Presence of Mine Enemies

by Stephen England

  “Of course.”

  “So tell me, why did you leave Germany to come here, to Belgium?”

  “Work,” Harry lied, looking into the eyes of the older woman, her face weary—prematurely aged far beyond her years, her skin yellowed grotesquely by jaundice. “The company I work for is considering opening up offices here.”

  It didn’t matter that it was as far from the story he had told Yassin, Reza, and the others as it was from the truth. He’d known from the first few moments talking with her that she knew nothing of her son’s activities.

  “Good, good,” she replied, her eyes shadowed by the cloth of the hijab loosely—hastily—draped about her face. He had little doubt she’d put it on just before he’d entered the room, struggling to arrange it with what feeble strength remained in her body. A pious woman. And a stubborn one. “It can be hard for Muslims to find work in these days. Aryn has. . .struggled. But of course, you’re European.”

  And that makes all the difference, she didn’t go on to say, but she didn’t need to. And she wasn’t wrong. The accusation, barely veiled in her voice.

  You’re not one of us, not really.

  He knew all too well that without the claim of having fought in Syria, he would never have been accepted by his “friends” here, by the young men who now surrounded him. Sheltered him. Without that. . .he would have been just another white convert—revert, rather—kept at arms’ length.

  Viewed with suspicion.

  But there was a bond there, in war—a bond of faith, and of blood. Perhaps the Prophet had truly been on to something. Peace be upon him.

  “I’m glad that Aryn has found such a friend,” the woman went on, closing her eyes as she leaned wearily back into the threadbare armchair. “Someone who can help him. . .move on, when I am gone. It won’t be long, now.”

  “May Allah raise you up,” Harry murmured reverently, his hands folded in front of him. Knowing it was a futile prayer—knowing she was right.

  “You’re a good man,” she announced suddenly—earnestly–looking up at him once more. “I can see it in your eyes. You will help him, won’t you?”

  What did she think she saw? For he wasn’t a good man, far from it—all illusion of that lost long before, forever tarnished by the years.

  A part of him wanted desperately to ask her, but Reza and Aryn returned in that moment. Ready to go. Ready to show him the man they were all now intending to kill.

  And the moment passed. “Of course,” he replied, favoring her with a quiet smile as he rose. “I’ll do everything I can.”

  9:31 A.M. British Summer Time

  Thames House

  Millbank, London

  “. . .yes, thank you, that’s all I needed. Thank you very much.” Simon Norris replaced the phone in its cradle on his desk, his fingers trembling ever so slightly as he leaned back in his chair, staring into space.

  That settled that. He'd spent the last three days trying to find a way to establish remote access to the Royal Bank of Scotland's databases, to wipe the files “Alexei” had ordered him to destroy.

  And, as he had suspected, once the initial panic from the Russian's approach in the restaurant had subsided—there wasn't one.

  The bank's security was simply too good—like that of most financial institutions these days. Which left him with the most dangerous resort of all: accessing their databases in person, armed with his Service credentials.

  But once he did that—there would be no road back. He’d be burned, as surely as if he had just gone ahead and turned himself in to the authorities.

  Unless. . .he shook his head, scarcely able to believe he was countenancing the thought. Of burning down everything he had worked for, everything he had built since he’d been recruited back in college—in one final blinding act of treason.

  And yet, that decision had already been made, hadn’t it? Made without knowing it, trapped in a box of his own design. No way out. . .

  Except one.

  10:33 A.M.

  Koekelberg, Belgium

  “It’s just up ahead,” Yassin announced, moving at Harry’s shoulder as the four of them made their way down the sidewalk, with him setting the pace.

  Slow and easy. Don’t attract attention. It was difficult to run surveillance under these circumstances, he thought—his gaze sweeping across the broad, open boulevard. A pair of one-way streets split by a green median bordered by low hedges.

  On foot, in small, confined neighborhoods where strangers could be easily picked out—where it would be almost impossible to find a place to park a vehicle and surveil a target over the long-term. It was a bad operational environment, to put it mildly.

  Made him question just how much surveillance Marwan’s little cell had actually done. Whether they might have managed to already alert their target.

  “There!” he heard Yassin say, his left arm—forefinger outstretched—coming up, visible out of the corner of Harry’s eye.

  His hand flashed out like a striking snake, seizing his friend’s wrist in a steely grip—his blue eyes boring into Yassin’s startled face.

  “Don’t point,” Harry warned, his voice full of quiet menace as he held the stare, finally letting go of the young man’s wrist after a painfully long pause. “Now tell me, quietly—as though we were friends having a conversation—which building it is that I am supposed to be looking at?”

  7:35 A.M. Eastern Time

  Manassas National Battlefield Park

  Prince William County, Virginia

  Head east from the visitor center. The stone bridge will be on the first trail to your right.

  Melody felt the gravel shift beneath her low heel, cursing softly as she continued down the trail, the park ranger’s words still ringing in her ears.

