Shadow Read online

  A string of high-pitched beeps sounded out and Marc flattened himself against the dividing wall, letting his stolen stun prod slip out of his sleeve and into his grip. In the other office, he heard the tinny buzz-buzz of a ringtone and then a woman’s voice, muffled by distance and encryption.

  “What is it?”

  “Was he happy?” It was the American on the other side of the wall. The agitation Marc had heard in his voice minutes before was now subsumed into a needy almost-whine. “I mean, I dunno, he cut me off and—”

  “Is he ever happy?” The words were thick with static, but Marc could pick out a polished French accent. “Do not shit yourself, Ticker. The video was perfect.”

  “It wasn’t easy with this short turn-around.”

  “You’ll need to be faster with the next one.” Marc heard the American—Ticker, she called him—walking in circles. “You have four more days to iron out any problems. Make the most of it.”

  Four days. The deadline could mean anything, but Marc guessed it wouldn’t be good.

  “I’ll be in the air for half of that,” Ticker complained. “I hate flying.”

  “Just get moving. You’ve been there too long, and Rubicon has people in Singapore now, sniffing around. You need to be gone before they get a clue.”

  Marc stiffened as he heard the woman say the name.

  What do they know about us?

  It wasn’t much of a stretch to figure that the black masks had their local talent keeping an eye on MaxaBio, and that they had observed the SCD team’s arrival. There was even the possibility of an insider working for the Singapore police force to consider. But Malte and everyone on the team had been well trained in the art of losing tails, so Marc didn’t think that they were blown, not yet.

  This conversation would be going a whole different way if she knew we were already here.

  “I’m working on it,” said Ticker. “What about our pickup?”

  “They are on station. But they won’t stick around forever, so don’t keep them waiting. Take what you need, leave the rest…” Marc heard a cruel smirk in the woman’s voice. “And don’t forget to wrap up warm.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  The pitch of the man’s voice changed suddenly as the phone beeped off, unexpectedly coming closer. Before Marc could react, the door to the other office swung open and Ticker came striding in, jamming the phone in his pocket and muttering angrily to himself.

  He was three steps into the room before he realized he wasn’t alone, but Marc was already swinging up the prod to a ready position, aiming the metal tines at the other man’s chest.

  Ticker spun, saw the flicker of bright blue electricity at the end of the stun baton and held up his hands.

  “Easy there, pallie. Don’t do nothing stupid.”

  The man’s faux-tough-guy manner made Marc’s lip twist in annoyance.

  “You’re going to talk to me or you get lit up,” he snarled.

  “Sure, man, sure…” Ticker tried to back away, but Marc moved with him, close enough that he could jam the prod into the man’s torso in an instant. “You’re Rubicon, right?”

  He ignored the question and countered with one of his own.

  “Where are the Lams?”

  Ticker’s face betrayed his intention to drop a reflex denial, but he must have caught the look in Marc’s eyes, because he thought better of it. Instead, he tried on a callous sneer.

  “You take a look in the van yet?” Marc’s expression told him the answer, and he snorted. “Then I guess you know already.”

  Marc closed the distance, thumbing the prod’s trigger stud, and the arc across the tines crackled loudly.

  “Where is Ji-Yoo Park?” he demanded. “Where are the bioprinters?”

  A slow, oily smile spread across Ticker’s face.

  “You don’t know jack, do you? Ha!” He leaned back. “Oh, we sent the gear where it’s gonna do the most good, count on that. You’ll see it on the news, just wait a little.”

  Ticker’s shit-eating grin and his hateful disregard for the Lams made Marc want to jam the baton into the guy’s belly, make him scream and piss himself. But he reeled that fury back in and nodded toward the workbench.

  “No problem. I’ll peel it out of your laptop. Won’t be hard. I mean, what kind of pillock leaves his machine unlocked, eh?”

  The grin on Ticker’s face faltered.

  “You’re welcome to try. My shit’s tighter than Fort Knox! Touch the wrong thing and everything burns.”

