Rogue

by James Swallow

  The Italian paused in front of a bank of screens erected across a wall of faded portraiture, engaged by a display of live data coming from several of the world’s key financial markets. Waves of green and red pixels moved to show the relative values of dollars and yuan, the fluctuation of gold stocks, steel futures and countless other indicators. It was the wealth of the world, washing back and forth in real time.

  On a stock ticker along the bottom of the screen, Glovkonin saw the code for his own company – the Eastern European gas and oil conglomerate G-Kor – and smiled at the green numerals showing a value increase.

  ‘You’re having a good day,’ said the Italian lightly. His tone was almost mocking, but then again, it always was. ‘I would like to say more than that to my colleagues on the committee when I speak to them again.’ The flippancy in his voice faded. ‘You made a lot of promises. You need to make good on them.’

  Glovkonin moderated his expression. ‘The Combine have suffered setbacks in recent years,’ he began, again enjoying the twitch in the Italian’s jaw when he said the name. ‘And most of them can be traced back to one source.’

  ‘Rubicon.’

  The Russian nodded. ‘Not alone, of course. The Central Intelligence Agency have caused problems within the United States, but those have largely been contained. And then there is the British secret service, who continue to interfere with global affairs despite the irrelevance of their tiresome little island. But none are as constant a thorn in our side as the African and his band of mercenaries.’

  The plot to use an Islamic terror cell to bomb a presidential rally in America; a scheme to take control of a portable nuclear device; a failed attempt to crash the economy of South Korea; and in the last six months, the disruption of a planned false flag biological attack in Europe. Over the last few years, each of these operations had been guided by or benefited the Combine in some fashion. Each one had ultimately failed because of outside intervention.

  ‘The British must be taught to mind their own business,’ said the other man. ‘But Rubicon is another matter entirely, it—’

  ‘Rubicon needs to be obliterated, da.’ Glovkonin liked saying the words out loud. ‘To send a message.’

  ‘Among other things.’ The Italian studied him closely. ‘Don’t preen so much, Pytor. I know you have been advocating for Ekko Solomon’s termination for a long time. You are being given the opportunity you asked for, so don’t waste it.’

  He bristled. ‘We have not been idle. Key recruits are in place. Operations have begun. It is a matter of time before a point of critical momentum is achieved.’

  ‘Time,’ said the other man, with an airy sigh. ‘It is not a limitless quantity, my friend. Remember that removing Rubicon from the board is not the end goal. Solomon’s operation is an impediment to a larger work. While you are focused on Rubicon, the committee has a bigger picture to consider. You prevent us from moving forward.’ The Italian looked around. ‘Where is Lau? After the considerable investment we put into him, I would like to be reassured that he was worth it.’

  Glovkonin opened his mouth to answer, but another voice beat him to it.

  ‘I am here.’

  A thin, gaunt figure in a linen shirt, deck shoes and casual slacks appeared from behind one of the server racks, materialising like a summoned wraith.

  Lau – full name Lau Fa Weng – was in his early fifties, but the institutionalised cruelty of a harsh prison system had aged him beyond his years. The limp in his gait was exaggerated by a steel walking stick, but even with it the Chinese man moved with purpose, with a soldier’s economy of motion. He gave a humourless smile without revealing any teeth, but the silence of his approach had given them pause. Glovkonin wondered how long had Lau been following them, listening.

  The Italian’s secretary reacted by putting herself between Lau and her employer, and abruptly Glovkonin realised he had misread the woman’s function. She was only meant to look like an executive assistant. She was agile and watchful, the mask of blank vapidity she had worn gone in an instant.

  The younger man said something sotto voce and the woman relaxed, but not all the way.

  Lau inclined his head to her, a mutual moment of respect perhaps, and then he came to stand in front of the two men.

  ‘I could tell you how grateful I am that your group has given me these tools,’ he began, one long-fingered hand waving at the room around them. ‘But as you said, our time is not limitless. To the matter of the moment, then.’

