Shadow

by James Swallow

  The Marburg virus and its weaponized Shadow variant had no miracle cure to be given to her. There was no magic bullet vaccine, only therapies and medications that could try to ease her pain and strengthen her body against the poison coursing through her veins. She could only hope to endure this, to battle through and make it out the other side.

  The next twenty-four hours would be critical. If she could hold on until then, her odds would improve dramatically.

  “You are the strongest person I know,” Marc told her, willing his words to carry through the glass, to find their way to her. “You’ll beat this, Lucy. I know it.”

  He stepped back from the window, but it was hard to turn away. A compulsion kept holding him there, as if he believed that as long as he stood in this room, keeping watch over Lucy Keyes, nothing more could happen to her. The feeling was old and familiar. Once before he had stood in the same place, watching his mother succumb to the slow march of illness. The helplessness of it was stifling, and in the end, it took a physical effort for him to walk out, back into the corridor.

  The room where she was being tended to was one of a cluster in the hospital’s secure wing, behind airlock doors and layers of screening to prevent the spread of any contagion. Some of Jakobs’ cops were stationed nearby, all of them wearing surgical masks over their faces as they stood guard. They watched Marc with calm indifference, and he wondered how much they knew about what had really taken place earlier that day. If events had played out for the worst, this ward would have been filled to capacity, with every visitor to Grand-Place a victim of Verbeke’s false-flag attack.

  “Dane.”

  Marc turned to see Loki—he still couldn’t think of him as Björn—in an examination room, finishing up his conversation with a doctor. The Icelander was in the process of shrugging on a shirt, and Marc saw a band of black tattoos across his broad chest. Norse symbols, the same kind of icons he had seen on Noah Verbeke.

  “How is Keyes?” said the Icelander.

  The doctor pushed past him and Marc stood there, unsure what to say next.

  “She’s a fighter,” he said, at length. “She’s not going to give that bastard another victory.”

  Loki nodded, running a hand through his dark hair.

  “I should have gone in there with her.”

  “Then you’d both be in the ICU,” Marc replied. “Right?”

  The Icelander paused, sensing something unspoken.

  “What is wrong?”

  Marc moved so he was blocking the doorway, and nodded at Loki’s chest.

  “That ink. I’ve seen it before.”

  “Ah.” The other man halted. “Of course.” He opened his shirt again and tapped his chest. “You are afraid this makes me like Verbeke, yes? Because of the runes? Because I have respect for Odin and the old gods?”

  “You said it, pal, not me.”

  Anger flickered across the other man’s face.

  “I am proud of my heritage. Viking blood runs in my family. But never tell me I am like that man. That insults what this means.” He drew a line across the spindly runes over his skin. “Men like Verbeke have taken the meaning of these words and twisted them. Corrupted the beliefs of others and clothed themselves in it.” He shook his head. “They have no right. No honor. His kind would see me dead.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a wallet. “Let me show you something.”

  He removed a photo and handed it to Marc.

  The dog-eared picture showed the Icelander and another man, both of them dressed in snappy tuxedos. They were holding hands, showing off wedding rings and grinning. It reminded him of Ji-Yoo and her husband.

  “Cute couple,” Marc offered, handing it back. “Sorry. It’s been a tough day.”

  “Understandable,” said Loki.

  Marc shook his head. “That’s no excuse. Sowing division is what the Lion’s Roar does. That’s what this whole thing has been about, trying to turn one group of people on another.”

  He glanced over his shoulder and saw the al-Burani family gathered in a waiting area. They stayed close to each other, unwilling to go beyond arm’s reach.

  He walked across to them, throwing the husband a nod.

  “How are you holding up?”

  “They won’t tell us anything,” said Meddur. “They say we will not become sick, but nothing more. I think they’re going to deport us.”

  Marc remembered the faces of the refugees the Rubicon team had rescued from the waters of the Mediterranean, back before this had started. They had the same haunted, desperate look in their eyes, that fearful sense of events beyond their control moving around them.

