Shadow Conflict Read online

  Drake could see nothing of his opponent’s face. He was wearing a black balaclava that left only his eyes exposed, but Drake could hear the rasp as the man’s lungs sucked air in greedily through the fabric, and smell the coffee and tobacco on his breath.

  Once bound, the giant hauled Drake out of the cell, his knees and feet dragging behind as he was too disoriented to walk properly. He saw a second man stand aside to make way for them, his shotgun no doubt loaded with more beanbag rounds in case Drake was foolish enough to try anything.

  The room beyond seemed cavernous compared to the claustrophobic confines of his cell, perhaps 30 feet square, and lit by a couple of bare light bulbs crudely wired into the ceiling in opposite corners. There was no furniture, and no windows that he could see, no source of natural light. The room was clearly underground: a basement or cellar of some sort, and extremely old. The walls were made up of large, crudely hewn blocks of stone, with thick, primitive support columns running down both sides and connected by a series of vaulted archways overhead. A simple flight of stone steps set into the wall opposite led to the level above, all worn down by long centuries of use. The place reminded him of some medieval dungeon.

  Coming to a stop in the middle of the room, Drake suddenly found himself hauled up from the floor, the giant picking him up as easily as a child would lift a doll. His arms were raised above him, and suddenly the support was withdrawn, gravity pulling him downwards until he was jerked to an agonising stop.

  Grimacing in pain, he looked up to see his plasticuffs looped into a metal hook protruding from the ceiling. It looked like the kind of thing one might string carcasses from in a slaughterhouse, and with his feet dangling at least 12 inches off the floor, Drake was suddenly very aware of how vulnerable he now was. The cuffs dug painfully into his wrists, warm blood trickling down his forearms.

  Another injury to add to the list.

  ‘That was brave, Ryan. Not very smart, but brave all the same,’ a voice said from the top of the stairs. ‘Then again, I guess that pretty much sums you up.’

  Drake watched as a new figure descended the stairs in a careful, unhurried fashion, taking the worn and uneven steps with caution. It was a man Drake knew all too well.

  Tall and broad-shouldered, well dressed in suit trousers, expensive-looking shoes and a dark woollen overcoat, Marcus Cain looked little different from the first time Drake had met him in a plush briefing room at Langley three years ago. His neatly combed hair was greying a little more at the temples now, but his face still possessed the same chiselled, movie-star good looks. His pale blue eyes were bright and alert behind a slender-framed pair of glasses, and they were regarding Drake now with a look that might have been pity.

  Marcus Cain: the man Drake had travelled halfway around the world to confront in Pakistan, and risked everything to defeat. The man who had cost him everything he held dear.

  ‘You fucking—’ Drake snarled, struggling against his cuffs. The sharp plastic bit deeper into his wrists, straining joints and sinew.

  ‘Do yourself a favour and quit whatever you’re thinking,’ Cain advised, indicating the two armed men flanking him. Both now had shotguns trained on Drake, a plainly needless precaution since he had no means of unhooking himself. ‘I’m sure a man in your position can appreciate there are worse places to get shot than the shoulder.’

  It didn’t take a genius to see what he had in mind. Drake was suddenly very conscious of the fact that he was hanging naked and exposed, but resisted the impulse to try to cover himself up. He wouldn’t give the bastard the satisfaction.

  ‘That’s better,’ Cain said, taking Drake’s inaction for acceptance. ‘I’d hate to think I came all this way for nothing.’

  Drake wanted to tackle him to the ground, tear those expensive clothes apart, pound that movie-star face into bloody pulp and shattered bone. But even in the red mist of his hatred, he knew he couldn’t come close to laying a finger on the deputy director of the CIA. Even if he could somehow find the strength to unlatch his cuffs from the meat hook, Cain’s bodyguards could put half a dozen more rounds into him before he made it two paces.

  ‘Wouldn’t want to disappoint you, Marcus,’ he spat instead. ‘Come to gloat, you piece of shit?’

