Exile

by James Swallow

  ‘What is his name?’

  ‘He calls himself Kawal Daan. But that is a lie. You are going to use the truth in our favour. God is helping us, Guhaad. You will see it.’

  Ramaas talked for a while longer, explaining Guhaad’s part in the larger plan. And while at first he had been frustrated to learn that he would not have the chance to better Zayd’s execution of the pale man, he gradually came to see that the task the warlord had for him would be better. After all, anyone could do a killing, but it took someone with cunning and strength to make a man into his servant.

  *

  The Bentley pulled into an underground car park and Lucy led Marc to an isolated private elevator with no call button, just a coin-sized camera lens placed at eye level. The doors opened automatically and he followed her inside.

  As the glass-and-steel box rose swiftly, Marc glanced around. Rubicon had the kind of security systems that were so discreet as to be practically invisible, and the hacker in him couldn’t help but wonder what kind of hardware lurked behind the walls of the elevator car.

  ‘Biometric scanner,’ offered Lucy, intuiting his thoughts. ‘Got a dedicated facial-recognition system, gait analysis, the works.’

  ‘What happens if it doesn’t recognise you?’ He pointed at the floor. ‘Trapdoor and a shark tank?’

  ‘If we didn’t know you,’ she replied, ‘you wouldn’t get this far.’

  Honey-gold light abruptly flooded the lift as it slowed to a halt in the middle of an open atrium level, and Marc was treated to his first view of Solomon’s private Monaco headquarters. The entire floor was a space wider than a football pitch, with staggered balcony half-levels stacked above it. He trailed after Lucy, out across a wood-deck floor, and couldn’t help but crane his neck around to take it all in.

  Frosted glass walls blocked off sections for office spaces and meeting rooms, and a wide diamond shaped area filled with soft furnishings was set low at the eastern face of the building, toward the sea. The city rolled out around them, and through the smoky floor-to-ceiling windows it took on an oddly toy-like appearance.

  Marc circled around a piece of modern art made from aged spars of driftwood and caught sight of the man himself, across the atrium inside a glass-walled boardroom.

  Ekko Solomon was in his early fifties, although you might be forgiven for thinking he was ten years younger. Tall and angular when he was at rest, he wore an unpretentious linen suit in pale cream and a white silk shirt that accentuated the dark teak tones of his face and his hands steepled before him on the table. The boardroom was soundproofed, so Marc couldn’t hear what he was saying, but his body language was clear enough. Solomon had the air of a man at ease in the world he had made for himself, moving through it with an urbane confidence that Marc couldn’t help but admire. If he had to hang one single word on Solomon, it would have been suave.

  But there was more to him than that, even if Marc had only glimpsed the edges of it. Here and now, Ekko Solomon was one of the world’s richest people, with a corporate empire at his fingertips and a personal philosophy that was, if Marc understood him well enough, somewhere on the spectrum between philanthropy and vigilantism. But he hadn’t always been that man. Secrets trailed after him like shadows, and buried in Solomon’s past there were threads leading back to a troubled youth among Africa’s brush-fire wars and child soldiers. Seeing him for the first time in a long while, Marc found himself wondering if he would ever know the full story about the enigmatic billionaire. Is that a thread I want to pull on?

  Solomon glanced up and caught his eye. He gave Marc a nod of greeting and then went back to his business at hand.

  ‘He’s got a thing with the board of directors,’ Lucy explained. ‘I guess we’ll see him when he’s done.’

  ‘You brought Dane to the office?’ said a voice, and Marc turned to see Henri Delancort crossing the room toward them. Solomon’s Québécois assistant was, as always, impeccably groomed and expensively attired – although Marc always found him to be a little too perfectly presented, as though it was a kind of protective colouration for him. The rakish man’s stand-offish attitude toward Marc clearly hadn’t thawed at all since last they met.

  ‘Figured it was the practical choice,’ said Lucy, with a frown.

  ‘I’m standing right here,’ Marc insisted. ‘Nice to see you too, Delancort.’

  ‘I won’t insult your intelligence by returning the compliment.’ The other man pushed his rimless spectacles up his nose.

