Sacrifice (30 page)

The problem was, he wasn’t listening.

‘So could a hundred other theories,’ she reminded him. ‘For all we know, Anwari might have stolen it from the convoy himself.’

‘Then why take only one?’ he asked. ‘If he had the ability to sneak in under the noses of forty armed soldiers, he could have taken all the launchers. Or he could have wiped out the convoy and taken everything in it. And who would have edited the cargo manifest?’

With no answer to that, she fell silent.

‘What if it was some kind of protection racket?’ Keegan suggested. ‘Maybe the Stinger was a bargaining chip.’

Drake paused, struck by the possibility. Keegan’s knowledge of the complex military and political situation in this country might have been limited, but his understanding of human nature wasn’t. He had worked with the FBI for more than a decade before joining the Agency, and knew as well as anyone the power of extortion.

‘So they give up one launcher in exchange for safe passage through enemy-held territory,’ Drake said, following through on his line of thinking. ‘When that same weapon gets used to shoot down a friendly chopper, Horizon realise the trail could lead back to them, so they’re forced to go into arse-saving mode. They erase all evidence of the missing Stinger and try to cover the whole thing up.’

‘Remember how eager they were to destroy the crash site when we got there,’ Keegan said. ‘They couldn’t blow that thing fast enough.’

They knew we were getting closer to the truth, Drake thought. Unfortunately for them, Horizon didn’t know McKnight had found a portion of the missile and used it to trace the weapon back to them.

‘Jesus,’ Frost said quietly. ‘We’ve unearthed a fucking conspiracy here.’

‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ Drake advised, trying to quell his own feelings on the matter. Much as it galled him, he owed his life to Horizon. ‘Right now, all we have are theories and conjecture. That’s not going to be enough to bring down a guy like Carpenter.’

Keegan regarded him curiously, struck by his inexplicable choice of culprits. ‘Am I missing something here, Ryan?’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked, trying to maintain a neutral tone. He realised too late that he’d said more than he’d intended.

‘You keep coming back to Carpenter. You had Keira run a profile on him right after you got back from your first meeting, like you expected her to dig up dirt on him. Now you’re talking like he’s the mastermind behind everything bad in the world.’ He leaned forward in his chair. ‘What do you know that you’re not telling us, pal?’

All eyes in the room were now on Drake. Silently he cursed his own lack of restraint, though he knew it made no difference now. He had to give them something.

‘Someone I trust warned me about him,’ he answered at last.

The next question was obvious. ‘Who might that be?’

‘It doesn’t matter now.’ He glanced away. ‘Right now we still need to work out out why they targeted Mitchell’s chopper, and more importantly what he was working on—’

‘Bullshit it doesn’t matter,’ Frost cut in. ‘If you’ve been
meeting with a source behind our back, we need to know about it. Otherwise you can count me out.’

She wasn’t going to let this go, he realised. Neither were the others, who were all looking at him expectantly. He couldn’t blame them. He would have done the same thing in their position.

He sighed, tossed his pen on the desk and looked at each of his teammates in turn. Three people who had trusted him enough to come halfway around the world in search of a man none of them had ever met. Three people willing to risk their lives by following him.

Three people who deserved more than what he’d given them.

‘It was Anya.’

‘Oh, Christ,’ Frost groaned, raising her eyes skywards.

‘Shit, Ryan. I thought she was long gone,’ Keegan said, his expression caught somewhere between shock and dismay.

McKnight, perplexed by their reactions, folded her arms and looked at Drake expectantly. ‘Who exactly is Anya?’

‘Bad news,’ Frost answered before he could. ‘We risked our lives to rescue her from a Russian jail, and the bitch almost got us all killed for our troubles. She’s a fucking nut job—’

‘That’s enough,’ Drake snapped with more heat than he’d intended.

Frost seemed ready to bite back, but one look at her team leader was enough to convince her otherwise. As fiery as she was, even she knew when to hold her tongue.

Calming himself, Drake glanced back at McKnight, trying to come up with a concise summary of the tumultuous events of the previous year. ‘She used to be an operative with the Agency until she got captured. She
ended up in a prison in Russia. We were sent in to rescue her, then it all went to shit. When it was over, she escaped and vanished.’

