Chapter 70

 

 

DAY 13

 

 

A hand nudged her shoulder. “Get up!”

Calla shot her eyes open. A face she knew all too well and hoped she would never see again stared directly into her eyes. Her hands were tied with steel cords. She wrung them and a scorching sensation distressed the skin around them.

“Refrain from movement or those hands will be charred.”

“Mason.”

Calla glimpsed around her. She was still on the airplane. It had landed and was completely deserted. She peered to the seat where Allegra had been.

Empty.

“I’ve taken care of her,” she heard a man’s hoarse voice say.

She shot a glimpse behind. “Lascar? What’s going on?”

Mason frowned. “I’m glad your memory serves you well even with the drug he slipped you at the start of the flight.”

Her eyes narrowed into Lascar. “You’re starting to make this a habit.”

Lascar moved closer to where Mason sat on the edge of the aisle seat across from her. Her head pushed back, eyes burning into him. “Where’s Allegra?”

Lascar snickered. “You should’ve listened to your marine back there. If he’s still alive.”

She studied him for two seconds and in one swift instant, swung her leg and caught Lascar’s jaw. She sprang to her feet and landed centimeters from Mason.

He remained seated, watching with assured calm. Blood seeped from Lascar’s jaw and trickled onto his shirt.

Lascar leapt up attempting to strike back. Mason held out an outstretched hand. “Enough.” He pulled a gun to Calla’s head. “Now Cress, you’ll come quietly or this gun may accidentally go off.”

Calla remained still, her lungs heaving in her chest.

Within minutes, Mason marched her off the plane, his gun edging in to her shoulder blades, with Lascar tailing behind. The warm climate was a contradiction to the weather she’d left in the Pakistani mountains. A warm gusty wind slapped her arms and legs as she descended onto the asphalt, hands restrained to her front.

Mason steered her toward a waiting dark Land Cruiser.

She took a glimpse at her new destination. Before her head was shoved into the backseat, the distant, Andalusia mountain ranges that had greeted her on the tarmac, told her she was in Spain.

 

 

 

ON THE ROAD TO ISLAMABAD

 

Jack read no response from Nash’s face, as he edged his back in the leather of the front passenger seat of the Land Cruiser he’d rented for them. It was the quietest he’d ever seen Nash.

“You in a hurry, buddy?” Jack said.

The bleary road ahead was barren of traffic. Seventy-mph winds clouted their windshield as Nash churned the engine into fifth gear. The cruiser made its way on the damp road as they left the mountain paradise to Rawalpindi in the late morning, where they’d catch a flight to Islamabad. The region frequently experienced mudslides and deep ravines could be spotted in range.

Nash remained silent. He’d contacted the US Embassy in Islamabad an hour ago and they’d arranged their travel back to London after a minor debrief on Mason Laskell’s latest attempts. The moron had probably exploded a major energy plant in the North West of China, on the US’s intelligence watch list.

Something told Jack that London would not be Nash’s end destination.

The tablet responded to a secret British Intelligence signal.

“It’s the only uncompromised link I have left.”

Nash didn’t respond, but kept his eyes ahead as the sunset rays glared on the wet downhill road.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Jack said.

Nash stared ahead at the deserted road. “No.”

Jack set his head down and found his videoconferencing application. He’d remembered something that Stan had once told him about MI6 intelligence procedures of the 1960s, and how they used to intercept signals. The secret service had used shortwave radio stations, characterized with unusual broadcasts, often created by artificially generated voices reciting streams of numbers, words, letters, tunes or better known as the Morse code. Mason had perfected this method of transmitting text information as a series of on-off tones, lights, or clicks openly understood by a skilled listener. The code Mason was using was new. A similar method, only he was not interpreting the basic Latin alphabet to intercept their communications. He was encrypting sophisticated, computing language.

If Jack could speak to Stan, then maybe he could get some ideas how MI6 had used it, if they would admit that they did. He could reprogram it.

