Rogue

by James Swallow

  On the way back, the mood inside the van was quiet, broken only by the wet gasps of Farrier’s laboured breathing. The smell of blood, cordite and stone dust thickened in the heat, and none of them could find anything to say about how badly it had gone.

  Twice now, Grace had led them into a trap, and to make matters worse, they had seen this one coming but still believed they could break through it. And Marc had believed that too, because he thought he knew the woman they were pursuing.

  How was it possible for someone to change so much? Samantha Green had always played by her own rules, but the woman who Marc had confronted back there in the terminal was unknown to him. Behind that damaged face and those cold eyes, she wasn’t the same person he had once held in his arms. But everything else about her – the way she moved, the way she spoke, the turn of her head and the tone of her voice – was the woman he remembered.

  He felt a twinge of pain in his chest. The Kevlar weave of his body armour had taken the bullet she put in him, but beneath that his torso was an ugly swath of bruising, taped high and tight with bandages.

  If she wanted you dead, that bullet would have been between your eyes, noted Lucy. She made a choice back there, for what it’s worth.

  ‘She didn’t kill me.’ Marc voiced the thought. ‘What does that mean?’

  There was no way to look at that fact that didn’t make matters worse, and no way to avoid the truth. When the moment had come, he’d frozen. And now she was in the wind again.

  Raised voices reached him as he approached the hangar. Marc recognised the whip-crack diction, common to a superior officer giving out a tongue-lashing to an errant subordinate.

  Entering, he found a ruddy-faced man in duty camos wearing the barcode tabs of a wing commander. He was jabbing a thick finger in Lane’s face, while a pair of junior base officers flanked him silently.

  ‘There’s a limit to the tolerance of our service,’ he spat, ‘and you bloody spooks have ridden right over it. Do you have any idea of the levels of shit that you have unleashed here?’ The officer didn’t wait for Lane to reply. ‘I will not have my men lumbered with the blame for the mess you created, do you hear me?’

  He glared around the hangar, finding the members of the Rubicon and MI6 teams and giving them a venomous scowl.

  Lane looked like ten miles of bad road, fatigue lying heavy on her. Still, she tried to hold her own against the officer’s bombast.

  ‘Sir, it wasn’t our intention to—’

  ‘I don’t give a toss about your intentions!’ He shut her down with a snarl. ‘The group captain is on his way in right now, and when he gets here, you’ll give him a full and complete account of this clusterfuck of an operation you were running.’ He paused for a breath. ‘And then, maybe, we can find a way not to go to war with the bloody Argies all over again.’

  The wing commander stalked away, pushing past Marc with his officers in tow, leaving an icy atmosphere in his wake.

  It was Regis who cut through the sullen silence that followed.

  ‘That bloke’s a twat, but he has a point. Is someone going to explain what the hell happened out there?’

  ‘Grace played us, end of,’ Pearce said quietly, staring at the floor. ‘She tried to finish what she started in Norway – wipe out the team.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ began Lucy, shaking her head. ‘If that’s what she wanted, there’s easier ways to fill some graves.’

  ‘Oh, you’re the expert now, are you?’ Suresh turned on her, his tone lighting up with undirected anger. ‘It was your idea to go in there, wasn’t it? If we’d just stayed on station—’

  ‘What?’ demanded Lane, cutting him off. ‘We should have stood by and let those soldiers get shot up?’

  ‘Fat lot of good we did them, though!’ Suresh shook his head. ‘They still ended up dead. And it could have been us too. You saw what happened to Farrier . . .’ He said the man’s name and suddenly ran out of steam.

  ‘Keyes is right,’ said Lane, after a long moment. ‘Grace didn’t bring us all the way to Cyprus just to cross us off. There’s another agenda here. We need to find out what it is, if we’re going to salvage any of this night’s work.’