  Marc gave him a level look. If this guy wanted to engage in some hacker dick-swinging, he was happy to oblige.

  “Let me guess, you’re using 2–5–6 symmetric encryption, yeah? ’Cos you don’t look like the imaginative type.”

  “Fuck you, limey,” Ticker said hotly. “Custom quad block cipher,” he added, with a beat that sneer.

  Marc gave an exaggerated shrug.

  “Oh. That’s nice. It’ll give me time to put a brew on while I crack it like an egg.”

  “Kiss my—”

  Ticker never finished the sentence, as Marc saw his eyes dart to the right, clocking something in the open doorway to the other office.

  Marc made a rapid pivot to meet another man who had crept up silently behind him, brandishing a Taurus semi-automatic in one hand. The gunman drew up fast and his pistol rose in a blur of motion, but Marc was already reacting and struck out wildly, jabbing the tip of the stun baton into the closest target—the gunman’s shoulder joint.

  The prod discharged with a sizzling snarl and the gunman cried out. Some misfiring nerve in his arm jerked and he pulled the trigger, firing a round into the concrete floor that screamed away in a ricochet. Even with the ceaseless thud-thud-thud of the nightclub’s music from over their heads, the shot echoed loudly across the basement.

  “Get this prick!” Ticker shouted at the top of his lungs, sprinting for the other door, snatching up the offending laptop as he ran. “In here! Shoot him, shoot him!”

  Marc clubbed the gunman across the face with the length of the baton and knocked him back, before hitting him again in the chest for another full-on discharge. The man thrashed and howled as the voltage crashed through him, losing his gun and collapsing against a desk into a twitchy heap. Marc left his would-be assailant gasping and retching, stooping to snatch up the Taurus that had skittered across the floor.

  The action saved his life. The grimy windows and prefab walls of the office space erupted into a storm of glass and fiberboard, as the Triad goons out in the basement proper took Ticker’s orders literally and opened up on the room.

  The dazed gunman lost the top of his head to a stray round that killed him instantly. Marc threw himself flat on the floor as a spray of bullets turned the stale air into a storm of cordite and lead. Swearing a blue streak, swarming forward on his forearms and knees, he made for the far door as quickly as he could move.

  * * *

  Lucy heard the first shot and dropped down low, aiming in the direction of the discharge through the gaps in the metal storage racks. On the far side of the basement, she saw the Triad goons reacting, scrambling up from the folding chairs where they had been sitting, in their rush knocking over a makeshift table piled with beer bottles and mah-jong tiles.

  The guns came out, the men pulling their weapons as they advanced in the direction of the office cubicles. Lucy flicked off the 1911’s thumb safety and pulled it in close to her chest, but in the next second she heard a man yelling and then saw the dark-haired guy from the kill room sprinting toward a fire exit, hauling a laptop computer under his arm.

  The goons didn’t hesitate, firing wildly into the office space that he had just left. If Marc was in there, he was about to get chewed to bits.

  Lucy aimed down the pistol’s iron sights and made a split-second tactical evaluation. The Triad shooters were oblivious to her presence and she had a good angle on one of them; she could take him out of play with a hit to his center mass. A second man was a less defin
ite target, a 70–30 hit or miss, and then there were half a dozen more. She needed to mess with all of them at once, not just one or two.

  Hanging from an iron support pillar was the fat crimson cylinder of a pressurized fire extinguisher. Not exactly a grenade, but close enough in a pinch. Lucy turned her aim toward the body of the canister and let off a single round.

  The bullet over-penetrated and the extinguisher leaped off the pillar, spewing great white plumes from the holes punched through it. Clouds of chemical vapor doused the Triad goons, sending them back in disarray.

  Lucy was already running for the wrecked office cubicle as the choking retardant gas seared her throat, and she almost collided with Marc as he dashed out into the open.

  “Which way?” he shouted.

  The Brit had to be talking about the American.

  “There!”

  She pointed with her gun and he set off in that direction, barely breaking stride to yank at the red T-bar switch of a fire alarm as he passed by it.