  “None of this is your fault,” he said. “You’ll be okay.”

  Meddur looked away, shaking his head.

  “I will accept any punishment. I understand my responsibility. But my family…” He grasped his wife’s hand and squeezed it. “I only want them to be safe.”

  “I work for a man who might be able to help,” Marc told him. He turned to Sakina. “I want to thank you. You didn’t need to stay to help Lucy, you could have run before the cops arrived. You put yourselves at risk for her when you didn’t need to.”

  “She came to save us,” said Sakina. “I could not pay that back if we fled.” She gave a shaky smile. “I couldn’t let her die. And if we did flee, where could we go? We’ve been running since we left our home.”

  Marc’s smartphone buzzed in his back pocket and he sighed.

  “Excuse me, I have to take this.” He stepped away, pressing the phone to his ear. “Dane.”

  “I have something for you.” Assim sounded distant and strung-out, and Marc’s first thought was to ask him how much sleep he’d had in the last few days. “But, ah, can I ask…?”

  “She’s not out of the woods yet,” Marc told him, knowing the question before he asked it. “But you know Lucy. She’s tough.”

  “The team at Rubicon’s private clinic in Zurich are on standby,” he went on. “I’ve been trying to route a med-jet to Brussels, but it is taking too long. I might be able to arrange something else…” He faltered, running out of steam.

  “The board will let you do that?”

  “I didn’t ask the board. Mr. Solomon authorized it personally. We protect our own, he said.”

  “Yeah, we do.” Marc nodded to himself. “Don’t worry, she’s in good hands here. They can’t move her until she’s out of critical condition anyway.” He straightened, pushing his own fears aside for the moment. “You said you had something. Did you get a hit in Antwerp?”

  After his conversation with Jakobs, Marc’s first instinct had been to send a message to Assim with an emergency action request. The digital currency transactions they had captured days earlier had been their best source of intelligence for tracking the finances of the Lion’s Roar, and Marc’s instincts told him that there was still more they could learn from it, if only they looked in the right place.

  “I sifted the metadata for any hits corresponding to that city and there’s a cluster of payments from a month ago.”

  “Tell me you’ve found a location.”

  “Yes and no.” He could hear Assim frowning from half a world away. “I was able to narrow it down to a postal area in the city, the 2060 district, but that’s all.”

  “2060…” Marc repeated the number, rubbing the tiredness from his eyes. “All right, send me everything you have.”

  “I’m sorry, Marc.” The Saudi hacker sounded defeated. “Verbeke has covered his tracks here. He must have planned to use this as his escape route right from the start.”

  “We can still get him,” Marc said firmly. “Start digging into Bitcoin brokers on the dark web, look for anyone in Belgium in the market to exchange cryptocurrency for hard cash. Verbeke’s going to need ready money to get out of the country. We might be able to use that to tighten the noose.”

  “Will do.”

  Marc saw Meddur approaching and added one more thing.

  “And do us a favor, see
if you can get someone from that Emigrant Aid NGO up here.”

  As the call ended, Meddur gave Marc a questioning look.

  “Forgive me, but I heard you speaking to your colleague. You spoke about the 2060 … In Antwerp, yes?”

  “You know it?”

  Meddur nodded. “I have friends there, men I knew from our town back in Libya. It was where we hoped to go, when we first came to Belgium, but the traffickers who brought us into the country gave us no choice and forced us to settle in Brussels. The 2060 is like the Molenbeek here, it is the ghetto for people like us, from North Africa.”

  Marc felt a tingle in the back of his head, the sudden flash of hope.

  “The man we are looking for—Verbeke. He’s gone into hiding there.”

  “Are you sure?” Meddur’s expression shifted, a new determination appearing there. “If that is so … someone would know.”

  “These friends of yours.” Marc offered the man his smartphone. “Can you contact them?”

  “I can,” he said, catching on quickly.

  Meddur took the phone and began to pick meticulously at the keypad, dredging up a number from memory.

