Читать книгу Blood Vendetta - Don Pendleton - Страница 12

Chapter 3

Bolan and McCarter met outside the headquarters of MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency. The fox-faced Briton, a Coke in his grip, was leaning against an iron railing and staring out at the Thames River, swollen from a recent rain. The Executioner noticed his old friend wore a black trench coat and a red necktie that occasionally lashed out from beneath the coat. A black leather valise stood on the concrete next to McCarter’s leg.

Seeing Bolan from the corner of his eye, McCarter turned and shot the Executioner a lopsided grin and a small wave.

“Welcome to paradise, Yank,” he said.

“Glad to be home?” Bolan asked.

McCarter shrugged. “Longer I’m away, the less it feels like home. Good to be here, though. I did get a hell of a deal on a Jaguar. Sweet little black number.”

“Love to see it.”

“See it from a distance, if it’s all the same,” McCarter said. “The cars you touch tend to end up pocked with bullet holes or blown to smithereens. I’d at least like to race this one once or twice before it ends up in the scrap heap.”

“Fair enough,” Bolan said, a smile ghosting his lips. “Our friends at MI5 playing nice?”

“Nice as can be expected, considering I just swooped in from across the pond and asked to see the family jewels. The bloke here, Damon Blair, seems decent enough. Balked a little at first, but got on board once he found out we have some heavyweights behind us.”

Bolan nodded. “Good, let’s go see what he has to say.”

* * *

BLAIR’S OFFICE WAS on the top floor of Thames House and had a window that overlooked the river. Blair was a small man, with straw-blond hair that was unkempt, a wide nose and large ears.

Bolan identified himself under his oft-used alias, Matt Cooper. Blair gestured for the two men to sit.

Bolan lowered himself into a chair that stood in front of Blair’s desk. McCarter took the seat next to him. Leaning forward, Blair laced his fingers together and set them on the desktop.

“Welcome to our fair city, Mr. Cooper,” Blair said.

“Matt,” Bolan replied.

“David says you’re looking for information.”

Bolan nodded.

“You want information on the Nightingale.”

Bolan nodded again.

“Man of few words, eh?” Blair said. “Well, not sure what I can offer you. As you can understand, we can’t—and I won’t—tell you specific sources.”

“Sure.”

“And the Americans probably have a lot of the same raw intelligence on this as we do. So I’m not sure what I have to add.”

Bolan crossed his legs, right ankle balanced on left knee.

“Fair question,” the big American said. “And, you’re right, our two countries probably have a lot of the same information, since we share so much. But you have two advantages. One, you’ve been following this individual for—what?—a couple of years now. And, two, you actually are on the ground. The shootings happened in Bayswater, just a stone’s throw from here. I’m guessing you’ve seen all the latest information on the shooting, including any police reports and other intelligence gathered. You know the area. You might have some insights into Nightingale’s behavior that a guy like me, someone who just parachuted into town, would miss entirely.”

Blair grinned. “So you can speak, eh? Okay, fair enough. What questions can I field for you two?”

The Executioner noticed the other man didn’t promise to actually answer the questions, but let it slide.

“What’s your take on the Nightingale?” Bolan asked.

Leaning back in his chair, Blair glanced at the ceiling and rubbed absently at his throat for a moment, apparently collecting his thoughts.

“She—our psychologists believe she’s a woman—she’s lost something. More likely she’s lost someone, maybe even several people, and she’s enraged. Probably so enraged she no longer feels or notices it. It’s like an arthritic joint. Bugs you all the time, affects how you move, maybe your choice in activities and lifestyle. But you’ve become so accustomed to it, you barely pay attention to it. Or you only do so on a limited basis.”

“I don’t buy it,” McCarter said. “How can someone be that bloody angry and not know it?”

“Pot meet kettle,” Blair said

“Don’t put me on the shrink’s couch,” McCarter growled.

“Above my pay grade.”

“She’s angry,” Bolan interjected.

“Enraged. Enraged, but conflicted. She obviously feels some guilt over what she does. That means she’s going against her grain by stealing.”

“Our analysts guessed the same thing,” the Executioner added.

Blair nodded. “That’s all low-hanging fruit. The real question is what does it all mean? And what is it about her that makes her handle her anger this way? A lot of people have bad things happen to them, things that change their lives and their perspectives. But this made her, well, a little daft. Not insane in the classic sense, mind you, but it knocked her off course. Our shrinks believe underneath all the rage and activity lies a lot of guilt.”

“For?”

“Whoever got hurt, she probably feels—or felt—responsible for them. Not for the action that hurt them, but for not being there to save that person. Maybe even for not being killed, too.”

“You mean survivor guilt,” Bolan asked.

“Sure. And a little bit of that is normal, especially with a tragedy. But this—starting a whole new life, going underground—smacks of someone trying to atone for something. Not just wondering why a bullet or a bomb didn’t take them instead. But really trying to atone for something done or, hell, not done for that matter.”

“That being?” McCarter asked.

Blair shrugged. “Hell if I know.”

“Thanks for crystallizing it, lad,” McCarter said.

