One client had likened Novak to a bulldog, which he knew was meant as a compliment, but made him uncomfortable because of the image’s association with the English. The old days may have gone, but as far as Novak was concerned the English remained lapdogs of the true Enemy; the hated USA.
And now this English woman, this obvious agent of MI6 sent to find the Exphoria mole, had killed Montgomery, Novak’s own resource. Such action demanded retribution, a message to London that this was not acceptable. More than that, he was unsure how much Bridget Short knew about the operation. The man Novak had stabbed and thrown in the Thames had no ties to the British government, no intelligence work under his belt that the Russian had been able to find. He had intended to search the man’s house to make sure, but the police beat him to making an identification, leaving Novak frustrated until his client assured him the man’s interference was nothing more than bad luck.
Ms Short, on the other hand, appeared after he’d been followed to the Eurostar. Did MI6 not know there was a mole on the project until then? Or had their previous mole hunts simply proved futile? The alias ‘Bridget Short’ was unknown to him, as was the tall, dark-haired woman he’d fought at Montgomery’s apartment. But she was fast, strong, a good fighter. Perhaps she was a specialist, someone the English sent to identify and kill moles when other means had failed. The thought excited him, and he remembered his hands around her throat, her ragged gasps as he held her down. A good memory.
After she escaped, Novak dressed Montgomery’s apartment a little, to hide his involvement and give the police a wild goose chase to conduct. Then he returned to his rented apartment near the river, taking the empty Grach pistol with him. After tending to the bullet in his leg, which left him limping but able enough to walk, he loaded the gun and pocketed a spare magazine. Then he stuffed the gendarme uniform into a suitcase with some soiled clothes, and drove to a secluded spot by the riverside where he burned them all and kicked the ashes into the river.
When that was done, he drove to the guest house where Ms Short was staying. His police scanner told him the local gendarmerie was all over it, and he didn’t expect Short herself to return there any time soon. No doubt the police would confiscate any electronics, and Novak would have to try and retrieve those at a later point for his client. But first, he must find and eliminate Ms Short.
She might return directly to England by diplomatic transport, and if so there was nothing Novak could do about it. But a sweep of Montgomery’s apartment after she escaped, plus a review of the footage he’d missed while he was on his way there, suggested that she might have uncovered Montgomery as a mole — without truly knowing what he was leaking. She hadn’t found the bag of blank SD cards Novak supplied, and the footage showed she tried to avoid Montgomery when he arrived home unexpectedly, rather than confronting him directly. So she might remain in Agenbeux, to find out more about what Montgomery had been doing. She might try to find Novak, now she could recognise him. That only made it more important that he find her first, instead.
It was dark when the gendarmerie left the guest house. He took a case from the boot of his car, booked a cash room under an alias, and went straight upstairs. He noted the sole gendarme outside what must be Bridget Short’s room, sitting on a chair, looking tired and bored. Novak entered his own room, prepared a chloroform pad, made sure he had lock pick and camera with him, then rendered the guard unconscious. The door behind him was unlocked, and the gendarme would sleep for thirty minutes at the dosage Novak had delivered, giving him plenty of time to search the room undisturbed. He dragged the young officer inside, laid him out on the floor, and closed the door.
The police had turned the place upside down and, as he expected, taken anything that looked electronic. That didn’t bother Novak. There were other ways. The bathroom contained just toiletries, nothing identifying or useful without a DNA test, and that would tell him little he didn’t already know. The bed had been stripped and searched. They’d even removed the bedknobs, in case Ms Short had hidden something inside the frame. If she had, the police had taken it, as they were now empty. Nothing else about the bed indicated a hiding place, so they’d tipped her suitcase over the mattress. But again, it all seemed very normal and innocent, with nothing that would tip off a normal investigator that she was a spy.
