The ambulance burned with Fuller’s body inside. A black Volkswagen minivan drove away from the wasteland on the outskirts of Rome. It cruised through a suburban district. Tall, narrow apartment blocks rubbing shoulders among congested streets lined with city cars, cafes, shops and a rainbow of Vespas. The heavyset Italian behind the wheel was with the UN. He wore a red and black check shirt with a holstered firearm on his belt. Contractor or peacekeeper, Driver couldn’t say. But like the men in the Libyan safe house, they had their instructions. Don’t question. Don’t ask. Just do. The man up front didn’t seem the asking kind, his eyes fixed on the road.
Driver rode in silence in the back, staring into space out of the window. It had been a draining day. High-intensity missions always ended this way, whether successful or not. It was the post-mission comedown. Adrenalin was like a sugar rush. It picked you up and dropped you off a ten-storey building. From flying missions in the US Navy, to going after high-value CIA targets, Driver was well versed in the comedown. You spent hours, days, weeks, even months and years planning for an operation. Then in an instant, it was over. All that remained was the void – until the start of the next mission. Yet nothing could have prepared her for the sight of Tom. Driver still had so many questions, perhaps her biggest fear being that he would now be in the wind, and she wouldn’t get the answers she so desperately craved.
For now, Driver was tired enough to let go for a moment. In the back of the Volkswagen, the others seemed to be feeling it too. Even Pope had gone quiet. Or rather, gone to sleep. He let out a gentle, steady snore, his head resting on the back of the seat, stinking the van out with a potent assault of stale body odour. The rest of the team sat in silence like Driver, except for Rios, who favoured the isolation of music through her earphones.
The ride was smooth but slow through the cramped, humid confines of the city. The radio chattered low with talk of impending war. All sides were issuing warnings, with breaking news of Driver’s own country moving to DEFCON 2, its highest state of readiness prior to war. Though whether she saw the US as ‘her country’ any more was a debate for another day. Yes, Driver knew when she signed up for clandestine CIA operations that disavowal was a real possibility. But no one ever thought it would happen to them. Somehow, Driver never expected her government would be quite so quick to abandon her.
Meanwhile, in further news, rumours abounded of a next-gen Russian sub positioned off the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, to which the British had responded by deploying two of its own Trident submarines.
According to the radio, business was booming for defence contractors. The French were thought to be placing huge orders for jets, tanks and combat equipment. There was also talk of the US Air Force flying weaponised Predators out of Sardinia. This all left the Italians calling emergency meetings of their own. And Romans asking themselves a barrage of questions – from which country was at fault and whose side they were on, to what their own government should do, whether conscription would come into force and what one should wear during a nuclear holocaust.
‘With around sixteen thousand nuclear missiles in the world and close to two thousand on high alert, the prognosis is grave and the window for a peaceful resolution shrinking by the hour.’ So said the military analyst the radio anchor had welcomed onto the show. Driver rested her head against the neck restraint. With her body relaxing, she returned to her own barrage of questions. There were so many emotions, she didn’t know which to focus on first. The sheer shock that Tom was alive? Relief he wasn’t dead? The sense of rejection? The feeling of betrayal, that everything she thought they had was a lie? Confusion as to why the man she loved – once loved – could do such a thing? Or anger at herself, that she’d wasted so much time and energy on him over the last two years.
Driver looked at the still-healing wounds from her failed suicide attempt. Laughter burst out of her like untapped oil from a well. It shocked Pope awake. Baptiste raised an eyebrow. Rios turned in her seat, but went back to her music. Driver settled down. It was the brain’s natural response to confusion. An overabundance of conflicting stimuli.
Lim removed her sunglasses and held Driver’s eye. ‘Are you going to tell us how you know McNeil?’
Driver shrugged. ‘He’s an old colleague, that’s all.’
‘From the CIA?’ Lim asked.
Driver shook her head, acting casual. ‘We worked together on a few missions.’
Wells turned in the front passenger seat. ‘Did I miss something back there?’
‘You mean while you were taking your nap?’ Driver asked.
Wells touched the bump on his head. ‘Ha ha. Seriously, something happen I should know about?’
Lim looked across at Driver. She placed her sunglasses over her eyes. ‘No.’
Driver felt grateful to Lim. The last thing she needed was Wells pressing her. Questions would be asked, but she needed time to process her still-raw emotions.
As she gathered her thoughts, the minivan came to a stop. It waited outside a four-storey cream apartment block. Each floor sported a Juliet balcony decorated with pot plants and hanging baskets – all the windows shuttered except for the top floor.
‘We’re here,’ the Italian man said into his lapel.
‘Thank Christ,’ Pope said. ‘I’m busting for a piss.’
The shutter in front of them rattled open slowly. They rolled down a ramp, the automatic headlights illuminating a small basement garage with a handful of spaces. Another matching minivan sat at an angle with a silver surveillance van parked a couple of spaces on.
Driver climbed out onto stiff, tired legs and joined the others in grabbing her black holdall from the boot. She slung it over a shoulder and they walked to the door of the apartments. It opened only from the inside by a remote operator somewhere in the block. A CCTV camera hung above, looking out across the garage floor.
They trooped as a unit through the door, past a broken elevator and up a steep run of stairs winding their way around the centre of the building. Driver pulled herself up each one by the wrought-iron railings, her legs heavy from the events of the day. They kept going until they reached the top floor, where two more men waited with submachine guns. One of them pounded on a solid steel door with a spyhole.
