Shadow Read online

  “Let’s finish this,” said Axelle, bringing up the shotgun. “If they knew where to find us, others will too. We need to get out of here.”

  “True.” Verbeke gave a nod. “But first we need to dispose of our guests here, and that does present a problem.” He wandered past Lucy, looking her over. “One industrial accident is plausible, that can be covered up. But three?” He shook his head, and reached out to finger her ski jacket. “Too many dead foreigners draws too much attention. This wretched little island, they have so few murders here.” Then he smiled coldly. “Few killings. But a lot of unexplained disappearances. You two came here pretending to be tourists. I understand a lot of visitors arrive with a poor grasp of Iceland’s climate. That can be deadly.”

  * * *

  Marc faltered as Axelle shoved him forward, out through the doors and into the cold, biting winds. Lucy was a few steps behind, being marched at gunpoint by another of the Lion’s Roar thugs, and he glanced back, trying to catch her eye.

  “Move,” snarled the French woman.

  Ahead of them, the black Jet Ranger Marc had spotted earlier that evening was lit up and the rotors were spinning lazily. In the pilot’s seat, a skinny beanpole of a man was nervously running through a pre-flight checklist, and Marc couldn’t blame him.

  “You actually think we can fly in this?” he said, over his shoulder. “Wind shear will smash us into the ground as soon as we get above the valley!”

  That wasn’t strictly true. Marc had flown helicopters in weather worse than this, although not by choice, and weather worse than this had almost killed him when he had, but the dark skies out here were changeable and that meant dangerous. Any pilot with half a brain would stay grounded on a night like this, and that meant that Verbeke’s man clearly feared the murderous thug’s wrath more than the power of a glacier storm.

  Axelle shoved Marc into the Jet Ranger’s rear compartment, where all but one of the seats had been removed, and then climbed in up front, next to the pilot. He saw her conversing animatedly with him. The pilot nodded a few times as he snapped a set of night-vision goggles into place over his eyes. The inference was clear: No problem.

  “Yeah, we’ll see,” muttered Marc, as Lucy was forced into the back with him.

  The heavyset thug marching her up had a sawn-off shotgun that he brandished like a pistol, and he took the only seat in the back, before holstering the weapon in his belt.

  Instinctively, Marc extended his hand to Lucy and she took it. The two of them huddled together on the floor of the helicopter, partly for stability, and partly for warmth. Before they were marched from the lab, Verbeke’s men went to town stripping off their outerwear, shredding their insulating coats. Gloves and hats were gone too, so now all Marc and Lucy had was little more than their underwear and base layers. Everything windproof and weatherproof was lying in a pile back in the blockhouse along with their kit. The only thing Verbeke had let them keep were wallets and passports.

  Enough to identify our corpses, Marc thought.

  “They’re gonna take us out to the middle of nowhere and leave us for dead,” said Lucy, leaning close to be heard over the thrumming of the rotors.

  “Yeah.” Marc gave a grim nod.

  The helicopter pitched alarmingly and left the ground, skidding through the air and away from the Frigga facility. The lights in the cabin died as the pilot activated his NVGs. They powered up and away, leaving the compound behind, heading out over the barren landscape at high speed. The Jet Ranger labored against the winds, buffeted by every gust that flowed across the icy wilderness, rattling the passengers and prisoners against the inside of the fuselage.

  They flew on in silence for long minutes before Lucy spoke again.

  “You don’t have a plan for this, do you?”

  It didn’t sound like an accusation, but it might as well have been one.

  “Looks like I didn’t have a plan for anything, despite what I thought,” he said, grimacing. “Should have listened to Delancort.”

  “Park was dead no matter what we did.” Lucy’s reply was firm. “Just like her husband and the kid. Fates sealed the moment they were taken.” She stared out into the darkness. “I let her down. I let them all down.”

  The Jet Ranger fell through a series of stomach-turning drops and the rotors slapped at the wet air as the storm gave them a passing nudge. Through the windows, Marc could only see a fathomless black void, and the memory of his dream in Singapore came crashing back down on him. It took a near-physical effort for him to push the bleak sensation away and concentrate on the moment.