  ‘Ignore him,’ said Lucy. ‘He’s still pissy that you turned down Solomon’s job offer back in London.’

  ‘I didn’t turn it down,’ Marc replied, quicker than he would have liked. ‘I just didn’t . . .’ He sighed. ‘It’s complicated.’

  ‘In my experience, that’s usually what people say when they’ve run out of convincing explanations.’ Before Marc could reply, Delancort went on. ‘The Special Conditions Division operated perfectly well before you crossed our path, Mr Dane. It continued to do so after you moved on.’

  Marc glanced at Lucy. ‘Is that right?’

  She gave a deliberately vague shrug. ‘It hasn’t all been a vacation,’ she allowed.

  Delancort extended a hand. ‘Why don’t we make a start? Let’s see what you have for us.’

  Marc made no move to pull his laptop from his backpack. ‘I’d prefer to lay it out in my own time, if you don’t mind. Just give me somewhere to set up –’

  ‘This way.’ Delancort was already walking away, up a shallow flight of stairs toward one of the other meeting rooms.

  Lucy started after him, and belatedly, it had occurred to Marc that Delancort might not be the only one he had pissed off. These people had put themselves on the line for him while he had been on the run from MI6, and he had repaid that by cutting them off once the dust had settled. Now he was at their front door again, and only because he needed something from them. Of course they’re going to be wary. I would be.

  The last familiar face from Rubicon’s staff was seated at the meeting room’s white glass table, working at a chrome-skinned Macbook with sharp-eyed intensity. Kara Wei gave him a quick look and flashed a cat-like smirk before she turned back to her computer without losing pace in her typing. ‘Hey. Welcome back. What rig do you have? We’ve got wireless induction links built into the table.’

  She went straight to business, and that was fine. The information churning in Marc’s thoughts was weighing him down like lead and he wanted to get it out in short order. ‘I’ll manage.’ His battered military-spec laptop looked completely out of place among the room’s clean, shiny lines, a grimy chunk of machinery in the middle of a modern art gallery.

  Marc found a projector connection and suddenly the laptop’s screen was being mirrored on one of the frosted-glass walls. Kara had not been exaggerating about the office’s embedded tech. He made sure that his machine was isolated from the Rubicon network as a matter of course –to be on the safe side, he told himself – and brought up a set of data panels. Each one was a scan of a partly redacted document from the Russian central military archive in Moscow, data that Marc had stealthily duplicated from a poorly protected NATO database the day before.

  Lucy immediately recognised it for what it was. ‘That is all kinds of illegal,’ she said, her native New York drawl coming through the words. ‘How’d you get access to those files, Dane?’

  ‘Not the right way,’ he told her.

  Delancort gave a theatrical sigh. ‘Well, you have just made us all accessories to your crime by showing it to us, so why not proceed further?’

  ‘Because Rubicon employees have never ever hacked into protected governmental servers at any time,’ Kara said flatly, as if she were reading the words from a page. Delancort shot her an acid look and she shrugged. ‘What? I sounded convincing that time.’

  Marc continued, ‘Before I left Croatia, I used the IAEA’s access to get a line on a reference I came across.’ It had been his last act before Schrader closed down hi
s system access for good, spoofing the Europol network to get him into the files that Jurgen Goss had been unable to penetrate. In a few days, a week at best, the intrusion would be flagged and most likely traced back to Marc’s user ident, but he was hoping that by then it wouldn’t make a lot of difference.

  ‘Exile,’ said Delancort, reading the tags on the top of the scanned pages. ‘Another of those very muscular-sounding martial code names. What does it attest to?’

  What Marc found on the NATO server had only served to cement his belief in the danger that was at hand. ‘It’s the classification for a weapons project the Russians developed during the Cold War.’

  Lucy gave a low murmur. ‘Oh, I heard of that. Baby thermonuclear packages, designed as covert munitions-in-place. The US Army had their own version, size of a trash can.’

  Marc took a breath. ‘I reached out to Rubicon because I believe, despite Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties to the contrary, that one of these devices is not only still active and viable, but that it got away from the Russians and into the hands of a non-state actor.’

