Nomad

by James Swallow

  Fighting down the trembling rush of adrenaline in his hands, he swung across the meter-wide gap to the foot of the next balcony along. They were staggered, one raised slightly higher than the next, and going to and fro Marc scrambled up past the ninth and tenth floors until he reached the lip of the roof and dragged himself up. His hands slipped on a damp lintel covered in bird shit, but he forced his way up and over, grunting in pain as he strained a muscle in his arm.

  Up here the flat roof was a maze of puddles and the low blocks of ventilator units. Marc moved away down the top of the building, searching for a route to street level that would keep him out of sight of the kill team.

  At the far end of the rooftop there were angled metal arms reaching over the sheer ten-story drop, the top of a gantry built for window cleaners to use. There might be a cable drum still up there, enough for him to play out and make it down to one of the elevated crosswalks. He went for it, low and fast, limping. Glass had cut his thigh on the way through the window and it stung like a bastard.

  Then a masked figure in black stepped out in front of him from behind a lift gear shed, and Marc jerked back in shock.

  “Don’t you fuckin’ move,” growled the gunman, bringing up the SD3 submachine gun in his hands. “You think you actually stood a chance?” He jerked the muzzle to one side. “Lose the gun. Put down the backpack. Hands on your head.”

  * * *

  “So,” Lucy said to the air, “not lucky, then.”

  Through the PSG-1’s scope, she could see the Brit standing stock still, and a sliver of the assault team operator holding him up. It was impossible to get a good look at the gunman. From her angle across the park, a cluster of vents prevented the sniper from seeing all of him.

  But she could fill in the blanks herself. Dane had done it again, made a risky play, and now he was paying for it. The shooter up there needed only to pitch the rogue technician off the roof and MI6’s problem would just go away.

  Lucy thumbed the rifle’s fire selector without really being conscious of the action.

  Solomon’s words echoed in her thoughts. Rubicon cannot afford to alert British Intelligence to your presence there.

  He had a very good point, but then he wasn’t here, watching the last seconds of Marc Dane’s life tick away. She wouldn’t be on the guy now if he wasn’t mission-critical—and wasn’t it always Solomon who told her that her skill, her judgment, was the reason he had recruited her?

  “Ah, shit,” she sighed, and pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  The flash and the crack of the round leaving the PSG-1’s barrel was swallowed by a cylindrical suppressor, enough that someone in the room next door would only have heard the metal noise of the slide recoil.

  The shot crossed the distance in a fraction of a second, windage dropping it a degree so it met meat squarely in the middle of the gunman’s right calf muscle. The man was in the process of reaching up to tap his throat mike when the bullet took him down. He howled and fell to his knees. The cry shocked Marc back into motion and he came running and kicked him hard in the chest. The SD3 went flying and vanished over the edge of the roof.

  “The fuck?” The gunman’s voice was thick with pain and surprise. He twisted back to look up at Marc and there was real fear in the eyes behind the gas mask.

  In his hand, Marc still had the Glock semi-automatic. Both of them knew what should happen next. The right choice, the expedient choice, was to put a bullet in this man’s head and keep running.

  Marc kept running.

  ELEVEN

  The thin sheeting of the ragged pergola barely served to cut the glare from the sky. Dots of sunlight marked the dust at Khadir’s feet as he walked down the line of youths, each of them standing to wary attention, each of them sweating—and not from the heat.

  A dry wind off the Taurus Mountains rumpled the metallic fabric, making it rattle and snap. It was makeshift cover at best, enough to hide them from thermal-optical cameras of drones or satellites.

  His gaze crossed the faces of the group and he found the boy that had been discovered hiding in the compound … What was his name? Halil. Yes. The teenager didn’t look away, and Khadir gave him the faintest of nods. At his side there was a thickset youth, still with a little puppy fat on him. Halil’s companion had bruises on his face and stood awkwardly.

  He glanced at Jadeed as he made his way back to the middle of the quad. The other men, the instructors and the guards, were all there. None of them spoke; they knew that any words today had to come first from Khadir’s mouth.

