Dark Horizon, page 5
‘It’s interesting,’ said Finn, taking the bait.
Breeze kept looking at Marty. ‘He’s saying that cos the British are polite.’ Her gaze slipped to the MI6 officer and she threw out a leading question. ‘So. The asset. Not quite what you expected, huh?’
‘I was briefed,’ Finn noted. ‘Briefly.’
‘Betcha your bosses told you the guy could be some badass Bin Laden motherfucker, right? A real haji tiger.’
Finn’s lip curled, and Breeze knew she was right. ‘First impressions can be deceiving.’
‘That’s the first non-idiot thing you’ve said. Good, glad to hear it.’
He frowned, unconsciously tracing the line of his well-trimmed beard. ‘Whitehall gave us information that was . . . patchy. Actually, I hoped you might be good enough to fill in some of the gaps? Special relationship, and all that?’
‘Special is right,’ Breeze replied, with a snort. ‘Maybe you missed that you Brits aren’t exactly our favourite people right now? I mean, your boss and my boss don’t get on, know what I mean?’ It wasn’t any secret that the current President and the UK’s Prime Minister didn’t see eye to eye, each one quietly – and sometimes not so quietly – considering the other to be divisive and ineffectual.
‘You don’t give a toss about that,’ said Finn, proving that he was at least a little bit perceptive. ‘Elected leaders come and go – on your side of the pond and mine. But our work doesn’t alter, does it?’
‘True enough,’ she allowed. ‘Who knows, some collaboration here might end up with us singing kumbaya round the goddamn campfire.’ She let that hang, and Finn filled the silence that followed.
‘Yusuf’s role in the group is unclear,’ he noted. ‘From what we’ve been able to determine, he has a fair bit of freedom of movement around the organisation, but probably not any actual influence. The prevailing opinion is that he’s a glorified go-between, at best.’
That chimed with one of the CIA’s estimates on the guy, but not all of them. ‘There’s a voice inside the agency who thinks he’s more than some messenger boy,’ said Breeze. ‘There are details that don’t match up about Yusuf. Some photos of him look like two different guys. Some data connects him directly to terror attacks, other info says it wasn’t him. Some of the intelligence we got puts our boy in conflicting locations at the same time.’ She sucked in a breath. ‘We need to nail shit down, one way or the other. Is this prick really a low-level mook, or some kinda player?’
‘A voice in the agency,’ echoed Finn. ‘That would be yours, I imagine?’
‘You are sharper than you look,’ Breeze noted.
‘And you’re out on a limb.’ Finn nodded in the direction of the transport vehicle riding up ahead of them. ‘It doesn’t take a genius to see it’s a tough sell, convincing anyone that man is a hardened terrorist.’ He sniffed. ‘When you took that hood off him, I thought he might wet himself.’
She shrugged. ‘There’s zero chance this guy here is innocent, or near as makes no odds. The whole point of this thing is to find out for certain.’
‘Whichever way it pans out . . .’ began Marty, confident enough to float a comment of his own, ‘it’s not going to be a lot of fun for Yusuf.’
‘I know there are people who didn’t want this to happen.’ Finn took in everything with a sweep of the hand. ‘On your side and mine. There’s a case to be made that this asset would be of more use if he could be turned. Even a . . . what did you call him? A “low-level mook” inside the al-Sakakin organisation would be a valuable source.’
It was the first time any one of them had said the name out loud – al-Sakakin, loosely translated from Arabic, meant the knives, and that was how the members of that terrorist group saw themselves. They were the sharp blades cutting open the belly of the monstrous, lumbering West, plunging daggers of fire into the hearts of infidels. These were cunning, violent men and women who had splintered away from jihadist groups like al-Qaeda and al-Shabaab because they considered them too lenient towards their enemies.
‘We’re talking about the people that AQ and ISIS call extremists,’ said Breeze. ‘And that’s a pretty fuckin’ high bar.’
‘I don’t disagree.’ Finn looked away, glancing out at the streets flashing past them. ‘We’ve seen how adept they are at suborning assets of their own, and striking high-value targets with showy attacks.’
