Exile

by James Swallow

  Horvat wasted no time shoving his spoils into the sling bag and getting out of there. Huffing and puffing, he took the stairs up from the basement as fast as he could and dashed across the bank’s wide hall toward the main doors, desperate to get away.

  It was only as he got to the doors that his brain caught up to the fact that the bank was empty. Horvat’s head whipped around and his heart sank as he saw a rank of blue-and-white patrol cars parked outside and officers in the black tactical gear of the Special Police unit aiming assault rifles at him through the driving rain.

  He hesitated on the threshold. Had the man who called himself Saito set him up, or had he been too long on the phone to avoid a trace?

  Then Horvat saw Saito emerge from the stairs to the basement. He had turned the dark jacket he was wearing inside out, and now Horvat could see the word POLICIJA written across the back. As he walked up, Saito was unscrewing the silencer from the muzzle of his gun. He aimed the pistol at the glass frontage of the building and pulled the trigger, blind-firing in the direction of the patrol cars outside. The black-clad tactical team reacted in kind.

  ‘No!’ Horvat screamed, pushing open the door and raising his hands. ‘Don’t, it wasn’t –’

  But they were already returning fire, and Franko Horvat went down in a hail of bullets.

  SEVENTEEN

  The yacht was called the Themis, and the Greek Titaness of mythology she was named after greeted them in the atrium beyond the sun deck where they boarded. An abstract metre-high statue made of copper showed a woman holding a sword, point down in one hand and a set of balanced scales in the other. The sun glittered off the sculpture’s androgynous face as she stared out at nothing.

  ‘Lady Justice,’ said Lucy, and gestured at the piece of art. ‘Isn’t she supposed to have a blindfold on, or something?’

  Delancort shook his head. ‘That’s a detail that artists added in the fifteenth century. Justice should never be blind. At least, that’s what Mr Solomon has told me.’

  ‘Is he here?’ Marc glanced at the French-Canadian.

  ‘Still in Monaco.’ Delancort walked past him. ‘He’s been very busy. More so, after the mess you made for us in Dubai.’ He sighed. Solomon’s aide had listened carefully as Marc and Lucy had filled him in on what happened in the Emirates as they sailed across from the dock, taking in everything with stoic nods of the head. ‘Despite what you may believe, my job is not solely to clean up after you.’

  ‘We didn’t have a lot of choice,’ said Marc. ‘We got here too late. Ramaas was already in play.’

  ‘And now he is, as the Americans say, in the wind. And you found yourself arrested. Your divergence from the script in Poland was bad enough, but this goes well beyond that.’

  Somewhere off toward the front of the boat, a bell trilled twice and Marc heard the rumble of diesel motors beneath his feet. Themis was weighing anchor and preparing to set sail.

  ‘We could have got out of it,’ Lucy insisted. Marc decided not to disagree with her. ‘We were working on a thing.’

  Marc halted, glancing around the brushed steel and azure glass of the yacht’s modernist interior. The vessel had the same design aesthetic that he had seen before, on Solomon’s private jet. It was all clean, smooth lines, every surface and accessory resembling a perfectly machined part for some colossal, elegant engine. The boat had to be a hundred and sixty metres long at least, and Marc wondered again about the enigmatic billionaire’s resources. ‘How did you get them to release us without charge?’ He looked out of a panoramic window, beyond which the towers of Dubai were beginning to diminish.

  ‘When you missed your scheduled check-in, we employed digital assets to track your whereabouts.’ Delancort raised an eyebrow. ‘I wasn’t surprised when Kara back-traced warrant searches based off your fingerprints to the Dubai police force. From there, it was simply a matter of applying the correct leverage.’

  Lucy’s expression stiffened. ‘You paid them off? Are you telling me that Solomon cut those assholes a cheque so we could walk?’ Her voice rose as she spoke. ‘Have you been over there, Delancort? Have you seen what it’s like outside the malls and the nightclubs? The last thing the people running that city need is more money –’

  ‘Calm down.’ Delancort shook his head. ‘Remember who we are talking about. Do you believe for one moment that Ekko Solomon has any illusions about the human rights abuses taking place out of sight here? You know him, Lucy. You know he would not be a party to enriching those responsible for such things.’

