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No emails.
No social media.
No banking activity.
No credit cards.
No immigration data.
A
“What are you missing?” she said aloud.
“I don’t know — what?” David McClellan said.
“Excuse me?”
“Talking to yourself again.”
“Sorry,” she said, managing a laugh. “Just frustrated.”
“Going to tell me what about?”
“Not really, it’s—”
“—classified,” he finished for her.
“I don’t know — all this computing power, all this information, but if you really want to drop out of sight, if you can drop everything and get off the grid, all of this is useless. You can still do it. I keep thinking I’ll think of something different — anything — something that’ll change the results, but I know that’s not going to happen. This guy is either a hermit, living in some jungle somewhere, or he’s dead. If I was going to find anything at all, I’d have found it long before now.”
But she couldn’t give up, so she thought it through again.
Eventually, she knew, they would have to go out into the field. The realistic plan was to confirm her assumption that nothing concerning John Milton existed in any data that GCHQ or the NSA held. After that, she would appeal to Control to broaden the scope of the exercise. Interviews with victims, witnesses, reporting parties, informants. Anything that might buy her more information, more selectors to add to the sweep. She knew from unredacted excerpts from his file that he had been in contact with people in East London before he had disappeared. Elijah and Sharon Warriner. They would be a good place to start.
“Coffee,” McClellan said. “Look at you. You need caffeine. Fancy it?”
She stood and stretched, working the kinks out of her stiff muscles. “Sorry, David, I would, but I’m meeting someone tonight.”
He looked almost comically crestfallen. “A boyfriend?”
“A friend,” she said. She logged off and collected her leather jacket from the back of the chair. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
* * *
The rendezvous had been arranged the day before and was to take place in the Beehive, a pub two miles away in the centre of town. A
The cloud was low and leaden and the wind was cold. She was thankful for her leathers as she hurried along the A40. She arrived at the pub ten minutes later, parked the bike and went inside to her usual table before the fireplace. A man was waiting for her. She didn’t recognise him, and that made her nervous.
“Haven’t I seen you before,” she said as she paused beside him. “Waterloo station?”
He was plain, early-middle age, a receding hairline, nondescript, just like they all were.
“I think it was Liverpool Street,” he corrected, completing the introduction.
Satisfied, she sat down. “Where is Alexei?” she said curtly.
The man spoke in quiet Russian. “He has gone home. Don’t worry about him. You deal with me from now on.”
“Fine. But in English, please. You are less likely to draw attention.”
“Sorry.” The man switched languages. “Yes, of course.”
“Have you done this before?”
“No. You are my first.”
She sighed. “Wonderful. Why couldn’t this wait until Saturday as normal?”
“Your last report has been passed to the highest levels. There are some questions.”
“A little more information about you before we can talk, please.”
“Very well. I work in the same department as you, but I work in the consulate. My name is Roman. I know you are going back to Moscow in two weeks and I know they want to sit down with you and talk officially about your work, your performance, and so on, but before that, we need further details after your last report.”
“Okay. What do you want to know?”
“The English spy — are you any nearer to finding his location?”
“Not yet. And I’m not sure that I’ll be able to. He’s good.”
“Too good for you?”
“Probably not. But they are withholding information from me. It makes it very much harder.”
“Have you seen Control again?”
“Daily progress reports. It’s all one-way, though. I get nothing back.”
“Do you know why they are looking for him?”
“He tried to resign. They wouldn’t tell me why. But they’re not happy.”
“The fuss with the other agent — in London?”
“Classified. Like almost everything else. But obviously co
“What about him?”
“Milton? He knows how to drop out of sight.”
“But they value him?”
“Yes — very much. I get the impression he was one of their best. I’d say this has caused them serious problems. They are very keen to have him back.”
“Colonel Shcherbakov is to be kept up-to-date. You must contact me if you make a breakthrough.”
“Why is he so interested?”
“You know better than to ask that.”
“Yes. But —?”
“I believe they have something pla
A
Roman cocked an eyebrow.
She took it out of her pocket and checked it. She had set up the system to ping her if any of her selectors were tripped. The message said that that was precisely what had happened.
“What is it?”
“The spy. I might have found him.”
* * *
She gu
The report that the system had emailed to her indicated that the selector that had been triggered was for fingerprints.
A finger print?
Seriously?
She jogged to her desk and sat down and there it was: a sca
“No fucking way.”
She sat down and fumbled for her mouse, scrolling through the metadata.
NAME: JOHN SMITH
ALIAS: None
DOB: Unspecified
SEX: M
RACE: White, Caucasian
HEIGHT: 182
WEIGHT: 80
EYE COLOUR: Blue
HAIR COLOUR: Black
SCARS/TATTOOS: Scar on face // Tattoo (angel wings) on back.
RESIDENCE: None
OCCUPATION: Cook
SOC. SEC. NO.: Unspecified
STATE ID NO.: Foreign
LOCATION: Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, MEX
ORGINATING AGENCY: Juá. Muncipal Police, District 12
OFFICIAL TAKING PRINTS: Lt. Jesus R Plato
“Fuck,” she said. The probability matrix was off the charts: the name, personal statistics, identifying features, the metadata all ringing back super-strong hits. But the prints themselves were the thing: the system had matched them with the positive set that she had taken from Milton’s SAS file and they were unquestionably the same.
The loops and ridges, whorls and arches, delta points and type lines.
One set fitted snugly over the other when they were overlaid.