Black List (22 page)

‘How bad is it?’ Alex asked as Anya sat down at the base of a sprawling pine tree, weary and pained, her clothes stained with dust and dried blood.

Reaching up, she gingerly removed her bloodstained jacket to reveal a ragged bullet wound that snaked across the skin of her upper arm. It was still oozing blood, though the bleeding seemed to have slowed as her body worked to form a clot.

She flexed the fingers of her injured arm a few times, then slowly curled and straightened the limb, wincing slightly as torn flesh was pulled apart by the movement of muscles beneath.

‘It’s not,’ she said, though there was a resigned, almost indignant tone to her words. ‘Just a scratch. I was luckier than I deserved.’

The dirt bike was standing nearby, its engine ticking as it slowly cooled. After making good their escape, they had ridden for more than an hour through the dense woodland, following winding forest trails and occasionally cutting straight across the rough terrain. The bike’s suspension seemed to be an afterthought, and by the time they’d finally come to a stop with their fuel running low, Alex felt like a broken man.

He could only imagine how she was feeling after riding all that way with a hole in her arm. But like most things in life, neither the injury nor the rough ride seemed to have troubled her. The only evidence that she’d even tackled the demanding physical task of navigating the bike through dense woodland was a light coating of sweat and dust on her face.

‘First time I’ve ever heard someone call it lucky to be shot,’ he remarked. ‘Don’t you think we should get you to a doctor or something?’

She glanced at him only for a moment. ‘Doctors ask questions, Alex.’

‘They also stop you bleeding to death. Or is this like in
Rambo
where you’ve been trained not to feel pain?’

Anya said nothing to that, concentrating instead on tearing away a portion of her t-shirt to use as an improvised bandage. Much as she would have preferred a suture kit and a sterilized field dressing, this would have to do for now.

A pool of rainwater had formed in a natural depression in the ground nearby, and after soaking the strip of cloth in it, she set about cleaning the dried blood from her arm. Even she couldn’t quite suppress a gasp of pain when she reached the gunshot wound itself.

‘Let me help,’ Alex said, taking a step towards her. Seeing her injured in this way had stirred an unexpected pang of guilt in him, as if she had somehow taken a bullet that was meant for him.

‘I can do it myself,’ she snapped, immediately causing him to back away. ‘I have done it enough times before.’

‘I’m sure you can. I just meant, you don’t have to.’ Sensing his words weren’t making much of an impact, he shook his head. ‘Never mind. Forget it.’

Despite her stoic silence and seemingly unlimited endurance, she was hurting, tired and defeated. She was angry, he realized, but not at him. She was angry at their failure today, angry at being forced to flee empty-handed, angry at possibly having met her match in the people now hunting them.

Anya sighed and looked away for a moment, perhaps sensing she needed to reach out to him but unsure how to do it. She reached up and ran a hand through her hair, staring off into the distance as she searched for the right words.

‘I’m sorry, Alex. About your friend,’ she said at last. ‘He did not deserve what happened to him. And… you did not deserve to be shouted at for trying to help.’

Alex swallowed, replaying Gregar’s death yet again, but nodded acknowledgement. It was about as close to an emotional reconciliation as he was likely to get with someone like Anya, and that meant something to him.

‘About the file,’ she went on. ‘You were able to download it once already. Can you do it again?’

Alex shook his head slowly. ‘The CIA didn’t know what to look for last time. When they get into that house and find Gregar’s computer, sooner or later they’ll figure out how I got in.’ He looked up at her, his eyes reflecting the immense disappointment he felt. ‘I’m sorry, but it’s hopeless.’

Anya chewed her lip. ‘There must be another way. Come on, Alex. You’re smart, and good at solving problems like this.’

He managed a weary smile. ‘That’s literally the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.’

‘I meant it,’ she assured him. ‘Now think. How else can you get to it?’

