Shadow

by James Swallow

  Most of the equipment he left untouched, but the laptop computer and portable sat-com dish was too new, too high-tech to be left behind. If the police found them the wrong questions would be asked, so they would bury the gear in the desert, in some lonely spot off the highway. The sweep was thorough, and when it was done they moved back out to the car.

  The street kids had gone but the Volvo was still intact.

  “Let’s go.” The taller man climbed into the driver’s seat. “I want to get to the airport before dawn, and it’s a long drive.”

  The bearded man nodded and walked down to the next building along, where their neighbor, an enterprising youth called Azeem, stored the wares he sold at the market.

  He made a space in the back of Azeem’s battered Toyota pickup, among bales of recycled clothing, and placed the nylon daypack there, set so the tip of the flask inside was exposed to the air.

  He paused and checked a second cellular phone in his bag. It was an old model, an elderly Nokia out of date a decade ago, but it still worked. It was still capable of sending a trigger signal.

  The tall man leaned on the Volvo’s horn and it gave a strangled hoot.

  Time to leave, thought the other man, and jogged back to the car.

  * * *

  There had been a moment, back when Marc Dane had been on his first tour at sea, when he found himself up on the aft deck of a ship in the middle of a force eight gale, and for the briefest of instants it had felt like the storm circling the vessel was seeing him, as a wolf would see its prey. It stalked him, swirling about, waiting for the moment to strike.

  That moment had never come, but now out here in the black cold, on the barren, near-lifeless Icelandic tundra, that ominous threat had come back to finish the job. Grit and ice particles came at him in pitiless bursts, sweeping across the landscape with enough force to make him stumble. He and Lucy hung on to each other, marching robotically through the darkness. He estimated they had been walking for hours, but it was impossible to be certain. Frost formed on his ragged beard and patches of white rime collected on the front of his thighs and shoulders.

  In the distance, stark black against the storm clouds, there was a line of hills and they used that as their landmark, navigating toward what Marc hoped would be the lowlands. Down there, they would find a road, maybe even a remote house or even a village. He kept telling himself that. With no stars to navigate by, even dead reckoning wasn’t going to help them.

  “I don’t know where it is,” Lucy said abruptly, slurring as she spoke. “Stop askin’ me.”

  She pushed against him, half-heartedly trying to shove him away.

  “What did you say?” He had to force out the words.

  “I … I don’t get it,” she went on, detaching herself from him. “Really don’t.” Lucy was holding one half of a conversation, responding to what she thought he was saying. In the dimness he could see her windburned face was slack, her gaze vague and distant. “S’cold. But why…? Why am I so damn hot?” Lucy staggered backward and pulled at the socks she wore as makeshift gloves. “Get these off.”

  “No.”

  Marc grabbed her hands and pulled her close. A sick dread churned in his gut.

  This was how hypothermia gets you, he remembered. It messes with your head. You become disoriented, confused.

  “Quit it!” she snarled, shaking him off, giving him an angry shove.

  “Aggressive,” he concluded.

  “What?”

  “Lucy, listen to me,” Marc said, calling out over the moaning winds. “You just think you’re warm. It’s your muscles tiring out, the blood vessels relaxing. It makes you feel like you’re heating up, but you’re not. You hear me?”

  “That sounds like something…” She marched away into the darkness. “You’re making that up, Johnny.”

  John is her brother’s name. Marc frowned. If she’s mistaking me for him, she must be losing it.

  He set off after her.

  “Lucy, it’s me, Marc. Hold on!”

  “I know,” she shot back, her voice trailing out of the night. And then in the next moment she cried out in alarm. “Holy shit!”

  Marc heard the near-panic in her tone, heard the sound of rock shifting, and he broke into a full-tilt run. She rose out of the dark in front of him and they almost collided.

  Lucy shoved him back and he was afraid she was going to attack him, but she seemed lucid again.

  “Watch it, there’s a goddamn hole here the size of New Jersey!”

