TWENTY TWO
Back at the ARU's headquarters, Jackson was standing alone in the briefing room, a cup of lukewarm coffee in his hands, made more out of a desire to give himself something to do than anything else. He was leaning against the drinks stand, staring at the noticeboard across the room with his name on it, deep in thought.
He'd been on the line with Agent Wallace in DC when Fraser had taken the round to the head, mere seconds before they got to him. Coupled with reports from Director Cobb's task force, who had found King dead in his apartment building, and the most recent confirmation that McCarthy had just been killed, it had quite simply been a disastrous hour. They'd had the jump on the Panthers, but nevertheless they hadn't reacted in time, their officers and agents beaten to the trio by seconds.
And because of that delay, three more men had now been murdered.
Agent Wallace had called Jackson back and told him that Fraser's office building had been completely evacuated. The murder weapon had been located on a rooftop across the street and taken to the lab, along with the spent copper jacket from the bullet lying on the ground to the right of the rifle. They were checking security and street cameras to try and tag the shooter, and were searching for any witnesses. They had to follow procedure of course, and the lab could come back with something if the rifleman had made a mistake, but deep down Jackson knew he wouldn’t have. These men knew what they were doing. And this operation was a one off, not a serial attack like the two snipers back in 2002. The guy had left the rifle behind deliberately.
And Jackson felt as if all that effort in the lab would just be a waste of time. Fraser was still dead, his wife now a widow, his kids left without a father. It didn’t matter if they found a hundred fingerprints on the rifle and cartridge.
None of them would bring the man back.
News of both King’s and Fraser's deaths had been confirmed moments apart from each other, just as Cobb had been preparing to leave with his family. Two of the armed officers would deliver them to the house in one of the replacement MI6 Ford 4x4’s, ensuring they weren't tailed, then return to the station.
Before he left, Cobb had walked into the briefing room to speak to Jackson alone. Before he spoke, the atmosphere between the two men had been tense.
‘I'm sorry for giving you such a hard time earlier,' Cobb said. 'I was too tough on you. None of this is your fault.'
Jackson smiled. ‘No problem. We’re all strung out.’
A silence had followed. Cobb had walked over to the board, tapping the photographs of the three murderers, the men who started all this, Carver, Floyd and Fletcher.
'This kind of thing has happened before, hasn't it?’ Cobb continued. ‘Massacres. My Lai, in Vietnam. Haditha, in Iraq.'
'And those are ones we know about,' Jackson said.
He paused.
‘I met one of the soldiers from My Lai back in Virginia just before I went to The Farm. Just before he died. When he spoke about it, he had the same expression that I saw on Fletcher’s face earlier.’
Pause.
‘I asked him how many women and children died that day in the jungle. He said he lost count. There was never an official number released to the public, but we know the minimum was 347 civilians dead. Women and children. Babies.' He looked at the board. ‘The same exact shit that happened here.’
Silence.
'Come with us, Ryan,' Cobb had said. 'Until this is over. We can run the operation from the Hall. You'll be secure. None of the Panthers will have any idea where we are.'
Jackson smiled, and shook his head, looking back at him. 'I need to stay, Tim. To be honest, I don't fancy isolating myself. I need to be near the airports. Once someone realises the connection in these attacks, I'll probably get called straight back to Virginia. But until then, I need to be in the thick of it.'
He saw the look on Cobb’s face.
'Don’t feel guilty. You have a family to protect.’
He pointed at Cobb’s office and at the damaged glass.
‘Besides, no one's taken a shot at me today.'
There was a pause.
Both men looked at the board, the eleven photographs and names, seeing their own faces at the top of the pyramid.
Seven of the photographs now had a big X over them.
'Four of us left,' Cobb said.
At the doorway, an officer from Second Team appeared. 'Ready to go, sir?'
Cobb nodded. He’d turned to Jackson and offered his hand.
'You're sure you want to stay?'
Jackson shook it.
'Positive.'
'OK. I'll see you again soon.'
'Take care of your family, Tim. And keep your head down.'
'You too.'
And with that, Cobb had turned, walking out of the room, and disappeared down the corridor, out of sight.
Truth be told, standing alone in the briefing room and with a fresh X over the face of McCarthy, Jackson was beginning to regret not taking up Cobb’s invitation. Shaking his head, he took a calming breath. There were armed men guarding every entrance here. They'd been unprepared before. The Panthers wouldn't get the drop on them again. And besides, Jackson couldn’t leave. He had a personal responsibility to stay here in the middle of this, one that no one knew about. He owed it to those who had already been killed by the soldiers. If they came for him, they came for him, and the chips would fall where they may.
