‘She’s dead by now.’ Kara threw out the words before she realised she was saying them. ‘Broken. Like the plane and everything else. Ruined.’ She aimed herself at the fire exit and tensed like a runner on the starting blocks. ‘You followed her, Erik, and she let you down. Like she let me down. Madrigal never cared about anything but herself. She’s the one that is empty. And nothing can ever fill the blackness inside her.’
‘Ligend hure . . .’ He came marching toward her, sweeping around the flank of the skeletal airframe with the heavy shape of a huge revolver in his hand.
The gun barked as Kara exploded into motion, racing for the exit door. If it was secured, or blocked from the outside, then her escape would end in the next ten seconds. She had no weapon to defend herself with, and no place left to hide.
Kara slammed into the push bar with both hands and for one heart-stopping moment, it resisted her; then the ill-maintained mechanism gave and the door popped open with a grinding clatter. She was almost through the gap when a bullet grazed the top of her right shoulder, tearing open her jacket and pulling a sharp shriek of pain from her lips.
Staggering forward, Kara lurched into a barrage of wind and rain. Hot, searing agony enveloped her shoulder and flames burned along her nerves, down her arm and across her chest in an expanding wave. Her back felt wet and sticky beneath the crimson leather jacket.
This is new. The clinical, robotic thought pressed itself to the front of her mind.
Kara had been on the wrong end of violence more than once. Growing up a mixed-race child in the social-care system had made that a certainty, but she had never been shot before. The pain seared her flesh, and every stumbling movement resonated up to the wound and made it worse.
She lurched over a grassy quad behind the hangar and found herself at the edge of a service runway near the airport perimeter. The endless torrent from a sky full of menacing black clouds hissed over the asphalt and into the gale. A hard gust blew her off her pace and she twisted to see Erik striding out after her. Slow and purposeful, he advanced, the gun swinging at the end of his arm as he flicked open the cylinder and shook out the empty brass cartridges. Methodically, he loaded in new rounds with each step he took.
‘You may be right,’ he called, raising his voice to be heard over the storm. ‘Perhaps she is gone. But Madrigal . . . Marie was . . .’ Erik struggled with the words, and Kara wondered what kind of compulsion the other woman had held over him. It was her way. She tied people to her by their own weaknesses. ‘Ghost5 will not die. I will rebuild it.’ Erik flicked the cylinder shut and cocked the gun, raising it to aim.
A light came down through the rain, glittering at the edges of Kara’s vision. She blinked, trying to focus in it. A crimson thread, appearing and disappearing, wavered over her. The bright dot at the end crossed her face and flickered away.
The wind howled and beat at Kara, a heavy clatter pounding at her ears as the shimmering thread lanced across the runway and rose up Erik’s chest. He saw it and flinched, reeling back, bringing up the revolver to aim skyward. The red spark danced over his cheek.
In the next second he was spinning away in a welter of blood and brain matter, crashing back into the muddy grass.
Kara drew in her arms, hugging herself as she turned toward the noise from the clouds. She saw a sleek silver shape dropping out of the storm, a blur of rotor blades whirling in the air.
Sitting with her feet dangling out the side of the helicopter’s crew cabin, Lucy Keyes looked down at Kara through the scope on an assault rifle, a targeting laser dancing through the raindrops.
The thread of red briefly connected the two of them once more, and Kara waited, afraid of what would come next.
*
The storm held the city in its teeth and shook it.
A long rumbling growl rolled from one side of the sky to the other, pads of slate grey cloud briefly illuminating from within as captured lightning flared in the distance. Ingrained reflexes, that battlefield instinct to be watchful for muzzle flashes, drew Lucy’s attention to the panoramic windows looking out from the fiftieth floor.
Seoul’s skyscrapers captured the dull white blinks of light, reflecting them back at the storm. The city was shrouded in shadows, even with the power now restored to full function. Whole districts were still dark as the authorities combed the streets looking for damage to the infrastructure. Ghost5’s silent assault would take weeks to deal with, not only the electrical grid but also the traffic control, the metro and a dozen other systems. And then there was the human fallout, the injuries and the lives that had been lost in the confusion, the panic the hackers had generated to cover their attack.