Novak turned over the suitcase, noting tell-tale marks around one of the ridges at the base of the handle tubing. He took a one euro coin and placed it edgeways into the slot, turned it, and found a hidden compartment — empty, but evidently something the gendarmes had missed. Did this mean they didn’t know she was a spy? That would explain why they also hadn’t checked the inner lining. Novak took a small knife from his pocket and slashed the lining, revealing the deep red of an English passport taped to the inside of the suitcase’s outer shell. He opened it to the photo page. The picture was of Bridget Short, or ‘Catherine Pritchard’ as she was called here, but with shorter hair and less makeup. An emergency backup, then, designed for getting out of trouble and out of town in a hurry. If the police hadn’t been here, she’d presumably have returned for this passport and used it to flee to England.
Novak allowed himself a grim smile, as this supported his notion that she was still in France. Her handlers had known that if the Bridget Short identity was compromised, she’d need an emergency passport to return home. But without it, she was stranded.
Novak could find nothing else in the clothes or suitcase, and the rest of the small room was also devoid of clues. A few clothes hung in the wardrobe, but after cutting them all open he found nothing hidden in the lining. Nor was there anything in the heels of her shoes, which he broke off one by one. Only detritus remained on the desk and in its drawers. The waste paper basket had been upended, presumably by the gendarmerie, and its contents left on the floor; two empty Marlboro cigarette packets, a banana skin, a plastic salad container from the local marché, a paper bag from a local farmhouse containing two stale cakes.
Novak crouched to poke through the trash, found nothing, stood, hesitated, crouched again.
Délices de la Ferme Baudin, Côte-d’Or.
Côte-d’Or was far from local. It was two hours’ drive away. He remembered something Montgomery had said, that Ms Short lied about visiting a vineyard. He thought she might have returned to London that weekend. But what if she actually spent it at a farmhouse in Côte-d’Or? A farmhouse she didn’t want Montgomery to know about?
Novak emptied the bag of its stale cakes, folded it, and placed it in his pocket. He stepped over the unconscious gendarme, who was murmuring and sweating in his sleep, and entered his own room. There, he returned his tools to their pockets in his case, removed all trace of himself from every surface, and left the guest house to drive south.
59
Andrea Thomson cursed and kicked the side of a cargo container. The metallic clang rang out across the dockside tarmac.
The cargo ship carrying the matériel chaud had docked the night before, and its cargo finished unloading several hours ago. The dock kept a record of each container’s location within the port, among the rows and rows of multicoloured stacked metal boxes, but some had already been placed on trucks and driven away. So there was no way to know if the smuggled material was still at the port, or on its way. Even if it was still here, the chances of it being part of the ship’s registered cargo were essentially zero. Everyone along the chain would have been paid handsomely to look the other way and wave the mysterious package through. Emily Dunston believed it would likely be buried inside a random legitimate container.
Andrea had demanded every container from the ship still at Portsmouth be detained until port security opened each one and ran a Geiger counter over it. She’d also insisted that every container leaving the port be scanned for radiation, but the port manager had put his foot down over that.
“We process more than a thousand import containers through this port every day,” he said, “and
we conduct random scans of departing containers at all times. We can add radiation scans to that procedure, and increase the frequency by maybe thirty per cent, maximum. But any more than that would cause an impossible bottleneck. It’d make French fuel strikes look like a day at the beach.”
“I don’t care,” protested Andrea. “This is a matter of national security.”
“And this is an international port with some of the strictest security measures in Europe,” said the manager. “I’m sorry, but even you lot don’t have unlimited authority here. Technically, this whole area is answerable to the Crown, not Parliament.”
Andrea wasn’t convinced that was true, but arguing the point would only waste more time. The manager turned on his heel and left, with an I’ll-see-what-I-can-do shrug.
Emily Dunston scowled. “Never mind the Crown, this is a right royal balls-up. I should have pushed for more resources. Now you lot are stuck with chasing a radioactive box around the country, and we can’t tell you where it is or who has it.”
