Hard Rain

Forty-nine

Stringer was recalled to CIA HQ, Langley. We were recalled also, though, as I pointed out to Masters, CIA wasn’t the agency that had called us to Turkey in the first place so recalling us was technically incorrect. She told me to shut up.

The interviews at Langley were more like interrogations, mostly because they were conducted under hot lights in an empty room and ran twenty-five hours pretty much without a break. Masters and I were interviewed separately. Obviously, the interrogators were hoping to pounce on some divergence in our stories, which was unlikely given we had every intention of telling them the truth. Only just not the whole truth.

After these interviews, CIA knew what we knew: that Portman had been killed by ex-Mossad agents in the employ of Moses Adbul Tawal; that he was killed because he’d discovered the secret of the buried HEX; that Kawthar al Deen was in fact a secret IDF base for Special Forces that would pave the way for an Israeli nuclear strike, which was imminent, on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

CIA also knew that we believed there was an Israeli spy operating at a high level within the US government. We told them that this same spy had helped obtain the HEX from a US storage facility, and had been instrumental in the deaths of numerous US and Turkish citizens.

The CIA told us they believed the HEX had come from Russia. The Company doesn’t feed anyone information unless it has good reasons — mostly related to disinformation. The good reasons in this instance were that it wanted Masters and me to go away and forget everything we’d seen, heard and done. We were happy to oblige, but only because we wanted the Company off our backs. As far as we were concerned, the account had yet to be closed. We owed it to Doctor Aysun Merkit to see it through, as well as to Emir, Colonel Emmet Portman and Dutch Bremmel, Adem Fedai and Ten Pin, the dead and wounded CIA guys, and all the guys on the Onur who went to their graves in her.

Fortunately for us, Masters’ contact at the Department of Energy was still being undervalued by her employer. So, to Masters’ hotmail address, she forwarded a spreadsheet on the nation’s inventory of depleted uranium hexafluoride. The inventory revealed that there were 686,500 metric tons of the stuff contained in 57,122 cylinders stored in three DoE facilities: Portsmouth, Ohio; Paducah, Kentucky; and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. A handy fact to have on hand for when dinner-party conversation slows, but what we really wanted — and what Masters’ deep-throat connection provided — was the serial number of every one of those cylinders.

There was ice in the rain and it was slanting horizontally when we arrived at the security gate to the old K-25 site, Oak Ridge Reservation. I lowered the driver’s window on the Ford rental, reached out and slid our credentials under the glass, towards the security guy. He glanced at them and signalled by holding up a finger that he’d be just a moment. A few seconds later he jogged out of the bunker and approached the window.

‘Mr Jurgensen and… Ms Swank. You’re down from Washington, aren’t you?’

‘Yeah, how’d you know?’

‘Never mind… but you’re hoping to catch us with our pants down.’

‘I’m sorry?’ I asked, frowning.

‘Well, looks like you got a leak somewhere in head office. We all think that’s kind of funny.’

‘Why’s that?’ I didn’t need to have it spelt out, but it went with my disguise.

‘You’re hoping to arrive unannounced and check for leaks here, right? But all the while you’ve got one yourself back in Washington. Ha ha.’

‘Oh, yes… ha ha… I see,’ I said. ‘Funny. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me who that leak is?’

‘Sorry, no can do. Gotta protect our sources,’ he replied, grinning. ‘So, anyway, I believe you’re heading for the cylinder yard.’

I pursed my lips and gave the steering wheel a thump. ‘Yes, goddamn it,’ I said.

‘You been here before?’

‘New to the job. Both of us.’

‘Well, head on straight. You’ll come to a traffic circle — go left. Come to another traffic circle, turn right, and you’ll find a security post two miles down the road. They’ll be expecting you.’

‘Thanks, damn it,’ I said, splashing the frustration around like cheap cologne.

He handed our credentials and documents back with a smile. Despite his rain hood, mini waterfalls ran off the end of his blue nose and chin. ‘You folks have a real nice day.’

The heavy boom gate lifted and we cruised beneath it, over a set of road spikes that clanged into their recess.

‘Your friend at the Department of Energy — her talents are wasted,’ I told Masters. We had no chance of sneaking into this facility as OSI special agents without all kinds of authorities and paperwork we’d never get. But posing as DoE bureaucrats and then having our surprise visit ‘blown’? Genius. The letters Masters’ friend had also supplied, as well as the security passes, could all potentially land her in a basket of snakes but, as the gate guardian rightly pointed out, you gotta protect your sources.

