The Exphoria Code

by Antony Johnston

  The mole probably also had auto-upload switched off, or could be using a phone with no SIM, completely disconnected from the cellular network. And the lack of CCTV at Guichetech meant that, so long as they took photos while no-one else was physically present, they would be unseen.

  Bridge thought of her daily trips through facility security. All handheld electronics were scanned separately, like at an airport, and every day random employees were chosen to be searched more thoroughly. The mole would have to get through that somehow. Security didn’t open and scan everyone’s phone or tablet as they went through the scanners; they were just looking for explosives, contraband, drugs. Still, it would be pretty risky to carry photos like that through on any device. And a USB stick by itself would surely stand out. But if Bridge was right, the mole had already managed to avoid security, and other watchful eyes, many times. So how on earth could she find and track this, to prove her theory?

  She took a drag, felt nauseous, and realised this cigarette was now down to the filter too. She tossed it into the night, disgusted with herself, and leaned out to look around at the rest of the guest house. Hers was the only light on this side of the house. If she wasn’t careful, she’d gain the reputation of Crazy Englishwoman Who Stays Up All Night sooner than she liked.

  She resolved to call Giles in the morning. With any luck, he’d had a breakthrough in London.

  42

  “Ah! Excusez-moi, monsieur.” Henri Mourad apologised for bumping into the thickset man, but even as he spoke he knew it wasn’t the man in the photograph.

  Henri ignored the man’s obvious disgust at being touched by an Algerian, and resumed his frustrated scanning of the crowd disembarking the Eurostar. He’d rushed to Gare du Nord after a call from Emily Dunston and Giles Finlay in London. He’d worked for her long enough, and taken enough calls from her, to know immediately that Emily was annoyed at Giles about something. Henri wasn’t sure what, until she made a sarcastic remark about ‘new information’, and the way she said it made him realise it was new to her, as well. Giles had a reputation in SIS for running his own petites féodalités, doing things off the books until he thought there was something worth recording, and ensuring his officers’ first loyalty was to him, not their department. It was exactly the kind of behaviour that infuriated Emily, because it was exactly how she also liked to run the Paris bureau. Like matching magnetic poles, their similarities pushed them apart.

  Henri was annoyed, too, but for a different reason. He’d not long returned from Saint-Malo, where he’d spent the weekend putting out feelers and working on potential agents, posing as a smuggler looking to prevent a Portuguese gang from muscling in on his patch. He used the story of Benoît, the slaughtered forger, to gain sympathy. Not that the underworld of Saint-Malo cared what happened in Toulouse, per se, but the unnecessary slaughter of a native French crook by foreigners was an affront to anyone’s national pride. Henri didn’t want to use the T word, not yet, in case it brought the wrong kind of attention. But he made it clear that the men he was looking for were more than just regular criminal smugglers, and bad for business if they could be traced back here to Saint-Malo.

  Eventually, two people came out of the woodwork and ventured into the bar where he made it known he could be found. It was a sailor’s bar, the type of hard-drinking establishment that had been dying out in France for decades, and was now an endangered species everywhere but places like this.

  On Sunday he got his first bite when a local fence came to offer his services. Henri could tell immediately this man would screw over anyone for a payday, but in his experience that was a double-edged sword. Such a man wouldn’t hesitate to feed you intel, even if it meant dropping his own mother in it, but he was also prone to telling you what you wanted to hear, regardless of the truth. Nevertheless, Henri encouraged the fence, and dropped hints about the unusual nature of the package the Portuguese men would be looking to move. He’d hoped to return to Paris that evening, but one source wasn’t enough, especially one so potentially unreliable. So he stayed an extra day, gambling that a working day like Monday would help to spread the word further.

  It did, and Henri was rewarded Monday afternoon when a tall, wide woman in a high-vis jacket lowered herself onto the bar stool next to his and introduced herself as ‘GL’. She was a dockside supervisor, and claimed to have ‘green routes’ into the UK via the Channel Islands. If GL was to be believed, not much departed Saint-Malo without her knowing about it. She was surprisingly forthright, and no less direct about what she expected to be paid for her services, although she did offer Henri a “Tunis discount” on account of their shared skin colour. He wasn’t about to correct her; thinking he was a fellow countryman could only increase the chances she might tell him something useful, despite it costing him an arm and a leg. Maybe just an arm, after the discount.

  Henri had caught the next TGV back to Paris, hoping his weekday absence hadn’t ruffled too many feathers. Not for the first time he thought about the days before budget cuts, when he could have stationed a junior officer in Saint-Malo to focus on the task, rather than splitting his own time and attention. He was just old enough to remember those days, when he’d been a junior officer in Marseille. Nowadays they didn’t even have a permanent office in Marseille, or Toulouse, or anywhere else besides Paris. The Service maintained apartments in all the major cities, but they remained empty and unmanned, waiting for the occasions a visiting officer needed somewhere secure and pre-swept to stay.

