The Darkest Day

SEVENTEEN

‘I mean,’ the client was quick to clarify, ‘she used to be one of my people.’

‘Who are you?’ Victor asked.

The client handed the image back. ‘My name’s Jim Halleck.’

He held out his hand. It was strong and worn and coarse. Victor looked at the hand suspended between them and kept his own near his hips.

Halleck let his hand fall back to his thigh. ‘No reason why we can’t be friendly.’

‘There’s every reason.’

‘Whatever. Muir said you keep your name to yourself. She refers to you as Tesseract.’

‘It’s a code name I can’t seem to shake.’

‘Better than no name. Guess I’ll do the same as Muir and call you Mr Tesseract.’

‘I’d prefer you didn’t.’

Halleck shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’re not exactly leaving me a lot of choice, are you?’

‘What are you, CIA?’

‘Not exactly. I’m as much CIA as you are. Affiliated, but not officially. I run my own task force. A small, elite crew. We’re independent, but connected with all the usual suspects. We work with the Pentagon, DIA, CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, FBI, and foreign intelligence services as well as with the CIA.’

‘The Activity?’

Halleck shrugged a hand, dismissive. ‘That’s an out-of-date label. The Activity doesn’t exist any longer. At least, not how it used to be. Now, it’s branched and split off into many different unacknowledged black-ops units. Some of the originals are still around, somewhere.’

‘And you control one of these offshoots?’ Victor asked.

Halleck nodded and scratched the back of his neck.

Victor said, ‘Tell me about her.’

Halleck said, ‘She went rogue three years ago during an op in Yemen. At the time we thought she had simply gone AWOL. It happens. People cut and run from the intelligence community like they do from the army. Not often, but there you go. Then she turned up, twelve months after she vanished, as a freelance shooter. We’ve tried tracking her, of course. But obviously she knows a lot about how we work and how to stay off the radar. Recently, she’s been hitting targets close to home: CIA assets and agents in the Middle East and Europe. She goes by the handle Raven.’

‘What’s her real name?’

‘Constance Stone. You were right, what you said. She grew up in the US but her father is Indian, of Persian descent. She was originally CIA, a star of the Special Activities Division. A career operative, straight out of college. No military background, not that you’d know. I worked with her and saw her talents were being wasted. I offered her a job with my unit and trained her up and she became my best operator.’

‘Why did she go rogue?’

Halleck shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Why does anyone move from the public sector to the private? It pays better.’ He looked back at Victor from over one shoulder. ‘Isn’t that your story too?’

‘I’ll keep my story to myself, if it’s all the same to you.’

‘I already know your story.’

Victor said, ‘Keep telling yourself that.’

Halleck turned round and leaned back against a wall. He rolled his shoulders to loosen some tension. He’d been standing up for a long time.

Victor said, ‘Why would she be protecting Al-Waleed?’

‘You’re suggesting it isn’t merely a coincidence?’

Victor remained silent.

‘Al-Waleed has been on our list of problems for a long time. As far back as when Raven worked for me.’

Victor was shaking his head before Halleck had finished. ‘No, she hasn’t been sitting idle for three years waiting for you to make a move on him. She knew when and where the kill was going to take place. So her intel is up to date.’

‘That’s impossible.’

‘If it were impossible we wouldn’t be having this conversation now. She’d found out somehow that the prince was a target and I was the shooter. Either you have a leak or she still has access to your data.’

‘Shit,’ Halleck said. ‘But why? Why would she protect him?’

‘Because she’s freelance. Because, like you said, the private sector pays better. If she knows who you plan to assassinate, she can make a pretty penny helping to prevent that happening. If someone was going to kill you, how much would you pay to make sure they failed?’

Halleck looked away.

Victor said, ‘Have you lost any people recently?’

‘Killed? No.’

‘Or captured unexpectedly while spying?’

Halleck exhaled. His lips were tight.

‘She’s selling your people out. She’s sabotaging your operations. Why?’

‘For the money, like we’ve established.’

‘What did you do to her?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘She’s coming after your unit any way she can. Maybe she’s cashing in at the same time, but if she’s as good at staying under the radar as you’ve suggested, then bringing herself out into the open like this is incredibly risky. She’s not going to do that unless she has a very good reason. So, I’ll ask you again: what did you do to her?’

Halleck swallowed. ‘Not to her, her boyfriend.’

‘Continue.’

