Ghost:

by James Swallow

  She nodded, doing the absolute minimum needed to register attention and not be considered ‘disrespectful’.

  ‘Shit,’ he went on, looking down at the papers in his hand, the arrest record that the cops had given to him. He pulled at the collar of his sweat-stained shirt and blinked. ‘I don’t know what half of this crap means . . .’ She thought he looked sick and fearful, his chubby face robbed of the usual ruddy colour it showed when he ranted at the kids. He was worried about how her exploits were going to reflect on him.

  She’d been at the group home for six months before they figured out she had a brand-new laptop computer hidden in the crawlspace above the communal bathroom. Naturally, they thought she had stolen it. And she had, but not in the way these morons understood.

  First, by co-opting the aging PCs at the local library, she’d hacked the Savings & Loan in town, faked herself a modest bank account and used the money to mail-order the laptop. Then, it had been easy enough to arrange for the old lady in the house next door to the group home to get ‘free’ cable TV – in fact paid for by an anonymous benefactor – and a home entertainment package that included a decent Wi-Fi router. The couple running the group home didn’t believe in computers. There was nothing in the house smarter than a decade-old flip-phone.

  So while the old lady enjoyed dozens of channels of soap opera pap and Lifetime movies, the router silently worked as a partner in crime. Once the set up was in place, it was easy to roam the web and look for trouble to make.

  In the group home, the other kids were numb or dumb. At seventeen, she had nothing in common with any of them besides the broken wreckage of a childhood, and she wanted as little to do with them as possible.

  She found her tribe out on the net, working her way into hacker circles by crunching code and breaking encryptions for shits and giggles. It was what she was best at, and it didn’t take long for her skills to draw the attention of some big guns out on the lawless digital frontier.

  They tested her. Gave her targets and applauded when she took down protected servers or single-handedly ran fierce denial-of-service attacks.

  She wasn’t stupid. She knew they were grooming her for better, bigger things. And this wasn’t some old pervert angling to get her panties off on a webcam. It was people like her, who saw how the internet could be both playground and goldmine, if you worked it right.

  But then one day the police were at the group home, talking about how the old lady’s son had come visiting and found something he didn’t like the look of. And pretty soon after that, the laptop had been discovered. Then there was a cop car and a cell and now this conversation.

  People, of course, had ruined it for her. People, with their unpredictability and clumsy behaviour, and their failure to follow the paths she wanted them to.

  The cops called her exploits wire fraud. Real jail time came attached to that sort of crime. Some bright spark in an office somewhere had tracked a line of misdeeds back to a certain IP address, and that was all she wrote.

  The consequences were supposed to be frightening to her, but what really cut deep was the thought that she would lose her lifeline to that other place. The meat-space of the real world was such a grinding, empty void and the net was her oxygen. Isolated from it, she would curl up and die. It was the closest she had ever been to really feeling, and now it would be taken away.

  The others, her friends behind their ghost identities and virtual phantoms, would learn what happened to her and she would become a cautionary tale. She would never see their world again.

  The door to the cramped meeting room opened suddenly, and in came a severe-looking woman with shoulder-length hair the colour of coal, and dark eyes that glared out from behind a pair of glasses with heavy frames. She wore a grey pantsuit with an FBI badge hanging out of the breast pocket.

  The woman introduced herself as Special Agent Trecento and told the man from the group home that wire fraud wasn’t all that was going on here. The question had been raised about federal crimes taking place, the invasion of government and military networks. Crimes that veered into acts of treason.

  It took less than ten minutes for him to sign off on surrendering her to the FBI agent’s custody, and with her wrists cuffed at her back, the last she saw of the man was as the door closed on his angry, judgemental glare.

  Trecento took her to a black rental car waiting in the parking lot outside the police station. A male agent in dark sunglasses sat in the driver’s seat, and he didn’t wait for her to get comfortable before they peeled out on to the highway.

