Sacrifice (3 page)

That was part of the reason Keegan had taken to hosting occasional barbecue evenings, particularly when the team had just finished their debriefings and wrapped up another operation. It was like a wrap party; something to bring an op to a definitive end.

Or in Keegan’s case, it was an excuse to open the tequila and put the world to rights.

A slow smile spread across Keegan’s face as he turned to look at Frost. ‘Hey, I meant to ask you – how’s that car of yours?’

Even in the dim evening light, Drake could see the colour rise to Frost’s face. The young woman had bought an old, beat-up Ford Mustang at the start of the year, hoping to turn it into a restoration project. The last time Drake had had the heart to ask about it, the entire engine block had been lying in pieces in her garage.

‘Doing just fine,’ she replied, but there was no conviction in her voice.

Keegan paused in his work, his expression pensive. ‘You know, my daddy once said never let women near guns, cars or VCRs. Sometimes I think he was wiser than he knew.’

Frost wasn’t rising to the bait. ‘Yeah, well, I suppose that kind of attitude was common in the 1930s. You know, when you were a kid.’

Seated at the edge of the garden’s decking area – another flawless creation built from scratch by Keegan – Drake took a pull on his beer, closed his eyes and exhaled slowly.

After a day of flickering computer screens, ringing phones and whirring printers, it was a relief to be outside in the fresh air, just listening to the sounds of the world around him.

‘Hey.’

Drake opened his eyes as Frost sat down beside him.

He winced, already bracing himself for another verbal assault. ‘Listen, Keira. About tonight –’

To his surprise, she shook her head. ‘Don’t worry about it. You’re here now, at least – that’s the important thing.’

Drake raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t like her to be so forgiving.

Her unexpected conciliatory attitude had caught him off guard. He felt awkward, unsure of what to say, but he didn’t want to let the conversation falter.

He recalled something about her moving house, yet the details remained elusive, like a half-formed idea long since discarded. His mind was a jumble of reports and classified documents and deadlines and a dozen other work-related problems that seemed to swallow up everything else.

‘So how are you doing with the new apartment?’ he asked, deciding to chance his hand. ‘Moved your stuff in?’

The flicker in her eyes told him he’d made a big mistake. ‘Ryan, that was three months ago. And it was my sister who was moving.’

Drake’s heart sank. He worked with these people almost every day, spent far more time with them than his own family, yet at times like this he felt he barely knew them. The only reason he was even here tonight was because Frost had parked herself in his office and refused to leave until he agreed to come.

Her excuse had been that she didn’t intend to suffer Keegan’s food alone, but even then he’d sensed a deeper motivation. She’d wanted to keep him involved, to make him focus on something outside work.

It was a valiant but futile effort.

‘I’m sorry, Keira,’ he said, taking a pull on the beer to hide his embarrassment. ‘My mind’s been all over the place lately.’

In truth, his mind had been in one place, and one place only – Iraq, last year. After being hunted as a fugitive by his own people and travelling halfway across the world, he had uncovered conspiracies and corruption that went almost to the very top of the Agency.

Then it had all unravelled. The one man who could help them had been executed, while those behind the entire thing had not only survived, but prospered. Drake himself was only alive because of a deal struck by his friend Dan Franklin, buying his security in exchange for silence.

Drake’s life was now in limbo; he was unable to leave the Agency, yet knew that one day his luck would run out. He understood now how Damocles must have felt
at that banquet table, trying to enjoy his roast beef with a bloody great sword hanging over him.

‘Easy mistake to make.’ Frost was silent for a few moments, contemplating something. Or maybe weighing up whether the time was right to say what she wanted to. ‘Mind if I ask you something?’

He looked at her, wondering what was coming. ‘You’ve never let it stop you before.’

‘Why do you push yourself so hard?’ she asked, dead serious.

Drake hesitated. Keira Frost was a straight talker who wasn’t afraid to voice her opinions, but it wasn’t like her to get into this deep and meaningful stuff.

‘You’re in that office working until Christ knows when,’ she went on. ‘You barely do anything in the real world. I mean, shit, I had to practically hold a gun to your head to get you here tonight. My company that bad?’