As the clang from Andrea’s kick faded, she sighed. “It’s got to be London, hasn’t it? You don’t ship a box of nuclear waste halfway round the world, smuggle it up through Europe and over the Channel just to unleash it on Skegness.”
Dunston looked amused. “Surprisingly London-centric for a Scot.”
“Call it realism. Comes with the job.”
“That it does. And you’re right, if this is to be weaponised, we have to assume London is the target. But there’s still a chance it could be on its way to a buyer, who might then ship it on somewhere else.”
Andrea snorted. “Chance’d be a fine thing. At least then it’d be someone else’s problem.” They walked back to the car. “But something tells me we won’t be that lucky.”
60
The data recovery process on the SD card had been running all night — she’d had enough foresight to plug the laptop in before she went to sleep — and was eighty per cent finished at six-thirty in the morning, when Bridge was woken by Izzy and Steph making cakes again. In the bathroom, visions of Syria drifted behind the mirror as she cleaned her teeth with Izzy’s brush. The sight of Adrian’s blood, his nightmarish head in the jeep’s passenger seat…it was just dream logic, they weren’t real memories, they meant nothing. And yet.
She took a scalding hot shower to distract herself, and move the thoughts to a dark corner of her mind. Dr Nayar would frown at that, but she didn’t have time to process this stuff right now. If past experience was anything to go by, they’d stop bothering her in a few hours. As she entered the kitchen they were already little more than phantoms, tenacious but insubstantial.
“Are you coming with us to the patisseries, Auntie Bridge?”
Steph’s question pulled Bridge from her thoughts, but before she could respond, Izzy cut in.
“Actually, sweetheart, I think this morning it’ll just be Maman and Auntie Bridge by ourselves. We need to talk about grown-up stuff.”
Steph was devastated. Bridge thought she might burst into tears at any moment. “But I’m four. I can talk about grown-up things.”
Bridge didn’t know what her sister was up to, but playing along was the surest way to earn some brownie points. She smiled sympathetically at her niece. “We’ll talk about more grown-up things with you when we get back,” she said, “but Maman and I have to talk about things for sisters. When you and Hugo are older, you’ll talk about brother and sister things.”
“But! But!”
“Auntie Bridge is right, Stéphanie,” said Izzy, packing the last of the cakes into their paper bags. “We’ll bring you back some pastries, OK? Then we can all have brunch together. You like brunch, don’t you?”
The look on Steph’s face suggested at that moment she didn’t like anything at all, not even breathing or existing. She slid off the stool without a word, head hung and shoulders slumped, every step out of the kitchen a leaden thump on the floor. Bridge pulled a face and turned to Izzy, but her sister shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Ten minutes with Fred and she’ll have forgotten this entire conversation. Come on, let’s go.”
They drove for several minutes in a silence that Bridge didn’t want to break, not knowing exactly why Izzy wanted to get her alone, and her sister didn’t appear to be in a hurry either. Then Izzy finally spoke, and Bridge realised it wasn’t nonchalance. Her sister was anxious, steeling herself to ask a difficult question.
“Why are you really here, Bridge? What the hell is going on with you?”
“I —”
“And please don’t give me that rubbish about office politics. Credit me with some intelligence.”
Bridge was torn. She’d always hated lying to Izzy about her work, but the rules were clear. She spoke slowly. “I’m not sure what I can say that’ll satisfy you.”
Izzy yanked the steering wheel and pulled the car to the side of the road, stepping on the brakes to bring them to a halt. “Satisfy? To hell with satisfy, tell me the bloody truth. First you just happen to be working two hours up the road from where I’m on holiday…”
“I swear, that is pure coincidence.”
