Bridge cradled a cup of coffee and looked out across the river. This was her favourite chill-out space in the Vauxhall building; a low, wide room with a Thames view, cushioned sofas, and machines for tea and coffee. The tea was awful, and the coffee wasn’t much better, but the view made up for them both.
She heard the door open behind her, and the scent of hazelnut reached her nose. “How’s Bowman?” she asked.
“Still sitting pretty in Belmarsh,” said Giles, taking a seat next to her. “He’s convinced we captured Novak and tortured the rendezvous code out of him.”
“Hubris is a powerful thing. I was relying on that when I posted the fake ASCII.”
Giles frowned. “I wish you’d told me about that before we all went running off to Rotherhithe.”
“Didn’t want to give you false hope. He might have known it was a trap.” Bridge sipped her coffee. “What about Sir Terence?”
Giles sighed, and Bridge knew what was coming next. Bowman had confirmed that Air Vice-Marshal Sir Terence Cavendish was his real target, and why. Then-Squadron Leader Terry Cavendish had an affair with Bowman’s mother while he was stationed in Sek Kong. After the handover he’d continued to fly over there from time to time, under pretence of a holiday, and see her in secret. But Sir Terence came to realise the Bowmans had been turned by the Chinese, and were in fact preparing to blackmail him to use as their own double agent. After all, if the British government discovered one of their soldiers was sleeping with a Chinese spy…
To save his own skin, Sir Terence instead reported his suspicions about the Bowmans to the Foreign Office, claiming the reason he’d slept with Mrs Bowman in the first place was to discover if she was a spy. The FCO believed him, and simply made it known to Beijing that the family’s cover was blown. When the National Security Guard Bureau arrived to remove the source of embarrassment, the ‘Pandas’ made sure Daniel, then just a child, knew exactly how his parents had failed to honour the glorious people’s republic. And throughout his subsequent upbringing by the state, they never let him forget.
Now it was Sir Terence’s word against Bowman’s. A knight of the realm versus a confirmed terrorist and Chinese spy, one highly motivated to smear the decorated military officer in charge of the project he’d just infiltrated, and whom SIS had since linked to four prior Chinese espionage attacks in the past decade.
“Cavendish is going to get away with a slap on the wrist, isn’t he?” said Bridge. More of a statement than a question.
“Not even that. Exphoria looks set for success, and a little birdy told me he’ll retire as Lord Cavendish in the new year. No public interest in making a fuss.”
She turned back to the river. “So they boot him upstairs with a peerage, to get him out of the way. Lovely.”
“And what about you? Are you all packed and ready? Got everything you need?”
“It’s only Ireland, Giles. I’m not going camping in the Andes.”
He stood. “All the same. I hope you, um, well, not exactly have a good time, but you know what I mean, I think?”
She did.