Wendy wrote up her report in a blazing hurry then hung around her cubicle for a long time, snooping on camera feeds. Eventually she found a view of the back of her own head, disappearing down an alleyway (the view inconveniently barricaded by a row of overflowing bins). She picked up the trail in the high street, where a black Porsche SUV glided along in monochrome silence, pursued by an angry woman on roller-blades. She glimpsed herself weaving in and out of oblivious pedestrians, jumping into the street to avoid a pram, leaping back onto the pavement to dodge a delivery van. The SUV turned right across traffic to dodge down a street running past a park. Right on cue, the woman on skates dismounted, stumbling to a panting halt on the pavement as the order to break off pursuit reached her.
Wendy skipped from camera to camera, swearing whenever she hit a blank spot or a gap in the record—too many systems still only recorded in low-def, or even spooled to tape—but she kept following the getaway car as it cruised past Kensington Park and slowed. She froze a frame in which a door swung open, scrubbed forward a couple of seconds and counted fewer indistinct heads, then backed up.
There. Him. She spotted the teenager in the hoodie crossing the road behind the SUV, heading into the park. She bookmarked and carefully saved the stream, then moved on. No more flung-open door footage, but one fewer head: the flare of a coat, a familiar figure glimpsed from behind, walking along the pavement behind the car. She followed him to a zebra crossing, then a footpath. London’s parks were heavily instrumented, a legacy of IRA bombing campaigns during the early 1990s. The municipal cameras were crap but they let her track Not-Bernard-Harris and Kid-in-Hoodie halfway across the park, in the direction of the mews behind Kensington Palace. Then she hit a blind spot. There was a dead zone where none of the cameras were working and nobody had fixed them because it was all outsourced these days, including monitoring the outsourcing agency’s performance and deliverables, so why bother when you can spend your maintenance budget on comfy office chairs and a C-suite pay raise? Or maybe there was something more sinister than everyday corruption and negligence at work. Hmm.
Fuming, Wendy dropped a bunch of pins around the target area on the street map. Then she went back to tracking the cute getaway woman with the dreads and the infuriatingly insouciant attitude as she drove away from the park. Just a kilometer further away she parallel-parked the Cayenne neatly, then got out and walked a hundred meters and entered a tube station. Which would have been great for further surveillance if only the cameras in the lobby of that particular station had been working, but somehow Getaway Girl managed to vanish inside during a very precise six-minute interval when there was no monitoring because the computer that controlled the station’s cameras was installing a Windows update and rebooting.
It was almost as if her target had known.
Wendy pushed her chair back from the desk and stretched to ease the crick in her neck. She blinked furiously, eyes watering from a couple of hours staring at a too-cheap monitor, and checked the time on her phone: it was nearly half past six. At least she had tomorrow off work, thanks to Gibson not being a total tool after she’d nearly gotten her ass shot off. She’d go home and cook herself dinner, maybe catch up on the washing, and have an early night. Then tomorrow she’d go for a walk in the park and see what she could find.
Back in her subterranean den Eve allowed herself a private Two Minute Hate—at Chez Bigge, one screamed silently in the privacy of one’s own head if one knew what was good for one: all the walls had ears, not to mention eyes and speech stress analyzers—then, with every outward appearance of calm, she placed the bid letter on her desk and tried to stare it into submission. When that failed she busied herself with make-work, directing one of the less unreliable members of her staff to identify the thief-taker at the bank—best to buy off the pursuit, as long as they were clueless about the manuscript. But finally she ran out of delaying tactics. So she took a deep breath, moistened her lips, adjusted her telephone headset, and made the unavoidable call.
Rupert answered the phone unusually quickly. “Yes?” He sounded irritable.
“My Lord.” He liked My Lord as a title, almost as much as he liked Master or Boss. “It’s about the rare manuscript. The acquisition is still in progress, but I’ve encountered some pushback, and I need clarification on how to proceed. Is this a convenient time?”
“Not terribly, no.” Rupert sounded distracted. “Don’t stop, get on with it,” she heard him tell someone else. “Ah, good.” A shuddering gasp. “Talk to me, Eve.”
Oh God, he’s with a rent boy again, she realized, or maybe a call girl, or—Rupert spread his affections widely, and wasn’t terribly happy to be interrupted in the act—“Yes, My Lord,” she said, re-centering herself. “A rival firm is bidding high and there’s already a body count—they tried to preempt with extreme prejudice. They smell of siloviki to me, but it might be a double-blind. Anyway, I’ve acquired the tender but I think it’s time-critical and I’d like your permission to throw money at the problem.”
“Yes, I already heard about it from Dmitry in Smyrna; it makes sense that there would be competition from that direction. Ahh, ahh—yes, how much money?” He sounded slightly breathless. “Keep going,” he added.
“Twenty-five
