Rogue

by James Swallow

  The lessons that experience taught him had not gone unremembered. His life had become more secure after he joined the Rubicon Group, but he knew that security was never as solid a concept as people believed it to be. Everything that mattered to you could be torn away in moments by disaster, by happenstance, or by malice, and that was a truth most people were too afraid to accept. Marc had learned the hard way how fragile life could be, and he had vowed to be as ready as he could the next time something went wrong.

  And this was why he had assets of his own that not even Rubicon knew about: phantom servers out in the dark corners of the web stocked with bitcoin wallets, fake IDs and blacker-than-black hacking software.

  Professional covert operatives like Lucy and Malte had gear caches and go-bags stowed in left luggage lockers in major cities, in case of emergency; Marc’s secret stashes were the same, but digital.

  He nicknamed them ‘parachutes’, because they were the last thing he would grab before leaping into the abyss. Each one was hidden behind walls of dead, old files, mostly ancient abandonware like forgotten 8-bit video games or office programs for computers that didn’t exist any more.

  He downloaded what he needed from a file called Blue Parachute, concealed on the server of a Madagascan college campus, conscious of the time he was spending online. Marc was well aware that the Combine’s own hacker cadre would be out in the net, like a pack of hunter-killer subs sweeping the ocean depths for an elusive fugitive contact.

  There was one other thing to do before he logged off. Marc was still processing the sudden shock of losing Ari Silber, and he couldn’t help but wonder after the fate of another friend in the aftermath. His last sight of John Farrier being hustled aboard an RAF medevac flight stuck in his mind, and Marc felt compelled to check in on his mentor’s condition. In the midst of all going wrong around him, he desperately needed to hear something positive.

  Hacking the outer layers of a military hospital’s network was difficult but within Marc’s talents, and he was soon inside. It would just be a drive-by, he told himself, a quick look to check on Farrier’s status and then he would be gone.

  But where John Farrier’s patient notes were supposed to be, there was nothing but a blank page and a short string of digits.

  Marc’s throat turned dry. He recognised the digits as a contact number for Signal, an end-to-end encrypted communications app favoured by whistle-blowers and undercover agents worldwide.

  Someone who knew Marc Dane had left a message in a place where he was likely to come looking.

  He backed out of his hack and covered his virtual path. Marc visited Rubicon’s coded email server and peeked in at his own personal data workspace, hosted on a computer back in the tower in Monaco. The same Signal code was waiting for him. Just to be sure, he visited a couple more sites that he knew had to be compromised, and each time the message was there.

  Someone wants to talk to me, he thought.

  It took a few minutes to prepare, to make sure that there were enough blinds in place to be certain he could not be tracked. At each stage, Marc paused, questioning whether this was worth the risk. It was clearly, unmistakably, an attempt to entrap him, but he took that as a small victory. If the Combine were reduced to using the same tactics as email spammers and social engineers trawling for credit card numbers, they had to be on the back foot.

  He knew if he waited for the others to return, they would talk him out of it. Marc took a breath, and logged on.

  The numbers took him to a virtual chat room where a single participant was already present. Marc’s masking software made him invisible, so the lone voice was all alone there. At first it seemed to be an automated message, printing up line by line.

  Mr Dane, if you are still alive.

  I imagine your curiosity has gotten the better of you.

  You need not worry about the health of your friend at MI6.

  He is mending, but he has greater problems to deal with.

  The tone was familiar. Stiff, formal, and superior. It had to be Lau.

  By now you must understand the seriousness of your situation.

  Nothing less than the complete disassembly of the SCD will suffice.

  You and your comrades are in grave danger.

  Will you speak to me?

  A muscle twitched in Marc’s hand as it hovered over the keyboard. It was impossible for Lau to know he was viewing the encrypted chat room, but the question still made his blood run cold.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Marc said quietly. ‘You’ve gotta be desperate, haven’t you, mate? You don’t know where we are and that’s making you anxious.’

  After a while, Lau’s messages resumed.

