Authors: Rob Sinclair
Half of the building was engulfed in a fireball; thick plumes of black smoke towered into the blue sky. Shards of wood and glass were hanging from the stricken structure. Some debris was still falling to the ground where a crumpled heap of bricks and what used to be the kitchen of the safe house lay.
‘Logan…Logan? Are you there?’
I’d forgotten that I still had the phone pressed to my ear. Mackie’s voice shook me back to reality. I quickly refocused.
‘I’m here,’ I said.
A pause. Then: ‘What the hell’s going on?’
‘The apartment just exploded.’
‘What?’
‘It just fucking exploded!’
‘The apartment? Are you okay?’
‘I think so. I mean…’
‘I thought you said you were in the apartment?’
‘No, I’m standing outside it. Wait a second…you thought I was
in
the apartment?’ I said, my voice raised, not just with growing anger but also so that I could be heard over the din around me.
‘You said you were in the apartment.’
‘What the hell is happening, Mackie? Why did the apartment just blow up seconds after I tell you that’s where I am!’
‘Logan, just cool it, okay? It’s pretty clear what’s happening here. There are obviously people still after you. You’re lucky you weren’t just killed. You’re not safe there. I tried to tell you that already.’
‘Lucky? I think I’ve been anything but lucky.’
‘Enough! Chris and Mary are on their way. They’ll be with you within a few hours. Wait with them, Logan. They can help you. I’m coming as well. You wait there until I come for you.’
‘You? Where are you?’
‘I’m in Moscow already. I’ll get to you as soon as I can.’
‘What are you doing in Moscow?’
‘I was on my way to Omsk to meet with you. I heard that was where you were heading.’
I was surprised he was so close. What was he doing in Moscow?
‘Where and when?’ I said.
‘I’ll let you know. Just wait for Chris and Mary. Meet them at the station. But keep your head down. You need to stay out of sight.’
‘Fine.’
I hung up, confusion sweeping over me. I didn’t know
what has happening, or why. One thing I did know, though, was that Mackie had been right. There definitely were people after me.
The only question was:
which
people?
Every night that I lay in my cell, I rummaged in my brain for any recollection of the lost time. But my mind was completely blank. Those memories had been locked away from me. I’d have put it down to an inner defensive mechanism, pushing away those difficult days, except the painful memories of those initial weeks of physical torture were still there, loud and clear.
The worst part was not the evident fact that during those lost days I had talked, but that I didn’t know what I had talked about. How much information had I given them about me? The mission that I was on? Previous missions? The agency?
I had no idea except for the snippets of information that would be slipped into conversation by the woman who called herself Lena.
She’d seen me each of the last eight days. It was becoming routine. Just an hour or so each time. More than once I’d refused to talk to her at all, not willing to play her games. But on other days I succumbed: the need for food – and, despite myself, my intrigue at what she had to say – was such that it was worth the co-operation.
Not that I was exactly feeling fully nourished from what I was eating. The food was better than what I’d been given back at the start of my ordeal, but it certainly wasn’t enough to maintain my full strength. I didn’t know how much weight I’d
lost – a lot. My ribs were starting to show through for the first time in my entire life. My muscles were slowly being burned for fuel.
In a regular prison, inmates can keep themselves super-fit exercising in the confines of their own cells. The extreme boredom of up to twenty-three hours a day locked up gives them plenty of time to carry out insanely hard regimens using nothing more than their own body weight. Stories of press-ups a thousand at a time are common.
But those prisoners get three proper meals a day. On the basic foods that I was being given, push-ups would just burn the limited fuel I had and that I needed to survive. I had no choice but to just lie there and take it as my body wasted away before me. Or maybe I had another choice, but it was one I wouldn’t even contemplate.
‘Where does this sense of loyalty that you have come from?’ Lena said.
I’d already eaten the paltry food that had been put before me. Today I felt like talking. If for no other reason than it made me feel human.
‘I could ask you the same question,’ I said.
‘It’s simple for me: my country. It’s something else for you, though, I think.’
‘But you don’t do this for your country,’ I disagreed. ‘You do it for a group of people in the shadows that nobody knows about. Doing it for your country implies that what you do is for the good of all of its people. The people are what make a country.’
‘What I do is for the good of the people,’ she said, entirely convinced by her own answer.
‘According to who?’
‘I wouldn’t do it otherwise,’ she said.
