Ghost:

by James Swallow

  Madrigal shrugged. ‘Fair point. Like I said, I believe in expediency. I’ll go with my other option instead.’ She outlined how Ghost5 would remote-hack a series of systems to ensure that a man who might or might not be Lucy Keyes’s brother would be shot dead in a botched police raid. ‘I’d rather not be occupying myself with this. I have other concerns right now. But I’ll make the effort if I have to. So by all means, say nothing if you’re willing to let more innocent people die.’

  Marc was quiet for a moment. He’d reached the point where there was no more dissembling he could do, no other opportunity open barring a violent and risky prospect that had as much chance of getting him killed as it did of succeeding.

  All he could do now was to give Madrigal exactly what she wanted.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I know.’ He straightened in the chair and consciously made his body language neutral, open and honest. ‘I know you’ve been gearing up for this for years. Most of your life, I’d imagine.’ Marc thought back to the police video from the old folks’ home in Florida, the clippings and the papers in Charles Hite’s blackmail file. He saw the jigsaw of the truth that they represented and tried to fill in the missing pieces. ‘Operation Overtone. Decades ago, now. A joint black-ops mission between the Central Intelligence Agency and what was then their South Korean counterpart. Over the border into the North, in violation of UN regulations and international laws. They would have used men already deployed in-country – soldiers from the US Army, trustworthy men with good records. Patriots.’ He leaned on the last word, watching for a reaction. ‘Most of them would have been selected to have few family ties. But not everyone ticks that box, yeah? One of them had – what? – a wife and a daughter?’

  Madrigal’s expression turned stony, and Marc knew he was on the right track.

  ‘Nobody expects Overtone to go as utterly, calamitously wrong as it does, though. It’s botched so completely that the CIA redact their files to hell and back. The South Koreans pretend it didn’t happen. But the men sent to do the job . . . they never come back. Fathers and husbands lost because someone fucked up.’ He held her gaze, searching for something to tell him how close he was to the truth. ‘That kind of trauma, it breeds a deep hate, doesn’t it? The kind that you nurture for years and years. That doesn’t go away. And someone wounded by that starts a life that will always be in the shadow of what she lost.’

  ‘Get out.’ Madrigal ordered.

  ‘You mean—’ Erik started to speak, but she silenced him with a throat-cutting gesture.

  ‘Both of you, get out.’

  Reluctantly, Erik walked from the room, and the gunman trailed after him. Fox hesitated at the curtain partitioning off the space from the rest of the crew deck. ‘This is not the time to allow your resolve to weaken,’ he said.

  ‘I won’t say it again,’ Madrigal told him, without looking. When they were alone, she studied Marc with a new intensity. ‘You are very perceptive. Keep going. Let’s see if you can find your way to the end.’

  He tried to picture Madrigal as a child, dealing with the loss of a parent under such circumstances. ‘No father means no more protection. Sent home from an army base in some foreign country, back to a place that’s just as alien. How does that work? Things don’t hold together. The wife, the mother . . . she can’t handle it, can she? What does that mean for the daughter? Foster homes and a childhood in the cogs of a broken system. If you’re a smart kid, you turn hard. Put up walls. Your skills get aimed toward the darker places. And off we go. You grow into someone who wants payback.’

  ‘Very good.’ Madrigal studied him coldly. ‘It’s just the details you’re missing.’ She took a breath and carried on, emotion bleeding out of her voice. ‘They were shot by border guards on the southern side of the Joint Security Area. Killed by their so-called allies. The intelligence was wrong. They were sent in to steal military secrets, but they deployed into a hornet’s nest. None of them were prepared for what happened. They fled. But by the time they approached the border, the word was out. They had become politically inconvenient. Operation Overtone had to be erased.’

  ‘The old bloke . . . Cooper. He told you?’

  She nodded. ‘His lies and his failure caught up with him.’

  ‘But that wasn’t enough for you. And now here we are.’ Marc gestured at the air. ‘You’re not going to be satisfied until you make them pay. The CIA, the South Koreans. And the North is happy to help you rip it all up.’

