Rise of the Enemy

Dance with the enemy and your feet will get burned. An old friend once said that to me, many years ago. The same old friend who was now sitting in front of me, across the table of the café. I think he’d misquoted the saying, but it always stuck with me nevertheless. And recently, his words had come back to bite me with a vengeance.

I’d made the mistake of getting too close to people I thought were friends. People I trusted. Angela Grainger was one of them. We’d had a connection like I’d never had with anyone before. I still thought about her every day. Mostly, despite myself, I still thought of her fondly. But she’d betrayed me. Betrayed my trust. I’d let her get too close and my feet had been burned.

The man sitting before me was another one. Grainger’s betrayal was something I would never forget – it still dominated my mind. But in many ways the betrayal of this man hurt the most.

He was the person I had trusted more than anyone else in the world.

I never imagined that we would end up like this. Talking in this way. The accusations. The insinuations. Speaking to each other like we were natural enemies rather than
two people who had worked so closely together for nearly twenty years.

They
wanted me to kill him. Until a few days ago, the mere suggestion would have been laughable. Something had changed, though. I didn’t know what and I didn’t know why, but our lives would never be the same again. The fact we were sitting here like this told me that.

And if it came down to it, I would do it.

I would kill Mackie. My boss. My mentor. My friend.

Because it might be the only way for me to get out of this mess alive.

Yuri Zhirkov. That was the name on the passport that I handed over to the security guard. He was sitting behind the booth in front of me – a big man, broad shouldered with a scarred and pockmarked face and deep-set, brooding eyes. He looked like he meant business. This was no rent-a-cop. All of the guards here were ex-military. In fact, it was a safe bet many of them were still military given what the site was used for.

At least, given what we
thought
it was used for. The official story was something quite different.

The guard took the passport and opened it to the picture page. The picture was of me, but he had no way of knowing I wasn’t Yuri Zhirkov, but Carl Logan, a British agent working for the secretive JIA.

Dmitri, a double-agent who worked for the Russian FSB and the man I’d been working with on the case, was standing next to me. He had a similarly fake passport in his hand, ready for the guard’s inspection, in the name of Andrei Veronin.

The guard pulled over a piece of paper attached to a clipboard. He held it at an angle and I couldn’t make out any words. I guessed it listed the day’s planned visitors. Yuri Zhirkov and Andrei Veronin would both be on there. That
was for sure. It had been carefully arranged that way by the man we would be meeting here, Viktor Grechko. The two passports were fakes but the names were real; two low-level analysts working for the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation. Nothing unusual about two staff from the Ministry visiting.

The guard carefully compared the details on the passport with the list in front of him. Without looking up, he started to speak. In Russian. He spoke quickly. His accent was strong. I didn’t catch all of the words straight away. I could speak Russian almost fluently, albeit with a heavy English accent. This wasn’t my first foray on Russian soil. At the start of the operation my language skills had been somewhat rusty, but after four months of living here and speaking barely a word of my native tongue, my Russian was now better than it had ever been. But the guard’s words had come out as one long mumble.

My mind raced as I tried to process what he had said. One second passed, then another. I looked over at Dmitri, who stared at me expectantly. He nodded his head to indicate for me to look up. I did so and saw the security camera in the corner of the room, up behind the right shoulder of the security guard. I finally translated the man’s words in my mind.

‘Look up at the camera for me, please.’

It had taken me three full seconds to process. Not good enough. If I kept that up, we would be found out before we even got into the building. They weren’t hard words to decipher. It should have been automatic. The first sign of nerves creeping in.

Nerves. There’d been a time not long ago when I didn’t even understand what that meant.

‘Okay, that’s fine. Thank you,’ the guard said, handing the passport back to me.

This time I understood his simple words straight off. The guard took a plain white plastic card and placed it into the machine in front of him. The machine whirred and the card popped out again with a picture of my face on it.

‘Wear this around your neck at all times,’ the guard said, placing the card in a plastic wallet, which he handed to me.

He then went through a well-oiled diatribe. I missed some of his words again. The gist was that the card he had given me identified me as a visitor, signified by the red cord that ran through the wallet. The card wouldn’t give me access to any internal doors. I would have to be accompanied at all times. Staff wore green or blue cords, according to their security clearance within the building complex. I noticed that the security card around the guard’s neck had a black cord – the skeleton key of security cards, I presumed.

‘Your passport, please,’ the guard said, holding his hand out to Dmitri, who promptly gave him the passport bearing the name of Andrei Veronin.

The guard repeated the same procedure again. The security here was tight, methodical. Deliberate. But then we knew that would be the case. We were at the headquarters of RTK Technologies, Russia’s biggest manufacturer of military technology.

At least that was the official line.

This part of it, the red-corded wallet dangling from my neck, was merely the cherry upon the icing upon the cake. Just to get this far we’d had to get past the outer gated entrance, which was fortified with armed guards. There, a brutish man in military-like fatigues had checked both our passports against a list. He had called something in on his radio, only opening the barrier for us after another colleague, driving a Jeep, had arrived to meet us from somewhere within the as-yet-unseen inner sanctum.

From there we had been escorted to the visitor car park,
which consisted of just four spaces in front of the Portakabin-style building that we were sitting in. The cabin stood directly in front of a wire fence, nine feet tall with balled barbs at its peak, a near-identical construction to the outer perimeter fence that lay some thirty yards further out. In between the two fortified fences was some sort of no man’s land. The only visible signs of life and activity within it were the visitor car park and the cabin. For all I knew the whole thirty-yard strip was booby-trapped with land mines. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all.

