BLUNT FORCE

A TRIGGER MAN THRILLER

AIDEN BAILEY

Published by Inkubator Books

www.inkubatorbooks.com

Copyright © 2025 by Aiden Bailey

Aiden Bailey has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work.

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-83756-575-7

ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-83756-576-4

ISBN (Hardback): 978-1-83756-577-1

BLUNT FORCE is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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For Bec, with love

PART I

THE AMERICANS

1

Ronda, Spain

The murdered journalist, with her wrists and ankles bound and her body twisted across the mattress as she soaked in a puddle of her own blood, suddenly became the least of Mark Pierce’s problems when he heard footsteps behind him.

“Don’t even try it,” said the intruder the same moment Pierce’s hand subconsciously moved towards his holstered Glock 19 semi-automatic pistol. “My sidearm is aimed right at your heart.”

Pierce froze, knowing the intruder would easily shoot him down if he continued to reach for his own weapon. The man had efficiently snuck close behind Pierce without him noticing, suggesting he was as skilled in subterfuge, breaking and entering, and killing as Pierce was.

“Don’t turn around. Take your gun out slowly. Throw it on the floor, then kick it away.”

Not wishing to give his opponent a rash reason to shoot him, Pierce did as he was commanded and watched as his pistol skidded across the floorboards to a Moroccan-style dresser positioned on the far wall.

“Good, now raise your arms up over your head.”

Pierce complied, but he didn’t rush. He used those seconds to search for a weakness in the man’s threat that Pierce could exploit, but without a direct line of sight to his enemy, this was difficult. “That accent, it’s Russian, despite your attempt to mask it as German.”

The still unseen intruder was silent for a moment, then said, “So what if I am? You’re not even attempting to hide your Americanness, which suggests you are here motivated by the same reason I am.”

“And what motivation is that?” Pierce asked, figuring if they were talking, then nobody was shooting.

Yet.

“I watched how you moved and studied how you assessed the room, long before you knew I was here. You do not act as a normal person does, so I’m presuming you’re CIA, a paramilitary operative of the Central Intelligence Agency?”

Pierce nodded, for the man had guessed correctly. He switched from English, which they had both been speaking until now, and answered instead in perfect Russian. “I guess that makes you SVR? Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service?”

The intruder sighed. “American, I’m not here to answer your questions. But you are in the position of needing to answer mine, that is, if you don’t want me to start putting bullets inside your organs?”

“Like you did with her?” Pierce snarled as he lowered his right arm to point at the still fresh corpse on the bed.

He noticed a bucket filled with water and a towel soaking in it, positioned next to the bed and out of sight from where he had originally approached the corpse. Then he became aware of the bed’s dampness and the wetness of her clothes, suggestive this man had tortured her before he had killed her. His process had involved waterboarding, a favoured method of the SVR in Pierce’s experience, whereby he had poured the liquid over a cloth covering her face and breathing passages, causing her to experience the sensation of drowning. Pierce had experienced waterboarding himself and knew how horrific it was. Any secrets the Russian had wanted from her, he already had them.

Pierce looked again at the lifeless Spanish journalist and lowered his arm further. “She had a name, you know? Liliana Torres Escarra. I suppose she told you that while you tortured her?” He saw again that her eyes had remained open until the end, and even now in their glassy and lifeless stare, she still expressed the fear she must have endured when the SVR operative had finally shot her, once through the heart. “She didn’t deserve to die, especially not like that.”

The Russian opponent said nothing and remained in the same spot. The sunlight shining through the windows of this apartment, nestled deep inside the tourist heart of the town of Ronda, offered Pierce no opportunity for reflections off mirrors or glass ornaments to see where his opponent stood. Pierce was powerless to act to subdue this foe until he knew more.

“Russian, if you’re not willing to talk about her, then let’s talk about her data files that you came to collect.”

The Russian moved then, causing a slight creak in the floorboards, and suddenly Pierce knew exactly where he stood behind him.

“What do you know about the data files the four journalists stole?” asked the Russian.

Pierce dropped his arms further still and turned in a circle until he faced his opponent.

He saw now that his foe stood four metres from him, exactly where he had guessed he had been standing, and held a Turkish Girsan MC P35 semi-automatic with a suppressor pointed at Pierce’s chest just as he had claimed.

The assassin was about the same age, height and build as Pierce, early thirties, tall and slender but all muscle. His hair was dark and his skin pale, with Slavic features. They even dressed similarly, in dark casual clothes comprising jeans, hiking boots, and long-sleeve shirts with the sleeves rolled up to just below the elbows. There was nothing Pierce saw in his foe that would give him the advantage if it came to a brawl, because they were the same.

But one fact, however, was certain in Pierce’s mind now that they had each sized the other up. They were both highly trained and professional killers, predators in the human world. Only one of them would live through to the conclusion of this encounter, because neither could exist together in the same hunting ground.

Pierce stepped forward, testing the limits of the Russian’s tolerance. So far, he had not told Pierce to raise his arms again, so he kept them out from his hips, where his empty hands falsely showed that he was still no threat. “I know a sizeable proportion of the data those journalists possess is already uploaded on the internet. You would know that too. Are you thinking, like I was, Liliana and her three journalist friends kept some of that data held back somewhere, possibly in many physical locations across Europe, and safely stored on printouts, data sticks, hard drives, etcetera. You came here looking for it and found nothing?”

The question didn’t seem to bother the Russian, but Pierce’s movements did, for he raised his weapon higher so that it now pointed at Pierce’s head. “Don’t come any closer.”

“Sure.”

“Since you brought it up, do you have any of her data? Or that held by the other journalists?”

Pierce raised an eyebrow at the question. He had nothing regarding these files and wondered if his foe was in the same situation. “Actually, the journalist who was her friend,” Pierce said, pointing to Liliana’s corpse again, “who was murdered with a car bomb three days ago in London, I have his collection of data. Is that of interest to you? Matter of fact, I have it with me now,” he said in a blatant lie.

The Russian’s barely blinking eyes seemed to intensify in their stare. “That’s not possible.”

“Are you so sure about that?”

“Then give me the name of the British journalist so I know you aren’t lying!”

“Daniel Connelly. Was it the SVR who assassinated him? Was it you who killed him too?” The Russian didn’t answer, so Pierce kept talking, figuring he was onto something here. “I saw the NSA report,” he said, referring to America’s foreign signals intelligence-gathering organisation, the National Security Agency, who often worked side by side with the CIA in data-related missions like this one. “When the police investigators at Scotland Yard assigned to the case filed a report on the Interpol databases, a whole cluster of trigger words that interest the CIA all came up at once. The NSA were straight onto it after that. They hacked all of Connelly’s accounts, drives and emails, and downloaded what they could. When a journalist is killed so brutally and publicly, and it’s got Russian intelligence written all over it, you know he must have been onto something good.”

Pierce was spinning lies, for his superiors had not yet fully briefed him on what exactly it was Torres Escarra, Connelly and their two surviving journalist peers had stolen that had mobilised a top-tier SVR capture and kill team to go after them with such vigour and intent as they had displayed in the last two days. Whenever the SVR showed interest in something with this much passion, the CIA got interested too. Hence why Pierce was here, to understand what motivated these Russians, and if their intent directly threatened America’s security interests.

“Come to think of it, why would you use a bomb to take out Connelly? Perhaps you don’t wish to recover the data, but destroy it, right?”

The Russian’s eyes flickered momentarily. Then he bit down hard on his lip as his eyes again searched the apartment, looking for something Pierce couldn’t yet guess at. Or perhaps he was still making up his mind as to what to do with Pierce.

Deciding that the building tension was about to break into violent action, Pierce cleared his throat as he lowered his arms further. “Russian, do you want the data I have with me or not? Are we going to bargain it for my life?”

The Russian’s eyes darted to Pierce’s hands, as if expecting to see a weapon there.

Pierce raised his voice, drawing the Russian’s eyes back to his face. “It’s in my left jacket pocket. Do I have your permission to take it out?”

“No! Take off the jacket instead. Throw it to the floor at my feet.”

“No problem!” Pierce said, suppressing a grin because the SVR operative had acted exactly how he had hoped he would. Simultaneously, as Pierce slipped out of his jacket, using it to obscure what his other hand was reaching for, he drew his KAMPO tactical knife and flung it hard at his enemy.

2

The Russian, anticipating an attack, easily sidestepped Pierce’s knife as it flew centimetres past his neck and impaled deep into the wooden door frame behind him, producing a loud thwack as it stuck.

Then they both rushed each other and moved with dextrous efficiency.

The Russian fired in Pierce’s direction.

Like the Russian, Pierce had anticipated this and had feinted to duck the other way only in the critical second when it mattered, to grab a standing lamp and swing it like a club at the Russian’s head. The shade collapsed, and the light bulb inside shattered. An electric arc shot from the element into the Russian’s forehead, but the volts only arced for a single second, as the force of forward motion caused the power cord to disconnect from the wall socket.

While the Russian staggered in response to the shock, Pierce closed the distance between them further, to knock the hand holding the P35 upwards and away from Pierce.

The Russian fired another suppressed shot that sounded like a loud sneeze, this one burrowing a bullet into the ceiling the same moment the two men wrestled. Then they punched at each other while parrying return blows. All the while, Pierce’s primary focus remained on keeping the Russian’s gun hand pointed upwards and away from his body mass.

After ten seconds of frantic fighting, Pierce sensed a weakness in the Russian’s attack and took it to twist an arm, turning his foe’s right side to Pierce, exposing it. He now pulled his weight down on the Russian’s gun hand, twisting the weapon so it would eventually point at his foe’s own forehead.

Anticipating what was about to happen, the Russian gave up resisting Pierce’s downwards pressure on his gun arm, to spin suddenly in a full circle, which resulted in him pulling Pierce off balance.

Pierce stumbled, but with their tight grips on each other, so did the Russian, and they separated.

With a powerful kick, Pierce’s left hiking boot collided with his foe’s gun hand, sending the Girsan MC P35 spinning across the room.

Rushing each other, they wrestled again as Pierce pummelled his foe in the face, splashing blood, while the Russian aimed for Pierce’s kidneys, but instead only angling effectively to smack at his ribs.

Then Pierce realised the Russian’s next deadly intention, too late to stop it.

His foe locked his leg around and behind Pierce’s knee, to knock him off balance and create enough momentum for the Russian to throw Pierce through the apartment window.

Deciding at the last second that he wasn’t going through the glass alone, Pierce grabbed the Russian by his shirt collar and pulled him along. Glass shattered around them as they fell together and dropped two metres onto the terracotta-tiled roof of the adjacent apartment block.

The impact stunned them both, and they disengaged.

Pierce rolled as he grunted and tensed from the shock and pain.

Then he realised the roof sloped, and he was sliding down it as tiles came loose around him.

With stunning and sudden clarity, he remembered Torres Escarra’s apartment was on the fourth floor of this two-hundred-year-old building, situated in the midst of Ronda’s tourist centre near the Plaza de Espana and the Puente Nuevo, directly above an open court next to Spain’s oldest bullring and a historic bridge crossing a one-hundred-and-twenty-metre chasm dividing the city in two.

As Pierce slipped and careened towards the four-storey drop, he watched as the Russian also failed to scramble to his feet. But the Russian was higher up, and it would be Pierce going over first. Pierce sensed, then watched from the corner of his eyes as tiles disappeared over the edge, and pedestrians screamed from below as the terracotta crashed around them.

Deciding he wasn’t going to die alone, Pierce lunged at the Russian’s legs and held tight to the left one as he disappeared over the edge.

To stop suddenly.

And find himself dangling twelve metres above the restaurant- and café-lined street below.

Tourists looked up and covered their open mouths with their hands.

Someone screamed, but Pierce had no time to see who it was.

The Russian had grabbed something solid and fixed in place, just out of Pierce’s sight, which had stopped them from both falling to their deaths. A gutter perhaps, or a roof frame. But now he kicked, attempting to dislodge Pierce and send him to that fate alone.

Knowing that he had seconds at most before he was shaken loose, Pierce looked for an opportunity. Then he noticed a wrought-iron apartment balcony below him, the closest of many positioned along the length of their building and across multiple levels, but barely wide enough to hold a child, let alone an adult male, on its ledge.

The Russian kicked again, and Pierce lost most of his grip. Regardless of the balcony’s miniscule width, when the Russian kicked for a third time, Pierce threw himself at it and dangled for a moment as more diners and shoppers looked up and gasped.

The Russian scrambled back up onto the shattered tiled roof and disappeared from Pierce’s line of sight.

Before someone took his photo, Pierce pulled himself up, shattered the apartment window with his elbow, reached inside and unlatched the window. Then threw himself inside.

The apartment was empty, but there were open suitcases on an unmade bed, and both a woman’s and a man’s clothes scattered everywhere, so perhaps this was a vacation rental. Pierce grabbed and donned sunglasses he’d spotted on the dresser, and a black scarf, which he wrapped around his nose and mouth. Then he raced out of the apartment, ready to give chase to the Russian.

Only to find his foe rushing past the door as Pierce opened it.

Unintentionally, the two men collided. Their combined momentum caused them to roll and smash into the walls and steps as they tumbled down an entire floor’s worth of stairs.

When they hit the next landing, Pierce summersaulted over the top of the Russian and thudded into the door of another apartment. The wind knocked out of him, Pierce was too slow, as the Russian was swiftly on his feet and coming down with a heavy boot stomp onto Pierce’s head.

Pierce grabbed the foot with both hands, and with only centimetres to spare from having all his face bones crushed, he twisted the foot, which spun the Russian and sent him careening down the next flight of stairs.

Scrambling to his feet, he noticed his scarf and sunglasses had come loose, so he donned them again, hiding his identity from the various new screaming and cowering onlookers also caught in the stairwell. Pierce looked over the balustrade and saw the Russian had rolled well and was up on his feet, sprinting again.

Pierce gave chase, expecting the Russian to take the stairs all the way down to the ground floor. Instead, on the second landing, he veered towards a passage that led to a service door. The Russian almost took the door off its hinges as he crashed through it and onto a balcony, running above a closed courtyard. He pushed past an old couple who seemed unable to get out of his way and knocked them over.

Sprinting after him, Pierce leapt over the fallen couple as he watched his foe take another stairwell on the other side of the balcony, not downwards, but up.

Pierce reached for his gun, but when he touched his holster, he remembered he had left the pistol in Torres Escarra’s apartment, and it had his fingerprints all over it. But capturing the Russian and learning what he could about the SVR’s intentions was more important, so Pierce kept chasing, taking the stairs four at a time to keep pace with the dead journalist’s torturer and killer.

When Pierce reached what was now the fifth storey, he spotted the Russian racing across a rooftop balcony, past many clotheslines with linen drying on them. This block was a series of apartment and office buildings all compressed together, offering the Russian a wide field of rooftops to sprint over until he reached a dividing street far below them, cornering him.

Noticing there was nowhere for the Russian to go, Pierce picked up the pace as he wondered why the Russian had adopted this tactic, when he knew he had finite space to operate in.

Then to Pierce’s amazement, he watched as the Russian turned perpendicular to the drop, then ran faster before catapulting himself off a railing.

Had the Russian just committed suicide?

Needing to know, Pierce ran to the same railing.

He looked down to see the Russian in a rooftop swimming pool, a level down and far across the narrow three-metre-wide alley dividing them both, fifteen metres below Pierce.

Unharmed from his escapade, the Russian swam to the other side of the pool and climbed out. On his feet again, he looked up at Pierce, snarled, and made out to shoot Pierce with a gun made from his thumb and index finger.

He had bested Pierce and would soon vanish from sight.

3

Pierce thought to throw himself into the swimming pool too, but he didn’t have the run-up the Russian had allowed himself. Plus, to run back to gain the forward momentum needed to accomplish the leap would also provide sufficient time for his foe to escape.

Then Pierce noticed a five-metre-high radio antenna on the next apartment block.

He threw himself at it, catching it about four metres up from its base. It bent like a bow as he’d hoped and sent him swinging across the gap to crash onto more terracotta tiles on an apartment in the same block with the swimming pool.

As these tiles dislodged around Pierce’s hands and feet, he once more struggled to maintain his balance, while the now furious and glaring Russian, seeing Pierce close to him again, took off on another sprint.

When Pierce’s feet hit the gutter, it held, and he ceased sliding. He waited for the broken tiles to slide past him, then manoeuvred himself onto the rooftop balcony with the pool, from where he gave chase again.

He followed the Russian as they raced across further tiled roofs, these ones more securely positioned in place, and after a chase across a half dozen different buildings, Pierce finally caught up to the Russian on another flat rooftop.

The Russian had anticipated Pierce’s gain on him and stopped suddenly, which Pierce wasn’t expecting, when they were only a metre apart. He turned and punched Pierce in the gut, sending the American operator down and rolling again. This man was good, as skilled and cunning a fighter as any foe Pierce had previously encountered. He came for Pierce again.

As Pierce tried not to focus on the pain in his gut, he stumbled to his feet.

At the same moment, the Russian paused, seemingly in contemplation. Then he spotted a metre-high potted palm, lifted it and threw it at Pierce.

The American operator ducked, but not fast enough as the pot caught him on his left shoulder and sent him spinning. Pierce toppled and fell two metres from one roof to another. The impact was not as jarring, as this covering too was sloped and ended at the wall of another building, so there was no sudden drop to the streets below to kill him.

Grunting, swearing, and wishing that for once he could avoid taking a beating on a mission, he staggered to his feet and gave chase again.

Climbing back up to the building he had come from, he found an open door where he heard noises of crashing furniture, plates smashing, and people complaining and screaming below.

Pierce descended the stairwell of another apartment block, passing many men, women and children who had already been knocked over by the desperate Russian. When they saw Pierce coming towards them as well, still with his face obscured by a scarf and sunglasses, they got out of his way, having learned their lesson. Pierce ducked around them rather than shove them aside, but by the time he had reached ground level, he had heard at least three individuals on their cell phones calling for the “Policia!”

He kept moving, knowing that he had to finish this soon; otherwise he, or both of them, would end up in jail or dead.

At ground level, Pierce found himself in a narrow street lined with outdoor café settings and dining tables shaded by white umbrellas, packed with tourists enjoying sangria cocktails and a variety of tapas selections. To his right, Pierce heard, then spotted an umbrella toppling and patrons complaining. Pierce headed in that direction.

Passing the site of the commotion, he came out into a square and realised this was Ronda’s famous Plaza de Espana. Looking left, he spotted the Russian rushing towards the Puente Nuevo, Ronda’s newest and largest of the three bridges that spanned the chasm carrying the Guadalevin River, which divided the city. But the stone bridge was old by modern standards, having been built over two hundred years ago, and it was surrounded on all sides by steep cliffs, for this was a clifftop town. If Pierce had been interested, from this bridge, magnificent views of the surrounding valleys and hills of the Serrania de Ronda countryside could be seen. But what concerned him in this moment was that the Russian was crossing that bridge, hoping to vanish into the also narrow streets of the southern portion of the old city.

Pierce pursued again, grateful that he still wore his disguise, because many people were filming them with their cell phones.

A police car with sirens blaring crossed the Puente Nuevo and screeched to a halt in the midst of the Plaza de Espana. Two uniformed officers leapt from the vehicle, a man and a woman. They pointed their service pistols at the Russian and yelled at him in Spanish to “Get down on your knees and raise your hands in the air!”

Before he too was caught up in this confrontation, Pierce merged with the crowds and watched as the Russian complied. So far, the police weren’t interested in Pierce, so he did his best to blend in with the mingling tourists and locals, even though many of those individuals now moved away from him and stared him down with both fear and disgust in their eyes, presumably because of his disguise or because they had witnessed his earlier antics.

Then Pierce heard shots.

He looked back at the Russian and the police officers and noticed the latter were both down and bleeding. The Russian had one of their pistols in his hand and was now sprinting across the bridge.

Pierce sprinted after the Russian, passing the male officer because he was obviously dead with his chest blown open. He stopped by the female officer, who was bleeding fast from a wound in her thigh, and pressed his hand down on the entry wound, slowing the flow of blood. She panted rapidly, then convulsed as she stared into his eyes with the look of a person who knew they were about to die.

“It’s not fatal! You’ll live!” Pierce spoke to her in Spanish, another language he was fluent in. He looked around until he spotted a young couple, each of them wearing shorts and T-shirts, as many tourists wore with this being summer. “You!” Pierce pointed to the man. “Put pressure on the wound to slow the bleeding! You,” he said to the woman, “dial 112 and call for an ambulance.”

The man took over from Pierce as the woman nodded and dialled on her cell phone.

Knowing that Pierce had done everything he could to save the young officer, he took off after the Russian. Both his hands were sticky with the wounded officer’s blood. He wiped them on his jeans to clean them.

As Pierce reached the bridge, the Russian stopped, turned and fired at Pierce.

In response, Pierce ducked behind stone-block features on the bridge and used it for cover while nearby tourists also scrambled to get out of the way.

After the Russian had fired three shots, he ceased with his shooting.

Pierce looked up and saw he was trying to free a jammed weapon.

Pierce rushed, then collided with him, again knocking him hard against the stone railing.

His still sticky, wet hands now gripped the Russian’s jacket as they both wrestled and inadvertently tilted their upper bodies over the stone precipice, with a more than hundred-metre drop directly below them into the vegetated gorge below. They were each trying to throw the other over, but with their equality in strength and fighting prowess, it would be both him and the Russian going over together.

A utility vehicle screeched to a halt next to them, with scaffolding poles and ropes in the tray. Two tradesmen in work gear stepped out, flexed their muscles and abused both Pierce and the Russian. They shouted at them in Spanish, ordering them to stop fighting each other like the dumb morons that they were!

Pierce and the Russian ignored them, concentrating on not dying at the other’s hands.

The tradesmen got up close and yelled in their faces. It seemed obvious to Pierce they had no idea the Russian had fired a gun earlier; otherwise, they might not have been so brave.

The Russian found a gap in Pierce’s defences, which he leveraged to jab the closest tradesman in his eyes with the fingers of his left hand.

As the man screamed and cursed, Pierce saw an opportunity in a long length of looped rope tied to the utility vehicle’s tray. He grabbed the long end, coiled it around the Russian’s neck, and then pushed them both over the side of the Puente Nuevo.

They dropped ten metres before the rope went taut and snapped the Russian’s neck, killing him instantly.

Pierce held on tight to the rope, which he had only just managed to loop around his palm as they went over. They now dangled together still a hundred metres above the rocks and the fast-flowing river beneath them. Despite his reckless actions, his sunglasses and scarf had at least remained in place, so his identity remained concealed.

While they swung together over the gaping abyss, Pierce still had enough wits about him to reach into the Russian’s jacket. In a lucky find, he snatched the dead man’s cell phone and pocketed it. Then as Pierce spun the body to search further, the rope uncoiled around the Russian’s neck, and his corpse dropped away to vanish into the cragged and scrub-covered rock beneath them.

Pierce looked up and saw dozens of surprised and shocked faces looking down at him.

The rope swayed another fifty or sixty metres below him, so Pierce shimmied down it until he reached a rocky and vegetated ledge. He swung onto it and dropped into the undergrowth, finally disappearing from the sight of everyone up above, all of whom had witnessed his outlandish and stupidly risky stunt, which he himself had barely survived.

4

Gibraltar

Four hours after his escape from Ronda, well after the sun had set over the westernmost stretch of the Mediterranean Sea, Pierce drove his supermini Dacia Sandero hatchback through Gibraltar passport control without incurring any delays or suspicion. He then took the newly constructed Kingsway tunnel and road, which diverted him around Gibraltar International Airport, delivering him inside this British overseas territory wedged into the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula.

Now firmly in another country that was not part of the European Union, he had escaped Spain without incurring further law enforcement interest, but with the volumes of unwanted mainstream and social media attention his stunt had caused in Ronda, Pierce knew he was about to receive a world of pain from his superior. He hoped his crazy antics in Spain had been worth it for the mission he was still to fully understand, for Pierce had not been properly briefed yet.

While he mused over his future, and the likely difficult conversation with his boss, he drove fast around the western side of the monolithic limestone mountain known as the Rock of Gibraltar that distinguished this tiny British-controlled peninsula. Then he curved around the steep narrow streets until he reached Flat Bastion Road lined with palm trees, whitewashed apartment towers built to the road’s edge, and glimpses of a commanding view over the harbour lined with luxury yachts and Panamax cargo ships traversing the Bay of Gibraltar.

He easily found the safe house he’d been briefed on prior to his entry into Spain and drove into its underground garage. With two additional hatchbacks already present, parking was tight, and Pierce had to squeeze out of his vehicle, not to scratch the next car’s door.

Waiting for him in his immaculate navy-blue chino pants, a white business suit and tanned brogue shoes, with his thick beard and hair neatly trimmed, was the CIA’s head of the Special Operations Group, Abdul Ibrahim. Pierce’s soon-to-be pissed off superior. Or perhaps he already was, because Pierce now saw how he fumed.

“Trigger Man,” said Ibrahim, using Pierce’s code name inside the CIA, “what the fuck happened in Ronda?”

Pierce said nothing as he handed his boss the Russian’s cell phone. “I took this from the SVR operative who went over the Puente Nuevo with me. He’d already tortured and murdered Liliana Torres Escarra before I got to her.”

“SVR?” Ibrahim raised an eyebrow, more curious than angry now. “You know this for a fact or are you speculating?”

“The latter, but that cell phone might tell us more. I’m guessing it’s a burner, so there will be nothing compromising on it about his identity, but there might be a call history. Tell me, sir, am I compromised in Spain?”

Ibrahim sighed and shook his head. “You’re all over social media. Most posters think you were some kind of hero, saving a cop’s life and subduing the killer. Luckily with your scarf and sunglasses, there is nothing posted anywhere that exposes your identity.”

Pierce nodded. “Good.”

“But you stay out of Spain permanently until I say otherwise.”

“I mean, sir, good that the cop survived.”

“Right.” Ibrahim shook his head as an expression of disappointment dominated his return stare again. “The higher-ups back at Langley,” he said, referring to CIA headquarters in the state of Virginia back in the United States, “want your arse fired because of all this. Some are even calling for criminal charges.”

Pierce paused for a moment, remembering he had never been a popular operative within the CIA since he had officially begun working with them five years ago now, and this was not the first time his own people had fought to bring him down. Simultaneously, while he found himself not caring about what those higher-ups thought, he did respect Ibrahim’s opinion on the matter, so he asked, “And what do you think, sir?”

“Trigger Man, they’re not coming for you yet. So let’s try to keep it that way.”

“Fine by me.”

“This mission we’re tasked with is now critical. The outcomes we achieve here, I suspect, will determine your ultimate fate.”

“And what is the mission, exactly?”

“Upstairs. I’ll fully brief you there.”

“Good. Then we’d better get to work.”

They took the stairs to the top floor of the three-storey town house, with a million-dollar view over night-time Gibraltar. Like most safe houses Pierce had stayed in during his many covert missions across the globe, the furniture and fittings were bland, but the technology was state of the art.

Sitting at a modern, IKEA-style desk and wearing a hoody, trainers and skinny jeans was Akash Parab, a technical operations officer recently assigned to this new, non-official cover team Ibrahim had pulled together in the last week, tasked with undertaking “special” missions that fell outside of the normal operational mandates of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, its members reporting directly to Ibrahim himself. Parab and Pierce had first worked together in India the previous month, and judging by what Pierce had seen of the computer whiz’s skills and fortitude during their time together, Pierce was glad to have him on the team.

The twenty-five-year-old stood, and the two men shook hands. “Pierce, good to see you again.”

“Likewise,” said Pierce. “How’s the girlfriend?”

Parab winced. Last time they’d talked, the technical operations officer had expressed concern that his relationship with his girlfriend was deteriorating because he wasn’t yet cleared to inform her that his employers were the CIA. She didn’t understand why he was always away on work assignments when she thought he worked for the Federal Treasury, in a rather boring and uninspiring role, compared to what he actually did with the CIA. “Not good. I don’t think it’s going to last.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. But it’s not over yet, so hang in there.”

Ibrahim pointed to a worn-looking sofa, indicating that Pierce should sit. “Let’s save social chit-chat for later, Pierce. I still need to properly brief you on what’s going down.” He handed Parab the cell phone Pierce had offered up in the garage. “This is from the suspected SVR operative Pierce took out in Ronda.”

Parab raised an eyebrow. “Russian foreign intelligence?”

“Allegedly. Hack it for me, will you, Parab, so we know what’s on it?”

The younger man nodded as he examined the phone. “So this could confirm if it’s the Russians who are interested in the journalists’ acquired data? Does this also suggest it was the SVR who planted that bomb in Connelly’s car, sir?”

“Looking that way, but you tell me after you figure out what’s on it.”

Parab nodded as he connected a data cable to the cell phone’s port and got to work.

Ibrahim sat himself down on the second sofa opposite Pierce. Then he poured them both glasses of water from the jug on the coffee table. It was warm beach weather here in Gibraltar with this being the height of summer. Pierce was glad for the refreshment regardless of the state of the weather.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get to properly brief you earlier, Pierce, before I sent you into the field. But now seems the appropriate juncture to rectify that situation.”

5

Pierce sipped his water and settled in for the briefing. He sensed from his boss’s body language that their impending conversation was about to be both lengthy and detailed. But he didn’t mind. It was always optimal to operate with as many of the facts as it was possible to know, especially while neck-deep in a covert and non-official cover mission with minimal backup. The alternative was to be ignorant of potential foes and situations he couldn’t prepare for. It was also important to understand the stakes at risk in a mission should they win or fail, because when there were noble outcomes to be achieved, Pierce was far more motivated.

Ibrahim drank from his glass, leaned forward and said, “Pierce, what do you know about Luxembourg?”

Pierce shrugged. “Tiny European country wedged between Germany, Belgium and France. Population is something around two-thirds of a million people. A member of the European Union, a democracy and one of the wealthiest countries in the world in terms of gross domestic product.” He took a sip of water before continuing, “If Luxembourg is of interest to the CIA and pertinent to today’s briefing, then I’d say it’s because of its banking secrecy laws and tax-haven status.”

Pierce knew well enough that tax havens like Luxembourg offered very low tax rates for residents, hence why a lot of the world’s wealthiest individuals and companies liked to hold their cash reserves in such countries. Luxembourg’s financial secrecy laws also allowed for easier business practices for hiding money, transferring it to and from questionable organisations, for laundering funds, and most especially, to finance criminal, terrorist or treasonous operations without giving away one’s intention. He hoped this mission was not about protecting the personal funds of some billionaire whose technological products were critical to America’s economic interests, or that it involved some oil sheikh whose supply or withholding of hydrocarbons could spark an international recession if he got in a bad mood and turned off the tap.

“Didn’t it come to light some time back, sir, that the supreme leader of North Korea has four billion dollars in funds hidden in Luxembourg banks, kept in reserve should the dictator ever need to flee an uprising in his own country?”

Ibrahim nodded. “Yes, it did. Luxembourg’s status as a tax haven is why I brought it up with you now, but this has nothing to do with North Korea.”

Pierce nodded as he reflected that he, too, maintained a series of secret bank accounts in other tax havens, which included the Cayman Islands, Jersey and Singapore. He currently enjoyed access to just over $1.2 million spread between a dozen accounts, money he had stolen from a corrupt CIA officer who had attempted to frame Pierce as a terrorist during a mission over a year ago. For too many months, Pierce had been forced to go on the run while his own people had tried to hunt him down and kill him. That “misunderstanding” was thankfully all in the past now, and he was good with the Central Intelligence Agency again, but the money had come in handy to keep himself alive while he had been a wanted man. So he’d kept the funds, and he’d kept it secret, there in reserve should he ever need to run again.

Many operatives in intelligence agencies across the world did the same, and many of them were encouraged to do so by their peers and superiors for similar contingency reasons. Pierce didn’t think Ibrahim had brought up tax havens now because he was concerned about Pierce’s Cayman Island, Jersey and Singapore accounts, or that he even knew about them. The briefing, therefore, must have something to do with funds belonging to other parties of interest to the CIA, moved through the Luxembourg banking systems, and he was only hearing about it because those funds were now compromised.

“Have you heard of the firm Broek & Trausch?”

Pierce shook his head. “Sir, I’ve barely operated in Western Europe during my career, and never in Luxembourg. Although, I do understand the CIA uses various banks and firms in Luxembourg, as well as Switzerland, to fund our various black operations across the globe. The two nations are ranked as the safest tax havens in the world, right? And we only use the best.”

Again, Ibrahim nodded as he ignored Pierce’s sarcasm. “Broek & Trausch are a legal firm, specialising in international, financial and corporate law, and offer as part of their client services the establishment of shell companies. Specifically, shell companies where ownership of both its parent and subsidiary companies is obscured and difficult to trace.”

Again, Pierce nodded, for he understood this. Many companies didn’t wish for the world to know about other companies they owned, particularly when those secondary companies invested money and resources into questionable businesses such as arms trade, illicit drugs, slave and child labour, funding terrorist organisations, or merely to hide money they didn’t wish to pay tax on. Pierce had now concluded that the CIA had used Broek & Trausch to establish various shell companies of their own, to fund operations around the world that needed to remain deniable or were questionable in their objectives. He didn’t have a problem with the CIA acting this way. After all, they were supposedly fighting for the “greater good”, to bring down authoritarian regimes and international terrorists organisations wherever they appeared across the globe, and if they needed to do so covertly, so be it. He’d figured he was only hearing about this Broek & Trausch now because they had become compromised. Otherwise, there was never any reason for a field operative like Pierce to ever know about their existence.

Pierce finished his glass of water, placed it on the coffee table and said, “Would I be correct in surmising, then, that the data Torres Escarra, Connelly and their two journalist peers secured — most of which they have already uploaded onto the dark web and that the Russians want to destroy — all originated from Broek & Trausch’s servers? Secured covertly?”

Ibrahim’s expression was grim when he nodded. “Yes.”

“How exactly did that happen?”

“The details are hazy. You already know that, three days ago, that British journalist with the Guardian was murdered with a car bomb just outside his London home. His wife and two young daughters witnessed it too. Horrible. They are all completely traumatised by the whole ordeal.”

Pierce nodded, feeling a sickness in his stomach. While he had no problem eliminating soldiers, criminals, warlords and terrorists who acted against normal human decency and fought to destroy security and safety for the world’s citizens wherever it existed, he himself could never condone the murder of innocents, particularly when children became involved in the trauma of their passing. Pierce had been in that horrible place himself sixteen years ago, and didn’t wish the pain he had experienced at the time upon anyone. Whoever had murdered Connelly fully deserved Pierce’s direct and uncomplicated form of extreme justice if he were ever offered the opportunity to inflict it. “Who killed him? Was it the SVR?”

“Like you, Pierce, I suspect it was the SVR, and we should know soon, when Parab hacks that phone and sees if there is at least a call log we might learn something from.”

Parab spoke up from his tiny desk, without looking away from his monitor while his fingers flitted fast across his keyboard. “Getting closer!”

“Thank you, Parab.” Ibrahim turned back to Pierce. “Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department investigated immediately, of course, and discovered a melted hard drive in the car wreckage. They identified it would have originally contained some eight terabytes of data. We’re guessing that was how much data was stolen from Broek & Trausch. With six terabytes of the firm’s data already uploaded onto the dark web that we can find, that equates to about two terabytes of content that is still unaccounted for. You didn’t find anything like another drive at Torres Escarra’s apartment, did you?”

Pierce shook his head. “I went back, wiped it down and recovered my pistol because I didn’t want that pistol connecting me to Escarra’s murdered corpse. I didn’t have long to search at the time, and I came up empty. The police turned up just as I was disappearing again. I don’t think there is anything there.”

“Good. About getting away unnoticed, I mean. What about the man who went over the bridge with you? Did you check his body?”

Pierce shook his head. “From a distance, I already saw tourists rushing up to where I thought his body had fallen into the scrub, so no. The burner, I grabbed before he fell. But he was operational at the time, and professional like us, so wouldn’t be carrying anything on him, other than the phone, that identified him.”

“That sounds reasonable.”

“What is the nature of the data, sir? I still haven’t been briefed on that.”

“Specifically, it’s a whole lot of legal and financial files detailing the clients of Broek & Trausch’s many thousands of secret bank accounts, ownership structures, letters of correspondence, meeting minutes, interview transactions, everything, really.”

“Not a problem, then, for the NSA’s AIs to summarise it all, right?” asked Pierce. The National Security Agency was the lead US government organisation responsible for cryptology and in securing signals intelligence, or SIGINT, transmitted by other nations. They also developed cybersecurity products and services, such as artificial intelligence applications, to enable American computer network operations to gain a decisive advantage against their country’s various enemies always on the lookout to hack their data. Pierce also knew from perused classified CIA files that the NSA also operated some of the fastest and most sophisticated data servers and information networks anywhere on the planet, so he figured his supposition was correct. “I’m guessing it took them minutes at best to ascertain what those files contained?”

Ibrahim shook his head. “Yes and no. It’s not what we found inside the dark web files that worries us. It is what might exist in the data that wasn’t uploaded that is of grave concern to us. Data that Connelly, Torres Escarra and the other two journalists might still have on physical data-storage devices.”

“What do the journalists want with the data?”

Ibrahim laughed. “I’m sure you’ve worked it out already. It’s a treasure trove of information that exposes the corrupt and nefarious activities of our various world’s leaders and wealthiest businesspeople, which will feed the news cycles for months to come. Stories that will cement our journalists’ reputations as hard-hitting, and provide them all the job opportunities and Pulitzer Prizes they could ever hope for.”

Perhaps this was about protecting the world’s ultra-wealthy as Pierce had feared. “Then why post the data to the dark web? They lose any scoops they might gain by doing that.”

Ibrahim shrugged. “If your team were being murdered one by one, it seems a viable option. Once the data is in the public domain, coming after you can no longer change the outcome. Perhaps the two still surviving journalists believed doing so would dissuade the SVR from killing them as well.”

“But not all the data was uploaded? Why?”

“We’re just speculating here, Trigger Man. On a lot of things. Perhaps they kept the juiciest secrets held back. We don’t really know the ins and outs of this until we investigate further. You and I also both know from first-hand experience that civilians rarely act rationally when they are in life-and-death situations.”

Pierce nodded, conceding the C/SOG’s points. Still, lots of questions that needed answering were filling Pierce’s thoughts at this juncture, but he stopped his busy mind from asking them all and instead focused on one piece of the puzzle at a time, knowing that when Ibrahim laid out all the pieces, it would make sense. “Torres Escarra and Connelly I know about, but they are now both dead. Both seemed not to have the pertinent intact data files on them and therefore offered no further leads. Who are the other two journalists?”

“There is Anna Birtadottir, an Icelandic freelance war correspondent with a good reputation, who has reported from the front lines in Afghanistan and Syria in the past, and most recently on the war in Ukraine. She is based in Reykjavik and has now gone missing there. The other journalist is Kasrin Nayef, formerly with Die Ziet but now freelance and based in Berlin.”

“Also missing?”

“Yes.”

Pierce considered that Kasrin Nayef was a Middle Eastern name, but that didn’t really mean much in the modern world, when so many nationalities from across the world immigrated to and became citizens of European nations, just as they did in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

“Do we know how the journalists got hold of the Broek & Trausch data?”

Ibrahim shook his head. “Not yet. But to make a risky move like that, they must have felt there was a story in there somewhere that was worth exposing.”

Pierce nodded as he poured himself more water from the jug on the coffee table. It was certainly a sweltering clime down here on the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea. But he was also mildly agitated because he still didn’t fully understand the purpose of this mission and why they were risking their lives to complete it. Because of this concern, he felt to be inefficiently motivated, and this bothered him. “Well, go on then, sir, tell me.”

Ibrahim frowned as he returned Pierce’s questioning stare. “Tell you what?”

“What it is, exactly, that the CIA are afraid has been exposed about them in this data breach?”

6

Ibrahim turned and stared out the window, over the Bay of Gibraltar and the lit-up town of Algeciras visible on the horizon on the Spanish side of the inlet. “What concerns the CIA, Pierce, is that we use Broek & Trausch for operational purposes, and we have done so for some time. They established various shell companies we use to fund and manage hundreds of safe houses across Europe. CIA safe houses, I can tell you, where multiple operations are being run from right now. There to offer sanctuary to case officers, assets and paramilitary operatives like yourself who, if compromised, could result in multiple foiled operations and put at risk the lives of many of the selfless women and men we have sent out there under non-official cover to protect America’s interests.”

Pierce too stared out the window at the picturesque scene and realised he was seeing what Ibrahim saw, a view into the free world of democracies, the rule of law, freedom of expression, and the freedom to enjoy life under a government that supported you and didn’t try to suppress or murder you, and then he understood what was at stake here. “So is that what the Russians want? The details of those safe houses. Russia with their invasion of Ukraine and war aggression in Europe, and their threats to use nuclear missiles against us, have to be our most dangerous opponent in this continent right now. The stolen Broek & Trausch data could go a long way to giving them significant advantages in this shadow war we are fighting against them right now.”

“Exactly!”

“If they knew the locations of our safe houses, they could bring down the many operatives currently working against them.”

Ibrahim stood, and so did Pierce. “That’s right, Trigger Man. More than half of our European safe houses are indeed currently supporting operations against Russia.”

Deciding that he needed more than just water to drink, and needing to take the edge off his morose mood, Pierce searched inside the refrigerator until he spotted several cans of beer. “I know we’re working, but I could do with a real drink.” He didn’t ask Ibrahim if he wanted one with him being a Muslim man, but he felt the need for one himself after his comedown from the events in Ronda.

“You go ahead.”

“What about you, Parab?”

“Yes, thanks.”

After popping two lids and passing one beer to Parab, Pierce gulped down the cool, amber liquid. The effect was exactly what he needed. He relaxed as he felt the muscles in his neck and shoulders loosen. It reminded him of the other infliction that often bothered him and also debilitated him during missions, which might come back to haunt him now, so he stared at his outstretched left hand. It didn’t shake, but sometimes, when he was highly stressed, exhausted, or on the comedown from an intense combat, his hands fluttered like a tiny potted plant in a hurricane. He had thought a drink wasn’t a good idea perhaps, but because he had been without tremors since his battle in Ronda, perhaps he was on the mend here, and one drink was justified.

When Pierce caught Ibrahim watching him while he stared transfixed at his own hand, Pierce made a fist of it and dropped it to his side. “Let me summarise, sir. Ignoring the Russians for now, four respected European journalists, two murdered and two currently missing, and all of them with access to the data stolen from the Luxembourg legal firm Broek & Trausch. We need to track down all copies to secure or destroy it all, using any means necessary, to prevent any data on our safe houses reaching our enemies. Correct?”

“Very much so. The NSA is doing their best to take down the data wherever they find it on the dark web and elsewhere, but thankfully the safe house information isn’t amongst the uploaded portions we’ve found thus far. We also know from trawling hacked email correspondence between the four journalists, it was the German, Kasrin Nayef, who came to the others with the data. She is the source vector.”

Pierce nodded, then stared off into empty space as his mind focused on a niggling thought that was bothering him.

Ibrahim raised an eyebrow. “What’s on your mind, Trigger Man?”

“Well, we’re talking about a total of eight terabytes of data here. Even if we take a conservative estimate on the content, and let’s say they are all scanned PDF documents that are on average one megabyte in size, that’s still a million scanned files. If the average scanned document, say, has five hundred words in it, and again I’m being ultra-conservative, that’s at least five hundred million words for four journalists to sift through. That’s the equivalent of reading five thousand novels, which you can only achieve if you can read more than one book a week over an entire human lifetime. But I’m guessing the data contains far, far more words than my measly estimate.”

Parab spoke up from where he still tapped away at his keyboard. “AI could summarise it all in seconds.”

“Yes, Parab. I agree, but that’s not the point I’m making. What I’m trying to say here is there is so much data, how do we even know the Russians want it for the CIA safe house intel? It could be something else, something completely unrelated to why we want the same data. Perhaps the Russians know nothing about the CIA safe houses, haven’t even made the connection, and whatever the Russians are up to might affect nothing in the greater scheme of our problems.”

Ibrahim’s eyebrows rose even higher. “That’s a good point you make there, and one I have already considered. But go on, share your thoughts.”

“In the Cold War, back when computers were clunky, unconnected artefacts, learning about an enemy’s intention involved smuggling out photographs of secret documents in hidden microfilm cameras. Now we can steal an entire organisation’s information history in minutes or hours at the most. When I exchanged words with the Russian assassin in Ronda, I got the impression their aim was not to recover the data for any intel, but to destroy all copies of it, like we are trying to do. That’s in alignment with using a car bomb to murder Connelly, because it destroyed any data he had on him too. The SVR could have been using Broek & Trausch for some time as well, for their own covert operational funding arrangements, and we’d have no idea.”

Ibrahim made a cage with his fingers and touched the two tips of his index fingers to his lips. “This is true. Which is why we need to both secure and recover all the data first and stop everyone else from getting their hands on it. To both protect our interests and to understand exactly what the Russians are up to.”

“With all due respect, sir, what you are asking might be an impossibility. The data is out, and it could have been copied thousands of times by now.”

“I agree, but we must do something. The Russians are killing anyone who has motive to use the data. But from our point of view, it’s only the safe house data we need to protect, and so far, that’s not on the internet or the dark web. Is your mission clear now?”

“Yes, sir.” Pierce looked to Parab’s monitor, which now displayed a photograph of the Russian he had battled in Ronda. “Parab, looks like you’ve found something there?”

The technical operations officer’s face broke out into a wide grin. “Yes, cross-referencing Spanish police photographs of the corpse with known SVR operatives turns up the name Piotr Mishkin.”

“So the Russian supposition is correct?” asked Ibrahim.

“Yes. But get this, sir, Mishkin is no ordinary operative, but a member of Zaslon.”

Pierce nodded the same moment he tried to suppress an unwanted shudder, for he knew this unit well from his many past encounters with this terrifying paramilitary group. Zaslon was a special forces unit within the SVR, created via a secret decree in 1997, and were structured in the same way to that of the CIA’s paramilitary Ground Branch group, of which Pierce was a member. Zaslon units were often deployed to Russian embassies in war zones such as Iraq, Iran and Syria to support protection of diplomats and other tasks. But they also conducted covert direct action, assassination, kidnapping and intelligence-gathering operations all over the world. While the rest of Russia’s military and intelligence services might be failing in their protracted and crumbling attempt to occupy Ukraine, Zaslon troops remained ruthlessly efficient at getting done whatever tasks were assigned to them, anywhere in the world they operated, as Pierce had learned the hard way from past direct and personal engagements with them.

He looked at his hands to see if they were shaking, but no sign of his old affliction had manifested itself when he had experienced that moment of fear towards Zaslon. He wondered what this sign, or absence of one, meant about his state of mind.

“That’s… disturbing.”

Ibrahim said, “It suggests that whatever data they want to secure or destroy is serious enough to send in their best operatives to complete the job. Parab, have you hacked the burner phone yet?”

The young man nodded as his face lit up with another mischievous grin. “The cell phone was indeed a burner. It was purchased five days ago in Seville and has only made calls to two other phones in that time. Eight calls to another burner, which was also purchased in the same store in Seville at the same time, which is now no longer active.”

“And the other?” asked Pierce, his curiosity rising.

“To another burner, in Luxembourg. That can’t be a coincidence.”

Ibrahim stepped closer to study the displayed contents on Parab’s monitor, as if the answer to his question lay there and not on the technical operation officer’s lips. “You mean Broek & Trausch?”

“Not exactly, but yes. I pinged the location of the second burner during both calls the two phones exchanged four days ago.”

“And?” Pierce and Ibrahim asked simultaneously.

“In both instances, the burner phone was within three metres of the registered cell phone of Frederick Schaus, Broek & Trausch’s head of security.”

Pierce and Ibrahim exchanged glances; then each broke out into a smile. At least they now had their next tangible target to pursue.

“I’d say we have your next objective laid out for us already, wouldn’t you agree, Trigger Man?”

7

Marseille, France

Hearing the lock unlatch on her front door, Captain Natalya Kozlova of the SVR raised her suppressed Walther P99 semi-automatic pistol and readied herself to shoot dead the intruder about to step into her Marseille apartment.

The lock rattled again, sounding as if her unexpected visitor had used a key. If they’d just tried to kick it down, Kozlova would have shot them already, but a key suggested this was another SVR peer also planning to use this safe house as a hideout or temporary refuge. Instead, she waited and brushed a loose strand of her blonde hair, which had escaped from the bun she had pinned it into earlier, back behind her ear. Sweat poured off her face and hands, the moisture making the pistol slippery in her grip, but as an experienced and hardened field operative of the Russian foreign intelligence services, she wouldn’t allow minor inconveniences to slow her down from using it to resolve a problem, should the intruder prove to be one.

She waited in silence as the locked turned once more, then unlatched, while her index finger applied the minutest pressure on the trigger.

The door swung open.

Her trigger pressure increased.

In stepped her second-in-command, Lieutenant Ivan Vassiliev.

“Fuck!” she said as she lowered, then holstered her weapon. “Vassiliev, you fool! I almost shot you!”

The late twenties Russian man was slender yet muscular, with thick dark hair and a fashionable moustache. But while this man was good-looking in the classical sense of masculinity, Kozlova had never warmed to him since they’d been paired for their mission. He always seemed permanently afraid and looked timid, which were never endearing qualities. Especially not for a man who was supposed to be a seasoned foreign intelligence officer.

“Captain Kozlova,” he said, betraying the slightest stutter, “sorry, didn’t mean to startle you. Didn’t know you were here.”

She nodded, recalling that this safe house in the French coastal city of Marseille was one of eight apartments spread across Western Europe made available to Kozlova and her SVR team while their mission required them to operate in this part of the world. Their Madrid safe house was now compromised, where she and Vassiliev had been this morning. Marseille was physically the next closest, so in retrospect it was no surprise that, like her, he had decided to regroup here.

“I presume you weren’t followed?”

He shook his head as he closed and locked the door behind him. “No, but then the Spanish police had no interest in me. That made it easier to get out of Ronda.”

“What the fuck happened to Mishkin?” She didn’t say that earlier this morning they had been a team of three, and now they were down one man. That wouldn’t look good at all on their service records.

Vassiliev shrugged as he shrank a little. “What do you mean? I mean… how did you find out what happened to him so fast?”

She punched him in the arm just hard enough to punish him with stinging pain. “Because it’s all over social media and the news, you idiot! Now with Mishkin’s face being broadcast everywhere, it won’t be long before someone works out that he’s SVR.” She ran her fingers across her now sweaty brow. “Who was he fighting on the bridge? Do you know?”

Vassiliev paused, and Kozlova worried it was because he was about to lie to her. She had sent Vassiliev into Ronda with Piotr Mishkin and had tasked them to interrogate, then silence Liliana Torres Escarra, and then recover and/or destroy any Broek & Trausch data files the troublesome journalist had in her possession. Kozlova’s instructions had not been to instigate a violent scene that could escalate into an international manhunt to track down and arrest all the culprits involved, but that seemed to be exactly what had happened.

“Who was he fighting? Why didn’t you help him?”

Vassiliev stared at her with wide eyes, and for the first time, she saw actual and raw fear in him. It was not some nebulous idea that had always hung over him like a dark cloud, but a terror centred specifically around her and what she might say or do to him. “Believe me, Captain, there was nothing I could do. Not when Mishkin started shooting police officers in the streets. Yeah, I was there, waiting for him in a café, but there was no opportunity for me to act without blowing my cover too.”

Kozlova snorted, not believing him. “You’ve lost your nerve, Vassiliev. What’s made you soft? Is it because you are about to become a father, and this new ‘thing’ in your world that you see as ‘life changing’ is making you squeamish?” When he didn’t answer, she knew she had guessed at his fears correctly. “Lieutenant, grow some balls! And a backbone, or I’ll recommend you for a frontline role in the battlefields of Ukraine.”

Vassiliev straightened his back, forced himself to stand taller, and then cleared his throat. “Sorry, Captain. The American Mishkin fought, he was as skilled a fighter as any of our Zaslon operators. I’m not sure our Zaslon man really ever had a chance against him.”

Kozlova raised a suspicious eyebrow. “How do you know he’s American?”

“Because I heard him speaking, insisting that two tourists help to save one of the police officers Mishkin shot. He might have been speaking Spanish, but the accent was definitely American.”

“Did he die too, this American, when he went over the bridge with our man?”

Vassiliev shook his head. “From what other tourists were saying afterwards, the American shimmied down the rope, then vanished.”

Kozlova shook her head and snorted, not hiding her disappointment in her underling. “At least tell me you recovered whatever data Torres Escarra still had?”

He didn’t answer, just stood motionless and stared at her without properly making eye contact.

“For fuck’s sake, Vassiliev! Give me a fucking answer.”

“Sorry, Captain. Judging by the American’s actions, and how he took control of the situation in Ronda, I think the American was a tier one special forces operator. Perhaps CIA Ground Branch. Which suggests⁠—”

“I know what it fucking suggests.” Kozlova looked around the tiny apartment where she’d been hiding out after the Ronda disaster, and now she hated everything about it. She saw everything inside it as a liability and immediately began wiping down anywhere she had left fingerprints. “We’re moving again.”

“Why?”

“Because the CIA will be onto us now. We need to get to the last two journalists and finish this before some fuckwit minister or oligarch in the Kremlin decides it should be me or both of us who needs to be punished for this monumental fuck-up!”

“It’s that bad?”

Vassiliev was all wide-eyed and scared again, and this unprofessional behaviour was grating on Kozlova’s nerves. For the briefest second, she thought about shooting him in the head and completing this mission on her own, until she realised this was just her frustration speaking, not a rational choice.

“Yes, it’s that fucking bad.”

Vassiliev shifted his weight from one foot to the other, then said, “I’d like to get back to Moscow, see my wife again, and my new baby when she arrives in three months’ time.”

Kozlova felt her temperature rise at the seemingly unimportant segue her underling had injected into their conversation. Again, the thought of killing him right now filled her thoughts, but she suppressed it again. “If that’s what motivates you, Lieutenant, then start acting like the competent intelligence operative I was told that you were.” Her words didn’t seem to have her desired effect of kicking him into action, for he still stared blankly at her, so she added, “Tell me, do you know of Rubicon?”

“Who?”

“Motherfucker! Rubicon is like the scariest assassin-for-hire, son-of-a-bitch, professional badass killer operating on the market right now. At least fifty confirmed kills since he first appeared on the scene four years ago. Charges exorbitantly too. And you know who likes to use him to solve his problems?”

“No? Who?”

“Our beloved Russian president, that’s who. Only two weeks ago, in Sochi on the Black Sea, one of our peers allowed a defector to escape Russia. Major Trunov of the FSB, our domestic cousin agency, was in charge of that operation. Do you know of him, Lieutenant?”

Vassiliev nodded. “Vaguely. I know him mostly by his reputation.”

“Well, our president wasn’t too happy about that defection, as the defector was a political critic of our government and had gained much popularity with dissidents.”

Her underling seemed to physically shrink again. “So what happened to Trunov?”

“Trunov fled Russia too when he knew he was a dead man walking. Only thing is, he turned up as actually dead in Istanbul last week. Naked and beaten badly in a bath house with his dick cut off and shoved down his throat until he choked to death on it.”

Vassiliev shuddered again. “That was Rubicon?”

Kozlova nodded, seeing that she was finally getting the seriousness of their precarious situation through to her underling. “Our president is also furious about the number of sanctions Europe and America have placed on Russian oil since our special operations in Ukraine commenced, essentially blacklisting us on the global market because of that war. Did you know about that Dutch economist who exposed the three secret markets Russia was selling oil to in Southeast Asia so we could obtain oil revenue elsewhere? Her exposing us led to a wave of additional international pressure, resulting in those markets being shut down too. Know what happened to that economist because of her insolence?”

“Rubicon?”

“Exactly. I won’t describe what state the body was in, but it was worse than Trunov, believe me! Nobody knows what this Rubicon looks like, who he really is, or where he is originally from. I don’t care about any of that. I just care about him not coming after me because we didn’t get this operation back under control, because after what happened in Ronda, our superiors won’t be happy with us. Let me make it clear, Vassiliev, if Rubicon does come after us, we won’t see him coming until the second before a bullet mushes the insides of our heads and hearts.”

“No, that would be horrible. And my wife and daughter…”

“Get your fucking act together, Vassiliev, and work with me to solve this mess. That’s the only way you’re ever going to meet your daughter. Understand?”

He nodded, more vigorously now, and this pleased Kozlova. “What do I do?”

“Help me sanitise and clean this apartment. Then we disappear.”

“Where to?”

She finally smiled, knowing that they at least had a viable lead for the moment. “Iceland.”

“What’s there?”

“Spetssvyaz have reliable signals intelligence that the journalist Anna Birtadottir is in Reykjavik and will meet the second of the two surviving journalists, Kasrin Nayef, there.” Kozlova had referred to the Special Communications and Information Service of Russia’s Federal Protective Service, the Spetssvyaz. This cryptologic intelligence agency, equivalent to America’s National Security Agency, had never let her down before on past missions, so Kozlova trusted their intel would be reliable in this instance too. Their travel to Iceland would not be wasted and might even save their lives if they could get this mission back on track. “Our targets will soon be in the same location, so this last stage should be simpler, presuming the Americans stay out of our way.”

“I’ve never been to Iceland.”

“How the fuck is that important, because neither have I? Get your ass into gear, you overly sentimental man. We’ll be rendezvousing with another Zaslon team there, so we don’t want to keep them waiting.”

“How many this time?”

Kozlova paused in her wiping-down activities. “Considering that it’s likely a CIA Ground Branch team is also hunting down the same data, I’d say a lot more than just one man. A lot more. Now move your arse!”

8

Gibraltar

It was nearing midnight when Ibrahim had driven Pierce and Parab to Gibraltar International Airport, where they passed uncontested through a checkpoint managed by the British Royal Air Force, waving them through and allowing them unhindered access to their aerodrome. The sentry officers must have been prewarned of their arrival.

Once inside the secure complex, Ibrahim drove them over the taxiway where a parked Gulfstream G550 long-range business jet waited with its hydraulically actuated air-stair doors in the open position, and its turbofan engines quietly humming.

Pierce checked the tail number and, recognising it, recalled that he had flown on this particular aircraft many times, most recently on a mission to Jakarta. This was a CIA plane, and its pilots were members of Air Branch, the aviation wing of the CIA’s Special Activities Group or SAG, tasked with flying covert missions in support of CIA operations across the globe. Their mission tonight would be a simple one, transporting Pierce and Parab from Gibraltar to a private airfield just outside the French city of Metz, which was less than one hour’s drive to Luxembourg.

When they parked, Pierce and Parab stepped out, grabbed their rucksacks from the trunk, and slung them over their backs.

“Wow!” Parab looked over the slick passenger jet, which shone with the multitude of neon-like colours reflecting off its smooth aluminium-alloy skin. “I’ve never flown on a private jet before. Makes me feel famous, like I’m some kind of movie star.”

“The novelty soon wears off.” Pierce shrugged, then chuckled when he noticed that Parab wouldn’t stop staring at it with his mouth subconsciously agape. “This is an opportunity for us to sleep.”

“Sleep? No way. Do they have a minibar?”

“Parab, at ten thousand metres elevation above the planet, you’re about as safe as you’ll ever be in this profession. It’s an opportunity to rest, because you’ll never know when you can do so again until the mission is complete.”

Parab nodded, but he was not really listening to Pierce and couldn’t draw his eyes away from the jet.

Ibrahim climbed out of their sedan and joined Parab and Pierce. “Parab,” he said, shaking the technical operations officer’s hand, “good job with cracking the cell phone. Now, secure yourself on board, will you? I need a few minutes with Pierce.”

The young man looked to them both and, unable to hide his disappointment that he was not to be involved in their next conversation, nodded, then disappeared up the ramp and inside.

After Ibrahim watched to ensure Parab was out of sight, he turned to Pierce. “Trigger Man, on this mission I need you to look out for our new technical operations officer. And I mean that, really watch out for him.”

“Of course.” Pierce had answered quickly; then he thought about what Ibrahim was really trying to tell him. “What do you mean, sir?”

“Akash Parab comes to the CIA highly recommended, and I don’t want you to scare him off. He was NSA, and those digital spooks aren’t used to direct action. I read the after-action reports from your last mission. I know what you put him through in India, and after all you both went through, I’m surprised he still wants to stick with us.”

“He’s Farm trained, though?” Pierce asked, referring to the CIA’s Armed Forces Experimental Training Activity, or AFETE facility, where new recruits completed extensive education courses in managing clandestine operations, resisting interrogations, running or avoiding a surveillance-detection route, operating a variety of weapons, picking locks and recruiting assets, all perfected before they were sent into the field. “You’re telling me he’s not?”

Ibrahim shook his head. “He’s done the training. But I know you, Pierce. You take risks that I rarely see other operatives contemplate let alone put into action in the field. I know why you do it too, because you haven’t forgiven yourself for what you did before you ‘officially’ joined the CIA, five years ago now, on that top-secret operation I ran you on for all those years.”

Pierce shook his head as he lost his humour, remembering those harrowing years with memories that weren’t even close to pleasant. Despite knowing Pierce better than anyone else alive did, Ibrahim still didn’t really understand what Pierce had suffered through during that time. No one did. “You only ran me for half of it, sir. I was running myself long before you showed up.”

Ibrahim nodded, then paused as he seemed to consider his next words before he spoke them. “Parab has nothing to do with whatever it is you are still trying to make up for, Pierce. Don’t scare him unnecessarily, and don’t put him in harm’s way if you can avoid it.”

Pierce sighed. “Okay, I hear you, sir.”

“Good.” Ibrahim relaxed marginally. “I’m still trying to finalise this new team that you are now part of. We’ll get you all together soon.”

“Rachel Zang and Mackenzie Summerfield?”

The C/SOG nodded. “Zang is the other senior paramilitary operations officer on the team other than yourself. She is currently in Iceland, tracking down the journalist Anna Birtadottir. As we can best work out, Birtadottir is in hiding rather than risking becoming another victim of the SVR. Zang will be joined by your team’s new senior operations officer and your new direct line boss, once I have secured who I have in mind for the role.”

Pierce nodded as his thoughts drifted to Zang, the highly efficient, complex and focused operator whom Pierce had shared an on-again and now very off-again intimate relationship with over the last nine months. She had lost a close friend in the field on their last operation, which left Pierce wondering how they would get along now they were working closely together, and she was still recovering from the trauma of his passing, and when only a week or so ago they had also agreed to end their intimate liaisons. He’d needed time apart from her, to emotionally get over her, but that was not a luxury he could enjoy anytime soon. Not with their new mission, which now loomed before them, reuniting them once again. Perhaps that was why he felt morose so much of the time, because he was trying to get over a relationship that meant more to him than it meant to her. Perhaps this could explain why he was having trouble getting motivated to complete this current assignment?

“Your old handler is back too, Mackenzie Summerfield. She will fly to meet you in Berlin, where I want you and Parab to go next after Luxembourg, to see if you can track down the other surviving journalist, Kasrin Nayef. Our intel suggests she is also now in hiding in her hometown.”

The mention of Summerfield brought a smile to Pierce’s face because, other than Abdul Ibrahim, he’d known her the longest, and he had missed her while she had been absent in his life. They had worked well together on extended tours of duty, taking down terrorists in the Middle East and West Africa, looking out for each other, and they had become close platonic friends in that time. She’d recently suffered serious tortures and prolonged incarceration at the hands of a terrorist group and had barely escaped that ordeal alive. After her physical recovery, Pierce had not been certain she would want to rejoin the CIA or if she would be mentally strong enough to do so, but here she was back in the field with him. And as much as he wanted to see Summerfield again, like Zang, Pierce wasn’t certain what their relationship would morph into after the multiple traumas they had each endured during his mission to rescue her.

“It will be good to work with Summerfield again, sir.”

“Yes, she is top-notch. I know the last handler we assigned you was no good, but you work well with Summerfield, so I have confidence you will again.”

Pierce remembered the handler Ibrahim had referred to, the cocky Ivy League–educated Mitch Hawley, who in their last mission had indirectly caused the death of too many CIA operators and a high-value asset through laziness and incompetence. Yet because of his family connections to Congress and old money, he still remained an employee of the CIA. Pierce had called Hawley out and embarrassed him in as public a forum as the CIA ever liked to participate in, and now Hawley had taken that slight against him personally, turning them into serious office enemies. The trick now was to ensure they never crossed paths again in the CIA halls of Langley, where Hawley now spent most of his time. At least Pierce spent almost all his time in the field.

