Midnight Empire Read online

  He wasn’t sure what his father meant by sending it. That times had changed? That Daniel was following in footsteps?

  That evening, for some reason the feeling of Hannah hit him hard as he queued for dinner. The feeling of her body on his. And it hurt: the seizing of his chest. It welled up.

  He got to the front of the line. The noise was the mess at full clamour. He collected steak and chips and Zasp, and there was not an empty table to sit at in the house.

  The following evening they sat drinking coffee and looking at the mountains. Almost white light from the sunset, as if their peaks were stucco. Gray was talking about ways to find north: watch hands, sticks in the ground, the constellation of Orion. Wolfe wasn’t correcting him so much as offering variations of method for better accuracy.

  Pilot education had just finished. There was the buzz of the drones returning to land.

  They were talking about north because someone had gone missing in Virginia, a new recruit at the Farm who’d been dropped alone in the woodlands.

  ‘East–west line,’ Wolfe said. ‘Any grade school student should be able to give you that.’

  ‘This boy is twenty-two.’

  ‘Hopeless.’

  ‘I think this is the generational change. I see it as a question of basic literacy.’

  ‘Man and the environment.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Gray.

  ‘Find your direction and walk.’

  ‘Understand your bearings.’

  ‘This is the new blood when everything falls away.’

  ‘You think he’s dead?’

  Wolfe shrugged. ‘Couldn’t be yet. There’s nothing to kill you in there.’

  ‘I guarantee a fourth-floor somebody has identified an occupational health issue. No more NOCs in the forest without emergency beacons.’

  ‘Defeating the exercise.’

  ‘Wouldn’t happen to you, Daniel. Plenty of spatial know-how, coming from Australia.’

  Daniel was watching the sunset’s shadow as it rose up the cliff faces, the nearest and bluntest edifices. ‘Why don’t we send a drone?’ he suggested.

  Wolfe snorted and smiled. Gray laughed. Daniel had meant it seriously. He tried his best to look deadpan.

  ‘Could have been a boar,’ said Gray. ‘Might have been a bear.’

  ‘The boy is armed.’

  ‘People miss. I’ve seen someone fail to kill a dinner plate at one yard. This was in Laos, a Hmong guerrilla trying to make a point to our cook.’

  ‘He might have drowned in the swamp. I remember they made us cross it. Otherwise of the Farm I recall only puke. Run some. Puke some. Puke breakfast, puke puke, puke bile.’

  The first drone landed. You expected to hear the tug of the wheels on the tarmac but this time, somehow, there was hardly a sound. The base lights were going up. There was the long echo of a door being slammed in the car park. Scatterings of distant speech.

  There was chatter about Protonic. Threads pulled from the furious cacophony of human data and voice that was the life mission of the NSA. Raw mentions of his name.

  It was nothing conclusive, Gray said. It was people out there saying the name at a rate higher than the regular background level, the cumulative average radiation for the words. It meant he was being discussed, and by certain relevant people, but there was nothing yet to indicate whether or not he was alive.

  Daniel wondered what his true name was, why he’d turned against his peers. A man who was two men. Liar and believer.

  Authorship and terror. Raymond J Wilson, a twenty-six-year-old veteran of Iraq, father of one and operator with the 432nd, was shot dead in his driveway. He was holding, at the time, a baseball bat, but the FBI was unable to establish whether he’d intended it as a weapon.

  The shots were fired at 7.06 a.m. The morning was one of clear skies and classic Nevada sunlight. Wilson’s girlfriend, Alice M Amber, had been on her cell phone in the bedroom. She and her cousin Amy, in Columbia, Missouri, were the only witnesses to the event, having heard the staggered reports, mistaking them for ordinary neighbourhood sounds.

  The weapon used was a .303 Lee Enfield, found a few blocks away in a garbage can. The Enfield was a bolt-action, magazine-fed rifle, the standard-issue firearm for British military forces until the Cold War. It was also, as Wolfe observed, the weapon of choice for desert mujahideen because of its accuracy over long ranges.

