Shadow Read online

  Marc showed a crooked smile.

  “Right here. Right now.”

  * * *

  Ticker couldn’t stop himself from throwing a look back up at the top floor window as he stepped out on to the street. A dark shape moved in the depths of the room and he knew it was Verbeke glaring down at him.

  It had taken every bit of his persuasion to convince the man not to come after him. Ticker cited the fact that his contact would walk away if he saw a face he didn’t recognize, along with Verbeke’s ready notoriety to the Belgian law enforcement community.

  You’re a liability, he’d told him, expecting to take a punch for saying it. Come out on the street and you put everything in jeopardy.

  In the end, that was how he’d convinced him, leaning hard into talk about the cause and the mission. Ticker gently reminded Verbeke that showing his face was what had got him arrested back in Slovakia.

  The big man had relented, but not before he promised the hacker that he would hunt him down and slice off his cock if he tried to double-cross him.

  Ticker adjusted the grubby white kufi cap on his head and pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt, burying his hands in the belly pocket. He wore a pair of glasses in his one other attempt to modify his appearance, but it was a poor disguise that wouldn’t stand up if the police took a hard look. Lucky for him, most of the time the Antwerp cops tended to keep their distance from the 2060 district. Within its borders, the area was dominated by Turkish and North African immigrants, and he didn’t see a single white face as he marched up the street.

  He felt Verbeke’s eyes on his back all the way up to the corner, before he turned out of sight of the apartment and headed toward the café on Diepestraat where the meet was set to take place.

  He thought about running. Verbeke had always been a terrifying force of nature in the Lion’s Roar, yo-yoing between smiling insincerity and violent anger, but that stuck-up French witch had always been there to give him something to aim at. With her gone, Verbeke was searching for a new target to unleash his endless anger on, and Ticker knew that sooner or later he would lash out at the closest person. He didn’t want that to be him.

  There was a look that Verbeke got, a mad distance in his eyes, a kind of blankness that came over him just before he blew his stack. Ticker had seen it more than once, even cheered it on when the man had been kicking a foreigner to death in some dank back alley. The thought of being on the receiving end of that torrent of rage made his gut clench.

  Sure, he could run. In his back pocket he had one of the hard drives from the server farm they’d been running in Iceland. It was loaded with Bitcoin data worth hundreds of thousands of euros, and even with the conversion discount the buyer was going to give him, he’d have enough to get out of Belgium, even back home to the States. He had people there who would take him in.

  But Verbeke was a vengeful son-of-a-bitch. He wouldn’t let Ticker get away with leaving him in the shit. That was why he had demanded the hacker leave his gear behind in the apartment, except for a phone, knowing that he would have to come back. If he ran, he would be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life. His short life.

  Mongrels and foreigners were scum, race traitors little better. But the weak bred a special kind of hatred in Noah Verbeke, and Ticker was terrified of being labeled as that.

  Just get the money, he told himself. Do that, and he’ll see he still needs you.

  Ticker was trying to carry his stride with a little more confidence when a dark-haired guy in a black jacket stepped out in front of him. The word cop flashed up in Ticker’s head and he pivoted away, pretending he intended that all along.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw more movement as another figure came out of a side alley, and he looked before he could stop himself.

  “Hello, ugly.”

  The scruffy-looking limey he’d first seen in Singapore was right there, one hand under his jacket in a way that made it clear he had a weapon beneath it.

  The dark-haired man shoved Ticker into the alley, where there were two more men waiting. Both were in heavy raincoats that just about covered the police tactical rig-outs they wore beneath them.

  “You’re nicked,” said the Englishman, and he grinned. “Always wanted to say that.”

  The dark-haired cop searched Ticker, finding the hard drive and the phone.

  “You don’t wanna hold me,” Ticker snapped. “If I don’t make a call on that in five minutes, another can of Shadow goes pop.” He showed his teeth. “We put it in the train station,” he added, making up the threat as he went.

  One of the cops immediately stepped away to talk into his radio, but the Englishman leaned in, giving him a withering once-over.