I really didn’t want to find out, though.

‘Okay, please take a seat over there,’ the guard said, having satisfactorily concluded his review. ‘Mr Grechko will be with you shortly.’

Dmitri and I turned in unison and walked over to the two plastic chairs that were facing the guard’s desk. We sat down and waited.

We had targeted the man we were meeting, Grechko, some two months previously. A leading biochemist for RTK, he had high security clearance that would provide him with access to RTK’s most confidential files and papers. And
we
had leverage.

We’d snatched him for the first time almost three weeks ago, just after he finished his business with a prostitute I’d paid off. Before he’d had a chance to buckle his belt back up, I’d been holding a gun to his head. From there it had been simple. Grechko was a civilian, a civilian with a questionable role no doubt, but he wasn’t trained to withstand the threats we’d made. It’d been easy to get him to do what we wanted. And for the finale, all we had to do was make him escort us into RTK, where we could get the information we needed and get out.

After five minutes sitting on the hard plastic chairs I
was beginning to get edgy and wondered whether we had already been rumbled. I thought over the options if the guards had discovered that we were imposters. I didn’t like any of them much.

I heard the deep rumble of another Jeep approaching the cabin. The noise grew louder and I could feel the vibration in my seat as the vehicle approached. The whole cabin seemed to shake from the reverberations of the growling diesel engine. My heart rate quickened and I squeezed my fists together tightly, channelling my energy, trying to remain calm and unfazed, at least on the outside. Whatever was going to happen, it was going to happen soon.

How many more guards would there be in the Jeep?

I heard the grind as the parking brake was engaged. The opening of a car door. Footsteps approaching the cabin. Only one set. That didn’t mean we were in the clear, but I suddenly felt at least the odds were still in our favour. I looked over to Dmitri. His face was a picture of calm. I hoped that mine was too, despite the nerves that I was feeling inside. That was the way it always had to be.

I turned my head at the sound of the cabin door opening. In stepped another thick-set guard.

‘Please come with me,’ the man said. ‘Mr Grechko is ready for you now.’

No onslaught. No ambush. No bullets or poisoned darts flying. No reason to panic.

Yet.

A wave of relief rushed through my body and I unclenched my fists. The game was still on.

I got up and casually walked to the door, Dmitri close behind. Outside we followed the guard to the waiting opentopped Jeep. Another guard was sitting in the driver’s seat. I took the seat behind him, and Dmitri sat next to me. The
driver reversed the Jeep out of the parking space so that we were facing the security gate that led into the compound. The barrier lifted up and we moved through.

We drove past endless rows of parked vehicles and turned corners lined with dense trees until finally the buildings making up the expansive complex came into view.

First we passed a sprawling two-storey office block, tens of windows long. Then an oversize industrial warehouse loomed into the sky, as high as eight or even ten storeys. Next came a series of smaller offices and workshops, and a giant chimney with dark smoke billowing out of its peak that swirled into the cold grey sky, becoming congruous with the dull clouds. The structure looked like an incinerator.

I wondered what they were burning.

We had driven for what I thought was close to a mile before we came to a stop. The building before us was a gleaming glass structure, four storeys tall. It looked out of place against what had so far been brick and corrugated-iron erections. More modern. Less aggressive. Less threatening almost.

‘Please follow me,’ said the guard from the passenger seat as he got out of the Jeep.

Dmitri and I stepped out and followed the man up to the large double doors that fronted the building. I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass in front of me. My six-foot-three frame looked misshapen by the edges of the glass and my green eyes sparkled from the reflected light. Dmitri and I were both wearing casual work attire: shirts, trousers, shining black shoes; no need for overcoats yet in the mild autumnal weather. My mousy brown hair was trimmed short and parted neatly. We looked every bit the office workers we were pretending to be.

I noticed to the left of the doors a gold plaque with black writing that said in Russian
Advanced Technologies
. Words,
I expected, that told very little about what went on there. But I knew enough.

Two words: biochemical weapons.

The guard swiped his black-corded security card against the pad underneath the plaque, eliciting a clicking and then a rolling sound as the locking mechanism on the doors released. He pulled a door open and ushered us through. Inside was a shining-marble-floored atrium. Two black leather sofas stood in the waiting area off to our left, clustered around a coffee table strewn with magazines and corporate paraphernalia. In front was a reception desk with a young and quite attractive brunette.

‘You’re here to see Mr Grechko?’ the receptionist asked.

‘
Da
,’ Dmitri said.

‘Okay, please take a seat. Someone will be with you shortly.’

The drawn-out process was becoming tiresome, but we did as we were told. We made our way to the coffee table and sat. The guard stood watch over us, not showing any intention of letting us out of his sight. That was fine by me. If the time came for action, having a guard with us might not be a bad thing. I had spotted some time ago they were all armed. And I wasn’t.

Not yet.

We didn’t have to wait in the reception area for long. Within two minutes the door off to the receptionist’s right wheezed open. In stepped a suited man. He was slick, tanned and well-groomed with jet-black hair neatly parted at the side. His navy-blue suit was complemented by a heavy white shirt and a blood-red, thick-knotted tie. He had a broad smile on his face – not pleasant, but knowing, calculating. A smile that showed he was in charge and he knew it. He strode over to us, maintaining eye contact with me
the whole way.

I had never seen the man before. I didn’t know who he was. But I could feel my heart thudding in my chest. I clenched my fists again and my mind raced, thinking over less-than-satisfactory options for our next steps.

Because whoever this man was, he wasn’t Viktor Grechko.