Dark Spies

by Matthew Dunn

  Catherine placed her cheek against Ed’s. “I’ve no idea. Laying low I guess.”

  Will shook his head. “Wrong guess.”

  Catherine frowned.

  Will crouched before her and placed his hand over hers and Ed’s. He didn’t know why, because Catherine had very nearly caused untold pain. Perhaps it was because he felt sorry for all pawns manipulated by the minds of the greatest intelligence officers.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Cochrane.” Catherine’s regret was tangible.

  “So am I. You knew Gregori Shonin was a myth. Thing is though, he wasn’t the only one, and you’ve been completely played for a fool. Terrorist activities that had been attributed to Cobalt were in truth atrocities that had been conducted by thousands of other terrorists. There wasn’t one man who was financing the majority of them.”

  Catherine stared at him, openmouthed, shock written across her face.

  Will ran a finger against her tears, stood, and threw his handgun across the room. He’d learned the truth and felt nothing but disgust that the world of espionage reduced people to winners and losers and the dead. “Cobalt doesn’t exist.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  One week later, Will was wearing an orange jumpsuit, had shackles on his ankles and wrists, and was shuffling along a brightly illuminated corridor inside ADX Florence—a Federal Bureau of Prisons supermax penitentiary in Colorado. Four burly armed guards surrounded him as they led him through the part of the facility where he’d been kept for seven days in solitary confinement.

  They forced him into a room that was bare of anything save a metal table and four chairs, all of which were molded to the floor to prevent them from being used as impromptu weapons. He was pushed down into one of the chairs so that he was facing the seats on the opposite side of the table. The guards took up positions in each corner of the room.

  He waited for approximately twenty minutes, no one speaking, no explanation given as to why he’d been dragged out of his cell and brought here. He supposed it could be another meeting with the prison governor, who’d already told him that sometime soon he’d be moved to another high-security prison so that he didn’t have time to plan his escape, and that he’d keep being moved until a decision was made about his fate. Or it could be another tedious interview with a Bureau agent or CIA officer, wherein they’d barrage him with questions about what had happened during the last few weeks before walking out of the room and threatening to throw away the key to his cell because all he’d given them were lies, manipulation, and crap.

  So he was surprised when the door opened and Marsha, Alistair, and Patrick walked in and sat opposite him.

  Marsha was clutching a white envelope, and she looked considerably different than when he’d last seen her in the alley off Wisconsin Avenue. Her hair was immaculate, and she was wearing an elegant suit. It didn’t surprise him that Alistair was also nicely dressed. The MI6 controller rarely liked to be seen in public in anything less formal than a three-piece suit, topped off with a Royal Navy tie and hair that was always cut at the two-hundred-year-old Truefitt & Hill barbershop in London’s St. James’s Street. But the fact that Patrick was also wearing a suit worried Will, because the CIA officer was normally a roll-your-sleeves-up guy. He never dressed up unless something bad was about to happen and he needed to look the part.

  Marsha said, “I know my colleagues have asked you the same questions countless times during the last few days, but now that I’m here in person, I’m going to ask the same things. How did you get to Canada?”

  “I flew first class with British Airways.” Will smiled. “It was a lovely flight. Very peaceful.”

  “You know anything about a Norwegian trawler vessel berthing and being boarded by Danish police in Denmark?”

  “Why would I? Sea travel makes me queasy.”

  “A downed aircraft off the coast of Nova Scotia containing a dead Russian female intelligence operative?”

  Will remembered Ulana telling him that all paperwork had been approved for her to adopt a baby boy. “No.”

  “If circumstances had been different, would you have killed any of the police officers you encountered in Nova Scotia, at the Canadian border crossing, or in Union Station?”

  “I’m not a cop killer.”

  “You shot one of them in the shoulder.”

  “He was trying to stop me entering your beautiful country. I was rather displeased with that. I presume he’s recovered?”

  “He’ll live.” Marsha tapped the envelope on the table. “Final question: You know anything about the deaths of Sheridan, Jellicoe, or twins called Augustus and Elijah?”

  Will glanced at Alistair and Patrick before returning his gaze to Marsha. “Their deaths are a terrible tragedy.”

  Alistair laughed.

  Marsha did not. “All four were”—she frowned while trying to think of the right word—“executed in the space of a few hours, the same evening you later confronted Ed and Catherine Parker. Was that your Night of the Long Knives?”

  A reference to when Nazis killed many of their German political opponents in a purge in 1934.

  Will moved his hands onto the metal table, causing the chain between them to rattle against the surface and the guards to take a step toward him.

  But Will held the palms of his hands up and smiled. “Now, Agent Gage: I can forgive you for accusing a gentleman like me of murder. However, tut tut: Comparing me to a Nazi? My grandfather and his brothers killed Nazis for a living.”

  “I’m drawing a comparison to the event, not the personalities involved. Did you kill Sheridan, Jellicoe, and the twins?”

  Will kept her gaze, his eyes unblinking. “Has Ellie Hallowes been laid to rest?”

  Marsha nodded. “In a grave next to her parents. The Director of the CIA personally placed the Distinguished Intelligence Cross in Ellie’s hands before the casket was sealed.”

