Shadow

by James Swallow

  The bag contained a dozen rectangular metal ingots, each one the size of a paperback book. Marc picked one at random, looking it over. Hard drives, commercial high-density solid-state units, a few of them scratched and dented where they had been stripped from the frames that had held the devices in their servers. It was the Bitcoin bounty from the Frigga facility, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of digital ghost money.

  Marc opened the window and yelled down to the street.

  “Oi!”

  Loki emerged from the doorway and looked up, frowning.

  “You found him?”

  “He found me,” Marc corrected. “Got something for you.”

  He stuffed the laptop in the bag, then hefted it up over the windowsill and waited a count before letting it drop. The Icelandic cop stepped up smartly to catch it as it fell.

  “Merry Christmas,” Marc added.

  He walked back out on to the landing, feeling flashes of pain in his arm with each motion. A few apartments along, doors were open and some of the other residents clustered worriedly on the threshold, afraid of what the commotion in the hallway might presage.

  “It’s okay.” Marc tried to wave them away, wincing as the movement sent stabs of new agony through his shoulder. “I’m … uh … with the police. Go back inside. Everything is okay…”

  When he reached the balustrade and looked down, he realized that everything was far from okay. Where Noah Verbeke’s body had been lying only moments ago, there were a few spatters of blood and nothing else.

  * * *

  Marc descended the stairwell in quick jumps, cannoning from corner to corner, keeping his pistol close to his chest. Reaching the ground floor hallway, he skidded to a halt, panting hard, peering into the shadows. It was noisier down here, with a steady burble of Middle Eastern music coming through the door that led into the takeaway fast food joint adjoining the apartment building. Across the way, the hall narrowed into a short corridor that ended in a heavy security door at the front entrance.

  He started toward it. If Verbeke had gone that way, he would have run straight into Loki. Marc looked back in the opposite direction. The doors over there opened out to a narrow back alley filled with rubbish bins, a path that would only lead to where Jakobs and his men were waiting.

  Which had to mean that the target was still in the building.

  Marc heard a huff of heavy, labored breath behind him and whirled around. There was a trash chute in the corner of the hallway that he had missed on his way in, and in the shadows it cast there was more than enough room for a man as big as Verbeke to hide.

  The thug was injured and he was moving slower, but still he had the drop on Marc. A savage blow came out of the gloom and struck him broadside across the chest. It was like being hit by the branch of an oak tree. Marc’s own forward motion supplied most of the force and he crashed to the ground.

  Verbeke swept in and stamped on his forearm, ripping a cry from his lips. The blow didn’t land straight, so bones didn’t break, but it was enough to jolt the Glock out of Marc’s grip. Scrambling, Marc rolled away, trying to find his way back to the gun.

  The other man wasn’t about to let that happen. His combat boot connected with Marc’s hip with enough force to lift him off the floor and flip him over. Marc sucked in a breath, turning to shout out toward the front door, hoping he could project it enough to get Loki’s attention. Verbeke kicked him again, knocking the air from him in a rush. Pain-fires lit up along his side and he lost a moment to the rippling agony down his torso.

  Then Verbeke dragged him off the floor and Marc swung a punch, hitting his attacker in the head. The bigger man’s face was a mess of scratches and contusions, his eyes wide and wild, his teeth bared and pink with his own blood. With a wordless snarl, Verbeke threw Marc against the wall. He deflected off the frame of a door and struck wood. The door swung open under him and Marc fell backward into the clammy, brightly lit interior of the takeaway. He tasted stale air, heavy with the odor of sharp spices.

  Marc slipped over a cracked vinyl table, knocking aside squeeze bottles of ketchup and mustard, before his stumble was abruptly halted as he fell against the glass frontage of a food counter.

  The fast food place was empty except for a skinny Moroccan man in a grubby white smock, who stood in shocked silence behind the counter. Marc barely registered him as the cook shook out of his surprise and set off a string of invective in his direction, complaining vociferously over the loud music on the radio.

