A Gentleman's Game Read online

  Poole, who by now knew the different tones of each phone, didn’t bother to react.

  “Minder One,” Chace answered.

  “D-Ops has requested the pleasure of your company in his office,” Kate said. “He asks that you come with haste, and that you bring with you those wayward young men with whom you share an office.”

  “He didn’t say that.”

  “No, he said get the Minders the hell up here now, but I thought my version was more polite.”

  “More florid, at least,” Chace said. “We’ll be right up.”

  •

  Kate ushered them into D-Ops’s office, and Chace led the way inside to find Crocker standing behind his desk, surrounded by a cloud of his cigarette smoke and speaking on the telephone. With the hand holding the cigarette, he waved for the Minders to come in and then waved a second time, dismissing Kate, all the while listening intently to whoever was speaking on the other end of the line.

  Kate closed the door behind them, and Chace motioned for Lankford and Poole to take the two chairs already positioned in front of the desk, then moved to the corner to push the third chair closer, for her own use. As she did, she glanced at Crocker’s desk and the red folder waiting there. She could read quite well upside down—another skill acquired as a child—and solely from the labeling at the top, she knew that conops had at last arrived.

  She settled into the chair, Lankford and Poole to her right, wondering what it meant that Crocker had brought them all upstairs for the news, and not her alone. The job had been promised to her, and she didn’t like the idea that things had changed, and that it might now be up for grabs.

  “I can’t mount an operation based on that, Simon,” Crocker was saying. “No, I understand that it’s hard to get reliable intelligence out of the region, but until we have a confirmation on his location, I’m not committing anyone to the field.”

  From the corner of her eye, Chace saw Lankford shoot a curious glance her way. She shrugged, and he slid his attention back to Crocker, shifting in the chair, trying to relax.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” Crocker told the phone, then slapped the receiver back into its cradle, harder than was necessary. He put the cigarette to his lips, drawing on it and looking over the three of them, and then, exhaling, he said, “Each of you is heading out to the School for a refresher. I don’t want to drain the Pit, so you’ll go one at a time, starting tomorrow, and starting with Minder One.”

  “Why me?” Chace asked.

  “Because the last time you were at the School, Ed was still alive,” Crocker snapped. “Because I bloody said so, that’s why. I’ve talked to Jim Chester, he knows you’re coming. You’ll do the course over two days, first day standard, second day active drills. You’re the damn Special Section, I expect your scores to be five point oh, nothing less. That’s for each of you.”

  All three of them nodded, with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

  Crocker focused on Poole. “And don’t think the SAS attitude is going to help you. Last time you took the motor course, you barely passed. Not again, Nicky.”

  “No, sir,” Poole said with such seriousness he was clearly mocking Crocker. Chace found herself looking at her knees in order to hide her smile.

  “And as for you, Chris, I remind you that despite the events of two weeks ago, your status as Minder Three remains Provisional, pending approval by your Head of Section and me. I’ve given Chester the quick brief on that arsing up you had in St. Petersburg, and he’ll be watching you.”

  Lankford nodded, then added, “Very good, sir.”

  Crocker glared at each of them in turn, then stabbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and took his seat, drawing the chair in closer to the desk, sitting up straight. He was tall to begin with, and with them all seated opposite, it had the desired effect of making each feel like a reprimanded schoolchild, or so it seemed to Chace.

  “Her Majesty’s Government has today supplied me with a directive to locate and neutralize Dr. Faud bin Abdullah al-Shimmari,” Crocker informed them. “The action is to be undertaken at the earliest feasible opportunity and will be carried out by a member of the Special Section. When this window opens, it’ll be one of you who’s going through it.

  “This means, with the exception of the refresher at the School, you’re to stay in London. No leave, no sick days, I don’t care if your pet bunny Flossy kicks it, you’re on call. Each of you is to brief on Faud, his associations, his history, his movements, all of it. Since we don’t know what may turn out to be relevant, all of it is relevant.