  The Distinguished Intelligence Cross was the Agency’s highest decoration, awarded for extraordinary heroism. Only a handful of officers had received the medal since the creation of the Agency in 1947.

  The act touched Will deeply, though he wondered if Ellie cared about medals. He thought about the jewelry box he’d returned to her, wishing he’d been able to place it in her hands. “You went out of your way to help me.”

  “Not help you, but help get to the truth behind Ferryman.”

  “Fair enough, but nevertheless it was help that you didn’t need to give and could have prompted severe repercussions against you if it hadn’t paid off. So, I’m going to give you something in return. If you choose to ask your question about the deaths of Jellicoe, Sheridan, and the twins one more time . . .”

  The guards placed their hands on the butts of their pistols.

  “. . . I promise you that I will answer your question truthfully.”

  Patrick and Alistair frowned.

  Marsha stared back at Will, oblivious to everyone else in the room. “The truth?”

  “The truth.”

  The room was silent. Everyone was motionless.

  It seemed like minutes later that Marsha broke her gaze on Will and put her finger on the white envelope. “In here is a joint letter from the president of the United States of America and the prime minister of Canada. They’ve signed it, and it’s stamped with the seals of their offices. The letter has been witnessed and countersigned by the U.S. attorney general and the chief justice of Canada. It says that, due to your outstanding devotion to Western national security, you are pardoned of all crimes known to be committed by you in their countries. But there’s a catch. Both premiers have told me not to give the letter to you if there are other crimes you’ve committed that they don’t know about and that would need to be investigated, particularly if those crimes involve murder.”

  Will nodded slowly. “I respect their position, and I respect your authority. I’m prepared to give you the truth, no matter what the consequences.”

  “Why?”

  Will sighed. “Becau
se I of all people know that the truth matters. I’ve spent the last two weeks thinking about nothing else.”

  All eyes were on Marsha.

  Nobody spoke.

  Finally, she said, “There’s only one witness to one of the incidents, and her description of the man who broke into her home doesn’t match yours.” Marsha’s eyes flickered.

  Will knew Marsha didn’t believe Lindsay Sheridan’s version of events.

  But she thrust the envelope across the table. “So that’s case closed as far as you’re concerned.” She looked at the guards. “Get him out of these darn shackles. This man’s saved the States from a shit storm and deserves to be treated better than this.” The guards tried to object, but Marsha barked, “Do it, or you’re messing with an executive order from the president.”

  After he was liberated from his cuffs, Marsha stood and held out her hand.

  Will got to his feet and placed his scarred hand in hers.

  She shook his hand firmly, turned, and walked out of the room while calling out, “If you come to my jurisdiction again and cause trouble, I’ll be the first one to put you back in here.”

  Will smiled.

  “Sit down, Will.” Alistair intertwined his fingers and looked at the guards. “Leave us.” When the guards were gone, Alistair said, “Task Force S has been shut down. There’s no future for you in MI6 or the CIA.”

  Will shrugged. “Up to a moment ago, I thought I was facing life imprisonment or the needle. Thoughts about my future career were the least of my worries.”

  Alistair studied him. “Patrick and I still carry a lot of power in our agencies. Plus, no one can touch the rather healthy slush fund that we’ve tucked away for a rainy day.” He smiled at the inadvertent poetry. “You’re unemployable in the normal world, and the secret world can’t afford to lose someone of your capabilities. So here’s what we’re thinking: you become self-employed but we’re your only clients. When we want a deniable job done, we pay you one-third up front, the balance on results. But we won’t want to know how you get those results.”

  “And you’ll stand in a court of law and deny any association with me if things go wrong?”

  “Correct.”

  Will looked around the room. “Rather strange place to be conducting a job interview.”

  Alistair had a genteel smile on his face. “Will, I think this is probably the least strange thing that has happened to you.”

  Will thought Alistair had a point. “Have you established how Catherine Parker communicated with Antaeus?”

  Patrick answered, “We have. Cell phone calls to set up meetings. And encrypted bursts between two covert comms transmitters, for use when they couldn’t meet but intelligence needed to be relayed.”

  “You got Parker’s transmitter and her key code to operate the system?”

  “Yep. Doesn’t help us, though.”

  “What’s going to happen to Parker?”

  “Life imprisonment. No chance of parole.” Patrick sighed. “Her daughter’s been put into temporary foster care. Reckon she’ll be moved from family to family, rather than staying put somewhere permanent, ’cause not many parents want to adopt the child of a traitor.” His expression steeled. “After what he nearly pulled off, I just wish we’d got Antaeus. Maybe that’ll be the first job we give you: get the bastard.”

  Will shook his head. “He was merely doing his job. In any case, last time I tried to kill him, I lost, Antaeus lost, and his family lost. Do you have a pen and paper?”

  Alistair withdrew his fountain pen and a notepad. “What are you thinking?”

  Will wrote carefully on a sheet of paper and put the note in front of the men. “This.”

  Alistair read the note before handing the paper to Patrick, who frowned.

  Will asked, “Do you think you can pull this off?”

