Enemy Agents (3 page)

There was a bright red line slashed across Hershey’s neck. She had slit his throat.

Above them, Hall blew the whistle. “Defenders win.”

“What the fuck?” Hershey shouted, wiping at his neck and smudging the ink from Erica’s Sharpie.

Jack jumped down from the elevated chair and smiled. “Now that was exciting. Usually it’s the same-old, same-old. Hostage situation. Entertaining at least.”

“No way does she win. There are no knives in paintball!” Hershey’s voice went up an octave as he whined.

Hall patted Erica on the shoulder. “There are also no pistols in the attacking team’s loadout. You changed the rules, so don’t complain when she follows.” Hershey gaped, but had no comeback. Whining to Jack Hall was one thing, but even Hershey knew not to piss him off.

The four of them waited for a few seconds, listening to the suddenly loud forest as the other players and referees came back to the platform. While they were still alone, Hall turned to Quarrel.

“You should have shot her.”

“He took her mask off.”

“This flagpole might represent a nuclear weapon. You can’t let him get that close. In a real life situation you shoot the hostage in the head and don’t stop firing until the hostage-taker is down. Only way to be sure.”

“But he took her mask off. I mean, this is only a simulation.”

“You think the real bad guys play fair? What if they take your wife—”

“—not married—”

“Ok, they take your adorable little niece or your grandma or something. You think she’s worth more than New York City? Worth more than Winnipeg or wherever-the-
Hell
hell you’re from?”

“You want me to shoot my adorable imaginary niece in the head?” As he said that, Quarrel realized that the rest of the class had gathered behind him.

“Everyone,” said Hall, “we just had ourselves an honest-to-God hostage taking in here. Thanks to some very impressive work by Miss Gibbons, the situation was averted, and the defending team won. In the first game the winning team had one survivor. In this game the winning team had two. So therefore Team Beta gets the win for this morning’s exercise.” The three other team members, the ones who had died in both rounds, grinned and circled Gibbons, giving pats on the back and celebratory fist-bumps. Quarrel, who had also technically survived the round, had to wait for them to notice him before they would congratulate him.

“Now if you’ll all just wait about five minutes, I’m going to go tally up my marks for the week and see whether or not any of you pukes actually graduate from the program or not. Then I’ll leave, and you can all have lunch and talk about how much you hate me.” There was a small chuckle in the class. Hall headed down the stairs, waving one of the referees to join him.

Quarrel felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned, expecting Gibbons. It was Hershey. “Good job man, you survived defending. Just like I did in the first game.”

Quarrel tried not to seem angry. He still had to work for this guy, so telling him off wasn’t a good plan. “Sure man, good game,” was all he could muster. They had been at this for six and a half days, and the idea that Hall was currently writing names on certificates sent his stomach into a spin. He looked around the group. Everyone had the same expression of trying not to look nervous. Everyone except Hershey, who was trying to look at his own neck in the reflection on his watch.For a moment, Quarrel locked eyes with Gibbons. She bit her lip and shook her head, a nonverba
l
I’m not gonna make it
.

Finally, Hall returned. He carried a manila folder so you couldn’t see how many certificates he had with him.

“OK everybody. It’s been a good week. You all made your agencies and branches proud, and I’ve already been in touch with each of your supervisors with good things to say. But this program has a high standard. That’s why it exists. This isn’t a vacation. It’s a proving ground. Being good here isn’t enough and you knew that before you came. You had to be the best. And when I reward only the best, it means that anything less goes home empty-handed. So let’s get to it.”

Quarrel exhaled through his mouth, waiting for the worst and hoping for the best.

“First up—Peter Hershey.” There was a smattering of applause that Quarrel forced himself to join. Hershey smiled broadly and stepped forward to accept his certificate. He shook Hall’s hand—the first time all week anyone had actually shaken hands with the grizzled, legendary operative.

“Next,” Hall wasn’t wasting time. “The Bushwacker.” A military guy named Bush stepped forward, laughing at the name. Bush had excelled in the earlier challenges, although he had died quickly in the role-play. He took his place next to Hershey, who had presumptuously stayed on Hall’s side of the platform. Bush happily accepted his certificate and shook Hall’s hand.

Hall looked down to his folder again. “Wouldn’t you know it, another one of the Canadians.” Quarrel’s eyes shot up from the floor to Hall, then quickly to Gibbons, who was already returning the look.

“Erica Gibbons.”

