by Will Jordan
‘That was our agreement,’ she said at length.
Strangely, that seemed to satisfy Frost. Anya was many things, but one thing she’d never done was directly lie to any of them. Holding her gaze a moment longer, Frost stepped aside, allowing her to pass.
With yet another potential argument averted, Drake looked at his watch. ‘All right, Cain’s flight touches down within the hour. Finish up your weapon and equipment checks, and be ready to move out. Everyone understand?’
Nobody objected.
‘Good. Let’s go!’
Chapter 44
As their car bumped along the rough, dusty road away from the industrial estate, Gondal was bent over his notebook in the passenger seat, neatly writing down a long series of numbers.
‘What do you think?’ Mahsud asked, his meaty hand on the wheel.
Gondal was quiet, concentrating on transcribing the passport number he’d memorized, plus the licence plates of the two vehicles. As fate would have it, he’d been endowed with a capacious memory, particularly when it came to numbers and written text. It was a gift that took a great deal of discipline to properly utilize, but it was one that had proven invaluable in his career as an intelligence operative.
Finishing his work, he laid the notepad in his lap and let out a breath, calming his mind while he replayed the encounter back at the warehouse. Every word spoken, every gesture, every movement and facial expression. Each of these factors were different elements in an equation that allowed him to make his judgement.
‘The leader, Douglas… he is hiding something,’ he decided at length. ‘He was nervous around us, even if he hid it well.’
Of course, that could mean any number of things. Perhaps they were running some kind of illegal operation from that warehouse, perhaps one of the vehicles was stolen, in which case he had little interest in them. Petty crime or fraud meant nothing to Gondal. He had bigger concerns.
Two of their men were dead. That was something that couldn’t go unanswered.
Mahsud grunted agreement. A naturally suspicious man, it was likely he harboured similar opinions, if less well informed.
‘What do you want to do?’
That was the question. Sending in a field ops unit to apprehend them was heavy handed at best, while allocating a surveillance team would tie up valuable resources that were sorely needed elsewhere. He was reluctant to take either step based on gut instinct. He needed something more to work with.
‘We do some digging,’ he decided, reaching for his cell phone.
A background check on the licence plates, Douglas’s passport, as well as Apex Deliveries that he claimed to work for, would tell him whether his suspicions were correct. And if so, he would come down on that man with everything he had.
* * *
Keira Frost was alone in one of the vacant offices when Drake found her. She had pulled up her T-shirt to expose the gunshot wound at her side, and was busy tending it. An old dressing, stained with patches of blood, lay on the table beside her. He heard a sharp intake of breath and saw her tense up as she pressed an antiseptic solution against the wound, though she wasn’t being gentle or tentative about it. Her movements were rough, agitated, as if she wanted the discomfort.
He could guess what was eating her. It was the same reason he’d come here.
‘You going to talk, or are you going to stand there eyeballing me?’ she asked without turning around, having caught the sound of his approach.
Drake knew what he wanted to say. ‘How long ago was it?’
‘This ain’t Lord of the Rings, Ryan. Stop speaking in riddles. How long ago was what?’ Unrolling a fresh dressing, she pressed it against her side and reached for the surgical tape on the table in front of her.
He crossed his arms, knowing she wouldn’t like the next question, knowing she probably wouldn’t want to answer. But whether she wanted to or not, she needed to.
‘That you were in the same situation as Yasin?’
Straight away he saw her tense up again, only this time it had nothing to do with pain. Her hand fumbled the tape just as she was picking it up, dropping it on the floor by her foot.
‘Goddamn it,’ she hissed, bending down stiffly to pick it up.
Drake was faster, and snatched it up before she could retrieve it. ‘Give me that back,’ she snapped, trying to pluck it from his grasp.
‘I saw the way you stood up for him.’
‘He was just a kid, for Christ’s sake,’ she said, though she couldn’t hide the rush of colour that had risen to her cheeks.
‘You’ve never acted that way before.’