The windshield wipers were moving around like a conductor doing ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’, but they still weren’t managing to cope with the volume of water and sleet.

The first traffic circle suddenly appeared out of the murk and I turned left.

‘There’s a hell of a lot of real estate here,’ Masters observed, thinking aloud.

‘Uh-huh.’ There was. The Oak Ridge Reservation was built on a colossal scale. It was the backbone of the Manhattan Project, which gave birth to the bomb in 1945.

We turned right at the next traffic circle. Signs told us where to go in case we weren’t sure. The security gate for the cylinder yard eventually reared out of the rain.

‘Just a suggestion,’ Masters said with a smile.

‘What?’

‘Try not to put it on quite so thick this time. Acting’s not your strong suit.’

‘Thanks for the confidence builder,’ I replied, before hitting the window button.

A woman in a grey hooded raincoat with broad yellow reflective strips came out in the rain to meet us.

‘Morning,’ I said through the crack in the top of the window, holding up the paperwork.

‘That’s okay,’ she replied in a husky voice, waving it aside. ‘Milton called — been expecting you. Turn right after the barrier arm and keep to your right till you get to the main building. Kevin will meet you there.’

‘So much for the element of surprise,’ I said, giving her a shrug.

‘Don’t feel bad, Mr Jurgensen. We don’t get a lot of visitors to the cylinder yard. Nothing ever happens, so we’re glad of the attention. We got nothing to hide here anyway. As we say, it’s all out in the open.’

‘I guess you’re right. Thanks.’ I edged the Ford over another set of spikes.

Masters gave the woman a wave and I watched her turn and go back inside her bunker.

Through the driving rain and the razor wire, I could see row after row of neatly stacked cylinders containing uranium hexafluoride. Like the lady said, it was all out in the open. The rows went on seemingly forever, disappearing into the driving rain. How easy would it be to misplace just one? Throw enough money around and anything was possible. And HEX was hardly plutonium — it couldn’t be put to a lot of use, not even by terrorists. The containers were just sitting here exposed to the weather, getting old and leaky.

The main admin building was a piece of 1940s kitsch — small secretive windows and a tiled exterior. Inside there were probably still pictures of FDR and Ike on yellowed walls. A guy in the regulation raincoat was waiting in a driveway beneath a portico, waving us in. Kevin, I presumed. We parked and got out.

‘Hello. I’m Sonny Jurgensen and this is Ms Swank,’ I said as I shook Kevin’s big wet paw.

‘Kevin Greig. Glad to meet you. You want to come in and have a cup of coffee before you get started, wait for a break in the weather?’

I looked at Ms Swank and she gave her head a slow and solemn shake. ‘I don’t think so. We have a schedule to keep, Mr Greig,’ she said.

Kevin didn’t mind. ‘Then where do you folks want to begin?’

‘There might be something wrong with our records, but it seems there are a number of cylinders that haven’t been visually inspected for five years.’

‘Really?’ Kevin asked, doubtfully. ‘I don’t see how that’s possible.’

‘Neither do we, Mr Greig, but we have a responsibility to the American people to ensure the records are up to date.’

‘You folks really are new to this, aren’t you?’

‘Excuse me, sir?’ Masters asked.

The guy shrugged. ‘So this is not a snap inspection of the facility?’ he asked, a little disappointed.

‘No,’ Masters replied.

‘Oh,’ he said, dejected. ‘We all thought it was. Don’t get many visitors to the yard. Okay… Well, follow me.’

Kevin led us inside to a change room. ‘You folks going to poke around the cylinders, get your hands dirty, or you just want to have a general look around?’

‘It’s not a great day for gymnastics,’ said Masters. ‘But we have a job to do.’

‘Sure,’ he agreed. ‘Well, I’ll break out a couple of NBC suits for you.’ He took a step back and sized us up. ‘The suits’ll keep the rain out, too. At least, you’d hope they would…’

Kevin was expecting a chuckle. I gave it to him.

A little over ten minutes later, Masters and I were suited up and waiting beneath the portico for Kevin, as instructed. There was no break in the weather. A white DoE-branded pick-up with a revolving yellow beacon appeared from around the side of the building and parked beside our rental. Kevin got out, leaving the motor running.

‘You folks ready to roll?’

