Flight Risk (An Ingrid Skyberg Mystery Book 7)

by Eva Hudson

“What do you mean, ‘locked’?” Hayes asked.

  Jen scrunched up her features. “I’ve never come across it before. Guess when they shut down Ingrid’s alias, they, like, sealed all Natalya’s files.”

  Ingrid’s scalp tightened. “How do we unlock them?”

  Jen shrugged. “Dunno. But I’ll totally find out.” She picked up her phone and started dialing.

  “Listen,” Ingrid pushed her chair backwards, rolling over Berryman’s feet. She didn’t apologize. “You ever worked undercover?”

  Jealousy fluttered across Hayes’s features. “No, I have not.”

  “Well, when I was undercover, I worked on sensitive material. It’s understandable that the Bureau will have classified it.” Ingrid turned back to her assistant. “Jen, can you please show Sergeant Hayes the diary for the previous month? Or any month from the past two years?”

  Jen tucked the phone under her chin and scrolled through the diary to reveal intermittent blocks of gray.

  “You see?” Anger infused Ingrid’s voice. “It’s not like it’s just those two days I can’t account for right now.”

  Hayes wrinkled her nose. “So, what was this UC gig?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.” Ingrid’s tone was increasingly indignant.

  “Then who here can vouch these blanks correspond with your UC work?”

  Ingrid and Jen sighed simultaneously. “Marshall,” Ingrid said.

  “And who is he?”

  Ingrid wanted to let out a scream. Was there anything else that wasn’t going to go her way today? “He was my boss. He was the one I told you about. He was murdered last month.”

  Berryman’s eyes narrowed. “You said it was your ex-fiancé who was murdered.”

  Jen piped up. “He was also, like, her ex.”

  Hayes took a step back. “So, you’re saying you weren’t involved in the accident, even though this footage shows you were the one who rode your bike out of this building the night before and back a few hours afterward? And you are also saying the only person who can give you an alibi is dead?”

  Ingrid’s jaw began to tremble and Lexi leaped into the fray. “Detectives,” she said, making sure their attention was on her and not Jen’s screen before continuing. “I will undertake to get you access to my client’s locked diary. I believe you wish to take her motorcycle for forensic analysis, which she consents to.”

  Ingrid hadn’t, but if Lexi was going to make this carousel stop spinning, she’d go along with it.

  “I am a lawyer. My client is a Special Agent with the FBI. We have both taken professional oaths. I am employed by the State Department of the United States government. Agent Skyberg is an officer of the Department of Justice.” She tilted her head. “You know what ladies. I think you can trust us to act in good faith here because we really don’t want no diplomatic incident. I suggest you do what you gotta do. Meantime, we will bend over backwards to get you gals what you need, and my client and I will attend an interview at your station house whenever you like.” Lexi tipped her head the other way. “What d’you say about that?”

  Ingrid felt the pressure inside her head decrease with every word that came out of her lawyer’s mouth.

  Hayes jutted out her jaw.

  “You ain’t really gonna take my girl into custody, are you now?” Lexi’s stare was intimidating.

  Berryman looked to Hayes for a decision. She gave a very good impression of this being her first day out of uniform.

  “You’ll have bail conditions,” Hayes said.

  “Naturally,” Lexi said.

  “And because you were intercepted at Heathrow, you will be deemed a flight risk. You’ll have to surrender your passport.”

  “No problem.”

  No problem? A piece of Ingrid still thought she might be getting on a flight later in the day. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Hayes. She just wanted her out of her sight. “Fine,” she managed. Anything to make the sergeant disappear.

  “And you’ll have to report weekly to a police station.”

  Just say what you need to say and get the hell out of my office. Ingrid’s patience was hanging by a thread.

  “So, we’re agreed, then?” Lexi said.

  Ingrid grunted her consent like a petulant teenager.

  “Okay then, let’s get this sorted.”

  When the paperwork was signed and Ingrid’s passport had been seized, Lexi offered to escort Hayes and Berryman from the building, leaving Ingrid and Jen alone.

