‘What’s he doing?’ said Kara.
‘He’s showing us the device’s registration tag,’ Marc explained. ‘So it can be checked out by the people in the know . . .’
‘Proving his bona fides,’ added Lucy.
The view cut to Ramaas in his chair. He sat in it like a king upon a throne. ‘My nation has been through much hardship, thanks to all of you. Our shoreline poisoned and our harvest from the sea stolen away, by you. Our cities ruined by your soldiers. And before that, our lands were taken by your colonials through force of arms. When we defended ourselves, when we did what we had to in order to survive, you called us brigands. Pirates and criminals.’ He gave a humourless smile. ‘But we have learned from you in that time, oh, yes. You have taught us.’
‘I don’t like where this is going,’ said Lucy quietly.
Ramaas stood up slowly and walked toward the camera. ‘The lesson is, that a nation, a man, can go beyond being a criminal if his wrongdoing is large enough. And what crime is greater than war?’ He pointed out at his viewers. ‘You fired the first shots. Now I have the power to declare a war on you, if I wish. Somalia will no longer be the whipping boy of the West. You will no longer ignore my nation. We have your weapons now. You will listen to us.’ His face filled the screen. ‘You will respect us.’
‘He has just handed the world’s superpowers a reason to bomb that country into the dust,’ noted Delancort. ‘The man is insane!’
‘Perhaps not,’ said Solomon. ‘Keep watching.’
There was another clumsy edit and the grain of the video changed. A different camera, thought Marc. There was no audio. The point of view panned around inside the back of an empty van as the vehicle rolled along a road, before dipping to show the same steel case at the camera operator’s feet. The lid was open, the mechanism clearly visible. A gloved hand closed the lid as the van came to a halt and the view bounced around as the person holding it got out and started walking. The camera was aimed down at the ground, but it caught glimpses of other people’s feet passing by and flashes of the steel case in the camera operator’s hand. It was a bright day in whatever city the weapon had been taken to. The pavement turned into a white-striped crossing and then the ground underfoot changed from asphalt to a path through a park. Presently, the camera stopped moving and panned up. The steel case was resting against a metal fence, and just past it was a waterfront, with land visible across the distance. The view shifted until it found a blurry point on the horizon. The blur gradually resolved into the Statue of Liberty.
Marc heard Lucy swear under her breath. ‘That’s Battery Park,’ she said stiffly. ‘Mom would take my brother and me there for picnics in the summer.’
The show wasn’t over. The image cut to a different stream of video. The set-up was the same; the interior of another van, the establishing shot of the Exile case and then motion as it was picked up and carried out onto the street. This time, the pavement was made up of diamond-shaped slabs and the ambient light was dull, from an overcast sky. Marc instinctively felt something familiar about the glimpses he was getting. Somewhere with older architecture, somewhere European?
This time, when the case was put down on the ground, the camera rose to show a wide open plaza of stone cobbles. In the distance was a set of minarets and distinctive onion domes clustered together. ‘St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow,’ said Marc. ‘This was shot in Red Square.’
Then, for the third and final time, the video flickered into a new view. It began with the camera operator pointing the lens down at a black rucksack similar to the kind that were owned by thousands of world travellers. Gloved hands opened the rucksack and removed the familiar steel case, opening it briefly to show off the inner workings before returning it to its place. Grey paving stones and dozens of pairs of feet flashed past as the person with the camera made their way through a dense crowd. Then finally they halted, showing the rucksack again and a silver corner of the case peeking out from inside. The camera was set on the ground and tilted upward until the view was filled by the tiers of a massive building with a swooping roof in the style of a feudal Chinese palace. Crowds of tourists milled around in front of the building, posing for snapshots.
‘I know where that is, I’ve been there,’ said Kara. ‘That’s the Gate of Divine Might. One of the entrances to the Forbidden City.’
‘New York, Moscow and Beijing,’ said Delancort. ‘I will say this for him, he is not one for aiming low.’
‘How did he get them there?’ said Lucy.
‘We’ve been off the grid for more than a day,’ noted Marc. ‘Long enough to sneak the cases in on a cargo plane or something . . . And we know our guy has the contacts to do it.’
