‘I’ve been monitoring a lot of feeds.’ Assim’s words were coming machine-gun quick. ‘Back channel, black core, dark web, shadow mirrors, Prism and Tempora hacks, you know . . .’
‘His blood’s gotta be 50 per cent stimulants by now,’ Lucy noted.
‘No doubt,’ agreed Marc.
Assim didn’t register their comments.
‘One of the things I did, I know I shouldn’t have because it’s technically a sacking offence, but I thought that these were special circumstances and it would be okay, well, not okay, but at least forgivable—’
Marc clapped both hands on Assim’s shoulders.
‘Mate. Take a breath. Calm down and explain.’
Assim made a visible attempt to steady himself.
‘I hacked us.’
Lucy raised an eyebrow. ‘Rubicon?’
‘Got into the building’s security feeds. Including the ones that no one is supposed to know about. And I also secretly implanted a ghost app on Delancort’s phone and turned it into a listening device, just in case. Because I was worried something bad would happen and it did.’ He blinked. ‘It did – I mean it is – happening. Right now.’
Marc went cold. ‘Let’s see.’
*
Five floors beneath the crisis centre, the atmosphere in the conference room was strung tight.
The pinhole camera hidden in the driftwood sculpture at the far end of the room had a fisheye lens that gave it a distorted view of the entire space, and so it was able to capture warped versions of every expression and every gesture as the board members cast their votes. An audio pickup built into the middle of the table recorded the silences between their words, the sharp intakes of breath.
Solomon sank back into his chair. On an intellectual level, he had always known a moment like this might come, but he had never truly believed it. Rubicon’s corporate charter was his creation, the power of the board’s vote something he had insisted on being part of those rules. The possibility that the people Solomon had hand-picked to support him would turn their backs on him seemed like a faraway, implausible event.
Not so now.
‘Ekko, please,’ said Keller. ‘Don’t make this any harder than it has to be.’
As he spoke, McFarlane’s assistant took a call and answered with a few terse words, before leaning in to whisper something to her.
‘Officers from the Monaco police force are in the lobby, and Interpol agents are on the way,’ she said. McFarlane kept her hand on the folder as she spoke. ‘Security and Legal have been ordered to co-operate fully with them. They’re waiting for the investigators to arrive with warrants, and then they’ll be cleared for full access. The police have asked us to make sure you remain in the building until then.’ She paused. ‘So we have a small window of opportunity here.’
‘For what?’
Solomon kept his voice level, but behind his calm exterior, old and long-buried instincts were awakening.
‘For you to be open with us, before we take a formal vote.’ McFarlane glanced around the room.
‘We know about the jet’s arrival at Nice,’ said Cruz.
McFarlane’s gaze turned back to Solomon.
‘Dane, Keyes and Kader, where are they now? I know you think you’re protecting them, but you’re making a mistake. Their names are on those Interpol warrants alongside yours.’
Solomon’s jaw set and he said nothing, betrayed nothing. He wondered how McFarlane would react if she knew that Dane and the others were a few floors above them, hiding in plain sight.
At his side, Solomon felt Delancort tense. His aide was the only other person in the building who knew the location of the three SCD operatives.
When she saw Solomon’s stony expression, McFarlane’s ire rose, her cheeks colouring.
‘You think any of us want to be doing this? You gave us no choice, man! You got us into this mess!’
‘It is a lie,’ Solomon repeated. ‘You have trusted me in the past. Trust me now.’
Cruz watched in rigid silence and Keller put his head in his hands, emotionally drained by the experience, but McFarlane had only just begun her tirade.
‘I can’t,’ she told him, angrily flipping open the folder, and fanning out the papers within it. ‘Because you’ve been lying to us for a long time, and it’s only now that it’s becoming clear.’
‘What is this?’ said Delancort, reaching out to pull one of the pages closer. It was a geological map, annotated with details of what could only be the locations of mass graves. ‘Mon Dieu . . .’
