Nomad

by James Swallow

  Nash followed him in, booting the door shut as he pulled at the tab on the belt that was part of his police officer disguise. “I gotta jet,” he said to the air. “Work to do. But I can’t pass this up, can I?” He let the belt, gun, holster and all drop to the floor, then shrugged off his jacket. “Lost count of the number of times I thought about knocking seven shades of shit out of you.” He rolled his shoulders, savoring the moment.

  “Feeling’s mutual…” Marc panted, getting unsteadily to his feet. “Come on, then. You’re not on the terraces now, you fucking thug!”

  Nash raised his hands into a boxer’s stance. “You don’t know me,” he retorted. “You’ve never been a soldier. You sat in a poncey helicopter, you think you can talk to me like you stood a post? Piss off!”

  “You’re right, Nash,” Marc shrugged, backing away toward the motor gear. “I’m not like you. You’re just a yob who joined up because he wanted a way to hurt people!” His temper rose, and he jabbed a finger at the other man. “Don’t come out with that ‘honor of the regiment’ bollocks to me. You don’t give a damn about Queen and Country. You’re a gutless traitor!”

  “Oh, you got my number.” Nash pulled a mock-sad face. “I’m cut to the quick, me.” His expression twisted into a savage snarl. “They let me down first! Salute and do the Crown’s dirty work, for what? A pittance, a crap pension and an ungrateful country run by posh wankers and asylum seekers?” He shook his head. “Fuck that noise. I shed my blood. I want my cut.”

  “And the Combine will give it to you? Off the back of killing your own squad? Murdering hundreds of innocent people?”

  “Who?” Nash snorted coldly. “You think I care about them, or those civvies out there?” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the National Mall. “You think anyone gives a toss about Khadir’s crusade or a bunch of whining Yanks? All a means to an end. If it don’t happen here today, it’ll happen tomorrow somewhere else.” He saw the question in Marc’s eyes and grinned unpleasantly. “Yeah, you getting it now, are ya? The Combine’s been at this shit for years. They were selling bullets to both sides in the First World War! Now they’re working up trouble where and when they want it, and coining it in. Anyone on the outside of that is a fucking chump.”

  “They’ll be stopped.”

  “What? By you?” Nash laughed. “And whose army?”

  Words failed him, and Marc went for Nash, feinting to the right and then going low to throw out a short stabbing strike to his stomach. The ex-soldier grunted in pain and grabbed at Marc, backhanding him with a glancing blow that lit sparks behind his eyes. Off-balance, Marc couldn’t stop Nash from shoving him down on to one of the elevator gears.

  He collided with the main motor, barely arresting his fall before his face struck the spinning edge of the gearwheel, but Nash had followed him down and he pressed his full weight into Marc’s back.

  Marc’s hands slipped on the motor casing, the muscles in his arms bunching as he put all his effort into holding back. The stale odor of grease filled his nostrils as the wheel flashed past inches from his face. Nash’s thick fingers gripped the back of Marc’s head and pushed him inexorably toward the metal gears. If the rotating rim met his flesh, it would cut into him like a blunted buzz saw.

  He could hear the clatter and rattle of the elevators beneath him and for long seconds, the two of them were locked in place, each resisting the other. But Marc’s muscles were already trembling with effort, while all Nash had to do was keep up the relentless pressure. The bigger man was leaning in on him, marshalling all the force he could muster.

  Then, with a thudding sound, the elevator directly below reached the lobby level and stopped. The spinning gearwheel clanked to a halt and Marc felt the tiniest relaxing of Nash’s hand as the other man reacted. It was the only opening he would get.

  With all his remaining strength, Marc threw back his shoulders and his head. The top of his skull slammed into Nash’s face and Marc felt the crunch of cartilage, a split second before it was drowned out by the wave of brutal pain that swept through him.

  Nash let out a guttural, animal noise, reeling back. He blinked and dragged a hand over his nose and mouth, his palm coming away wet with blood.

