Shadow Read online

  Marc ran the briefing on the move, keeping everyone on comms as he looked through the slim intel package he had assembled on the location where the lo-jack trackers were pinging. Dredging the web for whatever he could find about the target, Marc left Assim to work at finding a way into local traffic cameras soon after he arrived back at the apartment.

  “It’s not a warehouse,” Marc explained. “At least, not anymore.”

  On the screen of his weather-beaten laptop, he showed her a shaky YouTube video of a rave party in full swing. Hundreds of sweaty Singaporeans and drunken Westerners were bounding around under strobing lights and laser displays, while a DJ in a face mask made of glowing LEDs nodded along to a thudding bass beat rippling with electronica.

  “Apparently, pop-up nightclubs are this season’s new in thing,” he went on. “Reclaimed industrial spaces are where the hip kids are getting their jollies.”

  “Did you just use the word ‘hip’ unironically?”

  Lucy paused in the middle of applying a cherry red lipstick and gave him a withering look from across the sedan’s back seat.

  Marc shrugged. “What do I know? I’m more of the rock-metal type.” He made a devil-horns sign with one hand to underline the point. “These dancey tunes aren’t really my jam.”

  “Whatever.” Lucy leaned in and examined some stills of the building’s exterior. “So where are we at?”

  “Target location is on the far side of the West Coast Highway,” Assim volunteered, “sandwiched between the Pasir Panjang cargo terminal, and Labrador Park.”

  “It has that whole fake-dangerous, edgy-urban feel to it,” Marc went on. “I found a few pearl-clutching news items in the mainstream press talking about the club, usual screeds crying over moral turpitude and the fear of drugs and violence. Not that the police have had much actual evidence of that.”

  “Gotta be there, though,” said Lucy. “Even if they’re keeping it on the down-low, clubs always have mob connections, no matter what city you’re in. Which syncs up with the Lam abduction. Whoever the black masks are, they’d need some local contacts for logistics.”

  She pulled on a shiny, wet-effect PVC jacket, adjusting her look in the reflection from the windows.

  “It’s a good base to operate from.” Marc tapped a map on the screen. “Decent transport links. Close to the water and the highway. Straight run in either direction, east to the airport or west across the bridge into Malaysia.”

  Lucy nodded. “And the club makes good cover for out-of-towners coming and going.”

  “I’m in the cameras at the intersection across the street,” said Assim. “Big queue outside. It’s a popular place.”

  “What about the building itself?”

  Marc looked up as they turned a corner.

  “Is it unusual for a rave-club warehouse to have a stand-alone security system with no external hard lines?” Assim asked the question and then answered it. “It bloody is. And add to that, the fact that the building’s architectural plans are missing from the city record, along with those of several others owned by the same private concern.”

  “Triad front,” said Lucy, with a firm nod. “Called it. The Singapore cops might say they pushed the gangs out of the city, but where there’s money, there’s vice. They just hide it better these days.”

  “There’s definitely a lower level to the warehouse,” said the Saudi. “There are loading ramps leading down to secured doors. Given the attenuation of the tracker signals, I think that’s where the bioprinters are being kept. But I can’t give you any lead on how to get in there or what you might find.”

  The car began to slow, and Marc folded his laptop shut.

  “Assim raises a good point. There could be anything waiting for us.”

  “That’s what we’re here to find out,” Lucy replied, as Malte brought the sedan to a halt at the curbside. “We locate the printers, figure out our next move from there.”

  “Metal detector at the entrance,” noted the Finn.

  “So no weapons.” Lucy shot Marc a look. “We’ll have to—”

  “Improvise,” he finished, and opened the car door.

  She stalked past him, the ice-white high heels she wore click-clacking over the pavement, swinging her shoulders with catwalk confidence. Marc pulled his jacket tight and fell in behind, trying to project an air of casual indifference.

