Arrived Agenbeux local police 1015. No sign of Thumper, officers clueless - no idea who he was, said he was never there. Unable to locate senior officer, refused help. Please advise if further action needed, but I have MC to follow up (see H/PAR).
Bridge guessed ‘MC’ stood for Matériel Chaud, the codename of the case he was pursuing before Mourad got roped in as Bridge’s backup. She didn’t know what the case was, much less where it might take him. But the important part of the email was right there in the subject line. Where was François Voclaine? She’d watched the local police come and pick him up from Guichetech herself. Someone from that station had taken Emily Dunston’s call, agreed to come and arrest Voclaine at the facility, and sent officers to do so. But now they were denying it had ever happened. How? Did Voclaine bribe them all to let him escape?
The walls of the room slid sideways, skewing off-axis as Bridge fought to stay calm. Had she second-guessed herself one too many times, and got it all wrong? Perhaps it really was as simple as it looked, and Voclaine was the mole. He had backing from a hostile actor, and they’d somehow been alerted to his arrest. Perhaps the local police had been in their pocket all along, paid off and ready to protect Voclaine if necessary. She was angry at herself for not following through, for staying incognito and trusting the local authorities. If she’d gone with him to the police station, stayed with him till Mourad arrived, maybe questioned him herself… She could have gone with them to Paris, left behind this bloody place and been home in time for the weekend…
No, surely she was overreacting. This was a simple administrative error, and she’d find Voclaine stewing at a different police station, in the next town over. And if that turned out to be the case, she’d kick herself if she wasted this opportunity to check up on Montgomery. It was still possible he was the mole, and Voclaine was innocent, at least of espionage. The truth remained suspended in a superstate, waiting to collapse and become reality. All it would take was one last scramble to clear the mountain summit.
She typed a quick reply —
worrying, but hopefully simple admin error? will investigate
— And logged out, turning to her rolling suitcase. She flipped it on its front, with the steel tubes that encased the telescopic handle uppermost, and took a 10 cent euro coin from her purse. At the base of each tube was a horizontal depression in the metal, an innocuous moulding artefact. Bridge fitted the edge of the coin into the depression in the left-hand tube, and turned it anticlockwise. It was stiff, but it turned, and half a dozen revolutions later the hidden bolt came free, allowing the base of the steel tube to slide down and reveal a small, hollow space. Crammed inside was a Ziploc bag, which she removed and opened. Packed into the bag were a length of high-tensile monofilament, a solid-state micro camera, a tiny wireless audio bug and receiver, an LED flashlight the size of two matchsticks, five hundred US dollars, and a set of lockpicks. Bridge hadn’t expected to use any of these items, or to need the emergency Ziploc at all, while here in Agenbeux. But it was standard issue in OIT luggage, and now she was glad of it.
Her clothes were a different matter. As the job was supposed to be observation only, OpPrep hadn’t kitted her out with any serious gear, so she’d have to make do with what she’d brought of her own casual clothes. She’d worn most of them to Izzy’s farm, but hadn’t yet put them through a wash, so she rifled through the pile and pulled out a few things. Two minutes later she was wearing black jeans and a plain black t-shirt. She found a pair of clean socks, pulled her own casual walking boots over them, and finished with her leather jacket, dropping the emergency Ziploc in one of the pockets. She only really needed the lockpicks, but as they were probably the most incriminating thing in the bag, she might as well take the whole thing.
She wished she had some kind of hat, but didn’t, so donned sunglasses instead. Then she caught sight of herself in the mirror by the door, and suppressed a laugh. All she needed was big hair, some purple lipstick, and she’d look eighteen again. Except when she was eighteen, the only break-ins she did were virtual ones on computer servers. Now she was about to do it for real. She took an elasticated hair band from the dresser and scraped her hair back into a ponytail as she exited the room.
Montgomery’s apartment was on the other side of town. Agenbeux was small enough that she could have walked, but it would take at least twenty minutes, and the midday heat would tire her before she got there. Taking her car was a risk. If anyone really was following her, they’d know she wasn’t having a ‘lie down’ after all. But being followed like that would mean the game was up anyway. Better to try and fail than do nothing and let it all collapse around her.
Nobody appeared to be watching her as she left the guest house, and she didn’t notice anyone tailing her car across town. By the time she arrived at Montgomery’s apartment, she was confident it was merely her usual paranoia that was warming the back of her neck. The address led her to a row of three-storey townhouses, so she parked around the corner and took the driving gloves from the dashboard compartment, shoving them in her pocket.
His apartment was on the top floor. The upper floors of each house had balconies, and below the top floor these were roofed with tiles. Climbing up them to break in through a
