Shadow

by James Swallow

  The lock clicked open and Lucy slipped a slimline Glock 43 pistol from a hidden pocket in the back of her jacket, before nudging the front door wider with the tip of her boot.

  “The place should be empty, but don’t make assumptions. You know the deal, touch nothing.”

  Marc waggled his fingers in front of her. Like Lucy, he was wearing a pair of thin tactical gloves.

  “Copy that.”

  They stepped under the tape barriers and moved inside, securing the door behind them. Room by room, they swept the ground floor, starting in the lounge and heading back toward the open-plan kitchen-dining area. Discolored spots here and there showed where the police had dusted for fingerprints, and there were markers on the floor where boot prints marked the deep pile carpet.

  Marc was instinctively drawn to the bookshelves, glancing over the titles. Mostly it was biographies and law texts, but then suddenly it shifted sharply to a collection of classic fiction.

  “Austen, Brontë, Defoe and Dumas…” he said aloud. “All the romantic and escapist works.”

  “Seen the movies,” said Lucy. He turned to find her standing in the doorway between the two halves of the house. “For a crime scene, this place looks pretty damn neat.”

  Marc gave a nod and ran his gaze over the rest of the room, looking at the location of objects, ornaments, lamps and the like. Nothing seemed out of place.

  “Their taste in home furnishings is a bit bland,” he admitted, “but yeah, I see your point.”

  Lucy spotted something in the next room and pointed it out.

  “Security hub’s in here.”

  He stepped after her, bringing up the tablet again. Marc aimed an antenna wand at an electronic control panel tucked discreetly in a small alcove and ran an icebreaker program.

  “It’s encoded,” he began, “so—”

  “One two one zero one six,” Lucy cut in. “That’s the override.”

  Marc raised an eyebrow and tapped in the code. It did as promised, releasing full control of the house’s security system to him.

  “And how did you know that? What is it, the little lad’s birthday?”

  He pressed a tab on his hand-held screen to start a download of the data from the outdoor security cameras.

  “No, that’s the back door Rubicon had loaded, in case we ever needed to get in here discreetly.”

  He eyed her. “You could have told me that outside.”

  “Wanted to be sure our bad guys hacked the door.”

  Marc paused, processing that.

  “So I’ve learned something, then.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “One: someone cracked the digital lock to silently gain entry to the house. Two: you’re not telling me the whole story.”

  “Both true.” He glared at her, and at length she gave a sigh. “Okay. Sure. I know her. Lam, or whatever.”

  “Or whatever?” echoed Marc. He thought back to that moment in the VR conference room when Lucy had reacted to the picture of the woman. “I took a fishing trip on the plane over here, I knew right away Susan Lam was an alias.” He glanced down at the tablet, seeing the download was complete. “I do not appreciate being kept in the dark, Lucy. I thought you and me were past that.”

  “It’s … complicated,” she allowed.

  Marc scowled as he swept through a playback of the last few days of security footage. There was nothing but static.

  “Someone zapped the solid-state memory in the cameras, blanked it. It’s worthless.” He looked up at her. “Right, I’m done being on the back foot about this. Explain it to me.”

  * * *

  Along the wall of the dining room area, there was a mantel displaying the only family photos Lucy had seen in the entire house. Most of them were of the kid, Michael, a particularly poignant one showing him as a baby in the arms of his late mother. But pride of place was a shot of the Lams on their wedding day. Simon beaming in a linen suit, his son in a cute ring-bearer outfit, and Susan in an elegant cheongsam dress. Husband and wife were showing off identical rings, white gold bands with writing on them that Lucy couldn’t read. They looked so happy, but there was a particular kind of melancholy in there too. The snapshot had captured three people in the instant that life was giving them a do-over, a second chance at something good.

  “Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath, “Doctor Susan Lam was a new identity cooked up by Rubicon, for a woman whose real name was Ji-Yoo Park.”

  “Korean?”

  “North Korean,” Lucy corrected.