“Yes, sir. I appreciate you moving Hawley on. I did have one more question though.”

“What is that?”

“Why only one team going after the data? If this is as big as you say it is, you should have many more assets and teams involved in this.”

“I don’t have the resources, Trigger Man. Trust me on this.”

Pierce nodded, but he knew his boss was lying to him in that moment. He just didn’t understand why. What he did understand was that this revelation made him feel both angry and unmotivated, not that he would allow either emotion to cloud his judgement as he proceeded through the mission.

“Pierce.” Ibrahim spoke louder now that the Gulfstream’s engines had increased in pitch, readying for take-off. “There is one more thing I need to warn you about.”

Pierce sensed an uncharacteristic unease in his superior, so raised an eyebrow as a response. “What is that, sir?”

“The senior heads on Langley’s seventh floor aren’t happy about this breach, and they are looking to roll heads on this one.”

“You mean me, because of my overt actions in Ronda?”

Ibrahim nodded. “And me also.”

“Why?”

Ibrahim looked ready to speak what was on his mind, then paused.

“Sir?”

“You said it yourself, Trigger Man. There could be anything in the Broek & Trausch files, more than just the locations of our European safe houses. Do you remember the Panama Papers scandal that happened back in 2016?”

“Involving that Panamanian law firm? Yeah, I hadn’t missed the similarities to that incident with what we are dealing with on these ‘Luxembourg Papers’.”

“Panama was 2.6 terabytes of data. A third of what we are dealing with here. That scandal, also uncovered by several journalists working together, exposed multiple heads of state, high-ranking political figures, celebrities and wealthy business owners as being complicit in fraud, tax evasion and other crimes. Eleven and a half million leaked documents that detailed attorney-client information for well over two hundred thousand offshore entities. Two of those journalists involved were also murdered, one with a car bomb and the other shot twice in the chest. Who knows what the Luxembourg Papers will expose.”

Pierce nodded, finally understanding Ibrahim’s meaning. “You think there could be compromising details in the data that could embarrass senior executives of the CIA and the broader federal government?”

“I’m saying that is almost a certainty. Be careful, Trigger Man, because we have no idea who could be coming after us on this mission, or why.”

“Even our own people?”

Ibrahim nodded and looked away. “That’s all I’m saying on the matter.”

The Gulfstream’s engines revved louder.

“You’d better go, Pierce; we’ll speak soon. And good luck.”

“Yes, sir.” He still felt that his boss was keeping pertinent information from him, but it also seemed likely that Ibrahim was dealing with personal problems of his own, and this was the C/SOG actually doing his best to support Pierce on this mission. “Thank you.”

Pierce raced up the air-stair doors as they were rising, then moved into the passenger cabin, noticing all its luxury fittings, first-class seating, and fold-down tables.

But what he didn’t expect to see was an unhappy-looking Akash Parab at the back towards the galley area, buckled into a seat, and before him the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis’s deputy director of analysis, Henry Booker.

And smiling smugly in the seat next to Booker was the director’s newest special advisor, Mitch Hawley.

9

“Take a seat, Trigger Man,” said Booker with the voice of authority commonly employed by men in his position of power and influence. The sixty-something deputy director of analysis, or DDA/CIA as he was also known, in his crisp Savile Row navy suit, red tie and snow-white head of thick hair, was looking a little larger since the last time Pierce had seen him in the flesh.

His tone was as gruff as Pierce remembered, his sneer just as practiced, and Pierce realised this was the first time someone this senior in the CIA had deigned to actually speak to him. Pierce had never warmed to Booker because he was a bully in the workplace, but also it might have been because of all the rumours that floated around the CIA that Booker had a fetish for young female prostitutes, although the latter was an unfounded rumour.

“You and I need to have a talk.”

Pierce looked back to where he had stepped into the Gulfstream 550 and noticed the jet was already taxiing to the runway. He dropped his rucksack in one seat and fell into the one adjacent to it, positioned so he sat directly opposite the seventh-floor executive.

“You made quite the scene in Ronda, my friend.”

Pierce nodded. He said nothing, not trusting Booker’s reason for being here and bringing Hawley with him. But also because silence often elicited individuals who liked the sound of their own voices to just talk and talk, and while they spouted out their words, Pierce might learn something useful while he himself gave nothing away. And besides, this was not his meeting. Pierce had nothing to say to the DDA/CIA.

When the silence drifted into an uncomfortable length of many seconds, Booker spoke again, as Pierce hoped he would. “You were clever, wearing that scarf and sunglasses. You still haven’t been identified as the culprit of that senseless engagement I would only expect to see in a shithole like Af-Pak,” he said, referring to CIA and military lingo for the Afghanistan and Pakistan field of operations that had consumed so much of the United States defence budget for too long. “That is the only reason I haven’t fired your sorry arse.”

Pierce shrugged. “With all due respect, sir, you didn’t come all this way for a performance review?”

Booker’s face turned a deep shade of beetroot. He then glanced at Hawley, gave a curt nod to his underling and said, “Put that other one into SDM.”

Pierce understood the italicisation immediately, “sensory deprivation mode”, which was a technique the CIA often employed on captured insurgents and terrorists between interrogation sessions. He watched as the still smug Hawley bounced over to a nervous-looking Parab, handing him earphones and a black bag hood.

Parab looked up as the whites around his eyes grew wide. “What is this for?”

Hawley shrugged, and Pierce sensed the man was enjoying his moment of power. “Put these on.”

“What? Why?”

“Just do it, Parab. What me, the DDA/CIA and your buddy are about to discuss is not for your ears.” When Parab hesitated and his discomfort turned into fear, Hawley said, “Either you cooperate, or I forcibly cuff you, then bag you.”

When Parab looked to Pierce for guidance, Pierce nodded.

Reluctantly, Parab then placed the earphones into his ears to listen to what was presumably death metal music played at a high volume, because that was what US Marines played to captured Afghan insurgents between interrogation sessions during the War on Terror; then the hood went over his head.

The pilot’s voice came over the intercom, telling them to buckle up for take-off.

Pierce buckled in his rucksack to the seat he had dumped it on, ignoring the Air Branch convention that he should stow heavy items in the luggage compartment, then strapped himself in as Booker and Hawley did the same. Then they were accelerating down the runway and were airborne minutes later.

When the engine noise died down to a low rumble and they levelled out on their flight north towards France, Booker spoke again. “I’m not hearing good things about you, Trigger Man. Your last mission, in Pakistan, got six Ground Branch operators killed.”

Pierce nodded to Hawley. The younger man wore an expensive and tailored suit too, this one charcoal, and he still groomed his hair into a foppish schoolboy style. Other accessories were his wire-frame glasses, cufflinks and black brogue shoes, more suited to a business meeting than for field operations. But these guys were Directorate of Analysis, they were the thinkers not the doers, so their dress choices were not unexpected, just excessive. “Deputy Director, it was your new special advisor here’s failed intelligence that resulted in their deaths, or did Hawley spin it differently when he interviewed for a transfer to your team?”

Booker clenched his teeth for a moment before answering, “They said you were insolent. A rogue operative. A fool who doesn’t play by the rules and so nomadic in his travels, no one ever knows where the hell he is most of the time.”

“Then fire me.”

Neither Booker nor Hawley answered.

“I thought so. You don’t want me gone. This is a browbeating, thinking you can make me pliable for whatever assignment you are about to brief me on, and insist I complete it to the letter using the threat of being sacked as motivation.”

Still a bright shade of red, Booker nodded to Hawley again. “Show him the paperwork.”

With a smug grin, Hawley reached down to his leather suitcase and withdrew a file marked S//SAP-AG. Pierce knew this stood for SECRET // SPECIAL ACCESS PROGRAM with the AG being the code name assigned to that particular SAP.

Hawley handed the file to Pierce, and he opened it. The code name designation on the first page was ANDES GREEN. Pierce flipped through numerous historical memos and email printouts, all sent by Abdul Ibrahim to various peers during his period as head of station, Moscow, dated between six and eight years ago. Subject matters concerned the establishment of a network of new safe houses across Europe to support operations against Russia, Belarus and Russian-backed terrorist organisations operating across the continent. It didn’t take Pierce long to find the memo that implicated Ibrahim as being responsible for instigating Broek & Trausch as the intermediary to manage the legal and financial operations of these safe houses.

Pierce then wondered why Ibrahim had not informed Pierce of his involvement in the Luxembourg firm during their earlier briefing. He also recalled another conversation, from less than a week ago, and after the Pakistani operation, when Pierce had been on a break between missions. Ibrahim had confided in Pierce that most of Langley’s seventh-floor executives detested the idea that a Muslim ran the Special Activities Centre’s subdivision, the Special Operations Group, often shortened to SAC/SOG, of which Pierce was a member. Was this setup now an op run by Booker, conducted inside the CIA, to discredit one of their own? Were both Pierce and Ibrahim targets of their own employers, as his boss had warned him on the tarmac only minutes earlier this evening?

Pierce’s feelings were even stronger now that this mission was not about achieving the greater good, but protecting the self-interests of powerful individuals.

He closed the file and handed it back. “There’s nothing in there I don’t already know,” he answered with a lie. “Abdul Ibrahim has already briefed me.”

Booker had sunk further into his chair. His face wasn’t as red as it had been earlier, suggesting he felt more in control than he had been prior to take-off. “You and Ibrahim are skating on thin ice. Ibrahim because of his poor judgement in selecting Broek & Trausch in the first place with their lax security, and you because of your reckless and endangering approach to mission operations. I’m here to warn you, Trigger Man, that you cannot fail here. You must recover all the stolen Broek & Trausch data, and when you do, I am ordering you to hand all the data back to me, and me alone. If you fail, you’re both out.”

Pierce stared at Booker for many seconds without speaking. He guessed there was much more transpiring in the background here than he was aware of, and several ideas of what that could be came to mind.

“Five years ago, you appeared out of nowhere, Trigger Man. I know it was Ibrahim who brought you into the CIA and vouched for you. But I also know about that nasty business later in Angola and the Central African Republic you were involved in, and should I even mention Kazakhstan?”

Pierce snorted out a chuckle. “I was exonerated of all of that. You know as well as I do that I was framed.”

“Even if that is true, which I doubt, when you operated extensively in Yemen, Mali and Niger before that, it was repeatedly noted on your records that you refused to cooperate with other Ground Branch operators. You were reckless and risked their lives unnecessarily the whole time.”

Annoyed with the conversation, Pierce wished only to disengage. But he was trapped in the cabin with Booker and Hawley for the next few hours, so he shrugged instead and said, “Like I said, if I’m as bad as you say I am, just fire me. Sounds to me like that’s a whole lot easier than whatever all this bullshit is about.”

“We’ll get you eventually!” Hawley spoke up, leaning forward now with his left leg jiggling and agitation clear in his voice. “It’s inevitable.”

“Shut the fuck up!” Booker exclaimed as his eyes shot metaphorical daggers in his underling’s direction. Clearly Hawley had shown a hand that Booker had wanted to keep under wraps for the time being.

Pierce sank deeper into his seat, projecting a relaxed demeanour to show that these two bureaucrats couldn’t threaten him. He hated wasting time with idiots who were only interested in their own petty self-seeking schemes. Should these two idiots fire him, or if he chose to quit on his own terms, with over a million US dollars in his own secret bank accounts, he would have enough money to take an extended vacation and then work out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. That wasn’t a terrible option, but Pierce did like working with the CIA — when he worked with decent people. It allowed him to take down the worst of the worst of all bad guys wherever they popped up across the globe, which gave him purpose. But if he wasn’t working for the CIA, there were other means by which he could achieve the same objectives.

Regardless of the many post-CIA future options available to him, Pierce sensed this wasn’t about getting rid of him. Booker was setting Ibrahim up as the stooge in a blacklisted operation that wasn’t yet clear to Pierce in its intentions or desired outcomes, but he knew none of it could be good for either of them.

Pierce held Booker’s stare until the older man lost his nerve and looked away. “Let’s just cut the macho crap, Deputy Director. You’ve briefed me. Recover all the copies of the stolen Luxembourg Papers, and hand them all over to you, and you alone, sir!”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I am ordering you to do.”

“Good, then we’re clear. Mission understood.” Pierce pointed to Parab, agitated in the back of the cabin with the hood still over his head and the music still blasting in his ears. “Hawley, do us all a favour and relieve my friend of his needless suffering.”

Hawley snarled and didn’t move until Booker nodded that his special aide should act as Pierce had instructed.

Pierce then pulled a cap from his rucksack and pulled it down low over his eyes. “If we’ve got nothing left to talk about, I’m napping until we land.”

10

Metz, France

Early the next morning, Mark Pierce and Akash Parab were in a BMW 3 Series sedan driving north through France’s green and relatively flat landscape dotted with farmlands, gas stations, truck stops, industrial estates and the occasional nuclear power plant. The weather was cooler than in Spain but still warm, being the height of European summer.

“—There is no time to debate this any longer,” said Congresswoman Julieta Cardenas Rivera of New York’s 9th congressional district while she spoke with fevered passion on the English-speaking radio station Pierce had tuned in to. “We, as American citizens, need to stand up and be united in our support for Ukraine and say no to the unnecessary suffering and atrocities that our ally has endured for too long with Russia’s unlawful military occupation of their sovereign lands! Russian aggression, anywhere in the world, is a threat to our democracy and the rights of free people everywhere. I don’t care what other congresspeople and senators say about this war being too expensive and it not being our fight. Hundreds of thousands of women, men and children have died since the Russian invasion almost three years ago now. Many of those terrible deaths have been civilians, and that is just not right! We can’t with good conscience do nothing!”

As Pierce listened, he recalled what he knew about this up-and-coming progressive congresswoman who was a vocal advocate both loved and hated nationally for mandating tuition-free public colleges, free healthcare for all, national minimum wages, stronger gun control, climate action and, recently, as a staunch opponent against Israel’s and Russia’s military occupations of Gaza and Ukraine respectively and the brutal wars they fought in both countries against lesser powers.

Cardenas Rivera was young for a congresswoman, being only in her early thirties, the same age as Pierce. She was a powerful orator, charismatic and, in Pierce’s mind, rather attractive. He always found her speeches to be powerful and uplifting, even when they invoked the worst issues that humanity faced in the modern world, and even when he didn’t agree with everything she said.

“We need to do better at imposing sanctions. The imperialist dictator who is the president of Russia needs to be punished for his many, many war crimes. Russia can only fund its war by selling its oil and gas reserves internationally, but the sanctions congress has in place today are way too ineffective. I call on our president and say to him, you can do better! Stop this horrific war⁠—”

She didn’t get to finish what she was saying because Parab switched off the radio.

Pierce, who was behind the wheel, turned to momentarily frown at his passenger.

“What?” Parab shrugged. “You were listening to that?”

“Yeah, I was.”

“Sorry, Pierce. I need to concentrate.”

“Very well.” Pierce figured he could listen to Cardenas Rivera talk another time and let his technical operations officer do what he needed to do on his laptop. The mission came first.

Parab, with his device resting in his lap, typed furiously into it as if trying to break the keyboard. “I’m still maintaining that ping on Frederick Schaus’s cell phone. He’s just entered Broek & Trausch’s office on Avenue de la Liberté.”

Pierce glanced at his watch, noticing it was 08:14 hours local time. “So, our head of security man still thinks he’s untouchable. Still following his daily routine.”

“Looks that way.”

“Good. Once we’re in Luxembourg, we’ll establish surveillance on Schaus and work out when it’s the best time to take him aside for a little chat.”

Parab squirmed in his chair. “Exciting.”

Pierce turned momentarily to the younger man and raised an eyebrow, remembering what Ibrahim had said to him in Gibraltar. “Keep your head in the game, Parab. This might prove to be a straightforward op here in Luxembourg, but it won’t be without danger. The SVR could have him under observation too, and…” He was about to say another CIA team might be watching them as well, now that he had learned what he had from Booker and Hawley the previous night, then thought better of involving Parab in complications Pierce was only mildly speculating about at this juncture. “And anyone else interested in the journalists’ data. We still don’t fully know who else is involved.”

Parab nodded. “Sorry, Pierce. You got to understand, this is my first time outside of my two homelands, India and the United States.”

“And Pakistan, we were there together, remember?”

“Of course. But Europe. It’s so pretty, so different. It’s…”

“Like the romance of what spying is made out to be in movies?”

Parab nodded. “I’ve never been to Europe before. It’s amazing.”

Pierce nodded, thinking that the landscape here was not that impressive with its many nuclear power plants. Then he returned his attention to the road ahead, ready to overtake a convoy of cyclists in their Lycra jerseys and bib shorts, and carbon-framed racing bicycles that he had just spotted. “Yeah, it is something. I haven’t spent much time here either. Mostly the CIA sends you to fun places like Russia, Mexico, Yemen, Syria, etcetera. The world’s best shitholes.”

“You operated in all those countries?”

Pierce nodded, knowing that he was only partially telling the truth here. “Sure.”

Parab hesitated before he spoke his next words, for he was nervous again. “On the flight here, with Deputy Director Booker and the other man, Hawley. What happened when…?”

“When you were in SDM?”

“Yeah?”

Pierce considered what he should tell Parab while remembering Ibrahim’s instructions before they had departed Gibraltar. Don’t scare him unnecessarily, and don’t put him in harm’s way if you can avoid it. Perhaps the C/SOG had also meant protecting Parab from knowledge that could unnecessarily compromise him politically and career-wise. “Nothing that impacts the mission.”

Parab nodded, unable to hide his disappointment. “Sorry, I shouldn’t probe when I’m not cleared to be read in.”

Pierce felt fury in that moment, but it wasn’t directed towards Parab. Neither Booker nor Ibrahim had told him everything that was pertinent to this mission, and this irritated Pierce. Not because they had both lied to him, but because they hadn’t trusted him to act appropriately with the information they were laying out for him. And now he was treating Parab the same way. “Actually, Parab, if your instincts tell you something is off, then probe all you can. You might find you are being set up in some way. But the trick is not to get caught probing, and to always operate under the radar, as if you were never there. You understand what I’m saying?”

Parab thought upon this for a moment, then nodded. “I think so. You mean like sneaking around the CIA servers to see what I can find of interest, without leaving a trail?”

That was exactly the approach Pierce had been thinking of, but he’d also been talking about methods more aligned with social engineering than in utilising technical and computer skills, even though the principles were the same. He wondered if Parab had actually done what he had just suggested, then thought it was best not to ask if this were true. “I don’t think I’ll say any more, except that your first priority must always be not to get caught.”

Parab blew out a long breath. “This is so different from working for the NSA. All I did there was sit in a cubical with thousands of other employees, day in, day out. You received your assignment, you found and analysed the intel, you passed it on, and then you were onto the next job. Most of the time without ever speaking to anyone.”

Pierce grinned. “And now you get to do the same job while travelling the world as part of a team.”

“Yeah. It’s great. I just wish my girlfriend understood what my actual job involved.”

“Still can’t tell her you work for the CIA?”

Parab shook his head as he pursed his lips. “Don’t think I’ll ever be able to tell her, at the rate things are not progressing.”

“Sorry, friend. I can’t help you with this one.”

They passed a young couple walking hand in hand outside a café in the quaint village they were passing through. Parab watched them both longingly, then said, “I wish I could find a way to fix my problem.” Then he turned to Pierce. “Perhaps I could seek Rachel Zang’s advice when we catch up with her, on how to handle my girlfriend?”

Pierce shook his head, remembering that Zang’s relationship problems were very different to Parab’s. For a start, like Pierce, her partners were very casual, and the last one had died in her arms not that long ago, so the pain was still raw in her mind. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Parab.”

The technical operations officer nodded. “I guess you’re right. I wonder what she is up to right now.”

Once again, Pierce shook his head because he didn’t want to think about Zang any more than he already was. “Let’s concentrate on what we need to deal with first. Broek & Trausch’s dodgy head of security.”

11

Luxembourg, Luxembourg

The central business district of Luxembourg comprised many wide streets, modern cars moving at leisurely paces, Neo-Baroque-style buildings adjacent to their contemporary counterparts, street-dominating trams and a variety of sidewalk cafés. Throughout the morning and afternoon of this typical day inside the heart of this picturesque European city, Mark Pierce commenced his physical surveillance of Broek & Trausch’s office building, watching it from one of the many cafés positioned directly across the street, and knew he could be here for a while.

While pretending to work on a laptop and wearing his disguise of a herringbone-style cap, thick black-framed glasses and a cardigan, he watched all human movements as they transpired outside the café window but saw nothing out of the ordinary.

After he’d drunk one coffee, two black teas and eaten two sandwiches over the space of several hours with nothing changing in his field of view, his server asked him what he was working on. He told her he was preparing an overdue government report on European money policy for his boss, and then she lost interest in him, just as he hoped she would. He felt the story was sufficient cover to stay here all day, where he couldn’t be seen from the streets that he watched through the café’s mirrored windows, so he asked the server if it would be okay if he could stay until he finished his report. She said yes, so long as he kept purchasing drinks and food, then disappeared back to the counter to serve another customer.

All the while, Pierce mused that his surveillance routine would have been less taxing and more likely not to be detected if they had been afforded a larger team. In his earlier career with the CIA, Pierce had been a singleton operator, and he’d fitted into that mode of operation without any issues. But now when Ibrahim wanted Pierce working within a team, his boss hadn’t provided the resources he needed to properly apply tradecraft in the field. There had to be a reason why.

Parab called him on his cell phone and said, “Everything is in position, Pierce.”

“Good work, Parab.”

While Pierce had set himself up in the café, Parab had parked their BMW 3 Series on the roof of a nearby multi-storey car park, from where he launched several micro-surveillance drones.

“I’ve run several flybys of Broek & Trausch’s commercial premises. Frederick Schaus keeps an office on the third floor on the western side of the building. His routine is rather boring and typical of an office worker, I hate to say.”

“Well, at least we know where he is. Keep me up to date on Schaus’s movements if they do alter. Anything else?”

“Nothing at the moment.”

“Okay. Text updates to me only unless there is an urgent reason to reach me quickly, in which case call me.”

“Sure thing, Pierce.”

A few minutes later, Parab called again.

“What’s up?”

“Um… Nothing. Just had a question.”

Pierce scanned the café to ascertain if anyone was displaying any kind of interest in him but came up negative. “Make it quick.”

“I just… wasn’t sure what you wanted me to do now?”

“Just keep watching and keep those surveillance drones in the air. Report any movements. We want to speak with Schaus alone, but to do so we must wait until the opportune moment. That might not be until tonight.”

“You mean we could be sitting here all day?”

“Yes.”

“Oh! Okay, that makes sense.”

They ended the call, and Pierce worried for the first time that Parab might not have the patience for boring surveillance work. Then he remembered Parab had completed his training at the Farm, and this kind of fieldwork would have been drilled into him and now second nature. Reflecting on this brief conversation, Pierce didn’t know what opinion he should form on Parab’s work ethic, then decided he would put the incident out of his mind unless a similar questioning situation came up a second time, and reflect upon it then. For the most part, Parab had proven to be an exceptional technical operations officer. Pierce should trust that.

But Pierce had nothing to worry about, for it wasn’t until after 20:00 hours when Parab reported in again, when evening was settling in outside, and the café was getting ready to close. Pierce had checked in on Parab’s drone feeds from time to time, and Schaus had done nothing that interested them throughout the day other than to make lots of phone calls, send lots of emails and attend a few internal meetings. He never left the building, not even to get lunch. So when Parab’s message appeared on Pierce’s cell phone, he read it quickly, hoping to relieve the monotony of their day as much as Parab did.

Target has shut down and placing his laptop into a briefcase. Looks like he’s moving.

Pierce texted back.

Recall all drones. Pick me up outside in five minutes.

On it!

Pierce returned his own laptop to his satchel, then paid his bill. A new server had replaced the one who had earlier asked him about his report writing. “Hope your day was productive?” said the young woman with a smile.

Pierce smiled back. “Yes, it was, thank you. Back in my boss’s good books again. I hope.”

“Have a good night.”

“You too.”

Both Pierce and Parab knew from perusing Frederick Schaus’s CIA file that the security man owned a silver Audi A5 coupé, so when Pierce saw it pass him on the street with Schaus behind the wheel, he knew they needed to pick up their game and get after it. It was already speeding off, headed north, and if they didn’t catch it soon, they could lose him for the rest of the night, requiring them to restart their surveillance routine on him in the morning.

Then a minute later, Parab pulled up in the BMW.

Pierce jumped in, and they drove north as he lost his cap, glasses and cardigan disguise and changed into a business suit. “Schaus left a minute ago, headed north along that street.”

Pierce must have carried frustration in his voice, because Parab answered quickly with, “It’s okay, Pierce. Earlier today, I adhered a magnetic tracker to his car.” Parab handed Pierce his burner phone and showed him the app that was tracking Schaus’s vehicle. “Did I do wrong?”

“No.” Pierce shook his head, instantly losing his frustration and suddenly admiring Parab’s initiative. “That’s good work. How did you locate his car in the first place?”

Parab shrugged as they drove through the neon-lit night-time streets of the city. “I hacked all the local car parks and council meters until I found a vehicle space paid for by a credit card under the name F. V. Schaus. We knew it was a silver Audi A5 coupé, so easy enough to spot. When I spied Schaus disappearing into that meeting room with some very serious older men in suits just after lunch, I figured I had time to find the vehicle and apply the tracker. I had a drone monitoring the meeting, hovering over the roof of the building just above you, incidentally. I would have known instantly if he were to leave suddenly.”

Pierce nodded. “Okay, that was clever.” He was about to tell Parab to be careful and not get caught, but then every action they took in their profession as non-official cover or NOC operatives came with risk, and Pierce would have done the same, given the same opportunity.

After crossing a half dozen blocks and reaching a retail district, Schaus parked on the street and got out of his vehicle.

“Keep driving past,” said Pierce as Parab was about to slow. “Our man is still a security operative. He’s trained to watch for tails.”

As they passed their target of interest, Pierce got his first good look at their man in the flesh. Frederick Schaus was in his early fifties, with thick grey hair and a neatly trimmed beard. His pinstriped navy suit was tailor made and complemented his dress shoes, white linen shirt and navy silk striped tie. He disappeared into a nightclub with two bouncers in suits and a woman in a cocktail dress standing outside to either greet or turn away guests.

Parab turned a corner, and Pierce told him to park.

“You wait here. Be ready to move if I come out in a hurry.”

Parab was wide-eyed again. “What’s the plan now?”

“Get some answers, but with a man like Schaus, he’ll need some persuading before he gives anything up.”

Pierce reached into the glove box, where he kept his Glock 19 semi-automatic, fitted with a suppressor, and a handheld Taser stun gun, the latter capable of providing enough volts to incapacitate a grown man with a few seconds of contact. Not wishing to get frisked while entering the nightclub and knowing that if he was caught carrying a pistol in Europe, he would face serious criminal charges and likely a long prison sentence, he took the Taser only.

“Pierce? What are you doing?”

“Stay alert. When I come out, we may need to move quickly.”

12

The bouncers didn’t make any attempt to stop Pierce as he entered the nightclub, except to insist he pay the fifteen-euro entry fee. But he was dressed now in a grey business suit, open-collar white shirt and dress shoes, so wasn’t the type to be commonly turned away by them.

Once inside, he discovered a classily decorated club with a neon-lit bar offering every kind of spirit, wine or beer that Pierce could think of. At least a hundred guests comprising mostly young professionals drank and chatted beneath the hum of booming deep bass techno music, who were equal parts men and women, served by further young men and women garbed in the worldwide hospitality dress code of white shirts and black pants. A young slender woman in a lacy bra, thong, high heels and suspender stockings danced on the stage, and Pierce suddenly understood what kind of establishment this was.

He searched for Schaus in the low light but couldn’t hear a thing over the reverberating electronic music. Then he spotted his target disappearing through a door that led to another part of the club.

Pierce approached and found another bouncer blocking his path forward, big and muscular and in a suit two sizes too big for him. He held out his meaty hand. “Fifty euros for the floor show. Personal dances are extra.”

Pierce nodded, paid him cash and slipped inside.

The next club room, while as elegantly decorated as the first, did nothing to hide its purpose as a strip club. A slender redhead danced almost naked on a pole on a stage, while the servers here were all women in revealing lingerie who brought out strings of drinks to the almost exclusively male patronage.

One of those servers asked Pierce if he would like a drink. So as not to look out of place and using a thick Russian accent, he ordered a whisky on the rocks and paid for it with cash. She smiled, and he smiled back, hoping this establishment wasn’t too awful for her, and she was here by choice and not through indenture or other forms of modern slavery. He found himself wondering if this was the kind of establishment Booker liked to peruse on his days off, if the rumours about him were true.

As the server disappeared to prepare his order, Pierce spotted Schaus as he led two women wearing string bikinis into a private room. Pierce pushed through the crowd and followed. At the door, another heavyset bouncer blocked his path forward with a large paw pressed against Pierce’s chest. “Private party,” he said, speaking French.

The bouncer didn’t see it coming when Pierce punched him hard in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him and sending him to his knees, wheezing.

Stepping casually over the downed bouncer and through the door, Pierce entered a tiny red-lit room with velvet cushioned lounges and a mirror ball twirling in the ceiling, and in its centre, Frederick Schaus dancing leeringly with his two paid companions.

Before Schaus had time to react, Pierce yanked at the security man’s tie and tightened it, cutting off air circulation to his windpipe, which caused the man to drop to his knees, choking.

Pierce passed three hundred euros in cash to the women, then told them — again in a Russian accent — to disappear and keep this quiet until he’d finished a long-overdue word with his “old friend”. They took the money, nodded and vanished quickly.

When they were gone, Pierce figured they would report this incident to management within minutes at most, and that was as long as he had to get Schaus to talk.

By now Schaus was sprawled on the velvet lounge and had managed to loosen the tie around his neck, but his face was still red, and he still had trouble breathing.

Pierce moved up close to him and punched him hard in the gut. Again speaking with his Russian accent, Pierce said, “Why the fuck, Schaus, didn’t you report the data breach directly to me?”

Schaus’s eyes grew wide with fear as realisation that the situation he now found himself in was far more serious than he had perhaps first imagined. “Mishkin sent you?” he said, referring to the SVR operative Pierce had eliminated in Ronda.

“Mishkin sent me?” Pierce laughed with malice. “Of course fucking not, you idiot! The asshole Mishkin reports to me. Not the other way around.” Pierce shook Schaus violently. “I want to know what the fuck it was that you told him, Schaus, because now he’s fucking disappeared. You two up to no good behind my back?”

Pierce was improvising, but his words had the desired effect, as Schaus was quickly losing his cool and gaining a measure of fear against Pierce. “I told him just what we agreed. That’s all! If the bank accounts were compromised, I was to call the number you provided, and report in. That was the deal!”

Pierce gripped Schaus by his lapels and menaced, “No, Schaus! You were to call me! How did you fuck that up?”

“But…? But…?”

Pierce punched him hard in the gut to show how serious he was. The bouncers would return at any minute. He had to work faster. “The data, what is the nature of the data that was compromised?”

The security man spoke rapidly through laboured and pained breaths. “They were your bank accounts that your people provided. Eighteen of them, as agreed. Ready to transfer significant funds into when you gave the word. One point five million into each account. But you know this?”

“Humour me, you idiot, because this was not the mission I’d ordered Mishkin to undertake. Prove to me you two aren’t up to something I won’t like. These bank accounts, who are they for?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t fuck around, Schaus. Just answer me!”

Schaus’s eyes grew wider as it dawned on him that not everything Pierce was saying was adding up as it should. “But you do know this. It was you Russians who established the accounts in the first place.”

Pierce shook Schaus violently. “I’m the one fucking asking questions. Names? What are the names on the accounts?”

“I don’t know that. You people… You were going to provide them when you were ready to move. What is going on here?”

The door behind Pierce burst open, and two bouncers stormed inside and rushed Pierce.

He was ready for this, and with two sudden, fluid motions, he electrocuted both bouncers with the Taser, sending them both to their knees, convulsing.

Pierce then grabbed Schaus and led him from the private room. “You’re coming with me.” He held the live Taser close to his face. “Resist, and you’re next.”

Before the Broek & Trausch security man could answer, they were both back inside the main strip club. Pierce noticed an exit sign close by, and pushing through the crowds, they took it. It led them to a stairwell and a door opening out into an alley at the side of the club.

“I’m a family man. I have a wife and two daughters.”

“Yeah?” answered Pierce in the meanest Russian accent that he could muster. “Same age as the two women you were dancing with?”

It was then that Schaus made his move, with a strike against Pierce’s throat.

Anticipating this, Pierce was faster. He caught the older man’s hand in his grip, then twisted it until the wrist snapped. While Schaus screamed, Pierce marched him to the BMW and threw his prey into the backseat. Pierce went in after him and shocked Schaus with a two-second jab with the Taser, sending him into convulsions.

“Drive!” Pierce yelled at Parab, sticking with the Russian accent.

The technical operations officer fired up the engine, and soon they were moving through the night-time streets of Luxembourg. So far, it seemed no one else had noticed Pierce’s violent actions, and they had got away uncontested.

“Where to?”

“East, into Germany.”

As Schaus was recovering, Pierce leaned over the front passenger seat and took his Glock 9mm with the suppressor from the glove box, then pressed it hard into Schaus’s forehead. Still speaking in a Russian accent, Pierce said, “Listen to me, Schaus, you have caused me a world of pain tonight by not coming to me directly with this breach. No one betrays me like that!”

“I’m sorry!” He looked at his snapped wrist, which was already swelling and turning purple. “You broke my hand.”

“I’ll break the other one if you don’t start talking. Who stole our data?”

“A new employee!” Schaus was speaking fast now. “A young punk, but he’s vanished.”

“Names, Schaus. I need names!”

“Arab called Yakub Samaan. Fucker just walked out with half the contents of our servers. It wasn’t just your accounts that were compromised. It was… so much.”

Pierce memorised the name. “This Samaan, where is he now?”

“Like I said, he vanished.”

“You would have searched for him! A man like you is not without means.”

Despite his pain and the after-effects of his electrocution, Schaus still managed to snarl when he said, “I swear I didn’t find him. The fucker would be dead by now if I had.”

Parab now had them on a three-lane freeway and had picked up speed.

“Keep under the speed limit,” Pierce warned, and Parab slowed down. “Last thing we need is the police pulling us over.”

“Yes, of course. Sorry about that, Pierce.”

With Pierce’s name now spoken, he tensed and gritted his teeth, realising that with Parab’s rookie mistake, his cover was blown. He and Schaus now exchanged knowing glances that not all was as Pierce had made it out to be.

“You’re not SVR, are you? You’re not even Russian?”

Pierce shook his head and spoke in his normal American accent. “Who I really am won’t change your predicament.”

“The Russians won’t like this one little bit.” Then the Broek & Trausch security man paled. “Who are you, really? What are you going to do with me?”

Shrugging, Pierce pressed his Glock harder into Schaus’s forehead. “That depends on whether you cooperate or not. If you do, we’ll just hold you for a few days or a few weeks until this is all over, then release you.”

“And if I don’t?”

Snarling, Pierce said, “You won’t be the first individual to take a bullet in the head from this weapon, and I’ll happily use it again for the same reason if you continue to not answer my questions. Who, Schaus, are the eighteen bank accounts for, because I know you know this?”

Sweating profusely now, Schaus begged, “Please, I don’t know. These accounts are set up especially so no one can follow the money trail. All I know is that it all happens in nine days.”

“What happens then?”

Schaus shook his head. “I don’t know that either. But I can tell you, the real Russians will kill anyone who gets in their way and prevents this transaction. Anyone! Including you, whoever you really are, Mr. Pierce!”

13

Reykjavik, Iceland

Blending with the foot traffic of Icelandic citizens, Rachel Zang moved through the sunny but chilly streets of the capital, Reykjavik, like she belonged there. She dressed in locally purchased clothes comprising a puffa jacket, tight jeans, hiking boots and a beanie, but her Asian ancestry gave her away as a tourist. Not that her foreignness mattered, for there were plenty of international visitors to blend in with; therefore she didn’t really stand out.

Now as one of America’s spy satellites passed over in low orbit while its lens focused on the city’s central business district, she checked the highly encrypted CIA app on her cell phone linked to its beamed imagery. Artificial intelligence software churning the CIA’s data servers back in Langley discounted all males, all children and the elderly, while it simultaneously paid particular attention to females who weren’t pinging cell phone signals. One phoneless target stood out, a woman moving thirty-eight per cent faster than Reykjavik citizens’ mean foot traffic speed. Knowing that the satellite would only be in the skies for the next twenty-eight minutes, Zang decided to focus all her attention on this anomalous individual. All other options weren’t even close to what she was searching for.

As Zang moved at an even faster walking speed vectored upon her target, she marvelled at the city’s wooden and corrugated iron-clad houses that she passed, painted in a multitude of bright colours seemingly inspired by a palette of Lego bricks, and many walls painted with high-quality graffitied renditions of robots, seahorses, saxophones, stylised hip-hop stars and other random assortments of themes.

From nowhere, Zang’s subconscious told her that something was out of place, and for a moment she worried that she had a tail. Then she realised what was wrong in this picture. She had not seen a single dog since her arrival, and remembered dogs had once been banned in this country, and the pet of choice here in Iceland tended towards cats. Sensing again that all was calm and unimposing in this scene, Zang imagined what it would be like to live and work in Reykjavik for the long term, and what other oddities would throw out her threat sensory awareness from time to time.

Then her app pinged, sounding like a normal text message alert, but there as a subtle reminder her target of choice was now within her visual range.

Zang looked up as she spotted her target in the flesh.

“I’ve found her,” said the CIA paramilitary operator, reporting via the headset connected to her cell phone resting in her pocket and bursting with every kind of encryption and anti-virus application the CIA could cook up.

“Anna Birtadottir?”

“Yes,” said Zang as she answered her boss, Patricia Knight. She was their team’s new senior operations officer and was in the country with Zang. The two had worked on covert operations together in the past, and Zang respected the older, more experienced operative, but until two days ago, it had been six months since they had last spoken. Knight had been missing in action during that time and had not confided in Zang where she had disappeared to or why she had vanished in the first place. To reappear so suddenly, mission ready and fully briefed on the assignment Abdul Ibrahim had laid out for them, without an explanation as to where she had been during all that time, left a bitter taste in Zang’s mouth, and she kept trying to put this thought aside as if Knight’s lack of trust in Zang didn’t really bother her.

“You sure it’s her?” asked Knight.

“I am. I told you Reykjavik is too small a town to stay hidden forever.”

Like Zang, the Icelandic journalist was tall and slender, although when it came to age, she had ten years on Zang’s late twenties physique. But unlike Zang’s short, dark, choppy hairstyle, Birtadottir’s hair was blonde and long, held back from her face in a casual ponytail.

“Is she alone?” asked Knight, with impatience edging into her already clipped tone.

Zang scanned the street again but noticed no one she’d crossed paths with earlier today, and no one acted unusual, paused to watch the scene, or otherwise behaved out of the ordinary. “As far as I can see.”

“That doesn’t mean they aren’t there. What’s your position?”

“Intersection of Barónsstígur and Luagavegur streets.”

“Okay. Moving. When I reach you, we’ll approach her.”

“Copy that.”

With light spring snow on the roads and rooftops, and a chill in the air common for this North Atlantic nation island, Zang followed Birtadottir as she paced Luagavegur street, lined with many cafés, clothing fashion shops, art galleries, one-way road traffic, and a sizeable proportion of bicycles.

After a few minutes of walking, Birtadottir entered a café that seemed familiar to her, where she took a seat by the window. A young male server approached, and she gave her order.

Zang stopped outside and pretended to take a call on her cell phone, nodding and answering in short phrases from time to time to give her false conversation some credence. Birtadottir didn’t notice Zang and didn’t suspect anything unusual.

A few minutes later, the server returned with a coffee and a plokkfiskur, the latter being a fish stew cooked with mashed potatoes and onion, as Zang had learned from the Icelandic travel guide she had studied furiously on the flight over from the United States.

Deciding that with Birtadottir now eating, and therefore not in a hurry to leave, Zang ended her fake call, then entered a different café across the narrow street, where she ordered flatbread, a fruit yogurt and a coffee of her own. Seating herself near the café’s window, she continued watching her target.

Zang also kept an eye out for tails and again spotted no one else watching their target, but as Knight had said, that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Knight and she were hoping that someone else would show so they could gather intel on whoever else had an interest in the stolen Broek & Trausch data. But Zang suspected if they were to encounter anyone, it would be the SVR, particularly after what they had just learned during their most recent briefing from Abdul Ibrahim regarding Mark Pierce’s actions in Ronda, Spain.

Then Zang noticed how Birtadottir was nervously watching the streets, as if she was here to meet someone.

“Ma’am,” Zang reported into her cell phone, “when you get here, suggest that we don’t move on her straight away.”

“Why not?”

“She’s waiting for someone else to show.”

A minute later, Patricia Knight entered and searched the small crowd of patrons until she found Zang. She was an African American woman in her fifties, so stood out as a tourist like Zang did. There were bags under her eyes now, and more wrinkles on her face than Zang remembered from when they had last worked together. She had definitely put on a few pounds too. All signs that she was mentally and physically stressed. But was Zang any different? Her life had not been easy in that same period, and she’d certainly confronted many of her own demons in that time too, and many more that she had not dealt with either.

When Zang’s boss sat opposite to her, the server approached again, and Knight ordered a black coffee while turning down the offer of food.

Zang rolled her eyes to indicate where Anna Birtadottir sat inside the other café. “That’s definitely her.”

“Then we should grab her, get her out of danger, and for God’s sake, get her data before someone else does.”

Zang tightened her jaw. “Just give it a few minutes. I’m telling you, this is a meet.”

Patricia nodded, rolling her own eyes but otherwise capitulating. “Fine. I need this coffee anyway.”

The minutes rolled by until the server brought Zang her food and their coffees. Knight then proceeded to absent-mindedly pick at Zang’s flatbread, putting Zang off from eating her own meal.

Another minute passed before another woman from the street approached Birtadottir’s café, her hands jiggling as if pent up with nervous energy and with no means to release it. Of shorter stature and a body frame bordering on unnatural skinniness, the mid-thirties woman wore a hoodie and sunglasses, black jeans and hiking boots that spoke of a foreign origin. Just as she was about to reach Birtadottir’s café and step inside, she stopped suddenly and stared down along the eastern length of the street. Not liking what she had seen, the hooded woman turned a full one hundred and eighty degrees and proceeded to walk back the way she had come.

“Did you see that?” Zang asked, having observed that Birtadottir had been oblivious to the hooded woman’s approach, distracted by her printed menu because she had nothing else with her to read to pass the time.

“I did.”

“That was Kasrin Nayef. I’m certain of it.”

The muscles in Knight’s face tightened. “How is she in Iceland? We checked Iceland’s immigration databases, and nothing showed.”

Zang shrugged. “False passport? If so, we’ve underestimated Nayef’s capabilities.”

“We’ll check later. Right now we need to grab both of them. Regardless of how under-resourced we are.”

Zang finished her coffee and, ignoring her food, stood to leave. “I’ll go after Birtadottir. You deal with Nayef. Meet back at the safe house.”

Knight nodded.

Zang was moving to the entrance now but paused when she watched three men in black leather jackets, white shirts and dress pants walk with purpose towards their position from the opposite direction from where Nayef had appeared. They all had dark hair, but the middle-aged man in the middle was larger and more rotund than the others, with a balding head and a thick moustache.

“Those aren’t Russians,” Knight whispered close to Zang’s ear. “Even the worst SVR operatives aren’t that sloppy in their tradecraft.”

“I agree.” Zang reached for her holstered SIG Sauer P227 pistol, only to discover it and the holster weren’t there because it hadn’t been possible to bring weapons into Iceland with the country’s strict customs rules. She wanted her weapon because these individuals must have been the cause of Nayef abandoning her meet and turning tail when she had spotted them, which suggested they were dangerous, with hostile intent. “I’m the only one of us trained for direct action, ma’am, so I’ll deal with these interlopers. But not here.”

Zang was expecting the three men to go after Nayef. Instead, they entered the café, walked straight to Birtadottir and surrounded her. They must have had knives or pistols, because they kept close to the now scared-looking Icelandic journalist, and she cooperated as they led her outside, trembling though she was.

Pocketing a steak knife from the utensil box on their table, Zang slipped the makeshift weapon into her sleeve and stepped outside.

An SUV with tinted windows pulled up, and the three men and Birtadottir got in, with the kidnapped woman being forced onto the backseat between two of the captors.

Zang thought to attack there and then, when she glimpsed a pistol in the last interloper’s hand as he approached the front passenger seat. With its suppressed barrel, it was impossible to holster, so he kept it held under his leather jacket as he climbed in.

With only a blunt knife as a weapon, Zang knew any confrontation at this juncture would be suicidal.

As the sedan drove off, Zang memorised its make, model and number plate. A white Dacia Duster sports utility vehicle, PIR05.

“Shit!” She swore under her breath, for she remembered the CIA app on her phone almost too late. She quickly tagged the rapidly disappearing vehicle on her app so the spy satellite could track it and provide its exact location.

Or at least it would for the next thirteen minutes before the spy satellite was out of range.

That was how long she had to intercept the kidnappers before she lost them forever.

14

Knowing that she needed physical eyes on the Dacia Duster SUV after the next thirteen minutes to avoid losing it altogether, Zang scanned for a transport option.

There were cars everywhere, mostly SUVs and other four-wheel drives. Practical options, but not exactly what she was looking for.

Then her eyes locked upon a Husqvarna TC 85 dirt bike, causing her eyes to light up and her mouth to spread into an excited grin.

She stepped up to the bike, noticed the rider’s helmet resting on the seat and the keys in the ignition. Only in Iceland would someone be so trusting with their bike, for this country was considered the safest and most law-abiding nation on the planet. Where else did new parents leave their sleeping babies in strollers outside of cafés to enjoy the sun while they entered to eat an adult meal?

The 85 cc two-stroke engine and chromium-molybdenum-steel-framed bike was too much for Zang to resist, for she had a fondness for motorcycles. Acting as if she owned it, Zang casually slipped on the helmet, threw her leg over the seat, engaged the ignition, hit the kick starter and pulled back on the throttle, then kicked the gearshift level up through the gears and accelerated away.

Knight had watched the entire scene without comment, and Zang didn’t care that her boss might think her reckless. She had a purpose, and nothing would now stop her from achieving her objective of rescuing the kidnapped journalist and discovering who these unexpected perpetrators were.

Zang sped through the streets until she slipped onto Route 41, a two-lane separated highway that passed the Atlantic Ocean to the north, and rows of apartment towers and office complexes on the south. She scanned for the Dacia Duster but couldn’t see it anywhere.

“Knight? Ma’am?” She spoke into her mouthpiece and listened through her still attached earphone. “I need your help.”

“Zang, that was a reckless move. The owner of that bike could report you to the police at any moment.”

“With all due respect, ma’am, it’s not the biggest risk I’ve ever taken in my career.” The fact that she might now be on the police’s radar was not a zero possibility, but Zang figured rescuing Birtadottir was more important than maintaining absolute anonymity. “I can’t read the app tracking the SUV while I ride, so you’ll need to direct me.”

“I’ll do my best, but I’m also tracking Nayef.”

“Understood.” Zang took a bend at speed, causing a car she passed to honk at her. Zang resisted the urge to give the driver the finger and sped on. “Besides, that team we spotted will torture and murder Anna Birtadottir if I don’t reach her soon. I just know it.”

“If they do, she’ll give up the real secrets of these Luxembourg Papers before the end. Your priority, Zang, is to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“Of course, that as well.”

Zang had never noticed before, but Knight was much better than she at focusing on mission objectives, down to the letter of their briefings, and was always less bothered by the human suffering their actions often caused along the way. Zang had never really thought about this until now and wondered if Mark Pierce had influenced her own thinking of late, because the stunt she was performing now was exactly what the Trigger Man would have done in the same circumstances. Save the innocents first and worry about any state-sanctioned mission objectives later. She had never behaved that way before until she had worked with Pierce, and hated that some of his moral leanings might have rubbed off on her.

“Zang, I’m shadowing Nayef, currently travelling west. She’s proving harder to follow than I would have guessed.”

“Roger that.” Zang accelerated east towards the heart of Iceland, where she guessed the SUV would be headed too. “Can you give me any details of the kidnappers’ movements, while the sat link is still working?”

“Give me a second. Okay. They’re still on Route 41, so keep following.”

“Thank you.” With her stomach muscles tightening, Zang pushed on. Two journalists had already died because of the secret they had stolen from the Luxembourg firm, and Zang had no intention of another dying under her watch. “Ma’am, I still can’t see them. Any updates?”

Knight was silent for a moment. Then she said, “They’re still following Route 41 as the highway bends south, then west and will ultimately lead you to the international airport if you follow it long enough. If that’s where they are headed, then you’ve got time to catch them.”

“Thank you.”

With better intel than she had a moment ago, Zang decided it was prudent to pull over to reduce the chance of her stolen bike getting pinged by police licence plate scanners. She glanced at her number plate, noticing it contained two 3s. Using black lipstick, which she often carried on her for this very purpose, she painted over the 3s, turning them into 8s.

Then she picked up speed again and followed Route 41, passing sedans and four-wheel drives while sticking to just under the speed limit.

“Knight?”

“Yes, Zang?”

“Updates?”

There was another pause; then her boss said, “Sorry. My assumption was wrong. Your tangos have hit the cloverleaf intersection at Route 49 and are taking it east. They are no longer headed towards the airport.”

“Thank you, ma’am. No sign of any police interest, so I think I’m in the clear.”

“Good,” but Knight didn’t sound convinced or pleased with Zang’s answer. “I’m still on Nayef, and she’s still headed east. I’m guessing she’s returning to her hotel, which I’m presuming is around here somewhere considering how many I can see now. The satellite is almost out of range. Can I leave you to sort out Birtadottir on your own?”

“Affirmative!” Zang almost shouted her words, because Knight’s tone was suggestive that she didn’t believe Zang knew what she was doing. “Reconvene at safe house one?”

“Okay. That’s sensible. Good luck.”

“You too, ma’am.”

As Zang sped on, she wished they had more assets on their team. She was about to go head-to-head with at least four hostile opponents because she didn’t know how many others had been in the SUV when it had pulled up. Anywhere up to seven hostiles and potentially more when they reached their intended destination. Despite her extensive training and experience in dealing with such unfavourable odds in the field, she still could have done with more resources. Why had Abdul Ibrahim, the C/SOG of all people, and her other respected mentor been so stingy with operational deployments for this assignment?

After passing through the cloverleaf intersection at Routes 41 and 49, Zang followed the new highway east, and after another ten minutes of controlled driving, by which time their spy satellite would have been well out of visual range, she finally spotted the Dacia Duster. Getting up close, she read the number plate, PIR05.

With sunlight shining through the tinted glass of the Dacia Duster, the interior lit up with the silhouetted figures inside. She counted four male heads and connecting shoulders, but no sign of Anna Birtadottir. That didn’t mean she was not in the vehicle, as the men in the backseat likely had her laid over their laps or spread out at their feet, down low where she couldn’t see what was going on or signal for help, and if she had a bag over her head for sensory deprivation, not look out of place.

Zang pulled back, deciding that a shootout on a major Icelandic highway would draw the attention of multiple law enforcement officers she would not be able to avoid; she instead decided to follow and see where the kidnappers took her.

They drove for several miles, eventually reaching the outskirts of the city and entering a single-lane highway. The landscape transformed from urban into undulating hills with green but sparse vegetation comprising mostly grasses, low bushes and occasional birch trees, with steep hills seen on every horizon. Patches of snow were visible, but none were significant in size or spread.

Soon a fog rolled in, and visibility dropped to a few hundred feet. A short time later, the Dacia Duster and she were the only vehicles on this road, and now they were passing through a series of natural lakes. The weather grew chilly, and even with the parka, Zang was starting to feel the intense cold Nordic countries were renowned for.

Zang switched off her headlights and sank back just far enough so the taillights of the foes’ SUV remained just visible. Then, after at least another hour of driving, the vehicle turned down a dirt track, which looked to belong to a private property.

Zang slowed, then pulled to a stop, took her bike off the road and hid it behind a grouping of birch trees. She checked the map app on her CIA encrypted phone, noticing that the road the Dacia Duster had taken was a dead end and lay at the base of a steep hill of about two thousand feet elevation.

Zang realised that the only way she could effectively rescue Anna Birtadottir was to race up that dirt track in a sprint, warming her body with exertion and keeping her presence secret because the dirt bike would make too much noise if she had chosen to approach on it. Wherever these foes had taken the journalist, it was no more than half a mile distant.

She could cover that distance on foot easily enough.

Zang took off in a fast jog.

15

Eastern Region, Iceland

Captain Natalya Kozlova stood strong on the frigid wooden jetty as Arctic winds howled off the icy ocean and smashed straight into her body, seemingly here on purpose to dampen her stoicism. But her mood could not be dampened, for Kozlova’s purpose in Iceland and her patriotic duty as a Foreign Intelligence Service officer fighting for the very future of Mother Russia and her people was necessary. And if an early morning venture into the remote eastern shores of this Nordic island nation was what her country demanded of her in order to complete her mission, she would do so with a brave face and a proud stance, regardless of what the weather threw at her.

Shivering against the chill despite the layers she wore, Kozlova knew her tremors were also in part concerning her recent poor performance. It was only a matter of time before her superiors at SVR headquarters in the Yasenevo District of Moscow called her and checked in. Their words would start out as pleasant but veiled until they eventually threatened her, then warn that if she didn’t get her operation back on track, they would punish her.

What exactly that punishment would be… they would leave it for her to imagine the many horrid possibilities that awaited her. But she didn’t need imagination, for she had been the instigator of many such horrid possibilities on past failed servants of the state, and not all of them had lived through to the other side of those “punishments”. She had tried to warn Vassiliev of this punishment back in France, but he still didn’t seem to understand the seriousness of their situation as she did. Hopefully that would change soon.

As Kozlova stared out over the isolated pebbly beach with thousands of driftwood logs washed upon its shores, and not fully noticing this anomaly of the landscape, she considered that what had started out so well had now derailed spectacularly. Lieutenant Ivan Vassiliev and she had yet to locate and eliminate the two remaining journalists and the lawyer who had stolen the Broek & Trausch data in the first place, as was their objective. And now with a CIA team also moving in on the Luxembourg Papers, one of those American operatives had also managed to murder team member Sergeant Piotr Mishkin, embarrassing her further. Outcomes like that made her look weak, and in Russia, only the powerful stayed at the top, and alive.

She now spied the beamed fishing trawler Greben' Volny as it approached her jetty, rolling and pitching in the choppy waves that foamed and broiled, as if the Norse gods themselves did battle just beneath the waves. She knew from her briefing notes the vessel was 38 metres in length with a beam of 8.5 and a depth of 4.7 metres and gave the appearance that it had the capacity to hold two hundred metric tonnes of fish and could accommodate a crew of eight. But those specifications were lies it presented to the world to remain unremarkable and unnoticed.

The Greben' Volny might be registered to a Norwegian fishing company, but the shell companies that ultimately owned it through a multi-tiered obfuscation of deniability and secrecy, registered through various tax havens across the globe, all eventually linked back to the SVR. On the inside, it was not a fishing vessel, rather an ideal transport for Russian spies and paramilitary operatives for securing them into and extracting them out of Europe, equipped with all kinds of tracking, sensory and communications equipment, missile systems, and diverse inventory to support special forces operators inserted covertly inside the lands of foreign adversaries. The crew on the Greben' Volny today had travelled clandestinely for six days from the city of Murmansk in north-western Russia, circumnavigating Norway so they could reach the remote island of Iceland unnoticed.

She had been briefed that the team comprised not one, but ten Zaslon special forces operators, all of whom were hardened veterans of war zones located in the worst corners of the world: Ukraine, Georgia, Chechnya, Syria and Libya amongst other hellholes. In Kozlova’s mind, Zaslon were the most efficient killers in the world, and they were here to eliminate the surviving journalists now when Kozlova had failed, but more importantly, they were here to permanently deal with the interfering CIA team. She was not ungrateful for their help.

But Kozlova also knew she was lucky to still be on the team.

When the boat bashed against the jetty’s fenders, a grisly-looking operator threw a rope around a bollard, heaved on it to pull them in, then tethered the rolling vessel. Even from a distance, Kozlova recognised that he was a beast of a man, with bulky muscles and an imposing stature, and he was not alone in his god-like physique and menace. She spotted three more similarly chiselled men on the deck, then a fifth. Then others appeared, carrying packs and crates no doubt loaded with weapons and survival gear, and commenced loading their equipment onto the jetty.

She spoke fast into her radio. “Vassiliev, you copy?”

Her second-in-command answered immediately. “Yes, ma’am. I’m still with the second Land Rover.”

“Any signs of civilians?”

The radio chirped; then he said, “No, ma’am. All quiet since you left.”

She glanced at her latest model Land Rover Defender, with its high chassis for off-road travel and seven seats. Between their two all-terrain vehicles, they could transport the men, but she wasn’t certain they could fit all their gear as well, even with the roof racks. “Drive in. They’re here, and we need to load up quickly.”

“Copy that, ma’am. On my way.”

Kozlova turned her attention back to the Zaslon men, noticing how seamlessly they operated as an integrated and effective team, with only a few words required between them for communicating what needed to be done. Within minutes, they had their persons and all their gear on the jetty, and then the Greben' Volny was sailing back into the churning seas, ready to disappear as if it had never been here.

The men didn’t dress as soldiers. They resembled adventure junkies, the kind of men who liked to surf icy breakers, parachute off clifftops, or climb frozen mountainous peaks just for fun and the adrenaline rushes such experiences offered. Therefore, they would not look out of place in a remote wilderness location such as Iceland that catered for such tourists. But their purpose was not benign forms of adventure, it was death and instigating it.

The leader of the group approached Kozlova. He was a big man even amongst his companions, with wide shoulders and arms that bulged with rippling muscles under his jacket. His big bushy beard featured flecks of pepper-coloured hair, while his scalp was shaved bald. He must have weighed in at over 120 kilograms and stood over 1.9 metres in height.

The leader advanced fast until he was up close and in her personal space and stared down at her with his dark, beady eyes. “I take it you’re the degenerate who fucked up this mission?”

Natalya Kozlova’s first instincts were to slink away from the imposing killer and make herself small, but the SVR operative stood her ground as her back stiffened, and she stood taller. “I’ve heard about you, Sergeant Major Nikolai Solovyow. They say you never smile because you are never happy. Or you can’t smile because the muscles in your mouth don’t work that way to allow it. Which one is it?”

Solovyow merely shrugged. “Me and my men are here to fix your fuck-up. Not to answer your petty questions.” He pulled a fifteen-centimetre bladed fighting knife from a sheath on his arm, waved it in her face, then used the sharp tip to clean grit from beneath a fingernail. “Do you see those logs there, Kozlova? Those thousands of them, washed up on the beach?”

She nodded that she had.

“Do you know their origin?”

Shrugging, she said, “What is the point of this?”

“Iceland’s first settlers were Norse Vikings. When they arrived here in the ninth century AD, they discovered an abundance of trees spread wide across the island. But then, like most people in this world, who can only contemplate their immediate needs, they cut them all down to make charcoal, tools, houses, and ships. Meanwhile the harsh Icelandic environment hindered the regrowth of the trees, and soon the island was almost bare of them.”

Kozlova crossed her arms and frowned, not impressed with his story. When she spotted Vassiliev’s Defender approaching down the dirt track between two mountain peaks that was the only route to this jetty, she was about to mention it when Solovyow cut her off.

“By the early twentieth century, Iceland was almost out of wood. But it was this driftwood that saved them. Every year, these tree trunks would miraculously appear on their beaches, like a gift from the gods. But do you know where it really came from?”

“No, Major. I’ve already said that I don’t.”

“Russia. It started with the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the Soviets started logging in the northern Siberian wastes. The driftwood you see on this beach today are mainly pine logs, from the forest industry at the Yenisey River in Central Siberia. It was us Russians who saved Iceland, and they never knew it.”

She could see now where this conversation was headed, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of asking the major his meaning, so merely stood silent and stared unblinking into his cold, dark eyes.

“Captain Kozlova, in my story, you are the Icelandic woodsman, and I am the Russian driftwood, here to save your pathetic bony arse.”

“I don’t need saving.”

“Ah, but you do.”

“I have actionable intel already. We should discuss that⁠—”

He cut her off. “If this mission fails, if the truth of the Luxembourg Papers gets out in the next eight days, and if the surviving journalists and their lawyer collaborator aren’t all dead and the data all destroyed by then, then you — Captain — will not be long for this world. Am I making myself clear? You need me and my men. Only I can save you from your monumental fuck-up now. And I will save you if you don’t get in our way and follow my commands to the letter.”

Kozlova swallowed and did her best to mask any outward signs of the fear she felt towards this man and his threat dressed up as a promise.

“Do I make myself clear?”

Vassiliev had almost reached them now, and she didn’t wish to appear weak before her underling, so it was now time to end this conversation before he overheard any of it. “Yes, Major. I understand. Mother Russia thanks you for your service.”

“Fuck Mother Russia. It is you, Kozlova, who should be thanking me.”

16

Berlin, Germany

As Mark Pierce approached Checkpoint Charlie on Friedrichstraße in downtown Berlin, he was struck by how small the former Cold War crossing point was.

Once positioned at the infamous Berlin Wall and separating the Allied-controlled west portion of the city from the Russian-controlled eastern sector, today it was much more benign and comprised a back-to-back larger-than-life poster featuring a US and a Russian soldier, a tiny watchhouse with a tiny wall of sandbags, and a line of five floodlights once used by military personnel to shine into passing-through vehicles. More prominent now were the fast-food outlets inside the many shopfronts overlooking the former site where so many spies and double agents had died in their attempt to make the crossing from a time when this was ground zero for the world’s many espionage agencies active during the Cold War.

Surrounded by the throngs of passing tourists and residents, who never noticed him, Pierce felt a sadness overcome him as he watched the scene. He’d promised himself from a very young age that if he ever visited Berlin, he would come to this very spot. His parents had once owned a section of the Berlin Wall, nothing more than a concrete block fragment covered in illegible graffiti, but the stories they had told him about it and the city it had come from had fascinated him as a child. Tragically, that souvenir, like his parents and the Wall, were no longer of this world, and this left Pierce feeling at a loss. And this touristy relic seemed deeply insufficient to memorialise the tragic decades Europe had suffered through during the Cold War of the past century, and their efforts in keeping the free world safe.

He pulled tight his merino wool overcoat, because north of the Alps the European summer weather was cooler than it had been in Spain, and scanned the tourists.

He then spotted Mackenzie Summerfield, his former handler and his longest friend, watching him from across the road, with people passing all around her too and not noticing her. Like him, she wore smart business attire and a warm overcoat. Her dark hair was a tasselled bob now, which suited her. There was something about her that had changed too, and Pierce couldn’t put his finger on what this was, but he liked whatever it was.

“It’s good to see you again, Mark,” she said as she stepped up close and hugged him tight.

They had never hugged before, and Pierce now understood what had changed. Summerfield had gained a toughness about her since their last ordeal together in the Middle East, and with this toughness, there had emerged a self-confidence that had not been there before, which he now adored.

He hugged her back, liking that they could be this familiar with each other. “It’s good to see you too, Mackenzie.”

She stepped away, and they smiled at each other.

“Interesting choice of a meet, Mark?”

He shrugged, not wishing to tell her about his exact reasons for wanting to be here. But knowing that sharing intimate details was part of what kept a friendship strong and trusting and viable over the long term, he knew it was important to share something. “I always wanted to see this place. My parents always talked about Berlin. It was where they met.”

Summerfield raised an eyebrow, expressing a surprise she was unable to hide. “Were your parents CIA?”

Realising he had overplayed his sharing, he said nothing and kept his face impassive.

“Okay, I’m sorry, Mark. I know your past is a highly locked-down secret no one knows about, and I won’t press further. But hey, that’s some revelation if that’s true.”

He shrugged. “Perhaps another time, I’ll tell you the truth.”

She stepped closer to him and held his stare. “Then what are you going to tell me today, if not the truth?”