  Whoever had shot Wilson, however, had stood at a distance of only twelve yards, and their ejected cartridges had rolled to the gutter.

  The first person to see Wilson after the shooting was a blackjack dealer from the Excalibur named Nathan Parker. He had driven by Wilson’s limp form without seeing it until it made his rear view, then he reversed and called 911 as he left his seat, seeing the blood. When Alice M Amber arrived at the body she did not scream or shout or even look at Parker. She simply stood, her face blank. Later, she explained that she’d emerged from the house to see who she thought was Wilson, not Parker, standing over a dead man.

  At Creech, the fact of the Lee Enfield was met by icy silence. There was also a story connecting Raymond J Wilson to a ring of small-time cocaine distributors known to operate at Nellis Air Force Base. Wilson had purchased his house, it was said, before the property crash, and when his wife left him he’d stubbornly decided to buy her out rather than sell. So he’d had to get into drugs to service his debts.

  Daniel heard this story in the mess and relayed it to Gray. ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘You’re hoping I can shed some light,’ Gray said. ‘To me it sounds plausible. There are drugs at Nellis. But drugs, mujahi-deen—it could easily be either.’

  That afternoon and into the evening a strange mood settled on the base, people discussing the shooting but only in small and quiet groups, never larger than three or four, and a kind of electricity passed through on the last traces of sunset when word came that the FBI were speaking to anyone prepared to say that they’d recently been in any way surveilled or peculiarly approached.

  ‘Best talk to them,’ Gray told Daniel.

  Daniel went to the administration building where the FBI kept a normally empty office and he spoke to a special agent named Hughes, who took him to a desk and asked if it was alright to record him.

  ‘Tell me again where this occurred,’ Hughes said. He got his computer out and brought up a map.

  ‘Somewhere in this area.’ Daniel pointed. ‘To be honest, I’d have to go back to find it precisely.’

  ‘And when, did you say?’

  ‘I can’t recall exactly now. I reported it. The police would have it on file.’

  ‘You didn’t notice anything? Beforehand, I mean. Anything strange?’

  ‘Nothing I can think of.’

  ‘No men in the shadows? No dark cars?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you say you were walking?’

  ‘I’d got into the habit of it.’

  ‘So it was a path, then, a planned route that you took?’

  ‘I’d say it was an area. I walked a particular zone.’

  ‘These suburbs here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the attacker?’

  ‘Definitely American.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘His voice. He called me sir.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘He was black.’

  ‘You’re certain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘African or African-American?’

  ‘American.’

  ‘He couldn’t have been African?’

  ‘I think he was homeless. A homeless American.’

  ‘He called you sir.’

  ‘He asked for a dollar.’

  ‘Was he going to hurt you, do you think?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Regardless.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  Hughes had Daniel do a photo-fit while he rang the Las Vegas PD. Daniel tried his best to conjure the man’s face, but all he could r
emember was the body, certain movements, the stench. He could remember the shape of the street and the shadows of the empty blocks, and the moment he’d bolted: the dark mouth of a storm drain before he’d turned to look at the man, bent and huffing.

  ‘The police put this two months ago, night of the seventeenth.’

  ‘Sounds right.’

  Hughes came back. ‘They dispatched a car but you couldn’t give an exact location.’

  Daniel nodded in agreement. Hughes had found a biro somewhere, was tapping it at the edge of his mouth. ‘What made you take this guy on?’ he said.

  ‘The phone, I think. I didn’t want him to have the phone.’

  ‘A secure phone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he want the phone? Did he raise the topic?’

  Daniel thought about it. ‘I think he did. He might have said, “Wallet and phone.”’

  ‘He wanted the phone.’

  ‘He wanted the wallet and the phone.’

  ‘But he specifically said phone.’

  ‘The phone was why I did it. I didn’t want him to have it.’

  Hughes looked at the image Daniel had made with the photo-fit. ‘How would you score that out of ten?’ he asked.

