Ghost:

by James Swallow

  Marc snorted and pushed the drone in closer. The point-of-view video juddered and then began a slow retreat. Previously the movement had been fast and smooth, but now it was leaden and sluggish. ‘Feeling the extra weight,’ said Marc. ‘I have the case.’

  ‘Bring it on home,’ Lucy said, turning back to Crowne. ‘What was that you were saying before?’

  ‘Could be anything in there,’ said Crowne. Then he shifted slightly, mulling it over. ‘Whatever that case represents, it’s best if Horizon Integral take custody of it. I’ll return to the office, we’ll have our people open it up and—’

  ‘No,’ Marc spoke over him. ‘I can drop this into the sea in a second, pal.’

  ‘Besides,’ said Lucy, fishing the brass key from her pocket. ‘You don’t have this.’

  They gathered in the games room on the ground floor of the house, beneath another massive television and a cabinet packed with media players and consoles. Marc repurposed the regulation size pool table in the middle of the space as a work area. Getting the hang of the drone had been easy enough once he called on the twitch-action reflexes he’d honed playing videogames, and he piloted the compact UAV down through a skylight in the roof to deposit its payload on the blue baize.

  Putting aside the goggles, he disconnected the magnetic clamp and took the case in his hands, studying it. A single lock held it secure, and as Lucy had predicted, the key that Hite had died with fit it exactly.

  ‘You think he booby-trapped it?’ Lucy said quietly.

  Marc held his breath and turned the key. The lock opened with a metallic whisper and the lid rose automatically. No explosive blast followed, and he let out his breath in a low whistle. ‘Let’s see what he was hiding.’

  USB sticks or a hard drive, a pack of data discs, these were what Marc had expected to find inside the case. Instead, he drew out a grubby, dog-eared cardboard folder, thick with yellowing sheets of paper and news clippings. Beneath it was a flat brick of black plastic, and it took him a second to realise he was looking at an actual vintage VHS video tape cassette. Along with that, a dusty manila envelope contained a loose wad of faded photographs, the rubber band holding them together having long since degraded.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Crowne snatched the video tape from his hand and held it up in front of his face, examining the cassette like it was some artefact from some ancient civilisation. ‘Haven’t seen one of these for years.’

  Marc opened the folder and carefully laid out each item inside it on the pool table. He glanced over the first few articles; pages torn from an American high school yearbook circa 1978, a photocopy of a heavily redacted document bearing CIA code references, and a Chicago Police Department arrest report for a ‘Jane Doe’.

  Lucy flipped through the photos, sorting them into piles, pausing to study an image shot on some long-ago beachside holiday.

  Crowne leaned in for a look, then glanced at the file pages. ‘That’s the same face.’ He pressed a finger on the police mugshot and then indicated the photo in Lucy’s hand. Both were of a skinny teenage girl with short, copper-red hair.

  Marc stepped back to take in the content of Hite’s secret stash. ‘All of this . . . it’s one person.’ He nodded to himself as the understanding hit him. ‘We’ve got pieces of someone’s life here.’

  Lucy picked up the police report. ‘Arrested for breaking into an AT&T telephone switching facility. Estimated age suggests a birthdate in the early 1960s.’

  Marc nodded. ‘That’d make her, what? In her mid or late fifties now?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She stared at the page, and Marc saw a realisation wash over her expression. ‘The redhead. This is her. Shit! I think this is Madrigal.’

  ‘No . . .’ Crowne’s first reaction was scepticism. He had heard the stories about the notorious hacker and seemed doubtful.

  Marc blinked, taking in Lucy’s discovery, reframing the material in a new context. ‘Madrigal’s a phantom. Her identity has never been confirmed. Hacker legend says she deleted her past from every database on the planet.’

  ‘You can’t erase a piece of paper with a mouse and a keyboard,’ said Crowne, examining one of the news clippings, slowly coming around to the idea. ‘This is whatever she missed.’

  ‘Low tech,’ Marc thought aloud. ‘Like the brass key. Hite knew he couldn’t get anything on Madrigal through digital methods, so he went old school. Probably been gathering this material on the quiet as an insurance policy.’

