Deception Game (42 page)

They were clear.

After coming so close to disaster, neither Drake nor McKnight could quite bring themselves to believe it. At any moment they expected to find a convoy of Libyan army vehicles barring their path, or to catch the blue lights of police vehicles in their rear-view mirror. Neither thing happened, yet still the woman wouldn’t ease off, keeping her foot planted firmly on the accelerator while banking left and right to avoid slower moving traffic.

Turning right at the next junction, McKnight spotted a quieter street up ahead and went for it, block-changing into fourth gear and stomping on the gas once more. The engine roared like a wild animal in response, rough and unrefined after years of abuse, but still with enough fight left in it to send them hurtling onwards.

‘You all right?’ she asked, unable to take her eyes off the road for fear of losing control of the fast-moving vehicle.

‘I’m fine,’ Drake mumbled. He barely felt the pain in his arm now, though he was vaguely aware that blood was dripping down his arm and staining the seat. Now that he was out of danger, for the moment at least, his mind was able to think beyond the bare essentials of survival, to begin to process what had just happened.

She glanced at the torn, bloodstained fabric of his shirt. ‘You’re bleeding.’

‘I said I’m fine!’ he snapped, struggling with the impotent rage that welled up inside.

They could have left the country already, could have made it to safety with Sowan and his wife in tow. But he had made the decision to come back here, to risk his life and the lives of everyone else on the foolish hope that they could somehow make all of this right. And another good man was dead because of it.

He’d been wrong about Sowan – he knew that now. Before he’d seen a ruthless, cold-hearted man who cared nothing for human lives or the suffering his work caused, but now he saw him for what he was. A good man in a bad place, who had tried to make the best of his situation.

And who had died for it.

‘Faulkner was ready for us. He knew exactly what we were planning.’

He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to hold it back, trying to keep it under control. It was a futile effort.

‘Fuck!’ he snarled, slamming his fist into the dashboard.

‘Stop it!’ McKnight called out. ‘He’s gone, Ryan! I know it’s a shitty thing to face up to, but you need to deal with it now. I need you thinking clearly.’

Drake said nothing to this. She was right, of course. Losing control now wasn’t going to help anyone. But that didn’t make him feel any less guilty for what had happened, or less angry at himself for failing to prevent it.

‘I know what you’re feeling. I know, but this wasn’t your fault,’ she carried on, quieter now. Her gaze lingered for a moment on the rucksack lying at his feet. ‘Sowan found what we need. Now we have to make it count.’

Drake let out a breath, forcing those dark thoughts aside, forcing his mind to focus on the situation at hand and everything that had to happen for them to survive this night. Samantha was right. He could play the blame game later when circumstances permitted it, but for now the priority was reuniting with their friends and getting the fuck out of Libya for good.

Unzipping the rucksack, he reached inside and pulled the laptop out. Its casing was cracked and dented, damage likely sustained during the car crash, but he knew all that mattered was the hard drive. As long as that was intact, they still had a shot.

‘We need to head south-west from here, away from the city,’ he said, glancing around for landmarks that could aid navigation. He pointed to a road sign for Alzintan, which he remembered as belonging to the same mountainous region as Nalut. ‘There. Take the next slip road.’

This she did, swinging them off the city street and onto a larger cross-country highway heading in a generally southern direction out into the desert. Easing off the gas a little, she merged with the other late-night traffic, hoping that the relative darkness would disguise the broken rear windscreen and bullet holes in the chassis.

Sooner or later they would have to ditch the highway or risk running into a police or military checkpoint, but for now the primary goal was to put some distance between themselves and the scene of the desperate gun battle.

With a relative period of calm now upon them, they lapsed into silence, each harbouring their own thoughts as the lights of oncoming traffic flitted past.

‘Thank you,’ Drake said quietly, breaking the silence.

She frowned. ‘For what?’

‘For coming back. I never got the chance to say it before, but you risked your life for me.’ He looked over at her, reached out and laid a hand on her arm. ‘I’d be dead if it wasn’t for you, Sam.’

‘What was I going to do? Leave you behind?’ she said, feigning a wry smile. ‘Keira would never let me hear the end of it.’

‘Really? I thought she’d be glad to see the back of me.’

‘You’d be surprised.’

