Exile

by James Swallow

  He wandered away, to the far end of the excavated chamber. The space was wide enough to fit a pair of trucks side by side if one could have got them down here. The yellow-grey rock all around him was rough hewn and cool to the touch. The air had a dense, slightly damp quality to it that sat heavily in Zayd’s chest when he breathed in. Despite the size of the excavation, he still felt uncomfortable within it, too enclosed to be at ease. His natural arena was an open space with sky above, sighting across clear sea or over the rooftops of a city. He tried not to think about the tons of stone above his head, closing his eyes for a moment.

  Zayd heard the distant rumble of a subway train passing, as if it were some massive animal stalking through a nearby tunnel. The mental image disturbed him and he pushed it away.

  This place was a tomb. That was what fascinated him the most about it. The contact had said that the tunnels were ancient, cut out of the living rock a thousand years ago, but none of that mattered to Zayd. He reached the sheer wall that marked the cavern’s blank end and turned around, sighting down the length of the chamber that extended away into the dark. More work lights were scattered along the distance.

  This place seemed unnatural to him. The still and lifeless air. The strange echoes. Even the feel of the ground under his feet. It felt far removed from life.

  Close to death, he thought. As if he could be physically near such a thing. Buried underground with the corpses.

  Zayd made a negative noise in the back of his throat and shrugged off the notion, unwilling to follow it where it might lead him. He returned to where he had left his gear in the rusted-out hulk of an old car, moving aside the long fishing rod bag and placing a hand on the steel suitcase.

  Still there. It was foolishness to keep checking it, but Zayd could not help himself. Ramaas’s last words to him echoed through his mind. I have never asked you to do anything more important than this, brother. Do not fail me. Do not fail God.

  He considered opening the metal case, then thought better of it. Zayd pulled the walkie-talkie radio handset from its clip on his belt and made sure it was switched on and ready to receive.

  His gaze dropped to the watch on his wrist, the glowing numerals there steadily advancing. He should have made contact by now, said the voice in his head, the same voice that talked of tombs and death and burial. If he has not, what does that mean?

  Zayd let the question fester, and after a while he reached for the steel case once again.

  *

  As the van started to slow, Marc tapped the laptop’s keyboard and the data window he was looking at closed, revealing another active panel that he had forgotten was open.

  The window was the same nuke-map utility that Kara Wei had used back in the Rubicon office in Monaco, only here it had been reset to show the effect of the Exile bomb on downtown Naples. An above-ground detonation would atomise the heart of the city, coring it like an apple and flattening everything within a two-kilometre radius. With the day’s strong north-easterly wind, a dagger of radioactive fallout would cut right across the local countryside toward neighbouring Caserta and the Matese Mountains.

  The data graphic was sobering and Marc’s mouth went dry. Out of nowhere, he thought of his sister’s face and realised with a jolt that he had not heard her voice in over six months. For a brief instant, all he wanted was to talk to Kate again, to connect back to something good and honest and true, something far removed from the danger swirling all around him.

  ‘We’re here,’ said Lucy, and the moment faded. The van lurched to a halt a few metres up from the corner of Via Tarsia and Via Toledo, mounting the narrow kerb in front of a shuttered clothing store. The Internet café was a couple of doors away, an illuminated sign in the window showing it was open for business.

  As one, the Russians stood and Simonova gave them a last, terse order. All of them were dressed in dark, deliberately nondescript street clothes that were clearly too much for the warm Neapolitan morning. The GRU team wore light body armour under their jackets, they carried Serdyukov SPS pistols that ended in boxy suppressors, and Marc had little doubt they were prepared to use the guns on anyone who got in their way.

  Simonova glanced at her digital tablet. On it was the data Marc had gleaned from Jonas’s laptop, identifying the IP address of the computer the Naples contact had been using. ‘This machine is in there,’ she said.

  Marc got up. ‘I can take you right to it –’

  Simonova did not let him finish, pressing him back with the flat of her hand on his chest. ‘You and Keyes will both remain here while we execute the objective. If I need you, I will bring you in. Do not interfere with this operation.’

