Ghost: Read online

  Lucy stiffened as she got a good look at the man, masking her dismay with a sip from her coffee. Her free hand slipped toward the butt of the Pulse pistol hidden in a paddle holster in the small of her back. The compact, non-lethal stun gun would be enough to take down a man of twice the new arrival’s size.

  The guy took the seat across the booth from her without waiting to be asked. ‘You’re Keyes?’

  ‘Could be,’ she said, with a sleepy half-smile, and put down the coffee mug. ‘I don’t know you.’

  ‘Name’s Gonzalez,’ he explained. ‘I’m with Rowan.’

  ‘Are you?’ From the corner of her eye, she saw Malte enter the diner and come her way. ‘He never said anything about a new face.’ Lucy rocked back in the seat, as if she was preparing to leave.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Gonzalez, and the mask of studied calm he wore briefly slipped. ‘Give me a moment.’

  Malte was at the booth now, and slipped in next to Gonzalez so the other man had nowhere to go.

  ‘I’m going to take something out of my pocket,’ said Gonzalez. He produced a wallet and set it in the middle of the table, opening it to reveal a gold Department of Justice badge and a Federal Bureau of Investigation ID.

  ‘Special Agent Lee Gonzalez.’ Lucy read his name aloud off the laminated card. ‘Like I said, I don’t know you.’

  Gonzalez shot Malte a look and then put his attention on her. ‘Well, I know you, miss. Lucille Keyes, ex-US Army, dishonourably discharged, currently at large under an open arrest warrant—’

  ‘Oh, stop it. I’m blushing,’ She ate some more of the waffles, and talked around a mouthful. ‘You look like a smart guy, so you clearly didn’t come here on your own to take me in. Tell me why I am looking at you instead of Rowan.’

  Gonzalez blew out a breath. ‘People are concerned that Rowan has been operating outside his remit.’

  ‘People like you?’

  The FBI agent shook his head. ‘He’s just being careful.’

  Lucy saw Malte stiffen and reach for his own sidearm as a door behind her opened. A gruff voice, marbled with fatigue, cut through the air. ‘Good of you to come.’

  ‘Rowan.’ Lucy recognised the older man’s tones immediately. She looked at Malte and shook her head. The Finn gave her a wary nod and put his hands back on the table.

  ‘Keyes.’ In his mid fifties, with thinning hair and a face of weathered granite, Rowan looked like he should have been a senator or a general. Instead, his usual job was to keep those kind of men safe.

  ‘How’s the Secret Service treating you?’ she asked.

  ‘Poorly,’ he replied, sitting down next to her. ‘I don’t need to draw you a picture. D.C. is a shit-show right now . . .’ He trailed off. ‘That’s why I reached out to you.’ Rowan signalled the waitress, and Babs came over with the coffee pot. She topped Lucy off and poured out mugs for the three men and, before she left, the woman gave Rowan’s shoulder a squeeze.

  ‘We okay here?’ said Babs.

  ‘Always.’ Rowan gave her a brief smile that sent her on her way. He saw the question in Lucy’s eyes and answered it. ‘Barbara’s husband was in my unit, back in the day. After he passed, the rest of the squad chipped in when this place had some landlord trouble. In return, I eat for free.’

  ‘And we get to use it for off-book conversations,’ added Gonzalez.

  ‘Lee here is a good man,’ continued Rowan, ‘and he understands the situation. If you trust me, you trust him.’

  ‘All right.’ Lucy shot the FBI agent another glance, giving him a penetrating once-over. He didn’t flinch from it, and she got the vague sense that she was staring into the eyes of someone who, like her, had been in harm’s way more than once. ‘You served?’

  ‘Marine Corps. Two tours in Iraq,’ Gonzalez replied without hesitation.

  ‘Jarhead, huh? I guess I can make allowances.’

  ‘Don’t give him a hard time,’ said Rowan. ‘He’s sticking his neck out like I am.’

  ‘About that,’ said Malte, speaking for the first time.

  ‘What do you want from us?’ added Lucy. ‘After what happened with Al Sayf, I figured we wouldn’t talk again.’

