If I do this, will I be the next to be discarded?

  His hand hesitated over the computer’s fingerprint scanner, which would read his imprint and digitally authorise the directives to progress forward.

  Once he signed off, Delancort would have no more value. But what other choice did he have? He couldn’t look away from the shadows in the other room. There was nowhere else he could go.

  He pressed his thumb to the scanner, and the computer gave an answering beep.

  Grinning, Andre reached over and pulled the memory stick from its reader.

  ‘That’s more like it.’ He flicked a cocky salute. ‘Enjoy the rest of your evening, Henri.’

  Delancort watched Andre walk away into the gloom, back towards the elevators. After a moment, the shadows in the other office detached and followed, leaving him to clasp his trembling hands together and listen to the hammering of his heartbeat.

  *

  The night air was unseasonably warm, so Marc shrugged off his black TEC hoodie and lay back on the rickety sun lounger. He closed his eyes and listened to the river-rush sound of traffic on the motorway a few kilometres distant.

  Atop the empty office in Torcy, someone had left behind a makeshift smokers’ den when they abandoned the place. A pair of patched and broken loungers and an unsteady table of rain-swollen wood sat near a coffee can overflowing with stale cigarette butts and the caps from beer bottles, hidden out of sight by air conditioning units and the roof access shed.

  It was bad op-sec to be up here. Although the office wasn’t overlooked by any other buildings, there was no concealment, nothing to stop Marc from being spotted by a drone passing overhead. With the right kit, a watcher would be able to pick out his face.

  He cracked open one eye. The sky above was a thick layer of grey cloud, under-lit by street lights and so low he could almost reach up and touch it. Anything coming down to look at him would have to be close enough to swat with his bare hands.

  Been there, he thought, done that.

  The access shed door clanked and swung open. Marc turned his head to see Lucy emerge, a plastic carrier bag dangling from one hand.

  ‘Hey,’ she said.

  She wore the same sort of fleece as Marc’s, with the hood pulled up and her braids pooling around her neck.

  ‘Hey yourself.’

  Lucy automatically looked up into the sky, and Marc smirked.

  Same impulse, he told himself, same training.

  ‘Shouldn’t be up here—’ she began, but he waved her off.

  ‘I know, I know. But honestly, I’m willing to risk it for some peace and quiet.’

  She halted. ‘Oh. Okay. You want a little me time, I get it.’ Lucy turned to go.

  ‘Don’t.’ Marc shook his head. A moment ago, he’d wanted the chance to be alone for a while, but now she was here, that seemed selfish.

  Lucy understood, and she wandered over.

  ‘So what are you at?’

  He nudged the coffee can ashtray with the tip of his trainer.

  ‘Having a crafty ciggy.’

  ‘You don’t smoke.’

  ‘Thinking about starting. Need something to de-stress.’

  He closed his eyes again, and listened to the other lounger creak as Lucy sat. She was close enough for him to sense her there, just within reach.

  ‘Filthy habit,’ she noted. ‘I got something better.’

  He heard the rustle of plastic and then the low pop of a stopper. Fluid gurgled and the rich aroma of liquor reached his nostrils.

  He opened his eyes and found her offering him a disposable plastic cup containing a generous measure of brown liquid. In the other hand she had produced a bottle of Rémy Martin XO.

  ‘Cognac? Where’d you get that?’

  She gave him an isn’t it obvious shrug.

  ‘We’re in France, duh. They practically wean their kids on this.’

  He took a sip and savoured the smooth burn. The little indulgence helped. It gave Marc something else to think about instead of the day’s disappointment.

  Lucy read his thoughts as if they were being projected out in front of him.

  ‘The scrub of the surveillance data is almost done. But I gotta level with you, it doesn’t look good. With that and the other partial leads . . .’ She paused and took a drink. ‘Well, like they say, that dog won’t hunt.’

  Marc nodded. ‘We’ve still got Malte’s take to look at when he gets in. That could make the difference.’

  ‘It better.’ Lucy topped up her cup and Marc’s, then paused, staring into the liquid. ‘You know what today is?’ He shook his head and she continued. ‘It’s Ari Silber’s birthday.’