‘And she left you to die for your troubles,’ Frost added.

‘Since then she’s been on the run,’ Drake went on, ignoring her. ‘I never expected to see her again, but the other night she found me. She warned me about Carpenter, said he wasn’t a man to trust.’

‘How does she know him?’ McKnight asked, clearly intrigued.

‘She didn’t say,’ he admitted. ‘But if you read between the lines, I assume they worked together in covert operations. Remember that black hole in Carpenter’s service record in the late-eighties? You join the dots on this one.’

She frowned, deep in thought. ‘And there’s no chance she could have been lying to you?’

Drake paused, just for a moment, weighing up her words. He thought about Horizon, how they had saved his life yesterday. Could Anya have been wrong? Could she have misled him? Even if Carpenter himself was corrupt, the organisation he presided over might still be one of honest men.

‘No,’ he decided at last, going with his gut instinct. ‘She wouldn’t lie to me.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘She can see straight through lies,’ he explained. ‘She hates people who lie, so she won’t do it herself. It’s … dishonourable.’

‘Aw, a killer with a heart of gold,’ Frost remarked cynically. ‘Christ, Ryan, listen to yourself. You’re talking about a single unverified, undocumented source who might have a personal grudge against Carpenter. If we were journalists we couldn’t run a
fucking local newspaper article with a lead like that, and you want us to start a covert investigation?’

McKnight chewed her lip and glanced over at the whiteboard, now covered in Drake’s hastily scrawled notes. In the centre of it all was a single word:
Horizon
.

‘At the very least we need to bring this Anya in, find out what else she can tell us.’

‘Yeah, good luck with that,’ Keegan scoffed.

‘That’s not how things work with her,’ Drake said, doing his best to explain the kind of person they were dealing with. ‘You don’t
bring
her anywhere, and you don’t find her unless she wants to be found. If she decides to speak with you, she’ll find a way to make it happen. Otherwise, forget it.’

Drake had already resolved not to mention the second meeting he was due to have with Anya tonight. Even if he could somehow convince his companions to let him do it his way, he knew someone would try to follow him. Anya trusted him – that was a trust he did not intend to betray.

‘Great,’ McKnight said, throwing up her hands. ‘So what do we do now?’

Despite all the conflicting elements at play here, Drake kept coming back to the same conclusion.

‘Horizon are the key to this,’ he decided. ‘They can lead us to what Carpenter wants to hide. But we have to do it from the inside.’

‘How, exactly?’ Keegan asked.

For this at least, Drake had an idea. ‘I know a man who can help us.’

‘So let me get this straight,’ Cunningham said, glancing up from his cup of black coffee. ‘You want me to hack into my employers’ computer network, give out classified information, risk the safety of men I’ve worked with for years, my career and my life, all based on nothing more than your unproven theory?’

Getting the man to agree to meet them in a crowded coffee house in central Kabul had been easy enough. Persuading him to do what they needed was proving less so.

‘Pretty much,’ Drake replied.

At this, Cunningham actually laughed in amusement. ‘Ryan, if the CIA doesn’t pan out for you, you can always try your hand as a stand-up.’

Frost, however, was far from amused. ‘Your “employers” are a group of mercenaries who’ve been stealing weapons from the US military. You’ll pardon me if I don’t shed a tear for them.’

That was enough to wipe Cunningham’s smile away. ‘Put a lid on that kettle, mate. I don’t like the sound it’s making,’ he said, regarding the young woman with a cold glare.

‘Look, Matt, we wouldn’t ask you to do this if we didn’t have good reason,’ Drake said, jumping in before a more serious confrontation erupted.

As fair and even-handed as Cunningham had been during his days in the Regiment, he also had a temper that it was not wise to provoke. Drake had only seen him lose it a couple of times in the four years he’d known him, and that had been more than enough.

‘We’re not out to risk lives or sabotage the company,’ he went on. ‘If Horizon are genuinely innocent in this, fine. If we search their network and find nothing incriminating, so be it. But we need to be sure.’ Drake leaned in closer, looking his old friend in the eye. ‘I think you need to be sure, too.’

Cunningham said nothing for several seconds. Never an easy man to read, it was hard to tell what was going on behind those blue-grey eyes of his.

