Will watched the hostiles move back to the van and enter the vehicle. The van quickly reversed. Within seven seconds it was off the bridge, out of sight, and heading west away from Gdansk.
The defector had been kidnapped.
Though they all had different objectives, Will and his team had failed, the SVR team had failed, and the Polish AW and ABW men had failed.
Will watched the SVR officer. He had a clear line of sight and could easily shoot the man. But Will lowered his gun as he saw the Russian lift the Polish operative, carry him off the bridge back onto the island, gently lower him to the ground, lean down, pat his hand on the Pole’s shoulder, and stand before him for a few seconds before running away into the fog.
Will glanced at Delta 9. “Help the Pole!”
He turned east, ran across open ground toward the central road, sprinted harder when he was on it, tucked his handgun into his waistband, dashed between buildings, ran across more open ground, and barely slowed as he saw three men.
One of them was a dead hostile, lying still and awkwardly on the ground. His neck or back had been broken. Another man was next to him on the ground. He was Delta 1. Standing over him was the last hostile. He was very big, and his physique was made all the more imposing by the body and head armor. The man was grappling with the Q team leader, but clearly was on the verge of overpowering him.
Will slowed to a brisk walking pace. He felt overwhelming anger and frustration that everything tonight had gone wrong. Reaching the large hostile, he saw the man turn to face him. Will kicked his armored chest with such tremendous force the hostile was lifted off his feet. He looked at Delta 1. “Are you injured?”
Delta 1 shook his head and started to push himself off the ground. Will walked over to the prone hostile, stamped his foot on the man’s unprotected throat and pressed hard. He looked at Delta 1 again. “This has been a bloody mess.” He pressed harder with his foot and kept it firmly in place as the hostile grabbed his ankle with two hands and tried to wrench his leg away. Shaking his head, he muttered, “The defector’s as good as dead.” He looked down at the hostile. “Who sent you?”
The man tried to speak but was choking.
Will lifted his foot a fraction.
“We’re ”—the hostile coughed—“private contractors.”
“Who sent you?”
“Don’t . . . know. My boss did, but”—his eyes glanced sideways toward his dead colleague—“he can’t talk anymore.”
Delta 1 moved to the dead body, expertly searched the man’s clothing, looked at Will, and shook his head.
“You’re British?”
“Me and a couple of others. The rest of the team came from all over.”
Will nodded and stamped his foot down. The hostile arched his back, and his limbs thrashed for thirty seconds before he became motionless. Will looked away from Delta 1 toward the bridge. “Come with me.”
Will jogged back toward the western bridge, Delta 1 by his side. They reached the beginning of the bridge and saw the Polish operative sitting against a wall, his face covered in his blood. Delta 9 was by him, attending to his wounds with a battlefield medical kit.
Will crouched down in front of the Pole. “Do you speak English?”
The operative opened his mouth, winced in pain, and nodded.
“Okay. We’re British intelligence officers. We came here tonight to protect you from the SVR unit, but I let you and your men down. I’m sorry that you didn’t get the Russian defector.” He glanced at Delta 9. “How bad is he?”
“He’s only got flesh wounds, but they’re pretty nasty and he’ll need medical attention.”
Will returned his attention to the Pole. “We going to take you to a hospital.”
Police sirens rang out in the distance.
“Help is on its way.” The Polish operative grimaced as he adjusted position. “I’ll be looked after. But you need to get out of here. If they find you, the police and security services will arrest you for operating illegally in Poland.” He breathed in deeply and added, “I’ll not say anything to my colleagues about you three. That will buy you some hours to get out of Poland. But they’ll conduct a forensic analysis of this gun battle and in all probability will soon realize that there are men unaccounted for.”
Will shook his head. “Thank you. But I can’t ask you to cover for us and jeopardize your career.”
The Pole shrugged. “It’s dark, weather is bad, I’m injured. I could easily have failed to see three men escape this place.”
Will nodded.
The AW officer spat blood onto the ground. “The whole thing was a setup.”
Will frowned. “What do you mean?”
The operative looked at him. “After he carried me away from danger, the big SVR officer briefly spoke to me. He said that the defector had used my Agencja Wywiadu exfiltration route and resources to simply get out of Russia, but once in Poland it was never his intention to hand himself over to us. Instead, he’d come to Gdansk to be taken away by the team that showed up here tonight. The SVR man knew that and was here to try to stop it from happening. He said the defector was carrying something that must not get in the wrong hands.”
Will felt his stomach tighten. “What?”
