He dumped his sweaty clothes and took a shower, working out as much of the hair dye as he could, burning off the travel-lag with needles of hot water. By the time he was done, the sun was setting and out in the bay beneath the town there were a few new boats gently bobbing in the tide.
He fished out a pair of compact Pentax binoculars from one of the duty free bags and went back to the window, peeling them out of their wrapping. Marc had committed the profile of the Jade to memory, and it didn’t take long to find her. The yacht was out in the blue waters of the Ionian Sea, moored furthest from the shore, and as he watched the anchor light flicked on. The boat was marble-white from bow to stern, accented with emerald details and lines of black glass. It shimmered in the fading sun, resembling the closed carapace of some exotic beetle resting on the water’s surface.
He took a pen and made notes about what he saw. Jade was riding high, which made him wonder if the boat hadn’t taken on fuel yet. He recognized the open solarium forward of the flying bridge where Tanya Kirin had posed to take the falsely spontaneous snapshots on her social media page. It was empty now, the windows shuttered.
The vessel was locked up tight, exactly what someone like Dima Novakovich would do if he were looking over his shoulder. Marc felt a faint pang of empathy for the man. Yeah, pal. You and me both.
As the evening drew in, Marc collected a room-service snack from a smiling young waiter at the door and ate on the balcony, careful to stay in the shadows cast by the open sun parasol. He watched the yacht as the air cooled, and still the Jade showed no sign of activity other than the soft glow of her interior lights.
Finally, he blew out a sigh. He was putting off what he knew he had to do next. Sitting here and observing, studying the target and waiting around, that was the job that he used to have. Back then, back in the past, in the other life before Dunkirk and the shooting and the fires.
It seemed like a million years ago.
Marc shook it off and scowled. Old thinking, he chided himself. Too much note taking and data mining. Get this done.
Back in the room, he emptied the bags and arranged all the gadgets he’d picked up on the bed, making sure everything was charged and loaded. Some of the stuff was good spec, the rest was gimmick kit Marc had gathered up for just-in-case situations. He played with a recorder pen, twirling it around his fingers, considering. In the bad old days, what he had here would have been some kind of Q Branch wet dream for any intelligence officer in the field, and now it was hardware you could buy over the counter for your kids. But tech had a way of doing that, of filtering out into the real world. It was the kind of thing that gave the security agencies of the world nightmares, the idea that some ordinary civilian could amass the gear needed to do the sort of things that once had been the sole purview of governments.
When it was past midnight, he took what he needed and packed it into a waterproof drawstring bag, before changing into something darker and less easy to read in Taormina’s dimly-lit side streets.
Marc’s hands slipped into the pockets of his jacket and began to drum against the lining in an aimless rhythm. He reached for the quiet spot in his thoughts and there was something else there. It wasn’t fear; it was something like that, but not so poisonous.
The Glock went into a paddle holster in the small of his back, and anything that could identify him he bundled into the daypack’s hidden compartment along with his laptop. The pack would go somewhere safe; it was the one thing he couldn’t afford to lose.
He looked down at his watch. “Tick tock,” Marc said to the air. “Rules of engagement. Approach and isolate target.” He spoke as if it were a standard OpTeam pre-brief, as if he was in the room with the rest of the Nomad agents and this was a mission for all of them. “Get in and get…” He trailed off. The heavy silence of the room made it harshly clear exactly how alone he was.
Stop fucking around, Sam’s voice said in his thoughts. Green for go.
“Green for go,” Marc repeated, and reached for the door.
* * *
It wasn’t typical for such a large aircraft to wait away from the usual boarding gates, but the white and silver length of the unmarked Airbus A350 was not conventional in any sense of the word, and the Rubicon Group paid very well for their privacy.
Making her way across the tarmac, Lucy pulled her overcoat around her shoulders as the wind picked up over Heathrow’s flight line. Large men in black Armani suits, big as linebackers, flanked the foot of the ramp. They scanned the apron like a pair of well-dressed gun turrets, mechanical and unsmiling.
