Nomad

by James Swallow

  “A new account, totalling six hundred thousand US dollars,” Talia explained. “We’ve tracked the wire transfer to a bank in Beijing. It’s a known shell company.”

  “There’s more,” said Royce. “Notification of flight bookings under a different name.” He handed back the pad to Talia. “London to Riyadh. One way.”

  “Saudi Arabia,” offered Finch-Shortland. “Among other things, a nation that has no extradition treaty with the United Kingdom.” He gave Royce a level look. “Tell me, Donald, do you still think Dane is just looking for a bit of breathing room?” He turned away. “Get him back.”

  * * *

  At first Marc thought the message was another one of those fake Nigerian bank scams, the so-called “phishing” stings that swelled the inboxes of millions of email accounts worldwide. But the message passed through his junk-mail filters and it addressed him personally. It didn’t ask him for any personal information—it had that already. The BrightStar Cayman Trust was welcoming Marc Dane to their exclusive client list, and asking him if he wanted some advice on where he could invest the six-figure sum with his name on it, which had materialized in their bank.

  He checked the exact time of the deposit. According to the receipt, the money had changed hands several days before the operation in France. A cold prickle of anxiety crept along the length of his spine.

  The next message in his unanswered stack just made things worse. It was an e-ticket from Qatar Airways, for a business class flight from Heathrow to King Khalid International under the name of Thom Halle. The Halle identity was a standby snap cover Marc had been issued several months ago, an airtight Belgian passport forged to the usual high standards of the security services.

  For a moment, he blinked at the text on the little screen before him. He had picked the Blackberry from the suit pocket of a dozing businessman on the Underground, and here in a dingy coffee bar with free wi-fi access, Marc had dared to chance a look online to gather information. He regretted that now.

  It had taken a while to get here. First, Marc had doubled back on himself. It was a trick that Leon had told him about, something the old school spies called “washing the route,” the act of running in a loop in order to make sure you didn’t have a follower. At Euston station, Marc jumped off the train just as the doors were hissing shut, and made his way down to the Victoria Line platform. He rode south, back one stop to Warren Street, and then did the same in reverse, crossing to the Northern Line again and deliberately taking a route through the passages that went against the flow of the commuters. Then he rode two stops past his destination, crossed platforms and finally emerged from Camden Town station as evening began to draw in.

  He was as clean as he could hope to be, but that didn’t mean he could relax. Feeling edgy and with a headache threatening to bloom behind his eyes, he bought himself another jacket—a dark, weather proof SuperDry knock-off—and followed the street toward the nearby canal.

  The narrow coffee bar was sandwiched between a store specializing in leather wear and a brightly-lit frontage that was all glass cabinets full of jeweled mobile phone cases. Finding a table at the back, Marc got himself a cup of strong, mud-colored Kenyan and attacked a thick sandwich, working the stolen Blackberry’s tiny keys with greasy fingers.

  First he looked for any traces of his escape on news websites. The improvised bomb had rated a mention on some of the social networks, a line of hashtag conversations rising briefly in the aftermath as commuters complained about the police ordering a temporary evacuation of Waterloo. He sifted the web and social messaging sites using “accident car bus westminster bridge” as a search string but there was only a cursory mention on a traffic report page.

  Standard Service protocol, he considered. They were keeping things quiet for the moment.

  He finished the sandwich and then ate another. It hadn’t registered with Marc how hungry he had been, how empty inside, not until the smell of fresh-cooked food from one of the street vendors had washed over him. He had to remind himself to slow down and not bolt it.

  But his appetite was dead now, the half-chewed ham and cheese losing all taste in his mouth.

  The money, the ticket … They were coming out of the shadows to build a case against him. Someone was stacking evidence against Marc that would prove he was the traitor Welles had accused him of being.

  But as objectionable as the man was, he couldn’t believe that Welles would fit him up like this. It had to be the Combine, moving in to deal with him as swiftly as they could. Marc put down the Blackberry and took a careful sip of the coffee. It was an effort to think straight, to reason it through and not just react.

