Marc chewed on that for a moment. ‘In future, I want you to square this kind of thing with the team first.’

  ‘It would be easier to let me work the way I need to,’ she insisted. ‘Without outside interference.’

  ‘Was I unclear?’ Marc’s tone turned steely.

  ‘You want me to do as you say, not as you do?’ Kara shrugged. ‘All right. But it’s a waste of time.’

  ‘How’s that?’ said Lucy.

  ‘I’m being a realist.’ Kara glanced in her direction. ‘We aren’t Ekko Solomon’s private vigilantes anymore. We’re international fugitives. The world believes we’re terrorists who gunned down innocent men. To them, we’re no different to the black hats on the dark net.’

  Marc stayed silent for a long moment before he spoke again.

  ‘We’re not doing this to change the way the world sees us, Kara. We’re doing this to stop the Combine from rewriting the lives of anyone else.’ He turned away. ‘Both of you, get sorted for the off. We’re green for go.’

  EIGHT

  Dawn was two hours beyond the horizon, but there were still people out on the yachts moored along the shore who were unwilling to let the party fade. Laughing and drinking, their slurred voices carried indistinctly across the calm water.

  Nearby, in each of the boathouses lined up along the edge of the Marine Luxe Hotel, the racers bobbed in the swell or dangled on chains suspending them from maintenance racks. Soft lamps below the waterline lit each dock with a pale yellow glow, catching the shimmer of shoals of curious fish.

  Larger, darker shapes moved beneath the surface as well. Two forms drifted towards a dock close to the main buildings, edging up to the side of the aluminium jetty. Presently, a pair of heads broke the water, cautious to remain in the shadows.

  Breathing through the snorkel in his mouth, Marc folded back his dive mask onto his forehead and peered into the corner of the boathouse, letting his eyes adjust.

  There.

  He picked out a glowing red ember, the indicator light on the security camera keeping watch on the speedboat. With care, so as not to make any ripples, Marc slid a compact compound triangle bow from the sleeve on his back and nocked an arrow with a large, bell-shaped head.

  Behind him, Malte silently laid a hand on his shoulder.

  Someone is coming.

  Marc dropped back down under the speedboat’s hull as a security guard in a grey uniform shirt walked along the line of the dock, shining the beam of his torch into dark corners as he passed. The light passed over Marc and Malte without pausing, and they waited for the guard’s footfalls to fade.

  Marc rose again and aimed the bow in the direction of the camera, finding a spot a few degrees to the right of the device. He pulled the bowstring to him, pushing away with the frame, the cam wheels turning as the fibre went taut. The arrow loosed of its own accord, and Marc heard a thwack as it hit the wall and stuck there, beads of adhesive on the flat of the head forming an instant gluey gel to hold it in place.

  The impact triggered a capacitor inside it, feeding a tiny electromagnetic discharger, and the camera’s red light blinked out as the device’s electronics were momentarily overwhelmed.

  ‘Go!’ snapped Marc, and Malte hauled himself out of the water like a seal beaching itself.

  He grabbed Marc’s free hand and pulled him up, and the two men sprinted across the boathouse towards the corner where the camera was mounted. They flattened themselves against the far wall, outside the device’s cone of vision. Less than four seconds had elapsed.

  Marc reached up and tore the arrow away from where it had landed, then tossed it into the water. A moment later, the camera’s red indicator was alight again, and if anyone in the security centre noticed the outage, it would appear as a momentary glitch.

  He put a hand to his throat, where a waterproof contact microphone pressed into his skin.

  ‘Active One and Two on site, over.’

  ‘Overwatch copies.’

  Somewhere out in the darkness, Lucy was once more their lethal guardian angel, surveying the location down the night-scope of her PSG-1 sniper rifle.

  ‘Operations copies.’

  Kara was with Benjamin, out on the rigid inflatable boat they had deployed from, a short distance up along the headland. While he handled the boat, she worked systems intrusion, controlling a whisper-quiet quadrotor drone acting as their eye in the sky.

  ‘Moving in,’ said Marc, nocking another arrow as he pushed off from his concealment.

