Kitabı oxu: «Sidney Sheldon’s Reckless»
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
Copyright © Sheldon Family Limited Partnership 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photographs © Andrea Buso/Gallery Stock (Woman); Shutterstock (London scene & digital texture)
Tilly Bagshawe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007542024
Ebook Edition © October 2015 ISBN: 9780007542055
Version: 2017-10-18
Dedication
For Belen. With love.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Part II
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Part III
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Epilogue
Keep Reading
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also By
About the Publisher
PART I
CHAPTER ONE
ROYAL MILITARY ACADEMY, SANDHURST, ENGLAND SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 9:00 P.M.
SIR!”
Officer Cadet Sebastian Williams burst into Major General Frank Dorrien’s office. Williams’s complexion was white, his hair disheveled, his uniform a disgrace. Frank Dorrien’s upper lip curled. If he closed his eyes he could practically hear the standards slipping, like turds off a wet rock.
“What is it?”
“It’s Prince Achileas, sir.”
“Prince Achileas? Do you mean Officer Cadet Constantinos?”
Williams looked at the ground. “Yes, sir.”
“Well? What about him?”
For one appalling moment, General Dorrien thought that Williams might be going to cry.
“He’s dead, sir.”
The Major General flicked a piece of lint off his jacket. Tall and thin, with the wiry frame of a marathon runner and a face so chiseled and angular it looked like it had been carved from flint, Frank Dorrien’s expression gave nothing away.
“Dead?”
“Yes, sir. I found him … hanging. Just now. It was awful, sir!” Cadet Williams started to shake. Christ, he was an embarrassment.
“Show me.”
Frank Dorrien took his battered attaché case with him and followed the distressed cadet along a windowless corridor back towards the barracks. Half walking, half jogging, the boy’s limbs dangled like a puppet with its strings tangled. Frank Dorrien shook his head. Soldiers like Officer Cadet Sebastian Williams represented everything that was wrong with today’s army.
No discipline. No order. No fucking courage.
An entire generation of dolts.
Achileas Constantinos, Prince of Greece, had been just as bad. Spoiled, entitled. These boys seemed to think that joining the army was some sort of game.
“In there, sir.” Williams gestured towards the men’s bathrooms. “He’s still … I didn’t know if I should cut him down.”
“Thank you, Williams.”
Frank Dorrien’s granite-hewn face showed no emotion. In his early fifties, gray haired and rigid backed, Frank was a born soldier. His body was the product of a lifetime of rigorous physical discipline. It was the perfect complement to his ordered, controlled mind.
“Dismissed.”
“Sir?” Cadet Williams hovered, confused. Did the Major General really want him to leave?
Not that he wanted to see Achileas again. The image of his friend’s corpse was already seared on his memory. The bloated face with its bulging eyes, swinging grotesquely from the rafters like an overstuffed Guy on bonfire night. Williams had been scared to death when he found him. He might be a soldier on paper, but the truth was he’d never seen a dead body before.
“Are you deaf?” Frank Dorrien snapped. “I said ‘dismissed’.”
“Sir. Yes, sir.”
Frank Dorrien waited until Cadet Williams was gone. Then he opened the bathroom door.
The first thing he saw were the young Greek prince’s boots, swinging at eye level in front of an open stall. They were regulation, black and beautifully polished. A thing of beauty, to General Dorrien’s eyes.
Every Sandhurst cadet should have boots like that.
Dorrien’s eyes moved upwards. The trousers of the prince’s uniform had been soiled. That was a shame, although not a surprise. Unfortunately the bowels often gave way at the moment of death, a last indignity. Dorrien wrinkled his nose as the foul stench assaulted him.
His eyes moved up again and he found himself looking into the dead boy’s face.
Prince Achileas Constantinos looked back at him, his glassy, brown eyes fixed wide in death, as if eternally astonished that the world could be so cruel.
Stupid boy, Frank Dorrien thought.
Frank himself was quite familiar with cruelty. It didn’t astonish him in the least.
He sighed, not for the swinging corpse, but for the shit storm that was about to engulf all of them. A member of the Greek royal family, dead from suicide. At Sandhurst! Hung, no less, like a common thief. Like a coward. Like a nobody.
The Greeks wouldn’t like that. Nor would the British government.
Frank Dorrien turned on his heel, walked calmly back to his office and picked up the telephone.
“It’s me. I’m afraid we have a problem.”
FORMER SOVIET REPUBLIC OF BRATISLAVA, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2 A.M.
CAPTAIN BOB DALEY OF THE WELSH Fusiliers looked into the camera and delivered the short speech he’d been handed the night before. He was tired, and cold, and he couldn’t understand why his captors were going through with this charade. His captors weren’t stupid. They must know that the demands they’d made of the British government were nonsensical.
Disband the Bank of England.
Seize the assets of every UK citizen with a net worth above one million pounds.
Shut down the stock exchange.
No one in Group 99, the radical leftist organization that had kidnapped Bob Daley from an Athens street, actually believed that these things were going to happen. Bob’s kidnapping, and the speech he was giving now, was clearly just a big publicity stunt. In a few weeks his captors would let him go and think of some other way to grab the international headlines. If there was one thing you could say for Group 99, they were masters at self-promotion.
Named after the 99 percent of the global population that controlled less than half of the world’s wealth, Group 99 were a self-described band of “Robin Hood Hackers” targeting big business interests on behalf of “the dispossessed.” Young, computer savvy and completely non-hierarchical, up until now their activities had been confined to cyberattacks against targets they perceived as corrupt. That included multinational companies like McDonald’s, as well as any government agencies seen as being on the side of the wealthy, the hated 1 percent. The CIA had had its systems hacked and seen the publication of hundreds of highly embarrassing personal emails. And the British Ministry of Defence had been exposed with its metaphorical trousers down after accepting bribes to give places at Sandhurst to the sons of Europe’s wealthy elite. After each attack, the target’s screens would fill up with images of floating red balloons—the group’s logo and a tongue-in-cheek reference to the eighties pop song “99 Red Balloons.” It was touches like this, their humor and disregard for authority, that had given Group 99 an almost cult following among young people all across the globe.
