Ghost:

by James Swallow

  Marc looked at the tablet. The progress bar was three-quarters full, and without the complete download the mission would be a failure. If he tried to get out of the car now, he would be seen. Possibilities spun through his mind, all of them untenable.

  The downward spiral his day was taking continued unabated. The limo’s bonnet came down with a slam and the car jostled on its shocks with the force of it. Marc glimpsed movement in the side windows and he heard the driver’s door clunk open and closed.

  ‘What’s going on in there?’ said Kara. ‘I don’t have a visual.’

  ‘Think I’m going for a ride,’ Marc whispered.

  The vehicle’s engine grumbled into life and a chorus of dull metallic thuds sounded around him as the doors automatically locked. The limousine lurched into reverse and crawled out of the workshop, back into the wintry sunshine.

  ‘Oh shit.’ Kara’s reaction mirrored Marc’s own, but he stayed silent for fear of doing anything that might alert the driver to his presence.

  It would only require the man to drop the privacy shield and throw a glance into the passenger compartment for him to see Marc down on the floor, clutching at the data tablet. Toussaint’s drivers were provided by ALEPH, and they carried personal firearms in defiance of French gun laws. Marc’s folding baton would be no defence against a pistol.

  He felt the vehicle bump the kerb as it eased out on to the road, then lurch again as it moved into forward gear and away.

  ‘Dane, he’s leaving early. Tell me you’re not still in there.’ He tap-tapped the earpiece in answer and Kara’s reply took a while to come. ‘Shit. Okay. I’ve got your comms. I can track you.’ There was another long pause. ‘This is not optimal.’

  Marc didn’t respond, moderating his breathing to slow his racing pulse as he lay on the floor of the limo, staring up at the frost-spotted sunroof above him. The tablet in his hand vibrated gently, letting him know that the download had finally completed, but in the current situation that gave small consolation. He decided to risk sending a data signal, using the tablet’s wireless functionality to compress the stolen information, then direct it in an encoded burst back to Kara’s computer and a remote cloud server operated by Rubicon for exactly these kinds of situations. It only took a few seconds to run the subroutine, and when it was done, he took a deep breath. At least now, if he ended up on the wrong end of a gun, the intelligence they had come to Chamonix to capture was safe.

  It only remained for Marc to get the hell out of the limousine without being discovered. He tapped silently at the tablet as the driver switched on the radio, the vehicle accelerating as it veered on to a main road.

  The radio spat out a rapid-fire stream of French from a newscaster filling in the high points of the day’s global events, concentrating on a terse report about a metro train crash in Taipei that had claimed the lives of a French fencing team visiting Taiwan for the Youth Games. Presently, the news bulletin concluded and a female presenter returned to hosting a chart show rundown. The music gave Marc the cover he needed to move around in the limo’s rear compartment.

  He shifted so that his legs wouldn’t cramp up in the tight confines and ruin his chances of running if an opportunity presented itself. Trees flashed past the windows, but from his low angle Marc could see no landmarks. Instead, he used the tablet to mirror the satnav screen on the limo’s dashboard and squinted at the display. They were moving south, back toward the far side of the valley. That meant that the vehicle was most likely on its way to the cable car station to pick up Toussaint early.

  He ran through that scenario in his head, based on the surveillance data Rubicon had gathered on the woman’s routine. The limousine would park, covered, at the side of the station and Toussaint would get in with her executive secretary and bodyguards before they set off to her next destination, either the airport or her estate. Given the annoyance in the driver’s voice back at the garage, Marc guessed that this summons had not been planned in advance. He wondered if he could use that to his advantage.

  Marc considered and rejected a couple of possible action plans; get Kara to drive out and intercept the limo before it reached the station; try to co-opt the vehicle’s cell phone and fool the driver into redirecting them to a secluded spot where Marc could make a run for it. He shook his head. Both of those options were messy and they would leave Toussaint aware that her security had been violated. It was imperative she did not know her itinerary had been hacked, otherwise the woman would go dark and the intelligence Rubicon had painstakingly gathered would be rendered useless.

