“Precisely. We assume that’s also why it came onshore at Portugal, rather than somewhere closer like Italy, southern France, or directly to the UK. To be blunt, it’s much easier to get the Portuguese to look the other way. Fortunately for us, the men entrusted with the package have been as subtle as a brick through a window. Our sources flagged them early when they crossed the Pyrenees, and we’ve been chasing them ever since.”
“I haven’t touched French since high school, but doesn’t matériel chaud mean, well, hot stuff? Is this an arms shipment?”
Emily snorted. “In a manner of speaking. We believe the package contains radioactive material, possibly caesium-137 or similar. We haven’t been able to determine where it’s bound for, or to what end. But now that we know it was sent from Hong Kong…”
“…You suspect Chinese involvement. I know we’re hardly best buddies with Beijing, but that seems a little extreme?”
“It could be a rogue actor, rather than state. Or it could be fully deniable by design. Or it could simply be a money maker. Certain groups will pay through the nose for this stuff.”
“And by certain groups, you mean terrorists. ISIS, and the like.”
“They’d have a field day. Just ten grams of caesium can contaminate a square mile of land. More, if the weather’s right.”
“And how much matériel chaud have you been tracking?”
Emily lowered her voice. “About fifty grams.”
As the car sped south on the motorway, Andrea wondered if this week could get any stranger.
56
Izzy didn’t believe a word of it, and said so.
Bridge had arrived in the early evening, after a deliberately careful drive. Her instinct had been to race down to Côte-d’Or, to escape Novak and his gendarme flunkies as soon as possible. But driving like a maniac risked attracting police attention, and with her name and description on every gendarme’s dashboard, that could only spell trouble. So instead she drove carefully, always five kilometres per hour below the speed limit, always staying on boring, anonymising highways as far as possible, and always erring on the side of cautious driving once she had to come off the highways onto local roads.
Halfway down the N67 she’d remembered Montgomery’s mini tablet, tucked inside her hoodie. It had taken several blows during the fight with Novak, and the already-cracked screen was now a spiderweb of shattered glass. When she pressed the power button, the black glass defiantly refused to show anything other than her own cracked reflection. She wanted to pull over and scream at her own incompetence, but instead tossed it on the passenger seat, gripped the steering wheel, stared straight ahead and continued to drive. If she was lucky — if — then she might be able to hook something up to the data port and somehow extract data. It was a long shot, and she’d need specific equipment to attempt it, but it was enough to keep a tiny drop of hope alive in her stomach.
Only a drop, though. She’d blown the most important part of the mission by killing Montgomery. The more she thought about it, the more certain she was that he was indeed the mole. Assuming he was the only one, his death meant no more leaks from Exphoria. But it also meant no SIS interrogation, no opportunity to find out why he did it, who was paying him, who wanted these secrets. Marko Novak may have been his handler, but he was just muscle. A point man, not a mastermind. So who did he work for? Was he FSB, on ‘official unofficial’ business for Moscow? The FSB had grown in leaps and bounds since Putin’s second presidency, and Bridge’s whole life would have been different if not for Russia’s march into Syria. It didn’t seem far-fetched to imagine military espionage was also on the agenda. But with Montgomery dead, imagine was all SIS could do. Even if Bridge could somehow capture Novak, the chances of making him talk were slim. Everything about the man spoke of experience, a veteran spy who would rot in a cell before giving up his agency. And that assumed they could nab him at all. While Bridge could testify that he tried to kill her, he’d also caught her red-handed, burgling the apartment of a man she’d killed. All he had to say was that he tried to apprehend her, defending himself when she resisted arrest, and then it was his word against hers.
She’d been rash, moving forward with only half a plan and no contingency, like a novice. She’d wanted to find the mole so badly, and was so concerned she’d wrongly accused Voclaine, that she barged in to Montgomery’s place without stopping to think what might happen if things didn’t go to plan. She’d never imagined it could go so wrong that she now found herself on the run with nothing but the clothes on her back, a Ziploc of spy tools, and a tablet computer that was both potentially incriminating and also possibly broken beyond repair. She should call London, but first she wanted to make sure she knew what she was doing. She needed some time to think, to figure out the best way of fixing the terrible mess she’d made. Once she had a plan, she could call from Izzy’s place.