The thought of the group of men who wanted to end his life made him feel slightly sick. He looked down at the cup of coffee, two sugars, loaded with caffeine. That definitely wasn't helping keep his nerves steady. As he tossed the still-full cup of liquid into the trash beside him, he saw the dark-haired, attractive girl who ran the tech team enter. Nikki, he remembered. For a nasty moment he thought she was moving to the board to draw another X over Fletcher, but instead she walked towards him standing by the drinks stand.
'Good news,' she said.
'What's that?'
'Our team just captured one of the Panthers, the man who killed McCarthy. He was trying to escape from them through a shopping centre. They cut him off and got him in handcuffs.'
'That's great.'
'They’re on their way back with him. Maybe we’ll get some answers.'
Jackson nodded as Nikki grabbed a foam cup and helped herself to a small cup of coffee from the stand, more of a shot than anything, some caffeine to spike her blood sugar and keep her alert. They stood there in silence for a moment, then she nodded to him and turned, moving back to her desk next door with the cup in her hand. He watched her leave, then turned and walked over to the window, looking out over late-afternoon London, bathed in sunshine.
In the commotion and panic of the day's events, neither Cobb nor any of his officers had taken a moment to think about Jackson's initial involvement in the case all those years ago. He had been just as young as Cobb, only twenty six, a junior agent fresh from his training. It should have been obvious. His role to ensure Blackout ran smoothly should have been delegated to someone with far more authority and experience, especially considering the importance and secrecy surrounding the operation.
But none of them had stopped to question why it had been him.
He thought back all those years, back to when he was called into a Senior Agent's office only weeks after he had moved to London in March 1999.
Hearing what had happened in that small town in Kosovo.
What his cousin, Jason Carver, had done.
How he had butchered all those women and children. How the Brits would be organising the rescue, but that Deputy Director Carver had insisted his nephew Ryan oversee the operation as both an American and family presence, making sure it ran to plan, making sure they got the stupid boy out of there alive. It was shameful. His uncle was panicking, partly about his son, but mostly about the potential damage to his own career.
Still stunned after hearing the news and sickened by the massacre, Jackson had been passed a phone inside the senior agent’s office. His uncle was on the other line from his desk in Virginia.
Get him out of there alive and I'll see to it that your career takes off.
That was all he’d said.
To this day, Jackson's subsequent actions caused him shame. He’d hidden his revulsion at his cousin's actions, even though he was well aware that if the operation was a success Jason would probably never be punished for what he had done. Out of some stupid misguided thought of family and national loyalty that he had regretted every day since, Jackson had agreed to do what he was ordered. Blackout had gone ahead under his and Cobb’s supervision and it had been a perfect success. A month later they had a damn ceremony for Ryan in DC, where Deputy Director Carver pinned the medal on him in front of a national audience and the cameras, shaking his hand like he’d done something heroic and patriotic. In hindsight, given the guilt he now carried with him, Jackson knew he should have just said no and walked away. Every promotion he’d ever landed in his career since took him back to that first compromise. No advancement or pay rise had ever been worth it. They should have left the three murderers to die. The men who did that to innocent people deserved everything they had coming.
It didn’t matter if one or all of them were family.
Looking out as the sun started to set across the city, Jackson thought back to when they were kids. He and Jason were the same age and had grown up together in Staunton, playing football, riding bicycles and staying out late, sneaking into the local cinema to watch R-rated movies. In his wildest dreams, he never could have imagined that the boy he’d known back then would turn into an evil, mass murderer of a man. He remembered sitting next to Jason in the cinema and seeing his cousin’s feet barely touched the floor from his seat, his eyes wide with excitement at the movie playing on the screen, innocent and a good kid.
Jackson sighed and looked at the buildings in the distance. In the years since the rescue, Jason hadn't been in contact once. He would have been well aware by then that his cousin had helped co-ordinate the rescue operation, that he had played a significant part in the fact that he was still alive and not cut up into a hundred pieces by the men whose families he had slaughtered. But he had never once bothered to pick up the phone to thank him for helping to save his sorry ass, not once in the past fifteen years.
Jackson remembered how the kind, fun and intelligent Jason he’d known as a kid had morphed into a spoilt, arrogant and aggressive teenager. He’d lost all his charm and friendliness, and in short, he'd become a real a*shole. He was cruel and started bullying other kids, picking on anyone at high school smaller than him. He’d left high school with a shitty diploma and hardly any friends, and the next thing Ryan heard was that Jason had signed up to join the Marine Corps. At the time, Ryan had both figured and hoped the training and discipline might straighten him out and fix his problems. But deep down he’d worried about the thought of Jason with a gun and responsibility. Ryan knew that when Jason had arrived back on US soil after Blackout and signed the same secrecy pledge, he had been honourably discharged. Honourably. Like a damn war hero, his arm in a sling. A second chance, an opportunity to live a full life, a right he had stolen from all those people in that camp that night. And now, fifteen years later, seven more innocent men had died because of his crimes.
