Matt Hilton - Blood and Ashes

‘He was just looking for a way out of his predicament. He knew that if he didn’t talk, I was going to kill him.’

Rink didn’t have an answer for that. Instead he said, ‘There’s always the chance that Hicks still has the original flasks. Maybe he’s planning on using them for something else and Lincoln Square was just a warning of worse to come.’

I didn’t credit that; why would Hicks go to the effort of fabricating an explosion? But I went along with my friend. Rink was trying to find justification for killing Kwon, and this was a feasible way out of his funk. It wasn’t in me to deny him the peace of mind. ‘I think we need to speak to Walter without Vince being in the same room. What do you reckon?’

The two commandeered motorcycles were still parked where we’d left them. ‘I’m up for it,’ Rink said.

Less than a minute later we were kicking the bikes into life, pulling out through the cordon of police vehicles. There was a shout and Vince came dodging through gaps in the parked cars, but I resolutely ignored him. Rink was correct: too many contradictory elements were at play. It was time we had a private conversation with Walter without the young agent eavesdropping on our every word.

On our way to FDR Drive, we discovered that the traffic had resumed its normal flow. Once they heard the news that the explosion at Lincoln Square had been nowhere near as disastrous as the first accounts had it, the people of Manhattan had returned to a semblance of normality. Finding a way back to the office opposite the Woolworth Building wasn’t a simple task, but that was due to our unfamiliarity with this section of the city rather than the hold-up in traffic. Worried that Walter had already moved on, now that events had proven less serious than feared, we pushed the bikes to their limit. When we arrived at the building I was glad to see the CIA man’s personal bodyguards flanking the door. I’d conversed with both these men on occasion, had done them a kindness in a hotel in Miami when they’d otherwise been ignored by their boss, but that didn’t mean a thing. Both men reached for their handguns as we headed for the door.

Once the guards had checked with Walter that all was fine, they allowed us to enter. A wink their way was reciprocated by a nod of respect from both.

‘I thought you might head back here,’ Walter said, getting up from behind his desk. Then he craned his neck to see past us. ‘No Vince this time?’

‘We gave him the slip,’ I said.

Walter touched a finger to his lips, then said loudly, ‘Come with me. I just bet you’re ready for a coffee?’

That the room was bristling with listening devices was a given, and we went with him extolling the virtues of a strong Americano. Once out of the room, Walter told his guards to stop anyone entering his office. ‘You don’t let a soul in there. Not Stephen Vincent, not even the President if he turns up. Got it?’

He led us along a corridor and up a short flight of stairs. We went out through the main foyer of the building and found an espresso bar a short walk away. Walter ordered drinks, then patted his pockets. ‘Ah, my wallet’s back in my office.’

‘Cheapskate,’ I grunted, and handed dollars over to the barista.

The coffee shop was not the ideal location for talking over state secrets, so we walked, finding a bench in City Hall Park that was protected from the rain by the thick canopy of branches above. The leaves were long fallen, but the branches were thickly woven so the trees also served to conceal us from sight and directional microphones. The tinkle of a fountain made the only happy sound; everything else was the dull groan of traffic on Broadway, the hushed tones of pedestrians stunned by the recent events. Walter sat in the middle, like he was a tome wedged in place by sturdy bookends.

‘What I’m about to tell you must never be repeated,’ Walter began. ‘I need your word on the subject, boys. No exceptions.’

Rink cursed. I felt as though someone had just drilled a white-hot spear into my guts and was twisting it with malicious glee.

‘You’ve lied to us, Walter. Now you want us to swear a solemn oath to you?’

‘You are honourable men, Hunter. Your word binds you. Without it our conversation ends here. You can go back to Florida and forget all about Carswell Hicks and everything else you’ve heard here.’

I sipped coffee, mindless of the steam burning my lips. I couldn’t taste a thing. I leaned forward past Walter and met my friend’s eyes. ‘I gotta know,’ Rink said.

I nodded for us both. ‘OK, Walt. You have our word.’

Walter placed his cup on the floor between his feet while he searched for his cigar in his jacket pocket. The cigar was proof of Walter’s concentration over the past few hours, having been chewed down to a short stogie. He jammed it between his teeth, a necessary emotional crutch as he gathered himself to tell all. As soon as he started to speak, I felt dirtier than when I had been muddy and blood-spattered back in the Alleghenies.

‘The Senate Judiciary Committee has made life very difficult for the entire intelligence community, and as you know they absolutely despise the CIA. If it were up to them the Agency would’ve been disbanded a long time ago.’ Walter shifted on the park bench, holding out his cigar and studying it: a habit he was no longer aware of, a conditioned response to something he found distasteful. ‘Their lawyers scrutinise everything we do, enforce their liberal ideas of the way in which we should treat enemies of the state. You can blame Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib if you wish. It was the furore over the perceived mistreatment of enemy combatants that has led to this.’

‘You’re talking about the reactivation of Arrowsake?’ I asked.

‘I am. Because we can’t move without the full scrutiny of the Judiciary Committee, we had to come up with a new way to combat the threat to our country. You know the facts, and I don’t have to reiterate them. We are allowing our enemies to defeat us through our blase attitude to our impending destruction.’

Rink downed a mouthful of coffee. He turned and the wash of heat from his breath reached all the way to me. ‘I get the feeling that we ain’t talking about greenhouse gases or melting icecaps. You’re talking about how the move for tolerance and indulgence is weakening us in the eyes of the world.’

‘When the Nazis were defeated at the end of the Second World War, they laughed. They said there would be no need of a third war when they could dominate Europe through control of the financial institutions and by the subtle manipulation of peoples’ beliefs. Well, you just have to look around you to see that they were right.’

‘Carswell Hicks doesn’t seem to think so,’ I said.

Walter licked his cigar and placed it carefully in the corner of his mouth. ‘I’ll come to Hicks in a moment. And I’m not necessarily talking Nazis here. I’m talking about any nation which has a hard-on for the US, or the West in particular.’

Shifting uncomfortably, I took a look around the park. Nearby was a young mother pushing her twin babies in a buggy. She was hurrying and it had nothing to do with getting out of the rain. Where she was going I’d no idea, but the look on her face said she wasn’t too concerned about that, only with actually taking her children there safely. I swished the dregs of my drink, hardly conscious of having downed it. ‘Walter, this is taking too long. I get what you’re saying. The West is perceived as weak, and Arrowsake has been reactivated to show the world how they’ve got it wrong.’

‘Yes,’ said Walter. ‘That’s pretty much it. Because of the magnifying glass the intelligence community has been placed under, Arrowsake has been tasked with conducting a series of incidents that will remind everyone how ineffective a softly-softly approach to policing the world is. Hunter, you were in the UK when the London subway system was attacked, yet, a few years on, the British people are tiptoeing around their enemies for fear they make a politically incorrect slip of the tongue. The Islamic community is growing so large that within twenty years there’ll be no need for terrorists planting bombs on buses, they’ll have a large enough population to vote in a Muslim as Prime Minister. Two decades from now, Britain could be looking at a government under Sharia law and thinking, How the fuck did this happen?’