Embrace the Fire (Shadow Warriors Book 3)

by Stephen England

  “Julian Marsh,” Lay mused aloud, his expression unreadable. “That old warhorse. Tell him I’ll be there.”

  5:47 P.M.

  The port of Aberdeen

  Scotland

  He’d been fifteen when he first saw the open sea, Nadeem thought, hands shoved into the pockets of his hoodie as he strode along the quay, the gigantic gantry cranes casting hulking shadows in the harbor lights. Strange, that—for a lad raised in South London.

  But that had been the reality of his life, growing up. Skipping school whenever he could, running with the gangs. Getting into trouble.

  It wasn’t like his mum had anything to say about it, drifting in and out of alky-clinics all through his childhood. Lost in her bottle and pills, unable to find the peace that had eluded him until those darkest of days in prison.

  The peace of God. The path that had led him to this place, prepared to give his life for something greater.

  Nadeem glanced up at the warehouse looming large in the semi-darkness ahead, then back toward the chainlink fence surrounding the complex. One of the brothers standing guard by the wide vehicle gate he had entered only minutes before, a pistol concealed beneath the man’s jacket.

  Brothers. The like of which he had never had before. A sense of belonging. Of purpose.

  Making his way along in the shadow of a towering stack of shipping containers, Nadeem moved toward the side door of the warehouse, taking in the sight of a second man stationed there. “Salaam alaikum, bruv,” he said softly as he approached.

  “Wa’ alaikum salaam,” the older man responded, his dark eyes never leaving Nadeem’s face. “But among God-fearing men were two on whom Allah had bestowed His grace. And what did they say?”

  The briefest of smiles touched the lips of the young black man as he recited the pre-arranged response to the challenge. “When once you are in, victory will be yours.”

  6:09 P.M.

  The safehouse

  Leeds, West Yorkshire

  “The scope of an attack like that,” Darren Roth mused, leaning back in his chair as Harry finished talking. “The resultant fallout if it could be pulled off, if the Queen’s life was even placed in jeopardy… it would be unimaginable. I don’t understand what they can hope to gain.”

  “What do they ever hope to gain?” Steam drifted upward from Mehreen’s tea as she sat there, stirring it idly. Her eyes vacant, the eyes of someone who had seen far too much.

  “I don’t mean the Shaikh,” Roth shot back, gesturing impatiently with his hand. “I spent years fighting against his kind in the mountains of Afghanistan. I mean the nationalists—men like Conor Hale. The kind of men I served alongside.”

  “Your country is on the brink,” Harry offered, leaning back against the faded linoleum of the counter. “The violence of the last couple weeks, the bombings. All it will take is one push to send everything over the edge.”

  Over the edge, and hurtling headlong into the abyss.

  “And what then?”

  “What then? What’s ever the aim of the revolutionary—from Robespierre to Mao Zedong? To ride the chaos, remake the world in their own image. It takes a special kind of hubris to throw the world into the fires and believe you can pull it back out without being consumed yourself.”

  “So that’s what this is all about?” Roth asked, the irony clear in his voice. “A ‘better’ world?”

  “Isn’t it always?” Harry allowed himself a grim smile. A nameless wag had once observed that the reason history repeated itself was that no one had been listening the first time around. Not that they ever did. “They believe they can accomplish with this what none of the wars they bled and died in ever have—eliminate the Islamist threat to the UK, once and for all. A ‘final solution’, you might call it.”

  Echoes of more history. Repeating itself, again and again and again. And ever to the accompaniment of the cry, Bring out your dead.

  It was a moment before the British officer responded, sitting there shaking his head as if struck dumb by it all. “It’s madness. And yet he’s getting men to follow him. In God’s name, how?”

  “We both went to war,” he continued after a moment, “look around you. Do you recognize the country you came back to? I never did—and the longer I spent at war, the less of a bond I felt with those I had left behind.”

  Between the protector and the protected…a great gulf fixed. A chasm washed in blood.