  ‘Too late for that,’ said Lucy. She looked at the security exec. ‘So, you on board with us now?’

  Crowne gave her a sideways glance. ‘I don’t know. Some of this . . . It’s not about her. See?’ He handed Lucy the CIA document. ‘Look at the date. 1971. If this woman is who you say she is, she would have been a kid then.’

  ‘Marie Stone.’ Marc found the name scratched on the back of one of the photos, and sounded it out as he said it. ‘Same surname here.’ He pointed to a piece of still-visible text in the redacted document. ‘This could be about someone in her family, then?’

  ‘I see more agency pages,’ said Lucy, continuing to go through the papers, offering up a sheaf of blurry typewritten sheets. ‘Looks like an after-action report. References to an operation in South Korea.’ She glanced at Crowne. ‘Am I right?’

  ‘Why are you asking me?’

  She glared at him. ‘Don’t play dumb. I could tell you were an ex-Virginia farm boy by the haircut and the suit.’

  He sighed and took the papers from her, looking them over. ‘This is from way before my time. But it looks legit. I don’t even want to speculate how a dickhead like Charles Hite got his hands on these.’

  ‘Money opens a lot of doors,’ Marc noted. ‘Right now, I want to see what’s on this.’ He tapped the video tape. ‘It has to be significant, right? Hite wouldn’t have kept it otherwise.’

  Lucy eyed the cassette. ‘So how do we do that? Call the local thrift stores and hope someone has a VCR that can play it?’

  Marc shook his head, and started searching the cabinets around the walls of the games room and beneath the big TV. ‘Hite was a crook and an arsehole, but he was a techie. And so am I. And we hoard obsolete hardware like other people collect stamps.’

  Crowne sneered. ‘He’s not just gonna have one lying around—’

  Marc opened the third bureau along and smiled, running his hand down a set of carefully-preserved electronic gear. ‘Laser Disc. Betamax. U-Matic . . .’ He stopped as he found a compatible player. ‘VCR! Here we go.’

  ‘You’re kidding me.’ Lucy eyed him. ‘Should I get the maid to make some popcorn?’

  His smile faded as he studied the label on the tape: Evidence Item #34A. Dade County Sherriff’s Office Case File #93–37 (Cooper Homicide).

  Marc slid the cassette into the machine and pressed the play button.

  Time has worked on the cheap magnetic coating of the video tape, and the playback is full of static. A title card shows the case file numbers and the location where the assembled footage was shot. Bright Palms is the upbeat name of a Florida retirement complex in Hialeah. Twenty years ago, it was home to dozens of elderly men and women looking for someplace warm to see out their twilight years.

  A civilian auxiliary working in the Sherriff’s office assembled this recording from other tapes, and the cuts are workmanlike and clumsy. Grainy black-and-white images show the exterior of the gated community on a stormy August night. Lightning flashes in the distance.

  A black sedan that had been stolen earlier that night, according to the notes accompanying the tape, cruises past and melts into the shadows. The figure that climbs out is impossible to identify, lost under a sweatshirt and baseball cap, hands in dark gloves.

  Then different footage, from a security camera looking across the gated community’s swimming pool. Palm leaves are drifting on the surface of the rain-lashed water, and there are a few lights still on in the windows of the motel-style apartments. The time code in the corner of the fram
e reads 3.23 a.m.

  Something moves; a dark shape coming over the top of the exterior wall. The figure in the cap drops down and navigates across the open space, careful to stay in the dark as much as possible. The intruder knows where the cameras are mounted, and has planned their entry accordingly.

  The video jumps jarringly to a few seconds of footage shot during the daytime, from a bulky hand-held camera. The view shows the outside of a laundry room, peeking in at the ranks of aging washers and tumble dryers through a reinforced window that has been forced open. The gap is small, too narrow for a grown man to fit through.

  The edit flashes snow-static again and returns to the night in question. A camera at the end of a corridor looks down past dozens of apartment doors. If not for the slow tick of the time code in the corner of the frame, it might appear to be a static image. Then a door halfway up the corridor opens and one of the residents leaves his room. The notes say that this man is Calvin Cooper, age eighty-six. He’s wearing baggy tracksuit trousers, slippers and a housecoat.

