Ghost:

by James Swallow

  ‘Get that bitch!’ bellowed Crossman.

  ‘Go, go!’ Bullock, the guy with the prison tatts, shouted back. ‘I got this!’

  The strobes shifted as the ambulance started moving, and Lucy fired toward it, aiming for the tyres – but the TEC-9’s slide gave a dull clack and locked in place.

  ‘Shit!’ She yanked at the cocking lever to clear a jammed casing from the ejector port, but then a heavy shadow fell across her and Bullock slammed into Lucy with a brutal body-check that sent her staggering. She lost the useless SMG in the impact and brought up her hands to block the blows she knew would be coming.

  White light from Bullock’s head-torch dazzled her and for a second she thought he was going to shoot her, but instead the ex-con enveloped her in a reversed bear hug and pulled tight. Dense, prison-hardened muscle constrained her. He roared with effort, and Lucy’s feet left the ground as he lifted her up.

  She distantly registered the exchange of fire between the other Soldier-Saints and a blurry shape somewhere near the pillar where she had left Malte, but the air gushed out of her lungs in a ragged whoop as Bullock’s grip tightened and forced her to exhale.

  Lucy’s hand flailed as she grabbed for a soft spot, but she had hardly any room to manoeuvre, tearing at Bullock’s shirt, punching ineffectively at his gut. She heard him laughing, his breath hot on her bare neck. The angle felt all wrong for her to land a crippling blow in his crotch and he mocked Lucy as he squeezed the life out of her.

  Then her long fingers skipped across the top of a snub-nosed revolver holstered on his hip and she grabbed at it, tugging the gun free.

  ‘Oh no, you ain’t getting that!’ Bullock growled, shifting his grip to wrestle the weapon away, and they struggled against one another. Lucy couldn’t bring the gun up, couldn’t shift it by more than a degree or two. He had her hand trapped in his, his vice-like grip threatening to crush it. The muzzle stayed pointing at the ground, unable to find a target.

  Lucy gritted her teeth and made her play. She stamped down on Bullock’s shin, getting a wet hiss of pain from him and a split-second of recoil in his inexorable grip. It was enough for her to point the pistol’s muzzle back at his leg and pull the trigger. A round went off with a flat, heavy bang of discharge and blew through the toe of Bullock’s boot, blasting blood and bone out across the floor.

  He screamed and let go of her, cursing a blue streak. Lucy spun around in a swift pirouette and cracked him across the face with the butt of the revolver, breaking his nose in a wet crunch of splintered cartilage. The ex-con fell on his ass and howled, clutching at his ruined foot.

  She took a breath as one of the mini-vans lurched forward, the headlights coming on in a blaze that lit up the parking garage. Dead or wounded Soldier-Saints lay scattered about as evidence of Malte’s brutal but efficient skills. The rest of them had fled, vanishing into the darkened streets in the wake of the ambulance.

  The Finn looked out at her from behind the mini-van’s steering wheel. ‘Come on,’ he called.

  ‘Right . . .’ She threw Bullock a look, then jumped into the vehicle as Malte jammed the van into gear with a screech of spinning wheels, and they rocketed forward, out through the open gate, up the ramp and on to Fremont Street. Lucy was pissed off at leaving that asshole and his playmates behind, but they were not the priority.

  Stuffing the revolver in her jacket pocket, she grabbed her smartphone and glared at the No Cellular Signal message blinking on the display. She wanted to get a message to Gonzalez, but with no operational network there was no way to reach him.

  ‘There.’ Malte pointed up ahead and Lucy glimpsed the red strobes diminishing as the ambulance raced away from them. He stood on the accelerator, but the mini-van wasn’t built for performance and it felt like they were churning through mud to get after the other vehicle.

  Frightened faces and stalled cars flashed past them as they committed to the pursuit, and in her mind’s eye Lucy tried to remember the layout of the city streets. The distance to the open-air square that the Soldier-Saints had targeted was less than ten blocks. Were they planning a suicide run, into the middle of the crowds out there to detonate the device? Crossman didn’t seem like the type to kill himself for his cause, but her gut twisted. The thought of what damage the fuel-air bomb could wreak on unprotected bodies horrified her.