  He led them to a workstation, where a digital tablet the size of a coffee table displayed false-colour imagery of a landscape. It was a ground-penetrating radar image, noted Glovkonin, the kind generated by orbiting satellites that searched remote regions for mineral deposits below the surface of the Earth. Sections of the map were cloudy, showing areas that had once been open trenches.

  ‘What is this?’ said the Italian, sounding disinterested.

  ‘The dead,’ said Lau, drawing a finger over the image, hesitating at the darker patches. ‘Interred in shallow graves for decades. This technology has been used by the United Nations to search for evidence of war crimes. I am doing the same, assembling proof.’

  ‘To what end?’

  ‘Burning down Rubicon would take a lot of gasoline and matches,’ said Glovkonin, with a sniff. ‘Better that we help it destroy itself, yes?’

  Lau gave that non-smile again, fixing the Italian with a stare.

  ‘You want Solomon ended. I will do that for you.’ He pointed at the screen again. ‘This is the way.’

  There was something raw in his words, the Russian noted. A need that was growing with each passing day. At first, Lau had seemed almost indifferent to the task of destroying Ekko Solomon – a strange outlook, considering it was the African who had been responsible for all that Lau had endured. But in the weeks and months following his liberation from a laogai, the man’s fire had begun to rekindle. Freed from captivity in the Chinese state gulag, he was rediscovering his desire for retribution, as the chance to settle old scores became real and achievable.

  I am bringing out the worst in him, Glovkonin told himself, nursing it back to health. He smiled at the thought.

  ‘I want you to understand what was taken from me,’ Lau continued. ‘Thirty years of my life, lost to pain and torture. Not for what I knew, but for punishment’s sake. So I would be an example to those who might put themselves above the needs of the State and the People.’

  That old, cold fury burned hard, glittering through the cracks in his façade, and in a matter-of-fact way he told them about the beatings, the degradation, and the endless mechanical process of the attempts to break his spirit.

  Lau had a magnetism about him when he spoke like this, and in it, Glovkonin saw glimpses of the man he had once been. Thirty years ago, he would have been a force to be reckoned with.

  ‘Believe me when I tell you, my life has no other purpose than to tear down everything Ekko Solomon has built in the years he stole from me. I will repay him in full.’

  The Italian gave a nervous laugh and shot Glovkonin a look.

  ‘Your friend here, he’s quite intense! I respect that, the passione per la guerra, eh?’ But then his humour waned. ‘A good performance is fine enough, but we want to see action.’

  ‘Before the week is out,’ said Lau, looking to Glovkonin for a nod of confirmation, ‘the walls of Solomon’s palace will crumble.’

  ‘A pretty metaphor,’ said the Italian. ‘You sound so certain. I am almost convinced.’

  ‘I am certain,’ Lau insisted. He nodded at the screen. ‘After all, I know where the bodies are buried.’

  *

  The Italian remained for lunch, and then made his excuses and departed, the helicopter blasting away in a showy display of noise that mirrored the man himself. As the aircraft diminished in the teal afternoon sky, Glovkonin paused to study Lau anew.

  He was dangerous, this one. The knowledge in his head was like plutonium – rich with power but t
oxic to the touch. He would need to be handled carefully.

  ‘What you said, about how you were tortured,’ said the Russian. ‘How much of it was true?’

  Lau’s stories were so gruelling and grotesque that they seemed somehow improbable, even to a man who had grown up under the yoke of the Politburo at the height of the Soviet system.

  Lau eyed him gravely. ‘You lie a great deal,’ he said, ‘so you assume that everyone else also does so.’ He turned away. ‘I have no reason to be untruthful about anything.’

  FOUR

  Every security service had their own name for their places of work, varying from darkly derogatory to descriptive or cryptic.

  Americans at the National Security Agency in Fort Meade called their facility ‘the Puzzle Palace’; for the French, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure’s home base was ‘the Swimming Pool’ because of its proximity to the one used in the 1924 Summer Olympics; a glassy block in Moscow belonging to the GRU was known as ‘the Aquarium’; and MI6’s art deco-style headquarters near London’s Vauxhall station had been christened ‘Legoland’ by some cynical soul serving within it.