  ‘So explain what you meant by “leverage”,’ she demanded.

  Delancort gave a familiar Gallic shrug. ‘We did have to agree to replace the Bugatti you destroyed with one from Mr Solomon’s personal collection. But as to the matter of your incarceration, well . . .’ He paused, framing his words. ‘Rubicon owns controlling stock in a large investment bank that several Dubai interests are in partnership with.’

  ‘You mean, owe money to,’ corrected Marc. ‘I’ve heard the stories about investors overspending to keep that city from falling back into the desert.’

  ‘Quite,’ allowed Delancort. ‘The suggestion was made that certain loans would immediately be foreclosed unless an accommodation could be met. And so it was.’

  The explanation wasn’t enough for Lucy, however, and she scowled. ‘Serve them right if that place drowns in the sand,’ she muttered. ‘I need to go clean up.’

  ‘You both do,’ Delancort said curtly. ‘I will get to work on the information you gave me. In the meantime, there are cabins set up on the guest deck.’

  *

  A shower and a change of clothes made Marc feel almost human again.

  He helped himself to the contents of a medical kit that the Themis’s crew had thoughtfully provided, patching up the various bruises and cuts that a couple of days on the wrong side of Dubai had left him with.

  By the time he exited the cabin, it was late in the day and the sun was dipping toward the horizon as the yacht hugged the Emirati coastline, heading north-east into the Strait of Hormuz. The boat’s powerful engines were making good headway, the blade-like silhouette of the Themis cutting quickly through the littoral waters.

  Finding his way back to the main deck, in his mind’s eye Marc mentally unfolded a map of the region. It was another of his more useful skills, one that had made him invaluable as an Officer Observer back in his days with the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm, the knack of being able to hold a chart in his head as though he had it in his hands. Allied with a superlative sense of direction, it meant he rarely got lost.

  If he guessed right, the Themis would enter the Gulf of Oman by nightfall and then they’d be free to set a course for . . . where? He doubted very much that Solomon would want them to come and pick him up in Monte Carlo. The Horn of Africa, and the pirate Ramaas’s home territory, was a lot closer.

  Marc paused to watch the ocean, letting his mind drift with the waves for a moment, listening to the steady rush of the water along the hull. He hadn’t had a single moment to stop and process what was going on around him since that day in the gym, when Luka Pavic had brought him the information from his cousin. It was hard to grasp that it had been less than a week since that happened. It felt like months. The confrontation in the burning building, tracking Ramaas to the casino and then getting shut down by Schrader . . . All that had been the precursor to course he was on now, working with Rubicon’s Special Conditions Division and grasping his way toward stopping a ruthless killer from doing something terrible.

  I’ve been here before, he told himself. Last time we got through more by luck than judgement. This time . . . ? Marc sighed, and from out of nowhere came a sudden, acute pang of loneliness. For a second, he had a total and true sense of just how far away he was from his old life. Unbidden, the emotion turned bitter and he frowned as a question he had kept silent for over a year now pushed its way forward. ‘What the hell are you doing with your life, man?’

  ‘Say wha
t?’ He turned as he heard Lucy approaching. ‘Who are you talking to?’

  ‘Myself. I know – first sign of madness, my mum always used to say.’

  Lucy gave him an odd look. ‘She still around?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But your sister is, right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, at length. ‘We don’t talk much, though.’

  ‘Make the effort.’ Lucy had a look in her eyes he hadn’t seen before, one that Marc couldn’t place. Then it was gone and she was all business again. ‘But not right this second. C’mon. Solomon wants us downstairs.’

  ‘I thought he wasn’t on the boat.’

  ‘Trust me, he can be in two places at once if he wants.’

  *

  Lucy led Marc below, through sections of the yacht that were used as a reception room and a library, before bringing him into a large compartment that took up most of the width of the hull.