  ‘Hold on,’ warned Malte, as they flashed across an intersection clogged with stalled traffic. He swerved the mini-van around a halted truck and slammed a town car out of the way, drawing a shower of fat yellow sparks off the vehicle’s fender.

  Lucy rocked in her seat and glanced around, finding the TEC-9 that Malte had been using. She checked the magazine – a third of the rounds left, maybe enough for a couple of bursts – and detached the oil-filter silencer, tossing it into the back seat. ‘I need to take them out before they make their target. Nothing else is gonna work.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Malte’s unblinking gaze fixed on the dark street ahead and the splash of light from the mini-van’s headlamps. The white flank of the ambulance ghosted across the avenue before them, long and agonising seconds passing as the distance between them narrowed.

  She hauled herself out of the passenger seat and back into the mini-van’s middle row, wrenching open the side door with a jerk of her shoulders. The panel slid back, and the wind rushed in as they thundered through the confines of an underpass. Malte leaned constantly on the horn, sending frightened pedestrians scattering before them as he kept up the pace.

  Lucy leaned into the van’s frame to steady herself and brought up the TEC-9, bracing it to her shoulder. They were coming up on the intersection with Mission Street, and from there it would be a straight shot all the way down to Yerba Buena Gardens. She couldn’t wait for the ideal opportunity to present itself. She had to do this now.

  The SMG jerked in her hand as she squeezed the trigger, and she saw bullets spark across the back end of the ambulance, blowing out the tail lights and chewing into the left rear tyre. The vehicle twitched but maintained its pace, and then pivoted into a skidding motion to the right before it hit the crossing at Mission. The ambulance darted across her firing arc and she strafed it again, but as the TEC-9 ran dry the reason for the early turn was revealed.

  The long silver shape of a MUNI electric trolley bus blocked the road directly in front of them, stalled across the intersection when the power had failed. Malte wrenched the mini-van’s steering wheel hard over and Lucy pitched backward into the passenger cabin as it rolled on its suspension. For a heart-stopping second, she thought the high-sided vehicle was going to tilt too far and flip over, but Malte snaked the van through the ugly turn and they made it through – but not before clipping the side of the bus with enough force to rip the open side door off its mountings and toss it to the street.

  The ambulance was still moving, but hobbled by the blown tyre, throwing bits of black rubber behind it as the wheel cover disintegrated. Malte brought the mini-van into the fleeing vehicle’s slipstream and gave it a shunt, but that did nothing to slow it. Shots fired from the cab cracked back through the air, shattering the van’s windscreen into a spiderweb. The ambulance veered off as it approached an intersection jammed tight with cars, and mounted the kerb. The van followed and they swept through the turmoil and back on to the road.

  Coming up was 2nd Street, and that meant they were only moments away from the gardens. Lucy hauled herself toward the open doorway and shouted at Malte. ‘Get us alongside!’

  She didn’t wait for him to acknowledge her. Lucy grabbed the edge of the roof and hauled herself up and out, the wind buffeting her as she pivoted on to the top of the mini-van and swung her legs around. She moved like a gymnast, making the motions fast and fluid, ignoring the tension in her arm muscles.

  The ambulance fell in alongside the van and the two vehicles connected, trading paint and fragments of plastic. The flare of a muzzle discharge blinked yellow-white as someone in the cab tried to shoot back at Malte. Lucy took it as the g
o-sign and coiled her legs under her, before launching herself across and on to the flat roof of the emergency vehicle.

  The metal beneath her distorted with an audible crunch and she grabbed the flashing red-and-white light bar to drag herself forward. Ahead, she saw the passenger-side door flap open and a figure in a paramedic’s jacket rise up, standing on the seat and twisting backward to take a shot at her. Crossman.

  He cursed her to hell and back, aiming his big six-gun with one hand, hanging on to the seat with the other. The pistol bellowed and she felt a sting of pain as a hot round creased her leg.