The aircraft was plain and unremarkable—and that was exactly the impression it had been engineered to give. The uninspired livery was just similar enough to that of a handful of commercial carriers so an observer at a distance could mistake it for one of them. Lucy had heard one of Solomon’s ground crew say that the jet’s tail registration could be changed at a moment’s notice, and its on-board IFF transponder could illegally mimic any one of a number of civilian or military aircraft codes. Looking closer, there were odd blisters along the line of the dorsal and ventral hull, home to electronic countermeasures and other gear that she had no doubt was prohibited. Lucy knew for a fact that the plane had hidden launchers for infrared flares and chaff to throw off the seeker heads of air-to-air missiles; she tried not to let it bother her that Rubicon’s CEO thought he needed that kind of protection for his private aircraft. At the rear of the Airbus, a cargo hatch was rising up to seal shut. She glimpsed the wheels of the Ducati and the silhouette of a larger vehicle back there as the compartment was locked.
A tall, waspish figure came down the mobile staircase to meet her, his hand-made shoes clacking off the metal steps.
She gave Delancort a wan smile. “Henri. Pleasure as always.”
Solomon’s assistant cut her faux compliment dead with a narrow-eyed glare. “I think it’s only fair to warn you,” he began, standing so he blocked her way, “You’ve made a mess.”
She shot a look at the security guards, who both continued to behave like statues, deaf to their conversation. “You’re such a drama queen. I kept the Brit alive. Isn’t that what we wanted?”
“You tipped our hand.”
All of a sudden, Keyes lost her patience with the French-Canadian and pushed past him, climbing the stairs. “I don’t answer to you.”
She entered the plane and walked down to the bar-lounge looking out over the leading edge of the wing. Lucy was aware of Delancort following close behind, but she ignored him. She was tired, tired of running all over London looking for Marc Dane, tired of the vague orders she had been given.
Ekko Solomon was there, one of the flight crew handing him a tall glass of something clear and carbonated. He gave Lucy a grave look and she tensed. At his nod, the attendant took her bags and carried them away toward her guest room in the rear of the aircraft. Delancort excused himself and disappeared into an office across the corridor.
Without waiting to be asked, Lucy stepped behind the bar and helped herself to a shot of Booker’s. “Is this the part where you dock my pay?”
“Do not be flippant,” Solomon replied, shutting her down hard. “The choice you made has forced me to come here and recover you, do you understand that? There are operations that will need to go dark because of the notice you have brought to Rubicon.”
“Did you want Dane alive, or not?” she retorted, sipping the bourbon. “If you wanted a corpse, I could have made that happen.”
“It is more complicated than you realize, Lucy.”
“It is?” she repeated. “Then explain it to me. I don’t work well when you decide my need-to-know out of hand. Can’t give you my best if I’m cut out of the loop.”
Solomon’s jaw stiffened. He didn’t like it when his employees talked back to him. But Lucy couldn’t care less about that. She’d always spoken her mind.
“Your actions have drawn undue attention. British Intelligence are attempting to track you as we speak. I have backstops in pl
ace to retard their investigations, but activating them has burned several key assets. And despite your unauthorized intervention today, the net result has been a loss for our efforts. Marc Dane has slipped the net.”
“Out of the country by now,” offered Lucy. “I would be.”
“We have gained nothing. If anything, we have lost ground in Europe.” Solomon took a step toward her. “You do understand?”
“Dane is a viable lead, right?” That got her a brief, reluctant nod of agreement. “So better he’s still breathing than not. You know what happened back there. MI6 changed gear right in the middle of a surveillance operation. They had a bullet with that unlucky son-of-a-bitch’s name on it.” Lucy blew out a breath, and from the corner of her eye she saw the bodyguards boarding the plane, pulling the door closed behind them. “While he’s alive, he’s still useful, right? You said we need to know what he knows. Can’t interrogate a corpse.”
