Shadow Read online

  “My apologies for keeping you waiting,” began Solomon. “Thank you for coming.”

  He extended his hand to shake that of the closest man, starting with his sole ally on the board.

  “Any excuse to visit Monte Carlo is a good one.” Gerhard Keller smiled and pumped Solomon’s hand with his own.

  The barrel-chested financier was descended from German barony, and Delancort had always sensed something medieval in the man. In his late fifties, Keller was a genius mathematician, but he would have looked at home in some forest-bound Schloss, gnawing on a chicken leg and swigging from a flagon of mead. When he wasn’t keeping a hawk-like eye on Rubicon’s bottom line, the German liked to use his skills in number theory to gamble, and win more often than the casinos liked.

  “Speak for yourself, Ger,” said the woman standing at his side. “Too damn warm for me.”

  Esther McFarlane’s native Edinburgh accent grew more noticeable when she was irritated, and Delancort marked it now. The Scot’s tone was like a barometer of her mood and what he read there he seldom liked. A few years younger than Keller, McFarlane was the daughter of oilmen and engineers, and she was fond of saying that for all the expensive education her parents had given her, she still had crude oil running through her veins. Brisk and uncompromising, she was totally lacking in artifice. Solomon respected that about the woman, but Delancort found her uncouth, at times vulgar. She gave the African a perfunctory handshake and drifted back to her chair.

  “Let’s get down to it, shall we?”

  “Of course.”

  The final member of the board was Victor Cruz, a Chilean industrialist with a thoughtful demeanor whose own corporation—a mining and technology concern called El Solar—had been bought out by Rubicon in the early 2000s. Cruz had an unerring knack of absorbing everything said around him and elegantly parsing it. His skill in making connections that other people did not see was what had made El Solar the success it was, enough that Solomon had brought him on to Rubicon’s board after the takeover, so it could benefit the group still further.

  “It’s good to see you, Ekko. I wish it could be under better circumstances.”

  “That sounds ominous.”

  Solomon took his seat and then the rest of them sat.

  Delancort saw that his opposite numbers—Cruz’s, McFarlane’s and Keller’s own executive assistants—were poised over their individual data tablets, and he skimmed over his own.

  I know where this is going, he thought. I warned Solomon that we have been pushing at the limit for a while now. It was only a matter of time before the board decided to push back.

  “Let’s talk about some of the choices you’ve been making over the last year or so, Ekko,” said McFarlane. “Discretionary purchases and operational decisions that we haven’t been read in on. Funding diverted from some divisions into parts of Rubicon that we don’t have oversight for.”

  “I’ve done what I considered necessary,” said Solomon.

  “Was it necessary to contract a Swedish shipyard to build us a submarine?” she shot back, gesturing to her assistant. The woman at her side sent a graphic to the shared screen on the far wall, an image of the Saab A26 stealth submersible that Rubicon had yet to take delivery of. “I didn’t see this item on our oceanographic program or the coral reclaim operation.”

  “We have projects that will utilize that unit when it comes on stream,” came the reply.

  “What about the acquisition of the Horizon Integral Corporation?” said Keller, turning serious. “Before you say it, of course we see the value in such a procurement—their market share in digital infrastructure is substantial. But you went ahead without consulting the rest of the board.”

  Solomon gave a slow nod. “I have that power. I chose to exercise it.”

  “The timing, though, that’s fishy.” McFarlane leaned forward, glancing toward Cruz, then back again. “Horizon Integral suffered a major security incident several months ago, while you were actually present in their building. Along with members of the Special Conditions Division. Then within days, HI’s chief executive officer brings you an acquisition package so good it’s impossible to turn down.” She took a breath. “Ekko, if I look closely at this, am I not going to like what I find?”

