Last Man Standing

CHAPTER ONE

If the last year or so had taught him anything, it had taught Matt Drake that to stay on top of things he had to act quickly, and that despite the fact that some people were beginning to think he might indeed be a one-man disaster area, to dwell and tarry and hope for the best could end up costing his friends, and occasionally the rest of the planet, everything they held dear. If fate had chosen him to be the world’s soldier of fortune, its ready champion, then so be it.

With these thoughts still half-formed in his mind he dropped everything the moment he walked out of Hayden’s hospital room and turned to Mai.

“Ben’s funeral is in four days,” he said. “In Leeds, Yorkshire. That gives us time to fly to Russia, search Zoya’s place, and then attend.”

Mai only shrugged. “After all the talk of this supposed tournament invite, I thought you may want to remain here and see if Coyote contacts you too.”

“Let’s take the bitch by the horns,” Drake said. “This tournament could all be a load of bollocks, but know for a fact that Zoya was in contact with Coyote on behalf of the Blood King. We’ll worry about this supposed tourney and our bloody non-existent invitations another time.”

Mai sighed. “If that’s what I have to do to get some alone time with the man of my dreams then let’s go. Now.”

“My thoughts exactly. Almost.”

“But what about me?”

Drake turned to see the eighteen-year-old Grace standing behind Mai. “Hey, I can think of a million reasons why you should stay put. The Japanese are trying to find your parents. They’re trying to find you—who you are. Your memory loss is being addressed. You’re safer here. We don’t know who might be looking for you.”

Grace pouted. “That’s five at best. Not a million.”

Mai crouched down and laid a hand on the young girl’s shoulders. “It is best you stay, koibito. The authorities may need your help too. We won’t be gone for long.”

“All right.” Grace’s face showed that she already understood the reality of the situation and had been playing Drake. Wiser than her years, this girl had potential. Drake berated himself for thinking of her as a possible asset, rather than a victim that should be reunited with her parents.

“So who’s best to hang with around here?” Grace wondered. “The soldier Smyth likes Mai but tries not to show it. He likes Lauren too, but in a different way.” The young girl almost blushed. “He’s cool though. Kinimaka and Hayden are into each other, and always seem lost in each other. What of Yorgi? He seems okay, too.”

Drake made a face at Mai. “Not sure I’d recommend any of ‘em for looking after an eighteen-year-old, love. Probably best on your own.”

Mai narrowed her eyes at him. “They’re all responsible,” she said. “You may depend on everyone and learn from what they share. Except Smyth,” she added. “Ignore him.”

“And what will your colleagues think when they find that you have left them?”

“Our colleagues…” Drake nodded at the closed hospital room door. “Will understand.”

Entry into Russia was a tad easier of late, what with Putin sticking the majority of his nose into the Ukraine and the rest of the country becoming distracted. A White House call to a friendly Russian controller ensured a flight got the green light without delay. Funds may have been exchanged, possibly even a vehicle, but none of that troubled Drake and Mai. Their mission was clear and precise, and had to be carried out speedily. By the time the wheels squealed their greeting to Russian tarmac, the pair were donning equipment; and even before the doors were opened Drake was cajoling the pretty stewardess to just let him do a ‘jump-and-roll’.

Mai managed a lot of eye-rolling at his back.

The stewardess kept it together admirably, remembering her health and safety training, and finally allowed them to disembark with a happy smile. A priority customs check and a fast car had them close to Zoya’s place in good time, and Drake found that he could finally relax.

“So,” he leaned back in his seat and spread his knees, “wanna hop aboard?”

Mai raised her brows. “I don’t believe our driver would approve, do you?”

“No worries. I don’t think he speaks English. Or Japanese. Besides, we’ll make it quick.”

“Don’t be a goof. You know what I mean.”

Drake sighed. “I guess. But, you know, since we got back together.” He spread both hands. “Hasn’t been a whole lot of us time available. Too busy saving the world.”

