Ghost:

by James Swallow

  The gunman crumpled with a strangled wheeze, a fatal surge of blood drenching his legs as he went down. The thigh shot had gone through the man’s femoral artery, and the life gushed out of him.

  Gasping for breath, Marc tried to scramble back to his feet, but there was someone behind him. Another figure in black loomed over Marc, his face craggy and hard, with the long and spear-like silhouette of a sniper rifle in his hand.

  The rifle butt came down and struck Marc across the head, lighting black fires across his vision, sending him sprawling.

  *

  The fight spilled out of the bathroom and back on to the first-floor landing.

  Lucy was on the defensive, drawing back with each advance the other woman made. She was smaller and she didn’t have Lucy’s reach, but the wicked length of the assassin’s combat dagger gave her an edge that Lucy did not want to test.

  As they moved through the spin and the dance of it, she caught glimpses of her opponent’s face in the shafts of weak illumination that spilled in through the windows. The assassin was East Asian, which connected with the language Lucy had heard her speaking, and she could see the woman’s throat-mic comm unit around her slender neck. Her face was reddish-pink down one side where the shower had scalded her, and her hair was cut short enough to suggest someone with a soldier’s habits.

  The equipment and the angry focus in her eyes seemed to back up that last detail. Lucy wasn’t facing some hired hand or local talent gun-thug. This woman was military trained. But that she could exploit.

  She was losing room to manoeuvre, backing toward the bannister around the edge of the landing. A slow ache from the bandage around her leg threatened to put a drag on her speed, and she tried to ignore it.

  Lucy faked a stumble and left a small opening to see what it would get her. The assassin swallowed the bait without hesitation, following the line of her training to make a fast, hard kill whenever the opportunity presented itself.

  She stabbed forward with the dagger, but the exposed flank the assassin was targeting was abruptly gone.

  Lucy stepped into the motion and trapped the woman’s arm before she could withdraw, twisting it cleanly below the elbow, tearing the knife out of her hand in the same motion. The joint dislocated with a wet click and the assassin bit back a bitter shriek of pain. Lucy kicked the other woman hard across the knee and sent her sprawling.

  Rocking off her heels, she rolled the knife around to get a feel for it, and pitched forward, ready to go in and finish the job.

  Behind her, part of the wooden bannister exploded into splinters and she was knocked off-kilter, flinching at this new attack.

  Turning, Lucy saw another figure, a man in black tactical gear working the slide of a long rifle to load a fresh round, bringing it to bear on her.

  ‘No!’ The shout came from the other side of the atrium. ‘We need that one alive as well!’

  Lucy knew the voice. Her knuckles tightened around the hilt of the stolen combat dagger as a familiar figure came into view, followed by two of the masked men dragging a semi-conscious Marc between them. Her heart sank, but then the emotion drowned in a flood of new fury.

  ‘Kara,’ she spat, turning the woman’s name into a curse. ‘You fucking bitch.’

  THIRTEEN

  The blur of pain that packed Marc’s head pulsed like a living thing as he felt muscular hands drag him into the back of a vehicle and dump him on the metal deck. Sounds muffled by the singing of blood in his ears slowly began to reform into human voices and he heard the grumble of an engine starting up. There was a strong scent, like gas. Is that real, or am I imagining it? He remembered someone once telling him that people who suffered brain damage smelled odours that weren’t there. And the man with the rifle had hit him very hard.

  The metal pressing against his face vibrated and the vehicle lurched into motion. Dragging himself back to awareness seemed to take forever. The needles of agony in his skull and the sickly pressure in his gut ebbed, but only a little. His hands were heavy and leaden, secured together by a tight plastic band.

  He flashed back to the blow that had knocked the sense out of him, back in Hite’s games room. Is this what a concussion feels like? The thought failed to connect to anything and faded away.

  It took all his effort to roll on to his side. The first thing his eyes focused on was the metal attaché case, sitting on its narrow axis between a pair of booted feet. Marc’s gaze climbed up the body of the person minding the case and fixed on hate-filled eyes boring back into him. A slight oriental woman in combat gear, with one arm in a makeshift sling, glared at Marc with undisguised animosity. She wanted to kill him; it was written all over her face.