  Staying to the shadows and out of the camera’s sight lines, he threaded his way out of the boathouse and on to the greenery-lined path that led to the hotel’s main building.

  Malte kept close, moving silently over the wooden decking.

  ‘There,’ he said, nodding towards a clump of bushes out of the spill of light from the lamps lining the path.

  ‘You first,’ replied Marc.

  As he kept watch, the Finn dropped into cover behind the bushes and peeled off his black outer layer, revealing a dark jumpsuit beneath. He put his wet gear, snorkel and goggles in a collapsible sack and hid it in the undergrowth. They swapped places and Marc did the same. He carried two dry bags, one packed with kit for their sortie.

  Malte made a low hissing sound and shrank into the shadows. Marc looked up and saw movement. The same security guard who had missed them in the boathouse was coming back their way.

  ‘Confirming a single male on foot, three hundred metres, closing,’ reported Kara.

  Marc looked up. Somewhere overhead, Kara’s drone surveyed their location with thermal imagers, picking out the body heat of the two intruders and the guard as bright blobs against a greyed-out landscape.

  ‘He’s coming your way.’

  Malte gave Marc a sideways look, the unspoken question hanging between them. Had they done something to alert the guards? The mission had barely begun, and now it was in danger of falling at the first hurdle.

  ‘Overwatch has the target in sight,’ reported Lucy. ‘I can take him. Your call.’

  Marc watched the man continue on towards them. The next pieces of cover were a series of pump units for the garden sprinkler system, but if he and Malte went for them, they would pass directly in front of the guard and certainly be spotted. The man was two hundred metres distant now and still coming.

  He knew he only needed to utter two words – ‘send it’ – and a heartbeat later a 7.62 mm NATO round would strike down the guard like a bolt from the blue. Even now, Lucy tracked her oblivious target, cross hairs leading him, ready to put a bullet through his skull.

  One hundred and fifty metres and still approaching; this guy was only a rent-a-cop working for the hotel, not one of ALEPH’s callous thugs. The thought of ending him just for working minimum wage didn’t sit well with Marc.

  ‘Negative,’ he whispered. ‘Zero footprint.’

  From the coldly mercenary point of view, a sniper shot was the most expedient option, but it would leave them with a corpse to conceal and blood spatter on the decking. Marc shook off that thought, seeking a different approach.

  ‘Copy that,’ Lucy replied.

  Without taking his eyes off the guard, Marc reached into the depths of his bow sleeve and his fingers found a cylinder the size of a cigar tube. He felt the pattern of ridges on the device and knew he had the right one. In a series of quick motions, he snapped the tube over the head of the nocked arrow on his bow, and drew on the string. He flicked out a sighting ring to aid with targeting, and pointed the weapon at the top of a nearby palm tree.

  Marc let the arrow fly and it cut silently through the dark. The shaft hit the tree trunk with a dull thud – and then a moment later the tube at the arrow’s tip began to emit a series of random chirps, like an angry cicada.

  The guard halted, peering into the gloom, trying to ascertain the source of the sound. The distraction device continued to sing, drawing the guard towards it. At last, he turned his back on them and started towards the palm tree.

  Malte didn’t need any encouragement, and the moment the guard’s attention was elsewhere, he broke from the bushes and bolted to the cover of the pump units. Marc went after him in a fast, loping run, staying as low as he dared.

  The guard stood at the foot of the tree, shining his torch up into the crown of heavy leaves at the top, momentarily lost in trying to figure out where the noise was coming from.

  ‘Active call signs, tracking no other hostiles in your area, you are clear all the way to the main building,’ said Kara. ‘Go now.’

  Marc patted Malte on the shoulder and once more the Finn broke into a full-tilt run, surging away from a standing start as quickly as an Olympic sprinter off the blocks. Marc shouldered his bow, weaving around the edges of the puddles of light from the lamps on the pathway.