  “Bet you missed me, huh?”

  But Jen wasn’t feeling playful. Her lip trembled and her eyes threatened tears. “Why were you at Heathrow, Ingrid?” Her voice was suffused with as much vexation as Ingrid had ever heard from Jen. “You were just going to leave?”

  A lump rose in Ingrid’s throat. It hadn’t even occurred to her that leaving might hurt Jen. “I can explain––”

  “You weren’t even going to say goodbye?” Jen’s face was blotchy with anger. “No warning?”

  Ingrid’s eyes stung with tears. Jen’s fury had taken her by surprise. She didn’t know how to respond. “Jen, I’m sorry, I would have––”

  “You’re right. I did miss you. I have also been worried about you.” Jen wiped away a tear. “I stupidly thought you might have missed me too.” Jen stood up. “One day, Ingrid Skyberg, you are going to realize that there are people in this world who actually care about you.”

  Jen’s shoulders shook as she marched out of the office. Ingrid knew she should run after her, she knew that was what a caring, compassionate, remorseful human being would do, yet all she was capable of was slumping down into her chair. She let out a groan and shut her eyes.

  This was not how her day was meant to go. How had she gone from making the decision to walk out on the embassy and the Bureau to this? Now she was trapped. She couldn’t leave until she’d cleared her name. Resentful didn’t come close. Anger burned in the base of her stomach.

  “Oh, Jesus, no. Not that too.”

  The thought that the Bureau would force her back into therapy––why are you so angry, Ingrid? How do you feel about Marshall now, Ingrid?––made her jaw clench. But those emotions paled against the shame she felt at walking out on Jen. Everything else had been out of her hands, but not saying goodbye to Jen was on her. That had been her choice, and Ingrid knew she was going to have to find a way to make it up to her.

  She wiped her eyes.

  The CCTV image was still on her screen. Something wasn’t right about it. She glanced across at Jen’s desk. Either the diary on Jen’s screen was wrong, or the CCTV on hers was. The two pieces of information contradicted each other, didn’t they? Ingrid scratched her chin.

  When she was undercover, as the diary on Jen’s monitor showed she was, Ingrid had operated under a very strict protocol that prevented her from riding her own bike. To be absolutely sure her real identity stayed secret, whenever Ingrid left the embassy to become Natalya, she always wore a different set of leathers and rode a rental bike.

  If she was undercover, then she simply couldn’t have been riding the Triumph.

  She stared at her monitor. Her mouth suddenly dry. The only explanation was that the footage on her screen had been faked. Not only did someone want to frame her for Matthew Harding’s death, they had hacked into the embassy’s security servers to do it.

  And she had thought her day couldn’t get any worse.

  4

  Ingrid showered in the embassy gym and returned to her office. She’d found enough deodorant and hair product in the bottom of her locker to make herself look respectable. Jen wasn’t at her desk, which was probably just as well as Ingrid hadn’t yet figured out how to apologize.

  “Oh. Hi.” Maisie Millane, one of the counterterrorism agents, popped her head through the door. “When did you get back?”

  “Friday night.”

  “And how was it?” Millane wrote a note for Jen on her desk. “Marshall’s funeral?”

  “Oh, pretty awful
,” Ingrid said, not wanting to have such an intimate conversation with someone she didn’t really trust. “His parents are strict Baptists so… very traditional.”

  Maisie perched on the edge of Jen’s desk. “We were all thinking of you, you know.”

  Ingrid didn’t know how to respond.

  “We sent flowers. I don’t suppose you noticed if his parents received them?”

  Ingrid scrunched up her features and gave a half shrug. “There were a lot of flowers.”

  “Well, he was a young man. And the way he died…” Millane trailed off as Ingrid’s memories returned to the sight of Marshall lying in a pool of blood.

  “Sorry,” Millane said. Then, deliberately changing the subject, she waved the note she’d just written in the air. “I think I found what Jen’s looking for.”

  Ingrid said nothing

  “She’s been searching for a pair of earrings for her wedding. They’re pink pearls. Apparently the First Lady wore them at the G7, and I think I spotted something similar at a jeweler in Clarges Street yesterday.”

