Deception Game (47 page)

Following the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime in 2011, files recovered from the headquarters of the Libyan intelligence service in Tripoli indicated that the US and UK governments handed over dozens of opponents of the Libyan regime for interrogation and torture. Neither country has officially commented on these claims.

Samantha McKnight’s body lay curled up in foetal position at the base of the rocky slope it had rolled down after she’d thrown herself off the cliff above. Silent, unmoving, already coated with a fine layer of drifting sand that would eventually cover it completely.

To any casual observer she would have seemed long dead.

But it was not so. A tiny spark of life still burned within her. Her chest rose and fell in shallow, rapid breaths, her hand twitched, and her eyes slowly fluttered open.

Just for a moment, she was at peace. There was no sound, no sensation. All she was aware of was the sandy ground around her and the flawless blue sky overhead.

Then, in an instant, her memory returned. And with it came the pain.

It hit with such force, flowing up and down her body like a tide, that she almost passed out again. Vaguely she remembered the fall from the cliff above, the jarring impacts as she tumbled down the slope, rocks and stones hammering her body from every angle, then at last an explosion of darkness that had claimed her.

But it hadn’t killed her. Not yet at least.

She almost smiled at the irony. Couldn’t even do
that
right.

Not that it mattered much now. She might have avoided a quick death from the fall, but the desert itself would likely finish her soon enough.

At least Drake was gone, and that thought was some comfort to her as her mind drifted towards unconsciousness again. She closed her eyes, grateful for the chance to rest at last. It felt so good to rest...

Then she heard it. A sound, low and rough. The rhythmic puttering of an engine, the rattle of a metal vehicle bumping over rough ground, the creak of old axles.

It was growing louder. Too weary to move her head, Samantha could only wait, listening with curious detachment as the vehicle approached. Perhaps they wouldn’t even see her. Perhaps they’d drive on by and leave her to her fate.

A sudden shout, the squeal of brakes, and the engine noise died away.

Only then did she see the pair of scuffed boots come stomping across the rocky ground towards her, the crunch of gravel just audible beneath the continued shouting.

They stopped beside her, and Samantha felt strong hands grip her by the shirt, rolling her over onto her back. She saw a dark face silhouetted against the burning sun overhead before she finally lost consciousness again.

Drake gasped in shock, his mind jerked suddenly and painfully back to awareness by a chilling deluge of water. Blinking his eyes open, he looked around, trying to make sense of his surroundings.

All around him was darkness. Not the absolute darkness of a hood pulled over his head or bindings covering his eyes, but rather the deep shadows of night. How was it suddenly night? Where was he?

Slowly details began to resolve themselves as his vision cleared. He saw rock walls and a ceiling, rough and irregular – an interior space shaped not by man, but by nature. A cave. A cave lit by the flickering orange glow of a small fire somewhere nearby.

He could hear voices; several of them, their words blending together into a confused and jumbled drone that echoed off the cave walls. He tried to focus, tried to separate them and discern individual words, but his mind couldn’t comply with his demands.

Then suddenly he saw a face above him. A woman’s face, dark-skinned and framed by long black hair that fell all around him, blotting out much of his surroundings. A pair of piercing eyes were focussed on his own; hostility mingled with vague, professional concern.

Only then did a single voice emerge from the others, fighting its way through the fog of his brain to reach him. ‘Ryan? Ryan, can you hear me?’

He recognized this woman who was now so focussed on him. A name slowly drifted from the dark recesses of his mind.

‘Laila?’ he croaked, struggling just to form the word.

‘That’s right. It’s Laila. Ryan, tell me what happened in Tripoli. Where is Tarek?’

Tarek. That was another name he recognized, yet he couldn’t say why. He felt as if his mind was a vast darkened room, and he possessed only a dim light with which to explore its depths. Concentrating, he tried to piece together the fragmented images and thoughts that seemed to swirl around with no clear pattern linking them.

Tarek. Laila...

He saw himself running through a darkened alley at night, supporting an injured man in his arms. He saw another man swinging a weapon towards him, then suddenly he disappeared in a storm of metal as a car drove straight into him. He saw himself struggling through the desert, sand and heat blasting him, trying to reach a woman who had collapsed to the ground in an exhausted heap.

And then, just like that, the fragmented and confused thoughts, images and memories suddenly coalesced into a single whole once more. His bleary eyes snapped open and he reached out, grasping Laila’s arm, his grip strong and urgent despite his exhausted state.

‘Sam!’ he called out, the blood pounding in his ears. ‘She was...with me. Where is she? Where!’

Her dark brows drew together in a frown. ‘We found no one with you. They searched the area. It was just you.’

Drake released his grip, memories of Samantha staggering towards the cliff edge replaying like camera flashes in his mind. He saw her pitch forward, saw her disappear into the void beyond. And last of all, he saw her broken and lifeless body lying at the base of the slope.

‘What about the others?’ he asked weakly. ‘Keira, Cole...’

‘Listen to me, this is important,’ she pressed on, desperate for answers. ‘What happened to Tarek? Where is he?’

