Rogue

by James Swallow

  Sorrow welled up in him as he stared at the object and nursed his regrets. He would never forgive himself that he had parted on poor terms with Solomon, and now there was no way to make amends. Despite everything they disagreed over, Delancort’s deep respect for the other man had never wavered. It saddened him that, in the end, they had found themselves on opposite sides of an ultimately losing proposition.

  The telephone rang, making him jump. Delancort stared at it for a full three seconds. He was a non-person here, an object lesson left behind to warn others to behave. Why would anyone want to speak to him?

  ‘Oui?’

  He tapped the phone’s speaker button and sat down in front of the computer.

  ‘How’s life in the ruins, Henri?’

  Marc Dane’s low Londoner snarl filled the room.

  Delancort snatched up the handset in a moment of panic.

  ‘They’ll be monitoring this call—’

  ‘No, they won’t,’ Marc replied. ‘I worked there, remember? I know my way around that mainframe.’

  ‘Of course.’ Delancort took a breath and composed himself. ‘ALEPH are looking for you. I’ve heard resources are being diverted to an international search. If you are smart, you will run and not look back.’

  ‘I’m not that smart,’ Marc replied.

  ‘Ari Silber’s wife, his children . . .’ Delancort changed tack. ‘They have been taken care of. And Assim . . .’

  ‘We’re dealing with that.’

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘We all are.’

  A moment of silence stretched between them, and Delancort could hear the metallic whispering of encryption software masking the call.

  ‘If you want to accuse me or decry me, you are wasting your time.’ He sighed. ‘I made my choice because I believed in it. I would do so again.’ His words rang hollow.

  ‘Solomon didn’t blame you,’ Marc said, after a moment. ‘That’s why I’m calling, Henri. Because he would want you to know.’

  Delancort leaned forward, propping himself up on the desk.

  ‘Thank you for that. I regret how this progressed.’ He hesitated, summoning the will to ask the next question. ‘How . . . ? How did it happen?’

  ‘We’re alive because of him.’ The Englishman didn’t elaborate any further. ‘There’s something else I have to say,’ he continued. ‘This is not over. Not by a long shot.’

  Delancort rose and walked to the window, his voice dropping to a low hiss.

  ‘Look what this has already cost! It is a grave mistake to go against them, Dane. Surely you can see that?’

  ‘What I see is a bloke who picked the wrong side, and now he has to live with it.’

  And then Delancort heard another familiar voice on the same line.

  ‘He looks like shit,’ said Lucy Keyes. ‘Tell him to go take a shower.’

  He froze, suddenly aware that they were watching him. Delancort slammed the laptop lid shut, and glanced around, searching for monitoring devices. He turned back and stared out over the Monaco skyline. There were thousands of windows out there, and they could be behind any one of them, observing the tower through some high-powered optics.

  ‘Are . . . ? Are you here?’

  ‘Good luck, Henri.’ There was a calm smile in Marc’s reply. ‘Be seeing you.’

  *

  The armoured 4 × 4 deposited Saito outside the sun-bleached walls of the hospital building near Porto de Pemba, and stiffly, he climbed into the heat of the day, peering around to take in his surroundings.

  A handful of young soldiers in FADM uniforms patrolled the perimeter, and they gave Saito and his party a sneering once-over. But the youths did nothing more than that, unwilling to test themselves against Saito’s mercenary bodyguards and the militia veterans who flanked the newly minted Colonel Dahma.

  Strictly speaking, Dahma was a long way outside his territory here in the city of Pemba, but every soldier in this part of Mozambique knew who he was and the battles the militia had fought, and few would dare to question him.

  Saito had arrived as the late Colonel Simbarashe was being mourned, with his former second in command seamlessly stepping into the vacated role of warlord. When it became clear that the deal between Simbarashe and Glovkonin was still in effect, Dahma became a model host, providing Saito with whatever he needed.

  Within a day, he pieced together the events of that night. The gunner of the Hind had perished in the helicopter crash, but the pilot had escaped unharmed and he established the narrative.

  Glovkonin’s orders were clear and unequivocal.

