by Matt Rogers
She reached into her cleavage and produced a small chain of keys from a concealed pocket in the front of her dress, underneath her breasts. Roy’s keys. She dangled them in full view.
He watched, dejected.
She swung the doors shut on him, slipped the right key into the lock, and twisted her wrist.
A second later, she heard Wayne trying the doors on the other side.
They didn’t budge.
She dropped the keys on the plush carpet, having no further use for them, then palmed the earpiece and listening device — both too small to notice — and clenched them tight. The boarding ramp stretched across to the floating pontoon only a dozen feet down the corridor, giving her an unobstructed view all the way to the shoreline. She leapt up onto it and stepped off the superyacht for the last time.
In the distance, she saw a convoy of police cars screech to a halt, forming a rudimentary cordon around the pontoon and the potential crime scene. In her panicked call, she’d been specific about the extent of the disaster unfolding. Monaco simply couldn’t afford the damage to its reputation. It would be an international incident unless it was defused before it even began.
Too late for that.
Ruby went to the other side of the pontoon and slipped into the water between two larger vessels, ignoring the sting of the salt water on her open wounds. She set off at a devilish pace, heading north up the port.
Vanishing from the scene.
29
She made a beeline for the major landmark on the north side of the port.
Quai l'Hirondelle.
She had all of Port Hercules mapped out in her head, so logistics weren’t an issue. Her vision swam, what with only having one functioning eye and a crooked jaw. She didn’t think her jaw was broken — she’d be in unimaginable pain if so — but she knew for a fact her speech would be hindered. She hoped she didn’t have to speak much for the remainder of the day.
Her head thudded as she swam freestyle. Not an issue. Half her childhood had been spent facing some sort of adversity. Her handlers had steadily ramped the pressure up over time until any hint of non-sociopathic behaviour had been scrubbed from her soul.
Handlers.
Another flash of her childhood. A quiet suburb on the outskirts of Brooklyn. Big yards. Leafy streets.
Her mother.
Her father.
Her sister.
All gone. Wiped from memory, or at least dulled. She used to have a family, but then she’d run away from home as a result of an impulsive teenage mood-swing. She’d only been gone for twelve hours when she decided to go back. But she never got the chance. Her father’s friend from the military — a man named Russell Williams, now a black-ops handler — had scooped her up, coaxing her into a program he’d created. Back then, she’d been terrified to disobey. The brainwashing had dulled her rebelliousness by the time she figured out she’d been effectively abducted. Her family thought she was dead. They were nothing but blurry outlines, separated from her waking consciousness by a sea of training and conditioning. She couldn’t remember what it felt like to have a normal existence. Sometimes she wished the ditzy persona was her reality. She wished for blissful ignorance. The blessing of unawareness.
But she was aware. And that’s why she’d stayed. At sixteen years old, she’d properly dissected what had happened to her, and realised she’d been kidnapped by Williams. The man had stripped her of a normal existence, and she deserved a shot at it. But by then, she didn’t want it. She knew how her targets — the scum of the earth — operated. Where they hid in plain sight. Why they did what they did.
Unadulterated greed.
They ranked themselves mentally above the rest of the world, and when you do that, other people cease to matter.
All that matters is the pursuit of more.
So she stayed.
And she became the best operative in the whole goddamn program.
She finished her swim at the edge of Quai l'Hirondelle and clambered up onto the quay. Seawater ran in rivulets off her dress, and the wet material clung to her form. She gave silent thanks for it. For the brief time she’d have to spend exposed to the public, no one would be looking at her face.
She jogged to the gazebo at the end of the quay, the entire structure aproned with patches of shrubbery. A couple of passers-by stared, but she kept her face pointed squarely at her feet, masking her swollen orbital. At the same time she puffed her chest out, pushing her breasts against the see-through material of the dress, directing attention there. She made it to the greenery and reached down into the bushes and came out with a camouflaged backpack she’d positioned under cover of darkness two nights ago. A microfibre towel dried her, and then a giant sunhat shadowed her face and pinned her hair up in a wet bun. A pair of Gucci sunglasses covered her eyes. She shed the dress, tugged an oversized hooded sweatshirt over her torso, and slipped into denim short-shorts. Nike slides went on her feet, a new bejewelled iPhone materialised in her palm, and three sticks of gum slipped between her teeth.
The whole process took twenty seconds.
She stepped back out into public as the personification of the walk of shame. She chewed the gum obnoxiously and swiped at the blank iPhone screen, her head bowed, her features unclear. But anyone passing her would see what they wanted to see — the gorgeous young brunette wearing her sugar daddy’s jumper, strolling away from his boat after a hedonistic night of excess.
No amber gaze.
