Ghost:

by James Swallow

  Lucy realised she was holding her breath, and her jaw set. As much as she didn’t want to admit it, like Marc, she had held on to a thin thread of hope that Kara wasn’t the traitor she appeared to be.

  That thread was severed. ‘The Englishman is Marc Dane,’ said Kara, her tone blunt and matter-of-fact. ‘He’s the one the drone got a shot of.’

  ‘Former British Intelligence officer with K Section, MI6,’ said Madrigal, watching Marc’s reaction. ‘Yes, I’ve been told a lot about you. Your own side kicked you out when you lost your strike team in a terrorist ambush. You’re skilled and you’re clever, but you have poor impulse control. It gets you into trouble.’

  Lucy had no doubt who had supplied that information, and she glared at Kara as her former comrade took her cue from Madrigal. ‘That one was with US Army Special Forces before they threw her in the stockade for trying to kill her commanding officer. When she escaped from prison, she wound up working for Rubicon. Her name is Lucy Keyes. She’s a recon-sniper specialist.’

  Lucy felt Marc’s eyes on her, but she didn’t meet his gaze. There were details of her past he didn’t know, and this wasn’t how she wanted him to find out about them. She stared fixedly at Kara. Any lasting doubts about the woman’s intentions were long gone now.

  ‘A spy and an assassin,’ said Madrigal. She indicated the man standing next to her. ‘Erik here thinks I should wait until we’re up over the ocean and throw you both out, along with this . . .’ She held up the attaché case. ‘I am considering it.’ Slowly, deliberately, Madrigal reached under her jacket and her hand came back holding a small-frame Taurus semi-automatic. She turned the pistol in her grip so that she was holding the weapon by the barrel, offering it like a gift to the other woman. ‘Maybe you should do it for me, Song?’ She made a face. ‘Sorry. I keep forgetting. Kara.’

  ‘I won’t kill anyone,’ said Kara, after a long moment. Her face betrayed no emotion of any kind.

  Madrigal let the words hang for a few beats, before she replied. ‘Of course not.’ She smiled again, putting the pistol away. ‘We have people to do that for us.’ She nodded at the older shooter and he came forward, grabbing Marc’s arm to drag him off.

  Lucy felt a gun muzzle jab her in the small of the back. ‘Move,’ said Erik, prodding her forward.

  *

  Marc had known they were in a lot of trouble when the shooters had dragged him and Lucy out of the house. Keeping them alive opened up a whole raft of nasty possibilities that he didn’t want to think too hard about.

  Madrigal clearly relished her chance to lord it over the two of them, and that fitted what he knew of the secretive hacker’s modus operandi. She liked the feel of control over others, the power of life and death at the push of a button. Charles Hite had fallen victim to that, and now Marc expected a similar fate awaited the Rubicon operatives.

  Anyone else would have shot them and left their bodies to burn in the house. Madrigal wanted something from them. If Marc could figure out what it was, use that as an edge . . . He winced from the pain in his skull. The headache made it hard for him to think clearly.

  He looked around as the man with the rifle marched him up the plane. The big Antonov cargo carrier had been converted into a kind of mobile hacker hub, and he had to admit it was a smart play. The jet could travel relatively incognito, put down at any major airport, and the Ghost5 crew would only need to patch into the local internet nodes to start making trouble. In fact, with enough fuel on board they could stay airborne for hours at a time and use satellite links to do the same.

  He had wary looks from the black hats as he passed them by. They were setting up, bringing their machines on line, booting up laptops and custom computer rigs. Whatever Madrigal planned to do next, he had the sense that it was going to begin soon.

  Marc’s gaze raked over the computer gear, picking out the elements he could recognise from a distance, and then he spotted the communications hardware racked against the wall of the cargo bay. It was military kit, but not of Western manufacture. On board a jet built in the Ukraine by way of the Libyan government, he expected to see Russian-made gear, but the equipment retrofitted into the hull was from somewhere else. He struggled to place it, slowing his walk.

  ‘Move along,’ snapped the man with the rifle, and gave Marc a shove. He spun to glare back at his captor and out of nowhere the answer hit him. He was literally staring it right in the face.

  ‘Korean,’ said Marc.

