Sidney Sheldon’s Reckless

Althea ran a hand through her long, dark hair.

She could hardly wait.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_a31d4417-2fbf-5b1b-9c64-100fabacb804)

THIS IS A NIGHTMARE.”

Julia Cabot, the new British prime minister, put her head in her hands. She was sitting at her desk in her private office at 10 Downing Street. Also in the room were Jamie MacIntosh, Head of MI6, and Major General Frank Dorrien. A highly decorated career soldier, Dorrien was also a senior MI6 agent, a fact known only to a select handful of people, which did not include the General’s wife.

“Please tell me I’m going to wake up.”

“It’s Bob Daley who isn’t going to wake up, Prime Minister,” Frank Dorrien observed drily. “I hate to say I told you so.”

“Then don’t,” Jamie MacIntosh snapped. Frank was a brave man and a brilliant agent, but his tendency to assume the moral high ground could be extremely wearing. “None of us could have predicted this. This is the E bloody U, not Aleppo.”

“And a bunch of teenage geeks in red-balloon hoodies, not ISIS,” Julia Cabot added despairingly. “Group 99 don’t kill people. They just don’t!”

“Until they do,” said Frank. “And now they have. And Captain Daley’s blood is on our hands.”

It was hard not to take Bob Daley’s murder personally. Partly because Frank Dorrien knew Bob Daley personally. They’d both served in Iraq together, under circumstances that neither Julia Cabot nor Jamie MacIntosh could imagine, never mind understand. And partly because Frank had warned of the dangers of treating Group 99 as a joke. These groups always began with high ideals and, in Frank’s experience, almost always ended with violence. A splinter group would rise up, nastier and more bloodthirsty than the rest, and end up seizing power from the moderates. It had happened with the communists in Russia after the revolution. It had happened with the real IRA. It had happened with ISIS. It didn’t matter what the ideology was. All you needed was angry, dispossessed, testosterone-fueled young men with a thirst for power and attention, and in the end bad things, very bad things, would happen.

MI6 had been sitting on intelligence for weeks about where Captain Daley and Hunter Drexel might be being held. But no one had acted on it, because no one had believed the hostages were in serious danger. Indeed, when Frank had proposed sending in the SAS on an armed rescue mission, he’d been shot down in flames by both the government and the intelligence community.

“Have you lost your mind?” Jamie MacIntosh had asked him. “Bratislava’s an EU country, Frank.”

“So?”

“So we can’t send our troops into another sovereign nation. A sodding ally. It’s out of the question.”

So nothing was done, and now hundreds of millions of people around the globe had seen Bob Daley’s brains being splattered across a screen. Celebrities who only last week had been lining up to be photographed with red balloon badges on their dinner jackets, in support of the group’s lofty aims of economic equality, were now scrambling to distance themselves from the horror. Kidnap and murder, right here in Europe.

“I understand you’re angry, Frank,” Julia Cabot said grimly. “But I need constructive input. The Americans are screaming blue murder. They’re worried their hostage is going to be next.”

“They should be,” said Frank.

“We all want to get these bastards.” Cabot turned to her intelligence chief. “Jamie, what do we know?”

“Group 99. Founded in Athens in 2015 by a group of young Greek computer scientists, then rapidly spread across Europe to South America, Asia, Africa and around the globe. Stated agenda is economic, to address poverty and the global wealth imbalance. Loosely classed as communists although they have no stated political, national or religious allegiances. They use Greek codenames online, and they are very, very smart.”

“What about their leaders?” Cabot asked.

“One or two names have cropped up. The guy codenamed Hyperion we believe to be a twenty-seven-year-old Venezuelan named Jose Hernandez. He’s the fellow who leaked the private emails of the former Exxon boss.”

“The chap with the transsexual mistress and the cocaine habit?” Cabot remembered Group 99’s sting on the hapless oil executive. Despite the CEO’s resignation, hundreds of millions of dollars had been wiped off the share price.

“Precisely. Ironically Hernandez comes from a wealthy establishment family. They may have helped him avoid detection by the authorities. But part of the problem is that there are no clear leaders. Group 99 disapproves of traditional hierarchy in all its forms. Because it’s web-based and anonymous, it’s more of a loose affiliation than a classic terrorist organization. Different individuals and cells act independently under one big umbrella.”

