Shadow

by James Swallow

“Ekko … we understand what you have built here. And the board accepts that the SCD was created with the best of intentions. But each time you green-light an operation, you put all of Rubicon at risk. You have spoken before of how small actions can effect great changes, and no one sees that better than I.” Keller made a turning gesture with his hand. “I have watched a one percent shift in a stock price turn into a catastrophic nosedive that bankrupted a Fortune 500 company overnight. I have seen how one tiny investment can help a whole nation to bloom. But those are acts within the law. What the SCD does takes place beyond that framework. It goes past any gray area and deep into the black.”

  McFarlane removed her glasses and scowled into the sunlight.

  “You brought us here where no one can listen in on us, so let’s say the words, shall we? There’s evidence that your SCD operatives have broken dozens of international laws, resisted arrest, killed people. How can we allow that?”

  Delancort cleared his throat.

  “Our military contractors and security staff have mandates to use lethal force if required.”

  “Depending on contracts, local laws and dozens of other variables.” The woman silenced him with a withering look. “There’s a world of difference, Henri. Don’t insult my intelligence by suggesting otherwise.” She looked back at Solomon. “If this information were to become public knowledge, it could ruin us.”

  “We keep our secrets for a greater good.” Solomon glanced down at the tablet computer in his hand. “A few hours ago, our specialists, working in concert with the Belgian counter-terrorism division and officers of the Icelandic financial crimes unit, assisted in neutralizing a terror cell, and stopped a biological attack in the city of Brussels.” Everyone else on the sundeck fell silent. “This is being kept from the media, as is the truth behind the horror you have seen unfolding in Benghazi.”

  “What do you mean?” said Cruz.

  “The outbreak in Libya was deliberately engineered by the same terrorist group. Those behind that attack sought to duplicate their atrocity in the heart of Europe.” Solomon took a breath. “This is what the SCD does. We oppose these threats. You may challenge my motives and my methods as you see fit. But know that today, lives were saved and justice was served. I will never apologize for that.”

  “It’s not our job to protect the world, Ekko,” said McFarlane.

  “With respect,” came the calm, implacable reply, “I disagree. And while I remain in my position with this organization, I will…” Solomon paused, reframing his words. “Rubicon will do all it can to balance the scales of the world.” He looked away, out over the sea, and repeated a mantra that Delancort had heard many times before. “I believe in responsibility. The responsibility of the rich to see that the poor do not starve. The responsibility of the strong to see that the weak are not preyed upon.” He turned back again. “Rubicon has power, and we have an ethical imperative to use it to do right. We cannot be afraid to travel to dark places in order to do so.” Solomon’s gaze settled on McFarlane. “If there is anyone here who does not wish to be a part of that, I will respect their choice. But as of now, I am ordering the SCD to be returned to full operational status.” He gave Delancort a nod and stepped away. “My chef has prepared a light lunch. Please enjoy it. The launch will return you to Monte Carlo afterward.”

  Delancort followed him, blinking as he passed from the dazzling light of outdoors and into the shady interior of the Themis.

  “Sir,” he began. “Is there any update on Lucy’s condition?”

  Solomon nodded once. “She is stable.”

  He chewed his lip. “Sir, if my support has not been clear over the past few days, I—”

  “To do what we do,” said Solomon, speaking over him, “I need my people operating at the best of their ability. I need to trust in them. That includes you, Henri.”

  Delancort gave a slow nod. “Of course.”

  Solomon was going to say more, but then the doors slid open again and Esther McFarlane entered, clasping her hat and glasses.

  “If it’s all the same to you, Ekko, I’ll skip the lunch and go ashore now.”

  “As you wish.” He inclined his head, and Delancort felt the tension in the room rise as the woman made no move to leave. “Was there something else?”

  “No one can argue with your results,” she said. “And that’s why you’ll get your way today. But sooner or later, your private little war will go awry. Something will happen you won’t be able to walk back from.” McFarlane put on her sunglasses once again and headed through the doors. “You’d better be ready for that.”

