Lucy nodded again. ‘That’s because it is. We’re not one-and-done, this is a long game.’ She tapped the table. ‘You rolled up in here with plentiful evidence of that. There’s always going to be another asshole with a bomb and a reason to use it. But what you need to remember is what’s on the other side of that.’ Lucy smiled slightly. ‘You got a sister, don’t you?’
Marc gave a rueful nod. ‘She’s not talking to me. I have a way to go before I can come back from what happened between us. I put her at risk.’
‘But she’s alive, and her family are whole, right?’ Lucy insisted. ‘That’s because of you.’ Something suddenly occurred to her, and she pulled out her smartphone. ‘And so is this. Check it out.’
She showed him a photograph of a tawny-skinned teenage boy with large brown eyes and an untidy mop of black hair. He was among a group of other teens of similar age and ethnicity, clowning around in front of what looked like an American farmhouse.
‘Is that . . . Halil?’ The last time Marc had seen the youth, he had been moments away from death in a highway diner, fated to die as the unwilling weapon in a brutal suicide attack. Marc and Lucy had saved Halil’s life with only seconds to spare.
‘The very same. I got Kara to keep a line on him. The State Department has Halil in a counselling programme, with the rest of the kids Khadir used as his proxy soldiers. They’re doing okay.’ She held up the phone. ‘See? This is what you need to remember. Not who got away. Who got to live, because of what you did.’
He was trying to form a reply when an alert chime sounded from the laptop, and a new text window unfolded atop the others on the screen. His eyes widened as he read it.
‘Trouble?’ said Lucy, tensing at his sudden reaction.
He leapt out of his chair, pulling the laptop with him. ‘I need to talk to Kara, right now!’
*
They didn’t really have him under guard so much as they were watching him as if he was a poorly trained animal. Neven pulled the scratchy material of the boiler suit tighter around him and wandered away across the deck of the tramp freighter until he found a covered area where he could stand out of the driving rain. Another man was there, one of the Greek ship’s crew, and after a few moments of sign language Neven was able to beg a cigarette from him. They smoked in sullen silence for a while, and Neven took a long time over it. He was using it as an excuse to get outside, and the moment the crewman finished up and threw the butt of his cigarette over the side, he had the privacy he wanted.
As soon as he was absolutely sure he was alone and unobserved, Neven dug in the pockets of the greasy overall and found the compact, bling-gold satellite phone he had stuffed in there. Ramaas hadn’t searched him and the warlord had no idea he was carrying it, but up until now there had been no chance for Neven to use it where he could get a signal.
He powered it up, his heart hammering in his chest, and felt his hope rise as a couple of reception bars blinked into life. Neven had spent the past few hours thinking about who he would call. There were a lot of possibilities, but in the end it was less about finding someone he could trust and more about finding someone whose loyalty he could buy. That quickly narrowed the options down to one.
Next to the name in the sat phone’s memory were four different strings of digits. The first – the burner that Neven himself had supplied – returned a disconnected message. He swallowed hard and moved on to the next one, glancing furtively around. Eventually, Ramaas would notice that Neven was gone and come looking. He had no idea how long he had to do this, and he could only hope that at least one of his contact numbers was still valid.
*
Lucy followed Marc back across the atrium to the sunken conference area, where Kara Wei was working at her own computer. He started talking a mile a minute, and Lucy could only follow a little of the jargon-laced geek speak the Brit was spouting. Something about a phone intercept; he mentioned the name ‘Horvat’ and she remembered his earlier comments about the guy being a cop on the take from the Serb smugglers.
Solomon came striding down the suspended staircase, the pace and tone of the conversation catching his attention. ‘Is there a problem?’
‘More like an opportunity,’ said Marc, as Kara moved to an inset panel on a table and started reconfiguring the screens in the nearby windows. ‘Long story short, I put a digital tap on a burner phone belonging to Franko Horvat, one that was given to him by the Kurjaks. That phone’s dead now, probably destroyed, but along the way I did get the details of the one-and-only caller in the memory.’
‘It has to be Neven, the surviving Kurjak brother,’ offered Kara, as she worked.
