Rogue

by James Swallow

  Silence fell among them as they considered the same grave possibility. It was dubious enough for a group like the Special Conditions Division to have access to that kind of material. If Lucy was honest with herself, she had never been able to square the circle with regard to Rubicon’s covert information gathering, but she had silenced her concerns with the assurance that what was learned would only ever be used for a just cause.

  But if that kind of intelligence fell into the hands of a group with no moral compass, and no compunctions about using it . . . The thought made her feel sick inside.

  ‘Solomon’s biometrics give him access to the Grey Record,’ said Marc, thinking it through. ‘He’s literally a living key.’

  ‘How’d you know that?’ Lucy eyed him questioningly.

  ‘Because . . . After the first time I heard about it, I tried to hack the firewall. You know, just to take a look-see.’ He paused, looking uncomfortable. ‘I didn’t get far. It’s air-gapped, isolated from outside intrusion, layered with cutting-edge encryption software.’

  ‘You could be sacked for that,’ Assim retorted.

  ‘Report me to Human Resources later, yeah?’ replied Marc. ‘The point is, Solomon could be . . . compelled to unlock the server.’

  The Brit didn’t need to elaborate any further. Lucy had seen enough enhanced interrogations in her time to know that everyone had their breaking point, even a man like Ekko Solomon.

  ‘So wipe it.’ Lucy made the decision without a moment’s hesitation. ‘You can do that, right?’

  ‘Not with a single keystroke, no,’ said Assim. ‘It’s not designed like that. The server is virtually hacker-proof, as Marc learned, and that means it can’t easily be erased.’

  ‘Well, how is it designed?’ she demanded. ‘And how do we go fuck it up?’

  ‘You have any C-4 on you?’ said Marc, only half-joking. She shook her head.

  ‘I don’t have a plan for . . . ah . . . that contingency,’ admitted the hacker, and he tacked on a hasty addendum as Lucy took a warning step towards him. ‘But I can come up with one! I need ten or twenty minutes and some more coffee, probably.’

  ‘The cops are already sweeping the building,’ Lucy noted, pointing at the monitor. ‘So twenty minutes is a luxury we don’t have.’

  ‘Then I’ll buy us some time,’ said Marc, gathering up his jacket. ‘I got an idea. It’s a bit of a risk, though.’

  Lucy scowled at his flippant tone. ‘Oh, that’s original.’

  THIRTEEN

  Sigalov crossed the building’s atrium, giving the Monaco cops a hard glare as he passed. The mercenary had been recruited into ALEPH right out of the Bratva clans, stepping up from his criminal life as a brodyaga and into an elite hunter-killer squad. But he would not forget the bone-deep hatred of police learned on the streets of Saint Petersburg, no matter what country they came from or what badges they wore.

  The local musor moved out of his way quickly, and Sigalov liked that just fine. The word meant trash, like other criminals in other countries called the police pigs or filth, and that was how he always thought of them – as something he would scrape off his shoes. Maybe if it turned violent, some of them might get caught in the crossfire, he mused. What a pity that would be.

  Milost threw him a nod from where she stood, arms folded in front of her as she pretended to listen to the French cop, Dupuis. He was still salty about being put in second place, but at the same time he didn’t want to take responsibility for what was going on. That gave Sigalov even more reason to dislike him.

  One of the white-shirted cops reacted to something, his hand dropping to the pistol holstered at his waist, and Sigalov spun to intervene. A skinny, wolfish-looking man walked in from across the street with his hands raised in surrender. He had dirty blond hair and a searching gaze.

  Sigalov knew who he was. The Chinaman had briefed them on a number of ‘targets of interest’, and this one was high on the list: the British spy, Dane.

  The mercenary pulled his gun in a quick motion, the Stechkin pistol coming up to aim at a point right between the other man’s eyes. Sigalov was aware of Milost coming around behind the man, outside his line of sight, her gun already out. Dupuis started complaining about the weapons, but the ALEPH operatives ignored him.

  ‘Stop,’ Sigalov snarled, in thickly accented English. ‘Get on your knees.’

  ‘All right, tough guy. Settle down.’ Dane made no move to obey. ‘I came to you, didn’t I? But I’m not talking to the monkey, I want the organ grinder.’

