Armageddon Heights (a thriller) (18 page)

‘Is it, Mr Napier? Think about it. Who is the one person on your team who has managed to spot the majority of the incursions into the Heights by CSL? It was Levoir. Think that’s a coincidence? Think it’s purely down to his finely-honed skills? He knew where CSL were going to hit, so every now and again he’d let you know about it, you’d send in the Sentinels and CSL always managed to avoid them. The computers are networked. Somehow he’s been able to gain access to his team’s systems and effectively block out anything he doesn’t want them to see, and see only that which he needs them to. He’s managed to help hide most incursions, inform CSL of any developments in your system’s security and thus keep CSL always one step ahead of the game. Somehow he’s also been able to gain access to stocks of tremethelene – how exactly he achieved this we have yet to pin down, but we’re certain it’s him. He’s good, very good, both technically and being able to keep his real identity and purpose a closely guarded secret.’

‘I cannot believe…’ Napier said, the words stinging him.

‘It’s not your fault, Mr Napier. He’s good, like I say. The best of the best. If it hadn’t been for Fuller we’d have never found him out. I know you’re sceptical, but he’s worked his way up within the organisation to place himself not only within the team you perhaps trust the most, but has now managed to get himself working directly alongside you, even now being given some of the most sensitive and valuable material you’ve ever managed to get from CSL. What’s more, we’ve intercepted texts on his phone. Someone from CSL has been contacting him.

‘His phone?’ Napier said, his mind reeling.

‘Tapped, like all employees’ phones are, company or private. We’ve traced the origin of the texts sent to him – they’re certainly not from his mother in Albuquerque! Rather tellingly they originate from London. Another coincidence? He’s our man.’

‘I’ve had him checked out twice,’ said Napier. ‘He’s clean.’

‘He’s as dirty as a used piece of toilet paper,’ Mr Napier. ‘He only looks clean on the outside. CSL have been very thorough in ensuring his true identity has been so submerged we might never have discovered it if Fuller hadn’t blabbed.’

Napier sat down, drained his glass and gave a little cough as the alcohol hit the back of his throat. ‘Fuller could be wrong,’ he said feebly.

‘Fuller could be, but it all adds up,’ said Villiers, a triumphant glaze over his eyes. ‘On your behalf, I’ve seen to it that Levoir has already been called off the work he’s doing now. He might already have had the chance to simply destroy any useful data that’s on those hard drives.’

‘He said he was onto something,’ Napier said.

‘So soon? Think about it. Either he’s very, very good or he’s lying through his teeth. Of course he’ll say he’s onto something to keep you happy and throw us off CSL’s scent,’ said Villiers. ‘He can tell you anything that he wants and you’ll believe him. Send you all scampering in different directions till you’re running around like headless chickens. He’s been doing a great job of that until now.’

‘Mr Lindegaard knows all this?’

‘Some of it, Mr Napier. In truth, it was he that ordered the immediate cessation of Levoir’s work pending your decision. But to avoid causing too much suspicion he’s been sent back to the hotel where he’s staying, the cause of the shutdown supposedly an electrical fault that is potentially dangerous. But Mr Lindegaard knows very little. I told him it was best I speak with you first, as you were in charge of things. See, I’m not as bad as you paint me, Mr Napier. I did it for you.’

‘I need to meet with Mr Lindegaard, go over this…’

‘Mr Lindegaard wants Levoir removed as soon as we’ve got what we can out of him.’

‘Removed?’

‘He told me in no uncertain terms to let you know that’s what he wants. I think we both know what he means. But of course, you can confirm that with Mr Lindegaard directly, if you wish.’

‘Removed. You mean he wants the kid dead?’

‘It’s not for me to be quite so bold as to say such a thing directly, Mr Napier. But if his removal is causing you concern I can offer the services of my man Jungius, if that would be of any assistance. He has a flair for getting information out of people and disposing cleanly of irksome issues.’

Napier stiffened. ‘I’ll take care of Levoir in my own way. I guess I owe you my thanks,’ he offered begrudgingly.

‘You’re welcome,’ said Villiers, standing to his full height with his hands behind his back. ‘My pleasure.’

