The question now was, how far would he take it?

  The driver eyed him. ‘Boss cracking the whip on you, huh?’

  Saito turned away, ignoring the comment.

  ‘Get me to the airport.’

  Three hours later, Saito was on the red-eye overnight to Cairo, and he dwelled on his unanswered question every step of the way.

  TWO

  If money had a stench, then the elegant town house in Saint-Germain-des-Prés should have reeked of it.

  Built in the late 1700s for a wealthy Parisian aristocrat who didn’t hear the winds of change coming, the gaudy apartments had once been burned to their shell by the city’s disenfranchised poor. Those radicals, who led its occupants to the steps of Madame Guillotine during the bloody days of the French Revolution, would have been sickened to see the place now, and to know the history that surrounded it.

  Having the benefit of being located in one of the most desirable parts of the 6th Arrondissement, and despite the turmoil of the revolution, the building had passed up and up through the hands of moneyed men over the centuries that followed. They banked its worth again and again, until now its asking price was in the region of indecent. The value of a single brick could have fed a family on the poverty line for months. It was, if one considered it honestly, an obscenity of sorts.

  The men who owned it didn’t see it that way. Those long-dead, decapitated aristos whose blood had stained the boulevards might have recognised the current owners as kindred spirits because, like them, they saw their money as something to insulate them from the common world.

  They had never lived in the reality that most people experienced. Never once known an empty belly or the particular dread that came from having nothing to your name.

  It would not have occurred to Pytor Glovkonin to think of himself as like them. An outside observer wouldn’t see the difference in the tall and imposing Russian, viewing the petrochemical magnate as exactly the same kind of middle-aged white male oligarch as the three billionaires with whom he shared the room – but to Glovkonin there was one vital difference. He had been poor.

  The legacy of it showed in the gaunt, defined lines of his face, in the scars hidden behind an impeccably trimmed beard and beneath the sleeves of his Savile Row suit. He had grubbed in the mud as a boy, caught in the gears of the decaying Soviet system. He had lived with nothing, lying about his age to join the Red Army in a vain attempt to flee destitution, only to find he had submitted himself to the same decrepitude by a different name.

  But by his bootstraps, as the Americans liked to say, Glovkonin had fought and lied and bribed and murdered his way out of that. After decades, he was rich beyond the wildest dreams of that dirt-smeared child. He was the definition of a self-made man.

  This, he believed, earned him the right to hate the others in the room with a particular kind of loathing. None of them had worked to get what they had. Each had been born into an impenetrable bubble of wealth and privilege, like some untouchable scion of ancient monarchy. They had been given everything, whereas he had earned it.

  And they’d never known true fear, not like the Russian had. He looked forward to introducing them to it, in due course.

  ‘How long has it been since we were all in the same room?’ The Italian laughed at his own question, but his dark eyes were cold where his smile did not reach them. Cutting an urbane and dashing figure, he liked to hold the attention of the room as much as he could.

  A predator, that one. They had crossed swords in the past, and Glovkonin had the man’s measure. A raptor, hiding behind the colours of a peacock.

  ‘Two years,’ the Swiss replied, his age-lined face creasing, his bland tone retaining the same robotic, shallow affect he always displayed.

  The banker with the calculator in his head. The eldest of the group, Glovkonin considered him the dullest, the man’s only concession to personality expressed in the garish silk shirts he wore. Bloodless and without any passion.

  ‘Don’t like it,’ grumbled the American. ‘No need for it.’ Thickset and so red-cheeked he seemed permanently wind-burned, he nursed a glass of whiskey and glared out of the window, absently running a hand over his balding pate.

  The braggart. Glovkonin saw this one’s greed more clearly than in any of the others, driving him forward in everything he did. The biggest pig with his snout in the trough, in all the ways that could be true.

  For a moment, he wondered what they saw when they looked at him, and the thought made the Russian’s lips compress into a firm line. Unworthy, he told himself. Unfit to be among them.

