Rogue

by James Swallow

  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LETTER FROM AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  For those who weather the storms

  ONE

  The wipers chased each other across the windscreen of the decrepit Volvo, and from inside the trail car, it was hard to keep a clear line of sight on the target.

  The downpour turned the asphalt into shimmering metallic sheets, falling in hard surges pressed northwards by the wind. Heavy clouds darkened the late day into a pre-emptive twilight, bleeding colour from the buildings, the people, the trams and cars.

  Anyone who didn’t have a good reason to be outside retreated into doorways to find shelter. Some stoic locals clung to umbrellas as if their lives depended on it, but the torrent was coming in almost horizontally, soaking through coats and into clothes beneath.

  All week long, Oslo had been threatened by a turbulent cold front over the Skagerrak, and today it had finally come inland, sweeping rapidly up the fjords and over the city, releasing a month’s worth of rainstorm in a matter of hours.

  The dark-skinned man in the Volvo’s passenger seat was lean and tense in that way only ex-soldiers could be, his lanky form swamped by a blue parka big enough to conceal the Maxim 9 pistol holstered under his armpit. He leaned forward, eyes set, determined not to lose their quarry.

  The driver deliberately kept the speed down, her long-fingered hands gripping the steering wheel. Light where he was dark, she wore a coat with a fake-fur collar that pooled around her neck. With the sharp features of her face, it gave her the look of a carrion bird spying for prey.

  The target was moving at a steady pace, betraying no awareness of the trackers. The hunter team had not been given her identity, only a coded designation. They knew the nameless woman as Echo-One, and for the past six days they had been stalking her through the backstreets of the Norwegian capital.

  Piece by piece, the trackers assembled a model of Echo-One’s movements, looking for places where she intersected with persons of interest. The target was slim-built, of average height beneath a long, dark storm jacket with the collar turned up. A baseball cap covered a face turned pink by the chill. Her hands were buried in the jacket’s deep pockets up to the elbows, and she moved purposefully, hunched forward against the inclement weather.

  So far, Echo-One had given them nothing of value to report, and there was a tension building among the members of the team. Soon a decision was going to be made by someone higher up the chain of command, and then the target’s fate would be sealed.

  The man and the woman in the car had communication beads in their ears, connecting them to the team’s encrypted radio network. There were three more operatives out there; one on foot on the same side of the street as the target, another on the opposite, and the last sitting in a cafe a few blocks west, monitoring the operation via a laptop computer. Chatter was minimal, cut down to terse reports on Echo-One’s movements and little else.

  In the back of the Volvo was a gear bag with everything in it they would need to take the woman alive; duct tape, cable ties, a stun gun, a clamshell case containing two injector pens loaded with a pentobarbital derivative. The bag also held the items required for disposal of a corpse, if it went that way. Everyone in the team had memorised the locations where they would take Echo-One for detainment or dumping, depending on how it played out. The former was a vacant house in the Old Town, and for the latter, an isolated deep-water spot along the dockside at Bekkelaget.

  They had handled operations like this one before, renditions both legal and prohibited. The trackers worked as a well-oiled unit, enough that one single target was unlikely to stand a chance against them. This was a confidence born not of complacency, but from experience.

  The thin briefing from their superiors suggested that Echo-One was former armed forces, but she had no network, no backup, and no organisation behind her. Echo-One was alone and out in the cold, in both the figurative and literal senses.

  What this woman had done to deserve such scrutiny had not been made clear, but there was the usual amount of supposition and rumour. Echo-One was most likely someone who had gone off-book and earned the displeasure of her former masters. Perhaps she knew too much, perhaps she had exposed the wrong secret. Whatever the reason, this isolated, rain-soaked figure was being stalked like an animal, and her life hung in the balance.

  Her booted feet making splashes, she jogged over a pedestrian crossing where two four-lane streets intersected. The hunters in the car saw another of their team move to follow, the third man staying far enough back that the target wouldn’t make him. A radio call from the other hunter on foot warned that Echo-One was picking up the pace, turning into a side street that led north through the top end of the Majorstuen district, in the direction of more sparsely populated streets. If she continued that way, off the main drag and in this filthy weather, the few pedestrians around would make the trackers stand out.

  The driver exchanged a wary look with the dark-skinned man, who returned a nod. The Volvo moved off, crawling around a tram and shifting into the slow lane. Both of them knew that they were on the cusp of a go or no-go choice. If they maintained the follow, the chances of Echo-One spotting them rose significantly. If they broke off, they might not be able to reacquire the target at the hostel she was staying in or the bars she frequented.

  Then the target made the decision for them.

  The dark-skinned man saw it first and called out a warning. Echo-One abruptly broke her pattern and ran diagonally across the street, towards a shelter concealing a set of turnstiles. Over the shelter, the sign of a blue ‘T’ inside a circle indicated the entrance to the T-banen, the local metro system that criss-crossed the city. Majorstuen station was an interchange that spanned five of the metro’s lines, and if Echo-One escaped her hunters there, she would be able to resurface anywhere in Oslo.

