Outlaw, p.3
Outlaw, page 3
‘The equipment is being assembled, and everything will be in place for zero hour.’
The tinny echo the monitoring software put into the speech didn’t mask the distinctive Russian accent, nor did it damp down the obvious confidence in the man’s tone.
‘There he is,’ said Lucy, sneering at the sound of Pytor Glovkonin’s voice. ‘Hello again, asshole.’
‘You need to be right on your mark with this!’ The reply was terse and irritable, the Midwestern drawl turning acidic. ‘I’m the one at the sharp end when it goes down, don’t forget that!’
‘We have our cut-outs in place,’ said another voice, in a smooth, self-amused tone. ‘My friend, we’ve been preparing this for a long time. And we’ve learned from our past mistakes.’
‘No more cat’s paws,’ said another, with a soft Germanic lilt. ‘Our error was in using others as proxies. Now we will act directly.’
Marc shook his head. He wasn’t happy with the take from the listening gear, but now the meeting across the street was well under way, he didn’t dare mess around with it for fear of losing the pick-up completely.
Mounted on a cheap camera tripod, a device that resembled a military-specification torch was aimed at an angle through the one-way panel, directly at the window of the meeting room. It projected an ultraviolet argon ion laser invisible to the human eye, beaming it directly on to the glass. Next to the emitter, a dish-shaped photoreceptor hungrily gathered up the beam elements reflected back from the window and ran that pattern through processor software in the laptop.
‘If even a whiff of this gets traced back to us,’ continued the man with the American accent, ‘it is game over and I for one do not—’ The man’s voice stuttered and disintegrated into static once again.
‘Shit.’
Marc went to the dial. He had operated laser microphones many times as a field technician with the British intelligence services, using them to detect the minute vibrations in the window glass caused by the sound generated inside the room. But the audio take continued to drop out, and he constantly adjusted the laser power, fighting to keep it in the audible range.
Lucy raised an eyebrow. ‘We have a problem?’
‘They have passive countermeasures in the room up there,’ said Marc, frowning. ‘Vibrational interrupts putting out random bursts of subsonic noise to mess with any listening gear.’
‘You didn’t plan for that?’
‘Of course I bloody did,’ he shot back. ‘But I’ve got to make do with what we have to hand. I can’t exactly order this kit from Amazon.’ He blew out a breath. ‘Sod this. There’s a reason I quit being the bloke in the van. It’s always a pain in the arse . . .’
What felt like a lifetime ago, Marc’s work with MI6’s covert OpTeam programme had largely centred on seeing exotic locations and danger zones from the inside of a dingy vehicle much like this one. Back then, that had been all he wanted – staying out of harm’s way and serving Queen and country while others ventured forth to take down Great Britain’s enemies.
But that life had been torn away by traitors inside his agency, collaborators working with the Combine to suborn MI6 from within. It ended with the destruction of Marc’s team. He went on the run, putting him on a new path that led straight to a man called Ekko Solomon, the enigmatic owner of the Rubicon Corporation.
Reflecting on that traumatic experience, Marc could see how it had been a state-change for him. Ripped out of his comfort zone and forced to face danger head-on, he had been tempered in the fire. Now here he was, a different man in a different place.
The bloke in the van wouldn’t even recognise me now.
Solomon had given Marc something he hadn’t been able to find anywhere else: purpose. He became a part of Rubicon’s most secret asset, the Special Conditions Division, a privately funded security and intelligence unit with no allegiance to any government, no remit other than to work against threats to freedom and global safety. No nation but justice, as Solomon had once said.
Marc remembered the earnest rumble of the African’s voice. Few men in Marc’s life had impressed him as much as Solomon, with his quiet charisma and his ability to see, clear-eyed, into the hearts of the people he gathered around him.
But the man was dead now, murdered on the orders of the cabal of rich men who sat sipping their drinks up there in those expensive apartments, as they plotted to make the world dance to their tune.
That thought hardened Marc’s resolve and he concentrated on the dial again, adjusting it by increments until the audio cut back in.
