The Drifter-Man leaned back against the door of the ‘68 Mustang Fastback. It was a beautiful car, a gift for himself and taken from one of the dead Cartel members that he had personally dispatched. It was almost worth going through all the shit, all the killing and taking out the Cartel members, especially Hannity, to get this beautiful piece of machinery to drive.
The sun was starting to set and he thought that it was a perfect time to leave the hellhole that had been the town of San Fuego.
“Are you sure you won’t stay?” It was Juanita.
He turned to look at her. She looked beautiful framed against the New Mexico vista; the dark hair, the deep brown eyes that men could fall in love with, the thin silk dress that clung to the contours of her body. She was a whole lot of woman in anyone’s book.
“If I stayed, I’m afraid that I’d never want to leave,” he said, and somewhere deep inside him he meant it.
“And is that so bad?”
He nodded sadly. “It is for me, that’s not who I am. I’d rather remember us like this… what we had.”
She smiled, accepting their fate. “Don’t you think this is a bit obvious for a man like you?” she said, indicating the Mustang, teasing him.
He laughed. “All that travelling on a bus with a fold-up toothbrush and living out of thrift stores is for the birds! I’m going to travel in style for the future – and at speed!”
She walked towards him, her hips swaying, taking one last chance at seduction to make him stay. It’s worth a try, she thought. She reached up and kissed him, and her hand snaked around the suit jacket and covertly placed something heavy and metallic into the waistband in the small of his back.
“Papa would have wanted you to have this. I pray it will protect you,” she said, gliding her hands away from his body.
He knew what it was; it was her father’s Desert Eagle semi-automatic pistol. It had taken the heads of many a Cartel killer in the past. It was a weapon worthy of a freelance hit-man.
He leaned in for one more kiss, felt their lips gently brush and then turned and climbed into the driver’s seat of the Mustang. Moments later, the engine growled into life and he threw it into gear and gunned the engine. The tyres squealed, leaving a rash on the road and then the Mustang was off, heading into the burning fire of the sun and away from the ghosts of the past seven days.
He never once looked backwards in the rear view mirror for her. Not once. But somehow he knew that she would be there watching until the last piece of the Mustang disappeared from sight forever…
THE END
Tom Lyth sat back in his chair and looked out of the window at the illuminated Liverpool riverfront at night, his mind at last ripped away from the finished novel in front of him. He leaned forward once more and stared at the laptop screen and then clicked on the ‘save’ icon.
There, it was done, another one finished, he thought.
It was a moment filled with relief and regret; the writer’s curse. Whenever he returned from one of his ‘projects’ overseas, he was always invigorated to write. It was as if the trip away for his secret life gave him jet-fuelled inspiration and a desire to get the words down. Tomorrow, he would begin the process of going over the story, looking for inconsistencies, errors, and the usual bag of tweaking. Once that was finished, it would be emailed over to the publishers and they would be left to start their part of the process; editing, proofing, formatting, cover design and then release dates and marketing.
As for him… what was next? Another book? Certainly not yet, it was too soon. Perhaps his other life would come calling again – or perhaps he would do nothing, just nothing, just exist in his own vacuum. He doubted it, but it was a possibility.
He had been home for nearly a month after the murderous events in Vienna. He had conducted the usual team de-brief and then passed everything over to the Seer and her people. After that, he had made his way home to recover and rest and try to find his own pulse again. Women helped, even casually, and of course the writing started again for him… or at least some rough ideas.
When he had worked the frustration out of his system, he had had made contact with the Seer and she had invited him to come and spend some time with her to “discuss some unresolved business”.
Pavel, Sabina and Marco had temporarily been resettled at the Seer’s Prism safe house on the Channel Island of Jersey. In the following weeks, Lyth, along with the Seer, had travelled over to see them, but only from a distance. In truth, he just wanted to know that they were alright and safe.
“The Pandora information is proving extremely useful,” said the Seer, as they walked along the harbour wall in St Helier. Down below them, Pavel, Marco and Sabina were throwing pebbles into the sea and laughing. Lyth noticed discreet bodyguards blending in at a distance.
“And of course Pavel is clarifying any little points for us. All in all, that was a successful little operation that you ran, Tom,” she said. “What are they doing now?”
“They are trying to skim stones across the water. Sabina is taking photographs of them… or trying to,” he said, his eyes focusing on Sabina, lingering for a few moments.
“Lovely.”
“What will happen to them next?” he asked.
She turned in his direction and frowned, then thought better of whatever it was she was going to say. “The usual resettlement package. They have decided to start a new life over in the USA. Vermont, I hear. We’ve made arrangements for them. They’ll be well looked after. Sabina wants to return to her art studies, maybe even work on some commissions. We have a wound care specialist working with her to help her with her…injuries. Pavel wanted to know if you would be coming to visit them in America.”
“What did you say?”
“I said no, of course, for obvious reasons, Thomas,” she said, scolding him.
