Viper Nine Read online

  Something about the idea made Driver smile as they stepped through the entrance to the jail. It wasn’t a great deal cooler inside the clammy building, no air conditioning other than windows without glass and the cool face of stone corridors. They felt as if they were inching closer around her as her escort cajoled her on. That was, until they entered the main floor of the building. Circled by cells on the upper floors of the jail, an oval floor of desks and computer terminals populated the base of the atrium. The ceiling above was high, with natural light pouring in through a large, dusty glass dome.

  Everything echoed, from the voices of a twenty-strong team of hackers, to the machine-gun rattle of plastic keys as they worked.

  Driver picked her way through a snake-pit of wiring taped to the floor, checking for exits and potential weak points in the setup of the Saudi cell. As she scanned the room from left to right, she caught sight of him.

  Kovac, dressed like the commander of his own private army in casual desert fatigues and a black and white check scarf hung loose around his neck. He leaned over the shoulder of a young woman, with Otto Graf, since identified by Gilmore, not far from his side.

  The Serb glanced up over the monitor and made eye contact with Driver. A smile formed in the corner of his lips, like a man salivating over his dinner.

  He was about to get paid, and cured of his nagging problem.

  Kovac waved Driver’s escort towards a door at the far end of the atrium. The guard behind her gave Driver a good, hard, needless shove in the back.

  * * *

  Wells leaned on the roof of the Toyota Land Cruiser. He recoiled, the metal hot to the touch, instead leaning his weight on the frame of the door.

  Bringing a pair of tinted Steiner binoculars to his eyes, Wells put a foot on the door sill and scanned the area ahead.

  The white Mitsubishi Shogun had come to a stop outside what resembled an old jail in the shadow of a large desert rock formation. He fixed on Driver in the lenses of the binoculars as she stood waiting with a black hood over her head.

  One of her armed escorts spoke into a radio and whipped off the hood. As she squinted into the light, Kovac’s men surrounded Driver and walked her through a gate into the compound.

  She disappeared from sight into the main building. Wells checked the signal on the tracker. Thanks to the thick stone walls of the jail, the red hotspot had gone dead. He tucked the locater inside a thigh pocket on his sand-coloured combat trousers and let the binoculars hang from his neck. Slipping his sunglasses back in place, Wells walked to the rear of the Land Cruiser he’d parked off the highway, hidden behind a clutch of boulders.

  He grabbed the handle to the boot. It was oven-hot too. He blew on his fingertips and used the end of his khaki T-shirt to pull on the handle.

  Retrieving his rifle from the boot, he kicked the lid shut and paused to text Anna his coordinates. Anywhere within a mile of the jail would be close enough. With camouflaged vehicles sat outside and armed men guarding the perimeter, the place was pretty hard to miss. But having typed the message, Wells found the text wouldn’t send. He realised his phone was without a signal.

  Could it be jammed?

  Frustrated, Wells slipped the phone in his pocket, slung the semi-automatic rifle over a shoulder and set out on foot towards Kovac’s makeshift base.

  Chapter 27

  Juárez, Mexico

  ‘Do you ever stop eating?’ Rios asked, picking at a small plate of nachos.

  ‘When you’re on patrol in Helmand, you get used to eating when you can,’ Pope replied, biting down on a burrito, his face mere centimetres from the plate.

  ‘Well you sure don’t miss a chance,’ Rios said, watching the dishevelled, late-night streets of Juárez.

  Flanked by low-rising bars and stores just about holding it together.

  Rios reacted at a backfiring scooter, her hand moving fast to the pistol on her hip. She relaxed as the bike chugged by, ridden by a topless kid.

  She removed her hair band and re-tied her pony-tail, wiping the sweat from her brow with the flat of her hand. The outskirts of her hometown were arguably more deadly than the epicentre of the city. And a woman with her reputation had to be on her guard.

  Pope straightened up in his small plastic chair, cheeks stuffed with food and skin flushing red. ‘Bloody hell, this has got a kick.’

