The Exphoria Code

by Antony Johnston

  At first he was surprised, then confused, and finally deeply concerned. These emotions must have run over his face in quick succession, because GL whispered in his ear, “Come on, babe, you’re a gangster like I’m a Barbie doll. What is this, DGSI?”

  Henri kissed her on the cheek, excused himself, and ran outside to call Emily Dunston.

  53

  For the second time in ten minutes, Bridge was caught by surprise. Had the landlord heard the fight, and called the police? What were the odds that the responding gendarme would be Novak, of all people? Or was this no coincidence?

  Novak stepped inside, never taking his eyes off Bridge as he bent to retrieve the Grach pistol from the hallway floor. Behind him, the wide-eyed landlord backed away down the stairs. Novak held the pistol by his side, pointed down at the floor, and pulled the trigger. Once, twice, three times.

  He already knew it wasn’t loaded. He expected it to be empty. And that could only mean one thing: that Novak knew James Montgomery, and knew he kept an unloaded Grach in his apartment. Bridge’s mind began speculating wildly based on that conclusion: Novak may have given Montgomery the gun; this all but confirmed Novak as the mole’s French contact; Novak’s position as a gendarme gave him a licence to move and go almost wherever he wished; how many other Agenbeux police officers might be involved in this? And, and, and… But the facts as they stood were simple.

  Montgomery was dead. Novak was here. And Bridge had been caught red-handed.

  She scrambled back, ducking around the corner of the lounge, and listened to Novak’s steady footsteps approaching down the hallway.

  “What is your name, miss? Why are you in Mr Montgomery’s apartment?”

  His accent was so good, it took her a moment to realise he was speaking English. He knew damn well who she was.

  With the sun overhead, the strongest light came from the landing outside the apartment, throwing a long shadow in front of Novak. Bridge watched it carefully, edging closer to the corner where she still stood with her back pressed against the wall, its shadow hiding her own.

  Before Novak could round the corner, Bridge pivoted on the ball of her foot, swinging her other leg up and around with her full bodyweight behind it. She was tall, but Novak was taller, and her boot struck him on the shoulder. He flinched, surprised by the blow, and grabbed for Bridge’s foot. She’d expected that, and retracted her leg immediately, but before she could plant it on the ground Novak followed through and barged into her, leading with the same shoulder. She staggered back, and he swung at her with the empty Grach, the pistol butt missing her face by millimetres.

  He took one more step, then stopped when he saw Montgomery’s body on the floor.

  Bridge saw her opening and kicked out, landing a blow square in Novak’s kidneys. He crumpled to the ground, dropping the useless Grach. She moved in for another strike, but he recovered quickly. With a single smooth action he pulled and extended his baton, swinging it at her knee. Bridge’s leg buckled as it hit, and she dropped to the ground. Suddenly Novak was on her, holding her down with one hand, the other lashing out with the baton. She raised her arms, taking the stinging blows on her forearms instead of her face.

  “So he was right about you,” said Novak, tossing the baton aside, and now Bridge noticed a slight accent. St Petersburg? She couldn’t be sure, and this wasn’t the time to wonder. His breath was a sour mixture of alcohol and German cigarettes, and as he closed his thick hands around her neck, she couldn’t help noticing how smooth and uncalloused his hands were, more like an office worker than a stereotypical Russian thug. It all reminded her of an old boyfriend at uni, and not one she particularly wanted to remember.

  She tried to break his grip, or roll him off her body, but it was no use. He was too strong, and too heavy, to prise off easily. He squeezed, slowly but firmly. Bridge flailed her arms around, reaching for something, anything, to use as a weapon. Her fingers touched something hard, solid. Darkness blurred the edges of her vision, all of the focus on Novak’s smiling, gloating face. She walked the solid thing toward her by her fingertips, closed her hand around it, swung it up and around at Novak’s head without a second thought, because there was no time for thought.

  The wooden fruit bowl hit the side of Novak’s head with a satisfyingly deep crack.