  A flash of yellow-orange blinked through the rear windows of the van, making the woman look up. An instant later, the sound of an explosion rumbled over them.

  Someone up front gave an order, and the van increased speed, putting more distance between them and the detonation. Marc thought about the smell of gas. Was that how they were covering their tracks? He pictured Hite’s expensive clifftop home going up in a ball of flames. It would look like an accident at first, at least until someone examined whatever corpses were dragged out of the building.

  That thought jolted him with a flood of cold dread. He looked around, ignoring the sparks of pain the movement generated, searching the van’s shadowy interior. He saw masked men with guns, and then relief hit as he spotted Lucy sitting across the way. She bled from an unattended cut on her cheek and her hands were bound with plastic cable ties, the same kind that held Marc’s wrists together. The moment didn’t last long.

  She met his gaze and gave him a rueful nod that communicated a wealth of unspoken information. We’re in the shit all over again, it said.

  ‘This feels . . . familiar,’ Marc said thickly.

  ‘They killed everyone else,’ Lucy replied, breaking eye contact. ‘Shot them in the back as they tried to run. Executed them.’

  Belatedly, Marc realised that there was no sign of the Samoan security guard or the house staff in the van with them.

  ‘That’s what Ghost5 have become, right?’ Lucy asked the question of someone sitting across from her, and Marc shifted so he could see who she was speaking to. ‘They destroy the lives of innocent people without remorse. And for what?’

  Kara Wei leaned out of the shadows and studied him, ignoring Lucy’s words. ‘Sorry, Dane,’ she said, with a shake of the head. ‘You should have stayed out of it.’

  For a moment, the piercing pain in Marc’s skull was forgotten, overcome by his surprise at seeing her here. ‘What have you done?’ He blurted out the question. He wanted to know why she had deceived Rubicon, why she had deceived him. ‘I don’t understand why you’re part of this.’

  Kara cocked her head and studied him, as if Marc’s words were being delivered in some alien language she couldn’t decode.

  His perception of her changed, like that optical illusion that could be a vase or two faces, the form shifting from one image to another.

  Marc knew her face and her name and he thought he had known her, but now the young woman in the red leather jacket was a complete stranger to him, and he wondered for a moment if the blow to his head had knocked something loose in there.

  Kara’s expression was wrong, in a way he couldn’t put into words. Almost as if she were wearing it as a painted-on mask. It was fake, like the new identity Rubicon had given her.

  Then his brain caught up to what he was perceiving. No, it wasn’t that Kara Wei had become a different person. She was actually showing Marc who she really was. This isn’t her mask, he thought, this is the truth. The mask was who she pretended to be around us.

  ‘There’s nothing I can do for you now,’ Kara told him. ‘What happens next will be out of my hands.’

  ‘When I get free,’ said Lucy, her voice loaded with menace. ‘You’re gonna regret it.’

  Kara looked up at her. ‘You shouldn’t be angry that you trusted me. It’s not your
fault. It’s what I had to do to survive.’ The words were delivered in a flat monotone, and Marc felt his friend’s bland admission of her betrayal like a void in his chest.

  ‘Were you ever one of us?’ Lucy demanded.

  ‘I’ve never been one of anything,’ Kara said bleakly, her tone hardening as she gestured to one of the masked gunmen. ‘Get him off the floor.’

  Hands pulled at Marc’s arms and hauled him up on to one of the benches welded to the interior wall of the van. A gunman shoved him into a sitting position across from the woman with the broken arm, who continued to glare hatefully at him.

  ‘What’s her problem?’ said Marc, with a jut of the chin.

  Kara indicated a black body bag lying near the rear doors. ‘You shot her comrade. I guess she’s not real happy about it.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah.’ Marc’s throat turned arid as he remembered the weight of the silenced pistol in his hand. ‘He didn’t give me much of a choice.’