  “We only are going to get one shot at this.” He whispered the words into Lucy’s ear. “They’ll have to put down to kick us out. Just before that happens…”

  “Got it,” she replied. “You’ll have to deal with Axelle and the pilot.”

  Marc was going to say something more, but he heard the change in the helicopter’s engine note and saw the pilot’s hands moving on the controls. They were slowing and descending. The buffeting became worse the nearer they came to the ground, and the thug with the double-barrelled sawn-off snatched at a grab bar to hold himself steady.

  Axelle shouted a command at him and jabbed her finger at the rear compartment’s door. The helicopter’s running lights were off, so it was almost impossible to see anything outside, but Marc caught a flash of weak moonlight off acres of frosty wilderness. They were coming down on an ice field at the edge of a glacier.

  When they were less than a meter off the ground, the gun thug kicked open the door and a blast of freezing cold air filled the helicopter’s cabin. He reached out and grabbed a fist of Lucy’s undershirt, hauling her forward with a savage jerk. She let him do it, let the momentum carry her to him.

  She was going to go for the gun. Marc twisted toward the gap between the front seats. He would made a grab for the collective lever at the side of the pilot’s chair, intending to force it down to put off the pitch of the rotor blades.

  But that plan, like the others, broke apart in an instant. Axelle had a stun baton in her hand and she jabbed it in Marc’s direction, the metal tines at the tip spitting bright blue sparks. He flinched back before it could make contact, in time to see the gun thug produce one of his own and use it on Lucy.

  She let out a strangled cry and her body jerked. The helicopter rocked in another heavy gust and the thug hauled her the rest of the way. She went out of the open door and into the blackness.

  Immediately, the Jet Ranger sank into a shallow roll away from the ice field, and Marc knew what they were doing. Axelle had ordered the pilot to dump Lucy here, wherever the hell that was, and they were going to put Marc out somewhere else. Separating the pair immediately halved any chance either of them might have to survive the night.

  Marc reacted before the helicopter could gain any more height, and threw himself at the thug, putting all of his body mass behind the motion. The man wasn’t ready for it and he wasn’t strapped in, two mistakes that proved fatal. He tried to hit Marc with his baton, but it was too little too late. The weight distribution inside the Jet Ranger shifted off base and Marc fell through the still-open door, into the black night, locked in a violent embrace with the gun thug.

  The drop was almost ten meters, or so it seemed, dizzyingly long and terrifyingly short all at once. The man took the full force of the impact against the packed snow, his back giving a juddering crack as he hit. The shock resonated up through Marc’s body and threw him off. He rolled away across jagged vanes of ice that cut at him like blunt knives, coming to a halt on his back in a cauldron of pain.

  Overhead, the black helicopter was barely visible against the menacing sky, the phantom shape of some massive predatory hornet dithering over its prey. Marc lay there, every joint in his body on fire, waiting for Axelle to lean out and start shooting. But the wind clawed over him with icy needles and the aircraft reeled. The blades flickered in the darkness and the Jet Ranger left them behind. The noise of the rotors was quickly swallo
wed by the howling breeze.

  With effort, Marc rolled on to his side and pitched up into a sitting position.

  “Lucy!” He shouted her name into the dark, tasting blood in his mouth.

  “Don’t shout,” she called back, emerging out of the gloom. “Right here.”

  She was limping, favoring her left leg, and her shoulders were already twitching with the cold.

  “Y’okay?” He slurred the words and pushed himself to his feet. “Ow.”

  “Did you f-fall out?”

  “Jumped out,” he insisted. “Falling makes it sound like it was accidental.”

  He trudged over to the body of the dead gun thug.

  Lucy stared off after the Jet Ranger.

  “That did not go how I wanted.” She hugged herself. “Think I threw up a little.”

