Outlaw, page 8
‘I should have anticipated this,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘Perhaps we can make it work for us.’
Andre answered the next question before he asked it.
‘We don’t know what they know,’ he admitted, ‘but it can’t be much. Look at the risk they took to bug that meeting. It’s a gamble . . . And they botched it, you know?’
‘They still escaped,’ Glovkonin snapped, as the hacker’s tone become overly familiar. ‘What about Solomon’s former aide there in Monaco? Have they made any contact with him?’
‘Delancort?’ Andre sneered the man’s name. ‘We would know if he had any unusual communications. He’s being monitored.’ There was another pause. ‘If Delancort is considered a loose end, I can have it tied off.’
Glovkonin turned that thought over in his mind.
‘I will let you know. For now, continue with your assignment. And do better.’
He cut the call and handed the phone back to Misha.
The jet shuddered again and banked into a shallow turn. Within the hour they would start their descent towards Sochi, angling in towards the coastal resort, across the beaches and the complex left over from the 2014 Winter Olympics.
Glovkonin paid little attention to that, his thoughts orbiting the problem at hand. He would have to move carefully, planning each gambit like the exchanges in a championship chess match. Tracking Dane and the other Rubicon survivors risked splitting his focus, when his first priority was removing the Italian from the board. Would it be possible to use one against the other? It was an enticing idea, and he let himself consider the shape and weight of it.
Dangerous, he admitted to himself, but compelling.
And at the rare heights through which Pytor Glovkonin moved, there were so few games worth the effort.
FIVE
‘Malte’s here.’
Lucy was making coffee in the corner of their covert workspace when Kara sing-songed the warning, and she gave a sideways nod, still busy with her morning eye-opener. Time in the military, and then working for Rubicon’s Special Conditions Division, had weaned her off what she’d grown up with thinking of as coffee. She was now a full-on hallelujah convert to the dark and powerful nectar that her European team-mates drank. She brewed it strong and savoured the aroma, making sure she had an additional full mug to offer the Finn as he emerged from the stairwell.
‘Welcome back,’ she told him.
Malte Riis nodded and gratefully accepted the mug, slipping his pack off his shoulder. He looked tired from the long flight. Pale, clean-shaven and average in build, he was the kind of guy your gaze would slip right off if you saw him in the street – something that had been a benefit in his early career as an undercover officer for the Finnish rikospoliisi. In his work with Rubicon, Malte’s speciality was behind the wheel, serving as the team’s primary driver, but since the collapse of the SCD he’d drifted back to his original skill set. Everyone had adapted to the new circumstances, and his had sent him on a months-long assignment to Hong Kong, chasing up vital intelligence from sources across the border in mainland China.
He glanced around the room, taking everything in with those hard cop eyes of his, without uttering a word. Malte’s gaze lingered on Marc, busy hooking up a video projector, and then he pointedly glanced back at Lucy. The Finn’s expression didn’t alter, not one iota, but he was still asking a question.
‘What?’ she said, more defensively than she meant to.
How could he know?
Neither Marc nor Lucy had said anything to anyone about what had happened on the roof the night before, but Malte was giving her a look that made her feel like they were both wearing T-shirts that read Yeah, We Had Sex.
‘Nothing,’ said the Finn, without weight.
He grabbed his pack and carried it over to the table, exchanging nods with Kara and Benjamin.
‘No pressure,’ began Kara, without preamble, ‘but things here were a bust, so everyone’s counting on you to bring us a game-changer.’
‘Huh.’ Malte considered that for a second. ‘Lucky.’
From a concealed compartment in his pack, he drew out a USB drive and tossed it to the hacker. Kara cupped the thing in her hands and blew on it, giving the device a blessing.
The room fell silent as the rest of them let Kara do what she did best, waiting as she sifted valuable nuggets of information from the files Malte had couriered to them. How his contact had come across them was not a thread that Lucy wanted to pull on, but she suspected there were elements inside the Chinese Ministry for State Security who were playing both sides against the middle. Messing with a Combine strategy was win-win to them; the nationless group of elites were as much a problem to the People’s Republic as they were to the free world.
Enemy of my enemy and all that shit, Lucy told herself.