Alex closed his eyes, thinking once more about the complex deception he’d set up to gain access to the CIA’s network. He had neither the time nor the resources to stage something like that again, and it would be impossible to recover Landvik’s hard drive now.

So what was he missing?

Then, unbidden, another thought leapt into his head. A memory.

A memory of how slow Anya’s file had been to download, and his discovery of the mysterious web address that the information was being routed to. It had in effect downloaded twice, resulting in two copies on different machines.

And at last he understood why.

‘A ghost drive,’ he said, the realisation finally coming to him. ‘Gregar, you clever little shit.’

She regarded him curiously. ‘What do you mean?’

‘When we were downloading the file, I noticed it was being directed to two places – Gregar’s hard drive, and an IP address I didn’t recognise. I was in the middle of tracking it down when I heard you shouting in the other room, so I never got a chance to finish, but I think he was using a ghost drive. It’s like...an online duplicate of your own computer,’ he said, searching for layman’s terms he could use to explain it to her. ‘We used them all the time back in the day, in case our houses got raided by the police or burned down or whatever. At least all our work would be safe and backed up. I think Gregar had set one up to run automatically.’

Clearly his explanation had worked, because he saw the dawning comprehension in her eyes. ‘So you’re saying the file is still out there somewhere.’

He nodded.

‘So how do we get it?’

‘Well, we can’t download it over the internet, if that’s what you mean,’ he said, quick to shut down that line of thought. ‘The CIA will know what we were after now, so they’d know what to look for. The minute we tried to move it, they’d be on us. But…’

This prompted a raised eyebrow. ‘But?’

Alex let out a weary breath. ‘Well, this is purely for the sake of argument, but in theory you could get to it the old-fashioned way – find the building and even the machine the file is stored in, and manually copy it to a laptop or whatever. The CIA would never know about it, because the file would never move online. It would be like someone on the other side of the planet trying to see what you’re doing in your living room with the curtains drawn, and they don’t even know where you live.’

Clearly this sounded too good to be true. ‘There is a catch, I presume?’

‘The catch is you’d have to physically enter the building where the servers are kept, and these places are sealed up tighter than a duck’s arse. Even the smaller ones have got security guards, cameras, the whole
Mission: Impossible
routine.’

Anya however didn’t seem to share his bleak appraisal of the situation. ‘Nothing is impossible, Alex. If I could get you in, for the sake of argument, could you do the things you’ve described?’

He looked at her with a mixture of disbelief and burgeoning hope. ‘Probably. But—’

‘This is no time for probabilities,’ she interrupted. ‘Can you do it or not?’

Alex suppressed a sigh of exasperation. ‘Yes, I can do it.’

‘And do you know where this building is?’

‘I know the IP address is in Turkey, probably Istanbul, since that’s where most of their service-providers are based.’ The random series of numbers that made up the address would have been lost on most people, but they were imprinted on his memory like the lyrics of a favourite song.

She eyed him dubiously. ‘You memorized it?’

‘Trust me, remembering things isn’t a problem for me,’ he assured her. ‘Are you actually suggesting we break in?’

‘I will get us inside.’ There was clearly no doubt in her mind about that. ‘I only need you to download the file.’

‘Great, but how am I supposed to get there? I’m a wanted man. Plus I don’t have a passport.’

She nodded, her expression suggesting she had anticipated this problem. ‘Then we will need help.’

‘Who the hell would want to help us now?’

Anya rose to her feet. ‘The man who got you involved in this.’

Mitchell was in a bar around the corner from the US embassy, nursing her second vodka on ice, when Argento finally caught up with her.

‘There you are,’ he said, pulling up a stool next to her. ‘I was beginning to wonder if you’d gone AWOL.’

He’d called three times before she’d at last relented and answered, reluctantly confirming her location. Whatever he wanted to discuss, she could only assume it was important. Not that she cared much at this point.

‘Doesn’t make much difference now,’ she said, taking a sip of her drink. The ice clinked in her glass as she tilted it back. ‘We’re shut down, Vince. Hawkins pulled the plug.’