On the way through the offices on the lower levels of the building, Lucy had seen screens with rolling news coverage from the TV stations first to get back on the air. While she didn’t speak or read Korean, she didn’t need to in order to understand what they were saying. Footage of people swarming the streets, of police officers barking orders, the burning Antonov cargo plane at the airport, grainy cell-phone video of two helicopters chasing each other over rooftops. It told the tale well enough. The citizens of Seoul lived with an enemy forever breathing down their neck, but on days like this, the danger that was commonplace became real and present among them.
Two fast-moving specks in the distance crossed her sight-line, a pair of F-15 fighter jets from a base outside the attack zone pressed into combat air patrol over Seoul’s city limits. They were watching for the North to make a move, to take advantage. Elsewhere, Blackhawk helicopters from the garrison at Seongnam were criss-crossing the Han River, each one carrying squads of rapid-reaction troops, to both calm the populace with a visible military presence and be ready for any follow-up attacks. One such squad had already found the silver Dauphin where Marc had been forced to ditch it in the middle of a vacant construction site.
It had been a close-run thing, but the four of them had made it to the Rubicon offices in a stolen car and not lost anyone along the way. Lucy looked down at the fresh bandages on her hands, flexing them experimentally. She could still smell the stale blood from the wounded hacker’s injuries in her nostrils.
What was her name? Pyne, like the tree, Kara had said. With a ‘Y’. The girl was so ashen, Lucy thought at first sight she was already dead. But not so. Her gaze drifted away, back across the room to the glass wall and the space beyond it.
Rubicon owned three floors of this downtown office complex. The uppermost was vacant for renovation, so the Special Conditions Division co-opted it as a temporary crisis centre. Across the way, a conference space had been repurposed as a field hospital. Pyne was in there, behind sheets of painter’s plastic hung over the windows, being ministered to by a team of medical staff who asked no questions and worked with brisk efficiency. The same team had looked over Lucy and Marc, skilfully dressing their wounds and contusions. All the while, Lucy had been unable to stop herself from staring across at Kara, as a medic sewed up the bullet graze on the younger woman’s shoulder.
Her hands contracted into fists as she thought about Kara and what she had done, making the bandages tighten and the healing cuts on her hands ache. Lucy pressed down on her churning anger and took a breath.
An encrypted comms rig had been set up on the table in front of her. The gear spread out of an armoured case, a flip-up video screen built into the inside of the lid and wires leading from it to a collapsible satellite antenna by the window. After a moment, a cue on the screen announced that a successful scrambled connection had been made and she folded her arms across her chest, straightening. Back to work, she told herself.
Henri Delancort’s face filled the display, as he leaned close to the camera feeding an image from Ekko Solomon’s private A340 jet, currently speeding northward from Australia. He settled back and Lucy saw her employer nearby, watching impassively from a seat in the jet’s ops room. ‘Secure,’ said Delancort, adjusting his spectacles with one hand. ‘Lucy. C’est bon. We thought we had l
ost you both.’
‘It all went to hell,’ she said flatly. ‘The lead that pointed us to Hite’s house was a set-up. If they hadn’t wanted Dane and me for scapegoats, you would have been picking our corpses out of the rubble, the same as those other poor assholes.’
‘Quite so.’ Solomon gave a grave nod. ‘We are in the middle of a very serious matter. I will need a complete debriefing from Mr Dane and yourself when we arrive . . .’ He glanced at Delancort.
‘Sunset, local time,’ said the other man. ‘That is, of course, if we can expedite a landing at Incheon. The airport is still operating under emergency protocols at the moment.’
Lucy had already sent an audio file to the jet via burst encryption, a terse after-action report that covered the high points of the assault on the NIS campus, but there were details she had left out, and they were largely questions over what to do with Kara Wei. She studied Solomon’s face. On his order, Lucy had been willing to terminate Kara on sight if the situation had come to that – and the choice had been there, right in front of her as Marc braved the storm front to get them to the airport. She still wasn’t sure if she had made the right choice.
