Ghost:

by James Swallow

  The boulevards of the most expensive city-state on the planet crowded in on them, and the GLS wove quickly through the traffic toward the business district and the office buildings on the Avenue de Grande Bretagne. The Rubicon Group’s headquarters in Europe was a modernist pillar of steel and glass, rising out of the masses of old-money red tile and nouveau riche stucco lining Monaco’s hillsides. Most of the lower floors were turned over to offices managing Rubicon’s main corporate interests – mining and construction, biotechnology and aviation, as well as a more visible private military contractor branch. The upper tiers were reserved for Ekko Solomon’s private suites and a compact operations centre for the Special Conditions Division.

  Marc expected his escorts to take him there, but the elevator from the basement car park descended instead of rising, depositing him on a level that he hadn’t even known the building possessed.

  The corridor was all harshly lit concrete and steel panels, and Marc tensed once more as the two men walked him to a secure room. The door opened to reveal Henri Delancort seated at a metal table, with one empty chair opposite him. The room and the set-up screamed interrogation, and Marc stopped dead on the threshold.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ he demanded. A rough mix of fatigue and irritation curdled inside him and he glared at Solomon’s assistant. ‘You expecting trouble?’

  Delancort gave a theatrical sigh and removed his rimless spectacles, pausing to rub the bridge of his Gallic nose. ‘We already have more than enough of that to be dealing with.’

  His tone rang a warning bell in Marc’s thoughts. ‘Where’s Lucy? Malte? Has something happened to them?’

  ‘Yes,’ Delancort said firmly. ‘But it has been dealt with and they are both on their way here. And it has nothing to do with the conversation we need to have.’ When Marc still didn’t move, Delancort gave him a dark look and replaced his glasses. ‘Please. Take a seat so we can make some sense of this, oui? Do not be difficult.’

  Brass put a heavy hand on Marc’s shoulder and used the other to point the way to the chair. The intimation was obvious. Sit down before you are made to.

  He shrugged off the bodyguard and dropped heavily into the vacant chair. Brass followed him in, while the Farmhand waited outside in the corridor. ‘I don’t take well to being treated like a criminal,’ he told Delancort firmly. Marc had too many bad memories from rooms like this one, memories of accusations and threats from his own government, from his former comrades at MI6. Part of the reason he had come to work for Solomon and the SCD was to get away from that. And here it was, happening again.

  Delancort fiddled with the cuffs of his silver-grey suit jacket. ‘Let us get straight to the point.’ The French Canadian was slender in frame and rakish in the way he dressed, but there was always a manner about him that Marc didn’t like. He had a calculating edge underneath all that carefully engineered casualness that Marc found false. ‘Do you know where Kara Wei is?’

  ‘I thought I did . . .’ He took in the bare room and found the mirrored bubble of a monitor unit in the far corner. ‘I thought she was on Malta with me. Seems not, though.’

  ‘There is no evidence of her arriving on the island within the last two days,’ Delancort confirmed. ‘She dropped off the tactical grid in France at the same time you did and she has not resurfaced.’

  ‘I didn’t drop off the grid,’ Marc insisted. ‘I was following orders. From you.’

  ‘Were you?’ said Delancort, without weight. ‘Did you speak to me? Did you speak to anyone other than Kara?’

  Marc stiffened. ‘No.’

  ‘Explain it,’ said the other man. ‘We lost contact with the two of you after the data upload came in from the Toussaint woman’s GPS logs. Good work on that, by the way. You secured a very useful take for us.’

  ‘Okay.’ Marc was silent for a moment as he marshalled his thoughts, getting the facts in order. He talked for the next fifteen minutes and Delancort listened in silence as he went through what had happened. The unexpected call for redeployment, the time-sensitive investigation into the Wetherby killing, chasing the drone, the data-mesh hidden in the dead man’s flesh, all of it.

  When Marc was done, Delancort looked up at the monitor as if he was waiting for something, and then turned back to face him across the table. ‘If you were lying about any of that, we would know it.’

  Marc spread his hands. ‘So can we stop pissing about now?’

