Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (40 page)

Several figures round the table nodded, although the Home Secretary remained noticeably impassive. ‘But we understand,’ continued the attorney general, ‘that that is next to impossible. We’ve seen what happened when the Colombian police tried to close in on him. They lost nearly a dozen men and García got clean away.’

‘What about a drone strike?’ asked the Defence Secretary. ‘The Americans ought to be able to deploy a Reaper from Florida, surely.’

‘Let me answer that one, if you don’t mind,’ said Sir Adam. ‘Getting a drone into theatre isn’t the issue. It carries with it a certain risk.’

‘I’m sorry?’ The Defence Secretary leaned forward. ‘I’m not following you.’

The Chief hesitated before answering. ‘You’ll appreciate,’ he said, ‘that this is highly sensitive. But we have an agent in place close to the target. A drone strike on García would be a death sentence for that agent. Plus we don’t have an exact fix on where he is right now.’

‘Can’t you extract him?’ asked the Defence Secretary. ‘The agent, I mean.’

‘Not at present, no. We have no means of contacting them. Plus what they’re providing us with, when they can be in contact, is Grade A intelligence.’

There was a silence, broken after a few seconds by the attorney general.

‘Now, it has long been this country’s policy,’ he resumed, ‘that we don’t do assassinations. Obviously things changed in late 2015 with Syria, where those drone strikes were judged as legitimate self-defence under Article Fifty-one of the UN Charter. The situation we’re facing today is a little more complex.’

‘Which is why,’ interjected Sir Adam, ‘this will not be our operation.’

‘It won’t? Then whose will it be?’ asked Sir William Orgrave, Cabinet Secretary, the ultimate Whitehall warrior. He knew full well that if this came washing back in their faces, he would be the one left sorting it out.

‘Washington’s,’ replied the Chief, regarding the Whitehall mandarin with an unwavering gaze. ‘Officially, this will have a CIA signature. Just with a little input from us.’

‘And the Americans are onboard with this?’ questioned Orgrave.

‘Completely,’ replied Sir Adam. ‘We had an early conference call today with their National Security Adviser. The CIA already have a substantial presence in-country and they’re working up an insertion plan as we speak.’ His tone carried a note of finality. ‘Now, if there are no more questions I must be on my way. We have a rather busy day ahead of us.’ It was not yet nine thirty a.m.

The meeting broke up and Khan caught a lift back to VX with the Chief. He had stayed silent throughout the meeting in the Cabinet Office. Nearly twenty years younger than Sir Adam, he was in no hurry to stick his neck out on an operation he considered to be right on the cusp of legality. But if Sir Adam Keeling was happy to put his name to it, then that was fine by Khan.

As the car swept westwards down Millbank, ignoring the
speed limit and the yellow box cameras that flashed in impotent disapproval, both men stared out across the Thames in the weak early-November sunlight.

‘Dangerous times, Sid,’ remarked the Chief, ‘dangerous times.’ It was a comment that could have applied equally to the national threat situation or to their own careers. Heads were going to roll if they messed this one up. As they sped past Tate Britain, home to some of London’s finest art treasures, the Chief broached the subject he and Khan had been mulling over. ‘Who did you have in mind?’ he asked. ‘Who’s going to deliver the goods?’

Sid Khan suspected the Chief already knew the answer, just wanted to hear him say it out loud. ‘Well, it has to be Luke Carlton, doesn’t it? There’s no one with a better skill set.’

‘I concur,’ said Sir Adam. ‘We’ll need to pull him off that task force at Thames and get him into the lab at VX right away. I want him back in Bogotá by this time tomorrow.’

They had reached the junction with Vauxhall Bridge Road, the lights were changing to amber and they were swinging left onto the bridge, hugging the left-hand lane.

‘That said,’ cautioned Khan, ‘we do have a duty of care here, Chief, given that he nearly got himself wiped out on the last assignment.’

‘On a scale of one to ten, how dangerous would you estimate this mission to be?’

At first Khan didn’t answer. He peered out of the window at the grey expanse of the river beneath them. ‘I’d look at it another way,’ said Khan. ‘On a scale of one to ten, how much danger is this country in right now?’

Sir Adam grunted, reaching to unbuckle his seatbelt as the gate opened to let them through. ‘Fair point,’ he said. ‘Send in Carlton.’

