David Hewson - The Lizard's Bite

“What’s your name?” she asked in Italian.

The girl’s eyes flickered, fearful. Emily repeated the question in English.

“Flora,” she replied, still nervous.

“It doesn’t matter that you don’t speak Italian.”

“Supposed to.”

She didn’t like talking. Massiter preferred his female servants to keep quiet.

“Says who?”

The girl glanced backwards, to where the men would normally be. “Them.”

Emily wondered what the Croatians were like when they were on their own with these women. It wasn’t hard to guess.

“I could teach you some words. If you like.”

“Not right.”

The girl knew her place. And this was, Emily realised, the wrong tack, not that she relished the only alternative.

“Mr. Massiter’s not happy with the state of his office,” she said severely.

The girl looked shocked. “I cleaned it! Last night!”

“I don’t care. He’s not happy. If he fires you here . . .”

Flora put down the plates. She was trembling so much she was close to dropping them.

“You won’t get home, will you?” Emily continued. “You’d just be destitute there. No money. No friends. What happens to girls like that, do you think, Flora? Can you imagine?”

“I . . . keep trying.”

She was close to tears. Emily hated this.

“Come with me,” she ordered. “Maybe we can get you a second chance.”

They went downstairs, three short flights, until they came to the secure metal door of Massiter’s lair.

“Well?” Emily asked, crossly.

Flora fumbled with the chain of keys on her belt, found the right one, and opened the lock. Emily marched in, straight to the desk by the small porthole window, where a big laptop computer sat. Then she swept a finger across the table, which was spotless, waved her hand in Flora’s face and yelled, “See this?”

“I see noth—”

“Not good enough. None of this is good enough. You’re not good enough. I’m going to be in here for fifteen minutes. I’m going to make this place dirty in ways you couldn’t even begin to guess. Then when I go, you come back in. You clean up. You do it properly. If I like what I see, I say nothing to Mr. Massiter. Nothing to the Croatians. It’s forgotten. If not . . .”

The girl was sobbing. Emily felt awful and knew she couldn’t let go now. You did what you had to.

“Out!” she barked, and slammed the metal door behind the girl as she fled.

The computer was an expensive one with a wide screen, shut down, tethered to the desk with a security cable. She couldn’t imagine Massiter letting anyone near it.

She took out the little plug-in memory pod she’d kept with her from her days in the FBI, pushed it into the slot, then turned on the machine, praying for a break. Smart people encrypted their entire PCs. Smart people were in the minority, however. The FBI pod was something any hacker could run up himself for a few dollars of flash memory and a couple of downloads from the Net. On a machine that hadn’t been specifically set up to prevent its operation, the thing convinced the computer to boot from its operating system, not the normal one. Then it scanned every last directory on the hard drive and presented them naked to the intruder.

This was the kind of geek stuff they’d trained her in. There was nothing elegant involved. Just command lines and obscure instructions, techspeak she’d committed to memory.

Massiter’s computer was just as she’d expected: secure as long as it remained in control, defenceless the moment she managed to boot it from her little device. Emily watched the familiar routine happen just as it should, watched her little pod take control. Then she scanned the directories, found the one Massiter had created for his personal account, copied the contents of the documents folder, before scouring the drive for his e-mail files and copying them. Finally she looked up the cache on his Internet browser, caught all the temporary files, and captured them too. In under two minutes she had, she thought, recovered every possible piece of information relating to Hugo Massiter’s documents, messages and the places he’d visited online. In the U.S. she’d have committed several federal offences already, not that the FBI would have minded too much, under the circumstances. In Italy . . . She didn’t even want to think about the legal implications. There wasn’t time. Nic needed help.

Reminding herself how that fact kept haunting her, she took the pod out of the notebook, pocketed it, shut the machine down, and spread a few stray documents around the place.

It was the perfect hack. Undetectable and comprehensive, a textbook piece of work.

Then she went back upstairs, found Flora and said, “Do it.”

She followed the trembling girl as she rushed into the office, watched her work feverishly to clear up the junk Emily had scattered around the space, tidy what she could in a room that was as clean as anyone could reasonably expect.

“Enough,” Emily declared when the girl was finished, wishing she could stop hating herself for this charade. “Now lock this place up. Don’t ever let me find it in this state again. Then we never say a word about this. Not to anyone. Understood?”

Flora nodded, scared witless, eyes glassy and damp.

“It’s OK?”

“Yes. It’s OK. Everything’s OK. I’ll tell Mr. Massiter you’ve been extra good this morning. Don’t worry about anything. Just . . .”

You couldn’t let the act slip. They hammered that into your head at every last opportunity.

“Just keep this a secret between the two of us. Unless you want to be out on the street.”

When they went back upstairs the Croatians were still nowhere to be seen. Tidying up, Massiter had said. Emily could only guess at what he meant.

Evidence.

YOU COLLECTED all you could. You heaped it up in one big, big pile. And you hoped to God some small piece would give you what you wanted.

She called Teresa, arranged to meet for a coffee in the place they knew in the Ramo Pescaria, a little alley that led from this glossily artificial tourist world into a semblance of real Italy in the backstreets of Castello. Then she walked into Massiter’s private cabin: a long room, with a dining table and chairs, a TV set, an expensive hi-fi system and a drinks cabinet. The bedroom ran next to it, occupying a good tenmetre length of the starboard side of the vessel. She walked in. Flora had been in here already. Fresh orchids stood in vases on each side of the king-size bed, which was now made up with clean white sheets, perfectly pressed, folded tightly to the divan.

Emily closed the door behind her, locked it, then tore off the sheets as quickly as she could, throwing them to the floor, fighting to get down to the mattress.

They were there, beneath the final slipcover, as she’d expected. It was standard training to look for them in any investigation of a personal nature. Dark, dried stains, rings and rings of them, halfway up the mattress, always a little to one side because something in the way human beings mated meant they always happened this way.

She took a small penknife out of her pocket, knelt on the mattress, and, with great care, worked the blade around each dried puddle of human secretion. It wasn’t just semen. They taught them that at Langley. There was, in most cases, vaginal fluid too, and with the magic of DNA that could be all the lucky breaks you needed rolled into one, a fixed, unshakable line that led back to the women who’d been here. Every rape case she’d worked on had examined this possibility. There was good reason to think it could help them now too.

There were sixteen in all, each a small circle of fabric which she stashed in a supermarket carrier bag. She left the fainter ones. It seemed inconceivable they’d have sufficient material left in their indistinct stain to make them usable in time. Then she took one last look at the mattress and heaved it over, so the “wrong” side, which was clean and free of stains, was uppermost, put the slipcover back on, and lazily made the bed. That was another order she could bark at Flora on the way out. By the time Massiter discovered the damage—if he ever did—it would be unimportant anyway.