Zero 22, p.21
Zero 22, page 21
part #8 of Danny Black Series
Ordinarily, Danny’s strategy would be to manoeuvre a vehicle as safely and calmly as possible. All that Lewis Hamilton shit was for wankers. But right now, he needed speed. There could still be more shooters in the vicinity. A single bullet in a tyre and they’d be in even more trouble than they were now. They were still in the centre of the city and they needed to get out as quickly as possible. One hand on the wheel, he slammed his free fist on the horn to clear the way of the few stray pedestrians ahead of him, then accelerated up through the gears. Average speed down a narrow street like this? Maybe twenty miles per hour. Danny hit fifty and continued to accelerate. In his rear-view mirror he could see the General looking behind them.
‘Get down!’ Danny shouted. ‘Get out of sight!’
The General did as he was told, crouching down in the back seat. Just in time. A bullet hit the rear window. The glass splintered but remained whole. Bethany lowered her sitting position to protect herself. ‘Stay down!’ Danny shouted, and he kept his foot on the accelerator.
The road bent round to the right. Danny followed it with just the faintest whisper on the brake pedal. Blue emergency lights came into view. A police vehicle, blocking the road at right angles. Distance: forty metres. He slammed the brakes and pulled a hard left into a side street. The rear tyres lost traction, but he went with it and was back in control in a moment. He heard sirens and knew that the police vehicle was making chase.
‘You just killed two men,’ the General shouted from the back. ‘The police get us, we ain’t getting out of Amman this side of Christmas.’
Danny didn’t reply. The General was stating the obvious, and anyway, he needed to focus on the road. The side street continued for fifty metres before emerging on to another busy thoroughfare where the traffic, mercifully, was moving. Danny slammed the brakes, then merged more sedately on to the thoroughfare. He was sweating profusely and he could hear Bethany breathing hard. The General sat up. He looked back at the cracked window rather gingerly, then faced forwards again. ‘I think you owe me a goddamn explanation,’ he said.
‘Quiet,’ Danny said. With one hand on the wheel he located his phone and dialled in to Hereford.
‘Go ahead.’
‘We have him. We’re still in central Amman but we’re heading out.’ He didn’t mention Turgenev.
‘Make for your original drop zone. We’re sending in a stealth chopper to pick you up at 04.00 hours. Does that give you enough time?’
Time check: 20.37 hrs. He estimated they had forty miles to travel, and some of that was off road.
‘Roger that.’
He killed the line and dropped the phone into his lap.
‘I said,’ the General repeated, ‘you owe me a goddamn explanation. That crazy bitch was one cut away from killing me.’
‘Call me that again, lover boy, and I’ll finish the job.’
‘Cut it out,’ Danny said. He realised he had to choose his next words carefully. The message from Hereford had been cryptic. Tell him that we know about Poliakov and the deepfakes. When he’d said it, O’Brien had become immediately compliant. But what the hell did it mean? ‘I’m getting you out of Jordan,’ he said. ‘Right now. But you have to tell me everything about Poliakov.’
‘Tough shit, soldier,’ the General said. ‘That’s need to know, and you don’t need to know.’
Danny glanced in the rear-view mirror. The General looked like he meant what he said. Through the cracked rear window, he saw the distant glare of flashing blue neon. ‘The Amman police are on high alert,’ he said. ‘Easiest thing in the world for me to pull over right here, wait for them to catch us up.’
‘What are you, stupid?’
‘I just saved your life, pal, a couple of times over. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that means I give a shit about you. We pull over now, I like my chances of getting away better than I like yours.’
‘Don’t be an idiot.’
‘For a guy who had his dick hanging out half an hour ago,’ Bethany said, ‘he’s got a gob on him.’
‘Just tell me about Poliakov,’ Danny said, changing lanes to get ahead more quickly. ‘I can’t guarantee your safety, so if you have intel that needs sharing, now’s the time to share it.’