  The female agent watched her from the front passenger seat. ‘You’ve been clever,’ she said. ‘Broken a lot of laws. Did you think that no one would notice?’

  ‘I’d give you the finger if I could show you my hands,’ she replied, affecting a defiant air.

  Trecento started laughing, like it was the funniest joke she’d ever heard. She pulled a packet of French cigarettes from her jacket pocket and lit one. ‘We noticed,’ she went on, after a moment. ‘We were impressed.’ With her free hand, she reached up to the nape of her neck and tugged. Her black hair came away in one pull, revealing rust-red tresses beneath. She tossed the wig into the back seat and then fished a small key out of another pocket. ‘That doesn’t happen often. Not many pass the audition,’ said the woman, leaning in to unlock the handcuffs.

  ‘You’re not the Feds,’ the younger woman said, as everything caught up with her.

  The woman with the red hair smiled and blew out a thin streamer of smoke.

  Kara blinked back to the present as the train rocked over a set of points in the track, and for a second she could still smell the bitter perfume of Madrigal’s cigarette.

  The stone egg in her chest shifted, grew smaller, but it did not melt away. The real guilt, the weight at the core of it, was made from her feelings for Lex.

  He liked his riddles and his games. The one he left for her on the subdermal flash drive had been easy to see through, opening up a hidden partition that only she would have known to look for. It wasn’t up to Lex’s usual standards, and she imagined that was because he had programmed it in a hurry. And what the partition contained, what it told her about the rest of the files on the drive . . .

  Sitting alone in the silence, poring over the data Dane had uploaded from Malta, Kara understood far too late what Lex had been trying to tell her.

  Poor, stupid, funny Lex. With his jokes and his smiles and his idiocy that made her so angry. He had always been the puzzle she could never solve.

  He knew why she had broken away, back when everything went wrong. What right did he have to come after her years later? That had been part of the deal that Kara had made with herself. She had left that life behind and become someone else. But the past had come looking for her. Uninvited. Unwanted.

  Lex reached out, again and again. Bombarding her with anxious messages. Each time Kara had reflected them back into the digital void, hoping that he would understand and leave her alone. But then one day he was dead and the stone in her chest appeared. Absently, her finger went to the strap of the smartwatch around her wrist and she pulled at it. Kara caught herself in the action and shook it off, irritated by the impulse.

  She hated this. The awful, human mess of these emotions. They were part of why she had wanted to leave, back then. When Kara was small, there were doctors who explained that her mind was not a typical one, that it followed patterns some might find unusual, even abnormal. She craved order and clarity. What was so strange about that? She hated the random and the chaotic. At times, those things were almost physically painful for her.

  And when she grew up, she found ways to deal with that. Boxes, inside her mind. Boxes for memories. Boxes for skills. Boxes in which she could put away the untidy and haphazard bits of reality and concentrate on what was vital.

  But Lex opened them all up. Even after he was dead, he was still doing it.

  Kara closed her eyes as the train clattered through another elevated s
tation and she placed a hand on her chest. In the dark behind her eyelids, with the rain ticking against glass by her head, she reached in and closed her fingers around the stone. She imagined carrying it to a box and dropping it inside.

  Closing the lid. Sealing it tight.

  This was how it had to be, if she was to survive. She could not take anything extraneous with her where she was going. This was the plan.

  Like everything else in her life, Kara had a strategy for what was happening now. She had a million of them, stacked in the boxes of her mind, one for every possible outcome.

  Other people – ordinary, typical people – would daydream or zone out, but Kara’s mind never went adrift. Instead, in those blank moments she built plans in her head for every eventuality, from things as trivial as choosing the colours of the clothes she wore to the path of her life from hour to hour. That way she was never blindsided by anything. If something could happen to her, she had already thought about it. Made a strategy to deal with it.

  Lex’s death had been in those possibilities, one more computed variable among countless others, and the plan she had to react to that event was now in play. Seamless and clear.

