Authors: Hector Macdonald
Somewhere far behind, half the gendarmerie were following, sirens filling an otherwise peaceful valley. Simon Arkell barely noticed them. No pursuer was going to catch him, not at the speed he was doing. His entire attention was on the motorcycle ahead.
Yadin knew how to use a bike. Christ, he was nimble. The Legion hadn’t taught two-wheel skills, but Arkell had amused himself experimenting during a week of downtime in Pakistan. He wondered if motorcycles featured in the Mossad’s training programme and decided they almost certainly did. The Kidon manual probably set out a bunch of useful instructions: how to come alongside a moving vehicle and attach a shaped charge; how to remove oneself fast from the scene of a murder; how to fire a handgun while doing 160kph on winding roads.
Arkell had no intention of trying that.
Gavriel Yadin cut across an alluvial plain, then followed the winding course of a river as the mountains rose around them. Arkell wondered briefly if he was making for Spain; more likely he was simply trying to disappear. They roared through a gorge where twelve cars crawled behind a flock of cyclists in brightly coloured spandex. Yadin accelerated past them all in the face of oncoming vehicles, forcing Arkell to follow him through terrifyingly narrow gaps. The roadway was especially constricted in the gorge, squeezed between sheer rock and a tumbling river. Broad nets strung overhead to catch falling debris only added to the sense of claustrophobic enclosure.
When the gorge opened up, Yadin took a side road that climbed out of the valley. Isolated gîtes and farmhouses flew past. Spray from a waterfall dampened Arkell’s face and gave the tarmac a treacherous lustre. Startled drivers swerved out of their way. Further up the hillside, two hikers walked confidently in the road, playing a reckless form of chicken with the oncoming traffic. Arkell started to become aware of the changing temperature, the cooler breezes and occasional cloud overhead.
They cut through a dark birch forest and then, as the road levelled out, bounced over a cattle grid and raced on across open pasture. Cows with heavy bells, an Alpine scene, grazed placidly around them. An estate car was parked on the grass beside a picnicking family. Beyond them, three cyclists had abandoned their bikes to rehydrate and take photographs.
Something was bothering Arkell. The woman with the poisoned flower – Yadin’s accomplice – she had seemed . . . not familiar exactly, but reminiscent of some earlier memory. Arkell had not got a clear view of her face; he had seen a glimpse of reddish hair, and that flash of puppyish pride in the set of her chin when she gazed towards Yadin. But by then, he was already turning to see what she saw . . .
A low-fuel warning light caught his attention. Pointless to be irritated by the poor discipline of a dead gendarme. Arkell considered trying a shot, but the range was impossible. He needed an opportunity fast.
It came eleven minutes later, close to the snowy granite peaks that marked the Spanish border. Their route had carried them over a high ridge, where gusts of wind tested the balance of both riders, and Yadin was now accelerating down a zigzagging road into the valley beyond. Red-topped snow poles marked out eight hairpin bends. An opportunity – but a risky one.
The grassy hillside was liberally scattered with boulders and scree. Not a healthy environment even for an off-road motorcycle equipped with suitable tyres, forks and suspension. But what the hell: he was out of fuel anyway. As he dipped low around one bend and saw Yadin racing towards the next, he went for it. Coming upright he leaned immediately to the other side, describing an elegant S-track that launched him off the road and landed him with a jarring thud on the rock-strewn slope.
Navigating a tortuous course between boulders and fissures, Arkell reached for the Glock. The muscles of his left forearm bunched and trembled with the effort of keeping the bike steady. He was less than halfway to the next stretch of the zigzag before he was spotted. Yadin accelerated and pulled out his own weapon.
The navigable stretch of hillside was coming to an end. The way down was blocked by a mass of granite boulders. Arkell had hoped a route would open up between them, but as he bounced and skidded and slalomed towards it, the array of boulders remained solidly unbroken.
