Deception Game (37 page)

For a few moments, both men remained frozen in place, just staring at each other without saying a word.

‘Tarek,’ Jibril said, finally breaking the silence. ‘What are you doing here?’

Sowan’s mind was racing, composing and discarding half a dozen excuses and explanations in the space of a few seconds. Thinking fast, Sowan reached for the framed photo of Laila and held it up. ‘A keepsake,’ he said, allowing the sorrow and worry to show in his eyes. ‘It’s the only one I have left now.’

‘Ah, of course,’ Jibril said, nodding. ‘I can’t imagine how you must be feeling. You must be losing your mind with worry.’

‘I am,’ Sowan admitted truthfully.

The computer was still humming away. Cocking his head curiously, Jibril folded his arms. ‘What’s that for? I thought you’d be eager to get out of here for a while.’

I bet you did, Sowan thought.

Someone with administrative-level privileges trying to erase all evidence of Project Minos. Including perhaps the men involved in it.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he began.

‘About what, exactly?’

‘About the men who kidnapped me. Why they did it, what they were looking for. I had a hunch, so I came here and did some digging.’

‘Why didn’t you say something?’

‘Because I didn’t know who I could trust,’ Sowan said, allowing some emotion to creep into his voice. A man wrestling with the difficult and dangerous notion that his comrades might not be who he thought they were. ‘I didn’t want to say anything until I had proof.’

‘And do you?’ Jibril prompted, taking a step closer. ‘Have proof?’

Sowan gestured to the computer screen. ‘Take a look for yourself.’

Curious, Jibril rounded the desk and leaned in closer to take a look at the screen, while Sowan rose from his chair and stepped back to give him some room.

The timing was perfect. Reaching out, Sowan seized up the letter opener resting atop his stack of unread mail. Jibril began to look up, alerted by the sudden movement, but a backhanded strike with Sowan’s free hand sent him reeling, stumbling over the chair that Sowan had deliberately placed behind him.

The stunned man tumbled to the floor with a loud, fleshy thump, letting out a grunt of pain and surprise. Sowan was on him in a moment, the point of the letter opener pressed into the skin just beneath his right eye. It was hardly a formidable weapon, but used in such a vulnerable spot it was more than enough to blind or even kill him.

‘Make a sound, and you’ll be dead before you finish your first word,’ Sowan hissed, the righteous anger now burning inside him enough to temporarily override the pain of his injured leg. ‘Nod if you understand.’

Swallowing back his fear, Jibril nodded.

‘What have you done with the Minos files?’ he demanded.

Jibril’s eyes were wide. ‘Tarek, I don’t know what you think—’

‘Don’t lie to me!’ Sowan snarled, pressing the blade in harder. Hard enough to draw blood. ‘I know you’re part of this. After everything that’s happened, there’s no way you should have let me walk free after my debriefing. Any intelligence officer would have known I could have been compromised, but not you. You wanted me to leave this place, take a ride with your security detail. Where? Out to the desert where you could kill me?’

Jibril said nothing to this, and that hurt far worse than any injury. It was the pain of knowing he was right, that a man he trusted was ready to have him killed.

‘Why, Hussein?’ he pleaded. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

‘You don’t understand. It’s not me who made this happen.’

‘Who, then?’

His friend’s fleshy throat moved as he swallowed. ‘The Americans. They demanded you in exchange for one of their own, said they would break our alliance if we didn’t hand you over.’

‘What do you mean?’

Jibril gave a weary, resigned sigh. ‘The man you brought back from Paris. He wasn’t an Islamic terrorist. He was CIA.’

That was when everything changed. That was when the world seemed to fall apart around him. Sowan felt like a knife had just been plunged into his stomach. Fayed, the terrorist accused of trying to organize an armed insurgency in Libya, was in fact working for their supposed ‘allies’?

The only man who could answer his questions was right in front of him. ‘What the hell do you mean he was CIA? What was he doing there?’

