Every so often we could hear a low keening sound from the foxes, who had been banished to the patio and were staring into the house like the poor starving waifs they definitely weren’t.
Sung-Hoon asked me if I was looking forward to being a father and I said I was hoping to make a good job of it, which both the Rees seemed to find hilarious.
Afterwards I was helping Abigail with the washing-up when I got a text from Special Agent Kimberley Reynolds, who is the Folly’s semi-official liaison at the FBI. She handles what she calls the ‘basement files’, which I assume is a reference to The X-Files, and we swap advice and information back and forth using Skype and our official e-mail accounts. Our assumption is that the shadowy forces of the surveillance state were probably monitoring us, but our attitude was that if they wanted us to stop they could bloody well ask us nicely.
‘Good tradecraft,’ Indigo the fox had said. ‘Makes the opposition lazy and allows you to feed them disinformation while you continue through clandestine channels.’
Abigail says that the foxes think they are, or may actually even be in some way, spies. Which is why it didn’t surprise me when one of them, whose name I thought might be Sugar Niner, popped up from under the desk in the side room full of unpacked boxes that Beverley laughingly calls my study.
‘Can I sit on your lap?’ asked Sugar Niner.
‘There’s raw chicken on the patio for you,’ I said. ‘And dumplings.’
‘No thanks,’ said Sugar Niner. ‘I already ate. Had eggs and a mouse.’
‘You can sit on the other chair over there,’ I said. ‘But observation only.’
Sugar Niner reluctantly climbed onto the spare plastic garden chair next to the desk and watched alertly as I set up the call to America.
We’d asked Reynolds to follow up on Andrew Carpenter and Brian Packard, so I’d decided not to wait until the morning. It would be the middle of the afternoon at Quantico, so she’d still be in her office.
‘How’s Beverley?’ asked Reynolds once we were connected.
A thin white woman in her early thirties, with short auburn hair, she was wearing her work suit with her ID badge on a lanyard around her neck. A beige cubicle wall with a wall planner was visible behind her – if it hadn’t been for the letters FBI on her ID she could have been an office drone anywhere in the world.
I gave the latest update on Beverley, the bulge, and the fact that the birth plan appeared to be going out the window.
‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ said Reynolds. ‘You’re strictly kibitzing on this one. Make sure you don’t fall asleep, do what you’re told and you’ll be fine.’
We moved on to Carpenter and Packard.
‘They’re both naturalised US citizens now,’ said Reynolds, ‘Andrew Carpenter originally worked for Ogilvy & Mather, they’re a New York ad agency, but moved on to MullenLowe U.S., another agency, after he became a citizen. He still lives in New York.’
Reynolds had called Carpenter and found him co-operative. He remembered the Bible study group, and was convincingly surprised and shocked at learning of David Moore’s and Preston Carmichael’s deaths.
‘He said he hadn’t had any contact with the other members since he left Manchester,’ said Reynolds.
‘Did you ask him about his ring?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ said Reynolds. ‘He says he lost his this past January.’
‘Did he say lost or stolen?’
‘Definitely lost,’ said Reynolds. ‘He thinks he left it at a Vietnamese restaurant in the East Village. Took it off in the bathroom to wash his hands and forgot to put it back on again.’
‘Sounds unlikely,’ I said.
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Reynolds. ‘So I asked a couple of the oblique questions we discussed.’
We’d recently talked over some of the interview techniques me and Nightingale had developed as part of the Falcon Awareness Course. They seemed to have worked in this case.
‘There was a definite sense of disconnection from events,’ said Reynolds.
‘So probably he came under the influence,’ I said.
‘That’s the way it seems to me,’ said Reynolds.
‘Do you have a precise date?’
‘Fifth of January,’ said Reynolds.
The 46th World Economic Forum had run from the 20th or the 23rd, so plenty of time for Lesley to grab one ring from Andrew Carpenter before jetting over to Switzerland to seducere the other from Alastair McKay.
‘But,’ said Reynolds, when I proposed this, ‘that implies that Lesley knew who at least two of the ringbearers were.’
‘Ringbearers – really?’ I said.
‘Hey,’ said Reynolds. ‘If the name fits …’
‘So did Lesley know about Brian Packard?’ I said.
‘That’s where things get interesting,’ said Reynolds. ‘Brian Packard went to UCSD Health Sciences for both his master’s and his doctorate.’
That made sense – according to Manchester University’s records he’d graduated with a first in biochemistry. Reynolds confirmed that it wasn’t unusual for foreign students to be recruited by the top research schools. Although she said his résumé must have been impressive, since University of California San Diego was in the top five globally of biomedical research centres.
‘They sponsored him for a visa, too,’ said Reynolds. ‘He became an American citizen and joined the Life Sciences faculty at UCLA in 2007, and then in 2014 drops off the grid.’
It’s not as hard to avoid Big Brother as people think it is, although it helps if you have a source of readies and pay in cash. Without a legitimate reason to open an official investigation, Reynolds could only make a casual data sweep – basically social media plus reported crimes and deaths.
‘Could he have just opted for a quiet life?’ I asked.
‘It’s hinky,’ said Reynolds. ‘One minute he’s a happy man around Facebook, with a Twitter and an Instagram account, and the next day he stops posting. The accounts keep running but he’s not posting any more.’
‘Could he be dead?’
‘An identified body would have turned up in my initial sweep,’ said Reynolds.
And she said she’d reached out to the LA Office to do a more thorough search and see if there were any John Does that might match his description.
But what had really caught her attention was that in the six or so months running up to his abandonment of social media, he’d started interacting online with some real nutjobs.
‘Flat-earthers or our kind of nutjobs?’ I asked.
‘Difficult to tell from a distance,’ said Reynolds. ‘But the individuals in question used some of the key words you told me to look out for. I managed to obtain some transcripts of exchanges that happened on one of the 4chan boards and Mr Packard was definitely looking for something.’
Reynolds got the strong impression that Brian Packard wasn’t looking to drink the Kool-Aid, but instead searching for the real thing. And me and Agent Reynolds both knew that there were groups in California who knew where real magic could be found.
‘I’ll send you the transcripts and let you know if anything else turns up,’ said Reynolds, and after pleasantries we shut down the connection.
‘Classic case of recruitment,’ said Sugar Niner.
I looked over to where the young fox was still sitting on the chair and looking pleased with himself, and asked what he meant.
‘What’s it worth?’ asked Sugar Niner.
‘You know the rules,’ I said. ‘Information first, payment second.’