  His iPhone vibrated as the TGV pulled into Gare Montparnasse, and Emily had opened a conference call with Giles. She explained that Giles had lost a target in London (Henri could easily picture her satisfied expression at that part) and the man was now expected in Paris, arriving on the last Eurostar of the day. Giles forwarded a photograph of the target’s passport, the photo showing a thickset Croatian man, and explained they simply wanted Henri to follow the man from Gare du Nord and report where he went. Henri sighed inwardly, knowing it could mean an all-nighter, maybe even a trip back out of Paris. But it was easy enough.

  Or it would have been, if the man was anywhere to be seen at Gare du Nord.

  Henri swore under his breath. Monsieur Closet Racist had been one of the last passengers off the Eurostar, and from a distance he fit the target’s description. But it hadn’t been him, and Henri was confident he hadn’t missed anyone else. He watched the rest of the passengers leave the platform, then showed his ID to the guard and walked the length of the train, hoping Novak was dallying. But the target’s reserved seat was empty. Perhaps he’d expected them to be waiting in Paris, and so had disembarked at an earlier station. Or perhaps he’d got off at Calais and caught a night ferry straight back to England on a new passport. Either way, he wasn’t here.

  The train guard nodded at the seat. “The cleaners haven’t been through yet. You could swab the table for DNA.”

  Henri scowled in frustration. “You should lay off the Tatort,” he said. “We’d be lucky to get a fingerprint off that, let alone DNA. No, he’s given us the slip. And we have no idea where he’ll turn up next.”

  43

  “Morning, Ms Short. I completely missed you yesterday. Did you have a good weekend?” Montgomery closed the door behind him and lowered the blind without being asked.

  Bridge looked up from her screen, smiled, and gestured for him to take a seat. “Yes, thank you, James. Oh, and thanks for recommending the Fortalbis vineyard, too.”

  “You visited?”

  “I did, and it was great fun. You were right, the family are lovely people.”

  “Funny,” said Montgomery, sitting down, “I didn’t see you there.” Bridge’s fingers froze above her keyboard. “I mean, it’s such a small place,” he continued. “I don’t know how we didn’t bump into one another.”

  The room’s air conditioning was state of the art, but Bridge felt much too warm. “What day did you visit?” She asked.
>
  “Saturday, of course.”

  “Ah, well, that explains it. I was dog tired on Saturday, spent the day going over my notes from last week and then lazing around the guest house watching bad TV. I drove up on Sunday, instead.”

  “Well, then. That explains it, as you say,” said Montgomery, smiling. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

  The back of Bridge’s neck cooled. She could have kicked herself for almost being caught in a simple lie — why not just say she hadn’t gone, after all? — but it was too late now, and she’d got away with it. She changed the subject. “Actually, I’m glad you looked in. You were originally scheduled as my first interview tomorrow, but circumstances have changed, and I need to talk to you now.”

  “Changed? In what way?”

  Bridge had thought that line might intrigue his need for validation, and this time her gamble paid off. A man like James Montgomery couldn’t stand the idea that there was a plan he didn’t know about. She made a show of looking around the room, checking the blinds were all down, then leaned over the table and whispered, “I’ve had authorisation from London. I’m going to tell you why I’m really here.”

  In fact, she was going to do nothing of the sort.

  Earlier that morning she’d called Giles, who related the events of the night before in London and Paris, and forwarded Marko Novak’s passport image. Bridge didn’t recognise it, and was sorry the men had both got away, but was relieved the meet appeared to have been real. The ASCII code hadn’t been a red herring, and Giles said they’d found the same passport was used to enter the UK on several trips that coincided with past rendezvous dates in the coded messages. She thought of Ten, and how she wished she could tell him he’d been right. But so had she, of course — she’d told him to be careful, and one way or another, he hadn’t been.

  Bridge pushed the thought to the back of her mind. She couldn’t allow herself to feel guilty or mawkish.

  She’d explained her photograph theory to Giles. He agreed it was feasible, and would explain the lack of obvious system penetration, but remained sceptical. “How can you prove it?” he asked. “If you hang around too much, people will get suspicious, and nobody’s going to stand there taking photos while you watch. Short of rigging up your own CCTV all around the building, I’m not sure how you can catch someone in the act.”

  “But we don’t need to,” she said. “If they’re smart, and everything so far suggests they are, they’re not putting the photos anywhere online. Which means the handoffs must be to deliver the photos, maybe on a thumb drive, and if so then they have to physically get it out of the building. There’s absolutely no legitimate reason for taking photos like this. If we can find them on someone’s phone, we’ve got them.”

  “Might they have transferred them to a computer?”

  “No personal computers allowed into the building. Phones, tablets, and music players; that’s all.”

  “So what are you suggesting? Black bag job on everyone you’ve flagged, lift their devices?”

  Black bag jobs were thefts and burglaries, carried out in cases where obtaining a search warrant was either impossible or undesirable, to obtain evidence. Authorised, yes, but also illegal, and rare enough that the idea hadn’t occurred to Bridge. “Could we really do that?”

  “Of course we could,” said Giles. “But in the short time we have, it would make a terrible fuss. What are security checks like at the facility?”

  “That’s what I was going to suggest. The problem is, whoever’s doing this is already getting through security on a regular basis. I think we should take a more direct approach, but I need your buy-in. Probably H/PAR too, come to think of it.”