  “Children,” he began, looking at his young charges. “Children are weak and full of terror.” The commander saw their disappointment and fear. They were tense, expecting some sort of rebuke.

  He went on. “For a child, the world is a place full of arbitrary rules and obstacles. It is a landscape dominated by adults, where things can be taken from you without explanation or reparation.” He walked slowly along the line once more. “Children were brought to this place.” Khadir halted and made a point of looking each of the young ones in the eye. “But today I do not see them. I see men. Warriors who have left childhood behind.”

  A ripple of excitement passed through the assembled group. They were daring to hope now, just as he wanted them to.

  “A child can do nothing. A man takes control. When a child is hurt, they cower and they weep. When a man is hurt, he takes the measure of his injury back from those who injured him.” Khadir stopped and placed a fatherly hand on the shoulder of a tall boy with short, scruffy hair. They shared a look that two equals would have given one another. “Things have been taken from us. People we loved, our homes, the lives we lived.” His tone hardened. “Our peace.”

  Some of them nodded, others stiffened with old anger and sorrow.

  “Each of you had a life crushed beneath the wheels of conflict, and you were never given a choice. But you were not broken by that experience. You were tempered, made stronger.” Khadir smiled. “You are the best of the crop. The strongest and the most resilient. And today you are ready. Souls renewed in unity of purpose.”

  They responded just as all the others had, each time he had given this speech. It was predictable. In this moment, every hardship and beating, every back-breaking hour of forced exercise and tuition was forgotten. He was giving them what the young of their age wanted; adulthood, and the liberty that came with it.

  He looked at them and sought the mirror of his own face as a young man, in the moment when his life had been changed. Most were the offspring of common folk, farmers and workers, the unskilled and the ordinary. They had never known the dimensions of a better life; but he had.

  As a boy, Khadir had grown up in a house of wealth, the scion of a military family who had served the nation of Egypt for eight generations. And like his brothers, his father, his uncles, he was destined to be officer class. He believed the dream, dazzled by the promise of glory. He yearned for a chest of medals and the shimmering brass buttons of the elite.

  But the golden patina of magnificence was a shell, a fragile skin over something rotting and decrepit. The men he respected, the mentors and elders, they had cemented their position not through prowess in battle but by cunning in the shadows. They drank tea with sworn enemies and took coin from traitors, they laid with infidels and dogs to swell their pockets. They mocked the oath they had avowed. The precious and noble uniform he had so coveted as a child was revealed as nothing but a shroud to conceal corruption and lies.

  His pride, his love, all of that had crumbled into hate. He saw only greed and depravity, and a horrible stagnation of will. It shamed him to share kinship with these people.

  It had been a powerful moment, the day when the young Khadir had at last fully understood. He was being groomed, not for warrior status, but to maintain the status quo of a slow, immoral decay. His family and those like them were a cancer, and they were not alone. The rot infested many cities, nations, souls.

  But Khadir was not alone eit
her. Others felt as he did, others who whispered in dark corners or dared to speak out. Those people became his new family; and on that day he was awakened. Renewed with great purpose.

  His reverie ebbed away and Khadir’s tone changed, as if he were confiding a secret truth to the youths. “I envy you. You have been given such a great gift. The chance to take something from those who hurt us.” His voice hardened. “Vengeance.”

  Some of them muttered approval at that suggestion.

  “The nations of our enemies, our oppressors … The Americans and the Europeans, the Russians, even those among our own kind who would let us perish to aggrandize themselves. These are the ones who have hurt us.” He gave a solemn sigh. “A man with courage and spirit, who can look beyond fear … That kind of man cannot be stopped. He may take his revenge wherever he finds it.”

  He found himself in front of the boy Halil once more. “You are that man now,” he told him. “Each and every one of you.”

  * * *

  The commander’s gaze bored into Halil like lines of fire. The man’s intensity seemed to radiate off him, and Halil was unable to respond with anything more than a wooden nod of agreement.