They waited for what seemed like an eternity. Driver looked up into the camera and motioned for them to open the door. Rios gave the finger. The door opened. They walked through into a small vestibule branching off left and right. It was obvious to Driver the place was a UN intelligence station, with two large apartments knocked through to form one.
As they stepped inside and dumped their bags, Driver spotted Gilmore through an open doorway to the right. He stood with his hands on his hips. A mess of papers, TV monitors and laptops swamped a pod of desks behind him. She led the team into the ops room, stopped and looked around. Mo was busy on his laptop. Anna wore a set of headphones and watched a live report from Rome on a monitor.
The breaking news: one murdered Russian man. A traumatised child. And what the ticker tape along the bottom of the screen was calling a ‘gun battle’ on the Piazza del Popolo.
‘Hollywood actress Angela Westermann was involved,’ the young female news anchor said. ‘She is thought to be in Rome shooting a Steven Spielberg movie…’
‘What is it about the word invisible you don’t understand,’ Gilmore said to the assembled group.
‘Blame Driver,’ Pope said, regarding his blue Lycra. ‘She’s the one who put me in this bloody outfit.’
‘No one could have predicted what happened,’ Wells said.
‘The chatter I’m getting is that you’re out of the woods,’ Anna said, removing her headphones. ‘All they’ve got is a what. They don’t have a who or a why.’
‘Besides,’ Driver said. ‘At least we know who we’re up against.’
‘After today, I think we can assume we don’t know a thing,’ Gilmore muttered in disbelief. ‘Tom goddamn McNeil… Sam, any ideas?’
Driver pointed to herself. ‘You’re asking me?’
Wells looked from her to Gilmore. ‘Can someone please tell me what I’m missing?’
‘He was KIA two years ago,’ Driver replied, too tired to explain. ‘It’s a long story.’
Wells crossed his arms. ‘Then give us the abridged version.’
‘We’ll get to that,’ Gilmore said, much to her relief. ‘You said Fuller gave you a name?’
‘Vesuvius,’ Baptiste said.
Gilmore shook his head. ‘Doesn’t ring a bell.’
‘Mount Vesuvius.’ Anna slipped her headphones around her neck. ‘It’s an active volcano. It destroyed Pompeii in 79 AD.’
‘I was just about say,’ Pope said.
‘Yeah, sure,’ chuckled Rios.
‘Maybe it’s another code name, an operation,’ said Baptiste.
‘Whatever it is, it sounds ominous,’ Gilmore replied.
Wells dumped his holdall. ‘It might mean nothing at all. The man was pretty out of it.’
‘Here’s something more useful,’ Driver said, slapping Fuller’s phone in Gilmore’s hand.
He immediately threw it to Mo. ‘Can you get into it?’
Mo plugged the phone into his laptop via a USB cable. ‘Yeah, but it’s encrypted. It may take me a while.’
Gilmore looked the group over. ‘Pick yourselves out a room and clean yourselves up,’ he said, checking his watch. ‘Debrief in an hour. We’ll talk about everything then.’
As the team filtered out of the room, Gilmore pulled Driver aside. ‘Well I guess we know who the mole was in Kazakhstan.’
‘I can’t believe he’d do that,’ Driver said.
‘You mean you don’t want to believe,’ Gilmore said. ‘He’s buying weapons from Yedmenov, running his own personal death squad in Libya. I think it’s safe to assume he sold us out.’
Driver held her head in shame. How could she have been so stupid? How could she have trusted him? Most women were pretty good at spotting a lie. She was trained in it.
‘This entire shitshow just gets better and better,’ Gilmore continued, rubbing his tired eyes. ‘You okay?’
Driver shrugged. ‘I guess… We got any intel on Tom – I mean, McNeil?’
‘We’re working on it,’ Gilmore replied.
‘We’re going to need real surveillance on this,’ Driver said. ‘Airports, train stations – satellites and CCTV. We’ve got to call Langley, the NSA. Interpol—’
‘Not gonna happen,’ Gilmore replied. ‘Orders from up high.’ He glanced over at Mo. ‘Besides, they gave us wonder boy.’
‘One super-geek behind a laptop?’
‘A super-geek with an algorithm,’ Gilmore continued. ‘He didn’t get time to test it before the Swiss caught up with him. He says it can piggyback off all the illegal NSA and CIA spy programs they’ve got running.’
‘Undetected?’
‘It better be,’ Gilmore said. ‘He calls it Zeus.’
‘You believe him?’ Driver asked.
‘Guess we’ll find out,’ Gilmore said, an eye on the news, the narrative returning to the ongoing ‘WashCow crisis’. ‘I’d bet my balls McNeil holds the key to who planted those bombs,’ he continued. ‘We find McNeil, get some real answers, maybe we can stop this madness.’
Driver stared intently into Gilmore’s eyes. ‘Evidence isn’t enough. McNeil needs taking down.’
Gilmore stepped in closer. ‘I want to see the guy burn as bad as you. But all we need is something concrete we can pass up the chain. Taking down McNeil – that’s not the priority.’
‘So what, we track him down and just hand him over to Langley?’ Driver asked.
‘Remember what you’re here to do,’ Gilmore said. ‘For your own sake.’