Cabot sighed. “So it’s a hydra with a thousand heads. Or no heads.”

“Precisely.”

“What about funding? Do we know where they get their money from?”

“That’s a more interesting angle. For a group that purports to be against accumulated wealth, they seem to have a lot of cash washing around. They invest in technology, to fund their cyberattacks. It’s an expensive business, staying ahead of the game against sophisticated systems at places like Microsoft or the Pentagon.”

“I can imagine,” said Cabot.

“We also believe they are behind various multimillion-dollar anonymous donations to both charitable groups and leftwing political parties. Numerous sources have pointed to a female member of the group, an American, as both one of their largest donors and a driving force in Group 99’s strategic objectives. You remember the attack on the CIA a year ago, when they published a bunch of compromising private emails from top Langley staffers?”

The prime minister nodded.

“The Americans believe that was her. She operates under the codename Althea, but that’s pretty much all anyone knows about her.”

Julia Cabot stood up and walked over to the window, aware of Frank Dorrien’s eyes boring into her back. She found the old soldier difficult. Only a week ago, she’d met with him to discuss the tragic and diplomatically embarrassing suicide of the young Greek prince at Sandhurst. It struck her then how little compassion General Dorrien had shown for the boy, as well as how dismissive he was of the political ramifications of his death on British soil and in the care of the British army.

“Perhaps he was depressed?” was the closest he’d come to offering any explanation. And when pressed he’d become positively irritated. “With respect, Prime Minister, I was his commanding officer, not his therapist.”

Yes, Julia Cabot had thought angrily. And I’m your commanding officer.

She wondered whether Dorrien was being so rude because she was a woman, or whether he was always this way.

On this occasion, however, the general was right. Bob Daley’s blood was on her hands. If the American journalist, Hunter Drexel, died too, she would never forgive herself.

“We must work with the Americans on this,” she announced. “Total transparency.”

Jamie MacIntosh raised an eyebrow laconically. “Total transparency” was not a phrase that made him feel good. At all.

“They need to get their man, Drexel, out of there. I want you to give the CIA everything you have, Jamie. Possible locations. All of that.”

“So we’re going to help rescue their man, after abandoning our own?” Frank Dorrien looked suitably outraged.

“We’re going to make the best of a bad job, General,” the prime minister shot back. “And in return we’ll expect the CIA to share all of their intelligence on Group 99’s global network with us. Up until now their cyberattacks have focused primarily on US targets. American companies and government agencies have been hit a lot harder than we have. I’m sure they already have groaning files on these bastards.”

“I’m sure they do, Prime Minister,” Frank Dorrien said drily. It was uncanny the way he managed to make every comment sound like a criticism.

“Something made these people change tactics,” Cabot said, ignoring him. “Something changed them, from hi-tech pranksters into kidnappers and murderers. I need to know what that something is.”

“I DON’T LIKE IT. I DON’T like it at all.”

President Jim Havers scowled at the three men seated around his desk in the Oval Office. The men were Greg Walton, the diminutive, bald head of the CIA. Milton Buck, the FBI’s top counterterrorism agent. And General Teddy MacNamee, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“None of us like it, Mr. President,” Greg Walton said. “But what are the alternatives? If we don’t get Drexel out now, right now, we could be looking at his brains being sprayed across a screen. If we don’t act on this intelligence …”

“I know. I know. But what if he’s not there? I mean if the Brits were so damn sure, why didn’t they get their own man out?”

President Havers’s scowl deepened. He was under enormous pressure, from Congress and from the American public, to save Hunter Drexel. But, if the intelligence they’d just received from the British was correct, saving Drexel meant launching a military offensive in an EU country. The United States had gotten enough flak for sending troops into Pakistan to take out Bin Laden. And this was a whole different ball game.

Bratislava was an ally, a Western democracy. Its president and people would not react kindly to American Chinooks invading their airspace and dropping Navy SEALs into their mountains, mountains that the Bratislavans themselves categorically denied were being used as a safe haven for Group 99, or any other terrorists for that matter.