The Pole looked along the bridge toward the direction where the van had disappeared with its prize. “He’s carrying a single piece of paper. The SVR officer told me that it’s imperative the paper’s retrieved, that my country’s security service must do everything to stop the defector and his friends from escaping Poland. He said that he would hunt them down and that we should not attempt to stand in his way.” He looked back at Will. “He told me that the paper is lethal.”
T
he four senior CIA officers sat in silence within a windowless room in the agency’s Langley headquarters. Save a table and chairs, the room was empty of anything else including telephones or any other electronic equipment. On the oak boardroom table between the men was a jug of ice water, four glasses, nothing else.
Tibor, the oldest of the men, was in his mid-forties and had twenty years of intelligence service under his belt. Wearing a bespoke blue striped Adrian Jules suit, a pink French-cuff shirt with cutaway collar, a silk tie, and handcrafted black leather brogues, and with his dark hair styled and held in place by cream, the Bostonian looked like a Wall Street investment banker rather than a government employee. “I asked you here because we’ve got a problem. Lenka Yevtushenko has momentarily reappeared on the radar before disappearing just as quickly.”
“Where?”
“When?”
“How?”
Tibor took a swig of his water and winced as the cold liquid produced a few seconds of pain inside his head. “Gdansk. Yesterday.” He paused. “How? Well, that’s a bit more complex.”
Damien, the blond man to his right, snapped, “But no matter how complex, we still know why he reappeared. Right?”
“Wrong.” This came from a Texan named Marcus. “I’m betting Tibor’s a little confused.
Right,
Tibor?”
Tibor nodded. “Right. But so would you be.”
Lawrence, the youngest of the four, spoke, “Blow by blow, Tibor.”
Tibor rubbed his temples. “Yevtushenko did a walk-in to the Polish consulate in Saint Petersburg saying he wanted to make the transition to the other side. And he said he had some major coin for the ferryman.”
“Defection on Russian soil?”
“Stupid.”
“More likely calculated.” The pain in Tibor’s head receded. “Looks like it was a setup.”
“Exploiting the Polish exfiltration route?”
“Seems that way.”
Damien shook his head. “Yevtushenko isn’t clever enough to have thought this up himself. Someone gave him instructions.”
Tibor agreed. “But that someone met some unexpected resistance. The Russians tailed Yevtushenko to Gdansk and most likely would have grabbed him there had it not been for the fact that an MI6 team was also on the ground.”
“They were the ones who orchestrated the ruse?”
“No. The Brits were there because they had a tip-off about the defection from one of their assets in the consulate. They were deployed to shadow and protect the Poles, and to help them get Yevtushenko. MI6 didn’t set this up. Someone else did. And Yevtushenko managed to get to that person.”
The men were silent for a moment.
Damien muttered, “It has to be the Israelis, and yet . . .”
“And yet I agree with what you were about to say. It would have been a sledgehammer approach to grab such an unremarkable SVR target.” Lawrence drummed his fingers on the table. “What’s MI6’s take?”
Tibor answered, “They think he’s in the hands of private individuals, not a state intelligence service.”
“And how do you know about the Gdansk operation?”
“Our golden source.” Tibor was deep in thought. “Gentlemen. Perhaps we should agree with MI6 that Yevtushenko was extracted by private individuals, and if that is the case, perhaps we should conclude that he was extracted from Russia for other reasons.”
“Reasons that won’t trouble us?”
“Possibly.” Tibor studied his three colleagues. Though he was older than them, everyone in the room was of equal rank. They trusted each other completely, and while technically they answered to the director of the CIA, in practice the team answered only to themselves. “There’s no doubt that we were right in our assessment of Yevtushenko. He wasn’t the big fish we initially thought he was, but he clearly has immense value to someone. And whatever that value is, I think it has nothing to do with our mistake in giving Yevtushenko’s name to the Israelis.”
“Mistake?” Damien snorted. “What we did was damn right illegal!”
“A tactical error, my friend. Nothing more, nothing less. And it was done with the best of intentions.”
“Tactical error or not, it has serious jail time written all over it if the truth is ever discovered. I’d dearly like to track down Simon Rübner and grab him by the throat.”
Tibor smiled. “Why? Because we fell for the Mossad officer’s trick and failed to realize that he was an Israeli double agent? Come on, we must move on from that. We’ve got other priorities now.”
“We’re lucky the Brits didn’t get their hands on Yevtushenko.” Marcus frowned. “You think it’s case closed for them?”
Tibor shrugged. “I can’t be sure. Not yet. But I do know that the field officer who was in charge of the Brits’ team in Gdansk is MI6’s best operative.”
