Shadow Read online

  “His condition is as expected. Some malnutrition. Scar tissue and internal damage from years of beatings. But he has strength. Lesser men would have died.”

  “How is he taking to his newfound liberty? Is he grateful to his rescuer?”

  It came as no surprise to Saito that Glovkonin could find a way to make this moment about him. The Russian sat forward on the overstuffed leather sofa, still toying with the glass in his hand.

  “He is interested in clarity,” said Saito, picking his words with care.

  In truth, the guest had spoken little to him in the hours after Saito took custody of the man at the Mongolian border. Khadir had handed him over with no formality, and Saito watched the Arab vanish back into the night.

  The guest, though—the prisoner, as he had been—had the silent artfulness of a career spy, and a morose kind of hatred lurked behind his eyes like black fire, undimmed by years in captivity.

  “I’ll give him the clarity he needs, and more,” said Glovkonin. “Bring him in. We’ll toast his freedom.”

  Saito signaled to Gregor, and the bodyguard left the room for a moment. In the stillness that followed, he finally gave voice to the question that had been preying on him since that rainy day in Paris.

  “What is special about this man? You have invested a great deal in tracking his location and securing him in secret.”

  Glovkonin nodded. “He has been an expensive project, without question. The money I paid to the Ghost5 hacker cadre to source his whereabouts was a high price alone. But I believe it will be worth it.”

  The Russian crossed to where Misha stood sentinel, and examined Saito’s weapons on the silver tray. He picked up the thick misericorde dagger, balancing it between his fingers.

  “This blade is made to slide through the gaps in a suit of armor where a sword could not, to go through chain mail and then into flesh.” He made a slow stabbing motion. “To puncture the heart.” He smiled again. “But you know that. You know how it feels.”

  Saito stiffened but said nothing. He had removed that same weapon from his own flesh, after Marc Dane had left it there during a fight in the bowels of a derelict gas rig off the African coast. And before that, Saito had buried the blade in the belly of Dane’s colleague, the American woman Keyes. That it had found its way back to him convinced Saito that there was an ugly kind of balance to the universe.

  “Victory comes down to a matter of using the right weapon.” Glovkonin put the misericorde back where he’d found it. “When you consider that, what does it matter how much the weapon costs?”

  He looked up and his smile widened as Gregor returned with the guest.

  Attired in a presentable blue Brioni suit and a white cotton shirt, the guest walked carefully down the stairs, taking in everything. His dark brown eyes searched the room as a soldier’s would, looking for points of egress, cover and objects that might double as weapons if the need arose.

  Like Saito, he hobbled a little, but the guest’s limp was far more pronounced, forcing him to use a metal walking stick. The prisoner’s age was difficult for Saito to determine. He was of Chinese extraction, anything between his early forties and middle sixties, the passage of time upon his face accelerated by his ordeals.

  “You must be my benefactor.”

  The guest’s voice was quiet and his words were chosen with care. He switched briefly to Glovkonin’s language, and Saito followed along.

  “My English is far better than my Russian,” he said before switching back. “We will stay with that, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course.” The other man opened his hands, playing the part of the generous host. “I am Pytor Glovkonin. You have no idea how pleased I am to have you here in my home, Mr. Lau. Welcome.”

  Lau. The identity meant nothing to Saito, connecting to no known alias that he was familiar with. But he knew it was a variant of Liu, the surname shared by the ancient warlords of the Han Dynasty, and that the word meant to kill or to destroy. An opportune name for someone the Russian considered to be a weapon.

  “You have my gratitude,” said the guest. “But I must say, I do not understand why you have done so much.” Lau fingered the collar of his jacket. “Such fine clothes. And so much effort made…” He shook his head ruefully, hunching forward, almost aging before Saito’s eyes. “For a man like me. I am grateful, but I am confused. Why would you do this?”

  “A man like you.” Glovkonin wandered away, toward the sofa. “And what are you, Mr. Lau?”

