Ghost: Read online

  ‘How do you want to do this?’ he asked.

  ‘Quietly,’ she replied, then paused, thinking it over. ‘Or as close as we can get.’

  *

  Lucy flipped her Rubicon-issue smartphone to camera mode and slipped it into the breast pocket of her jacket with the lens peeking out. The device could digitally record hours of sound and video, and with a single tap it was possible to dump that data to a cloud server, so anything she captured from hereon would survive even if she didn’t. Lucy put that cheery thought out of her mind and led the way with the stolen TEC-9, picking her way down the vehicle ramp and into the parking space.

  The empty concrete hall had low ceilings strung with lines of white fluorescent tubes, but only a few were connected up and illuminated. Gathered beneath the stark pools of light were a trio of mini-vans more suited to soccer moms than domestic terrorists, and the ambulance she had seen earlier. Folding camping tables piled with weapons, bulletproof vests and radio gear were set before them, and a group of Soldier-Saints were busy kitting themselves up for whatever was coming. All of them were male, white and bristling with unspent anger.

  Lucy and Malte kept to the shadows as they approached, moving in low darting motions from behind one thick support pillar to another. The place made her gut clench. There was precious little cover down here, and all it would take was one yahoo with his head screwed on right to pick out the intruders and start shooting.

  At her side, Malte jerked his chin toward the back of the ambulance and Lucy caught sight of Crossman in close conversation with a big guy covered in prison tatts. They shared a harsh chuckle and then Crossman walked to the front of the vehicle, where the Asian in the long coat stood off to one side, facing away from Lucy and Malte. None of the Soldier-Saints seemed to want to come near the courier.

  ‘Okay, so you have the rest of your money,’ began Crossman. ‘Now how about you do your trick for us, huh?’

  ‘If you’ll give me a moment . . .’ Lucy’s eyes narrowed as she heard Madrigal’s odd voice. Something was off. It wasn’t the courier speaking, as she had assumed earlier. ‘Yes, there we are. The bank registers the transfer is complete. So we’re ready to proceed.’

  ‘I’m going to get closer,’ Lucy whispered to Malte. ‘Try to scope out the back of the ambulance.’

  ‘Copy,’ said Malte, and he broke away from her. In turn, Lucy went low, hugging the edges of the shadows as she circled around toward the nearest of the mini-vans.

  ‘I make a promise before God, I keep it,’ Crossman crowed. He had a shiny object in his hand, and now she was closer, Lucy could see it was a big silver crucifix on a chain. As she watched, he put the loop of it over his head and kissed the cross. ‘Tonight we’re gonna make good on a whole bunch of them.’ He turned to face his men and gave them a fatherly nod. ‘We’re doing the Lord’s work, boys.’

  Lucy paused to adjust the camera and when she looked back the courier had moved. ‘Let me tell you what your money has bought you,’ Madrigal went on. ‘Think of it as your only personal version of Genesis 1:3. The reverse of ‘let there be light’, as it were . . .’

  ‘She’s not here.’ The words slipped out of Lucy’s mouth as she had her first good look at the courier. The androgynous Asian hadn’t spoken once. The courier held a silver tablet in one hand, connected to a compact sat-comm unit in the other. On the tablet’s screen, Lucy could make out the head and shoulders of a white woman with henna-red hair. Her face was a mass of coloured squares, veiled by the same kind of gross pixilation that TV interviews used when showing folks on camera that didn’t want to be identified.

  ‘You’ll need to keep this with you,’ Madrigal continued. ‘My people will monitor the situation and send you a live feed via the tablet, so you and your men can find a clear route out of the city.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Crossman didn’t seem convinced. ‘What makes you think we’re gonna run when we’re done? We’re not in this for the glory, lady. This is for the War.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Lucy’s thoughts raced. If this meeting wasn’t in person, then what the hell was it about?

  Madrigal’s next words answered that question, and Lucy’s gut filled with ice. ‘While we have been talking, my team have inserted a digital firmware update into the smart electricity meters that monitor the power for this building. That update is now in the process of communicating itself wirelessly to the meters in the buildings around you. It will keep spreading, hopping from device to device, until every smart meter in the downtown area is affected. It won’t take long.’

  ‘That’s it? A fucking computer virus?’ Crossman’s lip curled. ‘You promised me a spectacular!’