A moment of silence. O’Brien frowned. Taciturn. Unsure of himself. He looked back at the neon light. ‘Fine,’ he said, with great reluctance. ‘I’ll tell you about Poliakov.’
SEVENTEEN
‘Poliakov’s an FSB agent, but I guess you know that, right?’ The General didn’t wait for Danny to confirm or deny. ‘He came to me with certain information.’
‘Wait,’ Danny said. ‘He came to you?’
‘That’s what I said, Einstein. He was blowing the whistle on the Russians. Hard intel about the Kremlin’s collusion with the Oval Office. It’s hardly a secret that I’m no fan of the President, so he figured I was the guy to approach. He figured right.’
‘No,’ Danny said. The General was obviously lying. ‘I read a transcript of your conversation with Poliakov in Crete. You gave him intel on the movements of the Zero 22 unit in Syria. I read it with my own eyes.’
‘You read it wrong. Or you read what somebody wanted you to read. Zero 22 was the SAS operation, right? Poliakov told me the Russians were going to ambush it and that they’d had the intel from the White House. I couldn’t act on that information. If I had, if I’d warned the British, the Kremlin and the White House would have known there was a leak. Couldn’t do it. Poliakov’s intel was too big. Had to accept that there’d be some collateral damage.’
‘That collateral was my unit mates,’ Danny said. It was a task to keep his voice level.
Silence.
‘You were on the op that was compromised in Syria?’ the General said.
Danny nodded.
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ the General said. He spoke the platitude with a bland expression.
‘That all you can say?’
‘What’s your name?’ the General asked.
Danny didn’t reply.
‘I’m a goddamn five-star general in the United States Army. You think I can’t find out your name?’
‘Danny Black.’
‘Okay, Danny Black. In case you didn’t notice, I just lost three good men to a couple of Russian hoods. They’ve got wives and families, too. Not to mention that this psychopathic bitch was a split second away from killing me. So spare me the victim act, huh? Truth is, Poliakov’s intel is bigger than all of us. If I had to compromise Zero 22 again, or put my men in the line of fire, I’d do it.’
Danny breathed deeply. Felt the air travel into his lungs and back out again. Forced himself to stay calm because he knew anger was no use to him. ‘So what was it?’ he said.
‘Poliakov’s intel?’
‘Right.’
‘The deepfakes,’ the General said, as if that explained everything. Danny glanced at him in the rear-view mirror and saw that he was smiling. ‘You don’t know about the deepfakes, right? You were just passing on a message from London.’
The bustle of Amman was all around them, but they were on a fast-moving northbound flyover. There was no sign of police and no indication that they were being followed yet Danny couldn’t relax. ‘The Regiment is picking us up in the desert,’ he said. ‘Close to the Israeli border. We’re going to have half the Jordanian police force looking for us, not to mention the Wagner Group. I’m going to do my best to get you out of here alive, but there’s no guarantees. If this intel is so important, you should tell me what it is now, in case you don’t make it out.’
‘You’re a smart guy, Danny Black. I’ve met a few of you boys from Hereford and I can’t say the same for all of them.’ He leaned back in his seat, and all of a sudden he was no longer a scared target fleeing from danger. He was the alpha male who had wasted no time hitting on Bethany in the hotel bar. It occurred to Danny that it took a special kind of self-confidence to go from being naked, tied up and humiliated to this. O’Brien was not a guy to let stuff get in his way. He cleared his throat. ‘Collusion between the Oval Office and the Kremlin, that’s no big story, right? The Russians helped the President get elected in the first place, they encouraged him to withdraw support from NATO and Europe. Sure, we haven’t seen a smoking gun, but we all know it’s been happening.’
Danny said nothing. He was a soldier, not a politician.
‘What we didn’t know, what nobody knows, at least not publicly, is the extent of it. Our president has developed a taste for power. I guess that when you have more money than you can spend in several lifetimes, your appetites become more rarefied. Fortunately for the United States, the founding fathers predicted just such an eventuality. They wove certain checks and balances into the US constitution. No president of the United States is permitted to serve more than two four-year terms.’
