Presence of Mine Enemies Read online

  “I have it in the back, saved for you—if you’d like to see it,” his friend went on, as eager as a child.

  And he did, more than anything else in the world. A treasure, found after so long—but Marsh found it impossible to get Greer’s voice out of his head. Dark and ominous. This concerns our friend in the Midlands.

  “I think I’d like to browse for a bit, if you don’t mind,” the former DG said, patting his old friend on the shoulder as he pushed past him, making his way toward the winding staircase leading to the shop’s second story, where he expected to find the counter-intel spook waiting for him. “I’ll see it before I leave.”

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather look at it first?” the old man’s voice called after him, something strange in his tone arresting Marsh where he stood. Could it be?

  He and Greer. . .they both knew Cyril, from years before. And his employment with Five was hardly the secret it once would have been—particularly now, in the wake of a departure that couldn’t have been more public.

  “On second thought,” he replied, turning, “I rather think I will.”

  Cyril disappeared into the back with one of his characteristically enigmatic smiles as Marsh stood by the counter, glancing distractedly through a stack of books balanced on the edge. Disraeli’s Sybil tucked in among Stevenson’s Kidnapped and a novel by Thomas Hardy. A late 19th-Century edition of Wuthering Heights perched atop the pile as if by the most careless of afterthoughts.

  “Here we are,” the bookseller’s voice announced a few minutes later, reappearing with a small volume in his hands. His voice trembling with genuine excitement as he passed it over to Marsh. “A first edition Puteshestvie v Arzrum. So very rare.”

  The former Security Service officer took the book from Cyril, opening its thin, weathered pages with a gentle reverence. And there it was. . .nestled just within the frontispiece. A scrap of very modern paper, folded in half—and within, an address.

  Phillip, you clever sod.

  6:16 P.M. Central European Summer Time

  Embassy of the United States

  Paris, France

  “. . .to end the campaign of murder by remote which has characterized American foreign policy abroad over the latter half of the last decade. It must—it will–end here. We—”

  The door of the chancery closed behind Daniel Vukovic even as the crowd of protesters without erupted into chants of “Drones kill kids! Drones kill kids!”

  God, what a disaster, the CIA chief of station thought, handing his briefcase over to a kid in the uniform of a Marine lance corporal. Taking a step back to drop his keys and phone into the basket as he prepared to go through the final metal detector.

  He’d been on overseas duty when the news of Abu Ghraib first broke, and this furor over the Sinai was becoming far too reminiscent of those days for his liking. Blowback. Ever the bane of direct action.

  He shook his head, picking up his briefcase on the other side of the x-ray machine as he adjusted his identification badge—making his way deeper into the embassy, down the corridors toward the heavily secured wing known as Paris Station.

  And all of it so avoidable. If the Agency had only remained focused on its original mandate—intelligence collection—as it had been when he’d first joined the Intelligence Directorate as a young man in the early ‘90s, instead of reshaping itself into the quasi-paramilitary organization it had become in the years following 9/11.

  But the Cold War had been over for a decade and the Agency had been an organization in search of a mission.

  All of it understandable, looking back—justifiable, even. Like the drone program itself, a natural reaction against the years of media controversy surrounding the treatment of captured terrorists.

  Somewhere along the line, no one could quite say where, it had just become way easier to kill than to capture. Less noise, less drama—at least, when things went right.

  He could understand it. Didn’t mean he had to like it.

  Or accept his role in having to clean up after it any more gracefully.

  And now with this operation with the French consuming his attention. . .he wasn’t any less aware of the pitfalls of human intelligence operations than he had ever been, but even he had to concede that SIGINT was giving them nothing—had done nothing to stop the previous five attacks in France.

  The only solution was to get a man on the inside, and pray he stayed alive.

  LYSANDER. Vukovic badged himself into the station past another uniformed Marine. An ironic choice of codename. The Westland Lysander had been a British light monoplane during the Second World War, tasked with inserting SOE officers into occupied France to liaise with the Resistance.

  Many of them snatched up by the Gestapo not long after landing—betrayed by double agents and themselves turned back against their handlers in London.

  One could only hope its present-day namesake would fare better. With luck. . .

  5:29 P.M. British Summer Time

  “The Nell”

  The Strand, London

  The visage of Nell Gwynne stared down at Marsh from a portrait over the bar as the former director-general pushed his way through the crowded pub.

  A beautiful woman, he thought absently—his eyes scanning the booths for Greer, the faintest of smiles touching his lips as he recalled the history. A fairly scandalous London actress of the late 1600s, Gwynne was perhaps best known for having been the mistress of King Charles II—a king whom Nell, with her characteristically irreverent wit, had styled “Charles the Third”, as he was the third of her lovers named Charles.

  He caught sight of the counter-intelligence officer then, sitting in the darkest corner of the pub, his back to the wall. The remnants of a nearly-demolished lunch on the plate before him, a pint of beer sitting just to one side.

  “Julian,” Greer said as he approached, sliding into the booth across from him. “It’s good to see you once again.”

