Black List (35 page)

‘Are you sure you’re ready for this?’ Alex asked, holding the memory stick containing the Black List at the ready. The laptop computer they had purchased less than an hour earlier from a budget electrical retailer was humming away, awaiting a command.

Anya raised her chin a little, squaring her shoulders as if she were facing up to a firing squad. The answers she’d sought for so long, as difficult and potentially devastating as they might have been, were now at her fingertips. She had but to reach out and take them.

‘I’m ready,’ she replied after a moment.

Alex took a breath. He had disabled the laptop’s wireless communications system, ensuring there would be no repeat of what had happened to him in London if the Black List had somehow been booby trapped, but nonetheless he was nervous.

After everything they’d been through, he almost refused to believe they finally had what they needed.

‘Here goes nothing.’

Inserting the stick, he waited a few seconds while its contents were scanned and read. Then, sure enough, a window popped up on screen with a single file.

D1189

Hovering his cursor over the file, Alex sent out a silent prayer, then clicked to open it. Anya leaned in close, her eyes staring intently at the screen. He could almost feel the tension and anticipation radiating out from every taut muscle in her body.

Then, at last, the file was opened, allowing them both to view its contents.

‘Oh my God,’ he groaned.

There were no secret dossiers contained within it. No incriminating pictures. No mission reports or debriefings. No signed presidential orders.

All that was displayed on screen was a single line of numbers.

Straight away Alex’s heart sank. He closed his eyes and sank back in his chair, his short-lived triumph destroyed. He felt utterly and crushingly defeated.

‘I don’t understand,’ he whispered, holding his head in his hands. ‘A fucking number. All this for a number. I don’t understand it.’

‘I do,’ Anya said, her voice heavy. ‘It’s an invitation.’

Alex looked up at her. ‘For what?’

‘For me.’

Reaching into her pocket, she fished out a cell phone. A cheap burner not unlike the one she’d given him in London.

Pausing a moment to read the number on screen, she punched it in, took a breath, then waited for the call to connect.

It rang for nearly ten seconds before it was answered.

‘Hello, Anya,’ a voice said, showing not a hint of surprise or alarm at her call. An American voice. A man’s voice.

Marcus Cain’s voice.

Anya closed her eyes for a moment and let out a breath. It had been a very long time since she’d heard that voice, and despite everything, despite all that she’d been through in the intervening years, the sound of it was enough to evoke something in her. A shadow of the young woman she’d once been. The memory of the way she’d once felt when she’d known the owner of that voice.

‘Relax, I’m not tracing this call,’ Cain went on. ‘It’s just you and me now, like it should be.’

‘You set me up,’ Anya said, her tone accusatory. ‘You let me go through all of this for nothing.’

‘You didn’t really think I’d leave the Black List unguarded, did you?’ he chided her. ‘I had the real list deleted a long time ago. But… I had a feeling you’d come looking for it one day. I guess it still served a purpose.’

Anya turned away from Alex, not wanting him to see the look in her eyes. ‘Why, Marcus?’ she whispered. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want to make you an offer. It’ll only come once, and if you refuse then there’s no coming back from it, so I suggest you think very carefully before you answer.’ He paused a moment; a breathless, agonizing moment. ‘I want you to give this up, Anya. Whatever revenge trip you’re on, whatever you think you’re going to achieve… give it up and walk away. Say you’ll do this, and I’ll believe you. I’ll stop looking for you, I’ll call off any searches the Agency or anyone else is making, I’ll end this whole thing today. It’ll be over for good. I promise.’

Anya said nothing. Somehow she managed to keep her composure, but the look of turmoil in her eyes was impossible to hide.

‘I can’t change the things that have happened,’ Cain went on. ‘God knows I wish I could go back and do it all differently, but I can’t. Neither of us can. But the two of us, right now, can change how this plays out. You’ve spent most of your life fighting, running, hiding… I can’t imagine the loneliness you must feel, or how tired you must be. But you don’t have to do it any more. It’s over. It’s time to let it go.’

Anya let out a ragged, shuddering breath. Cain, the master strategist, the man who so keenly saw the true nature of others, perceived all too well who she really was.

‘You can still have a life, Anya. You can live out the rest of your days in peace, because you deserve it. It’s yours. All you have to say is yes.’