  The Swiss plucked a speck of lint from the cuff of his tailored jacket.

  ‘Some matters must be discussed face to face. Even the best communications security can be defeated.’

  He would know, of course. His billions came from stock market manipulations and information banking, from a business empire made of computers that played games with numbers, and changed the course of nations with a mouse-click.

  The American gave a grunt that was neither agreement nor complaint. He was much more the ‘meat and potatoes’ type, or so he liked to have people believe. His deep investments in agriculture allowed him to play the part of a Middle-American son of the soil, the farmer who had made good through sweat and hard work. All lies, of course. The closest he came to the country was riding around the manicured lawns of stud farms and golf courses.

  ‘It’s important we mark this occasion,’ noted the Italian, his voice carrying.

  There was a singular enmity in Glovkonin’s heart for this man, above and beyond his more general antipathy towards the others, perhaps because they were so alike in age and manner. While the Russian had become rich on oil and gas contracts seized during the fall of the Communist state, the Italian’s inherited aerospace and engineering holdings had cemented his position in the top percentile of the world’s most wealthy. Glovkonin especially detested the Italian’s studied, indolent manner, the way he acted the caricature of the moneyed playboy breezing through life, as if everyone else were bit-part actors in a movie where he was the star.

  The Italian most of all, but each of them lacked the focus the Russian had been born with. He believed, in the fibre of his being, that none of them deserved what they had. So it would be right for him to take it from them.

  ‘Perhaps a toast, then?’ Glovkonin turned and signalled the Italian’s assistant, an austerely beautiful young woman in a grey trouser suit with a Germanic, unsmiling aspect.

  The woman looked to her master for confirmation, and at length the Italian granted it.

  ‘Excellent suggestion,’ he allowed. ‘Willa, if you would?’

  She nodded, moved to the bar at the far side of the room and poured for them. When the woman handed Glovkonin the glass, he raised it in salute.

  ‘To the Combine.’

  The other men winced when he said the name of their gathering out loud. Glovkonin could not understand why they reacted in such a fashion – as if to utter the word would somehow bring them to ruin. They thought it gauche, the act of someone tactless and ill-mannered.

  At length, they echoed him, and he couldn’t resist a chuckle.

  ‘And what an august collective it is. I am proud to be a part of it.’

  ‘It’s better if we are only whispered of, not spoken of full-throated and openly.’ The Swiss looked at him coldly over the rim of his glass, without taking a sip. ‘I have seen what happens when our exposure is too great. It puts us at risk.’

  ‘Of course,’ noted Glovkonin. ‘As the most senior member of this committee, we respect your experience.’ He cocked his head, drawing up information that his own spies had worked hard to find for him. ‘You took your father’s place in this group after his passing, yes? He did so much for the Combine before Berlin fell to the Red Army.’

  The Swiss banker’s blank face grew a scowl. ‘Yes.’

  The group’s origin story was shrouded in lies and obfuscation, deliberately cultivated to give such details the whiff of an outlandish conspiracy theory, and indeed when Glovkonin had first heard of the Combine, that was what he’d believed. But certain facts were too solid to be anything other than real.

  The Combine’s birth arose from the avarice of men like the banker’s forefather – men who understood that war was an inevitable consequence of the human condition, and sought to profit from it. This cabal, its membership untroubled by conscience and petty morality, had slowly evolved as the decades passed. From their first dealings as quartermasters to every battle they could monetise, they grew to stoking and ultimately inventing conflicts, maintaining a cycle of struggle that never ended. All was permitted, as long as it made them prosper.

  Sometimes Glovkonin wondered how rich one would have to be in order to declare victory. The money was the only way to keep score.

  ‘How each of us came to be here isn’t relevant,’ the Italian was saying, ‘or by whatever means we employed to assure our rise.’ He gave Glovkonin a warning look. ‘All that matters is that we work together to maintain our dominance.’

