Authors: Matthew Dunn
Spy Trade (4 page)
O
n the outskirts of the Renaissance-era city of Lucca in Tuscany, the Russian oligarch and property tycoon Viktor Gorsky smiled as he watched the sun mellow into a blood-red haze while it descended over the horizon. It was, as he’d hoped, at the time of day when his newlywed daughter was scheduled to have her first dance with her husband in front of the hundreds of guests in the grounds of his mansion.
Throughout all of yesterday and today, Gorsky had been a bag of nerves: fretting about the wisdom or otherwise of having the wedding and its aftermath celebrations alfresco; worrying that the flower displays would wilt in the heat; checking over and over again the settings on the starched white cloths that covered the dining tables within his orchard; feeling his blood pressure rise as the female wedding coordinator would break off from yelling orders at the legions of wedding staff to tell him for the tenth time in as many minutes that she was fairly certain everything was going according to plan; and phoning and rephoning vintners, caterers, the string quartet, the priest, the jazz band, the supplier of white doves that were to be launched in the air after his daughter had tied the knot, and the baker who seemed reasonably confident his cake wouldn’t melt when it was displayed.
Had his daughter gotten married a few years earlier, Gorsky’s wife would have willingly absorbed the stress of the wedding, allowing her husband to sit back and sip too many glasses of Cinzano while he watched preparations. But his wife had passed away last year. He’d had to step up to the plate and ensure his only child got the sendoff she deserved.
Now, the jazz band was playing. His daughter looked considerably more relaxed than she’d been earlier in the day, tossing her auburn hair back onto her flowing white dress as she laughed, embracing her husband, and allowing him to spin her as the guests quaffed champagne and whooped and cheered. All was good. The evening was warm but not oppressive; lanterns suspended from apple and orange trees were being lit; his twenty acres of land were as enchanting as a fairy tale, yet its lawns were manicured and its stone paths designed to perfection, a good thing since half of the guests were in high heels. People were well fed. The cake hadn’t melted. The best man’s speech had been polite. And the usually voracious appetite of the Martelli family seemed to be showing signs of restraint, given the family was not yet any drunker than the forty other clans in attendance.
The evening would be a long one, and Gorsky could now relax. He clapped his hands in time to the music as his daughter spun faster, her laugh pleasing him as much as it had when she was three years old and would run to him when he returned home after work.
“Papa, Papa!” she’d exclaim while launching her tiny body into his arms, throwing her head back and giggling with glee as if the daily moment had never happened before and was one of pure ecstasy.
Gorsky hadn’t changed since then. But his daughter was now grown-up, and here he was giving her away. He hoped she’d visit often from her new home in Umbria even though he’d told her not to worry about her papa and that she must now live her new life. He gulped his aperitif in an effort to suppress a tear.
“Mr. Gorsky,” said one of his many bodyguards as he approached his boss. “You have a telephone call. Urgent.”
Gorsky snapped, “I told you—no telephone calls yesterday or today unless they’re to do with my daughter’s wedding.”
“Urgent,” the burly guard repeated while looking a little uneasy. “It’s from one of your associates.”
Gorsky slammed his glass down on the drinks table by his side, fixed a grin on his face, and walked between tables and chairs containing relatives, acquaintances, friends of the bride and groom, businessmen and -women, and trained killers.
“Signor Gorsky,” many of them said as he passed them and shook their hands, “today you must be so proud.”
He walked into his huge and tasteful mansion, entered his study, and picked up the telephone. “Yes?” He listened to the caller for one minute, before saying, “Make sure nothing comes back to me. They’ll find out we did business together, and that’s fine. But that’s all they must know.”
B
ob Oakland had no idea whether it was day or night when the three jihadists entered the windowless chamber, removed the chain from his throat, and dragged him out of the room; its walls echoing the hysterical cries of Ramzi who remained tethered in the dead room.
Oakland’s head pounded against the stone floor, his lips were cracked and ragged, and one of his eyes was shut because of a punch. He was hauled into a smaller room. It contained a black hangman’s rope fixed on the ceiling and below it a wooden bench the size of a mortuary slab.
His captors breathed fast as they lifted Oakland onto the bench and put his head in the noose. The tallest of the Chechens was the man who’d previously dictated his terms to the president of the United States while holding Oakland on a leash and pressing a knife against his throat. He stood in front of Oakland while his colleagues kept hold of the CIA officer’s arms.