  Dunkirk, the Palomino … The people who destroyed the freighter, the ones who hired the gunman … They wanted bodies, not a survivor.

  I broke their plan, Marc told himself. I left the van.

  If he had stayed, the grenade that murdered Leon and Owen would have killed him as well. They wanted them all dead, every member of Nomad wiped out, and the gunman had been there to make sure it ended that way.

  The deaths of OpTeam Seven would have cut off the undisclosed investigation going on inside the Service, at least for a while. Enough time for the asset within the organization to cover themselves, to get away, or do something else …

  What did that mean? He asked himself the question, trying to think like the enemy.

  It meant that Marc was as much an opportunity for the Combine as he was a problem. He studied the emails again. Both were authentic, but the money and the airline ticket were quick-and-dirty plays. They lacked subtlety. Whoever was building this frame was taking advantage of an unforeseen situation, scrambling to make him look guilty, putting it all together on the fly. Marc imagined that this was just the start. If he dug deeper, he would probably find a drop somewhere, a lock-up or a safe deposit box in his name packed with more incriminating material. It would be easy enough for a group like the Combine to set up something like that. They had money and a long reach.

  If someone had already decided he was guilty—someone like Victor Welles—then all this would tip the needle further into the red. Welles wouldn’t look too hard at the evidence. Why the hell would he want to?

  Anything Marc said to defend himself would sound like a vague conspiracy theory—because that was exactly what it was.

  “I am so fucked.” It was a second or two before he realized that he had vocalized the thought. A couple of teenagers at a nearby table gave him an arch look, then went back to ignoring him.

  He didn’t notice their attention. All he could focus on was the rising thunder of the blood in his ears, the slow twisting of his gut like a claw reaching into him, tightening with every passing moment. The tide of dread was building, acidic like bile. The food he had eaten was like lumps of lead in his belly.

  The flood of panic threatened to overwhelm him. He wasn’t trained for this. He wasn’t an agent, he was a tech guy, a back-seater who had a gun but never fired it in anger. This escape, all of it, had been on blind luck and happenstance! They were going to catch him. He was going to be found and disappeared …

  Marc put his hands on the table and laid them flat to stop them shaking. With effort, he metered his breathing, staring fixedly at the space in front of him. Inside him, there was chaos, and Marc Dane looked right into it.

  In the car, at the crash, he had felt himself at a moment of change. And now, here in this unassuming, ordinary café, he was feeling that again, but stronger now, far more potent. Fear raced through him, and it wanted to take hold. If he let that happen, he would lose everything. If he let that happen, they would win.

  In that moment, Marc found what he needed. He reached inward and strangled the panic before it could grow. He thought about the people who wanted him dead, who had killed and lied.

  By inches, his fear made the slow, inexorable change into resentment.

  Someone out there—perhaps even someone he knew—had played the members of OpTeam Seven as if they were pawns
on a chessboard, sacrificing them in a game so big that Marc could only see the edges of it.

  Questions came to him in a torrent. What had Sam, Rix and Nash uncovered? What had they come close to? Who did this?

  He held his fury for a long moment, examining it. This was not just about his pain at losing Sam, or his anger at the deaths of his teammates, not any more. I need to know, he told himself. I need to find the truth and prove I wasn’t a part of it.

  And at last, Marc found an understanding that made it all snap cleanly into focus. The Combine and their associates in Al Sayf had done this because they were afraid. They feared what Nomad would discover, perhaps what had already been discovered.

  The others were dead, and now Nomad was only one man. Nomad was Marc Dane, and they were afraid of him. He nodded to himself. There was nowhere he could go but deeper into the labyrinth. There was no safe path anymore. This was the moment to commit to the risk of it all.

  I’m going to find out what Sam knew. A slow, glacial calm descended on him. And then I’m going to drag those secrets into the light for the whole bloody world to see.

