Authors: Matthew Dunn
S
oil clung to the CIA officer’s perspiring skin after he inadvertently rubbed the back of his aching hand against his forehead. Roger Koenig’s sweat made some of the grime enter his eyes, and he had to blink fast to clear them. He grabbed his pickax, swung it over his head, and slammed it into the ground. Three other men were close to him, all natives of Iran’s southwestern city of Shiraz, whose outskirts were ten miles north of their current location. They, too, were using shovels and pickaxes to dig, lanterns around the hole being the sole source of light in the pitch-dark night. Their grunts and the noise of their tools striking earth were the only sounds they could hear in the featureless and deserted rural location.
Reza was the twenty-nine-year-old son of a watchmaker who was by his side. He said, “I’ve hit something.”
They all immediately stopped digging.
Roger lay flat on his stomach and placed his hand in the hole, which was seven feet long, four feet wide, and three feet deep. The CIA officer had to stretch to touch the bottom. There was no doubt Reza was right. They’d reached something that was metal. Thank God. Roger had previously shuddered at the idea they might find rotting mahogany that would reveal what was inside if they tried to remove the item. He didn’t want that image in his head. It would be wrong.
Roger got to his feet and looked at the watchmaker. “Masoud. Very carefully.”
Masoud nodded and placed a hand on his other son, “Firouz will clear the surface. We’ll excavate around the box.”
They got back to work, this time making smaller indentations with their tools so as not to inadvertently damage the box. It took them nearly an hour to uncover it completely and allow enough space for them to stand next to the container. One man at each corner, they slowly lifted the heavy box that was as long as Roger was tall, and placed it next to the hole.
Breathing fast, Roger grabbed a rag and wiped his face and hands. “Okay. Let’s move. Box in the truck first. Then all equipment.”
Masoud asked, “Do we refill the hole?”
“No time for that.”
They drove nearly four hundred kilometers through the night, Reza at the wheel and where possible his foot to the floor because they were all desperate to reach the southern port of Bandar-e ‘Abbâs before daybreak. They made it with one hour to spare, Reza avoiding the main roads as he expertly navigated his way through the medium-sized city until they reached the shores of the Persian Gulf. Boats of all shapes and sizes were moored alongside jetties and harbor walls. Most of them were motorized cargo vessels, some were powerful speedboats. All of them were the type of craft that would have gotten them away from Iran and its naval patrols in quick time. But they were too obvious. Instead, Roger had decided they needed to escape in something that no fugitives in their right minds would use.
That vessel was now in front of them. A traditional dhow that had one big white sail but no motor.
Reza parked the truck. “Fast, fast.” He stayed in the vehicle as the other men ran to the back of the truck, grabbed the metal container, and carried it quickly along a jetty and onto the boat. Reza was driving away as they lowered the box onto the deck. His destination was Shiraz where he’d put the truck in a secure garage and leave it locked in there until he was sure that it wasn’t being looked for by Iranian police or the country’s more insidious security agencies.
Roger was a former member of SEAL Team 6 who had proficiency with most types of seafaring vessels. That experience enabled him to help Masoud and Firouz prepare the dhow to sail. It took them only two minutes to get the vessel moving. Roger was of no use now aside from scouring their surroundings as his Iranian assets steered the vessel and made adjustments to its rigging. He did so for one hour as they crossed the Strait of Hormuz, and even as they exited Iranian waters unchallenged, he continued his vigil as they approached the United Arab Emirates and followed its shores until they entered Dubai’s creek.
The CIA officer only let himself relax when they reached the inner part of the creek, where the majority of boats docked and unloaded their cargos.
The early-morning sun and balmy air soothed his weary face; there were noises of birds and men and vessels, but they were quiet, as if the creatures were half-asleep and respectful that others nearby were still in deep slumber. Roger wondered when he’d next sleep. Not for a while, he concluded.
He placed a hand on the metal box. It had taken him three years to identify its location, and he’d done so using his own money during downtime, when he wasn’t deployed by the CIA, and sometimes vacation time, when he should have been with his family. He’d sacrificed a lot to locate and extract the container by tasking his Iranian sources, bribing officials, analyzing old CIA reports, talking to former Iranian intelligence officers turned CIA assets, and by putting his boots on Iranian ground and making his own inquiries. Many times he could have been captured and killed if anyone had established his objective. And if that had happened, the CIA would have rightly disavowed him because it, too, had no idea what he was doing.