  ‘Yes, let us do that,’ Delancort said flatly. ‘You have been duped. I think we all have. Kara Wei has gone rogue, and she used you to get what she wanted.’ He paused, his tone softening. ‘I thought you might be in on it with her. I will not lie, I have harboured my doubts about your performance—’

  ‘Really?’ Marc couldn’t stop the acerbic interruption from coming out. ‘I hadn’t noticed.’

  Delancort’s eyes narrowed. ‘I have questioned your competence. Let us not forget that Khadir and Glovkonin are still at large.’

  Marc tensed at the mention of the two names. Khadir, a top cell leader for Al Sayf, had been instrumental in constructing the terror threat that first brought Marc into Rubicon’s orbit, and the Russian oligarch Pytor Glovkonin had been running the traitor in MI6 responsible for ruining Marc’s life. Both had yet to pay for what they had done.

  ‘You’re laying that at my door?’ Marc growled. ‘There’s not a day goes by I don’t think about them. And what they took from me.’

  Delancort went on as if Dane hadn’t spoken, content to get a reaction from him. ‘But if I were uncertain of your loyalties, this conversation would be going in a different direction.’

  Marc’s teeth set on edge at the unspoken threat in those words, but he didn’t rise to it, waiting for the other man to continue.

  ‘So, to summarise. From what we can determine, Kara received an automated, encoded email from a private server during the operation in Chamonix. Moments after that message arrived, she severed communications with Rubicon and began active efforts to impede our tracking of you both. Two hundred thousand euros were siphoned from an SCD black fund shortly afterward by an unknown source, and we believe this was also Kara’s doing.’ He waved vaguely at the air. ‘This operation you have been telling me about, this Malta investigation? It would appear that Kara instigated the entire mission on her own and presented it to you as a legitimate Rubicon tasking . . .’

  ‘So I would help her,’ Marc broke in, colour rising in his cheeks. ‘She set me up?’ He could hardly believe it, and he stared at the floor, confused and dismayed. ‘I knew things were off . . . She kept asking me if I trusted her.’

  ‘You did.’ Delancort cocked his head. ‘And now here we are. Rubicon’s network has gone into siege mode while we make sure that Kara has not tried to gain access elsewhere, or steal any materials from our servers.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’ Marc shook his head. ‘You think she’s attacking us? That doesn’t make any sense!’

  The door opened and whatever reply Delancort might have had faded in the presence of the man who entered. Both he and Marc rose as Ekko Solomon filled the doorway with his presence.

  In his early fifties but trim with it, the owner-founder of the Rubicon Group looked like he was carved from dark, weathered teak. He wore a sharp-edged suit and his eyes were hard and searching, his brow creased. ‘I wish I could be sure you are right, Mr Dane.’ Solomon gestured for them both to sit, but Marc remained on his feet, wound tight once again.

  ‘Kara let me think this was to do with the Combine,’ he said. ‘Led me to that, pushed my buttons . . .’ He shook his head, angry at himself. ‘She did that because she knew I would bite on it, and not look too hard at the mission in front of me.’

  ‘I regret that Kara may have manipulated all of our biases,’ said Solomon. He nodded toward the monitor. ‘I heard what you said. It is likely that she never intended to go to Malta. We think she headed deeper into Europe, but that is open to question. She is a most accomplished hacker. She
left a number of false trails that we are still in the process of running down.’

  ‘If you think this is some kind of play for money, you’re wrong.’ Marc spoke without thinking, instinct finding the words. ‘The way she acted . . . I think this is something more than that, something personal.’

  ‘Your insight is correct,’ Solomon said grimly. ‘Kara Wei and Alexander Wetherby knew each other. She was alerted to his murder and chose to pursue it using my company’s resources . . . And you, Mr Dane.’

  Marc recovered the data-mesh from his pack and showed it to them. ‘She cut me dead once she uploaded whatever was on this. She used me to get it.’

  ‘There are certain facts about Kara Wei that you are not aware of,’ noted Delancort. ‘To begin with, that is not her real name.’

  Marc glanced at Solomon, his concern deepening. ‘What facts?’

  ‘Ghost5. You know of that group.’ The African met his gaze. ‘Given your particular skillset in the digital realm, Mr Dane, I imagine you know exactly who they are.’

