Authors: Matthew Dunn
L
indsay Sheridan entered her living room, carrying a tray containing three glasses of brandy, a bowl of ice, a jug of water, and Cuban cigars. She placed the tray on a table between three leather armchairs occupied by Senator Colby Jellicoe, her husband Charles, and Ed Parker. The fire was burning well and there were plenty of extra logs beside it in case it needed replenishing. That was good; it meant she wouldn’t be called to fetch more wood.
Charles and Jellicoe didn’t acknowledge her presence and were talking directly to each other in hushed tones. Parker, on the other hand, beamed at her and asked, “That your usual perfume?”
Lindsay patted her throat, darted a look at her husband, who was still taking zero notice of her, and smiled. “No. Chanel. Thought I’d try something different.”
“Suits you. By the way, Catherine says pop over sometime.” Parker winked at her. “Think my wife wants a drinking partner. Someone to grumble to about being married to the Agency.”
“Well, that would be great.”
“Looks like you’ve lost a few pounds since I last saw you. You been on that five-two diet thing?”
Lindsay smiled. “Always flirting with me, Mr. Parker.”
“Someone’s got to.” Parker reached for a brandy, and said in a quieter tone, “Don’t worry, I’ll look after them. Just make sure you get on the phone to Catherine and get that all-men-are-bastards drinking session in the diary. It’ll do you a world of good.”
Her smile still on her face, Lindsay nodded, momentarily forgetting that her husband actually was a bastard.
When she had exited the room, Colby Jellicoe asked, “Marsha Gage?”
Sheridan took a sip of brandy. “I treat her like crap, but
she’s
good.”
“So why treat her like crap?” Parker stared at his drink, wishing he was going to partake of it at home with Catherine.
Sheridan smiled. “To keep her on her toes and focused. She thinks I’m a shit just for the sake of it. Truth is, I need her to think that way so she doubles her efforts to get to Cochrane before I do.”
“How can that be a good thing?”
It was Jellicoe who answered. “Because the president’s given me written authorization for Cochrane to be handed over to us the moment he’s in FBI custody.”
“Okay, that
is
a good thing. Where’s Gage looking for him?”
Sheridan shrugged. “Far as I can tell, mostly Europe.”
The senator nodded slowly. “If you capture him alive, he’s to be immediately executed. Do it somewhere private.”
Parker frowned. “President’s comfortable with a shoot-to-kill policy while Cochrane’s on the run. But I don’t recall him saying anything about a cold-blooded execution.”
“Neither do I. But that’s what’s got to happen. You okay with that?”
Parker didn’t know how to respond, then settled on the truth. “No, I’m damn well not okay with that.”
“You happy for national security to be breached?”
“What?”
“Got no problem with Cobalt’s drug money being used to blow up civilians and soldiers?”
“You know—”
“What I know,” Jellicoe said, raising his voice, “is that Cochrane caught and kept alive means a trial. Secret, of course, but a trial nevertheless. Someone’s going to leak what was said in the courtroom. Always happens. Public will get to hear why Cochrane’s been a bad boy. Ferryman will come to light. Then everything will be fucked, including national security.”
“You
need
to get authorization from the president.”
“You think he’d want me to pose the question to him? Force him to give me an answer?” Jellicoe drummed the tips of his fingers together in front of his bloated body. “I got to read between the lines, second-guess what the president ain’t saying but
is
thinking.”
“That doesn’t mean he wants an execution.”
“Doesn’t mean he doesn’t want one, either.”
“Oh, come on!”
“You got better ideas, Parker, then I’m all ears.”
“I . . .” Parker’s voice trailed off, because he had no other ideas.
Sheridan leaned forward and jabbed Parker’s knee. “You don’t need to get your hands dirty. I’ll take care of things. Just keep your mouth shut.”
Jellicoe ran a finger around the rim of his glass. “I gave the president the latest Ferryman intel.”
Intel that was from the United Kingdom. It stated that an MI6 officer had been tasked with flying around Afghanistan to hand out bags of cash to opium growers in return for them destroying their crops and turning their backs on the drug trade. A tribal elder who ran one of the largest plantations told the officer that his money was no good, because someone else had made contact with him and had offered to buy his crops for three times the price. Everyone in MI6 and Langley was in no doubt that that someone was terrorism financier Cobalt.
“What did the president say?”
“What I expected: keeping Ferryman intact remains an absolute priority. Cobalt
must
be killed. Ferryman will do that for us.”
Four thousand eight hundred miles away from Washington, D.C., Antaeus was sitting in his study in the rural outskirts of Moscow. On his desk was a leather-bound notebook, bought for him by his wife five years ago, his gold-embossed initials on its cover. The book was open to a page that contained his elegant handwriting in blue fountain pen ink. At the top of the page was the heading
DOMINOS
. His pen hovered over the page as he read his notes.