‘We are monitoring the situation in Seoul from here,’ Solomon intoned. ‘Very serious indeed.’
‘Have they given a casualty figure?’ Lucy dreaded hearing the reply. ‘I can’t get a straight answer from anyone.’
Delancort seemed to intuit this and he deflected. ‘Still to be determined. But it could have been far, far worse. You made a difference there today.’
She shook her head. ‘Kara’s the one who shut down the software weapon. Dane flew the chopper and I shot some guys.’
‘You need to be made aware of certain facts.’ Solomon fixed her with his steady gaze. ‘I am presently in contact with members of the South Korean National Assembly, the office of the Prime Minister and senior figures in the National Intelligence Service. We are attempting to find a mutually agreeable resolution to Rubicon’s involvement in this crisis.’
‘Right.’ Unsaid under that was the reality that Marc and Lucy were foreign nationals who had been closely embroiled in a terrorist attack on the Republic of South Korea, and right now their legal status in the country was south of ‘fugitive’, veering toward ‘enemy of the state’.
Delancort explained that Rubicon would be offering to trade the intelligence the SCD had on Madrigal, Ghost5 and their collusion with the North in return for immunity from prosecution. A full accounting of everything, from Wetherby’s assassination in Malta and the Soldier-Saints attack on San Francisco, to the train crash in Taipei and all the rest. Lucy was dubious, aware of tensions running high in the South, but Solomon’s aide noted that with the deterioration of political ties between the country and their traditional allies in the United States, the ministers of the National Assembly were looking for new friends. The Rubicon Group, as a stateless, transnational entity, especially one with its own military contractors and intelligence gathering capacity, fitted that bill.
Lucy listened and said nothing, wondering how generous the South Koreans would have been if the contents of the stolen SCIF had not been destroyed, saving their secrets from global exposure.
‘Martin Wehmeyer is using his local contacts to help us make headway,’ concluded Delancort. ‘Horizon Integral have close ties within local political circles that are proving useful.’
She nodded. Wehmeyer would be extremely motivated to do whatever he could to mollify the South Koreans, especially after a weakness in his company’s industrial control software had plunged their city into disarray.
Solomon followed the same train of thought. ‘Horizon Integral’s stock will go into freefall if the truth about the zero-day exploits is made public. I have offered to take them into the Rubicon fold. Their board of directors will be voting later today on the matter.’
Taking advantage of a corporate rival in a moment of weakness was cold, but Lucy couldn’t bring herself to voice the notion. Wehmeyer and his people had been complacent in allowing Hite to undermine them, and innocents had paid the price. She wouldn’t lose any sleep over their changed fortunes. ‘I guess Sunny won’t be buying any ten-grand dresses for a while,’ she said, after a moment.
‘We have been informed that the local police have made a few arrests,’ continued Delancort, glancing down at a digital pad in front of him. ‘Several cyber-criminals known to be associated with the Ghost5 collective have been caught inside the city limits.’ He paused. ‘Interpol are aware. A number of extradition orders are already being drawn up. They are wanted by a lot of people.’
‘The Central Intelligence Agency are at the head of that line,’ added Solomon.
He didn’t need to remind them that the CIA’s relationship with Rubicon in general, and Lucy Keyes and Marc Dane in particular, was not a friendly one. A while back, the Brit had run a spur-of-the-moment prison break from one of their black sites in Poland, freeing a terrorist asset named Jadeed Amarah in return for vital intelligence on a greater threat. Lucy was only too happy to be responsible for Amarah’s later termination, but the agency were not so sanguine about it. And before that, when Rubicon had thwarted the bombing of a political rally in Washington DC, the CIA had smarted at being out-manoeuvred by Solomon’s team. She didn’t doubt that they would want her head on a spike and Marc’s alongside it, even if the two of them had ultimately protected the CIA’s secrets along with those of the South Koreans.
‘On that . . .’ she began. ‘We have two members of Ghost5 here with us. We’ll have to deal with them.’
Solomon’s answer didn’t come. Lucy heard a rapping sound and looked over her shoulder. Marc stood outside the office with a tablet computer in his hand, and he took her expression as invitation to enter. The Brit appeared as tired as she felt, strung out, running on caffeine and raw adrenaline.