  “She’s right,” Delancort said, into the silence that followed.

  “I know,” said Solomon.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Her dreams were filled with shapeless, formless things. Walls of rippling color and motion, sounds that made no sense. And pain-laced fear shimmered underneath it, gripping her with iron claws.

  Lucy rose gradually out of the ocean of sensation and drifted back toward awareness. The lights and shapes of the hospital room took on solidity, and she saw the patient monitoring machines by her bedside, the reinforced window on the far wall. A sudden, desperate need to see the outside world, to have daylight on her skin, caused a half-sob to form in her chest, and she caught it before it could escape.

  Still here, she told herself, insisting on the truth of it. Still alive.

  With one shaking hand, Lucy reached up and touched her face. She remembered the sickening, burning sensation across her mouth and her nose when Verbeke had dosed her with the bioweapon, and in her half-awake state she was afraid it might have left her permanently scarred. Her flesh was hot to the touch, raw and swollen, but otherwise undamaged. She took a breath, and the smell of chemical antiseptics and the odor of her own tainted sweat were heavy in the air.

  The door slid open and a figure in a blue biohazard oversuit walked in, the boxy see-through helmet catching the light. Through the plastic faceplate she saw Marc staring back at her. He looked haggard, forcing a smile.

  “Hey,” he said, coming closer.

  “Hey,” she repeated.

  The word sounded like the creak of a broken hinge. Lucy realized her throat was desert-dry, and she made a drinking motion.

  “I got you,” said Marc, bringing her a squeeze bottle of cool water ending in a hooked tube she could draw on. He handed it over and sat on a metal stool next to the bed. The oversuit was comically big on him, and the thought made her smile.

  “That get-up, look like you oughta be in a cartoon,” she said. “Spaceman.”

  He reached out and took her hand.

  “You look okay.”

  “You’re a liar,” Lucy retorted weakly, and managed a gruff chuckle.

  Marc’s tired eyes narrowed.

  “Is it stupid to ask you how you feel?”

  “I’m…”

  Terrified.

  She wanted to say the word, but it was hard to drag it up and put it out there.

  “I’m here,” she managed.

  “You’re going to get over this,” Marc insisted. “You made it through the most critical phase of the infection, and it’s already burning out of you. I told the docs you’re a tough one, they said yeah, we know.”

  “Flatterer.” Lucy sifted his words. “How … is that? Marburg’s not … quick.”

  “The Shadow variant is different,” Marc noted. “Park said it was designed to be programmable. High infection rate, fast burn through. But this thing is dying off way quicker than anyone expected it to. I think she might have messed with the matrix before it went out to the bioprinters.”

  “Huh.” Lucy thought back to the woman she had known, the strong-willed soul who had risked certain death to flee the North Korean police state with her, and she knew what Ji-Yoo Park had done. “She sabotaged it.”

  Even in the midst of her world coming apart around her, Park must have altered the viral model to weaken it and radically truncate the bioweapon’s lifespan. A desp
airing, desperate attempt to do what she could to negate the attacks she knew would happen. Far more victims would survive a fast-burn infection than exposure to Shadow at its fullest potency.

  “They’re going to move you tonight,” Marc was saying. “Silber is flying in the jet to take you to Rubicon’s biomed clinic. They’ll get you better.”

  Lucy shook her head. Right now, the last thing she wanted to do was think about the state she was in and the road ahead of her. She held her fears at bay and looked Marc in the eye, asking the question that she had to have answered.

  “Did you get him?”

  Marc’s head bobbed inside the confines of the helmet.

  “Oh yeah. You know the Belgians really hate that bloke?”

  “Wasn’t easy?” She reached up and touched the faceplate. Marc had nasty purple-yellow bruises on his cheek and popped capillaries in one eye. The careful way he had sat down on the stool told her that he was hurting in lots of different places. “You seen a doctor?”

  “Later.” He dismissed the comment. “You just worry about you. Meantime, the rest of us are chasing up the loose ends.”

