Sacrifice (17 page)

‘You can say it, you know. It won’t kill you.’

Again he saw that disapproving look. She was tiring of this game. ‘I am an outsider now, Drake. There is only so much I can do alone. You, on the other hand, have the resources of the Agency to call on.’

It wasn’t exactly an admission of weakness, but it was as close as she was ever likely to get.

‘So what are you suggesting here? Collaboration?’

‘Cooperation,’ she replied. ‘Keep me in the loop with your investigation, especially anything concerning Carpenter.’

Drake eyed her dubiously. ‘Cooperation is a two-way street. If you want my help, you’ll have to do better than that.’

Anya said nothing. The silence stretched out, broken only by the drone of car engines outside. He wasn’t giving her anything this time – he wanted a concession.

‘All right,’ she conceded. Rising from her chair, she fished a cellphone from her pocket and tossed it to Drake. ‘Take this.’

He turned it over in his hand. It was a cheap pre-paid model with an old-fashioned LCD screen. The sort of thing that had been all the rage ten years ago.

‘You’re really spoiling me, Anya,’ he remarked with a raised eyebrow.

His attempt at humour wasn’t acknowledged. ‘It is pre-paid and anonymous, which means the Agency can’t listen in.’ She handed him a piece of paper with a number handwritten on it. ‘You can reach me on this number. Memorise it, then destroy it. And don’t use real names or keywords. Understand?’

‘I do,’ he said, already committing her number to memory.

Her precautions might have seemed excessive, but Drake knew as well as anyone the power and resources that the Agency could bring to bear. Any email, message or phone conversation featuring the words ‘
Mitchell
’, ‘
Kourash
’, ‘
missile
’ and so on would be automatically flagged up and passed on to expert analysts for further investigation. Anya wanted to stay very much off their radar.

‘Good.’ With that, she retrieved the
chadri
she had evidently cast aside on entering the building. ‘You know where Bibi Mahru Hill is?’

Drake nodded. Of course he did. It was hard to miss.

‘I will meet you there at eighteen hundred hours, two days from now. I will be by the swimming pool.’

‘I’ll be there,’ he assured her.

‘And make sure you come alone,’ she warned. ‘If you bring company or I think you have been followed, I won’t be there and you will never see me again.’

He didn’t doubt she meant what she said. That, more than anything else, served to quash any thoughts he had of going against her wishes.

On the verge of leaving, she halted in the doorway and turned around.

‘Oh, and one more thing, Drake.’

He was braced for another stern warning. ‘Yeah?’

For the briefest of moments, she allowed the armour
to slip aside. The look in her eyes softened, and he saw a faint, tentative smile.

‘It was good to see you again.’

A moment later, her face was hidden behind the fabric mask as she pulled the uncomfortable garment over her head. She was an old woman again, bent and arthritic, hobbling down the stairs on tired legs and aching joints.

He heard the door open and close down below, leaving him alone.

Unknown to either Anya or Drake, their meeting had not gone unnoticed.

Standing on the flat roof of a building on the far side of the square and armed with a pair of high-powered binoculars, Kourash watched the old woman hobble across the square, his brows drawn together in a frown.

The
chadri
made her impossible to identify. Who was this strange new arrival?

He had been keeping Drake under observation since the man had left Horizon headquarters, curious to see what he did next. His curiosity had intensified when Drake had left his vehicle and struck out alone.

Kourash had witnessed the seemingly chance encounter with the old woman, had watched the fleeting look of surprise on Drake’s face when he realised she had pressed something into his hand. Most passers-by had been oblivious to the brief exchange, but Kourash knew such tricks well.

The woman, whoever she was, appeared to be some kind of source who had made contact with Drake. After conducting their rendezvous in an old tea house at the edge of the square, they seemed to have gone their separate ways.

Picking up his encrypted cellphone, he quickly dialled
a number from memory. Two of his men were waiting in the square below.

It rang once before it was answered. The recipient said nothing, merely waited for him to speak.

‘The woman is leaving the tea house,’ Kourash began.

‘I see her.’ The voice that replied was a breathless whisper; the result of a shrapnel wound to the throat during a Soviet air strike two decades earlier. The owner of the voice was Ashraf – a lean, tough little Hazara man who Kourash had known since they were children.

A reliable man. Whatever he lacked in size and strength, he made up for in experience, ruthless aggression and the ability to think on his feet.

Standing next to him would be another man, named Faraj. Big, square-shouldered and imposing, he was the muscle to back up Ashraf’s brains. He didn’t talk much, because he didn’t have to. He was there to get things done, not to share his opinions. He followed orders without question, and certainly without remorse.

‘Your orders?’ Ashraf asked.

Kourash paused for a moment, considering his options. He could keep her under observation and see what she did, but tailing people was always problematic. They ran the risk of losing her or exposing themselves. Considering the sleight of hand she had performed earlier, he had to assume she was an operative with a certain awareness of her surroundings.

Another man from his background might have dismissed the threat she posed simply because of her gender, but Kourash was not such a man.

He had known strong women in his time, and knew they were not to be underestimated.

Mina, the woman who had followed him through the long years of war and hardship that had marked so much
of their relationship. The woman who had never been afraid to argue, to voice her own opinion, to show him when he was wrong. The woman who had once permitted him a glimpse of true happiness. She had taught him that there was strength and courage to be found even in the gentler sex.

But Mina was gone now, like everything else he had once cared about. He pushed her memory away, angry at himself for such sentimentality, and forced his thoughts back to the present situation.

He was by now all too aware of the danger posed by Drake and his team. His attempt to have the man’s two teammates killed at the crash site had resulted only in the death of one of his own operatives. True, it had at least forced Horizon to pull out and destroy what remained of the chopper, but he recognised that such an attack would have provoked suspicion as well.

