Ghost:

by James Swallow

  The pain in Lex’s bad leg collected around the knee joint and he winced as he slowed to a walk. He started checking the zips and fasteners on his clothing, making sure they were secure. Under different circumstances, what he planned to do now would have excited him. He would have a GoPro clipped to his shoulder, and the action camera set to record everything. But here and now he was more afraid than he had ever been in his life, driven by abject terror instead of a thrill-seeking impulse.

  Lex closed up the hoodie and tugged a canister from the thigh pocket of his cargo trousers. The size of a large beer can, it attached to a web of expanding bungie cords that he spooled out and looped over his shoulders, snapping them together with a spring-loaded D-ring. He pulled it tight and the canister sat high on his back, between his shoulder blades.

  Lex took a deep breath and climbed the stairs up to the battlements two at a time. As he reached the top, he felt the distant twitch of his stomach swooping before the sight of the drop.

  If I do this wrong it will end me, he told himself. But if he didn’t, the shooters would put him down right here in front of everyone. He turned his head and closed his eyes, feeling the breath of the wind on his face, sensing the direction of the gusts.

  Then Lex reached up his back for a red plastic toggle on the bottom of the canister, and stepped over the cautionary signs warning not to approach the unguarded edge.

  *

  Behind him, Lex’s pursuers held their guns sideways on and low. They kept them down by their hips, hidden in the folds of their jackets. Both of them fired, but even with their specialised training, their shots were off-target by too great a margin. One round blasted a discarded water bottle sitting on a step, the other blew up a puff of rock dust a few inches from the target’s feet. Again, the faces of bystanders started to turn in his direction.

  ‘He is going to kill himself,’ said the male assassin through the wireless communication node adhered to his throat. This was unexpected.

  ‘No,’ said the woman, her reply tickling him through his skin. ‘I don’t think so . . .’

  The target’s arm came down in a sharp motion, and the object he had strapped to his back snapped open into a blossom of bright orange fabric and fine white cords. The thin material immediately caught the steady breeze and inflated into a narrow rectangle with a kite-like cross-section.

  ‘A parachute?’ The man disregarded protocol and launched forward, hoping to get to the target before he could step off the ledge.

  The compact canopy filled with wind, drawing shouts of surprise from the assembled tourists in the square, and the target pushed off the side of Mdina’s battlements and into the air.

  The woman grabbed her partner by the shoulder and pulled him back. ‘Wait.’ She was already putting her weapon away.

  He resisted, irritated at the idea of missing the kill. The chute was little better than a gimmick, a toy that would barely slow the target’s descent. If he got to the edge, if the woman covered him, he might still be able to hit the mark. It was galling to think that this civilian would escape them.

  ‘Both of you stand away,’ said a third voice. ‘I have this.’

  *

  Lex had half-expected the micro-chute to flop out and tangle, leaving him with nowhere to go, but the device performed better than he dared to expect. A nasty shock went through his chest and shoulders as the canopy took his weight and the cords cut into his flesh, but that was a small price to pay for getting away from the silent shooters. An unexpected thermal from the base of the tall hill threw him up and to the side, slipping him away from the edge of the fortress city, carrying him toward the farms ranged out below. Elation shocked through his body.

  It would be a hard landing, he could tell from the rapid rate of descent and the fluttering of the canopy, but it would be one he could stagger away from and that was all that mattered. Lex was already thinking about what to do next – find a vehicle, get down to the coast and get off this rock – when the wind boosted him up once again in a brief rise. He caught sight of the church spires and tiled rooftops across Mdina and Rabat.

  In the tallest of the towers, the light of the sun glittered in reflection. A flare off the glassy eye of a telescopic sight.

  A moment later, a single steel-cored 7.62mm bullet penetrated Lex’s body a few degrees off his sternum and tumbled violently as it passed through him. In the brief instant it took to enter through his chest and burst out through his back, the round spun and ripped through the tissues of his lungs, and tore open the bottom of his heart. Blood gushed into the ragged void created by the passage of the sniper shot and his body twitched as it went into brutal, fatal shutdown.