Marc nodded briskly. ‘That number just tried to ring Franko Horvat’s desk at the Split police central precinct.’ He paused. ‘I’ve got a guy there watching it for me.’
‘If Neven is attempting to contact someone in Split, I reckon we can capture the call at the local cell nexus,’ Kara added.
‘Get into the SS7 routing protocols,’ said Marc. ‘Then we’ll be able to listen in, maybe even get a triangulation on Neven’s location.’
Kara paused and looked to Solomon. ‘With your permission, of course. Because to do that is, uh, not exactly allowed.’
Solomon didn’t hesitate. ‘Go to work.’
‘What makes you think Neven is going to keep trying to reach Horvat?’ said Lucy.
‘He will.’ Marc shot her a glance. ‘I saw the look on his face when Ramaas was hauling him away. Believe me when I tell you, he doesn’t want to be anywhere near that guy.’
*
The last number rang and rang, the chirping tone in Neven’s ear cycling endlessly around. A tight knot of fear constricted his heart and he let out a low sob of desperation. If this didn’t work, his one final lifeline would be severed and Neven Kurjak would truly be at the mercy of Ramaas. There would be no other choice but to surrender to the warlord’s demands and hope that he would keep his promise not to take Neven’s life when he had what he needed –
‘Who the hell is this?’
When the line finally connected, Neven was briefly dumbstruck. He gasped and clutched the sat phone to his face, crouching low to the deck and out of the wind. ‘Franko! It’s me. Don’t hang up, for God’s sake, please don’t do that!’
After a long pause, the corrupt cop’s voice sounded again. ‘Still alive, are you? Like a cockroach.’
Neven barely registered the insult. ‘I need help.’
‘Fuck off and die. I have my own problems right now, thanks to you and your brother!’
He went straight to the only card he had remaining. ‘I’ll pay you. There’s money no-one knows about, safe from the police. Half a million euros.’
‘Bullshit. I’m hanging up now. Have a nice death, you little prick.’
‘No! No!’ Neven screamed into the phone. ‘God damn you, Horvat! All right, shit, I’ll double that!’ He gulped in breaths of wet, briny air and fought to compose himself. ‘I know you need it!’
That must have struck a chord, because Horvat didn’t terminate the call. He could hear the rattle of a train in the background, the familiar sound of the suburban railway. Horvat was on a station platform somewhere in Split, and Neven experienced a powerful jolt of homesickness.
‘You’ve got thirty seconds,’ said the cop, after a moment. ‘Talk.’
‘The African, that psychopath Ramaas, killed my brother!’ The words gushed out of Neven’s mouth. ‘The deal we made with the Russian, he came in and screwed everything up, took over. He believes he’s on a mission from God! He wants me to take him to meet the Baker and I had to say yes –’
‘Why do I care?’ Horvat interrupted. ‘Even I know that the Baker has been dead for years. Your new friend won’t be happy when he finds out you’re lying to him.’ He snorted. ‘You’ve dug your own grave.’
‘Please, no,’ said Neven, and his hands started to shake. He could sense the conversation slipping away from him. ‘Just listen to me –’
&n
bsp; ‘No, you listen,’ snarled Horvat. ‘My nice little operation has fallen apart because of you, and now I’ve got everyone in the city looking for me! You don’t have any million euros, you don’t have anything!’
The line went dead. Neven cried out and shouted wordlessly into the phone, clutching it as if it were a talisman.
In the next second, a powerful hand closed on his shoulder and he was spun around. Ramaas stood there, the Greek crewman who had given Neven the cigarette behind him.
‘What is this?’ Ramaas plucked the sat phone from his hands and glared at it. He held it up, examining it from different angles. ‘Who did you speak to?’ He grabbed Neven by the throat and hauled him off his feet. ‘Who was it?’
Neven told him everything in a torrent of confession, begging for his life. After a moment, Ramaas let him drop and walked away to the guard rail along the edge of the tramp freighter’s deck.