“Shut up. And then you turn up again less than a week later, dressed like a bloody burglar, with no luggage or even a toothbrush — and don’t think I hadn’t noticed the bruises on your arms, by the way — and you want to, what, lie low for a few days? So either you’re some kind of international art thief, or some bastard work boyfriend is knocking you around, or maybe both, or whatever. Tell me, for heaven’s sake!” Izzy was shaking, breathing hard, and Bridge realised her sister was more anxious about this conversation than she was. A memory slid into the front of her mind. They were teenagers, and Izzy had begun stepping out with grown men, guys in their twenties who seemed impossibly mature to young Bridge. She remembered Izzy in tears, pulling down the hem of her sleeve, thinking Bridge hadn’t seen the bruises. Perhaps hoping more than thinking.
As tears welled up in Izzy’s eyes, another memory leapt unbidden into Bridge’s mind: the night their mother shouted herself hoarse, swearing at the same young man when he rolled up drunk after Izzy broke up with him. Izzy had sat at the top of the stairs, quietly crying, while Bridge peered out from behind her bedroom door.
Neither of them had ever spoken about it. And now, Bridge realised, Izzy was worried she’d got herself into the same situation, but like her sister before her she couldn’t face talking about it. She leaned over to stroke Izzy’s hair, and smiled in sympathy. “It’s not that, Izz, honestly it’s not. You know me, if some bloke tried that I’d kickbox his arse until he only wished Mum was throwing plates at him.”
Izzy snorted with laughter through her tears, remembering that same night. “You promise me, OK? You promise you’d tell me?”
“I promise. It’s not that.”
“Then what, Bridge? What’s going on?”
She’d backed herself into a corner by not lying. But she couldn’t bring herself to lie about that, especially not to Izzy. She was so tired of lying. “I work for —” She choked on the words, cleared her throat, tried again. “I work for the government.”
“I know you do,” said Izzy.
“No, you don’t. I’m not at the DTI. I’m not a junior civil servant. I work at…” She struggled to say it. It felt absurd, now more than ever, to say out loud: I’m a spy. How could anyone say it with a straight face? It was impossible. She tried to imagine how Giles might phrase it, using political language to disclose the minimum amount of necessary truth, but not a shred more. “I’m a technical analyst,” she said slowly. “You know I’ve always been the big nerd, right? And now I monitor computer hackers all over the world.”
“You monitor hackers all over the world. For the British Government.”
“Really, I just sit at a desk in front of a computer all day. It’s dead boring.”
“But you’re supposed to keep it a
secret, and tell everyone you’re a secretary.”
“Well, not really a secretary…?”
“And now you’re working here in France.”
“It’s just a one-off, honestly.”
“Bridge, are you a spy?”
She tried to reply, hesitated, tried again, got as far as “Um,” tried another tack but only made it to “Well,” and then gave up.
Izzy rescued her. “That’s why you had a different name on your laptop, wasn’t it? IT department joke, my arse. Oh my God, are you on the run? We should call the police.”
“No,” Bridge shouted, and regretted it immediately. She lowered her voice. “I just need somewhere to crash for a couple of days while I figure out my next move. I can’t trust the police.”
“What the hell do you mean, you can’t trust the police? They’re the police. That’s who you call.”
Bridge shrugged. “Not me. Officially, they don’t know I’m here. And they might be involved.”
“Involved in what?” Izzy was leaning forward, now, wide-eyed and excited, and Bridge knew she’d said too much.
“I really can’t say. This isn’t a movie, Izz. My chewing gum doesn’t explode, my watch doesn’t shoot poison darts, I haven’t got jets in my boots; none of that. I’m just a computer nerd, same as always.”
Izzy snorted, and put the car into gear. “Computer nerds don’t get into fights and go on the run,” she said as she pulled back onto the road. “But don’t worry, ma soeur, your secret’s safe with me.” Bridge wondered about that. Besides, the way this mission had gone, she was far from confident she had a job to return to in London anyway. Maybe that was for the best. “Oh, shit,” said Izzy, “do you know how to fire a gun? Have you got one?”
The Exphoria Code Page 26