  A clattering old bell-ringer spun up, and the alarm began to sound in earnest. Upstairs in the nightclub, the drinkers and the dancers would have their revels cut short as the warning circuit shut off the music rig. Creating some disorder was the best chance of them getting out alive.

  Hell, by now I should know, she thought, it’s a Marc Dane signature move.

  They crashed through the half-open fire door together and out on to a wide loading ramp that led straight to the water. Lucy saw the dark-haired guy vault off a nearby jetty into the back of a half-cabin motorboat stacked with gear cases, and cast off.

  “Printers are gone!” Marc yelled. “Need his laptop!”

  “Copy.”

  Lucy skidded to a halt and leaned into a modified Weaver stance, firing off another round toward the stern of the vessel. It cracked off the hull, close enough to make the target dive into the gunwale, but not enough to stop the boat from leaving.

  With the growl of a hard-pressed engine, the motorboat bucked against the low swell and zoomed away, curving out from the dock and into the midnight blue of the starlit bay.

  “There’s a RIB here,” called the Brit, pointing to another moored-up craft. “Fire it up!”

  He ran to the cleats on the jetty and pulled away the ropes.

  Lucy put her stolen .45 in the back of her jacket and leaped aboard the rigid inflatable boat. A standing podium in the middle of the orange-hued RIB held the controls and luck was on their side; the starter key was dangling from the steering wheel on a fluorescent tether. The motor turned over at the first try and as Marc scrambled aboard, she rammed the throttle bar as far forward as it would go.

  The RIB gave her a little bronco and then shot forward like a stone skimming over the surface of a pond. Fans of salt spray came up over the boat’s bullet nose, and she leaned into it, carving a zigzag course out into open water.

  “Where’s he at?” she called.

  “Looking…”

  Marc sat low toward the RIB’s bow, resting in the curve of the hull, scanning the dark bay opening up in front of them.

  In the middle distance across the water, the vast industrial complex of Bukom Island and its little sister Sebarok lit up the western horizon, the glow of hundreds of spotlights illuminating a cityscape of massive bulk petroleum tanks. To the southeast, toward the Straits of Singapore, Lucy could make out the vast shadows of a flotilla of container ships. This was one of the most heavily trafficked waterways on Earth, and if they lost their target here without an eye-in-the-sky to back them up, the black masks would be gone for good.

  But then the Brit pointed and yelled.

  “Right there! He’s going around the island!”

  Lucy hauled the RIB around and aimed it to run parallel with the long edge of Sentosa resort island, south of Singapore proper. She caught sight of the fleeing motorboat up ahead and eased back a little on the throttle. The other vessel had a bigger engine, but it was larger and loaded with heavy gear, while the low-slung RIB traded mass for speed. Lucy had trained for deployment from military versions of this craft in her army days, so she knew how to handle one. Now she had the target in sight she was sure they could catch him. The only question was what they would do when they got there.

  Can’t exactly flash my lights and get the prick to pull over.

  Belatedly, the comms bead in her ear gave a low buzz.

  “Marc? Lucy? Does anyone copy, over?” Assim sounded nervous. “Is something on fire?”

  “Not yet, but the night is young,” said Marc, pitching his voice up over the roar of the RIB’s outboard motor.

  Malte cut in. “Where are you?”

  “We’re feet wet,” Lucy replied. “In pursuit of a HVT. Didn’t have time to loop you in.”

  “Copy, tracking high-value target,” said the Finn. “Can we assist with intercept?”

  “Negative, we’re in this on our own. Stay on comms, we may need an exit strategy.”

  “Understood.”

  Directly ahead, Sentosa’s golden sands were lit up against the evening with the overspill glow from cartoonish hotel complexes and loud beach clubs. Music drifted out over the water from open-air festivities and dance boats riding in the shallows. For a moment, it looked like the motorboat was slowing to make for the shoreline, and then suddenly the water behind the craft frothed white and it veered away, cutting toward lines of party barges and anchored yachts.

  “He saw us!” called Marc.