  Do you recall what I told you in Monaco, Mr Dane?

  You have had time to reflect on that and draw your own conclusions.

  You are outside of the cage and you see it for what it is.

  Solomon lied to you, and I know by now his guilt will have driven him to confess it.

  You see, I told you the truth.

  How many lives have his lies cost, Mr Dane?

  You know that number far better than I.

  Marc looked away, staring blankly into the middle distance. As hard as he had tried to push it away, Solomon’s revelation that the allegations against him were true was as devastating a blow as Ari Silber’s unexpected death.

  There was so little in Marc’s life he could consider as solid and unshakable, and part of that had been his faith in the man who had brought him into Rubicon. To know what they had done was built on dark money and smuggled guns, on blood and buried corpses, threatened to hollow him out.

  More lines scrolled out across the screen.

  Solomon chose his personal cause over his comrades.

  He used the deaths of men in his own cadre to get what he wanted.

  Now he tells himself he is atoning for that with his good deeds.

  But that is a lie for himself and a lie for those he draws into his orbit.

  Marc watched the words rise slowly upwards, his vision shrinking to the train of bright green text across the dark background, with everything else fading away.

  When the moment comes, he will sacrifice you and your team for his ideal of a higher goal.

  You know him.

  You know this is true.

  Marc hated himself for it, but he gave a vague nod as he read the words. Solomon was a man of singular will and vision, and Marc didn’t doubt for one second that if it served a greater good, he was capable of making that choice.

  There is still time to avoid becoming collateral damage, Mr Dane.

  We will let you and the woman Keyes walk away.

  Solomon is the only one who needs to fall for this to end.

  Are you willing to give up your life and her life for his?

  There was a sound outside near the truck, and it brought Marc racing back to the hot, stale reality of the barn. He let out a gasp of breath. He could hear Lucy’s voice, quick and intent.

  Mr Dane, if you are still alive, will you speak to me?

  This is your last chance.

  Solomon replied to whatever Lucy had said, a low and serious rumble like faraway thunder.

  Marc scowled and clicked on the DISCONNECT tab, setting the laptop to flush the data caches and erase any record of the Signal communication ever having taken place.

  The barn door slid open with a grinding creak that woke Assim with a start, as Lucy entered with Solomon a step behind. She was carrying a grubby laundry bag, and he had a net sack heavy with fruit and sweating cans of cola.

  Lucy saw the expression on Marc’s face that he tried to conceal.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He covered with a yawn, suddenly finding it hard to look either of them in the eye. His own reaction surprised him. Why aren’t you telling them?

  Marc wasn’t sure if he trusted Lau’s offer. Anything that came from the Combine was tainted as a matter of course, but now there was a q
uestion forming in his mind, an option he might never have considered until this moment.

  If it was him and Lucy – just Marc Dane and the one person in the world he still trusted without question – they could disappear.

  And all of this, the deaths and the lies – they could leave it behind.

  ‘What?’ she repeated, coming closer, forcing him to hold her gaze.

  Marc searched, but he couldn’t find the words; and then Solomon was speaking.

  ‘Gather everything,’ he said. ‘We are leaving.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ Assim said, blinking away sleep.

  ‘For now, it is better that only I know our exact destination,’ Solomon replied, his features unreadable.

  *

  Malte took the truck’s wheel and Solomon joined him in the cab. After topping up the tank with a few gallons of gasoline from a plastic demijohn, Lucy scrambled into the back, beneath the ragged tarp that provided shade to the flatbed. Assim sat close to the front, staring out through a tear in the cloth to watch the road ahead, while Marc was low near a wheel well at the rear, taking up the shadows in one corner.

  They bounced back onto the rough track and picked up speed. Lucy distributed the sodas and sweet, red-green mangoes before taking a spot opposite.

  She pointed at her wrist as Marc worked his way around the fruit.

  ‘Traded them for his watch and cufflinks,’ Lucy explained, nodding in the cab’s direction. ‘I threw in a tactical flashlight and some euros. Along with a little local intel, it was a good deal.’

