Rogue

by James Swallow

  His mind raced. This is a set-up. Echo-One had deliberately drawn them to the ghost station, a location she had prepared in advance with traps and a stashed weapon. Those actions spoke to a mindset beyond that of some ordinary ex-soldier. That performance out on the street, on the metro platform, it had been an act designed to make them lower their guard. He spared a curse for his commanders, for keeping the hunter team in the dark, and for all their need-to-know bullshit.

  He scanned the space for the other hunter and his gut twisted as he found the other man on the far platform, slumped against a wall painted with fresh crimson.

  Another rushing roar of air came sweeping through the chamber as a train raced by in the opposite direction. He saw glimpses of commuters in the windows of the carriages as they hurtled past, most of them not even seeing the two men with guns and the blood on them, and those that did barely able to register the sight before it was gone.

  The last carriage flashed by and revealed the woman on the far platform, her shotgun aimed directly at him. He vaulted away as she fired, and the echoing report of the gun told him Echo-One had switched from shot to heavy, man-stopping slug rounds. She leapt down and crossed the gap between the platforms, racking and firing again. The next slug smacked into the wall near his head and the dark-skinned man returned fire with the Maxim, hating himself for leaving his fallen teammate behind.

  But she gave him no time to dwell on that. The shotgun’s third round skipped off the platform in a sparking ricochet and hit him in the gut. The blow burned red-hot, it was hammer-hard and it sent him sprawling. He tasted blood in his mouth and suddenly it was hard to breathe.

  He heard her reloading again. The snick-clack of shells going into the feed, and the slide ratcheting one into the chamber.

  She walked over to his teammate and took her time about aiming for the shot that killed him.

  The empty Maxim fell from his hand as the dark-skinned man lurched up and bolted towards the woman, dragging up his last reserves of strength. He felt the wind at his back, pushing him forward, the tunnel’s greasy metallic odour filling his nostrils.

  Echo-One saw him coming and yellow light flashed off a black-painted blade in her hand. She was faster than he expected, going low to cut him across the chest. The cut was deep and filled with fire, and it robbed him of his momentum.

  He tried to grab at her, and she kicked out, collapsing his knee. As he fell to the platform, it seemed to take forever – but even then, she wouldn’t let him go down on his own terms. She could have finished him with the gun, but she was taking her time, making a meal of it. The woman kicked him again and he tumbled over the edge, landing across one of the rails.

  White fire washed over him as the trackbed started to shake. A huge shadowed shape behind the light was bearing down on him, and he couldn’t move, couldn’t get away.

  He shouted out for it to stop, but his cry was lost in the squealing of iron wheels on steel.

  *

  The Volvo’s driver knew something was wrong when the train halted short of the platform, half of it still inside the tunnel, half of it out in the rain.

  Commuters came out through the turnstiles with ashen faces and hands covering their mouths. Emergency lights were flashing, and the patient, motherly voice of the automated announcer kept repeating something in Norwegian that she couldn’t understand.

  None of the men who had gone after the quarry were answering their comms. Then the howl of an ambulance siren reached her and her blood chilled. She leaned down to put the Volvo in gear, and missed the figure exiting the station.

  The driver saw a shadow at the window and turned, her heart leaping in her chest as the maw of a makeshift silencer pressed against the glass, protruding from the folds of a dark storm coat. The shotgun discharged with a heavy chug flattened by the hissing downpour, shattering the window and painting the Volvo’s interior with fluid and brain matter.

  *

  The woman discarded the shotgun, tossing it through the broken window and into the murdered driver’s lap. As an afterthought, she grabbed the dead hunter’s bag and walked away with it, holding it close as she rooted through the contents.

  An ambulance skidded to a halt across the street with a police car close behind, but she was already at the intersection, lost in the confusion.

  There was a radio handset in the bag and she tapped the push-to-talk button experimentally. After a moment, a man’s voice issued out, asking for a comm check. He sounded young and worried.

  The woman found a sheltered alleyway behind an apartment block, out of sight from the street, and took a moment to school her voice. To make it sound thick with pain and fear, almost plaintive. Then she toggled the radio, playing with the settings to mess up the reception.