“You wish for a quick death?”
Oakland lowered his head; his brain felt like a powerful hand was squeezing it to pulp. “Do I have a choice?”
“You are”—the Chechen frowned as if trying to establish what he was going to say next—“a puppet on a string, are you not?”
That’s exactly what Oakland felt like.
“What will you say?”
Oakland frowned. “Say?”
“Final words. A dead man must have his final words.”
Bob wanted to spit in the man’s face. It would’ve served no purpose. “Please tell my wife and daughters that I’m sorry.”
The Chechen leader took a step closer to the bench and Oakland. “Go out of this world with dignity, not regret! I won’t give you a quick death unless your final words deserve it.”
Bob smiled. Better final words? He recalled his trek in the desert, a walk wholly unlike that of T. E. Lawrence in magnitude but not in spirit. At least, not according to the David Lean movie depiction of the Englishman. A line from the movie stuck in his head.
“My final sentence is as follows.” Oakland spoke the words uttered by the actor who’d played Lawrence in the film. “The truth is, I’m an ordinary man.”
“I doubt that.” The jihadist nodded at his men, who swept Oakland’s legs off the bench.
He dropped to his death, a split second left of life, with Oakland hoping his body weight would cause his neck to snap when the rope became taut. Or maybe it wouldn’t, and he’d be allowed several seconds more of life to recall other memories while his legs thrashed.
He crashed to the ground, the rope still around his neck but its length no longer fixed to anything firm.
A mock execution.
His captors laughed.
The Chechen leader stamped on Oakland’s head and held it flush against the floor. “It’s not that simple. If Arzam Saud is given to us, you’ll walk out of here alive. If the American president decides that you must die, we’ll hang you for real.”
Oakland was hauled back into the dead room and chained against the wall. Thirty feet away, in the opposite corner, Ramzi wept. “What happened, Mr. Oakland?”
Bob told him.
“Will your country agree to the jihadists’ demands?”
Bob thought it unlikely though he didn’t know. He felt the chain tighten around his throat as he leaned forward. “No matter what they say, they’re not going to give us a quick death. It will take mental strength to do this, but if we can get to our knees and lean forward, we might be able to get the chains to strangle us.”
Both men tried. And both men failed; their instincts to survive kicking in quickly and forcing their bodies to adopt an alleviating position that caused the chains to slacken. Ramzi used his bound hands to strike his forehead with frustration. Oakland just sat, blinking fast as he stared at the solitary ceiling bulb in the center of the room.
“They must rescue us,” cried out Ramzi.
Oakland shook his head. “It took us ten years to find someone as recognizable as bin Laden. How long do you think it will take them to find a Jordanian kid and a guy from Montana?”
Ramzi prodded the ground, his usual good looks and enthusiastic demeanor cast aside in favor of actions that seemed to belong to an aging ape that had strayed too far from his patch and been caught unawares by other predators or the climate. He was touching the land, willingly preparing for death.
Oakland wanted his mind to grow wings and leave his doomed body. “They say I can be free. They make no mention of you.”
“I know,” said the Arab. “I wanted a different life.”
“Me too. At least, a different ending to the life I’ve led.” Quietly, Oakland added, “We just have each other now.”
N
inety-three miles southwest of Washington, D.C., is an old redbrick mansion that had in its history been the location of a murder, a suicide, a training ground for World War II OSS agents, an institute for the insane, and a beatnik poets’ retreat until they’d been evicted from the premises after a hallucinogenic-fueled weeklong orgy of free love had culminated in the crazed poets spilling naked into the neighboring village.
The government had repossessed the home and its grounds and totally renovated the property, returning it to the sumptuous glory favored by its first owner—a nineteenth-century high-court judge who’d by day practiced law in D.C. and by night had dined on flesh whose consumption was banned. During the last few decades it had been a discreet place for senior spies to gather and discuss matters of national importance, for high-ranking defectors to be housed, debriefed, and entertained, and for security-cleared senators to be taught the ways of the secret world and how to move within it while keeping one’s mouth shut.
Today it was devoid of all such characters though it was brimming with personnel whose sole area of expertise was ensuring that people could never escape their grasp.
Patrick showed his pass to the armed guardsmen at the razor-wire perimeter, waited while they checked the inside and underside of his vehicle for bombs or anything else untoward, and drove his vehicle onward along the sweeping gravel driveway before bringing his car to a halt in front of the huge house.
