Rise of the Enemy (9 page)

The food was good. The best I’d had in weeks. A true gastronomic delight. Fresh bread and some sort of meat and vegetable stew. I had no knife or fork, just used the bread to scoop up the bits and to soak up the gravy. I didn’t care. I just wanted, no, I needed, to eat.

But after five big mouthfuls, I could take no more. My belly felt bloated. It gurgled away, unused to the sustenance that was sloshing around inside it. I forced one more piece of meat down, but it seemed to stick in my throat. I knew that if I tried to eat any more, it would only end up back in the bowl in front of me.

I felt disappointed. Defeated. But I knew that even the small amount I’d managed to eat would do me the world of good.

If I could keep it down, that was.

‘You’re done already?’ said a voice – a female voice – with a condescending laugh.

A strange woman. I hadn’t even noticed her come into the room. I’d been too engrossed in gorging my way through the food that had been put in front of me. But her voice – it felt familiar. And like the unseen man who had so often been in here with me, her English was perfect.

‘Depends how long we’re going to be here for,’ I said. ‘Give me a few minutes, I’m sure I can finish it off.’

I’m not sure whether I’d intended my words to come out as
confrontational or playful. She must have thought the latter, because she laughed again as she sat opposite me, behind the desk. I was disappointed with myself for that. For speaking at all. Ever since I’d come here I’d tried not to communicate with them, no matter what they’d thrown at me. Now here I was on the brink of flirting. Maybe it was a direct response to their gesture of giving me some real food.

Maybe it was because of the person who’d asked me the question.

There was no bright light in the room this time. I saw that the room was square with dirty white-painted walls and a smooth concrete floor. It had no furniture other than the desk and two chairs, and only one other occupant aside from me and the two ubiquitous guards at my back: the woman.

She was dressed for the office in a tight black skirt and white shirt. She had dark, silken hair held in a tight bun. Her cheek-bones were high, her eyes penetrating, her lips full and rounded. She looked Eastern European – Russian? She looked beautiful.

Yet behind her sparkling eyes I saw a creepy darkness that was so out of place with the rest of her dazzling features. And despite my initial openness, that made me mistrust her all the more. Because I knew at first sight that this woman was a snake. Her looks were her deadly weapon, no doubt about it. I wondered how many men she’d suckered in her short life. She couldn’t have been older than thirty.

‘I know you’ve had a rough time in here,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t have to be like that.’

This time I stayed silent. I didn’t want to play her game.

‘You can have food like that all the time,’ she said. ‘If you want.’

I didn’t say anything to that either. Whatever reason they had to now be hospitable wasn’t for my benefit, however they tried to play it.

‘You don’t want to go back to how it was before. Do you?’

I pushed the half-eaten bowl of food across the desk, toward her, away from me. A signal to her that I was done here. That I didn’t want their hospitality.

‘You know that they’re not coming for you,’ she said, sterner this time. ‘Mackie and the others. They’ve left you here to die, Carl.’

Her words slapped me in the face. How did she know my name? I’d never told them my name. How did they know about Mackie? No matter what they’d done to me, I hadn’t given them anything.

But it wasn’t just the names she’d used. It was what she’d said. That no-one was coming for me. Because doubt had been creeping into my head more and more. I was having a hard time convincing myself otherwise. Hearing this woman say it made it all the more real.

Why hadn’t they come for me?

The only other time I had been captured on a mission had been my fateful assignment to bring down Youssef Selim. On that occasion I’d been gone a mere three days before I was rescued.

‘Come on, Carl. You like this food, don’t you? Don’t you want to be eating food like that every day?’

I did, but at what price would it come?

‘Come on, don’t go shy on me now. We can go back to the way it was before if you like? The interrogation room. The questions. The water. We’ve talked about this before, remember?’

‘What do you mean, remember?’ I spat. ‘This is the first time I’ve seen you.’

She laughed again. That same condescending laugh, mocking even.

