Battlefield 4: Countdown to War Read online

  ‘Friend of yours?’

  It was Jin Jié, the returning superstar that Wu had got all excited about on the TV in the bar. He was surrounded by bodyguards, but they weren’t doing much to beat back his admirers who were either trying to photograph him with their phones or thrusting paper and pens at him for autographs. He paused, so they could all get what they wanted, and politely bade them farewell, then, seeing Hannah, detached himself from his companions and strode towards the table, arms wide.

  ‘Hello, stranger.’

  He beamed down at Hannah who could no longer ignore him. She smiled back – her face completely altered. She rose slightly. He pecked her on the cheek and she blushed.

  His broad grin made him look even younger. He exuded vitality and youth, all of which made Kovic feel even more battered and tired. He bent, took Hannah’s hand and kissed it, then turned to Kovic, expecting to be introduced but Hannah hesitated. Kovic put out his hand. ‘Congratulations on the success of your book.’

  ‘Why thank you,’ Jin practically genuflected at the compliment, taking his hand and shaking his hand vigorously. Boy, could he exude enthusiasm.

  ‘Seems like the timing of your return is most auspicious.’

  He smiled. ‘How so?’

  ‘With this trouble between our two countries, maybe you can be a corrective.’

  He nodded, digesting Kovic’s words.

  ‘Thanks – I’ll give it some thought.’

  He turned to Hannah. ‘Don’t disappear now I’m home. We’ve got so much to catch up on.’

  They watched him go back to his crowd.

  Kovic lifted his glass. ‘The West loves him; that must piss off a few people here.’

  She didn’t respond.

  ‘Good friend of yours? Bit high profile – thought you people preferred to creep about in the shadows.’

  She looked a little sheepish.

  ‘It is important to maintain contact with a broad spectrum of individuals.’

  ‘That what it says in the manual? Then I’m honoured to be in such celebrated company.’

  She fixed him with a firm glare. ‘How will you manage?’

  ‘I can call in some favours. Plus I’ve put a bit by in case of emergencies.’

  She let out a deep sigh. ‘I know I’m going to regret this.’

  ‘We got a deal?’

  ‘Bring me names. You have forty-eight hours.’

  He put the last bit from the bottle into her glass.

  ‘Let’s drink to that.’

  She got up.

  ‘Better get started, don’t you think?’

  21

  USS Valkyrie – South China Sea

  The rain lashed the deck, cutting visibility to no more than fifty feet. Beyond, the grey sea was completely obscured by the downpour. Garrison was waiting. He wanted to be there in person when the Sea Hawk made its descent. Above all he wanted the crew to see him out and about, on the case. This was no time to hide.

  He heard the helo circling before it came into view. It hovered, the blades feathering before it dropped on to the apron in front of the control tower. The door opened. He knew CIA people came in all shapes and sizes. Just the way he descended the steps, cautiously, shielding his head from the rain, it was clear that Cutler wasn’t a field man. The briefcase said it all.

  Garrison took Cutler’s arm and steered him to the stairs and straight up to his private suite where they could be alone. He would have preferred the formality of the command room and a table between them in case he needed to bang his fist on something – in the circumstances a distinct possibility – but all the systems were down and he didn’t want to draw attention to it with a bank of blank screens.

  Even so, Cutler was aware. ‘Too bad about the glitch,’ he said, as he shook off his damp raincoat.

  Garrison shrugged. ‘We should have it back up in a few hours.’

  He handed him a coffee. In fact, he had no idea how long it would take. He needed to change the subject.

  ‘It’s good of you to make the trip.’

  Garrison was genuinely surprised that Cutler had chosen to fly in personally. Agency people usually preferred to communicate electronically. Perhaps he felt some personally delivered TLC was necessary.

  ‘The least I could do, under the circumstances.’

  Cutler glanced around the room as if checking for microphones.

  ‘I thought it best if we spoke privately.’

  Garrison sat back as Cutler launched in.

  ‘There’s no getting around it. We fucked up bad.’

