Shadow Code (A John Kovac Thriller Book 2) (John Kovac Thriller Series)

by David Caris

‘They’re planning some kind of attack. Tomorrow morning. Some kind of anniversary thing. Paris. They’ve timed it.’

  ‘Anniversary? What kind of anniversary?’

  ‘The woman said it was personal. The French guys are attacking Elementary schools.’ He tried to roll onto his side. ‘You’re finished. Your whole fucking company’s going down, and you deserve it.’

  Luther stood, putting down the iron and reaching for the table to steady himself.

  He remained like that for a long moment, thinking.

  Megan said: ‘It’s true. Kovac confirmed it. He’s trying to stop it, but he thinks there could be more.’

  Luther looked at her, confused, then stared down at Van Heythuysen. ‘Tell me everything you know.’

  ‘Go to hell.’

  Luther lined up one foot and delivered a savage stomp to the bridge of Van Heythuysen’s nose. He heard it crack, and blood ran thick and wet and fast. He did it again, then a third time, though with a little less heel now. He took satisfaction in Van Heythuysen’s eyes, which rolled back in their sockets, struggling to orientate.

  Van Heythuysen let out a deep, guttural groan.

  Or was it a sob?

  ‘Where is Bibi Dauguet?’

  Van Heythuysen tried to speak, but ended up coughing blood onto the carpet. He spat, and a tooth came with it.

  Luther picked up the hot iron again. ‘Where is she?’ he asked, as Megan reached for his shoulder and shook her head.

  He shrugged her off. ‘Where is she, Van Heythuysen? I’m not going to ask again. I’ll melt your face. I’ll go at it until there’s nothing but bone.’

  ‘I don’t know who that is,’ he spluttered, his voice rising. ‘I don’t. She doesn’t tell me that kind of thing. She was in Paris, but she was talking about Spain at… for the anniversary. She’s going there. To light a candle, she said. I… I have her number. Her cell phone number, it’s in my phone. She’s in as “January”. That’s the month she first contacted me.’

  He pointed to a cell phone on a bedside table.

  Luther nodded for Megan to grab it, before pointing back towards the door. ‘Bring my guy in. He can take this asshole out into the forest.’

  Megan didn’t look happy with this plan, but this time she didn’t argue.

  ‘Please,’ Van Heythuysen said. ‘You’ll never hear from me again. Let me go.’

  Luther took the phone from Megan and brought it back to Van Heythuysen. ‘Which number is it? Unlock it. Which number is Dauguet’s?’

  ‘I told you. “January”.’ Van Heythuysen entered his fingerprint and called up the number in his phone log. Luther watched, then snatched the phone back from him. He deactivated its security, replacing it with a simple four-digit pin he used for everything. He turned to see his bodyguard standing over Van Heythuysen, studying the damage.

  ‘You did all this?’ he asked.

  When he met Luther’s eye, there was a new respect.

  ‘Take him somewhere where there aren’t roads, cars, phones… nothing at all. Strip him, dump him in a room, lock it and guard it. I’ll send someone to take it from there.’

  The bodyguard nodded, albeit with a frown. He circled around Van Heythuysen, squatted and looped his arms under Van Heythuysen’s armpits. He started dragging him towards the bathroom, where he pulled him up onto his feet. ‘Okay,’ he said, stepping in and turning on the shower. ‘Let’s get you looking a bit more presentable before we hit the street, shall we?’ He dragged a wobbly Van Heythuysen in and shut the door behind him.

  Megan said: ‘I messed up. I thought…’

  ‘This changes everything, Megan. Everything.’ Luther took her by the arms. ‘Listen to me, what I said before, back in the cafe, I was wrong. You were right. You were absolutely right. I had lost my mind, and I don’t have any excuse. I just need you to hear it from me now, that plan is dead.’

  He waited until Megan nodded, then sat her down on the end of the bed. ‘You said it was an update from Kapoor, from Wilson Software Solutions that caused this. Where did you say you heard that? From Juliette?’

  ‘Juliette’s in hospital. I got it from her team. They think they know how this was done. Whoever’s attacking us – Dauguet, it seems – inserted malicious code into… a DLL I think they said it was. Wilson Software Solutions then delivered that to us as trusted third-party software.’ She exhaled, as if trying to steady her nerves. Her hands, both shaking, flapped outwards. ‘I don’t know. I’m not a computer person. Long story short, Kapoor ran an update, and we said fine.’

