At the top of the stairs was a single door. The apartment took up the whole floor, like a penthouse suite. Very nice, thought Bridge, and wondered if the project accountants back in London knew what Montgomery’s expenses were paying for. She pulled on the driving gloves, took the Ziploc from her pocket, and removed the lockpick tools. With a final glance over her shoulder, and keeping an ear out for any sudden noise on the stairwell, she set to work.
She’d been surprised, during the first Breaking & Entering class at the Loch, how easy lock-picking was. She’d always imagined it to be a precise, delicate skill, like the old myths of safecrackers with stethoscopes carefully listening for falling tumblers. In fact, with most modern locks it was more of a brute force act; a simple matter of keeping rotational pressure on the plug with a torsion wrench, then shoving a pick inside and lifting the pins until it opened. Advanced classes for more secure and industrial mechanisms would take longer, but by the end of the first morning Bridge and her classmates had mastered the basic skills well enough that they could now open, the instructor gleefully informed them, eighty per cent of all domestic locks.
Montgomery’s apartment was no exception. She felt the plug turn a fraction of a millimetre with each pin release, then rotate completely with a satisfying click. Picking the lock had taken less than fifteen seconds, and now all she had to worry about was a burglar alarm. But this was an old town, and old-fashioned with it. The kind of place where her mother would insist people still left their front doors unlocked and were never burgled. Bridge seriously doubted that, but regardless, it wasn’t the sort of place where rented apartments had pre-installed alarms. She slipped inside, closing the door behind her, and found herself in a hallway that opened out on the lounge. When she saw the state of the place, though, she was shocked.
The second law of thermodynamics states that the universe tends towards entropy; that order is more difficult to maintain than chaos, and such chaos is sometimes irreversible. Bridge had once demonstrated the second law to Izzy by dropping a tea cup on the floor, and asking her sister to imagine how much more energy it would now take to reassemble the pieces, let alone make an entirely new cup, compared to the ease with which it had fallen. Izzy just sighed, and handed her a dustpan and brush. But, sibling mockery or not, Bridge regarded the second law as an important universal constant. She often used it to make a joke of people’s reactions to her desk, or apartment, or the contents of her handbag. If the universe was heading inexorably toward entropy and chaos anyway, Bridge was just doing her bit to help it along.
In a similar fashion, she’d assumed a single middle-aged man, living alone away from home for months, would tend towards that same entropic state and follow a kind of ‘second law of manhood’. But, whether he was a spy or not, James Montgomery was definitely some kind of lawbreaker. His apartment was spotless, cleaned to within an inch of its life, and squared away like an army barracks. If she didn’t know better from his record, Bridge would have assumed he served in the military. She ran a gloved finger over the surface of an occasional table, and it came up clean. Even the space behind the TV was immaculate. Did he have a cleaner who came round and did the place? If so, the longer Bridge spent here, the greater the risk of her being discovered. But surely a cleaner was too much of a potential security risk for Montgomery to employ. Bridge began to think she’d misjudged him.
Until she saw the gun on the bedside table.
It was an MP-443 Grach, standard-issue Russian military. Bridge was no firearms expert, but the Grach, and its predecessor the Makarov, were among the first weapons that intelligence officers were trained to identify. She was actually surprised it wasn’t a Makarov. Officially the Grach had replaced them years ago, but Makarovs had been in service in the USSR and former Eastern Bloc for so long that many soldiers still carried them out of habit, and the European black market was awash with them. Buying one was as easy as clicking a link on a darknet website and collecting it from whichever dive bar the local criminals patronised.
Bridge found it hard to imagine Montgomery entering any kind of dive bar, but the very presence of the gun on his bedside table implied there was a secret side to him. And unlike Makarovs, buying a black-market Grach was neither easy nor cheap. What else did this officious little man hide from the world, she wondered? But, much as it raised serious questions about his character — and was surely enough to justify interrogating him — the Grach was, so to speak, no smoking gun. It didn’t prove he was the mole.
She was about to replace the pistol on the bedside table when she heard the front door unlock.
The bedroom door was open behind her, and in a smaller apartment she might have had a clear line of sight to the
