Ghost: Read online

  Flaps of polymerised cloth waved where they hung from the lower frame of the gigantic golf ball shape. Further up the sides of the construction, the panels were undamaged but weather-stained and grimy from the rain. Complex layers of graffiti covered every surface as high as human hands could reach, giving the sphere the look a strange paper sculpture rotting from the bottom.

  She liked it up here. The giant orb was one of a trio, a smaller sister off to one side on its own blockhouse and another atop a phallic tower nearby. When the Cold War had been raging, the domes contained state-of-the-art listening equipment aimed into the dark territory of enemy nations, sampling and interpreting every last radio signal for signs of aggressive intent or actionable intelligence. But now the entire site was an empty husk, lost and overgrown among a rambling woodland. Its echoing spaces and vacant halls had been repurposed, first by the rogue creatives who had turned it into a ghost-town installation for anti-establishment street art, and now by her people. Madrigal’s troupe were artists and rebels too, in their own way, but they worked from a very different palette.

  She liked the symbolism of taking this place and occupying it. A complex that had once housed the silent weapons of information warfare did so again. But not in service to faceless nation-states and grey men in the corridors of power. Today, the war was in the hands of the disenfranchised and the betrayed.

  Something about this place brought a long-buried memory to the surface. Other people would have walked these disused, decaying corridors and only seen the patina of paint and change on them, but Madrigal looked through that. The familiar, institutional design of the buildings reminded her of the places where she had grown up.

  A seemingly endless parade of blockhouse-built military bases. Schools and gym halls, post exchanges and prefabricated homes for the families of soldiers. She remembered running through those corridors, laughing and playing. Identical spaces, built from the same kit of parts, never too different. Always familiar and safe.

  The skies overhead and the weather would change. Cold and snowy in one place. Then sandy and dry somewhere else. Warm and humid in another.

  The faces of the teachers in the schoolrooms and the other children would change as well. So would the people outside of the wire, and the languages they spoke, the signs on their buildings turning from letters she knew to strange squiggles and pictograms. All of it a great adventure for a little girl.

  And with her every time, her father in his crisp and perfect uniform, a sharply defined image bright like the illustration from a storybook. Her mother, though, more faded with time, a washed-out watercolour.

  Madrigal felt the weight of the memory starting to turn toward darker shades and tried to arrest that shift before she lost control of it. Only hurt, heartbreak and anger lay past that point.

  Her pale mother weeping, beginning her slow process of breaking apart. Her destruction would take years, and she would almost drag her daughter down too. It would take courage, in the end, to break away and let her disintegrate alone.

  And then the casket draped with the flag that they refused to open, stopping her from saying goodbye. Her father lost in the dark of one clammy, rain-whispered night. The unanswered question that would kindle a cold, slow burn.

  ‘No.’ Madrigal shut down those thoughts with a physical effort, refusing to indulge them anymore. This was not the time.

  She drew hard on the cigarette and the tip glowed cherry-red. Events will start moving quickly now, she thought. After so long, after so many years of small, incremental motions toward her goal, it would happen in a matter of days if everything went to plan.

  There were regrets, of course. Matters that had to be dealt with. So many choices made over those years. Lines crossed and unnecessary principles discarded.

  She thought about Lex. Poor, weak Lex. How sad it had made her to learn of his duplicity. He was always too inquisitive for his own good, and he had discovered more than he was meant to know about her plans for Ghost5. Without context, without understanding, he had reacted poorly.

  If he had come to me, Madrigal assured herself, we could have worked it out. She would have made it clear, if only he had not failed her by running. His death had been close, close enough to pierce her brittle armour of aloofness. Distantly, she reflected on the thought of his blood on her hands, examining the notion as if she were observing from outside herself. Madrigal could not count the number of lives her actions had ruined, but they were small things, faraway things. They didn’t connect to her. They were not, in the sense of her personal reality, tangible. But she had known Lex personally, she had invested in him. That made the regret bothersome.

  Madrigal took another pull on the cigarette and brushed a thread of copper-coloured hair out of her eyes, losing herself in the view over the dark woods. She dismissed the thought with purposeful finality. Lex wasn’t the first she had been forced to leave behind. He would not be the last.