‘This disappoints me,’ he told Neven. ‘Now I will have to take certain steps.’ Ramaas raised the sat phone high and tossed the device away, into the black waves racing past the hull.
Neven dragged himself up from the damp deck, fully expecting to follow the phone into the drowning depths, but Ramaas waved him off. ‘This man will take you below, search you and lock you up,’ he told him. ‘I need to use the radio.’
*
‘Loss of signal,’ announced Kara, as the digital wavelength monitor on her laptop slowly flattened into a steady line. ‘Looks like that’s all we’re going to get.’
Marc studied the mirrored display on the window screen behind them. Clever vocal parsing software listened in on the conversation between Neven Kurjak and Franko Horvat, deconstructing their words in real time and assembling a machine-coded translation from Croatian into English. Text scrolled up the window as the computer’s simple artificial intelligence finished its job.
‘Any locations?’ Malte had joined them when the call intercept had begun, standing to one side and listening intently.
‘Receiver is inside the Split metropolitan area,’ Kara reported. ‘Got him narrowed down to the nearest cell tower, but that’s as good as it gets.’
Marc handed her a scrap of paper with Luka Pavic’s email address on it. ‘Do me a favour, send that as a priority message to this guy? Give him a digital recording of the call as well.’
‘Who is this?’ she asked.
‘Local cop,’ Marc explained. ‘He’s a good guy. It could help him put that creep Horvat permanently behind bars.’
Kara glanced at Solomon and he gave her a nod before she did as Marc asked.
‘What about Neven?’ Lucy studied the panel of text. ‘Can we lock down where he was calling from?’
Marc pointed out a string of data. ‘The call came in from a sat phone.’ The prefix showed it had been routed by a low-earth orbit satellite to a local provider on the ground and from there to Horvat. Backtracking through the information, it was a matter of isolating what satellite had accepted the signal and cross-referencing that with commercial orbital data.
Within a few minutes, they were looking at a zone of transmission centred over the Adriatic. ‘You were right,’ said Lucy. ‘He’s on a ship at sea.’
‘But which one?’ Marc folded his arms, thinking back to the long list of vessels. ‘We’ve got to find a way to narrow it down.’
‘Let’s say we do.’ Lucy ran a careful eye over the map. ‘If we can pinpoint the ship, what’s our next move?’
‘We go in,’ said Malte. ‘Neutralise the device before it makes landfall.’
‘There’s only one problem with that . . .’ Marc used his own laptop to lay additional panels of data over the projected map, each one folding over the next in a stack of layers. The first showed plots of all the commercial shipping traffic heading south toward the Med in illuminated yellow trails, and then across that he added real-time weather data. The ugly swirl of a large low-pressure system imposed itself on the image, a radar return of heavy storm clouds moving north from the Strait of Otranto between the Italian and Albanian coastlines. ‘Boat or helicopter, you won’t be able to get close. Unless you’ve got another way in, that’s going to scrub any attempt for an at-sea intervention, right there.’
Solomon gave a reluctant nod. ‘Regrettably, the Swedes have yet to complete work on the A26 submersible Rubicon purchased last year . . .’ He ran a hand over his chin. ‘But the point is moot. Unless we know the exact vessel to target, we can only watch and wait.’
Lucy stared at the translation of the telephone conversation. ‘Is this a misreading of a word here? From the context I think it’s a name, but it looks wrong.’
‘Baker?’ Marc looked at the same text. ‘Wait, no. Not a Baker, it’s the Baker.’
‘Ramaas is in the market for a nice cannoli?’ Kara raised an eyebrow.
‘The name is an alias,’ Marc explained. ‘I saw it in the files on the Kurjaks. It’s the nickname for some bomb-maker that worked with the Serbs back in the bad old days.’ He searched his computer’s memory for the relevant data. ‘Here we go. From what the NSNS could determine, this guy helped the Kurjaks build the fake nukes they got rich off in the nineties. Red Mercury detonators and all that bollocks.’
‘So more bomb-faker than bomb-maker?’ said Lucy,
‘Nope.’ Marc shook his head as he ported the file across to the Rubicon mainframe for Kara to add to their data trawl. ‘NSNS could never hang a name on the Baker, but he was supposed to be the real deal. Word was, he’d been in the game for decades, came up in the days of Black September.’