He laughed now, and so did she. He felt weird they were having this conversation in front of so many tourists, when they could potentially be sharing state secrets with the many people within earshot. “Would you believe it if I told you my parents were diplomats?”

Summerfield laughed and shook her head. “Only in as much as that you and I both know that many spies operate under the cover of diplomacy.”

He nodded, remembering that from a young age, he had felt his parents had always fought the good fight against clear enemies, awful people motivated to do only evil in the world. He felt the world he had grown up in had become far more complicated, where the lines between who was right and who was wrong were always blurred, and that it was almost impossible to tell the good people from the evil people anymore. “When I think of Berlin, I always think of the Wall and the Cold War. But it’s not that to everybody. What, then, Mackenzie, does Berlin remind you of?”

She shrugged. “That’s easy. The 1884–1885 Berlin Conference.”

Pierce raised an eyebrow, surprised by her answer.

“Do you know about it?”

“Not really.”

“It was when the then European leaders led by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and the genocidist King Leopold II carved up the African continent between the then imperialist European powers dominating the world’s geopolitics. Quite a disgusting time in retrospect, considering all that has happened in the world since because of its self-seeking rulings.”

Pierce nodded again. “I forgot, your qualifications are in African politics and North African insurgency.”

“That’s right. It’s good to see you again, Mark. I can see that you aren’t happy with this current assignment, but I can also see you are far more comfortable in yourself and who you are than even a year ago. That’s nice.”

“Thank you.” He looked at his hands, remembering that his shakes had not debilitated him on this mission, which could only be a good thing.

She smirked. “Shall we go somewhere we can talk, where there is no risk of being overheard?”

“Good idea. I have a place in mind.”

They walked north, past the Wall Museum and crossing several streets until Pierce took them into a café decked out with Bauhaus-style furniture and architecture. A painted mural adorning one wall depicted flappers and young men from the 1920s dancing the Charleston. A female server wearing a man’s tuxedo approached and asked if they had a booking.

Pierce answered in his very limited German and then pointed to a table where Akash Parab waited. He had his laptop out, which he furiously typed into. At least his back was to a wall, so no one could look at his screen without him becoming aware of it. “We’re with him,” Pierce said in English because his German had failed him.

The server nodded, then led them over to Parab and took their coffee orders in perfect English. Parab insisted on a hot chocolate instead of coffee.

“Mackenzie Summerfield, meet Akash Parab. Akash, this is Mackenzie.”

The youngest member of their team stood, knocking the table and shaking the liquid in his earlier ordered coffee as he did so, and shook her hand. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

“Mackenzie’s fine. Or Summerfield. And likewise.”

They all sat as Parab closed his laptop. “We’re Ibrahim’s new team, right?”

Pierce smiled at Parab’s enthusiasm. “Parab and I operated together recently in India. He’s our tech guru. Summerfield here is our intelligence analyst⁠—”

“Senior targeting analyst is my official title now.”

Pierce nodded approvingly. “A promotion. Well done.”

He placed a handheld audio jammer on the table, switched it on, then covered it with a napkin. Emitting a white-noise sound broadcast across all audible frequencies, it would mask the sound of their conversation, ruining any recordings and impeding live audio surveillance, should they be under observation by the enemy.

Turning to Summerfield, he said, “When did you arrive in Berlin?”

“Yesterday morning. I’ve worked up an activities timeline for Kasrin Nayef for the last week, which is telling in itself. But she’s not here. Vanished the day after Daniel Connelly bought the farm. Plus, the police and the BfV have already pulled her apartment apart, suggesting Germany’s domestic intelligence services have also figured out what is going down with the stolen Luxembourg Papers.”

BfV was the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, similar in structure to and with objectives analogous to that of America’s FBI or Britain’s MI5, with responsibilities for domestic counterintelligence and anti-terrorism activities within their respective nations. Pierce knew the BfV would now have everything of interest sourced from Nayef’s apartment in their possession, and there was nothing their team of three could hope to scrounge from the journalist’s former home.

“What happened to Frederick Schaus?” asked Summerfield, signalling to Pierce that she was up to speed with his and Parab’s operational plans. Ibrahim must have already briefed her.

Pierce shrugged. “He was informing the Russians as we suspected.”

“SVR?”

He nodded. “There is a timeline on this. Whatever is important to the Russians, it happens in eight days, when eighteen individuals all get paid one and a half million euros each when it goes down. You think that is enough detail, Mackenzie, for you to work out what this all means?”

She nodded. “I’ll see what I can do. Where is Schaus now?”

“We handed him off to a CIA black site team in Hamburg. They’ll hold him in a secure and undisclosed location until this mess is cleaned up. Then the boss can work out what to do with him.”

Mackenzie returned the nod. Then she noticed, at the same time that Pierce did, that Parab’s head was bobbing back and forth as he paid close attention to what they were saying. “I have an idea,” he said when they both stared at him.

“Go ahead,” said Summerfield.

“Well, I was just thinking. If I were a journalist who had just stolen a Europa Clipper equivalent’s worth of explosive information, I’d want to keep my digital trail as quiet as I possibly could.”

“Europa Clipper?” asked Summerfield.

“A NASA mission to conduct a detailed scientific investigation of Jupiter’s moon Europa,” he said, explaining his obscure reference. “The computers on board it are equivalent to the stolen Broek & Trausch data.”

“Oh,” she said, and then turned to Pierce.

Pierce nodded. “I take your point, Parab. But keep in mind Nayef doesn’t have the tech we do, nor the training or skills we have in counterintelligence and surveillance tech. Her methods can’t be that sophisticated. So what did you have in mind on how we can track her?”

Parab looked again at them both, his eyes widening when they weren’t getting what was on his mind. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“No,” said Pierce and Summerfield at the same time.

“In her position, I’d go to an internet café and not take my cell phone when I visited. I’d generate a completely different set of accounts for communications, under other names, that can’t be digitally linked back to my real identity. If we draw out an increasingly widening circle using Nayef’s apartment as the centre and check off each internet café from closest to farthest, who knows what we might find. And before you ask, yes, I can hack terminals at internet cafés, but it’s easier if I’m inside each one.”

Summerfield laughed. “Your new buddy has a point there, Pierce. It’s legwork, and lots of it. But who knows what we could uncover?”

Pierce smirked. “Don’t worry, I’ve already broken Parab in on how to suffer through boring legwork, in Luxembourg.”

Parab nodded. “He did.”

Their coffees and hot chocolate arrived. When the server disappeared, Pierce sipped at his long black, enjoying its strong, bitter taste. “I like the plan. We’ll get moving on once we finish these.”

17

Southern Region, Iceland

Despite the bright sunlight filtering through the fog, to Rachel Zang it felt like late in the evening as she jogged up the empty gravel road, which was gradually increasing in elevation as the landscape grew craggier. Lichen featured more and more prominently on the rocks, and the low leafless scrub now looked deader than it had earlier. Glancing at her wristwatch, she saw the time was 19:07 hours, yet the fog-shrouded sun was still high in the sky. Then she remembered this was the summer, and with the Arctic Circle being a few hundred miles to the north at most, of course it was light. With the daytime tilt of the earth facing the sun, it would be light for most of the day.

The fog, however, remained and reduced visibility to a few hundred feet at most, providing Zang with cover as she approached whatever destination these men had brought Anna Birtadottir to. The air remained chilly, and Zang was recognising that her layers likely weren’t enough to survive outside for hours on end.

As she marched, Zang recalled what she had studied concerning Iceland’s geography and landscape. A relatively young island, having only formed some sixteen million years ago and geographically positioned just south of the Norwegian and Greenland Seas, it was a landscape dominated by volcanoes, geysers, glaciers, fjords, and vast basaltic deserts left over from both ancient and recent lava flows. The North Atlantic Current ensured that for a country positioned this close to the North Pole, its weather remained temperate compared to other neighbouring regions at this latitude, which Zang was grateful for. Where vegetation did grow, it was mostly classified as tundra, and in the winter months, the entire island would be blanketed in snow. An environment, she appreciated, that could be as hostile as any adversary she had ever encountered in her past, should she get caught out here for too long.

Up ahead, Zang spotted a farmhouse, constructed of wood and corrugated iron, with a high sloping roof and surrounded by several barns, sheds and other outhouses, and fields of woolly sheep further beyond. The lights were on in the main house, and a fire burned, judging by the smoke escaping the single chimney stack. Two Dacia Duster SUVs parked outside in the driveway.

She paused, then hid behind bracken, allowing herself time to observe this remote hideout. After a few minutes, she spotted two men in leather coats standing outside, brandishing double-barrel Browning Cynergy CX 12-gauge shotguns and smoking cigarettes. Perimeter guards no doubt, but they didn’t seem that professional because they weren’t actively watching all potential approach vectors that an enemy such as Zang could exploit to reach them unseen. Zang wondered how this team had managed to smuggle weapons into a benign country when she and her team had not.

Then she heard a scream, originating from deep inside the main building.

It was followed by another.

It sounded like it was coming from a woman enduring intense pain.

Cursing because Zang had hoped for more time before these men got violent with Anna Birtadottir, she picked up her pace and, in a crouched jog, brought herself closer to her foes.

Each time the men looked up from their muffled conversation, Zang dropped and flattened herself against the damp ground. With the sheep bleating and moving around, she hoped any noise she made would be mistaken for just one more of the domestic flock. The men didn’t looked up fast enough to see her anyway, and when she was within thirty feet of them, she was surprised to hear them speaking Arabic, not that she understood what they said other than a few basic words.

What did bother her was that these were not the Russians Ibrahim and Knight had warned her about.

When they finally turned and looked in the opposite direction, Zang snuck closer.

More screams erupted from the main house, followed by frantic wailing, or was it rapid panting, Zang couldn’t be sure. But these bone-chilling noises were likely from the journalist. Whatever these men were subjecting her to must be horrific.

Zang pulled out her steak knife, her only weapon, and snuck closer to the two guards. The men were laughing now, but what amused them she could not tell. She couldn’t stand that they were enjoying this moment, so she sprinted the last few feet rapidly, closing the distance between them, with only furious thoughts on her mind.

By the time the more distant guard noticed her, she was already impaling the throat of the closer guard, spilling great gushes of his blood. He dropped, gurgling with panic in his eyes, as Zang flung the knife at the second man. It struck him in the left eye and burrowed deep into his skull, killing him instantly.

Zang scooped up the fallen Cynergy CX shotgun of the man expiring next to her, noticing that it was a new weapon with hardly any scuffs on it and had retained its sheen. She had kept the battle noises to a minimum, and while the first man expired, she listened and watched for signs of anyone else exiting the house in case they had been heard and were now investigating.

She herself heard nothing except the woman’s screams, which were now tapering off in both intensity and frequency.

With her face reddening and her teeth clamped tight together, Zang quickly searched the two dead men until she found more shotgun shells and a small switchblade in the pockets of their leather jackets, all of which she collected and pocketed in her own parka.

At the two Dacia Duster SUVs, she spotted that each had their keys in the ignition. Zang pocketed the keys for the first vehicle, then used the switchblade to puncture both the tires on the second on its left side, where she couldn’t be seen from inside the main house. Then she snuck up to the back door, finding it open.

She slipped into a laundry room, discovering it to be empty of people.

In the hallway, Zang found her eyes were watering, and her nose had become runny. Then she felt the skin on her hands and face prickle, as if thousands of microscopic insects had bit her.

Doing her best to ignore her discomfort, Zang advanced onwards with the 12-gauge shotgun out in front until she found the kitchen. She grabbed a tea towel, wet it, then wrapped it around her mouth and nose, bringing some relief from the stinging chemicals that permeated the air. Was it a gas leak, or were these the chemical residues of an oxyacetylene torch used to burn Birtadottir?

There was only one way to find out, and that was to keep advancing.

In the corridor were stairs leading up to a second storey. Two men were coming down the steps. They hadn’t yet noticed her because each wore white, whole-body hazmat suits, full-face-fitting goggles and self-contained breathing apparatuses, which limited their field of view. Resembling characters out of a science-fiction movie, they moved cumbersomely, and with their face masks, they’d hear their own breathing over her approaching footsteps. She saw one man slung a Tikka t3x Hunter hunting rifle, while the other slung another Cynergy CX shotgun, but she didn’t plan on either of them being able to use them effectively against her.

When they reached the bottom of the stairs, they turned to come down the corridor towards her, but she was already up close and in their personal space. They had no time to react as two shotgun shells fired from Zang’s weapon, disintegrating both their hearts, producing gaping holes inside their chests.

Then Zang was coughing, and her eyes stung worse than before. Her skin itches had worsened, and the phlegm now coming out of her mouth was both painful and disturbing.

Zang tore off the goggles and breathing apparatus from the first dead man, then retreated back the way she had come where the air was not as toxic.

Behind her, she heard noises from other men, at least three of them judging by the sounds of their footsteps as they rushed down the stairs. Hiding behind a wall just out of the men’s line of sight, Zang heard them yelling at each other in what she presumed was Arabic, and guessed they had just discovered their dead companions. They would have heard the shotgun blasts earlier, so they shouldn’t have been surprised at this outcome, but they still sounded both annoyed and flustered. Zang expected them to come for her now. Instead, they marched in the opposite direction, to the front of the main house, and away from her.

Deciding the goggles and breathing apparatus could wait until later, she reloaded two more shells into her double-barrel shotgun, then took off in a sprint around the side of the house.

She got to the front just in time to see the three men, similarly suited in hazmat suits, scramble into the SUV with the functional tyres.

Zang took one of the men down, then a second, killing them both with easy shots from her close range.

The third man, who was as large and rotund as Zang remembered from Reykjavik, was firing up the engine, and he had a pistol in his hand. He must have had a spare set of keys to have fired up the engine so quickly.

Fumbling for fresh shells, she took longer than she would have liked to reload and then line up the shotgun with the back of the Dacia Duster SUV now disappearing into the fog. She fired twice despite her imperfect aim, but the range was too far, and the slugs proved ineffective. The rotund man kept driving his intact vehicle and was getting away.

Cursing, Zang almost gave chase on foot. He might alert others in his team to her presence and come back for her, so getting away might be a more prudent course of action.

Then she remembered Anna Birtadottir was likely the woman still inside that house of horrors, suffering who knew what kinds of tortures.

Zang returned to the crippled Duster, finding a fresh biohazard suit in the trunk. She also noticed a packet of litmus tests that when dipped into an aqueous solution turned red in acidic conditions and blue in response to basic conditions. The writing on the pack was in Arabic, so Zang pocketed it in case the manufacturer offered some clue as to who these individuals were. She slipped into the suit, then fitted the goggles and breathing apparatus from one of the dead men she had shot outside.

Back inside the farmhouse, the suit protected her from the discomforts she had experienced earlier. She carried the shotgun with her, and her pockets jingled with fresh shells, for she was not fully convinced all her foes had fled or died at her hand yet.

But her fears were unfounded. All remaining hostiles were permanently incapacitated.

She took the stairs up to the second floor, where she could hear an unusual and unsettling fizzing, bubbling noise.

White vapours wafted in the air, misting out of a bathroom.

Zang approached cautiously, and when she heard no other sounds, she turned with the shotgun raised and ready.

To find Anna Birtadottir’s skinless body dissolving in a bathtub overflowing with fizzing, bubbling acid.

18

Berlin, Germany

It was late in the evening when Akash Parab, who had already investigated five internet cafés in the vicinity of Kasrin Nayef’s apartment, struck lucky at the sixth one.

In each establishment, the young CIA technical operations officer had bought time on a terminal, used that time to hack into their operating systems, then proceeded to download the entire contents of each café’s server and hardware network onto a CIA multi-terabyte flash drive in less than thirty seconds. After Parab had left each establishment, a brief check of the data had only come up positive for the sixth premise, with CCTV security footage of Kasrin Nayef tapping away at a keyboard.

Now with the data they needed, Parab, Pierce and Summerfield returned to the multi-storey residential tower where Summerfield had yesterday rented an apartment. Once inside, Parab unfolded a vast array of laptops and other devices and cables onto the living room’s dining table. Pierce had no idea as to what their functions might be but watched with interest as Parab put it all together and then proceeded to analyse the data from the sixth internet café. While Parab worked, Pierce stepped out and collected Chinese takeaway, while Mackenzie ran a bug sweep across every surface of their apartment.

Returning with food half an hour later, Pierce, Parab and Summerfield dug into the fried rice, sweet and sour tofu, chicken bean beef, and the broccoli and garlic vegetarian dishes Pierce had procured. He had avoided beef because of Parab’s Hindu practices.

While they ate, Pierce stared out the floor-to-ceiling night-time window view of Berlin, taking in the bright neon colours, the Spree River, the Berlin Cathedral, the 368-metre-tall Fernsehturm or “Television Tower” built in East Germany during the Cold War, and Alexanderplatz, which was a large public square and transport hub in the city’s central Mitte district. The German capital impressed Pierce with its well-put-together mixture of old and new buildings, and Pierce wondered if his parents had ever enjoyed a similar view of the city as he did now, when they had served here during the last days of the Cold War as CIA intelligence officers. He tried to imagine what the city had been like back then, when the focus of the intelligence services had been on preventing communist Russia from taking over the world, and when East Berlin was as dangerous a place for spies to operate in as Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, China and Russia were today.

“Pierce?”

He turned to Summerfield, who had likely called out his name multiple times while he’d been lost in his thoughts. “Yeah, sorry. What do you have?”

Parab bounced on the sofa where he had planted himself, chopsticks and a morsel of chicken in one hand, and a mouse in the other. “A lot, actually. Nayef last visited the sixth internet café three nights ago. Spent eighty-four minutes online and covered many topics of activity. Where do you want me to start?”

Summerfield crossed her arms and frowned. “Go through it sequentially.”

“Okay. Sure.” Parab popped his chicken portion into his mouth, then dug into his sweet and sour and fried rice. With his mouth full of food, he spoke through his munches when he said, “I don’t know how this relates to anything, but Nayef spent her first hour reading transcripts of an International Criminal Court hearing. The famous one, in The Hague. In the Netherlands.”

Pierce nodded. He knew that the International Criminal Court, or ICC, was an intergovernmental organisation with a mandate for trying individuals charged with genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression. The vast majority of those who had stood trial here since its founding were African warlords and rebel leaders, and their court hearings could last for months, while subsequent sentencings were often delayed for much longer periods than that. Recently, the ICC had issued arrest warrants for the Russian president in relation to child abductions he’d perpetrated during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Considering this news, Pierce mentally reassessed the SVR’s interest in the Luxembourg Papers, but he couldn’t see a connection to the ICC that made sense in this context. The Russian president’s war crimes were already well known, and he was also protected from any chance of arrest while he remained in his homeland, which had been his modus operandi since his country’s military aggression in Ukraine had begun three years ago now. There were no secrets here the SVR needed to recover or destroy.

Then Summerfield asked the question that Pierce himself had been about to ask. “Which case?”

Parab looked at them both with stares that suggested they should already know the answer to this question. “I thought it was obvious? It’s been on the news a lot lately. You’re not following this?”

“No!” said Pierce and Summerfield simultaneously.

“The Syrian, Da’oud Alzuhur? Cousin of the Syrian president? Director of that country’s Military Intelligence Directorate, or MID?”

“Ah, yes,” said Summerfield. “For some reason I was thinking this had something to do with the Ukraine invasion. My mistake.”

“Now I remember too,” said Pierce. “Yes, the MID is also known as the Mukhabarat.” He felt anger rising inside him, but his emotions were not directed at Parab, but the Mukhabarat itself. Syria was a totalitarian dictatorship widely condemned for its extensive domestic and political repression, arbitrary detentions, summary executions, censorships, tortures, forced disappearances, and chemical weapon attacks against its own people. The Mukhabarat were behind most if not all of the political murders, tortures, and disappearances plaguing the nation. They were an appalling group, and Pierce would not hesitate for a moment in putting down any of their members if he ever crossed paths with them, Da’oud Alzuhur included.

Pierce had also seen on the news reports of recent rumblings from the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham group, or the HTS as they were often referred to, which was a Sunni Islamist political and paramilitary organisation that had been consolidating forces in central Syria for some time now. Recent internally distributed CIA intel reports had suggested this group might be ready to lead a new offensive against the Syrian government, and if they did, they could cause additional complications for the Mukhabarat and their already too tight control over their populous. It could only benefit the world if a group like HTS could get itself organised enough to bring down the current Syrian regime, but the president and his father before him had ruled Syria for more than fifty years without any real threat affecting them, even during the height of the Islamic State caliphates, which included groups such as Islamic State, which had dominated much of Syria and Iraq at the time, almost ten years ago now. But how all this related to Da’oud Alzuhur, Pierce couldn’t see.

Pierce thought upon what else he knew about this Mukhabarat man, then said, “If I remember correctly, Alzuhur made his way up through the ranks of the MID as an interrogator, responsible for the torture, maiming, raping and killing of hundreds, if not thousands of Syrian citizens. Also has a fondness for bedding young, unwilling women, then beating them afterwards. Sounds like he’s in the right place.”

“And if I remember correctly,” said Summerfield, “six months ago, Alzuhur travelled to Qatar for heart surgery. It was there that Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, or the BND, intercepted him and smuggled him into Europe, where they then handed him over to ICC for criminal prosecution.”

“So,” said Parab, “while this asshole can no longer harm anyone, he could also die of a heart attack any day now, and the proceedings will be for nothing?”

“Maybe,” said Summerfield. “I’m sure other European doctors are checking him over and keeping him alive. Actually, I think I remember that legal proceedings began against him two months ago only when Alzuhur was fit enough to be prosecuted after his surgery, which he received anyway, in the Netherlands.” She turned to Parab. “What exactly was Nayef’s interest in this man?”

Parab pointed to a PDF file he’d pulled up on his laptop screen, comprising many dozens of pages of text. Pierce looked more closely and saw it was a word-for-word transcript of a case heard in Trial Chamber VI.

Parab said, “This transcript on Alzuhur’s most recent hearing was uploaded eight days ago. Analysing the logs on the terminal Nayef rented that night, I can see she read the entire thing front to back. She paused often, too, to take notes.” Parab switched windows to a CCTV feed of Nayef reading the screen, then scribbling notes into a paper journal.

Pierce noticed her stone-cold stares, but her real emotions were betrayed by the tears she kept having to wipe away from her eyes. “Something about this case affects her personally.”

“Yes, I can see that,” said Summerfield with the slightest croak in her voice. “We should all read this transcript. See what it tells us before we progress further.”

Pierce nodded.

“That’s easy enough.” Parab provided them both with laptops of their own with links already uploaded to the ICC website and the transcripts of the case.

Pierce fell onto the sofa and got comfortable before he read the fifty-eight-page transcript in twenty minutes while also finishing his portion of the Chinese takeaway. It was mostly legal jargon and time spent recognising the authority of the court, but the real subject of the day’s hearing concerned the torture, then the flaying of a Christian Syrian woman who had previously been a staffer at the presidential palace, reputedly punished for passing on political information to dissidents involved in the 2011 Arab Spring protests occurring in the capital, Damascus, at the time. The session ended with the defending lawyer claiming again that the prosecutors had provided insufficient evidence to back up their claims.

“How many of these has Nayef read?” Pierce asked when he had finished reading the transcript.

Parab flicked through several screens on his laptop. “I’ve got logs going back nine weeks, showing her visiting twice a week on average. My best guess from extrapolating the data she trawled was that she was mostly catching up on each proceeding as they were published.”

Summerfield placed her empty takeaway carton on the coffee table she was working at, then leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. “I don’t get it. This case started long before the SVR had any interest in Nayef, and any connections between the Russians and Alzuhur are tenuous at best. And she is a journalist after all; these kinds of stories are her bread and butter. And why is she keeping it secret from the other three journalists? Reading the transcripts between the four journalists that we already secured, they shared almost everything else they’d uncovered thus far. But not this.”

Pierce nodded, then leaned forward as he caught his friend’s eyes. He suddenly felt uplifted, as he could see clearly now when everything had been a blur before. “Isn’t it obvious?”

She laughed. “Not to me. I can’t go without sleep, or for days on end, and still function normally like you do, Pierce. My brain needs a recharge, and that only comes with sleep, before I’ll be able to work this one out.”

Pierce looked at his wristwatch. It was well beyond midnight already, but he wasn’t ready for sleep yet. There was still too much to learn.

“What’s obvious, my friend?” she asked.

Pierce’s nod was solemn. “Like I said earlier, this is personal for Kasrin Nayef. Either she, or someone close to her, sadly suffered through one or more of Da’oud Alzuhur’s particular brand of torture. Everything else, the sharing of the Broek & Trausch data with the other journalists, preparing an exposé on the law firm and their many clients, it was all a smoke screen so Nayef could find the evidence she needed to bring this horrific man down.”

19

“But how is the Syrian Mukhabarat connected to the SVR?” Summerfield asked of Pierce. Her eyes were now red from lack of sleep, and she spoke from where she too had collapsed upon the sofa. “Apart from the obvious that the Russians prop up the Syrian government in return for the regime allowing their air and naval bases inside the country.”

Pierce, seated next to her, shrugged. “That’s a good question. Parab, what else did Nayef get up to that night?”

“A few things. There is this.” Their technical operations officer flipped through a few more screens, then pulled up a messenger text conversation between two coded individuals. “The aliases you see on the screen are ‘JoPortman2009’ and ‘RosM3yers’, both created the same day Daniel Connelly died. The first one is Nayef’s account. The other, I’m not so sure who that is yet.”

Both Pierce and Summerfield leaned in and read the recent entries.

JP: (I’m scared for my life now!)

(DC’s death! It HAS to be connected to the Luxembourg Papers. OMG this is frightening!)

RM: (I agree. I’m fucking scared too!)

(Get yourself to Iceland. I have a place in the countryside we can hide out.)

JP: (But my passport?)

RM: (What about it?)

JP: (Whoever is hunting us is probably from one of the intel services. And not a friendly one!)

(We might have inadvertently exposed any one of their deepest state secrets!)

(These groups know how to track passports.)

RM: (Probably. Unfortunately. This is so awful.)

JP: (Any of those agencies could be tracking me now! And what if they are behind DC’s murder?)

RM: (Possible. Either way, you can’t return to your home. Promise me you won’t?)

(TOO DANGEROUS!)

(I mean, too dangerous to stay where you are!)

(And the stories we have in the LP files are too important not to publish!)

JP: (If we are all murdered, there is NO STORY!)

(BTW I can’t reach LTE! Who knows what happened to her too!)

RM: (I have no idea either.)

JP: (About LTE?)

RM: (No. Sorry. MTS how to keep you safe. I have an idea.)

JP: (WHAT?)

(HOW?)

RM: (My sister is in Hamburg. Use her passport. I’ll key it up with her.)

(You two are similar enough in appearance.)

JP: (That would work?)

(But biometric scanners at airports?)

(How do I bypass them?)

RM: (I have an idea! Drive to Denmark, catch the ferry there to Iceland.)

(It will take three days. Checks aren’t as stringent.)

(Believe me, I’ve done that trip. I KNOW!)

(You’ll be safe on that route.)

JP: (Thank you!)

(I’m TERRIFIED!)

RM: (I know!)

(ME TOO!)

(But stay brave. You’ve got this!)

(We can still expose these ASSHOLES for who they are!)

(Once the truth is out, they have no reason to touch us!)

(This LP data could gift us the biggest story of the decade.)

JP: (I shouldn’t have brought this to you all!)

RM: (Don’t be silly!)

(Good journalists, like us, take risks! But the reward will be worth it.)

JP: (I hope so!)

(It wasn’t for DC or LTE.)

RM: (It will.)

(They wouldn’t want us to stop now. YOU know THIS!)

JP: (Was it DC who posted most of the data to the dark web?)

RM: (He might have. More likely it was LTE. She was out of her mind when she thought the killers were coming for her next. And rightly so.)

(I’ll send you my sister’s details via our other comms method.)

(Get yourself moving!)

JP: (Okay!)

(Thanks.)

(Some weird-looking boys just entered the internet café.)

RM: (They are probably just that. Weird boys playing networked FPS!)

(Got to go. Chat soon!)

JP: (Thanks)

(FPS?)

RM: (First-person shooter.)

JP: (That’s not funny!)

RM: (You are right! That was insensitive. Sorry!)

JP: (You are a good friend!)

(The BEST)

(Got to go. Don’t like the vibe here anymore.)

RM: (You are the best too!)

(See you soon!)

(And look after yourself. Keep a low profile.)

(We’ll get through this. I promise.)

When Summerfield was done reading, she leaned back, rubbed her eyes again and said through a stifled yawn, “RosM3yers has to be Anna Birtadottir. And that conversation tells us a lot.”

“It does,” said Pierce. He quickly calculated the sequence of events in his head as he knew them, then worked out what the abbreviations meant. LP was Luxembourg Papers. DC and LTE were Daniel Connelly and Liliana Torres Escarra respectively. “Assuming Nayef left for Iceland straight away, she’d be there by now.”

Summerfield nodded. “Presuming no one intercepted her in the meantime.”

“I think we would have heard something by now if they had.”

“Agreed. I’ll arrange through Berlin station for new identities and passports for all three of us so we can fly to Reykjavik in the morning. We’ll travel separately, of course.” She let out another lingering yawn as she stretched her arms high above her head. “Sorry, guys! I’m beat. Once I’ve sorted travel, I need to sleep.”

“Sounds fair. I’ll call Ibrahim and brief him. Rachel Zang is already in Reykjavik, so I’ll coordinate our meet-up.”

Parab raised a hand to get both their attentions. “There is one more communication you should both know about first, but it’s weird in every way I look at it.”

“What do you mean?” asked Summerfield.

“I ran it through a translator, as it’s written in Arabic. But you speak Arabic, don’t you, Pierce? Perhaps reading it in its native format might make more sense?”

Pierce frowned. “The way you just said what you did, Parab, I feel like this is the first thing you should have told us.”

Parab shrugged. “Sorry!” He turned back to his laptop, then pulled up an email that Nayef had typed out in Arabic script, again sent from a coded email address to another coded email address, which gave nothing away as to the identity of either participant. But as Pierce read it, for he was fluent in the tongue that dominated much of the Arab world, he immediately guessed as to who the two individuals were and suddenly understood what it was they had done to set this entire international mess into motion in the first place.

Big Brother,

So happy to hear that you got away and are safe in hiding. We are so close to accomplishing our goals now with the files that you sent me.

But I fear our old enemies have guessed our intentions. This does suggest the Luxembourg Papers do indeed hold the damning evidence we need. We might still unlock the fears that chain our minds and be free again. We still can avenge our parents’ untimely passing for what that butcherer did to them, if we keep strong and brave.

But you must stay hidden. I need you to be safe. There is nothing you can do right now anyway. I will hide out in Iceland. I will be safe there.

I’ll contact you soon.

I love you!

Little Sister

Akash Parab looked up at Pierce and expressed worry. “What’s eating you, Pierce? What did you see in that email that I didn’t?”

Pierce shook his head as he felt a twisting, knotted sensation grip and churn his gut. Even Summerfield was looking at him as if he were an alien from another planet. “Parab, Summerfield, if I’m reading it right, ‘Big Brother’ is Yakub Samaan, the man Schaus told us about in Luxembourg as being the culprit who stole the data in the first place.”

“He is?” said Parab.

“Yes. And with this email, we now know Yakub is Kasrin Nayef’s older sibling.”

Summerfield yawned again, fighting to stay awake. “You mean…?” And then another yawn escaped her mouth. “Oh!”

“Yes, Summerfield, this whole thing started because of two siblings motivated by the single goal of bringing down one evil man for the crimes he’s committed.”

Pierce tensed, but on the inside he felt good. Finally, he had a personal motivation to see this mission through to completion, because at least one party operating inside this mess called the Luxembourg Papers, this Kasrin and Yakub team, was not motivated only by self-seeking outcomes, but fighting to achieve some good in the world. Pierce could get on board with that, and he would help them any way he could. Suddenly, this mission had real purpose, which it had been lacking until now.

“Yes, I empathise completely. And because of that, I feel we Americans finally have a much better idea of what this is all about, and have a clear objective to create something good out of all this mess.”

PART II

THE RUSSIANS

20

Keflavík International Airport, Iceland

When Mark Pierce, Mackenzie Summerfield and Akash Parab entered Iceland, they did so separately on three unconnected flights on three unrelated airlines, with each using individual cover identities. Only Pierce’s flight had been delayed due to technical issues, so he arrived last. Pierce had never visited Iceland before, and his first impression of the country was of an airport caught in a deluge of heavy rain and biting winds.

Once on the ground and through immigration and baggage collection, and with the rest of the team well ahead of him, he hired a white Land Rover Super Defender. With the weather clearing, he drove his new vehicle along the fifty-kilometre stretch of Highway 41 linking Keflavík International Airport to the capital, Reykjavik.

Even though he didn’t expect a need to travel far beyond the capital, Pierce still thought it prudent to hire a top-of-the-range four-wheel drive, as many of the gravel tracks were rated as F-roads and therefore forbidden to two-wheel drive vehicles by the local laws, and for good reason. Most of the F-roads existed only in the highlands of Iceland, a region commonly referred to as “the interior”, and other mountainous areas and got their name because they feature an F before the road number, such as F338 or F225. The F came from the Icelandic word for mountain, “fjall”.

While he drove through the flat, desolate landscape of southwestern Iceland instead, he remembered hearing on the news some time back that a volcano had erupted six months earlier, and in the process had produced new and vast lava fields inside the island’s interior. Pierce reflected that this was an island that was constantly growing and changing rapidly when compared with most of the world’s geography, which moved only at speeds comparable to that of fingernail-growth rates. No wonder Iceland was often referred to as the land of ice and fire, for it was always a churning and bubbling engine of creation. He didn’t see any of that wild landscape here, but suspected he might in the near future, and was ready for it.

While Pierce drove, it wasn’t long before he found himself yawning, and then his tummy grumbled to tell him he was hungry. He tried to distract himself with the latest news on the radio, with articles concerning further Israeli bombings of Hamas and Hezbollah targets in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, a discussion on what bills might get passed in the new meeting of the European Parliament held in the next two weeks, and an interesting piece on a Mayan ruin recently uncovered in Mexico. But the stories failed to hold his interest because his stomach rumbled, demanding he feed it.

He looked at his watch and realised it was after 2000 hours and that the sun was still high in the sky. He’d forgotten that Iceland was close to the North Pole, and this was the height of summer. The sun wouldn’t set until sometime around 2300 hours and would rise again at 0300 hours, offering only four to five hours of night each day, and even then, night would be more like twilight than actual darkness.

No longer able to ignore his hunger, he pulled into a service station, purchased several sandwiches and a black coffee, then got back on the road and drove again while slurping and munching his way through his provisions, and feeling much better because of it.

Twenty minutes later, Pierce pulled up at the safe house Abdul Ibrahim had instructed the team to regroup at, where he would soon meet their new boss, a senior operations officer, but that was all Pierce knew about this individual at this time. Again, Pierce couldn’t understand why Ibrahim had been so cagey about revealing more details about this person.

The safe house was a three-storey dwelling with white walls and dull red corrugated iron roofing sloped so snow would slosh straight off it when it fell regularly. The doors and window frames were also of the same colour. The house was surrounded by high walls, and the entrances all looked solid, and when he looked for them, he spotted the many tiny surveillance cameras watching all approaches to the dwelling. There was a cul-de-sac to park his car, where Pierce noticed a Suzuki Jimmy, but it was the only vehicle. It seemed the safe house had nowhere to park cars in garages or behind lockable gates, which was the norm for these types of facilities. He knew Zang well enough to know that she too would have selected a Super Defender as her vehicle of choice, and the absence of one suggested she wasn’t here for their meeting. If she wasn’t here, then where was she?

Climbing out of his car, Pierce was keen to re-equip himself with weapons, for he’d only brought a folding knife with an eight-centimetre blade with him because that was all Icelandic law allowed him. While the knife was better than no weapon, what he really wanted was a pistol and, if he were lucky, an assault rifle, because he was certain he would come head-to-head with Russian operatives while he was here, and such weapons would even the battlefield out considerably. He knew from first-hand experience that Russians had all kinds of illicit weapon-smuggling routes operating throughout the Arctic regions, and they would not show up empty-handed. Not for a mission that seemed this important to them.

Pierce knocked on the front door, knowing that whoever of their team was already here would have already seen him on the surveillance cameras, and therefore he was not about to surprise them with his unannounced appearance.

When the door opened, he found himself staring at a woman he had not seen in six months, whom he thought had been fired from the CIA for gross misconduct.

“Patricia Knight! Wasn’t expecting you.”

The CIA woman was almost exactly as he remembered her from the one time they had met in Florida on a past mission together. She was in her fifties with her hair cut short, slim and good looking for her age despite the few pounds she had put on since they had last met. Most telling, Knight didn’t smile when she saw him and instead glared at him with the same suspicious gaze that he also returned in her direction.

On that one mission together, Pierce had guessed, and had later almost been proved correct, that Knight was a cocaine addict. What he did know was that she had disappeared shortly after that mission, and Pierce had presumed it was because her habit had come to light. The CIA tolerated much bad behaviour from their officers and operators when coping with the stresses they constantly dealt with in the field, but illicit drugs was not one of them. Pierce didn’t mind that policy because, in his experience, habitual users of hard drugs often, if slowly, lost their humanity, gained unwarranted confidence, and took stupid risks. Knight had certainly taken unnecessary risks with Pierce on their one mission together, so if she was reinstated, she must have somehow proved to Abdul Ibrahim that she had kicked the habit and was back to being her old self.

“Not happy to see me, Trigger Man?”

“No,” he said unapologetically.

Then it occurred to him why Ibrahim had avoided telling Pierce who their new senior operations officer was. If Pierce had known it was Knight leading the team, there was a good chance he would have turned down Ibrahim’s offer to join it. Once again, Ibrahim had proved to be as slippery as an eel, and Pierce didn’t know if he admired or detested this trait of his mentor and superior officer. Was there real trust between them or not?

“Well, too bad, Trigger Man. I’m your new boss. You can quit and go home right now if you want, or you can answer to me, and I’ll put you to work. Your choice. You already know how critical this mission is, so I’m hoping you see sense and stick around.”

Pierce stood his ground, not moving or speaking for several seconds. He wasn’t considering Knight’s two alternatives, for he had already made up his mind. He was considering if Knight would truthfully answer the next question he was about to ask her. “You’re an addict. Cocaine is your weakness. I know, so don’t deny it. How are you back?”

She nodded and looked down. “Unfortunately, you are correct. I was an addict. Ibrahim put me in a remote CIA clinic in Montana for five months. I didn’t want to go, but I kicked the habit there eventually.” She looked him in the eyes now. “I now see the error of my ways. So if that’s not good enough for you, pick the first of my two options, and get the hell out of my sight!”

Pierce locked eyes with this woman while attempting to read her.

After several seconds of probing stares on both sides, he felt that she was telling the truth. For the time being, he would give her the benefit of the doubt.

Then without another word, he stepped past her and entered the safe house.

21

Reykjavik, Iceland

From the second-storey window of another house positioned across the road and hidden behind a mostly closed curtain with the lights off inside, Kozlova lowered the binoculars she had just used to watch the meeting of the two CIA officers. “I told you I have actionable intelligence.” She lowered her binoculars and looked to the still prickly Nikolai Solovyow, who had watched the entire interaction with her. “That, Sergeant Major, is the CIA’s local safe house for the CIA team also hunting down all copies of the Luxembourg Papers.”

The big bear of a man, standing on widely spaced legs in the darkness of the shadowed upstairs bedroom, frowned as his eyebrows pinched. “I didn’t get a good look at the man, but I feel that I know him from somewhere.” When Kozlova shrugged and did not respond, he said in a gravelly voice, “Grudgingly, Captain, I’m impressed. How did you find them?”

Kozlova tried but failed to suppress her responding grin. “Yesterday, a motorcycle was stolen in central Reykjavik. Traffic-camera footage we hacked into captured by the Icelandic Traffic Authority snapped a picture of this woman.” She unlocked her cell phone and showed Solovyow the photograph in question. It was of a tall and slender individual on the motorcycle, and her eyes were just visible behind the visor. “We got enough of an image for facial recognition to make a match. Our analysts back at Yasenevo say this is former United States Air Force Second Lieutenant Rachel Zang.” Kozlova swiped to the next image on her phone, of a young, stunning woman with Asiatic features in an USAF officer’s uniform. “These days, she is a paramilitary operator with CIA’s Ground Branch.”

Solovyow nodded. “She is inside the safe house now?”

“No. She returned briefly in the morning, then left again a short time later.”

“You didn’t go after her?”

Kozlova didn’t hide her sarcasm when she laughed at the Zaslon operator. “It’s only me and Vassiliev, remember? We established multiple static motion recorders to monitor the safe house because we had other tasks to complete elsewhere, like coming to collect you and your men on the other side of this island. I can’t do everything.”

“No. You can’t.” The Zaslon officer shrugged. “But I presume you know who else is in the safe house right now?”

Kozlova nodded as she smirked. “I told you I know what I’m doing.”

“Don’t get smart with me, woman. What is your intel?”

“Other than the man we just saw, two other operatives arrived early this afternoon. A young Asian man and a Caucasian woman, both of whom I haven’t yet identified, but will. The older African American woman who you saw just then, her name is Patricia Knight, and she’s a senior officer with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. This is a CIA extraction team with the same mission objectives as ours; there is no doubt about it.”

Solovyow grumbled, then cracked his knuckles. “Do they have the two surviving journalists in their custody, and any of their Broek & Trausch data packages?”

“One journalist they have. As for data copies, we don’t know.”

The Zaslon man frowned again. “Which journalist? And again, how do you know this? And is she inside this building? And what about the other surviving journalist?”

“Let me explain!” Kozlova shook her head as she let out a long, tired breath. “This is why I’m intelligence, and you are operations. To answer your questions, in a logical sequence if you don’t mind, a farmhouse burned down last night near the town of Laugarvatn. Again, SVR Yasenevo hacked the initial police reports on the incident. No one is officially reporting it yet, but so far, the police have discovered five hideously burned corpses in the destruction.”

“How is this relevant?”

“If you stop interrupting, it will all make sense in a minute. I learned one of the bodies is Anna Birtadottir, because her credit card was found discarded in the grass fields outside the house. That is why I say there is only one journalist remaining. Birtadottir must have dropped her card when whoever it was who kidnapped her brought her there, where they also murdered her.”

“A kidnapping? This is the CIA’s doing? Orchestrated by this team here?”

Kozlova shrugged. “I don’t know. I doubt it though.”

“Why?”

“My guess is that this is a third party also after the Luxembourg Papers. Not the Americans. Not us, the Russians. I’m also guessing it was Rachel Zang who took this third, still unidentified team out.”

Solovyow laughed. “One woman against four enemy operatives? Impossible!”

Kozlova was stone-faced when she said, “You haven’t seen what I have seen in Zang’s file. Don’t underestimate her.”

“She’s no match for me and my Zaslon men.”

Kozlova shook her head. “Later on, when it’s proved otherwise, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“I don’t need warnings and cautions, woman! I only need to know where my targets are so I can do what I do best. Hunt my enemies down and eradicate them.” The Zaslon man had refused to look directly at Kozlova throughout their conversation, but now he turned and held her stare. “Is the second journalist, Kasrin Nayef, in the safe house?”

“No.”

“Then where is Zang? I’m guessing she has this last journalist with her, and the remaining Luxembourg Papers data. That’s why we haven’t stormed the facility already?”

“That’s right.” Kozlova peered through the curtains again and glanced over at the CIA safe house she had been paying close attention to over the last twenty-four hours, but there was no movement outside now. Whatever the Americans were up to now would remain secret behind those walls until one or more of them decided to leave again. “We wait because there is good reason to do so.”

“And that is?”

“That man who just arrived, that you saw, he’s well-built and moves with purpose and situational awareness. Therefore, my prediction is he’s a paramilitary operator like Zang, Ground Branch, and he will soon be sent off to join her. We can fly in a micro drone to secure a tracker on the vehicle he arrived in or follow him with that surveillance-missile combo drone you brought with you. Either way, you and your men can shadow him from a distance until he reaches wherever it is Zang and Nayef are hiding out. You can storm the place then, apply all the brute force you like, and kill them all. Then we should have all copies of the data in our hands, ready to destroy, and our mission is done.”

Solovyow stared at her with suspicion in his eyes. “Woman, I’m curious, do you know why the data needs destroying? Because you are acting like you do?”

“No!” Kozlova shook her head and lied. “No one on the team needs to know why, me included. We just need to know what ‘must’ be done with the data and nothing else, strictly because the president demands it. You don’t want to cross our beloved president, do you, Sergeant Major Solovyow?”

“Of course not.”

“Good, because it could be construed as treasonous to show too much interest in the ‘why’.”

“Don’t get smart with me!”

She shook her head and made a tutting noise, but what Kozlova did not tell the Zaslon man was that she did indeed know why the data was important, why the destruction of all copies needed to occur, and why all individuals who’d accessed it needed to die.

She knew the truth because her uncle was a powerful oligarch in the president’s trusted inner circle.

That man was Konstantine Kozlova, a former intelligence officer who had served with the president back when they were both with the forerunner to the SVR, the KGB, but they had both become so much more since. These days her uncle managed three Russian banks with billions in assets and cash reserves, “gifted” to him twenty-five years ago when the president was still establishing his recently acquired power base as the leader of their beloved nation, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the many economic woes that followed after. Those funds were there in her uncle’s bank to support any operation the Russian president put his mind to, including the recent war efforts in Ukraine, but that hadn’t prevented her uncle from getting rich and powerful in the process. But to stay rich and powerful in a country where no one trusted anyone, and power could be snatched away with a single bullet, one had to remain well informed at all times.

Konstantine Kozlova knew why the Luxembourg Papers were important and had secretly told her the real reason behind her mission’s objective, because it affected them both if it failed. He had warned her that if the truth got out, it held the real possibility of dramatically and adversely affecting Russia’s war efforts in their country’s aspirations to occupy all of Ukraine. That was good for none of them, and why Kozlova was glad his niece was on the case. In Russia, you could only trust blood, and then only with one eye always firmly planted on them at all times.

“That man, I still feel I know him from somewhere,” Solovyow said, looking back at the safe house through the still slightly parted curtains as he scratched his head. This mystery of the Ground Branch operator seemed to consume all his thinking power now while the two of them had sat in silence. Then he locked stares with Kozlova again and said in his usual gruff tone, “And what do you plan on doing, Captain Kozlova, while me and my men do all the hard work?”

The senior SVR intelligence officer shrugged. “With the male operator gone, there will be only analysts and case officers inside that safe house to deal with. I can use this situation to my advantage, and yours too, Sergeant Major. If you let me.”

22

Pierce sat quietly in the safe house’s pleasantly warmed lounge, and listened attentively while Knight brought Summerfield, Parab and him up to date on her latest mission intel. Afterwards, when Pierce and Summerfield shared what they had also learned in the last four days, Knight then disclosed Rachel Zang’s current whereabouts.

“So you’re saying Zang has Kasrin Nayef with her, and that they’re currently hiding out at a second safe house situated on the outskirts of the town Hvolsvöllur, situated in the south?”

Knight crossed her arms, then nodded.

“How the hell did you secure the last surviving journalist?”

Knight shrugged. “Not well, I’m afraid to say. Yesterday I followed Nayef to her hotel. I confronted her in her room, but she refused to listen to me. I had to be… forceful.”

Summerfield raised a questioning eyebrow from where she sat on the sofa opposite Pierce, with Parab settled in next to her. “What did you do?”

“Knocked her out, with a choke hold. Then I tied her up, put her in a car I stole, and drove her here. When Zang returned and told me what had happened with Birtadottir, we decided we needed to move Nayef somewhere remote, where it would be safe to remove her bonds and too far from anywhere for her to make any real, effective escape attempt.”

Pierce let out a snorting laugh. “Sounds like Montana all over again.”

Knight glared at him.

Summerfield looked at them both and frowned, then said, “What the hell are you two talking about?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Knight waved away Summerfield’s question. “What is important is that Nayef still isn’t talking. She’s afraid of us. Even though we are treating her well and doing everything we can to convince her we only have her interests at heart since moving her to the other location.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Summerfield. “After what happened to her three friends, I would be distrusting too.”

Knight shook her head. “But we are the good guys. If anyone will protect her, it’s us. The Americans. I don’t know why she can’t see this!”

Pierce ignored the question and asked another question whose answer was important to him. “What about the stolen Broek & Trausch data packets? Does Nayef possess any containing the remainder of the unaccounted-for files? If so, how many are left that we need to track down and recover?”

“None on her, but she claims she knows where a full copy is hidden. She won’t yet tell us where it is because she’s convinced it’s her only bargaining chip if she holds this card close to her chest.”

“Again, I’m not surprised,” said Summerfield, sounding as annoyed as Pierce felt concerning the direction this discussion was taking. “Nayef has every reason to believe that we will no longer protect her if she gives it up.”

Knight sighed and shook her head. She was the only one standing, and now she paced. “I don’t care about any of this. There is a Russian team hunting her, and they are likely inside Iceland already, moving in on her as we debate this. Plus, there is this Arabic group too, which we know nothing about. With enemy operatives suddenly getting thick on the ground here, we must recover the full Luxembourg Papers data pack and secure it before anyone else does, and get it out of the country. That’s our priority.”

In that moment, Pierce saw Knight’s position and point of view. She was supposedly in charge of this team, and both he and Summerfield were challenging her at every turn. No wonder Knight was being defensive and standing her ground when she didn’t really need to. She was the officer in charge; officially they had to defer to her. And Pierce also recognised in that moment that she had owned her mistakes and apologised for them, which was a show of her strength of character. He decided that for the time being, he would give her the benefit of doubt that she really did know what she was doing, and that she had fully kicked her drug habit too.

“Pierce? Out with it? I can see something is on your mind.”

“We do know something, though,” said Pierce as he mulled over everything he had learned thus far.

“What are you saying?”

Pierce stretched out his neck and shoulders, marginally loosening an uncomfortable twinge growing in his upper back. There was so much more talking and less doing when he was part of a team, which was a frustration he had to fight within himself to just accept. “We know now that Kasrin Nayef and Yakub Samaan are siblings. We hadn’t made the connection earlier because Kasrin had married a few years back, as Summerfield quickly deduced with her background research. After her husband, Carim Nayef, died of cancer two years ago, she didn’t change her name back.”

“How does this help us?”

“Because as Summerfield discovered earlier and confirmed by the email we read in Berlin, Kasrin and Yakub are both Syrian refugees, orphaned by the ongoing conflict there. They got out of the country thirteen years ago, after their parents were tortured, butchered and murdered by this Da’oud Alzuhur creep, around the time of the Arab Spring uprisings in Damascus. Luckily for them, they were able to resettle in Germany under refugee status. Afterwards, they did well despite the traumas they’d endured, with one of them becoming a lawyer and the other a journalist.”

“Pierce, so what? You sound like you admire them? But we only care about securing the data. Remember? Mission objectives and all that.”

Now Summerfield sighed. “Perhaps that is why Nayef doesn’t trust us.”

Knight growled. “We’re not telling her she is a secondary objective, of course. What we say and do with our assets is our business while they are still of use to us.”

Changing the subject again because he just wanted to get on with accomplishing actual outcomes, Pierce said, “Ma’am, we’ve also since learned that Kasrin has an interest in The Hague’s case against Da’oud Alzuhur of Syria’s Mukhabarat. Something in the Luxembourg Papers must be usable against this torturer in the International Criminal Court hearings. That was the real reason Kasrin and Yakub went after the Broek & Trausch data in the first place. We should be able to leverage that!”

“So something not related to CIA safe houses or the eighteen transactional bank accounts the Russians are interested in? What a big, fucking, stupid mess!”

Pierce nodded, silently acknowledging that Knight’s analysis of the situation was spot on. Then the thought again crossed his mind that the deputy director of analysis Henry Booker also desperately wanted the data, and Pierce also suspected his other boss, Abdul Ibrahim, had personal reasons for recovering the data too. And in each instance, the data that any one of these groups sought could be unconnected to anything the CIA, the SVR and Mukhabarat wanted. It was a big, fucking, stupid mess indeed.

But he didn’t voice any of these thoughts and instead said, “Based on what we already know, my guess is this Arab group is Syrian General Intelligence Directorate, or the Mukhabarat as they are more commonly known.”

Knight nodded. “I agree. Zang and I learned yesterday that a chemical distributor sold many bottles of acid to a group of chemists a few days back. We can presume this was this Arab group, but they were operating under a cover identity of Egyptian chemists, and that trail has gone cold. How this group secured weapons into Iceland, we still don’t know.”

“Interesting.”

“You were saying, Trigger Man? About the data?”

“Well, yes, the Mukhabarat’s reasons for recovering and/or destroying the data is unrelated to our or the Russians’ reasons for going after the same source files. Because of Alzuhur’s family connection to the Syrian president, the Mukhabarat’s mission is likely to stop him from ending up in a European prison for the rest of his life. We can speculate that much.”

“So what’s your point?”

Pierce leaned forward and clasped his hands together. “We can use this info, ma’am, to bargain with Kasrin Nayef. To get her to talk to us again after treating her so poorly in the first place.”

“How?”

“When this is all over, we let her keep the data she’s sourcing on Alzuhur, and promise her sanctity in the United States in return for providing us with the remainder of all the data packs she knows about.”

Nobody said a word, and this caused Parab, who had been silent until now, to look between them all, trying to catch their stares and approvals. Summerfield looked tired. Knight looked annoyed. Pierce felt hamstrung and wondered if he’d expressed as much to this group with his own emotions written across his own face. So perhaps it was no surprise when Parab, in his confused state, said, if for no other reason than to break the growing and uncomfortable silence that hung in the room like a bad smell, “I’d say it’s a good plan.”

Knight ceased with her pacing and crossed her arms again. She didn’t answer Parab directly and held Pierce’s return stare instead. “Sanctity, yes, we could probably wrangle that. But the data, none of it can stay out there. How do you even know, Pierce, if the data Nayef wants doesn’t also compromise American secrets and national security? Syria is a big fucking enemy of the United States too, if you haven’t bothered to keep up with what’s been happening there of late.”

Pierce shrugged, indicating he didn’t know the answer to Knight’s question, but what he was thinking and didn’t voice was that he also didn’t care. In his view of the world, any intel that could bring down sociopathic Syrian torturers and butcherers needed to be made public and used against them or kept secret and used in more direct and brutal ways. “Either way, ma’am, our priority now is to get Nayef and the data out of Iceland and into the United States. No one is disagreeing with your goals. But to achieve that, it means Zang either brings our last surviving journalist here⁠—”

Knight shook her head. “Too dangerous. The Russians and the Arabs have better odds of compromising our target if we bring Nayef here to Reykjavik. A better plan is to smuggle her to the north or east, where Iceland is very isolated, and she’ll be harder to find. Besides, she’s hinted that the data is in a remote location, suggesting Reykjavik is not the best place to take her to for that reason as well, because I doubt it’s anywhere close.”

Pierce nodded. “Makes sense. But she’ll want to know what the exfiltration plan is. From the get-go.”

“A CIA Air Branch team can extract her from an isolated airfield and fly her back to Washington, DC. We could pick any airfield at random closer to the extraction date, complicating our enemies’ abilities to outguess our egress intentions. A last-minute decision until we actually need to move to it.”

Pierce stood, stretching his stiff back again, and said, “Good, then I’ll go join them. Zang’s going to need all the help she can get with Nayef, considering who’s coming after us.”

Knight sighed again. “Finally, I can approve something you’ve suggested, Trigger Man. Parab, Mackenzie and I will stay here and be your ops centre support.”

Pierce nodded. “Great. Now all I need before I leave is weapons. Where are they?”

Knight shook her head and growled again. “This is Iceland, Pierce, not downtown Baghdad or Austin, Texas! Automatic and semi-automatic pistols and rifles, automatic shotguns, and semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns that can carry more than two cartridges are illegal here. They just don’t exist in this country, and they aren’t easy to smuggle in.”

“You’re telling me there is nothing in this safe house I can use as a weapon?”

She nodded as her brows tightened. “Yes, I am. Why do you need them?”

He looked at her like she was from another planet. “The Russians, of course.”

“What about them?”

“They’ll be fully kitted. Paramilitary gear, assault rifles, body armour, explosives.”

“That seems a stretch.”

“It’s not. I know the Russians. Believe me on this.” Pierce twisted his neck, cracking it, and suddenly the twinge in his back vanished. When he first stepped inside this safe house, he remembered seeing a basement, and that gave him an idea.

“There are no weapons here, Pierce, no matter how much you want it to be otherwise.”

“Yes. Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we?”

23

Pierce set about exploring the safe house, and the first area he searched thoroughly was the wine cellar. He felt no surprise at discovering there were neither wine nor racks down there to store them on. Instead, the cellar featured a half dozen metal shelves and two wooden cabinets containing all kinds of food provisions, flashlights, tents, mountaineering and snow trekking equipment, resembling more a q-store on a forward operating military base. He searched for but found no weapons other than a few more knives, each with blades under eight centimetres in length, so no better than the weapon he had already brought into the country. The walls were brick, the floor concrete, its few light bulbs hung from exposed rafters supporting the floor above, and there was nothing else.

Not ready to admit defeat, Pierce stood motionless and allowed his eyes to scan the basement, hoping that his subconscious would detect something out of the ordinary his conscious awareness could not see.

It took a minute before he saw what he had hoped to find, a patch of concrete towards the centre of the basement floor, about a metre by a metre wide of a slightly different shade of grey to all the other concrete.

Grinning, Pierce returned upstairs and stepped into the backyard, where he rummaged around in the property’s tool shed until he found a sledgehammer. When he returned downstairs with the tool in hand, he found Mackenzie Summerfield waiting for him.

She leaned against one of the shelves and held her left hand to her chin, posed as if he had caught her in a moment of self-reflection. He noticed the ragged scarring around the joint where her little finger had once been, and it reminded him of how she had lost it, during a torture session while incarcerated in Saudi Arabia. The ordeal she’d suffered would have broken most people, but Summerfield had survived due to her own fortitude and cunningness, and had grown into a tougher, stronger and more confident person as a result. And now, he could see she was about to use some of that newfound toughness, strength and confidence to challenge him.

“A sledgehammer?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

He laughed. “I’m not taking it with me into the wilderness, if that’s what you mean?” He pointed to the slightly discoloured patch of concrete. “You’ll want to stand back. Me and that very spot are about to come to blows.”

Summerfield stepped away from where Pierce had pointed to. “Mark, before you get all physical and destructive, can we talk?”

Pierce lowered the sledgehammer he had been about to raise over his head. “Sure.”

She crossed her arms. “Do you remember, Mark, that time in Camp Lemonnier, in the dry mess, celebrating our first successful mission together in Yemen?”

Pierce nodded, because he had often thought back to that particular night Summerfield had brought up. Camp Lemonnier was a United States Naval Expeditionary Base situated in the tiny African country of Djibouti, home to the Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa, or CJTF-HOA, and a primary base of operations for US Africa Command, or USAFRICOM, one of the eleven unified combatant commands of the United States Department of Defense responsible for US military operations within that continent. It was also a base from which CIA special forces teams launched covert operations into the Middle East and North Africa. Pierce, Summerfield and a variety of American and British operators and intelligence officers had been a part of those covert operations inside Yemen and other parts of north and eastern Africa, taking down insurgent and terrorists groups hostile to western interests. Camp Lemonnier had been where Summerfield and he had first met, where their friendship had first grown.

“Yeah, Mackenzie, I remember. We were drinking ‘near beers’ because no alcohol was allowed on the base.”

“And you and our British SIS friend, Eli Yaghi, were loudly singing a very out-of-tune ‘Life During Wartime’ by Talking Heads,” she said, referring to the United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service and a British operative assigned to their team under a multi-national operating arrangement.

Pierce laughed, recalling his own fond memories of that evening. “Didn’t Yaghi say that was our theme song?”

Summerfield smiled. “My point is, Mark, that was the first time I felt part of a team that really mattered. And it was the first time I felt part of a team that really looked out for each other too. I actually felt I was doing some real good in the world for a change.”

“Yeah, we had some good successes then. We were a strong team.”

“Well, that’s what I feel we have now, with you and me, Parab, Zang and Knight. You and I are a given because we have a strong history already, and then there is you and Parab getting on like you’re old buddies from way back. And I know you and Zang had a thing, and it’s over now, but she’s one of the best operators, other than yourself, I’ve ever worked with, and you know that too.”

Feeling challenged, Pierce stiffened. “I’m not going to ruin this.”

She frowned and took a step towards him. “Are you so sure about that?”

He turned and looked up the cellar stairs to ensure they were alone. “Yeah, okay, that’s fair. I have my reservations about all this.”

“If Ibrahim chose Knight as our leader, he has good reason to. Trust that he didn’t just pick her on a whim.”

“Mackenzie, Knight is a former cocaine addict.”

Summerfield had been about to speak when his words silenced her, and she looked away. “Right. I didn’t know that.” She made eye contact with him again. “How do you know this?”

“I saw enough on the one mission I did work with her on. After it ended, she disappeared for six months. Forced rehab is what she told me this morning. It took her six months to get herself back on track, or so she said.”

“You confronted her?”

Pierce nodded.

Summerfield mulled over what Pierce had told her, then said, “Thank you for telling me this.” She wouldn’t look at him and seemed unwilling to say more, even though he sensed she wanted to say a lot.

Pierce rested the sledgehammer that he had been casually holding during their discussion against the wall, then touched Summerfield gently on the shoulder. “Okay, my friend. Tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“What is your read on Knight? Do you trust her?”

Summerfield took an even longer count of seconds to mull over her response, then nodded vigorously. “I do, actually, Mark. I know she means well. You’re right though, that I should be wary, because once you’ve been snagged by a serious drug addiction, it is far easier to lapse back into it again. But I also trust that Ibrahim knows better than any of us how much risk there is in Knight relapsing, and also how good an officer she is. If for no other reason than that, I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.”

“Okay,” said Pierce as he stepped back from her to collect the sledgehammer again.

“What?”

“If you trust her, then I can too.”

Summerfield’s face broke out into a wide smile.

“You’ll want to step back now because I’m about to get all physical and destructive.”

She laughed, then stood at the base of the stairs.

When Pierce felt he had sufficient room to swing the mighty hammer, he got to work smashing the concrete in the slightly discoloured patch. After several dozen blows, he had crushed the concrete down into rubble and, after a dozen more, detected a cavity in the structure. In the meantime, Knight and Parab had come to investigate and had arrived in time to find him lifting an old-fashioned suitcase that looked as if it had been buried there for fifty years or more out of the debris.

When Pierce looked up to find Knight staring at him with an expression of utter amazement, he said, “This safe house has been with the CIA since the Cold War, right?”

Pierce knew enough history to recall that the United States Navy had established an air station on Iceland during World War II near the modern-day Keflavík International Airport site. Initially established to defend Iceland from the forces of Nazi Germany, it also secured northern Atlantic air routes and served as a stopover point for ferrying military personnel, equipment, and supplies into Europe. Later it had become a base regularly visited by the American military and other NATO allies when they conducted military exercises or spying missions into Russia when it had been the Soviet Union. It wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine this safe house had been operational back in that time, and that this suitcase had been buried as a contingency should the Soviets ever invade Iceland, its contents designed to support CIA field operatives stationed here who had now found themselves trapped behind enemy lines. The Soviets had never invaded Iceland, of course, so the suitcase had been forgotten until Pierce unearthed it.

“Pierce,” said Knight, “how did you even know that suitcase would be there?”

Pierce had learned much tradecraft in his career, and how to seek out necessary resources in the field was one subject he had excelled in. “Just a hunch, ma’am.”

He dropped the suitcase down on a flat portion of the unscathed concrete floor, then opened it.

Inside, he found multiple food cans with faded labels for cream-style corn, bacon and bean soup, and sweetened pears with expiry dates in the 1970s; a signal lamp used to transmit Morse coded messages via line of sight; a solid-state spy radio set complete with a transmitter, an antenna tuner, a synthesiser, and a receiver that also required Morse code to operate it; a British Webley “WG” army model revolver; a Beretta 950 semi-automatic pistol; two boxes of .455-calibre and .25-calibre rounds for the revolver and pistol respectively; and an old-fashioned paperback novel, Running Blind by Desmond Bagley.