Lawrence muttered, “Shit. He’ll have the bit between his teeth. It’s highly unlikely to be
case closed
.”
Tibor placed his hands flat on the table and studied his three colleagues. He hesitated before saying, “I have information that could allow us to obtain an unorthodox solution.”
“We’re listening.”
The officer paused for thought. “I have the field officer’s name and home address.”
“From the golden source?”
“Of course.”
They sat in silence for a while. Lawrence was the first to speak. “We can’t do anything with that information. It’s too risky.”
Tibor disagreed. “The information
can
be used without us getting our hands dirty.”
Lawrence narrowed his eyes. “Give the name and address to someone who’ll do the work for us?”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
Damien clapped his hands. “We give it to Yevtushenko . . .”
“Who relays this data to whoever masterminded his exit from Russia . . .”
“A man who’s not going to sit around and wait for MI6’s finest to come knocking on his door.”
Lawrence said, “Yevtushenko will have destroyed his cell phone. We’ve got no way of sending him a message.”
Tibor grinned. “You’re forgetting about his squeeze. I reckon that if we send the message to her, she’ll find a way to get in touch with him: another cell number that no one knows about, a safe-deposit box, a third party. Who knows how she’ll do it, but we do know that Yevtushenko’s biggest weakness is his devotion to her. He’ll have cut all other ties, but I suspect he’ll have kept lines open with his woman. We gotta hope they have some private communication system in place.”
“It’s a long shot.”
“We’ve got nothing to lose by trying it. Trouble is, Rübner must have told him we’re Agency.” Tibor drummed his fingers on the table. “Though, does that matter? He’ll be confused about our motives, but he can’t ignore the message. We tell him that we’re sorry we misled him a year ago, that we still care about him, are looking out for him, have learned that he’s got himself caught up in something big, that the Brit is coming after him.” He smiled. “This should bury the Yevtushenko issue once and for all. We encourage the private contractors to take the MI6 officer out of the equation. Are we all in agreement?”
The others nodded.
“Excellent.” Tibor glanced at the door. Beyond it, thousands of CIA officers would be hard at work. Few of them knew about the existence of the four-man team in the room.
A team that carried the code name Flintlock.
And the CIA director’s nickname, The Chosen Ones
.
“Then let’s set things in motion.” Tibor nodded toward the exit. “But, as ever, not a word to the children.”
W
ill Cochrane pulled up the collar of his overcoat, thrust his hands into pockets, and walked through London’s Pimlico district. Rain lashed his face as he moved along quiet residential streets, apparently unaware of the white Regency houses, expensive parked automobiles, and the occasional umbrella-carrying pedestrian.
Turning a corner, he stopped for a moment and looked around, more out of habit than concern. He could perceive no security threat to the safe house. He saw nothing unusual, so he crossed the street and moved farther down the route before ringing a doorbell.
An elderly lady, immaculately dressed and with a streak of blonde in her otherwise silver hair, opened the door, barely glanced at Will, and beckoned him to enter. Stamping his feet on the doormat, he removed his overcoat and chucked it onto a side table before striding along the corridor toward a large living room.
Three men were in the room.
One of them was Delta 1.
One was Delta 9.
They’d both arrived back in the United Kingdom yesterday.
The third man was Will’s MI6 Controller, Alistair, the Cohead of the Spartan Section, a joint MI6/CIA task force that was top secret and reported directly to the British prime minister and the U.S. president.
The tall, athletic Q operatives, dressed in jeans and sweaters, were sitting in sumptuous armchairs, their heads bowed over steaming mugs of tea. Alistair was standing with his back to Will, staring out of the window.
“Morning, all.” Will rubbed his hands to aid circulation.
Alistair turned to face him, withdrawing a pocket watch from the waistcoat of his Royal Navy three-piece suit. He sighed. “It’s nearer to afternoon. Did you get . . .
delayed
?”
Will shook his head. “I had to route via three different airports to get back. It took some time.”
“
My
time.” Alistair replaced the timepiece into his pocket. The slender, blond-haired, middle-aged man looked uncharacteristically weary.
Will slumped into a sofa and looked around. The safe house was like many others he’d been to in London—tastefully furnished, immaculate, homely yet unlived-in. The woman he’d met at the door would have been the housekeeper, on MI6’s payroll and only visiting the property to clean it, forward mail, and ensure the kitchen was stocked with food and drink for meetings like these. “I could do with a cup of tea.”
Alistair nodded toward the teapot and mugs, and asked sarcastically, “Would you like me to make you one?”