‘Oh, Carl, think about it. Put the pieces back together.’

She went silent but her wicked smile remained as she stared at me intently. I got a sickly feeling in the pit of my stomach. From the food or her words, I wasn’t sure. It was surreal. My head was
a confused mess and yet it was like I knew what was coming. But I wanted to be wrong so badly that I tried to push the thoughts to the very back of my mind, tried to ignore the inevitable.

But I couldn’t. I had to know.

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘How long have you been here?’

I racked my brain.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, shaking my head.

‘Well, how long do you think? Two weeks, three, four?’

I had no way of knowing the answer. But that wasn’t the point. I could see where she was taking this conversation. And more than anything, I felt scared.

‘Something like that,’ I lied.

‘It’s been nearly nine,’ she chuckled. ‘You’ve been here two months now.’

She let it hang there. I knew what she was doing. Disorientating me. Toying with me. Trying to create doubt in my mind. I had no way of knowing how long I’d been there. But nine weeks? Could it really have been that long? And if it had, what the hell had happened to me in that time? I seemed to have so many blanks in my memory.

Nine weeks?

‘This isn’t the first time we’ve met,’ she said. ‘It’s not the first time we’ve had this exact conversation even. Do you really not remember?’

I searched my brain for a memory that made sense, but it was all a scramble. Thoughts were coming and going without taking hold.

‘No. This is the first time we’ve met,’ I said again, wanting to believe it, but no longer sure that it was the truth. I certainly couldn’t grasp a memory of ever seeing this woman before and yet, in a way, her voice and her pretty face seemed so familiar to me.

‘What’s the last thing you remember?’ she said.

My brain clunked and whirred, cogs turning, trying to figure it out. I felt so useless. What was happening to me? What had they done to me?

‘The water,’ I said.

It was the last thing I could get to. The water being poured onto my face. The knowledge that I was going to drown. It seemed so distant to me now and yet it was the last thing that was there in my head. I couldn’t even remember how I had come to be sitting in front of this woman now.

‘The water,’ I repeated. ‘That’s the last thing I remember.’

‘They really messed you up, didn’t they?’

They? Like she wasn’t part of it!

‘Carl, this isn’t the first time we’ve met. You’ve been in here with me every day for almost a month. I’ve been trying to help you get your head straight. You’ve been making great progress. The interrogation, the waterboarding, was weeks ago. All of that was weeks ago. Check your wrists if you don’t believe me.’

I looked down. The marks were unmistakeable. Each wrist had several rings of lumpy, whitened flesh, blending into one another. After the waterboarding these would have been open wounds. I could still remember the feeling of the blood trickling over my hands, over my feet, as I writhed against the restraints, trying desperately to free myself.

But these wounds had healed. These scars were several weeks old.

‘What happened to me?’ I asked, trying to hold it together.

‘Nothing happened. You’ve been in here with me. Talking. Recovering. They really went to town on you. We thought we’d lost you at one point.’

I had tried to hold out. I had held out over countless interrogation sessions, countless bouts of torture, all of the disorientation and other mind-screwing techniques. But it looked like it had all been in vain. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying not to think about what had been done to me. But more importantly
trying not to think about what could have happened during the lost period.

The period of time, weeks, that my mind was deliberately omitting from my memories.

Because it looked like I had been broken. And I didn’t want to think about what that meant.

‘But you’ve been doing great in here, Carl, since all that nastiness stopped. You’re well on the road to full recovery, I’d say.’

‘Who are you?’ I said. Though in my head, I really meant, What?

‘Carl,’ she said, leaning forward, her pretty face contorting into a look of menace, ‘I’m all that you’ve got.’

I slept for a good part of the journey to Omsk, only coming out of my cabin when I needed food. Chris’s wallet had provided me with enough cash to last me for a number of days. The train arrived in Omsk at just past ten in the morning.

