“Funny,” said Montgomery, sitting down, “I didn’t see you there.” Bridge’s fingers froze above her keyboard. “I mean, it’s such a small place,” he continued. “I don’t know how we didn’t bump into one another.”
The room’s air conditioning was state of the art, but Bridge felt much too warm. “What day did you visit?” She asked.
“Saturday, of course.”
“Ah, well, that explains it. I was dog tired on Saturday, spent the day going over my notes from last week and then lazing around the guest house watching bad TV. I drove up on Sunday, instead.”
“Well, then. That explains it, as you say,” said Montgomery, smiling. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”
The back of Bridge’s neck cooled. She could have kicked herself for almost being caught in a simple lie — why not just say she hadn’t gone, after all? — but it was too late now, and she’d got away with it. She changed the subject. “Actually, I’m glad you looked in. You were originally scheduled as my first interview tomorrow, but circumstances have changed, and I need to talk to you now.”
“Changed? In what way?”
Bridge had thought that line might intrigue his need for validation, and this time her gamble paid off. A man like James Montgomery couldn’t stand the idea that there was a plan he didn’t know about. She made a show of looking around the room, checking the blinds were all down, then leaned over the table and whispered, “I’ve had authorisation from London. I’m going to tell you why I’m really here.”
In fact, she was going to do nothing of the sort.
Earlier that morning she’d called Giles, who related the events of the night before in London and Paris, and forwarded Marko Novak’s passport image. Bridge didn’t recognise it, and was sorry the men had both got away, but was relieved the meet appeared to have been real. The ASCII code hadn’t been a red herring, and Giles said they’d found the same passport was used to enter the UK on several trips that coincided with past rendezvous dates in the coded messages. She thought of Ten, and how she wished she could tell him he’d been right. But so had she, of course — she’d told him to be careful, and one way or another, he hadn’t been.
Bridge pushed the thought to the back of her mind. She couldn’t allow herself to feel guilty or mawkish.
She’d explained her photograph theory to Giles. He agreed it was feasible, and would explain the lack of obvious system penetration, but remained sceptical. “How can you prove it?” he asked. “If you hang around too much, people will get suspicious, and nobody’s going to stand there taking photos while you watch. Short of rigging up your own CCTV all around the building, I’m not sure how you can catch someone in the act.”
“But we don’t need to,” she said. “If they’re smart, and everything so far suggests they are, they’re not putting the photos anywhere online. Which means the handoffs must be to deliver the photos, maybe on a thumb drive, and if so then they have to physically get it out of the building. There’s absolutely no legitimate reason for taking photos like this. If we can find them on someone’s phone, we’ve got them.”
“Might they have transferred them to a computer?”
“No personal computers allowed into the building. Phones, tablets, and music players; that’s all.”
“So what are you suggesting? Black bag job on everyone you’ve flagged, lift their devices?”
Black bag jobs were thefts and burglaries, carried out in cases where obtaining a search warrant was either impossible or undesirable, to obtain evidence. Authorised, yes, but also illegal, and rare enough that the idea hadn’t occurred to Bridge. “Could we really do that?”
“Of course we could,” said Giles. “But in the short time we have, it would make a terrible fuss. What are security checks like at the facility?”
“That’s what I was going to suggest. The problem is, whoever’s doing this is already getting through security on a regular basis. I think we should take a more direct approach, but I need your buy-in. Probably H/PAR too, come to think of it.”
She described her plan, and Giles agreed to cajole Emily Dunston, so while he was busy doing that she’d called Henri Mourad. “Henri, it’s Bridge. Can you prioritise those five names I sent over last night?”
“I literally just stepped through the door,” he said, stifling a yawn, “and I’ve got a to-do list that’ll keep me busy all week.”
“Sorry, but I need you to stop and dig these up by this afternoon if possible. We can’t question Novak, so in the meantime this is our best lead. I need to know if any of those people are high risk; susceptible to blackmail, communist family, money problems, anything at all.”
“Yeah, thanks and all, but I know how to do my job,” he said, but Bridge didn’t apologise. She was convinced she was onto something, and she wanted to chase it down as fast as possible.
Giles had called back ten minutes later. The bad news: as Bridge had feared, Emily Dunston was enough of a technophobe to insist her scepticism about the photograph theory be placed on the record, in the strongest possible terms. The good news: that same old-school attitude meant that off the record, she prioritised the instincts of an OIT above trifling details like proof. H/PAR was on board.
And that had brought Bridge to this moment at Guichetech, about to tell an expectant James Montgomery something that would blow his mind — and put her at risk.
“I’m not really an HR inspector,” she said.
Montgomery’s eyes widened. “What are you saying?”
“I’m not authorised to tell you everything, but here’s the situation: the MoD is concerned about security here at Agenbeux. Exphoria is a very expensive project, after all. The future of aerial independence rests on your shoulders.” She saw him tense, and said, “Nobody is questioning the project’s