But to do that required privacy, if she was to maintain her employment cover story, and that same story was wearing increasingly thin on her sister.
“You seriously expect me to believe your office politics are so bad that you can’t stay there, but you also can’t go home, and couldn’t grab a change of clothes from your hotel? Who the hell do you think you’re talking to, Bridge? I may not be some jet-setting PA, but I’m not stupid.”
“It’s really complicated, Izz. Can you just bear with me for a couple of days? Please?”
“You know Mum thinks you’re a criminal? That this civil service stuff is all rubbish, because they wouldn’t keep paying for you to fly all over the place, and that you’re actually smuggling drugs for the mafia?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Bloody hell, she’s never said anything to me.”
“Because you never talk to her, do you? I swear…”
“Auntie Bridge!” Stéphanie ran across the courtyard and hugged Bridge’s legs, before looking up at both women. “Why weren’t you talking in English?”
Bridge winced. Once again, they’d argued in French without realising. “We forget sometimes,” said Izzy, taking Steph’s hand, “just like how Daddy sometimes talks French.”
They walked back to the farmhouse. “But Daddy is French.”
“And so are Maman and Auntie Bridge, darling. We were born here.”
Steph’s mouth dropped open in surprise. “What, here? At the farm?”
Bridge smiled despite herself as Izzy and Steph’s voices faded inside the house. She took the broken mini tablet from the car and made to follow them. Fréderic stood inside the doorway, scowling as she approached, and nodded at the tablet. “No internet here,” he said. “You can’t get online with that.”
“Can’t anyway,” said Bridge, showing him the shattered screen. “Won’t even switch on. I just don’t want to leave it in the car.” As she turned it over in her hand, though, she saw something she hadn’t previously noticed. An SD slot, with a card still lodged inside. She tried to prise it out with her fingernails, but the slot was crimped, bent from all the damage the tablet had sustained. She looked to Fred. “Do you have a pair of tweezers?”
He led her into the kitchen, and proceeded to rummage through several drawers before producing a battered old pair of flat-nose pliers. Not quite what Bridge had in mind, but they’d suffice. She pushed them into the slot, slow but firm to get as deep as she could, then carefully prised them open. If the tablet had been made from better material she might have had difficulty, but the metal was thin enough to give under pressure, and the slot widened. She reset the pliers, leaving just a sliver of a gap, and this time pushed them in to gently clamp the nose around the SD card itself. With a cautious pull the card came free. It had suffered a dent, but the golden contacts were intact.
“And why is this so important?” asked Fred, who’d been watching over her shoulder.
“It belonged to my boss,” said Bridge, which wasn’t entirely a lie. “He asked me to see if I could retrieve
any data from it. I thought I might have to try and cable up the SSD…”
“…But now you think this card contains what you need?”
“Maybe. I’ll have to wait till I can get near a laptop to find out, though.”
Fred smiled, which in itself took Bridge by surprise. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him smile at anything other than his children. “Wait there,” he said, and put a finger to his lips as he ducked out of the room.
He returned with a courier bag, which he placed on the kitchen table and unbuckled the flap to pull out a small HP laptop. “Don’t tell your sister,” he said as he leant over Bridge and typed his login password. “Do you need cables?”
Bridge peered inside the bag and saw a nest of power and connectivity cables inside, but the laptop had its own SD card slot. “No, this should be fine,” she said, and took a deep breath, ready to insert the card. She looked at Fred, sceptical of this sudden change of heart. “Why?”
“Because you’re obviously in trouble, and whatever it is, I want it dealt with quickly so you can go back to work and leave us alone.”
