Marc heard an answering ping from Delancort’s tablet, and the other man’s expression shifted as he read the file. ‘This cipher text. I have seen it before.’ He looked up at Solomon. ‘Sir, this is from a communications blind used by the Combine.’
‘But they were not involved with these attacks,’ said Solomon. ‘Did we not confirm that fact?’
‘This has nothing to do with Arquebus or the infrastructure hacks,’ Marc insisted. ‘Back on the plane, after those assassins grabbed us, Madrigal said it to my face. She said she knew the Combine.’ He drew up the memory. ‘The phrase she used was “mutually beneficial associations”. I think their interests have aligned in the past. Someone inside the Combine paid them to do a job, and I reckon I know who.’
Delancort adjusted his spectacles as he read on. ‘I am looking at money transfers. Tens of thousands of dollars, paid through a Swiss bank.’
‘Recognise the routing, do you?’ said Marc. ‘That’s a shell account belonging to G-KOR. Pytor Glovkonin’s oil company. And we know that slippery bastard is in with the Combine up to his neck.’ He could picture the Russian as he spoke his name, with that wolflike face, expensive suit and the attitude to walk the earth like he owned it.
Glovkonin and the other members of his cabal were the hand behind the deaths of Marc’s team two years earlier, and recalling that horror brought up a whole tide of dark thoughts that swirled around him, mirroring the storm outside the window.
‘There’s no record in there of the actual material they stole for him,’ continued Marc, ‘but the metadata points to what he was after. Glovkonin paid Madrigal to do two jobs for him. The first was to break into a covert database belonging to the Chinese State Security Service.’
He saw Solomon stiffen. ‘Why?’
‘We can take a guess.’ said Marc. ‘The server they hacked is part of a cluster that stores information on secret detainees. It’s the prison roster for every black site and deep dark hole in the People’s Republic. Only hackers as good as Madrigal’s team would be able to get in there.’
Solomon’s gaze drifted to the middle distance as he processed this information, and Marc got the sense that he had revealed something that troubled the man.
‘You said two jobs,’ prompted Delancort. ‘What about the second?’
‘Another server hack,’ he explained. ‘And this one I recognised straight away, because we tried to get in there ourselves a few weeks ago, and bounced right off the firewalls. Ghost5 were paid to map out the security set-up for a particular luxury villa in Saint-Tropez.’
Delancort eyed him. ‘Who owns the villa?’
‘Someone we know,’ said Marc. ‘Celeste Toussaint.’
TWENTY
The slow lap of the water washed over her body as she turned back for the ninth length of the swimming pool. Blood-warm and crystal clear, it flowed across her naked flesh and drew her hair back over her scalp. Each over-arm sweep propelled her forward, her legs kicking gently below the surface. The exercise made her ache, but in a pleasant way.
Celeste relished the simplicity of the activity. The repetition allowed her a moment to relax, and she cherished these all-too-rare opportunities.
Soft lighting cast shimmering forms off the water and on to the walls, the artistically minimal bare concrete and sparse brick patterned with motion. As with the rest of the villa, the design of the sunken room was geometric and full of strong angles. The place had no softness, in echo of the will of the woman who owned it. Once, in an ill-considered moment, one of Celeste’s lovers had referred to it as resembling an exhumed nuclear bunker. She dispensed with her the next day.
This place was a citadel, Celeste decided. Armour and shield and holdfast combined. A fitting place for a leader, for one who formed the opinions of millions, to call their home.
The glow of morning grew through the slot-shaped windows at the top of the walls, giving everything a peculiar ghostly resonance that the world only seemed to show in the moments around dawn. She dipped her head under the water and swam the last part of the length without surfacing, indulging the fantasy that it was the strange light she moved through instead of the water.
As she surfaced, Celeste heard the low chime of a tiny bell. She glowered at the intrusion of it, her elegant and expensively cared-for face momentarily betraying her age. She was fifty-five, but had traded away hundreds of thousands of euros to clinics and beauticians in return for an aspect that seemed ten years younger. The bell sounded again.