  A chill ran through him. ‘I’ve heard of them,’ admitted Marc. The name belonged to a collection of mercenary hackers who held a top slot on the most-wanted lists of US Cyber-Command, GCHQ, the FSB and the National Security Agency. ‘Like Anonymous, minus the righteousness, with a taste for blood money.’

  Their name was a play on words. Ghost5 because it was gamer-geek leetspeak for ‘Ghosts’, the scariest of the phantoms that lurked in the haunted corners of the dark web – and also because rumours suggested there had originally been five members of the group at its inception. There were stories that the hacker collective had worked data intercepts in South America against the enemies of the La Noche cartel, leading to the murders of dozens of Drug Enforcement Agency operatives and informants, and chilling suggestions that they had been behind the downing of a passenger jet in Ghana, as part of an extortion plot against a major airline.

  ‘Alexander Wetherby was a member of Ghost5,’ said Solomon. ‘He may have been trying to double-cross them, or perhaps he was taking part in one of their operations in Malta. Either way, information we secured from Kara’s workstation makes his status as one of them undeniable.’

  ‘Where was the data?’ asked Marc.

  ‘A hidden partition on her hard drive,’ noted Delancort. ‘She neglected to secure it fully . . . Perhaps because this all took place with such haste. It suggests she was not adequately prepared.’

  The chill he felt bedded in, and Marc knew what would come next. ‘She was one of them too, wasn’t she? Before Rubicon?’ said Marc.

  Delancort nodded briskly and he adjusted his glasses. ‘She had quit the group by the time she came across our radar. We caught her operating on her own, attempting to penetrate one of our corporate mainframes in Senegal.’

  ‘When exactly did you know she worked with one of the most dangerous hacker groups on the planet?’ Marc could barely believe it. If even half the rumours about them were true, Ghost5 had as much blood on their hands as any conventional terrorist group.

  ‘From the start.’ Delancort nodded again. ‘Why do you think we hired her?’

  ‘I built Rubicon on many principles,’ Solomon continued, before Marc could retort. ‘Key among them is the promise of redemption.’ Unconsciously, his hand moved to his throat. It wasn’t visible, but Marc knew that on a chain around Solomon’s neck hung the trigger of a gun, one that he had used to take a life when he had been a much younger man. ‘Everyone I have brought into the Special Conditions Division has been somebody deserving of a second chance. You understand that as well as any of us, Mr Dane.’ A cloud passed over the other man’s face. ‘Kara . . . She told me she wanted to be free of her previous life. At the time I chose to believe her.’

  ‘And now?’

  Solomon looked away, letting Marc’s question hang in the air. Ekko exchanged a glance with Delancort, and Marc saw a silent communication pass between them. ‘I have to confer with the head of Rubicon’s overt military and security contracts division. The lockdown is causing problems for us . . . Henri, you will restore all of Mr Dane’s privileges and clearances. I want him working on an analysis of that device.’ He pointed at the mesh. ‘It is the only lead we have.’

  ‘Sir, are you quite sure—?’

  Solomon did not allow Delancort to finish. ‘I am sure,’ he said firmly. ‘Both of you know your jobs. Get to work.’ He hesitated before putting a hand on Marc’s shoulder as he walked away. ‘But first, get some sleep. I need you at your best.’

  Marc wanted to argue the point, but he was tired and the fight in him was fading. At length, he nodded wearily and picked up his backpack.

  After Solomon left, Delancort gave him a tight, forced smile across the table. ‘I hope you understand, my earlier concerns about you were nothing personal.’

  ‘Sod off,’ Marc said with feeling, and stalked away.

  SEVEN

  ‘Welcome back,’ said Delancort.

  ‘Say that like you mean it,’ retorted Lucy as she strode out of the elevator. She limped a little from the bullet-kiss on her leg, the bandage across the shallow wound tight and uncomfortable. Malte followed close behind, and offered no comment.

  Solomon’s aide fell in alongside them as they crossed the wide wooden deck that formed the atrium of Rubicon’s crisis centre. ‘I sent one of the jets for you,’ Delancort replied. ‘What more do you want?’

  ‘That’s a question with a long-ass answer,’ she told him. Malte threw her a nod and broke away, heading off to the residential quarters. ‘But it’s good we had the plane. Otherwise we’d still be back there.’