‘Ready,’ said Masters.

‘You got serial numbers for the cylinders you want to look at?’

‘Right here.’ She waggled her notebook.

‘I can take you down the line, if you like,’ Kevin suggested.

‘Thank you, Kevin,’ I said. ‘We sure appreciate your willingness to assist, but we have to muddle through this sometime. Today might as well be the day.’

‘Okay, I getcha. Well, the cylinder yard is laid out quite logical. The rows running this way are designated by letters; the ones at right angles by numbers. Mind if I have a look at your serial numbers?’

‘Not at all,’ Masters replied. She opened her notebook to a laser-printed strip of paper containing half-a-dozen serial numbers, all but one chosen at random. The cylinder we were here to inspect was buried amongst them.

‘Say you want to find cylinder BB-32-N101-A16,’ he said, pointing at the one on the top of the list. ‘Drive down BB till you get to cross street number 32. The letter N tells you your cylinder will be on the north side of block 101. The letter A tells you it’s on the bottom of the stack — C on top, B in the middle. Those last numbers in the series tell you it’s number 16 in the row.’

Masters and I must have appeared confused.

‘You sure you don’t want me to take you?’ he asked. ‘You don’t want to get lost out there. A lot of it is signposted, but some of those signs have rusted away.’

‘No, it’s okay, thank you,’ said Masters.

‘Well, I’ll see you folks when you’re done. Got any problems, use the radio.’

Masters went to the driver’s door.

‘Feeling confident, Ms Swank?’ I asked.

‘I’m just the driver,’ she said. ‘You’re the navigator.’

We nosed about, locating some of the cylinders. Finding them wasn’t so hard, but the sheer size of the yard was staggering, and the weather wasn’t doing us any favours. The cylinders themselves were big. Each weighed around fourteen tons and measured twelve feet long and four wide — not the kind of item that could be loaded on the back of a pickup and carted away.

After dicking around for half an hour, we found what we were looking for. On top of the stack should have been cylinder number JJ-74-E57-C25, and indeed there was a cylinder up there occupying the space, only it was a fake. Had to be. The real one was buried in the ground upstream of Kumayt, its poison leached into the earth. I took the ladder out of the truck, climbed to the top of the stack and confirmed the serial numbers. I read them off to Masters.

‘They’re the right numbers,’ she said. ‘What’s in it, do you think?’

‘Anything but what’s supposed to be in it. Let’s go talk to Kevin, see if we can get an introduction to his boss.’

We drove back to the main office, past thousands of HEX cylinders. I wondered how many of them were the genuine article; how many had been pilfered and for what reasons. Masters slotted the pick-up beside our rental. Kevin wasn’t around, so we found our own way back to the change room, showering in the suits first before removing them, as per the rules printed on a plate screwed to the wall beside the change-room entrance.

While I climbed back into my clothes, it occurred to me that with the serial number on the cylinder, we had something Portman never managed to get his hands on: proof. Portman had the lab report on the sample, but while the minute amount of uranium-235 it contained strongly implied US involvement, what we now had was incontrovertible. The cylinder we’d uncovered was definitely one of ours, stolen from this facility. The one in its place was a phony.

I had one last check that I had everything: wallet, keys, cell, and my uncle’s Vietnam war-era Colt 45, which I probably should have left back in DC. The thing was killing me, sticking into my rib.

Time to go.

I pushed through the swing door. Masters and I could now hand everything over to the FBI and –

‘Put you fucking hands over you fucking head.’

The shout caught me completely by surprise. The guy already had Masters pressed against the wall with his shoulder, her hair balled up in one fist, a Barak pistol in the other, the black muzzle pushed hard into her ear. Adem Fedai was found dead inside the car. He had been beaten and shot through the ear. He rolled the silver toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. I sniffed the air. There was something familiar in it.

He growled, ‘Do it, ya chatitchat hara.’

I had no idea what he was saying but I did it anyway — put my hands over my head. ‘You probably don’t know this, but there are only two kinds of people who wear sunglasses inside,’ I told him. ‘And you’re not a rock star, are you?’

‘Cooper…’ Masters warned.

‘Shut you face,’ he said.

‘Who? Me, or her?’

‘Both. I will kill her if you do not do exactly as I say.’ He wrenched Masters’ hair so that her head was pulled back, then slammed it against the wall. Masters’ knees buckled for an instant, then recovered. She didn’t make a sound.