By the side of the oval pool, on a low table next to a lounger, a small drum-shaped object resembling a piece of abstract art emitted a pulsing emerald light. Celeste suspended herself on the water’s edge and spoke to it in French. ‘House. What is it?’
‘Good morning, Mme Toussaint,’ said the device, in a lilting female voice with a Parisian accent. ‘You have an incoming call from Pytor Glovkonin on your private line. Shall I accept or dismiss?’
Her frown threatened to become a scowl, but she caught herself before she reflexively ordered the house’s computer to ignore the call. With a gasp, Celeste pulled herself out of the water and walked to the table. She disliked ending her exercise early, but the regrettable truth was, if Glovkonin had called, it was probably important. ‘Tell Cook I will be having breakfast now. Transfer the call to my phone.’
‘One moment, please . . .’ The voice-recognition device obeyed and the iPhone lying on the lounger next to Celeste’s towel blinked on.
She tapped the smartphone’s answer key as she shrugged into a bathrobe. ‘Pytor,’ she began, ‘Up early, I see.’
A gentle, self-amused chuckle issued out of the phone. ‘Ah, Celeste. Nobody sleeps late in Moscow, you know that. Too much to do.’ She pictured the smug cast he would be wearing, his canine smile. ‘How is the weather in Saint-Tropez?’
She glanced up at the windows, pulling back her wet hair and securing it with towelling band. ‘It will be a lovely day.’ She was already starting to become irritated by him. ‘What do you want?’
‘Business,’ he said solemnly. ‘Some matters have come to my attention, and I wanted to speak to you about the situation there. The threads of the web are twitching, yes? I have heard disturbing rumours about the state of your personal security. Regarding attempts to compromise it.’
‘Someone is always trying to compromise my security,’ she retorted, picking up the phone. Celeste walked out of the pool room and down a connecting corridor, her bare feet slapping on the tiles as she climbed the wide, shallow stairs to the main floor. ‘It is the price of success. Someone is always looking for a way to knock me off my plinth.’ She took a breath, reframing her thoughts, remembering to be cordial. ‘I appreciate your concern. If you have information my protection detail should see, perhaps you could forward it—’
‘Of course, of course,’ he interrupted. ‘Am I presuming? Perhaps I am. But then that is a failing of mine.’
‘Quite.’ Celeste looked down at the phone, raising an eyebrow. She wasn’t sure where this conversation was going, but it made her uncomfortable. The Combine had clear protocols for contact between its members, in order to maintain the isolated cell structure of the organisation. No one person knew the identities of more than two other members at the operational level, so that any failure of security or action by the group’s enemies would not cripple them. Glovkonin was being overly familiar and borderline reckless by using her private line for a matter that could have been dealt with in more circumspect fashion.
She entered the lounge, the thick white carpet enveloping her feet as she moved across the wide room. She caught the scent of fresh coffee brewing and wandered toward the window.
‘Is there anything else?’
‘Have you seen the news today? I assume your people keep you well informed about global events.’
Celeste paused in the middle of the lounge and held her hand over the phone’s audio pick-up. ‘House,’ she called. ‘Television. News.’
‘One moment,
please . . .’ said the synthetic voice, from another of the little speakers sitting in the middle of a low table. On the far wall, a large flatscreen display blinked on to show a patchwork of smaller video windows, each one tuned to a different global twenty-four-hour news channel. Along with the networks she controlled, France24, CNN, BBC World, NHK and several others were also present. The audio feeds were muted, but she saw the commonality instantly. Footage of police and emergency services on the streets of a Far Eastern city dominated the current news cycle. She read a headline off a ticker scrolling along the bottom of one window. TERRORIST CYBER-ATTACK CRIPPLES SOUTH KOREAN CAPITAL.
‘We’re not involved in this,’ she said, more to herself than to the phone in her hand.