He nodded in understanding. America for him was a no-go zone, it carried too much risk both for himself and for the people from his old life, the people he had loved. “That’s good. They both deserve it,” was all that he said by way of response.
“Oh, that’s not the end of it. The Architect has decided to offer Pavel a place on the Prism council. His knowledge and expertise will be invaluable. The irony is that he will save far more lives as a Prism council member than he ever could as a spy,” said the Seer.
Tom Lyth smiled at the news. “Oh, how the world turns, eh?”
“Indeed. Now, as for that other matter…”
“The traitor? Do you have any further leads?”
She shook her head. “Not leads, exactly, but things have moved on while you have been incommunicado.”
“You’ve found the spy?” he asked hopefully.
She smiled. “Not quite, but we have been given an option.”
He frowned, confused. “Explain?”
“The body of one of our people, a senior analyst with one of the more reputable defence and security think-tanks in Washington, was found just last week. Suicide. Gunshot wound to the head. He left a note to his wife and one to be passed to us.”
“Saying?”
The Seer shrugged. “That he had been coerced by parties unknown and that he had betrayed our trust… something along those lines.”
“How convenient!”
“Very, it was just a little too neat for my liking. This poor man had only very limited access to the Vienna operation and certainly couldn’t have known some of the more intimate details of what you and your team were up to. He was on the fringes at best,” she said.
Tom’s mind was trying to work out the angles. “So this spy, whoever he or she is, decided to find themselves a patsy in the hope that you would think he had been flushed out. It’s a set-up. Correct?”
“Exactly. The spy is embedded somewhere deep inside our organisation and is still there. So we have to tread cautiously as we move forward. But for the moment, we have the advantage; the spy thinks that we, the Prism, have bought the evidence that the traitor killed himself,” said the Seer.
It was a dangerous game, counter-espionage and she knew that enemies of all persuasions had tried to penetrate the Prism many times over. So far, she had kept them at bay… so far.
“What about the phone that we took from the dead Iraqi?” asked Tom.
“Well, there wasn’t much left of it. Obviously we would have preferred a live, talking former terrorist rather than a dead one, but clearly that wasn’t to be, was it?”
She took his arm and they walked on along the seafront, away from their former agents. “It will take time to repair what we have, probably even longer to get more data from it,” she continued.
“So what do we know?”
“We know that the Iraqi was part of a bigger network that had nothing to do with Islamic terrorism. He was an operative and recruiter for them. This network is well funded and well resourced. They specifically wanted the information that was in Pavel’s head and it seems that they were savvy enough to be able to infiltrate a spy into our organisation. That’s never been done before. That is worrying me,” the Seer said, in an unnerving bout of candour.
“So what do they want?”
“They want what we want, to control the future technology. So we have the want, we just don’t have the who or the why yet,” she said simply.
“Sort of like an anti-Prism?”
She nodded, accepting the analysis. “Possibly, only time will tell. Look, don’t overthink this. We are here, we aren’t going anywhere. The Prism will always survive and sooner or later these people, whoever they are, will poke their head above the parapet again and we’ll be ready to chop it off.”
They walked on some more, enjoying the brisk air; just two old friends, perhaps siblings or perhaps former lovers, taking a stroll on vacation. “What will you do now?” she asked.
“I’ll go back home. I have a book to finish.”
“And be someone else for a while? Not a Fisherman, but a Tom or a Dan Westlake, be an author?”
He shrugged. “Until you call again, yes. But anyway, it’s the story that’s the most important thing, not who writes it. After all, what’s in a name?”
Tom Lyth placed the laptop in his office drawer, out of sight and away from his mind for the night. The Drifter-Man was done and locked away. He was exhausted and tired. Whoever said that writing wasn’t a real job had obviously never had to wring that much emotion out of themselves before! It was physically and mentally draining
He turned on the DAB radio, tuned it to the BBC World Service, lowering the volume before pouring himself a glass of wine and settling himself down on the sofa in the living room. He sipped at the excellent Rioja, savouring it, his treat for completing the latest book. There it was again, that bittersweet moment of finishing a story, forcing himself back into author mode. The spy sleeps for now… now the author awakens!
He was only half listening to the radio. It was the usual UK politics, the situation in the USA, the normal car crash stuff. Thankfully there was nothing about a terrorist attack on a remote island off the coast of Norway, nothing about the downward spiral of the share price in Trillium Industries and definitely nothing about the disappearance of an eminent Czech scientist and his family. That was good. He didn’t need complications.
He finished off the last of the wine, placed the empty glass down on the coffee table and stood, ready for bed. He caught the last news item, about third or fourth down the list, so clearly a filler story on the itinerary and not important.
“In Asia, a man has died following an outbreak of an unknown pneumonia-like virus. Officials say only a limited number of other people are infected and have reassured the public that there is no cause for alarm…”
It was the 11th of January, 2019
Tom Lyth turned off the radio. Whatever the last news item was about could wait for another day. Now he needed to sleep and to finally accept its escape.