Shadow

by James Swallow

  She jerked her thumb at one of the other rooms.

  “Sleeping like a big, bearded baby.” Lucy picked up a wadded ball of paper towels and bandage offcuts lying on a nearby table. “Here, some souvenirs I pulled out of you.”

  She dropped it in his hand and Marc peeled back the bloodstained material, finding dozens of little shards, each one a tiny piece of Ticker’s ruined computer.

  “You’re lucky that guy went for the toughened option,” she continued. “I found the bullet lodged in the power pack.”

  He waited for the expected lecture about taking unnecessary risks, but she didn’t follow through with one.

  “Thanks for having my back out there,” he said, after a moment.

  She nodded. “We lost Ticker and his buddy out in the ghost fleet. I’m guessing they had a pickup waiting further out to sea, either took the motorboat on board a bigger ship or scuttled it.”

  “Indonesia is only a few hours’ sailing from there,” noted Assim. “It’s a good bet they made port in Jakarta and boarded a plane or another ship to their next destination.”

  “Plane,” Marc said absently.

  He remembered something the French woman said to Ticker over the phone. Wrap up warm. Marc put the debris from his injury aside and leaned forward in his chair.

  “All right. Let’s string together what we know.”

  “The bioprinters were gone before we reached the club,” began Lucy, sitting heavily in a folding chair. “The gang running the place…” She threw a look at Assim.

  “The Ang Soon Tong,” he replied.

  “Those Chow Yun Fat wannabes, they’re part of a smuggling network that goes to the US, the Middle East, Russia, Europe. Their speciality is trafficking in black market antiquities. Rubicon’s security division has a file on them an inch thick.”

  Assim nodded. “Over the last few years there’s been this spate of robberies in Europe, targeted thefts of ancient Chinese antiquities that are supposedly being ‘repatriated’ by the government in Beijing.” He made air quotes with his fingers. “Allegedly, the Ang Soon Tong have been helping with that, upping their game globally. They have contacts everywhere.”

  Marc scowled. “Which makes them the ideal middlemen to send those bioprinters to wherever the hell the black masks want.”

  “Speaking of them, we have a couple of faces now,” said Lucy, motioning at her head. “Your buddy the hacker and some of his playmates were caught on camera outside the club.”

  Assim opened up a data panel on his screen, presenting grainy image captures from the traffic monitor.

  “The equipment I have on site here is a bit lacking,” he said apologetically, “so a full-on deep dive data sweep wasn’t possible—but it turns out we didn’t need it. Facial recognition pinged this chap to an open FBI warrant.”

  “Let me guess,” said Marc. “Cybercrime?”

  “And a lot of it, too. As you already know, he runs under the nom de guerre Ticker, along with a dozen other aliases.” Assim flicked up a virtual panel showing the be-on-the-lookout bulletin bearing the man’s details. “Add to that aggravated assault, conspiracy against the American government, incitement to violence … All of it with a strong race-hatred element.”

  “I read his jacket. This prick is your classic angry white boy,” said Lucy, folding her arms across her chest. “Grew up cussing people out on Xbox, straight into credit card fraud and right-wing conspiracy theory country, next stop white hoods and cross burning.”

  “What’s he doing helping to kidnap a bioscientist in Singapore, then?” Marc eyed the man’s photo. “The bloke looks like the true believer type.”

  Assim was silent for a long moment, before he went on with the next piece of data.

  “I’ve been monitoring the local police force. Singapore CID’s specialized crime unit has been called in to go over the incident at the warehouse club. They haven’t connected anything up to the MaxaBio theft and the Lam abduction, but it’s only been a few hours.”

  “They will,” Marc said grimly.

  Lucy and Assim fell silent as he described to them the horror he had found in the plastic drum down in the basement, and the comments that Ticker had made after the fact.

  “He told you that?” Lucy asked quietly. Marc nodded and she swore under her breath. “Son of a bitch.”