  Verbeke was right there, never giving Marc a moment to catch a breath, storming toward him, charging in.

  Marc brought up his hands in a boxer’s defensive posture, twisting to avoid another rain of hammer-like blows from the bigger man. Verbeke missed with one shot and put his fist clean through the glass of the counter, spilling shards over the tubs of food behind it.

  The guy in the smock snatched up a lengthy chef’s knife and turned his ire on Verbeke, waving the blade in his direction and saying something about “Polis, Polis!”

  Marc took the distraction and backed off, but he had no way out on to the street, and with the braying music filling the air, he could fire off a shotgun and the sound of the blast would have been lost.

  Verbeke sent a punch across the top of the counter, the blow machine-fast and unstoppable, hitting the cook squarely in the head. He fell down and disappeared behind the counter, but not before Verbeke snatched the grimy knife out of his hand. Then he turned and stalked after Marc, flipping the blade about to present it in a fighter’s grip, the cutting edge out.

  Searching for something to put between them, Marc grabbed the back of a chair and pulled, but the plastic seat didn’t move an inch, the feet bolted right into the floor.

  The knife glittered dully as it came at him and he jerked back, flinching away as it slashed the air. The blade was sharp enough to open his throat if it came close enough, and Verbeke palmed it from hand to hand, making shapes in the air with the tip. He was wheezing through the pain of cracked ribs and stinging lacerations, but grinning that feral grin all the way. The bastard was actually enjoying this.

  Verbeke backed Marc into a corner, cutting off any avenue of escape. The blade flashed again and Marc ducked, bolting for a door at the back of the takeaway that had to lead to a kitchen, and another way out.

  The chef’s knife came at him as Verbeke came in for a stab and Marc twisted his body. He felt the tip pull at the baggy material of his hooded sweatshirt, barely missing his flesh as it pinned the hoodie to the door behind him. The blow was so forceful the knife passed through the wood and stuck there.

  Marc lashed out with a vicious double-hit, first a rabbit-punch to the wound in Verbeke’s arm and then a strike with the heel of his hand into Verbeke’s blooded nose. The two men were so close, it was impossible to miss his target, and the kinetics of the blows forced the kitchen door open behind him. Marc pulled away, the hoodie ripping open as he tore from the blade and retreated into the preparation area.

  If it was hot and close in the grubby little café, then the kitchen was ten times worse in half the space. The galley-sized area was home to a hissing, oil-smeared oven and hot plates filmed with years-old layers of grease. Stacks of dirty pots and pans were heaped on drying racks around a stained metal sink. A large walk-in refrigerator, too big for the tiny area, had been retrofitted into one corner. There was a heavy fire exit door on the far wall, but Marc’s heart sank when he saw it was held shut with a bicycle chain-lock.

  He’d trapped himself in a dead-end space, and the only way out was through the man trying to kill him.

  Marc grabbed the first thing that could serve as a weapon—a saucepan with a heavy copper bottom—and used it like a bludgeon. He slammed the flat of the pan into Verbeke’s head with a satisfying crunch, reeling it back for a second blow.

  Blood gushed in free flow from the other man’s ruined nose, over his mouth and chin, a red spatter collecting on the front of his jacket and the T-shirt beneath. H
e resembled some mad-eyed Dark Age berserker, a comparison that Verbeke would doubtless have relished.

  The man had been given the opportunity to escape, but once more the truth of who he was became apparent. Noah Verbeke was brutal for brutality’s sake, and whatever grand plans he might have for inflicting greater pain on his enemies, he liked the taste of blood above everything else. The abstract way of killing—of bombs and deadly infections, of death inflicted from distance—would never be enough. He wanted to get his hands dirty, to kill up close.

  Marc hit him again and Verbeke shrugged it off, cuffing the pan away and out of his sweat-slick fingers. With a weighty backhand, the bigger man knocked him into a pile of plates and Marc’s head rang like a bell.

  Verbeke wiped red spittle across his sleeve and tilted his head, eyeing his opponent.