  “Right now, Faud is presumed to be at his home in Jeddah, though we’re still awaiting confirmation of that. If he is, he’s safe, and will remain safe as long as he stays in Saudi. Our window will come only when he leaves the country, for whatever reason.”

  “How likely is that to happen, sir?” Lankford asked.

  “He’s been known to travel in the region. Visited Egypt last year, and Sudan in late 2001. There’s a good chance he’ll be moving again shortly.”

  “Not if he thinks he’s a target,” Poole said.

  “We already know he thinks he’s a target,” Chace said. “The question is, how much of one? Is he wearing body armor beneath his thobe, that’s the question.”

  Poole grinned lazily. “Head shots all ’round, then.”

  “He’s guarded, we know that much, has been ever since the attempt on his life in 1996,” Crocker said. “It was tribal-motivated, but since then, he’s never seen in public without security. Minimum of four bodyguards, sometimes as many as twice that. Whether he knows he’s caught our attention now, we’ve no way of ascertaining, but he’d be a fool if he didn’t think we were looking at him after what happened on the seventh.”

  “And we know he’s not a fool,” Chace murmured.

  “He’s in his seventies, isn’t he?” Lankford asked suddenly.

  “Seventy-three or seventy-five, depending on the source,” Crocker confirmed.

  “Maybe we can scare him to death,” Poole offered. “Send Tara at him in a short skirt and halter top, that should cause a little cardiac arrest.”

  “Or fishnets,” Lankford added. “Short skirt with fishnets ought to do the trick.”

  “That’s enough,” Crocker said, and Chace was grateful, because it meant she didn’t have to.

  Lankford and Poole went quiet.

  “Does conops specify method?” Chace asked.

  “At discretion, but it’ll have to be precise. HMG is anxious to minimize any collateral damage, so anything short of a sniper shot or a bullet at point-blank is probably out of the question.”

  “Hence the refresher course.”

  “Hence the refresher course, yes,” Crocker echoed. “So now you know what we’re waiting on, I suggest you get to it. Go on, get out.”

  There was a clatter as three chairs moved in unison, the Minders rising, murmuring “Yes, sir,” and “Thank you, sir.” Chace took the time to move the third chair back to its place in the corner, fell in last behind Poole as the others headed out the door. She followed them as far as the hallway, then tapped him on the shoulder.

  “I’ll catch up,” she told Poole, then turned back into the outer office. Kate glanced up from her terminal, her fingers still flying over the keyboard, arching an eyebrow. Chace grinned at her as she went past. Crocker had swiveled his seat to scowl at London beyond the window, working a fresh cigarette, the ashtray resting on a bony knee.

  Chace rapped her knuckles on the doorframe. “Boss?”

  He didn’t move. “Close it.”

  She shut the door quietly behind her, then approached the desk. The tang of the tobacco in the air settled at the back of her throat and she felt the crawling memory of addiction. She’d quit smoking almost a year before, and still the cravings could be enough to make her want to commit a little GBH at times.

  As if taunting her, Crocker flicked ash into the tray. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “It’s mine.”<
br />
  “Until we know where, we don’t know how. Until we know how, we don’t know who. If it’s going to be close quarters, Poole’s a better choice.”

  “I can kill a man as well as the next guy,” Chace said mildly.

  “It’s a matter of strength, Tara, and Nicky’s stronger than you are. If it’s neck-breaking, it’ll have to be him.”

  “Give me a pistol and a suppressor, I can do it just as well and a damn sight quicker.”

  Crocker took another draw from his cigarette, let the smoke go slowly, so that it climbed along the window and curled back toward them from the ceiling. The silence spread like the smoke, but it didn’t bother Chace. She could wait. She was well versed in the nuances of Crocker’s moods. When D-Ops acted like this, you didn’t rush him, because he was still working his angles. There was a validity to what he was saying about Poole, but she knew it wasn’t the real reason. She may have lacked the upper-body strength of Nicky Poole or Chris Lankford, but she was faster than both men and, with a knife or a gun or even her bare hands, just as lethal.

