“Keep your hair on. I was wondering what to wear.”
“You’re planning on getting up? That’s good.”
He said, “Louisa’s had her moments. She might have met someone in a pub and forgotten she said she’d call. But . . .”
“But?”
“But not if she was on a job. Especially not if the job involved Min.”
“Yes, I wondered about that. So I woke Ho an hour ago, and got him to run another trace.”
River waited.
Emma said, “The Fitbit’s not moved in the last few hours. Nor has Louisa’s phone. And they’re both in the same place. Which appears to be a roadside ditch.”
The current head of Tricks and Toys—the Park’s gadget section, which also oversaw tech issues; like a High Street phone outlet had merged with a party shop—was a forty-something redheaded black woman named Terrance. Richard Pynne was confident the red hair was a chemical intervention, and pretty sure Terrance couldn’t be her first name, but that was what everyone called her, and though he made a mental note after each encounter to check her personnel file, had never followed through. T&T, anyway, he kept at broomstick’s length ever since he’d queried the timekeeping of a junior glitch-monkey—the guy was arriving twenty to thirty minutes late on a daily basis: there was leeway, and then there was taking the piss—and that same afternoon found his Oyster card inexplicably fundless. Sometimes you were outgunned. But his long-term plan was to wait for the next round of development appraisals, then shaft the little bastard with a poison-tipped memo.
But right this minute, bright and early Friday morning, he was in a corridor, and here was Terrance buttonholing him.
“I’ve finished with the rogue laptop.”
It took Pynne a moment to work out which laptop she meant.
“And?”
“And my report’s in your inbox.”
“You couldn’t give me the bullet points?”
She could, she did, and like every IT professional everywhere, ensured it was unlikely he’d grasp her meaning first time round. By the third dumbed-down repetition, though, he thought they were, if not on the same page, somewhere in the same chapter.
He said, “So what I’m understanding here, what I’m taking away is, you can’t categorically state, one hundred percent, that the material found on the hard drive was downloaded by the certified user.”
“That’s right.”
Which punched a hole in the case against Lech Wicinski. It wasn’t just his laptop they were talking about, it was his culpability.
“And if it were introduced by a third party, there’s no way of knowing who.”
“Except it would have to be a savvy operator. The protection on our gear’s world standard,” Terrance said. “Bypassing it’s a lot more complicated than dicking with someone’s Oyster card.”
Pynne thought, on the whole, he’d let that one go.
“So not just a potential bad actor. A potential
“Would be my guess.”
“And would you have a shortlist? Who’d have the, ah, chops to pull this off?”
She said, “China, India, for sure. The Russians, probably.”
“Americans?”
“Nah.”
He said, “What about the Germans?”
“Hmm. Possibly.”
“. . . Thanks.”
“But I’m not saying for definite it happened that way. Twenty percent chance, maximum.”
“Okay.”
“Which is still way too big to let pass. I’m going to have to go for a rebuild on the firewall. Which will require an overspend.”
“Okay,” he said again. “Thanks. But listen. When you’re applying for the funding, don’t mention this in your business case. It’s highly classified. Highly.”
“Right,” Terrance said. “So I’ve got to apply for funds to patch a possible hole in our firewall which I’m not allowed to mention when applying for the funds.”
Pynne allowed that it wasn’t ideal.
“Nah,” she said. “Regent’s Park. Business as usual.”
She went on her way.
Pynne returned to his office, and deleted the email she’d sent him.
Two hours later River was on his fourth coffee: this one supposedly a double-shot Americano, though he’d had more kick from a cough drop. He was at a counter pressed up against a café window, the stool too high for comfort: he had to sit sideways, because his knees wouldn’t fit. Shirley Dander didn’t have the same difficulty, on account of having, as she put it, a lower centre of gravity: lot of syllables for shortarse, he remembered thinking first time he’d heard that. He’d called her once Emma Flyte had left, not because she was top of the list of people he’d call in an emergency, but because he had no such list. He was going to have to do something constructive about his life soon, but at the moment was too busy negotiating his way through it.
Shirley’s demands were predictable enough: a cappuccino and a sausage sandwich, the latter so lathered in ketchup, she looked like an extra from a zombie movie two bites in. That was for turning up. Getting her to listen to what Flyte had said was more of a struggle.
“So she’s missing.”
“Yes.”
“In Wales.”
“Yes.”
“What the fuck’s she doing in Wales? It’s just sheep and windmills.”
River, who wasn’t certain about the windmills, said, “She was looking for someone.”
“Someone Welsh?”