‘Would you do anything for them? The people who give you your orders?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘You’d kill for them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would you kill anyone they asked you to kill? Anyone at all?’
She took a little longer in answering the question this time. I knew what she was thinking: friends, family, if she had any. Would she kill them if asked to?
‘Yes,’ she said after only a few moments’ hesitation.
‘Then we’re two very different people,’ I said.
‘No, I don’t think so. I just think our loyalties are in different places. For you, maybe you do love England. But you love Mackie more.’
I felt my face redden slightly at her words. She had touched a nerve there. I’d never thought about it like that, certainly never used that word to describe my feelings for Mackie. But he’d given me this life. No, he’d given me a life. I’d done everything he’d asked of me for more than half of my sorry existence – nearly twenty years. Of course I loved him. Like a dog loves its master.
When I’d first met Mackie I was still in my teens. He moulded me into the man that I’d become. Yes, he’d moulded me into the man he had needed; it hadn’t all been for my benefit. But he’d also shown incredible faith, dedication even, towards me. More than once he’d fought my corner when others had wanted to cast me aside.
Five years ago I’d led a bungled mission to Iran. The intention had been to get to the bottom of an illegal arms-trafficking ring, supplying weapons from Western Europe to militants all across the Middle East. We had a source from the Iranian Defence Ministry who’d been an asset for almost two years. I’d been working with him day in, day out for twelve months when I found out he’d been trying to sabotage the whole operation. Feeding us false information, taking information from us to pass back to the terrorist cells, even setting traps to try to
ensnare other Western agents.
On finding out, my orders were to return home immediately. The mission had been aborted. But that wasn’t good enough for me. Before I left, I shot the asset in the face and dumped his body outside the hideout of one of the militant groups he’d been helping. He didn’t deserve anything more. And I wanted the message to get back to his allies.
But I’d underestimated the political machine that was still attached somewhere high up at the JIA – at least when it wanted to be. The Iranian government was outraged that one of their men had been killed by me, a foreign agent, on their own soil. It didn’t matter that he’d been working for terrorists; the powers that be were ready to give me up to win some diplomatic favours, expose me as a rogue agent. And I think it would have happened too, if it hadn’t been for Mackie. He fought for me. He fought for my life. And not for the first or last time.
My life had never been perfect. In fact, there had been a lot wrong with it. The scars that marked my body were testament to that. And it wasn’t just the physical scars, but the emotional ones too. From my horrific experience at the hands of Youssef Selim through to the betrayal of Angela Grainger. But despite those, I still believed my life would have been a whole lot worse without Mackie. It almost certainly would have been shorter.
‘I can see it in your eyes,’ Lena said. ‘The hurt. You can’t understand how he’s left you in here, can you?’
I wasn’t going to talk to her about that. I really didn’t want to think about it. As naive as it may have been, some tiny corner of my mind still held out hope that any second they would come for me. Come to my rescue. I was still waiting for the walls to explode and for armed troops to come storming in to take me away.
So far there had been no sign of that happening. But I didn’t want that hope taken away from me. Mackie had helped me
out before. I had to believe that he would again.
‘It’s not just Mackie out there,’ I said. ‘He isn’t the boss of all bosses. If they can’t get to me, it’s not because of Mackie.’
‘But he’s the one you take your orders from.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And you trust every order that he gives you?’
‘I always have. But that doesn’t mean that I always would.’
‘And do you trust that Mackie always knows what it is that he asks of you?’
‘Of course.’
‘So what were you doing in Russia?’
‘Every time that question is asked it’s in the past tense,’ I said.
‘You don’t think you’re in Russia now?’
‘I don’t know where I am.’
‘And that’s the way it has to be,’ Lena said, shrugging.
It didn’t really make much difference to me where we were any more.
‘But you still didn’t answer my question,’ Lena said. ‘What were you doing in Russia? Why did Mackie send you there?’
I was pretty sure that she already knew the answer to the question. Even if I hadn’t already told her in previous conversations, my cover had been blown way back on that day at RTK. She wasn’t interested in the answer to her question, just with messing with my head.
She didn’t wait long before she continued.
‘Well, let me remind you. You were brought here from RTK Technologies. You broke into there, killed three people. So what were you doing there?’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I can see we’re going to be doing this the hard way. Now, based on what you told me before – I know it’s a shame that you can’t remember it, but we really did have some very open discussions – based on what you told me, you were at RTK to recover files related to something called Project
Ruby. Does that ring any bells?’
