Black List (11 page)

In the end it took Mitchell nearly two hours to find the small, isolated farm compound where the three operatives had been killed. Despite having a top-of-the-line GPS stuck to her windshield, she had twice gotten lost on the winding no-name country roads, much to her frustration.

One thing she would never understand about the UK was the ridiculous road system, which seemed to have been dreamed up by some lunatic a thousand years earlier and had remained unchanged ever since. She supposed the rolling fields and hedges interspersed with small stretches of woodland must have made for pleasant Sunday driving, but it was a nightmare for anyone trying to get somewhere in a hurry.

Her mood wasn’t helped by the pounding headache that still plagued her, though she did her best to push it aside as she pulled her car to a stop outside the barn that seemed to be the centre of activity.

Security teams had already established a discreet but airtight perimeter around the entire area, sealing off every road in or out, and posting operatives on vantage points overlooking the surrounding farmland. Nobody would get near this place without them knowing.

There were no British police or security forces present. They knew that an incident had occurred here last night, just as they knew about most Agency activities in the UK, but the parties usually operated on a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ principle. They didn’t ask what went on in places like this, just as the US government didn’t ask what the Brits did at similar sites in North America.

It was a mutually beneficial arrangement that neatly skirted the uncomfortable issue of both countries sanctioning the kidnapping and torture of their own citizens.

She had barely killed the engine when a young man in civilian clothes emerged from the barn and approached her car with the long, purposeful strides of someone used to having things happen his way. Vincent Argento, her junior comrade in the Agency’s criminal investigation team, looked every inch the Italian-American poster boy. Tall, lean and good-looking, with jet black hair and olive-coloured skin, he walked with the confidence that only handsome young men in their prime seemed to possess.

‘Christ, you stop for breakfast on the way?’ he asked as Mitchell emerged blinking into the bright sunlight. In stark contrast to her dark mood the weather was annoyingly good – a rare enough thing in England.

Mitchell gave him a harsh look. ‘Remarks like that won’t get you in my good graces.’ She glanced towards the barn, guessing the bodies were inside. ‘Tell me what you’ve got.’

He led her towards the cavernous structure, giving her a brief overview as they walked. ‘Three men – one in the truck, the other two on the ground nearby. All experienced operatives and all armed, killed at close range with the same bladed weapon, most likely a field knife. No sign of their killers, or the man they were sent to recover.’

Mitchell frowned. Anyone who could take out three armed Agency field operatives at close quarters was clearly not to be fucked with. A team working in close cooperation might have accomplished such a task, but why use knives? Knives were messy and unreliable – certainly not an efficient means of killing people.

Entering the darkened space within, they were just in time to watch one of the victims being loaded into a black plastic body bag. His throat had been cut to such an extent that the windpipe had been completely severed, leaving behind a yawning gap of torn and bloody flesh. Mitchell said nothing to this.

Argento glanced at her, guessing her thoughts. ‘Not a pretty sight, huh?’

‘Never is,’ she remarked quietly, forcing her mind back into analytical mode. ‘Tell me about their target.’

Argento handed her a small dossier that had been prepared on the subject. ‘Alex Yates, twenty-eight years old. He’s a sales assistant based in London.’

Mitchell surveyed the file briefly. The picture on the front cover, likely lifted from Yates’s passport, depicted a distinctly average-looking young man in his mid twenties. Even features, scruffy light brown hair, pale complexion with a hint of stubble, and eyes that were somewhere between blue and grey in colour.

‘Why’s the Agency so interested in him?’

Argento flashed a brief smile. ‘Young Alex there used to be quite the cyber hell-raiser. Ran a software security outfit by day while hacking secure networks by night. Then he got caught by the Brits trying to hack a government database, did a couple of years inside before being paroled. Seems he’s back to his winning ways, because last night our cyber-crime unit detected him trying to hack into the Agency’s network. Local police arrested him without much trouble, and we sent a field team to bring him in. We know they made it as far as the police station where he was being held, but after that, they went dark.’ He gestured around them. ‘You can guess the rest.’