  “How’s Lankford coming along?” Crocker asked.

  “He’s been hitting the books. Having a hard time learning patience, but I had that problem, so did Ed.”

  “Not Poole.”

  “That’s only because he came to us wrong way ’round.”

  Crocker nodded, accepting the assessment. Almost every Minder had been seconded from within SIS to the Special Section, normally after serving some field time, but just as often was taken straight from the School at Fort Monkton. While some Minders came with prior military experience—Wallace had been a Royal Marine, Butler a sergeant in the Coldstream Guards—neither Chace nor Lankford had come to the job with armed services experience. It wasn’t a prerequisite.

  Poole was an exception, because he was homosexual. Unlike the American military, there was no Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in the British armed forces, as a European high court decision in early 2000 had declared such policies, and indeed Britain’s general ban on gays in the military, to be an unwarranted discrimination. The fact that Poole fancied men shouldn’t have mattered in the least under the ruling.

  But it was still the S.A.S., arguably Britain’s most prestigious regiment, and when one of Poole’s fellow troopers, a man by the name of Hart, had fired a bullet into Poole’s body armor during a training exercise in the Killing House, events had threatened to explode into the public eye. Faced with the choice of letting the matter stand or pursuing Hart with charges—an act that would have brought yet more scrutiny upon the S.A.S., still reeling from the bad press of the last decade—Poole had instead decided to leave the Army altogether.

  It would have been an extraordinary waste of the thousands of hours and millions of pounds that had been spent on his training, and fortunately, that was exactly what Poole’s CO had thought as well. After some pointed inquiries through the MOD, Poole’s CO had contacted the Colonel who headed the SPT, the military-trained Special Projects Team tasked directly to SIS under control of D-Ops, asking about an opening. Poole’s personnel jacket was forwarded as a matter of course, with a copy to D-Ops as protocol dictated. Normally, it wouldn’t have earned a second look, but Kittering’s replacement, Butler, had just died in T’bilisi, and for the second time in less than a month Crocker had found himself scrambling for a warm body to fill the post of Minder Three.

  Poole had caught his eye. Minders were hard to come by at the best of times; few who could do the job actually wanted to, and those who wanted to were, almost universally, the most likely to completely arse it up. The last thing Crocker wanted in the Section was an agent who imagined himself the next Jack Ryan or, worse, the next James Bond. In the face of that, an agent who was homosexual was laughably mundane, and a liability only if the agent let it be one. Crocker didn’t give a damn if Poole fancied women, men, or livestock, as long as it didn’t get in the way of the job.

  Crocker put out his cigarette, set the ashtray back on the desk.

  “It took eight months to find Lankford,” he told Chace. “Took three months of additional training after we’d found Poole to get him ready for action.”

  He’d lost her for a second, then Chace realized what he was saying and she nodded slightly, trying to conceal her surprise. Crocker wasn’t sentimental, she knew that, but all the same, it touched her. He could afford to lose Lankford, he could even afford to lose Poole, but what she was reading between his words now was that he couldn’t afford to lose her. The needs of the Firm came first.

  “You think it’ll be a one-way trip?” she asked.

  The scowl came back. “An hour ago the Deputy Chief was trying to convince me to put a Minder into Saudi. I held him off, but I don’t know if I can do the same if it’s C who’s behind him on the next go-round.”

  “It’d be madness.”

  “I did point that out to the DC.”

  “If Faud moves, goes abroad—”

  “No guarantees, Tara.”

  “I’ll make it back, you know I will.”

  The look he gave her was uncharacteristically sincere, and abruptly sad.

  “No,” Crocker said. “I don’t.”

  10

  Saudi Arabia—Tabuk Province, the Wadi-as-Sirhan

  18 August 0032 Local (GMT+3.00)

  After prayers and sunset Sinan was called to Abdul Aziz’s tent, arriving to find four others already waiting outside with the commanding officer. Since coming to the camp, Aziz had forgone his thobe for the more military desert fatigues the rest of them wore, so it surprised Sinan to see that Aziz was once again in his cotton robe.

