Shadow Read online

  The young Saudi technician cradled a tablet computer in the crook of his arm, and he blinked at them from behind his thick-rimmed glasses.

  “Back where?”

  Despite himself, Marc couldn’t stop from taking a peek. He saw a couple of uniformed Singaporean cops and a severe man in a black suit. They appeared to be grilling a member of the MaxaBio staff, the man in the suit punctuating his questions with sharp jabbing motions.

  “Don’t draw their attention,” insisted Assim.

  His enunciation was cut-glass Received Pronunciation English, the legacy of a childhood in the best British boarding schools that money could buy, and it was the polar opposite of Marc’s rough-edged South London accent. Assim Kader was the Special Conditions Division’s cybersecurity expert, or as he liked to joke, their “hacker without portfolio.”

  Thin and animated by a constant nervous energy, Assim had been pushed into the front rank a year ago when the SCD’s previous digital warfare specialist Kara Wei had gone rogue in pursuit of her own agenda. Months later, Marc still couldn’t bring himself to call what Kara had done a “betrayal,” something that Lucy was more than happy to do. Kara and Lucy had been friends, after a fashion, and the other operative had not taken it well.

  For his part, Assim was still struggling to find his rhythm in the team. He was smart and sharp, and his skills behind a keyboard were the equal of Marc’s—or better on his best day—but he still didn’t have the confidence he needed to be in the field. That was plain right now, as he hustled Marc and Lucy toward a side door, the unease coming off him in waves.

  “Here, take these.”

  Assim handed them a couple of smartcard passes on lanyards, and they followed him through the door and back out to a covered walkway. The fat, heavy drops of subtropical rain clattered off the metal roofing over their heads.

  “We didn’t expect the locals to be back here again,” he explained, his words coming thick and fast. “Not so soon, anyway. Someone at police headquarters downtown has got it into their head that this is a giant insurance scam of some kind, and I suppose they have good cause to—”

  “Slow down, mate,” said Marc. “Take a breath and bring us up to speed.”

  “Right. Of course.” Assim made a show of breathing in and out. “Okay. Sorry. I’ve been at this since last night, haven’t even gone back to base…” He beckoned them again and they started walking toward another building in the campus. “So the police scene-of-crime team swept the Lam house first and told us about the blank security logs.”

  “Yeah, we went there, we saw,” said Lucy.

  “We have the same thing in this place.” Assim pointed at a monitor camera on the walkway as they passed it. “On the morning the Lams were abducted, a robbery took place right here. Someone spliced into the main hard line, right to the core security server, flushed the lot of it.”

  “A robbery?” echoed Marc.

  He nodded. “They drove straight on to the campus using Doctor Lam’s pass. She was with them.”

  “In a blue van with no windows.” Marc jerked a thumb at one of the parked vehicles.

  “The same as MaxaBio uses.” Assim’s eyes widened. “How did you know that?”

  Pausing, checking to make sure they were not being observed, Marc handed over the 360-degree camera module to the other man.

  “Failsafe from the house. Our scumbags didn’t know it was there.”

  “Huh.” Assim took the camera and turned it over in his long-fingered hands. “Well, I’ll be buggered. This is the best thing I’ve seen since I arrived. And the footage is intact?”

  Marc nodded. “Don’t get your hopes up, there’s not much to work from. Two vehicles took the family, there’s visuals on the number plates, images of the kidnappers—”

  “They wore masks, right?” Assim passed a hand over his face. “There were a couple of eyewitnesses here when the robbery started.”

  They reached another door and he opened it to let them through.

  “So what happened?” said Lucy.

  “I’ve built up a rough timeline,” Assim explained.

  Marc nodded, listening with half an ear as he looked around. This building was as bright and steely as the other one, but it was clearly a working facility. Compartmentalized lab chambers sat like giant plastic cubes inside the echoing, warehouse-like space of the facility, interconnected by sealed walkways and safety airlocks. The fat silver snakes of air purification and circulation systems dangled down from catwalks along the ceiling, keeping the internal environments of the lab modules within a strict set of limits. There was only a skeleton staff on duty, he noted, half a dozen people in lab coats or anti-contaminant suits working at centrifuges and microscopes.