  Marsh just sat there for a moment, regarding his old comrade with a wary eye. He was a tall man, tall and thin—frail, almost, to appearances—a smoker’s rasp tinging his every syllable, thick glasses perched atop an aquiline nose.

  But appearances were deceitful, as the former director-general knew all too well. And whatever other adjectives one could have applied to Phillip Greer, “frail” wasn’t among them.

  “What’s with all the cloak and dagger, Phillip?” Marsh asked finally, breaking the silence. “First Cyril’s, now here. . .what are you going to tell me next, that you had people running countersurveillance on me all the way here?”

  “I did, as a matter of fact,” Greer announced calmly, plucking a stray crisp from among the wreckage on his plate. “Two of my men—officers I trust personally.”

  He shrugged, popping the crisp into his mouth and dusting the salt from his fingertips. “You’re still a person of considerable interest to people in high places, Julian. And I’d just as soon they not take undue note of this meeting today.”

  Fair enough.

  “Ashworth among them?” the former director-general asked coolly, his eyes never leaving Greer’s face. Patrick Ashworth was the former chief of the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, or “JTAC” as it was commonly referred to in the community—now the acting director-general of the Service following Marsh’s forced resignation.

  Greer just looked at him. “Patrick is. . .”

  “A good man,” Marsh interjected when the counter-intelligence officer paused, appearing to search for words. “A good man, and a competent officer with a long career in the Service. I shan’t allow my personal dislike for the man to color my assessment of his abilities. The PM could have done far worse.”

  “He’s a good man whose ‘long career’ began in the late ‘90s,” Greer retorted bitingly, seeming finally to find the words he’d been looking for. “He’s spent his entire career focused on terrorism, it’s all he knows—the world we knew, Julian, it’s a stranger to him.”

  And the world moves on w
ithout us. As it ever has.

  Marsh shook his head, smiling at the heat in his colleague’s tone. “As it is to most of our fellow officers today. Don’t waste time in mourning the ancien régime, Phillip—it’s not going to do any of us any good. So why did you ask me to come here today?”

  Greer looked for a moment as if he intended to continue, but then he shook his head, reaching for his pint. “The investigation into Arthur Colville’s murder is now essentially. . .closed. It will be kept up for another few months for the sake of the media, but we have our man.”

  “Are you serious?”

  He nodded, extracting a tri-folded piece of paper from the briefcase by his side and sliding it across the table toward the former director-general.

  “Should you be showing me this?” Marsh asked, hesitating—his fingertips resting on the very edge of the paper. “You’re aware that my clearance was—”

  “Sod your clearance, Julian. You being out doesn’t change the reality that you’re still one of the only men I trust. We picked this up off CCTV at a retail park nine miles east of Colville’s estate,” Greer continued as Marsh unfolded the paper to reveal a screengrab from a surveillance camera, “three hours after the established time of death. It’s Harold Nichols.”

  6:59 P.M. Central European Summer Time

  The apartment

  Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, Belgium

  “When one stretches forth his hand, he can hardly see it,” Harry breathed, reading aloud in Arabic from the Qur’an spread before him on the table as he sat alone in the apartment, “for any to whom Allah hath not granted light—there is no light.”

  He pushed back his chair, dropping to the floor and beginning a series of push-ups, reciting the next verse from memory even as he did so, his arm muscles rigid with tension as he struggled to push himself aloft. The words of the recitation coming out between gasps for breath. “Seest thou not that it is God whose praises all beings in the heavens and on earth do celebrate, and the birds with wings outspread?”

  Down and back up again. Down and up, down and up. Sweat beading on his bare chest as he pressed on, forcing himself to ignore the pain from his side. “Yea, to Allah belongs dominion of the heavens and the earth, and to Allah is the final destination of all.”

  He heard a key in the lock just then, holding his position for another long moment as the door opened, Reza’s voice calling out in greeting.

  “Ah, there you are, Ibrahim,” he heard a moment later, rolling over onto his back to see the younger of the two brothers enter the kitchen. “Salaam alaikum, my brother.”

  “Wa’ alaikum as-salaam,” Harry responded, pushing himself to his feet and reaching out to clasp the younger man’s hand, drawing him in for a brief embrace. “Where’s Yassin?”

  “At the boxing club,” Reza said, placing his laptop case on the chair as he turned to the refrigerator, pulling out a can of Pepsi.

  Again, Harry thought, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his undershirt as he walked back to the table. The boxing gym had become Yassin’s nightly haunt in recent weeks—the place he seemed to spend every waking hour he wasn’t searching for work, helping someone in the neighborhood out for extra cash, or attending prayers at the masjid.

  “I’m headed over there in a few minutes myself,” the young Moroccan continued earnestly, popping the top of his soda and tilting it back, “why don’t you join us?”

  He gestured toward the floor where Harry had so recently been doing his push-ups. “You’re trying to get back into condition, bro—you can do it way faster there.”

  No. If he was to have any chance of staying off the radar of Western intelligence long-term, it was going to mean keeping his head down. He started to shake his head “no”, but Reza’s next words arrested him.