No defining characteristics.
Just another woman.
The phone was already loaded with fake numbers that, if dialled, connected to wholly impressive voice actors before certain instructions patched her through to her Lynx handlers. But she didn’t need to dial. Everything was done. In her other hand she clutched a passport stamped with enough exotic destinations to give border security agents the picture of who she was and what she did in her spare time.
Cosy up to the rich.
An age old tradition.
Now she was Francesca Sauzier, an American college student with French parents and a rebellious streak a mile long. It was an airtight backstop, arranged by a dozen separate intelligence officers, but the key to it all was her performance.
Which had never been a problem.
She reached the Boulevard Louis II without incident and hailed a cab. It took her to the Office du Tourisme de Monaco, whereupon she found the correct bus stop and boarded the Express 110 to Cote d'Azur Airport over the border in Nice. Monaco had no airport, so this was her easiest route out. She paid for a ticket with a credit card connected to a bank account registered under a false identity. Then she mingled with the passengers, failing to stand out in any significant way, and dropped into a window seat up the back without facing a single question or inquiry.
She heard a couple murmuring in French two rows ahead, and translated in her head.
Something’s happening at the port.
Really?
Jon said it’s crawling with police.
She smiled, and settled back into her seat.
30
When her connecting flight landed in Chicago fifteen hours later, every news station was rolling out the same story.
Through the darkened sunglasses, she watched one of the largest screens in the terminal explain the social media firestorm unfolding around the arrest of real estate magnate Aaron Wayne in Monaco. Details were still unclear, but it appeared audio had been leaked that gravely implicated him in something dark and twisted. The anchors hadn’t yet clarified exactly what the allegations were, but Wayne had been arrested aboard his yacht amidst a scene of slaughter. Misinformation was spreading over the internet as the story went viral, but it seemed the carnage was the result of a shady deal gone bad.
Already, the hashtag #WayneKidKiller was trending number one on Twitter.
Ruby saw blurry footage of the man being led off the enormous boat, his dirty blonde hair matted to his head, his face slick with sweat and blood.
He didn’t take the easy way out.
He didn’t have the nerve.
She’d always known he wouldn’t.
That’s how she wanted it.
Keeping Zafir and his men alive would achieve nothing. They were corrupted through and through, uncaring what the world thought of them, stooping to the most primal level of human existence. But Wayne had always tried to save face. He still wanted to deal with the scum of the earth, but he’d kept it hidden behind shell corporations and dummy companies that were backstopped at the highest level.
That was the sort of man who deserved to dwell on his failure in prison for the rest of his miserable life.
Because it would cut through to the core.
It would hurt him like nothing physical could.
He cared about his image.
She’d destroyed it.
As she moved through the terminal, blending in with the throngs of passengers, she thought about what would have happened if she’d never been snatched as a child. It had changed the trajectory of her life, sure. It had been immoral, almost certainly. But if she’d stayed a normal kid with a normal childhood, Aaron Wayne would be basking in the profits of slaughtered rebels in Yemen, sharing thousand-dollar champagne with a warlord he’d flown over to Monaco. And that was just a single successful operation. There’d been a dozen in the past, and there’d be hundreds in the future if she stayed alive to see her career through to the end.
So was that worth it?
Her own life, stripped away, to save hundreds, if not thousands, of others?
She didn’t know.
She didn’t have the answer.
But she refused to run. She refused to rebel against the Lynx program. It had made her a killer, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t be sure whether that was a justification implanted by her handlers, but even if it was, she could see the need for people like her.
She tried her best to forget about the childhood that never was.
Her mother.
Her father.
Her sister.
Made them all vanish, like blood money washed through a shell corporation.
31
She got behind the wheel of a nondescript rental car and exhaled.
It was the first time she’d been out of the public eye since she’d stepped out of her suite at the Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo. Everything since had been a blur of façades, of disguises and personas. Pretending she was someone she wasn’t. Even the stone-cold killer aboard the yacht was a role she’d played.
All roles.
All acts.
She figured eventually she’d lose sight of who she was underneath it all.
She didn’t care.
She drove away from O’Hare International Airport, her pulse finally slowing, her heart rate coming down. It was an overcast day, the clouds thick and heavy in the sky, and the skyline had started to granulate as night fell. The outskirts of Chicago — dull and dreary in their monotony. A world away from Monaco. Neither setting appealed to her more than the other. It was all work.
She headed south, toward the Central Manufacturing District. Eventually she turned onto West 43rd Street and entered the industrial zone itself. The peak hour traffic fell away, and she found herself surrounded by warehouse operations in the process of winding down their day’s work. She pulled into the parking lot of an enormous warehouse complex for a metalwork company. The larger buildings were still illuminated with dull light and trickling with workers in a hurry. She kept driving past them, all the way to a small office complex on the outskirts. It was wholly unimpressive, with not a single light on inside. In fact, the building seemed abandoned.
