Rogue

by James Swallow

  ‘Our construction project in the Cypriot green zone . . . ?’

  ‘Already closed down by local law enforcement.’ Delancort’s frown deepened. ‘You should also be aware that our monitoring teams have noted an uptick in online chatter.’ He made a sour face. ‘A number of so-called alternative news sites are disseminating stories suggesting that the Nicosia incident is directly connected to Rubicon’s investments in Cyprus. They’re accusing us of engaging in an attempted false flag attack, in order to support Turkish control of the North.’

  Solomon nodded grimly. ‘More disinformation, designed to obfuscate the truth.’ He looked up. ‘And the footage that was released?’

  ‘It is already with our imaging lab in Palo Alto,’ said Delancort. ‘They’re working to deconstruct it as we speak.’

  ‘That will matter very little if no one cares,’ he noted.

  Delancort gripped his tablet tightly, and finally cut into the silence that followed.

  ‘Sir, we have to get in front of this before it is too late. We have to look at the realities of the situation . . . We must consider what is best for the organisation.’

  ‘Henri.’ Solomon’s next words were cold and hard. ‘I would hate to think you might suggest I throw my people to the wolves, so that Rubicon might gain some breathing room. That would go against the principles we stand for.’

  ‘I am only suggesting that we consider every available option,’ he managed.

  A chime sounded on Delancort’s tablet, ending the thread of conversation for the moment, and he tapped at a pop-up panel. His frown deepened.

  ‘A message. From the board of directors.’

  Solomon nodded. He had been expecting this since the moment the news story was broadcast.

  ‘And so it begins,’ he muttered.

  ‘Esther McFarlane has called an emergency meeting of all senior Rubicon Group board members,’ said Delancort. ‘For tomorrow morning.’

  ‘The summons to the gallows,’ said Solomon, finally taking a sip from the glass in his hand.

  ELEVEN

  Military service had taught Lucy how to grab rest when she could. In a career operating in regions that would have to clean up to be considered hellholes, she had developed that feline skill of being asleep, but awake enough to snap out of it in a fraction of a second.

  She blinked to full awareness, ignoring the brief but seductive pull back into dark oblivion. Lucy was dreamless, or so she liked to believe. If there was turmoil going on in her subconscious while she was out of it, it stayed there, and for that she was grateful.

  She slipped off a long sofa in the unlit, empty conference room, casting around to find a clock on the wall. It was the dead of night. Whatever had woken her, she couldn’t place it. She decided it was her body’s way of paying her back for the abuse she put it through, kicking her out of a comfortable REM sleep when she least expected it.

  Those weeks in the clinic made you soft, woman, she thought, scowling at the notion. Too much downtime had allowed her body to exert control over her will, and that wasn’t going to cut it any more. She stifled a yawn and took a deep breath. Her lungs tightened, warning her to go slow, but she pushed past the moment. She moved to a spot in front of the room’s window to do some stretches.

  Outside, the streets of Monte Carlo were lit like fading embers. Even a place like this needed to sleep once in a while, and in the predawn hours the casinos and the hotels were dialled down to their lowest beat, probably accommodating vampires or the few hedonists too stupid to go to bed.

  She gave herself a silent, internal debrief as she worked through her moves. Everything was a blur of activity after Akrotiri. The hop over the Med to Rhodes had been a turbulent, low-level rocket ride, and then there was the barge and Marc’s crazy salvage operation. But he turned out to be on the money, in spite of her misgivings.

  By the time they were back in the air and running under a fake flight plan to France, Marc had teased out the broken fragments of two USB flash drives from the guts of the broken microwave oven. He showed Lucy slivers of blackened circuit board and microchip that looked to her like the shiny carapaces of dead insects, insisting that there was still actionable intel on them.

  Zapping computer memory was a good way to wipe its content, but as the Brit noted, it wasn’t foolproof. Nothing short of dissolving the drives in a bucket of acid could guarantee 100 per cent erasure.

  Lucy didn’t like trusting the mission to something with so much ‘maybe’ coming off it, but there was little else she could do. Slim chances were the stock-in-trade for the Special Conditions Division, like it or not.

