Counterspy

by Matthew Dunn

  I’d always known that Abram’s nasty. In my line of work I’d mixed with ­people like that a lot, and in fairness to Abram he’s not the worst person I’d partnered with to attempt to screw the East in favor of satiating the West. Until this evening, I’d ranked Abram as a seven out of ten bad guy. But Abram’s stock had just gone up, and as I waded through crap I tried to decide whether he was an eight, nine, or ten out of ten.

  Maybe these were superfluous thoughts, because a man who will slit your throat is a man who will slit your throat, and his ranking won’t make the experience better or worse. But I thought about it anyway, as it helped me ignore the heat within the labyrinth of tunnels and the noise in my ears from the drumbeat of my heart.

  Part of me hoped Abram would keep running and use his knowledge of one of the oldest sewage systems in the States to his advantage. I knew nothing about the maze I was in, and every step I took furthered the possibility that I wouldn’t be able to find my way out of here. Trouble was, getting out of the sewer was the least of my problems, because Abram wanted me dead and I couldn’t think of a more perfect venue in which he could enact his crime.

  I reached a junction in the tunnel where I needed to make a decision to turn left or right. Standing still, I listened, trying to ignore the thump of my heartbeat, the rank odor, and the scurrying and splashing of vermin. A louder noise came from my left; whoosh, whoosh, whoosh; maybe a man kicking his leg through ankle-­deep water. That made sense, because Abram didn’t want me to make the wrong turn. He needed me to hear and follow him until I reached a place of his choosing so he could surprise me.

  I made no attempt to be quiet as I moved down a tunnel that was narrower than the previous one and clearly wasn’t flushed as frequently, because the smell was making me gag. My handgun at eye level, I waded onward, imagining my MI6 controller declaring to the chief of British Intelligence, “Will Cochrane died in shit.”

  I didn’t want to die in shit. I didn’t want to die at all. I had things to do, such as mastering the Chaconne Baroque lute recital, completing my thesis on loose-­leaf Chinese teas, going to the river Itchen for the first time and casting a fly line, and trying to find a woman who’d have me. These and other things were important, and it pissed me off that multiple times each year I found myself in situations where I’d put all of my aspirations in jeopardy.

  The wall lights—­bare bulbs that were throwing off a dull, yellow glow—­were fewer now, some flickering. Large chunks of the tunnel were in complete darkness. Most likely, Abram had concealed himself in the shadows, waiting to attack. Although he was twelve years older than me and had left the military over a decade ago, he was fit and strong, and in his spare time he kept up the crazy Russian special forces tests to try to be immune to pain. As I moved into one of the chunks of darkness, I decided that if he managed to disarm me, I wasn’t sure which of us would better the other.

  The slash of Abram’s knife across my forearm, which made me drop my pistol, meant I was about to find out.

  Instinctively, I twisted my body a split second before I saw the tiniest glint of steel thrust into the space where I’d been standing. I grabbed his knife-­wielding arm and twisted it hard. He punched his knee into my ribs. But I kept the lock on despite the agony in my body, yanked back his wrist, saw the knife drop out of his hand, twisted his arm further so that he was completely off balance, and dragged him with me so that he had no choice but to fall to the ground. I maintained my grip on his limb as I placed my foot on his throat and forced his head underwater.

  I had to use all of my strength to hold him there; his legs were thrashing and his free arm was punching my foot and trying to wrench it free from his throat. It felt like ten minutes but was actually nearer two when Abram stopped moving. I kept his head under for another minute in case he was trying to trick me into releasing my hold on him. But after that, I reached down and pulled his head out.

  No doubt about it; he was dead.

  Chapter 3

  OFFICIALLY THERE ARE eight directors who report to the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. Although most of them are not publicly named, their job title and rank are available for all to see on the Agency’s website. But I knew a secret that’s only privy to a handful of senior CIA officers, the president of the U.S., my London-­based MI6 controller, and the prime minister of Britain: there’s a ninth director in the Agency. His name’s Patrick, and he and my MI6 controller head up the joint task force that I work for. Barely anyone in Western intelligence knows about it.

  I was standing in an empty room within the Agency’s headquarters in Langley, and I was facing Patrick. He’s a tall, sinewy, ex-­army officer type, twenty years my senior, and was normally immaculately dressed, his expression composed. But today I was somewhat perturbed to see that he had his shirtsleeves rolled up and his rattlesnake face on—­a term I use when his eyes go mean.

  I had hoped today would be routine: filling in paperwork, telling the truth about Abram’s assault on me in the restaurant, lying that he’d escaped, and not telling the truth that I’d left his body to the rats. After all, it was only a few hours ago that I’d managed to find a way out of the sewer and had caused everyone in the lobby of the Mandarin Oriental hotel to stare at me with mouths wide open as I’d walked toward the elevators while covered in crap. And even when I’d gotten to my room, it had taken three showers and two baths before I’d been satisfied that I was clean enough to hit the sack. I was tired and needed today to be a boring one.

  But here was Patrick. With that look.

  “What’s up, old boy?” I asked in my best hammed-­up British accent, fully cognizant it would severely antagonize the rattlesnake.

