Shadow Page 39

  “Who the hell is this?” he demanded.

  “I am Officer…” The man on the other end of the line gave a heavy sigh and began again. “You do not know my name. You called me Loki. From the Viking Squad.”

  A dozen questions crowded into Marc’s thoughts.

  “You’re here? Larsson sent you after us?”

  “Yes, and—”

  “Doesn’t matter!” Marc cut him off with a sharp retort. “Explain later! Where’s Keyes, where’s the hostages?”

  “I am following your colleague to Verbeke’s staging area. The woman and the two children are in a vehicle with me—”

  Again, Marc didn’t give the Viking Squad officer a chance to finish the sentence.

  “Put the wife on, do it now!” He tapped the speaker icon on the phone and took another step closer to al-Baruni. “Meddur, listen. Sakina and the kids, they’re okay.”

  A woman’s plaintive voice, the same one Marc had heard earlier in the intercepted message, issued from the smartphone. She was crying, sobbing through her words. Al-Baruni looked shocked and shook his head.

  “This is false—you are doing this!” he insisted. The man clutched at the bulky watch on his wrist. “She spoke to me before! She told me they would kill her!”

  “Husband, that was a lie!” said the voice on the phone, in faltering English. “That was not me!”

  “No…” Confusion and fear warred across al-Baruni’s features. “It’s not true.”

  “What you heard before, that was the fake!” Marc held out the device to him. “Take it, man. Talk to her! Ask her something only your wife would know.” He jabbed a finger at the smartwatch. “That thing is what’s feeding you lies!”

  Marc was aware that some of the people in the crowd around them had drawn back, sensing the tension in the air. He took the last step and pressed his phone into al-Baruni’s trembling hand.

  “Take this,” he repeated, “and give me the bag.”

  “Sakina?” The man held the phone to his ear. “Is it you?”

  “I love you,” said the woman. “We love you.”

  Marc didn’t wait any longer. Al-Baruni made no attempt to stop him as he snatched the backpack away, cradling Marc’s phone as if it was the most precious thing, naked and unashamed relief turning into tears down his cheeks.

  Dragging the bag with him, Marc dropped down behind a metal crowd barrier in front of the town hall and pulled open the zip. Packed inside, the fat silver bullet of a thermal flask was aimed up at him. Aside from the cap, which he wasn’t about to mess around with, there was no visible triggering mechanism, no timer. Warily, Marc leaned in and put an ear to the metal canister. He heard thick liquid gurgle inside, stirring as if it was coming to life.

  Marc looked up as the band on stage finished their number and the crowd exploded into loud applause. They pressed forward, calling for an encore, and suddenly it seemed like there were twice as many people in Grand-Place as there had been only moments before.

  Everyone here is going to die.

  Marc’s breath shorted in his throat as the dire thought struck. He blinked and rubbed his sweating hands on his stolen jacket, looking right and left, searching for somewhere to take the weapon before it activated.

  Inside the hall?

  He had no way of knowing how many people were in there, or if that would be enough to contain the discharge.

  Down a manhole, into the sewers?

  Introducing the toxin to a water supply would be even worse.

  He needed somewhere he could seal it in, some way to smother the release. His mind raced, desperately reaching for and discarding one possibility after another …

  And then he had it.

  Marc snatched up the backpack and broke into a run, holding it close to his chest as he stormed through the crowd, back in the direction of Rue Charles Buls, back the way he had come. He shoved onlookers aside and leaped across barriers and café tables, knocking over steins of beer and scattering people as he went.

  Someone cursed angrily and a sharp, hard shout followed. Marc saw the flicker of a blue police jacket in the corner of his eye, but he didn’t break his pace. Adrenaline flashed through his veins. This was his one and only chance to get the weapon away from its targets, and if he failed Marc Dane would be the first victim it would claim.

  He dashed around the corner, the crush of pedestrians thinning as he hit the cobbled side streets, and ahead Marc saw the plastic-clad exterior of the shopping arcade.

  “Halte!” came a shout at his back. “Politie!”