  He saw a flicker of a smile. ‘Actually, I’m here for two reasons. First, I wanted to commend you on that job in Pakistan. Not many guys would have had the balls to try something like that, and even fewer could have pulled it off. You came close, Ryan. Closer than most others ever have. You deserve respect for that at least.’

  ‘And you deserve a hollow-point round in the back of the head,’ Drake fired back at him. ‘But I suppose we don’t always get what we deserve, do we?’

  Cain shook his head, looking almost regretful as he surveyed the starving, defeated man hanging before him. ‘What a waste. So much time and energy spent fighting for a lost cause, and where did it get you?’ he asked quietly. ‘You could have done something meaningful with your life.’

  ‘Like work for you?’ Drake snorted. ‘I’ve seen how that plays out. Keep your enemies close, right?’

  ‘You were never my enemy, Ryan,’ Cain said then, and Drake had a hard time deciding whether he was telling the truth or not. ‘At worst you were an irritating distraction, at best you were a useful asset. More useful than you could imagine.’

  Drake frowned. Had such words come from another man, he would have taken them for hyperbole, but not from Cain.

  ‘Useful for what?’ he asked, unable to help himself. Fuck it, if he was going to die here anyway, he at least deserved some answers first.

  Removing his glasses, Cain reached into his breast pocket for a cloth, then set about carefully wiping the lenses.

  ‘I’d imagine you’ve had a lot of time lately to reflect on your situation, and ask yourself a few questions. Like if I had Samantha spying on you all this time, why didn’t I move against you sooner? Why let you get so close when there was no need?’

  Drake said nothing. In truth, he had asked himself that same question, and many more, alone in the cold and darkness with only his thoughts for company.

  ‘You were bait, Ryan,’ Cain went on, his tone that of a sharp-tempered teacher dealing with a particularly dim student. ‘Anya was the real prize, and you were my link to her. You were her only real weakness.’

  Drake couldn’t have been sure, but he thought he detected an undercurrent of resentment in the older man’s voice. Cain was looking at Drake self-reflectively, trying to work out what separated the two of them, why Anya was drawn to one and repelled by the other.

  ‘She had her uses too, of course,’ Cain went on. ‘She always did. The trick was to make her believe she was acting of her own free will. Do that, and you can make her do almost anything, kill almost anyone. And I had a lot of people that needed killing.’

  Drake’s mind flashed through the events of the past few years, firstly to Afghanistan, where he and his team had become embroiled in a dirty war fought by a rogue private military contractor, headed by a retired army colonel named Carpenter. Anya had made sure Carpenter paid for his crimes, old and new, with his life.

  Months later, in Russia, she had infiltrated a terrorist group to get her hands on the corrupt head of the Russian Federal Security Bureau, who had once done everything in his power to destroy her. Again, her vengeance had been long in the making, but swift and merciless in its execution.

  Cain had done nothing to interfere in either case.

  ‘So you used Anya to kill off a few of your rivals,’ Drake scoffed, refusing to see his actions as anything but the work of a manipulative coward who let others fight his battles for him. ‘That makes you no better than them.’

  That seemed to amuse Cain. ‘Not exactly – they’re dead and I’m alive. That makes us quite different. But for what it’s worth, they deserved it. They got what was coming to them.’

  Drake looked right at him. ‘And you? What have you got coming to you, Marcus?’

  The
deputy director didn’t answer that. Instead, having finished cleaning his glasses, he placed them back on the bridge of his nose and carefully folded the handkerchief back into his pocket.

  ‘I told you I came here for two reasons,’ he continued. ‘The first, like I said, was to pay my respects.’

  ‘And the second?’

  ‘I’m here to offer you a deal. It’s the only one you’re going to get and it’s a one-time offer, so I suggest you think carefully before deciding. More than just your life depends on it,’ he warned. ‘Give me Anya, or at least solid intel that leads me to her, and I let you and Frost go free. No conditions, no strings attached. I’ll never come after you, your family or any of your friends again for as long as you live, provided you don’t come after me. You can have whatever you need to start a new life. Passports, new identities, even money. Enough to live comfortably for the rest of your days.’