‘It would appear not. Naturally, you would know if something on this scale had been facilitated by the other members.’ The Russian’s tone was hard to read. Was he accusing her, or trying to intimate that he had inside knowledge of this event when she did not? ‘We can’t be held responsible for everything, can we?’ Glovkonin chuckled. ‘But the Combine can take advantage of it nonetheless. Our kingdom is that perfect edge state between chaos and order, don’t you agree?’
Celeste’s tolerance for the man’s games wore thin. ‘The Combine adapts to every outcome, Pytor, that’s why it has survived for nearly a century.’ She eyed the TV screen, then stalked away to the floor-to-ceiling windows of the lounge. ‘Whatever this is, we will monitor it.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘We do not want terrorists controlling their own agendas. Bad for business.’
Her attention drifted from his voice to the immaculate stretch of lawn on the far side of the glass, and the grey gravel of the driveway leading off through the trees. One of her security staff lay face down on the manicured grass, a dark patch of fluid glistening around his head where it soaked into the earth. His gun was close by, fallen out of reach.
Celeste’s breath caught in her throat.
‘Is something wrong?’ said Glovkonin. ‘Hello?’
She ignored him and shrank back from the window, scanning the densely packed trees. The glass was bulletproof, of course, but even that would not be enough to stop an armour-piercing round from a high-powered rifle. A rush of fear shocked through her, a charge of fight-or-flight instinct that made her want to find a weapon, anything she might use to defend herself.
‘House!’ Celeste barked the command. ‘Emergency. Emergency. Emergency.’ Saying the word three times in a row set the voice trigger to activate the villa’s silent alarm in the event of a home invasion. The computer system would automatically alert every member of her security detail on site, the staff at her office and the local police station.
‘Understood,’ replied the artificial voice. ‘Please proceed immediately to the safe room.’
She moved quickly across the lounge, eyes darting toward every corner in search of any potential threat. Her fatigue from the morning swim was forgotten, and in its place she was caught by cold terror, and anger that someone had dared to violate her privacy and attack her staff. She put aside questions of how the unseen assailant had broken through the villa’s security perimeter and concentrated on self-preservation. There would be time to find someone to blame once the situation had been resolved.
Whoever had done this, she decided, would be made an example of.
As Celeste made for the stairs that would take her up to the second floor, she belatedly remembered that she was still clutching her iPhone. The line was still open. ‘Pytor? Are you there?’
‘Celeste. Yes. I thought the call had dropped for a moment. What is going on?’
‘Someone is here. An assassin.’ Saying it out loud made her blood run cold.
‘Oh! I am afraid I was right.’
Celeste was about to speak again, but a dull buzzing noise caught her attention as she made it to the stairwell at the back of the entrance hall. The sound came from a watch around the wrist of another of her bodyguards, the device’s display flashing the word Alerte in crimson. The man lay slumped in a corner by a large ornamental vase. He had been shot at close range through the right eye.
The body of a third person, one of the kitchen staff, had been dumped out of sight nearby, behind an ornamental chaise. The woman’s white linen jacket was wet with blood from the bullet wound in her throat.
‘They are in here with me,’ Celeste whispered. She ran back to the dead bodyguard and found the man’s pistol still in its shoulder holster. The weapon felt huge and unwieldy in her long, thin, fingers, but she knew enough to make sure that there was a round in the chamber and the safety catch was off.
‘Celeste, talk to me!’ Glovkonin said urgently, and she winced, reducing the volume on the phone.
‘I have a gun,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know where they are . . .’
‘There is a panic room in your home, yes? Go there and stay there. I’m already contacting my people. Help is on the way!’
‘Yes . . .’ She took the stairs up to the second floor two at a time, and when she reached the balcony on the upper level, she risked looking back down. From up here she could see into the media room as well, and saw no movement there. Outside, the drive was still and empty. The realisation settled on her that she might be the only person left alive in the villa. The men supplied to her by the private military contractor ALEPH were paid too well and they feared her influence too much to have put their lives before hers. If they were not at her side, then they were already dead.
