Shadow

by James Swallow

  Faintly, in the direction of the far end of the street, he heard a digital chime and then the smartphone in his pocket made the same noise. Marc snatched at the device and looked at the screen. The mirroring software tracking the input to the smartwatch on al-Baruni’s wrist was still working, but the range was limited. The display showed a directional indicator arrow, telling the man to keep moving northeast through the area around Avenue de Stalingrad.

  If the phone was picking up the input, then it meant the target was less than ten meters away. Marc moved forward, stalking his prey, and spotted a likely place to hide. Building work was a constant throughout the city, and to the right of the street an old town house was in the process of being gutted. Wire fences kept it inaccessible from the pavement, but there were stacks of plasterboard and metal scaffolds waiting to be taken inside, piled high enough for a man to hide behind them.

  He saw a shadow that looked like a crouching person and he slipped in behind it.

  “Meddur!” he called, in a sharp, loud voice. “Don’t move.”

  In the second it took Marc to realize he was actually talking to a black polythene bag full of builder’s debris, a figure burst from cover behind him, swinging a short length of steel scaffold pipe.

  Al-Baruni cried out and swung the pipe hard, but he timed his hit badly and struck Marc after having spent most of the momentum of the blow. Still, Marc took a hard hit that cracked his knee and he fell against the fencing, losing precious seconds as the other man took off at a run once again.

  “Shit!”

  Marc scrambled to his feet and staggered after him, jags of hot pain sparking down his leg. Al-Baruni slid over the hood of a parked car and into the next intersection, veering away around the base of a building with a giant comic art mural painted up along one wall.

  The man was gaining distance. Turning the corner, Marc pulled the Glock from its holster and shouted al-Baruni’s name again, swinging up the gun to take aim.

  Could he shoot to wound, try for a leg shot and bring him down? The clearer play was to put a round in the middle of the man’s torso, but that meant firing right at the backpack and whatever was inside it.

  Al-Baruni twisted, throwing a look back, and he froze when he saw the pistol. He held up his hands, palms open. There was no dead man’s switch, no trigger unit.

  “Stop running!” shouted Marc, his voice echoing off the walls of the empty side street.

  “I’m sorry…” the man called back, and his expression shifted between abject fear and terrified determination as he girded himself to flee again. “I can’t!”

  Marc’s finger tightened on the trigger, but in the next second a loud crash sounded. The heavy wooden door across the entrance of an apartment house between the two men slammed open, and a group of laughing students spilled out on to the street. Marc immediately concealed the Glock in the folds of his jacket before anyone saw the weapon, and over the heads of the group he saw al-Baruni cut across into another alleyway and disappear.

  The students flowed past him. They were dressed for fun, some of them carrying musical instruments, all of them happy and blissfully unaware of how much danger their city was in. He watched them go before limping back to the main street, scowling as he walked off the pain from the knee hit.

  Wincing, Marc looked at his smartphone. The target was well out of range now, but the mirror program retained the last bit of data it had captured, the direction arrow pointing northeast.

  A straight-up foot chase isn’t going to get this bloke, Marc told himself. Think smarter. Where’s he going? He opened a mapping application and zoomed out to get a bird’s-eye view of downtown Brussels. The better question would be where are they sending the poor bastard?

  The map suggested an unpleasantly large number of potential target sites within a few minutes’ walk. Shopping malls off Boulevard Anspach, a multiplex cinema, a dozen different churches, and several métro stations.

  The latter represented one of the nastiest options for a bioweapon. Brussels and its underground rail system was no stranger to terror attacks, having weathered a bombing in 2016 that killed fourteen people, as part of a double-header strike on the city and its airport by the Islamic State. Would the Lion’s Roar risk having al-Baruni run the gauntlet of the increased security?

  There was no way to be sure, but if Marc was right about what the man was carrying, the weapon’s discharge would be capable of killing hundreds, possibly thousands more than the 2016 bombs. He felt a sickly chill as he imagined the Shadow virus being propagated through the métro’s tunnels and air conditioning system, giving it a massive potential infection base.