  The “security incident” McFarlane referred to was far more than that. Horizon Integral’s main product—advanced software that managed major infrastructure systems, from traffic control to power grids, self-driving cars to automated factories—had been compromised by a black-hat hacker cadre. Those hackers had sought to create chaos and ultimately destabilize nations, and their plan would have worked if Rubicon’s operatives had not stopped them. In the aftermath, the agreement between the two corporations had helped keep that truth from the wider world, in order to prevent a panic.

  On the surface, it seemed like a cold, mercenary act. Perhaps it was, mused Delancort, but in the end, a worse fate had been averted.

  “If you have no need to pull on that thread,” Solomon said, “I would suggest you do not.”

  “Ekko…” Cruz gave a sigh. “No one in this room doubts the good work that you have done with the Rubicon Group. You’ve made this corporation an exemplar of ethical capitalism. We’re proud to be a part of that. But there are facts we cannot overlook. While Rubicon’s private military and security contracting divisions do their work in the light of day, your special conditions people do not. There are unconfirmed reports of Rubicon assets being deployed against active terrorist groups and criminal conspiracies, even talk about nuclear weapons, for God’s sake! What are we supposed to think?”

  “Aye,” agreed McFarlane. “And then there’s the work of data gathering going on. I mean, monitoring our rivals and the stock exchanges for an edge in the markets is one thing. But running a private intelligence database, this so-called—” she looked down at her notes—“Gray Record? We’re not a nation state. Activity like that draws the wrong kind of attention.”

  Delancort shot Solomon a sideways look. The Gray Record was the informal designation for an SCD data server, where every piece of intel they gathered was stored and cross-referenced, ready to be utilized. Its existence was not a widely known fact.

  “Those of us with long memories recall your former partner,” said Keller, and Solomon’s expression turned stony. “And how that turned out. No one wants to see a repetition of those events.”

  Delancort watched Solomon frame his reply with care.

  “I have never made my intentions secret from any of you,” he began. “Rubicon’s aegis encompasses aviation, mining, biotechnology and many more interests. Our security arm is only one part of that great machine, but within it is an entity that can do as much good as our medical research, our clean energy initiatives … The Special Conditions Division operates under my personal direction, and yes, it may exist on the edge of legality. But it works to even the balance in the dark places where the strong prey upon the weak.” His gaze briefly turned inward. “You all know … I came from such a place.” Solomon reached up and touched the silver necklace at his throat. An abstract piece of metal—the trigger from the rifle he had once carried as a child soldier—hung from it. “As long as I have the wealth and the ability, I will do what I can to bring justice there.”

  “Very admirable,” said Cruz. “But there must be limits to this … adventurism, Ekko. You must see that?”

  “Is that what you believe, Victor? This is some sort of game?”

  “We can’t make a profit if money is being diverted to bribes, buyouts and a private crusade.” McFarlane’s tone was damning. “We share some of the blame. For too long, we didn’t look too closely at what you were doing off the books. But the board is losing patience, Ekko. There have to be limits, even for a man like you.”

  “I forged Rubicon with blood and sweat and sacrifice. Be careful when you tell me what I should do with it.”

  Delancort had rarely seen Solomon roused to anger, but he saw it now, the African’s dark eyes t
urning steely, his jaw set hard.

  He saw his opportunity to intervene.

  “Sir, perhaps there is a middle ground we can seek here? Maintain the integrity of the SCD’s work and keep Rubicon protected as well?”

  “I’m glad to see where your loyalty lies, Mr. Delancort,” said McFarlane. “I was afraid I’d have to remind you that you’re in the employ of the Rubicon Group, not Ekko Solomon.”

  “That is not what I meant…” he began, but Keller and Cruz were already nodding along to the woman’s words.

  “We feel it is best to limit the operations of the Special Conditions Division for the time being,” said Cruz.

  “While we undertake a review,” added Keller.

  “We have an operation under way at the moment,” Delancort noted.

  “Close it down,” said McFarlane.

  “That would be ill-advised.” Delancort shook his head.

  “Then limit it,” said the woman, with finality.

