This is the last slow(ish) exposition part before the pace picks up in the next chapter in the run-up to the final curtain.
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"Well, caro, this time I've had to do it your way," she grumbles at Bruce instead of a greeting; he is the last to arrive, still looking sleepy, joining them in Jamie's rented office at Two Suntec, and immediately grabs Selina's coffee. Looking out through a gap in the Venetian blinds at Mitchum's office windows less than fifty yards away, Selina can see what the other woman meant about the prime view; in fact, zooming in with the camera Jamie had set up on the window sill trained on Mitchum's desk, she should just about be able to read a newspaper headline if the man were there reading it, but she can also see what Jamie meant about not being able to see the keyboard, or read anything useful off a laptop screen, from this angle and distance.
"What, did you blow it up?" Bruce asks, raising an eyebrow at her.
She shakes her head. "I may be warming to your methods but unlike you, I still prefer having enough safe left to open."
She spent the early morning hours patiently waiting in Theo's Raffles suite for Mitchum to get out of his room. They had reckoned the night before that as soon as Mitchum – or his handler who probably monitored the Suntec office – woke up and discovered the white noise from the camera and microphone feeds, and the alarm out of commission, thanks to their EMP handiwork, Mitchum would try to get a closer look at the office to ascertain the cause and extent of the damage, or dash off to discuss the disastrous developments with his boss from a convenient location if not in person, or both.
In the end it was both: between the two of them at the Raffles, grumpy Bruce armed with binoculars on his Swissotel balcony, and Jamie watching from her Two Suntec observation post, they watched Mitchum take off toward the One Suntec tower at his trademark trot at a quarter to seven, just before sunrise, to stare helplessly at his office window from the pavement outside, unable to get into the locked building, try knocking at the massive glass doors to get the guards' attention – to no effect – and hail down a cab to take off in the direction of Chinatown to the southeast.
Following him was out of the question: at 7 AM on a Sunday morning the streets were deserted, and the sun had just risen to make any attempt at pursuit blatantly obvious. He'd probably dive into the market and find a quiet corner there to switch on his next burner phone to make the call.
But his absence gave Selina an opportunity to slip in through the suite balcony, wearing Mitchum's prints, and take a look around – even if Mitchum only went as far as Chinatown and made it back in record time, she would have at least half an hour, and in reality likely more. Jamie, who had tailed him to the Raffles a couple of weeks earlier, had managed to slip in, her cover in case of emergency being a maid mistakenly delivering laundry to the wrong suite; but her quick survey had found nothing of particular interest, just clothes and toiletries – and not being an expert safecracker and not having the luxury of a few hours to have a go at the hotel safe with SoftDrill, she could not even see what was there, though she suspected that the pickings would be slim. Much as Selina would have loved to prove her wrong, her own, albeit longer, visit came up with much the same results; and while she did get into the safe – the short time window had forced her to do it a la Bruce with the laser cutter, carefully carving out a rectangle of wood and metal from under the shelf the safe sat on until the bottom fell out, only to stick it back on with a helping of industrial-strength adhesive later – the contents revealed themselves to be relatively uninformative. There were two open-date tickets in the Burlington name, one for Jakarta and another for Hong Kong, and about ten thousand dollars in cash; nothing more.
"I take it there was nothing useful in there," Bruce ventures, seeing her sour face.
"Nope."
"So the only way to find anything Mitchum holds would be to ambush him, and that would immediately alert the mastermind," he concludes.
"And would likely get us nothing but the demo version and his passport, at most," Jamie remarks.
"Too bad we can't get a helicopter here. Or at least a long-range drone," he continues sulkily.
"I guess I could talk to the Interpol," Theo starts. "I used to work for them," he adds for Jamie's benefit, "see if we can somehow get an orange notice out of them using your cam captures of screenshots," he finishes, addressing Selina.
"It's not likely to get you far, we have too little concrete proof," Bruce comments.
"And the CIA would crucify you for it," Jamie adds. "They'll take major issue with anyone they see as civilian, even the Interpol, getting on their turf without their explicit sanction... I could, in principle, talk to my former temporary boss at the MI6, chances are he won't have heard of my GCHQ suspension, they way it's all been under wraps, and they're the ones who largely took over from the GCHQ on this case, it's more their sort of thing anyway. If they can sort out the pecking order with the CIA, they'll be able to give us backup quicker than the CIA would. They still have quite a few people stationed in Hong Kong..."
Bruce shrugs. "It's an option, I suppose." He is clearly unhappy with having to ask for help, but by now even he has to admit that with 24 hours left, the chances of success are too slim to be playing proud. "And I can call Kettering when he wakes up and sort it out on the CIA end. I won't mention that you're here," he tips his head at Jamie, "If you give me your MI6 mentor's name I'll just say I know him and tell Kettering to talk to him."