‘So what?’ she demanded, bristling with anger. ‘Christ, what does it matter?’
‘It matters to me.’ He didn’t resist this time as she grabbed at the tape and pulled it angrily out of his hand. ‘And I know this is going to eat away at you if you don’t let it go.’
It hadn’t been too hard to join the dots on this one. Frost had never spoken much about her life before the military and the Agency, and had always made it clear that was how she wanted it to stay. He’d always assumed she’d had a difficult upbringing that she wasn’t keen to publicize, but even he hadn’t expected something like this.
‘Ancient history,’ she mumbled. ‘You don’t want to know.’
‘Try me.’
‘I’d rather not.’
‘I don’t care.’
With a weary sigh, she laid the tape down on the table, her shoulders sagging in defeat. ‘My dad – my real dad, I mean – didn’t stick around long after I was born. Never even got a chance to meet the son of a bitch. But there were other guys… later. There were always other guys.’ She flashed one of the crooked smiles he’d come to recognize when she was uncomfortable. ‘Pick your sob story. Most of them didn’t give a shit about me, some got real pissed off having me around. You think I’m a pain in the ass now? You should have seen me when I was ten.’
Drake didn’t speak. He knew there was more coming.
‘Then, I got a little older, I wasn’t a kid any more… and one of them started taking a liking to me. That was all the reason I needed, so I bailed when I was 14, hitch-hiked to Chicago, where I figured I could disappear. Spent about a year living on the streets. Just like Yasin.’
She shrugged as if it was of no consequence to her now, but her eyes told a different story. ‘You think you’ve had tough times, but you haven’t. Not really. Not until your stomach’s cramping up because you haven’t eaten in two days, and you can’t feel your feet because you’ve spent the night beneath an overpass in the middle of December. Chicago’s got some real long winters, believe me. I didn’t realize at first, but I learned. I learned a lot of things.’
Drake laid a hand on her shoulder, not really knowing what he hoped to achieve. Just wanting to give her something, to let her know he was there for her.
‘I’m sorry, Keira.’
She smiled then. The kind of ironic, mocking smile he had come to know all too well. ‘What the fuck are you sorry for? Everybody’s got a sob story.’
‘Including Yasin?’
The smile faded then. ‘Give him a chance, Ryan. I know it’s a risk, but… he doesn’t deserve to be where he is. No kid does.’
Noble sentiments to be sure, but Drake was under no illusions about who and what this mission was about. They hadn’t come to Pakistan to put the world to rights, to save or help anyone. They had a very different purpose here.
‘Even if we let him go, it won’t change anything,’ Drake warned her. ‘He won’t be any better off than he was this morning.’
‘But he’ll be alive. That’s a hell of a lot better than he could have ended up.’
She was right about that. Whatever their purpose here, however cold and ruthless they might have to be, they were still human beings. If they lost sight of that, then maybe they didn’t deserve to survive tonight.
‘Fair enough. I won’t shoot him. How does that sound?’
A glimmer of a smile
returned then. It wasn’t much, but it was real.
‘Sounds like progress.’
* * *
Yasin watched in silence as Anya carefully removed the rounds from the magazine on her Colt M1911 automatic and laid the brass cartridges in a line on the dusty floor. Taking the tension off the springs kept them from weakening, and helped ensure the weapon didn’t jam at a crucial moment. And if nothing else, it gave her something to occupy herself with.
She sat cross-legged on the floor, her back against the wall, her eyes on the weapon. Even without the gun, she knew she had nothing to fear from the scrawny, untrained boy on the opposite side of the room.
Nonetheless, she could feel his eyes on her as she worked. It was distracting and irritating, and as much as she tried to ignore it, the feeling only intensified as the seconds crawled by. She had never been comfortable around children, perhaps because she’d had so little exposure to them in her adult life.
‘If you have something to say, then speak,’ she advised, speaking in Pashto. It wasn’t often she felt the need to break the silence, but now was such a time.