  ‘Right.’

  Marc chewed slowly, watching the sun-beaten road unfold behind them.

  When the Brit turned monosyllabic, it was a bad sign. She’d known from the second she returned to the barn that something was bothering him, but if he wasn’t going to open up, Lucy had little chance of prising it out. Marc’s go-to was to withdraw and turn watchful, and if she pushed him, he’d slip further away. He’d come around eventually.

  But she had her fill of the bleak silence that filled the truck as they drove through the night, and Lucy kept talking, hoping to hook Marc into the conversation as they sped through the savannah.

  ‘We bartered a used cell phone from one of the villagers. A piece-of-shit burner, but it works.’ He eyed her, but said nothing. ‘Don’t worry, we watched our info-sec. Short calls, pulled the SIM card and battery right after, just in case.’

  ‘Why risk it at all?’

  ‘Solomon reached out to a contact in country. His bush buddy from the bad old days. We need resources if we’re gonna get through this in one piece.’

  Marc tossed an inedible piece of mango into the truck’s wake.

  ‘We’ve not had much luck with old mates recently.’

  ‘True enough,’ she agreed. ‘But Solomon’s got this. I trust his judgement.’

  Marc’s head snapped up as she said the words, and for a second he looked like he was going to say something. Then he returned to the mango, picking off another strip to chew on.

  On either side of the truck, palm trees and greenery crowded in on the sandy highway, and low plumes of ochre dust rose from the uneven road as they passed. Women balancing loads on their heads marched along the edges of the track, giving way as they raced by, and once or twice they drove around battered pickups heading in the opposite direction.

  Solomon had told Lucy little more than a rough location for their target. The backup server was concealed in a building a few kilometres away, towards Mozambique’s eastern coastline.

  ‘Hidden in plain sight,’ she told Marc, repeating Solomon’s description.

  ‘He say what we’ll do once we find it?’

  That thought had crossed her mind.

  ‘I guess we get the hell out of Dodge.’

  ‘And go where?’

  She blew out a breath. Her patience was starting to thin.

  ‘He didn’t give me a slide show, Marc. We are doing this on the fly . . . That’s S-O-P for you, you should be right at home with it.’

  ‘Now is not the time to be working without a net,’ he retorted. ‘We need to be more proactive, less reactive.’

  ‘You have something?’ Lucy flipped it around on him. ‘I’m listening. Seriously. I know you’ve been thinking up an angle, it’s how you tick.’

  ‘I . . . don’t know.’

  And when he said that, she knew he was lying to her.

  ‘What—’

  She was going to say what are you not telling me? But the truck bounced over a low hill and the brakes abruptly kicked in with a grinding crunch. Everyone lurched as the vehicle came to an unsteady halt and Lucy fell against Marc.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Assim, pressed to the rip in the tarpaulin cover. ‘This looks bad.’

  ‘Stay out of sight,’ ordered Lucy

  She climbed up on the top of the tailgate, peeking up over the back of the truck to look down its length.

  Up ahead, a crossroads cut diagonally over the roadway, and parked nose to nose to block it were a pair of militia technicals and a big yellow Hummer H2 SUV. A handful of soldiers milled around, clearly waiting for something.

  The technicals were battered Toyota pickups with heavy .50-calibre machine guns mounted on box-steel stands in the bed. Sharp-eyed men in ChiCom army surplus gear put their weight into the weapons to bring them to bear on the halted truck. If they chose to open fire, there was little chance anyone in the vehicle would survive.

  ‘What was that you said about info-sec?’

  Mark spoke in low tones from beneath her.

  Lucy watched the Hummer’s rear doors swing open, and a huge bull of a man climbed out. He was big enough that the vehicle rose noticeably without him in it. He started towards them, the soldiers on foot stepping back to give him room.

  The big guy was clearly the top dog, as evidenced by the swagger in his walk and fact that his uniform was tailored. Like the other soldiers, the outfit had no other identifying insignia beyond a low-vis patch of the design from the Mozambique national flag – an AK-47 and a mattock tool crossed over a book, atop a pale five-point star.