  “Aside from the fact that your presence in D.C. was supposed to be discreet—­no assassination attempts on you, no guns drawn, zero civilians screaming as they see you running through the streets, pretty much nothing out of the ordinary until you get on a plane and head back to the UK?”

  “Aside from that fact, yes.” I smiled insincerely. It always made Patrick want to punch my face. “Anyway, you can’t blame me because ­people want to kill me.”

  “I can. The fact that ­people want to kill you means that they are troubled by your character or actions. And that means you have social problems that are wholly your responsibility.”

  I thought Patrick had a point. “I did nothing wrong.”

  “Running in a public place with a pistol in your hand? You were lucky you weren’t shot by a cop.”

  Simply for the sake of seeing what it would do to Patrick, I wanted to tell him that it got much worse than that, but I decided that confessing I’d killed Abram on U.S. soil wouldn’t work in my favor. “Something else is bothering you.”

  Patrick looked at me in a way that always made me feel that he was my surrogate father or uncle. The look killed my flippant posturing.

  And rightly so. He was my father’s colleague, secretly gave financial support to my mother after my dad was killed, and had consistently backed me to the hilt even though privately he sometimes told me I was a frickin’ damn liability.

  Patrick kept his eyes focused on mine. “You know why Abram tried to take a shot at you?”

  I nodded. “Russia’s wanted me dead for years. Turns out Abram’s been loyal to the Russians all along. They used him to get to me.”

  Patrick tapped his hand on a telephone. “Yeah, well, we’ve spoken to the Kremlin. Told ’em that one of our own was targeted by one of theirs and that if anything similar happens again we’ll post on the Internet a video we got of a certain senior Russian politician having a good time with a woman who’s not his wife. That should keep Russia off your back for a while.”

  “Great.”

  “No, it’s not all great, because it’s possible Russia’s not the only one that wants you dead.”

  He told me about a man, code name Trapper, who was seized by Agency men in Afghani
stan, lied that he was an Indian intelligence officer, said that I was being targeted for execution by unknown terrorists because I’d killed a senior Taliban leader, and escaped from a cell that was deemed to be totally escape-­proof.

  “Trapper’s vanished,” Patrick said. “I can understand why he fed them the intelligence officer shit; bought him time to escape. But I don’t get why he went out of his way to say you were being targeted. Nor do I know how he got your name. You think there could be any truth in what he’s said?”

  “In principle, yes. I’ve lost count of the number of terrorists I’ve killed, including Taliban.”

  Patrick smiled, and this worried me. “I got to take precautions. Keep you here until we find Trapper and sort this out.”

  “For how long?” I had a sinking feeling.

  “As long as it takes.”

  The prospect of having to kill days, maybe weeks, sitting in my hotel room was the last thing I wanted. I liked my hotel, but I’m a restless type, and sustained boredom makes me prone to grumpiness and moments of unexplained whimsy. The last time I had nothing to do was a three-­week stint in a hotel in Vienna. By the end of that stint, I’d bought two awful paintings and a coat that hadn’t suited me but most certainly would have looked good on Liberace, and nearly thrown my room’s TV out the window because it had shown only one English-­language movie and I’d watched it seven times. To this day, I still knew every line in Finding Nemo. “Let me go after Trapper.”

  “Can’t afford for you to be taken out by a bunch of bearded crazies. There are some other big projects looming that we need you for.”

  “I’ll find Trapper quicker than anyone else, plus I can handle myself against crazies.”

  Patrick adopted his cross daddy look. “I’m not taking that risk.”

  I could see Patrick’s mind was made up. “I’ll go mad in my hotel.”

  “I know. So, I’m thinking we move you to an Agency safe house. Get you off the radar. The place has got a housekeeper, so she’ll be there to feed you and keep you company.”

  This was very bad news. There are two categories of CIA safe house keepers: the mothering type who spends every waking hour trying to make you fat; or the haughty type who thinks the house belongs to her and must remain spotless. Both types are always over sixty. “When do I move in?”

  “Today.”

  FIVE HOURS LATER I exited a taxi in a quiet residential suburb, grabbed my bag, paid the driver, then considered asking him to take me back to central D.C. because the place around me looked like it could be in the top league of the world’s most boring locations. On either side of the street the houses were identical and had manicured front lawns. I discerned no sign of life, meaning everyone was away at work or the occupants of the street were in their eighties and spent all day watching TV. It would have been better if the Agency had housed me in a downtrodden crime zone, because at least then there might have been something interesting going on around me.

  But I let the taxi go and walked toward the safe house while deciding that if its keeper was the haughty type, I would make an extra effort to be as messy as possible, and if she was the mothering type, I would lie to her that I’m gluten and lactose intolerant. I knocked on the door, it opened, and I was very surprised to see that the person standing in front of me was a superb CIA field operative.

  Her name, one of many but it’s the one I like the most, was Chrissie Lime. Though I hadn’t dared to ask her for her age, I guessed she was about five years younger than me, but despite her comparative youth she had eight years of operational work under her belt plus a degree from Harvard.

  “Hi, Chrissie, are you still single?” I wondered why I blurted this question without thinking.