Before the CIA officer could get out of the car, a young man in a suit was by the driver’s window. He tapped on the glass. “ID.”
“I’ve already shown it at the gate.”
“ID,” the official repeated with the charisma of an airport immigration officer at the end of a hectic shift.
Patrick held his passport to the window. “This do?”
“You don’t have Agency identification?”
“Nobody does,” replied Patrick, making no attempt to hide his impatience. “But you should be expecting me, plus I’m carrying the letter of introduction you needed.”
“Come with me.”
Patrick exited his car and followed the man into the house. He’d been there before, and though many things had remained the same—the oak-paneled walls, gilt-framed paintings, lavish furnishings, and other trappings of a government department that has an unaccountable budget—some things were very different. There was a body scanner in the entrance, numerous armor-clad penitentiary officers, and walls of iron bars that had been fixed in place from ceilings to floors. The people who’d taken over the building had transformed it into a high-security prison.
After Patrick emptied his pockets, removed his belt from around his suit pants, and walked through the scanner with his arms held apart, a middle-aged man appeared on the other side of the bars. “You the CIA guy?”
Patrick nodded, wishing the man hadn’t shouted out his vocation so loudly.
“Give me the letter.” The man held his hand between the bars, expectant.
“Are you in charge?” asked Patrick as he handed the man a sheet that contained the seal of the Agency and its director’s signature.
“Temporarily while my men are
temporarily
here. You wouldn’t believe what we had to do to make this property fit for our purpose. There are so many better places we could have transferred the prisoner to. God knows why we were told to come here.”
“It’s secret.” Patrick moved into a cage, its door behind him locked back into place while another was opened so he could proceed into the inner perimeter of the newly constructed fortress. “Your name?”
“Henry Kane.” The prison governor was a plump man, with receding hair and glasses that were balanced on the tip of his nose. “I was in the special wing at Guantanamo before you guys thought me and my boys might like a whiff of Virginia air. Damn inconvenience.”
“Where are you keeping him?”
“In the living room. It was the only place big enough to house our cell. We need to see him from all angles.” Kane frowned. “The prisoner wasn’t in the special wing at The Bay, because he’s just some lowlife. He’s a terrorist alright but a
nobody
terrorist. Now, we’ve moved him here, and we’re treating him like Public Enemy Number One. We’ve given him the Hannibal Lector treatment. He doesn’t deserve it.”
“It’s not who he is that matters; the reason he’s here is because of who wants him.” Patrick imagined Will Cochrane telling him he was probably only partially right on that observation. “I need to see him alone.”
Kane looked affronted. “The guards will have to stay.”
“Your guards can grab a coffee. Read the letter.”
Kane did so, his expression angry. “Jeez. You bunch of amateurs.”
“And the file in your hands. I want it.”
The file on the prisoner.
Kane threw the file at Patrick, pointed at the entrance to the living room, and walked in. Inside resembled a gentleman’s club. But the interior’s fittings had been rearranged. Rouge sofas that had many times been used by cigar-smoking men of many nationalities, talking to each other in hushed tones, sometimes sitting in silence while looking out of windows at the grounds, had been pushed to the walls. A billiards table was upended and flush against bay windows; once it had had pride of place in the center of the room. Patrick recalled playing a frame on it with a gravel-voiced senior MI6 officer who’d potted a black before dusting the tip of his cue, looking at Patrick, and proclaiming, “Double agent Gregor is slipperier than a spunked-over billiard ball.” Mahogany side tables that were usually dotted around the room so coffees or tumblers of whiskey could be rested on them were stacked in a pile. Rails supporting heavy velvet curtains now had the additional burden of surveillance cameras. Only the wall-mounted library and huge paintings depicting scenes from the War of Independence and Civil War remained in their usual place. Ordinarily, the room was eye-catching and exuded a powerful ambience of being a top secret retreat from the overt and covert worlds. Indeed, the whole mansion carried the nickname Purgatory because spies who came here thought it was a place in limbo. Today, everything paled into insignificance compared to the huge steel cage that was in middle of the room. Inside it were a bed, a table and chair, a portable latrine, a pile of books, and a dark-skinned, thin young man who would have been handsome were it not for the long, unkempt beard that made him look like a mad monk.
Arzam Saud. The ISIS terrorist jihadists wanted in exchange for Bob Oakland.
