Shadow

by James Swallow

  The man was still pointing at Susan, but glaring at Kyun as if he was a distasteful insect to be crushed beneath his boot.

  “Does she know what she has to do? Did you explain it to her?”

  “I … I did, I did,” managed Kyun, with a weak smile. “Park will comply, I promise.”

  “Then get to it,” snapped the man, dropping his arm and turning away.

  She started after him.

  “Who are you?” She shouted the words at his back.

  He halted, and then shot Susan a savage smirk.

  “I am the one holding your leash. So be a good little bitch and obey your master.”

  SIX

  It was late afternoon by the time they returned to the temporary base of operations set up for the Special Conditions Division. Marc expected Malte to drive them into Singapore’s business district, where the Rubicon Group had a slick branch office in the giant Capital Tower building, but instead they sped by the off-ramp and past the dense tropical greensward of Telok Blangah Hill Park, heading into an upmarket condominium complex.

  Singapore was a city bristling with unusual and challenging architecture, and this place was no exception. Craning his head to get a better look from the SUV’s passenger seat, what Marc saw resembled a strange hexagonal construction of apartment blocks, white six-story chunks piled one atop another at oblique angles that connected in unexpected ways.

  “Looks like someone crossed a skyscraper with a Rubik’s cube,” he noted.

  “The Interlace,” said Lucy, reading the name off a sign near the entrance. “Huh. Very cyberpunk.”

  He had to admit it was. A lot of Singapore had that sci-fi Blade Runner vibe that appealed to the city kid in Marc, but there was also something artificial about it. The whole place seemed a little too engineered for his tastes.

  They drove into an underground car park and Malte handed them keys.

  “Suites for all of us,” he noted. “Connecting room in the middle, for ops.”

  Marc nodded approvingly at the shape of the mechanical, non-digital key. Smartcards were too easy to hack, a fact he had often exploited himself. He grabbed his bag and stifled an unexpected yawn, glancing at the scruffy, weather-beaten Cabot dive watch on his wrist. He hadn’t set it to the local time, and jet lag from the journey was still messing about with his body clock.

  “Why are we set up here instead of the local office?”

  “You heard what Assim said.” Lucy took her gear from the back of the SUV and followed him toward the elevators as Malte parked the vehicle. “Maybe Solomon is trying to keep this on the down-low. Off the books.”

  Marc eyed her. “I thought he owned the books.”

  She shrugged off the reply, but he could tell she was wondering the same thing.

  They rode an elevator to one of the uppermost blocks, the floor numbers pinging off the indicator as they rose. Marc caught himself studying the tension in the muscles of Lucy’s spare, athletic back through her skin-tight workout top and told himself it was purely out of concern for his teammate.

  “What?” she said suddenly, without turning around. “I can almost hear you keeping your mouth shut. I know something’s been bothering you since the house. Spit it out.”

  His first impulse was to deflect the comment, but she was right. Something was on his mind.

  “Tell me about Park.”

  “I already told you,” she replied. “She defected. I got her out. Rubicon set her up a new identity here.”

  “I was hoping for a little more than the high points.”

  “What else do you wanna know?” Lucy said it like she really meant shut the hell up.

  The elevator slowed and deposited them on the top floor. Marc followed her out into the deserted corridor, automatically scanning around for points of egress and shady corners. He wasn’t going to let the other thing drop, though.

  “So how did Rubicon know what Park was doing inside North Korea? How did they know she was working on weapons of mass destruction?”

  “Solomon has a lot of contacts, you know that.”

  Lucy unlocked the door and entered the central suite. A large open room branched off toward bedrooms, bathrooms and a basic but well-stocked kitchen. Some equipment had already been laid out, with computers and communications gear powered up but set in sleep mode.

  “Why do you care?”

  Her tone was becoming defensive, but Marc pressed on, unwilling to let it drop.

