‘Cooper,’ said Stringer. ‘Nice of you to pay us a visit. Where’s your partner?’
Masters came through the doorway.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘We’re all together.’
‘You,’ said Masters.
‘Yeah, me,’ Stringer replied, trying to get comfortable in a chair a couple of sizes too small for him. ‘Don’t tell me you’re surprised.’
‘Not surprised, Stringer,’ I said. ‘We just don’t believe you’re the Mr Big – and I use the label figuratively, of course.’
Stringer gave me a crooked smile. ‘Were they armed?’ he asked, addressing Yafa and Ari.
‘Yes,’ said Yafa, handing him the Colt.
‘Lemme guess . . . Cooper, this is yours, isn’t it?’
‘Uh-huh.’ I noticed Stringer was wearing black leather gloves. There was enough hide in those gloves to upholster a car seat.
The CIA chief examined the Colt. ‘Nice weapon. Didn’t figure you for a traditionalist, Cooper.’ He popped the magazine, saw it was full, and snapped it back in. He fully cocked the trigger. ‘Just in case you get any ideas,’ he said. I saw his thumb interrogate the safety as he slipped the weapon inside his coat. ‘Where were we? Yes, me not being the Mr Big. I had motive, access . . .’
‘You were in Ankara the night Colonel Portman was killed,’ Masters said. ‘We checked.’
‘I had Special Agents Telopea and Blitz to help me out.’
‘I don’t think much of the CIA, Stringer, but those two weren’t special agents any more than their names were Mallet and Goddard. They were ex Mossad or Marine Recon or SAS . . . dredged up from the ranks of the guys who lost it, or who never really had it to start with. Maybe Telopea and Blitz could put together a recipe for disaster, but not a lot else. One member of the team that killed Portman let himself into the house. He was known to the Air Attaché. This person had a key that had been stolen from the leasing agent along with a floor plan. After he’d entered the house and made sure Portman was alone, he subdued him with chloroform. Then Yafa and Ari arrived and went to work.’ While I talked, something clicked: Damn! I remembered the glass shard my boot had picked up in Portman’s courtyard. ‘To make it seem like they broke in and did the job without assistance, and perhaps so we wouldn’t find out about the leasing agency break-in and the stolen key, a windowpane beside the courtyard door was punched out from the inside.’
Stringer’s hands were clasped across his gigantic belly. I watched them rise and fall with his breathing.
‘You want more, Stringer?’
‘Depends on whether you want to go to your grave with it – might as well get it off your chest.’
‘You were interviewed at Langley, same as us. We told them Moses Adbul Tawal’s people killed Portman. While we didn’t mention them by name, we believed that to be Psychokitten and Ice-Cream Boy here. Only, these two also led the raid that killed Tawal, the guy we thought was their boss, so something major wasn’t adding up. While we didn’t give Langley specifics, we told you who we saw riding in the helo, but you chose not to pass anything on to Langley. And they never questioned us about it. Why not? Only one reason we could think of. Because if CIA and OSI believed the people who killed Portman were dead – killed along with Tawal on his barge – then the case would be complete. That’s what you told them, wasn’t it? And they bought it. So now the real Mr Big can continue with business as usual. In fact, why don’t you ask him to come on in and join us?’
Stringer didn’t have to. A side door opened and Ambassador Burnbaum walked in, drying his hands on a paper towel. He shook his head and said, ‘Spilt some of that chloroform on my hands. Damn near passed out cleaning it off.’ He walked to the desk and lowered himself into it. ‘You know, Cooper, you and Masters have made this a lot more difficult than it had to be.’
‘You’re under arrest for espionage and murder, Burnbaum. You too, Stringer,’ said Masters.
Burnbaum picked up a paperweight, a six-inch-long graphite-coloured spike – a DU tank penetrator. The depleted uranium it was fashioned from had no doubt been extracted from the uranium hexafluoride stored in this very facility. Burnbaum examined it while he talked. ‘Yes, yes, of course I am. This is about Iran. In a very short period of time, Iran will be nuclear armed. We can’t allow that to happen.’
‘“We” being Israel,’ I said.
‘I don’t see anyone else having the nerve to do what needs to be done.’
‘Why is an American spying for Israel?’ Masters asked.
‘I’m Jewish, Special Agent, as is Harvey here. American on the outside, Israeli on the inside. Perhaps what you’re really asking is why one ally would spy on another?’
Masters glared at him.