Argento winced. ‘Yeah, I got the memo. The guy’s a piece of work, that’s for sure.’

Mitchell smiled grimly. ‘A piece of work with friends in high places.’

One of a bar staff, a plump woman in her forties with dusty blonde hair, wandered over to take his order. After ordering a Heineken, Argento waited until the beer had been delivered and she’d gone off to serve another customer before turning his attention back to Mitchell.

‘You never asked why I left CID to join the Agency,’ she prompted, looking at him searchingly. ‘Why not?’

He shrugged, taking a mouthful of beer. ‘I figured it was your business, not mine. You’d tell me when you were ready.’

The woman sighed and looked down at the ice floating in her drink. It was some time before she was able to speak, but Argento made no effort to prompt her.

‘I beat a man almost to death,’ she finally said. It came out so fast, so easily, that she even surprised herself. ‘Ended his career, and mine. It happened two years ago, when I was on my third tour in Afghanistan. You ever serve out there yourself?’

‘Haven’t had the chance.’ His voice had lost some of its usual confidence. His was an admission of inexperience, of having missed out on something that many of his comrades had been through over the past seven years.

‘It’s a lonely place,’ Mitchell said, her voice quiet and pensive. ‘The training prepares you for almost everything. The heat, the terrain, the people. But it’s the loneliness that gets to you. It creeps up on you slowly, so that at first you’re not even aware of it. But it’s always there, following you around every minute of every day, until eventually you forget what it’s like to feel anything else.’

She exhaled slowly and took another drink.

‘I was put in charge of a unit investigating crimes committed by ISAF troops against local civilians. Hearts-and-minds stuff; you get the picture. Anyway, it was my first command and I took it seriously, handled a lot of the cases myself. Probably too many. That’s when I was given my first sexual-assault case – a girl, fourteen years old, who claimed she’d been arrested by one of our patrols, taken into an abandoned building and raped. It was some private military contractor called Horizon. She even identified the man who’d done it by his name tag.’ She glanced up at Argento. ‘I guess he assumed she couldn’t read.

‘Anyway, I reported it, brought charges against him and the other men involved, tried to get them prosecuted. But her family wouldn’t let our medics examine her or take forensic evidence, and when I tried to push them they clammed up, refused to let me speak to her. The army didn’t want the bad publicity either, not against one of their biggest contractors, so the case collapsed. Insufficient evidence. Pretty useful phrase, huh? Covers a whole lot of dirty secrets.’ Her lips parted in a faint smile that was more of a grimace. ‘The thing of it is, I actually saw the son of a bitch as we were leaving the hearing. He looked at me, gave me this little smile like he’d known all along he was going to get away with it. Maybe he did.’

‘So what did you do?’ Argento asked.

She shrugged with feigned indifference. ‘Not much I could do. The justice system had made its ruling. All I could do was pick up the pieces. I went out to visit the girl they’d raped, hoping I could get her counselling or something to help deal with it. That was when I found out she’d hanged herself. She couldn’t accept the shame of what had happened to her, so she took her own life.’ Her grip on the glass tightened, and she blinked to rid herself of the tears forming in her eyes. ‘Fourteen years old.’

Argento said nothing to this. He could see the toll this was taking on her, but he sensed she had to get it out. She’d kept this bottled up inside for a long time, and it had been eating away at her ever since.

‘That was it for me,’ she went on. ‘I went back to my room, had myself a few drinks. More than a few, I guess. I looked at myself in the mirror… looked for a long time, and I realized her death was on me. If I hadn’t pushed so hard, if I hadn’t been so tired and strung-out and fucking arrogant, I could have won her family around. I could have gotten her to testify. That’s when I decided to go looking for my smiling friend. It took a while, but sure enough I found him in a mess hall having dinner with his buddies. He had a lot to celebrate, I guess.’

Her breathing was coming faster now, her pulse quickening as the emotions she’d felt that day stirred within her once more.