  Sigalov didn’t know the idiom, and the confusion showed on his face.

  But Milost understood.

  ‘He wants to talk to Lau,’ she said in Russian.

  Dane jerked in surprise at the sound of her voice, twisting around to see her aiming her pistol at his chest. His eyes widened and Sigalov saw his own confusion mirrored in the Britisher’s expression. The arrogance Dane had arrived with vanished in an instant, and he was staring at Milost like he knew her, like something was very, very wrong.

  ‘Hey, you,’ said Milost, her accent mimicking Dane’s. ‘We gotta stop meeting like this.’

  ‘Sam . . .’ he said, half-whispering, one hand reaching up to her pale and unblemished cheek, faltering halfway. ‘Your face . . . What happened to all the scars? You were burned . . .’

  ‘Those were never real, love.’ Her lip twisted, and she gave him a mocking, patronising look. ‘I’m not who you think I am.’ She pushed her gun into his sternum. ‘Don’t blame me for wanting to look pretty.’

  Milost threw Sigalov a nod, and he grabbed the Britisher by the shoulder, hauling him away in an iron grip.

  *

  Ari Silber looked up from the A350’s pre-flight checks as a silver G-Wagen entered the open hangar, halting near the fuel bowser. He leaned forward, catching sight of two women and a man in black combat jackets as they jumped out and advanced on the aircraft.

  Malte Riis was down there with the ground crew, and the Finn immediately moved to intercept the new arrivals. Malte looked up at the Airbus’s cockpit and mouthed a single word. Trouble.

  ‘Chara.’

  Ari sounded out the curse and cast around, wondering what his next move should be.

  After arriving at Nice, he’d leaned on Rubicon’s good relationship with the airport management to get the little HondaJet straight into cover and out of sight, all the better to stay hidden in the wake of the team’s less-than-legal departure from Cyprus. But once the smaller executive jet had been safely parked in the corner of the cavernous Rubicon hangar, he set straight to work on readying Ekko Solomon’s other private aircraft for immediate departure. No order had been given, but he knew from experience how quickly circumstances could escalate around the Special Conditions Division.

  The bigger Airbus A350–900 was a twin-engine airliner with a fifteen thousand kilometre range and a cruising speed of five hundred knots, and her flight deck was Ari Silber’s usual office. Converted for Solomon’s personal use as both an office in the sky and a mobile crisis centre for SCD operations, the A350 was self-sufficient and packed with military grade systems that could help it avoid detection and deflect attack. But none of that was any use while the bird was still on the ground.

  With Marc, Lucy and Assim in Monaco, Ari didn’t need to wonder what was likely to come next. They were in the middle of something dangerous here, and they had to be ready to move at a moment’s notice.

  The arrival of these black-jacketed thugs told the pilot his instincts were right on the money.

  He slipped out through the galley, and stayed in cover by the forward doorway, straining to hear the conversation down on the hangar floor.

  ‘Who is in charge here?’ said the man. He had oily black hair and wraparound sunglasses that seemed a size too small for his head.

  Malte jerked a thumb in the direction of the Airbus.

  ‘We are working with Interpol,’ said one of the women.

  She wa
s muscular, unsmiling and narrow-eyed. The other woman, a taller brunette with her hair up in tight braids, matched the taciturn Finn for his silence.

  As if to underline the woman’s words, the man in the sunglasses produced an identity card. Malte glanced at it, and even at a distance, Ari could see he wasn’t impressed.

  ‘You will suspend aircraft operations immediately,’ continued Sunglasses.

  His accent was Ukrainian, Ari guessed, and Muscles sounded like a Muscovite.

  So, Russian mercenaries, the pilot said to himself. That’s not ideal.

  ‘We are here to secure this hangar and everything in it. You understand?’

  Sunglasses was beginning to get annoyed with Malte’s silent treatment.

  A prickle of fear tightened over Ari’s chest and he drew back into the cabin, running the same kind of rapid mental threat assessment he used to in his days of flying fighters.

  If these mercs are here, then they’re in Monaco as well. If no one stopped them coming in, that’s a bad sign. This has to be a move against Rubicon, cutting off exit routes . . .