In the last eighteen months, the group had turned its attention to the global fracking business, launching devastating hacks against Exxon Mobil and BP, as well as two of the top Chinese players. The environmental angle had given them even more cachet among the young, as well as winning them a number of prominent Hollywood supporters.
Captain Bob Daley had rather admired them himself, even if he didn’t share their politics. But after three weeks locked up in a mountain cabin in some godforsaken forest in Bratislava, the joke was wearing thin. And now they’d woken him up at two in the bloody morning and dragged him outside to record some ridiculous video in subzero temperatures. The air was so cold it made Bob Daley’s teeth ache.
Still, he told himself, at least after this I’ll be going home.
His captors had already told him. He would go first. Then, a few weeks later, it would be the American’s turn. Hunter Drexel, an American journalist, had been snatched off the streets of Moscow the same week that Bob was ambushed in Athens. Hunter’s kidnapping had appeared almost random, a spontaneous act to generate publicity back in the US Bob’s had been more carefully planned. It was his first trip abroad for MI6, a training exercise, and someone in Group 99 clearly knew exactly where he was going to be and when. Bob was convinced they had someone on the inside at MI6. There could be no other rational explanation. His kidnapping had been designed to cause maximum embarrassment to both the army and MI6. It helped Group 99’s cause that Bob was also in fact the Honorable Robert Daley, from a wealthy and connected, upper-class British family. No one liked a toff.
“Don’t take it personally,” one of his captors had told him in perfect English, smiling. “But you are a bit of a poster boy for privilege. Just think of it as an experience. You’re doing your bit for equality.”
Well, it had been an experience. Hunter Drexel had become a good friend. The two men were polar opposites. Bob Daley was traditional, conservative and deeply patriotic, whereas Hunter was a maverick, individualist and lover of risk in all its forms. But there was nothing like three months stuck in a cabin in the middle of nowhere to bring people together. When he finally got home, Bob would be able to sell his memoirs and retire from both the army and his abortive career as a spy. His wife, Claire, would be delighted.
“Look directly at the camera please. And stick to the script.”
It was the Greek who spoke, the one they called Apollo. Everyone in Group 99 had a Greek codename, which they also used as their handle online, although members came from all over the world. Apollo was a real Greek, however, and one of Group 99’s founding members. The group traced its beginnings to Athens, and the euphoria following the election of the country’s most left-wing wing premier to date, the union firebrand Elias Calles. Perhaps for this reason, the Greek codenames had stuck.
Bob Daley and Hunter Drexel both disliked Apollo. He was arrogant and had no sense of humor, unlike the rest of them. Today he was dressed in black fatigues with a knitted balaclava covering his face.
Playing soldier, Bob Daley thought. The big man on campus.
It was pathetic, really. What were these kids going to do when they grew up? When the whole Group 99 adventure was over? When Apollo was caught, as Bob didn’t doubt he would be eventually, he’d be looking at serious prison time. Had he even considered that?
“My name is Captain Robert Daley,” Bob began. Looking right at the camera he delivered his lines perfectly. The sooner this was over, the sooner he could get back inside the cabin to his warm bed. Even Hunter Drexel’s snoring was preferable to being out here in the snow, jumping through hoops for this muppet.
When he finished, he turned and looked up at Apollo.
“OK?”
“Very good,” the balaclavaed man replied.
“Am I done now?”
Through the slit in his mask, Bob Daley saw the Greek smile.
“Yes, Captain Daley. You’re done.”
Then, with the camera still rolling, Apollo pulled out a gun and blew Bob Daley’s head off.
MANHATTAN, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 9:00 P.M.
ALTHEA WATCHED ON HER LAPTOP SCREEN as the bullet ripped through Bob Daley’s skull. She was sitting with her long legs crossed on the suede couch of her 5-million apartment. Outside, snow was falling softly over Central Park. It was a beautiful winter’s night in New York, clear and cold.
Captain Daley’s blood and brain tissue splattered across the camera lens.
How wonderful, Althea thought, a surge of satisfaction flooding through her, to be watching this in real time, from the comfort of my living room. Technology really is quite amazing.
She reached out and touched her screen with her perfectly manicured fingers, half expecting it to be wet. Daley’s blood would still be warm.
Good, she thought. He’s dead.
The Englishman’s body slumped forward, hitting the forest floor like a sack. Then Apollo walked towards the camera. Pulling off his balaclava, he wiped the lens clean and smiled at her.
Althea noticed the bulge in his pants. Killing clearly excited him.
“Happy?” he asked her.
“Very.”
She turned off her computer, walked to her refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of Clos d’Ambonnay, 1996. Popping the cork, she poured herself a glass, toasting the empty room.
“To you, my darling.”
In a few hours, Captain Daley’s execution would be front page news around the world. Kidnap and murder had become commonplace across the Middle East. But this was the West. This was Europe. This was Group 99, the Robin Hood Hackers. The good guys.
How shocked and appalled everyone would be!
Althea ran a hand through her long, dark hair.
She could hardly wait.
CHAPTER TWO
THIS IS A NIGHTMARE.”
Julia Cabot, the new British prime minister, put her head in her hands. She was sitting at her desk in her private office at 10 Downing Street. Also in the room were Jamie MacIntosh, Head of MI6, and Major General Frank Dorrien. A highly decorated career soldier, Dorrien was also a senior MI6 agent, a fact known only to a select handful of people, which did not include the General’s wife.
“Please tell me I’m going to wake up.”
“It’s Bob Daley who isn’t going to wake up, Prime Minister,” Frank Dorrien observed drily. “I hate to say I told you so.”
“Then don’t,” Jamie MacIntosh snapped. Frank was a brave man and a brilliant agent, but his tendency to assume the moral high ground could be extremely wearing. “None of us could have predicted this. This is the E bloody U, not Aleppo.”
“And a bunch of teenage geeks in red-balloon hoodies, not ISIS,” Julia Cabot added despairingly. “Group 99 don’t kill people. They just don’t!”
