Lazarus

Chapter One: The Man Who Stopped Answering

The pastis went cloudy the moment the water hit it, and Niko Vasseur watched the change the way other men watched television. Nine in the morning. The bar on Rue Sainte had its shutters half up, the light coming in low and yellow off the pavement, and the owner, Fabien, had learned not to say anything about the hour.

"Second one?" Fabien asked, which was as close to comment as he came.

"First one was medicinal."

"And this?"

"Preventative."

Niko was forty-one years old and looked like a man who had been left out in weather. He had the build of someone who had once been very fit and now maintained the shape out of stubbornness rather than discipline. His hair had gone grey at the temples in a single year — the year of Aleppo — and he had a habit of sitting where he could see the door, which he no longer noticed he was doing.

On the zinc counter beside his glass lay a folder from a Greek shipping consortium. Piracy risk assessment, Gulf of Aden, three thousand euros for eleven pages he could have written in his sleep. He knew which anchorages the skiffs launched from. He knew which harbourmasters took money and which took money and then talked anyway. It was honest work in the sense that nobody died from it, which was the only definition of honest he still trusted.

His phone buzzed against the folder. He turned it face down without looking.

He knew who it was. It was the same person it had been for seven months, calling from Beirut at hours that suggested she had just filed a story or just failed to. Leonie's name would be on the screen, and under it the number of missed calls, and he could not make himself touch the green circle, because if he did she would ask how he was, and he would have to answer, and the answer was a room in the Panier with an unmade bed and a bottle in the cupboard that he refilled more often than he replaced the sheets.

The phone buzzed again. He turned it over.

Not Leonie. A Marseille number he didn't recognise.

"Yes."

"You're in the bar on Sainte," said a voice he hadn't heard in three years. "The one with the terrible coffee. Don't get up. I'm two minutes away and I'd rather you didn't leave through the kitchen."

Niko set the phone down very carefully, as if it were something that might go off.

"Fabien," he said. "Put a coffee on. Someone unpleasant is coming."

Colonel Yannick Galtier came through the door at nine-fourteen wearing a linen jacket that had cost more than Niko's rent, carrying a slim aluminium case, and looking around the bar with the mild disappointment of a man confirming a report he had hoped was exaggerated.

"You look like hell," Galtier said.

"You look like a man about to ask me for something."

"I'm always a man about to ask you for something. Sit down, Niko. Please."

They took the table at the back, under a photograph of a football team from 1993. Galtier turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on its saucer, which Niko remembered as the tell that meant the Colonel was about to lie by omission.

"What do you know about Henrik Kvalheim?" Galtier asked.

"Nothing."

"Norwegian. Fifty-three. Epidemiologist, seconded to the World Health Organization in Geneva. Specialist in outbreak forensics — the man they sent when a virus appeared somewhere it had no business appearing and someone needed to work out whether nature or a human being had put it there." Galtier sipped. "Eleven days ago he was found dead in a hotel room in Nicosia. A hotel that charges thirty-eight euros a night, which is not where the WHO puts its senior people."

"How did he die?"

"Cardiac arrest, according to the Cypriots. He was overweight and smoked forty a day, so nobody argued. They released the body to the family in ten days, which for Cyprus is indecent haste." Galtier set down the cup. "Our station in Nicosia had a man in the hotel before the police finished. In the lining of Kvalheim's cabin bag, sewn in with dental floss, there was a micro-SD card."

Niko said nothing. Outside, a scooter went past with a broken exhaust.

"One file," Galtier said. "Two layers of encryption. Our people at the technical directorate broke the outer layer in six days. Underneath it there's an index. Not a document — an index, a table of contents. Nine entries survived intact. Each entry has a six-digit identifier, a GPS coordinate, a date, and a two-character code that our biologists tell us is a lethality classification."

"Lethality of what?"

"Laboratory-grade pathogen samples." Galtier said it in the same tone he might have used to order more bread. "Nine confirmed. Karachi. Two in Istanbul. One outside Sarajevo. One in Piraeus. One in a village in the Bekaa. One in Lyon, Niko. Lyon. A municipal facility."

Niko found he had stopped breathing at some point and had to start again deliberately.

"Confirmed how?"

"Not confirmed. Indicated. We haven't gone to any of them, because the moment we send a hazmat team to a warehouse in Piraeus we tell whoever owns this list that we have it." Galtier's fingers found the cup again. "The nine entries are fragments. The header structure suggests the full document runs to somewhere between thirty and fifty entries. The analysts have started calling it the Lazarus Index, because of the file name — a single word, *lazarus*, and someone in a basement in Paris thought that was clever."