  “Yeah.” Lucy pushed the throttle back to maximum. “Hang on to something.”

  Marc slipped his arm around the grab-rope ringing the hull as she gunned the outboard and cut across the motorboat’s seething wake, racing to steal a march on them. Lucy had a glimpse of the dark-haired American behind the boat’s cabin, and saw light flash off a pistol in his hand. He had to know that if they started shooting in close proximity to so many civilians, the Police Coast Guard would be on them in minutes.

  Or maybe he doesn’t give a damn.

  The motorboat slalomed around a floating restaurant and side-slipped to port, veering away from the RIB. Lucy was going too fast to make a turn after them, so she pressed on, passing between a party cruiser festooned with trains of blinking bulbs and a single-mast sailing boat riding high in the swell. The shocked faces of astonished tourists flashed past so close, she could have reached out and stolen a piña colada off their tables.

  They shot through the gap between the two craft and bounced over a whitecap, but where the motorboat should have been there was nothing but empty water.

  “Where…?”

  The rest of Lucy’s question was drowned out when the other boat roared out from the shadows and slammed into the side of the RIB, striking the smaller inflatable with enough force to lift it clean out of the sea and into the air.

  The RIB rolled hard toward starboard, reaching a ninety-degree angle and threatening to pitch them into the drink, as the motorboat droned by and shot away. Marc and Lucy both threw their weight to port, leaning hard against the impact, and the RIB seemed to hover for a moment before it slapped back into the surf, righting itself with a bone-jarring jerk.

  The outboard coughed, spluttered and then finally roared as the propeller bit into the water, and they were off and moving again, but the collision had given the motorboat a lead that they would have to work to narrow. Lucy wrenched the wheel around, sending a high tail of spray up over a gaggle of well-dressed partiers watching from the sundeck of a luxury yacht. Their angry yells faded astern as the RIB sliced through wave crests, heading away from the shore and out into the main channel at speed.

  “Still got him?” she yelled.

  “Right there,” began Marc, as a blink of yellow light flashed on the motorboat and low thunder cracked over the water.

  A split second later, a bullet whirred past Lucy’s head and she ducked reflexively. It seemed that their target’s patience had reached its limit.

  Marc dropped semi-prone over the curve of the RIB’s fla
nk with his stolen pistol in both hands, aiming it in the motorboat’s direction. He cracked off a couple of shots in return, but they went wide.

  As they closed the gap, the shooter on the boat fired again, missed again. Sudden frustration burned in Lucy. Maybe it was the jet lag, maybe it was the blood she’d seen on the floor and that asshole’s callous attitude, but in that moment she wanted nothing more than to put a bullet in him.

  “For cryin’ out loud, hit that fucker!”

  “Trying!” Marc retorted.

  “I swear, you hacker nerds can’t shoot for shit.”

  “Pardon me if my range training didn’t take place on a bloody speedboat in a two-foot swell!” He pointed at the fleeing craft. “Just get us closer. He’s running for cover in the big ships out there, see?”

  She couldn’t miss them. A silent, unmoving fleet of massive supertankers, container haulers and bulk carriers lay at anchor near the Singapore coast, their running lights shimmering off the low cloud overhead. Most of the huge vessels were riding tall in the water, the rust-red of their lower hulls beneath the Plimsoll line showing that they carried little or no cargo. Their owners victims of global economic instability, some even left abandoned after corporate bankruptcy, the ships were moored here in a ghost flotilla, manned by skeleton crews serving as caretakers until the day the cash started flowing again.

  From down on the waves, the scale of the vessels was monolithic. The ships were the size of skyscrapers lying on their sides, sheer walls of steel rising up from the water.

  “He gets in among this lot, and we’ve lost him,” called Marc.

  As if they had heard the Brit’s words, the running lights on the motorboat winked out.

  * * *

  Ticker’s boat turned into a shadowy blob that lost itself in the mass of a Panamax freighter across their path. The burning sodium lights of the bigger ship destroyed Marc’s night vision, making it almost impossible to see where the smaller vessel was going, down in the darkness.