His biggest fear now was that the thing in the box was not what he thought it was. After he took it to the American consulate in Dubai and it was flown back to the States, tests would be done on its contents. Then he’d find out if his efforts now and during the preceding years had been worth the sacrifice.
He dearly hoped so.
Because the box was his gift to a British MI6 officer who’d saved his life countless times.
A man who deserved some peace of mind in his otherwise mangled life.
A comrade.
A true friend called Will Cochrane.
F
or the last few months, Britain’s MI6 and its American equivalent, the CIA, believed that I’d been sitting at home doing nothing. MI6 occasionally checked up on me, but it had always given me advance notice of its visits, meaning I could make sure I was at my South London pad when the service’s Welfare Department came knocking. Tonight, the agencies probably thought I was going out for a few beers to drown my sorrows. After all, tomorrow was officially my last day as an employed field operative of Western Intelligence because during my last mission, a malevolent U.S. senator revealed my identity to the world’s media, I tore apart Washington, D.C., to get answers, and the joint U.S.-U.K. task force I worked for was shut down.
My employers told me I’d become a loose cannon without portfolio and added that I should be grateful that they were giving me four months on full pay to allow me to idle and decompress after nine years of near-constant deployment. And I was told to use that time to learn how to integrate into normal society. Trouble was, I don’t do decompression or integration well, and though I’ve enough sorrows to fill up a hundred lives, I rarely feel the need to drown them.
Instead, they are prone to drowning me if I stay still for too long.
So, I’d been busy. Secretly busy.
Traveling to different parts of the world; obtaining weapons, and other equipment, and secreting them in dead-letter boxes within the major cities; meeting my foreign assets and telling them that one day I might still have a use for them; and tying up loose ends. Only two people knew what I’d been up to: my former bosses Alistair McCulloch and Patrick Bolte from MI6 and the CIA, respectively. They’d helped me where they could with cash, and information, and covered my ass when needed. But even they didn’t know that tonight I wasn’t propping up a bar in London and instead was in Hong Kong, walking through the Temple Street Night Market.
It was a tying-up-loose-ends evening.
I was observing a Chinese woman who’s a highly prized intelligence operative who’d spent her entire career combating the West. I was behind her, disguised as a seaman onshore for a night out after twelve months on a tanker. She was unaware of me and the threat I posed. Around us were hundreds of tourists and locals, haggling with the multitude of vendors who’d crammed central Kowloon’s most popular bazaar with stalls selling counterfeit goods, clothes, noodles, and still-twitching bottom-feeding sea life. People were shouting, calling out to each other, opera was being sung by troupes busking for a few dollars outside stinking public toilets, and junkies were arguing with old men as they faced each other over games of Chinese chess. Few people would hear a woman scream in pain if someone killed her on the street, and no one would care if they heard such a noise. There was too much sensory overload to notice anything odd in this bustling and bruising place: people banging into each other; a heavy rain descending from the late-summer night sky; vast banners with Cantonese characters overhanging the street and flapping loudly in the wind; glowing Chinese lanterns suspended in the air; the smell of crustaceans, soy sauce, and burning incense; and swathes of dazzling neon light around each stall.
But there were also big chunks of darkness on the street, and that was where most people moved, their eyes transfixed by the areas of brilliant glow, like flies that were attracted to illuminated and electrified death traps.
Street-canny prostitutes chose to work the low-rise tenements behind the stalls. This was a place where they could do their business and men could come and pay them and go without being noticed.
It was also an excellent place to visit death on unwitting victims.
I increased speed as the woman picked up her pace, then stopped as my target perused a stall containing fake silks that were cotton and powdered rhino horn that was actually a lethal combination of ground stone, fiberglass, and bamboo root. I watched the target to see if this was a deliberate stop to catch sight of me.
Woman moved; I moved.
I had a knife on me. It was the best weapon for tonight because my target would be taking no chances and would almost certainly be carrying a silenced pistol or blade.
We were getting close to my kill zone.
The woman checked her watch, gave a physical gesture of annoyance, and turned toward me.
Shit!
I was a mere ten feet away from her, alongside lots of men, women, kids, and crackheads. Maybe if the woman looked at me, she’d think I had a bloodlust. I didn’t. I had a job to do, and right now it was one that would take the woman completely by surprise.
