Ghost: Read online

  ‘You’re unsecured,’ she told him, without preamble. ‘Sorry. Should have told you. Call backs to Rubicon are being routed through my machine right now.’

  ‘Is that usual procedure?’ He stared at the phone, imagining Kara on the other end of the line, sitting cross-legged on her bed at the Hotel Nova with a halo of electronic equipment spread out around her.

  ‘Delancort put a red code on this. Confidence is high that the Combine are doing deep channel monitoring of everything going in and out of the Maltese comms grid, so we need to compartmentalise. I’m gating everything, is that a problem?’

  ‘You should have told me.’ He paused, weighing her words. ‘Seems like a lot of effort for one dead guy.’

  Marc was going to say more, but Kara went on as if he had not spoken. ‘Okay, so, I broke into the police database. Forwarding you a copy of the case file right now.’ The phone chimed and he found a new digital dossier in the memory, pages of machine-translated Maltese from the initial police report and the medical examiner’s preliminary look at the hacker’s corpse. ‘Long story short, the cops from the Criminal Investigation Division are already tying Lex to Kyrkos and his links with organised crime. They’re following the assumption that this is a deal that turned sour.’ She made a snorting noise. ‘The obvious explanation.’

  ‘But not the actual one?’ Marc replied, finding the file pages from the morgue. ‘I mean, there’s a chance this could be what it looks like. Black hat hacker gets in over his head with a smuggler, and—’

  ‘No.’ She shut him down firmly. ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘Okay.’ He told her what he had learned from Stefan as he skimmed the file, ignoring the bulk of the text to find the summary section. The examining doctor’s report on Wetherby’s killing was stark and to the point.

  Cause of death: gunshot wound to the chest. Damage pattern consistent with high-velocity rifle round fired from range.

  Marc thought about the video and the grim possibility of a sniper on some nearby rooftop, and was glad he’d chosen to sit somewhere out of sight.

  ‘I’m working up an ID that you’ll be able to use to access the mortuary at Mater Dei, so you can get a look at Lex’s body . . .’ He heard the soft clatter of keystrokes through the earpiece. ‘It’s taking longer than I expected.’

  Marc scrolled back through the pages of the report. ‘Our guy stayed at a hotel in Paceville, a place called the Adagio.’ He opened up a web browser and found the Adagio’s booking site. It was a small, characterless block of self-catering apartments off the main drag of the nightclub district, little different from the hotel where he and Kara were based. ‘I’ll go scope it out,’ he added.

  ‘Good call,’ Kara said distractedly. ‘Do that.’

  But he didn’t move from his seat, instead pausing to finish his drink. At length, the hazy sense of suspicion that had been forming in Marc ever since he left France solidified. ‘You want to tell me what you’re not telling me, Kara?’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘I mean, I admit I’m not the same kind of operator as Lucy, I don’t have her experience. But I do have an instinct I depend on.’ It had been that sense that kept Marc Dane alive in the past when he had gone on the run, and over the past few hours it had steadily rung louder and louder.

  Kara remained silent for a long time, and once more he thought he had lost her signal completely. But when she spoke again, she sounded vulnerable and afraid. ‘You don’t trust me.’ He remembered what she had said to him in Chamonix. That same tone in her voice, like she was lost.

  ‘That’s not it.’ Part of him knew that he should have pressed her, but he was in this now, and the mystery of the motive behind Wetherby’s murder had its hooks in him. ‘Be honest with me.’

  ‘I am,’ she said tersely. ‘Get back in touch when you’ve taken a pass over the hotel.’ Her moment of weakness vanished, the line clicking off.

  If anything, the Adagio looked even less appealing in real life than it did from its shots on the travel advisor website. Fitted in asymmetrically between two other equally unlovely apartment blocks, it had a half-hearted set of pastel panels painted up the length of the facia in some vain attempt to make the place look cool. But those colours had gone out of fashion in the eighties and no one had cared enough to update it. The hotel and its neighbours formed a wedge of dull concrete blocking out the backstreets behind Paceville, serving as little more than crash pads for the tourists who lived for the neon-drenched clubs and bars that lit up the place after sunset. At this time of day, the hotels were quiet. Most of the residents would be out on the beach or still sleeping off the previous night’s over-indulgence.

