And now this English woman, this obvious agent of MI6 sent to find the Exphoria mole, had killed Montgomery, Novak’s own resource. Such action demanded retribution, a message to London that this was not acceptable. More than that, he was unsure how much Bridget Short knew about the operation. The man Novak had stabbed and thrown in the Thames had no ties to the British government, no intelligence work under his belt that the Russian had been able to find. He had intended to search the man’s house to make sure, but the police beat him to making an identification, leaving Novak frustrated until his client assured him the man’s interference was nothing more than bad luck.
Ms Short, on the other hand, appeared after he’d been followed to the Eurostar. Did MI6 not know there was a mole on the project until then? Or had their previous mole hunts simply proved futile? The alias ‘Bridget Short’ was unknown to him, as was the tall, dark-haired woman he’d fought at Montgomery’s apartment. But she was fast, strong, a good fighter. Perhaps she was a specialist, someone the English sent to identify and kill moles when other means had failed. The thought excited him, and he remembered his hands around her throat, her ragged gasps as he held her down. A good memory.
After she escaped, Novak dressed Montgomery’s apartment a little, to hide his involvement and give the police a wild goose chase to conduct. Then he returned to his rented apartment near the river, taking the empty Grach pistol with him. After tending to the bullet in his leg, which left him limping but able enough to walk, he loaded the gun and pocketed a spare magazine. Then he stuffed the gendarme uniform into a suitcase with some soiled clothes, and drove to a secluded spot by the riverside where he burned them all and kicked the ashes into the river.
When that was done, he drove to the guest house where Ms Short was staying. His police scanner told him the local gendarmerie was all over it, and he didn’t expect Short herself to return there any time soon. No doubt the police would confiscate any electronics, and Novak would have to try and retrieve those at a later point for his client. But first, he must find and eliminate Ms Short.
She might return directly to England by diplomatic transport, and if so there was nothing Novak could do about it. But a sweep of Montgomery’s apartment after she escaped, plus a review of the footage he’d missed while he was on his way there, suggested that she might have uncovered Montgomery as a mole — without truly knowing what he was leaking. She hadn’t found the bag of blank SD cards Novak supplied, and the footage showed she tried to avoid Montgomery when he arrived home unexpectedly, rather than confronting him directly. So she might remain in Agenbeux, to find out more about what Montgomery had been doing. She might try to find Novak, now she could recognise him. That only made it more important that he find her first, instead.
It was dark when the gendarmerie left the guest house. He took a case from the boot of his car, booked a cash room under an alias, and went straight upstairs. He noted the sole gendarme outside what must be Bridget Short’s room, sitting on a chair, looking tired and bored. Novak entered his own room, prepared a chloroform pad, made sure he had lock pick and camera with him, then rendered the guard unconscious. The door behind him was unlocked, and the gendarme would sleep for thirty minutes at the dosage Novak had delivered, giving him plenty of time to search the room undisturbed. He dragged the young officer inside, laid him out on the floor, and closed the door.
The police had turned the place upside down and, as he expected, taken anything that looked electronic. That didn’t bother Novak. There were other ways. The bathroom contained just toiletries, nothing identifying or useful without a DNA test, and that would tell him little he didn’t already know. The bed had been stripped and searched. They’d even removed the bedknobs, in case Ms Short had hidden something inside the frame. If she had, the police had taken it, as they were now empty. Nothing else about the bed indicated a hiding place, so they’d tipped her suitcase over the mattress. But again, it all seemed very normal and innocent, with nothing that would tip off a normal investigator that she was a spy.
Novak turned over the suitcase, noting tell-tale marks around one of the ridges at the base of the handle tubing. He took a one euro coin and placed it edgeways into the slot, turned it, and found a hidden compartment — empty, but evidently something the gendarmes had missed. Did this mean they didn’t know she was a spy? That would explain why they also hadn’t checked the inner lining. Novak took a small knife from his pocket and slashed the lining, revealing the deep red of an English passport taped to the inside of the suitcase’s outer shell. He opened it to the photo page. The picture was of Bridget Short, or ‘Catherine Pritchard’ as she was called here, but with shorter hair and less makeup. An emergency backup, then, designed for getting out of trouble and out of town in a hurry. If the police hadn’t been here, she’d presumably have returned for this passport and used it to flee to England.
Novak allowed himself a grim smile, as this supported his notion that she was still in France. Her handlers had known that if the Bridget
