Rogue

by James Swallow

  Lucy made a buzzing noise through her teeth.

  ‘That sounds extremely unsafe,’ said Delancort.

  ‘Oh, shit, yeah.’ Marc’s head bobbed. ‘I mean, really, really fucking dangerous.’

  Solomon walked to the console, pulling a slim key card from an inner pocket.

  ‘I will destroy it before I see it in the hands of the Combine.’

  *

  Lau stumbled through the doors of the conference level and into the midst of Dupuis and his men, cursing himself.

  His will was strong, undimmed by years of confinement, but he felt fury at the weakness in his flesh. The beatings, the malnourishment and the frigid prison cells had damaged him beyond recovery. He would never be the man he once was.

  He was in pain from the exertion of fleeing Solomon’s apartments, but it was better that than allowing himself to lose the game. Lau was within striking distance of his goal, his promised revenge. He would die before he allowed it to slip from his grasp.

  Dupuis came striding over, demanding to know what was going on, but Lau waved him away with the cane, searching for the woman in the black jacket.

  ‘Sigalov is dead,’ she told him, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial hush. Cuts and contusions on her face spoke of the violence she had been a party to. ‘Almost took me down too. Dane’s friends played us. Led us into a trap.’ She sneered. ‘They’re learning.’

  Lau’s anger, washing in and out like an ocean tide, briefly peaked again. He snarled a stinging gutter curse and bit down on the urge to spit.

  ‘Yes. They were waiting for us in Solomon’s quarters. Adaksin was killed, perhaps Gera as well.’

  ‘Shit.’ Grace’s Russian accent slipped, her Milost identity discarded like a shed skin. ‘This is coming apart. What do you want to do, old man?’

  ‘We must contain the situation.’

  He was going to say more, but Dupuis forced himself back into the conversation, his colour rising.

  ‘What are you doing, Lau? We’re getting reports of weapons fire on the upper floors, and the elevator systems are not responding!’

  Lau banged the tip of his stick on the floor with a crack of sound as loud as a gunshot.

  ‘Listen to me! There are terrorists in this building! They have killed three of my men and several civilians! They must be dealt with. We have no idea what they may be planning!’

  ‘We need this tower sealed tight!’ Grace called out at the top of her voice, backing up the story he was spinning. ‘Call in your men! Make sure no one gets in or out!’

  ‘Do what she says!’ Lau barked, and Dupuis hesitated half a second before obeying. Lau turned back to Grace, speaking so only she would hear him. ‘Where is our third team?’

  She looked at her watch. ‘They should be on station by now, holding over Cap Martin.’

  ‘Get them here,’ he growled.

  *

  Solomon inserted his key card into a slot on the console and held it, so the sensor in the card could read his thumbprint. Marc watched as he leaned close to the panel and spoke a string of words into a hidden pickup, activating the security system’s voice recognition function.

  ‘When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.’

  ‘Huh,’ muttered Lucy. ‘King Lear.’

  Marc shot her a sideways look. ‘I didn’t know you were the Shakespeare type.’

  ‘Saw the movie,’ she noted.

  A set of magnetic locks in the server’s access hatch released, and Solomon stepped away, gesturing to Delancort.

  ‘Your turn, Henri.’

  Delancort had his key card in his hand, tapping it nervously against his chin.

  ‘I am not sure I should,’ he said, at length. ‘This is not right.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Lucy turned to glare at him.

  Delancort sucked in a deep breath, steeling himself. He couldn’t stop from glancing at Marc, openly distrustful.

  ‘This is spiralling out of control. People are dead. People are trying to kill us. We need to go to the authorities!’

  Marc felt compelled to argue back.

  ‘In case it’s slipped your mind, don’t forget the local coppers are going along with Lau and his mercs! They think this is Interpol, not the bloody Combine!’

  There was something about Delancort that always brought the worst out in Marc. He couldn’t carry on a civil conversation with the man for more than ten seconds. The dislike between them ran deep and neither one wanted to try and bridge the gap. Today, that was rising to the surface.

  Delancort threw up his hands. ‘So we ignore the law and do what you say? Because that has worked out so well in the past, has it not?’

