Gray Vengeance (31 page)

He didn’t have to wait long for the answer.

‘Do whatever you feel necessary, James.’

‘Understood. Tell me exactly what capabilities this system of yours has.’

‘We can track the phone’s location via GPS, download the contents and activate and view the camera.’

‘Just what I need,’ Farrar said. ‘How do I access it?’

‘That’s out of the question.’

‘If I’m to find Thompson and Harvey, I’ll need real-time information. By the time they report to you and you find the time to contact me, Harvey could be ten yards away and I wouldn’t know it. I needn’t remind you what happens if I’m not able to intercept them and put a stop to their plan.’

Again the phone went quiet, but Farrar knew Harper had no option but to comply with his demands.

‘Okay,’ the home secretary eventually said, ‘I’ll get the NSA to create a new account, but you’ll only have access for the next twelve hours, and it’ll be heavily monitored. Deviate from the current mission in any way and you lose access immediately.’

‘Understood,’ Farrar said. ‘Do you know how many are coming? You mentioned Harvey and Thompson, but are they alone?’

‘I checked with Five and Harvey’s colleague, Hamad Farsi, is also on leave. You’ll have to assume he’s with them.’

‘Okay. Send me the login details as soon as you can.’

He cut the connection and looked over at Joel. ‘We’re moving. Send West in here and then start packing.’

‘Where do we start?’ Gray asked.

Thompson was sitting on the bed in Gray’s hotel room, while the rest stood around her.

‘How about Sarah here tells us what brought her to Havana,’ Harvey suggested.

‘I was following you, of course. I know you’re planning an assault on Farrar’s house.’

‘Yes, we saw that,’ Farsi said. ‘We intercepted the message meant for your great-aunt.’

Thompson barely flinched. ‘How could you possibly have got that? I was using a clean phone. Unless . . . .’

‘ . . . unless we had access to Brigandicuum,’ Harvey finished for her. ‘Yes, we do.’

‘How? Your access was shut down.’

‘It seems the NSA were so busy worrying about every other computer on the planet that they forgot to secure their own. Let’s just say we found a way in.’

‘What’s important,’ said Farsi, ‘is that we know you’re working with Juliet Harper to keep Farrar’s location a secret.’

‘I’m doing no such thing!’

Farsi opened the laptop and turned it towards her. ‘Then explain this message.’

‘I came here because I thought
you
were helping Farrar,’ she said. ‘Harper told me that you were suspected of helping him to escape, which was why you’d done such a miserable job of finding him for six months. When I followed you to his house last night, I thought it strange that you didn’t just knock on the door, and when I saw you dump your bag of weapons in the woods this morning, I realised things weren’t as they seemed. I wrote that message with the intention of coming here to talk. If I was wrong about you and anything happened to me, it would have gone to Harper after three hours.’

Harvey looked over to Gray. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think bringing that phone in here was a big mistake,’ he said to Thompson. ‘If we killed you, we’d be checking your phone, right?’

Harvey sighed and shook his head. ‘That’s not what I mean.’ He paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts. ‘Okay, Sarah, let’s say I believe you. Why did you hamper my search efforts? I told you months ago that we had a lead in North Africa, but you denied me any assets to check it out.’

‘That wasn’t me—it was Harper. All requests for resources had to go through her, and she obviously knew that you were too close to finding him. She granted my requests for searches in South America and East Asia, probably because she knew Farrar wasn’t there. Kept me busy and on what I thought was the right track.’ She shrugged. ‘Clearly, she played us both.’

Harvey stared at her for a moment, trying again to decide if she could be trusted. ‘What about Bicknell Security? You told me you’d spoken to Michael West’s client, but you couldn’t have, because they never existed.’

‘I only repeated what my operative told me,’ Thompson said. ‘I had someone call Harcourt and that was the answer he was given.’

It was just possible that she was telling the truth.
Someone
could have been manning a phone. One of Harper’s people,
perhaps
, or even Farrar’s. Efram?

Suddenly Farsi’s laptop beeped. He hit a couple of keys, then turned up the volume.

‘A call was just downloaded from Farrar’s phone,’ he said.

The message began playing, and nobody dared to speak as the conversation between the home secretary and Farrar filled the room.

‘So much for blood being thicker than water,’ Gray said, when the call ended. He looked at Thompson, whose face had turned ashen.

‘I can’t believe she’d do that,’ Thompson murmured.

‘I can,’ Harvey said. He sat down next to her and put an arm around her shoulder, then looked up at Gray. ‘We need a plan. Over to you.’

‘Well, they know we’re coming,’ Gray said, ‘but they don’t know that
we
know. There’s our advantage.’

‘You still want to go in?’ Harvey asked.

‘If we don’t, we tip our hand. Advantage lost. Hamad, see if you can trace the numbers Farrar’s called with that phone. One of them could be his security detail.’

Farsi started typing away, and in a couple of minutes he had a tight web showing on the screen.

‘All of these records are a couple of weeks old,’ he said. ‘There’s no recent activity.’

‘That’s to be expected. They’ll be using proper comm units while they’re on duty, not phones, but as long as they’re carrying them, it makes our job easier.’

‘Easier, maybe,’ Harvey said, ‘but a full-on assault is s
till risky.’

‘That’s not what I was thinking,’ Gray told the group. ‘I say we lure his forces into a trap and take them out.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ Sonny said, looking down at Thompson. ‘All we need is some bait.’

Chapter 41

21 December 2014

‘I’ve got tickets booked on the first flight to Grand Cayman
tomorrow
afternoon,’ Joel Haskins said, as he continued to pile clothes into his suitcase.

‘You couldn’t get anything this evening?’

‘Everything’s booked solid. Well, there was a flight to Moscow, but I didn’t think you’d want to go there.’

