By looking into his past, she’d jeopardised her future.
The gin arrived swiftly, and she lifted it in a mock cheers.
To Sam Pope. The only man to change her life.
As she took another sip, she wondered how long it would be until they would trace the source back to her. What would happen?
Would she go to jail?
Or worse?
With regret an option she could no longer lean on; Singh was startled from her thought process by the buzzing in her leather jacket. She fumbled it open and pulled out her mobile phone.
It was a number she didn’t recognise.
Most likely Wallace, telling her he had a sniper aimed at her head and he was calling to hear her last words.
Or Ashton, telling her they had the place surrounded and to come out and surrender.
Something told her not to answer, that it would only lead her further down the rabbit hole. She took a swig of her gin, realised she’d passed the point of no return a long time ago and clicked the accept button.
She should have listened to herself.
‘Amara.’ The voice shocked her straight. ‘It’s Sam. We need to meet.’
In an unknown location, deep below a derelict building in the centre of a small town, a number of servers were humming loudly, the entire Blackridge network buzzing with activity. For all the dirty work the operatives got through, the computer experts furrowed away underground were just as vital.
Every wiretap.
Every intelligence report.
Every location beacon.
They all went through ‘The Hub’.
The beating heart of Blackridge.
On that Saturday evening, a young man who had been recruited personally by Wallace out of Cambridge on the promises of espionage and adventure, found himself sat in the dark room, the heat of the monitors and the power of the servers causing his back to dampen with sweat.
Apart from the odd reconnaissance report and the one time he provided real-time information for an operative hunting down a target, the job had been oversold.
But that evening, he hit the jackpot.
The audio file had been downloaded from the tap on Singh’s phone and he’d run it against three separate voice recognition applications. Despite being in a shitty location, Blackridge had a near limitless budget and the equipment was enough to make his shorts tighten.
All three different programs verified the voice.
It was Sam Pope.
With his fingers trembling, the young man scrambled to put his headset over his thick, sticky hair and he pressed the direct line to Wallace.
His heart thumped with excitement and he almost lost his voice as the cantankerous voice of Wallace demanded the update.
The young man licked his lips, cleared his throat, and spoke as clearly as he could.
‘We have him, sir. We have him.’
Chapter Fourteen
The very idea of running a covert operation on home soil made Wallace nervous. Less than twenty-four hours ago, stood on his balcony, cigar in hand, he’d received a very real threat from the Hangman of Baghdad. It had seemed like the entire situation was slipping through his meaty grasp like particles of sand.
But then he received the call he’d been waiting for.
Sam Pope had resurfaced.
With Assistant Commissioner Ashton at his beck and call, he would have preferred to have gone through the appropriate channels. Have her pull together the remnants of the failed taskforce and have them ready to pounce. Let the police do their job and bring Sam Pope to justice.
But this wasn’t a run-of-the-mill operation.
And Sam Pope wasn’t a run-of-the-mill target.
Questions would be asked and the last thing Wallace wanted was the very few people he answered to asking them. No, this needed to be like majority of all other Blackridge operations.
Off the books.
Sat on the balcony of his remote safe house, Wallace felt the headset digging into his skull, listening with intent as the minimal task force moved into position. Three operatives had embarked on London Liverpool Street Station, all of them in their positions, ready to act at the first sign of Pope.
The Hub were logged in, using their considerable authority to seize control of the CCTV equipment of the station itself and were furiously surveying the scene.
Sam had given Singh strict instructions to meet him at one o’clock that afternoon.
It would be busy.
It would be full of people.
Clever, Wallace thought. The more people around, the harder it would be for his team to intercept. But his operatives were the best of the best, all of them recruited the same way Sam had been all those years ago. These were trained soldiers, all of them looking for the bigger thrills and the fatter paycheques.
Leading the team was Roland Brandt, one of Wallace’s ghosts. Brandt had been recruited seven years ago, after spending twelve years in the Kommando Spezialkräfte, an elite German special forces squadron organised under the Rapid Forces Division. Brandt was as ruthless as they came and if Wallace directed him to put a bullet in both Sam and Singh’s heads, he would do it without hesitation.
But he needed Sam alive.
Singh, she was collateral damage, but he figured he could throw Ashton a bone and let her prove that Singh was in collusion with the wanted vigilante. Both would rot in prison and Wallace would get his hands on the stolen files.
Two birds with one stone and hopefully, enough to remove Farukh from his life forever.
As Wallace sipped the large glass of Scotch that sat beside his laptop, he felt his heart rate quicken. He had carte blanche to run his operations across the world, eliminating terrorist targets, and dealing in the dirt that the UK government didn’t want to be a part of.
He had never failed them.
But this was personal.
He was trying to cover tracks he’d thought were long since covered and by carrying it out, in the midst of the British public would certainly land him under the microscope.
That could not be a possibility.
The entire morning had been spent trying to locate Farukh, with a number
