At that time, he was working as a field technician, the one in the van running comms and tech while operatives with Lucy’s skill set did the door-kicking and trigger-pulling. The OpTeams were agile, cellular units deployed by British Intelligence for what spy agencies called ‘kinetic actions’, a euphemism for counter-terrorist missions, surgical strikes or anything else off the black ops menu.
Not a million miles away from what the Special Conditions Division did, in point of fact. But unlike these folks, the SCD operated outside nations and governments.
Anger and disappointment twisted in Marc’s expression. Lucy could see that Farrier meant something to him, immediately getting the sense that the two men had been friends. Then it came back to her in a flash and she remembered where she had first seen the other man’s face.
A brief glimpse of Farrier following Marc into a graveyard in East London, after they stopped the terrorist group Al Sayf from triggering a suicide attack in Washington DC.
‘I’m here because I wanted to bring you in personally,’ Farrier was saying.
‘I don’t work for Her Majesty’s Government any more, John,’ Marc broke in. ‘Being accused of killing my team, and getting framed by a traitor, was more than enough to make me pack it in.’
‘That’s a fair point,’ the other man allowed, and he gave a weak grin. ‘In retrospect, we could have handled this better.’
Marc let the shovel drop, and his hands tightened into fists.
‘If you wanted to talk to me, you could have just done it!’
‘Not with her around,’ snapped Lane, pointing at Lucy. ‘She’s a criminal, a deserter, a known killer. Standard Operating Procedure is to isolate first, explain later.’
‘Aww, you kids are that scared of little old me?’ Lucy drew out the words. ‘I’m flattered.’
‘As far as I’m concerned, you’re both trouble,’ said Lane.
Marc glanced at Lucy, nodding in Lane’s direction. ‘Don’t mind her, I made her look bad once,’ he said, by way of explanation. ‘She clearly hasn’t forgiven me.’
Farrier held up his hands in what he clearly hoped was a calming fashion, as Pearce moved over to the greenhouse to check on the other agents.
‘Look, Marc. Something serious has come up, and like it or not, you’re connected. The Head of Operations ordered me to bring you in, and that’s why we are here.’ He paused. ‘I mean . . . You wouldn’t have just come if I asked you.’
‘Yes I fucking would!’ Marc retorted hotly. ‘We could have done this without the drugging and the kidnapping, mate!’
‘We couldn’t take the risk you’d refuse,’ Lane said flatly. ‘If it was my choice, you two wouldn’t have woken up until you were in the basement at Vauxhall Cross.’
‘Lane, you’re not helping.’ Farrier gave his agent a hard look, then turned back to Marc. ‘I’m sorry, but this is how it had to be done. Fact is, Rubicon is an unknown quantity and you’ve been out of the family for a couple of years. We didn’t know how you’d react.’
‘To what?’
‘Tell him,’ said Lane. ‘You’ll have to, sooner or later.’
Farrier gave a sigh. ‘Samantha Green.’
‘What about her?’ snapped Marc.
‘She’s alive.’
Lucy watched the colour drain from Marc’s face.
‘No,’ he said, after a long moment. ‘I was there. She’s gone.’ The words came out flat and toneless.
This part, Lucy did know about. Sam Green had been part of OpTeam Nomad, and one of Marc’s former teammates. A victim of an ambush that had killed six intelligence operatives and half a dozen civilians, when a massive bomb destroyed a freighter at the port of Dunkirk.
But Green had meant a lot more to Marc than he was willing to admit. He’d let things slip a few times about how the two of them were closer than regulations allowed. The murder of his team had hit him hard, but Sam’s loss was the worst of all.
I watched her die, Marc had once told Lucy, lost in the recall of something terrible. I watched her fade out and drift into the dark.
Lucy felt a jolt of empathy for her partner, mingled with an edge of anger that came out of nowhere. It had taken Marc Dane a long time to let go of the responsibility he felt for the deaths of Nomad, to get past the compulsion in him to undo that event in every mission he took on. Guilt like that was corrosive, and it could eat you alive.
