In the pre-dawn light, he saw a PP-2000 sub-machine gun in the man’s hand, the weapon’s distinctive matte-black profile appearing in his mind’s eye like a photo snapshot. Marc had a tech-nerd’s memory for stats, and he knew exactly how many rounds of 9mm ammunition the weapon would be able to put into him in a single burst. He found himself wishing he’d brought something more formidable than a bow and arrow.

  In the next second, he caught the hornet buzz at the top of his hearing, and the ALEPH gunman jerked as if reeled away on an invisible wire, tumbling back into the sky lobby.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ said Lucy, as she racked another round into her rifle.

  ‘Active call signs!’ Kara’s voice grew fuzzy as she shouted into her mike. ‘I have men on the roof of the conference centre, they’re moving to block your exit!’

  Marc craned his neck to get a better look down the stepped side of the Marine Luxe, and he saw the flicker of light off the spinning blades of Kara’s quadrotor drone as it bobbed down over the lower levels. Shadows moved atop the lower atrium and indistinct voices came to him on the wind. Muzzle flare blinked like fireflies and the drone zigzagged away, struggling to stay airborne.

  ‘Ah, the quad took a hit,’ said the hacker. ‘I’ve lost visual on you.’

  ‘Need another way,’ grunted Malte. He made his way to the other side of the penthouse level and peered over the edge. ‘Here.’

  The Finn jumped over without waiting for the other man to agree with him. Marc dashed across, and found Malte on a balcony one floor below, already clambering over the edge, positioning himself to drop to another on the next level down. The balconies on the residential floors of the Marine Luxe were arranged in an offset pattern, staggered left to right.

  They could follow them down towards the mezzanine, he realised. It was that, Marc reflected, or risk being gunned down in a hail of bullets.

  ‘You go over there, I can’t cover you,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Understood.’

  He shifted his bag to centre the weight evenly and jumped down to the first level below. The impact smacked hard against the flat soles of his deck shoes, and he went over the concrete rail around the balcony, trying not to imagine what would happen if he slipped and missed his landing spot on the next floor. There was nothing but open air all the way down the ten-storey fall to the sun terrace.

  Marc dropped again, this time landing on a balcony lit by the soft glow of lamps inside a huge suite. He saw the shocked faces of the residents as they bolted upright in bed, frightened out of their sleep by his arrival. He spared them a cheery wave and went over the rail again, dropping to the next floor. This time, he almost collided with a sun lounger and stumbled, momentarily losing his momentum.

  From above came the metallic chatter of automatic fire and a burst of rounds smacked into the concrete, chipping divots out of the balustrade as the crimson threads of targeting lasers wavered in the air. Two of the ALEPH operatives were firing down the side of the hotel, evidently uninterested in any collateral damage they might incur to the building or its occupants.

  Marc dismissed the idea of sending an arrow back up at them. He had no desire to expose himself to that withering fire. Instead, he grabbed the lounger and threw it over the rail as a distraction. The seat clattered against the side of the hotel as it fell, and it did the trick, drawing the attention of the gunmen as Marc dropped from balcony to balcony, hissing with effort with each landing and jump.

  He made it to the roof of the mezzanine, still twenty metres off the ground and with no cover of any kind. Marc heard the men on the top of the hotel shouting, and saw the aiming lasers sweeping his way.

  Malte stood at the edge of the roof, beckoning wildly.

  ‘Run!’

  Marc sprinted towards him, and the gunmen saw the movement. Shots slapped into the roofing felt around his feet, but as he moved, he suddenly realised what the Finn wanted to do.

  A section of the roof extended out over the terrace to become the sun cover for a swim-up bar, and beyond that was the pool, shimmering in the moonlight. Malte threw himself off in a run-and-jump, hitting the water like a cannonball. Marc released a whoop of spent breath and hurled his body out into open air, twisting to land back-first.

  He struck the surface with a smacking impact that stung like a bastard, and went under, bumping off the shallow bottom. Kicking away, Marc oriented himself towards the side of the pool and swam towards it, staying under as he crossed the distance. Bullets cut through the water in streams of bubbles as the shooters on the roof wasted ammo trying to tag him. At this distance, the best they could hope for was a lucky hit, but what was lucky for them would be fatal for Marc and Malte.

