The Darkest Day (20 page)

Victor released the showerhead when he was sure Guerrero was not going to get up again, and recovered the SIG and shook the water from it as best he could. He wasn’t sure if it would fire or not with water in the barrel and chamber and magazine, but it would dry out soon enough.

He stepped out of the bathroom, fast and smooth, gun up, but saw that Wallinger was not going to bother him so he tucked the weapon into his waistband and reached past Guerrero’s corpse to twist the taps and turn off the shower. He was soaked. There was no towel in the bathroom so he had to make do with swiping the excess water from his hair and face.

He swallowed the blood that had drained into his mouth from the cut on the inside of his cheek. The instinct was to spit it out, but that would leave his DNA and blood type behind. Swallowing blood wasn’t pleasant, but it was better than spending the rest of his life behind bars. He wiped the smear of blood from his lips with the back of a hand and pushed his cheek against his upper jaw to apply pressure to the cut.

He went through pockets, taking Guerrero’s wallet and identification and car keys and smartphone and spare magazines.

Victor left the bathroom and approached Wallinger, who was stationary in the lounge, slumped against a wall, his white dress shirt stained with blood where he had been stabbed multiple times in the abdomen and chest – a surprise attack, swift and savage. The knife that killed him was still buried in his chest, pinning his blue tie in place, an inch of bare blade protruding perpendicular from the dead man’s breastbone. It looked as if Guerrero had tried to remove it but the blade had stuck in the sternum. The fight in the bathroom might have had a different outcome had she been able to pull the weapon free and employ it after Victor had disarmed her of the SIG.

Had their roles been reversed, Victor would have had the knife to use in the bathroom because he would never stab a man through the solid bone of the sternum, and only in the chest with the blade on the same horizontal plane as the ribs, so it would slide between the bones and not become stuck. The corpse in the bathroom had never learned to do this or had been too rushed or sloppy to employ her knowledge.

Victor went through Wallinger’s pockets and compared his credentials to Guerrero’s. They looked as official and genuine as each other.

Wallinger was a little shorter than Victor and a little broader. Regardless, the suit jacket, trousers, socks and shoes fitted well enough for his needs. He was not going to turn heads dressed in another-sized man’s clothes, but that was fine by Victor. He left on his own shirt, given that it was not soaked all over and was less attention-drawing than a shirt marked with holes and bloodstains. Victor bundled his wet clothes and shoes into a plastic bag he found under the kitchen sink. He used a dishcloth to soak up some of the water from his hair and used his fingers to comb it until it looked respectable again.

When Victor went back into the lounge area, Raven was waiting for him.

He pointed Guerrero’s SIG at her face and said, ‘I want answers.’

Raven sat on the folding camp chair opposite Wallinger’s corpse. The red wig was gone and her own black hair was held back by a band. Her clothes were different too: jeans and a sweater replaced the suit. She looked relaxed and comfortable, but he saw from her pose she had not let her guard down. She was sitting on the edge of the chair, feet planted and square with her knees, and her head was over her hips. If required, she could launch up with speed. However casual she acted around Victor, she did not put herself at needless risk. He paid her the same compliment by keeping his distance and never letting her out of his peripheral vision.

‘Such a mess,’ she said and frowned at the body between them. Then she looked up at him and said, ‘Do you always leave a trail of corpses wherever you go?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s not uncommon. But two separate entities have tried to end my life on the same day. Even for me, that’s a little on the high side. So start talking.’

‘Killing everyone who gets in your way is hardly the best way of staying unnoticed, is it?’

‘Something tells me these two aren’t going to notice me again.’

She smirked. ‘Surely better for them to not notice you in the first place than leave corpses behind for others of their ilk to notice?’

‘It’s a vicious circle,’ he admitted.

She looked at the gun in his hand, still aimed at her. ‘If you’re not going to shoot me, could you point that thing somewhere else?’

He tucked it into his waistband.

‘Thank you. Did you have to steal his clothes? Are you really struggling for cash that badly?’

He ignored her.

She studied him, annoyed he wouldn’t take the bait, and then her expression became more serious. She glanced at Wallinger’s corpse. ‘Who were these guys?’

He tossed her the two IDs. She scrutinised them, running a thumb over each one in turn, as if she could measure their veracity by touch alone.

‘It’s a genuine ID and genuine badge,’ Victor said.

‘I don’t know either of these two,’ Raven said. ‘But it’s really not smart to kill federal agents. Whatever their temporary risk to you, you’ve done yourself far more harm than good. Do you know how many cops and government agents are in this city? Or in this country? Do you have any idea the lengths they’ll go to to get justice for these guys? You should have run. You should have done anything you could to avoid capture and get away, but you never should have killed them.’

Victor said, ‘You told me before they weren’t real agents.’

‘No, I told you they weren’t on genuine Homeland Security business. You’ve made things a lot worse for both of us by killing these two.’

‘Look at the knife,’ Victor said. ‘Tell me what’s wrong with it?’

