Dark Spies

by Matthew Dunn

  “I’m not helping Cochrane, though, am I?”

  “Oh, come on, dear.” An idea came to Catherine. “You told me Cochrane had saved lives during his career.”

  “A lot of lives.”

  “Presumably that means he’s the kind of guy who’s willing to sacrifice his life for others.”

  “For sure.”

  “How many women and children has Cobalt’s terrorist funding killed?”

  “Can’t be exact, but certainly thousands.”

  “Do you think Will would lay down his life to ensure a similar number or more won’t be killed in the future?”

  “Without doubt, but . . .”

  “Hello, Daddy.”

  Ed swiveled around and saw his daughter standing at the bottom of the stairs, wearing pink pajamas and clutching her teddy bear while rubbing her sleepy eyes. He beamed. “Hey, sweetie. What are you doing up?”

  She came over to him and nuzzled her head against his chest. “I heard you and Mummy talking about things dying. I was worried something bad had happened to Fred and Ginger.”

  Her pet hamsters.

  Ed rubbed her head. “Don’t be silly, pumpkin. They’re fine.” He pretended to look stern. “But they won’t be fine if you don’t clean out their cage tomorrow.” He smiled. “Want me to read you a story?”

  Crystal nodded.

  “Okay. Deal is, you take yourself back to bed and give me five minutes to finish up down here.”

  After she’d left, Ed nodded at Catherine. “Thanks. Think I needed that perspective.” For the first time today he felt his shoulder muscles start to relax.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Sheridan could hear the boars grunting and squealing before he stopped his car at the end of the forest-lined track, in front of the remote farmstead. It was eight P.M., and the CIA officer knew it was the exact time the fifteen swine got their evening feed. He’d witnessed it before, and it was a terrifying and frenzied display of gluttonous savagery. Because their owners had crossbred male boars with domestic pigs, the boars were twice the size of their wild cousins, had large tusks, coarse hair that was painful to touch, and the strength and ferocity to shred a man to pieces in minutes. As Sheridan stepped out of his car into the sodden night air, the animal screams began to sound like hysterical pagans witnessing a sacrifice.

  The sounds revolted him.

  Not least because the boars’ favorite food was flesh.

  The officer shivered, turned on his flashlight, and walked on, trying not to get his expensive shoes and suit trousers muddy. The complex was in West Virginia, approximately one hundred miles west of Langley, in forested, sparsely populated countryside; it had five main buildings and a cluster of outbuildings. As he headed toward the farmhouse, he passed the barn and could smell the boars’ stench, a combination of musk, piss, and shit; a brutish odor that oozed from three-hundred-pound beasts whose sole joy was to indulge in an orgy of bacchanalian feasting.

  The houses in the town of Springfield, Maine, were all spread far apart from each other; between them, trees ensured that residents had privacy from their neighbors.

  Some of the houses had garages where owners’ vehicles could be locked away, but others didn’t. Will walked from one property to the next, checking the driver’s seats of the cars and their distance from the brake and accelerator pedals, and glancing around to ensure none of the houses’ lights came on because someone had spotted him.

  At the seventh house, he found a vehicle with a driver’s seat that looked to be in the position that Will would put it in if he were driving it. He faced the house, could see no signs of an alarm system, so ran around the side of the house and entered the backyard. Placing his head against the back door, he listened for a moment and heard nothing save the rain. He turned the handle—unsurprisingly, it was locked—and withdrew his lockpick set.

  One minute later, he was in the kitchen. It was silent. He stayed still for ten seconds, listening for any signs that people were awake and allowing his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

  On either side of him were two large rooms. He turned his flashlight on and quickly checked both; they were empty.

  At the base of the stairs, he turned off the flashlight and stood still, listening again for any indication that an occupant had heard him and was getting out of bed to grab his shotgun. He slowly moved up the stairs in total darkness while praying the floorboards underneath were not creaky.

