‘How’s your wife?’ Ryker asked as he drove.
Winter didn’t respond. Just stared at Ryker like he’d asked something terrible of him.
‘What?’ Ryker prompted.
‘You don’t need to do that.’
‘Do what?’
‘Make this something that it isn’t.’
‘You’re reading too much into the question,’ Ryker said. ‘And I’m sorry if I haven’t asked about her, your personal life, for… probably years.’
‘Definitely years.’
‘It’s not like we hang out.’
‘This isn’t hanging out.’
‘Still… I was just asking.’
‘OK. And the answer is she’s doing great. I think her new man is really into her. Treats her well, is always there for her. Probably buys her flowers just for the hell of it. At least that’s what she makes everyone believe.’
‘Shit. Sorry.’
‘Ryker, she left me three years ago.’
‘Like you said, we don’t exactly hang out.’
‘And yet you remain one of the constants in my life.’
He didn’t say that in a particularly happy way.
They both fell silent, Ryker concentrating on the road as a BMW came blasting up to them in the outside lane. Ever wary, Ryker got himself ready – mentally – as though an ambush was imminent. But the car flew on past. A hundred and ten miles an hour, hundred and twenty probably.
‘I did wonder,’ Ryker said.
‘Wonder what?’
‘Last year when we… reconnected again. It’d been a while and you were working in Israel, not London. I thought it was just a transfer but…’
‘Now you think I ran away?’
Ryker shrugged.
‘I guess it was an opportune move, sure. Honestly, if that move had come up when we’d still been together, I would have taken it still. And I know she wouldn’t have come with me. She got out at the right time. For her.’
Ryker didn’t know what to say to that. He felt bad for him, even if Winter didn’t exactly sound heartbroken.
‘You might think of me as just a guy who sits behind a desk. A normal guy, with normal relationships. But that isn’t me. I might not be the tough guy you are, running amok across the world, but I’ve dedicated my whole life to my job, and I do it because I truly believe it makes a positive difference to the world.’
‘And because you get to spend time with me.’
Winter laughed. ‘Actually, when I hear your voice on the other end of the phone, or see your name crop up in my internal news feeds, I sometimes wish I was that other guy. An accountant or something.’
‘Liar. I tell you what. When this is done? We go out. Just me and you. A pub. Beers, food. What do you say?’
Winter looked at him like Ryker had just suggested they start a satanic cult or something.
‘Seriously,’ Ryker said. ‘Why not?’
‘I’ll do you a deal. If we get this done, without you crossing the line – my line – then yeah. Let’s do it.’
They shook on it. Then silence took over for a while. A silence that became increasingly uncomfortable as Ryker sensed Winter had something on his mind.
‘You haven’t told me what happened at Belmarsh yet,’ Winter said, sounding a little sour now.
‘Which part of what happened?’
‘You and Karaman. When you broke his fingers. What did he tell you?’
Ryker thought long and hard about the question.
‘Not as much as I’d hoped.’
Silence again. Although Ryker felt Winter staring.
‘What?’ Ryker eventually said.
‘I thought we were turning over a new leaf here. How about a bit more honesty.’
‘I haven’t lied—’
‘But you haven’t told me everything either.’
Ryker thought and sighed. ‘He has a mark on his wrist. Looks like a bad burn scar. Well, it is.’
‘And?’
‘I think he used to have a tattoo there. A double-headed eagle. Davis Bracey had the same tattoo. I’ve found it on… others too.’
‘Others? What others?’
‘The point is, Winter, it really does mean something. It’s the Syndicate.’
Ryker glanced over and noted the dubious look.
‘It’s a bit… in your face, isn’t it? A tattoo showing membership of a secret society?’
‘Whatever you think of it, it’s there.’
‘Except you said Karaman only has a scar.’
‘He claims from a bomb attack he survived.’
‘You don’t believe him.’
‘No. I don’t. But… Karaman didn’t deny being involved in the Syndicate. He told me he was a courier. A doer. Someone who took orders.’
‘From who?’
‘Andrew Lebedev, for one.’
Winter huffed. ‘Which fits with what you knew already. It was the link to Bracey and Lebedev which took you to Karaman.’
‘He also told me that Lebedev isn’t really dead.’
‘But… You really believe that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘If Lebedev is still alive… then…’
‘The body from the car was cremated. I don’t know how we even go about getting proof one way or another.’
‘No. Neither do I.’
‘But Karaman knows more than he told me. I know it. He’s the one who can take us further into the Syndicate.’
‘Perhaps. But remember our deal, Ryker. Your aim here is to get Karaman back into custody. Nothing more than that.’
Ryker didn’t say anything.
‘Ryker, do you—’
‘I hear you. Loud and clear.’
The next moment Ryker took his foot off the gas and switched on his turn signal for the approaching exit.
