Nomad

by James Swallow

  Marc saw the crater fall away before him, past a line of iron rods and the red rope cordon strung between them. The hard chemical smell in the air made his nostrils ache. Down in the pit, gurgling fumaroles frothed, coughing out volcanic gas and superheated water.

  The cleft in the dirty black rock was sheer-sided, rough walls of compacted basalt sand wet with snowmelt and condensed steam. Anyone who slipped over the edge would have nothing to grab on to, and the steep fall would take them all the way down into the mouths of the fumaroles, into the ragged plumes of searing vapor.

  Cruz would make it look like an accident. Leave Marc to die in agony while his killer faded away, back down the slopes.

  “No,” Marc muttered, the thought becoming a word, cementing his next action.

  “The fuck you say—” Cruz began, but Marc was already moving, as another breath of cold wind brought fog down around them.

  He deliberately tripped and fell, toppling like a cut tree away from the mercenary’s grasp. Marc landed hard on the crumbling stone path and rolled as he hit, ignoring the bolts of pain through his shoulders. He heard the hiss of the knife slashing through the air.

  His hands clawed at the dirt and filled with clumps of damp black sand. Blindly, Marc threw the muddy mess back at Cruz and instinctively the other man put up his hands to shield his face.

  He didn’t waste the moment the crude distraction provided. Marc pivoted and scrambled forward toward the mercenary’s indistinct shape, colliding with him at a low angle. He knocked his legs out from under him in a clumsy rugby tackle, and Cruz went down.

  Punching blindly, Marc hammered blows into the other man’s midriff and sternum, desperate to keep up the momentum. Cruz’s talon-like blade cut the mist again and Marc swallowed a cry of pain as a line of heat drew across his shoulder, the tip of the karambit making brief contact as it moved in a wild, defensive arc.

  Marc got a good look at Cruz’s face as the mercenary’s perpetually angry scowl briefly became an almost childlike expression of terror. The killer’s footing was stolen by Marc’s artless attack and Cruz’s right leg went out from under him as the fragile lip of the crater crumbled under his weight. He went into the red rope and fell over it, dragging one of the iron stakes out of its hole as he tumbled.

  Shouting in vain, Cruz dropped a good ten meters before he was silenced by slamming face-first into the sheer wall of the fissure. He whipped into a spinning, flailing tumble to fall the rest of the way into the crater.

  Marc scrambled to his feet and broke into a run back down the path, the first screams of shock from the sightseers echoing behind him. Clutching his wounded arm, he tried to block out the burn of the pain and focus on escape.

  * * *

  He had to warn Kate and Stephen. He had to reach a landline, call them and beg his brother-in-law to get his family away. It didn’t matter if he never spoke a word to them again after today—but Marc could not let them pay the price for his mistakes. They were all he had left.

  The material of the dark hoodie masked the knife cut’s spill of blood from the other people on the path and he was back at the end of the rough-hewn road even as word of the terrible “accident” at Bocca Nuova was spreading.

  Shrinking into the depths of the hood, he walked quickly toward a parked Unimog, threading around a group of tourists ready to be ferried back to the cable car station. He was just a few steps from the vehicle. Once he was on board, the misted windows and the hoodie would hide his face—

  Marc’s breath caught in his throat as his gaze crossed the snow-dusted tables in front of the baita delle guide hut and hung on two figures standing together, one busy lighting a cigarette. Grunewald and Teape were less than twenty meters from where he was, conversing in low tones. Marc turned sharply away as a woman behind him said something in polite Italian.

  He was hesitating, holding up the queue and she was urging him to board the vehicle. Before he realized what she was doing, the woman reached up to shake him on the shoulder, and he flinched as she touched him where Cruz’s blade had cut.

  The woman’s hand came back wet with blood, and the scream she gave hung in the wet air.

  Grunewald and Teape both saw him. The American rocked off his heels and came marching forward, his dull gaze unblinking.

  Marc shoved the woman out of his way and barged through the rest of the queue. A hut raised off the rock on wooden stands was directly in front of him, and without looking back he moved around it, putting it between himself and Teape.