‘You have that uplifting story about the boy from poverty who became a man in wartime,’ said McFarlane. ‘And the man who built a fortune out of nothing. But there’s blood and bodies beneath it, Ekko. You hid it from us.’
Keller took some of the papers and turned ashen as he read them.
‘This . . . This is Corte Vermelho. Rubicon’s original coltan mining holdings in Mozambique.’
‘No.’ Solomon had worn a mask of stillness and calm for so long that when it cracked, the moment shocked everyone in the room. ‘No! You don’t understand.’ He struggled to control his reaction. ‘That was a long time ago, it was different then!’
‘How many people died?’ said McFarlane. Her tone was matter of fact, but the question cut as deep as a knife wound.
Solomon had buried the guilt so deeply that perhaps he had convinced himself that it no longer existed. Now it rose up and grasped his heart, claws of ice seizing him, as potent as the day it had happened.
For a moment there was blood and powder and dirt in his nostrils, the sense-memory unfolding in full effect.
‘The mines where you made your first millions,’ said McFarlane. ‘And the men who were killed there were your responsibility.’ She leaned in, glaring at him. ‘Are you going to look me in the eye and say this is a lie too?’ She tapped the pages with a long finger. ‘It’s mass murder, Solomon. Just like at Nicosia.’
‘That is not . . . a lie.’ He said the words, unable to stop himself. ‘You are right. I was responsible.’
Keller’s shock rendered him speechless, but Cruz was on his feet, at the door, calling in two uniformed security guards.
‘Escort Mr Solomon to his apartments,’ he told them, biting out the words. ‘He is to remain there while the board discuss this new information!’
Solomon barely heard the words, unable to look up from the damning images across the table. He finally tore his gaze away to meet McFarlane’s, recovering some of his wits.
‘Who gave this to you?’
‘Does it really matter?’
All accusation was gone from her voice, leaving only the bleak reality behind.
The guards flanked him, and Solomon submitted. For now, he had been outplayed.
*
‘What the hell is Corte Vermelho?’ said Lucy.
‘No idea.’ Marc watched the hacked camera feed from the conference room, seeing Delancort leap to his feet to follow Solomon out into the corridor. ‘Shit, you know what this is? It’s a corporate coup d’état, and we’re right in the middle of it.’
‘He didn’t give us up.’ Lucy sat heavily on one of the empty desks near Assim’s bank of monitors. ‘So nobody knows we’re here.’
‘So far,’ said Assim, typing furiously into a clattering keyboard with one hand, pointing to a smaller screen with the other. The monitor he indicated was partitioned into video windows, each showing a feed from a Rubicon security camera. ‘But the police will search the building.’
Marc saw images from the lobby of the Rubicon tower, the underground car park and the plaza outside. Uniformed policemen were visible in each location, some of them talking into walkie-talkie radios. All the exits were covered.
At least, the exits that were public knowledge.
‘There’s other ways out of here,’ said Lucy, intuiting Marc’s train of thought. ‘The bike park, for one.’
She was referring to a moped bay in a nearby alley. Beh
ind a hidden hatch, a narrow tunnel that appeared on no city maps connected it to a false air vent on a lower level of the Rubicon tower.
He eyed her. ‘You want to do that? Cut and run?’
She shook her head. ‘Nah. Had to put it out there, but that wasn’t gonna fly.’
‘Corte Vermelho,’ called Assim, spilling out more rapid-fire words as he brought up new data on his screens. ‘Location of a now-played out mining concern in Mozambique, East Africa, site of a sizeable coltan strike in the late 1990s, considered to be the first major success for what was then Rubicon Mines, the root of what would now be . . . uh . . . all this, the Rubicon Group—’
‘Solomon’s big score,’ said Lucy. ‘But McFarlane talked about bodies.’
‘Mozambique was in the throes of civil war back then,’ said Marc. ‘And Solomon’s never made a secret of the past he had there.’
It was difficult to imagine the suave, urbane businessman Marc knew as the younger man he had once been, once a child soldier in bloody brushfire conflicts, who had grown to become a leader in his own right.
