Chapter 1: Rule One
The helicopter leaves without you.
You watch it go from the door of the hut, a black shape lifting off the snow in a storm of rotor-wash, its lights swallowed by the dark in about four seconds flat. Then there's just the wind. It comes across the plateau like it has a grudge, a long white howl with nothing to stop it for a hundred kilometres in any direction, and it pushes snow down the collar of the parka they gave you in Tromsø and into the tops of your borrowed boots.
"Inside," says the man behind you.
"They're coming back, though."
"Inside."
"It's just, the pilot said forty-eight hours, and then he looked at the weather radar and made a face, and I know that face. That's the face I make when somebody asks me how long a firmware audit will take."
A gloved hand closes around your upper arm. Not hard. Just very, very definite. You're steered backward over the threshold, the door slams on the wind, and a bolt the size of your forearm slides home.
The silence is so sudden your ears ring.
Lieutenant Simon Riley, call sign Ghost, stands between you and the door and looks at you. At least you assume he's looking at you. It's difficult to tell. He's wearing a black balaclava with a white skull printed across the face, and over that a hard half mask painted with the bottom half of a grinning jaw, and between the two, a narrow slit for his eyes, smeared with black. The eyes themselves are brown, pale, and unimpressed.
He's also enormous. You'd noticed that in Tromsø, when he came through the window of your hotel room at three in the morning and put a hand over your mouth and said, very quietly, "Don't scream, love, I'm the good guys," and then shot two men in the hallway without looking. But in a hut this size, he's a lot more enormous. His head nearly brushes the low beams.
"Rules," he says.
"Hi. Hello. We haven't actually been introduced. I know who you are, obviously, Captain Price told me on the boat. I'm—"
"I know who you are." He pulls off one glove with his teeth, or the place where his teeth must be under all that fabric, and points at the wall beside the door. There's a whiteboard there. Somebody in a previous life of this safehouse has drawn a small, sad reindeer in the corner. Ghost uncaps a marker.
1. DON'T TOUCH THE MASK.
He writes in fast, square capitals. You watch.
2. DON'T GO OUTSIDE WITHOUT ME.
3. RADIO CHECK 0600 AND 1800. YOU STAY QUIET.
4. NO LIGHTS AFTER DARK.
"It's January," you say. "In the Arctic. It's dark all the time."
He looks at you. He writes, underneath: 4a. NO LIGHTS AFTER 1800.
5. YOU DO WHAT I SAY, WHEN I SAY IT.
"What's six?"
"There is no six."
"There should be a six. Lists of five are weird."
He holds out the marker. After a moment, you take it, and step up to the whiteboard, and write in your own messy engineer's hand:
6. GHOST HAS TO SAY AT LEAST ONE FULL SENTENCE PER DAY.
He reads it. A long, long pause. Then he takes the marker back, drops it in the tray, and walks away into the hut without a word.
"That one's going to be hard for you, I can tell," you call after him. "Do you want to practice?"
From the far end of the room, very dry: "That's two."
The safehouse is a hytte, one of those old Norwegian cabins with grass growing on the roof, except the grass is under two metres of snow and the cabin has been retrofitted by someone with a defence budget. There's a satellite uplink in a locked case. There's a generator in a shed out the back, reached by a covered passage. There's a woodstove, a kitchen corner with a two-ring hob, a cupboard full of tinned fish, crispbread and a frankly worrying quantity of brown cheese, and, through a low pine door off the main room, a tiny wood-fired sauna, because this is Norway and even the safehouses have standards.
There is one bed.
It's in an alcove built into the wall, the old-fashioned kind with wooden sides and a curtain you can draw across, piled with sheepskins and a duvet thick as a cloud. It is clearly, unmistakably, a bed for one person. Or two people who really, really like each other.
You stand and look at it for a while.
"I'll take the floor," Ghost says behind you.
"You don't have to."
"I'll take the floor."
"I'm only saying, you're very big, and that floor is very hard, and I'm not going to be weird about it if you want to—"
"Floor," he says. And then, after a second, in a slightly different tone, almost grudging: "I don't sleep much."
You glance back at him. He's at the window, both gloves back on, looking out through a gap in the shutter at the howling nothing.
"That's two full sentences," you tell him. "Today's quota is done. You can take the rest of the day off."
He doesn't answer. But the skull tilts, just slightly, and you'd swear on your mother's life that underneath all that black fabric, something about the shape of his face has changed.
The days go like this.
At 0600 he unlocks the uplink and talks to Captain Price in a language of call signs and grid references, while you sit on the bed with the duvet around your shoulders and pretend you can't hear. Price's voice is gravel and pipe smoke even through a satellite delay. "Weather's not moving, Bravo Six. Another week minimum. How's our girl?"
"Alive."
"That's a start. Is she driving you mad yet?"
A pause. "Define mad."
A burst of static that might be Price laughing, and then another voice cutting in, Scottish and delighted: "LT! Has he smiled yet? Has anybody seen him smile? I've got twenty quid on it with Gaz—"
Ghost turns off the radio.