  The Volvo jolted to a halt, and the dark-skinned man was already out of the car, quickly slipping over a low gate to get onto the platform ahead of the target. Through the windscreen, the driver watched the other two hunters follow Echo-One through the ticket barriers. Then all of them were lost to sight and she called in a message to the man in the cafe with the laptop. He was already at work, bringing up a timetable for the trains passing through Majorstuen and their destinations.

  The driver opened her coat and checked her gun as she listened to him speak. Like all of the hunters, she carried the same nose-heavy Maxim semi-automatic. The blocky front end of the weapon concealed an integral sound suppressor, reducing the noise of the pistol’s discharge to a heavy metallic clatter. But if the guns came out, it would not take long for the Norwegian police to arrive on the scene. They needed to deal with this quietly and quickly, without drawing the attention of the politi.

  The driver scowled and told the man in the cafe to call up the chain with the new development.

  *

  The doors of the train in the station slammed shut as the target reached for them, and the dark-skinned man watched her flinch, as if shocked back by the realisation that her hasty escape was cut off.

  Echo-One looked up and down the platform, and he could sense her trying to pick out her pursuers. He gambled that she hadn’t s
een him in the Volvo, and affected a bored look, standing in plain sight as he pretended to study a route map. In the reflection of the panel, he took in the layout of Majorstuen station with a practised eye. It was open to the air, a cutting through the middle of the district with tracks that threaded back underground at one end, vanishing into narrow concrete tunnels. There was precious little cover, and few routes in or out. They could take the target here, he decided, if they moved fast.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw her gaze slip over him and pass on. Someone else in the team must have spooked her, most likely the man pacing her from behind.

  As that thought crossed his mind, the target caught sight of the other two trackers and she reacted, turning away to move down the platform.

  The situation wasn’t ideal. It would have been best to catch her between them, but they would work with what they had. The woman walked as quickly as she could without showing outward panic, but her movements were jerky and fearful. The exit at the southern end of the platform was closed, the barred metal gate chained shut. As he started walking after her, the dark-skinned man saw Echo-One shoot a desperate look across the train tracks.

  An express metro rumbled past at fast clip, wheels keening over the glistening rails, and the woman turned away. He could almost read the pattern of thoughts on her face. Crossing the tracks would cause a scene and it meant braving not only any oncoming trains but also avoiding the live electric rails that fed them power. Would she take the risk?

  One of the other men subvocalised a radio reply, catching on to the same conclusion. He turned right and jogged up a footbridge, crossing to the far platform in case she did make a run for it.

  Echo-One saw her two pursuers split, and her face fell. She had nowhere to go now, and she knew it. The handful of other travellers on the platform thinned out around her as she reached the southern end of the station, her pace slowing.

  Her body language changed, her shoulders dropping, her posture telegraphing the sense of defeat that had to be coursing through her mind. She came to a halt and drew her arms tight. Rain ran off the bill of her cap in streams as she stared bleakly into the tunnel beyond the platform’s edge.

  Flickering lights danced in the blackness down there, and an automated announcement gave a warning to stand back from the platform edge as another train approached. The dark-skinned man kept up his careful, casual pace, drawing closer to the woman with each footstep. His hand slipped under his parka to rest on the grip of his pistol.

  A chattering line of white and grey carriages rolled out of the gloom and sped past, the empty train heading back to the depot, and the sound and motion of it was a trigger.

  Echo-One exploded into motion, sprinting towards the tunnel at the end of the platform even as the train was still emerging from it. The dark-skinned man heard the snarl of annoyance from his teammate a few steps behind, and for a split second he hesitated.

  As the last carriage of the empty train passed out of the tunnel, the target vaulted off the platform and landed square-footed on the trackbed, scattering gravel as she lost no pace and fled into the poorly lit subway.

  He broke into a run, calling out to the other hunters. They had to contain this situation. If Echo-One was operating out of blind panic, there was a good chance she might injure herself dashing through the darkness, or worse, get hit by another fast-moving train. They had to secure her before that could happen.

  The other passengers on the platform were slow to react, still caught by surprise, and no one stopped the dark-skinned man and his colleague as they dropped over the edge and went after the woman in the cap. The third hunter on the far platform followed suit, moving behind them to come up a parallel tunnel.

  Once they were in the shadows, the dark-skinned man drew his gun and held it close to his chest. His boots crunched on the stone chippings between the rails, and he moved as quietly as he could, straining to listen.

  In his ear-bead, the voice of the agent in the cafe made him wince as he shot through a string of rapid-fire chatter. According to the man on the laptop, the next station was a long way off, but that didn’t rule out maintenance tunnels or other access routes that could lead back up to street level.

  The dark-skinned man demanded radio silence as he spotted movement ahead, the flicker of a storm coat caught in the yellow burn of service lamps bolted to the concrete walls. More light spilled into the tunnel from that direction, as the narrow channel opened out into a wider, cavern-like space.

