Redemption (54 page)

And in that moment, he couldn’t help but remember the brief conversation with Hussam the previous night.

I think there will come a time when you have to choose, either to stand with her or against her. When that time comes, I hope you make the right choice, Ryan Drake
.

‘I promised Hussam I’d protect you, Anya. Whether
or
not you think you need it, I’ll be there for you, and I won’t give up on you.’

He saw a change in her eyes then, a lowering of her defences. She looked as she had last night, when they had at last opened up to each other, bared their souls in the flickering light of the campfire.

Hesitating a moment, she walked towards him and held out her hand, saying nothing, waiting for him to take it.

He did so without reservation, without regrets or deception. He accepted her as she had accepted him.

Gripping his hand tight, Anya smiled. But it was a bitter-sweet smile, tinged with sadness and regret.

‘You know your problem, Ryan? You’re a good man.’

Moving with frightening speed, she reached for the weapon tucked into her belt, levelled it at his stomach and fired.

The impact of the bullet felt like a sledgehammer driven into his guts. In an instant, the hot searing pain of the impact was replaced by a cold numbness that crept outward from the injury. Gasping in shock and disbelief, Drake fell to his knees, staring at the woman with wide, unfocused eyes.

With the ease born from long years of experience, Anya yanked the carbine from his grasp before he could bring it up against her, then ejected the magazine and tossed the weapon away.

‘It’s all right,’ she whispered, easing him down onto the ground. ‘Don’t fight me. It’s all right.’

Vaguely, through the fog of shock and pain, he felt warm sand against his back as she laid him down with gentle care.

‘Why?’ he gasped, staring up into her eyes.

‘Remember what I told you once, Drake? We are both soldiers. No matter what they tried to make us,
we
are soldiers, and we do what we must to survive,’ she said, looking at him with genuine pity. ‘This is what I must do for both our sakes. Because where I’m going, you can’t follow.’

He felt Anya take his right hand and press it against the bullet wound. ‘Hold here, press down hard,’ she instructed. ‘The pressure should slow the bleeding. When they ask what happened, you tell them you tried to bring me in, but I shot you. I betrayed you. Do you understand?’

Drake’s pain-filled eyes opened wider as her words sank in. ‘No! I won’t …’

‘You do it, or they will blame you for everything!’ she said through clenched teeth. Only her eyes betrayed her true feelings. ‘I told you I have learned to live with a lot of things, Drake. But that is something I couldn’t live with.’

She rose to her feet again. She was hurt and tired and in pain, yet she stood tall and unbowed, her dishevelled and bloodied hair fluttering in the breeze.

Maras – a goddess of war.

‘Too many men have followed me to their deaths. I won’t let it happen again. You still have a life, a future.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t give you any of those things. But … if it means anything, I am grateful to you, Ryan Drake.’

She sighed and looked up at the sky, blazing orange and gold now as the sun dipped below the horizon.

‘For both our sakes, I hope we don’t meet again.’

With that, she turned and walked away.

She had hardened herself to emotions like love and compassion a long time ago, but today her armour had slipped. Just a little, but enough.

Bleeding and weakened, Drake could do nothing but watch as she faded into the distance, her blonde hair whipped up by the breeze.

Part Four
Resurrection

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting
.

Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War

Chapter 75

Iraq, 13 May 2007

THIS IS HOW
it ends.

Lying there with one hand loosely pressed against the bullet wound in his stomach, he was alone. His strength was exhausted, his reserves gone, his blood staining the dusty ground. A trail of it led a short distance away, mute testimony to the desperate, feeble crawl he had managed before his vision swam and he collapsed.

He could go no further. There was nothing left to do but lie here and wait for the end.

A faint breeze sighed past him, stirring the warm evening air and depositing tiny particles of wind-blown sand across his arms and chest. How long would it take to cover his body when he died? Would he ever be found?

Staring at the vast azure sky stretching out into infinity above him, he found his eyes drawn to the contrail of some high-flying aircraft, straight as an arrow. Around him, the sun’s last light reflected off the desert dunes, setting them ablaze with colour.