  Patrick laughed. “I’ll move heaven and earth to get this done. Will, this is brilliant.”

  “I don’t care about brilliance.” Will looked at Alistair. He’d been through so much with this man, who meant more to him than just being a high-ranking colleague. Sometimes Alistair was a pain in the ass, other times a pompous mandarin whose superb intellect could think in Latin, French, Arabic, and a host of other languages; and then there were his eccentricities, including his love of falconry during his retreats to his Scottish mansion, where he fed his beloved kestrels with dead baby chicks that he, and any other foolish guest who stupidly dared to come and stay for the weekend, had to spend evenings peeling the skin off before feeding them to the birds of prey. God had broken the mold after creating Alistair.

  But he was so much more than what you saw on the surface.

  To Will, he was a surrogate father.

  And Patrick was Will’s surrogate uncle.

  Both men had served alongside his real father and were there at the end.

  They’d subsequently supported his family, without Will or his sister knowing.

  They were complex, tough, yet ultimately magnificent men.

  Will looked at them both and felt like their child.

  A kid who was all bravado and uncaring of scratches and bruises caused during his imagination-driven adventures in the forests surrounding his home. And yet one who also needed love and security.

  Now that security was being taken away from him.

  By men who were acting like a mother who knew the time was right to cut her apron strings.

  He had to trust their judgment.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Dickie Mountjoy grumbled under his breath as his front doorbell rang. No doubt it was the postman again, who’d come with some soddin’ special delivery or whatever else it was these days that that was no better than a good old stamp with the queen’s image on it, stuck like it should be on a bit of paper and shoved through a red pillar box. Military men, he’d long ago decided, understand change just fine: new weapons, tactics, wars, blundering politicians telling them what to do and them doing it anyway because soldiers know duty even when it means supporting a blithering stack of spineless ignorance. But civvies like change because it keeps their boring lives on their toes. New this, new that; special or recorded deliveries; change for the ruddy sake of change.

  As he reached for the door, he decided he was going to tell the postman that, no, he wasn’t going to put his signature on some cruddy electronic screen just so that he could be given a package that belonged to him, because the screen didn’t work and nobody seemed to care that his signature never came out looking like it was supposed to.

  He pulled open the door, ready to give the postman a dressing down as if he were a young Guardsman who had a hair out of place while standing to attention in Wellington Barracks.

  But the man before him wasn’t the postman.

  It was Will Cochrane.

  Wearing a suit and overcoat.

  No hair out of place.

  He was smiling. Looked thinner than when Dickie had last seen him.

  Dickie’s bottom lip trembled as he stood ramrod straight, his hands clasped behind his back, his immaculate civilian clothes pressed to the standards of an off-duty major partaking of a glass of port in the officers’ mess. “You . . . you got here then.”

  “It took me a while.”

  “And I suppose you’re here to flog me some of your dodgy life insurance?”

  Will’s smile broadened. “Something like that.”

  “Except, everyone knows your cover as a salesman was all a big fib.” Dickie pointed at the ceiling. “Been to your home?”

  “I have.”

  “Like what you see?”

  “I called Phoebe on my way over here. She told me my place had been trashed. You didn’t need to . . .”

  “Do you like what you see, or not?”

  Will was overwhelmed with gratitude. “I like what I see.”

  Dickie held out his hand, keeping his expression gruff to suppress the true emotions that were searing within him. “Good to have you back, soldier.”


  Will shook his hand.

  No embraces for Englishmen like these.

  Just a brief eye contact to recognize that both men knew exactly what the other was thinking and feeling, and that no fuss needed to be made of those sensations.

  Will said, “Phoebe also told me that you’d only let me take you to a doctor. I’ve pulled some strings and fast-tracked an appointment.”

  “When do we go?”

  “Grab your coat. You’re on parade in ten minutes.”

  They left the apartment block, neither man speaking, their breath steaming in the cold London air, walking side by side over snow-covered ground, passing trees that had Christmas lights draped over them. Minutes later they entered the Princess Street healthcare clinic.

  They were inside for an hour. Sitting in the waiting room while ignoring each other and reading back issues of National Geographic magazine; sitting in a doctor’s consulting room while tests were made on Dickie; back in the waiting room to read about volcano eruptions and indigenous tribes in Botswana; and back in the consulting room.

  That’s when Dickie was given the news.

  They left in silence.

  Despite his arthritis, Dickie marched alongside Will with the vigor and precision of a commanding officer who was determined that his last-ever inspection of his troops should be one of his best.

  As they entered West Square and headed toward their apartment house, music was playing from one of the nearby houses.

  Dean Martin’s “Let it Snow.”

  The song that had played in a loop in Will’s head as he’d staggered through treacherous weather in Greenland, thinking that soon he would be dead.

  The communal front door to the apartment house opened. Phoebe and David were there, Phoebe wearing clothes that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a strip club, David wearing a food-stained apron over jeans and a sweater that had a reindeer stitched on it. They were holding each other, looks of concern on their faces.

  Dickie placed a hand on Will’s arm and stopped.

  Will stayed with him.

  They were surrounded by the gorgeous Edwardian square.