Shadow

by James Swallow

  “We’re employed by the same corporation,” said Lucy.

  “I asked him, not you.” Larsson didn’t take his eyes off Marc.

  Marc knew this conversation would end if he didn’t give the other man something more.

  He’s asking me to trust him, Marc thought. To bring him in to the circle.

  He didn’t need to look at Lucy to know that she wouldn’t like that idea. In the end, he stayed with a half-truth.

  “She’s a bioscientist, a cancer researcher. We think the people who took her are coercing her into working on something…” He struggled to find the right phrasing. “Something much worse than caesium slurry.”

  A light came on in Larsson’s eyes and he looked away, back at the data. But Marc had caught the moment, and he could see what it meant.

  He knows something.

  Ever observant, Lucy saw it too.

  “That ring a bell for you?”

  * * *

  She watched the man moderate his expression. Lucy had seen enough faces down her sniper scope, going through the same kind of mental process, to know what Larsson was thinking. He was weighing his options, considering the choice between going to ground and clamming up completely, or reacting in a way that wouldn’t turn out well for her and the Brit.

  The Icelander had to know they had entered his country illegally under false identities, and if he was as sharp as Marc said he was, the man knew he could shut down their entire mission in a heartbeat, just by calling the cops. If he wanted to burn them, there was not much they could do to stop him. But she could sense that there was something else going on here, some piece of the puzzle that neither she nor Marc had the shape of.

  Whatever happened in the next thirty seconds was going to determine how it would go from here. Her hand slipped around the small spray can secreted in the pocket of her ski jacket, flicking off a safety catch over the nozzle. The aerosol’s label said it was a ladies’ deodorant, but that was cover for a capsicum spray powerful enough to cause agony and temporary blindness in anyone unlucky enough to take a dose.

  Larsson met her gaze and he saw the intention there.

  “This conversation puts us in a delicate situation,” he began. “A legal gray area, as it were.”

  Marc nodded at the menacing, slate-colored sky outside the Harpa.

  “Gray is right…”

  “There are certain persons within the government who are paying undue attention to the SR’s investigations regarding cryptocurrency.” Larsson picked his words with care, giving his colleague in the dark coat a glance to be sure he wouldn’t be overheard. “One might suspect that they have something invested in ensuring that my agency give priority to certain cases.”

  Marc made a motion with his hand.

  “And let others slip to the bottom of the pile?”

  “Not that anything could be proven, you understand? SR is thinly spread. We only have so much in the way of resources.” Larsson removed the data card and handed it back to the Brit, before bringing up a map on his device. “One of these lower-priority cases involves the Frigga facility, a medical research laboratory near the edge of the Northwestern Region. They were flagged because they have their own geothermal power plant and their data transactions have been atypical.”

  He showed them a location that quite literally appeared to be in the middle of nowhere.

  Lucy exchanged a loaded look with Marc. If the Lion’s Roar were going to make use of Ji-Yoo Park and the stolen bioprinters, an isolated medical lab in the Icelandic wilderness was the perfect spot.

  “If there are no illegally active servers on site,” Larsson continued, “we would only need to send our computer forensics team in for a few hours to give it the all-clear. And yet, my department has been unable to secure a warrant for search. Insufficient grounds for suspicion, I am told.”

  “You don’t agree,” said Lucy.

  “I don’t have any choice,” he replied. “If only I had more men, more influence…”

  Marc stared at the table, thinking it through.

  “Hypothetically speaking, if an anonymous source was able to provide SR with actionable intelligence that financial crimes were taking place in there…”

  “I would be duty-bound to make it an immediate priority,” concluded Larsson. “Of course, that anonymous source would quickly find themselves under a great deal of scrutiny.”

  “The trade-off is worth it,” said Marc.

  “If that’s the right place,” countered Lucy.

  “You have a better idea?”

  She frowned. “You know I don’t.”

  Larsson pocketed his phone and drained the last of his tea.

  “I don’t wish to be melodramatic, but I think it is best for now to proceed as if this conversation never took place. The less I know about your intentions from this point onward, the better for all of us.” He stood up, adjusting his jacket, and his colleague in the dark coat rose with him. “I will give you some advice. Get a good vehicle and go prepared. It’s a long drive.”

  “Understood,” said Lucy, but Larsson shook his head.

  “That’s not the advice; this is.” He put a hand on Marc’s shoulder. “Be careful out there. Iceland embraces courage, but she does not forgive the reckless or the unready.”

  “That sounds more like a warning,” said Marc.

  Larsson gave a wan shrug and walked away.

  * * *

  Reykjavík vanished swiftly in the rearview mirror as Lucy took them out past the halo of suburban clusters surrounding the town, and soon they were powering along a lonely two-lane highway.

  In the end, the drive took around three hours, with Marc and Lucy sharing the work in ninety-minute shifts. She rented a jet black three-door Toyota Land Cruiser and they set off into the teeth of the storm. Marc hacked the Toyota’s on-board lo-jack, spoofing the GPS system to make it look like they were driving west toward the tourist route known as “the Golden Circle.” The fake route took them past the usual sights—the giant waterfall at Gullfoss, the Strokkur geyser and around the Thingvellir National Park—while in reality the 4 × 4 was speeding northward to a barely existent spot on the map in the highlands near Kjalvegur, east of the Langjökull glacier.

