A Hostile State by Adrian Magson (reading eggs books txt) 📗

The woman was clutching a sheaf of papers and moving from desk to desk, cubicle to cubicle, and either placing a sheet of paper on a desk if vacant or handing it directly to its occupant. Then she did a sharp turn and stopped outside a door in one wall. She appeared to knock, resting one hand against the wall to one side. Then she stepped closer to it before entering and disappearing from view.

It was the door to Lindsay Citera’s comms room.

Callahan sat forward, eyes on the door. When the woman emerged, pulling the door closed again, he found he’d been subconsciously counting off the seconds while they had been inside. Thirty-five. Half a minute to do … what? Drop a slip of paper onto a desk and leave?

He got Andrews to go back to the earlier footage, counting off how long it had taken to pass out the papers to others. Some had been handed over directly if the occupant was there, others were placed on the vacant desks. Each delivery took somewhere between three to five seconds. Normal internal mail delivery speed, he realized … except that in this building most deliveries came via internal mail-messaging. The longest was six seconds and that was when someone by the tilt of their head posed a question. Mostly, though, the occupant looked up, nodded and went back to their work, too busy or disinclined to chit-chat.

Eventually the woman walked back towards the stairs and disappeared off-camera.

‘Is that it?’ said Andrews, picking up by the subtle shift of Callahan’s body language that something on-screen had caught his attention.

Callahan checked himself. He couldn’t risk saying anything yet in case he was way off target and allowing things to add up which actually did not. The woman had been handing out an information bulletin of some kind, but so what? What was there to be suspicious about?

‘Keep going,’ he said, and sat back while Andrews ran more footage.

Thirty minutes later he’d seen enough. He thanked Andrews for his help then went down to the comms area and spoke to several staff members and scoured vacant desks, some of which had a collection of papers amassed over several days. Most of it consisted of updates related to current issues, country-specific news items or maps, training notes and reminders, staff-related matters and reminders about the need to remember security in and out of the building.

It was this last one that caught his attention. With one in his hand he walked along to Lindsay’s office and opened the door. He looked around for a moment, taking in her in-tray. It held very little that hadn’t been left there by her. It included the note he’d given her showing Portman’s locators in France. That now lay to one side of her desk, with three copies of the security reminder lying in the centre.

Dumped because they were no longer needed?

He went outside and showed the reminder to a section supervisor. ‘Do you get much of this stuff from the Support Directorate?’ he asked.

She glanced at the paper and shook her head. ‘Not usually. The internal email system deals with security issues. And there’s already a copy on every bulletin board in the building. In fact I don’t think it’s changed in a week or more. It’s like they think we’re kids in the schoolroom, constantly needing telling more than once.’

Interesting, thought Callahan. Why distribute a security notice around the building that was already posted on the bulletin boards?

More importantly, why would a person on Carly Ledhoffen’s pay grade be chosen to do it?

THIRTY-SEVEN

Seeing the man standing there gave me a chill deep in my gut. I’d seen the look many times before, and on faces exactly like this one.

I’d been on a mission in and around the Somali capital, Mogadishu, on behalf of the French General Directorate of External Security or DGSE. The city was probably one of the most dangerous places on the planet and the memory of being hunted there was still vivid. This man’s stance and look was familiar; fight or flight, it said, but more than likely the former because that was the way of things in that troubled part of the world.

I opened my mouth to call for Lindsay to step aside, and reached into my backpack for one of the guns. I sure as hell didn’t want a confrontation here and now, but I might not have a choice. If he was on the side of the ungodly he wasn’t going to let us go without trying to stop us.

Then he looked back at Lindsay and smiled, a genuine look of pleasure, and revealed his hand to be empty. I figured he’d just dismissed me as a potential client in favour of her.

I can’t say I blamed him.

I looked at the Mégane. It was tired looking, with a few dings in the bodywork here and there, but was spotlessly clean. A Libre sign was propped up in the front window. A freelance cab operator hoping for a fare. The driver stopped smiling when I moved up alongside Lindsay, his look of disappointment palpable. Even so he recovered quickly and nodded at me.

He spoke good if heavily-accented English in a soft voice, and informed us that his name was Djamel and he would be happy to escort us wherever we wished to go. As he spoke I saw his eyes flicking over my shoulder towards the station building, and I wondered how much he had seen. If he was about to shout for help it could be a problem.

‘It’s nice to meet you, Djamel,’ Lindsay said, giving him her most winning smile. ‘Is there a car rental place in town?’

Djamel looked as if he was about to melt on the spot and nodded enthusiastically. He told us he had a cousin nearby who would be happy to rent us a car, no questions asked. I didn’t know if that was his usual line, and we’d