Ghost:

by James Swallow

  Lucy and Malte had left their car hidden in an alleyway off Folsom Street and worked their way into an empty construction site that faced the corner with 1st Street. The SoMa district – so named because it was South of Market Street – had been the hub of a dozen new builds over the last decade, as foreign investors planted their stakes in the ground to take advantage of the city’s fortunes. Their view was filled by the golden glass facia of a newly built office block that was still a couple of months away from opening, the target address that Special Agent Rowan had given them in the diner. They stood in the angular skeleton of a neighbouring building, the frame of a high-end hotel that would be finished in a year or so. For now, it was a collection of flat concrete floors arranged around the grey pillars of elevator shafts and utility trunks.

  Keeping low, the two operators moved to the open edge of the fourth floor and took up positions behind sheets of plastic fencing that flexed in the wind off the bay. As Malte set up two compact tripods next to her, Lucy pulled a pair of Steiner military binoculars from her backpack and swept the front of the office block for threats. She picked out the wide marble atrium of the new building through a roof made of triangular glass panels, the frontage walled off behind safety barriers.

  She immediately spotted two men carrying small machine pistols, and by the way they clustered up too close together, she could tell they were weekend warrior types. They looked nervy.

  Still; the Soldier-Saints were not to be underestimated. They had been responsible for the torching of abortion clinics in the South West and attacks on mosques around the Great Lakes. In the past, they would have been ringing alarm bells up and down the domestic terror watch list for those kind of hate-crimes, but in the current political climate they were getting a free pass.

  Lucy continued her sweep, picking out a handful of other men on the lower floors and a couple more walking the office block’s perimeter. Hard-earned instinct made her skin prickle and she studied the patterns of their deployment, trying to read through the positions of the guards to guess at what was going on in there.

  ‘Something’s up,’ she told the Finn. ‘I think Rowan’s on the money. These creeps are edgy as hell.’

  Malte took that in with a nod, and plugged a pair of cables into the tube-shaped device on the first tripod mount. It resembled a child’s telescope made of black anodised metal, capable of projecting an ultraviolet laser beam for a distance of several miles. On the second tripod was another device, this one a silver box with a wide lens filling one face. Inside it, a detector array capable of picking up the reflections of the UV laser from whatever it was shone at. If the laser beam hit a window or some other surface that conducted vibrations, sound passing through the air nearby could be registered and digitally recovered. The laser acted like a long-range microphone and did away with the need to be in close physical proximity to a surveillance target. Malte ran the equipment through a calibration program as Lucy kept watch.

  ‘Ready,’ he told her, and activated the laser. He panned it around to find the first pair of guards and they listened in on a discussion that turned out to be a play-by-play narrative of the two men’s most recent sexual exploits.

  Lucy rolled her eyes. ‘I’ve seen this show already. What else is on?’ She unzipped her backpack and removed the pieces of a Remington Defence CSR long arm, a magazine of 7.62mm rounds and a compact sound suppressor.

  As she assembled and ranged-in the sniper rifle, Malte checked the data from the laser. Over the next half-hour they used the microphone to pluck out conversations from each group of Soldier-Saints visible inside the building. Most of them had little of value to say, but when one man dropped the mention of ‘an arrival’ Lucy exchanged a sharp look with the Finn.

  ‘So they’re waiting for somebody. This is feeling more and more like they’re staging for an operation.’

  ‘Agreed.’ Malte adjusted a dial on the laser. ‘You trust Rowan.’ He made it a statement, not a question.

  Lucy remembered a simple tattoo in black ink on the arm of the Secret Service agent, the silhouette of a dagger and the Latin phrase de oppresso liber. ‘He was Delta. He kept his word to me before. Yeah, I trust him.’ She took a breath and went on. ‘If he wanted me in cuffs, he had his chance to take me back at the diner. Why give us this lead?’

  ‘There are many reasons,’ offered Malte.

