Shadow Code (A John Kovac Thriller Book 2) (John Kovac Thriller Series)

by David Caris

  Megan pulled Kapoor’s drive out of a laptop she had borrowed from the hotel’s front desk staff, deciding Curzon’s greatest weakness hadn’t been its IT systems so much as its recruitment process. Had HR even bothered to check…? She suspected that, in time, she would discover Sims and Krathwohl had both been dismissed for breaching company policy, tripped up by their efforts to assist Bibi from the inside. But all that lay in the future. For now, as a starting point in what she expected to be a long and difficult investigation, she had requested the recording from the conference room dictaphone.

  A terror cell growing like a cancer inside a company that utilized hitmen.

  Nihilistic violence, born of corporate violence.

  She could see exactly how Yvette Morris would spin it in her article, and she had no idea how she would defend against such an appealing, intuitive narrative. Add in the footage of Kovac and the others preparing for terrorist acts, as well as Kovac’s long history killing for her family, and she was going to jail. Her father, too.

  As for the company: Curzon’s name would lose all value overnight.

  Worse than that, she realized.

  It would become a liability, a stain.

  She stood and paced her new hotel room again, before refreshing her social media feeds. There was nothing about Cuenca, nothing about Curzon.

  She picked up her cell phone, which wasn’t her cell phone at all but Kovac’s stupid burner from God-only-knew-where. Somewhere in France, by the look of it. She didn’t have her father’s number, didn’t have Bishop’s number, didn’t even have Nix’s number. Only her own. She had been reluctant to call herself, though. What if her timing was off and she somehow compromised Kovac? What if she blew up the whole mission with simple impatience?

  She was reluctant to call even now.

  She put the phone down again.

  They would ring her. It was a waiting game, that was all. Someone, surely, would ring her.

  But no one did.

  Megan checked in on Juliette, who was out of surgery and doing well, then made a simple meal. She sitting down to start on it when she heard a knock on the door. She hurried across to it and said through the hinges: ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Kovac.’

  She opened it and guided him in. ‘What happened? Where’s my father? Where’s –’

  ‘There’s nothing on the news yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Megan, I’ve never been particularly good at things like this, so I’m just going to come straight out and say it. It didn’t go as planned. Your father’s dead.’

  She took a few steps back and pointed at the laptop. ‘But there’s nothing on the…’

  ‘I saw it. Malone shot him.’

  She moved to sit, suddenly a little unsteady on her feet. ‘And Bishop?’ she asked, still shaking her head and pointing at the laptop, as if it proved Kovac wrong.

  ‘Bishop’s fine. Bibi’s dead, Malone too, and one other guy.’

  ‘It’s finished?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Paris, too?’

  ‘You said it yourself. Nothing on the news, no BoNT attacks.’

  ‘Where’s Bishop?’ she asked, before realizing she had just asked this question seconds ago. She wasn’t thinking straight, her mind trying to imagine a world without her father to lean on. How the hell would that ever work?

  ‘Bishop’s on the run. I can’t stay here more than a few minutes, either. Unfortunately, there were witnesses – a lot of them. I just wanted you to hear it all from someone you know, rather than a screen. You’ve got some hard weeks ahead. Some hard months, maybe. I wish I could help but…’ He rubbed at his mouth and sighed. ‘I know I’ve said this before, but I mean it. I’m out, Megan.’

  ‘Because my father’s dead? Kovac, I need you right now.’

  ‘No you don’t.’ He gave her a smile. ‘You don’t want the services I offer. And you’re ready for what’s coming. I don’t think I told you, but I saw that press conference and the way you handled yourself. You’ll get the company through this, and you’ll make an excellent Chairman.’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  Before Kovac could answer, Megan’s email chimed on the loan laptop. She saw it was from Nix.

  ‘That about his call with me?’ Kovac asked, also noting the name on the screen.

  ‘Nix called you?’

  ‘That reminds me.’ Kovac took out her phone and handed it to her. ‘Thanks for the loan.’

  Megan double clicked on an attachment in Nix’s email and heard a familiar voice say: “It’s amazing what you can find in all the noise when you know the signal you’re after, and when you have the technology to search for it. Herniations, lesions, cancers… All just sitting on the inside, doing the wrong thing, waiting to destroy you.”

  ‘What’s that?’ Kovac asked.

  ‘I asked Nix for the dictaphone recording. Griffin. I recorded her, remember, way back when this all started?’ Megan went to turn it off, but Kovac signaled for her to wait.

  “People look at me and they assume because I’m female that I can’t code. But it’s female coders you really have to watch out for. Coding is just like a foreign language, and nobody thinks it’s strange when a woman gets better at French…”

  ‘Jesus,’ Megan said.

