Ghost:

by James Swallow

  Getting deep into the code, losing yourself in the wires . . . There had been a time when Marc had found that restful. A part of him was envious that Kara was running support for this mission. Once, that would have been his assignment.

  But a lot had changed for him since that time. Formerly a field technician for one of British Intelligence’s tactical Operations Teams, Marc had left that life behind after fate conspired to first make him a fugitive, and then cut him off from his country and the service that had trained him. In the wake of that, he might have been set adrift and lost all purpose, if it hadn’t been for the intervention of others.

  A man named Ekko Solomon gave him a chance to recover some of what he had lost, to get back into the world and make a difference in it. The enigmatic African billionaire owned a large corporation called the Rubicon Group, and a small part of it operated as a private military, security and intelligence contractor. Marc was officially listed as a ‘consultant’ on the company’s books, but that vague title covered a multitude of possibilities.

  Rubicon’s PMC arm specialised in close-protection details, kidnap and recovery and information security – or at least, that was the face shown to the world. The reality was that the company’s so-called ‘Special Conditions Division’ had a much larger mandate than fielding bodyguards for affluent clients.

  Solomon made certain that Rubicon adhered to a staunch moral code. He was a man on a mission, using his wealth to do right, to reach out across the globe and take on threats that nation states were either unwilling or unable to oppose.

  Small actions with large consequences. Rubicon’s founder described their work in those terms.

  It was a just cause, and Marc had willingly signed on to be a part of it. He promised himself that he would remain until the day came when he had cause to doubt Solomon’s sincerity, if he ever did. In the shadow world of intelligence agencies, terror cells and non-state actors, where lines of loyalty and truth were often blurred, the suggestion of doing a thing because it was ethically right seemed like a quaint, almost naive notion. But there was a correctness about it, a truth that Marc Dane couldn’t ignore.

  ‘Five minutes out,’ said Kara, her voice pulling him back from his reverie. She studied video feeds from a series of co-opted traffic cameras. ‘You ready for this?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He straightened, moving to another table where his mission kit was laid out, waiting for the go.

  ‘All this build-up and then poof, it’ll be over . . .’ Kara said to the air. ‘A girl could be disappointed.’

  ‘You should be happy this is a low-hazard assignment,’ Marc noted. ‘Easier that way.’

  ‘Hope so,’ she said. ‘Of course, maybe Solomon doesn’t think the two of us can handle the dangerous ops.’

  He eyed her, uncertain if she was joking or not. Kara’s demeanour could switch from cat-eyed and grinning to flat sarcasm in a blink, and that made her hard to read. ‘You don’t want to get shot at.’ Marc told her.

  ‘You’d never say that to Lucy.’ She looked up, then back to the screen in front of her.

  ‘Lucy Keyes was a tier-one Special Forces operator before she signed on with Rubicon,’ Marc countered. The ex-Delta Force sniper was another vital member of Solomon’s covert agency, and while they usually worked alongside one another, right now the American was a world away on an assignment of her own. ‘I reckon Lucy’s tolerance for mayhem is different from yours and mine, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah,’ echoed Kara. ‘A gig like this would be way too boring for your girlfriend.’

  Marc stopped dead and glared at her, colouring slightly. ‘That is not, in any way, correct.’ He sounded out the retort so there was no equivocation. Marc had respect for Lucy and he trusted her, but he didn’t like the intimation that there was something else going on between them. ‘We have a strictly professional relationship,’ he added, and didn’t dwell on exactly why Kara’s comment bothered him so much.

  ‘I’m not judging.’ She worked at the keyboard, pulling up different video feeds. ‘I figured . . . you and she had . . .’ Kara gave a lazy shrug, starting to lose interest in the thread of conversation. ‘I mean, after you cut loose from MI6 and abandoned them—’

  ‘I didn’t abandon anything.’ His tone hardened. ‘I didn’t have much of a choice.’

  She heard the edge in his voice and became contrite. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.’ Kara shot him a blank look, then turned away again. ‘My mistake.’