“You don’t remember that waterfall on the island near Korea?”

“Sounds more romantic than it actually was. But yeah, there are certain parts that stick in my mind.”

“Then what? You getting soft on me, Drake? Don’t tell me you want to start doing it in an actual bed?”

“I’d never go soft on you, Mai,” Drake said with a straight face. “And didn’t I just offer to do it right here?”

“Perv.”

“I should know by now that I’ll never win.”

Mai smiled. “There you go. You have discovered the first step to a healthy relationship.”

“Japanese proverb?”

“Female proverb.”

“But seriously.” Drake placed a hand over hers. “Maybe we should take some time. Soon. Since we’re based in the US we’ll call it a vacation. A road trip. Whatever.”

Mai stared into the middle-distance, her expression suddenly hard. “You’re right about one thing. We should talk. I did something in Tokyo to a largely innocent man, something I now regret. It haunts me.”

“So let’s talk it through.”

“‘Talk it through’,” Mai echoed. “I murdered a man, Matt. To help find my parents. Gyuki made me murder a money launderer.”

Drake knew enough to say nothing at first, but then he said, “Triad?”

“No. Not Triad. Not exactly. Look, we’re here. Let’s do this another time.”

“Sure.”

Their Russian driver threaded the vehicle carefully through the bulk of Zoya’s property. Drake stared out the window and took in the sights, recalling the crazy assault, the fences and shattered guard towers, the trees that had secreted booby-traps, and the front porch where the crazed behemoth had spectacularly missed the most important kick of her life.

The silence between the couple stretched until their driver pulled up outside. Mai exited quickly, making Drake scramble to follow her. The Russians had said they’d already cleared Zoya’s place, sure, but both Drake and Mai knew from experience that Russian-built products and promises weren’t perfectly reliable.

Drake drew a handgun, an FBI issue Glock that rather surprisingly didn’t employ a contemporary safety, and hissed at Mai to tread carefully. The Japanese woman ignored him, crossing the threshold into Zoya’s house with only a cursory check. After that, however, she slowed down. Drake motioned to the right.

“Wonder if those cookies are still in the oven?”

Mai used her senses to test the new environment. “We’re alone,” she said. “Let’s get busy.”

Drake pocketed the Glock, having complete faith in her. “All right. Should we start with the treasure mountain?”

“Where else?”

Through another door, the great improbable pile of loot sat largely undisturbed. The Russian machine still moved slowly it seemed, thank God. Drake blessed Moscow’s snail-pace bureaucracy, not for the first time in his career.

“You know,” he said, “the US should inventory this entire house whilst the Russkies are still flogging king of the hill with people’s lives over in the Ukraine. Who knows what treasures, what secrets, are buried in here?”

Mai nodded. “No argument there.”

With time ticking away they got down to do what they came for. Carefully, gingerly, they picked at the pile, discarding swords, Uzis, a whole chest full of mixed-up bullets, mortar shells, anti-tank guns, grenades in bunches like deadly pineapples, and more guns than even Drake could keep track of.

Several of which looked futuristic.

“I’ll give this to Zoya,” he said. “Girl sure knew how to party.”

“Not sure what you mean by that,” Mai said distractedly. “All I see around me is death and madness.”

Drake frowned. Something had certainly changed within Mai, and it had a lot to do with Tokyo. He saw her reading a leather-bound book. “What you got?”

“I’m not sure. Something about a Lionheart Treasure. Maybe for the future.”

Drake agreed. “Yeah. I keep seeing tomes relating to Pandora, plagues and there’s a newish pad here about something called the Pythians. And the Devil’s Pyramid. What the hell is that? I think if we don’t stay on topic we could be here for days.”

“Weeks,” Mai said. “So look out for Coyote, Kovalenko, Blood Vendetta. Stuff like that.”

“Last Man Standing,” Drake said, putting the pad aside. “That’s the name of the supposed tourney.”