Blair’s neck and cheeks turned scarlet. “Sorry, didn’t realize I was supposed to do all your damn thinking for you.”

Uncrossing his legs, Bolan leaned forward.

“You’re a smart guy,” Bolan said, his voice even. “You have a theory.”

“Lots of theories. That’s how I spend my days, collecting information and spouting theories. When it comes to this young lady, though, it seems pretty damned easy actually.”

Bolan gave what he hoped was an encouraging nod. Apparently it worked.

“If we have traced her history back far enough—and it’s a big bloody ‘if’—her first two strikes occurred less than five years ago. Hit the money men for al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the Iraqi branch. Pretty nice piece of work, that. From what we know their IT crew came straight from Saddam’s government, a Sunni who studied computer science at Oxford. Once we knocked Saddam out of power, this guy suddenly found himself out of a job, got pissed off and joined al Qaeda. Lots of Sunnis did that in those days.”

“Got a name?” McCarter asked.

“He does,” Blair replied. “Khallad Mukhtar. Not that it matters. The Americans took him out years ago. Hit his car with a Hellfire missile while he was tooling ’round Tikrit. Took out three other al Qaeda guys, his security detail, in the process.”

“Good show, that one,” McCarter said.

“Indeed. But here’s my point, Nightingale already hit him months before that. She also hit two guys in London, a couple of Saudis, couple of fire breathers. They collected all kinds of money from sympathizers, not just in the Middle East, but also Europe, and funneled it back to al Qaeda’s operations in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. One of those assholes got deported back to his own country. Saudis put him into a government-sponsored rehabilitation program. When he reappeared six months later, he was a changed man, denounced al Qaeda and the Jihad.”

“A real beacon of light,” McCarter said. He took a swig from his Coke and swallowed loudly.

“An organic change of heart to be sure,” Blair said, allowing himself a dour smile.

“So she went after Islamists from Iraq,” Bolan said. “You thinking she’s related to a soldier killed in Iraq?”

“That was my original thought,” Blair said. “But that didn’t sit well with me. Not entirely, anyway.”

“Because?”

“Originally, it was a gut feeling. But I started piecing this thing together more and found another common strand between our first targets.”

Turning slightly in his chair, the analyst’s left hand disappeared below the desktop and the soldier heard a drawer being pulled open. Blair hummed and Bolan heard papers rustling. When Blair’s hand came back into view, he had a photograph and a couple of newspaper clippings in his hand. He tossed the items on the desk. Bolan and McCarter leaned forward and studied the items.

The picture was a still photo of carnage. The crumpled remains of a train car on its side, its silver skin scorched black, the interior belching oily smoke. It apparently had been ripped from between two other cars and thrown from the tracks. The soldier saw firefighters armed with hoses dousing the car with water. An officer from London’s Metropolitan Police pointed at something unseen, mouth open in a yell, while two other officers ushered civilians away from the wreckage.

Blair smoothed down one of the rumpled newspaper clippings with his palm, pushed it forward so the Stony Man warriors could read it.

“I know I could have printed it out from the internet,” he said, “but I’m still partial to the newsprint-and-ink version.”

Bolan nodded, but focused his attention on the clipping.

Terror Bombing Kills Seven

Seven passengers were killed—including a pregnant woman on holiday—and three others were injured when a bomb planted by an Islamic militant group tore through a train car’s interior.

The dead also included four London residents, a French tourist and another American, a man believed to be the husband of the pregnant woman killed in Sunday’s explosion, authorities said.

In a statement sent to news organizations, a group of Islamic militants with ties to al Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsibility for the bombing. The act was meant as a protest against the presence of British troops in Iraq, according to the statement.

Bolan scanned through the rest of the article, but found few other details useful to his search. It mostly contained eyewitness statements and comments from police and politicians vowing to hunt down those responsible.

Blair spread out a second article on the desk. Between the headline and the story, Bolan saw the photos of seven individuals lined up.

With his index finger, Blair tapped the picture of a young woman. The photo portrayed her from the shoulders up. Her hair was blond and her mouth was turned up in a warm smile.

“That’s the American. Name’s Jessica Harrison. Beautiful young woman. According to a New York Times profile that ran at the time, she was six months pregnant. Her husband, Jeremy, was fresh from foreign-service officer school and was stationed at the London embassy. He’d been in the country four months before he was killed. She arrived that day. They were on their way from Heathrow to the U.S. embassy compound. Diplomatic cables and other information from your government pretty much confirmed the information in the Times piece.”

It struck Bolan that the analyst was drawing details completely from memory.

“You’ve spent a lot of time on this,” the soldier said.

Blair gave him a lopsided grin. “Shows, doesn’t it? Normal people have hobbies or, better yet, girlfriends. Anyway, I thought for sure this woman was the key. See, she had a twin sister, Jennifer Davis—Davis was the dead woman’s maiden name. Her sister worked for a couple of major U.S. banks. Really understood the nuts and bolts of financial transactions. And did I mention she oversaw information security at another point in her career?”

“Happy coincidence,” McCarter muttered.

“Smart woman, obviously. Quite lovely, too, though more serious than her sister, judging by the photos I’ve seen.”

