Nomad

by James Swallow

  He was still dreaming of her as the train rolled across the Thames and into the terminus.

  * * *

  The telephone rang and the strident noise shocked Royce out of a doze. He jerked, almost upending a cup of coffee on his desk, and swore. The mission director took a deep breath and then snatched up the handset from the cradle.

  “What?” he demanded, his voice toneless. Hours in Hub White, sifting through the same after-action footage, had worn his frayed nerves down to nothing. Royce gave the gray morning light peeking in through his windows a narrow-eyed stare as he waited for the reply.

  “Good morning to you, too.” Irritatingly, Victor Welles sounded as if he was rested and fully focused. “I’m glad you’re here. I would have hated to drag you back in from Sussex.”

  Royce glared accusingly at the clock on his desk. He had a vague recollection of somebody—Talia, most likely—suggesting that he have one of the pool drivers take him home, get him off-site for some rest. That hadn’t happened. That couldn’t happen. The situation had too many variables. He had to be close, to keep an eye on things until they approached something like stability.

  “I repeat,” he said, fishing in a desk drawer for a tube of caffeine tablets, “what?” He swallowed a couple of the red pills with a swig from the stale coffee and grimaced at the foul taste.

  “There’s been a development on the Nomad incident.” Royce’s expression darkened. Welles was already using that term for the events in Dunkirk, “the Nomad incident,” as if it was a pithy headline he had pulled from one of the tabloids. “I’m in the main atrium. You need to get out here, now. And bring Patel with you.”

  “Despite your charming manner and boyish good looks, Welles, I don’t feel motivated to jump at your word of command.”

  “You may want to reconsider. We’ve had a walk-in. And you really should be here to see it.”

  The line went dead and Royce sat there for a moment, re-arranging Welles’s words in his mind.

  A walk-in. It was tradecraft slang for a person of interest, an officer or enemy operative who broke protocol by taking the most direct route possible to bring themselves to the attention of an agency—the front door.

  Royce’s fingers prickled as he gripped the telephone handset tightly, his thoughts churning over what he could expect to find downstairs.

  He swallowed and tapped a speed-dial button. “Talia,” he said, at the moment she picked up, not waiting for her to answer. “Drop everything and meet me at the atrium, this very minute.”

  * * *

  They rode the elevator to the ground floor in silence, and Talia Patel chanced a look across at her boss. Royce was straightening his tie and smoothing his hair, doing his best to make himself look like anything but a man who hadn’t slept in two days. He was good at it, she reflected. Royce stiffened and squared his shoulders, and with a blink he seemed to make all that fatigue go away.

  Talia was certain that she was the only one who saw his weaker moments; certainly not his subordinates, the OpTeams, or even his wife. She wondered what that meant.

  The lift doors opened and they emerged into the main reception area of the Vauxhall Cross building, the green glass doors beyond facing out toward the street.

  There was a man standing in the middle of the circular space. He wore a hoodie that was dark and dirty, and tracksuit trousers a size too large for him. At first glance he resembled the kind of disaffected urban troublemaker that was a favored target of the reactionary press.

  Victor Welles was standing nearby, and two men from his security detail had positioned themselves on either side of the hooded figure. Welles’s men were armed with snub-nosed MP5K submachine guns, holding them low but with obvious threat.

  The hooded man raised his hands slowly. “Just so you know, I have a gun in my pocket,” he said. His voice was familiar, but thick with exhaustion.

  Welles gave Royce a sideways look. “Ghost at the window, Donald.” He stepped forward. “You. Take the hood off, hands on your head.”

  “I’m not…” He turned toward them.

  “Do it!” barked one of the security officers.

  Slowly, he pulled the hood down and for a moment Talia couldn’t place the drawn, sallow face. Eyes full of anger and frustration scanned her, then found Royce.

  “Dane.” Royce blinked and his hand went to his chin. “Good lord. You’re alive.”

  “Came right in off the street, bold as brass,” offered Welles. He gave a sharp gesture and his men came in. One aimed his gun while the other frisked Marc roughly, recovering a silenced pistol from the hoodie’s belly pocket.