  On the second floor, there were four rooms that had open doors. He moved to the nearest doorway, crouched down beside it, and glanced inside. It was a study, and no one was in it. He repeated the same drill in the next two rooms. Neither was occupied: one was a cluttered storage room, the other a bathroom. He crouched beside the last door. It had to be the bedroom.

  Breathing deeply, he stuck his head into the room.

  Inside were a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, and a bed that was empty.

  The owner was not at home.

  Will opened the wardrobe. Though the position of the car seat suggested its driver was approximately the same height as Will, there was every possibility that its owner was fat or thin. But after checking the length and waist size of a pair of jeans, Will was relieved to see that they were a good fit. Together with the pants, he grabbed a shirt, sweater, and underwear from the drawers. He’d need a coat as well, and he’d spotted four of them hanging on a rack on the first floor.

  He made ready to leave, but paused by the bathroom.

  It looked so enticing.

  Should he?

  He entered the windowless room, shut the door, and stripped out of his clothes.

  After filling the sink with hot water, he quickly sponge-washed his body and hair, brushed his teeth with a spare toothbrush, got dressed in his new clothes, grabbed his old ones, went downstairs, and turned the flashlight back on. He chose a winter jacket that looked warm and sturdy but nothing like the kind of thing a man would wear if he’d received specialist military training and was on the run, and moved back into the kitchen. Beside the trash can was a roll of plastic bags. After removing his guns and all other items from his dirty jacket and placing them in his new coat, he chucked all his clothes in the bag. He’d dispose of it somewhere a few miles away. Then he opened the refrigerator and grabbed some food.

  He reckoned the clothes he’d stolen and the guilt of eating the man’s food called for two hundred dollars’ compensation. He withdrew three hundred and left the cash on the table.

  As he walked fast away from the house and the town, he felt rejuvenated. Just as important, he looked like an ordinary American civilian and not like the man who’d been seen in Nova Scotia and at the New Brunswick–Maine International Avenue crossing.

  He was now confident that he could blend in and get to D.C. within a couple of days by train, bus, or other public transportation.

  Trouble was, he was also aware that he could be heading toward his downfall.

  Being in the presence of the two men always made Sheridan feel uneasy. Augustus and Elijah were fifty-two-year-old twins and looked nearly identical, with straight shoulder-length black hair, bodies that were diminutive yet very strong, circular spectacles, galoshes, and all-in-one overalls that were covered in pig meal and crap. Though they looked a bit odd, Sheridan supposed they would look harmless enough to anyone else who could see them making mugs of coffee in their kitchen.

  But most people didn’t know what Sheridan knew—that they were former members of the CIA’s Special Activities Division, where they’d specialized in psychological warfare, physical and mental experimentation on foreign prisoners, torture, and execution. They’d honed their skills during every covert and overt war that the States had been involved in during their service. Few people in the Agency had known about their existence, and those who did rarely liked to talk about their role. They were an unpalatable last resort, and were tolerated by CIA senior management in the same way that psychopaths are tolerated in the ranks of an army when every able-bodied man is
needed to stave off a country’s obliteration. But that had ended nine years before, when the twins went too far on a mission in Afghanistan by reenacting the medieval English punishment of hanging a person to near death before emasculating, disemboweling, beheading, and chopping the person into four pieces. It was done in front of a suspected terrorist who they wanted to confess to a roadside bomb attack against U.S. soldiers. Ordinarily, the hanging, drawing, and quartering might have been hushed up by those members of the Agency who knew about the twins and their work.

  But the victim was the eight-year-old son of the alleged terrorist.

  They’d gone way too far. Even by the standards of Agency men who had no qualms about sticking their hands in blood and guts to get secrets so that they could protect the American way of life.

