Shadow Read online

  He heard more than he saw the motorboat, catching the rumble of its engine on the breeze as the craft raced toward the freighter’s stern. There was no spotlight among the RIB’s gear to use for illumination, and even if they had one, Marc would have been reluctant to use it for fear that Ticker would see them before they saw him.

  He strained to listen over the slapping of the waves against the hull of the RIB and the low rattle of the outboard. Back in his Royal Navy service with the Fleet Air Arm, Marc remembered nights like this on the deck of HMS Ocean, listening to the strange quality of sound as it carried over the sea. It could be misleading if you weren’t used to the way acoustics shifted out here.

  There.

  The drone of the motorboat’s engine lingered briefly and he pointed Lucy in the right direction. He looked, shading his eyes from the floodlights in a vain attempt to claw back some dark adaptation, and spotted a black-on-black shape cutting through the water.

  “Go, Lucy!” he called. “Get in there, give him a kick in the arse!”

  She pushed them back to top speed, racing over the waves at a high rate of knots.

  “What the hell are you doing, Dane?”

  The motorboat rose up in front of them, and they were coming at the aft quarter of it too fast to avoid hitting it. Marc gripped his pistol and braced himself for another impact.

  “Going over with a cutlass in my teeth, aren’t I?”

  The two boats struck each other and the collision was worse than before. The lighter RIB reared up and skidded noisily over the square stern of the motorboat, knocking the heavier vessel off course and into a hard list before it slipped back into the sea.

  Marc jumped as they connected, and after a sickening lurch he landed badly on the other boat, going shoulder-first into a pile of gear crates lashed to the aft deck. A juddering surge of pain exploded across his left arm and he hit hard enough that he lost his grip on his gun. Hissing with effort, he rolled over in time to see Ticker coming up the deck toward him. The other man spotted the Taurus pistol where it had fallen, and he gave it a showy kick that sent it over the side and into the water.

  “Dumbass move,” sneered Ticker, pulling his own gun from his belt.

  Marc bellowed wordlessly and leaped forward, bull-rushing Ticker before he could get the weapon clear.

  He slammed into the other man and knocked the wind from him, shoving Ticker up against a stack of crates secured to the deck with a cargo net. Ticker brought down the butt of the pistol in his hand in a hard falling strike that missed the mark, failing to hit his opponent in the temple and instead scraping across his cheekbone, tearing a gash.

  Marc felt blood flowing over his face, but he was focused totally on the metallic shape of the pistol dancing in front of his eyes. He grabbed the wrist of Ticker’s gun hand and forced it up and away, struggling to stay balanced as the deck of the motorboat yawed. He smashed Ticker’s hand against the crates over and over, and the gun went off, shots blasting up into the night sky, muzzle flares briefly strobing.

  Finally, Marc’s repeated attacks had the desired effect and Ticker lost his grip on the pistol, but before he could do anything about it, the other man brought up his kneecap and planted it with full effect in Marc’s crotch. A surge of pain shocked through him and he disengaged. Ticker took advantage and followed through with a clumsy roundhouse punch, which again did not quite connect, but did enough to send Marc reeling into a pile of equipment and black duffel bags lined up along the port side of the deck.

  The motorboat rolled as it cut around the stern of the freighter, hitting choppy water stirred by the waves lapping against the giant ship. Marc was distantly aware of Lucy and the RIB somewhere off to the side, still keeping pace with the other boat. He stumbled, ignoring the sting of seawater spray over his face, trying to pull himself up as Ticker scrambled after the fallen weapon.

  Marc’s fingers closed on the first thing that came to hand—the grip of a small carry-case—and he yanked it free as Ticker pivoted back in his direction.

  Ticker wasn’t weapons-savvy. If he had been, the man would have held his .45 pistol closer to his chest. Instead, he brandished it at arm’s length, all drama and no forethought.

  Marc had already started the carry-case on a fast arc at the end of his own arm, leaning into it, letting the mass of the object chart the course. The narrow side of it connected with the side of Ticker’s chin and there was a sickly crack as his jaw dislocated, mingling into a stifled moan of agony. The man floundered against the pitching deck.