‘Yeah, that hit in Cyprus was hardcore.’ Breeze had an enemy’s clinical respect for the cold-eyed precision of al-Sakakin’s operations. At the RAF airbase, their staged vehicular explosive attacks on the perimeter had effectively doubled the number of fatalities.
It was their signature tactic. Cyprus was the latest hit in a concerted terror campaign, following strikes against a German hospital, a military base in the Philippines and a holiday resort in Croatia. They liked to make a statement, drop a lot of bodies, and they made sure the world’s media got it in widescreen and full colour.
‘Quite,’ agreed Finn, then he sighed. ‘But if this man isn’t who you think he is; if he isn’t Yusuf, we’re pissing into the wind.’
Breeze eyed him, her tone hardening to a challenge. ‘So what’s your read on him? Go ahead, be honest. I got no interest in you soft-pedalling it.’
Finn took a long moment to answer, the road rumbling under the SUV’s wheels, and Breeze could sense Chester and Knox listening intently to what the Brit would say next.
‘If the asset is Yusuf,’ began Finn, ‘if he can move around the group with impunity, then he’s the closest we’ve come to Nasir and Hamid since we started chasing those bloodthirsty bastards.’
Nasir and Hamid: two more names that sent a cold charge through the air. The brothers were in the cohort at the apex of al-Sakakin’s structure, their chief tactician and enforcer respectively, both from a handful of extremists who had been behind the original formation of the splinter faction. Veterans of proxy wars and brutal bombings, their dirty fingerprints were on every kill the group had ever made.
The notion of putting them in the ground kept Breeze up at night. It wouldn’t only make the world a safer place, nailing either one of them would be a career-maker, and it would make every indignity she’d weathered at the Agency worth the agitation.
It would prove her right.
‘But if the asset is nobody,’ continued Finn, ‘then everyone will be looking the wrong way when the next attack comes.’
‘And we’ll take the blame,’ Breeze said, with a tight, false smile. ‘Don’t forget that detail.’
FIVE
Kate left the Mini in the car park and hauled her flight bag’s strap over her shoulder, marching grimly toward Teller Aviation’s office and hangar block. A fresh breeze came out of the clear evening sky across Ridley Hill’s runway. It carried to pull at her hair, and she paused to put her reddish-brown tresses up into a tight, business-like ponytail.
Situated, as the name suggested, atop a flat hill of greenery and low trees, the airfield was the modern incarnation of what had started life as a grassy strip for rich hobbyist pilots in the interwar decades. The Second World War made it a possession of the Royal Air Force, a base for some of the Spitfires and Hurricanes of the Battle of Britain’s ‘Few’, and that legacy still lingered in a list of names on a stone memorial down by the gate. But, eighty years later, the fighter boys who had hurled themselves into the air to duel with enemy Messerschmitts wouldn’t have recognised Ridley Hill at all. Demobbed and sold off to civilian interests after the conflict, it had gone through good times and bad before blooming in the eighties, becoming a compact private airport for moneyed City traders and yuppies leasing their Learjets and Gulfstreams, shoulder to shoulder with a handful of general aviation types.
That was well before Kate’s time, of course, but there was a formative memory of this place that lingered in her. An image burned into her mind when she was still a teenager, from a school trip to an air display held over Ridley Hill’s field: a Tornado F3 interceptor hurtling by in a low-level pass, the roar of its turbofan engines chasing a split-second later, the jet outrunning its own sound.
Younger Kate had been entranced by the plane, and when a boy in her class sneeringly told her that ‘girls aren’t allowed to drive those’, it crystalised a dream she spent years of her life struggling to make real.
And she did it. Years later, after making the grade in one of the most arduous military training programmes in the world, she’d strapped herself into the cockpit of a GR4 variant of the very same aircraft. It had felt like the biggest victory of her life. In a world that was good and right and fair, that would have been the peak of it.
But fate was mocking. It liked to give you what you wanted and then twist it. Twist and twist, until everything broke apart.
