Shadow

by James Swallow

  “Green for go.”

  Marc nodded and reached for the door handle.

  * * *

  At the bottom of the steel staircase, the basement of the warehouse extended away under the full footprint of the building. The space was broken up by thick concrete columns and elevated storage racks that went to the ceiling. Industrial bulbs enclosed in wire cage hoods cast a grimy light in narrow pools, conveniently providing zones of deep shadow that Marc and Lucy could exploit. Further down, parts of the space appeared to be closed off behind prefabricated walls.

  Lucy threw him a thumbs-up and vanished away to the right. Marc waited a beat and then moved left. The air in the basement was dense and humid in his lungs, and it vibrated with the heavy rhythm of the music seeping down from the club. Focusing past the sound, he heard the voices of men, their lazy chatter in the hodgepodge local creole called Singlish. The tone of the voices was relaxed, which meant that no one was alerted to the SCD’s intrusion.

  Marc kept low, using stacks of wooden crates for cover. Assim had shown them what to look for with regard to the bioprinters, and he scanned around for any sign of the gray plastic hard-cases the devices were carried in. But the machines were not what he was searching for—not really. In Marc’s mind, the abductees were of greater importance, even if Lucy had insisted they were a secondary priority to losing control of the bioprinters.

  She was a soldier, and that meant she could make ice-water flow in her veins when the time came to give the hard call. But he wasn’t wired that way. Despite everything that had changed in Marc Dane since he started working for Rubicon, despite everything that had impacted on him, he didn’t find it as easy to go to that darker, colder place in himself.

  He knew objectively that in the wrong hands, the bioprinters had the capability to fabricate creations that were truly appalling, things that could threaten countless lives. But that was theoretical, and he could only see the actual in his mind’s eye, recalling the abject terror on the faces of Simon Lam and his young son as they were hustled into the van outside their home.

  Moving forward, planting each step to make it as silent as he could, Marc took a long path around, avoiding the group of men. They were cut from the same cloth as the guy upstairs, but most of them went around without jackets on and he saw a couple with the telltale shapes of shoulder holsters tucked in their armpits. One of them told a joke and it set the rest of them roaring. He used the distraction to slip across an open area to another stack of crates.

  Some of these were still open and Marc stole a look inside. Packed within the closest one was a set of vintage Chinese chairs in dark, ornately carved hardwood with disc-shaped marble inserts. Another held a collection of ancient Imperial porcelain, brightly colored bowls and vases wrapped up in thick foam sheets, and in a third he found a loading sheet in Mandarin and English that listed dozens of items as “Han Dynasty Jade Figural Pieces.” Marc didn’t know much about historical relics, but these items definitely looked valuable, and there didn’t seem to be anything in the way of official certification with the crates. Destination stencils on the outside marked them as bound for cities in America and the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland, Canada and the UK, but the logos suggested the contents were machine parts, not antiquities.

  A smuggling operation, then.

  Marc snapped images of the items in the crates and the paperwork, in case there was some useful scrap of data to be gleaned from them.

  That dovetails with the black masks using the Triads on this. Smugglers would have a pipeline in place to get cargo in and out of Singapore on the quiet.

  Moving on, he edged up to a pillar and spotted an open doorway leading into one of the prefab sections. On the far side, he could see the back end of one of the blue vans from the camera footage, parked in front of a roller door leading up and out to the waterfront. But what drew his attention were two plastic crates in battleship gray, sitting unguarded on a shipping pallet.

  He slipped the taser prod into the sleeve of his jacket and started moving, weaving from shadow to shadow, closing in on the open door.

  * * *

  Lucy pressed herself up against a low wall and used the camera in her spyPhone as a makeshift periscope, peeking over and through a dirt-smeared window into one of the “office” areas. There was no sign of the printer cases or the abductees. Instead, three men, all of them white guys, were engaged in packing their gear into heavy matte black duffel bags. They wore the same type of nondescript semi-tactical clothes that she always associated with hired guns—MA-1 jackets, and cargo trousers that weren’t properly bloused into off-the-shelf tactical boots. Just from their body language she could tell that none of them had ever served, but it was clear they wanted people to think that they had.