  “The boss plays his cards close to his chest. I’ve been inside the SCD for a couple of years now, but every so often, I trip over something that tells me there’s a dozen other secrets for each one I can see.”

  “That’s about right.”

  “Yeah, well…” He dropped his pack on the sofa and sat heavily, while Lucy stalked around the room. “It’s not like when I was at Six, when I could get read in on a higher STRAP clearance if I needed it. I’m either trusted or I’m not.” Marc fixed her with a steady look. “Which is it?”

  Lucy’s eyes narrowed. “Listen, if you’d seen what I saw, the human trials they were doing … It was a weaponized virus, Dane, a project called Geulimja. Korean for Shadow. AKA, a fucked-up cocktail of some seriously nasty shit. You heard of Marburg, right?”

  He nodded slowly. “Viral hemorrhagic fever. Basically, the Ebola bug with the dial turned up to 11.”

  “Yeah,” she said coldly. “You get infected with it and your guts slowly turn into slurry, you puke out your insides. It’s goddamn horrific, is what it is. That was what they were basing Shadow on. They were trying to make it worse.”

  He took that in. Part of Marc’s analyst work at MI6 had been threat studies before he moved into field support, and he recalled the grisly facts of hazard files that had crossed his desk, each dealing with the potential casualties of a virus-based attack on a British city.

  In the bad old days of the Cold War, the Soviet Union ran a program called “Vektor” that worked toward developing the Marburg virus into something suitable for battlefield deployment—but they hadn’t been able to tame the lethal bug, and some rumors alleged that it had broken containment in one of their labs, killing dozens of their top researchers.

  All at once, a missing piece of the story snapped into place. Marc was always good at seeing the connections between fragments of data, and he saw them now.

  “Solomon didn’t send you in there to get Park out. He sent you to neutralize her.”

  “I really hate it when you do that,” Lucy grated. “Yeah. Right. Because that’s what the SCD does, that’s Solomon’s crusade. Small actions leading to big consequences, right? And terminating the key researcher developing a catastrophic bioweapon for a rogue state would fit the bill.” She leaned up against the wall, fading into a pool of shadow cast by the room’s half-drawn blinds, unconsciously concealing herself before she went on. “But it got complicated, like it always does.”

  Lucy gave him the story in snapshots, skipping from one to another, never dwelling long on one element.

  A dissident group in North Korea that Rubicon had contact with got Lucy over the border and close to the military hospital where Park was working. Under a stormy sky, she tracked her down, in the frame, ready to commit. It was going to be a close-quarters assassination, choking her out. Lucy had already prepared to send Park and her car to the bottom of a local ravine, make it look like an accident.

  If that sounded cold, she had good reason. Infiltrating the hospital took Lucy past furnaces where the bodies of test subjects were being burned, in rooms right next to the dirty, iron-walled cells where those still alive were dying in agony. The enemies of the nation, be they petty criminals, the disloyal or just the unlucky, were used as live fodder for the Shadow program. Lucy’s tone hardened as she told Marc of the stink of stale blood, of how the place reeked of death. What she saw there hardened Lucy’s determination to complete her mission.

  “Didn’t work out that way,” she noted. “Turned out Ji-Yoo Park wasn’t a willing p
layer.”

  The woman was weeping when Lucy finally found her, up on a derelict floor of the crumbling hospital. She learned later that Park had been informed that morning of her sister’s death at a labor camp. Her sister was there, not because of anything she had done wrong, but because the scientist’s superiors needed something to motivate her.

  “She had a pistol. Stole it from the locker of some junior officer. I watched her psyching herself up to put the barrel in her mouth and pull the trigger. If I’d let her do it, the operation would have completed itself.” Lucy shook her head. “That’s when I knew this had to play out differently.”

  All along, she admitted, Lucy had hoped that she could find a better solution than one more notch on her kill list.

  “After everything I saw in there, I needed to do something good. Balance out the world a little. So I had to improvise, make shit up on the fly … Not as good at that as you, but … I brought her out.”

