Ghost:

by James Swallow

  Behind him, Lucy shouldered a fallen rack aside and it clanged against the hull of the SCIF. ‘Blood here,’ she called from the darkness. ‘Lot of it.’

  Marc nodded, only half-hearing her, his gaze still locked on the memory modules. He knew some of the tainted history they contained from his service with British Intelligence, mostly relayed in war stories told to him by an older MI6 officer named Leon Taub. The Cold War veteran had been part of Marc’s OpTeam, one of the crew killed by a Combine assassin two years ago in France, but in his youth the man had served in the South East Asian sector and seen the KCIA’s combative operational style at close hand.

  It was an organisation born out of a coup d’état. A secret police by any other name that had no qualms about conducting illegal renditions of persons of interest from halfway around the world, interfering in domestic politics, engaging in extortion and bribery, even going as far as implementing the assassination of their own president. Characterised by unchallenged conduct and opportunistic overreach in every incarnation of its existence, first as the KCIA, then the Agency for National Security Planning and finally as the NIS, there was little doubt South Korean Intelligence had a lot of dirt to keep under wraps. By any lights, the contents of the stolen SCIF were politically explosive.

  But it wasn’t only South Korea’s government that stood to suffer from the blowback from any leaks. The anger and the loss that had driven Madrigal to brutally murder an elderly man had grown out of the aftermath of a clandestine mission run by the KCIA and their opposite numbers in the intelligence organs of the United States. She wanted to make that collusion public, in her own twisted search for some kind of justice. Whatever the SCIF contained had to be devastating.

  Evidence of collusion between America and South Korea in unsanctioned attacks on the North? Deniable operations and soldiers killed by their own allies? All that and worse still? It wouldn’t matter that it happened over forty years ago. It would be the pretext Pyongyang would need to go to the next step, to military action. And with a US government engaged in sabre-rattling and the fractious political climate in South East Asia, the end result would be open war.

  Marc hesitated, hearing the hiss of the rain through the roof of the broken cabin. It was hard to believe that all of that could come from this, that here and now on this windswept bridge in the middle of a thunderstorm, a tipping point turned around him.

  There was only one logical course of action. ‘We’ve got to destroy this lot,’ he said to himself, staring at the hard drives. ‘It’s the only way.’ Madrigal may have been a cold-hearted schemer, but she had been right. And if that corrosive truth was released, it would be like throwing a lit match into a fireworks factory.

  He felt a prickling at his throat and he reached up to scratch at it. The radio earpiece hung there, and beneath the ceaseless sound of the rain, he thought he heard a faint sound.

  Marc pressed the radio bead into his ear. ‘Who’s out there?’

  ‘Dane.’ Kara Wei’s voice was faint and full of static, but unmistakable. ‘I didn’t think you’d still be alive.’

  ‘That makes two of us,’ he retorted. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Airport,’ she said. ‘I need your help.’ Behind him, Marc heard another crash of shifting containers and ignored it, straining to listen. ‘Come and get us. Please.’

  ‘I’m right in the middle of something—’ he began.

  ‘You really are,’ said Madrigal.

  He jerked back at the sound of the woman’s voice issuing out of the shadows, dragging up the SMG dangling from the sling over his shoulder, aiming as he turned.

  ‘No,’ she warned, weary and pained and angry all at once.

  Lucy came into sight holding her hands down and away from her gun, her dark face like thunder. Gripping Lucy from behind in a smothering embrace, forcing her to shuffle forward, Madrigal glared at Marc with open fury. Her face was smeared with blood and she had snaked her arms under Lucy’s in a cross over the other woman’s chest. In one hand, gripped tightly, she held a grey metal cylinder stencilled with purple warning text. In the other hand she held an arming pin, and with a flick of her fingers she threw it at Marc.

  ‘We are not finished here,’ spat Madrigal, pressing the base of the live thermite grenade against Lucy’s throat.

  NINETEEN

  ‘Dane,’ Lucy said firmly, ‘shoot this witch in the face and put her out of my misery, will ya?’

