Ever since he could remember, Norrington had suffered gut-ache and stomach cramps whenever he was scared. He made for the toilet, sank down, grunting, and then left with a lighter step. He was at the door of the conference room, holding the handle in his hand, when all of a sudden he had the feeling that someone was staring at the back of his head. Not someone, something, some grinning, goggle-eyed bogeyman. He stopped dead, and whipped round towards his office.
Nobody there.
For a second he hesitated, but the whatever-it-was was still staring at him. Slowly he crossed the space, walked into his office and around his desk. Everything seemed to be in order. He tapped the touchscreen and tried to open one of his files.
Access denied.
Norrington stumbled backwards, looked around in a panic. What was happening here? A system error? Not on your life! He felt a trickle of ice creep up his spine as he remembered how Jericho had niggled at the matter of Vic Thorn, and what a stupid mistake he’d made in replying. Why hadn’t he just admitted that they’d been friends, good friends at that? What the hell would that prove, that he’d known Thorn, even if the guy turned out to be a terrorist a thousand times over?
He opened a login window and typed in his name.
The system told him that he was already logged in.
Download complete.
‘At last,’ Yoyo said, logged Norrington out and sent the message to Jericho’s phone.
Norrington stared at his screen.
Somebody was helping themselves to his data.
His fingers trembling, he tried again. This time the system accepted his codes and let him in, but he knew all the same that they had been through his files. They had got hold of his access data and they’d been spying on him.
They were onto him.
Norrington steepled his index fingers, and put them to his lips. He was fairly sure that he knew who ‘they’ were, but what could he do to stop them? Demand that Jericho’s computer be searched? Then the detective would cast his loyalty in doubt. Norrington would have to agree to a search of his own data if he didn’t want to arouse suspicion, and that would be the beginning of the end. Once they started to piece together his deleted emails—
One moment though. Jericho was sitting in the conference room. It might have been Jericho who had logged him out, but he could hardly have anything to do with what had just happened. One of the others, either Tu Tian or Chen Yuyun, was sitting in front of Jericho’s computer right now – what kind of stupid name had he given it? Diane? It was probably the girl. Hadn’t she been roaming through the control room just a while back, looking as though she had nothing better to do?
Yoyo. He had to get rid of her.
‘Andrew?’
He jumped. Edda Hoff. Pale and expressionless under her lacquered black pageboy cut. Expressionless? Really? Or wasn’t there rather a gleam in her eye, the sly look of someone watching a trap to see who will walk into it?
‘Jennifer rather urgently needs you to come back for the rest of the meeting.’ She drew her eyebrows together, infinitesimally. ‘Is everything all right? Are you not feeling well?’
‘The tummy.’ Norrington got to his feet. ‘I’m fine.’
The way he came back to the conference table set alarm bells ringing for Jericho. The man’s face was a jaundiced yellow colour, and his forehead was creased and lined with worry. There was no mistaking that Norrington knew exactly what was going on, but instead of pointing the finger at him and demanding an explanation, he sat down to suffer in silence. If any further proof of his perfidy were needed, Norrington had just supplied it.
‘Possibly I should recap on the—’ he began, when all of a sudden more faces appeared on the video wall, and the Xin working group broke in to have their say.
‘Miss Shaw, Andrew, Tom—’ One of the new arrivals held up a thin file. ‘You’ll want to hear this.’
‘What have you got?’ Shaw asked.
‘It’s about Julian Orley’s good friend Carl Hanna. He’s a Canadian investor, and he’s worth fifteen billion, isn’t that right?’
‘That was his story,’ Norrington said, nodding.
‘And you checked him out.’
‘You know that I did.’
‘Well, everybody makes mistakes. We asked around a little. In the end the CIA dug up his family tree.’
Expectant silence.
‘Hey.’ The man smiled at each of them in turn. ‘Anybody want to get to know the guy a little better? After all, this is somebody you people decided you could trust to go on a trip with Julian Orley.’
‘This is quite a build-up.’ Shaw gave them a razor-thin smile. ‘Is there going to be another advertisement break, or will you get to the point?’
The agent put the file down in front of him.
‘From now on, you can call him Neil Gabriel. He’s American, born in 1981 in Baltimore, Maryland. High school and US Navy, then after that he was with the police as an undercover detective. The CIA noticed him, recruited him and sent him off to New Delhi for an operation. He did such good work there that they let him stay several years. He became something of an expert on the region, but also a bit of a lone wolf. So he was telling the truth about India, although that’s about the only truth he did tell. In 2016 he left the good guys and signed up with African Protection Services.’
‘Hanna was with APS?’ Jericho blurted out.
The man leafed through his pages. ‘Vogelaar mentions pretty nearly everybody in his dossier who was connected with the Mayé coup in 2017. There’s a Neil Gabriel in that list, although he was only with the outfit for a little while and then went independent. It looks as though he did jobs for the Zhong Chan Er Bu as well, at least Vogelaar says that Xin liked his work. So now that we’ve talked to our American friends, we know who Neil Gabriel is. Clearly APS must have split at the time. One part stuck with Vogelaar, while the others became Kenny Xin’s creatures.’
Jericho listened, fascinated, and kept an eye on Norrington at the same time. The security number two was visibly distressed by the barrage of facts.
‘Right now we’re busy trying to unravel Hanna’s fake CV, pardon me, I mean Gabriel’s. We hope to find out who set him up with shares in Lightyears and Quan-time. People with serious money. This won’t be anywhere near as easy as it was to crack who he really is.’
‘You know one of them already,’ Jericho said. ‘Xin.’
The agent turned towards him. ‘We don’t hold out much hope of getting a glimpse of him. He seems to just melt away into thin air whenever you think you have him in your sights.’
‘Was it easy to crack Hanna’s identity?’ Shaw asked.
‘Well, easy would be overstating the case. We have good contacts with our friends across the pond, and we couldn’t have done it without them. But the bottom line is’ – he paused, and looked at Norrington – ‘a quiet chat with the Central Intelligence Agency would have done the trick back at the start.’
Norrington leaned forward.
‘Do you really think we didn’t talk to them?’
‘I have absolutely no wish to question your competence,’ the agent said, cheerily. ‘I leave that to others.’
Jericho’s phone rang. He glanced at the screen, excused himself and went outside, shutting the door behind him.
‘Norrington knows,’ he said quietly.
‘Crap.’ Yoyo was silent for a moment. ‘I thought—’
‘Didn’t work out as we expected. Were you able to download everything, at least?’
‘I’ve been hard at work already! The search program can’t find anything about Thorn in Norrington’s data, but there’s some stuff about Hanna. He was a long way from being the only one who could have taken Palstein’s place. There was a regular queue of candidates: Orley’s business partners, it looks like, or people he wanted to do business with. Multi-billionaires, the lot of them, but Norrington always managed to find something to cavil at. Heart condition, high blood pressure, this one’s been in therapy, that one might be flirting with the competition, the other’s got close links with the Chinese government and he doesn’t like the look of it, et cetera, et cetera. You can’t help but think that he was being paid money to find reasons to rule them all out of going along.’