  “Oh great.” Marc made a face. “Them again? As if we didn’t piss them off enough after that thing in Seoul.”

  “This was way before that, before you and I even knew each other.”

  Lucy put her pistol back in its concealed holster, hesitating as she wondered exactly how much to reveal to him. She trusted Marc with her life—he’d put himself on the line for her a dozen times—but still she was reticent to break a confidence. In the end, she erred on the side of conviction.

  “Park was a defector from the North. A bioscientist, originally working in medicine for their military. She was forcibly conscripted into their WMD program, lost her only sister to the work camps when she tried to refuse. Rubicon offered her an escape hatch. A better life.”

  “You’re the one who got her out.”

  The Brit was always quick to put details together, sometimes annoyingly so.

  “Wasn’t easy. She was at a facility outside of Pyongyang, and we…” Lucy drifted off, then shook her head. “The details don’t matter. I saved Park’s life. We set her up here, where she could put that big brain of hers to some good use.”

  “When were you going to tell me this?”

  “About now?”

  “Funny,” he grunted. “Okay, so if we’re assuming that someone kidnapped Lam—”

  “Park,” said Lucy.

  “Yeah, the next question is who and why? Is it her people come looking? I mean, the DPRK has a storied history of illegal renditions and covert actions in other countries. And they hold grudges for a long time.” He considered that. “Assassination is their standard operating procedure. So the fact that we didn’t find a bunch of deaders here means they want her alive for something—for what she knows.”

  “That’s a lot,” agreed Lucy. “Even if it isn’t the North Koreans, anyone dialed in enough to run a snatch job like this has to know that Park is more valuable alive than dead.”

  Marc studied the wedding photo.

  “Before she was a cancer doctor … Do I even want to ask what Park was working on?”

  Lucy gave a shrug. “Let’s call it end-of-the-world shit and leave it there.”

  She heard the door open and Malte entered the house, shaking off rainwater from his jacket. He was holding a brick of camo-colored plastic with a plastic dome at one end, and inside it a ring of tiny camera lenses was clearly visible. It looked a lot like the remote camera units nature photographers deployed in the wild, to spy on animals in their natural habitats.

  Marc took the device and turned it over in his hands. He knew exactly what it was.

  “Where was this?”

  “Tree in the garden,” said the Finn. “Emergency backup monitor.”

  “Your actual black ops nanny-cam,” added Lucy.

  “It’s a stand-alone unit,” Marc went on. “Not connected to the house cameras. Which means the erase command that wiped them won’t have affected this.”

  “Can you read what’s on it?” she said.

  “It has a 360-degree camera eye,” he told her. “I can do better than read it…”

  Marc shrugged off his ubiquitous backpack and dug inside it, returning with a pair of video glasses. They were the same model as the ones Lucy had used on board the Aphrodite for the virtual conference with Solomon and Delancort. Marc slipped them on and ran cables from the glasses to his tablet, and from there to the camera unit.

  “This’ll provide a full surround image.”

  * * *

&nb
sp; Marc heard Lucy send Malte off to finish checking the rest of the Lam house as he found himself a seat and booted up the spy camera. Sure enough, the memory card in the device was still intact, and while he couldn’t remove it, he could scan the contents. He took a seat at the dining table and set up his gear.

  “The lock software on the front door said it was opened from the outside at 8:17 a.m., three days ago,” he said to the air, “so I’ll spool back to just before that.”

  The virtual image flickered in the glasses and Marc put them on. He moved his head experimentally, letting the sensors in the rig map the motions.

  When the clock read 8:10 a.m., the footage began to play. Through the lenses, it appeared to Marc as if he was sitting atop a vantage point out on the grass in front of the Lam household. Moving his head left and right allowed him to pan around, seeing down to the end of the driveway, or toward the house’s picture window that looked into the lounge. A time code floated at the corner of his vision, ticking off the seconds.

  “What do you see?” Lucy’s disconnected voice came from somewhere close at hand.