Drake’s heart sank. Once again he saw Sowan lying on his back in that alleyway, foamy blood leaking from the bullet wound in his chest as he stared back at Drake, knowing he was dying. Knowing his promise to return to Laila would never be fulfilled.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, looking up at the woman who had entrusted her husband’s safety to his care. ‘I couldn’t get to him. I couldn’t...help him.’

Lying so close to her, he was able to watch in agonizing detail as her mask of tight control and composure crumbled before his eyes. He watched as she reached up and held a hand to cover her mouth, watched as she bowed her head and tears began to fall, her shoulders moving up and down as she sobbed.

Then suddenly she looked up at him again, the grief and sorrow twisting and magnifying into hate and anger. Her right hand drew back and then arced down towards him, and his world was jarred sideways by the blow.

‘You were supposed to protect him!’ she yelled, her tear-streaked eyes burning with rage as she struck him again. ‘He trusted you to bring him back. You used him, you bastard!’

Weakened and pinned down, there was nothing Drake could do to defend himself as the blows rained in, frenzied and driven by raw emotion rather than a cold desire to kill or injure. Still, they were doing damage all the same, and he knew that if the attack continued unabated there was a fair chance she might beat him to death before she realized what she was doing.

But as it turned out, she didn’t get the chance. Another figure, big and imposing, suddenly intervened in the one-sided fight, grasping her arm just as she was reaching back to deliver another stinging blow. Exercising a strength that far outmatched her own, Drake’s unexpected saviour shoved her backwards with such force that she was almost knocked off her feet. As it was, she had to scramble to regain her footing.

‘Enough,’ a gruff, accented voice decided. ‘I didnae save the man just to watch you beat him tae death.’

Drake felt a chill run through him at the sound of that voice, even as the rational part of his mind cautioned him that such a notion was almost impossible. It couldn’t be the man he thought it was. It just couldn’t.

‘My husband is dead because of him!’ Laila shouted, jerking a finger towards Drake. She was trembling visibly with fury. ‘He must answer for this.’

‘Aye,’ the voice agreed. ‘He will. But first he’ll answer tae me.’

With that, he turned around to regard the man lying on the floor of the cave, bruised and battered and exhausted. The moment Drake caught sight of his face, took in the familiar – if aged – features of the man he’d once considered both a friend and a mentor, he knew his suspicions had been proven horribly correct.

‘Matt,’ he managed to say.

The last time he’d seen Matt Cunningham had been nearly a year earlier, in the aftermath of a desperate gun battle in Afghanistan that had left one of his team dead and two others injured. The same night that Cunningham himself had tried to kill him.

Drake had promised to make him answer for his betrayal that night, if ever their paths crossed again. Apparently someone up there possessed a sense of humour, because now that they’d encountered each other again, Drake was in no condition to make him answer for anything.

Ignoring Drake for the moment, Cunningham directed a stream of Arabic to a young man dressed in Bedouin desert clothes standing nearby. Straightaway the youth moved forward and took Laila by the arm, escorting her gently but firmly deeper into the cave. The glow of another fire caused the two figures to cast grotesque shadows on the uneven walls.

‘Useful, that one,’ Cunningham remarked, watching her go. ‘Her being a doctor and all. She’s one of the reasons you’re still above ground. Well, in a manner of speaking, at least,’ he added, glancing up at the rocky roof. ‘By my reckoning, that’s twice I’ve saved your life now, son.’

Drake could scarcely imagine a more unlikely saviour, or a more unwelcome one. ‘How did you find me?’

‘I saw you in Nalut,’ Mason explained. ‘You and the lass from Afghanistan. Didn’t take long to figure out something was up.’

Drake closed his eyes, replaying McKnight’s earlier warning in his mind. A Western man with a greying beard, watching them from the other side of the road, only to vanish a short time later. It had been easy enough to dismiss at the time, but never could he have imagined that it was this man.

‘So you followed us out here?’ he asked.

‘Not exactly. The young lad you saw there; Iskaw’s his name. He ran into the rest of your team earlier today, rushed here and told me about it. So we came to question them. As it turned out, Laila there was the most cooperative of the bunch. She told us you’d planned to meet up with the others, so I sent the boys out to search for you. Lucky I did. You were about as close to death as I’ve seen any man. Even I had my doubts if you’d make it.’

Drake ignored that part. He didn’t need Cunningham to tell him how close he’d come. ‘What did you do with them?’ he demanded, wondering if he was cold and ruthless enough to have disposed of them once he’d learned what he needed.

‘The team comes first, eh? I expected as much,’ Cunningham said, his tone half mocking. ‘Aye, they’re alive, before you go fretting about them.’

He leaned in a little closer, taking in Drake’s dishevelled appearance. His expression made it plain he didn’t like what he saw. ‘You look like shit,’ he decided. Reaching behind him, he unscrewed the lid from a water bottle and thrust it at Drake. ‘Here, drink this. You need it.’