  Her heart pounding against her chest—her eyes scanning the trees nervously. She didn’t know why she had asked for this, why she had agreed to come.

  Why she hadn’t just packed all of her belongings and moved back to Seattle. Run.

  And then she saw him, standing off to one side of the bridge itself, the former chief of staff’s short, stocky figure nearly shrouded in the early morning shadow.

  “Why did you ask me to come out here?” she demanded, struggling to keep a tremor out of her voice as she came up to him. “You said you wanted to meet somewhere outside the city,” Ian Cahill replied evenly, not turning to look at her, “somewhere away from anyone who might recognize us. I couldn’t think of a better place.”

  That made sense, she thought, glancing about them. An old battlefield certainly wasn’t someplace she would have ever thought to come.

  “My great-grandfather was here at the first battle of Bull Run,” Cahill went on after a moment, his eyes shadowed as he gazed out over the slow-flowing waters of the creek. “Eamon Cahill, a private in the 69th New York. He was only twenty-two when the war broke out, had been in this country—a country that hated he and his kind worse than the blacks—for barely nine months. Yet on that hot July day, he and his fellow Irishmen went charging up that hill into a hail of grape—trying to hold off the Southern advance from the creek as the Union army disintegrated around them, the flower of Washington society fleeing for their lives. When they carried him back down, his left leg was gone below the knee, smashed into a bloody pulp by a ball. But he didn't give up.”

  Cahill's body seemed to shudder as if in the grip of some powerful emotion, a moment or two passing in complete silence before he continued, turning toward her. “And in the months and years that followed, he learned what every Irishman had to learn back then. What we've had to remember, all the years since. That only fighters survive. That in this world, no one's going to give you a thing. All that you have, is what you take. What you're willing to fight and scrap for, like the beasts we all are.”

  There was something in his eyes in that moment that frightened her, something akin to that which she had seen in Coftey, in his friend.

  “So tell me,” Cahill went on, leaning in cl
ose to her until she could feel his breath against her cheek, “just what did you uncover in Oklahoma?”

  12:51 P.M. Central European Summer Time

  The apartment

  Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, Belgium

  “No,” Harry heard himself say as the apartment door closed behind them, the street noise still audible through the open windows—a light breeze offering no respite from the oppressive midday heat. “It’s not going to work.”

  “How can you know?” Marwan demanded, turning back on him.

  Because I’ve done this before, Harry thought, knowing he couldn’t say it. So many times.

  So many people, all through the years. And no matter where you went, no matter whom you targeted—the fundamentals remained the same.

  The target apartment was three stories up in an old European rowhouse, just down the boulevard from a roundabout—at least two traffic cameras nearby that he’d been able to count, maybe more. People everywhere.

  It was a one-way trip, even assuming you got your target in the first place.

  “You’d all be arrested within two hours of killing him,” he replied coolly, meeting the young man’s eyes. “Maybe less.”

  “I wouldn’t,” came the confident, brash response. “I’m not afraid to die.”

  The implication, the challenge—all too clear. You may have won the battle, but the war is not yet over.

  “Nor am I,” Harry responded, glancing from Marwan to Yassin and back again, “as I have proven. But dying is not enough—if we are to win our war against the kuffar, we can ill afford recklessness.”

  “This is not—”

  “There are seven of you—seven of the faithful. Will you trade all your lives for this one man? For the lives of his family?” He shook his head. “We don’t have those numbers to throw away, brother.”

  Stall. Delay. Disrupt. Force them to discard a carefully laid plan in favor of an undefined goal.

  Keep it simple, stupid. Their plan was simple—as impossible to stop as it would have been for them to exfiltrate. That had to change.

  “If there were only one or two of you,” he went on, forcing a smile to his face, “I could commend no superior plan of action. As it is, it would be nothing more than a waste of the opportunity Allah has granted us.”

  “So. . .what?” Marwan demanded skeptically. “You have a better plan?”

  Harry nodded, his face hardening into a mask—his eyes betraying no hint of the emotions roiling just below the surface. “I do. But we’re going to need more in the way of weapons.”

  7:34 P.M. British Summer Time

  A hotel room

  London

  “Of course. . .I understand.” Alexei Vasiliev pressed the burner phone tight to his ear as he walked across the darkened hotel room to the window, his dress shoes sinking into the rich carpet—his bright blue eyes hooded as he stared out over the city.

  It was always difficult to analyze an asset's motivations in the early stages of a recruitment—particularly an asset induced through coercion, one of the reasons he had always preferred 'other' incentives during his years with the KGB. And since.

  But in this case, they had been left with no choice. And that made handling Norris all the more delicate, he thought, listening to the British officer's voice on the other end of the phone.

  He wanted to meet, but why? Had he elected to take his chances with the Security Service, given up his contact from the Russians? Vasiliev shook his head. If he had, well. . .he had gravely misjudged the man's courage.

  “Do you jog, my friend?” he asked after another moment, a cold resolution entering into his eyes as he reached his decision. In the field, you dared not hesitate, you had to make a decision and stick to it. Trust your instincts to carry you through. “No? Well, I do. And tomorrow morning, you will. . .”