But she didn’t spot me amid the throngs of people ahead of her. She was preoccupied, had clearly lost track of time, and used her cell phone to call her husband. Her partner took the brunt of her annoyance as she instructed him to get his car started and pick her up in five minutes or she’d stick something sharp in his gullet.
That wasn’t going to happen.
Not if another man had his way.
For he wanted to stick his knife into her gullet.
And I was here to stop him dead.
My target walked fast toward the woman, his blade exposed. I rushed at the large Chinese man, grabbed his chin from behind, and plunged my blade into his throat. As he slumped to the ground, the Chinese woman’s shock was amplified when she saw my face.
I walked past her, muttering, “Your cover’s blown. Get out of China. Time to retire to somewhere safe.”
The Chinese intelligence officer knew me well. Years ago, I’d turned her into an MI6 asset so that she could spy on her countrymen. Recently, I’d learned that her colleagues had discovered her treachery and tonight were deploying one of their best assassins to punish her. No way was I going to let that happen to such a courageous woman.
She opened her mouth to speak to me.
I didn’t stop and, within seconds, had vanished into the night.
And in ninety minutes I’d use an alias passport to fly back to London.
No one would know that tonight an English killer had been in China and that his real name was Will Cochrane.
T
he reason Admiral Tobias Mason no longer wore a naval uniform was because five years ago, he’d reached a stage in his career where he’d felt embarrassed by how he looked. He’d spent thirty-four years on water, half of them captaining U.S. warships of mass destruction and frequently being the ultimate power in several thousand square miles of ocean. The problem with this was it gave him too many medals on his uniform. While inspecting his massed naval ranks on a sunny parade ground five years ago, the medals made him think he looked like a throwback military dictator.
Mason hated the idea of looking like a dictator because he was by nature a nonconformist individual who didn’t like uniforms. In many ways he was the antithesis of a military man; the only reason he’d run away to sea as an adolescent was because his brain craved adventure. Nevertheless, his superiors in the navy quickly recognized his superb intellect and passion for unconventional tactics. They promoted him and kept telling him that one day he’d be an admiral. Mason didn’t like the flattery because he could never jettison his nonconformist mind-set, and nor did he wish to. His idol was the nineteenth-century British admiral Lord Thomas Cochrane, a man who’d been a maverick throughout his career yet could conjure naval strategies that were brilliant and often improvised. Cochrane tore the rulebook up and won. But he was still made to dress like a clown.
Three years ago, the navy had asked Mason if he’d like a job on dry land that didn’t require him to wear a uniform.
As he took a seat at the long rectangular conference table in the subterranean White House Situation Room, the diminutive silver-haired admiral wondered not for the first time whether he’d made the right decision to leave the sea. Dry land sometimes felt like it had too many captains trying to sail the same ship. It seemed that way now as America’s political elite took seats around the table. They all knew Mason though none of them really understood what he did for a living. Given he was by nature a private man, it pleased him they didn’t know he’d been singled out by the president for a very discreet role that required him to be the president’s confidant and to think through solutions that were beyond the intellectual capabilities of the president’s other advisors. It was a role that on paper didn’t exist.
The president walked into the room and sat at the head of the table. His chief of staff was close behind him and turned on three wall-mounted TV monitors. Each screen showed a video link to the prime ministers of Britain, France, and Israel.
After formal introductions and greetings were exchanged, the Israeli prime minister dominated the first fifteen minutes of the meeting. He told everyone that a week ago, a senior Hamas official had been killed by an Israeli missile strike in Gaza. Nobody in the room seemed particularly interested because Israel had made public the strike and kill, hours after it had happened. But as the Israeli prime minister moved on to the reason why this meeting had been called at such short notice, he made no attempt to hide his anger. His voice shook as he spoke about yesterday’s assassination of Israel’s ambassador to France. He spoke about how they’d gone to school together, served in the army as young men, attended each other’s weddings, and on more than one occasion shared a drink while watching the sun go down over Tel Aviv.
Mason wasn’t watching him. Instead, he was observing his American colleagues and the prime ministers of France and Britain. Did any of them know why they were here? Even the U.S. president hadn’t been given a clear agenda for the meeting by the Israeli prime minister, beyond being told that it was to discuss what had happened in Paris. But Mason was sure he knew where this was headed.
