Rogue

by James Swallow

  The fire on board had done a lot of damage, but it set the barge into a kind of half-capsize that put out the flames and left it in its present, not-quite-destroyed state.

  Marc swam up to the rail on the submerged deck and took hold. He blinked behind the mask, working the regulator in his mouth and failing to get comfortable with it.

  A brief, deep sleep on the jet was the only rest he’d had in the last twelve hours, and he was feeling it. They were in the shallows here, a few metres down, but still Marc was labouring each breath.

  You shouldn’t be doing this, he told himself. You get tired and you make mistakes.

  But what the hell else could they do? Lucy was up on the dock, covering them and watching for the local cops. Ari was back at the airport with Assim, doing their best to maintain the lie of the fake flight plan the hacker had spun up. Nothing the SCD team were doing on Rhodes was good enough to withstand any solid scrutiny from the Greek authorities. This was about as quick and dirty as it could be, and all of them knew they were one mistake away from arrest and incarceration.

  Marc found a collapsed skylight and pointed it out to Malte, who nodded again. Switching on a waterproof flashlight tethered to his wrist, Marc pushed off with a deft flick of his fins and dropped inside.

  The barge’s interior was a mess. The main open section was completely flooded, and through a side door Marc saw a shimmering mirror, indicating the area of the boat where a pocket of air was still trapped. Everything loose had been stirred up by the sinking, creating a slow-moving snowstorm of rubbish and gritty particles.

  The torch beam picked out what had probably been the main living and sleeping area. Burn-damaged chairs, a smashed television and a collapsed workbench were visible past a curtain of floating, discarded blankets.

  Malte followed him in and settled on the deck, but then kicked off again in a sudden gush of bubbles as the barge gave a low moan and shifted alarmingly. The wreck was dangerously unstable.

  The Finn gave Marc the I’m OK signal and Marc returned it. Slow and steady, the two of them spread out and scouted the compartment.

  Sam had been here and set this place alight on her way out. Marc considered that grimly, trying to put himself in her mindset. It wasn’t the best way to sanitise a location, but it was expedient. Burning it down should have destroyed anything left behind, and that might have worked if the barge itself hadn’t taken on water too soon.

  There was a chance that something, some clue, was still in here. He held onto that hope, even as another, more candid part of himself wondered if this was a waste of effort. Sam Green was trained the same way Marc had been, trained to make sure every location was left as clean as possible for just this reason.

  He moved through a web of ruined, shredded paper, remnants from whatever files, photos and maps Sam’s team had been using. None of it was salvageable, legible.

  Light moved over the floor, and Marc turned as Malte drifted towards him. In his hands, the other man held blackened, melted blobs of plastic. He offered up cracked circuit boards and heat-seared panels for Marc to inspect. All of it had been in the middle of the fire, most likely doused in kerosene before Sam had struck the match.

  Marc took the ruined bits of hardware. The first was the slagged, useless remains of a compact digital printer. He shook his head and tossed it away. But the second item was something else. He gripped the torch and shone it down.

  Malte had found part of a satellite communications unit, the broken thing still trailing wires.

  A wireless comms node, thought Marc. This is what was talking to those drones in Cyprus. The presence of the device as good as confirmed the lead that had brought them here, but it opened up a whole new problem. The node was internet-enabled, which meant that whoever had been flying the UAVs over Nicosia could have been on the other side of the world.

  Still, it was something. He handed it back to Malte with another OK and the other man stuffed it inside a mesh bag hanging from his belt.

  They split apart and moved on. Marc checked the time on the Cabot watch at his wrist, and peered at his air gauge. They’d both been down for around fifteen minutes, and the small tanks had maybe twice that in breathable air.

  He pushed to the bow of the sunken boat. The barge’s frame narrowed here, the fire-scarred walls closing in, and the metal kept up a constant groaning, creaking chorus as the wreck refused to settle.

  A shape hit Marc across the goggles and he jerked back in shock, bringing up his hands in self-defence. Drifting there ahead of him, paper booklets moved through the beam of the flashlight like fat, lazy moths.