  Solomon’s personal pilot, an ex-Israeli Air Force flyer named Ari Silber, had leveraged the Rubicon’s influence in California to get them out of the US and back to Europe, much to the chagrin of Special Agent Gonzalez of the FBI, who wanted Lucy and Malte to submit to a full debriefing about what happened with the Soldier-Saints.

  In the end, they’d found a compromise. Ari agreed to make a stop in Washington D.C. and Gonzalez had flown with them, getting the debrief in the air along the way. By the time they landed at Dulles to refuel for the transatlantic leg, the FBI agent had everything he and Agent Rowan at the Secret Service needed to demand a full-court press on the home-grown terror group.

  The plans of the Soldier-Saints to kill hundreds of people and grab headlines for their twisted cause had been stopped dead, but the horrible reality was that they had almost succeeded. Luck had played too great a role in stopping the detonation of their makeshift thermobaric bomb, and that burned at Lucy like acid. Someone had been paid to help the terrorists advance their cause, and she wanted to know who.

  The Combine, she thought. This was exactly their kind of operation, mass-killing attacks run through proxies, strikes that would hike up the global climate of fear so that they could profit from it. Was that Madrigal woman one of their agents?

  But that didn’t seem right. It was the easy answer. Lucy Keyes trusted her instincts, and they were telling her that more was going on here. The Soldier-Saints were small-timers, little better than a ragged backwoods militia long on rhetoric and short on action. Someone had given them a step up in lethality, and had it succeeded, the San Francisco attack would have been blunt and brutal.

  The Combine were more sophisticated than that. For them, it was never just about the bloodshed, never violence for violence’s sake. There was always another agenda.

  Lucy showed Delancort the evidence bag that contained the tablet computer she had recovered from the ambulance. ‘I need the techs to give this the full work-over. There’s more going on here than some redneck yahoos with a jury-rigged bomb. They don’t have the skills to orchestrate the blackout we saw there, and this is the only lead to whoever did.’ She glanced around. ‘Marc and Kara are back, right? I could use their eyes on this—’

  Delancort held up his hand to silence her. ‘We have brought in Assim to pick up Kara’s workload.’ He turned his gesture
into a beckoning motion and she turned to see the tall Saudi kid with an anxious smile and big glasses coming their way.

  Lucy only knew Assim Kader in passing as Kara Wei’s reluctant understudy. Young and nervous with it, he usually stayed quiet and hovered on the margins, and he didn’t look happy being pushed into the spotlight. ‘Here, I brought you a gift,’ she told him.

  ‘Oh. Thanks.’ Assim took the damaged tablet from her and turned it over in his long-fingered hands. He had a lilting accent that betrayed an expensive education in an English public school. ‘Someone took a dislike to this device, it appears.’

  ‘It’s gonna be booby-trapped,’ she warned. ‘Digitally and physically, so be careful.’

  ‘Right-oh . . .’ Assim held the device at arm’s length as he carried it away toward the data lab.

  Lucy watched him go. ‘What am I missing here, Henri?’ She didn’t often address the French Canadian by his first name, but she did so now.

  ‘We have a security problem,’ he offered.

  ‘Tell me,’ she demanded, hearing the cautionary tone in the man’s voice. On the flight across the Atlantic, Ari talked about a temporary lockdown protocol in effect across Rubicon’s systems, frustrating Lucy when she was unable to log in to the company network. At the time, she hadn’t thought too much about it, her mind occupied with fatigue, but now Delancort’s words brought her up sharp. ‘What the hell is wrong? Is Marc all right? Is Kara?’

  He frowned. ‘Kara is . . .’ Delancort paused, and started again, leading her toward one of the glassed-in conference rooms so they could talk privately. ‘While you were in America, there was an incident. You are not going to like it.’

  *

  Madrigal walked out across the tarpaper roof and lit a Gitanes, holding up a hand to act as a windbreak for her lighter. The air cooled now the sun had set, and the breeze that seemed agreeable during the day turned chilly, gusts of it rattling through the exposed triangular spars of the ragged geodesic sphere that dominated the top of the derelict building.