  The front desk was unmanned. Marc scoped out the cheap security camera aimed at the doorway through the gap between the top of his sunglasses and the bottom of his baseball cap’s bill. The lens was covered in a layer of dust, which meant that on the off-chance it was still working, his face would be obscured. So far, so good.

  Past a grumbling ice machine, Marc found a narrow, steep staircase and jogged up to the fourth floor where Wetherby had been staying. The corridor was dingy and unventilated, but he found what he was looking for straight away. Like Kyrkos’s yacht, the door to the dead man’s room had crime scene tape cordoning it off and another police warning sticker plastered over the spyhole.

  The lock popped open easily with a little work from the knife in Marc’s folding multi-tool. He could see scuff marks around the mechanism where it had clearly been forced before. As the door opened, he ducked under the tape and inside, halting on the threshold.

  The hacker’s room looked like a tornado had ripped through it. Every cupboard in the compact kitchenette had been opened. The mattress in the bedroom was folded up in a corner, the bedframe beneath it shoved away from the wall. All the drawers hung slack and the wardrobe gaped along with them. A breeze came in from an open sliding door on the far side of the room, making the blackout curtain shift and move.

  Marc picked his way over discarded piles of clothes and looked into the tiny bathroom. There was nothing but a dripping shower and a few cheap men’s toiletries along the top of the washbasin. He crouched and found the shredded remains of a leather wash bag on the cracked tile floor. Whoever had turned this room over had looked in every possible place where the dead man might have concealed something.

  The question is, what did Wetherby have to hide? The most likely answer was data, and if he hadn’t risked sending it to a cloud server that meant some kind of physical media, probably a USB drive or a microSD card.

  It was clear to Marc that the murders of the hacker and the smuggler were nothing to do with turf wars or criminal payback, as the police were assuming. His gut told him that Wetherby was a thief, and he had died because of it. Marc poked at the torn bag with the blade of the multi-tool. Had the people who killed him actually found what they were looking for?

  He wandered back into the room and made a slow orbit of it, checking through the mess, coming up empty.

  There were too many ifs and not enough certainties. If Wetherby had stolen from the Combine, if he was trying to leverage Kyrkos to get him to safety with it, if he had been killed for robbing them . . . Marc knew from personal experience that those who double-crossed the Combine’s power-players ended up dead.

  He thought about Dima Novakovich, a middleman who had worked with the group as a black-book accountant and a broker before turning informant to MI6. A man shot down right in front of him by a Combine kill-team for daring to go against them. And remembering Dima threatened to release a rising tide of other, more acidic recollections.

  Marc stifled the anger before it came, but it had already started to distract him. Enough that he had missed the little electronic device sitting beneath the dresser, aiming its unblinking eye into the hotel room.

  It wasn’t a camera, but a wireless ultraviolet sensor unit, the kind that would be connected to a cheap home-security system. The invisible beam it projected reflected bac
k into a tiny detector, and Marc had broken the line by passing in front of it. Silent alarm, he told himself, hesitating at the open window, looking out at the dilapidated sundeck beyond that connected the Adagio’s fourth-floor balconies.

  He retreated back into the shadows, annoyed at his inattention. If someone had planted the sensor here, it meant they were watching the place to observe anyone who might come looking into the hacker’s death – and Marc had blundered right into that. If he was quick, if he ran right this second, he might be able to get away before whomever the alarm summoned arrived.

  But then another thought occurred to him. This was an opportunity to get a look at Wetherby’s killers face to face. He could stake out the room and wait to see who came looking, turning the trap around on those who had set it.

  He started for the door, and had it open when a high-pitched whining tone reached his ears. The noise came from outside, a whirring, nasal buzz that sounded like a Formula 1 racing car on helium. Marc made a choice and ducked into the shadowy bathroom, pressing himself into a corner. He felt for the drawstring bag on his back and drew the Glock, pulling back the slide to make sure a round was in the chamber.