  Lex died as he sank toward the ground, his life ended in an instant. When his corpse finally crashed into a row of vines down in the valley, his clothes and the orange chute were soaked with a wet mess of dark, arterial red.

  *

  A tourist pointed over the edge of the battlements and shrieked. Others were holding up cell phones to record what was going on, and neither Cat nor Dog wanted to remain in the square a moment longer, for fear their faces might get captured on some idiot’s video footage.

  ‘Back to the rendezvous point,’ Dog said, stepping back from the ramparts. He gave Cat the slightest of sideways looks as he walked away, acting as if they had no connection to one another. ‘Leave through the main entrance. I will go through the west gate.’

  ‘Understood,’ said Cat, speaking without speaking, the device on her neck sensing the half-constructed words as they formed in her throat and turning them into a droning signal. The sub-voc unit made her skin crawl and she resisted the urge to scratch her face, directing the motion into adjusting the sunglasses perched on her small nose.

  ‘I am making my way to the car,’ Fox said. Cat unconsciously looked up, although from where she was there was no way to see the high roost the sniper had used. ‘Local law enforcement officers are at the site of the first engagement. Recommend we shift to secondary exit protocol.’

  Dog was team leader, so the decision was his, but both he and Cat respected the elder Fox’s field experience and the answer was as she expected it to be. ‘Agreed.’

  She passed by the cathedral and quickened her pace. Her fellow assassin had already vanished into a side street. ‘What about the target?’

  ‘I saw where he went down,’ Dog replied. ‘We must act quickly if we are to get there before anyone else.’

  ‘I had to leave the rifle behind,’ Fox admitted.

  ‘You sanitised it?’ said Dog.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then it won’t be an issue,’ Dog added. ‘Proceed.’

  Cat slowed her pace as she passed through the Mdina gate and stopped at a vendor to buy a bottle of chilled water, aping the tourists congregating nearby. As she paid for the drink, the green Fiat the team had been provided came around the corner and slowed to a halt. Cat walked over and climbed into the back.

  From the driving seat, Fox gave her a nod and then drove on, halting a second time at the next intersection to pick up Dog. As they rolled away from the traffic lights, a silver police car lined with a blue checkerboard livery raced past in the other direction. As soon as it was out of sight over the crest of the hill, Fox accelerated away, aiming the car toward Ta’ Qali.

  ‘Why was he not killed with the first shot?’ Fox’s voice sounded gruff when he spoke aloud. He didn’t direct the accusation at either of them, but Dog stared out of the window and at first gave no indication he was listening.

  ‘The Greek and his bodyguard were more dangerous,’ said Cat, after a moment, as she peeled the comm unit’s self-adhesive pad from her neck. ‘They were armed. They needed to be neutralised first.’ She always felt odd talking immediately after removing the sub-voc – she had to consciously remember not to whisper each word she said.

  Fox was going to add more, but Dog turned to him. ‘Just drive,’ he said. ‘If we don’t get what we came here for, then we will have to co
nsider our alternate options. That will extend the duration of the mission.’ He gave Cat a look. ‘None of us want to be here any longer than we must be, no?’

  Cat shook her head, and began reloading her weapon, swinging out the revolver’s angled chambers to insert fresh rounds. There might be witnesses at the landing site, she reasoned, and if that were the case it would be necessary to silence them as well.

  TWO

  There had been a good fall overnight, so the morning’s arrivals at Pont de la Flégère had come up the mountain eager to race the runs and make the most of the fresh powder. Across the valley from the majestic peak of Mont Blanc, the skiers and snowboarders were already carving paths back and forth before the sun was high in the clear blue sky. There were no clouds, and the thin air was crisp and dry. It was going to be another perfect day on the slopes at Chamonix.