  Waiting until the car reached the station was the worst choice of them all. Even with the element of surprise on his side, Marc estimated his chances as slim to nil. ALEPH’s mercenaries tended to solve problems with the liberal application of bullets, as he had learned back in Poland.

  ‘I checked the maintenance logs from Haute-Savoie,’ said Kara, referring to the nearest airport, an hour away in Annecy. ‘Toussaint’s Gulfstream is being gassed up as we speak. Something has her rattled.’

  Again, he didn’t reply. Speculating on the target’s reasons for her rapid departure was, for now, of secondary importance. Instead, he opened up another window on the tablet and streamed the live feed of traffic bulletins pushed to the satnav, skimming them for anything he could use. There was information about a stalled coach out in Argentiére causing tailbacks, a notation about ongoing roadworks in Le Houches . . . And then he found what he needed. An advisory to motorists warning them to avoid police patrols with radar guns camped out along the N205 motorway. The cops were tracking reckless or inattentive drivers speeding out of the long Tunnel du Mont-Blanc.

  Working quickly, Marc inserted a command window between the incoming traffic data and the limo driver’s display. His grasp of the French language was good enough to craft a quick message to the effect that an overturned truck had blocked the road they were already on. He hit Send and a moment later, Marc heard the satnav ping as the message appeared. The driver gave a grunt of irritation and Marc knew the man was buying it. With a few more commands, Marc made the hacked satnav display show a new route that directed the limo on to the N205 and a roundabout route to its destination. He deleted all mention of the speed patrols and held his breath.

  The limo rolled slightly as the driver pulled into a slip road and took the on-ramp. Step one, Marc told himself. Now for my next trick.

  Retreating out of the satnav’s programs, Marc went back to the basic maintenance menu and found the main virtual circuit for the vehicle’s other electrical systems. Like most cars built in the last few years, the limousine used a device called a ‘controller area network’ to run the power flow from the battery to the various devices. CAN access could be shielded from external wireless attacks, but from within the car with a hard line plugged in, it was wide open. Marc’s eyes narrowed as he swung into the pace of the plan. He cued up a macro to activate the solenoid switches in the door locks and open them on his command, then tabbed to the controls for the limo’s front and rear lights, and waited.

  On the satnav screen, the crimson dart representing the car passed into the area where the police patrol lurked and Marc set the next stage in motion. With a couple of keystrokes, he started the exterior lights blinking on-off, on-off, hoping that the driver wouldn’t immediately notice it. With more time, he might have been able to loop into the traction controls for the vehicle’s brakes or even affect the steering, but doing so would have run the risk of causing a traffic accident. With the frost-slick road beneath the limo’s wheels, it could have easily thrown them into a serious collision.

  If this doesn’t work, that’s exactly what I’m going to have to do. Marc tensed, wondering how best to survive that, if it came to it.

  But in the next second, the flash of blue strobes behind the car told him he had been successful. A white BMW police motorcycle roared up on the inside lane and Marc glimpsed the helmeted cop in the saddle jabbing a finger in the direction of the motorway’s
hard shoulder as he paralleled the limo.

  The driver swore under his breath and Marc felt the vehicle slow as it slipped across the highway. In a moment, they had halted and the man up front began drumming his hands irritably on the steering wheel.

  Marc cued up a last macro on the tablet, set the command running and then disconnected it. As he carefully replaced the flap over the access panel, the driver rolled down the window to talk to the police officer. Marc began counting down from ten.

  ‘Y at-il quelque chose qui cloche avec votre véhicule?’ Marc could make out the cop looking into the cab of the limo as he slid back over the floor of the rear compartment, toward the door nearest to the hard shoulder. The driver said something Marc didn’t catch as his count reached zero. The limo’s horn let out a long, loud blare of sound and the doors unlocked in the same instant.

  In the time it took the motorcycle cop and the limo driver to react to the unexpected noise, Marc had opened the rear door just enough to slip through and roll out, face down on to the asphalt. Staying low, keeping the body of the car between himself and the police officer, Marc squirmed over a squat concrete barrier and into a weed-choked ditch. He lay flat, willing himself to remain unseen.

