The Exphoria Code

by Antony Johnston

  Voclaine handed her his cigarette. “Now you come with me, and smoke this instead of talking.”

  He led her out of the station, past gendarmes whose eyes held nothing but hatred and suspicion. One senior officer looked like he might try to prevent them leaving, but Voclaine fixed him with a defiant stare and the man backed off. Outside, Voclaine opened the passenger door of a blue Peugeot, and made sure Bridge saw the gun holstered under his coat as he closed the door. The message was clear: don’t even think about running.

  In the three seconds it took him to walk round to the driver’s side, Bridge ran through many of the possibilities ahead of her. Voclaine was taking her to his bosses at DGSI HQ in Paris, who would place her under extrajudicial arrest at Château d’If (oh, the irony) and return her to England only in return for political favours. Or he would take her to Henri Mourad, with an offer to cover up the two murders Bridge had recently committed on French soil in return for everything the British had regarding Exphoria. Or perhaps he was simply going to drive to a quiet spot in the woods and shoot her in the back of the head.

  What she didn’t expect was for him to climb in the driver’s seat, reach into a briefcase on the back seat, and hand her a new passport. “Novak was carrying your ‘Catherine Pritchard’ backup when you killed him. It’s ruined. Use this instead.” It featured the same picture as her Bridget Short passport, but now she was called ‘Fleur Simpson’. Voclaine pulled the car away, nodding at the glove compartment as they approached the main road. She opened it to find, among the log books and driving gloves, a roll of cash held tight by an elastic band. “One thousand euros. You’ll use it to buy a flight to London; no paper trail. Once you’re back in England, you’re not my problem any more.”

  “Am I your problem now?”

  “Too fucking right you are.” Voclaine lit two cigarettes, and passed one to her. “Mourad is busy elsewhere, according to your boss Dunston.”

  Bridge didn’t correct him. Voclaine was trying to demonstrate he was in command, that he had enough knowledge about the situation that she shouldn’t question him. So let him believe she worked for Emily. The more he thought he knew everything, the more he might talk. “Only myself and two senior officers know who you are, and what you’re doing here. The faster you leave France, the easier it will be to keep it that way. Understand?”

  Bridge nodded. “How are you going to explain Novak’s death? Won’t the gendarmerie want revenge?” Voclaine gave her a quizzical look, and Bridge swore quietly as she realised how many assumptions she’d made in the heat of the moment. She’d been a bloody idiot. “Oh — Novak wasn’t police at all, was he? It was just a disguise. It was you who sent those gendarmes to my guest house in Agenbeux, not him.”

  Voclaine looked at her with surprise. “You were there?”

  “Watching from afar.” She neglected to mention the officer who’d stopped her, but let her go. It would only annoy Voclaine more. The memory led her to think of the farmhouse, and she gasped. “The hospital —”

  “Your family is fine,” grumbled Voclaine. “Fréderic Baudin has been stabilised, his family is with him, and the doctor says he’ll pull through. Mainly because you got him to the hospital in time, so at least you did one thing right.”

  Bridge relaxed. Knowing Fréderic would be safe was some comfort. But now she had another thought. “François… I need to do something before I go back to London.”

  Voclaine shook his head. “I don’t care.”

  “You will. I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

  He looked sideways at her. “My cover story was just that, you know. I’m happily married.”

  “And you’re not my type,” she laughed. “You’re too…French.”

  “So what are you offering?”

  “Take me back to the farmhouse.”

  “No chance. It’s a crime scene, and the gendarmes are crawling all over it.”

  “Fair enough,” she said, “I suppose it’s fine if the local cops find out about Exphoria, anyway.”

  Voclaine hit the brakes, hard, and the car juddered to a halt. He turned on Bridge, suspicious. “What are you talking about? We have your laptop and phone already. We found them at the guest house.”

  Bridge noted he didn’t say they’d cracked the security, which pleased her a little. Not that it would matter much if they had, because: “Everything on them is from before I confirmed Montgomery as the mole. But at his apartment I figured out how he was doing it, and retrieved some of the data. I’m sure the gendarmerie will find it fascinating.”

