Rogue

by James Swallow

  ‘There’s plenty of people who would pay a lot to sit on their arse in a place like this for a couple of months,’ Marc countered.

  ‘Would you?’ She didn’t give him time to answer. ‘You and me, we’re not plenty of people. Jeez, Marc, don’t make me break something to prove I’m serious.’

  ‘I have no doubt you are.’ He gave a solemn nod. ‘It’s just . . .’

  He paused, thinking on what the doctor had told him. Scarred lungs. Reduced operational capacity. The possibility of permanent nerve damage. There were precious few people in the world that Marc trusted, and Lucy was one of them. Marc’s gut twisted as he thought about putting his friend and partner back in danger too soon.

  She leaned close to him. ‘I appreciate what you did for me, I do. But that doesn’t mean you get to bench me.’ Again, she didn’t give him time to frame a counter. ‘Solomon wants you to report in when you get back to the Monaco office, right? He did the same with me after you took that hit in Washington. You know how he is, he likes his people to be optimal.’

  ‘True.’ Marc nodded again. Whatever he told Solomon about Lucy’s condition would carry weight, one way or the other. He didn’t have the right to determine her future, not now, not ever. ‘I’m just worried about you, yeah?’

  ‘I appreciate that in the manner in which you intend it,’ she said, with deliberate over-formality. ‘But there will be fire and blood if I don’t get outta here real soon, hand to God.’

  ‘I can’t be responsible for that,’ he said, matching her tone. ‘The doc did say I could take you out for a while. You want to grab a pint?’

  A sly smirk split her face. ‘Oh, hell yeah.’

  *

  The old man’s big grin returned in full beam when the Audi pulled in at the roadside cafe once again.

  ‘Welcome back,’ he said, doffing his cap to Lucy before directing them to a table inside. He threw Marc a knowing look.

  They were the only customers, alone aside from a surly calico cat sunning itself on a windowsill. The place was in the sweet spot between rustic and tumbledown, rough uneven floors and old wooden furniture. The old man served up glasses of Sagres, the beer crisp and cold, the perfect thing to cut through the heat of the afternoon.

  Lucy went through hers in a few quick pulls and asked for another. Marc paced himself and for a while they talked around things.

  There was an odd reticence between them. When the bullets were flying, when the clock was running, the impulsive Londoner and the sardonic New Yorker meshed into an effective pairing, but away from the action the distance between them increased. Marc told himself that they knew each other well enough not to need to spill out every last detail. Or perhaps it was that neither of them really knew how to disengage, to switch off from a constant on-alert mindset.

  The conversation drifted back towards the job, like it always did. The life, Marc corrected. Calling it just a job was a weak definition, barely scratching the surface of what they did. Once you were part of this world, there was no going back. Not after you had seen what Marc and Lucy had seen, the threats and the horrors out there that everyday people never registered.

  Marc watched the old man walk away after depositing Lucy’s refill.

  ‘Must be nice to be that guy. He’s only got this to worry about.’ He gestured around at the walls of the cafe. ‘I forget what having a smaller world-view was like.’

  ‘What, you wanna retire?’ Lucy eyed him. ‘Get a little place to put your feet up? Live in the same town for the rest of your days?’ She shook her head. ‘Not for me.’

  ‘Nah,’ Marc admitted. ‘I get bored too easy. Always want to see what’s over the next hill.’

  She chuckled. ‘Wow. It’s almost like Solomon has the eye for recruiting folks that don’t know when to quit, huh?’

  ‘Like knows like,’ said Marc.

  ‘I’m not the same as Solomon.’ Her reply had more chill in it than he expected. ‘The man’s a puzzle box, is what he is.’

  ‘And you’re such an open book,’ Marc deadpanned. ‘Heart on your sleeve, so to speak.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  He drowned a laugh with a sip of his own beer. ‘And there’s my point made – cheers.’

  Lucy scowled. ‘Okay, maybe you’re a little right. But the work does that. You operate on the margins, you learn to play your cards close to your chest or you get dead pretty quick.’ She chewed on the thought. ‘Solomon, though . . . he’s a master. What do we really know about him, aside from the man he is today?’