  ‘Not the time,’ he shot back, tamping down his irritation, forcing his attention back to the situation at hand. ‘Don’t be fooled into thinking this’ll be a cakewalk.’

  Marc returned to kitting up, completing his disguise with a grubby black watch cap and a plastic nametag that Kara had made up in a portable 3D printer at the back of the room. A folding Wingman multi-tool went into one of the boiler suit’s sleeve pouches, an ASP air-weight collapsible baton into another. Marc checked his custom-made Rubicon digital notepad and then zipped it into a thigh pocket, along with a spool of data cable. The last thing to go on were a pair of black 5.11 tactical gloves.

  ‘Comms,’ said Kara, and she threw a tiny object to him in an underarm toss. He snatched a flesh-coloured radio bead out of the air. The device resembled a discreet hearing aid, and he put it in place in his left ear.

  ‘Okay.’ Marc took a deep breath and tried to shake off some of the adrenaline rising in him. It didn’t help.

  ‘Nervous?’ she asked him, without looking up from the screen.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Liar.’ Kara tapped out a command and peered at the display. ‘One minute out. He’s turning on to the street now.’

  Marc wandered back to the window and found a tear in the paper to look through. Approaching from the end of the road, the midnight-blue limousine was impossible to miss. That kind of car was a rare sight in all but the largest European cities, with most of the older continental avenues too narrow to accommodate the vehicle. Having such transport in one’s personal fleet made a statement. The owner didn’t care for the shortcomings of the world impacting upon their need for conspicuous luxury.

  Here and now, the limo was empty, made clear by the way the driver bumped it over the kerb as it pulled into the forecourt of the garage. Marc watched a roller door rise so the car could nose into one of the workshops. ‘We’re sure that’s the right vehicle?’

  A digital camera encased in a non-reflective sheath was clipped to the window ledge and Marc heard its lens motor whine as it zoomed in. Kara captured hi-resolution images of the limo to compare with the surveillance shots they already had on record.

  ‘Same plates. Getting a ninety-eight per cent match on vehicle mass analysis,’ she told him, all business now. ‘That’s Toussaint’s ride.’

  ‘Okay.’ Marc pulled the watch cap down over his hair and scratched his chin through his beard. ‘Green for go. In and out in forty minutes, that’s the optimal.’

  ‘Good luck,’ Kara said absently, already lost once again in the glow of her screen.

  Marc exited the empty office by the rear fire escape and turned up the boiler suit’s collar, hunching forward as he walked toward the garage.

  ‘Radio check.’ Kara’s voice buzzed in his ear and he adjusted the fit of the radio bead.

  ‘Five by five,’ he replied.

  ‘En Francais,’ she admonished. ‘You’re pretending to be a local boy, remember?’

  Marc gave a thumbs-up that would be seen by the camera in the window. ‘D’accord.’

  The timing was good. Half of the garage’s staff were still out at lunch, and at a distance Marc’s disguise made him resemble any one of them. He could easily have been a guy wandering back early ahead of the other mechanics to get a start on the afternoon’s jobs. Nothing amiss here, he told himself, willing it to be so.

  The cover allowed him to cross the edge of the forecourt without drawing any attention and slip around the side of the workshops, where he knew a fire exi
t was situated. Two nights earlier, Marc had slipped carefully over a wall topped with broken bottles and done some in-person recon. The oil drum he had moved was still where he had put it, close to the wall where he could use it as the stepping stone to an escape route if the operation went badly wrong.

  Of course, if that happened, then the whole mission would have to be scrubbed. The operation hinged on leaving as near to zero footprint as possible, and getting made by the targets would trigger a whole load of secondary protocols.