  She described her plan, and Giles agreed to cajole Emily Dunston, so while he was busy doing that she’d called Henri Mourad. “Henri, it’s Bridge. Can you prioritise those five names I sent over last night?”

  “I literally just stepped through the door,” he said, stifling a yawn, “and I’ve got a to-do list that’ll keep me busy all week.”

  “Sorry, but I need you to stop and dig these up by this afternoon if possible. We can’t question Novak, so in the meantime this is our best lead. I need to know if any of those people are high risk; susceptible to blackmail, communist family, money problems, anything at all.”

  “Yeah, thanks and all, but I know how to do my job,” he said, but Bridge didn’t apologise. She was convinced she was onto something, and she wanted to chase it down as fast as possible.

  Giles had called back ten minutes later. The bad news: as Bridge had feared, Emily Dunston was enough of a technophobe to insist her scepticism about the photograph theory be placed on the record, in the strongest possible terms. The good news: that same old-school attitude meant that off the record, she prioritised the instincts of an OIT above trifling details like proof. H/PAR was on board.

  And that had brought Bridge to this moment at Guichetech, about to tell an expectant James Montgomery something that would blow his mind — and put her at risk.

  “I’m not really an HR inspector,” she said.

  Montgomery’s eyes widened. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m not authorised to tell you everything, but here’s the situation: the MoD is concerned about security here at Agenbeux. Exphoria is a very expensive project, after all. The future of aerial independence rests on your shoulders.” She saw him tense, and said, “Nobody is questioning the project’s success. You’re doing a fine job. The demonstration I saw was very impressive.”

  “Demonstration?”

  It was possible none of the people working here had seen the results of their work in action. But surely the site manager must know? “The airfield. With the blue and red cars.”

  “Oh, the targeting compensation test. Yes, that went off without a hitch. I gather Sir Terence was very pleased.”

  The name ‘Sir Terence’ rang a bell somewhere, but Bridge ignored it for now. “I wouldn’t know. Those sorts of conversations are above my head, so to speak.”

  The flattery worked, and Montgomery relaxed. “So what’s the concern over security? I admit, it’s not really my area of expertise. Voclaine is more hands-on with that sort of thing.”

  That was interesting, but it didn’t change the plan. “Well, I’m afraid you can’t tell him anything. In fact, we think the French factor here may be the root of the problem, if you catch my drift. But we can’t be sure. After all, if we could, then I wouldn’t need to be here.”

  “Why are you telling me now? How can I help?” Montgomery was sitting more upright now, excited at the notion of doing something clandestine.

  “I’m glad you asked. First, we’ll pretend you’re having your interview with me right now. I’ve asked everyone so far not to discuss what we talked about, and you can use the same excuse. But I’m not going to interview you. I’m going to outline a plan, and I need your help to put it into action.”

  A plan within a plan within a plan, she thought to herself. Could she trust James Montgomery? She had no choice. She couldn’t do this without authority, and with Voclaine still sitting at the top of her suspect list, that authority had to be absolute. Montgomery was an egotistical bore, but he had his uses, and Bridge intended to make the most of them.

  44

  At lunchtime she drove to a small café in Agenbeux, and settled in a corner table with the Dell laptop. Not so long ago she might have been frowned at, but even rural France was slowly dragging itself into the modern age, and several other young people had laptops and tablets out on their tables. Being one of the only places in town with free wifi probably had something to do with that, and Bridge connected after ordering a sandwich and coffee. But that was a feint, her natural paranoia kicking in, just in case someone checked the base station logs to see if she really had connected. Sure enough, there would be her laptop, innocently surfing the web.

  Meanwhile, she logg
ed into the secure partition, tethered it to her cell signal, and used an encrypted connection to check her real email. Henri Mourad had come through after all, running checks on the shortlist. There was only time to gather their security background checks and any related records; no real digging. But it was enough to make a start.

  First there was a junior programmer. Bridge looked up the entry in the spreadsheet, and recalled the woman’s interview. Standard answers, but she was fidgety and nervous. She’d spent most of the session tugging at the hem of her pullover, like a nervous tic, and spilled water in her haste to leave the room when the interview was over. But her background check was fine, and she had no police record or note of interest from security. She seemed clean.

  Next, a QA tester: a tall, rangy Bosnian guy that she remembered well. Orphaned, turned up in Strasbourg, adopted at six years old. His questionable origins were a black mark, but he’d spent his entire life since then in France. Good educational records, very respectable adoptive family. Bridge had mainly marked him because of his combative attitude in the interview, a real resentment of the interruption to his work and to all her questions. But again, his check was overall clean.

  Two senior coders, one of them a project lead. She couldn’t put her finger on why, but there was something about the woman, a British programmer a couple of years younger than herself, that made Bridge uncomfortable. The woman had been friendly, relaxed, answering the questions with an ease and thoughtfulness that should have made the interview fly by. Instead, Bridge somehow found the experience tense and exhausting. But the only black mark on the woman’s background was her connection to a Polish 8-bit demoscene group while she was a student, and according to Bridge’s own colleagues at SIS she’d ceased communication with them upon graduation.