  NINE

  In the dark the house looked different. Sullen, somehow, robbed of all the warmth and life that he’d known in there with Sam.

  Marc crossed the road and made his way up the stairs to the front door. Picking the lock was the easy part, the trick was getting inside fast enough to secure the alarm before it activated.

  He slammed the door shut and pulled open the security panel. In the dimness of the hallway he was working off nothing but the soft glow of the illuminated buttons and the display. As he punched in the code, Marc tensed. If they had changed the alarm setting for the safe house, he wouldn’t know about it until it was too late. No shrilling, screaming sirens would be set off; instead, a warning would be fed straight back to MI6 and someone would come looking.

  The alarm setting went from red and ARMED to green and SAFE, and Marc blew out the breath he’d been holding in. This would be the last place Welles would think to come looking for him, but that didn’t give Marc any excuse to breathe easy.

  In the shoe caddy by the door there was a false bottom, and beneath it, the same model of Glock pistol he had been issued in OpTeam Seven. Marc slid down the wall and sat there on the floor, checking the gun, cocking it.

  Waiting.

  * * *

  Two hours later he woke up with a jerk and reflexively pointed the gun at the door, blinking sleep from his eyes.

  “Shit.” His voice echoed in the empty hallway. Gingerly, he clicked the Glock’s slide lock into place and stuffed the pistol into a jacket pocket. The fatigue had come out of nowhere, swept up over him before he even knew it. Angry at his own weakness, he climbed up, wincing at fresh aches in his back.

  Like an explorer moving through the chambers of a tomb, Marc walked a path from room to room, turning on every light, looking in every corner, switching them off again as he left. His initial impression didn’t change. The house seemed like a dead space, still and old. He found the empty wine bottle in the kitchen where they had left it weeks earlier. The safe house had remained idle all that time, but somehow Marc could sense the ghost of Samantha Green in its spaces. She had come back here since the day they had spent together, he was certain of it.

  When he found the bag, he knew his instincts were correct. Concealed in a cupboard under the staircase, lost among brooms and a vacuum cleaner, it lacked the layer of dust on everything else.

  The bag was a black daypack that would not look out of place on an airport luggage carousel. Inside, it had inset panels made of a dense plastic that could smother the terahertz-wave signals from metal detectors. Buried among a few changes of shapeless unisex clothes and some toiletries were boxes of ammunition, zip lock packs of money in pounds, dollars and euros, a survival knife and a heavy-duty flashlight. He took the bag into the living room and emptied it methodically, taking inventory of everything in there. In tradecraft, they called this a “go-bag,” a prepared kit of gear that an operative could gather up and take at a moment’s notice if circumstances were turning against them.

  The clothes were hers, and so were the fake IDs secreted in one of the side compartments. Marc leafed through passports from four different countries, each under a different name, each bearing a different picture of Sam looking back at him. Her hair cut short in one, wearing glasses in another or peering out from under a long wig. The eyes didn’t change, though; her laughing, daring eyes.

  He sat across from the sofa where they had made love and listened for the echo of her. This was all he had now, a collection of pieces that were not the real Sam. Marc divided up what he could use from what he would discard, and in the process something slipped from the folds of a shirt. A metal bar, the length and thickness of his thumb.

  He recognized it immediately, turning it over in his fingers. It was an IronKey solid-state memory stick, a secure flash drive unit that could hold several gigabytes of data. What made it special was the construction of the stick and the built-in encryption software. Any attempt to crack the casing or break the password protecting the contents through a brute force hack would cause it to permanently erase its contents.

  He held it in the palm of his hand and studied it. Is this worth killing for?

  Very carefully, he placed the memory stick on the table in front of him, and reached for the packets of money. There were a few credit cards in there as well, and those Marc could make immediate use of. He turned on the stolen Blackberry one last time. It was a risk using the device again, but he had few options.