  He grabbed one. It was a Singaporean passport, the bright red cover catching the light. Others floated around him, in different colours from different nations, stirred up by the motion. Most of them were burnt and ruined, but some were still legible.

  All of them had variant versions of the Sam-or-Grace face on the identity page. Names, birthplaces, hair and eye colour changing, and none of them with visible facial scarring.

  Marc grimaced behind his mask and salvaged a few for later study. He cast around, shining the flashlight into the corners.

  Think like her, he told himself. What was she trained to do?

  If the barge had been a staging area, and the presence of emergency papers seemed to suggest that, then it stood to reason that Sam had prepared the attack on the UN base right here.

  She would have needed maps and imagery of the area. Tickets and travel documents. Any physical examples would have been shredded or burned, but digital assets were a different matter.

  The first phase of standard operating procedure for sanitising a location was erase everything, but control-alt-delete only went so far. It wasn’t enough to wipe hard drives and memory sticks, because even dead data could be resurrected with the right tech. There had to be physical destruction as well.

  Marc floated down to a makeshift kitchen in the lower section of the barge. Lying on the deck, he saw the bright yellow gun-shape of a cordless power drill and nearby, metallic bricks the size of hardcover books.

  He scooped one up. It was a removable hard drive unit, riddled with holes where the drill had been used to Swiss-cheese it. He let it drop. The drive was useless, the fragile magnetic platens inside it fractured beyond any hope of recovery.

  Then his gaze fell on a microwave oven fitted to a shelf. He pulled open the door and wisps of tainted water billowed out. Blobs of plastic and metal that had once been smartphone SIM cards and USB memory sticks littered the inside of the appliance.

  His eyes widened. Two of the memory sticks were relatively intact, and that meant that they might still be recoverable. Marc clawed at them, but he couldn’t get a grip, his neoprene gloves slipping. The sticks were fused to the floor of the oven, and if he tried to chip them out with his dive knife, he risked destroying them completely.

  He gripped the frame of the oven and pulled, putting his weight behind it. Loose bolts sheared off and it shifted, but so did the shelving, and a whole section of the wall broke away. The barge rumbled in response and the deck tilted.

  Objects migrated down and away from Marc, falling in slow motion as his unwitting shift in weight set off a chain reaction down the length of the wreck. The barge was rotating, this time leaning fully into a capsize.

  Light flashed in Marc’s direction. Malte was up at the other end of the compartment, close to the open skylight, signalling him to get out. Marc waved him away, signing Swim Up, and went back to the microwave.

  With effort, he hauled the weighty metal box to him and pushed off the deck. It was hard work to move with it, and he banged into the low ceiling, then off a support girder. Marc held onto his salvage even as the drag of it pulled him down like an anchor. Each kick of his legs seemed harder than the last, the exertion making his breathing rough, sending pennants of bubbles out behind him.

  Silt and debris rolled into the compartment, killing visibility, but Marc kept pushing up and forward, towards Malte’s hazy torc
hlight.

  The Finn met Marc halfway, his pale eyes wide behind his mask. There was no dive sign for What the Hell Are You Doing? Malte’s expression communicated that well enough.

  Marc shoved the metal box towards him, and the other man got the message. Between them, they shouldered it through the skylight, even as the barge reached complete inversion. Marc’s hard-won prize sank towards the bottom and they scrambled after it.

  Moving by feel in the silt-fogged water, Marc’s fingers found the frame of the metal box and grabbed on. The barge was coming down on top of them, serenely sinking the last few metres to the bottom of the harbour.

  The two divers kicked hard, moving low and fast, away from the wreck before it could crush them into the mud.

  The boat settled heavily into the sediment, displacing a shock of water that sent Marc and Malte reeling.

  *

  Lucy watched the sapphire-blue waters of the harbour turn opaque as the barge went under, a bloom of stale green-brown silt erupting to smother it.