  Marc had worked out the details before they had arrived in Chamonix. They would have to make it look like a failed attempt to steal a car, hiding one illegal action beneath another, but he hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  He kept moving, carefully following a path that kept him out of the eye line of the yard’s security cameras. Marc had their positions memorised, but he couldn’t afford to take any chances. A stocky, bearded man over by the petrol pumps caught sight of Marc and threw him a languid wave, not really looking at him. Marc returned it and before the greeting could turn into something more, he was out of sight and at the fire door. It opened easily, and Marc slipped into the workshop.

  Within, it was as unremarkable as it was outside. The garage’s owner didn’t draw attention to his place with big neon signs or gaudy advertisements. The business had a reputation for discretion and competence, which was why its customers paid handsomely.

  The workshop was gloomy and heavy with the reek of engine oil. The black Mercedes and the Land Rover were up on jacks above the maintenance pits, undersides lit by electric lamps but with no sign of the mechanics working on them.

  Parked between the two jacks, the target vehicle’s bonnet was open to reveal the engine beneath. Even at a distance, Marc could see the anti-fragmentation baffles around the power-plant. The car had been hardened, fitted with heavy duty shocks, run-flat tyres, sheets of high-impact armour and bulletproof glass. This kind of protection was usually afforded to vehicles that rode around in war zones rather than the French Alps. Nothing short of a rocket-propelled grenade would be able to pierce the passenger compartment, but right now the rear right door hung open as someone moved around inside.

  Marc drew back into cover and waited. He tapped the ear bead twice, a pre-arranged code to let Kara know he had eyes on the limo.

  ‘Copy that,’ she replied. ‘Be advised, I saw the driver go into the main office with one of the other employees.’

  After a while, a ropey young white guy in his twenties with a shaven head and a glum expression clambered out of the back of the car, cradling a portable vacuum and other cleaning kit in his hands. The servicing of the interior done, he moved to the front and set to work on the engine, snapping on another work lamp to flood the compartment with light. That had the effect of dazzling the mechanic, allowing Marc to slip around the Mercedes and go low, out of his line of sight. He moved toward the limo’s passenger door and eased it open again.

  Marc waited for the right moment, and when the mechanic’s attention was elsewhere, he climbed into the rear compartment and pulled the door shut.

  ‘I’m in,’ he whispered. Moving low and slow to keep his weight evenly spread, Marc slid toward the panel that separated the driver’s cab from the rest of the interior. The internal privacy blind was still up, and with the dark tinted glass in the side windows no one outside would be able to see him in here.

  Next to a glass-fronted mini-fridge stocked with bottles of expensive Veen mineral water and tins of Beluga caviar, Marc found an access port that flapped open when he pushed at it. Behind the flap, he saw the limousine’s electronics bay, a nexus for the circuits that ran the car’s entertainment system, air conditioning, internal lighting and more.

  It was the more that interested Marc. Plugging the data cable into the bay’s mini-USB port, he connected the compact tablet from his pocket to the other end and booted it up.

  The device quickly mapped the architecture of the limo’s systems and auto-launched a piece of intrusion software. Within a few seconds, the program had found the vehicle’s on-board satellite navigation system and set to work sifting through its limited memory. As Marc expected, the records of the previous journeys stored in the satnav were gone. He imagined the driver was dutiful about that, erasing each route map after it had served its purpose. But simply hitting the Delete key was not enough to destroy computer data. That would only erase the file’s header, and the majority of the data would remain in the device’s memory until actually overwritten by new information. If you knew where to look, that ‘deleted’ map could easily be recovered.

  A progress bar popped up on the tablet’s screen and slowly began to fill as the intrusion program copied the satnav’s memory. Two minutes, Marc guessed. Then we’ll have Toussaint’s complete itinerary for the last month.

  Madame Celeste Sophie Toussaint was proving a difficult quarry for Rubicon’s Special Conditions Division. She kept walled estates outside Annecy and down on the south coast, and the corporate headquarters of the media company to which she was sole heir occupied an elegant eighteenth-century building in the historic quarter of Lyon. All three were highly secure locations, protected by advanced security systems and guarded by well-paid forces of armed guards. Toussaint employed a Russian-based military contractor called ALEPH as her sentinels, and Marc knew them well. He had crossed paths with some of their mercenaries on an icy day in the Polish countryside and he had no desire to be in their sights again – hence this operation had been conceived to get the intelligence they needed on the woman by more indirect methods.