  “Help me with this pillock,” said Marc, crouching near the thug. He pressed a shaking finger against the man’s neck to be sure, but there was no pulse and the expanding patch of dark, steaming liquid beneath the guy’s head confirmed it.

  Lucy bent down with him.

  “How cold do you think it gets out here?”

  “This far north? Like minus twenty with the wind chill, or worse.”

  “Swell,” she managed. “Half an hour to frostbite, if we’re lucky. Dead before sunrise, that’s a given.”

  “That’s the spirit, think positive.” Marc’s teeth chattered as he retorted.

  “We need shelter,” she insisted, casting around in the darkness.

  In the direction the helicopter had taken, a gray field of ice extended away until it vanished in the blackness. The surface of the glacier was scarred and broken, dirty with black volcanic ash, a lethal terrain filled with bottomless crevasses that would have been dangerous to navigate in broad daylight.

  “Not that way,” Lucy concluded.

  The other direction, off the ice and on to the tundra, was only marginally less threatening. The stark and treeless plain promised no cover, no respite from the elements, and no signs of civilization.

  Marc dug through the dead man’s pockets, searching for anything they could use. He still had the sawn-off shotgun, with two shells in the pipe and six more in his pockets. The stun baton was fully charged, but good for nothing out here. When he found a radio in the thug’s back pocket, Marc’s heart briefly leaped—but the device was broken open and inert, and with no available light he couldn’t even think about trying to fix it.

  “Help me strip him,” he told Lucy.

  The thug had only a fleece and a few more underlayers that they could share out between them, and at these temperatures anything that kept the cold a bay a little longer was a good idea. Marc took the fleece, Lucy got the layer beneath and the windproof trousers. Socks were repurposed as gloves for her, and when the dead man’s cheap thermal leggings ripped, Marc wound strips of them into bindings to project his own hands.

  It was a surreal moment, leaving a barely clothed corpse on a glacier ridge, but they needed the gear more than the dead man. Marc gave the thug the finger.

  “Thanks, mate,” he added, and turned away.

  Lucy huddled in with him and the pair of them started walking, each supporting the other.

  “You were in the special forces,” he said to her. “You trained for this, right?”

  “You were Royal Navy,” she shot back. “Didn’t you?”

  “Our survival drill was mostly to do with ditching in the drink,” he told her. “This sort of thing not so … Not so much.”

  Each breath he took was rough and heavy in his lungs. He could feel the temporary sutures Lucy had put across the lacerations on his chest had split and he was bleeding there again.

  “Did teach us about hypothermia, though,” he remembered, pulling up the memory. “Starts with shivering. Then you don’t think straight. Blood pressure and heart rate drops.”

  She glared at him. “I swear to you. If I f-fucking die out here, I will haunt you. Full r-rattling chains and spook-house shit, I mean it.”

  “What makes you think you’ll freeze to death before I do?”

  The question was so ridiculous he almost laughed out loud.

  “Fair point,” she allowed. “Your skinny ass will ice up faster than mine.”

  “Cold, Lucy,” he admonished. “That’s cold.”

  “Look around.” She waved at the frost-covered landscape. “Isn’t everything?”

  THIRTEEN

  A chill was coming in off the Gulf of Sidra, kicking up loose sand that flickered around the street lights along the highway leading out of Benghazi, and along the Libyan coast. Overhead, the cloudless veil of night stole the warmth of the day, and what few people were outside stood close to doorways or around portable heaters.

  The bearded man paid a couple of kids to watch his weather-beaten Volvo, before slipping inside the shuttered garage and locking the door behind him. Although he had been born thousands of miles from this shell-shocked city on the edge of the desert, his serviceable Arabic and his resemblance to the locals meant he could pass for a native.

  The cover he was using was thin, but it wasn’t meant to be airtight. Part of the plan was that his fake identity would be discovered by the authorities. It was imperative to make sure that they left enough clues to lay the false trail and make it convincing.

  He fingered his oily facial hair and glanced around, removing papers and a broken cellular phone from his bag, then placing them in a wastebasket. He arranged them to give the impression they had been disposed of in a hurry, then made his way toward the back of the garage.