  The buzzing grew louder. It was in the hotel room now. Marc squinted into the mirror over the washbasin, the angle of it acute enough for him to be able to see a sliver of the bedroom and kitchen alcove. A shadow flickered over the walls and an odd, spindly shape floated into view.

  A small quadrotor drone, not much larger than hardback book, hovered in the air. Four arms ending in the blur of fast-spinning propeller blades suspended the skinny fuselage of the insect-like machine. It had a skeletal, unfinished look to it, the workings of the drone’s mechanisms clearly visible as it pivoted in place. Marc saw the stubby mast of a Bluetooth antenna poking up from the middle of the device and the glitter of a mono-eye camera in its ‘nose’. The drone executed a slow turn, taking in the room with its unblinking lens. It bobbed in the air toward the front of the room, coming closer.

  Marc shrank back, out of its line of sight. He could sense a human hand on the controls of the thing from the way it moved, and wondered who might be on the far end of its radio circuit. A clever idea, he reflected. Leaving the drone concealed nearby was a good way to keep a watchful eye on Wetherby’s room without actually exposing a human asset to discovery.

  But the drone could still provide some vital clues, if he could get his hands on it. Marc snatched a damp towel from the drying rack near the bath and made ready to throw it over the little machine.

  When he looked up, it was right there in the doorway, rotors spinning in an angry blur. He couldn’t help but flinch in surprise, and the drone did the same, jerking away as the operator flicked the controls to back off. With a screech of power, it retreated across the room towards the open window.

  ‘Shit!’ Marc dropped the towel and ran after the fleeing machine, hurdling the rusted metal rails of the balcony to land flat-footed on the sundeck. The drone powered upward in a vertical rise, and he brought the pistol to bear, aiming after it. But the target was small and fast, and he knew there was a less-than-likely chance of him hitting it. He kept cursing and stuffed the gun in his belt, grabbing at a series of artfully protruding bricks on the far wall. They gave him the handholds he needed to scramble up past the fifth floor and on to the roof of the Adagio, in time to see the drone buzz away in the direction of the beach. It flew lazily over the crown of the next apartment block along, weaving around a cluster of satellite TV dishes.

  Marc sprinted across the tarpaper-covered roof and over a low wall that demarcated the line between the two buildings. If he was actually going to try to shoot the thing out of the sky, he needed to be close enough to make sure he would not miss, because filling the air with bullets in a vain attempt to bring down the drone would have police swarming the area in minutes.

  As the little machine dipped over the far gable, he saw it make a yawing motion, turning into a backward-flying attitude to aim its camera eye at him. Whomever controlled the device most likely ran it through a first-person view rig, using video goggles to give them a simulated outlook that would mimic that of a pilot’s cockpit. They were trying to get a good shot of him, a clean capture of the face of their pursuer.

  Marc slid over the edge in front of him and into a half-metre blind drop down to the top of the next building. He landed hard with a grunt, and a shock of pain lanced up through his shins as the baseball cap on his head flicked off in the rush of air. The drone flipped over and pitched forward to gain speed and distance, zipping over the mildewed tiles around a dusty, waterless rooftop swimming pool.

  Cutting off the corner, Marc ran across the shallow end of the drained pool, slipping on a drift of crumbly leaves that had blown into the corners. He skidded and almost fell, losing precious momentum, and saw the drone extend away.

  For a moment, he thought he had lost his chance. But then the machine swung back around and bobbed closer, side-slipping through the air.

  ‘You are taking the piss, aren’t you mate?’ Marc called out, wondering if it had audio as well as video surveillance capability. The drone’s pilot was toying with him. Had they wanted to get out of there and leave Marc standing, it would have been easy enough to power upwards in a steep climb, or drop quickly down to the streets below. Instead, they were playing games.