  He wondered about Marc, Lucy and the others. The fact that they hadn’t contacted him was worrying.

  Ari returned to the cockpit for his Rubicon-issue smartphone, but when he attempted to call the SCD team the communication was immediately cancelled. Not good.

  He could hear raised voices in the hangar. He didn’t have much time.

  Ari’s wife answered her phone on the third ring.

  ‘You’re back?’ she said, her voice like honey.

  He sat on the arm of the co-pilot’s chair and schooled his own reply.

  ‘Not exactly, ahuva. It’s complicated.’

  Her tone became severe. ‘Ari Silber, you are going to tell me what is wrong right now.’

  He grinned ruefully. Bless her, but Vada was like a heat-seeker, able to lock right onto him whatever chaff he tried to use to obfuscate. Twenty years of marriage had made him transparent to his wife, and he loved her for that.

  ‘Vada, do you remember what it was like when I was deployed? I told you there might come a time when you’d need to take the children and get away, no questions asked.’

  He heard her take a shaky breath. ‘We left that behind. There’s no war here.’

  ‘No, we didn’t. And I’m afraid there is.’ He could hear boots coming up the boarding stairway. ‘Do it now, my love. Please?’

  She didn’t question him; she knew he meant what he said.

  ‘All right.’ Vada fell silent, and for a moment he could hear his son Ezra and daughter Leah playing in the background. ‘Ari, I’m afraid.’

  ‘No, wife. You’re brave.’ He had to fight to keep his voice steady. ‘I love you. I’ll be with you again as soon as I can.’

  He cut the call as the brunette with the braids appeared in the galley space. Ari stood up, feigning surprise, palming his phone.

  ‘Hey, you can’t be up here!’

  ‘You are the pilot?’

  ‘He went home for the day,’ Ari lied. ‘I’m ground crew.’

  He plucked at the orange high-visibility vest he was wearing, grateful that he had left his shirt with captain’s boards hanging up in the crew closet.

  She waved an ID badge at him.

  ‘Shut down the aircraft.’

  ‘I can’t do that!’ He made a deliberately big, expansive gesture of denial. ‘We’re in the middle of an engine systems diagnostic! Shut it down halfway and you’ll have explosive jet fuel pissing out all over the hangar – you want that to happen?’

  None of that was true, but Ari gambled that Braids here didn’t know anything about aviation.

  Fate came up in his favour.

  ‘Just you on board?’ She made a face but she didn’t question the story. Off his nod, she stepped back. ‘Okay, you stay in there and when you are done, shut it down. Understand?’

  ‘Sure, sure.’

  He watched her stalk away down the length of the cabin, then shot a look out of the cockpit window. Malte was still in view, silent and unresponsive as Sunglasses stood in front of him making annoyed jabbing motions with one hand.

  Trouble indeed, thought Ari.

  *

  Marc’s plan had been simple. Emerging from the hidden escape tunnel across the street from the Rubicon tower, he walked back in, right through the front door and gave himself up. He was gambling that he could play off ALEPH against the Monaco police and chew up their time while Lucy and Assim set an exit plan into operation.

  That fell apart when he saw her face again. Sam, or Grace, or Milost, which was what the mercenaries were calling her.

  He’d told himself he would be ready the next time they crossed paths, but that turned out to be wishful thinking. She stopped him dead, like she had before.

  There she was, standing opposite him as the express elevator rose to the tower’s upper floors. The scars from the horrific burns she had suffered during the catastrophic Dunkirk operation were gone.

  Had they ever really been there? Because if this woman wasn’t Samantha Green, then . . .

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ He couldn’t break away from staring at her.

  ‘Take a photo,’ she replied, in an authentic North London drawl. ‘It’ll last longer.’

  Then she switched to Russian and said something to the broad, bald-headed bruiser who had threatened him down in the lobby. The other man sniggered, eyeing Marc with a predatory sneer.

  They stopped on the lower conference level, and he was pushed out into a busy scene. Marc saw police officers from the Monaco SIU and a dozen regular cops, some of them interrogating Rubicon’s security staff, others poring over floor plans of the tower as they plotted out their search of the premises.