‘What McFarlane said . . . ? I can’t believe he’s capable of that.’ A shadow passed over Lucy’s face, a moment of stark doubt that Marc felt too, as a knife in his gut. ‘Not him.’
Marc wanted to deny it too, but something stopped him. As much as Ekko Solomon was selfless in his cause, there was a side of him that remained forever hidden.
Something John Farrier had once told Marc came rushing back into his thoughts. For all that man’s good deeds and high ideals, he’s not the noble crusader he paints himself. Solomon is a very dangerous bloke. He’s got a lot of secrets trailing after him.
Were they seeing that now?
‘This is the next hit,’ said Lucy, staring into the middle distance. ‘First, they draw us into that mess in Cyprus with a rope-a-dope. Now the uppercut, going for Solomon.’ Her hands contracted into fists, unconsciously mirroring the blows she was describing. ‘Next comes the knockout. We have to get off the ropes.’
‘New arrivals out front,’ said Assim, nodding at the monitor. ‘Oh, they seem serious.’
Marc leaned in to get a good look. A police van halted on the Avenue de Grande Bretagne, spilling out a squad of cops in tactical gear. With it came a silver Mercedes G-Wagen, and the figures that disembarked had a whole other aspect to them.
‘Is that the Interpol contingent?’ Assim wondered.
‘Not in this life.’
Marc recognised the swagger before anything else, the telltale fuck-you attitude that certain PMCs drilled into their operatives. But the man leading the four hired guns, the one the police deferred to, was something else entirely.
An older East Asian gent, well dressed and weathered, his age hard to peg through the video feed. He walked with a stick and a steady, purposeful gait, halting for a moment on the threshold of the Rubicon tower to look up and take in the whole thing.
The man smiled unpleasantly, like someone would if they were twisting the knife for the hell of it, and then carried on inside.
‘Can we run facial recognition on that guy?’ Lucy was already prodding Assim in the shoulder. ‘Looks like he’s the one calling the shots.’
‘Can’t risk it, I have to be bloody careful,’ said the hacker. ‘I don’t want to raise a red flag on the system with too much activity. Someone will come looking.’
‘Marc.’
Lucy called his name but he didn’t turn away. His attention was on one of the security contractors, the only woman in the group. She was careful, making sure she didn’t get caught square in the camera’s field of vision, but he found himself watching her until she disappeared out of frame.
‘Marc,’ Lucy repeated, coming over to his side. ‘You see their outfits? The patch on the shoulder?’ She answered her own question. ‘Only Ivans would be wearing combat jackets in seventy-degree heat.’
‘Our old pals the Vultures,’ agreed Marc. ‘The Combine’s rent-a-thugs.’
The SCD team had run afoul of the Russian mercenary force before. Marc recalled a particularly unpleasant high-speed chase through the Polish countryside where he had experienced ALEPH’s tactical doctrine first-hand, which involved applying large quantities of bullets to any problem they encountered.
‘So if they’re not Interpol—’ Assim began.
‘It’s exactly what we thought,’ Marc broke in. ‘The Combine set this up from the start.’
*
When the door opened, Solomon looked across the room with a frown, expecting to see Delancort on the threshold once again.
But it was too soon, he reasoned, surely? Could the board vote against him and seal his fate so quickly? It had to be unanimous, and as much as Gerhard Keller and Victor Cruz had been perturbed by recent events, he could not believe that they would commit to this without some kind of debate. Esther McFarlane’s position was as clear as glass, but he hoped the other two men would at least deliberate before ousting him.
But it was not Henri Delancort who walked into his private apartments.
It was a ghost.
‘Hello, old friend,’ said Lau Fa Weng. He moved stiffly but with certainty, measuring out each step with a steel walking stick. ‘Look at you! Lord of all you survey.’ He stopped and gestured around with the cane. ‘Not for much longer.’
‘Lau.’ Solomon had not spoken the other man’s name in years, and as the word slipped past his lips, he felt giddy, he heard blood roaring in his ears. ‘You are here . . .’
‘I am not dead. That must astonish you.’