  ‘Why attack soldiers at a UN military base that hasn’t seen action in years?’ said Regis. ‘Maybe she was double-crossing the Argentinians . . .’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Marc. He pushed aside everything else, boxing up his emotions to concentrate on only the facts at hand. ‘She faked the whole meeting with Nix to draw us in. After Oslo, she left enough crumbs of intel behind her so we’d take the bait and piece together where she was going. She knew who would be sent after her.’

  Ari looked up from where he sat, on the folding steps leading into the parked Rubicon jet.

  ‘So all that about buying weapons for a maritime assault was garbage?’

  ‘In hindsight . . .’ Assim gave a weak shrug.

  ‘She wanted us here,’ added Lucy. ‘What does that get her?’

  The trilling sound of a telephone issued out from the cabin of the jet, and Ari stood up, giving Lucy and Marc an I got this gesture as he disappeared inside.

  ‘The drones?’ Standing by a gear crate, Malte offered nothing more but a questioning look in Assim’s direction.

  In turn, the young hacker gave a slow nod.

  ‘There were definitely unmanned aerial vehicles over Nicosia Airport tonight. I’ve combed through the local comms traffic and there are two distinct control signals buried in the feed. High transfer rates. A lot of data being transmitted.’

  ‘We can dig into that, yeah?’ Marc threw the question at Assim, and off his reluctant nod, he went on. ‘Maybe back-trace the drones to wherever they were being operated from.’ He paused, thinking it through. ‘The one I saw, there was a definite lag to its movements, so that means whoever was flying the thing wasn’t close by.’

  ‘How can you know that from just looking at it?’ Suresh’s doubt bordered on mockery.

  ‘I know,’ Marc insisted. He had bitter experience of both being in control of and on the receiving end of military-grade unmanned aerial vehicles.

  ‘We need more than guesswork,’ said Lane. She was taking command now, stepping into the breach opened by Farrier’s loss. ‘In ten minutes, I have to be on a secure line to Hub White.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘And they are going to want something better than a weak tea replay of our collective fuck-up.’

  ‘I’m afraid that conversation is not going to go the way you think.’ Ari stood in the open hatchway, a wireless phone handset in his grip. His lined face was uncharacteristically pale. ‘There’s something you need to see.’

  *

  The narrow HondaJet’s cabin was configured to manage five people, so it was standing room only to squeeze all of them on board. Lucy found herself at the front of the group with Ari and Marc, standing before a drop-down video screen hanging over the rear bulkhead. A live feed from a Russian news channel was playing out, with a serious anchorwoman recapping a breaking story.

  ‘For those of you just joining us, we have learned this hour of an unprovoked attack at a United Nations military base, on the island nation of Cyprus.’ A graphic popped up in the corner of the image, a globe rotating to show any viewers the relevant part of the world she was referring to. ‘Footage has been released via internet and sent directly to a number of major news outlets.’ She paused before speaking again. ‘We warn you that this report contains footage some viewers may find disturbing.’

  Other stations might have edited out what came next, but this network was more interested in driving up ratings with the raw and the shocking.

  Lucy’s heart dropped as the images switched to night-time aerial footage of a familiar rectangular building, and the expanse of bare concrete apron in front of it. Nicosia Airport looked as it had in the satellite images that were still sitting on a table out in the hangar. She heard a sharp intake of breath from Marc and she knew he saw it too.

  �
�Is that . . . ?’ began Suresh, but then he fell silent, his question answered as the camera’s eye caught sight of the ruined lettering atop the derelict terminal, spelling out its name. The news anchor kept on talking, reiterating her warning as white 4 × 4s appeared in a lower corner of the frame. The camera shifted and sharpened focus to show the distinctive UN lettering along the sides of the vehicles.

  ‘The drones,’ Malte said again, with grim certainty. The video could not have come from anywhere else.

  There was a jumpcut. Now the vehicles were stopped, and soldiers were moving around them. From out of nowhere, sparkles of muzzle flare blinked in the shadows and the UN troops broke apart in disarray. Bodies fell as they failed to find cover, others running for the shelter of the terminal building. The drone camera moved and found three figures advancing and firing, M4 carbines up and tight at their shoulders. It zoomed in, stabilising the image.

