Rogue

by James Swallow

  ‘I apologise for neglecting you,’ he said. ‘Other matters required my attention.’

  Delancort launched into a replay of his complaints to the police, but Lau’s expression soured with disinterest. The aide changed tack, going on the offensive.

  ‘How long before they discover you are not actually an Interpol investigator?’

  The corner of Lau’s mouth quirked upwards in a faint smile.

  ‘You do not know what you think you know.’

  ‘I can hazard a guess as to who is running you, Mr Lau.’ Delancort composed himself. If he could not demand his way out of this room, he would try to reason his way to freedom. ‘Don’t pretend otherwise, it is insulting to both of us.’

  ‘No one runs me,’ Lau warned. ‘Do not make the mistake of believing that your opinion is of any importance here.’ He tap-tapped his cane on the floor. ‘There was a terrorist incident. People have been killed in this building! And I am the man that decides who is culpable. If I decide it is you, do you think anyone will listen to what you say?’ He nodded at the city outside, where the daylight was fading. ‘I speak a word, and ALEPH removes you from the world. Gone.’ He made a biting motion, snapping with his teeth. ‘Swallowed up in some nameless black site.’

  ‘Where are the board? Where is Esther McFarlane? I want to speak to them.’

  Delancort’s attempt to meter his tone was failing.

  ‘The Rubicon Group’s directors are helping me with my inquiries, and it is your turn to do the same,’ Lau replied. ‘I will start with a simple question. Where do your loyalties lie, Mr Delancort?’

  ‘To Rubicon.’ His reply was instant, reflexively swift.

  ‘Not to Solomon?’

  ‘My loyalty is to my employer.’ Delancort licked his lips. He did not like the direction the conversation was taking, and he tried to take control of it. ‘Say what you came here to say! I am tired of playing games!’

  ‘There is a backup of the Grey Record database. How do I access it?’

  The blood drained from Delancort’s face. It was worse than he thought. He had expected to be challenged on something he did not actually know, such as Solomon’s whereabouts or his plans following the flight from Nice, but not this.

  Lau held up a hand. ‘Yes, let us dispense with the playing of games, the obfuscation and the denials. Do not waste my time pretending you know nothing of it.’ That quirk of a smile rose and fell again. ‘It is insulting to both of us.’

  With the secure server in Monaco rendered worthless, and Rubicon’s resources denied to him, or worse, being used against him, Ekko Solomon’s options were scarce indeed. There were few places he could go to ground, fewer still where he might seek some way to protect himself.

  Delancort felt suddenly light-headed, detached from the moment, as the import of what he knew became clear to him.

  ‘Ekko is finished,’ said Lau. ‘This struggle is already over. All that remains is for you to choose where you will be standing, when the dust settles.’

  *

  As nightfall approached the hills of Corsica, the Italian returned to give Pytor Glovkonin a repeat performance of his strutting routine.

  His helicopter dropped out of the sky with great drama, the glossy shape glittering as it caught the lights of the mansion house. Presently, he disembarked with the German woman in tow, and the secretary-bodyguard studied Glovkonin blankly with her doll-like, predatory eyes.

  ‘I was passing,’ lied the Italian, ‘and I simply had to congratulate you, my friend!’ He slapped Glovkonin on the back with false bonhomie. ‘You must be pleased, eh? I expected to see a smile on that face!’

  ‘When we are done,’ he replied. ‘It is too soon to celebrate.’

  ‘Ah, so you say!’ The Italian chuckled. ‘I say, enjoy each victory as it comes to you. Like savouring each sip of a fine wine.’ He looked around, as if seeking something. ‘Speaking of which . . . Have one of your men bring us something to drink, eh? I know you have a few bottles of good rosé in the stocks. Perhaps that Sciacarello?’

  Glovkonin nodded to his bodyguard Misha, who stood waiting near the helipad, and the man stepped away. He didn’t dwell on how the Italian knew the exact contents of the mansion’s wine cellar. It was another calculated statement, intended to remind Glovkonin of his place.

  ‘Let’s walk and talk.’