  The muscles in her legs twitched, her first impulse to dive off the quay and go in after her teammates. She almost did it, but rocked back at the last second. She had no gear, no way to see clearly down there. A Navy SEAL she’d known during her time with JSOC had once warned her that going into the water unprepared, no matter if it was far at sea or next to shore, was asking for trouble.

  A group of fishermen who until now had been idling further down the breakwater started calling out in alarm, jabbing fingers in the direction of the sinking barge. It was attention she didn’t need, but there was nothing Lucy could do. Someone was going to get the cops, that was a given.

  ‘Ah, hell.’

  She shrugged off her jacket and took a step back, sucking in air in preparation to jump, but then two goggled heads burst from the muddy water, near a narrow slipway close by.

  Marc and Malte were carrying something between them, struggling to haul it out of the water. She dashed down to the slipway as Marc came up, kicking off his fins.

  He spat out his regulator.

  ‘I need . . . I need a . . .’ Marc was breathing hard and he couldn’t finish his sentence.

  For the first time Lucy saw what he was carrying.

  ‘Is that . . . ?’ It most definitely was a cheap microwave oven, the cracked case leaking seawater, the door flapping open uselessly. ‘You have the sudden need to heat up a burrito?’

  Marc dropped the microwave on the concrete quay and staggered towards an emergency locker bolted to a tall bollard, shedding his mask, buoyancy vest and air tank. He broke the glass over the locker’s latch and wrenched it open. Inside was a powder extinguisher, a lifebuoy ring, and he pulled them out, discarding them in search of what he wanted.

  ‘Aha!’

  Marc dragged a stubby fire axe from the locker and marched back to his piece of salvage.

  ‘What is he doing?’ Lucy asked Malte, who answered with a shrug.

  Marc attacked the microwave with swooping blows of the axe, breaking it into pieces, and Lucy started to wonder if lack of sleep or some kind of diver narcosis had temporarily fried his brain.

  ‘Got it,’ he reported, ripping out a section of the appliance, waving around the bit of scrap like it was a trophy. ‘We can . . . probably go now.’

  ‘Police,’ said Malte, nodding in the direction of the harbour centre.

  A patrol car was pulling to a halt at the other end of the breakwater, cops getting out to meet the animated fishermen.

  ‘We came here for that?’ Lucy glared at Marc.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he replied, still breathing hard. ‘See, this—’

  Lucy raised a hand. She had a hundred questions, but now was not the time for them.

  ‘Leave the gear and move,’ she snapped, sprinting towards the road. ‘You can explain it to me on the way.’

  *

  Many of the richest Monaco residents had expansive homes in the hills around Monte Carlo. Opulent penthouses, apartments and villas vied with one another to fill the territory with the biggest, the most expensive, the most lavish, but Ekko Solomon had never felt the need for such a domicile.

  Perhaps it stemmed from an early life where he had owned nothing material beyond the clothes on his back and the rounds in his rifle, but the African saw little value in surrounding himself with things. Most of his art collection stood in museums, not private galleries. He thought of his cars, yachts, and his aircraft as tools. The monuments of Solomon’s wealth were in plain sight, in the factories and hospitals and laboratories built with Rubicon’s successes.

  He had no home, at least not in the sense that others would think of it. Two floors of Rubicon’s corporate headquarters on the Avenue de Grande Bretagne were turned over to his private use, but Solomon’s quarters were elegantly spare in aspect.

  Clean, crisp and modern, the apartments were characterised by tall windows, wide open spaces and minor elements of decor that recalled the lands of his birth. That was his only nod towards possessions – a few rare artefacts, some Makonde carvings, an ivory lupembe hunting horn and nothing else. Even then, he saw himself more as a caretaker of the objects, rather than their owner.

  Solomon had always moved through life carrying with him what he needed. Anything more would hold him back from the path he had chosen. He did not measure his life by the dollars in his bank accounts or the reach of the corporation he had founded. Solomon found worth in only one thing: the balancing of the scales of the world.

  And now that was awry, the balance in danger of tipping past a point of no return.