He dialed Stan’s videoconference number and his tabletcaptured indistinct images before Stan’s living room drew into focus. The connection was pathetic, but would do. Stan stood to the corner of the room staring out the window. He’d left his computer on. He turned when he heard the system on his den table dial. It raised a curious look from his face. Stan strolled to the computer, shoulders drooped, with a slow, unsteady step and hit a button on his computer. “Jack?”

“Hey.”

“Is everything okay? Is Calla with you?”

Jack wasn’t sure the best way to answer that question. “She’s with Allegra.”

“And Nash?”

“He’s here with me. We’re in Pakistan.”

“That doesn’t sound right. What’s going on?”

Nash’s mouth was tight and grim as Jack shot him a glance. “Maybe another time Stan. Calla’s fine.”

“I should’ve come with you. I won’t forgive myself if anything happens to her.”

“Listen, the only way you can help Calla now it by giving us any information about her mother’s location.”

“I don’t know where she is Jack, or if she’s alive.”

Jack shot a purposeful look at Nash. “Oh, she’s alive.”

“How? Where?” Stan said.

“We’re not sure yet.”

Stan frowned in concentration. “What can I do?”

“Stan, several months ago you mentioned that Secret Security Service used a numbers station called ‘Carman’s Whistle’, a line of communication through which spies securely received encrypted messages at specific times and could therefore isolate the Services’ mainframe computers from contamination with the intelligence they received if necessary.”

“It was a shortwave, radio communication spies used. It used higher frequencies for greater range. There were many other uses, like delivering encrypted messages to overseas agents. I received the broadcasts many times and they saved my life,” Stan said.

“I wonder whether Mason is using the same method to communicate with his hackers and stay one step ahead of us. You don’t by any chance have details of those logarithms. It may help us intercept his messages and find his broadcasting hideout. ”

“Whoa! Jack, that was ions ago. I don’t see how those programs could help with today’s technology and at the rate at which Mason is eating up cyberspace.”

“It’s not the technology I need, it’s the principle. He’s probably using the same method, only with a new code, which I need to figure out. That’s how he’s getting to global technology systems before we can bat an eye.”

Stan’s face hardened. “Even if I could, Jack, such information would be classified and filed. We would need someone in authority to reopen them for us, surrender the classified location of the original broadcast location, or get ISTF to do it—”

The screen went black.

“Stan?”

“What is it?” Nash asked.

“He’s gone.”

Jack attempted a redial.

The connection failed to respond.

 

 

 

1327 hrs.

 

Calla glimpsed at the white arches. The sequence of crisp curvatures of Seville airport welcomed her calculating mind. She gawked at the clouds above, threatening rain, although temperatures looked moderately warm.

Mason shoved her into a chrome Land Cruiser and watched her for a moment. “Comfortable, Cress?” He slumped into the seat next to her with Lascar and the driver sitting up at the front.

She scrutinized his intense eyes. “What do you want this time, Mason? Didn’t prison agree with you?” Her voice was curiously flat as she spoke.

His eyes narrowed. “You’re my latest and probably last project, Cress. If I can crack you, I can crack anything.”

She squirmed beneath the steel grip on her wrists and felt a corresponding lessening of pressure from the thin restraining cuffs. “I’m flattered, Mason. I’ll make sure I give you the challenge you’ve so anticipated.”

She tugged at the cuffs. Their grip on her wrist tightened and pain shot through to her shoulder.

“I wouldn’t fight those, if I were you. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure you could snap them in half. But bear in mind, the inner sides of those cuffs are lined with miniature needles that will shoot a powerful hallucinating deliriant up your bloodstream if they pierce your skin beyond a centimeter. This means, you can afford little movement, unless you wish to sing all your secrets to me.” He checked his watch. “In ten seconds.”

Calla glanced down at the modern steel cuffs. A small red light beeped on the outer ring, a motion detection sensor, guaranteeing she couldn’t go anywhere without Mason’s knowledge. Calla couldn’t help wondering why Mason hadn’t killed her. What now? He’d accelerated his program to manipulate any global computer connected to the Internet. Had he used the same gimmicks to increase his telepathic mind to hypnotism?

