Embrace the Fire (Shadow Warriors Book 3)

by Stephen England

  Julian Marsh thumbed the mute button, cutting off the BBC news host in mid-sentence. Chaos in the streets. New violence seeming to spring up every day. The nights, even worse. And in the midst of it all, a trained Islamist sniper.

  There had been no new intel on Mirsab Abdul Rashid al-Libi since the Libyan’s arrival at Heathrow a day before. It was though the man had never even existed.

  Norris appeared at that moment in the doorway of his office, seemingly out of breath. “We just heard from Leeds.”

  “Any answers regarding the attack on our surveillance team?” The after-action report from the British officers involved had been less than illuminating, to put mildly. If there was another player out there—he had left nothing that could have identified him. A troubling new reality.

  Norris shook his head. “The prostit—the woman Roth located—she claims to have intelligence on the location of the Shaikh.”

  “And?”

  “She wants money.”

  MICE. The director-general shook his head, almost smiling despite himself. Money. Ideology. Coercion. Ego.

  It didn’t take the seventh son of a seventh son to predict which one of those a whore would choose. “How much?”

  “Twenty quid.”

  “Twenty thousand pounds…is that all? For a moment, I feared we might become a burden on Her Majesty’s exchequer.”

  12:34 P.M.

  The industrial park

  Outside Leeds

  “Ya Allah, ya Allah,” Rahman sobbed through the pain, well-nigh incoherent. Tears streaming down his face, shining among the coarse black hairs of his beard. Oh God, oh God, oh God.

  The strain of the suspension showing in every fiber of his body, sinews stretched taut. A ghastly sight in the harsh glare of the utility light, a man reduced to a wreck.

  Begging, pleading helplessly for his life. For an end to the pain. After all that he had done. The lives he had destroyed.

  No. Harry’s eyes flashed with a murderous fire, the rage of all the months finding a righteous target. There could be no mercy, no forgiveness. Only a reckoning.

  “God doesn’t seem to be listening to you, Hashim. Why could that be?” He backhanded Rahman across the cheek, watching him recoil against the ropes securing him to the ceiling, his helpless body dancing in the glare of the light. His hand wrapping around the back of the man’s neck as he brought him in close, staring him in the eye. “Surely is it not written in Surah an-Nisa? ‘And whoever kills a fellow believer intentionally, his punishment is Hell. Let him abide in it.’ You sent Aydin Shinwari out to die—to commit suicide in defiance of all God’s laws—you killed Ismail Besimi.”

  “Besimi,” Rahman began weakly, summoning up what little defiance he could muster, “was an apostate.”

  “Ismail Besimi,” Harry breathed into his ear, holding him in a close embrace, unable to move away as he drove a punishing blow into the man’s damaged ribcage, “gave his life in the service of his god, true to the faith of Islam to the very end. Would that you could say the same.”

  He took a long step back from the man’s swinging body, his face dark as he picked up the bloodied hose once more. “Welcome to hell, Hashim…”

  12:57 P.M.

  Leeds Central Police Station

  Park Street, Leeds

  “You’re not police, are you?” Darren looked up from his phone at the sound of the prostitute’s voice, finding her eyeing him carefully.

  “Why do you ask?”

  She smiled, but it never reached her eyes. “I was out on the streets doing this at sixteen. Known lots of police. And I know men.”

  Fair enough. It was her stock-in-trade, after all. He shook his head, unsure where this was leading. Giving her room to talk.

  “It’s in your eyes, I think,” Sarah Russell went on after a long moment. “That look, I’ve seen it before. Lads that came back from the Middle East, found their world had bloody well moved on without them. Sometimes their wives too—which is where I came in, of course. You’re…what, military? Security Services?”

  There was no comment he felt inclined to offer. Or that would have been safe to do so. “I knew it,” she continued, something of triumph in her face. “You’re with Five.”

  Before he could form a response, his phone vibrated against the metal of the table with the buzz of an incoming message. MacCallum.

  We have a deal.