  Nearly two years ago, she had been in Washington D.C. with Marc Dane, racing the clock to stop an atrocity engineered by the fanatical Al Sayf terror group and their collaborators in the Combine. It had almost been a total disaster, and if not for Special Agent Rowan – a former Delta Force operative like her – Lucy would not have been able to do her part in preventing the deaths of hundreds of innocent people. In the end, the shared conviction between two ex-soldiers had allowed her to avert disaster. That same trust had brought Lucy here to San Francisco, despite – as Gonzalez had rightly pointed out – her status as a fugitive under American law.

  Rowan had contacted Rubicon via back channels and asked specifically for Lucy Keyes. She owed him enough of a debt to agree to the meet, but this cloak-and-dagger crap was getting on her nerves.

  ‘Why am I here?’ she continued. ‘Spit it out.’

  ‘We need your help,’ said Rowan, and the admission was hard for him. He leaned in. ‘Over the last six months, a joint operation involving the Secret Service and the FBI has been unravelling. We’re tracking a radical militia group, but piece by piece, the op has been cut out from underneath us by the new administration. Now we’re inches from being shut down completely.’

  ‘I’m the point man on it for the whole west coast,’ Gonzalez said grimly. ‘Everybody else in the Bureau has been ordered to prioritise external terrorist threats over domestic ones . . . But these creeps? We know they’re planning an attack, possibly within the next forty-eight hours, right here.’ He tapped the laminated table with one finger. ‘But no one’s listening.’

  ‘I can’t get any weight behind this from my end,’ added Rowan. ‘Gonzalez has a couple of guys . . .’ He paused for a moment, and when he spoke again, Rowan sounded like he had aged ten years. ‘We’re mired in red tape. And I’m sick in my gut with the certainty that people are going to get hurt if we don’t intervene.’

  Gonzalez anticipated the next question. ‘We’ve exhausted all our options. That’s why Rowan threw in your name. Because you’re outside the system.’

  Rowan’s voice lowered. ‘I’ve heard the stories about Rubicon. I saw what you did in D.C. So I’m calling in a favour. A last resort. I need you to do some of that vigilante stuff for us.’

  ‘Who are the targets?’ said Malte.

  ‘They call themselves the Soldier-Saints,’ Gonzalez replied. ‘Your basic nightmare cocktail of radical Christian extremists, doomsday fanatics and white power neo-fascists. We got on to them because they were funding their exploits through a counterfeiting ring, but in the last couple of months they’ve gone through a step change. Upping the tempo of their operations in California, consolidating. They’re getting ready for a big event, but with no manpower and no resources to help us prove it, all I have to show my ASAC is a bunch of circumstantial evidence. There’s a location here in the city we scraped out of cell phone traffic, but without ironclad probable cause I can’t get a warrant to go turn it over.’

  ‘Soldier-Saints . . .’ Lucy gave a nod and beckoned Babs over for another refill. After the waitress had served them, she went on. ‘I know the name. If you ain’t white, straight or male, they’re looking to fit you with a collar or a noose. This city is gonna be like honey to them – hard to think of a place they’d hate more. But last I heard, they were pretty low-rent. What makes you think they’re moving up to the big leagues?’

  ‘Simple,’ said Rowan. ‘No one is there to stop them, and they’ve gotten bolder. And we’re being forced to look the other way while they arm up.’

  Malte frowned. ‘Is someone helping their cause?’

  ‘It’s likely,’ said Rowan.

  ‘Rubicon is a private military contractor, we know that,’ Gonzalez broke in. ‘But Rowan says you guys have a kind of pro bono attitude to this sort of thing
. Is he right?’

  ‘He’s not wrong,’ offered Malte, pausing to take a gulp of coffee. He glanced at Lucy, raising a questioning eyebrow.

  She found herself nodding. ‘There will have to be certain guarantees,’ she began.

  ‘Whatever you need,’ said Rowan. ‘If it’s in my power. Get us something actionable, something that the DOJ can’t ignore.’

  Lucy sipped at her coffee and fixed the older man with a hard look. ‘We’re not the police. People who get in my sights don’t tend to end up in jail, you read me? What you’re asking for here – what you’re sanctioning – are you really sure you want to pull that trigger?’