‘I had my sidearm with me, so I drew it, walked up on him from behind and clubbed him across the back of the head. He went down right away, and I… I didn’t mean to keep hitting him. I thought once would be enough, but I just couldn’t stop myself. It’s like I was watching someone else, someone I didn’t recognise. I hit him with that gun again and again, until he stopped trying to fight me off, until I could barely move my arm. Even when his buddies tried to stop me, I turned my weapon on them and threatened to kill them. And I swear to God I would have pulled the trigger. I would have done it without a moment’s hesitation. That’s when a couple of MPs showed up and forced me to drop it. That’s when I realized what I’d done.’

With a trembling hand, she raised the glass to her lips and took a deep pull on the vodka. She needed it now.

‘He didn’t do much smiling after that,’ she finally said. ‘Didn’t do much of anything, in fact. Last I heard, he’s still lying in a coma in some veterans hospital, probably never gonna wake up.’ She exhaled slowly, raising her chin as if facing up to her actions. ‘And as for me, I got the trial he never did. A closed trial – the kind they don’t keep too many official records of. They offered me a simple deal: leave CID and never talk about what had happened, or spend the next twenty years in jail for attempted murder. They were giving me a way out, or so they said, but it was a cover-up and we all knew it. A cover up of the rape, the mistrial, even me. And I went along with it, because I was too much of a fucking coward to stand up to them.’

Taking a final mouthful, she drained her drink, set the glass back down on the bar and turned to look at her companion.

‘I drink almost every night, Vince,’ she admitted. ‘Not because I regret what I did – I don’t. And not because I threw away my career – it wasn’t worth shit if it was built on lies anyway. I drink because of
her
. Every night I see her face, and every night I know her death is on my hands. That’s what I have to live with… forever.’

And there it was at last. The truth finally laid bare, without alterations, without omissions or exaggerations, without any attempt to paint herself in a more favourable light. She had told him exactly how it all came to pass, and she was glad of it. No matter how he judged her now, she felt better that he knew the truth, as if a weight had lifted from her.

‘You never told me any of this before,’ Argento said, his voice quiet and subdued. She could feel his eyes on her without having to look. ‘Why now?’

Mitchell sniffed and wiped her eyes, regaining her composure with difficulty.

‘This’ll be my last posting, Vince,’ she said, facing up to another truth she knew was inexorably closing in on her. ‘No matter what I do now, Hawkins is going to end what’s left of my career after what happened today. And believe me, he can make that happen. But before I go, I wanted you to know the truth. I wanted you to know who I really am.’

She didn’t see him reach out, but she felt his hand on hers, warm and reassuring against the cold hardness of the glass.

‘I know who you are,’ he said. ‘You’re an impatient, condescending pain in the ass. You’re terrible with authority. You manage to piss off just about everyone who has the misfortune of working with you.’

Despite herself, Mitchell couldn’t help but laugh at this. It was just like him to choose such a moment to list her faults, of which there were admittedly plenty to choose from.

‘And… it pains me to say this, but you’re one of the finest people I’ve ever worked with,’ Argento added, his voice taking on an uncharacteristically serious edge. She felt him squeeze her hand a little tighter. ‘What happened to that girl wasn’t your fault any more than it was hers. But it happened anyway… and you did your best for her. You tried to help her, you gave up your career trying to get justice for her. Nobody could ask more of you. Punishing yourself for it won’t change that.’

Mitchell closed her eyes and let out a ragged, shuddering breath. The grief, the anger, the pent-up frustration and pain threatening to overflow now that it had at last found an outlet. Argento said nothing while she fought to regain control, merely sat beside her, offering what comfort he could just by being there.

‘Thank you,’ she said at last, pulling her hand back. It wasn’t a rejection of his attempt to comfort her, merely an acknowledgement that he’d done what he could and that no more was expected of him. ‘I mean that.’