  It stunned him enough for Bridge to push him off and roll out from under him. Gasping for breath, she pulled herself to her feet and staggered toward the hallway. She tried to call out to the landlord, but all she could manage was a hoarse croak. Surely he must have heard the commotion. Would he just assume it was the police going about their business, or would he come to check? If he did, would Novak kill him, too?

  Strong, bulky arms closed around her from behind, swung and tossed her back into the apartment. She tried to find her footing, failed, and fell into the kitchen. She pulled herself to her feet, catching a glance out of the window. She expected to see gendarmerie cars, maybe a patrol van, in the street outside, and Novak’s colleagues rushing into the building. But there was nothing.

  The window exploded behind her. Novak had drawn his sidearm, a SIG Sauer SP2022, and this gun was definitely loaded. But he was unsteady on his feet, still reeling from the blow to his head, throwing his aim off. He took another step toward Bridge, steadying himself, ready to fire. She grabbed the nearest thing on the countertop, an aerosol spray cleaner, and clamped hard on the nozzle. He winced and coughed as the spray covered his face, shooting blind again. This time he barely missed Bridge’s head, sending a bullet into the wall two inches from her head.

  She closed on him, still spraying the aerosol, grabbing for the gun with her other hand. Novak screwed his eyes tight against the cleaner spray, and Bridge saw tears streaming down his face, but he held onto the pistol with a grim, determined strength. He squeezed the trigger again, shattering a line of splashback tiles above the counter.

  The spray was running out. Bridge adjusted the aerosol can and drove it into Novak’s face base first, then bit into his hand. He cried out and finally dropped the pistol. Bridge braced herself on the counter and kicked him in the chest. He rolled with the blow, and she crouched to retrieve the gun.

  As her hand closed around it, Novak grabbed and swung a cooking pan from the stove, slamming it into her shoulder. She staggered back, firing at him as he continued forward. The bullet hit him in the thigh, and he cried out. But his momentum carried him through, falling into her before she could brace herself, and now Bridge fell back, expecting to slam into the wall, but there was no wall, only the empty hole of the shattered window, nothing to stop her from tumbling backwards, out and down…

  To land on the tiled roof of the balcony below. She groaned with pain and rolled onto her front, looking up and down the street as she ran through options in her mind. She could turn back, kill Novak, and then escape back down the stairs. But the Russian had proven a hard opponent, and what if the landlord saw her leaving, after all this noise and destruction? Worse, what if the rest of the street came out to see what the noise was? At this moment the road was empty, but lunchtime or not, that surely couldn’t last. Someone must have called the police. Every moment she spent here was another moment she risked arrest and, no doubt, a fatal ‘accident’ in custody.

  Or she could run from this position. She was now outside, Novak had a bullet in his leg, and she had his gun. More worryingly, Novak somehow knew who she was. If the police weren’t already searching for her, the murder of a gendarme would put every other policeman from here to Lyon on the lookout for Bridget Short. Not that she intended to keep that name, compromised as it now was. There was a clean passport, under a new ID, in the lining of her case back at the guest house. She didn’t have time to change her appearance, but a new name would give her a short head start over Novak and the police. She probed her knee with her fingers, relieved to find it was only bruised, not broken, from Novak’s baton.

  Her mind mad
e up, Bridge scrambled over the edge of the roof to land on the balcony below, then climbed over the parapet and dropped the final three metres to the street. The landing sent a shockwave up her legs, and as she limped to her car, Bridge sighed, knowing she wouldn’t be able to rest for several hours at least. The guest house would be a short pitstop to collect clothes, the emergency passport, and her phone. Then she’d have to hit the road before the police figured out where she was staying, and call Mourad in Paris to be ready for her.

  She climbed into the Fiat, fumbled with the keys, and started the engine. Before the car was fully in gear she stomped on the accelerator, burning tyre marks on the road as she screeched away. Turning the corner, she glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw Novak limp into the street from Montgomery’s building, shouting at her to stop.

  Instead, she accelerated.

