Joe Country полностью

More to it than that, Emma could tell. She took another sip of wine, let it roll around her mouth, then said, “And you think you can trace this kid by his Fitbit?”

“Not personally. But the thing is, he’s still wearing it. And given they’re internet-enabled, and I’ve got its registration number—”

“Then someone with the right kit should be able to pinpoint—”

“His exact location, yeah.”

“Well, you’re probably right. But I’m not going to bluff my way onto the Hub and ask one of the worker bees to break fifteen different laws for me. They didn’t like me when I worked there. They’re not going to do me any favours now.”

“Sure they liked you.”

“They were scared of me.”

“There’s a difference?”

Emma conceded the point by finishing her wine.

She said, “Why don’t you ask your tame keyboard muppet? I seem to remember there’s nothing he can’t do with a computer. Or that was the impression he liked to give.”

“Yeah, no, the thing is, if I ask Roddy to do it, it would be like I owed him a favour.”

“It would be precisely you owing him a favour,” Emma pointed out.

“Which is worse,” Louisa agreed. “On account of I work in the same building as him. Though that does, in fact, give me an idea . . .”

Emma waited, but nothing more was forthcoming.

“You still there?”

“I was hoping,” Louisa told her, “that you’d work the next bit out for yourself. Hence my dramatic pause.”

“. . . God, no.”

“Pretty sure he’d jump at the chance to get in your pants. Good books is what I just said. Ignore whatever you thought you heard.”

“I am not going to go begging favours from Roddy Ho.”

“Awww, you remember his name. That is so cute.”

“Louisa—”

“Plus you’re bored out of your skull. You know you are.”

“This was your plan all along, wasn’t it? You knew there was no chance in hell I’d go into the Park for you. And you’re hoping because I’d say no to that, I’d be more likely to say yes to this.”

“I have no idea what you mean. Plan? We’re having a girly chat.”

“One in which you play me like a . . . xylophone.”

“Yeah, I can’t play the xylophone. Listen, Emma, seriously? I really need to find this kid. And I don’t think Ho will do it for me. He’s been kind of pissed off since, you know. That whole fake girlfriend thing.”

Emma looked at her empty glass. She was being played, no question.

It was true, though, that she was bored out of her skull.

She said, “I do this for you, you’ll explain what ‘complicated’ means?”

Louisa said, “To the last syllable.”

Emma picked the glass up, walked back to her kitchen. “Okay,” she said. “You want to read out that registration number?”

That evening—while River was turning off his computer at Slough House, then rebooting immediately, thinking ten more minutes; just ten more minutes running Jay Featherstone’s hire car through ANPR, in case it had registered while he was powering down—Richard Pynne stopped for a drink on his way home. He needed it. Instead of researching Frank Harkness, his afternoon had been one of crisis-management: a Park operative had dropped off the map. A contractor, her role was to supervise the incineration of shredded documents, the crushing of superannuated hard drives, and to some she was little more than a glorified janitor, but not to Pynne. The way he saw it, she regularly laid hands on broken secrets. Who was to say they couldn’t be reassembled? So when it had been brought to his attention that she wasn’t at work, and when the resulting knock on her door revealed a vacant flat, it was clear she’d taken her jigsaws to auction. Thus her photo was red-flagged, and took the UK airports’ hit parade by storm; meanwhile, Dick put a team onto assembling a menu of recently sledgehammered work product, a task which involved most of the Hub. And it went well, or as well as these things ever do: by seven, he’d been ready to deliver to Lady Di a list of operations to be regarded as tainted when someone handed him a Post-it the contractor had stuck to her manager’s desk that morning: she had the flu and was going home. Further investigation revealed she’d changed address without updating her personal details. All of which went to show, as Richard emphasised in his end-of-day report, that procedures should be rigidly adhered to. There was a reason red tape existed; it was so things didn’t fall apart. And now he needed a drink.