  This was more than Millane had spoken to Ingrid in the past year, and it was making her feel uncomfortable.

  “And didn’t you go to another funeral while you were home?”

  Ingrid was surprised Millane had paid enough attention to have noticed. “Yep, Agent Rennie. He’d been over here working a case.”

  Millane looked down at her hands. “Of course, I’m sorry, I forgot. He was killed right in front of you, wasn’t he?” She made an awkward face. “I didn’t mean to be so insensitive.” She used a change in tone to shift the conversation forward. “Have you heard who’s getting Marshall’s job?”

  Ingrid hadn’t given it any thought. “No. Have they appointed someone?”

  Millane’s eyes narrowed. “So, it isn’t you then?”

  “What?” Ingrid spluttered. “Not a snowball’s chance.”

  “Oh. I kinda figured you’d be a shoo-in.”

  Ingrid’s eyes widened. “Really?”

  “Sure, why not?” Millane smiled before softly making her way out into the bullpen, leaving Ingrid to shake her head.

  What just happened? One of the CT agents was A) being nice, and B) suggesting she was in line for a promotion? Ingrid blew out hard. The only thing she’d be getting was a pink slip if she was convicted of the hit and run. Ingrid glanced at the open door. She really, really hoped she wasn’t getting Millane’s sympathy because everyone thought she was still hung up on Marshall.

  Ingrid had no undercover work anymore, no boss to assign her cases, and no ongoing investigation. Until someone of a higher rank told her otherwise, her priority was finding out who had killed Matthew Harding. She opened a browser and Googled him.

  The top return was his corporate profile at the financial services firm he worked for. It was still written in the present tense. The next entry was a report on the accident on a website called Buckinghamshire Today. Ingrid took a moment, then clicked.

  Matthew Harding had been thirty-eight, married with three kids and judging by the photos illustrating the report, was a man with an envious future ahead of him. He was a marathon runner and a tennis club champion. He had been a senior executive on a substantial salary, living in the kind of house most people could only dream of.

  Ingrid stared at the images. He was a young, fit, man who she’d expect to survive being struck by a bike, albeit with broken bones and a long recovery. It wasn’t like a truck had run him down. He must have hit his head, she reasoned.

  Why might someone might want him dead? A jealous mistress. A jealous mistress’s husband. A debt. A deal gone wrong. A dormant grudge. Nothing in her search revealed why anyone might want to kill such a decent, likeable man. After an hour of scanning Facebook posts and financial records, the most likely explanation was that his death really had been a tragic accident.

  So why would someone try to frame her for it?

  Ingrid put in requests via the police database for a transcript of the 999 call. Then she asked to see the ANPR logs for herself, both from the night before and the morning after Harding was killed. She also requested the images taken from the ANPR cameras. She knew it would be hard to prove who was behind a full-face helmet in a grainy black-and-white photograph, but there was a chance those photographs would definitively rule her out.

  The CCTV image of her leaving the parking lot was still on her screen. The more she looked at it, the more troubling it was. Out in the bullpen, keyboards hammered and printers spewed out reports, but they didn’t mask the sound of her own heavy breaths as her brain tried to parse the facts. The image itself was real, but getting footage of her riding in and out on her Triumph wouldn’t be hard because she did it most days. However, seamlessly splicing footage and doctoring the security record of the United States embassy should be virtually impossible. Ingrid chewed the inside of her cheek. It was one of the most fortified buildings in the world. The embassy’s systems were among the most robust in the world. A chill scurried over her skin. In all likelihood the person who had set her up was on the inside of the firewall. That meant it was someone inside the embassy.

  Unnerved, Ingrid got to her feet and paced the office, her sneakers slipping on the worn carpet tiles. The embassy was due to move into a brand-new building, so for several years maintaining the existing premises had been a low priority. The threadbare carpet and missing ceiling tiles lent the place a decidedly neglected feel. The only new thing in the room was the stationery.