  Marc found an unprotected wi-fi connection, and started to gather what he was going to need.

  * * *

  The drizzle from the showerhead slowed to a trickle. She took a slow breath and held it, running her long-fingered hands up over her scalp and across the dark fuzz of her close-cropped hair. With military precision, Lucy Keyes let her breath back out in a slow, silent exhale and reached for the thick towel hanging on the rail near the tub. She didn’t bother to rub off the water still clinging to her, coiling the cloth around and over her like a toga.

  From the corner of her eye she caught sight of her own face in the wide mirror. Dark as ochre, she was stark against the brilliant white tile of the walls. A boyish face that the short hair accented, sharp-chinned with eyes that looked sleepy, if you didn’t pay attention. The towel concealed a body that was athletic and spare, and it hid other things too. A shallow burn mark on her waist. The pucker of the healed wound from a 9mm bullet. Other scars went deeper, forever out of sight.

  She gave herself a languid wink and wandered into the bedroom. Lucy was met by a panoramic view of London, dimming now as night made its approach, lights coming on all across the streets below. The window looked down to Hyde Park, and she could pick out the shimmer of the snake-shaped lake that ran the length of the greensward. She made coffee and orbited the suite, thinking over her assignment.

  Soft carpeting gave under her feet and she enjoyed the simplicity of the sensation. Sometimes it was important to take a moment for the small things like that, she reflected. When Lucy was growing up in a sparsely furnished apartment in Queens with her mother and brother, she’d been ten years old before they had anything other than threadbare rugs on the uneven floor. She remembered what seemed like a lifetime of splinters, and soles of feet made tough.

  A suite in the iconic Park Tower hotel on Knightsbridge was a hell of a long way from those backstreets, but Lucy’s course through the world had taken a lot of detours like this one, some high but a lot more low.

  She was pouring the coffee when she saw that the laptop on the desk was showing a blinking amber light. Biting back a curse, she reached for it and flipped up the screen.

  The computer had a thickset, rugged look to it, like it was designed to be dropped out of a transport plane without a parachute. It was military specification hardware, crammed with encryption software and sheathed in a layer of ballistic shell that would
stop grenade fragments and low-caliber rounds. Lucy didn’t care for all the tech-specs, though. It worked when she told it to, and she liked that just fine. Once, in a Brazilian favela, she’d used a similar machine to replace a ceramic armor plate in a combat vest, but that had been a bad day. She’d made it back in one piece. The laptop, not so much.

  The screen asked her for an access code and she swiped her finger over an infrared print reader. It took two attempts because her hands were still wet, but then the display blinked into a video image. It looked like a small but expensive office, paneled in light wood and brushed steel. Only the oval windows gave it away. She was looking into a room on board a private jetliner, and by the tone of the light through the portals she guessed it was somewhere over the ocean.

  A familiar face slid into view. “Ah. Keyes. You grace me with your presence at last.” The man on the screen was tall and pale. He wore fashionable spectacles and an expression that was perpetually arch. His accent was French-Canadian.

  “Delancort,” she replied, deliberately sounding out the name in her New Yorker drawl. “What’s going on?” The blinking light meant that he had been trying to contact her; the noise of the leisurely shower she had taken must have smothered the sound of the alert chime.

  He raised an eyebrow, studying her. “That’s an interesting look for you.”

  Lucy scowled back at the dot-sized camera in the crown of the laptop. “Like what you see?” she dared him.

  Delancort gave a shrug and demurred. “You’re not my type, you know that.”

  She folded her arms over her chest. “So, what? We’re going early? I’m not due to meet the contact for another three hours.”

  “That assignment has been scrubbed,” he told her. “You’re being re-tasked.”

  Lucy felt the first tingle of anticipation. “Can I put something on first?”

  “Make it quick. He wants to talk to you.” The screen blinked and showed a holding panel, and Lucy walked out of range of the camera, fishing her clothes from the armchair where they lay.