  “The bodies in the drum … That was the boy and his dad.” Assim had to voice it out loud to grasp the awfulness of it. “That’s what we’re saying?” His hand rose to his mouth. “Ya Allah…”

  “Why kidnap them just to kill them?” said Lucy, her cold anger seething beneath the words.

  “I have an idea about that.”

  Assim worked the keyboard and brought up a fragmented file menu gleaned from the recovered hard drive. He explained that he had been concentrating on the data pertaining to the money transfers, but that the drive also contained partially deleted video and audio files.

  “The footage is shots of Simon Lam and his son, and their house. At first, I couldn’t understand what the purpose of it was, but now…” He trailed off.

  Marc nodded. “There was camera gear and an audiovisual editing kit in the basement.” He looked at Assim. “Are you thinking…?”

  Assim returned his nod. “I believe it could be raw material for a deepfake.”

  “By the look on your faces,” said Lucy, “I know I am going to regret asking you to explain what that is.”

  “Basically … It’s a piece of software that will make sure you never trust anything you see on a screen, ever again.”

  Marc gave her the high points, watching as her expression shifted from incredulity, to concern, and finally to outright disgust.

  A deepfake, he explained, was video and audio footage compiled from real sources and blended seamlessly together using an artificially intelligent heuristic program. The program could take disparate recordings and patch one over the other, learning how to better manipulate images and sound to create something that looked seamless to the human eye.

  “The first ones were bogus sex tapes, slapping the faces of movie stars on top of pornography. Then politicians swearing or giving speeches they never had. And that’s the amateur work. Think about what a non-state actor with an axe to grind and some funding could do.” Marc let that sink in. “It’s the same tech that gives you movies about dinosaur theme parks and superheroes beating each other up. Only you don’t need a Hollywood special effects studio to do it.”

  “Shit!” Lucy shook her head. “Okay. I’m officially freaked out by that.”

  “Ticker and his mates were assembling deepfakes of the husband and the kid.” Marc voiced the thought aloud as it occurred to him. “There was an audio file I heard … It was Simon Lam talking, reading out a bunch of nonsense sentences.” He nodded to himself. “I knew I’d heard something like that before. It was establishing a baseline for his voice.”

  “You’re describing a phonetic pangram.” Assim swallowed hard. “A string of words that contain all the phonetic sounds of a given language. We have a few on file ourselves in the SCD’s secure server.”

  “We have?” Lucy gave him a sharp look.

  Assim nodded again. “Remember last year, when you two broke into the Horizon Integral tower in Sydney? How do you think we were able to simulate the voice of the CEO to open those digital locks?”

  “Yeah?” Her eyes flashed. “If I find out you have video of me humping a hockey team, I will straight up cut your balls off.” She shuddered. “Just hearing about this shit makes me want to take a shower.”

  “Okay, before we go any further, I reckon we need to call this in.” Marc looked to Lucy. She was mission leader, so the decision would be hers.

  She didn’t hesitate. “Agreed.” She glanced at Assim. “Contact the Monaco office, give them a sitrep.”

  “Okay. I’ve been mirroring the data recovered from the hard drive as I decrypted it,” he replied. “Delancort won’t be happy about our results.”

&nbs
p; “My heart bleeds.”

  The words came out in a snarl, and Marc winced as the bandages across his chest went tight.

  * * *

  The pain in the prisoner’s foot had worsened, after one of his tormentors smacked him too many times on the base of his callused sole. There had been a lot of blood and a desultory attempt to bandage the injury, but like so many of the ways in which the prisoner was treated, it was done in a careless and indifferent manner.

  He limped toward the waiting truck, its engine idling in the overcast morning, flanked by a pair of guards who were young enough to be his sons. One carried a rifle, forever tugging on the strap, while the other smoked a cigarette in clear violation of standing orders. Neither made a move to aid him in any way, but that was to be expected. Some distance ahead of the truck, a black car was parked near the camp’s main gate, and he sensed that it too was waiting for him.