  Back in Chamonix, when the monitor program she’d set up told Kara that Lex had been killed, she didn’t even hesitate. The plan was already in place, and she was executing it. Events were turning full circle, and Kara was heading back to where she had started.

  To do that, she needed to reboot herself. Re-format her emotional state as if it were a fragmented hard drive. And then she would be ready.

  She opened her eyes again and watched the rain streak the window, the runnels of water curving downward.

  *

  Lucy blinked to clear her vision and tilted her head slightly to look back through the Nightforce scope atop her weapon. The warm wind had been gusting for a while, but now it was starting to drop. She watched the motion of pennants of steam rising from vents on the rooftops of buildings around the Rubicon tower to gauge the strength of the breeze, and adjusted her aim.

  The cylindrical suppressor on the barrel of the Vanquish sniper rifle moved to point northwest, and Lucy lined up on the target she had picked out, a penthouse apartment in the complex off Kraemer Square, on the French side of Monaco. The range set in at around 300 metres, which for somebody with her level of training was as good as having the mark in her hip pocket.

  She found the target. A woman in her mid-thirties in a flowy silk dress, wandering around the penthouse’s open plan kitchen with a phone pressed to her ear. The target was getting ready to leave for a night out on the town. Lucy could see the bright-blue high-heeled shoes she carried in one hand, waving them about as she spoke animatedly to her caller.

  The woman described the same path. To the window, and back. To the window, back again. Lucy gauged where to lay the .308 round, accounting for the possibility of some deflection through the window glass. It didn’t look armoured, but she wasn’t taking any chances. The shot would go into the woman’s chest, above her left breast. The kill would be instant.

  Sound and muzzle flash from the Vanquish’s report wouldn’t reach the street several stories below, and even if someone happened to be looking directly at Lucy’s sniper nest, the thin light-dampening drapes that covered the rooftop would hide her.

  The woman stopped walking and waved as a small boy wandered into the sight picture. She covered the phone with one hand and spoke sternly to him. His shoulders slumped. He wasn’t happy.

  Lucy willed herself to ignore the presence of the child. She blotted out how much he reminded her of her kid brother and focused on the target. The green dot above the scope’s range gradient settled on the woman’s chest.

  The safety catch off, Lucy moved her finger to the trigger and applied gentle pressure, keeping her breath in check. Everything else fell away in the moment, every nagging concern from the outside world, every resentment and uncertainty. Lucy found clarity in the simplicity of her actions.

  ‘Please do not kill anyone,’ said a resonant voice from behind her. ‘Rubicon must deal with many objections to our presence in Monaco as it is.’

  She drew back and pulled out the rifle’s magazine, tilting it so Solomon could see the inert metal training rounds it held. ‘Practice,’ Lucy explained. She reloaded and moved to her second target, mentally logging the first ‘kill’. ‘It helps me relax.’

  The next mark was in an apartment block off Avenue Marquet, and the sight picture was cluttered. Closer to the shoreline also meant she would have to reassess windage to be sure of making the hit.

  Solomon sat down on an air conditioning unit and surveyed her. In his immaculate cotton Kiton suit, he looked utterly out of place among the dusty machinery, but his manner was unfazed. ‘I am sure there are other ways you could ensure your skills remain sharp.’

  ‘Build me that shooting range in the basement I keep asking for,’ she replied, reaching up to adjust a dial on the side of the scope. ‘If I could burn off a few hundred rounds, that might help.’ Lucy found the window she had picked out, one with a jolly little flag hanging off the frame. The shape of a heavyset man on a home exercise bike jumped into focus inside the apartment, twice as far away as the woman in the dress had been. She estimated the bullet drop at that distance and refocused.

  ‘I spoke with the board,’ Solomon told her. His tone indicated that it had not gone well. ‘Kara has presented us with a myriad of concerns, even at the most conservative estimate of the situation.’