Lucy had a share of her own, and she knew full well what it cost. She couldn’t escape the thread of resentment that Sam Green’s name dragged up in her. After all this time, the woman was reaching out from the grave to pull Lucy’s friend away from the light he’d worked so hard to reach.
‘We have evidence,’ Farrier said grimly.
‘Show me,’ said Marc.
*
The lunch that had been brought to Esther McFarlane’s room at the Hôtel de Paris sat untouched on its tray, the coffee turned stale and lukewarm, the cheeses and pastries wilting in the untrammelled golden sunshine beating down on the terrace.
She sat on an elegant rattan chair beneath a wide parasol, ignoring the food, ignoring the stunning view out over the quays of Monte Carlo, and the mass of yachts packed into Port Hercule’s moorings.
Her thoughts were still where they had been when she left Edinburgh two days earlier. The digital tablet on her lap absorbed her attention, a complex report into drilling operations taking place at the Ninian oil field in the North Sea.
She was here in body, but in spirit McFarlane was beneath the frigid waters off the Outer Hebrides, down in the stone and earth of the seabed, thinking on how to tease out every last barrel of crude trapped there.
Esther was the current generation of a dynasty of Scottish industrialists that had started in the nineteenth-century farming bog head coal, and now held interests in gas and oil reserves around the world. She was an accomplished geologist as much as she was an uncompromising businesswoman, and when McFarlane needed to centre herself, rock and stone was what she returned to.
Geology had a form that she could grasp and understand, and studying the data on the tablet gave her focus. People and companies and all that came with them were far more difficult for her to parse. Esther had grown up in a family with a brisk attitude to interpersonal relationships, where the work was always the most significant thing. Her family was not only her parents or her siblings, Ruth and Jennifer. It was the workforce on the rigs, in the refineries and laboratories. Their fates were tied to the black gold they tore out of the ground, to the company that bound them together – and in turn, that company was irrevocably joined to the Rubicon Group.
If Rubicon crumbled, so would McFarlane Energy, and so would the lives of countless workers. Her family’s fiefdom, for want of a better term, would come apart. That was something Esther could not allow.
She heard the delicate trill of a telephone back in her suite, and presently her assistant appeared at the terrace’s open doors. Ryan Finlay was from Glasgow, but she didn’t hold that against him. The rangy young man with dark eyes and close-cropped hair stood in the shade, with a handset in his grip.
‘Call for you, ma’am,’ he told her. ‘It’s him.’
McFarlane toyed with the idea of telling Finlay to decline the conversation, but her curiosity got the better of her.
She knew it would. McFarlane had been waiting for this call ever since she returned from her meeting on the beach.
‘Give it to me and go away,’ she replied, putting aside the tablet and waving Finlay off.
He did as he was told, but she sensed he was still close by, lurking out of sight inside the suite. Her assistant was good at his job, but he had a tendency to hover that she found tiresome. For now, she let that pass.
‘Good afternoon, Ms McFarlane,’ said the man on the other end of the line. ‘How are you enjoying Monaco?’
She listened carefully to every word, weighing each sentence and searching through them to study his diction. McFarlane believed that he was not
a native English speaker, but that he had been educated in Europe to a high standard. The faint lilt in some of the words suggested a person of Far Eastern origin, but she was still uncertain. He was a puzzle, and she liked those.
‘I had a feeling you would be in touch. You’re calling to see how your present was received.’
‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘I am interested to know how Ekko Solomon responded to the file I provided.’ There was a pause. ‘Ekko is such a measured soul, don’t you agree? Composed to the point that one can be frustrated by him. Sometimes it is amusing to throw a stone into a calm pond and see what patterns the ripples make.’
‘You already know the answer,’ she said warily. ‘He wasn’t best pleased.’
‘He likes his secrets.’
‘Aye, so he does.’
She stood up and walked to the edge of the terrace, leaning on the sun-warmed iron rail around the edge. Despite the heat, McFarlane felt a chill run down her spine. She had the uneasy sensation that whomever she was talking to was watching her at this very moment.