Quarrel felt his lungs deflate, but smiled and clapped for his co-worker, and stuck out his hand for a high-five as she walked by. She joined the other winners and soon everyone’s attention was back on Hall, waiting to see the next name to be called. Hall looked into the folder once again. “There’s one more certificate in here.” He held it up, the blank back side facing the class. Quarrel tried not to stare a hole through it. Hall continued, “ . . . and it’s blank. Nobody else is graduating this week.” He flipped the page over, showing the horizontal line where Quarrel had wanted his own name to be written.

“This blank certificate will be here next year. If you think you can honestly do better, it’ll be waiting for you.” As Hall finished his speech, he was looking straight at Quarrel. At least, Quarrel thought so. Hall finally turned his head to the three graduates. “Congrats. Enjoy the lunch, drive safe. And remember the lessons we learned this week. This training will save your life.” With that, Hall walked to the back stairs and disappeared.

“Alright everyone, back to the barracks for burgers and beer,” shouted one of the other supervisors.

As the students filed out, pulling off the jerseys and stretching their necks, Quarrel just stood there watching Gibbons and Hershey. Here, he was one of seven who didn’t pass. But in a day it would only be the tree of them, two who passed and one who failed. He knew they were going back to the same office in Ottawa, where he’d be the only one who didn’t graduate. Carol was going to be disappointed.

After the beer and burgers and packing their bags, the three Canadians hit the road. It was a ten-hour drive back to Ottawa, and they had to get in at least most of it today. They checked into a roadside motel that night, three hours from home but too tired to continue. They booked three rooms, all in a row, and were pretty sure they were the only guests.

As Quarrel lay in bed, reflecting on his own failure and guessing how Carol would react, the rhythmic thumping of the headboard next door made him sick
.
Goddamn Hershey, probably going to brag about that too.

3

The saltwater spray hitting William Thorpe’s face made him wince, both from the shock of the cold and the salt in his eyes. He had to close his eyes and shake his head to get the salt away from his eyes, but his hands never wavered—one hand shoving the boat’s throttle forward and the other holding the steering wheel steady. He rocked as the boat bounced through the wake of the larger vessel, but Thorpe’s little speedboat never wavered from its course.

Thorpe was chasing a one-hundred-and-ninety-seven foot yacht through the English Channel. The yacht had no hope of outrunning Thorpe’s speedboat, but they also weren’t about to stop and make it easier for Thorpe to board them. Now that he was within ten metres of the yacht’s stern, he was starting to wonder why nobody was shooting at him yet. It wasn’t as if his approach had been subtle. And they certainly knew he was coming, considering that he’d been kind enough to leave their men alive back in Dover.

He had woken in a damp room somewhere close enough to the Channel that he could hear the waves. His face was swollen on the right side from where he had been knocked out (he would later recall that he had been clubbed with a scuba diver’s air tank, but at the moment he just knew that his face hurt.) When he woke up after the knockout, they had him lying on a damp cement floor, arms tied behind his back, beneath a dangling light bulb that provided a ten-foot island of light in a huge dark room. He could smell the faint lingering ghost of a woman’s perfume.

There were four guards. One of them, Morris, was familiar. Morris was Anton Sidorov’s wild dog in Western Europe. Thorpe had been trying to kill Morris before his face became intimate with some diving equipment. The other three were unfamiliar, but the look of them told Thorpe enough. Local criminals, the sort of guys known for their violent tendencies. The sort that your average smuggler or drug dealer would avoid because they were too violent, too likely to become reckless when the smuggling game requires stealth. The sort of men that Sidorov cultivated wherever he went. Thorpe only hoped they would be easy to provoke into foolish rage.

The men spoke when they saw Thorpe stirring. They all had similar accents: English, trashy and uneducated. Only Morris, who wore a nice suit in his official role as “head of security” spoke clearly and without lapsing into slang. The smallest thug was Caucasian, wore a black New York Yankees cap not quite straight on his head, and had tattoos of flames creeping up his neck. The medium-sized thug was dressed in a white ‘wife-beater’ tank top as if he didn’t feel the cold. His whole body was tattooed, but the art was ugly and poorly drawn. Some might have been done in prison, but Thorpe guessed that many might have been inked onto the thug when the tattooist was drunk or high. The tallest of the thugs was dressed for warmth in a thick black leather jacket. His hands were in his pockets, and he stood very still. Morris was at the edge of the light, still dressed in the same blue pinstripe suit as earlier in the evening. His back was turned, and he talked quietly into a cell phone.

The two shorter thugs took turns mocking Thorpe, and Wife-Beater even stepped into the light long enough to kick Thorpe in the thigh, but Leather stood still, saying nothing.

