Authors: Matthew Dunn
Norway, Present Day
W
ILL
C
OCHRANE CROUCHED
on the frozen ground, removed his gloves, and withdrew two metal tubes from his rucksack. Each tube was two and a half feet long, ten centimeters in diameter, and branded with the name of the fishing equipment manufacturer Orvis and a label denoting that one tube contained an eight-foot-four-inch mid-flex Helios 2 fly-fishing rod and the other contained a ten-foot tip-flex variant of the same precision distance-casting model. He laid the tubes side by side on the ground, pulled out binoculars from his jacket, and examined his surroundings.
The tall man was alone on a mountain escarpment along the stunningly beautiful northern coastline. Around him were large azure-blue fjords that cut through the snow-capped mountain range, low areas of barren land carved into numerous islands by thin stretches of seawater, patches of mist hanging motionless over sea and earth, and above him a windless clear sky that looked heavenly and yet was cold enough to kill an ill-equipped man in less than an hour. But there were no signs of life out here save for an occasional kittiwake bird gliding close to water.
Carefully, he moved his binoculars until he spotted an area of lowland through which a thin meandering mountain river led to the sea. It was an excellent place to cast a lure and tempt a salmon or sea trout. But it was approximately one thousand yards beneath him; one would need be dressed in appropriate clothing and be at the very peak of physical condition to reach the area and fish there at this time of year. Thankfully, Will was supremely fit and had come fully prepared to stay out all day in this remote place. He was wearing a white woolen hat that was pulled down tightly over his close-cropped dark hair, a jacket and fleece, thermal leggings and water-resistant pants, and hiking boots covered with rubber galoshes. In these parts, an angler needed to dress like someone who was hiking to the North Pole.
As he further examined the distant stretch of river, his vision locked on the only evidence that any person had been here before: three log cabins and a track leading away from them. He wondered if the owners of the buildings had long ago deserted this place, or whether the cabins were rented out to vacationers during the summer months. He imagined clambering down to the river, preparing one of his rods, and making a few casts before being confronted by an angry owner of the cabins who would be shouting at him to leave.
Still, it would be worth the risk to try to fish there, as it would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
But that experience would have to take place on another day.
Because the MI6 operative wasn’t here to fish.
He unscrewed the caps on both tubes and withdrew pieces of metal equipment that had been designed and handcrafted by specialists in England before being couriered in a diplomatic bag to the British embassy in Oslo. Carefully, he slotted each piece together. One minute later, the sound-suppressed, high-velocity sniper rifle was fully assembled. After putting his gloves back on, he lay flat on the ground and stared at the buildings though the gun’s powerful telescopic sight.
He spoke into his throat mic. “In position.”
And immediately heard an American woman’s voice in his earpiece. “Okay. We got you.”
The woman was a CIA analyst, operating in the Agency’s headquarters in Langley, and was temporarily seconded to the highly classified joint CIA-MI6 Task Force S, which Will worked for as its prime field operative. She wasn’t very experienced, but didn’t need to be, as today her job was simply to sit at her computer and make notes of what Will could see.
Getting on this assignment had infuriated Will because it had come on the back of his being told without explanation that he was to cease his hunt for Cobalt. He’d spent the last eleven months chasing the financier—a man without a name or identifiable nationality, but one of the most dangerous men on the planet due to his funding of terrorist activities across the globe. Cobalt was all the more dangerous because he had no causes beyond seeking profit; his support of terrorist cells bought him their allegiance and gave him access to opium and coca plantations under their control. He transformed the crops into salable drugs, used his extensive network to smuggle them out of the countries, made vast fortunes, and in return gave the terrorists a cut of the profits. It was a deal that suited him, and suited them. And it was one that ordinarily would require someone like Will Cochrane to put a bullet in Cobalt’s brain. But the powers that be in Washington and London had decided that Cobalt needed to be left alone.
So here he was, on a routine job that should have been given to one of the Agency’s many paramilitary Special Operations Group officers.