‘I . . .’
A hurricane of questions burst open in Solomon’s thoughts, and it took a near-physical effort for him to hold them back. His shocked mind raced as he struggled to process what was in front of him.
He remembered the last time he had seen Lau. Bloody and beaten, being dragged in chains into the belly of a droning cargo plane. The instant when their gazes locked – the two rebels, two friends after a fashion, one the betrayed and the other the betrayer. Decades ago, but the memory prickled Solomon’s flesh, like acid against his skin.
Puzzle pieces snapped together. The attack on Solomon’s organisation, on his people, on him – there had been a strange sense of the personal about it that he had been unable to explain. Now it made sense.
He said the only words that he could.
‘I am sorry.’
A brief and terrible rage flashed in Lau’s worn face, but then it was concealed.
‘I do not care for your apology, Ekko. I do not accept it.’
Solomon took a step closer to the other man. There was no point seeking to excuse the inexcusable. To do so would have insulted both of them.
‘My people have no part in our dispute,’ he said gently, building each reply with care. ‘You and I . . . We can settle this.’
‘I am not the only one who wants your empire in ruins,’ Lau said coldly. ‘If it were just you and I, Ekko . . .’ He shrugged. ‘It might go differently. But that is not an option.’ Lau reached into a pocket. ‘I have obligations. What I owe to you is not the only debt I must repay.’ He produced a small-frame revolver, and removed all but one bullet from the six chambers. ‘But I will grant you this favour.’
Lau held out the nickel-bright gun in the palm of his hand, like an offering.
The inference was clear and unequivocal. For a moment, Solomon considered it. He would remove himself from the chessboard, becoming the king that surrendered itself. But it was foolish to believe that if he took his own life here and now, no more harm would come to what he had built. The fall of Rubicon was already in motion, he saw that now. He met Lau’s gaze and he understood.
‘You know me, old friend,’ said Solomon, deliberately echoing the other man’s words. ‘I am not a coward. I always turn my face towards danger.’
Lau’s brittle expression cracked. ‘I will take from you what you cost me. And you will watch it happen.’
The revolver vanis
hed back into his jacket and he walked away.
Just before he reached the door, Lau hesitated, and spoke without turning around.
‘If you had known, Ekko, that I was still alive . . . would you have come to liberate me?’
They knew each other too well for anything other than the truth.
‘No,’ said Solomon.
*
‘We can’t call out for help,’ said Lucy, stalking around the silent crisis centre, thinking aloud. ‘Have to assume comms going in or out are gonna be dead or monitored by the threat force. We need to get gone.’
‘We can’t just leave,’ Assim blurted out, shaking his head. ‘That would be a bad idea!’
Marc tried to give him a sympathetic look.
‘Solomon’s resourceful. You know the kind of man he is, he’ll have an exit strategy.’
‘I am not talking about Solomon!’ Assim’s hands blurred over his keyboard. ‘I am talking about the servers!’ He threw Lucy an imploring look. ‘The Grey Record!’
He brought up a schematic of the Rubicon tower’s upper floors, directing their attention to it. Lucy saw the levels below them as the virtual model of the structure turned, glimpsing the air column that ran the height of the building and the green-power solar arrays up on the roof, near the helipad. In the middle of the animated architectural drawing was a blocked-off section, fittingly filled in with dull grey pixels.
‘Do you know what is on those servers?’ Assim continued, without taking a breath. ‘File after file of surveillance data, not to mention reports on every member of the SCD, the missions . . .’ He ran out of steam, shaking his head again.
‘But it’s encrypted, right?’ said Lucy. ‘Unreadable to anyone without the right keys.’
‘The SCD is not just you people going out and doing all that kinetic stuff,’ Assim went on. ‘It’s digital! We watch non-state actors and rogue nations, corporate malefactors and organised crime groups. It goes into the Grey Record and we sift it for weak points or actionable intelligence. Some of it gets passed anonymously to law enforcement and security services, but what can’t be dealt with by them is . . . It’s what you get given.’
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