Nomad

by James Swallow

  “So why don’t you alert the CIA or Homeland Security?” Marc replied.

  “The Combine has penetrated several intelligence agencies,” said Delancort. “A fact I think you are well aware of.”

  Marc’s jaw stiffened, but he let the comment pass.

  “Will you work with us?” asked Solomon. “We want the same thing, Mister Dane. To expose these men and stop them before another atrocity happens.” He hesitated. “I know you have your doubts. But consider that if I simply wanted your knowledge, there are more … direct methods that could have been employed to get it. Lucy’s intervention in London allowed you to escape death on that rooftop. And again, we assisted you in Rome. These are not the acts of those who wish you harm.”

  There were reasons why this was a bad idea, Marc knew that. But he also knew that his luck had run dry in Italy, and the fact was he had no more cards to play. Without Keyes riding to the rescue, Marc would have most likely ended his life in a hail of bullets, or at best spent it buried in some ghost prison until he was old and gray.

  He turned it around in his thoughts. There was an opportunity here. All that stuff about the Chinese rockets was news to Marc, but it fit the profile. If Solomon was on the level, if Rubicon really did have their own leads on the Combine, then having the backup of a multi-billion dollar corporation could come in very useful tracking down the people who had ordered the deaths of Nomad team.

  Solomon’s speech about responsibility had struck a chord with Marc, as much as it might have been idealistic, but he wasn’t going to let that blind him to what was important to him. Marc saw Sam’s face in his mind’s eye, and once again a horrible second sense-memory came back with the smell of blood and fire. He drew a breath and let the moment fade.

  “I’m certain the Combine have someone inside MI6,” he told them. “I want to know who that is.”

  Delancort and Solomon exchanged a look. “We don’t have that information.”

  “Will you help me get it?”

  Solomon nodded. “If we can, we will.”

  “Okay.” A strange sense of relief washed over Marc. “I found something called Yeni Gün. It’s a charity for war orphans in Eastern Europe.” He said nothing else. Marc wasn’t about to trust these people with everything he knew, not yet.

  “Henri?” Solomon gestured to Delancort, and the other man produced a data tablet from inside his jacket.

  “Un moment…” He tapped at the device’s screen, typing with his thumbs. “I have it. The New Day … They have a number of ‘rescue centers’ for displaced and orphaned youths in Anatolia and the surrounding regions. The main office is in Ankara.”

  “I found the location of what is supposed to be a New Day orphanage out in the foothills of the Taurus Mountains. I’m not sure what’s there, but if the Combine’s mole in MI6 thought it was important, it must mean something.”

  Solomon went to an intercom panel on the wall and tapped a button. “Flight deck.”

  “Silber here, sir,” said a male voice. “Are we dropping off our new passenger?”

  “No. Mister Dane has agreed to work with us,” Solomon replied. Marc didn’t want to consider what exactly dropping off might have been a euphemism for, had he chosen to reject the billionaire’s proposal. “I need you to change course. Take us to Central Turkey.”

  “Will do,” said the pilot.

  Almost immediately, Marc felt the floor beneath his feet tilting gently as the jetliner eased into a slow turn.

  Solomon came closer and offered Marc his hand. “Thank you, Mister Dane, for your trust. I promise you it will be worthwhile.”

  Marc took the other man’s hand and found Solomon’s grip was firm and steady. “It’s not like I had a lot of choice, yeah?”

  He got a rueful nod in return. “When someone’s heart is honestly governed by what they believe,” noted Solomon, “that is all too often the case.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Dawn was moving in as Solomon’s A350 rolled to a halt at a private hangar on the far side of Erkilet International Airport. It was going to be another hot, arid day in the Turkish heartland.

  Delancort produced another fresh set of clothes for Marc, comprised of German-made tactical boots, rip-stop cargo trousers and a lightweight jacket, and at length returned his daypack with the contents intact.