  He didn’t dare raise his head to look over the wall, for fear that he might be spotted. Instead he waited, gripping the handle of the collapsible baton and straining to listen. Minutes seemed to stretch into hours, and at any second he expected the shadow of the cop or the driver to fall over him and a voice to angrily demand Que faites-vous ici?

  At length, he heard the grumble of the limousine’s engine as it pulled away, and after waiting another minute, Marc finally peeked back over the lip of the barrier. The vehicle and the motorcycle patrolman were gone. The tension of the situation drained out of him and a half-gasp, half-chuckle escaped from his mouth.

  ‘Close one,’ he said aloud, looking around to re-orient himself. Trudging back down the hard shoulder, he set off in the direction of the staging area. Marc reached up and tapped his radio earpiece. ‘You reading me? Extraction is complete, over. It was chaotic as hell, but I reckon we did okay.’ Only silence answered him, and after a moment he plucked out the device, checking to make sure it was still working. ‘Kara? Are you on?’

  The only sound that returned was the faint buzz of an open channel.

  He wanted to get back to the rented office as quickly as he could, but Marc resisted the urge and followed the protocol that existed for any irregularity in the mission. He took a circuitous route, making sure he wasn’t being followed, until he approached the site from the opposite direction he had left it hours earlier. He was cold and tired by the time he arrived, chilled by the icy mountain air even though the sun shone brightly.

  Across the street, nothing seemed amiss at the garage where it had all started, the mechanics at work and no sign of any suspicious vehicles parked nearby.

  Keeping out of sight, Marc came up the stairs to the office space with the ASP baton hidden in his hand, ready for anything. He found Kara alone in the bare, unwelcoming room. She was in the middle of stripping the place down, packing their kit into bags.

  ‘You’re back,’ she said, ‘good, help me with this.’ Kara thrust the portable satellite antenna into his hand and nodded at an open case on the floor.

  Marc pocketed the baton and set to work folding up the antenna for transport. ‘You went silent on comms—’ he began, but she spoke over him.

  ‘Had to,’ Kara insisted. Her earlier mood, the mix of sly boredom and undirected energy, was gone. In its place she seemed distracted and sullen. ‘There was . . .’ She stopped talking and then started again. ‘There’s been a development.’

  As she said the words, Kara moved to her laptop and snapped it closed. Marc saw a flash of a screen filled with text. ‘Toussaint?’ he asked. ‘I mean, are we blown?’ His hand clenched. Had all his on-the-fly improvisation to get the data from the limo been for nothing?

  Kara shook her head. ‘Not that.’ She flashed him a quick smile. ‘Smart play, very good.’ Then it was gone, flicked off like a light. ‘This is different. We’re shutting down, Delancort’s going to have a clean-up team come in and sanitise this place.’

  Henri Delancort was Ekko Solomon’s executive aide and de facto chief of operations, a man who seemed to have the numerical value for everything stored in his head, and in Marc’s eyes, someone who only saw the world in terms of losses or gains. It was usually his job to parcel out the tasks of the Special Conditions Division. ‘Delancort contacted you?’

  Kara gave a nod, stuffing the mil-spec laptop into a backpack before snatching up a red leather jacket hanging on the back of a chair. ‘As of now, the Celeste Toussaint investigation has been pushed to secondary status. We’ve been re-tasked to a more time-sensitive assignment.’ She jerked her head towards the door that led to another room, where their personal gear and sleeping racks had been set up. ‘You ought to change. I got us flights.’

  Marc closed up the antenna case. ‘We’re not going to debrief?’

  ‘No time for that. Give me the tablet, I’ll refresh the memory and load the data – you’re gonna need on it. I have you on a plane from Geneva. I’ll take the train across the border to Turin and get my flight from there, to maintain operational security.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Malta. Rubicon received an alert . . . Someone – a person of interest – was killed there today.’ She eyed him. ‘There’s a Combine connection.’

  Marc felt a rush of cold run through him. ‘Probable, like Toussaint, or—?’