She looked confused, as if trying to work out what trick he was attempting before deciding he was, to her surprise, being genuine. She leaned forward for a closer look. It only took her a second to see what he meant. He hadn’t expected her to take any longer.

‘Why did you stab him through the sternum?’

‘I should have gone for the ribs, right?’

‘Obviously, but with the blade thrusting on a horizontal axis so it wouldn’t have become trapped on bone. I would have thought you would know better than that.’

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘I do know better.’

Her eyes rose to meet his own. ‘You’re saying you didn’t kill these two?’

Victor said, ‘I’m saying I didn’t kill this particular one, but I did take his clothes. He won’t need them again. The dead woman in the bathroom is my own work. She stabbed this guy here, and then tried to kill me. I was acting in self-defence. I haven’t stayed alive this long by killing those who I don’t need to, especially people who will be missed who have powerful friends.’

‘Why did this Guerrero try to kill you? And why did she kill her partner?’

‘She tried to kill me because I said your code name. He wanted to take me in. She couldn’t let that happen.’

‘Why would you use my code name?’

‘To test a theory,’ he answered. ‘And to find out if you were telling me the truth before.’

‘I’m offended.’

He shook his head. ‘No, you’re not.’

‘True, but this would all have gone a lot smoother if you would just trust what I tell you.’

‘I trust no one. Least of all the word of people who have tried to kill me.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘You’re not going to let that go, are you? It’s not healthy to hold on to grudges. Forgive and forget, as they say.’

‘What are you doing here, Constance? Why didn’t you get out of the city while you had the chance? I might not have found you again.’

She frowned. ‘I really wish you wouldn’t call me that.’

‘What are you doing here? What am I doing here?’

‘Apparently, I’m helping you see the obvious.’

‘Which is?’ Victor asked.

‘Halleck set you up.’

‘Of course he did. But I still don’t know why. He told me he didn’t send you after me. I believed him.’

‘That’s because he was telling the truth. He didn’t send me after you, it was the other way round.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I was after a Saudi prince.’

She was shaking her head before he’d finished talking. ‘He orchestrated it so I came after you, but his intention wasn’t for me to kill you. It was for you to kill me. So, technically, he was telling the truth. He must have thought you, being historically so effective at taking out threats, would be more than a match for me.’

‘Then he overestimated my abilities.’

‘More like he underestimated mine. But it’s irrelevant, because we both walked away from that encounter. Which gave him a problem: I was still breathing.’

‘Why does he want you dead so badly?’

Raven said, ‘Because I’m trying to stop him.’

‘Trying to stop him from doing what?’

‘Committing a terrorist attack on US soil.’

‘The blackout?’ Victor asked.

‘We shouldn’t talk about it here,’ Raven said. ‘Not with two dead federal agents.’

‘I’m not going anywhere without answers. We’re okay for a few minutes. Even if someone were to walk in, what are they going to do? Send a carrier pigeon to notify the police?’

Raven frowned, then said, ‘The blackout is the first stage of it, yes. Not the whole thing. This city has had blackouts before. It’s no big deal and certainly not what you’d call a terrorist attack.’

‘Then what happens in the second stage?’

‘Now that, I’m afraid, I don’t know exactly. It’ll be a bomb though, for certain. Halleck’s people acquired two tons of black-market C4 earlier this year. A Turkish banker named Caglayan brokered the deal.’

‘So he was the true target in Prague,’ Victor said. ‘Halleck wanted me to sever the connection.’

Raven shook her head. ‘No, Caglayan was my target. Halleck knew I would go after him, that’s why he sent you after the prince, to make sure our paths crossed. I knew he would send someone after me, so I killed Caglayan and waited for Halleck’s assassin to arrive.’

He nodded, thinking that Halleck would have known about the prince’s activities from dealing with Caglayan and gone to Muir under the guise of the prince being a legitimate target, which he was.

‘And Halleck couldn’t have hired me to go after you directly,’ Victor said. ‘He had to trick my CIA broker as well as me. He couldn’t risk them knowing your name, because like me you’ll be on a list, and that could expose him. He even said he wanted to keep my broker in the loop. But I said no.’

‘Because you didn’t want anyone other than Halleck to know what you were doing,’ Raven added. ‘Which he would have predicted.’

Victor said, ‘So it was you who I was communicating with then in Prague.’

She said, ‘I was pretending to be Caglayan while you were pretending to be the prince’s accountant.’

‘You’re good,’ he said. ‘You almost killed me.’

‘Almost,’ she echoed. ‘As you can imagine, that two tons of plastique will make some serious mess in an urban environment.’

He said, ‘A bomb doesn’t first require a blackout.’

‘That depends where the bomb is planted, doesn’t it? No power means no CCTV to record them placing it, overstretched emergency services, no cell towers, no —’

‘I understand how electricity works.’

She nodded in apology. ‘Whatever Halleck plans to blow up, the blackout is necessary to make it happen. I don’t know any more about the attack than that, but what I do know is that this blackout is only going to be active for twelve hours. Well, under twelve now. So whatever it is Halleck is planning, it has to be occurring very soon. Sometime tonight.’