  He was counting on the reluctance of the mercenaries to start shooting or otherwise draw attention, but that would not last forever. Rounding the hut, Marc heard the rattle of a motorcycle engine and saw a shape moving through the mist along the rough highway—a four-wheeler Kawasaki ATV, ridden by a tall youth wearing a fluorescent orange crash helmet.

  Marc ran into his path and the rider skidded to a halt, flipping up his visor. “Cosa c’e?” he asked, frowning. Marc pointed in a random direction and the young man looked, peering into the haze.

  “Scusa.” With his other hand Marc threw a brutal left cross that slammed the rider hard enough to unseat him. He fell back over the rear axle, dazed and reeling as Marc leaped into the saddle.

  Teape turned the corner of the hut. There was the angular shape of a silenced pistol in his hand.

  Marc twisted the ATV’s throttle and it leapt forward, spraying a fan of loose grit as he wrenched it around in a tight turn. He caught a glimpse of the gun in Teape’s hand jolting, but the cough of the shot was swallowed by the snarl of the Kawasaki’s engine. Leaning low over the handlebars, Marc pointed the ATV into the fogbank and roared away, on to the path that snaked around Etna’s lower cones toward the cable car terminal.

  * * *

  A long, foggy straightaway let him build up a good clip of speed, before suddenly fading into a hairpin bend that almost put him into the rocks. Marc leaned up and away like a yachtsman pulling against a sail and the ATV howled as it went into a rasping sideways drift. The ugly little bike chopped off the tip of the corner and bounced back down on to the ice-rimed path, violently weaving left and then right.

  He had barely recovered any equilibrium before a set of white headlights appeared over a low rise directly in front of him, lancing out of the wall of mist. Swerving over the track, he cut across the path of another Unimog on its way up to the summit, earning a thunderous chorus of disapproval from the truck’s air-horn.

  Then he was into a series of descending switchbacks, passing the Cisternazza crater. Almost there. The cold wind whipped at his exposed face, numbing his cheeks and making his eyes run. In the middle distance he could see the glow of the lights from the restaurant atop the cable car station. Marc leaned into another tight turn and he glimpsed a shape—white and red, big and fast—looming large in his peripheral vision.

  More from instinct than conscious thought, Marc put the ATV into a slalom path as another Unimog vaulted the tip of the last bend and thumped onto the road behind. Roaring with acceleration, the truck came surging after him, flooding the gray landscape with engine noise and dirty exhaust.

  The Unimog’s front bumper crunched against the back of the ATV, shattering one of the taillights. The impact almost sent Marc into a skid, but he kept the four-wheeler stable, rocking it back as it threatened to tip. If he lost control now, his body would meet the road and a heartbeat after that, the truck would grind him beneath its tires.

  Marc dared to take a swift glance over his shoulder, wind whipping the hoodie off his head. He saw Teape glaring down at him from behind the Unimog’s steering wheel, the high 4x4 coming on like a charging rhino.

  They went into the next bend and the bigger, heavier truck lost momentum as it cornered wide. Marc concentrated on the apex of the turn, threading a good racing line as the road became a chicane, but, distracted by the pursuit, he saw the turn-off toward the terminus too late and was past it before he could react. The walls of sharp black rock around him receded and su
ddenly the path was taking the ATV out over a wide delta of old, solidified lava flow. The incline grew steeper, and gravity pulled on the lighter Kawasaki’s frame.

  He felt rather than heard the advance of the Unimog as the big truck shortened his lead, the drumming rumble of the engine vibrating through his chest. He concentrated on steering a zigzag course across the rough-hewn trail.

  They passed a towering pillar of green-painted steel rising out of the earth toward the sky, thick wires leading down toward Nicolosi Nord. Cable cars cranked past over Marc’s head as he emerged from their slow-moving shadows and into an area lit by bright sunshine.

  He took a risk and veered off the cracked roadway, on to the undulating plains of the lava field. The Kawasaki was catching air every few seconds as every little rise threatened to buck him out of the saddle.

