Deception Game (58 page)

His words were like a knife driven into her heart. She let out a faint sob, managed to regain her composure a little, then reached up and wiped a tear from her eye. ‘Will I see you again?’ she asked, her voice trembling.

Taking a step forward, he embraced her, pulling her tight as the tears finally came. He held her for a time in silence as she cried; cried for the loss of the parent she hadn’t truly known, cried for the loss of a brother she might never see again, cried for the loss of her family that had been driven away.

Only when her tears subsided and he finally backed off did she see the glistening of moisture in his eyes, and knew that he felt the loss just as keenly as she.

Some time later, Drake emerged from the house into the glow of the evening sky. His parting with Jessica had been as hard as he knew it would be, made all the more difficult because of the uncertain future they both faced. But he had at least made peace with her, told her how much she meant to him and how she would never leave his thoughts.

That at least meant something.

He was just walking away, shoes crunching on the gravel drive, when he glanced to the right and spotted the garage where his father’s car was stored. On impulse, he changed direction and headed for it, slipping the bolt open to swing the old wooden doors apart.

The Austin Healey was still there, paintwork gleaming in the evening light. Sighing, Drake reached down, allowing his finger to trail along the bodywork as he made his way to the driver’s side.

Swinging the door open, he settled himself into the seat. He could taste the scent of old leather, oil and petrol in the air. Such a strange thing that his mother had chosen to hang on to this car, this fragment of their former life, paying money year after year to maintain and look after it.

He wondered suddenly whether he could run the engine over, just once, to hear the sound of it again. Surely there was no harm in it? Remembering Jessica’s explanation from his last visit that the keys were kept in the glove box, he reached over and popped it open.

It was at that moment that something fell onto the floor. Something white and square. An envelope.

Frowning, Drake reached over and snatched it up. It was heavy and lumpy. Something was inside it.

A single word had been inscribed on the front in his mother’s distinctive handwriting.

Ryan

‘What the hell?’

Breaking the seal on the envelope, he reached in and fished out a slip of paper that had been folded inside. Feeling his heart beat faster, he unfolded the handwritten missive and began to read.

Drake leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes for a moment and crumpled the letter in his hands as the pent-up emotions he’d held in check since all this began threatened to break through whatever self control he had left. He could feel his eyes stinging, and reached up to wipe the drops of moisture away.

It had been there the whole time. Just waiting for him.

Looking at the envelope again, he reached inside and plucked out the other object that had been left there. A single piece of stamped metal that glistened in the sun’s dying light, with numbers etched into its upper surface.

A key.

Seventeen days earlier

Yanking her arm free, Freya turned around to face her adversary, eyes gleaming with defiance. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of putting a bullet through her head from behind.

‘You look me in the eye, you coward,’ she said, staring right at them. ‘Look me in the eye when you pull the trigger.’

If she’d expected her words to strike a chord, to engender some kind of reaction, she was to be disappointed. A second came and went. A second broken only by the sigh of the evening breeze, and distant hoot of an owl, and the hammering of Freya’s heart.

‘You shouldn’t have come looking for me.’

She saw the barrel of a weapon raised, saw the long snout of a silencer gleaming in the thin sliver of moonlight.

Freya let out a breath. ‘Of all the people, I never—’

A 9mm slug passing through her chest silenced that sentence before she had a chance to complete it. She let out a strangled gasp, as if in surprise, then fell backward and collapsed to the ground, her body skidding down the rocky slope until it came to rest in the pool of stagnant water.

As darkness closed in around her, Freya’s last thought was one of simple, heartfelt regret.

Ryan, I’m sorry.

Her killer lingered a moment or two longer, waiting to be sure the gunshot had done its work. Waiting to make sure her target really was eliminated.

‘You shouldn’t have come looking for me,’ Anya repeated, looking down on the dead woman with a hint of regret.

Her work done, she turned and started her walk back to the waiting van.

Republished with kind permission of Century/Cornerstone Publishing.

Iraq, 13 May 2007

This is how it ends.

Lying there with one hand loosely pressed against the bullet wound in his stomach, he was alone. His strength was exhausted, his reserves gone, his blood staining the dusty ground. A trail of it led a short distance away, mute testimony to the desperate, feeble crawl he had managed before his vision swam and he collapsed. He could go no further. There was nothing left to do but lie here and wait for the end.