  Marc called out to the Icelander. “Oi, Loki!”

  “My name is Björn,” he replied wearily.

  “Don’t care,” Marc shot back. “Find Jakobs, will you? We just got back in the hunt.”

  * * *

  The shabby apartment at the top of the three-story block was barely decorated, with only a couple of beds, some chairs and a folding table. In the corner of the living room–kitchen area, a television played a newsfeed with the sound muted, showing footage of the chaos still unfolding in Benghazi.

  The room reeked of stale, over-spiced food, and Verbeke wanted nothing more than to fling open the windows and let in some of the rainy air outside. He had to remember to stay away from the windows and keep his face hidden behind the thick blackout drapes hung across them. He had no choice but to sit there and seethe, breathing through his mouth as every passing second dragged by like an hour.

  The belongings of whatever foreigners had lived here before he arrived were piled up into a heap of rubbish in the corner of one of the bedrooms, but even stripping the place of their traces wasn’t enough for him.

  He hated being here. He hated hearing the mongrels chattering endlessly through the paper-thin walls. Hated the smell of the place and the cooking stink constantly wafting up the stairwell, from the grimy fast food shop on the ground floor. He hated how these immigrants strutted around down on the street below, back and forth past the métro station across the way, as if they had a right to be here. He hated the Arabic scrawl on the signs over their squalid little storefronts.

  He hated, and hated, and hated, and there was no end to it. Noah Verbeke’s enmity was depthless and dark.

  It was the ultimate ignominy to be hiding here among those fit only to be his prey. The safe house was prepared and secure as promised, but to get there through the streets of Antwerp he had been forced to disguise himself. Hiding the wound from the glancing shot across his arm, the scratchy fake beard and the prayer cap had been enough to stop him drawing too much attention among the swarms of Muslims infesting this part of the city. Once inside and out of sight, he tore them off and spat on them, furious at the shame of it. To be forced to pretend to be one of them made a mockery of everything the Lion’s Roar stood for.

  Ticker was already there, of course, planning his own escape. The coward had been shocked to see him still alive. The hacker tried to frame his abandonment of Verbeke as some clever move on his part, but it was exactly what it seemed to be. When push came to shove, the rat-faced man could not be trusted to follow the cause. Ultimately, he was only interested in self-preservation, and Verbeke had already decided that he would kill Ticker once they were safely away, when he didn’t need him anymore. Hackers were greedy children at heart, and it wouldn’t be difficult to recruit another.

  “What?”

  Sitting at the table, Ticker had stopped hammering away at his laptop and was watching him suspiciously. Verbeke realized he had been staring at the other man, his hands clasping as he imagined crushing his throat.

  “Get back to work,” he growled.

  “I’m doing it,” Ticker whined, and pointed at the screen. “The 3G here is for shit, but I have word from our contact. Van’s gonna come pick us up after sundown, take us to the docks. Got a freighter to take us up the coast.”

  Verbeke considered that. Once they reached the North Sea, Ticker could be disposed of and that would be the end of it.

  “Course, that won’t mean shit if we don’t get the cash crossed over first, but I have a line on that.” Ticker hesitated before adding something more. “I told them there was just the two of us … right? I mean, Axelle, she—”

  “She what?” Verbeke rose and crossed the room to him. “Go on. Say it.”

  “She didn’t come back, which means—”

  “It means she’s dead. Can you get that?” Verbeke prodded him in the chest. “She gave her life for the Lion’s Roar—do you understand the courage that takes?” Ticker said nothing, as the storm of Verbeke’s fury filled the room. “This is a fucking war, you piece of shit.” He waved at the walls and the city outside the window. “We are deep in enemy territory, surrounded by these animals! You look out there and you see what they want, to swarm over everything and steal it from the whites. It takes courage to fight that. You don’t have what she did.”

  “I’m sorry about your woman,” Ticker managed, uncertain which reply would be the right one to give.

