So as the young man approached the bottom of his glass, Andrea was ready. Giles’ joke about her being able to break into someone’s phone from across the room wasn’t entirely a joke. She couldn’t quite do that, but with the right gadget she could have cloned the young man’s mobile. Not from across the room, though. She’d have to get close, and that would almost certainly mean flirting with him. And while she’d learned over the years to feel less weird about doing that with men, and could now make a seemingly-real attempt, the bigger problem was that she and Giles had acted as if they were an item. If she played the ‘lonely businesswoman’ angle now, the young man would assume she was cheating, and that would make it almost impossible for her to subsequently tail him in the street. Besides, while cloning his mobile would give access to his GPS, that would only provide his location. It couldn’t give the context of what he was doing at those locations, which Andrea felt was sometimes more important.
But all this was moot, because she didn’t have a cloner unit. What she did have was a reversible jacket, which she turned inside-out when the young man stepped outside, and slipped on as she followed him thirty seconds later.
Of course, all of this assumed Giles was on the level. She was still annoyed at him for letting Brigitte Sharp run around Brockley like an amateur detective, and she didn’t believe for a second that SIS hadn’t scanned everything they could on Mr O’Riordan’s cloned hard drive before forwarding it to her office. On the other hand, they did forward it, and Giles had been open about why he needed help this evening. As she turned to follow the young man, who was now walking east at a fast pace, she made a mental note to have a word with Patel at GCHQ in the morning and remind them who they worked for.
Like Giles, Andrea had expected her target to go straight into the Tube. Was he heading to another meet? Perhaps, but inside the pub she hadn’t once seen him check his watch, suggesting he wasn’t on a schedule. And if these two were indeed stealing secrets from a classified MoD project, they wouldn’t leave their timing to chance.
So perhaps he was done for the day. He might live around here, though she doubted it. Arranging a meet close to your home, even a temporary one, was the last thing a professional would do. Then again, if Andrea found out her rendezvous code had been compromised by a random hacker, she also wouldn’t dream of using that code again, not even with the hacker dead. But these people had. So either they weren’t so professional, or they were so arrogant they assumed killing O’Riordan had removed the threat. And to be fair, it almost had. Without Bridge’s connection to the victim they might never have found the link to Exphoria, and they certainly wouldn’t have known about this meeting.
The young man walked east, through Hoxton and into Shoreditch. He didn’t act like a professional, and she didn’t think she’d been blown, but nevertheless she almost lost him a couple of times. After about fifteen minutes, they turned left at Old Street station. As Andrea took the corner, his grey jacket was nowhere to be seen. She kept walking, scanning intently, and soon saw him on the other side of the road with the jacket slung over his shoulder, exposing a bright blue t-shirt. Simple but effective.
Ten minutes later, weaving through the streets of Shoreditch itself, she lost sight of his cream-coloured woollen cap in a crowd. Andrea’s height was a disadvantage in crowd situations, and the daylight was fading, which didn’t help. So this time she paused, pretending to look at something on her iPhone, while scanning bodies and legs instead. She found him, resumed following, and when the crowds parted saw that he’d removed the woollen cap to free his thick, tousled sandy hair.
All of these changes could be explained. None of them definitively marked him as a professional. Once again, Andrea wondered if they really were following the right people. This was reinforced when the young man reached his destination, an anonymous door set back into the corner of an anonymous building. He used a contactless keycard to enter, and Andrea briefly caught a glimpse of a standard small business lobby — steel, glass, and trendy bare brick. No receptionist; just an elevator.
She couldn’t follow him inside. Even if she’d been able to open the door, stepping into that lobby would blow everything. But as she watched from the other side of the street, and the young man waited in the lobby, she noticed glass panes running the height of the building that showed the elevator’s progress. Andrea watched it descend from the second floor to ground level where the young man stepped inside without a care. Then she watched the elevator rise without stopping to the third floor, top of the building.
She couldn’t risk going over to look at the door for company names; the buildings around here may have been positively Victorian, but there was no question several high-tech security cameras would be watching the main door and lobby, feeding the images to every company inside. Instead she noted the address, and continued walking east until there was no chance at all that the young man could see her from his third-floor window. Then she turned south, and as the Gherkin came into view her iPhone vibrated.
GJB when safe - G
Andrea veered right, toward Liverpool Street station.
40
Lights reflected off the wide, dark water, giving the Thames a glamour and appeal that Giles had never really thought it deserved. By day, it was still just a dirty old river.
He saw Andrea approaching from the north end of the Golden Jubilee Bridge long before she reached him. He’d texted after leaving the St Pancras