He reached out and lifted his cup of coffee to his lips, taking a slow drink. The drone of conversation in the crowded room filled the air around them, though Drake was oblivious to it.

‘If I’m caught doing this, I’m fucked,’ Cunningham said at last. ‘You know that.’

‘You won’t be. It’s a simple process, and I’m assured it’s untraceable.’

The older man chewed his lip. ‘So what’s involved?’

Drake let out a breath and glanced at Frost. ‘Keira …’

‘You need to find a logged-in machine that has hard-line access to the Horizon network,’ the young woman said, launching into her briefing with gusto. Reaching into her pocket, she laid a USB memory stick on the notched, stained table in front of her. ‘When you’re ready, plug this in, and when the prompt appears on-screen, hit enter to confirm. Wait about ten seconds for the software to download, then remove the stick and destroy it. That’s it – the program will do the rest.’

Cunningham eyed her dubiously. Like Drake, he was
no computer expert, but neither was he a fool. ‘Aye? What’ll it do, exactly?’

‘It’ll open up a back door in the Horizon firewall that only I can access,’ she explained. ‘Nobody else will be able to exploit it, and in all other respects the system will still be secure. It’s even self-deleting, so once I’m finished, it’ll erase all trace of what I’ve done. Like it never happened.’

‘Just like that, eh?’

Drake couldn’t decide if he saw respect or contempt in Cunningham’s steely gaze, though he suspected the latter.

Either way, Frost didn’t seem concerned, instead meeting his gaze with a challenging stare of her own. ‘Just like that. Think you can handle it?’

‘We’ll see, won’t we?’ he replied, reaching for the stick.

He had just closed his fingers around it when Frost reached out and gripped his wrist. ‘Remember, hard-line access only. It won’t work any other way.’

‘I know.’

‘And on-site security is your problem,’ she added. ‘So don’t do something stupid like trying to install it right in front of a surveillance camera.’

Cunningham had heard enough. Exerting his considerable strength, he yanked his wrist from her grip and pocketed the memory stick.

‘I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that last part,’ he said. Draining the remainder of his coffee, he turned to Drake. ‘I’ll text you when it’s done.’

‘Thanks, mate. I appreciate this.’ Despite his assurances of anonymity, he knew the risk his friend was taking by agreeing to this.

‘Just do one thing for me, Ryan.’

‘What’s that?’

‘No matter how this pans out, not all of us are guilty just because of who we work for.’ Unfolding a pair of sunglasses hanging from his shirt, he slipped them on. ‘Keep that in mind, aye?’

‘I will,’ Drake promised.

Saying nothing further, Cunningham turned and strode away, soon lost amidst the thronging crowds on the street outside.

‘You think he’ll do it?’ Frost asked, watching him go.

Drake took a drink of the bottled water he’d ordered. ‘He’s never let me down before. I don’t think he’ll start now.’

He glanced at his watch. It was 1:47 p.m.

In a few hours, he would have to leave his companions to make his meeting with Anya. That was one meeting he didn’t intend to miss.

‘So let’s make sure we’re clear on this. During the entire two-hundred-mile journey from Bagram to Salerno, you don’t remember anything unusual happening at all?’ McKnight asked dubiously.

On the other side of the interview table, Corporal Evan Cortez sat slumped in his chair, his burly forearms folded across his chest, his dark eyes glowering. ‘No, ma’am.’

‘No unscheduled stops? No breakdowns? No forced detours?’

‘Not that I recall.’

‘That’s hardly definitive, Corporal,’ McKnight said, trying hard to hold her impatience in check.

They had rounded up as many US Army personnel from that convoy as they could find in the time available. Four were out running other convoy routes, one was sick with dysentery and another had returned Stateside on compassionate leave, which left them with six men to interview.

And so far, none of them had been able to offer up any proof of wrongdoing on Horizon’s part. In fact, none of them seemed able to recall anything of value.

The young man shrugged, beginning to get pissed off with the endless questions that seemed to be leading nowhere. ‘I don’t know what you want me to say, ma’am.
I haul dozens of these convoys every month, and after a while they all become kinda similar, know what I mean?’

‘Okay, that’ll be all, Corporal,’ Keegan decided, having been observing the interview from one corner of the room. ‘We’re done here.’