  After landing at Nice they executed a rapid deplaning, with Malte and Ari remaining in Rubicon’s hangar at the airport, while Marc, Lucy and Assim fled before too many questions could be asked.

  She didn’t like the thought of putting Malte and Ari in the line of fire, leaving the two of them to face the gendarmes. But neither man had their faces on the news and that hopefully gave them enough plausible deniability to stay out of jail.

  She still felt shitty about it. Lucy knew what it was to walk around with a target on her back, and she didn’t want that for anyone else. She owed Malte Riis too much, and Ari Silber deserved better. In the pilot’s case, it was the last thing a good man with a wife and kids deserved to be stuck with.

  So far, the cops had not come calling to the Rubicon tower, which meant that the world at large didn’t know where Lucy Keyes, Marc Dane and Assim Kader had gone to ground. But every hideout had a diminishing level of protection the longer it was in play, and any investigator worth the name would have the building at the top of their checklist. Someone would put two and two together, and the proverbial knock on the door would come.

  We need a plan, and soon, she told herself.

  Her warm-up complete, Lucy left the darkened conference room and padded out onto the main floor of Rubicon’s crisis centre. Normally, the space would be manned by a handful of techs working 24/7 at sat-com, surveillance and monitoring desks. Right now it was a ghost town, with all but a couple of screens running in standby mode. The staff were gone, sent home or temporarily reassigned in the wake of the Nicosia attack, and the emptiness made Lucy uncomfortable. It felt abandoned and dead, like the dusty halls of the derelict airport terminal back in Cyprus.

  But not quite empty, though. She caught the soft rattle of a keyboard and the faint double-clicking of a mouse. Homing in on the sound, she found Assim in front of a brightly lit monitor, obliviously manipulating complex lines of computer code.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, announcing herself, and the young Saudi practically shot off the chair in surprise.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ He gave her a shaky glare. ‘Don’t sneak up on me like that. Oh gosh, I nearly wet myself.’

  ‘Wasn’t sneaking,’ she noted.

  ‘You do it without even realising,’ retorted Assim. ‘It’s rather unsettling.’ He wiped his brow and took a moment to calm down.

  ‘Why are you even awake?’ she demanded. ‘Do you know what time it is? Do nerds ever sleep?’

  ‘That is a lot of questions.’

  ‘Pick one.’

  ‘We’ve been reconstructing bits of data from the damaged flash drives. A lot of it is rubbish, but it’s not a complete wash.’ Lucy noticed that pages from the fake passports Marc had taken from the barge were showing on another display, scanned images of them blown up to ten times resolution. ‘There’s some stuff there that looks like travel documentation, but the most interesting take is this.’

  He brought up a data panel filled with more lines of code, and looked at her as if she should have been impressed by it.

  Lucy studied him levelly, waiting for Assim to remember that not everybody had a degree in computer science.

  ‘Okay, so I harvested metadata from these files, like the digital equivalent of a label? It has the encryption signature of a STRAP 2 document – you know what that means?’

  ‘You’re gonna tell m
e,’ she said.

  ‘The STRAP protocol is the security rating system used by British intelligence agencies.’ Lucy turned towards Marc’s voice, as he walked in from out of the shadows. He looked pale and sweaty, but there was hard focus in his eyes. ‘Which means the digital docs on those drives had to originate from inside the UK intelligence sphere.’

  ‘You should be resting,’ Lucy admonished. ‘Shit, we all should be.’

  ‘Couldn’t sleep.’

  Marc waved that away with a vague motion. He positioned himself next to Assim, peering over the younger man’s shoulder.

  Reluctantly, Lucy gave in to the reality that she wasn’t going back to that comfortable sofa any time soon.

  ‘Okay, so Grace either stole, bought or otherwise acquired top secret MI6 files.’

  ‘Show her the picture,’ said Marc.

  Assim nodded. ‘I was able to partly restore an image.’

  He tapped a key and up came a grainy photo of Tracey Lane. It was your classic mugshot, the sort of thing that would be on an ID pass or in a criminal record.

  Lucy made an educated guess. ‘From her personnel jacket?’