‘But now I’m finished with you and I don’t want to see you near me again, get it?’

‘It’s a shame I cannot be of more help, Mr Napier. I could be, if you’d let me.’

‘I can do fine without you.’

Robert Napier strode purposefully from the room, slamming the door shut on Villier’s insufferable grinning face.

He had urgent business to attend to.

It was in all the newspapers and on television.

Private John Travers had been released from captivity. He’d been held prisoner by the insurgents for the better part of two years. They’d been trying to locate his whereabouts for ages, hopeful but sporadic reports and sightings of him coming out of insurgent-held territory, only to be followed up to reveal the rumours were as substantial as smoke. In the beginning, the government got involved, as much as they could under their policy of no deals with terrorists, deriding the cowardly taking of a British soldier hostage in an operation that served no purpose other than to intensify the enmity between the opposing sides and further hindering any attempt at peacekeeping or the ultimate aim of a ceasefire and peace talks. The British ambassador beat his chest ineffectually, talked of imposing sanctions on a people crippled by decades of war, whispered of deals for the stricken soldier’s release that never appeared to fully materialise. And then, after nearly a year of talk and more talk with no sign of the captured Travers, the government sort of washed their hands of the affair, or so Samuel Wade and his regimental comrades thought.

It was as if Private John Travers had vanished from the face of the earth and everyone seemed to say, not outwardly, of course, that there was nothing could be done in the face of such grim inevitability. Some even dared to whisper that Travers might be dead, but Wade did not give up hope. If the roles had been reversed and he had been taken instead of Travers, he knew his friend would never have given up on him. But he was helpless. For a start, he was still in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces; and secondly the botched patrol and its aftermath – five British soldiers dead, including Lieutenant Solway, the man who gave the fateful orders to split up the patrol – affected Wade deeply. Okay, so he didn’t let it show, but, the loss of Travers aside, Wade’s mind was in a mess. He couldn’t sleep, he was dosed up on a variety of tablets, he lost all appetite, and he had terrifying, recurring nightmares. But most of all he was being eaten away by the highly corrosive acid that is guilt. Why had he alone out of the three of them in their part of the patrol managed to get away? Peterson was dead. Travers was almost certainly dead, having suffered heaven knows what at the hands of his captors. And yet he, Samuel Wade, was still very much alive and daily detested the fact.

Travers’ wife Deidre was worried sick. She had a young kid, a boy aged two and a bit. Wade’s wife Colleen and Deidre were close friends, so Colleen offered a shoulder to lean and cry on, but the ordeal of waiting for news of her husband took its toll on the pretty young woman. She became drastically thin, her skin sallow, her mood one of creaky forbearance. Deidre cried a lot, Colleen told Wade.

And then, unexpectedly, out of nowhere, there was a video of Travers posted by the insurgents on the internet. He was on his knees, head bowed, hands tied behind his back. When he was ordered to look up to the camera Wade could hardly recognise his friend. His head had been shaved, but his face was swollen as if he’d taken a recent beating, his eyes mere slits in puffed-up pillows of bruising, his left cheek looked to have been broken at some recent time, his skin caked with dried blood and filth. When he spoke, his words were slurred and barely intelligible, saliva dribbling from the corner of his puffy lips. He gave his name, rank, serial number and regiment.

It was on all the news channels and Travers’ battered face featured in all the national newspapers, along with the telling of the frenzied diplomatic activity that burst back into life to retrieve the prisoner. Initially there were threats of beheading, but this soon gave way to clandestine meetings between negotiators and leaders of the insurgency. Whatever demands were made and met, two months later Private John Travers was released from captivity, and his final, silent and almost abashed arrival in the UK plastered all over the media.

But all was not well. The man was broken. Whatever hell they put him through stayed with him. Haunted him. Wade knew only too well what that meant, as well as the fact that his own ordeal was nothing in comparison to the terrors his friend must have been put through. Travers shunned the attention of the media until they gave up and searched for the next big thing. As far as his career in the army went, he was finished. His commanding officers knew that, his psychologists and counsellors all knew it, his wife, his friends, and, most of all Samuel Wade, though he scarce wanted to admit it. Everyone except John Travers, it seemed, was able to foretell the inevitable.