  ‘Henri, please.’ Solomon’s expression was grave. ‘You hold the second key because I trust you implicitly. But I need you to do this.’

  Solomon’s honesty seemed to wrong-foot Delancort, and he blinked.

  ‘I suppose I have no choice. It seems that is always how it is.’

  He shook his head and moved to the console, inserting the key card.

  ‘Chacun voit midi à sa porte,’ he said, speaking the words with a weary sigh.

  Lucy cocked her head. ‘What’s that a quote from?’

  ‘It is a French proverb,’ explained Solomon, as the remainder of the mag-locks released. ‘It means everyone sees noon at his own door.’

  ‘Deep,’ said Marc dismissively. ‘Okay, back off and I’ll take it from here.’

  He crouched down to gather up the ends of the thick power cables, and yanked them across towards the server module as the hatch retracted into the frame. A whiff of chilled air and ozone gusted out into the shaft.

  ‘You got this?’ Lucy didn’t appear convinced.

  He nodded at a service ladder running up the side of the elevator channel.

  ‘Get them to the roof. I’ll be right behind you.’

  ‘Are we ready?’ Assim shouted down from the open hatch high above. ‘I am quite exposed up here, I do not want to hang around!’

  Marc pushed past Delancort as he followed Lucy and Solomon to the ladder. Dragging the cables was more effort than it seemed, as they caught on support girders and Marc had to whip them across to get them into position.

  He jammed the heavy-duty electrical connectors into ports below the main server bus in the middle of the cube, snap-locking them in. Next, he shut off the fire safety system and pulled the overload buffers, tossing them down the air shaft and into oblivion.

  Marc stood back, his gaze passing over racks of brick-sized hard drives. Each one was an encrypted data store, the equivalent of a digital safe deposit box filled with hundreds of thousands of man-hours of potentially volatile covert intelligence. The entirety of the Grey Record, the collective memory of the Special Conditions Group, sat silently before him.

  Al Sayf’s attempted bombing of the National Mall; the Exile device in the caverns below Naples; Ghost5’s cyber-attack on South Korea; the Shadow bioweapon; and the rest of Rubicon’s battles in their covert war. Every mission they had undertaken, every injustice they had recorded, every enemy still to be challenged – it was in there.

  And now I have to destroy it in order to save it, he told himself. But the alternative was far worse. Marc’s chest tightened when he thought about what a man like Pytor Glovkonin could do with a database like that. That’s why he didn’t wreck Rubicon out of hand. He wants this in one piece.

  Marc marched away, across to the middle of the gridded deck. He shouted up to Assim.

  ‘Do it!’

  ‘Get clear!’ called the hacker.

  He shook his head. ‘Gotta make sure it works!’

  Above, Marc could see Solomon, Delancort and Lucy at the top of the ladder, within a few metres of the roof access.

  ‘Three! Two! One!’

  On the last shout, Assim threw the scissor-switch that made the cables go live, and for a long second, nothing happened.

  Marc rocked on the balls of his feet. Had he missed
something in the connections?

  Then the pungent ozone smell came back, acrid and harsh in the back of his nostrils. He tasted it as much as he smelled it – the bitter sting of overheating plastic and circuitry.

  A low and unpleasant hum built up, resonating in his back teeth, and as Marc retreated towards the maintenance ladder, the server began to obliterate itself.

  Fat blue-white sparks gushed from the faces of the stored drives, searing commas of purple after-image on his retinas, and barking cracks of noise sounded up and down the air shaft. The humming rose into a basso drone that made Marc wince. Sheets of yellow, smoky fire curled out from the racks, and with a crunch of displaced air, the server module went up.

  A howl of electrical feedback shook through the deck and the service lights winked out, the lifts grinding to a halt. For a moment, the only illumination came from the sunlight pouring down the air shaft, but then emergency battery backups clicked on, pouring a sodium-bright glow over everything.

  The choking grey smoke from the burning server stung Marc’s lungs as he started up the ladder, his boots clanging off the rungs. It was hard going, but he didn’t look back, and by the time he reached the top the fail-safe chemical powder extinguishers were firing, dousing the flames below. But they were too late to stop what Marc had set in motion.