  54

  The police were waiting for her.

  It was mid afternoon, broad daylight, and the local gendarmes evidently weren’t used to being discreet. Two marked vans were parked right on her street, while two uniformed officers stood guard outside the guest house. Presumably that meant the remaining officers were inside, searching her room. Watching through sunglasses from her car parked far down the other side of the street, Bridge’s stomach dropped. Had she left the suitcase’s hidden compartment exposed? Was the Ziploc still on her dresser, half-empty? No, that was here, in her pocket. But the Dell laptop and HTC phone were both inside, along with her emergency passport. She had to assume they were all now compromised. Everything in that room was lost to her.

  Alone and outgunned, surrounded by the enemy, lost in the desert…

  Bridge suppressed the thought. While there were similarities to Doorkicker, this was not the same situation. Yes, she’d completely screwed the mission. Yes, the mole and main witness was dead. Yes, she was now blown, and on the run. But this time, she didn’t just speak the language; she looked and sounded native. And the $500 in her pocket could be exchanged for euros, with which she could buy a whole new wardrobe and hairstyle.

  How much did they know? That was the real question. Nobody in the DGSE or DGSI had been informed of Bridge’s mission. If the police discovered she was SIS, they’d call her a spy. If she could make them listen, and let her call London, she could prove who she was… but that assumed Giles would back her up. Sending an officer undercover into foreign territory, without declaring them to the host country, was a textbook definition of espionage. Would SIS hang her out to dry, to protect Britain’s relations with France? One last option: she could go to Paris, and find Mourad. But if the police suspected her real purpose they might have him under surveillance, just waiting for her to make contact.

  There was one other big difference between this and Doorkicker. She had a bolt hole.

  Bridge started the car and drove casually down the street, turning off onto a side road before she reached the guest house. She gasped as a gendarme stepped out into the middle of the road, signalling for her to stop. But it wasn’t Novak, and with half a dozen more officers within shouting distance, ignoring him was too big a risk. She slowed to a stop, pulling the band from her hair but leaving the sunglasses on. She lowered the window, looked out, and shrugged. “Qui se passe, officier?”

  “An English woman is missing,” replied the gendarme in French. “Can I see your ID, please?” He held out a hand, expectantly.

  Bridge shrugged, and spoke in perfect French. “Sorry, I don’t like to carry my carte in case I lose it. My name’s Édith Baudin. What’s going on?” She regretted using her sister’s name the moment she said it, but with no other working alias to hand, it was the first thing Bridge thought of.

  “Not even your driver’s licence? You’re supposed to carry ID at all time.”

  “I know, but it’s bad enough I keep leaving my phone everywhere. I can’t go to a café without putting it on the table and walking out by accident, you know? And replacement ID cards aren’t cheap.”

  “Where have you come from?”

  “Just now? I had lunch in Saint Dizier. I’m on my way home.”

  “And where’s that?”

  Her sister’s name was one thing, but Bridge wasn’t about to give Izzy’s address as well. “Chalons-en-Champagne,” she lied. “We just bought a place on the river.”

  The gendarme raised an eyebrow at her hand on the steering wheel. “We? You’re not wearing a wedding ring.”

  “I lost it, gardening.” Bridge gave him a lopsided smile. “I told you, I’m hopeless.”

  The young officer hesitated, then sighed and waved her on. “All right, move along. But you should start carrying your card. Put it on a string around your neck.”

  “Oh, that’s a really good idea. I’ll get my husband to make one.” Bridge was two streets away before she realised she was still wearing a fake smile, like a rictus grin that made her facial muscles hurt. She massaged her jaw, nodding to herself that she was doing the right thing. “An English woman is missing,” he’d said. Careful code, so as not to panic the locals. But whether or not they knew her real identity, they were looking for her. And considering the number of gendarmes at the guest house, they probably considered her dangerous. She took a wide circle around several streets, circling back round to drive south, rather than north as she’d told the police.