  Nobody intervened as Marc was marched to an isolated room. His escorts waited outside, and Marc found himself alone with the suited man he had seen earlier on the monitors.

  ‘Take a seat, if you wish.’

  The man was making himself tea, keeping a narrow table and chairs between them.

  Marc automatically sized him up as a potential aggressor. He was old and wiry in that way that a lot of Chinese men could be, but there was something deceptive in his build and movement. Marc glanced at the metal cane by his side. As a weapon, it could be lethal in the right hands.

  Marc had been careful to leave his kit behind with Lucy, so he scanned the room, looking for anything that might come in useful. Some heavy objects, the little tea urn . . . If push came to shove, he could improvise, but with two armed guards outside the door there were not a lot of opportunities.

  Marc deliberately did not look in the direction of the abstract sculpture at the far end of the room, where he knew a security camera was hidden. He would have to trust that Assim could find him in this one out of hundreds of individual rooms inside the Rubicon tower.

  Instead, his gaze kept slipping back towards the frosted glass door, and the silhouette of the woman standing guard in front of it.

  Who the hell are you? The question echoed around and around in his head.

  The older man sat, and told Marc his name was Lau. He flashed an Interpol badge, but he did so with such disdain that Marc had the immediate sense it was a fig leaf of a cover.

  ‘Your name is Marc Dane,’ said Lau. ‘Royal Navy helicopter crew, turned MI6 field technician, turned private intelligence operative. Do you find your work with the Rubicon Group rewarding, Mr Dane?’

  ‘You meet a lot of interesting people.’ Marc kept his tone steady. ‘You see a lot of the world.’

  ‘You tell a lot of lies,’ added Lau. ‘That is the stock-in-trade of a spy, isn’t it?’

  ‘You tell me. Been with Interpol for long, have you?’

  Lau chuckled, not even bothering to deflect the veiled accusation.

  ‘Truth is such a malleable thing, I have found. I have spent years in cages, because some men wanted one truth to be false and another to be correct.’

  Marc’s gaze drifted to
the door again, and he pulled it away.

  ‘Sad story,’ he offered. ‘What’s it got to do with me?’

  ‘Secrets are cages too, Mr Dane. You’ve been inside one for quite a while now, without being aware of it. Ekko Solomon has been lying to you about who he is since the day you met him.’

  Marc tried to hide the flash of doubt that coursed through him, but Lau was watching for it. He had known it would be there.

  ‘Solomon is not a good man. He is a killer, with a great deal of blood on his hands. There are graves upon graves in the African dirt that he is responsible for filling.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Marc shook his head. ‘Let me guess – you have proof? Good for you. These days I don’t trust anything I haven’t seen for myself, and even then I’m still doubtful.’

  ‘Only weak men need to armour themselves with lies.’ Lau’s reply was icy. ‘Solomon knows his own guilt, and I think you suspect it. All this?’ Lau gestured around at the walls with his teacup. ‘You know why it exists? It is nothing more than Solomon’s elaborate attempt to shield himself from his past, and a pitiful effort at atoning for it.’ He took a sip. ‘A great hubris for one to have such ego that it draws others into the orbit of his penitence. Solomon risks you and those like you in his attempts to balance the scales of his guilt. It is a rich man’s vanity.’

  ‘I don’t know you,’ Marc replied, after a moment. ‘But I reckon I know who you work for.’

  ‘Rubicon would not exist without me,’ Lau told him. ‘I was there at the beginning.’ He put down the cup, unable to hide a grimace. ‘I have my own scales, Mr Dane. I am here because only I can carry the truth. Only I can open the cages.’ He leaned back in his chair, studying Marc through hooded eyes. ‘But enough of me and enough about Ekko. You are the question at hand, you and the choice you make next.’

  Marc caught Lau’s use of Solomon’s first name, the odd cadence to it. It took him a second to put it together, and then he was sure. They were friends once. You can’t hate an enemy that much.

  ‘In the spirit of truth, I will be direct,’ said Lau. ‘Ask any question you wish, but first, let me say this. I personally bear you no malice, but you have become . . . What is the phrase? Collateral damage. This is the reality for you. All you can do is think of how to mitigate harm to yourself and your comrades.’