  The other man led him into the ornamental gardens, and Glovkonin allowed it. A cool breeze was coming in off the sea, gently stirring the trees.

  ‘Are they satisfied?’

  Glovkonin decided to cut to the immediate matter, and looked out over the steep hillside.

  ‘Our friend Lau was as good as his word,’ said the Italian, with a flat chuckle. ‘Rubicon is in disarray. Solomon has fled.’ He eyed Glovkonin. ‘So far, you have delivered what was expected. Consider the committee pleased, Pytor.’

  It took a lot for him to ignore the other man’s patronising tone.

  ‘I keep my promises.’

  ‘Yes.’ The Italian smiled as Misha returned with the wine on a silver tray. He took a glass and toasted the air. ‘Here’s to success.’ He sipped and gave the bodyguard an indulgent nod. ‘Perfetto!’

  Glovkonin took a glass for himself, for appearances only. Wine was the drink of self-indulgent aristocrats and old men. He preferred something stronger.

  Get to the point. He wanted to say the words out loud, and the Italian seemed to sense it.

  ‘We have taken full advantage of the opportunities this scenario presented.’ The Italian took another sip of wine. ‘Ah. Our financial assets in Europe and the Far East have been deployed to manipulate market trends and share prices. The value of Rubicon Group stock has been severely depressed by news of their misdeeds!’

  Monitoring the Nikkei, Dow Jones and NASDAQ indices, Glovkonin was well aware of Rubicon’s tainted fortunes. The company board were distancing themselves from Solomon, without need of external coercion from Lau and the ALEPH thugs. Esther McFarlane, the interim chief executive officer, had made a statement assuring the public that all issues would be dealt with quickly. But investors were already cutting and running in droves.

  The Italian gave a sigh. ‘Confidence in Solomon’s company wanes. We will continue to exacerbate that situation. It will become, as the British call it, a carve-up.’ He made a slicing motion with an imaginary knife. ‘And what we do not take from Rubicon, we will break.’

  Glovkonin said nothing. He too had arranged for his financiers at G-Kor to bet against Rubicon’s fortunes, shorting stocks to his best advantage.

  ‘I am afraid you won’t make as much from their troubles as you expected to,’ said the Italian. His unsettling ability to read Glovkonin’s train of thought was becoming annoying. ‘But don’t worry, we have it in hand. What benefits our organisation, benefits all within it.’

  Glovkonin covered his irritation with a pull from his glass. He swallowed the overly sweet wine along with his resentment and presented a bland expression.

  ‘Of course.’

  The Italian turned his back on him, staring off towards the great house.

  ‘There is still the matter of the intelligence data accumulated by Rubicon’s private security division. I am told there have been complications in its recovery.’

  ‘I have it in hand.’ Glovkonin could not resist echoing the other man’s words.

  That seemed to amuse the Italian. ‘I am pleased to hear it. I would hate to return to the committee with news that would mar our successes today.’ He turned back to face him and the amusement was gone. ‘The database in Monaco is ruined. How do you hope to reconstitute it?’

  ‘There is a copy.’

  Glovkonin relished the look on the Italian’s face as, at last, he told him something he did not know. It was clear the other man had come here believing that the Grey Record was destroyed, and planned to use that failure to undercut Glovkonin with the other members of the Combine’s committee. He took pleasure in correcting that assumption.r />
  ‘Shortly before you arrived, Lau contacted me with information on an approximate location. I have already set a plan in motion to retrieve the data.’

  ‘Very good . . .’ The Italian recovered smoothly, but now there was a brittle note to his performance. ‘We will deploy our resources to secure it.’

  ‘That is not necessary.’ Glovkonin maintained his detached aspect. ‘I have operatives in play.’

  ‘Operatives . . .’ The other man picked out the word. ‘Oh yes. The Japanese, your little samurai? Or is it the other one, the Arab assassin? Is he still alive? I forget . . .’

  It was a poor attempt to rattle him, by showing that the Italian knew more about Glovkonin’s assets than Glovkonin did about the Italian’s.

