Smart knocked on the door and walked in, closely followed by Sonny.
‘What’s the emergency?’
‘Someone’s tracking us,’ Gray said, pointing to the laptop.
‘Who?’
‘We’ve no idea, but they appear to be heading this way,’ Farsi said. He switched the screens to show the pulsing red dot, now only two kilometres away from their hotel.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Gray said. ‘Grab your stuff and be in reception in one minute.’
He disappeared along with Sonny and Smart, leaving Harvey to throw some clothes on and grab his jacket. Farsi pocketed his wallet and passport, then closed down the laptop and joined him at the door.
Gray was already waiting in the reception area by the time they made it downstairs, and Smart and Sonny were only a few seconds behind them.
‘What’s the plan?’ Harvey asked.
‘I want eyes-on,’ Gray said. ‘We need to know who we’re dealing with. Hamad, let’s get you set up in the restaurant so we know when they reach the hotel.’
They found an empty table in the restaurant and Farsi opened the laptop. The red dot on the screen had moved closer, but was now stationary.
‘Could be stopped, or just stuck in traffic,’ Smart said.
‘Sonny, come with me. We’ll hide up near the entrance.’
Gray handed out the comm units and they did a quick check to make sure they were all working.
‘If that dot starts moving again, let me know,’ Gray said.
He led Sonny to the gift shop where they both bought baseball caps and sunglasses, then they walked out of the front door and through the large arch into the sunshine. Palm trees lining the approach road swayed gently, waving a welcome to a family of new arrivals that pulled up outside the building in an ancient cab.
‘Over here,’ Gray said, leading Sonny to the left, where a row of tables sat under a portico. Gray took a seat facing the hotel entrance while Sonny sat opposite him, and Gray used their comms to ask Farsi for an update.
‘They’re about twelve hundred yards out.’
‘Roger that.’
A waiter appeared and asked for their order, and Gray requested two coffees, more to keep up the pretence than anything.
‘Can you also bring me a newspaper?’
The waiter nodded and disappeared, returning two minutes later with a tray. He placed the drinks in front of them and offered Gray a selection of American broadsheets. Gray took the New York Times and paid the bill, adding a generous tip.
‘Now within five hundred yards.’
Gray donned his sunglasses and held up the newspaper, peering over the top of it. He could just make out the entrance to the hotel grounds, and he saw a taxi turn onto the approach road, ferrying more guests to the hotel.
The countdown continued, until Farsi reported the target vehicle a hundred yards out.
‘Fifty . . . twenty . . . turning in now.’
‘Shit,’ Gray murmured. ‘There are two cars. Which one is it?’
‘I can’t tell.’
Gray watched both vehicles approach the front of the hotel.
‘We’ll have to wait until they get out and pick the most likely.’
Both cars came to a stop outside the main entrance, and the valet opened the door to what looked like a middle-aged hippy. He climbed in and drove the vehicle away as the woman made her way into the hotel.
‘Not her,’ Gray said, focusing on the other vehicle. The passengers were already decamping, and the three men looked more promising. He gave quick descriptions to the team, and once the trio had disappeared inside, he got up to follow them.
‘Regret leaving the weapons in the woods?’ Sonny asked.
‘They’re not going to pull guns in such a public place. Not with so much CCTV, and certainly not in Cuba,’ Gray said. ‘Let’s try to find out which room they take and plan a little visit.’
As they entered the lobby, they saw the three men standing at the reception desk. Gray told Sonny to wait by the door and walked over to stand a few feet away from them, pretending to be engrossed in the selection of tourist leaflets. He chose one and scanned through it, all the while listening to the conversation between the trio and the receptionist.
The men seemed keen to book a scuba diving excursion, and spent five minutes arranging one affiliated to the hotel, then enquired about the local nightlife.
One of the men turned and caught Gray’s eye, but there was no sign of recognition, and he began to doubt that these people were here for anything other than a few days of sun and fun. He went to join Harvey, who waited in the restaurant with Farsi and Smart.
‘These aren’t our people,’ Gray said.
‘You sure?’
‘Positive. I eyeballed one of them and he didn’t blink. Did you see the woman who came in before them?’ he asked Smart.
‘The frumpy-looking one? Yeah, she stopped at the desk for a moment, then went upstairs.’
‘Then we wait for her to come down.’
After getting Harvey’s room number from the receptionist, Sarah Thompson took the stairs to the third floor and knocked on his door. When she got no reply, she tried again, placing her ear to the door.
Harvey obviously wasn’t in, which meant they probably hadn’t returned to the hotel yet. Realising her best bet was to take a seat in the lobby and wait for them to return, she decided to descend the stairs and grab a sandwich for the stakeout.
On the ground floor, she headed to the restaurant, but before she got inside a man appeared at her side.
‘Looking for someone?’
Thompson turned and found herself staring into Tom Gray’s eyes.
‘I see you recognise me,’ Gray said.
Thompson cursed herself for being caught by surprise, but she quickly regained her composure. ‘I’m looking for Andrew Harvey. I know he’s with you.’
‘And who might you be?’
‘Sarah Thompson. We worked together.’
