Silver (3 page)

The old man might call them the Forge, Noah called them the Lost Cause. It was a slightly different interpretation. Noah didn’t know who they reported to, who watched the watchmen, so to speak, but he assumed it was someone in MI6. Someone breathing the rarified air of the “higher ups.” The old man only ever referred to him or her as Control.

Noah didn’t know how the old man had picked his team. He didn’t know very much about them at all, despite the fact that every one of them would put their lives on the line for him. He knew that because they did, every day.

They put themselves into areas of unrest, sometimes to mediate, other times to facilitate, and when necessary, to bring the hammer down.

Good lies were simple lies, so they kept cover stories to a bare minimum. Less detail to remember meant less detail to forget. And of course, being deniable, any background checks run against any of the team would fail to find any links to the Secret Services.

Closest to him was Ronan Frost, the blue-eyed boy, steel-gray hair, steel-gray suit fashionably cut by Ted Baker. Frost didn’t look up. He had served with 1 Para in Kosovo in ’99 before joining the SAS’ Special Projects team—counterterrorists, to the rest of the world. Next to him was Orla Nyrén, every bit the Mediterranean ideal with her flawless olive complexion, rich chocolate eyes and shoulder-length black hair, fine bones and heart-shaped lips. She was actually mixed decent; her father came from a small Italian town down on the Amalfi Coast, her mother from the ice of northern Sweden. And Orla herself was a curious blend of both gene pools. Her Scandinavian heritage was obvious in her build. Coupled with her beauty—and she was beautiful, strikingly so, Noah thought—at half an inch shy of six feet she cut an imposing figure. Her Italian side manifested itself in other ways, most of them skin deep, including one hell of a temper. Noah had been on the receiving end of it once, and once was more than enough. Nyrén was ex-MI6, a Middle East intel specialist, fluent in a dozen languages, two of them dead. She was also the closest thing Noah had ever had to a crush.

On the other side of the table Konstantin Khavin inclined his head in greeting. Konstantin was ex-KGB and the very definition of the spy who came in from the cold: he had come over the wall in ’88 with nothing more than the clothes on his back and his id. He was older than the others, but he had lived the kind of life that carved itself into every inch of skin. His mouth was a thin slit like a knife cut above a dimpled chin. Noah had the distinct impression that the Russian only smiled when he wad to emphasize just how eager he was to take you outside and beat you bloody with fists and feet. Needless to say, Noah was quite happy that Konstantin wasn’t smiling. He sat there making a cat’s cradle out of his stubby fingers. The tip of the right index finger was missing and his shirt sleeves were rolled back on a cheap plastic digital watch.

They, each of them, had their own stories, their own flaws. None of them were squeaky clean or they wouldn’t have been working for the old man, but Konstantin was different. Sometimes it was impossible to tell if his stories were down to his rather dry Russian sense of humor or not. He had done things the rest of them couldn’t imagine, but he had a habit of reassigning all of the ills suffered by his people a place in his own story. He’d told Noah a story once of how he had been forced to walk down the street with his mother’s entrails draped around his neck to prove his loyalty to the State. Noah wanted to believe it was just one of Konstantin’s macabre stories because he couldn’t begin to imagine what kind of man could put a kid through something like that. It didn’t fit into his philosophy, and trying to claim that by doing it the nine-year-old Konstantin would somehow be proving his loyalty to some invisible government? It went beyond inhuman.

And then there was Jude Lethe, the cuckoo in this nest of soldiers, the team’s tech wizard. He was a nerd, but more than that, he was their nerd. He looked painfully serious in his black Joe 90 glasses.

Together they were Ogmios, named after the Celtic hero who himself was fashioned after the legends of Hercules.

What should have been the sixth seat at the head of the table was left open for the old man’s wheelchair.

These were his people, and they made an unlikely—and dangerous—group.

“So glad you could join us, Mister Larkin,” the old man said from his place at the table.

Noah nodded and took the last seat.

“Now perhaps we can get started?”

“Don’t mind me,” Noah said.

“Thank you.”

The old man adjusted the position of his wheelchair. It was the paraplegic equivalent of arranging his papers. He reached out and tapped his finger on the empty touchscreen, bringing the computer beneath it to life. The image on the wall array brightened immediately. Another tap and it started playing.

“London is one of the most closely watched cities in the world. There isn’t a square meter that isn’t covered by some sort of CCTV or private surveillance camera. What you are seeing now happened in Trafalgar Square at three p.m. today. There are various angles but they all show the same thing.” There was no need for Sir Charles to elaborate; the picture was worth considerably more than a thousand words. Noah watched the woman burn. She held her arms wide and turned and turned, stumbling finally as though she had become dizzy. “A minute before she committed suicide the woman placed a call to the BBC news desk,” the old man continued. He stroked the touchscreen, minimizing the freeze-frame of the burning woman on her knees, and brought up the audio recording of her call.

She spoke to them with the voice of the dead:
“There is a plague coming. For forty days and forty nights fear shall savage the streets. Those steeped in sin shall burn. The dying begins now.”

“Who is this? Who am I talking to?”
a second voice asked.

“I don’t need to tell you my name. Before the day is through you will know everything there is to know about me apart from one important detail.”

“And what’s that?”

“Why I did it.”

Sir Charles played it again.