Bridge rolled her eyes. “Be still, my beating heart.” She pushed the card into the laptop slot, dreading any one of a dozen sounds that would tell her it was broken. But it clicked into place, and after a few nervous seconds appeared as a drive in the disk explorer. Her pulse quickened. This could be it, the proof she needed.
But the drive was empty. “Shit,” Bridge said, balling her fists in frustration. “Shit shit shit shit.”
“Is it all lost? You can’t repair the drive?”
“There’s nothing to repair,” Bridge sighed. “The card’s — wait, hang on.” She’d been about to say ‘empty’, but her eyes had instinctively gone to the drive information summary on screen, and something there didn’t make sense. The HP said the drive had 61.5GB free. But it was a 64GB card. Even with a bloated directory tree, it should have at least 63GB remaining.
It was possible the reading was a by-product of damage to the card, and it was simply feeding incorrect information to the laptop. But there was another possibility; that the card contained data, potentially two and a half gigabytes’ worth, and it was the directory itself that was damaged or corrupt. Bridge fired up a shell prompt and started typing. She was more comfortable in Unix than DOS — it had been a long time since she’d operated a Windows machine, instead of just hacking into an MS server — but this, of all things, was worth a try. If she was right, and she could recover data from the card, it might vindicate everything she’d done.
“What the hell is this? We said we were leaving the computers at home.”
Bridge turned to see Izzy in the doorway, arms folded, glaring at Fred. He shrugged. “I have to get the Senegal pitch finished by the end of the month. I’m not doing anything in front of Stéphanie, don’t worry.”
“Not doing what?” said Steph, appearing behind her mother in the doorway. She gasped as she saw the laptop. “A computer? I want to play a game!”
“No, Stéphanie,” said Izzy, crossing the room. “Daddy and Auntie Bridge are just about to put it away, isn’t that right?” She took hold of the screen, trying to close the computer.
But Bridge gripped it and held it open, meeting her sister’s gaze. “I’m sorry, Izz, but this is really, really important. It could save my job.”
“Screw your job,” Izzy shouted. “If it’s so bloody great, why aren’t you still there instead of squatting here? My family is supposed to be on holiday, and we have rules about our holidays, and you’re ruining all of — Jesus, have you started weightlifting or something?” She gave up trying to close the lid against Bridge’s resistance and stormed out of the room, leading Steph away by the hand.
“Isabelle,” called Fred, following her. He stopped at the door, turned, and said, “Just hurry up.”
Bridge nodded in silence, mentally crossing her fingers as she continued typing.
57
The cold air was recycled and stale, belched out by noisy climate control units. Bridge wouldn’t have minded if this was a day raid, and they were escaping the searing heat that had threatened to overwhelm her every day since she arrived. But at night the desert froze, and they’d just spent two hours driving through it, with Bridge huddled under layers of blanket and a keffiyeh woven around her head.
She said nothing, maintaining mission silence, but she didn’t need to. Ahead of her in the stone corridor, Adrian turned and grinned. “Never bloody happy, are you, BB? Can’t live with the heat, can’t live with the cold. It’s a wonder you made it out of here alive…” He looked down at the dark patch spreading over his chest, looked back at Bridge with unusual sympathy, said, “You’d better go —”
She was in the jeep, rattling over rocks and sand while bullets zinged by her ears. The headlamps were barely strong enough to show ten feet in front of her. “How do you know where you’re going?” Adrian shouted from the passenger side. “You can’t see a thing.” Daylight flipped like a light switch, noon sun high and hot, foiling Bridge’s sight with heat shimmer, exposed for all to see. Night again, flip, and a bullet from the pursuing jeep ripped through Adrian’s shoulder —
The Russian guard demanded to know what they were doing here, who authorised their presence, what papers did they have? Adrian played the self-righteous alpha male card, puffing himself up and gambling the guard wouldn’t argue with an alleged order from an alleged senior officer. His Russian was excellent. Bridge’s wasn’t, but she had enough to interject with technical bluff that would lend veracity.