  “Nothing yet…”

  He hesitated. Right on time, he spotted a couple of dark shapes at the long wall marking the western edge of the house’s property line. Two figures slipped over the barrier, one moving fast and low toward the gates at the end of the drive, the other in the direction of the house. He described them to Lucy.

  “Both in similar clothes, black outfits. They have hoods on … Guessing from the bearing, I think the one coming to the house is a woman.”

  He flicked a look at the figure by the gate, and saw the man opening them. Out on the road, two identical blue vans were coming up the street.

  “The cops reported the front gate was open when they arrived,” noted Lucy.

  Marc turned back to look at the woman and he shifted in his chair, unconsciously wanting to move his point of view inside the footage’s virtual bubble but unable to. This wasn’t like a VR game where he could shift position in a simulated environment; the replay was coming from a simultaneous video capture gathered by the camera’s 360-degree imaging head. He was stuck in his fixed location, only able to see what the immobile camera had seen.

  “Wait one.”

  He paused the playback, glimpsing a shadow moving inside the house. Someone had passed through the lounge, but they had not spotted the intruder. The woman in the black outfit was half-turned, not quite looking in the direction of the hidden camera. And her face …

  “They’ve got masks on,” noted Marc. “Not like rigid plastic ones, though. It’s more like … black muslin maybe?”

  The hooded face had an eerie, inhuman appearance to it. The hollows where the eyes should be were deep pits of darkness, and there was no visible mouth.

  “That is fucking sinister,” said Lucy, as he described it.

  “Clever,” he added. “Not only are they disturbing as hell, they’ll fox any facial recognition software.”

  He hit the control tab and the replay resumed.

  The woman approached the house and Marc saw the door open dutifully for her as she waved a hand-held device at it. She moved inside as the two vans rolled slowly up the driveway, doubtless holding the speed down to keep noise at a minimum so the residents wouldn’t be alerted. He kept up his running commentary, as more masked figures in black carrying handguns climbed out of the vehicles. The point of view became cluttered, the vans positioned near the front door so Marc could only catch glimpses of what was going on through the gap between them.

  “I see a guy with a hard-shell case,” he noted. “Same type I use for transporting delicate electronics. He’s taking it inside.”

  “The hacker?” offered Lucy. “Maybe with the kit they used to zero the house’s security cameras.”

  “You don’t need a case that big for gear to do that. A smartphone jacked into the hub would be enough.”

  For long minutes, nothing changed. Marc tensed. He was waiting for the worst, to see a flash of muzzle flare in one of the windows, and then someone coming out with a body bag over their shoulder. But that never happened. Instead, he saw the black-suited woman again, her shroud-mask in place, leaving the house with another person walking stiffly beside her. Doctor Susan Lam, aka Ji-Yoo Park, moved with a haunted, broken pace.

  Park and the hooded woman exchanged a few words, and then the scientist disappeared into the back of the first van. She looked fearful, but there were no restraints visible, no handcuffs or zip-ties. No one was aiming a weapon at her.

  “She went without resisting,” said Lucy.

  “But not willingly.” Marc rocked the recording back to the moment where the two women spoke, trying to intuit what had been said. “Park is saying … Please. Asking for something?”

  “Please don’t execute my husband and my stepson,” Lucy offered. “That’s why she isn’t putting up a fight. The lady I knew wasn’t the type to give up easy. They have to be coercing her.”

  “Likely,” agreed Marc. “That’s what this is about. Snatch the family, pressure the wife.”

  The windowless van carrying Park drove away, and he tracked it until it vanished out of sight, giving Lucy details to follow up, reading off the license plate.

  “Those’ll be fake,” she said.

  “Still need to check, though.”

  One of the armed men stood in the shadows, out of sight of anyone passing down on the main road, while the others remained inside with the husband and the stepson. Once or twice, Marc saw a shadow moving around past the upstairs windows, but never defined enough to get a good read on it. He turned up the time index, zipping forward through the footage.