  Assim had been right about the queue. The rain had stopped, but despite the heavy clouds overhead threatening more of the same, a line of people had come out in force in the hopes of getting in. The queue extended along the front of the converted warehouse, everyone in it cast in blue and pink thrown from a neon sign fixed to the exterior. The club’s name was SKORE, rendered in a faux-80s style font, and to Marc’s eyes the place looked like the backdrop for a glossy Cantopop music video.

  Lucy ignored the faces gathered behind the velvet rope and passed right by the two thickset bouncers in their black bomber jackets and earpiece radios, without slowing her pace. They eyed her as she entered the dark, pulsing pit of the doorway, but neither raised a hand to halt her.

  Not so with Marc, though. One of the men pivoted into his path and he had to stop dead.

  “Get in line,” said the bouncer.

  “I’m with her,” Marc replied, but the words sounded lame coming out of his mouth. Lucy had already vanished inside and he was still out here in the chill evening air.

  “I have to repeat?” The bouncer pointed at the queue with a thick-fingered hand.

  Marc pondered pushing the point, but he wasn’t ready to start trouble thirty seconds into the operation.

  “No,” he said at length, then scowled and wandered away. He pulled a Bluetooth micro-bead from his pocket and inserted it in his ear. “You’re going to have to teach me how you do that.”

  The tiny bone-induction radio carried his words to the rest of the team.

  “Do what?” He could barely pick out Lucy’s voice from the rumble of the music. “Shit, this is…” He lost the rest of her words in the noise.

  “Loud,” offered Assim helpfully. “I think she said loud.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Marc sniffed, going to his spyPhone. From the corner of his eye, he saw Malte guiding the black sedan into a parking spot, putting the car into a position from which they could make a fast exit, if they needed to. “If audio isn’t working, let’s try smoke signals…” He tapped out a quick message and sent it.

  Sound no good. Text only?

  A moment later he received a reply—a crying sad-face icon and then a thumbs-up symbol.

  “I am not going to talk to you in emojis,” Marc said to himself, with a sigh. He sent another message.

  Find lower level entrance.

  The next icon that appeared was a hand making the sign of the horns.

  * * *

  Lucy bought a colorful, overpriced drink and wandered in a way that would have seemed aimless to the untrained eye, snaking around the edge of the dance floor as the driving beat made the air hum. She kept one hand near her pocket, ready for the buzz of her smartphone when a new message came in, and scanned the crowd.

  It was easy to pick out the obvious class structure at play in the club. The regular fun-lovers were thronging the floor, getting their kicks grinding and bouncing off one another. A ring of wide booths at ground level was where the cool kids sat, the ones too nonchalant to actually dance. She saw locals and not-so-locals with bottles of liquor or champagne, engaged in their own little dramas and show-offs. They weren’t who she wanted.

  Built into what had once been the warehouse’s service walkways and elevated platforms was the territory of the VIPs. Hemispheres of plastic ringed by plush sofas, each connected by a gantry to a central axis, allowed those with the money and the influence to sit up there above the gyrating crowd and pretend they were the gods. Someone had sensibly rigged a near-invisible mesh net beneath the upper level to catch any dropped bottles or drunk idiots that might slip over.

  From down
below, Lucy could see a few rich kids, but mostly it was hatchet-faced men in bulky suits up there, all of them attended by a parade of hot girls and younger guys with the hungry look of wannabe thugs.

  “Could you be any more Triad?” she said aloud, her words absorbed by the music.

  Those were the men in charge, there was no doubt about it, but the SCD were not here to mess with them. Lucy’s target was elsewhere.

  She swung away, fending off the enthusiastic advances of a local whose pinprick pupils told her he was high as a kite. Lucy reached down and found a nerve point in his thigh that made his leg instantly go dead. She was gone before he collapsed on to a bar stool, waving mournfully after her as if he was bereft at her departure.

  Lucy made her way through a set of heavy swing doors into a corridor that led to the restrooms and service areas. Back here, the music was still loud, but not so much that you couldn’t hear yourself think over it. Further on, the corridor branched with the restrooms to the right, and she hesitated at the intersection, where a sign in three languages warned ONLY EMPLOYEES PAST THIS POINT on the left-hand side.