  ‘Not good,’ said Daniel, ‘maybe a five.’

  ‘Keep going. Try to get me a seven.’

  Hughes left the room. Daniel sat with the photo-fit, wondered whether the agent was serious, whether it really could have been a planned attack.

  When Hughes came back, he’d brought another man, Seddon, a more senior agent, a man in a suit and tie. Seddon sat down and made Daniel retell the story. He took a copy of the photo-fit, telling Daniel not to do any more walking and that sometime in the next few days they might call him to take them to the spot.

  When Daniel returned to the control stations it was dark, the air quiet and still. They were waiting impatiently for his presence in control station three. Raul wasn’t prepared to launch for Peshawar without him.

  7

  Cold light curving out of the distance and they flew over peaks and snow, the border regions. They came down out of the mountains, flew above the flat green lands that approached the city, came out of the bearing of the sun.

  They were half an hour behind schedule and Raul was anxious. He wanted to be there already, wanted to go faster but Ellis said it would cost them fuel.

  In Peshawar, Dupont had been speaking to sources. He’d been taking meetings at a café that had once been a haunt for Arab fighters on their way to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, a place to stop and connect with the arms and money on offer from the Americans, the Saudis and the Pakistani ISI. Nobody, Dupont said, had heard the name Abu Yamin, but there was talk of someone new in Peshawar, a man who was tall and well financed, in other words the perfect fit. One informant, a weapons trader who the local CIA section deemed eighty per cent reliable, said he’d seen this man in a house, a way station run by Wahhabi extremists, two weeks ago. That was where they were headed again today. The house was in an alley, and in order to observe it they had to continually fly the alley’s length and then circle. So far, they had not seen Abu Yamin or anyone resembling him, but between Raul and Ellis they were building a comprehensive list of visitors, identified by appearance and codename, and Raul seemed convinced that Abu Yamin was in there or was somehow or other connected to these people, though there wasn’t that much reason to think so as far as Daniel could tell.

  The Toyota Crown still hadn’t moved. Dupont’s boy operative had fitted it with a short-range GPS tracker.

  Today the drone arrived above the alleyway an hour or so past dawn. The house was midway along, a triple-storey structure with a flat roof that was used now and again by groups of men for smoking. There was no movement at the house, just the pedestrians in the alley, headed for the crush of the main road: people carrying building materials or things to market.

  They’d spent two weeks above this city now, but Daniel still found himself amazed by its teeming complexity. In fact he found the thought of it exhausting. It was the kind of facile point made in television documentaries, in analyses of global warming, computer technologies and economic crisis: how complex the world of human beings had become. But it had taken these weeks for him to begin to see it, to know that any understandings of it were bound to be gross estimations, any abstractions flawed. He thought that the truth was that it was unfathomable. It was like peering into a void.

  Amid this, the taxi arrived at 9.17 a.m. Later, they would trace it to an 8.10 a.m. inbound at Peshawar International; much later again, they would consider it poor tradecraft to come straight from the airport. A figure got out of the taxi a block from the safe house. They watched him because a taxi in the alleyway was unusual. Then a man came out of the house. Both men went quickly inside. Raul gave the newcomer the codename Sierra; minutes later he emerged on the rooftop of the house with a man they knew as Bravo, one of the ringleaders. It seemed Sierra was receiving a visual tour of the city, Bravo’s long arm pointing things out.

  Daniel looked at Raul. The CIA man was staring intently at the vision, asking Ellis whether he could improve it. Then he was on the phone to Dupont. ‘This is something,’ he said.

  Dupont didn’t want anyone near the place with a camera, didn’t want to spook the occupants. Instead, he went to the airport and somehow got the passenger list for that morning’s flight from Oman. There was a name on it that struck him as suspicious, he said; it felt like a nom de guerre. Raul was relaying this information to Gray, who’d come in, when Dupont rang again.

  The name sounded suspicious, he said, because it was one of theirs.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Raul.

