Contents
Also by Geoffrey Archer
Title Page
Epigraph
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Copyright
ALSO BY GEOFFREY ARCHER
Sky Dancer
Shadow Hunter
Eagle Trap
Scorpion Trail
Java Spider
The Lucifer Network
The Burma Legacy
Dark Angel
Fire Hawk
Geoffrey Archer
Terrorism is perpetrated by individuals with a strong commitment to the causes in which they believe.
The widespread changes occurring within the last two decades have allowed international organised crime groups to become increasingly active worldwide.
Louis J. Freeh
Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation
28 January 1998
For Eva, Ali and James
Prologue
THE ENGLISHMAN WAS naked. His hands were tied and his eyes were blinded by a rancid hood. His terror was unspeakable. They’d hurt him dreadfully and would hurt him again, searching for the moment when he could take no more.
The unseen interrogator stood close, smelling of tobacco and cheap after-shave. There were salivary noises from his mouth. The Englishman sensed his eyes on his bruised body, choosing which part to work on first.
Sam Packer struggled to close his mind to what was about to happen. Tried instead to picture something far away from this hell he was in. His mind focused on a face – the face of the woman he’d entrusted with his life.
Then they clubbed him behind the knees and brought him down.
Three days earlier.
Baghdad, Iraq.
They’d been friends for a long time – the middle aged Iraqi and the man he was about to double-cross. His decision to betray the secret they shared had been blocked by fear until now. The others would kill him when they learned what he’d done. But if the loss of his own life saved the thousands that the Colonel planned to murder, it would not have been lost in vain.
He sat hunched in the rear of the new-smelling military saloon, heart thumping, sweat dripping inside his shirt. The car had left behind the dust and poverty of the souks, crossing the Tigris towards the administrative sector of Baghdad. His breathing hurt – from fear and from the bad chest that had forced his retirement from the army a year after the Kuwait war, where he had served under the same Colonel who would soon be ordering his death.
He would do it just as they’d told him to, handing over the letter with its cryptic warning. But he would do something else, something they couldn’t suspect, whispering in the Englishman’s ear a secret so shocking he would move mountains to get it to his masters.
The road widened to a broad avenue. Looming on the right was the Rashid Hotel where the foreigners stayed.
Haji Abbas clutched his knees. All along, they’d kept him on the fringes of the conspiracy. Little more than an extra pair of hands. A doubter, but one bound to the Colonel by a loyalty that had now been tested too far. His knowledge of the plan and his complicity in it had become a shame he could no longer bear. The men in the front of the car were also tense. Their loyalty to the Colonel was unswerving yet their lives too were on the line. The Major, black-haired and moustached like their president, and the broad-shouldered Lieutenant behind the wheel whom he hardly knew.
The hotel gate guard lifted the pole and the driver swung in to the right and parked. Stepping inside the hotel’s grand entrance, the three men trod solemnly on the face of George Bush painted where visitors would walk on it. Beyond it and to one side, long-faced men from Iraq’s impoverished middle-classes sat at tables selling heirlooms to the few foreigners who ventured here.
They knew the Englishman was in the hotel. The Colonel had checked a short while ago. Abbas made for the elevators. Room 217, he’d been told. A room booked in the spy’s cover name Terry Malone. As Abbas approached the lifts the Major touched his arm.
‘No,’ he hissed. ‘Over there.’
Abbas looked across the lobby. The Englishman was sitting on a settee with a newspaper in his hands. Grey trousers, white shirt and dark tie. The British spy had a strong, square face with a determined chin, thick, dark hair and steady eyes that registered all they saw. The gritty face of a military man. Ex-military, though still in his thirties. Navy.
Abbas crossed the polished floor, tugging the envelope from his jacket. The Englishman looked up. Fear flashed in his eyes like an animal sensing a trap. The Arab’s hand shot forward with the letter, the back of his neck prickling from the gaze of the men who’d driven him here.
‘For you, Mister Packer.’
Shock in the eyes then quick recovery. ‘That’s not my name. I’m Terry Malone.’
But Packer was his name. His real one.
‘You read please.’ Abbas spoke hoarsely, his throat dry. With the letter passed, his duty to his friends had been fulfilled.
‘Wrong man, old boy,’ Packer insisted. ‘Malone’s the name.’
Heart in his mouth, Abbas leaned forward for the unscripted act that would betray his Colonel. Trembling lips close to the Englishman’s ear, he unburdened his conscience of its dreadful secret. Words that might yet save thousands from a dreadful fate, but which he knew would seal his own.
1
Wednesday, 25 September 1996
Odessa, Ukraine
IT WAS A little after seven in the morning when the two black Mercedes SL500 limousines sped through the elegant, tree-lined boulevards of Odessa. The sleek machines swept past the grey-green edifice in vulitsya Evreyska that used to house the KGB headquarters, the cars’ heavy-set occupants giving it barely a glance. They’d feared the place in the old days. Feared the authority it represented. But today in this much-changed land it was they who held the power.