“Until they do,” said Frank. “And now they have. And Captain Daley’s blood is on our hands.”
It was hard not to take Bob Daley’s murder personally. Partly because Frank Dorrien knew Bob Daley personally. They’d both served in Iraq together, under circumstances that neither Julia Cabot nor Jamie MacIntosh could imagine, never mind understand. And partly because Frank had warned of the dangers of treating Group 99 as a joke. These groups always began with high ideals and, in Frank’s experience, almost always ended with violence. A splinter group would rise up, nastier and more bloodthirsty than the rest, and end up seizing power from the moderates. It had happened with the communists in Russia after the revolution. It had happened with the real IRA. It had happened with ISIS. It didn’t matter what the ideology was. All you needed was angry, dispossessed, testosterone-fueled young men with a thirst for power and attention, and in the end bad things, very bad things, would happen.
MI6 had been sitting on intelligence for weeks about where Captain Daley and Hunter Drexel might be being held. But no one had acted on it, because no one had believed the hostages were in serious danger. Indeed, when Frank had proposed sending in the SAS on an armed rescue mission, he’d been shot down in flames by both the government and the intelligence community.
“Have you lost your mind?” Jamie MacIntosh had asked him. “Bratislava’s an EU country, Frank.”
“So?”
“So we can’t send our troops into another sovereign nation. A sodding ally. It’s out of the question.”
So nothing was done, and now hundreds of millions of people around the globe had seen Bob Daley’s brains being splattered across a screen. Celebrities who only last week had been lining up to be photographed with red balloon badges on their dinner jackets, in support of the group’s lofty aims of economic equality, were now scrambling to distance themselves from the horror. Kidnap and murder, right here in Europe.
“I understand you’re angry, Frank,” Julia Cabot said grimly. “But I need constructive input. The Americans are screaming blue murder. They’re worried their hostage is going to be next.”
“They should be,” said Frank.
“We all want to get these bastards.” Cabot turned to her intelligence chief. “Jamie, what do we know?”
“Group 99. Founded in Athens in 2015 by a group of young Greek computer scientists, then rapidly spread across Europe to South America, Asia, Africa and around the globe. Stated agenda is economic, to address poverty and the global wealth imbalance. Loosely classed as communists although they have no stated political, national or religious allegiances. They use Greek codenames online, and they are very, very smart.”
“What about their leaders?” Cabot asked.
“One or two names have cropped up. The guy codenamed Hyperion we believe to be a twenty-seven-year-old Venezuelan named Jose Hernandez. He’s the fellow who leaked the private emails of the former Exxon boss.”
“The chap with the transsexual mistress and the cocaine habit?” Cabot remembered Group 99’s sting on the hapless oil executive. Despite the CEO’s resignation, hundreds of millions of dollars had been wiped off the share price.
“Precisely. Ironically Hernandez comes from a wealthy establishment family. They may have helped him avoid detection by the authorities. But part of the problem is that there are no clear leaders. Group 99 disapproves of traditional hierarchy in all its forms. Because it’s web-based and anonymous, it’s more of a loose affiliation than a classic terrorist organization. Different individuals and cells act independently under one big umbrella.”
Cabot sighed. “So it’s a hydra with a thousand heads. Or no heads.”
“Precisely.”
“What about funding? Do we know where they get their money from?”
“That’s a more interesting angle. For a group that purports to be against accumulated wealth, they seem to have a lot of cash washing around. They invest in technology, to fund their cyberattacks. It’s an expensive business, staying ahead of the game against sophisticated systems at places like Microsoft or the Pentagon.”
“I can imagine,” said Cabot.
“We also believe they are behind various multimillion-dollar anonymous donations to both charitable groups and leftwing political parties. Numerous sources have pointed to a female member of the group, an American, as both one of their largest donors and a driving force in Group 99’s strategic objectives. You remember the attack on the CIA a year ago, when they published a bunch of compromising private emails from top Langley staffers?”
The prime minister nodded.
“The Americans believe that was her. She operates under the codename Althea, but that’s pretty much all anyone knows about her.”
Julia Cabot stood up and walked over to the window, aware of Frank Dorrien’s eyes boring into her back. She found the old soldier difficult. Only a week ago, she’d met with him to discuss the tragic and diplomatically embarrassing suicide of the young Greek prince at Sandhurst. It struck her then how little compassion General Dorrien had shown for the boy, as well as how dismissive he was of the political ramifications of his death on British soil and in the care of the British army.
“Perhaps he was depressed?” was the closest he’d come to offering any explanation. And when pressed he’d become positively irritated. “With respect, Prime Minister, I was his commanding officer, not his therapist.”
Yes, Julia Cabot had thought angrily. And I’m your commanding officer.
She wondered whether Dorrien was being so rude because she was a woman, or whether he was always this way.
On this occasion, however, the general was right. Bob Daley’s blood was on her hands. If the American journalist, Hunter Drexel, died too, she would never forgive herself.
“We must work with the Americans on this,” she announced. “Total transparency.”
Jamie MacIntosh raised an eyebrow laconically. “Total transparency” was not a phrase that made him feel good. At all.
“They need to get their man, Drexel, out of there. I want you to give the CIA everything you have, Jamie. Possible locations. All of that.”
“So we’re going to help rescue their man, after abandoning our own?” Frank Dorrien looked suitably outraged.
“We’re going to make the best of a bad job, General,” the prime minister shot back. “And in return we’ll expect the CIA to share all of their intelligence on Group 99’s global network with us. Up until now their cyberattacks have focused primarily on US targets. American companies and government agencies have been hit a lot harder than we have. I’m sure they already have groaning files on these bastards.”
“I’m sure they do, Prime Minister,” Frank Dorrien said drily. It was uncanny the way he managed to make every comment sound like a criticism.
“Something made these people change tactics,” Cabot said, ignoring him. “Something changed them, from hi-tech pranksters into kidnappers and murderers. I need to know what that something is.”
“I DON’T LIKE IT. I DON’T like it at all.”