THE FRISSON, THE
buzz, the elixir of excitement that Luke had experienced on that earlier mission to Colombia was now spent. He felt inert. This was a job, an assignment, nothing more, not a calling. Now heading west once more over the Atlantic, no fretting lawyer in tow this time, he gazed at his reflection on the in-flight entertainment screen. He had not yet got round to switching it on. His face stared back at him: he looked tired, even before the mission. Luke rubbed the knuckle of his partly missing middle finger and considered the last twenty hours, pursing his lips. He didn’t want to think about Elise’s reaction when he had given her the good news that, yes, he was off again.

First had come the call from Angela, pulling him out of the ops room at Thames House. A car was waiting outside, she told him, to whisk him across the river. Time was tight if they were going to get him on the 12.50 flight but first he needed to come into Vauxhall Cross. Luke had known from her sympathetic tone that someone higher up the chain was about to shovel a load of metaphorical manure in his direction.

‘You absolutely have the right to refuse this one,’ she told him, as she met him by the lifts in the circular lobby on the ground floor of the MI6 building.

‘And you think I should be saying no?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘But that’s what you’re implying?’

‘Listen, Luke.’ Without knowing she was doing it, she squeezed his arm, then immediately let go. ‘You – you’re already proving yourself here. You’re starting to think like a case officer. You’re on the point of making the grade.’ Angela stopped as two colleagues passed, nodding at her but saying nothing. ‘You really don’t need to take on this mission,’ she said, in a hushed voice. ‘They can always find someone else.’

‘But someone who doesn’t speak Spanish, right? Or know the Colombian cartels? Or how to handle themselves in a fire fight?’

‘It’s conceivable,’ she said, picking her words carefully, ‘that we don’t have anyone else in the Service with all three of those skills. We could hand it to the Americans. They’ve certainly got the resources. But then we relinquish control and, of course, we are the target here.’

‘Well, that settles it,’ he said, giving her an easy smile. His safety seemed to trouble Angela more than it did him. ‘I don’t really have a choice, do I? Given the threat that’s hanging over this country right now.’

Four floors up and five minutes later, in Sid Khan’s office, it had been a very different conversation. No room for wavering there, it was straight down to business.

‘You’ll be going in with the Americans,’ announced Khan. ‘So, as you know, we’re putting you on the twelve-fifty BA flight non-stop to Tampa.’ He glanced at the clock on his wall. ‘That’s just under three hours away so we don’t have a lot of time to prep you for this. You’re due to land at seventeen forty local time and someone from Langley will meet you and take you straight to MacDill. I expect you know it.’

‘MacDill Airforce Base?’ said Luke. ‘For my sins, yes. Home of SOCOM – US Special Operations Command. I did a course there once.’ His mind flashed back to days and nights of gruelling, bone-breaking training alongside the operators of Delta Force and Naval Special Warfare. His muscles ached just thinking about it.

‘You’ll be going in with a mixed team,’ said Khan, ‘CIA and Special Ops. You’ll have a complete security envelope around you at all times. There’ll be no repeat of what happened last time.’

‘That’s reassuring,’ replied Luke.

Khan shot him a look, which reminded Luke that he still had questions to answer about going off-piste on his last mission. Apparently today was not the day for a reprimand.

‘I cannot emphasize enough,’ said Khan, speaking with unaccustomed gravitas, ‘how critical this mission is.’

‘Got it.’

‘It’s your task, Luke Carlton, to make contact with Tradewind, deliver the package, show her how to administer it, then stay on location long enough only to make sure the job is done.’ Khan stood up, came round to Luke’s side of the desk and sat on its edge, looking directly at him, as if searching for reassurance that the proven warrior they had selected really was up to the task.

‘García,’ he continued, ‘has to be terminated before he can flee Colombia. Why? Because once he gets to Panama he’s immune. At least, he’ll think he is. The moment he decides he’s somewhere safe he’ll execute his plan.
Bang!
Then we’re too late. He’s already moving towards the end phase now.’

‘Tradewind is someone you’ve had in place for some time? An agent recruited by Benton before he was murdered by the narcos?’ Khan said nothing. ‘Why wasn’t I told this the last time you sent me over there?’

Sitting just a few centimetres away from Khan, Luke could see that his words were making the other man uncomfortable, but he didn’t care. If they were about to send him back into the jaws of Hell then he deserved to know the full picture.