  “You should have shot me dead from a mile away,” he said thickly. “Flattened this place with a drone strike. Stormed it with a hundred jackboots. Instead you came on your own.”

  “I’m not on my own,” Marc retorted, around a wheezing breath.

  “You are,” Verbeke insisted. “Your mongrel bitch will be dead by now. Those chems she sucked down, it’s a bad way to go.” He laughed wetly. “But you know that. You watch the news. One more animal corpse. Send it back to Africa, eh? Burn her with all the rest.” He spat on the floor. “We’ll make this continent pure, you’ll see. Purge it. Become the fortress we used to be. And then we’ll sit back and watch the rest of the lesser races die off. The weak perish and the strong survive. How it should be.” Verbeke’s eyes shone at the thought of it. “How it will be.”

  For a moment, the fury that had been pushing Marc through faded like the wind changing direction. He felt empty and dejected at the prospect of a man like the one standing before him.

  “You—your kind. There’s no end, is there? No bottom to the well. Just hate and fucking bile going on forever.”

  Verbeke showed his shark’s smile.

  “It’s glorious, isn’t it?”

  Marc’s anger came back in a hot wave, instantly rekindled by the sneering, hateful contempt on the other’s man’s face.

  Right about one thing, he thought. We should have killed him.

  He moved before Verbeke could stop him, bringing down his fist on one of the scattered plates, breaking it into jagged wedges of ceramic. Marc snatched up the biggest piece and launched himself at the other man. He jammed the makeshift dagger into his chest, feeling the tip pierce flesh and glance off his ribs.

  Verbeke howled and retaliated, hitting Marc so hard that for a second he almost blacked out, feeling the floor move under him and the dizzying sense of the room spinning. He slammed into the door of the refrigerator, and barely ducked out of the way before a fist slammed into the metal. The broken shard of plate was still stuck in him, but Verbeke kept on going, each blow he didn’t land putting a massive dent in the door plate.

  Marc snagged the handle and pulled hard on it. With a gust of freezing cold air the refrigerator door creaked open, and he put his shoulder to it, swinging it wide to slam the corner of it into Verbeke’s face. He let go and stumbled away, trying to gain some distance, but the floor around the overfilled sink was slippery and he fell down on one knee.

  “Enough … bullshit…” gasped Verbeke.

  He pulled a meat cleaver off a rack on the wall and advanced on Marc.

  In the damp, slimy space beneath the sink there were dozens of plastic bottles and battered aerosols. Marc snatched up a dirty orange can and mashed the nozzle, spraying an acrid haze of oven cleaner into the air.

  With his face covered in dozens of open cuts, the fine mist burned Verbeke like acid and he let out a strangled scream. He slapped at his face, the cleaver dropped and forgotten.

  Marc rose, bracing his hands on the sink and the cleaning rack on either side of him, enough that he could swing both legs up and plant a double-kick squarely in the bigger man’s gut. Verbeke toppled backward and fell into the open walk-in refrigerator, crashing down through wire shelves and frost-slick boxes of frozen meat.

  Marc charged at the door, reaching into the torn hoodie’s belly pocket for his last-ditch weapons, the other party tricks he had taken from the Belgian cops. Back in Iceland, Verbeke and his cronies had used something similar on him and Lucy, and now Marc was going to return the favor.

  He pulled the pins on the two knurled black cylinders in his hand, letting their spring-loaded trigger plates fly away. Verbeke was already hauling himself back to his feet, as Marc threw the M84 stun grenades into the cold store and slammed the door shut. He jammed the latch closed as the big man charged the door in desperate panic, making the entire thing rock on its mountings.

  Then the grenades detonated inside the cramped space, with brilliant flashes of million-candlepower light and roaring screams of hundred-decibel sound.

  * * *

  Delancort stepped off the launch and on to the deck of the Themis, his brow furrowing as he saw that he was not the only person who had been summoned to the yacht. Beneath a folding pergola over the aft of the vessel, seats had been arranged for the members of Rubicon’s board of directors and their aides, and he was the last of them to arrive.