President Jim Havers scowled at the three men seated around his desk in the Oval Office. The men were Greg Walton, the diminutive, bald head of the CIA. Milton Buck, the FBI’s top counterterrorism agent. And General Teddy MacNamee, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“None of us like it, Mr. President,” Greg Walton said. “But what are the alternatives? If we don’t get Drexel out now, right now, we could be looking at his brains being sprayed across a screen. If we don’t act on this intelligence …”
“I know. I know. But what if he’s not there? I mean if the Brits were so damn sure, why didn’t they get their own man out?”
President Havers’s scowl deepened. He was under enormous pressure, from Congress and from the American public, to save Hunter Drexel. But, if the intelligence they’d just received from the British was correct, saving Drexel meant launching a military offensive in an EU country. The United States had gotten enough flak for sending troops into Pakistan to take out Bin Laden. And this was a whole different ball game.
Bratislava was an ally, a Western democracy. Its president and people would not react kindly to American Chinooks invading their airspace and dropping Navy SEALs into their mountains, mountains that the Bratislavans themselves categorically denied were being used as a safe haven for Group 99, or any other terrorists for that matter.
And what if the Bratislavans were right and British Intel was wrong? What if Havers sent troops in, and Drexel wasn’t there after all? If a single Bratislavan citizen so much as spilt their coffee over this, President Havers would be dragged in front of the UN with egg all over his face before you could say “breach of international law.”
“They might let him go,” the president said, half to himself.
The three men all gave their commander in chief a look that roughly translated as and pigs might fly.
“I’m just saying, it’s a possibility.”
“I imagine that’s what the British were thinking, right up until last week,” said Greg Walton.
“But maybe what happened to Captain Daley was a one-off,” the president countered, clutching at straws. “An aberration. After all, Group 99 have never espoused violence before.”
“Well they’ve sure as hell espoused it now, sir.” General MacNamee said grimly. “Can we really afford to take the risk?”
“What I don’t understand is why they even kidnapped Hunter Drexel in the first place.” President Havers ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “I mean, to what end? A two-bit journalist and gambling addict, fired from the Washington Post and the New York Times. Which is quite an accolade in itself, by the way. How is this man representative of the one percent of the people this group claim to despise? From what I understand he can barely pay his bills. How is he representative of anything?”
“He’s an American,” the FBI man, Milton Buck, observed quietly.
“And that’s enough?”
“For some people,” Greg Walton said. “These people aren’t necessarily rational, sir.”
“No shit.” The president shook his head angrily. “One minute they’re sending pop-up balloons onto people’s computer screens and storming the stage at the Oscars, and the next they’re making snuff movies. I mean Jesus Christ! What next? Are they gonna start burning people in cages? It’s like a bad fucking dream. This is Europe.”
“So was Auschwitz,” said the general.
A tense silence fell.
If he sent in the SEALs and the operation was a success, President Jim Havers would be a hero, at least at home. Of course, he would owe the British big-time. Julia Cabot was already demanding more information on Group 99’s global network and funding sources, particularly “Althea,” information the CIA was extremely reluctant to share. If this worked President Havers would have no choice but to give it to her. But it would be worth it. His popularity ratings would be through the roof.
On the other hand, if Drexel wasn’t where the British said he would be, it was Havers who’d be hung out to dry, not Julia Cabot. America’s reputation abroad would plummet. He could wave goodbye to a second term.
The president closed his eyes and exhaled slowly. In that moment, Jim Havers hated Hunter Drexel almost as much as he hated Group 99.
How in hell had it come to this?
“Fuck it. Let’s do it. Let’s go in and get the son of a bitch.”
CHAPTER THREE
HUNTER DREXEL PRESSED THE RADIO AGAINST his ear and listened intently. The voice of the BBC World Service newsreader crackled through the darkness.
“As concern grows for the welfare of kidnapped American journalist Hunter Drexel, a minute’s silence was held today at Sandhurst Military Academy in Berkshire in memory of Captain Robert Daley, whose brutal murder last week at the hands of terror group 99 shocked the world.”
Hunter thought, So now they’re terror group 99. He laughed bitterly. Funny how one little murder changes everything.
Two weeks ago the BBC couldn’t get enough of Group 99. Like the rest of the world’s media, they’d fawned over the Robin Hood Hackers like groupies at a One Direction concert.
Then again, was Hunter really any better than the rest of them? After all, he’d misjudged Group 99 too.
At the time he was kidnapped he’d been working on a freelance article about corruption in the global fracking business. He’d been particularly interested in the billions of dollars flowing between the United States, Russia and China, and the secretive way in which drilling contracts were awarded, with oil giants in all three countries splitting obscene profits. Handshake deals were being thrashed out in Houston, Moscow and Beijing that blatantly contravened international trade law. Back then Hunter had seen Group 99 as an ally, as opposed to the rampant corruption in the energy business as he was. Ironically, he’d been on his way to meet Cameron Crewe, founder and owner of Crewe Inc. and one of fracking’s very few “good guys,” at Crewe’s Moscow office when he was dragged into an alleyway, chloroformed and bundled into the boot of a Mercedes town car, not by Kremlin thugs but by the very people he’d believed were on his side.
He remembered little of the long journey to the cabin. He changed cars at least once. There was also a short helicopter ride. And then he was here. A few days later Bob Daley showed up, and was introduced as Hunter’s “roommate.” It was all very civilized. Warm beds, a radio, reasonable meals and, to Hunter’s delight, a pack of cards. He could survive without freedom if he had to. Even sex was a luxury he could learn to live without. But a life without poker wasn’t worth living. He and Bob would play daily, often for hours at a stretch, betting with pebbles like a couple of kids. If it hadn’t been for the armed guards outside the cabin, Hunter might have believed himself taking part in some sort of student prank, or even a reality TV show. Even the guards looked halfhearted and a bit embarrassed, as if they knew the joke had gone too far but weren’t quite sure how to back out without losing face.
Except for Apollo.