  “I might believe that, if I didn’t know what a lying little tosser you are.”

  “Verbeke has the rest of these?” broke in the dark-haired man, holding up the hard drive.

  “Nah, I sold them to your fat-ass momma.”

  “Rude,” replied the other man, and he pocketed the device.

  “Let me make this clear,” continued the Englishman. “No one is coming to meet you. The Belgians already intercepted the buyer you hooked before he made it to the 2060. We’ve been ghosting you through the net since you left Brussels.” He made a disappointed tutting noise. “I told you before. Your info-sec game is sloppy, mate. You give black hats a bad name.”

  “Fuck you!” Ticker retorted, but it was half-hearted. Everything was coming apart and he couldn’t stop it. “Five minutes,” he insisted. “Let me go!”

  “I have a better idea,” came the reply, and the Englishman nodded toward the café, giving him a hard shove in that direction.

  Across the street, through the window, Ticker could see the place was busy. There were dozen or so men in there, all Muslims, all watching the television up on the wall. Even from here, he could see it was tuned to the same news channel Verbeke had been watching. The men looked solemn and angry.

  “I’m willing to bet that everyone who lives around here knows someone from Benghazi,” said the Englishman. “What will they do if we walk you in there, tell everybody who you are and what you’ve done, then close the door and leave?” He paused to let the threat sink in. “Your choice. Talk to us, or talk to them.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  He paced the room, prowling as a tiger would circle a cage. Alone in the apartment with only the silent television for company, Verbeke’s short fuse was burning down, moment by moment.

  There was no news from Brussels of any terror attack, no word of the weapon he had sent out to murder his enemies, and spread discord in the city he had come to loathe. He knew well enough not to reach out to any of the group’s other cells, to check in with them and see if they knew any more, but the inaction irritated him. He pawed at Ticker’s laptop, looking over alt-right blogs and nationalist websites, searching for anything of note. But it was the same as it ever was, the legions of keyboard warriors throwing directionless spite and bile, all sound and fury with no core to it. These people were useful to the movement, Axelle had often said, but on an operation out in the real world, their value was far less. They were no use to him now.

  He tossed the laptop back on the table and stalked away to the window, pawing at the bandaged wound on his upper arm. The woman’s words continued to return to him as he stood there in the quiet. Verbeke could never admit to himself that he needed her, and with each hour that passed it became more likely that she had died at the hands of the enemies of the Lion’s Roar. The alternative was that Axelle had allowed herself to be taken prisoner by the police, and that he would never accept. He could not accept the possibility that she would surrender.

  The Lion’s Roar had no lack of soldiers and casualties of war. The fallen deserved to be remembered, and more so one who had become a martyr in the name of the conflict. This was the closest Noah Verbeke could ever come to showing care toward her, to rank her alongside the dead men upon whose backs the group was built.

 
; But even that moment of regret still smacked of frailty. He could find another woman. They were venal and easily bent to his will. His needs would be serviced and Axelle would be forgotten. There was no place for attachments in this war. A man could only be the perfect weapon if he were in command of such needs. As Verbeke looked down at the street, watching the foreigners wander aimlessly through their pointless lives, he reminded himself that this was a truth lesser peoples could never grasp.

  We will show them, he thought. If not today, then tomorrow. And the day after, on and on until we rid ourselves of them.

  He caught sight of a figure in a familiar black hoodie, hunched forward as he walked, face lost in the depths of the raised hood. Ticker was on his way back, but the hacker was acting oddly, staying close to the edge of the street, taking the most direct route back to the apartment block.

  Verbeke sneered.

  Idiot.

  It didn’t matter how many times he tried to train these fools in counter-surveillance techniques, when they were under pressure they acted like the amateurs they were. For all his digital skills, Ticker was inadequate in the field. He couldn’t stand up in a real fight, could barely handle a gun. Outside the internet, he was a poor specimen who otherwise would never have passed muster in Verbeke’s brotherhood.

  Then he looked again and a nagging suspicion pushed into the front of Verbeke’s thoughts. The way Ticker was walking seemed wrong. The purpose in his pace was different from before.