  ‘Kapoor delivered the worm,’ Luther said to himself.

  ‘They think it sat inside our system for a while. Weeks maybe, dormant, waiting.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I don’t know. There was stuff about establishing backdoors, about a hands-on keyboard attack… I didn’t understand much of it. There was credential theft, too. That’s what helped it spread.’

  Luther’s bodyguard reemerged from the bathroom. Trailing him was a sedate, still groggy Van Heythuysen.

  The bodyguard opened the door to the hallway and eased Van Heythuysen out. Luther would’ve liked to keep both men on hand, but it was more important to be able to exit the hotel. ‘Take a side door or rear exit,’ he said to the bodyguard. ‘We’ll exit via the lobby when we’re done here.’

  He nodded. ‘I wiped down the bathroom. You’re right to do the rest?’ He nodded to the blood on the carpet. ‘They’ll send police up when they find all this.’

  ‘I know.’

  Chapter 60

  With the bodyguard and Van Heythuysen gone, Luther took out his phone and arranged a conference call on speaker. He rang Bishop, and as soon as he had Bishop on the line, he asked Megan if she had a number for Kovac.

  She retrieved Kovac’s new burner number from her own phone and read it to him, and Luther added it to the call.

  When Kovac answered, Luther put the phone down on the table but got in first: ‘You’re on the line with me, Bishop and Megan. How much do you know, Kovac?’

  There was a pause, then Kovac’s voice came through along with a little burst of static: ‘It’s Bibi Dauguet, right?’

  ‘She’s Rose’s older sister,’ Luther said, nodding.

  ‘That’s what I figured. How much has Megan told you? There’s another guy Bibi has, called Malone. I think it’s personal for him, too. As for Griffin, I think she was just trying to help us. She’s possibly the only reason we’re still in this fight.’ There was a pause, then Kovac added: ‘Bishop, if we go on the offensive, who do we have that can help?’

  ‘Just the men I had at the soccer stadium, except for the guy who was sitting beside you, Kovac. He’s got a sick grandkid he’s visiting.’

  ‘What about the guy I crash tackled?’

  ‘He wasn’t ours,’ Bishop said. ‘Given what you did to him, I figured you knew that.’

  ‘Nope.’

  There was a tense pause.

  Luther said: ‘So we have Bibi and two hostiles – Malone and another man. And we have Bibi’s phone number. Bishop, I’ll send it to you after this call. Trace it. We think maybe Spain. Something to do with an anniversary, lighting candles.’

  Megan said: ‘We’ve got Van Heythuysen, too.’

  ‘Who?’ Bishop asked.

  ‘He’s a coder,’ Luther said. ‘We bought software from him called DELPHI, remember?’

  ‘The fat kid?’ Bishop asked. ‘The psycho?’

  ‘That’s right. The software the French Government’s trialing.’ Luther realized he was going to need to explain DELPHI to Kovac. ‘As you may or may not know, Kovac, we built a data center in Vienna. The aim was to break into IaaS cloud computing but that didn’t work out. We arrived far too late and we failed to grab market share. So I started looking for an alternative use for the asset.’

  ‘That’s how you came across Van Heythuysen?’ Kovac asked, through thick static.

  Luther leaned a little closer to the phone, speaking as loudly and c
learly as he could. ‘That’s right. He’d spent something like a decade working on an algorithm he said located potential terrorists. I’ll spare you the technical details, but suffice to say it hacked and utilized ISPs to psychologically profile internet users. Nobody wanted to touch it, because it was a regulatory nightmare.’

  ‘So why us?’ Kovac asked.

  ‘When I asked around, it turned out the French were open to a trial. So I made a pitch for it. Van Heythuysen didn’t have a clue about business and I screwed him out of his life’s work. I make no apology for that. He wouldn’t have got it off the ground anyway. At least with me, it got its trial, and I figured maybe it would do some good in the world. Maybe even prevent a terror attack one day.’

  Luther glanced at Megan, who didn’t look convinced by this argument.