‘The US will stick by Israel only while there are common interests. And that’s the issue here, really: the US has no stomach for an attack on Iran, especially after the mess in Iraq. No, neutralising Iran – it might have been a common interest once, but now it’s off the table. For the nation of Israel, though, it’s a matter of pure necessity, of survival, of life or death. We’re looking down the barrel of genocide all over again. If we don’t stop the Iranians, they’ll do their best to kill us all as soon as they have the capability – they’ve said so time and again – which could be any time now.’
‘So this whole operation – the murders, the desal plant, the poisoning of the water – the whole filthy mess has been sanctioned by Israel?’ asked Masters, incredulous.
‘You should know better than to ask, Special Agent. And if the answer were no, would you believe it?’
Masters was furious. ‘What damn well makes the value of your life greater than anyone else’s? What about the children at Kumayt?’
‘You’re talking about the effects of the HEX . . . You know as well as I do that in this game, you have to use the tools available to you and some of them are blunt. However, we have to look at the positive side. We’re focused on the lives we’ll save. And, yes, they’ll be Israeli lives. We needed a facility like Kawthar al Deen. Reliable intelligence is a real problem. We can get a lot of it from the air and from shared intelligence links with Washington, but if we’re going to go in with ordnance – especially of the nuclear sort to surgically remove their assets – we need quality boots on the ground. And that means a base from which Special Forces can be launched at a moment’s notice.’
‘Why the orchestrated killing?’ I asked. ‘Why Portman, Bremmel, then Ten Pin?’
‘Well, yes, why indeed. Tawal was a businessman. He was to be awarded a bonus of twenty million dollars if he could keep the base at Kumayt a secret, at least until the strike. Incidentally, you and Masters should consider yourselves fortunate. Too many people knew you were paying Kawthar al Deen a visit. That meant Tawal couldn’t kill you while you were there, not without risking his bonus.’
I thought about the advice I’d given Doctor Bartholomew. I sure hoped the guy had taken it.
Burnbaum continued. ‘Portman was a problem. He figured it all out. He’d even uncovered the secret of the planted HEX cylinder. He talked to me about it, told me he was going to go public, and I passed that news on to Tawal. If Portman released what he knew, Tawal would have lost a lot of money, which had the effect of signing the Attaché’s death warrant. Tawal was looking for an excuse anyway. I don’t think he liked Portman a whole lot. And, ironically, if Tawal hadn’t become emotionally involved and hadn’t insisted on Portman’s elimination first, before those other two, Yafa’s plan to link their deaths with the F-16 upgrade might have been a little more convincing.’
‘We had to deal with Portman fast,’ said Stringer, chipping in, ‘before he talked.’
Burnbaum shrugged. ‘Well, there you are. The enterprise was flawed from the beginning. Might there have been a better way to achieve the desired result? Quite possibly, but you pay people to do a job, in this particular instance to maintain security and buy time. And I’m happy that at least we’ve succeeded in that and time has been bought
.’
‘Time for what?’ Masters asked.
‘Turn on CNN tomorrow and you’ll see some very nice smoking holes in Iranian soil. Oh, I forgot, you’re not going to be around tomorrow.’ Burnbaum smiled. ‘Stringer – kill these two.’ He indicated which two, as if he needed to, waggling the DU penetrator at Masters and me.
When I looked back at Stringer, the CIA station chief already had a gun in his hand. It was my gun, the Colt .45, and it was pointed at my sternum. From this distance he couldn’t miss. Even a bad shot would be fatal. Stringer’s eyes were calm and cold. I flinched, expecting the soft-nosed anti-personnel slugs I loaded it with to tear a hole as big as a –
BANG! Something crashed behind me. I turned. It was Burnbaum, flung back from his seat and into the wall behind him. I watched him slide to the floor. There wasn’t much of the guy’s head left above his nose. The DU penetrator rolled slowly across the desk and fell with a heavy thud onto the carpet in front of me.
‘Yeah, like I said, nice weapon.’ Stringer bounced the Colt in his hand. ‘I like a piece with some weight in it. These nasty Glocks with all their polycarbonate just don’t do shit for me.’
Yafa and Shira seemed pretty relaxed about what had just happened to Burnbaum, the guy I believed had been pulling their strings. Which meant they were either quick to jump onto another horse when theirs fell over, or Stringer was their mount all along. Yafa stepped across to Burnbaum and bent over him, feeling for a pulse. She then pulled his piece from a shoulder holster – one of those nasty Glocks – which she handed to Stringer.