Just being in his company confirmed the grim reality for Wade. Violent mood swings, aggression, tears, rage, a veritable tsunami of emotions Travers could do little to control. It was shocking to behold, and though Travers’ wife Deidre assured Wade the doctors had told her it would take time, lots of it, before her husband was ever going to be anything like his old self, even she doubted the wisdom of their clinical predictions the longer her ordeal went on. Months passed. A year. More. Travers was discharged from the military. And it became clear to all that Travers’ old self had perished on the day the insurgents hauled him from that mud-brick house in that faraway land fought over for generations.

And all for what? Why John, why us? Deidre asked these questions and more. She did well to hide her own frothing emotions, but to a close family friend like Wade she opened up just a little, so he could see the painful red sore of her hurt festering away beneath the Bandaid of her stoical exterior. It screwed him up to see her like this, to think that if he hadn’t taken his eyes off the ball for that split second his friend might never have been taken and this nightmare could have been avoided. His own counsellor told him he wasn’t to blame. It was war. Things like that happen at such times. He needed to stop beating himself up over it.

But Wade couldn’t, and he drank himself into oblivion, put his own army career in jeopardy with his increasingly erratic behaviour fuelled by anger and guilt. Finally he was discharged, honourably at least, but that didn’t stop the downward spiral. He discovered later that Travers and Deidre split up, and though Wade tried to be supportive to both parties, Travers wanted nothing to do with his one-time friend. Wade had to concede that the best thing for all of them was to never see each other again, at least for the foreseeable future, a foreseeable future that eventually stretched quietly into forever. Wade stumbled from mediocre job to mediocre job, drank way too much and found himself waking from unconsciousness and close to death in A&E without the faintest idea how he got there.

And that’s where the angels intervened. Here he met Colleen. The old cliché – a nurse, a patient, a mutual attraction, a marriage, a house and a daughter. Salvation and redemption all rolled into one. And they might have lived happily ever after, but that simply would have been too good to be true. There was one last twist of the knife to be suffered for those caught up in that doomed patrol all those years ago. One final agony to endure…

John Travers, his body still bearing the scars of his capture, his mind equally scarred and broken, but invisibly so, his career and private life in tatters, was out for revenge. He sought to take it out on Wade.

‘You ought to rest. You can’t go on punishing yourself like you are.’

Samuel Wade’s thoughts were derailed by the sound of Martin Bolan’s voice close by his shoulder, the gruelling recollections turning to a vile mush that settled like obnoxious silt inside his head awaiting the next disturbance, when it would rise up again to cloud his very being with its insidious poison.

Wade relaxed his hands on the steering wheel, aware of his fingers hurting with the pressure he’d been unconsciously applying. ‘We need to get as far as we can,’ he said.

‘Then let me drive, or hand the wheel over to someone else.’

‘I can’t. I need to make sure we get out of here…’ Wade said.

The road ahead was still dark, the headlights struggling to penetrate the sheet-like blackness of the desert night.

‘Sure, you’re on a mission, I get that,’ said Bolan, ‘but you’re so tired you’re liable to land us in a ditch or something. You didn’t eat anything either. You have to rest and eat. It’s what you keep telling us.’

‘You’ve seen how many provisions we’ve got,’ Wade said. ‘The average person drinks up to two litres of water a day. We’ve got four litres of fluid, some of it water, most in the form of energy drinks, and that’s it. The food is not going to last long, if you can call it food, but at least the human body can last longer without food than without water. We need to get to somewhere where there might be water.’

‘That’s your excuse? Water?’ Bolan said quietly. ‘You’re desperate to get out of here to kill the man who killed your family. You’re driven blind by it. You said yourself that we might bust the axles on this terrain if we’re not careful, and yet you’re risking it. You’re putting all our lives in jeopardy, especially now you’re tired.’ Then he raised an eyebrow. ‘Wait, I get it. You daren’t fall asleep, right? You think I’m going to pounce on you or something, or we’ll all overpower you. Is that it?’