It was a good place to die.

Men like him were destined never to see old age, or to die peacefully in their sleep surrounded by family. They had chosen a different life, and there would be no reward for them.

You know your problem, Ryan? You’re a good man
.

Had she been right?

Could he look back on his life honestly and say he’d been a good man? He had made mistakes, done things he wished he could undo, and yet his final act had been one of trust and compassion.

That was the reason he was lying here, bleeding to death. That was his final reward.

A low, rhythmic thumping was drowning out the sigh of the wind. The pounding of his heartbeat in his ears, slowly fading as his lifeblood flowed out between his fingers. He might have slowed the bleeding, but he couldn’t stop it. Nothing could.

He was dying.

You know your problem, Ryan? You’re a good man
.

However he had lived, he knew in that moment that he would die as a good man. And that had to count for something.

A faint smiled touched his face as the thudding grew louder. He closed his eyes, surrendering to the growing darkness that filled the world around him.

Then, to his amazement, something loomed over him. A shape, vast and dark. And loud. A high-pitched whine filled the air, mixing with the hammering thump that he had mistaken for his own heartbeat.

The peaceful scene around him was engulfed in chaos as a storm of dust and small stones erupted. Vicious winds whipped at his clothes, blasting his face and exposed skin.

In an instant, his consciousness returned, and he stared up in awe at the vast underbelly of the Black Hawk helicopter.

Shapes appeared in the doorway, and then suddenly they were descending on him, falling as if they had just thrown themselves out of the door.

There was a thud, and a few seconds later Frost had detached herself from the fast-descent harness and knelt down beside him.

‘Ryan, can you hear me?’ she asked, having to yell to be heard over the whine of the engines and the thumping of the rotors. ‘Ryan! Look at me, goddamn it!’

With some effort, he focused his attention on her.

‘Can you hear me?’ she repeated.

‘Yeah,’ Drake replied, squinting against the dust that was being kicked up into his eyes.

‘You’ve got a gunshot wound to the abdomen. I’m going to stabilise you, then we’ll get you airborne. I want you to keep talking to me. Okay?’

‘My … sister?’ he asked, his eyes suddenly wide with concern.

The young woman smiled and nodded. ‘She’s okay. She’s in the chopper right now. It was all we could do to stop her roping down!’ Her smile faded as she went back to work. ‘I’m gonna give you something for the pain.’

Just as the syringe went into his arm, Drake looked up as another man in uniform rushed over and knelt down beside him.

‘It’s all right, Ryan,’ Dietrich assured him, his face etched with worry. ‘You’re safe now.’

‘So people … keep telling me.’

‘Where’s Anya?’

Anya. He had some faint recollection of her looking down on him with sadness in her eyes, then turning to walk away.

‘Anya?’ he repeated.

‘Yes, Anya! Come on, Ryan. Focus on me. Where did she go?’

His vision was growing hazy as the drugs took hold, and it was an effort just to form the words.

‘She left. I couldn’t follow her. Where she was going, I couldn’t follow,’ he managed to say before the darkness swallowed him.

Sir! Sir, you can’t go in there,’ Cain’s private secretary protested, rising from behind her desk as if to stop him.

‘Fuck you!’ Franklin snarled, striding past without so much as glancing at her. He didn’t give a shit who tried to get in his way. He was past that now.

Throwing open the door, he practically burst into Cain’s office, scanning the room for the older man.

He found him over by the window, staring out across the dark waters of the Potomac.

‘I figured you’d show up, Dan,’ he said without turning around.

‘What the hell have you done?’ Franklin demanded. His shoes rustled on the expensive carpet as he took a step toward the director.

‘What have
I
done?’ Suddenly Cain rounded on the younger man, blazing with anger. ‘Do you have any idea of the damage you’ve done today? Disobeying direct orders, interfering with an active operation, launching an unsanctioned mission against a foreign country … You just destroyed your own career, you stupid fuck.’

A week ago, Franklin might have been intimidated by such a threat, but they were playing a different game now. Cain was backed into a corner and he knew it.