Calla was not sure how it worked. She couldn’t look him in the eyes. That was as far as her knowledge in hypnotism went. Hallucination was another thing. She wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between reality and the imaginary. Her hand bent painfully at the wrist. “You’re one sick criminal, Mason.”

Lascar glimpsed back. “Hey! You promised not to hurt her. She’s just an experiment.”

Mason broke into braying laughter as Calla contemplated. Mason would keep no such promise.

 

 

Within the hour, the car nosed into a parking lot outside a villa in Seville’s old quarter of Barrio Alfalfa. The large Andalusian mill house was set in mature gardens of oranges, lemons, palm and olive trees surrounded by open countryside. Ridge joined them on the cobbled lot and jumped into the Rover, and they continued on a heated drive toward the Andalusian Mountains. Soon the Cruiser entered a private gated community in the agrarian mountain countryside, positioned on the fringes of the village of Benahavís.

With her wrists still imprisoned in a set of deadly cuffs, Mason marched Calla in to the villa, a converted seventeenth-century casa that seemed meticulously restored and converted into a private home. Built in the conventional Andalusian white village style, its architecture merged many modern characteristics.

They traipsed past expansive living rooms. Oversized windows allowed in a steady, Mediterranean breeze, and Mason’s style had spared no luxury with the indoor fixtures—the interior design being fashioned closer to Italian Renaissance.

A robust, middle-aged woman, displaying several degrees of masculinity met them in the hallway. “Everything’s ready, sir.”

“Good, then by all means let’s begin.”

Had it not been for the acidic ache around the cuffs, Calla longed to scuffle herself free, slam a fist in Mason’s chest and a knee in Lascar’s groin. The steel didn’t look any more resilient than the double glazed windowpanes of the Shard skyscraper that she’d tossed her fists through once to rescue Nash. The more she grappled with her wrists, the worse the agony that filled her hands with a vicious sting. “What do you intend to do with me?”

“All in good time. First I would like to offer my hospitality,” Mason said.

“I don’t wish to be entertained by you.”

Mason glared at her. “Stubborn as your mother. Let’s see if you can sustain my investigations longer than she did.”

Calla’s face went taut with anger. Mason had more than once referred to injuring her parents. He’d first threatened her with the topic at Murchison Falls in Uganda, and now he’d done it again.

Mason jetted her toward a rooftop garden, three floors up, overlooking a miniature canyon. With no warning, he jostled her violently into a lounge chair. “Try to relax.”

Lascar took a seat across from where Mason perched over her in the roof garden. Mason shot Lascar a perturbed glare. “You, leave now!”

Lascar’s eyebrows drew together in an angry frown before he rose and ambled to the door that led back to the lower floors of the house.

 

“Calla Cress. A very promising operative. The one who’s to take on the mandate. I’ve heard it mentioned that you and I aren't so different.”

“I’m nothing like you.”

“You and I have the same genes. The same operative genes. We both know what we want. We’re both distrustful of people. We both don’t trust those closest to us, and we both have very ambitious women for mothers.”

“What makes you think you know my mother?”

“I know you’re every bit like her—untiring, strong and will let no man rule or tame you.”

Calla writhed at her wrists. “Take these things off before I shrink your neck to their size and use them as a mutt collar.”

Mason flung his head back in a roar of laughter. “You’ve always had it in you. Don’t be sure about that. The last time we met in such a state, I didn’t make myself clear. This time, there won’t be much conversation between us.”

Mason regarded her with a knowing severity.

She gazed away. Yet something stouter than her will made her face him. Perhaps it was curiosity. Perhaps it was interest. Calla wasn’t certain. All she felt was an alluring force and pull as his voice took on soothing subtlety. His words comforted her mind.

How?

She took on an amplified state of focus and concentration, able to deliberate intensely on a particular thought or memory. Her eyes drifted. It was not sleep. It felt like freedom—as if she had no individual will.

She didn’t desire one.

Calla stopped resisting.