  Voclaine seethed quietly. For a second, Bridge thought he might actually hit her in frustration. Instead he punched the steering wheel, spat out “Merde,” and pulled a U-turn before speeding back towards La Ferme Baudin.

  66

  Lacking official ID, Bridge let Voclaine do the talking. He told the gendarmerie his name was Serge Tolbert, and presented himself officially as DGSI, but she suspected that was no more his real name than ‘François Voclaine’.

  Whatever his name, she was grateful for his authority. He stopped the police from bagging Fred’s HP laptop, and ordered them all out of the room. Bridge opened the lid and was presented with a login screen. Voclaine (she couldn’t think of him as ‘Tolbert’) groaned in frustration. But Bridge had watched Fred log in the night before, and while she hadn’t specifically followed his typing, it was a simple enough password that she’d caught it without meaning to. She entered:

  s-t-e-p-h-a-n-i-e-1-2-3

  And the login screen was replaced by the desktop. The frontmost window was the DOS shell she’d used to run the recover process. She scanned down to the last message before the prompt.

  > Session complete: 435 files recovered

  Bridge opened the SD card directory, and where it had been empty the day before, now it was full of photographs. She could tell just from the thumbnails that these were what they’d all been looking for, but she opened half a dozen at full size to confirm it for Voclaine. Photographs of a computer screen inside the Agenbeux facility.

  Voclaine almost choked. “That’s my desk,” he said in disbelief. “Why are there photos of my desk?”

  “Not your desk,” said Bridge, “your screen…and the Exphoria code.” She scrolled through the photos, to show the pages and pages of code on the screen. “This card was in a mini-tablet Montgomery carried, rather than his phone. I’m guessing he took these while you were out of the room, probably during smoke breaks.”

  “We didn’t find a tablet at his apartment.”

  “Because I took it with me, and pulled this SD card out last night. You’re lucky I managed to recover these photos, to be honest. Novak almost destroyed the entire tablet when he attacked me.”

  Voclaine shook his head. “You knew this was how James leaked the code?”

  “I had a hunch,” Bridge shrugged, “but until now I wasn’t completely sure. Hell, until now I wasn’t completely sure Montgomery was the mole.”

  “Are you telling me you killed him without proof? Are you completely insane?”

  “Hey, it was self defence. I was looking for proof at his apartment when he attacked me, and now we have it. I just wish we knew who he was working for.”

  “Russia.”

  “How do you know?”

  Voclaine nodded out toward the courtyard, where a coroner’s tent had been erected around Marko Novak’s body. “His real name is Grigori Pushkin, and the DGSE has a file on him. Ex-FSB, freelance for the past twenty years, but does plenty of work for Putin’s boys. We found hidden cameras watching Montgomery’s apartment, and there was even a Russian go-bag on the bed, ready and packed. Rubles, fake passport, the works.”

  “I thought you were DGSI.”

  “This isn’t England, mademoiselle. Our departments don’t keep secrets from each other.”

  Bridge sighed. So it
seemed Russia really was still up to military espionage, after all. “Do you have a USB stick?”

  Voclaine reached inside his jacket and pulled out a small blue flash drive. “Always. You never know.”

  Bridge plugged it in, and started copying the photographs across. They both watched in silence as the progress bar inched up the screen, until all the data had transferred. Then she removed the drive, closed the HP, replaced it in the bag, and handed it to Voclaine. “The laptop, and the card in it, go straight to London. If Médecins Sans Frontières want it back, they’ll have to take it up with SIS.”

  Voclaine was confused. “Why not take them yourself?”

  “Because I’m not going to back to London.”

  “Now hang on a second.”

  Bridge tucked the USB stick into Voclaine’s coat pocket. “How ever did the DGSI get that data? I suppose the gendarmes made a copy before they handed over the laptop. Maybe only I know for sure, but seeing as I escaped your custody and hopped on a plane, you can’t ask me.”

