With MI5’s help, it had taken two days to acquire all the CCTV footage he could from the locations where the package pick-ups had been made. Four didn’t have CCTV, and the ones that did could only narrow down the collection times to a morning or afternoon. Steve cursed poor design and wondered aloud who on Earth would design a system, in this age of ubiquitous barcodes, that didn’t automatically track packages and log a time? The response was usually a don’t-ask-me-I’m-on-a-zero-hours-contract shrug, and after the first few exasperated enquiries he stopped asking.
But now, a day into scanning the various feeds at x8, he wondered if his gut had simply been wrong. There were mail sorting office collection points, private package holders, newsagents that ran a click-and-collect service on the side, and more. The clientele for all of them ran the gamut, from businessmen to PAs to shift workers to tube drivers to, yes, some very dodgy-looking types. From the ostentatious bling of a dealer or heavy, to the threadbare leisurewear of a street chancer, more than half the people who used these services didn’t want to be recognised for one reason or another.
Steve yawned and thought about lunch, as on the screen a bored sorting office clerk in Slough checked his text messages for the hundredth time. A new sushi place had opened in town the week before, and Steve wanted to try it out before it inevitably shut down in three months, drowned out like everything else by the ubiquitous coffee shops. It was a shame, really…
There. Stop. Scan back thirty secs. Pause. Check the records.
Gwendolyne Hartwell, 57 years old. She wasn’t even aware of the theft until Slough police made enquiries with her, after Steve called them. She’d checked her MasterCard statement and saw the anomaly. Steve could only wonder how she’d missed an unauthorised purchase for just shy of three hundred pounds, but he was more concerned that the bank hadn’t flagged the purchase as suspicious, despite Mrs Hartwell’s usual credit card purchases coming to less than a hundred pounds per month.
Either way, that wasn’t Mrs Hartwell on the surveillance footage, entering the sorting office and showing the clerk a receipt. The man never showed the camera his full face, and he was dressed very differently. But there was no mistaking that sandy beard Steve had first seen in Shoreditch.
Three weeks ago, Nigel Marsh had travelled all the way to Slough to collect a package that just happened to be the right size for a personal quadcopter drone. Steve isolated an image from the footage and dialled Andrea Thomson’s direct number.
69
Wherever it was, she couldn’t find it.
Bridge had covered every inch of ground within fifteen minutes’ drive north of the settlement. Then she tried to the west, and to the east. She even drove south, doubling back toward the Russian site where it had all gone so wrong, the place from which she’d escaped.
They place from which they’d escaped. Together. She knew that now.
Late in the afternoon, something glinted on the horizon and she sped towards it, leaving a thirty-foot dust cloud in her wake. It wasn’t a mirage; she knew what those looked like. It was something metal, something here in the desert, and it was in more or less the right place, though further west than she’d expected. It would give her answers, maybe a bizarre sense of closure.
But it didn’t, because it wasn’t the jeep. It was something like a section of fuselage, blackened and twisted by violence. She almost cried, then, to come so close only to be frustrated again. Instead she let out a wordless shout, pulled the Grach, and fired two angry bullets into the fuselage. The vast sound was lost in the desert’s emptiness, emphasising her isolation. It was enough to motivate her to get back in the drivers’ seat and resume driving.
But now, as the sun slowly descended to the horizon, the jeep coughed to a halt. Only one canister of fuel left, enough to get her back to Homs if she was lucky. If she was unlucky…
She kicked the side of the jeep, cursing her stupidity, her naivety, her failure.
“Did you honestly think I’d still be here?”
Adrian sat on the tailgate, relaxed and casual, in his fatigues. “Maybe,” she said. “The Russian jeep’s still there, just about.”
He smirked. Just like the real Adrian had, three years ago. “They got blown up. Whereas you abandoned me sitting upright in a more-or-less working jeep.”
“I didn’t abandon you. I had no choice, you were already dead.”