  The prisoner flexed his wrists in the handcuffs holding them together, and chanced a closer look at the guards. Like the men who fed him in the camp’s sparse mess hall, the ones who patrolled outside his isolated cell, or those who came to administer his regular “correctional” beatings, they were ignorant of who he was and why he was a convict. They followed their orders to keep him alive and uncomfortable, but he imagined they did not dare to ask why they did so.

  How many years had it been? After the first decade he stopped counting the days. The prisoner’s existence flattened into endless bleak nights on hard bunks and dull daylight hours of stultifying routine and back-breaking work. Sometimes they allowed him to read books or join the other prisoners to watch films in the common area, but these were always insipid entertainments designed to reinforce the rightness of the State. These respites were only granted so they could be taken away, and after a few years he had learned to see the patterns in the mechanical cruelty of it.

  Last night it had rained, and the chill remained in the damp air. He navigated around puddles in the pockmarked road, aware that he was being watched by several convicts from the exercise yard. They hung on the wire of the inner fence, indolently observing him making his way, wondering what made him so special. To them, he must have seemed like a phantom. A thing glimpsed from the corner of the eye, a rumor more than a man.

  This was an old and familiar parade for the prisoner, of course. At random intervals chosen by those who judged him, guards would come to his cell and lead him out. There would be a vehicle waiting for him, a truck or a car, on the rarest of occasions a helicopter, and he would be placed aboard and taken elsewhere. This particular camp, which he guessed to be somewhere toward the northwestern border, was what had once been known as a laogai. It was one of a myriad of penal labor sites scattered throughout the wilderness of the People’s Republic of China, where those who broke the law or opposed the Party would be brought to engage what the State called “reform through labor.” Such camps might be tanning works or asbestos mines, tea plantations or wheat farms, where the inmates worked their sentence for the good of the country. Other times, the prisoner found himself in military-style stockades or windowless bunkers where the most reviled enemies were entombed. The only constant was the inconstancy, as if the government that he had wronged could not bear to keep the prisoner in one place for too long.

  He sometimes wondered if the men who had condemned him were still alive. Did they too observe him from a distance, content that they had done their jobs well? Or were the reasons for the prisoner’s incarceration lost and no longer remembered?

  He was a forgotten man, of that there could be no doubt. All trace of him erased, his previous honorable service to the State wiped out after his crime. This was his lot.

  The smoker became irritated at his slow pace, but the prisoner made no attempt to move faster. He did not want to chance reopening the wound on his foot. It was an old scar, from many prisons ago, and he didn’t heal as well as he once had. Poor subsistence-level food kept him weak, and the years of confinement had aged him prematurely. The prisoner was somewhere in his mid-fifties, he estimated, but the face that he occasionally studied in the mirror resembled that of his grandfather.

  The thought of the time stolen from him hardened his resolve. It was the core around which his resistance was built, the last thing he held on to after everything else had been stripped from him.

  His punishment for daring to believe he could out-think the State and pursue his own agenda was a prison sentence with no end, a penance that did not officially exist in any records. He was that transient phenomenon the other convicts saw, the ghost trapped inside an engine of contempt, with no hope of escape.

  At the back of the vehicle, another guard, with the cow-eyed look of a country yokel, dropped the cargo gate and beckoned him up. The Jiefang truck was a heavy three-axle affair, a brutish diesel machine in drab military camouflage with a mottled fabric canopy suspended over the flatbed. The prisoner knew from experience that the ride would be uncomfortable.

  He climbed aboard, taking his time, careful not to snag the dark blue material of his too-thin jacket on the protruding spars of the truck’s frame. As he settled in, a senior guard appeared around the side of the vehicle, and the smoker jerked in shock, caught in the act. He threw his cigarette into a puddle but it was too late. The senior man berated him for a few moments before ordering him to follow the prisoner into the truck. The guard with the rifle on his shoulder came next, shoving up next to the yokel. Inside the close confines of the covered flatbed, he could smell the rifleman’s breath, like sour milk.