  The storm ebbed and flowed around them, at times retreating enough that they could see for miles over the bleak landscape, toward white ice fields in the far distance.

  For Marc, much of the countryside brought to mind Yorkshire and the Pennines, but flattened out and going off into a long, level forever.

  Lucy had never seen anything like it outside of a science fiction movie.

  “Now I know what driving a moon rover feels like,” she said dryly.

  “Little further out than that,” he noted. “NASA uses Iceland to simulate the surface of Mars.”

  “Huh. I can believe it.”

  At other times, the storm came in to toy with them like a bored cat with a mouse, throwing blasts of freezing sleet across the road and buffeting them whenever they crested one of the hills. Smoky curtains of gritty white powder marched over the landscape in waves, and despite himself Marc gave a shiver as they pushed through it.

  They were around a kilometer away from the location Larsson had given them when the storm let go again, folding away into a black sky, retreating toward the distant hillside. With Marc currently handling the second driving shift, Lucy had slipped into the back seat. She was busy with the steel case holding the kit to sell her wildlife photographer cover story, but she stopped to look out at the sudden wall of darkness arching up over them.

  She cocked her head to get a better angle.

  “It looks like the dead of night out there.”

  “Better this than the other way around,” noted Marc. “If we were here in the summer, it’d be daylight all … day.”

  The highway beneath the Land Cruiser’s wheels had grown steadily rougher as they ventured closer to the core of the island, and loose scree skittered out as they pulled off the road and
into the hollow of a low rise. Killing the engine dropped them into a lightless void and the constant wind moaned around the vehicle as the metal ticked and cooled.

  “We walk from here,” said Marc.

  * * *

  Finding the Frigga facility turned out to be easier than he expected, but then the area was so lifeless that even the smallest of human constructions would have stood out a mile.

  They stayed low, keeping close to the rocky, frost-marked landscape, moving to a ridge line that overlooked a shallow valley. In the center, around the four hundred meter mark, a cluster of metallic domes and square blockhouses were connected by lines of dark-colored pipes. North of that was a helipad with a black Bell Jet Ranger sitting on it. Weather blankets covered the helicopter’s nose and rotor blades, and a dozen cables had it tied down to steel eyebolts against the wind. To the west, a set of steel chimneys rose above the rooftops, venting a stream of white haze into the air. It was run-off from the facility’s power plant, where water was pumped down into the thermally active layer below the ground and turned into superheated steam to power turbines. The constant wind was pulling the ribbon of vapor across the valley, in the direction of Marc and Lucy’s vantage point.

  “Upwind is good,” Lucy said quietly, settling into a prone position.

  She pulled a high-powered sniper scope from her pocket and used it to sweep the buildings. Marc did the same with a pair of compact Steiner binoculars.

  “Should have brought a thermographic rig,” she noted.

  Marc shrugged. “Maybe. There’s a lot of radiant heat bloom from the ground around here, that’s why the snow won’t settle. It would mess with the goggles.” He paused. “The earth here is warmer than you’d think. There are places in Iceland where you can’t bury the dead. The volcanic heat from underground slow-cooks them.”

  “That’s an unpleasant image,” Lucy replied. “Thanks for sharing.”

  “I don’t see any fence line down there,” Marc noted. There was a vacant security hut where the sole entrance road approached the main buildings but little else. “No patrols.”

  “Who in their right mind would wanna be out in this chill?” Lucy’s words were slightly muffled by the fur around her all-enclosing hood. “Gotta be electronic security instead.”

  “No doubt. I’ll need to run a wifi sweep to be sure.”

  Lucy was quiet for a moment.

  “Did it occur to you that your pal Larsson might be dirty?”

  He put down the binoculars and shot her a look.

  “For a minute, yeah. But if he wanted to mess about with us, he could have done that at the Harpa.”

  “Just checking.” She continued to peer down her scope. “We’re going a long way on your hunch, Dane. If this doesn’t pan out—”

  “Nobody knows that better than I do,” he broke in.

  Lucy stiffened. “Door’s opening, blockhouse to the south by the smaller dome. I see someone coming out.”

  Marc put the binoculars to his face and swept around, finding the target.

  “Got them. One person. Big coat.” He zoomed in and his brow furrowed. “Oh shit. Is that…?”

  “It’s Park.” Lucy’s reply was unequivocal. “Looks like … she’s taking a smoke break.”

  They watched her in silence. Through the long-range optics, Marc watched the scientist shakily light a cigarette. He couldn’t see her face clearly, but it appeared to be the same woman from the video, pacing dejectedly in a circle.

  “This means we’re in the right place.”

  “Yeah, how about that?” Lucy scowled behind her scope. “Real convenient, how it’s all lining up.”

  “It’s lining up because we followed the right leads,” he insisted.

  “I don’t like coincidences. Makes me feel like I’m getting played.”

  He shifted his weight, moving down the ridge.

  “You’re senior operative here. If this smells wrong to you, if you want to pull the plug and drive back to Reykjavík, then say it.”

