Nomad

by James Swallow

  “Welles says he’s a team player, but I reckon he would set fire to K Section if you gave him matches and petrol,” Marc replied. “I don’t know the ins and outs of it, but he and Royce hate each other’s guts.”

  Farrier considered this, glancing back to the door to check it was secured. “You reckon he’s on the wrong side of … all that?” He gestured at the laptop.

  “Not sure,” Marc admitted. “But this’ll help me find out who is.”

  The other man put the Glock aside and came to the keyboard, typing in his codes with deliberate, two-finger precision. “The moment I log on, it’s going to raise a flag with security. They’ll figure out what terminal I’m using and send a team.” He hesitated over the “enter” key.

  “Yeah,” said Marc, tapping it for him. “They will. So step back and let me work.”

  Farrier’s codes were still valid. With a few shortcut commands, Marc drilled down through the layers of the secure communications framework and set a search running. He had already drawn up a file of parameters for the program to look for, a list of time and date tags, keywords from message headers, even commonalities in encryption methods. “Think of it like a freight train timetable,” he said, speaking in a low voice, almost to himself. “I know where the trains were. I know how many carriages they had. But what I don’t know is where they went, or what was on them…”

  “Suppose you find what you’re looking for,” said Farrier. “Then what?”

  “Then I surrender. For real. And you get to be my character witness when I stand up in front of the Old Dog and tell him exactly who has been taking the fucking silver…”

  Marc trailed off, and just as fast as it had come to him, the cold-eyed focus he had felt in the corridor bled away. His cheeks were suddenly hot and he felt light-headed. Farrier was saying something, but Marc didn’t hear it. His world collapsed to the monitor in front of him and the dialog window across the middle of the screen.

  Each sliver of data Marc had been able to glean from Novakovich’s hard drive had a header string of letters and numbers. One by one they scrolled by as the search program sent a virtual shout out into the network, listening for the call back, for the echo of data that would signify a hit.

  Every one of them was returning the same result; a single word in bold, repeated over and over until it filled the search column.

  Failed. Failed. Failed.

  “Oh hell.” The room swam around him, and Marc gripped the arms of the chair. “No … That’s not right. It should be there.” His voice rose. “Why the fuck isn’t it there?”

  Farrier saw the endless string of negative hits. “Okay, I don’t know this computer stuff like you, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that looks bad.”

  “It’s bad,” Marc’s reply was brittle.

  It confirmed beyond the shadow of a doubt that someone was working against Marc at MI6, that with very deliberate and exacting care, all traces of covert electronic communications between Vauxhall Cross and Dima Novakovich had been excised.

  “No loose ends,” he breathed.

  SIXTEEN

  Marc was propelled up from the chair by a burst of directionless fury. Frustration crowded in on him, and he snatched up the wireless keyboard from in front of the monitor, every last impulse in him wanting to smash it against the desk. In that second, all he wanted to do was break something.

  It had been a waste, everything he had done. His elaborate ruse to gain access to the embassy, getting himself in a room with John Farrier so he could use his old friend’s pass codes … All for nothing. His prize was gone, his targets one step ahead of him, just as they had been in Dunkirk and every day since.

  “Fuck!” He let the keyboard drop and stood there, every muscle in his body tense with rage. He could almost hear the sound of his luck running out, like some far-off crash of thunder rolling down the hills toward him.

  And then, as if fate was playing a joke at his expense, a single string of text in green appeared among the endless stream of dull red Failed fields.

  Two words. File Found.

  Like a drowning man grabbing at a rope, Marc snatched back the keyboard and his fingers scrambled across the buttons in a clattering rush.

  “What is it?” said Farrier, frowning at the lines of impenetrable code.

  “A temp file…” The words spilled out of Marc’s mouth. He was almost giddy, snapped back from the bitter edge of failure in a heartbeat, desperate to see what single piece of data his search had recovered. “It’s something stored on the MI6 comm server while being moved from one stack to another…” He had to stop typing and physically force himself to take a calming breath. What lay before him was the ghost of a file, a fragment of digital chaff caught in the cogs of the electronic communications system.