He checked his watch and estimated that the Israeli would drop that bombshell in three minutes. In fact, he was fifteen seconds wide of the mark. And that was when the room became a chaotic cacophony of people trying to talk over each other, some trying to do so with insincere smiles on their faces, others looking hostile and slapping their hands on the table. During the following hour, the chief of staff had to call for order seven times. The room seemed evenly split between those who were for Israel’s bombshell and those who were against. Mason was the only person who was silent throughout this unproductive period of too many generals and chiefs and secretaries of this and that all trying to take control of the ship and drive it in the wrong direction. He wanted to sigh but maintained his composed and professional demeanor while his mind raced.
The chief of staff called for order again, and this time he did so with the look of a man who’d rip anyone’s head of if they didn’t comply.
The president began asking people individually for not only their calm assessment but also whether there was a solution to this problem. All of them gave their views, and none of them had the slightest idea what to do about them. The president turned to the head of the CIA, the one man who technically would have some answers. He did of sorts, but they were insubstantial and certainly not enough to placate the Israeli prime minister.
Finally, the U.S. president locked his gaze on Mason from the far end of the room. He asked the admiral if he had a solution.
All eyes were on Mason.
He didn’t speak.
Didn’t need to.
Instead, he gave the tiniest of nods.
A
dmiral Mason was chauffeured in a bulletproof vehicle from the White House to the Pentagon. The car stopped in the secure underground parking lot; Secret Service agents escorted him through the vast labyrinth of corridors to his office and returned to their vehicles. Mason entered the large, oak-paneled room that he’d furnished in the design of an eighteenth-century man-of-war captain’s quarters, and pressed a button on his desk’s speakerphone. “I’m back. In here now. Both of you.”
Mae Bäcklund and Rob Tanner entered without knocking and sat in leather armchairs facing their boss.
Tanner was in his early twenties and had the ready charm and confidence of a man who didn’t have a care in the world. Courtesy of 661 C Street’s Michael Anthony Salon, his auburn hair was designed in a medium-length ruffle that looked asymmetrical yet was strand perfect and fashioned to exude playboy nonchalance. His suits, handcrafted by Michael Andrews, were—the tailors of the bespoke salon often exclaimed—a pleasure to cut for a man whose physique carried no surplus fat because it was toned by a personal trainer. And his teeth and eyes shone because they were fixed that way. On the surface, Tanner was a fraud. He was, after all, a trust-fund baby; though unlike the majority of those who shared his financial ease into life, he had a Harvard-sharpened barrel-load of intellect. It wasn’t enough. Tanner wanted to position himself to one day have power. And real power, he understood, rested on Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon. That was why he was in Mason’s shitty office, sucking up rules and regulations and pocketing a government salary that barely made a dent in the bill for a bottle of
Krug Clos d’Ambonnay
fizz.
Tanner needed Mason to set him on a path where riches and cleverness would pale into insignificance compared to what could be achieved by a click of his fingers. The admiral knew that, and Tanner didn’t care because if Mason didn’t employ him, he’d have to employ someone just like him. Mason mentored Tanner, knowing that one day Tanner might try to stab him in the back. The trouble for Tanner was that nobody had ever successfully outwitted the admiral.
Mason needed his employees to have independent wealth. Those he’d previously employed had lacked that financial freedom and had quickly left to work in high-salary positions in investment banks and law firms. It had been a major irritation because Mason required subordinates who would serve out the duration of their terms and complete the tasks at hand. But that requirement came at a cost, and in the case of Tanner, it was having to endure the young Harvard grad’s inflated ego and flippancy.
Mason had trawled Ivy League universities to find someone with Tanner’s attributes. None of them suited him, and it was only by good fortune that the young man’s resume landed on Mason’s desk with a Post-it note on page one stating the guy wanted a job in government.
Bäcklund was different. She’d worked for Mason for half a decade and had seen other employees come and go. Only she remained because she was loyal, selfless, and adored Mason. It helped her work considerably that she was also calm, cerebral, and courageous in thought and conviction. Bäcklund was fully cognizant of the fact that Mason viewed her as the perfect counterbalance to the Machiavellian exuberance of the young bucks whom he’d handpicked to assist him and Bäcklund. Her usefulness in countering Tanner’s excesses was no different. But that wasn’t the sole reason why Mason had hired her. Mason had been a dear friend to her father, so much so that her dad had asked him to be his only child’s godfather. Fourteen years ago, Mason was a ship’s captain when her dad had asked Mason, “Do I walk from this?”
“Admiral, you’re on your deathbed,” Mason had replied.
“I expect better precision from you, Captain.”
“Yes, sir,” Mason had said. “I’ll walk out of the hospital room. You’ll float.”
