“What’s going on now?”
MacCallum gestured to the phone. “CO-19 is on-scene and beginning their sweep of the area.” He stared up at the screens on the wall before them, the timestamp of the first CCTV images clearly visible. “Forty minutes. They could be anywhere now.”
11:37 P.M.
Southeast London
“I think you were right,” Dunne laughed, an arm thrown around his old comrade’s shoulder as the two of them staggered down the street toward the bus station.
“About what?”
“I think,” the British Army corporal began again, his words slurring as he lifted one finger for emphasis, glancing around at his friends, “that I may…have been drinking too much.”
That brought a laugh. They had seen so much together, been through so much hell since the day they had first met on a FOB in the Helmand—so many years before. “But what’s a last night for if you can’t spend it getting royally…”
A shout interrupted Dunne’s words, the sound taking a moment to penetrate through the haze surrounding his brain. A single man standing perhaps ten feet in front of them, his face cloaked by a hooded jacket. “…killed our brothers in Iraq, in Palestine! And if God had willed, He could have taken vengeance upon you Himself. But—”
“Oh, bugger off, Paki, what are you on about?” Dunne responded, still not full grasping their danger.
And then he saw the gun.
The wood was slick against Muzhir’s palm—slick with sweat he realized, bringing the heavy revolver up in one hand. Squeezing the trigger.
Squeezing and squeezing…he hadn’t cocked the hammer back, panic seizing hold as he struggled to pull the heavy double-action trigger. This wasn’t how he had envisioned it, the glory of this moment turning to sheer terror in his heart.
He saw the British soldiers start to move toward him—the sights of the Smith & Wesson wavering from one to another.
And the trigger broke, the night erupting in fire…
11:58 P.M.
M40 Motorway
Near Birmingham
It had been the right thing to do. The necessary thing to do if she hoped to extract her nephew from the danger that he had placed himself in. She knew that, but it didn’t change the way she felt. Dirty, as if she needed to bathe.
If she had known that working for Five would one day pit her against her own family—her own community—how would she have responded to their efforts to recruit her? Mehreen shook her head, staring straight ahead as the car sped down the motorway back toward London.
It was a question she had asked herself time and again in the years since 9/11. A question she still didn’t have the answer to. Hadn’t seemed relevant back in the ‘90s.
All she knew now was that the personal was rapidly overwhelming the professional, despite all her efforts to the contrary. Nichols, Besimi…now her nephew.
She felt the slight bulge of the drive again, tucked into the pocket of her jeans. Knowing that the data on it could incriminate her family—could even bring her down, if it went that far.
But for the moment, all that mattered was saving Aydin from himself.
All that mattered. That had been Nick, once. Their love the only thing in life she had cared about. Until it had been ripped away from her.
If she closed her eyes, even for a moment, she could hear MacCallum’s voice saying, “Sean Dugan is a suspected alias of Stephen Flaharty.”
A name from the past, she thought bitterly, struggling to push aside the anger. To focus. She couldn’t trust MacCallum with this—he was far too loyal to the Service. The same went for everyone else at Thames House, the people she had worked side by side with for years.
And yet…there were too many variables at play, too many things that could go wrong. The risk of losing her nephew far too high, her family the only thing left to her. She wasn’t going to be able to do this alone.
Her hand stole within the unzipped front of her jacket, closing around the mobile in her inner pocket.
She pulled it out, hesitating as she glanced at the screen. The moment of decision, doubt plaguing at her mind. What would Nick have done had he faced this?
Mehreen swore under her breath. She knew, because she knew who Nick had been. What he had been.
She punched in the number from memory, waiting as the phone dialed, its ring the only sound in the darkened car as she sped south. Pick up.
An automated voice came on as the call went to voicemail—no name, just the number, which was as she might have expected. The phone was a burner, no doubt.
She opened her mouth to leave a message, but found herself hesitating once more even as she did so, Nichols’ face rising before her.
The way he had looked in the park, lifeless blue eyes staring back. “They all have families.”
Did she dare trust him…again? With this? The seconds ticked by, just the tone in her ear as the car continued to roll south.
The phone vibrated against her fingers in the next instant with an incoming call, MacCallum’s number displaying itself on-screen as she turned the screen toward her face.
“Mehreen here,” she responded, struggling to pull herself together. Perhaps she should have left a message on the burner. Perhaps. But the opportunity had passed.
“Where have you been?”
“Following up on a lead,” she responded, repeating the lie she had told Darren with an ease that unsettled her. “I’m driving back to the city as we speak.”
“Come directly to Thames House—I need you here.” She could hear the tension in his voice, didn’t understand it.
“What’s going on?”
“There’s been another attack.”
Chapter 13
7:03 A.M., March 29th
A flat
Failsworth, England
“Did you see the news?” Harry asked, kicking the door closed behind him as he entered, bearing a steaming cup of coffee in either hand. Everyone in the small market had been clustered around the television, watching the reports out of London.
Reports of a shooting, British soldiers on the eve of deployment—gunned down outside a London nightclub.