  ‘What?’ said the man, his hands tightening around the rifle.

  Like the woman with the busted arm, like the masked men in the van, the shooter was East Asian. But he wasn’t Chinese or Japanese. The more Marc studied him, the more he became certain of it. ‘From the North,’ he said firmly, and glared at Madrigal as the woman walked up behind them. ‘That’s how you’ve been able to float this whole gig. There’s only so far you could go as a non-state actor. So you reached out to Pyongyang and did what? Made a deal?’ He waved at the communications gear. ‘They gave you hardware and manpower. And you give them a new weapon for the digital war.’

  ‘That’s an interesting theory,’ Madrigal said airily. ‘But Ghost5 don’t work with governments. It isn’t who we are.’ The last few words were addressed not toward Marc, but more for the rest of her team, who watched the confrontation with guarded interest. ‘Fox and Cat here are with another interested party, one that is aligned with our current aims. That’s all.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ Marc retorted.

  His mind raced as he tried to mentally rearrange the fragments of information that had bombarded him over the last few days. Assim’s mention of the Korean connection to the Taipei train crash, the murder of the old CIA case officer, the redacted file on Operation Overtone, and now the identity of the shooters and the equipment on the jet. It was all pointing in the same direction.

  He had nothing to lose, so he threw the only logical possibility in Madrigal’s face. ‘All those other attacks were you field-testing the Arquebus software and the zero days you bought from Hite.’ He shook his head. ‘I thought you were here to hit Sydney, but that’s not the mark. You’re going to target Seoul.’ Marc’s thoughts unspooled as he said them aloud. He remembered what Wehmeyer has said about the South Korean capital. ‘Half that city’s critical infrastructure runs on the HIOS Sigma codebase. What better target is there for the North than that? Tell me I’m wrong.’

  ‘What we do,’ Madrigal said coldly, ‘is teach the rich and the powerful a lesson. Corporations and governments, we make them fear and respect their citizens, not treat them like cattle. We are justice coming to claim it’s due. And there are a lot of people that deserve to learn that lesson the hard way.’

  ‘Like the passengers on the trains in Taipei?’ Marc threw the retort back at her. ‘The people in those cars in Germany? Or the ones who nearly got blown apart in San Francisco? Did they deserve it?’ He shook his head bitterly. ‘You’re lying,’ Marc told her. He knew it instinctively. Staring into Madrigal’s icy gaze, he glimpsed the ghost of the truth and seized upon it. ‘You’re lying to yourself and your own people.’ He gestured at the other hackers. ‘And not only about who you’ve got them into bed with.’ Marc tried to take a step forward, but the man Madrigal had called Fox grabbed his arm and yanked him back. ‘Do they know who killed Lex Wetherby? Do they know the real reason you’re doing this? It’s not about justice, Marie. It’s about just you.’

  ‘That’s clever,’ she said. ‘We’ll see how that works out for you.’ Madrigal shot Erik a look and he gave Lucy another shove.

  Marc moved of his own accord, not wanting to invite another blow from the man with the rifle, who eyed him with renewed suspicion. ‘You talk too much,’ offered Fox.

  ‘It’s been said,’ Marc replied.

  As they reached the front of the aircraft, Marc expected to be sent up the ladder to the Antonov’s crew deck above the cavernous cargo bay, but Erik gave a grave shake of the head and gestured to keep moving. ‘Not up
there. You’re going in the cooler.’

  Stepping around thick trunks of power and data cables leading back to the hacker hub, Marc saw that the forward quarter of the jet had been modified from its usual design. Most An-124’s had a mechanism that could swing up the entire nose so that cargo could be loaded from front and back at the same time, but this aircraft was missing that machinery. Instead, the nose section had been welded in place and walled off into its own compartment. An airlock-style hatch was the only way in, and Fox opened it while Erik kept his weapon trained on Marc and Lucy.

  A familiar waft of dry air and ozone smell pricked Marc’s nostrils as they were marched though, and he knew what he would find within.

