Her hand stroking the lifeless arm of a boy. Pyotr. An American college student, dead before his time.
The sins of the father.
And there was nothing he could do—helpless, trapped. He felt himself reach down, fingers searching for her wrist, seeking to pull her close to him, keep her safe…and the face of the boy seemed to melt away, even as he did so. The weathered visage of Davey Malone in its place, hollow and staring. Carol’s voice, harsh and bitter. “Does this look like ‘no harm’ to you?”
And then she looked up at him, and in place of her blood-streaked countenance appeared the stricken face of Mehreen, dark eyes gazing back into his own. A look of condemnation, of—
Fear. Harry came awake with a start—finding himself back in California in that moment, staring down at the body of Pyotr on the bathroom tiles of the abandoned mansion.
His hand flew out, clawing for his pistol. Fingers closing around the checkered grip. No.
It wasn’t happening—not again, he wouldn’t allow…he gazed up at the darkness of the ceiling in the bedroom of the small, second-story flat—realizing only then where he was.
But it had been so real.
He slowly rolled into a sitting position, knees drawn up, leaning back against the head of the bed. Calm down.
Post-traumatic stress. That’s what a doctor would have called this—except there was nothing post about it.
Just demons which came in the night, nightmares that wouldn’t flee with the approach of day.
Because the reality was worse.
Flaharty was on the couch when Harry came out into the main living area of the flat, just sitting there staring off into nothing.
Malone’s pistol was lying on the coffee table in front of him, inches away from a bottle of Bushmills.
He glanced over at Harry in the dim light, a bitter smile slowly creasing his face. “So, you couldn’t sleep either, boyo,” the Irishman observed, slurring the words drunkenly. “There’s a kind of justice, there.”
He lurched forward in his seat, reaching with unsteady fingers for the Bushmills and upending it into the small tumbler.
The resulting trickle of amber liquid barely enough to cover the bottom of the glass.
A curse exploded from Flaharty as he pulled back his hand, throwing the empty bottle against the wall.
The crash broke the silence of the apartment, fragments of glass cascading to the floor as he buried his face in his hands, seemingly overcome.
“I don’t know how I could have…missed something so sodding obvious,” he said finally, downing the last of the whisky with an angry gesture.
Friendship. Trust. That most perilous of human actions.
“It happens,” Harry replied after a long moment, unable to escape the memories this had awoken. Of Jerusalem. Hamid Zakiri.
The beginning of the fall.
Flaharty snorted, staring down into his glass. “The worst of it is, he was right. I sold out to your people. I’d spent my youth fighting for a free Ireland—had bugger-all to show for it—nothing but the ashes of dreams. Along came one of you Americans—a smooth-talking sod with a suitcase of money. And I thought I’d seen my way out. A way to make a fresh start for myself.”
Fresh start. The chance to begin again—start over. Lay aside the sins of the past. Live free.
The chance he had glimpsed ever so briefly with Carol, Harry thought, leaning heavily against the counter. A man would do most anything for such a chance. Beg, borrow, steal.
Kill.
“But you know what, boyo? You can’t escape from who you are,” Flaharty continued, a sort of morose honesty coming through the whisky. “Because no matter how hard you run, you always catch up with yourself in the end—like a bleedin’ dog chasing his tail. And tonight…tonight I put a gun to the head of a man I’d loved like a brother ever since we were young, and I blew his brains out—all to save me from my sins.”
“You had no other choice.” It might have even been true, but that was less than relevant. Right now, nothing was more important than stabilizing the asset. Nothing.
The arms dealer just smiled. “That’s what we like to tell ourselves, isn’t it? ‘No choice.’ It was him or me. Kill or be killed. The lies we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night. Because everything we do is a choice.”
And so few of them can be undone. The older you got, the more evident that became. The more frightening.
Flaharty set his empty glass down on the coffee table and stood, swaying uneasily. “So,” he began, “Davey’s no longer with us. And the weapons are in the wind. What are we goin’ to do now?”