‘Under the museum you said, “It’s started.” How do you know how long the blackout is going to last for? You also told me when the lights went out that it wasn’t you this time. Explain.’

‘I didn’t activate it,’ she explained, ‘but I caused it. I made sure the virus got into the system.’

‘I assume you mean a computer virus.’

‘A computer virus, yes. A pathogen, we called it. We stole the idea from the Israelis. Mossad used one to knock out an Iranian nuclear reactor by making the turbines run too fast. Set Tehran’s enrichment plans back several years. They released the virus into the world and sat back and waited while it infected computer after computer, doing no damage but spreading exponentially until it naturally found its way on to a USB stick that someone took to the nuclear power plant. Obviously, the computers that run such things aren’t linked up to the web. It worked brilliantly. They were a bit more sophisticated than us. I broke into the house of one of the guys who works at a power plant upstate and infected his home computer with our virus to make sure it got into the power plant’s system on the right timescale. The Israelis were a lot more patient than Halleck.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Victor said. ‘Halleck works for the government. Why is he going to commit a terrorist attack in the US? He’s no terrorist.’

She stood and stepped towards a window, giving him her back. ‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.’

‘I don’t buy it.’

‘I bought it at first,’ Raven explained, turning to face him again. ‘When he first had me killing people I couldn’t rationalise as bad guys. I believed his bullshit about sacrifice and the greater good and all of those clichés. But eventually I figured out that he works for whoever pays him the most. More often than not that’s the government. But not always.’

‘Halleck said you lost a teammate in Yemen. A lover. He said you blamed him and were going after his people in revenge.’

She looked sad for a moment and avoided eye contact. ‘I did lose a man I cared about in Yemen. But it was no one’s fault. The intelligence was bad.’

The intelligence was bad
. Halleck had used the exact same words. The man was a skilful manipulator, hiding the lies within truths to convince Victor of his veracity.

‘And who is paying Halleck this time?’ Victor asked.

‘
They
are.’

‘And who exactly are you talking about?’

‘The one per cent. The old white men. The guys who run the world.’

Victor said, ‘I don’t do conspiracy theories. Who?’

‘The man who Halleck has been answering to this time was a lobbyist for the arms industry.’

‘Ah,’ he said, understanding. ‘Cause a false flag attack and blame it on… let me guess: some hotspot in the Middle East?’

She nodded. ‘Cue increased defence spending and billions more to the share values of the corporations who manufacture the bombs and bullets. Like I said: the old white men who run the world. Do you know why they call it a false flag attack? It dates back centuries, from naval warfare, when ships used cannons and sailors fought each other with swords and hatchets. It was a ruse, flying the flag of your enemies to deceive the target ship, allowing you to sail close enough to strike. But the ship flying the false flag would raise its own before engaging in battle. It would admit the deception before the fight began.’

‘I don’t imagine Halleck will show the same kind of honour.’

‘Of course he won’t,’ Raven agreed. ‘Governments have been doing this, and getting away with it, forever. In 1962 a plan was drawn up to justify the invasion of Cuba to overthrow Castro. The Department of Defense put together Operation Northwoods to sink ships and shoot down planes and blame it on Cuba. It was never put into action, but it wasn’t the first and it won’t be the last.

Victor said, ‘This lobbyist will know who he’s working for.’

Raven shook her head. ‘Don’t be naïve. He’s only a middleman. Besides, there isn’t someone in charge of this. There isn’t even a conspiracy. It’s just the way it works. It’s like a consensus. In fact that’s what I call them: The Consensus.’

‘The Consensus,’ he repeated.

‘The old white men who keep the wheels turning for their benefit, and those who support them. In this case it’s all about peacetime, which is bad for business. The US spends over a trillion dollars a year on defence, most of it going to US arms manufactures. That has to be justified. There has to be war to keep that bankroll. The problem is there’s been too much of it recently. The politicians need to be able to justify those wars. They need to get public backing. No better way to do that than have something blow up.’

‘I’d like the name of the lobbyist all the same.’

She said, ‘His name is Alan Beaumont. Or, to be more precise, it was his name.’

Victor said, ‘You killed him,’ and she nodded.

‘I’ve been doing what I do best, trying to stop Halleck.’

‘But Halleck’s going forward anyway?’

Raven said, ‘I was too late getting to Beaumont. He’d already transferred the money to Halleck. Now, the vested interests are expecting their fireworks. Halleck’s got a job to do or he’s going to make some extremely powerful enemies.’

‘Okay,’ Victor said. ‘Then it’s time to leave the city. I have no desire to be a casualty of Halleck’s attack.’

‘Good luck with that.’

He said, ‘I don’t believe in luck,’ and headed towards the door.

‘Well, whatever you do believe in, you’ll need its help.’

Something in her tone made him turn round. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because you’re going to be Halleck’s patsy. By coming here you’ve set yourself up to take the blame for the attack.’