Deception Game (44 page)

‘So Faulkner’s playing the Agency and the Libyans against each other? Doesn’t make any goddamn sense to me. If the man we recovered from Paris was part of an Agency black op, we would have known about it. Why would they let us render one of their own men?’ McKnight said, a little out of breath after maintaining their brisk pace for the past several hours.

Both she and Drake were physically fit and well conditioned to environments like this, and their progress westward had been surprisingly swift, helped no doubt by the relatively cool temperature overnight.

That would change soon, however, as the sky in the east gradually lightened with the coming dawn. Normally travellers welcomed the start of a new day, but not this time. This time it would mean merciless, unending heat, burning rays that would sear their skin and tear the moisture from their throats, and winds that could whip the drifting sand up into storms intense enough to blot out the sun.

Already they could feel the temperature starting to rise.

‘I don’t know,’ Drake admitted. Sowan’s revelations about the chain of events that had led them to Libya had been a bombshell, but he sensed the picture was still incomplete. Some vital element still eluded them. ‘The only logical explanation is that the Agency didn’t know who this guy was really working for.’

‘That’s not making me feel better.’

‘Me neither.’

For some reason, his conversation with Charles Hunt at Arlington resurfaced in his mind, particularly the man’s cryptic warning about the enemies Drake faced.

The real power in this country doesn’t lie in buildings that give guided tours, or men who have to answer to oversight committees or voter groups. The real decision makers are the ones you can’t see, that you don’t know about because that’s exactly how they choose to make it.

‘Maybe there’s something else at work here,’ he mused. ‘Some covert group we haven’t seen before.’

‘They must be pretty damn good at staying hidden, if they have the resources and the intelligence assets to overthrow a military dictatorship without anybody even knowing they exist.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m not buying it.’

‘And I’m not selling it, but it fits with what we know.’ He adjusted the straps of his rucksack, feeling the solid weight of the laptop shifting a little inside. ‘We get this bloody thing to Keira, maybe she can give us some answers about our new friends.’

In that at least, McKnight seemed to be in agreement, and said nothing further on the matter. ‘By the way, you never did tell me how you and Faulkner know each other.’

‘When I left the Regiment, he made contact with me, said he knew about a new unit being formed for special work in Afghanistan,’ Drake said, reluctant to go into too much detail. His exit from the SAS hadn’t exactly been a happy time in his life. ‘He said they needed...men like me.’

‘What did he mean by that?’

Drake didn’t say anything for a time.

‘I’ve done things in my life that I’m not proud of, Sam. Some of those things I deserved to be punished for. But that unit...they wanted men like me, they
rewarded
men like me. Men who were ready to be more than just soldiers. That’s what he meant.’

‘And that’s what you became?’ she asked, a little uncertain now. She was opening a door she might not be able to close again. ‘More than just a soldier?’

He shrugged. ‘I was what I needed to be. Let’s leave it at that.’

They both paused for a moment as the first shafts of sunlight broke over the eastern horizon, bathing the world before them in a bright orange glow and causing their own shadows to stretch out far ahead.

McKnight cast an apprehensive glance at the ball of fire rising slowly and inexorably into the sky.

‘We need to hurry,’ Drake said quietly, urging her forward.

David Faulkner was in a foul mood as his convoy of two SUVs headed south away from Tripoli at high speed. They had already encountered two military roadblocks on their journey, hastily set up in the wake of the shootout near the Mukhabarat headquarters, but fortunately the team’s diplomatic credentials had been enough to get them through without incident.

Talk about fixing the barn door after the horses had bolted, he thought with mild irritation. The horses in question were now on the loose somewhere in Libya, and he had no idea where they’d gone. Satellite tracking might have allowed him to trace their movements from the scene of the shootout in the alleyway, but calling upon such a resource would draw undue attention to his venture here. And attention was something to be avoided at all costs.

Up until now, Drake had been entirely predictable in both his decisions and his actions. Bold and audacious perhaps, but predictable all the same. Now the game had changed. Drake had lost the very thing he believed he needed most. What he would do next was hard to predict.

