‘I will not kill you,’ Ramaas corrected. ‘And neither will the men I sell you to. Not at first. Not for a very long time.’
‘Suh-sell me?’ Neven had expected to meet the same fate as Bojan had, in the roar of a bullet. But there were worse ways.
Ramaas nodded. ‘How many terrorists did you and your brother make fools of? They will be angry their money is gone but still they will pay to take that cost back from you in blood. Who will offer me the most, do you think? I will auction you.’ He grinned. ‘Like an animal to be slaughtered.’
Neven felt giddy, and the deck at his feet briefly became an abyss that yawned open and swallowed him up. He screwed his eyes shut and fought down tremors in his hands. All the weaknesses and frailty that Neven had been able to hide with his brother at his side were stripped bare. Inevitably, inexorably, he was drawn toward the person with the power, giving himself to Ramaas with a feeble nod before he was even fully aware of it. ‘What do you want from me?’
Ramaas sat down across from him and began to outline a plan of action to Neven. Slowly at first, building up momentum and passion with each reveal. It was audacious, risky, and there were a hundred ways in which it could go wrong – but it was the strategy of a brigand, a predator. Cunning, callous, brutal.
When at last Ramaas fell silent, Neven reflected that it was exactly what he expected of the warlord. ‘There is someone,’ he began, trying to think a few steps ahead, grasping for a way to use the situation to his advantage. ‘There is a man who can give you what you’re asking for. I know him personally. We worked together, in the past . . .’
‘Good.’ Ramaas’s head bobbed. ‘I knew it was right to let you live. Go on. Tell me about this man.’
‘We call him “the Baker”. A genius, certainly. I know where to look for him, but I must warn you . . . He is no longer part of the business. He retired as a very wealthy man. He has little interest in causes or money.’
‘Let me worry about that,’ said Ramaas, getting up to cross to a porthole. ‘God will provide a way.’ It was dark outside now, and Neven saw the faint flicker of distant lightning reflected off the warlord’s face. The ship was sailing into a storm out across the Adriatic Sea. ‘You will mark the path, Kurjak.’
‘And then you’ll let me go?’ Neven asked the question, more afraid than he had ever been in his life of the answer he would get.
Ramaas didn’t look at him. ‘I won’t kill you,’ he repeated.
NINE
‘Phobie de l’avion?’ said the man in the next seat.
Marc shook his head, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the helicopter’s rotors. ‘No. It’s more like I have a professional sense of concern . . .’
Beneath them, cerulean-blue waters flashed past as the red-and-white EC130 followed the French coastline north toward the Ligurian Sea. The journey from the airport in Nice was a short one, but flying over the water was always enough to dredge up some of Marc’s more unpleasant memories. He had hoped it wouldn’t show on his face, but that clearly wasn’t the case.
‘I used to fly these things myself,’ he added, feeling compelled to explain away his reaction. ‘I don’t like it when someone else is the pilot.’ For a giddy second, he feared the sea was rising up to reach for them – it could be deceptive that way, easy to gauge your height wrongly if you weren’t paying attention – and he closed his eyes to banish the thought.
It didn’t work. He remembered a stretch of ocean half a world away, and the heart-stopping impact of a Royal Navy Lynx’s canopy hitting the water. He took a deep breath before the recall could take hold and pull him under.
‘Backseat driver?’ Somewhere in his late fifties, deeply bronzed beneath a panama hat and an expensive safari suit, the man next to him studied Marc’s face.
Marc gave a wry nod. ‘Yeah, you could say that.’ It was hard for him not to drop back into a kind of muscle-memory, placing his feet just so where the pedals for the tail rotor would be, his hands automatically reaching for the cyclic and collective control sticks. He made a conscious effort to shake off the sensation and looked away.
Ahead of them, the dense sprawl of Monaco filled the view, sand-coloured buildings with orange tiled roofs compressed into some of the world’s most expensive real estate. Here and there, residential towers and office blocks rose up from the mass, mirrored windows reflecting sunlight back at the cloudless sky above.
