Nomad

by James Swallow

  Delancort emerged from Solomon’s office across the way and caught sight of them. “Ah, c’est bon. I have something you both should take a look at.” He used a wireless link to relay images to a television monitor that unfolded out of a hidden panel.

  Marc craned his neck to see a series of stills fan out across the display. “What are we looking at?”

  “The first pass from our data forensics people on the New Day orphanage,” said Delancort. “No prizes for guessing that it has as many shells as a matryoshka…”

  “A what now?” said Lucy, leaning against the wall.

  “Nesting doll.” Marc made the shape with his hands. “One inside another.”

  Delancort gave a curt smile. “Pardon the metaphor, but I thought it particularly apt when this gentleman’s name floated to the surface.” A patrician face snapped into view, a man with a severe beard and close-clipped mustache, the hard hunter’s eyes of a wolf glaring back at them.

  “Pytor Glovkonin,” breathed Marc. “Well now…”

  “He’s a patron of many charitable groups, of course,” Delancort went on. “Most of them seem legitimate. It could be a coincidence that one of the richest oligarchs in the Russian Federated States has a connection to the New Day orphanage…” He let the sentence trail off. “I do not believe any of us would lean toward that version of things, oui?”

  “A day ago, I was as close to him as I am to you,” Marc noted. “Ships that pass, and all that.”

  Lucy took this in with a nod. “I get that this guy is big money and dirty with it. But we’re saying he’s Combine too?”

  “It’s a good fit,” said Marc. “MI6 have nothing actionable on this bloke. He’s got assets all over Europe and Russia. He operates up high, where the air is rare and the cash is thick.”

  Delancort tapped a finger on his lips. “Rubicon is well aware of Mister Glovkonin’s more questionable business enterprises. G-Kor and Rubicon have crossed swords in the past, financially speaking.”

  Marc shot him a look. “How so?”

  “G-Kor are connected to a holding group in Irkutsk, which host an array of secure internet servers from the safety of a decommissioned nuclear missile silo.”

  “Dark net,” Marc said, with a grimace. Off Lucy’s questioning look, he went on. “It’s like a shadow internet, yeah? A web below the world wide web. Servers in countries with an elastic view of data law. They operate information banks, hosting sensitive material for rogue states, drug cartels, arms dealers, you name it. They bounce digital files from place to place, sometimes in deep storage like the silo thing…”

  “That’s what Novakovich, the broker guy, was into?”

  He nodded. “He had his own little piece of the ghost web, right on his yacht.” Dark net servers were what allowed criminals like the Combine to continue to function on a global basis. Marc didn’t add that the reason why many such data havens stayed in operation was that dozens of larger nations also secretly used them as remote hosts for material they didn’t want on their own servers.

  Delancort was watching Marc carefully. “Will you tell us what else you have?” The question seemed to come out of the blue, and Marc knew immediately that he hadn’t schooled his expression quickly enough to hide his reaction.

  “I told you about New Day. I told you what I want.”

  The other man nodded. “Yes, the identity of the person or persons responsible for the loss of your team in Dunkirk. But I think you’re holding something back.”

  Lucy came and took a seat across from him. “He’s right, Dane, isn’t he?” Her eyes narrowed. “Look, after the drone and all, if you still don’t think you can trust us, then—”

  Marc cut her off with a wave of his hand. “It’s not that. It’s just…” He sighed. “What I have isn’t anything at all. It’s worthless.” He explained about the email data he had recovered from the MI6 network. “It’s all circumstantial stuff, traces of traces, nothing solid or even remotely provable.”

  “Digital information never dies,” Delancort countered. “You may not have access to it, but it is out there in the web. Everything leaves an impression.”

  “Maybe so,” Marc admitted. “Maybe there are some fragments caught in a buffer somewhere, but I can’t track it down. There are only two places in the world that could reconstruct the data, and neither are open to me.” He shot a look at Delancort. “Or your boss’s money, for that matter.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. You may have been able to get into my MOD files, but Rubicon can’t break the encryption at GCHQ, can you?”