  “I was once a soldier for my nation. Overtaken by arrogance, by the folly of youth. My reach exceeded my reason and I was convicted because of it.”

  His head bobbed, as if he were repentant.

  “A soldier.” Glovkonin picked out the words. “But not an ordinary one. An ordinary soldier in the army of the People’s Republic of China does not speak six languages. Did not study at Oxford. Does not have degrees in economics, geology and finance. Did not train with the Spetsnaz.”

  He picked up the tablet he had used to silence the television and tapped at it, before making a flicking gesture that sent images directly to the bigger screen. Images fanned out over the display, prison records and military documents, pages of text in close queues of Chinese pictographs. Old photos of a much younger man in a military uniform drifted past.

  The eyes are the same, noted Saito.

  But back then they were eager and daring. That had been replaced with something else.

  “I know all about you, Mr. Lau.” Glovkonin weighed the tablet in his hand, as if he were holding the sum total of the man’s life. “At first you were just a rumor caught by my people, almost a ghost story. A man edited out of history, forcibly forgotten by those who knew him.”

  Lau’s body language shifted again. The appearance he had given, that of a weakened and beaten-down man, melted off him. Saito was impressed. Not once during the flight from Mongolia had Lau’s mask slipped. But then, he had been given decades to perfect it.

  “I’ve always liked mysteries, ever since I was a boy,” the Russian went on. “I found your story compelling, sir. The man who was once a hero to his nation, decorated and feted. Only to fall out of favor because of hubris.”

  “I became poison,” Lau said quietly. “It was my fault. I believed I was far enough away from my masters to make my own rules. They showed me how mistaken I was.”

  “And yet, that story might have been different, if not for a single betrayal.”

  With a conjuror’s flourish, Glovkonin sent another image to the screen. A photograph, washed out by age, of two men in their thirties shaded beneath a skeletal tree on some dusty grassland plain. Saito heard Lau make a small noise in the back of his throat as he took in the picture, not quite a growl but a murmur of animal sound. Something primal.

  Lau was on the left of the photo. He wore tropical combat fatigues, like the garb of a mercenary, and he was staring out of the image as if daring the world to challenge him. The man by his side was an African, dark as polished teak, dressed in the same gear, with his jacket open to his belly. Saito’s eye was drawn to a necklace the young African was wearing. A steel chain, upon which hung an abstract metal object that could only be the trigger from a rifle.

  “I remember that day,” said Lau. “We had such great plans.”

  “This is why I have done so much for you, sir,” said Glovkonin.

  “Yes.” Lau nodded. “I understand now why I am valuable to you.” He paused, gathering himself. “What is it you want from me?”

  “I need your knowledge.” The Russian stared at the face of the young African in the image and Saito saw his expression harden. “I want you to help me destroy Ekko Solomon and everything he has built.”

  “Where do we begin?” said Lau.

  SIXTEEN

  Marc had a clear view down the descending curve of Lebeaustraat from the dust-filmed window of the empty office on the fifth floor, good enough to capture images of the front door of the VdG Gallery and anyone going in or out
, but the angle was too oblique to get a direct look through the windows. He made the best of it, setting up a pair of Nikon digitals on tripods with overlapping fields of vision, one close-up and one wide-angle, to keep constant surveillance on the building.

  He’d hooked up the HD cameras to a slimline Lenovo laptop and had everything working. The computer, like the camera and the other techie kit he was using, had come from a gadget store at the airport and he was doing his best to make it mission ready. The floor of the bare room was littered with boxes and plastic packaging, with Marc and Lucy’s gear forgotten in a corner. Like everything else in the vacant space, the floor had a layer of brownish dust over it. The place had not been used in years, a testament to the high rents in the arty end of Brussels’s Sablon district.

  Their Rubicon-issue smartphones were the only tactical equipment the operatives had been able to bring with them from Iceland, so Marc had co-opted his to act as a temporary secure network hub. Through it, he ran a rapid download to the laptop’s memory, filling the machine with any intrusion software he might need. It wasn’t an ideal set-up, but circumstances had pushed the two of them into making do with what they could get their hands on.