  The novelty of hearing someone take responsibility almost put Garrison in shock, but he kept his face free of amazement; he’d had years of practice.

  ‘Beijing and Washington are both putting a brave face on it but there’s no question this is a game-changer.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  Cutler looked faintly irritated.

  ‘The fallout! The Chinese people don’t seem to like us as much as some of us thought.’

  Cutler spread his hands as if carrying a giant tray.

  Garrison reached for his coffee.

  ‘So, how did you get it so wrong?’

  Just because the guy was grovelling didn’t mean he was going to get an easy ride.

  Cutler took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  ‘I know this name has – uh, troubled you, before.’

  Garrison sighed.

  ‘Kovic.’

  ‘If I’d had the slightest idea—’

  The commander wafted his contrition away.

  ‘That’s in the past; let’s concentrate on what just happened.’

  Cutler sighed.

  ‘The guy’s been in-country six years. That’s a long tour. Kind of plays with your perspective.’

  Garrison looked at him for a while, then leaned forward.

  ‘So let me get this right. You’re saying—’

  ‘Obviously I can only say so much, you’ll understand.’

  ‘He wasn’t in the photographs.’

  Cutler looked away, as if there was something he couldn’t find the words for.

  ‘Yeah, he survived.’

  Garrison stiffened.

  ‘You’re saying he was complicit? Where is he now?’

  Cutler’s expression was grave.

  ‘Well, he got back to Shanghai but – it seems it was all too much for him.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Looks like he chose to end it all.’ Cutler stared into the distance, chewing his lips. ‘In his residence, if you can call it that. Set fire to the place. I’d seen him that morning, told him I was standing him down, pending inquiries. And the Chinese wanted him out of the country. I think that was likely the last straw. Maybe what with everything that haunted him . . .’

  He shot a meaningful glance at Garrison. ‘. . . it had all got too much to handle.’

  ‘Son of a bitch.’

  Garrison sat back and digested the news. What did he feel? Quiet satisfaction? No, nothing like that. A sense of justice having been done? That wasn’t it either. Blankness – he just felt blank.

  He studied Cutler’s face.

  ‘So can you take me through what actually happened? I don’t want to be giving those Marines’ families any bull.’

  ‘We’re working on the detail of it now. But without Kovic’s input . . .’

  His demeanour suddenly changed.

  ‘But Commander, you have my word we will keep you in the loop. Whatever we come up with. But right now we’ve got one hell of a shitstorm coming our way: Shanghai’s going crazy, protests against America; Beijing doesn’t know which way to turn.’

  He glanced at his watch.

  ‘I want to thank you, Commander, for giving up the time to hear me out.’

  He got to his feet. Garrison rose too.

  ‘Well, I appreciate your taking the trouble to come all this way just to brief me – especially at this difficult time.’

  They shook hands. Garrison saw
him back to the Sea Hawk. Cutler used his briefcase to cover his head as he mounted the steps. He gave the Commander a sort of apologetic salute as the door closed behind him.

  Garrison watched the helicopter rise into the cloud and disappear. He stood there staring into the clouds. Whenever he was in conversation with Agency people Garrison could never shake the feeling that he was being played. Cutler had done all the right things, the personal visit, the admission, the contrition. But something else was going on, something he couldn’t put his finger on.

  22

  Hotel Majesty Plaza, Shanghai

  Kovic slept fitfully through what was left of the night and much of the next day, plunging into deep unconsciousness then being jolted awake by the images of Louise’s remains. He’d seen dead people before, burned, shot, dismembered, detonated, and pretty much anything else that could happen to a person in a riot, insurgency, famine or war. But never someone close to him. He turned the TV and radio on low, to fill the room with noise and jam the memories while he slept. He had to rest. He would need all his energy and all his wits for what was ahead.

  He surfaced at three in the afternoon, focused and horribly alive. A rainstorm had temporarily washed the air clean and the city stood out in high definition against a rare blue sky reflecting off the still slick pavements. He ordered room service and took a shower, trying to get rid of the persistent smell of smoke. Even afterwards, his hair still smelled singed.

