I didn’t reply.
“I thought so,” he said.
“When they parked the car, was anyone with it?” I said. “I mean, anyone other than the two people you shot?”
Fothergill took a moment to think.
“No,” he said. “Just them. The man and the woman. Why?”
“ ’Cause they were no ordinary pair,” I said. “I don’t care about her, but the guy was clearly running their show. We needed to take him alive. To talk to him. He was our last link to McIntyre. Without him, we have no idea where to look.”
“It was a question of priority. Taking him wasn’t worth losing you. Not in my opinion, anyway. And I’m sure not in London’s, either. You might be a royal pain in the ass, but you’re an expensive pain, too. I wasn’t about to lose you on my watch.”
“There was no question of losing me. The situation was completely under control. Until you got there. Now we’re back to square one.”
“So you say. I saw it differently. And we still have all that computer stuff, remember. That I found at the machine shop. Which you missed, when you were having that little gun battle of your own. It’s all at the consulate, already. The gurus are working on it. They’ll find something. They always do.”
“Let’s hope so. Do they have a timescale?”
“Not yet. It’s a question of ‘How long’s a piece of string?’ They’re no slouches, though. Shall we make our way back and see if they’ve made any headway?”
“We might as well. Since there are no warm bodies left to interrogate.”
“Come on, then. And let’s stop bickering. We’re like spoiled kids. One quick question, though, first. You said you didn’t care about that girl?”
“That’s right.”
“So how come, after I’d shot her, you went back and took something out of her jeans pocket?”
I shrugged.
“Some kind of memento, perhaps?” he said. “That speaks of a slightly less disinterested attitude than you’ve been letting on. I hope there are no conflicts of interest emerging here?”
“No,” I said. “None.”
“Then why did you want something of hers?”
“I didn’t.”
“So what did you take?”
“Something of mine.”
“What?”
“My shorts.”
Fothergill’s eyebrows arched, and his mouth began to open.
“Don’t even ask,” I said.
He was alluding to a road I knew I’d never be going down again.
THIRTEEN
All change is for the worse.
That was a phrase I heard a lot when I was growing up. I guess the advances of the sixties didn’t sit too comfortably with my parents. I sometimes thought they’d be happier if time had stood still at the start of the thirties. As in, the eighteen-thirties. They didn’t see the potential for changing your life, to take advantage of circumstances. For changing your routine, to benefit from new facilities. Or for changing your plans, to make the most of whatever the gods of fate saw fit to throw in your path.
We reached the consulate without incident, but once we got there three interesting things happened, one after the other. When the guard on duty at the garage saw Fothergill approaching, he came straight out of his booth and offered to park the car for him. Then the doorman from the foyer walked across with us and hit the button for the fourteenth floor, without waiting to be asked. And the receptionist left her desk and unlocked the door that led directly to Fothergill’s corridor, saving us from dawdling our way through the sniffer machines.
I watched each one carefully. They behaved in exactly the same way, and their expressions and body language told me exactly the same thing. They weren’t acting out of sympathy for Fothergill’s injury. They weren’t in a rush to get him out of their hair, even though it was pushing five and they probably wanted to go home. They were doing these things because they all seemed to genuinely like him, and were happy to see him back in the fold, safe and sound.
It was a strange phenomenon to observe, especially since it involved someone who wore the same uniform as me. Someone who’d cut his teeth in the field, like me. Who’d also lived a large portion of his life on the outside, looking in. Fothergill had somehow turned all that on its head. He’d been absorbed by the crowd and was now on the inside, looking out. At me. I wondered how that would feel. To be part of something that wasn’t temporary. Something with some stability—transfers and repostings permitting. I hadn’t known Fothergill as an agent, but it was clear that now he’d put down roots. He was welcome here. He was flourishing. And for the first time, I began to wonder if my future could ever hold anything like that. I’d never really thought about it consciously before. My longterm planning had never gone beyond a vague image of my number coming up, leaving me sprawling in an alleyway or a hotel room. And everything after that going dark.
Fothergill dropped into the chair behind his desk and started to swing lazily from side to side, reinforcing the image of comfort and familiarity. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d produced a couple of cigars for us to smoke, like we were at some kind of exclusive club. Instead, though, he pulled out his phone and called down to the IT guys for a progress report.
“Anything?” I said.
“Not yet,” he said. “But they’re good. And they’re pulling out all the stops. They’ll come through with something. I’m pretty confident.”
“I hope you’re right. I can’t see what you’re hoping to get out of this, though. Who would leave vital contact details lying around on some laptop? These guys weren’t amateurs.”
“All the data was encrypted. And they’d need some sort of backup, in case of injuries or fatalities. That’s how teams work. Not everyone runs around on their own, with everything stored in their head.”
“I’m not saying there’ll be nothing useful, when you get it all deciphered. But encrypted or not, they wouldn’t have just left Mc-Intyre’s cell number in their address book for anyone to find. And even if they did, what are the chances of him still using the same phone? He’d have dumped it the moment he got out of the building, after he shot you.”
“You’d be surprised what we find. People are careless. And it’s all about lateral thinking. Finding oblique ways to achieve the same goal. Like nicking Al Capone for tax evasion. All they cared about was getting him behind bars, not how or why.”
“Excellent point. Maybe McIntyre won’t have paid his cell phone bill. Then we could dress up as debt collectors and catch him that way.”
“See? You’re getting it. In the meantime, you sound tired. Do you need a caffeine fix?”
Fothergill reverted to small talk until after his assistant had delivered the coffee. Then he called IT again.
“Still nothing,” he said.
“And there won’t be anything if you keep harassing them,” I said. “Give them the time they need to do their jobs.”
“You’re right. I can ride people too hard, sometimes. I just keep thinking back to those people in the bar. I can’t see that stopping them will really be a long-term problem. Can you? I mean, what would they have told us?”
I shrugged.
“Probably nothing,” he said. “Or whatever they thought we wanted to hear. Either way, we’d be no further along. Dispassionate, factual evidence is what we need. Taken directly from their computers. Properly analyzed. That’s what’s going to break this. As long as we get it quickly enough.”
Fothergill drained the final drops of his coffee, then sat for a moment and stared into the empty cup.
“Need a refill?” he said. “Or something to eat? I could call back down.”
I declined. I wouldn’t have objected to another drink, actually, but I was used to fetching things when I needed them. Not sitting back and waiting for them to be delivered. Like the situation with McIntyre. My preference would be to get out of the office and start shaking things loose for myself. I was itching to move, but I knew that in the circumstances, waiting for a solid lead was the right thing to do. And I had to confess, part of me was fascinated with Fothergill. Watching him work was a revelation. He wasn’t in the field anymore, but he could still get things done. Unlike most desk jockeys, who are completely useless. And he’d shown at the Commissariat that he could still get his hands dirty when he thought he needed to. It’s just that he worked in a different way, now. He’d pulled himself into the center of the web. Nearly everything was achieved through other people. As it was with me, really. Only in a way, his approach was more honest. At least the people who were involved knew what was happening to them. They knew what they were part of, and stayed on board voluntarily. That was a galaxy away from the lies and deceit that are the basic building blocks of my world.