  ‘I know you said you have something of great import to share with us,’ said a voice from behind him, and Marc turned to see Ekko Solomon enter the room. His expression was grave. ‘But this . . . Marc, are you certain of what you are saying?’

  His throat became dry, and all the doubts that had been swirling around him now filled Marc’s thoughts in a riot of noise. ‘The last time someone told me I was wrong about something, I threw my whole life away to prove I was right.’ He silenced the turmoil in his mind and straightened. ‘I wasn’t wrong then. I am not wrong now.’

  Solomon held his gaze, and he felt as if the other man was looking right into his soul. ‘Very well.’ At length, he gave Marc a pat on the shoulder and took the chair next to Delancort. ‘I will hear you out.’

  *

  Lucy wanted to interrupt the Brit at almost every juncture, and it became a physical effort just to say nothing and let Marc’s explanation wash over her. Halting at first, he quickly got into a pace as he unfolded a story that made her eyes widen. At her side, she saw Kara running searches and checks on each name that came out of Dane’s mouth, starting with low-life Serbian mobsters and their crooked cop pal through to the people he had been working with at the NSNS’s field investigation office in Split.

  On the surface, Dane’s story about a dissolute Russian general cashing in his last chip for enough walking-away money had the ring of truth, but then adding in the presence of some of the most brazen conmen on the planet threatened to knock the legs out from under his narrative. She noted that but said nothing. Delancort, on the other hand, went for the throat and did his best to blow holes in Marc’s story at every possible turn.

  Kara used another wall-screen to pull up a nuke-map profile of an Exile device’s projected yield, and to hammer the point home she centred it on the site of the building they were sitting in. The coloured concentric circles expanding outward painted a grim picture. ‘If it goes off here, that’s at least fifteen thousand people dead instantly. Pretty much everything north of Port de Fontvieille is gone. Monaco ceases to exist.’

  Lucy couldn’t stop herself from glancing out of the window at the city beyond, warm in the morning sunshine, and picturing it in ruins.

  Kara’s eyes narrowed as she continued. ‘Put the same thing in a more densely populated city . . . Mumbai, Paris, Tokyo . . . You could expect that casualty count to double or triple. And that’s just the people who would die quickly.’

  ‘Maudit,’ Delancort said quietly, suddenly sobered by the possibility of such devastation.

  ‘The general . . .’ Solomon drew them all back to the moment at hand. ‘His involvement in this lends considerable weight to the intelligence Mr Dane has brought us. How much do we know about him?’

  Marc talked about the man’s connection to the Kurjak syndicate, but it was Kara who once more mined something valuable from the sea of data that was constantly being sifted by Rubicon’s analysts and expert systems. ‘We’re continually monitoring our friends in the Combine,’ she explained. ‘For obvious reasons, because they’ve tried to kill most of the people in this room at least once.’

  Lucy sneered, in spite of herself. The Combine was a collective of international power-brokers who worked in the shadows of global conflict, acting as the quartermasters for the violent, the angry and the vengeful on the world stage. If there was a bush war, a terrorist attack, a criminal conflict taking place, they were likely to have a stake in it. The way she understood it, they were the scions of a clandestine network that had been profiting from violence since the days of the First World War – and by manipulating, encouraging and more recently, initiating terrorist atrocities, they kept the world’s engine of fear running at a high tempo.

  Marc paled and Lucy felt a pang of sympathy for him. Of all of them, Dane had lost the most to the Combine’s schemes. ‘You’re telling me they are part of this too?’ he asked.

  ‘A unique weapon of mass destruction coming onto the black market?’ Solomon said grimly. ‘It would be a miracle if they were ignorant of such a thing.’

  Kara continued. ‘Our sources in Moscow believe it was Combine assets that helped orchestrate Oleg Fedorin’s fall from grace. It’s a good fit, because the man who is set to replace him in the Russian high command is a friend of Pytor Glovkonin, whom we are well aware is a highly placed partner in the Combine.’