  For the briefest moment, a tiny ember of actual regret burned in Verbeke’s chest, the first tiny spark of an emotion that could have been sorrow, an acknowledgment that the woman had meant something to him. It brought a physical reaction with it, a twist of pain worse than the bullet wound.

  He stamped it out mercilessly, destroying the moment without compunction before it could fully form.

  That is weakness, he raged at himself. That is corrosion.

  “She’s dead,” Verbeke repeated, reining in his rage. “If you don’t want to end up the same way, do your job.”

  He turned away, without waiting for a response. His dark mood deepened as he glared at the images on the television.

  “This isn’t over,” Verbeke continued, jutting his chin at the scenes of horror and degradation unfolding on the screen. “We can make more of the weapon. We can keep striking back. It won’t end here.” His hands contracted into fists. “I will make sure it never ends.”

  * * *

  In an alleyway off Van Stralenstraat, a few blocks south of the Lion’s Roar safe house, a panel-sided beer truck was parked in the shadows cast by the fading day. Any passing observer would not have given it a second look, but if they had, they might have noted that no delivery was taking place.

  In reality, the truck belonged to the UCT, the undercover operations unit of the Belgian Federal Police’s counter-terrorist division. In the back, Marc sat across from a command and control console under the watchful eye of Nils Jakobs and the men from his command. It was cramped in there, along with the Icelander and Meddur al-Baruni, who rocked gently in his seat. The refugee was visibly nervous, surrounded as he was by armed police officers, the people he had been told would hunt him down like an animal.

  “Don’t worry,” Marc told him. “This’ll be over soon.”

  Loki shot him a questioning look. The Icelandic cop knew that was not a given, just as Marc did, but he wasn’t about to correct him in front of the civilian.

  “This is as close as we can get,” announced Jakobs. “Verbeke was trained in counter-terror operations. He knows what to watch for, he knows our playbook. I’m reluctant to send anyone in while it’s still daylight.”

  “It won’t be dark for hours,” said Loki. “Do we want to wait that long?”

  Marc glanced at Meddur. The man had been as good as his word, and used his contacts in Antwerp to ask around, looking f
or any sign of new arrivals in the 2060. Sure enough, there was mention of two men taking up residence in an apartment where the previous family had suddenly been evicted with no explanation. The men had arrived a couple of hours after the incident in Brussels.

  “They said they looked like converts,” noted Meddur. “Both Europeans. One of them large, the other with dark hair.”

  “Ticker and Verbeke,” said Marc, “hiding in plain sight. Cheeky bastards.”

  He removed a hard-side case made of gray armored plastic from his daypack, and spoke into a voice-activated lock on the side. It snapped open and from within he recovered a ruggedized tablet computer. Assim Kader had arranged for the gear to be in Brussels when Marc and Lucy had flown in from Germany, but aside from the pistol, he’d had little opportunity to use most of it. As the computer booted up, Marc was struck by a moment of cold familiarity.

  Back in the van again, he told himself. Some things never change.

  For a long time, this had been his posting in OpTeam Nomad, working as a field support officer for MI6’s strike teams, monitoring from a distance while others went in harm’s way.

  But that past Marc Dane seemed like a stranger—the man who had chosen not to take any risks, the one who had kept on what seemed like the safer path. He wasn’t that person anymore. Marc had learned to his dire cost that there was no safe path.

  Risk wasn’t something you could hold at bay, not if you lived in this world. Now it was something that he sought out, a phantom from his past he felt compelled to confront over and over again.

  The shadow at my heels, he thought.

  “I would welcome any input from our observers,” said Jakobs, resting heavily on his stick.

  “I have some new intel,” said Marc, reading off his screen. On the drive north from Brussels, he had been busy coordinating with Assim, trawling through the illegal money-changers of the dark web, looking for a telltale spike of digital traffic. “Ticker’s set up a meeting with a buyer. He’s going to exchange one of the Bitcoin drives for a bag of euros.”

  “Where and when?” said Jakobs.