  Marc ran at the metal fencing walling off the construction around the outside of the arcade and leaped at it, snatching at the chain-link mesh. His momentum got him halfway up, and he hauled himself over the top, the pack jangling across the wire. The racer jacket caught and ripped on the bare wire, and he tugged, freeing himself. Marc landed hard on the dry, bare concrete on the other side of the fence, and his feet scraped as he regained his pace.

  The police officer from the square, a stocky older guy with a blue forage cap atop his thin face, was right behind him, starting his own climb up over the fence line. Nearby, construction workers in hi-vis vests were moving closer, drawn by the commotion.

  Marc ripped open the backpack to expose the silver flask inside.

  “It’s a bomb!” he bellowed. “Run! All of you, get the fuck out of here!”

  The police officer dropped off the fence in shock and backed away, and the workers bolted, leaving Marc alone amid the chattering cement mixers and diesel generators. He saw the Belgian cop go for cover, snatching at his radio to call in an emergency. Marc moved deeper into the building site, searching for the unfinished concrete pilings he had seen before.

  He found a deep pit going ten or more meters down into the earth, lined with precast plates reinforced with metal rebar. In the shadows at the bottom, he saw what he needed, a pool of drying liquid cement. With both hands Marc threw the backpack, flask and all, into the gray mud-like mix.

  The pack landed with a dull splat and sat on the surface, resolutely refusing to sink. Over the grumble of the mixer’s motor, Marc caught a new sound. The thin squeal of fluid under high pressure.

  He looked up. Fat droplets of cement drooled from the mouth of a hopper hanging suspended over the open pit, and Marc reached out for it, clawing to grab the handle that would open the valve. He put his hand on it and pulled hard. The motion made the hopper swing away on its chain and Marc felt himself go with it, his feet slipping off the lip of the pit.

  The latch clanked open and the hopper ejected a torrent of fresh cement, but now Marc was hanging on to it, his legs dangling over the open space. Beneath him, the new flow of thick slurry covered the pack and buried it, drowning the cylinder with a wet belch before its lethal payload could spread.

  Marc’s hands, still smarting from clinging to the back of the tram, could not maintain purchase on the slippery metal handle, and gravity began to reel him in. The fall wouldn’t be enough to kill him, but suffocating in a pit full of toxin-laced liquid cement would do just as well.

  Then someone grabbed his jacket from behind and Marc’s weight shifted back toward the edge, toward safety. He finally lost his grip, but it didn’t matter. He fell back, landing with a grunt on the unfinished floor of the construction site, and rolled over.

  Meddur al-Baruni stood over him, offering Marc a hand up.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Thanks, mate.” Marc gratefully took the man’s hand and pulled himself to his feet. “You came after me.”

  “I had to help you.” He pulled Marc’s smartphone from his pocket, handing it back. “And return this.”

  “No worries.” Marc nodded, a rough laugh escaping with the words. He cast a look back into the pit, and al-Baruni did the same.

  “It is down there?” said the man.

  Marc nodded, then reactivated the phone, calling Lucy’s number once again. The Icelandic cop she’d nicknamed Loki answered on the first ri
ng.

  “Dane?”

  “Where is she?” Marc beckoned al-Baruni to follow him through the construction area, away from the fence and over to the gutted fascia of the shopping arcade. “I need to talk to her. The second device has been neutralized, but we don’t know if Verbeke has any more of this poison.”

  “Keyes went on ahead. She’s going after Verbeke on her own. The woman is willful.”

  “And then some.” Marc shook his head. “You’re at the warehouse by the canal? I’m not far away. I’ll come to you, just hold off.”

  “It may be too late for that.”

  “Police are here,” said al-Baruni, pointing back the way they had come.

  Marc cut the call and threw a look over his shoulder. Sure enough, the cop from the square now had backup, as he and two more uniformed officers scrambled over the fence.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” muttered Marc.

  “I will come with you,” insisted the other man. “Take me to Sakina and the children.”

  “Can do, yeah.”

  Through a nearby archway, Marc saw a man stepping off a swift-looking Suzuki scooter parked outside a bakery.

  “I’ll get us a ride,” he added.