Pierce flipped through the thriller novel first, finding it well worn, but with no markings. Deciding it was likely a cypher book once used for transcribing coded messages he would have no chance of decoding and because its purpose was no value to his current mission, he discarded it.

He then passed the Beretta pistol and its corresponding box of ammunition to Summerfield. “Keep it out of sight, but somewhere it is easy to reach.”

Summerfield took the items from him. “The weapons and the ammunition have been buried down there for forty years or more. Will they still work?”

Pierce lifted the revolver, noted the previous owner’s initials of “I.J.” carved into the grip, then unlocked the weapon and spun the barrel. This model of pistol had a history dating well into the 1880s and seemed to be efficiently oiled, clean and in good working order. “Ammunition can easily last a hundred years without degrading so long as the environment is cool, dry and clean. Being buried in airtight concrete in Iceland for all that time, I’d say both weapons are fine.” He spun the barrel of the Webley, discovering it was well maintained, then loaded six bullets into it and locked the top-break revolver again. It wasn’t a modern pistol, but it was better than anything otherwise available to him in this country, and a .455 round was more than sufficient to drop a foe with a single, well-placed shot.

Knight said, “Seems you have the weapons you wanted after all?”

“I do.”

She looked at her wristwatch. “When do you plan on reuniting with Zang? In the morning?”

Pierce stood as he slipped the weighty revolver into his jacket pocket. “No. Immediately.”

24

Hvolsvöllur, Southern Region, Iceland

Driving east, it took Pierce two hours to reach the town of Hvolsvöllur, where he refuelled his Land Rover and stocked up on jerrycans with sufficient fuel to last him several days of continuous driving. He also purchased food and chocolate bars, the latter of which he knew were ideal sources of energy should he, Zang and Kasrin Nayef get caught out in the cold for any length of time. He thought this to be a good idea when he watched several dark clouds pass over when he stepped out of the convenience store.

On the town’s outskirts, he turned north until he reached an F-road and followed it into the sparsely vegetated and flat landscape, with mountain ranges boxing him in on all sides. Soon the skies became overcast, and rain fell as heavy splashing droplets, wetting the volcanic soil and rock that the road had been graded from.

Yawning, he checked his wristwatch and was surprised to see it was 2300 hours. Blinking in surprise and yawning again, Pierce realised this was the middle of the night, and it was still daylight outside. He felt foolish that he had allowed the Arctic condition known as the midnight sun to confuse and disorient him. No wonder Knight had looked at him incredulously when he had departed the safe house at what must have been around 2100 hours. Then Pierce realised he would have done so anyway, regardless of where he was in the world, because time was against them, and Zang needed his help now, not in the morning.

With his windscreen wipers working frantically, he drove again until he reached a fast-flowing but wide riverbed. As a rule of thumb, rivers were often their deepest at their calmest point, so Pierce searched for, then spotted the road signs designating the crossing, then drove steadily but not at speed through the chilly flows. In the middle, water reached to the top of his tires, but the track was manageable, and he reached the other side without difficulty or complication.

He parked when he was on dry land again, then checked Google Maps on his cell phone and located the GPS coordinates Knight had provided for Zang’s current safe house. The location was easy enough to find, noting that it was about twenty kilometres north of his current position and in a rather isolated region of Iceland. When he studied the map app again, he identified that the lands north and west of his current location were comprised of nothing but mountains, Icelandic tundra, volcanoes, geysers and glaciers, and that he truly was on the edge of a vast and human-unpopulated wilderness.

Sensing that something felt off, Pierce stepped out of his four-wheel drive and used binoculars to assess the road ahead. In twenty kilometres the track turned mountainous and therefore would become windy with steep edges and curvy paths with significantly reduced lines of sight. With no other route through the landscape available to him, Pierce drove through it at speed.

At one point he passed through a narrow crevasse positioned between two steep cliffs with excellent vantage points on each side and realised this would be an ideal place for an ambush. Stopping and examining the landscape before him through binoculars for several minutes, he spotted nothing that concerned him, so he kept progressing forward and was thankful nothing happened when he reached the other side.

Once the crevasse was a kilometre behind him, he parked again on a rise in the undulating landscape and stepped out of his vehicle. Looking behind him, Pierce again used the binoculars to scan for any vehicular traffic that might be following him, but he saw nothing. So far, it seemed, he had avoided the SVR and the Mukhabarat, but that didn’t mean they weren’t out there. They could be far better at hiding than he was of seeing them.

He scanned again, for an aspect concerning his current situation still niggled, with his subconscious warning that something was not right. But without any signs of threats, even the hint of one, he had no choice but to get back in his vehicle and drive.

After he had passed along another eight kilometres of dirt track, the landscape became even more sparse, with the only vegetation comprising clumps of yellowed grass scattered in patches in the dark volcanic soils and rocks. The roads were steeper and windier now as the terrain grew craggier and hillier, and Pierce could only ever see a kilometre ahead or behind him at most, even when the wet weather cleared.

When he arrived at the GPS coordinates of this second safe house, he discovered a mountain hut adjacent to a fast-flowing stream with another white Land Rover Super Defender parked outside. Built from metal sheets and sloping roofs, the sparse hut appeared both practical and bleak in the empty landscape. His senses warned again that not all was right, and when he studied the scene in more detail, he saw that using the Defender as cover while peering down the scope of a hunting rifle held tightly in her grip was Rachel Zang, and he was firmly in her crosshairs.

Pierce killed his vehicle’s engine, engaged the handbrake and stepped out slowly with his hands raised and empty of weapons.

When she saw who he was, she lowered the weapon and walked up to him. “Trigger Man.”

He gave her a short nod. “Ronin.”

Now she broke out in a warm smile. “Mark Pierce. Who would have thought…”

The last time Pierce and Zang had been together was less than two weeks ago, in Singapore when she had firmly placed him in the “friend zone”, abruptly ending their intimate — even if only ever casual — relationship. Pierce had accepted her decision even though it would not have been his choice if he’d had a say in the matter, but intimate relationships required both parties wanting it, and when one party changed their mind, it ended. He knew he would have moved on emotionally if he’d been given time and space away from her, but that was not a luxury he could enjoy anytime soon. Now, when she was there right in front of him and within touching distance, his feelings towards her still felt raw and conflicted. His only desire was to embrace her and kiss her with all the passion he felt towards her at this moment. Instead, he steeled his emotions inside, tensed, and gave her another curt nod. “Rachel Zang.”

Then she did exactly the last thing he both hoped for or expected from her in that moment. She raced up to him and hugged him tight. “Mark, it’s so good to see you again.”

Pierce stiffened, then eventually hugged her back and tried not to read anything into this embrace that might give him hope. They were just friends. That was all this was.

She squeezed him tighter when he responded.

When he felt their hug had lingered too long, he pulled away and said, “You have Kasrin Nayef with you?”

Zang stepped away, then nodded as she scratched the back of her delicate neck. “Yeah, I do.”

She looked good. Muscular, slim and almost as tall as him, with a short choppy-style haircut, and was casually — but also sexily — outfitted in tight jeans, practical boots, a puffa jacket and a beanie, all in neutral and dark colours.

She waited until he looked her in the eye, then said, “Are you okay, Mark?”

“Sure. I’m fine.” He turned away, pretending to study the rugged and bleak landscape that kind of resembled the surface of an alien world in a science-fiction movie. He didn’t want her to know that he still held feelings towards her; that was a secret he would keep bottled up inside. “We have Russians and Syrians tracking us. I need you to get me up to speed on your situation; then I suggest we get moving.”

She laughed with a lightness in her voice. “It’s three in the morning, Pierce. You look like you could do with some sleep first.”

Pierce shook his head. “Something’s not right. I don’t know what, but my instincts are telling me we need to get moving straight away.” He couldn’t bear talking to her while she was all jovial and casual. He couldn’t allow her to break down his defences and leave him emotionally vulnerable while it was just the two of them sharing a moment together. But he also couldn’t allow their enemies to sneak up on them when they were ill-prepared and exposed in this remote and isolated mountain hut. “Where is Nayef?” If there was a third person in their group, perhaps he wouldn’t feel so awful around Zang. “I’d like to speak with her now.”

Zang nodded as she lost a little of her joviality. “Sure, Pierce. She’s inside. Let me introduce you.”

25

Reykjavik, Iceland

Mackenzie Summerfield had been dreaming about the eighteen payments the Russians had organised with Broek & Trausch when she woke suddenly and instantly sensed not all was right.

Her instincts immediately proved correct when her opening eyes focused and she discovered a blonde woman standing over her with a Walther P99 semi-automatic pistol in her grip. The suppressed weapon’s barrel was less than a foot from Summerfield’s head and aimed between her eyeballs. The woman spoke to her in English, using a Russian accent. “Make any sudden movements, and I decorate that nice pillow you’re lying on with a new colour called ‘inside-out brain matter’.”

As Summerfield transitioned out of the momentary haziness experienced between sleeping and wakefulness, she tried to understand what had happened. It came back to her that she’d taken the first sleeping shift while Akash Parab established his tech and Patricia Knight developed and implemented an extraction plan for Zang, Pierce and Nayef. The safe house was supposed to be secure, with all kinds of physical and technological security countermeasures to keep enemy operatives at bay, yet here was the SVR, up close in her face without Summerfield having time to react.

The Russian brought her handgun closer to Summerfield’s nose. “Nod that you understand.”

Fully awake now, Summerfield nodded and slowly sat in her bunk. She’d slept fully dressed except for her shoes and was grateful for that. Then her thoughts turned to the Beretta 950. She remembered she had hidden it behind a hole in the wall she’d cut out and later covered with a skirting board. Pierce’s forethought yesterday had seemed excessive at the time, but now she was glad of his honed paranoia. The weapon might be her only chance of escaping this unfortunate development alive — but only if she could get to it.

“Don’t try to think your way out of this one, American. Your intentions are written all over that pretty face of yours.” She threw Summerfield a pair of flexicuffs. “Put them on.”

Knowing that she had little choice, Summerfield placed them around her wrists at the front of her body.

“No. At the back. Turn around so I can watch you do it.”

Summerfield stood and did as the intruder instructed. “You’re SVR?”

“Of course. But that’s as obvious as you are CIA.”

Facing a wall, Summerfield couldn’t see what the Russian woman was doing behind her but soon guessed her intention as she tightened a second pair of flexicuffs around her wrists, securing Summerfield’s already bound hands to her jean’s belt at her back. Now it was no longer possible to escape her bindings by banging her wrists against her body and applying shear force to break the bond. When the Russian had finished with her bindings, she spun Summerfield around so they could lock eyes and get a measure of each other.

“Good. That will prevent you from doing anything stupid.”

Summerfield asked, “What about my colleague? Is he hurt?”

The Russian woman laughed. “Nice try. Both your CIA friends are downstairs, tied up like you are. Now move, because we need to reunite you all.” She grabbed Summerfield’s upper arm with one hand, and with her other she pushed the suppressed Walther P99 into Summerfield’s kidney, then led her downstairs, past the hidden hole in the skirting board where the Beretta waited.

In the lounge area where Parab had been preparing his computers and surveillance tech, Summerfield felt both relief and distress to see that while Knight and Parab were both alive, they were both cuffed like she was, and that Knight had a gash across her forehead that had bled profusely. Summerfield wondered why she hadn’t heard a commotion, which should have woken her and allowed her to prepare for battle with these foes.

Then Summerfield noticed the other two men in the room, and her question was answered for her.

The first man seemed to be in his late twenties, unimposing and of slender build, with a foppish haircut, a designer cut to his clothing, and a tiny wisp of a moustache. She guessed him to be a tech operator like Parab or an analyst like her, because he didn’t carry the menace or confidence that a seasoned intelligence officer like Knight or a paramilitary officer like Zang or Pierce did. He wasn’t even armed with a weapon.

The second man, however, was the complete opposite and the reason why Summerfield could now understand how they had been overwhelmed so rapidly and silently. With over two hundred pounds of muscle layered upon his beefy frame, this man looked as if he could snap limbs like twigs without expending any energy. Yet he also had a control to his movements that she had seen in Pierce, Zang, and other Ground Branch operators. In either his late thirties or early forties, he sported a neatly trimmed black beard, and his black greased hair he tied in a ponytail knotted at the back of his thick head. The Russian SR-1 Vektor semi-automatic pistol in his right hand was suppressed, and he kept it at the ready. Also known as the Gyurza, which was Russian for “blunt-nosed viper”, Summerfield knew that this was a Russian military handgun and, according to recent CIA reports circulating Langley, was currently being tested by Zaslon operators. If this man was Zaslon, he would have the same or better training than Zang or Pierce.

“Sit,” said the imposing Russian operator, his words directed at Summerfield while he pointed with his Vektor to an empty spot on the lounge next to Parab. When she didn’t move, he said in a gravelly tone, “I don’t ask a second time.”

Fearing him, she planted herself on the lounge opposite Knight. When she caught her superior’s groggy return stare, Summerfield noticed her boss’s diluted irises and an inability to focus. “My friend has a concussion.”

The Zaslon man slapped Summerfield hard across her mouth, the shock stunning her and the force rattling her jaw and causing her to bite down hard on her lip. Then she felt a hot, salty liquid inside her mouth and immediately knew that this was her own blood.

“Shut the fuck up! Bitch!”

Not wishing to be hit again, she said nothing and studied the room. While the Zaslon man seemed to be the only brute-force component of the trio, he looked to the blonde woman, and Summerfield immediately understood it was the Russian woman who was in charge.

Now the blonde Russian was looking over Summerfield, as if assessing her. Then she raised her Walther P99 and forced its suppressor inside Summerfield’s mouth in a deliberate act of violation. She removed the weapon a few seconds later, and the suppressor came away wet, covered in blood. “Novgorodsky hit you pretty hard, didn’t he?”

Not certain how to respond without provoking further violence, Summerfield merely nodded.

“He didn’t hit you hard at all, actually. If he did, that pretty jaw of yours would now be shattered and disconnected from your skull. Want him to hit you again?”

Summerfield shook her head with vigour. Behind her back, she instinctively tested the flexicuffs at her back, appreciating that the fight had not been beaten out of her yet, but there was no give in them.

“Well then,” said the Russian woman with a smirk, “answer my questions truthfully, and he won’t need to.”

Deciding that she had nothing to lose sharing information she could guess that both parties already possessed, Summerfield said, “You’re after the Luxembourg Papers, like we are. The full set.”

The Russian woman raised an eyebrow, then grinned. “You’re not telling me anything that isn’t already obvious. But the real question is, what copies do you have, where are they, and how much of the original contents do they contain?”

Summerfield remembered her intensive training at the Farm that all CIA recruits went through shortly after she had first been recruited into the organisation, recalling her instructors’ advice that when being interrogated, a tactic that sometimes worked in delaying the interrogator was to talk endlessly around commonly understood intelligence, so this was the tactic she would apply now. “We secured a full copy from Anna Birtadottir. That’s in CIA headquarters already. We don’t have it any longer. We don’t want it out in the world any more than you do.”

The younger, foppish SVR operator spoke for the first time. “If that’s true, Kozlova, we’re fucked!”

The blonde Russian operative called Kozlova sneered at him. “Shut the fuck up, Vassiliev.”

When Vassiliev saw that Novgorodsky also gave him a steely look, the younger man slinked away.

Kozlova turned back to Summerfield. “There are three of us, and there are three of you. Only thing is, we don’t need three of you. Only one.” She pressed her pistol against Knight’s head, whose physical state now seemed to have deteriorated, and she seemed barely aware of anything of the world around her. She then switched the pistol to Parab’s head, who in comparison appeared hyperaware, but was saying nothing and looked as if he was about to wet himself. “I can start shooting your friends until you tell me what I want to know. Or I can torture them slowly. Or I can torture you. You know I can do many things, and that I will get my answers eventually. It’s up to you, Pretty Face, to decide which method I’m going to use, and how many of you will survive through this intact when I’m done.”

Summerfield stuck with her earlier plan and told the Russians everything. She spoke for at least half an hour, and the only bits she left out were the existence of Mark Pierce and Rachel Zang and that they already had Kasrin Nayef. She also gave away nothing about the CIA European safe house data in the Luxembourg Papers in case the Russians weren’t after the same information, and stuck with her earlier false story that they had obtained a full copy of the Luxembourg Papers from Birtadottir, which they had since passed on to their superiors.

By the time Summerfield had finished speaking, Knight had fallen into unconsciousness and Parab’s eyes were filled with streaming tears. She felt she had succeeded in spinning enough truth amongst the lies to be believable, and had answered all of Kozlova’s probing questions consistently, because her objective was to keep Pierce and Zang in the field, allowing them any time and distance she could afford them to complete their mission and, if the fates were on her side, to come back and rescue them.

When Summerfield finished talking, Kozlova nodded her head and grinned smugly again. “That was very good, Pretty Face. A very comprehensive and detailed story.”

Summerfield said nothing.

“Only problem is, I know your operator Rachel Zang has met up with another of your operators in the heart of the Southern Region, and they have Kasrin Nayef with them.”

Summerfield’s surprise must have been clearly written on her face, because Kozlova smirked again and seemed to be enjoying this moment too much. “Hit her again, Novgorodsky. But not in the face. I need her to be able to speak clearly. But hit her hard enough so that she knows it was wrong to have lied to me.”

“Gladly.”

The Zaslon brute advanced on Summerfield as she slinked away, but trapped in the lounge as she was, she had no means to escape him. He dropped down suddenly as a fist came pounding into her gut, and the pain she experienced was both intense and shocking. She let out a tiny scream; then her eyes watered profusely.

As Summerfield tried to recover, the pain wouldn’t go away. Through its intensity, she caught Parab’s eyes, and for a moment, when it seemed no one else was looking, he mouthed the word “knife”, but Summerfield didn’t understand his meaning.

Kozlova grabbed Summerfield by her hair, forcing her to turn her head upwards and look at the female Russian operative again. “I know far more than you think I do, Pretty Face.” She turned to Vassiliev. “Take their photos and collect biometrics. Send it all to Yasenevo headquarters. I want to know exactly who Knight’s two companions are before we make our next move. And believe me, our next move will be spectacular, which none of you will enjoy.”

26

Southern Region, Iceland

Zang insisted she speak with Kasrin Nayef first before Pierce presented her with their extraction plan. The journalist was already terrified after how Knight had handled her in Reykjavik, and Zang had spent much time since trying to build up trust between them. Zang didn’t wish to break that rebuilt trust now when she was about to introduce another member of their team who had appeared suddenly, without warning of his arrival, before first providing some context. Pierce agreed.

Nayef hid in the bunk room, which meant that Pierce either waited outside or in the mountain hut’s only other room, the kitchen. He chose the latter, finding it fitted out with a kerosene-operated stove for heating the hut, a gas cooker for cooking, wooden chairs and a table, some candles for light at night during the winter months, and multiple water canisters because there was no running water inside. The mountain stream would be amongst the purest water in the world, so they were at no risk of getting thirsty.

It took Pierce only minutes to thoroughly investigate the kitchen’s contents, so he checked their other inventory next: their weaponry. He had brought the Webley .455-calibre revolver with him from Reykjavik, while Zang had secured two Browning Cynergy CX 12-gauge shotguns, a Tikka t3x hunting rifle and two flare guns more ideal for signalling than as weapons. None were ideal for modern warfare, and the revolver, shotguns and rifle each required reloading after every sixth, second, fourth and one shot respectively, which would slow them considerably in a sustained firefight should they find themselves in one. At least they had plenty of rounds for each weapon other than two single shots for the flares, but if the Russians or the Syrians were coming after them fully kitted for a paramilitary operation, they didn’t stand a chance against that kind of firepower. Why Abdul Ibrahim had been so skint with equipment and resources on this mission still bothered Pierce, and he would seek answers when this was all over. In the meantime, their best option was to keep moving and to stay ahead of the enemy, or not engage with them at all if it could be helped.

Earlier, Pierce and Zang had agreed on how to split the weapons, with them each taking a shotgun, and him carrying the Webley while she took the hunting rifle. The 12-gauge shells for the shotguns they split evenly and stuffed into the many pockets of their cold-weather parkas. Pierce thought it ironic that she had the sniper weapon when his code name was Trigger Man, but the reason for his code name had nothing to do with his shooting abilities and more to do with how he could cause unwanted problems for his enemies. But he also found it ironic that her code name was Ronin, which was a Japanese word that roughly translated as a samurai who had no lord or master, a lone operative essentially, and it was Pierce and not Zang who liked to operate outside of the chain of command and had far more issues with authority than she did.

While he searched the kitchen and checked the weapons, he’d also listened to the muffled conversation between Nayef and Zang on the other side of the wooden wall separating the two rooms, and sensed his peer was trying to dampen the multitude of fears the journalist must be experiencing and expressing.

When Zang eventually brought Nayef into the second room, Pierce noticed how red and sunken the journalist’s eyes were, and that she visibly trembled. It had been a long time since he’d seen someone outwardly displaying this many physical signs of their fear, and Pierce found himself saying, “Kasrin, we’re getting you to the States, where we can protect you. You have my word.”

From where Zang stood behind Nayef, his fellow paramilitary operator frowned at Pierce. He knew too well what she was telling him with that facial expression, that promises were vows operators never made because it was impossible to know if they could be kept.

Pierce gave his peer a nod, acknowledging that she was technically correct, but he still felt justified in his response because he needed Nayef to operate with hope if they were to get out of this situation alive.

Then he looked at Nayef again and studied her more closely. He’d seen her in the CCTV footage obtained in Germany and online photos of her from social media accounts, but in the flesh she looked different. Her straight black hair, cut to just above her collarbone, had a dullness to it, her skin was ashen, and her thinness seemed more the result of not eating than from a regular exercise regime. Her height also surprised him, much shorter than he’d expected from her online photos, for she was at least a head shorter than him and Zang. She looked to be closer to forty than her thirty-four years of age, but stress could age people like that.

Nayef looked down at the revolver, shotguns, rifle and flare guns laid out on the table.

Pierce caught her stare, noting her expressed fear of those firearms. “For us to get you safely away, Kasrin, we need these, and your cooperation.”

“You mean you want me to reveal where the remaining complete data sets of the Luxembourg Papers are hidden?”

Pierce nodded. “Set or sets?”

She looked Pierce in the eye. “How do I know I can trust you?” She looked to Zang. “How can I trust either of you?”

Zang shrugged, then turned to Pierce. “Nayef’s hardly talked since we grabbed her. But I don’t blame her, considering we literally snatched her off the Reykjavik streets and brought her here under duress.”

Nayef turned to Zang, her eyes wide, unblinking and red. “You did, and you scared the life out of me!”

“Sorry.” Zang stiffened. “Hopefully you’ll eventually see it was a better option than the alternatives. Either the Arabs or the Russians would have grabbed you by now if we hadn’t. The Arabs and the Russians would have tortured you extensively by now. With the Russians, it would have been waterboarding if what I heard about what happened to Liliana Torres Escarra is correct. Also, it wasn’t us, the CIA I mean, who murdered your three journalist peers. It was these two sadistic groups, and Knight rescued you from that.”

Nayef flared with anger. “So you keep saying. But how do I know that anything you’ve told me is not some kind of elaborate trick?”

“Knight saved your life, and I’ve treated you fairly since.”

Nayef’s face reddened. “I’m not giving up the data. Not until I’m in America and in your witness protection program or whatever it is you do to safeguard people like me in my situation.”

Observing the tension rising in both women’s voices, Pierce decided to defuse the escalating confrontation by intervening, and said, “Perhaps we should talk about your brother, Yakub Samaan?”

Nayef turned sharply and caught Pierce’s stare, expressing both anger and surprise. He saw that she had not been ready for this revelation. He could see now that she had believed she had thoroughly hidden this from everyone. “How do you know that?”

“Let me explain.”

Pierce rapidly relayed everything he had learned about Da’oud Alzuhur and his prosecution hearings in the International Criminal Court, how Nayef had studied all the proceedings and transcripts of the case, and how she and her brother had fled Syria thirteen years ago because of the horrific things Alzuhur had done to their parents. Then he laid out his speculation that she and Yakub had concocted their plan to steal data from Broek & Trausch with the primary objective of obtaining evidence that Alzuhur was indeed a torturer and murderer, and if they could get that evidence to the ICC, his case might still end in a conviction and a lengthy jail sentence. At the moment, it looked as if the case was headed in an unfortunate direction where there was insufficient evidence to prosecute.

When he finished speaking, Nayef shook her head as tears streamed down her face. She half sobbed when she spoke. “And you’re just going to take the data from me and leave me and my brother with nothing?”

“No.” Pierce shook his head. “I want to make a deal so we all win.”

He caught Zang’s stare and saw that this was all news to her too, and that with his revelations, further aspects of this mystery were also now making sense to her too.

Zang said, “So the Arabs I encountered here are Syrian Mukhabarat?”

“Yes. General Intelligence Directorate is our working assumption.”

“What’s the deal you’re offering?” Nayef asked as she sobbed.

“The deal is you can have all the data in the Luxembourg Papers related to Alzuhur so you can bring that asshole down, and that we get you and your brother into the US, where we will get you citizenship and new identities. In return, we get all the other data, all copies that you know about, and you have no claim to any of that.”

“That data was going to make my name as a journalist.”

Zang pressed her hands onto her hips and tensed. “I’d say that’s no longer an option for you, Kasrin. Your peers are all dead. Tortured and murdered in fact, and the Russians won’t stop trying to kill you if you still present a risk in publishing data that embarrasses or compromises their government further. We don’t know exactly what it is the Russians are trying to achieve, but it’s important to them, whatever it is.”

“So the truth gets buried, and the bad people of this world win again?”

“No!” said Pierce adamantly. “No, I promise you that won’t happen either.”

Nayef shook her head. “I need time to think through all this. I still don’t know if this is not some kind of trick and that you won’t kill me in the end anyway. Because from where I stand, that’s obviously the easiest option for you.”

Pierce peered out a window towards the dirt track he had followed to get here, but saw nothing that worried him, yet. “Staying here is not a good idea. We leave in fifteen minutes and no longer. For now, Nayef, I’ll ask that you provide a general direction that we head in that will bring us closer to your data copies. Hopefully you’ll see in time that we are on your side, and you’ll tell us exactly where the data is when we get there. Will you accept that offer of assistance for now?”

As her sobbing subsided, she contemplated his offer for many seconds before nodding. “Head north, then, to Akureyri.”

Zang nodded. “That’s Iceland’s second-largest city, and it has a port. It’s located in the central northern coast, and the quickest route there from here is directly through the central highlands. But that means travel through remote wilderness and F-roads for most of the journey.”

“Good. We’ll do that. Get ready to move.”

His cell phone started ringing, an Icelandic number. He guessed this would be Knight calling him on her burner phone to provide him the location of their extraction. “I need to take this.”

It was not Knight, but Mackenzie Summerfield who answered. “Code in, please?”

Pierce complied, offering a series of seemingly random words that told her that he was in position and not under duress.

“Thank you. Counter code is noxious, ambidextrous, proton, Himalaya, zest, lion.”

Pierce paused as a chill ran the length of his spine. He now heard the stress in Summerfield’s voice, even though she did her best to hide it, and more telling, the absolute silence on the end of the line when she wasn’t speaking. What he said next had to be framed very carefully because she had just warned him with her coded message. Her and his situations were extremely dire, and she was under extreme duress.

Pierce chose his next words carefully because he presumed Summerfield wasn’t the only one listening to his responses. “I’m with Zang, at the second safe house.”

“And Kasrin Nayef?”

Pierce felt his Adam’s apple run the length of his throat and constrict. “She’s secure and cooperative.”

“Good,” said Summerfield, once more doing her best to hide the stress in her voice.

Pierce realised he only detected her tension because they had worked together for a long time now, and he had learned how to pick up on the subtle signals of her mental state, which no doubt the rest of their team would not because they didn’t know her like he did.

“Knight has an extraction route. Return to Hvolsvöllur and meet at the service station on Hvolsvegur Road. From there we’ll relocate to a private airfield, where we will all extract to the US.”

“Okay. Perfectly understood.” His last phrase was another agreed code that only he and Summerfield shared, advising her that he would not do anything she had just instructed him to do. In fact, he would do the opposite. He wanted to tell her that he would come for her, but he didn’t have the prearranged code words to do so.

“I’ve got to go. Look after yourself.”

She hung up before he could answer, and Pierce found himself standing motionless and numb all over.

“What’s up?” said Zang, when she caught him in his rigid pose.

He looked up and caught her eye. “Summerfield just told me she’s being held hostage. The instructions she gave me were under duress, the people who have her captive know our location, and a trap is being set to capture or kill us.” Pierce’s thoughts immediately turned to the narrow crevasse he had driven through earlier, and he realised this was the point where his enemies would be waiting for them, should they decide to drive back to Hvolsvöllur as instructed. “We can infer from that that Knight and Parab are also hostages with her.”

Zang frowned. “How did she tell you all that?”

“We have code words we share that no one else knows about. We’ve been doing it for years.”

“You two are close, aren’t you? I’d never realised how much.”

Pierce thought he had just detected the tiniest hint of jealousy in Zang’s words, then put the thought out of his mind because to speculate on this would not help him in this stressful moment. “Yes, and Summerfield might have just saved our lives because of our relationship. However, the last two words she included in the code, ‘zest’ and ‘lion’, I don’t know their meaning.”

Zang thought on this for a moment. Then she said animatedly, “Zest-lion. Zaslon. She just told you that the Russians have her, and specifically who in Russian intelligence we are dealing with.”

“That makes sense.”

“So what do we do?”

“Summerfield was instructed to send us back to Hvolsvöllur. But we’re not doing that. I’m convinced they are laying an ambush for us at the crevasse we both drove through to get here.”

Zang shuddered. “That’s scarily highly plausible, now that you mention it. Then the only option is to drive in the opposite direction through the interior, which we planned to do anyway.”

Pierce nodded as his mind turned to the dilemma Summerfield, Knight and Parab now faced as hostages of the SVR and Zaslon. He considered heading back to Reykjavik anyway on a rescue mission, but then guessed most of the Zaslon team she had warned him about would be nearby, hunting them. He didn’t have to go to the fight, it was already here. The only realistic option was to deal with the nearby Zaslon team first, then go back for Summerfield and the others afterwards.

He checked his phone.

There was no signal.

“They’re jamming us,” said Zang as her face paled. “We can’t call out.”

“Then we need to move. Immediately!”

27

Before Pierce stepped outside the mountain hut, he scanned the landscape through its various windows using his binoculars for a more detailed assessment. He spotted a distant drone, which would have them under observation, but it was too far away to take out with a rifle shot. There might be snipers out there as well, but he suspected they would be waiting back at the crevasse. Whatever their setup, as soon as he, Zang and Nayef turned north, the Russians would know their trap was no longer viable and come for them. The crevasse was just over twelve kilometres behind them, so that was how much of a head start they would have on their enemies when they did move.

As Pierce further studied the landscape, searching for any other scouts, snipers or other forms of surveillance and seeing nothing, he wondered how the Russians had tracked them here in the first place.

Then a thought occurred, and he grimaced. The Russians could have placed a tracker on his Land Rover while he had been inside the Reykjavik safe house, or they had followed him here with the drone he had just spotted. This must have been the nagging worry that had bothered him during his drive here, and he mentally scolded himself for not trusting his instincts earlier. But he also acknowledged modern technological surveillance techniques were just getting too sophisticated for operators like him to defeat anymore.

He tried his cell phone again as he considered calling Ibrahim to request additional support and to arrange for a team to go in and rescue Knight, Summerfield and Parab, but was not surprised to find the cellular network was still down, no doubt jammed by the Russians with the sophisticated array of tech their nation commanded. Ill-equipped with their own low-tech weaponry, Pierce and Zang in comparison were on their own.

“Zang!” he called out to his peer, who was helping Nayef pack her gear so they could get moving.

“Yeah, Pierce?”

“What’s the operating status of your Land Rover?”

“Good, but it could do with more gas. Why?”

“I suspect mine is compromised. We go in yours, and we leave mine as a trap.”

“Roger that.”

Hefting one of the shotguns into a firing position, Pierce stepped outside and used the two vehicles as cover where he could. The distances that a shooter would require to cover in this vast empty landscape to take him out were far beyond only what the world’s top snipers could achieve, so he felt his risk had been a wisely calculated one. After a minute waiting in fear for that improbable shot and nothing happening, he decided that his hunch with the crevasse was correct, and he was safe to go about his business for the moment.

He got to work transferring his gear, the spare tire and the gas cans to Zang’s Defender; then he filled up her tank. Two minutes later when he was done, he looked again at his vehicle and considered how he could boobytrap it. When an idea came to him, he returned inside and removed the two heavy gas bottles attached to the kitchen stove and placed them on the backseat. Then he repositioned both Land Rovers so that Zang’s vehicle was ready to take the F-road into the country’s interior while his blocked any other traffic from taking the same route.

When he stepped inside to grab three candles and a pack of matches from the kitchen, he encountered Zang and Nayef coming out. “Get going, drive fifty metres up the F-road. I’m setting a trap and will meet you after it’s live.”

“No problem.” Zang placed her shotgun next to her on the driver’s side and her rifle on the backseat; then she and Kasrin drove off.

Pierce placed three candles down low on the footrest area of the front passenger seat of his Defender and lit them all. Then he opened the valves on the gas canisters just enough so that they leaked slowly. It would be pure luck if he could time the explosion for the Zaslon team’s arrival at the hut, but if he did nothing else, a burning and smouldering wreck in an awkwardly blocked section of road positioned between sharp rocks on either side of it would impinge the speed at which this enemy could come after them.

Shutting all the doors on his Land Rover and locking it, Pierce then sprinted up the road to where Zang had parked. She got out when he approached and grabbed the rifle from the backseat. “You drive. I’m a better marksperson than you are.”

Pierce smirked. “You sure about that? I saw your last firing-range scores. They weren’t that good.”

She smirked back. “Counterintelligence, my friend. Those were the false-flag results I wanted you to see, easily duping your overinflated self-confidence.”

Pierce nodded and lost his smile when he realised this banter was a minor flirt. He didn’t want to go down that path with her ever again, not when she had firmly closed that door. He changed his tone, so it was flat and devoid of emotion, and said, “Agreed. You sniper. Me driver.”

They jumped back into the Land Rover and drove north over rugged terrain where a bleak, empty and inhospitable alien landscape awaited.

28

Reykjavik, Iceland

After Summerfield had relayed the orders Kozlova had insisted she impart to Pierce, during which she had included the coded message he had hopefully interpreted accurately, the Russians had left Summerfield, Parab and Knight cuffed on the sofa while Novgorodsky watched over them, seated on a chair taken from the kitchen table. The oversized Zaslon operator rested his Vektor pistol on the coffee table so it was within easy reach should he need it and then proceeded to sharpen his eight-inch fighting knife. Elsewhere in the other rooms, she heard Kozlova and Vassiliev as they tore the safe house apart, searching for copies of the Luxembourg Papers, and Summerfield feared they would find the Beretta hidden behind the skirting board in the upstairs hallway.

In the living room, she and Parab had said not a word for perhaps half an hour until Knight stirred. When she did wake, she suddenly turned to her side and vomited.

“Help her!” Summerfield commanded, but the Zaslon operator ignored her and left Knight to fend for herself.

However, her boss proved able to fend for herself, and when she had finished emptying the contents of her stomach and the room stank of acrid vomit, she sat upright and for about a minute stared unblinking at a blank section of the wall in front of her. Then she recovered marginally and turned to Summerfield and asked, “What happened?”

“Three SVR operators hold us hostage. One of them is Zaslon.”

Novgorodsky menaced Summerfield with the sharp edge of his fighting knife. “Shut the fuck up!”

The CIA analyst knew better than to speak further, but she did examine her boss, noticing that the blood on her head had congealed, and her irises were no longer overly dilated, which had to be a good sign. She glanced at Parab, whom she still hadn’t been able to get any further information out of regarding his reference to a knife, but figured he had been referencing the weapon the Zaslon brute was threatening her with.

“Fuck, I feel awful,” said Knight to no one.

Novgorodsky stood and leered over Knight, bringing the blade close to her face. “I said no fucking talking!”

Knight nodded, then slunk back into her seated position.

Several more minutes passed while Novgorodsky returned to sharpening his knife, and the three Americans again sat in silence and barely moved.

Later, Kozlova returned to the lounge area with a smirk on her face. She reached down behind Summerfield, to her cuffed left hand, and felt around until she found the fleshy stub on her hand where there had once been a little finger. “Confirmed,” said the SVR operator. “You are Mackenzie Summerfield, senior targeting analyst with the CIA. You lost that finger in the Middle East is what SVR headquarters are telling me. It seems this is not the first time you’ve been held hostage and been made to betray your beloved United States of America.”

Summerfield shrugged. “I’ve never betrayed my country.”

“Ah, but you have. Today, in fact, less than an hour ago. Soon the rest of your team will be dead or in our custody thanks to your deception.”

“You don’t have to kill them. You don’t have to kill any of us.”

“Sorry, that is the risk of the game we play. There are nine of us hunting your measly two operators, with Rachel Zang being one of the hunted.” She turned to Parab. “Oh, and just so you know how good our intelligence is, this is Akash Parab, formerly of the NSA. See, we know all about you.”

Summerfield thought it, but didn’t say it out loud to Kozlova that she hadn’t yet identified who Pierce was; otherwise she suspected Kozlova would have shared this information already. What she was hoping for was for the SVR to underestimate Pierce, and the less they knew about him, the more likely they would. The Trigger Man had come through for her like that in the past.

Knight spoke up then. “And you are Captain Natalya Kozlova of the SVR. I’ve read your file too, even run operations against you in the past. Cairo, Egypt, five years ago now, or did you want to forget that one?” When Kozlova’s eyes darkened, Knight spoke faster. “You were trying to recruit one of my team from the US Embassy there. I seem to recall you didn’t get him, and I neutralised two of your SVR operatives.”

Kozlova snarled, “And you, Patricia Knight, are a cocaine addict.”

Now Knight shrank a little, as this was a barb she had not expected.

“Where have you been these last six months while you rehabbed, Knight? I heard the CIA almost threw you into prison for that misdemeanour. I’d say my track record is stronger than yours.”

This revelation regarding the cocaine surprised Summerfield, understanding in this moment that Pierce’s earlier instincts had been correct and on the mark, when she herself had questioned his conclusions. But knowing that this moment was not the time to dwell on this further, she did her best to mask any emotions this revelation was stirring in her and kept silent. Her time would come when she could fight back; she just had to wait for that opportunity to present itself.

Recovering from the barb, Knight stiffened as she said to Kozlova, “I proved my worth on my own. I don’t need some Russian oligarch uncle in favour with your president looking out for me when I fuck up!”

Fuming now, Kozlova raised her hand, ready to slap Knight, then reconsidered her actions. “You know you have already lost, Knight. I’m just waiting to hear the outcome of our ambush, when I confirm that Zang and your other man are dead and that Nayef is in our custody, and then you won’t be so smug anymore.”

A cell phone rang in Kozlova’s pocket. She answered it, speaking Russian. Summerfield didn’t understand the language, but she could see that the SVR operative was becoming more frustrated and angrier with every word the person on the end of the line spoke.

But Knight seemed to understand, and she was laughing. “Nine Zaslon operators, and Zang has got the better of you all!”

Kozlova had turned bright red, and was ready to slap Knight again, when she stopped herself and turned her attention instead to Summerfield. “You sent your man a covert warning when you spoke to him? You must have!”

Summerfield kept silent.

“Fuck! I knew I shouldn’t have let you do that.”

The skin around Summerfield’s eyes tightened as she squinted in Kozlova’s direction. Her ploy had worked, and for the moment, it seemed, Pierce and Zang were still on the run and acting independently, and they still had Kasrin Nayef with them. “Even if I hadn’t used code words, our man would have known something was up anyway.”

But nine Zaslon operators, who were all special forces trained, veterans of the world’s worst war zones, who were heavily armed and amongst the toughest combatants of the entire Russian military apparatus, could still be a combined threat that even Pierce and Zang could not defeat.

29

Central Highlands, Iceland

As Pierce drove northwards, Iceland’s uninhabited interior wilderness turned even bleaker and more inhospitable than he had thought possible. The surface transformed into a black volcanic desert, and the peaks on the horizons were a mixture of snow-capped ranges or black rock as dark as the earth around them. The skies became shadowy as heavy storm clouds rolled in, but they had yet to burst with rain or snow. Then a bright light lit up on the distant horizon behind them, which was followed seconds later by the noise of an explosion. Pierce glanced into his rear-view mirror and spotted a thick trail of black smoke rising from the location of the mountain hut. He looked at his odometer and saw that through the rough winding roads they had driven, they had only covered six kilometres since leaving the hut.

Nayef, in the passenger seat next to Pierce, said, “Is that the trap you set?”

Pierce nodded. “Doesn’t mean I took out any of the enemy though. Or that the Russians are even there yet.” He glanced again in the rear-view mirror and saw that Zang was using the binoculars to look behind them, so to give her a steadier bead, he stopped the vehicle. “See anything?”

“Not sure yet. Just give me a minute.”

Pierce nodded, knowing that she would be searching for the drone he had seen earlier.

“Wait a second! There it is. The drone. It’s coming right for us.”

“ETA?” asked Pierce as he grabbed his shotgun and opened his door to step out the same moment Zang did.

“What are you doing?” asked Nayef, again with the panic rising in her voice.

Pierce checked again that there were two shells in the double-barrel shotgun. “That drone will be armed with explosives. We need to take it out before it reaches us.”

“You can do that?”

“It’s kind of a pass/fail thing. We either do, or we don’t.”

Outside the vehicle, Zang laid her Tikka t3x hunting rifle across the engine block of the Land Rover, then lined the drone up in her sights. After a few seconds of peering down her scope, she said, “It’s darting about in random, evasive motions. Do something, Pierce, to distract it.”

“On it!”

“Hurry! It will be on us in thirty, and I’ll only have one good shot at it.”

“Roger that.” He raced to the backseat of the Land Rover and grabbed the first of the two flare guns. “I have an idea, Zang. Don’t look behind you.” Pierce turned and fired the flare into the black volcanic rock five metres ahead of where they had been driving, causing a brilliant glow of red light to flare out of the earth. He turned away before it momentarily blinded him with its luminous intensity. He was hoping the drone wouldn’t react as fast as he had, and the light would debilitate its visual sensors, which was a fault he knew to exist in some Russian-made drones.

“That’s working. The drone has slowed considerably and is veering off course.”

“Then take it out!”

Zang fell silent, for he knew she would be centring her breath and focusing on the target. Eventually she fired a single shot timed between breaths, and then a second later the drone disintegrated, creating a large blast of heat and shrapnel consistent with it being loaded with high explosives.

“First drone down!” reported Pierce. “Scanning for secondaries.” He took the binoculars and searched for more aerial vehicles, but after two minutes of searching, he had seen nothing. “I think we’ve just blinded their long-range sensor capabilities. Good shot, Ronin,” he said, using her code name.

She flashed him a smile as she clambered onto the backseat.

Pierce was behind the wheel again; then he drove around the still burning flare. As he pushed on, the road levelled out into a flat, moonlike landscape of further black, rocky desert, and Pierce picked up speed.

Nayef, gripping the passenger handle tight, said, “What happened back there?”

“We took out the Russians’ eyes and ears. Or at least we hope we have.”

“The two of you? You’ve worked together before, right?”

Zang and Pierce glanced at each other; then Zang said, “What makes you say that?”

Nayef shrugged. “You just both seem to instinctively know how to work as a team. Like me and my brother do.”

Pierce smiled as he drove fast around a large rock that had rolled onto the road. Above them, the clouds were getting thicker; then a heavy snow was falling around them.

“The weather’s cover at least,” said Zang.

After they had been driving for another hour and with still no sign of their pursuers, the storm clouds and falling snow cleared, and they came across another fast-flowing river. A temporary sign positioned at the designated vehicle crossing said in both English and Icelandic that the road ahead was closed to all traffic.

Pierce stopped at the river’s edge, then noticed a wall of steaming vapour rising along the entire length of the horizon ahead of them. “Where are we?” he asked, checking his cell phone but discovering again that there was no signal, and therefore it was still jammed, suggesting that the Russians weren’t far behind them.

“What do you mean?” asked Zang.

The wall of rising steam was an anomaly, and if these were geysers, he would have presumed they would have been chimney-like and randomly spread, not a continuous wall of water vapour rising out of the earth. “The volcanic eruption that occurred here six months ago, where was it?”

Zang and Nayef both looked as if they were about to speak, but neither said a word.

“I fear,” said Pierce, “that I read it was somewhere in the interior of the country.” He pointed to the rising steam clouds that seemed to fill the entire horizon ahead of them. “Perhaps right there.”

Zang shuffled in the backseat. “Well, I now see at least three four-wheel drives approaching on the horizon. The Russians have finally caught us up.”

Pierce shook his head. “This just gets better and better.”

“What do we do?” asked Nayef, again barely able to control the panic in her voice.

“We keep driving.” Pierce pressed down on the accelerator, raced them across the icy river without complication, then picked up speed as they covered the next kilometre of dirt track while reaching speeds of up to eighty kilometres per hour.

Then the road ran out, and in its place, a vast black lava field buried the landscape, and steam was pouring off it everywhere.

Nayef gasped. “The snow that fell earlier, it’s melting here. That’s what’s causing the steam.”

Pierce licked his lips, then bit down on his lower lip as he considered their options. “What do either of you know about lava fields?”

“Drive a little closer,” said Zang.

Pierce brought them to within a few metres of the lava flow, and they all stepped out. The air temperature was no longer frigid and chilly, but like a sauna.

Zang came up beside him and pointed a palm-sized surveillance camera in her hand towards the rock while she watched the infrared video feed transmitting to her cell phone via a connected data cable. “Didn’t think I’d need a body-heat detection camera for this kind of work, but the temperature readings I’m getting on that rock are between 120 degrees and 180 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Pierce did a quick conversion in his head, because he’d grown up predominately in countries that used the metric system, and those units were more natural to him. Zang’s numbers translated to roughly between 60 and 80 degrees Celsius, verging close to the boiling point of water. “Do you think that rock is solid enough to walk on?”

“What!” said Nayef as her eyes widened. “Are you crazy? That’s a lava field. What if it collapses, and we fall into the hot magma beneath that is obviously still bubbling away under all that rock?”

Zang pointed to the three four-wheel drives approaching from behind and now crossing the river they had passed through. “I think Pierce has a point. That lava field is too jagged to drive across, and I prefer our chances running that gauntlet than taking on a team of Zaslon operators who no doubt will be far better equipped with weaponry and firepower than we are. Especially in such an open and coverless landscape as this.”

“I agree,” said Pierce as he kicked at a black chunk of the lava rock, finding it immobile and firm. Then he stepped onto it and climbed up to the top layer of the field. “Seems to hold my weight no problem. And up here around my head, the temperature’s more like thirty degrees.”

Zang snorted. “Celsius, right?”

He smirked. “Of course, what other measurements are there?”

“Smart arse!” Zang pulled gear from their Land Rover and shoved them into two rucksacks. “See that mountain range over there?”

Pierce looked to where she pointed, identifying a long line of snow-capped peaks some two to three kilometres distant. “Yeah, I do. They seem the closest target we can aim for.”

“I agree.”

“Hey!” shouted Nayef. “Pierce, your boots!” She pointed to his feet.

Pierce looked down to see the soles of his sturdy footwear were now softening and melting, and noxious vapours were coming off them. He raced back down and off the lava rock, then darted for a patch of snow, where he cooled his feet again. Standing still on the dried lava field had been a bad idea.

Nayef crossed her arms and paced back and forth. “Trekking across that field has to be suicide.”

Zang was already clambering up onto the new rock and moving north. “Less suicidal than a stand-off here. If we keep moving and don’t stop, we should be fine.”

“Should be?” Nayef asked.

“We don’t exactly live in a universe that’s geared up with too many absolutes we can hold on to, Nayef.” Pierce slung his pack, in which he had been stashing water bottles, food and additional cold-weather gear and other survival equipment, then took after Zang. But when he looked back to where they had parked their Land Rover, he saw that Nayef wasn’t following them. “Remember what Zang said to you earlier, about Birtadottir and the Syrians torturing and murdering her?”

“What about it?”

Pierce pointed to the closing convoy of Russian special forces operators. “Whatever they have planned for us, if they catch us, it will be far worse than this.”

Nayef swallowed audibly, then climbed up onto the lava field and followed Pierce as they raced across it.

30

Reykjavik, Iceland

When her satphone rang, Natalya Kozlova knew it was in her best interest to answer it immediately. “Yes?” she said in Russian, feeling an itch in her throat.

“Your plan failed!”

Sergeant Major Nikolai Solovyow sounded pissed, more so than his usual gruff that she’d witnessed over the last two days, and wondered which aspect of the plan had not executed as he’d expected or hoped for. “We came up with the plan together, remember? Which part of our plan didn’t work?” She looked over her shoulder to the lounge room, where the three American spies remained bound and under Novgorodsky’s guard. She spoke Russian in a soft voice to lessen the chances of being understood; then remembering that Knight spoke the language, Kozlova headed upstairs and into a bedroom and shut the door behind her so she had more confidence that she wouldn’t be overheard.

Solovyow growled again. “The bit where you were going to convince Zang and the other operator to come back out the way they came in.”

“Yes? What about it?”

“The crevasse ambush we had prepared would have taken them out easily, and the last journalist would be singing like a pig to me right now! But they headed in the opposite direction.”

Kozlova resisted the urge to clear her throat before she revealed the truth to this Zaslon brute of a man. She had initially thought to keep this fact to herself, but it wouldn’t serve their overall plan if she did so now. Solovyow needed to know the truth in this instance. “The analyst called Summerfield passed on a coded message, that’s why. She warned them we were coming for them.”

Solovyow screamed so loud, his words hurt her eardrums. “WHAT THE FUCK?”

“It’s not my fault!” Kozlova screamed back. “With the intricate codes she was using, none of us could have seen or prevented her doing that.” Kozlova didn’t completely believe this statement — she could have done much more, and she knew it — but there was no way she was taking the blame for this and therefore offering Solovyow an easy pass to blemish her reputation.

“Put a bullet in her head! Right now!”

“No!”

“Are you disobeying a direct order from a superior officer?”

Kozlova calmed her tone, not to show submissiveness to this fool of a man, but to lessen his rage, because she needed him to remain calm and focused if he were to succeed in his assigned aspect of their mission. Because if one of them failed, they both failed, and doing so would put both their long-term survival into jeopardy regardless of whose fault it was. “No. Just advising. We’ll kill the three Americans when we are done, not before. But for now, they can still be useful.”

“How?”

“As hostages. As decoys. As sources of information that we haven’t yet considered. Lots of reasons, Sergeant Major.”

The Zaslon operator grumbled a string of words she couldn’t decipher.

Kozlova shook her head in disgust. This behaviour reminded her of the many special forces operators she had dealt with over the years from the various branches of the Russian military and intelligence services, including GRU, FSB, SVR, the various Spetsnaz groups, Special Operations Forces, Wagner mercenaries and OMON military special police units, and they were all the same, hard men who had been betrayed, underappreciated and forced into impossible battlefields with no backup and only the tyranny of higher command to motivate them. They entered every mission knowing they were already fucked by a state that didn’t care about them, and that it was up to them and them alone to get themselves through to the end alive, in one piece, and not to be later incarcerated in some gulag in northern Siberia if the mission didn’t go exactly as planned. Most of them were unpleasant, aggressive and violent as a result and numbed their stressed-out states of minds with a steady consumption of booze, women and drugs that instead served only to enhance their already unpleasant, aggressive and violent behaviours in an unsustainable and vicious cycle of self-destruction.

Kozlova also knew that Solovyow only saw her as just one more of those tyrannical commanders who would place all the blame on him if this mission failed, so he was already laying down all the evidence he could fabricate, implicating her as being responsible for all the fuck-ups. With the way this mission was progressing, one of them might survive through to the end of this poorly managed operation, but Kozlova doubted both of them would. Solovyow would have drawn similar conclusions himself.

The Zaslon operator, however, had not hung up on her, which suggested he still wanted something from Kozlova, but he couldn’t yet bring himself to ask for her help.

“Where are you now?” she asked.

“At that fresh lava field, from that volcano that erupted half a year ago. The Americans abandoned their vehicle and are crossing it on foot.”

“Are you going after them?”

“Of course. Four of my men are already in pursuit.”

“On foot as well?”

“Yes, you stupid bitch. You can’t fucking drive over this shit!”

“You don’t have to take that aggressive tone with me all the time. I know what is at stake here.”

“Fuck off! I’m telling you now, the rest of the team led by me will drive around it. We’ll catch them on the other side if they make it across.”

“I see. You know what you are doing, then. Why are you calling me?”

He grumbled out a litany of further unintelligible words.

“Sergeant Major, the blame for who fucked up what can come later. Right now, you and I need to resolve this; otherwise neither of us is walking away from this unscathed.” She didn’t say that she knew what was really at stake if the Broek & Trausch data was exposed, and how critical it was that they succeeded, but she wasn’t prepared to share this information with Solovyow either, purely to motivate him. In fact, it was more dangerous for her if he did know the real reason behind their mission than if he were ignorant to the potential dire consequences of failure. “You have a reason for calling me, so out with it!”

He made further grumbling noises, then said, “Earlier, the two CIA operators took out our drone. The one with the missile we were going to incapacitate them with. Shot the fucking thing straight out of the sky like it was pheasant-hunting season.”

Kozlova frowned, knowing that drone technology was sophisticated enough these days for that not to be possible, with artificial intelligence tech that made aerial vehicles dart around in erratic and random movements so that it was near impossible to get a sniper’s bead on them. “How did they do that?”

“The man. The other operator, not Zang, lit up a flare behind them. The flare blinded the drone, confused it, caused it to lose its bearings, and suddenly it was smoothing out its flight path. Then Zang took it out easily with a single shot.”

“I told you she was good.”

“I don’t fucking care about her. That’s not what this is about. I want to know who ‘he’ is.”

“Why?”

Solovyow mumbled again.

“For fuck’s sake, tell me!”

“That particular model of drone, it’s a state secret that it has a flaw with flares and other sources of bright lights, and no one inside our glorious military apparatus has yet been able to resolve this frustrating glitch. Been like that for too many years.”

“So?”

“So how does some ill-educated, American cowboy foot soldier know that?”

Kozlova considered what Solovyow was telling her. It was long suspected that the CIA had a double agent who was a high-ranking officer operating inside the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, that for years had been passing on secrets to Washington, DC, detailing her nation’s extensive and secret military capabilities. The spy supposedly went by the code name Rogue Nomad, and that was all that was known about him or her. She had heard other rumours that the Russian president himself had offered a reward of five hundred million rubles, the equivalent of five million US dollars, to whoever exposed, captured or killed this spy. Was it possible this secret regarding the fault in the drone had got out via Rogue Nomad, and now this was common knowledge to everyone inside the CIA? Or was Solovyow too proud and stubborn to admit his Zaslon team was not as efficient and effective an operational group as he reputed, when he knew deep down inside that it was inefficient tech and a failure in his team and not some superspy enemy operative that was causing these mission setbacks?

“I can think of many reasons why the CIA would already know about this flaw.”

“I don’t care, Kozlova. I want to know who this man is. Something about him is not right, and I know I’ve encountered him before.” He growled like a dog, then said, “You have his name yet?”

“No. Not yet.”

Nothing had come back from Yasenevo on this one last target in the CIA team they were still yet to identify. She had held off on interrogating Knight, Summerfield and Parab until she had at least some useful data on this man so she could better shape the direction her interrogations would take, but perhaps this was a mistake. Perhaps this man really was an anomaly.

“Then what the fuck are you doing? You have three fresh CIA operatives in your custody. They all must know something about him, even if it’s just a code name he goes by. Start torturing them and find out who he is.”

Kozlova nodded, not that Solovyow could see this over an audio-only communication medium, for she had been considering this option more seriously now that he had brought it up.

“Kozlova?”

“I agree. I’ll start with the one called Mackenzie Summerfield. I sense that she knows him far better than the rest of them do. There is definitely a personal connection there. I just know it.”

31

Central Highlands, Iceland

Checking his wristwatch, Pierce saw they had now run for a total of thirty-two minutes as they crossed the lava field, and still they were barely a quarter of the way across it.

The going had been tough, partially because the ropey rock formations resembling black tar were uneven and crisscrossed with fissures, and partly because if they stopped in one place too long, the soles of their boots started melting. These elements combined made every step treacherous because a wrong footfall could twist an ankle or catch a boot in the sharp edges. Under normal circumstances this type of terrain wouldn’t have bothered Pierce, but what made this landscape unusually challenging was the heat radiating like an oven from beneath the ground. The basaltic rock, while now solid and firm on the surface, contained slowly cooling magma metres or mere centimetres beneath the soles of his boots. When he paused for too long in a single spot, the temperature of the ground was weirdly balanced so that his boot rubber started melting, but not when he was moving.

Despite the dangers of the plateau, Zang and he were making good time as they crossed the basalt plateau, even with their heavy packs weighing them down with the food, water and survival gear they would need when they reached the snow-capped mountain range on its opposite side. It was Kasrin Nayef who couldn’t keep up despite her carrying nothing.

Pierce reminded himself that she was not trained and conditioned for strenuous and prolonged feats of endurance, but he also knew that if she didn’t move faster, it wouldn’t matter that she wasn’t up for the task, the Zaslon operators would eventually catch them. He could already see four of the enemy approaching from about four hundred metres behind them, lugging military rifles and kitted with chest rigs and presumably plate carriers and other body armour, as Pierce suspected they would.

“Keep moving,” he called to her.

“It’s too hard!”

Pierce stopped for a moment, and she did too.

“Kasrin, we can’t afford to slow down!” Now that he was stationary, he felt his feet heating, so he moved in an arc perpendicular to her position.

“I… really… can’t!” she hissed between wheezing breaths. “It’s… just…”

“What’s the delay?” Zang called back from her position in the lead, where she had been operating as pathfinder, seeking the easiest route through the radiating plateau.

“Give us a minute!” Pierce called back. “We’ll catch you up.” He turned again towards Nayef, and while still moving, he took out a pocket-sized notepad he had brought with him from the Reykjavik safe house, then screwed its paper sheets into a ball. He had an idea on how to scare her, because no other emotion seemed motivation enough to keep her moving.

“What are you doing?”

“Your feet,” he said, pointing to the soles of her boots.

She looked down and saw the fumes coming off them as they started melting. “Fuck!” She moved again, but still not as fast as Pierce would have liked her to.

“You can’t stop. It’s suicide to do so.” He threw the crumpled ball of paper onto the basaltic rock at a point between them. Within a few seconds it was smouldering. Within ten seconds it had burst into flame and quickly disintegrated into ash and black smoke.

“Fuck!” said Nayef.

Pierce felt air rush past his head; then a second later he heard a gunshot.

Instinctively, even though the shot had already missed him, he ducked low and ran fast in a zigzag across the basalt. Looking back as he moved, he saw that four Zaslon men had gained much more distance than he had expected them to in that short time he had spent speaking with Nayef, and now less than three hundred metres separated them. One had just halted long enough to get a bead on him to take a shot.

“Pierce!” yelled Zang from behind him. “Keep moving!”

“Roger that!” He sprinted to Nayef, grabbed her by the arm and then dragged her along beside him as they trekked again. Soon she was puffing and wheezing again, and he still couldn’t get her moving fast enough with the undulating rock surface slowing them down.

He heard two more shots.

Then he spotted Zang halting, to take a bead with her rifle and to fire off four shots.

Pierce heard a grunt behind him and turned just fast enough to see one Zaslon operator drop as a bullet struck him. Pierce grinned to himself, grateful that Zang was indeed a better marksperson than him, and that she had kept the rifle. Then he noticed the other three enemy operators were now less than two hundred metres from him and Nayef. If he kept running at the speed they were maintaining, the Zaslon killers would eventually come close enough to easily finish them both with clean shots. There was no other option now but to halt and engage.

“Keep moving!” he said to Nayef. “Don’t look back! Follow Zang!”

“Why? What are you doing?”

“Slowing them.”

Pierce raised his shotgun and fired both barrels in the direction of the closest operator. He missed, but his shots forced the Russian to halt and seek cover, yet there was nowhere to hide.

Nayef was still standing next to him, and both their boots were now smouldering again.

“Run! Now!”

The desperation in his tone finally seemed to be enough to propel her into action, and she took off.

Pierce moved too, in a perpendicular direction to his attackers, towards a not particularly tall natural chimney stack of basalt that might provide him with at least marginal cover. While he moved, he emptied the spent shells in his shotgun, then loaded two more rounds.

One Zaslon operator now engaged him with a burst from his military rifle, chipping and fragmenting basaltic rock around Pierce as he sprinted faster.

Pierce returned fire, not with any intention of taking the enemy out, but to force them to duck, thereby slowing them. Then he considered that in this open plateau with almost no cover, it was suicide for either side to get too close to the other.

Then he heard one of the Russians swear with a desperation in his tone Pierce had not expected. While maintaining his erratic pace, Pierce glanced towards the sound coming from the man and saw the operator standing over the corpse of his peer whom Zang had either wounded or killed earlier. The body now smouldered; then Pierce spotted licking flames. Lying on the rock had superheated the dead man’s gear and clothes.

Suddenly, he erupted as an inferno of barbequing meat.

The Russian next to him swore again.

As Pierce moved closer to the natural chimney stack, the air around him grew hotter still, and the atmosphere rippled. He saw why. This was the volcano’s crater, where red-hot molten lava flowed beneath the surface rocks, about a metre down and seen between cracks and fissures. In the central crater, not previously visible to him before because it had been behind the chimney stack, was a pool of lava about three metres across. It churned and spluttered and spat out tiny globules of molten rock from time to time. Then he could smell the noxious sulphur dioxide fumes oozing out of the lava.

He decided he wasn’t getting any closer.

He looked back to see what the Zaslon men were doing.

Then the dead man exploded, surprising them all. The force of the blast catapulted the Russian standing next to him five metres across the black rock. He tumbled and smacked against the jagged rock as bones broke and snapped, to come to a halt seconds later in a position that no living human could possibly adopt.

Presuming the first dead Russian had carried grenades on him and the heat of the earth had caused them to detonate, Pierce gave the incident no further thought as he paused, lined up the closest living Russian with his shotgun and shot him square in the back. The man jerked, then fell forward, his arms and head snapping backwards. The fool had looked behind to see what the explosion was, giving Pierce the precious seconds he needed to take him out.

Then the last standing Russian strafed him with a continuous burst of fire from his military rifle.

32

Pierce dived, knowing that both standing or dropping were equally problematic options. He figured in the split second he had to consider which choice he’d make, burns were optimal to a bullet wound. He’d dropped in time to ensure dozens of rifle rounds filled the empty air above him and had not entered him instead. But the basalt field was both jagged enough to cut and hot enough to burn. He felt his jacket tear open on his upper left arm and across his shoulder. Then he felt his left side heating, and he could smell smoke.

With enough sense in him not to touch the rock with his gloved hands, Pierce leveraged the shotgun as a crutch and used it to clamber to his feet again, only just fast enough not to sustain serious burns.

Once he was up on his feet, he heard further shooting.

Then he witnessed the last Russian jerk backwards as a bullet hit him in the shoulder, and he spun fast to turn side-on to Pierce. Zang was still in the game and had just saved his life with another well-placed shot.

Pierce raised his shotgun, lined up the still staggering foe, and shot him through the face with his own well-aimed round, finishing him off.

Then he saw his own parka was alight across his left shoulder.

In desperate motions, Pierce patted down the dancing flames with his right arm to put them out while managing not to burn his hands further in the process.

But his actions distracted him from seeing the Russian he had shot in the back now coming for him with an eight-inch fighting knife out in front. He wore body armour, which explained why Pierce’s earlier shot hadn’t killed him outright. The right side of his face was badly burned with weeping red sores and exposed flesh where there had once been skin, and his right hand was black and mangled from where he must have pressed too long on the rock while he’d been down. This explained why he hadn’t taken another shot at Pierce. Rifles required two hands to operate. Instead, he lunged again with his blade and struck within a few centimetres of Pierce’s throat as Pierce stumbled backwards to get out of the way.

They separated as the Russian howled at him like a wild animal, perhaps in an attempt to control his pain and fill his body with adrenalin, or it was an act to terrify Pierce. Likely it was both.