  He remembered his first thoughts of Khadir—a lion among jackals, powerful as a predator. Halil’s father always had a good-natured, bright charm to him … But Khadir’s charisma was something else. He burned like dark fire, as if he were a champion out of old legends; and at that second, if Khadir had asked him to march to the gates of hell itself, Halil might well have done it.

  Halil could see that Tarki was enraptured by the commander. He doubted that the farmer’s son had ever heard anything like it, the stirring words striking a chord with all the young men beneath the canopy.

  The things Khadir said were right. It was an unfair world, he had been hurt, and he did want some payback for all he had lost. Some far distant part of Halil’s thoughts seemed to stand outside him and watch, detached from the events. Even as he felt himself being carried away by Khadir’s speech, he wondered if the man was only saying what the youths wanted to hear, manipulating them.

  He was using words like a musician would play an instrument, stoking hatreds that were buried deep.

  Halil could not deny it. Whenever he thought of his family, the blade of sorrow that cut into him was immediately followed by a burn of fury. He wanted to make someone pay for what had been taken from him. Khadir was promising to give Halil that, and the offer was hard to resist.

  In his mind’s eye, he saw his parents again, remembering the morning that they had died. Sorrow pulled him one way, impotent anger another. It would be so easy to succumb—but his father’s face brought with it memories of his father’s words. His slow, steady delivery of stories and parables, from the Qu’ran and from other books written by people in far-off lands. Halil remembered him talking of other men, men with bad souls who liked to take such books and twist their meanings so others would follow them. They took words that spoke of peace and hammered them into weapons.

  Halil had not fully understood what his father had meant then, but the young man understood now. A chill ran through him as it became clear in his thoughts, as the last vestiges of anything approaching trust crumbled. What does Khadir want from us?

  “A man takes his revenge,” the commander was saying. His second brought forward a wooden crate with a hinged lid. None of the youths spoke as Jadeed upended the container. A dozen wooden batons—enough for every one of them—tumbled out on to the sands.

  Khadir picked up one of the rods and placed it in Tarki’s hand.

  Halil watched, not daring to move. Tarki had not spoken a word to him, or to anyone else since the previous night. The last sound he heard from his friend had been the cries of panic coming from the shower blocks. Tarki had been alone with one of the guards … No one was sure what had happened in there, only that shouting brought other men running, and violence in their wake. Tarki cried himself to sleep afterward, but in the morning his eyes were dead and distant.

  Jadeed shouted an order, and two of the guards disappeared into an outbuilding, returning a moment later, dragging a third man between them. He was bruised and bloody, but there was no mistaking his face. Tarki’s shocked reaction was enough to be certain that it was the same man that had hurt him.

  Jadeed’s men threw the bloodied guard to the ground. He looked up, confusion on his face, and tried to speak, but all that escaped from his lips was a dry rattle.

  The commander beckoned the youths to come closer, to form a semi-circle around the cowering figure. Tarki and Halil were pushed forward.

  “This animal walked among us,” Khadir showed a sneer. “He exploited his position to indulge his baser desires. He betrayed me and he betrayed his god. But worse than that, he betrayed you.”

  It began with Tarki. A slow change on the boy’s face, the fear melting away and something hateful reforming in its place. Halil saw his knuckles whiten around the baton. The seething anger in the youth was like a taint, infecting all the others. The ones closest to the front of the group helped themselves to the pile of wooden sticks, and Halil knew then that it was not just his friend the errant guard had assaulted.

  “Such things cannot be forgiven,” the commander went on. “Such animals must be put down.”

  The guard was struggling to rise to his feet, a pleading look on his face. Khadir ignored him, and his gaze found Tarki’s. It was all the permission that the other youth required.

  Tarki’s hand blurred and there was a sharp crack. Then the bloodied guard was staggering backward. He shouted a curse, muffled by the hand held to his broken nose. He called Tarki a motherless whore, bellowed that he would gut him like a fish—but his threats were buried in the rush as the rest of the youths went for him. Halil saw Adad snatch up a loose rock from the sand at their feet.

  They all beat him, screaming and yelling, and Halil was pushed along with the rest of the group, another baton pressed into his grip. They followed the man down as he tried to stagger away, the rain of blows falling again and again.