Thorpe let them have their fun. He even smiled for them, and winked at the short one, just to prolong their taunts. He needed the time. Behind his back, he was jerking his wrists against the rope, at the cost of several layers of skin, in order to line up two things. He needed his right thumb to reach the face of his watch, and he needed the 12 on the watch to line up with the rope. When Wife-Beater kicked him, he exaggerated his flinch of pain enough to jerk his hands around beneath the rope. His thumb drew a letter R on the touch-screen face of the watch, and then he felt the heat of the rope burning as the top of the watch fired a small, invisible laser beam. This was a dangerous play, since the smell of burning rope would be obvious soon enough, but Thorpe had no hope at beating the four of them without his hands.

Once he felt the fibres starting to slack against his wrists, Thorpe decided it was time to lure in one of the thugs.

“Hey, boy, you know what that symbol on your shoulder means?” he said to Wife-Beater. It was a Chinese pictogram that Thorpe didn’t know.

“It’s Chinese for fury.”

Thorpe snorted. “I bet the artist wasn’t Chinese, was he? Because that’s Korean for queer.”

“Fuck you it is! My brother gave me that tat.”

“So your brother’s Chinese then? Or maybe he just knows what you like . . . ”

“Old bastard callin’ me a bloody queer . . . ” Wife-Beater mumbled as he stepped back into the light. Morris was turning around, having just realized that Thorpe was baiting one of his thugs. He tried to shout an objection, but it was too late. Wife-Beater leaned down and grabbed Thorpe by the collar, cocking his right hand back in a fist. It left his neck wide open. Thorpe sprung his arms free from beneath himself and smashed the butt of his left hand into the younger man’s Adam’s apple, knocking his throat sideways hard enough to ensure he would not be getting back up.

Then he was springing to his feet. The other two thugs came at him straight away, with Leather Jacket pulling a knife from inside his pocket. Thorpe found his footing while in a crouch, and then threw himself at the Yankees fan. He got the kid to stumble back, creating just enough time to assess Leather coming in blade-first, going for a high arching stab at Thorpe’s neck. Thorpe caught the knife hand between his palms and twisted the thug’s wrist, freeing the knife. Thorpe grabbed it out of the air with his left hand. With the man’s arm raised and momentum carrying the thug forward, Thorpe’s instinct was to stab the knife into the attacker’s armpit, pushing as deep as he could. The leather softened the attack, but the man still screamed as the blade found flesh, and Thorpe scanned the room for Yankee and Morris. He saw the flame-necked goon to his right and turned toward him. That was all the opening Morris needed.

The veteran assassin looped his favourite weapon—a steel guitar string—over Thorpe’s head and in an instant Thorpe was choking. The garrotte was too tight to get a hand under. He flailed at Morris, but Morris had turned his back to Thorpe’s and was using the leverage to yank on the wire with all his strength. The blood was cut off from Thorpe’s brain, he knew, and that meant unconsciousness in seconds. Fortunately, Yankee was just as violent and reckless and Thorpe had assumed. The young thug pulled a knife of his own and ran at Thorpe. With his vision narrowing, Thorpe managed to catch this blade as well, but instead of stealing it, he redirected the thug’s arm, guiding him to stab past Thorpe’s left side, burying the blade in Morris’
s
belly. The garrotte went slack and Thorpe fell to the floor, gasping. His eyes saw black and white static while his brain drank oxygen again, and he then realized that the thug still had the knife. All three thugs were recovering now, although Wife-Beater was breathing in harsh, rasping chokes and was in no condition to fight.

Yankee came at him first, and in his barely-conscious state, all Thorpe could muster to defend himself was his watch. The thug kept his knife in his left hand now, but opted to start in on Thorpe with a punch. As the thug landed a harder-than-expected right cross, Thorpe rolled with the punch and raised his hands. The thug had leaned in with the punch, really committing to it as he also prepared to follow-up with the blade, and Thorpe turned the watch laser on just as the young man’s carotid artery passed by the 12 o’clock mark.

The thug screamed. The laser cut flesh like a scalpel, leaving a very narrow slash across the vein. The blood seeped at first, but once the Yankee fan put his hand to his neck and depressed the skin, the artery opened up and hot burgundy blood painted his hand. Thorpe caught a deep breath, his own neck still screaming at him from Morris’s wire, and threw a shoulder into Leather Jacket’s leg. The big man fell, his weight threatening to crush Thorpe, but Thorpe rolled Leather over his shoulder in a comfortable Judo move. The same instant the big man’s head hit the concrete, Thorpe threw a hard left elbow into his temple. The big man’s eyes suddenly lost focus, then closed.

When Thorpe looked at Wife-Beater, the thug was doubled-over, still fighting to breathe through a damaged windpipe. Thorpe turned his back to the thug and looked for Morris, but all he found was a rectangle of light: an open door, heading outside. Walking slowly, still catching his breath, Thorpe headed toward the door.

