Burning Angels

68

The big, powerful Audi barrelled along the Autobahn at breakneck speed. Raff had met them at the airport, and he was clearly in a hurry. In fact, they all were, and as Raff was as fine a driver as any, Jaeger wasn’t particularly worried.

‘So you found the kid?’ Raff asked, without taking his eyes from the dark road.

‘We did.’

‘Is he for real?’

‘The story he told us – no one could have made it up, and certainly not an orphaned kid from the slums.’

‘So what did you learn? What did he say?’

‘What Konig told us is pretty much the full story. The kid added a few minor details. Nothing significant. So, are we any closer to finding that island? Kammler’s island?

Raff smiled. ‘Yeah, we might be.’

‘Like how?’ Jaeger pushed.

‘Wait for the briefing. As soon as we get to Falkenhagen. Wait for that. So where is the kid now? Is he safe?’

‘Dale’s got him in his hotel. Adjoining rooms. The Serena. Remember it?’

Raff nodded. He and Jaeger had stayed there once or twice, when rotating through Nairobi with the British military. For a hotel in the centre of the city, it was a rare island of peace and tranquillity.

‘They can’t stay there,’ Raff remarked, stating the obvious. ‘They’ll get noticed.’

‘Yeah, so we figured. Dale’s taking him to a remote retreat. Amani Beach, several hours south of Nairobi. That’s the best we could come up with for now.’

Twenty minutes later, they pulled into the dark and deserted grounds of the Falkenhagen bunker. Oddly, considering the gruesome testing that Jaeger had been subjected to here, it felt somehow good to be back.

He woke Narov. She’d dozed through the journey curled up on the Audi’s rear seat. They’d hardly slept at all in the last twenty-four hours. Having extricated themselves and the kid from the knife-edge chaos of the slums, they’d been on a whirlwind journey ever since.

Raff checked his watch. ‘Briefing is at 0100 hours. You got twenty minutes. Show you to your rooms.’

Once in his bedroom Jaeger splashed some water on his face. No time for a shower. He’d left his few personal effects in Falkenhagen: his passport, phone and wallet. Since he’d travelled to Katavi under a pseudonym, he’d had to make sure he was one hundred per cent sterile in terms of being Will Jaeger.

But Peter Miles had furnished the room with a MacBook Air laptop, and he was keen to check email. Via ProtonMail – an ultra-secure email service – he knew he could check his messages with little risk of Kammler and his people being able to monitor it.

Before discovering ProtonMail, all their previous communication systems had been hacked. They’d used a draft email account from which messages were never actually sent; all you ever did was log on to the account using a shared password, and read the drafts.

With no messages being sent, it should have been secure.

It wasn’t.

Kammler’s people had hacked it. They’d used that account to torture Jaeger – first with photos of Leticia Santos in captivity; then with photos of his family.

Jaeger paused. He couldn’t resist the urge – the dark temptation – to check it now. He hoped that Kammler’s people would somehow mess up; that they’d email something – some image – from which he could extract a clue as to their whereabouts. Something via which to track them – and his family.

There was one message sitting in the draft folder. As always, it was blank. It simply had a link to a file in Dropbox – an online data storage system. No doubt it would be part of Kammler’s ongoing mind warfare.

Jaeger breathed deeply. A darkness descended upon him like a black cloud.

With shaking hands he clicked on the link, and an image began to download. Line by line it filled the screen.

The image showed a dark-haired, emaciated woman kneeling beside the figure of a boy, both dressed in nothing but their underclothes. She had one arm thrown around the child protectively.

The boy was Jaeger’s son, Luke. His shoulders were thin and hunched, as if he had the weight of the world piled upon them, and in spite of his mother’s protective stance. He was holding a strip of torn bedsheet before him, like a banner.

On it was written: DADDY – HELP US.

The image faded out. A blank white screen replaced it, with a message typed in black across it:

Wir sind die Zukunft: we are the future. It was Hank Kammler’s calling card.

Jaeger clenched his hands into fists to try to stop them shaking, then slammed them repeatedly into the wall.

He doubted if he could go on. He couldn’t do this any more.

Every man had his breaking point.