“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” Bridge sighed. “This was the last time.”
Dr Nayar frowned. “After all this, are you seriously asking to be taken off the OIT list again?”
Bridge laughed. “Off the list? No, no. I’m quitting SIS.”
“Don’t be absurd. You can’t resign.”
“This isn’t the cosa nostra, you can’t force me to stay here.”
Giles Finlay raised an eyebrow. Not for the first time, Bridge wondered if SIS kept blackmail files on its officers in case coercion became necessary. “You misunderstand. You can’t resign because your mission isn’t complete.”
Bridge threw up her hands. “What more do I have to do? I found the mole, I killed the mole for God’s sake, and by the way, I took out his handler, too.”
“Now you’re starting to talk like a real OIT,” said Giles, and smiled. Bridge scowled in response, and he quickly continued, “Look, you did very well, a commendable A-minus. But we still have a problem. Actually, two problems.”
“And why are they my problems?”
“Because I said so. First, Nigel Marsh is in the wind.”
“Who?”
“The man Marko Novak met in Islington, the night we lost Novak on the Eurostar. Andrea Thomson and Steve Wicker from GCHQ checked him out, and he claimed to be running a tech startup in Shoreditch. But about the same time you decided to take a holiday in Syria — for which I have run monumental interference in Whitehall this week, and you can thank me later — back here at home, Wicker connected Marsh to a series of recent identity fraud purchases of drone units.”
“You think that’s his connection to Exphoria? So what’s he been doing since Novak went dark?”
“That’s the problem. Following Wicker’s discovery, Five raided the startup and found the whole place cleaned out. Everyone and everything, gone without a trace. So all we know for sure about the Exphoria leaks is what you found on that SD card. Thank you for sending it back in your absence, by the way.”
“It was the least I could do.”
“Wasn’t it just. Now, the second problem is rather more political. You see, Exphoria is still going ahead.”
Bridge tried to reply, but all she could manage were wordless, incredulous sounds of disbelief.
Giles raised his hands in resignation, and related the events of his meeting with Sir Terence and the others. “Basically, all they see are a few photos. They can’t, or won’t, understand the implications.”
“Isn’t that precisely why they have intelligence agencies in the first place?”
Giles gave her a lopsided smile. “Sometimes I wonder. By the way, Archives found this. You should see it.” He handed Bridge a file from his desk. She opened it to see a recent photo of James Montgomery, and several word-processed reports of activity monitoring and financial checks.
“What’s this from? Are you saying you knew Montgomery was dirty when you sent me in?”
“Not at all. We only came across this after you’d uncovered him. Turns out there was a watch on Montgomery a few years ago, when he was a departmental advisor at the MoD. There were rumours one of the bidding contractors on a defence job was owned by a conglomerate of Russian oligarchs, through shells of course, and they were trying to buy the contract with bribes.”
“Montgomery was working for them?”
“All we had was speculation, so we kept an eye on him throughout. In the end the contract went to a different firm anyway. The file was closed, the flags removed. We didn’t make the connection until we found out the Russians were behind the Exphoria leak.”
“Are we sure they are behind it, though?”
Giles looked surprised, then frowned. “Explain.”
“Well, I’m not a hundred per cent myself, but…”
“Bridge, it’s your own evidence that points to Moscow in the first place. Spit it out.”
She took a deep breath, still not entirely sure of her theory. But it was the best she had. “Something Voclaine said after he picked me up from the police. He said they found a go-bag waiting on the bed in Montgomery’s apartment, with a Russian passport, currency, the usual.”
“Correct, and that confirms who his handlers were.”
“But I was in Montgomery’s bedroom directly before he attacked me, and there was no bag. So who put it there? I didn’t. He certainly didn’t.”
“Then it must have been Novak, after he — oh.” Giles rubbed his beard. “Yes, now you mention it, that is strange. Why prepare an agent’s bag, when you can see with your own eyes that the agent is dead?”
Bridge smiled. “Unless, of course, you want the police to assume he was leaving for Russia.” She was growing in confidence. Explaining the theory out loud made it sound more real, more plausible, than when it was locked in her head. “And then there was the gun, a Russian-issue Grach that I’m positive Novak gave to Montgomery.”
“Why?”
“Because Novak seemed to know it wasn’t loaded before he picked it up. As if it had never been loaded, and he knew that precisely because it was his gun.”
Giles leaned back and gazed at the ceiling. “It fits, I’ll give you that. But it’s not much to go on.”
“It makes sense combined with other things that occurred to me in Syria, though. Lots of time to think, out there in the desert, and I realised how old-fashioned this has all been. A traditional code cipher, sent over a part of the internet hardly anyone uses any more. Photographing computer screens, instead of just hacking into the servers. Handing off the photos, rather than a secure online transfer. And Novak himself was old school. He tracked me down with old-fashioned tradecraft rather than electronic surveillance, and he fought like a relic of the Cold War. He couldn’t have been any more Russian if he’d had Stalin’s face tattooed on his forehead.”
“It is all rather outdated,