Ghost: Read online

  ‘You’re gonna love this,’ he told Kara, snapping a picture of the bloodstained circuit with the phone. ‘Sending you an image now . . .’

  ‘I want more than that,’ she shot back, recognising the tiny device. ‘There’s a data slot in your spyPhone. Upload the drive’s contents to me.’

  Marc hesitated. ‘You sure that’s a good idea? There’s no way to know what’s on it.’

  ‘For safety,’ Kara added. ‘You can walk back the original while I start work on the contents.’

  ‘All right. Here we go.’ Warily, Marc wiped the card clean and inserted it into the Rubicon-issue handset. Built-in isolation software put a firewall around it in case there a virus lurked inside the data, but what came up in the streaming window was only a cascade of information – text and pixelated images that flashed past too quickly for Marc to make head or tail of. ‘Wetherby had a back-up,’ he thought aloud, ‘in case he lost what he hid in his prosthetic. Smart bloke, taking the belt-and-braces approach.’

  ‘Not smart enough,’ Kara said bitterly. ‘He still got himself murdered. Stupid . . .’

  Her words had an edge that made everything snap into hard focus. The unspoken truth that had been hiding right in front of him abruptly became clear, and he said it without thinking. ‘You knew this guy . . .’ He looked again at Wetherby’s slack face. ‘You were close to him, yeah?’

  ‘It’s complicated.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

  Kara made an odd noise over the open channel that could have been a stifled groan. ‘I’m sorry, Marc. I’m really sorry.’ The data upload concluded and the phone’s screen went dark. ‘About everything—’ Her voice cut out suddenly.

  The phone was not just blank, but totally dead. The signal through the earpiece ceased at the same instant and Marc stood in the harsh silence that fell in its wake. ‘Kara? Kara!’ He tapped at the comm unit ineffectually. ‘What the hell—?’

  The words died in his throat as a blob of white torchlight flicked off the walls of the corridor outside, flashing toward the window in the doorway across the room. Marc quickly shoved the corpse back into the storage locker, his eyes darting around to find somewhere to conceal himself.

  He could hear voices now. Two men. He caught the word pulizija and the low grunt of a reply. It seemed that the guy on the front desk had not been as inattentive as Marc had hoped, and he pulled the shemagh up around his face, looking around for anything he could use as a distraction. He drew the Glock pistol from his pack and weighed it in his hand. He had only brought it along as a last resort.

  The light from the torch came closer and Marc ducked out of sight, behind a metal cabinet near the door, pressing himself into the shadows.

  The handle rattled and the door opened. Marc heard the crackle of a police radio. If he didn’t act quickly, this would get called in and the alarm would be raised.

  Two figures entered. The first was a weary-looking cop in the blue shirt of the local force, a middle-aged guy with a thick moustache, who carried a heavy flashlight. Following him was a shorter, younger man in a white lab coat, waving his hands and talking animatedly in Maltese.

  Marc rushed out from behind the cabinet and snatched at a handful of the morgue technician’s collar, wrenching him backward and pressing the Glock into the side of his head. The man let out a strangled yelp of shock and struggled.

  The police officer twisted, getting over his surprise in a blink, whipping out his extendable baton. Maltese police didn’t carry firearms as a matter of course, which meant Marc could use his as an advantage. But he had no desire to turn this into a lethal engagement. The cop was just a guy doing his job, but Marc couldn’t allow the man to waylay him. Kara’s silence could only mean that something had gone very wrong, and police entanglement was the last thing he needed.

  Keeping the morgue technician between himself and the police officer, he gestured with the gun and made it clear what he wanted. The cop reluctantly dropped the baton and the flashlight. ‘Cuffs!’ snarled Marc, shoving the technician toward a nearby examination table. The cop glared back at him, then snapped one ring of his handcuffs around his own wrist. Marc forced him to loop the frame of the restraints around a stainless-steel pull-bar on the metal table, and then fasten the other ring around the technician’s wrist.

