Out here in the silence of the desert, the jeep’s engine was a cacophony of white noise, drowning out all other sounds. But somewhere in the roar Bridge detected a high-pitched keening, something like…a siren? A motor, spinning up? The sound faltered, broke, and then she recognised her own voice, screaming into the wind. Tears filled her eyes. Whether they were born of the stinging sand grit blown into her face or genuine self-loathing, she neither knew nor cared.
Until the Russians shot out her windscreen from behind.
“Over there!” Adrian leaned across her, pointing to a collection of shanty houses and temporary structures up ahead, sheltered behind hills rising to the north.
Adrian?
Bridge stared at the empty seat, knew he couldn’t really have been there only a moment before. But she didn’t argue. She turned hard, wrestling with the jeep’s bad joke of a suspension as it threatened to tip over and roll the vehicle. More shots flew past, each with a tiny supersonic crack as it whistled close to her head, but none hit.
The settlement was abandoned, but now that she was among it, the structures didn’t seem so temporary. Some were made from breezeblock, and several had second floors held up by metal scaffold. Bridge wondered how big the area was, whether she could lose her pursuers in here somewhere. The jeep created an enormous dust cloud behind her as she turned through the settlement’s makeshift streets, and she hoped it would be enough to make the Russians take a wrong turn, or give up the chase.
As if in answer, bullets slammed into the jeep’s rear. She yanked hard on the wheel to avoid a stone wall rising out of the ground ahead, twin-paddling the brake and accelerator to drift through the corner. The vehicle’s back end clipped the wall, grinding the tailgate in a frenzy of sparks and groaning metal, but then she was out of it, speeding away. Behind her, the Russians took the corner more slowly, avoiding collision but losing ground.
Perfect.
“Grenade, now!” she shouted, holding out a hand.
Then remembered, again, that Adrian wasn’t there. Bridge fumbled in her jacket pocket, fingers closing around the last of his ICE grenades. She gripped it, pulled the pin with her teeth, and dropped the grenade out of the driver’s side. The Russians shot at her again, but she ducked down into her seat, counting off.
Three. Two. One.
The grenade exploded under the back half of the pursuing jeep, blowing out the rear tyres and killing one Russian soldier instantly. A second later the fuel tank caught and erupted, tossing the others like rag dolls into a breezeblock wall. The wall collapsed, burying the burning wreckage.
Bridge glanced over her shoulder. No survivors.
Then she hit a low hill, and the jeep sailed ten feet into the air before crashing down into the scrub outside the settlement.
“Watch out, BB! Bloody women drivers,” Adrian laughed from the passenger seat, wincing in pain as the jeep bounced and rattled through the scrub. He’d christened her ‘BB’ the moment he discovered she was a French woman named Brigitte. She’d asked him not to. He did it anyway.
“Don’t call me that,” she grunted, turning to face him. But he still wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t. He never had been. Adrian was dead, lying in the server room rubble, lost forever.
Her eyes stung with tears. She cried out, unleashing pent-up adrenaline in a wordless scream that was lost to the empty landscape, drowned under the waves of wind and engine noise.
She wiped her eyes with a filthy sleeve and clung hard to the wheel.
28
If anyone had asked for her first impressions, Bridge would have said security at the Guichetech facility could be tighter.
It wasn’t terrible, exactly. The grounds were surrounded by a security fence topped with razor wire, with only a single gate, and being in this relatively flat, featureless region of the country afforded the location good all-round visibility. It would be almost impossible to sneak up on the facility without being seen. At the gate her car was swept for bugs, and upon entering the lobby of the facility itself, she and her briefcase were put through a scanning setup similar to airport security. But like that security, Bridge knew it was mostly theatre. Someone determined enough, sneaky enough, could get a weapon through if it was disguised and placed well enough. Then there was the social engineering aspect, which didn’t just apply to hacks and stolen passwords. She wondered if the security guards here were paid well enough to resist bribes.
Getting something into the facility wasn’t their prime concern, though. They were much more worried about people taking things out. According to the operational procedure files Giles had let her access, random searches, scans, and bag checks were conducted every night, and on some evenings the entire workforce was subjected to them before leaving. Bridge would have preferred everyone being searched every single day, but with almost a hundred and thirty staff that would be extremely inconvenient, and seriously affect morale.
Yesterday, before leaving Vauxhall, she’d asked Monica to monitor the newsgroups, in case any new messages were posted while Bridge was in theatre. After the last message spoke of ‘possible compromise’ they couldn’t be sure the ASCII code would ever be used again. But if there really was a mole, the approaching end of the Exphoria programme would almost certainly mean one or more meetings and handoffs had to be arranged somehow.
However, Monica had a mountain of her own work to attend to — “Sorry, North Korea’s trying to plant one-click spyware on cabinet-member laptops again, let me hand you to Lisa,” — and so she’d briefed Lisa Hebden, a former ‘Doughnut’ colleague of Monica’s at GCHQ, the government’s electronic surveillance centre. Everyone called it the ‘Doughnut’ because of the building’s flying-saucer shape, which always made Bridge wonder why