None of them wanted to think about what had been done to get this vital data. It had to be worth it.
Eventually, the hacker emerged from her labours and looked up at them with a start. She hadn’t been aware of them watching her.
‘So, good result. Merging the take from Paris with this puts us in a slightly better position,’ noted Kara. ‘We now have a partial picture of the Combine’s current plans.’
Marc picked up a tablet computer and read the files mirrored there.
‘Intercepted communications from cellphone networks in Eastern Europe,’ he noted. ‘We have Combine assets discussing a transfer that will take place in the next forty-eight hours.’
‘A transfer of what?’ said Benjamin, worrying at his moustache. ‘People? Money? Weapons?’
‘Unclear.’ Kara gave a brisk shake of the head. ‘When they discuss the payload in question, the phrase that keeps turning up is the equipment. No more detail than that.’
Lucy shot Marc a look. ‘I heard that. When we had the laser mike on them in that fancy-ass apartment, one of them said—’
‘The equipment is being assembled, and everything will be in place for zero hour.’ Pytor Glovkonin’s studied tones issued out of a speaker atop Kara’s computer stack, the waveforms from the playback writhing on the screen.
‘That sounds ominous,’ said Marc. ‘All right, whatever this is they’re on about, based on their past form we can be sure it’s going to be a show-stopper. The Combine don’t put this much grunt into anything small-scale, it’s not their style.’
‘Synchronous suicide bombings. Portable nuclear devices. Biological weapons.’ Kara ticked them off on her fingers.
‘Cyberwarfare,’ added Malte, giving the hacker a pointed look.
‘Yes, that too,’ she admitted. ‘And those are the gigs we know about. As Marc says, the Combine like to go big. Each attempt they’ve made in the past five years to move the needle to their advantage has been through manipulation of a terrorist atrocity with a high body count.’
‘Rubicon interfered with their operations so they took us out of play,’ mused Benjamin. ‘Or so they think. Without us around to put a drag on their ambitions, I fear that the Combine might want to make up for lost time. Do something truly unpleasant, on a grander scale.’
‘Worse than nukes or viral warfare?’ Lucy scowled, and unconsciously reached for her throat. She had taken a dose of a Combine-sponsored bioweapon the year before in Belgium.
‘It is the nature of the unrepentant bully, when thwarted, to hit back twice as hard,’ said the big man. ‘And you have thwarted them quite a bit, oui?’
‘We have to know more about what they’re planning so we can put a stop to it.’ Marc put down the tablet and drew himself up. He took in the rest of the team with an earnest look. ‘We’ve been searching for a way to take them out, once and for all. This could be it.’ He came closer, his hands moving in the air. ‘They’ve cut our legs out from under us, scattered us to the winds. The Combine reckon we are finished.’
‘Are they wrong?’ muttered Malte, around his coffee. He cast a meaningful look at the shabby surroundings of the abandoned office.
‘That’s up to us.’ Marc threw a nod in the Finn’s direction. ‘Glovkonin and his mates swan around like they’re unopposed, yeah? We’ll use that to our advantage. Their weak point is their arrogance.’ He gave a dry chuckle. ‘Blokes like them, it always is.’
‘So the chatter about this transfer comes from Eastern Europe.’ Lucy paced her thoughts out loud. ‘We got an idea of where, exactly?’
‘Russian Federation,’ said Malte. ‘Voronezh. Saratov.’
‘And a lot of pings on the Caspian Sea coast,’ added Kara. ‘Those locations correlate with known criminal hubs, Russian military assets . . . and G-Kor corporate holdings.’
G-Kor was Pytor Glovkonin’s rapacious energy and construction conglomerate, and the front for much of the oligarch’s illegal enterprises. In the New Russia, the company was essentially a state-within-the-state, allowed to operate above the law as long as the government remained well compensated for looking the other way, and the wider interests of the Kremlin were not threatened.
‘So smart money says the equipment is military hardware.’ Lucy mused on that. ‘Another bomb? We know they were after a suitcase nuke at one time.’