  Gerhard Keller gave him a wan salute with a glass of sparkling water and smiled.

  “Ah, Henri is here.” The German financier glanced around at the others. “Perhaps now we can get some answers?”

  “Where’s Ekko?” Esther McFarlane sat as deep in the shade as she could get, frowning at him from behind dark glasses and a sun hat. As usual, the woman didn’t waste time with any preamble. “If he wanted to talk to us, we could be doing it in a nice air-conditioned room.”

  She waved dismissively at the blue waters where the Themis was anchored, a short distance off the coast.

  Delancort looked back in the direction of the Monte Carlo skyline and the Rubicon tower in particular. Bringing them out here was a theatrical gesture, something that Ekko Solomon was not known for. Delancort’s employer was far too direct for that kind of thing. He clearly had something else in mind.

  “I know as much as you do,” he replied, finding an empty seat next to Victor Cruz. The Chilean was the only member of the group who seemed comfortable being there, and he basked in the bright Monaco sunshine.

  How much of that is a false front?

  Since the board’s arrival and the delivery of their ultimatum, Solomon had barely spoken to Delancort. It felt as if things were coming to a head. Delancort had tried several times to rein in Solomon’s desires to pursue dangerous challenges and risk Rubicon’s involvement in increasingly perilous extra-legal situations, but with little effect.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in Solomon’s cause. Delancort understood that the world was a harsh place where the disenfranchised and the unfortunate were continually victimized, and he was willing to do all he could to help. But step by step, Solomon had shaped Rubicon’s Special Conditions Division into a task force that operated above the law, and done it without any oversight.

  Solomon’s vessel, named after the Greek Titaness of justice, was an example of his crusade made manifest. The gigayacht was all smooth-lined luxury, but it also contained a compact crisis center on the lower decks and enough military grade hardware on board to outfit a special forces unit. He glanced at Cruz, Keller and McFarlane, wondering if they knew about that.

  How much of what the SCD have done has he kept from them? The thought bled into another, more cutting question. How much has Solomon kept from me?

  Delancort knew there were operations that had not been documented, missions from the earliest days of the SCD that left no trace. Despite the warmth of the day, he suppressed a shiver. Being on the inside of the circle of Solomon’s trust had made it easier to overlook those possibilities, but his brief experience of being outside it sent his thoughts back to the matter of exactly how much he didn’t know.

  The glass doors at the back of the yacht’s lounge opened and Solomon ste
pped through. It was rare to see him in anything other than an impeccably tailored Savile Row suit; however, today the man was dressed in a short-sleeved cotton shirt, tan trousers and deck shoes. His eyes were hidden behind mirrored sunglasses, and despite his casual attire, his manner was stiff and formal. In one hand he carried a tablet computer, one of the military-specification portable units from the crisis room.

  “Thank you for coming,” he rumbled. Solomon did not sit at first, taking them in with a measuring look. “Before we get down to business, I wanted to inform you that our assistance to the humanitarian effort in Libya is going well. We coordinated with United Nations medical teams and Médecins Sans Frontières. The disaster relief units shipped to Benghazi have made a great difference there.”

  “The outbreak has been contained, then?” said Keller.

  “Indeed,” replied Solomon. “The situation is fluid, but it appears that the spread of the contagion was far less than first expected.”

  Delancort saw McFarlane nodding.

  “This is the kind of work the Rubicon Group should be seen to be doing. In the public eye, in the light of day.”

  Solomon stiffened. The Scottish woman’s comment immediately changed the tone of the conversation.

  “You have completed your review of the Special Conditions Division,” he said.

  Cruz frowned. “Well, there are still some areas that need—”

  “You have completed your review,” Solomon repeated, making it clear the statement was not a question. “This has gone on long enough. If you have issues to bring to me, now is the time. Speak plainly.”

  McFarlane, Cruz and Keller exchanged glances, and the German was the one to reply.