Ghost:

by James Swallow

  ‘Later,’ Solomon cut in. ‘We are here for a few days. We will see what develops.’

  ‘Sure!’ Wehmeyer nodded. He seemed to remember the other man standing nearby and gestured to him. ‘This is Bob Crowne, my head of security. Keeper of my secrets, you know?’ Wehmeyer laughed and Lucy smiled politely.

  ‘Good to meet you,’ said Crowne, revealing an East-Coast American accent. Lucy immediately ran a silent evaluation of the man. Ex-CIA, she decided. He had the look of a former spook about him. ‘Welcome to Australia.’

  ‘I hear the fishing is real good out here,’ said Lucy, tossing out a lure of her own.

  ‘It is,’ Crowne replied, and that was all she got. The man leaned in to Wehmeyer’s shoulder and spoke to him quietly. ‘Sir. The guests are all here now. We should start.’

  ‘Oh. Of course.’ Wehmeyer unconsciously raised his hand and Lucy took a good look at the gold signet ring hanging loosely on his little finger. It had a flat onyx insert the size of a nickel, but beneath the ornamental surface it concealed a suite of microelectronics. She knew this because of the all-too-thorough briefing Dane had given her on the flight over.

  Wehmeyer was about to tap the ring with his other finger when a voice cut through the air like the whine of a police siren. ‘Dad. Dad? Dad.’ A girl in her late teens, with shoulder-length hair as chestnut as her father’s, drifted through the crowd and pulled Wehmeyer into a kind of half-hug, burying her face in his chest. He gave Solomon and the others a knowing what-can-you-do shrug and disengaged himself. ‘Sunny, sweetheart, Dad’s working. Can you give me a minute?’

  Sunny Wehmeyer, one of the current darlings of Sydney’s gossip pages, gave a regretful smirk and let go. ‘Okay.’ Her attention snagged on Lucy’s dress and her eyes widened. ‘Now that is lit. I want one. But in red, though. Do they make them in red? Where’d you get it?’

  ‘Sunny,’ her father continued gently, ‘I thought you were chatting with Charles.’ He nodded across the room, in the direction of a younger guy with shaggy hair, wearing a suit jacket over a designer T-shirt emblazoned with an ironic design that Lucy didn’t get.

  Charles Hite, she guessed, recalling his name from the briefing. Horizon Integral’s chief technology officer and their top gun-systems programmer. Hite looked their way, adjusting his thick-rimmed glasses before continuing his conversation with some of the yacht crew.

  ‘Chuck is such a— ’ Sunny caught herself before she said something insulting and tried again. ‘We don’t have a lot in common, really.’ Before Lucy could stop her, Sunny took her wrist and started leading her away toward the bar near the ornamental pond. ‘But you and I, we have to talk fashion.’

  ‘I guess we do . . .’ Lucy surrendered to the inevitable and allowed Sunny to steer her.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Dane’s voice sounded in her ear. ‘Talk if you can.’

  ‘I’m getting a refill,’ she said to the air, depositing her empty glass on the tray of a passing server.

  ‘Damn right we are,’ Sunny said firmly.

  Behind them, Wehmeyer stepped on to a low stage. Lucy saw him tap the ring and the lights came up. The man cleared his throat and told another joke, riding a wave of chuckles before launching into a speech.

  ‘Take your time,’ said Marc dryly. ‘No pressure.’

  ‘Remember,’ he went on, ‘if you don’t get what we need, this will be over before it even starts.’ Lucy didn’t reply, and Marc’s lip curled.

  ‘All secure up here,’ said Malte, crossing the rooftop toward him. Like Marc, Malte was dressed in a black tactical coverall beneath a gear vest, with gloves on his hands and a watch cap on his head. Marc joked that they couldn’t have looked more like criminals if they’d been toting around a bag with the word SWAG written on it, but the Finn didn’t seem to get the reference. ‘You are sure about this?’

  ‘No,’ Marc admitted, snapping open the latches on a hard-shell gear case hidden in the lee of an air conditioning unit. He removed a custom-made compound bow from inside, the curve of dense plastic fitted with cross-strung cables, rotating cams and a polymerised string that quadrupled the release force of the weapon. Putting on a wrist guard and a finger tab, Marc gave the bow a test pull, checking the resistance.

  ‘If you miss . . .’ Malte began.