  Solomon broke his silence, folding away the moment of annoyance he had shown as if it had never been there.

  “I believe you had already decided on your course of action before I arrived, yes?” He didn’t wait for the others to reply. “It seems I have no alternative but to agree.”

  He stood and turned to the door, and Delancort rose with him, but the African put out a hand and held it to his assistant’s chest, halting him in place with firm pressure.

  Delancort hesitated, suddenly unsure of where he was supposed to be.

  “Sir?”

  “Give the board whatever they require,” said Solomon, and there was a distance in his tone Delancort had never heard before.

  He walked away, leaving Delancort with a growing sense of unease.

  * * *

  The first leg of Marc’s journey had him out of Naples toward Germany. It felt odd going through the outskirts of that city again. The last time he had been there, it was the end of a pursuit across the globe chasing a stolen portable nuclear device, and the tension of those desperate hours came back over him like a cold shadow.

  He tried to push it away, but in the end Marc let a restless sleep take him under. The next thing he knew, a flight attendant was nudging him awake and they were at the arrival gate in Munich.

  He drifted around the airport’s huge enclosed atrium, unable to settle. Malte and Lucy were on separate flight plans—the Finn going via his native Helsinki and then Bangkok, the American through Istanbul—to meet at Singapore Changi within a few hours of one another. He wondered why Delancort had insisted on routing them differently, and only one possibility seemed to fit. The situation with Doctor Lam was more sensitive than Rubicon were letting on.

  On the next leg of the flight, which at least was comfortably in first class, Marc logged on to the airliner’s in-flight wifi and did a little pre-mission prep of his own. He pulled up the hood of his dark SeV fleece and leaned over his ruggedized computer tablet. It was his own personal piece of kit, not the one that Rubicon’s techs had issued him. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Solomon’s people, but there were times when it felt smarter to maintain his own degree of operational security.

  As they flew east and the evening drew in, Marc’s fellow passengers slipped off their expensive shoes and tailored jackets, drank their cocktails and ate their meals, while he lost himself in the web. Using custom search tools and back channel protocols, Marc dredged the internet for whatever he could find about Susan Lam.

  There was plenty about MaxaBio, the research lab where she worked. Set on an elegantly manicured campus in Singapore’s tech-industry quarter, the Rubicon subdivision was right at the bleeding edge of oncological medicine. Their stated goal was to find the vital key to unlocking a cure for cancer within the next decade, and if the papers and seminars their scientists presented were accurate, they were well on their way to achieving it. Biomedicine wasn’t exactly in Marc’s wheelhouse, but he had the soul of a tech-geek and he’d read enough issues of New Scientist to get the basics. MaxaBio were developing an artificial biological agent that mimicked the action of a virus, but instead of infecting and destroying the host’s tissues, their cure would target only the deadly cancer cells and eliminate them, leaving the patient’s body to recover naturally.

  Marc balked at the mention of the word “virus,” his blood chilling.

  Would Rubicon ever be involved in something as dangerous as biological weapons?

  He couldn’t believe that Ekko Solomon would countenance something like that. The African had been born in the chaos of destructive brushfire wars, and he had seen famine and disease first-hand. He knew better than any of them the misery they left behind them.

  Marc read on. A typical virus found in nature, so the MaxaBio brochure said, was in many ways the genetic equivalent of an empty container. A “shell” element did the work of getting the disease into a living host, but it was the genetic material within it that did the unpleasant things. Their plan was to use such a shell to deliver a genetically tailored payload to kill off malignant cells, and Doctor Susan Lam was at the head of the team leading that initiative.

  “And of course, this kind of thing could never be misused,” muttered Marc.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  He looked up at the flight attendant standing in the aisle next to his seat. Marc managed a weak smile and became aware that some of the other, well-heeled passengers were looking questioningly in his direction. In his jeans and hoodie, with the taint of two weeks of shipboard life barely off him after a cursory shower, Marc suddenly realized how out of place he looked.