‘They don’t exactly trust me now, do they?’ Wade pointed out. He glanced briefly over his shoulder. People weren’t sleeping. Their faces were white as sheets and bearing worried expressions. They hadn’t taken their eyes off Wade since they found out who he really was.

‘Sure they’re scared, but I figure they’re more scared of what’s out there than of you. Well I ain’t about to jump on you when you least expect it. We need each other to get out of this mess. And I say you have to let me take over the driving at least, or you pull over for a while and grab some shuteye.’

‘Maybe,’ said Wade with a non-committal flick of his head. ‘The fuel is running low. Another half day’s worth, I’d say.’

‘That’s bad,’ said Bolan.

‘Get them to wrap up warm, I’m going to turn off the air conditioning again. This time for good.’

‘It’s getting pretty cold out there,’ said Bolan. ‘And how will we stay cool in the heat of the day? We’ll bake like beans in a can without the air con.’

‘Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it. We have to conserve fuel and the air con laps it up.’

Surprisingly, Wade braked and the bus came to an untidy stop, throwing Martin Bolan forward. There were murmurs of complaint from the rear of the bus where everyone else had gathered after the impromptu prayer meeting, putting a little distance between the man with the gun and themselves.

Bolan said, ‘What’s wrong? Have you seen something? Is it the creatures again?’

Wade stared through the large windscreen into the night, his eyes wide. Something stirred within his insides, a curious feeling.

‘I dunno,’ he replied. ‘It’s like I’ve just become aware of crossing over something…’

‘What kind of something?’

‘A boundary…’

He opened the bus doors and skipped from the cab. The cold air rushed inside and nipped at their exposed skin like rats of ice.

‘What boundary? You’re not making sense, Wade,’ said Bolan. ‘Look, is it safe to go out there? What the hell are you doing, man?’

Samuel Wade stepped outside and walked to the front of the bus, the biting air eating through his thin clothing almost immediately. It must be minus 20, he thought vaguely. But it wasn’t the temperature that froze him to the spot; it was the thought that he knew – just
knew
– he’d crossed an invisible line that he shouldn’t have crossed. As if he’d moved over a boundary from one place into another. And yet, as he looked about him, up front and behind, everything looked the same, no evidence of anything that should cause him to think such a thing. Desert all around. The same dry earth and ghostly scrub. But the feeling was tremendous, like a physical pain that shot through his insides, forcing him to want to turn back.

‘Wade, get back inside,’ said Bolan. ‘You’re freezing up the bus and it’s not safe.’

‘There’s food and water up ahead,’ said Wade clambering back on board and closing the door.

‘Food and water?’ said Amanda, who had come to the front of the bus. She alone out of the rest of the passengers did not seem to view Wade as a threat. ‘How do you know?’

‘Yeah, how’d you know that, Wade?’ asked Bolan. ‘What have you seen?’

He shook his head, suddenly feeling the cold and shivering, folding his arms about him. ‘I don’t know. I have this feeling…’

‘Great,’ said Hartshorn from the back. ‘The man’s got a feeling. Are we supposed to buy that? You say there’s food and water up ahead and we all have to buy it?’

‘I don’t care what you think, Hartshorn,’ Wade snapped. ‘I just know we’re headed to where we’re going to get something to eat and drink.’

‘The man’s delirious,’ offered Jack Benedict. ‘We shouldn’t trust him.’

‘Are you sure?’ Amada asked Wade.

He nodded. ‘I feel it in my bones. That’s all I can tell you. There’s something up ahead.’

‘Okay, say there is. How far up ahead?’ Bolan said.

‘I dunno. I guess we just keep driving till we find it.’

Bolan shook his head. ‘How can you be so certain? I think you need to stop, have something to eat and catch up on a little sleep. Maybe Jack’s right; maybe you are delirious because of it. I’ve heard of such cases…’

Wade ignored him and clutched the steering wheel. He hit the gas and continued to gaze unblinkingly out into the night, the curious feeling inside him getting even stronger, till it wrapped its claws tight around his guts and crushed them till it hurt.