‘She had a romantic relationship with one of my men. He was on her team in Yemen. They were going after a terrorist cell…’ He paused, and looked at the ceiling. ‘But the intel was bad. She narrowly escaped. Her lover wasn’t so lucky.’

‘She blames you?’

‘My sources were reliable, but no one is one hundred per cent, are they? It was bad luck. She didn’t see it that way. Like I said before, she went AWOL.’

‘And now she’s back for revenge.’

‘That’s your conclusion, not mine. But if you’re right, she has lists of our deepest agents and blackest of black operations. She’s already got one of my men locked up for life in a Shanghai prison and sabotaged the Prague job. Who knows what she’s going to do next?’

Victor paused for a moment because he heard footsteps in the alleyway outside and pictured Halleck’s men, but ignored the sound when he also heard children laughing.

‘How did she know I was to be Al-Waleed’s assassin? I shouldn’t be on any list.’

‘The CIA is a spy agency second and a bureaucracy first. Everyone is on a list. We have lists of lists.’

‘Why haven’t I been told about this threat before?’

‘Because until you identified her, we didn’t know who she was and who she was after. In case you failed to notice, she’s good. I trained her, after all.’

‘Which is more likely: a leak, or Raven still having access to your files?’

‘A leak. I don’t believe any of my guys would, but even if Raven was any kind of hacker, there is no way she’d know her way around our system now. A lot changes in three years.’

‘Find the leak.’

‘Oh, I plan to. And I’ll deal with it, don’t you worry about that.’

‘I never worry. When you find out who is doing this, pass me their details.’

‘Hold on there, friend,’ Halleck said with raised palms. ‘If someone is selling us out to Raven, then they’ll get what’s coming to them. But through the courts. I’m not handing them over to a cold-blooded killer. No offence.’

‘None taken,’ Victor said. ‘But I don’t plan to kill them. I only want to use them to get to Raven. In the meantime I want her file. I want every sliver of intel you have on her.’

‘Why?’

‘I would think that was obvious.’

‘You’re going after her?’

Victor nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘Even though you don’t think she was targeting you directly?’

‘That’s my judgement based on limited evidence. It’s going to take a lot more to convince me. If I’m a target, I want to know about it and I want to know why and most importantly, I want to eliminate that threat on my terms. I have enough people to look out for without adding Raven too.’

‘If you go after her, then even if you’re not a target, you will end up as one.’

‘I have to act like I am anyway. Making it a reality doesn’t make a lot of difference.’

‘Okay,’ the client said with a nod. ‘I’ll have Muir pass on Raven’s particulars.’

‘No. I deal with you directly. I don’t want an intermediary.’

‘What do you have against Muir?’

‘Nothing. But I have plenty against information being shared beyond those who need to know.’

‘I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that arrangement. I went to Muir in the first place. I know her. She should stay in the loop.’

‘I don’t care what you think. You sent me to kill a target and now I have one of your former assets after me. You owe me. So we do things my way.’

Halleck considered this. ‘Doesn’t sound like I have a lot of choice.’

‘That’s because you don’t.’

‘And what if Muir feels like I’m stepping on her toes if we cut her out?’

‘She’s a grown-up. She’s a professional. She’ll get over it. I’m sure her psych screening didn’t highlight any irrational tendency towards jealousy.’

‘Okay then. You’ll deal with me and me alone.’

‘I have a question about Raven,’ Victor said. ‘Before she went rogue, did she have any assignments in the Dominican Republic?’

‘Yes, maybe three years ago now. One of her last jobs before she went dark. Why?’

‘Did she work alone or with local assets or any former agency people out there?’

‘Yeah, a local asset. Why?’

‘Anyone she might have connected to; any reason for her to go back?’

‘She hasn’t been back there since. We know that.’

‘Who was the asset?’

‘Jean Claude Marte. He’s a fixer. Passports. You know the sort of thing. He’s in real deep with the cartels down there. Does all their documents. You probably know a dozen such guys.’

‘Two dozen,’ Victor said. ‘What’s his cover?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean: Marte doesn’t own a shop called Forgers R US. I mean: what’s his day job? What kind of business does he run that’s legitimate?’

Halleck thought about this, eyes going up and to the left, accessing memories that hadn’t needed recalling for maybe three years. He said, ‘If I remember correctly, he was a tobacconist.’

Victor opened the door. ‘Email me everything you have on Raven by midnight tonight. I’ll do the rest.’

‘You know,’ Halleck called after him, ‘this whole not explaining yourself thing is really quite annoying.’

‘I know,’ Victor said. ‘But that’s half the fun.’