“No. You’ll put milk and all sorts of other nonsense in it.” Will sprung up to make it himself.
“Tell me”—Alistair’s tone was once again sharp—“what went wrong in Poland.”
Will removed the lid to the teapot, shaking his head as he saw that the brew had stewed. “The unexpected happened.”
“Resulting in ten dead Q operatives.”
Will raised a jar of fresh tea to his nose, recognized the leaves as Assam breakfast tea, and carefully placed two spoonfuls into a cup.
“And all but one man from the AW and one man from the SVR teams killed.”
Will poured boiling water over the leaves.
“A bloody massacre. The Polish government wants answers.”
“Our men were deniable. No links to HMG.” Will placed a tea strainer over another mug and slowly poured the tea into it. “Sure, they’ll be asking around—other European countries, the Americans—and we’ll all plead ignorance.”
“Not all of your men were deniable.”
Alistair was referring to Luke. Despite his alias documentation, it would only be a matter of time before the Polish police matched Luke’s dead body to the fully declared post of Head of Warsaw Station.
“Your mission was an utter failure!”
Will took a sip of the tea and momentarily closed his eyes in appreciation. Turning, he stared at Alistair. “It was a failure.” He looked at Delta 1. “I’m truly sorry for what happened to your men.”
The Q operative stared at him and asked with a deep south London accent, “Did you know the Russians were coming?”
“That’s none of your—”
Will held a hand up to interrupt Alistair. “Yes, but I didn’t know about the private contractor team. That was the unexpected part.”
Delta 1 considered this. “Then you’ve got nothing to be sorry about. If the contractors hadn’t turned up, together with the Poles we’d have held the Russians off.”
“Aye.” Delta 9 spoke with a strong Scottish lilt. “But even so, we were underequipped.”
“You were.” Will gave a slight shake of his head to Alistair to indicate that he wasn’t going to mention Luke’s treachery. “That was due to a breakdown in communication. We’re looking into it right now.”
Delta 1 carefully placed his mug down before looking up at Will. “Whoever’s responsible for the breakdown in communication needs to be strung up. I’ve lost most of my team.”
Will recalled the frozen look of terror on Luke’s face as he’d dumped his dead body in the trunk of the Head of Warsaw Station’s car. “What are your names and backgrounds?”
Delta 1 answered first. “Mark Oates. Nine years in the Qs, two as team leader. Prior to that, twelve years in the Royal Marines, eight of which SBS.”
Will looked at Delta 9.
“Adam Tark. Five years in the Qs. Before that seven years in the SAS.”
Will frowned. “I once knew a Scot called Ross Tark who was also SAS.”
“Aye, he was my younger brother.” Adam smiled. “Always followed me around.” His smile vanished. “Were you there when he died?”
Will answered, “No,” as he recalled gathering up Ross’s entrails and inserting them back into his stomach. The SAS soldier had been gutted by a Russian Spetsnaz commander during Will’s last mission. That operation was so sensitive that everyone involved in it was instructed to never speak to anyone else about what happened, anyone including security-cleared relatives of those who’d died in the mission.
“And who are you?” Mark flexed his muscular hands.
“That”—Alistair held up a hand toward Will—“really
is
none of your business.”
Will studied the Q men. Adam looked nothing like his deceased brother. Though probably in his early thirties, he was prematurely balding with graying hair, and clearly had undergone emergency reconstructive surgery on what would have once been a handsome face. Mark was older, probably early forties, with cropped brown hair. His face was weathered, tanned, and partially covered with stubble. Aside from their physique, both men shared one trait. Their eyes looked dead.
Will asked Mark, “What’s your brief right now?”
“Fuck knows. Vauxhall Cross”—MI6 HQ—“wants us to report in tomorrow. I suspect we’re going to be put before the Inquisition. Seen it happen to other Qs before. Our bollocks will be squeezed until we’re without a job and a hair’s breadth away from prison.”
“But you’ve done nothing wrong!”
“On paper, I did nothing right.”
Will looked at Alistair. “We can’t let that happen. We owe these men, plus they performed impeccably.”
Alistair frowned. “And what would you have me do?”
“We’re light by two men on the paramilitary front. Make them part of the section. If you do that, you’ll save them from the bureaucrats.”
Alistair looked affronted. “Selection to the unit is rigorous . . .”
“It is. And Mark and Adam passed the test in Gdansk.”
Alistair darted a look at the Q men. “Gentlemen, would you be kind enough to leave the room for a moment?”
“Let them stay. After what they’ve been through, I believe we can talk openly in front of them.” Will nodded at Mark. “My name’s Will. There
are
real sensitivities around what I do, but don’t take it as a slight against you that we can’t go into what they are.”