The woman closed her eyes for a moment, her once iron resolve wavering in the face of his impassioned plea. He was telling the truth. She couldn’t rationally explain it, but deep down in the very core of her being she knew that his offer was genuine.

She could leave this all behind. This life of fighting, of pain and heartache and loss and sacrifice. She could let go of it all. All it took was a single word.

And then, unbidden, the old words that had been drilled into her a lifetime ago surfaced from the depths of her mind.

I will endure when all others fail. I will stand when all others retreat. Weakness will not be in my heart. Fear will not be in my creed. I will show no mercy. I will never surrender.

‘Do you remember the day I came back from Afghanistan, twenty years ago?’ she asked suddenly.

‘Anya, what are—?’

‘Do you remember, Marcus?’ she cut in, a harder edge in her voice.

She heard him sigh. ‘I do.’

‘I was hurting when I woke up in that hospital in Peshawar. And I was weak. So weak I could barely lift my arm. But I saw you sitting at my bedside, and I felt… I felt like I had come home. For the first time in a long time. I thought you would be happy to see me, but… that wasn’t what I saw in you. You were looking at me, but not seeing me. It was as if you couldn’t bear to look at me.’

She could feel a tiny warmth on her cheek. The warmth of a tear trickling down her skin. ‘At the time, I thought you were… ashamed of me, like I was tainted and ruined. I thought that when you looked at me, you could see only the things they had done to me, and it disgusted you.
I
… disgusted you.’ She swallowed hard, maintaining her self-control only through a supreme effort of will. ‘But I was wrong. It wasn’t me you were ashamed of; it was yourself. Because you knew where they were holding me – all along, you knew. You could have found me, but you didn’t, because I wasn’t meant to come home. And when I did, my life, my survival, became an endless reminder of your own weakness, your own failings.’

‘Anya, you don’t understand—’

‘No,’ she said, her wavering resolve suddenly blazing to life once more. ‘I do understand. You’re not interested in saving me, Marcus. Just as you weren’t twenty years ago. You’re interested only in saving yourself. Well, this is one fight you can’t run away from.’

She heard a sigh on the other end of the line. The weary, resigned sigh of a man finally acknowledging a painful truth.

‘You know what this means,’ he warned her. ‘You know there’s no going back.’

Anya reached up and wiped away the tear that had so briefly stained her cheek, pushing aside the weakness and the doubt. She was herself again. Strong, capable, determined, and set on her course no matter what.

‘I hope you’re ready, because I’m coming for you,’ she promised. Tossing the phone on the ground, she brought her booted heel down on the device, crushing it.

‘You are sure you want to do this?’ Anya asked, nodding towards the winding mountain road stretching out before them. Somewhere up ahead, perhaps ten miles or so, lay the border with Austria.

She had driven him up here in a battered old 4x4 that she’d bought at a local dealer for less than the price of a new TV back in the UK. The vehicle might not have looked pretty, but its rust-streaked chassis was still solid and the engine rumbled with a throaty growl that defiantly belied its age.

Alex followed her gaze, his eyes hidden behind a pair of dark sunglasses.

‘Nope,’ he admitted. ‘But isn’t that what makes it fun? Not really knowing.’

Anya said nothing to that. No doubt she entertained her own thoughts on such matters and felt no need to share them, but he was used to that now. Indeed, he’d grown used to a lot of things about her since the tumultuous events in Istanbul a week earlier. They had travelled together, lived together, even fought to survive together. He wouldn’t exactly call their relationship a friendly one, but somehow it seemed to work.

Their journey had taken them from Turkey across the border into Bulgaria, through Romania and into Hungary. There, Anya had been able to provide him with a new passport and identity, courtesy of a forger she had known and worked with many times before. As far the European Union was concerned, he had everything he needed to travel from Lisbon to Helsinki.

And now that he had his new identity, the time had come for them to part ways.

‘Where will you go now?’

He shrugged. ‘I was thinking of taking a career break. Never really got around to travelling, but… maybe now’s my chance.’

He certainly wouldn’t be going near a computer for a while. With warrants still out for his arrest in the UK and US, he intended to lay low and live ‘off the grid’, as they were so fond of saying in cheap action movies.

