Ghost:

by James Swallow

  Pasco did as he was told, falling back a step or two, giving Noya room to work. Her partner, a skinny Portuguese lad, came across the hall with a folding stretcher in one hand. The youth said the word again, and without thinking about it, Pasco pulled out his birthday gift and thumbed the tab marked Translator. As best he could, he repeated what he had heard into the device’s pinhole microphone.

  *

  It would not have been an exaggeration to say that Jadeed’s room was the most expensive space he had ever been in. The executive suite on the upper floor of the Hilton was alien to him in a way he found difficult to articulate. It wasn’t something he would have spoken about to the other men, for fear that they might be amused by it and consider him parochial and unworldly. He didn’t like to be thought of as inferior.

  But the suite could quite easily have encompassed the entire footprint of the slum apartment in Jeddah where he had grown up. The first night, he had not been able to sleep in the huge, soft bed, interrupted by dreams of being swamped in a vast, empty space. He took sheets and made a place instead in the living room, arranged in the lee of a long sofa where he wouldn’t be seen by someone entering through the doorway. It served him much better.

  Jadeed sipped from a tumbler of water as he crossed the room toward one of the floor-to-ceiling windows. It seemed wrong to him that so much space should account for the needs of a single person. He felt that in his bones, as if it were a violation of some kind of law. It was wasteful. But then, it was Western.

  At the open window, he felt more comfortable. A low moon was already visible in the sky, and lights were coming on across Barcelona, all along the Diagonal Mar and out toward the city centre. Sounds reached up to him from sixteen floors below, where restaurant terraces in the shopping mall across the street were taking in their early evening business.

  He sat before a low table and lit one of the Czech cigarettes that were his sole vice, taking a long draw. He tossed the match into a glass ashtray before exhaling a cloud of blue smoke.

  Next to the ashtray were a pair of compact but powerful Bushnell binoculars, a wireless headset and the flat, glassy tile of a smartphone. Jadeed nudged the phone with his finger, turning it idly in a circle where it lay. Although the device outwardly resembled any one of a number of next-generation handsets, it had been heavily modified. Beneath the brushed aluminium surface, there was barely a single component still in place from the original design. Jadeed remained suspicious of the technology, but more intelligent men than he had told him it was safe to use, and he knew enough not to question them.

  The smartphone buzzed and he blinked in surprise. Stubbing out the cigarette, he hooked the lozenge-shaped headset’s loop over his right ear and tapped the phone’s screen. The panel immediately illuminated with a number of coloured icons and an oscillating display showing the rise and fall of a signal waveform.

  He heard a resonant voice in his ear. ‘I am watching.’ Khadir’s words were strong and clear, almost as if he were standing at Jadeed’s shoulder. Only the ghostly whisper of static beneath them betrayed the fact that the man on the other end of the line was thousands of miles away. There was a fractional delay, doubtless some artefact of the complex course taken by the call’s clandestine routing around the globe and back via satellite relay, through encryption filters at both ends.

  Jadeed nodded. ‘Very soon now.’ He reached for the binoculars and scanned the rooftops. He quickly found his sightline. After a moment, he looked away to the smartphone, carefully tapping one of the application icons. It grew into a window containing a countdown clock, and Jadeed watched the numbers tumble toward zero. Khadir would be looking at the exact same display.

  The clock reached the two minute mark and blinked red. ‘One hundred and twenty seconds,’ murmured the voice. ‘We are committed.’

  Jadeed smiled slightly. ‘Has there ever been a moment when that was not so?’

  Khadir didn’t rise to the comment. ‘Were there any issues with the sample before deployment?’

  He glanced down at the fingers of his right hand. They were still a little red and inflamed from where he had been forced to use them to inflict a moment of discipline, wrapping the steel spheres of his misbaha prayer beads in a tight loop like a knuckleduster. ‘No,’ he lied. Silence answered him, and he reluctantly amended his reply. ‘Nothing of note.’

  If Khadir heard the pause in his voice, he didn’t comment on it. ‘I appreciate you handling this personally,’ he said. ‘You understand that I need eyes I trust to witness this?’

  ‘Of course.’ The fact was, there were many men that Khadir could have given this assignment to, men they would have been more than willing to leave to take the blame after the fact; but this was too important to be left to inferiors. ‘I have my departure arranged.’ Jadeed had paid for the room for another day, but he would be leaving it in little more than . . .

  He glanced at the smartphone. Only sixty seconds now. The binoculars came up again and found their mark. ‘This is what the Americans would call the moment of truth,’ said Jadeed, almost to himself.

  ‘How apt,’ offered Khadir.

  *

  The boy tried to stop Noya, but his effort was weak and half-hearted, as if he couldn’t muster the energy to do it. He moaned as Noya pressed the disc of the stethoscope to his chest. Her other hand moved lightly over the youth’s torso, stubby fingers clad in blue latex probing at his flesh. Each touch got another pained reaction.