Mark shrugged. “Fine by us.”
Alistair moved up to Will and whispered, “What would Roger and Laith think?”
Roger Koenig and Laith Dia. The two CIA SOG paramilitary officers who were permanently seconded to the Spartan Section.
“They’ll want to know they’re working alongside professionals of equal caliber. Once they’ve ascertained that’s the case, their respect for you will grow exponentially. They’ll have seen that you’ve put your powerful wings around two men just like them, and that will make you stand out from the pencil pushers.”
“I don’t need faux flattery.”
“I know. But you need a team.”
Alistair seemed unsure. “If I requisition them, I’ll upset quite a few people.”
“Since when do you care about pissing off senior management? In any case, if you requisition them for the section, nobody can do anything about it.”
Alistair nodded slowly, deep in thought. “It would, I concede, complete the team.” He turned toward the Q men and studied them for a moment before speaking in a commanding voice. “Gentlemen, in days gone by, condemned men were sometimes given a choice between the rope or a lifetime of serving on the very worst battlefronts. I’m giving you a similar choice.”
Mark smiled. “Nobody’s going to put me in a rope.”
Adam nodded. “My sentiments, exactly. But what is this section?”
Alistair wagged a finger. “You’ll need to sign some nondisclosure documents before I get into that.” He glanced at Will. “Then, things will become clearer.”
Will looked at Mark and Adam. “Once you’ve signed the papers, you’ll be outside of all other chains of command. Trust Alistair, trust me, trust everyone else in the section, but no one else.” He guided Alistair away from the Q men and asked quietly, “Patrick?”
The CIA cohead of the section.
Alistair frowned. “What about him?”
“He needs to be here, together with Roger and Laith. When are they flying over?”
“For what?”
Will felt exasperated. “You know
what
the AW operative told us. We can’t allow that piece of paper to remain in the wrong hands. The mission is clear . . .”
“It’s not! We don’t know anything about the paper.”
“We know its value. What happened in Gdansk proved that.”
Alistair spoke with deliberation. “You can’t expect me to deploy the section on something so intangible. And I’m certainly not going to do so just to allow you to make up for the fiasco in Poland.”
Will snapped furiously, “It’s got nothing to do with that. The Russians deployed a whole SVR team to retrieve the paper.”
“Then let them find it.”
“What happens if they can’t? There’s only one of them left.”
“They’ll send him more bodies.” Alistair shook his head. “You can’t expect Patrick and me to take this to our premiers to get them to sign off on the section’s deployment.”
“I can.”
“This is wrong.”
“Have I ever been wrong in the past?”
“Yes, lots of bloody times.”
“I mean in terms of the results of the operations I’ve conducted?”
Alistair hesitated before saying, “You’ve got nothing more than a hunch that this is worth pursuing.”
“Perhaps, but every operational instinct in me says it’s vital we get involved.”
Alistair sighed. “We’d have to tell the premiers that we’re recommending this course of action purely based on your
instincts
.”
“Tell them what you like. Just make sure they sign off.”
“And what if we do deploy and you’re wrong, William?” His expression changed to one that looked like sympathy. “The premiers’ patience with you is already stretched to near breaking point.”
Will shrugged. “What are they going to do? Find someone to replace me? I wish them luck, because I doubt anyone else is able to complete the Program.”
“They know that!” As did Alistair. Eight elite MI6 officers had not only failed the Spartan Program before Will had gone through it to earn the code name Spartan, they’d been left psychologically and physically damaged and had needed to leave the service. “But things are changing. There are cries for transparency from the intelligence community, demands to do away with so-called
shadowy
task forces and the like. This is not just about you. If we get this wrong, some might grab this as an opportunity to shut us down.”
Will nodded slowly. “I see.”
“I’m so glad that you do.”
“But conversely, if we get this right we might turn some of those detractors into supporters.”
“That’s a damn big risk.”
“Worth it though, don’t you think?”
Alistair was motionless. “I concede, you have always been
right
about the things that matter. But there is a first time for everything. This would be an almighty gamble.”
“Please, Alistair. Say what you like to the premiers. Position it however you think is best. Just get them to sign off on this.”
Alistair lowered his head. “If you’re wrong and they shut down the section because of that, all of the section members, me included, would be given other jobs in the service or the Agency.” He lifted his head. “But you’ve been operating on your own for too long. No one would want someone with your kind of skill set. It would be over for you.”
Will smiled, patted Alistair gently on the arm, and said, “I know.”