  Teape was still on him, the heavy truck bulling its way over the uneven going. The stolen Unimog was going to follow him all the way down unless he could do something about it.

  Leaning hard into the handlebars, Marc swerved the more agile ATV into a turn that carried him around a patch of black sand that had collapsed in on itself, forming a wide pothole. High up in the Unimog’s cab, Teape wasn’t aware of the hazard until he was right on it.

  The 4x4’s rear right wheel fell sharply into the pit. The tall-sided vehicle over-balanced and rolled, crashing hard against the rocky slope, finally coming to a clattering halt back on its wheels.

  There was little time to celebrate any kind of victory, though. Marc had well and truly lost any sight of the proper pathway and it was all he could do to cling to the yowling Kawasaki bike as the steep incline and the basalt shingle collaborated to unseat him.

  He was a hundred meters from the highway when one of the ATV’s front tires finally burst and showered Marc with shreds of rubber. The wheel hub sank into the loosely packed dirt and with a grinding hiss, the four-wheeler bike juddered to a halt.

  Marc stumbled away from the bike, his heart hammering in his chest and his breathing labored. The thinner air up on the mountain was draining the energy from him. He staggered down the last length of the slope to the parking lot.

  A pair of payphones under plastic hoods stood close to a nearby vendor, who was hawking colorful postcards and odd little souvenir statues made of black volcanic glass. Marc lurched into the closest one, snatching up the orange handset and jamming a phone card into the pay slot. He blindly dialed the only telephone number he never had to think to remember, and fought down the trembling in his numb fingers.

  Stephen Parker’s gruff voice answered. “Yeah?”

  “Don’t talk, just listen.” The words spilled out of him in a rush. “Get Kate and Matt and get out of the house right now, go to the station, stay there, there’s men with guns in a van outside, you have to go now—”

  “Marc?” He felt the anger and disappointment in the growled reply. “What the hell have you done?”

  “Just fucking do it!” Marc bellowed, drawing apprehensive looks from day-trippers examining the tourist mementos. “Go, Steve! Do it right now!”

  His brother-in-law never graced him with a reply, but in the seconds before he hung up, Marc heard Stephen calling out urgently to his wife.

  The next sound he heard was the roaring snarl of the Unimog as it smashed through a chain link fence behind him and came hurtling across the footpath. Smoke snorted from the truck’s engine as the mercenary aimed it like a missile, mashing the accelerator to the firewall.

  Marc ignored the screaming tourists behind him and at the last possible second he threw himself aside, diving toward a heap of dirty slush gathered by the side of the road. The out-of-control Unimog missed him by an arm’s length, colliding with the payphone where Marc had been standing and beheading it, ripping the stand from the ground with a shriek of torn metal. Bleeding off speed, the truck went into the side of the vendor’s hut, caving in a wall and collapsing the sloped roof as it ground to a stop.

  The tang of a gasoline fire reached his nostrils and Marc slipped away as flames caught and spread, chewing down jolts of pain with every limping step.

  * * *

  Lucy feigned dozing, but it was a poor act. Despite the comfort of Solomon’s private jet, she still couldn’t surrender to sleep. The best she could manage was some kind of vague nap-state, hovering at the edge of real rest but never really getting there. It wasn’t that she was a nervous flyer—far from it. If anything, conventional air travel bored the hell out of her. No, Lucy Keyes guessed that on some level, she just couldn’t release herself from a baseline level of alertness while thousands of feet in the air, inside a pressurized steel tube. Instead she cat-napped, letting her mind drift.

  She heard the thud of the office door down the corridor, and blinked as Delancort appeared in the lounge area. Shifting planes of light moved slowly around the cabin as the jet began a slow turn and he was illuminated by the glow.

  “What is it?” she asked, spotting the smartphone in his hand.

  “Caught a fish,” he replied, with a faint smirk. “A priority message just came through from the London office. It appears that our good friend Marc Dane has broken cover.”

  Lucy frowned at the thought of that and got up, holding out her hand to demand the phone. “Gimme.”

  “I don’t—” Delancort began, but he made only a vague attempt to prevent Lucy snatching it from his grip.

