Ryker didn’t stay in Weller’s office much longer, and after leaving the building he set off on the half-mile walk back to his hotel. Nothing Weller had said contradicted Diaz’s version of events, but then Weller hadn’t really given much. He’d been on the outside, looking in, and had a pretty decent excuse for not knowing what had gone wrong, and now claiming ignorance to the whole thing.
Yes, it was all a little too convenient that he was relying on his remote role, the confusion of the moment, and the ten years since to not be able to recall the sequence of events clearly. Weller was certainly intelligent, but did he have the gall to lie to Ryker’s face?
The trip to Frankfurt wasn’t a waste exactly, but it had been frustrating so far. A short rest, then on to the next.
He ducked into a coffee shop and joined the short queue inside. He looked at the street outside as he waited his turn. A woman moving past the windows caught his eye. He wasn’t sure why at first. She was shortish and wearing a long, thick coat, gray scarf, and black bobble hat. He could barely see any of her face, and her smart and dark winter gear matched a huge chunk of the people around him in the financial district, and yet…
‘Can I help you?’ the young barista asked.
Ryker turned and ordered a cold drink. He’d had enough coffee this morning already and wanted to quench his thirst. He took a pastry, too, then headed outside. He looked right. The direction the woman had gone in. No sign of her now. At least no obvious sign of her among everyone else.
He carried on his way, his eyes working a little more keenly now than before.
After a couple of turns, he was sure he spotted her again. Behind him now. About twenty yards away. Hands in pockets, head down, trying to blend in.
Ryker slowed his pace as he walked along to the next junction. Then when he was five yards away he suddenly sped up, not far from a jog, and took a sharp right onto the next street. Once around the corner he abruptly came to a stop and pulled up against the wall. If this woman was intent on following him, she’d most likely be hurrying now, too, to get to the corner before Ryker turned again.
He waited. And waited.
No sign of her. He edged right up to the corner. Passersby eyed him oddly. He peeked around.
There she was. Rushing forward. Straight into him. He reached out and grabbed her and pushed her up against the wall. Her hat fell off her head, revealing wavy, dyed-red hair that framed a face he knew but hadn’t seen in an age. She squirmed for a second until their eyes met and Ryker let go.
‘Hello, Nadia,’ he said.
* * *
Ryker’s hotel room was cramped for one; it was even pokier with two of them. Ryker was propped on the edge of the single bed. Nadia Lange was in the chair by the window next to which was the tiniest of tables. They were all of three feet apart.
Ryker still wasn’t sure he’d made the right choice inviting her back here rather than staying somewhere outside and neutral.
‘I’m guessing you came here for the same reason I did,’ Ryker said.
‘Weller?’
He nodded.
‘That’s how I found you,’ she said. ‘I was outside his office waiting. I was going to approach him when he came out.’
‘I decided not to wait.’
‘I noticed.’
Had he initially passed her when he’d entered the office building? If so, she hadn’t registered at all at that point. He was disappointed in himself for that. He should have been more on guard.
‘So you followed me instead?’ he asked.
‘There was nothing sinister about it.’
‘You weren’t very good at it.’
She laughed. ‘Perhaps you could teach me some tricks.’
‘You came here to speak to Weller? About Grichenko?’
‘Yeah. Though I’m kind of glad I found you instead.’
She smiled at him now. He held her stare for a moment. The dark makeup around her eyes added a devilish intensity to her look. In a good way.
‘You’re still working for The Man?’ Ryker asked.
She nodded.
‘You’re working right now?’
‘I’m not going to pretend otherwise,’ she said, looking down.
‘What are your orders?’
‘To find out who killed Grichenko and why. Which I’m thinking is what you’re doing too.’
‘It is. Except I’m doing it for me.’
‘I figured. I knew you’d left. I heard about your new identity, all that.’
All that? How much did she know? And how had she heard exactly?
‘So you’ll be reporting this conversation?’ Ryker asked.
She caught his eye again. ‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On what I get out of it.’
Ryker humphed. ‘Have you spoken to any of the others?’
‘Weller was first on my list. Given his new far from clandestine life, he was the easiest to track down.’
Ryker nodded. He’d thought the same, though had gone to Diaz first purely because he felt she’d have more to say. Which turned out to be quite accurate, really.
He wouldn’t tell Lange about his visit to Copenhagen.