  In many ways, the building did resemble one of the plastic-brick construction sets in its final form. Sandstone-coloured walls made up of square panels, and grids of emerald glass windows formed a blocky bulwark on the South Bank of the Thames. It blended with the office blocks, hotels and apartments strung around it along the riverside. It was easy to overlook that Number 85 Vauxhall Cross went as far below ground as it did above, the unseen lower levels concealing the British Secret Service’s external intelligence apparatus as it went about its duties.

  Returning there was not something Marc Dane welcomed. The last time he had stepped through MI6’s doors, he had walked in from out of the cold, his team dead, and unknown to him, the blame for their killings laid at his feet.

  He missed London more than he cared to admit, missed the city he’d grown up in, fallen in love in, got drunk, hurt, laughed and cried in. But he didn’t miss this piece of it.

  Blackness engulfed the minivan that brought them from the airbase at Brize Norton as it left the street, and passed into an enclosed car park. A heavy, armoured gate dropped shut, and to Marc it was like a great castle portcullis coming down, sealing him off from the world. Next stop, the dungeons.

  ‘Not happy to be home?’ Looking at Marc from the front passenger seat, Lane didn’t miss the opportunity to needle him.

  ‘Do you have to keep talking?’ Lucy interposed, from behind him.

  ‘No one invited you, love,’ Lane replied coldly.

  ‘We kinda got past good manners when you drugged and kidnapped us,’ Lucy retorted.

  An argument had been brewing since they flew out of Portugal, and Marc stepped in to stop it before it finally kicked off.

  ‘Let’s just get this done. We need to check in with our office, let them know we’re okay.’

  ‘I’ll see to it,’ said Farrier, seated nearby. ‘But we need to keep the circle tight on this, Marc. We have a renegade MI6 officer at large, and we don’t want everyone and their dog knowing about it.’

  Marc shot him a look. ‘Rubicon knows how to keep confidences.’

  ‘That’s part of the problem,’ Lane noted. ‘They’re an unknown quantity.’

  The minivan halted and they climbed out, into an echoing grey space. Marc’s gaze was immediately drawn to a nearby line of shabby, unmarked white vans. They were similar to any one of hundreds of other unremarkable delivery vehicles that roved the streets of the UK on any given weekday, slightly battered and scuffed, deliberately ordinary. You would have to look twice to see that they sat low on their axles, or notice the discreet blisters on the top of the cabs that concealed antennae for encrypted radio channels.

  Marc knew the inside of those vans better than the council flat he grew up in. He had spent a long time in vehicles just like them, sitting in front of a monitor with a radio link in one ear, working communications, systems intrusion or drone control while a group of armed operatives were busy prosecuting a target.

  That was who he used to be. A ‘forward mission specialist’, the guy in the van, the techie with the toy box. The one who stayed behind when others went in harm’s way.

  He could barely remember what it felt like to be that person. Too much had changed, too much blood had been shed. What would that Marc Dane think of me? He didn’t have an answer that he liked.

  The group were met by security, and for the second time since returning home Marc was searched thoroughly by grim-faced men with guns. When they were eventually satisfied, he and Lucy were allowed to ride up to the higher floors in a windowless elevator, with two armed guards flanking them.

  One of the escorts stared fixedly at Marc, and finally he turned to face him.

  ‘Can I help you with something, mate?’

  ‘You remember me?’ asked the man.

  Marc looked him up and down. ‘Not really,’ he admitted.

  The escort was the kind of bloke that Six liked to recruit for their tough-guy jobs. Former coppers or men out of the Parachute Regiment, good at taking orders and giving out hard jolts of controlled violence where it was needed, but not flexible enough to be field officer material. The man seemed vaguely familiar. He had probably been working here when Marc was part of OpTeam Nomad.

  The guy reached down and slapped his calf.