  Marc told her that even though Assim had passed on the full take of the Bitcoin transaction data to Larsson and the SR, he still wasn’t sure that the Icelandic government would forgive them.

  “Loki has the hard drives from the servers,” he continued. “Interpol secured the bioprinters. The Belgians have Ticker’s computer, after I made sure to delete all trace of the Shadow viral model from it before they got their hands on it. Anything they can use on there will go toward rolling up more of the Lion’s Roar.”

  “Sakina?” she whispered, pausing to take another sip of water. “Her family?”

  Marc nodded. “I called in a favor with Emigrant Aid. They’re going to help them in their case for asylum. That’s going to be an interesting discussion. But Meddur helped us isolate Verbeke, so they have to take that into consideration.” He sighed, the sound echoing inside the helmet. “They can’t send them home. It’s still bad in Benghazi. Rubicon is helping out with transport and medical supplies. But it could have been a lot worse.”

  “Yeah.”

  Without Park’s intervention, the Libyan city would have become a living hell, but still the death toll would be considerable. Dark, forbidding memories of sickened bodies in rusting metal cells pushed at the horizon of her thoughts and Lucy turned away from them, trying to concentrate on something else.

  “We still have one unanswered question.”

  “Saito.” Marc rose and paced the room. “I keep coming back to him. Didn’t have the time to weigh it up when the shit was hitting the fan, but now I’ve had a while to process it…” He paused, staring into space. “I go over that phone call again and again in my head, trying to figure him out. It doesn’t make any sense. He gave us the Lion’s Roar, when all he needed to do was nothing, and the Combine would have made big on their investment.”

  “Maybe … they bet against him,” she offered.

  Talking was tiring her out, but she needed to know.

  “Saito wanted us to deal with Verbeke for him, so he could keep his hands clean,” Marc went on.

  “If it was Saito,” Lucy managed, “you gotta know it’s really Glovkonin pulling the strings. And I don’t like … not knowing what that Russkie son-of-a-bitch is up to.”

  Marc nodded his agreement. “No argument here. One thing’s for sure. Glovkonin never does anything without a good reason.” He dwelled on that thought for a moment. “Somehow—in some way—we helped him.”

  Lucy barely caught the last few words he spoke. The fear and the darker memories haunting her had crept closer as they talked, and she couldn’t hold them back any longer. A faint gasp escaped her and she felt tears on her face.

  Marc sensed the change in her and came back to Lucy’s bedside.

  “What’s wrong?” He took her hand. “I’ll get the nurse.”

  “No,” she told him. “It’s not that.”

  Vulnerability was not a word that Lucy Keyes ever applied to herself. It was a quality that she sought in her enemies, the chinks in their armor, the holes in their defenses. They had burned it out of her in the army, or so she had believed. But in this room, the lie of that became clear.

  “Marc, I did a terrible thing.” Her voice was low and breathy. “Broke my promise to that woman. I said I would get her to a better life and I failed twice over. I’ve shed so much blood, I wanted to have one good thing on the right side of the scales. Just one.”

  The fear that she would not survive this gripped her, that her end would be marked only by what she had done in the darkest of her days.

  “That’s not on you,” he told her.

  Lucy looked down at her hand, seeing the chalky cast to her ochre skin where the IV line entered her arm.

  “You know, they trained us to die like heroes. Like Aunt Dani, rushing into that tower when the sky was falling in,” she rasped. “But I’m not ready to go out like this. Like a victim.”

  Like my father, she thought, cut down by something he never saw coming.

  “You won’t.” Marc pulled the metal stool closer and put himself on it, leaning close until the blue plastic of his oversuit touched the bare flesh of her arm. “I’m not going to let that happen.” His long fingers clasped hers. “Back there, all I could think about was keeping you alive. You always have my back, Lucy. You’re what keeps me going.”

  The simple words and the honest, human contact made the memories and the horrors they held draw back and fade.

  “You saved the girl after all, white knight,” she told him, her smile coming back. “Glad it was me.”

