Did the Americans take all of the hardware with them from the house?'
'Yes.'
'Did the Americans capture any of the occupants from the house?'
'Yes. I saw three.'
'Did the Maliskia then manage to take any of the hardware or occupants from the Americans?'
She was like a doctor working through a list of symptoms with a patient.
'Not the occupants. They got one of the wagons that contained some hardware, for sure.'
She nodded slowly. We joined a small crowd at a crossing, waiting for the green man to illuminate, even though there was no traffic to stop us all crossing.
I whispered into her ear. 'This is bullshit, Liv. I want Val here, with the money, then I'll hand everything over and fuck off and leave all of you to it.'
My rhetoric was having no effect on her whatsoever. We crossed the main drag to the sound of the warbling signal, heading for the cobblestoned pedestrian shopping area.
'That, Nick, will not happen. He will not come, for the simple reason that you haven't anything to trade, have you?' She spoke very evenly.
'Now, please answer my questions. This is very important. For everyone, including you.'
Fuck her, I wasn't waiting for any more questions. Besides, she was right again. 'Why did the Americans hit the house? Whatever we were going in for belongs to them, doesn't it? It's not commercial, it's state.'
She treated me to her best Mr. Spock look as I dragged her along.
'Turn right here.'
I turned the corner. We were on one of the shopping streets.
Streetcars, cars, and trucks splashed through the slush.
'The Americans were NSA, Nick.'
Oh fuck. My heart sank to hear my suspicion confirmed and the pain returned to my chest. I wanted money, but not that badly. This was a big boy fuckup. Those people were the real government of America. 'Are you sure?'
She nodded. 'They also hit my house last night about two hours after you left.'
'How did you get away?'
She flicked at the ends of her hair. 'By having a very cold and long night out on the lake.'
'How did they know to hit you?'
'They must have been guided to the house, but I don't know how. Now please, you are just wasting time and we don't have a lot of it.'
I didn't even notice a van passing and giving my jeans and her coat the good news with some slush. I was busy feeling more depressed than pissed now. The NSA. I really was in the shit.
She gave me more directions. 'Cross here.'
We waited like sheep again until a little green man told us to cross.
Jaywalking must carry the death penalty in this country. Moving on green, it was safe to talk again.
'Tell me, did you or Tom use e-mail, telephone, fax, or anything like that while you were at the house?'
'Of course not, no.'
And then I remembered what had happened at the airport. 'Wait. Tom did. Tom '
She turned her head sharply. 'What? What did Tom do?'
'He used e-mail. He sent an e-mail to someone in the U.K.'
The calm, controlled look drained from her face. She stood still, pushing me away as people skipped around what looked like a domestic spat just about to erupt.
'I told you both not to do that!'
I pulled her back toward me, as if I was in command, leading her down the street. She composed herself, and finally, very calmly, she said, 'So, it was Tom who brought the Americans here.' She pointed to the right, down another cobblestoned street. 'Valentin wants me to show you something, then I am to make you an offer that your pocket and conscience will not let you refuse. Come. This way.'
As we turned I decided to keep quiet about the fact that it wasn't necessarily Tom's fault. E4 might have followed me from the moment I left her apartment in London, or kept tabs on us via Tom's credit card.
But fuck it; I couldn't do anything about that now.
We'd ended up by the harbor. A fish and vegetable market had been set up on the dock, steam billowing from under plastic awnings that protected the traders and their merchandise from the snow.
'Over there, Nick.'
My eyes followed hers, hitting on what looked like the world's largest Victorian conservatory a couple of hundred yards away from the market.
'Let's go and get out of the cold, Nick. I think it's time you knew what's really going on.'
26
The teahouse was hot and filled with the aroma of coffee and cigarettes. We bought food and drinks from the counter and headed for a vacant table in a corner.
With our coats over a spare seat and her hat now removed, it was even more obvious that Liv had had a bad night. We must both have looked pretty rough compared with the American tourists who were beginning to fill the place, fresh off the cruise liner I could see down in the harbor. The sharp hiss of the cappuccino machine punctuated their conversations, which for some reason were louder than everybody else's.
The Finns seemed to speak very quietly.
Our table was by a grand piano and partly screened by potted palms. The less conspicuous the better. Liv leaned forward and took a sip of tea from her glass while I shoved a salmon sandwich down my throat. She watched me for a while, then asked, 'Nick, what do you know of the U.K./U.S.A. agreement?'
A camera flash bounced around as the tourists posed with their tea glasses and big wedges of chocolate cake. I took a swig of tea. I knew the bones of it. Set up by Britain and America in the late 1940s, since when Canada, Australia, and New Zealand had also become part of the club, the agreement basically covered the pooling of intelligence on mutual enemies. Beyond that, however, the member countries also used their resources to spy on each other: In particular, the U.K. spied on American citizens in the U.S.A.' and the Americans spied on British citizens in the U.K.' and then they traded. Technically it wasn't illegal, just a very neat way of getting round strict civil liberties legislation.
Liv's eyes followed three elderly Americans in multicolored down jackets as they squeezed past our table, loaded down with tea trays and elegant paper shopping bags full of Finnish crafts. They didn't seem able to make a decision about where to sit.
Liv looked back at me. 'Nick, the three men in the house last night were Finns. They were engaged in accessing a technology called Echelon, which is at the very heart of the agreement.'
'You mean you were trying to get Tom and me to access state secrets for the Russian mafia?'
She looked calmly around the other tables and took another sip of tea.
She shook her head. 'It's not like that at all, Nick. I didn't explain everything to you before, for reasons that I'm sure you will understand, but Valentin wants commercial information, that's all.
Believe me, Nick, you were not stealing secrets, state or military.
Quite the contrary: You were helping to stop others from doing precisely that.'
'So how come the NSA were involved?'
'They simply wanted their toy back. I promise you, Valentin has no interest in the West's military secrets. He can get those whenever he wants; it's not exactly difficult, as I'll demonstrate to you shortly.'
She glanced at the Americans to make sure they weren't listening, then back at me. 'What do you know of Echelon?'
I knew it was some kind of electronic eavesdropping system run by GCHQ, intercepting transmissions and then sifting them for information, a bit like an Internet search engine. However, I shrugged as if I knew nothing at all, I was more interested in hearing what she knew.
Liv sounded as if she was reading from the Echelon sales brochure.
'It's a global network of computers, run by all five nations of the U.K./U.S.A. agreement. Every second of every day, Echelon automatically sifts through millions of intercepted faxes, e-mails, and cell phone calls, searching