  Boots clanked on the rusted metal stairs behind her, and she glanced over her shoulder as Erik approached, carrying a tablet and a comms rig. His hard, eternally glaring eyes locked on to her like gunsights, the dark umber of his face lost in the shadows. Madrigal was in her late forties, which meant Erik was young enough to be her son, although that hadn’t prevented them from sleeping together a few times over the last year. He had an athlete’s physique and the stamina to match, but it had been a machine-like process, all function and no joy to it. More recently, there simply hadn’t been the opportunity. They had too much to do, too many other diversions that were far more engaging than mere sex.

  ‘Is it time?’ she asked, but of course it was. Erik was German and he was flawlessly precise, utterly unaware of what a cliché that made him. She wandered inside the sphere and out of the breeze as he set up the gear, unfolding a thick satellite antenna to aim it at the cloudless sky.

  ‘We have word from Andre,’ he told her as he worked. ‘Lex’s gear has arrived by courier from Malta. They took everything of note from the hotel room and the corpse. He will bring it up later tonight.’

  ‘What are the others saying about Lex’s disappearance?’

  He shrugged. ‘Some are confused. Most don’t care. But Pyne talks about it a lot. She doesn’t understand why he ran.’

  ‘Don’t let them focus on it,’ Madrigal said firmly. ‘Keep them occupied. Pyne’s skills are useful but she’s easily distracted. There could be complications if people start pulling at loose threads.’ She sat down on a steel box in the middle of the empty space. ‘As for Lex’s gear . . . Is the flash drive there?’

  Erik nodded once. ‘Our new friends will have made a clone image of the drive’s contents before they sent it to us,’ he noted.

  ‘They will,’ echoed Madrigal. ‘Bureau 121 and their cohorts in the Lazarus Group are good, but they won’t be able to make use of that data on their own.’ She smiled briefly. ‘Otherwise, why would they need us?’

  He paused. ‘Why do we need them?’

  She shot him a warning look. ‘You know the answer to that question. The partnership grants me access to resources that I can’t get on my own.’

  ‘Not true,’ said Erik, eyeing her. ‘We could do this without them. Agreed, it would take longer, but—’

  ‘I’ve waited long enough!’ she spat, crushing the cigarette against the floor in a flurry of annoyance. ‘It’s taken too long.’ Madrigal shook her head and the moment faded. ‘I’m sick of walking the slow road.’

  He didn’t press the point. The tablet came to life in Erik’s hands, and he set it on a section of the dome’s frame at eye level. ‘Ready to begin. I’ll leave.’

  ‘No,’ she ordered, covering her flash of anger with this small allowance of trust. ‘You stay this time. Just listen.’

  He knew enough to stand beyond the range of the tablet’s camera, and he loitered in the shadows as the complex electronics in the comms brick analysed the incoming satellite transmission and set up the masking filter.

  Presently
, an image blinked into being on the tablet screen. Before a blank backdrop sat a round-faced Asian man with olive skin and receding hair, in the same poorly tailored suit he always wore. Undoubtedly a soldier of some high rank, she surmised that he didn’t enjoy being out of uniform for these conversations. He had protruding ears that always put Madrigal in mind of a cartoon character, but the sullen glower he sported put paid to any sense of levity about him.

  ‘My officers have communicated with me,’ he said, without preamble. ‘They tell me your stray has been put down before he could compromise the project.’ His voice came tinny and harsh through the tablet’s speakers, his words tight and over-enunciated.

  ‘I’m grateful,’ she said, with a turn of the head. ‘They are as good as you said they were.’

  ‘Of course,’ replied the man. ‘It is not their efficiency that concerns me. It is yours, Madrigal. The deployment in America failed!’

