Enemy Agents (5 page)

As he stepped out of the stairwell into the lobby, he ran into Pete Hershey, who was stepping out of the elevator.

“Quarrel, you got back from a break like an hour ago and you’re taking another break already?”

“Before I was running out to get the correspondence. Thi
s
is my break,” said Quarrel, fighting back the urge to end with the wor
d
asshol
e
.

“You just spent a week at a training mission. You need to play catch-up. Get back to the office.”

“I’ll stop taking coffee breaks when you cut out smoking, OK?” said Quarrel, pulling on his gloves. As he pulled the front door open, he felt Hershey slap his shoulder.

“And did you receive a Level Seven folder today?”

“On my desk.”

“Next time tell me when you get something like that, alright?”

“Sure, Pete.”

Finally, Quarrel was able to escape the office, leaving Hershey, who was just taking a smoke break, to loiter in front of the building. As he walked toward the coffee shop, Quarrel was thinking to himself:
‘
The last three Level 7s that came along, he told me to buzz off. So when I finally don’t tell him about one he uses it as a reason to dump on me
.
’ And also
:
‘God I wish I was a field agent and I didn’t have to put up with this passive-aggressive office politics shi
t
.’ And of course there was the constant refrain of Quarrel’s inner monologue:

‘
I wish I worked alon
e
.’

As he rounded the corner from the side street onto the main road, Quarrel scooped up a handful of half-melted snow from the roof of a parked car, balled it up in his hand, and threw it at a young maple tree in the boulevard. It was a perfect throw, nailing dead center on the two-inch-wide trunk. For just a moment, Quarrel felt a hint of pride at his hand-eye coordination.

Just as the snowball impacted, Quarrel’s office exploded.

5

The breeze blowing through the air vent was cold. It wasn’t strong enough to carry the dust to the filters, so the vents were covered in a thick layer of dry filth. Jessica Swift was covered in it. The dirt stuck to her clothes, to the sweat on her bare skin, and collected at the end of her ponytail whenever she turned a corner. She crawled along a route she had memorized from the blueprints before she entered the building. Tonight was a dress rehearsal. She needed to know that she could get in and out of the vents where she needed to. She scouted possible B- and C-exits in case her original escape was blocked somehow. Wherever it wouldn’t be noticed, she replaced vent cover screws with wing screws that she could pull off quickly and without tools. She studied the views from each vent and where it would lead.

This was mostly an office building. It belonged to a major bank, and only the first two floors were open to the public. The rest of the building was just offices, desks, computers, and cubicles. She was disappointed by that. Given the reputation of Swiss banks, she had hoped to find a secret hidden room, or at least soundproof offices. Where did they do all the scheming with South American despots?

WBS was the fourth-largest bank in Switzerland, headquartered in Zurich. This building was decades old, and the exterior matched its neighbours to create a charming street view. A 2000s renovation had modernized the inside; knocked down some walls and opened it up a bit, but the bones were still very boring to crawl around in. The building was square, and from the third floor up, every floor was virtually identical except for the occasional oversized executive office. They had installed some new vents, bigger than they would have been originally (which she was grateful for since she had a few inches to spare between her slim shoulders and the sides of the vent) but they hadn’t upgraded the ventilation enough to keep the air moving, hence the dirt.

Jessica had never been to Zurich before, and she had hoped the assignment would be in something more interesting than this. The assignments she got from Jupiter, her handler, always gave her the basics—an address, a target, a timeline—but never a sense of what the place was actually like. A centuries-old castle would be fun to sneak into, or some postmodern twisting absurdity of steel and glass might be interesting. Instead she was in an ordinary six-storey building that was probably identical to half the other buildings on the street, trapped in the dusty air vent. It was exactly like her training, and she had trained in a filthy abandoned warehouse.

Her target was on the ground floor, but she was currently on the third. She wanted to make sure that if she needed to, she could get out this way after she had robbed the bank.

It was after hours, but not very late. She had entered through the front door just before the bank closed at five, made her way into a vent without a single person or camera noticing, and began her work. It was past six when she crawled past an office and felt the air duct sag under her weight.

It creaked, loudly, the steel twisting away from the ceiling just a little.

She wasn’t near a vent cover, so she couldn’t see where she was exactly, but since she had just passed an office, she assumed that she was currently sitting above a hallway. And underneath her, someone said, “Was war das für ein Lärm?”

‘What was that noise?’

There was someone in the hallway. She tentatively shifted backward, pushing with hands as she walked her knees back. The pressure of her hands made the vent groan again, louder.

The person spoke again. “Die decke.
”
The ceiling.