  ‘High confidence,’ she cut him off again. ‘Look, there will be a briefing packet waiting for you on arrival, okay?’ Her tone softened. ‘You know how it goes with these creeps. If they pop up on the radar, we have to take advantage of it. Solomon wants us to get this done. Low-profile. Minimum communications.’

  ‘There’s no one else Rubicon can send?’

  ‘SCD’s other assets are tied up,’ she explained. ‘It has to be you. And me.’

  Marc nodded to himself. If there was a confirmed Combine lead in Malta, it would go cold quickly. The group were good at covering their tracks.

  And after what happened today, he felt the gnawing rise of a familiar ache in his chest. The need to make the Combine pay for all they had taken from him, for all they had taken from so many innocents, never really went away. If there was a chance to strike back, for certain this time, he wanted to be a part of it. ‘The guy who was killed, he was with them?’

  ‘He was their victim,’ she corrected. ‘We have to find out why.’

  ‘Okay,’ Marc said, at length. ‘I suppose this is what we get for complaining about low-hazard assignments . . .’ Kara looked at him blankly. ‘Are you okay?’ Studying her, he noticed her cheeks were flushed.

  ‘Fine,’ She noticed his close attention and turned. ‘I was blindsided today. Getting complacent. Seeing you nearly get tagged out there brought me up sharp.’ Kara gave a low sigh. ‘It reminded me this isn’t a game.’

  ‘Can’t argue with that. All right, I’ll get my kit and we’ll head out.’

  ‘Marc.’ Kara called his name as he walked away. ‘You trust me, don’t you?’ It seemed an odd question and his confusion must have shown on his face. ‘Never mind.’ She brushed her words aside like they were a nagging insect, before he could answer.

  THREE

  A bell over the door jangled as Lucy Keyes entered the diner, drawing a wan smile from the dark-haired waitress standing near the cash register. The woman gestured with the pen in her hand at the tables and booths, most of them empty this early in the morning. ‘Sit where you want, honey. Be with you in a second.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Lucy smiled back as she removed her expensive designer sunglasses, dropping them into the pocket of the bolero jacket hanging off her athlete’s shoulders. She ran an ochre hand over the tight fuzz of her close-cropped hair, and wandered deeper into the restaurant. Instinct made her pick t
he booth closest to the fire exit and she slid into place where she could see the doors and observe the street outside. She pretended to look over the menu as she scanned the other people in the restaurant. A couple of early bird commuters getting in their carbs before heading downtown, a few solid blue-collar types tanking up on coffee and one or two bleary-eyed night shift workers stopping in on their way home. None of them set off her hunter’s radar and she allowed herself to relax slightly.

  Outside, the watery post-dawn light of the new day had the promise of sunshine behind it, but Lucy was distrustful of the weather in San Francisco. The winds off the bay could bring rainclouds in from the Pacific when you least expected it, or present clear blue skies at a whim.

  The city was still waking up. A few blocks away, the residential streets around Alamo Square were shaking off a long weekend as the inexorable rush of a new Monday came upon them. She watched sparse traffic flicker past and found her partner on the far side of the street, pretending to smoke. Malte Riis was a good head taller than Lucy’s spare, athletic frame, with sandy hair and the kind of angular features that only Nordic genes could generate. He didn’t talk much, and she liked that about him. When he did speak, she listened. Malte had been a Helsinki cop and then later a member of the Finnish SUPO intelligence service, and his instincts were always razor sharp. For her part, Lucy brought her sniper’s eye to every situation, but she had a tendency to think only in terms of targets or potential targets, and sometimes the nuances could get lost behind her more military frame of mind.

  The rosy waitress, whose badge announced her name as Babs, came to the booth and Lucy ordered coffee and waffles. By the time the order arrived, Lucy had spotted the car where the contact was waiting. A dark-blue Ford sedan, probably a rental, parked down the block in front of a vintage clothing store that had yet to open. On the dot of the clock striking the hour, the driver-side door opened and a Hispanic guy in a suit walked quickly across the street. As he entered the diner, he found Lucy and strode toward her. Over his shoulder, she saw Malte peel off from his position and vector in after him.