  ‘I caught a bullet, a through and through, right here. The docs told me I wouldn’t walk properly again. But I showed those pricks. Eighteen months of fuckin’ physio. Wasn’t going to let them take my job.’ He paused, then showed his teeth. ‘Last time you saw me, I had a mask on.’ The man held up the MP7 machine gun hanging off a strap across his chest, as if he was on an operation. ‘On a roof. Block of flats in Walworth. It coming back to ya?’

  ‘Oh.’ And in a rush, it did.

  Marc remembered a grimy, half-derelict housing estate in South London. He had been on the run, hiding out while a forger cut him new papers. A traitor in his own department, his former supervisor, had cooked the paperwork so an arrest warrant for Marc turned into a shoot on sight command. The escort was one of the men who had been sent to do the deed, and he would have, if not for the intervention of Rubicon.

  ‘Huh.’ Lucy leaned into the conversation. ‘For the record? It was me who put you down.’ At the time, Marc hadn’t known the sniper was watching the whole scene unfold through a rifle scope. ‘Dane here could have finished you off,’ she added, ‘but he didn’t.’

  The man’s expression hardened. He hadn’t expected that reply. He glared at Marc, lost for a comeback.

  ‘You’re not a small bloke,’ Marc noted, refusing to be intimidated. ‘You ought to thank the lady for missing the rest of you, yeah?’

  The lift arrived and they filed out across a corridor, into a conference room that faced the river. The room was up high, a higher floor than Marc had ever visited as a serving MI6 officer, and through planes of armoured glass, he saw the shapes of the buildings on the North Bank of the Thames.

  Lucy immediately moved to the windows, and Marc imagined that was some by-product of her shooter’s instincts, always measuring and calculating sight lines and firing angles. Marc’s own instincts went to a different place, as he immediately picked out the exit points and the places where surveillance gear was most likely concealed.

  Presently, Farrier and Lane joined them, along with two more faces from Marc’s past.

  Talia Patel looked older than he remembered, but she still dressed the same, in expensive jackets and quality blouses. A well-presented East Asian woman in her early forties, Marc had always considered Talia a professional sort, friendly but not sociable, the kind of department manager that you felt comfortable knowing was on your side. She gave him a brief smile of greeting and came over to shake his hand.

  ‘Marc, it’s good to see you again. You look well.’

  He nodded. ‘I’m surviving. How are you, Talia?’

&nb
sp; ‘The same.’ Her smile faltered. ‘It was difficult for a while after . . . the unpleasantness. But we moved on.’

  Unpleasantness. Marc let the word fade. It was too vague, too bloodless, to encapsulate what they had actually gone through.

  Along with a member of Marc’s own unit, the head of K Section and the Tactical Operations Team programme – his de facto commanding officer and the man Talia had worked directly below – had betrayed them to the Combine.

  Marc walked away from MI6 after that, but like Farrier and Lane, Talia had to live through the aftermath of that crushing deception.

  So too had the last man to enter the room. Sandy-haired and of average height and build, Victor Welles dressed like an Esquire model, equipped with natural good looks and an ability to make anything he wore seem fashionable. All of that was counterbalanced by an expression that was perpetually on the edge of becoming a sneer, and a superiority in his manner that he did not care to tone down. A director in Six’s internal security department, Welles had been instrumental in the hunt for Marc when he was framed by his boss. It had to be acknowledged that as much as Marc thought the man was an egotistical prick, in the end Welles had accepted the truth when it was revealed. He was one of those people who, despite being deeply irritating, was actually good at his job.

  Welles gave Marc a brisk, sardonic once-over and didn’t offer his hand.

  ‘Dane, how’s life in the private sector?’

  ‘Better,’ he replied, and decided to leave it at that.

  The other man studied Lucy. ‘And this is Keyes?’ He shot a look at Farrier. ‘I don’t want her around for the briefing.’

  Lucy sniffed. ‘What, you brought me here for nothing?’ She made a tutting noise.

  ‘You don’t get to make that decision, Welles,’ Marc said firmly, before Farrier could reply. ‘She and I work together. You want me to help you with your problem, Lucy stays.’