  He turned away towards the window and pressed on with his explanation. ‘I was also interested in the way DELPHI made use of edge computing, reducing demand on the cloud. I figured if that became a thing, Curzon would have a head start and we wouldn’t arrive late to the party like we did with IaaS. The trial with the French Government is legitimate and it’s legal – at least under the new frameworks they developed to accommodate it.’ He paused, knowing what came next wouldn’t be so easy. ‘Obviously, I don’t like to have all eggs crammed into one basket though, so I also arranged to trial DELPHI in-house. I turned to an old friend of mine, Virat Kapoor. I owed him, and he had fallen on hard times, so I gave him the work. Payment on completion. Cash. He was testing DELPHI for me, under the in-house title Aurelius. We were passing it off as accounting work.’

  ‘The software Griffin was trying to warn us about,’ Megan said under her breath.

  Luther didn’t look back at her. He remained focused on the phone. ‘It seems that in-house trial was compromised by Dauguet, and I suspect it’s how she hacked us so comprehensively. My guess is, Kapoor betrayed me as soon as he had the opportunity. There was some history there, and it seems he knew about it. If so, he had every reason to hold a grudge.’

  Luther waited, listening to the static on the line, trying to gauge Kovac’s reaction to all this. But there was silence. Both from Megan behind him, and from Kovac and Bishop. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there you have it. The question now is, what do we do? With Dauguet using DELPHI for recruitment rather than to arrest potential terrorists, she has a near-endless supply of martyrs. And thanks to Bishop’s work with Mehmood, we also know she has BoNT. Enough of it to kill millions.’

  ‘Cuenca,’ Kovac said.

  Luther looked at Megan quizzically, then picked the phone up. ‘What was that, Kovac?’

  ‘She’s going to the city where I neutralized Rose. You said she was going to Spain for an anniversary? Tomorrow’s nine years to the day, and Dauguet still thinks her attack in Paris is a go. If she’s lighting candles, my guess is she’ll do it where Rose died.’

  ‘What’s Paris?’ Luther asked.

  ‘The elementary schools,’ Megan said, as Kovac spoke over her:

  ‘We can’t be sure, but we’re possibly out in front of Dauguet for the first time since this started. She might just go to the site where her sister died. That would give us a fixed location and time.’

  ‘And if you’re wrong?’ Megan asked.

  Kovac ignored this too: ‘Bishop, get what you can on that phone number, then get moving.’

  Bishop said nothing, but Luther heard him zip something.

  Already packing the trusty old duffel bag?

  He said: ‘If Kovac’s right about this, Bishop, we’ll only get one shot at Dauguet. What are your thoughts?’

  ‘You have a better idea?’ The question wasn’t rhetorical; it was clear from his tone Bishop genuinely wanted to know.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me either.’

  ‘Then I’ll need a plane,’ said Kovac. ‘I’m still in Europe, but not close enough to Cuenca to make it there on time. And I suggest we keep this just to the four of us. We don’t know who we can trust, and we can’t afford leaks of any kind. If Bibi hears about our plan, she’ll change hers up, and we’ll lose our one shot.’

  ‘Agreed.’ Luther went for a cloth to start wiping down the room. He had more to ask Bishop about the rogue journalist, Yvette Morris, but that could wait for now. ‘I’ll send you Dauguet’s number and flight details, Bishop, and we’ll meet you at Heathrow in a few hours. You’ll fly with me and Megan. My plane’s still there. Kovac, what’s your nearest city?’

  ‘I can do anything south of Paris,’ Kovac said. ‘We’ll need to buy whatever we can in Spain?’

  ‘Correct,’ Bishop said.

  ‘Okay. I’ll see if I can find something en route.’ Kovac hung up.

  Luther shared another look with Megan, then said: ‘Bishop, I’ll be in touch.’ He ended the call. ‘Okay, help me wipe down this room. Let’s move.’

  Chapter 61

  Anna’s emergency call was to Kovac.

  She made it from her own phone, wanting to take Kovac up on his offer of help. But he didn’t answer.

  She tried again.

  Same outcome.

  On her third go, she caved and left a message: ‘I told you to leave me alone. Now Bishop has me. We’re…’ She looked around in the dark.

  Where the fuck were they?