Gliding past two rattling Volgas and a packed bus belching soot, the limousines turned left by the Shevchenko Park. Then, tyres drumming on the cobbles, they pounded down the long, straight avenue to the Memorial to the Great Patriotic War, its obelisk set between a V of trees like the needle on a gun sight.
In the first car, two bodyguards rode up front, silently respectful of the man behind them dressed in a dark grey Armani suit and an expensively tasteful silk tie. Vladimir Filipovich Grimov sat on the central squab, keeping his distance from the armoured side windows. His close-cropped hair had the stiffness of a brush and his dark eyes were out of line with each other because one was made of glass.
The cobbled avenue ended in a paved circle. Parking was forbidden here, but the
se men had nothing to fear from the Militsia. The two Mercs pulled up a couple of metres apart in front of a red marble tablet engraved with the dates 1941–1945. Beyond lay a small flower bed bursting with red geraniums, and beyond that a narrow, well-trimmed lawn flanked by flagstones stretched two hundred metres down the slope to the monument itself.
The doors of the second car were the first to open. Four men in black got out and spread through the trees, looking for shadows that moved. But at this early hour there was no one else here, as Grimov had expected. He strode down the slope to the terrace where the obelisk stood, ignoring the eternal flame flickering at its foot. He wasn’t a man who paid homage. The terrace was edged by a waist-high wall. Like a preacher in a pulpit, he gripped its rim and looked down. Below and to his left lay the ugly sprawl of the docks. Beyond the cranes, most of them idle, a breakwater reached into the Black Sea, a small, white lighthouse at its tip.
The morning was clear and bright. He searched for the pier where the vessel had been due to dock. He held out a hand and an aide pressed binoculars into it. He raised them to his eyes, adjusting focus for the good one until he could read the names of the vessels below. He smiled. The container ship had arrived. As an ex-military man, it pleased him when things ran to plan. He lowered the glasses and watched the containers being swung from the deck to the quay, taking pleasure in knowing that those huge, powerful cranes were in part working for him. There was just one rust-red container on that ship that concerned him. It was his box, although his name and that of his organisation could never be linked with it.
The vessel had come from Piraeus, picking up cargoes there that had been gathered from ports all over the eastern Mediterranean. His container had been shipped from Haifa, packed with cartons of Israeli fruit and vegetable juices that were well past their sell-by dates and had been bought for next to nothing. The great plan he’d evolved for his foreign clients was going to make him very rich indeed. Their motives concerned him not one jot. Responsibility for the gruesome deaths would be his clients’, not his. The one thing that did concern him was the complexity of the plan. Too much scope for things to go wrong.
He began to run through in his mind what lay immediately ahead.
In a few hours, if all went to schedule, the container would be delivered to a warehouse. A customs officer would turn up, to be greeted by the warehouse manager, who knew him well. The two men would drink tea together in the site office and talk about football, the customs man quoting from the match report in the morning paper which he would leave folded on the table when they went back outside. In the yard they would break the Israeli customs seals on the forty-foot steel box and open the doors.
Both men would recoil from the stench erupting from inside. Naturally. Both would click their tongues at the sight of the bursting cartons. The warehouse manager would curse the Israelis for sending them such rubbish, giving vent to his deep-rooted anti-Semitism. The load would have to go back. No question. But first the customs official would want it fully unloaded, to check for hidden drugs. Once that was done, and the box was found to contain nothing but rotting juice, the two men would retire to the site office again for a shot of pepper vodka. The customs official would agree to return in a few days’ time to reseal the container, once a ship had been found for its return to Israel. There’d be no need to inspect the foul-smelling contents again, he would say. Of course not. No need at all. Then, after another shot of Pertsovka, the customs officer would pocket his folded newspaper – heavier now there was an envelope inside it – and be on his way.
Usually it was stolen icons that slipped out of the country this way. What it was to be this time the customs man would neither know nor care.
Vladimir Filipovich Grimov brushed imagined dust from the sleeves of his Armani suit and cast a last glance down at the harbour. He sniffed the crisp morning air. He had a good feeling about this one. A confidence that, despite its complexity, the plan would work.
He turned away from the view, handed the binoculars to his aide and strode back up the slope towards the cars.
It had begun.
2
Saturday, 28 September
Baghdad
THE DUSTY YARD behind the old, three-storey imports warehouse in eastern Baghdad had been little used since 1991 when the UN cut Iraq off from the outside world. Just large enough for a small truck to enter through its dilapidated wooden gates, it was shielded from prying eyes by a high breeze-block wall.
A small pickup in the dark green of the Iraqi army stopped in the alley at the back, a canvas awning covering its load area. Its uniformed driver undid the heavy, new-looking padlock on the gates and swung them open. Then he reversed in until the closed tailboard of the pickup was just a metre from a small doorway into the building. He quickly shut the gates again, glancing furtively at the empty neighbouring blocks for signs that his arrival might have been observed.
Then he went inside.
