When the smoke cleared the gathered ministers, dignitaries, buyers, and dealers in the viewing stands stood and applauded, before filing out into the marquee for champagne and vol-au-vents. Later, Sir Terence and his French counterpart made short speeches to thank the attendees for their support, and reminded them of the official launch reception tomorrow evening in London. Then they all departed, car by car, to their offices, homes, or hotels.
Everything had gone perfectly, and Exphoria was set to be a roaring success. As his driver returned him to his home in Hampshire, Sir Terence dared to wonder if there might be a peerage in it for him.
77
“I don’t understand. Why didn’t he try anything?”
Ciaran and Monica were shutting down, ready to leave. The CTA unit, along with Giles and several other departments, had all stayed at Vauxhall throughout the Exphoria demonstration. Even after the main event, while the drinks reception took place, they kept searching through all the data they could, and waited for word that something, anything, was kicking off.
But nothing did. Finally the attending MI5 liaison phoned Andrea Thomson, to inform her that everyone except security and maintenance personnel had left the airfield without incident. Andrea called Giles, who called Emily Dunston and C, before walking into the CTA office and telling the team himself. Bowman hadn’t tried anything, and the demonstration had gone without a hitch.
“Maybe he’s cut his losses and scarpered while he can,” said Monica, shrugging on her jacket. “Whatever; it doesn’t matter. The demo went fine, the drone software works, everyone’s happy.”
Ciaran buttoned up his own coat and came to lean against Bridge’s desk. “She’s right,” he said.
“Wow, are you feeling OK?” Monica laughed. “Can you say that again while I record it?”
Ciaran ignored her. “There’s nothing more for him to do, Bridge. If your man got enough of the software, he’ll turn up on the black market trying to sell it, and then we can send an OIT after him. If he didn’t get enough, which, to be honest, is my guess, then he’s gone to ground and we’ll never hear from him again. Either way you’re grand, and you should go home and relax for once.”
Bridge chewed on her lightsaber pen and mumbled goodbye as they left, still staring unfocused at her screen and turning things over in her mind. Something still wasn’t right, and she couldn’t shake the notion she was missing an obvious connection.
Giles poked his head round the door, saw she was the only one left, and sighed. “Go home, Bridge. In fact, take tomorrow off. You of all people could do with the extra sleep.” She glared at him in silence until he backed out of the door.
But twenty minutes later, on the northbound Victoria line, she resigned herself to the wisdom of her colleagues. She really did need some sleep, and the Exphoria demo really had gone off without a hitch, let alone an attack. Bowman hadn’t hacked anything, hadn’t planted a bomb, hadn’t sabotaged the drone. He hadn’t done anything at all, despite the fact that he almost certainly had multiple state-of-the-art prosumer drones and a packet of radioactive material at his disposal.
Why bother, if he wasn’t planning to use them? Why go to the trouble of the ID thefts, the smuggling, the secret purchases? It didn’t make sense that they could be a red herring. The point of a distraction was to be so big and noticeable that people couldn’t ignore it, yet Bowman had worked hard to cover his tracks every step of the way. If the Exphoria demonstration wasn’t the target, what else could be in his sights? Was Bowman running two completely separate missions at once, and their only connection just happened to be drones? In a way it seemed the most likely answer, but Bridge couldn’t swallow it. If she’d learned one thing in the past eight years at SIS, it was the alarming lack of true coincidences in the world.
Two hours later she was still thinking about it, while she shovelled ready-meal vegetable pasta into her mouth with zero enthusiasm. She reconsidered everything she knew about Bowman, and now realised it was entirely second-hand. Steve Wicker had found the ID fraud; Andrea Thomson had followed him from the meet with Novak; they’d visited ‘Nigel Marsh’ at the Shoreditch office together; and now the only tangible record they had of that office was a dump of network traffic, most of which was completely uninteresting and useless because Bowman’s technology efforts had all been centred around wifi, both the real stuff and his physics-breaking ‘quantum state’ rubbish.
At three in the morning, as Through the Night played quietly on her iPhone, something from Bridge’s insomniac episode two nights ago kept scratching at the gates of her mind. But she couldn’t find the key.
She slept until one the next afternoon, and while she woke still tired, it was just her normal state of perpetual tiredness rather than the exhaustion of the past two days. She brushed her teeth, showered, put an old Year of No Light CD in the stereo — her computer was full of MP3s, but she’d never got round
