Zero 22, p.5
Zero 22, page 5
part #8 of Danny Black Series
The CO handed a sheaf of photographs over the table. They were scene-of-crime pictures and they were grotesque. One showed a corpse bound to a pole with a cable tie round his neck, his ears missing, blood streaking down the sides of his face. Another showed a dead man on a bed in the position of a crucifix, fingers removed and lying on his chest, blood blooming into the bedclothes from his butchered hands. A third picture – the worst – showed a male body with a cut throat and the genitals removed.
Danny had seen these pictures before. He put them down on the table. ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,’ he said.
He knew that these killings were the handiwork of the former MI6 agent Bethany White. The victims were ex-SAS, and Bethany had taken them out in a bloody spree of anger and revenge. She would have killed Danny if she’d had the chance. It was only because her kid had begged her not to that Danny was still alive. ‘You’re insane. She’ll never do it. She’s got you over a fucking barrel.’
This was true. Bethany White had hard documentary evidence of British war crimes. Copies were secretly stashed with various lawyers around the world. She’d made it very clear that if anything ever happened to her or her son, the lawyers would release the evidence to the world.
‘It may be true,’ Sturrock said, a hint of self-satisfaction in his voice, ‘that at one time Bethany White had some leverage. That time has passed. She made it particularly hard to track down the lawyers she’d engaged, but we managed it. The guardians of her precious so-called evidence have been dealt with.’
The phrase ‘dealt with’ had a note of finality about it. Danny didn’t probe any further. ‘There’s still no reason why she should do what you ask her,’ he said. ‘She fucking hates you. She hates all of us. Plus, she’s a psycho.’
‘I can’t disagree with you there,’ Sturrock said. ‘But you’re quite wrong in other respects. Bethany White will do as she’s told. We’ve arranged some leverage of our own.’
‘Yesterday afternoon,’ Attwood said, ‘an SBS team abducted her son. I believe he’s also called Danny?’
‘Yeah,’ Danny said. ‘He is.’ And though he would never have admitted, nor even let it show in his face, he felt a moment of queasiness. No matter what Bethany White’s faults – and they were many – her boy was a good kid. Dragging him into the mess? Danny didn’t like it.
‘The boy’s being held in a secure location,’ Sturrock continued. ‘He’s safe, he’s well looked after. Rather better looked after than he was with his mother, I should think.’
‘Does Bethany know?’
He nodded grimly. ‘Her reaction was extreme.’
‘I bet it was,’ Danny muttered. There was an awkward silence, then Danny shook his head. ‘This doesn’t add up,’ he said. ‘There are other ways to deal with O’Brien. Why does it have to be Bethany White?’
Sturrock looked at the two military men. It looked like he didn’t want to articulate whatever was coming next. It was Attwood who took over. ‘Let’s be plain,’ he said. ‘We’re green-lighting a British op to take out an American five-star general. The fallout is potentially catastrophic. It’s all very well doing the Yanks a favour, but who’s to say they won’t use our complicity against us at some time in the future? If that happens, it either compromises the assassin, or it gives them a great deal of leverage over us. It’s much better if, once the job is complete, the assassin is taken out of the picture.’
And suddenly, it all became clear to Danny. ‘You want me to kill Bethany White when she’s done it. You want to use her because she’s ruthless and expendable.’
‘More than expendable,’ Sturrock said. ‘She’s a rogue MI6 agent and she has intel that cannot enter the public domain.’ He pressed his fingers together once more. ‘Like I said, three birds with one stone.’
Again, silence. It was Danny who broke it. ‘What about the kid?’ he said.
‘He will be well looked after,’ Sturrock said. ‘We have the budget for it. He’ll be re-homed in a more stable environment. To be perfectly honest with you, the outcome will be much better for him. Once he’s got over the initial distress of losing his mother, of course.’
‘You reckon?’ He couldn’t help thinking of his own daughter Rose. The daughter he seldom saw. Was his absence the best outcome for her too?
