Rogue

by James Swallow

  Not for one second did the pilot entertain the idea that the video might be real, and Marc was grateful for the man’s unquestioning trust.

  ‘The software combines one piece of digital footage with a completely separate one,’ he explained. ‘Manipulating a moving image, erasing something . . . In this case, adding something.’

  ‘And all of it seamless.’ Ari shivered involuntarily. ‘So in this day and age, seeing is not believing any more, is that what you’re telling me?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ said Marc. ‘I tried to grab one of the camera drones buzzing around back at Nicosia, and now we know exactly why they were up there.’

  ‘Grace wanted you where she did her killing, so it would match up.’ Ari nodded as he thought it through. ‘Better to hide the seams that way, I’m guessing.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Assim noted. ‘I mean, a deepfake program can patch images of one person’s face over another from any source, but the closer the raw data is to the patch, the easier it is to do.’

  ‘And the faster it could happen,’ said Marc.

  ‘You were in the same place at the same time.’ Ari mimed a pair of scissors with his fingers. ‘So they cut and stitched you, like cloth in my cousin Zussa’s tailor’s shop.’

  ‘That’s about the size of it.’

  ‘But even the best needlework comes undone,’ insisted Ari. ‘It can’t be perfect, can it?’

  Marc and Assim exchanged a grim look.

  ‘No. But it will take weeks of decompiling to prove beyond a shadow of doubt that the footage is fabricated,’ said the hacker, ‘and by then the damage will have been done.’

  ‘Would anyone even believe you, after the fact?’ said Ari, shaking his head.

  ‘This is pure disinformation warfare,’ concluded Assim. ‘It is a targeted propaganda strike designed to discredit Rubicon and MI6.’

  ‘The amount of effort needed to refute bullshit is infinitely more than the amount needed to create it,’ muttered Marc. ‘What else is in this pack of lies they put out?’

  Assim brought up another panel on his screen.

  ‘Actually . . . most of that material is authentic.’

  The display showed scanned images of police records and military personnel files. Many sections were heavily redacted, but much of the salient data remained.

  Marc saw pages from his own Interpol dossier, a leftover from his brief time as an international fugitive. There were details of a federal warrant in Lucy’s name, and then excerpts that named Tracey Lane, John Farrier and other members of the OpTeam unit as officers of British intelligence. Sam Green was in there too, he noted.

  He leaned in to read his file.

  ‘This is terrific,’ Marc said coldly. ‘Our greatest hits collection, right out in the open.’

  ‘But why would Grace . . . ? Why would she expose her own identity?’ said Assim. ‘That doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Because she doesn’t give a damn!’ Marc retorted. ‘That’s an acceptable loss for her, you get it?’ He sat heavily on the edge of a workbench and rested his head in the palm of his hand. ‘Shit, I’m fucking exhausted by this.’

  Saying it out loud drained the energy from him as the adrenaline and anxiety Marc had been cruising on dissipated. For a moment, all he wanted to do was find a shadowed spot in the back of the hangar and let sleep take him.

  An alert ping sounded from Assim’s laptop, and the hacker jolted with surprise. Suddenly he was closing data panels on the screen, scrambling to decode the contents of an encrypted email.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Marc shook off the fatigue and fixed him with a hard look.

  Assim coloured, and fumbled his reply.

  ‘It . . . uh . . . It’s something from a contact on the dark web.’

  The young Saudi had the worst poker face of anyone Marc had ever known, and he utterly failed to conceal what he was doing.

  ‘Let me see.’

  ‘I reached out to some people I know.’ Assim started with a pre-emptive excuse, trying to get his explanation in early. ‘I thought I could get a quicker read on tracking the drone command paths if I . . . uh . . . crowd-sourced it a bit.’

  Marc wanted to be annoyed at him, but he was too worn out to expend the effort. And there was something to be said for the many hands make light work model of intelligence gathering.

  ‘Did it help?’

  Assim nodded sharply. ‘It might well have, yes.’

  He pulled up a map graphic and overlaid the new data over it.