Then he rushed Pierce again with his blade ready to impale.

The shotgun was spent, so Pierce used it as a cudgel and blocked the knife strikes. The Russian was huge, bulky with muscle, and loomed over Pierce like some kind of nightmarish supernatural demon. Every time Pierce blocked, he advanced again, thrusting with the knife but never getting close enough to effectively wound him.

Then Pierce realised why.

The Russian was forcing him towards the lava-spewing crater. He had no intention of finishing Pierce off himself but would leave it to natural hazards to do the job for him.

Pierce thought to reach for his revolver in his parka pocket, but it was too awkward to reach in the time frames between strikes.

Then another explosion sounded behind the Russian. Another Zaslon operator’s grenades detonating, disintegrating another corpse.

He hoped this was distraction enough for the last Zaslon operator to glance back and see what had happened. But his foe was either too wise to let his guard down, or his animalistic instincts were too dominant, making him oblivious to everything else that wasn’t Pierce.

Pierce blocked again with his shotgun.

Behind him, his back and neck warmed with the heat radiating behind him. He sensed the blood from his shoulder and arm wound trickling down inside his clothes. If he didn’t come up with a new strategy, he would soon be dead.

The Russian struck again, and once more Pierce stumbled backwards.

Then Pierce spotted that the Russian was about to get his foot caught in a jagged twist of basalt. Pierce feigned to his right, prompting the Russian to follow in that direction until his foot caught. This surprised him, and he glanced down to see what had slowed his forward progression.

Pierce wasted no time as he swung his shotgun like a baton and smashed it against the already crippled and blackened hand.

The Russian screamed, dropped his knife and used his good hand to grip the wrist around his ruined stump.

Pierce yanked him by his chest rig, which loosened him from the jagged basalt, and then propelled him sprawling across the hot rock.

To Pierce’s surprise, they were on a slope, and the Russian kept rolling for several metres until he went over the lip of the crater and disappeared into the pool of lava bubbling away in its many thousands of degrees of pure heat and menace. He screamed for a few seconds; then his wails turned into sobs, then gurgles, then nothing. Out of Pierce’s line of sight, the Russian had likely burned on the bubbling surface, because lava was too viscous to just sink into. Pierce didn’t want to get any closer to confirm his suspicions. He didn’t need that kind of horrific death seared into his mind’s eye for the rest of his days on this earth.

Then he remembered the grenades the Russian likely carried on him.

Pierce sprinted for at least ten seconds, getting away only fast enough as the corpse exploded. As well as the blast sending flesh, shrapnel and broken weapon bits scattering into the sky, it also splattered globules of lava into the air behind him. Pierce had run just in time for those globules to not come raining back down on top of him.

For a few seconds Pierce stood stunned and numb where he was. The heat was like standing next to an open oven. The smell of sulphur dioxide was making him feel sick. The sweat was pouring off him in bucket loads.

“Pierce!”

It was Zang calling to him, and her words snapped him out of his trance.

“Come to me. It’s not as hot here.”

Pierce nodded, remembering where he was and how dangerous this environment was. His boots were smouldering again, so he took off in a sprint towards where he could see Zang and Nayef.

He thought of going back for one of the military rifles the Russians had brought with them. They were modern AEK-971 selective-fire 5.45×39mm assault rifles, recently deployed to Russian Spetsnaz units and some airborne personnel and, as it seemed today, also to Zaslon fire teams.

As Pierce ran, he cooled in the less hot air and noticed that the ground underfoot was not as hot as it had been earlier.

“How the hell did you pull that off?” Nayef asked when Pierce reached her and Zang.

“Don’t know. Actually, I don’t even think about it while it’s happening. I just embrace the moment and go with it.” He remembered the last Russian slowly expiring as he burned to death on the bubbling lava field. “But now you’ve got me thinking about what just happened, I’d rather not. Let’s just keep moving.”

33

Reykjavik, Iceland

Mackenzie Summerfield’s hands had turned numb from the hours she had spent cuffed, and suspected Knight and Parab seated next to her also endured the same physical pain. In addition to her bindings, Knight also suffered from concussion, so she faced a worse predicament. But Summerfield also knew from both her CIA training in interrogation-resistance techniques and horrific previous experiences where she had personally endured prolonged torture and incarceration, their situation would only worsen, not improve, unless they could find a way out. The objective, therefore, before their physical and mental states deteriorated to a point where they were helpless, was to negotiate, fight for their freedom, or if it got really bad, end their own lives.

The first problem in achieving the freedom option was dealing with Novgorodsky, the beefcake Zaslon special forces operator with the chiselled body of a champion wrestler and the attitude of a badly treated guard dog, for he gave them no latitude to move or even speak. In her silence, Summerfield had watched how he played a game of solitaire with a pack of cards, and how he often looked up and studied them each intently every time one of them shuffled to find a more comfortable position to sit in. There was no gap in his methods that they could exploit, which left her feeling depressed.

After an indefinable period of hours had passed, Kozlova and Vassiliev re-entered the lounge room, returning from wherever else they had secured themselves inside the safe house during that time. Kozlova was focused and quickly fired off a series of instructions in Russian to Novgorodsky.

Whatever she said caused Knight to sit straighter and tense while her eyes grew wider in their sockets. It was at that moment that Summerfield realised Kozlova was not pointing at Knight or Parab, but at her.

Novgorodsky nodded, not expressing much interest in whatever Kozlova had said to him.

Then Vassiliev reached for Summerfield and pulled her to her feet.

Parab swung from side to side, his eyes searching the room for something that Summerfield could not guess at, and he seemed unable to see it.

“You can’t!” said Knight, bellowing and squirming where she sat. “Interrogate me instead! I’m the senior officer! I know far more⁠—”

She had been about to plead further but hadn’t seen Novgorodsky’s meaty fist fly like a missile through the space between them and punch her hard in the head again. With the shocking impact, Knight’s eyes suddenly rolled up into her skull, and she wavered in silence for a second before dropping unconscious again to the floor.

No one made any attempt to check on her.

After many seconds of no one saying anything, and Novgorodsky returning to his card game as if nothing had just happened, Kozlova let out a nervous laugh. “Looks like you’re the senior officer now, Summerfield.”

“You bitch!” Summerfield struggled with her bindings and the grip Vassiliev had upon her, but with his greater strength and her bound hands, she got nowhere fast.

“Calm the fuck down, Summerfield! You and me and Vassiliev are going to have a little chat. How pleasant that chat will be is up to you. Let’s go.”

Despite Summerfield’s physical protests, her two captors easily dragged her up the stairs and into a bathroom while Novgorodsky kept up with his card game.

Once upstairs, it was no surprise to see the bath filled to the brim with cold water, chilled by the copious amount of ice floating in it. Summerfield shuddered when she realised that they were about to torture her through suffocation by drowning, and the icy water was there to increase the pain.

“I’ll talk! Please!”

“I know you will.” Kozlova pushed Summerfield down onto her knees so that she was forced to stare at the bath face-on. Then the Russian woman held her head immobile by gripping a handful of Summerfield’s hair and held it tight in her fist. “This is also a training exercise for Vassiliev. He’s never conducted an enhanced interrogation in the field before. I am correct, Lieutenant?”

The pale young man looked as if he were about to puke. “No, Captain.”

Summerfield spoke fast. “This goes against your every moral fibre, doesn’t it, Vassiliev?”

Before he could answer, even with his eyes, Kozlova pushed Summerfield’s head into the icy water, submerging her while the Russian’s second hand pressed her hard in her back. With this pressure and her hands bound behind her, Summerfield had no means with which to resist. She struggled, tried to lift her head, but there was no force she could muster to achieve this. Suddenly air was escaping her mouth, and she imagined she was screaming underwater. She feared the chilly liquid was about to enter her lungs, drowning her, and if she remained submerged too long, that was exactly how it would happen.

And then the arm pulled her back out of the water, and Summerfield gasped for air. She couldn’t think rational thoughts as a primal fear overwhelmed her. Summerfield felt she had regressed to emotions very young children experienced but didn’t yet have the words to describe.

Kozlova spoke after a moment. “And that, Vassiliev, is how we do it. Do you want a turn now?”

Still on her knees and Kozlova still holding her immobile, Summerfield recovered enough to see the fear in the young Russian man’s gaze. He didn’t want to be here any more than she did. If Summerfield had any chance of surviving this torture session, it would only be through appealing to Vassiliev’s humanity.

Vassiliev coughed into his hand, then said in a quiet voice, “Ah, how long…? How long should I hold her under each time?”

Kozlova laughed, expressing genuine amusement at his question. “Generally…” Then she paused and finished her lengthy reply in Russian, of which Summerfield did not understand a word.

“That long?” He hugged himself and scratched both shoulders with his fingers. “Won’t that kill her?”

Kozlova again answered him in Russian, and her remarks served only to further pale Vassiliev’s already ashen complexion.

“What do you want to know?” Summerfield asked, dreading to re-experience the horror of being submerged underwater again. “I’ll tell you anything! Just tell me what you need to know.”

Kozlova smirked. “All in good time, Summerfield. First, though, I want to ensure Vassiliev here gets his technique mastered. When he does, depending on how long that takes, is when we’ll start with the real questions.”

Summerfield couldn’t believe what she was hearing. In her fear, she decided to share information the Russians had likely already worked out. Delay, that was all she had to achieve, a delay in the torture until she could escape or until someone else came and rescued them, such as Pierce or Zang. “I did send the male operator in our team a coded message. I warned him that you had a trap set for him.”

Kozlova smirked again. “We already guessed that. A name? What is his name?”

“His code name is Trigger Man,” said Summerfield, panting hard from where she kneeled by the bath, saturated in icy water, and forcibly looking upwards with a stiff neck at Kozlova, who still held her immobile. “That’s all the rest of us know about him. He was assigned to our team yesterday. A deniable asset. A Velociraptor special access program asset.” She made up the last name, for no such program existed as far as she knew.

Kozlova and Summerfield shared a long moment of eye contact, and Summerfield couldn’t read anything in the woman as to her intentions on what she would do next.

“Trigger Man, you say?”

Summerfield nodded.

“See,” said Kozlova, looking bored. “They always start out lying. Or sharing harmless half-truths. It takes a while to break them. And to get the truth.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“So now it’s your turn, Vassiliev. Come over here and learn how to properly hold her head down in that icy water. And while you’re practicing, I’ll pass on this Trigger Man intel to the Zaslon team and SVR headquarters. One of them, at least, should know something about this man that we can use.”

34

Central Highlands, Iceland

After an hour of further rapid marching over the black basalt field, which had gradually decreased in its radiating temperatures as they’d crossed it, Pierce, Zang and Nayef reached its northern edge and stepped back onto a more familiar sandy and rocky desert landscape. As they all took a moment to catch their breath and rest a moment, Pierce reflected on how insane it had been for them to risk crossing a still cooling lava field, but then reflected it was still a better option than taking on multiple Zaslon operators from a boxed-in position.

A few hundred metres further ahead of where they rested, Pierce spied the near lifeless wilderness transform again into steep black mountains covered in caps of white snow and patches of dark green moss-like vegetation. To the right, the ground dropped into another fast-flowing river, this one sourced from a lake at the base of a wide glacier about a kilometre across and at least fifty metres high. It extended so far into the snow-capped range ahead of them, it was impossible to see where it ended.

After a minute passed whereby the three of them stood and did nothing, first Zang, then Nayef and finally Pierce dropped to their knees, then their haunches and literally fell upon the secure earth. From where he lay supine, Pierce unslung his pack and immediately felt lighter as a result. He heard Zang do the same. For about a minute, no one moved, and all anyone could do was breathe heavily while they recovered their strength and energy.

After another minute had passed, Pierce felt the intense pain in his upper body that he had been able to ignore until now. He sat and tore off his jacket, then removed his sweater, shirt, and thermal top until he was bare-chested. The air was chilly here, well below zero degrees Celsius now they were away from the radiating lava field, so he knew he had to deal with his injuries fast before he froze.

Examining his wounds from the few angles available to him, he saw the cuts on his left arm were deep and long but had not bled significantly. The skin around these wounds was also red from burns but had thankfully not blistered too badly. It all hurt like hell, and more so now that he could see the extent of the damage. He hoped the injuries on his back, which he could not see, were of similar or lesser severity. He flinched as both Nayef and Zang approached to see the extent of his wounds for themselves.

“It doesn’t look too bad,” said Zang, standing behind him.

He couldn’t tell if she was saying this because she spoke the truth, or because it was bad, and she didn’t want him to lose courage until they could secure professional medical attention.

“Some ketamine for the pain, followed by a washing-out of those deep cuts with saline solution. Then antiseptic swabs. Then supergluing the openings back together, and then some antibiotics. See, no problem. You’ll be all good in minutes.”

Pierce laughed, but it hurt to do so. He pulled out his first aid kit, then rummaged around, searching for syringes and the pharmaceutically sealed vials of the ketamine painkiller.

“But first,” said Zang, “I need to assess our tactical situation.”

“You do that. I can fix myself.”

Zang raised a questioning eyebrow. “I’m not sure you can.”

Nayef, who was close to Pierce, now spoke up. “I can help.” She had been checking the soles of her boots, which, like Pierce’s and Zang’s, were a melted congealed mess imbedded with particles of sand and small rocks. They were still suitable as footwear but were without the grip a normal hiking or combat boot provided in the field, which could still be problematic in the near future. “I’ve training in first aid.”

Zang stood tall and planted her fists onto her hips. “Battlefield first aid?”

The journalist shrugged. “Kind of. I volunteered at a hospital in the West Bank, years ago. For three months, I provided first aid to Palestinian refugees with all kinds of wounds, some of them being gunshots and others being burns. Was there on a cadetship with a local Palestinian newspaper while finishing my degree. That was only part-time work, so hospital work filled in the rest of my time there.” She shrugged. “I learned things, but I’ll admit I’m a bit rusty.”

Zang grinned. “That’s good enough for me. Pierce can guide you where there’s any gaps in your memory. It’s not like this is the first time he’s needed patching up. He’s experienced too.”

“Weren’t you assessing something, Zang?”

She poked her tongue out at him, then turned and wandered off.

Pierce turned to Nayef. “Can you get to work now, Nayef? It’s freezing, and I’ll start shaking soon, and it hurts like hell.” He looked at his hands, expecting his neurological infliction to debilitate him in this moment, but his fingers and wrists were as steady as the mountains around him. He turned to Nayef again. “Plus, I don’t want a case of influenza on top of all my other problems right now.”

She nodded and got to work.

First, as Nayef injected ketamine into the muscles surrounding his wounds, Pierce felt a calmness come over him as the pain shrank away, becoming a sensation in his body that he was aware of rather than the agony that had been debilitating him earlier. He hardly felt the saline solutions that Nayef squirted through his wounds, or the tweezers she used to pick out caught fibres and other debris.

“Thanks,” he said as she worked, feeling exhausted during the entire process, but also aware that they still had a long trek ahead of them before they were out of this mess.

“You’re welcome. It’s the least I can do after…”

She didn’t finish her sentence, and he didn’t prompt her. She was coming around to trusting them, and the best strategy was to let her do so in her own time. That meant letting her do most of the talking when they did converse.

To pass the time while she patched him, he watched Zang some fifty metres distant, standing on a rise and looking through the binoculars to the way they had come. There would be further Zaslon operators hunting them, and they might be driving around the lava field even now to reach their position if they could find a path through this rugged wilderness, for there were no F-roads visible nearby.

“Maybe I was wrong about you both,” said Nayef, with a confidence now that Pierce had not yet witnessed in her.

“Oh yeah?”

“You and Zang really are fighting to save my life?”

Pierce chuckled. “Of course.”

She didn’t respond immediately, but eventually asked, “Why?”

“Because what you do matters. Because your reason for securing the Luxembourg Papers doesn’t conflict with what the CIA needs them for.” He felt her hands applying the antiseptic swabs to the cuts on his back and recognised that she was so much gentler than medics he’d dealt with in the past who’d patched him up after suffering similar wounds in the field. “It’s also because I really hate the Russian military establishment, and if this is an opportunity to take them down, even just a few of them, I will.”

She laughed then. It was the first time he remembered her doing so. “I don’t think the last reason is true. You and Zang strike me as individuals who’d rather do good than bad. At least I hope you are.” She swabbed another wound on his back, and he flinched. Despite the ketamine, his injuries still stung in places. “Fighters like you, I know it’s your job to kill people. But only bad people, I hope. But good or bad, killing is difficult for me to reconcile. I spent my whole adult life trying to get away from senseless and barbaric killings.”

Pierce chuckled again. “You might not be a killer, but you’re a fighter, Kasrin. Isn’t fighting what this is all about, and why all this mess started in the first place? A fight to achieve freedom from tyranny?”

“I guess you are right. At first, I thought you were like all the other killers, and I didn’t think you and Zang were on my side. But after watching what you both went through back there on the lava field, especially you, I’m starting to believe you.”

“Well, it’s not over yet. You still have time to make up your mind about us both. Good or bad.”

“I’m close on that.” She sealed the last of his back wounds with the superglue. “There, all done.”

“Thanks. Now for bandages.”

“Of course.”

Zang returned to them and stood before Pierce and Nayef. “The same three four-wheel drives we saw earlier are rapidly approaching. They’re still some distance off, but they’ll be here within the hour. Less so, I suspect.”

Pierce nodded. “Don’t suppose you ascertained their numbers?”

“No, too far away to pick out individuals and weapon capability. Seems you are nearly done here. I’ll keep watch until you are ready to move, and determine the best route out of here.”

“Good plan.” He checked his cell phone while Nayef wrapped bandages around his chest, back, left shoulder and upper arm. He noticed he had connectivity again. The Russians’ jammers would be too far away to remain effective. Pierce also knew this was an opportunity that wouldn’t last as their enemy drew closer. “I have a signal. I’ll call Ibrahim.”

“Who is Ibrahim?” asked Nayef.

“Our boss,” Zang and Pierce answered her simultaneously.

Pierce said, “I’ll arrange for a team to secure Summerfield, Parab and Knight. Then for a team to get us out of here.” He turned to Nayef. “The last copy of the Luxembourg Papers is in Akureyri, right?”

She held up two fingers and nodded. “At least, that is where Anna Birtadottir said she hid them. I have detailed instructions on where they both are once we get there.”

“In two separate locations?”

“Yes. Why?”

“That’s interesting. So there are two copies, both containing the full data set you took from Broek & Trausch? Please be clear on this.”

“Yeah. Anna Birtadottir was smart like that.” She sighed, then blew out a long lungful of air. “I just want this to be over, to be with my brother again, and for Da’oud Alzuhur to never see the outside of a prison cell, ever.”

Pierce nodded as Nayef tightened, then secured the pressure bandages around his wounds, and he was glad, for he didn’t wish his sliced flesh to reopen when they moved again. But now he was shivering from the cold, so when she finished, he quickly dressed in fresh clothes from his pack. Then he dialled Ibrahim.

Only it wasn’t Ibrahim who answered.

“Trigger Man,” said Henry Booker with a steely tone, “I hope you have all the data I tasked you to collect, or there will be hell to pay.”

35

Stepping away from Nayef and Zang so he could speak privately, Pierce stared out across the vast empty Icelandic landscape of snow, black rock and sparse vegetation, and realised again how isolated he and his team really were. The deputy director of analysis, Henry Booker, wasn’t making him feel any more connected to the civilised world. Instead, he was doing the opposite, expressing the venom he felt towards Pierce in the few harsh words they had shared.

“You do have the Broek & Trausch data?” Booker asked again when Pierce didn’t answer him the first time. “All remaining copies of it?”

“Yes,” said Pierce, doing his best to keep his emotions out of his inflections. “All other copies are now destroyed, thanks to the Russians. One remains,” he lied, “and I’ll have that to you in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, depending on how much assistance you can provide in the next one to two hours.”

Booker snorted. “Where is the data?”

“Akureyri.”

There was a pause as Booker presumably searched for the Icelandic town online. He was probably also reading its Wikipedia page. “That’s an entire city, with a population of twenty thousand people. Your answer isn’t specific enough.”

“That’s as much intel as I have right now. But I’ll have more when you send support⁠—”

“Don’t you bargain with me, Trigger Man. You are a serving operator of the United States government. You will obey orders as I give them, not dictate your own.”

Pierce growled. He had been about to point out that Booker was Directorate of Analysis, while Pierce reported through the Directorate of Operations chain of command, so technically Booker had no authority over him. But Pierce knew immediately upon thinking this, his argument would get him nowhere. Men with power did whatever the hell they felt like and ignored the rules when it didn’t suit them.

“You hear me, Trigger Man?”

“Three of my team, Knight, Summerfield and Parab, are currently being held hostage by a Russian Zaslon team in Reykjavik.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Exactly what I said.” He gave the address of the safe house. “This is their last known position. You need to secure and rescue them immediately.”

“How the hell did that happen?”

“With all due respect, sir, let’s debate that when they are safe. Get them rescued, and then I’ll tell you where the data is.”

“Fuck you, Pierce, you insolent little shit!”

Pierce paused and just breathed for a few seconds. He knew he was allowing the DDA/CIA to rattle him, but Summerfield and the others were in mortal danger, and there was nothing he could do to help them from his current position and circumstances. But Booker, on the other hand, could.

“Me and Zang would appreciate backup support too.” He gave the GPS coordinates of his current position. “But we’ll get up on top of the nearby glacier, where it will be easier to spot us for a rescue.”

“You are fucked up, Trigger Man.” Booker growled again. “Your very short leash just got miniscule.”

“How about I make this decision easy for you? We’re being pursued by a Zaslon team of unknown numbers. If we don’t get out of here soon, we die, and then we won’t be able to provide you with the location of the last data set.”

“Fucking hell! You and I will have words later.”

There was a pause while Booker presumably muted the call and barked orders to his underlings, no doubt gathering them around him, or was receiving up-to-the minute intelligence briefs pertinent to this operation.

As Pierce waited, he considered again how little backup his team had received for this mission, both from Booker and Ibrahim, and was now convinced more than ever there was a reason why this was so, and one he was not likely to appreciate when he learned the truth of it.

“Pierce?”

“Yeah? I’m still here.”

“I’m arranging for the Icelandic National Police Force to intervene in Reykjavik. Also, I’ll commission a helicopter to come out to you from Naval Air Station Keflavik. ETA ninety minutes. Can you hold out⁠—?”

Pierce was about to answer when the line turned to static.

That could mean only one thing, the Russians were close now and had reactivated the jammer.

Slipping his cell phone back into his pocket, he beckoned Nayef over to him. She approached, and when she was close, he asked, “You ready to move?”

She nodded.

“Good. Any thoughts on telling me and Zang where the data is hidden specifically?”

She shrugged. “I’m getting there.”

Pierce nodded and licked his lips. “Okay, follow me.”

He took off on the path Zang had taken to where she now stood on the edge of the wide lake perhaps a kilometre in length and one hundred metres wide. Seen on the far side, Pierce examined the fifty-metre-high cliff of the glacier ice stretching the entire length of the lake and boxed in by two dark mountain peaks at each end. The distinctive blue in the ice in the deeper layers and in the crevasses impressed him, where the pressure of the ice above had pressed out all the air in the lower levels, causing the sunlight reflecting off it to only return the blue spectrum. He’d seen glaciers before, and this one was just as majestically stunning as others he had witnessed, particularly now when there was not a single cloud in the sky and the sun was performing a lazy loop, never quite setting.

Then a sheet of ice slipped off the face of the glacier, perhaps ten metres wide by fifty metres tall, and crashed into the lake with an abruptness that shocked them all. The thundering noise generated by the powerful impact was tremendous, and Pierce felt the ground momentarily shake. They all jumped at the shock of its suddenness.

As the ice disappeared into the water, a wave at least three metres high propelled across what had just been a still surface, and came crashing up the pebbly shore where Pierce, Zang and Nayef stood. The water didn’t reach them, but it got close.

Zang whistled. “That… was unexpected.”

Pierce shrugged. “I guess that’s what glaciers do.”

“What did Ibrahim say?”

“It wasn’t him. It was Booker.”

“Booker? You mean DDA/CIA Booker?”

“The very same.”

“How and why is he involved?”

“Good question.” Pierce shared a summarised version of his conversation while leaving out details of the animosity they both felt towards each other, then finished with the sketchy details concerning the helicopter on its way to extract them. He also mentioned that the jammer was active again, which meant the Zaslon operators were close now.

“You know, Pierce, before he was deputy director, Booker was head of station in Damascus, Syria. Was there for fifteen years and pulled off all kinds of intelligence coups in his time.”

Pierce frowned. “You’re bringing this up because of the Syrian connection to this mess?”

“I’m just saying it’s something to keep in mind. You didn’t speak to Ibrahim at all?”

He shook his head. “I suspect our boss has been sidelined on this one. And that he might not be our boss for much longer.”

“Why? That makes no sense.”

It did to Pierce, but he was speculating a little, and he required more intel before he could act on that speculation in any meaningful way, and more importantly he had no time to explain his reasonings for the moment. Their priority was getting out of this predicament alive. “We have one flare left, which we can use to signal the helicopter when it gets here.”

“Agree!” said Zang, tapping her foot.

“If we stay down here, the Russians will easily outflank and outgun us.”

“Also agree.”

“If we can get up on that ice sheet, we have higher-ground advantage, and the Zaslon team loses the ability to use vehicles in this chase.”

Zang nodded. “Good plan. While you’ve been blathering on, I spotted a potential route in.” She pointed to a narrow crevasse between two large blocks of ice in the glacier. “We could climb that, and it would hide us most of the way up.”

“It’s ice. Climbing it will be complicated.”

“I brought some equipment, but…” The conclusion of her sentence forgotten, she bit down on her lip and pondered.

“What are you not saying, Zang?”

“You ever walked across a glacier?”

He laughed. “Yeah, I have. Wasn’t fun the last time, so I know how dangerous they are.”

“What’s dangerous about them?” asked Nayef.

Zang answered, “Glaciers comprise multiple crevasses, some of them hundreds of metres deep. They are okay if you can see them, but if the weather turns bad and visibility drops, or if a thin sheet of ice forms over them that doesn’t support our weight, then this is optimal conditions for one or more of us ending up at the bottom of one.”

“And we don’t have rope,” said Pierce, “otherwise we could tie our group together as we crossed it.”

All the fear that Pierce had seen in Kasrin Nayef when he had first met her was again alarmingly present in her eyes when they darted back and forth between him and Zang. “Then why are we doing this?”

Zang pointed back down across the vast Icelandic wilderness, where the three Russian four-wheel drives were clearly visible now and perhaps less than twenty minutes out from reaching them. “Because our chances on the ice are better than engaging that lot down here.”

36

Reykjavik, Iceland

With her head forcibly submerged in the chilled bathwater again, Summerfield struggled against the powerful hands that held her down, with the flexicuffs immobilising her ability to fight back. She held her breath, but it was difficult to do so and not swallow water with the panic overwhelming her. But the thought that consumed her most in this desperate moment was that eventually Kozlova would order Vassiliev to hold her submerged until she drowned. That time could be now. It could be any time.

She didn’t want to die like that, not after surviving so much worse for so long.

And then she was roughly pulled up out of the water and dropped carelessly again on the saturated bathroom floor.

Fighting to breathe again, Summerfield could only lie motionless, gasping for air and shivering against the icy water that had soaked her. She was coughing violently as water expelled from her mouth. Then she sobbed.

Vassiliev paced around her, panting as he recovered his own breath, because torturers got exhausted too being the inflictor in this nasty and cruel business.

“I think you know more about this Trigger Man than you are letting on,” said Kozlova, seated on the toilet with the lid down. “That was a sophisticated code you sent him. You don’t sync that well with another operator unless you’ve been doing so for some time.”

Summerfield kept her breathing erratic. If she appeared unable to control her bodily responses, she couldn’t be considered able to speak.

“I’ll tell you what, Summerfield, tell me one truthful fact about the Trigger Man right now, and I’ll give you a break from Vassiliev’s methods for at least five minutes. But if you don’t, I have another idea.” She found a linen hand towel hanging on a hook, then rolled it up and ran water over it from the sink tap. Then she unrolled the soaked towel and picked up the nearly full water bottle she had sipped from while watching the session. “You do know what waterboarding is, don’t you, Summerfield?”

Summerfield rolled onto her back as she sobbed and squirmed erratically. That was how Liliana Torres Escarra had died, and it had been one of the Russians who had killed her.

“From what I’ve observed, waterboarding is far worse than actually being submerged. Shall we find out?”

“Please! No! I can’t!” Summerfield rolled and thrashed again, but also worked the flexicuffs against her belt, sawing their two edges together, hoping that the plastic in the cuffs would eventually give. It felt as if Kozlova and Vassiliev had been torturing her for hours now and that she should have worked through the bindings already, but the passage of time had been difficult for her to fathom while enduring their cruelty. She couldn’t face any more of this and knew she was at the point of breaking. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

The only two thoughts that had kept her from deteriorating into ineffective depressiveness was that first, Pierce knew she was in danger and would come for her eventually, and second, there had been no mention of the Russians finding the Beretta hidden behind the skirting board, just outside this bathroom of all places.

Kozlova said, “I’ve already passed this Trigger Man information on to SVR headquarters. They are very interested in this individual now. And because my team is currently hunting him in central Iceland at this very moment, they want to know about him too. His weaknesses, methods, etcetera, to make it easier to take him down. So answer my question.” She held up the wet towel with one hand and the water bottle with the other. “Summerfield?”

With her heartbeat racing again, Summerfield spoke rapidly, panting out her words. “Trigger Man is Ground Branch, has been for five years at least.” The truth. “I think he’s a former Navy SEAL.” She knew this was a lie, but where he had received his training, she did not know. “His Russian and Spanish are excellent.” Another truth. “He’s a Russian expert, knows all your methods.” Another lie.

“Why is it that he can speak my language fluently?”

For the moment, Summerfield gave up on surreptitiously breaking her bindings and focused on the question. Kozlova had raised a valid point, to which Summerfield had no answer. Pierce had turned up in the CIA from nowhere just over half a decade ago now, fully trained as a special forces operator and obviously highly experienced, no doubt with his extensive skills gained in multiple war zones across the planet, and nobody seemed to know where he had come from. It was true that he spoke Russian like a native, but he also spoke Arabic, Mandarin and Spanish with the same skill. All that Summerfield had already surmised in that time was that he could have come from a deep-cover operation in any of the regions where these languages were common. But which one?

Or had he operated for significant times in more than one of these regions?

“Summerfield?”

“I don’t know the answer to that any more than you do. That’s the truth.”

Summerfield watched as Vassiliev and Kozlova exchanged glances. Kozlova nodded, and Vassiliev moved to lift Summerfield over the bathtub again while Summerfield moaned and sobbed.

“No. Turn her around. Push her head backwards instead.”

Vassiliev manhandled her into position.

Summerfield knew why. The wet towel was about to be slapped over her face and the water poured over it. The experience would feel worse than actually drowning in the bathtub.

“Please, I beg you.”

She was running out of fight and the will to live. If they pushed her into the icy bath, soon enough she would give in to the suffocating, and swallow water faster than they expected her to, and drown herself rather than endure this seemingly unending torture. She worried that she was close to giving up so soon, when help or an opportunity to escape might not be that far away, but death, for the first time, had become a viable alternative in her mind.

But she couldn’t do any of that if they were waterboarding her.

Then she realised this predicament she found herself in wasn’t just about her, it was about the rest of the team and the yet unknown implications to the world if the Russians destroyed all copies of the Broek & Trausch data. She had to keep going, just for a little longer, even if just to give others the time they needed to finish the job.

“Please! Trigger Man and me, we operated together for years. In the Middle East and West Africa! I have been lying. There is much I can tell you… If you let me.”

Vassiliev now had Summerfield up on her knees and was arching her back and pushing her head behind her, forcing Summerfield to look up at the ceiling, with him looking down at her.

“It’s in his nature to make Nayef trust him. He probably knows the location of the last data sets already.”

She was betraying Mark now, and her information about him would soon make it easier for the Russians to defeat him. But giving in and talking was inevitable for any operative subjected to torture for too long. Everyone broke eventually. She knew that from first-hand experience too.

Kozlova came at her with the wet towel.

“Please! He’s the assassin who killed your man in Ronda!”

“Wait!” said Kozlova, dropping her hands and the instruments of torture to her sides. Suddenly the pressure lessened on the back of Summerfield’s head and back, and she could kneel in a straight position again.

Then Novgorodsky yelled out suddenly from downstairs. The sound of his pained voice surprised them all. They all heard what was presumably a string of Russian swear words escaping his mouth.

Next came a commotion, of fighting in the lounge area.

Vassiliev looked towards where Novgorodsky was making the noise and no longer paid attention to how he held Summerfield.

This was her opportunity.

She decided to take a chance and yanked hard at the flexicuffs. The rubbing of the plastic against her belt must have had some effect, because they snapped, and suddenly her hands were free again.

The struggling noises from downstairs continued, soon followed by lots of banging and crashing going on down there.

Kozlova said something to Vassiliev in Russian, and then she was out the door and disappearing. It seemed likely she hadn’t seen that Summerfield’s hands were now free; otherwise she might have stayed.

Vassiliev, however, was not the veteran operator the other two were, that had been obvious since the moment Summerfield had first laid eyes on him, and now he was about to pay for his lack of training. She fell down at his feet, half in exhaustion but half in tactic. Down low she grabbed his left foot with both hands and yanked it hard in a direction it was not designed to move in. Fury gave her the strength she needed to shatter the bones in his ankle, and now Vassiliev was howling louder than Novgorodsky. He dropped immediately and crashed into the lip of the bath, then tumbled into it.

With adrenaline surging within her, Summerfield scrambled to her feet, then lost her balance and fell through the door into the hallway. Crawling on hands and knees, she frantically reached out for the loosely placed skirting board, yanked it away and pulled the Beretta 950 from its hiding place. It was a tiny pistol, even for a woman of her size, with a single-action trigger and only eight rounds in the magazine.

But it would do the job she needed it to do.

The scuffling downstairs continued, but so too did Vassiliev’s thrashing in the ice bath.

With the chilly water still dripping off her, Summerfield decided to deal with her torturer first.

Regaining her balance, she stepped into the bathroom to find the young Russian man struggling and thrashing in the water, his shattered foot betraying him each time he tried to climb out. He screamed and swore a lot, and tears were gushing out of him. When Vassiliev finally looked up and saw Summerfield with her pistol pointed right between his eyeballs, a sudden calmness overcame him, and he said quietly in English, “My wife is pregnant. I want to live long enough to see my child.”

“Sorry.”

Summerfield shot him cleanly between the eyeballs, and he dropped and submerged as a corpse into the chilly water that could have easily caused her own demise.

Meanwhile, the fighting downstairs was losing its intensity, with lessened struggles and more grunting.

Knowing she had to deal with that situation next, Summerfield crept down the stairs and turned the corner to the lounge. Knight was still laid out unconscious on the floor, but what disturbed her far more was Novgorodsky sitting on top of Parab, who was lying on his back, and his arms were pinned by the Zaslon operator’s huge thighs as he straddled the young man. Novgorodsky had a kitchen carving knife impaled in his back just below his shoulder bone, and it bled profusely. But that hadn’t stopped him from trying to ram the full pack of cards he had been playing solitaire with down Parab’s throat.

Summerfield stepped up silently behind Novgorodsky and put a bullet through the back of his head, killing him instantly.

With life suddenly taken from him, his corpse dropped on top of Parab, who now choked and spluttered as he exhaled the fifty-odd cards wedged in his mouth. Then he was trying and failing to roll the weight of the heavy Zaslon operator off him.

“Kozlova?” Summerfield asked, aware that she still needed to neutralise all threats before she applied aid to Parab and Knight. “Where is she?”

The technical operations officer finally crawled out from beneath Novgorodsky, rolled onto his front and then onto his elbows, and coughed and spluttered some more before he was able to answer her. “She… ran… out the front door.”

Summerfield pricked up her ears. Outside, she heard a car reversing, then driving back and forth as if trying to escape a cramped parking space.

Further away, there were the sounds of approaching sirens. Pierce had pulled through after all and had sent in a rescue team, and now Kozlova was getting away before she was arrested.

Summerfield thought to pursue Kozlova, but then her body spasmed, and she shook violently in the post-comedown experienced from barely escaping her torture alive and unscathed.

“Summerfield?”

“Are you okay?” she asked Parab in a voice that sounded ethereal and not her own, as he too struggled to get to his feet just as she had earlier. She saw the bruising and cuts around his face and realised he’d endured a serious beating from Novgorodsky. Then she remembered the carving knife still impaled in the Zaslon operator’s back. “You did that?”

Parab nodded. “I was trying to tell you before. I grabbed it and stashed it under the sofa the same moment the Russians stormed the safe house.” He glanced down at the big dead man. “When he looked away, I saw my chance… And then…”

She nodded, still shaking and now feeling numb all over. “Good work, Parab.”

“Freeze!” came a voice from the front door. “Drop your weapon! Get down on your knees and raise your arms over your head.”

Summerfield looked up to see several police officers storming the house and pointing their firearms at her. She still had the pistol in her grip, so she dropped it, then placed her hands on her head and fell to her knees as they had instructed.

When the police cuffed them, locked them into the back of a police wagon and bundled a still unconscious Knight into an ambulance, Summerfield smiled. Nothing the Icelandic police force could throw at her could ever be worse than anything she had already suffered this afternoon.

37

Central Highlands, Iceland

As Pierce, Zang and Nayef hastily jogged around the lake and to the base of the glacier where it fused against the mountain, Pierce was impressed at the sheer scale of the natural wonder before him. Looking at it front-on, all he could see was a wall of white and blue ice that creaked and groaned like it was alive, while tiny chips fell off it and tiny bubbles escaped at its base where it sat in near freezing water. To his right he noticed there was a steep rise in the rock on the mountain, but which was an otherwise manageable natural route they could follow up to the top of the glacial wall. But before they could reach it, the three of them needed to cross a series of lesser ice sheets with a network of ice caves beneath it, seen in places where the roofs of those caverns had melted, leaving openings to the sky.

Hearing distant car engines, Pierce peered back to where he had received first aid minutes earlier, which was some five hundred metres behind them now. When the three Land Rovers parked there, which was as close as they could get to Pierce’s and his companions’ position in wheeled transport, they parked, and five hard men jumped out.

Pierce had been hoping for fewer numbers but was expecting more. Regardless of their quantity, there was no doubt that these were Zaslon operators. He knew it in the way they moved, full of confidence, precise and operating with a focused intensity of cold hard logic. Pierce could see from this distance that they all carried assault rifles and wore body armour, but it was too far to ascertain the makes and models of their equipment. Likely they were armed with AEK-971 assault rifles, when considering what their foes on the lava field had carried.

“We’ve got company,” Pierce yelled to Zang, who was leading the charge. He was rearguard action, and Nayef in the middle was their protected asset. They had been operating this way since the battle near the lava crater. “They’ll be in shooting range before we can get up that rise.”

“Then we’ll take a trip through those ice caves,” answered Zang. “They’ll get us to that crevasse over there and provide cover while we do so. From there it’s a different route to the top, but workable.”

She handed him the binoculars, and Pierce looked to where she pointed. The path she had now selected involved a climb up inside a frozen crevasse within the glacier. “Isn’t that near where that sheet of ice just sheared off?”

Zang smirked. “You got a better idea? The original path up the mountain leaves us exposed and vulnerable when the bad guys reach this point.”

Pierce nodded, knowing that Zang was correct. “Well, let’s keep moving.”

Zang led them down a rocky rise in a fast trot, and they quickly reached the first entrance to the icy cave network. Its interior was a ragged half-circular cylinder shape comprising a stark blue rippling ice that made up the walls and roof, and a dirt-covered rocky base with a tiny stream of melted water flowing out of it. The cave was about five metres high, ten across and the stream half a metre in width in the middle.

“Don’t those things close up unexpectedly from time to time?” Nayef asked, afraid again. “And it’s pitch black down there.”

Pierce shrugged. “Yeah, but we can lose our enemy inside it.”

Zang proceeded down one tunnel that forked into two directions. She took the one to the right. Pierce and Nayef followed, and before long the pervasive silence, other than the soft gurgle of the stream and single points of distant dripping water, soon felt eerie.

At the next junction, Zang pointed into the tunnel where slithers of dim light shone from some distance down it. The tunnel joining this spot to the slithers of distant light, however, was pitch black for most of its length. “It’s that way!”

“Works for me,” said Pierce.

“Can’t we hide down here?” asked Nayef, her face red from exhaustion again.

“No!” said Zang firmly. “They’ll eventually find us if we do.”

“And the Zaslon team are fresh,” said Pierce. “We’re not. Because of that, they’ll move faster than we can, so let’s not delay.”

Zang pulled a flashlight, packaging tape and a rubber strip from her pack, and Pierce did the same. They each then strapped the flashlights to their shotguns, fitting the rubber between the barrel and the torch to absorb the shock, minimising the chance of the bulb shattering when the weapons fired.

As they jogged deeper into the darkness with the flashlights shining, the height of the roof dropped, and they were soon crouching.

Then they were crawling on the rock.

Pierce wasn’t worried that this route would terminate in a dead end because of the dim light ahead, but the passage through might tighten further, and he was in no mood for crawling through caves with the various injuries he had sustained earlier.

After they had crossed a hundred metres, the stream disappeared, and Pierce heard footsteps pounding through the cave behind them. He quickly switched off his flashlight, and Zang did the same. In the near absolute darkness, the only source of light came from a chamber some eighty metres ahead of them, and the distant lights used by the intruders bouncing off the walls far down the tunnel where they had come from. The sound of their approaching foes’ pounding footsteps grew louder with each passing second.

Zang came up close to Pierce and whispered in his ear because sound carried far and echoed in this ice-cave network. “I’m taking us to a surface exit I marked earlier. It will be in the roof of the next cave, requiring us to climb out. But before that, the path just up ahead is tight and narrow.”

“Can we squeeze through?”

“Yeah, it won’t be a problem. Wanted to ask though, you think you can bring it down when you are through?”

Pierce gripped her on the shoulder as an offer of camaraderie. “I’ll do my best, Zang. But I’m not packing explosives, and I take it you aren’t either.”

“No. But you have shotgun shells. Plenty of them.”

“That’s what I thought. Get moving. I’ll see what I can do.”

Zang then whispered to Nayef, instructing the journalist to follow her, and soon the three of them were crawling through a narrow tunnel of rock-hard ice and gravel, barely half a metre wide. Pierce’s wounds ached as he bent into unnatural angles to propel himself through it, but he pushed on regardless.

The sliver of a tunnel seemed to stretch for fifteen metres and bent so he couldn’t see the end. Regardless, they kept scuffling as fast as their shuffling hands and knees could carry them. The rock underneath was rough, and Pierce felt certain he was gathering more grazes and cuts on his hands, shins and knees. All the while, behind them the footsteps of their pursuers were getting louder and therefore closer. If they weren’t out the other side soon, they would be easy targets inside this confined space. Zang hurried them on, and Pierce and Nayef were only too obliging to comply.

Pierce couldn’t be certain, but instinct told him that it was two operators following them through the cave route, which meant the other three would now be crossing the surface ice to meet them when they re-emerged again, presuming there was an easy route on the surface to follow them to this point.

Eventually, after about thirty more metres of crawling, the cave opened enough so they could all stand. The natural light was brighter now because some forty metres ahead, the roof of the cave in this section had melted, and sunlight shone down through the gap. As Pierce’s eyes readjusted to the light, he spied that it positioned them directly underneath the fifty-metre-high cliff face of the glacier. The roof had melted in this spot because of a steady stream of icy water cascading off the glacier, which fell into a pool in the middle of the cave, which then formed a stream that likely joined up with the one they had seen earlier.

“Go!” Pierce whispered. “Get out of here.”

Zang nodded, and she and Nayef took off.

Pierce looked around, trying to find rock or ice boulders he could use to block the path he had just emerged from, but saw nothing. He tested the ice walls to see if he could break them, but they were as solid as rock.

He heard the Zaslon men again, now at the other end of the narrow passage, whispering in Russian, discussing their next moves. Due to the acoustic properties of the cave, their voices carried and sounded in Pierce’s ear like they were speaking right next to him, even though many dozens of metres still separated them. They discussed a plan involving smoke and flash-bang grenades, which they would propel down the tunnel before they entered wearing gas masks.

Knowing that he was running out of time to act, Pierce risked turning on his flashlight. The illumination would give away his position, but it did provide him with an option. In the icy roof above the narrow passage was a fissure about three centimetres wide and of undeterminable depth. Dousing his light and using only touch to guide him, Pierce took a half dozen shotgun shells from his pockets and wedged them into the fissure. Then from several metres back, he fired both barrels of his shotgun into the same space. The ice cracked and shuddered as he hoped it would.

As Pierce stepped back, the ice groaned further.

Then he heard a series of cracking noises erupt around him in the ice cave.

Pierce turned and sprinted in Zang and Nayef’s direction just as the entire ice cave behind him came crashing down, burying the path that had brought them here and, hopefully, the two Zaslon operators with it.

38

When Pierce reached the natural hole in the ice cavern, he saw parts of it had already collapsed. Those boulder-like fragments had jumbled together at various angles and provided a rough slope easy enough to climb up, as indicated by Zang’s and Nayef’s fresh boot prints leading out.

Then he heard the crack of bullets, the first from a nearby rifle. The others were distant drum-like bursts originating from military weapons. Keeping low to the earth, Pierce rushed to the surface, where he found Zang in a shooting position. They were behind a rocky protrusion several metres in height, providing cover from the Zaslon team presumably shooting back at them. Zang had climbed it to where she had secured herself a sniper position and was now laying covering fire with the Tikka t3x hunting rifle. Nayef lay protected in a gully, covering her ears as tears streamed down her face again, and her body shook each time gunfire sounded.

As he passed Nayef, Pierce said, “Stay here and keep your head down.”

She snorted out a nervous cackle. “Sounds sensible.”

“That’s the spirit.”

When Pierce reached Zang, she turned to him and expressed relief. Then she quickly masked her concern with the best neutral expression she could muster and returned to laying down covering fire. But for the briefest moment, Pierce had seen that she still genuinely cared for him. She might not wish to remain his lover, but she still wanted him in her life in a meaningful way.

He wasn’t certain how he felt about that.

Shaking these unhelpful thoughts from his mind, Pierce lay next to her and readied his shotgun for violent action.

“Sitrep?” Zang asked, all businesslike.

“I brought the tunnel down. The two Zaslon guys aren’t coming for us from that direction.”

“Eliminated?”

“Unknown. If they survived, they’ll have had to double back.”

Zang nodded as she fired off another shot, then reloaded while Pierce watched for the targets she was engaging with. He swiftly spotted a trio of Zaslon operators some hundred and fifty metres distant, pinned down behind a few largish basaltic boulders and with nowhere nearby they could sprint to that could provide them additional cover.

“I spot three. Between eleven and twelve o’clock,” he said, using the hands of a clock face to indicate their position relative to where his eyes pointed. Pierce fired off a round from his shotgun in the direction of one Zaslon man who was attempting to move to another position of cover, but who now changed his mind when the slug shattered a small rock next to him.

“Good.” Zang finished reloading her rifle, then returned her attention to laying down her own covering fire. “That’s what I see too. It’s a stalemate right now. Problem is, the Russians can reload faster, they have more ammo, and if you didn’t take out those two tangos below, they’ll soon number five against two.”

“Then we need to move.”

“Agreed. We’re next to that route up the glacier I indicated earlier.” She fired off another rifle shot as further bursts from assault rifles barked back at them. “You ready for this?”

“Seems my calendar has a space in it, Ronin.”

“Trigger Man!” She shook her head as she frowned. “A simple yes was all I was after.”

Pierce grinned as he fired off another covering blast from his Cynergy CX 12-gauge shotgun, then reloaded. As Zang took over, he glanced back to the crevasse in the glacier’s cliff face. Looking upwards, he saw that the deep narrow passage Zang had pointed out earlier did indeed reach all the way to the top of the glacier and was about a metre wide for most of its length. He felt confident he would be able to climb it, even without mountaineering equipment, and felt assured that Zang could too. Nayef, however, might struggle. “It will be complicated,” Pierce said.

The Zaslon operators fired off more bursts from their weapons, interrupting them.

“Keep them pinned down,” said Zang. “I’ll go first.”

“Roger that!” Pierce fired off two return shotgun blasts, then quickly reloaded. He noticed that his pockets were significantly lighter than they had been when this day had started.

Lowering her rifle, Zang reached into her pack and pulled out two ice axes, then looked down to where Nayef cowered, covering her ears with her hands and squeezing her eyes tight. “Kasrin!” she called out to the journalist, gaining her attention. “You can use these.” When Nayef appeared to be confused, Zang said, “Not as a weapon, but to climb this glacier!”

Timidly, the journalist reached up and took the two ice axes in her hands. She studied them like she had never seen anything like them before. “I just smash them into the ice and use them to pull myself up?”

“Essentially yes.” Zang reached into her pack and pulled out three sets of crampons designed to strap to their boots. “Luckily, I have six of these, even if I only have two pickaxes.”

Pierce took a pair of crampons from Zang and examined their spiky metal protrusions that would greatly aid any climbing they attempted on the ice. “I’m guessing that’s all the climbing equipment you have?”

“Yeah. It’s lucky we have this much.”

As Pierce and Zang took turns in maintaining covering fire to keep the Zaslon team pinned down, the other one fitted their crampons. They also ensured Nayef similarly fitted her own crampons, as she would be climbing too.

When they were ready, Pierce said, “We ascend in the same order as before. Zang, you as the pathfinder, Nayef in the middle, and me in the rear, ready to catch her when she slips.”

“Hey, I’m standing right here. Don’t talk about me like I’m not here.”

Pierce turned to the journalist, who was no longer squeezing her eyes shut and covering her ears. He nodded in acknowledgement of what she had just said, then pointed upwards towards the glacier. “That’s the route we’re taking. Think you can manage?”

Nayef was about to speak when Zang fired off further shots at their foes.

Then the Zaslon team returned fire.

Each side was in a stalemate, but that would only last as long as both sides had ammunition.

Nayef looked up at the glacier wall and paled. Pierce could see she hadn’t properly examined the route ahead of them. “You mean… climb that?” she said. “I thought you meant there were steps or a passage or something.”

“It looks harder than it actually is,” said Zang, not looking away from her shooting. “I’ll show you when we are at the base.”

“Is there another way?”

Pierce laughed. “Yeah, stay here and keep shooting each other until one side eliminates the other.”

“I don’t like the sound of that either.”

“Exactly,” said Pierce. “Zang, give me the rifle. You two go first and get as high as you can before I come after you.” Between glances back at the Zaslon men shooting at them, he saw she was grappling with the many problems his offer presented. He fired off another two slugs from his shotgun and reloaded while she contemplated further.

When he looked at her again, her expression had changed to one of resolution, and she said, “Yeah, unfortunately, I’d say you are right, Pierce. We don’t know how fast Nayef can ascend. She and I need as much head start as you can afford us. Or you can take her, and I’ll cover our rear.”

Ignoring Nayef’s shocked expression, Pierce shook his head and gave Zang a look to say that was a bad idea.

“What the hell are you on about now, Trigger Man?”

He shrugged. “Trust me, I know how Zaslon operate.”

“How?”

“That doesn’t matter. But it’s a skill I have that you don’t have right now. So let’s maximise it. You go up the cliff first with Nayef.”

“Again, I’m right here.”

Zang held out her rifle.

“On second thoughts, don’t worry about changing weapons,” said Pierce, ignoring the protests emanating from Nayef. “It would take too long to swap over ammo in our pockets. Just get moving.”

“Roger that!”

Pierce momentarily checked to see that Zang and Nayef were moving, then laid down further covering fire. The Zaslon team hadn’t been able to move or get a decent bead on them, which gave Pierce time. But his 12-gauge shotgun slugs were diminishing fast. He fired off several more times until he saw that the two women were inside the base of the icy crevasse and climbing.

When he returned his attention back to the three still-pinned-down Zaslon fighters, he saw now that the two he had encountered under the ice caves were unharmed. They had snuck up unseen and had now positioned themselves on the mountainous rise that led up the side of the glacier.

One of them lugged a Russian-made revolver-like RG-6 grenade launcher with six shots, likely loaded with thermobaric grenades, if his knowledge of Russian small arms served him correctly.

And the other held an RPG-32 Barkas reusable shoulder-launched anti-tank rocket launcher, which was a weapon with greater range and superior lethality.

They would both be in position in seconds and would have the higher-ground advantage.

And while these two new foes were outside of Pierce’s effective firing range, with respect to him, they were not so hampered.

He felt in his pockets for further shotgun slugs but came up empty.

“Shit!”

The Russian with the rocket launcher rested the weapon on his shoulder, then aimed it in Pierce’s general direction.

“Incoming!” Pierce yelled back to Zang and Nayef, not sure they could hear him anyway over the whoosh of the firing rocket and the rattling fire of assault rifles aimed in their general direction. He ducked low behind the rock, not certain it would provide enough cover to survive the rocket assault.

Then the missile flew straight over him and impacted with explosive force near the base of the glacier on a portion of it that rested on rocky earth.

Stunned, Pierce glanced back, hoping that Zang and Nayef were deep inside the ice and protected.

Then the ice groaned.

Then it shuddered.

Then a huge wall of it came crashing down, and it was all he could see as its destructive and awesome power filled the full depth of his vision.

39

As gigantic blocks of white and blue ice came crashing down around Pierce, he realised he had dived in the wrong direction. Now, as a powdery wall of white mist rushed towards him like a tidal wave, he pivoted, then dived over the rock to the side where the Russians had been shooting at him. He wasn’t worried about coming under fire now, as the thick mist of ice and snow blinded all lines of sight for everyone. He was more worried about chunks of ice massing many tonnes that could suddenly pulverise him, rolling unseen through the white haze.

As he dived and rolled and lost his shotgun in the process, Pierce felt projectiles of smaller ice chunks bang against him, but none heavy enough to be more than a nuisance. Then a shower of white powder covered him, and Pierce worried that tonnes of icy layers would soon press down and crush him until he could no longer breathe. He swam against this onslaught of raw natural power to keep himself towards the surface as best he was able to manage.

As seconds turned into minutes, and the explosive forces of a crumbling ice wall subsided, Pierce realised his efforts had proved fruitful because he was only mostly covered in snow. His head and right arm were above the powdery surface. He still couldn’t see anything but white because of the ice crystals still heavy in the air like a thick mist, but he had survived.

Pierce thought to dig himself from the snow, which wouldn’t be difficult because the pressure of the layers above him weren’t compact or thick. But when he heard the Russians talking in low voices and advancing towards him, Pierce buried himself deeper until he was completely submerged in the soft aerated snow.

The Russians walked right past him.

He heard them talking, reporting in and checking all approaches. They debated amongst themselves if anyone could have survived the collapsing ice wall. The leader, who spoke in a gruff tone that was vaguely familiar to Pierce, told them not to assume anything.

Pierce waited until the Zaslon men had passed. Then he emerged from the snow and armed himself with the Webley revolver in his right hand, and the eight-centimetre blade in his left. Then he trudged through the soft snow, following a Zaslon operator’s fresh footprints he was barely able to make out in the white haze.

After a dozen metres, that operator materialised as a whitish shadow in the otherwise white mist. Pierce found it easy enough to sneak up behind him because the ice made almost no noise as he stepped through it. He slowed his breathing and, in a sudden and fluid motion, hurled himself across the two metres that now separated them, then reached the knife around the Zaslon operator’s throat and slit it open.

The Russian gurgled and grasped at his throat. He couldn’t call out, as air now hissed through his ruptured windpipe and not his mouth. Blood sprayed like flicked paint and was quickly lost in the white; then he dropped to his knees before falling to his side, and ceased moving inside his freshly forged indentation within the snow.

Pierce slipped the revolver and knife back into his pocket, then relieved the dead man of his matte-black fifteen-centimetre fighting knife, his AEK-971 assault rifle and several spare thirty-round banana-shaped magazines, which he stuffed into pockets that had once held shotgun shells. The AEK-971 was similar in shape to that of the AK-47, another Russian weapon Pierce was intimately familiar with. This more modern firearm, in part, utilised the successful features of that much older weapon, and it felt lighter and slicker in his hands.

Armed and ready for action, Pierce trundled further through the snow, soon encountering large blocks of snow and ice that would force him to climb rather than march over them.

Then another Russian man materialised out of the white haze and was rushing Pierce.

The American operator didn’t hesitate as he fired off a controlled burst, obliterating the man’s guts in a cloud of blood and spilled organs.

Then the air about Pierce erupted with bullets zipping around him. He felt the assault rifle rip from his hands as a bullet must have hit it, and suddenly it was lost in the snow.

Knowing that he was exposed, and the weapon was lost, Pierce ducked low and sprinted through the white, then clambered up and over the ice blocks, seeking shelter as more bullets zipped past him. He threw himself over the collection of ice fragments and tumbled down a steep incline of perhaps half a dozen metres before he rolled onto rocky ground.

Groaning, Pierce picked himself up and pulled the Webley, silently cursing that he had lost his modern firearm so soon after acquiring it. At least the shooting had subsided, which suggested the three remaining Zaslon men had lost sight of him for the moment. But his next problem was that the white snow cloud was now dissipating, and visibility was improving. If he remained out in the open, he would become an easy target.

Ahead, the new, fresh face of the glacier wall that had survived the earlier rocket assault was now collating in his vision.

“Zang?” called out a woman.

It was Nayef, her cries echoing from deep within the glacier.

“Kasrin?” Zang called back. “Where are you?”

Pierce couldn’t believe they were both alive, not that he had wished to think about the possibility that the rocket attack could have easily killed them before now. He was relieved they had survived, but being alive didn’t equate to them being safe or unharmed either.

He ran towards the noise.

At the base of the glacier’s fresh face, he spotted the crevasse Zang and Nayef had taken and saw that it extended much further into the ice than he had earlier presumed. He heard whimpering in its dark reaches, so ran into it.

As Pierce followed the crevasse, it narrowed as it gradually rose due to the recent ice debris that had fallen into it. He had to turn side-on to squeeze through gaps in the rock-hard ice. He looked up, seeing light from a blue sky somewhere up above, and knew that he would eventually need to climb out of this treacherous passage. Visibility was better here, as the white haze had not seeped this deep into the crevasse, but it was a highly claustrophobic environment, and its twists and turns meant he couldn’t see further than a half dozen metres in any direction.

He heard a groaning, sounding like some mystical and enormous leviathan was waking from an aeonic slumber.

Then one wall of the ice shifted a few centimetres.

Pierce felt the moving ice press against his chest, so he pushed on into a larger gap between the two narrow ice walls before it crushed him.

“Nayef! Keep climbing!” yelled Zang from somewhere unseen above him. “The ice is moving again.”

He heard Nayef whimper, but her words only came out as panicked grunts.

Then he heard further gunfire. Ice fragmented around him as bullets buried themselves into the cavernous walls.

Awkwardly, Pierce pivoted as the crevasse walls seemed to squeeze him malevolently, to see a Zaslon man only a few metres distant, trying to angle his AEK-971 for a clean shot to take out Pierce.

The ice wall groaned again as Pierce simultaneously pressed his crampons into the ice and climbed while he aimed his Webley and shot towards the Zaslon man. He fired off four bullets until he heard a grunt. It was impossible to achieve a direct-line-of-sight shot in the twisted and contorted ice cave, but Pierce was counting on ricocheting bullets with the lesser muzzle velocity of his pistol compared to the power of the Russian assault rifles, which had buried bullets in the ice instead. His strategy seemed to work, as he sensed one .455-calibre bullet had hit the Russian man in the chest, but his body armour had also seemed to have saved him from serious damage.

“Fucker!” the Russian exclaimed in his native tongue when the pain of the impact registered for him. “You’re fucking dead!”

The crevasse groaned and shifted again.

Ice shards and snow fell upon them.

“Climb!” Zang screamed from above. “The ice wall is collapsing!”

Controlling his panic, Pierce awkwardly ascended through the tight spaces enveloping him even though he knew Zang was talking to Nayef and not him. He slipped the revolver into his coat pocket, which he switched out for his two knives. Then he impaled the ice with his blades and propelled himself upwards as fast as his muscles and lungfuls of air would allow him.

“I can’t!” exclaimed Nayef, who was also somewhere above him and close now. “I’m stuck!”

The ice shifted again; then one wall slid about a metre relative to the other. For a few seconds, Pierce thought he was about to be crushed between two sheer lengths of hard ice, and its edges rubbing against his burns and gashes in his back and upper arm stung madly. He closed his eyes and waited for the end.

Then the walls separated to about a metre, and he had room to manoeuvre again.

He heard a gurgling and groaning from a few metres below.

He turned to look down just fast enough to see the ice squash the Russian as his head and chest exploded and splattered organs and blood across the blue walls below Pierce, like a balloon popping.

Zang yelled from up above. “I’m coming for you! Don’t move!”

“Hurry!” cried out Nayef.

“Wait!” Pierce yelled as he climbed faster. The ice creaked and groaned again, then slipped another dozen centimetres. He felt certain one side of the crevasse was about to topple and crash down into the valley as the last ice sheet had. He didn’t want to be taken with it when it did.

“Pierce?” called out Zang, whom he still couldn’t see in the narrowness of the crevasse and the ice and snow still falling around him.

“I’m coming up!”

Pressing against both sides of the narrow chasm, Pierce climbed with a speed he had never thought possible. Within a minute, maybe two, after the ice had shifted again, he reached Nayef hanging on to two ice axes embedded in the wall. She was paralysed in her fear.

“I’ve got you!” Pierce said as he climbed up next to her. He looked up and saw the surface was only six or so metres above them. “We’re almost there.”

Then one side of the crevasse gave out completely and disappeared, crashing down into the lake and the gravel valley where they had been standing less than twenty minutes earlier.

40

Instantaneously, Pierce’s world transformed from claustrophobic and confusing to wide open and dazzlingly bright. Another sheet of the glacier had given way and had dropped as a crackling rumble of ice boulders that crashed into the valley at the base of the frozen river. His senses had been correct to adhere himself to the stable side as he had.

But the side Kasrin Nayef was hanging on to with her ice axes was not.

With one hand holding on to his newly acquired fifteen-centimetre blade jammed into the ice, Pierce let go of the other shorter knife and reached out for Nayef, snatching her by the hood of her parka as she dropped. A second later, she was swinging below him, screaming at the top of her lungs.

“Zang!” Pierce yelled out.

“Mark?”

He looked up, and there was Zang, positioned six metres above him, peering over the fresh glacier cliff face. “A little help, please!”

“Okay. Hold on.”

She disappeared, presumably with a plan of action in mind.

Pierce looked down at Nayef, who was still screaming and struggling in his grip. If she kept up with her antics, she’d slip out of his fingers and drop forty-odd metres into the fresh cloud of billowing white where ice and snow had just crashed into the earth beneath them. “Calm down, Kasrin! I’ve got you!”

“What?”

He glimpsed that she still had her ice axes, for she’d had enough foresight to loop the cords attached to each handle around her wrists. “Impale yourself in the ice again.” He felt his knife slip marginally. “I can’t hold you for much longer.”

“Okay!” She was hyperventilating, but then gained enough self-control to swing one axe, then the other into the wall.

“Use your feet and axes. Start climbing again!”

“Okay!” she said again, sounding out of breath.

“Pierce!”

He looked up and saw that Zang had climbed to a lower ledge only three metres above him. On the top half of her body, she now only wore a sports bra. At first Pierce didn’t understand why, until she dropped a rope made from her jacket and thermal layers, until its knotted length hung just above Nayef. She called down, “Kasrin! Grab this!”

Nayef looked up, saw the sweatshirt and grabbed it.

Then Zang started hauling her upwards, and the journalist was moving again.

Not wishing to hang around on this precarious ledge, Pierce used his crampons and his knives to resume climbing, and reached the ledge the same moment Nayef did.

Safe for the moment, he fell and lay on the ice, panting to recover his breath.

“Trigger Man!” Zang, still in her sports bra, stood over him. “Not a good time to lie around when this wall could give way at any minute too.”

He nodded and got to his feet. Together they raced from the glacier edge, testing the ground as they progressed so as not to step into a lightly snowed-over crevasse hidden in their path, until they were some fifty metres further in.

When they stopped, Zang got dressed. “I thought you were dead.”