  Madrigal rose from her chair. ‘You don’t know what I’m going to do. Rubicon don’t know. But you will.’ That cold smile of hers returned. ‘You and your lady friend are going to have a ringside seat.’

  She turned to walk away, and Marc called after her. ‘What about Kara? What happens to her?’

  ‘She’s where she was always supposed to be. If you had ever really known her at all, you’d understand that.’ Madrigal pushed through the curtain and left him in the gloom.

  FIFTEEN

  Kara jerked awake as the Antonov rumbled through a pocket of turbulence, the motion of the big aircraft shoving her against the back of her seat. There was no blurry transition between sleep and awareness for her. Adrenaline shock sparked through her veins and she blinked, pawing at the seatbelt across her lap.

  Behind her, in the rear sections of the cargo compartment, she could hear the rattle of keyboards and the low mutter of conversation. Kara twisted in her seat and pulled up the blind on the oval window beside her. Dawn was just below the horizon, and through patches of grey storm clouds she could see a craggy, forest-green landscape extending away to the coastline.

  She did the math in her head. They were travelling up the Korean peninsula, with the Yellow Sea out there beyond the angle of the jet’s portside wing. Soon, the Antonov would start its descent into the pattern for landing at Incheon International, a few kilometres from the South Korean capital. Kara released her seatbelt and stood up, assimilating this new information. She rubbed her throat and swallowed experimentally. It was still uncomfortable, bruised and swollen where Lucy had tried to strangle her. When she reached for any resentment toward the sniper, she found nothing.

  What bothered her more was that Madrigal had let her sleep through the majority of the journey, and even now as they were nearing their destination, she hadn’t roused her. Had she planned to let Kara sleep all the way to Seoul? That wouldn’t do.

  Kara made her way down to the work area, drawing sideways looks from Andre and some of the others. They didn’t like her, but Kara didn’t allow herself to dwell on it. The others only mattered to her if they got in the way or if they could help her reach her goal. Whichever it was, the end result would be the same.

  Pyne intercepted Kara, but she pushed right past the skinny hacker to where Madrigal and Erik were working on panels connected to the jet’s mobile mainframe. ‘You didn’t wake me?’

  Madrigal kept typing and didn’t look up. ‘You needed the rest. And we have this covered.’

  ‘Right.’ Kara turned a laptop screen around so she could see what was written across the display. Panes of digital code were running in multiple instances, aggressor programs that the Arquebus software had deposited in their target systems like cluster bombs strewn from the warhead of an area-denial weapon. In one, she saw a myriad of data intrusions in play against controller area network software, the kind of tech that eighty per cent of cars in the South had fitted as standard. Blood-red lines of corruption laced the text, each one signifying a vehicle that had been rendered useless. Arquebus had blown through the firewalls of the interconnected network that linked the city’s vehicles to the traffic grid and poisoned them.

  ‘The morning commute is gonna be a bitch from hell,’ Pyne said, with a callous chuckle. ‘Pretty much every car in Seoul is gonna have to go into the shop.’

  ‘You triggered the vehicle hack already.’

  Madrigal gave Kara a quick look beneath an arched eyebrow. ‘We did it a half-hour ago. Anything not on the move h
as been bricked and won’t start without a full software reinstall. As for the ones already on the road . . .’ She went back to her work with a shrug.

  Pyne had a tablet screen in her hand, and Kara snatched it from her. It showed a live feed from the national YTN news channel, an outside broadcast framing a reporter in a raincoat standing on a footbridge over one of Seoul’s main highways. In the rainy, pre-dawn gloom, it was possible to see lines of stalled cars clogging the street, and over the reporter’s rapid-fire explanations the screen cut to other scenes from around the city. Jack-knifed trucks blocked intersections, and buses had collided with buildings. The camera view swept over traffic cops waving illuminated batons and desperately trying to get a handle on the unfolding disaster.

  ‘How are we on social?’ Madrigal threw the question toward Andre, seated nearby at another laptop. ‘People are getting out of bed and looking at their phones. I want to see the uptick.’

