Voclaine looked at her with surprise. “You were there?”
“Watching from afar.” She neglected to mention the officer who’d stopped her, but let her go. It would only annoy Voclaine more. The memory led her to think of the farmhouse, and she gasped. “The hospital —”
“Your family is fine,” grumbled Voclaine. “Fréderic Baudin has been stabilised, his family is with him, and the doctor says he’ll pull through. Mainly because you got him to the hospital in time, so at least you did one thing right.”
Bridge relaxed. Knowing Fréderic would be safe was some comfort. But now she had another thought. “François… I need to do something before I go back to London.”
Voclaine shook his head. “I don’t care.”
“You will. I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
He looked sideways at her. “My cover story was just that, you know. I’m happily married.”
“And you’re not my type,” she laughed. “You’re too…French.”
“So what are you offering?”
“Take me back to the farmhouse.”
“No chance. It’s a crime scene, and the gendarmes are crawling all over it.”
“Fair enough,” she said, “I suppose it’s fine if the local cops find out about Exphoria, anyway.”
Voclaine hit the brakes, hard, and the car juddered to a halt. He turned on Bridge, suspicious. “What are you talking about? We have your laptop and phone already. We found them at the guest house.”
Bridge noted he didn’t say they’d cracked the security, which pleased her a little. Not that it would matter much if they had, because: “Everything on them is from before I confirmed Montgomery as the mole. But at his apartment I figured out how he was doing it, and retrieved some of the data. I’m sure the gendarmerie will find it fascinating.”
Voclaine seethed quietly. For a second, Bridge thought he might actually hit her in frustration. Instead he punched the steering wheel, spat out “Merde,” and pulled a U-turn before speeding back towards La Ferme Baudin.
66
Lacking official ID, Bridge let Voclaine do the talking. He told the gendarmerie his name was Serge Tolbert, and presented himself officially as DGSI, but she suspected that was no more his real name than ‘François Voclaine’.
Whatever his name, she was grateful for his authority. He stopped the police from bagging Fred’s HP laptop, and ordered them all out of the room. Bridge opened the lid and was presented with a login screen. Voclaine (she couldn’t think of him as ‘Tolbert’) groaned in frustration. But Bridge had watched Fred log in the night before, and while she hadn’t specifically followed his typing, it was a simple enough password that she’d caught it without meaning to. She entered:
s-t-e-p-h-a-n-i-e-1-2-3
And the login screen was replaced by the desktop. The frontmost window was the DOS shell she’d used to run the recover process. She scanned down to the last message before the prompt.
> Session complete: 435 files recovered
Bridge opened the SD card directory, and where it had been empty the day before, now it was full of photographs. She could tell just from the thumbnails that these were what they’d all been looking for, but she opened half a dozen at full size to confirm it for Voclaine. Photographs of a computer screen inside the Agenbeux facility.
Voclaine almost choked. “That’s my desk,” he said in disbelief. “Why are there photos of my desk?”
“Not your desk,” said Bridge, “your screen…and the Exphoria code.” She scrolled through the photos, to show the pages and pages of code on the screen. “This card was in a mini-tablet Montgomery carried, rather than his phone. I’m guessing he took these while you were out of the room, probably during smoke breaks.”
“We didn’t find a tablet at his apartment.”
“Because I took it with me, and pulled this SD card out last night. You’re lucky I managed to recover these photos, to be honest. Novak almost destroyed the entire tablet when he attacked me.”
Voclaine shook his head. “You knew this was how James leaked the code?”
“I had a hunch,” Bridge shrugged, “but until now I wasn’t completely sure. Hell, until now I wasn’t completely sure Montgomery was the mole.”
“Are you telling me you killed him without proof? Are you completely insane?”
“Hey, it was self defence. I was looking for proof at his apartment when he attacked me, and now we have it. I just wish we knew who he was working for.”
“Russia.”
“How do you know?”
Voclaine nodded out toward the courtyard, where a coroner’s tent had been erected around Marko Novak’s body. “His real name is Grigori Pushkin, and the DGSE has a file on him. Ex-FSB, freelance for the past twenty years, but does plenty of work for Putin’s boys. We found hidden cameras watching Montgomery’s apartment, and there was even a Russian go-bag on the bed, ready and packed. Rubles, fake passport, the works.”
“I thought you were DGSI.”
“This isn’t England, mademoiselle. Our departments don’t keep secrets from each other.”
Bridge sighed. So it seemed Russia really was still up to military espionage, after all. “Do you have a USB stick?”
Voclaine reached inside his jacket and pulled out a small blue flash drive. “Always. You never know.”
Bridge plugged it in, and started copying the photographs across. They both watched in silence as the progress bar inched up the screen, until all the data had transferred. Then she removed the drive, closed the HP, replaced it in the bag, and handed it to Voclaine. “The laptop, and the card in it, go straight to London. If Médecins Sans Frontières want it back, they’ll have to take it up with SIS.”
Voclaine was confused. “Why not take them yourself?”
“Because I’m not going to back to London.”
“Now hang on a second.”
Bridge tucked the USB stick into Voclaine’s coat pocket. “How ever did the DGSI get that data? I suppose the gendarmes made a copy before they handed over the laptop. Maybe only I know for sure, but seeing as I escaped your