  Marc didn’t hesitate to activate the laptop and check the portable computer’s security. His firewalls and lockout protocols had been tested but not penetrated, just as he had hoped. Still, he resolved to crack the laptop’s case at the first opportunity to check for the presence of any bugs, key loggers or other unwanted additions. The daypack had also gained some extra content in the form of an emergency survival kit and a box of 9mm ammunition for the Glock. The pistol was in there too, and he was surprised to note that someone had cleaned it for him. Five star service, he thought.

  “You may need that,” Delancort noted, nodding at the weapon. “But let us hope not, eh?”

  Marc walked down the jet way, blinking into the rising sun. He dug in the bag for the USAF-issue sunglasses that he habitually carried and wiped them clean. Lucy was waiting at the foot of the ramp, dressed in the same kind of almost-neutral clothing as he was. She was peering at a sheaf of paper maps, and among the sheets Marc saw a blow-up of the satellite image he had provided to Rubicon, the errant picture salvaged from the comm files.

  “We can make this by late afternoon if we hustle,” she told him. “A helo would draw too much attention. We’ll take the highway.” She jerked her thumb at a battered Land Rover parked in the shadow of the jet. Malte, the taciturn driver, was in the process of loading the 4x4 with two equipment cases, one labeled with a red stripe, another with blue.

  “Is he coming with us?”

  Lucy shook her head. “Just you and me, pal.”

  “Oh, good.” Marc shrugged. “I mean, he’s such a talker. Wouldn’t be able to get a word in edgewise.”

  “That’s funny,” she said, in a way that suggested she thought the exact opposite.

  She walked away toward the car and he trailed after her. “Hey,” he said to her back. “I, uh, suppose I should thank you. For Walworth.”

  “Where?” Lucy didn’t turn, giving Malte a smile as she passed him going the other way. The driver didn’t even glance in Marc’s direction, climbing back up the jet way without looking back.

  “London,” Marc clarified. “The roof.”

  “Oh.” She paused to give the Land Rover’s tires a desultory kick. “Yeah. That guy was gonna smoke you, all right.”

  “You didn’t kill him, though,” Marc noted. “I mean, you must have had the shot, right?”

  She glanced at him. “Wasn’t my choice. It was yours.”

  “He was just some tactical bod, he wasn’t…” Marc halted, frowning. “He wasn’t Combine.”

  “Whatever you say, slick.” Lucy climbed behind the Land Rover’s steering wheel, pausing to fix a dun-colored headscarf in place over her hair.

  Marc took the passenger seat and found a threadbare cap he could pull down low to shade his eyes.

  She glanced at him and smiled thinly. “Relax, Dane. I’m not going to drive you into the desert to put a bullet in your head and dump you in a ditch. That’s not Solomon’s style.”

  He tugged self-consciously on the bill of the cap. “In the last few days, almost everyone I thought I could count on has tried to arrest me or shoot me. So I may have some trust issues at this point.”

  Lucy chuckled and put the car in gear. “Buckle up,” she told him. “We’ll work on that as we go.”

  * * *

  The early hour meant that traffic on the local roads was thin, and as they joined the D300 highway heading southeast out of the city of Kayseri, there were few cars but regular lines of trucks moving down the dual lanes. If there was a speed limit, Lucy Keyes didn’t seem to have any desire to obey it, and she kept the Land Rover at a swift pace, weaving the vehicle around the larger, slower-moving cargo carriers.
Beyond the edges of the dusty road, the landscape was an expanse of brown and gray, patched by slivers of greenery that flashed past in ill-defined blurs. The hills and the mountains dominated the view ahead, growing larger as they closed in.

  At first, Marc’s conflicted mood threatened to drag him away into a morose silence as his thoughts turned inward, but the last thing he wanted to do was dwell on the chain of events that had forced him into this situation. Second-guessing himself would only undermine his confidence, and right now he needed to keep his doubts at arm’s length, until he could be sure that Solomon’s people were really what they said they were.

  “So.” He took a breath and looked across at Lucy. “You’re from New York City, right? But not Brooklyn, I’m guessing. I’d say Queens, yeah?”