  Pretending to stop at a mirror on the wall to check her make-up, she observed another suited guy standing guard next to a door protected by a secure keypad. He glanced her way once, but he seemed more interested in chatting up a leggy Malaysian girl with bleached-blonde tresses that reached to her butt. She looked for a security camera, but didn’t see one. Clearly, the club’s owners thought that the guard on the door was enough.

  Lucy slipped out her phone and snapped a few captures of the door, sending them to Marc and the others.

  That’s it, he texted back. Next move?

  W8-1 was what she sent back: wait one.

  Lucy hung around for longer than she dared, and in the mirror she could see the guy on the door becoming more interested in her as the seconds ticked by. Then a light on the secure keypad flashed green and the door opened.

  Exactly the man she wanted stepped through, exchanging a few words with the guard. In his forties, she estimated, with the kind of rough-hewn look sported by ex-boxers or cops who were too long in the tooth, he was most likely a mid-level enforcer, what in the old days the Triads would have called a “Red Pole.” The East Asian gangs were more lax than they used to be when the Triads were at the height of their powers, but some of the old ways endured. Ranks and positions were based on the numerology of the I Ching, and the Red Poles carried the number 426 to signify their seniority.

  The man was stone-cold sober, which meant he was here tonight for work and not play. As he made his way past her, Lucy saw him fiddle with a packet of cigarettes and then put them away again. No one smoked indoors in this town, not even the criminals. The man started pecking obstinately at a smartphone with one finger and she smiled. This was getting better by the second.

  Angling her phone, she used the mirror to catch a couple of shots of the older guy. A moment later, the phone vibrated in her hand and she saw the next message from Marc.

  Anything yet?

  The guard looked up at her as the Red Pole vanished into the crowd, and she melted away after the other man.

  “Oh yeah,” she said to herself, formulating a quick response.

  * * *

  “Guy in a tuxedo, a cigarette, a key.” Marc looked at the icons and sighed. “Is she deliberately trying to make this hard or what?”

  “She doesn’t have time to write you a sonnet,” said Assim.

  Marc’s retort was cut off as his phone buzzed again. This time Lucy had sent him a snapshot of a man in a suit, caught in the low light of the nightclub’s interior.

  “Who’s this guy?”

  He had barely uttered the question when the same man exited the club, nodded to the bouncers and wandered over to the outdoor smoking area. Marc watched him light up and start to fiddle with his phone.

  “He’s got a key?” said Assim, seeing the same data mirrored to his screen.

  “Actually, he’s going to be our key.”

  Marc smiled and tapped out two icons in reply.

  * * *

  Lucy bought another drink at the bar—a club soda this time—and sipped at it as the Red Pole walked back past her, a whiff of fresh tobacco trailing behind him as he made his way toward the corridor to the rear. He was still tapping at his phone.

  Marc picked his way through the crowd to her and she gave him a nod. He leaned close, raising his voice to shout into her ear.

  “Good eye, there.” He waggled his spyPhone in his hand. “Should do the trick.”

  She turned her face to reply to him.

  “Did you sneak in through the ladies’ room?”

  He shook his head. “Got in the old-fashioned way. Bribed the bouncer with a fifty.”

  Lucy nodded. “So what the hell does this mean?” She showed him her own phone screen, and his earlier reply—two icons, a cellular phone and a dolphin. “Is this like a weird come-on, or something?”

  “Watch and learn,” he replied, and beckoned her to follow him.

  She trailed Marc into the back corridor, careful to put the Brit between her and the guard, who was still engaged with the leggy blonde. He nodded at the other woman.

  “Can you run some interference for me?”

  “No problem.”

  Lucy pitched into a purposeful swagger that took her straight toward the blonde, while Marc slipped around to the secure door. The guard saw her coming and reacted, standing up from where he was slouched at the wall.

  “Bitch, what you think you doin’?” snarled Lucy, channeling her best faux-Ghetto accent.