  “War teaches a man that he has only his brothers.” And sometimes not even them, Harry thought—feeling anger swell within him at the memory of brotherhood betrayed. Hamid Zakiri. “That they are all that matters—because at the end of the day, they’re the only ones comin’ for you. And it’s that brotherhood that Conor Hale is leveraging to achieve his objectives. The sacred trusts of men who have been through the fire together.”

  “But who is backing his play?” Roth looked up, his eyes searching Harry’s face. “An operation of this magnitude—a former NCO isn’t funding it off his bloody pension.”

  He pulled a slip of paper from the pocket of his jeans and extended it to Roth. “We have this…a list of phone numbers Hale has been in communication with over the last week. Can you see that they’re run—discreetly?”

  A nod. “I believe so—there’s an officer I know at GCHQ. Owes me a favor or two.”

  “Call them in,” Harry responded simply. It was no time to be holding back. Go for broke. “We only have eight days to get to the bottom of this. Less if we stay here—by now Five has to be wondering why you haven’t brought me in. They’ll be sending back-up, might already be on their way.”

  Roth exchanged a glance with Mehreen before clearing his throat, drawing a disassembled cellphone from an inner pocket and laying it out on the table. Shell, battery. SIM card. “Thames House doesn’t know where I am.”

  The admission caught Harry off-guard, his eyes narrowing as he stared at the intelligence officer. “Then do you mind telling me what are you actually doing here?”

  “You spoke of brotherhood,” Roth said, pausing for a long moment before continuing. “And from what Mehr tells me…you and I both passed through the fire with the same man. Nick Crawford.”

  9:58 P.M.

  Brooks’s

  St. James, London

  It had been as a young intelligence officer that he had first set foot in one of London’s famous gentlemen’s clubs, Lay thought.

  Back in the ‘80s, before the Wall came down. When the biggest enemy—near the only enemy—on anyone’s radar was Russia, and Usama bin Laden was nothing more than a failed guerilla fighter.

  But then, as now, he had come to meet with an opposite number in British intelligence. The more things change…

  The passage of nearly thirty years, and yet the unmistakable feeling of entering the Old World remained, the Great Subscription Room’s barrel-vaulted ceiling rising high above him as he strode purposefully among its clustered tables—brushing past a waiter in formal attire carrying a silver tray upon which balanced a decanter of brandy and a pair of crystal tumblers. A room in which the fortunes of English nobility had once ridden on drunken wagers, the stakes ludicrous even by modern standards—thousands of pounds sterling changing hands in a night over games of whist or ribald bets.

  Nowhere near as high as the stakes this night.

  The stern countenance of Pitt the Elder gazed down from a marble bust of the long-dead statesman as Lay mounted the stairs to the suite of rooms on the second floor of Brooks’s, finding himself standing a few moments later in a small, dimly-lit room, towering oaken bookcases filled with gilt-bound volumes stretching toward the ceiling—the portrait of some 18th-Century English lord hanging over the mantel.

  “It’s been a very long time, David,” a voice announced, the slight form of Julian Marsh rising from a dark leather wingback chair just across the room. “Too long…please, have a seat.”

  “I can just as easily stand,” Lay responded coldly, pausing where he stood—his bulk framed in t
he open doorway.

  “If that’s how you prefer it.” The Cambridge graduate shrugged—his eyes keenly searching Lay’s face. The eyes of a man who had spent years at this game, grown old in the playing of it.

  And there was nothing more dangerous than an old spy, as they both knew.

  “We’ve known each other for what, nearly three decades?” Marsh asked, taking a bottle of Glenlivet off the small endtable by his chair and deftly pulling the cork—watching as the aged single malt splashed into a glass. “Drink?”

  Lay shook his head in the negative. “Very nearly. It was the fall of ‘88, if I remember correctly. West Berlin.”

  “Ah, yes…that was during the Medinsky affair, wasn’t it?” Marsh smiled faintly. “A rum show, that.”