  Among the early risers were a couple who kept to themselves, freestyling on a pair of fast CAPiTA boards, looking for kickers to jump and natural drop-offs at the periphery of the blue runs. The guy was white, in his late thirties, tall and whipcord-thin with a scruffy mop of dirty-blond hair, and he had a ragged excuse for a beard that aged him more than he wanted to admit. Now and then he let out a whoop when he caught some air, and he spent most of the time grinning out from behind a pair of mirrored goggles. He took risky turns that planted him in the snow every few runs, as he rediscovered old skills faded with disuse and worked at finding the limits of his abilities. The woman with him took it more cautiously. She was East Asian, maybe ten years his junior, and slightly built. Her small frame, the blue highlights in her black hair poking out from under a cherry-red helmet and her round face made her look more like a teenager. Her matching crimson jacket was a size too large for her, accentuating the impression. She made languid, geometric lines in the powder and rarely got herself into a spill.

  Their path brought them toward a cable car station rising further up the peaks, close to a lounge bar with a wide terrace looking out over the valley.

  ‘Race ya,’ she said, with a challenging nod.

  ‘You think you can keep up with—?’ He didn’t get to finish the question. Out of nowhere, his partner made a rapid push off a low slope and flashed by him, digging in a little to spray snow as she passed. ‘Funny. Ha.’ He called after her, pivoting on to the same line.

  ‘Loser buys!’ She sang the words over her shoulder, deliberately mimicking his boarding style, cutting back and forth in tight traversals.

  He pushed into the headwind rising up from the valley and closed the distance. Up ahead of them, pennants raised over the lounge bar’s frontage flicked and snapped in the breeze, marking their makeshift finish line.

  Another group was at the bar’s entrance in the process of removing their skis; an elegant couple in expensive, fur-lined snow gear, along with an assistant and three grey-jacketed men of heavy and intimidating build. One of the heavies detached himself from the group and walked into the path of the snowboarders.

  They didn’t appear to notice him, both of them too busy trying to outpace the other on the last few hundred metres of their improvised race.

  The guy on the snowboard used his weight to his advantage and cut the line past the woman, tossing off a sarcastic wave as he left her in his wake.

  ‘You’re a dick!’ she said, without heat.

  The man looked back in her direction as the slope levelled out. ‘And you are—’

  He was going to say a sore loser, but the tip of his board hit a mogul that he hadn’t noticed and before he could correct, his balance shifted the wrong way and he wiped out. Face-planting in the white, he rolled to a stop and came up laughing at himself. ‘Idiot!’

  The big man’s shadow fell across him and for a second he thought there might be the offer of a hand to help him up; but the heavyset man just watched, waiting for him to rise.

  ‘It’s okay. I can manage,’ the boarder said dryly.

  The man in the grey jacket moved to block the path to the lounge. ‘Bar is closed,’ he said, in a thick Eastern European drawl.

  ‘Oh?’ The guy made a show of looking over the other man’s shoulder, watching the elegant couple as they took the best table on the terrace. The lounge’s staff were in the process of ushering out the handful of other customers already there. ‘Doesn’t look that way to me.’ Behind him, he heard his companion slide to a halt a short distance away.

  ‘Bar,’ repeated the man in the grey jacket, ‘Is closed.’ He said the words slowly, as one might speak to someone who was hard of thinking. Then to underline the point, he used his thumb to drag down the zipper on his jacket so it fell open. The knurled grip of a handgun was visible protruding from a belt holster beneath the coat.

  ‘Whoa, whatever, pal.’ The guy raised his hands. ‘Be cool.’

  ‘Go away,’ suggested the other man calmly. ‘Now.’

  He shrugged and picked up his board, deciding not to argue the point. The woman fell in step with him as they carried on down the slope.

  *

  ‘That’s her.’ Marc Dane dropped the Canadian twang he was affecting and switched back to his natural London accent as he hefted the snowboard on to his shoulder.

  ‘Oh yeah.’ Kara Wei nodded, adjusting her goggles. ‘I got a good capture.’ The optic rig the Chinese-American woman wore concealed a digital image processor, and she tapped at a control pad on the brow of the frame. ‘Looks like she’s brought her latest lover up for some of that clean mountain air.’

  Marc turned his head so he could steal a glance back toward the bar. The big man watched them walk off, and by now the lounge had been completely emptied of everyone but their target and her entourage. ‘How much d’you think it costs to buy out a place like that for lunch?’