  It was only then that Marc realized what he was actually holding on to—not a carry-case at all, but the ruggedized Kontron NotePAC laptop Ticker had been so desperate to protect. He drew it near, eyes darting around for a way out.

  Ticker was swearing violently, but his busted jaw turned his pain-laced words into incomprehensible mush. Without hesitating, he aimed the pistol in Marc’s direction and emptied the rest of the clip.

  Most of the rounds were wild, but one shot was right on target. A single .45 caliber bullet punctured the center of the laptop’s armored lid and spent its force within, turning the machine’s circuitry into splinters and shrapnel.

  For Marc, the impact was like being hit in the chest by a bowling ball covered in razor blades. The shock blew him off his feet.

  Gravity took hold and he tumbled over the side of the motorboat, into the black water. The air in his lungs blasted out in a gush of bubbles and he twisted into the undertow.

  * * *

  Lucy heard the shots and saw Marc go overboard, clutching the laptop. She had her gun in her hand and she started firing back at the motorboat, trying to land a hit on anything moving over there, but the other craft was already veering off, trying once again to extend their lead and escape pursuit.

  “Shit!”

  There was a split-second decision point where she could cut the engines and try to fish the Brit out of the water, or press on and risk letting him drown. Lucy was under absolutely no illusions that these black mask assholes were into something big, something serious, and if it revolved around Ji-Yoo Park and what she knew, one guy lost at sea wouldn’t even measure on the scales against the deaths that could result.

  But for all the lives she had taken in cold blood during her service, at a distance through the scope of a sniper rifle or striking unseen from the shadows, she couldn’t bring herself to let Marc drown out here, wounded and alone. She owed him; and for all the hard-earned armor over her soldier’s heart, she could not let herself be responsible for the death of a friend.

  Lucy pulled the throttle back to idle and the RIB slowed to a rolling halt. Snatching her spyPhone from a pocket, she used the device’s flashlight to sweep the dark waters off the bow. With the vertical wall of the freighter’s hull looming over her head, it was like looking into an abyss. In the near distance, she heard the fading mutter of the motorboat as it raced further away with each passing second.

  Then she caught sight of a tan-colored mass a dozen meters away. It was Dane, floating face down with his arms pulled close to his torso. Lucy called his name but he didn’t respond.

  She feathered the RIB’s outboard and sent it in the right direction, and as it passed Marc’s drifting form she leaned out over the bow as far as she could and grabbed handfuls of his jacket. Hauling him back and up was an effort, and as he came into the bobbing boat, she saw he was still clinging on to something like grim death—the smashed-up laptop computer.

  Peeling the handle of the busted device from his fingers, Lucy let it drop and turned Marc over. The cotton shirt he wore was plastered to his chest and it was pink with his blood. The material was shredded and torn, and the skin beneath it lacerated. Fearing the worst, she felt around for a bullet wound but came up with nothing. Marc was on the edge of consciousness, and she rolled his head aside, letting brackish water trickle out of his mouth. His pulse was thready but he wasn’t breathing. There had to be water in his lungs, and every second she didn’t do something
about it, he edged closer to slipping away.

  “Okay,” she told herself, tilting back his head and lifting his chin. “Pucker up, handsome.”

  Filling her lungs with air, she pinched shut his nose and pressed her lips to his, exhaling hard into his throat. His chest rose, but it wasn’t enough. She tried again, this time with compression against his breastbone. The dozens of oozing wounds on Marc’s chest turned her hands red and slippery, and a sudden fear gripped Lucy that she could be making it worse.

  If he has a busted rib in there, a puncture in his lung … I could lose him.

  She rejected the bleak thought and stamped down on the ember of nascent panic before it could catch.

  “Don’t you do this to me,” she growled, and started the resuscitation cycle again.

  On the second time around, muscles in Marc’s arm jerked and he twitched against the RIB’s deck. Suddenly he rolled over and retched, bringing up salt water with a noise that was half a choke, half a howl.