‘I’ll take the Fifth on that one,’ he said, hoping to lighten the mood but soon realising it was a wasted effort. She wasn’t about to let this one go. ‘Look, it’s just the way things are with work …’

‘Ryan, there’s always going to be too much work if you want there to be.’

Drake was careful to avoid her gaze. ‘I imagine you’re going somewhere with this,’ he prompted, wishing he didn’t sound so defensive.

‘You’re burning yourself out,’ she said simply. ‘It’s like you’re trying to punish yourself, or prove something. Either way, it’s not good.’

‘For who?’

‘For anyone,’ she answered. ‘If you’re exhausted and strung out, you’re not thinking straight, which means you put all our lives at risk next time we’re in the field.’
She fixed him with a searching look. ‘And as much as I’ll hate myself for saying this, I’m worried about you. I don’t want to see you burn out. You don’t deserve it.’

At last Drake turned to look at her, his vivid green eyes shimmering in the glow of electric lights nearby.

But before he could reply, he felt his phone buzz in his pocket. Out of habit he fished it out and checked the caller ID.

It was George Breckenridge – the officer in charge of the CIA’s Shepherd programme, and Drake’s immediate superior. The man who’d previously held that post, Dan Franklin, had been promoted to director of Special Activities Division last year, leaving a power vacuum that had to be filled.

Drake had little contact with his former friend now.

There was little choice but to take the call. In the Agency, if one’s boss called outside work hours on a Friday night, chances were the news wasn’t good.

And yet, for once, he welcomed the distraction.

‘Yeah, George?’ Drake said.

Breckenridge was, as always, brisk and to the point. He had little time for grunts like Drake, and made no attempt to hide that fact. ‘We need you to come in. Where are you?’

‘Brookeville. Keegan’s place. Why, what’s going on?’

‘We’ve got a situation here. We want your input.’

Which told him nothing at all. Not that he was surprised – this was an open line, and while Drake doubted the Russians or Chinese were listening in on his every phone call, there were still rules. More than one op had been compromised in the CIA’s history by casual conversations on unsecured lines.

‘How urgent is it?’

‘I’m sorry, did I give the impression this was a dinner
invitation?’ Breckenridge asked, employing his most patronising tone. ‘We want you and your team here five minutes ago. Exactly what part of this is unclear?’

Not for the first time, Drake found himself seriously questioning Franklin’s choice of successor. Whatever the vetting process for that position, it clearly wasn’t designed to filter out arseholes. ‘Abundantly.’

‘Good. I’ll see you in Conference Room One in thirty minutes.’ He hung up without saying anything further.

‘Prick,’ Drake said under his breath as he closed down his phone.

Frost regarded him suspiciously. ‘Trouble in paradise?’

‘SNAFU, as your Marine cousins are fond of saying.’

She nodded sagely. SNAFU – Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.

‘What does he want?’

Drake tipped back his beer and downed it in one gulp.

‘Well, the good news is you’ve escaped Keegan’s food tonight.’

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

One thing Drake had to commend the Agency on was their sense of irony. The George Bush Center for Intelligence (itself a contradiction in terms) was where some of the most important decisions in the world of espionage, counter-terrorism, clandestine operations and global politics were made, yet the place reminded him more of a garden centre than an intelligence-gathering hub.

Set within acres of well-maintained parkland, there were trees and flower beds and neatly trimmed lawns everywhere. The main entrance was even a long glass-covered archway with plants and expensive decor. All they needed to complete the look was a coy pond and a café selling overpriced coffee and pastries.

There were two main elements to the CIA’s headquarters – the Old Headquarters Building (OHB) and the imaginatively named New Headquarters Building (NHB). The OHB was a double H-block arrangement that dated back to the Agency’s beginnings in the 1950s, while the NHB consisted of a pair of six-storey office towers that dominated the landscape like a pair of modern-day castles.

Drake and his two companions were headed for the
northernmost of the two towers. After passing through the main security checkpoint and traversing the length of the glass tunnel, they took a left at the T-junction.