Tightening his grip, readying himself for the impact, Arkell drove straight at a slanting outcrop of rock, using it as a ramp to lift him into the air so that his spinning tyres bounced once on the flattest of the boulders and he was propelled blind onto the tarmac below.
As he dropped onto the road, right in front of Yadin, both men fired. Then Arkell was crashing down the next stretch of hillside, and immediately he was in trouble.
This slope was steeper, densely scattered with boulders and pitted with fissures and crevices. His brakes seemed to have barely any effect. By some miracle he escaped the worst of the fissures, and he took the rest at an angle that kept the wheels from catching. Steering between the boulders, slowing, just about making it . . .
Until a loose stone bumped his rear wheel onto a patch of scree which sent the bike sliding sideways and round and down until he went over.
He landed hard, just managing to pull his legs clear as the machine crashed down and hurtled on into a boulder. The crunch and howl of twisting metal was terminal.
Arkell allowed himself a few seconds to deal with the pain in his head, his hip, his right knee. As he lay there, more points of injury became apparent. Lacerated forearm, knuckle abrasion, shoulder contusion. The growing list was not helpful. He lifted his head to look for Yadin, but lowered it immediately as a wave of nausea struck him. A little bump to the skull. He’d had those before. It would pass.
Reloading, he gazed back up the hill.
No sign of Yadin.
Nothing was broken. He could move both legs, with some complaint from the right knee. He could flex all his fingers and toes. Gingerly rolling sideways, he confirmed that his spine was undamaged. Vision fine. The rest was unimportant. No bullet holes in him, although when he crawled over to the misshapen bike and turned off the engine he found one in the seat.
A new quiet. With the motorcycle silent at last, he could finally hear the Pyrenees – the punchy winds, the rustle of grass, the intermittent whistling call of red kites overhead.
No sound from the other bike.
Crouched beside a boulder, he raised the Glock. Which way to point it? Yadin could be lying injured on the road above, or he could have continued on to approach from below. One way or the other, he was close by. Had he ridden away, unscathed and uninterested, the sound of his engine would have been audible for miles.
Above or below?
Arkell laid his left hand flat against the ground, picturing the Gascon smugglers and Basque separatists and subsistence herdsmen and Vichy militia and horseback lovers who had passed over this spot. That brief connection settled him, dulling the pain.
A sound. A small rock, perhaps only a pebble, skittering across the percussive hillside. Still a little disoriented, he was fairly sure the noise came from above.
On principle, Simon Arkell hated staying still when the enemy knew his location. Better just to go have it out. He tested his muscles, readied himself, checked the Glock. Then he started running.
Sprinting between the boulders, randomly altering his course up the hillside to make it as hard as possible for Yadin to target him, Arkell powered his way back up the hill. The sprint drew a fresh wave of nausea and redoubled the pain in his skull and knee. But he had lost interest in his physical state. He wanted to know. He really, urgently wanted to know.
Had he got him?
Something made him shift his gaze, and he saw to his astonishment the figure of a man cresting the ridge far up beyond the switchback road. Moving with speed and purpose; no limp, no obvious injury. Sprinting up to the road, Arkell saw the other bike lying crumpled about two hundred metres from the intersection point. Things were looking up. Arkell knew mountains. He had spent
long
months marching through mountains. Whatever endurance tests the Mossad put their Kidon recruits through, it was highly unlikely they featured quite so much mountain time as the Legion’s programme.
Smiling broadly to himself, despite the lingering nausea and aches, Simon Arkell set off at a steady jog up the hillside.
Three left. Vine, de Vries, Watchman.
Linus Marshall used to say there was no such thing as truth in Counter-Intelligence: everything rested on the interpretation of tiny, ambiguous fragments of evidence; the art lay in assembling the most plausible story to fit those fragments. The trouble was, decided Madeleine Wraye, there were three equally plausible stories on the table.