  She shrugged and put her eye to the scope of the CSR. ‘Guess we’ll find out . . .’ The rest of the sentence fell away as she sighted a vehicle slowing to a halt in front of the mesh gates closing off the darkened office building. ‘Action,’ she said. ‘I see an ambulance pulling up to the back of the building. No lights and sirens. Can’t see who is inside.’

  Malte tilted the laser and the receptor to bounce a beam off the flat side of the vehicle, but the return they got back was dirty with vibrations from the ambulance’s idling engine and it was impossible to pick out anything intelligible. As Lucy watched, the gates were opened enough to let the ambulance through, and then the guards quickly closed them again, casting wary looks up and down the street to make sure they hadn’t been observed.

  From their high angle, Lucy could see the ambulance turn and drop on to the ramp that led to the office’s underground car park. It thudded over the lip of the ramp, rolling on its shocks. Light briefly spilled out from inside as it passed through the gate, and then it was gone.

  ‘An emergency vehicle is good cover,’ she thought aloud. ‘It’s riding low on the shocks, so now I really wanna know what they have in there.’

  ‘Hospital is a soft target,’ offered Malte, the grim outcome of any such attack giving them both pause.

  Lucy drew back from the rifle and checked an area map on her phone. The UCSF Medical Center in Mission Bay and St Francis Memorial to the north were a few minutes’ drive away, and both would be easy marks for men with guns and hate in their hearts. She wondered about that, and reached deep for a colder, more detached part of her psyche, trying to put herself in the mindset of the Soldier-Saints.

  They had clearly invested a lot of time and effort to set up their operation. The free run they had of the office block told her that they must have infiltrated the construction firm charged with completing it, plus the ambulance and the guns on display spoke to careful forward planning. This was more than some opportunistic drive-by shooting.

  ‘How do we proceed?’ Malte watched her carefully. She was senior field agent, and the call was hers to make.

  Options lined up in her head as she weighed them for viability. An anonymous call to the San Francisco Police Department about men with guns would bring the cops in loaded for bear, but that could have serious blowback and it upped the risk of casualties. If she started picking off the Soldier-Saint guards from range, the whole pack could get wind and make a run for it. That left one more unpleasant alternative; they needed to get closer, and see for sure what was going on in there.

  ‘Another vehicle,’ said Malte, shifting forward to get a better look. ‘At the front this time.’

  Lucy swung the rifle around to find the silver shape of a BMW rolling to a stop by the sidewalk. An androgynous figure in a long leather coat climbed out of the back seat, carrying a black briefcase. Lucy flicked the scope’s setting to full magnification and the face leapt closer. The new arrival had dark, slick hair and East Asian features, and stood in stark comparison to the stout white men who came out to meet the car. The BMW pulled away and vanished around the corner, leaving the figure in the coat alone to face the glowering Soldier-Saints.

  ‘Looks like someone is at the wrong party,’ muttered Lucy, as the two guards patted down the new arrival and then marched them through a gate, into the darkened entrance atrium. ‘Get the mic on them.’

  Malte aimed the beam at the glass. Lucy zoomed out couple of notches and tracked the figure in the leather coat. Other armed men were coming to meet the group, led by a shaven-headed guy who walked with a cowboy swagger and a big revolver in a hip-holster. />
  ‘Well, hello Hop-Along.’ Lucy took in the bald man, gauging his attitude from the way he moved among the others. This was somebody in charge. The group passed out of sight into the depths of the shadows and she lost sight of them. ‘Shit. No visual.’

  ‘I can still get audio,’ said Malte, adjusting the laser. The pick-up from the decoder crackled.

  ‘You’re it?’ The voice was male and it had a hard, Midwestern edge. He didn’t sound impressed, and Lucy surmised she was listening to the man with the revolver. ‘After all the goddamn money we’re payin’, I expected something . . . I guess, more impressive? Not one little slope. But then again, you guys are supposed to be real smart with the computers, right?’

  She heard a clicking sound – maybe the case opening – and then another voice, strangely low but with a cadence that told her it was a woman’s. ‘Good evening,’ came the reply. ‘You must be Mr Crossman.’ The words were mechanically bland, a robotic kind of American accent that keyed to no single geographic region.