  Marc saw Cyprus in the centre of the frame, a pair of blinking dots showing where the drones had been flying over Nicosia. A line drew back over the digital landscape to the northern coast, to a building in the town of Girne. It hesitated there as the computer continued to process the information.

  ‘That’s where the operator was?’

  Assim shook his head as the trace line started moving again.

  ‘Just a repeater. A local node to boost the signal strength.’

  The trace bounced across to southern Turkey and a cellular exchange in Anamur, then around the country to other nodes in Ankara and Istanbul, crossing and recrossing its own path. It picked up speed, flicking to sites on the far side of the Black Sea in the Ukraine and Moldova, then back south again.

  ‘They were definitely trying to obfuscate any tracking,’ said Assim.

  ‘Yeah, no shit.’ Marc watched the line make a dive south until it terminated at a location on the Greek island of Rhodes. ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Tracking sequence ends there,’ confirmed Assim.

  Marc blinked to clear his thoughts, glancing up towards the parked jet as he processed this new information.

  Greece. We could be there in a couple of hours.

  ‘Huh.’ Despite himself, Assim gave a faint smile. ‘My . . . ah . . . source has supplied more than just the trace.’

  He pivoted the screen so Marc could get a clearer look.

  The location where the trace terminated was a grungy commercial marina near the northern tip of Rhodes, on the edge of the town from which the island took its name, and attached to a map was content from a file stolen from a Hellenic Police server.

  Marc skimmed the text. ‘Says here there was an unexplained fire on a barge yesterday afternoon. It sank in the harbour, and the police are waiting on divers from the mainland to come and check it out . . .’

  Assim cocked his head. ‘Why is that relevant?’

  ‘Because there’s a witness statement mentioning a woman seen on board before the fire. The description talks about a white woman with dark hair and facial scarring.’ Marc gave Assim a hard look. ‘Where did you say you got this information?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  Marc held his gaze for a moment. ‘Is this a don’t ask, don’t tell thing?’

  ‘Most emphatically yes,’ said Assim.

  ‘And you trust this source?’

  ‘Same answer,’ said the hacker.

  ‘Okay.’ Marc hauled himself to his feet. ‘You trust this, I trust you. Pack up the kit, we’re going to Greece.’

  He left Assim behind and called out to Lucy, striding quickly across the hangar.

  ‘Hey! Where’s Ari?’

  Lucy caught the urgency from him.

  ‘Catching some shut-eye, like we all should. What’s the hustle?’

  ‘Wake him up. Assim has a lead, we need to follow it.’

  He waited for her to react, but Lucy shook her head, and looked past him, out towards the airbase.

  ‘I reckon that’s gonna be a tough sell,’ she said.

  *

  Marc turned to see what Lucy had already spotted. Tracey Lane marched towards them with a face like thunder and a two-man armed escort at her heels. The guards waited outside the hangar, but Lane came in angry and looking for somewhere to dump it.

  Lucy knew that expression. She’d seen it in the mirror enough times.

  Lane didn’t waste a s
econd with preamble.

  ‘It’s as bad as you think. Welles has everyone back at Hub White scrubbing their feeds for incriminating data—’

  ‘They should be trying to clear us!’ said Suresh, but he fell silent again when Lane gave him an acid glare.

  ‘According to him, Six are reviewing the situation, which for now means saying sod all and letting the accusations fly.’ Lane cast a weary look in Marc and Lucy’s direction. ‘The long and the short of it is, we’re on lockdown for the time being. Welles is coming out himself on the next available flight with his incident team, whatever that means.’

  ‘It means his pit bulls from the ninth floor,’ said Regis.

  Victor Welles ran the department at MI6 whose primary function was to police the officers of the agency, and investigation of a catastrophic mission failure like this one was squarely in his purview.

  ‘I’ve been here before,’ said Marc, under his breath. ‘I have no desire to do it over again.’ He spoke up. ‘That’s an interrogation for all of us, Lane. You know it and I know it . . .’

  ‘We don’t have time for that crap,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Welles will handle the debrief,’ Lane continued, ‘and we’ll go from there.’

  ‘What about our target?’ Pearce broke his sullen silence.