  ‘No more talking,’ said Kara, as sirens sounded up ahead of them.

  Crimson strobes pulsed through the interior of the van as they passed fire and emergency vehicles racing the other way, and Marc tried to crane his neck for a look out through the cab of the vehicle, but the gunman at his side shoved him back into his seat and prodded him in the chest with a silenced Micro Uzi. ‘Stay,’ he grated.

  Marc admitted defeat, for the moment, and hung his head. He marked the passage of the drive by mapping where he was bruised or sore, gauging the pain, trying to put it out of his mind.

  His jacket had been ripped in places, the lining showing through on the shoulder and around the pockets. When he had been semi-conscious, they must have searched him for weapons and kit, swept him for trackers. He couldn’t feel the weight of his spyPhone in his pocket, and there was no sign of his computer tablet or backpack.

  It was smart operational security for his abductors. The phones, the ear-bead comms, the tablet, anything that had been tagged with a GPS locator that Rubicon could activate, was gone. The only thing still in place was the familiar weight of the careworn dive watch on his wrist. Marc glanced at the luminous hands on the Cabot’s face and watched the minutes tick away. He wondered how long it would be before Solomon and Wehmeyer learned about the explosion at Hite’s house. What would they do next?

  The van drove on in silence for almost an hour, before making a sharp turn into an area lit by bright overhead floods. Marc heard the sounds of jet engines and guessed that they were entering the grounds of the Sydney Airport. No other airstrips were close enough to reach in so short a time.

  He gave Lucy a sideways glance and she silently met his gaze. She had to be thinking the same as him. Out on the eastern side of the runways, Ekko Solomon’s private A340 airliner sat parked among the other business jets, having flown the team in from France less than forty-eight hours ago. But surrounded by armed thugs, there was no way Marc and Lucy would be able to get free and make it back to the Rubicon aircraft, and no way to alert Assim and the others on board that they were close at hand.

  The van passed through an entry gate without stopping, which boded poorly for the two of them. That meant that Ghost5 had already bypassed airport security, and a chilling possibility rose in his thoughts.

  What if Sydney was the next target for the Arquebus software weapon? What if they had taken over the air-traffic control system or hacked the autopilots of dozen jetliners? The horrifying potential for mass destruction was sobering.

  He looked back at Kara, trying once again to reach the woman he thought he had known. ‘Do you care that innocent people have died because of Madrigal?’ He saw a brief flicker of reaction as he used the criminal hacker’s alias. ‘Or are you incapable of that?’

  ‘You don’t know anything about me,’ she replied, her tone even.

  ‘On that point, we agree,’ he said. ‘The Kara Wei I knew wouldn’t be involved in this.’

  ‘That person doesn’t exist,’ said the woman. ‘She’s a phantom you made the mistake of thinking was real.’

  The van slowed and jolted as it bounced on to a wide ramp, and Marc caught a glimpse of a cavernous metal tunnel yawning open around them. They were driving up into the back of a huge cargo aircraft, the white flanks of the fuselage briefly visible through the windscreen. Once inside, the vehicle halted and behind them heavy pistons ground into motion as massive doors swung slowly shut.

  ‘Out,’ ordered the gunman, prodding Marc again with the Uzi.

  Lucy stepped down on to the deck of the cargo plane in time to see the clamshell doors at the rear of the aircraft come together with a thud. The black van was nestled up against one side of the interior, a space wide enough to incorporate two vehicles side by side and still have room to spare. In the past, she’d rode on board the USAF’s giant C-5 Galaxy transporters, but this was bigger even than those monster jets. The cargo bay extended up and away, the curved walls covered with orange-brown thermal quilting to retain heat and dampen vibrations. Toward the nose, she saw that the interior had been modified with converted cargo containers slotted into place. Complex webs of cables festooned the walls, leading to and from heavy pods of hardware that had a distinctly military look to their design. The air inside here smelled like ozone and jet fuel.

  Up ahead, a handful of people – all of them dressed like they should have been at a rock club or a World of Warcraft tournament – were in the process of setting up portable computers and communications gear.