“I don’t know.”
12:17 A.M. Eastern Time
KramerBooks
Washington, D.C.
“You know, I wouldn’t have really thought this was your kind of place.”
“Oh?” Senator Roy Coftey asked, his eyebrows arching in more than a trace of amusement. He glanced briefly around the interior of the Dupont Circle bookstore before looking back across the cafe table at the junior senator from Florida.
A heavy emphasis on the junior. At thirty-four, the oldest son of Cuban immigrants, Daniel Acosta was the new face of a party that was still trying to remake itself in the eyes of an ever-hostile media—in the vanguard of the new Republican near-majority that had swept into power along with Norton the previous November. Seizing the White House along with a commanding majority in the House of Representatives. And forty-nine seats in the Senate, falling just short of majority.
So very close to the kind of power the GOP hadn’t seen in nearly a decade. And yet so far.
“And what precisely did you think was ‘my kind of place’?” Coftey continued, lifting his half-empty lager to his lips.
The young man shrugged, seemingly embarrassed. “I don’t know—didn’t really see you as much of a reader.”
“I’m not,” Coftey laughed, tapping the thick hardcover sitting there only inches from his plate. The political memoir of the erstwhile Vice President—an eminently forgettable book from an eminently forgettable man which had been written as the lead-in to a presidential run that didn’t have a prayer of coming to pass. “But Kramer’s gives me the opportunity to peruse the latest political tell-alls without ever wasting good money on my colleagues’ bilge. And that, my friend, can be invaluable.”
“Friends?” Acosta leaned back in his chair, a skeptical look on the young Republican’s face. “Is that what we are now?”
Coftey smiled. Say what you would, the kid had sand. That could be…useful. “Well,” he said, gesturing to the slow-roasted duck on Acosta’s plate, “that’s a question I suspect we’ll know the answer to by the time you’ve finished your cassoulet.”
5:34 A.M. Greenwich Mean Time
The house
Leeds, United Kingdom
In another hour, he would need to be up and readying himself for school, but Aydin hadn’t been able to sleep, just lying there awake, staring up at the ceiling of his small bedroom.
Too much adrenaline still pumping through his veins to even think of rest.
He’d been back in his family’s house for two hours, letting himself back in through the rear door with a spare key.
It had been three long hours since he’d left the company of his brothers, he thought. The mujahideen.
Brave men all, ready to die in Allah’s struggle. Ready to die. And yet he had never felt more alive.
Aydin rolled over onto his side, slipping a nervous hand under his pillow.
Cold metal touched his fingertips, the metal grip of the pistol Rahman had given him. Keep this. Our day is coming soon.
And it was impossible to resist the urge to look at it once more, his eyes shining as he dug the small Czech semiautomatic from beneath the pillow, holding it up to the dim light filtering into his room from the street.
All praise be to God, he breathed, a single .32-caliber round falling from the weapon to strike his bare chest as he racked the slide—the cold
sound of metal on metal loud in the silence of his room. The Lord of worlds…
12:51 A.M. Eastern Time
Kramerbooks
Washington, D.C.
“No.” His long-forgotten cassoulet pushed to one side, Daniel Acosta raised a hand, shaking his head at Coftey. “That’s simply not going to happen. Not going to happen. The American people want transparency, and that’s what I promised to give them if I was elected. It’s a promise I intend to keep.”
Coftey leaned back in his chair, skepticism written in his eyes as he gazed at the junior senator. “What your average American voter,” he began, “knows about the intelligence community—the actual facts they know—would fit in a shot glass. With plenty of room for ice.”
“Laying aside the patronization,” Acosta countered, “that’s an argument for hiding less, not more. What do you think the Founders would think of the unaccountable system of surveillance that has been put in place?”