The General obviously liked the sound of his own voice. But he was talking, that was the main thing. Danny kept quiet and let him continue.
‘Of course, you tell an autocrat that he’s not allowed to do something, you can be pretty certain he’ll start trying to find a way to do it, right? Look at that ex-KGB jackal in the Kremlin. The moment his tenure as president comes to an end, he fixes his sights on the post of prime minister and starts increasing the scope of prime ministerial authority. He frames it as the will of the people. It’s how tyrants work. Bit by bit, they chip away at the structures intended to prevent the abuse of executive power. Bit by bit, they whip the people up into a frenzy of paranoia. They tell them that their livelihoods and their safety are under threat by external forces. Think Hitler and the Jews. They persuade them that the only solution is more authoritarianism. It’s a seductive message. It works. History tells us that the result is never happy.’
‘Poliakov,’ Danny reminded him.
The General nodded. ‘Poliakov’s your regular FSB careerist. But when he found out what the Kremlin and the Oval Office were plotting, it was too rich even for his Russian blood. He came to me because he knew I was a vocal critic of the President, and because I might be in a position to do something about it.’
‘About what?’
The General pointed at Bethany. ‘Can she be trusted?’ he said.
Bethany was staring straight ahead. She showed no sign that she was even listening to the General, nor did she react to his question in any way. ‘Yeah,’ Danny said. A short answer, because the long one was complicated and couldn’t be spoken out loud.
‘Okay then. This is what I believe to be happening. The Oval Office is planning what I can best describe as a right-wing coup. To do that, the President needs a scapegoat, and the Kremlin is helping him make one. There will be a terror attack. My understanding is that it will take place on the fourth of July. That’s an important day for us Americans. Independence Day, right? A terror attack on the fourth of July is like, I don’t know, bombing Buckingham Palace on the Queen’s birthday. It’s an affront to all patriots. And patriots, or at least those who make a song and dance about how damn patriotic they are, they’re the President’s base. They’re the ones who will be most outraged, and most susceptible to what comes next.’
‘I don’t get it,’ Danny said. ‘If the Americans know there’s going to be an attack, what are they doing to stop it?’
‘You’re not listening, soldier. They don’t want to stop it. They’re making it happen. They’re actively manipulating known jihadists. Funding them. Planning the whole damn thing. And then, when the outrage is at its highest, and the President has addressed his rallies, and the crowd are baying for Muslim blood, that’s when they release the deepfakes.’
‘What are the deepfakes?’
‘Video footage of the President’s political rivals meeting with known terror suspects. He has form, right? Smearing his rivals, any means necessary. But this takes it to the next level. The meetings are fakes. They take totally innocent footage of totally innocent meetings between the President’s rivals and ordinary folk, and they map the faces of terror suspects on to the images. It’s completely convincing. You wouldn’t know the difference. Even the top tech guys analysing the footage wouldn’t be able to tell it’s a deepfake. So, the Oval Office makes this footage public and the narrative writes itself. The liberals and left-wingers are hopelessly compromised, they’ll say. There’s an existential threat to the United States, they’ll say. It requires a change in the constitution to give the President a firm hand, they’ll say. You ever seen one of those goddamn rallies of his? Well I have, and trust me, he whips those people up. They get this idea in their head, they’ll never let it go. It’ll happen.’
‘I don’t get where the Russians come in,’ Danny said.
‘They made the deepfakes.’ It was Bethany who spoke, not the General. She was still looking straight ahead and her voice was emotionless. ‘When I was working at MI6, we knew about it. They’ve been on to the potential of deepfake technology for a long time now. It’s a natural extension of the way the Kremlin thinks. Fake news, electoral interference, social-media manipulation. We thought they were developing the technology for blackmail purposes. We were wrong.’
‘But why the Russians? Why would they be doing this?’
