Only one option remained. She ran through the kitchen and back out of the main hallway, into the yard. She’d expected to find Izzy and Steph out here, perhaps hiding behind a car, but they were nowhere to be seen. A movement at the edge of her vision caught her eye, and she turned to see her sister and niece running into the estate woodland. Good. If they stayed there Novak wouldn’t find them, and they wouldn’t have to see Fred.
Bridge fumbled with the keys in her pocket, pressing the blipper twice before the Fiat finally unlocked. She leapt inside, turned the key in the ignition —
Nothing. She tried again. Not a whimper or groan.
Novak emerged from the doorway, laughing as he saw her behind the wheel. He raised his pistol and shouted, “You didn’t think I’d leave a perfectly good car just sitting there, did you?” He fired twice, hitting the bonnet and the windscreen. Bridge ducked, pressing her face into the passenger seat as glass exploded around her. She reached out blindly, fumbled with the glove compartment latch, and reached inside. The car had been locked, so Novak must have forced the bonnet open to remove the starter motor. He hadn’t been inside. It should still be there.
It was. Bridge felt the loaded weight of the SP2022, and the unnerving sense of comfort that came from knowing the odds were now even. She pushed open the passenger door. The window immediately shattered as Novak fired at it, followed by another two bullets slamming into the metal of the door. But Bridge had expected that Novak would assume she was trying to flee the car, using the door as cover, and so would focus on that area. Instead she sat bolt upright inside the car, raised her pistol, and shot twice at Novak through the empty windscreen.
He crumpled like a sack of potatoes.
Bridge staggered out of the car, and saw Izzy and Steph running back across the field toward her. She motioned at them to stay away, then turned back to the house.
Fred lay where he’d been shot, shivering in a pool of his own blood, clutching his abdomen. He was alive, barely, but his skin was ten shades whiter than healthy. Bridge tried to pull him up, but he was too heavy even for her. “Fred,” she shouted, “Fred! Can you hear me?” He looked at her for the first time, his eyes focusing into a glare filled with blind hatred. Good. Anger would keep him alive longer than fear. “I need you to stand for me,” she said, helping him into an upright sitting position. “Put your arm over my shoulder, OK?”
He said nothing, but grunted and seethed through gritted teeth as he pushed himself up. Bridge dropped one of his arms across her shoulder and took the weight on her legs. He reached out for purchase, smearing bloody handprints on the wall, and after a couple of false starts he was as upright as he was ever going to be. Bridge began a slow limping walk back through the utility room, out into the yard. Fred grunted in pain with every step.
Izzy yelped in horror at the sight of him, and Stéphanie started crying again. Bridge couldn’t blame either of them, but she needed Izzy’s car, and shouted at her to open the passenger door. Izzy ran to the Renault, holding the door open while Bridge pushed and folded Fred inside. She removed her hoodie, balled it up, and pressed it against his stomach. “Hold this tight,” she said to him. He nodded weakly, placing his hands across it, then coughed as his head lolled back.
Izzy was trying to reach Fred, to comfort him, but it was just wasting time. Bridge pushed her sister away, closed the door, then gripped her by the shoulders. “Hey, hey. Look at me. You and Steph need to go inside, call the gendarmes, and tell them what happened.”
“But I don’t — I mean, what about —?”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t care. Tell them everything you know, everything you saw. Tell them it was me who killed the Russian, me who made this whole mess, and if they want me they can find me at the hospital.” It was true; she didn’t care. She got in the car, fired up the engine, then lowered the window when Izzy tapped on it.
“The hospital is on the north edge of town. Turn right out of the driveway, and there’s a sign at the first junction.”
Bridge placed her hand over Izzy’s, resting on the window. “He’ll be OK,” she said.
“He’d better, or I’ll kill you myself,” said Izzy, and Bridge knew she meant it.
“Maman, Maman, he’s not dead,” said Stéphanie, tugging at Izzy’s arm.
“I know, darling,” Izzy said, “but he has to go to the hospital.”