  She handed her tablet to one of the agents – a younger guy with dark, close-cropped hair – and Marc knew she was ordering him to stay behind to watch them. The man threw her a nod in return. Simonova produced a pair of glasses and set them in place. On the tablet a video window appeared, showing a remote feed from a micro-camera in the frames. The GRU operative closest to the sliding door in the side of the VW counted down from three, and the Russian team were out and gone in less than a second.

  The door slammed shut and Marc blew out a breath. ‘Huh. Stay in the van. I thought I was past all this . . .’

  Lucy looked out of the tinted windows in the back of the vehicle, watching the Russians move quickly and carefully down the block toward the target. ‘That building is a rabbit warren. There’s gotta be a dozen exit routes. Must be why he picked it . . .’

  Marc closed the laptop and leaned across to peek over the GRU operative’s shoulder. The tablet relayed Simonova’s point of view as she entered the cramped confines of the café, panning around to show dozens of old PCs with large, outdated monitors lined up before users who were intent on sending emails, surfing the Web or engaging in video chat. The business largely catered to African immigrants, which meant it would be a perfect place for a Somali expat to blend in.

  He watched a stocky, barrel-chested man interpose himself in front of Simonova, demanding to know what she wanted there and in the corner of the shot, a dark-skinned guy with a panicked expression suddenly bolted from his chair and vaulted over the next row of computers. There was a flicker of motion and Simonova was on the move, glimpses of her men at the edges of the image showing them keeping pace. The agent ran up a narrow set of stairs, onto a landing, and slammed open a door.

  ‘Here we go,’ said Lucy. The patrons of the café were spilling out onto the street in rapid order, doubtless convinced that this was a police raid of some sort.

  The GRU operative was speaking quickly into a microphone concealed in his collar, and on the screen Marc caught a glimpse of Simonova’s silenced SPS semi-automatic as she aimed it ahead of her.

  It was like playing a first-person shooter video game, but without any direct control of events. Simonova’s gun bucked in her hand as she fired in the direction of a dark blur. She was moving again, running through a shady apartment hallway barely wide enough for one person. Marc heard shouting coming from down the street.

  Somewhere above them, glass shattered loudly, raining down on the top of the VW; then a heartbeat later the van sank hard on its shocks as a weight slammed into the top of the vehicle, deforming the roof with a wide, circular dent. Footsteps resonated across the metal and a figure jumped down, hitting the ground in a rolling sprawl. As the man came up, Marc saw the same face he had glimpsed through the Russian’s video feed.

  ‘That’s him!’ He reacted without hesitation, rocketing off the bench and through the rear doors of the van. Behind him, Marc heard a warning shout cut off mid-flow as Lucy intervened to cover his exit, but he was already on the move, sucking in a deep breath as the fugitive dashed away down the side street.

  The aches in his legs were still there, but they were a distant thing dulled by doses of military-grade painkillers. Marc forced the sensation away and concentrated on one thing – the runner.

  The Russians were still reacting, still scrambling to d
ouble back and snare the target. If Marc waited for them Ramaas’s contact would be lost.

  They sprinted up the rise of the street, barely a few metres between them as they threaded between blank concrete walls covered in fly-posters and plastic recycling bins crowding the side of the pavement. The runner hopped over an iron safety bollard and veered across the road. Marc came after him, but he almost collided with a teenage girl riding a scooter down the low hill. She leaned on the horn and cried out in dismay, and Marc lost precious seconds getting around her.

  He shot a look over his shoulder and saw Lucy coming after him, one hand pointing after the fugitive. ‘Keep going!’ she shouted.

  The road ended abruptly in a T-junction and the runner cut the head off the turn, going over a low wall and on to the first of a couple of steep hairpin switchbacks. Marc kept on him, seeing his target vault up and over a battered green Fiat Panda, much to the vociferous response of the irate driver.

  Marc was closing the distance as they hurdled the next turn, dodging around a heap of uncollected rubbish and discarded building debris heaped on the corner. He was just a moment from getting close enough to grab at the other man, his muscles crackling with each impact of his feet against the rough, cobbled street.