So for now Faulkner was left with no option but to wait, monitoring Libyan police and military transmissions for any mention of Drake and his companions.

Waiting. At a time when countless lives, including his own, depended on the outcome of this venture, he was sitting on his hands doing nothing.

Suppressing a sigh of frustration, he took a sip from his glass of orange juice. The car’s air conditioning was working overtime to keep the interior of the vehicle cool and comfortable, protecting the occupants from the nightmarish desert heat outside, but just being in this godforsaken country was enough to make him feel dirty. He couldn’t wait to leave once his mission here was completed.

Sitting opposite him was the pale, almost waiflike figure of Caitlin Macguire, her expression sullen and brooding as she stared out at the desert through the car’s tinted windows. Perhaps she was pondering the implications of their failure last night, or perhaps she was simply annoyed that a target of hers had escaped. It was hard to know what was going on behind those steely blue eyes of hers, whether she truly appreciated what was at stake.

As if in response to these dark thoughts, he felt the cell phone in his pocket vibrating. Setting his drink down, he fished the phone out and glanced at the screen, feeling a chill run through him when he saw that the caller ID was blocked. Few people knew his number, and even fewer were able to call while masking their identity.

‘Yes,’ he began, managing to keep his tone flat and composed.

‘You have an update for me?’ The voice that spoke was American. Soft and surprisingly pleasant to listen to, but laced with a harder undertone of command now. The caller was accustomed to making decisions that could end lives, and it showed.

‘Sowan is dead,’ Faulkner reported, deciding to open with the one piece of good news he could supply. ‘He can’t compromise us now.’

A pause. ‘And Drake? The information you were sent to retrieve?’

‘We’re working on that.’

A longer pause. Faulkner winced inwardly, bracing himself for what was coming.

‘You’re
working on that
?’ he repeated. ‘Maybe I didn’t make myself clear. Anger-management; losing ten pounds in time for summer; building a new fence around your front lawn. Those are things that you
work on
. This is something that you
do
, David. You were brought in to
do
something for us – not to work on it, not to try your best, not to give it a shot, but to get it done. But you’re not getting it done. You’re failing, and every failure is piling up on the ones that came before it. Every failure is bringing us closer to losing everything we’ve been working for. That is not something you need to
work on
, David. That is something you need to
fix right now
.’

Faulkner swallowed hard. The AC vents were still blasting icy cold air at him, yet he could feel beads of sweat trickling down the side of his face. ‘It’s not over yet.’

‘No, it’s not. Not for us. But it will be for you if you don’t get this done,’ he promised, his grim warning delivered with the absolute conviction of a man who had pronounced such a sentence many times before. ‘So I’ll make this very simple. Find Drake, find the information...or we’ll find you, David. No matter where you go, no matter what you do, no matter how long it takes, you know we’ll find you. And you know what we’ll do after that.’

With that, the line went dead.

Closing his eyes for a moment, Faulkner laid the phone down, reached for his drink and took another sip, though he couldn’t quite keep his hands from trembling.

‘What the fuck was that about?’ Macguire asked, her voice betraying an edge of concern for perhaps the first time.

Faulkner didn’t answer. He had far more important matters to concern himself with now.

The next couple of hours were a grim, monotonous march across largely featureless terrain, marked only by their gradually slowing pace under the wilting sun. With no visual landmarks to mark their progress or take a bearing, accurate navigation could only be accomplished with a compass.

Had time been less critical, they would have found a place to rest up for the day, conserving their strength while they waited for the relative cool of night to push onward. In this case however, they simply couldn’t afford to wait. The only option was to keep going and hope they were able to rendezvous with the rest of their group before they succumbed to heat and dehydration.

‘Breaking rocks in the...hot sun,’ Drake mumbled as he trudged wearily onwards, having a hard time forming the words. His tongue felt like it was glued to the roof of his mouth. ‘I fought...the law and the law won.’

