The Russians understood the value of both stick and carrot. Yes, they threatened to send his wife and employers the photos. But they also opened a Zurich bank account in his name, and wired money into it at regular intervals. And all he had to do was persuade his colleagues that the new equipment contract should be awarded to Joint Allied Star Defence. He didn’t have to leak any secrets, so it’s not like he was betraying anything. Not technically.
But the Russians and Montgomery alike overestimated his power and influence. He mounted a good argument, but the contract was ultimately awarded to a different supplier. All the money Joint Allied Star Defence had spent on Montgomery, routed through byzantine layers of corporate obfuscation, had gone to waste. For weeks, he expected to suffer a terrible accident at any moment. The pinprick of a hypodermic needle as he crossed London Bridge, or the unusual aftertaste of a drink at the Black Horse, or a sudden hand at his back on the platform at Embankment. The Russians would not forget.
And yet, they did. Montgomery’s contact, whom he only ever knew as ‘the banker’, stopped calling. After a couple of weeks he looked for the banker, worried that this lack of contact would prevent him from being able to explain what happened, how he’d done everything he could to ensure Joint Allied got that contract. He didn’t want to die because the Russians thought he was lazy.
But weeks turned into months, and still the banker was nowhere to be seen. Nobody contacted him. Nobody tried to assassinate him. Nobody sent the photos to his wife. Montgomery began to relax, and his life returned to normal. He might have thought the whole thing was a fever dream, if not for the Swiss account, and the payments still being made into it. He’d always been cautious with the money — being compromised in the first place through a lack of discretion had taught him a valuable lesson, so he restricted his spending to treats for his wife and family, nice meals out, a new car that was only slightly too expensive. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself through extravagance. But for some reason, the Russians were still paying him. Perhaps it was connected to the banker’s sudden disappearance. Perhaps they’d just forgotten about him. Whatever the reason, within a couple of years Montgomery could have paid off his mortgage, except that he couldn’t begin to justify why he had enough money to do so. By now there was too much to simply explain away as an inheritance or windfall.
And then, not long after he was chosen to run the Exphoria facility at Agenbeux, they found him again. He asked the new contact, the Russian he met every few days here in France, what happened to the banker. He was told it was none of his business, and he should only be concerned with the matter of his debt to Russia, for his previous failure. That debt was not yet repaid, as the Russian regularly reminded him.
But the payments kept arriving in Zurich, and Montgomery finally concluded that it was a mistake. The Russians thought they’d stopped paying him, but they hadn’t. He briefly considered telling his new contact, but only briefly. After all, if they hadn’t noticed yet, why should they now? It was, he considered, worth the risk.
And it really was quite a risk. Every day, he waited until Voclaine took his first post-lunch smoke break of the afternoon. In the morning, the Frenchman’s breaks were fairly short. Even a man like Voclaine knew he shouldn’t really spend all day outside, smoking. But come the afternoon, and especially if he’d had drinks with lunch, Voclaine adopted a more relaxed routine of fifteen minutes or more at a time in the compound. And every time he went out, he invariably left some part of the Exphoria code on his monitor. All Montgomery had to do was cross their office, double-check the blinds were drawn — sometimes the secretary raised them in the morning, despite his pleas for her to stop — and take pictures of the screen using the mini-tablet he kept in the office drawer, paging up and down to capture as much as he could of whatever Voclaine was working on that day. He allowed himself no more than five minutes, just to be sure he’d finish before there was any chance of Voclaine returning. It was normally enough to capture fifty screens or more of code.
He had no idea if it was useful. The programming side of things was completely beyond him. But the Russian seemed happy enough with what he delivered them.
That was where his feet came in. Every day, he brought a new Toshiba SD card into the office, from a batch the Russian had given him. Before taking the pictures, he inserted the card into the mini-tablet, and ensured the camera was set to save photos directly to the card, not the internal memory, which contained nothing more than his family photos and Chris Rea albums. After taking the pictures, he ejected the SD card and slid it into his pocket. The mini-tablet, which had its wifi permanently switched off and possessed no cellular capability, was replaced in his drawer. It never left the building, so never drew suspicion from the security guards, or the likes of Bridget Short, for being a ‘second device’.
The only remaining conundrum was how to get the SD card out of the building. That was where his feet came into it. At around five in the afternoon, an hour before his normal leaving time, Montgomery visited the bathroom and installed himself in a cubicle. There, he carefully and quietly removed one shoe and sock, usually his left, and placed the memory card inside the sock before sliding his
