Wraith, page 8
He leans back in his chair and puts his bandaged hands behind his head as if he’s relaxed, even though I can feel his tension radiating from where I am. ‘You’ve been out for two whole days and Jamie’s beside herself; she keeps ringing to find out if you’re conscious yet. It’s the most she’s said to, or about, anyone for months. Soon as you’re strong enough to get up, I’m taking you back to hers. Then you can tell us how the hell we’re supposed to help you find — and get — the Anti-Christ.’
10
We make it back to Jamie’s house as soon as the sun’s up and I have to laugh at how long it takes us to get there, even though it’s a block and a half at most from Shaun’s place.
At Jamie’s doorstep, Shaun gives my shoulders a reassuring squeeze and drops the arm he’s had around me the whole way. ‘For support, that’s all, don’t get ideas or get all defensive now,’ he told me cautiously — like he was scared I’d bite — when we set off from his man-cave located above an Indian grocery store.
With the weight of Shaun’s arm gone, I have to push down the sudden cold feeling of abandonment. I force myself to stand straighter as Jamie studies her security cam feed from inside the house before cautiously unlocking her front door and letting us in.
Once I’ve had a hot shower and pulled on one of Jamie’s bedazzled pink tracksuits with trembling hands, Jamie has Shaun help me back downstairs into an armchair in her study while she goes to fetch a fleecy blanket to tuck around my legs.
‘You’ve got the shakes,’ she says firmly, when I try to fight her off.
‘This is hopeless,’ I mutter, looking down at where she’s got my knees tucked up under fluffy pink fleece. ‘I’m still as weak as a baby and it’s been more than forty-eight hours since Mercy...’ I almost say landed through me like a bomb but finish weakly with, ‘It’s like a whole body/brain flu thing. Even my skin hurts.’
‘Let’s just assume what’s required will be a once-off,’ Jamie says briskly, settling into her office chair and turning to look at me, the tight plastic face mask over her skin glistening under the bright study lights. Her mouth crooks up wryly. ‘Just like the last time was. All “once-offs”; that’s the way I look at things these days. Shaun and I will get your strength back up — for when it’s needed.’
‘Speaking of which,’ Shaun sighs, running a hand through his curls, ‘can’t do that till I’ve got a working boxing gym again. I’ll be at the Pound for the next few hours, supervising the clean-up, all right?’
His look is sombre as he backs out the study door. ‘Tell her exactly what you told me, Gia, word for word. Don’t leave anything out. I’ve come to realise that she knows things the same way you know things — by impossible means.’
After Jamie locks up her front door again and returns to the study, I tell her about the ‘test’ Mercy put me through at the Pound. When I come to the part about the scar that was somehow inside me, Jamie rubs her breastbone absently, as if she knows exactly what I’m talking about.
When I get to the part about working out who Luc is ‘wearing’ these days Jamie leans down and switches on a series of computer towers on the floor under her desk.
She straightens up and swings around in her office chair to face me. ‘I figured it would be something like that. So I took the liberty, pet, while you were away, of preparing a slide show of sorts for you to look over.’
In that instant, all the lifeless, black computer screens come to life, and I give a high, breathless shriek of surprise. There are eight screens set up side by side across the long workstation that takes up one whole wall of the room. Apart from the terminal directly in front of Jamie — which only has a single blinking cursor on it — on each of the others is the face of a dangerous man.
I shuffle my wheely chair closer to the terminals reluctantly, skin prickling in apprehension. On the screen closest to me is the image of a tanned, smooth-skinned, black-bearded man in a beret and white military uniform with epaulets and loads of gold trim. I would say Middle-Eastern based on the desert backdrop and brilliant background light; maybe late fifties, early sixties.
The next one along features a chiselled northern European businessman. It’s a sharp, professional head-and-shoulders shot — like a portrait taken by an official photographer at a business or political summit — and I see that he’s got white-blonde buzz-cut hair, pale grey eyes and cheekbones you could julienne vegetables across. The backdrop to this guy is the flag-filled lobby of some rolled-gold hotel I faintly recognise that only stratospherically rich people can even enter.