  She pretended to look annoyed and responded in her New England accent, “Yes.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Not sure. I guess it’s a matter of perspective.” From my perspective I was glad she wasn’t hitched, because I had to admit I’d felt a bit of a feeling in my gut when I’d first laid eyes on her two years ago in Hanoi. She’d been operating under diplomatic cover in the U.S. embassy in Vietnam, recruiting spies and sending them over the border into southern China. I’d been visiting the country with the primary remit to do a review for a nonexistent holiday magazine, with the secondary remit to place a bomb under a car that was owned by a slave trader of children. Chrissie had been my in-­country point of contact and the person who would supply me with the equipment I’d need for the job. After I’d turned the trader into a charred corpse, I’d invited Chrissie out for a drink at the Bamboo Bar in the Sofitel Metropole. It had been the unprofessional thing to do because we were supposed to have been keeping our contact to a minimum, but, like mischievous kids, spies sometimes cannot resist doing things that fly in the face of their tradecraft training. I’d sat in the bar, my beer encapsulated by hands that had still smelled of cordite; she’d walked in—­tall, slender, black trouser suit, white shirt, shades, dark hair pinned up—­and moved across the room with the confidence, charisma, and beauty of a movie star who was about to address a pack of photojournalists. She’d sat next to me, ordered a whiskey, looked me in the eye, and said, “You’re not going to screw me tonight.”

  I’d respected that, and in any case it hadn’t been my intention to tempt her into my bed, though the moment she’d told me that option had been off the table I’d felt a twang of disappointment but also a sense of optimism, because the word tonight was time-­specific, meaning there was always the possibility of another day. We’d had quite a lot of drinks, and she’d made me laugh by telling me about the time she’d posed as a white Kenyan arms dealer while meeting an Iranian defense attaché in a restaurant in Switzerland that had overlooked the Alps and, for some reason unbeknownst to her, had bizarrely and wholly inaccurately said to him that the vista around them had reminded her of Kenya. I’d made her laugh by recalling the time I’d spent one year making preparations to lure a rogue nuclear physicist to a meeting with me, travelled to Nicosia to have dinner with him in my hotel’s restaurant, had twenty minutes to spare after dressing in my room, put the TV on, and become so engrossed in a live AC/DC rock concert that I’d lost track of time and missed the meeting.

  After that evening in Hanoi, Chrissie had been posted somewhere else, I’d been whisked off to do more covert operations, and our paths had never crossed again until this moment.

  She was dressed like she was when I last saw her, and physically identical; I was getting the same feeling in my gut.

  “Can I come in?” I felt like a sheepish boyfriend who was trying to get his girl back after an argument.

  Chrissie didn’t answer; instead she went into the living room, sat on a sofa, and examined me. “Since we last met, you’ve lost seven pounds, have nine more visible scars, and look like you’ve recently killed someone.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Which bit?”

  “The killing bit.”

  She pointed at my face. “When I met you before you killed the target in Hanoi, your eyes were clear; after, they were dead. You’ve got the latter look right now.”

  “Actually, I think I’m just tired.”

  She clicked her tongue but didn’t articulate that she knew I was lying.

  “Why are you here?”

  Chrissie rested an ankle on her leg and cracked her knuckles. “I was at a loose end in Langley—­not due back in the field for another month—­and Patrick thought I was the ideal candidate to keep an eye on you.”

  “I don’t need watching.”

  “Patrick disagrees. Thinks that you wouldn’t last one day with one of the normal safe house keepers; that you’d walk out the back door when she wasn’t looking and just keep walking.”

  I feigned annoyance. “He’s probably right.” A thought occurred to me. “Maybe Patrick’s decided
it’s time for me to settle down and get myself a good wife. He’s thrown us together to see how things work out.”

  Chrissie raised her eyebrows while pointing at the ceiling. “My room’s upstairs. It’s got a lock on the door.” She nodded toward the hallway. “You’re on the first floor.”

  I sighed. “So what happens now?”

  Chrissie jumped to her feet. “We need food, booze, and some good rental movies, so let’s go shopping.”

  Two minutes later I was about to enter Chrissie’s car, when my cell rang. The number was withheld, but I knew it was Langley because no one else had my number. I smiled as I answered because I was really pleased to be going shopping with a woman, which hadn’t happened to me for a long time, and especially so because the woman was Chrissie. I answered the call. “Yeah?”

  I could hear breathing at the end of the line, before a man who was definitely not Patrick said, “Mr. Cochrane, this is Trapper.” His English was flawless, no hint of an accent. I’d never heard his voice before. “I’m calling out of courtesy to let you know that I’ve arrived in the United States of America. It’s imperative that we meet soon, because I need to kill you.”

  Chapter 4

  I GOT OUT of bed, having barely slept during the night. The evening before, Chrissie had been great company. We’d cooked together, eschewed her movie choice of a costume drama and mine of a real-­life Navy SEAL mission in favor of Scrabble, which she’d emphatically won, drunk wine, and, at one point, engaged in the briefest of eye contact, which I’d interpreted as meaningful but probably hadn’t been—­at least, not on her part.