  Talia saw the weapon and wasn’t sure what to think.

  “Marc Dane,” Welles continued, taking on a hard, formal tone, “as of now you’re under detention pending investigation into the events of the past forty-eight hours.”

  “I came in on my own!” Marc retorted, pulling against the man holding his arm. Dane’s cheeks colored and he snarled at Royce. “You left me behind in France! Why the hell did you do that?”

  “Marc,” Royce began, struggling to find the right words. “I don’t—”

  “You’ll get your chance to talk to him soon enough,” Welles broke in. He lowered his voice for a moment. “I wanted you to see this, Donald, so that there is no misunderstanding between us at a later time.” He didn’t wait for a reply, and turned away. “Dane. You’re being held under internal security regulations, section thirty. There will be an immediate debriefing.”

  Marc hissed as the security officer snapped a set of handcuffs around his wrists, and Talia found her voice. “Is that actually necessary?” she demanded. “This man is one of ours, he’s not a criminal. I think we can keep this cordial, don’t you?”

  “That doesn’t work for me,” Welles replied, shooting her a dismissive look. “What works for me are answers. And seeing as how there have been precious few of those forthcoming from Hub White, I’m going to take the opportunity to debrief someone who was actually on site when the Palomino exploded.” He nodded to his men. “Clean him up and take him to one of the secure conference rooms.”

  Royce regained some momentum as Dane was led away toward one of the secure elevators. “Marc! For god’s sake, what happened over there?”

  “They’re all dead,” he retorted, his anger boiling over. “Sam. Nash. Rix. Every single one of them.”

  SEVEN

  Across the dark wood of the conference room table, Welles asked the questions, every once in a while sparing the data pad in front of him a quick look. Marc had no idea what he was checking, but the camera in the corner of the far wall had him fixed in its sights and there was no way to know what other devices were in the room as well, watching him for any tells.

  The room looked ordinary enough, but when no one spoke, the flat way the silence lay there showed the falseness of it. The walls were sound-proofed, the windows inch-thick armored polymer. The reproduction of a Turner painting on the wall was probably studded with listening devices, and the speckled foam tiles in the ceiling could be hiding a myriad of scanners looking at skin temperature, voice stressors, eye-blink ratios, the lot. The room was an interrogation space hiding behind the veneer of civility. No bare concrete walls and steel chairs bolted to the floor here, no harsh spotlights and cell doors—although MI6 had those kind of rooms as well, if you went deep enough. This place was supposed to make Marc feel like he wasn’t a prisoner, but even though they had dressed the wound on his arm and done away with the cuffs, he didn’t buy it.

  Welles made him go through it all a third time. It was a classic interrogation technique, forcing repetition out of a suspect in order to find the places where the story didn’t match up. Welles was looking for the breaks in Marc’s narrative—but all he had was the truth.

  Most of it, anyhow.

  Careful who you trust. Marc remembered Sam’s words at the dockside, and he kept that tiny fragment of events to himself. Welles had a reputation throughout the Service as a man
who looked for notches to put on his belt, for expedient choices that weren’t necessarily the right ones. Marc had no intention of placing his faith in a man like that. He had to get through this, find someone he could confide in.

  His reverie broke with a start as Welles tossed something metallic and heavy on to the desk, where it landed with a solid thud. It was the gunman’s Sig Sauer semi-automatic, now wrapped in a plastic evidence bag. “I’d appreciate it if you paid attention,” Welles was saying. He nodded at the pistol. “Where did you get this?”

  “I told you,” he said wearily. “I took it from the man who tried to kill me.”

  Welles glanced at his pad, consulting his notes. “But you left the grenade launcher, though? Why? Too conspicuous?”

  “Don’t take the piss,” Marc growled, and immediately regretted it.

  The other man smiled slightly, as if he had scored a minor victory. Then the smile went away. “Technical are chasing down the details as we speak, but this weapon appears to be part of a shipment sold by a Lithuanian arms dealer. It’s not the kind of thing a British intelligence officer should have on him.”