The sun was out, the sky was deep-blue and the cold had lifted to somewhere not too far below zero. Compared with what it had been two days ago, it felt positively balmy.

I remained alert as I left the train and the station, looking out for any sign of people who might be waiting for me – whether other passengers on the train or the people milling about off it. I’d been sure there would be a welcome party for me. Chris and Mary had known where I was going. But I saw nothing. At least no-one who looked like they were there for me. It made me feel uneasy, even though it certainly made my life simpler.

I still had a lingering doubt in my mind about whom Chris and Mary were working for. Their actions told me that in all likelihood they had been sent by my boss at the JIA, Mackie. If the two of them had been with the Russians then they surely would have just taken me back to the same hellhole I’d run from? But if that were true, that they were from the JIA, then just where
were
the Russians? Why weren’t they after me?

I headed off on foot towards the safe house I’d been using some months ago when the plan to infiltrate RTK had first begun. It was an apartment in a better-off part of town that Dmitri had rented under an assumed name.

I’m not quite sure why I went there, other than it was somewhere familiar and a place that might hold some answers. Answers as to what had happened to me. And to Dmitri. I hadn’t seen him since we’d first been taken. I’d been told by the Russians that he died at RTK, but I had no way of knowing whether or not that was the truth. It seemed plausible. He’d certainly been in a bad way back at RTK, far worse than me.

I’d prepared myself that going to the apartment might simply be walking into a trap. But I wasn’t about to run away from my problems. I was ready to face them head on. Now I was back on familiar territory, away from my prison cell, I felt like the home advantage was all mine once more.

Omsk wasn’t my home, but it felt good to be back in a place that was familiar. It felt like real civilisation rather than the barren tundra I had travelled through over the last few days. And that fortified bunker that had been my prison for the last three months.

During my confinement I’d always been taken through the same short and narrow corridors to the same worn rooms. I’d only come to appreciate the full expanse of the complex during my escape. It was a simple concrete monstrosity, probably one of the original gulags from the Stalin era. From what I had seen it certainly wasn’t being used in the same way that it would have been in that bygone time, and yet its repressive past seemed to ooze from its walls still. It was a place that I knew would haunt me for the rest of my life.

And I would never be taken back there alive.

It took me just over an hour at a brisk pace to get to the
apartment. It would have been forty minutes but for the fact that I stopped off at a shoe shop on the way to buy some trainers. Taking off the too-small boots and swapping them for the soft fabric trainers was heavenly. Together with the thick socks from Chris, walking felt like floating on air.

The apartment was on the fourth floor of a six-storey block that lay on the corner of a busy crossroads. A handsome pre-war building with high sash windows and wrought-iron balconies, it wouldn’t have looked out of place in any of the hippest and trendiest European cities. A nice building in a nice area that was well kept.

Over the years of travelling to far-flung places I’d come to recognise that many often-overlooked mid-sized cities have rich histories and architecture, often mimicking their nearby, more illustrious neighbours. Omsk was no different.

The apartment building was nice, for sure, but it wasn’t top-end luxury. It didn’t have a concierge or security, for instance. That would have been counterintuitive for a supposedly safe location where a certain level of discretion was required. It meant that I was able to get into the building without any issues.

Getting into the apartment itself, however, would be a different story. I had no key. The door had two locks: a standard latch and a five-lever mortice deadlock. I couldn’t pick them both. I had neither the tools nor the skills.

The latch would be easy enough to kick through. The lever mortice lock, not so. I knew from past experience that it simply wasn’t possible to break one of those with only the force of your foot or shoulder. You had to rely on the frame or door itself failing.

Your best bet was usually to kick against the hinges side of the door. People generally pay much less attention to the quality and strength of their hinges than they do their locks. Kick at the hinges side and often the door will snap straight
off the frame, with the locks still intact. A small part of me wished that I was still wearing the thick steel-toed boots. They would have come in handy for breaking down a door. But doing so would also create noise. And draw attention. And I didn’t want to do that.