  ‘Be quiet,’ sneered Madrigal, her knuckles whitening around the grenade’s spring-loaded safety lever. The fuse had been dialled down to zero. All she needed to do was release that grip and the ‘spoon’ would flick off, instantly triggering the device.

  Bile rose in Marc’s throat as he recalled the sickly sweet reek of scorched human flesh, and the blinding flare of the thermite charge that had torched the corpses of the dead North Korean soldiers. That sun-hot fire would be a horrific, agonising way to perish, but Madrigal seemed ready to accept that if it meant Lucy would burn with her.

  ‘I’m serious,’ Lucy continued. ‘I mean, if you gotta, shoot the hostage. Just end her.’

  ‘We will both die,’ said the other woman, bearing her bloodstained teeth. ‘Right here.’

  Madrigal’s arch, cold mask slipped, and once more the furious, murderous reality of her that Marc had glimpsed on the police video was revealed. Her pale face flushed pink with rage, and the blood and soot matting her wine-dark hair gave the hacker the look of some revenant spirit bent on revenge.

  Marc aimed the submachine gun, holding his finger off the trigger. The two women were only a few metres away from him, and instinct told him that he could make the shot with the first bullet, even if the others went astray. But the second he started to analyse the angles, his confidence evaporated and doubt crept in. A degree the wrong way and Lucy would be fatally struck. Even if his aim was true, hitting Madrigal would make her drop the grenade and set it off. Too many variables. Too much risk.

  ‘C’mon, do it,’ Lucy implored. ‘She got the drop on me back there. It’s embarrassing. I don’t want anyone to know—’ Her words were choked off as Madrigal hauled her closer and rammed the cylindrical grenade into her throat.

  ‘You are going to back off,’ demanded the hacker. ‘I am going to get what I came here for. No one is going to stop me.’

  ‘How’s that?’ said Marc, willing himself to remain still, to keep on target. ‘The Halo is wrecked. Your playmates from the North aren’t here to back you up anymore.’

  ‘Should I give up? Let you turn me over to Interpol?’ She snorted.

  ‘You have nowhere left to go.’ Marc’s reply was matter-of-fact.

  ‘You don’t choose when this ends!’ spat Madrigal, with raw heat. ‘I choose! I always get what I want!’

  ‘That’s a lie,’ said a static-laced voice in Marc’s ear.

  ‘Kara . . .?’ Belatedly, he realised that the radio earpiece was still on, the channel still open. ‘Madrigal has Lucy,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Everyone who failed me is dead,’ Madrigal was saying. ‘I buried them all.’

  ‘That’s a lie, too.’ Kara whispered. ‘Tell her.’

  ‘That’s a lie,’ repeated Marc, trying to buy time. He saw a flicker of dark emotion, a jolt of surprise crossing Madrigal’s face. He pushed on. ‘Kara . . . Song . . . she gave you up. Betrayed you.’

  ‘No,’ Madrigal shook her head. ‘She came back to me. She made a mistake. I’ll correct her.’

  ‘You have to break her to end this,’ said Kara. ‘She’s brittle. She will flinch if you put the pressure in the right place. Do you get it, Dane?’ He didn’t respond, his mind racing to grasp what she was telling him. ‘You trust me, don’t you?’ They were the same words Kara had spoken to him back in Chamonix, the last thing she had said before she sent him to Malta. Before she lied to him.

  If Marc uttered the wrong word in the next few moments, this would end in fire and death. There was a hollow in his chest when he imagined Lucy
Keyes being torn out of his world. He couldn’t grasp the possibility. It seemed impossible, inconceivable. He could not let that happen. Too many variables. Too much risk.

  The voice in his ear had gone silent, the channel hissing quiet static. He saw Kara Wei in his mind’s eye, trying to square his memory of the sparky young hacker he thought he knew with the reality of the distant, damaged woman he had encountered on board the Antonov.

  Which of them was the false front? Marc wanted to believe that she had been playing a long game all through this mess. He wanted her to still be one of them. He loathed the idea that Kara had played everyone in Rubicon. He felt that same hollow in his chest at the prospect of her treachery.

  Did he trust her? Did he have a choice?