  Months ago, she and Malte had run across a gang of troublemakers much the same as these guys, in another basement on the other side of the Pacific. Those men had been planning to detonate a truck-bomb in the middle of downtown San Francisco, and she remembered the hard zeal in their eyes as they made ready to commit mass murder. These men had that look as well, casual and predatory, as if they believed that nothing was going to get in their way.

  Beg to differ, she said to herself.

  The one who appeared to be in charge was an American with a mop of unkempt curly black hair and a tendency to wave his hands around.

  “Get this out to the boat,” he was saying.

  She pegged his accent straight away, recognizing a Long Island native when she heard one. Born and raised in Queens, Lucy picked out the subtle differences and filed that bit of data away for later consideration.

  One of the other men was at the Germanic end of the spectrum, and he grunted out a reply.

  “What about that?”

  He jutted his chin, indicating something in the corner of the room.

  Lucy angled the phone’s camera to get a look at what he was talking about. She saw a patch of rust-red on the concrete floor, and a spatter pattern low on the far wall.

  “What do I care? We’re paying these assholes to clean up our mess,” said Long Island. “We’re outta here.”

  “Should have put down some plastic,” said the third man, in a low grumble.

  Lucy crouched back down as the men left the room, the image fixed in her mind’s eye of what could only be bloodstains.

  * * *

  Marc waited until the joker on the far side of the basement cracked another funny, and when the men laughed, he bolted through the open doorway and pushed it shut behind him.

  There was a pungent chemical odor lingering in the walled-off area, but he ignored it and went straight to the gray plastic cases, giving them a quick once-over. The MaxaBio logo was prominently displayed on the lids, along with a metal data plate attached to the exterior that corresponded with the serial numbers of the two stolen bioprinters. He bent down and fumbled for the latches holding the lids shut, but the metal fasteners were missing. Bare steel showed where someone had used bolt-croppers to cut them off, and Marc’s heart sank. He lifted the lid.

  Empty.

  The case was about the size of a small dining table and contained nothing but balled-up sheets of packing foam and the broken ends of the latches. He flipped open the second one and it was the same story. The black masks had taken the bioprinters away and left the cases here, with their lo-jacks still chirping mindlessly away regardless of the fact that their contents were gone.

  Marc dug around inside the cases, finding the hidden panels that unclipped to reveal the battery-powered locators built into them. With a sigh, he flicked them on and off a couple of times, then closed everything up. Back at their base of operations in the Interlace complex, Assim would see the two tracking icons wink in and out, and hopefully put two and two together.

  Leaning back against the cases, Marc cast around the room, his irritation building at the possibility that they had arrived too late after all. His gaze fell on the blue van. The back doors were hanging open.

&
nbsp; Checking to make sure he was still undetected, Marc warily approached the vehicle. The thudding noise from the nightclub was loudest here, and he guessed they had to be right beneath the DJ’s massive speaker stacks on the ground floor.

  The bitter chemical smell was strong in the back of the van. Refuse sacks filled with empty polymer jugs sat in one corner, but the cargo space was dominated by a forty-gallon drum made of green plastic. Marc knocked on the side of it and it rang dully, oily matter sloshing around inside.

  A sudden sense of foreboding settled on him as he reached for the drum. It had a circular lid held in place by spring-loaded clips, their metal surface smeared with acid burns.

  Acid.

  He stopped and pulled open a refuse bag, peering at one of the jugs inside, taking care not to touch it with his bare hands. Every single one of them bore a bright orange warning strip with a skull and crossbones. The text on the bottles was in Chinese, but there were two English letters that stood out a mile: HF. The chemical designation for hydrofluoric acid.

