“Bloody far enough,” said Andrea, leaning on the railing. “Hipster boy walked all the way to Shoreditch, and went into an office building. I’ll check on it in the morning, but with the location and everything else, my money’s on a tech startup.”
Giles paused, considering this. “My target walked to St Pancras and hopped on the last Eurostar before I could stop him. He certainly moves like a professional, but I can’t be entirely sure if he made me or not. He didn’t seem to take any specifically evasive manoeuvres.”
“Same here. Hipster took off his coat, and then his hat, which threw me a couple of times. But it could have just been an innocent guy, taking off layers on a warm evening.”
“You mean like you just happened to be wearing a reversible jacket?”
Andrea looked down at her inside-out jacket, then back up at Giles, and laughed as she reached the same conclusion. “It’s exactly what we’d want from our own people, isn’t it? To make closing-door getaways and costume changes look like innocent actions. Yeah, this pair are professionals, all right.”
Giles pulled out his phone and unlocked it. “Here’s further proof, if we needed it.” He swiped to a photograph of an open passport and pinched to zoom in on the picture ID, recognisable as the burly man. “I got this at Eurostar border control. Marko Novak, an import-export businessman from Croatia. I’ll have the ID checked out, but if it’s not a legend I’ll eat my hat.”
“At least we have a picture.” Andrea checked her watch. “There’s still plenty of time to get someone in position to follow him after he arrives in Paris.”
“I have a man taking care of it. Now, what about this startup? Do you think we can break in?”
Andrea rolled her eyes. “I swear, you lot think you’re Mission: Impossible. How about you let me check them out first, and maybe I’ll make an appointment to look around, like a civilised person? You’re not the only ones who go undercover, you know.”
“If Bridge wasn’t away, I’d send her in with you. Might take a nerd to figure out what they’re up to.”
“We don’t know for sure that they are. At this stage, all we have is assumptions and coincidences.”
“No smoke without fire.”
Andrea sighed. “And you’re not the one who has to submit eighteen reports to the Home Office if we’re wrong. Christ, even if we’re right.” A train leaving Charing Cross rumbled past, and she shouted to be heard above the noise. “Just let me know whatever your man in Paris finds out about Novak.”
She walked away, leaving Giles alone on the bridge.
41
From one and a half metres, she could see everything. And that was just with her work phone.
Giles had told her to get some sleep, but Bridge had known that wasn’t going to happen. Her argument with Fred had put her in a bad mood since Sunday. Not just because of his comments about her lack of responsibilities, which in light of her current mission she found risible, although she could never tell him why. It was more because, without even knowing it, he was right. Her life — both real and cover story — was no model for a clever young girl like Stéphanie, who at the rate she was going would probably grow up to run the EU or something. Then the discovery of the new ASCII post, and Lisa Hebden’s incompetence, had set Bridge raging all over again. It was going to be a long night.
First, she went back over the spreadsheet. She’d picked out half a dozen potential candidates for the mole before going to Côte-d’Or, letting them stew at the back of her mind over the weekend. Now she looked at them again, discounted one, and forwarded the remaining five names and positions to Henri Mourad in Paris, for him to dig into tomorrow morning. She wondered if he’d raise an eyebrow at her sending email at this time of night.
Then she cast an eye over who she still had to interview, and saw James Montgomery’s name there at the bottom of the list. She’d missed him all day earlier, but there was something at the back of her mind, scratching to get out like an insistent cat, something she’d told herself to remember…
Oh, shit. The vineyard.
Fortalbis, Montgomery had called it. Bridge exited the secure partition and searched the name online. The first three hits were all the same place, Champagne Fortalbis. She clicked through and read the About pages. She was relieved to see it had been open at the weekend, and there was no need to book for a tour. She noted the route as an easy, uninteresting drive. One where she could say she used GPS and wasn’t really paying attention, so had no significant memory of any landmarks. Next she crammed the vineyard’s history, noting the parts a tour guide might highlight; its age and provenance, how the variety originated, that the vineyard was still owned and managed by the same Italian immigrant family who first planted it almost three hundred years ago.
Finally she checked the photo gallery, memorising features and terroir so she could bluff her way through a conversation. Then she went back to the secure partition to conduct an image search, looking for photos taken and posted by tourists that she could download to her phone, passing them off as her own. It might not fool someone who knew the Fortalbis intimately, but who ever looked closely at other people’s holiday photos anyway? In fact, she could probably just take photos of her laptop screen rather than bothering to download them. She magnified one of the search result images, a samples table of the vineyard’s bottles, to fill the screen. Then she picked up her phone and snapped a test shot. Both the screen and