‘Isn’t it obvious? The President is their puppet. They can’t believe their luck. They’re pulling the strings of the man in the Oval Office. They want him in there as long as possible.’
‘Right,’ said the General. ‘And if I know the President – which I do, unfortunately – he’ll be quite certain this is all his great idea, and completely oblivious to the fact that he’s been totally played. And I guess I don’t need to tell you what a threat it is to global security to have a Russian stooge in the White House?’
‘No,’ Danny said. He was thinking of poisonings on the streets of the UK. He was thinking of the horrors he’d seen in Syria. He was thinking of the Wagner Group, and Turgenev. ‘You don’t have to tell me that.’
They were doing a steady thirty miles per hour along a northbound dual carriageway. The lights of Amman glowed all around them. The traffic was fluid and the dual carriageway well lit. He checked his mirrors, making a mental note of the cars surrounding them. Then he said, ‘The fragment of conversation between you and Poliakov that ended up with MI6 . . .’
‘Doctored to fit their narrative,’ the General said. ‘Look, I don’t know what MI6 and Hereford have been told, but the fact they sent you two to assassinate me means they’re playing you Brits as if they were the goddamn New York Philharmonic.’
‘It means they know you’re on to them.’
‘Not necessarily. He’s got other reasons to want me out of the way.’
‘What reasons?’
‘You think a coup like this happens by itself? Who does every tinpot dictator in every banana republic need on side before they make a power grab?’
And immediately it became clear. ‘The army,’ Danny said.
‘Right. And you know what? In the US military, the President is pretty popular. Talks the talk, finds the funding, and he’s developing a taste for battle. But he’s got one big pain in the ass.’
‘You?’
‘Me. Without my support, it’s hard for him to keep the military on side. He’d like to get rid of me, but I’m a tough guy to fire, even for him. He’d face a revolt from the joint chiefs for a start. I’ve been expecting some dirty tricks to oust me so he can install one of his own in my place. I was on the lookout for it. I didn’t expect this.’
‘And by making the British complicit in your assassination, it keeps us quiet if we ever find out what’s really going on.’
‘Like I said, New York Philharmonic. And if you fail to finish the job, the Wagner Group are on site to finish it for you, as you say. Thanks for dealing with those guys, by the way.’
I haven’t finished dealing with them, Danny wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead, he responded to the General’s acknowledgement with a curt ‘You’re welcome.’ He slowed down as they approached a large roundabout. Danny circled it three times, maintaining his vigilance of the vehicles around him, checking for trails. He saw none. He left the roundabout and accelerated back up to thirty. ‘So the fourth of July attacks happen and you go on CNN to say the President was behind them,’ he said. ‘You’ll get laughed out of town.’
‘Sure. Unless I have evidence.’
‘Do you?’
‘I have the footage. Before and after. The raw material and the deepfake. Look at it side by side, nobody’s going to be in any doubt about what’s going on.’
‘So you do what? Let the attacks happen? Let the President release the deepfakes and then out him?’ He couldn’t hide the distaste in his voice. ‘More collateral?’
‘No,’ the General said. ‘Military targets are one thing. Civilian targets, that’s a whole other can of worms.’
‘So what’s your tactic?’
‘A pre-emptive strike. I release the footage in advance. Use whatever weight my name and authority carry to accuse the President of planning a coup.’
‘But nobody’s going to believe you,’ Danny said. ‘The President will deny it. Straight out. It’ll give him an excuse to remove you from office. You’ll be totally discredited.’
‘Discredited? I’ll be more than discredited. I’ll be a laughing stock. Paranoid. A fantasist. It’ll be the end of my career. But it’ll stop him doing it, right? Guy can hardly deny the whole thing and then go through with it. And deep down, the man’s a coward. Trust me. I’ve sat in a room with him. Looked him in the eye. He’s a draft dodger. Spends his life blaming other people for his own mistakes. If he knows someone’s on to him, perhaps he’ll think twice before trying something like this again.’
