Ghost:

by James Swallow

  Madrigal took the radio from Erik’s hand and spoke into it. ‘What are you talking about? We have the woman here. She’s under control.’

  ‘Not her,’ Kara said roughly. ‘The other one.’

  *

  Marc let a minute or two pass after Lucy was taken before he decided to make his move. He let out a groan, more real than he wanted it to be, the ill-effect of the electric shock still churning in his belly. He hunched over, pulling against the zip-tie holding his bloodied wrists to the server compartment’s mesh barrier. Fixed securely at waist height, there was little room for him to move, but he could feel it starting to give.

  ‘Oi. Ugly!’ He glared at the tattooed thug and made a pained face. ‘Listen, I don’t know what you did by belting me, but I think you busted up my gut. Seriously. I feel like I’m going to piss blood.’

  ‘I don’t care.’ The thug pulled at the collar of his jacket, revealing more of the dense inking around his neck. The designs were devils, skulls and inverted crosses.

  ‘I need to get to a bathroom.’ Marc grimaced in pain. ‘You know what I’m talking about? Das Klo, ja?’

  ‘Hold it in,’ snorted the other man.

  ‘Yeah, that ain’t going to happen.’ Marc turned his back on the man and faced the barrier, with the server stacks beyond. He stretched up, pulling at his belt. ‘Fine. I’ll take a leak over this lot, then. And you can be the one who tells Madrigal why her plane stinks like a backed-up toilet. That’s if I don’t short-circuit something first.’

  ‘Nein.’ The thug rocked off his feet and came over stop him.

  Marc tucked his head forward, and when he felt the man’s hand on his shoulder, he lurched in an unexpected motion. The back of Marc’s skull connected with the thug’s nose and the German gave a grunt of pain. Striking out blindly, Marc pushed through the cramping from his muscles and fired off a sharp downward kick that connected with the guard’s knee. He howled and stumbled to the deck.

  Now or never, Marc told himself. He jumped back and kicked at the mesh barrier, for one brief moment putting his weight against the restraint holding him up. The move would either break the bones in his wrists or snap the plastic lock on the zip-tie, and fresh jolts of pain lanced through his forearms as his body mass shifted.

  The mesh deformed and the zip-tie finally gave way with a high-pitched ping. Marc couldn’t arrest his fall, and he collided with the thug as the other man tried to rise, flattening him back on to the metal deck.

  Marc drove his elbows into the tattooed man, striking him in the gut and the chest. The thug swore at him and swallowed a choking cough.

  The stun baton lay on the deck and the two men scrambled wildly to be the first to grab it. Marc clawed at the thug’s face to keep him back, and his other hand snatched up the weapon. Without hesitating, he jammed it into the man’s chest and the touch-switch in the metal tines made the connection. A roiling crackle of discharge buzzed loudly in the confined space of the server room and the thug cried out. If it hadn’t been for the compartment’s heavy door and the constant thrumming of the Antonov’s engines, someone might have heard the commotion.

  Marc kept hitting him again and again, inflicting payback for the jolts that he had been given, but more for the brutality that Ghost5 had inflicted on Lucy. Finally, panting and twitchy, he relented. But it wasn’t over yet.

  The thug gasped for air, shivering uncontrollably as his muscles went into spasm. Marc lurched across the deck and trapped the man’s throat in the crook of his knee, then pulled tight. His opponent flailed, but the shock hits had drained the resistance from him. Marc’s sleeper hold was a clumsy mess, like the rest of the fight had been, but in the end it had the effect he wanted. The thug’s convulsing subsided and at length he lay still.

  His hands prickling, Marc pushed away from the unconscious thug and tucked the stun prod into his belt. The device’s charge was almost spent, but in this situation he was reluctant to give up any kind of weapon. Searching the thug’s pockets produced nothing of use, so finally he dragged the man to the door and positioned him so that his body weight would push it shut when he left.

  He opened the hatch and slipped through, back into the cargo bay. The engine noise was louder out here, and most of the interior lights were off, leaving the space in patches of blackness. Marc saw a few of the Ghost5 hackers gathered in a group near their workstations. The skinny Polish girl who had been with Kara was there, talking animatedly to her comrades, but of Marc’s former colleague there was no sign.