  ‘African success story,’ Marc began. ‘Self-made bloke. Pulled himself out of poverty from one of the most war-torn pieces of dirt on the planet. You know this.’

  ‘Former child soldier,’ she added. ‘Ever wonder what growing up in that would do to a person?’

  ‘We do know, don’t we?’ Marc gestured with his glass. ‘He got rich enough to live a soft and easy life, and chose not to. Decided to use his money and influence for something better.’

  That something was the Special Conditions Division. Their mandate was to act as a privately funded intelligence-gathering and black ops unit, with no allegiance to any one nation, and a firm ethical code. They were the spear-tip of Ekko Solomon’s personal crusade, out in the world looking for terror threats and organised cruelty of every stripe, doing what they could to hold back some of the darkness that lay forever on the horizon.

  The thought made Marc shiver and he covered it with another swig of beer, his gaze drifting to the open door across the cafe. The circumstances that had brought him into Rubicon had been out of his control, but what kept him there was an undeniable sense that he was doing the right thing. The needed thing in a dark world desperate for any light it could get.

  ‘Solomon keeps secrets like a collector,’ Lucy was saying. ‘We do because we have to.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Marc said, after a moment. ‘I’m pretty bad at it, actually. You get what you see with me.’

  ‘I’ve kept stuff from you,’ she admitted. Marc looked up and found Lucy studying him intently. Her voice was husky, and the sound of it made him flash back to a moment months ago in a Reykjavík hotel, when the two of them had almost crossed a line that would have taken them beyond being friends and teammates to something else entirely. ‘Never told you why I was in jail when Solomon brought me in. Not the full story.’

  That had been before Marc’s time in the SCD, before he had found himself on the run from his own government, before Solomon had offered him another path.

  ‘You don’t need to. I don’t need to ask.’

  She shook her head. ‘Don’t be so goddamn British about it.’ She took a breath. ‘I was serving time in a military stockade at Miramar because I assaulted my commanding officer. I threatened him with a loaded weapon, hit him.’

  ‘He must’ve deserved it.’

  ‘He was an okay C-O but he was a shitty human being,’ she explained. ‘You know the type. They work okay inside the green machine but they got something missing in the heart. They can’t be good people.’ Marc said nothing, letting her carry on at her own pace. ‘Long story short, we had local confidential informants in-country, people who were feeding us intel on high-value targets. Vulnerable people, a lot of them. Women.’ Her expression darkened. ‘You consider how a man with power and zero empathy could abuse that relationship, and . . . You get the picture?’

  Lucy told him there was a death, a cover-up. And that was when she had enough.

  ‘Next thing I know, he’s on the floor of his hooch, pistol-whipped and covered in blood, and I’m being dragged away by the MPs. He was – he still is – connected, so it didn’t end well for me.’

  Marc looked past Lucy’s shoulder. ‘No wonder Solomon brought you in.’ His attention wandered to the road outside. ‘The guy likes your sense of justice . . .’ He trailed off.

  She frowned. ‘Seriously? I’m having a sharing moment here and you’re not paying attention.’

  ‘I am,�
� he insisted. ‘But I just noticed that van parked across the street, and it looks a lot like one that was following me on the motorway from Faro.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Lucy’s posture shifted slightly as she picked up on the sudden tension in his expression. ‘Now you mention it, the old dude went into the kitchen a while ago and he hasn’t come back out.’ She leaned in. ‘You have a weapon?’

  ‘In the car,’ he admitted, taking his time over his beer. ‘I could be wrong. It’s probably not the same van.’ But the battered grey Toyota Hiace looked very similar, and hard-earned experience had taught Marc not to ignore his instincts.

  ‘You think it’s nothing?’

  He gave a slow shake of the head. It was the same vehicle. It had paced him to Vilamoura before it vanished, and he’d thought no more of it. That was looking more and more like a mistake now. His mind had been on seeing Lucy again, and he had allowed his tradecraft to slip.