  Kovac nodded. ‘It’s all in there,’ he said.

  ‘She told us it was Bibi.’

  ‘Yep.’

  Megan refocused on the laptop and heard her own voice again.

  “I was enquiring as to the source of your confidence.”

  “Oh, that’s easy. My boyfriend. My confidence comes from my boyfriend.”

  ‘Malone,’ Kovac said.

  Megan groaned, still listening. ‘My God, it really was all in here.’

  “I can get their addresses. Aurelius. The team of coders I worked with… It’s a bad name for accounting software, I know. It sounds more like some secret surveillance program, right?”

  Speaking over the recording, Kovac said: ‘Aurelius was never a group. The whole story she told you, it’s just one big container for the information she wanted to get across.’

  Megan stopped the recording, hearing a siren outside. ‘So why not just tell me outright?’

  ‘She wanted to be able to get out of the building after telling you, maybe?’

  ‘She didn’t want to go to jail, you mean?’

  Kovac nodded. ‘She was leaving Malone. Or he was leaving her. That’s possibly what their fight was about. She must have found it all. London, Paris, Cuenca, everything.’

  ‘She wanted to get clear, then she wanted him arrested?’ Megan stood and started pacing, thinking it through. ‘That makes sense. She wanted to stop the attacks, but she was a victim, too. Malone presumably figured it all out after your visit. From that moment on, he must’ve known Griffin had come to us. She was dead the instant you knocked on her door.’

  Kovac shifted a curtain with one finger to check a window. ‘Truth be told,’ he said, ‘that’s a pattern. And one you don’t need in your life going forward.’ The sirens were louder, and there were more of them now. He started for the door. ‘Time’s up. I have to leave, Megan. Are you going to be okay?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You will – you’ll see.’

  ‘And if I’m not?’

  He had his hand to the doorknob. He turned it. ‘You will be.’ He gave her one last nod, then stepped outside. The door clicked shut again, and though Megan went to the window to watch him leave, there was nothing outside. Just an empty street filled with shadow.

  Epilogue

  Tasmania, Australia

  Kovac woke to darkness and the first warbling of the native birds outside.

  He got up and lit the wood fire stove he had prepared before turning in for the night, and boiled water for coffee. Then, barefoot, he padded out onto the wooden deck overlooking Tasmania’s Houn Valley.

  The house wasn’t his. It belonged to a woman in Hobart, who had advertised i
t not online but in a local newspaper. She was an elderly woman, and she had no interest in profit or short-term rentals. She had listed it for the year, cash upfront each month. What had first caught Kovac’s eye was the phrase “off-grid”. The woman’s son had written the ad for her and, considering himself something of a salesman, he’d played up the isolation and rustic nature of the place. “Dirt road access”, “hilltop”, “sweeping views”, “mud-brick and timber with 6 x 150-watt solar panels”. Kovac had read that as “difficult to find and ambush”, and he’d been right. The land around him was cleared for three hundred yards in every direction, but after that it was forest and trees almost as far as he could see.

  He watched the sun rise over these treetops now, his mind wandering as he sipped coffee. It was bitterly cold, and his breath and the steam off the coffee were both a perfect white. The clearing around him was a perfect white, too. There had been another severe frost overnight. He had no internet up here, no computer, no phone. He depended on rainwater and his solar panels, and he divided his time much as he had in London. Workouts, study, and fiction to switch his mind off at night. The last he had heard, Curzon was in trouble. There had been no feature article from Yvette Morris or Alex Bain, but there were rumors. There was also footage from Spain. As Bibi had intended, tourists had captured her death, and they had captured Kovac killing Rumpled Jacket, too. It was the sort of graphic footage which most sites flagged and removed, and Kovac had been relieved to see how grainy and jerky the footage of him was. There were seven frames in which his face was visible though, and he wasn’t under any illusions. His identity was out there now, and his name, too. Eventually, someone would connect the name John Kovac to the face in the seven frames, and then both of these clues to the fragments of his past work for Curzon that were now circulating on the dark web. One day – and in all likelihood that day wasn’t too far away – someone would come for him, tripping the sensors he’d installed around this property. He didn’t know who yet. He didn’t know how many, or even if he would be able to hold them off; but he was armed here, and he’d sure as hell try.

  He headed back into the house, the reclaimed timber now lit up by the sort of pure sunlight that only came immediately after a winter dawn. He sat down at the kitchen table and drained the last of the coffee. From here, he had a view of a woodshed, a large lemon tree, and a little workshop that had never found its way into the ad. He’d discovered this workshop contained a derelict Landcruiser and a collection of basic tools. He’d spoken with the owner, and she was happy for him to undertake work on both the old truck and other aspects of the property, so he’d have a few projects at least. This comforted him. Boredom had been the most torturous aspect of his journey to the southern hemisphere, but without formal identification there had been no other way to get home. More often than not, he’d been forced to travel by sea in cramped, sometimes even unhygienic conditions, and he was happy to have space around him now and a list of jobs.