  More like a case study in how quickly and completely an operation could go awry, from his memory of it. Even with his experience running assets into Castro’s Cuba—Berlin had been a league unto itself. “Rather.”

  “Hardly, I dare say, a high point of Anglo-American cooperation,” Marsh observed, returning to his seat. “But you and me—we saw it through.”

  “You, me, and Beecher.”

  The DG smiled, taking a sip of his whisky. “Right, Frank Beecher—how could I forget?”

  We three spies. Two Americans and a Brit—him freshly divorced, Marsh and Beecher fighting over the same woman.

  “Best case officer Berlin ever saw,” Marsh went on, “leastways the best on our side of the Wall. Any word from him of late?”

  “No, I’m sorry,” Lay shook his head, feeling a pang. “I thought you knew—Frank passed away back in ‘09. Prostate cancer.”

  Marsh winced. “A shame. He was a good man. And Jacqueline?”

  “By his side to the end. They were always good for each other. But you didn’t arrange this meet to discuss old times and dead spies, Jules—so why don’t you just cut to the chase?” Lay advised sharply, knowing it had been a mistake almost as soon as the words had left his mouth.

  Never blink first.

  But he was running short of patience with…all of this. This godforsaken world of shadows that had claimed first his marriage, then his only child. Perhaps him, as well—when it really came down to it, not that it seemed to matter. Not anymore.

  Marsh leaned back into his chair, his elbow resting on the polished leather, drink poised delicately between the fingers of his left hand.

  “You know, David,” he began finally, extending a long forefinger toward the CIA director, “I could almost bring myself to admire, even respect, the audacity of what you’ve done—if this was playing out in some sodding Third World backwater. But this isn’t Afghanistan, this isn’t the Bekaa. This is Britain. We are a nation of laws, and I will not sit idly by and let you run them over roughshod.”

  He had known the situation was serious. The detainment of an entire team was unprecedented in the history of relations between the Agency and the UK intelligence community—on either side the Atlantic. But this…this was something far graver.

  “Perhaps it would help both of us,” Lay responded, his words clipped and low, “if you explained precisely what you believe I’ve ‘done’, Jules. And why you’ve now ordered the detainment of my team—a team tasked with aiding your service, on the dime of the American taxpayer.”

  The DG just sat there for a moment, regarding him silently. As if deciding what to say next. At length, he picked up a folder lying there on the endtable beside the bottle of Glenlivet and extended it to Lay. “This man…do you know him?”

  There was something in the way he asked the question, and in that moment Lay knew. He just knew, a premonition seizing hold of him as he took the folder from Marsh, flipping it open to reveal an oh-so-familiar face staring back at him.

  The face of the man he had once entrusted with all that was dear to him—the safety of his daughter, her protection against the men who had tried to take his life. A sacred trust.

  A trust betrayed.

  “Harold Nichols,” Lay acknowledged, lifting his eyes from the folder. “I know him.”

  10:14 P.M.

  The safe house

  Leeds, West Yorkshire

  “You still don’t trust him, do you?” Mehreen asked, breaking the silence as she glanced across the table toward Roth. Harry was out, recovering his equipment from the boot of his vehicle—the two of them alone once more.

  “No,” her colleague responded after a moment, meeting her eyes with a steadfast gaze. “Do you?”

  An impossible question to answer, easy as it would have seemed just weeks before. God, how do these things get so complicated?

  “No,” she admitted finally, the words coming out with painful reluctance. How had they ended up in this place? “But I believe him. And that’s the more important thing, in this moment. You don’t?”

  Roth let out a long heavy sigh. “I believe there is another agenda at play, whether it’s his or the Agency’s.”

  “Then what do you intend to do now?”

  “Head back in to the regional office,” he responded, pushing back his chair and rising to his feet, “make my best excuses for my absence and do what I can to trace these mobile numbers. Best case, I get myself recalled to Thames House. If I can get back to London, I have a direct line to the DG. I can go around MacCallum, or anyone else. But this isn’t something to be dealt with over the phone. Keep me apprised of developments here—anything you find out. As soon as you find out.”