  The only way to stop al-Baruni would be to get ahead of him, intercept him before he reached whatever arbitrary trigger point Verbeke had decided for the attack. Thinking quickly, Marc plotted a route and hailed the first taxi that passed him by.

  “Take me there,” he snapped, flashing his phone to show the driver a point on Rue du Midi, less than a kilometer north. “Do it in under two minutes and I’ll pay you double the meter.”

  “Seatbelt, please,” said the young Kenyan behind the wheel, with a grin.

  The cab shot away from the curb and Marc watched the streets flash past.

  He was taking a big risk by breaking visual contact with his target and hoping to reacquire al-Baruni in a different location. If the follow had been set up by any conventional agency, there would have been a dozen agents in the field, cars on call and rolling coverage to ensure the subject never once knew he was under surveillance. All of that was an impossibility for Marc on his own, his circumstances forcing him to improvise.

  There was a peculiar kind of excitement that came over him in moments like this one, when he balanced on the razor edge between success and failure. Was it wrong to admit that he felt energized by it? Marc’s pulse raced. He felt alive, focused. He had purpose here, in this one instant, more than anywhere else in his life.

  But beneath that surge of adrenaline lurked a black abyss. Marc Dane had pushed his luck more often than anyone had a right to, and this time he had crashed out. That terrible night in Iceland when Park had been murdered, when he and Lucy had been left to die of exposure—all of that spun out of his belief that he could roll the dice and come up a winner. Now he was in the same place, making the same kind of gamble, only the stakes were infinitely higher.

  This time, if he failed, it wouldn’t just be a handful of lives that were lost. The death toll would be catastrophic.

  “Here we are,” announced the driver, bringing the taxi to a sharp halt. “You know, if you’re so eager to see the Manneken Pis, he’s around the corner from here…”

  The Kenyan pointed in the direction of the city’s famous ornamental fountain.

  “Sightseeing later.”

  Marc paid what he promised before scrambling back out on to the cobbles. He found a tabac shop with a broad glass frontage that mirrored the rest of the intersection in its window, and placed himself off the line of sight, standing in a half-shadow beneath an awning. And he waited.

  Another two minutes passed before a familiar figure emerged from a side street. Marc felt a surge of relief; this time he’d chosen right.

  Al-Baruni looked around furtively, but his gaze passed right over Marc’s back without seeing him, and he kept on walking.

  From the far side of the street, Marc watched him march dejectedly on his way, still heading northeast in the direction of the Bourse, the elegant Neo-Palladian building that was home to the Brussels Stock Exchange. Beyond that was the heart of the city’s historic district, and on any given day it would be swarming with tourists.

  Marc gave his target as much of a lead as he dared, and then set off after him. The gun in his waistband was heavy, and he felt the weight of every bullet in the magazine.

  If I can’t convince al-Baruni to surrender … If I can’t stop him in time …

  To prevent this day from becoming a nightmare, he might have to kill an innocent man.


  * * *

  Verbeke chose a Škorpion machine pistol from the gun case and loaded the weapon’s stubby sickle magazine, ratcheting the side to make it ready. He cast around, watching Ticker and the others load the last of the gear into the rear of the remaining truck. The tents were being dismantled, and soon enough there would be little trace of the Lion’s Roar in the decrepit warehouse.

  Still, it was going more slowly than he wanted, and his frustration warred with his need to get moving. He forced the Škorpion into a bulky pocket and glared at his watch. There was an overpowering appeal to witnessing the effects of his brutality up close, a fixation that Verbeke had never grown out of. He wanted to remain in the city’s confines long enough to see the first immigrant mongrel coughing up blood on the afternoon news. But now that plan was being disrupted by Rubicon, forcing him to move up the timetable.

  That same vicious instinct wanted them to come here, if he was honest with himself. He wanted the Englishman and the American to know it was him behind this, to see his face before he put a bullet through theirs. Anything less would leave him unfulfilled, his violent impulses swirling around, waiting to be spent on anyone who crossed him in even the smallest of ways.