  Numbly, Marc moved back to the forty-gallon drum and released the lid, sliding it open a few degrees. A foul reek like sour bile hit him in the face and he gagged, biting down on the compulsion to vomit. The drum was filled to the brim with a dirty, mud-brown fluid that shimmered with oily deposits beneath the basement’s lights. Something black and fibrous sat close to the surface of the stinking liquid, and in a heart-stopping moment Marc realized it was human hair. Vanishing into the acidic broth was the hazy shape of what had to be a body, curled up in a fetal ball—and it didn’t appear to be the only one in there. He slammed the lid back into place and secured it, staggering out of the van, gasping as the full import of what he had found hammered home.

  There was a repulsive method that the notorious La Noche cartel and their rivals in the South American drug empire used to get rid of human evidence, when a corpse might be too inconvenient to have around. The nickname for this technique was pozole, after a traditional Mexican stew made from pork, maize and peppers. It involved either solutions of boiling sodium hydroxide—commonly known as lye—or gallons of hydrofluoric acid. Poured into a sealed drum with a body, and given enough time, human remains could be turned into a liquid slurry, a “stew” thin enough to be dumped down a municipal drain, or straight into the ocean if one was close enough to the waterfront. The technique had clearly been adopted by the Triads as well.

  Marc caught the sound of voices approaching the room. Shaking off the sickening churn in his gut, he scrambled down into the only place where he could conceal himself, beneath the wheels of the parked van.

  Lying face down on the concrete, he saw the door open and a pair of army boots stride in.

  “We had a deal, right?” said a rough-edged American. The boots turned as a couple of pairs of smart shoes followed him in. “Why is this shit still here?”

  “Takes time,” said another voice, in a drawling East Asian accent. “No problem.”

  “It is a fucking problem!” insisted the American. He walked over to the gray cases and kicked them. “I told you to dump them in the sea last night, they’re still here. We not paying you enough to do what you’re told, you stupid dink?”

  One of the others said something insulting that made his buddy laugh, but the American only grew more incensed.

  “If I had my way, we’d never have used you fucking chumps. Can’t you do one thing right?”

  “Sure, sure,” said the first voice. “We get done, all good.”

  “This goddamn country…” muttered the American, and he shoved his way back out of the room, past the two men.

  Marc felt the van move over his head as the other men grabbed the gray cases and tossed both of them into the back of the vehicle. He held his breath for a moment, ready for them to climb in and start up the van, but instead they turned away and wandered off. Clearly, the Triads had no intention of jumping when the black masks told them to.

  The presence of an American confirmed something else. Susan Lam’s kidnappers were looking more and more likely to be independent actors, not operatives backed by a nation state.

  When he was sure he was alone again, Marc slid out from his hiding place and made for the door. Across the way, another series of cube-like offices sat in a row, each one walled off from the others by prefab panels that stopped short of the ceiling. Marc glimpsed the familiar digital glow of a video screen reflecting off a half-open door and decided to investigate. But more than that, he wanted to put some distance between himself and the van, the horrible cargo it carried and the grim possibility of exactly who lay in that drum, slowly dissolving into nothing.

  * * *

  Rubicon’s Special Conditions Division had no legal jurisdiction in their operations, no mandate beyond their agreed moral code. On the occasions when a government hired Rubicon’s private military contractors, there was a precedent in law set in place, but the SCD’s missions were rarely connected to that.

  What we do is justified not by law but by ethics. Ekko Solomon had told Lucy that when she questioned him. I am a wealthy man, a powerful man. And so I am morally obligated to use that power to better the world. We act when others are afraid to do so, when they cannot or when they refuse. But within that mission statement was another unswerving truth: Those that we target are enemies of the world. We do what we do for a greater good.