  Lucy pulled back to give him room and Marc sagged against the side of the inflatable boat, shaking with near-shock.

  “What…” he began, then lost the words and had to start over. “Oh bollocks. Not again.”

  Marc ran a trembling hand over his bloody face.

  “Welcome back,” said Lucy, with a weak gulp. The rescue had taken it out of her as well, and she felt the twitchy backwash of an adrenaline comedown in the tips of her fingers. “I thought you’d be…” She gasped. “Better kisser.”

  Marc gave a laugh, a slightly drunken, amazed-to-be-alive laugh that tailed off.

  “Not without … dinner and a movie first.”

  Then his gaze settled on the blasted laptop and he suddenly became animated, scrabbling to grab the wrecked machine. He hissed in pain as he snatched it back up.

  Lucy hunted around for the RIB’s first aid kit, finding a tiny travel-size one under the steering wheel.

  “Easy, tiger. You’re bleeding pretty bad.”

  “Later,” he muttered. “Need to…”

  His ragged breathing came in fits and starts as he wrenched at the broken frame of the waterlogged computer.

  Lucy could see where the device had taken a round at point-blank range, the innards of it a mess of shattered circuit boards and busted components. Marc pawed doggedly at the laptop, pulling modular sections out of it one by one and discarding them, until he seized on what he was looking for.

  “This,” he said, waving a battered solid-state hard drive in her direction, tearing wires from its connecting ports. “I think I pulled it out before any … any auto-erase.” Marc gave that faintly wasted chuckle again. “Yeah, good,” he panted, and nodded weakly toward the darkness of the distant sea.

  She sat down heavily next to him.

  “Yeah, we’re okay, I guess.”

  “Thanks for … stuff.” He was nodding woodenly, trying to smile. “I just need to … uh … you know … pass out now.”

  The nodding stopped and Marc fell silent, his head lolling forward.

  NINE

  When the lightning hit, the sound shocked through the cockpit of the Lynx with a noise like the hammer of the gods. White light, hard and searing, momentarily blinded Marc through the night-vision goggles he had been wearing, and on reflex he had flipped them up, clutching at his eyes even as he felt the world dropping away beneath him.

  Helicopters and thunderstorms are a bad mix, an instructor had once told him. Spinning rotor blades create a negative charge in the air around your bird. And lightning loves that. Comes looking for it. Out of the sky like …

  Like the hammer of the gods, yeah.

  And as something went catastrophically wrong, and the power in the aircraft turned dead, there was this moment as the crash truly began, when Marc looked out of his window and saw the deepest darkness he had ever known.

  Then they were falling, spiraling out of the sky, down toward the gray churn of the South China Sea, and he had thought to himself I didn’t join the Navy to die out here, not like this, not on a bloody training exercise—

  That was then, but this time the stricken Lynx didn’t crash into the waves, and this time there was no ocean, only a depthless, unending void.

  And Marc was trapped inside the dying helicopter, falling, falling into an ink-dark abyss that carried on forever. His chest was on fire, and his heart was hammering.

  But he wasn’t alone. His gaze drew inexorably around to find the face of a woman slumped in the seat across the cockpit. She was clad in burned-black tactical gear, at once seared raw from fire and soaked through like a drowning victim. Dark, lank hair caged an ashen face and searching eyes. Her mouth opened but no sound emerged. She was trying to tell him something. Sam. Sam was trying to tell him—

  * * *

  Marc awoke.

  It took long seconds for the dream-reality to slip off him and fade. His skin was filmed with sweat and at first it was hard to breathe. He wasn’t in any rush to close his eyes again, so he stared fixedly at the mottled ceiling above the bed, letting his heartbeat normalize, stopping himself from taking panic-breaths.

  He could almost taste the metallic seawater in his mouth, and that sense-memory threatened to trigger off a whole raft of unpleasant recollections. The exercise, the crash and the aftermath of it were a long way gone, but the moment was embedded in the center of Marc Dane, lodged in his brain like a splinter of shrapnel. The death of Samantha Green had come much later, but the shock of that moment was just as intense, as immediate as it had been on a Dunkirk dockside three years ago.