  Without warning, the vehicle slowed as the driver pumped the brakes, and Lucy almost lost purchase. She slipped forward over the slick roof and straight at Crossman. He reacted too slowly, jolting against the open passenger door, and she struck out on reflex, landing a clumsy punch in the side of his head. He hit her across the ribs with the big revolver, but Lucy caught his arm before he could draw it back. There was a split second of giddy equilibrium, when the only thing keeping the two of them in check was the mass of the other. Then she yanked at him and let the man lose his balance.

  Crossman shouted in fury as he fell out the door and slammed face-first into the road. Lucy glimpsed his arm and shoulder vanishing under the right rear wheel of the ambulance, the vehicle bouncing as it rolled over him. She felt them slowing, the driver uncertain how to proceed with his leader torn away, possibly dead.

  Lucy did not hesitate. She scrambled around the crown of the ambulance’s cab and came in through the open door feet-first. She connected with the startled Soldier-Saint in the driver’s seat and planted her foot in his face, slamming his head against the window. The ambulance staggered to a stop and for good measure, Lucy kicked the driver again, before pitching him out on to the street.

  Malte brought the mini-van to a halt nearby and shouted to her. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Forget me,’ she called back. ‘The payload . . .’ Shaky with adrenaline, Lucy leaned over the back of the seat to look into the rear compartment. The hydrogen cylinders and the cobbled-together FAE bomb were still intact, and she saw a glow of green light from what had to be a triggering mechanism. There was nothing that looked like a countdown timer, and only a complex nest of wires threading from the electronics into the trigger. The hardware was alien to her, and her heart sank. Lucy was a shooter, a door-kicker and a trigger-puller. She wasn’t a bomb disposal specialist, she wasn’t a tech. ‘Shit, Marc,’ she said under her breath, ‘Where’s your limey ass when I need it?’

  She spotted something lying in the foot well and grabbed at it. The silver digital tablet the courier had brought to the terrorists was damaged, the screen smashed into a varicoloured mess, but there might be data on it they could salvage.

  ‘Take this!’ Lucy leaned out of the window and tossed the tablet into the passenger seat of the mini-van. ‘I’m going to . . .’

  She trailed off. Ten seconds or ten minutes. There was no way to know how long she had before the device would detonate. All she could be sure of was that the Soldier-Saints had not built it for show. It would explode, and countless people would die.

  ‘No,’ she growled. ‘Not today.’ Lucy clambered in behind the wheel and slammed the ambulance into gear, stepping on the gas. The vehicle’s wheels spun and it jerked into reverse, fishtailing around to face the way they had come. She rammed the gearstick into drive and accelerated back down Mission Street. Lights flashing a storm of white and red, sirens screaming a banshee chorus, Lucy turned the ambulance into a guided missile. She pushed the pedal into the firewall and leaned forward over the steering wheel. The darkened apartment buildings and office blocks either side of her loomed large, as if she were at the bottom of a canyon cut from hard-edged towers of obsidian.

  The rotten-egg stink of hydrogen and the chemical tang of explosives stung her nostrils. Lucy tried not to think about the monstrous destructive power contained in the improvised bomb, instead keeping her eyes focused on the road ahead. In the distance, she could see where Mission Street terminated, and beyond the glitter of a low moon off the waters of the San Francisco Bay.

  The stalled trolley bus rose up to fill the windscreen and she navigated around it in a whipping, arrow-fast motion, but the ambulance was heavy and unbalanced with that damaged rear tyre, and it fought her. Control began to slip away and the vehicle skidded into a long line of parked scooters, bulling its way through them, flipping the enamelled two-wheelers across the lanes of the avenue.

  Lucy battled grimly through the skid and kept the ambulance on true. Almost there.

  There wasn’t a plan in her head, not really. It was more like a wild instinct, a last-second piece of improvised action fuelled by barely concealed panic. The kind of insane risk that Dane would take, not me, she told herself. Lucy didn’t want to perish because of the reckless Brit’s bad influence on her. But here I go . . .

  The ambulance burst from the mouth of Mission Street and careened over the Embarcadero intersection, scattering terrified pedestrians before it. Lucy pointed the lumbering vehicle toward a gangway close to Pier 14 and crashed through a chain-link gate. She was rapidly running out of road.