  He dragged this list towards him and scanned down through it again, wondering which job he’d make a start on this morning. Building a pump house was top of the list, but he couldn’t start on that until he repaired the Landcruiser, which he couldn’t do until he walked into town and sourced a manual and parts. And given all that would need to come from Hobart, he was probably looking at two trips into town.

  He heard something outside. He put down the pencil, stood and walked to the cupboard he was using to store his rifles and other assorted gear. It was one of the bags he’d prepared while still with Curzon, which he had stashed at the farm in Victoria along with cash and ID. He’d found the farm empty and deserted when he passed through, but the old keys and security codes still worked, and he’d been able to collect what he needed before rolling on. Bishop – if he was still even with Curzon – would know about this visit to the farm. But Kovac wasn’t worried about Bishop.

  He listened now and someone – no, something – made its way onto his deck.

  He smiled, realizing what it was.

  His neighbor’s dog, an old, arthritic mutt with a tendency to overeat then wander off in search of yet more food. Cajun, as she was affectionately known, had discovered Kovac was a good source of scraps.

  He sat back down. He’d promised Cajun’s owners, Kate and her boyfriend, that he wouldn’t feed Cajun anymore, and he planned to keep his word.

  He heard Cajun flop down outside his door, blocking it and settling in.

  He went back to his list and realized he wasn’t going to do any of it. Not yet anyway. Today, he would get Cajun and start with a run. There was an entire hillside near here that was nothing much more than tree ferns, and it was one of the few runs where Cajun would actually bother to stick with him and see it through.

  He thought about London, about the Themes at this hour of day, and about the young boy with the knife and stab vest. Christopher Diaz. It was all literally a world away, and hopefully in Kovac’s past. But if he ever did return that way, there was a name in the very back recesses of his mind. The gangster, Anton Sanz.

  There was unfinished business there, like an itch Kovac couldn’t scratch.

  He grabbed a fresh sheet of paper and started a new, very different kind of list. At the top, he wrote “Sanz”.

  He sat back and stared at it for a moment, thinking about Christopher Diaz again. Then he pocketed both lists and headed for the door. ‘C’mon Cajun. Time to clear our heads.’

  –

  Thanks so much for reading and for embracing this series. Here’s a bonus chapter that didn’t make the final draft, but which I always liked. It’s Bishop visiting Anna in London shortly after the events in Cuenca, Spain. No newsletter sign up required, though if you’re not already on my list you can add your name to get more free content like this ahead of Book 3.

  I’m in the same situation with this one as I was with SHADOW KILL. I’m hoping to get this series into the hands of new readers via a BookBub promo. To do that I need approximately 100 ratings/reviews on each book. I’m so grateful to those of you who rated and reviewed SHADOW KILL and I learnt a lot reading the feedback. My aim with these novels is to give people some quality escapism, and reviews help me see where I’m hitting the mark and where I’m not. So if you have a few spare seconds for an honest rating/review on Amazon, it’d mean everything to me. You can likely just flick to the end of this book and rate it there to keep things nice and easy. If Goodreads is easier for you, feel free to leave a rating there instead. That helps just as much!

  If you’re open to becoming part of an advance team who get my books for free before they go up onto Amazon, I’d love to hear from you at: davidcarisbooks@outlook.com.

  And of course, thrilled to hear any other feedback via email, too!

  Take care out there. And again, thank you for the time you’ve invested.

  David – July, 2021

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  The John Kovac Thriller Series can be found here.

  Book 3 in the John Kovac series, SHADOW HUNT, is currently available as a pre-order, and although it shows on Amazon as publishing mid-2022, I’m hard at work on a first draft and hoping to release far earlier than that.

  And of course, you can also go back to where it all started for John Kovac.

  To get a free 35,000-word John Kovac origins novella, click or navigate to: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/gmupd6s5fv

  One last thing, if you want to read a few bonus chapters that fall between Book 1 and Book 2, here’s Bishop tracking down information on the missing botulinum toxin in Lahore, Pakistan. I’ve sent this out to my newsletter already, but you can sign up here to get free content ahead of Book 3. It’s via BookFunnel, so – easy to get the content and easy to unsubscribe any time. Click to get your bonus chapters here.

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  Copyright July 2021 by David Caris

  SHADOW CODE is a work of fiction.

  All names, characters, businesses, locations and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used
in a fictitious manner.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.