  ‘Oh.’

  A slow jab of regret pushed into him. They all missed the veteran pilot, with his easy smile and his endless catalogue of war stories. Ari had flown them into and out of dozens of bad situations, but the life had finally caught up with him in the skies over East Africa. He’d got them down safe, but Ari hadn’t escaped the burning fuselage of their crashed aircraft. Marc felt a breeze on his face and for a moment, the sense-memory of smoke and burning aviation fuel was right there. He scowled, rejecting it.

  Ari wasn’t the only one they had lost. Their flight from the Combine had taken Assim Kader along with him, when the young Saudi hacker was gunned down. And then there was Solomon.

  Marc raised the cup. ‘To absent friends.’

  Lucy nodded. ‘Absent friends.’

  She downed the contents of her cup in one go, and refilled it. Marc looked away and pretended that he didn’t see the shimmer of tears in her eyes.

  ‘This one time, when we were on Solomon’s Airbus over the Atlantic, middle of the night, he told me something.’ Marc let the story come up as he nursed his drink. ‘Started off as two pilots bullshitting each other, yeah? Me the chopper guy, him the jet jockey. Comparing notes on the worst things we’d ever had to deal with in the air.’ He made a winding motion with his free hand. ‘When I served in the navy, the helo crash I survived when my Lynx went down . . . That was because of a storm. Lightning struck the rotors and we lost power. He told me the same thing happened to him once.’

  ‘Ari flew F-15s for the Israeli Air Force, right?’ said Lucy.

  Marc nodded. ‘He’s on this moonless night flight, skirting a storm over the ocean, and he drifts off course. Lightning strike hits his bird, zap, fries the avionics, everything goes dark.’ He made a flat, winged shape with his hand, drifting it through the air. ‘So now he has no radio and it’s black as pitch outside, he can’t tell how high he is or what direction he’s heading. If he’s going the wrong way, he’ll keep flying out over the sea until his tanks are dry and . . .’ Marc dipped the wing in a steep dive. ‘So what does he do?’

  ‘He turned in to the storm.’

  Marc paused. ‘You’ve heard this one?’

  She shook her head and showed a sad smile. ‘No. But I know Ari.’

  Marc went on. ‘He turned in to the storm, because he figured it was moving towards the coastline. He flew that bent jet right through the wind and the rain, got it back to dry land, and lived to tell the tale.’

  Lucy leaned closer. ‘And the moral of the story?’

  ‘When you’re in the storm . . . you have to keep going.’

  She gave a low chuckle. ‘I see what you did there.’

  ‘We have to keep going, Lucy,’ he told her. ‘Whatever the setbacks, however long it takes to burn down the Combine. Otherwise, what’s all this for?’

  ‘I just . . .’ She covered her pause with another sip of cognac. ‘For every two steps forward, we get pushed back one.’ She met his gaze. ‘And they’re close, Marc. Glovkonin’s people, ALEPH . . . they almost had us in Tangiers.’

  He nodded, remembering their fraught escape the previous month.

  ‘Yeah. If Kara hadn’t worked her magic, we’d be dead and gone.’

  Mentioning Kara Wei’s name made Lucy’s manner harden. She wasn’t going to let go of her baggage over her former friend’s betrayal any time soon, even though the hacker was doing all she could to mend that trust.

  ‘We’re not going down that road.’ Lucy’s eyes hardened, before Marc could say more. ‘I don’t wanna get into it.’

  ‘We need to be a team,’ Marc told her, holding her gaze. ‘You need to put aside your problems with her.’

  ‘That an order?’ She cocked her head. ‘I mean, you’re leading now, right? It’s your mission, you set this running.’

  ‘It’s everyone’s mission,’ he shot back. ‘Don’t act like that’s what you’re sore about.’

  ‘Oh, you know what I’m sore about?’

  She rocked back, her ire building. The flash of vulnerability she’d shown a moment before vanished.