  * * *

  “Boats are ready,” said Ticker, shifting nervously from foot to foot on the warehouse’s debris-strewn floor. “All my kit is on board, plus the hard drives.” He threw a nod in the direction of the canal. “So, we going?”

  Verbeke gave him a narrow-eyed look.

  “What are you afraid of?”

  The other man showed an insipid smile.

  “We don’t need to be here no more, do we?” He waved at the rest of the men. Two of them were closing up the last truck, and the other was setting a fire to burn the tent where the Korean had done his work with the bioprinter. “Let them finish up.”

  That shark’s grin unfolded on Verbeke’s face. The hacker was a weasel of a man, of use only because of his skills with computers. In any other circumstances he would never have been inducted into the ranks of the Lion’s Roar. He reeked of fear, and Verbeke wanted to punish him for it.

  “Have you seen how someone dies from Shadow?” He made a mock-retching noise. “Black blood gushing from everywhere. You die shitting out your innards. It’s not pretty.”

  Ticker paled. “It’s what they deserve, right?” He forced out a weak smirk. “Fucking mongrels.”

  “You look a little sickly. Sure you didn’t get too close to it?”

  The hacker’s smile faded.

  “No. I’m good.” He swallowed hard. “I just wanna know why we’re still waiting around.”

  Verbeke shot a look at the open doorway leading out to the street. Axelle should have been back by now. It didn’t take that long to torch a truck. But as each minute passed, he wondered if something had gone wrong. Had the cops caught up with them? Or was it Rubicon?

  He gave a low, derisive grunt. It didn’t matter. Axelle knew the plan. If she wasn’t here, that was her problem, and he had places to be.

  “Start it up,” he told Ticker. “We’re out of here.”

  The hacker didn’t wait to be told twice, and he ran across the disused warehouse to the loading dock near the water, where the two boats were moored. Verbeke called out to the others and gestured at the truck. It was time to go.

  The Korean came jogging up to him, running a worried hand through his hair.

  “I will come with you?”

  “No,” snorted Verbeke, snidely amused by the foreigner’s presumption. “Get in the truck. I don’t want to look at your face any longer than I have to.”

  “We had an agreement,” Kyun insisted. “I have delivered on everything you and the Combine asked of me.”

  Verbeke turned angrily on the other man and prodded him hard in the chest, suddenly seething at the mention of the Combine.

  “This is my game, not theirs. You get that? We run it how I say!”

  He was about to give Kyun a hard shove to underline his point, but then the nasal snarl of a motorcycle engine rose out on the street, and a bike came curving around, bouncing up the ramp and into the warehouse proper. A woman in an all-encompassing black helmet was in the saddle, and Verbeke’s shark-smile flickered.

  She made it back.

  But the thought was only half-formed when he realized that the figure on the bike wore a different jacket, and had one hand on a pistol laid over the handlebars. He grabbed at Kyun as the biker pulled the trigger, and dragged the Korean across him, into the line of fire.

  Kyun twitched and danced, crying out in agony as the bullets struck him. Verbeke discarded the man and broke into a sprint, hauling out his own gun to shoot back at the motorcycle as he ran.

  Shots struck the wheel and the bike skidded. The rider kicked off and landed in a tuck-and-roll. The other men had been caught unawares, and only now were they reacting. The woman used their laxity to her advantage and put rounds into the two by the truck, dropping them.

  Verbeke fired again as he moved, and one round clipped the biker’s helmet, skipping off the curved surface and knocking her back. He reached the loading dock as she tore off the damaged dome and tossed it away.

  “Bitch,” he snarled.

  It was the black American, the one that was supposed to be a frozen corpse on some Icelandic hillside. He kept firing, forcing her to stay down behind the fallen motorcycle.

  Behind him, Verbeke heard the roar of an outboard engine, and he pivoted toward the sound. Ticker had cast off one of the speedboats, and like the coward he was, the hacker was saving his own neck. The boat left the dockside in a spray of foam and bounced across the swell behind a passing cargo barge, before zooming away up the canal.

