Henri took one of the sandwiches from Marcel, unwrapped it, and offered it to the sobbing smuggler. He recalled Old Philippe saying how ill both men had looked, that one of them seemed ready to keel over at any moment. “Your friend was already very ill when you reached Saint-Malo, wasn’t he? Is that why you didn’t travel to England?” The smuggler took the sandwich with one hand and bit into it with furious hunger, nodding in silent reply as he chewed. “And you thought you could make it back to Portugal instead, find a friend who could help you.” Another nod. “Did you know what you were carrying? Did the client tell you?”
The smuggler nodded again, but Henri said nothing, waiting for more. The man swallowed too quickly, coughed three times, swallowed again, then said, “But he told us it was sealed. That if we didn’t open the package, we were safe.”
“Why tell you at all?” Marcel asked. “Isn’t is always safer for the courier not to know what he’s carrying?”
“That’s terrorism for you,” said Henri. “People like that, they want everyone to know. Even if these guys had been caught in Saint-Malo, as soon as they said ‘radioactive’ the place would be sealed off, news cameras everywhere, lots of publicity and people saying ‘My God, they came so close, we could have all died.’ It’s a textbook play.” Marcel shrugged with disdain, and lit a cigarette. “Give him one,” said Henri. Marcel was about to protest, but sighed and handed his cigarette to the smuggler. He lit another for himself, and stepped outside the room.
“You’re doing very well,” Henri said. “Just a couple more things. First, what address was on the package? Where was it going in England? Do you have it written down?”
The smuggler pulled on the cigarette and shook his head, then coughed for ten seconds straight. Henri took out his phone and pulled up the photo of Novak and Marsh from the bar. “What about the client? How were you contacted, how were you paid? Did you see either of these men?”
Before the smuggler could answer, Marcel ran into the room. “We’ve got company,” he hissed, “I told you it wouldn’t take long for them to find him.” Henri heard distant angry shouts. They didn’t have much time before the Toulouse underground would be here to take revenge on the smugglers, assuming they weren’t both dead before the mob arrived. The smuggler was coughing incessantly now, and threw the cigarette away. Henri tried to help the man to his feet but he bent over, coughing and wheezing, too weak to stand. “Strange English-looking man,” he gasped between coughs, “found us in Sines…”
Henri propped the man up against his own knee, holding the phone screen to his face. “Why was he strange? Did he look like this? Like one of these?”
The smuggler lifted a finger toward the screen, but couldn’t hold it long enough to point at anyone in the photo. “On his mobile,” whispered the smuggler, “sounded like Chinese…” The man’s body softened, as if the tension held within his chest had dissolved into air, and he was gone.
Henri and Marcel left, taking a different route to avoid the mob. As they clambered out of a broken ground-floor window, the angry shouts of criminals denied vengeance echoed through the concrete and steel.
75
Giles was talking about Nigel Marsh/Daniel Bowman, about the radioactive material, about drones and targets. Bridge was listening attentively, hearing every word, but distracted by an insistent, incessant thought at the back of her mind. Something just didn’t add up.
She’d spent most of the night failing to find sleep, tossing and turning long after the sleep timer had silenced the almost inaudible Radio 3 feed on her iPhone. The confirmation from Mourad that Daniel Bowman had commissioned the matériel chaud smuggling operation — and on a shoestring, by the sounds of it — had begun a flurry of secure phone calls, encrypted emails, records searches, plus warrant applications on both sides of the river and across it, as SIS and Five argued about who had jurisdiction and primacy over whatever was about to happen.
That it was connected to Bowman’s interest in drones seemed obvious. A dirty bomb flown into central London by consumer drone to explode somewhere like Oxford Circus would be devastating to the population, to transport, to the economy, to the government. But if that was the plan, why bother installing a mole on the Exphoria project? He didn’t need that to buy and control remote drones. And what was the startup in Shoreditch all about? Had ‘Marsh’ made up that rubbish about quantum state information in wifi signals just to get Andrea and Steve off his back? Steve had filled Bridge in when she returned to London, and her guess was that Bowman knew all along they weren’t from a local business bureau. Otherwise, why clear out so fast after their visit? Perhaps he wasn’t some genius physicist working on an impossible technology. Perhaps he was doing something much simpler with existing signal technology, which explained the routers and signal units Steve saw on Bowman’s workbench. If you were going to run a drone attack on the Exphoria demo, you’d need range extenders and signal boosters in order to maintain a signal across the security perimeter. You’d want to place them in advance, test their reception.
But security around the Lincolnshire airfield had been triple-A for weeks. Bowman would have had to infiltrate the location before Andrea and Steve paid him a visit. Nevertheless, it wasn’t impossible. Bridge, having given up on sleep, added a bullet point to the long email she was composing to Giles and everyone else involved. Then she went for a pre-dawn run round Highgate