She had removed his gag to make it easier to breathe, on the understanding that if he screamed or cried out, she would take steps to ensure he never talked again. A graphic description of what was actually involved in removing a human tongue had been enough to get her point across.
‘You know about guns.’ It was more a statement than a question.
‘I do.’
‘Who taught you?’
‘Lots of people.’
She could guess what was coming next.
‘Have you ever killed anyone?’
She saw no need to lie to him. ‘Yes.’
‘How many?’
She glanced up at him then. ‘Including young boys?’
‘I’m not a boy,’ he hit back, his pride stirred by her disparaging remark. ‘I’ll be 12 next month. Old enough to be a man.’
Anya couldn’t quite hide a smile of amusement at such a futile display of masculine bravado, and turned her attention back to the weapon. ‘There is more to being a man than getting older. You will learn that one day, if you live that long.’
‘How would you know?’
She paused, in the midst of inspecting the weapon’s feed mechanism. ‘What?’
‘How would you know?’ he repeated. ‘You’re not a man.’
He had a point there, but she had no interest in being drawn into a philosophical debate with someone 30 years younger than herself.
‘You talk too much,’ she decided, resuming her work.
‘Would you have killed me?’ he asked suddenly, speaking with the frank honesty that only came with youth. ‘If they hadn’t stopped you?’
Forcing herself not to sigh in exasperation, she looked up at him once more. ‘Would you like to find out?’
But for once, he didn’t look intimidated by this implied threat. ‘You won’t do it now. You promised that other man you wouldn’t. He’s a good person, I think. You’re not.’
Anya shrugged and turned her attention back to the weapon. Back to something she was comfortable with.
‘Like I said, you talk too much.’
Chapter 45
Forward Operating Base ‘Foxtail’, Afghan–Pakistan border – 23 February 1986
‘No!’ Anya snapped, bristling with indignation and defiance at the new orders Cain had just delivered. ‘I will not do it.’
‘It’s not a matter of choice,’ Cain reminded her. ‘These are your instructions. You’ve been ordered to go back to Langley for debriefing.’
‘Debriefing?’ she repeated. ‘Our mission here isn’t over.’
‘Yours is.’
Anya folded her arms, staring him down. She wasn’t buying into this. ‘So I am supposed to run back to Langley like a frightened dog, and leave the rest of the task force here? No.’ She shook her head emphatically. ‘I will not leave them.’
Cain was as annoyed as he was perplexed by her reaction. After months spent operating behind enemy lines, fighting and risking their lives in appalling conditions, most operatives would have jumped at the chance to return stateside. Why then was she so determined to stay here in this godforsaken place?
‘You’ll do what you’re told,’ he snapped, a harder edge in his voice now. ‘What the hell’s wrong with you, Anya?’
She took a step towards him, while outside the wind howled and the rain lashed against the side of the tent. ‘You have no idea what we are doing here, what this means to me. I had to work twice as hard to get them to respect me, risk my life more times than I can remember. Now they do, finally, and you would have me turn and run like a coward? No!’
Overcome with frustration at her stubborn refusal to see sense, Cain slammed his fist down on the map table.
‘Goddamn it, Anya! Do you know the strings I had to…’ He trailed off, instantly wishing he could undo what he’d just said.
But it was too late. The damage was done.
Her vivid blue eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean by that, Marcus?’
‘Forget it,’ he said, turning away.
Moving forward, she clutched his arm, pulling him close and staring him hard in the eye. ‘This was your doing, wasn’t it? You were the one who made this happen. Why?’
‘Because I’m afraid of losing you,’ he snapped, finally admitting the truth he’d tried so hard to bury.’ Because every day since you got on that flight, I’ve been thinking about you. Every night I’ve lain awake thinking about what you were doing, wondering if you were safe… wishing I was with you. That’s why I want you to come back, Anya. Because I don’t want to go through that again.’