  He gathered himself and let his eyes adjust. She was right. Black against the blackness, directly in the path they had been taking, a yawning void lay ahead of them. It was a wide, jagged-edged sinkhole, opening into a shallow cave maybe ten meters below.

  “It’s a lava cave,” Marc said, his heart hammering in his chest as he realized how close they had come to stumbling blindly into this gaping pit. Lucy flinched back and he shook his head. “I mean, not like lava lava, not molten or anything … But it’s shelter!”

  “Yeah.” Lucy gave a weak nod. “Sure, why not. Let’s hide out in a volcano.”

  * * *

  It was hard work picking their way down the slope of rough, broken stone spilling into the cave space, and the frosty patina on the rocks made them slip and stumble several times. But once in the chamber, the difference was immediately apparent. It was still bloody cold down there, but the wind chill was cut to a fraction of its former ferocity.

  “So d-dark here,” Lucy managed. “Have I gone blind?”

  Marc sat on the floor of the cave and fumbled in his pockets, removing the items he had on him, placing them so he could find them by feel alone. Lucy’s speech was still slurred, and he knew that if he didn’t get her warmed up soon, the hypothermia would bed in and loss of consciousness would be next.

  He had to keep her alert, keep her focused on something else. He said the first thing that came into his head.

  “Why’d you join the army? You’ve never told me the reason. I’ve always wondered.”

  He heard her sit heavily, close by.

  “Oh,” she began, after a low intake of breath. “That’s a story.”

  “Can I hear it?” he prompted.

  Marc found one of the unused shotgun shells he had taken from Verbeke’s man and made a pit among the cracked rocks on the cave floor.

  “There was … this dude who lived, few blocks from us. In Queens.”

  As Lucy picked out the words, Marc twisted and pulled at the shell’s brass base, gradually cracking it open. He poured the cartridge’s propellant powder into the pit and then repeated the action with a second shell.

  “Rich guy,” she went on. “Bought this old movie theater. Everyone thought … he’s crazy.” She sighed. “Mom. And my Aunt Dani. Said Johnny and me needed to learn some responsibility. Found us after-school jobs with this guy. Fillin’ the popcorn machine. Wipin’ windows.” She shivered. “Big old projector there. Old movies. Kung fu flicks. Horror films and monsters. Musicals.”

  “Huh.” Despite the severity of their circumstances, Marc smiled in the darkness as he dismantled the next shell. “That explains a lot.”

  More than once, Marc heard Lucy refer to films made years before she was born, and he had assumed that she was quietly a movie buff. But this made sense. He imagined a teenage Lucy Keyes in some unconventional indie cinema, toiling away under a flickering screen showing aging prints of old cult classics.

  “Got a favorite?”

  “Fantasia.” She slurred the name. “You?”

  “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

  “Figures,” said Lucy.

  Marc pulled a handful of loose threads from the material strips wound around his wrists, then bunched them in the pit between the rocks, tamping them down.

  “Okay. Moment of truth,” he told her. He grabbed the stun baton from where it lay and pressed the tines into the mound of propellant powder. “Cover your eyes!”

  Blue light flashed and crackled, and th
ere was a flat chug of ignition. Marc recoiled as the contents of his makeshift fire pit caught and combusted. A smoky ball of orange flame grew into being and he gave a whoop of success.

  Drawn by the light, Lucy crowded close and dropped to the ground, curling up around the fire. Marc stripped more cloth and tore pages from his snap cover passport, feeding them in to keep the meager flames burning.

  “So, what then?” he asked.

  “Aunt Dani,” Lucy repeated, and a note of sadness entered her voice. “Miss her. Was really her idea. She knew the guy. Knew Mom. Everyone.”

  The story had yet to connect up to Lucy’s military career, but he wasn’t about to push her. Even after all they had been through together, Lucy was never forthcoming about her past. Now something hidden was trickling out, something he had never heard before.

  He lay down next to her and pulled closer, until they were side by side. She didn’t object. Lucy knew as well as he did that the fire wouldn’t be enough to stave off the cold, even out of the wind. They would have to conserve what body heat they could as well.