‘Old-school terrorist,’ offered Kara. ‘That helps, Dane. I’ll start a program on this guy. Maybe reach out to our assets in Mossad. They’re always good with this stuff.’
Marc glanced back in Solomon’s direction, and noted that not once had the man given an order to anyone in the room. Everybody in the Rubicon team slotted straight into a role the moment that a problem presented itself, and Marc saw that he had done exactly the same thing. It felt oddly correct. There was an energy in the room that until now he hadn’t realised was missing from his life.
Back in the NSNS field office, every day and every task had felt like an uphill struggle. But here and now, even if they didn’t have a plan to deal with Ramaas right this second, there was motion toward one.
A sense of purpose, Marc thought.
*
The heavy padlock securing the tool room clattered and the metal door swung open. Neven looked up from the crate he was sitting on and blinked at Ramaas. He felt sickly and drained. The waves around them had grown as the tramp freighter forged on into the building storm, and even here below deck Neven had not been able to keep his food down. The bucket he had been given to use as a toilet stank of his stale vomit.
Ramaas gave Neven a sideways look with that dark, predator’s eye of his and then beckoned him to his feet. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Time for you to go.’
Each time Neven saw the warlord, he was convinced it would be the last, and this was no different. He hauled himself up from the crate, disconnected from his body by a grinding, constant fear that had no end to it.
The deck lurched as he stepped out into the corridor. Neven heard noises coming from the starboard side of the ship – the clanking of metal on metal, the rattle of chains and men’s voices.
‘You believe you are about to die,’ Ramaas said from behind him. ‘I have told you. That is not my intention. Even if you did cause problems for me.’
‘Nothing I said or did will matter,’ Neven managed bleakly. ‘I was a fool to think I could get Horvat to help me.’
‘No-one cares about you. No-one trusts you,’ said the other man. ‘This is what you reap from a life of lies and tricks. But there is still a chance that remains.’
They were moving toward the front of the ship’s ‘castle’, where the bridge and crew cabins were clustered. Neven heard urgent footsteps thudding on the deck above them and someone calling out a warning in a language he didn’t un
derstand. He risked a glance over his shoulder and saw that Ramaas was holding his dead brother’s Python revolver in his fist.
‘Redeem yourself, Neven Kurjak,’ said the warlord. ‘Do one righteous deed for me and for Waaq. For God.’
‘I’ve told you all I know,’ Neven muttered. ‘What more can I do?’
‘All in good time.’ Ramaas had barely said the words when the chatter of automatic gunfire rang out and Neven heard the screams of a dying man.
He flinched, stumbling against the wall in fright, but Ramaas was on him, pulling him back to his feet. More shots sounded above them and then from ahead, past the door that led to the weather deck. The yellow flash of muzzle flare was visible through the rain-slicked windows. ‘What is going on?’
‘The consequence of your actions,’ Ramaas told him, and shoved him outside.
Neven was startled as he saw that the vast shadow over the port side of the boat was not cast by a storm cloud, but was actually a wall of black steel. A container ship many times the size of the tramp freighter was cruising alongside them, and a web of cables had been strung from the other craft to the deck before him.
He saw lights on the bigger ship, and men moving on board with the spindly shapes of assault rifles in their hands. Others – all of them gangly and dark-skinned – were moving around the freighter’s deck. Neven watched one of them walk to a pair of motionless bodies lying near where the smokers had congregated, and put a single shot into their heads.
Behind him, glass broke and a shotgun sounded. Then someone shouted something and Ramaas replied in the same language.
‘The crew . . .’ Neven cast around. All the Greeks were dead. ‘Why did you do this?’
‘You made it necessary,’ Ramaas told him, pushing him in the small of the back toward the web of ropes and cables. ‘The call you made may be tracked to this vessel. The moment you did that, it meant this ship and its crew were compromised.’ He shook his head. ‘I could not trust them to be silent if others came to find us. You forced me to advance my plans.’
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