  The senior man banged hard on the side of the truck. As the vehicle lurched away, the prisoner saw him speaking into a handheld radio.

  When he looked back, the smoker was glaring at him, as if it was his fault that he had been reprimanded. The prisoner automatically let his gaze drop to the floor, showing passivity, but it was too late.

  “What are you looking at?” spat the smoker. He prodded the prisoner in the chest.

  The prisoner said nothing, his face a mask of dumb penitence. But that was not enough.

  The smoker took his silence as an insult and slapped him about the head, spending his anger in a few quick blows. When he was done, he leaned back and glowered.

  The pain in the prisoner’s foot was now a throbbing twinge, and he had the beginnings of a headache from the slaps. He hunched forward and stared at the wooden floorboards and the chink of visible road in the gaps between them, losing himself in the nothingness of the action. This was how he survived—by disconnecting from the world around him. Only when he was truly alone would the prisoner allow himself to reach down for old memories, for the warm recall of the good days and the steady burn of resentment for everything left unresolved.

  They drove for several hours along dirt roads and desolate highways. He guessed they were heading south. From what the prisoner could see out of the back of the truck, they were moving into craggy lowland territory, where the roads cut through the hills with arrow-straight efficiency. The yokel dozed off and the rifleman traded stories with the smoker. Once in a while, the driver up front would beg a cigarette.

  The daylight changed as they entered a snaking canyon. The prisoner heard the grind of gears as the driver nursed the elderly Jiefang’s engine. And then suddenly the brakes bit hard with a low squeal.

  Everyone in the back of the truck lurched forward, and the yokel was thrown out of his sleep with enough shock that he called out a woman’s name in surprise, slurring like a drunkard. The rifleman laughed at him.

  The smoker lifted a flap in the cover and peered through it at the empty road behind them.

  “What is this?” he demanded.

  “Hey!” the rifleman called to the driver. “Why did you stop?”

  The prisoner heard the sound of breaking glass and the driver slumped forward against the steering wheel. Blood smeared the sliding window that looked into the truck’s cab.

  The yokel recoiled, then grabbed for his weapon where it lay on the floor. Beside him, the
rifleman was turning toward the rear of the vehicle, his aspect hardening. The dark tarpaulin over the flatbed crackled as something punched through it. An ugly blossom of red burst on the rifleman’s chest and he rolled on to the floor. The prisoner heard the bullet that struck him drone past, passing out through the other side of the vehicle. The rifleman gasped and a horrible wheezing, sucking sound came out of the wound as it began to end him.

  The smoker vaulted over the dying man, scrambling out of the back of the truck, fumbling with his own weapon. The yokel dashed after him, leaving the prisoner and his wounded comrade.

  Out on the road, the smoker had his gun up and he was panning it around, trying to aim in the direction of the incoming shots. The prisoner watched him take two rounds, one in the chest and one in the belly, before collapsing on the highway.

  The prisoner slipped off the bench mounted inside the flatbed and made himself as small as he could, pressing himself against the steel frame of the truck. The silent shots might penetrate the metal, or they might not. He wasn’t going to take the chance.

  The yokel started firing, sending bursts upward at the crags, but if he had a target he was missing it. The man started to retreat back toward the truck when a shot passed through his kneecap and he fell down in a screaming heap.

  The prisoner watched this through a hole in the metal frame, as detached as he ever was. The yokel cried out for help, and for the moment the shooting stopped.

  From behind the prisoner, the rifleman continued to die slowly and noisily. He turned to look at the young man.

  The rifleman’s face was bloodless with shock as he clutched weakly at the grotesque wound in his chest.

  It was easy to pull the rifle from his hands. The gun was a modern bullpup-fashion assault weapon, familiar to the prisoner but not something he had ever trained with. Still, a rifle was a rifle. He turned it over in his hands, considering it. Then he shot the young man through the head rather than prolong his agony.