‘This one was off the books,’ Mitchell surmised, thinking about the long winding roads that had brought her here. The nearest village had to be a good two or three miles distant. ‘They didn’t want any tape recorders or witnesses.’

Argento arched a dark brow. ‘That’s against protocol.’

‘Depends whose protocol they were following.’

In reality this kind of thing went on more often than anyone was willing to admit. Mitchell herself had taken part in more than a few ‘field interrogations’ as an Army CID officer, either due to time constraints or because the subject matter was sensitive enough to warrant it. If these three men had brought Yates here to interrogate him as some kind of black operation, she was willing to bet they had done it on some higher authority.

Argento said nothing to that, and Mitchell didn’t follow it up. Such things were mere supposition at this stage; what she needed were hard facts and an understanding of what exactly had happened out here.

‘So they bring Yates out here and strap him to a chair so they can start their interrogation,’ she said, indicating the wooden chair standing in the centre of the concrete expanse, which she was quite certain hadn’t been placed there by chance. ‘Before they can finish, they’re hit by an unknown number of assailants who take out all three men, free Yates and evac him.’

The younger man nodded. ‘That fits with what we’ve found. Their trail leads outside, cuts through a small wood to a dirt track about half a mile from here. Seems they had a car waiting.’

‘Any idea of the make and model?’

‘Hard to tell, but the wheel spacing’s too small to be an SUV. Probably a hatchback of some kind. Tyre marks suggest a front-wheel drive.’

Mitchell pursed her lips, considering what he’d said. Such a vehicle was hardly ideal for the bumpy, uneven roads in this part of the world. Then again, a knife was far from a perfect weapon to take down three armed men either.

‘I want to see the bodies.’

With Argento close behind, Mitchell made her way over to the line of body bags, helped herself to a pair of surgical gloves from a box placed there by the forensics teams, then unzipped the first bag and bent close to examine the occupant. The sight of blood and death didn’t frighten her; she’d seen more than enough of both in her life to have become numbed to it. The only thing that concerned her was the manner of death.

There were three stab wounds that she could identify. The first two were in the upper abdomen, angled upwards to pierce the lungs without the danger of fouling the blade between two ribs. Either stab wound would probably have proven fatal as air from the torn lung filled the chest cavity, slowly suffocating the victim.

However, it was the third wound that had dealt the finishing blow. On the left side, just below the armpit. A single deep thrust, angled perfectly to slide between two ribs and straight into the heart, probably severing both the left and right ventricles and causing catastrophic damage to the cluster of vital arteries near the top.

This was no frenzied knife attack by a desperate killer, but a series of precise, almost surgical strikes calculated to cause maximum damage with the fewest number of thrusts. Not many people were that handy with a blade.

‘I can’t understand the MO here,’ Argento went on. ‘The killings themselves look like the work of a serial killer – all up-close and bloody – but an extraction like this had to be done by a pro. It’s like they’re trying to misdirect us.’

Mitchell wasn’t so sure. Most killings were a matter of necessity rather than desire, and somehow she couldn’t imagine a serial killer choosing to target a group of armed men. No, there was a more fundamental explanation for this.

‘Or they were forced to improvise,’ she suggested, the disparate pieces of information slowly coalescing into a more rational chain of events in her mind. ‘When Yates was lifted, they tracked him out here in whatever vehicle they had available, and took down the Agency field team protecting him. They used a knife because they didn’t have time to get their hands on a better weapon. Then they high-tailed it out of here in the same car.’

‘If they did all this as a scratch operation, I’d hate to think what they could do if they were properly prepared,’ Argento mused.

Mitchell preferred not to dwell too long on that.

‘I want to take a look at the tracks,’ she decided instead.

Pausing only a moment, Argento led her outside.

It wasn’t hard to pick up the trail, especially for Mitchell. She’d done her share of tracking in the military, and one set of prints in particular was easy to pick out.

‘Nike trainers,’ she said, indicating the distinctive brand symbol that had been imprinted into the soft ground at regular intervals. The steps were awkward, the trail winding, and in one or two places she noticed a disturbance in the undergrowth where someone had blundered right through it. ‘That’ll be Yates.’