  He picked up the phone in one hand, turning it around so that she could see the screen. “You’ll get your money. Now, what can you give me on Tarik Abdul Muhammad?”

  His words seemed to bring her back down to earth, focusing her attention once more on the reality of their situation. “He paid for me to meet him tonight. All night. I was given the address of a flat.”

  “Then that’s exactly what you’re going to do.”

  8:01 A.M. Eastern Time

  Russell Senate Office Building

  Washington, D.C.

  “Pruitt?” Coftey asked guardedly, stepping to one side as a Capitol Police officer scanned his briefcase. “Has he even hit puberty yet?”

  “He’s thirty-one, Roy,” Lamar Daniels responded. “Not much younger than you were when you were first elected.”

  True enough, the senator thought, acknowledging the officer with a curt nod as he retrieved his briefcase. He’d been young—very young for a US senator.

  But by the time he’d come to the Senate at the age of thirty-three, he’d already been to war. Led patrols deep into Viet Cong territory, where the least mistake—the slightest error in judgment—could have cost the life of every man with him. Not to mention his own.

  Brian Pruitt, on the other hand, was rumored to have still been living in his parents’ basement in Lawton five years earlier when he’d begun making a name for himself as a blogger—quickly establishing himself as one of the Hancock campaign’s fiercest partisans. And now, if Daniels’ information was correct, he was being groomed as the man to take Coftey’s seat in the Senate.

  Not without a fight.

  “Thanks for looking into that for me, Lamar,” the senator responded distractedly, hearing the Gulf War veteran’s hearty acknowledgement as he signed off, returning his cellphone to the inside pocket of his suit.

  He caught sight of the statue of Senator Richard Russell as he moved through the rotunda—pausing, as he did ever, to regard it with a mixture of admiration and disbelief. Hard to believe that they hadn’t torn it down by now.

  In his day, Russell had been the most powerful senator on the Hill…and a segregationist until the bitter end. Caught on the losing side of history. Last advocate for a lost cause.

  Was this what it felt like? Coftey shook his head, glancing up at the high, vaulted ceiling of the rotunda as if he expected to find his answers written somewhere up there among the Corinthian capitals. But this cause wasn’t lost. Not yet.

  You didn’t gain power in a single night—and outside of being caught in bed with a live boy or a dead girl—you didn’t lose it in a single night either.

  Which meant that you could still wield what power you had while it lasted. The weak would use it to strike at once in desperation, lash out at their enemies with what remained of their ebbing strength.

  The strong, would remain in the shadows. Gathering strength.

  He felt his phone buzz suddenly against his ribs as he mounted the stairs to the upper floor, digging it back out to see a brief message displayed on-screen. The response to a text he had sent nearly an hour earlier.

  Central span, Key Bridge. 1840 hours tonight. Be there.

  1:04 P.M.

  The offices of the UK Daily Standard

  Central London

  “And there’s nothing you can do?” Arthur Colville shook his head, glaring across the office at the painting hanging upon the far wall. Richard Caton Woodville’s depiction of the charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman. British grit and steel cutting its way through a sea of Muslim fanaticism.

  Would God that doing so to
day were so simple, so straightforward. After all they had sacrificed, all they had risked—the months of planning—it seemed well-nigh unbelievable that it would come down to this. Everything ruined by one man’s stupid lust for a whore.

  “Nothing,” came the voice of his contact at M.I.-5. “Special Branch is already on their way. They’ll have the flat surrounded within fifteen minutes.”

  “And we have no way to contact him,” Colville demanded, careful not to mention the name of the Shaikh over an unsecured line, “to warn him?”

  “None. My last instruction to him, as we discussed, was to go to this safehouse after disposing of his last burner and stay there. Stay out of sight after the fiasco of yesterday morning. Our friend was supposed to visit him this evening with another supply of mobiles. You will be needing to warn him off.”

  Conor Hale. “I will handle it. In the meantime, see what you can do there to…adjust the situation in our favor. We need him free if things are to move forward as planned.”