  He considered his options. On an aircraft like this one, the cockpit above him would be staffed by a crew of at least three, maybe four people. Getting up there and taking control of the plane, even for a little while, would be nearly impossible. The Antonov’s radio was in the same compartment too, so reaching it to call for help presented the same problem. His window of opportunity was going to last exactly as long as the tattooed thug stayed insensible – or as long as Lucy Keyes could hold out against whatever Madrigal and her toy boy were doing.

  Marc pushed that unsettling thought aside and dropped into a crouch. Staying out of sight, he kept in the shadows and moved down the length of the plane, heading toward the rear where the black van sat secured to the deck. When the shooters had captured them at Hite’s house, all of Marc and Lucy’s gear had been taken away. If that kit was still in the van somewhere, if he could get to it, Marc would have a means of communication.

  He didn’t want to dwell on the slim likelihood of getting out of this situation alive. The odds were colossally, hysterically bad. But if he could alert Rubicon, get them to have the authorities ready to intercept the jet when it entered South Korean airspace, then at least there was a chance to stop Madrigal from executing the terminal phase of her operation.

  He crawled the last few metres down the narrow gap between the fuselage’s interior wall and the side of the van. The hackers were too engaged in their own conversation to see him, and so far there was no sign of the shooters. The cargo plane rocked as it passed through an area of turbulence and Marc moved into position, getting ready. The next time that happened, he would use the rattling of the aircraft’s hull to cover the action of getting inside the van.

  His mind kept circling back to what Madrigal had said earlier. Or rather, what she didn’t say, he corrected himself. There were still gaps in the logic of what Madrigal and Ghost5 was doing out here, pieces of the puzzle that Marc didn’t have.

  The deck beneath his feet shuddered and the fuselage groaned. Marc twisted the handle on the door and vaulted into the back of the van, securing it behind him in less than a second.

  To his dismay, he wasn’t alone.

  ‘What are you doing, idiot?’ At the far end of the van’s interior, Kara sat on a gear case with a laptop open over her crossed legs, the glow from the screen painting her face in a bloom of cold, polar blue.

  Marc pulled the stun baton and brandished it before him. ‘Don’t you make a sound.’

  She didn’t seem to register the implied threat. ‘You’re jumping the gun,’ she rasped, rubbing a hand over her reddened throat. She waved a hand in his direction. ‘Go back to the lock-up before somebody sees you.’

  He took a step toward her. ‘Where’s my gear?’

  Kara guessed what his intentions were. ‘You’re not going to be able to contact Rubicon. Erik trashed your phones before we took off,’ she said dismissively.

  Marc halted, dealing with this new information. ‘Never mind. Get up. You can be my bullet magnet.’ Perhaps he could still send out a digital call for help, if he could take control of her computer.

  Kara eyed him. ‘For crying out loud, Dane. Catch up! I am not going anywhere with you. You have to trust me. Let me do what I do and we might be able to get through this.’ She trailed off for a moment. ‘We can make sure Madrigal pays for what she’s done.’

  ‘Trust you?’ He spat the words in harsh snarl. ‘Are you out of your fucking mind? You betrayed us, Kara! You lied to me and lef
t me in the shit! You gave up Lucy and the rest of Rubicon to your hacker mates. People are dead because of what you’ve done, do you get that?’

  She stopped working the laptop and looked up at him. In the weak digital light from the screen, Kara’s face seemed strangely empty. ‘I . . . I think so.’ Then the moment passed. ‘But I mean what I say. You can’t be here, Marc. You’re going to ruin everything.’

  ‘Ruining Madrigal’s plans is exactly what I want to do,’ he shot back.

  ‘Not her plan. Mine.’ Kara scowled in clear frustration. ‘Good grief, you neuro-typicals are so dense! What do you think I’m doing now?’ She held up the laptop. ‘Madrigal’s techs have a transient electromagnetic device wired through the plane, to blitz all the hard drives at once in case of an emergency. I’m trying to crack the control protocol. Or I was, before you interrupted me.’

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’ Marc advanced on her, his temper flaring. ‘I don’t know if you’re lying to me now, or if you were lying to me before!’