  Marc’s first thought was of the Hub White facility at MI6’s headquarters in Vauxhall Cross, a compact, carefully engineered crisis centre banked with video display screens and data consoles. The light level in the room was low, illuminated by the screens and a soft blue glow that came from several door-sized panes of glass that extended from floor to ceiling. Like the smart windows in Rubicon’s Monaco office, the panes here were filled with waterfalls of information moving in a constant flow of new intelligence.

  Kara Wei stood up from a keyboard and gave them both of them a jaunty wave. ‘Hey. Glad you’re not dead.’

  ‘Us too,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Got something you might want to look at.’ She offered Marc a set of chunky, over-engineered digital glasses with a laser projector built into the frame. He eyed them warily. ‘Put these on,’ Kara told Marc, making the motion for him. ‘Can’t see it without them.’

  He slipped the glasses over his nose and recoiled. Floating in front of him was a blurry, pixelated image of a distorted metal box. He blinked. ‘What is this? It’s out of focus.’

  ‘Use your hand.’ Kara grabbed his wrist and moved it so his fingers were up in front of his face. The image of the box immediately reacted as though he had touched it. ‘Synthetic haptic response, see?’

  ‘Oh, right.’ Marc reached out and put his fingers where the box would be if it were really there. He pinched a corner of it and found he could move it around. The virtual-reality device responded smoothly to his gestures. ‘So, what? There’s a motion tracker in the specs following my hand movements?’

  ‘Yeah, you got it. We built that image out of high-definition object data that was uploaded to the UAE national police server. Recognise anything?’

  ‘You look like you’re swatting flies,’ said Lucy. ‘Or signing something.’

  ‘It’s the suitcase.’ Marc kept his head steady, and slowly turned the distorted lump of steel around in mid-air. ‘The one that fell out the back of the Merc when we were chasing it.’

  ‘The fake bomb?’

  ‘Yeah, lucky for us.’ He studied the ruined interior of the simulated device. ‘It’s a mess. I suppose the local coppers must have recovered it from the roadway.’

  ‘They have any idea what it was supposed to be?’ continued Lucy.

  ‘It would appear not,’ said Kara. ‘Probably a good thing.’

  Marc tried to visualise what the fake would have looked like when it was intact, and he felt a chill run up his spine as he recalled what he had seen in Neven Kurjak’s case back in Croatia. The ruined replica of the Exile device was convincing, even half-smashed. He pulled it closer to him, trying to examine the cylindrical sections that made up the core of the unit, but the image began to lose definition.

  Right cylinder, nine rods. Those had been Jalsa Sood’s dying words to him, but without an intact example of his work, Marc could only guess at what the old bomb-maker had been trying to tell him. Unable to gain any more from the image, he handed the VR glasses back to Kara.

  Delancort entered, working at a digital pad. ‘Mr Solomon will be conferencing with us in a few minutes – we’re just waiting for an optimal satellite position for the link,’ he explained, and his usual unflappable mask faltered. ‘Something is up,’ he admitted. ‘The usual levels of signal encryption have been doubled.’

  Marc and Lucy exchanged glances. ‘So while we’ve got time to kill, some questions,’ she began. ‘Do we know what the Dubai police are doing about the kills at Sood’s place? I mean, there’s a dozen bodies there, including an escaped Al Sayf terrorist. Once they figure out what they have, it’s going to be a big deal.’

  ‘They’re nothing if not good at being discreet,’ said Delancort. ‘Malte has been monitoring them. The public line is that the estate belonging to one Mr Vishal Daan has been closed off because of . . .’ He glanced at his pad to find the relevant data. ‘A gas leak.’

  ‘The locals are going to want to make this all go away,’ said Kara. ‘I would not like to be them when the CIA find out they’re sitting on Jadeed Amarah’s corpse.’

  ‘Is that likely to happen?’ said Lucy.

  Kara gave an airy shrug. ‘Oh, someone may have dropped an email containing that very information on a secure server at Langley. Just saying.’

  Marc nodded at the screens. ‘So what about the two jokers in the red BMW we ran off the road, and the guy Ramaas ditched? Got any intel on them?’