There’s an exceptionally tall, handsome, clean-shaven African man in military fatigues thundering oratory from a podium, fists raised; a short, moustachioed South American in an open-necked silk shirt with flashing eyes and facial scars; a white-haired elderly gentleman of average height and slender build in an impeccable morning suit and top hat at an English garden wedding; a heavy-set Greek or possibly Italian with wind-tousled dark hair in off-duty mogul-wear of sports coat, polo shirt, slacks and loafers, standing on the deck of a large yacht.
The last computer screen features a dumpy Asian official in olive drab surrounded by a battalion of sharply dressed generals. He’s the only one of the lot who looks familiar.
As I scan the seven faces, each image begins to dissolve into a new one: of the man in question opening a new bombing range, say, or single-handedly shooting an assault rifle into the air from an open jeep.
‘What do they all have in common?’ I ask tentatively, not really wanting to know.
‘They’re all mass murderers,’ Jamie replies grimly as images dissolve and appear before our eyes. ‘They each control enormous global networks that do a lucrative sideline in businesses ranging from arms dealing, drug trafficking, human slavery, torture, money laundering and state-sponsored genocide. They are far and away the current worst-of-the-worst for sheer numbers: in dollars, foot soldiers, lives, countries and territories affected.’
I look at Jamie, in her neat wig and pale pink cashmere pullover, blue jeans, bare feet, meticulously pink-painted finger- and toenails, the livid scars on her face and neck like a crazy roadmap.
‘What are you?’ is all I can manage as I return my awed gaze to the shifting and dissolving images. I don’t doubt her for a second. She knew things about me before I even came into her life. Whatever she used to be — dolly bird, glamour model, lads’ mag fave — that person is long gone.
Jamie begins to type furiously into the keyboard in front of her, the screen with the blinking cursor filling up rapidly with scrolling lines of text and code. ‘Not just a pretty face these days,’ she rasps. ‘Like your friend Mercy, I’ve been forced to adapt. I’ve had to learn to tap into the river that allows you to move between the world you see — and the one you don’t. There’s a whole load of people out there, just like me, who still love a good gossip and a project. When I asked my friends who the most powerful, evil men on earth were right now? This was the consensus. Evil knows no boundaries: not culture, not faith, not geography.’
‘It’s a smorgasbord,’ I agree lightly, but we can both hear the tension there.
Jamie shoots me a sideways glance. ‘So where should we start, do you think?’
I look at the seven faces on the screens before me and my reply is immediate.
‘The obscenely wealthy Teutonic ice-blond,’ I say tiredly. ‘Start with him. Luc’s got a definite type. I saw it for myself, in Milan. If these guys are like suits for hire? Then the “businessman” — is the best…fit.’
***
Jamie starts digging down into the life and times of a thirty-eight-year-old Russian resources, telecommunications and logistics multi-billionaire called Spartak Arkady Skorobogatov, fetching and retrieving information from all across the Clearnet and the Deep Web with the aid of others in her hazy, anonymous, friend-to-friend network of wounded people.
When she spots me nodding off in my chair an hour later, Jamie sends me back upstairs to bed, but not before I remind her woozily of the date that Mercy appeared to me in the farmhouse in Craster. ‘Assume that’s close to when she, uh, died — give or take a few days — because time doesn’t seem to run in the same way for her kind.’
I can still feel Ryan’s warm hand in mine — from that last memory of Mercy’s when they were still together, still whole, so in love it almost hurt me to look at him — and I close my eyes momentarily to block out the pain.
‘And Mercy…died,’ I falter again on the word, ‘somewhere in Asia. So see if there are reports of a young woman losing her life at a temple that was popular with tourists where the Hindu goddess Kālī featured heavily — maybe a temple in Malaysia or Bali or India? And if Luc assumed the body of that man between the date Azraeil and Mercy made their bargain for Ryan’s life and now, look out for some kind of catastrophic event during that time which killed loads of people in one hit that the Russian somehow miraculously “survived”.’