  “You men are coming with me tonight,” Aziz told them, and gestured toward the old Russian truck, draped with camouflage netting and parked in the shadow of the wadi wall. “Get in the back.”

  They moved to the truck, climbing into the bed as directed. There were wooden benches bolted at either side in the back, and the canvas top had trapped the heat of the day within. Sinan heard grumbles from some of the men as they took their seats, stowing their Kalashnikovs either beneath them or between their legs.

  The drive was long and uncomfortable, the truck bouncing and hopping along the almost-roads out of the camp and into the desert. With the canvas flaps thrown back, Sinan could see the desert stretching forever into the night, and the stars were brilliant, thick in the sky. There was no illumination except for what the heavens provided; the truck drove without headlights, the driver wearing NVG.

  Of the four others with Sinan, three were Saudi. The fourth was an Afghani named Matteen, and he had good stories of fighting Americans and British near Tora-Bora, and to relieve the boredom of the trip, he shared them. Sinan listened to the veteran’s tales with absolute attention, eager to learn from Matteen’s experience.

  “They tried to bomb us, you know?” Matteen told them. “For days and days they dropped bombs on us, and the whole earth shook and shuddered, as if Satan was trying to climb free. But Allah protected us in the caves, and their bombs did nothing. They tried to murder us for days, and in the end, their bombs did nothing. We were protected because we were righteous.”

  All of them nodded.

  “Back in the camp,” Matteen continued, “it’s the same thing. The wadi is a good place, very safe from the air. No satellites to spy on us, and if the mushrikun try to bomb us, there are many places to wait and stay safe. A very good place.”

  “If they come on foot?” Sinan asked.

  The Saudis laughed. “It will never happen,” one of them said.

  Matteen shook his head, barely visible in the cowled darkness of the back of the truck. “You don’t know, you don’t know. Your rulers allowed Americans to build bases on our holy soil. There are mushrikun in Riyadh, and they are cowards. Spineless, gutless . . . Don’t believe for a moment that we won’t be sacrificed on the altar of their greed if it comes to that.”

  “The Crown has always supported us in the past.”

  “In the past, yes. But
even with the West in its death throes, there are still those who want to pacify the Americans. Look what happened to our brothers in Riyadh and Sakakah after the bombings last year. It was your leaders who rounded up those muwahhidun and had them executed, all to appease the apes and pigs of the West.”

  Matteen waited to see if the man would offer a counter, but none came.

  “If they come on foot, Matteen?” Sinan asked again.

  “The same thing, like we did in Afghanistan. Know the land, Sinan, and use it. Anyone who comes to us, comes to us blind. But we fight with our eyes open, and with clear vision, we are victorious.”

  Sinan thought about that, looking out at the desert lit by stars. Since his arrival, he’d spent almost all of his time in the camp, with the exception of the successful trip to the West Bank. His days, spent mostly in prayer, classes, and training, left little time for exploration of the surrounding area. But he would find the time, he resolved.

  Anything that made him a better warrior, Sinan would do it.

  •

  Sinan felt the change, the truck’s tires moving from cracked and desiccated earth to pavement, and he guessed they were soon to arrive at their journey’s end. He had no idea where it might be, but he also lacked any feeling of apprehension. Abdul Aziz was in the cab, leading them, and it was Abdul Aziz who had brought him this far, after all.

  The truck slowed, then stopped, but the engine remained running. Sinan heard one of the cab doors open and Abdul Aziz’s voice, but he couldn’t make out the words. A man’s voice answered, and there was the sound of machinery, and the truck shook slightly as the cab door slammed closed again. The truck started forward with a lurch that nearly sent each of them toppling one against the other. Sinan righted himself and looked out the back to see that they had passed through a gate into a compound of some sort. The gate was closing now, and in the illumination from the guard post, he saw two men dressed like paramilitaries.

  The truck stopped again, and this time the engine died. Doors opened for a second time and then Abdul Aziz appeared, lowering the gate to let them out.