  ‘Welcome to Mexico,’ Rios chuckled, swirling a nacho in a dollop of guacamole on her plate.

  It was a rare light moment. Having made the call from the back of the cantina, it wouldn’t be long until their arrival.

  ‘You wanna tell us what we’re doing here?’ Pope asked, before chugging on a beer.

  ‘It’s better you don’t know,’ Rios said, holding her own ice-cool bottle to her forehead. ‘Don’t wanna ruin your appetite.’

  ‘No ruining that,’ Pope replied, slapping his midriff. ‘Guts of steel.’

  ‘And how about those abs of steel?’ Rios asked, as Pope finished one of two giant chilli burritos. ‘How are they coming along?’

  ‘Counter-terrorism burns calories,’ the Australian replied, coming up for air. ‘Everyone knows that.’

  ‘Someone tell my thighs,’ Rios said, throwing a nacho in the air and catching it in her mouth.

  Pope paused and looked under the table. ‘You’ve got a nice set of pins there. If things were different and we were out in a bar, I’d be on you like the plague.’

  Rios slugged on her beer. ‘Aw, how sweet.’

  Pope waved away what he thought was a genuine moment of thanks. Rios smiled and shook her head as the nylon-stringed twang of folk music breezed its way out of the cantina and into the street.

  She and her fellow Wildcard operative sat in the orange glow of rusting lanterns hanging off a washing line. Their table was round and plastic. One of three astride a terrace made of wooden boards painted pale-blue.

  The street was deader than Elvis. And the view along the potholed road ran into a pitch-black wall no more than a hundred-yard walk to the left or right. Yet out of the darkness appeared a speck of light. It doubled into two specks of light and grew larger, morphing into a pickup truck with a rack of four high-powered headlights mounted on the roof.

  Suspending her weight on the hind legs of her chair, Rios sat forward and downed the remains of her beer for luck. ‘Finish up,’ she told Pope.

  He cast an eye over his shoulder, dropped the half-eaten burrito and took a last swallow of beer.

  While Pope wiped his hands and mouth clean of chilli sauce with a paper napkin, Rios got to her feet. She walked down the two creaking steps to the dirt road floor.

  The Australian appeared at her shoulder, the duo of pickups pulling to a stop in the middle of the road. With thirsty engines chugging loud through their diesel exhausts, Rios counted two men in either pickup. Plus, a man on the rear of the second truck.

  They were dressed for the weather in vests or short-sleeve shirts left open at the chest. The skeleton-thin guy on the back of the rear pickup sported a red bandana and a body inked with tattoos. He tossed a cigarette butt to the ground, an Uzi 9mm slung over a bony shoulder.

  ‘This is our ride,’ Rios said.

  Pope wrestled a chunk of meat from between his teeth. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Just follow my lead,’ Rios continued, watching each of the men in the pickups. She eased a hand to her hip, the other in the air. Drawing her weapon slow, she held it up by the butt with finger and thumb, turning and revealing she was otherwise unarmed. Pope did the same until the pair of them faced the men with their weapons held out.

  Red Bandana waved them forward. He jumped down to the road and relieved them of their handguns. A fast pad down and he beckoned them to join him on the back of the pickup.

  ‘Whatever happens next, try not to shit your pants,’ Rios said.

  ‘Why, what happens next?’ Pope asked, bravado dissolving in the cold stares of the waiting men.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rios replied, stepping towards th
e pickup.

  Chapter 28

  Saudi Arabia

  Driver received a painful dig in the back from the muzzle of Graf’s handgun. He’d seen fit to join two of Kovac’s men and escort her personally out of the atrium.

  Entering another corridor, she heard the whir of a large fan and the buzz of electronic equipment. The sound was coming from her immediate left. A server room with a free-standing steel fan blowing cool air on wall-to-wall stacks of servers.

  The entire place had the feel of a hastily assembled facility. A pop-up cell they’d moved into fast, and didn’t plan on being in for long.

  Driver saw an opportunity and stopped outside the server room. She swayed on the spot. Graf barked at her to continue. Yet Driver fell to her left and slid to the seat of her pants in the doorway of the room.

