Hunt for the Enemy (#3 Enemy)

by Rob Sinclair

  Innocuous to look at, the man was in his early forties with wispy brown hair, stubble a few days old and nondescript clothes. He was an unassuming man who held a lowly position at the courier company. And yet his under-utilised mind contained a wealth of information far beyond his humble position. As legitimate as the majority of its business was, the company he worked for couriered goods, parcels and correspondence for the cartels. And that put him in a very privileged position indeed.

  Logan opened the door of his car and stepped out into the blazing sun. He lifted his hand up to his face as his eyes adjusted to the brightness, then casually walked across the quiet street.

  The man saw Logan coming after just a few strides. He stopped walking, panic etched on his weary face. Logan continued up to him.

  ‘Hector,’ Logan said.

  Hector held out his hands, as though warding Logan off. ‘No, please. Not here. They can’t see me with you here.’

  Logan took no notice. ‘Turn around, Hector,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Turn around. Walk.’

  Logan grabbed Hector’s arm and tugged on him. He took him away from the bar and down the street with little resistance.

  ‘This’ll be quick,’ Logan reassured him. ‘Then you can go and drink as much shit beer as you like.’

  Logan pulled Hector into an alleyway and they walked far enough down it so that they were out of sight from the main road.

  ‘What do you want?’ Hector said, his voice quivering.

  It wasn’t Logan he was scared of – it was the situation. Logan had only spoken to Hector twice before, but both times the meeting had been carefully arranged. But Logan wanted answers fast this time. He took the postcard-sized photo out of his pocket.

  ‘Who is she?’ he said, holding the picture up for Hector to look at.

  Hector’s pupils seemed to burst with recognition. ‘I … I don’t know,’ he stammered.

  He was lying, Logan knew. And he would have pressed Hector harder if he could. In the end, he never got the chance. It was the change in Hector’s demeanour that tipped Logan off: Hector’s eyes, fixed behind Logan, shot wide open in shock.

  Logan reached out, grabbed Hector by the scruff of his neck, bent his knees and spun around, tossing Hector like a hammer thrower. Hector bundled into the man who had crept up on Logan. The two men fell into a heap on the ground, Hector on top.

  As they scrambled to get back to their feet, Logan quickly assessed his options. He could quite easily fell both Hector and the would-be attacker. But that wasn’t what he had come for. And, looking down at the man who had surely been about to attack Logan, he realised the situation had already provided him with a lot of the answers he needed.

  So Logan opted for the only other choice he could see: he turned on his heel and ran.

  As he exited the alley, he did a quick recce left and right down the street. He spotted two men lurking. They saw Logan and immediately began to close in on him, walking with purpose. Luckily Logan’s car was in the opposite direction to where they were. He sprinted back to it, dived in and fired up the engine. He crunched the gear stick into first and thumped his foot onto the accelerator. The tyres skidded, kicking up a cloud of dust, before the car lurched forward, down the road, away from Hector and the three men.

  Although it looked like he was in the clear, Logan kept on high alert as he drove on. He took an unnecessarily circuitous route back toward the safe house, then dumped the car some half a mile away in the small car park of what passed as a supermarket. He cautiously trekked back to the safe house, a roasting hot studio apartment where he had been staying for the best part of three months.

  Logan came up to the door. The wood was splintered and chipped. The whole building, in fact, was rundown and in need of serious repair; the white-rendered outside walls were yellowed and had great chunks of paint and plaster missing, exposing the breeze blocks underneath.

  Safe house was perhaps in some ways a misnomer. There was certainly very little secure about it in a physical sense. It was, however, entirely congruous with the surrounding area, and Logan knew that as long as he was careful about his own movements, it was entirely safe. He just had to hope he had managed to evade the heat that had clearly been on Hector.

  He took the deadlock key out of his pocket, turned the lock and pushed open the door. Then froze.

  ‘Surprise,’ Mackie said.