  Marc’s eyes narrowed. He and the oligarch Glovkonin had crossed paths more than once, and Lucy could imagine what was going through the Brit’s mind at that moment. ‘But if they disgraced Fedorin as a means of getting their hands on that device, then it backfired,’ he snapped. ‘Fedorin is gone and so is the weapon.’

  ‘True,’ said Kara. ‘He dropped out of sight in Moscow a week ago. Hasn’t been seen since . . .’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Marc tapped a few keys and brought up long-lens photos of an older man with Slavic features. ‘I took these shots myself. Here he is in Split, from a couple of days ago. And I believe the men with him are the ones he sold the bomb to.’

  ‘So we locate these Kurjaks,’ said Delancort, and he glanced at Solomon. ‘Sir, if you are willing to authorise the asset transfer, we might be able to actually buy the device from them and turn it over to the NSNS before the Serbs sell it on to –’

  ‘Too late for that.’ Marc shut Delancort down before he could go on. ‘One of them is dead, and the other is on a lead held by the man who does have the device. His name is Ramaas. He did his best to run me over when I tried to stop him from getting away with it. I got a look at his face, later I got a name . . .’ He brought another image up on the wall screen and Lucy saw a grainy photo of a brawny, dark-skinned man with scars and dreadlocks. ‘This was him in the late nineties, the most recent shot I could track down. He’s changed his haircut since then but not his behaviour. I got this image from the mug book of the Anti-Piracy Operations Centre in the Seychelles.’

  ‘Checking . . .’ said Kara, as she ran the same data. ‘The international coalition database for Operation Ocean Shield has a file on him. I have it. Abur Ramaas. Listed as a known active participant and organiser in a large number of maritime piracy incidents in the Gulf of Aden. Suspected ties to several Somali bandit clans and the Al Shabaab extremist group.’ As she read on, her usual flippant tone became muted. ‘There are pages and pages of warrants here. He’s done a lot of bad things.’

  ‘And now we suspect he has a nuclear weapon in his possession?’ Delancort peered at Marc. ‘Mr Dane, I think I can speak for everyone here when I say you were rather conservative when you described this situation as merely dangerous.’

  Solomon’s hands threaded together. ‘We are going to act on this,’ he said, after a moment. ‘Henri, direct our people to gathering more data based on Mr Dane’s information.’

  ‘Sir . . .’ Lucy heard the challenge in Delancort’s voice before it had finished forming. ‘If the
re is an actual device, if it is even in an operable state, should we not consider bringing the matter to the attention of a larger power? Our contacts at the UN or the American State Department?’

  ‘The UN don’t see it as a viable threat,’ Marc broke in. ‘Trust me, that ship has sailed. And the American government have never believed the Russians could perfect a compact nuke, because they couldn’t. Without proof in hand, you’re going to have a hard time convincing anyone of anything.’ He paused. ‘Just like I’m having a hard time now convincing you.’

  The room fell silent, and then it was down to Solomon to have the last word. Lucy studied his impassive, sculpted face. Ultimately, whatever happened next would be his choice alone. Rubicon was his company, backed by his fortune and his will.

  ‘I believe in small acts that create large effects,’ Solomon began. ‘I believe that nations cannot always be relied upon to do the right thing at the right moment. This group was created to step into that breach. We do that today. If there is a threat to the world and it is in my power to do something about it, I will.’

  Solomon’s words brought the briefing to an end, and Kara was the first out of the room, eager as ever to start mining data for whatever would come next. Lucy stood, Delancort rising with her, but Solomon was still seated, and he gestured to Marc.

  ‘Sir?’ said Delancort, a frown crossing his face.

  ‘Henri, Lucy. Give us the room, please,’ said Solomon.

  *

  When they were alone, Marc closed the laptop and took a long breath. A weight lifted from him; he had a sudden sense that he was no longer shouting into the wind, desperate to find someone to believe him. ‘Thank you,’ he said at length.

  ‘I owe you,’ Solomon told him. ‘After the incident in America . . . Without your assistance, the Combine and their partners in the Al Sayf terror cell would have done appalling things and I could not have stopped it. You helped me gain a victory in a long war that has few opportunities for such things.’