  The message on the handset was from the Rubicon Group’s UK headquarters, and it had an audio file attached. She pressed the “play” button and two voices emerged from the device’s tiny speaker, layered by the distortion effect typical of a digital phone tap.

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t talk, just listen.”

  “Second one is Dane,” Delancort explained. “First is his brother-in-law, an officer in the London police.”

  “I know.” Lucy let the brief, terse conversation play through. “Brother sounds pissed,” she offered. “What the hell is this all about? Dane talking about men with guns outside a house?”

  “Blowback from his escape, perhaps?” Delancort shrugged. “It’s likely the cop helped him get out of the country somehow.”

  “This doesn’t sound like two guys happy to help each other.” Lucy handed back the phone. “So we got this how? Tapped the line?”

  “It would be more accurate to say that we tapped the tap. British Intelligence put a wire on Dane’s sister’s phone the moment he went off grid.”

  “I’d like to know exactly how we seem to be reading MI6’s mail.”

  Delancort gave that thin, unctuous smile that always made Lucy want to smack him upside the head. “Rubicon has a lot of assets in Europe.”

  He wasn’t going to give her more, so she let the question go for the moment. “Where’d the call come from?”

  “A public payphone in Sicily, in the Etna National Park. And obviously, if we have that information, then so do Dane’s former employers.”

  Lucy was already marching past him, heading toward the cockpit. What was Dane doing in Sicily? It was a short hop from the UK and as good a place as any to lay low—but then he’d blown that in a hot second by phoning home.

  Men with guns, he had said. Was that MI6 again, threatening his family to pressure Dane into surrendering, or someone else?

  “What are you doing, Lucy?” Delancort trailed after her as she approached the flight deck.

  The door was open, and as she came up, a broad-shouldered man with dark hair in close-cut curls emerged, rolling up the sleeves of his white uniform shirt. Captain’s epaulets on his shoulders made him resemble any one of countless civil aviators, but it was his eyes that betrayed a youth spent in the cockpits of warplanes. Ari Silber had that kind of rugged early-forties look that handsome Jewish doctors and Hollywood actors struggled to cultivate. He had an easy smile but a killer’s gaze. Lucy liked that about him; she knew another shooter when she saw one.

  From what she had gathered, Silber had come to work for Ekko Solomo
n after a distinguished career flying an F-15I Ra’am strike fighter for the Israeli Air Force. She wondered if it bothered him to have gone from top gun to a rich man’s chauffeur. Or does he owe the African something too?

  “Looking for me?” he asked.

  “Where are we at right now?”

  “Over the Med,” he replied. “I’m guessing you have forgotten a bag in London and you want us to go back for it?”

  “If we divert, how soon to get us on the ground in Sicily?”

  Silber paused, doing the calculations in his head. “Three hours at the inside, touching down at Catania airport.” He glanced at Delancort, nodding toward the flight deck. “You want I should make that happen?”

  “No,” said another voice, and the conversation stilled.

  As ever, Ekko Solomon was dressed as if he was about to step out to a business meeting. He held a digital tablet in one hand and Lucy guessed that he had seen the same message from the London office.

  “We know where Dane is,” Lucy noted.

  Solomon shook his head. “We know where he was.” He gestured with the data pad. “This man is running and he will not stay in one place. He knows he has burned his hiding place in Sicily. He will flee.”

  “We’re playing catch-up with his people,” said Lucy. “Unless we can get out in front of Dane, we’re not going to be able to grab him before the Brits. If there’s a lead we can find—”

  “Marc Dane is desperate,” Solomon went on. “He needs help. So he will go to someone that he trusts.”

  Delancort nodded. “That’s what the behavioral model suggests, based on the data from Zurich. Everyone Dane is close to is back in England.”

  “Not so,” replied Solomon. “Captain Silber, we are going to divert this aircraft, but not to Sicily. Contact Cairo, have them adjust our flight plan. This is our new destination.” He handed the pilot the digital pad.

  “Yes, sir.” Silber nodded and vanished back into the A350’s cockpit, leaving Lucy to frown at the new orders.