  Voclaine grumbled, but reached into another pocket and produced a small Ziploc bag. It contained a micro camera, bugging equipment, a tiny flashlight, and a roll of US dollars. “You’ll want this, I expect. I requisitioned it from the station when I picked you up.”

  Bridge took her emergency SIS bag and smiled. “Thank you. Now, what’s the smallest local airport that can get me to Greece?”

  67

  Finding a boat to take her from Cyprus to the Syrian coast with no questions asked was easy. Even getting to Homs wasn’t too hard, just a matter of offering a few dollars to drivers heading there anyway. But finding someone in the city willing to drive her into the desert was difficult. In fact, finding anyone who would even talk to Bridge was proving to be a challenge.

  Picking her way through the ruined streets, shocked at the sheer scale of destruction from the bombings, it was hard to be surprised. Language wasn’t the problem, as almost everyone here spoke either French or English. It was that she was an outsider, a Westerner, one of the many who’d abandoned the people here to die, and that created a default state of hostility she’d never encountered before.

  She eventually found a man who collected and stockpiled military equipment, lost or abandoned by both government and rebels during the city’s long siege. His compound was the shell of an old building that might once have been a centre of local administration, but it was impossible to say for sure. Remove a building’s windows, decor, and signage, and replace them with shrapnel scars, shell craters, and fallen rubble, and pretty soon they all look the same.

  Getting in to see the collector required bribe upon bribe to various levels of armed guards, and when she finally reached his inner sanctum Bridge’s stockpile of cash had a serious dent. A couple of American dollars here was a small fortune. She could only imagine the chaos if she had to ask armed gangsters to break a fifty.

  As the complex hierarchy of guards gatekeeping their boss led her through the black-market compound, she glimpsed the stockpile. A stack of assault rifles here, a row of grenade launchers there, mortars and grenades arranged for viewing, and handguns laid out by size and calibre. Was all of this really from the streets of Homs, looted from the bodies of soldiers or abandoned by retreating forces? Or was some of it smuggled in through the old Iraqi supply lines, the very place Bridge wanted to go? Worse still, could some items have been bought from Europe’s own black-market traders? She wasn’t naive enough to think she could trust anyone here, but could this trader really give her what she needed? More importantly, would he?

  Then they crossed a central courtyard, and she saw the rows of vehicles. Land rovers, troop trucks, jeeps (rear-mounted M60 machine gun optional), a US-style humvee, all in differing states of repair.

  To his credit, the trader didn’t seem surprised to see this pale Western woman, all in black except for the hair-covering keffiyeh she’d bought in Latakia, on mysterious business at what was once the epicentre of Syrian violence. Instead he merely asked, in perfect French, what he could do for her.

  Bridge told the trader where she wanted to go, and asked for one of his men to drive her there and back. He lost his composure, and laughed in her face. So she offered instead to buy one of his jeeps, and drive herself. He laughed again, but this time more politely. He asked how much money she had. Bridge offered him a fifth of what she was carrying. If they frisked her, they’d find double that. The remainder was inside her underwear, and if things went that far Bridge would happily use the loaded Grach she’d also tucked in there. Perhaps it was detecting that attitude, a dead-eyed fatalism betraying no fear, which made the trader think twice.

  They eventually settled on just under half of her ‘visible’ cash for a fully-fuelled jeep, one of the better models, plus a desert blanket and two canisters of extra petrol. Bridge wasn’t sure that would leave her with enough cash to return home, but right now she wasn’t thinking that far ahead. If she made it out of the desert in one piece, maybe she could sell the jeep in Tartus — albeit for a fraction of what she’d just paid — and bum around Egypt for a while. Perhaps then she’d finally tell Giles where she was, and he could formally fire her over the phone. But not before she’d found what she was looking for.

  One of the collector’s guards tried to feel her up as she walked to the jeep, but she broke his shin with a swift kick, disarmed him, and stripped his pistol while the other guards hooted with laughter.