  That would suggest they were ‘official’ militia, tied to the country’s leading Frelimo party, but Lucy knew well enough that appearances could be deceiving in this part of the world. Some zones down here were run more like warlords’ fiefdoms, under the control of groups who made their own laws as long as they kept the ordinary folks in line and the insurgents at bay.

  The big man noticed her and smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. His hand dropped to his hip, where a large-frame revolver sat in a fast-draw holster.

  With a creak of metal, the truck cab door opened and Solomon climbed out. The gunners on the .50s tracked their weapons to aim at him, but he didn’t react.

  The smile on the top dog’s face went out like a light as he saw Solomon’s face.

  Not good, Lucy thought, and suddenly she wished she had a weapon of her own.

  Solomon shot her a look and made a gesture with his open hand. Stay back, be calm, don’t interfere, it said. That was fine, but Lucy didn’t trust any of these men to think first and shoot second.

  From beneath her in the flatbed, she heard the click of the SCAR’s safety catch. Marc clearly shared her misgivings.

  ‘Ekko,’ said the big man, drawing out the name. ‘It really is you.’ He turned his head and spat into the dirt. ‘It shows a great deal of arrogance to come back here, after what you did.’

  He spoke unhurried, over-enunciated English with a smoker’s growl. The look in his eye told Lucy that he wanted nothing more than to haul off right there, and crack Solomon across the chin with a right cross.

  Solomon spread his open hands.

  ‘Simbarashe, brother. Last time I saw you, we parted as friends. Or am I mistaken?’

  ‘That was a long time ago,’ said the man. ‘The world has changed.’

  ‘That’s one of Solomon’s soldier mates from the civil war,’ said Marc, his voice filtering up to L
ucy’s vantage point.

  ‘He doesn’t look pleased to see him,’ she said quietly.

  The comment had barely left her mouth when Simbarashe lunged, cocking a fat haymaker of a fist at Solomon’s head. At the last moment, Simbarashe halted the blow, and burst out laughing. For his part, Solomon never flinched, but the big man didn’t notice or care.

  ‘Ice water!’ Simbarashe clapped Solomon on the shoulder and gestured to him, showing him off to his men. ‘Didn’t I tell you? This one has ice water in his veins!’

  Given permission to do so, his men chuckled, and at length the long barrels of the .50s dropped away.

  ‘The world may have changed but your sense of humour has not,’ Solomon said dryly.

  ‘The consistent man,’ Simbarashe grinned, ‘is the constant man.’

  ‘Who said that? Marx?’ Solomon eyed his old friend.

  ‘No!’ The other man made a mock-wounded face. ‘It was me!’ He looked Solomon up and down, then surveyed the truck, pausing to meet Lucy’s gaze. ‘Ekko, it seems your circumstances are in a poor state. If I ask you about the bird that fell from the sky last night, what will I learn?’

  ‘Nothing that will benefit you.’

  ‘Ah.’ Simbarashe gave a solemn nod. ‘Your plane has crashed and so have you. Did you come seeking the safety of home?’

  ‘In a way.’ Solomon paused. ‘You told me you would meet us tomorrow, on the road to Pemba.’

  ‘I couldn’t wait!’ he replied. ‘I decided to intercept you early. If you are here, Ekko, you need my help.’

  Was that jollity in his voice a little forced? Lucy couldn’t be sure, and she had already decided to stay wary of the big man.

  ‘Well,’ she heard Assim say, ‘he seems friendly . . . more or less.’

  ‘More or less,’ repeated Marc.

  The technicals moved out of their roadblock positions, making space for the truck to pass.

  ‘You’ll ride with me, brother,’ insisted Simbarashe. ‘Come, come!’ He beckoned Solomon towards the Hummer. ‘There is so much for us to discuss!’

  Solomon gave a reluctant nod and shot a look back at the truck.

  ‘Do not fall behind,’ he called out.