Hunter hated using the stupid Greek codename. It was so pretentious. But as it was the only name he had for the bastard who had shot Bob, it would have to do. Apollo was always different. Angrier, surlier, more self-important than the others. Hunter had identified him early on as a bully and a nasty piece of work. But never in a million years had he thought Apollo was intent on murder.
Bob’s execution had left the entire camp in a profound state of shock. It wasn’t just Hunter. The other guards seemed genuinely horrified by what had happened. People were crying. Vomiting. But no one had the gumption to face down Apollo.
This was it. The new reality.
They were all in it up to their necks.
The radio signal was fading. Hunter twiddled the knob desperately, looking for something, anything, to distract him from his fear. He’d been in dangerous situations before in his journalistic career. He’d been shot at in Aleppo and Baghdad, and narrowly escaped a helicopter crash in Eastern Ukraine. But in a war zone you had adrenaline to keep you going. There was no time for fear. It was easy to be brave.
Here, in the silence of the cabin, with nothing but his friend’s empty bed and his own fevered thoughts for company, fear squatted over Hunter like a giant, black toad. It crushed the breath from his body and the hope from his soul.
They’re going to kill me.
They’re going to kill me and bury me in the forest, next to Bob.
In the beginning, in the days and hours after Bob’s death, Hunter had dared to hope. Someone will find me. They’ll all be looking now. The Brits. The Americans. Someone will come and rescue me.
But as the days passed and no one came, hope died.
Hunter’s radio crackled loudly, then the signal dropped completely. Reluctantly, he crawled back under his covers and tried to sleep. It was impossible. His limbs ached with exhaustion but his brain was on speed. Images flew at him like bullets.
His mother in her Chicago apartment, beside herself with worry in her tatty chair.
His most recent lover, Fiona from the New York Times, screaming at him for two-timing her the day he left for Moscow. “I hope one of Putin’s thugs catches you and beats you to death with a crowbar. Asshole!”
Bob Daley, making some stupid wisecrack the night before he made the video.
The night before Apollo blew his brains out.
Would they make him record a video too? Would Bobby’s bloodstains still be on the camera lens?
No!
A cold prickle of terror crept over him, like needles in the skin.
I have to get out of here!
Hunter sat bolt upright, gasping for breath, struggling to control his bowels. Please, God, help me! Show me the way out of this.
He hadn’t realized until this moment quite how desperately he didn’t want to die. Perhaps because this was the moment when he knew for certain that he was going to. Any rescue mission would have happened by now.
No one knows where I am.
No one’s coming.
And really, why should they come? Hunter Drexel had never felt or shown any particular loyalty to his homeland. What right did he have to expect loyalty in return?
Hunter had never understood the concept of patriotism. Allegiance to a country, or an ideology, was utterly baffling to him. People like Group 99, who devoted their entire lives to a cause, fascinated him. Why? Hunter Drexel saw the world only in terms of people. Individuals. People mattered. Ideas did not. Hunter had more in common with Group 99’s worldview and political beliefs than he did with Bob Daley’s. Yet Bob was a good person. And Apollo, or whatever his real name was, was a bad person. In the end, that was all that mattered, not the labels that either man lived under:
Soldier.
Radical.
Terrorist.
Spy.
They were nothing but empty words.
If Hunter Drexel identified himself as anything, it was as a journalist. Writing meant something. The truth meant something. That was about as ideological as Hunter got.
He looked around the wooden cabin that had been his home for the last few months and tried to slow his breathing. The heavy wooden door was wedged shut with a split tree trunk and armed guards took shifts outside. Since Bob’s death two solid iron bars had been nailed across the window. Beyond it lay miles of impenetrable forest, an army of tall, darkly swaying pines above a thick white blanket of snow. In their wilder moments of fantasy, Hunter and Bob had concocted escape plans. All were insanely risky, preposterous really. The kind of thing that would work in a cartoon. And all involved two people. Alone, escape was quite impossible. The only way out of here was the one that Bob Daley had already taken.
Hunter lay back, not calm exactly, but past the hyperventilating stage. Acceptance, that was the key. Letting go. But how did one accept one’s own death?
His mind drifted to a story he’d heard on the radio yesterday, about the Greek prince who’d hung himself at Sandhurst. Achileas. It sounded like one of the stupid names Group 99 gave themselves. There was much hand-wringing about the boy’s death and an “official inquiry” had been launched.
As ever, it was the human side of the story that gripped Hunter.
Here was a young man with everything to live for, yet who had chosen to die.
Perhaps if Hunter could understand that impulse, the impulse that drove a young prince to embrace death like a lover, he would feel less afraid?
Slowly, Hunter Drexel drifted into a fitful sleep.
THE NOISE WAS A LOW BUZZ at first. Like insects swarming.
But then it got louder. The unmistakable whir of chopper blades.
“Dimitri.” One of Hunter’s guards grabbed the shoulder of his companion, shaking him awake. “Listen.”
The other guard slowly struggled out of sleep. Like Dimitri he was only nineteen. Both boys were French. This time last year they’d been studying computer science in Paris. They’d joined Group 99 for a lark, because a lot of their friends were doing it, and because they loosely supported the idea of taking the world’s super-rich down a peg or two. Neither of them quite knew how they’d ended up in a Bratislavan forest, freezing their tits off and armed with machine guns.
By the time they got to their feet, strobe lights filled the sky. The whole camp was bathed in blinding light. Then the first shots rang out.
“Shit!” Dimitri started to cry. “What do we do?”
Already the helicopters were so loud, it was hard to hear one another.
“Run!” yelled his friend.
Dimitri ran. He heard shots behind him and saw his friend fall to the forest floor. He kept going. His legs felt like jelly, as if all the strength had been sucked out of them.
The camp was a horseshoe of canvas tents clustered around the cabin. There were also two breeze-block structures, one used as a weapons store, and one as a control center, complete with a generator, satellite phone and specially customized laptop. The second structure was closest. Dimitri staggered toward it. All around him, group members were emerging from their tents, bleary-eyed with panic. Some waved guns around, but others were unarmed. Atlas and Kronos, two German lads had their hands in the air. Dimitri watched in horror as they were mown down anyway in a hail of bullets, their limbs flailing grotesquely like dancing puppets as they died.