  Marc rolled toward the workbench, across the machine room. He snatched at the first thing that looked like a weapon—a weighty adjustable spanner—and came back toward Nash, swinging it in a wide arc.

  The other man backed off and grinned, showing bloody teeth. Nash beckoned Marc with both hands. “Let’s have you, then,” he grunted, pausing to cough out a glob of bloody spittle. “I’ll shove that down your throat, prick!”

  Marc raised the tool like a club, but instead of advancing to attack, he struck out at the fluorescent lighting tube hanging from the machine room’s ceiling. He turned his face away as the spanner shattered the tube and plunged the confined space into semi-darkness with a burst of electricity.

  * * *

  “I will fucking gut you!” Nash bellowed, enraged and near flash-blinded. He lurched toward the door where he had dumped his jacket and belt, groping for the pistol he had discarded there. He was tired of playing this game, and Nash wanted nothing more than to end Marc Dane’s life as quickly and painfully as possible.

  The only light in the room was now coming up in weak shafts through the cable guides. He heard footsteps scuffling across the concrete flooring, glimpsed a shadow caught in the half-light.

  Nash would kill Dane here and leave the smartphone on the body, make it look like he’d been in on the attack all along and left for dead by his Al Sayf co-conspirators. He smiled in the dark as his fingers touched the metal cylinder of a big police-issue Maglite torch. It wasn’t the gun, but it would do.

  Nash liked the way this story was shaping up. He grabbed the flashlight and spun around, stabbing the button to drench the room in illumination. “Surprise, you fuckwit—”

  The space in front of him was empty; then from the shadows by his side, a hard nub of metal jabbed him in the temple. From the corner of his eye he saw the blurry shape of a silencer pressed to his head.

  * * *

  Nash was going to say something. Marc saw it in the parting of his lips, heard the swift indrawn breath.

  But he had already committed to the act. Whatever thought was forming in the other man’s mind never completed the journey. Marc’s finger tightened on the Sig Sauer’s trigger and the gun bucked in his hand.

  Nash jerked back as if he had been hit in the head by a hammer. Dark blood and brain matter glittered in the edge-glow from the flashlight as it sprayed up the wall. He collapsed into the corner of the machine room, his body giving a final shuddering twitch before it became still.

  Marc held the gun tightly. In the darkness he had found Nash’s pistol in the folds of his jacket, and he gambled that the ex-soldier was cocky enough to carry it with the safety off and a round already chambered. Aggressive and predictable to the last, Nash had not let him down.

  It didn’t seem like enough.

  A man Marc had thought was dead, seemingly resurrected just to spite him and now dead again by his hand, this time for certain. It wasn’t enough that he had died here, out of sight of the world, his crimes still hidden.

  Marc wanted Nash to be alive so he could punish him, berate him, kill him again. He wanted to shoot him in the belly, let him lie there and bleed out slowly and painfully.

  “I should have known this was coming. I knew you were a bastard from the first day I saw you,” he told the corpse, tired and furious all at once. “You murdered Sam and all you’ve done is die for it.” Marc aimed the gun and wavered on the edge of unloading the rest of the magazine into the dead man, out of sheer hate for him.

  Instead, he got to his feet, groaning as all the bruising and contusions across his body made themselves known. Marc gathered up the police jacket, searching the pockets for more ammunition, for anything that could be useful.

  The black slab of a smartphone tumbled out and clattered acros
s the floor.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Marc left the stairwell on the ninth floor, the door crashing open with a bang that echoed down the corridor.

  A businessman who had slept late and was still in his hotel-issue dressing gown almost dropped the breakfast tray he was depositing outside his room as Marc charged past. “Hey buddy,” he called, “where’s the fire?”

  “I need this,” Marc told him, snatching up the ice bucket on the tray, handing back the empty wine bottle it contained. Marc dumped the melted water through the overflow grille of a nearby ice machine, and quickly refilled it with fresh cubes. Without pausing, he stuffed the black cell phone he’d found in Nash’s jacket into the ice.

  The man laughed. “That’s gonna void your warranty.”