  He walks with a metal stick, away down the corridor, disappearing around the corner with a newspaper tucked under one arm.

  The screen flicks to a grimy point of view over the day room. It’s dark in there. The chairs are empty, the rest of the residents asleep in their apartments. Calvin goes to a table in the corner where he can sit with his back to the wall. Lightning illuminates him briefly as he moves. He’s thin and stiff.

  The long corridor again. The figure in the cap enters frame. The intruder moves carefully, never once looking in the camera’s direction. They stop outside Calvin’s room and force the lock. The resident rooms maintain their privacy, so there is no video of what happens inside during the minute that elapses. The notes say Calvin’s room was searched.

  But the intruder isn’t here as a thief. They have come to find someone. The figure emerges again and there’s a moment of hesitation before they move off, following in the old man’s footsteps.

  The remainder of the video plays out from the perspective of the day-room camera. Calvin reads his paper, lit by a small lamp. He doesn’t seem to realise that he isn’t alone until the intruder is almost upon him – but then he moves faster than someone of his age might be expected to. He strikes out with the stick. The action isn’t random, but an attack someone who has been trained to fight would employ. It’s only age that betrays him.

  The intruder blocks the blow and disarms the old man, tossing the stick away. For a split second, the face beneath the cap is visible. A woman? It’s unclear.

  The figure sits down across from Calvin and stares at him over the small table. And they talk.

  There’s no audio in any of the footage, so everything unfolds in silence. But it isn’t hard to imagine the quality of their voices, if not the actual words. Their postures suggest a terse interchange made in low, hissed tones. It goes on for some time.

  Slowly, their body language changes. Calvin becomes stoic as an invisible weight descends upon him. The expression on his face looks a lot like sorrow. Like guilt. He seems defeated.

  Seen from the back, the intruder hardens. It’s anger there, cold rage that builds as the minutes pass. Finally, the figure in the cap pushes a notepad and a pen across the table to Calvin, and reluctantly the old man begins to write. It is impossible to see what he scribbles on the pages.

  When he is done, the intruder puts the pad away and takes back the pen. Calvin looks as if he is about to speak.

  There is a blur of motion and the figure jams the pen into the old man’s throat. He rocks back in shock, and the intruder springs up to smother his cries with one gloved hand. Calvin’s killer tears the pen free and stabs him again, and again. The assault is violent, furious. The notes state dispassionately that there were six separate entry wounds.

  Blood, rendered ink-dark by the video recording, gushes down the front of Calvin’s housecoat and he pitches on to the table, shuddering. His killer doesn’t leave, not straight away. The intruder stands over him, watching until there is no question that the man is dead.

  Lightning flashes again as the bloodied figure moves to the exit. The camera catches their face, and it is clear, recognisable.

  A woman in her thirties with ash-pale skin and henna-red hair, her eyes hollow and predatory.

  With Assim working backup from the jet, Marc dove into a search across the US Department of Justice database and records from Florida law enforcement that were two decades old.

  Behind him, while Crowne stood by silently, Lucy removed the video tape from the VCR and weighed it in her hand. ‘If we get this to the techs in Palo Alto, we might be able to have the images enhanced . . .’ She trailed off, looking down at the scattered photographs. ‘Ah, hell. It was her. No question about it. Younger, but definitely Madrigal. She murdered that poor bastard in cold blood.’

  ‘Not cold blood,’ Marc corrected. ‘You saw what she did to him. That was hate letting go. She didn’t just kill Cooper, she wanted to brutalise him, she wanted—’ He stopped himself. Marc knew he was right, because he recognised that ghastly moment of violent rage. He had experienced the exact same impulse himself when loss had driven him to kill. Like knows like, he thought.

  Lucy seemed to understand what was passing through his mind and gave him a nod. ‘What else have we got on this?’