  Lucy caught sight of someone and the recognition moved through her in an electric shock. She saw herself there, walking alongside Grace as if the two of them were part of the same kill team. The third shooter in the group wore Marc Dane’s face.

  She felt all eyes in the cabin on her back as the footage jerked through another series of cuts. Some of the following shots were from inside the ruined building, blurry images through greenish low-light filters: Lucy and Marc stalking down the throughway, weapons at the ready; Pearce and Suresh out on the apron, appearing to deliver execution headshots to wounded men; more dead soldiers lying where they had been cut down; Grace at the entrance gate, calmly killing the lone guard on duty.

  ‘That is not what happened,’ insisted Lane. ‘Where are they getting this?’

  The news report returned to the studio, and the grave-mannered anchor showed the right amount of dismay and concern as she launched back into her report. She spoke as footage of the terminal building’s demolition unfolded on a screen behind her.

  ‘This video was supplied to our network via an anonymous source, together with information on the attackers, and we believe it originates from a principled whistle-blower within the international intelligence community. We are still in the process of confirming the veracity of this material, but it appears to clearly show figures identified as officers of the British security services, collaborating with agents of a private military contractor called Rubicon, in what can only be described as a deliberate and unprovoked attack on United Nations personnel.’

  ‘They didn’t want us there to kill us,’ said Marc, in a dead voice. ‘They wanted us there for this.’

  *

  Esther McFarlane sat bolt upright in her hotel bed, pulling the cotton sheets tighter around herself in an unconscious attempt at self-protection. The chilly blue-green images on the television in her room were the only illumination, hard flickers of colour wiping out the soft glow through the windows from the Monaco skyline.

  She mashed the channel-change button on the remote in her hand, advancing down the line of news stations. Each of the main broadcasters had some variation on the same report, from circumspect and grave in some cases to loud and accusatory in others. Everywhere she paused, the ticker chyron showed the name ‘Rubicon’ or the reports repeated the words that accompanied the damning video.

  ‘Additional details are becoming clear as we report on this apparent act of state-endorsed terrorism,’ said a sober-looking man on an Asian news feed. ‘It is now being suggested that the motivation behind the attack may be connected to corporate holdings belonging to the Rubicon parent organisation in Cyprus. It is possible that a destabilisation of the tenuous Turkish-Cypriot peace that has existed for years in that island nation would be beneficial to Rubicon’s corporate agenda—’

  McFarlane’s smartphone lay next to her on the bed sheets, and it trilled incessantly as dozens of incoming text messages bombarded it. An initial call from her assistant, Finlay, had awoken her from a fitful sleep, with little more than a panicked warning to turn on the television, and now everyone wanted to talk to her, all screaming for some kind of explanation.

  The moment felt unreal and dreamlike, but she knew too well to hope that this was some stress-induced nightmare. McFarlane picked up the phone and scrolled through the steadily increasing series of messages, many of them from reporters at the same networks currently accusing Rubicon of committing a terrorist act.

  One message was tagged as a place name rather than a person – Giardini Botanici Hanbury – and it had no content, only a cellular number.

  She calmed her racing heartbeat and muted the television, before tapping the call return tab. A voice answered before the second ring.

  ‘You have seen it, I assume?’ The Chinese man’s words had no weight.

  ‘You did this?’

  Esther tried to keep her tone level, but it came hard. Anger and frustration and fear churned as the import of this grew clearer to her.

  ‘Does it matter who allowed the information to leak? Now it is out in the world and it cannot be called back. You knew that Solomon’s agents would get out of control. The only question of importance at this hour is: how are you going to deal with this situation?’

  She fought back the impulse to throw the phone across the room. His tone was so metered, so damnably calm that it was like nails dragged down a chalkboard.

  ‘I dinnae take kindly to being manipulated!’

  Her native Scots accent cut through, the stress of the moment bringing it to the fore.