  He ate a traditional rice soup with eggs and dressed in the kit that Hannah’s goons had got him. They fitted. Maybe they had his measurements on file. Courtesy of Hannah, he had the room for one more night. What happened after that – who knew?

  For Louise he felt a kind of numb grief, but at least the memory of her was part of who he was, or had once been, the man inside Kovic, who joined the Agency with a good deal more hope for the human race than he had now. But with everything else destroyed, he was in a vacuum. He was used to being other people, had inhabited eight different aliases in his life so far. But now, hollowed out by the madness of the last three days, he felt like no one at all. On the up side, he was officially dead, which for his purposes couldn’t have been more ideal. The question almost amused him: now that he was dead, how long could he stay alive?

  He dived into a VW Santana taxi and headed for the Hong Kong & Shanghai Safety Deposit Company. By now word would have gotten back to Cutler either that he had been successfully deported, or that he had died in the fire. Whichever he believed, it meant the CIA wasn’t about to go looking for him and getting in his way, at least not right away. And with the trident boys thinking that they’d nailed him in his bed, he had more than a good head start. All the same, the less time he spent on the streets the better.

  He got the driver to stop first at a luggage store, where he bought a standard white collar salaryman’s ‘Dream’ briefcase, then at the side entrance of the bank, where he moved quickly through the revolving doors, the lobby and up to the security desk. He picked up a pad, wrote a name and a number on it and passed it to the blank-faced assistant. It helped that he didn’t have to say anything, and that they didn’t want him to. Coming from a world of ‘And just how are you today, sir?’ and ‘knowing your customer’, the absence of grovelling was always a relief. Give me Chinese service industry surliness any day, he thought.

  The assistant took the pad and directed him to the eye scanner that boasted an error rate at one in ten million. But since China had a population of one point four billion maybe it was just as well they also required a palm scan, plus a good old-fashioned signature.

  A minute later he was riding the elevator deep into the bowels of the bank. Another attendant met him at the lift door, handed him a key and pointed him to the wall of slim metal doors. He inserted the key, opened the door and slid out the shallow, drawer-shaped box. Just as a final touch he had added his own double combination padlock. He was shown to a small curtained cubicle with a chair and a small desk where he could lift the lid in privacy.

  ‘Hello, John Richards.’

  John Richards’ passport photo did have him looking a bit younger, less frayed; a man who hadn’t yet had to look on the charred corpse of his lover. But then Americans seemed to age faster in Shanghai; maybe the pollution eroded their collagen, and deciphering the two or three thousand characters needed even to read a news report screwed their eyes.

  He pulled out another: Ray Nyman, South African, physical instructor. His current physique may not have quite fitted the bill but at least his scars did. And now was not a great time to be an American in China. He decided to take both, together with their matching drivers’ licences. Into his Dream case also went a fat wad of around a million yuan, nearly two hundred thousand US dollars and two debit cards, from Deutsche Bank and Credit Agricole: nice solid European institutions, each with a deposit behind them of fifty thousand dollars. Underneath those was a Sig Sauer P220 Combat TB with a couple of clips. Kovic hadn’t had much need of a weapon since he hit Shanghai, nor had Langley authorised him to keep one, but he had added it to his kit when a friend in the ATF skipped town in a hurry and left it in a drawer. He knew if he didn’t help himself someone else would, and the day might just come when he would need it. Today was that day, and probably tomorrow was too, and beyond that – maybe forever, who knew?

  Even in the Tribal Area badlands of the Af–Pak border or on the mean streets of Baghdad, Kovic had had the comfort of knowing he was part of a machine, that the CIA would watch his back, and even when he got into deep shit, even though they might deny all knowledge of him, they would try to get him out. Now there was no one. Never in his whole time in the game had he felt like a fugitive. And yet this wasn’t the US or Lebanon or Afghanistan. Packing a weapon in Shanghai could land you in big trouble. He held it in his hand. It was comforting. He felt in the drawer for the suppressor and screwed it into place. It wouldn’t make that foof sound that Hollywood liked, but it would turn the volume down from an ear-splitting crack to something that wouldn’t frighten the horses. He checked the clips: standard eight rounds. Okay to be going on with.