  Sheridan had stepped in to save their necks, arguing that Agency interests would not be served by making what had happened public, and also suggesting that the twins could still be of use to the CIA, albeit completely off the books. The Agency agreed that the twins could return to the States and live off their pensions. It also said that the twins could not be used again, on or off the books. That hadn’t surprised Sheridan, because the Agency says stuff like that a lot, even when it doesn’t mean what it says. In situations like that, what the Agency doesn’t say is more important, and in this case it didn’t say that Sheridan wasn’t allowed to meet the twins again. So for nine years Sheridan had been the twins’ sole point of contact with the Agency, and he’d drawn upon their skills to do the really nasty stuff that nobody wanted to know about. In particular, anyone on U.S. soil whom the Agency didn’t like could be made to vanish when Sheridan involved Augustus and Elijah.

  The kitchen looked normal, aside from a work surface that had nineteen large bottles of bleach, an excessive number of meat cleavers hanging from hooks in the ceiling, and clothes racks that were standing next to radiators and had animal skins draped over them.

  “What you got for us?” Augustus handed Sheridan a mug of coffee and lit a cigarette that was wrapped in paper as black as his long hair.

  Sheridan wondered whether he should drink the coffee, because consuming anything in this place seemed unnatural. “Right now, I haven’t got anything for you. Very shortly, though, I may, and I need you to be ready when that happens.”

  “Man or woman?”

  “Man.”

  Elijah interlocked his fingers, outstretched his sinewy arms, and cracked his knuckles. “Age, nationality, and name?”

  Sheridan answered the questions.

  “The guy who’s been all over the news?”

  “Yes. You got a problem with that?”

  “Nope. How much does he weigh?”

  Sheridan frowned. “What?”

  “Simple question.”

  “I haven’t had the opportunity to put him on a scale.”

  “You know his height and build?”

  Sheridan shrugged. “Over six foot. He’s big. But athletic. Doubt he’s got much fat on him.”

  Elijah glanced at his brother. “Should we assume two-ten to two-forty pounds?”

  Augustus nodded. “I’m thinking so, and that means at least three days in the chest.”

  “I’d say four and a half to be on the safe side.”

  Sheridan had no idea what they were talking about. “The chest?”

  Augustus inhaled deep on his cigarette. “Chest freezer.”

  Elijah added four spoons of sugar to his coffee and slowly stirred the drink. “Few months back, me and Augustus conducted a forensic analysis of the site of our last kill. We thought our methods were good enough to cover our tracks, but we were wrong and found traces of the target’s DNA. Not much, but enough to get us the needle. So, we’ve further refined things.”

  Augustus said, “Day before it happens, we turn up the empty chest freezer to maximum cold.”

  Elijah added, “When it’s at its lowest temperature, we sedate Cochrane.”

  “And put him in a see-through bag.”

  “Body length.”

  “Sealed over the head.”

  “Then we strangle him.”

  “No blood.”

  “Dump him in the freezer.”

  “For four and a half days.”

  “Body’s going to be rock solid after that.”

  “Easy to put through the wood chipper.”

  “Then easy to feed to the boars.”

  Sheridan smiled. “All trace of Will Cochrane and his DNA disappeared.” He stood, checked his watch, and decided he could be back in D.C. in time to get showered and changed before going to the FBI ops room for Marsha Gage’s briefing to her newly assembled task force. “What’s your price?”

  The twins answered in unison. “Fifty thousand.”

  It was money that would come out of the Agency slush fund under Sheridan’s control.

  The CIA officer nodded. “You’ll get it once your pigs have turned Cochrane into shit.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Ellie Hallowes got out of her hotel room bed and stared at the cell phone.

  Goodness knows how many times per day she’d looked at the cell’s screen, desperate to hear it ring or receive an SMS, her mind crying out for Will Cochrane to make contact. But every time she glanced at the blank screen it further reinforced her belief that Will had either decided to turn back and flee, or died in the wilderness somewhere in Europe.

  That would mean she’d never see him again. She didn’t like that prospect one bit.