  ‘Yeah, I think I do.’ Marc matched her tone. ‘None of us have any illusions here. We’re working without a net. We screw up and there’s no one to bail us out. This . . .’ He made a circling motion. ‘This is all we have. We have to pull together.’

  Lucy opened her mouth, and he knew she was about to throw back a retort – but then her annoyance waned.

  ‘Okay,’ she began, ‘all right. Because you ask me. I’ll back it off. But don’t expect me to be best buds with her again. Kara’s not the woman I thought I knew.’

  ‘You’re right, she isn’t,’ he admitted. ‘So work with who she is.’

  Lucy made a show of studying him. ‘She’s not the only one that’s different.’

  He looked away, shaking his head. ‘Don’t start in on me. I’m winging this. I’m not . . .’ Marc stumbled over the name before he could say it.

  ‘Not Solomon?’ Lucy said gently.

  He felt the tension crawling back into him.

  ‘I don’t know how he ever managed to stay so cool about it. It’s like the weight of the fucking world. Benjamin, Kara, Malte, even you . . . Looking to me to steer this.’

  ‘You took the lead, so you take the burden,’ she told him, moving closer again.

  ‘I hope I can carry it.’ He sighed. ‘That’s why I need my team. It’s why I . . . need you.’

  Lucy looked back at him, and Marc felt as if he was losing himself in those striking amber eyes.

  ‘Ari always told me to live in the moment,’ she said, her tone shifting, deepening. ‘Never really got that until he was gone.’ She rolled back the hood and leaned in towards Marc. ‘I don’t wanna think about what we don’t have. Let’s stick to what we got.’

  Marc gave in to the impulse and closed the distance, meeting her. She kissed him deeply, gently, the slow fire of the cognac on their lips.

  He dropped the cup and reached for her, but she held him away, placing one hand on his face. Her fingers were cool on his cheek. She didn’t speak, a question in her eyes.

  He hesitated. Marc and Lucy had been to the precipice of this before, more than once, but never gone beyond it. In fire and danger, in adversity that had taken them to the edge of death, a bond between them had been forged, something that defied simple description. It was more than trust. That word wasn’t strong enough, powerful enough to encompass it.

  And suddenly he saw how foolish it was to believe there might be a moment that was right, that was perfect, when things would be clear and uncluttered between them. There was only what they had, right here and right now.

  Marc drew her closer, and he felt her push against his body as they kissed again. Heat charged through him and his blood raced. He drew back the zip of her fleece, unbuttoned the top beneath, and ran his hand over the smooth skin of her belly. Her fingers came up under his T-shirt, spreading, exploring him.

  He broke off to take a husky breath. ‘You’re not going to smack me in the face again, are you?’

  ‘That depends,’ she whispered.

  *

  The Gulfstream rumbled through a pocket of turbulence that set the glassware rattling in the executive jet’s cabin. Glovkonin gave an irritated grunt of disapproval as the tumbler of Stolichnaya Elit before him migrated across the table of its own accord. He snatched up the vodka and drained it, grimacing.

  The clean sting from the alcohol had barely abated when the pilot came over the intercom to apologise for the disturbance. There was a storm cell over the Kerch Strait, he explained, forcing them to take a longer route from the Crimean peninsula and down the Russian coast on their approach to Sochi.

  Glovkonin glared out of the window, unable to shake the sullen mood that had taken root in him before departing Paris. He looked down through broken cloud illuminated in strobing blinks of light from the jet’s running lights. Slices of shimmering water were visible here and there, sections of the Black Sea glittering like shards of onyx.

  Unable to settle, he shifted in the soft leather of his chair, uncomfortable wherever he rested. It was uncommon behaviour for the Russian, and he recognised that in himself. It was his frustration, working its way to the surface.

  The transfer of the equipment for the Combine’s new project was the Italian’s responsibility, and that had been made very clear to him before the meeting in the apartments had been disrupted and cut short. But Glovkonin’s plan to push the other man aside and have the committee grant him that obligation had not come to pass. He had never had the chance to make his move, and now he was a step behind.

  Glovkonin loathed any suggestion of him being out of pace. The best he could do would be to make up the loss on the fly.