  Ingrid peered through the slats of the Venetian blind at a small gathering of protestors braving the rain in Grosvenor Square below. Their handmade placards demanded the US stop selling weapons to Saudi Arabia.

  She thought about what Lexi had said, that any number of people could have gotten hold of the Triumph’s key after the fire in her apartment. She needed to speak to someone who could tell her who had been in the saddle on the eighteenth, and that person was Steve, the former garage manager. He’d always loved her bike and he would have noticed if anyone had touched it, let alone taken it out of the building. She picked up the phone and called HR.

  “This is Agent Skyberg with the Legal Attaché Program.”

  “This is Barnaby Jackson. Are you calling about the Deputy Assistant Director?”

  “Um, no. No, I’m not.”

  “Only we’ve had a few calls asking if we’ve made an appointment.”

  “And have you?”

  “I wouldn’t be authorized to tell you one way or another.” The HR executive sounded a little too pleased with himself.

  “I’m actually looking for the contact details of an employee who recently quit. I need to speak to him urgently. It’s Steve. Thompsett is his last name, I think. He worked in the garage downstairs.”

  “Ah, now that I can’t help you with. Data protection, you see.”

  “This is a criminal investigation. Doesn’t that make a difference?”

  “Not unless you get a subpoena.”

  Somehow Ingrid managed to keep the sarcasm from her voice when she thanked Barnaby for his help. She pulled out a drawer. Years beforehand she’d been given a print-out of emergency embassy contacts. It was just possible Steve’s cell was on the list.

  Jen had tidied Ingrid’s drawer as well as her desk. The mélange of paperclips, Post-Its and charging cables had been ordered into a neat grid of easily identifiable objects. There was no dog-eared list of numbers. Ingrid closed the drawer, then immediately opened it again. Something had caught her eye.

  Her Russian passport. It had been issued to her undercover alias, and presumably should have been withdrawn, or at least locked away when Natalya was retired. Ingrid didn’t know who she should hand it to. It was only when she was keying Steve’s name into various police databases it occurred to her it probably should have been surrendered to Thames Valley Police.

  She found a contact number for Steve in the Met’s system, which Ingrid duly rang. A recorded message announced the number was unavailable. She pull
ed up Facebook, where finding Steve proved to be a cinch. Their eleven mutual friends—all embassy workers—allowed Ingrid to see enough of his profile to understand why he had left his job so suddenly. He had moved to Portugal. It was the middle of December and there he was on the Algarve, wearing short sleeves and drinking beer in the sunshine at a bar called Monkeys and Peanuts. The comments showed Ingrid wasn’t the only one who was envious. She sent him a message and a friend request saying she needed his help.

  Even if Steve could testify that someone else had been riding, what she really needed—what all successful prosecutions required––was a witness to the accident itself. She wasn’t going to find one of those sitting at her desk. Ingrid checked the clock on the wall. Almost two o’clock. She glanced at the window. There were still a couple hours of daylight left. If she hurried, it would be worth it.

  She reached under her desk for her helmet before remembering Thames Valley Police had taken her gear for analysis. She’d have to get a car. Ingrid instinctively dialed the garage, but hung up before anyone could answer. Until she knew who had breached the embassy’s security, she couldn’t alert anyone in the building to the fact she was investigating the case herself. Taking an embassy car with a tracker on it to the scene of Harding’s accident was out of the question.

  She rang Hertz, and five minutes later walked out of the office. She stopped at the threshold to the bullpen and turned back. She needed to leave a note. Disappearing again without explanation wouldn’t do anything to heal the rift with Jen.

  After she had written her own message, Ingrid picked up the note Millane had left. She really didn’t like that a member of the counterterrorism unit had a better idea of what Jen wanted for her wedding than she did. Pink pearl earrings? Really? Wasn’t that very conventional? Even for Jen? The First Lady’s school marmish fashion choices were responsible for her tabloid epithet of ‘Principal Brady’. Surely that wasn’t the bridal look Jen was going for?

  No matter. If anybody was going to get those earrings for Jen, it was damn well going to be her.