‘I’m going to level with you, Luke,’ said Khan. ‘I may have misjudged you at first. I didn’t let you in on Tradewind because I didn’t think you were ready. Right now, that agent is
the
most valuable HUMINT source we have in the whole of Latin America. There are only six people in this building who even know she exists. Now there are seven. By the time you’ve read your assignment brief you’ll know as much as I do.’ Khan glanced up again
at the ornate clock on the wall, a gift long ago from the Lahore Cricket Club. ‘Time is running short, and the boys and girls in Tech Division are waiting downstairs to give you a crash course in the dark arts.’ He stood up and held out his hand. ‘For the second time in a few weeks I’m finding myself saying this to you. Good luck. Execute the task and please come back in one piece.’

IN A DARKENED
room at Vauxhall Cross, Luke sat waiting as the screen in front of him jumped to life. It was a 2002 news clip from Moscow. Black-clad Russian Special Forces were bringing a violent end to a stand-off with Chechen terrorists who had taken around a thousand people hostage in a theatre.

‘Fentanyl,’ said the biochemist sitting beside him. ‘They used a form of fentanyl to end that siege. Remember?’

‘Think I was still at uni at the time.’

‘Fentanyl is an opiate, a narcotic analgesic that’s eighty times more powerful than morphine. In tiny doses it can be perfectly benign. You’ve probably heard of people using a fentanyl patch as an analgesic?’ Luke nodded. ‘It’s also used in substance abuse, combined with other ingredients. As a chemist, I have to say I dislike the term “designer drug”, but that’s what they call it. It’s got other names too, like China White, Perc-o-Pops and Dance Fever. It’s led to a lot of sudden deaths.’

The video playing on the screen was now showing a procession of bodies being carried out to ambulances. A light flurry of Moscow snow was swirling around them.

‘Used as a gas, as they did inside the theatre there,’ continued the chemist, ‘it can be lethal. It shuts down the body’s respiratory system, leading to asphyxiation, cardiac arrest and death. The Russians basically got their sums wrong, and around a hundred
and thirty people ended up dead in that place. We never did discover the exact formula they used.’ The chemist held up his hand as a signal and the image on the screen changed. ‘Know who this guy is?’ he asked. A bearded man, silvery grey hair, intense eyes, open collar.

‘Looks familiar,’ said Luke. ‘But no. Sorry.’

‘Khaled Meshaal. The political leader of Hamas. In 1997 Israel’s Mossad sent a hit team into Amman to kill him. Their weapon of choice?’

‘Fentanyl?’ offered Luke.

‘Close. Levofentanyl. A derivative. The plan was to distract his attention then spray it into his ears and for him to expire quietly forty-eight hours later. But it didn’t quite work out like that. They got caught, Meshaal went into a coma and there was an almighty diplomatic row, Clinton on the phone to Jordan’s King Hussein and so on. In the end the Israelis had to hand over the antidote and he lived. Major embarrassment for the Israelis.’

Luke could see where this was going. ‘And you’re going to ask me to do the same thing to our player in South America?’

‘Not exactly. Things have moved on quite a bit since then. Come with me.’

Luke followed him into an adjoining room. It had fluorescent strip lights and a clean, almost aseptic feel. Men and women hunched over their workstations or conferred quietly while pointing to streams of data on screens. Even to Luke, still only in his thirties, they all seemed incredibly young.

‘Not quite the Gadget Palace you see in those Bond films,’ said the chemist, leading him to a table. ‘And no silver Aston Martin lurking behind the curtain, I’m afraid! But we do have this . . .’ The chemist turned and nodded, just once. A young man hurried over with a small green plastic box marked ‘Travellers’ First Aid’.

‘Jed,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to show Mr Carlton the toolkit.’

Carefully, the assistant opened the lid of the box and laid its contents on the Formica table. Luke leaned in for a closer look. He saw a set of needles, a syringe and a pair of thin transparent phials, each filled with a clear liquid tinged slightly yellow.
‘It’s an acupuncture set,’ announced the chemist, ‘but with a twist.’ He sounded as though he were describing a kitchen blender with more than one speed setting.

‘Your agent,’ said the chemist, indicating the row of needles, ‘will need to administer these ordinary needles first. They’re harmless. But these . . .’ he indicated a row set apart, noticeably thicker than the others ‘. . . are hollow, like a hypodermic. They deliver the poison. It’s a form of fentanyl citrate. Just two milligrams is more than enough to kill a man.’