Martin de Vries, driven by a hatred of narcotics and the urge to avenge his dead sister, with unrivalled technical access to the machinery of SIS, caught in a lie about his knowledge of Arkell’s return from Yemen. The fact that Joyce had fabricated evidence against him did not make him innocent.
Tony Watchman, whose career owed much to attacks like GRIEVANCE, linked to Yadin – in this latter-day wilderness of mirrors – by Rodrigo Salis’s murder. He’d dispatched a last-minute courier to Riyadh on the day of Ellington’s death – with a vial of poison to be cached for Yadin in the ambassador’s geraniums?
George Vine, the only director known to have met Yadin, with a proven financial tie to one of GRIEVANCE’s major beneficiaries . . .
She paused on Vine. Where was the link to Think Again? If AMB was Vine’s sponsor, and Vine commissioned Yadin’s assassinations . . . what might AMB have against drug reform?
An idea . . . A possible motive. AMB was one of the USA’s primary contractors in Afghanistan and the Middle East, trusted by the Department of Defense to deliver a private-sector solution to a tough government problem. Might not the DoD’s buddies at the Department for Homeland Security also draw on their services?
The facts weren’t hidden, as her search engine swiftly revealed. They just weren’t that widely known. It had never been a big news story. The replacement of US Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection staff and equipment by AMB assets had been so gradual as to seem largely uncontroversial. First, as in war, AMB had supplied logistical support and facilities management. Its security teams had taken on some of the administrative burden of processing captured smugglers and drugs. Then the company had begun to operate a few of the USCG’s cutters on a sale-and-leaseback basis, still with uniformed Coast Guard personnel on board but with AMB hands on the engines and tiller. A new division had been set up to pilot non-weaponized drones along the US–Mexican border fence; its monitoring staff had successfully directed Border Protection officers towards smugglers building ramps or firing contraband over the fence from catapults and pneumatic cannons. Another division was tasked with detecting tunnels, using a range of ground-based and satellite technologies.
Finally, in an era of government cutbacks, and with a compellingly priced offering, AMB had been contracted to take over many of the routine counter-narcotics patrols both at sea and on land. Just another case of creeping privatization in the ongoing process of downsizing the federal government. At a time when the space programme was being outsourced, and even air traffic control and the postal service were being sized up for sale, it was not surprising that routine supervision of the War on Drugs had been entrusted to the private sector.
In the contested streets of Iraq, AMB had built their reputation for efficient and orderly fulfilment of contractual obligations; along the extensive southern border of the US, they were collecting on that reputation, quietly channelling a sizeable proportion of the Homeland Security counter-narcotics budget into their own coffers. And what would happen to that multibillion-dollar revenue stream if Think Again’s reformatory agenda reached Washington? Yes, AMB had every reason to wish Anneke van der Velde, Murilo Andrade and Terence Mayhew silenced.
Wraye’s phone rang: it was one of the two international news-scanning organizations she paid to alert her to events of relevance to her work. She listened to what the researcher had to say and brought up the BBC News homepage. The shaky smartphone footage from Lourdes showed only the president staggering and collapsing, although a couple of gunshots could be heard in the background. He was holding a rose, she noticed; he didn’t let go of it, even as he fell. It was almost beautiful.
The cirque was majestic, a great natural amphitheatre at the head of the valley, a geological bowl adorned with packed snow and waterfalls. Swathes of pine forest reached partway up the gentler slopes, but the rest was sheer granite, stepped cliffs with only the occasional small plateau to interrupt the vertical rock. Beyond rose the highest peaks in this region of the Pyrenees – the border with Spain – a forbidding wall of near-vertical rock. No villages, no roads, nothing but raw, unforgiving splendour.
They had been running towards the cirque for over an hour. Arkell had matched the other man’s formidable pace, always keeping the distant figure in sight but resisting the temptation to try to close the gap. They had settled into a kind of unspoken agreement: there would be no desperate racing; the outcome would be a question of stamina alone.