  When his cell phone rang, he barked out his answer.

  “What?”

  “Problem here,” said Brewn. Street sounds and background traffic noise made it clear he was in the middle of the city. “Got the mule zeroed, but he has company. The Englishman is following him.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “See for yourself.”

  The phone pinged. Brewn had sent him a photo message.

  The image was taken from across the road, but it clearly showed the male Rubicon agent walking by the Bourse’s tiered steps. His face half-hidden beneath a dark cap, the Englishman was looking at his own smartphone.

  “Has he seen you?”

  “Not yet.”

  For a moment, Verbeke toyed with the idea of having them drag the man back here, so he could have the enjoyment of personally ending him. But the operation was too important. He would have to find something else to take out his frustration on.

  “Orders?”

  “Kill him,” said Verbeke. “Do it quietly, out of sight.”

  NINETEEN

  The box truck swayed around a series of tight corners before veering down a curved concrete ramp. Lucy dropped back, slowing, holding the moped at a distance for fear of being spotted. The road they were on paralleled a long cutting where the city’s métro lines crossed, but the ramp was off to one side, away from the main working tracks.

  Pulling to a halt at the top of the incline, Lucy watched the truck push through a set of gates held shut with a weak chain, the metal splitting with a sharp shriek. The drifts of trash and windblown debris along the edges of the ramp made it clear this part of the métro system wasn’t in regular operation.

  Leaving the Piaggio on the road, Lucy moved down after the truck, staying to the shadows. The lurching vehicle reached track level, bouncing over the steel rails until it came to a sharp halt, half-inside a disused tunnel. Down there, with the only daylight coming in beneath concrete baffles and rusty wire fencing, it was difficult to get a good read on what was going on. But the moment the truck’s engine died, Lucy heard the cries coming from the back of the vehicle, the sound of fists banging on the inside of the box frame.

  She dropped to one knee and unfolded the XAR rifle, bringing it smoothly to her shoulder and sighting into the gloom.

  The truck rocked as the bearded, heavyset driver climbed out. He stood by the cab, reaching back in to gather something up, and around the front of the vehicle came the pale lady herself, a compact machine pistol hanging over the shoulder of her black jacket. Lucy tracked Axelle, evaluating the situation.

  The woman walked over to where a dark tarpaulin had been draped over something large, and she whipped off the cover like it was a magic trick, revealing a pair of Yamaha SR400 street bikes and crash helmets that had been stashed there.

  If they’re changing vehicles, this has to be the end of the line for the hostages.

  As if to confirm Lucy’s conclusion, the guy with the beard walked along the length of the truck with a heavy jerrycan in his grip, throwing splashes of liquid from it up the side of the vehicle and over the tires. The banging noise from the cargo box grew frantic as the faint odor of gasoline reached Lucy’s nostrils.

  The man gave the can a final shake and discarded it below the doors to the rear of the truck. Backing away, he fished inside his coat and came back with the fluorescent tube of a road flare. Lucy put the XAR’s cross hairs on him as he fiddled with the cap, hitting the flare’s striker.

  She let out half a breath and waited for her opportunity. The wrong angle, and the man would fall into the puddle of fuel and it would all be over.

  The flare ignited with a pulse of bright red-orange flame, throwing jumping patterns of crimson over the concrete walls of the railway cutting, and in the same moment Lucy’s finger tightened on the trigger. She sent a round through the joint in the thug’s right knee, cutting his legs out from under him with the shock. He fell screaming and the flare bounced away, spitting fumes and infernal light.

  Lucy traversed, swinging to aim at Axelle, but the pale woman was faster off the mark than she expected. Axelle’s Škorpion pistol brayed on fully automatic fire, a fan of .32 ACP bullets chopping up the dusty ramp toward Lucy’s position.

  The rounds sparked off the concrete and Lucy leaped away, moving and firing her rifle from the hip. She zigzagged, avoiding the burst from Axelle’s gun, then vaulted over the lip of the ramp’s lower half and down into the shadows of the métro rail siding.