Jackson shook his head, looking out at the city. His own blood had butchered those people, the same gene-pool, his own damn cousin. He liked to believe in the goodness of people and that life usually found a balance, but he knew the reality was often far harsher and a lot less romantic. So far today, two men had been shot at close range. Another had been car-bombed. Another sniped. One had committed suicide. And the latest had been hit in a rocket attack.
More bodies. More death. More innocent people dead just because his idiotic cousin wanted to play the hero, go home and brag about how many people he’d killed during the war, forgetting to mention that they were pretty much all women and children. And now, men who had saved his life, men he had never bothered to even look up and thank, all dying because of his drunken stupidity and lust for blood.
But then again, life had sort of found a balance. The supposed glory that had awaited him had never materialised. His marriage had fallen apart almost the moment he got back and his father had turned his back on him, disgusted by what he’d done and the threat he’d posed to his own career. Jackson knew his cousin had been living alone in DC for the past eight years. He had no friends and no money. He worked a dead-end job in a sleazy strip-club far from the wealth and importance of the city, getting fatter and older and watching his life pass him by.
He was so broke he couldn’t even afford to be an alcoholic.
Jackson had caught the CNN report at his office earlier in the day. It said that Jason Carver had been strangled with a wire in his car in the early hours of the morning, no witnesses, no one around to see him die. His funeral would take place sometime in the next two weeks, and Jackson was as sure as anything that there would be few, if any, mourners
Strangled with a wire.
Jackson nodded. Jason was dead. So too was Floyd, his partner in crime. Although he’d claimed he hadn’t pulled a trigger that night, Fletcher’s time was also coming to an end due to Nature. It was a fitting end for all of them. Fifteen years on, justice had been served. Even though one of them was family, they deserved exactly what they got.
But the other men who’d died today didn’t.
The hardest part was, Jackson could understand the rage of the Panthers, the thirst for revenge. If it had been his family who had been massacred, God only knew how he would feel and what he would do to bring those accountable to justice.
Jackson looked out at the orange-tinted sky on the horizon.
They were out there right now, and Jackson was next on their list. He knew they would die to get to him, and to Cobb and Fletcher in the hospice bed. They wouldn't show mercy, even for a sick man. One way or another, this thing would end with more people dying. More kids left without fathers. More wives left widows. All of them paying for the crimes of three stupid men committed over a decade ago.
And the shame Jackson had carried since that night suddenly felt ten times heavier.
Something outside the window caught his attention, and the CIA agent looked down as a dark Ford pulled into the parking lot. The front of the car looked like it had been damaged from gunfire. It moved swiftly along the tarmac and swung into an empty space near the doors below. He saw two men from the Unit's First Team step out, Fox and Archer, and then watched as another officer opened one of the rear doors and led out a huge man dressed in black fatigues, his hands cuffed behind his back. Jackson watched the four men lead the captive inside. He was a giant, dwarfing the two officers either side of him. The American studied him as he was led into the building. Jason had ruined this man’s life.
Looking down at the captive, all those feelings of guilt and regret at what his cousin did that night filled him like a balloon full of water, close to bursting.
Alone at the window, he watched as the man was led across the tarmac.
'I'm sorry,' he said, quietly.
Then he turned on his heel and headed downstairs to watch the interrogation that would surely follow.
But he’d make sure that the man was securely in the cell first before he moved down the corridor.
Outside, Chalky and Fox escorted the huge man towards the entrance of the building, Porter and Archer checking behind them that they hadn’t been followed. Once they all moved inside, Chalky and Fox took the captive through to holdings as the other two officers exchanged greetings with several members of Second Team. Archer touched the cut above his left eye. It was sore and he had a thumping headache. Beside him, he saw Porter still had dried rivulets of blood down his neck that had trickled out of each ear, his face peppered with cuts and blackened from the explosion.
He turned to Archer.
‘You alright?’
‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Better than you, anyway. Go and get cleaned up, boss.’
Porter nodded and patted him on the shoulder, then walked into the station and headed upstairs. As the two officers from Second Team turned to talk to each other, Archer had time to stop and think for a moment, the first time in a while.
Taking his left hand off the stock of his MP5, he pulled his phone from his tac vest and scrolled through his recent Call History, finding Katic’s number. He pushed the green button and waited for it to connect, turning and walking to the entrance to look out of the windows.
It rang three times, then it was answered.
‘Two calls in one day,’ she said, munching on something. ‘Did you miss me already?’
‘Bad time?’
‘Lunch break,’ she said, through a mouthful of food. ‘It’s been a quiet day. No one’s robbing any banks.’
