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.
CHAPTER TWO
As Michael Crouch ended the call to Drake a shot rang out behind him. Shocked, he turned, already reaching for the handgun kept in the drawer by his side. The Ninth Division offices near London were kept intentionally sparse. The various chiefs, cyber experts and field-soldiers were in a constant state of flux, always shipping in and then out to the next crisis. Just this month Crouch himself had overseen jobs in Vienna, Zurich and Milan. The world was always warding off a catastrophe of some sort. The room was rectangular, a low-roofed shed with multi-colored exposed cables, thickened walls, expensive computers balanced on the edges of cluttered desks, operatives rolling along at hyper-speed on their castor-fitted chairs, locked and barred weapons cupboards, and privacy corners set apart only by curtains. The Ninth Division had always been rough and ready, poised to act in an instant and used to the constant comradeship and tramp of soldier’s boots; the knife-edge of Britain’s response, the rugged home and op-center of military men.