  On the turn, the runner wrenched a metallic object from his pocket – a cell phone – and threw it in the opposite direction. Marc saw the phone go spinning over a low wall and vanish. ‘Get that thing!’ he yelled and pointed, and kept on running, hoping that Lucy would understand what he meant.

  The pursuit passed into the shadows as they ran into a tight, single-lane street, hemmed in on both side by terraces of five-storey tenements. The runner snatched at a dining-table chair left out in front of a doorway, and hurled it blindly back in Marc’s direction.

  Marc sidestepped and gritted his teeth, forcing himself into a surge of speed to close the distance and bring the other man down. Despite having been ordered to remain in the van, Marc and Lucy had still been kitted out with the same Kevlar vests as the GRU team and the armour was working against him, slowing his pace. If he didn’t catch this guy in the next sixty seconds, he wasn’t going to catch him at all.

  As they came up on the graffiti-daubed mouth of a blind alley, the runner dared to shoot a glance over his shoulder and Marc saw the raw panic on the other man’s face.

  The man was looking the wrong way when the water truck came out of the crossway and slammed into him, square-on. The truck’s brakes shrieked as the terrified driver brought it to a skidding halt, and the runner was thrown back across the intersection as if he was a lure jerked on a fishing line.

  Marc got to the man and stumbled to a stop, his chest heaving with the effort of the chase. The fugitive was lying on the cobbles with his neck at an appalling angle, blood seeping from his mouth and nostrils. He resembled a broken, discarded puppet.

  ‘Bollocks . . .’ Acting quickly, Marc dropped down and pretended to check the man’s pulse while patting him down. He found a wallet and pocketed it.

  Lucy came up behind him as doors around them started to open. People were coming out onto their balconies, having heard the horrible sound of the accident. ‘Ah, sucks to be him,’ she muttered, beckoning Marc to back away from the body.

  ‘Sucks to be us,’ he corrected. ‘Our only lead just killed himself.’

  ‘Not exactly.’ She showed him a battered digital satellite phone with a shattered screen. ‘Still in one piece. Can you hack it?’

  ‘Reckon so,’ he said, taking it from her and turning it over in his hands. The case was dented but still intact, which meant there was a good chance the internals were still in working order.

  ‘Company,’ said Lucy. Two of Simonova’s men came running up the street toward them, but their guns were hidden away as they approached. The locals were gathering around the dead man and the driver, who was ghost white and shaking with shock. Attention started to turn toward Marc and Lucy.

  ‘We must go,’ said the crop-cut Russian from the van. ‘Police will arrive. We cannot be here then.’

  ‘Yeah, copy that,’ Marc agreed, heading back the way they had come.

  *

  By the time they returned to the Net café, Simonova’s crew had locked the place down and she was in the middle of interrogating the owner, the stocky character who had been caught on the video stream.

  She broke off her questioning as Lucy entered, with Marc following behind and their two GRU minders flanking them, in case the urge for another run came over them.

  ‘What part of remain in the vehicle did you fail to comprehend?’ Simonova snarled. ‘I will personally shoot both of you if you try anything like that again.’

  Lucy gave her a sideways look. ‘Nah, you want to try that another way, sister. Repeat after me: Hey, thanks for going after that guy we were too slow-ass to catch.’

  One of the other agents told Simonova that the runner was dead, and that didn’t go down well. ‘You got him killed. Yes, I can see how that is something I should be grateful for.’ She shook her head. ‘The Polizia won’t take long to track him back to this place, which means we have to abort. You have single-handedly ruined this operation.’

  Marc walked over to the computer that the runner had been using. ‘Not yet, we haven’t.’

  ‘But the day is young,’ Lucy added, with an unfriendly smile.

  The Brit gave the PC a quick once-over, tapping at the grimy keyboard. His expression told the tale. ‘Yeah, this is the machine Ramaas was sending messages to. It’s got a VOIP program installed on it. Very basic but also low-bandwidth. Easy to piggyback behind something else.’ He glanced at Lucy and the Russian woman. ‘The exact same software is on Jonas’s laptop.’