  ‘Got you,’ said Lucy, offering a much-needed hand to haul him up the last half a metre to the roof.

  ‘Cheers.’

  Marc shielded his eyes from the bright sunshine as his vision adjusted, stepping away from the open hatch. A pennant of smoke had followed him up, and it rose vertically into the air with no breeze to deflect it.

  The rooftop of the Rubicon tower was a glittering field of black and silver solar panels shimmering in the morning heat. On the far side of the upper tier, a crimson EC120 helicopter sporting the Rubicon Group corporate logo sat waiting on a hexagonal helipad. Marc set off at a jog, threading through the rows of panels without waiting to see if the others were following.

  He scrambled up on to the helipad, circling to the pilot’s side of the aircraft. Marc was certified on the Eurocopter, and it would be swift enough to put some much-needed distance between them and Lau’s plans. He was already mentally plotting his flight path when he came around the nose and stopped dead.

  ‘No, no, no . . .’

  Marc’s gut filled with ice as he saw a service panel beneath the chopper’s engine compartment hanging open and unsecured.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Lucy was coming up behind him.

  He stared blankly at the empty space. ‘They pulled the fucking battery!’

  Lau was a sharp one – he would have to be to play chess with someone like Ekko Solomon – and he’d seen this move coming. Somewhere in between swarming the tower with cops, Lau had sent his ALEPH black-jackets up here to sabotage the helicopter in the event of an escape attempt.

  ‘So we are going nowhere?’ Delancort gave a heavy sigh. ‘And this is the inevitable end result of recklessness. A rash ploy fails and there is nothing else left!’

  Marc wasn’t certain if the other man was addressing him, but it certainly felt like it. He rounded on Delancort with fire in his eyes and his fists cocked.

  ‘For once in your life, shut your mouth.’

  ‘And if I do not?’ Delancort glared back at him. ‘Imbécile! You brought us to this!’

  Marc returned his cold stare. ‘You want to go back down there and watch them take apart everything we’ve bled for?’

  Before Solomon’s aide could answer that, Assim called out, pointing into the sky.

  ‘We have more company coming!’

  The distant double-thud of rotor blades reached Marc’s ears and he looked in the direction of the sound. Out over the bay, a black helicopter was coming in on a wide, curving approach.

  ‘It is ALEPH?’ said Solomon.

  ‘Likely.’

  Marc gave a grim nod. He estimated they had less than five minutes before the other aircraft was over them.

  ‘They know where we are, then . . .’ said Assim. ‘That’s not good.’ He pivoted back to stare at the smoke billowing out of the open hatch. ‘So, we try something else? I might still be able to co-opt the lift controls.’

  ‘We’ll have to risk it,’ began Marc, but Lucy put her hand on his arm and shook her head.

  ‘We have another option.’

  She moved to a bright yellow storage bin near the edge of the roof and kicked open a latch. Inside were racks of what looked like small backpacks, each one the same reflective colour as the bin. She tossed one to Marc and he caught it with both hands.

  It was a lightweight, one-shot escape parachute, an ‘egress rig’, to give it its technical name. At once, he knew what Lucy was suggesting.

  Assim fumbled the catch on his and his dark eyes widened.

  ‘Oh good grief, no.’ He offered it back to Lucy. ‘I am not doing that.’

  ‘Why is jumping from a great height always your go-to plan?’ Marc weighed the chute in his hand.

  ‘What can I say? I got the taste for it in Delta.’ She spoke quickly. ‘C’mon, let’s hustle.’

  Solomon already had his rig on, and the brightly coloured gear looked utterly incongruous over the cut of his expensive suit.

  ‘Where is our landing zone?’

  He peered over the edge of the roof, scanning the city below.

  ‘Can we get to Port Hercule?’

  Lucy looked to the south, to the glittering waters of the marina.

  ‘The Hermes is moored at the quay,’ said Delancort, glaring at the chute by his feet. ‘But you’ll never make it down there.’

  Marc pulled on his rig and secured it, before turning to Assim.

  ‘This is the only way, mate. Trust me, it’s not as scary as it looks.’

  ‘You b-bloody liar!’ stuttered the hacker, but he reluctantly followed suit.

  Marc double-checked him to be sure.