"Raising the dead," Niko said.

"Or the dead raising us. The second encryption layer is the problem. It isn't a passphrase. It's a hardware handshake — the file wants to talk to a specific physical device, and our people believe the device is keyed to a biometric. Somebody's eye or somebody's thumb. Without it we have nine entries out of forty-something, and thirty-something caches of engineered disease sitting in shipping containers and cold rooms across Europe and the Middle East, and no idea where."

Fabien came past with the pot and Galtier waved him off without looking.

"So take it to the DGSI," Niko said. "Take it to Interpol. Take it to the WHO, since it was their man who died for it. Put a hundred people on it."

"I would love to. Paris disagrees."

"Why?"

"Because a list like this is worth more than the lives it threatens, and everybody who touches it knows that." Galtier let the sentence sit. "I need a man who can walk from Beirut to Karachi without generating paperwork. Someone who knows Amira's kind of people. Someone who is, and I say this with affection, entirely disposable."

"No."

"You haven't heard the terms."

"I don't need to hear the terms. I burned two assets to death in Aleppo because I trusted a promise from a man like you and moved eleven minutes early. There's a report with my name on it in a vault in Paris and the only thing in my life I'm proud of is that I stopped." Niko stood. "Drink your coffee, Colonel. Fabien makes it strong."

"Sit down, Niko."

"No."

"Your sister's name is in Kvalheim's contacts."

The bar was suddenly very quiet, or perhaps it had always been quiet and Niko had only just noticed.

Galtier didn't look up. He had the decency, at least, not to enjoy it. "Leonie Vasseur, freelance, currently Beirut. She met Henrik Kvalheim twice in the three weeks before he died. Once at a café in Hamra and once at a restaurant in Gemmayzeh, and on the second occasion a third person joined them for forty minutes. Kvalheim called her nine times. She called him four."

Niko sat down.

"We are not the only service that recovered something from that hotel," Galtier said. "We were first, but we were not alone, and within a week or a month somebody else will do what we did — pull his contacts, run the names, and find a French journalist in Beirut who spoke to a dead man about a list of pathogens. When that happens, they will not send a colonel to buy her a coffee."

"You could protect her."

"I could try. I have no station chief in Beirut who would thank me and no legal instrument that lets me put a French national under guard in a foreign city against her will. And your sister, from what I read of her, would not go quietly into a safe house." Galtier finally met his eyes. "You know her better than I do. Would she?"

Niko thought of Leonie at nineteen, standing in the door of their mother's flat in Aix with a rucksack and a plane ticket to Cairo, and their mother crying, and Leonie saying *I'm not asking permission, I'm telling you where I'll be.*

"No," he said. "She wouldn't."

"Then the fastest way to make her safe is to make the list worthless. Find the key. Unlock the index. Put every cache in the hands of people who will destroy them. After that nobody has any reason to care what a journalist heard in a restaurant." Galtier put the aluminium case on the table. "Or don't, and hope."

Niko looked at the case for a long moment.

"My way," he said. "No leash. I don't file. I don't check in on a schedule. I don't ask permission before I do something you'd rather not know about, and when it's over you don't put my name in a report."

"Agreed."

"You agreed too fast."

"I've had eleven days to prepare for this conversation." Galtier flicked the catches on the case. Inside: a passport in the name of Nicolas Verdier, a phone still in its plastic, twelve thousand euros in mixed notes, and a printed sheet of nine lines of numbers that made Niko's skin cool as he read them. "There is one condition on my side."

"There always is."

"You take a liaison."

Niko laughed, one short unpleasant sound. "No."

"The card was in a Cypriot hotel, and Cyprus is a British listening post with a country attached. Our friends in London knew about Kvalheim's death before we did; they simply searched the wrong bag. Two days ago they came to us formally, under the reciprocal arrangement, and offered cooperation. If I refuse it they will run their own operation in parallel and we will be tripping over each other in three capitals." Galtier turned his cup. "So I said yes, and I chose the officer myself, which is better than letting them choose."

"You chose an MI6 officer."

"I chose the one whose file suggested she would be a nuisance to her own side as well as to ours." He glanced at his watch. "She landed forty minutes ago. She's at the house near the Vieux-Port. Her name is Suki Penrose."

Niko sat with his hands flat on the table. Through the doorway he could see a strip of the street, a woman carrying bread, a boy on a bicycle, all of it ordinary and unaware and eleven kilometres from a water-treatment plant with a coordinate on a list.

"Nine entries," he said. "Out of forty."

"Give or take."

Niko reached out and closed the case.

"Then we'd better be quick."