Midnight Empire (22 page)

He rolled over, pulled the blankets high, drew himself foetally into a ball and reached for the headphones. What he listened to was the sound of a storm rolling over the savannah, wild and distant lightning and long, deep rain.

When Peach failed to report for duty, there was no initial worry. For six hours of his shift, Wolfe and Gray (still trapped in their discourse with Langley and able to launch a drone with Ellis) did not report his absence to base command.

Only when the point was made that Peach had never skipped a day before, had never called in sick, had never once done anything less than promptly in his three years on the base, did they attempt to call his phone.

It was off.

‘He told me he was going to do something,' Daniel said. ‘About the truck. About Moore.'

Gray's reply was irate. ‘What was he going to do?'

‘He didn't say exactly.'

‘What
did
he say, Daniel?'

‘He said we shouldn't sit around waiting for them to pick us off.'

Gray winced. ‘This asshole. This gung-ho jerk.'

He rang command and then Special Agent Seddon. A police cruiser visited Peach's house and found it empty, his truck gone. They called his ex-wife in Stoddard County. She'd not heard from him and neither had his son.

They pictured him in a dark basement, his bloody mouth and hands bound by silver tape. They pictured him in the driver's seat of his truck with his throat cut.

‘There are only so many permutations,' said Wolfe. ‘None of them are very good.'

They hoped he would turn up, the victim of a breakdown or an honest accident. The police checked at the Mountain View, the Spring Valley and the Valley hospitals. Daniel didn't know what to think. It did feel like Peach would do something of the type: get lucky enough to find the cell and be so crazy as to attack them himself.

Another six hours later there was still no sign. When their flight ended, Gray told Ellis to go to the 432nd and find him a replacement pilot.

Daniel wanted to go to the loft for a change of clothes. He stopped to fill his car on the way. Standing with the gas pump in hand, he felt vulnerable in the open air.

At the Nexus, the hole in the plaster was a silent reminder he wasn't sure what to do about. In the bathroom was a foil of Inderal. He took one of them.

There was an email from Michael Sett, subject line
Seeking an update
. He left it unopened. Went instead to the sofa and closed his eyes.

He felt weirdly strung, wholly unreal. He felt spaced and dizzy. As if he shouldn't swallow in case something came up.

He kept his eyes shut. Now came the urge for harm, to feel pain. He dug his nails into his arm; felt lost and floating.

A lover's whisper.

The flash and the spark.

Did it matter what happened now? Really, didn't he deserve anything he got? Where were the men to arrest him? When would they burst into the room?

He lay still, holding a shallow breath. He thought suddenly about Hannah and it almost seized him up.

On the roof top, he stood by the pool. The Strip was a blaze of lights and an emptiness and the water was dark and full of sky. He wondered how far Ania had managed to get. He pictured her on a 747, sleeping in a window seat. At least he'd freed her from having to run from her husband. He supposed he could claim that.

Perhaps he should rue it—saying no to Europe when she'd asked. But regretting it would have been kidding himself. Never in a million years could he make a decision like that.

He slept in a hot bed that night and in the morning ate rubbery sausages and drank grapefruit juice in the mess. It was 9 a.m. He expected to find the briefing hut empty, but Gray was on the floor, asleep, his jacket for a pillow. Daniel stopped and backed out quietly. Went outside to sit on a chair.

‘FBI wants to see you.'

He looked up. Wolfe was leaning against the corner of the hut, his body in shadow. He didn't turn to face Daniel but stayed looking east.

Daniel did not have a reply.

‘You'll find them in their office.'

He thought, yeah. He thought, get it over with, it was only ever a matter of time.

He walked with the sun at his back. Everything was glare and he felt somewhere between sick and resigned. He reached the administration building. The FBI's office was along a corridor. He walked to it with a deliberate slowness. He wondered what he was going to say when they asked.

The door was shut. He heard several voices before he knocked. The man who opened the door he didn't recognise. The voices were loud and busy; there must have been seven or eight people in the room.

‘Yes?'