Mai was plucking more distracting volumes out faster now, revealing even more treasures at the heart of Zoya’s pile. A bulky black chest, strapped down with leather fastenings and three enormous padlocks. A brass plate screwed to the top read: Le Comte De Saint Germain. Mai’s eyes widened to saucers, but she made herself ignore the huge chest, flicking through a sheaf of papers piled to its side.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing and nothing.”

“Bollocks,” Drake agreed with Yorkshire aplomb. “Bollocks and more bollocks. Look, Grannyzilla must have had a laptop or something. How else could she have communicated with Kovalenko’s lieutenants?”

Mai pursed her lips. “Could be. You go look for that. I’ll continue here.”

Drake rose, trying not to groan as the toll of the past year manifested itself in the deep aching of his joints and muscles. The sudden thought of pain brought forth an onset of guilt — at least he was still alive to feel this variety of emotions, unlike some of the heroes that had fallen along the way.

Take a moment.

After a while he moved out of the room, casting a searching eye around the kitchen. Zoya’s idiosyncrasies meant that a laptop could be hidden literally anywhere. Hang the rule book, the Russian monster had been an utter loon. The oven was the first place he looked, perhaps with more curiosity than expectation. Burned cookies stared back at him, their little charred faces drooping; a sight that filled him with a sudden unaccountable sadness.

It made him think of children, and all that he had lost in his life.

The tray had warped a little. Drake pulled the cookies out and placed them on top of the stove. The Russian driver, smoking a cigarette in the doorway, stared at him strangely.

Drake shrugged and turned away, quickly opening cupboards and checking shelves, then standing on top of chairs to inspect the harder to reach alcoves and hideaways. Dust dens and spiderwebs greeted him. Pretty soon, he crossed into the front room and began an inspection there. When the hunt still revealed nothing he gave an audible groan and went to find Mai.

“Damn. I got nothing. There’s only one place left to search. Do you fancy…”

Mai smiled sweetly. “Not a chance. Have fun. Oh, and be careful. Zoya was probably sexually active.”

Drake closed his eyes. “Thanks for that.”

He made his way warily to the woman’s bedroom. The big double bed was unmade, the dirty sheets rumpled. He tried to dismiss the sight of rubber-boot prints on the duvet at the foot of the bed. Such visualizations could lead to debase imaginings. The drawers were full of clothes, but at the bottom of the wardrobe, hidden by hanging coats and trousers, he found a sparkly new Lenovo.

Within a minute he had it laid out on a table and was calling Mai. The Japanese woman came through to see the welcome screen flashing up.

“Good luck with the password.”

“These days,” Drake said. “With Windows 8, most people leave their accounts logged in just as they do on their mobile phones. It’s quicker. I’m hoping…”

The front-page apps showed which e-mail account Zoya used most and flipped nicely open when Drake clicked on it. “Thank you, app developers,” he said. “For making all our accounts so much easier to access.”

Mai jabbed at the screen. “That folder there. DK. Dmitry Kovalenko. You know, until now, I actually thought this might be a huge waste of time.”

Drake opened the folder. Immediately half a dozen e-mails flashed up, all entitled Blood Vendetta. Drake quickly checked the ‘sent’ folder and noted that every single one had been forwarded. Zoya then was indeed the go-between, acting as a middle-monster between Kovalenko and Coyote.

He clicked on the last e-mail, scrolled to the bottom and started to read the exchanges. The contents were stark and grueling, sent at the Blood King’s behest for the attention of the world’s greatest assassin. Drake expected ghastliness and was not disappointed.

Mai read it without emotion. “It changes quickly from an exploratory message sent to Zoya that appears to contain several… code words?”

Drake nodded. “Yes. Some kind of security protocol that even then is vetted by the Russian before being forwarded to Coyote. But once established—” he didn’t need to continue.