  She regretted losing the computer more than the phone, but she’d sent Henri Mourad an update the night before; a full data dump of her work so far, so he could pass it all back to London. Unfortunately, she hadn’t mentioned her suspicion of Montgomery, because yesterday it had been nothing more than a hunch.

  Once again, she wondered about Marko Novak’s timing. He hadn’t seemed at all surprised to find her in Montgomery’s apartment, and making the landlord open the door, rather than knock, suggested he wanted to surprise whoever was inside. The only thing that had seemed to catch him unawares was Montgomery being dead. Then there were the words he spoke as he tried to strangle her. “He was right about you.” That suggested Montgomery had talked about her, and it was now a safe bet he’d told Novak about her mole hunting. But had he also guessed she’d come to suspect him rather than Voclaine, or was at least working her way towards it? That would explain why he attacked her with such force, because there was no chance of mistaken identity. Montgomery had known exactly who he was fighting in that apartment.

  As she drove along the N4, a theory formed. Could the apartment have been bugged? If so, Marko would have known something was wrong as soon as she and Montgomery began fighting. If it was also wired for vision he would have known even sooner, possibly from the moment Bridge broke into the apartment. And that could explain why he expected to see her, but was surprised at Montgomery’s body. If Novak headed for the apartment as soon as he saw her enter, then he would have been in transit when Montgomery returned home, fought with Bridge, and died, which all happened in the space of a few minutes. He hadn’t known Montgomery was there until he saw the body.

  If Bridge was right, that meant the Russian was spying on his own mole. Not too surprising, but she wondered whether he trusted his fellow gendarmes more than that. Were they all in it together, coordinating the leak between them? Was he simply bribing them to look the other way? Or were they blissfully unaware one of their own was betraying not just the British, but their own country as well?

  It was all too risky. If just one other gendarme was working with Novak, all it would take was a word to the wrong person and she’d find herself staring down the barrel of another SP2022. Agenbeux wasn’t safe for her any more, and as for trying to get into Paris unseen; she might as well shoot herself now.

  She turned the Fiat south onto the N67 and began the long drive towards Côte-d’Or.

  55

  “It was originally shipped from Hong Kong. And it could already be in Portsmouth.”

  Two short sentences that had sent Emily Dunston into overdrive, a flur
ry of phone calls and emails that culminated with Andrea Thomson sitting next to her in the back seat of a car as it raced to Portsmouth. While both women were veterans of their respective departments, their paths had rarely crossed. But Andrea had received a call from Giles Finlay — at home, of course — asking if she could accompany a colleague of his to Portsmouth for the night. A smuggling concern of urgent priority, he said, but couldn’t elaborate on the phone. Eight minutes later, a blacked-out car quietly pulled up outside her flat and Andrea climbed in to find Emily Dunston waiting for her.

  “Thank you for coming, Ms Thomson. Technically I could just invoke the Terror Act, but I have a sense this will go easier if someone with domestic authority can pull a few strings.”

  “Giles said it’s connected to smuggling. That’s not really my area…?”

  “Doesn’t need to be. Let me worry about the details. Giles may act like he’s everyone’s friend, but he doesn’t trust people lightly. That’s why he recommended you.”

  It took a moment for Andrea to realise this was a compliment. “You’ll still have to give me more to go on. I’ll help if I can, but I’m not willing to throw Five’s authority around without some kind of brief.”

  Emily exhaled loudly through her nose. Finally she said, “No paperwork. Not yet. Strictly verbal only. Will that do?” Andrea nodded, and Emily continued. “We’ve been tracking an amount of what we call matériel chaud through Europe. It appears to have sailed from Hong Kong, over the Indian Ocean, up through Suez, to make landfall at Sines in Portugal. From there it travelled through Spain and into France, making its way to Saint-Malo. It shipped from Saint-Malo one or two nights ago, heading for Portsmouth by way of Guernsey.”

  “Easy entry into the islands, no questions asked. And that puts it firmly inside UK territory, so getting it onto the mainland becomes easier.”