Rogue

by James Swallow

  That idea alone was troubling: that one man, even someone as rigidly moral and unswerving as Solomon, could wield that kind of power. But worse still, the SCD was tied directly to the operations of the Rubicon Group as a whole, and its continued existence threatened everyone who owed their livelihood to the company. The longer it was allowed to operate freely, the greater the chance that something terrible would happen because of it, and Rubicon would be held responsible.

  The more McFarlane looked, the more she found. The SCD had been involved in confrontations with terrorist groups, mercenary hackers and clandestine agencies from a dozen countries, and she had evidence that unauthorised intelligence gathering and other legally murky acts had taken place on Solomon’s say-so. It didn’t matter that the SCD was on the side of the angels. Even if the billionaire truly believed that it was his responsibility to defend the weak and bring evil to justice, there were other ways to do it. Being a philanthropist was one thing; being a vigilante was something else.

  That someone outside the circle of Rubicon’s board knew about this was worrying to her. Even the suggestion of such details leaking to the media was a grave danger, even if there was nothing that could be proven. If the SCD’s actions were to become public knowledge, if solid proof could be presented, Rubicon would be declared in violation of dozens of international laws. It would be open season for legal and civil suits, and the value of the company’s stock would plummet. Everything McFarlane and her fellow board members had struggled to build in their alliance with Solomon would be put in jeopardy.

  She had to know more.

  The path levelled out, and presently McFarlane arrived at the meeting place. Water cooled the air where it fell from the carved shapes of the fountain, and deep shadows ranged away in every direction. A man in a light blue Brioni suit stood near a stone balustrade, and he gave her a shallow bow as she came into the glow of the lights illuminating the water feature.

  ‘Ms McFarlane,’ he said, in the voice she recognised from their phone conversation. ‘Thank you for accepting my invitation. I apologise for the theatrics, but it seemed to me that secrecy should be maintained.’

  ‘Aye, true enough.’

  Her suspicions had been on the money. The man was of Far Eastern extraction, Chinese most likely. He had that look about him that made it hard to accurately peg his age. She took in his greying hair and careful brown eyes that had seen a lot of life. Her instincts pushed the word soldier to the front of her thoughts, and she held on to that. In his middle fifties, she assumed, picking a median. He’d walked a hard road, evidenced by a stiffness in his movements and the steel stick at his side.

  He offered her his hand and she didn’t take it, keeping her distance.

  ‘And you are?’

  He let his hand drop, smiling slightly. ‘My name is Lau. I am hoping you and I will be able to work together.’

  ‘How much do you want?’ She went for the first, most obvious option. ‘To keep quiet about Garza?’

  ‘Straight to business. I was told to expect that of you.’ He gave a dry chuckle. ‘Is that what you want me to do, Ms McFarlane? Pretend that Ekko Solomon is not running covert operations all over the world under your company’s global network?’

  She gave him nothing in return. If this was a blackmail attempt, it had to be quashed.

  ‘I do not want to be paid,’ said Lau. ‘At least, not in the way that you might think of it.’ He shook his head, and rested on the metal stick. ‘I gave you the Garza file as a proof of intent. I have other information about Rubicon you would find interesting – material that would cause great upset if it were to leak out.’

  ‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘What would you say if I told you I could provide what you need to unseat Solomon from his stewardship of Rubicon? I can help you bring an end to his mercenary cadre and his reckless acts of intervention. Swiftly. Bloodlessly.’

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

  His smile faded. ‘Please don’t insult my intelligence. I hope I have not made an error in coming to you. I am aware Solomon engenders great loyalty in his people, but I thought you were beyond that.’

  He knows him. Something in Lau’s tone, a faint note of wounded pride, told her that the Chinese man had a personal connection to Solomon, and she put that thought aside for later consideration.

  ‘I have Rubicon’s best interests in mind,’ she continued. ‘One man, no matter who he is, cannot be allowed to compromise that.’

  ‘Agreed.’ Lau’s head bobbed. ‘You want to keep your people safe, Ms McFarlane. A commendable goal.’