  The long silence that followed was finally broken by a sigh from Rowan. ‘I don’t like it one damn bit,’ he said. ‘But right now, we don’t have any other choice.’

  *

  The shower in the Hotel Nova kept alternating between pulses of hot or tepid water, but the flow was powerful and Marc tried to wash away the sluggish after-effects of the flight.

  It was late morning by the time he touched down in Malta, and the journey had made him itchy and uncomfortable. He wanted to clean off the adrenaline and refresh himself after the incident with the limousine, but it seemed now that the only chance to gather himself had been on the plane. It hadn’t done the job.

  Instead of snatching some much-needed sleep, he found himself going around and around down blind alleys of thought, picking at recent events like they were scabs.

  The operation in France was the first Rubicon mission he had taken on where he acted as the lead in the field, and as much as he knew from previous experience that things never followed the plan you set out for them, the final execution had been disappointing. They had what they needed, but Marc felt like it was still undone. The abrupt drop everything and go to Malta orders from Solomon only served to make that worse.

  Marc wanted to prove that he had made the right choice in accepting Solomon’s offer of a job with the Special Conditions Division. Last year’s situation in Mogadishu and Naples, where he and Lucy tracked and neutralised a rogue nuclear weapon, had left him feeling wrung out, questioning his place in the world. In the end, it was Solomon’s simple perception of a truth that allowed Marc to find his way – he wanted to be part of this, of something greater than himself, to work with a force for good.

  But there was more than that to it. Buried deeper beneath a drive to do right lay a colder, more pragmatic motivation. Marc understood the compulsion for justice – no, for revenge – that came from losing what mattered most to you.

  There were still days when he closed his eyes and saw Samantha Green’s smile in the darkness, fading from him like smoke. He would remember her touch on his skin and the bitterness would rise. Sometimes he would bolt awake in the middle of the night, convinced he could hear the jangle of a telephone ringing, knowing she would be on the other end of the line. But that phone was in a Camden Town safe house, half a world away.

  Marc leaned into the water streaming from the showerhead and turned the dial toward the blue, embracing the cold. Icy needles burned out the thoughts plaguing him and he felt his skin tighten around the puckered marks of the healed bullet wounds on his arm and his belly. The exercise regimen drilled into him by the doctors at Rubicon’s private clinic in Oslo had made a difference to his rail-thin form, giving back some of the muscle mass that his more sedentary time behind a keyboard at MI6 had stolen from him. He was nearly as fit as he had been back in his Royal Navy days. Marc Dane 2.0, he thought. At least, that’s the idea.

  He turned off the water and towelled dry as he walked out of the bathroom, although in the hot Maltese afternoon he hardly needed to. The basic, shabby hotel room had a good view of the bay. Settled in the Gzira district, close to the tourist hub of Sliema, it was ordinary enough to blend into the hundreds of other mid-range multi-storey apartment blocks that lined the sea front. Security was a joke – Marc had already repurposed a spare towel to secure the door handle and blocked the balcony with a chair – but it was low profile, and after absorbing the new mission brief, that was exactly what they needed.

  The file was unusually terse, but straight to the point. He assumed that was because this operation that had been put together quickly. Was that why he had been chosen to deal with it?

  Marc’s skills were at their sharpest when improvising in a fluid situation, but that impulse always pulled against his conflicting desire to try and plan for every outcome, to weigh the numbers on each potential scenario.

  The brief explained that an American civilian named Lex Wetherby was dead, apparently killed by a gunshot to the chest inflicted as he attempted to base jump from the battlements of Mdina. A known quantity in the world of data intrusion, Wetherby had previously been employed as an analyst for a major digital security company. At the start of his career, he ran ‘red team’ sorties against the firewalls of major corporate clients in order to test their defences, but eventually he came into conflict with his bosses and switched sides, dropping into the shadows of the so-called dark web. As a black-hat hacker-for-hire, he’d taken happily to the criminal life, but then his story became hazy.