Looking up at the great Palaeozoic crest of rock that lay ahead, Arkell couldn’t believe Yadin meant to go over it. Spain might be slightly safer, the police a little less determined to catch a French cop killer, but the risk of tackling that rock face without any gear . . . surely it was easier for a man of Yadin’s talents simply to disappear in France.
Unless his objective was not to escape. Could it be that this contest with a well-matched opponent had become more important to the Israeli?
For the first time, Arkell considered seriously the possibility of going up that rock face dressed in clothes intended only for a formal evening event in Strasbourg.
Yadin’s path led through a meadow of purple and yellow wild flowers, and then across a pebble-strewn river. They were getting close now; the sound of tumbling water was growing loud. A small pine wood obscured the lower reach of the main waterfall, but the upper section sparkled in the early afternoon sun. A cloud of fine spray caught by the wind dispersed into nothing. The river was a relief after six hot kilometres. Arkell allowed himself a few seconds’ pause to gulp the deliciously cold water.
Clearing the treeline, he blinked rapidly against the light. The waterfall was two hundred metres away, a thundering rush of ice-cold snowmelt. And there at its base was Yadin, half lost in the spray, staring directly at him.
The man waited a moment longer, then turned and vanished behind the cascade. Arkell slowed down. Whatever else, there was surely no need to run any more. Yadin wasn’t going anywhere but up. At last Arkell understood: the waterfall would obscure Yadin’s progress up the rock face, protect him from a ground shot. It also made the physical challenge of the ascent that much greater, and Arkell had by now acknowledged the importance of that factor to his opponent.
He was starting almost to like the guy.
Grinning, he ambled across the banks of gravel and fluvial debris and the grimy packed snow that covered the ground. The spray, this close, was blinding. There had been little undercutting, even over millennia, of the hard granite face. Only a slight gap separated water and rock – enough to provide air to breathe and a semi-dry surface to climb.
Edging forward, Glock in hand, Arkell peered upwards. Little light penetrated the curtain. No movement, other than the constant rush of foaming water. Just a bare, bleak wall disappearing into near darkness overhead.
A scrape in the moss, three metres off the ground. Arkell climbed onto a boulder to get a closer look. The mark was fresh, the rock dry and clean where the moss had been stripped away. By Yadin’s boot? There was the first handhold, there the jutting pimple he’d used to step up. Arkell examined it closely. A trace of mud marked the edge.
Tucking the weapon into his waistband, he set his own foot on the same fragment of rock and started climbing.
The ascent at first was not difficult. The granite was sheer, but there were plenty of fissures to grip or to wedge a fist inside, and a few protrusions here and there for a foothold. He kept scanning the rock face above, searching for movement in the gloom.
No Yadin.
The waterfall closed in around him as he approached the overhang. Water flooded the rock face on both sides. Yadin must have forced his way through the water to one side or the other. But which way?
In the darkness beneath the overhang, it was hard to make out the bumps and holes on which his life depended. Glancing down, he saw the shallow plunge pool and the boulder debris of the talus far below. It would be an instantly fatal fall. He imagined Yadin, up here in the darkness, gazing down at him while clinging for his life to these few meagre holds.
Which way? Running his fingers over the rock face, Arkell could find nothing at all to grasp on the left side. To the right, an inadequate crimp. He formed a rigid claw over it and felt around with his foot for some kind of toehold. Nothing within reach except a narrow fissure. He couldn’t fit any part of his shoe into it, but maybe . . .
Retreating to his earlier holds, he took off his shoes and secured them under his belt. With some difficulty, he managed to jam his smaller toes into the fissure. He leaned close into the wall, let go of his last secure hold, and trusted his weight to his toes. Switching hands on the crimp, he swiftly spread his right fingers to search the rock beyond. A long stretch, almost to the watery curtain, found a robust chickenhead.
Easing his toes out of the fissure, he let himself swing one-handed from the new hold.