He had taken to singing, or as close to it as he could manage under the circumstances, to maintain his sense of time and progression.

Having operated in hot countries many times before, he was well aware of the dangers that came with loss of water in the body. The symptoms usually started after losing just 2 per cent of the body’s water, increased heart- and respiration-rate being the first noticeable signs, as the body tried to compensate for decreasing blood pressure.

At around 5 per cent water-loss, headaches, nausea and impaired judgement began to make themselves felt. By 10 per cent, vision loss and delirium set in. And if they lost more than 15 per cent, multiple organ-failure and death were the most likely outcomes.

These unpleasant thoughts were interrupted by a hiss from McKnight, who was several paces ahead of him. Glancing up, Drake saw her standing tense and alert with one fist raised; a signal to halt.

She had spotted something.

Her silent warning thus given, she lowered herself down on one knee, drawing her weapon at the same time. Drake did likewise, crawling forward until he was close enough to whisper in her ear.

‘What you got?’

‘One vehicle on our eleven o’clock, about a hundred yards out,’ she replied. ‘Looked like it was parked between a couple of dunes.’

Drake’s heart rate stepped up a gear. ‘Just one?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Military?’

‘Couldn’t tell for sure, but it was definitely a four-wheel drive. I didn’t see any hostiles. Could be a lookout position.’ She looked at him. ‘We could try to box around it.’

Drake paused for a moment, considering their situation. A lone vehicle wouldn’t have ventured this far from civilization without good reason. It could well be part of a search operation mounted by the Libyan government. If so, they had very nearly blundered right into an ambush. Only McKnight’s sharp eyes had saved them.

They could indeed try to work their way around this unexpected obstacle, but the landscape here was largely flat and provided little cover. They would have to venture far indeed to slip by unseen, and that would waste precious time and effort. Not to mention the chance they might encounter another vehicle forming some kind of search grid.

The alternative was just as risky, but also had the potential to solve their current problems at a stroke.

‘We go for it,’ he decided. ‘Split up and converge from different directions, take out the crew and steal the car. Then we find the others and get the fuck over the border.’

As far as plans went it was neither sophisticated nor foolproof, but it was the only one that came to mind. There were only two of them, lightly armed and already feeling the effects of their long march. There was a good chance they might find themselves both outnumbered and outgunned, but Drake had faith in their abilities – they had taken on larger forces before and prevailed. And the element of surprise might just tip the scales in their favour.

‘I like that plan.’

‘You circle around to the north, I’ll come at them from the south and we’ll meet in the middle. We go in hard and fast, try to take them alive if they look like civilians. Otherwise, we put them down.’

McKnight nodded. She knew as well as he did what was at stake here. If anyone onboard that vehicle managed to send out a call for help, they were fucked.

‘Stay on comms and call out if you see anything. Oh, and try not to shoot me when we move in.’

She flashed a wry smile. ‘Any more remarks like that, and I just might.’

With that, she turned away and hurried northward, bent so low that she was soon a barely noticeable shape flitting between the dunes. Drake likewise took off in the other direction, trying to choose a path that provided at least some cover for him. Taller and larger than McKnight, he was a more prominent target.

The Browning automatic was clutched tight in his hand. He’d expended his own supply of ammunition during the ambush in Tripoli, but McKnight had shared out her remaining rounds between the two weapons, giving them five shots apiece.

Not much of an arsenal with which to take on an unknown number of hostiles, but better than nothing. He would be sure to make each shot count if it came to it.

The hot sun continued to beat down on him as he worked his way forward, the heat and exertion raising beads of sweat that trickled down his back, causing his dusty shirt to stick to his skin.

Sure enough, he could make out the distinctive boxy frame of an old-style 4x4 over the tops of the dunes as he moved into position. Its paintwork seemed to have been scoured bare over the years so that it was difficult to tell what colour the vehicle had once been, but Drake thought he saw faint camouflage markings.

‘Envoy’s in position,’ McKnight reported over the radio net. ‘No sign of hostiles. What’s your sitrep?’