  Saito, the Japanese, had been a Combine agent long before he fell under Glovkonin’s direct command, so it was no surprise the Italian knew of him. The Arab, as the other man referred to him, was Omar Khadir, the former terrorist cell commander with the now-defunct Al Sayf extremist group. That organisation had been wiped out by the Americans, but Khadir lived because Glovkonin protected him. In return, he became Glovkonin’s personal knife in the dark. Khadir had been the one to kill Glovkonin’s predecessor in the Combine hierarchy, and both of them shared a mutual hatred for Ekko Solomon.

  He let the comments pass.

  ‘Solomon has made a virtue of staying out of sight, but no man can be truly invisible. Over the years I have gathered extensive research material on him. His personality, his history. No one can escape their past, my friend. I will find Solomon, I will find the data, and soon neither will be of concern to anyone.’

  The Italian put on a false smirk. ‘Extensive material, eh? Do you keep such dossiers on all your enemies?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Glovkonin, and this time his smile was genuine.

  *

  Assim Kader and sleep had an odd relationship. He could go for days without it, a talent he honed in his youth during boarding school all-nighters, and it was a definite benefit when pulling a round-the-clock hacking session.

  The only problem came when he crashed. That backed up sleep debt came down like a dense, cottony wave, and he was off to a dreamless abyss. He lost nearly fifteen hours this time, putting his head on one of the beds in the Airbus’s guest cabins when they were still above the Med, and waking up to find them somewhere over the border zone between Malawi and Tanzania.

  He wasted no time getting back to work, beginning with the black hat’s breakfast of champions – a stale sandwich from the galley and a mug of dense coffee to wash down a handful of nootropic capsules. The pills were a cocktail of methylphenidate, Piracetam and Panax ginseng, brain-enhancing drugs that acted like vitamin shots for his grey matter. Assim wasn’t 100 per cent sure they actually worked, but they were better for him than his on-off cigarette habit.

  He found a seat in the common area and booted up his laptop. No one else was around, and he guessed the rest of the team were getting rest while they could. Assim considered checking in on Captain Silber up in the cockpit, but forgot about that when he saw a particular MESSAGE WAITING flag blinking on his screen. The flag displayed a distinctive icon, a stylised musical note, and its appearance made Assim’s mouth go dry.

  He checked again to be absolutely certain that he was alone, then logged on via the jet’s on-board encrypted satellite router. Moving out through a series of data proxies, he connected to the wider grid of the internet.

  The email message itself was heavily coded, but he had a one-time digital key that opened it without issue. There was no text in the correspondence, only an attached photo. It was a big file, a large, high-resolution image of a cute kitten playing with a ball of string. But for the size of the file, it could have been the kind of trivial thing anyone might post to their social media feed. On first look, it was meaningless.

  There were no instructions explaining what to do with the image file, but Assim didn’t need them. He had already agreed a delivery process with the source providing him information along the dark web’s clandestine back channels. Everything so far had been gold. He expected no less. His source was one of the best net rangers out there.

  The kitten picture went into a decoder program, and pixel by pixel, it transformed into pages of text. Through a process called steganography, the covering image was stripped away until the real data hidden within was revealed.

  Assim’s eyes widened as he read what the source had purloined for him. Most of the material came from a partly redacted file with CIA security headers. It referred to an asset with the codename ‘Regal’, a woman deployed undercover in Europe as part of a programme to probe for intelligence leaks in the EU security community. As he dived deeper into the document, Assim became more and more certain that Regal was the woman they had been tracking in Cyprus. The perfect mimic, he thought, she doubled for Marc’s ex.

  Regal was extremely good at her job. The file commended a mission where she assumed the identity of a French military liaison and under that woman’s name, placed several software implants on a computer mainframe in their embassy in Germany.

  But then Regal began to show signs of ‘intransigence, disinterest in mission goals and questionable morality’. Assim wondered what the latter meant, given the reputation of the Central Intelligence Agency for its own dubious moral compass.

  One day Regal didn’t report in to her handler. The next the CIA knew about their asset was when the wife of a prominent Emirati prince apparently masterminded a million-dollar jewel heist in Abu Dhabi. The wife was found four thousand miles away on the same day, and swore her innocence, later describing a Spanish woman as the culprit. The Spaniard was a match for Regal.