  Whoever had gone through the server at Vauxhall Cross had been very thorough, but they had missed this one record because it was in the wrong place. “It’s like you scrunch up a bit of paper and toss it in the rubbish, only you miss and it falls between the bin and the wall, you don’t find it for weeks…” Marc swallowed, aware that he was talking without thinking. “It’s an image.”

  “Can we see it?”

  Very carefully, Marc sent a copy to the laptop, then to make doubly certain he added a macro to send another out via email to the dozen anonymous file-sharing data banks he used. Inside the shielded walls of the embassy building, the laptop’s wi-fi wouldn’t be able to accomplish that, but the moment Marc was outside it would zap off into the cloud, replicating itself in blind servers all over the globe.

  The picture unfolded on the bigger monitor, a complex swirl of dull earthy colors, whorled like a fractal and dappled by shadows.

  “Satellite imagery,” offered Farrier. “Russian sourced, judging by that.” He pointed at a Cyrillic digital watermark at the bottom of the shot. “Desert, mountain foothills…” He scanned the screen with a practiced eye.

  “What have we got here?” Appended to the picture were notations in a language Marc didn’t immediately recognize.

  “That’s Turkish,” Farrier went on. He leaned in to read it. “And this is Turkey. There’s map coordinates here. Somewhere near the northwestern border of Kahramanmaraş Province.” Off Marc’s questioning look, he gave a shrug. “I had some work there a while back.”

  Marc knew better than to ask for more details. He pointed at a cluster of buildings at the foot of a hillside. “This looks like a compound of some kind.” He wondered why the MI6 mole thought this image was important enough to email it to Novakovich.

  “Not a military site, though…” said Farrier. He tapped the screen, indicating two words. Yeni Gün. “New Day,” he translated. “I know the name. It’s a charity group for kids in that region. Waifs and strays, war orphans, all that.”

  They’re just kids …

  Farrier’s words sparked a flash of recall in Marc’s mind. For a second, he could smell burned metal and hear Gavin Rix’s voice in his ear as it crackled over the secure radio link. The memory made his skin crawl and he frowned.

  Was there a connection, or was he just forcing two disparate pieces of data together to create a correlation that didn’t exist? It wasn’t something Marc had time to dwell on. Lane and the rest of the embassy security team were on their way by now, and every second he spent considering the fractional sliver of intelligence he had recovered was a second less he could spend making his next move.

  Whatever the hell that is going to be, he said to himself.

  Marc pulled the cables on the laptop, erasing the search program but leaving the secure terminal open. “I’ve gotta go,” he said. “Thanks again.”

  “I can’t cover for you this time,” Farrier told him, his eyes solemn. “You can’t come to me again, Marc. It’s too risky, for both of us—”

  “I know,” Marc said, cutting him off. “And I’m sorry too, mate.” Without warning, he brought up the Glock and used the butt of the gun to club his friend across the temple. Farrie
r went down in a heap, dazed and bleeding.

  He flinched at the violence of the act, but it was necessary if he was to keep Farrier blameless. The twist in his gut still felt like betrayal, though. Marc ignored it and slipped out of the office, sprinting away down the narrow corridor.

  * * *

  The embassy’s first floor windows were designed to trap the shade of the day and keep the offices cool. Security concerns meant that from the outside, they were almost impossible to open, but from within it was a different story.

  Marc would have liked the opportunity for a subtle approach, but that wasn’t to be. His mind kept spooling back to a single toxic dread; he had no plan for this. The way he wanted it to play out, the way it should have, he would find the files he wanted, then offer a surrender—secure in the knowledge that he had the proof he needed to clear his name. He cursed himself now for being naïve, foolish enough to think that things might actually go his way this time.

  Off the administration wing there was a room with a window that peered out over the ornamental pond at ground level. Marc loaded a trolley with cartons of copy paper, turning it into a makeshift battering ram. He shouldered it into the window with a crack that popped the seams around the toughened safety glass. On the second attempt, the window yawned open wide enough for him to scramble out with the daypack secure on his back.