“Tell me about it. Doubt I was out here a week before someone nicked the jeep and left me to the scavengers. Or burned me to the bone.”
Bridge sighed. “No, don’t sugar-coat it, tell me straight.”
“Look who’s talking, BB.” He winked. “Anyway, what were you going to do if you found me? Collect the bones and take them home? ‘Anything to declare, Miss?’ ‘Only a three-year-old half-eaten corpse, Mr Customs Officer.’”
Bridge slid to the ground, her back against the jeep’s rear wheel. He, that is to say her own subconscious, was right. Had she been seeking some kind of validation? She’d found and killed the mole. Neutralised his handler, too. MI5 would mop up at home, Exphoria would be scrapped. Her mission was, all in all, a success. And not a single person would thank her for any of it.
“Aw, diddums,” said Adrian, now sitting beside her in the dirt. “Did you want a medal? Tea at the Palace?”
“How about my own brain not playing tricks on me? Or is that unrealistic, too?”
They watched the sunset in silence for a while. Then Adrian said, “At least you got the bastard who killed Ten.”
“I’d rather have Ten still alive,” said Bridge.
“Well, that makes two of us. Fuck it, why not make it three? It’ll be days before Giles sends anyone to look for you, months before they find you. Drive back to the breezeblocks, hide the jeep in there, then eat the Grach, and they may never find you at all. We can both be out here, lost forever in the desert. You and me together, BB. Comrades in fuckedsville.”
She took out the gun and turned it over in her hands. What was it all for, anyway? What was the point? If it wasn’t the Russians, it would be someone else. If it wasn’t Exphoria, it would be something else. Ciaran’s game of whack-a-mole, never-ending and ultimately futile. They might win a battle here and there, but the war would never be over.
“Might as well press the big red button and have a nuclear war,” said Adrian. “Start all over again. Couldn’t be much worse, could it?”
“That’s not what I was thinking, and you of all people know it.”
“Don’t know why you bothered fighting Novak, really. Izzy and the kids will all die eventually, anyway.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’ve made your point.”
“In a hundred years we’ll all be dust, right? Everything we’ve done will be forgotten, lost to history. People won’t even know we existed.”
“Will you shut up?”
“Probably should have just shot Izzy yourself while you had the chance, spared her the angst.”
“Fuck off!” Bridge raised the pistol at Adrian’s head. But he wasn’t there. She looked around for him through tear-blurred vision, but saw only the horizon devouring the sun, darkness swallowing light, unstoppable and inevitable; a universal truth.
That was why she’d come here. To prove she didn’t need her mind to hide things from her, to mask the pain, to make things hurt a little less with lies and deceit. To own her failures, and press on anyway, because while nature was inevitable, people weren’t. People could change.
And that was the truth.
70
The building manager unlocked the door and stood aside, watching open-mouthed as a dozen black-geared Armed Response officers swarmed into the lobby. Four remained there, rifles trained on the elevator doors, while the others executed a perfect cover-and-climb procedure up the stairwell.
Andrea Thomson waited in a car parked on the street, listening to command status on an earpiece. Th
e stairwell wasn’t visible from outside, but she’d seen enough raids like this to know how the officers would move. Four muzzles aimed upward, allowing the other four officers to climb under their protection. Then they’d stop, take up their own firing positions, and the first four would climb under their cover, like a joyless, lethal game of leapfrog. Slow and laborious, but effective and foolproof.
Ninety seconds in she heard the magic words, “Target on visual. Prepare for breach.” This was the critical moment, where her own reputation was now in the hands of eight police officers with heavy-duty weaponry.
Scenario one: the breach and infil were clean. Nigel Marsh, and his colleagues Andy and Charlie, were caught unawares and surrendered immediately. Everyone’s a hero.
Scenario two: the breach and infil were clean, but Marsh and his colleagues were ready for them. Hostile contact ensued, resulting in one or more deaths. Acceptable, but not optimal. Andrea would face an enquiry, and the armed response officers would undergo counselling, but ultimately it would be written up as a success.