  Waiting until the last possible moment, he burst out of the water and hauled himself up and out. Malte rose close by, coughing and wheezing. The gunfire had stopped and, looking up, Marc could see several hotel residents out on their balconies, awakened by the chaos.

  On the floor directly above the pool, an angry man in a dressing gown shouted his fury at this disturbance, and belatedly the ALEPH gunmen had put up their weapons. Over the man’s tirade of gutter Russian, Marc heard the peal of an alarm sounding through the building, and his heart sank. They had well and truly blown any semblance of stealth.

  ‘This way,’ called Malte, heading back through the hotel grounds.

  Lights were coming on in quadrants as the security team came out to chase them down, dispelling the shadows that had previously given them sanctuary.

  Marc tabbed his throat mike as he ran. ‘Ops! Burn the phone in the cable bus, do it now!’

  ‘Operations copies,’ came the reply. ‘We’re on our way to pick-up.’

  From her station on the RIB, Kara sent a remote kill code to Malte’s spyPhone where Marc had left it tucked in among the basement wiring. The signal destroyed the device by forcing a critical overload of its battery, setting it and the surrounding cables alight.

  Marc heard the far-off sound of something combusting, and the hotel’s exterior lights flickered as power faltered. Smoke emerged from the ramp leading down to the basement as the two men sprinted past it, running for the safety of the boathouses and the water beyond.

  They halted by the bushes to recover their swimming gear. There was no time to change back into the wetsuits, but they couldn’t risk leaving the kit behind, especially after the operation had fallen apart. The priorities now were escape and damage control. They could not afford to leave any clues behind for the Italian’s men to find.

  ‘Go, go!’

  Marc urged Malte into the dark waters of the marina, spotting the low-slung shape of the RIB out on the water as Benjamin brought it around. He dived off the end of the jetty and pulled hard into the current, working against the drag of the bags looped over his shoulders.

  The effort started to tell on him. Marc forced himself to push on, moving into the tide as the RIB grew from a black smudge on the water’s surface.

  He found a grab rope near the stern and pulled himself aboard, sloughing off the bags with a wheezy grunt. Malte was already down in the gunwale, panting hard.

  Crouching low over the helm, Benjamin rammed the throttles forward to full and the RIB shot away, out into the Black Sea.

  Marc crumpled against Kara, staring back past the churning outboard towards the hotel and the docks as they sped away. On the shore, beams from torches bobbed as the security team searched the grounds fruitlessly for the two intruders.

  *

  Lucy waited for them by the Hunter 4 × 4 when they came ashore out past the city limits, and Benjamin drove them back to the derelict school in silence, as the rising sun turned the sky purple-pink.

  It was only when they stepped out into the shadows of the building that Kara finally broke the silence.

  ‘The breath sensor must have been a recent security upgrade,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s why it wasn’t in the data.’

  ‘Or maybe your black hat buddies left that out, because they knew it would screw us.’ Lucy shot her a look. ‘What is it they say? For the lulz?’

  ‘Knock it off. Blame won’t fix this,’ Marc said, shutting down the argument before it could begin.

  He felt tired down to his bones, and all he wanted was to sleep – which is why he didn’t see the figure in the open doorway until she struck a match to light a cigarette.

  Marc jolted back in shock, and from the corner of his eye, he saw Lucy tearing a pistol from her belt.

  But he couldn’t pull his gaze away from the face of the woman in the gloom, the flickering match giving her an infernal aspect.

  ‘Aw, don’t fight,’ she said, with a smirk. ‘It’s so unprofessional.’

  ‘Grace.’ Marc said her name, the leaden sound of it falling from his lips.

  The fraud who had impersonated a woman he loved, killed MI6 agents and almost murdered his friends. Here she was, coming out of the darkness to haunt him like a nightmare that would not fade.

  ‘You should be a corpse,’ spat Lucy, taking aim at her. ‘Let me catch you up.’

  Grace shook her head. ‘Your boss wouldn’t like that.’