  Logan’s tense body suddenly relaxed and he let out a sigh as he walked in, then closed the door behind him. Mackie was sitting casually in a worn-out brown leather armchair. He was smartly dressed, his pot belly pushing out over the waist of his pressed trousers and tugging on the buttons of his sky-blue short-sleeved shirt.

  ‘You’ve got a habit of doing that,’ Logan said, remaining on his feet.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of turning up unannounced.’

  ‘Well, if you answered your bloody phone more often, it wouldn’t come as such a shock to you, would it?’

  ‘I’ve been busy.’

  ‘I’m sure you have. Busy evading me, by the looks of it.’

  ‘That’s not it at all.’

  Logan moved over to the large sash window and pulled it open, letting in a blast of warm, moist air.

  ‘Tell me what’s going on, Logan. You’re not a one-man show. You’re my agent. You do what I tell you.’

  ‘She was with the CIA,’ Logan said, staring over at Mackie, whose face remained deadpan.

  ‘How do you know?’

  Mackie must surely have come to the same conclusion by now. Why else would he have turned up in Venezuela at such short notice?

  ‘Because of the heat that’s on me. Or at least on our assets.’

  Mackie remained silent.

  ‘When did you find out?’ Logan asked him.

  ‘A few hours after you shot her.’

  ‘And you didn’t think to tell me?’

  ‘I couldn’t get hold of you. You were running amok, hassling every asset we’ve worked on out here for the past two years.’

  ‘So what do we do now? Do the CIA know about me? Know about what we’re doing here?’

  ‘No,’ was Mackie’s simple response. ‘And they won’t find out so long as you keep your head.’

  ‘Easy for you to say.’

  ‘Yes, it bloody is. Because I’m the one who gives the orders around here. And you’re the one who’s supposed to follow them.’

  ‘I always do,’ Logan said.

  ‘And yet this time you didn’t. And that worries me. You should know better than that. That’s who you are, Logan. You shouldn’t piss unless I tell you to.’

  ‘Some life, eh?’

  ‘It’s the life you signed up for. The only one I’m offering you. I’m not sure you’re quite understanding the seriousness of this situation. You do what I tell you. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s what you were trained for. You’re not Sherlock Holmes.’

  ‘I’m not trying to be.’

  ‘Then take this as your first and final warning. You stray from protocol one more time and that’s it, you’re finished.’

  It wasn’t Mackie’s words that surprised Logan, it was his calm tone. Plenty of times Logan had seen Mackie blow up in anger. To be chastised by Mackie without his once raising his voice added a sinister edge to his words.

  ‘I’m not straying from protocol,’ Logan said, surprising himself with his own continued defiance.

  ‘What?’ Mackie said, his forehead creasing, just the first sign that maybe his bubbling anger wasn’t too far away.

  ‘This is what you trained me for.’

  ‘I trained you to follow orders. To not ask questions of me.’

  ‘You trained me to survive. That’s what I’m doing. I’m surviving. I killed a CIA agent because of your orders – which, you’ll find, I carried out to the letter. I don’t know who she was or why she was there, but I know my actions will have put me in danger one way or another. You can train me all you like, but
you’ll never take the instinct for self-protection from me.’

  Mackie stayed silent for a few moments after that. Both men stared at each other. Logan wondered what was going through Mackie’s mind. He knew he was pushing his relationship to the limit. But he wasn’t asking much, really. He had carried out his orders. He’d shot and killed two people on the say-so of his boss. It turned out this time that the say-so was wrong. He’d killed a fellow agent. Logan was sure that hadn’t been Mackie’s plan. Logan didn’t regret it. He felt no sorrow or anger for having pulled the trigger. The training that Mackie had put him through had made sure of that. But what he could still feel was his own desire to live. And to seek out and eliminate any threat against that.

  In the end, Mackie seemed to come to that same realisation.

  ‘Her name was Janet Ford,’ he said. ‘It was a painstaking task to even get that much – after you shot her, the internal network went into meltdown. We had bad intel, it’s as simple as that. We’re still trying to assess why. Someone somewhere along the line isn’t playing ball like we thought they were.’