Unaccountable. Coftey swore softly under his breath. Well-nigh hamstrung by bureaucracy and endless layers of oversight, the intelligence agencies could hardly have been more accountable, even if that wasn’t how they were portrayed in spy movies and the news media, the second portrayal even more fictitious than the first.
He glanced around the café before responding, taking the measure of the few remaining patrons at this late hour. A college student with a stack of books piled beside his laptop as he typed furiously away. A couple barely out of their teens, drinking coffee and hopelessly lost in each other’s eyes.
A middle-aged blonde with earbuds in her ears, sipping on a latte as she perused a book on…Tantric sex. Well.
“Look, son,” he began, lowering his voice and leaning forward, placing a heavy elbow on the table, “I don’t think you understand how any of this works. I’ve been in this town since before you were born.”
“Which is precisely what some people would say is the problem,” came the swift retort.
“And they might not be all wrong,” Coftey shot back. “But that’s not the point here—the point is that the types of ‘reforms’ the House is pushing for will put out America’s eyes—on the basis of information that simply isn’t true. And it’s not going to pass the Senate, not if I have anything to say about it. It’s not even going to get out on the floor. You’re on the Select Committee now…I need to know that I have your support.”
Acosta didn’t look at him for a moment, idly toying with his fork. “Why are you talking to me—why not your fellow Democrats?”
“My party?” Coftey snorted. “They’ve been gunning for the IC ever since Frank Church. And now you fools have joined them.”
7:03 A.M. Greenwich Mean Time
Thames House
London, United Kingdom
“…acrid smoke from burning tires is forming a haze over the city this morning, restricting some flights in and out of Birmingham Airport. Mayor Janice Harding has issued a call for calm and police presence in Birmingham is expected to…”
All the televisions were on in the Centre, as usual. Like any intel agency the world over, they learned about far too much from watching news reports.
And this morning, none of the reports were good—riots in Birmingham overnight, leaving shops smashed and looted. A police officer in critical condition after she was stabbed in the midst of the riot.
A West Midlands Armed Response Vehicle had been overturned and set aflame, injuring two more officers. She hadn’t yet seen credible intel on which side had started the fighting, but the dawn seemed unlikely to bring calm.
She’d been unable to reach her sister-in-law the preceding night, her text messages going unanswered. Normally that wouldn’t have worried her—Nimra was notorious for not checking her mobile and their contact had been sporadic, at best, through the years. But now.
Mehreen shrugged her coat from off her shoulders, forcing herself to filter out the continuing drone of the news host as she dropped her coat over the back of the chair.
There was a thick stack of folders sitting on the desk of her workstation—along with a pair of USB thumb drives.
She reached down, brushing a hand across the cover sheet, the logo emblazoned at the head. Four letters beneath a blue diadem.
GCHQ.
The “raw data”, the intercepts she had requested from Cheltenham the previous day. The data that could prove Ismail Besimi innocent. Or damn him completely.
To hold the fate of an old friend in your hands…
Enough. There was no place for any of that in this—an analysis had to be objective if it was to be worth anything.
Time to get to work.
9:35 A.M.
Failsworth
“…neighbor thought they heard the sound of a shot. Of a car leaving shortly thereafter.” Conor Hale paused, gazing through the windshield of his car. “They’re taking the body out now. Yes, I’m sure. It’s Malone.”
There was a long silence for a moment on the other end of the line, then Colville responded, “That’s the end of it, then. We can’t allow ourselves to be distracted with this any longer. Time to cut our losses.”
Cut our losses. The former SAS sergeant flinched as though he had been slapped. He didn’t care about Malone—would have happily put the bullet in the Irishman himself, but the men who had died in Hammersmith…well, it was enough to say that they were his brothers.
The Green Howards—as fine men as this world had ever seen.
Hale listened for a couple more moments in silence, then responded with a curt, “Yes, sir. Understood.”
Did he? He closed the mobile, tucking it back into its pouch on his belt as he watched the emergency personnel moving in and out of the small flat.