  The front half of the building had been left untouched, the elevator jacks, tool chests and storage cupboards still sitting where they had been when his partner had taken over the place from the previous owner. The old man who ran the garage lay where he had left him, wrapped in a dust cloth, the corpse half-hidden behind a pile of balding tires. Stale blood from where the fool’s throat was slit had soaked through the cloth in a dark brown patch, and a colony of flies had made it their home.

  The rear half of the garage was much changed, however. Double layers of thick polypropylene had been erected on a frame of scaffold bars, forming a box-shaped tent nested within the building’s interior. A makeshift inflatable airlock was the only way inside, and right before the entrance was an industrial shower hanging from another of the jacks, the metal head dripping water on the stained concrete.

  The bearded man’s taller partner saw him through the clear plastic and made a sharp beckoning motion. He nodded and quickly changed out of his street clothes, stepping into a waiting hazmat suit. The all-encompassing bright yellow oversuit zipped closed and he took a quick self-check before venturing inside. Any rips or tears in the suit would have deadly consequences.

  “Where have you been?” The taller man demanded an answer as soon as he came through the airlock’s inner door. “I’m almost done. This needs two pairs of hands.”

  His florid, pinkish face looked odd framed in the bug-like shape of the suit.

  “I thought it would take longer,” said the bearded man.

  “No,” his partner replied. “Once the model uploaded, it was actually quite quick. They told me how to prepare the base elements.”

  “Well, fine. I had to wait a while to get the tickets. But we’re ready to go. First plane off the ground after morning prayers.” He jerked a thumb at his bag outside, the movement exaggerated by the bulky hazmat gear. “Rome for you, I have Milan.”

  “Help me with this.”

  The tall man moved to the far corner of the tent, where the bio-printer had been set up next to a stack of car batteries. Inside the glass cube at the core of the machine, a moving tray beneath a set of delicate nozzles was in the process of retracting, mechanical armatures shifting into place to present a clear vial. The machine offered it up, waiting for them to take it.

  He hesitated. “You are sure it is safe?”

  “Of course it isn’t safe, that’s why we are wearing
these.” The other man plucked at his suit’s baggy yellow sleeve. “But once we get the payload inside the dispersal unit, there will be no more risk of exposure.”

  The bearded man gave a reluctant nod, reminding himself that his employers valued his skill set too greatly to let him perish. Already, there was a generous fee sitting in his account from their successful operation on the train in Slovakia, and that would double once this assignment was complete. On the flight to Milan he would decide how best to spend it.

  The taller man opened the glass cube with a hiss of escaping air and gingerly accepted the vial. He held it up to the light. Inside was a pinkish gel that seemed like nothing at all, but the deadly potential swirling in it was great enough to wipe out thousands.

  Now the vial was out of the machine, the bearded man was suddenly sweating. What if he had missed a tiny pinhole in the hazmat suit? Would that be enough to kill him? He scowled and shook off the moment.

  “You wanted to get this done. Stop admiring it.”

  He stooped and gathered up the delivery device, unscrewing the cap. Outwardly, it resembled a chrome thermal flask, the kind of vacuum-insulated container that could keep tea warm for hours. The innards had been stripped out and repurposed with a remote-activated aerosol dispersion mechanism, and beneath the cap there was a slot for the vial to fit into. He held it steady as the taller man slowly brought the vial over, fitting the payload into place. Finally, the cap went back on. The device was now live.

  They abandoned the tent, passing through the airlock and showering off. One at a time, they secured their used hazmat gear and bagged it. Normally, the next phase in an operation like this would be an aggressive clean-up, a floor-to-ceiling burn to leave nothing behind—but not this time.

  He put the flask inside a nondescript nylon daypack he had picked up from the morning market the day before, while scouting the target area. The taller man changed into street clothes, using a shemagh and a baseball cap to hide his Western features, then gathered up the gear that would detract from the narrative they wanted to leave in place.