  Kicking open the driver’s door, Lucy saw a blur of decking and threw herself out toward it. The impact knocked the wind from her and she rolled, feeling her jacket snag and tear, feeling blood wet her face. Behind her, the ambulance’s engine gave a dying roar as the vehicle smashed through a wooden barrier at the end of the jetty and crashed into the waters of the bay.

  Time blurred and she lost a few moments. Seconds or minutes, she couldn’t tell.

  People were running to help her. No. No. They had to get clear. It wasn’t over yet.

  Lucy dragged herself to her feet and pulled out the revolver that had been jammed in her pocket, aiming it into the sky. She fired at nothing, the reports of the shots driving the would-be Good Samaritans back the way they had come.

  Limping, forcing herself to run-stumble, Lucy put as much distance as she could between herself and the sinking ambulance. A thermobaric weapon worked only when it could disperse a deadly aerosol of explosive material for its secondary detonation, and drowning it in seawater would hopefully be enough to neutralise that lethal effect. But the primary charge could still go off, could still claim lives—

  That thought was forming in Lucy’s head when a wall of air pressure and heat rammed into her back and threw her forward. The blast lit up the pier like a flash of summer lightning and she stumbled against a low wall.

  Lucy turned and saw a bolus of dense black smoke rising from the shallows, framed by the lights coming on again along the distant Bay Bridge. Fat droplets of water and splinters of the wooden wharf cascaded down around her. At length, Lucy allowed herself to slump against the wall and gulp down some air. The ringing in her ears made it hard to concentrate, and it was only when a shadow fell across her line of sight that she realised Malte was standing over her.

  Are you hurt? His mouth moved but she didn’t hear the words.

  ‘Deafened,’ she managed, tapping her earlobe. Then she broke into a jag of rough-throated laughter. ‘That was reckless.’

  Malte gave her a sardonic nod in return and helped her up, guiding her toward the idling mini-van. More strobes, blue ones this time, and the searching pillars of spotlights beneath Coast Guard helicopters were converging on the pier.

  ‘We wait?’ Malte jerked his chin toward the distant police cars. She saw he had the damaged tablet computer in his other hand, and Lucy guessed the question he hadn’t uttered. Do we turn this over to Rowan and Gonzalez?

  Straightening, she took the tablet from him and levered off the broken back cover. ‘Knife?’ she asked, holding out her hand. He handed over a folding blade, and in quick order Lucy found and cut out the tablet’s battery pack, to ensure no kill-code wiper program could be run to blank its contents. ‘We don’t wait,’ Lucy told him, getting into the van. ‘These fanatic pricks had help. I want to know w
ho gave it to them.’

  *

  Marc’s route out of Malta took in a blind stop in Tunis and then back across the Mediterranean Sea to Nice, doubling back on the route to make certain that the local authorities had not tracked him leaving the island. The Dutch passport he used went into a burn bag as soon as he left the arrivals lounge, but Marc was barely a few strides into France before two men emerged from of the edges of his vision and surrounded him.

  He didn’t know their names, and no one at Rubicon had ever thought to tell him. They were part of Ekko Solomon’s personal security detail, both muscular men in black Brioni suits and dark glasses, both shaven-headed and utterly humourless. They could have been pressed out of the same mould in a factory that made tough guys, he reflected, the only thing that differentiated them being the tone of their skin. One of them had the ruddy tan of a farmhand, the other was dark brass. They moved with careful, economical motions, and with slow alarm Marc realised that they were treating him like he was a potential threat.

  ‘You going to tell me what’s going on?’ He directed the question toward both of them as they flanked him out into the afternoon sunshine.

  ‘Alert procedure is in effect,’ said the Farmhand.

  ‘You’ll be debriefed at the office,’ added Brass. And those were the last words either of them spoke to him. Marc climbed into the back of a waiting Mercedes GLS and Farmhand drove while the other man sat next to him, silent and impassive.

  Belatedly, Marc fell into a much-needed doze that lasted all the way to Monaco, and by then the sun had dipped toward the horizon. He had snatched a few hours of sleep on the flights, but it didn’t feel like it was anywhere near enough. Each time Marc had started to sink toward real rest, his mind pulled him back out with the dread about what had happened in Malta, and where Kara Wei had vanished to.