Shadow

by James Swallow

  Still, something about the metal flask made Azeem uncomfortable. He remembered his father’s stern warnings to him from when he was a boy, about the dangers of touching unexploded shells left over after the countless attacks that had bombarded Libya over the decades.

  Azeem picked up the flask and turned it over in his hands.

  “I think I should get rid of it.”

  He touched the cap, and without warning jets of cold fluid spat out through pinholes in the rim of the metal. He recoiled, dropping the flask. His hands and his robe were wet and sticky, and without thinking, he grabbed the nearest thing to wipe them clean, a T-shirt with a garish logo on it.

  “Are you all right?” Gamal was at his side, a worried look on his face. “Did you open it?”

  “I must have,” said Azeem, dabbing himself down. The liquid had no odor, but it seemed to have gone everywhere. He found a bottle of water and used it to wash off his hands.

  Gamal gathered up the hissing flask and put it back in the daypack.

  “You’re right,” he told him. “Get rid of this.”

  “What do you think it is?” Azeem asked, his mind racing. “Some sort of practical joke?”

  “That must be it,” Gamal insisted. “Your cousin is making fun of you.” He found a smile and nodded. “Next time, pay him half what he asks.”

  Azeem shrugged and tossed the daypack into the pickup’s flatbed.

  “I’ll dump it later.”

  He stifled a catch in his throat. There was an odd medicinal taste at the back of his mouth.

  Gamal absently rubbed his hands on his robe and moved back to the box of DVDs, nodding as he did.

  “In the meantime, let me buy these to improve your fortune.”

  He held out a cluster of shiny discs, covering his face as he coughed.

  Azeem nodded, as a vague wave of nausea washed over him.

  In the back of the Toyota, the flask continued to emit a quiet, metallic whisper as its lethal payload emptied into the morning air.

  * * *

  Marc awoke slowly, degree by painful degree. A fitful sleep on the hard, cold floor of the cave had left him riddled with chills and aches, and his joints popped audibly as he rose and shook it off. Lucy crouched by the campfire, poking at the dead embers with a stick.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “Never mind me, what about you?” he countered.

  They had spent the night wrapped around one another, preserving what fractions of heat they could, and the intimacy of the act felt awkward in the aftermath.

  “I’m okay.” That wasn’t true, but Marc decided not to call her out on it. She nodded in the direction of the cave mouth. “Good news is, storm’s gone.”

  Watery gray daylight leaked into the lava cavern and Marc gave a nod, looking around. In the pitch darkness of the previous night, it had been almost impossible to grasp their full surroundings, but now he saw how the ancient tunnel of rock curved away from them, disappearing deeper into the cold earth. Millennia ago, the cave had been a channel for volcanic magma, and the signature of the molten rock was still written on the craggy ceiling over their heads. A dirty silvery sheen marked where deposits of metallic gas had been locked into the rock.

  “I’m going to one-star this place,” he told her, gathering up the shotgun, starting toward the slope of rubble near the cave mouth. “Room service is terrible.”

  Despite herself, Lucy gave a hollow chuckle and followed him up, back out into the cold air of the morning. Cloud banks overhead extended off to the horizon in all directions and a light, fine rain was falling, but the visibility was good enough to see for miles. The previous night’s violent wind had dropped to a steady, chilling breeze.

  At the top of a low rise, Marc turned in a slow circle, getting his bearings, only to stop dead as he saw something that made him curse out loud.

  “You are taking the piss!”

  “What?” Lucy scrambled up the last few meters to his side, brandishing the stun baton. She followed his line of sight and then swore loudly along with him. “I do not fucking believe this.”

  Around a mile distant from where they had climbed down into the lava tube, there was a small prefabricated hut at the end of a hiking trail. A line of wooden spikes set in the frost-covered ground drew a course from the far side of the sinkhole entrance to the clearing around the hut.

  “That was not there last night,” Lucy insisted.

  “Yeah, it was,” Marc said, almost incredulously. “We just didn’t see it in the pitch bloody dark!”