  Graf was impatient. Ordering her to get to her feet.

  Driver mumbled about the heat. As he yanked her up by the arm, she yanked a cable out of a socket in the wall.

  Graf shoved her on, cursing her weakness. She resisted and complained – enough of a distraction for them not to notice the fan slowing down, its plug detached from the socket.

  Committing the layout of the building to memory, Driver was shoved hard through a doorway. It was one of few that appeared to come with a door that wasn’t a cell.

  From a quick scan of the space, she would have said it was once the office of a warden or head jailor. Yet now it came furnished with a desk, a small, single bed against the wall and a steel shelving unit stuffed with papers and a handful of books. Driver glanced from corner to corner. In one rested a fire extinguisher and a bucket of ice with a large bottle of water lodged deep inside. In another corner was a rail of utilitarian clothing and a spare pair of dirty boots.

  On the far wall, she noticed a map of the world, furled at the edges with a rainbow of pins stuck in various locations across the continents.

  A hollow window frame behind iron bars let in a view of the desert while a desk rested beneath, swamped with papers and an open book left face-down.

  A laptop sat open too, the screen pointed away from her.

  Graf put a rough-skinned paw on Driver’s shoulder and spun her around. He pushed her against the wall and muttered to one of his underlings in German. ‘Don’t let her out of your sight.’

  Graf left with another guard, leaving Driver one-on-one. She sized the man up. He was a little out of shape. Ex-military with a burgeoning paunch at the waist. The guard would be relatively easy to take down. But that would undermine the mission.

  Driver was here to communicate the account number requested by Kovac. What came after that, she didn’t know, but she could hazard a guess that it wouldn’t involve her breathing. Yet she couldn’t endanger the lives of millions by going against the agreed plan.

  Driver laughed to herself. She wanted a meaningful mission? Well, hell if she’d got one.

  Suddenly, wet work in the park didn’t weigh so heavy on her conscience after all.

  Driver put a hand to the scarf around her head. ‘Do you mind?’

  The guard shrugged as if he couldn’t have cared less. She wound the scarf free from around her neck and folded it over. Could she wrap it around a man’s throat?

  If needed, yes. But she entertained the naïve hope it wouldn’t be necessary.

  In the meantime, Driver picked up on the acrid smell of smoke. Seconds later, she heard the shouts of fire from out in the corridor.

  Her little trick with the fan had worked. So many servers working so hard in such hot conditions… It was only a matter of time before an overloaded circuit or an overheated motherboard sparked a fire.

  Pungent with burning plastics, the stifled air of the corridor filled with black smoke. Driver glanced over the guard’s shoulder and saw flames licking at the walls.

  Graf, Kovac and a couple of others confronted the small blaze, blaming the fan. Accusations flew and Graf yelled along the corridor for the guard to fetch the fire extinguisher. He protested back his orders to watch Driver.

  She shrugged at the guard. ‘Where am I gonna go?’

  ‘Just do it!’ Kovac yelled, coughing on the toxic fumes.

  The guard rushed into action, snatching the extinguisher from the far corner of the room and dashing into the corridor.

  With Kovac and his men distracted, Driver leapt into motion too, first moving to the desk. With an eye on the doorway and an ear to the corridor, she scrambled through Kovac’s mess of papers left out on his desk. But there was too much information. Too little time. Overwhelmed, she spun one-eighty and consulted the map on the wall. A quick scan of the assorted pins told her there were several locations not already attacked. Saudi Arabia was one of them. Could one be Mecca? Perhaps, but more likely it marked the location of Kovac’s impromptu base.

  With no time to spare, Driver turned her attention back to the desk, and the laptop. As she woke the computer, her eye fell upon the spine of the open book. It was a weathered copy of The Coming Dawn, an extremist text written by Sergei Molevchek. She knew the book well and didn’t have to investigate further, instead jumping onto the laptop. There were two open tabs on the task bar of the screen. She clicked on a text document first. It featured a half-finished hate-speech in Russian in the same extremist mould as the book.