  ‘The lady wins a prize.’ Marc nodded back at her. ‘Yeah, it looks like what we rebuilt are bits and pieces of OpTeam crew files.’

  ‘I sent out the hounds for fragments of names for the rest of Paladin.’ Assim’s prim English accent held a note of triumph. ‘And came up trumps!’

  Another screen-in-screen showed positive hits for the words LANE, REGIS, SURESH and FARRIER.

  ‘I got the bally lot of them,’ he noted.

  Marc put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Mate, you’re a smart bugger but sometimes you sound like a P. G. Wodehouse character.’

  Assim started to protest, but then thought better of it.

  ‘The public school system has a lot to answer for.’

  ‘She had files on the MI6 officers coming after her,’ said Lucy. ‘Us too?’

  ‘Could be,’ offered Marc. ‘There’s a lot of data that’s totally unrecoverable on those drives.’

  Lucy nodded. ‘Makes sense. Grace is running a con. If I was her, I’d want to know as much as I could about my marks.’

  ‘But she . . . Samantha Green already knew these people.’ Lucy could see it was hard for Marc to say her name. ‘She served alongside them in K Section, like I did. John Farrier recruited Sam from Army EOD the year before he brought me in.’

  ‘It’s not just the members of Paladin she had information on.’

  Assim replaced the search panel with another. The call sign NOMAD was highlighted, along with a series of other names that included GREEN and DANE.

  ‘I’ve copied everything we have and forwarded it to Lane,’ said Marc, his tone turning stony. ‘But I don’t know what it means, or why Sam would have this. Seems off to me.’

  Lucy sat heavily on one of the workbenches, and looked him in the eye. In the back of her thoughts, an unpleasant idea had been gathering weight, picking up momentum as it took on a spiky, solid reality that she couldn’t continue to ignore. Marc met her look and said nothing, and she knew right then and there that he was seeing it too.

  Dane picked up on threads of information faster than anyone Lucy had ever worked with, intuiting connections where others would see random events. And that meant that if she spotted something, he was already ahead of her. He just couldn’t bring himself to say it out loud.

  ‘We’ve been so busy focusing on our target that we didn’t stop to look at why this is happening,’ she began. ‘What’s her objective?’

  ‘Grace is a rogue with an axe to grind,’ said Assim.

  Lucy shook her head. ‘That’s the easy narrative, the simple choice. It’s more complex than that.’ She held Marc’s gaze. ‘Isn’t it?’

  He took a long moment before he told Lucy what she already knew.

  ‘Everything that has happened up to now was to get us where we could be framed for a terrorist attack. Enticing MI6 by picking at old Nomad contacts, pushing them off balance by killing their officers.’

  ‘And drawing you – and Rubicon – into the game,’ added Lucy. ‘They dangled some bait and goddamn it, we took it hook, line and sinker.’

  ‘What do you mean, they?’ Assim’s brow furrowed.

  ‘Sam was the stalking horse,’ said Marc, his manner turning grim. ‘That’s obvious now. Which means, this is much more than a rogue officer looking for some payback. It’s bigger, it’s been planned down to the last detail. We’re in the middle of an orchestrated attack, on us. On Rubicon and MI6.’

  Assim considered that soberly for a moment. ‘Which raises the question . . . Cui bono? We have made a lot of enemies. And that’s just since I signed up.’

  ‘Okay, I’m gonna come right out and say it,’ Lucy broke in. ‘This thing has the Combine’s fingerprints all over it.’

  ‘It does fit their profile,’ admitted Assim. ‘They have a long and storied history of false flag operations. It’s practically their hallmark.’

  ‘You’re making a big leap,’ said Marc, but it was a weak deflection and Lucy called him on it.

  ‘They know us,’ she insisted. ‘They know you, Marc. That dick Glovkonin and his billionaire boys’ club have the resources and the reach. They know what buttons to push. I mean, what better way to drag you in than to bring your—’

  ‘Enough.’ Marc held up a hand to stop her talking. ‘Just . . . enough, Lucy, okay?’

