Black List (36 page)

She was alive.

She was alive, and she was moving.

Even through the haze of painkillers and sedatives, Mitchell was vaguely aware of movement. She could feel the bounce and rattle as her hospital gurney was wheeled down a busy corridor, slowing down occasionally as it was steered past staff and patients.

She was surrounded by sounds. Ringing phones, beeping life-support machines, whirring printers and most of all the clamour of voices. Voices everywhere; so many of them merging and blending together that they became little more than a background hum, no more distinct than the drone of a thousand bumblebees.

And yet even amongst this background din she was able to discern a conversation close at hand. A conversation in English.

‘I have told you, the patient is still in a dangerous condition. She can’t be moved yet.’ A doctor’s voice, tense and agitated, filled with concern.

‘I understand, sir.’ This voice was cold, precise and clinical. To her surprise, it was a woman’s voice. ‘But she isn’t secure here, and we have our own team of doctors on standby. She’s to be extradited to the United States. As of now, you’re relieved of professional responsibility for this patient.’

With some effort she forced her heavy eyes open, seeing nothing but the hospital’s cheap, intense overhead lights sliding by. She blinked, tried to reach up and rub her eyes, only for her hand to be jerked back.

Something cold and metal was shackled around both wrists. Handcuffs.

With a fleeting sense of disappointment, she at last realized what was happening, who her mysterious new carers were. The Agency had come for her.

She’d known it would happen of course. The moment she awoke for the first time several days earlier in a clean and sterile hospital room, she had felt that same disappointment. Disappointment that the doctors had fought so hard to save a life that was doomed anyway, disappointment that she couldn’t have slipped away peacefully on her own terms. Disappointment that they would be the ones to end her life.

The trip didn’t last long. An ambulance was waiting for her in the parking lot outside. Mitchell made no effort to protest or cry out for help as she was loaded onboard. It would do no good anyway.

The doors slammed shut, and the woman who had helped load her into the ambulance took a seat. A young woman, Mitchell noted with vague surprise. Couldn’t have been more than thirty years old. Short and slender, with spiky dark hair, pale skin and a nose piercing.

Christ, I’m going to be interrogated and executed by a fucking kid, she thought.

‘If you’re going to kill me, you might as well get it over with,’ she said, straining to sit up straighter in her gurney. ‘I don’t regret anything I did.’

To her surprise, the young woman with the piercing smiled at her. There was no animosity, no hint of malice in her smile. ‘Relax, Mitchell. We’re not here to kill you.’

She frowned, a little less sure of herself now. The effort of holding herself upright was starting to tell. ‘So what do you want?’

As she watched, the ambulance’s driver twisted around in his seat, his vivid green eyes flashing in the afternoon sunlight. ‘It’s lucky for you we have a mutual friend,’ he explained. Bizarrely, he spoke with an English accent. ‘We’re here to get you out. We’ll take you to a safe place until you’re recovered enough to travel. That all right with you?’

Mitchell’s heart was beating faster now. She had resigned herself to the ignominious fate that awaited her, had made peace with it, but this sudden and unexpected change in her fortunes had shocked her into silence. More than that, it had kindled the wild, inexplicable hope that he might be telling the truth.

‘Who are you people?’ she managed to say.

‘My name’s Drake, but you can call me Ryan,’ he said, then nodded to the young woman sitting in the back. ‘And this is Keira Frost, part of my team.’

‘Team?’ The name Frost was familiar, but in her confused state she couldn’t place it.

‘Shepherd team,’ he explained, and suddenly a big piece of the puzzle fell into place. ‘You’re in good hands, Mitchell. For now, at least.’

‘And after that?’

‘Well, that’s up to you. You can run and hide, and hope none of this catches up to you.’ He shrugged. ‘Or… you can stand with us, and maybe do something about it.’

With that, he turned around and started the engine.

‘Like what?’ she asked, unable to help herself. ‘What can you do against people like that?’