‘Faulkner. He tipped us off that the Americans were preparing to move against us, channelling weapons and money to opposition groups in the western provinces. The deal they cut was nothing but a delaying tactic to hide their true intentions. They’re planning to start a coup here, Tarek. He gave us the name of one of their key weapons suppliers, told us where and how to find him, so we did. We put you in charge of capturing him, only the Americans found out what we were doing, traced the rendition order back to you. They must have sent a team in to capture you. When that failed, they demanded that we put you on a rendition flight to the United States. We deleted all references to Faulkner’s intel on our systems as a precaution.’

‘And you just agreed to it?’ he managed to say, stunned by what he was hearing. ‘Why?’

‘To buy time. The man you captured was one of the key elements of the coup attempt. He knew everything – names, bank-account numbers, the time and place of transactions, even the routes they were using to smuggle weapons into the country. All of it was stored on his computers, but their contents were encrypted. We needed time to break in, decipher it all. Until then, we had to keep the Americans on side.’

‘On side?’ Sowan repeated, incredulous. ‘The men you knew were plotting our downfall? How did you ever expect to keep them on our side?’

‘Use your head, Tarek. We both know the situation in our country. Half the western provinces are on the verge of open rebellion, there are more attacks and demonstrations with every passing month. We can kill and imprison as many rebels and dissidents as we want, but in the end it will make no difference. The tide is turning against us, and sooner or later we are all going to be washed away by it. Unless we have allies who will help us, protect us when the time comes. Allies who owe us a favour, because we uncovered their plans but chose not to act against them.’

Sowan felt like he was about to throw up. This man that he trusted, believed in, who was supposed to be leading the fight to hold Libya together, was openly admitting defeat. Worse, he was virtually sanctioning a foreign-backed revolution to save his own skin.

‘You’re talking about standing by and allowing them to start a civil war? Letting them tear our country apart? ‘

‘I’m talking about survival. That’s all it comes down to in the end.’

Sowan let out a breath, shock and disbelief vying with a growing sense of disgust and hatred towards the man cowering beneath him. Survival, he thought with grim resignation. Saving his own fat ass at the cost of hundreds, maybe thousands of lives. Was such a man really worthy of survival?

Did Sowan himself deserve to live, knowing he’d played a part in this terrible chain of events that might well destroy his country? What might he do now that the evidence he’d planned to use against Faulkner was gone? Stand impotently by and watch the tragic events unfold? Run away and hide, hoping that history never caught up with him?

No, he thought, a fire of defiance kindling inside him.

He wouldn’t stand by and do nothing.

‘The intel you recovered from the American. Where is it?’

Jibril’s eyes lit up, perhaps guessing what he was thinking. ‘Tarek, you can’t—’

Withdrawing the letter opener, Sowan raised it up and plunged it suddenly into Jibril’s left hand, feeling the spongy resistance as the slender blade passed through his flesh, followed by the jarring impact as it buried itself in the floorboards beneath.

He was able to clamp a hand over Jibril’s mouth, muffling his scream sufficiently that no one in the corridor outside was likely to hear.

‘Tell me what I want to know,’ he whispered in the man’s ear. ‘Or the blade goes somewhere far more...personal next time.’

It was a good few seconds before Jibril had calmed down enough for Sowan to remove his hand. When he did, the man was breathing hard, his teeth clenched against the pain.

‘Where is it?’ Sowan repeated.

‘Evidence room,’ he spat. ‘Locker...G43. But you can’t get to it, even if you try. You need high-level security clearance just to get in.’

‘You mean this?’ Reaching down, Sowan yanked Jibril’s access key card off the pin holding it to his shirt. ‘I’ll take my chances.’

With some difficulty he rose to his feet. Adrenaline was coursing through his veins, and doing a good job of suppressing the pain in his injured leg for now. Jibril, with one hand still pinned to the ground and a noticeable pool of blood seeping out beneath, was forced to remain where he was.

‘You hate me,’ he said, seeing the look in his former friend’s eyes. ‘You hate what I am, what I’ve done. The compromises I’ve made, the people I’ve chosen to side with. Maybe you have a right to, but that doesn’t mean I regret it.’

‘I know,’ Sowan said sadly, reaching for the walking stick he’d been using since his discharge from hospital. ‘And that’s what hurts the most, Hussein.’