  Lucy palmed one of the knives on the table between them.

  ‘So, we gotta—’

  Before she could finish, a fizzing metal cylinder came tumbling in through the street-side door. It landed on the stone floor with a clank loud enough to wake the dozing cat and send it rocketing out of the room. In the next second, jets of white smoke spewed from the canister.

  Marc and Lucy bolted from their seats. He was nearest to the door leading into the kitchen and instinctively turned towards it, away from where the van was waiting.

  He tasted the acrid chemical smell of the smoke in the back of his throat. It wasn’t CS gas, which was a good thing, but it was most certainly the precursor to a room breach. That meant armed assailants already on the move, giving the two operatives a fraction of a second to react before the attack would be upon them.

  Marc grabbed the tall beer glass, still half-full with his drink, and spun into a figure coming in from the kitchen. In the haze he had an impression of a man his size, broader of build, wearing a breather mask and leading with a pneumatic dart pistol.

  The gun meant that this wasn’t an assassination. Whoever was in the grey van wanted them alive, which gave a fractional advantage to the SCD operatives.

  Marc smashed the glass across the man’s faceplate, sending beer and fragments everywhere. The attacker wasn’t ready for it and lost a step. Marc knew he had to keep up the momentum for as long as he could, and he slammed himself into the masked man, forcing the pistol away. The gun discharged with a chug and a thick dart hummed across the room, clattering off the skirting.

  Marc heard Lucy coughing from somewhere behind him, but he couldn’t disengage. His weight turned the tide against the attacker and they both stumbled into the kitchen, through a dangling bead curtain and down a couple of steps into the back of the cafe.

  The old man was in there, trembling on his knees, with a black cloth bag over his head and another masked figure, a woman, holding a gun on him. She reacted and fired at Marc. He tried to pivot and pull his opponent into the path of the shot, but inertia was going the other way.

  The dart buried itself in his chest and a jolt of searing heat shocked through him, immediately followed by a flood of icy cold. Marc staggered back through the clattering beads, swatting away the projectile. Numbness raced across his torso, along his arms, up his throat and face. He tried to make his legs work but they were shaking, turning to rubber. Half of his body became slack, as if he were the victim of a stroke.

  Whatever drug load had been in the dart’s reservoir, enough of it was in him that he would barely be able to make it another few steps. Marc struggled to stay awake, crashing back through the smoke-choked cafe. He wanted to call out a warning but nothing was working.

  Everything slowed, became glassy, the air thickening to the consistency of heavy oil. Through the haze he saw Lucy framed by the bright sunshine through the front door. She jammed the table knife into the shoulder of another masked man as he shot her in the gut, and Marc watched her fall into her attacker’s arms, her eyes rolling back to show the whites.

  This isn’t supposed to be happening. The broken, directionless impression tumbled down and down through Marc’s mind. Who is doing this?

  The last coherent thought he had was a bleak one.

  Too many enemies to know for sure.

  *

  In the predawn light, the cold black waters of the Baie de Roquebrune pulled on Ekko Solomon’s body as he knifed through the shallow waves. The muscles in his arms and legs were starting to burn as the effort grew greater. He had already turned back to the shore as the lights in the houses on Cap Martin came on, the residents waking to begin their lazy days even as he decided to end his exercise early.

  This was becoming a regular occurrence. There had been a time when he could defy the currents and swim out to the rocky point of the peninsula, but those days were behind him. For a man of his age, Solomon was fit and strong, but his body was slowing by increments with each passing year, and it grew more difficult to deny it. To accept it.

  He had always thought of his body as a machine, something to be sustained with precision care, a synchrony of well-maintained parts that worked as one. The mindset was a holdover from his time in the war, when he imagined himself like the rifle he had carried. A tool that had to be ready at all times, every element functioning perfectly to keep him alive. To be anything less was to risk a critical failure at the worst possible moment. His hard life had taught him that to be found unready was to invite death.