  Does he know that I murdered the woman whose place I usurped? Glovkonin met the look in full and waited, testing the other man’s resolve. Would he dare to say so openly?

  He doubted it. Ultimately, these men didn’t care about whose blood was shed, as long as the cut of the knife served to enrich them.

  Before, the Russian had suffered the ignominy of working outside the Combine’s controlling committee as one of their ‘associates’, like a damned supplicant petitioning for entry to a king’s castle. It didn’t take long for his patience with that to grow thin, and he had followed the more expedient path of assassinating the bitter French media heiress who had stood in his way.

  The last time he had visited these apartments, the others had done everything they could to remind him he was an outsider. It had taken years to prove himself to the Combine’s inner circle, but now that threshold was in the past, and he stood on an equal footing.

  Whether they like it or not.

  ‘What matters is the goddamn work,’ snapped the American, turning towards them. ‘We’re here, so let’s do what we came for.’ He gestured at the Swiss. ‘Say what you have to say.’

  ‘We appreciate you taking the lead on this.’ The Italian tried to appease the other man. ‘The preparation work you’ve done has been exemplary.’

  ‘My people know their jobs,’ said the American, taking the compliment with a brusque sniff. He threw a nod at Glovkonin. ‘Your boy, the Jap . . . We didn’t need him there to watchdog.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  Glovkonin let the comment go. In point of fact, the primary reason for deploying Saito was to observe the American’s operations at first hand.

  How else will I be able to destroy him when the opportunity presents itself?

  The others constantly talked about their ideal of a ‘stable instability’, a state of fear in which they could hold the nations of the world and farm them for profit. Glovkonin saw that, too, but with he alone at the reins. It was the next logical move: from outsider to inner circle, and from there to total control.

  He smiled. Don’t get ahead of yourself, Pytor. One step at a time.

  The American read the smile as Glovkonin’s acquiescence, and carried on with more confidence, his tone taking on its typical bellicosity.

  ‘Look-see, the God’s honest truth is that we paid a lot to get where we are. Nothing’s gone to plan, you can’t deny. Failures and half-successes . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Too many setbacks.’

  ‘No one denies that,’ said the Swiss. ‘But we can spend time apportioning blame and complaining about the Fates, or we can move forward. Adapt. Progress.’

  The Italian chuckled. ‘To think of the money we poured into widening the cracks between nations and classes . . . And then Mother Nature comes along and moves that needle for us!’ His amusement became a full-throated laugh, and he raised his glass in a mocking salute. ‘Gentlemen, I give you coronavirus! We couldn’t have done better if we’d cooked up that unpleasantness ourselves!’

  Glovkonin considered the Italian’s glib tone as he blithely dismissed the deaths of hundreds of thousands to the viral outbreak that had gripped the world for months on end.

  The American gave a sage nod. The man’s biomedical holdings had turned a pretty penny from their sales of the viral vaccines across North America and beyond, cashing in on the catastrophe at the right moment.

  ‘We optimised this crisis for our benefit,’ said the Swiss. ‘In a sense, the pandemic served as an unexpected force multiplier for our project. It exacerbated societal tensions already present, and we are in the ideal position to use that to our advantage. With our opposition effectively nullified, thanks to our newest member’s work –’ he gestured to Glovkonin, who accepted the faint praise – ‘we are poised to execute the larger objective.’

  For a moment, Glovkonin considered the fate of Rubicon, the corporate parent entity to the private security group that had been such a thorn in the Combine’s side over the last few years. Once a Fortune 500 company, it barely existed now, gutted by a brutal hostile takeover that Glovkonin had carefully engineered, its name tainted by accusations of terrorist links, thanks to a clever disinformation campaign. Some fragments of Rubicon still remained at large – he frowned at the thought of these loose ends – but they were of little importance.

  The Combine had many enemies, but astute political manoeuvring, blackmail, bribery and extortion had placed their group firmly in the ascendant. Rubicon had been the last major obstacle to the Combine’s greater goals. Now the path was clear.