  She walked to the edge of the fountain.

  ‘You’ve got a handle on my motivations, but then I’m not quiet about them. What about yours, Mr Lau? I keep asking and you keep ducking me. What are you after?’

  ‘I want justice,’ he said firmly.

  ‘Solomon says the same thing.’

  ‘Ekko Solomon wants redemption,’ said Lau, and that bitter flash was in his eyes again. ‘That is not the same thing.’ He took a breath, and his manner returned to its earlier detachment. ‘He will sacrifice everything he touches for his own ends. His crusade. That includes you and your people. We both want him to stop. My reasons are my own, but they align with yours.’ He looked around, and his voice dropped, as if he was sharing a confidence. ‘You and I, we are being pushed by the agendas of others. We both wish to take back control.’

  ‘And how do we change our situation?’ McFarlane listened to herself ask the question.

  For months now she had sought to bring the SCD’s operations to a quiet end, and although she had never spoken openly of it, her thoughts did sometimes dwell on how Solomon’s removal from the board would facilitate that in one single act. But unseating a king from his throne was no easy task – something every Scot who knew their history could attest to.

  ‘You already know the answer,’ said Lau, seeing it in her eyes. ‘Are you willing to do whatever it takes? Even if you have to destroy Rubicon in order to save it?’

  ‘Solomon is not Rubicon,’ she told him. ‘He’s only one man.’ A chill washed over her; doubt and fear crept into her thoughts. She decided to push forward to end the conversation, one way or another. ‘If you have an offer, let’s hear it. Otherwise, I’m walking away and you’ll be—’

  ‘I will be hearing from your lawyers?’ Lau ended her sentence for her, and gave a humourless chuckle. ‘I do have more for you, but you will not see it yet. The moment is not right.’

  McFarlane scowled. ‘You shouldn’t have brought me here if all you want to do is drop hints. My time is valuable, and I don’t take kindly to those who waste it.’

  ‘Meeting an ally face to face is not a waste of time,’ said Lau.

  ‘Is that what we are?’ She’d had enough, and turned to walk away.

  ‘I will be in touch,’ he called after her, but she didn’t look back. ‘When the moment comes.’

  *

  The lounge on the Park Plaza’s upper floors had an excellent view of the river, and out on the smoker’s balcony, Marc Dane leaned over the rail with a glass of neat Reyka in one hand, swirling the Icelandic vodka in slow circles.

  ‘Careful,’ said a voice behind him. ‘Drop that and you’ll brain some passing banker, and we’ll be in the shit.’

  Marc took a sip without looking up, staring out across the water. On Millbank, on the far side of the river, he could see Thames House. The headquarters of MI5, the sister agency to MI6, was a stately grey pile with sloping roofs in the neoclassical style. Even at this time of the night, lights blazed from the windows as officers of the country’s internal security agency worked around the clock.

  ‘I should have signed up with them, instead of Six,’ he said, gesturing with the glass. ‘Got a gig in some little cubicle over there, sifting intel takes and going down to Starbucks for lunch. Pub on Friday after work.’

  ‘Nah.’ John Farrier took up a position next to
him. He had a drink of his own, and it would be a glass of Glenlivet single malt, if Marc recalled correctly. ‘You wouldn’t last a year doing desk work. You were always going to be a field man, like it or not.’ Farrier looked out over the London skyline. ‘I knew that, first time I met you.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Marc turned to study him. ‘You found my measure, did you?’

  Farrier had been, for want of a better term, Marc’s recruiter, his conduit into the shadow world of intelligence operations. They had crossed paths in Afghanistan during Operation Herrick, when Dane was crewing helicopters for the Royal Navy and Farrier was part of a shady, nameless unit doing shady, nameless deeds in places off the battle map. A year after Marc had been demobbed, Farrier had come calling with a job offer.

  ‘Like knows like,’ said the older man, after a moment. ‘We enjoy the cut of it too much, us two. More than is healthy.’

  ‘I didn’t want to be a field officer,’ Marc insisted. Even to his own ears, the denial sounded hollow.