Then he checks the perimeter, which means going out into the black in his white snow smock with a rifle and coming back an hour later with ice in his eyelashes, which are the only part of his face you've seen. Then he cleans the rifle. Then he sits by the window and watches the snow, or reads one of the battered paperback thrillers left by previous tenants, or sharpens a knife that doesn't need sharpening, with the endless steady patience of someone who has spent a great deal of his life waiting in the dark for something to go wrong.
You, meanwhile, go slowly out of your mind.
You're not built for waiting. You've spent your whole career taking things apart: routers, smart locks, a satellite modem once, on a dare. You reverse-engineer for a living. You look at a black box and you want to know what's inside it. It's how you ended up here, in a way. You designed an encryption chip for a defence contract that was supposed to be uncrackable, and then you found out a company called Vantor had stolen the design and was using it to hide arms shipments, and you were stupid enough to say so, out loud, to the wrong person, in an email. Three weeks later your flat in Leeds was on fire and a nice MI6 woman named Laswell was telling you to get on a plane.
So you fix things. You fix the shower, which only did cold. You fix the sticky drawer in the kitchen, and the generator's fuel line, which was leaking, and you take apart the cabin's ancient radio and put it back together so that it picks up NRK and you can listen to Norwegian weather forecasts you don't understand.
And you watch him. You can't help it. He's the biggest black box you've ever seen.
You learn that he eats with the mask rolled up just to the tip of his nose, so you get a glimpse of a jaw shadowed with stubble and a mouth, and then it's gone again. That he eats fast, like someone's going to take it off him. That he turns his whole body to look at things, not just his head. That he hums sometimes, under his breath, when he's cleaning the rifle, and stops the instant he notices. That he's left-handed with a knife and right-handed with a pen. That he always, always sits where he can see both the door and you.
On the fourth night, you get out of the sauna, pink and steaming and wrapped in a towel, and he's sitting on the bench outside its door in a black t-shirt and the balaclava, waiting for his turn.
You stop dead. So does he.
His arms are bare. You haven't seen his arms before. They're huge and corded and covered in scars, little white ones and a long ugly one wrapping around his left forearm, and a tattoo on one bicep you can't quite make out. You're very aware of how small the towel is. You're very aware that his eyes went down, just once, from your face to your collarbones and back up, quick as a flinch, and that now he's looking very firmly at the wall.
"You're not going to wear that in there," you say. "Are you."
"Wear what."
"The balaclava. In the sauna. It's ninety degrees in there."
"Rule one."
"Rule one says I can't touch it. It doesn't say you have to boil alive in it." You clutch the towel tighter. "I won't look. I'll go to bed and draw the curtain and stuff my head under the pillow. You'll have total privacy."
He's quiet. Steam curls off your skin into the cold room. You can see his throat move under the black fabric when he swallows.
"Go to bed," he says finally, and his voice is lower than you've heard it. Rougher.
You go. You draw the curtain. You lie in the alcove under the sheepskins with your hair wet on the pillow and your heart going like you've been running, and you listen to the sauna door open and close, and you think about scars and big hands and a mouth you've only seen in glimpses, and you don't sleep for a long time.
On the sixth night, the generator dies.
You wake up because it's quiet. Then you wake up properly because it's cold, a deep, bone-aching cold that's already crept into the alcove, and you can see your breath in the faint glow from the stove. The wind has changed. It's screaming. Something outside is banging, rhythmic and furious, like a fist on a door.
"Ghost?"
He's already up. You can see his shape against the stove, pulling on his boots.
"Shed door's come off," he says. "Snow's in the generator. Fuel line's frozen."
"I fixed the fuel line."
"I know. It's still frozen."
"I can—"
"Not tonight. Not in that." He jerks his head at the screaming outside. "Minus thirty-five with the wind. Stove won't hold the whole cabin on its own. It'll hold that alcove." A pause. A long one. "If two people are in it."
You sit up in the bed with the duvet clutched to your chest and stare at him through the dark.
"Are you saying," you say slowly, "that we have to share the bed."
"I'm saying you'll lose toes if we don't."
"Because of body heat."
"Because of body heat." He finishes lacing the second boot, then seems to realise he won't be going anywhere, and unlaces it again. "Don't make it weird."
"Me? I'm not the one who's going to get into bed wearing a skull."
He stands up. In the faint red glow of the stove, he crosses the room toward you, and he's taking off his outer layers as he comes: the smock, the vest, the black hoodie, until he's in the black t-shirt and the dark trousers and the balaclava, and he stops at the edge of the alcove, a huge shape blotting out the stove.
Then he reaches up and pulls the bed curtain closed behind him, and the dark goes absolute.
You can't see anything. Not your hand. Not him. You just hear him breathe. Then there's a soft sound of fabric, and he says, very quietly, from right above you:
"Rule four. No lights after dark."
The mattress dips under his weight.