But in a couple of hours, he knew where they would be — or where they said they would be. ‘Send someone to watch Alderley’s house as well,’ he told Staite, ‘just in case this meeting’s a diversion.’ It was possible the call to Alderley had been a decoy, as he was sure they knew it would be monitored; but if it was, then to what end?
‘Play the call again,’ he told Waterford, who dutifully called up the audio file. There was something in the short conversation he had overlooked. He just had to figure out what.
The answer had not come to him by the time Alderley approached the rendezvous, though.
‘Subject is going into the St Pancras multistorey,’ reported one of the watchers tailing the section head. After leaving work, Alderley had travelled by Tube and train to his home, then driven back into central London to make his rendezvous. There had been no sign of Chase or Wilde on either leg of the journey, or near his house. ‘Do we follow him in?’
Brice hesitated — having the watchers take their car in behind Alderley ran the risk of his noticing them — but gave an order in the affirmative. ‘They might try to meet him inside. Don’t let him out of your sight.’
‘Roger. Going in now.’
He waited impatiently for an update. More watchers were already in place at the public square between the two railway terminals, but so far none had anything to report. ‘He’s parked on the second floor,’ Alderley’s shadow finally said. ‘Going past to find a space for ourselves… he doesn’t seem to have noticed us.’
‘Split up,’ Brice told them. ‘One of you follow him, the other park the car and then catch up. I don’t want you to lose eyes on him for a moment.’
‘Understood, sir.’
Brice looked up at the operations room’s screens. Many showed real-time CCTV feeds from cameras around Battle Bridge Place, little wireframe boxes flashing over the heads of the milling pedestrians as MI6’s facial recognition software searched for a match. None yet, though…
His phone rang. ‘Yes?’
It was a call he had been waiting for. ‘I have an update on that laptop,’ replied Evans, one of SIS’s senior technical specialists.
‘Did you recover any files from it?’ Brice asked.
‘We haven’t recovered anything from it yet, old man,’ said the Welshman with silken pomposity. ‘The bullet clipped its hard drive, as well as causing a fair amount of damage to the main logic board. I can give you categoric reassurance that it would have been impossible to boot up after it was shot, though.’
‘What about getting data off it? Could anything have been copied even if it couldn’t power up?’
‘There are ways, yes. But I doubt they could have been employed in the field without specialist hardware.’
‘I need to be absolutely sure, Evans,’ Brice said firmly. ‘There’s a video file on that computer that’s of the highest importance to national security. I need confirmation that it hasn’t been watched or copied.’
‘I did read your request form, old man. Don’t worry, we’ll get to the bottom of it — just give us a little time. We’ll dismantle it and see how much we can tease out of the SSD. Might have to write a custom controller to piece together any scrambled data, but that’s why they pay us the modest salaries, right?’ He chuckled.
‘Just get on with it and report back to me the moment you have an answer,’ he said before ending the call.
‘Techies, sir?’ asked Waterford. ‘Always a pain in the arse, aren’t they?’ Staite smiled.
‘Keep your minds on the job,’ Brice told them irritably. Based on Evans’ report, it seemed unlikely that the incriminating video had been copied — certainly none of the other devices retrieved from Chase and Wilde had contained it — but he needed to be absolutely sure. Once he had confirmation, the threat the couple posed both to himself and SIS as a whole would be drastically reduced. Until that time, though, it had to be considered very great indeed.
‘Subject’s going down the stairs,’ reported the watcher following Alderley.
‘Ground units, have someone ready at the bottom,’ ordered Brice.
‘Already in position,’ replied another officer, a woman. Seconds passed, then: ‘I see him. He’s alone.’
‘Nobody passed him on the stairs,’ said the man.
‘Okay, wait for your partner. Ground units, he’s coming your way.’ Brice looked back at the screens. One of the CCTV cameras covered the car park exit closest to Battle Bridge Place. A brief wait, then Alderley emerged. ‘There he is — track him,’ he told Waterford.
Different cameras followed Alderley into the square. He slowed as he neared its centre, looking around. Several watchers announced that they had him in sight. ‘No sign of the main targets,’ said one.
‘Be patient. Let them come to him.’ He kept watching the screens. Alderley wandered back and forth, looking hopefully at the stations’ exits, but it didn’t take long before his body language revealed impatience. He sat on a bench, checking his watch. Even on the CCTV image, his frown was clear.
Twenty minutes ticked by, and still no trace of the people he was supposed to meet. Alderley became increasingly irritated. ‘Maybe the woodentops caught them,’ suggested Waterford.
Staite shook her head. ‘They would have notified us. Sir, this whole thing might be a decoy.’
‘I’d already thought of that,’ said Brice. The nagging feeling that he had missed something still would not go away. ‘But a decoy from what?’
Another ten minutes passed. ‘He’s moving,’ said one of the ground team. Brice looked up from a styrofoam cup of tea. Alderley had finally thrown in the towel, visibly huffing before stalking off towards the car park.
‘Looks like he’s had enough,’ Brice told everyone. ‘Stay with him. Mobile units, get back to your vehicles. Wherever he goes, I want him followed.’
‘He’s making a call,’ said Staite, seeing Alderley take out a phone.
‘Get it,’ ordered Brice. An intercept had already been set up on the section head’s mobile by GCHQ; the call came through in real time.
But it was nothing of value. ‘Hi, sweetie, it’s me,’ Alderley said to his wife, who asked how he was. ‘A bit pissed off, actually. The people I was supposed to meet never turned up. I’m coming home.’ The rest of the call was similarly innocuous.
‘Keep some people in the square, just in case they show up,’ Brice told Staite, but he was sure now that Chase and Wilde weren’t coming.
He glared at the screens. Where were they — and what were they doing?
Alderley returned to his car. The 1971 Ford Capri 3000 GT was his pride and joy, the classic vehicle lovingly hand-restored over two decades as time and finances permitted. It was rare that he actually took the metallic orange coupe out on the road, not wanting to risk damage or — more likely — a breakdown, but the fact that Eddie Chase had been very insistent he bring it rather than his everyday vehicle had caught his curiosity.
So had the rest of the phone call. While he was quite fond of Nina, she was hardly a close friend, and Chase himself was aggravating at best. They would not have contacted him simply to catch up over a coffee. There was something they wanted — needed — to tell him. But knowing that all calls to SIS headquarters were monitored, they had been forced to be circumspect.
Except… they hadn’t turned up. That was both annoying and surprising — as a former military man, Chase was a stickler for punctuality. Had something happened to them?