‘Will you be all right?’ Anya asked, looking and sounding a little less sure of herself. It was the same thing that always happened when she had to deal with any of the interpersonal stuff that so rarely entered into her normal life.

‘Well, let’s see. I’ve got no job, no home, no friends, no money and no prospect of changing that any time soon.’ He grinned at her. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt better.’

It might have been a facetious remark, but there was nonetheless a grain of truth in his words. He felt more alive, more optimistic, more determined now than he ever had in his so-called life before this all began. He didn’t know what the future held for him, but it was a hell of a lot better than what it had offered before.

And for once, he felt ready for it.

Anya shook her head in bewilderment. ‘And I thought only Americans were lunatics,’ she remarked. ‘Still, maybe I can help you with one of those things.’

Reaching into the glove compartment, she handed him a plain brown envelope, thickly packed. Opening it, Alex found himself confronted by a large wad of euros; far more than he could easily count.

‘What’s this?’ he asked.

‘Payment for services rendered.’

‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said, feeling like he’d taken far more from her than he’d given in return.

‘That was the agreement I had with Arran,’ she informed him. ‘One hundred thousand pounds on completion of the deal. I would say you’ve earned it.’

Alex sighed, her generosity only serving to highlight their failure. Halvorsen’s betrayal had weighed heavily on both of them since that day in Istanbul. His only consolation was the knowledge that the man apparently hadn’t lived long enough to celebrate his achievement. An online news report from Turkey had confirmed that Halvorsen had been found dead in a patch of waste ground just off the man highway, apparently having committed suicide.

As for Sinclair, there was no sign. For now at least, the man had vanished.

‘Thanks,’ he said, not sure how else to phrase it. In truth, he wasn’t too proud to take the money. It would at least buy him a place to stay for a while, and perhaps the time he needed to get himself together. ‘What about you?’

She looked away, staring off into the distance but seeing nothing. ‘I started this looking for answers. I will find them, even if I have to do it alone.’

‘Not alone,’ he corrected her, though unaccountably he felt himself blush as he said it. ‘Well, what I mean is, if you ever need a hacker with bad aim and worse taste in films, let me know, yeah?’

He guessed she wouldn’t have much trouble finding him if it came to it.

He didn’t imagine such an offer would mean much to someone like Anya. And yet, to his surprise, her face lit up with a smile. The kind of smile that seemed to wipe away the years of care and pent-up anger she carried with her, and that once more offered a glimpse of the woman he’d watched peacefully sleeping that morning in Norway.

He watched as she reached out and took his hand, her grip strong and her gaze searching. ‘Remember what I said to you on the balcony in Istanbul?’

You are stronger than you look, Alex. Maybe even stronger than you realize.

‘Yeah, I remember,’ he said quietly. Those words would stay with him for the rest of his days. However long that turned out to be.

‘I meant it.’ Releasing his hand, she settled herself in the driver’s seat once more. ‘Good luck to you, Alex.’

And that was all she had to say; all she needed to say. As with everything else in her life, there was no desire for emotional farewells. Alex watched as she swung the car around and drove off back down the road at a steady, unhurried pace, leaving only a faint cloud of dust in her wake that was soon carried away by the fitful breeze.

As the throaty rumble of the engine receded into the distance, he caught himself wondering if their paths would ever cross again. Anya’s arrival in his life had changed him beyond all recognition, had destroyed nearly everything he’d once had. And yet, part of him hoped he would see her again.

Adjusting the straps on his rucksack, he turned and surveyed the road ahead. It was a long walk to his next resting place, but that was just fine with him. Plenty of time alone with his thoughts.

As he started forward, his boots crunching on the little rocks underfoot, the sun beating down on him, an unknown future lying ahead, Alex couldn’t help but smile.

Anyone who saw me walking along that dirt track must have thought I was a lunatic; a man walking alone in the middle of nowhere grinning like a fool. Anyone who knew me before this all started would have questioned what on earth I had to smile about.

But none of that mattered any more. For the first time in my life, I was making my own way, following my own path.

I’m not a normal guy. I don’t have a job, or a car. I don’t pay taxes, I don’t even know where my next meal is coming from. And that’s fine with me.

This is happening.

This is me. This is who I am now.

Strange the things that flash through your mind when you realize you have a reason to live.