  ‘I am going to tell you the truth.’ Marc let the words come without hesitation. He didn’t measure or gauge them, he just spoke, digging deep and turning what he found there on Madrigal. ‘You think Song is something she’s not. I don’t know what she meant to you, Marie. Maybe she is the kid sister or the daughter you never had.’ He leaned in, using the woman’s real name to hook her attention and hold it fast. ‘You have that dead, empty space in you and you want someone to fill it.’

  He knew that feeling intimately. The reckless, grinning face of someone he had deeply cared for ghosted through Marc’s thoughts, the echo of Samantha Green so close that in the moment he thought he could hear her laughing through the rainfall.

  ‘But you chose wrong,’ he continued. ‘What you saw was what you projected on to her, not what there is. And when it goes away, it’s no one’s fault but your own.’

  ‘Song returned,’ growled Madrigal, biting out each insistent word like a bullet. ‘I knew she would.’

  ‘She came back to destroy you,’ managed Lucy, forcing out the words in a rough gasp. ‘Yeah, I get it. Not to join you, Red. And damned sure not to forgive you or become you.’

  Marc stared into the pale woman’s dark eyes. He saw a flash of the hidden fragility that Kara had warned him about, the smallest fraction of it appearing and disappearing on Madrigal’s taut features.

  He nodded toward the wreckage around them. ‘You were so set on this, you didn’t see it. You didn’t want to.’

  ‘Stop talking,’ said Madrigal.

  ‘You murdered somebody she cared about.’ Marc saw all the pieces fall into line, all the tragic connections slotting into one another. ‘Maybe the only person she ever had cared for. And then you were arrogant enough to think she wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Lex was weak!’ Madrigal’s face twisted. ‘It had to be done! She understands! She didn’t care about him—’

  ‘You’re wrong.’ Marc remembered Kara’s face from that day in France. She had known her lover was dead then, and she hadn’t said a word to him about it. Instead, she’d buried the raw pain, turned it into to fuel for herself in the same way he had when the Combine had killed his team, killed Sam Green and ripped her out of his life. Kara had spun the elaborate lie that had sent Marc after a truth she must have dreaded hearing, the first step on a road that meant destroying the trust she had accrued with everyone at Rubicon. All that to reach a truth that on some level she must have known from the very beginning.

  ‘Kara isn’t who you think she is,’ he said, as much to himself as to Madrigal. ‘And you’re the echo of what you lost forty years ago, clawing for some meaning. Trying to make her fill that void. And failing.’

  ‘You don’t fucking know me!’ Madrigal’s last fraction of control splintered apart and for a split second she shook with a lifetime of pent-up anger. She broke beneath the pressure of the truth, exactly as Kara said she would.

  Lucy saw her moment and shot her elbow into Madrigal’s gut. The hacker flinched, jerking back against one of the SCIF’s metal racks. Her hand twitched around the thermite grenade as Lucy threw herself forward and away from the other woman.

  As Lucy cleared his line of sight, Marc squeezed the SMG’s trigger and put three bullets into Madrigal’s chest. The hits spun her around and the thermite grenade tumbled from her hand, the safety lever releasing with a loud click.

  Lucy slammed into Marc and shoved him back as the device detonated. He couldn’t close his eyes or look away from the flare of metallic light, and was briefly dazzled by the searing brightness. The two of them tumbled out of the SCIF and on to the wet asphalt.

  Despite the downpour, the piles of papers inside the torn-open cabin were ready kindling for the thermite and in a heartbeat they were a raging bonfire. Madrigal and her spoils alike were consumed in the flames.

  Marc scrambled to his feet, still clutching the submachine gun, looking into the crackling, hissing heart of the inferno. Purple retina burns clouded his vision, only the writhing shimmer of the fire moved within the SCIF.

  Lucy put a hand on his shoulder and pulled him back a step. ‘She got what she wanted. What she deserved.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he managed, the weight of his actions settling on him. For a moment he was afraid to turn from the flames, convinced that Madrigal was still a threat. Then slowly he walked to the edge of the bridge, the rain hammering down around him. He reached up to the radio bead in his ear and tapped it. ‘Kara. Are you there? It’s . . . done.’