  ‘It’s happening,’ he replied. ‘Better than our projections by about twelve per cent.’ Outwardly a slight, unassuming Frenchman in a bulky parka, Andre was the field marshal for Ghost5’s troll army of social-media foot soldiers. Under his command, simple intelligent software ‘bots’ scanned the messaging platforms in use across the city, from basic text through to image- and video-based postings. The bots sought out posts that matched a set of pre-programmed criteria, looking for key phrases containing words like ‘panic’, ‘disaster’, ‘attack’, ‘terror’, and reposted them dozens of times on fake accounts that mimicked those of human users. It turned the feeds into an echo chamber filled with the clamour of frightened people.

  The bots were the line infantry of the troll army, cheap and disposable, there to make noise and clog up the system. The next line of attack was a legion of human agent provocateurs. Some of them were junior-league wannabes who jumped at the chance to work with the notorious Ghost5 crew, mostly bored kids or destructive nihilists who liked to create mayhem for the sheer hell of it. Others were low-end workers in illicit click-farms out on the Indian subcontinent, men and women paid in anonymous bitcoin to put up pre-scripted postings on hacked Facebook pages and hijacked Twitter feeds, hundreds of times per hour.

  The last part of the social-media strike force was Andre and a few of his top troublemakers, who surfed the tone of the shared information space in real time, watching the rise and fall of hashtags and popular posts, and manipulating them to reflect the reality that Madrigal wanted the world to see.

  As she watched, Kara saw Andre loading up an image of the same stretch of highway she had seen in the YTN news video a few moments earlier – but now the picture had been manipulated to show cars on fire and what looked like heavily armed riot police on the march. He fired it out into the net and watched it ricochet from server to server, gaining more page-clicks and re-postings with each passing second.

  Existing public dissatisfaction across the country with the current administration and law enforcement propelled the falsified report even further. The presidential impeachments and political chicanery that had tainted the South Korean government in recent years only served to deepen the distrust that Ghost5 were now co-opting for their own ends. Add that to the climate of tension generated by American allies engaged in a dick-measuring contest with the military across the border to the north, and things could only deterior-ate. People down there were willing to believe the worst without questioning it too deeply.

  An instantaneous, malleable and unstoppable propaganda assault was unfolding right before Kara’s eyes, sowing dread and discord. ‘We are past the point of no return,’ Andre noted. ‘This is already feeding itself. Everyone on the ground is buying into it, they’re re-blogging for us. And anyone who tries to swim against the tide, the bots are fake-news shit-posting them into oblivion.’

  He grinned, pleased with his work.

  The goal of the ‘panic attack’ was to convince anyone on social media that the city of Seoul was on the verge of imploding, and gradually turn that falsehood into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Run in isolation, this kind of social engineering hack had a finite lifespan. People would eventually figure out where the truth really lay, given long enough. But with the vehicle network malfunction already happening, the fear was underpinned by something real and tangible. To keep the ball rolling, the imagined dangers had to become actual ones.

  ‘Tags are now in place on the nine primary lines of the subway,’ reported Erik. ‘Still working on the others.’

  ‘The metro system,’ Kara gave voice to the thought. ‘That’s the next target.’ It made a ruthless kind of sense. With a city waking up to roads jammed with stalled vehicles, taking control of the public transport infrastructure would bring Seoul to a grinding halt, at the very least. But she doubted that Madrigal would be so forgiving as to only render the subway network inert. It would be within her power to cause a train crash like the one in Taipei all over again, and not a single collision, but dozens of them.

  A green light mounted on the inner wall of the cargo bay blinked three times, and Madrigal’s head tilted to look up at it. Kara felt another shudder move through the deck beneath them and the Antonov tilted as it started to descend.

  ‘Everyone secure your gear for landing!’ Erik shouted out the order. ‘We’ll pick this up when we’re on the ground!’

  Pyne, Andre and the others set about switching their computers to standby, and Kara stood among them, watching impassively.