‘Someone wants to see me, I think. Probably Special Agent Hughes.'

‘Name?'

‘Daniel Carter.'

‘Daniel Carter!' The man turned to declare it to the room. A voice said, ‘In a moment,' and the door was closed.

He waited. There were no seats in the corridor. He could hear phones ringing and then a man in a suit approached from outside and went into the room.

Eventually, Hughes appeared. He was with a second person, a larger, older man in a suit with no tie. This person gave a slight smile and extended a hand. Daniel shook it.

‘We'll go down here,' said Hughes, leading the way to a small room with desks against each wall. Hughes indicated that Daniel should sit at one of them. He and the other man took chairs for themselves. They all sat facing one another in the middle of the room.

‘This is Special Agent Austen,' Hughes explained. ‘He has a few questions for you about another matter.' A pause. ‘But first I thought I'd show you these.'

Hughes opened a folder and passed Daniel a photograph. It was a man with dark skin, and, presumably, his wife, a blue background behind them; a family portrait, the man standing, the woman sitting. He guessed this was a member of the terrorist cell. The implicit question, was it the man who'd mugged him.

‘I don't think it is.'

‘Are you certain?'

Daniel looked again, more carefully. No, he was sure that it wasn't. He shook his head. Hughes took the photo from him then gave him another. This was a composite, two passports, Islamic Republic of Pakistan. He was surprised that the men appeared so youthful. One had cropped hair and the other's was long, almost flashy. They didn't look like killers.

‘No,' Daniel said. ‘It was definitely neither of these.'

Hughes took the picture. ‘Alright, so not them. Perhaps some other connection, something else.'

Daniel wasn't sure what he meant. Hughes turned now to Austen. Daniel wondered what he was going to do when the questions came. Deny things? Contort himself into various configurations of conflicted untruth?

Was he only imagining that Austen was studying him? There were still faint traces of a smile on the agent's face. Unlike Hughes, who looked rough and poorly slept, Austen seemed fresh, fully awake. He produced a small voice recorder. ‘If you don't mind,' he said. ‘My memory is terrible.'

Daniel didn't believe that but he wasn't going to argue. What had Ania said about willingly falling prey to situations even when we know the truth?

Austen clipped the recorder to a document wallet and rested it in his lap. He looked at Daniel. ‘LinkLock,' he said.

Daniel listened.

‘An important technology,' Austen continued. ‘You would agree it's something most governments would be very happy to get their hands on? I wonder if you might do me the favour of explaining its development. Mostly the people actually, exactly who was involved.'

There was a pause. The topic was a surprise. When Daniel began to speak something lifted in him. He was suddenly sure that this wasn't going to be the moment of reckoning.

He explained everything he could. He gave away things he probably shouldn't have, the project's stumbling blocks and how they'd been overcome, personal details of LinkLock's directors. He found himself suddenly very eager to talk. Austen listened and occasionally posed a question.

‘And the connection with the United States, how did that come about?'

‘A man named Bradley. Arthur Bradley, at the Pentagon.'

‘Do you know how it happened exactly?'

He didn't. He said he knew only that Michael Sett was the man behind it, the initial connection. This prompted more questions about his boss: where he lived, what car he drove, what sort of man he was. What was LinkLock like as a company? How focused was it on its own security?

Their chat continued for twenty minutes or more. Every once in a while Austen returned to Bradley. It was only when the questions veered towards Daniel, towards his life in Las Vegas, that his discomfort returned. Austen wanted to know about any approaches he'd had, anyone trying to get close, befriend him.

‘No one,' Daniel said.

‘You see, we worry that we've been a little lax here. Regarding this project and keeping it on a leash.'

‘Oh.'

‘There's nothing you can think of?'

‘No, nothing.'

‘You're staying, Hughes tells me, in a loft in town?'

‘That's right.'

‘One we rent for you.'

‘The base does, I think, yes.'

‘Do you have friends here?'

‘No. I mean, only people on the base. There's Lieutenant Peach, who's missing.'