“I had the same thought about you.”

As she slipped on her parka, Zang turned and scanned the top of the massive glacier, which had to be hundreds of square kilometres in size, and they were standing on the very edge of it. “I can’t see anyone. How many tangos left? Do you know?”

“Two at the most.” Pierce turned and saw that Nayef had collapsed onto her haunches, her eyes had lost their focus, and she was trembling.

“She’s going into shock,” said Zang as she took Nayef’s face in her gloved hands and looked her directly in the eyes. “Kasrin! It’s okay. You’re okay. We’re safe.”

Pierce didn’t believe this statement but kept quiet, because he sensed that the two surviving Zaslon operators were still coming for them. When he scanned for them, he saw them nowhere, but that didn’t mean they weren’t out there.

He glanced at his wristwatch. It was 1922 hours, so if Booker remained true to his word, their rescue helicopter would be here in just under thirty minutes. If the two potentially alive Zaslon men still had access to the RG-6 grenade launcher or RPG-32 Barkas rocket launcher, they could take out the helo when it arrived. That meant neutralising the remaining Zaslon team or confirming that they were already eliminated was Pierce’s next priority.

Zang gently shook Nayef, and this seemed to snap her from her malaise.

“Why are we not dead?”

“Because Pierce and I are both professionals.”

Pierce passed Nayef a chocolate bar. “Eat that. You’ll feel better in minutes.”

She nodded and started chewing.

Pierce took out more chocolate bars and handed one to Zang before he bit into his own.

Zang meanwhile scanned the vast glacier, which stretched for kilometres as a vast sheet of undulating ice until it fused with ragged snow-capped mountain ranges on three sides. There were ridges, dips and crevasses everywhere across its surface. “Pierce, we need a landing zone for the helo. Somewhere safe with no hidden chasms.”

The sun above still circled in the eerily perfectly blue sky, and Pierce realised his body clock had no sense of time in this land of near perpetual daylight interspersed with short periods of twilight.

“I don’t think we need to worry about that.” Pierce handed Zang the flare gun. “The helo will have a SPIE or STABO ropes to extract us.” SPIE was short for special patrol insertion/extraction, a military technique developed as a means to rapidly insert or extract a reconnaissance patrol from an area where it was difficult for a helicopter to land, and a STABO extraction harness was a shortened version of “stabilised body”, a device that allowed personnel to be rescued by helicopter from field locations that also prevented conventional landing and boarding of a helicopter. “Just fire this off when it is close. They’ll come and drop ropes, and you can extract on those.”

“Why not you?” Her nostrils flared as her eyes narrowed. “Don’t tell me you’re staying behind?”

“Trust me on this,” said Pierce as he turned to Nayef. “Kasrin?”

“Yeah?”

“I need to tell you something important. Unlike Zang and me, the CIA extraction team that is about to rescue us won’t necessarily have your best interests in mind.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, suddenly focused again now that she’d had a sugar hit.

Zang frowned. “Pierce? What the hell are you up to?”

“A man on that helo will be Booker.”

“You mean deputy director of analysis Booker?” said Zang, expressing shock at this revelation. “No way!”

“Yeah! Let me explain.” Pierce quickly described his tense exchange with Booker and Hawley on the Gulfstream flight from Gibraltar to France. “Either him or his new offsider, Mitch Hawley, will be coming to meet us. I’d bet money on it. I don’t know why yet, but they want the Luxembourg Papers buried and forgotten as fast as the Russians do.”

Zang sneered. “You mean that asshole Hawley who gave us bad intel on that mission in Pakistan? The one that cost too many Ground Branch operator lives?”

“The very same. Something in the data compromises Booker, I’m certain of it. We need to give him one copy, the one in Akureyri, because that’s his price for getting us out of here alive. But the second copy he doesn’t know about. I can secure it on my own, eventually enabling Kasrin to use that data to prosecute Da’oud Alzuhur.” He held Nayef’s stare. “But only, Kasrin, if you tell me exactly where the other copy is right now.”

Zang spoke before Nayef could answer. “But that relies on sticking with the story we tell Booker and Hawley, that only one further copy exists.”

“Yeah, it does, but you can both pull that off.”

Nayef looked back and forth between Pierce and Zang. “I suppose I have to trust you. I have no other choice!”

Neither Pierce nor Zang said a word. They both knew that Nayef had to reach the decision on her own. That decision could not be forced upon her.

“You have both risked your lives to bring me this far. I see that now, and I thank you both for everything you’ve done to keep us alive. Pierce, it’s in a locker, number eighteen.” She took a cord tied around her neck with a key on it and handed it to him. “The locker is in a backpacker hostel. The Ragnar Lodge, in central Reykjavik.”

Pierce reached out to take the key, but she didn’t let go of it.

“This means everything to me. You do understand this?”

He nodded. “Absolutely.”

Nayef finally relinquished the key and looked away. “I can’t believe that this path me and my brother started down has resulted in so much death and misery. We never intended that at all, only justice.”

“Then make the next few hours count,” said Pierce. “Take Booker or his representative to the Akureyri copy and hand it over, be silent on the other, and I promise you’ll get the evidence you need to bring Alzuhur down. Permanently.”

“Talking about promises,” said Zang, pointing to the far edge of the glacier. Approximately two hundred metres distant where the ice fused with the rocky mountainous path were the two surviving Zaslon operators, hiking fast up the steep incline, and one of them lugged the RG-6 grenade launcher. “We’ve still got to deal with these two.”

“Leave them to me,” said Pierce. “Whatever happens, you need to tell Booker I fell down a crevasse, and you presumed I died down there. That lie gives me time to collect the data and work out what Booker wants from it⁠—”

“Pierce!” Zang almost screamed at him, her pitch was that high. “This is ridiculous. You are ridiculous, thinking you can do this alone. This is why you and I…” She stopped herself from saying more and looked away.

Then Pierce noticed that she was blushing.

“This is why, what? Zang?”

She smarted and shook her head. “Don’t do this, Mark. It’s too hard, this death wish you have. I just can’t work with you when you act all crazy like this.”

Then he guessed at her real meaning, that she couldn’t be in an intimate relationship with him when he acted crazy, and her words stung.

“It’s not a death wish, Zang. It’s… balance.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. We fight this out together or not at all. Oh, FUCK!” She pointed to where the two Zaslon men had now stepped onto the glacier. One of them had fired a grenade from the RG-6 launcher. They had moved faster than Pierce and presumably Zang had expected them to, and now they watched in horror as a missile propelled through the air towards them.

Pierce dived one way as Zang and Nayef dived the other.

When the grenade hit, Pierce was flat on the ice with his mouth open and eyes shut to lessen the impact of the shock wave rattling his inner ears. When it hit the ice a second later, its explosive powers were still loud and jarring on his body.

After the explosion dissipated, and he looked up to see that he was unharmed, he turned to ascertain the status of Zang and Nayef.

The grenade blast had revealed the location of a fresh length of crevasse that now separated their two groupings by a width of about three metres, and that was at least a hundred metres long in each direction and at least twelve metres deep, if not more. Pierce saw that he was on the same side as the two Zaslon men now running towards him. He also saw that he was about a metre higher than Zang, meaning he might be able to jump to her side, but the reverse was less likely to result in a successful crossing, and Zang would know this too.

“Looks like the decision has been made for us, Zang.”

“You asshole, Pierce.” She threw her shotgun across the gap to him, and he caught it easily.

Then she took a pouch from her belt and flung that over as well. Pierce grabbed it and saw it was full of shells.

“I can lay down covering fire with my rifle.”

“Good idea, but get cover for you and Nayef first⁠—”

He was interrupted by the blast of another grenade roaring through the crisp air towards them, and Pierce dived again.

41

Aridge in the ice provided cover for Pierce as another grenade blasted snow and frozen water into the still blue sky. He kept himself low, knowing that incendiary projectiles tended to fly outwards and upwards in cone patterns, so if he stayed close to the glacier sheet during an impact, only a direct hit could seriously damage him.

When the force of the blast dissipated, and he saw that he was still unharmed other than his now aggravated earlier cuts and burns, Pierce lifted himself up into a firing position and aimed two shots at the Zaslon men, still over a hundred metres from him. The shots didn’t hit, but it did force them to take cover.

Knowing they had an unknown number of grenades in their arsenal, Pierce moved again as he reloaded. One of the soldiers fired a burst from his AEK-971 assault rifle in his general direction, but no bullets hit Pierce because of the distance separating them and his erratically changing speed as he moved.

When he heard another grenade fire, Pierce leapt across another open crevasse in the ice onto a ledge two metres down. The grenade hit somewhere out of sight and further away compared to where the previous two had landed relative to his position. Yet the shock waves caused the crevasse he hid in to shake as fragments of ice and snow dislodged and fell around him.

Wasting no time, Pierce climbed back up to the surface, took cover and fired his Cynergy CX 12-gauge again. As before, he hit nothing, but that didn’t matter. Because his distracting shots gave Zang enough time to line up her target in the crosshairs of her rifle and shoot the man holding the grenade launcher firmly in the centre of his chest.

Whether or not the shot penetrated his body armour didn’t matter because he stumbled and dropped into a deep rift in the ice. He must have fired the grenade launcher the same moment he’d taken the bullet, because it resulted in a misdirected shot straight into the snow at his feet. The explosion from the grenade detonated a second after he fell, and Pierce knew he would instantly become nothing more than vaporised meat because the man had been too close.

“Good job, Ronin,” Pierce whispered to himself, then moved again.

Only one target remained now.

He’d raced across thirty metres of ice before he heard further shots aimed in his direction.

Pierce dived, sensing rounds passing over him.

Now prone in the snow and ice for the moment, Pierce expelled his used shells, then reloaded. He didn’t move, knowing that his current cover was good, but standing now could mean putting himself in the crosshairs of his enemy.

Then he heard the crack of a rifle behind him.

Then another.

Zang.

She was providing cover for him again.

Crouching low, he sprinted until further bursts from the same Russian assault rifle filled the air.

Zang fired again and a fourth time. This gave Pierce a chance to move once more, to get closer to this last target.

The man had proved difficult to spot most of the time because he was maximising cover as much as Pierce was, but Pierce knew roughly where he had positioned himself because of the wisps of cordite smoke gathering above him. This Russian thought it a better strategy to dig in and fight from a well-fortified position, but he would be wrong.

Then, overhead, Pierce heard the distant noise of a helicopter approaching from the west.

He dropped again behind another ridge of ice, thankful that so far, he had not sprinted over and fallen into a thinly iced over and deep crevasse, because there sure had to be many of them dispersed around them. But to remain motionless in this gun battle was a greater risk to his life, so worth the chance.

With his shotgun readied and reloaded again, Pierce shuffled through the snow. He was very close now to the ridge in the ice where he suspected the last Zaslon man had positioned himself.

The helicopter passed over, and Pierce saw that it was an Airbus H225, well-equipped for high-altitude and cold-weather conditions. Its marking seemed to be those of the Icelandic Coast Guard, guessed from the brief glimpse Pierce had seen of it.

Then Pierce heard the flare gun fire behind him.

He didn’t look back as a bright light lit up the sky overhead. He looked ahead, to see if the last Russian would react and reveal himself.

And when he did, the Russian’s movements were subtle. He shifted in the snow just enough for Pierce to see an arm rise for the tiniest moment.

Pierce reacted instinctively, firing a single shot, then watched as the slug tore meat from the Zaslon operator’s limb. The enemy operative cried out momentarily from the pain, swore, then disappeared again.

Knowing that Pierce had crippled the man from effectively using a rifle, he sprinted across the final stretch of ice that separated them until he was almost on top of his foe and shot him in the chest.

The slug didn’t kill him, because the Russian wore body armour, but it did stun and disorientate him.

Pierce jumped into the hole the operator had adopted, and his boot crashed down on the man’s one good hand.

His enemy screamed from this second eruption of crippling pain. Pierce ignored his expression of self-pity and pulled them both down into a trough inside the ice about three metres deep and a metre wide. He punched the Russian in the stomach, winding him. Then as the crippled, older man slid into a wedge against the ice, it trapped him.

With a moment’s reprieve, Pierce saw that his foe was a huge beast of an opponent, with wide shoulders, taut muscles, a big bushy pepper-coloured beard and a shaved scalp.

While the man groaned and regained his senses, Pierce pulled the man’s pistol, knife and grenades from his many holsters and pouches and pocketed them.

“Arkady?” said the man, finally reaching a moment of clarity, only to express utter disbelief in his slowly refocusing eyes. “I knew I fucking knew you!”

Pierce did a double take and stared at his foe again. He did indeed now recognise Sergeant Major Nikolai Solovyow. Then a barrage of unpleasant memories featuring this pig of a man suddenly washed over Pierce, reminding him why he completely and utterly detested this man.

“Arkady-fucking-Volkov! Fucking hell!”

Because the shotgun was cumbersome in this tight space, Pierce lifted his Webley .455 revolver and pointed it at the Zaslon operator’s head. In the same moment, Pierce was reliving several of the awful tortures this man had inflicted on innocent civilians in the short time Pierce had known him, during a period in his life when Pierce could do nothing to prevent this man’s sadistic brutality.

But now, in this moment, when they were reunited again, Pierce held all the advantages.

“Everyone believes you are dead!”

“Yeah, Sergeant Major, everyone does. And I think we need to keep it that way.”

Pierce squeezed the trigger, and suddenly Nikolai Solovyow was no longer a man who could be counted as existing amongst the living.

42

From her sniper position in the snow and ice, Zang waited without moving while internally she fought a mental war with her own impatience. She had provided cover fire as Pierce had requested, even taken out one of the two remaining Zaslon operators despite the long-distance shot that complicated it. She’d even watched as Pierce shot, then chased their last foe into a deep ridge in the ice. That had been more than a minute ago now, and Pierce had not emerged.

Meanwhile, the Icelandic Coast Guard Airbus H225 had closed in and hovered over her and Nayef, and the downward pressure of the winds prevented her from aiming her rifle. The flare Zang had fired had attracted the pilot to their position, but she still cursed it coming for them this soon.

“What do we do?” Nayef mouthed the words and presumably said them too, but Zang couldn’t hear over the booming noise of the helicopter.

While pointing to her ear, Zang looked up and waved to the pilot and the winch operator, then gave the thumbs up. In response the operator proceeded to lower the winch with harnesses attached. Zang returned the thumbs up gesture. Figuring she had a better chance of spotting Pierce from the air than on the glacier, she decided to board rather than delay their rescuers any longer.

Nayef tried to talk to her again, but Zang still couldn’t hear her over the deafening noise of the engine and spinning rotor blades. She shook her head and pointed up to indicate they could talk once they were airborne.

When the winch reached them, Zang fitted them both into the harnesses, then gave the thumbs up that they were ready. Ascent was rapid, and soon they were flying to a much higher altitude than Zang would have expected by the time the operator pulled them both into the cabin. He gestured for her rifle and said something to her she couldn’t hear over the engine’s roar. Figuring these people were technically on the same side as her, she handed the rifle over without resistance.

The H225’s interior was that of a search and rescue configuration, with eight seats and room for several stretchers. Three of the crew, two women and one man, wore Icelandic Coast Guard uniforms. They looked harmless enough. It was the two civilians strapped into the seats who looked to be the complete opposite of the Icelandic nationals: dangerous. One man she didn’t recognise, and the other she did.

The first man, with a dark beard, dark sunglasses and a “fuck-you” attitude, was an operator like Zang. She could tell by his cool demeanour and how he watched every move she made very closely. He dressed like he’d just come off a shift lumbering timber in Alaska, with a thick woollen jacket, a beanie, cargo pants no doubt over thermals, and sensible hiking boots. She didn’t see any weapons on him, but knew he was packing. She would have done so if their roles had been reversed.

The second individual was more the suit-and-tie variety of a masculine man despite not wearing either. Today he’d donned a flannel shirt, jeans, and a puffa jacket, and looked too thin of body to be out in the cold, the snow and the wilderness, where she suspected Mitch Hawley wouldn’t last more than a day if he had to fend for himself. The analyst whom she’d had the unfortunate experience of engaging with in Central Asia pushed his wire-frame glasses up his nose, clutched his leather satchel tighter to his chest, then smiled at Zang while he gestured for her to take the seat next to him.

After ensuring the coast guards were attending to Kasrin Nayef and that she was okay, Zang buckled in and placed a noise-reducing headset on her scalp. Hawley held up four fingers, so Zang checked that was the channel number they were on, which they were. Presumably this was a conversation for her ears only, and she was fine with that.

Hawley spoke into his microphone as she heard his tinny words in her ears. “Can I presume you have the last copy of the Broek & Trausch data?”

Zang had been about to speak on another subject, but now paused. On her last mission with this man, early on, Hawley had proved himself to be efficient and attentive as her handler while she had been operating in the field. Sometimes she’d thought he was even flirting with her, and that had made her feel good about herself at the time. But later she’d learned that during an insertion mission into an enemy facility in Pakistan, his laziness had inadvertently caused the deaths of six Ground Branch operators and had almost got herself and Pierce killed. He should have been fired for that level of incompetence, but his connections to the highest levels of government and old money had instead seen his promotion into the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis, working for none other than Deputy Director Henry Booker himself. Therefore, Zang had concluded that Hawley wasn’t in his job to do good, but to fast-track his career and gather power, and didn’t care about the collateral damage he caused along the way.

She had been about to insist they go back and look for Pierce to ensure he was safe. Then she remembered what Pierce had asked her to pretend: that he had fallen into a crevasse and was presumed dead. What now caused her stomach to churn over and over again was the unsettling fact that she didn’t know if he really was dead, or if it was a ruse, and this both irritated and hurt her to no end. Even when they weren’t together, Mark Pierce could still make Rachel Zang run the full gauntlet of intense emotions she’d rather just bottle up and pretend didn’t exist.

She hated him for that.

“Zang?”

“What?”

“Rachel,” Hawley said more kindly as he reached out to touch her on the leg, then changed his mind when she gave him a steely stare, “I’m glad you’re okay.”

Zang blurted out her next words, knowing that the deep emotions she was expressing right now were real regardless of the deceit they were intended to achieve. “I’m not sure about Pierce, though. He disappeared down a crevasse.”

For a moment Hawley looked to be inconvenienced, then masked his real emotion with an expression of concern. “I’m sorry. Is he…? Did he…?”

“Survive?” Zang returned to projecting only her practised steely stare. If Pierce still lived but was injured and in need of assistance, this was her last chance to rescue him. But she also knew he wouldn’t want her to. Watching Hawley watch her now, she finally sensed what Pierce had. Whatever it was Booker and Hawley were up to, it was no good; it was real and not a figment of the Trigger Man’s imagination. She had to trust that her peer, ex-lover and, dare she say it, friend knew what he was doing. “No, Hawley. I don’t think he did.”

He nodded and kept up with his solemn expression, even though he had to work hard to project it. “He was a good man. He’ll be missed.”

Not by you, thought Zang.

“We’ll send a second team back to recover his body.”

“There are nine dead Zaslon operators down there too.”

Hawley’s eyebrows shot to the top of his forehead. “Nine? Zaslon you say?”

Zang nodded.

He cleared his throat and shifted in his seat. “On other matters, we have news on the rest of your team. Knight, Parab and Summerfield are safe and receiving professional medical care. I’ll get to them in a minute. But right now, I need to know exactly where that copy of the files is.”

She nodded but didn’t answer him. He’d have to frame it as a question before she would deign to answer him.

“Pierce said it was in Akureyri. Is that correct?”

Zang turned to where Kasrin Nayef was seated, where one of the women coast guards was attending to her and checking for injuries. Nayef smiled weakly at Zang, and Zang returned the gesture. Then Zang said to Hawley without looking at him, “Nayef is the only one who knows exactly where it is. You are going to look after her because of her voluntarily helping you out?”

Hawley patted his satchel while he grinned with mischief. “All the paperwork is in here. A protection order. US residency for her and her brother.” Then Hawley smacked himself in his face. “I forgot to tell you, Zang. Good news, we have her brother too. Yakub Samaan is in a CIA safe house in Copenhagen and well protected. We’ll be able to reunite them both, then send them to America, where they will be even safer.” He cleared his throat. “Actually, pretend I didn’t tell you it was Copenhagen. You aren’t supposed to know that detail. For operational security reasons, you understand?”

Zang nodded. “I hope it isn’t one of the safe houses compromised in the Broek & Trausch data breach?”

He laughed loudly like it was a funny joke, even though Zang saw no humour in his remark. “I’ll tell Nayef the good news in a minute.”

Zang shrugged, as she considered this was indeed good news, and perhaps Kasrin Nayef and Yakub Samaan still might achieve justice against the brutal Syrian regime they had set out to hurt in the first place. But she also couldn’t help but feel that the entire mission was still about to turn to shit.

Perhaps that was because Hawley was nothing more than a piece of shit in a suit.

“Get us to Akureyri, Hawley; then I’ll get Nayef to take you to the data. Then we can all go home.”

“I’m sorry about Pierce, Zang — Rachel.” Hawley smiled again, but the desperation of how much he wanted her to like him in return was written all over his insincere face, and that was all she could see him expressing in this moment, which made her hate him even more. “But you and the team did good. The entire Russian SVR Zaslon outfit is all dead except for one who got away. And the Russians don’t have any copies of the Broek & Trausch data — as far as we can tell. So that’s a win.”

Zang leaned forward, frowning. “What do you mean? One got away?”

Hawley shrugged. “No one important. The SVR operator leading the team. She escaped and has gone to ground.”

“Who is she?”

“Captain Natalya Kozlova, a senior operations officer with the SVR. And niece of the oligarch Konstantine Kozlova, if you believe that?”

Zang shrugged, as if this information was of no consequence to her at all, when in fact it was.

“We’ll get her eventually, Rachel. But don’t worry your little head about any of that anymore; the Russians lost this round. We have the data. Our safe houses are protected again. It’s all good in the world. America won again.”

PART III

THE SYRIANS

43

Akureyri, Iceland

Later that day, or night, for Rachel Zang could not be sure of the actual time with the perpetual daylight, she found herself standing in a street in the quaint Icelandic town of Akureyri, in a natural harbour on the northern side of the island. Zang realised this was as far north as she had ever been on this one planet that was home to all of humanity. A bone-chilling wind blew off the Atlantic Ocean, but at least the sun was bright in this weirdly remote but highly modern part of the world where it always seemed to be day, and Zang asked herself why she was allowing distracting trivia to intervene in what she should have been doing instead, being vigilantly, situationally aware despite the mission being over.

She was distracted, Zang realised, because Mitch Hawley and his unnamed Ground Branch minder were keeping her in the dark. It had been Hawley who had provided Nayef with all the paperwork and promises of a better life, and he had used his charm to talk her into providing him the location of Luxembourg Papers data set, the last one in existence, or so he thought. And in the process, Hawley had managed to keep Zang out of the decision-makings or in filling her in on details regarding his undertakings.

What had impressed Zang was how Nayef had pulled off the deception of a single remaining data copy, and it was only this ruse that stopped Zang from mouthing off at the prick Hawley, who was enjoying the power rush of being in charge too much.

When Nayef took them to Anna Birtadottir’s cousin’s house in the middle of the night despite the sun still sitting near the horizon, she revealed where her dead journalist friend had hidden it in a tool shed at the back of the property. The location was like any other European suburban street, with hedges, gardens, two-storey houses with sloped roofs, and modern cars parked in the streets. It seemed not to belong in the dangerous world that Zang and her peers operated in.

Then as Zang watched as the unnamed Ground Branch minder snuck into the garden shed, the illusion of normalcy was ruined.

When he returned with the drive, Hawley’s eyes lit up like he was a small boy about to open all his presents on Christmas morning.

They walked around the corner, so they were out of sight just in case they had been seen when everyone was supposedly sleeping, but no one seemed to be up and about to challenge them.

“Let me just check this.” Hawley took a tech device that was unfamiliar to Zang from his satchel, then connected it via a data cable to the drive. A few seconds passed before a line of green lights lit up, bringing on another one of Hawley’s insincere smiles. No doubt this tech was amongst the latest spy gear developed by the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, a pre-programed device that quickly analysed and confirmed that the drive’s contents were indeed the genuine Luxembourg Papers without the need for a human operative to check the old-fashioned way, which would have been ridiculously time consuming to achieve. “It seems, Zang,” said Hawley after a moment, “that you and Nayef were true to your word. This does seem to be all the data.”

“Why would it not be?”

Hawley shrugged and didn’t answer.

“Do I get to see my brother now?” Nayef had perked up after the Coast Guard had brought them to Akureyri, where Hawley had delighted in informing her of Yakub Samaan’s secure and safe location under their care. He had even allowed Nayef and her brother to talk briefly on a phone call, which had brought tears of happiness to the journalist’s eyes.

Hawley was still smiling. “Yes, reuniting you is exactly what we’ll do next. I just need to make one phone call first.” After placing the hard drive and the tech device in his satchel, Hawley took out his cell phone and dialled a number. “All confirmed,” he said, then hung up.

Hating that she was a passive observer in this interaction, Zang crossed her arms and sneered because she didn’t know what else she could do. “Where exactly is this safe house in Copenhagen?”

Hawley tutted. “Sorry, Zang, that’s need to know only.”

A Kia Sorento four-wheel drive suddenly pulled up next to them.

Zang had been about to react until she realised Hawley and his minder seemed to be expecting its arrival. The man behind the wheel, judging by his bulk and projected confidence, was likely another Ground Branch operator and probably best buddies with Hawley’s minder. Zang was also surprised to see that the single man in the backseat was the DDA/CIA himself, Henry Booker. A man in his senior position shouldn’t have been operating in the field like this, which made Zang question if his involvement in this mission was not professional, but personal.

Hawley showed Kasrin Nayef to the backseat and ushered her in. She followed him as she glanced back at Zang, her doleful eyes seeking assurance.

Zang nodded, encouraging her to go with them, feeling that as long as they stuck together, Nayef would be okay.

Then as Hawley got in behind Nayef, the unnamed Ground Branch operator stepped in front of Zang to stop her. “You’re not coming with us,” he said in a commanding yet matter-of-fact tone.

“What the fuck?”

The man didn’t move. “We can fight it out. I’ve heard enough about you, Zang, to know I won’t put you down easily. But I will if you force me to.”

Zang clenched and unclenched her fists, tensing as she considered her next move.

“If you and I come to blows, my buddy there will just drive off, and I’ll catch up with them later. You’ve lost this round, whatever you do.”

Zang drew in a deep breath and held it for many seconds. Infuriatingly, the operator was correct, and she felt like a fool for not seeing this eventuality.

“Get yourself back to Langley,” said the operator when he recognised that Zang had chosen not to fight him. “Do the smart thing, and don’t involve yourself any further.” He climbed into the front passenger seat, and the Kia Sorento drove off.

Zang instinctively memorised the number plate but knew it would be useless to do so. Booker, Hawley, Nayef and their Ground Branch minders would be in the air and on their way out of Iceland within the hour.

When they were out of sight, Zang walked fast from this location, knowing that despite it being the middle of the night, the sky was like a normal sunny day, and she had just participated in a nearby break and enter. She walked for fifteen minutes in the chilly air, watching for tails and spotting none, until she reached a gas station, where she purchased a prepaid cell phone. Then after installing off-the-shelf encryption software, she logged on to a secure CIA website where her team recorded the numbers of burner cell phones that they were currently utilising. The only member of their team currently active on the account was Mackenzie Summerfield.

Leaving the gas station, Zang walked along the edge of Akureyri’s inlet with rolling green hills as scenery on the other side of its watery stretch, then called her peer.

“Hello?” said Summerfield.

“It’s me,” answered Zang.

“Okay. Code in.”

They proceeded through a series of coded words determining that neither of them was under duress nor subjected to enemy surveillance.

Zang asked, “Are you okay, Mackenzie?”

There was a strain in the analyst’s words when she answered, “I’m okay now. It was horrible, what happened in the safe house, but not the worst I’ve endured as a hostage.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“Knight, Parab and I are all okay now, and in Reykjavik’s Landspitali University Hospital.” Summerfield then described what had happened when the SVR team had taken them hostage, and how they had only just managed to escape with their lives. “Parab and I have been discharged. Knight’s staying in for a few days because she has a serious concussion, and she’s not talking sense at the moment, anyway. The doctors reassure us she will improve with rest and medical care. Regardless, none of us will be here for much longer, as our embassy is getting us out before the Icelandic government changes their mind about prosecuting us.”

Zang didn’t ask what the charges would be, but knew they could extend to espionage, possession of illegal weapons and even murder despite it sounding like Parab and Summerfield had acted in self-defence. “Sounds like a reasonable plan.”

Zang then proceeded through her last forty-eight hours, with the chase across Iceland’s interior, the encounter with the Zaslon team, Pierce’s disappearance on the glacier, and Hawley and Booker’s involvement in snatching Nayef away from her. She didn’t mention the second copy of the full Luxembourg Papers that Pierce was pursuing if he was still alive, just in case the line was compromised. Zang could tell Summerfield about that later. “Can you get yourself and Parab to Copenhagen?”

“I can try. Our flight back to Washington, DC, is British Airways and stops in London. Theoretically we could vanish there if we need to.”

“Good. Do that. But keep in mind, Summerfield, what I’m asking isn’t sanctioned. You join me, and we’d be operating alone and without support if we do this.” Zang looked around to see if anyone was following her on this coastal stroll between a road and the ocean, but she saw no one. “But something isn’t right about all this, and I have to follow it to its end, whatever that is.”

“I agree. More so because I can’t reach Ibrahim, and that’s also suspicious. Like Pierce, he’s disappeared off the grid too.”

Zang tensed. “That’s a worry. It would be good to get some direction from our boss, because whatever the Russians are up to, we haven’t stopped them, only prevented one team from destroying all the Broek & Trausch data that hides their dirty secret.”

“So what do we do?”

Zang thought on this for a moment, then said, “I have some ideas, but I don’t want to discuss them over this line. Get yourselves to Copenhagen, and we’ll meet up there to plan our next steps.”

“And Pierce?”

Zang shook her head, frustrated at how infuriating and noble he could be at the same time. “If he’s alive⁠—”

“Zang, don’t worry about Pierce,” interrupted Summerfield. “I know him. He’s alive, I’m sure of it.”

“Thank you, I think. If our working assumption, then, is that he’s alive, that means he’s still operating off the grid.”

“I agree. It’s infuriatingly when he does.”

Zang sighed. “Well, if he won’t contact us until he’s ready to do so, I’m afraid he’s on his own until then.”

44

Denmark, Copenhagen

The next morning, after what felt to be an exhausting day and night of international travel across Europe, Kasrin Nayef finally reached the location where Mitch Hawley said her brother was being secured. Hawley and his still unnamed CIA bodyguard had taken her to Vesterport railway station in Copenhagen’s central business district, then led her through an old metal door that required an iron key to unlock it, and down a series of stairs inside a concrete tunnel that suddenly appeared behind it. She would have been more worried about the dark tomb-like qualities of their descent if Hawley hadn’t been cheery and considerate of her needs on the way down.

“Kasrin,” he said in his reassuring tone, “I’m sorry about all the cloak-and-dagger checks and double-checks I’m subjecting you to. We still don’t know if the Russians or the Syrians are coming for you is why. But rest assured, this bunker is the safest place we can secure you both. At least until we can get you and Yakub to America.”

As they descended the metal-grille steps, Kasrin noticed how quiet and still this facility seemed to be. “What exactly is this place?”

Hawley laughed lightly, still clutching his satchel close to him, as if it were an aspect of his self-identity he could never part with. “This was a nuclear bunker built during the Cold War. While not as elaborate as the famous REGAN West super bunker in the north of the country now open to tourists, it was still designed to withstand a nuclear blast, and to secure and house key members of the Danish government for several months in safety, if needed.”

“What do you mean, nuclear blast?”

“Yeah.” He laughed again. “Perhaps you don’t know your history, Kasrin, which is not surprising considering where you came from.”

His words sounded condescending, but she let this pass without comment, for she did know her history of the last one hundred years rather well. “Tell me?”

“The Cold War was a period of political and military tension between the United States and NATO, and the Soviet Union and their Warsaw pact with the then Eastern European nations. It spanned from shortly after World War Two until the early 1990s and triggered a nuclear arms race. After the Soviets started developing and testing hydrogen bombs, and with the Cuban Missile Crisis in the 1960s that followed after it, the world started to exist in a state of perpetual fear that Armageddon was just around the corner. Nuclear Armageddon and mutual assured destruction and all that.”

She shuddered but was also playing to his vanity when she said, “And I thought the modern world we live in is bad.”

Hawley shrugged. “Hard to say which was worse. But to answer your question, Kasrin, Denmark, as a NATO country, was situated in a rather interesting position of being at the mouth of the Baltic Sea, ideally positioned where lots of Soviet naval ships and submarines passed through these waters on an almost daily basis. It was a very strategic city back in those times. This bunker, then, is a legacy of that war.”

“Really?”

He smiled kindly. “Yes, indeed. These days we rent it from the Danish government, because they have hundreds of others just like it that they can use for their own clandestine purposes and don’t need them all. And they get intel from us that they otherwise would never be able to secure on their own. In return, they leave us alone down here.”

At the base of the stairs, Nayef guessed that they were at least sixty metres underground now. She wished Zang and Pierce were still with her, because they had made her feel safe. Despite Hawley’s charm and good nature, she didn’t feel the same sense of security around him, and his minder was just outright creepy. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come here after all, but her desire to see her brother was a far stronger motivator for her right now.

They passed through another secure door, then entered a network of tunnels with various rooms coming off them. Nayef peered into one and saw old-fashioned rotary dial telephones and stationery on wooden desks that looked to have remained unchanged since the 1970s. Then Nayef noticed that there were no other people down here with them.

“Ah,” said Hawley. “Your brother is in there.”

He pointed to another secure metal door, where another muscular and stoic man waited, guarding the entrance, the first person she had seen since disappearing underground.

Hawley and his bodyguard nodded to this new man, who then unlocked the door and opened it.

Hawley said, “We’ll leave you two alone for a minute to catch up. But rest assured, we’ll be out of here in the hour. So don’t get too comfortable.” He laughed at his own joke, then stepped outside.

Kasrin looked in and saw what appeared to be a conference room, with full wall maps of Denmark, the world and Europe covering every surface. Then she spotted her older sibling, Yakub Samaan, seated at a conference table, reading a Harry Potter novel, presumably because there was nothing else to do down here to pass the time.

“Big brother!” she called out as she rushed to him, hugging herself close to the person dearest to her in the whole world. “You’re okay!”

He held on to her tight. “I am, little sister. And it looks like you are too.”

“We’re going to be safe soon,” she said, not quite believing it now that she had said it out loud. “Mr Hawley said we will be in America this time tomorrow. Have you met him?” She pulled back from her brother to get a better look at him. Like her, he was thinner than she remembered, with dark circles around his eyes, his hair flat and lifeless. He’d also grown the beginnings of a beard, and didn’t look as smart as he normally did in his business suits, like he had been living in the one he wore now for too many days in a row.

He nodded. “Yeah, Mr Hawley I know. To my surprise, he found me in Copenhagen where I was hiding, then brought me here. Apparently, my digital trail wasn’t well enough hidden for their NSA spying organisation not to eventually track me down.”

“Wow!”

“Yeah, and frightening too. When he turned up with his bodyguards, I was terrified they were the Russians or Broek & Trausch security men sent by Frederick Schaus.”

“They’ve treated you okay?”

He nodded, then looked down, expressing both sadness and embarrassment. “I had to give up my copy of the stolen data. Mr Hawley insisted. I hope you still have a copy somewhere; otherwise I fear we’re never going to bring justice to that butcher Da’oud Alzuhur. I really hope we can put that awful torture he inflicted on our parents before he murdered them behind us, and all this hasn’t been for nothing.”

Nayef returned a smile that was full of the same sadness her brother expressed. She wanted to tell him that a man called Mark Pierce had promised to provide them with a copy of the data The Hague prosecutors would need to win their day in court, but that seemed such a fanciful hope now that Pierce and Zang had completely disappeared from her world. “I hate to say it, but I had to give up my copies as well. But at least, big brother, the data exists in the free world now, somewhere, I hope. We still might gain access to it in the future.”

“Or we might end up in jail ourselves for stealing the data in the first place.”

Nayef shuddered at the thought. “Let’s pray these CIA people are more lenient towards us than our own country people ever were.”

Yakub frowned, then looked over her towards the door Kasrin had entered by. “Do you hear that?”

She turned and listened. There was a muffled noise, but she couldn’t determine what it was.

“It sounds like our CIA minders are walking away.”

Nayef felt a chill prickle across her skin. “Why would they do that when they said we are leaving soon?”

Yakub didn’t answer as he tried the door. “It’s locked.” He shook it now, to no avail. “I mean, they’ve kept me locked in here for days. Perhaps it’s nothing.” He returned to her side and smiled bravely.

“I’m sure it’s fine. This will all work out. I’m sure of it.”

She kept repeating the words while wondering who she was trying to convince more, her brother or herself?

To pass the time, Yakub showed her around, taking her to a kitchen area, where there was dried coffee, tea bags and canned food, a toilet and a shower, and a side room with several bunks. One bunk was in disarray, and it looked as if Yakub had been sleeping in it for more than a few days. “There is a collection of novels,” he said, pointing to a pile of books next to his bunk. “I’ve read most of them. You might as well too, little sister, until they come back for us. There is nothing else to do.”

Then they heard the door opening.

Both Nayef and Yakub raced back to the entrance. Her because she was keen to be away from this dark, silent tomb, and her brother likely felt the same, judging by his enthusiasm.

But the three men who waited at the door were not Mitch Hawley or his minders.

They all wore leather jackets, white shirts and dress pants, and each of them held a pistol in their grip.

Nayef recognised the middle-aged man in the centre immediately and wished that she had not. He was larger, older and fatter than the others, with a balding head and a thick moustache. He was the scary man she had spotted in the streets of Reykjavik, coming for her when she had tried to meet up with Anna Birtadottir, and now he had found her here.

“We finally meet,” said the fat man, speaking Arabic with an unmistakable Syrian accent. “The Mukhabarat are not pleased with you both. Not pleased at all.”

Yakub stuttered as Nayef felt a sinking fear overwhelm her. “You… are not the CIA?”

“No,” said the fat man with a sneer. “We are the Mukhabarat, and I am Butros Jerash. Perhaps you have heard of me already?”

Nayef looked to her brother, but he was as confused as she was.

“Never mind.” He waved the two men behind him in. “We’re here to return you to Damascus for your punishment. And soon enough, you’ll both know me by my more popular nickname, for I am the dreaded Doctor Acid! Heard of me now?”

With all hope seemingly fleeing from her in this instance, Kasrin Nayef realised that she did.

This was the man who had once been Da’oud Alzuhur’s most favoured apprentice.

45

Reykjavik, Iceland

Two days after his battle with the Zaslon team on the glacier, Mark Pierce was again in Reykjavik. Although stiff and sore from his injuries, in that time he had managed to secure the full digital copy of the Luxembourg Papers. He’d taken it from the locker in the backpacker hostel, then returned to the hotel room he had booked earlier that morning, where he’d cleaned and redressed his wounds before logging in to an earlier purchased laptop to peruse the data, finding it legitimate, within the realms of his skills to assess such things. Next, he’d searched for any documents that had a match for the names Da’oud or Alzuhur and copied all hits onto a secret Google Drive account known only to himself. Then after making another copy of the full data set, he saved it onto another physical drive that he’d purchased with his laptop, then visited the hotel reception, where he’d arranged for it to be physically mailed to his Cayman Island bank for secure keeping. Then he reached out to Abdul Ibrahim via a secret account that they both shared, and arranged for a clandestine meet.

It had been evening by the time he had completed all his tasks.

Exhausted from his injuries, he dosed himself up on powerful painkillers, cleaned his wounds again, shot back three measures of Norwegian vodka, then slept for the next twenty-four hours.

That had all occurred yesterday.

When he woke late this day in the afternoon, Pierce burned to re-engage with the world again. Energised and feeling like he had just run a marathon, he headed out.

Once in the heart of Reykjavik, he took a direct route to where he needed to be and was soon stood outside the location of his meet with his boss, Iceland’s Harpa concert hall. The modern architectural fusion of glass and steel featured a building fabric of crystalline lattices lit up in purple lighting, while billboards outside it promoted that the Icelandic orchestra was performing Swan Lake tonight, not that Pierce was here to see the famous Russian ballet performed live.

Wearing a three-quarter coat, a woollen sweater, dark slacks and lace-up boots, Pierce was dressed both to impress in this high-class establishment and for ease of movement should this meet prove to be compromised. Wiping sweat from his forehead, he touched the .455-calibre Webley army model revolver that was secure in his coat pocket. The weapon was practically ancient, but an aspect of its rarity and unknown history appealed to Pierce, and he had found himself wondering how he could smuggle it back to the United States with him as a curious souvenir of this adventure. For the moment, however, it was an ideal weapon he could use if compromised.

Stepping into a modern bar inside the Harpa, Pierce found himself surrounded by men and women dressed in dinner suits, gowns and cocktail dresses, ready for a pleasant evening at the ballet. It took Pierce a moment to spot Ibrahim with all the men dressed the same, in a tuxedo, drinking a soda water at a table towards the back and where the light was dim.

Pierce ordered a gin and tonic from a passing server, then joined Ibrahim. “Didn’t think you were going to show.”

Ibrahim sipped his soda water, then said casually, “Losing faith in your superior officer, Trigger Man?”

Pierce sat himself down next to his boss and just as casually said, “Not yet. I just expected Booker to have fired you already.”

Ibrahim smirked. “If he can’t find us, he can’t fire us. I’m presuming that’s why you too disappeared off the grid?”

The same server arrived at the drinking spot and passed Pierce his gin and tonic, which Pierce paid for with cash.

“Skál!”

“Skál!” said Ibrahim, returning the toast.

They chinked glasses.

Pierce said, “I have a few questions for you.”

“I’m sure you do.”

Dabbing his sweating head with the napkin that had accompanied his drink, Pierce asked, “Why is Booker hell-bent on bringing you down? And I’m presuming it’s got nothing to do with those rumours floating around Langley that he likes to pay for sex with eighteen-year-old prostitutes? That’s not the secret you’ve got over him?”

Ibrahim laughed. “I’m presuming you’ve already figured out it was me who originally established all the European safe house accounts through Broek & Trausch?”

Pierce nodded.

“Do you also know that before his promotion to DDA/CIA, Booker was head of station Damascus?”

Pierce nodded again as he took off his coat because it was hot in here.

“This was the same time I was head of station Moscow. And with all those Russian military bases in Syria and the two dictators of both countries enjoying all kinds of security, military and intelligence pacts and get-togethers, it was inevitable that Booker and I would end up working many intelligence operations together.”

“What did you do to piss him off?”

Ibrahim finished his soda water and placed it on the table between them. “I never proved it, but I definitely accused Booker of sharing too much intel with the Syrian Mukhabarat. I might have even suggested that what he was doing was borderline traitorous.”

“Sounds traitorous to me.” Pierce frowned as he drank more of his gin and tonic, more to quench his thirst than for the alcohol kick. “Why would he do that? That’s the worst kind of treason.”

Ibrahim shrugged. “The intel Booker produced from Damascus was always top rate, the best anyone had got out of the regime in decades. But every time he had an intelligence coup, I’d lose an asset in Russia, or an operation would become compromised. It was getting to a point it wasn’t a coincidence anymore.”

Pierce nodded as he finished his gin and tonic. It had gone down too fast, and he realised he was still thirsty. “So I would guess the story here is that Booker hadn’t actually compromised or blackmailed an asset, or picked one who was motivated purely in bringing the Syrian regime down, to provide him with those juicy secrets. I bet Booker was horse-trading with the Mukhabarat instead. And the downside of that is, he could only get good intel if he exchanged something juicy in return. Such as details on your Russian operations that were always getting compromised. Am I right?” He waved over a server and asked for a glass of iced water.

Ibrahim asked for soda water, then continued when the server vanished. “That’s what I suspected too, but I could never prove it. Booker blew his top when I came out and accused him, and later my suspicions held enough weight for an internal investigation to occur. Needless to say, Booker came out the other side squeaky clean, I didn’t, and I made an enemy as a result.”

“So when the Broek & Trausch safe house data was compromised, he was presented with an ideal opportunity to get his revenge on you and put you under an internal investigation.” Pierce shook his head. “I’m guessing that’s why you couldn’t provide our team with the additional resources we needed, because you suspected Booker would position one of his people on the inside, who would report every move we made back to him?”

Ibrahim laughed. “That’s very astute of you, Pierce, to have put all that together.”

Pierce shrugged. “We’re in the business of intelligence. It’s our job to un-puzzle pieces.”

“I’m sorry it was only you, Zang, Summerfield, Parab and Knight on the team. You are the only people I trust right now.”

Pierce raised an eyebrow. “Patricia Knight? You do know she’s a cocaine addict, right, or at least was one not that long ago?”

“Of course. But she’s clean now and has proven her loyalty, like the rest of you have.”

Pierce nodded, not seeing it but deciding to accept Ibrahim’s vote of confidence on their senior operations officer for the time being. “You should have trusted me and the others with this knowledge. You should have trusted me about your connection to the Broek & Trausch safe houses. I had your back when Booker confronted me with this, even though you didn’t. What did he say the special access program was called? Andes Green?”

For the first time ever, Pierce saw that his boss was embarrassed. “You’re right, Trigger Man. I should have told you.”

The two men stared at each other for a moment, neither saying a word.

Then Pierce made up his mind and reached into the pocket of his coat laid next to him, and passed over Kasrin Nayef’s original data drive.

“Is that what I think it is?” Ibrahim asked as the digital storage device disappeared inside his jacket.

Pierce nodded. “The full set. Everything Kasrin Nayef and Yakub Samaan stole from the dodgy Luxembourg lawyers. I’m trusting you’ll do the right thing with it, sir.”

Ibrahim raised his eyebrows again. “I thought Booker had all the copies now?”

Pierce smirked, impressed at how well informed the C/SOG had kept himself despite being in hiding. “Not all of them. Whatever the dirt on Booker is that he doesn’t want anyone to know about, it’s on that hard drive.”

“That’s… not entirely ethical?”

Pierce laughed out loud as sweat dripped off him. “I don’t think anything we do in this job could ever be mistaken as ethical.” Pierce finished his glass of water, but still felt hot and sweaty. “Did Kasrin Nayef and Rachel Zang get away okay?”

Ibrahim nodded.

“Good. Now, you and I need to talk about how we put a stop to whatever it is that the Russians were planning. But first I need to get another glass⁠—”

Pierce stood, but as soon as he did, his legs gave out from beneath him, and he crashed onto the carpet.

Everyone saw him fall, but no one rushed up to offer assistance except Ibrahim.

Suddenly Pierce’s head was spinning, and he couldn’t get up. He realised he wasn’t hot because of the venue’s heating, but because he had developed a fever.

Ibrahim eventually helped Pierce to his feet and touched him on the forehead. “My friend, you are burning up.” He moved aside the collar around Pierce’s shoulder until he found the edge of one of his wounds. “They look infected. Badly.”

“I’m okay.”

“Bullshit you are, Pierce.”

Several of the bar’s staff approached and offered assistance.

“We’re good,” Ibrahim said, waving them away. “I’m taking him to a doctor.”

Normally Pierce avoided elevators because they were an easy location to ambush a target, but that was where Ibrahim brought Pierce, who was now leaning on his boss’s shoulder because he didn’t have the strength or coordination to stand up on his own. Ibrahim pressed the button for the underground car park, and they descended.

The whole way down, Pierce felt that he was on the verge of passing out, until he realised that he had somehow carried a half-full glass of water with him. He splashed it onto his face to shock him into staying awake.

It did shock him, but it didn’t make him feel any sturdier on his wobbly feet.

“Of course,” said Ibrahim matter-of-factly, “I’m not taking you to a conventional doctor. But I do want you on a course of antibiotics, and fast. Plus, you need to rest for a few days. You are no good to anyone in this state.”

Pierce wanted to disagree with his boss, but the fever had hit him so hard, he could no longer speak legible words.

46

Denmark, Copenhagen

After three days of constantly being on the move and chasing shadows in Copenhagen, Rachel Zang was convinced the local CIA station was hindering rather than assisting her investigations into Kasrin Nayef’s and Yakub Samaan’s whereabouts. While Zang had established early on that Mitch Hawley and Henry Booker were no longer in the country — which didn’t bode well for the journalist and the lawyer still being in Denmark either — she still needed to secure a lead soon, otherwise it seemed likely that the two Syrian refugees would disappear forever, and Zang couldn’t have that failure on her conscience.

In the meantime, while she, Summerfield and Parab had leveraged personal relationships with CIA officers in the country, they couldn’t tap into CIA databases and intelligence resources because officially the team were on a recuperation break. But also because Henry Booker and Hawley would likely be alerted to any attempts that they made to access Langley support, and might move to shut them down.

Then Zang learned that one of her peers whom she’d trained and studied with at the Farm was also assigned to the Copenhagen station. Zang had helped this woman, Ailie Perry, with all her exams and tests during that time, so therefore Zang figured Perry owed her even though they hadn’t spoken to each other since graduating. This clandestine meeting they were about to have in the heart of the Danish capital would soon answer that question.

Perry, an analyst with the Directorate of Analysis, stood by a canal overlooked by eighteenth-century buildings, with old trees that were losing their leaves, and cobbled streets. She wore a brown overcoat, a scarf and a beret, looking very European as she fidgeted and blew out steam from her mouth in the cold air.

Because Zang had seen Perry first, she approached and said hello.

Perry smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “I’m not comfortable with this, Zang.”

“Nice to see you too, Perry.” Zang stepped closer so they could speak in softer tones. “Do this, and I’ll never ask you for anything ever again.”

“I don’t owe you, Zang.”

The CIA paramilitary operator dug her hands deep into her leather jacket pockets and did her best to suppress a grin. “One day, you might need to lean on me.”

“I’m going to regret this.” Perry nodded, then looked around to see if they were under observation. Presumably then, because she confirmed that no one suspicious was watching them, she handed Zang a hard-shell glasses case. “There is putty inside, with the impression of a key.”

Zang took it and pocketed it. “What does it open?”

“A tunnel leading into an old bunker under Vesterport railway station, a few blocks from here. You’ll find it by asking locals for directions. Don’t use Google Maps or any other electronic means of locating it; otherwise we’ll both get pinged.”

“Understood.”

Perry danced on her feet for a moment and again studied the streets to ascertain if anyone was watching. There were no obvious tails, Zang had checked earlier, but surveillance was like proving a negative in a scientific research paper, an impossibility. You could only ever know for certain that you were under observation, and never its opposite. It was why Zang believed half the people she worked with were always crazy with fear.

“All I can tell you, Zang, is that something was going on down there a week back. Highest security clearances. I’m supposed to know nothing about it.”

“Thank you,” said Zang. “I owe you one.”

“You definitely do. Don’t contact me again for at least a year. Ideally, for much longer.”

Zang waited until Perry had disappeared, then turned and walked in the opposite direction along the quaint streets with cafés and bookstores and parked cars that were on average much smaller than regular automobiles in the United States. Then she called Mackenzie Summerfield, who showed up a minute later in her rented Cupra Born battery electric compact car. Zang jumped in, and they drove off. In the back, Akash Parab typed away at his keyboard.

“How did you go?” asked Summerfield.

“Learned of a bunker under Vesterport railway station, which is our best lead yet.” Zang filled them in on what she had learned. “Parab? Can you cut keys? Physical keys I mean, not electronic ones.”

He nodded. “Sure. I can do it right here if you like?” He took the hard-shell case from Zang with the imprint inside, then removed a collection of files and blank keys from his backpack and got to work. “Can we park somewhere? It will be easier to prepare while we’re not moving, as this is delicate work.”

“No problem,” said Summerfield. She drove them to a seaside park overlooking the Øresund, a strait of water in the Baltic Sea separating Denmark from Sweden. On the horizon in the chilly ocean currents, Zang spotted several rapidly spinning wind turbines generating electricity.

Summerfield handed out hot thermoses filled with coffee, and fresh sandwiches in brown paper bags. “I have news.”

“Oh?” said Zang as she bit into her pastrami rye sandwich. “Is it about Pierce?”

Summerfield shook her head. “No. I haven’t heard anything yet regarding our wayward friend, but let’s presume he’s gone dark for the moment, and with good reason too, that we’ll learn about later. He’ll be fine, Zang, I just know it.”

Zang knew she had fretted a little about Pierce’s well-being after the chase across the lava and ice fields, and that Summerfield was picking up on this. While Zang knew her former lover could look after himself, she also worried that Pierce’s injuries were more severe than he had let on, and it wasn’t the first time he’d lied to her about his health in the field. “Sure. I know you’re right. What is it, then, that you’ve learned and I have interrupted?”

“You’re going to love this, Zang!” Summerfield beamed with a smile as she spoke, proud of herself. “Latest intel is that the SVR put out a capture or kill order for Captain Natalya Kozlova. I’m guessing it’s because she failed to secure or destroy all copies of the Luxembourg Papers.”

“Wait!” Zang stopped herself from taking her next bite because this news was of great interest to her. “You’re talking about the SVR officer who…?”

“Tortured?” said Summerfield as her eyebrows shrank, her skin reddened and her eyes dampened. “Say it for what it is, Zang! Let’s not minimalise this. Kozlova tortured me.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

Summerfield shrugged. “I guess it’s happened to all of us. An occupational hazard.”

Zang didn’t say it, but she had been lucky so far and had never been tortured in the field. She had taken a bullet and had been beaten severely several times, but never tortured. “Doesn’t ever make it right.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Zang nodded but didn’t voice her next thoughts, as she knew they would be insensitive to her peer if she did.

“It’s okay, Zang. I know what you’re thinking. If we can get to Kozlova, we might learn Russia’s real intent with those bank accounts and who they are paying off in now only four days’ time.”

“Yes,” said Zang, nodding because Summerfield had guessed correctly. “I had been thinking we could make a deal with her in return for her protection.”

Summerfield blew air out through her nostrils. “Yeah… I suppose… I didn’t know this would be so hard until we started talking about it.”

“But all you want to do is shoot her dead? Right?”

Summerfield nodded. “Is that bad of me?”

“Not at all. That’s exactly what I want to do to her. And she didn’t even… you know, with me? But even if we did follow through with this plan to turn Kozlova, how would we find her anyway? She could be anywhere in the world right now.”

“I have an idea,” said Parab, from the backseat, where he was busy filing down a key based on the imprint.

The two women turned to look at their technical operations officer, whom Zang was finding to be rather efficient and good at his job, from what she had seen of his work so far. But she wasn’t ready to tell him this just yet. “Go on then. Tell us?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Parab looked back at Summerfield and Zang with a stare that suggested they should have already guessed what was on his mind. When they didn’t answer, he said, “Frederick Schaus, of course. I’d say it’s a good chance he knows how to contact Kozlova. Considering that I’ve since discovered digital connections between Kozlova’s uncle and Schaus, that makes it even more likely the banker knows more than he let on to Pierce.”

“What do you mean?” asked Summerfield. “I thought you handed him off to another team in Hamburg? Like Kozlova, we can’t exactly reach him when we’ve been ordered to stand down and are operating surreptitiously under the radar of our employer.”

Parab blushed. “I… uh.”

“Out with it, Parab!” said Zang. “What did you do?”

He cleared his throat and ceased his filing so he could fully focus his mind on how to frame his next response. “I know I shouldn’t, but I snuck around the CIA servers and learned where Schaus is being held. It’s how I made the uncle connection too.”

“Parab!” Zang frowned while she suppressed a smirk. She said in a jokey tone, “You are a terrible man!”

“I know.”

“Don’t be silly! Not for sneaking around, but for not telling us this juicy fact earlier.” Zang was laughing now, and so was Summerfield.

But Parab wasn’t and stared at them both with a serious expression etched all over his face. “It kind of goes against everything I swore not to do when I joined the agency. I really shouldn’t be hacking my own employer.”

Now Summerfield was laughing so hard she was covering her mouth with her hand. “No, you shouldn’t, Parab. But tell us anyway!”

He gave them the address of a property on the outskirts of the German city. “It’s a CIA safe house, in the countryside far away from other properties. And before you ask, not in the Broek & Trausch data breach. There are three operatives with Schaus right now, but generally only two are on duty at any one time. I checked, and they are all only lightly armed. Budget doesn’t extend to much more than a few pistols.”

Zang shook her head. “Incredible. How do you know all this?”

Parab shrugged. “Unfortunately, my curiosity always gets the better of me. It’s a fatal flaw. I can’t help myself.” He handed the key he had now filed into a replica of the putty imprint to Zang. “That should work.”

Zang took it in her hand, feeling the heat of the friction still radiating from the metal. “Good work.” She turned to Summerfield. “We have two lines of investigations now, I’d say. Shall we start with the closest one first?”

47

The entrance into the bunker under Vesterport railway station had been easier to find than Zang had expected, and the key worked without seemingly tripping any alarms. Once inside, she and Summerfield took flashlights with them as they descended, and Zang was glad she’d been able to secure a Heckler & Koch USP9 semi-automatic pistol off the black market just before she had met up with Ailie Perry, because she now kept the weapon ready to shoot anything that threatened them as they explored the empty and silent underground Cold War facility.

The further they descended, the more it became like a museum closed for the evening, with rooms and equipment decked out as if it hadn’t been touched since the 1970s. But it was also like a crypt, because their flashlights were the only illumination, which left most of the interior smothered in impenetrable shadows except for what was directly in front of them at any moment in time. Despite feeling like she’d wandered amongst the graves of the long dead, Zang quickly realised there was no one down here. This suggested that Ailie Perry had been wrong, and this site had nothing to do with Kasrin Nayef and Yakub Samaan.

Then Zang noticed a piece of paper discarded in a dusty corridor, and it looked to be oddly familiar to her.

She crouched down and picked it up.

“What have you got there?” asked Summerfield. She and Zang had explored the bunker together while Parab remained at the surface to keep watch. Not that he would be able to warn them of any unexpected visitors, as cell phone signals on their burner phones didn’t penetrate this deep underground.

Zang shone her flashlight on the piece of paper. She’d seen it before; then she remembered where.

She pulled from her coat pocket the packet of litmus tests she had secured from the Icelandic farmhouse where Anna Birtadottir had lost her life, her tortured body horrifically dissolved in acid. Zang drew in a deep breath and held it for a moment when she realised this piece of paper was identical to those litmus test strips. Then a cold chill washed over Zang before she was overcome with fury and anger.

“What’s going on? You look like you just saw a ghost.”

Zang shook her head. “It’s worse than that.” All the pieces of this mission she had not previously understood were now falling into place, and she didn’t like what the truth implied. Not one little bit. “Fuck!”

“Zang?”

“The Mukhabarat that I encountered in Iceland have Nayef and her brother now!”

“What do you mean?” Summerfield shuddered. “Weren’t they with Mitch Hawley? How did you work that out?”

Zang showed Summerfield the litmus test pack and the paper strip she had found here. “They are identical.”

“How could the Mukhabarat even know Nayef and Samaan were even here?”

Tensing, her blood boiling, Zang said, “Only one way I can think of. It has to be Booker and Hawley. They told the Mukhabarat where to find them!”

Now Summerfield shuddered. “But why?”

Zang shrugged. “That’s a good question.” She looked around, shining her flashlight into the many dark corners of this facility. “They aren’t here. That’s for sure. Let’s go.”

Fifteen minutes later they were outside and in the electric Cupra Born car, driving south with Parab behind the wheel. As they headed out of Copenhagen on the E20 highway, Zang checked the secure CIA website again, where their team recorded burner cell phone numbers, and saw that Abdul Ibrahim had recently posted his new contact number.

But still nothing from Pierce.

Zang called Ibrahim immediately and felt relief when it was he who answered, which meant their team’s secret site was still just that. They proceeded through a series of code word responses, confirming that neither party was compromised; then Zang said, “Sir, what happened to you? No one has been able to reach you for the last week.”

“I needed to go dark. Booker revoked all my security clearances and put me on administrative leave.”

“Wow!”

“Yeah. Stays that way until the Broek & Trausch data breach is fully investigated. In theory, we should all be back stateside now, waiting for the outcome of that investigation. Those are our orders, if they weren’t clear to you before.”

Zang sighed. “Why do I get the feeling you’re not doing any of that?”

“You are correct. I’m still in Iceland, with Pierce.”

She felt herself release what must have been a held breath. “Is he okay?”

“He is now. He had a serious fever, caused by a major infection from the wounds sustained on the lava fields. He’s much better now that I’ve pumped him full of antibiotics and forced him to rest, but until today he was in no state to return to the field. Not that he ever agreed with me on that fact.”

“You’re both hiding out, in Reykjavik?”

“In Iceland. That’s as much as I can say. Where are you?”

“Well, we’re not obeying orders either.”

“I presumed that.”

Zang smiled. “I’m driving out of Copenhagen, with Summerfield and Parab.” She described everything they had learned since the action on the glacier, including her suspicion that Syria’s Mukhabarat had custody of Nayef and Samaan, the implication that it was Booker and Hawley who had orchestrated the exchange, that Natalya Kozlova was on the run from her own people, and that Zang and her half of their team were on their way to Frederick Schaus’s safe house location, where they intended to interrogate the security man on how he might be able to assist them in reaching out to the disgraced SVR operative.

“I can smooth that over,” said Ibrahim. “The team holding Schaus will be off grid and operating dark. They won’t know about my redacted clearance yet, and since they technically report to me, I’ll let them know you are on the way to speak with their ‘guest’. On my orders.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I’m not sure what we can do about Nayef and Samaan, though. But our priority has to be the Russians. Whatever is going down, it all occurs in four days’ time, and it could be catastrophic and linked to their war of occupation in Ukraine if my gut is right on this one. Pierce and I will meet you in Hamburg tomorrow, then plan our next moves from there.”

Zang felt relief that Ibrahim was operational again, even if he was acting in an unofficial capacity. She had come to respect and admire him in the short time she had worked with him and knew if anyone could be the glue that held their team together and accountable, it was Ibrahim. She realised that she would trust him with her life, and perhaps it would still come to that on this mission, and this was a respect she rarely held for anyone. “Again, thank you, sir.”

“You realise all this is unsanctioned? Probably illegal. Likely, it could get us all fired. Might even result in jail time for some of us.”

There was a pause in the conversation, where Zang felt that both she and Ibrahim were waiting for the other to speak.

“But…?” she eventually asked.

“Pierce provided me with a copy of the full Broek & Trausch data. If I’m reading it right, and if we cleverly play the cards we’ve been dealt with on this one, then I think we can all come out of this okay. But we have a few delicate steps to make first, starting with Schaus.”

“Good,” said Zang, meaning it. “We’ll see you in Hamburg tomorrow.”

48

Keflavík International Airport, Iceland

When Pierce and Ibrahim drove into the rental car park at Keflavík International Airport, a light snow fell, and the outside temperature had plummeted to well below freezing. Pierce reflected that less than two weeks ago he’d been sweating in southern Spain, yet here he was feeling the biting cold. Then Pierce remembered that he was five thousand kilometres north of the other end of Europe, and that was a planetary radius roughly forty-five degrees or a quarter of the distance between the Earth’s two poles. No wonder the temperatures and weather conditions had fluctuated so much on this whirlwind mission across Europe.

He also remembered that this far north, the sun had never properly set for him for the last seven days. Pierce would not miss the weirdness of this phenomena when he departed Iceland.

Out of the Land Rover, as Pierce moved, the stiffness and soreness of his body reminded him how much worse his situation could have been if Ibrahim hadn’t provided medical attention when he did. In the cottage in the countryside where they had hidden, his boss had procured a doctor from nowhere who had cleaned and sutured his wounds, then dosed him up on antibiotics. She had insisted on him resting and had given Pierce plenty of painkillers to get him through the coming weeks. Then she had disappeared again.

But that had been four days ago, and Pierce had recovered significantly since then. He knew he was ready to return to the field, and while Ibrahim had not yet briefed him on the current status of the mission, Pierce knew it was far from over.

“Where are we flying to?” he asked as they took their luggage and headed for the check-in counter.

“Hamburg, Germany.”

“What’s there?”

“Many leads.” Ibrahim filled Pierce in on the potential opportunity to turn Captain Natalya Kozlova into a defector, her link to the oligarch banker Konstantine Kozlova and Frederick Schaus of Broek & Trausch, and that hopefully out of all this they would learn what scheme the Russians were up to with the money transfers occurring four days from now.