  The phone still had some charge in it. The service provider was Hong Kong registered, a popular one with private security operatives as it automatically erased the call log and couldn’t store contacts. It was a device that required the user to have a good memory. Fine: he wasn’t planning on organising a party with it.

  He put it all into the briefcase and headed for the exit. John Richards, aka Ray Nyman, was on his way.

  Wu was waiting for him, parked across the street in his cousin’s pickup. Kovic examined the badge and burst out laughing.

  ‘For real that’s what it’s called, a Great Wall Wingle?’

  Wu’s face was blank, his humiliation complete.

  ‘Guess you won’t be bringing one of these with you to America.’

  The Chinese might be on their way to making more cars than anywhere else, but they had a way to go with naming them.

  Kovic got in and turned the radio on low: a traditional music station, playing classic songs for the older generation.

  ‘No, no, I got Springsteen. Or you want James Brown? “Sex Machine”?’

  ‘Really. This is okay. So, what do you know?’

  ‘That there was a fire in your building. I was relieved to get your call. I thought maybe you—’

  He told him about Louise. Wu looked horrified.

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘So if I come over a little vengeful you’ll know why.’

  ‘You think it was—?’ He patted the back of one hand with three splayed fingers like the trident.

  Kovic shrugged.

  ‘Fire up the Wingle; we need to go find ourselves a posse.’

  The pickup’s cab smelled of brand new plastic.

  ‘Where do you want to start?’

  ‘By getting rid of this smell. Open the windows, for God’s sake, and let the smog in.’

  23

  Jing’an District, S
hanghai

  Kovic sat on the roof terrace of the Wooden Box cafe, waiting. It seemed an appropriate venue for a dead man. He’d had enough bad coffee for one day so stuck with green tea. Wu sat at another table by the door, keeping watch. The blue sky had gone and purple grey cumulus was rolling in over the city like a giant roof, pressing the day’s pollution back down on its inhabitants. Maybe he should take up smoking again, just to give his lungs a change of poison.

  Kovic stared at the table in front of him until he became aware of a presence, lingering nearby.

  ‘Hey, don’t sneak up on me like that, okay?’

  Zhou’s eyes almost disappeared, enveloped by his grin.

  ‘Sneak up on the spy!’

  His gaspy laugh was straight out of Beavis and Butt-Head; that and the grin were his only distinguishing features. Otherwise, he prided himself on his blandness; when his face was still it became impossible to remember. It was a brilliant cover, especially for a burglar. Zhou had done Kovic’s dirty work for several years, specialising in theft and safe breaking, which he conducted with meticulous care bordering on the obsessive. Frequently his victims never realised they had had an intruder, believing they had mislaid the missing items themselves or blaming family members or staff. Most of his jobs were carried out in broad daylight. ‘By day I am much less conspicuous,’ he explained to Kovic.

  The suit he had on was an anonymous grey, but Kovic could tell it was seriously expensive.

  ‘Tailor made in Savile Row. I flew there specially.’

  ‘Maybe you should slow down.’

  A thief since he could walk, Zhou had grown up on the streets of Shanghai after his parents abandoned him to avoid the punitive fine for having more than one child. First he stole to survive, developing such a gift for it that he soon graduated to ever more sophisticated and daring thefts, culminating at the age of twelve in spending weeks studying how to fly online and stealing a light aircraft. He crashed the plane, but managed to escape from the emergency services by feigning concussion. Briefly, he worked for casino owners, stealing money from their own safes so they could avoid taxes. But after a bloody argument over his rate he resolved never to work for criminals again. He came into Kovic’s life when they chose the same moment to break into a Singaporean arms dealer’s penthouse. Kovic had set off the alarm and Zhou switched it off. From then on he outsourced that part of his work to Zhou, who also proved to be an expert at scaling buildings, as well as claiming to have an inbuilt sonar-like sixth sense for infrared motion sensors.