  He showed her. The first hits had come up straight away, from public records, newspaper articles and the like talking about the brutal attack and the police manhunt that followed. No one had ever been arrested for the crime, but the black sedan had been found in a ditch off the Florida Turnpike a week later. The vehicle had been torched, and the body of a woman the State Troopers recovered from the driver’s seat had no identity that they could find. No dental records, no fingerprints. Nothing that could have indicated who she was existed in county, state or national records.

  ‘Madrigal covering her tracks,’ Lucy said quietly. ‘Someone else died in her place.’

  But where things took a turn for the unusual was when Calvin Cooper’s life went under the microscope. Information about the old man was sparse, in that very engineered way that only those who worked in the shadow realm of intelligence warranted. Marc knew the telltale signs when he saw them. Vague references to a past career as a ‘government consultant’ and ‘embassy staff’ stood out like red flags. ‘That’s code for a non-official cover if ever I saw it,’ he noted. ‘What do you want to bet this bloke was a former spook?’

  ‘He was,’ said Crowne, his manner abruptly muted.

  Marc turned to look at him and saw recognition in the other man’s eyes. ‘You knew him?’

  Crowne shook his head. ‘Not really. I knew of him. I wasn’t sure at first. Didn’t think it was the same guy. But now . . .’ He glanced at Lucy, then reluctantly pressed on. ‘At Langley. There was a Cal Cooper who served as an instructor out at the Farm, for a while. Old guy, probably taught hundreds of trainees over the years.’ He indicated the video tape. ‘That could be him.’

  ‘The Farm’ was Central Intelligence Agency shorthand for the organisation’s training facility at Camp Peary, in the woodlands near Williamsburg. Within the base’s walls, trainees were subjected to a regimen of intensive physical and mental challenges designed to hone their skills for eventual deployment in the field, and the CIA often seconded veteran field agents to teaching duties there. Marc had gone through the MI6 equivalent of the program at Fort Monckton in Hampshire, after his recruitment into the British intelligence service. ‘Go on,’ he prompted.

  ‘All I know is, the man was a case officer in the ’70s. Far East specialist. Word around the agency said he’d been pulled off active duty after an op went south in a bad way, and never allowed to go back.’ Crowne looked down.

  ‘How does that connect to Madrigal?’ said Lucy. ‘Did he know about her past?’ She turned to Marc. ‘Whatever information he had, she was willing to kill for it.’

  ‘The notepad.’ Marc nodded. ‘Cooper gave her what she
needed and then she disposed of him. But that wasn’t a loose end getting tied off.’

  ‘It was a revenge kill,’ agreed Lucy.

  A message window pinged open on Marc’s tablet and Assim’s face filled the small panel. ‘Okay, I ran the file codes from that redacted document,’ he said quickly, launching in without preamble. ‘They appear to be legitimate, part of the paperwork from an operation codenamed Overtone that ran in the winter of 1971. Details are scarce, but the paper trail connects the CIA and the US Army to an office of, get this, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency.’

  ‘As in South Korea?’ said Marc.

  Assim’s head bobbed in assent. ‘Whatever Overtone was, all primary materials on it have been thoroughly scrubbed from any databases that Rubicon can access. That only happens when someone at a senior government level wants something buried deep and forgotten.’

  ‘Rubicon has offices in South Korea,’ Lucy noted. ‘We got any assets there we can deploy, find out more about this?’

  Assim shook his head. ‘I don’t believe so. The KCIA doesn’t even exist in that form anymore, largely because the head of the agency assassinated the country’s sitting president in 1979 . . .’ He paused. ‘Long story. Not relevant. The bottom line is, South Korean Intelligence has a very chequered past that nobody wants to dredge up.’

  ‘No doubt.’ Lucy looked at Crowne. ‘So, backing up, if we put two and two together, Overtone could have been Cooper’s failed operation. The time period, the location. The facts line up.’

  Crowne folded his arms across his chest. ‘You’re making a lot of assumptions.’

  ‘Respectfully,’ said Assim, ‘this isn’t the first time Korea has come up in recent days. We know that Ghost5 hacked a metro in Taipei to deliberately cause a head-on collision with another train—’

  ‘Taipei is in Taiwan, not Korea,’ interrupted Crowne.