  ‘I want proof,’ he said, growling the command over a satellite link. ‘Not some bloodstained cloth or an eyewitness account. Like the ancient tradition of your people, in the samurai fashion, I want Ekko Solomon’s head brought to me in a box. Nothing else will suffice.’

  And so for the past few days, Saito had been both figuratively and literally digging through the rubble, gathering up the truth. Dahma’s men excavated the site and took what they found to Pemba, and after more money changed hands, the new colonel had agreed to show it to Saito.

  First, he came to a grubby room in a far corner of the hospital, where more soldiers stood guard. The room’s sole occupant sat on the threadbare bed, her legs drawn up, her knees at her chest. Dahma told him that she had been found several miles away, wandering injured and disoriented through the savannah a day after the explosion at the petrol station.

  When she saw Saito she froze, and he saw a new expression form on her face. The woman did not know what to do.

  He studied her. She was bandaged around the head, and covered in scratches.

  ‘Were you there when it happened?’

  Grace frowned. ‘Are you here to finish it?’

  ‘Answer my question.’

  ‘Khadir was going to kill me,’ she insisted. ‘You knew that, didn’t you?’

  ‘As far as anyone else knows, he did.’ Saito folded his arms over his chest. ‘Tell me what you saw.’

  At length, Grace unfolded her version of events, concluding with a sigh.

  ‘Solomon actually saved my life, can you believe that? I’d have let me take the bullet.’ She told him what she saw as she fled, the explosion of the gas tank and the collapse of the building. ‘I hope that fucker Khadir died screaming.’

  Saito glanced at the soldiers and the ALEPH bodyguard outside the room. He had his misericorde dagger in the arm sheath beneath his left sleeve, and he was sure that he could draw it, use it, and end Grace’s life without interruption. That was what Glovkonin had ordered Khadir to do.

  She saw him making that calculation in his thoughts.

  ‘I can still be of use to you,’ Grace insisted. ‘Just give me a window, yeah? Get rid of those yokels for ten minutes and I’m gone.’

  ‘A blonde-haired white woman would not be able to vanish easily here,’ he told her.

  Despite herself, she grinned.

  ‘Try me. Your boss doesn’t have to know. And I’d owe you a marker, big-time.’ Her tone changed, becoming sly, and for a moment she was the woman he had met for the first time in a dingy Greek taverna. ‘You think Glovkonin is going to let you run out the clock? Sooner or later, he’ll have no use for you too. You planned for that, Jackie Chan?’

  ‘I will consider it,’ he said, and left her there.

  Dhama had more for him to see.

  *

  ‘You enjoyed that,’ said Lucy, as she stuffed her gear into a ballistic nylon holdall. ‘Dragging poor Henri.’

  ‘Little bit,’ Marc admitted.

  He ran a subroutine to erase his intrusion software, which had allowed him to hack a home security camera in an apartment block across the avenue from the Rubicon tower. The camera returned to its normal functions and there would be no evidence that it had done anything untoward, but it had been surveilling Henri Delancort’s office for the past few days, feeding that data back to an anonymous server ticking over in the depths of the in
ternet.

  Lucy shifted a blind at the window and peered out into the rain falling hard on Friedrichstrasse. She watched a U-Bahn tram halt outside their hotel, disgorging passengers into the downpour before setting off in the direction of Berlin-Tempelhof.

  In the belly of the Hercules, somewhere over the Indian Ocean, they had drawn lots and she had got Germany. Lucy was still sore about that, even if her company was good.

  Marc glanced at his Cabot dive watch.

  ‘Time to go.’

  He had barely unpacked, and it took only a moment to toss his gear into his bag and throw it over his shoulder. On the hotel room’s wide bed there were two identical cell phones, each of the cheap little burners coded with a coloured strip of insulating tape. Marc picked up the blue-labelled one, and Lucy took the one with a red marker.

  They moved to separate corners of the room and made their calls. Lucy’s contact answered first.

  ‘I’m here.’ Malte sounded tired but focused. She could hear voices in the background talking in animated Cantonese. ‘On the pier at Central. All clear.’