2010. FSB double agent tells Germans that Russian security services are hunting major terrorist financier, code name COBALT. Financier strikes terms on terrorist-controlled opium and cocaine plantations; manufactures and ships drugs using sophisticated network; sells drugs; gives terrorist plantation owners cut of profits. Germans share this intel with Western allies.
2011. FSB freezes account in Bank of Moscow, moments after $80 million was transferred to account in Algeria. British GCHQ intercept encrypted burst from SVR’s London Station, saying, “Cobalt’s moved his money. We’re too late.”
2012. FBI meets FSB and asks if Russia has heard of a major terrorism financier, code name COBALT. FSB says it believes Cobalt is financing more terror operations around the world than all other sources of funding put together. But FSB is wary of cooperating with FBI.
2013. Security services from States, Europe, and Russia conduct independent and joint operations to try to locate and capture Cobalt. But Russian-American cooperation still tense. Americans suspect Russians are withholding information.
2014. Pakistani ISI tells America that it has captured and interrogated a Taliban fighter, and he’s confessed that he’d been contacted by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan who said that a financier called Cobalt was making arrangements to travel to the Afghan-Pakistan border to meet the Taliban leadership, and that he was to be given safe passage.
Antaeus moved his pen underneath the last paragraph and wrote two sentences.
MI6 officer tries to buy off major opium plantation in Afghanistan as part of ongoing operation to rid country of drugs. Plantation owner refuses, says Cobalt has made far better offer and will be taking possession of crop soon.
Antaeus capped his pen, rolled an ink blotter over his latest entry, and closed the notebook. In approximately two weeks’ time, Project Ferryman would know the exact location and time that Cobalt was going to be in Afghanistan to secretly meet senior Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders. Ferryman had already told the CIA about this meeting, that it was going to be heavily guarded by upward of three hundred combat-experienced jihadists, and that Russian intelligence had decided it was too risky to infiltrate the country and attack the meeting. The Americans, on the other hand, had decided that the scale of the defenses precluded a SEAL or Delta assault to kill Cobalt, but that didn’t matter because they’d use an unmanned predator drone to drop a bunker-destroying bomb on the location. And a minute after they’d done so, they’d go public to the world’s media with the success story.
The Ferryman intel had prompted the premiers of Western countries hunting Cobalt to agree that all existing efforts to find him should cease, for fear that if they continued they could drive him further underground and prompt him not to travel to Afghanistan. All they needed to do now was wait for Ferryman to obtain the final piece of the jigsaw that would pin down Cobalt. Then America would blow Cobalt to pieces.
Ferryman had to remain untouched for that to happen.
Antaeus looked at his chalkboard containing the names of the major parties who were wittingly or unwittingly involved in the Ferryman project. His eyes settled on the name Will Cochrane. The MI6 officer was the biggest threat to Ferryman and could not be allowed to get closer to the truth.
Antaeus smiled.
Because the truth was that the Americans didn’t know that dropping their bomb would cause a catastrophe.
W
ill didn’t turn around when he heard the vehicle behind him draw nearer. Instead, he continued walking along the slush-filled edge of the road, his hands in his jacket pockets and his collar pulled up to give him some protection from the driving rain. The vehicle sounded like a car or an SUV, but he couldn’t be sure because the wind was loud and hitting his ears from different directions, and he was dog tired and not thinking straight. He hoped the vehicle didn’t contain a woman or child—no driver of either would stop for a stranger—and that wherever it was headed, it would be driving through a place where he could be dropped off and rent a room for the night.
The vehicle’s engine grew louder.
Please slow down, drive alongside me, lower your window, and look concerned.
Please.
The vehicle was close now, changed into a lower gear, and was slowing for sure.
He kept walking, his feet aching from fatigue, boots full of water after he’d witnessed Ulana’s plane sink into the icy strait.
The vehicle was right behind him.
He carried on.
So did the vehicle. But it remained behind him, matching his speed.
Jeez, it would be ironic if the person behind him turned out to be precisely what he hoped he didn’t look like: a prowling serial killer.
It turned out that the vehicle was something even less welcome. Blue lights flashed over the ground around him, followed by a short burst of siren and a man’s voice on a microphone saying, “Police. Stop where you are. Turn around.”
Will’s heart and mind were racing. The broken-down-car story wouldn’t work with the cops. They’d drive him back there with the intention of radioing for a tow truck. He turned, keeping his hands in his pockets, because only soldiers, special operatives, and experienced criminals would automatically put their arms out if someone had a gun trained on them from a distance.
There were two cops, both standing behind the cruiser’s open doors, hands on their holstered pistols, one of them holding a mic close to his mouth. “Hands where we can see them.”