  ‘Well, shit.’ Crossman chuckled. ‘What the hell is this?’

  ‘A courier, nothing more. We can speak freely.’

  Lucy tried to visualise what was going on in the darkness, keeping her sights on the shadows. The CSR didn’t have a low-light function, and she regretted that she hadn’t packed a thermographic scope.

  ‘If you’re fucking with us,’ began Crossman, and there was the distinctive oiled snap of a pistol being cocked, ‘I swear you will be punished for it.’

  ‘Please be careful,’ said the woman. ‘If it is damaged, we will be unable to provide you with any assistance to your venture.’

  Lucy wondered what the woman was referring to, but then she saw movement as Crossman wandered to the edges of the shadows and back into her sights. He gestured with the nickel-plated revolver in one hand. ‘You made a lot of promises, Madrigal. And now here we are, at the moment of truth. Are you gonna disappoint me?’

  ‘Madrigal.’ Malte repeated the name. ‘That’s an unknown.’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said the woman’s voice. ‘My word is my bond, Mr Crossman. We’re ready to begin at your discretion.’

  Crossman smirked and put the gun away, pausing to look at his watch. ‘Well, then. It’s time we showed this blighted Gomorrah the price of its sins.’ He walked off across the atrium, followed by the courier and the rest of the armed men, disappearing down a stairwell toward the lower levels.

  ‘Pack up the kit,’ said Lucy, after a moment.

  ‘We’re going in?’

  She gave a slight nod, her eye never leaving the sniper rifle’s scope. ‘No doubt.’

  FIVE

  Wade desperately wanted a cigarette, but he had been told by Bullock in no uncertain terms they were to do nothing to draw attention to the perimeter, even as insignificant an action as lighting up a smoke. Wade kept his face blank all the while as the man snarled and spat, but the fact was, Crossman’s heavily tattooed lieutenant scared the crap out of him.

  Rufus, who had driven them down to the coast from the assembly point in Stockton, had a whole lot of stories about Bullock and none of them were good. He’d done terrible things before he went to jail and found the Lord, and more after escaping, or so the driver had said. Wade saw that type a lot in the Soldier-Saints; guys who figured that because the cause was righteous, it excused any kind of behaviour. He didn’t like that. Their war was about making sure the rules in the Bible were adhered to, not hurting folks for the fun of it. Wade had joined up after he lost his factory job to some outsourcing purge that saw the work sent to India or some other shit, and he was in for the right reasons. To make America clean again, proud again. To kick in the heads of those liberal assholes who were ripping on the little man and letting the fags, the women and the Jews run everything. That was what this fight was about. It was serious business.

  At least Crossman saw it the same way. Wade liked the man. He was inspirational. Smart. And he didn’t take any shit from anyone. Crossman had a way of making you feel like you were the only one in the room that he talked to, and sometimes Wade thought that if he had known his real father, that the man might have been the same kind of guy.

  Crossman used the word payback a lot. Wade could get behind that. His whole life, he’d felt like someone was short-changing him, and it was only when he started to get woke that he realised he wasn’t imagining it.

  He rocked off his heels and walked up the line he’d been given, manning the post out by the south side of the street, beneath the shiny glass walls of the office block. He fingered the grip of the TEC-9 submachine gun dangling from a harness over his shoulder, a jury-rigged suppressor made from an oil filter bouncing off his thigh with each footstep. He itched to use the gun, and part of him was afraid that the night’s work would go off without that happening. Crossman had told him not to worry, and for the moment that would have to be enough.

  From behind him, Wade heard a tinkle of breaking glass and one of the portable work lamp rigs went out. He spun on his heel, fumbling the TEC-9 up to aim in the direction he had come. The work lamp’s power generator hummed, but the reflectors on top of the rig were dark. Wade approached cautiously and his boots crunched on broken glass and pieces of still-hot lighting filament.