  They trudged down the shallow incline and made their way across the moss-covered rocks toward it. As they came closer, Marc had to fight off the crazy impulse to reach out and touch the shelter, to be certain it wasn’t some kind of hypothermia-induced hallucination.

  “If this thing has a hot shower, steaks and coffee inside, I might be able to forgive it,” Lucy muttered.

  Marc circled the building, finding the front door. The hut’s wooden exterior had been painted international orange some time in the distant past, but countless harsh winters had shredded the paintwork, exposing the planks underneath. He unlatched the heavy-duty weatherproof catches holding the door shut and ventured inside.

  The hut’s interior was damp and musty, but it was a palace compared to the cave. There were two beds with survival mattresses, an oil heater and a battery-powered UHF radio. Lucy wasted no time firing up the heater as Marc studied the radio set.

  He reached for the handset, then hesitated.

  “If we use this in clear and Verbeke’s men are monitoring, they’ll know we’re still alive.”

  “They think we’re dead. We almost were.” She crouched by the heater, still shivering. “We have to take the chance. That, or we sit here, play cards and wait for the next tourist to turn up and jack their ride.”

  Lucy was right, and he knew it. Setting aside the sawn-off, Marc took a breath and keyed the mike.

  “Break, break,” he began. “To anyone copying this transmission. This is an emergency. I need to make contact with Inspector Andri Larsson of the SR. My name is Marc Dane, I am a private security contractor with the Rubicon Group and I have critical information for the police. Please respond, over.”

  Static hissed back at him.

  “Look on the bright side,” said Lucy, scanning the sparse landscape out of the hut’s windows. “We have good sight lines up here. Anyone comes with ill intent, we’ll know it.”

  “Yeah, that makes me feel a lot better,” he lied.

  The radio crackled.

  “This is Ice-SAR,” came the reply. “What is the nature of your emergency, over?”

  “Get a pen,” Marc told the rescue dispatcher. “You’ll want to write this down.”

  FOURTEEN

  By her estimate, Lucy was up by three hundred bucks when the helo buzzed the shelter. They dropped their cards and she snatched up the shotgun on the way out of the door, but Marc waved her off as the aircraft turned back and loitered, looking for a place to put down.

  “It’s Larsson,” he told her, as the red and white Super Puma dropped to the ground and the hatch on the side slid open.

  The Icelandic cop was first out, his coat catching the downwash from the rotors, and with him came four armed men in black tactical gear, each toting a Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine gun. Lucy had second thoughts about the sawn-off, holding it high as she followed the Brit out into the cold morning air. The tac-ops guys all saw the gun at once, and they took aim. Lucy tossed the weapon and did the smart thing, holding her hands up, palms open.

  Larsson picked his way over the rocks to them, and he did not look happy.

  “Let’s go,” he said, without preamble. “We’ll get you to a secure location, and I’ll be back to debrief you when we are finished at the Frigga facility.”

  “Wait, no.” Marc grabbed Larsson’s arm and the nearest of the tac-ops came over like he was ready to kick the Brit’s ass. “You can’t bench us, Andri. We w
ere just in there!”

  “You both look half-dead,” Larsson shot back. “I warned you about coming out here unprepared. It’s a wonder you’re not corpses.”

  “Yeah, lucky us,” Marc went on. “Mate, I didn’t call you in so we could sit on the sidelines.”

  Larsson hesitated, weighing his options.

  “Do you understand how much paperwork will be involved if you are injured or killed?”

  “And do you want someone who can tell your men exactly where to go, or not?” Lucy shot back.

  He gave a reluctant nod. “All right.”

  He called over one of the tac-ops guys and there was a rapid exchange. The men jogged back to the helo, and Larsson beckoned Marc and Lucy.

  “Okay, it is already happening,” said the Icelander. “Echo Squad is on approach to the complex. I had to miss out on the breach because I came to rescue you, so hurry up!”

