Assim kept talking. ‘Yes, I know, but there are rumours emerging that one of the victims of the crash was a prominent dissident from the North with a price on his head.’
‘They caused a rail disaster to kill one man?’ Marc was disgusted by the callous possibility.
‘There’s also the fact that Horizon Integral do a lot of business in the South . . .’ Assim paused, losing momentum. ‘It’s another connection.’
Marc leaned over the pool table, staring at the papers. ‘All right. Keep digging, get back to us if you find anything else.’ He tapped the video window on the tablet and it folded closed. Marc released a breath and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Shit, for every piece of intel we find, we get a dozen more unanswered questions!’
‘Then we need to step back and refocus,’ said Lucy. ‘We’re going at this the wrong way. Ever since that bomb in San Francisco, since the dead guy in Malta, we’ve been running to catch up and failing. Face it, Madrigal is ahead of us! She’s a game-player, right?’ She looked to Marc for confirmation and received a slow nod in return. ‘She has that whole chess master ten-moves-ahead bullshit down pat. So how about we stop wasting our energy trying to get out in front of her and attack this the other way?’
‘Slow her down,’ said Crowne, following Lucy’s reasoning. ‘How do you propose to do that?’
‘The fly likes honey.’ Lucy gestured toward Marc. ‘Hite already got us what we need, right?’ She laid the tip of a long finger on the pile of old photographs.
He saw where she was heading. ‘We make Madrigal come to us. She has a serious fixation on keeping her identity concealed. All this stuff would be irresistible for her. If we use it to draw Madrigal out into the open—’
‘We can take her,’ Lucy concluded. ‘Cut off the head of Ghost5 before they do any more damage.’
Marc nodded to himself. ‘It could work. And odds are good she’d come in person. This isn’t the kind of material Madrigal would trust to anyone else.’
‘To be clear,’ said Crowne, ‘it sounds like you’re asking me to be party to what amounts to an illegal rendition.’
‘Your job is to protect the interests of Horizon Integral, yeah?’ said Marc. ‘Madrigal is holding your company hostage as long as she has those zero-day exploits in her possession. It’s only a matter of time before someone figures out that the Sigma software is the common denominator in all the attacks. When that happens, the company stocks will tank. So your window of opportunity to deal with this problem is swiftly closing.’
‘Unless, of course, you wanna wait to see what she’ll do?’ Lucy went in for the coup de grace. ‘Those other hacks were the warm-up. I guarantee you whatever comes next will be a show-stopper.’
Crowne was silent for a long moment before he finally replied. ‘I’ll need to talk to Wehmeyer.’
Lucy waved him away. ‘Do what you have to.’ She watched him walk to a windowed door that opened out on to a sun deck, and step through, dialling a number on his smartphone. When the door clicked shut behind him, she turned back to Marc. ‘Before you say anything, I know. I know this play is a gamble.’
‘No argument there,’ he agreed. ‘But our other options are thin on the ground. And you know me, I like to roll the dice.’ Marc considered the most expedient approach. ‘I can put out a message to a few trading hubs on the dark web. Drop some hints. We get Crowne to front it. Pretend he was Hite’s partner. Ask for a load of money and threaten to go public. She’ll bite.’
Lucy gave a harsh snort of derision. ‘Laughing boy out there is never gonna go for that.’ Then a darker mood clouded her expression. ‘But suppose he does. Let’s say we do get our hands on Madrigal. What has to come next, you sure you’re up for that?’
‘Madrigal’s a pragmatist,’ said Marc. He knew exactly what Lucy was suggesting. ‘She’ll make a deal.’
Lucy raised an eyebrow. ‘Think so? In my experience, the ones who think they have their emotions in check are really just burying them deeper than the rest of us. When that comes to the surface . . .’ She frowned. ‘You said it yourself. We saw what she did to Cooper. You have to know that wasn’t the action of a rational person. Even with all the years that have passed, someone who stabbed an old man a half-dozen times isn’t likely to go easy.’
Marc found he didn’t have an answer for that.