  Next, Driver opened a spreadsheet. Again, in Russian, the language of Kovac’s adopted country. The spreadsheet was complex, colour-coded. It appeared broken into phases.

  Phase one listed a long string of attacks, the major ones recognisable from reports on the daily news. Driver checked the doorway and read further, finding dates and locations for each attack. Each came with action steps and the cells responsible. Not to mention times, dates and alternative strategies depending on government responses.

  Driver felt like her head was swimming, overloaded with too much data. It was impossible to retain more than a snapshot, yet she tried nonetheless, scrolling down to the second phase.

  This listed a further wave of terror attacks, planned to take place after the cashing of the ransom payment.

  So her instincts were right. Viper Nine had no plans to stop the attacks once they had the money. If anything, the ransom money would fuel and finance their operation for years to come. All while weakening the economic might of its opponents.

  Any doubt vanished when Driver happened on a cost analysis of how Kovac and his people planned to invest some of the vast sum. The scope of his vision was epic in scale. First, dismantle the existing machines of power. Second, run a campaign of right-wing terror and propaganda. Third, take political power and install himself in the Kremlin.

  Fourth…

  Driver gasped at the final stage of the plan. Riding into power on a wave of fear and terror, Kovac intended to wage genocidal war on the ethnicities of the world.

  Hearing voices in the corridor, she closed the applications and hurried around the desk.

  Driver picked up her headscarf and returned to her place by the wall. Peering into the corridor, still thick with smoke, she felt the lingering fumes invade the back of her throat.

  Driver coughed and held her headscarf to her mouth.

  With the blaze extinguished, Kovac marched towards his quarters with Graf and his female assistant in his wake. ‘Can we still operate?’ he asked over a shoulder.

  ‘Only two of the servers were damaged,’ the young woman replied, working a slimline laptop as she walked. ‘I can work around it.’

  Kovac’s eyes were ablaze, far hotter than the fire. His face lined with deep creases and his wayward teeth clenched. Yet as he entered his quarters, he relaxed at the sight of Driver.

  The Serbian was over six-foot, yet had an energy far more imposing than his rangy physique. He stopped in front of her, flanked by Graf, with the young woman peeling off to rest her laptop on the edge of his desk.

  Kovac looked Driver up and down. ‘So you’re the pain in my neck.’

  She lowered the head scarf and threw it around her ne
ck.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse the idiots who work for me,’ the Serb continued. ‘They don’t understand the purpose of a fan in the fucking desert.’

  Still reeling from the sight of Kovac’s plans, Driver tried to calm her mind. To decide what to do next. If she didn’t give Kovac the account number for the ransom payment, more attacks were imminent. That was she could bet on.

  She would also be killed – that Driver could guarantee. Yet if she did give him the code… Well, the last few days would be just the start.

  ‘I have to say, I’m surprised,’ she said, deciding to test the pliability of the man’s character.

  ‘At what?’ the Serb asked.

  Driver looked around the room. ‘I don’t know, an organisation like yours, in a place like this?’

  ‘What were you expecting? An underground lair?’

  Driver shrugged. ‘You just seem more professional, that’s all.’

  ‘We find it better to fly under the radar,’ Kovac replied. ‘Ostentation draws attention.’

  ‘Still, it’s not much fun, is it?’ Driver continued, fanning a hand to her face. ‘So damn hot.’

  The Serb rolled his eyes and sighed. ‘Can we skip the part where you attempt to build rapport?’

  Driver held up her hands. ‘Can’t blame a girl for trying.’

  ‘Now,’ the Serb said with a cold, impenetrable stare. ‘The account number.’

  * * *

  From an elevated position on the ridge of the rock formation, Wells peered down over the compound. The perimeter fence was drilled into the rock either side of the rear of a rear courtyard, with a rare strip of grass, trees and desert bushes at the base.

  He ran the binoculars over the courtyard, finding a guard to the far left and another to the right, both strolling in opposite directions. They walked like ex-military, with faces beneath khaki baseball caps and a uniform more akin to a marine.