Scenario three: the breach and infil were clean, but one or more of the three targets wasn’t present. Those inside were captured, but the remaining target would still be in the wind. A good start, but too early for celebration.
Scenario four: the breach and infil were messy, potentially booby-trapped. There were enough AR boys that the ultimate result would likely match scenario two, but with additional casualties. Andrea would be hauled over the coals, and there might be a public enquiry. Nobody wanted that.
Wrinkles in each scenario brought the contingency count close to a dozen, but these four main scenarios were the ones Andrea had discussed with the Armed Response unit that morning. Through the earpiece, she heard the sound of the SignalAir door being smashed open with a battering ram, and the officers shouting, “Armed police! Lie down on the ground!” as they marched into the office. More shouting, a few calls of “Clear!” here and there. No shots fired. That was good.
Then silence, and a hissed whisper of “Fuck.” Not so good.
“Location secure, tango negative,” said the commanding officer to everyone listening in. “I repeat, location secure, tango negative. Ma’am, there’s nothing here. Looks like the place has been cleaned out.”
Andrea was already out of the car, striding toward the building entrance, with two of her Five colleagues behind her. Nobody there? Cleaned out? What the hell could that mean? The rear door of an unmarked van parked close to the entrance opened, and the co-ordinating AR officer looked out. “Tell them to bloody well stay where they are,” Andrea barked at him, and entered the lobby. The officers in the lobby stood down as she passed, heading for the stairwell. “Three foxtrot approaching by stairs,” said one into a radio, alerting the officers on the third floor. She took the stairs at a jog with her colleagues following, careful not to overtake her.
After three flights she marched into the SignalAir office, and stared at nothing. Nigel Marsh and his colleagues — alleged colleagues, Andrea corrected herself, quickly realising there was no evidence beyond Marsh’s word that they existed — were not only absent from the office, but so was everything else. The desks were empty, the bookshelves bare of the few binders they had, the filing and storage cabinets devoid of everything except stationery. Even the grimy kitchenette area had finally been cleaned, and very well, no doubt to reduce the chance of DNA collection.
All that remained of SignalAir was the inkjet mockery of a company plaque on the wall outside. ‘Nigel Marsh’, or whatever his real name was, had done a runner. Had he known they were coming? Or had her visit with Steve Wicker tipped him off somehow, and he’d cleared out as soon as they left? Andrea kicked herself for not putting Marsh or the company under observation, but at the time, it would have been difficult to justify.
Hell, it still was. All they really had Marsh on was ID theft, receipt of fraudulently obtained goods, and drinking with a man they now knew was former FSB — and whom Brigitte Sharp believed was connected to the Exphoria leak, but couldn’t confirm because she’d killed both the suspected leak and the Russian, before apparently losing the plot and going AWOL. Andrea still hadn’t decided if Sharp was a paranoid nut or a genius, and that particular jury would be out until this whole case was closed.
But the only way to achieve closure now relied on finding Marsh. If he really was involved, then as far as they knew he was the last surviving link in a chain of international espionage and potential terrorism. But there could be dozens more behind him, supporting and financing him.
On the other hand, he might not be involved at all, and Sharp’s instincts were simply wrong. Giles trusted her, but how much of that was departmental loyalty? What did he say behind closed doors? Did he even know where his golden girl was?
Andrea waved her hands to shoo everyone out of the office. “Nobody comes in until SOCO have been over this place with a dozen fine toothcombs,” she said, exiting with them. “If that smug posh bastard left a fleck of dandruff here, I want it bagged.”
71
“I don’t think anything here warrants aborting the demonstration, much less the whole project. Really, Finlay, is this all you have?”
Giles looked up from his briefing file and raised an eyebrow across the table at Air Vice-Marshal Sir Terence Cavendish. He’d expected resistance, but not outright dismissal. “Perhaps I didn’t explain things well enough, sir. The evidence we have in hand, including our officer’s first-hand account, suggests the entire source code of Exphoria may have leaked.”