  ‘The update contains malware code that gives me direct control of the power supply of everything for miles around.’ Madrigal continued, like she was explaining it to a child. ‘You can thank City Hall for that detail. If they hadn’t insisted on upgrading their infrastructure, this vulnerability would never have existed.’ She paused. ‘Give the word, Mr Crossman, and I will bring San Francisco to its knees. The city will be in disarray, and you and your men will be free to do as you wish.’

  Finally, a hateful grin broke across Crossman’s face. ‘Well. That’s more like it.’ He raised his voice. ‘You hear that, soldiers? Today we’ll ride right into the middle of those godless freaks out there and burn them down! We will remind them whose nation this is! We will teach them!’

  ‘Teach them! Teach them!’ Crossman’s men took up the words as chant, their voices echoing off the walls and the ceiling.

  Lucy shrank back and spotted Malte coming around to her. The look on his face told her that whatever news he had, it was going to make things worse. ‘What?’

  ‘Look.’ Malte had been using his smartphone like a body-camera as Lucy had, but now he handed it to her and spooled back the footage. She saw the side of the ambulance from his point of view as it lurched closer on the tiny screen. Then slowly, the camera revealed what was inside the vehicle.

  She saw four pressurised bottles on a makeshift metal frame, arranged around the guts of what could only be an improvised explosive device. The bottles were fire-engine red, the identifying colour for industrial-grade hydrogen gas.

  ‘It looks like a two-stage charge,’ Malte whispered. ‘You know what that means.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ Lucy was looking at a jury-rigged thermobaric weapon, a so-called fuel-air explosive device.

  Far more lethal than a conventional bomb, FAEs were particularly destructive devices that worked first by igniting a charge that would disperse a vapour of explosive material into the air. The aerosolised fuel mixed with oxygen into a diffuse, fast-spreading cloud, and then a second charge would turn that mass into a huge high-temperature detonation, accompanied by a powerful blast-wave effect. The Russian and American militaries had used them in Afghanistan against hardened targets, and terrorists had been building home-brew versions like the one on the phone screen for decades. The last time a thermobaric bomb had been triggered on US soil, in 1993, it had almost destroyed the World Trade Center in New York City. What sat in the back of the ambulance was a close cousin to that weapon. If it went off somewhere heavily populated – the Financial District, Union Square, Chinatown – the death toll would be catastrophic.

  ‘When we’re done today,’ Crossman told his men, ‘these degenerates are gonna look at the hole we put in this rotting abortion of a city and they will weep!’

  ‘Time to show the faithful their target, boss,’ said the tattooed man, pressing a leaflet into Crossman’s hand.

  The leader of the Soldier-Saints nodded to himself and offered up the sheet of paper. Lucy saw the words YERBA BUENA TOLERANCE FESTIVAL written across the top of the leaflet and her heart sank. Yerba Buena Gardens was only a few blocks away, close to a Jewish museum and a Catholic church, a popular gathering spot for people from all of San Francisco’s diverse populace. Crossman produced a Zippo lighter from his pocket and set the leaflet burning, dra
wing hoots of approval from his men. ‘They will know that we are the hand of God,’ he declared, ‘come down to smite them for their sins!’ Crossman flicked the ashy remains of the paper aside and called out to the men to open the gate leading to the exit ramp on the far side of the parking bay. The others strapped on head-mounted torches and readied their weapons.

  ‘If that device detonates in here,’ Malte said quietly, ‘it could bring this whole tower down.’ He knew Lucy well enough to already know what was going through her mind. Rowan and his FBI buddy had stumbled on something far worse than any of them had expected. The Soldier-Saints had to be stopped, and it had to be right now.

  Crossman strode over to the courier and snatched away the tablet. ‘Time for you to do what you do,’ he said to the woman on the screen, his mouth pulling into a savage sneer. ‘Let there be dark!’

  ‘Lights out,’ said Madrigal, and as the words left her lips, the parking garage was instantly plunged into blackness.

  *

  Mater Dei’s namesake had been rendered in an iron statue in front of the modern hospital campus, the statue of Mary and a young Jesus marking a cluster of sandy-coloured blocks that contained Malta’s most modern medical centre.