Anya took a step back, startled by what she’d just heard. Of course she was shocked, he thought angrily. How the hell had he expected her to react to such a confession from a man ten years older than her?
‘Forget what you just heard,’ he advised her, already trying to make excuses. He glanced away, unable to meet her gaze. ‘It’s been a long trip, and you don’t need to hear this crap.’
That was when he heard her voice, thin and uncertain where before it had been defiant and angry. ‘Marcus?’
‘What?’
He looked up just as she moved closer, tilted her head back and pressed her lips against his, tentative and hesitant at first but soon with a growing confidence and desire. He was so surprised by the unexpected gesture that for a moment or two, he barely reacted.
Only when he felt her arms slip around his neck, and his own instinctively circle her waist, did he at last realize what was happening. That was when it all changed, when all his worries and fears and uncertainties seemed to melt away, as he felt the firm warmth of her body against his. He wanted her with an urgency, a need, a hunger he’d never experienced before, and somehow he knew it was the same for her. It always had been.
The two of them, so different in so many ways, had at last found what they both needed and wanted. Each other.
* * *
Benazir Bhutto International Airport, Pakistan – March 2010
Travelling under diplomatic protection, Marcus Cain was able to breeze straight through the busy airport after disembarking his flight, circumventing security checkpoints and passport control as if he owned the place. Other men might have taken some measure of satisfaction in this exercise of power and privilege, but Cain had his mind on other matters.
As agreed, Hawkins and a contingent of security operatives were waiting to escort Cain to their two-vehicle convoy outside, his well-tailored suit standing in stark contrast to the fearsome appearance lent by his facial scarring. He would have to look into plastic surgery for that man, Cain thought absently as Hawkins fell in step beside him. It was just lucky for Hawkins that he was still useful enough to justify the investment.
‘Where are we on security?’ Cain asked right away. Hawkins knew better than to exchange greetings or enquire about his flight, most likely because the man didn’t give a shit either way. Whatever th
e reason, it suited Cain just fine.
‘Everything’s set,’ the field operative confirmed. ‘The safe house is ready to go, and we have men standing by to cover all aspects of the op.’
‘Reliable men, I assume?’ Cain asked.
Hawkins gave him a sidelong glance, the scar twisting his smile into a disparaging sneer. ‘Hand-picked them myself. Believe me, we’ve got the right guys for this kind of work.’
That was all he needed to know. Whatever his personal motivations, Cain was content to leave operational details in this man’s hands.
Escorted by Hawkins, and with a pair of armed operatives in front and behind, Cain strode through the main terminal, the crowds of travellers parting with before him as he headed for the big automatic doors leading outside.
As soon as they were free from the cool, air-conditioned environment of the terminal building, the wall of heat hit him like a physical blow. The tropical air, heavy with moisture, seemed to raise beads of perspiration on his exposed skin almost immediately, while the sun beat down hard through a gap in the clouds.
Slipping on a pair of sunglasses, Cain glanced at the pair of black Audi SUVs with diplomatic plates waiting for them in the crowded pickup area. Cain and Hawkins went into the lead vehicle, eager to escape the oppressive heat, with most of the security detail taking the follow-up car.
‘What was your read on Qalat?’ Cain asked, loosening his tie. He’d once been well adapted to hot climates like this, but it had been a long time since he’d ventured out into the field. Too long, he realized now.
‘He’ll be at the meeting,’ Hawkins concluded as their driver pulled away and the terminal building slid by outside.
‘That’s not what I asked.’
Hawkins shrugged. ‘He’s a hard-ass. Cool under pressure, not the kind to crack easily. I caught him off guard with the Black List, but I wouldn’t count on that a second time.’
Cain most certainly wouldn’t. He glanced at his watch as the convoy pulled out of the airport perimeter, joining the main drag leading into Islamabad. Just over four hours to go. Enough time to prepare himself for the task ahead. One way or another, it was sure to be a long day for both men, and he intended to be ready for it.