  ‘By the time I get back to the States, we’ll be good to go,’ said the American. ‘We just need the equipment you promised.’

  He kept his distance from them, fingering his collar nervously. Glovkonin knew much of his reticence at being in Europe came from the inherent view of many of his countrymen, of the rest of the world as ‘the other’, the outside from which all threats to them came. The experience of the pandemic had only strengthened that divisive belief.

  ‘As soon as we have it in place, we can flip the switch,’ he concluded, making the gesture. ‘And I, for one, am going to be happy to sit back and watch those assholes runnin’ around like their hair is on fire.’

  ‘One thing continues to concern me,’ said the Russian. ‘Given the . . . volatility of your government in recent years, can we be certain it will fall in line after the event? You are closely connected to the Senate. You know their minds.’

  The other man waved the question away. ‘Sure, they’ll stamp their feet and squawk about it in public . . . But they’ll come around once they see the new situation benefits them.’ He nodded at his own answer. ‘Politics breeds pragmatists, don’t you know?’

  Glovkonin smiled again. ‘I will take your word for it.’

  ‘I want to go over the logistics once again,’ insisted the Swiss.

  The Italian rolled his eyes and signalled his aide to refresh his drink. ‘If we must.’

  ‘We have people to do that,’ the American said testily.

  Glovkonin’s lip curled. ‘Do you really want to swing the axe without being certain the blade is sharp?’

  *

  On the far side of the Rue Bonaparte, a few doors down from the apartments, a cargo truck sporting the jolly logo of a defunct food service company was parked awkwardly in front of a shuttered clothing store. The building was empty, its previous tenants priced out by extortionate rents, which meant no one was around to question the vehicle’s presence.

  Despite the fact it was early for lunch, the handwritten note on the windscreen reading Au Déjeuner sold the lie to anyone passing by. The truck had been there long enough for the security team in the expensive apartments across the way to consider it inert.

  It was impossible to tell from the outside that part of the truck’s rear cargo box had been replaced, the panel refitted with an adaptive plastic screen opaque from outside, and transparent from within. Like a one-way mirror, the panel allowed anyone inside the truck to conduct surveillance on the apartments and remain unseen.

  That was the plan, at any rate. But it wasn’t working out that way.

  ‘Why do we keep losing it?’

  Lucy Keyes ran a hand through the tight weave of braids over her head, and leaned in close to the rack of electronic equipment bolted haphazardly to the inside of the truck. Ochre-dark, with an athlete’s build and a boyish face, the ex-soldier chafed at the inaction. So close to the targets they had been seeking for so long, it was hard for her to resist the impulse to go kick in the door and start shooting. She kept her voice low. The tones of her New York accent were like those of an ex-smoker, roughened by damage she had suffered from a lethal bioagent that had nearly killed her.

  ‘You told me this hardware would do the job for us.’

  Sat in front of the gear on an upturned beer crate, Marc Dane held up a hand to ward her off.

  ‘I can’t focus with you hovering. Give me some breathing room.’

  Whipcord-thin and hawkish, he had never quite lost the pale cast brought on by an urbanite upbringing, and a career that had mostly been spent behind computer screens. His watchful gaze was framed by the dirty blond hair and unkempt stubble he’d let grow too long. Marc had a South London growl that came out sharper than he meant it to, his attention on the flexing forms of sound waves that washed up and down on the screen of his laptop.

  Lucy kissed her teeth, but she did as he asked, backing off to sit gently atop a heavy shape shrouded by old painter’s cloths. They had to stay sure-footed inside the truck, careful not to move too fast in case they made the vehicle rock on its shocks.

  It was imperative not to draw any attention to their presence here. After everything it had cost them to get this close to the Combine’s inner circle, they couldn’t risk blowing the opportunity.

  Marc reached up to one of the electronic modules and adjusted the gain on a dial by a minute amount. The waveforms stabilised, and the crackly hiss of static whispering around the truck morphed back into a human voice.