Not yet.
‘What did he tell you?’ she asked.
‘Not a lot.’
She laughed. ‘He never was too chatty. Imagine being stuck in a van with him for hours on end.’
‘What about you?’ Ryker said. ‘What do you remember from that night?’
‘I remember quite a lot from that operation, actually,’ she said with a look of cheekiness now.
Of course, he knew why she gave him that look. The planning for the Doha op had seen the seven of them cooped up together for several weeks. Hours on end every day spent with each other in a safe house with a single communal area. Ryker and Lange had gotten close. Very close. But it had never been a serious thing. Just a bit of fun to pass the time while they planned and waited. Still, Ryker felt a little awkward now, looking back, though he wasn’t sure why.
‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘that night has always bugged me. I hated that it wasn’t a clean op. We should have been in and out of there without a hitch. The only reason I never dug into what went wrong before was because as far as I knew Grichenko was dead.’
‘That, and the fact that rule number one is to follow orders and never question.’
Ryker humphed again. He wasn’t sure if she was mocking or not. ‘The point is, something did go wrong that night. Someone in our team lied to me. Lied to you. I want to find out who and why so we can figure out who betrayed us. For all you know, it could be someone you’re still working with.’
She fidgeted a little at that. The thought had surely crossed her mind already. Lange was still an operative, even if Ryker didn’t know the full details of who her bosses were. Someone on the Doha crew had lied, but there would have been someone else in the shadows directing that. A boss somewhere, who could still be in position, still calling shots.
Maybe it was even Lange herself who’d betrayed them in Doha and was still working for the same boss. Ryker couldn’t rule it out.
‘Tell me then, James, what do you remember of that night?’
No point in keeping it to himself. He gave her every detail he could think of – from his own recollection, at least. He didn’t add the details he’d learned from Diaz. He took her through the sequence. Aldern saying he was moving to check something out. His comms going down. Ryker following and getting into a fight with two men whom he still didn’t know the identities of. The firefight and explosions inside which Ryker could hear but had no part in, and finally the chase back to the van where he was told Grichenko was dead.
‘The two men in the trees, they targeted you,’ Lange said. ‘It wasn’t random.’
‘No, it wasn’t.’
Salman and Diaz were ambushed too, by the conference room. And according to Diaz, the first shots were fired where Elliott was, suggesting maybe someone had tried to take him out. Before all that Aldern had disappeared. Every one of them had come under attack.
Except for Lange and Weller.
Ryker had never thought of it like that. If someone had put in place a plan to save Grichenko and to attack every single one of the crew inside the palace, why hadn’t they also attacked the van?
‘What about you?’ Ryker asked.
Lange went on to give her version of events. To start with her story was unsurprisingly similar to Weller’s.
‘There is one thing that’s helped me a bit though,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’
‘I’ve the benefit of a little bit of a memory jog.’
Ryker raised an eyebrow. ‘How so?’
She fished in her backpack and took out a laptop, then spent a few seconds firing it up. They sat in silence as she did so. Her eyes fixed on the screen, Ryker’s on her. He was trying hard to get a read on her, her reasons for being in Frankfurt, for following Ryker like she had, for now being so apparently open with him.
But he also couldn’t escape comparing how she looked now to ten years ago. Not ten years older, that was for sure. Her face was a little fuller, her skin a little more tanned. Her hair was redder and her makeup was darker. All in all, she looked—
She glanced up and caught his eye and both of them smirked. She’d caught him and wasn’t bothered by it in the slightest.
‘Take a look,’ she said. She turned the screen to him and he shuffled along the bed a little closer. A map. Five little red dots. She turned the sound up and voices filled the room. Seven voices, Ryker included. His mind took him back ten years with a startling clarity.
‘Everything was recorded?’ he said, not sounding as shocked as he was. ‘Surely that’s not protocol?’
Plausible deniability had been a cornerstone of black ops as long as black ops had existed. The less evidence that was kept of an operation the better. Yet here Lange was with a full record of the surveillance and comms from that night.
‘Definitely not protocol,’ she said. ‘This is my own personal insurance.’
He held her eye for a few seconds. Did he believe her? It was a reasonable enough explanation, even if it was an incredibly risky move. Lange was sitting there openly admitting that she’d broken very clear rules. On the off-chance she’d need some evidence to save her own back one day? She’d put her own career in jeopardy and was laying it all out in the open for Ryker, a man she hadn’t seen for ten years and had no real clue who his allegiances were now to.