A faint breeze sighed past him, stirring the warm evening air and depositing tiny particles of wind-blown sand across his arms and chest. How long would it take to cover his body when he died? Would he ever be found?

Staring at the vast azure sky stretching out into infinity above him, he found his eyes drawn to the contrail of some high-flying aircraft, straight as an arrow. Around him, the sun’s last light reflected off the desert dunes, setting them ablaze with colour. It was a good place to die.

Men like him were destined never to see old age, or to die peacefully in their sleep surrounded by family. They had chosen a different life, and there would be no reward for them.

You know your problem, Ryan? You’re a good man.

Had she been right?

Could he look back on his life honestly and say he’d been a good man? He had made mistakes, done things he wished he could undo, and yet his final act had been one of trust and compassion.

That was the reason he was lying here, bleeding to death. That was his final reward.

A low, rhythmic thumping was drowning out the sigh of the wind. The pounding of his heartbeat in his ears, slowly fading as his lifeblood flowed out between his fingers. He might have slowed the bleeding, but he couldn’t stop it. Nothing could.

He was dying.

You know your problem, Ryan? You’re a good man.

However he had lived, he knew in that moment that he would die as a good man. And that had to count for something.

A faint smiled touched his face as the thudding grew louder. He closed his eyes, surrendering to the growing darkness that filled the world around him.

Seven days earlier, Mosul, Iraq

‘Come on! Get out of the way!’ Nassar Alawi growled, honking his horn in frustration.

His efforts did nothing to hurry along the rusty, dilapidated white saloon in front of him, its rattling exhaust spewing grey exhaust fumes as the driver revved the engine. Like Alawi, he was trying in vain to fight through the narrow streets and thronging crowds.

They were approaching one of the many open-air markets that dotted the city, and traffic was always heavy there. Ancient stone buildings festooned with satellite dishes and drying laundry leaned precariously inward as if they might collapse at any moment.

Alawi leaned back in his seat and ran his forearm across his brow. He was hot and uncomfortable, his open shirt already damp with sweat. The van’s air conditioner hadn’t worked in years, and rolling down the windows meant allowing in the relentless wind-blown sand, the fumes of other cars struggling to run on cheap gasoline, the reek of animal shit and countless other unsavoury odours.

He was a builder and electrician by trade; a source of great pride for both him and his family most of his adult life. A skilled job, a trade to be proud of. Now there was even greater demand for his services, both in Mosul and many of the surrounding towns. Everything that had been bombed and destroyed in the chaos of the invasion had to be painstakingly rebuilt.

A man like him could make a fortune in just a few years. Enough to provide for his wife and for his two young sons until they became men and followed in his footsteps, enough to live in comfort, enough to escape the grinding poverty that his peers endured.

If only he could get where he needed to be!

He honked his horn again, and at last a gap began to open up. The beaten-up white saloon started to trundle forwards, exhaust rattling. He stepped on the accelerator as well, eager to keep their momentum going.

Relieved to be on the move again, he reached for the packet of cigarettes lying on the passenger seat, tapped one out and held it to his lips as he fished his lighter out of his pocket.

Maybe today wouldn’t be so bad after all, he thought as he clicked the lighter.

The sudden flash of light up ahead was so unexpected that he didn’t even have time to react to it. The cigarette fell from his mouth as the white car in front disappeared, consumed along with everything else by an expanding wall of orange flame that rushed forward to meet him.

Central Intelligence Agency Field Ops Centre, Baghdad, Iraq

‘This had better be good,’ operations chief Steven Kaminsky grumbled as he strode from his office, doing his best to ignore the painful twinge in the small of his back. A compressed disc from a high-school football injury, the pain came and went, though in recent years it seemed to be coming more frequently and with greater intensity.

All things considered, today was a bad day, and judging by the urgent summons that had just come through to his desk, it wasn’t likely to get better.

With computer terminals crammed into virtually every available one of its 5,000 square feet of floor space, the Pit, as it was known, was reminiscent of NASA’s mission control centre. The comparison was an appropriate one, because in many ways it served a similar function. The computers in this room allowed their operators to control a fleet of twenty unmanned Predator drones deployed throughout the country.

The place was bustling with activity, and judging by the concerned looks and urgent tones, the news was not good.

‘Somebody talk to me!’