  ‘If you do not act now, swiftly and decisively, it will mean the end of Rubicon. The end of everything you have worked for. Is it necessary for me to repeat this truth? You know it as well as I. You must take control, or Ekko Solomon will drag you down with him.’ He paused to let that sink in. ‘I promised I would help you. I will.’

  ‘What . . . ?’

  There was a sound at the far end of her suite, out past the open bedroom door, in the direction of the hallway. McFarlane leaned forward, and she saw a shadow moving in the spill of light that fell under the suite’s doorway from the corridor beyond. Someone was out there.

  ‘I have sent you material that will be of use,’ he told her. ‘Forgive me, but I had to wait for a moment like this, because you would not have accepted it otherwise.’

  The shadow moved, and with a whisper of paper, a white envelope slid into the room under the door. The light changed as the shadow faded away.

  ‘It is time for you to know the truth about Ekko Solomon,’ said the voice on the phone. ‘How you use this knowledge is up to you. But I think I know what choice you will make.’

  The line went dead, but McFarlane had already tossed the phone onto the bed. With the sheets still wrapped around her like a shroud, she padded into the hallway and recovered the envelope. Inside was a thin memory card bearing the seal of Interpol.

  Her laptop blinked to life with a touch, and she sat before it, ensuring that the device was secure before inserting the card.

  The contents were mostly high-definition photographs, large files dense with visual information. As an experienced geologist, she immediately recognised the formatting of ground survey images. The first few files were false-colour stills of deep-penetrating radar returns, but as she paged through, the character of the shots changed. They became images taken on location, then stage-by-stage shots of digs in various states of progress. Red mud and dusty skies; it looked like Africa.

  Her hand rose to her mouth when she saw what had been buried.

  *

  ‘This is bullshit,’ snapped Marc.

  ‘I do not disagree,’ said Assim, hunching closer to his laptop’s screen.

  Somehow, Lane had been able to convince the wing commander not to immediately throw the whole lot of them into Akrotiri’s glasshouse in the wake of the news report. He settled for removing their weapons and placing them under guard, before marching her back to the base proper while a few men from the RAF Regiment were posted in front of the hangar. The big doors were now open, letting in the breeze an
d the morning light, but that was less for the team’s comfort and more so their guards could keep an eye on them all at once.

  The team had, disappointingly, broken back into its component groups. On one side of the hangar, Regis congregated with Suresh and Pearce, while Lucy, Malte and the rest of the Rubicon squad stayed close to the tent and the HondaJet.

  Marc looked at the old Cabot dive watch on his wrist. Two hours now since the story had broken, and communications had gone unpleasantly quiet.

  The silence from Hub White and Rubicon stirred up unpleasant memories of similar circumstances. Years past now, but the recall of it as strong as if it was yesterday. Marc’s unit gone and him in the dark, unsure where the next shot would come from.

  He’d done the dutiful thing, the right thing. Called in to MI6, hoping to request a rescue, trying to figure out what the hell happened. Silence answered. He was left hanging, forced to fend for himself.

  This felt a lot like that, but now it wasn’t just Marc Dane twisting in the wind. It was Lucy, and Assim and Ari and everyone else. It was Lane and Farrier and the Paladin team.

  ‘We know what this is,’ said Assim, drawing Marc’s attention back to the screen. The young hacker had already downloaded the raw dump of the so-called leaked footage, cutting into it with surgical precision. ‘This is the same thing Lion’s Roar used in Iceland and Belgium. Deepfakes.’

  Ari sat nearby, scowling at the mention of the violent extremist group.

  ‘How does that even begin to be a thing?’

  Marc shot the pilot a look. ‘You’ve seen doctored photos. You know how that works, yeah?’

  ‘Sure.’ Ari shrugged. ‘My kids do that all the time. Joke pictures of Ezra surfing off Niagara Falls and Leah walking the dog on Mars.’ He pointed at the computer. ‘But that is next-level falsehood.’