Ghost:

by James Swallow

  She was thrown through the air, crashing against the far wall, tumbling back to the carpet as books and framed pictures clattered down around her.

  Celeste tasted blood in her mouth and shakily drew up, pulling the torn robe back over her shoulders to cover herself. She blinked and saw the assassin for the first time. Dark and imposing, perhaps even handsome, he was a hard-eyed Arab with the face of a soldier. He seemed familiar, but she couldn’t place him.

  A silenced pistol emerged from inside his black jacket and he pointed it at her. ‘You are making a mistake,’ she said, in Fush’ha Arabic. ‘If you are his ally, you will be dragged down with him.’

  ‘I am not his ally,’ replied the man, in flawless French. ‘And I will not be yours or that of your collaborators.’

  ‘A trade, then. I can make you a better offer than he did,’ she told him, switching back to her native tongue. ‘Name your price.’

  ‘I do not want money.’ The assassin’s face twisted. ‘There is no way to buy yourself out of this. I loathe your kind, with your lies and pacts and secrets! You are a cancer on the world. I want you destroyed.’

  It came to her then whom she was talking to. ‘You’re Khadir . . .’ Celeste shook her head. The terrorist was a wanted man on every continent, personally responsible for dozens of bombings and assassinations. ‘But . . . Your organisation, Al Sayf, it is gone. Broken apart by the Americans. They said you were killed in an airstrike in Syria.’

  ‘Lies,’ he repeated. ‘No better than yours.’

  She held out her hand, grasping at a slim thread of hope. ‘The Washington attack . . . I know the Combine promised Al Sayf we would make that work, and we fell short. That cannot be denied. But we can still find common ground—’

  ‘I left Al Sayf behind,’ Khadir told her. ‘To walk my own path. They were as blinkered as you. I will finish the work I began there on my own. I do not need them or you.’

  She choked out a breath. ‘But you’re working with Glovkonin? Killing for him?’ Celeste let her hand drop and gathered up what defiance still remained in her. ‘How is he any different from me?’

  ‘He is not,’ agreed Khadir, taking aim. ‘And one day, this will also be his fate.’

  *

  Lighting the cigarette in his mouth with one hand, Glovkonin used the other to press on the Bluetooth earpiece he wore, straining to pick out the sounds coming to him from the other end of the line.

  Voices spoke softly in French, a language he had never troubled himself to learn. That irked him. If Toussaint had any final words, he wanted to hear them for himself.

  Then, very distinctly, he heard the chug-chug of a silenced weapon. Presently, a solemn lion-growl of a voice addressed him. ‘It is done.’

  ‘What did she say to you?’ Glovkonin crossed his hotel suite and made for a half-open window. He wore silk night-clothes, the garments hanging off his tall frame in disarray, the remnants of his brisk and forceful pre-dawn encounter with the young woman still dozing in the bedroom.

  ‘Nothing of import.’

  ‘Humour me,’ he insisted. Leaning on the window ledge, Glovkonin exhaled a puff of blue smoke out into the chilly Moscow morning. He stared toward the domes of the Kremlin without really seeing them. His mind was in Saint-Tropez, imagining Celeste Toussaint as her last breath left her body.

  Khadir sighed. ‘She bartered for her life.’

  Glovkonin grinned briefly, running a finger over his manicured beard. ‘The offer was not to your liking?’ He didn’t need to remind the Egyptian that their agreement was predicated on the assassin’s obedience. Khadir would get what he wanted after Glovkonin’s ultimate desires were fulfilled.

  Predictably, the other man did not rise to the barb. ‘I will sanitise the area. There will be no traces.’

  ‘Well,’ Glovkonin corrected, ‘there will be one.’

  At great expense, his people had procured a copy of a Europol personnel file on Marc Dane, and from that it had been possible to artificially duplicate a partial fingerprint from Dane’s right thumb. Khadir carried a plastic pad that could apply the false print to a shell casing, and he would leave the spent brass behind in the villa to be discovered by ALEPH’s response team. In the fullness of time, the Englishman would become a person of interest in Toussaint’s murder, and that would cast suspicion on his employer, the Rubicon Group. When the moment came, Glovkonin would be there to use the woman’s death to further his own agenda.

  ‘Finish up and head for extraction,’ he ordered. ‘Return to me.’

  ‘That will take time. I have to travel via indirect means.’

  ‘Of course.’ Glovkonin made a dismissive gesture. He wasn’t interested in the details. ‘I must prepare for the next step.’

  ‘Is there another . . . impediment to be removed?’

  ‘No. Quite the opposite.’ He ended the call with a tap on the earpiece, removing it and dropping the device on a low, glass-topped coffee table.

  Glovkonin sat and poured himself tea from a small samovar, a sense of undeniable anticipation welling up in him. He was in control again, and with the woman out of the picture, he would no longer be subject to her whims in accessing the rest of the Combine hierarchy. It had grated on him to be forced to bend to the needs of others. The displeasure of the experience was so rare that it was a novelty, one that he was glad to be rid of.

  He reached for a secure digital tablet resting on a pile of the day’s papers. As a sensor in the device registered his fingerprint, he spoke his name aloud and the screen blinked on. Madrigal’s data packet lay there, spread out in panel after panel of illicitly captured information. Gathered for him by the elite hackers of Ghost5, the packet contained pages of machine-translated Mandarin and hundreds of digital photos. He flicked through them with swipes of a finger.

  The files told the story of a single man, a man who had not taken a breath of free air in decades. This man’s existence was a twisting path of random jaunts between nameless prisons, of endless days and nights confined in dark places. It was the story of a single life, one that a great and pitiless agency had decided to punish with indifferent malice. Trapped in the grinding cogs of a monolithic covert power, this man was prisoner, victim and object lesson.

  His name was Lau. The men who had taken away Lau’s freedom were an agency within an agency, a ‘star chamber’ concealed inside China’s Ministry of State Security who were not beholden to the established chain of command in Beijing. The full details were unclear, but the facts were these: he had earned their disapproval and he would spend the rest of his life paying for that error.

  Most of the pictures of Lau showed him in grimy prison fatigues, out in work gangs or sitting alone in a tiny cell, but there were others from the time before he had angered his masters. In a few of them, he wore an officer’s uniform of the Army of the People’s Republic. In others, his garb was business suits of a cut that had been popular during the 1980s. Lau smiled in some, was serious and thoughtful in others. In each of the earlier photos, he had the look of a man of purpose.

  Glovkonin found his way to the picture that kept drawing his eye over all the others. The scene was a grassy wilderness, most likely Zambia. Two men stood framed in the shadow of a low miombo tree. Lau, dressed in tropical fatigues, squinted into the sun with a fierce grin on his face. At his side, decades younger and sharing the same expression, stood Ekko Solomon.

  The Russian flicked back and forth between this image and the most recent one of Lau, trying to frame the changes the man had been through in the intervening time. What sorrow in that older face, what dejection. But not only those emotions. Glovkonin looked closely and saw an aspect he recognised from himself. A glimmer of rage. Contained, guarded and carefully ministered, like a naked flame protected from a windstorm.

  After a moment, Glovkonin sat back and drew on his cigarette once more, musing on the future. It would take time and there would be costs, but eventually he would find this prisoner. And when he did, he wou
ld be in possession of the perfect weapon with which to destroy the Rubicon Group and the man behind it.

  If the world still had any hard edges, whatever drugs they had pumped into Pyne’s veins had softened them into a kind of fuzzy dullness.

  The brutal, savage agony that had engulfed her back on the Antonov was a blurred memory now. When she looked down at the place in her belly where the point-blank shot had ripped her open, there was a great white wad of bandages that seemed to bloom out of her like fungus on piece of tree bark.

  Her mind took hold of that image and sailed away with it, buoyed on winds of disconnected thought. Pyne had a waking dream full of grass as tall as trees, trees as high as mountains. She saw blue skies and felt a cool breeze on her face.

  Eventually the dreamy haze ebbed and she came down to earth. Slow, lumbering icebergs of thought shifted through her mind and came together. After the pain, she remembered jagged fragments of what came next.

  Kara dragging her through the hangar, the sound of thunder and rain. Blades spinning over her head. Glass walls and people wearing paper masks. Then the flash of lights and the sense of falling upward. Had that been the drugs?

  She turned her head, her body coming into focus, moment by moment realising that the buzzing in her ears was coming from outside. She lay on a medical gurney on a train. No, a plane. A small one. A jet, like the ones rich dicks in rap videos showed off.

  Out of the oval windows she saw grey cloud scudding past, and blinks of dream-blue sky. Pyne remembered more. A woman, a doctor with a thick Asian accent, telling her she would be fine. You will lose some kidney function, but you will heal. The bullet missed everything vital. Was that true, or did she imagine it? The doctor said they were taking her to a hospital. Somewhere called Busan.

  She blinked at the bandages. Hadn’t she been in a hospital already? Where did the doctor come from? Busan? That sounded like a long way from home.

  ‘Hello, stupid.’ Pyne turned her face toward the sound of the voice.

  ‘Kara?’ The other hacker sat across from her in a swivelling chair, typing rapidly on a tablet computer resting on her knees. A Wi-Fi sniffer had been haphazardly duct-taped to the side of the tablet. Kara wore the same kind of smock that the doctor with the accent had been wearing. ‘Why are you . . . dressed like that?’ It was an effort for Pyne to make the words join up and leave her mouth. ‘Are you my doctor now?’

  ‘It’s my disguise,’ said Kara. ‘Why did you get yourself shot?’ Pyne wasn’t sure if she was supposed to answer the question, so she didn’t. She wasn’t completely certain that Kara was really sitting next to her at all. ‘You shouldn’t have stood up to Erik. Look what that got you.’

  Pyne managed a nod. ‘Lex would have done it.’

  Kara’s blank expression flickered like a light – sadness there, on and then off again. ‘People are waiting for you in Busan,’ she told her. ‘The CIA. They haven’t forgotten what you did.’

  ‘Oh.’ Prior to falling into Ghost5’s orbit, Pyne’s biggest solo hack had been outing a CIA source, an ISIS turncoat whose bounty of intelligence had come with the price of overlooking his multifarious dealings in sex trafficking. After Pyne leaked his new identity on the dark web, he hadn’t lasted long, much to the chagrin of his handlers. ‘That’s bad.’

  Kara shook her head. ‘It’s not.’ She looked up as a Korean man in a pilot’s shirt entered the cabin from the cockpit and shot her a hard glare. He did not seem happy. ‘Well?’ Kara snapped, brusque and unfriendly.

  The man in the shirt glanced at Pyne, then away again. ‘I did what you asked. But Busan Air Traffic Control are already on the radio, demanding to know what is going on. And once we get close to the Japanese coast, the SDF will send up interceptors to see what the hell we are doing!’

  ‘Leave that to me,’ Kara said firmly. ‘By the time we get into their airspace, we’ll have an authorised flight plan and everything.’

  ‘Nagasaki,’ said the man. ‘We’ve barely have enough fuel to reach it.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ Kara held up the tablet and showed the man the screen. Pyne’s gaze snapped back and forth between the two of them, as if she were watching a tennis match. ‘Don’t try to play me. I’m tapped into the control systems on this aircraft. If I don’t keep entering a code every ten minutes, the ailerons will lock and we will go right into the sea.’ The man paled as she spoke. ‘I know exactly how much fuel is in the tanks. And my friend and I, we don’t have anything to lose. You get it?’

  ‘I get it,’ said the man. ‘Don’t do anything stupid, okay?’

  ‘Go fly the plane and let me work.’ Kara went back to her typing, and after a moment the man sighed and returned to the cockpit.

  Pyne tried to sit up, but it was too painful, so she sank back into the gurney’s mattress. ‘You’ve hijacked us.’

  ‘I couldn’t stay there.’ Kara’s eyes lost focus as she typed, and she became remote, almost robotic. ‘I’ve done a lot of bad things, Pyne.’ She made a strange noise in her throat, like swallowing a sob before it could fully form. ‘I don’t like what I’ve turned into. So I should get away. You too.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘A safe place. I’ll figure it out.’

  Pyne blinked. ‘Those people who came and rescued us . . . your friends. They’ll be super-pissed.’

  ‘Yes.’ Kara stopped typing for a moment. ‘Yes, they will. But it’s okay. I left a note.’

  *

  By sunset the storm had dissipated and the skies over Seoul were clear and cold. A few patches of the city, visible from the windows of the office tower, were still dark. The army had been called in with portable generators and the forecast was good for full restoration of the grid in the next few days.