  She improvised the sketch of a story, a lie about how she was hurt and the others were dead, about how she couldn’t make it back to the exfil site. She kept her accent toneless and vague, letting the worried young man fill in the gaps.

  He said he was close. It wouldn’t take him long to get to her. She still had the knife she’d used back in the ghost station, and cleaned it off as she listened. He would be there soon, he said.

  The skies overhead grew darker as she settled in to wait.

  TWO

  ‘What is her name?’

  The old man looked up at him from beneath the bill of a grimy cap, squinting into the bright sunshine and smiling as he crossed the garage’s forecourt.

  ‘The car?’

  Marc Dane watched the old man insert a pump nozzle into the fuel tank of the steel-blue Audi R8 Spyder, and set to work.

  The pump chirped as petrol flowed, the cost climbing on the meter. Marc would have been happy to fill her up himself, but the elderly gent minding the combination gas station–cafe wouldn’t hear of it. He insisted on doing the job, first attempting to engage the Englishman in a discussion about football and, when that didn’t take, switching to talk of the weather and the road ahead.

  ‘Not the car,’ corrected the old man. His accent was thick, but his English was good. ‘The woman.’ His grin widened. ‘You’re not here for the golfing. You are out here to see someone.’

  Marc couldn’t help but smile a little, confirming what the old fellow surmised.

  ‘It’s not what you think.’

  He put a hand on his chest and made a mock-pious face.

  ‘I do not judge.’

  ‘I’m just calling in on a friend.’

  ‘Oh.’ The old man nodded in the direction of the hills. ‘Up in la clínica, yes?’ He gave the pump trigger an extra squeeze, finishing off the top-up. ‘You should not keep her waiting.’

  Marc paid him with a fold of euros and nodded.

  ‘You’re right there, mate.’

  ‘Obridago.’ The old man pocketed the notes and eyed him. ‘You one of them?’

  ‘One of who?’

  That earned him another smile. ‘I’ve been here many years, my friend. Seen many come and go. People up on the hill, they like to keep their secrets.’

  Marc climbed in behind the driver’s seat.

  ‘I’m just out for a drive.’

  ‘You picked a fine day,’ said the old man.

  *

  The Spyder bit into each turn along the highway with perfectly machined ease, and from behind the steering wheel of the humming sports car, it occurred to Marc that operating in the private sector had its benefits.

  The wiry ex-MI6 officer had been cut loose from working for Queen and country for a while, but he could never really detach the ghost of that old life from the one he had now. He tried not to dwell on the changes in his circumstances. That felt too much like standing still. But Marc wasn’t the same man he had been back then. He carried himself a little more confidently these days, even as the wary edge he’d grown up with stayed as sharp, as present, as ever.

  A narrow and wolfish face hid searching eyes behind dark aviator sunglasses, and his deliberately shabby beard matched unkempt dirty
-blond hair that badly needed a trim. He had the Spyder’s top down, and the breeze played over him along with the throaty rumble of the Audi’s V10 engine.

  The car was one of a fleet of vehicles made available to high-clearance employees of the pan-global Rubicon Group, and while he could have taken something more conservative as his ride, it was hard to resist the perks.

  A crooked smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. Working for one of the wealthiest men in the world came with a lot of strings attached, so why not make the most of it?

  Sunshine flashed through trees on his right as Marc made another smooth turn, and the car entered a straight. The Audi climbed gentle switchbacks, past clusters of resort villas and the manicured lawns of golf courses, speeding from the outskirts of Vilamoura and into the shallow hills sloping down on the southerly edge of the Portuguese coastline. The satnav led him through decorative olive groves to an estate behind whitewashed walls, set just off the beaten track.

  The Clínica Delphi resembled the home of some moneyed recluse, but it was the property of Rubicon – a satellite facility belonging to MaxaBio, the corporation’s biomedical subsidiary. The Delphi clinic did cutting-edge work in organ rejection therapy and artificial bone structures, but it had a secondary, clandestine function.

