‘What kinda party are we gatecrashing here?’ Rink asked.
‘Beats me, but there’s only one way to find out,’ I said.
Vince didn’t offer an explanation. He’d been unforthcoming about many things since we met him the day before. All he’d allowed was that we had to make the trip to the Adirondacks due to an urgent change in plans. He’d left the meeting telling us to eat and to get some rest. His parting shot, ‘You’re going to need all the strength you have.’
We’d dined, but neither of us had got much rest.
On the flight from Pennsylvania, Vince had conducted business over a satellite telephone, often shouting to make himself heard over the thrum of the rotors. Despite the racket Rink snored but I was too wired to doze, even though I could count on one hand the hours of sleep I’d caught in the last few days. I felt mildly nauseated, telling myself it was due to the turbulence as rain-laden wind assaulted the chopper from all angles, and it was a good feeling when I finally set my feet on sturdy ground. But that wasn’t why I’d felt queasy; it was the horrible sense of foreboding clawing at my insides that was responsible.
I was wearing the winter coat purchased in Hertford, and was glad of it. It was even colder here than it had been in the Alleghenies and the rain had built from a steady drizzle to a deluge. It was like the winters I’d left back home in northern England, but I didn’t feel even slightly nostalgic. I joined Rink and Vince in jogging towards the beckoning warmth of the log cabin a hundred yards away.
Before we’d made it halfway there the door of the cabin swung open and a man stepped out, an unlit cigar jammed between his teeth. Maybe it wasn’t that warm inside the cabin because the rotund man was sheathed from knees to throat in a quilted parka and had a flat cap pulled low on his round head.
The rain conspired to soak us before we reached sanctuary, driving from the heavens. The sound was like the thunder of hooves, and a sheet of teeming water obscured Walter Conrad from sight.
‘I’m missing Florida already,’ Rink muttered into my ear.
‘Tell me about it.’
We ducked under the canopy at the front of the cabin, but the pounding rain made greetings pointless. Rink shook himself like a dog. I stamped. Vince tried to put his hair in some order. Walter directed us all inside, using his cigar like a band leader’s baton. I was last through the door, and as I entered it wasn’t the plushness of the interior that gave me pause for thought: it was the three men reclining on easy chairs.
Each was as old as the next, probably in their mid- to late seventies. Like Walter they all had the grey pallor of men who spent their days in places hidden from the light of day. They reminded me of a cabal of ghouls who’d risen from their crypts in the dead of night to feed on the corpses of humanity. It wasn’t the disquieting affect these men exuded that made me pause, but the fact that I knew all three faces. Here, in Walter’s bolt-hole in the Adirondacks, sat the men behind Arrowsake. Without exception I’d believed each one of them dead. Rink cast me an indiscreet frown, equally perplexed by the reanimation of these supposedly dead men.
All three of them smiled at me, but with expressions reserved for prodigal children. A worm of unease crept up my spine: if we’d been manipulated by Arrowsake in the past, then this was positive proof that they weren’t finished with us yet.
I never pretended to understand the politics behind the shadowy organisation, of which even those in the top echelons of government had little or no genuine knowledge. Arrowsake had fielded search-destroy teams in total contradiction of political convention and international treaty, under the aegis of total deniability. As such, the men at the head of the organisation were neither politicians nor military leaders, therefore member states could not be held culpable for their actions. In effect, Arrowsake was a ghost organisation that didn’t officially exist, and it was headed by men who had no tangible presence upon the earth. When Arrowsake fell foul of the modern war on terror, its members had been disbanded, and those at the head of the organisation had been struck from the annals. In effect, the three men here had been metaphorically killed, if not physically so. They had disappeared without trace.
But now they were back.
My next and more important thought was, had they ever been gone?
Conspiracy theorists argue about a hidden world government, giving it a fanciful title like the New World Order, but as absurd as it sounded, I feared there was some validity in it. The men sitting opposite me were living proof.
More worrying than their re-emergence was why they had chosen now to rear their heads. The men from Arrowsake wouldn’t emerge from obscurity because of a low priority threat like Carswell Hicks. These men were concerned about the overall stability of nations, primarily anything threatening the security of international finance, infrastructure and commerce, with the loss of life being tacked to their list almost as an afterthought. From what I’d learned about Hicks, he was a vicious son of a bitch suspected of a number of racially motivated murders, who’d also executed a series of bombings against financial institutions before Don Griffiths had thwarted him. If he was planning something similar now he would be palmed off on to the FBI to deal with, which explained the presence of Vince, but wouldn’t raise as much as a blip on these men’s radar. Therefore it was obvious that Hicks had stepped up dramatically and the reason for my being drafted in wasn’t to cover up a government blunder as I’d been led to believe, but to end a threat capable of rocking the entire Western world.
All I’d wanted to do was save an old friend and his family. What the hell had I got myself into this time? I looked at Rink, trying to impart my most sincere apology. My friend had followed me here through blind loyalty, and I had more than likely dragged him into more crap than either of us could possibly imagine.
My next glance was for Walter, but the man who was famous for twisting the truth to fit his own ends could only study the drips marking his floor. This was something big when even Walter was ashamed of himself for pulling us into it.
Under the gaze of the Arrowsake men I pulled to attention, not quite as formally as I once would have, but the old indoctrination was still there. Alongside me, Rink shoved his hands in his pockets in a show of nonchalance but I felt his impulse to straighten up like it was a static charge.
‘Sirs,’ was all that I could think to say to the men. At least I didn’t salute.
They nodded like sages but didn’t offer a reply. I considered their silence and recalled that though this wasn’t my first time in their presence I’d never heard any of them speak before. It looked like nothing would change now. They each stood, nodded at Walter and then filed out of a door at the back of the cabin. Engines started and then receded as the vehicles were driven away, bearing their silent occupants back to their hidden holes in the ground.
‘Why don’t you all sit down?’ Walter pulled off his cap.
‘What the hell was that all about?’ I demanded.
‘Sure wasn’t like any show and tell I’ve ever been a part of,’ Rink said. ‘If I didn’t know otherwise, I’d say we just met the three wise monkeys.’
I couldn’t find a smile for Rink’s joke; those three had seen, heard and talked more about evil than any other people on the planet.
Walter busied himself with shedding his parka and cap, now that he had no reason for going out in the rain again. He must have had to bow and scrape to the Arrowsake men when first they arrived, greeting them at their vehicles, and he hadn’t had the opportunity to get comfortable before now. The CIA controller did a good impression of Edward G. Robinson by jamming the cigar in the corner of his mouth. As ever, the cigar was unlit, but by the sheen of cold sweat on Walter’s brow he sure as hell was battling the urge to set it ablaze.
‘You got any coffee on the go, Walt?’ I asked. There was much for the old man to tell, and something strong that didn’t come from a liquor bottle wouldn’t go amiss.
‘I’ll have some made.’ Walter looked grateful for the opportunity to step out, no doubt his first opportunity to order his thoughts before we launched ourselves at him like rabid pit bulls. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen the black-ops man flustered by anything.
As soon as Walter was out of the way, I turned on Vince. ‘So when do you come clean, Vince? You’re no more an FBI agent than we are.’
‘Why would you come to that conclusion?’
‘First off, SAC Birnbaum didn’t get to where he is by being the whipping boy of a lowly special agent,’ I said. ‘Then there’s the fact that you’re here. You wouldn’t get to see those men’s faces without special clearance. What are you? CIA? Homeland Security? What?’
Vince thought for a second. ‘Let me throw a question back at you. Back when you were active, did you ever