  Drake barely managed to hide the sudden spark of hope that Cain’s words had inadvertently kindled in him. Not only was his teammate Frost still alive, but so was Anya. Somehow she must have escaped the ambush in Pakistan and evaded her pursuers, which meant she remained a threat. Whatever victory Cain might have won that night, the ultimate prize had eluded him.

  ‘One way or another your war’s over, Ryan,’ Cain finished. ‘The only question is how you want it to end – as a free man with the rest of his life to live, or… in this place.’

  ‘How do I know you’ll keep your word?’ he asked.

  ‘Like I said, you were never my enemy. I don’t blame you for the things you’ve done; you’re just the wrong guy in the wrong place, caught up in something he doesn’t understand. You’re compelled to protect the people close to you, and I respect that. But take a moment to consider where it’s gotten you.’ He glanced around, taking in the dimly lit underground space. ‘This doesn’t have to be how it ends. You can still have a life, go home and put all of this behind you. All you have to do is help me.’

  He could have been telling the truth, Drake knew. For a brief moment he found himself considering Cain’s offer, taken in by his softly persuasive voice. He thought of himself and Frost far away from this dark and terrible place, standing in the sunlight once more. He thought of his sister Jessica no longer living with the looming threat of abduction that had haunted her for the past three years. He thought of a life free from fear and danger.

  It could all be his. But it all came at a terrible price.

  ‘And in return, Anya dies.’

  Cain’s expression darkened, but he didn’t look away. ‘I’m not a monster, despite what she might have told you. I don’t want to hurt Anya. I want to help her.’

  Drake couldn’t help it. He started laughing then. The harsh, bitter laugh of a man with nothing left. In light of all the things he’d done, all the lives he’d sacrificed and destroyed, such a claim could only be met with derision.

  ‘Help her?’ he repeated. ‘You destroyed her, and even now you still can’t see it.’

  ‘Don’t presume to lecture me about things you couldn’t possibly understand. We were changing the world while you were still in goddamn high school,’ Cain snapped, his voice betraying real anger for the first time. He shook his head, taking a breath to calm himself. ‘Anya was different back then. We both were. We were going to do incredible things together, before she was taken away from me.’

  Drake knew what Cain was referring to. Anya, serving as a young CIA operative in Afghanistan two decades ago, had been caught in an ambush and captured by the Soviets. She’d never said much about the imprisonment and torture that had followed, but her scars told their own story. The ordeal had been a defining moment in her life.

  Judging by the haunted look in his eyes, Cain was reflecting on the same thing, though from a very different perspective. He’d lived through it and Drake hadn’t. Worse, he’d seen its terrible aftermath.

  ‘When I finally got a call from a hospital in Pakistan saying she’d been found, I thought all my prayers had been answered. Somehow she’d come back, back from the dead,’ he went on. ‘I couldn’t get out there fast enough. I even tried to kid myself that things could go back to the way they were, but I was wrong.’

  He sighed the weary sigh of a man old beyond his years, beaten down by too many compromises and disappointments and failures.

  ‘After a while, I began to realize that Anya never really came back. The woman I found in that hospital was something else. She was broken, deep inside, and I couldn’t fix her.’

  He blinked, then seemed to come back to himself, and looked at Drake again.

  ‘I can’t rewrite history, Drake. I can’t change the things that were done, or the mistakes that were made. All I can do is try to make amends for them, and that starts with finding her. I want Anya in a safe place – a place she can’t hurt herself or anyone else, and where no one can hurt her. Because if there’s even a chance that a piece of the Anya I knew is still in there, I have to try to bring it back. Maybe then she can find some kind of peace. Maybe we both can.’

  Whatever Drake’s thoughts on Marcus Cain, the sheer force of conviction in his voice was undeniable. For perhaps the first time, Drake perceived him not as a distant and menacing figure of authority, not as a master manipulator, but simply as a man. A man looking back on a life of regrets, desperate to undo some of the wrongs he’d inflicted while there was still time.