  It was one of the best places in the Western hemisphere for combat trauma recovery, somewhere people could rest and heal after gunshot wounds, blades, burns or any one of a bestiary of critical injuries had taken them to the edge of death. Marc had briefly been a resident himself, in the weeks after a zealous US Secret Service agent had shot him in the chest. Without being aware of it, he reached up with one hand and scratched at the site of the old entry wound on his torso.

  He didn’t like hospitals. There was something about the smell of disinfectant and the oppressive atmosphere built up from the suffering and pain the buildings contained. It brought back too many unpleasant memories, not just of his own hurts but of loss and fear from sharing the pain of those he cared about. The Delphi clinic worked hard to make itself different from those kind of places, looking more like a day spa than a medical centre. But still it felt unwelcoming to the rail-thin Englishman. He took a breath and banished those thoughts. Today’s visit wasn’t about him.

  The clinic’s gates opened as the Audi approached, the smart sensors in the driveway detecting the car’s arrival, the discreet cameras in the surrounding trees having already captured and confirmed the driver’s identity. Marc slowed as he came to the main building, a low two-storey mansion in a faux-Greek style, surrounded with satellite cottages connected by sunlit colonnades.

  At the main entrance, a brass panel by the doors announced the name of the clinic but gave no other details about the facility. If you didn’t already know so, there was nothing here to immediately connect Delphi to the Rubicon Group. That kind of engineered discretion, that stealth by wealth, was inherent in everything that Rubicon did. It flowed from the example set by Ekko Solomon, the man in charge, the inscrutable billionaire who had founded the company from humble beginnings in strife-torn East Africa. Solomon was good at staying out of the public eye, and his company mirrored that ethos.

  Rubicon’s aegis encompassed dozens of subdivisions – MaxaBio and Delphi just two among many – but the part Marc worked for was unique among them. The vaguely named ‘Special Conditions Division’ was part of Rubicon’s private security contracts sector and, like the clinic, its unassuming mantle concealed something more complex. While Rubicon’s overt work in security was a matter of public knowledge, providing bodyguards and the like, the SCD had a mission brief that too frequently put its operatives directly in harm’s way.

  Marc often tried to parse the SCD’s remit into a simple, clear statement. Sentinels, watchmen, guardians – none of those words really encompassed the whole of what Ekko Solomon’s people did out in the world.

  We’re vigilantes, Marc told himself. Nothing more, nothing less.

  An attendant met him at the portico to park the Audi, and Marc passed into the cool, air-conditioned interior of the clinic. The first face he saw drew a wary smile from him.

  ‘Benjamin. Hey.’

  ‘Mon ami.’ Smiling broadly, Benjamin Harun came across the chequerboard tiles of the reception, placing a big, thick-fingered hand on Marc’s arm, and he said the same thing he always did when they met. ‘How is it going?’

  ‘It’s going.’ Marc deliberately kept his reply vague.

  Harun was as broad as Marc was tall, and burly in the truest sense of the word. The Frenchman was built like an old-time circus strongman, affecting a wax-tipped moustache in the Imperial style. Marc had no doubt that he was capable of bending iron bars in those beefy paws of his, but Harun’s calling was aligned more towards the shaping of people than it was to twisting metal. Harun had served long tours with the Foreign Legion, but he had come into Rubicon’s orbit because of his training as a therapist and expert in post-traumatic stress. Every six months, active members of the SCD had mandated meetings with the avuncular ex-legionnaire, and Marc’s was overdue.

  Harun didn’t call him on it, though. That wasn’t his way.

  ‘You’re here to see her,’ the Frenchman noted.

  Marc gave a nod. ‘You two talked?’

  ‘I talk,’ Harun corrected. ‘Her, not so much. You might have more success.’

  ‘How’s she doing?’

  ‘Catching up on her reading. Complaining that Delphi doesn’t have a shooting range for her to practise on.’ He paused. ‘It’s not easy for people like us to accept this kind of thing. The Americans trained her to believe she was bulletproof. When it becomes clear one is not, that can be a shock. We’re all mortal.’

  Marc nodded, momentarily looking inwards to catalogue the many near-hits and lucky breaks that had kept him upright and still breathing.