She caught those intense green eyes in the rear-view mirror once more, set with a resolve that was almost frightening.

‘We’re going to war, Mitchell.’

Republished with kind permission of Century/Cornerstone Publishing.

This is how it ends.

Lying there with one hand loosely pressed against the bullet wound in his stomach, he was alone. His strength was exhausted, his reserves gone, his blood staining the dusty ground. A trail of it led a short distance away, mute testimony to the desperate, feeble crawl he had managed before his vision swam and he collapsed. He could go no further. There was nothing left to do but lie here and wait for the end.

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

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

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

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

Had she been right?

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

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

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

He was dying.

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

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

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

‘Come on! Get out of the way!’ Nassar Alawi growled, honking his horn in frustration.

His efforts did nothing to hurry along the rusty, dilapidated white saloon in front of him, its rattling exhaust spewing grey exhaust fumes as the driver revved the engine. Like Alawi, he was trying in vain to fight through the narrow streets and thronging crowds.

They were approaching one of the many open-air markets that dotted the city, and traffic was always heavy there. Ancient stone buildings festooned with satellite dishes and drying laundry leaned precariously inward as if they might collapse at any moment.

Alawi leaned back in his seat and ran his forearm across his brow. He was hot and uncomfortable, his open shirt already damp with sweat. The van’s air conditioner hadn’t worked in years, and rolling down the windows meant allowing in the relentless wind-blown sand, the fumes of other cars struggling to run on cheap gasoline, the reek of animal shit and countless other unsavoury odours.

He was a builder and electrician by trade; a source of great pride for both him and his family most of his adult life. A skilled job, a trade to be proud of. Now there was even greater demand for his services, both in Mosul and many of the surrounding towns. Everything that had been bombed and destroyed in the chaos of the invasion had to be painstakingly rebuilt.

A man like him could make a fortune in just a few years. Enough to provide for his wife and for his two young sons until they became men and followed in his footsteps, enough to live in comfort, enough to escape the grinding poverty that his peers endured.

If only he could get where he needed to be!

He honked his horn again, and at last a gap began to open up. The beaten-up white saloon started to trundle forwards, exhaust rattling. He stepped on the accelerator as well, eager to keep their momentum going.

Relieved to be on the move again, he reached for the packet of cigarettes lying on the passenger seat, tapped one out and held it to his lips as he fished his lighter out of his pocket.

Maybe today wouldn’t be so bad after all, he thought as he clicked the lighter.

The sudden flash of light up ahead was so unexpected that he didn’t even have time to react to it. The cigarette fell from his mouth as the white car in front disappeared, consumed along with everything else by an expanding wall of orange flame that rushed forward to meet him.

‘This had better be good,’ operations chief Steven Kaminsky grumbled as he strode from his office, doing his best to ignore the painful twinge in the small of his back. A compressed disc from a high-school football injury, the pain came and went, though in recent years it seemed to be coming more frequently and with greater intensity.

All things considered, today was a bad day, and judging by the urgent summons that had just come through to his desk, it wasn’t likely to get better.

With computer terminals crammed into virtually every available one of its 5,000 square feet of floor space, the Pit, as it was known, was reminiscent of NASA’s mission control centre. The comparison was an appropriate one, because in many ways it served a similar function. The computers in this room allowed their operators to control a fleet of twenty unmanned Predator drones deployed throughout the country.

The place was bustling with activity, and judging by the concerned looks and urgent tones, the news was not good.

‘Somebody talk to me!’

He was joined within moments by Pete Faulkner, the floor officer, and the man responsible for the day-to-day running of the twenty control suites in the Pit. Faulkner was only in his forties, but with his overhanging beer gut, perpetually furrowed brow and thinning grey hair, he looked at least ten years older. He was always tired, always out of breath, always sweating.

‘We’ve got a problem,’ he said, wasting no time on preliminaries.

Kaminsky made a face. ‘So I heard. What’s going on?’