  It was a matter of faith. He had little confidence in the other man’s abilities beyond his skills at bedding pliant women, gambling and separating his many gullible investors from their money. There was too much at stake with this project to put it in the hands of a man so profoundly flippant. Glovkonin leveraged his own contacts in the Russian Federation to ensure that he would also be a key participant in this transfer.

  And if I can further my own personal goals at the same time, so much the better.

  The Italian was too much in love with his own legend, cutting back and forth across Europe acting the playboy while others in the Combine worked in the shadows. They were impediments to Glovkonin’s advancement, of course, the American farmer and the Swiss banker as well, but he disliked the Italian the most.

  Making an attempt to shake off his bad mood, he cheered himself with the thought that the self-aggrandising peacock would be dealt with soon enough. Glovkonin had already killed his way into the Combine’s inner circle, and he had no intention of stopping there.

  The others have to suspect that, he thought. They’re not fools. They know I have ambition and the will to back it. But he knew the answer. They don’t believe they can be threatened. That will be the arrogance that brings them down, in the end.

  He sensed a presence behind him and turned to find Misha, one of his bodyguards.

  ‘A call for you, sir,’ he said, in his rolling Georgian accent. ‘It’s the Frenchman.’

  The ex-Spetsnaz operative waited patiently, cradling a wireless telephone in the beefy paw of one hand. Glovkonin took the handset and dismissed Misha without a word.

  ‘Report,’ he demanded.

  Andre’s voice had an odd echo, a sure sign that the call was being scrambled.

  ‘The directives have been delivered and enacted.’

  ‘Any resistance?’

  ‘No. They’re like whipped dogs. I think some are actually relieved it is over.’ He paused, and Glovkonin could hear him smirk. ‘By tomorrow night, the last pieces of the Rubicon Group will be dissolved. You won, sir.’

  ‘Not yet. I don’t want any more loose ends,’ he noted. ‘We are at an important juncture.’

  ‘Of course.’ Andre paused, taking his time over the next issue they were to discuss. ‘And the fugitives?’

  Glovkonin took the opportunity to dress him down.

  ‘Your performance in that arena has been lacking, to say the least. While you have been wasting time chasing blind leads on the dark net, the targets came to me. They were within striking distance, do you understand what that means?’

  ‘I can only apologise again, sir,’ Andre said quickly. ‘They’re difficult targets – experienced, hard to track. I know their digital systems expert, and she’s very skilled . . .’ He drifted off, falling silent, sensing Glovkonin’s irritation at his excuses.

  The Russian reached for a data tablet in the pocket of his seat, activating it by pressing his thumbprint to an embedded reader. The screen lit up with a gallery of image captures, some taken from cameras outside the apartments in Paris, others co-opted from police body cameras and CCTV feeds. With terse flicks of his hand, Glovkonin paged through photos of the duo who had attempted to surveil the Combine committee’s gathering.

  The images didn’t show them clearly but he knew their names. Marc Dane and Lucy Keyes. Still not dead, despite a good many attempts to end their lives.

  ‘Have the other members of the committee seen this material?’

  ‘No, sir. I secured it immediately after the . . . ah . . . incident.’

  ‘Keep it under wraps. I want any new information brought to me first, am I clear?’

  Andre paused again. His loyalty belonged to the Combine as a whole, who had taken him on after the hacker collective he worked with had been torn apart by law enforcement in a dozen countries. But the Frenchman had a base cunning about him, and he was intelligent enough to understand where the power lay in this relationship. He was smart enough to back the right horse.

  ‘Very clear, sir.’

  Glovkonin studied a blurry shot of Dane and Keyes, the pair of them caught ascending a staircase up from a Métro platform. For months now, he had been personally directing the hunt for them, drawing on the Combine’s resources to track down and terminate them. They had resolutely remained unfound, fleeing from ALEPH’s investigator teams whenever they got close.

  But rather than running and working to stay one step ahead of the Combine’s pursuit, Dane and Keyes had flipped the dynamic. They were tracking him.

  A bold move, he had to admit. But so very reckless. And perfectly in line with what he knew of the Englishman’s character.