Chris Ryan - Osama

As a plainclothes officer it was normal for her to be wearing civvies, but ordinarily that meant something smart. This morning, having thrown on jeans and a sweater when she fled her house, and then spent the remainder of the night shivering in the shelter of the bandstand watching Joe muttering feverishly as he slept, she looked a mess. Her clothes were still damp, and she was in no doubt that she smelled none too fresh. She kept a change of clothes in her office, but until she got there, she’d stick out horribly.

These offices never slept. There was always a selection of mostly male officers, thickset and burly, wearing cheap suits, and with physiques that suggested they’d spent a lot more time behind desks writing reports and drinking sweetened coffee than was good for them. But this was the Yard’s quietest hour. The main shifts wouldn’t change over till 8 a.m. – that was when Eva was officially due in – but the bulk of the night’s work was done and the corridors were largely empty. The security guard at the desk gave her a friendly nod, with perhaps a hint of surprise that she’d arrived at this unusual hour looking so bedraggled, but she was a familiar enough face to walk straight past him and along the corridor that led to the lifts.

Eva knew, of course, that there was CCTV all over the Yard, but she’d never registered just how many cameras there were. She counted three on the short walk to the lifts, and as she ascended to the third floor she pictured herself as a monochrome fish-eye image on a screen somewhere in the bowels of this place. Never before had she felt so watched … It occurred to her that she had been infected with paranoia, and she put from her mind the obvious truth: that the source of the infection was on the run from the police, wanted for the murder of his girlfriend and, by his own admission, messed up in his head.

The lift doors hissed open. Eva turned left. Her office was twenty metres along this corridor on the right. Once she was in there, she figured, she would not be disturbed for an hour at least.

‘Eva?’

The voice, male, had come from behind. Eva stopped and turned slowly. On the other side of the lifts from which she had just emerged was her colleague Frank. She felt sick. They shared an office, but their rotas were normally in sync. She hadn’t expected him to be here.

Frank caught up with her. Unlike most of the men who worked out of the Yard, he was lithe and fit. He looked tired, but had a big smile on his face.

‘Twenty-four hours, then I’m EasyJetting it out of here.’ He started to whistle ‘Viva España’.

‘What?’ Eva asked, confused.

‘Annual leave,’ he said. ‘Flying at midday.’ He gave her a broad grin. ‘Heard about Daniels?’

She shook her head as they continued to walk down the corridor. Daniels, the sleazy colleague whose PNC login Eva had stolen. ‘What about him?’

‘Some lag broke out of Barfield. Turns out Daniels made an unauthorized PNC search on this bloke a few days ago. Commissioner’s spitting feathers. Looks like a suspension and he’s got one of Jacobson’s murder investigation teams knocking on his door. Still, couldn’t happen to a nicer fella, eh?’

He stopped and looked at Eva as though for the first time, noticing her crumpled casual clothes and that she looked rough. ‘You all right?’ he asked.

‘Why the MIT?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘You said the murder investigation team were banging on Daniels’s door. Why? I thought it was just an escaped convict.’

Frank shrugged. ‘Looks like he killed another inmate before he got out. Sounds like a right fucking psycho. Him and Daniels deserve each other. Tell you what – I’ll get us some coffee. Black?’

Eva gave him a weak smile. ‘Great.’

Frank wandered off and she hurried into her room. She felt sick. Joe had said nothing about another inmate. Nothing about…

She drew a deep breath and remembered what he’d supposedly done to Caitlin. The scalpel he’d held in front of her face. The threats he’d made. Had he been lying to her after all? She closed her eyes and saw him, and the look of confused anger on his face when he’d told her all that stuff last night. Bin Laden… assassination attempts… Did she really believe him, or was she just trying to?

‘No,’ she muttered to herself.

She reminded herself of the figure approaching her house just moments before they’d escaped it. It was a chilling memory, and it told her that something weird was going on, even if she didn’t know what.

Eva turned and headed back to the door just as Frank entered carrying two polystyrene cups. They collided, and coffee sloshed over Frank’s suit. ‘Oh my God… sorry… sorry …’ But she didn’t stop to help him. She just wished he would go, so that she could change her own clothes. But it was clear he wasn’t going to and she gave up on that idea. A few seconds later she was back out in the corridor and running back towards the lift.

The offices of Scotland Yard’s Homicide Command Unit were on the first floor. Ordinarily they had just a skeleton staff during the night, but it was immediately clear to Eva, as she walked along the corridors, that at least one MIT was active. She counted about fifteen people in the first incident room she passed, all of them looking busy.

Eva stepped inside the room. It was ten metres square and its tinted-glass windows looked down on the Yard’s main entrance. There was the constant noise of muted telephone rings, the tapping of keyboards, the chuntering of a photocopy machine. The room smelled of warm printers and coffee. Eva was a familiar enough face here, but nobody even acknowledged her arrival.

A woman approached from the far side of the room. She was wearing a two-piece suit and her grey hair was very short. For a moment, as the woman looked her shabby clothes up and down, Eva thought she was going to challenge her, but she swerved to Eva’s left and pinned a photograph to a corkboard on the wall adjacent to the door. Eva looked at it and felt her skin prickle. It was an old photo, but it was clearly Joe.

She scanned the room. Frank had mentioned DCI Jacobson, head of one of the MITs. She knew him well – chubby, with brown hair, and always a bit crumpled. Jacobson was one of the few people in this place who didn’t have time for the constant inter-departmental sniping. A good man. She couldn’t make him out in the room. She swallowed hard, then followed the grey-haired woman back to her desk on the far side of the office.

‘Yes?’ The woman sounded impatient and didn’t look up from her screen to talk to Eva. It was clear she felt her personal space was being invaded.

‘Jacobson sent me,’ Eva said, as briskly as she could. ‘I need to cross-check visitors to Barfield over the last week.’

‘First I’ve heard of it.’

Eva gave a half-smile and decided it was better not to volunteer anything. The woman sighed, but rummaged through a pile of papers on her desk until she found a plastic sleeve with a single data stick in it. Without looking at her, she handed it to Eva.

‘Good. Thanks. I’ll, er…’ Eva jerked a thumb over her shoulder, stepping backwards, and smiled. It wasn’t returned.

She walked as casually as possible back to the door, holding her breath, positive that she was going to be called back at any moment. But she wasn’t. Out in the corridor again, she did her best not to run, looking for an empty room with a spare terminal. She found one three doors along, and within seconds she was sitting in front of the screen, plugging in the data stick.

The information was divided into folders, one for each day over the past two weeks. She opened a file marked ‘08_05_11’, to be presented with a list of twenty thumbnail images. Her own photograph was third in the list. For a moment she considered deleting it, but she knew that would be stupid, and she hurried on.