‘Hey!’ I yelled. ‘I’ve done it, okay — see?’ I wriggled my fingers above my head. ‘What next? What do you want?’

‘Up the stairs. Go!’

I took a step towards them, and he brought Masters around to face me, using her as a shield, keeping her between us. He was a well-drilled, sunglasses-wearing asshole.

‘Your name is Ari Shira,’ I said as I moved past them and commenced the climb. ‘They tell me you like ice-cream. I’m kinda fond of chocolate-chocolate chip myself.’

‘Shut you face.’

‘You’re Israeli, ex-Mossad. So is your partner, Yafa Fienmann. They kicked you out and so now you’re doing your best to give the Czech Republic a bad name. Okay, an even worse name.’

‘Keep walking,’ he said.

‘CIA knows all about you —’ I rounded the flight and saw Kevin slumped on the floor, coagulated blood trails from his mouth and nose and the air reeking of that smell. I recognised it now: chloroform. Kevin was either out cold or stone dead — it was impossible to tell. There were no gunshot wounds evident, so maybe he was lucky. Perhaps he’d wake up later with a killer headache and a real sore throat, though I didn’t like the odds on his luck being good. Yafa and this Ari character didn’t seem all that interested in temporarily knocking out the folks who got in their way.

The doorway at the top of the stairs was open. Yafa Fienmann suddenly stepped into it, a Barak held casually by her thigh. ‘Ah, so it is you. Have you brought your gorgeous partner?’ She craned her neck to look past me at her partner coming up the stairs. ‘Yes, she is here.’ The fruitloop clapped her hands — or rather her hand and gun — together with excitement. ‘Ari, do not hurt her. Not yet.’

‘Go!’ He yelled to get me moving. I reached the top of the landing and walked towards Yafa. ‘You and your beautiful friend. How do you manage it to stay alive?’ she asked. ‘Someday we will sit down and you will tell me.’ The way Yafa was talking, she could’ve been asking how Masters and I managed to match our drapes with the carpet.

Shira said something to Yafa in an unfamiliar language. I guessed Hebrew. She turned me around, pushed me against the wall and frisked me with one hand while the other kept the pistol pressed into the base of my spine. She grabbed the fabric of my jacket, feeling for lumps of metal over the tops of my arms and then their undersides, my armpits, my ribs, belt line, small of my back, down the outside of my legs, the inside legs. The last port of call was my crotch, which she lingered over, with more interest than she needed to, looking for lumps of a different kind, cupping my testicles and then giving Little Coop a friendly squeeze. He wasn’t interested.

I went to turn around, thinking she’d missed the Colt.

‘Stay, big man,’ she said, her hand pushed between my shoulders, cold metal on the back of my neck. She went down the inside of my leg a second time, and found the pistol tucked into the top of my boot. She pulled it out.

‘Hmm… heavy. This is an old one, well used. A man’s gun.’ She rubbed my crotch again. Little Coop still wasn’t interested. Yafa flicked the weapon at me, indicating that I should move back and give her some room.

‘I haven’t searched the woman,’ Shira said.

‘Thank you, Ari. You have left the job to me. You are so considerate.’

He muscled Masters up the last couple of stairs and then let her go, pushing her at the wall. Masters wheeled about and glared at him while she straightened her jacket.

Yafa held my Colt in Masters’ face and said, ‘Turn around and face the wall, please. You will enjoy this.’

‘Get on with it, bitch,’ Masters spat.

Yafa put her through the same routine she’d just given me, only this search was conducted with her hands groping around inside Masters’ shirt and pants. Yafa sniffed her fingers, waved them under her nose and said, ‘I love your natural perfume.’

Masters said nothing.

Yafa shrugged. ‘Inside. Now,’ she said, gesturing at the doorway.

I covered the distance in a couple of steps. It was a corner office — the boss’s office. The smell of chloroform inside was almost overpowering. It had a sofa. It had a matching lounge chair. In the matching lounge chair sat a very large man. On the floor beside the chair and the very large man was another man in a suit, curled into a ball, blood leaking onto the carpet from a gut wound. He looked like the smiling guy in the family photo on the desk. I figured he was the boss at the facility, and now he was a loose end being tied. If I ever got out of here and pulled the boss’s financials, I suspected there’d be a very large sum of money deposited somewhere for at least one storage cylinder of HEX.