  ‘That’s the same conclusion I came to,’ Logan said.

  He moved over to the pine dresser in the corner of the room and opened the doors at the bottom to reveal a simple electronic safe built into the wall behind the dresser. Logan input a six-digit code and took out the brown envelope that he’d prised from Janet Ford’s dead grasp. He tossed the envelope over to Mackie, who took it and pulled out the contents.

  ‘However the CIA got Ford in, she was certainly a step ahead of us,’ Logan said. ‘There’s information there on the college’s methods of operation, key personnel, locations. The man she met yesterday wasn’t the college’s honcho as we thought he was. He wasn’t a threat. He was an informant.’

  Mackie perused the documents, sighing here and there as he took in not so much the information that was in front of him, Logan guessed, but the predicament that they were now in.

  ‘How the hell are we going to explain this?’ Logan said.

  ‘We’re not,’ Mackie said with no emotion or further embellishment.

  ‘I said it didn’t feel right,’ Logan said, no longer able to resist pointing out the fact.

  ‘But I don’t pay you to feel,’ Mackie said.

  ‘Then maybe you should.’

  Logan knew that Mackie was never going to apologise, even though it was clear to both men that the hit had been a significant error of judgement. What Logan didn’t know or understand was how the JIA had been fed intel that was so far off the mark.

  ‘We could have aborted,’ Logan said. ‘ID’d her before taking any action. That way we would have saved her life and still had a useful informant on our hands.’

  ‘It’s always easier to see the alternatives with hindsight.’

  Logan shook his head. ‘What do we do now?’ he asked.

  ‘You tell me. You’re the one who seemingly wants the freedom to think all of a sudden, to tell me how we should be doing things. So tell me, please, what do you think we should do next?’

  ‘With the information we now have, we could take the whole college down.’

  Mackie smiled. ‘A moment ago, you were concerned about the threat to your own life. Now you want to go all Rambo out in the jungle?’

  ‘I never said I was concerned about the threat. Just that I wanted to find out what the threat is. Who the threat is.’

  ‘Fair point. But we’re not going to do that. Not while the CIA are out here stepping on our toes. And I’m not about to up and tell them what happened.’

  ‘Even though there’s a potential mole out there?’

  ‘Let me think about that. I think we need to close this one down. Start afresh with the new information when we really know what’s happened.’

  ‘So we just pack up and go home? That’s it?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I need you to do one more thing first.’

  ‘Spit it out.’

  ‘We’ve got another man in there. Deep cover.’

  Logan turned to face Mackie, not bothering to hide the surprise on his face. His boss’s declaration was a revelation, and yet Mackie’s demeanour and tone were flat and placid, like it was nothing.

  ‘And you didn’t think that was something I should have known about?’ Logan said, the irritation in his voice clear.

  ‘No. I didn’t. Like I said, I don’t pay you to think. You only know what I need you to know.’

  ‘Perhaps if you want to keep on paying me, that needs to change.’

  ‘Is that a threat?’

  ‘No. But don’t you think this would work better if you let me in? I’m good at this. I’ve shown you that. I’m not asking for much. I’m just asking for you to trust me. To trust my judgement. I’ll carry out your orders, I always have. But let me in. Use me properly.’

  ‘It might not seem like a lot to you, but it’s a lot to me. There’s more for me to lose in this than you.’

  ‘I don’t see how. The only thing either of us has to lose is our life.’

  Mackie stared at Logan but didn’t say a word. Logan wished he could tell what his boss was thinking. He understood why Mackie had to be so vague and secretive, even with agents like

  Logan. But there came a point when the model just didn’t operate effectively when Mackie withheld so much. Logan knew Mackie’s relationship was different with each agent, for the very reason that each agent he ran had different skills and uses. Logan had become, in effect, a trained killer. An assassin. The problem was Logan wasn’t sure he was happy with the hand he’d been dealt anymore. Despite all the training, physical as well as psychological, he knew he had more to offer than that. And he wanted the freedom that he knew some of Mackie’s other agents had. Mackie wasn’t in the field day in, day out. He couldn’t expect to always call every shot.