  Madrigal met her gaze. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I have a vital task for you when we’re down.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me why you’ve brought us to this?’ Kara leaned in, so only Madrigal could hear her. ‘When I came back, you promised me you’d be truthful with me from now on. But everything about this hack feels like it’s moving to someone else’s beat.’ She nodded toward the windows, and the rain-swept grey city they were approaching. ‘We never take this kind of risk. We never go on site. That’s the whole point of what we are. Ghost5 has no centre. We strike from half a world away and still hit hard. That’s how we roll.’

  ‘You’re right, we don’t need to physically be here,’ replied Madrigal. ‘But I do. Some deeds you can’t do at a remove, Song.’ Her eyes clouded with memory. ‘Sometimes you have to hold the knife yourself.’ Then she shook off the brief reverie and smiled again. ‘I promise I will explain. Trust me. It’ll make sense. Justice will be done.’

  At length, Kara gave a nod, knowing that she would get no more from the woman. ‘What about Dane and Keyes? What are we going to do with them?’

  Madrigal pushed past Kara toward her seat. ‘Oh, you already know the answer to that.’

  *

  After the fist fight in the server compartment, Madrigal’s people had re-thought the whole idea of keeping Marc and Lucy together, putting her back in the room and taking him all the way to the rear of the cargo bay. They were as far apart as they could be and still be inside the Antonov, and it had been hours since Marc had seen her.

  The thug he had hit with the stun prod, the one with the tattoos who called himself Null, took great delight in knocking Marc around before securing him to one of the metal ribs supporting the cargo jet’s inner wall. He left him there to huddle up and suffer through the chill soaking through the hull, weathering the polar cold with each sharp breath.

  Here and there Marc snatched a few moments of sleep, but for the most part the flight seemed like an endless droning nothing.

  He tried to keep his brain active by running over the facts he had to hand. The puzzle of Madrigal’s intentions was almost solved, and through the hours he tried to figure it out. There were so many targets in Seoul for someone with a grudge against the government and its American allies, it was hard to narrow it down.

  What is her endgame? To drive a wedge between the South and the USA? Or to cause so much mayhem that the North could roll across the border?

  Every option he gamed out in his thoughts seemed more unpalatable than the last.
Born in the early conflicts of the Cold War, the fractious relationship between the two Koreas had balanced on a knife-edge for decades, each side continually posturing against the other. Their shooting war had ceased in a stalemate generations ago, but the battle had never really ended. There was no way to know how much or how little would be enough to begin the slide toward open warfare once more. And for all their bluster and threats against Japan and the continental US, the South was the prize that the North really wanted.

  Madrigal was callous and driven, and paired with her amoral legion of hackers and operatives from the belligerent DPRK, he doubted any target would be beyond them.

  Other questions rose and fell in his thoughts. The interrogation to learn what Rubicon knew, such as it was, had petered out. Madrigal had no reason to keep Marc and Lucy alive, and yet they were still breathing. It wasn’t through a reluctance to shed blood. Madrigal’s cold-hearted dismissal of the lives she had ruined in the past and those yet to suffer made that clear. There was another motive at work.

  Marc’s mind drifted back to that anxious night in Cambridge, when the attack to steal the Arquebus prototype was under way. Even then, Madrigal had been playing a game within the game, seeding a lie about who had been behind the hack to conceal the reality of Ghost5’s involvement. MI6 had almost walked into a clandestine war with China’s spy agency because of the near-flawless misdirection the hacker group had spun, fooling them into thinking the source of the attack was Beijing’s cyber-warriors. It was a tactic Madrigal had used time and again, not only in that scenario but in ventures against Russian intelligence, even when she had murdered Cooper on that stormy night in Florida and framed some unknown woman for the crime. It didn’t escape Marc that Kara had used a similar ploy back in Malta, with the hapless tourist in the Hotel Nova.

  Madrigal always makes sure she has someone to take the blame. There was no question in Marc’s mind that this was the reason why he and Lucy Keyes were still breathing. Whatever was going down, they would take the fall for it.