Flaharty was leaning back on the dirty, tattered sofa, his pistol lying there beside him, within easy reach. “I did. There’s nothing bloody else on the telly. Just people bawling their eyes out over a few dead Brits.”
He looked up as Harry set the coffee down on the table, catching his sharp glance. “What—you thought I’d be sorry for them? I killed my first British soldier when I was fifteen, boyo.”
And yet…there was something there in Flaharty’s voice. Was it regret? “You never forget your first,” Harry replied, a perverse irony in the words.
Flaharty took his glasses off, holding them up to the light as if seeking smudges on the lens. “I can still see his face if I try—the look in his eyes when I put the knife in. The way he struggled, trying to scream against my hand.” The man’s voice grew softer at the memory, a note of hesitation entering his tone. “He wasn’t much older than I…just a boy, really. And how about you—who was your first? A wog?”
Harry shook his head, unzipping his jacket to reveal the Sig-Sauer holstered on his hip. “No,” he replied, the memories of that night in Istanbul flooding back. So many years ago.
John Patrick Flynn sitting there in the driver’s seat of the Passat, handing over a Ruger Mark II, a round already chambered, a suppressor screwed into the long black barrel. “You’re going to kill two men in there, son. Your target…and the man you were before tonight. There’s no road back from this.” “He was a Berliner, a scientist. A family man. Selling the wrong thing to the wrong people.”
Nuclear components to Saddam’s Iraq, as he recalled—thinking back. An eternity ago. “But that’s something you would know all about, wouldn’t you?”
Flaharty replaced the glasses on the bridge of his nose, picking up his coffee and taking a long sip of the steaming liquid. “Did he deserve to die?”
“Someone believed that he did,” he replied finally, remembering the pleading fear in the man’s eyes, the way his own fingers had trembled as he raised the pistol—the long barrel wavering. The moment of truth.
“And you?” Flaharty pressed. “What did you believe?”
“That it was the wrong question to ask,” Harry said, unable to get that face out of his mind. It was one thing to take a life when your blood was up, reacting in your own defense in the heat of the moment. But they never told you how it really was to kill a man, kneeling before you, begging for his life. How hard it became to pull the trigger in that moment.
“And that would be?”
“That in the end, it didn’t matter whether he deserved to die. Only whether others deserved to live.”
Only silence followed the statement, the grim weight of memories bearing down. They’d both made their choices, so long ago. No turning back.
At length, Flaharty leaned back into the thin cushions, extracting a slip of paper from the breast pocket of his shirt. “I found the bird,” the Irishman said simply.
He reached out, taking the slip of paper from Flaharty’s hand. Unfolding it to reveal the address scribbled thereon.
Their last lead, unless Malone had known more success than they. Following the guard the night before had ultimately given them nothing, just a cheap hotel on the outskirts of the city.
One room among a hundred others. No name, no way to pursue it further without rousing more suspicion than they could afford. “How soon do we leave?”
“As soon as Davey gets here.”
“You’ve heard from him?
A nod. “He lost the car in the city last night.”
“Leeds?”
The Irishman shook his head. “No, trailed them to London.” He caught Harry’s look of disapproval at the news and scowled. “Look now, Davey’s a good man—none better—and I’d trust him with my life. That doesn’t mean he’s had all your spook training, teachin’ him all the latest sodding methods of surveillance and countersurveillance. We learned on the streets of Belfast, and lived to tell the tale. That’s bloody good enough in my book.”
Fair enough. It was hard to argue against, in light of their own failure. But London…
8:43 A.M.
The Richmond Footbridge
London
Three soldiers dead. Eventually, no matter how hard you tried, you became numb—a little piece of your soul slipping away with each casualty report.
Except this wasn’t Baghdad. This was London.
Julian Marsh folded the newspaper in his hands, staring out over the Thames, the gathering high tide rushing through the opened sluice gate below him.
Muzhir bin Abdullah.
The Moroccan was dead now, beyond questioning, his brains bashed out against the pavement by a British Army corporal who had since succumbed to his own wounds in a London hospital. Dunne, he believed the man’s name had been. It got so you couldn’t remember all the names.
And they were no closer to finding Tarik Abdul Muhammad. Failure.
The stone faces of dead soldiers stared back at him from the front page of the Daily Standard, underneath the headline, “Never Have So Many Been Betrayed By So Few.”
A figure emerged from the light mist along the footbridge, pausing by the rail a few feet away—near an ornate lamppost dating back to the bridge’s construction in the late Victorian era.
“Where did you get the death photos?” Marsh asked, looking over into the eyes of Arthur Colville. “They haven’t been released to the press yet.”
The publisher smiled, the damp breeze toying with his greying hair. “Like any journalist worth his salt, I have my sources inside the MoD.”
“And apparently, the Security Services,” the director-general countered grimly. “What are you playing at, Arthur?”
“Play? I’m not one for games. Never have been—we didn’t know each other at Cambridge, you were so much older than I. But discussing my past, that’s not why you asked me to meet you here this morning, is it?”