  A man looking for redemption.

  But not everyone seeking redemption deserved it.

  ‘I can’t help you,’ Drake said at last. ‘I won’t help you.’

  Cain stared back at him, saying nothing.

  ‘You had your chance to help Anya 20 years ago,’ he went on, relishing the old pain and guilt his words evoked as every ounce of his hatred and disgust for this man came pouring forth in a final, bitter act of defiance. ‘She told me everything, Marcus. She told me you knew where she was being held, what they were doing to her. She told me how she stayed strong, how she kept telling herself you would come for her, but you never did. You could have gotten her out, but you chose to stand back and do nothing. You showed her exactly what kind of man you were. You’re a cowardly, selfish piece of shit, and everything that’s happening now is your fault. If Anya’s a monster, then you created her, and you deserve everything that’s coming to you. I’ll never help you.’

  Cain backed away a pace then, staring at Drake with disappointment and resignation, as if this were an argument he’d been through many times before and no longer had the energy to engage in.

  He made a faint gesture, a slight nod of the head, as if acknowledging that his errand had failed. A harder road lay ahead for both men. Harder, and far more unpleasant for one of them.

  ‘It’s your call, Ryan. I’d hoped you would see things differently now.’ He turned away, heading for the stairs leading to the building’s upper level, but paused at the bottom step, regarding Drake with the same mixture of pity and disdain as before. ‘For what it’s worth, when I find Anya, I’ll tell her you refused to give her up.’

  As Cain ascended the stairs, returning to the world of light above, one of the guards moved forward and lifted Drake down from the hook, hauling him back to the darkness of his cell.

  Chapter 2

  Krakow, Poland

  Anya was running out of time.

  Every hour that passed increased the chance that Drake and his team would be killed or compromised, yet she knew she had to play her hand carefully. The man whose help she needed owed her nothing, and in fact had lost a great deal by assisting her previously. He might well choose to stay out of this fight, and she wouldn’t blame him if he did.

  Emerging from the basement club where she’d finally tracked him down, into the chill night air of early spring, Anya had to admit that he’d chosen his new home well. One of the best-preserved medieval cities in eastern Europe, Krakow had emerged relatively unscathed from the Second World War, its splendid Renaissance and Baroque architecture spared the destructive a
ir and artillery bombing that had laid waste to much of eastern Europe.

  Even the five decades of Communist rule that had followed had done little to diminish its beauty, and with the fall of the Iron Curtain, the city had wisely turned its eyes westwards. Property and goods were cheap here, and foreign investment welcome.

  All of these factors had combined to make Krakow one of the most popular cities in Europe for tourists, with hundreds of thousands of them flocking there every year. An easy place for an outsider to blend in amongst the mass of Americans, Germans, Russians, and most of all, Brits.

  They seemed to be everywhere, mostly groups of young men in their early twenties, and almost universally intoxicated. It wasn’t surprising given the late hour and the number of bars and nightclubs in the area, waiting to soak up foreign beer money, but even Anya was surprised by their prevalence.

  She watched in distaste as one young man with bleached blonde hair calmly staggered out of a nearby bar, doubled over and loudly emptied the contents of his stomach into the doorway of an apartment block, much to the amusement of his fellow drinkers. This done, he wiped his mouth with the garish football shirt he was wearing and followed his companions in search of more drink, laughing and chanting a song she wasn’t familiar with.

  ‘What’s the matter? Never seen a stag do before?’ Alex Yates asked, noticing that she’d stopped to watch the unruly spectacle.

  Anya looked at him. ‘A stag what?’

  He made a dismissive gesture. ‘Never mind. Follow me.’

  ‘How far is it?’ she asked, eager to get down to business. She hadn’t travelled 6,000 miles to go on a night tour of the city.

  ‘Not far,’ he promised.

  Crossing a modern road bridge that spanned the Vistula river, beneath the floodlit walls of Wawel castle, they soon found themselves in the network of narrow side streets that made up the city’s old town. Alex guided her with speed and confidence, never stopping to check his location or direction.