“Suggests is all very well,” said Devon Chisholme, positioned at the head of the table, “but there seems a distinct lack of proof. Sharp made rather a mess over there, including two deaths and a rather annoyed DGSI, and all you have to show for it are some photos of computer screens.”
“With respect, Devon, that’s the proof,” said Emily Dunston, next to Giles. “One of her kills was the mole himself…”
“So you assume,” Chisholme interrupted. “But once again, we appear to be rather short on supporting evidence.”
Giles forced himself not to sigh or raise his voice. “This isn’t a court room. Montgomery had the photographs in his possession when he attacked her, and the gendarmes later found a go-bag prepped for Moscow in his bedroom. In our book, that’s open and shut.”
“And those photos are how the information was leaked, without ever needing to actually conduct a computer hack,” said Emily. “Modern cameras afford extremely high resolution, as the sensors on autonomous vehicles like Exphoria itself demonstrate. What was cutting edge five years ago is now on sale in Argos.”
Sir Terence snorted. “Even assuming any code was extracted, I still don’t see how it justifies cancelling the demonstration. We assume Moscow has insight on our hardware initiatives anyway. If they now also have some knowledge of the software, surely it’s in our interest to demonstrate it quickly, before they can do anything with it themselves.”
“Yes, like hack into it,” said Giles, running out of patience.
“Is that likely?” asked Chisholme.
“Highly. If we had access to equivalent Russian software, our people would be working around the clock to dismantle it.”
“And how long would it take them?” asked Sir Terence.
“How long is a piece of string, or indeed, computer code? Hours, days, weeks, months, it’s impossible to speculate.”
“And yet, speculation is all you’ve presented this morning. Months, indeed. What you mean is, it might never happen. Or maybe they’ll just take a photograph of it, would that constitute a danger?” Sir Terence closed his briefing file, and his aide quickly scooped it into her briefcase. “In the face of a multi-billion euro project, I find your proposal to be a gross overreaction. Bring me real evidence, or drop it. And thank God we discussed this amongst ourselves before taking it to the French.” He stood, and turned on his heel. “Exphoria will p
roceed as scheduled, and that’s my final word on the matter. Good day, everyone.”
After Sir Terence and his aide left, Chisholme and his assistants followed, with an apologetic shrug but no offer of help. Giles and Emily remained, seething with shared anger.
Emily spoke first. “He’s after Lord Bloody Cavendish, isn’t he? Knighthood’s not enough for him.”
“Come on,” said Giles, “we have a lot of speculating to do.”
72
“How do you feel, now that you know the truth?”
Six hours ago, Bridge had been cooling off in a Heathrow detention room, thanks to the immigration officer who called security when she tried to enter the country. After three days in Syria she looked nothing like Fleur Simpson’s passport photo, but it wouldn’t have mattered if she had.
Two hours ago, three SIS juniors came to collect her, and said the passport was red-flagged the moment she went AWOL. They didn’t say a whole lot more, and she knew better than to ask. The only real surprise of the journey was that they drove directly to Vauxhall. She half-expected to be tossed in a secure compound.
Ninety minutes ago, she’d delivered a debrief to Buchanan, one of Giles’ deputies, down in the ‘fishbowl’, a basement interrogation room that earned its nickname because it was fully wired for sound and vision from a dozen different angles. She’d watched sessions in there herself from the comfort of a nearby viewing room, and wondered who was watching this time, as she related why she’d gone to Syria and what she now remembered about Doorkicker. She skipped the part where she’d contemplated blowing her own brains out in the desert.
Five minutes ago, she was brought to Dr Nayar’s corner office. The doctor had evidently watched the debrief, and now she wanted to know how her patient felt.
Bridge looked out over the Thames, and said, “It’s complicated.”
The Exphoria Code Page 30