‘Cooper,’ said Stringer. ‘Nice of you to pay us a visit. Where’s your partner?’

Masters came through the doorway.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘We’re all together.’

‘You,’ said Masters.

‘Yeah, me,’ Stringer replied, trying to get comfortable in a chair a couple of sizes too small for him. ‘Don’t tell me you’re surprised.’

‘Not surprised, Stringer,’ I said. ‘We just don’t believe you’re the Mr Big — and I use the label figuratively, of course.’

Stringer gave me a crooked smile. ‘Were they armed?’ he asked, addressing Yafa and Ari.

‘Yes,’ said Yafa, handing him the Colt.

‘Lemme guess… Cooper, this is yours, isn’t it?’

‘Uh-huh.’ I noticed Stringer was wearing black leather gloves. There was enough hide in those gloves to upholster a car seat.

The CIA chief examined the Colt. ‘Nice weapon. Didn’t figure you for a traditionalist, Cooper.’ He popped the magazine, saw it was full, and snapped it back in. He fully cocked the trigger. ‘Just in case you get any ideas,’ he said. I saw his thumb interrogate the safety as he slipped the weapon inside his coat. ‘Where were we? Yes, me not being the Mr Big. I had motive, access…’

‘You were in Ankara the night Colonel Portman was killed,’ Masters said. ‘We checked.’

‘I had Special Agents Telopea and Blitz to help me out.’

‘I don’t think much of the CIA, Stringer, but those two weren’t special agents any more than their names were Mallet and Goddard. They were ex Mossad or Marine Recon or SAS… dredged up from the ranks of the guys who lost it, or who never really had it to start with. Maybe Telopea and Blitz could put together a recipe for disaster, but not a lot else. One member of the team that killed Portman let himself into the house. He was known to the Air Attaché. This person had a key that had been stolen from the leasing agent along with a floor plan. After he’d entered the house and made sure Portman was alone, he subdued him with chloroform. Then Yafa and Ari arrived and went to work.’ While I talked, something clicked: Damn! I remembered the glass shard my boot had picked up in Portman’s courtyard. ‘To make it seem like they broke in and did the job without assistance, and perhaps so we wouldn’t find out about the leasing agency break-in and the stolen key, a windowpane beside the courtyard door was punched out from the inside.’

Stringer’s hands were clasped across his gigantic belly. I watched them rise and fall with his breathing.

‘You want more, Stringer?’

‘Depends on whether you want to go to your grave with it — might as well get it off your chest.’

‘You were interviewed at Langley, same as us. We told them Moses Adbul Tawal’s people killed Portman. While we didn’t mention them by name, we believed that to be Psychokitten and Ice-Cream Boy here. Only, these two also led the raid that killed Tawal, the guy we thought was their boss, so something major wasn’t adding up. While we didn’t give Langley specifics, we told you who we saw riding in the helo, but you chose not to pass anything on to Langley. And they never questioned us about it. Why not? Only one reason we could think of. Because if CIA and OSI believed the people who killed Portman were dead — killed along with Tawal on his barge — then the case would be complete. That’s what you told them, wasn’t it? And they bought it. So now the real Mr Big can continue with business as usual. In fact, why don’t you ask him to come on in and join us?’

Stringer didn’t have to. A side door opened and Ambassador Burnbaum walked in, drying his hands on a paper towel. He shook his head and said, ‘Spilt some of that chloroform on my hands. Damn near passed out cleaning it off.’ He walked to the desk and lowered himself into it. ‘You know, Cooper, you and Masters have made this a lot more difficult than it had to be.’

‘You’re under arrest for espionage and murder, Burnbaum. You too, Stringer,’ said Masters.

Burnbaum picked up a paperweight, a six-inch-long graphite-coloured spike — a DU tank penetrator. The depleted uranium it was fashioned from had no doubt been extracted from the uranium hexafluoride stored in this very facility. Burnbaum examined it while he talked. ‘Yes, yes, of course I am. This is about Iran. In a very short period of time, Iran will be nuclear armed. We can’t allow that to happen.’

‘“We” being Israel,’ I said.

‘I don’t see anyone else having the nerve to do what needs to be done.’

‘Why is an American spying for Israel?’ Masters asked.

‘I’m Jewish, Special Agent, as is Harvey here. American on the outside, Israeli on the inside. Perhaps what you’re really asking is why one ally would spy on another?’