Will put his hands up and flat in front of his chest, as if he were about to play patty-cake and had never confronted someone with a gun before. “I’m glad you guys are here.” The words were spoken in an East Coast American accent. Before she’d been murdered, his English mother had frequently told the adolescent Will that he sounded just like his CIA father. Not that Will had copied his father’s accent. He’d been incarcerated in Tehran when Will was five years old. But like his father, Will had grown up in Virginia.
“You in trouble?”
Will smiled. “You could say that. Woman trouble.” He nodded toward the road behind the cops. “About five miles that way, my girlfriend kicked me out of our van. We had a bit of a . . . disagreement.”
“You on vacation?”
“Yeah. Well, that was the idea.”
“Where you headed?”
Will shrugged. “Anywhere that’ll give me a bed for the night. Debby gets like this sometimes. Never lasts more than a day. I’ll text her, she’ll probably pick me up in the morning.” His smile broadened. “All I said to her was that her driving was crappy.”
The policeman near him tried to suppress a laugh. “Bet you regret saying that now.”
“Yep. I wondered if it was Debby behind me. Not guys with guns.”
“Seems it’s not your day. You tried calling her?”
“Several times. Goes straight to voice mail. She’ll turn it back on when she calms down.”
“Dumb move getting out of the vehicle this time of year. You can die out here.”
“I realize that now, but staying in the vehicle might have been just as dangerous. Debby’s got a crazy temper.”
The cop with the mic asked, “She going to be okay?”
Will nodded. “The van’s got a full tank plus spare gas, and lots of food. We’ve done plenty of touring before. Debby knows what she’s doing.”
“Vehicle registration number?”
“No idea. It’s a rental car, and Debs sorted all the paperwork out in New York.”
“You take the Maine–New Brunswick route in?”
“Yeah. Crossed at Vanceboro eleven days ago.”
“Okay, lower your hands. We’ll need to see some ID.”
“Sure. You able to drop me off someplace?”
The cop glanced at his colleague, who nodded. “We’re heading back to Truro. That do you?”
“If Truro’s got a diner and a motel, it’ll do me just fine.”
“Center of town’s got Holiday Inn, Willow Bend, Best Western, and Glengarry hotels. You have options. Identification, please.”
Will pulled out the American passport Ulana had given him. “I got other ID, but it’s in the van.”
The nearest policeman stepped up to Will, took the passport from him, and leaned over the ID so that his upper body shielded it from rain as he flicked through the pages.
As the cop opened the page containing the photo, Will mentally rehearsed what he’d do if the officer reached for his gun because he realized that the man in the photo wasn’t him or because he suddenly recalled seeing a nonbearded shot of Will Cochrane in a newspaper after the Senator Jellicoe hearing.
But the officer closed the passport, handed it back to him, and said, “Okay, Mr. Jones. All seems good. We’ll get you to Truro, and we should be able to get the plates of the van from Vanceboro immigration. During your crossing, it will have been logged alongside your passport. It’ll take a few hours though. If you don’t hear from your girlfriend by morning, it’s vital you call the RCMP station in Truro. We’ll go looking then.”
“Sure.”
The cop beckoned him forward. “Afraid we’ve finished our flask of coffee and we got a good hour before we reach Truro. Still”—he smiled—“since you look like shit, I’m betting you won’t mind getting a bit of shut-eye during the drive.”
Marsha Gage was sitting at her desk in the FBI task force room and had her cell phone pinned against one ear and a landline handset against the other. On one line was Sorocco Fonseca of Spain’s Centro Nacional de Inteligencia; on the other was Bianca Dinapoli of Italy’s Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Interna. Both were telling her that there’d been a few possible sightings in southern Europe of someone matching Will Cochrane’s description, but all of them had proven to be false. Behind Marsha, Patrick and Alistair were playing chess, while Sheridan was on the phone to Senator Jellicoe. Not for the first time since the three men had graced the room with their presence, Marsha thought that at best they were useless and at worst downright counterproductive. Regardless, it seemed that they enjoyed doing nothing while she worked her ass off.
On the screen of her landline, she saw that she had a call waiting from Assistant Commissioner Danny Labelle of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. She ended the other calls, picked up, and said, “Commissioner. You got something for me?”
“Might be nothing, but you told me to report anything odd.”
“Wish half the people I work with could be as forthcoming. What is it?”
“Our Coast Guard’s found a crashed Islander plane on our Nova Scotia seaboard. Only reason they spotted it was due to the tide being out.”
“That happen a lot where you live?”
Labelle laughed. “Not where I live. But yeah, it happens in parts of Canada where there aren’t many roads but there are plenty of high winds that’ll knock you sideways.”
“So, why suspicious?”