The careful Germanic voice rose out of the clatter of the interference, returning in mid-sentence.
‘. . . to be considered. Let us be clear, by many measures what we are doing will be considered a military attack on a First World state. An act of war.’
‘There’s no need to be so grandiose.’ The reply came from the Russian. ‘Wars are for smaller players. Games of tanks and soldiers. Our objective is very different.’ The microphone buzzed through his pause. ‘I consider it as a much-needed rebalancing of the global power dynamic.’
‘Well, that sounds fucking terrifying,’ muttered Lucy. ‘Whatever these pricks have planned, it’s not going to be rainbows and unicorns.’
For some time, Marc and Lucy and the handful of survivors who had escaped the collapse of Rubicon had been gathering scraps of intelligence, building their way toward a single objective – an all-or-nothing revenge strike on the Combine. But the closer they came, the more they suspected that Glovkonin and his wealthy co-conspirators were gathering momentum for their most audacious play yet.
And now Marc was hearing them say it out loud. He grimaced, suppressing a shudder, as the thought that had been dogging him for the past months rose once again: nothing will stop them unless we do.
For her part, Lucy had advocated taking a more kinetic approach to the situation. Marc had argued her out of destroying the building with all of the Combine committee members in it, not just because blowing a hole in an upmarket Parisian neighbourhood would have been nigh-impossible to do without serious collateral damage.
Solomon’s death had been hard on her. The man had been as much a mentor to the ex-Special Forces operator as he had been to Marc, and she wanted bloody revenge. But to take the full measure of payback, they had to be smart. What they were doing was guerrilla espionage, high speed and low drag, applying force only when they could strike at their enemy’s weakest point. In a stand-up fight against a group with the resources and the reach of the Combine, they would not prevail.
Lucy knew that as well as Marc did, but that didn’t mean she had to like it.
‘Signal’s dropped again,’ he told her, as the static came roaring back. ‘Keep the recorders going, I’ll try to get it again.’
Marc did the only thing he could – turning up the UV laser’s power in the vain hope that the backscatter from the window would come in clearer.
The static rumbled and faded, and they heard a few seconds of clear, dead air. The conference room in the apartments was silent.
‘Did they leave?’ Lucy shot him a look. ‘Is the mike still working?’
‘It’s working.’ Marc’s skin prickled with a sudden rush of fear, the unexpected silence echoing louder than a screaming siren. He bolted to his feet. ‘They detected the laser . . . They know we’re here!’
He shot a look through the misty plastic of the one-way panel and confirmed his assumption. Four men in dark suits, wearing amber shooter’s glasses and sporting radio earpieces, had emerged from the entrance of the apartment building. Hands dipped to grab the holstered weapons beneath their jackets; one of them looked in the direction of the truck and started towards it.
*
ALEPH trained its operatives well, drawing hardened men and women from the ranks of military forces across Eastern Europe. Everyone in the employ of the Moscow-based mercenary contractor had a common profile that included proficiency with weapons of multiple kinds and zero qualms about using them. ALEPH were the people you hired when you wanted the application of lethal violence with no questions asked. Their skill set dovetailed perfectly with the ruthless intentions of the Combine.
Moving quickly, two men formed up at the front of the cargo truck, pointing their guns into the vacant cab, scanning for any motion inside. The second pair came around the rear, communicating by hand signals.
One took aim at the rear doors, and the second reached for the release bar, positioning himself to wrench it open in a rush.
From inside the truck came a harsh noise, a guttural sound like a circular saw blade spinning against metal. The noise became a stuttering growl, then a roar, and the truck rocked as the weight inside shifted.
The man with his hand on the bar reacted, yanking it down, but halfway through the action the door exploded open and struck him in the face. A silver and black shape howled out of the truck’s interior, crashing down onto the street in a skirl of tyres on asphalt.
The second gunman spun away, dodging the mass of a sleek Aprilia racing scooter as it blew past, trailing a dust cloth behind it. He barely had time to register the rider bent forward over the handlebars and the woman riding pillion before the vehicle bit into the road and fled, towards the intersection at the end of the road.