He was standing by one side of his prison, wearing an orange jumpsuit, his feet bare, his hands gripping the bars, while he watched Patrick.
Four guards were outside the cage, on each corner of the asymmetrical cubicle. Reluctantly, Kane told them to leave.
“And you,” said Patrick to the governor.
“God damn it!”
“Please. Go.”
As Kane walked out while muttering threats about making official complaints, Patrick grabbed a wooden chair and sat opposite the young ISIS member, only bars separating them. He said nothing for five minutes, just stared at the prisoner, with his legs folded and his hands clasped. “You speak English?”
“Is that a statement or a question? The intonation in your voice suggests the latter though your absence of a proper sentence construct instructs me that
I
speak better English than you do.” Saud’s accent was barely noticeable.
Patrick smiled while flicking through the file. “Schooled in England. Wealthy Bahraini parents. They allowed you to access some of their wealth. You used it in business. Then you joined ISIS.”
“I’ve lived a rich life.”
“You’re only twenty-three.”
“Then I’m doubly blessed to have so much good fortune squeezed within so few years. I must be the envy of many.” Saud sat on the floor, his legs crossed in the lotus position, his hands resting on his lap.
“You know why you’re here? Who I am? Why I’m here?”
“Three questions in rapid succession. How can you value the answers to those questions if you toss them all at once at me? Surely, you’d prefer to give me each question piecemeal in the hope of fuller and more instructive answers. Instead, you strike me as a pathetic blue-collar gambling addict who’s throwing all his dimes into different slot machines, hoping one of them will pay out.”
Patrick didn’t respond.
Saud shook his head, an expression of contempt on his face. “I’m not afforded the luxury of a television, access to the Internet and newspapers, and nor do I have friends and family visiting me and telling me what’s happening in the outside world. I’m not clairvoyant. It would be impossible for me to know why I’m here and why you’re here. But, as to who you are, I would imagine you’re CIA, NSA, or FBI.”
“Why do you think that?”
“That’s better—one question at a time.” Saud’s expression softened. “It’s a case of
interested parties
. Who’s interested in me? Of course, people who are interested in the ranks of ISIS. That would include special divisions of the United States military, but you don’t belong there.” Saud frowned. “Actually, a long time ago you might have been in the military, I’d guess.”
“You’re sure?”
Saud looked exasperated when he replied, “A guess negates certainty. But you have the deportment of a military man, and your cheap clothes have been cared for by you in the way a man who’s spent a bit of time in the military can’t break the habit of ensuring he never leaves the house without pants that are immaculately pressed. A further guess would be army, possibly infantry.” He held up his hand in case Patrick was going to interject. “But once again, it’s a guess.”
“You have an eye for detail.”
“When you spend all day in places like these, it’s easy to notice the little things.” Saud lowered his hand. “Something that isn’t a guess is a deduction about your expression. It suggests lack of conventional thinking. Blindly following orders in the army was a long time ago. Since then, you’ve been allowed to break rules. I suggest that means we can drop the possibility of the FBI. That leaves NSA or CIA. But you don’t look like a computer number cruncher to me. So, I’m betting you’re CIA.”
Patrick held his stare.
“Strange, though, that the CIA would employ an illiterate man who doesn’t know how to interrogate people.” Saud grinned, showing off immaculate white teeth.
Patrick closed the file and smoothed a hand over its cover. “You’re here because a bunch of crazies want us to release you in exchange for an American hostage. Why do you think you’re of value to them?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Nor do I, and that’s the problem.”
“Why?”
“Because if I knew why they wanted you, I could make an informed decision whether to keep you locked up or not.”
Saud’s grin remained. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help. Perhaps if you’d improved your interrogation technique, things might have been different.”
Patrick was very still when he responded, “I didn’t come here to interrogate you. I came here to
look
at you. And what I see is a dumb kid who thinks a good education has made him smart when in fact it’s just given a rich brat a few words. Mom and Dad had to give you their money so you could play at being successful. And when that didn’t work out, you thought you’d play at being a fundamentalist. Thing is, though, you sucked at that as well. Got yourself caught in Iraq. In prison. In here. Just some dumb kid who’s looking at me through bars.”
Saud’s smile vanished.
Patrick stood. “The president isn’t going to cut a deal with ISIS over some loser like you. And that means you’re going to rot in here until you die.”
To Patrick’s surprise, Arzam Saud burst out laughing.