My mouth is suddenly dry and I have to swallow hard a few times before I can get the words out. ‘The man who, who, hurt me — he was there, Mercy said, when Luc took the body over. He’s some kind of human agent for Luc these days. They’re tight — wherever Luc is, he is. So look out for him, too, in your travels. An image, a snatch of video, he must be somewhere…’
I describe the man’s tattoos to her again in shuddering detail, and Jamie nods as she jots down the descriptions on a notepad. ‘There must be a picture with him and the Russian in it,’ I insist, backing unsteadily out of Jamie’s study. ‘Find it for me.’
***
I sleep for hours. The house is dark again when I roll out of bed to the rumble of Shaun’s deep voice downstairs answering Jamie’s lighter one.
When I shuffle back through the door of the study, Shaun and Jamie are staring at the central computer screen while spooning soup out of giant mugs.
Shaun leaps to his feet when he sees me. ‘Sit,’ he commands, taking Jamie’s mug with him as he leaves the room. ‘I’ll get you something to eat, yeah? You must be starving, G.’
Only a couple of computer screens are on now, the one in front of Jamie still filling rapidly with letters and code, the other populated with a hazy black-and-white image of an airport tarmac somewhere, littered with dead bodies. All the people are lying where they fell between a clutch of sleek private jets, their legs and arms at impossible angles. Standing at the very far end of the shot, to the left, are two men: one very tall and well-built, impeccably dressed in a tailored suit and heavy overcoat, the other blocky and muscular in typical international thug-wear of wraparound sunnies, form-fitting leather jacket, muscle tee, jeans and boots. The second man is big, but still dwarfed by the first.
From the way they’re standing it’s clear what they are to each other: master and servant.
I go hot. It’s impossible to tell, but something about the shorter one with the shaved head seems ominously familiar.
When Jamie sees me staring, she hastily clicks the image closed and turns to me just as Shaun comes back in, handing me my own mug of hot soup and a spoon.
‘You sure you’re ready for the highlights, darl?’ Jamie says worriedly as Shaun hunkers down beside me, sitting in the chair that’s still warm from his body. He takes the mug and spoon out of my nerveless hands and starts feeding me from them until I suddenly snap to attention and grab them both off him with a snarl. I find I am shovelling the soup into my mouth because I’m ravenous.
But also because I’m suddenly hugely, absurdly afraid.
‘It’s him,’ I whisper as I continue taking huge, gulping swallows of my hot soup. ‘Isn’t it? The tattooed man. I’m sure it’s him. You found him.’
Shaun’s dark gold eyes search mine and he rests one hand briefly on my arm before standing and stretching.
‘It’s bad,’ he warns, looking down at where I’m sitting hunched over my mug. ‘I’ve been part of combat operations that weren’t as brutal as some of the footage Jamie’s pulled together. Spartak’s on your hit list for good reason.’
I lick the last of the thick, creamy soup off my spoon. ‘Play it,’ I tell Jamie grimly, my legs already beginning to shake. ‘I’m ready.’
But I’m not, not really.
Oh, it starts off innocently enough, with an aerial shot of a massive 200 metre-wide, 80 metre-deep sinkhole crater that inexplicably opened up in Siberia eighteen months ago with a vast, icy lake deep at its heart. Like the earth expelled something noxious into the air, and the wound then filled with rank water. But that’s quickly followed by real-time video footage taken at an explosion at a coalmine complex in the nearby Ural Mountains where I can see actual human body parts littering the foreground, to a soundtrack of continuous, tortured screaming. It sounds like people are being torn apart alive.
I kind of lose track of my sanity after the photo montage of eighty-one dead people crammed into a refrigerated truck abandoned on the side of a freeway in Serbia, oil tankers packed with scores of suffocating slaves and the Spartakex-branded shipping container brothel-town filled with dead-eyed, emaciated teenage girls of Middle-Eastern appearance. There are images of burnt bodies inside a Spartakex-operated ‘alternative energy’ research facility and follow-up shots taken in and around the radiation-affected ghost town near the Chinese–Russian border. Jamie skips quickly through those, but I know I’ll never unsee the picture gallery of livestock born with six legs or no heads, the flash-burned, cancer-ridden survivors of the fallout, or the miles of dead pine forest to the immediate north of the failed power plant.