  Marc didn’t reply, carrying the bucket back to the stairwell. He attached a cable to a port on the bottom of the phone as frost formed on the device’s glassy screen.

  Marc had dumped Nash’s gun, the fake police jacket and the contents of his battered daypack on the stairwell’s narrow metal landing, and left his wounded laptop to power up. While it was heavily ruggedized, the portable computer wasn’t invulnerable and Marc glared at the screen where it had fractured from bullet damage. Much of the display was marred with black voids, as if someone had spilled ink over a sheet of paper, but a fraction of the screen still functioned and by some miracle the machine had booted. He dropped to his haunches and tapped the keyboard experimentally.

  It took three tries to get a USB socket working, and he double-clicked a password hijacker program as the laptop connected to the device down the cable. Rapidly chilling the smartphone and then hitting it with the code breaker could make the device’s recent memory accessible, and make it possible for Marc to sift out the key code Nash had used to lock the phone. The memory chips inside the device would retain the patterns of the code for a short period, and cooling it stopped that data from decaying too fast.

  In a few seconds, the hijacker was spooling out a page of barely-readable information on the phone’s settings, and among it was the vital six digits. Marc tipped out the bucket and tapped in the numbers, the ice-cold metal of the phone burning his fingers. He flicked through the menu screens; a single application was running, and he tapped it open.

  There were a series of countdown timers arranged in a column, each of them on a steady decrease toward zero, each one running a few tenths of a second slower than the one above it. The top timer clocked over to fourteen minutes and falling as he watched.

  Fourteen minutes from now would be just after the top of the hour, when the president would be on stage making his speech.

  What he held in his hand was a trigger for Al Sayf’s atrocity. Nash had doubtless kept access to the Khadir’s “weapons” for himself, in case the Combine had decided to change the scope of the plan.

  Marc sat down hard on the metal stairs, and very carefully, he drew his finger over a series of tabs next to the first timer.

  ARM.

  SAFE.

  ZERO.

  He didn’t want to think about what ZERO would do, but SAFE was clear enough. He could stop this now with just a keystroke.

  What if it’s a booby-trap? He asked himself.

  Marc screwed his eyes shut and pressed the button, holding his breath, straining to listen for the sound of a detonation. But there was nothing. He opened his eyes again.

  The countdown was still going, and a pop-up message had appeared. Command Not Sent, it read, Unable to Connect.

  He tried again and got the same result. It couldn’t be an issue of distance, and Nash’s phone was showing full bars and a strong network signal. “Bollocks!” His curse hung in the air, and he put down the device, glaring at it.

  I can’t do this on my own, he told himself, reaching for his own smartphone. Rubicon’s New York office answered on the second ring. “I need Delancort,” he said.

  “He’s on the other line,” said a woman’s voice. “This is Kara. I brought the car out to Jersey?”

  He nodded, remembering the Chinese girl. “Yeah, yeah. Red jacket.” He took a breath. “Okay, we got a situation.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’ll manage,” he lied, the pain in his ribs throbbing with slow insistence. “Can you reach Lucy?”

  Kara hesitated, and that was enough to tell him that something was amiss. “We’re monitoring DC police bands here, and it looks like someone matching her description has been taken into custody. I’m sorry, Dane, but you probably can’t count on Lucy’s help right now.”

  Marc leaned away from the phone and made a snarling noise through his gritted teeth. “Listen to me,” he began, sucking in a deep breath. “There were two observers in the Willard Hotel.” There was no need to go into more detail than that right now—details of Iain Nash’s return from the dead and the end of him could wait. “I got a phone from one of them, and it’s running a remote timer for seven, repeat seven, separate devices. But the abort command isn’t working. I don’t know how we can locate the carriers and I have no bloody idea what to do next.”

  “Dane?” Henri Delancort’s voice cut in on the line. “Can you run a feed from the stolen phone back to us? Our team here might be able to hack it remotely.”