  * * *

  Night fell as she reached the desert, but Bridge switched on the headlamps and kept driving. The closer she got, the less anxious she became, as if she was returning to a familiar place that she knew well. Still, night driving in the desert was risky, and lacked peripheral vision. Anyone could come at you from the sides or rear and you wouldn’t know it until they were on top of you. Or shot out the windscreen.

  Around midnight, she parked in the shadow of a rock formation, using her matchstick flashlight to see. She climbed into the back of the jeep, placed the Grach within easy reach, pulled her keffiyeh tight, and swaddled herself in the blanket. The stars out here were bright and beautiful, and she fell asleep with their after-image dancing inside her eyelids.

  * * *

  She awoke to the sound of something knocking against the body of the jeep. She jerked upright with the Grach in hand — and recoiled at the overwhelming smell of dung. A curious gazelle had come to investigate the jeep, and after evacuating itself next to a rear wheel it was rubbing its horns against the metal in curiosity.

  After shooing the animal off she made her own ablutions at the foot of the rock formation, emptied a fuel canister into the tank, and resumed driving. Hunger pangs cramped her stomach, and she remembered she hadn’t eaten since late afternoon the day before. But while she had water, she hadn’t brought food. She didn’t intend to be out here more than half a day.

  East by southeast, straight as a die except when she had to skirt hills or rocks. After two hours, she slowed and began to pay more attention to the landscape. Nothing looked familiar, and for the first time in three days her emotions threatened to overwhelm her. What had she been thinking? Of course nothing looked familiar. Even if she’d set off from the site of the old Allied base, she’d never find it. The base site itself would have been cleared and lost to the desert long ago. Worse, she didn’t follow the same path on her return drive, escaping the Russians and driving through pitch dark. After she abandoned the jeep, it took her another day to get close enough to the base to be spotted by an American patrol, a friendly bunch who kept calling her “real hardcore.” When they discovered the British were coming to whisk her away, they gave her a stars-and-stripes patch. Bridge still had it, but it was stuffed at the back of a drawer she never used, so she didn’t have to look at it.

  Light glinted off metal to the east. Steel girders, reaching for the sun from behind a group of low hills. Bridge let out an involuntary cry of surprise, and turne
d the wheel.

  Was it the same place? The same abandoned settlement she’d driven through that night three years ago, trying to escape the Russians? It looked the same, but it had been so dark, and there were so few identifying features. She stopped the jeep and got out, looking around. Wherever this was, nobody had lived here for a long time. Sand drifts leaned against the breezeblock walls and buried the bases of girders. She walked between the half-finished buildings, pulling the keffiyeh over her face as air currents whipped around hard corners, filling the air with sand and dust.

  There. To the north, twisted metal visible against the sky. She walked faster, turned a corner, and looked up a street on the perimeter of the settlement. Close to her, an outer wall with a row of bricks knocked out, the same height as a jeep tailgate. And there, further up the street, under the shadow of the twisted girders — rubble and wreckage, half-buried by shifting sands and shattered breezeblocks. Here and there were bones, gnawed clean by scavengers. Mangled steel jutted from the ground, pools of rubber melted and reformed under the desert sun, reflecting off shards of blasted glass.

  Bridge took a dozen pictures with the solid state micro camera, then climbed back in the jeep and drove north, following what she hoped was the same path she’d taken that night. After the settlement, the jeep had lasted no more than a quarter of an hour before a bullet hole emptied the fuel tank, and she abandoned it to continue on foot. Fifteen minutes’ drive wasn’t that far. It had to be around here somewhere.

  68

  Eighteen hours into the surveillance tapes, Steve Wicker was starting to regret asking Patel if he could liaise with Five on Andrea Thomson’s case.

  Their visit to SignalAir, and the startup’s possible link to drone technology, had seemed an obvious lead at the time. If Nigel Marsh and his company were some kind of front, as Andrea had suspected, then the possibility they could be connected to the ID theft drone purchases had stirred in Steve’s gut. It wasn’t enough to arrest anyone, but it was more than enough for him to start investigating.