The three men were staring at him. There was no sense that they were waiting for his agreement. Danny had been a soldier for long enough to understand that was not how it worked. They were waiting for an acknowledgement that he understood his orders. ‘Just to be clear: you want me to babysit Bethany White on a mission to assassinate General O’Brien. When it’s done, you want me to kill her.’
‘It’s more than babysitting,’ Attwood said. ‘Of course you need to make sure that she does what she’s told. But getting her into Jordan isn’t straightforward.’
‘For obvious reasons,’ Sturrock said, ‘we’ve wanted to keep tabs on her movements. She’ll be pinged at any border with facial recognition technology. It means we don’t want her making a standard border entry into Jordan. You’ll have to get her in covertly.’
‘We’re proposing a tandem HALO,’ said the CO. ‘We’ll get you into the Jordanian desert and you can make your way cross country into Amman. Once you’re there, we’ll have counterfeit IDs and press passes waiting. We’ll arrange for you to be on the press list for access to the hotel where O’Brien is staying. Our intelligence suggests that his routine is to go to the hotel bar every evening at 18.00 hours sharp for a cocktail. That’s where you’ll need to make contact. Get the job done and get her out of there and out of Amman.’
‘We don’t need to worry about getting her out of the country, of course,’ Sturrock said. His self-satisfied smile had returned.
‘What’s the timescale?’ Danny said.
‘O’Brien is already in Amman,’ said the CO. ‘The drop happens tonight.’
‘Where’s Bethany now?’
‘On her way to Brize Norton,’ said Sturrock. ‘By all accounts, she’s making rather a nuisance of herself.’
‘No shit,’ Danny muttered.
‘A van’s waiting for you,’ the CO said. ‘Check out anything you need from the armoury.’ He pushed a folder of documents across the table. ‘That’s your target pack. It has your movement orders, details of the location of the hotel in Amman where the General’s staying, everything you need to know. The rest is up to you.’
Danny nodded, stood and left the room.
The door clicked shut. Sturrock, Attwood and Williamson remained silent for a full minute.
‘Can he be trusted?’ Sturrock said finally.
‘You asked us that once before,’ Attwood said. ‘I think it’s safe to say that Danny Black has proved himself.’
‘Frankly, Sturrock, I’m surprised he sat in the same room as you for so long,’ said the CO. Another long pause. ‘We should have told him that Bethany White’s little boy is dead.’
Both Attwood and Sturrock shook their heads. A rare moment of solidarity between them. ‘The boy’s the only leverage we have over White,’ said Sturrock. ‘If she finds out he’s dead, we have nothing over her.’ He coughed. ‘It’s all very tragic, of course,’ he added.
‘He’s right, Mike,’ said Attwood. ‘We can’t risk Black letting it slip.’
‘Danny Black’s a professional,’ said the CO.
‘Agreed,’ said Attwood. ‘But he’s also a decent guy beneath it all. Not always an advantage, in situations like this.’
Nobody had anything to say to that. The three men collected their papers and left the room.
FOUR
London, 10.00 hrs, GMT
Alice Goodenough was married to her job. All her friends said so. But they didn’t know what her job was.
They thought they did. Something boring and desk-bound in the civil service that kept her in the office way past six o’clock. It was a big joke that she was always too late to get a round in. As long as she smiled and joined in on the joke, nobody asked what had kept her.
Alice was twenty-nine. They’d recruited her at a university careers fair. She thought her degree in Russian Language and Literature might lead her into the Foreign Office, so had chatted with a bookish civil servant. No, he had assured her. Being a woman of colour would not impede her application in any way. He encouraged her to put her name and email address down on a clipboard list. She received an invitation to come in for an ‘informal chat’ the next day. It took place in a bland office near Victoria Station. One chat led to another, and another. Gradually it became clear to Alice that she was being recruited into something more interesting than the civil service.
Alice accepted the need for secrecy. In the seven years she had worked at the MI6 building in Vauxhall, she never told her friends or even her widowed mother, who lived in a council flat in Peckham, what she really did for a living. She sometimes wondered what would happen if she found herself in a serious relationship. Would she be able to keep the secret then? That was academic anyway. Yes, Alice Goodenough was truly married to her job.