  *

  They came up on the entrance that Marc had used the day before to enter the Marine Luxe’s conference centre, but diverted away into the shadows, towards a concealed ramp that led down to the maintenance level. They followed the ramp’s gentle curve until they were in a low-ceilinged concrete chamber that smelled of stale seawater and machine oil. Lit by a cloudy low-energy bulb, the space was dominated by a wide metal cabinet fitted to one wall, and according to the data Kara had skimmed from the hotel’s network, it contained the cable ducting for the entire complex.

  The cabinet was made of weathered steel plate, thick enough that it could have shrugged off a heavy calibre bullet at close range. There were no cameras down here, as clearly the invulnerable cabinet was thought to be deterrent enough. Marc smiled thinly at that thought.

  We’ll see about that.

  Malte examined the two heavy-gauge locking mechanisms on the cabinet door.

  ‘Key?’

  Marc produced a twin-barrelled syringe from his dry bag.

  ‘Sort of.’ He uncapped the nozzle. ‘Stand back, this is potent stuff.’

  He injected a thick plug of gel into each of the locks, the gooey chemicals from the two barrels mixing as they flowed in.

  Inert when separated, the chemicals formed a powerful binary compound when combined, creating a brief but intense exothermic reaction that could melt through steel. The gel fizzed and spat, burning out the locks from the inside, and within a minute, the mechanisms were ruined.

  Malte produced a dive knife from an ankle sheath and used it to lever open the cabinet door. Inside, he found a mass of glowing fibre optics – hundreds of bundles of them bunched together in loops, as dense as the roots on a forest floor. The Finn pulled his spyPhone from his dry bag and handed it to Marc as he ran a gloved finger down the numeric tabs on the cables.

  Marc found what he was looking for, and quickly connected the spyPhone to a non-conductive interrupt that clamped around the target bundle. Malte’s phone booted up and he wedged it in among the cables, safely out of sight.

  Malte tapped his throat mike.

  ‘Connected. How copy?’

  Kara’s voice buzzed through their induction headsets. ‘Operations has solid copy. Working, wait one . . .’

  Marc pictured the slight young woman down in the gunwale of the RIB as it bobbed out in the shallows, her hands skittering across the keyboard of her waterproof laptop. Kara’s wireless connection to the spyPhone gave her a direct path into the hotel’s network, quicker and cleaner than a brute-force hack from outside. She woke up the dormant software implants Marc had inserted the day before and set to work making the Marine Luxe’s security net dance to her tune.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, after a brief silence. ‘I’ve set up active loops on all camera feeds. Tremor alarms on windows and doors are ghosted. You’re clear to proceed.’

  ‘Guards can still call it in, though,’ noted Lucy. ‘Can’t hack people.’

  ‘I could,’ muttered Kara.

  Marc and Malte backtracked up the ramp, catching sight of the patrolling guard in the distance. Evidently, he’d lost interest in the distraction device and resumed his beat, moving back along the line of the boathouses – better for them, as his attention was in the wrong direction.

  Despite Kara’s assurances, Marc still tensed when he opened the door leading into the conference centre atrium. No alarms sounded, and he slipped inside, casting around to find one of the security cameras he had spotted earlier. An unblinking digital eye was aimed at him, the red ember visible, but the device was sightless.

  He moved on. The tables and low modernist sofas that had been busy with people the day before were empty, lit by the glow of Sochi’s buildings coming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Off at the far end of the complex, the bar and VIP lounge were dark and silent.

  ‘Operations has no visual on active call signs,’ said Kara. ‘I’m orbiting the drone around, but you’re on your own in there.’

  ‘Negative,’ corrected Lucy. ‘I have line of sight on our boys, through the north-facing windows.’ She paused; her next words were urgent. ‘Hold up. Two more guards moving your way from the main building.’

  Marc dropped behind a low planter and he heard Malte find his own cover. He saw shadows moving in the dimness, and not for the first time he found himself wishing for a pair of night-vision goggles. But they hadn’t been able to source anything beyond a single set of bulky Cold War vintage scopes in time for the operation, and ultimately Marc had made the choice to leave the Red Army tank crew optics behind. Peering into the gloom, he regretted his decision.