A soft spatter of droplets cut through the fine mist, dampening his face. His bare feet found a narrow ledge that seemed to extend into the waterfall. Switching hands, he reached sideways with his right arm to assess the force of the flow. Not good.
He found a sharp-edged fissure for his right fingers, and eased his way along the ledge. The barrage of ice-cold water on his shoulder, then on his head, unbalanced him, and he lay flat against the rock for a few seconds to get used to the rushing, disorientating flow. He could see nothing at all now. The cold was paralysing. He had endured colder conditions, but not when his life depended on the precise functioning of his fingers and toes.
Sliding his right foot sideways, he measured another half metre of support before the ledge came to an end. Beyond that, the slick wet rock face was bare.
Cursing, he balanced on his left toes, left fingers crimping that sharp-edged fissure, while his right hand and foot searched the rock face beyond for some kind of hold. It was completely smooth: no way to climb any further. Already the icy torrent battering his skull was bringing on a headache. Go back? Try the left route? He wasn’t at all sure retreat past the chickenhead would even be possible.
Arkell opened his eyes beneath a visored hand and let them adjust to the glow of light coming through the waterfall. It was perhaps another two metres to the edge of the water. He could see just the faintest outline of the dry rock face beyond.
Crouched down, left foot poised on the end of the ledge, he let go of the fissure above and focused all his energy into his left leg. The icy water was already causing him to shiver violently. It was time to move.
Thrusting hard, he propelled his body upwards and sideways. With eyes creased almost closed, he could just make out the rock face rushing past. Then he was out of the waterfall, in bright, clear sunshine, and starting to fall. As the curve of his trajectory steepened and his vertical speed accelerated, he glimpsed a rough and fracturing ledge. His right fingers, drawn into a claw, lunged at it, grasping and scratching for a hold. A piece of granite came away, and with it his fingers, but his left hand was ready to take their place, forming a tenuous clamp on what was left of the ledge.
It held.
He hung, motionless, and gazed around. Three metres to the right, a buttress he could reach via an indent and a jug. Eighty metres below, the scree-covered ground. And just thirty metres above, hauling himself onto a granite outcrop: Yadin.
Still hanging from one arm, Arkell whipped out the Glock and fired three rapid shots. His aim, squinting against the sun, was slightly off. Fragments of granite burst from the mountainside. He corrected for the error and fired again. But Yadin had rolled forward onto the outcrop and disappeared. Stuffing the Glock back in his belt, Arkell twisted sideways, stamped on the indent to get a hold on the jug and swung himself onto the buttress.
God, it was good to be able to see again.
Beyond the buttress, the rock face curved inward, and Arkell eased his way round to a gully out of Yadin’s line of fire. The gully led more or less straight upwards for fifty metres, with big dry rocks jutting out on either side. In comparison with the rock face he’d just left, it was the equivalent of an express elevator. A child could have scrambled up it.
It was a chance to close the gap.
Simon Arkell hauled himself from rock to rock, kicking off one boulder to pounce onto another. The cold of the waterfall was wearing off. New energy coursed through him. If he could just get higher than Yadin . . .
He emerged from the top of the gully onto a scrap of rough, sloping ground that still bore a few traces of dirty snow. The grass that clung to it was thinly spread and coarse. With the Glock in his right hand, Arkell crawled to the edge and gazed across to the outcrop.
No one there.
His feet were throbbing from a dozen sharp edges, and he paused to put on his shoes. Then he continued upwards.
By two o’clock, Simon Arkell was starting to worry. He had kept the entire local area of the cirque under constant observation, yet had seen no sign of his quarry. Each time he crested another rise or peered over a new ledge, he expected to spot the Israeli scaling the next stretch of rock. But there was never anything but patches of old snow and the occasional eagle using the mountain updraughts to rise lazily into the sky.