  While he was distracted by removing his combat mask, Lucy risked taking a step away from the gunman acting as her chaperone, trying to get a look through a porthole in the fuselage. She saw the red flashing strobe of a landing light off the end of a broad, high wing, from which hung a pair of massive jet engines. An AvGas tanker nestled under one of them, the elephant trunk of a fuel pipe disappearing up into a service port.

  ‘A Ruslan,’ said Marc, from behind her.

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘This is an An-124,’ he explained. ‘Biggest military transport plane on Earth. I have to wonder how Ghost5 got their hands on one.’

  ‘We bought it,’ said a new voice, the clipped edges of the words betraying a German accent and a forbidding attitude. Lucy turned to see a dark-skinned guy with a hard but handsome face and searching eyes approach from the front of the jet. Without the arrogance that followed him like a cloud of smoke, the man might have actually been her type, but he could barely speak to them without letting a sneer into every word. ‘From the Libyans.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ said Marc. ‘A day later, you stole the money back from their Swiss bank accounts.’

  Lucy heard a woman chuckle. ‘No. We do have some standards.’ The words had the same cadence she’d heard in the parking garage in San Francisco, only without the digital filtering to mask the voice beneath. A figure in a rumpled leather jacket over a black hoodie stepped into view and long-fingered hands came up to roll back the dark material. Lucy saw henna-red hair and a face that would have fitted some Hollywood character actress at the top of her game. It was the same face she had seen on the old video tape, but with twenty more years of wear and tear written across it. ‘Here you are,’ she said, looking Lucy over and then giving the same treatment to Marc. ‘This is a rare opportunity for me. I don’t often get to meet the people who pursue me in the real world, not face to face.’ Madrigal smiled like she knew the win was hers.

  Marc mirrored the woman’s slow grin. He recognised her too. ‘Marie Stone,’ he said, annunciating the words loudly and clearly. ‘I thought you’d be taller.’

  Despite all of her self-control, Madrigal couldn’t prevent a momentary flash of annoyance from crossing her expression as Marc tossed out her real name. She covered it quickly, but now there was real flint in her eyes. ‘You’ve heard that old saying about how a little knowledge can be dangerous?’

  ‘Oh, I know a lot,’ he went on, determined to twist the knife while he still had the chance. ‘Especially about you, Marie.’

&nbs
p; ‘I doubt that.’

  ‘No, really.’ Marc shook his head. ‘Your friend Chuck over at Horizon Integral was more paranoid than you gave him credit for, I reckon. He put a lot of time and money into finding out about you. I suppose that alone was a good enough reason for you to have him killed.’ The last sentence he said loudly, so that some of the other Ghost5 hacker crew heard him. They paused, more of them turning to see how it was going to play out. Marc made a twitching motion, mimicking the effect of being electrocuted. ‘Bzzzt. Nasty way to go.’

  Madrigal’s neutral expression hardened into solidity, and Lucy knew he had scored another point. But as much as she liked that, if Marc kept it up it would get him killed. The Brit never did seem to know when to keep his goddamn mouth shut.

  ‘Speaking of which,’ Madrigal said, after a moment. She reached out with a hand. One of the shooters from the house, the woman whose arm Lucy had dislocated, approached and passed her Hite’s blackmail case before backing off again. The other shooter, the older guy who had most likely put the kill-shot into Crowne, stood nearby and watched in stoic silence. ‘I want to thank you for finding this for me,’ Madrigal added. ‘There are a few things I’ve missed over the years. This will help to cover some of those gaps.’

  She opened the case and there was a strange light in her eyes as she fingered the photos and the papers. Lucy couldn’t read the expression. It might have been sorrow, anger, happiness, or some conflicted mix of all three.

  ‘I knew someone had been looking into our operations,’ continued the woman. ‘Imagine my surprise when I discovered who it was. The Rubicon Group. Ekko Solomon’s private vigilante brigade. Luckily for me, I recently reconnected with someone who is very familiar with the – what does he call it? The Special Conditions Division.’ She inclined her head toward Kara.