  ‘I won’t,’ Marc insisted. ‘Been practising.’ The offices of the Browder Insurance Agency were a couple of floors taller than the Horizon Integral building, and from their roof he had a good sight-line down into the upper atrium and the highest levels of the software developer’s headquarters. Marc had already picked out a good target; a recessed section where an automated window-washing cradle rested when it wasn’t in operation. He flicked on the laser-assisted sight ring attached to the side of the bow and adjusted it. Point to point, the distance between the two buildings covered less than twenty metres, but it was the thirty-plus storeys of sheer drop down to the street that gave him pause.

  The carbon-fibre arrow he prepared was feather-light, and with care he connected a fine cable to a clasp behind the mushroom-shaped head at the end of the shaft. The arrowhead had a frangible structure, filled with powerful adhesive gel that would stick instantly to practically anything. Marc tugged at the cable spool he had strapped to the roof ledge, making sure it freely paid out the line.

  He and Lucy had used a similar device on a rainy night above the Port of New Jersey, the graphene spider-wire acting as a descender to drop them in on a target from a great height. This was an upgraded version, capable of supporting the weight of a small car, or so the tech specs promised.

  ‘Keep back,’ Marc warned. ‘If this snaps and whips back on us, it’ll cut through you like cheese wire.’ He nocked the arrow, and took a breath before drawing back the string and pushing away the bow. The cams turned and the bow limbs creaked as he waited for the wind to drop. The muscles in his arms and across his back stiffened.

  This wasn’t like shooting a pistol. A whole different set of physics were involved in the act, but Marc found he liked it. Plus, the fusion of archery’s low-tech marksmanship with the hi-tech next-generation bow kit appealed to his hardware-geek side. A rope gun line launcher could do the same job, but it was louder and far more likely to be noticed than what Lucy had nicknamed ‘the Hawkeye option’.

  The breeze momentarily faded, and Marc put the ring-sight where he wanted the arrow to land. Release. The shot was gone before he was fully aware of it happening, the bowstring giving a low twang. The spider-wire went fizzing out after the arrow, glistening as it caught the light from the street below.

  The arrowhead landed a little off the mark, but close enough for what he needed. Marc put down the bow and tugged experimentally on the graphene cable, making sure only to touch it using the ceramic pads on the fingers of his tactical gloves. It held firm.

  ‘Ready?’ said Malte, offering him a slide-wire rig made of the same diamond-hard material.

  Marc eyed him, intuiting what the other man wasn’t saying. ‘I know you want to go in my place. But you don’t have this.’ He showed Malte his ruggedised tablet computer before slipping it into a protective pocket in his gear vest. ‘And honestly? You’re not nerd enough for what’s gotta happen.’

  Malte gave a reluctant nod. ‘Agreed. I don’t want to repeat what we did at Strefa G.’ The Finn referred to a black-site prison in Poland, when Marc had been forced to work Malte like a game avatar, so they could extract a high-value target. ‘I cannot help you from over here.’

  ‘I’m sure it’ll go fine,’ Marc replied, snapping the rig into place and threading his hands through its safety loops to seize the grip bar. ‘Piece of cake.’ He slid his legs over the edge of the roof.

  ‘Don’t look down,’ Malte told him, then shoved him hard in the small of the back.

  Marc’s stomach fell through a giddy swoop as he went off the ledge, and for a split second he thought the cable had snapped and he was plummeting to his death; but then the tension equalised and he was roc
keting through open space.

  Ahead, the leafy cladding of the Horizon Integral building rushed to meet him and he swung up his legs to take the impact. Marc hit it square on, and grunted as the shock of deceleration passed through him. Scrambling into the cradle dock, he disconnected himself from the rig and climbed up. Pushing through to maintenance space past that, he very definitely did not look back over his shoulder at the yawning gap he had traversed.

  Adrenaline prickled in his fingertips and he flexed his hands. ‘Okay, I’m in.’ He tapped the radio pickup pressed to his throat. ‘I had my oh shit moment, but we’re good.’

  ‘Welcome to the party, pal,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Yeah, thanks for that.’ The door that led from the maintenance room to the corridor beyond had a digital magnetic lock, and Marc made short work of it, using a non-conductive knife to slice through the wiring. No alarms sounded as he stepped out into the gloomy, unlit floor.