  “You really should come tonight, man. Some of the brothers train there, and they meet for prayers afterwards. It’s a good time—I think you’d enjoy meeting them.”

  “Would that more of us had been granted such an opportunity.” Yassin’s words, coming back to him from the previous day. The fire in the young man’s eyes when he had spoken of jihad. If there was something there. . .

  “Praise be to the name of God, subhanahu wa ta’ala,” Harry said, forcing a smile to his face as he turned toward the young man. The most glorified, the most high. “Let me get my shirt—I’ll join you.”

  6:03 P.M. British Summer Time

  The Nell

  The Strand, London

  Nichols, Marsh thought—the sound of Greer’s voice and the noise of the pub around them seeming to fade away as he stared at the figure of the tall, dark-haired man in the image.

  The former CIA officer who had arrived in the UK several months earlier, on his own—acting without sanction. Gone rogue.

  In search of Tarik Abdul Muhammad, the Pakistani-born terrorist who was alleged to have been responsible for the Christmas Eve attacks on Las Vegas, Nevada.

  And now the attack on Her Majesty herself, he mused, for by the time Nichols had located his target, the attack was already underway. Good men, already dead.

  Marsh shook his head, his finger tracing over the surveillance photo—grainy and indistinct, but clear in the message it told.

  The deathly pallor of the American’s face, the way he was leaning heavily against the counter of the mini-mart, as if using it for support.

  As if wounded—which he had been, according to their best intelligence.

  Wounded desperately, and yet somehow he had managed to make it from the docks of Aberdeen all the way to Colville’s estate in the Midlands. Targeting the man who had financed the attack on the Queen, who had hoped to plunge England into civil war.

  And, in killing him. . .making him into the kind of martyr for his cause that Colville had always dreamed of becoming. Accomplishing more by his death than his life.

  “My God. . .what have you done?” the former director-general murmured quietly to the image, glancing back up at Greer. “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure,” the spook replied, his voice cold and certain. “The man who murdered Arthur Colville and took out his security team left quite a bit of his own blood behind. We sent DNA samples to the cousins over a month ago, and they came back with a positive match. It’s him.”

  A formidable man. As demonstrated by their own failure to find him.

  He’d tortured and killed a British citizen in order to get the information that had led him to his target. Co-opted not one, but two former officers of the Security Service for his own purposes. A bloody quest for vengeance which had ended that night in Aberdeen, a bomb killing Tarik Abdul Muhammad and his bodyguards—turning his vehicle into flaming wreckage.

  “So,” he began, re-folding the paper and sliding it back across to the table toward his colleague, “that settles it, doesn’t it? We weren’t involved in his death, no matter how damning the circumstantial evidence may have first appeared. The witch hunt in the press can be brought to a close, and the Service can get back to work.”

  “I wish it were that simple, Julian,” Greer responded, tucking the surveillance photograph back into his briefcase, “but none of this is ever going to see the light of day. We—”

  “For the love of God, why?” Marsh demanded, his dark eyes flashing as he leaned forward across the table. His own career was over, he knew that—but the Service, that was what mattered. All that had ever mattered.

  “Think about it,” the counter-intelligence officer responded calmly, seeming to rummage in his briefcase for a moment before retrieving a slim folder. “Releasing it is to no one’s benefit—not ours, certainly. And the Americans are not overeager for the media to explore the role their officer played. What difference would it make, after all? The relationship between the Service and the Agency is well-documented—if it were known that an American paramilitary officer had been responsible for Colville’s death, the media would simply pivot to the belief that Five had contracted out its dirty work. That the Americans had taken care o
f our ‘problem’ for us.”

  He was right, that was the worst of it. The narrative in the media, in the on-line blogosphere, was already too deeply embedded to be rooted out. They could only batten down the hatches and hope to ride out the storm.

  “Then I’m going to have to ask you again, Phillip—what does any of this have to do with me?”

  Greer paused for a moment, regarding him keenly across the booth.

  “Because,” he began, pushing the folder across the tabletop, “I think there’s more to this than either of us know to date. Look at this.”

  The former director-general took the folder from him, flipping it open to the first page. It took him a moment to realize what he was reading, and when he did he snapped the folder closed—his head coming up to meet Greer’s gaze, his voice coming out in a low hiss.

  “Are you out of your sodding mind?”

  7:20 P.M. Central European Summer Time

  The boxing club

  Brussels, Belgium

  The interior of the gym was cool and dimly lit, fans working overtime to dispel the summer heat as Harry followed Reza’s lead into the building—his dark eyes flickering back and forth, searching out every shadow.

  Knowing just how much danger he could be walking into. From all sides.

  Loud rock music was pulsating off the walls, drowning out nearly all else as they passed small knots of men gathered around the rings. An African man wearing a kufi—a traditional Islamic skullcap—atop his greying hair as boys in their teens, presumably his students, clustered around him.

  Young men, stripped to the waist, their chests gleaming with sweat as they danced beneath the lights—pummeling each other with gloved fists.

  And then he saw Yassin, in a ring near the back of the building—sparring with another young Arab, the two of them circling ‘round each other like cats, waiting an opportunity to pounce.