  And it would mean she would either have to stay quiet about her suspicions that Antaeus knew about Ferryman, or she would have to tell someone else. But who? She recalled what Will had said to her in Norway.

  Be very careful. Trust no one.

  Maybe she could speak to someone outside the U.S. intelligence community. Perhaps the attorney general or someone like that. She’d seen it happen in the movies, but had never been told how it worked in real life. No instructors on her Agency training course had said to her, “Look, if one of us is a traitor and you can’t trust anyone, then this is what you need to do.”

  And even if she did speak to someone who was wholly independent, she decided that nothing would come of it save her being severely punished for meddling in affairs she wasn’t cleared to know about. The president himself had signed some of the documents she’d read in the Ferryman files. So had Senator Jellicoe, Charles Sheridan, and Ed Parker.

  Powerful people.

  All men.

  With huge vested interests in Project Ferryman because it would give them fame and glory when it served up Cobalt’s head.

  She wondered if Helen Coombs had established that Ellie had deliberately gotten her drunk so she could temporarily steal her identity. If she had, no doubt Helen would report it immediately to the Agency, and Ellie would be grabbed by CIA heavies and locked in a cell. So much depended upon Will getting into the States to meet with Ellie. And it had to happen fast, or everything she’d done and hopefully Will had done would be a waste of time.

  She changed out of her nightgown into a bathrobe, started running a shower, and switched on the TV. After flicking through the channels, she settled on a news network’s story about a bomb attack in Kabul that had left twenty-two dead and three times that number mutilated. A security analyst was saying that the bomb used was sophisticated, containing military-grade high explosive. The type of bomb, Ellie mused, that would be expensive to buy and would be used by terrorists with access to a stack of cash—money that in all probability came from Cobalt.

  The anchor cut short the analyst and announced the show was going live to Washington, D.C., where there was breaking news.

  Ellie gasped as she saw a grainy black-and-white close-up shot of a bearded Will Cochrane’s face. At the base of the screen were his name and a text feed that stated, WANTED FUGITIVE IS IN UNITED STATES. ARMED AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. DO NOT APPROACH. IF SEEN, CONTACT FBI OR POLICE.

  Ellie’s heart was pounding, her body tingling with adrenalin
e.

  The show cut live to a female reporter who was close to the FBI’s headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Standing next to the reporter was a man Ellie didn’t know. He was wearing a suit, held an umbrella over his head, and looked pissed to be standing out in the rain and darkness so early in the morning.

  The reporter announced, “I’m with a spokesperson for the FBI. Sir, we understand from Senator Colby Jellicoe’s televised appearance at the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that Cochrane is a member of Great Britain’s MI6 intelligence service.”

  The man nodded. “That’s correct.”

  “So can you tell us why Cochrane’s on the run?”

  “Something he did in Norway while operating on a joint CIA-MI6 mission. But I’m not privy to the details.”

  “You’ve confirmed Will Cochrane’s been sighted at the Canadian border crossing into Maine. Do you have any other confirmed sightings of him?

  The FBI spokesperson shook his head. “We’ve had one or two possible leads, but nothing substantial. That said, we’re fairly sure he’s headed to Washington, D.C.”

  “Why D.C.?”

  “I can’t answer that, ma’am.”

  “Is he a danger to members of the public?”

  The FBI official looked directly into the camera. “He’s a real danger to certain people.”

  “What advice do you give if he’s spotted?”

  “Stay well away. Then call us or the cops. We’ll send in HRT or SWAT to take him down.”

  The reporter frowned. “What’s HRT?”

  The spokesperson replied, “They’re the type of men we need to take down Cochrane, and they’re embedded in our task force.”

  “Is that standard procedure?”

  “No, but this is a highly unusual case. We need to move very fast and with maximum force if Cochrane’s spotted or tracked down.”

  The reporter asked, “Can you tell us a bit more about Cochrane’s capabilities?”