At length, the video playback returned to Ramaas once more, and he was nodding to himself. ‘Which of those devices is the real weapon? If you test us, you will learn.’ He let that sink in. ‘If you attempt any action against us, if your militaries advance toward our nation, you will learn.’ He waved the camera away, as if he had become bored with it. ‘Now, go and think on your crimes, and consider what compensation you might provide for them.’
The recording ended and Marc released a breath he had been holding. ‘This guy, he’s got some stones. Ramaas is using the bomb for a power play. He’s declared Somalia a nuclear-armed rogue state.’
‘He doesn’t have the authority to speak for the whole country,’ said Delancort.
‘Who would have the courage to stand against him?’ said Solomon. ‘He already has a substantial power base . . . And by threatening the superpowers on their own terms, there are many who would consider him a heroic figure . . .’
‘Delancort is right. Ramaas must know that this makes him the most wanted man on the planet!’ Lucy said hotly. ‘He’s painted a target on his chest and invited America, Russia and China to step up and take a shot! What’s going to stop any one of them sending in a black-ops team to blow the shit out of his little pirate empire?’
‘That won’t be the first option,’ noted Marc. ‘Right now, the CIA, the FSB and Chinese state security are tearing that video to bits in analysis, trying to track down whomever shot the footage and make sure they don’t have a loose nuke in their backyard . . .’
‘But there’s only one device,’ said Kara. ‘Marc, you said you saw it in Croatia, when Ramaas got away.’
‘But there were five in the boot of the Merc we chased,’ he said. ‘One got run over. Three we saw in the video. That leaves one unaccounted for, and it could be anywhere.’ He frowned. ‘Like I said before . . . Ramaas is playing a shell game with us. We don’t know which are dummies and which are not.’
‘But now we know what he wanted with Jalsa Sood,’ said Solomon. ‘A smokescreen.’
‘Sood told me something before he died.’ Marc relayed the bomb-maker’s final, cryptic statement. ‘Maybe if we can get a better look at the devices on the video, that might give us a steer?’
Kara nodded. ‘Let me see if I can work up something with the digital imaging guys at the Palo Alto office.’ She dropped into a seat in front of a computer console. ‘It’ll mean getting them out of bed, but they do like a challenge . . .’
‘That’s a start,’ said Marc, glancing at Lucy. ‘But Lucy was dead-on, what she said before. We’ve got to find this guy and figure out what his real game plan is.’
Lucy gave Marc a nod of agreement. ‘So we have to break it down. What does Ramaas want?’
‘Money,’ offered Kara, without looking up from her console. ‘What did he say at the end of the video?’
‘Consider what compensation you might provide,’ repeated Delancort. ‘That certainly sounds like a man looking for a pay-off. One could read that as a tacit offer to cash in his nuclear device for recompense.’
‘It fits the pirate modus operandi,’ said Marc, but Lucy could tell he wasn’t convinced. Both of them had stood in the same room as Abur Ramaas and they shared a similar impression of him. ‘Take a hostage, demand a
release fee. Except this time, the hostage is a city and not some unlucky freighter crew.’
‘But you don’t buy that?’ Lucy prompted.
‘Nope.’ The Brit gave a firm shake of the head. ‘He’s sending mixed messages, isn’t he? Asking for money, that’s a brigand move. But earlier on he’s kicking off about the injustices done to him and his country. Ramaas is demanding respect.’
A chill prickled Lucy’s skin as another possibility occurred to her. ‘There’s a third option. He’s doing this out of ideology. Because he believes in something. And zealots are always the hardest ones to predict.’
‘Kara will concentrate on supervising analysis of the video,’ said Solomon, shifting in his distant, sun-lit office. ‘But I believe that if Rubicon is to be of use, we must commit to an act of intervention now, before Ramaas solidifies his position.’ He looked out of the screen and directly at Marc and Lucy. ‘Agreed?’
They both gave a nod. ‘So, circling back to the question of the hour,’ said Marc, ‘where the hell is he?’