  Delancort paled slightly. “No. No, we cannot.”

  Marc nodded to himself. British Intelligence’s electronic surveillance center monitored a huge volume of emails, data, radio and cellular traffic, but its security was airtight. “As we know, I’m on MI6’s shit-list right now, so they’d never turn over their data to me.”

  “You said two places,” noted Lucy.

  “The second one is an even tougher nut. The National Security Agency.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “That whole PRISM thing.”

  His lip curled. “That’s just the program you know about.” MI6 had been aware for years that the NSA’s data trackers watched all the British intelligence agencies. But while the security services publically appeared to be turning a blind eye to it, GCHQ were doing exactly the same thing to American assets in Europe with their Tempora initiative.

  Delancort sniffed. “The NSA would never admit to having the data you need to trace the emails.”

  Marc nodded. “So I’m back to square one.”

  Lucy shot Delancort a glance and he sighed. “Mister Dane, I understand that you are wary of incurring any obligation to Rubicon, but Mister Solomon has told me to offer you, within reason, any and all help the group can provide for your objective.”

  The offer was a genuine surprise to him. “Why would you say that?”

  Delancort seemed confused by the question, as if it had never occurred to him. “Because it is the right thing to do,” he replied.

  * * *

  At first, Halil thought he was drowning.

  His throat was clogged and his arms and legs were numb. They felt like distant things, vaguely connected to his body. He tried to open his eyes, but the pain of the bright lights above him forced them shut.

  It took effort, but he turned over, feeling the sagging mattress give as he shifted his weight. Sharp, jabbing pains prickled all across his belly and sternum, making him gasp. He rolled back, and forced one hand to his face to cover his eyes. Minutes passed, minutes that seemed like hours, and finally Halil managed to lift himself to a sitting position. The pain across his torso was constant, and he found it hard to breathe.

  He sorted the sounds around him. The creak of rusted metal, the distant lap of waves. Other youths, some talking in low voices, others crying softly. Halil slowly dropped his hand and placed his bare feet on the cold floor. He was dizzy, even sitting still, and his flesh felt strange. It was hot to the touch.

  Halil’s labored breathing sounded loudly in his ears. He had no recollection of walking back to the long, chilly room where the teachers had billeted the youths after boarding the ship. He remembered them marching out to the mess hall in a loose group. They were all hungry, stomachs empty and growling. The teachers had forbidden them to eat for over a day, and there was talk among the group that someone had done something wrong that the lot of them were being punished for.

  But when they trooped into the mess, the men there were eating. The food had been a meat stew, and remembering the smell of the greasy soup now made Halil gag in reflex, the acid boil of bile tickling the back of his throat. He desperately wanted water.

  He fixed on the memory again, trying to replay it in his mind’s eye. The mess hall. The food. Jadeed had been there, and he smiled at them. At first Halil was wary of any pretense of warmth from the commander’s bullying second, but he had brought a reward—gassy American sodas th
at fizzed and popped in sculpted bottles with garish labels.

  Tarki had guzzled his like it was nectar, belching loud and long. Everyone had laughed, and for a moment they forgot they were young men, all of them acting like children. The teachers didn’t censure them, so they all drank and they laughed, and it was only when Halil drained the bottle that he saw the powdery dregs in the bottom. White crystals, like refined sugar.

  Then a heavy sleep came in a wave, swallowing him whole. Through blurry vision he saw Tarki slump against his bench. Color bled out of Halil’s vision and then there was nothing …

  Except that there was. A collection of sensory details that meant nothing in isolation. There was the hard metal smell of rust, the burning chemical odor of powerful cleaning agents. Metal, bright and mirrored and full of pain. Blood, cold and wet. And the screaming.

  He shuddered as that came back to him, a door in his memory opening wide, bringing a torrent with it. At the time, he had not processed the sound correctly, but now he knew that it had been Tarki. Tarki, screaming in absolute agony, weeping and bawling.