Suddenly, there was a dull sound of movement, and she knew someone was moving the ceiling tiles. She crawled backward faster, and just as she moved away someone poked at the vent. The steel panel where she had just been kneeling rose up an inch as somebody tested it.

The Swiss person, who she now assumed was one of at least two security guards in the hallway, said something else in German, but she didn’t know enough of the language to understand it. A second person asked a question, and the guard answered.

She made it back to the vent over the office, and looked out in time to see a security guard in a blue and white uniform enter the office. She continued easing backward, silent as a mouse now that she was held up by better-supported vents. She thought she could get out of this. But then all of a sudden the guard jumped on the desk and shoved the air vent upward.

Jessica was wearing goggles to protect her eyes from the dust. She also had a black headband on her forehead. It was sweaty and dusty, but she ignored the filth and pulled it down to cover her mouth. That would have to do as her disguise. It was another ten metres of backward crawling to the corner, and the guard would poke his head up and see her before then. Instead of retreat, she crawled forward, toward the grate the guard was fighting to shove upward.

“Hello,” she called, quietly, in French, a language she spoke better than German.

“Who is that?” the guard asked, his French was flawless. Like so many Swiss, he was multilingual.

“I was trying to get to my boss’s computer. You caught me. I’ll come out now.”

The guard lifted the grate and she moved it aside, then lowered herself down to the desk, feet first, trying to look as awkward as possible. She didn’t want to look like a pro. She wanted to look like an idiot.

“What were you doing in there, girl?” he asked as she came down off the desk.

“I messed up very bad on this week. All my reports are shit. I wanted to change it in my boss’s computer. It’s stupid.”

“Who is your boss? What floor do you work on?” He reached out to pull the headband off her face.

She sighed. There goes that plan.

She grabbed at the key ring on the guard’s belt, snapping it away before he realized what was happening. Then she was headed for the door, but the guard was quick. He ran at her and shouted for his partner, and before Jessica could reach the hallway the guard tackled her hard into the wall. Her shoulder immediately started to throb from the impact.

“You think I’m stupid, bitch?” he spat the words in German now.

Everything flashed in front of Jessica. All the trauma that had brought her to this point in her life. The fire. The beatings. The warehouse. Everything that had scarred and shaped her piled up around her. This guy was nothing compared to them. That was why she wouldn’t hurt him. Couldn’t hurt him.

The guard grabbed a handful of her hair with his left hand while his right went to grab h
er
wrist. She ducked and spun, grabbing at his left forearm with the keys still in her hand. The
teeth
keys
bit into his skin just enough to make him let go of the ponytail, and by then she had spun all the way around his body, stole the flashlight from his belt, and was out the door. She pulled it shut just as the guard tried to grab the knob. Before he could overpower her and pull the door open, she jammed a key into the lock and broke it off with the butt end of the heavy flashlight, locking the guard in the office.

The second guard was only a couple metres away. She ran at him, full-speed. He was a smallish man, and didn’t fill up much of the wide hallway. Clicking on the flashlight, she shined it into his eyes and threw it at his face. He reflexively caught the light, only to realize that the girl had slipped right past him. Before Guard Number Two even knew what was happening, the filthy girl from the vents was in the stairwell.

She didn’t run the stairs, she leapt over them to each landing. It was four big leaps to reach the ground floor, and then she just slipped out the fire exit and into the street. She had a backpack tucked under a bush on the corner. One minute after a girl in black tights passed a guard on the third floor, a completely different girl in a red sweater and blue jeans walked down the Bahnhofstrasse listening to her iPod.

The Bahnhofstrasse is the expensive street in Europe. Immaculate and lined with young trees, it was home to every prestigious retail store in Europe. Jessica didn’t notice the beauty of Zurich’s buildings or expensive shops on the way back to her hotel. She was too busy thinking back on her own mistakes, and wondering what would happen if anyone ever really had her cornered. Scratching a dumbass guard’s arm was one thing, but in her business things would only get worse. Someday, somehow, someone would get the drop on her and she’d have to fight for her life, and Jessica’s hands shook as she wondered if she’d even be capable of defending herself. She silently swore that she’d be better than she had been today, that she’d never be caught; always slip in and out without confrontation. She had to be the best, or she’d be dead.

The hotel had a bar in the lobby and she lingered, looking in, tempted. Her hands clenched and she walked away.

In her room she ran a scalding bath, stripped out of her clothes and scratched out the third-floor escape plan on her blueprints. With the water still steaming she climbed into the tub, kneeled down, dunked her head under painfully hot water, and screamed until she was out of breath.