‘Did you discuss LinkLock with him?'

‘Never.'

There must be something, Daniel thought. Why these questions out of the blue?

‘What about women?' said Austen. ‘If you don't mind.'

‘My girlfriend didn't like me coming.'

‘Yes?'

‘So. A little rough patch,' Daniel said.

Austen opened his document wallet and wrote something, gave Daniel a business card.

‘If anything occurs to you,' he said.

•

Surprising to be outside, the day building and him in it.

He returned to the hut. They were almost ready to launch a flight. Gray looked pleased and Daniel was told that Raul had been in touch. A signal had been intercepted in the Tirah Valley, a cell phone, a number associated with Abu Yamin's network. An area informer had gone to the village with a photograph of Abu Ja'far and the locals there were sure that the man who'd passed through their village less than a day ago was him.

‘On the run,' Gray said as the drone warmed up.

‘Going where exactly?' Wolfe asked.

‘Barbados,' Gray suggested. ‘Aruba. The Maldives.'

‘We can conclude he reads
The Guardian
.'

‘We have to be the ones who end him. To keep our jobs it has to happen on camera so we can pass the footage up the line.'

The valley was north of Peshawar, ran along the border with Afghanistan. It was lush, a land of long crops and green, virgin hills. Clefts in the earth and hamlets. There were rocky tracks between the villages and mountains on all sides. They flew to the place of the last sighting. They followed the tracks and the natural forms. They saw waterways and olive trees and great, staggered terraces. It was a landscape so brilliant it was hard to believe it could survive.

The FBI raided the Meadows, a small hotel on the eastern edge of the downtown zone. In the 1970s, the hotel had been popular with visiting families, mostly because it was cheap. In addition to the occasional overnight and short-stay guest, it had more recently started to rent rooms by the hour to casino workers able to show ID. Ignoring the fact that it was crumbling, the workers liked it because it was clean.

The three men the FBI had come to get fought back. The FBI agents were a tactical unit who wore Kevlar and trained for these types of scenarios four days in five. Both parties knew how it was going to end but there was still the matter of carrying it out. The weapons the men had were small arms. They shot them inaccurately; shot them at doors and the edges of walls while wearing sunglasses and earmuffs, protection against flashbangs. After a short exchange of fire down a corridor, the men barricaded themselves in a room. The tactical unit shot tear gas through the window. When one of the canisters was hurled back they shot in five more. The room turned white. One of the men came to the window, making a sudden, suffocated appearance out of the shroud of the gas. They shot him. The door to the corridor burst open and the two other men threw themselves forward, firing aimlessly. They were shot too.

The unit then looked for Peach. He was not in the room and they found no sign of him. What they did find was the men's kit: cameras, binoculars, maps and letters, payroll receipts for air force personnel that had been stolen from mailboxes, computers with spreadsheets of names and times and routes, digital images, snapshots of houses and highways, photographs of people shopping. They found ammunition and cigarettes, baseball cards and gum, a utility knife, electrical tape, a video recorder, a can of Pepsi, a souvenir Grand Canyon ashtray, two pairs of handcuffs, a GPS tracker (brand name Cheating Spouse), five postcards, a five-inch lock blade, a shoulder holster, a baby doll with a plastic bottle, an LED Maglite, a guidebook to Las Vegas. They found complimentary breath mints, the business card of a local realtor, a guide for manufacturing explosives, a dozen unused SIM cards, a flyer from the Bond Girls Club, three passports, a paperweight, two-for-one meal and coffee vouchers, a Ruger LCR .38 special, a souvenir golf ball, dirty hiking boots, a mirror with adjustable stem.

In the hotel's parking lot was a damaged white van for which one of the men had the keys.

In the short twilight, the hotel's manager (who believed that the fugitives were bank robbers on their way from Los Angeles) watched a wide ambulance arrive to collect the dead.

13

T
he drone was right above the border, a great sweep of earth, when it happened. At first Daniel mistook it for a heat warning—a solid, high tone. He looked at the console.

*** Interception alert ***