Marc caught sight of the landmark Louis II football stadium as the pilot executed a clean turn and they descended quickly, dropping onto a broad concrete apron jutting out over the water. As the engine spooled down, Marc felt a tension he didn’t know he had been holding in dissipate like vapour. He climbed out, dragging his weather-beaten backpack over one shoulder, and blinked through his aviator sunglasses at the city-state laid out before him.
As the helicopter fell silent, the first sounds carried to him on the wind were the rattle of ropes on the masts of yachts and the clinking of champagne glasses from a nearby restaurant. The sun gave everything a crisp, bright sheen and for a moment, it was as if Marc could smell the money in the air.
It didn’t come as a surprise that here was where Ekko Solomon wanted to meet with him. After all, the man was a billionaire.
*
A black Bentley Mulsanne sat waiting for Marc when he exited the heliport. Standing by the driver-side door was a pale man with sandy hair and a watchful, unsmiling face. He wore a casual suit that did little to soften his hard edges. Malte Riis was probably Finnish, and probably ex-special forces, but that was about all Marc had ever been able to glean about Solomon’s taciturn driver. Malte saw him approaching and directed a nod toward the rear passenger door.
‘Hey, man.’ Marc felt a little awkward. Malte had never said more than a half-dozen words in his presence, and he was never really sure how to take the guy. On an impulse that he would swiftly regret, Marc tossed his pack into the back of the Bentley and slipped into the front passenger seat instead.
Malte gave him a withering look and the car vaulted away from the kerb. The driver took turns down the tight streets with speed, threading them through underpasses and down narrow avenues choked with clumps of parked mopeds.
‘So . . .’ Marc began, unable to fight the urge to fill the silence. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Rubicon,’ Malte told him. ‘Making a stop first,’ he added, in a tone of voice that made it clear they had covered the full scope of their conversation.
Marc leaned into the turn as the Bentley shot across a roundabout and down the Avenue du Port, heading back around to follow the line of the waterfront. The car emerged from another boxy tunnel and he saw the massive flotilla of yachts and other watercraft filling the moorings of Port Hercule.
Malte accelerated and Marc realised with a jerk that they had crossed the Antony Noghès corner, the turn at the bottom end of the Circuit de Monaco route used in the city’s Formula One races. They sped up past the point of the starting grid and the Sainte Devote turn, and for a moment Marc felt a smile pull at his mouth. If things had been different, he would have loved the chance to drive the F1 route himself.
The moment faded. You’re not here on holiday, Dane, he told himself. Focus. They were heading for the business end of the principality. Ekko Solomon’s globe-spanning corporation had a building on the Avenue de Grande Bretagne, one of many such offices that the African industrialist maintained in cities all over the world.
A conglomerate that dealt in mining, aviation, biotechnology and a dozen other lucrative fields, the Rubicon Group was also the parent entity for a small but well-funded private military contractor. Operated under Solomon’s direct supervision and empowered by a mandate that put justice over profit, the so-called ‘Special Conditions Division’ was a micro-scale version of a national intelligence-gathering and covert-actions agency operating on the blurry edges of legality.
A year ago, Marc Dane had crossed paths with them in Rome while on the run from his own
side, and that had marked the beginning of an ad-hoc association with the billionaire and his team, one that led to the thwarting of a terrorist conspiracy to murder the President of the United States and hundreds of civilians on the streets of Washington.
Together, they saved a lot of lives and – more importantly for Dane – they uncovered the conspirators in MI6 responsible for the deaths of his team, the men who had tried to frame Marc for that crime. But for all they achieved, the power-brokers behind the traitors and terrorists, the ones who set the plans for atrocity in motion, were still at liberty.
That single fact gnawed at Marc every day, and in part it had been the reason why he walked away from both MI6 and the offer of a job with Solomon’s PMC. Taking the analyst assignment with the United Nations Division of Nuclear Security had been an attempt to find some clarity, some distance. But now here he was, propelled forward by his inability to leave well enough alone, by an undeniable sense of what had to be done. Despite everything, he was falling back into the orbit of the same circumstances that had almost killed him.