  This was just one of the lab clusters that MaxaBio—and by extension, the Rubicon Group—were using to crack the genetic code of cancer, in the hope of one day eradicating the disease forever. Marc had lost his mother to it, ultimately, when complications due to kidney failure took her down a road there was no coming back from. He chewed on that bleak memory for a moment, then shuttered the thought away.

  Not the time to dwell on that, he told himself, and tuned back into Assim’s explanation.

  “We’ve kept this quiet for now, but it looks certain that Doctor Lam was helping the masked men. Our witnesses fled, but they saw enough to confirm. She brought them on site, and her pass code and identity badge were used to access this building and the main storage area around this corner—”

  They turned as the corridor branched into a junction and Assim stopped dead. Marc and Lucy both caught the odor of old blood; she reacted by tensing, unconsciously ready for conflict, he by dropping back a step. There was a set of temporary folding panels made from translucent plastic standing up against one wall, arranged to cordon off a section of the corridor. The same yellow crime scene tape that had been around the Lam house, with its Do Not Cross warnings in English, Malay, Tamil and Mandarin looped around the panels. Marc’s eye was unerringly drawn to what might be hidden behind them. He thought he could make out a dark, discolored patch on the wall.

  “They killed a man here. One of the security guards,” Assim said quietly. “Shotgun, at close range. He … uh … He had two children.”

  “We know why?” Lucy said, her tone hard.

  “As far as I can determine, he was just … in their way.”

  “Did the police find a spent cartridge?” It was an effort for Marc to look away. Assim shook his head, and he considered the silent reply. “So these pricks either picked up after themselves or they used shell traps on their weapons. That shows forethought.”

  “Another tick in the column for an experienced crew,” noted Lucy. “The masks, the cameras, no casings … They’re trying to leave as little evidence of who they are as possible.”

  “But killing a man who couldn’t see their faces, that’s unnecessary. It’s vicious.” Marc shook his head.

  “This isn’t what I wanted to show you.” Assim was becoming animated again, eager to be away from the area. “As far as I can determine, the robbery took place up here.”

  They passed through another set of coded locks and emerged in the storage section. All around, refrigerated containers held chemical compounds and there were tanks for liquid storage, as well as pallets of scientific hardware in plastic shrink-wrap and large equipment cases. The storage area was easily the size of a small warehouse, extending back to the full length of the building.

  Marc surveyed the racks as they walked between them.

  “What did they take?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Assim walked to one of the racks and tapped on a barcode sticker indicating its location and contents. “Everything in here, from test tubes to fractionators, is logged and recorded in a central materials database.” He indicated a drum of reactant fluid, which had a similar barcode tag attached to it. “These tags contain a radio frequency ID circuit, like you have in a credit card or a travel pass. Active sensors in the building
talk to the campus database, which automatically logs items out as they get used, replacements are automatically ordered, that sort of thing.”

  “So if something is missing, the system will know it,” said Lucy. “I wanna say problem solved, but you’re giving me the wrong vibe.”

  He nodded. “The hack that tanked the security monitors also shut down the RFID monitoring array, allowing whoever kidnapped Lam to take whatever they wanted and leave no trace. I haven’t been able to get it back up and running.”

  Marc leaped straight to the next logical step.

  “Someone has to do a manual inventory and find out what’s missing, yeah?”

  Assim’s shoulders drooped. “I already have people on it, but we’re looking at a day, maybe two, to check it all.”

  “These creeps already have a seventy-two hour head start on us,” said Lucy. “We gotta do better than that.”