The door creaked open again, letting in the early evening breeze. Outside, the sun had set and the sky above the garden darkened toward magenta-blue. Crowne stepped back across the threshold. ‘All right,’ he began, ‘Mr Wehmeyer says I am—’
The front of the man’s head erupted in a mess of bone and blood as a high-velocity bullet entered the back of his neck and ripped through his skull. The horrendous crater where his face had been emitted a whine of escaping air from his lungs, and Crowne’s body crashed to the floor.
‘Fucking hell!’ Marc jerked back from the grisly sight and Lucy collided with him.
She caught the familiar stink of death drifting up from the dead man’s ruined body and a trigger pulled in her mind, an automatic artefact of her military training. She moved into a different means of thinking, shifting instantly to soldier-mode.
‘Stay back,’ she hissed, pushing Marc toward the wall and out of the line of any potential follow-up shots. Lucy flattened herself against the frame of the door and dropped low, calculating that any aggressor lurking outside would be aiming at chest height. She jerked her head out across the open doorway, taking a fast mental snapshot of the gardens behind Hite’s house before pulling quickly back into cover. The image was a jumble of impressions. Blackness and long shadows in the fading evening light. Had she imagined that brief instance of motion in the trees, the glitter of reflected light off a targeting scope?
‘Anything?’ Marc whispered.
‘We got at least one shooter with a high-powered rifle. And if there’s one, there’s more than one.’
Marc grimly dragged Crowne’s corpse toward him, and patted him down. ‘He doesn’t have a weapon.’
Lucy swallowed a curse. Wehmeyer had insisted that no Rubicon representatives could be armed while working with his people on Australian soil, even with non-lethal weapons, and Solomon had agreed to the restriction. She was now regretting her decision to obey that order.
‘We need to—’ Marc started speaking again, and as he did every light in the house abruptly went out. The slow-moving fan hanging over the pool table spun to a halt.
‘They cut the power.’ She scrambled over to where a telephone sat on a small side table and snatched up the receiver. The device was silent. ‘Landline too.’
Marc glared at his smartphone. ‘Nothing here, either. Wireless, cellular, satellite, all negative. They must have a jammer set up nearby.’
Both of them fell silent, straining to listen for the sound of an approaching enemy. From the far side of the house, Lucy heard glass breaking and a man’s voice call out indistinctly.
‘Ten moves ahead . . .’ muttered Marc. He jabbed a finger toward the papers on the pool table. ‘We have to get that out of here!’
Lucy shook her head. ‘Forget it, we gotta move!’
‘We lose those files, we lose our only edge on Ghost5,’ he shot back. Marc rose and kicked the garden door shut. ‘Give me a second . . . Keep me covered . . .’
‘With what?’ Lucy growled. As the Brit scrambled desperately to repack the metal attaché case with Hite’s bounty of blackmail, she moved to the far door that led back to the main atrium.
She eased it open a crack and slipped through. A wordless shout from the far end of the corridor reached her. It sounded like the Samoan, the noise strangled and full of pain. More glass broke and there was another cry that echoed through the house.
In the dimness, each shadow potentially concealed an armed assassin. Lucy dashed into the cover of a wide support pillar and looked toward the front door. Through the narrow slit-windows either side of it, she could make out the shape of a large black van parked sideways
across the mouth of the driveway. The path was completely blocked, and three men stood between the vehicle and the gate to the house, watching. They were dressed in dark street clothes, but their faces were hidden behind hard-shell masks that only revealed their eyes. Each one had what looked like a submachine gun in their hands, the barrels elongated with a thick sound suppressor.
She watched, waiting for them to move in, but they stood their ground. Belatedly, Lucy realised that the men by the van were there to keep the area contained. If someone broke out of the house and tried to run, their task was to gun them down.
Hite’s home had the kind of structural security that someone rich and paranoid would prefer, with few points of entry and high walls around the gardens to keep out the uninvited. But that layout also meant that anyone trying to leave the grounds would be funnelled out in a single direction. In this case, right into a hail of bullets.
Sweep and clear. Lucy understood how this was going to play out. It was a scenario she herself had frequently participated in as an aggressor, sometimes as the backstop, but more often than not as the attacking element. Which means they’re coming in through the back.
