Brute Force

59

We sat on the bus for Chiavari, still heading south along the coast, away from Santa Margherita. Our seats were halfway along the single-decker and out of view of any vehicles that followed. We'd dumped the Punto in a residential street and Lynn had navigated us to a bus stop. We'd bought our tickets at the roadside machine and jumped on.

His head hung down. He was feeling shit for compromising us, and so he should. But I had to keep him revved up. We still had a lot to do.

'Fuck it. Don't worry, it's done. We all fuck up. Besides, they were going to hit us anyway.' I leant over. 'I guess we now know it's the Firm.'

His head jerked up. 'Do we, Nick? It couldn't have been Skype. It's secure. All the Firm knew was our RV. They wouldn't have had operators scouring the whole length of the autostrada just to follow us in. Why bother, if they knew where we were going?'

He had a point.

'And if they'd got a fix on us from the call, why wait until we were on the road? Why not hit us at the flat? Why take the chance of the surveillance being compromised, why take the chance of us not going to the RV?'

He was right. We still did have a place to hide.

The bus stopped for a couple of waffling women and some kids with day sacks. The air conditioning kept everything nice and cool and calm. It was helping me, for sure.

We got to the edge of Chiavari and the bus stopped. I stood up and Lynn followed. We might as well stay on the outskirts of this place and move back to the flat once it was dark.

We went into a café to keep out of sight of the road. I nursed an espresso as I visualized the opening of my cache down on the Golden Lane Estate. I picked up the menu and gave it to Lynn. 'Might as well order some food, eh?'

I played with my coffee. In my mind's eye, the screws were still in place. The mortar was still in place. Even the clingfilm; everything was as it should have been. I swallowed the shot and shuddered – only partly because the coffee was so strong. Mainly it was the thought that whoever knew about my cache would have my passport details, and everything else would have followed. They would have trawled through any credit card movements. My passport would have been pinged by the biometrics as soon as it was put under the reader at Genoa, and that would have confirmed that the tickets I'd bought on the credit card weren't a decoy. The hire car would have turned up on their screens, and all they had to do was check the camera information coming out of the tollbooths.

It all pointed back to the Firm, no matter what Lynn believed.

They would have some intelligence-sharing agreement in place with the Italians. They'd be able to link into their cameras and access plate-recognition machinery at the tollbooths without even leaving their desks. The Italians wouldn't have had to know what was going on. The request would have been entirely routine, and submitted with a big pile of others.

Once they knew where we'd come off the autostrada, they would have had to start checking the old-fashioned way, and they wouldn't have involved the Italians in that, for sure. Meanwhile, they would have been looking for us electronically, waiting for credit cards to be pinged.

Lynn was busy waffling away to the waiter when I realized that there was someone I'd overlooked – someone else who knew about my passport.

The waiter left.

'Can you get me a phone card?'

'We calling Vauxhall Cross?'

'Fuck Vauxhall Cross.'

A few seconds later a couple of paninis appeared, along with glasses of chopped-up carrot and celery.

I asked for a cappuccino.