He was joined within moments by Pete Faulkner, the floor officer, and the man responsible for the day-to-day running of the twenty control suites in the Pit. Faulkner was only in his forties, but with his overhanging beer gut, perpetually furrowed brow and thinning grey hair, he looked at least ten years older. He was always tired, always out of breath, always sweating.

‘We’ve got a problem,’ he said, wasting no time on preliminaries.

Kaminsky made a face. ‘So I heard. What’s going on?’

Faulkner gestured over to terminal 6, where most of the anxious-looking technicians were gathered. The flatscreen monitors that should have been transmitting feeds from the Predator’s on-board cameras and instrumentation were blank, as though there was nothing going on.

‘Three minutes ago we lost contact with one of our drones over Mosul,’ he explained as they strode over. ‘Data feeds, telemetry, the works.’

Kaminsky frowned. ‘Has it been shot down?’

Faulkner shook his head. ‘It was orbiting at ten thousand feet. The only thing that could shoot it down from that altitude is a surface-to-air missile, and we had no threat warnings before we lost contact.’

‘Equipment failure?’

‘It’s possible,’ Faulkner admitted. ‘But unlikely. Unless it was a catastrophic engine failure, we’d have seen some sign before we lost the feeds. Make a hole here, gentlemen!’

The junior technicians clustered around the terminal parted like the Red Sea, giving them a clear path to a young man working over one of the few remaining monitors still up and running.

Terminal 6 and its associated drone were his responsibility. He knew he had done nothing wrong, but if something happened to the multi-million-dollar aircraft, the blame would fall on his head first.

‘Anything, Hastings?’ Kaminsky asked.

Hastings shook his head without looking up from the screen. ‘I can’t find anything wrong, sir. Engines, instrumentation, on board computers… everything was good right up until we lost contact. It’s like it just… vanished.’

‘So if it’s still in the air, it’s flying without direct control.’ Kaminsky glanced at Faulkner. ‘Contact air traffic control. Find out if it’s still airborne.’

Shit, I hope it’s not over a populated area, he thought. The drone might have been an unmanned aircraft, but it was still an aircraft with engines and on-board reserves of fuel, not to mention any munitions it might have been carrying. Plenty of things to go boom if it crashed in the middle of a town.

‘If it loses incoming control, it’ll revert to its automated flight programme,’ Faulkner assured him.

That wasn’t much comfort.

‘Maybe it’s a problem at our end?’ Kaminsky suggested. ‘The other drones are fine. If it was a problem with our uplink, we’d have lost control of everything.’

Kaminsky opened his mouth to reply, but before he could say anything, the monitors around him suddenly flickered back into life as the data feeds resumed, telemetry readings once again reporting the status of an aircraft hundreds of miles away.

Faulkner glanced at the technician. ‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing, sir. It just came back all of a sudden.’

Cursing under his breath, Kaminsky reached into his pocket and put on a pair of reading glasses, leaning closer to the screens to take a look for himself. Now in his early fifties, he needed glasses more than he cared to admit.

‘Get me a full system diagnostic, now,’ he ordered, his eyes darting across the various screens. Altitude, heading, airspeed, engine temperature, fuel pressure … All of it looked fine.

Such was his concern for the technical status of the aircraft, he almost didn’t notice the feed coming in from the downward-looking nose cameras. Designed for battlefield observation and intelligence gathering, the high-resolution digital cameras could zoom in close enough to pick out individual facial features from 10,000 feet.

Now, however, they were focused on an urban area of some kind. Characteristic of the ancient cities that dotted Iraq, it was a maze of narrow streets, walled courtyards and old sandstone buildings.

It was a scene of utter chaos.

One of the buildings had taken a direct hit, blasting out an entire wall and collapsing part of the roof. Smoke and flames billowed from the ruined structure, rescue crews and fire fighters trying to fight their way through the destruction and search for survivors. And everywhere, scattered on the streets around the building, lay the motionless forms of the dead.

‘Sir.’

Tearing his eyes away, Kaminsky looked at Hastings. The young man was pale, a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead. He looked as if he was about to be sick.

‘What is it?’

Hastings swallowed hard. ‘All three Hellfire missiles have been deployed.’

Shock and disbelief were reflected in the eyes of every person in the room. Nobody uttered a word.

With slow, deliberate care, Kaminsky removed his reading glasses and turned to his subordinate. ‘Pete, better call Langley right now.’