  “I assure you, I know the stakes.”

  1:24 P.M.

  The US Embassy

  Grosvenor Square, London

  “The text message, it was from the British officer,” Jan Traeg responded, taking another sip from the bottle of spring water. Despite all the hours that had passed, she could still taste the CS gas deep within her throat. “At least it was supposed to have been.”

  “It was,” Carlos Jimenez confirmed quietly, glancing at Thomas. “Or at least his phone. The Security Service has verified that. They recovered both phone and officer, about five miles west of the flat—he was roughed up and disoriented, but otherwise fine. And what happened after that?”

  Otherwise fine. No casualties, Thomas thought, a growing sense of disquiet gnawing at him as it had ever since he had first heard the story from Traeg hours earlier. Something was wrong with all this. He glanced at his watch, mentally calculating what time it would be in the States.

  “My partner opened the door to let him in—and the next thing I heard was the grenade. I-I didn’t see—it all happened so fast.”

  It would have.

  “If you’ll excuse me, Carlos,” Thomas interjected, forcing a bland smile to his face as he rose from his seat. “I’ll be back in just a moment…have to take a leak.”

  The station chief barely even looked up. “Of course.”

  “Look, Ron, don’t give me that. This isn’t a social call.” Thomas swore into the phone in exasperation, wishing for the hundredth time in the day that he had a drink.

  Or a woman, he thought…momentarily eyeing the State Department attaché who had just stepped from the elevators down the hall. Tall and blonde, with a tan that certainly hadn’t come from the climate around here.

  Focus. He closed his eyes, forcing himself to address the matter at hand. “Something’s come up—with the op here in the UK. I need to talk with Richards.”

  There was a brief pause before Ron Carter responded, a thousand miles away in Langley, Virginia. “I can’t do that. Not right away. Not on an unsecured line.”

  “But you can do it?”

  “I didn’t say that,” the analyst responded. “I’ll do what I can. Richards is off-CONUS at the moment. I can’t say anything more, you know that.”

  “I do.” Deployed with Bravo Team, no doubt. In the months since Harry’s departure, Tex had become Nakamura’s right-hand man over at Bravo. “Get in touch with him and get back to me soon as you can.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Make it a priority, Ron. I’ll owe you one.”

  He signed off and ended the call, shaking his head as he gazed down the hall at the gracefully retreating form of the attaché. The hit on the surveillance van was…familiar.

  Very familiar.

  5:47 P.M.

  The industrial estate

  North of Leeds, North Yorkshire

  Exhaustion. Harry passed a hand over his face, unscrewing the cap on his bottle of water and taking a long, deep swallow. There was only so much longer he could keep this up. Interrogation, torture, if you wanted to call it that—and he had no problem with doing so—was as much emotional as physical.

  And it took as severe a toll on the interrogator as the man being interrogated.

  Okay, maybe not, he thought—eyeing Rahman’s suspended, bloodied form. Memories of his first rendition flight coming back to the fore. As a man sows, so shall he also reap.

  It had been him and John Patrick Flynn—just the two of them—flying into Queen Alia late one night in the fall of ’03 in a blacked-out Agency 737. A bound-and-hooded senior Taliban field commander in their custody…try as he might, he couldn’t even remember the man’s name now.

  He could never forget what had happened after they landed. After King Abdullah’s Mukhabarat met them on the tarmac. All smiles and Savile Row. “Welcome to paradise.”

  Hell, more like.

  “Don’t look away.” That had been Flynn, his soft gray eyes turning hard as a flint. “If you do, you’re no better than them.”

  Them. The Agency bureaucrats back at Langley, reading their intelligence reports and averting their eyes from the truth of how that intel had been obtained. The politicians on Capitol Hill, pushing for “something to be done”, then claiming utmost innocence when something was.

  The American people, snug in their beds.