‘This is it,’ he said.
He took them off the motorway, slowing almost to a stop on the exit ramp as he craned his neck to look up out of the car.
‘That’s the camera,’ he said. ‘Where the getaway car was last picked up.’
‘And now we go on a needle-in-a-haystack search through Kent from here?’
‘So cynical. No. Actually, we go on a search of a less than one-mile radius. Because I did my homework while you were getting this car.’
‘OK, explain,’ Winter said.
‘There’s a blackspot immediately after this camera, but it doesn’t go on forever. There are two roads at the top of this ramp. To the right takes us to the nearest large town. It’s two miles away. CCTV towers cover the main in and out routes there and the car wasn’t spotted going that way.’
‘There are no turn-offs before the town?’
‘There are. But only for residential streets. I don’t think that’s where they’re hiding, and if they abandoned the car there I think it would have been reported by now given the furor in the news.’
‘Possibly, but not absolutely.’
‘No. But we’re looking for most likely here. Most likely they took that car and dumped it somewhere quiet, where they already had a new vehicle waiting. They wouldn’t have wanted themselves seen out in the open on a residential street. Too many risks.’
‘Plausible. So in the other direction?’
‘In the other direction, we have two busy A-roads, a smaller town, and a village. The A-roads and the town have cameras, and the only roads in and out of the village lead from the A-roads. So there’s only a small area, about a mile radius, between this exit and the crossroads for the first A-road that’s not covered. We search every street between here and there.’
‘Then let’s get to it. We have about thirty minutes of daylight left.’
But they didn’t complete the task within that timeframe, and eventually, they’d scoured every street with no luck.
‘It was a big assumption that they switched cars,’ Winter said.
An assumption Ryker wasn’t yet ready to give up on.
‘So now what?’ Winter asked.
‘We keep looking.’
Winter looked far from convinced but then they’d already done a once-over of the area Ryker had earmarked. He knew Winter had already doubted his approach before they’d started, but now he had to face his own doubts too.
‘We’ll go back to the start,’ Ryker said.
Winter didn’t have to say anything for Ryker to know that the guy wasn’t impressed by the idea. But he set off again anyway, taking them back onto the main road, the junction for the M20 less than a mile away.
‘There!’ Ryker said, flooring the brake pedal. Winter shot forward in his seat as the car slammed to a stop outside a shabby-looking gas station.
‘Jesus, Ryker! If you need to fill up—’
‘It’s not the gas station I’m looking at.’
He continued into the parking lot for the gas station, straight through and over to the closed-down restaurant on the other side. No cars there, but the tarmac carried on around the back of the brick building, into darkness.
Ryker took them that way, slowed the car down to a crawl. He checked his mirrors as he moved. The petrol station was out of sight behind them. When he looked forward again he hit the brake and stared beyond the corner of a huge dumpster. A flash of light had caught his eye, his headlights catching on… The corner bumper of a car, its back end poking only a few inches beyond the dumpster.
Ryker shut down the engine and had his fingers on the door handle when Winter grabbed his arm.
‘We could get some backup here,’ he said. ‘Seriously. If that’s the car, how do we know they’re not inside that building?’
‘If they are? All the better,’ Ryker said. ‘If you want, stay here. I’ll go check the car.’
‘I’ll come,’ Winter said after a moment of hesitation.
The early evening was blisteringly cold with a clear sky above. Ryker’s breath swirled up into the moonlight as he walked slowly, silently, toward the car, Winter a half-step behind him. He heard no sounds from inside the building, no indication anyone was in there or had been at any recent point. They reached a side door.
‘Padlocked,’ Ryker whispered to Winter who nodded in response. ‘And the front was locked tight too.’
A few more steps and they’d reached the back of the car.
‘Yeah?’ Ryker said, smiling as he looked from the license plate to Winter.
‘Yeah,’ Winter responded before looking all around him, even more apprehensive now than before.
‘They’re not here,’ Ryker said.
‘You don’t know for sure—’
‘Yeah. I do. They’re not here.’
Winter jumped in surprise when his phone vibrated in his pocket. Ryker held back a laugh as Winter fished the device out and stared at the screen.
‘I need to get this,’ he said, moving purposefully back for the car. For safety, or perhaps just for privacy.
Ryker followed him, intrigued, though the hushed way in which Winter took the call suggested he didn’t want Ryker to overhear. He glanced over to the gas station. Lights were on there even if it did look more than a little dilapidated. Lights on. A camera on the roof.
Ryker strode that way.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later he returned from the gas station with the image on his phone. Winter had finished his conversation and was leaning up against the bodywork of the car. He didn’t look happy.
‘Sorry,’ Ryker said. ‘I should have unlocked the car.’
He pressed the button on the key fob but Winter didn’t move inside.