  He dropped into a crouch and booted up the rugged tablet, double-checking the layout against the floorplans taken from architectural blueprints of the tower. The database server was located eight levels below him, in a secure section of the building with triple layers of security. One layer Marc knew he could defeat, but the others . . . they would require Lucy’s assistance.

  Marc tapped into the building’s wireless network and uploaded a variant of the GCHQ Optic Nerve driver-control software, using the intrusion program to spoof the motion sensors in his immediate surroundings so that no lights would come on and no warnings would be sent to the security desk. That done, he moved fast toward the main elevator bank.

  ‘I’m on my way to the server,’ he said into the throat mic. ‘Do your thing.’

  Sunny was telling a story that she seemed to think was pretty engaging, about a guy who drove a white Lamborghini and had a tendency to get a little too ‘handsy’ after a few drinks. Lucy nodded and smiled like she was actually interested, but her goal was to work her way back through the partygoers in the atrium and find Sunny’s dad. Without him, the mission would stall.

  Sunny was already on her second Piña Colada but Lucy had only pretended to drink hers, and the younger woman trailed after her, going on about the dress again. ‘C’mon, spill. Where’d you buy it? Paris? Tokyo?’

  ‘Custom-made,’ she admitted. ‘Cut-Tex anti-slash fabric. Mil-spec.’

  ‘Anti-what?’ Sunny didn’t catch all of it. ‘Milan, you said? Yeah, I get that. Those Italians know how to bring the look.’

  ‘And then some.’ Lucy opened her clutch and retrieved her spyPhone, activating the device’s high-acuity camera as she returned to Solomon’s side. ‘Darling?’ she purred.

  Solomon offered her a sardonic smile. ‘Lucille, my dear. I was telling Mr Wehmeyer about our facility in Switzerland.’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ Lucy slipped into the part easily, shifting her accent northwards from New York to New England. ‘Yes, you must come! Fantastic skiing!’

  ‘I love skiing!’ Sunny chipped in. She gave her father a hug. ‘We should go!’

  ‘We should!’ Lucy echoed, and grinned as she saw her opportunity. ‘Look at you two! So cute!’ she chirped. ‘Selfie!’ Before Wehmeyer could disengage, she slipped in next to him and snaked her arm around his waist, cupping his hand. She brought up the spyPhone and it snapped three fast shots of father, daughter and her.

  The flash was dazzling, a tiny starburst that made all of them blink in surprise. Lucy used the moment to slip Wehmeyer’s ring off his finger and palm it, and it was gone before he noticed.

  ‘Oh, that was bright,’ he muttered. ‘I’m seeing stars!’

  ‘Charmer!’ Lucy planted a kiss on Wehmeyer’s cheek with a theatrical mwah sound and disengaged. Her gaze caught Solomon’s and she gave him the tiniest of nods. ‘I’m gonna go powder my nose,’ she told him. ‘Don’t talk business all night, Ekko.’

  The men went back to their conversation, chuckling at her comments, and as Lucy stepped away, she let the act drop off her like a discarded item of clothing.

  She stopped momentarily and pivoted back to Sunny, leaning in to offer the girl a thought before leaving her behind. ‘Hey. About Lamborghini Boy? Next time he tries to grope you, take one of these . . .’ She handed her the tiny cocktail umbrella from her drink. ‘Put it in the heel of your hand. Then jam the pointy end under his thumbnail. After that, I guarantee he’ll leave you the fuck alone.’

  Sunny twirled the umbrella in her fingers as Lucy walked off, abruptly at a loss for words.

  ‘Image uploads are coming in now,’ said Assim over the radio channel. ‘This is a good take. Give me a few minutes to enhance it.’

  ‘I’m heading to the elevators now,’ Lucy replied. ‘How’s that going?’

  ‘Almost done,’ said Marc.

  He tapped the call button for the lift, but the illuminated control remained dark.

  An automated voice issued out of a speaker above the frosted glass doors. ‘We’re sorry. All lifts are currently out of service above the tenth floor. If you need to access this system, please contact security. Would you like me to do that for you now?’

  ‘No thanks,’ Marc muttered, cuing up a digital sound-synthesis program on his tablet.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that. Can you repeat, please?’