She parked, got out, and finally had the opportunity to take the sunglasses off. She threw them onto the rear seat, followed swiftly by the sunhat. She let her hair fall sloppily on either side of her face, and tucked loose strands behind her ears.
Took a deep, all-encompassing breath.
Done.
Debrief time.
The lobby was dark and empty, so she simply reached through the shattered glass frame and unlocked the door from the inside. It swung open with a creak. She stepped through, made for the stairwell, and went up two flights to a shadowy office floor. Long abandoned. Everything was years old, and the whole building was dead silent.
But there was a conference room up the back, shining like a beacon.
Bright fluorescent tubes in the ceiling cast a stark white glare over the room’s contents.
It contained a long table, a collection of chairs, and two ordinary-looking men.
They had the build and complexion of pen-pushers, which was deliberate. She didn’t know their names, or anything about them, really. All she knew was that they were razor-sharp. In all the time she’d spent working with them, they had never once asked her to repeat anything. They listened like their lives depended on every word, which was key in their line of work.
She crossed the floor, skirting around overturned furniture, and slipped into the conference room.
They nodded to her.
She nodded back.
They had no visible reaction to her grotesque orbital injury.
One of them said, ‘You’re going to need to get that looked at.’
She nodded. ‘I know. The debrief, first.’
A consummate professional, always.
She sat down, and they regarded her warily.
The guy on the left said, ‘How’d it go?’
She said, ‘Fine.’
‘Anything of note you want to tell us?’
She heard Wayne’s voice in her head.
You think Zafir’s the only one carrying out human rights abuses?
She said, ‘No.’
He said, ‘We’ve already got our hands on photos of the crime scene. Monaco’s Criminal Police Division has some of the worst cybersecurity we’ve seen. We have everything they do.’
She didn’t answer. They hadn’t asked her a question.
The guy on the right said, ‘It was messy.’
She nodded.
‘Your messiest yet.’
She nodded again.
‘How are you?’
‘Fine.’
‘We’re going to give you a break. When you think you’re fit to return, there’ll be full psychological vetting waiting for you. And you know you have access to any counselling resources that we—’
‘Is this a punishment?’
He hesitated. Looked hard at her. Then said, ‘No.’
‘Then I don’t want it.’
‘Ruby…’
‘Do you think I’m a liar?’
‘No,’ the man said. ‘We don’t.’
‘Then when I tell you I’m fine, I’m fine. It means what it means.’
‘That sort of experience would affect anyone—’
‘Not me,’ she said. ‘As soon as my eye heals, I want the next job.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Do we need to go over this again?’
‘No. I get it. You’re ready.’
‘More than ready. Any red flags over the way I handled things?’
‘No. We reviewed the audio. You’re clean.’
‘Good.’
The guy on the left said, ‘You know, we have other operatives if you need time to process—’
She cut him off with a glare.
He shut up.
‘What if I hadn’t been there?’ she said. ‘What if it had all gone off without a hitch? It only would have kept happening. You really want to live in a world where half the New York skyline is owned by warlords?’
Silence.
She said, ‘I’m not going to miss the next opportunity. Not a chance.’
The guy on the right scribbled something on the dossier in front of him, and closed the file.
He said, ‘That’s what we wanted to hear. You’re good to go.’
‘I assume the Doc will be over to see me tonight.’
‘Yes. The best. As always.’
<
br /> She stood up, and made for the door.
The guy on the left cleared his throat as she reached for the handle.
She turned back.
He said, ‘You killed the audio when you were talking to Wayne. After you dealt with Zafir and his men. The two of you were the only ones alive on the boat. You had a private conversation. What did he say to you?’
She remembered.
Maybe take a look at your own handlers, too.
She said, ‘He tried to plead with me. Tried to bribe me. I refused. Gave him an out to kill himself, but he didn’t do it.’
Twin nods.
Twin stares.
The guy on the right said, ‘Are you happy with your career?’
She stared at him.
Said, ‘Yes. Wouldn’t trade it for anything.’
‘You must be aware that you’ve made certain… sacrifices.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But if I didn’t make those sacrifices, then I’d be letting Zafir, and a hundred others just like him, carry on living. That’s a sacrifice in its own right. That’s one I can’t allow.’
The guy on the left said, ‘Exactly. Thank you, Ruby. We’re done here.’
She turned and walked out, the darkness of the complex swallowing her whole.
She was black ops, but her world had never been black and white.
All she’d ever seen was grey.
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