In the largest wooden building below was Ellie Hallowes, the CIA’s best deep-cover officer. Will had never met her, but he knew she was thirty-five years old—the same age that he was now—and was an excellent and courageous operator whose job required her to live in near constant danger. Today, he was here to watch over her while she met a Russian intelligence officer who carried the CIA code name Herald. The Russian was her spy, and during the last two years they’d met many times without the need for protection. But this meeting was different. Two days earlier the CIA had received signals intelligence that suggested the Russian intelligence services had suspicions about their officer and the real reasons for his trips overseas. The Agency was worried that the meeting could be compromised and that Ellie could be attacked. If that happened, Will was under orders to do whatever was necessary to ensure Ellie escaped to safety.
It was a straightforward job for a man like Will.
As a younger man, he’d spent five brutal years in the French Foreign Legion, initially in its elite 2e Régiment Ètranger de Parachutistes before being handpicked to serve in the 11e Brigade Parachutiste’s Special Forces unit, the Groupement des Commandos Parachutistes. Upon completion of his military service, he’d returned to England and studied at Cambridge University. After being awarded a first-class degree, he’d briefly considered a career in academia, though others had different plans for him. MI6 tapped him on the shoulder and said it was very interested in someone with his skill set. He could have turned the intelligence agency down and hidden away from the world in an ivory tower, surrounded by books and with human contact limited to students and other lecturers and professors. But MI6 knew it was an impossible dream for someone like him: a man whose CIA father had been captured in Iran when Will was five years old and incarcerated in Tehran’s Evin Prison for years before being butchered, who’d fled to the Legion aged seventeen after witnessing the brutal murder of his English mother, who’d killed her four assailants with a knife to protect his sister from a similar fate, who’d been deployed not only by the GCP behind enemy lines but was also used by France’s DGSE as a deniable killer, a man who was not completely at peace with the world.
Within the first few weeks of training alongside other recruits, MI6 had singled him out as having attributes that were even greater than expected. He was removed from the course and put on the top-secret twelve-month Spartan Program. Only one person at a time was permitted to take the mentally and physically hellish selection and training course and, if successful, carry the code name Spartan. Despite the fact that all other applicants before him had either voluntarily withdrawn from the program, failed, received severe physical or mental injuries that prevented them from continuing, or died in selection and training, Will passed the program. He was awarded the distinction of carrying the code name, and the program was shut down and would remain closed all the time Will was operational and alive. He’d spent the subsequent eight years on near continuous deployment in hostile overseas missions, and was tasked on the West’s most important operations. Throughout that time, very few people knew he was an MI6 officer, let alone the nature of his work and his achievements.
He sighed, concluding once again that today’s babysitting job should have been given to someone else. After slotting a magazine containing twelve rounds into the rifle, he trained the weapon on the track leading to the cluster of buildings. That was the route Herald would take to drive to the meeting. He checked his watch. Ellie Hallowes was a stickler for exact timing, and she’d told the Russian that he was not to arrive a minute before or after the allotted time. The Russian wasn’t due to arrive for another eight minutes.
Will relaxed and thought about other things. A year ago, he’d moved into a new home in West Square, in the Borough of Southwark, south London. It was a two-hundred-year-old house that had been converted into four apartments. For the first time in his adult life, it was a place where he felt he was putting down roots. A sudden panicked thought hit him. Had he paid the latest council tax bill? He thought he had, though—shit—he couldn’t be sure. The local council was becoming a bastard with people who didn’t pay up on time. Well, there was nothing he could do about it until he got home tomorrow. He thought about his three single neighbors who lived in the converted house: stubborn Dickie Mountjoy, a former major in the Coldstream Guards and now a retiree; Phoebe, a thirty-something art dealer and lover of champagne, high heels, and middleweight boxing matches; and David, a recently divorced, slightly flabby mortician. They believed Will was a life insurance salesman. That false cover seemed apt, because today he was here as insurance that Ellie lived.