  Anna had to assume Bishop was monitoring her phone. He was probably monitoring everything: her ID, her bank accounts… Bishop would be nervous about Kovac getting to her and asking questions about Japan. He would come back. He would kill her. She was sure of it.

  ‘Which way?’ Yvette asked.

  Yvette was the reason Anna was out here, running for her life in the middle of nowhere. It was Yvette who had first convinced Anna to escape. She had found a way to force a boarded-up window open, immediately after Bishop dumped her in the room.

  Anna looked around in the dark. They had been running since slipping out that window, their hands zip-tied in front of them. Bishop hadn’t stayed more than a few minutes, and they had timed their escape to coincide with him leaving. The other man – the tall man – had been distracted, too. He was helping Bishop load things into the car.

  At first, in their blind panic, they had almost run clean off a cliff edge. Thankfully though, Bishop hadn’t heard Yvette scream. He had gone ahead and driven out, none the wiser. And as far as Anna could tell he was yet to return.

  Since then, Anna and Yvette had been running: now moving inland, and slowly making their way across vast, dark paddocks. Yvette had rolled her ankle, but they were making progress. They were at a road – the first they had encountered in what had to have been a mile or more of running.

  It was two lanes, but there weren’t any signs. The road disappeared into darkness in each direction. No headlights…

  Shit.

  But someone would come. Surely. They could hitchhike, make their way into a nearby town and find transport back to London.

  At least, that was Anna’s plan. Yvette was still talking crazy. She wanted to go to the police. She was a journalist, she said. She was writing an article on Curzon. But for all that, she didn’t seem to know the first thing about the company. She thought police could help. Anna knew better. Anna was terrified of Bishop, and had been ever since Japan. She knew her best hope, paradoxically, was Curzon’s inhouse hitman, John Kovac. Only Kovac could take on Bishop. And he had promised, if it came to it, that he would.

  Anna checked her phone again.

  Nothing.

  She had grabbed the device on the way out of the house. She had seen it in the laundry room along with her jacket as they circled the rear of the building, and she had risked ducking back to grab it. Yvette had been at her to call emergency services ever since, but Anna couldn’t bring herself to do it. She knew that would be the end of them. They would never hear sirens, never see police lights coming down the road. Instead, police would arrive to a pair of corpses.

  And even if they did live long enough to end up in a police station, how long would Cur
zon tolerate that sort of exposure?

  ‘If you won’t call anyone useful, switch it off,’ Yvette said, her Irish accent softening what was in fact a command.

  Anna shut the device down again. She had been turning it on every five minutes since escaping, always to try Kovac and only Kovac, but Yvette was right. It was too risky. Even with the GPS off, which it was.

  They started along the side of the road, Anna following Yvette. There was something unpleasant about her, with her pixie cut and air of superiority, as if she alone knew what was best for them.

  She didn’t know Curzon.

  So Anna tried yet again to explain it all. As they walked, alone save for the sound of insects, she told Yvette about Japan, about Kovac, about Bishop buying her off. Yvette said nothing. She was circumspect, even guarded. She walked with a limp, routinely checking behind them for headlights. ‘Can you at least promise you won’t go to the police?’ Anna asked. ‘They can’t stop a guy like Bishop.’

  ‘And do what instead?’

  ‘Get a ride back to London.’

  ‘How? We don’t have money.’

  ‘We’ll hitchhike or… I don’t know. We’ll find a way. There has to be a way.’

  Anna was starting to panic. Maybe there wasn’t a way. She stopped walking and turned her phone back on, struggling to handle it with the zip ties. She tried Kovac again, and when he didn’t answer she memorized his number.

  He had said he would help.

  ‘Jesus, will you switch that thing off already?’

  Anna clicked the screen to black and threw the phone as hard as she could – which wasn’t very hard at all with the zip ties. Still, it was light, and it sailed well out into the adjacent, dark paddock.

  ‘What did you just do?’ Yvette demanded, spinning on her and glaring in the scant moonlight. ‘Was that our phone?’

  ‘My phone. And like I told you already, if I can’t get a hold of Kovac it’s useless. Worse than useless. You’re right, they’ll just use it to track us. Now they can waste their time looking for us here.’

  ‘It’s still on?’

  ‘It’ll act as a decoy.’