  Delancort found another file, and with a swipe of his hand he migrated it to one of the glass panels. Marc saw still images of the crimson Z3 abandoned in a roadside ditch. ‘Malte managed to intercept this for us. The body of an African male of unknown identity was found in the vehicle, dead from multiple gunshot wounds.’ He glanced at Lucy, then away again. ‘Police on site reported that there was evidence of another person in the car, but no-one else was found in the area.’

  ‘So the driver bolted,’ said Lucy. ‘Which means he’s either lying low, or more likely he connected up with Ramaas after his boss pulled the dirt-bike trick.’ She looked toward Kara. ‘You got any leads on that?’

  ‘There’s like thousands of motorcycles in Dubai alone, not counting unregistered ones.’ Kara gave a slow shake of the head. ‘Give me full access to all of their traffic cameras and a week to sift the data and I might be able to find the bikes. Emphasis on might.’

  ‘No time for that. We need to go back to core principles,’ said Marc firmly. Intelligence analysis and pattern matching was something else he was good at, and he called on those talents right now, grabbing another digital tablet. He began to leaf through the intelligence data they had on the warlord. ‘Forget everything else. Ramaas is at the middle of all this, he has been from the start. We’ve got to put all our energy into tracking him down.’

  ‘We need to find out where he sleeps,’ agreed Lucy. ‘We get to him, we get to the weapon.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’ said Delancort.

  ‘Gut instinct,’ she replied. ‘A guy like that, he’s not got a lot of trust to spread around.’

  ‘It’s time,’ said Delancort, and he stepped aside to face one of the smart-glass panels.

  The data displayed here became a haze of photons that flickered and re-formed into an image of Ekko Solomon, seated behind his desk at the Monaco office. It was late afternoon there and the sun was still high in the sky behind him. The glass panel suddenly became a doorway, and Marc imagined it was a portal through which the other man could step through.

  ‘Mr Dane, Lucy. You are both uninjured?’

  ‘More or less,’ said Marc. ‘Thanks for the get-out-of-jail-free card.’

  ‘It is only money,’ said Solomon, and from the corner of his eye Marc saw Delancort actually wince at the words. ‘And after what has happened in the past hour, it would seem that an investment in intelligence about Abur Ramaas is about to become a far more valuable commodity.’

  Lucy made a face. ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘While you were being extracted from Dubai, events have proceeded apace,’ Solomon said grimly.

 
Marc’s throat became dry as his mind raced with the worst of possibilities. ‘Tell me he didn’t . . . set off the device?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Solomon tapped a control panel inset on his desk. ‘Observe. I am relaying you a video file that was passed on to Rubicon from a contact we have in the Chinese Ministry for State Security . . .’

  One of the wall screens blinked into life, and Marc was suddenly looking at Ramaas, as the man sat indolently in a large wicker chair against a stone wall. Waxy evening light filled the room, but there was little other detail to make it clear where and when it had been shot. Marc knew, however, and he glanced at Lucy, getting a nod from her. ‘That’s Jalsa Sood’s mansion,’ he said. ‘Which means this must have been recorded in the last few days.’

  Ramaas leaned back in the chair, beckoning whomever was holding the camera to bring it closer. ‘Take a good look at me,’ said the pirate warlord, enunciating his words in steady, measured English. ‘You men of power. See this face and know who and what it is that is coming to punish you.’ He pointed a finger at his dead, dark eye. ‘I will show you something. You will see.’

  The video jumped in a hard edit to show metal decking, in some location that Marc did not recognise. The camera panned over a sheaf of military blueprints covered in Cyrillic text and found a steel case lying there. Thin, spindly fingers came in to open the steel lid and reveal the device inside.

  Marc tensed in spite of himself, and he felt a strange pressure behind his eyes, like a tiny pre-echo of the nuclear weapon’s contained destructive power.

  ‘There is a name for this thing,’ continued Ramaas, over the playback. ‘Exile.’ He sounded out the word. ‘But I call it what it is. This is a piece of the sun.’ The camera zoomed in on a metal plate riveted to the inside of the steel case, blurring before it sharpened again.