  Verbeke grimaced and darted out to the dock where the second speedboat was moored. Lines held it to rusted iron cleats, and he holstered his gun, exchanging it for a tactical knife to cut away the ropes. Back inside the warehouse, more shots sounded, then nothing. He slashed through the first line and crouched by the second, sawing through it with the blade.

  “Where d’you think you’re going?” said a voice. “Stand up, asshole, and turn around.”

  Verbeke halted, then slowly rose to his full height. He took a step and came about to face the American. The woman was a head shorter than him, her dark face filmed with sweat and marred by cuts and bruises. She had a semi-automatic pistol in one hand, aimed directly at his chest. The barrel didn’t waver as she stepped out of the warehouse and on to the dockside.

  “Lose the blade,” she told him.

  He gave a shrug and tossed the knife into the canal. It didn’t matter. The second line was cut nearly clean through, and one sharp pull would snap it.

  “What do you think is going to happen here?” Verbeke cocked his head, looking her up and down. “You believe someone like you can stop me?” He laughed at her.

  “Get on your knees,” she told him, each word spat out like it was a piece of broken glass in her teeth. “Show me your hands.”

  He sneered at her audacity. “You don’t have any authority over me. I don’t take orders from your kind.”

  “I’m the one with the gun,” she retorted.

  “So shoot me!” He advanced a step toward her and she tensed. “Go on!” he snarled. “Or I’ll take that from you and force it down your throat! Beat you with it until you beg me to stop!”

  Verbeke savored the rush of blood racing through him at the thought of such violence. He imagined punching her, kicking her, saw her bleeding and crushed in his mind’s eye. She wouldn’t be the first he had beaten to death with his own hands, and she wouldn’t be the last.

  “But you don’t have the strength, do you? Americans always want their hero story. You want me to surrender so you can feel righteous!” He spat on the concrete, his stepfather’s lessons rising in his thoughts. “Never! This is war. Never submit. Never yield. Death first.”

  “You have it backward, Jean-Claude Van Dumbass,” she replied. “Right now, it’s
taking every fucking ounce of my strength not to put a bullet in your belly and let you die screaming right there. One time, I never would have hesitated. Now…” She showed her teeth. “Now I wanna see you dragged out in chains for the world to laugh at.” Verbeke’s towering rage stoked higher as the woman smiled and steadfastly refused to rise to his goading. “You got no war, no cause, nothing but an excuse for that hate-filled shithole you call a personality. You’re gonna go to jail, motherfucker. You’ll pay for what you did in Benghazi. And everyone is gonna see it happen. All the people you terrorized, the scumbags who funded you, all your fascist boyfriends. They’ll see you pay for what you’ve done. Count on it.”

  For a long moment, he teetered on the edge of attacking her, heedless of the gun in her hand. Then he shackled his anger and spread his hands.

  “You want to take me in? You are welcome to try.”

  * * *

  Marc guided the stolen Suzuki through the backstreets of Brussels, tracking away from Grand-Place and into the network of alleys and avenues. In the saddle behind him, al-Baruni hung on for dear life, muttering a prayer under his breath as Marc gunned the engine and pushed it to its limit.

  Weaving around trams and other vehicles, taking risky lines against the flow of the traffic, he brought them out on Quai de Willebroeck. The dual carriageway paralleled the canal and Marc pointed the Suzuki north along it, speeding through red lights across intersections, closing on the warehouse as fast as the scooter could take them there.

  Once or twice, he had seen the flash of strobes and heard the skirl of sirens, but so far the police were still off his pace, unable to follow him over pedestrian streets and down passages too narrow for cars.

  Even then, it seemed to take forever to cross the distance to the warehouse, and as they ate up every meter, Marc’s pulse raced.

  I never should have sent Lucy out here alone, he told himself. If anything happens to her …

  He shut down the traitorous thought with a shake of the head and leaned into a turn, bringing them down a shallow incline leading toward the canal. There, on the street in front of the warehouse, he saw a car skewed across the street and a dark-haired man in cover behind it. A woman in a hijab, a boy and a teenage girl were close by, under the man’s protection.