“Pilot was still inside the plane when Coast Guard found it. And she’s got a bullet in her brain.”
“ID on her?”
“American passport. My guys have already put a call in to your Department of State. Turns out the passport’s a fake.”
“Drug runner making a delivery that went wrong?”
“Could be.”
“Anything else on her to suggest this isn’t just some criminal matter?”
“Can’t say there is, but you wanted to know about any suspicious transportation movements into east coast Canada.”
“I did indeed. Thanks anyway, Commissioner.”
“My pleasure. Oh, and Marsha?”
“Yeah.”
“Her body’s now at the Nova Scotia Hospital. Just a formality because she’s been dead for at least twenty-four hours. But doctors examined her anyway. She’s got a tattoo on her upper arm. Odd looking. Not the sort of thing women generally go for.”
“Probably a prison thing.” Marsha drummed her fingers on her desk. “Can you fax a picture of it over to me?”
“On its way.”
Two minutes later, the fax machine printed a single sheet with the letterhead
ROYAL CANADIAN MOUNTED POLICE
—
MAINTIENS LE DROIT
, NATIONAL HEADQUARTERS, HEADQUARTERS BUILDING, 73 LEIKIN DRIVE, OTTAWA ON K1A 0R2.
On it was the photo image of an upper arm, and next to the limb was a handwritten note stating,
Dead female pilot. Still no luck identifying her. Not seen this kind of tattoo before. She liked hunting, maybe? D. Labelle.
Marsha took out a magnifying glass from her desk drawer and examined the tattoo. It was a picture of a bear; an eagle with outstretched wings looked to be landing on its back. Like the commissioner, she had no idea if it symbolized anything or was just an innocuous cartoon that signified its wearer was prone to moments of illogical whimsy.
She swiveled in her chair and eyed Patrick and Alistair. Both were still engrossed in chess. “Unlike you, I’m kind of busy right now. So,
gentlemen
”—she folded the fax sheet into the shape of an airplane and tossed it at them—“I wouldn’t mind if you tapped Spooksville—Stateside and old country—on the shoulder to see if that tattoo makes any sense.”
Patrick picked up the fax with one hand while moving knight to take bishop with the other. The CIA officer unfolded it and held the image in front of Alistair, then thrust the fax toward Sheridan and called out, “You know what this means?”
Sheridan looked bemused. “I have no idea.”
“That a statement about your raison d’être?”
“What?”
“Never mind, idiot.”
Marsha gestured toward the paper and told the men about the downed Islander airplane. “Most likely it’s nothing, but I really would like it if you could find out if that tattoo means anything.”
Alistair shrugged while positioning a rook as bait to tempt Patrick’s knight to take it and in turn leave the knight vulnerable to attack from a bishop. “We don’t need to.”
“Just because I’m not paying by the hour doesn’t mean . . .”
“Shit.” Patrick stared at the chessboard, knowing that Alistair was thinking ten moves ahead. He adjusted his thinking, moved a rook, and called out, “It’s a military tattoo.”
“Russian.” Alistair’s rook took his opponent’s rook. “A version not too dissimilar is popular among Special Forces paratroopers.”
“This one’s unusual though, because it’s on a woman and because the bear and eagle aren’t fighting but instead are cooperating.” Patrick’s brain was racing because he knew Alistair had thrown in a new strategy. “You only see it on specialists.”
“GRU specialists.” Bishop defends queen.
“Who’ve been given advanced airborne training.” Pawn move to feint attack on queen.
“Secret training.” Queen retreats two squares.
Patrick’s knight puts Alistair’s queen and rook in jeopardy. “Seems your dead pilot was very unusual.”
“A highly skilled paramilitary intelligence officer.”
“Unlikely to be a drug runner who’d let petty criminals get the better of her.”
“More likely she was conducting a covert infiltration.”
“And something went wrong on her return journey.”
“Plane malfunction.” Alistair moved his queen. “Or got hit by some godawful weather.”
“And put a gun to her head rather than let the Atlantic do its work on her.” Patrick smiled as he moved his bishop. “Your king’s got nowhere to run. Checkmate.”
Alistair rubbed his hands together. “Didn’t see that one coming, old boy. Congrats.”
“Reckon that’s nine wins each so far.” Patrick turned to Marsha. “Also reckon you’d better be wondering what the GRU woman was delivering to Nova Scotia.”
The police cruiser stopped outside the Best Western hotel in Truro. One of the Mounties opened the rear door and gestured for Will to get out. “Remember—call us in the morning if your girlfriend doesn’t make contact with you.”
“Sure, and thanks again for the ride.” Will exited the vehicle, shook the cop’s hand, and walked into the hotel lobby. He had no intention of staying here or anywhere else in Truro. A few minutes after the cops had gone, he’d leave the hotel and head farther west.