In the end it wasn’t even an issue. Because it turned out the door was unlocked.

I’d turned the handle whilst I stood contemplating what to do. I’d only done it because it would have been careless to assume the door was locked and not even try. And to my surprise, it swung open right before my eyes.

As soon as I stepped into the apartment, though, the initial pleasure at my good fortune dissipated when I saw that the place had been ransacked. It had only been partially furnished back when Dmitri and I had been staying here, just basic, necessary furniture, no real fittings or personal touches. But what there was had been completely trashed, turned upside down. Sofa cushions were torn to shreds, their contents strewn across the lounge area. Splinters of wood from the smashed bookcase, dining table and chairs lay everywhere. Holes had been punched through walls, the plaster ripped off in great chunks. In the kitchen, the cabinets had been pulled from the walls, the appliances broken into pieces. Crockery had been smashed and scattered across the floor.

Whoever had been there had gone to town. And it was a short list of candidates. Either one or the other. My own agency knew of this place; they had been paying for it. And the Russians, of course, would have been looking for this place since the day I’d been captured. But whichever party had done the trashing, the main question was: what had they been looking for? And had they found it?

Dmitri and I had been staying at the apartment for a number of months whilst we put together our plan. We had
always been so careful about what evidence of our identities and our work we kept there. That wasn’t a procedure just on this mission but on every single one.

Something niggled about the mess and destruction that I looked at. If whoever had done this was after information of some sort – and my own agency would have known we kept nothing there – why had they gone to so much trouble to destroy everything? Turning a place upside down is one thing, but this felt more deliberate. The way I saw it, either this had been done simply to make a point, or because someone was trying to blinker me. Pull the wool over my eyes, send me in the wrong direction.

But about what?

And that was when I noticed something odd. In the kitchen, tins, packets and jars had been burst, broken or torn open and the contents spread across the room. A creamy puddle oozed from a spilled carton of milk. The remnants of meals clung to large shards of broken plates. But I noticed no stench, no sign of mould or rot. The food looked relatively fresh. Which meant that the apartment had been trashed recently. Probably within the last couple of days. Someone had been living here.

I knew then that I had to leave. There was nothing there for me now. No Dmitri, no answers to the questions that remained about what had happened to him, to me, and why.

I had half-wondered whether Mackie might have been sitting in the apartment, waiting for me like a parent waits for a son or daughter to return home from war. In fact, in a way, I felt great disappointment when that had turned out not to be the case. In the end, all the apartment held was more questions. I walked out of the door, not even bothering to close it behind me, then headed down the winding staircase and back out into the cold street.

I walked across to the other side of the road and around
the corner to a payphone. It gave me a good view of the apartment block but was also well placed for escape if needed, with a number of side streets nearby. I hadn’t yet seen anyone lurking. In fact, I was becoming more and more suspicious and uneasy that I was seemingly alone.

Regardless, it was time to check in. I’d been on the loose, away from the place that had been my prison, for something like three days. Maybe Mackie would have the answers that I was looking for.

Mackie, the father-figure boss who’d left me to torture and abuse.

I dialled the number for Mackie. I didn’t need any change for this call. I could call from anywhere in the world and get through. Every field agent like me had a telephone number that was effectively an ID. When I called this number, it would route to Mackie, because he was my commander. The caller ID that came up on his phone would tell him I was calling. It didn’t matter what phone I was using, or where I was in the world, as long as I dialled that number.

Mackie answered on the third ring. There was an awkward silence, neither of us willing to break it at first. But then Mackie spoke.

‘Logan? Is that you?’

His voice sent a rush of memories through my head. Most of them good. But the memories were tinged with betrayal. I wasn’t sure that feeling would ever go away.

‘It’s me,’ I said.

‘Thank God you’re all right! You are all right, aren’t you?’

‘What do you think?’