  She stepped aside, and behind her stood someone else – once a tall and elegant figure, now worn down by injury.

  ‘My friends,’ said Ekko Solomon. ‘It is good to see you.’

  NINE

  ‘How did you find us?’

  Marc sat forward on the edge of a folding chair, trying to grasp what he was seeing in front of him.

  ‘That’s the question you lead with?’ Lucy shot him a hard look. She still held a gun in her hand, the muzzle of the Sig Sauer semi-automatic tapping against her thigh as the tension in her sought a release. ‘How about starting with what the fuck?’

  ‘I think that’s implied,’ noted Marc, casting about the motley group arranged around the decrepit classroom.

  He didn’t know where to look first. To one side stood Grace, leaning against a wall with a studied air of disinterest – the woman who had weaponised his past against him. Delancort, who had turned his back on them when the Rubicon team fled from their enemies, kept to the corner, eyeing his surroundings in the manner of a trapped animal. Solomon, the man he had come to consider as a mentor, and for the past few months, someone they had all believed to be dead, sat watching him intently from the corner of a broken school desk

  Solomon held himself up on a cane, and he looked as if he’d aged a decade since Marc last saw him. He was a broken reflection of the imposing, patrician figure Marc had come to know. Yet, despite that, it had not quite diminished him. Solomon looked at Marc with his good eye and nodded to him, that simple motion communicating volumes.

  ‘We used the Grey Record to track you down,’ said Delancort, venturing a reply to Marc’s question, referring to the Rubicon Group’s secret files. ‘I followed the movement of money from those black budget accounts. With that to hand, finding you here in Russia was relatively simple.’

  ‘I knew I should have scrubbed them.’ Kara gave a low grunt. ‘Makes sense. The only other person who knew about the existence of those accounts was Mr Solomon. He set them up, after all.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Solomon. ‘I hope you understand, it was too risky to attempt any contact before now. We had to come here, to see you face to face. So there would be no doubt.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ offered Benjamin, rubbing a hand over his bald pate. ‘If someone purporting to be Ekko Solomon reached out to us, what would we have assumed?’

  ‘That they were a fake,’ agreed Marc. ‘It’s not like we haven’t seen enough of those.’ He pointedly glanced at Grace, who let the comment roll off her.

  ‘Damn right.’

  Lucy stalked across the room and took Solomon’s chin in her hand, staring into his face. He didn’t react, and she tilted his head left and right, examining the healed wounds on his cheek. Then at length, Lucy undid a few buttons on the man’s shirt and stared at the livid scar on his chest.

  Solomon remained still, waiting for Lucy to come to her own conclusions. Her hand dropped away and her mask of defiance slipped for a moment, her sorrow shining through.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her voice thickening. ‘If we’d known you survived that explosion, we never would had left—’

  Solomon held up a hand. ‘I was buried under a collapsed building. I expected to perish. You have nothing to apologise for.’

  Marc closed his eyes for a moment and he was back there in Mozambique, recalling a night of fire and death out in the burning wilderness. In a brutal showdown at a petrol station on a deserted highway, the Combine’s killers had come to end the lives of the Rubicon survivors.

  They had nearly succeeded. At the end of it, Solomon had held off the enemy attackers and paid with his life, caught in an explosive trap laid for the assassins.

  Or so they had believed.

  Malte stood up and walked to Solomon, offering him his hand.

  ‘Welcome back, sir.’ The Finn gestured at his face, indicating the other man’s burn scars. ‘Hurts?’

  ‘I live with it.’ Solomon smiled slightly and shook his hand. ‘It is preferable to the alternative.’

  Marc waited for the same reaction in himself – an expected flood of relief that his friend and mentor had returned to them. It did not come. Instead, there was something else – a hard, obdurate unwillingness to accept these new circumstances.

  ‘Let’s hold off on the reunion party,’ he insisted, and the steel in his words was enough to make Lucy and Malte draw back. ‘No one’s happier than me that you’re alive. But the company you’re keeping raises a lot of questions.’ He gestured at Grace and Delancort. ‘And then there’s the whole issue of why you’re not rotting in some Combine black site.’