  ‘She’s the most resilient person I’ve ever met,’ he said honestly. ‘Tougher than me.’

  ‘She’s been asking after you.’ Harun eyed him. ‘A couple of months since you’ve been here, Marc.’

  He gave a guilty nod. ‘It was . . .’ Marc fell short of a good explanation, and finally chose a more succinct one. ‘Work,’ he said.

  ‘Ah.’ The Frenchman gave a knowing nod. ‘I did hear some talk.’

  ‘It got busy,’ Marc replied, and he left it there.

  Harun knew well enough not to pry.

  ‘Come see me soon, then.’ He smiled and patted Marc on the shoulder as he walked away. ‘Stay out of trouble, rosbif.’

  ‘Never can tell,’ said Marc.

  *

  The main building opened into an airy courtyard with a shallow pool and a space for eating and resting in the sunshine. A few of Delphi’s patients were taking advantage of the lovely day, but the one Marc Dane had come to see was in the shade of a parasol, pushed up into the frame of a lounger with her head buried in a leather-bound hardcover.

  Six months ago, on a canal-side dock in Brussels, Marc’s partner Lucy Keyes had taken a lungful of an aerosolised biological agent. An engineered variant of the haemorrhagic Marburg strain, the so-called Shadow virus had almost killed her, and it chilled Marc to think how narrow the survival window had been. If Lucy had made it to the hospital fifteen minutes later, today he would been putting flowers on a grave.

  Keyes was ex-US Army – everyone who worked for the Special Conditions Division was ex-something, Marc reflected – once a highly trained sniper in a secret all-female unit of Delta Force, but that had been a different life for her. As with Marc and the British secret service, and Benjamin and the Légion étrangère, the SCD was populated with people who had left what they once were far behind.

  The book in Lucy’s hands was a translation of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, the pages yellowed and well-thumbed. Marc had read it when he was training for the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm, but found it slow-going.

  ‘I already read the other books in the library,’ she said, without looking up. Her voice still had the scratchy,
brittle quality it had taken on after the doctors had given her the all-clear. Although the corrupted Shadow bioweapon had burned out of her system, it had damaged a lot of her on the way, not least her throat and her lungs. ‘I read a bunch of those fantasy sagas too.’ She made a shape with her free hand to indicate a thick, brick-sized novel.

  Marc brought tall glasses of ice water and set one down before her, taking a seat.

  ‘Sorry I haven’t been up.’

  ‘Work,’ she said, still reading the book as she reached for the glass. ‘I know.’

  ‘You look good,’ he offered, and that was true. As far as he could tell under the loose tracksuit she wore, Lucy had put back the muscle mass lost in her stay at Rubicon’s Zurich medical centre, but that new distance in her eyes had not gone away.

  As Benjamin said, it was one thing for a soldier to face off against guns and bombs, quite another to endure the ravages of a germ weapon that could turn your body against you, and consume you from the inside out.

  She finally graced him with a glance, her deceptively sleepy gaze coming up sideways from a boyish face the tone of deep burnt ochre.

  ‘How’s life on the outside?’

  He snorted. ‘You’re not in prison, Lucy.’

  Then he immediately regretted the comment, because she had been a convict once, back before Ekko Solomon had recruited her into Rubicon from a military stockade.

  ‘You brought me a cake with a file in it, right?’

  He gave a weak smile as she let him off the hook. ‘I did. But I ate it.’

  ‘I miss cake,’ she said, with feeling. Lucy put down the book, pulling absently at the short braids of her hair, grown longer than her usual military-style buzz cut. ‘Sons of bitches here make me eat healthy, can you believe it? I miss red meat even more. Tried to explain to them about my exceptional metabolism, but . . . I mean, everyone’s nice and all, but I’m starting to climb the walls.’

  ‘I spoke to the doc, he said you’re still a few weeks away from—’

  ‘I know I’m not at top kick,’ she broke in, the words coming out in a growl. ‘Sure, I may sound a little sexier than I did before Belgium, but c’mon, I’m going stale here! They don’t sign me back on to operational status soon, I swear I’m going to exfil myself in the dead of night and bust up whoever gets in my way.’