Gray gripped her elbow and escorted her into the restaurant to the table the team were occupying.
Harvey looked up, his face a mask of confusion.
‘Hello, Andrew.’
It took a moment for Harvey to put a face to the voice.
‘Sarah?’
Thompson offered a weak smile. ‘I think we should take this somewhere private.’
James Farrar closed his eyes and reached down to run his fingers through Joel Haskins’ hair. It had been almost a year since he’d seen his lover, and they’d been making up for it over the last forty-eight hours.
‘You know, I think I prefer you as Efram. Why don’t you dye your hair?’
Joel’s head continued to bob up and down, but he found time to pinch Farrar’s inner thigh. ‘I hate it when you call me that,’ he said.
‘Don’t you know it’s rude to talk with your mouth full?’
Their bout of pleasure was interrupted by the telephone. It was the handset set up for the relay service in Manila, which forwarded his calls but looked for all intents and purposes to be the end point. Knowing that only one person had the relay’s number, he pushed his boyfriend’s head away from his crotch and snatched up the mobile.
‘Your timing’s impeccable,’ he said.
‘I see you’re in Cuba,’ Harper replied, ignoring his insolence.
‘What the . . . ? I warned you what would happen if you tried to find me.’
‘I wasn’t looking for you, James. Every time someone enters any of my details into a device, the contents are downloaded and I receive a warning. Two hours ago, someone prepared a text message saying that Andrew Harvey has your address and is planning an assault. If you live on Avenida de La Mar, then this threat is real.’
Farrar sat bolt upright. ‘That’s impossible. I covered my tracks w
hen I left Africa. It must be someone at your end.’
‘Preposterous! I’ve had a tight rein on things from the very start. For the first six months I had MI5 searching for you on the quiet, with no external agencies involved. You, more than anyone, should appreciate how hopeless that made their task.’
‘Well, they seem to be back up to speed now, don’t they?’
‘I put my own great-niece, Sarah Thompson, in charge of the operation and she kept me updated every day. Whenever they got close to you in Africa, I blocked their efforts. I fail to see what else I could have done. Needless to say, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation if you hadn’t taken things too far.’
Farrar ignored the jibe. ‘You should have taken Harvey off the case once the bombings started.’
‘I did, James. I warned Ellis to drop the case, and when she didn’t, I had her removed. I thought that would be the end of it, but Harvey appears more tenacious than I anticipated.’
Farrar cursed and reached for a glass of water. ‘Who sent you the message?’
‘I haven’t got proof, but Sarah isn’t answering her phone and hasn’t been seen for two days. I think she may have tailed Harvey to Cuba. That message was typed into a phone but was never sent, which means she could have been trying to warn me but was interrupted.’
‘Does she know your part in this?’
‘Of course not.’
‘You do understand what you’re saying, don’t you? If she knows my address, she’ll want to bring me in. That would be disastrous for both of us.’
He waited while the home secretary mulled over the options, though he knew there was only one. He would have to move to a new country—that was certain. It also meant anyone on his tail would have to be eliminated, including Thompson. Would Harper condone terminating her own blood, no matter how distant the relationship?
He didn’t have to wait long for the answer.
‘Do whatever you feel necessary, James.’
‘Understood. Tell me exactly what capabilities this system of yours has.’
‘We can track the phone’s location via GPS, download the contents and activate and view the camera.’
‘Just what I need,’ Farrar said. ‘How do I access it?’
‘That’s out of the question.’
‘If I’m to find Thompson and Harvey, I’ll need real-time information. By the time they report to you and you find the time to contact me, Harvey could be ten yards away and I wouldn’t know it. I needn’t remind you what happens if I’m not able to intercept them and put a stop to their plan.’
Again the phone went quiet, but Farrar knew Harper had no option but to comply with his demands.
‘Okay,’ the home secretary eventually said, ‘I’ll get the NSA to create a new account, but you’ll only have access for the next twelve hours, and it’ll be heavily monitored. Deviate from the current mission in any way and you lose access immediately.’
‘Understood,’ Farrar said. ‘Do you know how many are coming? You mentioned Harvey and Thompson, but are they alone?’
‘I checked with Five and Harvey’s colleague, Hamad Farsi, is also on leave. You’ll have to assume he’s with them.’
‘Okay. Send me the login details as soon as you can.’
He cut the connection and looked over at Joel. ‘We’re moving. Send West in here and then start packing.’
‘Where do we start?’ Gray asked.
Thompson was sitting on the bed in Gray’s hotel room, while the rest stood around her.
‘How about Sarah here tells us what brought her to Havana,’ Harvey suggested.
‘I was following you, of course. I know you’re planning an assault on Farrar’s house.’
‘Yes, we saw that,’ Farsi said. ‘We intercepted the message meant for your great-aunt.’
Thompson barely flinched. ‘How could you possibly have got that? I was using a clean phone. Unless . . . .’
‘ . . . unless we had access to Brigandicuum,’ Harvey finished for her. ‘Yes, we do.’
‘How? Your access was shut down.’
‘It seems the NSA were so busy worrying about every other computer on the planet that they forgot to secure their own. Let’s just say we found a way in.’