  The second hunter, his gun hanging at the end of one arm, came over and offered the dark-skinned man something he had found on the tracks. It was the soaked-through baseball cap Echo-One had been wearing.

  The two of them moved cautiously into the area ahead and found themselves looking at a set of abandoned platforms on either side of the parallel rail lines. They had emerged in a ghost station, a gutted space that had been abandoned in favour of the bigger terminus.

  A low, curved ceiling and denuded grey walls extended towards sets of stairs and a shared balcony bridge. Dust-caked graffiti covered the walls and the cold air smelled of rainwater and rat piss. At the opposite end of the platforms, the far tunnel was lit up by more yellow lamps, and there was nowhere to hide. Echo-One was in here, somewhere.

  Closer to the hunters, other safety lights cast pools of weak illumination, but the platforms were deep with shadows. Cable reels and piles of debris from unfinished works lined the bare spaces, and the hunter picked out a cracked plastic sign that gave the ghost station’s name: Valkyrie Plass.

  He radioed that detail back to the man in the cafe, but the signal was heavy with static, the thick walls playing havoc with the transmission. He gestured to his team. The third hunter had arrived, and in silence, they split up to comb the abandoned station for the target.

  Capture, hold, and determine. Those were the next steps. It would be up to others to decide if Echo-One was to be taken from here alive and whole, or terminated on sight. If it came to it, the team could drop the body on the tracks and make it look like an accidental death.

  The dark-skinned man moved down the narrow median strip between the sets of metro rails, and the other hunters each took a platform. As they swept forward, he tried to sift through the sounds in the tunnel, listening for a human noise.

  Distantly, something scraped on stone. It came from the direction of the balcony bridge over the rail lines, and he waved his men towards it.

  The hunter on the right reached the base of the stairs first, the other man still picking his way through heaps of debris. As the first man began to climb, a plug of warm, oily air left the tunnel ahead – the metro exhaling ahead of an oncoming train. The dark-skinned man dropped down into a crouch and concealed himself behind a signal panel as the noise grew louder. White light flooded over him as a train rolled past, wheels spitting sparks a few centimetres from his face.

  Mingled with the racket of the passing carriages, he heard someone cry out in pain and then a rough metallic sound he didn’t recognise.

  *

  The first hunter was almost at the top of the stairs when his boot snagged on the fishing line tripwire hidden in the shadows.

  The line pulled tight and released a jury-rigged trap. It was a clever improvised thing, made from cheap household items. Bungee cords wound around eye-bolts snapped back, driving a pair of duct-taped kitchen knives into the hunter’s leg. The knives and the trap mechanism had been sprayed black with car paint to make them blend in. The blades buried themselves deep in the muscle and he cried out in shock, collapsing against the wall. The sound was swallowed by the noise of the passing train, and the hunter tried to shift his weight, distracted by the sight of the blood gushing from his wounds.

  Something moved up on the middle of the bridge, someone breaking concealment from beneath a paint-spattered tarpaulin. He saw Echo-One emerge and caught a glimpse of her face. Short dark hair, ruddy skin and healed burn scars over her right cheek. She had a stub-barrelled pump-action shotgun in
her hands, the muzzle hidden behind an improvised silencer made from a spray can. Before the hunter could bring his own pistol to bear, she fired into his head, a burst of heavy-gauge buckshot turning his face into wet red pulp.

  *

  The second hunter was at the base of the stairs on the opposite platform when he heard his comrade choke out a scream. As the roar of the train rolled away towards the next station, he surged forward, over a mess of broken planks and building debris.

  His boot came down on a thin piece of wood, beneath which two shotgun cartridges had been fixed upright with a plug of epoxy glue. His weight compressed the shells into pipe caps fitted across their bases, each one threaded with a thick screw, the tips of which rested against the faces of the shell’s primers.

  Both rounds discharged with a crash, blasting through the wood and the sole of his boot. Skin, muscle and bone were shredded instantly, and he fell backwards, down to the platform. Jagged streams of agony tore through his nerves, catching his breath, making him gag. He heard his teammate calling out as the woman they had been chasing hove into view at the top of the staircase, and he tried to wave him back.

  *

  The dark-skinned man heard the improvised trap go off and saw the other hunter collapse, his face sweaty and pale, and his leg a bloody mess from the ankle down. He scrambled up onto the platform and called out a warning, but the comm network spat back static instead of voices.

  On the stairs, Echo-One was out of cover, leading with a short shotgun. She fired twice, filling the air with buckshot, and he felt hot pellets rake his face as they passed. The woman dropped back behind the low wall and he heard the oiled metal noise of rounds being loaded.

  Ignoring the pain and the stinging wetness across his cheek, he grabbed the injured man and hauled him away, looking for some kind of cover and finding little fit for purpose. Behind him, boots scraped on stone and he knew she was coming after them. The dark-skinned man let his colleague drop with an agonised moan, turning with the Maxim pistol in his hand. He fired back at the staircase, cracking off four rounds to discourage any immediate pursuit.