by Matthew Dunn
“The walls, floor, and ceiling of Gray Site—how can you be certain entry wasn’t forced through one of them and then covered up?”
“We checked every inch of—”
“A professional could put a fake facade over a tunnel and get the coloring and texture to exactly match its stone surroundings.”
The man looked up. “I know. That’s why we X-rayed every inch of stone. Top to side to bottom. No concealed tunnels. No nothing.”
“Tell me about the breach.”
“You must have read about it in the reports.”
“Tell me!”
“We used blowtorches to get through the door. Took us a while. Finally, we got the door down. Sparks from our torches ignited a sofa in the corridor, but that didn’t matter because one of the paramilitary guys stood guard at the entrance while putting out the fire. Rest of us went into the complex. We reached the rooms and—”
I said, “Stop,” and held up a hand. “Backtrack. What did you see when you were about to step through the entrance?”
“At first, not much because of the fire and smoke.”
“Yes, yes, but once you got clear of that?”
“Wide corridor. Same metal cabinets we’d installed, lining the corridor. They were there for the Gray Site officers to store files. And nothing else.”
“Ceiling?”
“Nothing.”
“Lighting?”
“It was working. Plus we had flashlights.”
“The rooms? I’m most interested in the rooms.”
The technician looked upset. “I’d never seen anything like it before. Never want to again. The paramilitary guys moved very fast, checking each room, their weapons out. Me and my two tech pals kept pace with them because we were under orders to retrieve data. Then we went into the fourth room. I wish I hadn’t.” The officer started rocking. “Four dead guys. I didn’t know gunshots looked that bad in real life.”
“They always do.” I felt sorry for the guy, but couldn’t show that. “Take a deep breath and continue.”
“I knew who the dead men were because they’d been around when we were finishing off installing Gray Site. The Israeli was on the floor, one bullet wound in his arm, another in his stomach. The French officer was slumped in the corner of the room, blood all over the floor in front of him. The paramilitary guys said he’d bled out. He was shot in the chest.”
“And the British man?”
“Head down on the desk. We checked him. There was an exit wound in his lower back.”
I didn’t want to ask my next question, but had to. “The American?” My friend Roger.
The technician’s body shook. “That was the worst bit. I can still see it now. Hate it. Half of his face was shot off. Bits of his jawbone were jutting out like . . . like I don’t know. Bone. Jagged bone.”
I clenched my teeth, desperate to remember the last time Roger and I had a drink together rather than visualize the image I’d just been presented with. I failed. But I was a DGSE officer, I told myself, not a grieving friend. I wanted to rip off my padding and just walk out of here. But if I did that I’d never get out without being arrested for interrogating a CIA officer, because revealing my disguise to the technical officer would quickly lead others in the Agency to deduce that it had been me in his home tonight. “What happened next?”
“We examined the site for hours. The paramilitaries got the bodies into our van. Then we sanitized the place—removed all equipment and bloodstains, bleached, scrubbed, all of us in head-to-toe disposable coveralls, even the shooters who kept guard while we did what needed doing. The X-rays I spoke about, we did after Gray Site was completely empty. And we didn’t stop there. We swept the place three times in case we’d missed anything. It was backbreaking. I’ve never done anything as intense before. But we had to be thorough. We only just managed to get on the road before daybreak.”
My mind racing, I asked, “What do you think happened in there?”
The technician wrapped his arms tight around his chest and continued rocking. “I’m just a—”
“You saw the result of what happened! I didn’t. You don’t need to be an operative to have an opinion.”
The CIA technical officer stopped moving and looked at me imploringly. “You swear you won’t say anything about this conversation?”
I nodded. “You choose whether you want to declare it or not. But I’ve no interest in causing you trouble.” I stood, ready to leave. “Your opinion?”
He didn’t reply at first and seemed to be finding the right words. Finally, he said, “I’ve installed covert intelligence stations in places you wouldn’t believe—castles, churches, disused prisons, and on one occasion a former brothel in Mogadishu. They were fun, if that makes sense. Gray Site wasn’t. It had the smell of death in there when we moved in. I reckon people died in the house above when it was shelled by the Israelis in ’82.” He looked at me, his eyes bloodshot. “I think being in that place day and night drove Roger Koenig mad.”
THIRTY
Monsieur de Guise watched his university students filing into the Rennes University lecture hall. He was standing at the podium at the front of the classroom, a table by his side, behind the table a freestanding chalkboard. The students were chatting to each other, laughing, and all of them were carrying bags stuffed with academic books and electronic devices that de Guise didn’t care to understand.
This morning he was giving his students a lecture on the unsolved, highly complex abc conjecture. Most of them wouldn’t understand a word that came out of his mouth. So, as he was often inclined to do, he’d decided to start the lecture with something that would engage their young minds.
Magic.
His tricks pulled in students to his classroom, which would otherwise be near empty. Full classrooms kept the university administrators off his back and allowed him to maintain his cover as a professor. He was pleased to note that when the students sat down, the hall was at capacity. As a reward to them, he was going to show his pupils something special. It wouldn’t be easy, for it required dexterity and, as with most tricks, misdirection.