  She stopped again and Kara sighed. ‘It’s my fault. We had a friendship and I broke it. But this is how it is. You can’t interfere.’

  ‘I want to trust you.’ The words escaped from his mouth, coming up of their own accord. Marc found that it was the truth. He did want to have Kara walk back from what she had done. But the losses and the treacheries of his past told him that was a vain hope, and he said as much to her.

  ‘You need some proof,’ she said, after a while. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? But I only have one thing to offer.’ Kara got up and walked to him, rolling up her sleeve as she did. She unclipped the smartwatch around her wrist and held out her right arm so he could see. ‘Here.’

  He saw a tattoo. A blue-inked bracelet. An abstract collection of lines and circles. It was an exact duplicate of the one he had seen on the body of the dead hacker in the Maltese mortuary, and as she turned her arm he could see there were numbers written into the design. But before, where there had been three groups of digits, Kara’s tattoo only showed a pair. 41 57.

  ‘That’s the only proof you can have,’ she concluded. ‘Is it good enough?’

  At first, he didn’t answer, and looked away. The meaning behind the tattoos, the resonance they suggested, spoke to him of a deep personal connection. Marc had known of people who had survived great adversity or long periods of separation from someone they cared for, and this kind of ink was often a way to make those connections indelible and real. Kara put her watch back on, concealing it once more.

  ‘If you’re telling me the truth,’ said Marc. ‘Then you have to level with me, right now. I need to know everything.’

  When he looked up again, she had a small frame .25 calibre pistol in her hand, aimed at his head. ‘I don’t have time for that.’ Kara pulled a walkie-talkie from her pocket and keyed the mic.

  ‘What?’ Erik’s voice grated.

  ‘Tell Madrigal to get down to the hold,’ Kara said into the radio, the gun never wavering. ‘The animals are out of their cage.’

  Conflicted, dejected and angry, Marc raised his hands and let the stun baton drop. Kara stared back at him, turning blank and unreadable once again.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ He heard Madrigal’s terse reply. ‘We have the woman here. She’s under control.’

  ‘Not her.’ Kara’s eyes were dead and emotionless. ‘The other one.’ She released the push-to-talk button so her next words would not be heard by anyone else, and studied him coldly. ‘I’m sorry, Marc. But I can’t have you getting in my way.’

  *

  They came and dragged him down the cargo bay, Erik and the older man from the shooting party, the one that Madrigal had called Fox. Marc caught a glimpse of Lucy being shoved back into the server room, this time with double the people guarding her and the other shooter, the woman called Cat, watching her every move. Cat and Fox shared a loaded look as they passed each other, and then Marc was being marched forcefully up the crew ladder to the Antonov’s upper deck.

  Erik hauled him into a curtained-off area with two metal chairs bolted to the floor and gestured for Marc to sit down.

  He dropped heavily into one of the seats and saw a figure in the shadows. ‘Before you get started,’ said Marc, squinting into the gloom. ‘Can I just say one thing? The hot-fixes you used on the Arquebus beta build? Quite good. But I have to tell you, the code is a bit sloppy. You’ve had it for long enough. I thought you’d have taken more time to streamline it.’

  Madrigal stepped into the light. ‘That’s how you want to start this? By ragging on my programming skills?’ She sniggered. ‘Poor effort.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ replied Marc. He rubbed at his aching wrists. ‘I tested you. See, a proper hacker wouldn’t let someone take the piss out of their kung fu. Good code is like music. Yours has a lot of bum notes.’

  A flicker of displeasure flared and died in the curling of her lip. ‘I’m a pragmatist. I go with what works, not with what’s pretty.’

  ‘That’s abundantly clear.’ Marc gave a pointed look at Fox, observing from the other side of the compartment. ‘So, did you go to the DPRK or was it them who recruited you?’ The gunman feigned disinterest, and Marc answered his own question. ‘Yeah. You went to them. Because Ghost5 need the resources of a nation-state to land this nasty little project of yours.’

  ‘Careful,’ warned Madrigal, a mocking playfulness in her manner. ‘You keep disparaging something I’ve put a lot of time and energy into, and I might get angry.’