“Yes, it’s pretty graphic. There’s a request from Kovalenko’s men to bring Coyote in, in the event of his death. It actually says ‘finish the job’, and ‘activate in the events of Dmitry’s death’. It’s real.” Mai hung her head. “Damn. I can’t believe that after all this, and with the bastard dead, this is all real.”

Drake linked her fingers. “Coyote was always going to be an obstacle that at some point would need addressing,” he said. “This way, we don’t get to put it off. We take her on directly.”

“So the big question, the one everyone’s been asking since Odin…” Mai left it hanging.

“Who is Coyote?”

“Yeah. I’m betting it’s Alicia.”

Drake didn’t smile. “Don’t forget what Coyote has done.”

Mai bowed almost imperceptibly. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine. But what we have here, what we really have in a crazy way — is the first real proof that Coyote exists. And a way to backtrack. All we have to do is find out where Coyote’s e-mails originated from.”

Mai could have doused his sudden fire with a flood of pessimism, but chose not to. Drake silently thanked her. He knew the chances of her using her own personal channels were practically zero at the moment. But there was another problem.

“Damn. We can’t ask Karin, can we? Bollocks. She’d have this cracked in about ten minutes.”

“Is there anyone else?”

Drake let out a breath. “Yeah. Of course. Dozens of people. Hundreds, probably. We do have the resources of the US government. But—” he shook his head. “Someone I would trust with information like this?”

He fell silent. Mai watched his face. Something this important, this sensitive, required a Karin or a Ben. Or even a Jonathan Gates. A proven trustworthy warrior that could be relied upon to do it right. Truth be told, Mai couldn’t think of a single person.

Then Drake looked up. “There is one person. Just one man I would trust with this.”

Mai frowned. “Who?”

“Michael Crouch.”

Drake walked out into the sunshine, leaving the sense of cloying madness behind, and thought about what he would say. Crouch had contacted him recently, probing for information, and Drake hadn’t exactly come through. But the Yorkshireman knew that the boss of his former boss was not one to hold a grudge, but one highly principled and disciplined straight arrow.

He made the call and waited for Crouch to become available.

Eventually the clipped tones leapt across the airwaves. “Drake? How the devil are ya?”

“Not bad, sir. And how’s the Ninth?”

The Ninth Division was the covert British agency with blanket authority to protect England’s assets anywhere, at any cost.

“Still here. And kicking arse like the Good Samaritan’s hysterical donkey.”

Drake remembered now that Crouch was prone to adding the occasional over-embellishment in his descriptions. Doing so now meant the boss of the Ninth Division was enjoying a slow day.

“We need your help.”

“What can I do?”

Quickly, Drake outlined the situation, not surprised when he heard Crouch’s sharp intake of breath on hearing the name of Coyote.

“So we have a chance to nail this Jackal.” Crouch rarely made accidental references. To call Coyote by that name showed both the hate and regard in which he held her. “Just give me a minute.”

Drake felt Mai come up beside him and knew, even as she laid her head on his shoulder, that she was scanning the area for adversaries. The bane of their brilliance was that they could never switch off.

“Drake? You there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Send the files over. Send them here. I have someone that can do all kinds of shenanigans, an outsider actually. And Caitlyn — that’s her name — could never be back-traced. She sure speaks the lingo. Remote capture of your laptop. Piggybacking. Backtracking through digital trails. I won’t pretend to understand it all, but she’ll get the job done.”

“Excellent. I’ll send the file and leave the laptop turned on then. Will that do?”

“Probably.” Crouch laughed. “Give us an hour then call back.”

Drake ended the call. “Now, we wait.”

“It will give us chance to talk.”

“About what?”

“Oh, so much. How Dai Hibiki is looking into Grace’s past and trying to track her parents. How the DC doctors are trying to jog her memory using a kind of hypnosis. How I murdered a man, a father of two, in cold blood and, one day, expect to pay for it. How even changing my phone number doesn’t stop Smyth from texting me. How Alicia will cope now, and what she’ll do. This is the aftermath, Drake. Everything changed when Kovalenko hit DC. What do we do next?”