“No, the other man. Look!”
Time slowed as Bridge turned to where Novak lay on the ground. Except now he wasn’t on the ground. He was pushing himself up, staggering to his feet, raising the Grach.
Bridge stood on the accelerator, leaned hard on the wheel, and jammed the car into gear. The Renault surged forward in an arc and broke Novak’s knees as he flew onto the bonnet, slammed against the windscreen, then fell off the side.
Bridge opened the door and stepped out. Novak squirmed on the ground, his mouth howling a silent scream of pain. His pistol lay nearby. She picked it up.
“Izzy, take Stéphanie.”
Izzy understood. She pulled her daughter toward her, burying Steph’s face in her dress.
A single shot rang out across the farmland, scattering blackbirds.
63
The Renault itself was innocuous and unremarkable, but the deep dent in the bonnet, along with Bridge’s driving, was anything but. As she sped down country roads, Bridge saw several drivers reach for their phones.
Let them. Let them call the police. The cops would be on her soon enough anyway, with all the red lights she was running. The Renault was the diametric opposite of a performance getaway car, but it was small and nippy enough to weave through crowded junctions and cut across traffic islands with abandon. If Hard Man could see her now, it was equal odds whether he’d praise her daring, or bollock her carelessness. Driving may not have been Bridge’s best class at the Loch, but she’d never been this motivated before. Motivated to save the life of a man who disliked her intensely, but meant everything to the only people she had left to care about.
Blood soaked into the passenger seat, and Bridge wondered if Izzy’s insurance would pay for this kind of thing. Did ‘acts of God’ cover international espionage? Would “front seat, footwell carpet, and door lining irrevocably soaked with human blood” make the car a write-off?
It would definitely write off her hoodie, which was now soaked through with blood as she held it pressed against Adrian’s stomach whenever she didn’t have to change gear, or spin the wheel with both hands. His own limp hands rested on the jacket, but as soon as she let go there was no pressure. She squinted ahead, trying to see beyond the dim headlamps in the desert night, looking for a landmark.
Not the desert. French roads. France, not Syria.
A road sign pointed to the local hospital, left across a traffic island. She took the direct route, skipping the island itself, and cut in front of a courier van taking the same turn. The van driver blasted his horn and slammed on the brakes. Bridge sped away, flicked the car back into high gear, and thrust out her hand to press her hoodie against Fred’s wound. Her fingers sank into the wet fabric as if there was no resistance underneath, no real body casually pouring out its life onto the cheaply upholstered seat of a Renault hatchback.
If only he’d listened to her. Why did nobody ever do what she told them to?
“Wake up, Adrian!” Bridge shouted. He was slipping in and out of consciousness, occasionally regaining enough sense to whimper quietly as the jeep’s iron-hard suspension bounced him around while they sped through the night.
When she was young, Izzy had fallen off a low wall in the street, landing on her head. The doctor had attended her at home and said she would be fine except for bruising, but warned their mother not to let Izzy fall asleep for at least six hours, otherwise she might be concussed…or was it that she might slip into a coma… It was so long ago. Bridge thought of her sister lying on the couch, prodded awake
by their mother every time she closed her eyes. She shouted at Fred again and threw the jeep down a gear. The engine complained, high revs whining like a lawnmower, but the vehicle grudgingly accelerated, bouncing over the terrain, and Bridge’s laugh was carried away on the desert wind. She hoped he wouldn’t remember that, if he lived.
When he lived. He was going to live. He was not going to die. Not this one.
Not this time.
Fuel. How much fuel did she have? She glanced down, cursing herself for not checking before. Half full. Enough to get to the hospital. More than the jeep, only a quarter full even before the Russians shot a hole in it. Choking its last north of the settlement, dying without drama and leaving Bridge alone in the cold night.
Not this time.