  Once they were secured to each other, Marc tore off the radio handset clipped to the man’s shirtfront. It was already spitting out agitated voices, so he dropped it on the tiled floor and smashed it under his heel. ‘Skużani,’ he offered, as a belated apology.

  With the cop’s shouted curses trailing after him, Marc gave up on stealth and fled the morgue at a run. Part of him knew that he should have got into the security console behind the reception, maybe pulled the hard drives from the system, but every second he wasted here was a moment longer that Kara was offline.

  He sprinted to the Maruti jeep and leapt in, gunning the engine. The car bounced through a sharp turn and out on to the highway as couple of local police cruisers flashed past in the opposite direction. Marc kept right on the point of the speed limit during the ten-minute drive back to the Hotel Nova, threading through the backstreets of Gzira until the building rose up before him. Along the way, he ran the comms gear through a hard reset, the smartphone too, but nothing worked. Somehow, the Rubicon-issue equipment had been deactivated remotely, and that suggested a whole lot of possibilities. None of them were good.

  Kara’s words ran around in his thoughts. He was sending a message. At first she had dismissed his mention of the numbers on Wetherby’s wrist tattoo, but they had been important after all.

  ‘Was the message for her?’ He asked the question out loud as he brought the jeep to a halt a few doors down from the Nova.

  There were no new vehicles parked outside, nothing that seemed amiss, but Marc wasn’t willing to take any risks.

  He kept the Glock out of sight under his jacket as he entered the building. The night porter on the front desk snored loudly with his feet up on a chair, and Marc eased past, letting him slumber on.

  Instead of riding the lift, he took the stairs, pausing every other level to listen out for any signs of danger. Reaching the fifth floor, music and noise issued out of a few of the rooms, where clubbers had staggered back to the hotel intent on continuing their partying until sunrise. A fast, bassy dance track thudded through the door of room 56, enough that it would cover the sounds of whatever was going on in there.

  Marc hesitated on the threshold. What would he see inside? Kara Wei, laid out on the bed with a bullet through her eye? He shook off the unpleasant image. One corpse is enough for tonight, he told himself.

  He planted a firm heel-kick in the lock mechanism and the whole thing popped right off the latch, swinging the door wide. Marc surged in, the pistol high and close to his chest, and shouted her name.

  The twenty-something surfer he had seen earlier that day came storming into the room from the balcony with a beer bottle gripped in his fist, his face like thunder. Then the guy saw the pistol in Marc’s hand and the fury dropped out of him in an instant. ‘Whoa! What the hell?’ He had a rough Scottish accent and his cheeks were flushed red.

  ‘Back up!’ Marc aimed the gun at him and took a quick look through a side door into the small, dingy bathroom. There was no sign of Kara in there, or anywhere else for that matter. It all seemed wrong.

  He advanced, holding the pistol steady. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘What? Where’s who?’

  ‘Kara!’ Marc spat her name. ‘Don’t fuck with me, mate! She picked you up at the airport, today! Brought you here! What have you done with her?’

  The surfer kept his hands raised, still gripping the beer. ‘What?’ He repeated, shaking his head, blinking nervously. ‘No. I don’t know any Kara, pal. I wasn’t at the airport! I’ve been here a week already!’

  Marc’s gut sense told him he was hearing the truth, but he was still uncertain. ‘Get on your knees.’

 
; ‘No, please—’

  ‘Get on your bloody knees!’ He bellowed at the other man with enough force to make him drop the bottle and obey. ‘Are you in on this shit?’ Marc demanded. ‘You know about Wetherby?’

  The surfer shook his head, trembling as the muzzle of the Glock moved closer. ‘Look. You have issues, okay? But it’s nothing to do with me!’ The man was clearly terrified. ‘I’ve been in this room all week! I came on my own! No girls here, right?’ He took a deep breath and nodded toward the table. ‘That’s not what I’m into, you get it?’

  Marc glanced down and saw a laptop computer sitting open, the dance music issuing out of its speakers. A very prominent rainbow-flag sticker had been plastered across the corner of the casing. He paused, and his eye was drawn to the pinhole camera atop the laptop’s screen. ‘Have you . . . had that switched on all the time you’ve been here?’