  They scrambled aboard the Super Puma and the aircraft pitched up into the air, taking off like a rocket. Lucy grabbed an intercom headset, looking over the nearest of the black-clad men in the seat next to her. His gear was squared away and in good order, and like the other masked operatives, he gave off the hard, steady focus of a career soldier. Lucy knew a fellow professional when she saw one. Wordlessly, he handed her and Marc spare jackets and gloves, which Lucy gratefully accepted.

  On the jacket’s breast, below a regulation police shield sigil, was a low-visibility black-on-black unit patch. It showed the face of a bearded Nordic warrior and a single word.

  “Víkingasveitin…” She sounded out the syllables.

  “I told you not to speak my language.” Larsson’s voice hissed in her ear through the headphones. “You Americans always murder it.” She looked back at him and he nodded toward the men. “Viking Squad,” he explained. “Our equivalent of your SAS or Delta Force.”

  “Cool name,” said Marc.

  He shot the Brit a look. “Are you going to tell me the full story about why you came to Iceland? No more games, Dane. If my country is at risk, you need to come clean about it.”

  Marc glanced at Lucy, and she sighed.

  “How long until we get to the facility?” she asked.

  Larsson glanced at his watch. “Twenty minutes.”

  Lucy tapped her headset. “Can you patch me into a sat-com phone from this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Call this number,” she told him, and from memory she spooled off the SCD contact protocol details. “It’s time we got everyone up to speed.”

  * * *

  It took only a few minutes for the connections to be made, and then they were on a scrambled party line—Marc, Lucy and Larsson in the speeding helicopter, Assim in Singapore and Delancort in Monaco.

  Marc gave up trying to work out what the time zone differences were. Unsurprisingly, everyone sounded strung-out and dog-tired. He chewed greedily on a ration pack offered to him by one of the helicopter crew, as if he could drag a little more energy from the gooey, tasteless bar.

  He concentrated on the dull taste of it and the voices in his ears, ignoring the familiar, unpleasant tension building in the back of his head. Every time he climbed into a helicopter that he wasn’t flying, his old fear crept back.

  “This is Keyes,” began Lucy. “Dane’s here, and we have Inspector Larsson of the Icelandic SR on with us too…” Marc heard an audible intake of breath from Delancort over the encrypted channel, but Lucy kept speaking. “We’re on the move, so I’ll stick to the high points.”

  In short order, with keen military precision, she went through a blunt after-action report on their failed infiltration of the Frigga facility. Ji-Yoo Park’s brutal murder was reduced to a clinical evaluation of the event, and Noah Verbeke’s raging anger became a side-note to the issue at the core of everything.

  Marc listened in silence, the guilt from his failure gathering in his chest like a ball of lead.

  “We believe there are no biological agents on site,” Lucy told them. “Everything they were doing there was at a distance. They faked us out. While we were busy tracking the Bitcoin transfers out here, they were shipping the bioprinters to other locations. We don’t have a lead on those as yet.”

  “Have you identified the biological agent that Park was being forced to work on?” said Delancort.

  “It’s the Shadow virus,” Lucy said firmly. “The weaponized fast-burn variant of Marburg developed by the DPRK.”

  “Helvítis…” Larsson muttered the curse, taking in this troubling new information.

  “But I repeat, the weapon was not at the site,” Lucy went on.

  “Are you one hundred percent sure of that?” Larsson demanded.

  He shook his head and began jabbing at a cell phone in his hand, sending out a series of urgent text messages.

  “As sure as we could be,” added Marc. “The Lion’s Roar aren’t stupid enough to bring something that lethal here. They have no reason to target this country.”

  “All of this tracks with what I’ve uncovered,” said Assim. “I’m still teasing apart this web of financial transfers, but I did find a solid hit on a series of Bitcoin payments to shady characters in the Philippines. The transaction dates match up with an incident that took place in a biotech plant in Makati City near Manila. A disgruntled ex-employee came in and shot the place up—”

  “What does that have to do with this?” said Marc.

  “The plant in Makati manufactures biokits and seed materials compatible with the stolen bioprinters,” replied Assim.