  Lane looked away. ‘Other assets will be tasked with that. Like I said, we’re stood down until this is cleared up. Six can’t have us in the field right now if our faces are plastered over the news.’

  ‘We stand here with our thumbs up our arses and we lose our lead!’

  Marc advanced on Lane, and for a second Lucy thought he was squaring up for a fight.

  ‘Back off,’ warned Lane, but he shook his head.

  ‘What lead?’ said Regis.

  Marc filled them in on the information Assim had dredged up from his anonymous dark web buddies on the drone control trace and the barge in Rhodes harbour.

  ‘The way I see it, we have half a day at best to get there and sweep for whatever Sam left behind.’

  ‘And what makes you think that won’t be the prelude to another ambush?’ Lane made an angry, cutting gesture at the air. ‘Your ex roped us in twice, Dane, laid down a false trail just like that one. You want to go for three fuck-ups in a row?’

  ‘This is different,’ he insisted.

  ‘How so?’

  The question escaped Lucy before she was even aware she’d asked it. But once it was out there, she didn’t want to call it back. As much as she trusted Marc, Lane had a point. Their quarry was making a habit of the sucker-punch play, and they would be fools to let her do it again.

  Marc seized on the question. ‘Because she knows how this is supposed to shake out. An OpTeam mission fail means hold for evaluation. She knows those protocols! She knows we’ll be taken off the board. But if we keep going, keep chasing her—’

  Lane made a hissing noise. ‘Did you miss the bit where I said the word lockdown, Dane?’

  Marc was silent for a moment. He glanced at Lucy, and she knew he was going to go next.

  ‘I heard it. Now you hear this.’ He leaned in. ‘We don’t work for MI6, remember?’ Marc gestured at the other members of the Rubicon team. ‘We don’t have to jump when that prick Welles cracks the whip.’

  ‘You think you can just fly out of here?’ Suresh got up, eyeing him.

  ‘We have good intelligence.’ Assim stood with his laptop, gripping it like a shield. ‘We have to chase it down.’

  Suresh gave him a withering look. ‘Stay out of this, nerd.’

  Lucy expected Lane to kick off angry, but she went a different way, matching Marc toe to toe.

  ‘You know Welles already has a serious dislike for you and Rubicon. He thinks you’re loose cannons. You make a run for it and you prove him right!’

  ‘We’re not running from anything,’ said Marc, ‘and I am long past giving a toss about what Victor Welles thinks of me.’

  ‘You reckon you can still get to Grace? Get to the bottom of this?’ Regis asked the question on everyone’s mind.

  ‘That’s the idea.’ Marc kept his eyes on Lane. ‘Are you going to try to stop us?’

  The question hung in the air, the tension in the hangar pulling drum-skin tight, and in that instant the simmering rivalry between Paladin and the SCD operatives was laid bare. When Lane didn’t answer Marc’s challenge soon enough, it was Suresh who sounded off.

  ‘Why are you so eager to be gone all of a sudden?’ He pointed at the jet. ‘Are you afraid something else is going to come up? Something you don’t want found out?’ Pearce protested, but the other man was on a roll and talked right over him. ‘Maybe you’re in it with Grace or whatever the fuck she’s called. Maybe you set us up.’

  ‘Maybe you set us up!’ Assim blurted out the retort.

  Lucy had to intervene before someone did something stupid.

  ‘Cool down, everyone. Look, no one likes this, but what we have now is a bunch of bad options.’

  ‘You’re not allowed to leave,’ said Lane, slow and clear.

  But something had shifted behind her eyes. Marc saved her life back in the terminal building. Was she weighing that up, measuring the debt?

  ‘You’re not going to get in the way,’ Marc replied. He said it matter-of-fact, not like a threat, and Lane didn’t counter.

  ‘Those apes will give it a shot.’ Pearce jerked his chin in the direction of the RAF guards out on the apron.

  ‘Not if we give them something else to think about.’

  Regis rose to her feet. Suresh started to complain, but the other woman shut him down with a glare.

  Lane scowled. ‘Well, we’re already in deep shit. A little more isn’t going to make much difference.’