Damn, that was fast, he thought. Picking up the pace, he hit his radio transmitter. ‘Almost there. Ten seconds.’

‘Move your ass. I’m exposed here.’

Coming to a halt at what he guessed was the southern edge of the depression around the vehicle, Drake took a couple of deep breaths, drawing the hot dusty air into his lungs to try to prepare himself for what was coming next. They were both tired and weakened, but they had to see this through. They couldn’t afford to waver now.

‘Monarch’s in position,’ he called in. ‘Move in three, two, one...Go!’

Rising to his feet from behind the scant cover offered by a low drifting dune, Drake advanced quickly towards the vehicle with his weapon raised. About a hundred yards away, he spotted McKnight doing the same thing.

‘Monarch has no targets,’ he warned, wondering if this might be a trap.

It didn’t make any sense. No driver, no guards, no passengers taking a piss nearby. Not even footprints. Nothing but drifting sand and the sigh of the wind.

He was almost there now. The jeep that had been partially hidden behind a dune at last came into view, allowing Drake and McKnight their first proper look at it.

Straightaway he felt his heart sink.

Now he understood why they’d encountered no resistance on their way in. Coming to a halt, he lowered his weapon and grimly surveyed the blasted shell of a Libyan army jeep, its forward wheels destroyed by some kind of explosives, most likely a mine or IED. Whatever remained had long since been stripped of useful parts, so that only the broken chassis was left; a silent memorial to the crew that had likely perished in the explosion.

He had no idea which conflict or even which decade this forgotten battlefield belonged to. Libya had seen plenty of armed clashes over the years, both inside and outside its borders. This could have happened last month or last century.

McKnight walked towards him, her shoulders slumped in defeat. Reaching down, she picked up a twisted piece of metal that had once been the steering wheel, holding it a moment or two before hurling it away in disgust.

‘Goddamn it,’ she said, closing her eyes for a moment.

He understood how she felt. Things like this happened sometimes. Mistaken identities, fleeting glimpses on which one suddenly had to make life or death decisions. Not every call was the right one.

‘Nothing for us here,’ he said quietly, resigned to the grim march that lay ahead. ‘Let’s go, Sam.’

Mukhabarat headquarters, Tripoli

Seated at his desk in his cramped office, Bishr Kubar sighed and rubbed his eyes, struggling to focus on the computer screen in front of him. He was no stranger to fatigue, yet even he couldn’t keep working without sleep indefinitely. He’d been awake for nearly forty-eight hours now, and was growing increasingly aware of the effect it was having on him.

He reached for the cup of coffee beside him and took a mouthful, realizing vaguely that it was long cold. He could feel his eyes closing almost of their own volition, as if his mind no longer had any say in the matter.

He found his thoughts wandering like a ship without a tiller, drifting between vague and disconnected memories. One moment he was a young boy fighting with his older brother near a river, the next he was a grown man surveying the scene of carnage in the wake of a car bomb in central Tripoli.

He pictured his brother as a young man now, still tall and gangly but beginning to show the strength and maturity of manhood. Old enough to join his father as they went off to settle a grievance with a neighbouring tribe.

Old enough to get himself killed.

The dreamlike trance was shattered by a knock at the door. Without waiting for a reply, Mousa rushed into his office, flushed and perspiring.

‘We may have something,’ he announced triumphantly.

Kubar stared at him. ‘What?’

‘Aerial reconnaissance just picked up a red sports car abandoned in the desert south-west of the city. No sign of the driver. They may have switched vehicles or struck out on foot.’

That was enough to jar him awake, his heart surging as a fresh wave of energy rushed through his tired body. South-west. Heading towards the border with Tunisia, back towards the remote mountain region near Nalut which had always been so difficult to patrol.

‘Get me a bearing on that car,’ he ordered, jumping to his feet. ‘Vector in ground units. I want to know why it was abandoned. And mobilize every unit we have in the area.’

No way was he letting them get across the border alive.