“And why is this so important?” asked Fred, who’d been watching over her shoulder.
“It belonged to my boss,” said Bridge, which wasn’t entirely a lie. “He asked me to see if I could retrieve any data from it. I thought I might have to try and cable up the SSD…”
“…But now you think this card contains what you need?”
“Maybe. I’ll have to wait till I can get near a laptop to find out, though.”
Fred smiled, which in itself took Bridge by surprise. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him smile at anything other than his children. “Wait there,” he said, and put a finger to his lips as he ducked out of the room.
He returned with a courier bag, which he placed on the kitchen table and unbuckled the flap to pull out a small HP laptop. “Don’t tell your sister,” he said as he leant over Bridge and typed his login password. “Do you need cables?”
Bridge peered inside the bag and saw a nest of power and connectivity cables inside, but the laptop had its own SD card slot. “No, this should be fine,” she said, and took a deep breath, ready to insert the card. She looked at Fred, sceptical of this sudden change of heart. “Why?”
“Because you’re obviously in trouble, and whatever it is, I want it dealt with quickly so you can go back to work and leave us alone.”
Bridge rolled her eyes. “Be still, my beating heart.” She pushed the card into the laptop slot, dreading any one of a dozen sounds that would tell her it was broken. But it clicked into place, and after a few nervous seconds appeared as a drive in the disk explorer. Her pulse quickened. This could be it, the proof she needed.
But the drive was empty. “Shit,” Bridge said, balling her fists in frustration. “Shit shit shit shit.”
“Is it all lost? You can’t repair the drive?”
“There’s nothing to repair,” Bridge sighed. “The card’s — wait, hang on.” She’d been about to say ‘empty’, but her eyes had instinctively gone to the drive information summary on screen, and something there didn’t make sense. The HP said the drive had 61.5GB free. But it was a 64GB card. Even with a bloated directory tree, it should have at least 63GB remaining.
It was possible the reading was a by-product of damage to the card, and it was simply feeding incorrect information to the laptop. But there was another possibility; that the card contained data, potentially two and a half gigabytes’ worth, and it was the directory itself that was damaged or corrupt. Bridge fired up a shell prompt and started typing. She was more comfortable in Unix than DOS — it had been a long time since she’d operated a Windows machine, instead of just hacking into an MS server — but this, of all things, was worth a try. If she was right, and she could recover data from the card, it might vindicate everything she’d done.
“What the hell is this? We said we were leaving the computers at home.”
Bridge turned to see Izzy in the doorway, arms folded, glaring at Fred. He shrugged. “I have to get the Senegal pitch finished by the end of the month. I’m not doing anything in front of Stéphanie, don’t worry.”
“Not doing what?” said Steph, appearing behind her mother in the doorway. She gasped as she saw the laptop. “A computer? I want to play a game!”
“No, Stéphanie,” said Izzy, crossing the room. “Daddy and Auntie Bridge are just about to put it away, isn’t that right?” She took hold of the screen, trying to close the computer.
But Bridge gripped it and held it open, meeting her sister’s gaze. “I’m sorry, Izz, but this is really, really important. It could save my job.”
“Screw your job,” Izzy shouted. “If it’s so bloody great, why aren’t you still there instead of squatting here? My family is supposed to be on holiday, and we have rules about our holidays, and you’re ruining all of — Jesus, have you started weightlifting or something?” She gave up trying to close the lid against Bridge’s resistance and stormed out of the room, leading Steph away by the hand.
“Isabelle,” called Fred, following her. He stopped at the door, turned, and said, “Just hurry up.”
Bridge nodded in silence, mentally crossing her fingers as she continued typing.
57
The cold air was recycled and stale, belched out by noisy climate control units. Bridge wouldn’t have minded if this was a day raid, and they were escaping the searing heat that had threatened to overwhelm her every day since she arrived. But at night the desert froze, and they’d just spent two hours driving through it, with Bridge huddled under layers of blanket and a keffiyeh woven around her head.
She said nothing, maintaining mission silence, but she didn’t need to. Ahead of her in the stone corridor, Adrian turned and grinned. “Never bloody happy, are you, BB? Can’t live with the heat, can’t live with the cold. It’s a wonder you made it out of here alive…” He looked down at the dark patch spreading over his chest, looked back at Bridge with unusual sympathy, said, “You’d better go —”
She was in the jeep,
