After shooing the animal off she made her own ablutions at the foot of the rock formation, emptied a fuel canister into the tank, and resumed driving. Hunger pangs cramped her stomach, and she remembered she hadn’t eaten since late afternoon the day before. But while she had water, she hadn’t brought food. She didn’t intend to be out here more than half a day.
East by southeast, straight as a die except when she had to skirt hills or rocks. After two hours, she slowed and began to pay more attention to the landscape. Nothing looked familiar, and for the first time in three days her emotions threatened to overwhelm her. What had she been thinking? Of course nothing looked familiar. Even if she’d set off from the site of the old Allied base, she’d never find it. The base site itself would have been cleared and lost to the desert long ago. Worse, she didn’t follow the same path on her return drive, escaping the Russians and driving through pitch dark. After she abandoned the jeep, it took her another day to get close enough to the base to be spotted by an American patrol, a friendly bunch who kept calling her “real hardcore.” When they discovered the British were coming to whisk her away, they gave her a stars-and-stripes patch. Bridge still had it, but it was stuffed at the back of a drawer she never used, so she didn’t have to look at it.
Light glinted off metal to the east. Steel girders, reaching for the sun from behind a group of low hills. Bridge let out an involuntary cry of surprise, and turned the wheel.
Was it the same place? The same abandoned settlement she’d driven through that night three years ago, trying to escape the Russians? It looked the same, but it had been so dark, and there were so few identifying features. She stopped the jeep and got out, looking around. Wherever this was, nobody had lived here for a long time. Sand drifts leaned against the breezeblock walls and buried the bases of girders. She walked between the half-finished buildings, pulling the keffiyeh over her face as air currents whipped around hard corners, filling the air with sand and dust.
There. To the north, twisted metal visible against the sky. She walked faster, turned a corner, and looked up a street on the perimeter of the settlement. Close to her, an outer wall with a row of bricks knocked out, the same height as a jeep tailgate. And there, further up the street, under the shadow of the twisted girders — rubble and wreckage, half-buried by shifting sands and shattered breezeblocks. Here and there were bones, gnawed clean by scavengers. Mangled steel jutted from the ground, pools of rubber melted and reformed under the desert sun, reflecting off shards of blasted glass.
Bridge took a dozen pictures with the solid state micro camera, then climbed back in the jeep and drove north, following what she hoped was the same path she’d taken that night. After the settlement, the jeep had lasted no more than a quarter of an hour before a bullet hole emptied the fuel tank, and she abandoned it to continue on foot. Fifteen minutes’ drive wasn’t that far. It had to be around here somewhere.
68
Eighteen hours into the surveillance tapes, Steve Wicker was starting to regret asking Patel if he could liaise with Five on Andrea Thomson’s case.
Their visit to SignalAir, and the startup’s possible link to drone technology, had seemed an obvious lead at the time. If Nigel Marsh and his company were some kind of front, as Andrea had suspected, then the possibility they could be connected to the ID theft drone purchases had stirred in Steve’s gut. It wasn’t enough to arrest anyone, but it was more than enough for him to start investigating.
With MI5’s help, it had taken two days to acquire all the CCTV footage he could from the locations where the package pick-ups had been made. Four didn’t have CCTV, and the ones that did could only narrow down the collection times to a morning or afternoon. Steve cursed poor design and wondered aloud who on Earth would design a system, in this age of ubiquitous barcodes, that didn’t automatically track packages and log a time? The response was usually a don’t-ask-me-I’m-on-a-zero-hours-contract shrug, and after the first few exasperated enquiries he stopped asking.
But now, a day into scanning the various feeds at x8, he wondered if his gut had simply been wrong. There were mail sorting office collection points, private package holders, newsagents that ran a click-and-collect service on the side, and more. The clientele for all of them ran the gamut, from businessmen to PAs to shift workers to tube drivers to, yes, some very dodgy-looking types. From the ostentatious bling of a dealer or heavy, to the threadbare leisurewear of a street chancer, more than half the people who used these services didn’t want to be recognised for one reason or another.
Steve yawned and thought about lunch, as on the screen a bored sorting office clerk in Slough checked his text messages for the hundredth time. A new sushi place had opened in town the week before, and Steve wanted to try it out before it inevitably shut down in three months, drowned out like everything else by the ubiquitous coffee shops. It was a shame, really…
There. Stop. Scan back thirty secs. Pause. Check the records.
Gwendolyne Hartwell, 57 years old. She wasn’t even aware of the theft until Slough police made enquiries with her, after Steve called them. She’d checked her MasterCard statement and saw the anomaly. Steve could only wonder how she’d missed an unauthorised purchase for just shy of three hundred pounds, but he was more concerned that the bank hadn’t flagged the purchase as suspicious, despite Mrs Hartwell’s usual credit card purchases