  The paramedic swore under her breath and bunched a handful of the boy’s t-shirt in her fist, and she bared his chest with another slice of the cutter.

  Pasco heard her partner gasp. He actually heard the sound of the Portuguese recoiling in that sharp breath, the man’s face twisting. He knew that expression too, of disgust and horror being swiftly shut away beneath a professional façade of detachment. One of the tourists watching the scene unfold made a gagging noise and went ashen.

  Pasco was compelled to take a look at the boy and he regretted it immediately, crossing himself as he realized what had been done to him. ‘Santa Maria . . .’

  Suddenly he felt his age, right there in the marrow of his bones, heavy like lead. It disappointed him to think that someone could inflict such horrors as the young man had suffered.

  A soft digital ping brought his attention back to the electronic gadget in his hand. Pasco had forgotten he was holding it in his thick fingers. The device offered a translation of the word he had given, and his blood ran cold.

  Shahiden (Arabic, Noun), it read. Martyr.

  Noya began to speak. ‘I think there’s something–’

  The wet gasp the boy gave was the last thing Pasco Abello heard.

  *

  One moment there was nothing but a sea of red-tiled rooftops, and the next a grey-black blossom of haze and debris filled the optics of the binoculars. Jadeed let them drop just as the sound-shock of the explosion crossed the two mile distance to the balcony, buffeting him as it passed, rattling the tall windows.

  He closed his eyes and visualised the effect of the weapon, almost basking in the thought of it. The first blinding flash of the detonation itself and the ring of compacted air radiating out through the interior of the police station, glass and plastic shattering under the catastrophic overpressure. The bodies of those closest to the ignition point would have been utterly destroyed. Blood would atomise into vapour, flesh becoming cinders. Supporting pillars and walls would distend and crack, ballooned outward by forces they were never meant to contain. In a few microseconds, the building would break apart and begin to die. The structure would collapse under its own weight, the discharge churning outward in thunderous torrents, channelling destruction into the surrounding streets.

  He opened his eyes. Behind the rush of the blast noise came a shrieking machine chorus of honking horns and bleating sirens as every car alarm within a mile radius went off at once. In the cool evening air there was no breeze to stir the motion of the pillar of smoke that spiralled
upward. It hung like a great black dagger pointing into the heart of the ruin.

  He waited, straining to hear, and was rewarded by a long, low rumble that resonated in his chest, blotting out the chatter of the people on the avenue below, as they struggled to understand what had just happened. A second, larger dust cloud projected itself into the air as the stricken building collapsed. Jadeed couldn’t see the station house from where he sat, but he could see the mark its demise left behind.

  ‘Broad dispersal,’ noted Khadir, with clinical focus. ‘There are fires.’

  Jadeed wondered exactly how his superior was seeing that. A spy satellite or a drone, perhaps? He absently looked up into the darkening sky. ‘The gas lines will–’ he began, but before he could fully voice his thought, the dull concussion of a secondary detonation joined the unfolding chaos. New streamers of smoke rose with the main plume, illuminated from within by gas-fuelled fires.

  Jadeed rose from his chair, gathering up the phone and binoculars.

  ‘I am satisfied,’ said the voice in his ear. ‘The sample meets with my approval.’ The last words sounded like they were being directed at someone else.

  ‘I am leaving now,’ Jadeed replied, but when he looked down at the smartphone, the display was static, the waveform signal a flat line, the countdown frozen at zero. The phone went into his pocket, clattering against his prayer beads.

  He took the small case containing everything he needed from where it lay on the bed, securing the compact Beretta 84F pistol sitting next to it in a hip holster, which was concealed by the cut of his clothes.

  In all the noise and confusion, the sound of the Hilton’s fire alarm shrilled away unnoticed as he left the hotel through the emergency exit, and threaded away between the people pointing and gawping at the column of smoke.

  About the Author

  James Swallow is a three-time New York Times bestseller and the Sunday Times bestselling author of Nomad and Exile. He is a BAFTA-nominated scriptwriter, a former journalist and the award-winning writer of over forty-five books and numerous scripts for radio, television and interactive media.

  He lives in London, and is currently working on his next novel.

  Also by James Swallow

  Nomad

  Exile

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Zaffre Publishing

  This ebook edition published in 2018 by

  Zaffre Publishing

  80-81 Wimpole St, London, W1G 9RE

  www.zaffrebooks.co.uk

  Copyright © James Swallow, 2018

  Cover design by Nick Stearn

  The moral right of James Swallow to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-7857-6374-8

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-7857-6375-5

  This ebook was produced by IDSUK (Data Connection) Ltd

  Zaffre Publishing is an imprint of Bonnier Zaffre, a Bonnier Publishing company

  www.bonnierzaffre.co.uk

  www.bonnierpublishing.co.uk