‘All right, you have my attention. Who are you and what do you want?’
‘I will not divulge my identity for the moment. I have to maintain some distance. But as to what I want . . . I want the truth to come out, Ms McFarlane. I want to help you ensure the stability you seek for your people.’
‘That’s generous of you.’
‘There is other material I could provide, other files,’ he went on. ‘Material that shows exactly what kind of man Ekko Solomon is. You could make good use of it.’
Questions rolled through her thoughts like dark tidal breakers. How exactly did this mystery man know what she wanted, how did he have access to information about Rubicon that even a member of the board of directors did not, and how did he know where to find her? She pushed those concerns aside.
‘My father always told me, “Nobody gives you nothing” and he’s never been wrong. What’s the price of this going to be?’
‘We should meet, face to face,’ said the man. ‘You are a shrewd judge of character. We will better understand what we can do for one another if we can first look each other in the eye. Do you agree?’
‘I agree.’
It would have been a lie to say anything else. As much as she sensed the danger in dealing with this unknown source, Solomon’s reaction on the beach and McFarlane’s own research into the Garza file convinced her it was authentic. If there was more like it – and there had to be, she was certain of it – then perhaps it could provide her with what she needed to finally end Solomon’s adventurism.
‘I am pleased,’ said the voice on the phone, and there was amusement in it. ‘I will contact Mr Finlay in a few hours with details of a location. Good day.’
The line went dead and McFarlane found herself looking down at the boats in the marina, searching for a smiling face looking back at her.
*
The Leonardo made a languid turn over the roof of the mansion house, blasting the closely packed trees with the downwash from its rotors. A shiny black form like a lacquered wasp, the helicopter pivoted to drop cleanly onto a wide stone platform in the middle of the house’s ornamental gardens, its undercarriage emerging from hidden bays in the nose and winglets.
Pytor Glovkonin stood unmoving as the hurricane-force winds plucked at the hems of his slate-grey Kiton suit, his hands clasped in front of him while his two bodyguards shielded their eyes from the dust kicked up by the arrival. The tall, imposing Russian oligarch was unimpressed by this show of power and presence. It was the kind of entrance he might have made himself, but with less panache. The helicopter’s rotors wound down and he flicked a speck of grass off his lapel, before running a hand over the scrupulously maintained beard that did nothing to soften the harsh angles of his face.
Normally, Glovkonin would have sent his people out to greet this visitor in the manner of some king bringing a new petitioner to his court, but the power dynamic in this meeting was weighted in the opposite direction.
A trim, handsome man in a straw-coloured jacket and designer jeans stepped cleanly out of the helicopter’s limousine-styled interior, catching Glovkonin’s eye and giving him a jaunty salute.
The Italian, as Glovkonin thought of him, was a few years his junior and unfailingly confident with it. An engineering tycoon with a taste for fast cars, trophy wives and frequent divorces, on paper he would have appeared to be of similar status to the Russian billionaire. With any of those gauche rich lists or three-comma clubs their names would have been in the same stable, but what counted between them was something more ephemeral than money. The Italian bettered Glovkonin in one essential way. He had a seat at a very particular table that the Russian longed to join.
‘Pytor . . .’ The Italian spoke in English, their only shared language, and still he was able to ruin the Russian’s name with his accented, indolent delivery. ‘How are you, my friend?’
‘Well,’ Glovkonin replied, behind a thin smile. He gestured at the house and the groves of trees around them. ‘Welcome to Corsica.’
‘Do you know, I’ve never been before?’ The Italian stepped in close, putting a hand on Glovkonin’s shoulder and speaking as if he was confiding a secret. ‘I suppose I should have before today. I hear the food is remarkable.’
Misha and Gregor, the Russian’s thickset bodyguards, reacted to the Italian’s overly familiar behaviour, their stances tensing as if they were attack dogs whose owner had been threatened. Glovkonin gave them a slight shake of the head as he allowed the other man to lead him away, and the two ex-Spetsnaz fell in step behind.