‘If I go down, you go with me,’ he promised. ‘I know what you did, and nothing you say can change that.’

Cain smiled in amusement. ‘Tell me, what do you think you know?’

‘You tried to broker an illegal arms deal with a dictatorship, you tried to plant weapons of mass destruction in their country to justify an invasion, and when it went
south
you kept the money for yourself. You launched an attack against a civilian target, you authorised a strike against a Russian government facility, you hijacked intelligence assets and you tried to kill everyone who knew about it. Well, you failed, you son of a bitch.’

‘And you have proof of this, I assume?’ Cain challenged him. ‘There’s nothing to connect me to this “arms deal” you keep talking about. I don’t remember trying to kill anyone, and I certainly don’t recall hijacking intelligence assets. The raid on Khatyrgan was authorised by the Agency’s board of directors. Everyone signed it off, and the record will show that.’

Franklin hesitated, daunted for a moment by his calm, reasoned argument. Why wasn’t he sweating? Why wasn’t he begging or trying to explain himself? It was as if Franklin’s threat carried no weight, as if he were nothing more than an irritating fly to be swatted away.

‘What the record
will
show is that you worked behind
my
back, interfered with
my
operation, and tried to subvert
my
authority. It will show that Drake turned renegade and helped a known criminal escape, assaulted government personnel and put innocent civilians at risk. It will also show that Dietrich and his Shepherd team took part in an illegal operation without orders.’ Cain eyed him with disdain. ‘So tell me, Dan, who do you think will really take the fall for this?’

The colour drained from Franklin’s face. He had been so sure when he came storming in here, so certain that Cain would crumble in the face of his wrath, that he could bring him down with a snap of his fingers.

But the director was made of different stuff than that. He hadn’t risen to his current level by backing down in the face of ill-judged threats. He wouldn’t crumble, because he had faced dangers far worse than this.

Cain could fucking destroy him.

Then, in an instant, he realised he didn’t care. He had done the things he’d done to save Drake’s life, and the lives of the team he’d sent in to bring him home. He didn’t regret it for one moment, and he never would.

Franklin was no longer a soldier, but he hadn’t stopped thinking like one. Loyalty to one’s brothers in arms came above all else. That was one thing a man like Cain would never understand.

‘I don’t have to give them all the answers,’ he said. ‘If I blow the whistle on you, it won’t matter whether I can prove it or not. There will be investigations, hearings, accusations … People will be going over every decision you’ve made in the past twenty years, and sooner or later, you know they’ll find something. Nobody can hide the truth that well, not even professional bullshit artists like you.’

His heart was pounding as he spoke, and it took a great deal of self-control to stop himself trembling. He was attempting a desperate final gamble in a very dangerous game, with his career and perhaps his very life at stake.

Cain said nothing, though Franklin noticed his smile had faded a little. And just like that, with that one glimpse of weakness, the game changed.

I’ve got you, you son of a bitch. You’re not going to slip out of this one. I can destroy you, destroy everything you built. All your plans, all your little schemes, all your lies and betrayals … All of it will come tumbling down like a house of cards.

I’ve got you.

Walking away from the window, Cain settled down behind his desk and surveyed the younger man for a long moment.

‘And what exactly do you intend to do?’

Franklin didn’t flinch. ‘You have to answer for what you did.’

‘Bullshit,’ Cain retorted. ‘If that was true, you would have come in here with a dozen security agents and had me arrested.’ He leaned forward. ‘You’re smarter than that.’

‘Am I?’

‘This is your get-out-of-jail-free card, Dan. You’re going to save it for a time when
you’re
in deep shit, when
you
need a favour to call in. And when that happens, I’ll be there for you.’

Franklin said nothing.

‘Let me tell you a little secret,’ he went on. ‘I’m about to be promoted to Deputy Director of the Agency. It’s been on the cards for a while, and the announcement will be made in a couple of weeks. That means I’ll need someone to take over as Divisional Leader.’ He regarded Franklin with a raised eyebrow. ‘I can’t think of anybody better for the job.’