"You can also ask him for a no-objection to my talking to the Interpol, who can then liaise with the local police," Theo cuts in. "It could help to have backup if we ever get a chance to catch anyone in flagrante."
"That sort of decision may be above Kettering's pay grade," Bruce argues. "Let's hope he does not bring our beloved Mr Wrigley into this."
"Well, Wrigley may relish a chance to humiliate us seeing how we have to stoop to call for help. And if he also smells a chance of promotion, he'll go for it," Selina offers.
"So much for rubbing their noses in it," Bruce mutters sourly.
"Don't give up hope yet," Selina mock-admonishes him. "Knowing Wrigley's quick wits, there's bound to be an opportunity or two."
xxx
By lunchtime they have seemingly shared, compared and analysed every relevant bit of data they and Jamie have on Mitchum's recent activity – and are still, it seems, at square one. The greatest obstacle is posed by the man's untraceable phones that keep both his movements and his communications off limits to them: what little Jamie gleaned of his e-mail account is, indeed, of very limited value by now.
"If we're lucky, Kettering may have dug up something on your girlfriend's phone use history by now," Selina suggests. "Another question to ask him when he wakes up," she offers, addressing Bruce.
"Your what?" Jamie stares at them both.
"I was just going to bring that up," Bruce says with a chuckle. "She's not so much my girlfriend as Mitchum's, if anything. There's this half-American grad student called Kitiya Davison who booked Mitchum's suite at the Raffles in her name, but he's had to sign in as her visitor named Charles Burlington..."
Jamie slaps her forehead. "Serves me right for being a fucking idiot. I only ran a check for Perry and Mitchum in the guest register, he'd previously flown in as Perry, and of course there was nothing so I just followed him there to see where he was staying, figured he was there on a disposable ID anyway, and by the time he went to Thailand and back to meet you, I could no longer get into immigration records. Never thought of digging through the guests' backgrounds..."
"It would have taken you days."
"I knew he was in a bloody Personality Suite, there are only – "
"Anyway, now's your chance to make up for it," Bruce cuts off her self-punishment session. "This girl has seen each of us – " he gestures to Theo and Selina, "so none of us can physically tail her. But we have a SIM number she permanently uses. It's switched off a lot of the time, but does crop up occasionally." In fact, their tracking from the past 24 hours or so has shown her to have been to a gym, a supermarket, two shopping malls, and a dance club, but all in all, this amounted to perhaps three or four daytime hours of SIM card activity, with no calls and about a hundred messages swapped with, judging by quick search results, two female fellow students and a male gym instructor. And the nine hours it stayed switched on at the graduate dorm at night were pretty much devoid of activity. "She hasn't checked in after she switched it off at the dorm at 10 am. As soon as we get her next location, you go tag her there and keep an eye on her."
Jamie nods. "I'm not a field operative, but so long as you show me what she looks like I'll do my best."
"And you," Selina adds, turning to Bruce, "can write to her when you see her phone is on and keep up the chatting to give Jamie time to get to her. She fancies the pants off him since they sat together on the inbound flight," she explains to the other woman.
"I'm not sure I can compete with a gym instructor, though," Bruce offers, if only to hide his embarrassment. "After all, she thinks I'm just an asset manager for the Italian mafia – "
"I think her, er, heart is big enough for more than one man," Selina quips as she pulls up a camera screengrab of Kitty on her tablet, the result of Bruce's dinner date the other night. "Here you go, meet your new best friend," she adds as she hands the tablet to Jamie.
...and has to quickly catch it again when the other woman nearly drops it.
Jamie has gone deathly pale and looks too shocked – scared even – to start her typical swearing.
"I... oh fuck. I think – I know who's behind it all."
Definitely not good news, by the looks of it.
"You said you haven't talked to Peter Newell since you got dragged into this?"
Dragged may be a somewhat unflattering way of putting it, but it is no time to be nitpicky. "No." Selina looks to her companions for confirmation, and is relieved to see them nodding.
"It's him." Jamie takes a couple of nervous breaths. "I've seen him with this girl in Hong Kong. Didn't think much of it, thought maybe she was an asset he was developing, or just a casual lay, she didn't really look like much of an asset unless she was someone's mistress. So she's the messenger between Newell and Mitchum, and he's the one who stole the Matrix..."
And the worst thing is, it all makes sense. Selina remembers Wrigley's glum warning: no one is behind suspicion. Well, he can say that again.
"I guess it still counts as progress... of sorts," Theo offers.