  The bulbs had blown out. Did that kind of thing happen with these rigs? Wade had no idea. He reached for the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt and hesitated, remembering. Bullock had prodded him in the chest and told him not to break radio silence unless there was, in his words, a shit-storm of jackboots kicking down the gates. If he called in for a blown light, the big man would take it out of his hide.

  Wade was weighing it up when he heard another crash of glass, this time from further down the fence line. A second work lamp guttered out and died, plunging the pathway along this part of the perimeter into darkness. Wade froze, straining to listen, but all he could hear was the rush of traffic out on 1st Street. His jaw hardening, he drew up his determination and raised the SMG, gripping the extended ammo magazine beneath the barrel to hold it steady. He stamped on the urge to call out a challenge. Who the fuck ever did that, anyhow, except in the movies? The oil filter silencer bobbed as he walked, moving this way and that in search of a target. Because if someone is here, if someone is fucking around with the lights, I’ll send them straight to Hell—

  Glass crunched out in the shadows and Wade’s head flicked to the right. A piece of the blackness detached itself from the rest of the gloom and he saw a blond man with hard eyes come rocketing toward him.

  Wade jerked the TEC-9’s trigger even though the gun was way off the target, and swept about, firing off a burst of rounds into the air at waist height. The silencer reduced the sound of the discharge to a metallic chatter, but the blond man didn’t seem to care.

  With one hand, he caught Wade’s gun-arm before it could reach him and pushed it away. The other was balled into a fist that hit Wade hard in the throat, hard enough to make the cartilage in his neck crackle as it broke.

  Pain shocked through Wade as he abandoned his weapon, clutching at his collar. He couldn’t breathe. His lungs emptied but no air came in to fill them again.

  He staggered backward and the intruder snaked an arm around his neck to finish the job. Desperately, panicking, he clawed at his assailant. Wade was terrified of dying, terrified of what kind of judgement would be waiting for him on the other side of the shadows filling his vision.

  He tried again to draw a frantic breath, but then there was only blackness.

  *

  ‘You get him?’

  Malte didn’t answer as he dragged the guard’s body into the lee of the power generator. He put a finger on the young man’s neck and felt a thready pulse there. He’d survive, if he was strong.

  ‘Malte, copy? You’re out of pocket there, I don’t see you.’

  The Finn began to uncoil the lanyard keeping the guard’s gun on his shoulder and threw a look toward the building site across the street. ‘He is down,
’ he said, pressing the radio bead in his ear.

  ‘Wade?’ The voice came from close by, rising up along the nearby ramp that led into the silent building’s underground garage. ‘Where the fuck are you, dickless?’

  ‘You have company coming,’ reported Lucy. ‘I don’t have a good angle from up here. You’re gonna have to deal.’

  ‘Understood,’ Malte replied, sparing the TEC-9 a wary look. The gun was dented and worn, and he felt unwilling to risk his life on any weapon that he wasn’t 100 per cent certain about. He set it down on the ground and dropped into a crouch as the second guard came into view. This one was stocky and bearded, cradling an identical SMG close to his chest, his weapon also sporting a makeshift silencer.

  ‘Wade!’ The guard’s tone turned angry as he groped in the pocket of his jacket, finally producing a flashlight as he wandered into the pool of darkness around the smashed lamps. ‘If you are jerkin’ off out here, I swear I will strip you naked and feed you to them feral queers they got in this town—’

  ‘Hey.’ Malte spoke quietly as he slipped behind him. The second guard had not waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, so he didn’t see him in the shadows until it was too late. Malte jabbed his fist into the small of the man’s back, hitting him hard before he could react. The guard gave a strangled moan and stumbled into the Finn’s grip. Malte repeated the sleeper hold he had used on the younger man, and it was over in a few moments. By the time he stripped the second guard of his weapon and stowed his unconscious form out of sight, Lucy had emerged from the shadows.

  ‘I guess I should have known you didn’t need my help,’ she offered, taking one of the SMGs and checking it over.

  Malte said nothing and shrugged.

  ‘So where’s the party?’ She glanced around, back in the direction of the parking garage.