  “I authorized one of our pilots to fly one of Rubicon’s security operatives to Manila,” said Delancort, clarifying for Larsson’s sake. Marc didn’t need to ask to know he was referring to Ari Silber, the former Israeli combat aviator and the SCD’s chief pilot, and Malte Riis. “Our man is investigating the lead there as we speak.” He paused. “The Rubicon Group will, of course, cooperate fully with the Icelandic government and the SR with regard to this troubling turn of events.”

  “You should have done that first,” Larsson said coldly. “Catch-up is a game we do not play here.”

  “Yes, of course.” Delancort’s tone was conciliatory, but it swiftly turned flinty. “Be assured any and all responsibility will be apportioned in full if our employees are culpable.”

  The last was clearly directed as a warning to Marc and Lucy. He would not put it past Solomon’s aide to hang them out to dry if it meant protecting Rubicon’s reputation.

  They exchanged glances as Lucy spoke again.

  “We’ll provide whatever support Inspector Larsson requires.”

  “Let me know how it goes,” Delancort said curtly, echoing Lucy’s words to him from the night before as he cut the communication at his end. The point was not lost on either of them.

  Marc’s weary thankfulness for surviving the night on the ice melted away under the steady realization of the consequences he now faced. Park’s death, Verbeke’s cunning manipulation of them—the burden was his to shoulder.

  I underestimated that bastard and I got cocky, he admonished himself. Now we’re paying the price.

  The pitch of the Super Puma’s engine changed, and Marc felt the helicopter descending. The weight in his chest tightened a few notches more and out through the cockpit canopy he saw the valley they had surveilled the night before. Another white-and-red helicopter was already parked on the facility’s landing pad, but there was no sign of the black Jet Ranger. Passing on a description of the aircraft was one of the first messages he sent over the UHF radio, but seeing it absent here stirred a growing certainty that Verbeke and his people were—once again—long gone.

  Marc’s fears were stoked as they approached the main blockhouse. Leaving the second helicopter grounded across the facility’s entrance road, the Viking Squad team led the way with Larsson, Marc and Lucy bringing up the rear. The SR officer forbade them from doing anything more than observing, and he relayed Lucy’s descriptions of the blockhouse’s interior layout over a hand-held radi
o in gruff bursts of Icelandic.

  Now the wind had eased, the steady white streamer emerging from the facility’s steam pipes rose into the sky at a steep angle. In the stark daylight of the morning, the square buildings and silver domes glistened with hoarfrost, and the only sound was the crunch of the black gravel beneath their boots.

  The door Marc had hacked the night before hung open.

  Another bad sign, he thought. They left in a hurry.

  Following the tactical squad inside the blockhouse, Marc was struck by the silence. He expected alarms, shouts, gunfire—but the ghost town nature of the place was, if anything, greater than it had been before. Two of the team broke off, likely to rendezvous with the second unit, while Larsson directed Lucy to show him where the server farm was located. Marc hesitated, seeing sets of drag marks on the scuffed flooring. Someone had hauled a heavy object down this corridor.

  They rounded a corner and found their path blocked by a thick steel door, secured with an industrial padlock.

  “This was open when I came through here,” said Lucy. “The computer stacks are in the next room.”

  One of the troopers fingered the lock, giving it an experimental tug. Then he reached up and pulled a curved metal shape from a scabbard-holster on the back of his armor vest.

  Lucy blinked “Is that…?”

  “An axe,” Marc concluded. “Viking is not just a cool name, then.”

  The operative split the lock with a single downward blow of the black-anodized tactical blade, and the door swung freely. His teammate shouldered it open and the space beyond was revealed.

  Marc looked in at dozens of server racks, the aluminum frames lining both sides of the room from the ground to the ceiling. On the floor there was a mess of discarded fascia plates and torn data cables, and where modular hard drives should have been there were only gaping spaces. More cables hung uselessly in ragged bunches, many of them stripped where they had been cut with knives in haste.

  “Déjà fucking vu,” growled Lucy. “Nothing in the damn box, same as before.”