  ‘Let’s say it is the Combine.’ Assim didn’t get the message, turning in his chair, his fingers working at the air as he became lost in the problem. ‘We would need to know for sure, of course. But the circumstantial evidence is compelling, especially the deepfake tech and the use of proxy operatives. I can dig into this.’ He nodded to himself. ‘There are people I can reach out to.’

  Lucy was going to say something about the dangers of mingling with black hat hackers on the dark web, but given their current circumstances, it seemed a moot point. She turned to Marc, but he was walking away, the room’s long shadows swallowing him up.

  *

  Lau’s phone trilled and he fished the device from his pocket. Two words in English script – GREEN LIGHT – appeared on the screen and he smiled thinly.

  The office inside the police headquarters on rue Suffren Reymond was modern and light, but narrow and condensed like the majority of real estate in Monaco’s expensive environs. Lau rested on the windowsill, considering a cigarette as he squinted into the darkness outside.

  The four operatives Glovkonin had provided waited patiently nearby. Three men and one woman, no two alike in build but all of them identical in terms of manner.

  A soldier knows soldiers, Lau reflected.

  The four security specialists wore black tactical trousers, combat boots and military jackets. Each had a hi-tech set of polarised glasses that also contained a radio bead, a wireless eye-tracking device and a built-in digital camera. They holstered semi-automatic pistols beneath their jackets, and the only identifying mark on their clothing was a discreet coloured flash on the right cuff and a patch on one shoulder. The patch was white on black with crimson trim, showing the design of a stylised vulture – the corporate logo of ALEPH, a Moscow-based private military contractor.

  Lau worked his phone with a thumb, tapping a fast-dial key that would immediately connect him to Glovkonin, and the phone buzzed to indicate the line was secure.

  ‘Report,’ said the Russian.

  ‘We are in position,’ said Lau. A strange sensation whirled through him, a mixture of anticipation and building fury. ‘I hope you are prepared.’

  ‘Are you?’ said Glovkonin. ‘I’ve invested too much for anything to go awry.’

  ‘You will get what you want,’ Lau replied.

  He gave the ALEPH operatives a sideways look. They were under his command, that was true, but he did not doubt that the Russian had given them orders that superseded his. He could not allow himself to forget that Glovkonin saw men as his t
ools. Lau’s presence here was not a partnership, more a temporary alignment of shared goals. It would be a grave mistake to lose sight of that.

  And yet, it was difficult for Lau to think too far beyond the next hours. Years of captivity – decades of it – and all that had sustained him was a dogged refusal to die and a cold ember of hate. He imagined that ember cupped in his hand, a cinder of dark fire, seething and burning. The glow of it brightening now, as his moment of truth moved closer.

  ‘I will remind you – for my own sake, you understand – to be mindful of our objective.’

  ‘I know what must be done.’

  ‘You do. But it is easy to become caught up in the emotion, yes? Your great patience has been taxed to the limit. So promise me you won’t shoot Ekko Solomon dead the moment you lay eyes on him.’

  The idea of that made Lau lick his dry lips.

  ‘I will try to restrain myself.’

  Through the glass office walls, he saw a group of police officers approaching, some of them in the black and red caps of the uniformed division, others in the tactical gear of Monaco’s Specialised Intervention Unit.

  ‘You are to prioritise securing the computer server containing Solomon’s Grey Record files, am I clear?’

  ‘I understand.’

  Lau had been briefed in detail about the clandestine database and what it contained.

  The Combine were very interested in that particular prize. Not only would it tell them exactly what Rubicon knew about their operations and where any security leaks in their organisation might be, but it would also give them thousands of man-hours of useful intelligence on Rubicon’s other targets of interest – many of whom were direct rivals of the Combine. The material could be used for blackmail, assassinations, and worse.

  ‘I will contact you again when I have it,’ Lau told him.

  He cut the call as the door opened, and put on a wan smile.

  The lead officer from the SIU gave Lau and the ALEPH team a wary look. He was the tallest man in the room, and his manner made it clear he was accustomed to being obeyed. He, like all his officers, was clearly unhappy about being called in to prepare for the forthcoming operation in the middle of the night.