On the table were eight figures of men and a large metal box with no bottom. The professor looked across the room and counted the figures aloud, tapping the head of each as he did so. “Eight in total,” he said in French. “Does anyone disagree?” De Guise stared at his students, deliberately silent for a while to instill more anticipation. Some of his students shook their heads. “Very well. We all agree there are eight men on the table.” He turned and wrote the number eight on the chalkboard. With his back once again to the board, he lifted the metal box. “This is their prison. They have no food, no water. There are no guards to let them out for exercise. They will die in here. But maybe one of the men is stronger than the others. He will outlive them and survive for a while by eating the dead prisoners’ flesh and by gnawing on their bones until there is nothing left to consume. When that moment arrives, there will be no trace of the seven dead men.”
De Guise placed the box over the eight figures and his hands behind his back. “We now speed up time. Days pass. A week. Then the man who is still alive can no longer bear the agony of his starvation and thirst, so he becomes a consumer of rotting flesh and a drinker of congealed blood.”
Some of the students were squirming, others nudging each other while lapping up the grotesque mental image.
“Let’s assume he swallows the very last morsel and fragment of bone available to him in one month’s time. That moment is now.” De Guise lifted the box. There was only one figurine on the table. He was still standing. The students clapped and laughed. Monsieur de Guise raised a finger to hush them. “One man is left. Agree?” The pupils nodded eagerly. He turned and moved out of the way of the chalkboard behind him. “One,” he repeated as he pointed at the board. The students gasped when they saw that the number eight previously written on the board had somehow transformed itself to the number one. The students cheered, but de Guise gestured the
m to be quiet again, his expression stern. “Alas, this is magic with pathos. Eventually, the survivor collapses and dies.” He tapped the figure over so it was prone on the table. “One becomes zero.” As he moved to his podium, the students were astonished to see that the number one on the chalkboard had been replaced by the number zero.
He gave a slight bow as his pupils stood and applauded, most of them whooping with delight.
Later that afternoon, the music of Chopin’s Revolutionary Étude in Monsieur de Guise’s Rennes home was accompanied by the sounds of raindrops hitting the cobbled street outside. De Guise was sitting in his leather armchair adjacent to the fireplace, which he’d lit because the early fall day had turned unseasonably chilly. His eyes were closed and his fingertips pressed together as he toyed with the idea that the music he was listening to could be used as a code—each note carrying a numerical value that in turn would define a specific letter. Such a code would be of use only to a skilled musician, but some of Thales’s assets had such skills and one day the code could be of help to them.
Thales’s empire was growing, thanks to the increased freelance work that had recently come his way. From the four corners of the world, businessmen, politicians, military chiefs, and even intelligence officers used his services. Almost entirely, his services were engaged via a series of intermediaries. Very few employers had direct contact with him. Most of them didn’t even know he existed.
His tasking on the Paris assassination and the subsequent need to stop Cochrane dead in his tracks was different. His employer for these jobs had direct contact with him via phone. In this case there was no need for communications to take place through intermediaries, given that Thales had recruited his employer a year ago to spy on some extremely sensitive secrets. The spy had now turned employer, and after the job was done the employer would return to being Thales’s employee. That was fine, because this momentary switch of roles came with a lucrative revenue stream.
But as a former high-ranking MI6 officer, Thales knew that a growing network of assets and other resources, together with a swelling bank balance, came with increased responsibilities and risks. With every new person he hired, the chances of treachery within his organization rose. The more cash he accrued, the more devious he had to be with his money-laundering structures. But all of this was easily within his capabilities and gave him no concern. Plus, few knew Thales’s false name of de Guise and nobody in his employ knew his real English one.
After the music finished and the only sounds were the weather and the crackling flames, de Guise decided that he wanted to take a walk through the old quarter of Rennes. Today wasn’t market day, which was good because he was keen to be alone. He was momentarily irritated when his phone rang, though that irritability vanished when he saw that the asset calling was the woman he’d tasked to track Richard Oaks’s passport and credit card.
He picked up the phone, listened for thirty seconds, then ended the call.
Colonel Rowe’s long, stiff legs strode over heathland on his family’s estate in Norfolk, one of England’s most easterly counties. The windswept and rugged surroundings were made all the more harsh by a fine rain that had persisted all day. Rowe didn’t care. If anything, the wind and humidity would further test the capabilities of the hunting rifle he was carrying, handcrafted by him in former stables that he’d converted into a workshop adjacent to the estate’s main house.
Seven generations of his family had lived in the vast grounds, many miles away from the nearest neighboring houses. Being an only child, Rowe had inherited the estate when his parents died years ago. They’d also left him their remaining savings, though the money wasn’t enough to maintain the significant upkeep of a west and east wing that contained fifteen bedrooms apiece, 115 windows that frequently leaked and let in drafts due to their age, and a roof that was sorely in need of replacing. In many ways, the estate was an unwanted burden. Rowe had frequently toyed with the idea of selling it. He had no emotional attachment to it, no wife and kids to take advantage of the property’s potential and big open spaces, and considered his parents to be cash-poor snobs who’d lived beyond their means and thought they were still in the Edwardian age.