A few minutes later a different man emerged from the warehouse, also dressed in the dark green of Iraq’s armed forces. Dark-haired and with a moustache that was a copy of his much-feared president’s, he had the bearing of a middle-ranking officer. He stood beside the truck and listened.
It was early morning still. In the maze of mean streets behind the warehouse lived some of Baghdad’s poorest. For them another miserable day was beginning. The officer heard a baby cry, children shouting and mothers jabbering in efforts to shut them up. Smoke with an acid bite drifted into the yard. Many families, he knew, had been reduced to cooking on fires fuelled by refuse.
He checked the windows of neighbouring buildings, then, as satisfied as he could be that he was not being watched, he unfastened the tarpaulin at the rear of the truck and lowered the tailboard.
A minute later the pickup’s driver reappeared, his left hand gripping the pinioned arm of a prisoner hooded by a black bag with a small breathing hole cut in it. The captive, who wore a white shirt, grey trousers and no shoes, stumbled as if his feet had been cut by broken glass.
‘Where am I going?’ An English voice. Weak. ‘Where are you taking me?’
‘No speaking!’
‘I want to know, damn you!’ Stronger now.
Silently the officer with the moustache stepped forward and punched him in the stomach. The Englishman buckled. As they bundled him into the rear of the pickup, his damaged shins scraped the tailboard and he yelped with pain. Crouching beside the prisoner on the ribbed metal floor the guard sat the Englishman upright, then unlocked the cuffs that held his hands behind his back.
‘Tch, tch,’ he clucked. ‘I told you, no questions. It is better for you.’
He saw blood seeping through the prisoner’s trousers. It had been several days since the beatings, but shins took a long time to heal. On the floor of the pickup was a stretcher. He told the Englishman to lie on it.
‘Look, what the hell is this? Where am I being taken?’
‘You soon see,’ the guard whispered, tying the man’s arms to the poles. ‘If you lucky this finish quick for you.’
The Englishman felt as if his heart had stopped. The bastards were going to kill him.
The green pickup wove though the narrow alleys of the market district, squeezing past dusty tinsmithies where shutters were being rolled up for the day’s business. The driver braked frequently to avoid crushing boys balancing trays of tea. Pungent smells wafted in through the open window. The moustached officer sat silently beside the driver, glaring out of the window, revelling in the intimidating effect his green uniform had on those who saw it.
The vehicle’s jolting on the rutted back alleys of Shaikh Omar turned the stretcher Sam Packer was lying on into a bed of nails. He was a strong, fit man, just under six feet tall, but a couple of weeks of being battered by what he’d assumed to be the Mukhabarat – the Iraqi secret police – had reduced his strength to a girl’s. Above all else he wanted to see again. Since the day they’d grabbed him they’d removed the foul-smelling hood
from his head just once, and then only for a desperate purpose. None of the training he’d been given upon joining the Intelligence Service six years earlier had prepared him for what they’d put him through. But he’d told them nothing of what they wanted to hear. To confess to being a spy meant the gallows, and death had no appeal for him. A terrible dread, however, told him that death was now to be his fate, confession or not.
It had been the middle of September when he’d arrived in Baghdad, but how many days had passed since then he had little idea. His visa application had given his employer as Entryline Exhibitions of Egham, Surrey. The job was genuine enough. So was the purpose of his visit: to survey arrangements for a trade fair the following year. But his second job was the one that mattered: listening out for hints of which European and Asian businessmen had plans to satisfy Iraq’s appetite for arms once UN sanctions were lifted.
The moment of his entrapment was a scene he’d relived countless times as he lay on the stone floor of the latrine-like cell waiting to be beaten again. It had happened out of the blue. No inkling. Sitting in the lobby of the Rashid Hotel on his fourth evening in Iraq, he’d been glancing at a week-old Herald Tribune a German had passed on to him when a middle-aged Iraqi had approached. Small and scruffy, with pale, strangely dead eyes, the man was a creature he’d never seen before.
‘For you, Mister Packer.’
It had been terrifying to hear his real name used, terrifying to hear it spoken by this stranger. The Iraqi had ignored his denials, leaning forward until his mouth was just inches from his ear. Then he’d begun to whisper, a warning that had taken Sam’s breath away: ‘Anthrax warheads – they have been taken outside Iraq and will soon be used.’
Anthrax. Biological warfare. BW – the UN’s living nightmare, the primary target now of its five-year-long inspection regime inside Iraq. Will soon be used . . . Where? And when? Before he could ask the man was gone.
His mind had cartwheeled. Was the warning true, or a trick? The man had known his name. Not Terry Malone, the name on his passport and the hotel register, but Packer. Sam Packer. And if they knew his real name, they knew he was a spy, and they must be Iraqi counter-intelligence. He’d felt caught in a spotlight. He’d scanned the lobby for watching eyes. The hotel was riddled with hidden cameras and microphones. Someone would have recorded the contact made with him. Slowly he’d stood up, slipping the envelope into the pocket of his jacket and making for the lifts.
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