She was trying to make light of it, but he sensed how much this meant to her, and why. Her appointment to their team had coincided with the loss of one of their own in Afghanistan, and though she had worked hard to fit in and prove herself, she still acted as if she were somehow an outsider. But nothing could be further from the truth, either for his comrades, or for Drake himself.

‘Look, I know it hasn’t been easy for you. Fitting in, feeling like you’re being judged against someone you never really knew. But I need you to know that none of that matters. It never did. You’re part of this team now, Sam. We’re here for you...
I
’
m
here for you, no matter what.’

He saw the muscles in her throat moving as she swallowed, saw her fingers tighten on the wheel. Her attention was still focussed on the road ahead, but there was something in her eyes, some hidden pain that his words had somehow exposed. She pressed down a little harder on the accelerator, causing their speed to creep up.

‘Take it easy,’ Drake advised her, wary of overtaxing the car’s ageing and neglected engine. Already it sounded like it hadn’t seen the inside of a garage in a very long time. ‘This car’s a heap. It’s not going to take much more.’

Reluctantly she eased off, though the tension remained in her. ‘I don’t want to let you down, Ryan,’ she said at last. ‘I don’t want you to be disappointed in me.’

‘You won’t,’ he promised her. ‘You never could.’

Samantha said nothing to that, concentrating instead on driving.

Oblivious to the forensic specialists and security personnel swarming all around him, Kubar stared down at the lifeless body of Tarek Sowan. This man had once been one of the Libyan intelligence service’s rising stars; bright, intelligent and ambitious. Now he was lying sprawled on the dusty ground of a Tripoli back alley, his blood staining the sand.

Whatever he’d hoped to achieve through his desperate escape from Mukhabarat headquarters, it had ended abruptly here with a high-powered rifle bullet to the chest. What had happened to bring him to this? How had this inconceivable chain of events played out? Who had killed him and why? And where were they now?

As always, he had more answers than questions.

‘He was killed by a long-range shot from an elevated position. Ballistics should be able to give us the calibre of weapon shortly,’ Mousa reported, his voice devoid of its usual wry humour. This was no time for jokes. Traitor or not, one of their own was lying dead, as were several other good men dispatched to take him into custody.

‘A sniper,’ Kubar concluded. ‘The same one who took out our field team?’

‘Most likely. Their wounds are consistent with sniper kills.’

Kubar rubbed his eyes, fatigue weighing heavily on him at that moment. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. Sowan flees our compound, crashes his car, and a mystery man appears to save him from capture. They run here, Sowan ends up dead and the other man vanishes.’ He glanced over at one of the metal dumpsters that littered the alleyway, its metal frame shredded by multiple bullet holes. ‘What the hell happened here?’

‘The evidence of a firefight is obvious. We found plenty of 9mm shell casings scattered around,’ Mousa went on. ‘As well as blood that doesn’t seem to belong to Sowan.’

Just like at the airfield, he mused. Both times they’d found evidence of a sudden, brutal confrontation between two different groups, with Sowan apparently caught in the middle. Why were they fighting over him? Was he working for one group, both, or neither? Had he been an active participant, or an unwilling accomplice to whatever scheme they had concocted?

Kubar let out a slow, weary breath. ‘Strings.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Tarek Sowan was a puppet,’ he concluded grimly. ‘The man who dragged him away from the crash scene was the one pulling his strings.’

‘Whoever he is, he was able to coerce one of our operatives into betraying his own people, infiltrating the most secure compound in our country, and waltzing right out before we could stop him. Not to mention killing every man who stood in his way.’ Mousa shook his head, simply unable to comprehend how all their efforts thus far had ended in failure. ‘We may as well be fighting a ghost.’

‘Ghosts can disappear. Men can’t,’ Kubar reminded him with a sharp look. ‘He’s out there somewhere, and it’s our job to find him. What else do we know?’

‘We have a report from a local civilian of a carjacking at the same time as the attack. The perpetrator was a Caucasian woman, standing in the road pretending to be injured. When he stopped to investigate, she pulled a gun and stole his car.’

Kubar frowned. Another piece of misdirection, or the desperate actions of a group trying to escape something they hadn’t anticipated? ‘Make and model?’

‘A red Toyota sports car. I’ve already forwarded the license plate and vehicle description to police and military units.’

‘Good.’

‘If they are as smart as they seem to be, they’ll ditch the car soon enough,’ Mousa warned him.

‘Maybe, maybe not. Either way, it’s worth a try.’