  ‘You recall Mr Saito?’ Solomon uttered the name of the Combine assassin, and Lucy stiffened. The man had stabbed her in the gut and left her to bleed out in their first encounter, and while she had later returned the favour, Lucy wasn’t the kind of woman to let something like that be forgotten. ‘He is responsible for my recovery. Saito had plentiful opportunity to turn Grace and me over to his masters. Yet he did not. In point of fact, he is the reason we are here.’

  ‘Saito let you go?’ Lucy’s tone made it clear what she thought of that.

  ‘Maybe he did it so you could lead him to the rest of us,’ said Marc.

  Solomon shook his head. ‘No. If that were so, would we be having this conversation? Saito is a victim of the Combine, as we are. He was coerced into their service by threats against those most dear to him. I believe we can turn this man.’

  It took an effort for Marc to put aside his personal feelings towards Saito and consider the possibility with a clear eye. Someone as highly placed in the Combine apparatus as the Japanese assassin would be a perfect tool to use against them, as Glovkonin had used insiders within Solomon’s company to destroy Rubicon.

  Delancort cleared his throat. ‘Speaking for myself . . . The past few months have given me ample time to re-evaluate my choices.’ He met Marc’s gaze. ‘What I told you that day on the roof in Monaco . . . I still believe I was right. But I understand now that you did what you thought was right.’ He sighed. ‘I thought we could weather the storm. But instead Pytor Glovkonin forced me to watch him systematically dismantle everything Rubicon stood for.’ Delancort considered his next words. ‘You and I have never seen eye to eye, Dane. But this goes beyond our personal differences.’

  Marc accepted his explanation. There was no love lost between them, but he had to admit he respected Delancort’s intelligence, even if he disliked the man’s prissy personality.

  ‘I’m willing to give Henri the benefit of the doubt – he’s earned it.’ Marc carried on, turning his attention to Grace. ‘But you? That’s a different story. I’m asking myself why you don’t deserve a bullet in the head and a shallow grave.’

  ‘Wow.’ Grace clasped her hands together, glancing around at the others. ‘Months on the run and Marc-y boy here has toughened up, am I right?’ She leered at him, miming the shape of a gun. ‘You gonna do the deed, tough guy?’

  ‘Oh no, honey. That’s my prize,’ Lucy insisted, rocking on the balls of her feet.

  Solomon held up a hand to silence Grace before she said something she might regret.

  ‘Let us have no illusions here. Grace is a mercenary. But not a zealot. The Combine made her a target, like us. Our interests coincide, and she has been of great use getting us to this point.’

  ‘Common enemy, you know how it goes,’ said the woman. ‘As long as Glovkonin’s breathing, I have a target on my back. Like it or not, you idiots are my best shot at putting him in one of those shallow graves. Get it?’

  ‘We don’t need her,’ muttered Malte.

  ‘Or maybe we do,’ said Benjamin. Marc shot the big man a surprised look, and he carried on. ‘Let us not sugar-coat it. We are . . . how do you say . . . running on fumes? We failed in our mission tonight. We need help if we are going to succeed.’

  Marc’s gaze drifted to Kara, who had barely spoken during the conversation. He remembered something she had said back in France.

  If we want to get back at the Combine, we may have to give up the luxury of the moral high ground.

  Marc scowled. As much as he wanted to deny it, there was truth in Benjamin’s assertion. And if he divorced himself from the visceral, emotional content of his reaction to Grace, Marc had to admit that the woman was a superlative undercover agent. She’d fooled him and MI6 when she assumed the identity of Marc’s ex-lover and former team-mate. He made a dispassionate calculation, considering how they could turn those skills towards destroying the Combine.

  Of course, they would never be able to trust her.

  But then this is what a leader does, isn’t it? Manage risk versus reward?

  He had to concentrate on what served the mission best, not sentiment.

  Marc took a deep breath, and glanced at Solomon once again, considering the weight the other man had carried through their ordeals in the Special Conditions Division. That burden now belonged to him.

  ‘All right. Grace gets a stay of execution.’ Marc nodded, and for a second Lucy was lost for words.