6

Chris Quarrel was sitting in an empty office in a government building on the other side of Ottawa. The walls were recently patched but not painted, so several spots of white putty blotted the pale violet walls. The desk was cheap chipboard and peeling veneer, and the filing cabinet had two locked drawers nobody could find the keys for. Not that it mattered. This wasn’t Quarrel’s office. It was more like a waiting room. Or a jail cell.

With his entire office dead, Quarrel had become both a witness and a liability. He had spent the Tuesday and Wednesday in interrogation rooms, being asked the same questions by a series of men and women. He had very little to tell them. There was a strange letter. “Have you noticed the Letter Six yet?” A report classified level seven, that Quarrel had never opened. Correspondence from several foreign employees, who Quarrel did not know by name. A copy of Jekyll and Hyde that Quarrel guessed was part of a book cipher. That was all he knew. The detail of whom the letter was addressed to—T. Takahashi—Chris kept to himself. Carol had been damned worried about that little detail and Chris wasn’t about to break the last promise he had made to her.

With every new person who came to ask questions, Quarrel became more convinced that they all wished someone more important had survived. Someone who had real answers. Every few hours, for the entire week, someone new had come along to ask questions and left disappointed. The one thing everyone knew for sure was that a lowly functionary like Chris probably didn’t have any clue about any information that would be worth blowing up a building to destroy. Most of these interrogations/interviews/grief counselling sessions included a middle-aged man with greying red hair named Mr. Thompson. Thompson was a clearance level 4, and as such he was a nice buffer between lowly Chris Quarrel and the higher-ups who answered to the politicians.

Nevertheless, the mere fact of surviving was enough to draw suspicion. Chris was neither a helpful witness nor a very likely bomber, but there were people in the service who saw him as both. Thompson was nice enough, and Quarrel was glad to see that Thompson at least seemed to believe Quarrel’s eyewitness account was helpful. Because of this, instead of sitting him in the interrogation room each day, Quarrel was given this half-renovated office to sit in and while away his days whenever he wasn’t being questioned. He was given freedom to leave at night (under surveillance so obvious Chris felt both insulted and disappointed), and was back to sitting in the waiting room on the Thursday, the third day after the bombing.

Bored and fed up with his status as a pariah, Quarrel headed out into the hallway and started to wander. He poked his head into offices, rounded corners where he’d never been. When he saw an unfamiliar face he tried to act like he belonged there, and when he saw someone who knew him he pretended that he was just getting some coffee.

“Twelve hours to the deadline and you still don’t have it?” The voice came from inside an office on the third floor.

“It’s an entire country. At this point any analysis would be more guesswork than science.”

“I’ve got to give the Brits something. Triple-Eight won’t last much longer. They expect an answer within a half hour.”

Quarrel stood in the doorway and looked inside. The office was more like a classroom, with papers and maps stuck to bulletin boards along the walls. The
centre
center of the room was a large table covered in papers, laptops, and coffee cups. Three men, plainly bookworms, sat at the table, looking like they hadn’t slept in days. All three wore rumpled clothing, and the room smelled like they’d been there too long. The demanding one wore glasses, the others didn’t. All three had their backs to Quarrel, focused on a map pinned to the wall. It was a map of France, with pins stuck in three places. One was obviously Paris, one a little southeast was likely Lyon, and one on the Mediterranean coast might have been Cannes or even Monaco.

“What are you looking for?” Quarrel asked.

They turned. “Who the hell are you?” asked the one with glasses. Before Quarrel could answer, he continued with “This is restricted information. Stick to your security level.”

But Quarrel was starting to remember that corner of paper Carol had been holding. What was the title? R
E
:888. And the man had just said something about triple-eight.

Quarrel ignored him, walked through the room and approached the map on the wall. He fought to remember the email he had seen in Carol’s hand. He had gone through training for this sort of thing, speed-reading, visual recall, and so on. The pin on the Med coast wasn’t stabbed in either Cannes or Monaco, but between them.

“How did you narrow the cities down?”

“Who the hell—” stammered Glasses.

“I work in an office that you don’t know about, and never will because it blew up on Monday. Now tell me what the hell I’m looking at.”

“These are the only French cities where Sidorov is known to control properties.”

Quarrel had no idea who this Sidorov was, but Carol’s email had been very clear about what to say next. Quarrel jabbed his hand at the pin on the Med.

“Nice. Definitely Nice.”

“Because some random guy walks in—”

“Tell them CSIS-2 confirmed it. Definitely Nice.”

