Matt Hilton - Blood and Ashes

‘It’s set up?’

‘Of course. All they need is paying and it’s a done deal.’

‘They’ve come through?’ Hicks couldn’t help glancing at the boxes stacked in the room.

Lloyd laughed. ‘Sure they’ve come through. But you don’t think I’m going to be as crazy as to store the goods here, do you? Are you insane, Cars? I’ve enough Agent Orange bubbling through my veins without exposing myself to any of that crap!’

Hicks shared the laugh, again unimpressed by Lloyd’s offhand insult.

‘When and where?’

Lloyd turned to his computer, placing down the empty whiskey bottle so he could jab at keys. He brought up an email account for which he and Hicks shared administration tasks. He opened a draft document and typed in the details. He didn’t send the message. Hicks could enter it from any console and read the draft, before deleting it. That way there was no record of the message and no chance of them being traced by it. It was the same method used to communicate by many terror cells, the way in which 9/11 and the London bombings were allegedly planned.

When Lloyd turned round again, he was surprised to find that Hicks had opened the door and that the minder was standing in the doorway. In his hand was a gun, a tubular suppressor screwed on to the barrel. Lloyd, a veteran of combat, couldn’t even get his feet to move, let alone reach for a weapon. ‘Cars? What the hell is this?’

Hicks smiled coldly. ‘Thanks for setting up the meeting with the Koreans, Jim. I couldn’t have done it without you.’

Lloyd eyed the gun pointing directly at his face. ‘This is some way to show your gratitude.’

‘Oh, no,’ Hicks said. ‘This is payback. I think you set us up, Jim. You were the one who introduced Vince Everett to your daughter, knowing full well he was FBI, and you’re the one who warned Don Griffiths that we were coming. And you know something, Jim, I think you were the one who tipped off Griffiths the first time round and had me jailed for more than nine years.’

Lloyd’s groan told Hicks that everything he’d just charged his old friend with was the truth. He jerked his chin and his minder fired in response. The bullet struck Lloyd’s forehead and he dropped to the floor with a flexibility that gallons of Tiger Balm would never give him. The little dog yelped in response, cowering in a corner of the room.

Hicks pulled on a pair of leather gloves, then accepted the gun from his minder’s hand. He went and stood over his old comrade. Looked down on him. Fired twice into his chest. This time the dog stayed quiet.

‘And just in case I was totally wrong about you, Jim, I’m sorry. But I had to kill you anyway. Seeing as you aren’t capable of leaving this dump, I wouldn’t want you to suffer through what I’ve planned for the Big Apple.’

When he’d read what Lloyd had written on the screen Hicks deleted the message. Then for good measure he shot Lloyd in the head a second time.

‘By the way, that’s for calling me a pig’s ear, Jim.’

SAC Birnbaum’s helicopter transported me, Rink, and Agent Vincent to a clearing alongside a tumultuous river in the Adirondacks in New York State. On the opposite bank of the river the trees grew thick on the sloping hills, but on this side the ground had been cleared and made way for a two-storey wooden cabin and outbuildings. Cars parked at the rear of the buildings had been visible as the chopper descended. They were town cars, black with tinted widows, sitting low on their chassis due to the concealed armour plating. Hard-looking men in heavy overcoats stood ready by the cars. They weren’t an unusual addition, considering who we’d come here to meet, but the numbers didn’t seem to add up.

‘What kinda party are we gatecrashing here?’ Rink asked.

‘Beats me, but there’s only one way to find out,’ I said.

Vince didn’t offer an explanation. He’d been unforthcoming about many things since we met him the day before. All he’d allowed was that we had to make the trip to the Adirondacks due to an urgent change in plans. He’d left the meeting telling us to eat and to get some rest. His parting shot, ‘You’re going to need all the strength you have.’

We’d dined, but neither of us had got much rest.

On the flight from Pennsylvania, Vince had conducted business over a satellite telephone, often shouting to make himself heard over the thrum of the rotors. Despite the racket Rink snored but I was too wired to doze, even though I could count on one hand the hours of sleep I’d caught in the last few days. I felt mildly nauseated, telling myself it was due to the turbulence as rain-laden wind assaulted the chopper from all angles, and it was a good feeling when I finally set my feet on sturdy ground. But that wasn’t why I’d felt queasy; it was the horrible sense of foreboding clawing at my insides that was responsible.

I was wearing the winter coat purchased in Hertford, and was glad of it. It was even colder here than it had been in the Alleghenies and the rain had built from a steady drizzle to a deluge. It was like the winters I’d left back home in northern England, but I didn’t feel even slightly nostalgic. I joined Rink and Vince in jogging towards the beckoning warmth of the log cabin a hundred yards away.

Before we’d made it halfway there the door of the cabin swung open and a man stepped out, an unlit cigar jammed between his teeth. Maybe it wasn’t that warm inside the cabin because the rotund man was sheathed from knees to throat in a quilted parka and had a flat cap pulled low on his round head.

The rain conspired to soak us before we reached sanctuary, driving from the heavens. The sound was like the thunder of hooves, and a sheet of teeming water obscured Walter Conrad from sight.

‘I’m missing Florida already,’ Rink muttered into my ear.

‘Tell me about it.’

We ducked under the canopy at the front of the cabin, but the pounding rain made greetings pointless. Rink shook himself like a dog. I stamped. Vince tried to put his hair in some order. Walter directed us all inside, using his cigar like a band leader’s baton. I was last through the door, and as I entered it wasn’t the plushness of the interior that gave me pause for thought: it was the three men reclining on easy chairs.

Each was as old as the next, probably in their mid- to late seventies. Like Walter they all had the grey pallor of men who spent their days in places hidden from the light of day. They reminded me of a cabal of ghouls who’d risen from their crypts in the dead of night to feed on the corpses of humanity. It wasn’t the disquieting affect these men exuded that made me pause, but the fact that I knew all three faces. Here, in Walter’s bolt-hole in the Adirondacks, sat the men behind Arrowsake. Without exception I’d believed each one of them dead. Rink cast me an indiscreet frown, equally perplexed by the reanimation of these supposedly dead men.

All three of them smiled at me, but with expressions reserved for prodigal children. A worm of unease crept up my spine: if we’d been manipulated by Arrowsake in the past, then this was positive proof that they weren’t finished with us yet.

I never pretended to understand the politics behind the shadowy organisation, of which even those in the top echelons of government had little or no genuine knowledge. Arrowsake had fielded search-destroy teams in total contradiction of political convention and international treaty, under the aegis of total deniability. As such, the men at the head of the organisation were neither politicians nor military leaders, therefore member states could not be held culpable for their actions. In effect, Arrowsake was a ghost organisation that didn’t officially exist, and it was headed by men who had no tangible presence upon the earth. When Arrowsake fell foul of the modern war on terror, its members had been disbanded, and those at the head of the organisation had been struck from the annals. In effect, the three men here had been metaphorically killed, if not physically so. They had disappeared without trace.