  The guards passed by them no more than three metres away, the two men engaged in a conversation about the poor result in the recent match between PFC Sochi and Spartak Moscow. Marc held his breath until they disappeared through a side door.

  ‘Clear?’ said Lucy.

  ‘Clear.’

  Marc broke into a sprint that took him across the atrium, up a staircase and on to the upper level, with Malte close behind.

  ‘Roof access in the east corner,’ noted Kara.

  ‘Actives copy.’

  Marc found the hatch in the grid of glass squares forming the top of the atrium and, with a hand up from Malte, he slid open the latch and climbed out. He pulled the Finn up to him and crawl-walked to the narrow gap between the edge of the conference centre roof and the hotel proper. The gap was less than two metres wide, but the drop beneath it was a black void, plunging down a good thirty metres to the hard marble path leading to the Marine Luxe’s swimming pool.

  Marc heard the low buzz of electric motors and saw a dark shape blur past overhead, as Kara brought the quad-drone back on station. He ignored it, finding his way to a narrow concrete beam that connected the two buildings.

  ‘All good,’ said Kara, but Marc hesitated. ‘In your own time,’ she prodded.

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  Marc took a deep breath, tried not to think about the mess he would make if he fell, and then ran across the beam. His shoes slapped over the concrete and he skidded onto the hotel roof. Of course, Malte made it look effortless, making the gap in a couple of long-legged strides.

  The hotel was a series of stepped tiers, rising up three more storeys over the conference centre, to the penthouse level where Da Silvio stayed for the duration of the Sochi heats. The man himself was up there in the master bedroom with the companion he’d chosen for the evening, the team’s surveillance having put him there some time around two in the morning. Given the amount of alcohol the Italian had been observed imbibing, Marc hoped that he would be dead to the world by now.

  Marc and Malte began the climb up the outside of the building, scaling the ornamental ledges and boxy outcroppings that adorned the exterior of the Marine Luxe. Normally, anyone attempting this would have been detected by security the moment they reached the roof level, but Kara’s interception of the camera feeds and alarm triggers kept them hidden.

  The intelligence that the hacker had bought from her dark web contacts included a copy of the penthouse’s floor plan redacted from public records, and – most vitally – details of the sentinels who guarded Da Silvio while he slept.

  For all his investment in the Combine and their machinations, it turned out that the Italian only employed men from the group’s favoured private military contractor for issues outside his personal security. When it came to his own safety, the Italian had particular rules about who – and what – he considered trustworthy.

  ‘We’re here,’ said Malte.

  Marc followed him over the last ledge and onto the penthouse deck. Staggered glass panels coated with golden mirror-film caught the light from the city in warped reflections, and Marc took a second to centre himself.

  Off along the coastline to the east, he could make out the first change in colour across the horizon, signalling the oncoming dawn. He rolled back his cuff to check the time on the Cabot dive watch around his wrist.

  ‘Running a little behind,’ he whispered. ‘We need to step up the tempo if we want to be clear by sunrise.’

  He heard the faint buzz of the drone circling around the building.

  ‘I’m seeing movement in the penthouse’s sky lobby. Overwatch, you have it?’

  ‘Ah, this angle sucks,’ Lucy replied tersely. ‘I see a silhouette, but no clean image. I’m changing position.’

  ‘Understood, proceeding with caution,’ said Marc, moving to a window with a set of concealed hinges. ‘Making entry . . .’

  He grabbed the twin-injector once again and applied generous blobs of the binary chemical to the joints. Mixed and exposed to air, the acidic gel dissolved the steel, turning it into oily slurry.

  Malte levered the window up with the tip of his knife and popped the whole thing out of its frame, letting a mutter of sea breeze blow into the penthouse interior.

  Inside the sky lobby, a metre-tall object in the shape of a bullet – which until now Marc had assumed to be an ornamental sculpture – suddenly began moving, sliding across the wooden flooring on hidden wheels in its base. A ring of sensor eyes around the upper quarter of the thing’s ‘head’ rotated, and a fan of emerald laser light flicked on from a concealed emitter. The machine rolled steadily towards them, giving off a low, menacing hum.