  ‘Not about want,’ Farrier noted, around a swallow of his Scotch. ‘It’s about need.’

  Marc gave a snort, and opted out of the old argument before it got going.

  ‘Okay, whatever you say, Obi-Wan.’

  Farrier’s smirk became a chuckle, a sound with genuine warmth in it.

  ‘You’ve changed a lot, mate. In a good way, I mean. It’s a shame it took everything it did to get you there.’

  ‘I had a decent teacher.’

  ‘Cheers for that, padawan.’ Farrier saluted him with his glass. ‘Won’t lie, I’ve been keeping an eye on your exploits.’

  After parting ways with MI6, it had been Marc’s old friend who found him a job with a United Nations department tracking the illegal trade in nuclear materials; but even that had ended up leading Marc back to the Rubicon Group.

  ‘Pays more than government work,’ he noted.

  ‘No doubt.’ Farrier was silent for a moment. ‘We’ve been picking up some of the pieces you dropped.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  The other man made a face, an expression Marc knew of old. It was his way of signalling that he was talking around something he wasn’t supposed to be talking about.

  ‘Rubicon upset some rich people with big ideas and low morals, didn’t they?’

  The Combine. Farrier didn’t need to name them.

  ‘Six took advantage of that, here and there. Pushing back against some Russian wankers making inroads in Knightsbridge. Knocking off a few tangos. Hunting the Lion.’

  The Lion was a nickname for a particular terrorist whose handiwork Marc had encountered and barely lived to tell the tale. Omar Khadir, a former Egyptian army officer turned nihilist radical, was rumoured to now be in the Combine’s employ, but no one had confirmed a sighting of him in years. Others said that Khadir, along with the rest of his Al Sayf terror network, had been wiped out by the Americans as payback for their attempted bombing of the US capital.

  ‘The Yanks got him,’ Marc offered.

  ‘No, they didn’t,’ the other man said quietly. ‘Someone’s protecting him. Using him.’

  The thought of that sent a shiver down Marc’s spine. Khadir had been a dangerous foe when left to his own devices. As a tool of someone with a larger agenda . . . Marc dreaded to think of what that could lead to.

  ‘You know what this reminds me of?’ He felt the urge to turn the conversation in a different direction, and went with it. ‘That night in Odessa. With the French bloke – what was his name?’

  ‘Villeneuve,’ said Farrier. ‘Like the racing driver.’

  ‘That’s him.’ Marc nodded to himself. The man had been an MI6 asset embedded within a Ukrainian mining consortium, a group that the British suspected of funding radical pro-Communist groups in the UK. Farrier and Marc were part of a team sent in to extract him, but things went pear-shaped and they ended up getting stuck in a seedy waterfront hotel, waiting for a boot through the door that never came. ‘He did not shut up all night.’

  ‘Give the bloke a break, he was shitting himself,’ said Farrier.

  Villeneuve’s cover had been catastrophically blown and the Ukrainians were on the warpath, coming to slot him before MI6 could get the man out of the country to be debriefed. For ten hours they had sat in a dank, unheated room, trading hits off a bottle of cheap vodka to stay warm while a gang of thugs swept the waterfront for them. At one point, the Ukrainians were in the room next door, high as kites, turning it over and jabbering in graphic detail about how they were going to kill the Frenchman and his British friends.

  As dawn broke, the MI6 team decided to risk it and made a dash for the airport west of the city. It didn’t go well, and the guns had come out. In the thick of it, only Farrier’s guidance had brought Marc through it in one piece.

  The first thing he did when he got home was to drink some good vodka, to wash away the taste of the fear.

  Farrier wasn’t the kind of person to ever say out loud that Marc owed him, just like Marc was never going to admit it. But they had a bond that had been forged in fire, a mutual respect that went beyond the oath of service.

  He won’t cash in that marker, Marc thought, because he knows he doesn’t have to.

  He took another long pull on the Reyka.

  ‘You looked at those docs?’ Farrier said, into the lengthening silence. ‘I know you have an ear for that kind of music. What’d you find?’