  The forward compartment housed the brain of the Ghost5 operation. Racks of computer servers filled the space, complex function lights blinking along their faces, and yellow data cables coiled away into bunches, disappearing back down the fuselage through narrow access channels in the deck. Each server sat on a vibration-proof dais within an armoured cage, and in turn the entire server ‘farm’ was behind another metal barrier like a dense chain-link fence. On their side, a small anteroom area held a monitor panel and security station.

  Lucy looked around. ‘What the hell are we supposed to do in here?’

  Erik produced another set of zip-ties. ‘Get comfortable. This is your home for the next eleven hours.’

  Once more, Madrigal’s lieutenant kept his gun trained on them while Fox secured them to the chain-link, looping new ties around the ones already holding their wrists together.

  Marc didn’t resist. The uncompromising look in Erik’s eyes told him that the man would shoot them both dead if they tried anything. Play for time, he thought. ‘You know Madrigal’s speech out there was bullshit,’ said Marc. It wasn’t a question. ‘So what are you getting out of it? Money?’ He jutted his chin at Fox. ‘A nice medal from the Dear Leader? Or does Madrigal have something on you?’

  A nerve twitched in Erik’s jaw and he knew he’d touched on the truth. ‘Is this the moment where you try to make me a better offer?’ He showed his teeth. ‘Despite what you may think, your patron Solomon cannot throw his money around to make us go away.’

  ‘So you’re the loyal kind, huh?’ said Lucy, backing up Marc’s play. ‘Is that why Wetherby got smoked? Because he wasn’t loyal enough?’ She glared at Fox as he secured her. ‘And you . . . that was a tough shot, hitting a moving target like that from range. I bet you didn’t even break a sweat killing Crowne back at the house.’

  Fox spared her a look, and then stepped away. ‘You are the same as him,’ he said, nodding at Marc. ‘You talk too much.’

  ‘Wetherby is dead because he was weak.’ Erik offered the comment, ending the conversation as the two armed men went back through the airlock hatch. ‘He got what he deserved.’

  The door thudded shut and Marc waited for the hiss of the pressure seal before he turned back to Lucy. ‘Okay. Once we’re off the ground, our options narrow considerably . . .’

  ‘Copy that.’ Lucy made a face. ‘Shit, is it getting colder in here?’

  ‘And dry too.’ Marc nodded toward the server farm, where air ducts in the ceiling of the retrofitted compartment were visible. ‘There’ll be dehumidifiers up there, sucking out all moisture in this room.’

  ‘Right. For the computers . . .’ She nodded, looking around. ‘Lot less insulation in here too.’

  ‘It’s set up to cool the equipment. Servers generate a lot of heat when they’re running, and overclocked custom rigs like these even more so.’ He glanced at her. ‘They probably have vents to draw in cold outside air when the jet is at altitude, to keep the temperature down.’

  ‘Can we mess with that?’ As usual, Lucy immediately went for the option that would cause the most trouble.

  ‘Not from here.’ Marc eyed her. ‘And not while we’re trussed up.’ He paused. ‘You know why Madrigal’s keeping us around, yeah?’

  ‘She doesn’t strike me as the type to miss an opportunity. She wants to know more about Rubicon and the SCD.’ Lucy’s brow furrowed in concentration as she tested the play in the zip-ties. ‘You heard what she said. Most people who go after her don’t get as close as we have. She’ll want to stop that from happening again. Know what we know.’

  Marc shook his head and shifted his weight. ‘There’s more to it than that.’ He tried to lean out in the direction of the control panel on the opposite side of the compartment, but it was way beyond his reach. ‘Hackers like Madrigal, they look at the world the same way they look at computer code. As a thing they can exploit, re-program or crash.’

  ‘Rubicon is on Ghost5’s target list,’ said Lucy, her tone turning acid. ‘That’s a given. She’s had her own personal Trojan horse inside our firewalls for years.’

  There was little he could say that wouldn’t fan the fire of Lucy’s anger on that front, so Marc let the comment pass. ‘So now our plan to draw out Madrigal has gone totally and utterly into the shitter, we need to figure out what the hell we do next.’

  ‘I’m thinking I wait for them to come interrogate me, and kill whoever the fuck they send.’ Lucy said flatly. ‘Then drop this jet into the sea as an encore.’