‘You noticed, huh?’ Argento remarked with a smirk.

‘Even 
you
 could follow these tracks,’ she countered without looking up.

The other trail however couldn’t have been more different.

‘His friend’s a whole other story. They had a real serious ghost-walk going on,’ Mitchell carried on, creeping forward with her eyes firmly fixed on the ground.

In her mind she could already imagine Yates stumbling through the darkened woods, trying to keep up with a far more confident and capable accomplice.

‘Weight distributed to the outside of the feet, even pressure with each footfall, minimal ground disturbance...’ She paused a moment, struck by a sudden realisation. ‘Whoever she is, I bet she’s had military training.’

Argento glanced at her. He hadn’t missed the gender she had assigned to Yates’s mysterious rescuer. ‘And you know it’s a woman, how?’

‘Because I know what to look for. Shorter stride length, smaller boot size, lower weight.’ She nodded to herself, her conviction growing by the second. ‘Our killer is a woman.’

Darkness had fallen by the time Alex and Anya sighted the faint lights of land in the distance. Aside from several more bouts of nausea on Alex’s part, the voyage across the North Sea had been largely uneventful, their only sighting of another vessel being the gas flare of an oil rig on the northern horizon.

They continued on for another ten minutes or so before Anya finally killed the engines and allowed the vessel to drift to a halt. A small fishing trawler like this was unlikely to attract much attention, but even so, she was unwilling to risk a closer approach.

‘So what now?’ Alex asked, surprised by how quiet it was without the constant rumble of the engines down below. All he could hear was the lapping of the waves against the hull, and the occasional creak and groan as the vessel’s timbers flexed with the movement.

‘Wait here,’ Anya instructed, clambering down the hatch to the vessel’s lower deck.

It was several minutes before she returned, during which Alex began to perceive a gradual change in the trawler’s motion. It wasn’t easy to pin down at first, but he was left with the impression that the vessel wasn’t riding the swell in quite the same way as it had earlier.

He glanced down as Anya emerged from the bowels of the small ship, then pointed to a large plastic container fixed to the deck outside. ‘I’ll need your help with that,’ she explained calmly. ‘I don’t want it to be caught in the rigging as we go down.’

Alex blinked, taken aback by her remark. ‘Wait. What?’

The woman let out a faint breath; a small but noticeable show of impatience. ‘The boat is sinking, Alex. I just opened the water intakes. There’s nowhere to dock around here, and it will attract too much attention if we beach it. We’ll paddle ashore in the life raft. Now, come on.’

Without waiting for an answer, she opened the door and strode out onto the deck. Alex followed a few moments later, pulling his oversized coat a little tighter against the chill night air. The deck was listing noticeably beneath his feet now.

Opening the container fixed to the deck, Anya hauled out a bulky inflatable life raft. Alex moved forward to help, and together they carried it over to the vessel’s starboard side. It was surprisingly heavy, requiring both of them to manhandle it over the gunwale.

Grasping the inflation toggle, she gave him a single nod, indicating that he should let go. As the survival raft tumbled into the water, there was a loud hiss as the compressed gas cylinder inside went to work, causing the roughly octagonal lifeboat to unfold and inflate in a matter of seconds. Much to Alex’s relief, there were no obvious defects; it appeared the raft was in far better condition than its parent vessel.

A long, painful groan from the trawler’s wooden frame reminded him it was sinking beneath them, the heavy engines and fuel tanks causing the bow to slowly rise up as the stern settled lower in the water.

‘You first,’ Anya said, holding a single line to keep the raft from floating away.

Gingerly Alex clambered over the gunwale and looked down, very much aware of the dark undulating waters all around. He could swim to a reasonable standard, but in freezing water and burdened with a heavy sweater and overcoat that would inevitably pull him down, he didn’t fancy his chances if he missed the raft.

In any case, he was spared the difficulty of having to make the leap over the side, as a single hard push between his shoulder blades sent him tumbling through the air. He let out a startled cry as he fell, convinced he was about to land in the sea. Fortunately for him, the trawler’s gradually sinking stern had reduced its height above sea level to mere feet. Landing more or less in the centre of the life raft, he bounced once on the flexible surface before coming to rest.