He was playing a dangerous game, and on some level he sensed he was starting to lose control of certain elements. To allow this to continue would be to invite disaster. Swift, decisive action was needed now.

He was in the midst of these contemplations when loud, echoing voices began to carry across the evening air. It was the local mosques calling the faithful to
Maghrib
, the fourth Islamic prayer, offered at sunset.

Having never known true faith, he had no need of such prayers. Still, it provided just the opening he’d been looking for. The streets would be quiet soon as the population of Kabul settled down to make their offering to Allah.

‘Bring her in. Alive.’

Whatever she knew, he would get it out of her. And once he had what he needed from her, he would turn his attention to Drake.

‘It will be done,’ Ashraf promised.

The line clicked off. Pocketing the phone, Kourash raised his binoculars once more and trained them on the square below.

Ashraf and Faraj were already moving, crossing the square in the casual, unhurried manner of two men out for an evening stroll.

Without saying a word, Faraj peeled off right and headed for the van he’d parked a short distance away, while Ashraf carried on in pursuit of the woman. A sensible move. Big as he was, Faraj could attract attention, whereas Ashraf was small and inconspicuous.

The two men had worked together long enough to appreciate each other’s strengths, and use them to their fullest. Kourash was willing to bet that only the briefest of exchanges had been required for them to formulate their plan.

He smiled as he trained the binoculars on the woman hobbling away from the square, disappearing down a side street within moments.

I’ll see you soon, my friend, Kourash thought. Then we will talk.

Anya’s thoughts lingered on her encounter with Drake as she made her way down the narrow side streets of central Kabul, playing the part of the crippled old woman just as she had done twenty years earlier. The
chadri
was uncomfortable, claustrophobic and sharply limited her peripheral vision, but there were few better ways of concealing her identity.

Even in post-Taliban Kabul there were still enough women, particularly the older generation, clad in such garments to make the disguise viable.

Seeing Drake again had left her with mixed feelings, and she found her thoughts drifting inexorably back to their meeting. When they had parted ways last year, she had expressed her hope that they would never meet again, and she had meant it. Drake was a good man who she didn’t want to become entangled in the murky world she existed in.

And yet standing face to face with him, seeing the subtle changes that another year of life had brought about, had stirred long-buried memories and emotions within her. The sense of closeness, of kinship, of being connected to another human being and knowing they felt the same way.

It had been a long time since she had allowed herself to feel anything like that. Drake had made her feel it last
year during their brief, tumultuous time together, had brought her back from the cold, lonely world of pain and brutal survival that had been all she’d known since her imprisonment.

She sensed it happening again now.

Almost without realising it, she allowed her pace to quicken a little, for her back to straighten up. She was far enough away from the bazaar that no one who had been there could still see her.

A short distance behind, Ashraf was watching her intently, observing the gradual changes coming over the crippled old woman before him. The bent old back seemed to straighten out, the hunched shoulders squared, the hobbling gait became a steady, confident walk.

This was no old woman. He had suspected as much anyway, but it was always satisfying when his instincts were confirmed.

Reaching into his jacket pocket, he felt the cold steel of a Makarov pistol. He didn’t intend to shoot her, but the weapon would be useful for intimidation. And if he was lucky, he could get close and use it to land a quick, sharp blow on the back of her neck. Just hard enough to put her down, to subdue her and make her easy to bundle into the van that would be waiting just yards away.

Faraj was standing by in the vehicle less than a block away, the engine idling, his foot poised on the accelerator. That was how they always conducted such takedowns.

Ashraf glanced around. They were on a quiet residential street, virtually deserted with everyone at evening prayers. Long shadows stretched across the ground as the sun dipped below the horizon. It was a perfect place to lift their new friend.

Reaching into his other pocket, he found his cellphone. A simple text message had already been composed, the recipient’s name inputted. All that was required was his command to send it.

Now.

Human intuition is perhaps the most overlooked and least understood of all our mental faculties. Blinding in its potential and infinite in its subtlety, it is a trait born from millions of years of hard-won survival and evolution. And yet, it often has to break through a lifetime of conditioning and rational thought to make itself known.

That same primal ability to see without seeing, to
feel
changes in the world around us, had once helped Anya’s distant ancestors sense when a hidden predator was stalking them. For them, living on a knife edge of survival in a cold, untamed wilderness, it had been just another tool to help keep them alive. Unfathomable, but tacitly acknowledged.

That intuition had faded almost beyond all knowledge for many people, but for her, it was still very much alive. Over the years, as she was forced to rely on every tool at her disposal to stay alive, her rational mind had learned to trust what her subconscious already knew.

She couldn’t say when exactly she became aware of the man following her, only that as she approached a junction in the road up ahead, the sense of being watched crossed some invisible boundary within her mind to become more than just a background item of minor interest. Now it was a potential threat.

Straight away she began to consciously analyse her situation, drawing in what little information she could glean to decide on how to respond. She couldn’t see the person following her, but it was almost certainly a man
in this part of the world. If he was behind her, she couldn’t turn to look at him without making her intentions obvious, and in any case the narrow slit through which she was able to view the world sharply limited her field of vision.

Instead she tried to use her other senses to better identify this potential threat, straining to hear his footsteps above the rustle of fabric and the drone of car engines nearby. Almost without being aware of it, she changed her stance and walking style to reduce the noise of her own steps, allowing her to focus in on her pursuer.

There were no pavements on this street, and even the road was nothing but bare earth compacted down by the passage of countless vehicles. The ground underfoot was a mixture of loose rocks, dust, mud and discarded, half-buried trash. Few could travel far on it without making any sound.

Her new friend was not such a man.

There! She heard it, faint but unmistakable. The click of shoes on the rocky ground. Shoes, not boots or trainers.