Then something hit him from behind. Not a bullet or a stone. It was a gust of wind, so powerful it blew him off his feet. The choppers had landed. Suddenly all was chaos, light and noise. American voices were shouting. “ON THE GROUND! GET DOWN!”
Dimitri screamed, a child’s wail of terror. Then suddenly, arms were around him, under his shoulders, dragging him into the control center.
“You’re OK.” Apollo’s voice was firm and calm. Dimitri clung to him like a life raft.
“They’re going to kill us!” the boy screamed.
“No they’re not. We’re going to kill them.”
Dimitri watched as Apollo pulled the pin out of the hand grenade with his teeth and lobbed it toward the men who had just killed his friends. As they were blown into the air, their legs came off.
“Here.” Apollo handed him a grenade. “Aim for the choppers.”
INSIDE THE CABIN HUNTER DREXEL COWERED under a table.
The noise of the Chinooks was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.
They’re here! They found me!
Even the gunfire, the all too familiar pap pap pap pap of machine guns he remembered from Iraq and Syria sounded soothing to his ears, like a lullaby, or a mother’s voice.
Boom! The cabin door didn’t so much open as explode, shards of wood flying everywhere. Smoke filled the room in seconds, disorienting him. Hunter’s ears were ringing and his eyes stung. He heard voices, shouts, but everything was muffled, as if he were hearing them under water. He waited for someone to come in, a soldier or even one of his captors, but no one did. Crawling on his belly, Hunter began feeling his way towards the space where the cabin door used to be.
Outside, he quickly got his bearings back. Stars up. Snow down. The Americans—presumably?—were mostly in front of him and to the right, directly facing the camp. To his left, what was left of Group 99 had taken up position in the two breeze-block buildings and were firing back. Gunshots flashed in the blackness like fireflies. Occasionally a strobe or flare would illuminate everything. Then you could see men running. Hunter watched as three of the American soldiers were gunned down just feet in front of him. His captors were clearly not giving up without a fight.
A whimpering sound to his left, like a wounded animal made him turn around.
“Help me!”
Crawling towards the sound, Hunter found the English boy codenamed Perseus sprawled out in the snow. Hunter had a particular soft spot for Perseus with his skinny, chicken legs, cockney accent and thick, dorky glasses. Hunter had nicknamed him “Nerdeus.” They often played poker together. The boy was good.
Now he lay helplessly on the cold ground, his eyes wide with shock. A deep crimson stain surrounded him. Glancing down Hunter saw that both his lower legs had been blown off.
“Am I going to die?” he sobbed.
“No,” Hunter lied, lying down next to him.
“I can’t feel my legs.”
“It’s the cold,” said Hunter. “And the shock. You’ll be fine.”
Perseus’s eyes opened and closed. It wouldn’t be long now.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I never meant for … all this.”
“I know that,” said Hunter. “It’s not your fault. What’s your name? Your real name.”
The boy’s teeth chattered. “J-James.”
“Where are you from, James?”
“Hackney.”
“Hackney. OK.” Hunter stroked his hair. “What’s it like in Hackney?”
The boy’s eyes closed.
“Do you have any brothers and sisters, James? James?”
He let out one, long, fractured breath and was still.
Hunter felt his eyes well up with tears and his body fill with anger.
Not anger. Rage.
James was his friend. He was just a fucking kid.
“NO!” He started to scream, all the pent-up fear of the last few days erupting out of him in one wild, animal howl of fury and loss. In that moment he didn’t care if he died. Not at all. Stroking James’s cold, dead forehead tenderly, he stood up and ran toward the light of the Chinooks.
That’s when it happened.
One of the helicopters exploded, sending a fireball hundreds of feet high shooting into the air like a comet. Hunter watched it in shock. It dawned on him then that the Americans might actually lose this battle. This wasn’t the clean rescue they’d intended. It was all going wrong. Soldiers were dying. Group 99 were fighting back, fighting for their lives.
Hunter kept running, because really, what else was there to do? He would run until something happened to stop him. Until his legs blew off like James’s, or a bullet ripped through his skull like Bob Daley’s, or until he was free to write the truth about what had happened tonight. The truth about everything.
The lights grew brighter. Blinding. Hunter thought he was past Group 99’s control center now but he wasn’t sure. Just then a second Chinook roared back into life, its blades turning full pelt just a few yards from where Hunter was standing. Hunter watched camouflaged men leap into it one by one as it hovered just inches above the ground. Bullets flew over his head. Then, right in front of him, a hand reached out in the carnage.
“Get in!”
The American soldier was leaning out of the Chinook, reaching for Hunter’s hand. He was younger than Hunter, but confident, his words a command, not a request.
Hunter hesitated, a rabbit in the headlights.
He thought about the story that had gotten him kidnapped in the first place.
About the truth, the unpalatable truth, that so many people wanted to suppress.
Once he got into that helicopter, would he ever be able to tell it? Would he ever complete his mission?
He looked behind him. Scores of corpses littered the charred remnants of the camp that had been his world for the last few months. It had all happened in minutes. Bad men and good men and naïve young boys lay slaughtered like cattle. Just like poor Bob Daley had been slaughtered.
And now a confident young American was holding out his hand, offering Hunter a way out. It was what he’d been praying for.
Get in!
Hunter Drexel looked his rescuer gratefully in the eye.
Then he turned and ran off into the night.
CHAPTER FOUR
WHAT DO YOU MEAN, ‘HE RAN’?”
President Jim Havers held the phone away from his ear in disbelief.
“He ran, sir,” General Teddy MacNamee repeated. “Drexel refused to get into the helicopter.”
There was a long silence.
“Fuck,” said the president.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘HE RAN’?”
The British prime minister rubbed her eyes blearily.
“I don’t know how many other ways to say it, Julia,” the President of the United States snapped. “He wouldn’t get in the chopper. He ran into the fucking forest. We’re screwed.”