Her foot tried to push the accelerator through the floor, across two lanes and into the hospital entrance. She eased off twenty metres from the emergency admissions door, standing on the brakes, grinding the Renault’s offside wing against a parked ambulance. She stumbled out and pulled open the passenger door, trying to haul Fred out of the car. Her hands fumbled on his arm and shoulders, slippery with his blood and her sweat. “Come on, you bastard,” she grunted, and then someone was pulling her away, back, as the ambulance staff reached over her to lift him out, shouting and running, and Bridge let herself fall to the pavement, whispering, “Je vais bien, aidez-le,” to the men crowding over her, and then he was gone, inside to safety, and there was nothing more she could do for Adrian.
Not Adrian. Fred. Fréderic had been with her in the jeep — no, not the jeep, the car — next to her, blood spreading from the wound in his stomach, Adrian’s useless hands red and slick — no, Fred’s hands — fading in and out as they drove through the night, no, the day, not the desert, not Syria…
Bridge doubled over and vomited into the gutter. She gasped for breath and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, her mind clear for the first time in years. She remembered.
She remembered.
She vomited again.
64
Adrian’s back was turned when the second guard ran in.
Bridge saw him, but she couldn’t move. Like a nightmare where her body wouldn’t respond, she wanted to draw her gun, eliminate the threat, sweep for follow-up, as all her training had conditioned her to do. But she couldn’t open her mouth to shout a warning, much less fire a gun. Less than a minute ago she’d witnessed her first live kill, and now her body was shutting down, trying to make sense of it all. She pushed against it, summoning every ounce of will she could dig out from the depths of her consciousness, struggling to move, to act, to save her partner’s life.
The guard looked past her — just a woman — to Adrian, the big man he’d heard shouting in English, and raised his rifle. Perhaps the guard made a sound, something in the air that was imperceptible to Bridge, but that Adrian’s experience allowed him to hear. Or maybe he was just turning to shout at her again.
Whatever the reason, turning saved his life. The guard’s bullet — single shot fire, not spray, not here in a room full of computers — hit Adrian in his lower side, rather than full in the chest where he’d been aiming. Classic gut shot, Bridge immediately thought. He’ll live.
And now her body was working again. The Zastava CZ 99 was in her hands, muzzle raised, sighted at the second guard, who was turning his rifle on her as a third Russian ran in behind him. She squeezed, felt the pistol kick, squeezed again without re-sighting. She could almost see Hard Man watching over her shoulder, nodding approval as the guard dropped to the ground, double tap in the chest and shoulder. The third guard fumbled for his own rifle, but Bridge had the advantage, with her pistol already raised and ready to fire. She adjusted, re-sighted, fired. Missed, but stone chips ricocheted off the wall by the guard’s head, and he flinched, and then a single shot from behind Bridge made the guard’s nose explode.
She turned to see Adrian on the floor, propped against the base of a server rack, gun in one hand, the other pressed against his body. Blood spread through the fingers. “Fucked that up, didn’t we?” he grunted, using the barrel of his CZ 99 as leverage against the ground, forcing himself to stand. Bridge holstered her own pistol and helped him up, dropping his arm across her shoulders. Except for a short pre-teen phase when she first shot past her friends, Bridge had never been self-conscious about being tall. Now she was positively thankful she didn’t collapse under Adrian’s weight. “Wait,” he said, “in case of emergency…”
She reached inside his jacket, found Adrian’s backup grenades, their carbon surfaces slick with his blood. “Two for now; keep one back,” she said, and took them out. She threw one to the far side of the room with the pin still inside, to cover a wide zone, then pulled the pin of the other and prepared to drop it. She took Adrian by the hand and looked him in the eye. “You’re sure you can run.”
“It’s only a flesh wound,” he said, and winked.
Bridge tossed the grenade on the floor and ran, back through the stale air of the stone corridors, pulling Adrian behind her, ignoring his grunts of pain and not thinking about the blood pouring out of his abdomen.
She shot the jeep guard while Adrian followed, using all his energy to stay silent.
They drove the stolen jeep into the desert night together.