  Marc let Lucy find her way back from the desolate memory before pressing on.

  “That still doesn’t answer my question. Rubicon is a corporation, a private military and security contractor. It’s not a government power. Sure, Solomon’s money and his contacts open a lot of doors, but they’re not MI6, they’re not the CIA. How did they know about Park in the first place?”

  Lucy shot a look at the door. Malte would be coming up soon, and if she was going to confide something to Marc, she would only do it while they were alone.

  “There’s this thing called the Gray Record…”

  Despite himself, Marc snorted at the name.

  “What, like ‘the White Album’?”

  She ignored the flippant comment.

  “It’s a secure database. Rubicon maintains files on persons of interest. Not just corporate intelligence for their business, but data for the Special Conditions Division. How else do you think Solomon picks the targets we go after in our operations? He’s constantly watching, looking for troublemakers before they start to make it. Remember back in Somalia, that whole thing with the phones?”

  Marc nodded. During their pursuit of the Exile nuclear device, the Rubicon team had tracked the weapon to East Africa, and a vital clue that enabled them to trace the men holding it had come from data covertly harvested from local cellular phones. That data had been sifted illegally by a telecom subsidiary of Rubicon, essentially trawling hundreds of thousands of innocent people’s phone conversations. Despite their denials, government organizations like America’s National Security Agency or the British GCHQ routinely flouted privacy laws by doing similar warrantless wiretaps, but for a private group like Rubicon to do the same thing … That was different.

  At the time, the criminality of the phone taps ran a distant second to the issue of stopping a nuke from blowing a hole in the Horn of Africa, but that revelation had planted a seed of concern in Marc’s mind. If Ekko Solomon—if Rubicon—had the capacity to secretly gather that kind of data, and more, where did such an action sit on Marc Dane’s moral compass? If the SCD used it for the right reasons, did that make it fair? And who was the arbiter of what the right reasons were?

  He thought about Lucy and Park. Rubicon’s data had sent her to terminate that woman in order to forestall a greater horror. If someone else had been there to make that call, someone without the compassion of Lucy Keyes, an innocent woman would be dead—but then this situation would not have taken place.

  Marc trusted Ekko Solomon with his life. The African was responsible for pulling him back from the brink, when his own country had declared him a traitor to the Crown and the sharks had been circling. But there was darkness in that man.

  He’s got a lot of secrets trailing after him.

  Marc remembered a rainy afternoon in a London graveyard, and his old friend John Farrier warning him that Solomon was more dangerous than he knew.

  He couldn’t help but wonder what might happen if one day Rubicon went down a darker path. The thought chilled him.

  “The question I keep asking myself,” said Lucy, breaking his reverie, “is how the hell those black masks knew where to find Park?” She shook her head. “Did I leave something behind, a lead that took them this long to figure out? Shit! Is this my fault?”

  Marc tried to find a reply, but before he could the door opened and Malte entered. The Finn was holding his smartphone in his hand.

  “Assim has new information,” said the driver.

  Marc glanced back at Lucy, but the brief moment of vulnerability she had shown him was gone. She was all tactical now, straight up and tensed for action.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  Malte snapped the phone into a data cradle next to one of the computers, and a built-in video projector stuttered into life as it connected, throwing an image of the young Saudi up on one of the suite’s white-painted walls.

  He was in a car, the feed captured from a camera on the dashboard. Like Malte, Assim was using one of the Rubicon-issue “spy-Phones,” a custom-made satellite-enabled smart device that packed in the capabilities of a regular smartphone along with a bunch of other tech that was strictly black book.

  “Okay, so I am on the way back to the apartment,” he said, the words spilling out of him in an anxious rush. “I don’t think the police are following me, but they were asking a lot of questions, I thought it best to make myself scarce—”

  “Malte says you have something?” Marc broke in. He knew from experience that Assim had a tendency to go off-piste if he wasn’t kept on task.