And she was good at it. Very good. She had an enquiring mind and an eye for detail. It could make her unpopular. Hers was not a workplace where young black women from poor backgrounds were expected, or even intended, to thrive. She endured all the usual slurs, racist and sexist. The pale, male and stale contingent – the PMS, as she liked to think of them – routinely raised their eyebrows at her south London accent. As for the coloured strands in her braided hair, her elaborately painted nails and the tiny stud in her nose: Alice stood out in the offices of MI6. People stared and talked behind her back. She ignored all this as best she could, and concentrated on her work.
Right now, her work involved research into an FSB agent called Dmitri Poliakov.
The assignment came from the top. Alice could practically hear the muttering from the PMS contingent when she was summoned to the fifth floor to see the head of the Russian desk, Maxwell Stark. Stark was a powerful guy, second only to the Chief, the odious Sturrock. You wouldn’t have thought it to look at him. He was a tubby old-timer in his late sixties with eyebrows so bushy Alice wanted to reach for the tweezers every time she saw him. He wore thick-rimmed spectacles that often looked as though they needed a good clean. And he had a helpless addiction to extra strong mints. The tang of peppermint accompanied him at all times, and his teeth were shocking. Stark was a mild-mannered old boy, though. He wielded his authority lightly and treated Alice with respect. He clearly saw something in her. He asked her opinion on important matters when he didn’t need to and listened carefully to her replies. If he was male and pale, perhaps he wasn’t quite so stale as some of the others.
The brief was concise. ‘We’ll be needing every last bit of intel you can find on an FSB agent called Dmitri Poliakov, especially in respect to any contact he may have had with the American General Frank O’Brien. We think O’Brien’s dirty. Would you be okay with that, Alice? That’s very good of you. Needless to say, we can’t allow this to go any further.’
Alice fully understood. A five-star general on the Russian books? In her world, that was as big as it could be. The need for secrecy was obvious. Equally obvious was that putting Alice on the job was a vote of confidence in her abilities. If she worked this case well, there might be a promotion. That, she thought, would silence the PMS contingent for good.
Stark briefed her more fully about the reasons for this research. She learned about a disastrous SAS mission in north-eastern Syria. Thirteen men dead at the hands of a Russian paramilitary force. He showed her the transcript of a recording made by the CIA in Crete between O’Brien and Poliakov that incriminated the American general. And she knew not to ask too many questions when Stark said, ‘The O’Brien situation is being dealt with.’ His statement had an air of impropriety about it, and Alice was smart enough not to probe further. Her job was to do some digging on Poliakov. Nothing more.
Alice had a small office – more of a cupboard, really – on the fourth floor overlooking the train line into Waterloo. River views were not for people like her. It was neat and adequate for her needs. She sat at her desk. To one side was a laptop displaying a screensaver image of a Caribbean beach. She had a file open in front of her, fresh from the records office in the basement. Her index finger guided her eyes down the page as she read. She felt she had a good idea of who Poliakov was already.
Born 3 September 1970. Father: an intelligence analyst for the KGB. Mother: no job listed. Married to Alexa, a florist in Moscow, with two children, one boy, one girl, Ivan and Sophia. Poliakov had been a known field operative for at least fifteen years and likely been working for Russian Intelligence for much longer than that. He’d been active, so far as MI6 knew, in Georgia, Ukraine and South America. Alice studied a picture of him meeting with a contact in a Bogota cafe in 1998. He was a handsome man, or at least he had been then. Short black hair, an aquiline nose, a mole on his left cheek, heavy stubble and – according to this photo at least – a charming smile. Charm was the most important attribute in an intelligence officer working in the field. You couldn’t learn it. Charm was either there or it wasn’t. Alice continued to look through the file. Here was Poliakov in Rio de Janeiro. Here he was in Tbilisi. Here he was with his wife and kids waving at the camera under the Eiffel Tower.