  “A man does what has to be done,” Flynn had gone on, watching through the glass as the Taliban commander was stripped naked and chained to the wall of the darkened room, the only illumination coming from the fire pit at its center, the glowing pokers resting in the coals. “And he doesn’t pass it off to others, he does it himself. He accepts that responsibility. And everything that comes with it. The demons.”

  His own reply, haunting in the ghostly silence that preceded the screams. “Is that why we’re on this side of the glass?”

  9:45 P.M.

  Leeds

  “Are you sure you want me to do this?”

  “Of course,” Darren responded, looking over at Sarah Russell in the passenger seat of the darkened BMW. A transformed woman from the way she had appeared before him in the police station only hours before, the sparkle of diamonds in her ears, the dress well-nigh open in the back—her neckline dipping perilously low.

  It wasn’t nearly so hard to see how she commanded the prices they’d seen on the ‘Net. “We’ve been over this a time or two.”

  She shook her head, biting her lip in the darkness. Not looking at him, the nerves on full display. “I don’t know if I even can. What if he suspects?”

  Right. “Just do what you’ve always done,” he said, no emotion in his voice. “Fake it. All these years…how many of your clients have suspected?”

  Russell laughed, but it was a laugh as fake as the diamonds in her ears. Brittle, sharp. “Not a single one. Men, they’re all the same.”

  “There you go, then. Nothing to worry about.” She unbuckled her seatbelt, her hand on the door when he stopped her. “And one final thing. We’ll need you to wear these.”

  She looked back, her eyes fixing on the black lace in his hand. “What do you mean, I…”

  “It’s important. And I need you make a gift of them to him when you leave.”

  Seeing the puzzled look on her face, he went on. “There’s a miniature transmitter in the gusset—transmits location and audio back to us in microbursts. We’ll have ears in the room.”

  She reached out and took them from his hand, favoring him with a look of disgust. “So you’re going to be enjoying the show, is that it? Bugger you—if everything was as it should be, I’d be charging you lot for the entertainment.”

  “If everything was as it should be, Miss Russell, I’d be arresting you rather than sending you in,” he replied, the ghost of a smile flitting across his dark face. “But that’s not the way the world works.”

  She could feel her heart beating loudly against her chest as she walked up to the door of the terraced house, st
eeling herself not to look back—not to attempt to find the police surveillance team she knew was somewhere on the street.

  And then she was inside, her eyes adjusting to the dim light of the entry hall—stilettos tapping against the weathered wood as she made her way to the door of the flat, her hand lifted to knock.

  Calm down. She’d had dangerous clients before. This one wasn’t even particularly rough. Or at least he hadn’t been.

  She heard the bolt slide back, and then he stood there before her in the doorway. “I was hoping it would be you,” the Pakistani said, favoring her with a charismatic smile as his gaze swept over her body. “You really don’t know how much I’ve been looking forward to this.”

  The sound of a passionate kiss came over his headphones, followed by the unmistakable noise of fabric tearing.

  A woman’s laugh, nearly pitch-perfect…but somehow vaguely discordant. False.

  Roth leaned back in the chair of the surveillance van, raising his eyebrows as he glanced at the other British officer. “She’s in.”

  He waited a moment before toggling his earpiece. “Are you getting this, Thames House?”

  “Loud and clear,” came MacCallum’s voice unexpectedly. The section chief should have gone home hours before, but none of them had been getting much sleep of late. “Voice-print analysis has been confirmed, it’s the Shaikh.”

  Thank God, Roth thought. Would have been a rum thing if they’d gotten the wrong john, after all this. “And our status on the assault?”

  “Marsh is on his way to meet with the Home Secretary.”

  6:37 P.M. Eastern Time

  The Francis Scott Key Bridge

  Washington, D.C.

  Darkness. Kranemeyer leaned forward, his elbows resting on the parapet of the bridge—hands clasped before him as he stared out toward the city, the towering obelisk of the Washington Monument just barely visible in the night, nearly two miles to the east. That was what this city represented, its thousand glittering lights notwithstanding.

  The dark, corrupt heart of a country that was slowly rotting from within.