Julia Cabot thought, You mean you’re screwed, Jim.
Her mind raced as she tried to figure out the best way to play this.
“I’ve already had the Bratislavan president on the line, screaming blue murder,” President Havers ranted on. “The UN secretary General’s asked me for a statement as a matter of urgency.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Nothing yet.”
“What will you tell him?”
“That Drexel wasn’t there. He’d been moved. But that they successfully took out a bunch of terrorists.”
“Good,” Julia Cabot said.
“I can count on your support?”
“Of course, Jim. Always.”
President Havers exhaled. “Thank you, Julia. We need a joint intelligence meeting. To figure out where we go from here.”
“Agreed.”
“How soon can your guys be in Washington?”
“I think, under the circumstances, Jim, it makes more sense for your guys to come to London. Don’t you?”
Julia Cabot smiled. It felt good to have the upper hand with the Americans for once. Right now she was the only friend Jim Havers had in the world and he knew it. She must play her cards for all they were worth.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Jim Havers said gruffly.
“Wonderful.” Julia Cabot hung up.
EXACTLY ONE WEEK LATER, FOUR MEN sat around a table in Whitehall, eyeing one another warily.
“Good of you to come, gentlemen.” Jamie MacIntosh rolled up his shirtsleeves and leaned forward, smiling amiably at his American counterparts. “I know you must both have had a difficult week.”
“That’s an understatement.” Greg Walton of the CIA looked desperately tired. He resented being summoned to London, especially at a time when his beloved agency was being ripped to shreds by Congress back home. But he made an effort at politeness. Unlike his FBI colleague, Milton Buck.
“I hope you have something important to add to this operation,” Buck snarled at Jamie MacIntosh. “Because frankly we don’t have time to waste on handholding you Brits.”
Sitting beside Jamie MacIntosh, Frank Dorrien stiffened. “Well, quite,” he said sardonically. “After the mess you made of what should have been a perfectly simple rescue mission, based on our entirely accurate intelligence, I imagine you want to devote as many man-hours as possible to training your own men. Heaven knows they need it.”
Milton Buck looked like he was ready to throw a punch.
“All right, that’s enough.” Jamie MacIntosh glared at Frank Dorrien. “None of us have time for chest beating. Let’s leave that to the politicians. We’re here to combine our resources and share information on Group 99 and that’s what we’re going to do. Why don’t I start?”
Greg Walton leaned back in his chair. “Great. What have you got?”
“For starters, we’ve got a name for Captain Daley’s killer.”
Walton and Buck looked at one another in shock. “Seriously?”
Frank Dorrien pushed a file across the table.
In the top left-hand corner was a photograph of a handsome, dark-skinned man with a strong jaw, long aquiline nose, and hooded, distrustful eyes. There was a detached air about him and a certain watchful hauteur, like a bird of prey.
“Alexis Argyros,” Jamie MacIntosh announced. “Codenamed Apollo. One of Group 99’s founder members and a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work. Grew up in foster care in Athens. Possibly abused. A high school dropout but brilliant with computers and obsessed with violent video games from his early teens. Hates women. Sadist. Narcissist. All this is from his social worker’s reports.”
“Criminal record?” Greg Walton asked.
“Oh yes. Petty theft, vandalism, arson. Two years in youth custody for rape. And he was suspected in a hideous case of animal cruelty where a cat and kittens were burned alive.”
“You only get two years for rape?” Greg Walton asked.
“The Greeks can’t afford to run their prisons,” Jamie MacIntosh said matter-of-factly. “Not since austerity. Anyway, we believe Argyros was the man who pulled the trigger in Daley’s execution video. He was running the camp you raided, and his star is on the rise within Group 99. For months now he’s been trying to steer the group towards more violent methods, battling against the moderate elements within 99. Argyros appeals to disaffected young males in the same way that the jihadist groups groomed boys in the west after the Syrian war. He offers them a purpose and a sense of belonging, wraps it all up in a pretty parcel of social justice—”
“And then murders people,” Greg Walton interrupted.
“Precisely. We are fearful that Captain Daley’s death may mark the beginning of a new era of global terror. It’s an enormous pity you didn’t kill Argyros when you had the chance.”
“How do you know we didn’t?” Greg Walton asked.
This time Frank Dorrien answered.
“Because we’ve picked up internet traffic between Apollo and an unknown contact in the US Alexis Argyros is alive and well and he’s out there looking for Drexel, just like we are. Make no mistake. Group 99 want Hunter Drexel dead.”
“And you know all this how?” Milton Buck demanded sourly. A stocky, handsome, middle-aged man with dark hair and what ought to have been a pleasing face, Buck successfully concealed whatever charms he may have had beneath a thick veneer of arrogance.
“Our methods are none of your concern,” Frank Dorrien snapped back. “We’re here to share intelligence, not tell you how we came by it. Now, what do you have for us?”
Milton Buck looked at Greg Walton, who nodded his approval. Buck pulled out an old-fashioned Dictaphone voice recorder and put it on the table.
“While you’ve been unmasking the monkey,” the FBI man sneered, “we’ve been focused on the organ grinder.”
Jamie MacIntosh sighed. He was starting to find Milton Buck’s posturing deeply irritating.
“Your man Apollo may have pulled the trigger,” Buck went on, “but he was following orders from above.”
He pressed PLAY. A woman’s voice filled the room. It was American, educated, soft and low and the sound quality was excellent, as if she were sitting right there with them.
“Is everything ready?”
A man’s voice answered. “Yes. Everything has been done as you instructed.”
“And I will see it on live feed, correct?”
“Correct. You’ll be right there with us. Don’t worry.”
“Good.” The woman’s smile was audible. “Have him deliver the speech first.”
“Of course. As we agreed.”
“And at nine p.m. New York time precisely, you will shoot him in the head.”
“Yes, Althea.”
Milton Buck hit STOP and smiled smugly.
“That, gentleman, was the authorization for Captain Daley’s execution. The woman on that tape, who goes by the codename Althea, is the real brains behind Group 99. We’ve been tracking her for the last eighteen months.”