‘This had better be fucking good,’ Frost hissed, striding along beside her two companions with a look in her eye that would give most guard dogs pause for thought. ‘I’m talking alien invasion or Presidential kidnapping here.’

‘That how you define good, huh?’ Keegan quipped.

‘Big words, John,’ she bit back. ‘Thought you rednecks were still learning how to read and write.’

The older man flashed a grin. ‘Must’ve been a child prodigy.’

Their route took them past an outdoor seating area overlooking the infamous
Kryptos
sculpture. Appearing as four large metal plates engraved with a seemingly meaningless stream of letters,
Kryptos
had been an object of fascination for code breakers and conspiracy theorists since it was unveiled nearly twenty years earlier. The code on three of the plates had since been broken, but the fourth remained stubbornly unsolved.

Even today, Drake knew that people within the Agency liked to hang out around it, particularly the intelligence analysts who made a living breaking codes and sought to test their mental prowess. He had never understood the fascination himself. Breaking codes for bragging rights made about as much sense to him as jumping into an empty swimming pool. Still, each to their own.

Passing through the automatic doors that led to the north tower, he and his companions found the nearest elevator and rode it up to the fifth floor, Drake ignoring the curious glance from the young man in a sharp business suit who got in at the second floor. Langley was a shirt-and-tie kind of place, but unfortunately Drake wasn’t a shirt-and-tie kind of man, especially not tonight.
If Breckenridge wanted him here so urgently, he would have to take him as he came – in this case clad in cargo pants, a casual shirt and trainers that had seen better days.

Frost didn’t take kindly to the disapproving look either. She had been in a foul mood since finding out that her planned evening of drinking and relaxation had been whisked away and replaced with a high-priority briefing with a man nobody liked.

‘Something wrong, pal?’ she challenged, staring right at him.

She was spoiling for a fight, and the young man sensed it. Saying nothing, he glanced away and suddenly became very interested in checking his cufflinks.

Smart guy, Drake thought.

Conference room 1 was first in line as they stepped out on the fifth floor. It was a big, plush room reserved for top brass and high-level briefings, partly because it looked impressive but mostly because it was totally secure from any form of surveillance. The fact that the meeting was being held there told Drake a lot more than Breckenridge’s ambiguous phone call.

It was in this very room, over a year ago, that he had first been handed the mission to break into a Siberian prison and rescue a woman identified only by her code name Maras. It had seemed like a simple objective at the time; only later had he discovered how wrong he’d been.

Drake hadn’t been back here since. Normally his orders and debriefings were handled in one of the many smaller, more utilitarian rooms downstairs which were more suited to the unobtrusive nature of his work.

Access to the room was controlled by a swipe-card terminal next to the door. Drake’s personal access card would have been cleared in advance, so all he had to do
was swipe it through the reader, punch in his PIN, and he was good to go.

There was a single beep and a crisp click as the lock disengaged. As always, everything worked flawlessly here. Here we go, he thought.

As the door swung open, he couldn’t help comparing the room before him to the one vividly imprinted on his memory.

The place hadn’t changed much in the past year. Same long conference table topped with a single unbroken length of polished mahogany that probably cost more than he made in a year. Same high-backed leather chairs, same expensive silver coffee set. Same majestic view over Langley’s garden-centre grounds, the dense woodland beyond and the muddy sweep of the Potomac about half a mile away.

In fact, the only thing different about the room was the occupant. Instead of Dan Franklin and Marcus Cain, the former director of Special Activities Division, this time he was greeted by the fleshy, unsmiling face of George Breckenridge.

In his early fifties, greying and overweight in a way that suggested he’d never really been in shape, Breckenridge looked exactly like what he was – a guy who’d been shining seats with his not-inconsiderable arse since leaving college. God only knew what strip-lighted back-room office Franklin had dug this guy up from, but it wasn’t a place Drake was keen to visit.

He knew little about Breckenridge, because theirs was not the kind of relationship that encouraged the exchange of personal information, but he knew one thing – his volume of admin and paperwork had more than doubled since Breckenridge took over the Shepherd programme.