Quarrel walked out, leaving the three men to gape at each other. When he was back out in the hallway, one of them shouted, “There’s a CSI
S
tw
o
?”

#

William Thorpe had not slept in three days. He had spent all three of those days naked, tied to a chair in a warehouse. He could tell he was in France, but otherwise he didn’t know where he was.

Sidorov liked torture. He lived for the prospect of maiming and killing his enemies. And Thorpe had been his enemy for a long time. However, they hadn’t hurt him as much as he expected. Sidorov had a reputation for making tortures last up to a month, often resuscitating his victims so he could kill them again later.

What was it he had threatened
?
“Tarred and feathered or drawn and quartered.
”
Thorpe expected that sometime soon, Sidorov would make good on that promise. While he had trained himself to resist any torture, to never let his spirit break, a small voice inside hoped that Sidorov would at least leave his body somewhere his country could find it. He wanted to be buried in England, to spend eternity next to Julia.

N
o
, said another part of him, a stronger part.
You’re not dead yet, old man.

Sidorov had tied him to a wooden chair and then simply did nothing to him. That was the torture. No standing or lying down, no bathroom breaks, and starvation. Sidorov’s goons would let Thorpe drink as much water as he wanted, but food was strictly denied. It was now day three, and Thorpe’s lower body was completely numb. His head throbbed constantly, his belly ached and distended, and every muscle he could still feel was in agony at the combination of starvation and discomfort.

So far, Thorpe had not screamed.

On this evening, he was only guarded by a single thug, a local hire who he didn’t recognize as one of Sidorov’s regulars. Thorpe knew that even if he could somehow get free of his bonds, his extreme weakness and exhaustion would ensure that this thug could take him. Sidorov didn’t need to post more than one guard now, because Thorpe’s body was wearing down.

When he first woke up, Sidorov had been there, and so had Morris, who was wrapped in bandages after an underworld doctor had cut Thorpe’s bullet out of him. Morris was the one who had told them to take Thorpe’s clothes, a lesson he learned after Thorpe’s watch had freed him the first time. But now, both Morris and Sidorov only visited occasionally. Ignoring a prize as hated as Thorpe meant they were working on something big. Something that required a lot of attention.

There was s crash somewhere to the left, out of sight. It was Sidorov, kicking the door open. He entered slowly, hunched over, carrying a heavy, lidded bucket in each hand. Thorpe’s eyes needed a moment to focus before he could read the labels on the buckets. Sidorov had brought two 17-litre containers of driveway sealer. Tar.

Following Sidorov was a second goon, one who had guarded Thorpe the day before. This one rolled an empty oil drum. Thorpe understood immediately. They probably had feather pillows somewhere too.

“So that’s it, then?” he asked Sidorov.

The Russian grinned. “I’m looking forward to your death.”

“I heard you could torture a man for weeks on end. Those stories must be rubbish if you can’t even go four days before killing me.”

Sidorov was already setting up a little ring of cinder blocks. He would want a fire under that barrel to get the tar nice and hot. He spoke casually, as if he didn’t even feel the malice in his words. “Mr. Thorpe, if I could, I would make you my masterpiece. I would cut off pieces one-by-one, letting each heal before I took the next. I would leave you as a faceless, armless, legless beast. I would take one lung, one kidney, both eyes, and all your teeth. I would burn and freeze and bludgeon and stab you. I would deafen you with loud music and feed you your own organs. I would deliver your heart to your Queen. But I am a busy man and I don’t have time to give you what you deserve. Tar and feathers shall do.”

Thorpe didn’t hesitate in his response, not wanting Sidorov to think, even for a moment, that this torture was working. “I don’t see any feathers.”

Sidorov started to say something, then stopped and his cheek twitched. He spoke to the Russian thug, and the Russian gave a nervous answer.

“It seems we forgot the feathers. Nevertheless. The tar will take time to warm up. By the time I get back, we’ll have quite a show.”

He barked orders at the two goons, and left the same way he had come. The two goons set about building a fire pit from the cinder blocks, placing the barrel on top of it, and pouring the thick black tar into the drum. The quiet inner voice once again thought of Julia.

And then there were two quiet sounds. Twip-twip.

And the goons dropped dead.

There had been no warning. No siren, no signal. They had entered and infiltrated in total silence, like fog creeping through an open window; a team of MI-6 agents coming in from every direction. They swarmed toward Thorpe, cutting him free while the old agent fought the urge to sigh in relief.

“Where’s Sidorov?” one black-clad agent asked.

“Out buying pillows.”

“Anything you need, Triple-Eight?”

“I’ll start with my pants,” Thorpe said, “then a bloody large martini.”