  ‘Good. Just keep your eyes on the person in front of you, use the cords to steer left and right.’

  ‘And for crying out loud, bend your knees when you touch down, ’cos no one’s gonna be carrying your sorry ass if you break your legs.’

  Lucy covered it with sarcasm, but her unease was real and she shot Marc a concerned look.

  Both of them knew that making a regular jump from an aircraft was dangerous enough. Doing it over a city, where invisible thermal air currents rose up from the streets below, added a lot more complexity.

  Delancort thrust his chute rig back into Marc’s hands.

  ‘I will not participate in this insanity.’

  ‘Henri . . .’ began Solomon, but the other man shook his head.

  ‘No.’ Delancort backed away a step. ‘To hell with this! There is a point I will not go beyond!’

  ‘Now?’ Lucy glared at him. ‘You’re chickening out right now? Shit, man, your timing sucks.’

  ‘It is not cowardice!’ Delancort shouted back at her. ‘This is my choice!’ He looked towards Solomon. ‘The board are right, sir. You have gone too far. I have tried to pull you back, time after time, but I failed to do so! Please.’ He opened his hands. ‘I beg you, stop now. If you do this, it is the end of everything. The end of Rubicon. Of everything we have built.’

  ‘We are trying to save it, Henri,’ said Solomon.

  ‘I know you believe that.’ Delancort looked away. ‘But you are wrong.’

  Marc’s jaw stiffened, and he tossed the spare pack away.

  ‘Fine. He’s made his decision. He wants to pick the wrong side? That’s up to him. We don’t have time to debate it.’ A sharp tug on the D-ring pulled the rig’s smaller pilot chute into Marc’s hand, and he gathered it up, ready to deploy. ‘We’re going.’

  ‘Five-second intervals,’ called Lucy, flipping her legs over the guard rail. ‘Assim, Solomon, then Marc, that’s the order.

  ‘I’m not really sure . . .’ muttered Assim, but Lucy drowned him out with a yell.

&
nbsp; ‘Go!’

  She threw out her pilot chute and jumped into open space. She went through a split second of free fall and then the main chute unfurled into a wide arc of yellow canopy. Lucy pivoted smoothly through the air, angling away across the parkland and towards the Beaux Arts domes of the Casino Monte-Carlo.

  Marc had to give Assim an ungentle shove and the hacker let out a scream as he fell off the edge, but his emergency chute popped on cue and he wobbled into Lucy’s wake. On the next count of five Solomon jumped as if he had been born to it, tacking expertly into the line.

  Marc moved himself into position, ticking off the numbers. Out in the lead, Lucy was making good progress, cutting confident S-turns through the air to line up her descent with the marina.

  ‘Dane!’

  Delancort shouted out his name in a warning as a metal door banged open on the far side of the rooftop. He saw SIU officers in tactical gear boiling out of an access way, brandishing their weapons. Grace was with them, her gun tracking right to him.

  A burst of bullets sparked off the metal of the guard rail inches from Marc’s arm, and he fell, tumbling off the edge of the Rubicon tower.

  FIFTEEN

  A sheer wall of gold-tinted glass flashed past as gravity pulled Marc towards the streets below. The little pilot chute was ripped out of his hand by the violent rush of air, vanishing into his wake.

  The ground seemed terrifyingly close, and the heart-stopping gap between jump and release felt like an eternity. But then the canopy opened, kicking him in the back with the force of it, and he lurched around. A rising thermal coming from a tall apartment block pushed him off course and he struggled to counter it. For one giddy moment, Marc was afraid he’d screwed up his path, fearing that he would come down in the park – or worse, collide with the side of a nearby hotel.

  He tugged on the steering cords, levelling out, and found Solomon’s neon-yellow canopy ahead of him. Beyond that, the sun was in his eyes and there was no sign of Lucy or Assim’s chutes. He hoped that meant both of them were already down and safe.

  Marc risked craning his neck around to look back towards the Rubicon building. He caught sight of figures in white shirts spilling out across the ground-floor plaza, as uniformed officers from the Monaco police sprinted for their cars. It was going to be tight, keeping a lead on the local cops. If Marc went down short of the dockside, he was as good as caught.