“So she went underground?” Bolan asked.

“In a manner of speaking,” Blair said. “She’s dead.”

“Dead?” Bolan leaned forward.

“Very much so. As I said, she was my favorite guess for the Nightingale when I first started poring over all this stuff. But circumstances have forced me to change my mind.”

“‘Circumstance’ being that she’s dead,” the Executioner said.

Blair nodded. “Seems a logical conclusion to draw, doesn’t it? It’s not likely she faked her own death and just fell off the grid. I mean, right? Who does that?”

Bolan said nothing. In the waning days of his war on the Mafia, he’d done just that, allegedly dying after a bomb destroyed his war wagon. When that ruse fell apart, he’d been forced to stand trial for the blood spilled in his War Everlasting. Ultimately, he’d “died” a second and, as far as the public was concerned, final time. This time it had stuck, but that was partly because of his experiences as a soldier and the help of the White House and Stony Man Farm.

Presumably, this young woman had none of those resources at hand, he told himself.

“She died in a house explosion,” Blair said. “It was six months after her sister died. The local fire department blamed it on a gas leak. Neighbors saw her walk in after work. An hour later, an explosion tears through the house, incinerates the damn thing.”

“They thought it was suicide,” Bolan said.

“According to her coworkers and family, she collapsed when her sister died, took a month off work to recover from the shock. When she finally did come back, people said she’d changed. She was sullen, depressed and withdrawn.”

“No surprise,” McCarter said.

“Agreed. But as time went on, according to the interviews I saw, she got worse rather than better. Since her sister was lost in a terrorist attack, the authorities gave the case a hard look before they closed it, but they found no signs of foul play. She could have died from an accident, which seems plausible. She’d called the gas company to the house at least once about a month before the explosion to report the smell of gas. Or she gave up and killed herself.”

Bolan nodded. “If she’s dead, why tell us all this?”

“More to illustrate a point,” Blair said. “Jennifer Davis fits the profile pretty well. So do a couple of other women. They didn’t check out, either, for various reasons. If you’re trying to find the Nightingale, it won’t be easy. That’s really the point I am trying to make here. You’re chasing a ghost.”

They spent the next hour going through the other information Blair had, including other suspects who’d turned out to be false leads. The Stony Man warriors thanked Blair for his help and left Thames House, along with a flood of civil servants heading out for lunch.

“Fun to yank his chain, but he seems like a good enough lad,” McCarter said. “Not much help, though. Sorry for dragging you out here.”

“It’s been a long flight,” Bolan said. “Let’s see if Kurtzman dug up anything in the meantime.”

* * *

AFTER HIS VISITORS left, Blair forced himself to sit in his office and, for an excruciating twenty-two minutes, pretended to work. Finally, he grabbed his sack lunch from his bottom desk drawer, grabbed his windbreaker from a hook on the wall and headed out the door.

A nervous flutter in his stomach nagged at him and, as he made his way through the corridors of Thames House, he felt as though all eyes rested upon him. He bought a foam cup filled with hot tea from a street vendor and walked a few blocks from MI5’s headquarters, where he bought a couple of newspapers from a newsstand.

Though he tried to look nonchalant about it, he surveyed the streets for any signs he’d been followed. He saw nothing amiss, but knew that meant absolutely zero. He wasn’t a trained field operative. Though he understood surveillance and countersurveillance techniques and principles, he hadn’t applied them in the real world. Said other ways, he was out of his element, over his head or any other clichés one wanted to apply.

Folding the newspapers in half, he put them under his arm and continued on two more blocks to a small municipal park. With the edge of the folded newspapers, he brushed some leaves and other debris from a wrought-iron bench. He seated himself on the bench, drew his tuna sandwich from the bag and took a bite from it. Nerves continued to roil his stomach and he didn’t want to eat. However, he also wanted to make it look as though he was here in the park for a reason, some reason other than the truth.

The sandwich became a sticky ball inside his dry mouth and he washed it down with the tea. Three children played nearby. The middle one, a slim girl with long, blond hair, threw a ball to one of the other children, who caught it and tossed it back to her. She let loose with a giggle. A smile tugged at Blair’s lips, followed almost immediately by a mental image of Eleanor, face pale and still, the sound of his ex-wife sobbing, a swirl of people putting their hand on his shoulder, uncomfortably uttering words meant to comfort. The memory of his ex-wife, Daphne, sobbing, makeup smeared, cut him anew. A dull, all-too-familiar ache formed in the middle of his chest.

He set aside the sandwich. With his thumb and index finger, he reached into the breast pocket of his shirt, withdrew a phone and flipped it open. It wasn’t his phone; it had shown up inside his flat—the bastards had broken into his place while he was at work—and was in a brown envelope on his kitchen table.

With his thumb, he punched in some numbers. On the third ring, a woman’s voice answered.

“Yes?” the woman said.

“I got a visit,” Blair said.

“Okay.”

“They asked questions.”

“About our friend?”

“Yes.”

“And you told them what?”

“What we agreed I’d tell them. Nothing more.”

“Good.”