Down the hall, a door banged open and the terrified woman in the maid’s uniform came through, skidding over the tiled floor as she fled. The maid was gripped by total panic, her eyes wide and lost in terror. The woman caught sight of Lucy and faltered, stumbling against the wall. From her point of view, Lucy would have seemed to be a dark human shape, another threat.
Lucy opened her mouth to call out to her, but the words didn’t have time to form. The clattering noise of a silenced weapon echoed and the fleeing woman jerked abruptly as a bullet struck her in the back. She collapsed against an ornamental shelf and dragged a glass lamp down with her to shatter against the tiles.
Her killer came into view, and Lucy saw a slight female figure in tactical gear holding the angular shape of a heavy pistol in both hands, the thread of an under-barrel aiming laser probing the air before it. The shooter’s shoulders tensed and Lucy knew in that fraction of a second that she had been spotted.
She wasn’t aware of the soldier’s equation in her thoughts on a conscious level, the instinctive evaluation of risk versus reward, of one danger traded off against another. It was ingrained in her. Lucy reacted.
She broke from her meagre cover and sprinted up the curved staircase leading to the first floor, gambling against the chance of drawing this armed killer away from Marc, putting herself in harm’s way in order to buy him time to escape.
The rattling report of the silenced pistol sounded again and a large calibre round embedded itself in the wall as she ran. Lucy glimpsed movement down in the hallway as the killer came after her.
*
Marc heard the disturbance and held his breath, the case half-shut as he tried to close it on the papers jammed inside. Through the gap in the door he saw Lucy vanish in the direction of the stairs, and he almost ventured out after her before his caution hauled him back.
A petite, athletic woman in a black combat rig flashed past, and took the steps two at a time to race up after his partner. He saw the gun in her hands, and Marc’s gut twisted.
He knew exactly what Lucy was doing. And he knew he should take full advantage of the moment, grab the case and find a way out of this place, get clear of the range of whatever frequency jammer they were using and call for help.
But the notion of leaving Lucy Keyes behind to an uncertain fate was like a ball of lead in his belly. It didn’t matter that she was more than capable of defending herself, it mattered that he would be the one to exchange his safety for hers.
With all that had been taken from Marc in recent times, Lucy was one of the few people he could still count on, one of the diminishing number he considered a trusted friend. A year ago in Somalia, Marc had been torn by guilt after being forced to leave Lucy for dead on the strife-torn streets of Mogadishu. Leaving her now was making the same choice all over again.
But she knows that, he told himself. Because that’s the mission.
Marc reached for the attaché case and as his fingers touched the handle, he heard the scrape of a boot on the tiles out in the hall. Someone was out there. Another shooter.
The half-open door to the games room began to move, slowly easing wider.
He dropped behind the pool table and held his breath, looking under the supports toward the doorway. From his low angle, Marc couldn’t see the figure clearly, but he estimated it was a man, slightly below average height. Each step the intruder took was measured, slowly putting one foot in front of the other and carefully placing the weight so as to be virtually silent.
Marc turned, finding the television screen on the far wall. Reflected in the inert surface of the display, he saw the blurred form of a man in black, one hand holding a gun aimed down toward the floor, the other reaching to touch his throat.
In the near-silence, a faint buzz sounded. It could have been a voice across a radio channel, but there was no way to be sure.
The dark figure grasped the case where it still lay atop the pool table, and metal scraped on the blue baize.
Marc’s hand found a cue stick hanging in a rack on the side of the table, and his fingers closed around the maple-wood shaft. The lessons of the Bosniak cop who had schooled him in a few Krav Maga techniques rang in his thoughts. Use the environment to beat your enemy. If in doubt, use anything you can find as a weapon. He took a breath and saw the intruder turn away, distracted by the sight of Crowne’s body sprawled on the carpet.
Hesitation gave way to action, and Marc burst out of cover, swinging the cue around in a vicious crossing strike. The gunman spun back, trying to block, but the stick smacked him hard across the face and he reeled as the wood splintered.
