The Searcher

by Christopher Morgan Jones

  “You are fucking Jew. You work for president. You come to kill Georgians.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. I’m going to start with you.”

  The young man leaned back to grin at his friends and opened his eyes wide and punched Hammer in the stomach, not a great punch but enough to double him up. Then he closed the passport and handed it to someone by him. Hammer’s eyes followed it.

  “Give me that.”

  The passport was passed on again. Around them the crowd continued to rush, began to thin.

  “Give me the fucking passport.”

  “You are enemy of Georgia.” The young man leered into Hammer’s face and pushed his hand up into his throat, straightening up. Hammer felt his breathing tighten. The lock on his arms was total.

  “I’m a fucking tourist, you idiot.”

  Hammer fought for breath. He felt the blood pulsing round his skull.

  “Why you here?”

  “To drink the waters.”

  “Why you here?”

  The punk was shouting now and showing no signs of backing down. The leer had gone. Hammer was getting no air, and his body was beginning to panic.

  There was no way he was going out at the hands of this schmuck. He tried to kick, to bring his knee up into his crotch, but the little fucker was standing to the side of him now and nothing found its target. He jerked his head back but for a runt he had strong hands and he kept an iron hold.

  “Why you here?”

  Hammer could barely talk and his lungs felt full of acid. The time for wisecracks had gone.

  “To find a friend,” he said, with the last breath he could find.

  The revolutionary looked into his eyes.

  “Bullshit.”

  From somewhere down the street came three shots, and Hammer felt the hold on him relax, just a degree. Then two more shots, from the same gun. The young man looked beyond him down the street, released his grip, and nodded at his friend, who with a glance backward let go of Hammer’s arms and moved off, at one again with the scattering crowd. Hammer bent over, sucking in air, and felt himself being pulled upright by the young man, who patted the breast of Hammer’s jacket and gave him a look, somewhere between mischief and mania.

  “Next time, American,” he shouted, and slipped into the tide.

  The last stragglers hurried by, throwing some final taunts behind them, until Hammer was alone with his driver and the beaten Mercedes, all its windows smashed and one door hanging from its hinges. Placards lay broken at his feet, and papers spilled from the car onto the ground. He felt in his trouser pocket for his handkerchief and brought it up to his nose, bending over to catch the drips, watching them spread crimson onto the smudged white cotton.

  His hand shaking, the driver walked toward him, holding out an open cigarette packet.

  “You OK?” said Hammer, twisting his head to look up.

  The driver nodded, but his face was white. He offered the pack to Hammer, pushing up a single cigarette.

  “Hell yes,” said Hammer, and took one. His own hand shook as he reached for it. If his memory was good it had been twenty years since his last.

  Before he lit it from the driver’s trembling lighter, he sensed movement behind him and a new voice shouted something he didn’t understand. The driver let the flame die, raising his hands once more in submission, and as Hammer straightened he saw six policemen rounding the corner, guns up and pointing at him.

  FOUR

  An investigator, Hammer liked to call himself. Not a private detective, which sounded a little seedy, and anyway, who detected? That wasn’t what he did, at any rate. He talked to people, and he scoured documents, and then he sat back and figured out some part of the problem, and then he did some more talking. He liked to talk, in part because he was good at it but mainly because people told you things when they talked back—consciously or unconsciously. Information was to be found in documents or in people’s heads, and Hammer had always thought that the heads held the best stuff.

  No, he didn’t detect. He investigated. It was a better word—it meant something. It suggested you might be interested in getting to the truth.

  The fifteen visitors in the Ikertu lobby were detectives, come to do some detecting, he supposed. Some were in uniform, some weren’t, but even those in plain clothes were plainly police; they had an air of prerogative that most people coming into this office did not. Hammer resented the deliberate aggression they had shown by turning up in force—five could have done the job, which meant the remainder were here to scare him and unsettle his staff. Katerina was with them, and his two receptionists looked on in confusion.

  A woman in a suit had turned to meet him. She was forty, Hammer guessed, a little gaunt, the face tired but the brown eyes keen and sharp and resolutely on his. A band of freckles ran across her cheekbones under pronounced bags. She looked wary but belligerent, as if she spent her days in fluorescent-lit rooms, as she probably did, listening to people lie to her; there was a suppressed fervor about her, a tension that suggested she was trying to appear calmer than she was.

  “Isaac Hammer?”

  “I’m Ike Hammer.”

  “Detective Inspector Sander. I have a warrant to search this office for documents and computer equipment.”

  She handed him a piece of paper. He had seen its like before but this one had the name of his company at the top. Ikertu Limited. Then Isaac Hammer and Ben Webster. Their names still joined together. The wording was stark, familiar, and in order.

  For a second he felt unsteady, a sort of swaying in the stomach, like a man feels on land after weeks at sea. Used to calmly advising clients in the worst of crises, now he reeled briefly, buffeted by the thought of confronting his own: advising was easy; living it would not be. But he was quickly in charge of himself again, and with a facility perfected on others’ behalf began to rank the dozen questions competing for attention. What was at stake. How to defend himself. What to tell his people.