  Marc typed a short sentence into the tablet and held it up to the speaker grille. ‘Sig-ma. This is. Martin Wehmeyer.’ The speech sounded stiff and full of pauses in the wrong places, but Marc counted on it being enough to fool the smart building’s voice recognition software. ‘Unlock the. Lifts.’ He pushed the call button again.

  Horizon Integral’s CEO liked being in the media spotlight, and that meant that Wehmeyer left a considerable digital footprint behind him, data that Rubicon had been able to mine in order to assemble a passable digital impersonation of the man. Constructed from corporate promotional videos, news reports and so on, the data gave the tablet enough sound elements to make Wehmeyer say whatever Marc needed him to. The quality wasn’t good enough to dupe a human, but a computer was a different story.

  ‘Recognise: Martin Wehmeyer, Chief Executive Officer. Good evening, sir,’ came the reply. ‘All lifts are now unlocked.’

  The irony of using a fake human to hoodwink another fake human made him smirk. Presently, an empty car slid smoothly to a stop and the doors opened to present Marc with a glass-walled elevator giving a view down the core of the office tower. He pulled the watch cap tight over his hair and kept his back to the camera dome in the corner of the car.

  Far below, he could make out the glow of the gathering on the ground floor. He stepped inside and tapped the keypad to take him to the server level. ‘Going down,’ said the building’s synthetic voice.

  ‘Lucy, you read me?’

  ‘Ears on,’ she replied. She sounded tinny and distant, her voice flattened by the comm gear’s built-in encryption protocols. ‘Where’s my ride at?’

  ‘Should be ready now,’ he said. ‘Meet me on floor twenty.’

  ‘Copy.’

  The doors hissed shut and the lift began a rapid descent. The tablet pinged and Marc booted up an image package that Assim had sent to him. He smiled. Two down, one to go. Once he met up with Lucy and she handed him the smart-ring, he would have everything they need to enter the company’s secure server. It all was going according to plan.

  The lift slowed to a halt and Marc turned back to the doors. As they started to open, he noticed the level indicator read 22 and not 20.

  Directly outside stood a Samoan guy in the uniform of a security guard. The man had a rugby player’s build, all broad neck and glower. He and Marc both reacted in surprise to see the other, but the guard was faster off his feet and he barrelled into the lift, body-checking Marc into the control panel. He slammed up against the buttons and the elevator car dropped once more.

  ‘Going down,’ said the computer voice. ‘Express to ground floor.’

  ‘Going up.’

  Lucy made sure no on
e saw her slip into the waiting elevator, and she crouched low as it rose, in case someone happened to be looking up the glass shaft as it ascended. When she was sure she was out of sight, she started re-configuring her evening wear, as the level indicator climbed into double digits. First, the folds across the shoulder of the dress opened along hidden lines of Velcro so she could wrap it over and mask her silhouette. Next, the ornamental sections around the skirt were turned into figure-hugging shorts for ease of motion. Lastly, she pulled her clutch bag inside out and uncoiled concealed straps to make it into a cross-belt holster for the flat, slab-like ML-12 pistol secreted inside. Lucy drew the gun and cracked it open along the width to check it. The two-shot weapon was loaded with a pair of non-lethal 12-gauge bean-bag rounds. Solomon had been adamant about that. No bloodshed . . . and ideally, no traces.

  As the floor indicator passed 18, Lucy glimpsed motion through the clear dome above her and caught sight of another elevator coming down the neighbouring shaft. She barely had time to register what she saw inside as the other glass-walled car flashed past; Marc Dane and a guy about twice his size going back and forth like two boxers trapped in a phone booth.

  ‘Oh shit!’ She went to the glass, craning her head to follow the other elevator’s descent.

  The first punch the Samoan guard landed rang a church bell through Marc’s head and hit him hard enough to knock the radio bead out of his ear. He heard it crunch under his boot as he staggered back to avoid the one-two follow on, ducking as best he could to avoid a meaty haymaker that whooshed through the air where his face had been a split second earlier.

  He went for a Krav Maga strike, hitting by reflex at the guard’s gut, hoping to get a lucky shot in his opponent’s solar plexus, but the blows landed and appeared to do nothing. The guard tried to grab him, and they both pivoted in the tiny space of the lift car. Marc kicked out and made contact with the bigger man’s shin, getting a growl of pain in return and briefly putting the Samoan off-balance.