Nothing in the file suggested that Poliakov was an especially important or successful FSB agent. He had recruited a minor Dutch member of the European Parliament and had been responsible for spreading some low-level misinformation about elements in the Gilets Jaunes in Paris. Alice wasn’t fooled. She had learned, back in her days on the council estate, that the criminals to fear were not the famous, showy ones who had spent more time inside than out, but the quiet, clever ones. The ones the police could never pin anything on. So it was with spies. A thin file didn’t necessarily suggest a lack of activity. Sometimes it just meant they were good.
Was Poliakov good? It was impossible to say from the information available. But if he’d been assigned contact with General O’Brien, the smart money was surely on him being higher up the tree than his file suggested. She kept this in mind as she continued to work her way through it. She found copies of his children’s school reports, and the transcript of a Skype conversation between his wife and her mother in Kiev. There was an unconfirmed report from an agent in Moscow that he had a penchant for cocaine. Someone had written, in red pen, the word ‘Blackmail?’, and circled it twice.
Then, at the back of the file, she found something interesting.
It was a one-page report from a British agent she knew well. His name was Mark Cawley and he worked under diplomatic cover at the British Embassy in Moscow. He was a sleazy old dinosaur, but his information was usually reliable. She read his memo greedily. It was dated just two days ago and reported a rumour that Dmitri Poliakov had been missing for one week. Ordinarily, this would not merit any kind of comment. Poliakov could be anywhere, for any reason. He was a spy, after all. However, his wife and two children were also missing. And for anybody who knew anything about Russia, that was alarming. The families of FSB agents were protected citizens, but only for so long as the agent was in favour. If the agent messed up in any way, the family could expect to pay a price.
Alice put the file down and stared out of the window over the train tracks. A South Western service trundled by, glinting in the bright sunshine. She thought it through. Poliakov was General O’Brien’s point man. But he’d messed up. He’d been spotted with the General in Crete, their conversation overheard. Did the Russians know this? If so, they would most certainly want to eliminate Poliakov. So, was he still alive? Was his family still alive?
So many questions, impossible to answer from a broom cupboard in Vauxhall. She picked up her work phone.
It was a regular smartphone, but with a dedicated app for making encrypted calls. She used it to dial Mark Cawley in Moscow. He answered quickly.
‘Cawley,’ he said. He had the affable, patrician voice of British diplomats all over the world.
‘Mark, it’s Alice. From the Office.’
‘What can I do you for, Alice?’
‘You can speak openly?’
‘As openly as anyone can speak in Moscow, my dear.’
Alice let the ‘my dear’ pass. ‘I’m looking at your communication regarding Dmitri Poliakov.’
‘Yes,’ said Cawley. He elongated the word. Yeeeessss. ‘I have an intelligence source who is a friend of his. He’s rather unreliable, to be honest. Bit too fond of the old Stolichnaya. Told me about Poliakov and his family after a sherbert too many. Didn’t think it would be of much interest, if I’m honest.’
‘Can you find out more?’ Alice said. ‘Is he still missing? Do we have any idea of his whereabouts?’
‘Of course, my dear. Might it be important?’
‘Just putting my ducks in a row, Mark.’ She made a face. It was the sort of thing the PMS contingent said, but she used it now because this was Cawley’s language. ‘Could you make it a priority? I’ve got the fifth floor breathing down my neck.’
‘Say no more,’ Cawley said. ‘And maybe we could have a spot of lunch next time I’m over?’
Alice made a sour face. ‘That would be super, Mark,’ she said. ‘You’ll call me as soon as you know anything?’
‘The very moment, my dear.’
The line went dead.
FIVE
Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. 05.00 hrs, Eastern Standard Time
Hamoud Al Asmar’s sheets were soaked in sweat every morning when he woke. Today his thin, boney, naked body was clammy, the mattress uncomfortably damp.
At least he hadn’t woken to the sound of his own screams. That happened two or three times a week, and it made him feel bad all day. Not bad for himself, but for his wife, Rabia, and his children, Malick and Melissa. It distressed them terribly to hear their father in such anguish. No matter how often he tried to persuade them that it was just a silly bad dream, that it was really nothing to worry about, that he was absolutely fine, they never believed him. Why would they? They weren’t stupid.