Masters glared at him.

‘The US will stick by Israel only while there are common interests. And that’s the issue here, really: the US has no stomach for an attack on Iran, especially after the mess in Iraq. No, neutralising Iran — it might have been a common interest once, but now it’s off the table. For the nation of Israel, though, it’s a matter of pure necessity, of survival, of life or death. We’re looking down the barrel of genocide all over again. If we don’t stop the Iranians, they’ll do their best to kill us all as soon as they have the capability — they’ve said so time and again — which could be any time now.’

‘So this whole operation — the murders, the desal plant, the poisoning of the water — the whole filthy mess has been sanctioned by Israel?’ asked Masters, incredulous.

‘You should know better than to ask, Special Agent. And if the answer were no, would you believe it?’

Masters was furious. ‘What damn well makes the value of your life greater than anyone else’s? What about the children at Kumayt?’

‘You’re talking about the effects of the HEX… You know as well as I do that in this game, you have to use the tools available to you and some of them are blunt. However, we have to look at the positive side. We’re focused on the lives we’ll save. And, yes, they’ll be Israeli lives. We needed a facility like Kawthar al Deen. Reliable intelligence is a real problem. We can get a lot of it from the air and from shared intelligence links with Washington, but if we’re going to go in with ordnance — especially of the nuclear sort to surgically remove their assets — we need quality boots on the ground. And that means a base from which Special Forces can be launched at a moment’s notice.’

‘Why the orchestrated killing?’ I asked. ‘Why Portman, Bremmel, then Ten Pin?’

‘Well, yes, why indeed. Tawal was a businessman. He was to be awarded a bonus of twenty million dollars if he could keep the base at Kumayt a secret, at least until the strike. Incidentally, you and Masters should consider yourselves fortunate. Too many people knew you were paying Kawthar al Deen a visit. That meant Tawal couldn’t kill you while you were there, not without risking his bonus.’

I thought about the advice I’d given Doctor Bartholomew. I sure hoped the guy had taken it.

Burnbaum continued. ‘Portman was a problem. He figured it all out. He’d even uncovered the secret of the planted HEX cylinder. He talked to me about it, told me he was going to go public, and I passed that news on to Tawal. If Portman released what he knew, Tawal would have lost a lot of money, which had the effect of signing the Attaché’s death warrant. Tawal was looking for an excuse anyway. I don’t think he liked Portman a whole lot. And, ironically, if Tawal hadn’t become emotionally involved and hadn’t insisted on Portman’s elimination first, before those other two, Yafa’s plan to link their deaths with the F-16 upgrade might have been a little more convincing.’

‘We had to deal with Portman fast,’ said Stringer, chipping in, ‘before he talked.’

Burnbaum shrugged. ‘Well, there you are. The enterprise was flawed from the beginning. Might there have been a better way to achieve the desired result? Quite possibly, but you pay people to do a job, in this particular instance to maintain security and buy time. And I’m happy that at least we’ve succeeded in that and time has been bought.’

‘Time for what?’ Masters asked.

‘Turn on CNN tomorrow and you’ll see some very nice smoking holes in Iranian soil. Oh, I forgot, you’re not going to be around tomorrow.’ Burnbaum smiled. ‘Stringer — kill these two.’ He indicated which two, as if he needed to, waggling the DU penetrator at Masters and me.

When I looked back at Stringer, the CIA station chief already had a gun in his hand. It was my gun, the Colt .45, and it was pointed at my sternum. From this distance he couldn’t miss. Even a bad shot would be fatal. Stringer’s eyes were calm and cold. I flinched, expecting the soft-nosed anti-personnel slugs I loaded it with to tear a hole as big as a –

BANG! Something crashed behind me. I turned. It was Burnbaum, flung back from his seat and into the wall behind him. I watched him slide to the floor. There wasn’t much of the guy’s head left above his nose. The DU penetrator rolled slowly across the desk and fell with a heavy thud onto the carpet in front of me.

‘Yeah, like I said, nice weapon.’ Stringer bounced the Colt in his hand. ‘I like a piece with some weight in it. These nasty Glocks with all their polycarbonate just don’t do shit for me.’

Yafa and Shira seemed pretty relaxed about what had just happened to Burnbaum, the guy I believed had been pulling their strings. Which meant they were either quick to jump onto another horse when theirs fell over, or Stringer was their mount all along. Yafa stepped across to Burnbaum and bent over him, feeling for a pulse. She then pulled his piece from a shoulder holster — one of those nasty Glocks — which she handed to Stringer.