“We already knew about Althea,” Jamie MacIntosh said dismissively, to the FBI man’s visible annoyance.
“But you didn’t know she’d directly ordered Daley’s assassination. Did you?” Greg Walton countered.
“No,” Jamie admitted. “What else have you got on her? An ID?”
“Not yet,” Greg Walton admitted, a little uncomfortably.
“You’ve been tracking this person for eighteen months and you still don’t know who she is?” Frank Dorrien asked, disbelievingly. “What do you know?”
“We know she channels funds to Group 99 through a complicated network of offshore accounts that we’ve mapped extensively,” Milton Buck snapped.
“We have some unconfirmed physical data,” Greg Walton added more calmly. “Witnesses at various banks and hotels we believe she’s used have suggested she’s tall, physically attractive and dark haired.”
“Well that narrows it down,” Frank Dorrien muttered sarcastically.
Milton Buck looked as if he were about to spontaneously combust.
“We know she orchestrated the attack on the CIA systems and the blackout of the stock exchange servers on Wall Street two years ago,” he snarled. “We know she personally arranged the kidnap and murder of one of your men, General Dorrien. All in all I’d say we know a hell of a lot more than you.”
“How long have you had this recording?” Jamie MacIntosh asked.
Greg Walton shot Milton Buck a warning look but it was too late.
“Three weeks,” Buck said smugly. “I played this to the president the day after Daley was killed.”
A muscle on Jamie’s jaw twitched. “Three weeks. And nobody thought to share this information with us sooner?”
“We’re sharing it with you now,” Greg Walton said.
Frank Dorrien slammed his fist down hard on the table. Everybody’s water glasses shook.
“It’s not bloody good enough!” he roared. “Daley was one of ours. With allies like you, who needs enemies?”
“Frank.” Jamie MacIntosh put a hand on the old soldier’s arm, but Dorrien shrugged it off angrily.
“No, Jamie. This is a farce! Here we are spoon-feeding the Americans valuable intelligence, detailed intelligence, actually providing them with the exact location of their hostage. And all the while they’re sitting on vital information about Bob Daley’s killer? It’s unacceptable.”
Buck leaned forward aggressively.
“And just who are you to tell us what’s acceptable, General? Has it occurred to you that maybe we didn’t trust the British with this intelligence? After all, your men have been dropping like flies lately.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Think about it. First a Greek royal dies on your watch, General,” Buck said accusingly, “a young man who just happens to be a personal friend of Captain Daley. Then, only days later, Daley himself is killed, which let’s just say is out of character for Group 99, up to this point. Now, you may say there’s no connection between those two events—”
“Of course there’s no connection!” Frank Dorrien scoffed. “Prince Achileas died by suicide.”
Milton Buck raised an eyebrow. “Did he? Because the other possibility is that Group 99 have someone embedded within the British military. Maybe someone at Sandhurst, or in the upper echelons of the MOD—also the subject of a Group 99 attack, if you remember.”
“As were the CIA!” Dorrien shouted back. “Prince Achileas was gay. The man hung himself out of shame, you cretin.”
“What did you call me?” Buck got to his feet.
“That. Is. ENOUGH.” Greg Walton finally lost his temper. “Sit down, Milton. NOW.”
Greg was the senior man here. He hadn’t flown thousands of miles to watch his FBI colleague and General Dorrien go at each other like a pair of ill-disciplined dogs.
There was also something about the tone the general used to talk about the Greek Prince that put Greg Walton’s back up. Greg was also a homosexual. He found the general’s lack of compassion for the dead boy both distasteful and disturbing.
“Whatever has happened in the past, in terms of sharing information, has happened,” he said, looking from Buck to Dorrien and back again. “From now on we have direct orders from the White House and Downing Street to cooperate fully with one another and that’s what we’re going to do. This is a joint operation. So if either of you have a problem with that, I suggest you get over it. Now.”
Frank Dorrien looked to Jamie MacIntosh for support but there was none forthcoming. He shot a last look of loathing at Milton Buck and sat back in his chair, sullen but compliant. Buck did the same.
“Good. Now, as it happens we do have one other important development to share with you,” Greg Walton went on. “Have either of you ever heard of an individual named Tracy Whitney?”
Frank Dorrien noticed the way Milton Buck tensed up at the mere mention of this name.
“Never heard of her,” he said.
“Tracy Whitney the con artist?” Jamie MacIntosh frowned.
“Con artist, jewel thief, computer wizard, cat burglar,” Greg Walton elaborated. “Miss Whitney’s résumé is a long and varied one.”
“That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. We thought she was dead,” said Jamie. He explained to Frank Dorrien how, along with her partner Jeff Stevens, Tracy Whitney had been suspected of a swath of daring crimes across Europe a decade ago, conning the corrupt rich out of millions of dollars in jewelry and fine art, and even extracting a grandmaster from the Prado in Madrid. But neither Interpol nor the CIA nor MI5 had ever been able to prove a case against her. “I dread to think the man-hours and money we wasted trying to outsmart that woman.” He sounded almost nostalgic. “But then, overnight it seemed, she vanished and that was that. Jeff Stevens is still knocking around in London I believe, but he seems to be retired.” Jamie turned back to Greg Walton. “I’m baffled as to what Tracy Whitney can possibly have to do with all this.”
“So are we,” Greg admitted. “The day after the failed raid in Bratislava, we received an encrypted message at Langley from Althea in which she referenced Tracy Whitney.”
“More than referenced,” Milton Buck jumped in. “The two women clearly knew each other.”
“What did the message say?” Jamie MacIntosh asked.
“It was a taunt, basically,” Walton replied. “‘You guys will never catch me. I’m going to outsmart you just like Tracy Whitney did. I’ll bet you Tracy could find me. Why don’t you have Agent Buck call her in …’ That kind of stuff. She clearly knew Tracy, but it was more than that. She knew the agency’s history with Tracy. She knew that Agent Buck had had dealings with her.”
Pulsuz fraqment bitdi.