  “I know … I know,” Assim said wearily, a note of self-reproach entering his voice. “I’m sorry. I’m doing the best I can here. I know Kara would have had a better handle on this—”

  “That’s bollocks,” Marc cut in. “You’re here because you’re the best we’ve got, mate. Work your end of the problem, we’ll try the other angles.”

  “The footage from the back-up camera at the house,” said Lucy, “Rubicon has their image analysis geeks in Palo Alto, they love a challenge. Send it to them, they can rip it apart frame by frame, maybe find something we missed.”

  Assim gave her a look. “No can do. While you were in transit, Delancort sent out a new directive. You didn’t see it?”

  “I don’t like the sound of that.” Marc shook his head. “We went straight to it, to the house. We didn’t check in with the crisis center in Monaco yet.”

  “Ah.” Assim nodded again. “All right. Well, I don’t know the full details, but the long and the short of it is, the Rubicon Group’s board of directors are reviewing the operations of the Special Conditions Division. Apparently there have been some … concerns.”

  Marc remembered Solomon’s manner when they had been talking in the virtual conference room. Terse, even distracted. Now he understood why.

  “Reviewing,” echoed Lucy. “Which rhymes with dicking around with.”

  “Quite,” agreed Assim. “As such, the option of deploying any additional Rubicon Group assets is on hold. For now.”

  “It’s Solomon’s company, isn’t it?” said Marc. “Why can’t he do what he likes with it?”

  “Sometimes, even a billionaire has to answer to someone,” noted Assim. “I mean, if we are being honest, the SCD does skirt the edge of legality.” He paused. “Often. It was only a matter of time before someone noticed.”

  “Solomon is Rubicon, but Rubicon is not Solomon.” As usual, Lucy cut straight to the heart of it.

  “Okay, I suppose we’re on our own, then.”

  Marc wanted to add something more, but then he heard the security door opening and through the lines of the racks, he glimpsed the man in the black suit—a detective, he guessed—stride in with the pair of uniformed cops at his side.

  “You should go,” said Assim, looking the same way. “That brisk gentleman has already put me through the wringer, demanding to know why Rubicon sent in an external technician to deal with this. He thinks we’re covering something up.”

  “He’s not wrong,” said Lucy.

  Assim shook his head. “The point is, he gets hold of you two, he’ll put you in a locked room for hours and ask you the same questions over and over.”

  “And that’s not time we have to waste,” concluded Marc. “Look, Assim. Throw the bloke a bone, yeah? Tell him about the vans we saw, give him the numbers to run. That’ll keep him sweet.” He beckoned to Lucy. “Come on, we’ll sneak out the other way.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” Assim called after them, as they slipped away.

  * * *

  The stench of the slums was unlike anything Saito had encountered, and he had visited many places where hardship and poverty wound together in a lethal, inescapable spiral of decay.

  Dharavi had the dubious honor of being known as the largest slum in Asia. It dwarfed the favelas he had seen in Brazil and the trash-laden landscape of Ciudad Neza in Mexico City. It was a rancid network of hovels built from recycled plastic sheeting, cinder blocks and repurposed wood. Boiling up from the hide of Mumbai, the veins of the shantytown were open sewers thick with stagnant water fouled by human effluent. What had once been a mangrove swamp was now a chaotic sprawl thick with activity.

  Buildings crowded in on one another, in some places so close they created narrow alleyways barely wide enough for a person to pass through. Saito was reminded of the backstreets of his native Tokyo, where small homes were similarly tightly packed and byways were constricted. But it was a world apart from the clean, moderated city of his youth. Dharavi was a wild explosion of human community, messy and foul. It had the character of something that had bloomed like a fungal growth, rooting into Mumbai so deeply it could never be dislodged.

  Above his head, webs of cable snaked between makeshift poles, supporting lines for power hijacked from the city grid or stolen telecoms. The ever-present stink of stale excrement was overpowering, and as he traveled further into the slum, Saito expected to become habituated to it—but that moment never came.