  Jumping into the dark was never a good idea. There was no way to know what you would land on, and a bad fall now would put Lucy down as cleanly as a bullet. Flat-footed, she hit the shingle piled alongside the disused rails and the impact was jarring, almost enough to knock her off balance. But Lucy was nimble and she turned the momentum into forward motion, scrambling across the track.

  The man Lucy had shot was shouting in pain, writhing on the ground and calling out, but his companion did nothing to help him. Axelle was more interested in killing the interloper, and she didn’t allow Lucy to find cover.

  She came around behind the truck, still firing, bracketing Lucy with shots, and trying to keep her on the defensive. The snarl of gunfire echoed off the low roof and down the shadowy métro tunnels.

  It was a smart play, but Delta Force trained its operatives to work under live fire conditions and keep their cool. Lucy Keyes was no different. Before Rubicon, she had been a Tier One specialist in Delta’s covert all-female Foxtrot Troop, and the hard training that had been drilled into her there was second nature. The whine of bullets at close quarters was music she knew well, and it didn’t stop her from firing back. Her rifle chugged and Axelle ducked behind a set of wood and steel buffers. The woman fired once more, and there was an echoing clack of metal on metal as she finally emptied the Škorpion’s magazine.

  With the brilliant, blinding light of the flare ruining her low-light vision, Lucy could only see the jagged, moving shadows of the injured man on the ground and Axelle, half-concealed behind the buffer stand.

  She had only precious seconds to exploit the lull in the firefight. Lucy dashed forward, swinging the XAR rifle back over her shoulder on its sling, drawing her Glock semi-automatic. She put down a few rounds to keep her attacker in cover, the sound reverberating off the walls, and broke into a run.

  In the quiet between bursts of gunfire, the hostages inside the truck continued their cries for help. Lucy heard the piercing wail of a terrified child, and knew it had to be Meddur al-Baruni’s son, the frightened little boy she had seen earlier. Every second they remained trapped inside there was a second closer to a grisly death, and that she could not allow.

  Not this time. Not again.

  On the far side of the rail siding stood a series of rectangular support
pillars, and Lucy used them as concealment, slipping from one to the other, breaking Axelle’s line of sight so the pale woman wouldn’t know where to aim. Moving deeper into the tunnel, the hellish illumination thrown out by the hissing road flare turned everything into a two-tone world of flickering red and fathomless black. She moved slow and steady, careful to spread her weight as she walked over the wooden sleepers between the rails and the heaps of loose stone chippings around them. The jumping motion of the flare’s flame threw moving shadows on the walls, threatening to distract Lucy from any real target.

  She circled back toward the truck, the stink of gasoline hitting her again. The wounded man was on the far side, making an attempt to drag himself away. Snarling in pain with each movement, gravel rattling as he hauled his ruined leg after him, he continued to call out for Axelle’s help. Wherever she was, she continued to ignore him.

  Lucy stopped and peered into the wavering shadows, looking for something that made a human shape.

  Loose stones clattered behind Lucy and she pivoted, fast and graceful. It wasn’t fast enough to avoid Axelle flying at her from the dark, like a pale-faced vampire bursting from a grave.

  The woman had her crash helmet in one hand and swung it like a wrecking ball, cracking Lucy hard across the cheekbone. Her head snapped back with a flash of sharp pain at the base of her skull and she staggered. There was no sign of Axelle’s machine pistol, but with her free hand the pale woman grabbed Lucy’s gun arm in a vice-like grip, razor-sharp nails biting into her wrist.

  By sheer reflex, Lucy’s finger twitched on the Glock’s trigger and a shot went wild, sparking off a far wall. She pushed through the disorientation from the blow to her head and tried to turn into the other woman’s attack, but Axelle was quicker than she expected, nimble and sinuous. She threw out a punch, but she might as well have been fighting smoke. In the half-dark, the pale woman got behind Lucy and snared the XAR rifle where it still hung over her shoulder.