I don’t ask how Jamie got hold of all of these images, or the snatch of video of Spartak himself giving a fiery motivational speech at a private, invitation-only billionaires’ business symposium in Geneva fifteen months ago. But I don’t doubt for a second that it’s all real.
When Jamie’s Spartak montage finishes on that haunting black-and-white image of two men standing calmly at the edge of a private airfield littered with dead people, I have to leave the room for a moment to heave into the powder room sink.
When I get back, dropping into the empty seat beside Shaun, Jamie reaches out and gives my knee a quick squeeze before asking if there’s one more thing she can show me.
Voicelessly I nod, and she opens a new file as she says, ‘He’s got deep sea gas and oil drilling interests, coalmine and fracking concerns, freight, tanker and trucking companies, satellite and wide dish arrays, telecoms towers and huge retail networks. Everything it takes to make this world tick, Spartak Skorobogatov has a piece of it. He’s the perfect human “cover”, wouldn’t you agree?’
I think of Mercy’s words — Luc is not content to be just anyone, remember that — and nod. ‘Luc’s always going to pick outliers: good-looking, off-the-charts wealthy, super-connected freaks.’
Jamie nods, then brings up the same snatch of video from the fancy business symposium in Geneva and I snap, ‘We’ve already seen that. It’s the least offensive bit and I don’t really need to see it again.’
But Jamie silences me with a look and clicks play.
This time, the footage has been slowed down to an excruciatingly slow number of frames per second. There’s nothing new for several seconds and I shift restlessly in my chair until Shaun clamps his warm hand over mine and murmurs, ‘Look, look, it’s coming up, right…here…’
I suck in a shocked breath. When Spartak Skorobogatov appears to shrug his broad shoulders mid-sentence, there’s the faint silhouette of another person around him, or rising from him, like a dark halo: who is taller, broader; inhuman in proportion.
‘Just a flash,’ Shaun breathes, his hand holding me steady, ‘like a shadow, but then at the two minute thirty-nine second mark, there it is again.’
Leaning forward, I see Skorobogatov shrug again, and there’s another weird after-image of a dark, man-shaped halo stretching for a moment, as if trying to shake itself free of Skorobogatov’s body. But then the dark halo disappears completely and there’s nothing else for the rest of the sample. Jamie finds and plays the same snatch of video at normal speed and there’s nothing more than two flickering changes in the light moving across Skorobogatov’s face. And the two weird shoulder shrugs.
What had Mercy called them? Tics and tells.
‘One of my girls cleaned the video up for me,’ Jamie lisps. ‘Her exact words were: Fixed lighting, internal conference room, no windows, no blinds, so there shouldn’t be any shadows playing across his face that way. Plus, those two involuntary shoulder movements of his. Skorobogatov isn’t listed anywhere as suffering from a motor tic. He’s always been written about like some prototype man of the future: always the smartest, best-looking, best-dressed, richest, most physically threatening guy in the room. So maybe it’s something new. Good pick-up, right? Scared the pants off me when I first watched it, too. And I know for a fact that Skorobogatov’s going to be in London in a couple of weeks for a Titans of World Logistics business summit. Every billionaire logistics magnate in the world will be there. Mega deals are done at this thing. But the real reason Skorobogatov will be in town is that he’s negotiating for valuable oil and gas interests in the North Sea off the Shetlands. The financial press have been talking about it for months. So he’s confirmed for the summit’s opening night black-tie function at the Argo, a private club in Pall Mall.’
‘I need to see him,’ I reply without hesitation.
‘Get into the Argo?’ Shaun exclaims. ‘It’s members, guests and bodyguards only. I’ve had mates run personal security there. It’s like a fortress. What you’re asking is impossible.’
Searching my memory hazily, I say, ‘Logistics has to do with the movement of things or people…’