  The surfer’s head bobbed. ‘I Skype with my maw, every day.’ He gulped audibly, panic making his eyes wide and fearful. ‘Listen, take whatever you want. Money, passport, the computer . . . I won’t stop you . . .’

  But Marc wasn’t hearing him. Instead, all the comments Kara had made before came back to him in a rush.

  We’re running this op under isolated protocol.

  I figured he’d be good cover.

  Call backs to Rubicon are being routed through my machine.

  He let the gun drop and looked at the computer, then his hand angrily whipped out and slammed the laptop closed. The music ceased. ‘She’s not here.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been telling you, pal!’

  ‘No,’ Marc turned away, shaking his head. ‘She was never here.’ He felt like a fool.

  Since he had separated from her in France, Kara Wei had only ever been a voice in his ear, but she could have been sending that comm signal to him from anywhere. What proof did he have that she had actually gone to Turin and then flown out to Malta as he did? None. She could have monitored him through the spyPhone and he would never have known it.

  In his mind’s eye, he put together the shape of the deception. Kara was an accomplished hacker, and it would have been child’s play for her to co-opt the laptop of some unlucky traveller. She probably picked the surfer’s details out of the Hotel Nova’s booking records, snaked her way into his computer through the building’s unsecured Wi-Fi network to monitor him. This poor guy had unknowingly become her cover story, little more than a prop to fool Marc into thinking that Kara was close by.

  On the breeze, the sound of police sirens filtered up through the open balcony window, getting nearer.

  ‘Th-that for you, is it?’ said the surfer.

  ‘Yeah,’ Marc replied, and left at a run.

  He recovered his gear from the hotel room down the hall and found the service elevator to the ground floor, exiting the building through the back via narrow corridors stacked with boxes of toilet paper and cleaning supplies. Marc knew he couldn’t risk going back to the rented Maruti. It was likely the Maltese police had tracked it from the hospital to the Hotel Nova, so he helped himself to a Peugeot XR6 that had been left unsecured in the back alley, and took the motorcycle out into the backstreets of Sliema.

  Getting well clear of the tourist district, Marc found a hillside layby at the edge of the highway where he could stop and catch his breath.

  The wind coming in from the sea pulled at him. He sat on the stolen bike’s saddle, glaring at the pre-dawn glow on the horizon. He was trying to make some sense of what had happened when a chiming ringtone sounded from inside his pack. Marc dug through the contents and found the Rubicon phone. The black slab of glass and metal came alive once again. On the screen, a harsh crimson message flashed up warning of an Incoming Priority Call.

  Warily, he tapped the answer key and held it to his ear. ‘Kara?’

  ‘Mr Dane.’ Ekko Solomon’s steady, firm tones had a hard edge to them that he had not encountered before. ‘At last. Are you alone?’

  ‘It’s just me,’ he replied, frowning at the question. ‘Okay, can someone please tell me what the hell is going on?’

  ‘Listen carefully,’ said Solomon. ‘We have now reacquired your location. Exfiltration arrangements are being made as we speak. You are to cease whatever activity you are involved in and fully disengage. Abandon everything and return to the office at once. This order supersedes all others. Do you understand me, Mr Dane?’

  ‘Yes,’ he began, his confusion deepening. ‘But where’s Kara? What’s the—?’

  Solomon cut him off before he could finish his sentence. ‘You are not participating in a sanctioned operation. Observe silent protocol. Proceed to the airport and extract immediately.’ Then as an afterthought, he added: ‘I will explain in person. Until then, continue as ordered.’

  The call ended and Marc stared at the black screen, wary and uncertain.

  SIX

  The blackout effect blossomed across downtown San Francisco in a soundless wave. It spread across the buildings and down the streets, as if a giant hand had poured a torrent of dark ink across the map. The radius grew to engulf ten blocks, then twenty, then a hundred, two hundred, and kept on expanding. Power failed along the line of the bay up toward Telegraph Hill and down past Mission and Haight. The city’s famous Cable Cars were unceremoniously halted in their tracks, and traffic lights winked out, causing dozens of accidents as drivers reacted too slowly to the unexpected darkness.