  And that meant obtaining proof. That moral authority had to be backed up with hard evidence. Every covert action the SCD had ever engaged in, every operation—from the smallest data interdiction to the prevention of a terrorist atrocity—was documented in the secret files of the Gray Record. If the day did come when they were to be judged for taking part in Solomon’s crusade, there would be no doubt as to their intentions.

  Lucy held on to that thought as she entered the room and logged everything she could with her phone camera, taking high-definition shots of the blood spatter and the area around it. A cold sense of familiarity came over her, bleak and uninvited. She had seen this kind of thing too many times, and it left a mark on her.

  She turned away, opening up one of the duffel bags that the men had yet to move. Inside she found a black muslin hood, and photographed it. Beneath, there was a hard case that contained a 1911-style semi-automatic pistol and three magazines of .45 caliber ammunition.

  “I’ll take that,” she said aloud, pausing to sniff the barrel before checking and loading the gun. The weapon had been fired recently. She tucked it in her belt loop and did not look back at the corner of the room.

  The rest of the gear in the duffel was men’s clothing, except for a resealable plastic bag containing a few personal effects. Among them was a wristwatch, a big expensive thing larger than the Cabot that Marc habitually wore, along with a fountain pen and a silver ring.

  Lucy picked out the ring and held it up to the light. She recognized the design of it. She had seen it that morning, visible on the groom’s finger in Simon and Susan’s wedding day photo.

  Then a thought occurred to her and she rechecked the bag, to be sure she hadn’t missed anything. There was only one ring; the bride’s was not there.

  EIGHT

  What Marc didn’t expect to find in the nightclub basement was a half-dismantled set of video processing equipment, and a portable rig that any indie film-maker would have given their right arm for.

  He saw the camera that the black masks had used outside the Lam house, and weighed it in his hand. The thing had a quartet of high-acuity digital lenses and a built-in laser ranger for pinpoint accurate focus. He knew a guy in the games industry who used similar kit to this for motion capture, where they filmed some actor in a suit covered in glowing ping-pong balls, and used that as the skeleton for computer graphic space aliens mapped over their body movements.

  “What the hell are these dickheads doing with this?”

  He put the camera back where he found it and looked around the large open area, finding a workbench stacked with more gear cases. There was an open laptop
sitting next to a disconnected satellite communications node, and he instinctively homed in on it, mentally measuring up the machine with a tech-geek’s eye for hardware specs. It was a modular device, a military grade Kontron NotePAC variant set up for field use.

  Marc gave the keypad an experimental press and the standby screen flicked away. The computer’s desktop was a mess of icons for various kinds of image processing and audio editing software. Once again he thought of some amateur movie-maker salivating over the thing.

  Most of the device’s internal hard drive was heavily partitioned with redundant firewalls that Marc couldn’t bypass, not without a few hours of working at it, but the owner’s layout suggested someone who was sloppy with the details. The “recent programs” tab showed that the last person to use it had been rendering a big file in real time, but Marc couldn’t locate the actual data. What he did find was a set of raw audio source files, and leaning in close, Marc dialed down the volume and listened close as he hit play.

  “Read the words out loud, if you don’t want your little runt crippled in front of you,” said a voice, and he recognized it as belonging to the American with the army boots.

  Another man spoke, hesitant at first. “The beige hue on the waters of the loch impressed all, including the French queen…” He became irritated. “What is this? It’s nonsense!”

  “Say it. Don’t mess it up. Then the kid goes next,” said the American. “Do it again, from the top.”

  “The beige hue on the waters of the loch impressed all, including the French queen, before she heard that symphony again, just as young Arthur wanted.”

  “I know this.” The odd words and the strangely poetic combination of their order rang a distant bell in Marc’s thoughts, but he couldn’t place it. “Think, man, think…”

  A door slammed in the next office along and Marc jumped, the peculiar sentence momentarily forgotten. He hit the sleep key on the laptop and shrank back, eyes darting toward the door he had come in through. Another entrance led to the next room in the cubicle row, and someone was in there now, pacing around.