  Halil couldn’t look away, but he could not raise the stick to strike. He heard his father’s voice, the echo of his reproach warning not to do this, not to embrace the violence.

  The guard’s face was a pulpy, swollen mess, and his arm hung limply at his side. The voices of the other orphans crowded out everything, howling and loud. Halil felt hands shoving him forward, heard the youths spurring him on to join in.

  Tarki’s tormentor made one last effort to regain his footing and defy them. He came lurching toward the edge of the ring formed by his attackers, straight at Halil. Hands raised like talons, he gurgled and spat, blinded by frenzy.

  Halil struck out before he was even aware of doing it, stabbing with the length of the baton to hit the guard in the face. The blow broke the man’s jawbone and he spun, shattered teeth and pink, gummy spittle drooling from his lips. Halil watched him fall once again and felt a sickly churn in his gut, suddenly aware of the speckles of warm blood spattered on his cheek.

  The guard dropped and did not move again. The others made certain by kicking him until finally, with a hint of pride in his voice, Khadir told them to stop.

  * * *

  From the outside, the Monte Tauro seemed not so much a building, as a carved extension of the rocky hillside. Emerging from the rough stone cliffs that fell from the coastal road above, down toward the narrow shingled beach and blue shallows, the hotel was a range of terraces formed from precise slabs of reinforced concrete that mimicked the natural gray of the rocks. The suites and rooms sat behind long, flat patios, divided by circular balconies and square-cut shrubs, their wooden sundecks warming in the Sicilian afternoon. At its lowest level, the waters of a pool ringed by ranks of loungers shimmered in the breeze.

  Marc leaned over the lip of his balcony and made a slow survey of the hotel exterior. Up on the road, there was only a cobbled drive leading to what resembled an elegantly appointed blockhouse of white stone and green gla
ss. Elevators and a spiraling staircase descended through gaps cut in the cliff, tiled corridors branching off toward the rooms. Everything in the Monte Tauro had a pared-down ethic to it, like the halls of a chic gallery or a modernist office complex. Marc liked the simplicity of the building. With all its straight corridors and glassy partitions it was easy to see anyone coming. After all the rush and panic of the last few days, he actually felt a little safer here.

  Still, he closed the blackout curtains until there was only a thin column of daylight showing and retreated into the room. His luggage and the gear he had bought in the airport duty free electronics store were scattered over the bed, so he took the wicker seat by the sliding doors and drank the rest of a bottle of tepid San Pellegrino. He worked hard to moderate his pulse, which hadn’t slowed since he left the safe house.

  The journey seemed to take forever, each little delay mounting up as if it were about to reveal the lie of his escape. He ran a hand through his hair and it came away dirty, fingers dulled by the spray-in dye that had been part of the Marko Stahl disguise. The baseball cap he had worn on the plane from England was stained dark inside, and he frowned, tossing it into the waste bin at the end of the bed. As an afterthought, he found the American Express card he had been using for the last twelve hours and snapped it into quarters, taking care to gouge out the embedded chip. As for the growth of scruffy stubble coming in around his chin, he decided to leave it unshaven, all the better to break up the silhouette of his face.

  The Glock was where he had left it, concealed by the anti-detection baffles in the bottom of the go-bag. Holding it in his hand made him feel calmer, more in control, as if the cool polymer frame was leaching the dread out of him. Marc checked the rounds in the chamber even though he didn’t need to, and took stock of what he was going to do next.

  He was almost surprised to be here. Passing through the gauntlet of airport security, Marc had expected to be pulled from the lines of passengers. He kept looking up from the month-old copy of Wired he was pretending to read, expecting to see Victor Welles standing over him with that shit-eating smirk of his firmly in place. But then the blur of the trip ebbed and he was in a taxi on its way out of Catania International for Taormina, and it all seemed a little … surreal. Getting to where he wanted to go had slightly wrong-footed him, in point of fact. Marc allowed himself a rueful smile. So help me, I might actually stand a chance of doing this.