Pierce snorted out a chuckle. “And we’re doing all this while you are on administrative leave and all of us are potentially breaking multiple treason laws?”

Ibrahim shrugged. “You operate like this all the time, so I’m not sure why you’re bothered now?”

Pierce smirked. “I’m not. I’m worried about you, sir, because you’re the only one with a reputation to be ruined.”

Ibrahim laughed.

“You do remember, sir, that the intel we uncovered on Booker will only go so far?”

“If it keeps us and the rest of the team out of jail, I’ll be happy with that.”

“Speaking of the rest of the team?”

“We’re meeting with Zang, Summerfield and Parab. Knight is in a hospital in the United Kingdom, recovering from serious concussion, so she won’t be joining us.” Ibrahim produced two American passports and handed one to Pierce.

He opened it and discovered a recent photo of himself and his new temporary cover identity of “Harry Pearce”. “Someone has a sense of humour. Who are you?”

“Jim Coaver. Not very Middle Eastern, but it’s the best I could do when I’m procuring off the black market. We’re investors in aquaculture, if anyone asks. That’s fish farming, if you didn’t know.”

“Why not. It’s not the worst cover I’ve ever operated under.”

Ibrahim laughed again. “That’s an understatement if I’ve ever heard one.”

They checked in without issue at the Scandinavian Airlines’ desk, then made their way to customs and passport control. As they were lining up, unanswered questions that had plagued Pierce’s thoughts and dreams while he had rested and healed now returned to him. “What happened to Kasrin Nayef and her brother? Did we find him?”

When Ibrahim didn’t immediately answer, Pierce knew something was wrong.

“Sir?”

“I’ll tell you once we are through customs.”

“No!” said Pierce firmly. He saw then the guilt in Ibrahim’s eyes. “Sir? Tell me!”

Ibrahim hesitated, then said, “I’ll explain when we are in the air. Not here.”

“No!” Pierce stood rigid. “I told you, if this relationship is to work, you have to trust me.”

“It’s not about trust, Pierce. Because I do trust you.” Ibrahim’s voice was rising; then he lowered his tone to a whisper to lessen the chance of other lined-up passengers at customs and passport control taking an interest in them. “It’s about managing you so you don’t shoot off somewhere on your own personal escapade whenever the hell you feel like it.”

With every muscle in his body tensing, Pierce knew something was off.

“If I tell you what’s really going on, you won’t get on that plane and aid me in completing this mission that could, for all we know, detrimentally affect the war in Ukraine if we let it slide.”

A realisation struck Pierce suddenly. “You’ve lost Kasrin Nayef?”

When Ibrahim looked away, Pierce knew he had guessed correctly.

“But the Russians don’t have her; otherwise it would be part of this mission we’re partaking in in Hamburg?”

Again, when Ibrahim went to speak and then changed his mind, Pierce realised he had made the correct assumption a second time.

“The Mukhabarat have her?”

Ibrahim nodded.

“And her brother?”

He nodded again, then explained Rachel Zang’s theory that Henry Booker and Mitch Rawley had handed over the Syrian siblings to the Mukhabarat in return for yet unknown payment of previous services rendered. “I still have friends and contacts in the CIA, Pierce. One of them told me that Nayef and Samaan turned up on a satellite feed taken at the Port of Beirut, in the custody of three men.”

“Fuck!” Pierce mouthed the expletive without sounding it. Reeling from the shock, he stepped further away from the line because he didn’t wish for anyone in the queue to overhear what he was about to say next.

Thankfully, Ibrahim followed him to a spot they could safely speak.

“We’ll get them back, Pierce, but first we need to resolve the Russian problem. We do that, we put leverage on Booker, and we all get reinstated. That allows us to execute a proper rescue mission inside Syria.”

Pierce felt fury and rage overwhelm him, but he kept it locked down deep inside where he could use it more effectively later. “No! You have the rest of the team with you, so you don’t need me on this one. Zang is excellent, the best operator I’ve ever worked with, and she can lead the rest of the team to finishing the Russian angle.”

Now Ibrahim was expressing his anger rather than guilt. “And what are you going to do, Pierce? Lead a one-man rescue mission into Syria on some fool’s errand to save, and let’s be honest here, two criminals who only have themselves to blame for getting caught up with this mess when they stole that data in the first place. They’re not Americans. They’re not even assets. They’re not anyone to the CIA, and we owe them nothing!”

Pierce shook his head. Ibrahim had guessed correctly to his intentions. He had been right to fear that Pierce would take off on his own, self-appointed mission when he had learned the truth of Nayef’s and Samaan’s fates. But Pierce still had one card he had not yet played that might still change Ibrahim’s mind. “You haven’t thought this fully through yet, sir.”

“And how is that?”

“The Syrians who have the siblings. They are in league with Booker too.”

Ibrahim paused as he considered this new angle to their problems. “What are you planning on doing? Capturing these three Mukhabarat men, and questioning them? While you are deep inside hostile Syria?”

Pierce grinned; that was exactly what he planned on doing. “We know Booker is dirty with the Syrians. This is just how we prove it undisputed.”

“It will take you at least twenty-four hours to get yourself to the Middle East. By that time, the five of them will already be in Syria. They’ll be lost forever by then.”

“You know I’ve operated in Syria before! I’m not afraid to go back, not like…” He stopped himself from expressing a fear he buried deep inside his subconscious, which he didn’t wish to relive again now.

Ibrahim’s eyes widened as he shook his head. “Syria was a long time ago, under very different circumstances.”

“Yeah, but I speak Arabic like a native, and I know enough about the country and its politics and culture so that I can blend in.”

“And funding? How do you plan to pay for all this? I have barely any money left for what we are doing in Hamburg, let alone aiding you. Booker might not have pushed too hard yet to have us brought in, but he’s certainly cut off the purse strings.”

Pierce paused as he considered he did have access to the funds he needed. His options weren’t exactly ideal, but what choice did he have? It couldn’t be on his conscience that he’d just let Nayef and her brother go, not after he had already done so much to keep her alive so she could bring justice to the butcher Da’oud Alzuhur.

“I suppose you don’t officially work for me anymore, Pierce. So do what you have to do. But you are completely on your own if you do.”

His mind made up, Pierce stood taller and stiffened. “Don’t worry about me, sir. I’ve got this all under control.”

49

Queen Alia International Airport, Jordan

The next day when Mark Pierce exited the terminal of Jordan’s international airport, the shock of the dry oven-like heat enveloping him was like a punch to the face. Pierce had operated enough times in the Middle East for the scorching weather not to be a surprise, but the difference between this nation’s climate and Iceland’s was dramatic.

Wiping the sweat from his forehead that had instantly appeared there, he passed the taxi rank and headed for the passenger drop-off area. He found the Chinese BYD electric hatchback with the number plate he’d been told to look for and climbed into the passenger seat.

The hatchback took off the moment Pierce had his seatbelt on. The driver, a man in his mid-forties with dark hair starting to grey, and wearing a cheap suit over a nylon shirt, turned to Pierce and shook his hand. “Nice to see you, my old friend.”

Pierce pumped the man’s outstretched palm. “You too, Eli Yaghi.”

They drove out onto the highway linking the airport with the heart of Amman, Jordan’s capital, passing date palm and olive and carob trees breaking up the otherwise semi-desert environment. There were plenty of other cars on the roads, dull-looking houses and business frontages that they passed by, which grew more numerous the closer they got to their destination.

“Why is it, Pierce, that every time I see you, you look like you’ve been in a brawl with another man, and he won?”

Pierce laughed. While the wounds on his back and arms had healed nicely, the forming scars and associated burns still itched and bothered him. “If I remember correctly, Yaghi, last time I saw you, you were in a London hospital, having a bullet wound patched up in your leg.”

Yaghi shrugged. “Men like you and I, we suffer too much blunt force trauma in the name of national security. Why do we do it, I wonder?”

“Well, blunt force is what I need right now. Not for me, but for men who do deserve it. Whom I am hunting.”

“Yes, indeed. The Mukhabarat trio you asked me to track down definitely do.”

The man who drove Pierce was a British Secret Intelligence Service officer, selected for recruitment as a spy because of his Christian upbringing in Lebanon as a child during the war back then, and his native proficiency in Arabic, French, Hebrew, English and Russian hadn’t hurt his application either. These days Yaghi was one of the SIS’s top spies in the Middle East, and one of the best case officers Pierce had ever worked with from any agency.

They had first met close to three years ago now when Pierce and Mackenzie Summerfield had run capture and kill operations against Islamic terror groups in Yemen, Sudan, South Sudan and Kenya, and Yaghi had been a key member of their team. Pierce didn’t count many people as friends, but with Yaghi he did. Their friendship was why Pierce had leaned on him now when he needed intel on the Mukhabarat hostiles who currently had Kasrin Nayef and Yakub Samaan in their custody. And Yaghi also had the connections and the smarts Pierce would need to get them all safely out of war-ravaged Syria again.

Yaghi pressed down on the accelerator and overtook a van. “Are you aware of a Syrian terror group calling themselves the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS?”

“Yeah. I am, actually.”

“What do you know about them?”

Pierce shrugged. “A Sunni Islamist terror group based in the country’s northwest, who seek to bring down the Syrian president and his government and replace them with an Islamic caliphate. What about them?”

“Well, the HTS, with support from the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army, is currently advancing across the country. They’ve already taken the city of Homs. They have their eyes on Damascus, and they might even succeed in overthrowing the president because his Russian and Iranian allies are doing nothing to aid him in fighting back against these challengers.”

Pierce chuckled to himself. “So you’re saying, Yaghi, that if I enter Syria, I’ll be immersing myself in an even more complex and deadly conflict compared to anything that has already plagued the country since the 2011 Arab Spring?”

Yaghi smiled. “But it might also work to your advantage. I haven’t told you about the Mukhabarat men who have Nayef and her brother in their custody. They are currently bunkered down in the town of Nawa, one hundred kilometres south of Damascus and only fifty kilometres north of the Jordan border. If the HTS weren’t active in their major offensive, which is slowing everything down in the country everywhere, I think the Mukhabarat trio would be in Damascus already, and you would have lost them for good.”

“I guess that’s something.”

“You’ll like this. I know exactly where they are, right down to their last GPS coordinates, thanks to my connections inside the Israeli Defence Force and their intelligence services counterparts, Mossad. Their intel is sourced from the thousands of drones both organisations have watching that part of the world on a constant basis right now, so you know it’s good.”

Pierce mentally mapped out his understanding of the geography of this part of the world, positioned less than one hundred and fifty kilometres north from where they were now. He recalled that Nawa was near the disputed Golan Heights bordering Israel, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, a UN-occupied region and a battlefield of continual asymmetric warfare because of the sovereignty claims by Syria and Israel over the region. After several recent normalisation and peace agreements had fallen apart in the Middle East, leading to Israel entering into an all-out war with the Hamas terror group in Gaza and the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon, the Golan Heights had since become another front for Israel’s offensives against the latter terrorist organisation, who also operated extensively in that region. With all these regional wars escalating all over the place, the Middle East was in a mess again, with hundreds of civilians dying and thousands becoming displaced every day. If Pierce planned on seeing this rescue mission through to completion, he would do so only by walking into a war zone, where death might come to him from a random shell or missile, and even one fired from a friendly nation.

But it was a risk he knew he had to take.

“Let me guess, Yaghi, the Mukhabarat would have tried to cross near the Lebanese town of Majdal Aanjar, but with all the fighting, they were forced to turn south and cross closer to the Golan Heights?”

“Yeah, that’s what my intel tells me. By the way, this all costs money, and you are racking up quite the bill. How much have you got to fund this operation?”

Pierce hesitated before speaking. Eli Yaghi didn’t know Pierce planned to pay for this out of his own personal cash reserves, and if he told him, Yaghi would think Pierce was out of his mind. “As little as possible.”

“Give me a number.”

“Less than a million. Can you do that?”

Yaghi rubbed his chin. “Let’s see. We’ve got to get you in and out of Syria. That’s not easy, and especially not now with everything going down here. Plus, you’ll need equipment, including weapons, but what will cost you the most is bribes.”

“How much are we looking at?”

Yaghi shrugged. “You might be in luck. Shouldn’t be more than a million US dollars.”

“I said less. Not more.”

“I know you did.”

Pierce swallowed hard. That quantum of costs would come close to draining him of almost all his squirrelled-away funds. “Let’s hope so, Yaghi, because the budget won’t extend beyond that. Now, tell me who these Mukhabarat villains are.”

“That I don’t know. But I’m taking you to someone who does. Someone, I’m told, you already know very well.”

Pierce shook his head and sighed. “Why am I not surprised?”

50

Amman, Jordan

The streetscapes of Amman resembled those of most cities Pierce had previously operated in across the Arabian Peninsula, and that comforted him somewhat. His plan wasn’t completely insane, and he did know how to survive here. Familiarities included the dirty white buildings they kept passing, one to three stories in height and crammed together in seemingly random arrangements. These buildings in turn were jammed between fruit, vegetable, clothing and trinket stalls with their wares on display in the open streets, while everything was crisscrossed by vehicular traffic that never seemed able to gain too much speed, nor could it ever fully stop. He noticed all signs were in Arabic, and nowhere was there advertising with human representations in them, but that was expected where the predominant culture was based on the dominant religion.

But unlike many other metropolises Pierce had visited in the Arab world, Amman seemed as if it had been put together right, and functioned like a normal city should. He felt a comfort here that he rarely felt elsewhere in neighbouring nations. Perhaps that was because war and fundamentalism had never fully touched this land in the last eighty years, and therefore Amman had been allowed to grow naturally into its own self-identity and culture.

This was not Pierce’s first time in the city, for he knew Amman well, as this was where he had learned Arabic as a child. As they drove, he recognised many places he had previously visited in his past. It wasn’t so bad here because it felt a tiny bit like coming home.

About thirty minutes after their departure from the airport, Eli Yaghi parked them on a semi-busy street less than a kilometre from the high-end retail and business district of central Amman.

“We’re here,” Yaghi said as they both climbed out of the electric vehicle, and Yaghi locked it with his fob. The heat outside was still nearly unbearable, so they moved out of the direct sun as Yaghi took Pierce inside a café. Inside, it was all concrete walls with no decorations, where the patrons drank coffee, ate pastries and smoked hookah pipes. Yaghi nodded to a middle-aged, rotund man whom Pierce guessed was the proprietor; then he and Yaghi stepped out the back, past the kitchen and the hole-in-the-floor toilets, to a secondary and smaller building. It was shaded by two date palms and surrounded by the white concrete fences and back walls of neighbouring buildings, and the only way out was back through the café again.

They stepped inside, and waiting in the first room of that secondary building, drinking a black coffee and reading a print copy of the Guardian newspaper, was one of the last people Pierce had expected to see in this part of the world at this particular juncture in time.

Patricia Knight.

Yaghi gestured Pierce over to his boss, who sat under a ceiling fan spinning lazily overhead, which kept the air cooler and more bearable than it was outside. “Mark Pierce, this is Patricia Knight, also with the CIA. Patricia Knight, this is⁠—”

“We’re already acquainted,” said Knight, standing at Pierce’s presence and crossing her arms.

The first things Pierce noticed about the senior operations officer were the bandages on her head and the bruising where she had taken a beating during the time the Russians had held her hostage. The second thing he noticed was that she wore loose pants and a shirt, and a hijab pulled down off her head. The style and cut of her clothing allowed her to blend easily with the local populous. She must have arrived here discreetly and would leave the same way. That told him she wanted the least number of people knowing that she was ever here.

Yaghi turned to Pierce and shook his head. “Always the way, isn’t it? I didn’t ‘need to know’ you two had already met, so no one told me. Oh well, guess I don’t have to waste time getting you up to speed on each other’s skills and capabilities.”

Pierce patted his friend on the back. “It’s okay, Yaghi. It’s all good.”

“I’m not bothered, mate. Just amused.”

Pierce grinned as he spotted a pot of brewing coffee next to Knight, so he poured one for himself and one for Yaghi. Then he turned to his boss and said, “I’m trying to work out why you are here, ma’am, but I can’t.”

“That’s because you always expect the worst from people.”

He shrugged. “It’s kept me alive this long.”

“I’m here to help you. That’s why you are confused, because altruistic possibilities never register in your brain.”

He nodded, conceding her point, then gestured to the table Knight had been seated at, and the three of them sat together this time. “Ibrahim told you where I was?”

“More than that, it was Ibrahim who asked me to meet with you. He pulled some strings and obtained some files on the three Mukhabarat men leading Nayef and Samaan into Syria, made easier after we identified them from satellite imagery captured at the Port of Beirut a few days back.”

Pierce sipped his hot coffee, which had a mild sedimentary taste to it, then turned to Yaghi. “You already knew about this?”

Yaghi nodded. “This time I agree with her. Everyone here is trying to help you, my friend.”

“I see⁠—”

“Do you?” Knight interrupted. “Since you and me, Pierce, and the rest of our team are all stood down for the moment, there is no funding that would otherwise allow us to run meaningful operations in this or any other part of the world. But Ibrahim felt bad about letting you enter Syria unsupported and unprepared. But I’m not money, I’m only a HUNINT resource,” she said, referring to the spy lingo for human intelligence. “It’s not much that I have with me, but Ibrahim pulled in lots of favours, and together we built up the dossiers on the three Mukhabarat men you are going after. All are from the GID, General Intelligence Directorate, and their leader reports directly to the Syrian president himself on their extraction mission.”

Pierce found he couldn’t help but feel suspicious about Knight’s sudden appearance, when he himself had only decided to fly here less than twenty-four hours ago. If nothing else, her timing made no sense. “I thought you were incapacitated?”

She shook her head. “Discharged three days ago.”

So Ibrahim had lied again.

“Discharged from where?”

“Ramstein Air Force Base. That’s in Germany if you don’t know.”

Pierce leaned forward and caught Knight’s stare. He wanted to trust her, respect her, but he still couldn’t get to that place just yet. He did know all about Ramstein, America’s largest military base in Western Europe, but that piece of her story was not what bothered him. “How can you be here, with comprehensive files on the three GID men, in such a short time?”

Knight leaned back in her chair, crossed both her arms and her legs, and laughed at Pierce. “Because I arrived three days ago. I’ve been working with Yaghi and the Jordanian Intelligence Services, tracking the GID and their hostages, since we first got news of their arrival in Beirut.”

Pierce raised an eyebrow at this revelation.

“See, you don’t trust anyone. Ibrahim knows we can’t do anything operationally to stop the Syrians until all of us receive our official reinstatements again. If we ever do. But you and I both know, Pierce, that intel is best when it is gathered in the moment. That’s why I’m here, to gather the intel we need right now while it’s fresh. And then I will feed it to you.”

Pierce felt himself go rigid, then leaned back too. “Okay. Thank you for all that, ma’am.”

Her eyes widened, and she leaned forward. “You just accepted that? Just like that?”

He shrugged. “My instincts keep telling me not to trust you, and that might still be unfounded. If so, I apologise. But when you provide me with rational explanations like that, I find I have these moments of admiration for you. It’s hard for me too, to understand what is going on here between us.”

Knight’s expression now changed to one of puzzlement. “I don’t understand you, Trigger Man.”

“Perhaps that’s why we don’t get along, because we don’t understand what motivates each other. It unsettles us both.”

Yaghi looked back and forth between the two, with a puzzled expression etched on his face. “If it helps, Knight, I thought Pierce was a pain in the arse when I first met him too. He does grow on you though, but it takes time.”

Knight shook her head and looked in her handbag. “Shall we talk shop now? That is why I’m here.”

Pierce grinned. “Certainly.”

She took out three unmarked manila files and spread them across the table. “The three men who have Nayef and Samaan are Kirollis Al Razzaq, Habil Duyub, and their leader Butros Jerash. Have you heard of any of them? In particular, Jerash?”

Pierce shook his head.

“I wasn’t sure. Butros Jerash is a senior intelligence officer with the GID. In his time, he’s been involved in many despicable acts such as orchestrating chemical weapons attacks inside his own country against his own people; sniffing out double agents inside the presidential offices, then executing them; general intimidation of Syrian civilians, of course; and torturing and executing so-called dissidents of the regime in their hundreds if not thousands.”

“Sounds like the standard position description of all Mukhabarat officers.”

Knight smirked while her eyes remained cold. “The reason I asked if you knew him, Pierce, was not to be smart, but because Jerash was a star pupil of Da’oud Alzuhur. Did you know that?”

Now Pierce frowned, not in derision but because he felt confusion, as if an important part of a puzzle he could not yet see clearly was about to be revealed to him. “No. I didn’t.”

“Did you know what Alzuhur’s favourite form of torture was?”

Pierce remembered when Zang had described the scene of the dead journalist, Anna Birtadottir, dissolving in acid, and how the house she had been found in resembled a horrific and secluded torture farm for a well-practised psychopathic serial killer. Suddenly, he felt he did know the answer to Knight’s question.

“Like Alzuhur, Butros Jerash has tortured and killed hundreds of his victims using acid. He prefers hydrochloric acid, and we know he has many gallons of it with him right now, which we learned he procured in Beirut just before leaving for Syria.”

Pierce felt a sickness in his stomach. Nayef and Samaan had been in the custody of this brutal man for four days now. Who knew what kind of tortures he had put them through already. Acid could disfigure, blind and produce painful wounds that took much time to heal and left behind horrific scarring. Even though Yaghi said the five of them were all alive and still pinpointed to a building inside the town of Nawa, that didn’t mean that the brother and sister hadn’t both suffered extensively already.

“Perhaps you also didn’t know that Nayef and Samaan’s parents were tortured the same way. From what we understand, the siblings suffered the unfortunate experience of finding their parents’ skinless and half-dissolved bodies dumped at their home when the GID had finished with them. Did you know that?”

“Knight, you know I didn’t.”

Pierce felt his stomach churn, and he was wondering why they were sitting around talking and not taking action. He flipped through the files in front of him until he found the one for Butros Jerash and scanned it. He was too angry to read it in detail, so all he could see were individual words repeating over and over again: “dissolved”, “burned”, “scarred”, “melted” and one phrase that kept appearing more often than any other, Jerash’s favoured nickname.

Doctor Acid.

51

Nawa, Syria

Bound at her wrists and ankles, Kasrin Nayef had cried for many hours. She sat on the top floor of a four-storey building that was more rubble than a structure, partially destroyed from years of bombing and shelling. She leaned against a crumbling support column and watched the distant shooting and rocket fire of opposing groups battling it out in Nawa’s distant streets. It was a surreal experience for her, observing a war like she was a mere spectator at a football match and not a part of it. The sounds of machine-gun fire and rockets were constant, and occasionally she spotted convoys of military vehicles and tanks moving through the streets. Now that it was dusk, and the sky was lit up in red, orange and purple hues, the scene almost became beautiful. But she knew it was anything but that. This was a land of death and lost hope, and she never imagined she would have the misfortune to watch a scene as horrific as this one.

Nayef cried because, like Syria, she had no hope now. The Mukhabarat had her, and the only future that awaited her and her brother was one of humiliation, torture, and death.

She tried to recall how Yakub and she had found themselves returned to Syria, but most of her travels in the last days or week since their capture were a blur because of the drugs they had been subjected to and the long periods they had spent in sensory-reduced confinement. It had confused her sense of time. They had first been drugged in the Copenhagen bunker, which had plummeted them into unconsciousness. Then she remembered waking inside a crate with her wrists and ankles similarly bound as they were now, and at the time, she had thought she’d heard the noise of an engine and the rattling hull of an aircraft as it flew over.

Later, she woke in an airfield, where Doctor Acid and his men had forced her and Yakub into a covered truck. They had driven for hours until they reached a port. From there they had boarded a boat offloading throngs of scared and confused people dressed in threadbare clothes, who were ordered around and roughly manhandled by men with guns. Nayef immediately recognised this place as a people-smuggling route that she and Yakub had used to escape their homeland when they were not yet adults. This had been Türkiye, and this time they departed it as prisoners headed the other way, first into Lebanon and then crossing the border on foot into Syria.

When opportunities presented themselves, Yakub and she had discussed escape options, but the three men who had them as their prisoners kept their hands bound most of the time, and they all carried pistols. One of the men had also brought what looked to be a rocket launcher with him as well, and she wondered why.

There never seemed to be an opportunity, and now that they were back inside Syria again, Nayef regretted not attempting to flee from these men earlier. It would have been better if they had shot her, for at least then her pain would be at an end and not about to begin. But she couldn’t give up and escape through the coward’s route if Yakub didn’t join her, for she could not leave him to face a prolonged fate of horrific tortures alone. Then when it was too late, she had seen the blue plastic bottles of hydrochloric acid the men had purchased in Beirut and brought with them.

She knew that this acid, typically used for etching concrete, bricks and pavers, could bring excruciating pain and suffering to humans when applied to human flesh. Her fear then became one of not dying quickly from a bullet, but from dying slowly as Doctor Acid applied the concentrated solution to their skins, their insides and their eyes.

But now that they were in Syria, Doctor Acid and his two goons had become fearful and argumentative. This surprised her, as they should have felt elation at being back in their home. Something dramatic had happened in Syria in the last few days, forcing the Mukhabarat men to seek refuge in this abandoned and extensively shelled building. Perhaps an escalation in the war that had ravaged her country for more than a decade, perhaps a sudden growth with an intensity that even she could never have previously imagined, and maybe, finally, the rebels were winning.

As dusk turned into night and stars and distant airplanes and helicopters filled the skies, Nayef heard whimpers, then screams from Yakub on the floor beneath her. The Mukhabarat men had separated them an hour earlier, and now she knew why. Doctor Acid was torturing him using all the methods her overactive imagination had feared, and likely for no other reason than that he could. She hoped Yakub would die soon so his pain would end, but she also hoped that he would not, because when they were finished with him, they would come for her.

Eventually after what seemed to be hours but was likely far less than that, the screaming ceased.

A few minutes later, Doctor Acid climbed up the half-crumbled stairs, panting hard as he took each step because he was not that fit. He now stood next to her on the dusty concrete floor.

Nayef whimpered and tried to be still and unseen.

But he was watching her.

“Look at me.” He spoke to her in Arabic.

Shaking, Nayef turned, but couldn’t keep her gaze on the fat man in his leather jacket and loose khaki dress pants, scuffed and torn from their rough travelling in this war-ravaged land.

“LOOK AT ME!”

Tears gushing, Nayef eventually gained enough courage to obey his shouted instruction.

“Rebels have overrun our country. Our president has fled, abandoning his people. Everything is in chaos.”

Still shaking, still gushing tears, Nayef didn’t know how to respond.

Doctor Acid spoke again in his croaky voice, which reverberated like he had spent too much of his life smoking cigarettes or, more likely, breathing in too many acidic vapours. “We don’t know who is fighting who out there.” He pointed towards a ground battle occupying another part of this devastated city. “Kurds, Russians, Sunnis, Christians, Alawites, Turks, Americans, it could be any of them. Either way, there is no point returning you to Damascus now. There is nothing for us there anymore. Even the Mukhabarat is gone.”

Nayef sobbed louder, and her panting grew faster. “Ya…?” She tried to say her brother’s name. “Ya…?”

Doctor Acid shuffled around her, because he could not move fast with his weight, and eventually stood before her. “You are asking about your brother?”

She nodded as more tears filled her eyes.

“Yes, I had my fun with him. But he passed out. It’s no fun dripping acid on an unconscious man.”

He stepped closer and held her face in his grubby hand, forcing her to look at him, and then his hot and fetid breath was on her skin.

“Plea…” she tried to beg, but her words came out only as incoherent sobs. “Please?”

He squeezed her face. “You are so pretty. That is why I left you until last. But we can’t move from this location until the fighting moves on, and that could be hours or days away yet. And I have nothing else to do to pass the time…”

He turned her head until her eyes fell upon the blue bottle of acid that he had carried up the crumbling stairs, which she had not been aware of until now.

“Shall we begin?”

52

Hamburg Outskirts, Germany

To Zang, the quaint country cottage on the outskirts of Hamburg seemed the perfect setting for a CIA safe house, mostly because of its isolation and the trees that grew around it, providing privacy. It featured plenty of rooms to accommodate field operators and case officers, an inventory of useful spying equipment and gadgetry, and high-tech security that would warn and protect against any hostile intruders should they show. And the CIA men and women stationed here had also accepted Zang’s, Ibrahim’s, Summerfield’s and Parab’s presence without question and had kindly assisted in their needs where they could.

Rachel Zang thought upon all this as she sat across the soundproofed cellar and examined the Broek & Trausch head of security Frederick Schaus. The late middle-aged European man had spent almost all his time in this windowless room since Pierce had handed him over to the CIA minder team. The redness around his eyes and his inability to focus showed how tired and exhausted he had become over that time, which was exactly how Zang needed him: vulnerable so he would tell her exactly what she wanted to know. Whatever the Russians were up to, it occurred in less than three days, and he might be the only source left to them who had any answers.

Time was running out.

She looked him over again, taking in more details. His hands, including his broken and plastered right wrist, were chained to the bolted-down desk in front of him, and a lamp light shone in his gaunt and sickly-looking face. “Your clothes, Schaus, they seem loose on you.”

He stared at her without speaking. He must know, as she did, that they weren’t strictly treating him as humanely as the Geneva Convention dictated they should, and Zang didn’t know how she felt about this. But apart from sleep deprivation and periods spent in stress positions, they hadn’t physically hurt him, so that had to count for something. If this were Russia or Syria and if she were SVR or GID, Schaus would be naked, covered in burns and cuts, and likely missing three or four fingers and several toes by now. It was hard to believe it, watching the man before her, but the Americans were still the good guys when it came to interrogation in the field.

Or at least that was what Zang told herself.

“You’ve only been here a week, and look how much weight you’ve lost. That means you’re scared.”

“I am scared!” Schaus blurted, expressing a wildness in his eyes that was animalistic. “But I’m not scared of you.”

“Who, then?” Zang raised an eyebrow. “The Russians?”

He snarled, “Of course the fucking Russians. If I don’t do what they ask of me, it won’t be me who dies a horrible death. It will be my wife and daughters.”

Zang sighed as if this news was inconsequential to her, even though it wasn’t. “And I’ve told you many times, Schaus, that if you tell me what I need to know, we’ll protect your family.”

A tear escaped the security man’s eyes, and she saw in that moment of raw expressed emotion just how much he cared for his family.

Hating herself for thinking it, Zang knew that if she too resorted to threatening his family, this would be the fastest method of getting him to capitulate. But she and Ibrahim had another scheme in play, which they were about to lay down before him, and could still get them results fast.

“I only have to hold out five more days.” He laughed manically. “Then it’s over. Then I’ll tell you everything because the Russians won’t care then, when there is no going back.”

It wasn’t five days, thought Zang. It was only three days. Schaus’s CIA minders had kept him locked up in this cellar for a week now, and the man had lost sense of time, which was the point. She looked to the cot he slept in and the provided shower, toilet and basin in an adjoining room, so it wasn’t completely horrible down here for him. Outside, it was late in the evening, but as far as Schaus knew, it could be the middle of the day, the middle of the night, and everything else in between.

“Eighteen bank accounts, Schaus, 1.5 million euros to be transferred into each. What are they for? What do they stop or start from happening? I know you know.”

Abdul Ibrahim and she had discussed whether a request for the CIA to shut the bank accounts down immediately was a good idea, but they feared that if they did, it would tip off the SVR that the CIA knew about them. Then the Russian intelligence service would establish new accounts and payment methods, or they might have done so already anyway, and these accounts were already moot. But there was also another speculated problem with DDA/CIA Henry Booker that they had to consider, who might still play a part in the Russians’ schemes for all Zang and Ibrahim knew, and he might block their plans either way if they showed their hand. There were too many players in this mismatch of conspiracies, and Zang hated that she still felt overwhelmed by it all. So they decided to do nothing with the accounts and instead focus on discovering their purpose.

“Tell me, Schaus, and this all stops.”

Schaus hung his head, then rested it on the table.

Zang slammed the table with her fist, startling him before he nodded off.

He jerked upright. “I told you, nothing you can do to me comes anywhere close to what the Russians can threaten me with.”

“Is that right?” Zang looked to the CCTV camera that watched and recorded the proceedings, and nodded. In the next room, Summerfield, Parab and Ibrahim watched the entire interaction, ready to advise or assist with information gathering should Zang need it. They were all convinced from the interrogations sessions the safe house minders had put Schaus through over the last week that he really didn’t know what the money was for and who the individuals were who were going to collect it, but that didn’t mean he was devoid of useful intelligence.

A minute after her nod, Abdul Ibrahim entered, because that was the purpose of her signal.

“Hello, Schaus,” he said in his calm, charismatic manner as he entered, and the door locked behind him. The C/SOG gave the outward impression that he would be empathetic to Schaus’s needs when he stood before him, but Zang knew the truth. “We wanted to show you pictures we think you might be interested in.”

He laid down on the table several photographs of Schaus, Konstantine Kozlova and several other men all drinking together. Everyone was merry and having a good time, and Schaus appeared to be drunk.

Ibrahim pointed to the Russian oligarch. “You remember Konstantine Kozlova, of course. He’s a banker and a personal friend of the Russian president. These photos were taken six weeks ago in Saint Petersburg, Russia. We know the money that will appear in those accounts will come from Kozlova’s bank. We also know this was a meeting to arrange all the transactions in advance, which you orchestrated.”

Zang knew that the last two points were mere speculation on Ibrahim’s part, but when he said it, all the colour drained from Schaus’s already pallid complexion. The C/SOG had guessed right. This brought a smile to Zang’s face because it meant they were close to snaring the security man.

“Did you know that Kozlova’s niece, Natalya Kozlova, is an operative with the SVR?”

Schaus looked back and forth between Ibrahim and Zang. The fear he expressed now had magnified in the last few seconds. They were close to netting him.

Ibrahim grinned and stood closer to Schaus until he loomed over him. “That’s right, Schaus, you’re starting to understand what all this means. Or at least you think you do. Let me fill you in on what you don’t know.”

“What…? What’s going on?”

“Natalya Kozlova, the niece, was charged with recovering the Broek & Trausch data Yakub Samaan stole from your firm. She failed, her team was decimated, and we, the CIA, secured the full set of the data instead. Does that change anything?”

Schaus said nothing.

“The SVR aren’t happy about it at all, so in retribution they are hunting Natalya down with intent to kill her. What my colleague,” he said, pointing to Zang, “and I find interesting is that it’s a bit of a coincidence that Konstantine’s niece was assigned to the mission in the first place, when there is a suspicious connection there already. Right?”

Again, Schaus kept his mouth shut.

“I’m talking about that Saint Petersburg meeting you had with Konstantine, Schaus. That looks very dodgy now in light of Natalya’s involvement, don’t you think? What is it that the three of you schemed up here?”

Now Schaus stared at Ibrahim with eyes that seemed to be enlarging inside their sockets.

Zang smirked, for she sensed the Broek & Trausch man was mentally losing his mind right before their very eyes. She leaned forward and said, “You have two options, Schaus. First, you tell us nothing. That means the funds go through and pay whoever it is they were intended for. In that scenario, we release you to the Russians afterwards with this Saint Petersburg evidence plus some other documents we’ll concoct up that prove you were conspiring with the Kozlovas against the Russian president’s wishes. ‘Evidence’ along the lines that you planned to steal the money for yourselves.”

He sat straighter and was wide awake now. “But that’s not true.”

“We know that, but can’t you see, it all looks very suspicious.”

“You’re setting me up!”

“True,” said Zang. “We want it to look suspicious enough for the Russians to not treat you very well when you are back in their clutches.”

“But—” He looked ready to cry.

“But the second option, Schaus, is the option you should choose. The smart choice. The safe choice. In that scenario, you tell us how to contact and reach Natalya, because we know you know how. If you do that, we leverage her instead of you to find out what the Russians are planning, and in return we get you and your family out of Europe and into America, where you can start a new life, and you’ll be protected.”

Now Schaus seemed to shrink in his chair, as if being swallowed by it. The emotions he must be enduring would be varied and intense. He looked as if, had he the means to do so, he would have cut open his own wrists to bleed out in this moment, because it was all too much. But he also knew that suicide wasn’t an option for him either, bound and closely watched as he was.

Zang leaned back and crossed her arms. “Schaus?”

The Broek & Trausch man looked from her to Ibrahim. “But my life here⁠—?”

“Is already over.” Ibrahim finished the sentence for him. “We’ll give you a minute to decide which option you’ll take. But I’d suggest you choose wisely. And if you don’t choose, we’ll choose for you.”

53

Amman, Jordan

At close to midnight, Mark Pierce and Eli Yaghi drove through quiet streets to reach the outskirts of northern Jordan. This far from the city centre, the traffic had thinned out, and they were alone in the semi-desert and rugged hills. Pierce was starting to feel a foreboding sense overcome him, knowing that the point where he could no longer choose not to proceed with his self-imposed mission was not far off.

“The 1,200-kilometre Arab Gas Pipeline,” said Yaghi as he drove his BYD hatchback at speed, “originates near the town of Arish on the Sinai Peninsula, and its purpose is to export Egyptian natural gas to Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Most of the pipeline is about nine hundred millimetres in diameter and features compressor stations situated approximately every one to two hundred kilometres along its length. With me so far?”

Being so late at night and there being no more streetlights, Pierce had no sense of their exact location in Jordan, but he did appreciate they were close to the border with Syria now. “Why are you telling me this?”

Yaghi laughed. “Because that’s how we get you into Syria.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what a pig is, right? I mean in reference to a pipeline. Not the food type that no one here eats. Or what we call bad police officers in England.”

Pierce nodded. “A pig? Let me see. Bullet-like devices that are fired through a pipeline to clean them. Wait! You can’t be serious?”

“I am.”

“No way!”

“Pierce, I have contacts inside the Egyptian Natural Gas Company who manage this pipeline. They have pigs designed to carry a person inside it. It’s not the first time I’ve used this method to get operators inside our northern neighbour. It won’t be the last.”

Pierce felt his stomach tighten and his teeth clench. “We’re talking a gas pipeline here, Yaghi! That’s highly flammable material on the inside and in large quantities, and you just want me to ride it with all those volatile explosives enveloping me as I enter a war zone?”

Yaghi’s silhouette shrugged. “It’s never failed. The pig is sealed. Airtight, and you’ll have scuba tanks for breathing the whole way.”

“How long does the journey take?”

“An hour.”

“An hour?”

“Maybe a little longer. Grow a backbone, Pierce. You’ll be fine.”

Pierce had already transferred over most of his cash reserves so Yaghi could forward it on to his various contacts who were already making this operation happen, and for influential and powerful individuals who needed or demanded cash incentives to look the other way while Pierce acted covertly in Syria. And these individuals presumably also included Yaghi’s contacts who operated the pipeline. With less than fifty thousand dollars remaining in his tax haven accounts now, Pierce knew he could no longer afford alternative routes into the country. He’d become trapped into either taking up this offer or giving up completely, and either way, he was broke already.

“Fuck!”

“You’ll be fine. No side in the conflict wants to bomb this pipeline, even if all sides want to control it. Everyone wants to profit from the gas supplies, and they can’t if the pipe infrastructure isn’t working.”

“It’s insane, Yaghi.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that you’ll be enveloped in inert nitrogen gas as you are pushed through, thereby mitigating explosive risks. It’s safer that way, for you and the pig. Did I not mention that?”

Pierce growled. “No, you didn’t.”

Yaghi shrugged. “That’s got to be a comfort, right?”

“How do I get out of Syria when I’m done? The same way?”

Yaghi laughed louder than he had previously, with a little too much joviality for Pierce’s liking. “Not a chance. Gas only flows north, so pigs don’t come back the other way. Plus, there will be three of you leaving if you secure Nayef and Samaan, and there is only enough room in the pig for one. We’ll get you out through the Golan Heights instead.”

“What? That’s even crazier than the pipeline method. Golan Heights is a battlefield between the Israeli Defence Forces, Hezbollah, and various Syrian factions, and a UN peacekeeping unit that likely looks the other way most of the time. And that’s not even mentioning HTS!”

Pierce had been following the news and knew his risks while operating inside Syria had increased exponentially in the last couple of days. Since the HTS had ousted the Syrian president and overthrown his regime, the Israel Defence Forces had responded by ignoring UN peacekeepers stationed in the Golan Heights and had fully occupied the contested region with force, while also proceeding to bomb into rubble every Syrian military and chemical weapon site across the country they knew about before any of them fell into the clutches of the HTS. The Golan Heights had always been an unstable region, but now it was a literal, intense war zone like no other battlefield in the world, and walking into it was suicidal.

“I know what you are thinking, Pierce, but it’s not that bad.”

Pierce snorted as he asked himself why he was risking his life for two people he barely knew and one he’d never met. “Then tell me.”

“You’ll have three flares, a green, a red and a blue one. Your crossing point is at the town of Al-Rafeed. When you get there, fire the flares in that order. That is a signal for the IDF to not bomb the corridor you’ll follow through on foot and into the Golan Heights to reach the Khirbet Berg archaeological site, where I’ll be waiting for you.”

“Just like that? Yaghi, there are serious security fences between Al-Rafeed and Khirbet Berg that might say otherwise. Those security barriers are much taller than I am, curved against me and covered in barbwire, and are monitored constantly by security patrols and drones belonging to both the IDF and the UN. I’m not getting through.”

“Except that you are. The whole area is in chaos, and fighting is intense everywhere in Syria and the Golan Heights right now. One particular section of the fence between those two points I have mentioned was severely bombed two days ago, leaving a gap in the line. You’ll get through that. Keep in mind, if the HTS weren’t throwing Syria into chaos right now, this would all be far more complicated. This is an excellent opportunity for you, Pierce. I wish I’d had it this good all those times in the past when I had to smuggle myself into and out of the Golan Heights.”

Pierce couldn’t tell if Yaghi was making a joke or being deadly serious.

Up ahead, they had reached a metal-walled industrial building a little larger than a small house and resembling a shed. Surrounded by cyclone fencing with barbwire lines at its tops, Pierce could also see large-diameter metal pipelines entering and exiting the building. Signs everywhere warned of the risk of explosive gases and prohibited smoking or the use of open flames anywhere.

“We’ve arrived,” said Yaghi. “This is the last compressor station before the Jordan-Syria border. It’s from here that we’ll launch the pig, with you inside it.”

54

Eli Yaghi parked outside the main gate of the compressor station, then flashed his headlights three times, then twice, then four times.

While the identity-affirming routine transpired, Pierce felt exposed in the spotlight that shone from the main building, and was ready to spring into action if the situation suddenly turned hostile. But he had nothing to worry about, as the gate shuddered, then rolled open automatically.

Grinning, Yaghi drove them inside before the gate shut behind them.

Two men stepped out of the main building. Both were in their early thirties and dark haired. One had a shaved head and beard trimmed down to a millimetre all over and was a stocky man, while the second was lankier, wore glasses, and his dark hair was thick and mop-like. The first looked like he used his muscles all day, and the other looked as if thinking was his only daily routine.

Yaghi stepped out of his car, approached both men, then embraced and kissed them on their cheeks, which was a common custom in this part of the world.

“This is Besha,” said Yaghi, using Arabic and pointing to the stocky man. “He’s brought your equipment. And this here is Osman, an engineer. Not their real names, of course.”

“As-salamu alaykum,” said Pierce. Peace be upon you. He approached cautiously and shook their hands.

“Wa ’alaykum as-salam,” came the response from both men. And peace be upon you too.

“Let’s get inside,” said Besha. “You never know who is watching.”

The interior of the compressor station featured many pumps, valves, electrical boards, high- and low-voltage cables, and various pressure tanks. Soon Pierce heard the hum of machinery and noticed that there were side access valves on the main pipeline, which were open, and inside several of them sat pigs. Most resembled the oversized dumbbells used by weightlifters, but one in particular drew Pierce’s eye because it more resembled a capsule with a compartment inside designed like a seat in a jet fighter, complete with oxygen tanks and a face mask.

“You have the money?” asked Osman.

Yaghi nodded. He withdrew three packages from his pockets, then handed one each to Besha and Osman, and the third to Pierce. “The last one is for the engineer in the compressor station in Syria.”

Pierce nodded, understanding.

The two men checked their respective packages’ contents and counted it. When they were satisfied, they all got down to business.

“I am your weapon master,” said Besha as he placed a sports bag on a workbench. Unzipping it, he revealed an AK-47 assault rifle, a matte-black fifteen-centimetre fighting knife, a flare gun, several flash-bang and smoke grenades, a small quantity of C-4 explosives with detonators and timers, and a MP-443 Grach or Yarygin pistol as it was commonly known as in Russia. “All the weapons are Russian, which are readily available in Syria so won’t be suspicious if you are caught with them.”

Pierce first checked over both firearms. The AK-47 was an old weapon but reliable, and he had used this rifle more often than any other firearm in his career. While not an effective weapon over longer ranges, it had impressive stopping power, low recoil, few moving parts, a thirty-round banana-shaped magazine, and two fire-selection options, being automatic burst fire and single-shot mode. In comparison, the Grach was a more modern semi-automatic pistol that had first come into service in 2003, with an eighteen-capacity magazine of 9 x 19mm Parabellum rounds and an effective firing range of fifty metres.

Pierce closely checked over both weapons, ensured that they were each in good working order, and that he had plenty of spare magazines. The flare gun was without fault, the knife was sharp and well balanced, and the grenades looked to be perfectly functional too.

“I’m happy with it all.”

“Good,” said Besha as he laid out further equipment on the workbench. “We have a plate carrier for protection and a chest harness for your magazines and grenades. Local desert-coloured clothes to blend in culturally and physically, and a turban if you need it. Rations for five days — local food, of course.”

“Of course.”

Besha grinned at Pierce’s casual use of his native tongue. “There is a first aid kit, water bottle and iodine tablets to purify liquids if required.” He handed Pierce a cell phone. “This device is clean and includes apps for orientating yourself in the landscape.”

Pierce checked the equipment and pocketed it all. “Thank you. God willing, Besha, it is everything I need to complete my mission.”

The weapon master nodded, then touched his chest. “God willing.”

Yaghi said, “My friend, you can’t take much more than that with you anyway. There is little enough room inside the pig as it is. Now, give me all your identities, including your passport.”

Pierce and Yaghi had discussed this earlier, and he handed over everything that identified him as a foreigner. If he got caught with his passport, driver’s licences and credit cards in Syria, it would immediately mark him as a foreigner and spy. “You’d better be on the other side, my friend, ready to hand these back to me.”

“Of course.”

Osman stepped between them, then blinked twice as his outstretched arm pointed to the man-carrier pig. “It’s time to go. Pipe cleaning is scheduled in five minutes.” He started switching over valves between their on and off positions, while telemetry indicated he was flooding the pipeline with nitrogen. “If I don’t stick with the scheduled pipe-cleaning program, my superiors get suspicious.”

“You’d better get in,” said Yaghi with a wry smile.

Pierce shook his head as he stared nervously at the man-carrier pig. “You’ve never let me down before, my friend. Don’t start now.”

“If I were you, I’d be more worried about what you’ll face once you are out of the pipeline.”

Osman interrupted again. “The man on the other side, Joud, will let you out of the pipeline when he collects you. He will provide you with a bike for transport in Syria. You don’t have to do anything during the journey other than to breathe normally. Now get in.”

Pierce nodded and climbed inside as once again his mind considered if this was really the best method of insertion for him, when he controlled absolutely none of the variables. But time was running out for Nayef and Samaan, and this realistically was by far the quickest mode of transport to get him to where he needed to be. So perhaps he really had no choice after all.

Once Pierce was inside and laid out on his back, Osman fitted him with the air mask while Besha and Yaghi wedged his weapons and equipment into the canister with him.

“It will be dark and tight,” said Osman. “Try not to hyperventilate, or you’ll run out of air.” He turned on the scuba tanks, allowing an oxygen-nitrogen mix to flow into the mask. “Keep calm. It will be like being fired out of a cannon. This is normal. Again, if you panic, it will not serve you, as you might end up suffocating before you reach the end.”

Pierce nodded and gave the thumbs up. He couldn’t help but feel that this experience was exactly the same as being buried alive.

When the lid shut and Osman sealed it, the darkness became absolute.

Trapped now, he realised he could barely move his hands around, and the only sound he could hear well was his own breathing. For many seconds he heard clanging against the metal exterior as the pig was moved into firing position. Then another valve sealed shut as all other noises other than those coming from him drifted away.

Pierce waited in the silence and darkness, forced his breathing to remain shallow, and started counting down.

“One thousand and one… One thousand and two… One thousand and three… One thousand and⁠—”

When the pig fired, it was indeed sudden and dramatic, as the force and pressure suddenly bearing down on him was akin to what he imagined astronauts experienced when their rockets lifted off from the earth. He was racing now, as an oversize bullet hurtled inside a tube, and there was nothing he could do about it until he reached its other end.

55

Khirbet Ghazaleh, Syria

His lengthy journey speeding through the pipeline rattled Pierce constantly, with sudden direction changes, cramps in his muscles, claustrophobia in his mind, perpetual darkness and the ever-present noises of clangs, venting gases and metal pings. During the entire ordeal, Pierce kept himself as still as possible while he breathed yoga breaths and tried to focus on nothing. But despite his efforts, his mind drifted often, and he found himself imagining many alternative presents to the one he lived in. A present where his parents still lived, where he and Zang were still an item, or of a future that had not involved him going undercover in hostile territory, and of another potential life still lived with his first serious girlfriend, who had introduced him to yoga as a method of calming his mind when stress would have otherwise become too overwhelming. If any of those many possible pasts had been different, he wouldn’t be here now, trapped inside a constrained darkness where he had no control over anything, wondering if he would still be alive in the coming hour.

Eventually the journey ended when the man-carrier pig came to a sudden halt inside what was presumably the next compressor station.

Still trapped, he waited inside for several minutes, not moving as the pig was shunted around at much slower speeds than he had previously endured. When the lid finally opened and light shone again, Pierce ripped off his mask and breathed air that was not slowly increasing with carbon dioxide.

“You are alive,” said the old and frail engineer who greeted him, who was presumably Joud. He helped Pierce out of the cramped confines as Pierce’s muscles ached and spasmed now that he was moving them again.

“You look surprised?” said Pierce, feeling exhausted even though he had barely moved in the last hour, or whatever period of time had passed during his long journey.

The man shrugged. “You weren’t moving around, struggling, when we pulled the pig out. Most people do after being inside for too long. The fear finally gets to them. I thought you were dead.”

Pierce thought this over, then nodded. “Thank you.” He took Yaghi’s package of money from his pocket and handed it over. “This is for you, Joud.”

The man smiled, took the package from Pierce, then nodded his head. “It is a pleasure doing business with you, sir.”

Seemingly from nowhere, a jet fighter or a missile shot by fast overhead and sounded close, as if it were inside the compressor station with them. Pierce couldn’t see it, being inside a building, but he dropped to the ground immediately and covered his head, expecting bombs to fall or a warhead to hit them.

But when nothing happened and he heard explosions off in the distance, he also noticed that Joud was still standing. He had neither moved nor had he been bothered by the low strafing aerial craft.

“Aren’t you worried?” asked Pierce.

The man shook his head. “Nobody is willing to destroy oil infrastructure in this country. The last time the Arab Gas Pipeline was sabotaged, money stopped flowing everywhere, and no one was happy.” As if an unexpected thought had just occurred to him, he touched his finger to his lips, then walked to a curtained-off room and opened it. Inside, Pierce saw a woman in a hijab seated by a stove, where she brewed coffee. Two young children slept next to her on a seemingly random arrangement of carpets and cushions. “My wife and boys. It is safer to keep them here with me than anywhere else in the country. Would you like a coffee?”

Pierce nodded. “Thank you.”

Within minutes, he had a mug of strong-smelling black coffee in his hands, and its taste was exceptional.

“You like?” asked Joud.

“Yes. Where am I?”

“The town of Khirbet Ghazaleh. You are about fifteen kilometres inside our border from Jordan.”

Pierce heard the noises of further aircraft howling from one part of Syria to the next, but these sounded more distant. Then he heard farther-away rumblings of explosives detonating, and wondered if these were noises Joud and his family lived with constantly. “Who is that, who just flew over?”

“I don’t know.” The man shrugged, and Pierce noticed that he was not so much old as thin from malnutrition. “When you are gone, you will never have been here. You never were here. It is the same with the aircraft. I never heard them. They never existed.”

Pierce frowned, remembering that the Syrian regime had been oppressive for so long, as a survival strategy, most of the population had conditioned themselves not to see, let alone recall, anything out of the ordinary or suspicious. If the Mukhabarat ever visited in the night with questions they wanted answering, it was better to have never known a fact than to pretend not to know.

Pierce studied the interior of the compressor station further, confirming his earlier supposition that they were indeed alone other than his family. “I was told you have transport for me?”

The frail, malnourished man nodded again. He walked across the station, which looked far less put together than the one Pierce had entered in Jordan. This building had signs of rust everywhere, and most of the equipment and dials looked shabby, worn and operating well beyond their expiry dates. Pierce turned his attention back to Joud as he grabbed a rusted bicycle from where it leaned against a wall and looked as if it too was decades old.

“When I was told it would be a bike, I was expecting something with an engine.”

The man just looked at him and said nothing for a long moment. “You were never here. When you are gone, the bicycle was never here either. You both no longer ever existed.”

Pierce nodded, took the bike and thanked him.

Outside, the similarities between the two compressor stations were present, but here in Syria the cyclone fences were wrecked or missing, and none of the floodlights worked. It was still dark out, and when Pierce went to check his wristwatch, he stopped himself. Several “technicals”, which was a commonly used name in military and espionage circles for all-wheel-drive vehicles fitted with a machine gun or rocket launcher, were parked only a dozen metres from him. At least a dozen men waited beside the weaponised vehicles, with AK-47s slung over their backs while they smoked cigarettes and spoke softly amongst themselves. Pierce had no idea who this group was, but he knew their purpose was to guard the compressor station for the local powers that wished to control this site. They likely siphoned off gas here to turn a profit to pay for their time.

Wishing to remain unnoticed, and like Joud had said, to have never existed here in the first place, Pierce turned the other way and silently walked into the night until he was over a slight hill and out of sight. Only then did he look at his watch and see that it was 0203 hours. That gave him at least four more hours of night, and while not a motorcycle, the bicycle was silent, and he could cover the thirty kilometres to Nawa by pedalling fast, thereby reaching it before sunrise.

He checked the burner cell phone Patricia Knight had provided him, feeding him up-to-date intel reports on Nayef and Samaan’s position. An IDF drone sighting from an hour ago still placed both friendlies and their three hostile kidnappers in the same building they had been in yesterday. That was a positive sign for Pierce, so he started pedalling along the mostly flat, mostly desolate semi-desert with only the stars and the Milky Way galaxy illuminating his path forward, while he hoped that an unseen and randomly placed landmine didn’t send him on a one-way trip to oblivion before his arrival.

56

Agulo, Canary Islands, Spain

Eighteen hours after Frederick Schaus had given up Natalya Kozlova’s location to Rachel Zang and Abdul Ibrahim, Zang and the team found themselves in the Canary Islands, an autonomous Spanish region situated on an archipelago within the Atlantic Ocean positioned less than four hundred kilometres off the coast from Morocco in north-western Africa. Specifically, they were on the island of La Gomera, which was mountainous, sparsely populated, and with a desert-like climate despite there being woodlands on the upper slopes of the steep mountains, and banana plantations and date palms everywhere else.

Upon arrival, Zang saw immediately that this was a popular tourist destination, with plenty of resorts, fabulous beaches, and a national park forged from now extinct volcanos that was today a UNSECO World Heritage site. The tiny town of Agulo, where she found herself now, was experiencing late afternoon heat and a cloudless blue sky. Features included quaint cobbled European-style streets, tall pine trees and white-walled Spanish-style villas. Surrounded by steep mountains, Zang and the team had discovered that the only way to reach Agulo was via a drive along a treacherous road navigating ravines and sheer cliff edges. Yet despite its wildness and old-world feel, Zang couldn’t help fantasising about returning for a vacation, because it had that high-end touristy vibe she sometimes longed for after a stressful and dangerous mission had come to an end.

But she was working, and Zang looked up, shielding her eyes from the harsh sun, to spot one of Akash Parab’s surveillance drones watching her watching it. Grinning, Zang spoke into the mic positioned at the collar of her shirt. “What’s caught your attention, Whisky One?” she said, using Parab’s call name for this operation. “It’d better not be me?”

She heard coughing and spluttering from the other side of the radio transmission. “Sorry, Ronin. Got a little distracted.”

“By what?”

He cleared his throat again. “Nothing.”

Zang shook her head, remembering stories she’d heard about how the drone surveillance geeks of the CIA often got excited when they discovered women on rooftops sunbathing in bikinis or less, when they should have been focusing on targets and assets connected to a mission instead. She hoped Parab wasn’t that kind of guy.

“I thought I’d found our tango, but it was a mistake.”

“What kind of mistake?”

He grumbled again. “I… thought you were our target for a moment.”

“Oh?” Zang said, not knowing how to take that remark. “Keep looking. There are less than a thousand people in this town. Our target can’t be that good at keeping herself hidden forever. Even for a seasoned SVR operative.”

“Roger that, Ronin.”

“Ronin out.”

The drone zipped off, and Zang kept walking.

She encountered Mackenzie Summerfield, who wore a light blue summer dress to blend in with the tourists she meandered through, and a headband to keep her tasselled bob out of her eyes. Zang in comparison wore cargo shorts with lots of pockets, hiking boots and a sleeveless but collared shirt, also to blend in. But unlike Summerfield, Zang carried a SIG Sauer P227 semi-automatic pistol tucked into her shorts at the small of her back. It was the only weapon Abdul Ibrahim — who was currently situated in one of their hotel rooms with Parab, watching the drone feeds — had been able to secure here. With any luck, Zang wouldn’t need to use it.

Summerfield stepped up to Zang, and the two women lightly embraced.

She next showed Zang several postcards she must have purchased during her circuit of Agulo. Zang played along with the ruse of being two friends catching up while on vacation together, while they studied these pictures together.

Summerfield said, “Haven’t seen the target anywhere. But then she is SVR. She knows how to hide.”

Zang nodded. “If Schaus was lying to us, I’ll cut off his…”

Summerfield caught Zang’s intense stare with her own, then smirked. “Cut off his… what, exactly?”

“Never mind. This is just frustrating.”

Then Summerfield’s eyes grew wide as she looked over Zang’s shoulder, and her face became a mask of pale fear.

Sensing immediate danger, Zang turned suddenly in a full half circle and almost pulled her pistol when she spotted Natalya Kozlova standing unperturbed and unarmed only a few metres behind her.

The Russian intelligence officer also dressed as a tourist, wearing shorts, runners and a cream-coloured tank top. She was as tall and as slender as Zang, and her blonde hair had been dyed black and cut short. They could have been sisters if their ethnicities weren’t different.

And she also wasn’t threatening with any weapons or aggressive poses of her own.

“Rachel Zang. Mackenzie Summerfield.” She said their names with a confidence that irked Zang. “You’re either here to kill me or offer me a deal. Which is it?”

“A deal,” said Zang. “One you’d better take, because there is nowhere else you can run to now.”

The Russian intelligence officer shrugged. “Who sold me out? Told you where I was?”

Zang didn’t see any reason not to tell the truth. “Frederick Schaus.”

“The Broek & Trausch hatchet man?” Kozlova laughed without humour. “How the fuck did he know where I was? Only one person knew where I was hiding…” Then as her mouth rested open with no words coming forth, she nodded to herself and looked away. “Ah, my uncle. Of course, the old bastard. It should not have slipped my mind that those two are close.”

“You…?” When Summerfield tried to ask her question, it came out as a croak, and she wouldn’t look at Kozlova directly. “You had… an exit strategy? That relied on your…?”

“Uncle?” the Russian said with a sneer as she completed Summerfield’s sentence. “Yeah, I do. Or at least I did. Why are you trembling, Mackenzie?” She laughed cruelly. “Don’t tell me you are still afraid of me? That’s ridiculous because you are the one with all the power now.”

For a moment, Zang wondered what had spooked Summerfield. Then she remembered that Kozlova had tortured her colleague in the Reykjavik safe house, and Zang suddenly felt to be a fool for not anticipating that Summerfield might not be ready for a direct encounter with this cruel woman after such a horrific ordeal.

“I’m… not,” said Summerfield, staring at her feet and holding herself rigid.

“Put it behind you,” said Kozlova, as if to do so were an easy feat. “We don’t have time to get all emotional with each other right now.”

Summerfield tried to speak again, but the words wouldn’t come forth.

“I’m sorry, Mackenzie. But you know it was nothing personal, what I did to you back in Iceland. We are all professionals, and we do what we have to do to get the job done.”

Summerfield was turning bright red now and clenching her teeth.

Zang touched her peer gently on the small of her back and whispered, “Leave this to me.” Then she turned to the smirking Kozlova and said, “We can get you a new identity, a one-way ticket to anywhere in the world that you choose to permanently disappear to, and enough cash to set yourself up with a new life. But to do that, you have to tell us one thing. I’m certain, Natalya Kozlova, that you know already what we want from you!”

“That’s very presumptuous of you.”

“Am I? It’s why you showed yourself when you found us here, because you are ready to bargain.”

The Russian shrugged. “How do you expect me to trust you?”

Now it was Zang’s turn to smirk. “You don’t. But I don’t see you are in a position to earn my trust, anyway.” Zang looked to Summerfield and felt a rising anger inside her, aimed towards Kozlova for the tortures she had inflicted on Summerfield, Knight and Parab. A part of Zang would have happily put a bullet in the Russian’s heart the moment she had secured the information that she needed from her, but the nobler side of her knew she was better than that. She would keep her bargain because the greater good was more important here than a personal vendetta.

“I’m being hunted,” said Kozlova.

“By whom, specifically? Do you know?”

Kozlova snorted as her eyes darted around, as if seeking to see if they were being watched. “Perhaps you’ve heard of him, a new assassin on the market calling himself Rubicon?”

Both Zang and Mackenzie shook their heads.

“Unbelievable! You and your CIA have a lot of catching up to do. I’m reliably informed Rubicon has never yet failed on an assignment. I’m hoping to be the first where he does fail, but that’s now unfortunately up to you two.”

Summerfield cleared her throat and stood taller, even though Zang still sensed her micro tremors and quivering lips. “If you want our protection, Kozlova, tell us what we want to know. Now.”

Shaking her head, the Russian said, “I’m not stupid, Pretty Face. If I give up what I know before I’m on a plane flying out of here, you’ll just abandon me.”

Zang shook her head. “No way, Kozlova. You already know that you’ll have to give up something first before we offer you anything. That means you’ve already worked out how you’ll stagger the information releases. So let’s not play games because I don’t have time, and you already know that your big secret goes down tomorrow. You only have that long to accept a deal for your intel to be worth anything to us. Time is on our side, not yours.”

For the first time since their meeting, Kozlova expressed her feelings of vulnerability, which she had masked until now. This pleased Zang because she knew then that she had the Russian right where she wanted her.

“Very well,” said Kozlova, pursing her lips. “At least, let’s get somewhere private and out of sight of unfriendly eyes.”

Zang said, “We can walk and talk and keep to the narrow streets. We have rooms in a hotel nearby where we can secure you for the time being.”

Kozlova nodded as she wrapped a scarf around her head as if it were to protect her from the sun and not to hide her features. “I do hope those drones I spotted earlier today are all yours.”

“So do I,” said Zang as she touched the P227 at the curve of her back, confirming it was in easy reach should she need it.

“I’ll tell you this much, because you are correct. What I’m willing to give up right now is that the European Union parliament meets tomorrow to vote on a new sanction against my government.”

Summerfield’s eyes suddenly grew wide in their sockets as her mouth dropped open. “Oh my God! I should have seen this!”

“Seen what?” asked Zang.

Kozlova smirked. “I knew you were smarter than you let on, Macken⁠—”

But Natalya Kozlova couldn’t complete her sentence because, in the next instant, three red marks appeared suddenly on her cream-coloured tank top, centred around holes spaced in a close circle about her heart. The Russian spy dropped lifeless to the pavement the same moment Zang heard the killing shots, delayed because sniper bullets were faster than the speed of sound.