  ‘Stay safe out there.’

  ‘You too.’

  She cut the call and set to work taking the phone apart.

  ‘He’s getting the ferry,’ Lucy offered. ‘He’ll be in Kowloon within the hour.’

  Marc acknowledged her with a nod as his contact picked up. Lucy couldn’t make out the words spoken, but she recognised Benjamin Harun’s voice.

  ‘All good here,’ Marc told him. ‘Is she behaving herself?’

  The she in question had to be Kara, and thinking of the hacker made Lucy scowl. Harun and the woman had the job in Istanbul, and part of Lucy wished that she could have taken that gig, if for no other reason than to keep an eye on Kara Wei.

  ‘Okay,’ Marc was saying, ‘you know what to do. Let us know when it’s done.’

  He followed Lucy’s example, ending the call and gutting his phone so nothing would be left to trace.

  The dismantled handsets went into a garbage bag, and Lucy took out the FN Five-Seven pistols they’d picked up the night before in Sonnenallee, passing one to Marc and checking the other before putting it into her waistband.

  ‘This guy we’re meeting, he’s ex-Stasi, right? Will he help us . . . ?’ She stopped, realising that Marc was staring at her. ‘What?’

  ‘Just thinking,’ he said, looking her in the eye. ‘I don’t want to lose anyone else I care about.’

  She moved to him. ‘You don’t get to decide that. Life don’t work that way.’ Lucy reached for his hand and took it. ‘We gotta play what we’ve been dealt.’

  ‘All or nothing?’

  She nodded. ‘All or nothing.’

  Marc had one of the hard drives in his other hand, and he weighed it there, a faint and wolfish smile playing on him.

  ‘Let’s go start a fire,’ he said.

  *

  Dhama led Saito down to the hospital’s basement mortuary, and after a roll of American dollars had changed hands, the glum, white-coated attendant presented them with a greasy body bag.

  Saito’s nose wrinkled at the stink of sour death and disinfectant, but he did not allow anyone else to open the zip. Pulling open the bag revealed a body crushed and distorted by fire damage and great pressure. A flattened ribcage was split and open, allowing organ matter to pool where it had burst through flesh and bone. One muscular arm had been completely torn off, and it lay there in the bag along with the rest of the remains, still covered in a coating of pale dust. Fingerprints were visible on it from whoever had found the limb and stowed it with the mangled corpse.

  Saito rolled back the mouth of the body bag and came across the upper torso and quarter of the dead man. Dropping his slender, stiletto-like dagger into his grip, he used the tip of it to move the rigor-stiffened head towards him.

  Omar Khadir’s face was slack in death, his umber skin turned waxy and sunken. Fire had marked him, leaving raw lesions across his throat and up to his brow. The lion of a man whose presence had stalked the nightmares of thousands was inanimate, decaying meat and broken bone. Saito looked down and saw the ruins of the assassin, of someone only fanatics and killers would mourn.

  He took a series of digital photos and a DNA sample, then withdrew and moved to the second bag the attendant presented for his consideration. In halting English, the man in the stained lab coat explained that this body had been dug out of the rubble in close proximity to Khadir’s, but it had sustained considerable fire damage.

  Inside, Saito found a charred mass that was barely identifiable, the flesh bloated and blackened to such a degree that there was no immediate way to make an identification. The corpse reeked of spent gasoline and burned meat, and once again Saito imaged and sampled it. He paused before zipping the bag closed, noting a piece of charred material that flaked away in his hand. A fragment of nylon, the same fabric that made up the tactical vests used by Khadir’s strike team.

  ‘Are you satisfied?’ said Dahma.

  Saito’s dagger blurred through the air like an arc of mercury and suddenly the tip of it was pressing into the colonel’s thick neck. The ALEPH bodyguard reacted in kind, his gun whipping out to aim into the face of the lone militiaman who had accompanied Dahma into the mortuary.

  ‘I am not satisfied,’ said Saito. ‘You are beholden to the agreement made by Simbarashe. Will you follow it, or will you follow him?’

  At length, Dahma gave a slight nod, careful not to cut himself on the misericorde’s point.