  From a distance, it hadn’t seemed so high, but now as he contemplated the fall, Marc realized that there was enough of a drop from the first floor to the shallow pond to break his bones. He took it anyway, lowering himself as much as he could before letting go.

  He cut the water with a hissing splash and hit the concrete bed beneath, hard enough that lines of fire shot up his legs and shocked his spine. Soaking the stolen Armani suit, he ran across the width of the pond, dodging around the spray from the fountains.

  The white glare of torch beams bobbed among the embassy’s pillars, crisscrossing as they searched for him. He glimpsed figures carrying the spindly shapes of Heckler & Koch MP5 SD3 submachine guns. Marc had fired those during training, the snapping sound of the discharge reminding him of the pop of Christmas crackers. The weapons were discreet enough that the sound would be swallowed by the steady hum of the traffic out on the Viale del Muro Torto.

  He moved into the wooded area of the embassy gardens, staying low. There was little doubt that any capture orders on him would now be shoot-on-sight as a matter of course.

  Escape and evade, he told himself. Easier said than done.

  The daypack bounced as he moved, staying in the shadows. He threw a glance back toward the main entrance where he had driven in with Torrance’s Ferrari. Blue strobe lights shimmered on the other side of the big gates, an Alfa Romeo from the Polizia parked nose-to-nose with a fire tender from the Vigili Del Fuoco. Even if he could cross the open ground between here and there, the guards on duty would catch him well before he had a chance to step off British territory and back into Italian jurisdiction.

  He did what was least expected of him—and the most risky. Marc turned back toward the main building and headed toward the far side of the compound. There was a service entrance over there for delivery vans and maintenance vehicles. As he moved, under the noise of the traffic and the steady bleating of the fire alarms, a low-pitched buzz caught the edge of Marc’s hearing and he reflexively looked up—but then it was gone and he shook off the distraction. He moved around a skinny cypress tree, behind a leafy bush on a rise overlooking the service gate. The secondary entrance opened out on to the Via Palestro, and while the big metal gates had been partially drawn open, the retractable bollards blocking access to the road were still up.

  Marc’s hopes withered as he counted six armed figures forming a cordon around the gate. He caught sight of Lane, her pistol still drawn, in conversation with one of the guards. He couldn’t make out what she was saying, but Lane’s body language was more than enough to convey her ferocity.

  “Not that way, then,” he whispered, drawing back into the shadows. Marc was about to turn away when he glimpsed a slow, black shape through the open gate as it passed by. A Toyota RAV4, identical to the vehicle that Marc had seen in his rear-view mirror on the way from the St. Regis, crawled by at a steady, deliberate pace before disappearing behind the wall.

  He wanted to tell himself that there was no way it could be the same vehicle, but the shape of the SUV and the tinted windows were identical. Marc moved back through the trees, paralleling the path of the side road. If the SUV was something, if it wasn’t MI6 …

  The buzzing noise interrupted his train of thought, and this time he was certain he had heard it. Marc aimed his pistol in the direction of the sound and saw a blur of motion; a spindly shape like two joined figure eights, clustered around a spherical pod.

  The little drone flyer hovered a few meters over his head, bobbing in the light breeze, and he drew a bead on it. Wherever the thing had come from, it sure as hell wasn’t Foreign Office issue, and if it was feeding images of him back to embassy security, he would never have heard the bullets that would have taken him down. Marc hesitated to fire at it, knowing that a gunshot would announce his location to everyone in the compound.

  Slowly, the drone dropped down to head height. Then, with little flicks of motion, it buzzed toward the wall, stopping to wait for Marc to follow it.

  “What’s that, boy?” he asked it, as if he was talking to a dog. “What have you got for me, huh?” The entire thing seemed surreal, and it was almost enough to make him burst out laughing.