The Italian, he noted, had left his own security waiting by the helicopter. Only a secretary, an attractive blonde with a Germanic look about her, followed on.
‘I want you to know that I appreciate you handling this personally,’ said the younger man. ‘The other members of the committee . . .’ He made a what-can-you-do face. ‘You know how they are. They’ve forgotten what it means to get their hands dirty.’
Glovkonin glanced down at the Italian’s soft palms and wondered if he had ever worked a day in his life. The Russian knew the meaning of toil and struggle; he had lived through it in the bad years of the Soviet Union. This one had inherited every euro he had. Like the rest of the men who stood in his way, who held the status that Glovkonin coveted, the Italian was more akin to a monarch risen to power by birthright. He was no self-made man, even if he pretended as such, and it irritated the Russian to think his guest believed that lie would work on him.
‘I intend my association with the Combine to be long and productive,’ said Glovkonin, and the Italian winced as he used the group’s informal name. They didn’t like anyone to say it out loud, as if to do so would invite danger.
‘Of course. And you’ve made yourself at home here.’
The Italian nodded towards the house as they approached the open doors to the great hall.
‘We have made great progress,’ he agreed.
The country estate lay towards the northern end of Corsica, up above the town of Bastia, an oasis of affluence shrouded by the thick woodlands and a treacherous hillside. Outwardly it was a convivial place, as good as any of Glovkonin’s holiday residences, but beneath its faded opulence the estate hid a different face. Men would come here to train with weapons and tactics, safe from the prying eyes of police forces and spy agencies. Valuable computer data was held in server farms buried beneath the hill, off the grid and invisible to the world. It was one of a handful of ‘embassies’ secretly owned by the members of the Combine, a node in their network of power and influence around the globe.
Glovkonin had first heard of the organisation as a young man, and at the time they seemed like a fanciful concept. A clannish group of the rich and amoral, who saw the opportunity inherent in man’s unerring ability to make war on his own species.
Armourers, gunrunners and quartermasters to the fanatical, the desperate and the hateful, the Combine’s stewards were al
ready among the wealthiest men on Earth. But money is its own end, a truth that Glovkonin knew all too well, and the Combine drew together their assets to help foster the instabilities of a troubled world.
They profited greatly. So the rumours said, beginning in the ashes of the First World War to the present day, stoking fears and fuelling conflicts on every scale. The Combine sought what Glovkonin thought of as a stable instability – that perfect state of grace forever balanced on a tipping point between chaos and order. In that condition, nations and non-state actors alike could be controlled, caught in a war that never ended, where victory could never be declared.
That was real power, he reflected, true wealth. And Glovkonin wanted it more than anything in the world.
A rich man only hates one thing, only really desires one thing, the Russian told himself, and that is what he is told he cannot have.
It had taken him years to get to this point, to be standing outside the circle of the Combine’s controlling committee. Millions of dollars expended. Murders and lies and other crimes committed. And still it wasn’t enough.
‘But soon, though,’ said the Italian, and Glovkonin almost flinched, as if the other man had plucked the words from his silent thoughts. ‘Soon we’ll need to see some concrete results, Pytor. The role you occupy – that of your predecessor, Celeste . . . She was noted for her ability to act with rapidity and ruthlessness. By contrast, your operations are taking much longer.’
Glovkonin smothered a sneer at the mention of Celeste Toussaint’s name. He had engineered the assassination of the French media baroness in order to take her place in the Combine’s cellular structure, and the Italian and his friends had to suspect so. That they let it happen and did nothing spoke volumes, and this thin excuse for chastising him was an irritation.
‘The work can be done quickly or it can be done well. I prefer the latter.’
They passed through the halls of the great house, spaces modelled on the palaces of regency-era France, with ornately decorated walls and painted ceilings. Many of these had been turned over for use as military-style operations rooms, and the stark lines of modular computer units and encrypted satellite communications systems clashed aggressively with the eighteenth-century aesthetic.
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