The sound from behind Thorpe was one he had heard a thousand times and from many distances. It was a gun cocking. He turned in time to see that Wife-Beater had raised a semi-automatic handgun, held out sideways like in the movies. Thorpe faked to the right and the kid fired, missing by inches. Not one to waste an opportunity, Thorpe tackled the kid, pinning the gun between his own arm and body. Another shot went off, and the muzzle burned Thorpe’s arm, but the bullet had no hope of hitting him. As he overpowered the younger man, Thorpe’s lungs were burning. He could taste blood. He was getting old. Still, he took the thug, at least thirty years his junior, hard to the cement floor and landed a headbutt to the kid’s nose. The nose broke with a crunch followed by a weeping of blood that soon became a torrent. Thorpe twisted the gun free and pistol-whipped the kid across the cheek, triggering another crunch as the cheekbone caved. This time he really would stay down.

Thorpe stumbled his way outside, only now discovering that he was at a warehouse on the waterfront a mile from the port. There was only one obvious way to go from the open door: to follow the string of lights at led to the water. He jogged at a slower pace than he would have in his younger days, but even taking it easy on himself he was still out of breath.

Morris was just untying the mooring ropes on the speedboat when Thorpe spotted him and fired four shots. Morris ducked at first, then as more shots came he dove into the frigid water. Thorpe would have liked to find him and finish him, but there was no time; the boat was more important.

Letting Morris swim away, Thorpe jumped into the speedboat, already running in neutral, and threw the throttle forward. He was in the open water within seconds, and heading south.

He had no doubt that Sidorov’s yacht would have filled up at this warehouse, and he knew they were heading southeast toward France. It only took a few minutes before the yacht came into view.

He was close enough now to make out the yacht’s name
,
Democracy!, painted in blue script along the stern. There was a small platform on the back of the yacht, barely above the water. That platform might have been used for sunbathing or launching scuba divers, but now it would make an obvious place to board. Thorpe jammed the throttle until he rammed the larger craft, then ran along his speedboat and jumped. He hit the platform gracefully, staying on his feet.

He kept his pistol cocked and raised as he worked his way along the deck. Much of the cabin was glass, with massive windows along almost every wall. But there was no sign of movement, inside or out. Working slowly and steadily along the massive boat, it took Thorpe a few minutes to reach the cockpit. He took a quick peek through a porthole and saw nothing inside. Taking a deep breath, he yanked the door open and stepped into the doorway, gun ready.

It was empty. There was nobody driving the boat. Thorpe paused just long enough to throttle down the engines before he headed below deck.

The lower level was the same as above. No drugs. No guns. No henchmen. No Sidorov. Anton Sidorov was the most notorious smuggler, murderer, kidnapper, and all-around villain in Europe. He had gone to such trouble to arrange this boat, this warehouse. Was there really nothing on it? Or was Thorpe too late? He hadn’t seen a helicopter in the air, but maybe…

After a quick but not exhaustive search, Thorpe barged into the captain’s cabin. The bed was made. Towels were neatly folded, sitting on a dresser. There was almost no sign that the boat had ever been lived in. Except for the obvious one lying on the floor at the foot of the bed.

The dead woman.

Black hair, a blue dress, olive skin. She was lying in a crimson puddle that would soon turn brown.

“Carmen,” sighed Thorpe. He could still smell her perfume on himself. As he knelt next to her, gently brushing the hair from her face, he realized his mistake. Behind her body, a flashbang grenade went off, blinding and deafening Thorpe.

True to the nautical setting, he felt a fishing net drop on him, just before a group of men tackled him to the floor. By the time William Thorpe regained his senses, layers of rope wrapped the net around him, his ankles were tied, and his watch was gone. And as his eyes relearned how to focus, Thorpe saw his target enter the room.

Anton Sidorov, tall and gaunt, with oiled-back hair and thin lips, smiled at Thorpe and puffed on a cigar.

“Agent Triple-Eight of the British Secret Service.” Sidorov said. “Pleased to finally meet you face-to-face.”

“The pleasure is all mine,” said Thorpe.

“I do admire you,” the Russian spoke English, heavily accented. “I love the British. So many unique forms of torture. What do you like better,” he asked, his eyes alight with pleasure, “tarred and feathered, or drawn and quartered?”

Thorpe had tracked Sidorov, and knew his reputation. He knew that Sidorov would actually do the things he threatened. Sidorov liked torture. It was his hobby, his passion. Thorpe stared his captor in the eyes and answered: