Nomad

by James Swallow

  He was, for want of a better word, a broker. Marc had first seen his name on a list of middlemen working in Eastern Europe. Novakovich was a Lithuanian national, but stateless by his own choice, one of a breed of extra-legals born out of the rise of the bratva, the Russian organized crime clans. He liked the high life, expensive hotels and expensive women, and an inclination to roam from resort to resort as the mood took him. Novakovich specialized in the trade of exotic weapons systems, but nothing large enough to put him on hit-lists alongside ex-Rocket Korps generals trying to sell surplus SS-20s. No, Dima was a denizen of the dark web, the black market network buried a few layers below the internet that most of the world surfed on.

  There were emails logs here, messages that had been routed through blind servers and back-channels. Marc’s brow furrowed as he skimmed through them in reverse order. Rix had been talking to Novakovich for weeks, so it appeared, looking to use him for a way into the structure of the Combine. At first, Marc couldn’t parse how the two of them had even got to be talking, but the unfolding narrative of the communications slowly settled into place.

  The middleman had come to them. Novakovich wanted out. A man like him, even a minor player with his limited skill-set, he had to know about the Combine. And he did … More than that, he had worked for them.

  Marc settled back in his chair, rubbing the fatigue from his face. He let his thoughts settle for a moment. “They offered you a step up from the kid’s table, didn’t they?” He looked at the broker’s picture on the laptop screen. “But you choked. You got scared … By what?”

  He filed that away for later consideration and read on. It was Novakovich who had confirmed what Rix and Nash and Sam already suspected, that Combine had connections, not just in foreign agencies, but also inside MI6 itself. They were talking about how to extract him, how to make sure he could never be found again, in return for spilling what he knew.

  Marc had to wonder what kind of threat would motivate someone like Dima so forcefully. Could it have been a double-game, Marc wondered? The Combine setting up Novakovich as the stalking horse? It was possible, but it seemed more likely that the middleman had got in over his head, and started flailing.

  Deliberate or not, whoever Novakovich was talking about had become aware of what was going on, and set up the Dunkirk ambush to deal with the problem. In keeping the investigation off the books, Nomad had unwittingly made it easier to end them.

  Marc made coffee and poured the night-black liquid into a cracked mug. He set up blinds and proxy routers to mask his digital trail, then punched out into the internet, sifting the anonymous online forums and shadow chat rooms that existed in the non-space of the web. It took him hours, but from a lead he picked up from a Singaporean anti-capitalist forum, he tracked a faceless person who knew someone who knew that Novakovich had gone off the grid in the last few days.

  The timing couldn’t be a coincidence. The broker’s business only existed online. His was a fully digital enterprise where buyer and seller never met, a shell game. Money went in one end, and weapons came out the other. Clean, neat, and utterly untraceable.

  But Novakovich was off-line, his every virtual storefront shuttered up and silent. He was either dead already, or keeping a low profile.

  The man was the next link in the chain. Marc studied his face, paging through the file on him that Sam had appended to her notes. Novakovich had a boat, a slick 170-foot super-yacht called the Jade that he liked to sail around the Mediterranean. If he was on board it, he could conceivably stay off the radar for months, moving from port to port and still living in the style to which he was accustomed.

  That thought lodged in Marc’s mind as he looked at a digital still of the broker climbing out of a limousine, a long-lensed shot of Dima with his hand on the shoulder of a woman half his age.

  Her name was in the notes; Tanya Kirin, a Polish émigré with a serious jewelry habit. The file on Tanya said she was a “dancer,” a nicely vague euphemism that covered a multitude of possibilities. The couple had a history of explosive break-ups in public places and tearful reconciliations, and these incidents were usually followed by Kirin appearing with a new and bigger rock on her finger. Marc knew right away that the girl was his line to finding the broker. Novakovich wasn’t a fool—he knew how to manage his digital footprint, and tracking him would be an uphill struggle … But pretty Tanya, with her costly tastes and shallow manner … Someone like her wouldn’t take well to being cooped up on a boat for days on end, even if it was a luxury ride like the Jade.

  Marc started researching the exclusive designers that Tanya Kirin liked to wear, tracking her back until he came upon a trail of ill-kept social networking data. He grinned; it was the mother lode. Within moments he was paging through Tanya’s photo stream, watching as the images shifted from cell phone camera snaps of high-end restaurants and sports cars to sunlit pictures from the deck of the Jade.

  Powder blue skies and dark water; they were out in the deeps. He checked the time-stamp. The most recent shot had been uploaded just that morning. Tanya hadn’t been good enough to tag the image with her GPS location, but she had engaged in a string of messages with her friends directly afterward. One of them was an event planner who worked for the Atlantis Bay, an exclusive hotel in the town of Taormina. Marc pulled up a map search. The resort was on Sicily’s Ionian Coast, and it also happened to be home to an artisan who specialized in the art deco necklaces that Tanya adored.

  “Gotcha.” He leaned back in the chair, and took a sip of stale coffee. It was a chancy deduction, a shot in the dark. Marc was basing a lead on the possibility that Novakovich would want to keep his lover sweet by treating her to something new and shiny. He could just as easily be putting two and two together and making five.

  But was there another choice? Novakovich was off grid because he was afraid, and with good reason. The Combine didn’t like loose ends. The broker was marked, and if Dima was making for Sicily, it was a certainty that he wouldn’t stay there for long. Once Novakovich had indulged his lover, the Jade would put to sea again and there would be no guarantee that Marc would find him.

  And then there was the other consideration. If Marc could find the man, so could the Combine.

  When he was done, Marc made a ghost-image copy of the contents of the flash drive, and re-coded it with an encryption to his own recipe. Marc seeded a handful of copies of the files to open access cloud servers and torrent sites out in the shadier corners of the internet, buried them deep under faked names that made the data look like out-of-date versions of office programs or ancient abandonware videogames. Anyone who downloaded the dossiers by chance would get what looked like a corrupt file. Hiding in plain sight in the margins of the net would keep Sam’s intel safe. He thought about setting a time-release, a countdown clock that would automatically email the data in the clear when the timer reached zero—a digital dead-man’s switch in case the Combine caught up with him. But who could he trust with this? That question, he still couldn’t answer.

  Marc returned to the go-bag and loaded it with the gear he had gathered, and made a place to sleep in the living room, close to the window where he could exit quickly. Lights out and in the dimness, he turned over his next move as the fatigue came on again.

  He had a new mission now, one he had chosen for himself. In some strange way, that felt freeing. But leaving the country would present challenges of its own. Locating Novakovich meant nothing unless he could be there to look the man in the eye.

  Slowly, Marc realized that he would need to call in a favor.

  TEN

  Stephen Parker failed to stifle a bone-deep yawn as he passed by the duty officer at the front desk of Albany Street police station. The barrel-chested man behind the high counter saw him and chuckled.

  “Rough night, detective sergeant?”

  “Long night, Mike,” he corrected.

  “I thought you could run all hours.” The duty officer looked him up and down, taking in Parker’s sturdy build
and his round, serious face.

  He shook his head. “Get a wife and a kid and you’ll see how long that lasts you.” He gave a weak grin. “Later.”

  Outside, London’s morning sky was low and gray, and it threatened drizzle. He blew out a breath and marched against the flow of commuters coming up the pavement, making his way to the side street where he’d left his car. Parker was far enough down the pecking order at Albany nick to ensure that he didn’t get a proper parking space to call his own, and his nondescript four-door Ford sat against the curb, misted with condensation.

  He slowed as he approached the vehicle, something in his copper’s intuition ringing a warning bell. Without making it obvious, he scanned the street, but saw nothing that gave him pause. He blinked and sighed. After everything that had happened in the last few days, he was jumping at shadows. Right now, more than anything, Stephen wanted to be home with his wife and young son.

  If the traffic was with him, he might be able to make it back before Kate took little Matthew to nursery …

  Parker was reaching for the door handle when he glimpsed movement from the corner of his eye. He turned, immediately presenting himself side-on in case of an assault, but what he saw was a gangly figure garbed in rough clothes lifting up a square of soiled cardboard. The homeless man had been concealed in the mouth of a narrow alleyway.

  “Oi, mate,” said the man, raising his fingers to his lips like he was holding an invisible cigarette. “Spare a fag?”

  “Don’t smoke,” Parker replied, his tone hardening. “Jog on, fella.”

  The vagrant kept his head down, dragging a heavy backpack over one shoulder. His voice shifted. “Kate made you quit, didn’t she?”

  Marc Dane peeked up at him from under the bill of a threadbare baseball cap, and Parker froze. When he replied, his voice was low and hostile. “I haven’t seen you. I don’t want to see you. Do yourself a favor and get lost.” He turned his back and opened the car door.

  “I need some help, Steve.”

  Parker stopped, and cursed himself. This is a mistake, said a voice in his thoughts. Just drive on. Leave him be.

  He wanted very much to do that, to go home and never tell Kate that he had seen her brother again. But even as that thought formed in his mind, he knew he wouldn’t.

  “Get in the back seat and keep your head down,” he said, in a flat tone. “Don’t talk.”

  * * *

  He drove a few streets away until he came to a housing estate where traffic was light, and parked in a lay-by. Resting one hand on the pepper spray he kept on a belt clip, Parker turned in his seat and glared at the man sitting behind him.

  “Steve, thanks—”

  He silenced Marc before he could say more with a grave shake of the head. “You’ve got brass balls turning up like this,” he growled. “No bloody sign of you for over a year, and then you come to me on the street?”

  “I’m sorry,” Marc said, looking out through the windows like he was being hunted. “But you’re the only one I could talk to.”

  Parker’s fists clenched with the echo of old anger. He was thinking of how he had watched his wife cry after the last time Marc had spoken to them, of the impotent fury he had felt at his brother-in-law. The two men had been civil to one another for Kate’s sake, but Parker had never been able to connect with Marc, finding him hard work, distant. After the passing of Kate’s mother, the rift had grown wider. Marc hadn’t been there at the funeral—they said he had been on operational duty—and in the aftermath the two siblings had fallen out.

  He didn’t exactly know what it was that Marc Dane did for the government, but he was a copper and he knew the players in the city of London. It wasn’t hard to hazard a guess.

  “I told you I never wanted you to bring your spook shit to my door.” The day before, men in suits who made vague assurances of being from “the security services” had come to question Parker and his wife, pressing them for any information about Marc’s whereabouts. They had not been subtle with their threats about the consequences if things were kept from them.

  “Welles,” Marc said, almost to himself. “Victor Welles.”

  “I don’t know what you’re mixed up with,” Parker told him. “I don’t want to know. The only reason I haven’t already dragged you into the nick is because Kate loves you, as much as you’ve upset her. And I love my wife.”

  Marc was silent for a long time. “I’m sorry,” he said, at length, and Parker knew he meant it. “I never wanted that to happen.”

  He sank back in the driver’s seat and felt a wave of weariness engulf him. “You’ve pissed off some very important people, Marc. They told us that you’re implicated in serious crimes. Murder and treason.”

  “That’s a bloody lie!” Marc spat. He stopped and took a moment to gather himself. “Look, I’m going to make this right. I’m not in the wrong here.”

  Parker was a good detective, and the one skill he truly prided himself on was the ability to detect a lie when he heard it. Marc was not lying to him, and for all the differences between them, he had never considered his brother-in-law to be a criminal.

  On some level, he understood about the funeral. Kate hadn’t wanted to hear it, so he kept it to himself, but Parker knew that the requirements of duty often failed to account for the small, human needs of people. He’d seen the flowers Marc left at the grave where his mother was buried.

  Parker released a long, slow sigh. “What do you want, Marc?”

  The answer took a while coming. “I have to get out of the country, and I have to do it in the next twenty-four hours. Otherwise, they’re going to catch up to me and I’ll end up buried in some Welsh peat-bog.”

  “You need money, is that it?”

  He shook his head. “I need papers. Passport, driver’s license. A clean skin.”

  Parker frowned. “I can’t get you that.”

  “I bet you know a man who can.”

  He gave Marc a sharp look. “You understand what you’re asking for, right? You’re making me an accomplice to international flight. They’ll put me inside for that. Kate and Matty, they won’t have anything if I get pinched.”

  “Help me with this and I am gone,” Marc told him. “It won’t connect back to you. I won’t put my sister’s family in danger…” He trailed off. “She’s all I have now.”

  After a moment, Parker pulled out the flat black notebook he kept in his coat pocket, and scribbled down a few words. “You’ll need to be quick,” he said, as he wrote. “Immigration is going to smash this place flat in a couple of days.”

  He tore out the page and handed it to Marc, who took it like it was the ticket to his freedom.

  “Thank you,” said Marc. “And, look, Kate. Can you tell her…?”

  Parker turned his back on him. “I’m not going to tell her anything. Not that I saw you, or talked to you, or even got a sniff of you. But if your MI6 mates come back to my home and they put you on the line over my family, I will give you up without even a second’s hesitation. Do you get me?”

  “Yeah.” Marc said quietly. “Yeah, I do.” He opened the door and took a last look around before climbing out.

  “One more thing,” Parker glanced at him in the rear-view mirror. “If you really are a traitor, Marc … Never come back.”

  When the door slammed, he started the car and drove away, eyes fixed on the road ahead.

  * * *

  The Ford sped off, leaving the unkempt man on the street watching it go. Neither the driver nor the passenger had seen the silver Nissan sedan that had shadowed them from Albany Street.

  The woman in the driver’s seat put the Nissan in gear, ready to pull out. “Target’s moving again. Do we stay on it?” She had a severe look about her, a tight face beneath short brown hair.

  Her companion’s expression was fixed in a glower, his face swollen around the bandage over his broken nose. “No. We stay with the primary.”

  “Are we sure that’s him?”

  The other m
an nodded once. “I’m sure.” After the incident at Waterloo, he wasn’t going to forget Marc Dane’s face in a hurry. Without taking his eyes off his subject, he drew his smartphone and hit a speed-dial key.

  “Alpha One,” said Victor Welles. “Report.”

  “Echo team, on the brother-in-law,” he replied. “We have a sighting of the primary. Request permission to isolate and extract.”

  “No,” said Welles. The scrambler on the line made his voice sound tinny and distant. “I know you owe him a slap, but reign it in. Your orders are to track but not to engage, is that clear?”

  The man with the broken nose shared a look with his partner, and she shrugged. “We’re not going to reel him in, sir?”

  “Now Dane is out, I want him to think he’s cleverer than the rest of us. Let him get complacent. See where he leads us. He can’t be in this alone.”

  * * *

  “To confirm,” said the gruff, mechanical voice inside Lucy’s helmet. “Echo team are to track but not apprehend primary.” She heard the burble of a reply, but it was too faint for her to decipher.

  She leaned forward over the handlebars of the black Ducati 848, her face invisible behind the cowl of her visor. A wireless link between the helmet speakers and the ultraviolet laser microphone rig in her hand parsed the sounds of the voices inside the Nissan into something she could understand. The laser mike looked like a bulky flashlight, the invisible beam it generated bouncing off the passenger-side window of the Nissan and reflecting back to a sensor that registered the smallest of perturbations in the laser’s wavelength. On-board software turned the vibrations back into audio, allowing Lucy to remotely bug the MI6 team from her perch on the motorcycle a hundred meters away.

  She smiled. Keyes liked the irony of conducting surveillance on a surveillance unit. Her instincts had been good, like they always were. Dane had made contact with the one person who, according to the files Solomon’s connections had delivered, was the least likely choice.