  “Don’t get handsy,” she told him. “Break your fingers.”

  He fought back a shiver.

  “Believe me, copping a sneaky feel is not on my list of priorities.”

  “First time I ever hit a guy for touching me, Dani arrested us both.”

  “She was police?”

  “She was the most police,” Lucy said, with real warmth. “MP in the army. NYPD when she got out.”

  “So you joined up because of her.”

  Lucy was silent, and when she spoke again, it was with the clarity and distance of someone with long-faded regrets.

  “I lost my dad when I was ten. Shooting in the bodega on the corner. Robbery. He was just in their way.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The face of Marc’s own father flickered in his thoughts, then sank into the gloom again.

  “Me too. Dani was the cop who came to tell us. And she stuck around. Looked out for us, me and my brother.” Lucy’s voice began to shift back to its more usual timbre, her breathing evening out. “Her and my mom made me what I am.”

  “They must be proud of you.”

  She gave a soft, sad grunt. “Mom thinks I’m a criminal. Dani…” Lucy paused once more, and Marc felt her stiffen. “I enlisted the year after 9/11. Johnny never forgave me.”

  All at once, Marc saw the tragic, unspoken thread running through the middle of Lucy’s story, and he felt a stab of sorrow for her.

  “Was Dani there? At the World Trade Center?”

  “You always put it together real quick, don’t you?” Lucy nodded. “Dani went into the North Tower and she never came out. She always told me I needed to have a purpose in my life. That’s the day I figured out what it was.”

  Marc’s own memory of the fateful day when Al Qaeda terrorists attacked New York and Washington, D.C., was blurred by time and distance. His unit had been on a military exercise along with hundreds of other British army and naval forces when the news broke. At first he had thought it was a random twist thrown into the operation’s narrative, until his commanders called endex. They suspended the fake conflict as the first shots in a new and very real war were still echoing around the world.

  A man his sister Kate once dated, a city dealer type who was in finance, had been in the South Tower and evacuated before the second plane hit. In a surreal moment, the bloke’s face had popped up on the BBC, as one of the first British eyewitnesses they’d been able to get hold of. Marc remembered that clearest of all: the weird dislocation of watching a man he knew from thousands of miles away, shell-shocked and dazed, talking about streets full of gray ash and lost co-workers.

  To have been there on that day, to have seen it and lost someone you cared about …

  All of a sudden, a lot of what he knew of Lucy Keyes made sense. He gently put his hand on her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry about your friend.”

  “Your turn,” she replied. “If I have to overshare, so do you.”

  “I don’t have anything to give you don’t already know,” he told her, and that was more or less true. “I joined the navy because I thought it would be cool.” Marc paused, annoyed with himself for the reflex denial. “Nah, that’s all. I joined because I wanted to get away from life on a council estate with zero prospects. I grew up trapped between being bored out of my mind or afraid I’d get eaten alive by the troublemakers and the crime. The navy was a way out.”

  And for a while, he’d found a place for himself there. But then came the crash that nearly saw him drowned in the South China Sea, and suddenly it wasn’t so easy to be fearless anymore. After he got out, the security services had come calling, seeing the skills he had, and he took that path more from inertia than anything else.

  For a while Marc Dane was okay with being the bloke in the van, running backup, acting as technician on field ops while it fell to other people to kick in the doors and pull the triggers. But that too was torn away from him. His unit was ambushed and the blame fell upon his shoulders.

  Feels like forever ago, he thought.

  “You know why I hooked in with Rubicon,” he told her. “It’s because I had no other option, not really. My mum passed, my sister and me don’t speak, haven’t seen my father since I was a kid. After Six turned on me, I had nowhere to go.”

  “You talk like you didn’t have a choice,” Lucy said quietly. “But you did, like I did. You could have sat back and done nothing, but you didn’t. You wanted in. We’re both here because we needed some payback, Dane. And the fact is, what drives us is what put us into this mess.” She gave a humorless chuckle. “Shit, we’re both victims of our worst impulses, ain’t we?”