Inside the truck, a sparking, fizzing ball of white fire burned through the surveillance gear mounted on the inner wall, the sun-hot flare of a thermite charge disgorging plumes of grey smoke as it melted the equipment to slag.
The gunman sprinted after the Aprilia, casting around as he ran. The scooter was nimble and fast. If it hit the flow of Paris’s mid-morning traffic, it would vanish and the pair spying on his principals would be lost. That could not be allowed to happen.
A few metres away, a youth with a crash helmet perched atop his head sauntered back towards another moped, having just dropped off a delivery of hot food from the bulky thermal box on the back. He gawped at the sight of the ALEPH mercenaries. The gunman shoved him out of the way and mounted his ride, gunning the battered Vespa’s engine. The delivery rider started in on a torrent of angry invective, but swallowed it when the gunman waved a pistol in his face. Hands raised, the rider made the smarter choice to back away and let the ALEPH operative steal his wheels.
*
Marc guided the scooter around the slower-moving vehicles without losing speed, ignoring the chorus of French swear-words and blaring horns. He felt Lucy shift behind him, one hand snaking around his belly to hold on, the other gripping a compact Sig Sauer P320 pistol. The Sig was tucked low, the gun’s barrel resting unpleasantly close to his crotch, and he squirmed.
‘Watch where you point that!’ he yelled over the rumble of the traffic.
Lucy didn’t register his discomfort, her head turned to look back the way they had come.
‘We’ve got company!’ she called. ‘Tell me you pulled the memory card before we bolted.’
‘Give me some credit.’
Marc would have patted the pocket where the solid-state drive rested, but he didn’t dare take his hands off the controls for even an instant.
He risked flicking a glance into the scooter’s wing mirror and caught sight of a figure in a black suit on a moped behind them – a man who was very definitely not a delivery rider. Beyond him, a grey 5-series BMW came up fast, and by the way it wallowed into a chicane, Marc knew it was an ALEPH-issue security special, heavy with armour plates and bulletproof glass.
‘Lose them,’ added Lucy, as if that wasn’t already the only thought on Marc’s mind.
Up ahead, the Rue Bonaparte opened out into an intersection crossing over the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and traffic lights showing red had halted the vehicles in front of the scooter. Marc used his body mass to steer, guiding the nimble racer with his shoulders and his knees, briefly mounting the kerb and threading the needle between two iron posts. Pedestrians bolted out of his way as he veered back on to the road, closing on the crossroads.
The BMW momentarily stalled, but the gunman on the stolen Vespa mirrored each move they made, the delivery bike spitting out black exhaust, the empty thermal box on the back flapping open in the wind.
Lucy leaned forward and spoke into his ear. ‘I see a gun!’
He won’t start shooting in the middle of rush hour . . .
Marc’s thought was still taking shape when something buzzed hornet-loud past his right ear, and proved him wrong.
‘Shit!’
Ignoring the crimson stop signals, Marc threw the scooter out into the stream of traffic crossing in front of him, and put more power to the Aprilia’s screaming engine. Cars swerved to avoid the scooter, colliding with one another, but Marc concentrated on finding the sweet path between all that fast-moving metal, veering around and into the flow of the vehicles.
‘Still on us!’ Lucy shouted a warning. ‘Lights changing!’
Behind them, the mass of waiting cars started to move, and the armoured BMW bulldozed its way through to the front of the pack.
Ahead, on the far side of the intersection, where the road continued on past the local Benedictine abbey towards the river, the street was clear of traffic. No traffic meant no cover, and Marc had a horrible mental image of the Beemer roaring up to slam them off the scooter and into the pavement.
A shape caught his eye, an ornate sign rising over a narrow stairway descending into the ground: the entrance to the nearest Métro station.
‘Hold on.’
At the last possible second, Marc jerked the scooter’s handlebars and veered toward the entrance. Shouting, screaming people threw themselves out of the riders’ path as Marc took the Aprilia over the lip of the steep line of stairs, and juddered down into the subway.