  She held up a finger. ‘I beg to differ. We did our part perfectly. The mistakes were made by the Soldier-Saints, and I can’t be held responsible for their poor operational security.’ Madrigal glanced briefly at Erik. The full details of what had happened in California were still unclear, and nearly a day later San Francisco’s power grid was only partly functional. But the plan of the far-right radicals to detonate an explosive device in the city had not come to pass. ‘The third phase worked,’ she went on. ‘We paralysed a major city. With the initial test in Germany and then the Taiwan hack, we’ve had nothing but successes.’ She eyed the man on the screen. ‘Are you having second thoughts?’

  Predictably, he bristled at her suggestion. ‘When you brought us this project, you agreed that if we entered into a collaboration, certain criteria would be met. We remain . . . unsatisfied.’

  Madrigal’s tone hardened. ‘How many people lost their lives in Taipei?’ She was willing to play the role of inferior from time to time, but the man’s tone grated on her. She needed to remind him where the talent lay in this association. ‘Your people could not have made that happen. We did. And when this is over, we will have given you what you have been craving for decades. Respect.’ She leaned closer to the tablet screen. ‘I think that will satisfy you.’

  He chewed on that for a moment, and when he spoke again his tone was more moderated. ‘When will you initiate the main operation? The timetable is vague.’

  She sensed his impatience. It was a mirror of her own. ‘We’re ready for the main event, don’t fret. Your, uh, officers may have some more work, depending on how we progress from here. But soon. Very soon.’

  ‘There must be no further distractions,’ insisted the man on the screen.

  ‘I could not agree more,’ she told him, reaching for the tab to cut the connection. ‘I’ll be in touch shortly.’

  The image winked out and Erik stepped in to dismantle the gear. ‘More work,’ he said, picking up on her comment. ‘More loose ends like Lex?’

  She sighed, tapping another Gitanes out of the packet and into her palm. ‘He was a problem that I didn’t see coming.’

  ‘It was dealt with before it got out of control.’

  ‘Yes,’ she allowed, ‘but now we are a man short and I’m thinking about other people outside the circle who could be an issue. It might be prudent not to wait for the next problem to occur.’

  ‘You are talking about Dart.’ He gave her a level look. ‘You think he’s a liability? He has everything he wants. Our deal with him is over and done.’

  Madrigal shrugged, flicking on a wavering flame from her lighter. ‘Is it?’ She lit and took a drag on the fresh cigarette. ‘Then call this being prepared.’

  *

  ‘Kara left Marc twisting in the wind? In the middle of a goddamn mission?’ Unconsciously, Lucy’s hands contracted into fists. ‘He could have been killed out there!’ She stood up from the conference room table and walked to the frosted-glass window, glaring out over the Monaco skyline and the bay beyond.

  ‘Quite,’ said Delancort. ‘Fortunately for him, Dane managed to make his escape, and after Kara cut off communication with him, we were able to re-establish a link and set up an extraction. It is unclear if her intentions were to leave him to fall into the hands of the Maltese police, or to the mercies of Wetherby’s killers.’

  Lucy shot Delancort a look. ‘You think she’d deliberately do that?’

  ‘I have learned that the world we move through seldom has any firm truths in it. People change to fit their circumstances, or they are eventually forced to reveal the reality of themselves. I think we have seen Kara’s mask fall from her face.’

  Lucy found she didn’t have a reply to that. Kara Wei had always been difficult for her to get a handle on, even though she had considered her a friend. Lucy suspected that the dry, petite Chinese American woman was on the autism spectrum somewhere, better at handling the rigid structures of computer code and technical hardware than parsing social cues and dealing with human beings. But still, she found it hard to believe that Kara had so vague a connection with other people that she could intentionally cut someone off and leave them in harm’s way. Marc was capable of looking after himself, sure, she knew that. But Kara’s actions set Lucy’s teeth on edge.

  ‘We are attempting to track her movements,’ Delancort went on, ‘but as of now, we have no firm leads and no sense of her ultimate purpose. In light of this, I have advised Solomon to keep Rubicon at secure status, until we can be sure Kara’s actions are not part of a concerted move against the company.’