Marc shook his head. ‘Possible, but I don’t think so. Jurgen would have heard something, he would have sent up a flare.’ Marc’s contact Jurgen Goss worked with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Office of Nuclear Security, the group responsible for gathering intelligence on the illegal proliferation of atomic weapons and radioactive material. ‘They learned their lesson after the Exile device got loose. It must be something else.’
‘There’s more than one flavour of WMD,’ said Kara, with a cat-like smile that didn’t reach her eyes.
Benjamin cleared his throat. ‘I do not want to talk out of turn . . . I am the new addition here, so to speak. I haven’t been in the field on these other operations like the rest of you . . .’ He ran a hand over his head, frowning. ‘But I would be remiss if I did not ask the question. We have actionable intelligence in our hands, but the resources at our disposal lessen by the day. We could get this information into the hands of any one of a dozen national security agencies – the CIA, MI6, DGSE, Mossad. We could let them take the lead. The list of those who have suffered at the hands of the Combine is lengthy.’
‘Fair point,’ said Marc. ‘But don’t forget, there’s people in those organisations who have prospered from the Combine’s actions as well. And if we turn over what we know, we risk showing our hand to Glovkonin and his mates.’ He paused. ‘I’m willing to trust the people in this room and not many more.’
‘There’s also the whole thing about being wanted fugitives,’ said Kara, snapping the words briskly. ‘Her Majesty’s Government threw Rubicon under the bus to protect their own when that fake attack video surfaced. They did everything they could to distance MI6 from the Special Conditions Division.’
Lucy grimaced, recalling the so-called ‘deepfake’ footage that had superimposed her face and Marc’s over those of killers who had assaulted a UN military installation in Cyprus’s Green Zone. The vision of seeing herself cast as a cold-blooded terrorist stuck with her, embedded in her mind’s eye. She glanced at Marc and saw the same distance in his expression, and she knew he was remembering it, too.
‘The Central Intelligence Agency would not be receptive, either.’ Kara was still speaking. ‘They’ve had Rubicon on their watch lists for quite a while, thanks to Lucy’s antics in their backyard.’
‘Bottom line – we do this ourselves or not at all.’ Marc summed it up with a terse nod.
But Lucy was still dwelling on those chilling images, turning them over and over in her thoughts. The world had seen the doctored videos and accepted them at face value, branding the team as murderers. And while the men and women directly responsible for those acts had been crossed off, the lie was out there with a life of its own. As much as she wanted to burn down the Combine, Lucy still held out the hope of one day clearing their names. But she had no idea how to achieve both goals.
‘How do we proceed?’ said Benjamin.
‘We need an entry vector,’ noted Marc. ‘A way to get close to the Combine’s operations and crack it open. A weak point.’
Kara gave a slow nod. ‘I have a primo option for that.’
Malte raised a quizzical eyebrow.
‘Show him what we have,’ said Lucy, jutting her chin towards Kara.
With the Finn busy halfway around the world, the rest of the team had worked on cracking one of the toughest challenges they’d ever faced – learning the true identities of the men who made up the Combine’s ruling cadre.
To kill a demon, first you have to be able to name it.
As it turned out, the advice Lucy had gleaned from old horror movies worked just as well as it did with one-percenter shit-heels who thought they were untouchable.
As Kara brought up new files on to her screen, Marc activated the projector and threw a mirror of that display on to the cracked plaster of the nearest wall.
‘This has cost us a big, big wedge of what we had in black budget money,’ he explained to Malte, who took it in. ‘Months of bribes and blind alleys and intelligence gathering, all for some names and faces. Now we’re going to find out if it was worth the price.’
The first face up on the wall was a familiar one – the angular features of Pytor Glovkonin, caught in a long-lens shot stepping down the gangway of a business jet.
‘We all know this prick,’ offered Lucy, her anger turning cold. ‘And we all know who he took from us.’
‘He’s smart, but he’s arrogant as fuck,’ said Marc, with the certainty that only first-hand experience could bring. ‘Greedy with it. He knows us, knows our faces. Chances of getting close to Glovkonin without him being aware of it are very low. We can’t risk it.’
‘Next candidate,’ said Kara. The image switched to a blurry picture of a portly older man, who looked to Lucy like her stuffy high school principal. ‘Swiss banker. Rolling in cash, mostly other people’s, wired into the global monetary grid like he’s Neo in The Matrix. This is their money guy.’