  He adjusted the focus on the cameras and shifted from foot to foot. Marc had followed Lucy’s lead and snatched some rest on the flight in, but he felt as if he had been awake for days. He made a circuit of the room, leaving a trail of footprints in the dust. If he stopped moving, the fatigue would pounce.

  A double-double knock sounded at the door and Lucy entered. Across her back she carried a heavy sports bag and in her hand was a paper sack from a local artisanal fast-food restaurant.

  “Breakfast,” she explained, and thrust the paper bag into his hands.

  Marc delved inside and eagerly helped himself to coffee and a toasted baguette as she dropped the sports tote to the floor. It landed with an audible clunk.

  “Anything?”

  She jutted her chin in the direction of the window.

  “A blonde girl entered about twenty minutes after you left.” He ran a finger over the laptop’s touchpad and brought up an image. “She’s an employee, her photo is on the VdG website.”

  Lucy nodded. They’d used their time the night before, between changing planes at Frankfurt, to dig up what was publicly known about the second address found in Ji-Yoo Park’s note. VdG Acquisitions maintained an austere web presence with some details of the gallery and the family that owned it, along with a digital catalog of their most crowd-pleasing procurements from the Far East. Their online security was good, Marc noted, better than average for a place that bought and sold million-dollar objets d’art on a regular basis. He was itching to take a run at their firewall, but Lucy had warned him off. Now was not the time to do anything to arouse suspicion.

  For the moment, they had an advantage. Verbeke and his crew would assume that Marc and Lucy were dead, thanks to Andri Larsson agreeing to release a fake report stating that the Icelandic search and rescue had recovered the bodies of two missing tourists out on the ice. The lie would only last so long. They had to make the most of it.

  That didn’t stop Marc from doing some passive digital intelligence gathering, however. In the past couple of hours, he had researched VdG Acquisitions, its staff and its current owner Elija Van de Greif, combing social media sites, sweeping for anything that might raise a red flag.

  From a distance, the gallery and the Van de Greif family appeared to be clean, but when viewed through the lens of what the SCD team had discovered, certain connections slotted into place. There was a small but certainly non-zero likelihood that the gallery had dealings with front companies owned by the Ang Soon Tong back in Singapore, and peering through the haze around the Bitcoin transactions Assim had uncovered suggested even more links. It wasn’t a big leap to imagine that VdG Acquisitions didn’t always acquire their items altogether honestly.

  Being a link in a chain of black market smugglers made the gallery the perfect delivery point for one of the stolen bioprinters. But the connection faltered there. Marc couldn’t find anything that directly linked Van de Greif to the Lion’s Roar aside from the cryptocurrency.

  Lucy nodded as he explained. “Could be they’re a conduit, a way for Verbeke to get his toys into the country unnoticed. Or it could be more.” She moved to the window, careful to stay out of sight of anyone down on the street. “For all we know, that bioprinter is in there right now and they’re whipping up a bucket of virus as we speak.”

  “I don’t think it works like that,” said Marc.

  “Yeah, well…” She stalked back to the sports bag. “We can’t just sit up here and watch.”

  “I know that song.” Marc gave a humorless chuckle.

  “Last time we did it your way.” Lucy unzipped the bag and Marc saw the matte black metallic forms of firearms inside. “This time we do it my way.”

  She handed him a plastic case, and inside he found a Gen4 model Glock 17, along with three magazines of 9mm Parabellum ammunition and a paddle holster. For herself, Lucy drew out a MP9 sub-machine gun, a compact and deadly weapon that was still small enough to fit under her baggy jacket. She made short work of checking it over, slamming a loaded mag into the well in the grip.

  The bag also contained a folding assault rifle.

  “What’s that for?” said Marc.

  “Just in case,” she replied.

  “Do I want to ask where you got this from?”