  The dead air answered him with static.

  *

  ‘I can hear you,’ called Erik, his deep voice rebounding off the walls of the hangar. ‘You won’t get away. Nein.’ He slipped back into his native language, growling out threats. ‘Ich werde dich langsam töten . . .’

  Kara crouched low in the Beechcraft’s cramped cockpit until only her eye line was above the control console. Staring out of the sloped windows, she tried to look in every direction at once, but it was impossible to know where Madrigal’s thug was. His words echoed back and forth, mingling with the rattle of rain off the roof high above and the sullen rumble of the burning Antonov.

  She turned the aircraft radio down even as she thought she heard Marc Dane’s voice. She couldn’t answer him. Any sound could draw Erik to the plane, and if he found them now, Kara knew he would not hesitate to murder her and finish off Pyne.

  Keeping low, moving as quickly as she dared, Kara crawled back down the length of the Beechcraft’s cabin to where the girl lay propped up against the back of a passenger chair. Pyne’s breaths came in short, panting gulps, and her gaze wavered in and out of focus as she looked up at Kara. ‘Are they . . . coming to help . . . us?’ She laboured to get each word out.

  Kara’s mask-self, the carefully prepared personality she showed the world, told her that now was the time to lie. Give Pyne some pre-digested falsehood about how everything would be fine and this would be over soon. Flash a plastic smile. Touch the wounded girl’s arm in a gesture of solidarity and support. But those were part of an act, and Kara was sick of being the ghost of something false instead of what she really was.

  ‘I know you are in here!’ Outside, Erik bellowed the words and Pyne stirred in fright as she heard him. ‘I see blood,’ he shouted, and now they both his heard footsteps coming closer. ‘I can see you!’

  ‘He’s lying,’ Kara whispered.

  ‘I want to go home,’ wept Pyne, all the girl’s hard edges and strength torn away by her pain. She clutched at the sleeve of Kara’s jacket with bloody fingers. ‘I don’t want to die here.’

  All the trite promises she could give faded before Kara could voice them. She shrugged off Pyne’s grip and pulled away. The girl gasped in shock, and tried to call out to her. Kara ignored her and vaulted out through the half-open passenger hatch in the side of the Beechcraft. She landed in a cat-fall on the hangar floor, boots scraping on the ground as she pushed off again into a full-tilt run.

  ‘Song!’ Erik’s furious shout came in her wake. He was close, behind one of the nearby maintenance trucks, catching the motion of her flight from the corner of his vision.

  She heard him roaring after her, the heavy thudding steps as the big man broke into a sprint. Gunshots barked at h
er back and the rounds whistled past her as Erik fired on the move. Kara pivoted around a dismantled engine block and hurdled a low tool chest, scattering spanners and bolts across the floor as she went.

  The gloom at the rear of the cavernous hangar promised some kind of cover, and she fled toward it, trying to put as much distance between her and Pyne’s hiding place as she could. Another shot cracked at her heels as she ducked out of sight behind a dismantled airframe. Kara’s heart hammered at the inside of her ribs and fear swirled around her.

  ‘I never believed you,’ Erik called, slowing as he stalked her. They both knew she was running out of room, and would soon be cornered. ‘I knew you were falsch. A fake.’ Kara heard him give a low grunt of callous amusement. ‘It infuriates me so much. Madrigal is blind to you. Cannot see what I see.’ He hesitated. ‘Does she feel sorry for you, is that it?’

  Kara held her breath, staring into the shadows, straining to listen. A few metres away, hidden where the hangar’s overhead lights didn’t reach, there was a fire exit door secured by a push-bar. Between here and the door there was no cover, but if she could reach it, she might be able draw Erik away. The emergency services from the airport hub had to be on their way by now, coming out to deal with the burning cargo plane. They would discover Pyne, get her to a hospital. But only if Erik did not find her first.

  ‘I saw what you were the moment you showed your face in Teufelsberg,’ he called, closing in. ‘I have heard the stories about Wong Fei Song. But I will show Madrigal what you really are.’