  In the silent, open atrium at the heart of his apartments, he sat on a heavy suede chair and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, a crystal glass of dark bourbon clasped in his hands. A single drop had yet to pass his lips.

  Solomon had always known that his crusade would make him a target. A man of his power and influence could not rise as high as he had without making enemies. There were those he had outbid, outmanoeuvred or outfought, nursing their enmity and wishing an end to him. There was the hatred he had drawn simply because of the colour of his skin and the circumstances of his birth.

  Rubicon had fought its own small wars before, in boardrooms and corridors of power, sometimes in the ghost realm of cyberspace or down a darkened alleyway with the chug of a silenced bullet. Solomon had done all that and worse; he held back secrets and dark truths for the promise of a greater good. In doing so, he had made many enemies.

  They were coming for him. The footage of the Nicosia attack was burned into his thoughts. His most trusted people, cast as killers and terrorists. His organisation, branded as conspirators in partnership with a supposedly corrupt intelligence agency.

  It was all lies, of course. But it seemed the days of reasoned doubt and rational challenge were long gone. The world was a riot of the credulous and the mendacious, driven by emotion over fact. Too many were seeing and believing, but not questioning, in an age when truth was the rarest commodity. Every day, the powerful spewed blatant falsehoods in such explosive profusion that they drowned out even the merest chance of challenging them.

  And now that tide of deceit was rolling over Rubicon.

  Solomon’s gaze turned inward, his thoughts searching through countless bleak possibilities, sifting every potential outcome. He could not escape the sense that these were only the opening shots, the thunder rumble of an oncoming storm.

  That worse was yet to come.

  A soft click behind him signalled the opening and closing of a door, but he did not acknowledge it. Reflected in the golden glass of the windows, Solomon’s aide Henri Delancort came into view, and the younger man’s face was set in a worried frown.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, sir,’ he began. ‘It is just . . .’ Delancort trailed off, his usually prim manner briefly crumbling. ‘Merde! There have been new developments.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Solomon watched his reflection, as Delancort read from a digital tablet in his
hand.

  ‘Legal Operations received a formal warning from Interpol that Rubicon is now the subject of a major criminal investigation. They’ll be calling for complete access to company records next.’

  ‘Of course they will.’ At length, Solomon turned to study him. ‘There’s more.’ He wasn’t asking a question.

  ‘The Dow Jones and the Nikkei indices have yet to stabilise. The negative impact on Rubicon Group stocks in the wake of the Nicosia report has been . . .’ He faltered, grasping for the right word. ‘Substantial.’

  ‘It is just money, Henri,’ Solomon told him. ‘What about our people?’

  With a flick of his wrist, Delancort would have been able to reproduce the content of his tablet’s screen on the digitally enhanced glass of the apartment’s windows, but he knew Solomon, and knew that he would want to hear the words said aloud.

  Delancort sighed. ‘We have only one Special Conditions Division team in the field.’ He didn’t need to say which, and off Solomon’s nod, he carried on. ‘They’ll be landing at Nice in approximately thirty minutes.’ He paused, then spoke quickly. ‘There are arrest warrants in effect for some of them. Sir, there’s still time to route the aircraft to a non-extradition location. If Rubicon impedes an active Interpol investigation—’

  ‘I know the risks. But I want my people safe. I need to look them in the eye.’ Solomon turned away. ‘Kader has set up a cover story for their flight. I want you to move them quickly. Bring Dane and Keyes here as soon as possible, and keep it quiet. No one outside this room is to know where they are, am I clear?’

  ‘Yes sir.’ Delancort’s discomfort was obvious, and for a moment Solomon thought he would push back. But then he continued with his briefing. ‘The Argentine Republic, the United Nations Security Council, and the Republic of Cyprus have condemned the Nicosia attack in the strongest possible terms. They’ve demanded explanations from Rubicon and the British government. In addition, Argentina and Cyprus have frozen Rubicon Group assets within their national borders.’

  Solomon weighed that consideration. In material terms, that last act was of little consequence to the company, but it had a strong negative effect regarding the global perception of Rubicon.