A swift, hard blow to the face was enough to slam Jibril’s head back against the floor. There was fleshy thump, and Jibril let out a grunt of pain and surprise in the fleeting moments before his consciousness faded away.

Dropping the stick, Sowan knelt down beside him once more. With trembling hands he quickly searched the unconscious man, helping himself to Jibril’s cell phone and car keys, shoving the keys in his pocket alongside the security card.

The cell phone was his first priority. Swiping a finger across the screen to unlock it, he punched in a number from memory and hit the dial icon.

As he’d expected, it didn’t take Drake long to answer.

‘What’s your situation?’ he asked, his voice low and deceptively calm.

‘The files are gone,’ Sowan replied, a little out of breath as he pocketed the car keys. ‘The director was part of this. He ordered them deleted before I could get to them.’

Sowan could only imagine what was going through Drake’s mind. ‘Then we’re finished.’

‘Maybe not. The CIA are planning a coup in Libya, sending weapons and equipment to anti-government rebels in our western desert. If they succeed, the country will fall into civil war. Tens of thousands will die.’

Silence for several moments. ‘You’re sure of this?’

‘The director himself confessed to me.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Drake breathed.

‘That is what this was all about; protecting that operation, and the man you captured in Paris was the cornerstone of the whole thing.’

‘So where is he now?’

‘Dead,’ was Sowan’s blunt response.

‘You mean executed.’

‘I mean dead. He killed himself in his cell the night we brought him in, took his own life rather than give up the rest of his conspirators.’

‘Shit,’ Drake growled. ‘Then we’ve got nothing to go on.’

‘Maybe not. The laptop he had with him was heavily encrypted, which means it likely holds something of great value,’ Sowan went on. ‘Our experts have not been able to break into it yet, but if we can get to it and decrypt it—’

‘We can stop this thing before it even begins,’ Drake finished for him.

‘I can get to it, but I don’t have much time. I’ve been discovered. Hussein Jibril, the director, he found me. I had to take him down, but it won’t be long before people realize he’s missing.’

‘Did the man have car keys on him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know what kind of car he drives?’

‘I think so.’ He vaguely recalled seeing Jibril entering a silver Lexus in the past. ‘The parking lot is downstairs, in the basement.’

‘Then you need to get out of there,’ Drake said. His voice was still calm and controlled, but there was an edge to it now. The commanding tone of a man used to giving orders and making decisions under pressure.

‘Not without that computer.’ Sowan’s tone was equally firm.

Another pause. ‘Can you make it?’

‘For all our sakes, I hope so.’

‘Fuck,’ Drake said under his breath, realizing there was no way he could stop Sowan going through with his hastily conceived plan. ‘Then you’d better get moving.’

‘On my way.’

Powering down the computer, Sowan dragged himself to his feet, wincing in pain as damaged flesh and muscle protested. Injured, tired and afraid he might be, but he was here, and nobody else could help him now.

Even if this desperate plan somehow succeeded, he would certainly have no future in Libya. He would be a traitor, an outcast; shunned and despised for his betrayal and hunted by agents of the very organization he had worked so hard to serve. Assuming he made it out of the country, he didn’t doubt his ability to disappear and remain hidden from them for as long as he had to. After all, he had played that game from the other side and knew all the tricks his people employed.

But such a life of running and hiding, forever watching his back and keeping his guard up was a failure, a defeat. A humiliating end to a life and career that could have been so much more. He’d once imagined himself as a protector, a bastion of peace and order striving to hold back the tides of chaos and bloodshed that threatened to engulf his country. A good man fighting a good cause.

But there were no good men in this world. He saw that now well enough, and felt nothing but shame for his part in this disgusting abuse of power. His only hope now was to prevent more innocent lives being lost.

One way or another, he had to see this through himself.

Leaving Jibril sprawled on the floor, he paused for a moment at the door, listening for activity in the corridor beyond. Satisfied that the coast was clear, he retreated from the room, pulling the door shut behind him and locking it.

With luck, it would buy him enough time to do what he had to.

On a rooftop several blocks away, Drake moved the phone away from his ear and instead hit the radio transmitter at his throat.

‘Monarch to Envoy.’

‘Go, Monarch.’