*
Lucy went through the first door she saw on the next floor up and kicked it shut behind her, finding herself in a well-appointed bathroom with a big tub just short of the size of a kiddie pool. In the semi-darkness, the tiled marble space was all dull reflections and bronze mirrors, and what light there was came in through misted windows on the far wall.
She shrank into a shady corner and covered her eyes, forcing them to dark-adapt. Lucy heard the soft padding of her pursuer’s approach, then an odd whispering with a metallic timbre. Speaking on a throat mic, she guessed, but Lucy couldn’t place the language. Asian. Not Cantonese or Mandarin.
The woman in black kicked open the door and flowed into the room, her gun’s red laser thread flickering and rebounding off the mirrors. She pivoted toward the glass door of the shower cubicle and opened it.
Lucy attacked. She bolted out of the shadows, head down and fast into a full-tilt shoulder charge. Slamming into the back of the smaller woman, the blow transferred the full energy of her assault and sent the assassin sprawling into the empty cubicle. Before the woman could recover, Lucy swatted at the shower controls and knocked them into the crimson end of the dial.
A powerful blast of searing hot water gushed from the rainfall head mounted on the ceiling of the cubicle, and the assassin emitted a piercing scream as it scalded her. Lucy fought through the natural urge to recoil from the heat, instead leaning in to put two hard punches through the water and into the other woman’s torso.
She thought that would be enough to put the assassin down, but Lucy had underestimated her opponent’s toughness. The woman had lost her gun in the shock of the steaming deluge, but not her resolve. She came hurtling out of the cubicle with a howl and barrelled into Lucy, clawing at her face.
Light flashed off the polished steel edges of a dagger as it slipped from a wrist-holster and into the woman’s hand. Lucy jerked back as the blade slashed through the air at eye level, feeling a sting of pain as it nicked her cheek and drew blood.
*
The gunman struck out at Marc blindly, swatting at him with the attaché. He wasn’t fast enough to avoid it and the metal case slammed into his shoulder. The blow was hard enough to pop the latch and the contents
spewed out across the floor, the old VHS tape bouncing away over the carpet.
He drew back from the blow, but the other man was already bringing his pistol to bear. Marc had no choice but to close the gap again and try to get inside his reach before he could fire.
They fell into a clumsy wrestle. The gunman had less body mass than Marc, but he was compact and muscular, and a trained killer. It was all Marc could do to keep the bulky pistol from pivoting toward his head. The gunman squeezed the trigger and the weapon bucked, firing uselessly into the ceiling. The muffled discharge of sound from the strange-looking revolver was little more than the metallic snap-clack of its moving parts, but he had no time to dwell on how that might have worked.
The two fighters struggled, clawing at one another as they fell against the pool table. The gunman snarled and jolted forward, clipping Marc with the flat of the firearm.
He shook off the impact, but the moment it took to react was enough for the other man to grab at his face. His opponent’s gloved hand snatched at him, fingers trying to gouge his eyes, palm smothering his mouth.
Marc reacted and savagely clamped down on the webbing between thumb and forefinger, the bite crushing flesh through the material of the glove. He wrenched at it, and the gunman let out a long yelp of agony, letting go of him, giving him an opening.
Into that gap, Marc sent a series of bullet-fast piston punches, as his instructor had taught him, landing them in the softer tissues around the throat and beneath the jaw. Keeping up the momentum, with his other hand still firm around the man’s wrist, he slammed the gun-hand hard against the lip of the pool table until the pistol left his opponent’s grip and tumbled to the floor.
The moment the weapon was unseated, Marc gave the gunman one last shove to put him off his balance, and dove for the weapon. At the edge of his awareness, Marc sensed new motion on the far side of the room, somewhere near the door to the sun deck, but he had already committed to what would happen next.
He landed on the pistol, snatching at it as he rolled. The weapon felt dense and off-balance, and he pulled the trigger again and again as he turned toward the gunman. The hammer fell three times, the first round missing as it buried itself in the side of the pool table, the second and third hitting Marc’s assailant in the thigh and the belly at close range. As before, each time he fired there was no full-throated roar, instead a smothered, tinny rattle as the heavy recoil shocked through his wrist.
Ghost: Page 25