“I want angels and trumpets. Can you organize that for me?”
“I’ll try my best, my friend.”
“Want you to try harder on something—my daughter, Mae. Patty gone, she’s all that’s left.”
“I don’t have much money, but it will always be enough to look after her.”
The admiral coughed, choked, nurses came, he ushered them away with his liver-spotted hands. Then he fixed his eyes on the man who had dark hair back then and a reassuring demeanor. “Mae’s got money. Made sure of that. Man-to-man, I need . . .”
“I’ll look after her.”
“She’ll tell you no man should be tasked to look after her.”
“Then I’ll tell her to look after me. It’s not far from the truth.” Mason bowed his head and held the admiral’s hand as it grew cold. “I can’t promise you angels.”
Since her father’s death, Bäcklund had considered Admiral Mason to be an uncle of sorts. Five years ago, she was twenty-seven, didn’t need to work, and had just completed a PhD at Stanford. Mason took her out for a celebratory dinner wherein he asked her if she’d come to work as his assistant in a land-based Pentagon job he’d just been assigned to. At first she had declined, but Mason was canny and knew that part of her had aspirations one day to get into politics. He gave her sage counsel that before that day came, she could learn the ropes from the inside. He would teach her the ways of politics until such time as she was ready to broadside the ugliest natures of government and run for office. And teach he did. She respected the fact that he gave her no special dispensation because of who she was. On the contrary, Mason could be as withering in his comments to her as he was to Tanner. Only when they were alone would he soften and speak to her with a light touch and a paternal combination of admiration and concern for her well-being. Maybe Mason’s role in her life would recede if she got hitched to a guy. Right now, that wasn’t in the cards. On the rare occasions that men fleetingly entered her private life, the moments had made her feel sorrowful and unfulfilled. Finding the right guy was tough when you were an independent woman with a job that frequently shunted your brain into overdrive.
Bäcklund and Tanner were silent. Mason sat on the edge of his desk, and said, “Interesting meeting.”
“President, Secretaries of Stuff, you.” Tanner’s smile broadened. “Who else was there?”
“Britain, France, and Israel.” Mason patted his short, silver hair. “Their prime ministers, anyway, and via video link.”
Bäcklund was motionless. “France equals pedantic legal jurisdiction. Britain equals meddling has-been. Israel equals rabid dog on a leash.”
Mason eyed her with the look of a professor addressing a gifted but overly forthright student. “Perhaps I’ve been too long at sea to realize that the psyche of three countries can be distilled down to one sentence each.”
It was Tanner who responded. “Perhaps you have,
sir
.” He was careful because Mason’s intellect would crucify too much sarcasm. “Israel wants blood.”
“Yes. Why?” Mason was very still, watching them like a killer who would turn on his captives if he or she gave the wrong answer.
Bäcklund put a cigarette in her mouth and left it unlit. “Israel kills a Hamas official last week; yesterday someone kills Israel’s ambassador to Paris. Has to be Hamas; ergo two egos need to have a head to head in the locker room. Should we care?” She glanced at Tanner, wondering whether the man-boy seven years her junior would take her bait and make a crass remark. “Boys with dicks and toys. Right?”
“Yeah, right.” Tanner tried to decide whether tonight he should finish writing his monograph on
God & Physics
or instead play Texas Hold ’Em poker with his pals. “Last time I checked, shit happens a lot in the desert. We shouldn’t care.”
Mason ran a finger along the crease in his trousers. “But we do care, don’t we?”
“Not me.” Tanner smiled.
Mason did not. “Then I’m in the company of a fool.
Think.
”
Bäcklund withdrew the unlit cigarette from her lips and looked at its sodden butt. “Escalation.”
Tanner added, “Not just a few missiles lobbed into Gaza.”
They took it in turns to articulate their thoughts at rifle-shot pace.
“It’s an excuse.”
“One Israel’s been waiting for.”
“Take revenge against Hamas.”
“Big style.”
“Invade Gaza . . .”
“The West Bank . . .”
“And . . .”
Mason nodded expectantly.
Bäcklund concluded, “Lebanon. Shit, this is a whole different story.”
The admiral was pleased with his assistants because they’d nailed what the Israeli prime minister had said in the meeting. Israel believed the assassination of its ambassador gave it the legitimacy it needed to obliterate Hamas once and for all. And it had no problem invading two territories and one country to do so. “What position do you think France and Britain took?”