He looked up, about to voice his anger at Anya’s decision to push him over the side, only to see the woman leap down beside him. She landed with graceful ease, twisted around before she’d even come to a stop, and unfixed a collapsible paddle from the side of the raft.

‘You could have warned me,’ Alex remarked with sour grace.

‘Yes. I could have,’ she acknowledged. ‘Now help me paddle. We don’t want to be dragged down with the trawler.’

Already water was sluicing in through the stern deck scuppers, forcing the bow higher into the air. The complex masts and rigging overhead could easily come down on them as the vessel sank, dragging them down with it. Seizing a spare paddle, Alex attacked the water below in an effort to propel them away. Their efforts were oddly unbalanced, with Alex creating more spray than momentum, but after a minute or so they had put enough distance between themselves and the stricken vessel to halt for a moment and watch it sink.

There was nothing very dramatic about it; no great crashing of gear coming loose inside, no frothing sea or cracking timbers. The stern dipped below the surface, water rushing in through the open hatch to the engine room below, and the trawler quietly slipped away, heeling over to starboard as it vanished beneath the waves.

And just like that, they were alone. Two people in a rubber life raft, with hundreds of miles of open sea behind them and the darkened coast of Norway an unknown distance ahead. As a chill breeze sighed in from the north, Alex caught himself hoping it wasn’t too far. He was tired after paddling just fifty yards from the sinking trawler.

‘There’s a swell building up,’ Anya said, gauging the raft’s movements. ‘We should get ashore before it gets any worse.’

Alex wasn’t about to argue. Seizing his paddle again, he was about to resume his efforts when a thought suddenly crossed his mind. Despite everything, despite the ordeal he’d been through and the unknown dangers that lay ahead, he couldn’t help but chuckle in amusement.

‘You know, I might be up shit creek,’ he said, then held up his paddle. ‘But at least I’ve got a paddle this time.’

His remark was met with stony silence.

‘You don’t go in for humour much, do you?’

Somehow he couldn’t imagine her stretched out on the couch with a tub of ice cream and Comedy Central on the TV. Then again it was hard to imagine what, if anything, a woman like Anya did when she wasn’t stealing top secret files, killing people and commandeering fishing trawlers.

Without looking at him, she dipped her paddle in the water and began pulling with slow, deliberate strokes. ‘I suppose it depends on what you consider humour.’

There wasn’t much Alex could say to that. Together the two of them resumed their advance towards the shore. It was slow going; the raft was designed with stability rather than speed in mind, and their efforts weren’t helped by Alex’s lack of experience. Still, even he seemed to get the hang of it after a while, encouraged by a few terse words of advice from Anya, and before too long he spotted a rocky coastline up ahead.

Their paddling, plus the incoming tide, carried them into a relatively sheltered bay between two spurs of tree-covered land. Alex’s arms were aching when at last he felt the raft grate against solid ground.

Gratefully throwing down his paddle, he clambered over the edge and onto a narrow pebble-covered beach. Up ahead, thick stands of spruce and pine trees crowded close to the shore, their thick coverage blocking out the night sky above.

A loud hissing and bubbling sound from the waterline told him that Anya had put her knife to work on the life raft, slashing its rubber hull and allowing it to sink from view. A few heavy stones laid on top were enough to finish the job.

Alex however cared little as he let out a relieved breath and sank to his knees, exhausted, seasick and thoroughly grateful to be back on dry land. He felt as if he could curl up right there on that beach and happily fall asleep.

‘Get up,’ Anya said, tapping his shoulder none too gently. ‘We have to move inland. If I’m right, the nearest town should be about twelve miles from here.’

Alex glared at her. ‘For fuck sake, don’t you ever stop?’

‘The people hunting you won’t. We can’t afford to either. Now get up.’

Alex closed his eyes and forced calm into his mind, reminding himself that he owed his life to this woman. Still, that didn’t stop him from wanting to punch her lights out at that moment.

Without a word, he struggled to his feet and began a weary trudge up the beach.