  ‘The owner says the one who ran was waiting outside when he opened up this morning,’ offered Simonova. ‘He’s been here since then. Drinking apple tea and watching YouTube. He didn’t use the video chat.’

  Marc gave a slow nod. ‘He had the VOIP program running all the time in the background . . . But it didn’t connect to anything, incoming or outgoing. He was just waiting. Waiting for somebody to call in.’ Something caught his eye and he reached behind the keyboard. His hand came back with a walkie-talkie in it. ‘Hello. Our boy must have left this behind when he bolted.’

  ‘Why’d he need a walkie if he had a sat phone?’ said Lucy.

  Marc turned the radio over and examined a label on the case. ‘Check this out . . .’ He tossed it to her, but before she could grab it, Simonova interposed herself and plucked the handset out of the air.

  ‘Proprietà di Napoli Metro,’ said the Russian, reading it aloud. Simonova weighed the radio in her hand, considering something. Then she used the device’s antenna to point at the café’s owner. ‘He says the contact was a night worker for the city Metro service.’

  Lucy nodded in the direction of the main road. ‘And we’re just around the corner from the nearest subway stop.’

  ‘Yeah. Dante Station, in the piazza,’ added Marc, as he rifled through the dead man’s wallet. ‘There’s a prepaid travel pass in here. But he didn’t have any work ID on him, or anything, just a CIE . . .’ Marc held up the dead man’s national identity card for all of them to see. He trailed off; then suddenly he was working at the broken phone, manipulating the device. ‘There’s a bunch of deleted texts on here, but I can fish them out of the recent memory.’ Marc was silent for a moment as he worked. ‘Okay, here we are. Looks like, maybe, times of the day?’

  ‘Orders for a meeting,’ Simonova suggested.

  ‘Last one was this morning,’ Marc continued. ‘Three a.m. . . . That’s well before the Metro officially opens, right?’

  Lucy nodded. ‘A phone signal, that wouldn’t reach someone underground in a subway tunnel.’ She thought it through out loud, assembling the connections. ‘But a radio would be enough.’

  ‘Computer, satellite telephone, radio.’ Simonova ticked off the items one after another. ‘Our dead friend was acting as messag
e hub.’

  ‘Not just that,’ Marc said, with a grim nod of agreement. ‘He gave his contacts access, don’t you get it?’ He pointed at the ground. ‘I know where the weapon is.’

  *

  They left two men with the van to clean up and intimidate the café owner into keeping his mouth shut, and the rest of the group broke into pairs. Temporarily splitting apart, they made their way to the Piazza Dante, approaching the square from a variety of angles, each of them taking a different route down into the Metro station.

  Marc walked with the crop-haired GRU agent, forcing himself not to move too hurriedly in case it drew attention. He scanned the open space, devoid of the vendor stands that usually choked the place on a market day. Behind metal railings in the middle of the square was a white marble statue of Dante Alighieri on a high pedestal, the poet gesturing languidly with one hand. Marc recalled something of his writings on hell, and scowled at the thought of an apocalyptic inferno erupting right beneath the statue’s feet.

  They approached a glassed-in entrance, and when Simonova’s agent was momentarily distracted, Marc slipped the damaged sat phone from his pocket and thumb-typed a quick message. He input the number for the Rubicon digital dead-drop and pressed SEND, hoping that the device was still able to transmit.

  ‘What are you doing?’ The GRU operative glared at him as they descended below street level and into the station proper.

  ‘Checking this,’ Marc lied. ‘In case there’s more information, yeah?’

  ‘Keep your hands where I can see them,’ he was told.

  Simonova and Lucy were already engaged in a conversation with a man in a station manager’s cap. The Russian woman had a good grasp of rapid-fire Italian, and she flashed him a fake Interpol badge. Marc caught the word terrorista and that opened the floodgates. In a few seconds, the manager’s manner changed from aggressive and obstructive to obedient and worried. He released the ticket barriers and let all of them through without another word.