‘Hey,’ he said, nodding to Lucy and then to the screen. ‘I thought I should be in on this.’
‘Of course,’ Solomon allowed. ‘I am glad you are well and whole, Mr Dane. After the fire in Sydney, we feared the worst.’ He carried on, returning to business. ‘Henri was bringing Lucy up to speed on our conversations with the Assembly.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Marc threw her a glance. ‘Well, I talked to the doc here and he says that the girl, Pyne, she’s stable. But they need to get her to a proper hospital. There’s a trauma centre down in Busan, they reckon they can get an air ambulance to take her—’
Solomon gestured to Delancort. ‘Authorise it.’
Delancort made a notation on his pad, then looked out of the screen at Marc. ‘And . . . what about Kara Wei’s status?’
‘She’ll be okay.’ Lucy watched Marc as he said the words, and the way he very deliberately didn’t look back at her. ‘Most importantly, though. Arquebus.’ He waved the tablet computer. ‘I checked the data in the software weapon’s command and control page . . . that’s the website that the program reports back to for new orders and whatever. The self-destruct order is embedded in there. If there are any other iterations of the modified Arquebus code drifting around out on the internet, they’ll read that and erase themselves.’
‘You are certain of this?’ Solomon sat back in his chair, considering the ramifications.
Marc gave a quick nod. ‘And if we give Horizon Integral’s programmers everything from Hite’s files on the zero days for HIOS Sigma, they can patch it and this hack can never work again. The vulnerabilities will be eradicated.’ He paused. ‘Well. At least until someone finds a new one somewhere else.’
‘So the weapon is useless? Just like that?’ Lucy raised an eyebrow. She wasn’t convinced.
‘It’s been fed a digital cyanide pill,’ Marc replied. ‘I also have the address protocol of the cloud server Ghost5 used as their central data store. Think of it as having the keys to their virtual armoury. I took a fast pass over the directory in there . . . I found intrusion tools, encryption software, activity logs and more besides. We turn this over t
o Assim and he can send a wiper program in there. Blank every single drive, erase all their assets. Ghost5 will cease to exist.’
Delancort made an approving noise. ‘So then the question becomes, what would benefit Rubicon best? To allow the South Koreans to take credit for that? Or the Americans? The US Navy already has ships on the way.’
Lucy scowled at the man’s mercenary attitude and turned her full attention on Marc, pointing at the table. ‘That’s fast work, Dane. Where did you get the address data?’
She knew his answer before he said it. ‘Kara.’
‘And you accepted that?’ Lucy’s lip curled. ‘After everything she did. After she lied to all of us. Abandoned us for Madrigal.’
‘She went back to Ghost5 because of Lex Wetherby’s murder,’ Marc retorted. ‘She wanted to bring Madrigal down, don’t you get it?’
‘Evidently not. Kara was willing to use us as meat-shields, Dane. I can’t look past that.’ The anger she had been holding down was pushing back up once more. The pressure of it built, and Lucy knew that if she let it show, she would say something she couldn’t take back. ‘I don’t trust her,’ she said at length, distilling it down into four words.
‘Maybe. But we saved her life,’ Marc countered. ‘And her friend’s, too. That alone means she owes us.’ He held up the tablet. ‘I believe in this.’
Anger turned to motion, and Lucy could not fight the impulse to leave the room, leave this conversation. ‘I hope you don’t regret it,’ she said, and marched out of the office.
‘Shit.’ Marc ran a hand over his face, feeling all the fatigue he had been trying to ignore wash over him in a rush. Alone in the room with the video screen, he felt exhausted and strung out.
Solomon cleared his throat from a thousand miles away and cut the tension in the air. ‘Is there anything else to add?’
‘Yeah,’ said Marc, glancing after Lucy and then back to the tablet computer. He tapped out a command string. ‘I’m going to send you a file packet, some communications that jumped out at me when I scanned the Ghost5 servers.’ He pressed a tab and dispatched the data. ‘Have a look. You’ll see what I mean.’
Ghost: Page 39