  He tried craning his neck to get a better look, but short of opening the window and leaning out, there was no other angle from which he could observe.

  Heat tingled along Verbeke’s nerves. The innate predator’s sense that had always been in him came alive, the raw instinct sounding a warning. It was too soon. Ticker had barely been gone a few minutes.

  Why would he come back so quickly?

  He looked up and down the street, searching for other warning signs. A dark-haired man, a Westerner, was walking in the same direction. Aside from the other man, the foot traffic seemed to have suddenly reduced.

  Then it came to Verbeke that the figure in the hood wasn’t actually Ticker at all. The uneasiness he felt snapped into place. Back at the warehouse, that American bitch had got the drop on him by disguising herself with Axelle’s helmet, buying herself enough time to get close to him. He wouldn’t fall for that trick again.

  In a bag at the foot of the window there was a Škorpion machine pistol with a lengthy sound-suppressor mounted on the muzzle. Verbeke snatched up the weapon and racked the slide, then kicked over the table on to its side and pulled it to the center of the room. He dropped into cover behind it and gripped the Škorpion with both hands, settling the iron sights on the door leading into the apartment. He flicked the fire selector lever to the “20” mark for fully automatic, and waited.

  He strained to listen, catching the sound of quick footsteps coming up the concrete stairs to the third floor. They approached the door and then there was a hesitant knock, the pattern a one-two-three.

  On three Verbeke squeezed the machine pistol’s trigger and the Škorpion bucked in his hands, as he unloaded the weapon into the door and whoever stood beyond it. He wrestled down the recoil as the gun brayed, the sound resembling the noise of a drill bit chewing through dense wood. An extended burst of rounds punched through the cheap door, gouging out divots of it and splintering the frame.

  As the last casing spun away from the ejector port, Verbeke was already on his feet and storming to the ruined door. He kicked it open and the whole thing came apart in pieces, collapsing into the gloomy hallway landing outside.

  He strode out, ejecting the spent magazine in favor of a fresh one. The landing was ill-lit and the air was laced with the smell of spent cordite and seared plywood.

  Verbeke registered the gloom. Pools of darkness lay where the weak illumination from the grimy skylight overhead failed to fall, the shadows reaching down past the chipped iron balustrade to the levels below.

  The bullet-riddled body Verbeke expected to find sprawled on the landing was absent. Even as he registered that, from the corner of his vision he glimpsed a figure in a black hoodie burst out of the shadows at a full-tilt run, one arm coming down in a falling arc.

  A silver-black rod glittered in the attacker’s hand and it cracked hard across Verbeke’s arm where he had been shot, lighting a storm of agony that made him drop the Škorpion’s reload before he could jam it into the magazine well. A rain of rapid-fire blows from the metal baton hit the exposed flesh of his neck and his face, opening cuts on his cheek, his brow, splitting his lip.

  He threw up his hands to deflect the attacks, trying to snatch at the baton as it swept back and forth, snarling as he was forced on to the defensive.

  The face beneath the black hood belonged to Dane, the Englishman, and in the man’s eyes was the kind of rage and hate that Verbeke knew like an old friend.

  * * *

  At the last second before he rapped on the apartment door, Marc changed his mind and used the extended ASP baton to do the knocking. As much as he believed that Ticker had given him the right address, he feared Noah Verbeke enough to take that extra precaution.

  The instinct had saved his life, and the spray of bullets ripped the door to pieces. Marc had no time to dwell on how Verbeke had known something was wrong, and instead he turned the adrenaline shock of his survival into motive power. His fight instructor always told him to divorce himself from anger when the blows started flying, but he couldn’t do that. Not here, not now.

  As the big man came stalking out into the hallway, all Marc wanted to do was hit him as hard as he could, to see blood and hear bone break. The bleak dread in his heart, that Lucy Keyes would never get out of the hole Verbeke had put her in, ignited in the rage.