‘There’s something else.’ Mousa paused. A strained, uncomfortable pause as he sought a good way to deliver bad news. ‘We checked the key card access logs back at headquarters. Sowan didn’t just go to the parking lot after stealing Director Jibril’s access card.’

Kubar looked up from the body, turning his attention to his comrade. ‘Well spit it out, damn you. Where else did he go?’

‘The evidence vault.’

Kubar clenched his fists, struggling to hold his emotions in check. The evidence vault. One of the most secure rooms in the entire compound, where the Mukhabarat
’
s
most deadly secrets were kept, where even he was unable to venture without an armed escort.

He could practically feel his blood pressure rising by the second, and with it a growing headache, but he no longer cared. At last he understood what Sowan had been looking for, and the danger it represented if he found it.

‘I want them found,’ he said, his voice icy calm. ‘No matter what it takes. Do you understand? We find them, and we make them answer for this.’

His colleague knew better than to question him.

They hadn’t gone far before it became obvious that McKnight’s high speed escape through the streets of Tripoli hadn’t done their ageing vehicle many favours. Their speed had begun to drop off noticeably despite her attempts to coax more power from it, and the engine’s note had become less of a throaty growl and more the shuddering rumble of metal grinding against metal.

The final straw came when Drake glanced out the broken rear window and spotted clouds of white smoke billowing from their twin exhaust.

‘We need to stop,’ he decided, nodding to the engine temperature gauge, which was now close to maxing out. Already he suspected the cause of their problems, but he needed to see for himself how bad it was.

Spotting a low sand berm up ahead, McKnight turned off the minor road they’d been following for the past fifteen minutes and pulled to a halt on the far side, more or less shielding them from view of passing cars.

Stepping out into the slightly cooler night air, Drake paused for a moment to survey their surroundings in case anyone happened to be around. There wasn’t much to see save for undulating dunes stretching off into the darkness. Deciding the area was more or less safe, he circled around to the front of the vehicle and popped the hood.

The resultant cloud of steam billowing from the engine compartment, accompanied by the faint hiss of high-pressure water escaping through a narrow gap in the engine block, was enough to confirm his suspicions.

McKnight too had approached to survey the damage. ‘Tell me we’re not screwed,’

‘I could, but I’d be lying,’ he said, leaning over to get a better look. ‘We’ve blown the cylinder-head gasket.’

With the gasket designed to separate the various fluids vital to the engine now compromised, water from the cooling system was leaking into the combustion chamber. The engine was literally burning up its own coolant as it ran, reducing its power output drastically and causing steam to billow from the exhaust.

‘Anything we can do?’

Drake surveyed the stricken engine, his expression grave. Then, removing his shirt, he wrapped it around his right hand to form a crude glove, reached out and unscrewed the water filler cap. The sudden eruption of steam and boiling water that followed was enough to make both of them back off a few paces.

‘That’ll keep the pressure down, hopefully buy us some time,’ Drake explained, tossing the plastic cap away. He didn’t add that without any additional water to top up the coolant reservoir, there was nothing they could do to stop the engine eventually running dry and seizing up.

‘So what’s the plan?’

‘We go cross-country from here. We can’t afford to stay on the roads any longer – not in this condition. Anyway, the terrain looks flat enough to drive on.’

He would rather have tackled such a journey in a Land Rover, or one of the Toyota Hiluxes that seemed to be ubiquitous in this part of the world, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

He glanced up at the night sky, trying to take his bearings. With little light pollution and no clouds in such a dry desert environment, his view of the star constellations was almost perfect. It didn’t take long to pick out Ursa Major, followed by Ursa Minor, and finally in the extreme northern hemisphere, Polaris – the North Star.

‘It’s got to be a hundred miles to the rendezvous,’ McKnight said dubiously. ‘Can we make it that far?’

Drake said nothing to this as he glanced at his watch. They had perhaps six hours until sunrise. Six hours to find Frost and Mason, and get the hell out of this country.

‘Get in,’ he said, slamming the hood shut. ‘I’ll drive.’

After some persuasion, the car shuddered reluctantly back into life. Trying to keep the engine revs low so as not to stress the failing machinery, Drake eased them away from their temporary hiding place and back onto the road, leaving a cloud of steam in their wake.

Six hours to cover a hundred miles of rough and hostile terrain in a 20-year-old sports car on its last legs, with few weapons to defend themselves.

Nothing like a challenge.