‘Actually,’ Ryker said, ‘we hit gold here.’ He turned the phone around to show Winter the picture. He expected a more enthusiastic response, but Winter stared, deadpan, arms folded.
‘The guy let me see his CCTV recordings for fifty pounds. It didn’t take long to find this. He doesn’t get many customers, apparently. But his cameras are good because he’s been robbed twice in three years.’
Winter humphed.
‘His camera caught the car coming in. It’s not a great view of the license plate but the timeline, color, everything else matches. We never see Karaman or the attackers, but what we do see is this second car leaving not even two minutes later. And this time we get a clear shot of the license plate.’
‘Good work,’ Winter said, though he still didn’t sound happy.
‘And the problem is?’
‘The problem is the phone call I had just now.’
‘Because?’
‘Three of the attackers have now been identified.’
Which was a surprise, because as Ryker had suggested earlier, he thought MI5 was deliberately trying to keep quiet the identities. Was he wrong or had something changed?
‘And that’s bad?’ Ryker said.
‘When you find out who they are… Yeah, I think it might be.’
* * *
‘I know her,’ Ryker said, pulling his phone down, looking away from the screen.
Winter drove this time. Ryker wanted to do as much research as he could as they traveled.
‘You know her?’
‘The name. I’ve never met her. But don’t forget I’ve done a lot of investigation into Karaman and his past. Angela Everett. Also known as Angel. The Angel of Death, the press called her. She was a sniper for the British army, later special ops, apparently. You told me before that MI6 had tried to take out Karaman? There’s never been any official confirmation of their involvement, but the story goes she was part of an assassination attempt against Karaman in Lebanon. But she made a mistake and missed her shot. She hit Karaman’s daughter instead. It didn’t kill her, but still… There was a fallout, political as much as anything else. MI6, the British government left Everett out on her own in Lebanon to face justice. She was imprisoned in Beirut for attempted murder and spent four years there before she was finally repatriated to serve out her sentence here.’
‘You said “story”. So you think some or all of that isn’t true?’
Ryker paused before answering because actually, he wondered how much of this Winter already knew himself.
‘I don’t know. But whether she was ever working with MI6, she’s someone who potentially has beef with Karaman. Highly unlikely that she’d be his rescuer.’
Winter huffed and then sighed. ‘What about the other two?’
‘I don’t recognize their names. I’m still searching but there’s not a lot I’m seeing about them online. What were you told?’
‘Nothing has been released publicly. What I know came from a very good source I have. I shouldn’t even know. But the other two, the dead guys from the van, are Harvey Harman and Sean Doyle. Harman is ex-army too, although he spent more time working as a mercenary in Africa. A gun for hire. Some of the ops he was on… I know they were linked to MI6.’
‘Surprise, surprise.’ The description bore a striking similarity to Brock Van Der Vehn. Ryker didn’t dwell on it. ‘And Doyle?’
‘He was the driver of the van. Irish republican. A former foot soldier for the IRA, apparently. He’s never been convicted of anything, but…’
‘But maybe that was because he was a protected asset?’
‘It’s possible, isn’t it?’
‘So, let’s lay this out,’ Ryker said. ‘We know the identities of three of four of the attackers. Which in itself tells us something.’
‘In what way?’
‘Doyle was the driver, you said. So Harman was the dead guy in the back of the van. Everett is the woman I fought with. The fourth, as yet unidentified guy, is the one who was bleeding all over the place who Everett took away with Karaman. I don’t believe they couldn’t ID him too.’
‘Someone’s covering for him?’
‘Most likely because he’s the one in charge. The others… Perhaps they were always meant to be expendable. Scapegoats. Everett had a past with Karaman. Perhaps look into the other two more and you’ll find the same. One thing is for sure, though.’
‘And that is?’
‘The attack has the hallmarks of being an inside job. MI5, MI6. Whether it’s rogue operatives or the whole damn organization collectively behind it.’
‘You believe our own intelligence services broke Karaman out of prison? Even though it was Fatma Yaman of MI6 who brought him here?’
‘You mean Fatma Yaman who was killed in her apartment in a robbery gone wrong? Fatma Yaman, who had years of intel on Karaman but had never done anything with it?’
‘I agree this looks bad. Really bad,’ Winter said. ‘But I assure you there is no officiality to what’s happening here. If this has any links back to MI6 or MI5 then it’s rogue operatives who’ve put together this crew. The question is, who are they and why?’
‘No. We already know the why. The Syndicate. This is what they do.’
Winter sighed, as though he thought the mention of the Syndicate was unnecessary, or that he still didn’t believe its power and reach was as extensive as Ryker did.
‘Then why break Karaman out rather than just have him killed like Bracey, Lebedev?’
‘Because for whatever reason, Karaman still has worth to them.’
‘OK. So we’re left with only the who,’ Winter said.
‘And that’s what I’m going to find out.’