‘You were Burnbaum’s handler,’ I said. ‘You ran him.’
‘And he never knew,’ replied Stringer. ‘Can you believe that? And Burnbaum was a Cold War graduate. Well, I guess you can believe it – you didn’t get it either.’
Stringer placed the Colt on the arm of his chair, and went with Burnbaum’s Glock. ‘Thanks for killing a dangerous spy for us, Cooper. Washington will give you a medal. Posthumously, of course.’
I shook my head, almost in wonder. Stringer had it all thought out. The guy they bought the HEX from was dead on the floor, the spy who organised it was dead beside him, apparently killed with my gun by me, the special agent on his tail. And no doubt Masters would be killed by Burnbaum’s weapon – all nice and neat. Stringer could then go back to what he was doing, being Jerusalem’s man on the inside. No doubt he’d work it so he was first on the scene, having cracked the plot wide open. He’d earn Mossad’s Man-of-the-Month plaque for sure.
I heard a series of thumps coming from the other side of the main door. And then suddenly it burst wide open and shoved Yafa Feinmann hard in the back. The force of the impact launched her forward. She stumbled and drove her head into the corner of the desk as she fell. There was a bloody divot in her forehead at the hairline. She groaned, semi-conscious, licked her Ferrari-red lips.
Kevin stood unsteadily in the doorway, blood running from his mouth and nose. He coughed up a glob of red ooze, into his hand, looked at it, then collapsed.
There was a moment of complete and utter silence, tension having squeezed every ounce of sound and movement from it. Stringer, Shira, Masters, me. We all looked at each other, calculating the angles, weighing the odds. Four pairs of eyes flitting left and right.
I broke first. I dived for the floor. The room exploded with gunfire. Deafening. BANG! BANG! Masters twisted and sank an elbow into Shira’s gut. I saw her get a hand on his pistol. BANG!
The Glock in Stringer’s hand was pointed at the both of them. BANG! He squeezed the trigger again. BANG! And then again, only now at me. BANG! I was on the move, finishing the roll.
He missed.
As I came up, I snatched the DU penetrator from the carpet. Shira saw me. His gun jumped twice as Masters wrestled him for it. BANG! BANG! A round missed its intended target – me – and buried itself instead in Yafa’s back, between her shoulder blades, shattering her spine.
The penetrator was in my hand – warm and heavy. I had the angle, and the momentum.
BANG! Stringer, thinking I was shot, had shifted aim again, now targeting the swirling duo of Masters and Shira, fighting for his Barak.
I carried the swing through its arc, using its energy, rising up off the floor. Stringer’s massive head came back with surprise when he saw me coming. His mouth opened. I caught him under the chin. The heavy DU penetrator pierced the soft muscle beneath his jaw. I pushed forward, putting my weight behind it. The DU continued up through the roof of his mouth, through his soft palate. I gave it a final thrust and the pointed tip crunched out through the back of the man’s skull, plastered in hair, blood and grey matter.
I snatched the Colt from the armrest. I had a clear shot at Shira as he wrestled with Masters. He saw me turn. Our weapons jumped at the same instant. He span away from Masters as the jacketed round from the Colt smashed through his arm, into his abdomen and out his back, taking his liver with it.
Masters stood, swaying. She lifted her head and I saw the dark stain spreading from her chest, soaking her jacket. I took a step towards her as she faltered. I caught her as she fell, her face suddenly ashen and bloodless. I unzipped her jacket, tore through her shirt and T. The ragged hole in her pale skin was big and black and red, a sliver of wet pink bone poking through. Beneath a ragged crimson flap of skin, I could see her lungs pumping. I reached behind and checked her back. Blood was seeping away through the entry wound, warming my hand, soaking the carpet beneath her.
‘Anna! Can you hear me!? Hang the fuck on. Anna! Jesus . . . !’ My head swung around. What was I looking for? The room was full of dead people, unconscious people. No one to help. Nothing to do. Jesus fucking Christ. Masters whispered something but I couldn’t hear her. I bent down, put my ear close to her lips. Her breathing was shallow, red froth bubbling from the hole in her chest.
‘Vin, I’ve . . . made . . . up my mind,’ she whispered, her breath shallow, fading, the wound sucking. ‘I . . . I quit.’
Table of Contents
About the Author
Also by David Rollins
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
Contents
Prologue
Three days ago
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
>
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