"Except that it doesn't give us much of a chance of nabbing him," Bruce mutters. "What do we do, try to arrest a CIA spymaster because he has a girlfriend?"
"She's likely his drug courier as well as his messenger," Theo counters. "Assuming he killed the Suntec maid, he had to get that heroin from somewhere, and I don't think he'd have risked buying it himself. Now that would be a good angle – "
"We'd still need to have enough reason, or at least a chance, to search his PanAsian front office and wherever he's staying at, if we're hoping to nab him for drugs possession," Bruce argues. "When you saw them in Hong Kong," he continues, turning to Jamie, "did she see you?"
Jamie scowls. "She did, once. The second time I just saw them getting into a car together, but the first time I was in his office when she stopped by. He looked rather pissed off about the timing."
"So no polite introductions then?" Selina quips.
Jamie smirks, but her face stays glum. "He was too busy ripping into me to mind his manners, anyway."
"For what?"
"I told you, the guy hates me. Ever since – " she pauses, apparently weighing the risk of divulging the story, but goes ahead. "Ever since I fucked up his attempt to catch Sutcliffe."
So Wrigley's reference to Jamie's alleged role in the Sutcliffe debacle was not a red herring, after all.
"How did you manage it?"
"Wasn't actually a matter of doing much. More of a matter of not doing what he asked."
"Were you in a position to say no?" she asks the other woman, not quite believing it.
"Of course not," Jamie scoffs. "But there's always sabotage," she goes on. "I wouldn't have done what this guy did, but a lot of what I've seen in the years I've been in this business is pretty sickening, frankly. So I can see where he's coming from. And when he made his statement in Hong Kong and The Guardian carried the story, I thought he had a point in making it public. Newell didn't see it that way, to put it mildly. He really hit the ceiling."
"Probably hated the guy for publicly disclosing things he might have made money selling," Selina suggests.
"Probably. Then again, he was probably crapping himself thinking there would be a far-reaching investigation and his own very recent theft could come to light. He must have found a way to make his copy at about the same time as this guy came to Hong Kong with his haul. Newell was known to be a hacking wizard, so he probably used some sort of backdoor to leave no record of his access."
"Or to fake someone else's, more likely," Bruce jumps in.
"Exactly. But it was much more likely to have passed undetected before Sutcliffe's bombshell."
"And then he probably figured that he could use it to his advantage by blaming it on Sutcliffe," Bruce goes on.
"Makes perfect sense, in retrospect. From his point of view, at least. Also explains why he was acting so extremely furious and frantic trying to catch the guy. It was Newell's mandate anyway, seeing how it had happened on his turf, but he was so damn bloodthirsty about it, it bordered on being unprofessional. He wanted Sutcliffe dead or alive."
"Dead would suit him better," Selina quips.
"Absolutely. I couldn't understand it back then, his real motives, but it was obvious that he'd jump at a chance to kill the guy and saw it as a vastly preferable alternative to Guantanamo or whatever else Sutcliffe would get if he were captured. And I didn't want to be part of that."
"What did he have you do?"
"I was supposed to hack into the Guardian guys' accounts and scan their communications for signs of where Sutcliffe was staying. Newell was too busy manning a stakeout at the airport hoping to apprehend Sutcliffe if he tried to fly out, so he had to use additional resources to help with the online data sifting, I remember there was also a junior CIA guy he'd urgently brought over from Jakarta, and maybe others. I'd figured out where Sutcliffe was by matching the interior from his TV interview footage to file pictures of hotel interiors on the major booking sites, so I knew he was at the Luna, but didn't say anything and pretended to keep looking until some local journalist figured it out and shouted about it. That was my first offence, as it were."
"What, did he find out you'd known it?"
"No. He was just furious with me for being a slow stupid cow, the way he put it. Told me my last chance was tracking Sutcliffe to where he was staying after that, and trying to see if I could find an online flight booking in his name. Well, the guy isn't an idiot, I suppose he just had his local benefactors book blocks of tickets on the flights he thought of taking through agencies, it looked like packaged group tours, that way when they cancelled their bookings at the last moment he could be sure there'd be a free seat if he bought one for cash at the airport. Which, incidentally, is what he did in the end. Anyway, I didn't exactly kill myself looking, and when I did see something suspicious in a local lawyer's e-mail, one of the people Sutcliffe used as it turned out, I snuck away to drop a handwritten warning note into that lawyer's hand just outside the court, I reckoned if I'd found him out then the CIA people would soon find him too."
"And that's when you got nabbed?"