Perhaps. He had lost men before, in Iraq. In war. And this was war—a little fact that none of his country’s so-called leaders had the courage to admit.
That’s why they were doing this, after all. Laying down their lives once more for the nation they loved—for the England their fathers had known. For the England that was being stolen from them, bit by bit. Day by day.
It didn’t make the losing of them any easier.
Hale ran a hand across his face, the stubble of his beard scratching against the rough calluses of his palm. A hard road, and it was only just beginning. It wasn’t going to get any better from here.
He glanced away from the flat in which Malone had died, down to the terrain map he had been studying, spread over the passenger seat beside him.
Marked heavily in red pencil—lines of sight marked out, paths of movement. Potential firing positions.
He would only have one shot.
High treason. That’s what this would be called—he knew that. Once, it would have seemed unthinkable, but now it seemed that nothing was beyond the pale.
Desperate times. Far more desperate measures.
1:56 P.M.
The US Embassy
Grosvenor Square, London
“Birmingham, Leicester, Manchester, Luton, the Tower Hamlets…” Carlos Jimenez waved a hand at the wall map, shaking his head. “The whole country’s on fire this morning.”
That was an understatement, Thomas thought. An attempt to summarize a situation that was spinning out of control faster than anyone could keep up with it.
The death toll from the mosque bombing had climbed by five this morning, with another eight worshipers still barely clinging to life. Among them Ibrahim Khattam, the imam at the Madina, and one of the few strong voices of reason left in the Islamic community.
A voice now silenced.
“What are we picking up on our end?” he asked, taking his seat in the station chief’s small office. Jimenez never had been one to stand on ceremony.
The former Marine gestured at the secure telephone unit on his desk. “I’ve spent the morning on the STU back to Langley. If they’re getting anything actionable, they’re not sharing it with me.”
“And locally?”
Jimenez rounded the desk, cocking
his head to one side as he gave Thomas a hard stare. “You know there’s nothing for me to say there…we get all our information locally through Thames House, as per our intel-sharing agreement.”
Officially. The CIA wasn’t supposed to run sources on British soil, unofficially, well they did what they needed to do. And everyone knew it, even Jimenez wanted to play coy.
The whole situation called for a drink. Or two. Or more. Three days dry, this time.
Nothing to write home about.
Funny thing about AA, no one told you how hard it would become when work prevented you from going to the meetings. When your sponsor was four thousand miles away.
“And when it comes to Thames House,” the station chief continued after a moment of awkward silence, “they just reacquired Hashim Rahman.”
Thomas glanced up. “Where?”
“Apparently still in Leeds. We’re not getting any further details as of yet. Which is why I want you to get back up there, STAT.”
2:04 P.M.
The M62
West Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Flaharty had been snoring when Harry left the flat, finally sleeping off the whisky.
No telling how long he would be out.
And there were more important things to be concerned with. The rolling fields of West Yorkshire flashed past as the Audi sped down the motorway, waves of grass as far as the eye could see, towering white clouds hanging low over the foothills toward the north, their bases dark and threatening.
Such a vastly different landscape from the terrain where he had spent so much of his life, where so many of his brothers had bled and died. The snow-capped mountains of Afghanistan—the searing, arid heat of Iraq.
And yet now the war was here. Hard as it was to believe, staring out across these pastures.
Ashton-under-Lyne had been the location of the first weapons cache—a cache now long gone, according to Mehreen’s report.
The West Yorkshire town of Huddersfield, thirty minutes due east from Rochdale along the M62 Motorway, was the second—the coordinates on a slip of paper in the pocket of his shirt.
A sign for Junction 24 alerted him that he was approaching A629 into the town, and Harry glanced to the right as he shifted lanes, taking in the sight of Castle Hill far to the south, the granite silhouette of the Jubilee Tower standing tall against the sky.
Embrace the Fire (Shadow Warriors Book 3) Page 32