In his hand, out of sight from anyone else, Marc held the grey Rubicon business card that had been consigned to the bottom of his backpack for the last few months. He turned it over in his fingers, weighing the implications it represented, before finally stuffing the card in his jacket pocket.
The Bentley left the path of the F1 track at the Portier turn and followed the line of the beaches along Larvotto. Then without warning Malte turned it sharply and parked at the entrance to an unmarked private pavilion on the seafront. Beyond it, a whole slice of the exclusive shoreline had been partitioned off with tasteful but very definite barriers to screen anyone in the more public areas from seeing within.
Marc felt distinctly shabby in his nondescript clothes as he left the car and crossed through an expansive wet bar, and onto a terrace dotted with tables and chairs. Good looking people in thousand-euro shirts and equally pricey swimwear enjoyed the sea and the sun. As Marc stepped onto the golden sand he noticed the discreet shape of the Rubicon Group logo on the tablecloths and glassware.
Two children, a boy and a girl who couldn’t have been older than ten, ran past him laughing and calling out to one another. They dove onto the sand at the feet of their parents, a willowy woman with long auburn hair and a broad-shouldered man who Marc recognised.
It took a second to place him in this context, but then he had it – Silber, from the plane . . . The Israeli was Solomon’s personal pilot, who captained the billionaire’s private Airbus A340 jetliner. He met Marc’s gaze and gave him a neutral nod of greeting before going back to his wife and kids.
Marc looked around, questions rising. If Malte the driver and Silber the pilot were here, then how many other members of the Special Conditions Division were also in Monaco?
A figure wading in from the shallows caught his eye and he got his answer. The woman was sinuous and ochre-toned, wearing a russet bandeau bikini with a thin wrap draped about her waist. Her face was half-hidden behind oversized Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses, and she had a large sun hat cocked at a breezy angle. Lucy Keyes pulled the glasses down her nose to look over their frames in Marc’s direction and she grinned a little, coming his way.
‘Close your mouth,’ said Malte, from behind him.
Marc coughed politely and managed a smile. The truth was, he was genuinely pleased to see her again. ‘Hey, Lucy. You seem, uh, well.’
‘Marc Dane.’ She made a show of looking him up and down. ‘Here you are. I like the scraggy beard thing you got going on. It adds character.’
He snorted self-consciously. ‘It’s not so much a beard, more like a lack of shaving.’
‘Right. Still got that monitor-screen tan, though . . .’ Lucy reached out and poked him in the shoulder with a long finger. ‘You been working out?’
‘Little bit,’ he explained. ‘I got tired of having my arse kicked by strangers.’
‘Huh. Fits you good.’ She took off the hat and tossed it onto a table, revealing her short, cropped hair beneath. ‘But you don’t call, you don’t write. We were starting to think you’d forgotten all about us.’
‘That would not be easy,’ he admitted. ‘How is . . . work?’
She shared a loaded look with Malte and for a brief instant Lucy’s playful mask dropped. Her expression shifted, from looking like a model who could have walked in from the pages of a fashion magazine to the cool-eyed, lethal sniper he knew she really was. Then the moment passed and that sleepy, boyish smile of hers was back in place. ‘You know how it goes.’ They started back toward the pavilion. ‘So why do I get the feeling that our generously paid-for down time is about to be interrupted?’
On the flight in from Croatia, Marc had rehearsed and reviewed how he was going to present his discoveries, but each time it felt forced. His lips thinned and he went for what he knew was undeniable. ‘I’ve tripped over something very dangerous,’ he told her. ‘And I’m smart enough to know when I’m out of my league. I need some help from people I can trust.’
She saw the seriousness in his eyes and all the gentle mocking in her tone faded away. ‘All right. I guess vacation is over. Let’s go see Solomon.’
*
The Pakistani driving the truck from Muscat was far more talkative than Guhaad liked, and finally there was a moment as they stopped on the side of the road to take a piss when he had Macanay and Bidar rough him up. Not too much, of course, because he still had to be able to drive, but enough to convince him to stop running his mouth or playing the same filmi pop CD over and over.