Jamie shrugs. "Newell could never convincingly prove it was me, we were at the very edge of CCTV coverage and I'd made sure I wasn't facing any cameras, and with my hair dyed black it was easy to blend in, that's why I've had to look like a Goth ever since I moved to Hong Kong," she explains. "But between the Luna and this, he was angry and suspicious enough, so he ordered me off the case and complained to my superiors."
"But that's not when you got suspended," Selina prompts.
"No. My boss thought it was typical CIA dickhead behaviour and told me to concentrate on my GCHQ work. Which, at that moment, happened to be looking for the Matrix."
And Newell, who was behind that, had to eat his stupid cow assessment in the most unpleasant way possible when Jamie almost nabbed Mitchum. "And when Mitchum told him about the maid and the bug, he probably figured out it must have been your doing, panicked and killed the girl hoping to blame the murder on you to shut you up."
Jamie does not look happy with the scenario, but she does seem relieved to realise the likely truth. "Looks like it. Either way he realised someone had got too close, and killing Yanisa was a way for him to discourage further snooping by whoever he thought it was. But I know he was the one pressuring my GCHQ boss for the internal inquest after the murder, I just thought it was his way of hitting back at me for letting Sutcliffe slip away."
"That was probably a contributing factor," Selina agrees. "After all, from his perspective these were parts of the same plan, and of the same problem."
"The good thing is, he must have thought he'd dealt with the threat you posed and was free to go ahead with the sale."
"Until today," Jamie points out. "As of this morning, as soon as he found out about the Suntec cameras, that's no longer the case."
"Do you think he'll cancel the auction now?"
Bruce jumps in while Jamie is still pondering her answer. "Unlikely. If he doesn't sell the Matrix now, he may never get another chance, and the data may be obsolete in a few months, or even weeks, the CIA will sure make an effort to shift their assets between the field and HQ if the stolen copy is not recovered. He stands to get at least 30 million from selling it – " That, of course, is a reference to Selina's bid; and they were betting on others bidding more. "And so far nothing points in his direction, all that's happened is that someone fried the cameras in Mitchum's office."
"Someone with an EMP generator," Selina reminds him.
"They are rare, but my own example shows that not all these devices are in government hands. It could still be an interested party hoping to get the Matrix for free, as you said," he adds, looking at Jamie. "I think he'll still try to pull it off. Mitchum is the one at risk, and to Newell, he is 100% disposable."
Which makes Mitchum's state of permanent panic quite understandable, in retrospect. "But then, if he thinks Mitchum is too compromised, he'll need to show up in person at the moment of handover to bring the database and get the money," Selina reminds him.
"And that's the only point when we can catch him," Theo points out, "that will be definitive proof of his involvement and will be sure to get us the Matrix."
"If I am the winning bidder," Selina counters. "Which is far from certain." In fact, they had hoped it would be anything but certain. They will likely have IDs on the remaining incognito bidder by tonight – Jamie has been able to identify two others apart from the Syrian – but knowing who they are does not help them much in knowing where they are staying so as to track them and tail the winner as he goes to the meeting; hotels and other official establishments that track staying guests are not the preferred sort of accommodation for terror suspects. And while they can find out Newell's registered residential address as the head of the fictitious PanAsian, it is practically certain that he will not use that place, or his PanAsian office that is probably monitored by his CIA colleagues, to hold the exchange. It is either Selina's win, or their loss. "I suppose I could try to contact Mitchum using the email and numbers he's used to contact me and say I'm increasing my bid," she offers.
"There's no guarantee he'll check the phone messages, he probably ditched those cards days ago," Jamie argues. "Email's possible, but he may have become even jumpier now that he's scared, and if you increase your bid too much" – which is, of course, the only way she can guarantee a win – "he may smell a rat and stick to selling it to the current highest bidder."
Much as she hates hearing it, Selina cannot argue with the logic. "So basically, our base case scenario is, one of these assholes will buy the Matrix tomorrow and then we're fucked."
She is surprised to see Bruce perk up looking positively pleased with his latest idea, whatever it is.
"No. I'll buy it tomorrow. And then they're fucked."
It is good to see him this upbeat, but Selina has to confess that on this occasion, his optimism seems very misplaced.
"You can't show up and buy it as a small-time 'Ndrangheta hitman. If they'd wanted it, they'd have put out feelers much earlier, and would have sent in the big guns for the final deal. These people are formal as hell – "
Bruce interrupts her, his excitement showing no sign of diminishing. "No, I'll buy it as myself."
Selina narrows her eyes at him. "As Wainwright?"
He shakes his head.
"As Wayne."
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TBC
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I've done what I could to make the references to Hong Kong events consistent with the way the real-life version went according to The Snowden Files, though obviously, a degree of "artistic license" was inevitable.