  “Just paying back what I owe. Look at us.” He gave her a wan smile in return. “All worn out and beaten up. But like you said, we’re still here, yeah? We’re not done yet.” He shook his head again. “Not by a long way.”

  She didn’t have to ask him to stay, and he didn’t make it a question. Lucy’s head sank back into the pillow and her eyelids fluttered closed. She felt the gentle press of the oversuit helmet resting against her shoulder, and as she listened their breathing slowly fell into sync.

  After a while, the two of them surrendered to the inevitable and drifted away, toward silent shores of sleep.

  * * *

  “Wake up.”

  The words were fuzzy and muffled, and they came with a splash of freezing water over his face, shocking him out of his doze.

  He blinked, remembering where he was, and instinctively rocked forward in the metal chair bolted to the floor in the middle of the room. Restraints around his thick wrists and muscular ankles bit tight, forcing him back into the seat.

  “You are not dead,” said an unpleasantly familiar voice, “as good for the world as that might be.” The speaker turned to another figure in the gloom, beyond the pool of light falling from the caged lightbulb overhead. “Can he hear us?”

  “The discharge from the flashbangs cost him the hearing in his right ear,” said another man. “But he knows what you’re saying.”

  Nils Jakobs stepped into the light, and for a brief moment he showed the glimmer of a smile.

  “Good.”

  Seeing the older man’s face ignited the anger in Noah Verbeke, and he bellowed like an enraged animal, once more straining wildly at the chair. But it was an impotent, directionless fury, and the sound rebounded off the concrete walls of the cell. Going nowhere, meaning nothing.

  “Did that make you feel better?”

  Jakobs gave him a sideways look when he reeled back, panting and spent.

  “It did.” The sounds in the room had a muddy quality, and even his own voice seemed to be coming to him from a great distance. “Nils. I knew I should have slit your throat.”

  “Another failure on your part,” said the police officer.

  Verbeke’s eyes still ached from the burning flares of white fire that had temporarily blinded him, and his skull throbbed incessantly. Even his sense of balance was d
amaged, making his stomach lurch with the slightest motion of his head. But all this he ignored, unwilling to show even the smallest sign of weakness to his enemy. He gave a derisive snort and made a show of glancing around.

  “This feels familiar. We’ve been here before, haven’t we? It wasn’t enough for you to have your men on the train killed? Fine. We can do this again.”

  “No one is coming to rescue you this time,” said Jakobs. “By the end of the week, anyone who ever cared about your wretched existence will be in prison or on the run.”

  “You think so?” Verbeke shot back.

  “I know it.” Jakobs came closer, leaning heavily on a walking cane. “I’m going to remember you every day of my life, Noah. Every time the wound you gave me acts up. Every time I take off my shirt and see the scars where they dug those bullets out of my gut.” Verbeke grinned at that idea, but Jakobs kept on talking. “But it is worth it to know that you are finished.” He nodded at the door. “You should have picked better people to work for you. The American—Ticker? He willingly turned over your entire operation to save his neck. We’re going to give him a deal, and in return he will open up the Lion’s Roar to my department. We will eradicate your repugnant horde of racist shits, and salt the earth behind us.”

  “He doesn’t know anything,” Verbeke sneered, convincing himself as he threw out the lie. “You might score a couple of arrests—so what?” He chuckled. “We are legion, Nils. We are everywhere. We do what others are too afraid to! You can’t stamp out the truth!”

  Jakobs gestured with the cane, taking in Verbeke with the motion.

  “This is the problem with people like him,” he said, addressing the other person standing in the shadows. “They cannot conceive of the fact that anyone else thinks differently from them. They believe that every man is as hateful as they are. They think that everyone dissimilar to them wants to destroy them.” He paused. “It is because they are afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid of you, you old prick.” Verbeke laughed at the idea.

  “That’s true.”

  Jakobs beckoned the other figure into the light. A man with Middle Eastern features became visible. He wore a uniform in dark blue urban camouflage, and he glared at Verbeke with naked, seething hatred.