  “I’m fine,” he said, and the attendant took the hint, moving on.

  Stifling a yawn, Marc rubbed his eyes and continued, changing tack, looking into Lam herself. There wasn’t much to grasp, beyond a terse bio on the company website and a few contributing bylines on articles in journals of note like Nature and The Lancet. Lam seemed respected but not lauded, the kind of diligent researcher who was toiling away toward an essential goal, uninterested in the limelight.

  Or maybe not. Maybe that was what people were supposed to believe. In his time at MI6, before he had become field-rated, one of Marc’s duties had been pattern analysis. He had a sixth sense for it, something that his recruiter-instructor John Farrier had once called his “ear for music.” It came from the same tech-nerd data-hungry compulsion that made him good with computer code, able to reel off the specs of military hardware at the drop of a hat, or quote the entirety of the original Star Wars trilogy from memory. Marc saw the shape of data as a whole, analyzing the entirety of the “take,” not just the individual pieces of it. He knew a manufactured identity when he saw one.

  Susan Lam’s life was just on the wrong side of artificial. It wasn’t ragged enough to be real; it didn’t have the loose ends that normal people had. Her social media comprised a lonely photo-sharing page that didn’t contain a single shot of Lam’s face, and some oblique comments on a gardening newsgroup. By contrast, her husband Simon was active across a dozen different platforms, the lecturer engaging with his law students on many subjects, and posting family pictures of his son week in and week out. Susan was in some of those shots, but never fully, always as if she had been turning out of frame when he took them.

  Just shy? Self-conscious about her looks? Marc wondered. Or is there another reason?

  Tracking back through the years, he came across images of the boy’s birth mother, after a sad oasis of shots where dad and son were clearly trying to carry on as usual without her. That gave him a time frame, and he matched it with Susan Lam’s sparse digital footprint.

  The scientist had been working at MaxaBio for a few years, marrying Simon six months after being announced as part of the oncology project. But before that, she had barely existed at all. Every reference he found that pre-dated the MaxaBio gig had the same whiff of the artificial to it. It was a decent cover, Marc allowed, but it wasn’t designed to be bulletproof.

  Whoever put this together didn�
�t expect anyone to give it any serious scrutiny, thought Marc, studying the photo of Susan Lam.

  All of which raised a single pertinent question: who was this woman?

  * * *

  Twelve hours later, most of which Marc had passed in a deep, dreamless sleep after surrendering to his fatigue, he sat in the back seat of a black Maserati Levante. Lucy lounged across from him like a dozing cat, her face half-hidden under a tan baseball cap. Up front, Malte drove the big SUV westward through the traffic on Singapore’s Pan Island Expressway, keeping on the button of the speed limit as a heavy rain squall passed over them.

  “I checked in with Assim,” she said, directing the comment at no one in particular. “He’s still at the lab, sifting security footage.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  Lucy nodded. “Seems Delancort was wrong about Lam vanishing completely. She made a stop at MaxaBio before she ghosted.”

  Marc’s skin prickled.

  “Making a deposit or a withdrawal?” He knew the answer before she gave it.

  “Take-out. Local cops are on it, which means we need to work fast. They’ve already entered her house and searched it.”

  Marc was going to ask another question, but then Malte took them off the highway and on to an upmarket residential street.

  “This is it,” said the Finn, pulling to a halt on the driveway of a two-story colonial house.

  Leaving Malte outside, Marc and Lucy dashed through the rain to the house. The upper floor of the building was larger than the lower one, supported by square pillars that matched the black-and-white exterior décor, forming a veranda around the front door. Behind streamers of crime scene tape, a modern electronic lock secured it, but Marc had the necessary kit in his pack to run a bypass, simulating the wireless electronic key fob needed to open it.

  He peered at a data panel on the screen.

  “The lock’s memory shows another hack took place here,” he said, without looking up. “Someone used the same kind of gear I have to get in without setting off the alarms.”