Another silence. I don’t know what I expected him to say. ‘Sorry’ would have been nice, but I knew that it would never come.

‘Where are you?’ he said.

I didn’t answer. If I was on the line long enough, he’d be
able to trace the call anyway. And I wasn’t sure that I wanted to make it so easy for him. I didn’t know whether or not I could trust him any more. Whether I could trust anyone.

‘Logan,’ Mackie said, breaking the silence once again, ‘you need to come in. Where are you?’

‘That’s not important. I need to know, Mackie. I need to know: why?’

My question was vague. Why what? It could have meant anything. But it made sense to me. And I knew that it would to Mackie.

Why was I left to torture for months? Why did nobody come for me? Why did
Mackie
not come for me?

‘You need to come in,’ Mackie said again. ‘It’s not safe for you out there.’

‘Oh, so now you’re concerned with my personal safety? Isn’t it a bit late for that?’

Mackie sighed. ‘We can get you looked at. We can help you.’

‘Looked at? Why’s that, Mackie?’ I said through gritted teeth.

As ever, his choice of words had been telling. This wasn’t about me or my wellbeing. This was all about them.

‘Why? We need to make sure you’re okay. Because you’ve been gone for so long. We need to know what’s happened to you.’

Mackie didn’t need to be any more explicit than that. I knew what he meant. They thought I’d been turned. Or at the least that I’d talked.

‘And whose fault is that, Mackie? I was there, alone, for three months! Whose fault is that?’

‘This isn’t the time, Logan. What we’ve seen so far suggests you’re not exactly all there. You know, you didn’t have to leave poor Chris for dead.’

So Chris and Mary
were
working for Mackie. At least
that was one answer I had. Too bad about Chris. It didn’t make me feel sorry for having split his head open, though. He and Mary had brought it on themselves with their underhand tactics.

‘Nice of you to send two goons after me.’

‘They’re not goons. They’re agents, just like you.’

‘They’re
nothing
like me,’ I snapped. ‘And orders to kill?’

‘Come on, man, don’t exaggerate. Their orders were to bring you in any way they could. Why would I want them to kill you?’

‘Why indeed?’

‘I’ll say it again: this isn’t the time. Look, where are you? We’ll send someone to get you right away. Wherever you are, it can’t be safe.’

‘Tell me about it. Held captive for three months and I get out only to find my own people are after me with orders to kill me.’

‘Logan, goddammit!’ Mackie blasted. I pulled the receiver away from my ear, expecting a torrent of abuse, but Mackie held it in. ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m in Omsk.’

Another pause. Even down the phone I could feel Mackie winding himself down from his near explosion.

‘You’re in Omsk now?’

‘Yeah. I’m at the apartment.’

I figured I didn’t have anything to lose in telling him. Where else was I going to go now? Who else could I turn to?

‘The safe house?’ Mackie’s voice had gone quieter, like he was being distracted.

‘Yes, I’m at the safe house. The trashed safe house, I should say.’

‘Trashed? What? Look, you’re at the safe house now?’

‘Yes, I’m at the bloody safe house. Why’s that so hard to understand?’

‘Just hold on a minute.’

I heard a clunk as Mackie put the phone down, then whispered voices, too far away from the receiver for me to make out any words. Mackie was gone for a good half-minute and I started to get impatient. I was about to shout down the phone to him to ask what was going on.

But then…

A deafening explosion came from behind me.

The ground shook and swayed. A shockwave of air smacked into the side of me, almost taking me clean off my feet. Car alarms began to blare. People began to scream. Dust and grit clouded the air all around me, filling my mouth and eyes.

I was shaken. My ears were ringing with a high-pitched whine. My eyes were blurred from the grit. My head was dazed and confused.

I stood, shocked, wiping at my eyes to try to remove the grit whilst people around me screamed and moaned and ran or wandered aimlessly. The cloud of dust began to disperse, leaving behind a dirty haze. Still rubbing at my eyes I turned back to the apartment.