“No indeed.” A shrill steam whistle shattered the morning stillness and a small tug broke through the mist up-river, its rounded prow seemingly aimed directly at the two men. Marsh turned, his back to the river as he faced the publisher. “Life could become very difficult for you, you know that. Whomever your source for the Mousa story might have been, he’s in clear violation of the Official Secrets Act. Given the right barrister…I imagine we could find you in violation as well.”
“You brought me out here to threaten me?”
“I’d prefer to think that wouldn’t be necessary,” Marsh replied calmly. He’d been in this position before—so many times. Blackmail, it was part of his trade.
“All this…” he continued, indicating the front page of the Daily Standard with a forefinger, “I need to ask you to reconsider your position and that of your paper. For the good of your country.”
“My country.” Colville’s grip on the rail tightened, his knuckles whitening for a brief moment. Beneath them, the whistle sounded again as the tug passed over the barrage, ripples fanning out from its churning wake to touch both sides of the Thames. When he spoke again, his voice was barely above a whisper. Laden with a curious intensity. “All that I have done…I have done for my country.” He paused, gazing keenly into the director-general’s eyes. “And what of you?”
Marsh saw the riposte coming, just rapidly enough to meet it with a parry of his own. “I have dedicated my life to the service of this country.”
“No, no,” Colville held up a hand in remonstrance, “you dedicated your life to the service of the state, to ‘defend the realm.’ They’re not the same thing, you know.”
Semantics. The debate was pointless, Marsh thought. Not the time—or the place. “This country is like a tinder box, Arthur. People are desperate, ready to lash out at the slightest provocation. And the Standard is pouring on the petrol.”
“We are telling the truth.” There was an unmistakable passion flaring in the man’s eyes. The look of a true believer. “That’s the job of the fourth estate—or do you not believe that? Do you believe that people only deserve the ‘truth’ your state wants them to know—the ‘truth’ that you’ve deemed them capable of hearing?”
The honesty of the press and the secrets of the realm. Freedom of speech and the security of the state. The knife’s edge upon which a free democracy balanced. It was an old argument…and irrelevant to his purpose.
“We’ve had two terrorist attacks in the last forty-eight hours,” Colville continued without waiting for a reply. “Two Islamic terrorist attacks, and the Standard has been the only paper with the courage to name the threat.”
The intelligence chief held up a hand. “We’ve had two terrorist attacks in the last forty-eight hours and a reprisal—and that is exactly why I’m asking you to take a step back. Don’t fan the flames.”
Colville seemed to consider his words for a moment, standing there with one hand upon the parapet. “Is that a request?”
“For now…”
8:56 A.M.
The safehouse
“This isn’t bloody well going to work.”
Harry looked up from the GPS map on his phone to see David Malone staring at him. There was something different about the man this morning, something…beyond the usual hostility. Hard to properly identify. “What do you mean?”
“All this waiting—watching,” the enforcer spat. “Trying to follow up on ‘leads.’ We don’t have the manpower for that and you know it.”
The worst part of it was that he was right, Harry thought, glancing over at Flaharty.
Sending Malone to shadow the car leaving the warehouse had been a dice roll, nothing more. Making the best of a bad situation. A five-car surveillance team would have been hard-pressed to run a tail in the urban environment he’d found himself confronted with.
“You find this woman,” Malone continued, gesturing to the address on the paper lying there on the counter. “You get her to talk. Or you don’t. Or she knows sod-all nothing to talk about. And what have we gained? Nothing. But they have—they’ve gained time.”
“That’s a risk we have to take,” Harry returned evenly.
“No, we don’t.” Malone met his gaze for a moment before turning back to Flaharty, making his outlook on the chain of command all too clear. “I can reach out to Éamon, get a couple of the lads that are left with us. We strike while they’re still recovering from their losses on the motorway, hit the warehouse tonight.”
“We’ve been over this once before already,” Harry shot back. “It doesn’t work.” But there were no loyalties like old loyalties, he thought, watching Flaharty’s face, the indecision written there. The two Irishmen had fought shoulder-to-shoulder against the Queen for years, trusted each other implicitly.
It was a relationship he couldn’t hope to match, an argument he couldn’t counter. Emotion overpowering reason, a desperate feeling he knew all too well.
Malone ignored him. “You and me, Stephen…we’ve been together a long time. And you didn’t get where you are by letting people betray you. They have to pay.”
“Wait,” Harry interjected, holding up a hand as Flaharty began to turn toward him, his mouth opening to speak. It was a desperate play, made all the more so in light of the last time he had parted with her.
But there had been a call placed to the burner the night before, a blocked number. Could it have been her?
He’d rolled the dice on far longer odds. “They will pay, for all they’ve done. For the lives of your men. And it will be done today. But not like this.”
“Then how?” It was Malone, still pressing his advantage.
The moment of truth. “I’ve been in contact with a friend…at the Security Services. I can—”
Embrace the Fire (Shadow Warriors Book 3) Page 25