  “Needs must,” Marc shot back. “I was running for my life. I had to defend myself.”

  Welles checked his notes again. “Which is why you killed this mystery man, and then made sure his body and his vehicle were set alight, so there would be little evidence left behind?”

  “We had our orders…” Marc muttered. “The French police were in the area … Hub White wanted zero traces.”

  “Zero traces. Is that what you call setting fire to a car with a corpse in the boot? And of course, now we can’t get anyone near the remains to verify what you’re telling me.”

  Marc showed teeth. “I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter!”

  That got him a slow, considered nod. “It must have been difficult for you. The kill, I mean. Your first time, hand to hand, like that.”

  “What?” The reply wrong-footed him. “Uh. Yes. It was.”

  Welles went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “I mean, you’re not a field officer. You’re not rated to go directly into harm’s way, are you?”

  “What … do you mean?”

  “Just making an observation. Because you had the opportunity to take on that role, and you turned it down. Am I right?”

  Despite his weariness, Marc felt his hands tense into fists. “How is that relevant?”

  “It’s relevant because to understand these events, I have to understand you.” The other man’s manner shifted, the faux-conversational tone dropping away to reveal a flinty edge beneath. “You were there, and you came through it alive when seven other officers did not. Officers who were much better trained than you. That automatically makes you very, very relevant, Dane.”

  A fist of icy cold was forming in Marc’s stomach. “I’m alive and here and talking to you because of blind, stupid luck.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short.” The casual manner returned for a moment. “You showed real initiative. We confirmed your illegal crossing at Dover with the Border Agency. Very smart move.”

  Marc went on. “You’re talking to me like…”

  “Like you’re responsible?” Welles snapped. “At best, you let something slip by you, and OpTeam Seven paid for that laxity with their lives. At worst, you’re to blame for what happened.”

  “No!” Marc pushed away from the desk, shaking his head, confused and angry at what he was hearing. “That’s not it.” He looked up. “This mission was a set-up, man! They were waiting for us on the Palomino, they had that guy with the grenade launcher positioned to mop up any survivors … It was an ambush, plain and simple!”

  “It does look that way, doesn’t it? Conveniently, there’s no way for us to access the remains of the truck for any data recordings.” Welles shot back. “So if someone warned the targets, we need to start looking for a penetration here at MI6.”

  “Yes,” said Marc, and he was thinking of Sam again, of her warning.

  “I’m glad we’re on the same page.”

  Marc’s thoughts suddenly caught up to Welles’s implication and he glared at him. “You’re accusing me?”

  “I never said that.”

  He leaned across the table, staring defiantly at the other man, and in that moment all he wanted to do was punch Welles in the face. “I came back, damn it! Why would I come back if I was part of this?”

  “That’s a good question. Considering how you went silent for over twenty-four hours, how you covertly re-entered the country, without any Service oversight—”

  “I told you!” he shouted. “I had no choice!”

  “So you keep saying,” Welles matched him, speaking over his words. “But come on, Dane. If you really wanted to, you could have phoned the front desk! But you didn’t! Instead, you went dark for an entire day!” He let that hang in the air for a moment. “You’re not a fool. I mean, you appreciate how that looks, don’t you?”

  “I…” Marc felt sick inside as the understanding washed over him. “You weren’t there. You don’t understand.” He forced the wellspring of fear in him down and away, working hard to keep his voice level. “If I betrayed my team to Al Sayf, or the Combine…” He bit out every word. “If I did that, why the hell would I walk back into the Cross and surrender to you?”

  “I can think of some reasons.” Welles looked away, musing. “Maybe the people you sold out to double-crossed you, and you’ve come crying back to us. Maybe you screwed up so badly you thought you would cut your losses. Maybe you’re not as clever as the psych file says you are.”

  Marc shook his head, incredulous. “Where are you getting all this? Don’t you want to know who was behind the explosion? Why they chose to hit Nomad? Doesn’t any of that matter to you?”