The guard said OK, but he’d need to go and check. That was fine. Bridge knew they only needed three minutes, tops, inside the server room. Adrian knew that, too, but he still killed the Russian, stabbing the guard in the back with his dagger as he turned away. Up and through the lungs, preventing any cry of pain. All that escaped from the young soldier was wheezing air and blood.
Bridge stared down at the man’s body, and he stared up at her, and blood bubbled up from his mouth as he smiled and said in Adrian’s voice, “First one’s always the worst —”
She was so close now, the ruins of the village behind her, if she could just keep the damn jeep upright and rolling for another twenty clicks she’d be home, and she thought of Adrian’s body lying in the ruins of the Russian base, and then she remembered there wouldn’t be a body because of the grenades, but there was something on the passenger seat, underneath a desert blanket, and when she pulled it back with one hand and glanced down, not wanting to take her eyes off the dirt track she was now following, it was Adrian’s head that looked back up at her, and he laughed, “Silly girl, didn’t you notice how quiet I’d been? As if I could have lived through that —”
She said it wasn’t necessary to kill the guard; they could have been in and out before he came back. Adrian argued the kill had bought them time, because now they wouldn’t raise an alarm until they found his body, and to make his point he dragged the Russian’s corpse behind one of the server racks. Bridge was still in mild shock. Her first live kill, and she’d been trained to expect some disorientation, but she had no doubt that Adrian had made a mistake.
“What if they expected him back right away? What if there are hidden surveillance cameras here, and someone just watched you kill him? This was never part of the plan.”
“Neither was getting stopped by someone guarding the bloody computers,” said Adrian, red-faced from hauling the body by himself, “so we improvise. Anyway, this is a cave. You can see for yourself there’s no cameras here.”
“No, I can’t. Have you even seen the latest stuff? The Chinese are making wifi cameras the size of a pound coin, these days. Christ, you can buy them on Amazon. I bet the Russians get first dibs.”
“There are no bloody cameras,” Adrian shouted. “Fuck’s sake, I knew you weren’t ready for this. You’re panicking.”
“I’m no
t panicking,” she shouted back, “but now I might only have half the time I need to locate the right server.”
“Then you’d better hurry up and get looking, hadn’t you?” he said, just as another guard ran into the room and she’d never been so sorry to be proven right —
Driving through the desert, alone, swallowing back tears —
Adrian’s hand at his stomach, blood spreading through his manicured fingers —
The jeep sputtering to a halt, fuel gauge bottomed out —
Adrian pulling his ICE grenades, shouting at her to hurry —
And the icy dark of the desert night, closing around her as an Allied patrol drove by.
58
“Bonsoir,” he said to the young gendarme sitting in the hallway, before pressing a chloroform-soaked cloth to the policeman’s face.
Marko Novak — an alias, but it sufficed for this mission —made no apologies for being an old-fashioned kind of spy. As long as he could remember, he had wanted to follow in his late father’s footsteps and become a KGB officer. But then the USSR collapsed while he was a young man, and Marko had to settle for a place in the FSB, the crippled successor to the mighty security agency. Old KGB spooks who were recruited to train the new FSB officers would joke that if the KGB stood for intelligence, the FSB stood for halfwits. Novak was just old enough to share their fond memories of that lost time, a simpler time, when the enemy was known and the mission was clear. He had been an outstanding FSB officer. But there was no place for a man like him, so out of step with his own time, in Yeltsin’s ‘New Russia’. After yet another round of cutbacks he quit.
Ironically, if he had waited just a few more years for Putin, Novak had no doubt he would be running a bureau by now. But in that time he had come to enjoy the freelance life.
Besides, it was all so complicated these days. Everything was so political, sometimes it was hard to know in whose interests you were working. That was why Novak liked to keep his own operations as simple as possible. He’d built a good reputation as an old-fashioned freelancer, someone who didn’t rely on fancy computer tricks and technology that might fail in the middle of a job. He tracked and found people by old-fashioned means, and eliminated them in ways that had been tried and tested for decades by legendary spies from both sides of the Cold War. Most importantly, he never gave up.
The Exphoria Code Page 25