“Next? I have no idea. I’m living day to day. Aren’t you?”

“We all are. But that can only last so long.”

Drake took a while to think it through. “You know what I think? The catalyst is Hayden. Always was. When she gets better, we’ll have somebody we all respect to lead the way.”

Mai thought about that. “It makes sense. But Drake, it’s going to take something big to stop this team from breaking up. Something bigger than anything we’ve encountered so far.”

“Is that even possible?”

Mai shrugged. “I don’t know.”

They talked some more, carefully avoiding Mai’s most dangerous problem, as if knowing that an hour was just nowhere near enough time in which to tackle it. The time ticked by and the Russian driver smoked until Mai worried he might very well expire on the spot.

As the late afternoon sun began to fall from the skies, Drake’s phone rang. “I’m here.”

The line was silent, uncharacteristically so. Drake checked to see if the line had gone down. “Are you there, sir?”

“Yes.” Crouch’s voice was low, devoid of fire, of confidence. The man sounded as if the whole world had just come crashing down around him.

“Did you manage to discover the origin of those e-mails?”

“Yes. Yes we did.”

Drake felt a little like a man trying to kick-start a dead horse. “Where do they originate from?”

Crouch’s voice dropped yet another octave. “God help us, Drake. They were sent from here. From the Ninth Division.”

A 747 landing on his shoulders couldn’t have surprised Drake more. His mouth fell open and he adopted similar mannerisms to what he imagined Crouch must be displaying thousands of miles away.

“It can’t be. No way. From the Ninth?”

Drake stared at Mai, utter incredulity shining from his eyes. But he knew better than to question Crouch any more. The man made little or no statement that hadn’t been properly verified.

“It gets worse.” Crouch groaned, his words forced from his throat like daggers. “The e-mails were sent… from Shelly’s computer.”

Drake stiffened again. Shelly Cohen was and always had been one of the mainstays of the Ninth Division, ever since its long-ago inception. Known affectionately as Crouch’s vice chairman, she regularly stood in for the boss and undertook missions of her own.

“Someone set Shelly up?” he said immediately. “Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know,” Crouch said. “The protocols are pretty strict, but I guess it could be done. Either way, Drake, it’s an inside job. Has to be. The e-mails originated from our intranet.”

“Gotcha. So what does Shelly say?”

“Don’t know. She took a week’s holiday two days ago.”

An inexplicable shiver ran down Drake’s spine. “She did? Christ, that’s unfortunate.”

Crouch didn’t answer. Drake knew what he was thinking. “But Shelly?” he said. “She’s always been part of the backbone. The lifeblood. Shelly is… well she’s at least four parts of the Ninth Division.”

“And has always had access to every piece of Intel the British government ever acquired.”

Drake shook his head. “All right then. Why now? Why does this operative, so good she’s worked under the radar for twenty years, suddenly make a rookie mistake?”

Crouch remained silent, waiting.

Mai fixed him with a challenging stare.

And then Drake got it. “That’s the whole point isn’t it? Coyote is too good to ever get caught. This was a deliberate act.”

“I believe so.”

“Kovalenko must have paid her a fortune. Jesus, sir, we have to be sure. Have you tried raising Shelly?”

Crouch exhaled. “Of course I have. Every channel. No answer so far. We won’t give up on her, Drake, until the proof is absolute. And at that time… I’ll be happy to slit her throat.”

Drake still couldn’t reconcile the facts. Coyote had killed Alyson. Coyote was the world’s greatest and worst contract killer. Assassin. Cold blooded murderer.

Shelly?

“I… I need time with this, sir. Let me know what you find.”

“Of course,” Crouch said and signed off. As he did so Drake thought he heard a gunshot.