  Annoyance flashed briefly in Welles’s eyes. “Don’t tell me how to do my job. We have people working on those things right now. Those questions will be answered. All elements of this misadventure will be fully analyzed.”

  “Misadventure?” he spat the word back across the table. “Don’t talk about it like it’s a bad fucking football result! I saw them all die over there! My teammates, my—”

  “Your what?” Welles seized on his outburst. He manipulated something on the data pad’s screen and from the corner of his eye Marc saw Sam’s face appear on the display. “Did you think that we didn’t know, Dane? About you and Green?”

  Marc stiffened, and suddenly he could find nothing to say.

  “We knew,” Welles continued. “That’s our job, up on nine. To know about that sort of thing.” He leaned in. “Did you get close to her because she was one of OpTeam Seven’s senior field officers? Did you think that would … help you somehow?”

  Welles’s cell phone bleated and he pulled it out of his pocket. His expression soured and he shot a glance at the security camera before dismissing the call.

  “You’re way out of line,” Marc told him, low and cold.

  “I don’t know what you thought was going on there,” said the other man, “but you were not the first … liaison … Green had within the Service. She was quite the free spirit.”

  The phone rang again, and this time Welles switched it off, but Marc wasn’t seeing him anymore. He was thinking of the dream, of a night in Camden. Of fire and smoke and blood on a bleak French dockside.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” said Marc, in a dead voice.

  Welles was going to say something else, but then the magnetic lock on the door buzzed, snapping open, and one of the security guards was standing there. “Sir?” he said. “You need to step outside for a minute.”

  Marc’s interrogator frowned. “All right. Let’s take a break, as I see I won’t get any peace until I deal with this.” He stood up and leaned in to gather up his pad. “We’re just having a warm-up chat, anyway.” he told him. “I’ll come back in twenty minutes. Take the time to have a think about your situation while I’m gone.”

  The door slammed and Marc was suddenl
y surrounded by silence.

  * * *

  “What the hell do you think you are doing in there?” Royce’s voice cracked like a whip, and Talia found herself glancing along the corridor outside the conference room, afraid that someone of higher rank would happen on the confrontation.

  “My job,” Welles replied, without apology. He strode away, forcing them to keep up.

  Talia and Royce had been allowed to watch the so-called “interview” from an observation room down the hall, but the mission director’s tolerance for Welles’s style of questioning soon ran thin. When he ignored his calls, Royce stormed out and demanded an explanation.

  “I won’t have you trying to bully a confession from one of my officers,” said Royce.

  Welles raised an eyebrow. “I haven’t even got the thumbscrews out yet.”

  “How does some suspected relationship between two consenting adults have anything to do with the Palomino explosion?” Royce demanded.

  “Oh, believe me, there’s nothing suspected about it,” said Welles. “And you know full well the regulations about office romances.”

  “As if you don’t have enough dirty pictures on file already,” Royce shot back. “My operatives are all professionals. They’re not compromised by the kind of sordid insinuations you’re making.”

  “What exactly does that mean, Donald? That you turn a blind eye to shagging in the ranks as long as it doesn’t impact on mission performance?” They reached the elevator bank and Welles turned to stare at him.

  “Pretty much, yes.” Royce gave the other man a challenging glare in return. “The OpTeams keep their own houses in order. I keep a loose rein on my crews because they are bloody good at what they do. I trust them, and I don’t like you playing games with one of my men for your own amusement! If you have proof of misconduct, show it to me.”

  “I really don’t care what you like,” Welles replied, with a sniff. “Your … what did you call it? Your loose rein may have compromised an entire mission! Dane belongs to me now, and I will question him any way I want to. If I want to mess with his head by bringing up his dead girlfriend, I’ll do it.” He pointed a finger in Royce’s face. “I don’t answer to you, Donald. I answer to Control, and Control wants facts.” He nodded back in the direction of the conference room. “I’m going to get the facts, the proof, and you are going to stay out of my way. I paid you the courtesy of letting you know your man was still alive, but now we’re done. If he’s innocent, you’ll get him back. If not…” He let the sentence hang.