  And perhaps some of the screams had also come from Halil’s lips.

  He touched his face, feeling the tracks of dried tears. The prickling pain in his stomach was so fierce, he could only breathe in quick increments, panting like a dog.

  Where did they take us? With mounting horror, he found that the cotton thawb he wore was marked with dots of fresh blood. His hands shaking, Halil rolled back the garment to bare his torso to the air. He shivered and fought to keep himself from bringing up vomit.

  A wadding of cotton wool was across his belly, held there by strips of yellow medical tape. Blood was soaking through the pad.

  Tears gathering in his eyes, Halil picked at the tape, fingers trembling as he did so. It came away and allowed him to peer under the pad.

  The prickling pain seemed to double, and he felt a wash of cold across his face as the color drained from his cheeks. Vertical lines lay across his belly, from his crotch to his sternum. Each one a livid, fresh suture, held closed by rows of tiny plastic staples beneath a thin mesh bandage. Halil let the garment drop back, suddenly too terrified to look at what had been done to him. He saw others among the group with expressions that mirrored his own, brimming with fear and uncertainty.

  It was then he realized that the bunk where Tarki had slept was empty. At last, he found his voice and managed a few words. “Wh-where … is he?”

  The gangly youth called Adad was sitting nearby, and he fixed Halil with a sleepy gaze. “A teacher said he was sent back.”

  Halil shook his head sharply, making himself giddy. That wasn’t possible. They were on a ship, miles from their homeland. It was a lie, and he said so.

  Adad didn’t seem to hear him. He was gingerly probing at the bloody stitches in his distended stomach with a finger, their patterns mirroring those on Halil’s belly. “I know a story,” he said. “A man put drugs in people’s food and then cut them open. Took their kidneys to sell to the Saudis. They’ve done that to us.”

  Halil forced himself to take shaky steps across the cabin, becoming lucid as he felt the chilly metal beneath his bare feet.

  There was a teacher blocking the doorway, and he glared at the youth. “Go back to bed. You are unwell.”

  “Why did you do this?” Halil managed. “What did we do wrong?”

  “Nothing,” snapped the teacher. “Idiot. It was for your own good. You were ill. Now you will be better. Rest.” The man gave Halil a shove, and the teenager staggered back.

  Returning to his bunk, he saw that Adad was at a porthole, his pasty face pressed to the glass. “Do you see this?” he asked.

  Halil peered out of the window and saw pale skies over a wide bay, framing a concrete shoreline and a forest of towering blue cranes. Beyond were lines of cargo containers as far as he could see.

  “Is that Africa?” said Adad, his pain momentarily forgotten.

  Halil caught sight of a design painted on one of the mammoth cranes. Horizontal lines of white and red, a field of stars on a dark rectangle. “Not Africa,” he said, shaking his head.

  TWENTY

  The teachers turned the youths out of their beds, making them stand in a line against the bulkhead. Anyone who had even the slightest wisps of facial hair was made to shave them off, and so attended, they seemed years younger than they actually were, men reduced to boys once again.

  Halil could see the edge of a porthole from the corner of his eye, and the movement of light and shadow through it told him that the freighter had docked at the American port.

  America. It seemed impossible to believe that he was there. As much as he had been fed propaganda tales of the unholy United States, he also knew the country from the snatches of stories he had seen from television and books. In his mind it was a riotous collision of all these things, stitched together from hearsay, the lyrics of overheard pop songs and the fiery rantings of angry imams.

  A teacher told them to take off their clothes, and when they hesitated, the closest youth got a backhanded slap across the face. Halil and the others did not need a second lesson, and he rolled the thawb off his body. The others did the same, forming piles of dirty clothing at their feet. Soon they were shivering and naked, hunched forward to protect themselves from the cold air.

  All of them had the same scars that Halil had on his stomach, some so pale they were fish-belly white. He tried to understand what that meant, once more taking a hand and pressing it lightly on his stomach. The prickling pain flared and he hissed to himself, blinking furiously.