  She nodded, pursing her lips. “Not bad. That’s a pretty good call for a Brit, most of you guys can’t tell the difference.”

  “I’m good with accents,” said Marc, making a circular motion with his finger. “Like some people have an ear for music, you know? Also, I watch a lot of American telly.”

  “Let me guess, cop shows?”

  He shook his head. “Nah, sitcoms. Cop shows are too close to the job. Plus, they never get the little stuff right, and it pisses me off.”

  “I heard that,” she agreed. “People in Hollywood think if they park a yellow cab at the end of a street in LA, it’s a dead ringer for Manhattan…”

  “Or if there’s a double-decker bus and some rain, it’s London.”

  “What, you guys have sunny days?” She smirked. “Huh. Who knew?”

  Out of nowhere, Marc felt an unexpected pang of regret. He’d grown up in London and lived there for most of his adult life. The sudden possibility that he might never get to return carried more weight than he was ready for. “You … miss it? New York, I mean?”

  “I miss the food,” said Lucy, with feeling. He sensed a moment of shared regret between them, as if they were both some kind of exile.

  “How did you end up in all this? Working for Rubicon, I mean?”

  She shot him a look, and he wondered if he had touched on a sore point. Lucy guided the Land Rover past a sluggish tanker truck and set her gaze on the view through the grimy windshield. “It’s no big deal,” she said, at length. “I was Army green for a good while. No job for a lady, so my mom used to say. But I got a good eye, and I like guns. Delta was recruiting for Foxtrot Troop, so I opted in. Stayed for a tour.”

  “I thought that was a myth,” said Marc. “About Delta Force having an all-female squad…”

  “Sure it is,” Lucy replied evenly. “Just like it’s not true that British Intelligence has its own covert strike teams.”

  “Fair point,” he allowed.

  “Uncle Sam may be old-fashioned, but he ain’t stupid. Sometimes girls can get where boys can’t.”

  Marc nodded. “You’ll get no argument from me.”

  “So you’re ex-Royal Navy, right?”

  He tensed. “How do you know that?”

  Lucy pointed at his arm. “Cabot wristwatch. It’s a dead giveaway.” Marc frowned. The military-issue dive watch was the only connection he still had to that part of his past. “And also my boss is a billionaire, remember?” The woman went on. “Information gets bought real easy, if you know how to deal.” She smiled again. “So you’re all about Queen and Country. From navy puke to covert spook, all for the Union Jack.”

  “Something like that,” he muttered. “And just so you know, we only call the flag the ‘Union Jack’ if it’s flying on a ship.”

  “Oh yeah?” Lucy cocked her had. “How about that? Every day’s a school day.”

  They passed another car and the other driver leaned on the horn to show his displeasure at Lucy’s cavalier attitude to the rules of the road. Marc cinched his seatbelt a little tighter.

  “So why did you pack it in with the army?” He was aware that she’d tried to steer the conversation away from that subject, but Marc wasn’t ready to let that drop without pushing a little more.

  “Solomon made me a better offer,” she said. Lucy seemed as if she was going to say something else, but then the impulse faded. That was all he was going to get. Marc guessed there was more to the story, but he wouldn’t hear it today.

  She pointed at a road sign as they approached the outskirts of a town at the base of a low mountain. “Pinarbaşi. We turn south here, to the provincial border. Roads will get rougher once we start into the foothills.”

  Marc threw a glance over his shoulder, back down the highway. “I can take the wheel for a spell, if you want.”

  “No need.” Lucy didn’t look away from the road.

  * * *

  Without an operation in progress, the Hub White command room seemed hollow to Talia Patel, still haunted by the ghosts of the events of OpTeam Nomad’s fatal mission. For now, the room’s large main screens were the only active system, each paired with the discreet bulb of a digital camera looking down on the table and the rank of chairs that faced them.

  Welles and one of his ninth floor men were already there when she entered behind Royce, and he spared them both an arch look. “Here we are again,” he began. “We should stop meeting like this, Donald. People are going to talk.”

  “Oh, Victor,” Royce said quietly as he sat down. “Do sod off.”