  The oppressive heat made it worse. It made everything an effort, exacerbated by the aches from Saito’s healed injuries, clustering around the sites of bullet hits and stab wounds. It aggravated the fragments of a 7.62 rifle round that the Combine’s doctors hadn’t been able to dig out of him. Years after he had earned that mark on a rusting gas platform off the Somalian coastline, the pain still gnawed at him like a parasite burrowing into his back. He dry-swallowed a mild analgesic before moving on. Saito would not risk taking anything stronger, for fear it might slow his reflexes.

  Poring over aerial shots from drones and documents that approximated maps, he had committed his destination to memory. Dharavi’s structure was not easy to navigate without a guide, but Saito was an accomplished city-stalker and the rules he applied in Tokyo, London, Moscow or Rio de Janeiro worked equally well in the Indian metropolis. Fixing the location of a nearby mosque through the reeking, dusty haze across the early morning sun, he picked his way down a shallow incline and crossed a patch of barren, exposed earth. A cluster of schoolchildren passed him going the other way, incongruous in their neat uniforms amid the squalor, and he cut through an open shed where old men were shredding discarded plastic bottles into strips with wicked knives.

  Despite the grinding poverty, the dirt and the smell, Dharavi was alive with activity. It teemed with people and a clever kind of industry that fed off the refuse dumped upon it. An entire society operating freely under its own rules, far removed from the rest of the world.

  Which made it an ideal place for one of the most wanted men on Earth to go to ground. Saito’s quarry was here. A lion hidden amid these sheep, biding his time.

  Eventually Saito emerged into a kind of courtyard, where four buildings formed the walls around a sunken section of old roadway. He waited under a sheet-metal awning, watching a pair of old men engaged in an energetic argument over something. They didn’t notice him.

  This was the place. It matched the images from the drone, the most likely location for the target to be concealing himself. Saito looked up and scanned the upper floors of the two-story shanty-buildings, finding one that had the best lines of sight. He was about to step out of the shade and make for the door when another thought occurred to him, and he froze.

  It is a good position, he thought. Too good, in fact.

  His quarry was a shrewd, calculating man, and not the sort to pick the obvious choice. His target had set up that location as a lure, to draw anyone coming after him into a dead end.

  And to be sure, the target would need to be close. He would need to be able to see anyone entering or leaving.

  There.

  The building to the
south, its upper walls corrugated iron and undulating sheets of blue plastic moving in the breeze. A staircase made of scrap wood climbed the exterior to a door made from a repurposed advertising billboard.

  The steps creaked loudly with each footfall, and he made no attempt to quiet his ascent. This was not a man to sneak up on, Glovkonin had warned him, but in truth, Saito was not as nimble as he once was.

  The makeshift door had no lock, and he eased it open, entering the hot enclosed space beyond. The room was basic: a sleeping pallet and a low table at the far end, a cooking plate next to a solar cell at the foot of the bed. A pile of dog-eared paperbacks sat beside a folding lawn chair. Tubular metal bars had been erected to the other side, making a crude exercise frame. It looked like a soldier’s quarters, bereft of anything that had no tactical value.

  Saito stepped inside, opening his hands to show he wasn’t armed. The air was close and heavy with humidity.

  “I am not here to kill you,” he said, in English.

  “So says the assassin.”

  The voice came from a corner of the room drenched in daylight, and a figure moved out of it toward him. Saito blinked and there was a muscular man with a silenced pistol in his hand in the room with him. Naked from the waist up, his flesh was a deep bronze and filmed with perspiration. He had dark, furious eyes in a patrician face, framed by black hair that was graying at the temples.

  The man was panting; Saito assumed he had caught his quarry in the middle of exercising on the frame. He imagined the Egyptian had little else to do while marking time and waiting.

  “You know who sent me,” he offered.

  “The Russian.”

  Saito nodded. “He has work for you. If I may?” He indicated the bag hanging over his shoulder, and on the other man’s wary nod, he slipped it off. “The details are here.” He showed him the files inside. “You should destroy this when you have assimilated the information.”