  One of the ship’s crew rolled a laundry trolley into the cabin and upended it on the deck. A pile of new clothes spilled out, their colors impossibly bright, along with dozens of blue cardboard boxes. Inside each were brand new running shoes that smelled of plastic and processed leather.

  “Dress,” the teacher told them, pointing at the pile.

  Halil joined the others as they warily came forward and dug through the heap of trousers, t-shirts and sweatshirts. They fished out socks and underwear and garbed themselves in silence. Halil found a pair of jeans that were a size too large, a blue t-shirt bearing some incomprehensible logo and a dark, voluminous top to wear over it. Fiddling with the zipper, he went to the shoes and recovered a pair that matched the size of his feet.

  “These are the clothes of infidels,” Adad whispered, pulling moodily at the front of a hooded sweatshirt. “I don’t like them.”

  Halil said nothing as he knotted the complex laces of the shoes, just happy to be warm again. He looked up as the teacher accepted a box from another of the instructors. The teacher threw away the lid and began pawing through the contents. He removed laminated cards, and wandered back and forth between the youths, handing them out. Each of the youths also got a small paper bag.

  When it was Halil’s turn, the teacher peered at his face and then pressed a card into his hand. He looked down and saw that it was an identity pass, the same thing he had seen on the chests of police officers or government officials. Halil’s face was there, a photograph of him he remembered being taken on his arrival at the orphanage.

  In the paper bag there was an odd collection of things; a cheap digital watch, some boiled sweets, a packet of disposable tissues and at the bottom, foreign money. It didn’t seem like much, a dozen copper and silver coins of varying sizes, and a fold of green paper notes that felt strange to the touch. The items seemed alien to Halil, but he followed the example of the others and found pockets to stuff them in. He ate one of the sweets, crunching it nervously between his teeth.

  When each had dressed and been issued with a card and bag, they were marched along the snaking corridors of the ship. The teacher led them down below the waterline, and despite the pain and the anxiety of their new scars, there was a growing air of excitement among the young men. A hatch creaked open and they emerged into a tall, cavernous hold.

  Halil glanced up and saw that the roof of the hold was open and one of the blu
e cranes he had glimpsed from the window was hanging over the wide cargo bay. Drops of fine rain were finding their way down, and he felt them touch his cheek. A jolt of panic shivered through his body.

  Where are they taking us? What has become of Tarki?

  The teacher took them to a container made of corrugated steel and cranked open the door at one end, then gestured sharply. “Get in. Remain silent once this door closes, or you will be beaten. When the container moves, do not cry out, do not try to open the door.” He glared at them, and they returned solemn, cautious nods.

  Halil was the last to climb in, chancing a look upward in time to see the crane’s hoist descending. The teacher shoved him in the small of the back and the door slammed shut, trapping the dozen or so of them in the dank, metallic box.

  He found a place to sit, his back to the wall, and Halil lowered his head, drawing up his knees. None of them dared to speak as metal clattered on metal around them, and then came the sickening lurch as the container rose off the deck. In the darkness, Halil heard some of the others praying but he did not join in with them. He had the chilling sense that if there was a god out there, it had abandoned him long before now.

  The container creaked as it swung about, before settling hard on another platform. Halil heard the hoist wind back, and they moved again, this time atop some chugging hauler that grumbled like the trucks that had visited the orphanage.

  Then there was silence, for perhaps an hour. It ended with an abrupt rattle of chains at the door, and the container was opened by a towering figure.

  “Come,” said Khadir. “Take your first steps across the battleground.” He backed away and let the youths scramble out.

  Halil looked around, trying to take it all in. The container and the truck it sat upon were inside a warehouse. The roof over their heads was rattling with the steady patter of rainfall, and there were men here and there. Some had guns, some were teachers and some not. The commander was dressed similarly to Halil and the other teenagers, his features disguised beneath the bill of a black baseball cap. He said something Halil didn’t hear to a man with a flat, dead expression, and got a nod in return.