  “In less than fourteen minutes?” He heard the French-Canadian swear softly under his breath. “That’s what I thought. This isn’t a software problem, its hardware. Something’s stopping the abort signal from getting through to the bomb carriers.”

  “The cell jammer!” said Kara. “That’s it!”

  “What jammer? Where?”

  She launched in to a rapid-fire explanation without pausing for breath. “The presidential motorcade has two mobile units that contain powerful short-range cellular and radio jamming systems. They can blanket up to four square city blocks with an umbrella of electronic countermeasures. That means, no cell phone signals in or out.”

  Marc nodded. He had seen similar setups during his time with British Intelligence. “Okay…”

  “They are usually deployed when the Secret Service is on a heightened state of alert,” added Delancort. “And they are now, after the incident at the Port of New Jersey.”

  “Right.” Marc thought it through. “The bombs are programmed and activated by the remote, but once they’re inside the jammer radius, they can’t get the abort call so nothing can stop them from going off. Al Sayf are using the Secret Service’s hardware against them…” His mouth was dry and he licked his lips. “So we need to kill this jammer, then. How do we do that?”

  “Short of blowing the thing up with a missile? You would have to actually pull the plug yourself,” Kara explained.

  “Which requires access to the staging area where the motorcade vehicles are parked,” said Delancort. “And even if you could do it, the secondary mobile unit would automatically activate to cover the signal loss of the primary in a matter of seconds.”

  An unpleasant certainty settled on Marc, a gallows-walk chill that spread through him like cold fire. “So that’s what we’re doing, yeah?” He heard himself say the words.

  “I’ll send you an image of the vehicle so you know what to look for,” said Kara, and he heard the clatter of her tapping at a keyboard. “But … I mean … How are you going to get into the secure area?”

  Marc’s eyes fell to the collection of items on the landing in front of him—the police jacket, the laptop, the gun, and the contents of the backpack. He reached for the press pass he had stolen on his way into the Willard, and turned it over in his fingers. “I got an idea.”

  * * *

  Lucy found herself in the back of an empty K9 mobile unit. The interior of the van smelled like wet dog and in short order she had taken to breathing through her mouth.

  They confiscated her gun, her phone, her watch, just about everything she had on her short of a strip-search, before binding her wrists with a zip-tie and leaving her to wait. Still, Lucy’s sense of time was good, and she estimated that th
ey were still in the green, still in with a chance of stopping the attack.

  The problem was, with each minute she sat here, that margin grew thinner. Lucy began a count to ten. At eight, she was going to start kicking at the doors and screaming.

  She reached five and the rear of the van opened. The two agents who had corralled her on the Mall were there, along with an older man who had the granite-hard manner of a drill sergeant. He took off his sunglasses and gave her a measuring look.

  “Come to take me for a walk?” Lucy asked. “You bring a leash?”

  “That depends on how you behave.” The older man, who was clearly in command here, glanced at his subordinates. “I’ll handle this.” He climbed into the van with Lucy, closed the doors behind him and sat down opposite her.

  “You got a problem,” she told him.

  “Every day,” he replied. “I’m Special Agent Rowan. You want to tell me why you’re really here, Keyes? And don’t waste my time with any bullshit. We ran your jacket. We confirmed your identity.”

  “Jadeed Amarah. A top lieutenant of the Al Sayf terror group. He’s out there right now with his finger on the actual trigger.” She leaned toward him. “That clear enough for you, Special Agent Rowan?”

  “Yeah, that’s what you told my people.” He paused, running a hand through his thinning hair. Lucy guessed Rowan was in his early fifties, and by his manner she pegged him as ex-military.

  “You served?” she asked, the question coming to her automatically.

  He answered by unbuttoning the cuff of his shirt and pulling it back a few inches. On the inside of his forearm was a simple tattoo in black ink, the silhouette of a dagger and the Latin phrase de oppresso liber.

  “To liberate the oppressed,” she translated. “So you were SF.” It wasn’t a question. The dagger was part of the sigil of the US Army’s 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment, also known as Delta Force.