  There were few vehicles along the campus’s service roads, so Marc deposited the jeep as far as he could from the nearest light pole, reversing it into the shadows so he could race for the exit if he had to leave in a hurry. He shrugged on a dark jacket and gloves, then looped a thin grey shemagh around his neck to obscure his face. Staying well away from the hospital’s main entrance, he headed toward the low, one-storey building on the northern side of the complex where the mortuary was located.

  Long past midnight, the air had cooled. The night sky was empty of clouds and the day’s heat had faded away, but the flow of in-patients hadn’t slowed after sunset. It was the weekend, and that meant that a regular train of tourists who had overindulged passed through the doors. An ambulance sped past him, making for the accident and emergency department, and Marc gave it a wide berth.

  He pulled out his phone and a small metal tube the size of his thumb as he approached the entrance to the outbuilding. At this time of night, the door beneath the sign for Mortwarja was secured with a touch-key lock and intercom for calling the front desk, but Marc wasn’t going to waste time with that. He pointed the tube at the eye of the security camera above the entrance and it projected a powerful blue-green laser into its CCD circuits. The powerful beam dazzled the digital camera for a few moments, enough for Marc to get to the door before it reset. He placed his phone against the sensor pad for the key and it transmitted a wireless ping into the lock, mimicking a digital ID Kara had sourced for him from the database of the Maltese Divisional Police. It fooled the lock into thinking he was a detective-rank officer with clearance to enter the building, and the door clicked open.

  Marc edged through and inside, looking around, alert for any kind of confrontation. The morgue’s reception area was empty, and he quietly approached the front desk, using the dazzler a second time on another camera mounted above it. A sign on the desk in Maltese and English explained that the mortuary was closed until tomorrow, but the sounds of a television were issuing out from a half-open door on the far side of the desk. Marc heard tinny reports of gunfire and the screeching of tires. Whoever was on night duty appeared to be more interested in watching some action-packed movie than keeping an eye on the desk.

  Fine by me, he thought, and moved to the next security door, this one leading into a hallway and the rooms beyond. The fake ID programmed into the phone worked a second time and the magnetic locks snapped open. Marc slipped into the unlit corridor and advanced slowly and carefully, reading the bilingual signs on the walls. The preliminary medical report Kara had pulled from the police server told him where to find the body of Lex Wetherby, and he moved from door to door, searching for the right one.

  In the quiet and the dimness, Marc had to fight off a nagging uneasiness collecting at the base of his thoughts. He didn’t like hospitals. There was something about them that always made his skin crawl, even in one as new and as airy as this. In a more fanciful moment, he wondered if it was possible for all the pain and suffering that had occurred in such a place to be somehow concentrated in the walls, lingering there like an invisible psychic stain. A morgue was even worse, built to service the dead and nothing else.

  The bleak thought brought a flash of recall, a moment of sense-memory from a grimy, hot basement in a ruined orphanage in Turkey. He could almost smell the stale blood and rust in the air. Marc dismissed it with shake of the head and found the room he was looking for.

  Inside, he switched on a lamp and angled it toward the hatch of the roll-out freezer storing Wetherby’s corpse. Grimly, he opened it and eased out the tray, revealing a translucent white body-bag and the pallid corpse within it. A computer-printed label with the dead hacker’s name and personal information was slotted into a pocket on the bag, along with a barcode that Marc couldn’t interpret.

  Taking a deep breath, he unzipped the bag and found himself looking at Wetherby’s pale, bloodless face. Below, the dead man’s chest had been torn to shreds where a sniper’s bullet had struck him.

  ‘Shit.’ Marc wasn’t a stranger to death, but the sallow, pasty cast to the corpse was particularly grotesque. It seemed unreal, like a prop created in a Hollywood film studio. Breathing through his mouth, he still tasted cleaning chemicals on his tongue as he continued his investigation. He saw no Y-shaped incision down the dead man’s torso to indicate that a full autopsy had taken place.

  ‘Cause of death is pretty damn clear,’ Marc said aloud. Still, he noted scarring on the hacker’s forearm and hands, and poked gently at it, seeing evidence of old damage there from a fire or a chemical burn. The right arm was less marked than the left and he found a tattoo there, ringing the wrist in a blue-ink bracelet. Had Wetherby been wearing a wristwatch, it would have been obscured.