‘Henri, show them the intercept data,’ ordered Solomon.
Delancort frowned, but he did as he was told. With more flicks of his wrist, Solomon’s aide sent digital information windows to the display panels around them. Lucy recognised a ‘heat map’ of Somalia, with areas along the coastline dotted with zones of glowing colours. The regions were clustered largely in the areas of major urban centres, hot reds and oranges in the cities fading to cooler blues and greens in the more sparsely populated areas.
‘You may not be aware that the Horn of Africa has one of the highest usage-per-person rates for cellular telephones on the planet. Somalia alone has a dozen different telecommunication suppliers serving the population.’
‘That’s because landlines are unreliable,’ said Lucy. ‘Collapsed infrastructure and graft in the government means phone lines don’t get fixed. The people out there are adaptable . . . They use what they have to hand.’
‘Indeed,’ said Solomon. ‘Rubicon has invested heavily in the region . . . Including fronting a major cell phone provider. This map shows the areas where Rubicon-manufactured SIM cards are in use.’
‘That’s a lot of coverage,’ noted Marc.
‘That’s deliberate,’ said Delancort, off a nod from Solomon. ‘For some time now, we have been discounting the cost of SIMs in this region, undercutting or buying out the competition, all to widen the spread of Rubicon’s market share.’
‘You’re listening in.’ Lucy felt that chill on her flesh return. ‘You’re running all the phone conversations in your network through an Echelon server, sifting for keywords.’
‘Most recently for specific references to Abur Ramaas,’ said Delancort. ‘Nothing from the man himself or his close confidantes, but we’ve assembled some consistent locational intelligence in the last fifteen hours.’
‘It is for a greater good,’ insisted Solomon, seeing the look on her face. ‘America and the NATO powers have been doing the same for decades, for far less altruistic reasons.’
Lucy’s eyes narrowed and she hovered on the verge of expressing her disquiet about Solomon’s revelation – but then a voice in the back of her head reminded Lucy that she had come into her employment with Rubicon with her eyes wide open. She had known from the start what tools Ekko Solomon had at his disposal, and how he wanted to use them. Lucy glanced at Marc and once again, she knew he was thinking the same thing.
They had hacked into a cellular network only a few days ago to capture a call from Neven Kurjak’s smartphone, but he had been just one man, and a known criminal. This was an intrusion on a far greater scale, involving hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Was it right to do something like this?
For today . . . With these stakes . . . I’m going to say it is. She took a breath and buried her misgivings. Tomorrow, though . . . That may be different.
‘Okay,’ Marc broke in, ‘if we’re all going to pretend we’re happy ignoring the egregious violation of civil rights that just happened, let’s not waste the opportunity. What have you got?’
Delancort told them the cell phone traffic picked up spikes in conversations that included Ramaas’s name and that of Welldone Amadayo, an influential local power-broker who was suspected of widespread corruption. By all accounts, Amadayo had been killed by the pirate warlord’s men and in the ensuing vacuum, those among the rich elites in Mogadishu and nearby regions were running scared. The intelligence gleaned from thousands of local phone calls over the past few days showed that Amadayo’s private estate was now home to a cadre of armed men whom no-one dared to challenge.
‘You reckon Ramaas has taken this Welldone guy’s place for himself?’ Lucy turned the idea over in her mind. ‘That’s pretty thin.’
‘We know that Ramaas was there the day before he flew to Croatia to meet with the Serbians,’ said Solomon. ‘We believe that he murdered Amadayo.’
‘He likes the personal touch,’ muttered Marc, then looked up. ‘Think about it. He didn’t need to go to Split in person, he didn’t need to go to Dubai to find Sood. He did all that because he wants to look people in the eye.’
‘That sounds like someone who likes to send a message,’ offered Kara.
Lucy folded her arms. She wasn’t convinced, but then again in the past she had pulled the trigger on operations with less intel than this. ‘Okay. So we infiltrate this dead guy’s place and track Ramaas from there? That’s the plan?’
‘There’s no time to spend on surveillance and prep,’ added Marc. ‘It would have to be a lightning-strike raid.’