  Nowhere was spared the abrupt fall of night. Every building connected to the electrical grid instantly darkened. Office blocks and hotels become gloomy, tomb-like spaces. Elevators halted in their shafts, trapping their passengers inside, and in the absence of light a flood of panic spread as fast as the power had died.

  Back-up generators and emergency batteries, programmed to recognise when the city’s mains supply dropped offline, failed to activate. The complex, insidious code that replicated through the smart-meter system fed out a stream of fake data to replicate the normal running of the grid, and the back-ups stayed resolutely inactive. Other command and control signals went back into the Californian power network, confusing the feed and preventing any kind of automated reset.

  Out on the streets, the avenues began to choke themselves as vehicles came to a halt, and others collided or shunted. People poured out of the buildings, waving their smartphones to cast what little light they could, even as the cell towers in the city had fallen dead and cut them off from the rest of the world.

  San Francisco was a city of the prepared – you couldn’t live in an earthquake zone and not be ready for disaster to strike – but there had been no tremor, no warning of an imminent shock, and the people milled in the streets, nursing the cold fear of the ground shifting beneath their feet.

  *

  In the basement of the unopened hotel, brilliant white spars of light stabbed on from every direction as the assembled Soldier-Saints activated their head-mounted flashlights. Lucy recoiled, pulling Malte with her toward the safety of the deeper shadows behind one of the support pillars.

  ‘The power . . .’ Malte whispered. ‘The whole city . . .?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she muttered.

  Crossman’s harsh laughter echoed off the concrete walls of the underground parking garage. ‘Listen! Can you hear that?’ Lucy caught sight of him moving back toward the ambulance. As he walked, he shrugged on a paramedic’s jacket. ‘Oh, they know judgement is coming!’

  Lucy heard it, all right. Outside on the streets, a rising, atonal chorus of honking car horns, shouting and screaming filled the air. The disorder Crossman and his men wanted had sparked, catching alight in the first embers of a fire that could engulf the city unless it was stopped.

  ‘Saddle up!’ Crossman shouted, and beckoned to another of the men. Lucy saw the tattooed thug briefly illuminated in the torchlight. ‘Bullock, you take a team, go give a little absolution!’

  The other man nodded. ‘Time to fill some graves,’ he spat, rocking off his heels in anticipat
ion of imminent violence.

  ‘I’m going for the ambulance,’ hissed Lucy, brandishing her stolen SMG. ‘We shoot out the tyres, the engine, it won’t be going anywhere . . .’

  ‘The bomb—’ Malte began.

  ‘I haven’t forgotten,’ she said, knowing full well what kind of horrific damage the improvised thermobaric device could do. ‘Back me up!’

  Lucy bolted out from behind the concrete pillar and broke into a run, but as she closed in on the boxy black shadow of the ambulance, the vehicle’s emergency strobes flashed into life. An infernal, blood-crimson light illuminated everything. Flickering colour turned the Soldier-Saints into jerky shadow-marionettes, and Lucy was revealed to them. She stood out of cover and in the open.

  ‘Intruder!’ shouted someone, and all guns came around in her direction.

  She reacted without thinking. Lucy turned into the TEC-9 and let off a blast of full-auto fire from the hip, the shots clattering through the improvised silencer on the weapon’s muzzle.

  Out in the dark, Malte’s gun joined the fray and the Soldier-Saints came in a heartbeat later, most of them firing wildly in her direction. She heard a cry of pain and glimpsed a figure in a long coat jerk and spin. Caught in a fatal crossfire, the courier went down in a heap, body torn open by blind shots with no regard for who might be in the way.

  Lucy threw herself at the ground, hitting the floor with a grunt as she tumbled into a shoulder roll. Bullets hummed over her head as she scrambled back to her feet and into a loping run. Behind her, she heard the rattle of Malte’s TEC-9 as it cut across the red-lit space, heard the dull spanking impacts of the rounds as they cored through the doors of the parked mini-vans.