  “But you said…”

  “I don’t believe Nichols.” Roth took a step toward her, placing a big hand on her shoulder as he looked into her eyes. “But I believe you. And if you believe this is what needs to be done, then we’re going to let it play out. We have eight days.”

  Relief. Stemmed only by the fear that somehow she might be wrong—that her own thirst for revenge could be blurring her vision, blinding her to the truth. “I thought earlier that—”

  “I had to be sure,” he replied, drawing her close—his arms enfolding her. “But those times in Iraq…all Nick could talk about was you. You were everything in life to him, and I’d be betrayin’ his memory if I let you down now.”

  Memories. It was hard to think of them now. Now, when all they represented was grief.

  “What time is Stephen Flaharty supposed to arrive here with the weapons?” he asked quietly, holding her in a gentle embrace.

  “Sometime in the morning—I don’t know the exact time. Neither does Harry.”

  Or didn’t seem to, she corrected herself silently. The two were not the same.

  He looked down at her, concern written across his dark face. “Are you sure about this, Mehr? I can pull you out right now—you don’t have to go through with this.”

  “But I do,” she replied, taking a step back from him. This was more important than her own life. Justice, finally served in Flaharty’s death. For Nick.

  “All right, then,” he nodded, turning to leave. “We let this play out. But understand at the end of all this, Mehreen…Tarik, Flaharty, Nichols—MacCallum, if he’s as guilty as you believe—we’re taking them all down. Every last one of them is going to prison.”

  “I understand.”

  10:19 P.M.

  Brooks’s

  St. James, London

  “And you honestly believe that I authorized an operation of this nature?” Lay took a seat on the couch opposite Julian Marsh, tossing the folder on the coffee table between them as he sank back into the smooth leather. “Are you out of your mind, Jules?”

  “What I choose to believe doesn’t alter the facts,” the DG responded calmly. His words even, measured. Ever the epitome of the unflappable Brit—exactly as Lay remembered him from those days back in West Berlin. “Or the reality that our alliance now hangs by the most tenuous of threads. We do not spy on one another, David…it is that imperative that undergirds the very existence of the Five Eyes. A trust now broken.”

  Australia. Canada. New Zealand. The United Kingdom. The United S
tates. The five countries whose intelligence-sharing had coordinated efforts against the Warsaw Pact throughout the darkest days of the Cold War. And these days, against the threat of international jihad. No partnership more vital.

  Marsh drained the last of his single malt and set the glass back on the table beside him, his eyes coming back to rest on Lay’s face. “You understand, I don’t hold you personally responsible for any of this. If there is one thing I realize all too keenly, it is that you and I are the instruments of policy—not the architects of it.”

  The eternal dilemma of the spy, as it was that of the soldier, Lay thought—considering his next words. Tasked ever with executing the will of other men. Threading the needle between the objective desired and that which was possible. Understanding that no politician who mouthed the words “Do whatever it takes” ever really meant them. Or would stand behind them when the butcher’s bill came due.

  But Marsh wasn’t done.

  “After all, the last time your nation was attacked on such a scale you responded by going to war—twice. Is it inconceivable that you would launch a covert operation to assassinate the one man responsible for the attack on Las Vegas? Hardly. If anything, that’s rather restrained by the standard of you Americans.”

  It made sense, he could see that. And was precisely the course of action he would have presented to the President…if Tarik Abdul Muhammad had sought refuge anywhere but the UK. Not that there was any guarantee this President would have given his authorization.

  “You might very well want to believe that, Jules,” Lay responded finally, measuring his words with care. “But nothing could be further from the truth. Nichols resigned from the Agency over two months ago.”

  “How convenient.”

  10:27 P.M.

  London Bridge

  Central London

  London bridge is falling down, Arthur Colville thought—a smile touching his lips at the memory of the old children’s rhyme as he stood there by the concrete balustrade, staring up-river at the unmistakable silhouette of Tower Bridge, lit against the night. Falling down, falling down. My fair lady.