The windscreen exploded, showering them both with glass.
Adrian passed her his last ICE grenade in the settlement, and she used it to take out the Russians chasing them.
Bridge laughed. “We’re going to make it. We’re bloody well going to make it! I mean, Giles is going to bollock us for blowing up the server farm, but we had no choice, right? It was better guarded than we were expecting, and then once reinforcements showed up the job was a bust anyway, so we had to get out of there.”
Adrian said nothing.
“Look, don’t get shirty with me. I told you they probably had cameras in there, but you wouldn’t listen. Now you’re going to have a month in hospital to think about that, and maybe if you apologise I’ll bring you a bunch of grapes.”
Adrian said nothing.
Bridge had done enough club all-nighters on speed to recognise she was hyped, that the adrenaline coursing through her body was making her a blabbermouth. That was fine. It didn’t matter. It was good to be alive. They’d got out, and they were going to make it.
Adrian said nothing.
Bridge howled at the night, drowned out by the sound of the jeep, crying for the dead man beside her.
When the fuel gauge hit rock bottom and the jeep sputtered its last, she had no tears left to cry. The Russians hadn’t just shot out the jeep’s rear fender, they’d hit the fuel tank as well, and Bridge had never been so alone in her life. Just her, the cold black desert, and a Serbian pistol with half a dozen bullets left in the clip.
She began to walk.
Bridge wiped her mouth, tasting vomit on the back of her tongue, and looked up through her fringe as two police cars, lights blazing and bright even at this time of the morning, screeched to a halt outside the hospital. About time, she thought, and collapsed in the road.
65
“My name is Bridget Short. I’m a British civil servant. I was visiting a friend when a madman took us hostage. I want to call the British embassy in Paris.”
“Your French is impeccable. So let me say this clearly: bullshit.”
“My name is Bridget Short. I’m a British civil servant. I was visiting a friend…”
Bridge lost count after the fourth gendarme interrogator. It didn’t matter how many they sent. The first rule of being interrogated, whether by police or security services, was remarkably simple. No matter what you think they might know, no matter what they claim to have on you, say nothing and demand a lawyer. Simple, but surprisingly difficult to follow. Interrogators were practised at bluffing, stretching the truth, sensing weakness and giving the impression they already knew w
hat had happened, they just needed to hear it in your own words, and telling all now would make things so much easier later… But in fact, most of the time they knew very little. They relied on educated guesswork, knowledge of the criminal mind, and outright lies to convince prisoners their situation was hopeless and confession was inevitable.
Bridge knew how that felt. She’d screwed up so much, she was just about ready to throw in the towel anyway. Killing Montgomery had forced her to go on the run; fleeing to Izzy had brought Novak to them, and endangered her sister’s family; killing Novak had exposed her to the authorities, and blew whatever cover she still had left. And she still didn’t know how bad the Exphoria leak was, or what Montgomery had actually stolen.
She had one thing to do before returning to London, but then she was done. Giles had been wrong about her. She should never have gone OIT in the first place. Not three years ago, not now. All she did was screw everything up.
And then François Voclaine walked in the door, smiled at her, and lit a cigarette.
Memories, images, and fragments of conversation flooded Bridge’s mind. A carefully placed word here, a cautious silence there, his interrogation, the moment when he defiantly destroyed his phone. And his disappearance from police custody, which Bridge had all but forgotten about in the frantic, violent madness that followed.
“Oh, balls,” she sighed, making sense of it all. “You’re DGSI.” The Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure was France’s internal partner to the Extérieure DGSE, just like MI5 to SIS, or the FBI to the CIA. And they’d sent their own mole hunter to Agenbeux. “Why didn’t you tell us? For God’s sake, we could have worked together.”
Voclaine reached over to unlock Bridge’s handcuffs, and snorted. “I could say the same to you. A British spy, operating in France without our knowledge or consent? Naughty, naughty.”
“So now what?” said Bridge, rubbing her newly freed wrists.
The Exphoria Code Page 28