  Keeping one hand up high to protect his head, Marc used the baton on a rapid series of falling strikes, cracking the bigger man across the brow, the bridge of the nose, his forearms and hands.

  Marc had borrowed the collapsible steel tube of the ASP and a couple of other party tricks from the Belgian cops who arrested Ticker. He still had the Glock pistol in the back of his waistband, but as furious as he was, his first instinct was still to take Verbeke alive. Marc believed Ticker was lying about his five-minute deadline and the possibility of another Shadow dispersal device in the Antwerp Central rail station, but there was a chance he wasn’t. Verbeke’s capture was the priority, as Jakobs had insisted over and over again. Dead, he would become a fallen hero for his followers. Alive and imprisoned, he would be a warning to them.

  Down on the street, the Icelander was watching the front entrance, and Jakobs would have his men racing in to block off rear access from the apartments. Marc had drawn the short straw, going in to entice Verbeke to where he could be isolated and captured.

  At least, that was the idea. The hits he landed were good, but Verbeke didn’t slow down, and belatedly Marc was wishing he still had the dart gun he had used infiltrating the Frigga facility.

  Verbeke managed to grab the tip of the baton and twist it. Marc had to make a split-second choice, to either have his arm bent the wrong way or to lose the weapon entirely. He picked the latter and the baton flew out of his hand, pinging off the balustrade and spinning away into the open light well leading down to the ground floor.

  A hammer blow whooshed past Marc’s head as Verbeke closed the distance between them. He avoided it and fired back a couple of punches, but that was just what the other man wanted. Verbeke snagged Marc’s arm and trapped it, grimacing through the blood that oozed from the cuts on his face. All at once he was on him, shoving Marc into the iron rail.

  “Shit!”

  Marc’s feet slipped out from under him and the small of his back smacked into the top of the balustrade. It went wrong so fast. He was going over, losing his balance. Verbeke would pitch him into the air and there would be nothing to break his three-story fall, down to the cracked black and white tiles in the hallway below.
r />   Clawing wildly at Verbeke’s face with his other hand, Marc grabbed at one of the metal spindles along the rail and held on as tightly as he could. The momentum of the two men shifted awkwardly as Verbeke tried to shove him the rest of the way over.

  For one horrible second, he balanced there, his body from the waist up flailing out into empty space. Then Marc got a good grip on his opponent’s jacket and did the exact opposite of what Verbeke expected. Instead of trying to scramble back over the rail to safety, he pushed off, hauling the other man over the edge with him.

  There was a giddy swell of vertigo and Verbeke shouted out in alarm, failing to stop himself. His greater mass did the work. He and Marc toppled over the rail.

  The fall didn’t come. Agony exploded down the length of Marc’s arm as he took his own weight and Verbeke’s together, clinging to the iron bar. They hung there for a fraction of a second, but it felt like an eternity. Marc yelled in pain as his shoulder joint extended and twisted. He felt sickening pain as it began to dislocate, felt the raw burning in his hand as the rusty metal lacerated his palm.

  He struck out blindly, jabbing with his fingers, and connected with Verbeke’s face. Scratching at his eyes, Marc jammed his thumb into the right socket and the big man howled.

  Suddenly, the agonizing weight was gone and Marc’s other arm was hanging free. Shaking with pain, he snatched at the edge of the stone landing and gripped it. Then, with slow and aching motions, Marc dragged himself up, hand over hand, back over the rail.

  Panting, he supported himself on the thick balustrade and cast a look over. On the tiled floor below, Noah Verbeke lay face down in an unmoving sprawl. Marc probed his shoulder as he eyed the body. Everywhere he touched it there was burning and stinging, the memories of past conflicts written into the meat of him coming back with a vengeance.

  Satisfied that the thug wasn’t going anywhere, Marc pitched through the broken door and into the apartment beyond. Stiffly, he finally drew the Glock and panned it around the rooms, making sure there were no other surprises waiting for him. He found no sign of any kind of triggering device, or any evidence of another metal canister like the one he had smothered back in Grand-Place. The only items of note were a shop-new laptop, and a sports bag lying under a table.