  Marc frowned. It was hard to look at the raw intelligence data on the woman with the ‘Grace’ alias, hard to sift it dispassionately and not see Sam Green at every turn.

  ‘She has a plan,’ he said, putting it into one thought. ‘Her moves, they’re not random. She’s building to something.’

  ‘Against us?’

  ‘Can’t tell.’ He put down the glass on a nearby table. ‘It doesn’t track, John. If it’s Sam, why didn’t she just come in? Where’s she been? What’s put her on the offensive now?’

  ‘You’ve gone through what she has,’ Farrier countered. ‘Left for dead. Cut off. You tell me.’

  That truth knocked him off his train of thought.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose I have. But that was different. People inside Six were working against me.’

  Farrier drew a breath. ‘I know this isn’t easy for you, mate. You have history with this.’ He shook his head. ‘You know what? I never wanted to come anywhere near you with it. I told Welles and the Old Dog we could deal with it inside the family.’

  The Old Dog was Sir Oliver Finch-Shortland, director of MI6’s tactical operation programme, a man who worked at a level high enough to mingle with chiefs of staff and senior cabinet ministers. Tenacious in the most cut-glass of English manners, he was a formidable sort, and very much a takes-no-shit kind of fellow.

  ‘And yet . . . ?’ Marc prompted.

  ‘You know Welles. You can always count on him to be a prick of the first water, can’t you?’ Farrier didn’t wait for Marc to agree. ‘He forced the issue. Even talked about trumping up some charges for a pretext so we could pull you in.’

  ‘Of course he did.’

  None of that was a surprise. There were still those in Vauxhall Cross who hadn’t forgiven Marc for shining a light on the traitor in their midst, as if it offended them more to be caught out by one of the rank and file than to have a collaborator in the agency’s upper echelons.

  Marc pushed those grievances aside and took a mental step backwards. He had gone through the data on the tablet more than once since the morning’s meeting in the conference room. He was caught by what he found there. Trapped between scrutinising the intelligence like the technician-analyst he once was, and seeing it through the lens of someone who had shared a bed with the subject in question.

  ‘I can’t square the circle,’ he said, after a moment. ‘Sam or Grace, or whoever. I’m not sure what to think.’

  But that wasn’t true, and something in his tone betrayed him.

  Farrier knew him too well to miss it
.

  ‘Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, mate. Tell me what you got out of that.’

  He sighed, and then committed himself. ‘Her next move is going to be a meet, if she hasn’t done it already. It’s the pattern she’s been following. Move, set-up, action, then check in with her contacts. Repeat.’

  ‘Who’s she talking to?’

  ‘Can’t give you that, too many variables. But there’s communications logs you had in there, same lines of connection we used back when Nomad was up.’

  Farrier nodded. ‘GCHQ is trawling those, she’d know that.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Marc admitted, ‘but I think she’s hiding in plain sight. It’s a very Sam thing to do.’ He had left the tablet back in the suite, and he wished he had it to hand to show what he meant. In the end, Marc picked the cleanest explanation. ‘Every tactical operations unit has its own shorthand, right? Informal comms protocols and set-ups that work for the team and the command hub back home, but don’t go wider than that.’

  Farrier nodded. ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘There’s no one from Nomad around to know how it went, except me. I saw the same practices we used in those comms logs. Real signals in among fake ones, set up so that prying ears can’t tell the difference.’

  ‘You think that . . . Grace is doing that?’ Farrier almost said Sam, and barely stopped himself in time. ‘Risky, isn’t it? Following old routines?’

  ‘It is,’ said Marc, ‘but when you’re under the cosh, people tend to go with what they know.’

  Farrier leaned in, a spark catching in his eyes as he saw that Marc might have a lead that Six had overlooked.

  ‘So if you don’t know who she’s talking to, do we know where the messages are being sent?’

  Marc nodded. ‘I have an idea.’

  Every encrypted message he found that fitted the pattern was headed with metadata pointing to the same place. A cluster of digital IP addresses on the island of Cyprus, in the eastern Mediterranean.