She hesitated at the top of the stairs, briefly considering a different tack. The sporty red Porsche she used as a run-around on those rare days she wanted to drive herself was in the garage, close by. Could she risk making a run for it? But that would involve going outside through the front door, or taking the long way through the service area and kitchens.
She rejected the thought, refusing to give in to raw fear. The safe room was nearer, hidden behind a bookcase in her study. Only ten metres away.
It took monumental effort for Celeste to stop herself sprinting that final distance. Instead, she took careful, quiet steps, leading with the gun grasped in one hand and the smartphone pressed to her ear.
‘Don’t worry,’ Glovkonin told her, a silken smile ghosting beneath the words. ‘This will be over soon.’
She froze. Pytor Glovkonin was accomplished in many arenas, but Celeste had learned on their first meeting that the man simply could not hold fast over his arrogance. He had a compulsion to show off his superiority, even in the smallest of ways. It was the Russian’s greatest tell, and she heard it coming to her across the distance from Moscow. All at once, the horrible reality of the situation caught up with her.
‘You have done this.’ It was not a question. The moment of drawn breath she heard down the line was the confirmation she needed.
It made sense. This abrupt contact out of nowhere, outside their pre-arranged schedules for communication, the stilted pace of their phone conversation. He had called her because in some way, he wanted to be present for this moment.
‘I have always admired how perceptive you are, Celeste. A pity that your attention is forever aimed outward. If not, you might have seen this coming.’
She edged toward the study in silence, her mind racing as she tried to pick apart the Russian’s motivation and intent. If her security was breached, then it was likely that the alarm call had been intercepted as well.
A power play, then. How like the man. Anyone else would have had her quietly drowned in the pool, but Glovkonin liked theatre. He wanted to be part of the sport of this. And that gave her an opportunity.
Celeste was very close to the study now. The door was ajar, as she had left it. The slice of the room she saw beyond, undisturbed and empty. She could still survive this.
The safe room operated on an independent, self-contained control grid, isolated from the villa and equipped with its own electrical, communications and security systems. Enough food and water supplies for a month. Walls thick enough to we
ather the impact of a bomb blast. Once Celeste made it inside, Glovkonin’s little game would blow up in his face. In this moment, she wanted that more than anything in the world.
‘I need you to understand,’ he began, irritated that she had fallen silent. ‘This will serve a greater purpose. The Combine is a great and powerful organisation, but it moves too slowly. I am going to help it along.’ She held her breath, waiting silently for him to continue. ‘I told you the truth when I said your security has been compromised. I have learned that intelligence about your activities, your dealings with certain people, has been passed to the Police Nationale by those Rubicon fools. That makes you a liability. I could have warned you, given you time to go to ground, but I saw a more useful solution. It is better this way, quicker.’ He paused again, letting that sink in. ‘Your place will need to be filled. And I will make certain that the others discover it was the African who sent his people to kill you today.’
The final piece of the puzzle slotted into place. Glovkonin’s hatred of Ekko Solomon and the Rubicon Group had been the Russian’s bête noir, ever since their involvement in thwarting the Washington attack initiated under his stewardship two years ago. More recently, the situation with Glovkonin’s failure to procure an ex-Soviet nuclear weapon had once again been laid at Solomon’s feet.
The Combine did intend to deal with Rubicon, but like all of their projects, it proceeded at the correct pace. It seemed the Russian was unwilling to wait. He would make this incident look like Solomon’s operatives were behind it, in hopes of stirring the other members of the Combine into quicker action.
‘You won’t succeed,’ she told him, tossing the iPhone on her desk as she rushed into the room.
Powerful hands came from out of the gloom and ensnared Celeste before she made it halfway to the bookcase. Lying in wait, concealed in the shadows, Glovkonin’s assassin wrestled the bodyguard’s gun from her and broke three of her fingers in the process. She cried out as the weapon discharged a round into the ceiling, and then it was gone. The assassin’s hands were broad and strong, the acrid tang of spent cordite coating the leather gloves that shrouded them. He grabbed Celeste by the throat and the collar of the bathrobe, lifting her off her bare feet.
Ghost: Page 40