‘Damn right I don’t. What time tomorrow?’

‘Three twenty-five. Once I’ve finished packing I’ll plan our onward travel.’

Michael West burst into the bedroom. The big soldier ignored Farrar’s glare and addressed the pair matter-of-factly. ‘Your system’s online and we’ve got movement on the woman’s phone. It left the hotel twenty minutes ago.’

‘Heading here, I assume.’

West nodded. ‘ETA fifteen minutes. My men are in position.’

Farrar looked at his watch and saw that it was barely seven in the evening. ‘You don’t find it unusual that they’d turn up befo
re dark?’

‘Not particularly,’ West shrugged. ‘I expect them to stop about a kilometre away and walk the rest of the way. They’re probably planning to set up close to the house and wait until the early hours before attacking. Once they dig in, we’ll surround them and take them out.’

‘Let’s hope you’re right. I want you to leave two men here, though, just in case.’

‘That’s not necessary. We’re talking about three people, one of whom’s a woman. They’re not likely to get past us.’

‘Then you won’t need eight men to deal with them,’ Farrar smiled. ‘Humour me.’

West tried to hide his frustration, but Farrar could see he didn’t like the order. He didn’t want to have to play the ‘don’t forget who pays your wages’ card, because he knew full well that if he were to piss West off, there was a chance he’d simply leave and find another lucrative contract. Farrar paid West well above the going rate, but even a mercenary had his pride. And West was a bit of a loose cannon.

Thankfully, West nodded, got onto his comms and instructed one of the team members to pull back and protect the building. ‘I’ll be co-ordinating the mission from here anyway, so you’ve got your two. Is there anything else, or can I go and do my job now?’

Farrar let the impertinence slide. ‘If you can do it without
waking
the neighbours, that would be good. We won’t be leaving the island for another twenty hours, and the last thing we need i
s th
e local police turning up on our doorstep.’

‘That was always the plan,’ West said. He turned and marched out of the room, leaving Farrar to finish his packing.

‘They’re still holding their positions,’ Farsi said over the net. ‘Two are inside the building, two more at the rear of the house, by the beach, and the remaining four covering the approach road, one pair to the north and the other to the south.’

‘Roger that,’ Gray whispered. ‘What about Sarah?’

‘Right on schedule. She’ll be here in ten minutes.’

‘Copy. Out.’

Gray felt the damp earth soaking into his clothes, but there was nothing he could do about it now. At least no insects had decided to explore his face yet, which was always a danger when one was buried under three inches of turf.

It had taken two hours to get the three of them into position in a fifty-foot triangle around the fallen trunk where they’d stored the weapons. First, they’d marked out a plot twice the size of each man near the foot of a tree, then dug them out carefully. It had taken a lot of skill to get the grass out in one piece, and once the top cover was removed, a hole had been excavated underneath. The dirt was carried out of the area so as not to leave any tell-tale signs, and finally the men lay in the holes while their comrades gently covered them over again. Gray had been the last to be buried, so he’d had to recruit Harvey and explain what was required. He only hoped his friend had done a good job, otherwise his plan to make it home for
Christmas
was going to turn to shit pretty quickly.

Each of them had nose and ear plugs, and the NVGs covered their eyes, but there remained the chance that a beetle, or worse, might decide to investigate their mouths. It had happened to Gray before, and he’d once had to resort to eating a large centipede rather than giving his location away.

Cramp was another problem to overcome. To accommodate the night-vision goggles, the three men were forced to lie on their sides. The alternative was to leave the glasses off until they emerged, but as the purpose of the exercise was to gain the element of surprise, there simply wasn’t time to jump up from their hiding places and start fiddling with the headsets.

If Sarah were minutes out, Gray knew he’d be in the hole for another three hours at the very least. Farrar’s men would wait until dark to tackle them, he was sure of that. His main concern was that Farsi’s laptop not run out of battery by then.

‘Hamad,’ he whispered, more to stop earth flowing into his mouth than anxiety over anyone hearing him.

‘Go ahead.’

‘Watch the juice on that laptop. We can’t have it dying on us.’

‘Already in power-saving mode,’ Hamad assured him.

With that fear allayed, Gray tried to relax his mind. The plan was simple enough, and it was too late to second-guess it. Having intercepted the call from Harper to Farrar, they knew Thompson’s phone would soon be tracked, so Sarah would meet up with Harvey at the side of the road, and it was Andrew who would walk into the woods and place the phone in the clearing. After that, he would retreat and the three of them would drive Sarah’s car a mile to the east. Farsi would stay with it to provide updates, while Thompson and Harvey would walk north to the beach and lie up a few hundred yards from the house.

After that, it was simply a waiting game.

‘They’re here,’ West said over the comms. ‘Looks like they parked on Via Blanca. I’ve got movement north, through the trees.’

He received a series of double-clicks in his headset, confirming that his team had heard the broadcast. Each two-man team had a designation, and he began moving his pieces into position, like a grandmaster engaging in a deadly game of chess.

‘Alpha, move west half a click and then south towards the road. If anyone’s in the car, take them out.’

Click-click.

‘Tango, move east two hundred yards, then south three
hundred yar
ds.’

Click-click.

With the two teams that had been covering the road moving to their new positions, he was left with the pair guarding the back of the house. It was highly unlikely that Harvey would have the skill or resources for a beach assault, so he ordered them around the building and told them to lie up ten yards inside the treeline.

‘Now what?’ Farrar asked. He’d been standing behind West, looking over his shoulder.

‘We wait until they’re settled into position. They’re unlikely to strike until at least one in the morning, when they think we’re at our weakest. While they count down the minutes, we move in closer. At eleven, we take them out.’