  “Yes!” He paused as he steered the car around a turn. “Nanoscale bioprinters! Two of them are missing from the MaxaBio inventory. It was pure chance I checked that section of the storage before the rest…”

  “Bioprinters.” Lucy looked at Marc, and made a winding motion with her hand. “Come on, Dane, you know how this goes, make with the nerd explanation for those of us without a subscription to Wired.”

  “It’s not that hard to follow,” he shot back. “You’ve seen 3D printers that make objects out of plastic, yeah? Same deal, but with biomaterials. You can use them to construct a cellular matrix, artificial tissues, that kind of thing.”

  “Replacement organs,” offered Malte.

  “Yeah, that too,” agreed Marc. “But nanoscale units work on the really tiny stuff, building…” He trailed off as his train of thought caught up to what he was saying. “Ah.”

  “I do not like that look,” said Lucy. “So let’s assume the black masks have Park, all the shit they need and two of those things. Worst-case scenario, what can they make?”

  “The short answer?” Marc said grimly. “Anything they want. It’s like dial-a-bioweapon.”

  “And these machines were just … what—lying around in a warehouse?” Lucy shook her head.

  “The bioprinter is the fabrication system,” insisted Assim. “The difficult part is getting a viable cell matrix design and the biomaterials to build it with.”

  She glared at the image on the wall.

  “Do these fuckers seem like the kind of people who won’t have thought of that already?”

  “No,” admitted Assim. “Not really.” Then he became animated again. “I know it sounds like I have discovered something that has made this ten times worse, and I suppose I have, but there is an upside!”

  He explained that the machines, which were worth more than a mid-range sports car, were carried in secure cases protected with a cellular tracking device.

  “The printers are lo-jacked?” Lucy nodded to herself. “Okay, now we’re cookin’. Where are they at?”

  “They are still in Singapore, or close by,” said Assim. “I need to run the signal through the processor in my gear in the apartment.”

  “I can do that.” Marc dropped into the seat in front of the laptop screen. “Forward me the data.”

  “Okay…” Assim pulled into a lay-by and the image spun around as he grabbed the phone and tapped across its screen. “Sending it.”

  Malte hovered at Marc’s shoulder
, and asked the question that was preying on everyone’s mind.

  “Still here, after four days?”

  He didn’t need to add how unlikely it was that the black masks were sitting on the tech they had stolen, but a lead was a lead. The only one they had, in point of fact.

  Marc ran the cellular tracker data through the triangulating software and set a scanner subroutine running. The cell towers in Singapore were not easy to spoof, but he had an icebreaker program that could grant a brief window of access before automatic network security locked him out. It was a gamble that was worth taking. If the bioprinters were within the city limits, it would only take a few seconds to find them. He held his breath.

  A low double-ping sounded from the laptop and two red dots—right on top of each other—winked into existence on a map overlay. Marc’s jaw dropped open and he had to recheck the data to be sure.

  “I have a hit … It’s close! I mean, like a fifteen minute drive away!” He zoomed out on the map so Malte and Lucy could see it. “Just over a kilometer from here, as the crow flies.”

  “Where?” asked Assim.

  “The dockside,” said Lucy. “Cargo terminals.”

  “Good cover,” noted Malte.

  “Did we just catch a break?” she went on.

  Marc gave her a severe look.

  “Don’t jinx it.”

  * * *

  Axelle began to gasp as she approached orgasm, and from behind Verbeke snaked one hand around her bare arm, the other clutching her throat. He started to tighten his grip on her neck and she bucked against him, struggling to push away. He held on firmly, aggressively slamming himself into her over and over, and the woman’s pale buttocks slapped hard against his muscular belly. She cried out, but that was part of their little game. Axelle knew her cry would excite him, lure him to make their rough, jagged intercourse even more forceful.

  She gasped, but it became a strangled choke as he cut off her breath. The woman’s sweat-smeared face turned back to look at him, but he held her tight, stopping her from twisting her neck.