That Kate’s path shook her out here, back to the same place, felt like some crass moment of grand irony. Every time she turned up to work, the sharp edges of what she had lost jabbed at her, the wound of her failure never quite allowed to scab over and fade.
Ridley Hill’s glory days of well-heeled passengers fuelled by cocaine, cash and Champagne were a distant memory, and the current iteration of the airport served three types of client: learner pilots and instructors on single- and twin-engine props, a hangar where a privately owned flight of vintage warbirds roosted in between air-show appearances, and a couple of executive jet companies, of which Teller Aviation Solutions was one.
It was almost but not quite a backwater, overshadowed by other, better-appointed airports throughout Kent and south-east England. But that semi-obscurity suited Kate Hood fine. Here, she was out of the way, overlooked and uncommented upon. She could continue to do the one thing she was good at, and no one would bother her.
That was how it was supposed to be. But more and more, Kate wondered if that was a lie she told herself.
She changed in the locker room beside the pilot’s lounge, noting the absence of anyone in that part of the building. Usually there was somebody about, and the fact that there wasn’t added another ringing alarm bell to the clangour in her thoughts. If Brian Teller had given everyone the evening off, there had to be a reason.
On went her working uniform, the crisp white cotton shirt and black captain’s boards on her epaulettes, plus a clip-on tie embroidered with the TAS logo and then a flight jacket over the top. Had it been daytime, she would have leaned into the look and worn a pair of aviator sunglasses to give it a little Top Gun flair. Teller liked his crews to play the part for the clients, be they noisy posh kids jetting down to the Balearics or dour oligarchs off to Europe. Like most commercial pilots, Kate had a love-hate relationship with the popular stereotypes associated with her job, but it was hard to deny that a fair few of the flyers she knew lived the epitome of them.
Paperwork came next, but when she looked for what she needed in the office, it wasn’t there. Kate’s temper was thinning when Teller suddenly entered the room from the hangar-side door and stared her down.
‘Good. You’re here.’ He gave her a frantic ‘follow me’ wave. ‘Come on!’ Before she could respond, he was gone again, the door banging shut behind him.
‘Twat.’ Kate threw the sotto insult after her boss, then pulled her bag with her and trailed after him.
Teller didn’t slow down as he strode across the hangar’s gleaming white floor, forcing Kate to jog to catch up. He had ten years on Kate, but you would have thought it was more than that, his lined face and pinched expression ageing him before his time. He tried to leaven things by dressing like a younger man, all cargo trousers and tight-fitting polo shirts, but that made it more obvious. Teller had a fidgety, distracted quality to him that Kate found hard to deal with for extended periods. He was one of those people you met at a party who were constantly looking for someone more important to talk to, and he didn’t care to hide it.
He curved around the ice-white wing of the company’s primary aircraft, one of a pair of well-appointed Embraer Phenom executive jets, as she caught up and fell in step.
‘There better be a bloody good reason for dragging me in like this,’ she said.
‘Like I said on the phone,’ he replied quickly, ‘rush job. John’s nowhere to be found. You’ve got to take over.’
Her tone sharpened. ‘Are you at least going to fill in some of the useful details, like where I’m flying to and who I’m taking there? Or do you want me to wing it and kite around in circles?’
‘I want you to do your job,’ he retorted. ‘I need to know you won’t get pissy about this, all right?’ Teller made the request but didn’t actually wait to see if Kate would agree to it. He ploughed on, out through the hangar doors and on to the flight apron. ‘It’s a night hop down to North Africa. A small airfield in Morocco. Handful of passengers. The client’s supplying their own co-pilot. There and back, nothing fancy.’
She stiffened. Morocco wasn’t on the usual list of itineraries, and the notion of crewing the aircraft with a complete stranger led her toward an unpleasant possibility, one that Kate immediately didn’t want to give voice to.
But then Teller came to a halt a few feet away from the company’s number three aircraft, the bird that never had the job of ferrying the idle wealthy or the corporate bigwigs.