  In the helicopter crash, Marc had gone to the brink of death and somehow survived. When Sam and the rest of his MI6 OpTeam had perished in fire and betrayal, he had been the only one to survive it. When he least wanted it, the dark recall of these moments would come up and smack him around, like an old and spiteful enemy he could never escape.

  Rubicon employed a specialist in their medical team, a counselor named Benjamin, an expert in post-traumatic stress disorders. Marc had taken sessions with the man. Every active operative in the SCD did so annually, as a condition of their contracts with the company. He’d sat across from this big, burly Frenchman with a manicured mustache like an old-time circus strongman, and lied to him about how he was dealing with it. Marc suspected Benjamin knew he was covering—the guy was former Légion étrangère, and he had likely seen enough combat trauma to fill several lifetimes. But he never once called him out over the deceit.

  The searing salt taste faded but the steady burning over his chest remained. Marc winced as he sat up. He’d been stripped down to his boxers, bandaged up and left to sleep it off. He scratched at an itchy spot on the crook of his arm where a tiny scab showed someone had given him an injection. By the fuzzy sensation in his head, he guessed it was a mild sedative and something to stall any infection. Swinging his bare feet over and on to the floor, he took in the room.

  He was back at the Interlace, in one of the apartments the team had secured for their base of operations. The room was large and practically empty, except for the folding camp bed he sat on and a pile of gear arranged against a nearby wall. Cream-colored pile carpet extended away to a floor-to-ceiling window that looked out across the top of the apartment complex toward the heart of Singapore. A line of pinkish radiance on the horizon signaled that dawn was not far away, and he stood up to take a closer look.

  At the window, Marc probed the surgical tape over the cut on his cheek and the bandages taped across his chest, hissing in pain as he touched the raw areas. When Ticker had shot at him through the toughened laptop, the shock of the hit had stunned him. A jet of searing hot fragments of plastic and metal showered his torso, and then he was in the drink, struggling to stay upright. Failing, now that he thought about it.

  Lucy dragged me out of the water. I pulled the drive …

  Those moments seemed less real, blurry and untethered like the helicopter nightmare.

  Did that actually happen?

  Blinking away d
izziness, he pulled on trousers and a T-shirt from his gear bag, then padded barefoot back through the connecting apartments. He followed the soft mutter of a keyboard and a whiff of tobacco smoke into the open-plan kitchen–dining room that was their temporary command center.

  Assim looked up as Marc approached, and guiltily plucked a cigarette from his mouth and looked at it.

  “I un-quit again,” he said sheepishly. “Are you all right? I mean, you’re up, so I suppose that means yes.”

  “How long have I been out of it?”

  Marc dropped into a folding chair next to the younger man, casting an eye over the dense wall of text on the screen in front of him.

  “Eight, ten hours, I think?”

  “You been awake all that time?”

  “I don’t need much sleep,” Assim replied, with a shrug.

  Marc saw the solid-state hard drive he had rescued on the table, wired up to a buffer module that in turn was connected to Assim’s computer.

  So I didn’t dream that bit, then.

  “What’d I miss?”

  Assim’s brow furrowed in concern.

  “Marc, you don’t have to get straight back into this…” He was going to say more, but Marc waved the comment away. “Okay. All right then.” He pivoted the laptop screen so they could both see it. “Bloody awful housekeeping, if you ask me. Whoever this belonged to, they left their drive contents looking like a rubbish tip.”

  “Yeah, I got that sense from the bloke.” Marc studied the display. The hacker was running a cluster analysis. “So you pulled—what? Communications metadata off this?”

  “Money transfers,” Assim confirmed. “Lots of them.”

  Down the corridor, a toilet flushed and the bathroom door opened. Lucy, now dressed in a baggy gray sweatshirt and matching tracksuit trousers, wandered into the room and gave him a sustained frown.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Like crap,” Marc admitted, and he tried to laugh it off, but the action made his chest sting and he winced. “Where’s Malte?”