But he couldn’t bring himself to sell the estate for two reasons. First, the place needed millions spent on it and he doubted a potential buyer would want to take on that investment. Second, the expanse and privacy of the grounds allowed him to shoot.
And shooting was his passion. Especially if he had a man or woman in his crosshairs.
He wasn’t a psychopath. Nor did he consider himself a killer. Instead, he believed he was a dispassionate professional who was gifted with the talent to take a man’s head off from one mile away and in return receive some money for doing so.
It was all he had left in his life.
His former army regiment, the Royal Dragoon Guards, had banned him from attending its annual reunions. He had no aunts, uncles, nephews, or nieces; no friends; and no aspirations whatsoever beyond pulling the trigger and watching his bullet strike its target in precisely the right place.
But that’s not to say he was a shallow man. Given the chance to do so, he could be charming in company. He could entertain people with numerous anecdotes including the time the British monarch inspected Rowe’s troops and she shouted at him because he winked at her, and for at least three months each year he’d travel across Mongolia on horseback while staying with local tribesmen.
By his own admission, he was a man who didn’t belong in this era. His roguish and eccentric behavior, propensity to cheat fellow gamblers out of their bets, and complete disinterest whether big-game hunting was driving certain wild cats to extinction, would have been better tolerated if he’d been in the senior ranks of Queen Victoria’s colonial army. But here he was, in the twenty-first century. And he was determined to carve out a living the best way he could, uncaring that his contemporaries were more likely to be found in investment banks and law firms.
He stopped in a wooded area of the grounds, used the sleeve of his jacket to wipe rain off his sodden face, lowered himself to a prone position and gripped his rifle. “Let’s see what yer made of,” he muttered while taking aim. Over a thousand yards away was a range target, hammered into a tree. He went still, allowing his body to relax so that he felt as if he were merging with the heath and soil beneath him, part of the land. That way there were no unnecessary movements, zero human frailties that would ruin his aim. Now, he was oblivious to any distractions—no sounds of the nearby sea and seagulls flying over it, or the wind racing across Norfolk’s flat land and through leaning trees; no discomfort to be had from the cold rain striking the naked skin between his collar and hairline; and the rich country smells he usually adored no longer registering.
All that mattered to him were his aim, the gun, and the target.
He focused on the center of the target. It was a circle, surrounded by increasingly larger circles. When he was ready, he pulled back the trigger. His bullet hit the exact spot he anticipated it would strike—seven inches wide of the mark.
After making adjustments to the weapon’s sight, he took aim again. Not at the center of the target but four inches away and at the ten o’clock position. Now, he was compensating for the wind and rain. He fired. The bullet struck dead center.
“Okay, my beauty, one more test.” He attached a large silencer to the tip of the barrel. The device upset the perfect weight and balance of his weapon and required even greater skill for him to make an accurate shot. He stayed prone for five minutes, his eyes closed, just feeling the weapon in his hands, letting it become him. Then he opened his eyes, readied himself, inhaled, half exhaled, and held his breath.
The sound of the bullet exiting the gun was barely audible. The high-powered bullet struck the target in the center.
Colonel Rowe fired six more successful shots to be sure of his weapon’s accuracy, then walked back to the estate’s crumbling buildings. Soon the sun would be setting and he’d have to turn on
the grounds’ exterior lights. Only a third of them worked, but he still needed them on because without them the grounds would be in pitch darkness. And with his home’s interior lights on, that would allow any ne’er-do-wells to easily get right up to the house without being seen by him. Rowe could be many things, but one thing he insisted on was never being a target.
After placing his gun alongside many others in wall-mounted racks in his workshop, and securing the building, he entered the ridiculously oversized main house. He only used three of the rooms: an oak-paneled living room with sumptuous nineteenth-century furniture, whose walls were adorned with the stuffed heads of exotic animals Rowe and his forefathers had shot; a former maid’s bedroom that had a single bed, toilet, sink, bathtub, and a rail for his clothes to hang on; and the kitchen that was once used by dozens of service staff to prepare banquets for the visiting wealthy and powerful in his forebears’ heyday. The rest of the house could fall down for all he cared.
He lit a fire, just a few bits of wood and coal in a fireplace that had capacity to burn half an oak tree, and poured himself a brandy from a crystal decanter. He leaned against the mantelpiece above the fire, just the way his great-grandfather was depicted in one of the room’s paintings, albeit his ancestor was in fine Hussars’ uniform and Rowe was in a hessian sweater and tweeds that were steaming as they dried out in the heat. On a side table he saw his cell phone flashing. Cursing, because only Thales had his number, he picked up the phone and checked its screen. It showed a missed call but there was no voice message. Thales never allowed his voice to be recorded.
He called his boss, who answered without a word on the third ring. “Sorry, sir. I was practicing.”
“You did well to do so. Are you satisfied with your results?”
Rowe’s back was straight as he responded, “Always.”
“Excellent. Listen carefully. Mr. C has purchased a British Airways flight to London. Delays considered, he will be arriving at Heathrow tomorrow.”