  Then finally, nearly thirty minutes after Park had been taken, Simon Lam and his boy were marched out of the house by two masked figures. Marc’s hands clenched as he got a good look at the kid; his face was a picture of desolate terror, cheeks streaked with tears, eyes wide with panic. His dad held him close, and if anything, the parent’s dread was deeper than the child’s.

  What had to be going through that poor sod’s mind, right there? Marc studied his face. This has to be any father’s worst nightmare.

  The two hostages passed out of sight behind the second blue van and the vehicle rocked as they were put inside. The masked men followed them, all except the one carrying the heavy gear case. He had something else in his other hand—not a gun, but an odd, bulky camera unit. Marc watched as he panned it around, and the light of the morning sun glittered off a quartet cluster of video lenses. The “cameraman” moved as if he was making sure to get footage of all of the outside of the black and white house.

  “He’s using a quadrascopic camera,” explained Marc.

  “Like the ones we use for snooping under doors?”

  “You’re thinking of endoscopic,” he snapped. “Different thing. This is expensive gear. Records multiple overlapping images to render video in 3D.”

  “Why the hell would anyone want pictures like that of this house?” Marc lifted up the video glasses on to his forehead. Lucy stood close at hand, peering around at the walls. “You think maybe they documented the whole snatch-and-grab?”

  He thought on that for a second. In the modern arena of covert ops, helmet- or gun-camera footage from state-sanctioned missions was streamed live to a tactical operations center, so that commanders in another location could watch events unfold in real time. Part of Marc’s duties back when he had been a field technician in the British security services had been to safeguard those digital feeds from his OpTeam, making sure they were transmitted safely back to Vauxhall Cross for the viewing pleasure of the armchair generals in the room.

  But that didn’t seem right. The set-up, the gear the unknowns were using and the way they were using it, didn’t fit the hypothesis.

  “There’s more going on here than we know,” said Marc, after a moment.

  Lucy grimaced, the expression marring her face.

  “Same as it ever was. This whole deal is gonna be u
s playing catch-up, believe it.”

  Marc could only nod in agreement.

  FIVE

  When they pulled up outside the main entrance of the MaxaBio campus, the first thing Marc noticed was the row of windowless blue vans parked off to one side, in the lab’s service area. He shot Lucy a look and she nodded back at him.

  “Yeah, I’m thinking the same,” she replied, before he could voice his thoughts. “It’s not a coincidence. Hide in plain sight.”

  “Police are here,” added Malte from the driver’s seat, pointing with the fingers of his hand atop the steering wheel. There was a white Hyundai patrol cruiser with red and blue stripes on the hood on the other side of the car park, next to another sedan that was obviously a plain-clothes unit.

  “We’ll tread carefully, then.”

  Marc threw Lucy a nod and grabbed his pack, sliding out into the rain.

  The two of them jogged across the wet asphalt to the modernist glass awning that fronted the lab’s reception area, but even across the short distance, the downpour soaked them both. Shaking it off as best they could, the pair passed inside and Marc took in the place. The reception was all clean lines of white and silver, with scattered planters of cacti and a two-story sculpture in the shape of a DNA strand.

  “Décor by the Apple Store,” Marc said, out of the side of his mouth. “Hi-tech and flavorless.”

  “I’d bet that’s deliberate,” Lucy replied, catching sight of a large MaxaBio logo on the far wall. “Camouflage. They don’t want rivals figuring out what they have going on here.”

  Beneath the company logo was a smaller panel that read A SUBSIDIARY OF THE RUBICON GROUP.

  “Corporate espionage?” Marc sounded out the words. “That’s as good a motive as any. Maybe we need to look closer to home for who’s behind this, instead of at the Hermit Kingdom…”

  He trailed off as a tall young man in cargo shorts and a polo shirt came across the reception toward them, intercepting Marc and Lucy before they went too far.

  “Hello, hello.” Assim Kader smiled and gave Marc’s hand a perfunctory shake, but the faux-eager grin didn’t reach his eyes. “Keep walking, come with me, and don’t look back over there.”