  Lucy gave a grim nod. ‘Given the access she’s had . . . Damn, she could have got into any of the company servers, downloaded files or uploaded a virus . . .’ The more she considered the possibilities, the worse they were. ‘Kara betrayed us . . .’ When Lucy finally said the words out loud, it made the notion permanent and real. The last embers of sympathy she held for the other woman faded as her sniper’s mindset reasserted itself. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Solomon is talking to the board of directors. He’ll want to brief you privately when that’s over.’

  There was an unspoken inference in Delancort’s words, but neither of them acknowledged it. ‘I’ll be ready,’ she said, after a moment.

  A blurry figure formed behind the glass door before it abruptly slid open. Carrying his laptop under one arm, Marc peered into the room and found Delancort at the table. ‘Good, you’re here . . .’ He took a step in, ignoring any protocol, and then caught sight of her. A brief but honest smile crossed his face. ‘Lucy . . .You okay? I saw the news about San Francisco, was that—?’

  ‘That was,’ she said with a wan nod. ‘Malte and me had a little trouble.’ Then she shook that off, feeling the slow burn of her previous anger return. ‘Delancort filled me in on this shit with Kara.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Marc seemed to remember why he had arrived. ‘About that.’ Without preamble, he took a seat and opened up the computer, his fingers clattering across the keyboard.

  ‘We were in the middle of a conversation,’ Delancort began, but Marc paid no attention to him.

  Panels appeared on the opaque walls, displays opening like windows into streams of text and computer code as Marc sent information through the table’s wireless pickups to screen-circuits concealed in the glass. ‘So, long story short, I broke the encryption on the mesh-drive from Wetherby’s body,’ he told them. He glanced at Delancort. ‘She knows who that is, right?’

  ‘I brought her up to speed on your unauthorised jaunt to Malta, oui.’ Delancort’s brow furrowed. ‘How did you crack the protection so quickly?’

  ‘I’ve been working on it for the last ten hours straight.’ Marc eyed him. ‘Probably drunk my own body weight in coffee and Red Bull. Plus, I still have a server full of GCHQ icebreaker programs from my days at Six and I am really good at this,’ he said, as if it was obvious. He took a breath. ‘Anyway. I found something serious on the drive. It’s not just data, it’s a piece of software. An executable attack program.’ Marc spoke quickly, falli
ng over his words to get the information out. ‘Don’t worry, it’s dormant. Like a gun that’s not loaded. At first I wasn’t sure what I had here, I mean, it’s very high-spec. Not the kind of code some Lulzsec wannabe could put together, more advanced even than a hacker team like Ghost5 could build. I’m talking about a nation-state level of sophistication. But when I took a look into the base code I started seeing elements I recognised . . .’

  ‘Wetherby was gonna traffic a digital weapon?’ Lucy was vaguely familiar with cyberwarfare protocols from her time in Special Forces, but only in the places where they had crossed over with her own, more kinetic brand of havoc.

  ‘He put up some good firewalls on the drive but it was quick and dirty job,’ Marc explained, the explanation tumbling from him in a rush. ‘Formidable, but not impregnable. I mean, his Interpol jacket said his expertise was as a red team raider, all about the act of penetrating digital security. A wall-breaker, not a wall-maker, yeah?’ He took a breath. ‘But anyway. I got in. I got in and I found . . .’ She saw him lose momentum, like a runner faltering in their steps. ‘I know what it is, Lucy. I know it because they stole it out from under us! And now here it is, years later, right in front of me!’

  ‘Slow down, hoss,’ she said, walking back to look down at the screen in front of him. ‘You’re skipping whole chapters, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  Marc made a physical effort to reel it in and re-frame his thoughts. ‘What I’m talking about is Arquebus. I mean, I never thought I’d see it again . . .’

  ‘Arquebus,’ repeated Delancort. ‘A sixteenth-century matchlock rifle. Like a musket.’

  ‘That’s the code name,’ Marc explained, ‘for a multi-vector worm program designed to act against compromised systems, enemy networks, embedded infrastructure targets, the works.’

  Lucy watched a pane of dense command text scrolling down the wall-screen. ‘I don’t want to ask how you know what that is.’

  Marc let his hands drop off the keyboard. ‘I know because I helped to write it. Back when I was working for British Intelligence’