  “Ben Webster no longer works here, Inspector.”

  “I’m aware of that. It’s his computer I want.”

  Sander pressed her mouth into a line, the opposite of a smile. Better for you if we just start, it said.

  “OK, Inspector. This all looks fine. But I’d appreciate it if you could give me two minutes. I have a guest to take care of. He was just leaving.”

  Hammer turned to gesture toward Rapp, who had come through the glass door into the lobby and was frowning mildly at the crowd he found there. He looked at Hammer in search of an explanation.

  “No one leaves,” said Sander.

  “An hour ago I’d never seen him, nor him me. He has nothing to do with this.”

  Sander held his eye, establishing control. She was his height, more or less, and her stare was level. Her eyebrows had been plucked into thin arches that gave her a look of fixed surprise.

  “Until the search is complete no one leaves.”

  “He has a plane to catch.”

  “There’ll be other planes.”

  “You have discretion, no?”

  “I do. And I’m exercising it.” The eyebrows lifted a little further. “You know your rights, do you, Mr. Hammer?”

  “I’ve had clients in this situation.”

  “I bet you have. Then you’ll know you’re not in charge. Your guest stays.”

  Their audience seemed to sense that this was growing into a contest. Probably it wasn’t a fight worth winning; Sander was here to do a job and nothing Hammer might do could stop her. Nor was there any clear benefit in making her like him even less than she seemed to already. But her manner, and the prickling hostility he detected in it, were unnecessary. Raid my offices, by all means, but don’t try to humiliate me.

  Rapp was watching the business calmly, confident that he occupied a different universe.

  “Can we talk for
a moment, Inspector? Privately.”

  Sander shook her head.

  “Mr. Hammer, this is a simple process. I ask you for things, you give them to me. There’s no negotiation.”

  If it had been wise, Hammer would have sighed. In his experience, the people who found it so difficult to behave appropriately had some lack in them, a need to inconvenience others to feel good about themselves. He had respect for the police but expected some in return. So be it.

  “Inspector, I wasn’t going to make a deal. I was going to make a plan, see this all goes smoothly. Get the material ready, go over the computers and the servers and everything, because this can be a complicated process and if I can help make it easy for both of us then I will. We can do it like that. Or we can all just sit here and wait for my lawyer, which may take a while because he’ll need to get a big team together to keep an eye on your hundreds of people, and when we get started I can drag the whole thing out with ten questions to your every one. I’m happy either way. No doubt you have all the time in the world. But my friend here, he has a plane to catch, and until just now no connection with this company, and I’d appreciate it greatly if you let him leave. OK? I shouldn’t think he’d mind if you checked him for pieces of evidence.”

  Throughout his speech Hammer kept his eyes on Sander and smiled a cool, hard smile that he didn’t mean. Anger tended to show itself as frost in him. But given the chance he’d have marched her out of the building.

  Sander looked from Hammer to Rapp and then back to Hammer, calculating, he imagined, the price and value of a compromise.

  “What have you been discussing?”

  “An e-mail breach in Poland. Nothing that concerns you.”

  “Who is he?”

  Hammer fished inside the top pocket of his jacket, pulled out a card, and passed it to her.

  “He’s a Polish businessman. He owns a television company.” He didn’t think it necessary to mention all the others.

  “Parker,” Sander said, with a nod, and one of the plainclothes officers walked over to Rapp, who held out his briefcase to be searched. Hammer went to shake his hand.

  “My apologies.”

  For the second time, Rapp surprised him by smiling.

  “All the best people get raided from time to time, Mr. Hammer. Let me know if you need help with your strategy.”

  Hammer saw him into the elevator and watched the doors close.

  • • •

  Webster’s old office, still unfilled, was designated the hub (their jargon), an irony that may or may not have escaped Sander. Hammer felt it keenly enough as he watched officer after officer tramping across the floor with arms full of folders, papers, binders, taking them to be bagged and numbered as evidence. All those secrets. All that work.

  Without Ben, none of this would be happening. Without his obsessions, his crusading, his perpetual fucking moral crisis, this would just be an ordinary day, with reports to be written and clients to see and money to be made. If Hammer had only acted sooner, on instinct rather than evidence, this less than ordinary day wouldn’t be happening. Know someone for ten years and you get used to their nonsense. Your defenses drop. And your standards. If Ben had pulled that shit in his first week he would’ve been out, straightaway, without so much as a discussion.

  Each time Hammer was asked a question—where the servers were kept, what the archiving procedures were, dozens of pointed, dreary questions—his frustration grew. Who were these people, anyway, to be going through his things? Over this nonsense, this fad of an offense. How had they earned the right? No one had died. If there was a problem here he should be investigating it himself. This was his territory. His jurisdiction.

  But not his world. The world was hysterical about small things these days, and heedless of the big ones. That was a change he had seen. It was like a man careering toward a cliff edge straightening his tie. So much energy consumed in the pursuit of empty rectitude.