  Dupont said it was a war name, a fake identity, one of several passports he believed they’d given to Protonic long ago.

  Raul’s expression changed to one that was more hopeful. He unlocked his briefcase and plucked out a photograph that he stuck between the monitors: a strangely familiar man shot from above, almost certainly from a drone.

  Daniel recognised him as the new arrival. Sierra and Protonic were the same.

  ‘He’s alive then.’ The voice was Gray’s.

  ‘And if he’s with these bastards he’s not been found out.’

  ‘So why hasn’t he called in?’ Gray asked.

  ‘Maybe it’s too hot,’ said Raul. ‘Maybe he’s first trying to locate Abu Yamin.’

  They watched the house at slow speed, banked, came around to watch again. People on pushbikes went by it, and brightly decorated rickshaws loaded with goods. Daniel wondered what would happen should Abu Yamin appear on the roof. Bombings and assassinations were one thing, but they couldn’t fire a missile, surely, in the middle of a city?

  Wolfe explained to Daniel how to tell if he was being followed. The methods of some al-Qaeda operatives had proved to be very good; tradecraft straight out of the Cold War, techniques the CIA itself had created.

  There was the ABC tail, a three-man system of overlapping followers: the A-man behind you, the B-man behind him and the C-man parallel to you on the other side of the street. At intersections, the C-man would overtake you while the A-man stopped at a shop window and the B-man took his place. The A-man would then reposition behind B, or, in the ‘Prague variant’, exchange places with C. Unless you were extremely paranoid, you were not going to notice. One thing Daniel could watch for in this instance, however, was that the men were likely to be foreign.

  More likely than an ABC tail, however, was that he would be followed in his car. There were complex and near-undetectable methods for doing this: parallel tailing one block over, and also a system known as ‘gridding’, which required five chase cars. But in the volume of traffic around Las Vegas, the likely method was a simple dead-follow, same lane or one lane over, two cars back. On the highway, this would be hard to shake but in town he should simply time the lights so that he was the last car through, or, if he was second-to-last, quickly slow so that the other car had to go past
him (assuming there were two lanes) and then he should turn immediately to the right.

  ‘Do you think we’re being targeted?’ Daniel asked.

  Wolfe’s expression was blank. ‘At the moment I can’t rule it out.’

  ‘Schultz and now Wilson.’

  ‘These could be regular murders.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘We see what happens.’

  ‘We rely on the FBI?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘They’re going to investigate my mugging.’

  Wolfe frowned. ‘Well, I suppose this is their turf. They know how to follow a lead.’

  That night Daniel made a series of loose turns and changes of direction on his way back to the Nexus. The highway had been mostly empty, but in town he still took pains to ensure the few cars that had taken his exit didn’t stay long behind him. It was a strange thing to be doing, and he wondered a little how he’d got here, to the point where he was seriously and legitimately worried about being cased by terrorists. He wondered who he could tell that to who wouldn’t smile and think he’d gone mad.

  The Nexus car park was a long, silent chamber that smelled of concrete and exhaust fumes. He parked midway along Level 1, and for a moment he thought he’d glimpsed something moving against the far wall, a dart of colour. But he knew he was just spooking himself. He told himself this as he skipped quickly towards the elevators.

  Upstairs, he considered not going to the Bellagio. Just now, he didn’t like the prospect of walking the side street to the Strip. But he opened the wall safe and his bankroll; the feeling it gave him—of what? power?—persuaded him to go, and five minutes later he was edging from the building, not quite bolting. Thankfully he met nobody until he reached the familiar crowds of the boulevard, yet even then he didn’t feel safe until he’d made the casino floor.

  He played badly, made a series of awful calls, mostly holding two pair against clear sets and straights. And it cost him a lot too, seven or eight hundred dollars. There was a man on his left who seemed to have made it his mission to pick on him, ceaselessly raising his bets. He began to question what he was doing here, whether it would even help him to sleep. When Ania finally messaged, it was a relief to stack his chips.