  Marc raised his right hand and offered the drone a universal gesture that would communicate his temperament to anyone who saw it, his middle finger aimed upward. The drone bounced playfully through the warm air, circling him just high enough to be out of arm’s reach, and as it came around, the operator might have seen where Marc’s other hand was resting – atop the grimy haft of an old pool sweeper half-hidden beneath the leaves and windblown rubbish.

  He moved in a fast spin, flicking up the length of the sweeper so that the ragged mesh basket at the far end hit the drone square-on, swatting it like a fly. The little quadrotor spun down against the floor of the pool and clattered noisily off the grimy blue tiles, spinning to a halt in the deep end.

  ‘Gotcha, you little sod!’ Marc dropped the sweeper and ran down the incline to where the drone lay on its back. The rotors juddered, whined and stopped, fragments of plastic littering the area around it.

  If he could tear it apart, get into the control circuitry and radio gear, dismantle it . . . Marc grabbed at the frame of the machine. Taking a good look at it, he could see it was built on a carbon-fibre mount, with high-end components.

  This was a custom racer-grade machine, not some gadget store plaything. He turned it over in his hands, and without warning the digital motors at the ends of the frame burst back into life. Razor-sharp polymer propellers slashed at his hands, slicing into skin.

  ‘Damn it!’ He let go by reflex and the drone leapt from his grip, and into the air, the high hornet’s snarl of its rotors setting his teeth on edge.

  Damaged and wobbling, but still airworthy, the drone fled as fast as it could, vanishing over the edge of the pool. Ignoring the pain from the lacerations across his hands, Marc went after it. He scrambled along the roof and over the edge on to a series of staggered concrete sun shades. From there, he made a jump over a metre-wide gap to the next building, a series of older terraced apartments with roofs of red tile. Even as he chased after it, a part of Marc knew there was no way he would be able to catch the drone now. The machine ignored him and flew at full throttle, down the line of the road that ended in the blue-green waters of St George’s Bay.

  Each sloping roof brought him one storey closer to street level, and from below he heard tourists calling up at him as he ran, ducking under low-hanging antennas or over the humming forms of air conditioner units. The last roof ended in a sheer drop above the entrance to a bar and he used an open awning to break his fall, sliding down off it and on to the road.

  The drone sped out over the sand, over the heads of surprised sunbathers who called out in alarm. Marc jumped a low-slung barrier bordering the beach and ran down t
o the water’s edge, the waves swamping his trainers as the drone kept on flying and left him behind, arrowing out over the blue toward nothing. For a moment, he thought it might be homing back on a boat out there, possibly the place from which it was being flown, but there were only empty dinghies bobbing on the water. The drone became a dot, the buzz of its rotors fading as it reached the mouth of the bay where the shallows fell away. Marc shaded his eyes to stare after it, and saw a brief blink of sunshine off the shiny black frame as its battery charge finally gave out and it fell. A white splash of foam marked the place where the drone hit the water, and then it was gone.

  Glaring into the distance, Marc retreated back from the tideline and sat heavily on the coarse yellow sand. He did his best to clean the stinging, shallow cuts on his hands with clean water from his pack.

  He hung his head and stared at the ground. ‘I fucking hate drones,’ he said to himself, wincing as his hands tightened into fists.

  After a while, he looked back in the direction he had come, scanning the rooftops of Paceville and considering the situation. The drone’s remote pilot had dumped it into the sea to prevent anyone from getting information from it, and with the currents out in the bay there would be no chance of finding the thing in the water. Marc’s first thought was that the operator had to be close, no more than a thousand metres away from the drone itself, but then he remembered the high-density antenna he had seen on the machine’s casing. With the right kind of on-board communication hardware, the drone’s command signal could have been coming from any wireless network within range. That meant the pilot could have been as close as the guy with a smartphone sitting on the patio of the nearest bar, or a world away down some fast-traffic internet connection.

  And they saw my face.

  *

  The day had turned out to be a fine one in the end, and the warmth still lingered as the sun set behind the downtown towers of San Francisco. Now darkness was falling, but the streets were bright with street lamps and loud with the constant ebb and flow of traffic through the grid of avenues and boulevards.