  At first, he thought the design was an abstract one, a collection of lines and circles, but looking closer he found three numbers arranged in a line: 56 46 53. They looked like decimal map coordinates, but there were too few figures for that. He checked the other wrist and found nothing.

  Marc moved down the body, figuring that perhaps there might be more numbers hidden in another tattoo elsewhere, but he blinked and halted when he found something else – or rather, the lack of it.

  Wetherby was missing his right leg from the knee joint down. By the texture of the skin there, he had lost it a long time ago, and the lines of hardening in the epidermis made it clear he used a prosthetic of some kind. Where that was now, Marc had no idea.

  He plucked the comms earpiece from his pocket and tapped it to go active. ‘Kara? Are you on?’

  The woman responded after a brief silence. ‘What? You’re at the morgue, right? Is he . . . I mean, the body, is it there?’ Her voice was muffled for a moment, then it came back clearer. ‘What have you got?’ He told her about the numbers on the tattoo and she dismissed it. ‘That’s not relevant. What else?’

  ‘That report on our dead friend neglected to mention that he’s short half a leg. He should have a prosthetic here.’ Marc spoke quietly, so his voice wouldn’t carry. ‘According to that uploaded video, he very clearly had it when he took a dive off the ramparts at Mdina.’

  ‘The cops don’t have anything like that in evidence with his personal effects,’ Kara confirmed. ‘So he either lost it on the way down, or—’

  ‘Or someone found his body before the police did.’ Marc had already filled Kara in on his chase after the drone and the state of Wetherby’s hotel room, and it didn’t take much of a leap to connect the events. ‘We know the killers were searching for something. My money’s on data, so if he stowed it somewhere safe . . .’

  ‘He hid it inside the prosthetic. Which they now have.’ Kara cut her mic for a moment.

  In the silence, he went to his smartphone and toggled a reader app to scan the b
arcode on the body bag’s label. The data keyed to a notation from the hospital’s main server that the corpse was scheduled for cremation. Too soon, considered Marc. Somebody is trying to cover their tracks.

  But then his train of thought broke when the handset vibrated and a message bubble appeared on the screen. The smartphone’s built-in sensors were detecting a radio frequency ID chip close by.

  Marc tapped the screen and studied the read-out. ‘Kara? I’m getting an RFID ping here . . .’ The display showed the signal’s proximity, clearly tagging Wetherby’s body. ‘Oh hell, did he swallow it?’

  ‘What’s the ping read as?’ she demanded, her voice muffled and throaty.

  The tag returned a series of six familiar digits. 564653. ‘The same numbers as the tattoo.’

  ‘He . . . He was sending a message.’

  ‘Yeah, but to who?’ Dialling up the sensor’s acuity, Marc began to run the handset over the body, searching for the tag’s exact location and trying not to think about the worst places it might be concealed. In a few moments, he had narrowed down the RFID signal location to the fire-scarred hand.

  Marc put down the phone and explored the cold flesh of the dead man fingers and palm. He found a lump in the webbing between Wetherby’s thumb and forefinger, a tiny capsule of circuitry no larger than a grain of rice. A chip that size could only hold a couple of kilobytes of data at the most.

  ‘This is a marker,’ he said, pressing his gloved fingers into the scarification until he came across what he suspected was there. In the heel of the dead man’s hand, buried beneath the skin, was a flat, regular object. The old scarring hid the fact that the flesh had recently been cut open and healed closed again. ‘I have something,’ he added, searching a nearby drawer for a disposable scalpel.

  ‘What is it?’ snapped Kara.

  ‘Give me a second.’ Grimacing, Marc took the blade and made a deep incision around the foreign object, cutting into the sallow meat of the corpse and peeling it back. Dark, coagulated blood oozed out of the opening, and the light from the lamp glittered on a black sliver of plastic embedded in the layers of Wetherby’s epidermis. Marc used a pair of long-nosed forceps to snag the object, but it resisted removal more than he expected. Gently applying force, it slowly came free and he saw the reason why. The plastic shard wasn’t all he’d found. A web of metal threads came with it, and Marc realised that he was looking at a ‘distributed’ flash drive built around the core of a microSD connector. The hacker had deliberately implanted it in his hand to keep it concealed.