  ‘Pocket change for the rich and self-centred,’ Kara said flatly. ‘Meanwhile, we have to work for a living.’

  ‘Yeah,’ sighed Marc. ‘For a second back there, I actually remembered what it was like to take a holiday.’

  Kara made a face at him. ‘Boo hoo. Come on, we have crime to do.’ She dropped her board back on to the snow and stepped into the bindings, rocking on the heel side as she snapped them tight.

  Behind her goggles, Marc thought he saw a flicker of anticipation. He looked down at the battered Cabot dive watch on his wrist, putting himself into a mission-ready mindset. ‘If she follows her usual pattern, that gives us roughly three hours before the limo meets her party at the cable car station . . .’ He clipped on to his own board, gazing along the line of elevated cables down through the snow-dusted trees to the terminus in the valley below. ‘You ready to try a black run?’

  ‘Race ya,’ Kara repeated, and launched herself with a burst of speed, hunching low and forward.

  Despite himself, Marc grinned again and turned after her, guiding the rocker board into Kara’s wake.

  *

  The descent passed in a blur of white and brilliant sunshine, the mountain depositing them back at Les Praz de Chamonix, toward the northern end of the valley. For Marc, the Evettes Flégère run concluded a hazy race through snow, rock and woodland that seemed to take only moments. Time became elastic on the track, contracting into one single extended instant of concentration as he guided himself down and down, crossing dozens of switchbacks and descents. Then it was over, and his heart was still pounding in his chest. The denser air felt oddly heavy in his lungs and he panted as his body adjusted back to it.

  Kara shared a bottle of water as they walked quickly through the side streets toward the heart of Chamonix. They avoided the main drag, which at this time of the day would be choked with tourists and those late to the party on the mountains. Marc checked the countdown as they found their way to the back of a nondescript two-storey office behind a hotel complex.

  The building had been rented from a letting agency weeks earlier, and deliberately left to sit idle. Marc and Kara had arrived in the dead of night a few days ago, and they followed a careful routine to make sure the place appear
ed unoccupied to the outside world.

  ‘I’ll spin us up,’ said Kara, as she went upstairs.

  Marc stripped out of his snowboarding gear and cleaned off. He changed into a dark-blue boiler suit, rolling it on over a fresh T-shirt, working his arms into the sleeves before pulling the brass zip to his neck. A match for the ones worn by the mechanics working in the garage down the street, Marc had weathered it by dragging the thing around the tarmac behind the office, making sure it had enough oil stains and scuffs to look lived-in.

  He moved to the windows and peeled back the corner of a layer of sun-bleached newspapers taped over the glass, peering out at the garage a hundred metres away. Set back off the road, the collection of low hangar-like structures had the same arched roofs as the rest of the town. But where the residential chalets, hotels and shops sported wooden cladding, ornamental balconies and sprays of flowers, the garage workshop was bare corrugated metal and blank grey walls. Petrol pumps and a spare parts store took up the eastern end of the place, while the rest of the area had been given over to grimy workshops and maintenance bays. It was a long way from the clean lines, expensive stores and classy restaurants a few blocks south.

  He scanned the open mouths of the workshops, picking out the shape of a green Land Rover and a black Mercedes C-Class inside, but saw no sign of the target vehicle. His leg muscles were stiffening from the run down the mountain, and he walked in a circle to fend the aches off. He wanted to look at his watch again, but Marc knew that counting every second wouldn’t make time move any faster.

  He wandered up to the bare, unfurnished room on the second floor, where Kara sat in front of a camping table, staring fixedly into the screen of a military-specification laptop computer. Black cables snaked away from the machine, some coiling into a portable power pack, others connected to a collapsible satellite antenna that sat on the floor like a discarded, open umbrella. As with the floor below, the windows were papered over with yellowing pages from Le Monde.

  Kara’s expression was distant. Her eyes had taken on a hacker’s robotic intensity, an aspect that Marc himself knew well from his own experiences of being stationed behind a keyboard. There was a strange kind of non-awareness that came on when you were glued to a screen for too long, a narrowing of the world that made everything fall away until the motions of your hands and the blink of the cursor seemed to happen of their own accord.