Eagle Strike

at least he had spotted Damian Cray.

    Alex waited until the guards had gone, then twisted out from behind the fire escape. He made his way as quickly as he could around the square, keeping in the shadows. Cray had made a mistake.
    Breaking into the compound was virtually impossible, so he had worried less about security on the inside. Alex hadn‟t spotted any cameras, and the guards in the towers were looking out rather than in. For the moment he was safe.
    He followed Cray into the building and found himself crossing the white marble floor of what was nothing more than a huge glass box. Above him he could see the night sky with the three windmills looming in the distance. The building contained nothing. But there was a single round hole in one corner of the floor and a staircase leading down.
    Alex heard voices.
    He crept down the stairs, which led directly into a large underground room. Crouching on the bottom step, concealed behind wide steel banisters, he watched.
    The room was open-plan, with a white marble floor and corridors leading off in several directions. The architecture made him think of a vault in an ultra-modern bank. But the gorgeous rugs, the fireplace, the Italian furniture and the dazzling white Bechstein grand piano could have come out of a palace. To one side was a curving desk with a bank of telephones and computer screens. All the lighting was at floor level, giving the room a bizarre, unsettling atmosphere, with alt the shadows going the wrong way. A portrait of Damian Cray holding a white poodle covered an entire wall.
    The man himself was sitting on a sofa, sipping a bright yellow drink. He had a cherry on a cocktail stick and Alex watched him pick it off with his perfect white teeth and slowly eat it. The three men from the square were with him, and Alex knew at once that he had been right all along—that Cray was indeed at the centre of the web.
    One of the men was Yassen Gregorovich. Wearing jeans and a polo neck, he was sitting on the piano stool, his legs crossed. The second man stood near him, leaning against the piano. He was older, with silver hair and a sagging, pockmarked face. He was wearing a blue blazer with a striped tie that made him look like a minor official in a bank or a cricket club. He had large spectacles that had sunk into his face as if it were damp clay. He looked nervous, the eyes behind the glass circles blinking frequently. The third man was darkly handsome, in his late forties, with black hair, grey eyes and a jawline that was square and serious. He was casually dressed in a leather jacket and an open-necked shirt and seemed to be enjoying himself.
    Cray was talking to him. “I‟m very grateful to you, Mr Roper. Thanks to you, Eagle Strike can now proceed on schedule.”
    Roper! This was the man Cray had met in Paris. Alex had a sense that everything had come full circle. He strained to hear what the two men were saying.
    “Hey—please. Call me Charlie.” The man spoke with an American accent. “And there‟s no need to thank me, Damian. I‟ve enjoyed doing business with you.”
    “I do have a few questions,” Cray murmured, and Alex saw him pick up an object from a coffee table next to the sofa. It was a metallic capsule, about the same shape and size as a mobile phone.
    “As I understand it, the gold codes change daily. Presumably the flash drive is currently programmed with today‟s codes. But if Eagle Strike were to take place two days from now…”

    “Just plug it in. The flash drive will update itself,” Roper explained. He had an easy, lazy smile.
    “That‟s the beauty of it. First it will burrow through the security systems. Then it will pick up the new codes … like taking candy from a baby. The moment you have the codes, you transmit them back through Milstar and you‟re set. The only problem you have, like I told you, is the little matter of the finger on the button.”
    “Well, we‟ve already solved that,” Cray said.
    “Then I might as well move out of here.”
    “Just give me a couple more minutes of your valuable time, Mr Roper … Charlie…” Cray said.
    He sipped his cocktail, licked his lips and set the glass down. “How can I be sure that the flash drive will actually work?”
    “You have my word on it,” Roper said. “And you‟re certainly paying me enough.”
    “Indeed so. Half a million dollars in advance. And two million dollars now. However…” Cray paused and pursed his lips. “I still have one small