Drake eyed the water bottle warily, saying and doing nothing for several seconds. Being dragged unconscious to this place was one thing, but willingly accepting help from a man who’d tried to kill him the last time they’d met was quite another. Nevertheless Drake was now all too aware of the ravenous thirst that had seized him.

Knowing Drake well enough to guess his thoughts, the older man smiled in amusement. ‘There’s a lot of good reasons to die. Pride’s not one of them, mate.’

Reluctantly Drake snatched the bottle out of Cunningham’s hands, held it to his lips and drank. The water was warm and tasted faintly of chemicals – likely purification tablets – but to a man who had come close to dying from thirst just hours earlier, it felt like vintage champagne at that moment.

It was all he could do to control himself enough to keep from gulping it down in one go, though he knew that that would do more harm than good. It had to be taken slowly at first, sipped in small doses so that his shrunken stomach could adapt to the sudden influx of hydration.

‘How’s the head?’

‘Like you care,’ Drake fired back.

Cunningham eyed him with disapproval. ‘If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t have sent the boys out looking for you. And I definitely wouldn’t have wasted my afternoon dragging your sorry arse all the way here, just to have you dirty my beautiful home.’ As he said this, he spread his arm out in a grand gesture to encompass the small cave.

‘You live here?’

‘Aye, from time to time. It’s cheaper than the Hilton, and a handy place when I’m doing business in the area.’

Drake frowned. ‘What kind of business?’

Cunningham reached into his pocket, found a packet of cigarettes and fished one out, lighting up and taking a draw before he spoke. ‘I was a wee bit short on job prospects when I left Afghanistan last year. And my boss wasnae around to give me a reference, if you catch my drift.’

He certainly did. Richard Carpenter, the head of the private military company that Cunningham had worked for, had been assassinated by Anya after trying to have Drake’s entire team murdered. Not long after, his double-dealings with an Afghan warlord had been exposed to the world, resulting in the dissolution of what remained of his company.

‘Your boss was a lying, murdering piece of shit. He killed good people for money.’

‘No argument here.’ Cunningham shrugged, as if that were enough to put the matter to bed. ‘Anyway, I went freelance, taking work where I could get it. Turns out I’m good at finding people – especially the kind who don’t want to be found.’

It all seemed to fall into place then.

‘You’re a bounty hunter,’ Drake said, his voice carrying an undertone of disdain.

There were lots of men like him in places like this nowadays. Iraq in particular had been swarming with freelancers during Drake’s tour there, all hoping to claim the lucrative bounties placed on the heads of former regime members by the CIA. Most had been unemployed ex-military types looking for a quick payday, others mere wannabes out to make a name for themselves, while a few had been true hardcore mercenaries in the strongest sense of the word. Men who had fought and killed all across the globe, wherever the tides of war and fortune took them.

Those belonging to the latter category were some of the most genuinely frightening men Drake had ever encountered.

‘No need to say it like that, mate. A man’s got to work,’ Cunningham reminded him. ‘Anyway, you should be thankful I got into this business. You’re the reason I came to Libya in the first place.’

‘Me?’

‘Aye, you. Kidnapping one of the Mukhabarat’s best and brightest in the middle of the night, from his own home no less. Not a bad job you pulled there, if you don’t mind me saying. Shame it all went tits up from there. But you can bet the Libyans weren’t so impressed. They put a price on your head – a very hefty one actually – plus a bonus for returning Tarek Sowan alive. Looks like I won’t be collecting that.’

It didn’t take a genius to see where he was going with this. Cunningham’s inexplicable concern for his welfare made a lot more sense now. ‘So what now? You turn me and the others in, collect your bounty and fuck off?’

‘That’s one way this could play out.’

‘Is there another?’

‘That depends on you, Ryan.’ Cunningham took another draw on his cigarette. ‘What’s on the laptop?’

Drake looked away, saying nothing. He had made the mistake of trusting this man with his secrets once already; he had no desire to do so again.

‘Playing the strong, silent type isn’t going to help you here, son. You kidnap a senior Libyan official, then let him go free, then travel
back
to Tripoli before ending up way out here with an encrypted computer. That’s a pretty strange chain of events, even for you. So my question is, why?’

‘What are you going to do? Kill me like you tried to in Afghanistan?’ Drake challenged him, his green eyes flashing in the firelight.

‘I don’t expect you to trust me,’ he conceded. ‘Or forgive me.’

‘Good, because I don’t plan on doing either of those things.’

For a moment, he actually saw a flicker of pain in the older man, as if his words had genuinely hurt him.

‘I made mistakes, Ryan. Aye, none of us can say we haven’t. But I made mine, I admit it, and there’s not a day goes by that I don’t regret what happened.’ Taking one last draw on the cigarette, he flicked it into the campfire and leaned in a little closer. ‘You might hate me. You might even wish me dead. Christ knows, I wouldnae blame you. But I’m probably the only person in this country who
doesn
’
t
want to kill you right now, so maybe you should think twice before you burn that bridge. Like I said, there are a lot of good reasons to die, but pride isnae one of them.’