Solomon gave the short nod again. “I am compelled to agree. But in the future, we will need to make sure this kind of incident does not occur again, yes?” Before she could answer, the African’s eyes turned colder. “I would not wish to be forced to terminate your employment with Rubicon over another such breach of contract.”
“No doubt,” said Lucy, covering with a sip of bourbon.
The office door opened and Delancort returned, a digital pad in his hand. “We’ll be taxiing soon,” he told them. “Departure’s confirmed.”
Lucy glanced at her watch as Delancort offered the pad to Solomon. “The file?” he asked.
The assistant nodded. “Procurement were able to get a copy of the salient pages from Dane’s jacket.”
“What’s this, his personal records?” said Lucy.
Delancort shook his head. “Not the whole thing. But we have an asset in the Ministry of Defense’s medical department. We were able to get a look at Marc Dane’s psychological report.” He nodded to himself. “I think we may have enough here to start building a profile on him.” He looked at Solomon. “I took the liberty of forwarding it to our people in Zurich.”
Lucy put down the glass. The Swiss office had a department staffed by psychologists, who did something called extrapolative human analysis. Rubicon used them to plan marketing strategies and stock market analysis, among other things. “So we’re going after Dane, then?”
“Everyone is,” said Delancort, with a dry smirk. “It’s just a question of who gets to him first.”
* * *
If you ignored the bright orange casing of the Bladefish, the propeller looked like a bulky desk fan. In the shallows of the bay, the sea jet’s quiet electric motor dragged Marc along behind it at a steady two knots, guiding him out beneath the calm surface of the waters. He directed it with twists of his shoulders like a steering wheel, but in the dark it was easy to go off track. He halted every few minutes to rise up and get his bearings. Marc paused by a vacant mooring buoy and lined himself up on the Jade once more. Salt water collecting from his snorkel swilled in his mouth and he spat it out through clenched teeth. The drawstring bag on his back felt heavier and he frowned, pulling it tighter over the black t-shirt plastered to his chest. He had no wetsuit, no fins, just the shirt and dive shorts, figuring it would be better to look like an errant tourist.
Being in the water always made him feel calmer, somehow, like the waves dragged away the tension in him. He bobbed there, watching the yacht, and for the first time he saw movement.
A bulky outline passed behind a closed curtain, but it was hard to pick out any detail. He listened, hearing nothing but the slap of water against the hull of the Jade and the murmur of music on the wind from the island.
He pushed away from the buoy, angling the Bladefish to carry him down, and something moved at the back of the boat, out of synch with the rise and fall of the yacht, low against the waterline.
Dialing down the sea jet’s speed, Marc took a deep breath and slipped under the surface, making his approach as close as he dared. When he was ten feet from the dive platform at the aft, he came up slow and steady, without a ripple.
There was another boat concealed from line of sight from the shore by the Jade’s hull. Featureless and matte black, it rolled gently in the slight swell. A nylon cable tethered it to a temporary suction-cup cleat attached to the yacht.
The other boat was a semi-rigid inflatable, like the Zodiacs used by the military. Big enough for five men, it was the craft of choice for anyone wanting to make a covert insertion by water.
It was the last thing he had expected to see, and Marc knew for sure that the inflatable had not been there before sunset. Was Novakovich meeting someone out here? he wondered. Or is this an escape route?
There was movement above him, the shuffle of deck shoes on wood, and Marc drifted into the shadow cast by the Jade, floating between the yacht and the smaller craft. He strained to listen and heard a scraping, like something being dragged.
In the next second, there was the cough of a silenced weapon, and from out of nowhere a man in short-sleeved tropical whites fell overboard and hit the water an arm’s length from Marc’s face.
The man turned in the swell and his head lolled, coming around to look blankly at Marc. He had a small entry wound in the soft flesh of his neck and a halo of bright blood, staining a shirt with the kind of faux-gold braid that rich men with yachts liked to make their crews wear.