  Talia blinked at her superior’s off-hand insult. It wasn’t like him to so easily rise to the bait, but then the stress of recent days was starting to tell. Royce had repeatedly ignored suggestions to take some time away from operations, and Talia was aware that he hadn’t been home for the last few nights.

  Welles thought better of digging up any kind of comeback and covered the moment with a sniff and a glance at the clock on the far wall. The minute hand snapped around to the top of the hour, and the three screens lit up, along with red LEDs beneath the cameras. The displays showed an almost identical conference room set-up. Only the quality of the daylight and the time-stamp in the corner of the images broke the illusion. The other end of the teleconference was a room in the British Embassy in Rome.

  Two people looked back out at them, a woman Talia didn’t know, helpfully identified by the screen’s image recognition software as LANE, T; and John Farrier, who seemed to have aged ten years since she last saw him in the flesh.

  “Secure,” reported Farrier, his lips thinning. “Let’s get to this.”

  Ignoring any pretense at protocol, Welles leaned forward and launched into a cold-eyed snarl. “I won’t waste time by going through a laundry list of your security detachment’s shortcomings. I don’t care how Marc Dane got into the compound, but I do want to know how he got out of it again.” He glared at Lane and Farrier. “Any takers?”

  “He had outside help,” said the woman.

  “Of course he bloody did!” snapped Welles. “I wonder if he had some inside as well.”

  Farrier’s gaze sharpened. “If you’ve got something you want to say, spit it out.”

  Welles produced a data pad and laid it on the table. “I have information on a piece of OpTeam hardware Dane used to cause a road accident in the middle of Central London, tech that as far as my investigators can determine, he wasn’t issued with.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Farrier replied, and Talia saw a stony cast come over the other man’s face. Had Farrier actually intervened in order to get Marc free? She didn’t want to think about the implications if that were true.

  “I find it interesting that when Dane was on the run, when he had a million different places to hide, it was you he came looking for.” Welles cocked his head. “According to the details from Lane’s report, you were out of contact for almost fifteen minutes while Dane had you as his so-called hostage.”

  “He trusted me,” Farrier snapped. “Because you didn’t give him any other option. That’s why he came to my door.”

  “What did he say to you?” Royce spoke up.

  “I told him to surrender,” Farrier went on. “H
e wouldn’t listen. He said he was innocent, that he had nothing to do with the loss of Nomad.” The other man paused. “And for the record? I believe him.”

  “What you believe is of little interest to me,” said Welles. “Dane’s a fugitive. He had the chance to come quietly and now he’s racking up criminal charges like they’re going out of style.”

  Royce sighed. “He wanted access to the secure messaging network. Your report says that he coerced you into giving him your passwords.”

  Farrier nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Why?” said Royce. “What was he looking for?”

  “Marc believes there’s been a penetration at the Cross.” Farrier let that statement hang for a moment, and Talia found herself stiffening at the possibility. “He thinks the ambush that took out Nomad was expedited with the help of someone inside the circle.”

  “Which is exactly the kind of explanation he would give if he were that insider,” Welles insisted. “An innocent man doesn’t run.”

  “He might if he thinks he’s going to vanish down a deep, dark hole and never see the light of day again,” noted Royce.

  Welles dismissed the comment with a snort. “How long were you alone with him in the embassy comms room? What did he do while he was there?”

  “A few minutes. He got nothing,” said Farrier. “Check the logs yourself. He tried to break through the firewalls, and botched it. In the end, he gave up.”

  Talia glanced at her own pad, which contained the same reports Welles was referring to. A records dump from the embassy mainframe showed that someone had attempted to access the MI6 network through a secure terminal, but all the activity log contained were dozens of rebuffed calls as the system denied entry over and over again. The log made it seem like Dane had spent several frustrating minutes repeatedly trying and failing to get in.

  But then Marc Dane was one of the best OpTeam field technicians they had, and Talia imagined that he was more than capable of erasing an actual activity log and replacing it with something like this, to blind them to what he had really been doing.