57

In the seconds following the sniper taking Natalya Kozlova’s life, Zang had tackled Summerfield, dropping them both to the cobbled street.

Zang realised that where they lay, they were still in the sniper’s line of sight; the street they had walked was narrow and without cover, as it was lined only by the white walls of one- and two-storey houses broken up only by shuttered windows and doors of dark wood. At one end of the street, Zang could only see a very steep-edged, scrub-clad mountain, and at the other, an open field of grass in an indented bowl in the natural landscape. Beyond that, several similar white-walled and dark wood-framed houses some four hundred feet from her. It was only the latter that offered a sniper the angle required to achieve the kill shots that they had used.

Then, squinting, Zang vaguely made out a man in that exact location with a long package strapped upon his back, who was now climbing onto a motorcycle and kickstarting its engine.

“Ronin? Whisky Two?”

She blinked, for it took her a moment to realise Ibrahim was speaking to her through the mic, using their call signs.

“This is Whisky Actual. Are either of you hurt?”

With Summerfield now squirming underneath her, Zang climbed off her colleague and got to her feet. She then pressed herself close to a wall, limiting her chance of taking a bullet should the man on the motorcycle not be the sniper. “Ronin here. I’m okay,” she said, sounding out of breath even though she wasn’t, as she spoke into her collar mic. “Whisky Two, what about you?”

Summerfield was shaky as she climbed to her feet, and Zang saw specks of blood on her face and blue dress. Her hands were checking her body all over, searching for wounds she had not yet registered because of the adrenalin surging through her, suppressing any pain she would have otherwise endured should there be a bullet inside her. “Yeah. I think I’m good.”

“Target’s dead.”

“Ronin, you and Whisky Two get out of there,” said Ibrahim, delivering his words rapidly. “Locals and tourists have stopped what they were doing. They all heard the shots, as did we. But their stunned passivity won’t last much longer.”

Zang remembered that Ibrahim and Parab were observing the scene from drones still circling in the air above them. “Whisky One?” she said to Parab, taking a handkerchief from her pocket and using it to wipe the blood on Summerfield’s face, who was still motionless with shock. “How long before someone enters the street we’re in?” She couldn’t believe her luck that they had been alone during the shooting, but as her boss had just pointed out, that luck wouldn’t last forever.

It took their technical operations officer a few seconds to answer. “No one approaching at the moment. Every civilian nearby is taking cover or standing still.”

“Okay,” said Zang as she shook Summerfield lightly until the two women were staring at each other. “You good?”

Summerfield finally nodded as she visibly pulled herself together before Zang’s very eyes.

“Summerfield’s coming back to you. We’re abandoning the body.”

“Good idea,” said Ibrahim. “We have no means by which to clean the site anyway.”

“Go!” Zang said to Summerfield.

The other woman nodded, and then they both walked off in opposite directions, with Zang taking the route towards where she had seen the man on the motorcycle. As she moved, she used the handkerchief to wipe her own face in case there were blood specks on it too.

As she stepped out into a new, wider street with better views of the town of Agulo, she saw no sign of the sniper. So she kept walking, passing an older couple who looked confused and terrified, who spoke to her in Spanish.

“No hablo Español,” she said, speaking the truth, and kept walking.

When she was alone again, Zang spotted a red, blue and black Montesa Cota 4RT racing motorcycle parked in the street with no one near it. Remembering her stunt in Reykjavik, and with a grin growing on her lips, Zang spoke quickly into her mic. “Whisky One, do you have eyes on a motorcyclist, man with a long package on his back, likely a sniper rifle?”

“Roger that. Give me a minute, Ronin, and I’ll find him.”

While she waited, Zang wasted no time hot-wiring the new bike. Unlike the 85 cc two-stroke-engine bike she had commandeered in the Icelandic capital, this beast offered up a 298 cc four-stroke engine, which would provide her with far more power on the roads when she gave chase.

“Ronin, what are you up to?” asked Ibrahim, who must have been watching her through the drone cameras, which were still active and circling the town.

“Whisky Actual, sir, we might have eyes on the assassin. According to our downed target, his code name could be ‘Rubicon’. Mean anything to you?”

“Rumours only. Why?”

“Fill me in later. I’m going to pursue.” Zang had the gear on her this time to hot-wire a bike and had its engine rumbling as she straddled it. “Get your eyes on this target ASAP, because I’m going to take him down when you do.”

Zang sped off as she heard police sirens in the distance. Agulo would soon become a crime scene, which meant she and the team had to get out of here fast before some local official identified them as a potential culprit, but not before she took out this assassin, who had likely cost them their one opportunity to halt the Russian operation with the funds transfer still going down tomorrow.

“Roger that, Ronin,” reported Parab. “Located the target. He’s taking the GM-1 road, which leads him counter-clockwise around the island.”

“Into the mountains?”

“Yes, it’s a steep route for sure, with many sheer cliffs both above and below the road.”

Zang looked up towards the mountains encircling Agulo until she spotted the GM-1 road circling up and around the city. A few hundred metres from her, there was the bike and its rider. “Got him. Pursuing now. Suggest the rest of you get out of there.”

“We will. Whisky Two just showed.”

“Great. Moving.”

Zang didn’t wait for further replies as she sped the Montesa racing bike out of the narrow streets of the town onto the sealed road circling and rising up the side of the mountain. She zipped around tiny compact cars and larger all-wheel drives as the road indeed did grow steeper, and the cliff edges of the mountains encircling it also became more vertical.

Turning a corner, Zang spotted a road tunnel cut through the mountain and spotted the bike with the assassin on it, still with the long bag strapped upon his back, with his sniper rifle no doubt inside. The bike was a Honda Africa Twin, ideally configured for off-road riding like her own. She watched as the bike disappeared into the tunnel.

Zang increased the throttle and sped up to eighty kilometres per hour, far above the recommended speed limit of sixty. When she exited the three-hundred-foot tunnel on the other side, Zang caught a view of how high she was, and the views down the side of the mountains to the vast Atlantic Ocean were breathtaking. There were no trees or scrub here, just rock, dirt and grasses.

She spotted the assassin, close by now.

He looked back.

Had he just spotted her?

Clenching her teeth and sneering, Zang accelerated again. It was only the two of them for the moment on the steep, winding road, and she could catch him. As she maintained balance of her racing bike while closing the distance between them, she reached for the P227 at her back.

She noticed the rider drop a canister behind him. It bounced several times on the road ahead of her.

A grenade! Zang suddenly realised and braked hard.

58

The grenade kept rolling down the steep road towards her, and within seconds, she knew she and her motorcycle would be right on top of it.

She braked harder still, burning rubber on the road.

Zang wasn’t going to make it.

A horn blasted behind her.

Then the grenade detonated just ahead, shattering the road base and projecting its instantly created rubble as deadly shrapnel propelled through the air.

Zang ducked as low as she could, realising only after the blast had occurred that she had managed to get far enough behind it not to have her bones break from the concussion wave.

There was the screeching of tyres and further blasting of horns behind her, where she imagined a pile-up of cars was occurring. But Zang didn’t look back to check, for the grenade attack confirmed the man was a hostile and almost definitely the assassin Kozlova had named as Rubicon, and she needed to bring him down.

Zang accelerated through the smoke cloud left behind by the blast and continued her chase.

Turning another corner, she zipped around a small truck coming the other way. The driver blasted his horn at her and swore in Spanish as she only just got out of his way, crossing to the wrong side of the road to gain speed by maximising the use of road curves.

Ahead, she spotted that the assassin had turned off the road and was taking a hikers’ trail up the side of the mountain, far steeper and narrower than the GM-1.

Zang took the same route and gave chase.

Soon she realised that the track was far more precarious than she had anticipated. She corrected only just in time to prevent her slipping off a cliff edge and dropping fifty feet to her death.

She slowed, noticing that the assassin had too, and thought of pulling her pistol again to shoot the man, but this was not a track that could be navigated with only one hand on the handlebars, and he was still more than a hundred feet ahead of her.

The trail was taking them around and up the mountain that the tunnel had cut through. The GM-1 remained visible below them, but it was getting further away with every passing second, as the trail was rising faster than the road.

Zang glanced up when she heard a sickening squelching sound, to see the assassin had clipped two hikers, whose bodies now tumbled down the cliff edge.

Seeing this assault on innocent civilians maddened Zang, so she slowed, pulled her pistol and fired off several rounds in the direction of her foe.

He ducked and kept riding until a lucky hit blew out his back tyre. The Twin Africa skidded and wobbled, and Zang hoped the assassin would drop off the cliff too. But he managed to control his bike and fall into the ledge, not off it.

The Twin Africa bike continued to skid and went over the cliff, with the sniper rifle bag following after it.

Zang accelerated, knowing that she would soon have her target within killing range.

He stood and pulled a compact Steyr TMP machine pistol from his jacket pocket and let loose a burst of 9mm rounds in her direction.

Zang dived off her bike to avoid taking a bullet, for the dirt track had widened here. She rolled several times before coming up on her feet, and then raced behind a rocky outcrop for cover.

The assassin fired another burst, but the bullets pinged harmlessly off the rock around her. She quickly checked to see if she had taken a hit and, finding no entry or exit wounds, waited for a lull in the shooting, then twisted her hand around the rock with her P227 ready and fired off multiple rounds in his direction.

She ducked back, expecting return fire. But when the seconds passed and there was only silence, Zang turned again, fired off three more rounds into the same spot, then looked towards where the assassin had previously fallen off his bike.

He was not where she’d expected him to be.

Instead, he was scrambling up the cliff, which was just at the right angle to climb rapidly using hand- and footholds. The man had gained considerable distance already, so Zang shot at him again, emptying her magazine in the process with its meagre three remaining rounds.

She missed every time.

For one short second, they locked eyes.

He was a muscular man, middle-aged with greying hair and a close-cropped beard, and ruggedly handsome. His features were Slavic, his eyes narrow, and despite his looks, there was a coldness about him that caused Zang to shiver involuntarily.

But the moment was only that.

He pulled another grenade from his pocket and lobbed it towards Zang.

She ducked behind her cover as the grenade bounced down the other side of the cliff from her hiding point. It detonated harmlessly. Its purpose had not been to kill her, but to give the assassin time to reach the top of the cliff, and when Zang looked around again, her suspicions were proved correct, for he had vanished.

Reloading a fresh magazine into her P227, Zang sprinted up the track. She could have climbed the cliff as he had, but she suspected that if she did, the man would be lying in wait to kill her when she reached the top.

The longer route following the hikers’ trail to the flat mountaintop took Zang several minutes to reach it, even when sprinting at full speed. But when she attained the highest altitude possible on this mountain, Zang saw she was already too late.

Running off the cliff and suspended from a fully expanded parasailing fabric wing, shaped like a crescent moon, was the assassin. He had just caught the strong breezes present at this altitude and was now gliding fast towards the horizon. Zang knew the parasail would carry him right across this island if he was skilled enough in its operation and therefore take him far beyond her or anyone’s reach within the coming minutes.

This must have been his planned escape route all along, because he had not carried the parasailing gear with him to this point while she had pursued him.

As she watched him disappear, Zang was convinced this must be Rubicon, and that if Natalya Kozlova had spoken the truth today, then the assassin had maintained his perfect kill record, with her death as his most recent accomplishment.

59

Nawa, Syria

Reaching the shelled and rubble-strewn town of Nawa had been simple enough on his bicycle ride the previous night, but moving through and around its shelled and decimated landscape on foot the next morning proved to be far more complicated than Mark Pierce would have liked, and he had wasted most of the next day as a result.

The times he’d spotted other people moving through the city, their numbers were few, and it was only to seek cover, as distant shelling and nearby gunfire was a common background noise and a threat to life here. But what complicated Pierce’s mission more was a convoy of technical, armoured personnel carriers, two T-72 Soviet-era tanks and at least a hundred paramilitary soldiers armed with AK-47s and other assorted military rifles and pistols gathering in the town. These men had established a heavily guarded camp just outside the severely shelled building Butros Jerash and his two Mukhabarat goons had holed up in.

Judging by their bravado, war cries and the intel Eli Yaghi had fed him since entering Syria, this group was likely HTS, the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, who, if the intel reports were to be believed, had just ousted the Syrian president and taken control of the country. But a friend of Pierce’s enemy wasn’t necessarily his friend, so Pierce kept out of their way and out of sight. Butros Jerash and his Mukhabarat goons would likely be doing the same for similar reasons.

Earlier that morning he’d positioned himself inside another severely shelled building also situated across the road from where the HTS forces had established themselves. From there, he had watched the scene through his binoculars throughout the day, eventually confirming Jerash and his men’s presence inside the building Yaghi had previously identified as their hideout, positioned directly behind where the HTS had now established themselves. Pierce never saw Kasrin Nayef or Yakub Samaan in that time, but IDF drone intel fed to him during the day confirmed they were still inside the building.

As Pierce watched and gathered his own personal intel, it became obvious to him that Jerash and the Mukhabarat couldn’t move from their current position either, because if they did, the HTS forces, who were spread widely around them, would inevitably encounter them. Capture would lead to their torture and execution, so their strategy then would be to lie low until the convoy moved on.

The problem for Pierce was that he was also constrained by the same forces. But he had no intention of waiting until the convoy departed. He would strike tonight.

His partial four-storey shelled-out building with its few remaining walls proved to be the best option for him to hide out during the day. Earlier, he’d had to conceal himself in the rubble when a HTS patrol reconnoitred the building, and thankfully they didn’t linger. From what he could gather from snatched conversations he’d overheard, one man in the patrol was an engineer who had quickly concluded this building would collapse if too many soldiers entered it and set up camp here. Pierce figured he was only one man, so weight should not be a problem for him.

After they left, Pierce decided he needed a distraction to occur later this evening, and came up with a plan when he spotted several rusted oil drums in the building’s mostly collapsed basement. He got to work, carrying three drums to the roof but doing so as quietly and as well-hidden as he could make himself. When he had all his material on the roof, he filled each drum with as many rusted metal scraps as he could find lying scattered about.

As day turned into evening, Pierce fitted his C-4 explosives and timers into each drum, then set them to detonate at 1957 hours, 1958 hours and 2001 hours respectively. Then he returned to his optimal observation post, to again observe the movements of the HTS soldiers, and prepared his best estimates on their patrol routines and individual group numbers.

When the sun set and darkness became a cloak of near invisibility for him, for no streetlights worked here, Pierce moved closer to the well-lit and heavily defended convoy. He knew that his only path to Butros Jerash, the infamous Doctor Acid, was to walk through the HTS team like he was one of them. Luckily for Pierce, the weapons master in Jordan had been correct; the AK-47 and the clothes he wore made him look exactly like he was one of them.

He looked at his watch.

It was 1953 hours.

He strutted out of the shadows like he was adjusting his pants to suggest his absence was to relieve his bladder. He passed two patrolling guards, acting like they were inconsequential to him, each with AK-47s of their own and both smoking cigarettes.

“Marhaba,” he said, greeting the men informally, and kept walking.

“What are you doing?” asked the younger of the two patrolling soldiers, holding a flashlight normally used to illuminate their route as they trod it out. It was now shining directly into Pierce’s scarfed face.

Pierce gave them a stare that he hoped implied he was confused by their question. “My ablutions. Why? Want me to shit where we camp and eat?”

“Of course not,” said the second older man, who waved his hand against his nose to wisp away faecal smells that didn’t exist in this moment. “Get back to the main camp before we have reason to report you for failing to obey your orders.”

“Very well.”

Pierce turned and kept walking, and when he was shrouded again in the shadowy night, he sprinted silently to his target’s building. At the stairwell, strewn with rubble, Pierce waited.

A minute later, the first drum exploded.

He could just make out its gushing flames through cracks and holes in what remained of the building’s fabric. Then he listened as the HTS soldiers became distracted by it, as he had hoped they would. Many shouted that they were under attack. Others fired weapons into the building.

Then the second drum exploded, and this caused a sudden eruption of soldiers to gather and approach the commotion and declare war on whoever it was they believed had caused it.

With no one likely to approach him in the coming minutes, Pierce examined the stairwell he’d hid beside. It was too dark to see the details of the stairs clearly, but his instincts warned him that it was not a safe route to take. It was too obvious a passage not to place boobytraps, such as tripwires or pressure plates connected to shaped charges or improvised explosive devices.

Instead, Pierce explored the other side of the building away from where the HTS had set up, and from where they were now engaging in a battle now that the third drum had just exploded. Pierce found a dysfunctional light pole adjacent to the building he wished to enter, and it gave him an idea.

Slinging his AK-47 across his back, he removed his leather belt, then hooked it around the pole before tightening it around his wrists. Then he shimmied fast up the pole until he reached the third floor before stepping onto a concrete floor slab through the space where there had once been a wall. He then slipped his belt back on, readied his AK-47 for action and advanced through this floor, seeking both hostile targets and friendly assets.

But when Pierce encountered the first Mukhabarat intelligence officer, they surprised each other, as both of them had been moving through the near darkness without any forms of illumination other than that of the stars and the HTS’s drum fires and technical headlights lit up in the street below. They literally walked into each other.

When Pierce realised what had happened, he dropped his AK so it hung off him via its sling and pulled his knife, hoping to dispatch this enemy silently.

But the man reacted first and clumsily. He’d been holding a Russian human-portable rocket launcher and, in his panic, had engaged and fired its high-explosive warhead directly into the building they were both inside.

In an instant Pierce switched tactics, to roll and dive in a desperate move to seek cover as most of the entire third floor lit up as a brilliant inferno, far outshining and outbooming his efforts with the oil drums earlier.

60

Pierce rolled while ducking behind what remained of an interior concrete wall, barely keeping his body ahead of the blast front that obliterated most of the floor he’d been standing in. The heated air that smothered him became almost too unbearable to breathe, but that moment lasted only seconds as it moved past him. Then it was smoke from the blast and pulverised rubble that covered Pierce in dusty layers while he recognised a trio of facts all in the same moment. Firstly, he had survived while the Mukhabarat intelligence officer with the rocket launcher had presumably not. Secondly, he couldn’t stop coughing and spluttering on the aerated dirt and dust as it got into his eyes, mouth and nostrils. Thirdly, and most importantly, the blast would now attract the attention of the HTS forces just outside the building. He had to move fast and finish the job he had come here to do before further trouble came to him.

Clambering to his feet and moving away from the destruction to the far side of the building away from the HTS, Pierce felt his legs shake. He couldn’t believe, after an entire mission where his shakes had not bothered him, they were haunting him now in the most inappropriate of moments.

Then he realised it wasn’t him, it wasn’t his old tremors come back to disable him, but the entire building rocking on its foundations.

He heard a loud groan. Then cracking.

Then one-third of the entire building, where he had been ducking and rolling only moments earlier, crumbled and fell away as it disappeared into another pile of rubble, broken steel reinforcement and more billowing clouds of dust. His chest tightened when he also calculated that Kasrin Nayef’s and Yakub Samaan’s odds of surviving the collapse were now a mere two to one. He might have come all this way and risked so much for nothing.

But there was no time for further reflection, for Pierce heard shouted orders from the HTS forces as they presumably mobilised teams to see what had caused disruption on this side of their street as well.

Using mostly the sense of touch because the night offered little more than starlight to see by, Pierce checked his AK-47 and MP-443 Grach pistol to ensure they were still locked and loaded, then advanced through the building, confirming it was clear of any hostiles. When he found the one mostly intact stairwell in the building, he started down it.

The same moment the HTS started shelling the building with mortars.

The first two hit the building on the far side from Pierce, so he kept moving.

When the third hit, the entire building rattled, then suddenly slid a dozen or so centimetres on its foundations. For a moment, Pierce feared that the entire structure might come down around him…

But it held.

He kept advancing.

On the second floor, with his nocturnal vision improving because of the HTS’s floodlights shining further into this part of the building, he spotted the second Mukhabarat man, presuming the first had died at his own hands when he’d misfired the rocket launcher earlier. This Syrian Mukhabarat officer stood shaking with a pistol in his grip, hiding behind a concrete column and pointing his weapon down towards where the mortars fired from. He didn’t see Pierce come up behind him, press his AK into his head and obliterate his brain with a single shot.

Without slowing his stride, Pierce kept progressing until he found Nayef and Samaan laid out in the dust and rubble fragments with their hands and legs bound by rope. They both squirmed and rolled and flinched every time a mortar fired. But they were okay for the moment, and he felt a sense of relief wash over him.

Then Pierce found Butros Jerash, the infamous and overweight Doctor Acid, hiding behind his own crumbled support beam and muttering prayer words to himself in Arabic straight out of the Qur’an. With all the noise and light and concussion waves shaking what remained of their building, he didn’t see Pierce approach either.

Pierce shot him through the right shoulder, causing the man to squeal and kick out, for the pain would have been sudden, shocking and intense, and in seconds he would realise that intensity was not going to drop away anytime soon.

Pierce stepped around him, then kicked him hard in the head, stunning him. It offered a moment for Pierce to remove Jerash’s pistol and knife from his person and kick them away, and to take his cell phone from his pocket.

As Jerash recovered his senses, while another mortar struck the building, causing it to wobble again, Pierce pressed the AK into his collarbone. “Don’t move, or I’ll shoot out your other shoulder.”

Sweating, with tears flowing from his eyes, Jerash nodded. “Please. I’ll pay you if you get me out of here.”

“Oh, I’ll get you out of here,” said Pierce, “but wait your turn.” He returned to Nayef and cut the bonds around her wrists; then he handed her the knife. “You know what to do.”

“Pierce?” she said as her eyes widened while rifle fire erupting from the HTS forces filled the air outside the building. “You came back!”

“Yeah, this is your rescue party. One-manned. But a rescue party, nonetheless.” He looked to the shadowy form of her brother squirming next to her. “Can you both walk out of here?”

“Even if it kills us,” she said, taking the knife first to the binding around her legs and then to free her brother. “He’s a friend,” she said to Yakub Samaan when he looked up at Pierce, with surprise and shock written all over his face in this moment of chaos, long after he had likely given up all hope that he would survive through the next hour. “This is Pierce, whom I told you about. Remember?”

He nodded. “I didn’t believe you.”

“I didn’t believe it either, but here he is!”

Pierce returned to Jerash, who was trying to crawl across the concrete to what seemed to be a collection of plastic bottles.

He fired a short burst of bullets in front of him to slow his progress. The bullets hit the bottles, causing their contents to spray everywhere.

Jerash screamed again when the mist hit him, his hands going to his face as he shuddered and convulsed. “My eyes!”

He turned to Pierce, and the sight that greeted Pierce was as horrific a scene as he had ever witnessed. Had those bottles been his acid collection, and now the caustic liquids were dissolving the flesh off his face? His eyes were suddenly gone, smoking as they dissolved, as was half his nose, and his teeth showed through gaps in his flesh where there was no skin at all. He looked like the monster he had always been on the inside.

“It hurts!”

Kasrin Nayef stumbled up to stand next to Pierce and stared down at her kidnapper. “He’s been dripping acid on my and my brother’s skin for days.” She lifted her forearms to show Pierce the many welting burns scarring her, which he could barely make out in the darkness. Then she burst into tears, releasing all the hurt, fear, anger and terror she must have bottled up during her last week of captivity. “Just put him out of his misery, and can we then get away from here?”

Pierce nodded. “In a minute, maybe less.” He had Doctor Acid’s cell phone in his pocket. He took it out and opened the lock screen. “I’ll tell you what, Jerash, you tell me what the passcode for your phone is, and I’ll shoot you now.”

He was sobbing like a baby, but he still managed to speak through his evolving disfigurements and escalating agony. “And if I don’t?”

“We’ll leave you here. When the HTS come for you, I bet they’ll keep you alive for weeks, maybe months, while they torture you further. Imagine all that horror and pain, while you are blinded.”

“Eight, zero, six, six.”

Pierce checked, and the cell phone unlocked. “Good choice.”

He shot the dissolving Doctor Acid three times, using the Mozambique drill, twice in the torso and once in the head.

“Time to get out of here.”

On the first floor, Pierce kicked rubble down the stairs until the improvised explosive device he’d expected to be there detonated. Then he, Kasrin Nayef and Yakub Samaan sprinted to the ground level and out the back of the building, away from the HTS forces, seconds before the entire building came crashing down.

61

Pierce didn’t slow his pace as he pushed through the narrow, maze-like alleyways out the other side of the building that had just collapsed. Littered with trash and rubble and wedged between closely-packed-together houses, they were only just wide enough for one person to walk through at a time. Despite being late at night with the cover of darkness able to hide them, the HTS forces were still active and nearby. They were presumably searching for any survivors from the chaos of the last several minutes, which meant they were coming after Pierce and his companions if they got wind that they were there.

“Keep up!” he said to Nayef and Samaan as they staggered behind him. He knew they both suffered multiple wounds across their bodies from where Jerash had tortured them with acid drips, and Pierce had no idea how extensive their wounds were, but he knew that if the HTS paramilitary soldiers caught them, their fate would be far worse. The HTS were a Sunni Islamic fundamentalist group with former ties to Al-Qaeda, and a designated terrorist organisation with multiple international sanctions imposed against them, including from the United States. Pierce wasn’t putting any trust in their benevolence towards them if they ended up as their prisoners.

When they stepped out onto the other side of the constrained alleyways into a wider street, he was surprised to see one of the HTS’s old T-72 Soviet main battle tanks parked right in front of them. Pierce knew these heavily armoured tanks were common in the country and used by various fighting factions, including the Syrian Arab Army and various rebel and Islamic jihadist groups. The driver of this particular T-72, whose head showed in the open hatch at the front of the vehicle, and those of the commander and gunner in the turret were all visible to Pierce. They dressed in turbans and with bandoliers strapped across their shoulders. The commander was speaking on a radio, presumably receiving orders.

Pierce thought to backtrack, but then his fighting instincts took over, and he fired off a series of short bursts, killing all three occupants before they even knew they were the target of a hostile force.

Next, Pierce approached to ensure the three hostiles were permanently downed. He fired a single bullet into the head of the commander when he twitched in his open hatch. “This, my friends,” he said to Nayef and Samaan, “is how we’re getting out of here.”

“What?” said Samaan, who looked as exhausted and as shellshocked as his sister he was supporting to stand upright. Or perhaps it was her helping him to stand upright. “Can you drive those things?” he asked.

Pierce grinned. “Let’s find out. It certainly beats walking.”

He jumped up onto the body, pulled out the driver and dumped his corpse onto the dusty street. Then he did the same with the two bodies in the turret. “Nayef, Samaan, get in there,” he said, pointing to the turret.

Nayef said, “What about you?”

“I’ll drive. You do that seated down there,” he said, pointing to the driver’s compartment at the front of the tank. Then he helped them up and got them into position. “Sit in the turret, but don’t press anything. You might accidentally blow us up if you do. Oh, and keep your heads down. Everyone this night will be trying to take random shots at us.”

Once Pierce was inside the cramped and claustrophobic driver’s seat, he checked the throttle, clutch and brakes, then ensured the ignition switches were still on, and the gears were in neutral. He next disengaged the handbrake, popped the gear into first, then pushed the two drive levers forward as the tank took off. He was familiar with the T-72, having trained how to operate them a long time ago now, and although out of practice, he soon got the hang of driving the forty-odd-tonne beast again. Essentially the two drive levers switched power and speed between the two tracks, so operated together, they were the equivalent of its steering wheel.

When Pierce checked the driver’s main periscope, he found it broken, so his only option was to sit high enough so his head was just outside the hatch. There was also the Luna infrared spotlight mounted on the turret, designed so that the driver could see at night, but it didn’t seem operational, plus the equipment he needed to utilise its night-vision capabilities also seemed to be dysfunctional and beyond repair.

Figuring a badly maintained tank was better than no tank, Pierce took off, churning up dust in the street as he headed northwest towards the Golan Heights and his crossing point into Israel.

But Pierce had barely covered a few hundred metres when a Toyota Hilux mounted with a .50-calibre machine gun pulled up alongside him on the left and matched his speed. The gunner in the technical yelled at Pierce a few times in Arabic, in what sounded to be aggressive queries over why he had left his post. But it was almost impossible to hear him over both their engines, so Pierce wasn’t certain what the man’s meaning actually was.

Then the gunner’s mannerisms shifted completely, and he swung his machine gun towards Pierce and fired off round after round into the tank’s steel and composite armour, resulting in zero damage to his vehicle.

Pierce did, however, have to duck down so his head was no longer exposed, and this resulted in him driving blind. Not that it really mattered, as the tank would do far more damage to anything it hit compared to what those obstacles could do to him.

As the machine-gun fire rattled on, Pierce pulled back on the left-hand gear, disengaging the tracks on the same side, and the T-72 turned sharply to the left. The sound and reverberation of the technical smashing into his tank and then partially going under it hardly bothered him or his vehicle as they careened forward.

Correcting, Pierce stuck his head up to see the technical was gone, and he was about to crash into a large building. He switched levers so that he turned sharply in the other direction and powered down a main street lit by only a few working streetlamps and occasional oil drums alight with flames.

Then a series of sparks lit up inside the driver’s cabin.

For a moment, Pierce feared the interior had caught on fire, until he realised that the spark had come from one of the banks of batteries lined up and exposed next to him on his left. Pierce couldn’t effectively release either handle without losing control of the tank, but he turned to his left and in the dim light of the cabin saw how corroded the batteries were and the frailness of their connecting wires. It would be a simple accident to electrocute himself if he hit a deep rut in the road and the sudden changes in momentum threw him against an exposed wire. Or worse, if one of the batteries exploded. In the latter case there would be very little left of him to identify his body if it came to that. Or if anyone here cared.

But this part of Syria was mostly flat and open, and again the risk of driving a decrepit tank far outweighed the risk of moving on foot.

As Pierce passed a mostly intact mosque with twin minarets, he then turned a corner onto the main road out of town and took it.

But no sooner was Pierce on that road than he encountered a roadblock, complete with sandbags, metal barricades, machine-gun posts, spike strips and several armed militia soldiers who could have been HTS or from any other fighting force operational in this part of Syria.

Pierce didn’t care who they were and kept driving.

This prompted a response from the guards, of further automatic rifle and machine-gun fire directed into the body of his tank. So Pierce ducked his head again and drove straight. He smashed through the barricades and sandbags effortlessly and kept driving.

When he reached the other side and he was still moving forward at speed, a flash, then an explosive blast lit up on his right side. He guessed someone had just fired an anti-tank rocket in his direction and had missed.

Again, Pierce didn’t slow, and within a few minutes he was out on open road in almost completely flat land dotted with spaced-out houses, dirt roads, ageing power lines and the occasional low and slow-flowing river. He could see more clearly now; a sliver of the moon had risen above the horizon, shading everything in dark blues. In the skies above, he spotted the flares of missiles firing back and forth between Israel and Syria. Israel was at war with the Islamic terrorist organisation Hezbollah, which was also operational in this region, so Pierce was not surprised to see this sight. The chaos of the coup erupting across Syria would allow Israel to take out many Hezbollah and Syrian regime military and chemical-weapon targets.

The drive ahead was about fifteen kilometres, and after he’d turned in a circle to check no one followed them now, he covered that distance in about twenty minutes without further resistance or confrontation.

Many times, Pierce had thought to check on Nayef and Samaan, but with the noise of the tank’s motors and tracks, and the awkwardness of their extremely cramped confines, he decided to do so when he reached his designated border-crossing point, where they would be able to speak clearly.

Then he noticed his cell phone ringing, vibrating and flashing.

He pulled to a stop in the middle of an empty field and checked his phone.

He’d missed about fifty calls, all from the same number.

Pierce called back immediately.

“Pierce, you idiot,” said Patricia Knight, “you’re about to get yourself killed.”

“How do you know where I am?”

His boss made a grumbling noise. “Because I’m seated here in an IDF forward operating base, watching your every move captured on high-resolution drone footage.”

“What?”

“I’ve been watching you since you left Jordan. Right now, I see you’re in a commandeered T-72 tank. God knows how you secured that. But I’m here to tell you, if you don’t stop and advance on foot instead, the IDF will take it out with a missile strike. They don’t want it anywhere near their newly established front lines, which you are about to drive right into.”

Pierce blinked several times as he absorbed what Knight was trying to tell him.

“I have Eli Yaghi here with me, if you’d rather hear it from him?”

Then it struck Pierce what had been on his mind. He had never expected this level of commitment from his team, ready to help him in any way they could on this unsanctioned and unfunded personal mission simply because they valued him as an individual worthy of their help. He’d spent so much of his career in the field without support or backup, it had been instinctual for Pierce to believe he was operating alone this time as well. Was that now a mistake to always keep acting that way?

“Thank you,” he said, meaning it. “How far?”

“One and a half kilometres. If you move now, you’ll make it on foot before sunrise.”

“Roger that. Thank you, Knight.”

Pierce ended the call, then climbed out the awkward hatch until he was stood upon the chassis. A quick scan of the moonlit landscape presented them as being alone for the time being, so he climbed up onto the turret and helped Kasrin Nayef out of the commander’s seat. He saw clearly the many welts and bleeding acid injuries on her arms and around her neck and shoulder blades. He didn’t wish to imagine how much of her body suffered with similar, raw inflictions. “Are you still functional?”

She nodded. “I’m worried about Yakub though.”

“Okay, I’ll check on him.”

Yakub Samaan murmured when Pierce approached, but he was otherwise unresponsive.

“Hey, bud, we’re almost there. Want to help me and climb down now?”

“We’re… crossing into Israel?” He slurred his words and wouldn’t open his eyes. “Why would the Jews… help us… when we’re Muslims?”

Samaan had a point, but this was not the time or place to debate geopolitics and who held the moral high ground in the Middle East. “You’re also German citizens. You aren’t Syrians anymore. But let’s worry about that later. Let’s focus on getting you and your sister home.”

He waited for a response, but Samaan was silent.

Pierce shook him, then slapped his face gently.

Still no response, but at least he was still breathing normally.

Hauling him out of the gunner’s seat, Pierce slung the unconscious man over his left shoulder and climbed down to the ground. With his AK-47 slung over his right shoulder and held in a single-handed firing position, he turned to Nayef. “I hope you can walk.”

“Thank you.”

Pierce stared at her as he took a flash-bang grenade from a pouch, ready to lob into the driver’s compartment to defuse all the batteries and render the tank useless, preventing anyone from finding and commandeering it, then using it to come after them. “That doesn’t really answer my question.”

“Sorry,” she said as she looked away. “I didn’t at first believe it when you showed up, back at that horrific building where they tortured us. I thought me and Yakub were fated to die there. I thought escape was nothing but an insane fantasy. But then you showed up, and somehow, here we are. No one, ever, has valued us as much as you have this night, Mark Pierce. That’s why I wanted to thank you. How many other people would do the same?”

Now Pierce looked away, not sure how to answer her. He had almost completely drained all his secret contingency funds to rescue these two individuals, who, in the scheme of a larger world and its many problems, weren’t that important. He didn’t completely understand why he had done it, but he did know that if he hadn’t at least tried to rescue them both, their deaths would become another past failure with dire costs that he might not be able to forgive himself for letting a hopeful resolution slip by.

Then he realised that these were genuine human beings, who’d fought for a better world, and in Pierce’s mind, that counted for everything.

But instead of acknowledging her, he got all businesslike and said, “Can you walk, Kasrin? It’s a kilometre and a half that way. Do that, and it’s all over.”

She nodded as her hand gently brushed against his right shoulder.

“Yes, I can. You’ve shown me how.”

PART IV

THE AMERICANS (IN CODA)

62

The Hague, Netherlands

Mackenzie Summerfield sat next to Rachel Zang in the glassed-off viewing gallery overlooking Trial Chamber VI, where the latest trial proceedings against Da’oud Alzuhur progressed inside the International Criminal Court. Seated in the defendant’s chair next to his lawyer, the Syrian torturer looked old and frail despite only being in his early sixties. To Summerfield, he also looked unimpressive, but as she had learned too often during her career as a CIA officer, first impressions were often entirely deceptive.

The Australian prosecuting lawyer, Phoebe Maio, in her crisp court robes and smart modern haircut, pressed her dark-rimmed glasses back up the bridge of her nose and continued with her soliloquy addressed to the presiding judges. “As you will note, Your Honours, exhibits 219A, 220A, and 224D, and a dozen more that we are preparing to submit to the court in the coming days, provide additional irrefutable evidence that the defendant transferred funds from his torture victims’ bank accounts into his own numbered account held with Broek & Trausch. You will note that the dates line up exactly with the alleged date ranges the individual victims were subjected to the defendant’s interrogation sessions.”

When this comment brought an interested and raised eyebrow from the lead judge, Zang leaned back in her visitor chair and crossed her arms and legs at the same time. “We’ve got him.”

Summerfield smiled with her, pleased that they could share this moment of victory together. “I’d say we have, Zang.”

“I don’t know how Pierce got the evidence into session, but good on him.”

Summerfield looked at her wristwatch and yawned. It wasn’t particularly late in the day here in Europe, but jet lag was catching up with her, and she still didn’t feel fully recuperated even a week after their mission had officially concluded. Iceland and Canary Islands had been an ordeal, and she was glad to be back operating in a semi-normal state of affairs again. “I’m not sure I can watch much more. Shall we grab a coffee and a bite to eat?”

They exited and found a café, where they each ordered ham, cheese and tomato sandwiches and strong coffees. Then they both sat in silence for a while, sipping their beverages and nibbling at their food. Summerfield knew why their moods were sombre, for this was likely the last time they would ever work together with the changes announced to their team. Henry Booker had got his way, and their team was splitting up.

To lighten the mood, Summerfield said, “I hear Nayef and Samaan are recovering well.”

Zang nodded while she grimaced. “I also heard their bodies are covered in hundreds of tiny acid wounds. They’ll both be scarred for life and need multiple skin grafts for years to come.”

Summerfield held up her hand to show her missing little finger, lost while she had been subjected to horrific tortures of her own. “But they survived, like I did. And they will recover, like I did. And they succeeded in keeping Da’oud Alzuhur in prison for the rest of his life. They are heroes.”

“Yeah, I guess that counts for a lot.” Zang leaned forward so she was closer to Summerfield. “Tell me again, how did you work out what the Russians were up to?”

Summerfield shrugged. Her deductions towards the Russians’ intentions, which had been correct, hadn’t been that difficult to come by when enough pieces of the puzzle had been revealed to her. “You do know, since the Russians’ invasion of Ukraine, the west froze all of Russia’s international monetary assets and stopped buying Russian oil and gas to decimate their monetary funds further? This was an attempt to destroy the Russians’ economy and halt their military capabilities and conquests.”

“Of course.”

“Well, in a roundabout way, the west has still been buying Russian oil for years, sourced from refineries in India, Türkiye and China, that buy Russian oil and refine it and then sell it to us. The equivalent to 530 million barrels per year. That’s the equivalent to forty billion US dollars in revenue. The European Union was about to vote on whether these third-party oil sources needed sanctioning too.”

“Ah!” said Zang, nodding, then taking a sip of her black coffee. “Now it makes sense. Those eighteen accounts were for members of the European Parliament who were voting on the sanction, right? They were being paid off?”

Summerfield smirked. “Exactly. But when they were each informed that the CIA knew about the accounts and what it was paying them off to vote for, and who was funding it, none of the money was touched, and the Parliament voted in the majority for imposing the sanctions.”

Zang finished her coffee. “Well then, something good came out of all of this after all.”

“Yes, it did. Or… what do you mean?” asked Summerfield. She had noticed that Zang was not like other women she knew, more closed off and not that expressive of her emotions except when some aspect of her life frustrated her, in which case she was often vocally negative in her attitude. And Zang was very frustrated and negative in this moment they shared together now. “The Russians’ unlawful invasion of Ukraine might still rage on, Zang, but we made it harder for them. That has to count for something.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry, Summerfield. You are right. I’m just angry that our team is being broken up, and that Ibrahim is out of a job. Or soon will be.”

Summerfield nodded. “Yeah, it’s very sad.”

They sat in silence for several more minutes before Zang asked, “What will you do now?”

“I’ve been told I still have a job at Langley, back on the North Africa desk. But my clearance for overseas work has been rescinded for the foreseeable future. And I’ve been demoted on my pay grade too.”

“I guess that counts for something, that you are still employed.”

“What about you?”

Zang shrugged. “I’m back in Ground Branch, but as an instructor. Again, prohibited from fieldwork, like you… For the foreseeable future.”

Summerfield grimaced. She had agreed to come back to the CIA only because she could work with her peers again and, dare she say it, her friends. But that opportunity had now been cut off from her as soon as it had begun. In the last two weeks, she found she had admired Zang and Pierce more than she had before, and had grown to respect Ibrahim, Parab and Knight too. She felt that they really had an unbreakable synergy going on between them all, but the unbreakable had sadly been broken, and this was the end.

Summerfield finished her coffee. “It’s just shit, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is,” said Zang as she examined the crowd. “And that assassin, the so-called Rubicon asshole, got away. That’s shit too, because I can’t go after him.”

“I hear you are the only individual we know of anywhere who got a good look at him. And the seventh floor are not even using that?”

Zang shrugged. “Yeah, they’re not. But if I go after him, I’d have to go off the reservation to do so, Pierce style. But… I’m not like him. Don’t ever want to be.”

Summerfield thought of Pierce, her friend, and realised how she missed him. She hadn’t seen him since he’d disappeared and then returned from Syria, and he’d made no effort to reach out to her in the last week since his return despite this being something he would have normally done by now.

“Speaking of Pierce, where is he? And what are the CIA’s plans for him?”

Zang snorted out a laugh. “That’s a very good question, isn’t it? One I find myself asking a lot.”

63

Huntington, New York, United States of America

Abdul Ibrahim sat outside the white gabled church in his sedan, reading the Washington Post, while he waited for the congregation inside to end. The front headlines of his broadsheet reported how the European Union had voted to increase sanctions on Russia, while a second article discussed the deteriorating coup situation in Syria, with the Middle Eastern country’s former president now in Russia and his country in the hands of the ITS, and an uncertain future. There was also the war in Ukraine, and that didn’t seem to be going well for the heroes of that conflict, the underdog Ukrainians themselves.

All of the news held many parallels to Abdul Ibrahim’s own upturned life.

When the congregation finally exited the church, Henry Booker was one of the last to step out, with his wife on his arm, and his gathering of adult children about him, their respective husbands and wives, and his young grandchildren all dressed up in their best suits and dresses for a Sunday gathering of worship. Booker was all smiles and charm until he spotted Ibrahim now standing at the main gate to the church, waiting for him. They both wore tailored suits, because that was one of their shared modus operandi, to dress both smartly and aggressively, ready for any situation.

Snarling, Booker approached. “Jesus Christ, Ibrahim, what are you doing here? This is my private life.”

Ibrahim projected his practised cool and calm exterior, even though he was raging inside. “Did they teach you in Sunday school, Booker, that the Muslims, Jews and Christians all worship the same god?”

“Don’t get smart with me.”

Ibrahim nodded as he casually adjusted his cufflinks. “I’ll tell you what, I won’t if you won’t either.”

“Why are you here? Rudely disturbing my family and desecrating my values.”

Ibrahim smirked at Booker’s inflated sense of self privilege and resisted his urge to bring up common allegations that Booker had a weakness for young women prostitutes who were barely of adult age. “You should join me in my mosque one day. You might find it more enlightening and uplifting than you might imagine.”

Booker snarled. “You’re out. Or soon will be. We will never speak again.”

“Yeah?” Ibrahim raised a questioning eyebrow. “Haven’t you figured it out yet, Booker, that I’ve discovered your dirty secret?”

For the briefest moment the DDA/CIA looked terrified.

Then just as quickly he switched to his default mode of anger and aggression. “Go on, try to impress me.”

“You already know what I’m about to tell you. The secret in the Broek & Trausch data you and your lacky Hawley worked so hard to suppress.”

“Oh, that one.” Booker seemed to lose much of his fury in that moment. “What is it, Ibrahim, that you think you have?”

“Shall we walk and talk?”

Booker nodded, and they stepped onto the quiet residential streets. Huntington, on the Long Island Sound northern side of Rhode Island, was populated with immaculate hedged gardens and old-style wooden and brick two-storey mansions. This was Booker’s home turf, and it stank of old money and power, just like the DDA/CIA did. But Ibrahim wasn’t about to let this home-turf advantage rattle him, for he knew how to blend in with Booker’s type, and he did it so well Booker’s kind almost never recognised that Ibrahim had long been a sneaky imposter in their world.

When they were beyond earshot of any potential listeners, Ibrahim said, “I’ve seen the full set of the Broek & Trausch Luxembourg Papers. I found what you didn’t want me to find. And when I tell you what it is, you’re going to reinstate me as head of the special operations group.”

Booker laughed out loud. “You fucked up the security of the CIA’s European safe house locations. Heads have to roll for that. Specifically, yours.”

“I have all the documentation showing multiple transfers of money back and forth between you and Da’oud Alzuhur.”

Booker suddenly stopped in his tracks as this news rattled him; then he set off again as if this revelation didn’t matter, even though it clearly did. But it didn’t seem to rattle him as much as his first moment of weakness had.

“It’s been going on for years, Booker. Alzuhur was paying you off. I don’t really know why, but this all stinks of selling secrets to the enemy. Specifically, to the Mukhabarat. You’re a traitor, Booker. I have the evidence to bring you down, proving that you were greedily lining your own pockets. I reckon I can even prove it was you who tipped off Butros Jerash and the Mukhabarat on where to find all the copies of the stolen Luxembourg Papers when it reached the four journalists, and you got the Syrians messed up in all this in the first place. Like me and Pierce, they were doing your dirty work to shut it all down. I’d even go as far as saying it was you who provided the Syrians with their small arms while they were in Iceland, illegally secured from our weapon stores at our base at Keflavik Airport.”

Booker kept walking for a moment, and for a few seconds, Ibrahim was convinced he had the deputy director of analysis right where he wanted him.

Then Booker roared with laughter. “You’re here to blackmail me?”

Ibrahim shrugged. “It’s how we’re trained, as intelligence operatives, to apply pressure wherever we need to, to get the job done.”

Booker kept laughing as he shook his head. “You’ve got it all wrong, Ibrahim. Completely wrong.”

Now Ibrahim felt uncertain, but he kept his face like a mask to obscure his many conflicting emotions.

“Don’t you get it, you fool? Da’oud Alzuhur was my asset. Was for many, many years. He was why I had such great intelligence all that time I was chief of the Damascus station. And why I was later promoted to DDA/CIA, for my good work there.”

Ibrahim felt his gut turn in knots. This was not what he had expected, but now Booker had laid out his hand for Ibrahim, he saw that it all fit.

“We both know Alzuhur is a piece of skin wrapped up in shit; I won’t deny that. But he provided excellent intel. Always did, and ultimately, we could use that intel to mobilise the HTS to bring down the regime. Through multiple back doors, of course, but it was Alzuhur who made it happen.”

Ibrahim thought upon the dates of the money transfers when the cash flowed to Booker from Alzuhur and not the other way around. A period of approximately six months ago. “You got him out of Syria and into Qatar for his heart surgery.”

“Yeah, the money he sent me was to pay for all that. He was an asset, and he was supposed to ‘die’ on the operating table so he could disappear without repercussions, and no one would ever be the wiser.” Booker made quotation marks with his hands. “Then the fucking German BND snatched him and smuggled him into Europe, and from there I couldn’t do anything about him when he was hauled up inside the ICC machine.”

“Or you didn’t want to,” said Ibrahim as his mind played a rapid game of catch-up. “You had no use for Alzuhur anymore, and the CIA doesn’t really want a disgusting piece of shit like that in a witness protection program.”

“Exactly!” said Booker, sounding impressed with Ibrahim’s deductions for the first time. “It would have all just disappeared quietly if fucking Nayef and her brother hadn’t dredged it all up. I couldn’t have it all coming out in public and then have to explain my dubious relationships with a Mukhabarat asshole during some closed-door congressional hearing with my testicles on the chopping block. I don’t need those kinds of headaches in my life anymore.”

They walked further for a moment in silence. The church was far behind them now. Ibrahim felt like a fool for not seeing any of this, and he knew he had no bargaining chips left in him to secure his job back.

“I’ll tell you what, Ibrahim, we can make a deal.”

The former C/SOG frowned. “What kind of deal?”

“I might not like you, but I know you’re good at what you do. I’ll tell you what, you keep those full sets of the Luxembourg Papers I know you have squirrelled away that are secret and inaccessible to anyone, and in return I’ll reinstate you with the CIA. How does that sound?”

“But not as head of the special operations group, I take it?”

Booker laughed out loud again. “No, can’t go that far. You need to take the fall for this, like I said, with the European safe houses fiasco. Perhaps you could be head of station again, but this time in Port Morsby or Malabo. You know where those cities are, I take it?”

Ibrahim did indeed know these facts. “Papua New Guinea and Equatorial Guinea, respectively. Two failed and tiny nations that mean nothing in the global scheme of anything. You’re burying me.”

Booker shook his head. “Not burying you, Ibrahim. Just putting your career back ten years. But I know you, too, you’ll find your way back, so it’s not all bad. A man with your cunning and resources, I give you three years tops before you’re back in the fold again. What do you say to that?”

Ibrahim didn’t answer, but he didn’t need to, because he knew this was the only choice left open to him.

Booker grinned, knowing that he had Ibrahim exactly where he wanted him, and not the other way around. “If you don’t mind, I need to get back to my very wholesome and loving family. I’ll be seeing you around, or not, Ibrahim. You look after yourself now, you hear.”

64

New York, New York, United States of America

At first light, when Mitch Hawley jogged through New York’s Central Park, he did so with earphones on, presumably with loud music playing. That made it easier for Pierce to jog behind him and remain unnoticed. For a CIA-trained operative, the desk man had terrible tradecraft.

Pierce was dressed in his jogging gear of sweatpants and a hoodie too. He’d also grown out his beard, providing an extra level of disguise, differentiating him from when they had last met in the skies above Europe. He jogged past fireflies lighting up in brief spurts because this was summer, and Central Park was full of them.

When Hawley jogged under a sandstone arched bridge, and it was only the two of them, Pierce moved in close and tripped him.

Hawley tumbled, then smacked face-first onto the pavement. A second later, he turned and abused Pierce while blood gushed from his busted nose. His wire-frame glasses had cracked in many places, and Pierce hoped it would cost him a lot of money to replace them. “Fuck you! You fucking idiot! Wait⁠—?”

Pierce had stepped closer and was now out of the shadow of the arch. “Yes, Hawley, it’s me. Your old buddy, Mark Pierce.”

“Pierce?” The CIA special advisor touched his nose, finding that it bled profusely. Then he looked down at his hands and saw the many abrasions from where he had tried to control his fall. “You just assaulted me!”

Pierce grabbed Hawley roughly by the back of his own sweater and dragged him to a park bench, where he dropped him onto it. “You can either pretend this was an accident and I’m a concerned citizen helping you, or I can start breaking your fingers.”

“You’re a fucking savage, Trigger Man.”

Pierce tensed, resisting the urge to punch Hawley in the gut to show how serious he was, or to break a finger for the same effect. Instead, he said, “Yeah, want to talk about savagery? How about when you and Booker handed Kasrin Nayef and Yakub Samaan off to the Mukhabarat? Have you seen the wounds and scars they suffered as a result? Not much gives me shivers, Hawley, but that did.”

Hawley seemed to deflate and lost some of his fight. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

Pierce sat on the bench next to his opponent and huddled in close, intimidatingly. “Yeah, like I don’t know what you’re talking about when you tripped back there.”

“But you fucking tripped — ouch!”

Pierce had just squeezed a nerve nodule in Hawley’s upper arm, sending a sharp signal of pain through his body. As a young couple jogged past, Pierce said kindly, “Just sit for a moment, buddy. That was a bad fall you had.” The couple gave them a look, but kept jogging, and Pierce knew they were in the clear, but he kept his grip firm on the same spot on Hawley’s arm, ready to squeeze again.

“Are you just going to keep beating me up?”

“Yes. Until you sit quietly and listen to my offer.”

“What offer? You’ll be out of the CIA soon. You and Ibrahim. You’ve got nothing left to offer.”

“Don’t be so sure about that.”

“You’re an asshole, Pierce. I bet I’m not the first person to tell you that.”

Taking in a deep breath, Pierce sat quietly for a moment, then said, “You are so impulsive, Hawley. You have no self-control, like a child. Instead of reacting emotionally, you should be listening to me very carefully. Because what I’m about to show you, and how you react to it, will determine the fate of both our careers. But if I go down, you go down with me, and you’ll be the one cushioning my fall when we both hit rock bottom.”

Hawley squirmed and was preparing to argue again until Pierce applied the minutest pressure on the same nerve nodule, and he froze. “Okay! Okay! I’m listening.”

“Good. When I was in Syria, I had a brief conversation with Butros Jerash. You do know who I’m talking about here, right?”

Sweating now, with the blood on his nose starting to congeal, Hawley nodded.

“Give me your cell phone.”

“No!”

Pierce squeezed again, and predictably, Hawley squirmed as his pain levels rose.

“Okay. Fuck! Stop! It’s in my flip belt.”

Pierce looked down at Hawley’s waist, where he wore a stretch-fabric belt that zipped up and held his cell phone inside. Pierce took it out and opened the keypad screen. “What’s your passcode?”

“I’m not telling you that!”

Checking they were alone, this time Pierce punched him in the gut.

Hawley doubled over and cried out in pain.

“It’s okay, buddy,” said Pierce as another couple walked past them. “Give yourself a moment. That was a nasty trip you had.” When the second couple moved on, Pierce lost all sympathy in his voice and said, “Shall we try that again?”

“Six nine. Nine nine. Five two.”

Shaking his head, Pierce unlocked the cell phone. He quickly checked to see it was registered to Hawley. Then he checked the call history during the date ranges he suspected Hawley had been in Copenhagen. “Ah, this is interesting. These many and lengthy calls are to Butros Jerash’s cell phone. You should have used a burner, Hawley, you fucking idiot.”

“You don’t know that about that number.”

Pierce grinned. “I do, actually. You see, the so-called Doctor Acid kindly gifted me his cell phone while I was visiting Syria. I’m going to hang on to your device, Hawley, like I’m hanging on to his, because that’s enough evidence to link you to Syria’s former Mukhabarat. That’s enough for me to kick-start an investigation to determine whether you were acting treasonously or not.”

Hawley snarled. “You have no fucking idea how deep a hole you are digging for yourself, Trigger Man. Jerash and Alzuhur were both turned assets. They worked for Booker, for years, providing excellent intel on the Syrian regime.”

Pierce nodded, for Abdul Ibrahim had told him this yesterday after his boss’s meeting with Booker on Rhode Island, but there was more that Pierce knew that the C/SOC did not. “Let me show you something else.” He pocketed Hawley’s device and took out his recently acquired burner, and opened the photo and video file app. He hit play on a video of Alzuhur and Booker wandering through what appeared to be a row of poorly lit cells inside a prison, presumably surreptitiously filmed by Jerash should he himself need it for future leverage. Each cell they passed, Alzuhur shone a light into it, each time illuminating a young woman wearing little or no clothing, terrified out of her mind, and in places scarred with what appeared to be acid burns. Pierce played the video for a minute, then stopped it because he was too disgusted, then pocketed the phone. “I don’t believe you speak Arabic, Hawley, but I do. Alzuhur there is offering up each woman to Booker. And Booker is saying words to the effect that he approves of some of them, but he hasn’t made up his mind which ones he wants to bed. That’s fucking sick, don’t you think? Imagine what Booker’s wife and children and grandchildren would feel and say if they saw this?”

Hawley paled and couldn’t speak.

“You had no idea how sick and twisted your boss is, did you?”

Again, Hawley was stunned and shocked.

“I thought about just killing both of you. I could have, in a way where your bodies would never be found. You are both such sick assholes, you deserve it.”

Then Hawley was puking.

“Buddy,” said Pierce as a group of tourists now wandered past, “I’ll get you to a hospital if you want. But I don’t think your fall was that bad.”

When the group moved on, tears were gushing from Hawley’s eyes. “Please. I don’t want to die.”

Pierce grinned. “Good, we are negotiating now.”

“What…? What is the deal?”

“It’s simple,” said Pierce. “You go to Booker today and tell him what you just saw. I know he’s here with you in New York, for that Five Eyes conference that is one of the worst-kept secrets in the intelligence community, so don’t lie to me that you can’t reach him. Tell him that if Ibrahim isn’t reinstated as chief of the special operations group, and if me and my team aren’t back working for him again by the end of the day, this goes viral, and the contents of Jerash’s and your cell phones go direct to the Justice Department.”

Hawley had marginally recovered from his earlier shock, but he still had tears running down the side of his face, and his words came out as near unintelligible. “That’s… all?”

“For now,” said Pierce. He patted his nemesis on the shoulder and stood. “You have a nice day now.”

And then Pierce was off, jogging on his own through the dappled morning light of Central Park during a near perfect summer day.

65

Washington, DC, United States of America

Five days later, it was late into the evening when Pierce arrived at the wine bar on Fourteenth and S Streets in America’s capital. He looked at his hands and noticed the shakes infliction he had suffered through during many past missions was gone now, and it got him wondering. He was part of a team now, and that made him feel a little bit protected, and a little bit like he had friends again in the world, other than Mackenzie Summerfield, who had always been there for him even when they were apart. He had often wondered if his shakes were neurological or psychological, and now he was convinced it was the latter. They were gone because his world had changed, for the better.

That brought a private smile to his face.

He was about to step inside the bar and join the team for drinks, but spotted Abdul Ibrahim standing in the corner. His boss had just stepped out of the shadows to ensure Pierce saw him, so Pierce approached. They both wore three-quarter coats because the weather was turning from summer into fall, and the heat would soon leave the northern hemisphere for another six months.

“What did you do? Five days ago, in New York?” Ibrahim asked, a mild annoyance in his tone.

Pierce shrugged. “Don’t know what you are talking about?”

“Booker went missing two days ago.”

“I didn’t know.”

Ibrahim turned away for a moment, then snapped his head back and caught Pierce’s stare. “Park rangers found Booker’s body this morning. In his car parked deep inside a Virginia forest with a hose hooked up to his exhaust pipe. Carbon monoxide killed him, and he had a shitload of barbiturates in his bloodstream.”

Pierce nodded. “Good.”

“You wouldn’t have had anything to do with that? Or have any knowledge as to why it just happened to happen after he reinstated our old jobs?”

Pierce shook his head. “I really don’t know what you are talking about, sir. But I have no sympathy for him. Not after what he did to Nayef and Samaan. Perhaps his conscience finally caught up with him, and the guilt of what he did was too much.”

Ibrahim stared at Pierce for a long moment, and neither of them blinked. “If I remember correctly, Trigger Man, back in Iceland, you insisted there had to be honesty between us if we’re going to work together.”

Pierce laughed. “That’s not what I said, sir. I said there has to be trust. That’s different to honesty. I don’t care if you lie to me, or if I lie to you. But there has to be trust that the actions we take are for the good of the team and each other.”

Ibrahim paused, then nodded. “I can live with that.”

“Good.” Pierce reached out and shook his boss’s hand. “Shall we go celebrate with the team?”

Ibrahim nodded, then touched Pierce on the shoulder, halting him. “I have one more question to ask.”

Pierce grinned. “You want to know if I have a full copy of the Broek & Trausch data squirrelled away for safekeeping, just like you do?”

Ibrahim looked ready to answer Pierce, then changed his mind and merely nodded.

“I wouldn’t worry, sir. Like the COVID-19 virus, Pandora’s box or a badly kept secret, once it’s out there in the world, it’s out there forever. I’m convinced the full set of the Luxembourg Papers will show up again, now or in the future, and will cause us further problems in times to come. And there is nothing you and I can do about it, or ever could, in the first place.”

Ibrahim nodded again. “I agree with you. That’s why all the European safe houses are being changed, and managed by a different law firm. That’s going to cost a lot, but what do you do?”

Pierce laughed. “What we always do, bring down the bad guys whenever they get cocky.” He pointed to the bar. “Shall we? I need a drink.”

Together they entered the modern wine bar, with its rustic yet modern décor and framed modern art pieces on the walls, calling itself “Back to the Cat”. The bar was crowded with Friday night office types celebrating the end of the workweek, but Summerfield had managed to reserve a table as promised, and seated there with her were Akash Parab and Patricia Knight. Between them they had several bottles of red wine already open on the table and were drinking generously from their full glasses.

When Pierce approached, Summerfield stood and came up to him to give him a huge hug. “Good to see you, Mark.”

He returned the hug with as much affection. “You too, Mackenzie.” He stood back to get a better look at her. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so…?”

“Vibrant?” said Knight from her corner of the table, raising a wine glass.

“Yes,” said Pierce. “That was the word I was looking for.”

Pierce and Ibrahim squeezed into seats next to the team while Parab poured Pierce a generous glass of a South Australian cabernet sauvignon. Then Parab leaned over and shook Pierce’s hand. “I ended it with my girlfriend.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Parab shook his head. “Don’t be. In fact, I think she was relieved when I did. And, weirdly, so was I.”

“Well, it’s tough breaking up, whatever the reason. But if it’s the right choice for you, that’s great.” He turned to Patricia Knight. “I need to apologise to you.”

His other boss smirked and raised an eyebrow, and Pierce could see that she was mildly tipsy. “About time. But why?”

“You saved my life in Syria. I underestimated your commitment to the job.”

She raised her glass. “That’s nice of you to say so, Pierce, and to recognise.”

He looked around and noticed that one of their team was missing. “Where is Zang?”

The expressions on both of Summerfield’s and Parab’s faces turned sad. Then Summerfield reached out and took Pierce’s hand in hers. “She doesn’t mean anything by it.”

“She doesn’t mean anything by what?”

Neither answered Pierce, but their eyes moved to the bar, to where Zang was seated next to a handsome man in a smart suit, sharing a drink with her. Pierce looked at them for a moment and knew instantly that the man was making moves on her, and Zang’s body language said that she was interested. She was keying his number into her cell phone.

And then Pierce realised he didn’t care.

He turned back to the group and shrugged. Finally, he recognised that he had moved on rather than just hoping that he had. “Good luck to her.”

Parab was wide-eyed. “You’re not upset?”

“No!” said Pierce, realising the truth of it. “I’m happy for her.”

Knight raised her glass again. “Well, we’re reinstated as a team. Isn’t that what we’re here for? To celebrate that? And forget everything else that is shit in this world for one night?”

Pierce was about to raise his glass when Zang came over and touched him on the shoulder. He stood, and she hugged him tight. “It’s good to have you back, Mark.”

“Thank you, Rachel. It’s good to see you too, but don’t you want to get back to your date?”

She looked over at the guy she’d been talking to, who was now back chatting with his office pals. “He can wait another night, if I decide to follow up. This is more important. What are we drinking?”

“Australian plonk!” said Pierce, using Aussie slang as he poured Zang a glass. He waited until they all raised their glasses, and they were all grinning happily, then said, “Here’s to the team. May we forever have each other’s backs!”

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Kashif Hussain, Roxy Long, Diwaker and Kenneth Karcher for early feedback on this novel. Mistakes, as always, lay solely with the author. I’d particularly like to thank Jude Teakle for sharing his first-hand experiences in Syria and the Middle East, which informed much of the detail included in this novel.

Once again, I’d like to thank everyone at Inkubator for their fantastic support and professionalism in getting this series out into the world, and those I have engaged with directly include Lizzie Bayliss, Shirley Khan, Brian Lynch, Claire Milto, Carol Mulligan-John, Garret Ryan, Stephen Ryan, Pauline Nolet and my editor Alice Latchford. I thank you all.

Other thanks go to Ian, Ann, Megan, Aron and again, as always, Bec Short, for her ongoing support and encouragement with every step I’ve taken with the Trigger Man series.

And for you, the fans, for reading, reviewing and sharing the word regarding the Trigger Man and helping to make the series the success it has become.

Mark Pierce will return. Rest assured I have plenty more of his stories to tell.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aiden Bailey is an international bestselling thriller author from Australia. Formerly an engineer, he built a career marketing multi-national technology, engineering, and construction companies. His various roles have included corporate communications with the Australian Submarine Corporation, technical writing for several defence contractors, engineering on an outback petroleum pipeline, a magazine editor and art director, and engineering proposal writer for the Royal Australian Air Force’s surveillance and intelligence gathering aircraft and drone enabling works. Aiden has travelled widely in six continents and his experiences are the basis of many of his stories.

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Blunt Force