‘Hey, that’s my good deed for the year,’ he remarked with a wry smile. ‘Now I’m gonna be a complete asshole to balance it out.’

‘Makes a change,’ she said sarcastically, though in truth she was relieved he’d opted to lighten the mood and return to his more playful, provocative nature. It was a tacit acknowledgement that things hadn’t changed between them in the wake of her revelation, that he still saw her as the same person as before. And it was what she needed at that moment.

She turned to look at him. ‘So tell me, what’s gotten you so riled up that you had to speak to me so bad?’

The young man shook his head. ‘It’s nothing. I mean, it doesn’t matter now.’

‘Sure it does.’

‘This is the last thing you need to be dealing with now—’

Mitchell held up a hand to silence his protest. ‘Vince, just because I told you a few things about myself, doesn’t mean we’re soul mates now. I’ll decide what I can and can’t handle, so say what you came to say. I’ll take it from there.’

Clearly he knew when he was fighting a losing battle.

‘Fucking waste of time trying to argue with you anyway.’ Glancing about to make sure no one was within earshot, Argento leaned closer and lowered his voice. ‘Okay, like I said back at the lakeside house, I managed to clear the place before we pulled out of there. There was a computer in one of the bedrooms, a real serious looking rig, and I don’t think they were using it to watch YouTube.’

Mitchell frowned, failing to see where he was going with this. ‘So what was it for?’

‘No idea. Hawkins had put a sniper round through it, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t down to bad aim. But I managed to remove the hard drive before we left, and sent the contents to a friend of mine back at Langley. Her name’s Frost – she does a lot of technical work with the shepherd teams there.’

That said a lot about her credentials, Mitchell thought. The shepherd teams were an elite amongst the Agency’s field teams, tasked with finding and retrieving operatives who went missing in the most dangerous and difficult environments on earth. Only the best in their respective areas were put forward for selection, and not many made the grade.

‘How the hell do you know someone like her?’ she couldn’t help asking.

‘Let’s say she owes me a favour or two,’ Argento went on, the look in his eyes hinting that there was more history there than he was prepared to get into. ‘Anyway, from what she could tell, our friends had been downloading a file from the Agency’s secure network. The file itself was damaged beyond repair – I guess a fifty-calibre round will do that – but she did find something interesting about the download. It seems everything was being backed up in an online ghost drive, probably as a security measure. She was able to trace the IP address to Istanbul, Turkey.’

The bartender was approaching to refill her drink, but Mitchell waved her off. Her attention was very much on Argento now. She found it hard to believe Yates would risk so much by taking another shot at cracking the Agency’s network. Then again, if men like Hawkins were prepared to kill to protect its secrets, it made sense that others were prepared to go just as far to uncover them.

‘So what’s his play now?’ she wondered.

‘According to Frost, there are two options. One, he tries to set up another download. The downside is he knows we’re onto him now. We’ve seen the program he’s using, so we’d know what to look for if he tried again. For what it’s worth, she’ll keep a lookout for this just in case. Option two, he goes to the server building where the ghost drive is stored and manually retrieves the file without us knowing. What would you do if you were him?’

Mitchell couldn’t believe what she was hearing. If Argento was right, they might well have been granted a sudden and startling insight into the intentions of Yates and his female accomplice. This was a game-changer; an advantage they simply couldn’t afford to pass up.

The only question now was what to do with it.

‘Does Hawkins know about this?’

He shook his head. ‘I’ve got the only copy of the hard drive.’

‘And this Frost back in DC. Do you trust her?’

Argento made a face. ‘She’s a pain in the ass at times – you’d like her – but she won’t compromise us. I’d stake my life on it. Right now, the three of us are the only ones who know about this.’

‘Then that’s how I want it to stay,’ Mitchell decided.

‘I can live with that. But there’s something else you should know.’ His smile faded a little as he continued. ‘Don’t get pissed with me, but I also had Frost run a covert personnel search on our friend Hawkins. I was hoping she might dig up some dirt.’