‘You were Burnbaum’s handler,’ I said. ‘You ran him.’

‘And he never knew,’ replied Stringer. ‘Can you believe that? And Burnbaum was a Cold War graduate. Well, I guess you can believe it — you didn’t get it either.’

Stringer placed the Colt on the arm of his chair, and went with Burnbaum’s Glock. ‘Thanks for killing a dangerous spy for us, Cooper. Washington will give you a medal. Posthumously, of course.’

I shook my head, almost in wonder. Stringer had it all thought out. The guy they bought the HEX from was dead on the floor, the spy who organised it was dead beside him, apparently killed with my gun by me, the special agent on his tail. And no doubt Masters would be killed by Burnbaum’s weapon — all nice and neat. Stringer could then go back to what he was doing, being Jerusalem’s man on the inside. No doubt he’d work it so he was first on the scene, having cracked the plot wide open. He’d earn Mossad’s Man-of-the-Month plaque for sure.

I heard a series of thumps coming from the other side of the main door. And then suddenly it burst wide open and shoved Yafa Feinmann hard in the back. The force of the impact launched her forward. She stumbled and drove her head into the corner of the desk as she fell. There was a bloody divot in her forehead at the hairline. She groaned, semi-conscious, licked her Ferrari-red lips.

Kevin stood unsteadily in the doorway, blood running from his mouth and nose. He coughed up a glob of red ooze, into his hand, looked at it, then collapsed.

There was a moment of complete and utter silence, tension having squeezed every ounce of sound and movement from it. Stringer, Shira, Masters, me. We all looked at each other, calculating the angles, weighing the odds. Four pairs of eyes flitting left and right.

I broke first. I dived for the floor. The room exploded with gunfire. Deafening. BANG! BANG! Masters twisted and sank an elbow into Shira’s gut. I saw her get a hand on his pistol. BANG!

The Glock in Stringer’s hand was pointed at the both of them. BANG! He squeezed the trigger again. BANG! And then again, only now at me. BANG! I was on the move, finishing the roll.

He missed.

As I came up, I snatched the DU penetrator from the carpet. Shira saw me. His gun jumped twice as Masters wrestled him for it. BANG! BANG! A round missed its intended target — me — and buried itself instead in Yafa’s back, between her shoulder blades, shattering her spine.

The penetrator was in my hand — warm and heavy. I had the angle, and the momentum.

BANG! Stringer, thinking I was shot, had shifted aim again, now targeting the swirling duo of Masters and Shira, fighting for his Barak.

I carried the swing through its arc, using its energy, rising up off the floor. Stringer’s massive head came back with surprise when he saw me coming. His mouth opened. I caught him under the chin. The heavy DU penetrator pierced the soft muscle beneath his jaw. I pushed forward, putting my weight behind it. The DU continued up through the roof of his mouth, through his soft palate. I gave it a final thrust and the pointed tip crunched out through the back of the man’s skull, plastered in hair, blood and grey matter.

I snatched the Colt from the armrest. I had a clear shot at Shira as he wrestled with Masters. He saw me turn. Our weapons jumped at the same instant. He span away from Masters as the jacketed round from the Colt smashed through his arm, into his abdomen and out his back, taking his liver with it.

Masters stood, swaying. She lifted her head and I saw the dark stain spreading from her chest, soaking her jacket. I took a step towards her as she faltered. I caught her as she fell, her face suddenly ashen and bloodless. I unzipped her jacket, tore through her shirt and T. The ragged hole in her pale skin was big and black and red, a sliver of wet pink bone poking through. Beneath a ragged crimson flap of skin, I could see her lungs pumping. I reached behind and checked her back. Blood was seeping away through the entry wound, warming my hand, soaking the carpet beneath her.

‘Anna! Can you hear me!? Hang the fuck on. Anna! Jesus…!’ My head swung around. What was I looking for? The room was full of dead people, unconscious people. No one to help. Nothing to do. Jesus fucking Christ. Masters whispered something but I couldn’t hear her. I bent down, put my ear close to her lips. Her breathing was shallow, red froth bubbling from the hole in her chest.

‘Vin, I’ve… made… up my mind,’ she whispered, her breath shallow, fading, the wound sucking. ‘I… I quit.’