The Exphoria Code
Page 36
Bridge saw movement at the edge of her vision, and looked over her shoulder. Two women turned the corner of the church, heading this way. She had to get back to Dublin for the ferry, anyway. She took a breath, said a silent, sad farewell to the headstone, and walked back.
The cemetery pathways were narrow, so she cut sideways between two headstones to make way for the women, whom she took to be a middle-aged daughter helping her elderly mother along the narrow strip of grass. Bridge saw a hint of disapproval in the middle-aged woman’s expression, and supposed it was because taking the shortcut risked stepping on a grave. Then she recognised the woman’s necklace, and quickly turned away.
Halfway back to Dublin she pulled over to the side of the road, lit a cigarette, and cried.
88
“You wanted to see me?”
“I should coco. Come in, have a seat.”
“Which one?”
“Oh, take your pick. I’ll get you a coffee.”
Giles Finlay’s new office was twice the size of his old one, and occupied a coveted corner spot in the labyrinthine Vauxhall corridors. In addition to the usual chairs opposite his desk it also had a small leather sofa and a kitchen stool at the back of the room, by the kitchenette counter where Giles now made a fancy coffee from a fancy machine. The view faced directly north, but today the autumn rain was coming down like stair rods and Bridge could barely see Lambeth Bridge, let alone Parliament.
She chose the sofa. It creaked as she sat down, then again when she leaned forward to take the coffee from Giles, then again when she leaned back, and she decided in future to maybe stick to the Aeron in front of his desk. “You’ve done well out of this one,” she said, genuinely impressed at Giles’ ability to turn any victory, no matter how pyrrhic, into a promotion.
“I had some help,” he said, raising his coffee to her as he sat down. “And now I need it again.”
Bridge sipped her coffee, waiting. She had no idea what this was about, and knew better than to jabber to fill the silence.
Giles placed his coffee down and picked up a file on his desk. “First, congratulations, you’re now indefinite OIT. Everything finally ticked and approved.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Indefinite, not permanent?”
“Nobody’s permanent,” Giles shrugged. “You know how quickly things change.”
Bridge said nothing.
“I was in a meeting yesterday at Number Ten, whole lot of generals and the like. Terry Cavendish was there, too.” Bridge groaned at the mention of his name, but Giles held up a hand before she could speak. “And in his defence, he put his weight behind a suggestion from the MoD that I think you could help me with.”
Bridge remained sceptical. “If you try to put me on his staff, I’ll be out that door before you can open my resignation envelope.”
“Good heavens, no,” said Giles. “They’ve asked me to draft a proposal for a new task force. Cross-departmental, collaborative, relatively high-autonomy. One of the conclusions of the Exphoria business is that we’re all rather too compartmentalised. If us, Five, GCHQ, and the MoD had all spoken to one another and shared information more consistently, it might never have got out of hand. And you, I might add, wouldn’t have been placed in harm’s way.”
“I’m touched by your concern,” she said sarcastically, “but what do you need my help for? Do you want me to research potential operatives?”
Giles laughed softly. “Bridge, I want you to be one of the operatives. In fact, I rather think you should lead it. And yes, that will mean helping to figure out who else we should recruit.”
She fought not to show reaction in her expression, as a multitude of emotions collided inside her. Mostly there was surprise, but also pride, and even a certain amount of optimism. “Definitely worth giving it a try,” she said, deliberately understated. “Count me in.”
“Don’t get too excited,” said Giles, half-smiling. “It’s only draft stage, no guarantees. There’s a whole circus of flaming hoops to jump through for approval, not to mention trying to scrape together funding from somewhere. But what do you think?”
Bridge looked around at Giles’ palatial new office and thought the funding part wouldn’t be a problem.
* * *
After dinner, she logged into the chat server at Telehouse and purged the entire machine, running a seven-pass overwrite to ensure nothing could possibly be retrieved from the hard drive. When it finished two hours later she installed a basic NT profile, infected it with a weak trojan, then deleted the admin login and cleaned all trace of it from her own computer.
Bridge made a cup of tea, took the laptop to her bedroom, and unmuted the Tenebrae_Z memorial thread.
Acknowledgements
I’m indebted to many people for their help in writing this book. It’s no exaggeration to say that without some of them, Bridge’s story wouldn’t exist — though any errors, inaccuracies, or exaggerations are entirely my own, and all angry correspondence should be directed to your humble author.
Thank you to my agent, Sarah Such, for endless patience and advice; to Anthony Horowitz and Greg Rucka, for friendship and inspiration; and to Scott Pack and everyone at Lightning Books, for pulling me back from some of the more obscure edges upon which I occasionally teeter.
Thanks are also due to the erstwhile netizens of uk.people.gothic, for services to ultraviolet dancefloors; Glenn Fleishman and John Hawkes-Reed, for casting a sceptical eye over technical matters; Alison Gander, Lydie Turco, Noel Gourvennec, Thomas Mauer, Julia Scheele, and Natalia Antonova, pour l’aide avec les traductions; Monica Richards, for her generosity; my wise and fastidious beta readers; Keith Blount, creator of the indispensable writing software Scrivener; and, as always, Marcia, for everything.