  Lucy touched her finger to the rifle’s trigger and ‘killed’ the man on the exercise bike. She released what remained of the breath she had been holding in and drew back from the weapon. ‘And then some.’ She shifted into a cross-legged position and started dismantling the Vanquish, piece by piece returning it to a plastic case packed out with foam inserts. ‘If she cut and run, that’s one thing. But if this is part of a longer game . . .’ Lucy let the sentence hang. The simmering annoyance that the work of the shoot had shrouded revealed itself again, and it pushed in on her thoughts.

  Solomon broke eye contact. ‘It is difficult for me to admit, but I may have made a serious mistake bringing Kara into our fold. I believed I could trust her. Now it appears that conviction was misplaced.’

  ‘You knew where she came from.’ Lucy’s reproach was open but there was little malice in it. ‘Who was she, before she became Kara Wei?’

  ‘I did not know her real name,’ he replied. ‘There were a variety of aliases . . .’ Solomon paused and then went on. ‘If she is acting against us, we are vulnerable. She knows much about the operations of Rubicon and the Special Conditions Division. If that knowledge is used, everything I have struggled to create is put at risk.’

  Lucy gave a slow nod. Rubicon was not without its enemies, both in the realm of overt corporate competition and the more shadowy spaces where the SCD operated. The Combine were out there, biding their time and rebuilding after what happened in Washington and Naples, along with other groups like Al Sayf and Russian Intelligence, all of whom had axes to grind with Solomon’s organisation. ‘If Kara’s going to sell us out, she’s not lacking for people who’d want some of that action.’

  ‘We may need to take steps,’ Solomon went on. ‘I have to ask you. If an extreme sanction is required, will you attend to it?’

  Lucy didn’t hesitate. ‘Say the word and it’s done.’

  ‘The others may be reluctant to go that far.’

  ‘You’re not asking them,’ she replied, closing the lid on the rifle case. ‘You’re asking me. And frankly I don’t find it that hard to see someone who broke my trust through a gunsight.’

  Solomon stood up and brushed dust from his suit. ‘Be prepared for the eventuality,’ he told her. ‘We have to protect Rubicon. The ideal. The people. All of it. One rogue operative cannot be allowed to threaten that.’

  *

  The train pulled into the stop at Heerstrasse and the doors chimed for arrival.

  Kara waited
until the last possible second to get off, bolting through the doors as they started to slide shut. No one in the carriage was following her, but if they had been, she would have left them stranded inside as the train pulled away. Kara watched the train shrink in the direction of the Olympic Stadium. When she was sure of herself, she walked briskly away. First she followed the road, before veering on to the leafy, damp paths that wound their way up the shallow, forested mountain which overlooked Berlin.

  Teufelsberg; Devil’s Mountain. Beneath the dark green canopy rose a man-made hill born from the rubble of homes obliterated by the bombings in the Second World War, dumped there to smother the remains of a Nazi military training facility that defied all attempts to destroy it. In the Cold War that followed, Teufelsberg became the site for an Anglo-American listening post to spy on Communist East Germany, eventually falling into disrepair as that conflict also crumbled and faltered. She saw the ruin of it as she progressed up the incline. The drab spheres of the old radomes peeked over the tops of the trees. Their skeletal, strange forms made Kara think of the shed husks of giant insects.

  The rain blurred their shapes and she hesitated, lost for a moment.

  When she had tried to explain it to him, Lex had laughed.

  ‘It’s not easy for me to process being present,’ she said. ‘I mean, I see how emotions work on other people. I can observe them like an outsider looking in.’

  ‘You going to tell me next you don’t feel it?’ Lex rolled over under the sleeping bag and the floorboard beneath them creaked. He ran a hand through his unkempt bob of brown hair and peered at her. ‘You felt this.’

  Under the thermal layer, they were both naked, surrounded by a halo of body heat trapped by the covering. Lex was the warmest person she had ever met, in the literal sense. Some people were cool or tepid when they touched you, but he was a furnace. Beyond them, the cold brought by the rain pattering on the roof of the abandoned farmhouse seemed a far-off and unimportant thing.