  *

  The black smoke from a burning tyre doused in flammable engine degreaser coiled up from behind the hangar. It did the trick, drawing the attention of the RAF guards long enough for Ari to start the HondaJet’s twin over-wing engines.

  Normally, the business of setting up the swift little executive jet for take-off was an involved and measured process, but Ari threw the manual aside and went back to his fighter pilot roots, spinning up the aircraft to power even as it rocked against the chocks holding the wheels in place.

  Assim and Malte were already on board, strapping in for what was going to be a hostile departure. Lucy bounded up the stair ladder ahead of Marc, but he hesitated on the lowest rung, turning back to see Lane standing behind him.

  ‘This is the best you’ll get from me!’ she called, over the rising whine of the jets. ‘So don’t waste it!’

  ‘Come with us!’ He hadn’t thought to make the offer until that second, but as soon as he did she knew he meant it. ‘We could use you!’

  ‘Idiot,’ she snapped back, as Pearce pulled the chocks and threw a salute to the cockpit. ‘Someone’s gotta look out for John.’

  ‘Yeah—’

  ‘Dane!’ Lucy bellowed at him from the open hatch as the jet began to roll. ‘What the hell, man? Get in here!’

  She grabbed a handful of his jacket and pulled.

  Marc lurched into the cabin, and dragged the hatch shut behind him. Up at the front of the aircraft, Ari had the cockpit door open, and through a side window Marc saw the guards coming back at a full-tilt run. But the jet was already out of the hangar, and Ari gave a nasty chuckle as he put more power to the engines, sending a heavy pulse of exhaust wash into their path.

  The guards staggered and fell as loose debris from inside the hangar whipped into the morning air.

  ‘This is your captain speaking,’ called Ari, as calm and steady as any commercial airline pilot. ‘You know the drill. Seatbelts on, seat backs up, tray tables down, all that whatever. Hold tight, children, because this will be a fast one.’

  Marc dropped into the closest chair and secured himself, chancing a look towards Lucy across the cabin.

  ‘If this doesn’t work, this is going to be a real short trip,’ she muttered.

&nb
sp; The jet lurched as Ari pushed the throttles forward, and Marc let the sudden acceleration press him deep into the leather chair.

  A voice spoke up behind him. ‘Even if we g-get off the ground,’ said Assim, forcing out each word, ‘wh-what is to stop the RAF sending one of those F-35s after us?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Marc. ‘So we’ll have to fly below radar and move fast.’

  ‘Here we go!’ Ari sounded almost cheerful as the jet’s nose tilted upwards and they shot into the air. ‘This is my favourite part!’

  ‘He’s enjoying this way too much,’ growled Lucy.

  Marc watched the ground flash away to become blue waters beneath their wings, the white wave tops close enough he could have reached out and touched them. They were low, a lot lower than he was comfortable with.

  ‘Are we c-clear?’ called Assim.

  ‘Ask me again in a couple of hours,’ said Marc.

  TEN

  Marc’s feet touched the muddy bottom of the harbour, and he moved slowly, careful not to stir up any silt. He let himself float there, listening to the hiss of air through his regulator and the pulse of blood in his ears.

  The midday sun fell down through the water above, throwing the shadows of the moored boats on the surface across him. He turned in place as Malte settled close by. Like the Finn, Marc was making do with tourist-quality gear rented from a shabby little dive school a few miles down the coast from Rhodes. It wasn’t the best kit, but they couldn’t afford to be choosy. An over-generous rental fee had got them use of skin-suits, vest, masks and short-duration air tanks, and most importantly, with no questions asked.

  He signalled Malte to follow him, and the other man gave an exaggerated nod. They drifted towards the black bulk of the ruined barge, and Marc looked it up and down, thinking through his next move.

  Sometime in the past, the old craft had been converted into a houseboat of sorts, but that was being generous with the description. It was a rusting, decrepit tub, thick with barnacles on the underside and patched in dozens of places. It sat at a steep list, with a quarter of it afloat and the rest beneath the water. The mooring was in the deepest part of the harbour, and Marc assumed that it had been meant to sink all the way.