  But the fatigue in him was not just from the swim. Like the water dragging on each overhead stroke of his arms, each kick of his legs, other forces were acting on Solomon. He had come so far over the years and faced down one injustice after another – yet still he had only kept the darkness in the world at bay. Not banished it. In truth, barely diminished it.

  At this moment, in dozens of places around the world, elements of his company were working to do right. Rubicon sponsored initiatives to cure diseases and improve social conditions, to fight climate change and eradicate poverty, taking the billions of dollars the corporation earned from minerals, technology patents and manufacturing concerns, and pouring some of it back into the world.

  He thought of it as balancing the scales, but would it ever be enough? Some issues could not be answered with a vaccine or an aid parcel. Some problems could only be solved by the application of brute force, by a silenced bullet or the destruction of a target. That was the lesson he had learned as a boy, when his childhood was traded away for an AK-47 assault rifle and indenture to a vicious warlord.

  That boy was forty years gone, but he lived on in Ekko Solomon, his anger and his fear channelled into something better. At least, that was the hope.

  The waves pushed him to the shore, and Solomon found the spot on the Plage du Buse where his morning swim had begun. A lone torch speared in among the white pebbles burned in the chilly air, and he aimed for it. With each stroke, the beach drew closer.

  He turned in the water, looking east towards Monte Carlo. He knew where to find the gold silhouette of the Rubicon tower, rising up over the streets of Monaco as a monument to his endeavours. All he had built was reflected in that glass and steel, but it would matter for nothing if he could not see his cause through.

  I have so many enemies, he told himself. I have given myself too many wars to fight.

  It would be easy to let it exhaust him. But not today, he vowed. And not tomorrow. There was still much to be done.

  His feet touched the bottom and Solomon stood in the shallows, wading up through the breakers towards the torch. At the foot of it was a folding table and upon that a heavy towelling robe. Water sluiced off his broad, teak-coloured shoulders and he ran a hand over the skin of his shaven head, drawing himself up to his full, imposing height. Other than his black trunks, the only other item on Solomon was a chain around his neck, and hanging from it a piece of curved metal. The trigger from a long-destroyed rifle, the ice-cold steel comma was a piece of his past.

  At this time of the morning, the be
ach should have been empty of all but a lone bodyguard and his adjutant Henri Delancort, but Solomon found a third person standing in the flickering light. The older woman had dark red, shoulder-length hair that fluttered around her pale face in the stiff breeze, and she wore a long coat that gave her a gothic profile in the dawn light.

  ‘She arrived just after you set off,’ Delancort began, stepping gingerly over the pebbles and wet sand in his expensive, handmade shoes. He handed Solomon the robe.

  ‘Swimming, Ekko?’ said the woman, as he put on the robe. ‘I thought you had a yacht to sail about on.’

  ‘The Themis is in dry dock,’ said Delancort. ‘For maintenance.’

  The cold and the effort sent tremors though Solomon’s muscles, but he stood his ground, meeting the woman’s gaze.

  ‘Esther,’ he began, stones crunching beneath his bare feet as he walked up. ‘This is an unexpected pleasure.’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  Esther McFarlane’s blunt Scottish burr was carried away by the breeze, and he noticed for the first time that the woman was holding something. A file folder.

  ‘I thought you were still in Edinburgh.’

  ‘Came over early,’ she explained, ‘to get a head start. Check up on operations.’ By operations, she meant the Special Conditions Division.

  ‘I did suggest Ms McFarlane wait in her car,’ offered Delancort. The well-dressed, waspish French-Canadian had never liked Solomon’s early morning jaunts out to the bay, and he was even more terse than usual in the face of this unanticipated visitor. ‘She declined,’ he added.

  While Solomon was at the head of the Rubicon Group’s hierarchy, he could not operate the company alone, and among the three board members who worked directly with him, the Scottish oil heiress was the most outspoken.

  It was Esther McFarlane who pressured Solomon to rein in his work with Special Conditions, citing the legal grey areas where its people operated and the potential for catastrophic blowback. Months earlier, a critical SCD intervention against a far-right extremist group had almost been derailed by the disunion she fostered in Rubicon’s boardroom.