Behind them, the BMW skidded to a screeching halt, but the gunman on the stolen Vespa was still on them, coming down in their wake.
Rush-hour travellers flattened themselves against the tiled walls as Marc rose up in the saddle and let the racing scooter buck like a bronco as it hammered over the stairs. They skidded into the mid-level where the ticket hall opened out to escalators leading to the platforms, and the Aprilia’s revving rear wheel drew a comma of black on the floor as Marc hauled it around.
Automatic ticket barriers closed off entry to the station’s lower levels, but one was locked open with a makeshift Hors D’usage sign strung across it. Marc twisted the handlebar to gun the engine, hearing the nasal snarl of the other moped echoing behind him. Once again, he threaded the needle and aimed the scooter through the narrow gap, ripping away the sign, scraping his knees and elbows against the barrier’s frame as he pushed them through it.
A square of white tile near Marc’s shoulder exploded as another bullet narrowly missed, and the ticket hall was suddenly filled with new cries of panic as the shocked commuters saw the gun.
The ALEPH man followed Marc’s lead, but the other bike didn’t fit quite as easily through the skinny opening. The thermal box on the moped, usually filled with bags of hot takeaway food, snagged on the panels of the barrier and, for a moment, the bike stalled. Then, with a tearing sound, the box ripped away and the pursuer was on the move again.
Marc made use of the precious extra seconds, dragging the handlebars around to put the scooter’s front wheel on the descending escalator. Lucy moved with him, and together they brute-forced the Aprilia through a knot of people. The scooter juddered down the metal steps, forcing the passengers riding the moving stairway to vault onto the median divide to avoid them.
Marc didn’t let himself think about the danger, all too aware that weighing this up with rational thought would stop him dead. He pressed on, trusting instinct and luck.
They shot off the end of the escalator and hit the platform at a bad angle, enough that the scooter slipped into a wicked shimmy that forced Marc to overcorrect, risking a skid that would have thrown them into the curved wall. Colourful posters flashed past as they thundered along the length of the subway platform, and another bullet pitted the floor beneath the scooter as their pursuer emerged behind them.
‘He’s persistent,’ spat Lucy, before nodding ahead. ‘And we’re running out of road.’
At the far end of the platform, more temporary out-of-order panels walled off the opposite exit, trapping them in the Métro station with no means of escape other than the route they had taken down.
‘Okay.’
Marc acknowledged Lucy’s warning as they zipped beneath an illuminated sign, indicating the imminent arrival of the next train. Instead of slowing, he accelerated as the platform’s end came up to meet them.
At the last possible moment, Marc jerked the steering and the scooter fell, dropping to the gravel-covered sleepers down on the railbed. A wave of white light from the front of the arriving train coming up behind blazed around them. Marc didn’t dare to look back, leaning into the wind and over the handlebars, as if that might give the Aprilia an extra boost of speed.
A shadow flickered behind them and Marc knew that the ALEPH gunman had followed their lead.
Lucy shouted again. ‘Still on us!’
Darkness swallowed them as they entered the tunnel, and Marc fought to keep the scooter steady over the rough, bumpy path beneath the wheels. Horribly aware of the live rail threading close to the front wheel, Marc feared what the thousands of volts coursing through it could do if he or Lucy accidentally made contact with it.
With no civilians to get in the way and his target clear ahead of him, the gunman on the moped opened up, hoping to put a pistol shot into his fleeing targets.
Marc felt Lucy’s weight shift and he instinctively leaned the opposite way to counterbalance her. She twisted at the waist and fired back with her Sig, aiming more by luck than judgement.
They blew through the bright lights of Odéon station, the next stop on the Number 4 line, and Marc registered flash-frame impressions of startled Parisians ducking back from the edge of the platform as the two bikes thundered by.
Then they were back in the dark again, only this time Marc could see the crimson glow of indicators over the walls of the tunnel up ahead. In a few moments, they would catch up to the train in front of them, which would already be slowing to halt at the next stop at St-Michel.
