Rahim raced to the pen and was astonished by what he saw. The large sow was dead and, as expected, had been largely devoured by the hungry males who had slit her from anus to breastbone. But the males, also, were dead. All from one single carefully measured milligram of the substance; less than a drop. The agent was as lethal as reported. Truly, it was a weapon of massive and indiscriminate destruction. Rahim’s mind drifted to the concrete encased, stainless-steel canisters now sharing his quarters: twenty litres of the very blood of Death himself.
Manila, Philippines
Skye Reinhardt lay awake in the early hours of the morning. She’d been living with the guilt for several weeks and the stress of it was starting to show, the occasional fine line between her eyebrows now a deep and permanent fixture on the face that met her in the mirror. That guilt was like some kind of wild animal she couldn’t shake, stalking her, leaving her staring into the dark, fearful of closing her eyes.
Jeff was the source of that guilt, or rather, her feelings for him were. The frequency of his visits had started to increase to the point where he was now flying into town every few days just to be near her. For a while, she’d managed to convince herself that she was in control of the relationship, but two factors were forcing her to realise the truth. The first was that she resented the existence of a Mrs Kalas down in Sydney. Jeff had recently let slip that he’d had sex with her. Skye argued long and hard about that. She was incensed. What? You had sex with your wife!? No matter how vehemently she argued the point she just hadn’t been able to make him understand how wrong that was. The other disturbing fact was that Skye had been unable to tell him who her employer was, not the full truth, anyway. She’d only managed a version of it, that she was an academic researching the stability of the Filipino government amidst the rise of Islamist fundamentalism throughout the region.
At first, Skye had successfully managed to convince herself that the subterfuge was a necessary aspect of spycraft, that she was working undercover here. But the reality — and this truly frightened her — was that Jeff would simply stop seeing her if he knew she was CIA. He hadn’t told her this directly, of course, but she knew it nonetheless. Why? Because he was somehow involved in the bombing of the US Embassy in Jakarta! At some point Skye had not been able to identify, she had had to make a choice: a relationship with Jeff, or loyalty to her country. The choice hadn’t seemed as stark as that but, as she lay in her room watching the ceiling fan slowly rotate, the truth of it struck her as inescapable.
When the embassy was bombed, every CIA station in South East Asia had been put on full alert. Langley screamed that the perpetrators of the murderous act would have to be run down and damn fast. As expected, the politicians and the press back home immediately and aggressively began to question the CIA’s capabilities — or lack of them — because of its failure to pre-empt the attack. Shit flows downhill. This unhappiness had been passed on down the line and the Manila bureau had received its fair share. The perpetrators of the heinous act had to have had a base, and the island of Mindanao, where the US was already fighting a dirty little war alongside Filipino regulars, was high on the list of probable locations for it.
Skye took several deep breaths and then forced them noisily through her open mouth, hyperventilating like an athlete before a race. The shock of seeing the dartboard on that first morning, when the field of suspects had been narrowed by some unknown piece of intelligence, was still very real within her. She had arrived late to work because Jeff was in town. He’d taken her to dinner, a French restaurant and very expensive — of course. They’d had champagne, Veuve, their special thing, and then they’d gone home to his hotel room to fuck — no, to make love. It was more than just a physical thing by then.
It was ten past nine the next morning when she had woken, feeling bleary but sated, with the deep satisfaction in the base of her spine that only came from great sex. She had come three times and was proud of it. She remembered joking with herself in the taxi ride on the way in whether she should send a memo around about what she was getting from her man but, of course, decided against it. The office was too tense since the bombing of the embassy for that kind — or any kind — of frivolity. So instead she’d gone straight to her desk, put her bag down, then headed to the kitchen to fill her jug at the cooler. Fortunately the kitchen was empty because then she didn’t have to explain why she suddenly dropped her jug, sending shards of glass to the four corners of the room. The dartboard beside the water cooler had been modified, rearranged, the pictures culled. Even the haunting picture of Bin Laden with that oddly gentle Mona Lisa smile had been taken down. Now there were only two photos pinned to the board. If she was not mistaken — and she wasn’t — they were the men she’d seen that day, poolside with Jeff. ‘Prime Suspects — Jakarta’ said the laser-printed headline below the mug shots.
The manhunt was being conducted out of Australia, the Canberra bureau. The coordinator for the hunt was a Ms Gia Ferallo, the deputy assistant station chief down there. Skye had hurriedly written down the deputy director’s direct phone number on a piece of scrap paper, then cleaned up the glass on the floor before returning to her cubicle. The rest of the day was vague in her memory, probably because she spent most of it staring at the wall, replaying in her mind every moment she’d spent with Jeff, winnowing it, searching for anything of substance that was suspicious. Jeff was a moneyman, that much she knew. And he was married — twice. Skye realised that she had very quickly become far more preoccupied with Jeff’s marital situation than his relationship with the two obviously very dangerous men. She had failed in her stated objective to get inside his guard. Instead, she was getting herself laid.
Skye turned on her bedside light and pulled out the two laser prints of the suspects from under her mattress. One of them, Kadar Al-Jahani, was dead, killed in Israel according to office circulars and confirmed by news reports. A large red X had been drawn on his mug shot on the dartboard. The other one, the man known as Duat, stared at her with flat black eyes above high cheekbones, the skin shiny where it pulled tightly across them. His lips were thin and he wore a scraggly beard. A happy thought occurred to her: if both the men were killed, would her relationship with Jeff slip into the irrelevant basket? No, she decided, after a heartbeat of hope. There was only one course of action open to her, but she knew that it would end her career at the CIA and possibly earn her a small cell in Leavenworth. The only question unanswered in her mind was whether she would confront Jeff first.
Flores, Indonesia
Hendra danced up and down, whooping and yelling. Duat swivelled his head as the drone flew overhead, watching it track down the beach. Unbelievable. The plane had completed its pre-programmed flight plan just as Hendra had said it would, a circle that took it more than fifty kilometres out over the sea. Duat patted Hendra on the back as the former air force communications man took control of the plane through the small transmitter. It behaved just as if a pilot sat at the controls, only the pilot in this case would have to be impossibly small as the cockpit was only big enough in size for a piglet.