  For a start, he would be forced to defend himself. Better than most he knew how tedious that would be—the countless statements, the endless meetings with solicitors and barristers, the narrowing of one’s life to a tiny set of disputed facts. Then he’d have to explain himself. Tomorrow or the next day news would leak and there’d be headlines reporting that the great detective had come unstuck, and sometime after that it would emerge that every e-mail to and from every client, on every imaginable sensitive subject, was now with the police. To each of those clients he would have to give an explanation, and some of them would leave, and he would watch them taking their problems and their confidences elsewhere. That was OK. Fuck ’em. He’d find out who his friends were.

  Seven floors below, the world was doing what it always did, oblivious. Through the trees he could see groups of office workers eating their lunch on the grass of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, while his own staff stayed inside, unable to leave. Traffic sat clogged on Fleet Street. It was a clear blue day, a late echo of summer. He entertained the childish notion of rappelling down the building and simply running away. Buying a dodgy passport. Spending his fortune somewhere remote where nothing ever happened.

  But that was not his way. He had fought to create this company and he would fight to save it.

  Sander, it seemed, would cause him as much pain as she could. He’d met her type before, and thought he recognized that particular brand of zeal. There would be no reasoning with her. In her mind, every private investigator was the same: a stalker, a phone tapper, a rummager in other people’s rubbish. An unnecessary form of lowlife that lived in the dark spaces left unlit by the shining light of the law. He hated that crap. He’d heard it ever since he came to London, when everyone he met was surprised not to find him trailing spouses in a grimy trench coat and a worn trilby.

  There were nearly two hundred people on this floor—his people—and more than anything Hammer wanted them to go home this evening knowing that they had no reason to be nervous about their jobs, or ashamed of them. They did good work, and the Sanders of this world would never see that. As soon as the police had gone he would talk to them. Sitting down at his desk again, flushed with a sort of righteousness of his own, he took a notebook from his pocket and began to sketch out a speech. A short, powerful speech.

  It was good to do something, however modest; the first step to restoring control. After the speech he would talk to Hibbert, get the PR people in. Make a plan. But before he could finish writing, Sander appeared in the doorway, Hibbert at her shoulder looking grave and excited. He was a good man, Hibbert, but he did enjoy a crisis.

  “Inspector. I hope you found everything you needed.”

  “We have enough.” Sander came a yard into the room, looking pleased with herself. Not triumphal, but expecting triumph.

  Hammer looked at Hibbert. “You’re staying, yes?”

  “You can talk later.” Sander moved past Hibbert and up to Hammer’s desk. “Isaac Hammer, I am placing you under arrest on suspicion of breaching the Computer Misuse Act 1990. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”

  Hammer had been arrested before but never had his rights been read to him. In Nicaragua they hadn’t troubled themselves with the niceties. Nor in Iraq. The words had an unreal quality, as if they hadn’t been written to be read aloud.

  He looked at Sander and barely heard her. Everything else he had been prepared for, he realized. This, he was not.

  FIVE

  The police station in Tbilisi was a green glass cube, and it glowed above the river like a jewel in the dusk. There are no secrets here, it said; watch us work for your protection; we are accountable to you. Hammer had been expecting something as dusty and established as his first glimpses of the city, but this was modern, new, even shiny. It might have been the headquarters of a minor insurance company som
ewhere quiet and European, Berne or Bonn. But tonight it was full of chaos, and even as he was led toward it, wrists cuffed in front of him, Hammer could tell from all the commotion and the running about that the Georgian police were having a bad night.

  Inside, all was noise and hurry. Officers in and out of uniform marched new prisoners to the cells, ignoring their colleagues leaving the building to fetch more. The police were focused, their charges angry, drunk, shouting. The place had the strained air of a crisis not yet quite out of control. With his hands cuffed in front of him Hammer was pushed through a chaotic press of people waiting to be booked and into a room at the heart of the building, without windows, where he was left alone.

  Two police stations in two days. Good going for a respectable citizen.

  It was hot and airless but with his handcuffs on he couldn’t take off his jacket or the sweater underneath it. Every so often he gently checked that the bleeding from his nose had stopped. It had, but God it still hurt, and the cartilage slipped around queasily as he examined it. He looked down at himself. The stitching on the cuff of his jacket had come loose, and there was grime on his lapels and on his sleeves where he had been held. Most of the blood was on his shirt, as far as he could tell. When he closed his eyes he heard the crowd’s thick roar.

  Perhaps a younger man would have sidestepped all that trouble: caught a bus from the airport, run from the car, taken out that little fuck who’d stolen his passport. A wiser one might have sidestepped this whole business a long time ago. In either case, it was time to sharpen up. This wasn’t the kind of job that could be done behind one’s desk or in meetings, and an adjustment would have to be made. Well, if he needed a jolt, this qualified.

  The room was completely blank. White walls, no mirrors, no cameras, no tricks that he could see. After five minutes he tried the door and found it locked.

  No one came, and in the bare stillness of the room he waited. Hammer was never truly at rest. In quiet moments, in meetings, in conversations that didn’t demand his full attention he tapped out rhythms, twirled pens, doodled on documents. His fingers kept pace with his thoughts. Now they beat an impatient, quickening tattoo on the desk.