He began to wonder if the other man had outsmarted him, had found a way down, was already ambling towards the nearest village. Arkell was thirsty. The sun was brighter at this altitude, unrelenting. His clothes had long since dried out in the gusting winds: there was no moisture to be sucked from a shirtsleeve. He considered the residues of snow, streaked with black, and decided he was not yet that thirsty.
He had traversed slowly across the cirque to intersect what he believed to be Yadin’s route, but could find no sign the other man had ever been here. At this altitude there was little noise from the waterfall, and Arkell spent long minutes trying to detect the scrape of scree on rock, or the tumble of a dislodged pebble. But if Yadin was moving anywhere nearby, he was doing it without making a sound.
Arkell kept climbing.
There was something about the little meadow that made him pause. A welcome plateau between two challenging bluffs, it was green and lush compared to the sparse patches of grass scattered elsewhere on the cirque slopes. It would have been a beautiful place to come with a packed Gascon lunch and a case of cold beers, if it wasn’t so hard to reach.
No movement. No sign of the man. Arkell lowered his weapon.
It seemed, then, to fly from his hand. His right arm was flung outwards as an intense pain tore through it. The sound of the gunshot he registered almost as an afterthought. The Glock had landed several metres away. He needed to leap towards it, drop to the ground, work out Yadin’s position – three tasks already in his mind, not quite carried out when the second round struck his left leg and he collapsed.
Simon Arkell did not have time to crawl towards his weapon. Closing his mind to the searing pain, he saw a man already standing in the place it had landed. The man’s own gun rested neatly against his thigh, the trigger finger of the right hand flush against its barrel.
That finger tapped twice on the metal, a contemplative action. Arkell raised his eyes to gaze into Gavriel Yadin’s bleak face. The assassin looked tired. Capable, but tired.
He picked up the Glock and hurled it far out over the valley.
‘Shouldn’t have done that,’ managed Arkell through the pain. ‘Some kid will blow his toes off.’
Yadin made a brief phone call. His words were inaudible to Arkell. Then he walked the eight paces that separated them and gazed down at the crumpled figure. ‘What’s your name?’
‘I can’t remember.’
Yadin drew back his foot, and kicked him very precisely on the entry wound on his thigh.
It took Arkell a moment to get his breath back, but when he did he managed a convincing laugh.
Yadin watched him expressionlessly. ‘Your friend in Strasbourg gave a good description of you. He knew your approximate age. He believed that you once worked for SIS, but he did not know your name and could not find your file.’
Poor Joyce, thought Arkell. He must have suffered a lot worse than this. Plus the view wasn’t so good for him.
When Yadin kicked his leg a second time, he just grinned.
The Israeli sighed. ‘In fact, this question of one name or another name is not interesting to me. Others find it interesting but now, after this long climb you and I have made, I do not care. I have a different question. It was you in Cyprus?’
Arkell nodded, clamping his jaw against the waves of pain coming from his thigh.
‘My question is only personal: I . . . sensed someone in the restaurant in Limassol. Was it you? Did you come in?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you didn’t act.’ He glanced sideways at the sound of an engine. ‘Why?’
‘Guess I’m not cut out to be an assassin. Maybe you could give me some pointers.’
Yadin was quiet for a while. Somewhere overhead, the noise of the engine grew, accompanied by the thud of rotating blades.
‘You let me finish my dinner,’ said Yadin. He holstered the Sig Sauer. ‘I will let you finish your . . .’ He gestured around the cirque, the towering rock walls, the precipitous plunge to the valley floor. ‘. . . Excursion.’
The helicopter came into Arkell’s field of view, dropping neatly onto the meadow behind Yadin. Spanish registration. An efficient exfiltration; no doubt the original rendezvous had been at a somewhat lower altitude.
‘You’re good,’ said Yadin, with a last look at the route they’d both climbed. He hesitated before turning to the aircraft, gazed once more at Arkell. A trace of something like regret in his eyes. ‘Unfortunately, not good enough.’