The dead man slowly sank under the surface and vanished from sight.
TWELVE
For long moments, Marc willed himself to become a ghost in the water, his breath held in his chest as the seconds ticked by. He didn’t dare look up for fear that he might meet the gaze of the crewman’s killer.
There was a faint creak from the decking and somewhere deeper inside the boat, the muffled noise of delicate glass breaking. The shooter was gone from the rail overhead, but there was no way to know for how long. He had to move fast.
Marc pushed to the rear of the Jade, where dive steps extended outward into the water. Dumping the Bladefish in a shadowed corner of the gunwale, he climbed aboard the yacht in a low, careful crouch. Seawater trickled off his shoulders in steady drops and he moved slowly, planting each foot as if he were walking through a minefield.
Tanya Kirin lay on her back on the deck before him, her head facing away, clothed in a floral-print shift dress that spread out around her immaculately tanned legs. She’d been carrying a champagne flute when she fell, and the broken stem of it was still clutched in her hand. Marc saw the black pit of the entry wound where the bottom of Tanya’s jaw connected with her throat. His stomach tightened as he realized that the pool of shadows haloing the woman was a puddle of blood and brain matter.
It brought him up sharp. Poring over his laptop in Camden, he’d got used to the idea of seeing the flighty young model as nothing more than a vector of information. Now here she was, life snuffed out because she hadn’t paid attention to the security settings on a messaging website.
Tanya had likely been the first to die. Marc glanced over his shoulder at the dive steps. Her assassin had come up the same way, weapon drawn, as she unwittingly wandered out to finish her glass of Tattinger.
Open doors led into the Jade’s gym, and there Marc glimpsed a second figure in crewman’s whites slumped against an exercise bike. Suddenly, his first impression—that Novakovich was planning to flee—seemed way off.
He pulled the Glock from his waterproof bag and held the pistol close to his thigh, but the last thing he wanted to do was use it. A gunshot out here would not only carry clear across the bay, but more importantly it would alert the killers on board the Jade. And there were killers, plural. A lone assassin would have followed Marc’s approach and swum to the yacht. The presence of the zodiac meant a team sweeping the boat, executing everyone they came across. No witnesses, no survivors.
Marc paused by Tanya’s corpse and touched the skin of her neck. Still warm. Closer to her, he could smell perfume and the tang of spent cordite.
; His plan of action was in tatters. He hadn’t anticipated this, but now it seemed obvious. The people behind the Palomino were cleaning house, chasing down all the loose ends. Just as he feared, they had followed the same chains of data to Sicily, and got here before him.
He glanced back at the sea, contemplating the fallout if he abandoned his mission and fled.
Where the hell can I go?
Each second wasted was a second closer to losing everything. His fingers tightened around the grip of the Glock. Novakovich was the only lead he had.
There was a chance the accountant was still alive. Marc reasoned it through; if Dima was already a corpse, then the Jade would be a ghost ship.
Soft footfalls thumped on the deck above his head. They were moving forward toward the flying bridge. Starting at the top, working their way toward the keel.
Marc backtracked through the gym and found one of the stairwells that dropped down to the lower level. He froze as a shadow passed by on the other side of the glass doors.
The figure was clad head-to-toe in the same kind of matte black tactical gear utilized by the MI6 OpTeams, his head was hidden behind a mesh balaclava and clumsy night-vision goggles that gave the shooter a bug-eyed aspect. Marc recognized the long, heavy frame of the pistol in the man’s hand. A silenced Mark 23 semi-automatic, the same kind of weapon favored by American SOCOM operatives.
He had no desire to see the gun up close, however, and when the shooter turned away to look to the stern, Marc slipped down the stairwell and moved as fast as he dared past the doors of the passenger deck. At each compartment he paused for a count of three, holding his breath to listen. Nothing.
Nomad Page 18