  Over the course of the last year, Rubicon’s digital intelligence sources had tracked payments going into Toussaint’s accounts through several shell companies that were suspected fronts for militant groups operating in Central and Western Europe. They didn’t have proof yet, but the intel strongly suggested that Toussaint was using her global network for the clandestine brokerage of classified information. While she overtly supported nationalists, manipulated politics and stoked the fires of dissent through divisive news programming and slanted media, nothing outside the bounds of legality could be traced back to the woman. Toussaint was suspected of deep ties to the leaders of far-right organisations and fanatic extremists on all sides of the ideological divide, but to date Rubicon had been unable to put her in the same place as any of those people. When she left her estate, she travelled below the radar, and her vehicles, like her homes and her office, were swept twice a day for listening devices. Tracking her was not a viable option, and the dense firewalls around the computers in Toussaint’s offices and estate were formidable.

  In the end, Rubicon applied an old but irrefutable truth to the operation: security is only ever as strong as its weakest link. Marc had found that weak link in the garage used to service Toussaint’s cars while she visited Chamonix. It was impossible to remotely attack her limousine’s on-board electronics, but a physical connection would get the intelligence Rubicon needed. If they could build up a picture of Toussaint’s movements and map that on to information already in hand about her clients, things would come into sharper focus. Toussaint had a reputation for wanting to make deals face to face, and if that meant she had been meeting terrorists and criminals somewhere in the French countryside, her itinerary would be proof enough of her dealings. And then . . . steps would be taken.

  Marc turned that thought over in his mind, watching the progress bar creep forward, listening to the mechanic working at the engine a few metres away.

  The French media heiress was more than an amoral opportunist. She was part of a covert group called the Combine, a gathering of power brokers, industrialists and old money types who worked with the common interest of enriching themselves still further. The group had originally come together in the horrors of the First World War, profiteering off the sale of weapons to both sides in the great conflict. In the present, they sought to manipulate the unending War on Terror, stoking the fires of a fearful world and reaping the rewards.


  For a moment, Marc lost focus, remembering. The actions of the Combine had set him on the path he now followed. They were responsible for killing the members of his MI6 team, when the unit had come too close to the edges of a Combine-supported terrorist plot. A woman he had cared deeply for, his friends and his career in the British secret service had all been lost in fire because of that.

  These people, with their money and their power and their view of the world as if it were a chessboard for their games, were the ones who had struck the flame. A year later, he had been forced to work alongside Combine operatives during the frantic search for a missing weapon of mass destruction, and being directly exposed to their callous outlook had only hardened Marc’s resolve to bring them down.

  If Toussaint was just a criminal, then exposing her would restore a small measure of balance to the world. But if they could prove she was Combine, then the deed became a personal one for Marc Dane. He nursed an icy fury for the group and ruining their schemes was a victory he sorely wanted.

  But Rubicon had to be certain. Ekko Solomon would not act against someone without being absolutely assured of their guilt.

  ‘Hey.’ Kara’s voice sounded in his ear, drawing him back to the moment once more. As she spoke, the layers of digital encryption in the signal gave her words a flat, machine-like timbre. ‘I’m seeing the guy who spoke with the driver. He’s walking out to the front of the main gates for a smoke. He’s alone.’

  ‘Eyes on the limo driver?’ Marc whispered the words, letting the bone-induction microphone in the earpiece pick them up.

  ‘No joy,’ Kara told him, and a jolt of cold ran down Marc’s back. As she said the words, he heard a mutter of conversation strike up outside the car, behind the open bonnet. He caught a few words in clipped, fast French. The mechanic complaining about a half-finished job. Then another voice, gruff and pissed-off, insisting that it was time to leave, right now.