  Down in the valley, Park’s diminutive figure began a march back toward the blockhouse. Lucy tracked her movements every step of the way until she vanished inside again.

  “Back to the car,” she said, after a long moment. “We’re calling this in.”

  ELEVEN

  The 4 × 4 rose out of the darkness as they approached, a black megalith, shiny and foreign against the rocky landscape where they had left it.

  Once inside, Marc pulled the sat-com rig from his backpack and worked by the crimson light of the display while Lucy went to the camera case. Methodically, she removed the false panels in the steel container, to reveal the hidden storage areas underneath. She removed and strapped a sheathed ceramic combat knife to the inside of her forearm, before detaching her jacket’s removable hood. If there was going to be some action, she would rather risk the cold than lose her peripheral vision.

  Pieces of camera gear, sections of tripod, optics and other mechanisms came apart in her hands and went back together in new configurations. Bit by bit, she assembled a skeletal, compressed-air rifle, completing the puzzle of it by snapping the telescopic sight she’d used earlier to a mount over the barrel.

  “Connection,” said Marc.

  It would be late evening at Rubicon’s crisis center in Monaco and predawn back in Singapore, which explained the unsettled timbre in Lucy’s bones. She was still on Far East time.

  In the military, she had learned the knack of snatching fragments of sleep wherever she could, but even so, resting up on the flight to Iceland was no substitute for a full night on a comfortable rack. Lucy was operating at the same level of activity she’d been on during the mission in the Med—and Marc was probably doing the same.

  Need to watch that, she told herself. Fatigue kills as easily as bullets.

  Marc put the tablet computer on the Toyota’s dash. He’d set it to operate in red-spectrum mode to preserve their night vision, so everything inside the vehicle had a dark, bloody cast to it. On the tablet’s split screen, one side showed Henri Delancort’s pinched and wary expression, the other Assim Kader, looking pale and sweaty.

  “Report?” said Delancort.

  Lucy launched into a rapid summary of the last few hours. She ignored the look on his face when she told him that the Icelandic SR were now effectively collaborators in the operation and pressed on, getting to the core of the matter.

  “We have a positive ID on Susan Lam, aka Ji-Yoo Park. They’re holding her here.”

  Delancort gave a curt nod. “All right. You need to formulate a strategy for recovery.” He glanced to one side, looking at a split screen of his own. “Kader. How soon can you and Riis close down your operations in Singapore and be on a flight to Iceland?”

  “What?” said Marc, holding up a hand, but the conversation continued over him.

  “Uh, well, before we address that, you should know we’ve had some developments here too.” The Saudi took a deep breath. “I’ve been sweeping law enforcement databases for anything relevant connected to the Lion’s Roar, and I found something that we should be concerned about.”

  He tapped a keypad and the tablet screen mirrored something from the hacker’s computer. Lucy recognized the format of an Interpol Red Notice, the agency’s equivalent of a BOLO bulletin circulated to police forces across the globe when a suspect of note was sought for arrest and extradition. A grimacing, hard-eyed white man looked back out at her from the screen, the red illumination making him deathly pale.

  “This is Noah Verbeke. He’s single-handedly responsible for making the Lion’s Roar into the international menace that they are today.”

  The Red Notice explained that Verbeke had escaped confinement during a prison transfer a few days earlier, killed a number of police officers, and then dropped off the grid. All that had taken place within hours of Park’s abduction.

  “That can’t be by chance,” said Marc. “Their top dog gets out of his cage and they start putting together a major terrorist hit
? The Lion’s Roar must have been planning this for a while. They’re still two steps ahead of us.”

  “Them—or whoever is really running this,” Lucy added. “Assim, what else?”

  “I tried a different approach to locate the bioprinters,” he went on. “They don’t just fabricate materials out of thin air, you see, they need seed stock. A package called a biokit. I’m running a search protocol, looking for thefts or purchases of any regulated biokits with the correct profile over the last few weeks. There’s a promising lead in Manila, but nothing firm yet, so I will—”

  “Wait,” Marc said firmly, cutting off the other man in mid-sentence. “Back up a bit. Are we seriously saying that Lucy and I are going to sit on our arses for another ten or twenty hours while Malte and Assim fly over here on the company jet?”

  “You can conduct surveillance on the target site,” said Delancort.

  “Oh, great idea,” Marc snapped, his tone rising. “Then we’ll know exactly when they put a bullet in Park’s head and dump her in a shallow grave.” He leaned in before Lucy could speak up. “We lost them in Singapore because we were running behind. Park was already gone by the time we arrived, and we’re only here now because their bloke Ticker is sloppy and we caught a lucky break. We have to move on this now. Tonight!”

  “The two of you,” Delancort said, in a dour tone. “Entering a location you have little intelligence on, facing threats you know even less about. Without backup. Do I have it right, Mr. Dane, or have I missed out any of the reasons why this is a bad idea?”

  “Four days,” Marc retorted, sounding out the words. “The woman on the phone said four days until they go live on whatever the hell they are planning—and that was two days ago. So you tell me how wasting more of that dwindling time is a good idea.”