Sometimes, her desk was part of the problem. Every so often, on hot days, her chair became the seat of a stolen jeep roaring across the desert, with soldiers chasing her and Adrian at her side, laughing over the sound of wind whistling through the bullet holes in his head. The first time it happened, she cried out so loud that Ciaran spilt coffee over his keyboard. Monica sighed and shook her head. Over time those days became less frequent, and Bridge learned to live with them, or at least make no outward sign anything was amiss.
Server rooms took longer. The first time she tried to walk between two racks the thick spaghetti of network cables seemed to flex, trying to trip her, while the racks loomed and bowed inward, ready to crush her under tons of sweltering metal. Ciaran found her crouched on the floor, covering her head with her hands, sobbing. She still hated going in them.
But all of that was behind her now, wasn’t it?
She’d returned from Guichetech, after waiting for the local police to pick up François Voclaine. She’d called Giles, who’d put her on to Emily Dunston, who’d authorised Voclaine’s arrest and made arrangements for him to be taken into custody. In the morning, Henri Mourad would come and transport him to Paris for questioning. Bridge remained incognito the whole time, watching from behind the one-way mirror as Montgomery dealt with the police.
“Why do you need to remain hidden,” Montgomery had asked, “if you’ve got your man?”
“Because I’m still not a hundred per cent sure Voclaine is who we’re after,” she said. “But if he is, imagine I leave now, immediately after his arrest. Do you think anyone here will still believe I’m an HR inspector? Or that whoever he’s working for won’t become suspicious and ask awkward questions?” She could tell Montgomery didn’t like it. No doubt her presence here was causing disruption, and the final stages of any project like this were the worst time for any kind of turmoil. But to his credit, he didn’t object further.
She picked up a microwaveable dinner on the way back to the guest house, eating it in hurried bites between relating events to Giles at the other end of a secure VOIP call. He was pleased, and like her, hoped she’d struck gold. He reminded her that this, her first return to OIT, had been entirely safe and risk-free, and she was forced to concede that yes, he knew what he was doing and he’d been right all along. Well done, Giles, well done.
But after she ended the call, and tossed her dinner packaging in the recycling, Bridge couldn’t relax. She opened the Dell and re-examined the spreadsheet yet again, not entirely sure what she was looking for this time, but determined to find it all the same.
47
Twice a week, James Montgomery wished he had bigger feet.
He was a size 9, quintessentially average for a man of his height, and nothing in his life had ever made him question them. But now, he realised with grim humour, they were an essential part of what spies called ‘tradecraft’, the methods and techniques by which they schemed and deceived.
He still didn’t think of himself as a mole. Not technically. But Bridget Short’s arrival, and Voclaine’s arrest, had brought things into sharp focus. He could no longer escape the fact that his actions here at Agenbeux were, at the very least, treason of a kind. And hadn’t they always been? Not just here, but before, when he was first approached.
London, three years ago, and Montgomery had enjoyed a recent promotion within the department. Enjoyed it so much that when a friendly banker, drinking at the Old Crown one evening, had begun chatting and buying him drinks, he thought nothing of it. Why shouldn’t people buy him drinks? He was a very successful and important man. People thought politicians ran the country, but those who saw behind the curtain knew better. It was the civil servants who did the real work; they who negotiated deals, who made good on ministerial promises, who conducted reviews and assembled reports on what was feasible within the labyrinthine corridors of Whitehall. The banker knew that — bankers ran more of the country than civil servants, after all — and therefore knew Montgomery was a good friend to have, someone in a position to pull strings behind the scenes and make things happen.
Someone in a position to influence the allocation of a defence contract worth billions of pounds.
Nobody in the department knew the company was Russian. It was a shell within a shell within a shell, a tangled maze of holding companies and ‘brass plaque’ conglomerates registered in sterling-friendly tax havens. These shadow companies had no premises beyond the same offshore address as a thousand others, no named directors or stakeholders, and unseen paperwork kept well away from prying legal eyes. But if you knew how, and could follow it back far enough, eventually you would find that Joint Allied Star Defence was owned by a syndicate of Russian oligarchs, many of whom had ties to the mafiya and FSB, one of the KGB’s successor agencies. Meanwhile, the other successor, the SVR, was the real employer of Montgomery’s new drinking friend. He discovered this the next morning when, waking in a Soho hotel room, he struggled through his hangover to understand why images of himself in places he didn’t recall were flashing before his eyes. Then he recognised the shape of a television, and the telltale transition flicker of a PowerPoint slideshow, and became nauseous. He remembered nothing of the previous night past his fourth gin and