  In a world where bragging rights for those who pulled off the toughest hacks was precious currency, Wetherby became a phantom. Whatever he had been doing happened under the radar, unremarked and uncelebrated. Usually that was a sign of someone co-opted to work for a nation state’s cyberwarfare force, but Wetherby didn’t fit that profile. He was too much the console cowboy, too much the thrill-seeker.

  And now he was dead, and the file said Rubicon believed that the Combine were involved in the killing. The mission orders were to sniff around and find out more about the circumstances of the hacker’s murder. Marc grimaced as he thought about that. The briefing packet’s text on exactly how that reasoning had come about was vague to say the least, and he made a mental note to press Kara for more information.

  He sat on the bed, next to the large padded envelope that had been waiting for him at the lobby when he checked in. There was a machine-printed label on the front from a wholesale company, one small element of the Rubicon corporation’s global structure. Toy Box Supplies.

  The name made Marc smirk as he ripped open the packet and slid out the contents. The cardboard sleeve for a kit of construction blocks hid a small case made from grey armoured plastic. He could have tossed it out of his fifth-floor window and it would have remained intact after hitting the road below, contents still undamaged. Flipping up a panel in the side of the case revealed a pinhole microphone where the lock should have been, and he spoke three words into it.

  ‘Marc Dane. Nomad.’

  His choice of recognition word might have seemed mawkish, backward-looking even, but the name of his former MI6 unit still resonated with Marc in a way that nothing else could. It was also a constant reminder of where he had come from, and what would always be at stake.

  The case accepted the voice print and concealed locks snapped open. Inside, dense foam padding protected the black glass slab of a satellite-enabled smartphone and a matching Bluetooth earpiece. Nestled next to the communication kit lay a Glock 29 subcompact semi-automatic pistol and a couple of additional magazines of 10mm ammunition. He considered the gun. Given the situation, Marc hadn’t expected to be issued a ‘lethal pack’ and again he wondered about what Rubicon were not telling him.

  After checking and loading the weapon, he dressed quickly in some light cargo trousers and a loose khaki jacket over a T-shirt. Marc fastened his dive watch around his wrist and glanced at the time. He was due to make contact.

  The smartphone was a custom-made model bereft of identifying marks. It chimed as he activated it, and the micro-camera in the casing snapped a shot of his face, ensuring it recognised its user before it unlocked. A suite of apps blinked into life and he tapped an icon to activate the built-in end-to-end encryption software. A moment later, a bubble-shaped graphic flickered into life and the device vibrated.

  He hit the answer c
all key and Kara Wei’s voice issued out into the warm air. ‘How’d you like the new spyPhone?’

  ‘Does it do more than the last model?’

  ‘Read the manual.’ She took a breath. ‘So, we’re running this op under isolated protocol. I’m down the hall from you in room fifty-six. I’ll act as base, you’re the legs.’

  ‘Got it.’ He considered what that meant. Under this mission profile, Marc and Kara would not interact directly except in the direst of circumstances. Each would operate physically separate from the other in order to maintain effective security. He looked at the gun as he paired the Bluetooth earpiece and put it on. ‘Are we expecting trouble here?’

  ‘A man is dead,’ Kara said briskly, her voice switching to his ear. ‘Whoever shot him is still out there.’

  ‘Right.’ Reluctantly, Marc tossed the weapon and the spare loads into a waterproof drawstring bag and slung it over his shoulder, heading out. As he passed Kara’s room, he heard someone moving around inside. ‘So I reckon we start with Wetherby himself, yeah?’

  ‘His body is at the mortuary at Mater Dei Hospital, a few miles out of town.’ Her voice was level now, back to ‘operational’ mode. ‘But there are guards on it. Leave that for a moment. I’m working on penetrating the local police headquarters in Floriana. I’ll get what they have on the case, you check . . .’ She paused, and for a moment Marc thought he had lost her signal as he descended via elevator to the ground floor. ‘Check out Nestor Kyrkos, the man Wetherby met with.’

  ‘Okay.’ Marc slipped on the USAF-issue sunglasses he habitually wore as he walked out on to the street. The briefing had been equally thin on the Greek national and his employee, who had both been gunned down shortly before the hacker was murdered. He said as much to Kara, but she offered nothing more. ‘So where am I going?’