  2:51 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time

  The Russell Senate Office Building

  Washington, D.C.

  “. . .but, Senator, wouldn’t you acknowledge that events like the tragedy in Berlin Friday, which claimed the life of an American serviceman, demonstrate the clear need for the very kind of intelligence collection which the president’s proposed reforms would be aimed at rolling back?”

  Roy Coftey glared at the television mounted on the far wall of his office, scowling as the face of Daniel Acosta appeared on-screen, nodding in response to the CNN anchor’s question. He had once courted the young Republican as a potential ally in the fight to stave off Norton’s original push months earlier with SB286, the so-called “NSA bill.”

  But in the days and weeks that followed, Acosta had demonstrated where his real loyalties lay. With a constituency that knew little about national security and understood less—making up for that lack of understanding with a self-righteous zeal worthy of religion.

  “To be honest, I think your question answers itself, Karen,” he heard his colleague respond, displaying all the calm self-possession that had turned the son of Cuban immigrants into an ascending political rockstar in a few short years. “We've allowed this kind of governmental intrusion into our lives for years now—ever since the attacks of 9/11—all in the name of this so-called 'security.' And what have we gotten in return, really? Attacks like Berlin still happen all the same, and the actions of the American intelligence community continue to not only intrude into the lives of private citizens at home, but to blacken our name abroad, through incidents the like of which took place in the Sinai. We have crowds of protesters outside our embassies all across Europe and the Middle East, Karen—they’ve been there for weeks. And they’re there because of US policy. We have—”

  “But don’t you think it’s fair to point out that—”

  “We have,” Acosta continued, cutting her off firmly, “as Franklin warned in the days of our founding, sacrificed essential liberty for a little temporary safety, with the result that we have lost both liberty and safety. It is essential to rein in the actions of agencies which have, under the malfeasance of previous administrations, been allowed to run—”

  Coftey shook his head, thumbing the mute button savagely as he tossed the remote aside, returning to the papers on his desk. People like Acosta adored that Franklin quote. . .never realizing it had been written on behalf of a colonial assembly to a recalcitrant governor—the “essential liberty” in question being that of the government, not the individual.

  But since when had anyone in the American political sphere let context, truth, or history stand in the way of a good narrative? The way the game was played.

  The way he was going to have to play it, if he wanted to win. Acosta’s CNN appearance told him everything he needed to know. The administration wasn’t going to treat Berlin as anything more than a speedbump in the way of their legislative agenda.

  And he had to find a way to get out in front. Or make one.

  “Here’s the report on SB 367 you asked for, sir,” he heard a staffer announce, placing a folder on his desk as the senator acknowledged it with an absent nod.

  He was missing something here. Some piece, some lever he could use. He glimpsed Melody in the outer office as the door closed once more behind the young man, the sight of her distracting him from his thoughts. She’d only arrived a couple hours before, having taken the first half of the day off—for some reason, she hadn’t explained it to him.

  She had seemed. . .different, somehow, these last few days—particularly in bed together last night, he mused, lost in reflection.

  After all these months, he knew her body almost as well as he knew his own, and there had been a tension, a reluctance there that he didn’t recognize from the countless times before.

  He only knew that something was wrong.

  7:21 P.M. British Summer Time

  Thames House

  London

  The numbers were beginning to blur together after so many hours, the seemingly endless web of accounts on Greer’s screen stretching back from the UK to the United States to Singapore to Eastern Europe.
Russia?

  That was the logical conclusion, but he was going to need more. Far more.

  The intelligence officer removed his glasses, digging a handkerchief from a trouser pocket and wiping the dust from their thick lenses. It would have made more sense to have assigned a junior officer to this task, but he was doing his utmost to keep the circle of knowledge small. Even here in D Branch.

  With this kind of money being spread around, there was no telling who might be compromised.

  He was missing something here—he knew that. But what? That was the question, as yet unanswerable.

  He’d gambled on Litvinov in an effort to find that missing piece. But so far. . .nothing.

  It was early yet.

  He replaced his glasses on his face, adjusting them on the bridge of his nose. And then it hit him. Of course.

  The missing piece—one of them, at least–was Arthur Colville himself, the beneficiary of all this. . .largesse.

  A vital witness, or at least he would have been—had he not been forever silenced by Nichols’ rash action.

  Greer shook his head, a frown furrowing the officer’s brow. But that was the American way of war, was it not?

  Rash, decisive. Youthful. Fools rush in. . .

  He’d seen it so many times, working with them back during those closing years of the Cold War. The Americans, supremely confident in their power, their technology. No problem that couldn’t be solved with money, tech, or the swift application of overwhelming force.

  His own, older, service forced to do more with less. And often succeeding—because espionage wasn’t about technology. Or force.

  And even with Colville dead, there was one card left to play.

  He minimized the account windows, searching through files for a few brief moments until he found what he was looking for—picking up the phone from its cradle on his desk.