  But a kind of stillness hung over the streets, manifesting itself in the hurried steps of the population as they made their way to their homes and locked themselves in with their loved ones. The attack on Seoul had been a strange kind of almost-war, and the old folks with long memories who recalled blackouts from the battles with the North told their grandchildren to be wary. No one had yet put a name to it, but the engineered collapse of the power grid here and Ghost5’s test-run attack in San Francisco were the latest refinements of a new means of battle.

  State-sponsored hackers had been attacking infrastructure targets in the Middle East and Eastern Europe for years now, but with major cities in South Korea and the United States becoming targets, the rest of the world could no longer overlook the threat.

  Marc reflected on what that would mean for Rubicon, an organisation now inextricably linked to these events – and for all its power and money, an organisation that existed in the grey shadow margins where the authority of nations thinned to nothing.

  ‘Where do we go from here?’ he wondered aloud.

  ‘Damned if I know.’ Lucy stood in the doorway, arms folded, watching him intently. ‘You looking for me?’

  ‘I was,’ he admitted, then nodded at the view outside. ‘Got distracted for a minute.’

  ‘You okay?’

  He gave a crooked smile. ‘About to ask you the same.’

  ‘Tried to get some sleep. Didn’t take.’

  ‘I meant . . .’ He held up his hand, trailing off.

  Lucy shrugged. ‘Blood washes off. Scars fade.’ She looked down at her palms. ‘I’ll manage.’

  He wanted to question that, but for the moment he held off and gestured with his smartphone. ‘Delancort pinged me. Solomon’s plane touched down at Incheon twenty minutes ago. They should be here in an hour or so, give or take passing through the police checkpoints.’

  ‘Where’s Kara?’

  His smile faded. ‘Yeah. About that.’ Marc met her gaze. ‘She must have slipped away while no one was looking. It looks like she snuck on board the air ambulance taking Pyne south, and diverted—’

  ‘Fuck!’ Lucy snarled, showing her teeth. ‘Did you know about it?’ She advanced toward him, eyeing him angrily. ‘You h
elp her?’

  ‘What? No!’ Marc blew out an exasperated breath. ‘Shit, if anyone is responsible for making her bolt, it’s you. And Solomon.’

  ‘How’d you figure that?’ demanded Lucy.

  ‘Despite evidence to the contrary, I’m not an idiot,’ Marc retorted. ‘You think I didn’t know you were willing to end her if you thought Kara had gone over? You’d already decided when she first cut and ran. You wrote her off.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what I know,’ Lucy shot back. ‘You’re a smart guy, Dane, but sometimes you’re too trusting. Like it or not, Kara Wei – or whatever the fuck her name is – played us from the start.’

  ‘I refuse to believe that.’

  ‘That so?’ She made a show of looking around. ‘Then why did she sneak away? Again?’ Lucy went on, before he could frame a reply. ‘I trusted Kara. I considered her a friend. And how did that go? She turned rogue. She deceived me, deceived all of us.’ Some of her anger faded. ‘Kara . . . did not trust me. She lied. And now, instead of trying to make amends, she does it all over again.’ Lucy sighed heavily. ‘Solomon is gonna be pissed as hell when he finds out we lost her twice.’

  ‘This time, it’s different,’ he told her, activating an audio player app on his phone. ‘Listen. She sent me this from a blind server.’

  Marc held up the phone and increased the volume. A tinny, faraway version of Kara Wei’s voice spoke to them.

  ‘I had to go,’ she began. ‘And the reason is because I don’t want to look at you every day and know you’re wondering when I will lie to you again, run away again. So I’m doing it now. It’s the best way.’ There was a long inhale of breath, and Marc sensed she was frustrated at being unable to articulate her feelings. ‘I keep saying I am sorry. This is the last time I will do that. If you don’t believe me by now, then you never will.’ There was another long pause. ‘You’re asking yourselves why you didn’t see what I was before this. I’m good at masks. You want to know why I didn’t neutralise Arquebus before Ghost5 triggered it. I had to wait until it went active before I could kill it. Before Madrigal committed to the hack, I couldn’t be sure if the data Lex left behind for me would work. Then I would have been dead and no one could speak for . . . for someone I loved.’ Marc saw Lucy’s expression soften. ‘I had to play a long game,’ Kara continued. ‘I put everyone at risk to do that, but now it is done and I am not sorry. If this was looped, I’d do it over again. No changes.’ She fell silent for a moment, and then Kara said one more thing before the recording ended. ‘I am not coming back.’