I remained silent, wondering, as I often did, just how much information I’d given her. She seemed able to read my mind from start to finish.
‘Do you even know what Project Ruby is?’ she asked.
My lack of response prompted her to carry on.
‘So you’re sent all the way to Russia, you spend months preparing yourself, and then you raid RTK to kill innocent people and steal information about something called Project Ruby when you don’t even know what it is? Why? Because Charles McCabe told you to?’
‘No. Not just because Mackie told me to,’ I said, not wanting to rise to the bait, but unable to stop myself. ‘I never do anything that I don’t want to do. I came to RTK because your scientists are developing chemical weapons like nothing we’ve ever seen before. They’re making millions of dollars of profit selling their heinous concoctions to God knows how many of the world’s terrorist states. To me, it was a no-brainer.’
Lena laughed. That same mocking laugh that she so often directed at me.
‘Wow, and that certainly does sound like something that would need to be stopped,’ she said.
I shifted in my seat, feeling increasingly uncomfortable at the way she was toying with me.
‘And which countries are we talking about?’ she said. ‘I hope you weren’t including Russia in your list of terrorist states. We’re one of your closest allies now, surely?’
‘So close that you’d hold me here like this?’
‘So close that you’d raid one of our corporations and kill three innocent workers?’ she said.
‘They weren’t innocent. They would’ve killed me.’
‘Are you a scientist, Carl? Wait, you don’t even need to answer that. Of course you aren’t. Have you actually seen any evidence of what Project Ruby is?…Wait, you don’t need to
answer that one either. Because I know the answer. The answer is no. The only thing you were given was Mackie’s word.’
‘I trust him.’
‘Well, maybe you shouldn’t.’
Lena bent down behind the desk and came back up with a stack of papers in her hand. She threw them over to my side of the desk. The neat pile scattered and some papers fell off, onto the ground.
‘Take a look for yourself,’ she said.
I didn’t pick any of the papers up, but I couldn’t stop my eyes wandering over the scattered pile. The words were in Russian but I noticed that the papers were mostly headed up as being from RTK. I could see analysis, charts, graphs. I noticed the words ‘Project Ruby’ in bold letters at the top of more than one piece of paper.
‘These are just some of the files that your friend Dmitri took on his clever little gadget. Before he took one too many rubber bullets to the head, that is.’
I cringed inwardly. It wasn’t the first time Lena had mentioned Dmitri’s death. An accident, she’d have me believe. If you ask me, it’s not much of an accident when you fire a weapon at someone’s head. If he was dead, it was no accident. If. I wouldn’t have put it past the Russians to have made up the story of his death and to be holding him in similar conditions to mine.
‘This is all very interesting,’ I said, ‘but what am I supposed to do with these?’
‘These papers are the reason you were sent here. Don’t you want to take a look? See exactly what Mackie was willing to sacrifice you for?’
‘No. I don’t second-guess orders.’ Though I knew deep down I didn’t fully believe my own words. There was a time for sure when orders were the be-all and end-all for me, but not any more.
‘But I thought you said you only do things that you’re comfortable with? How do you decide that if you’re shown no evidence beforehand?’
‘I trust Mackie.’
‘Let me fill in the blanks for you then. Project Ruby is biochemical research into vaccines and remedies for a number of common diseases that affect military troops in the field: dysentery, cholera, malaria, legionnaires’. And some of your so-called terrorist states that have funded this research, well, they include France, Germany, Italy, India, and…wait for it…even the mighty UK.’
I tried not to betray any reaction to her words. I didn’t want her to know that her tricks were working, that the doubts in my mind were growing larger by the second. But I couldn’t help but scan the papers again. Looking for anything that corroborated what she was saying. Nothing jumped out at me. But how the hell was I supposed to know the difference between the chemical formula for a vaccine and a poisonous weapon?
Regardless, I was intrigued. Could what she was saying be true?
‘So what do you think about that, Carl?’
‘How do I know you haven’t just made all of this up?’ I said, willing for that to be the truth.
‘Well, I guess you don’t. You have to just take my word for it. The same way you so often just take the word of your boss.’
‘I don’t believe any of it. If any of it were true then why would the JIA have sent me here in the first place? There’d be no point. Why would they want me to steal that information?’
‘You’re right, they wouldn’t. They didn’t. They had no need for that information. For any of it. But you’re wrong about there being no point to your mission. It had a purpose.’
‘What possible reason could there be, then?’