  Lucy had been empty-handed when she left the office two hours earlier, heading out on an errand she vaguely described as “a shopping trip.”

  She made a face. “Oh, no. You certainly don’t.”

  Marc gave a reluctant nod, checking and loading his own gun.

  “So we’re going for the … uh … kinetic approach to this, then?”

  She countered with a question of her own.

  “What time does Elija Van de Greif get in to work?”

  Marc glanced at the dive watch on his wrist.

  “Gallery opens at ten o’clock, an hour and five from now. Company website says they take appointments from 10:30 on weekdays.”

  “He’ll see us early,” said Lucy, with a cold smile. “Guarantee it.”

  Marc’s smartphone gave off a telltale warble signaling an incoming call, and he tapped the screen, activating the automatic encryption application to mask the conversation.

  “This is Dane.”

  “Hello,” said Assim. The Saudi sounded weary and distant. “What time is it there?”

  “Morning,” said Marc. “What about you?”

  “I’ve lost track,” Assim replied, with feeling. “I’ve passed through tired and gone out the other side. Every time I try to go to sleep, I see…” He halted, and Marc heard him swallow hard. “You know, those pictures of the people in Benghazi. It’s difficult not to think about them.”

  “I hear you, mate. Just stay on task, right? One way or another, we’ll be done with this by the end of the day.”

  The last few words came out in a bleak tone that Marc didn’t expect, and Assim heard it.

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “You have something for us?” said Lucy.

  “Oh, right, yes.” Assim coughed and found his focus. “We now have positive confirmation that seed materials and biokits for the printers were stolen from the factory in Manila. Check your email queue, Marc, I sent you a file.”

  “Wait one.” Marc brought up a link to the SCD’s secure email server and streamed the video to the laptop’s screen. Grainy security camera footage unspooled as he watched. “What are we looking at here?”

  “I pieced this together from some video Malte was able to secure for us. Remember I said there was an incident, an active shooter at the factory?”

  “Disgruntled ex-employee, right?” said Lucy.

  “That’s the popular narrative. The man was a security guard, fired for drinking on the job.”

  On the screen, a stocky Malaysian man carrying a shoulder bag strod
e warily into an office reception, and started yelling. An older woman behind the front desk tried to calm him down, but in the next second he dug both hands in the bag, and they came back out gripping a pair of silver revolvers. The footage had no sound, but Marc could see people in the office screaming and panicking. The stocky guy started shooting in random directions.

  Something didn’t track, though, and Lucy articulated the same thought.

  “He’s firing over their heads. He’s not aiming at anyone.” She tapped the laptop’s touchpad to freeze the playback, pointing at the corner of the screen. “Look. That old lady is right there, hiding under the chair. He wanted to kill someone, he couldn’t miss her.”

  Marc let the footage play on. The gunman emptied one pistol and advanced into the office, shaking out the spent cartridges on the floor, using a speed-loader to rearm as he walked. His movements were clumsy and frustrated, not the actions of a cold-eyed killer.

  “This was cover for the theft of the seed materials,” said Marc. “A distraction.”

  “Yes, got it in one,” agreed Assim. “And here’s where it gets interesting.” The video feed suddenly blanked. “That’s the point at which the shooter entered the security office and pulled the plug on their recording equipment. There’s no more video past that … But I spooled back a half-hour and I found something.”

  The image returned: the same viewpoint, the same day. A group of people were milling around in the reception area, a mix of locals and Westerners. The lady from the reception desk was handing out visitor ID badges.

  “A tour group?” said Lucy.

  “Yes. Some investors, in town to visit the plant. See anyone familiar?”

  Marc spotted her face immediately.

  “Bottom right of the frame. The pale lady, in the flesh.”

  Axelle, the woman he had seen marching Ji-Yoo Park from her house, the one who had tried to kill them out on an Icelandic glacier, was doing her best not to be picked up by the security camera. But she couldn’t avoid it totally, and as the group walked off with their guide, Marc raised an eyebrow at her choice of disguise.