  The blonde woman spun around in time to get a face full of soda. The drink spilled down the front of her low-cut dress and she squealed, stamping on the spot like an angry toddler.

  “Get the hell away from my boy!” added Lucy, and the blonde bolted for the ladies’ room.

  “You siao, hah? You are insane woman!” cried the guard, his hand clutching at a touch-taser in his belt. “I don’t know you! Step off!”

  The man saw movement from the corner of his eye as Marc came up behind him and he tried to twist around, but the Brit was too quick for him, putting a knee-kick into his back.

  He crumpled. Marc got an arm around his throat and pulled tight. The guard tried to struggle, but Lucy was there to grab his arms. In a few seconds the man was gasping as Marc put his other hand up and forced his head forward, cutting off the flow of blood to his brain. On a five-count, the guard’s eyelids fluttered and the strength dropped out of him as he lost consciousness. He fell back, almost slamming Marc into the wall, and the Brit let him go.

  “I guess you were paying attention with that Krav Maga,” said Lucy.

  “I’m out of practice,” Marc admitted, pulling out his phone. “One second. Be ready to peg it if this doesn’t work.”

  “Still waiting for the dolphins,” she noted.

  He worked a series of apps on the glassy black face of the spy-Phone and held it to the electronic lock. It gave a series of quick beeps, the same kind that a touch-tone keypad would emit, and the lock light flashed green.

  “Thank you, Flipper,” he muttered, and nudged open the door.

  The thin slice of the space beyond revealed a shabby concrete corridor ending in a set of metal steps that descended to the lower level. Marc grabbed the unconscious guard, hauling him over the threshold as Lucy followed. She secured the door behind them. No one had seen them, and the doused blonde was still in the toilet.

  “Storeroom here.”

  Marc nodded toward a wide janitorial closet a few steps away. Together, they manhandled the guard inside and Lucy found a role of duct tape to serve as bindings and a gag.

  As they secured the man, she shot Marc a look.

  “Okay, so how’d you do it? You clone that other guy’s phone or something?”

  “I used a Dolphin Attack,” he explained. “You know how they communicate, yeah? Ultra-high-frequency clicks and whistles.”

  “I watch
Animal Planet,” she said, with a nod.

  “Most smartphones have voice recognition software built in, same as those talking home assistants. You say it, they do it. Call Mum. Open web browser. Play music. That kind of thing.”

  “Always thought it was a shade creepy myself…”

  “Good instinct, because they’re also very insecure. See, what most people don’t know is that the microphones that pick up your voice commands are not just sensitive to the sound of speech, but frequencies way higher than that. Right up into the UHF, beyond the range of human hearing.”

  “So what? You’re telling me Flipper could order a ton of shrimp on my cell and I wouldn’t know it?”

  He nodded. “Hence the name. Outside, while that other bloke was having a smoke, I sent an inaudible UHF command to his phone that told it to connect straight back to Assim in the apartment. He injected some hijacker malware, and turned the phone into a short-range monitoring device…” Marc showed her his spyPhone. “When that guy entered the code for the door, his phone heard the tones—”

  “And so did you. That’s real clever, Cousteau.”

  He shrugged. “It got us through the door. We still have to find those bioprinters.”

  Lucy grabbed the guard’s touch-taser and tossed it to Marc.

  “No heroics down there, Dane,” she said firmly. “I mean it. If it goes south, we get out. Cut and run.”

  “Okay,” he said, without weight.

  “Assim, Malte. You read me?” She tapped the comms bead in her ear.

  “Yes,” said the Finn. “Barely.”

  “You’re patchy,” said the hacker. “Breaking up.”

  “We’ll stay radio-silent unless the shit hits the fan,” Lucy went on, and took a deep breath, pausing to snap the quick-release fittings in her high heels that turned them back into flat shoes. “If we’re not out in twenty minutes, call it scrubbed and exfil without us.” She glanced at Marc. “You and me’ll split up, we can cover more ground that way. Copy?”