  He was close to the sheer gray expanse of the embassy wall when the drone suddenly zipped up into the air and over the coils of razor wire at the top. A second later, Marc heard a hollow cough of compressed air and a black nylon cord came streaming back over the wall, trailing from a grapnel head. It landed at his feet, an open invitation.

  Marc threw a last look over his shoulder in the direction of the embassy, and holstered the Glock before snatching up the cord. He tugged it twice and got an answering pull in return. He barely had time to brace himself before the line went taut and he was yanked up off his feet. For one worrying moment, Marc feared he would be dragged through the sharp tines of the razor wire, but his ascent halted just short of the top of the wall, allowing him to gingerly negotiate the coils. From the far side, he could hear angry voices and see the flicker of torchlight reflected off the tree canopy.

  Discarding the cord, he gathered himself as a door opened on the side of the SUV idling at the curb. An athletic black woman with short hair and a wry curl to her mouth looked out at him. “Hey,” she said, by way of a greeting. Over her shoulder, Marc saw what looked like a mil-spec equipment case packed with low-light video screens and control boards.

  “Hey,” he replied, because he didn’t have a better response.

  “So I guess you need a lift.” Her accent was East Coast American, confident with it. She beckoned him with her index finger. “C’mon.”

  Marc made the snap decision and vaulted into the vehicle, hearing the wheels hiss against the asphalt as the Toyota bolted away and into a slewing turn that threw it down a narrow side street. He rolled with the motion and bounced on to a seat, struggling to keep his balance. Behind the woman, he caught a glimpse of sandy hair and a sallow face, but little more of the vehicle’s silent driver.

  The woman showed Marc a smile. “So this makes it twice I saved your ass,” she told him.

  “Twice?” he echoed, even as one of Farrier’s questions came flashing back to him. Who was the sniper in Walworth?

  “You don’t have to thank me,” she added, pulling something from the folds of her jacket.

  More police strobes flashed past as they turned on to the main boulevard, and Marc shot a worried glance out of the window. “Where are we going?”

  When he looked back, she had one of those dart guns in her hand, the kind that zookeepers in wildlife documentaries used to drug tigers. “Out,” she told him, and the pistol chugged.

  Marc saw
a fast blur, as if a giant bee had thrown itself at his neck and stung him. He slapped at the pain as a wash of cold went through his veins, and his hand came away with a little blood on it, a feathered dart falling from his numbing fingers. He tried to talk, but his lips and tongue had suddenly turned into lifeless meat.

  The inside of the SUV spun around him and warm darkness rose up to smother him.

  * * *

  The wind off the ocean rolled up over the decks of the Santa Cruz, plucking at the places where tarps had not been firmly tied down. Emerging from out of the threatening cloud, the helicopter seemed to approach in total silence, all sound of its rotors stolen away by the stiff breeze.

  It passed up the length of the freighter and turned around. The loud clatter of the aircraft came from nowhere and the wedge-shaped fuselage of the German-made MBB BK117 dropped toward the deck of the ship. The loading hatch over the Santa Cruz’s main cargo bay had been reinforced to act as a helipad, and the pilot lined up the skids for a careful touchdown.

  Two men watched the helicopter’s arrival, the Serb with the eternally disdainful expression and the grimacing Englishman, who glared into the fading light of the day.

  The BK117 landed with a heavy thud and the rotors were barely spooling down as the Serb barked out orders to a pair of crewmen, sending them up to secure the helicopter against the deck. Three figures climbed out of the aircraft, one less than there was supposed to be.

  The Englishman wasted no time, shooting a look at the man who had piloted them to the ship. “You Grunewald?”

  The man shook his head. “Ellis,” he said in a dry growl, jerking a thumb at his chest. He indicated the two others with him, one with a blank, hollow-eyed countenance and another with a sardonic measuring gaze. “That’s Teape. And the posh one, he’s Grunewald.”

  “You’re the new man,” said the Swiss mercenary. “Pleased to—”

  He was cut off before he could continue. “They said there were four of you coming. Where’s the other one? What’s his name, Cruz?”