The jet’s registration code was G-LTTP, and one of the wits in the maintenance team had suggested that stood for Late To The Party. With a bullet-shaped fuselage, and a pair of engine nacelles either side of its high tail, the British-built Hawker 800 had a stocky look to it. Slightly smaller and heavier than the Phenom, it was an older aircraft now out of production and not as sleek or Instagram-worthy as its Brazilian-made stablemate. On the Teller Aviation Services flight line, the Hawker sat at the back of the pack – the one that got the assignments that were less showy, less glamourous . . .
Less legal, thought Kate.
Modified internally, a lot of the luxurious bells and whistles the company’s usual clientele demanded had been stripped out of the Hawker, turning it into an aircraft better suited for light cargo runs, ambulance flights or the repatriation of remains.
But no one who worked for Brian Teller could ignore the flying elephant in the room: the fact that the Hawker was always going out or coming back in the hours of darkness, and that its cargoes and flight plans weren’t discussed among the staff. Teller liked to bang on about ‘discretion’ and ‘sensitivity’ when it came to his company’s operations, but as Kate’s partner Alex had so eloquently put it, you couldn’t escape the suspicion that there was some shady shit going on.
Teller was smart about his business. It wasn’t as if they were trucking suitcases full of cocaine up from Colombia. It was more like slipping the possessions of some tax-dodging Russian billionaire out of the country ahead of his debtors coming knocking, or scooping up some drunken wild-child pop star from Cannes before the paparazzi tracked them down – done discreetly and sensitively so that no one got a whiff of it.
Teller made sure the people working for him, the waifs and strays of the aviation world, were grateful – or, as in Kate’s case, desperate – for the work. Because people in that position didn’t tend to make a fuss when their boss bent the rules.
That might have been something that could be overlooked, if Brian Teller’s desire to earn and the rising costs of running millions of pounds’ worth of jet planes hadn’t driven him to seek other patrons. Kate realised that the rumours she had been hearing around the place about the jobs John Price had been flying were more than the product of some overactive imaginations.
‘What’s the load?’ She looked Teller in the eye, daring him to lie about it.
‘I’ll pay you what Price was getting,’ he said. ‘And in return you don’t ask that question again, right?’ It was a typical Teller reply. His first instinct was always to throw money at a problem.
The offer was not enough to silence Kate’s concerns. ‘I’ll say this once, so you understand it clearly, Brian. I will not do anything illegal.’
Teller rocked back, looking her up and down. ‘Listen to you! Laying down the law. What’s the weather like up there on your high horse?’
‘Don’t patronise me.’ Her temper flared like cold fire. ‘I have more than enough black marks of my own to deal with. I don’t need any more.’
‘Yes, quite,’ Teller said airily. ‘Remind me how long you were out of work after the whole . . . unpleasantness?’ Again, he didn’t wait for her to reply. ‘How many job offers did you have? Oh, it was bugger all, wasn’t it? At least until I came along and stuck my neck out to get you flying again.’
She let the bag drop off her shoulder, feeling the moment coming to a head as a flush of heat rose in her cheeks. ‘You’re threatening me?’ If Kate Hood had a character trait she loathed the most, it was her temper. When the right buttons were pushed, her cool reserve could dissolve in an instant, and that always ended up with her saying or doing something she couldn’t take back. She was close to it now.
‘Don’t be so dramatic,’ he replied. ‘I’m telling you it like it is, Kate. I’m a realist.’
Her jaw hardened. ‘In my experience, people who make that claim just want carte blanche to be an arsehole.’
‘I don’t—’ Whatever Teller was going to say next, the rest of the sentence died in his throat as a convoy of vehicles rolled up to sudden halt outside the open doors of the hangar.
Kate saw a nondescript car, a big American 4x4, and between them a panel truck. But no, not a truck. A prisoner transport. The second the convoy stopped rolling, men with serious, hawkish demeanours decamped from the vehicles, looking around in all directions like they were expecting trouble.
‘Balls.’ Teller looked at his watch. ‘They’re early.’
The surge of annoyance building in Kate turned icy cold and the truth they were dancing around could not be ignored any more. The presence of the truck could only mean one thing.
‘No.’ She prodded Teller in the chest. ‘No. I’m not doing this.’