‘Did you just volunteer?’ Lucy raised an eyebrow.
That knocked him off his pace. ‘I, uh, well . . .’ He swallowed hard, realising what he was getting into. ‘I am the only one here who’s seen the device up close. If it’s there –’
She shook her head and spoke over him, turning to look toward Solomon. ‘Ramaas knows our faces now, and so do his men. If he’s as dialled in as we think he is, he’ll make us the moment we step off the plane, or the boat or whatever. And a land crossing over the border from Kenya or Ethiopia could take days.’ Lucy ran the scenario in her head. Ramaas had threatened nuclear detonation if military force was deployed toward Somalia, so that meant that flying in by helicopter wouldn’t work either. If the American drone assets patrolling outside the border didn’t interdict them first, odds were that the locals would shoot them down before they could reach the outskirts of Mogadishu where Amadayo’s estate was located. ‘We need the quick and direct approach,’ Lucy went on, and nodded toward Marc. ‘Out of the sky like lightning, just as you said.’ A plan began to form.
‘I have the sudden sense I am going to regret those words,’ said the Brit.
A smile pulled at her lips. ‘You know how to use a parachute, right?’
EIGHTEEN
Marc hunched forward in the canvas seat and tried to ignore the steady vibration coming up through his feet and into his bones. The skin of his face felt raw and uncomfortable beneath the breather mask clamped over his nose and mouth. It had been necessary to shave off all his scraggly facial hair in order for the mask to make a good seal, and now he was resisting the urge to scratch. Cool, pure oxygen had been cycling into his lungs for the last couple of hours and he was finally getting past the light-headedness as his body equalised itself to the air mixture.
He cradled a smartphone in his gloved hands, one of Rubicon’s hi-spec custom models that packed a ton of cutting-edge tech into something small enough to slip into his pocket. The unmarked device was built out of scratchproof glass surrounded by a reflectionless carbon-fibre shell, and it replaced the one that he had lost in Dubai. The spyPhone, as Kara Wei liked to call it, advanced in capability each time he got a new version – and that happened a lot, as she took every opportunity to remind him. He had no idea what happened to the phones that got left behind in the field, but knowing the attention to detail shown by Rubicon’s Special Conditions Division, he didn’
t doubt they had some kind of self-bricking mode that rendered them useless after the fact.
Marc busied himself configuring the new device’s settings to the way he liked them, trying to find a moment of peace in the mundanity of the task. It didn’t work.
He shifted uncomfortably in his matte black jumpsuit and tactical rig. It was fresh out of the package and scratchy, and along with the mask, helmet, gloves and webbing, he felt as if he was wearing a costume more than a set of working clothes. Everything occurring around him had an artificial feel, as though it was happening to someone else. He frowned and pulled himself back to the moment.
The phone’s satellite communications link blinked a green icon in the corner of the screen and in a moment it had flash-loaded data from the handful of contact blinds Marc had set up for himself. One of the off-grid phantom servers he employed ghosted the office email account Marc had used while working at the NSNS in Split, and he was about to scrub the numerous threatening messages from Schrader and de Wit when he noticed one of them was from Luka Pavic.
He read on. Pavic spoke better English than he wrote, but the salient points in the email were clear enough. The day before, an anonymous source had called in to the precinct with information about the whereabouts of one Franko Horvat, and his plans to rob a bank in the city. Marc didn’t think for one second that the corrupt cop would ever have done something so blatantly stupid, but the police in Split had no choice but to respond to the tip-off.
Horvat had come out of the bank shooting, so the officers on site had said. Pavic’s tone, even through the email, seemed unconvinced. But no-one was going to look too hard at the brutal death of a man who was uniformly detested by crooks and cops alike.
Still, Pavic noted that there were questions that had no answers trailing in the wake of the bank shooting. A large safety-deposit box that had apparently belonged to Horvat was found empty and the bank’s video security system had suffered a strangely convenient malfunction in the hours surrounding his arrival. More than that, Pavic said there was a rumour going around the station house that the gun recovered from Horvat’s side had not been fired.
Exile Page 32