Faulkner gestured over to terminal 6, where most of the anxious-looking technicians were gathered. The flatscreen monitors that should have been transmitting feeds from the Predator’s on-board cameras and instrumentation were blank, as though there was nothing going on.

‘Three minutes ago we lost contact with one of our drones over Mosul,’ he explained as they strode over. ‘Data feeds, telemetry, the works.’

Kaminsky frowned. ‘Has it been shot down?’

Faulkner shook his head. ‘It was orbiting at ten thousand feet. The only thing that could shoot it down from that altitude is a surface-to-air missile, and we had no threat warnings before we lost contact.’

‘Equipment failure?’

‘It’s possible,’ Faulkner admitted. ‘But unlikely. Unless it was a catastrophic engine failure, we’d have seen some sign before we lost the feeds. Make a hole here, gentlemen!’

The junior technicians clustered around the terminal parted like the Red Sea, giving them a clear path to a young man working over one of the few remaining monitors still up and running.

Terminal 6 and its associated drone were his responsibility. He knew he had done nothing wrong, but if something happened to the multi-million-dollar aircraft, the blame would fall on his head first.

‘Anything, Hastings?’ Kaminsky asked.

Hastings shook his head without looking up from the screen. ‘I can’t find anything wrong, sir. Engines, instrumentation, on board computers… everything was good right up until we lost contact. It’s like it just… vanished.’

‘So if it’s still in the air, it’s flying without direct control.’ Kaminsky glanced at Faulkner. ‘Contact air traffic control. Find out if it’s still airborne.’

Shit, I hope it’s not over a populated area, he thought. The drone might have been an unmanned aircraft, but it was still an aircraft with engines and on-board reserves of fuel, not to mention any munitions it might have been carrying. Plenty of things to go boom if it crashed in the middle of a town.

‘If it loses incoming control, it’ll revert to its automated flight programme,’ Faulkner assured him.

That wasn’t much comfort.

‘Maybe it’s a problem at our end?’ Kaminsky suggested. ‘The other drones are fine. If it was a problem with our uplink, we’d have lost control of everything.’

Kaminsky opened his mouth to reply, but before he could say anything, the monitors around him suddenly flickered back into life as the data feeds resumed, telemetry readings once again reporting the status of an aircraft hundreds of miles away.

Faulkner glanced at the technician. ‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing, sir. It just came back all of a sudden.’

Cursing under his breath, Kaminsky reached into his pocket and put on a pair of reading glasses, leaning closer to the screens to take a look for himself. Now in his early fifties, he needed glasses more than he cared to admit.

‘Get me a full system diagnostic, now,’ he ordered, his eyes darting across the various screens. Altitude, heading, airspeed, engine temperature, fuel pressure … All of it looked fine.

Such was his concern for the technical status of the aircraft, he almost didn’t notice the feed coming in from the downward-looking nose cameras. Designed for battlefield observation and intelligence gathering, the high-resolution digital cameras could zoom in close enough to pick out individual facial features from 10,000 feet.

Now, however, they were focused on an urban area of some kind. Characteristic of the ancient cities that dotted Iraq, it was a maze of narrow streets, walled courtyards and old sandstone buildings.

It was a scene of utter chaos.

One of the buildings had taken a direct hit, blasting out an entire wall and collapsing part of the roof. Smoke and flames billowed from the ruined structure, rescue crews and fire fighters trying to fight their way through the destruction and search for survivors. And everywhere, scattered on the streets around the building, lay the motionless forms of the dead.

‘Sir.’

Tearing his eyes away, Kaminsky looked at Hastings. The young man was pale, a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead. He looked as if he was about to be sick.

‘What is it?’

Hastings swallowed hard. ‘All three Hellfire missiles have been deployed.’

Shock and disbelief were reflected in the eyes of every person in the room. Nobody uttered a word.

With slow, deliberate care, Kaminsky removed his reading glasses and turned to his subordinate. ‘Pete, better call Langley right now.’