The rest of the journey passed much more to Guhaad’s liking, and they crossed the border between Oman and the Emirates without further incident. The guards checking their papers didn’t notice the driver’s black eye and mournful expression.
Guhaad spent most of the time in the back of the truck with the suitcases of good clothes Ramaas had ordered him to bring, watching the digital satellite phone he had been given like a mother hen waiting for an egg to hatch. He did not allow the stale, searing air or the smell of cramped male bodies to bother him. It was important to make sure that this mission went well for the warlord. Guhaad knew that Zayd was favoured over him for doing jobs in other places, and he wanted to prove to Ramaas that he was more than capable of the same thing. Bringing along the other two men was insurance. They were both afraid of him, and he trusted that to keep them in line.
Guhaad kept thinking back to the conversation a day or so ago. He did not really understand what this machine was that Ramaas had been given, but he could grasp the idea of a bomb powerful enough to destroy a city. He had seen the airstrikes the Americans sent from the skies to blow up the hideouts of the Al Shabaab, and in his mind’s eye, he imagined Ramaas’s new weapon to be something like that on a far greater scale.
God had given it to him, the warlord said. Guhaad wasn’t sure if that could be true, but he didn’t care. Weapons made you stronger, that was something he certainly believed in, and if this bomb was enough to make foreigners tremble, then he was all for it.
Macanay called out from the cab and told him that he could see the needle tower in the distance, the one that pierced the sky from the middle of the Arab city. Guhaad stepped over Bidar’s sleeping form on the truck’s flatbed and stared out through the windscreen, but then the phone began to chirp and he scrambled back to it, desperate to be quick to reply.
He made the driver stop and scrambled out into the shade of the halted vehicle. There was a set of headphone beads he could use and he stuffed them into his ears. ‘Yes, boss?’ he began. ‘I am here.’
‘Where is that?’
‘The highway. A few hours’ drive from the city.’
Ramaas’s voice had a strange mechanical echo on it that made the warlord sound like a ghostly revenant reaching out from beyond the grave. ‘Good. Have there been any problems? Be honest and tell me, brother.’
‘None,’ Guhaad insisted. ‘Everything is good. I won’t fail.’
<
br /> ‘I know that.’ There was a smile in the reply. ‘Listen now. I have things to tell you.’
‘I am ready.’ He dropped into a crouch by the wheel well of the truck, hearing the creaking and ticking of the vehicle’s metal bodywork. The vague orders Ramaas had given him might have troubled another man, but Guhaad had total trust in his leader. He was impatient to know everything, that was true, but he also understood that some things had to be kept secret for reasons of safety. The only thing that irritated him was that Zayd would often know things before he did. Guhaad told himself that would change once this mission was complete. Ramaas would bring him fully into his inner circle. He knew it.
‘First. The Combine man, the one who was holding Amadayo’s chain. He is gone. Zayd killed him for us.’
Guhaad frowned. ‘I could have done that for you.’ Then he quickly moderated his reply. ‘It does not matter. The gaal is dead. Good.’ He spat into the dust, cursing the pale man’s soul. ‘Fuck the Combine.’
‘Yes. We have sent a strong message, brother. There will be no turning back now. In time, we will send another.’
He licked his dry lips. ‘What about the . . . gift? Are you bringing it with you?’
Ramaas’s tone shifted. ‘I have everything in hand, do not fear. I will be with you in a few days, and then we will take the next step forward.’
Guhaad nodded, even though he knew the warlord couldn’t see him. ‘What do you want us to do once we are in the city?’ He began to hope that Ramaas had chosen a man for him to murder as well. He liked the idea of showing he could do that job better than Zayd.
‘Someone will be waiting for you,’ Ramaas explained. ‘They will give you food and shelter. You will find someone for me. This is important, brother. I need this man alive and well. He is going to help us.’
‘All right, boss.’ Guhaad frowned, unable to cover his disappointment. ‘Who is this person?’
‘A rich, spoiled child,’ said the warlord, with open disdain. ‘It will not be hard to hunt him down. He posts pictures of himself and his exploits all over the Internet. The cars he drives, the places he goes to and the women he lies with. Little Jonas will send you details of how to look at them.’
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