  ‘Makes sense.’ Marc turned his attention to Erik, ignoring her reply. ‘I mean, Ghost5’s profile is solid, isn’t it? Fearsome. Your black hats rock up and any network-security nerd will shit themselves. But North Korea? Their rep is a bit inconsistent. All that rubbish about hacking Sony because the Dear Leader was pissed off about some stoner movie. Did Bureau 121 do that? More likely some bored kids from North Wales.’

  Bureau 121, the hermit kingdom’s secretive cyberwarfare division, also known as the Lazarus Group or Hidden Cobra, were often held up as one of the key threat vectors in the digital battlespace, and they were keen not to lag behind other actives like China’s PLA Unit 61398, Russia’s infamous web brigades and the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations division. The North’s conventional military forces were antiquated and unreliable, but their cyber-army were making strides in internet warfare, and the offer of an alliance with a group of experienced mercenary hackers like Ghost5 would have been irresistible to the generals in Pyongyang.

  ‘But so much for you lot being the masterless rōnin anarchists of the dark web, eh?’ Marc’s gaze returned to Madrigal. ‘You’ve ruined that reputation forever. When people find out what you’ve done, Ghost5 will forever be remembered as a bunch of sell-outs.’

  Madrigal smiled at him. ‘You say that like it should matter. I was never in this for anything as crude as bragging rights. Our goals align with North Korea’s, so we’re in partnership. Ideology doesn’t play any role in this.’

  ‘I refer you to my earlier statement: bollocks.’ Marc leaned back in his chair. The longer he could keep her talking, the more chance he had to draw out information from Madrigal that he could use. ‘How much did they give you to crash those trains in Taipei? What’s the going rate to kill a few hundred innocent people so that one dissident pain in the arse winds up dead?’

  ‘I considered it a proof of concept,’ Madrigal replied.

  ‘So you didn’t even get paid for it?’ Marc snorted in derision. ‘You’re not only sell-outs, you’re cheap.’

  ‘What does that make you?’ The woman’s affected amusement started to slip. ‘Marc Dane. Once the loyal patriot for Queen and country, propping up a corrupt government on its tired, provincial little island. Now a bought and paid for mercenary for a billionaire with a vigilante complex. You have no high ground to stand on.’ She folded her arms across her chest. ‘I know about Solomon and Rubicon, and his crusade. I know more than he’s told you, about where that impetus of hi
s comes from. After all, no one understands someone better than their enemy . . . And you’ve done well making one of the Combine.’

  Marc said nothing. Madrigal’s mention of the shadowy cabal of power brokers was unexpected and troubling.

  ‘Oh, I know them too,’ Madrigal went on, sensing his interest. ‘We’ve had mutually beneficial associations in the past. It’s a shame you won’t be around to see what their endgame is.’ She cocked her head. ‘I’m sure they’ll be pleased to hear you and Keyes have been taken off the board.’ Madrigal glanced up at Erik. ‘Remind me to contact them when the operation is complete, will you? They’ll owe us for dealing with their problem for them.’

  ‘You know, the difference between me and you,’ Marc said, pacing out his words, ‘is that I don’t pretend to be what I am not. You’ve gone against everything you ever said you stood for. You don’t give a fuck if you bring South East Asia to the brink of war. You whored out yourself and Ghost5 – not because you’re looking for justice or balance or any shit like that. You want to settle a score.’ Marc gave a wolfish smile and pointed at her face. ‘I’ve seen that look in the mirror. I know where it comes from.’

  ‘You’re going to tell me what Rubicon knows about our operations,’ said Madrigal, switching gears. She’d plainly had enough of the small talk. ‘I’m not going to have Erik here beat you until you break. That would require effort I don’t want to expend.’ He got the impression she’d been through this play more than once. ‘Instead, we’re going to find what family you have, and we’re going to bring their lives crashing down on them—’

  ‘No you won’t,’ Marc broke in. ‘Someone tried that with me before. Afterward I made sure that anyone I care about is living behind firewalls with encryption so complex, you won’t be able to crack the keys before the sun goes out.’ He glanced at the dive watch on his wrist. ‘I don’t reckon you have that much time to spare.’