“No, stay where you are,” replied Dunston. “I assume Giles was asking in case of emergency.”
“Exactly so,” said Giles, smiling. “I just want to know how quickly you can get there if Bridge needs you.”
25
If anyone had asked the clerk to describe the man who came to pick up package delivery #48 that day, he would have shrugged and pointed to the CCTV camera in the corner of the front office.
But if anyone had analysed the footage from that camera, they would be disappointed.
The man was white, of average height and slim build. He wore a large white baseball cap and aviator-style sunglasses that obscured much of his face, while a sandy blond beard obscured the rest. Apart from the cap, his clothes were wholly unremarkable — black t-shirt, slim blue jeans, black Chelsea boots. He wore a black messenger bag over his shoulder. The only thing that separated him from London’s army of young male baristas, barmen, and buzzfeeders was the lack of visible tattoos on his skin.
It didn’t matter. Nobody would request the footage from that day.
The man had exited King’s Cross, noting once again how much it had changed since his last time in England. He crossed the square and entered the parcel-holding office. The office was a destination for deliveries from Amazon, eBay, and the like, for people who were not at home during the day. Instead of doing the missed-parcel dance, the recipients could set this holding office, which was always open during work hours, as the delivery destination. For a small fee the office would hold on to the package for a couple of days, until the customer had time to collect it before catching their train home.
The man with the sandy beard wasn’t catching a train home.
The clerk checked his ID, typed his name into the system, and located the package. The man paid the fee with cash, then the clerk fetched the package and handed it over the counter. The man took it, thanked the clerk, and left. It was a decent-sized package, maybe half a metre on all sides, but light.
If anyone checked the name to which the delivery had been addressed, they would find it was as false as the name registered to the pay-as-you-go Oyster card he’d used for today’s travel. And if they checked the name used for the Amazon account that placed the order, they would find it belonged to a sixty-two-year-old man from Surrey who barely used his computer. Everything about the transaction was false, just like the other names, identities, and travel cards the man had used more than a dozen times over the past two months, at other addresses and pickup locations around London and the Southeast.
With the package under his arm, he caught a cab at the nearby rank and gave the driver an address in Shoreditch.
If anyone had stolen the package — well, if anyone had tried to steal the package, the man would have shot them with the unregistered and untraceable automatic pistol concealed in his messenger bag. But if by some miracle they escaped, and looked inside the package, all they would find was a toy; a modern gadget that anyone, anywhere, could simply buy. It was a small, black, polycarbonate quadcopter.
Otherwise known as a ‘drone’.
26
“Mange ton cul, connard! Dégage avec tes putains de moutons!”
Bridge checked her rear-view mirror. The car was still there, two behind. She couldn’t make out the driver’s features, couldn’t tell whether the figure behind the wheel was a man or woman. But they’d been following her for the past fifteen minutes, and now both she and her shadow were stuck in a stationary queue of vehicles while a languid French farmer led his sheep across the road. Not for the first time that day, Bridge wondered what the hell she was doing here.
But Giles hadn’t given her much choice. When he’d dropped the bombshell that he intended to send her to Agenbeux to conduct the mole hunt, Bridge had frozen. For the next ten minutes she listened in silence, only occasionally nodding her head, as Giles and Dunston discussed her cover as a ‘workplace satisfaction inspector’ from London, the parameters of the hunt, and Henri Mourad’s support role. She was to relay all findings to Henri in the first instance, and let him dig into anything that looked unusual, to keep her one step removed from any suspicious activity.
It occurred to her that Giles had put the groundwork of this together in the ten minutes she’d spent sitting alone in Broom Eleven, after looking over the laptop clone with her. While she’d been wondering if she was about to be fired, Giles had been preparing Chisholme, Dunston, and Mourad for the Exphoria read-in. Now he was planning the op more or less on the fly, making fast decisions about mission procedure and protocol. As frustrating as she sometimes found him, Bridge admired his ability to do that. She liked structure, plans, and logical systems. She’d never seen improvisation as one of her core skills.
As they wound down the initial brief, Giles turned to her and said, “Everything OK? All on board?” But something in Bridge’s facial expression must have made him finally realise she hadn’t spoken for some time. He turned to Dunston and Henri and said, “Thanks for your attention, chaps. Let’s leave it there for now, and I’ll be in touch later today.” He cut the video link with Paris, and Dunston left the room with barely a nod.
Bridge and Giles were alone, in silence. She got up and paced around the room, struggling to put her anger