  ‘Is that her?’

  Assim jerked in shock. He had been so engrossed in the file, he hadn’t heard Marc approaching. He looked up at the other man, seeing the weary resignation on his face. Behind Marc, Assim caught a glimpse of Lucy getting something to eat from the galley.

  ‘It looks that way.’ Assim turned the screen and Marc dropped onto the couch next to him, leaning in for a closer look. ‘I asked around for intel on this Grace person,’ he said, using the woman’s other alias. ‘This is what came back.’

  ‘Where’s the data from?’ said Lucy.

  ‘The CIA by way of . . . um . . . my less than legal source.’ Assim didn’t elaborate beyond that.

  Marc gave him a sideways glance, but didn’t press the point. He read on in silence for a while, then sat back with a sigh.

  ‘Matches up with what Lau said. She’s a professional double. Trained by the Americans, but she cut loose and turned freelance.’

  Assim saw the hollow look in Marc’s eyes, and he felt a pang of sympathy.

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  Marc shook his head. ‘For what? That she’s not really Samantha Green? Forget it,’ he said sharply. Then Marc looked in Lucy’s direction and that distance in his gaze went away. ‘What’s done is done.’

  Assim felt like he was supposed to say something, but he didn’t get the chance. Without warning, the fading light through the cabin windows abruptly shifted. The deck tilted so steeply that Lucy fell into the wall, and Assim scrambled to grab his laptop before it skidded off the low table and away across the carpeted floor.

  Lucy grunted as she hauled herself up. ‘What the hell . . . ?’

  ‘Everyone belt in!’ Ari Silber’s voice barked out the command from a speaker in the ceiling. ‘I’m afraid our girl has attracted some unwanted advances . . .’

  ‘Who did what?’

  Assim didn’t immediately understand what the pilot was getting at. The airliner continued to turn hard, the fuselage rattling alarmingly as it pivoted.

  Marc ignored Silber’s order and lurched across the cabin to the nearest window, pressing his face up to the clear plastic to scan the sky outside.

  ‘There’s something out there,’ he called back. ‘Other aircraft.’

  *


  The radar sweep displayed on the A350’s cockpit monitor showed the steady progress of two arrowheads as they continued to vector in on an approach course.

  Ari leaned across to the cockpit window and looked eastwards as the Airbus levelled out. He searched the low cirrus clouds for any sign of the incoming interceptors, but saw nothing. He blinked heavily. Fatigue was weighing on him. So far, his only respite had been to catnap in short bursts over the duration of the flight, but it was no substitute for real rest.

  The challenge had come over the guard channel within a few moments of crossing the northern border of Mozambique, like a nasty surprise. The Airbus’s reprogrammable IFF transponder was supposed to be masking Rubicon Alpha One’s true identity, telling the world it was a chartered air cargo flight on its way to Johannesburg. Operating under that false flag was, by all definitions of international air law, hugely illegal, but it had never failed to work.

  Until now. The timing could not be a coincidence.

  The cockpit door thudded open and Ari glanced back as Marc came rushing in. The Englishman didn’t wait to be asked and took the co-pilot’s seat, slipping awkwardly into position as he scanned the control panel.

  ‘What’s the flap?’

  Ari pointed a thick finger at the radar screen.

  ‘Say hello to the Forca Aérea de Moçambique.’ He reeled off the name with a flourish. ‘Who are suddenly taking a serious interest in our otherwise unremarkable aircraft.’

  ‘Fighter patrol,’ said Marc, with a frown. He fiddled with a switch on his side of the cabin, adjusting a display screen. ‘This feels familiar . . .’

  Despite Marc being a helicopter pilot by training, Ari was willing to give a rotor-head like him the benefit of the doubt and allow him into his office. Marc had been a good, if itinerant, student on the occasional long-distance flights they shared, and last year he’d shown some real mettle when called upon to handle an emergency landing aboard a hijacked commercial jet.

  ‘They were waiting for us,’ Ari told him. ‘The first radio call didn’t come from air traffic control or a military command asset. The lead pilot challenged me directly.’