The only alternative was that their bosses had wanted this record all along, but why on earth would the government have wanted anything at all recorded from that night?
‘Why are you showing me this?’ he said, his suspicion clear in his tone.
‘I know you. I know what motivates you. The truth. Rules don’t bother you. I trust you.’
She held his eye the whole time. He didn’t have a response. Because, unfortunately, he couldn’t say the same thing to her. He’d been burned too many times in the past. Plus, he wasn’t sure he even believed her, as much as a large part of him wanted to.
‘So this is when you all started to go dark,’ she said as she pointed to the screen. ‘Here’s Aldern, by the trees.’ She flicked forward. ‘Aldern went down. You followed him outside. A couple of minutes later you go dark too. Elliott, Salman, and Diaz were still live at that point.’
And steadily moving northwards, Elliott at the front.
‘Then Elliott stops here,’ Lange said. ‘That spot is right outside the bathrooms. Salman and Diaz carried on to outside this conference room, further north, but all are still live.’
Ryker’s eyes were firmly fixed on the screen now, his ears tuned to the voices of his crew members. A conversation he’d never before heard because his comms had already gone down by this point.
One of the red dots flicked off.
‘Wait,’ Ryker said. ‘Pause it.’
Lange clicked a button and the voices stopped.
‘What is it?’
‘Elliott went down next.’
Lange nodded. ‘And the gunfire started seconds later.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense.’
‘What doesn’t?’
‘That Elliott went dark first.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The dark spot was in this northern section,’ Ryker said. ‘Right? But Salman and Diaz were already further ahead than Elliott. Further north. So why did his go down first?’
Lange looked a little flummoxed by the question. Not because she didn’t get his point, he thought, but more likely because she didn’t have an explanation.
‘If there was a signal blocker,’ Ryker said, ‘which I think we can agree on, its jamming capabilities spread outward, right? A circle?’
‘Yeah?’
‘So going by the timings of when we went dark, and where we were at that time, we should be able to pinpoint the location of the blocker?’
‘In theory.’
‘Go on then.’
Lange hesitated for a second, as though concerned about something Ryker had said. But then she got to work. It took several minutes, but the answer was pretty much what Ryker had thought it would be from his own mental map of the layout and what he now knew from that night.
‘The most likely location was around here,’ Lange said, pointing to the spot on the map.
Outside the palace. About halfway between the building and where Ryker had got into a fight with those two men.
‘Do you think that’s what Aldern had seen?’ Lange asked. ‘He’d spotted whoever was lurking there? Or their equipment, at least?’
‘Possibly.’
‘And the two men who attacked you?’
‘It’s consistent. It’s all consistent. Except for one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It still doesn’t explain why Elliott went offline after me. It should have been Salman and Diaz.’
‘What are you saying?’
He thought about that for a few moments. ‘I’m saying it’s time to go and speak to the man himself.’
Lange looked at him a little dubiously.
‘You? We?’
Good question. The truth was he’d rather work alone. Others weren’t put at risk that way. Experience had taught him that over and over. It was one of the biggest reasons why he’d left his old life behind. Why he was now a loner. He’d cut ties with the few people he was closest to in order to protect them, from him.
‘I get it,’ Lange said. ‘I really do. But let me put it this way. You go out there on your own, chasing down Elliott and Diaz and Salman, and we’ll just be stepping on each other’s toes because I’m going to be doing the exact same thing.’
Interesting that she’d included Diaz in that. So did she really not know that Ryker had already seen her? And also no mention of Aldern. So she did know he was dead?
‘I won’t tell anyone,’ Lange said. ‘You know me, James. That’s not what I’m about. No one will know you were helping me. I’ve nothing to gain from it. Hell, my boss would be horrified if I told her. Probably more horrified than knowing I have this recording.’
Her. Ryker wondered who Lange’s boss could be. Not that he knew every honcho in the UK’s intelligence services.
‘Please?’ Lange said.
‘You already know where Elliott is?’
She dug into her pocket and took out her phone. She tapped away then turned the screen to him to show a map. Ryker stared for a couple of seconds. She was certainly well prepared.
‘Looks like Switzerland is our next stop then,’ he said.