  ‘Or,’ Marc began, drawing out the word. ‘We try something with a smaller percentage chance of fatality for both of us.’

  She gave him a sideways look. ‘I’m listening.’

  *

  Assim looked at the jerky video displayed on the monitor screen hanging from the wall of the conference room, and his heart sank. The inferno that ripped through Charles Hite’s house was now under control, and the local firefighters visible in the shot were spraying water to damp down the blackened ruin. Framed against the dark sky, blue strobes flashed off cascades of broken glass, the collapsed walls and fallen gates bordering the house. The pattern of destruction matched what eyewitnesses had reported to the emergency services. Hite’s home had gone up in a catastrophic gas explosion that had been heard clear across the bay.

  The point of view shifted, passing behind the bulky shape of a fire rescue truck liveried in red and yellow checkerboard, to reframe on a group of paramedics dealing with the victims of the fire.

  ‘Do you see this?’ Malte’s voice was low in Assim’s earpiece, relayed over the encrypted network to the Rubicon jet and to Ekko Solomon’s private phone. Solomon was still in the city, watching the same footage on a screen in the office of Horizon Integral’s CEO. ‘They are bringing out the dead.’

  One by one, the paramedics loaded an ambulance with five black body bags, before slamming the doors and sending the vehicle on its way. The camera view moved, tracking the ambulance as it pulled out.

  ‘Should we follow?’ said Assim.

  ‘No.’ Solomon sounded distant and fatigued. ‘There were three staff at the house. Crowne brought his driver with Mr Dane and Ms Keyes. Remain close to the site . . . in case others are found. We need to be certain.’

  Assim’s eyes dropped to the laptop in front of him. The computer’s screen showed several data panels, each pertaining to elements of the Special Condition Division’s communications network. The indicators for Lucy and Marc’s personal tracking devices were dark. The trackers were resilient, he reflected, but not enough to survive the heart of a firestorm. ‘It’s going to be days before we can get access to any evidence gathered by the New South Wales police,’ he added. ‘How are we going to proceed?’

  ‘This was not an accident,’ Malte insisted. ‘Someone will have seen them entering or leaving.’ At the corner of the image, a police officer started walking in the observer’s direction, and the camera view abruptly cut out as Malte palmed his spyPhone and moved away.

  ‘Investigate,’ said Solomon. ‘But be careful.’

  ‘Affirmative,’ came the Finn’s reply, and he disconnected from the group conversation.

  ‘All other efforts should be applied to the data recovered from the computer in Hite’s office,’ continued Solomon. ‘Contact
Henri if you require anything more.’

  Assim reached for something to say, something to express his regret, but the words seemed trite and thoughtless. Then Solomon cut the call and he was left there alone, staring at the blank screen.

  He minimised the comm display and went back to a subroutine that had been quietly running in the background. Henri Delancort had made certain that a data image of Hite’s office hard drive had been copied to Rubicon’s secure cloud servers, and a few hours ago Assim set a complex search program running through the volume of information.

  The program was a mesh of heuristic learning algorithms that, given the correct clues to follow, could piece together disparate bits of computer metadata to recover deleted files and work back though blinds to follow hidden email trails. If Hite had ever been complacent enough to use his office machine in his dealings with Ghost5, the search program would sniff it out. But there was nothing Assim could do to help speed it along. It would take as long as it would take.

  They nicknamed the software ‘the bloodhound’; both Marc Dane and Kara Wei had helped to write it. Assim watched the agonisingly slow pace of the program’s progress bar and thought of the two of them, both lost now.

  A sense of raw, powerful dejection followed, and abruptly Assim wanted very badly to be out of this room and away from the grinding inaction of his role. He let that impulse propel him up and out of his chair, through the door and down the corridors of Solomon’s jetliner. Grabbing his jacket, he pushed past the broad-shouldered bodyguard standing sentinel at the aircraft’s open hatch and took the steps down the mobile jetway two at a time, until he was standing on the tarmac.

  Long past sunset now, the airport was still busy with jets taking off and taxiing past toward the main buildings. Assim saw the bright glow of the terminal across the way, and the aircraft rolling past the apron where the big private jet was parked, without really being aware of them. He was too deep in his own thoughts for anything else.