range Rover to his home a mile or so from Pentagon City, he still felt rattled. He’d had to kill a good man, Hawks, and all because Brigadier Hasni, the ISI boss, had ratted him out to the DS special agent called Tom Dupree.
If the whole plan was compromised as a result, he was finished. But dead men didn’t speak, and he hadn’t been called after leaving the warehouse. He guessed Tom Dupree really hadn’t known anything. He could have stayed around, just to be sure, but he had no stomach for torture. Never had. When a gnarled-faced Legion sergent-chef, a veteran of the Battle of Kolwezi in Zaire in 1978, had suggested cutting the ears off a terrified Iraqi prisoner during the Gulf War in 1990, Swiss, who was then a young officer, had threatened to court-martial him for even suggesting it. His world had changed since then. Now he allowed such things, but only on the proviso that he didn’t have to witness them firsthand. Just like every politician he had ever known.
Sitting in the back seat beside him, his Russian bodyguard took a call on her cell. He turned his head, saw her nodding silently, her face as white and hard as alabaster; her blue-green eyes unblinking.
“Our source at Pentagon says all leave cancelled for the Marine Corp and 101st Airborne Division. They put on twenty-four-hour standby,” she said, disconnecting.
More good news, he thought. But he couldn’t stop himself from saying, “The man’s a useless leech. That kind of information could’ve been picked up from a private’s wife at a grocery store.”
The woman shrugged.
He thought about the Saudi ambassador. He’d been contacted by him six months ago. His proposition had been stark and ambitious: the kidnapping and murder of the US Secretary of State. If he could organize the men, the ambassador would ensure that the Pakistanis wouldn’t interfere. They would, in fact, facilitate it. Apart from bringing about a war with Iran, which could only benefit ADC, the ambassador had promised him exclusive contracts with the Saudi military.
Although the survival and growth of his business was his overriding driving force, Swiss found it peculiar that the US had such close links with the Saudis. Politically, the country was essentially a feudal system, with no voting rights. Eleven of the fifteen hijackers in the 9/11 attacks were Saudis, after all. Women were forbidden from driving and people were still executed for sorcery. Saudi Arabia wasn’t exactly a model state.
It was, he knew, the natural reaction to what the Saudi religious leaders had been preaching for years: Wahhabism, an extremist form of Sunni Islam. The CIA considered it the soil in which al-Qaeda grew. And yet in the Arab world, the Saudis were seen as the most pro-Western state, despite being the biggest backer of anti-Western Sunni terrorist groups. A paradox, perhaps.
But Swiss knew that for years the Saudis had increased oil production in order to boost the US economy at times that coincided with presidential elections. The deal had been the same since Roosevelt had met with the founder of the Saudi kingdom: security for oil. Politicians had gained personal and family wealth from that arrangement. But it also meant that whereas Iraq and Afghanistan had felt the full force of US military might, the Saudis had escaped it. Whether the Washington elite had allowed personal gain to dictate US foreign policy was an argument he had no intention of getting into. For him personally, though, it was obvious.
As the Range Rover reached the gated entrance to his country spread – a seven-bedroom, single-storey ranch house with four paddocks, three lines of stables and miles of fenced grassland – he’d calmed down a little. The world was full of contradictions, he thought. But if selling arms for a living was deemed morally reprehensible, politics and the oil business were Faustian pacts.
79.
Tom watched Lester walking back to the van. Karen had opened the door and had slid out, saying that she had to check her bag. He decided to call Crane.
“Tom, it’s good to hear from you, although if anyone is checking my calls they’ll think we’ve got something going on between us.”
“Are you done?”
“You can’t last in this job without a little humour, Tom.”
“The man responsible for the abduction of Lyric is called Peter Swiss.”
“Wow, hold on there. That’s a helluva statement to make.”
“I got the proof. He’s the CEO of ADC, the corporation that Hawks worked for.”
“You said worked for.”
“Swiss killed him.”
“What?”
“I’ve got it on video. But don’t bring him in. Watch the borders and airports if you must, but don’t bring him in yet.”
“Why’s that?” Crane asked.
“Because those that have Lyric will likely kill her and disappear.”
“And they are?”
“I don’t know exactly. But I’m pretty certain she’s being held in Normandy, France.”
“I know where Normandy is,” Crane said, his tone serious. “But what does ?pretty certain’ mean?”
“You of all people should know that nothing’s certain in this game, right?”
As he was telling Crane the exact location, Karen opened the door and he held up his hand so that she wouldn’t interrupt him.
“I gotta contact the DCRI,” Crane said, referring to France’s Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence. “But it’ll take them hours to get organized, put a team together and arrive there from Paris.”
“What about their Special Forces?” Tom asked
“They’ve got the 1st Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment. That’s their equivalent of the British SAS. But they’re based in Bayonne in the far southwest. I don’t even know if they’re at their base. Anyone else, it’ll be hours, too.”
“I thought they were fast-response.”
“That generally means twenty-four hours. What are you gonna do, Tom?”
“I’m going to France. The French intelligence service ain’t trained for sophisticated hostage situations.”
“Neither are you. Unless
you’re not telling me everything. And I don’t wanna bring you down too hard, but you got as much chance of hooking up with them as they got of bringing back the monarchy. Gimme one good reason why they gonna do that?” Crane asked.
“I’m still head of Lyric’s protective detail. That’s gotta mean something. Besides, I know something nobody else does.”
“And that is?”
“I’ll call you when I land,” Tom said. “Just tell them that. And I know I don’t have to say it, but if the place is crawling with cops she won’t get out alive.”
“I can’t guarantee the DCRI will go for it, but I’ll do my best. Someone’s gonna have to make a quick decision about how we’re gonna get Lyric outta there. And, Tom?”
“Yeah.”
“Steve Coombs had a bank account in the Caymans with three million in it.”
Swiss’s blood money, Tom thought.
“But that’s not all, Tom. I got a hold of his medical records, too. He’d been diagnosed with brain cancer a year ago, told that he wouldn’t reach his fiftieth birthday.”
So it was the money, but not for him. His family, Tom thought. He disconnected the call, remembering Coombs complaining about headaches as they stood outside the secretary’s temporary office in Islamabad the morning she was taken.
“How long before we get the plane?” Tom asked Lester as he came up to the van.
“Thirty minutes tops.”
Tom jumped out and Karen came over to join them. Lester pulled out the two reinforced-plastic cases from the back of the van and lowered them onto the damp grass. He flicked open the clasps and lifted the first lid.
“These here are state-of-the-art lasers.” Lester took out four separate shafts, which he proceeded to fit together into a long black tube, a full metre long. “This was adapted from a tank-based prototype used in the Gulf War,” he said, smiling broadly and holding up the tube. “I call it the Stingray.”
He explained that CCTV cameras could be taken out because they were imperfect mechanisms, susceptible to both what he termed blooming – where the camera sensor was overloaded – and lens flare, caused by light filtering into the internal glass. The CCTV cameras on the chateau’s wall could be located by an anti-sensor laser, which picked up the glints of reflected light. They were disabled as the Stingray switched to a high-energy laser capable of overloading the sensor behind the CCTV cameras’ lenses.