  He shook his head. “The blame for this is on me. I pushed. I convinced you to go in when we should have held back. And now Park is dead and we’re one bad night away from joining her.”

  “I’ve never done anything … I didn’t want to,” Lucy said, fighting off a shiver as her fatigue drew her down toward sleep. “You’re not the white knight, man. Stop thinking that you are. Because that’s what’ll get you killed.”

  Marc lost himself in the flicker of the feeble firelight, her words echoing in his mind long after she had spoken them.

  * * *

  Azeem’s stall was in a prime place, across from the school on the corner of the Keesh Square, a spot he jealously guarded from the others who came to sell their wares at the street market. He had the old trestle table in place across the drop-down tailgate of his pickup, angling the thin sunshade so that buyers could stop and pore over his wares without having to squint as the day carried on.

  Right now, the sun was low in the sky, peering hazily through low cloud over the old zoo. It hit Azeem’s stall at just the right angle to show off his stock. Secondhand clothes harvested from the castoffs of Europeans, lots of them flashy T-shirts with printed logos, out-of-date football team strips, sneakers and more. He had a cousin down at the waterfront, who also sold him the occasional box of pirated DVDs. Those were always popular. He imagined the new discs he had to sell today would be gone by noon, before the muezzin made the call for Zuhr.

  This was the best spot in the Western Dawud, he told himself, perhaps even the best spot in all of Benghazi for a man like him. People would wander up from the cafés or across from the park all day, and the steady foot traffic made it the most lucrative of any pitch.

  “Salam, Khou-ya!” called a rough voice, and Azeem’s fellow stall-holder Gamal came waddling up, smiling widely.

  Gamal had a bad leg, a reminder from the civil war, and it made him rock from side to side whenever he walked. He greeted Azeem with a two-fisted handshake, enveloping the younger man’s fingers in his meaty paws.

  “How are you this day?”

  “Hoping for good customers,” Azeem replied.

  “As are we all, inshallah,” Gamal made a praying motion. His gaze fell on the box of DVDs. “What do we have here?”

  Imm
ediately, the older man began fingering through the contents. He had three daughters who loved American romantic comedies, and he bought them to bribe his way into their good graces. His big hands gave him the impression of someone clumsy, ham-fisted, but Gamal moved with great delicacy as he plucked one disc after another from the box.

  Azeem left him to it and continued to unload his Toyota.

  “I heard a story last night, from Badis at the café. He was telling me about Fatima and Remi.”

  Gamal made a negative noise. “Badis should mind his own business.”

  “He has no family of his own so he gossips about everyone else’s.” The boy Remi and his sibling were the only children of Gamal’s second cousin, an unlucky woman who had died the previous year during the last violent spasms of the war. “Badis said they paid smugglers for passage out of the country. Is that true?”

  “A lot is true,” Gamal said testily. “A lot are lies. I can’t say.”

  Azeem hesitated, afraid that he had inadvertently touched a raw nerve with his old friend.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”

  Gamal’s shoulders sank. “No, it’s all right. Yes, Badis is correct. They escaped on a boat. I didn’t want them to go. Too dangerous. But Fatima called me two nights ago. They are well.” The big man shuddered. “So many days without word. I was convinced they were dead, lost to the sea. But God kept them safe.” He shot Azeem a look. “Speaking of divine intervention … Did you hear about the men who were washed up down the coast, near Bin Jawad? Europeans! From one of their ‘protection boats’! Someone shipwrecked them!”

  Azeem snorted. “I hope they were given a fitting welcome…”

  He trailed off as he came across something he didn’t recognize. A black nylon daypack, the flap hanging open so that a silver cylinder inside was visible.

  “What is in there?” said Gamal. “Your breakfast?”

  “I’m not sure.” Azeem concentrated, trying to remember if this was something he had bought from the wholesaler. He had no memory of it. “Perhaps someone left it behind, and it was put in with my stock.”