  ‘This way,’ he said, pointing.

  In the next room, a storage area had hastily been converted into a recovery space of sorts, with a bed and an outdated medical monitor for a lone occupant. A man with teak-dark flesh, half-mummified by bloody bandages, lay at the mercy of an intubated ventilator. Much of his face was lost behind more dressings, and his chest rose and fell in low stutters. Saito saw an IV line and heard the slow pulse of a regular heartbeat.

  Saito shrugged off Dhama’s hand as the colonel tried to stop him from moving closer.

  ‘No one should have been able to survive that,’ insisted Dahma, as if denying what was right in front of them. ‘Buried under it. He should be dead. Everyone has been told he is dead.’

  From behind him, Saito heard the low electronic chime of a sat-phone alert, but he ignored it, leaning in as something metallic caught his eye. Hanging on a blackened silver chain around the injured man’s neck was a comma of pressed steel. The familiar shape of a rifle trigger.

  Reaching for the metal object, Saito’s proximity caused the man in the bed to stir, one bloodshot eye cracking open to study him.

  ‘Saito.’ The ALEPH bodyguard called out from the mortuary in his terse Ukrainian accent. ‘Message from the principal. He wants an update.’

  Saito met Solomon’s gaze, and silently considered what he would do next.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to Robert Kirby, Kate Walsh, Zoe Ross, Jonathan Lyons, Ben Willis, Ciara Corrigan, Steve O’Gorman, Nick Stearn, Margaret Stead and Kate Parkin for their hard work in bringing this novel to the world.

  As ever, any errors are mine but every attempt is made to be accurate. In the pursuit of that, my thanks go to Ben Aaronovitch, Peter J. Evans, and David and Kara Mack for both moral support and sterling advice; to Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard and Lorne Balfe for musical inspiration, and to Tom Burgis, Marc Dubin, Jeff Goins, Naomi Klein, Jack Rhysider, Algarve Extreme, Deutsches Spionage Museum, Skater Powerboats, SOS Parachutes and SpyScape for resources and research materials.

  And as always, much love to my mother and to my better half, Mandy.

  This novel was written on location in London, Vilamoura, New York City, and 35,000 feet over the Atlantic.

  About the author

  James Swallow is the New York Times, Sunday Times and Amazon bestselling author of the Marc Dane novels Nomad, Exile, Ghost and Shadow. He is a BAFTA-nominated scriptwriter, a former journalist and the award-winning writer of over
fifty books and numerous scripts for radio, television and interactive media. He lives in London, and is currently working on his next novel. Find him online (along with more about the Marc Dane series and free downloadable fiction) at www.jswallow.com.

  Also by James Swallow

  Nomad

  Exile

  Ghost

  Shadow

  A message from the author . . .

  Hello!

  Thanks for picking up ROGUE, the fifth book in my Marc Dane action thriller series. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing and researching this story. If you are new to Marc Dane, Lucy Keyes and the Rubicon team, it’s great to have you aboard and I hope you’ll check out the other books in the series – and to all my returning readers out there, thanks for your ongoing support, it really means a lot!

  I’ve always said that the Marc Dane novels scratch the itch I have to write modern, tech-savvy action-adventure thrillers, like the high-octane fiction I loved from the 80’s and 90’s, with an everyman hero facing off against deadly threats.

  Marc is my way of inverting that old character trope of the “bloke in the van”, the person always on the side-lines while others are in the thick of the action. I wanted to explore what would happen if that guy was pulled kicking and screaming out of his comfort zone and into danger . . . I love the idea of a hero who isn’t the toughest guy in the room, but instead has to rely on his wits and his resourcefulness . . .

  After Marc’s journey through the events of NOMAD, searching for vengeance and racing to stop a brutal terrorist, he finds himself in dire new circumstances for EXILE, chasing down a rogue nuclear device. In GHOST he faces a betrayal in his own team, in SHADOW Marc fights to stop a bioweapon attack in the heart of Europe, and as you’ve just read in ROGUE, Marc and the Rubicon team finally come face to face with the forces that have been plotting their downfall from the shadows.