‘Don’t jinx it.’
‘You OK?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine.’
‘Any news on your situation?’
‘We found out that the two guys who attacked our station are from a larger group of eight.’
‘Oh shit.’
‘We captured one of them. He just got taken inside to the cells.’
‘Do you know who they are?’
‘Funny you ask. Your family is Serbian, right?’
‘Yeah. My grandparents left after the Second World War, but I still have relatives there.’
‘You ever heard of the Black Panthers?’
There was a long pause.
Down the line, he heard her stop munching on her lunch. In the receiver, there was nothing but a period of silence.
‘Why do you ask?’ she said eventually.
‘Apparently they were a Special Forces Unit during the Kosovo war. Part of the KLA.’
‘I know who they are.’
He paused.
Silence.
‘Can you tell me anything about them?’
Another pause.
‘My family who are still there, they live in a town called Priboj,’ she said. ‘It’s a small place, less than 30,000 people, towards the border with Bosnia. A few years ago, I went to visit my first cousin, Marija. I stayed at her home, with her husband and two small girls. The first night I was there, we all had dinner together, and then she took the girls off for a bath and put them to bed. I headed upstairs too to have a shower and get an early night’s sleep, but from my room I heard Marija telling the two girls a story. I’d never heard it before. It was one of those bedtime stories with a moral that warns children about something. Like the Boy who cried Wolf.’
‘A fable,’ Archer said.
‘Yes, that’s right. Anyway, I heard her talking to them in Serbian. She told them about a family. They used to live down the street, before the two girls were born, and were not nice people. They lied, they cheated, they treated everyone around them badly. They had two boys who would bully all the other children in the playground, punching and kicking them and so forth.’
She paused.
‘Anyway, long story short, there was a school bus in the town that came every morning to pick up the children who lived on the street. And one morning, the driver pulled up outside the house of the two bully boys. But no one came out. The driver shrugged, then drove on and continued on his way. But then the kids didn’t show up the next day. Or the day after. So eventually, the police went round to their house. And they found that the family was gone. Vanished into thin air, the father, the mother, the two boys. But the sheets on their beds were rumpled, blankets half on the floor, chairs knocked over. As if they had been snatched in the night.’
‘OK,’ Archer said, confused, not sure where this was going.
‘Marija told the two girls that something came for the family. She told them that because the family were so cruel a monster came in the middle of the night and took them away, and no one ever saw them again. She said the beast had a name, called the Crno Kuguar. The Black Panther, in English.’
Archer frowned, touching the cut again over his eye.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘After Marija shut the kid’s bedroom door, we went downstairs to get a drink and I told her I’d overheard her story. I didn’t grow up in Serbia so had never heard it before. I asked her if it was a famous old tale or something she made up.’
She paused.
‘Then she told me it was actually true.’
‘What?’
‘Well, not the monsters thing. But I swear to you, as Marija swore to me, that during the war people just went missing from all over the area, in the town and in the surrounding countryside. She assured me that the family she spoke of had existed, and all four of them had vanished. Rumours had spread about who was responsible for these disappearances. She told me it was a KLA Special Forces Unit called the Black Panthers.’
‘They stole people?’
‘That’s what everyone there still thinks, even the adults. No one ever found out what had happened to those who disappeared. But not a single one was ever seen again. Rumour had it the Panthers were arrested and put on trial in Belgrade after the war. And after that happened, no more people went missing.’
‘That’s right. That’s what we were told.’
‘So the story was actually based on reality. It scared kids into behaving because of that. And Marija told me that no one ever knew what had happened to the Black Panthers. Like their victims, they just disappeared too.’
‘Not anymore,’ Archer said.
She paused.
‘Whoa, wait a minute,’ she said. ‘Are you telling me these are the men who attacked your station?’
‘Yes. They’re trying to kill my boss.’
‘Why?’
‘I can’t say.’
‘Jesus Christ, Sam. These men are the stuff of nightmares in Serbia.’
Archer went to reply, but he heard a whistle from behind him. He turned and saw Chalky in the doorway of the lower corridor, gesturing at him to join him.
‘I need to go.’
‘Archer, listen to me,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot of bullshit back home surrounding these men, but somewhere the myths mix with the truth. To this day, grown men in Priboj are scared shitless at the mention of the Panthers. Be careful.’
Archer nodded.
‘Is there anything else you can tell me about them?’
‘Yes.’
‘What?’
‘They must have been desperate to kill your boss.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘They attacked during the day. That’s very unlike them. That’s the opposite of the fable, in fact.’
‘Why was it unlike them?’
She paused. He looked out of the windows of the police station at the setting sun.
‘Because they come for you at night.’