‘What’s important,’ said Farsi, ‘is that we know you’re working with Juliet Harper to keep Farrar’s location a secret.’
‘I’m doing no such thing!’
Farsi opened the laptop and turned it towards her. ‘Then explain this message.’
‘I came here because I thought you were helping Farrar,’ she said. ‘Harper told me that you were suspected of helping him to escape, which was why you’d done such a miserable job of finding him for six months. When I followed you to his house last night, I thought it strange that you didn’t just knock on the door, and when I saw you dump your bag of weapons in the woods this morning, I realised things weren’t as they seemed. I wrote that message with the intention of coming here to talk. If I was wrong about you and anything happened to me, it would have gone to Harper after three hours.’
Harvey looked over to Gray. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think bringing that phone in here was a big mistake,’ he said to Thompson. ‘If we killed you, we’d be checking your phone, right?’
Harvey sighed and shook his head. ‘That’s not what I mean.’ He paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts. ‘Okay, Sarah, let’s say I believe you. Why did you hamper my search efforts? I told you months ago that we had a lead in North Africa, but you denied me any assets to check it out.’
‘That wasn’t me—it was Harper. All requests for resources had to go through her, and she obviously knew that you were too close to finding him. She granted my requests for searches in South America and East Asia, probably because she knew Farrar wasn’t there. Kept me busy and on what I thought was the right track.’ She shrugged. ‘Clearly, she played us both.’
Harvey stared at her for a moment, trying again to decide if she could be trusted. ‘What about Bicknell Security? You told me you’d spoken to Michael West’s client, but you couldn’t have, because they never existed.’
‘I only repeated what my operative told me,’ Thompson said. ‘I had someone call Harcourt and that was the answer he was given.’
It was just possible that she was telling the truth. Someone could have been manning a phone. One of Harper’s people, perhaps, or even Farrar’s. Efram?
Suddenly Farsi’s laptop beeped. He hit a couple of keys, then turned up the volume.
‘A call was just downloaded from Farrar’s phone,’ he said.
The message began playing, and nobody dared to speak as the conversation between the home secretary and Farrar filled the room.
‘So much for blood being thicker than water,’ Gray said, when the call ended. He looked at Thompson, whose face had turned ashen.
‘I can’t believe she’d do that,’ Thompson murmured.
‘I can,’ Harvey said. He sat down next to her and put an arm around her shoulder, then looked up at Gray. ‘We need a plan. Over to you.’
‘Well, they know we’re coming,’ Gray said, ‘but they don’t know that we know. There’s our advantage.’
‘You still want to go in?’ Harvey asked.
‘If we don’t, we tip our hand. Advantage lost. Hamad, see if you can trace the numbers Farrar’s called with that phone. One of them could be his security detail.’
Farsi started typing away, and in a couple of minutes he had a tight web showing on the screen.
‘All of these records are a couple of weeks old,’ he said. ‘There’s no recent activity.’
‘That’s to be expected. They’ll be using proper comm units while they’re on duty, not phones, but as long as they’re carrying them, it makes our job easier.’
‘Easier, maybe,’ Harvey sa
id, ‘but a full-on assault is still risky.’
‘That’s not what I was thinking,’ Gray told the group. ‘I say we lure his forces into a trap and take them out.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ Sonny said, looking down at Thompson. ‘All we need is some bait.’
Chapter 41
21 December 2014
‘I’ve got tickets booked on the first flight to Grand Cayman tomorrow afternoon,’ Joel Haskins said, as he continued to pile clothes into his suitcase.
‘You couldn’t get anything this evening?’
‘Everything’s booked solid. Well, there was a flight to Moscow, but I didn’t think you’d want to go there.’
‘Damn right I don’t. What time tomorrow?’
‘Three twenty-five. Once I’ve finished packing I’ll plan our onward travel.’
Michael West burst into the bedroom. The big soldier ignored Farrar’s glare and addressed the pair matter-of-factly. ‘Your system’s online and we’ve got movement on the woman’s phone. It left the hotel twenty minutes ago.’
‘Heading here, I assume.’
West nodded. ‘ETA fifteen minutes. My men are in position.’
Farrar looked at his watch and saw that it was barely seven in the evening. ‘You don’t find it unusual that they’d turn up before dark?’
‘Not particularly,’ West shrugged. ‘I expect them to stop about a kilometre away and walk the rest of the way. They’re probably planning to set up close to the house and wait until the early hours before attacking. Once they dig in, we’ll surround them and take them out.’
‘Let’s hope you’re right. I want you to leave two men here, though, just in case.’
‘That’s not necessary. We’re talking about three people, one of whom’s a woman. They’re not likely to get past us.’
‘Then you won’t need eight men to deal with them,’ Farrar smiled. ‘Humour me.’
West tried to hide his frustration, but Farrar could see he didn’t like the order. He didn’t want to have to play the ‘don’t forget who pays your wages’ card, because he knew full well that if he were to piss West off, there was a chance he’d simply leave and find another lucrative contract. Farrar paid West well above the going rate, but even a mercenary had his pride. And West was a bit of a loose cannon.
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