‘Rutger Bremmens.’ Marc gestured at the picture. ‘Top of the heap at KantonBank Basel Zeta, one of the largest financial institutions in Europe, in the big six globally. That picture is five years old, and it’s the most recent we could find. Bremmens is the oldest member of the Combine’s inner circle, and he’s the most reclusive. Rarely leaves Switzerland other than for meetings with the rest of the cabal, and never sets foot outside Europe. He’s got an estate in the Jungfrau region where he lives alone, heavily protected by the top echelon of mercs hired from ALEPH. He’s single-handedly responsible for ruining the economies of at least four Third World nations, and he makes millions profiting off insider trading and illegal currency manipulation. As far as we can find, he has no family, no lovers, no nothing.’
‘Sits up there counting his francs and jerkin’ off to the stock market,’ muttered Lucy.
‘Next.’ Kara tapped her keyboard again, and the old man was replaced by a middle-aged guy with a ruddy face, wearing a shiny grey suit with a loud tie. The ensemble was incongruously topped with a brightly coloured baseball cap that sat off kilter on his head. ‘The farm boy.’
Marc carried on with his briefing. ‘Connaught Cassidy III, American agriculture and construction magnate. Odds are, if you eat something anywhere inside the continental US, it’s gone through one of Cassidy’s companies at some point. He owns farms, food processing plants, warehouses, trucking concerns. His hands are in tobacco and biomedicine. Fingers in a lot of pies, this one, and he likes his politics.’
‘Publicly, the redder the state the better,’ noted Lucy, ‘but privately he doesn’t care as long as it gets him the green. This guy splits his time between his holdings in Iowa, Kentucky and Washington DC. Currently on his sixth wife. Same as Bremmens, he likes his home turf better than anywhere else. Plays up the whole shit-kicker-made-good angle, and I believe he has “America First” tattooed on his cock.’
‘Really?’ said Benjamin.
Lucy shrugged. ‘He’s the type.’
Marc gave a crooked smile. ‘She’s not wrong. Cassidy is your textbook profiteer. If he can screw money out of something or someone, he’ll do it without hesitation. What he doesn’t use to fund his expensive habits, he invests in buying political influence, and covertly bankrolling domestic extremist groups, like the America Alone Alliance and the Soldier-Saints.’
Malte gave a sullen grunt at the mention of the Soldier-Saints. He and Lucy had faced off against that radical militia group during an attempted bombing in San Francisco, and barely lived to tell the tale.
Kara moved on to the final image. ‘And here’s our guy.’
Where the other pictures had been fuzzy and off kilter, as if shot quickly and surreptitiously by some clandestine observer, this one was crisp, clean and square on. It looked more like something that would have been posted on the account of a high-rolling social media influencer than a surveillance photo. In it, a swarthy man in a sand-coloured suit stood in conversation with a managerial type, next to a crimson Ferrari Enzo on the forecourt of some opulent hotel. He carried himself with obvious confidence, grinning, caught in the middle of gesturing. Heavy gold rings were visible on his hands, along with a large, diamond-studded Jacob & Co. wristwatch.
‘I can see this one is a subtle sort of fellow,’ deadpanned Benjamin.
‘Giovanni Da Silvio,’ said Kara, ‘of the Da Silvio Ingegneria fortune. Born in Turin, parents died early, leaving him at the head of an engineering and transportation empire with global reach and deep, deep pockets. The other Combine committee members tend to keep themselves off the radar, even Glovkonin, but this one likes to hide in plain sight. Outwardly, he’s your stereotypical idle-rich billionaire – but that’s his protective coloration. He’s in deep with organised crime networks in Russia, Europe, America and Asia, and his speciality is trafficking.’
‘In what?’ Malte cocked his head.
‘Anything and everything.’ Marc picked up the thread again. ‘Drugs, weapons, people . . . if it’s illegal, he’ll ship it – after he takes his own bit off the top first, of course. Da Silvio is the Combine’s transportation and logistics guy, so if there’s something going on, he’s the one moving the hardware for it. This equipment they’re talking about.’