And again.

Her final sentence hung in the air.

“Do we know who she is?” Orla Nyrén asked. She leaned forward in her chair. The woman had a habit of coming alive when things around her became interesting. Most people did, but it was her definition of interesting that set her apart from “most” people.

“Mister Lethe? Would you care to share your discovery?” Sir Charles inclined his head slightly.

pan>

“Our fiery female is one Catherine Meadows, age 39, graduate of Newcastle University, with no romantic entanglements. Ms. Meadows was, at the time of her combustion, a relatively well regarded forensic archeologist. Most recently she had testified at the Radovan Karadzic war crimes tribunal at The Hague. Her résumé reads like a Who’s Who—or Where’s Where, I guess—of archeology. But that’s it. That’s her life. She was obsessed with the past. She didn’t live in the here and now.

“Reading between the lines, she was a lonely woman more likely to end her day cuddling up with her cat, a cup of Horlicks and the latest episode of Eastenders, rather than locking lips with some gorgeous Lothario. There’s nothing here to suggest she might be typical terrorist material, or even atypical terrorist material,” he said with a shrug. “Indeed, right up to her going out in a blaze of glory I would have said Ms. Meadows was, for want of a better word, boring.”

“It’s amazing what you can find out with Google,” Noah joked.

“Actually, to be honest, half of this was out there in the public domain. Given her name and her picture, any one of you could have found it. She had a Facebook page that’s littered with pictures of her ginger tom, that links her up with the class of ’91 at Newcastle Uni, and had some rather unfortunate photographs dating back to her time as a Cure fan.” Lethe raised a wry eyebrow behind his glasses. “You would think an archeologist ought to have known that some things are best left in the past, wouldn’t you?” He chuckled at his own joke. “She’s written for a number of academic journals. The articles are likewise online for people with insomnia to peruse at their leisure.”

“So why burn herself like that? I mean, that’s a pretty extreme way to go,” Ronan Frost asked, his accent a soft burr now.

“In my country we would be looking for the invisible men,” Konstantin said, rather cryptically.

“Precisely,” the Irish man agreed with him. “Something about this stinks. A boring woman doesn’t just suddenly decide to set fire to herself on a whim. So who is hiding in the shadows? Who are the invisible men?”

“Sir Charles?” Lethe said, indicating the old man should pick up where he’d left off.

The single image on the plasma screens fractured into twelve seemingly identical ones. No, not identical, Noah realized, just remarkably—disturbingly—similar. The center of each screen was dominated by a burning figure. The time-stamp on each read 1500Z. But that was all they had in common.

Working his way around the screens he recognized Dam Square and the white stone pillar of the National Monument in Amsterdam, the glass pyramid of the Palais du Louvre in Paris’ first
arrondissement
, the red brick façade of Casa de la Panadería in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor, the towering majesty of the cathedral in Stephansplatz in Vienna, the obelisk in the heart of St. Peter’s Square in Rome, the Vatican hidden behind the flames, and the glass monstrosity of the Sony building in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. There were more cities and more monuments he didn’t recognize. Noah counted them, even though he knew full well there were twelve screens.

“Well
now
it is starting to get interesting,” Orla said. An errant strand of hair curled over her brow and across her left eye.

“Thirteen people set themselves alight in very public places all across Europe at exactly the same time? I’d say we’ve moved way beyond interesting,” Noah said. Interesting really wasn’t the word he would have chosen though. The whole thing had a fatalistic simplicity to it.

“Oh, it gets better than that, or worse, depending upon your perspective,” Jude Lethe told them.

“Don’t tell me, more of that Google-Fu?”

“Something like that,” Lethe said. He leaned forward and started rapidly manipulating the images on the screen, zooming each one in until the display was filled with their screaming faces. The detail and precision of the digital images was nothing short of horrific. The images were hideously sharp. Noah had seen enough death to last him a lifetime, but something about this, as Frost had said, was different. Wrong.

“Italy, France, Spain, Germany, England, Greece, Switzerland, Austria, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Russia,” Lethe reeled off the countries where thirteen martyrs had self-immolated. “You can’t really tell the ethnicity from the faces now, too much damage, but the facial recognition software picked up hits for all thirteen here in the UK.”

“You’re telling me they’re all English?”

Lethe nodded. “Passports issued by the UK and Commonwealth Office.”

“This is nuts,” Noah said, trying to take in the logistical nightmare of forcing thirteen people to commit suicide in public, and in such a violent manner. “What’s the news reporting? I presume it’s all over every channel in the world.” He found himself thinking about the old Smiths song “Panic,” though his imagination took it way beyond the streets of London and Birmingham.

“At the moment truth is rather fragmented,” the old man said. “As one would expect, the initial reports were very insular. Then within an hour of the event, the scope of the actual event began to come clear. Regional television stations were broadcasting identical CCTV images of the suicides. It’s difficult to deny the evidence of your own eyes, of course. No one wants to believe it. The reporters are playing down any connection, for now, but it is obvious for anyone to see.

“The actual content of the telephone calls hasn’t been broken yet, but that is only a matter of time. And when it does—and people hear that promise of forty days and forty nights of terror—then as the Americans like to say, everyone will just be waiting for the other shoe to drop. That is the kind of world we live in, I am afraid.”