  ‘My agent’s position is compromised,’ Mackie said. ‘We need to extract him.’

  ‘How do you know he’s compromised?’

  ‘Because I haven’t been able to reach him for two days.’

  ‘You think he’s still alive?’

  ‘I can’t be sure. But even if his cover hasn’t been blown, I think it’s too dangerous to leave him in now.’

  ‘You want me to get him out?’ Logan said.

  ‘Exactly. You want something different. This is something different.’

  ‘Is that it?’ Logan responded, surprised at the simplicity of the proposition, but also somewhat disappointed. ‘I get him out, then we all go home?’

  ‘Yes. That’s it. You want to prove yourself? This is it. First, you need to find him.’

  Chapter 38

  Akmola Province, Kazakhstan

  Butler was on the ground, half out of it, when Logan attacked Paul Evans and jumped into the Land Cruiser. His body was heavy and distant, his vision somewhat blurred. The blows Logan inflicted had taken their toll. But his mind, although not sharp, was still fully aware. He felt a cynical satisfaction as he watched Logan and Grainger speed away in the four-by-four.

  The deal that he and Fleming had agreed to hand over Logan and Grainger was the best they could achieve in such a short time, though Butler had felt from the start that they could have held out for more money. Fleming hadn’t been so keen. He saw Logan as a threat and simply wanted rid of him.

  Butler had been somewhat disappointed at the prospect of losing such valuable assets so quickly. Giving up Logan meant Butler would never get the chance to personally make him suffer. That bastard had ruined his life. Butler had lived for the army. Lived for the SAS. When he’d been turfed out at the age of just thirty-two because of his gammy arm, his life had headed in a downward spiral. He’d contemplated suicide more than once but had always bottled it. One of the few things that had kept him going was his relationship with Fleming, who’d never lost faith in him.

  When Logan had turned up out of the blue, Butler had outwardly been hostile, but inwardly pleased that he m
ight finally get a chance for some payback. The deal that Fleming had struck had seemed to have brought to an end that possibility. But as Butler watched Logan heading off on the run once more, he felt his chance was still there after all.

  That short moment of satisfaction didn’t last long, though. The scene in front of Butler quite quickly changed into one of chaos and destruction.

  Fleming was kneeling over him, saying something to Butler whose groggy mind was struggling to decipher the words. Fleming had seemed oblivious to what was going on behind him until the revved engine and screeching tyres caught his attention as Logan and Grainger made their getaway.

  Evans and Mason lay sprawled on the floor. Evans’s two armed guards were haphazardly firing their weapons into the distance at Logan’s vehicle. Out of Fleming and the crew, it was Ilya who reacted first. He walked right up to Fleming and Butler. He took a handgun – a Sig – from the holster on his hip and, as nonchalantly as you could imagine, raised the gun and pointed it at Fleming’s head.

  Butler tried to move. Tried to shout out. He wasn’t sure whether it was the state he was in or the speed of events unfolding that meant he never got the chance.

  Fleming was looking over to the compound gates. He began to get to his feet. He reached for his own sidearm. With Butler frozen, it was Vassiliy who called out, who tried to alert Fleming to the fact that one of his own men was pointing a gun at his head.

  Fleming half-turned before Ilya pulled the trigger. The bullet tore into the side of Fleming’s face. He stumbled and fell, landing in a heap on top of Butler, whose weak body was pinned down.

  All hell broke loose. There was shouting and a cascade of gunfire from all directions. Vassiliy, off to Butler’s side, opened fire with his AK-47. Ilya, completely out-positioned, took at least half a dozen bullets. He collapsed to the ground just inches away from Butler who was still struggling to lift Fleming’s heavy body off him.