He glanced at his watch again and put his eye back against the scope. A black sedan was driving along the coastal track, at exactly the right time, easily visible against the backdrop of the tranquil blue sea. Will moved his weapon millimeter by millimeter to keep the crosshairs of his sight in the center of the vehicle. It stopped, and a man got out and walked fast into the largest of the three buildings.
“Our man’s arrived. He’s in the building.”
“You’re sure it’s him?”
“It’s him.”
He flexed his toes and his muscles. Not for the first time this week, he tried to decide if he could afford the nineteenth-century sheet music for Bach’s Lute Suite No. 1 in E minor. It was for sale in a tiny basement store in London’s Soho district. He’d paid the elderly proprietor of the store a £50 deposit to take the music temporarily off the market, with the promise that he’d settle up the balance of £750 after his next paycheck had come through. Still, as desperate as he was to place the sheets on a stand, pick up his German antique lute, and expertly play what was in front of him, he had to reconcile the high cost with the fact that he was a man who was on government salary, could obtain the same music for free at a library or off the Internet, and in any case knew every note of Suite No. 1 by heart. But the score had been produced and edited by Hans Dagobert Bruger, meaning the papers were a rare and beautiful thing. That was decided then; he’d eat beans on toast for a month to ensure he had enough cash to pay for the sheets. Will had made many similar decisions in the past. His new home was crammed with antiques and rare items he’d picked up during his travels, including a Louis XV lacquer and ormolu commode, Venetian
trespoli,
a pair of Guangzhou imperial dress swords, a German chinoiserie clock, an Edwardian mahogany three-piece suite and chaise longue, woven silk rugs from exotic markets, and vintage vinyl records of Andrés Segovia guitar recitals. He shouldn’t have bought any of them, because every time he’d done so he’d nearly bankrupted himself, but he’d always done so because life was too short to ignore beauty in favor of financial well-being.
He tensed as he saw movement in the distance.
A man walking awkwardly over rough ground, using a walking stick as an aid.
Will trained the scope on him and watched him move toward the cabins, stop approximately two hundred yards away from them, and sit on a boulder on ground that overlooked the cluster of buildings and the sea beyond them. The man had his back to Will, so his face was not visible, though Will could see that he was wearing tweed and oilskin hiking gear. His walking stick also seemed to be from another age; it was nearly as long as the man and at its head was a curly ram’s horn. Judging by the way he’d been walking, it was clear that the man needed the stick, meaning he was either old, weak, disabled, or all of those things. The man rested his stick beside him on the rock, withdrew a metal thermos flask, poured liquid into a cup, and drank.
Will relayed what he’s seen to Langley.
“Suspicious?”
“Impossible to know.” Will moved his face away from the scope. “I’m going to look at his face.”
Carrying his rifle in one hand, Will ran while keeping his upper body low. Two minutes later, he threw himself onto the ground, then crawled until he reached the summit and could once again see the distant cabins in the valley. The man was still there, a tiny speck to the human eye. Will looked through the scope, moved the gun until he located the man, and saw that he was still sitting on the rock. From this angle, Will could easily see his face.
He studied it, felt shock, and muttered, “Hell, no!”
A
NTAEUS DABBED A
handkerchief against the corners of his mouth to absorb any traces of the coffee he’d now finished, rested his weaker leg over the stronger one, and rubbed the disfigured side of his face before realizing what he was doing and abruptly stopping. It was a habit he’d had for years and he was trying to break it, because no amount of massage would get the muscles on that side of his face to work properly. His carefully trimmed beard helped to hide the lower part of the disfigurement, and the thick rims of his glasses covered most of the area where his left eye drooped. From a distance, he looked normal. But up close there was no mistaking what he was: a man who was ugly on one side.
He’d long ago gotten used to it and no longer cared. All that mattered to him was his mind. It was perfect and beautiful.
He stared at the Norwegian log cabins and gripped his walking stick.
The performance was about to begin.