Deliver Us From Evil (31 page)

“
Y
OU DID NOT
use the company jet, correct?” asked Kuchin.

“No. Like you said to, I rented a private plane under one of the corporate shells we have. Untraceable to you or me.”

“And you have stayed outside of the city in the safe house?”

“Yes. Just as you instructed. I’ve conducted business through secure phone and computer lines.” He paused. “You think people
are after me?”

“No, they’re after me, but they can use you to help in that search. I could have killed you or kept you under wraps. I chose
the latter.”

Rice looked like he might be sick.

Kuchin gripped his arm. “Now your report.”

“It was quite fascinating how we were able to crack this. The technology is really remarkable. We started with using—”

Kuchin raised a cautioning hand. “Alan, get to the point.”

“We found nothing on the data banks we could get into. No doubt if we had access to some of the Americans’ files or even
Interpol’s it would have been a different story. But we don’t and thus we had to turn to other things. Now, in these alternative
venues the data streams were immense and the server access protocols were complex, but—”

“The point,” snapped Kuchin.

Rice hurried on. “The thing we turned to was aftermarket surveillance feeds.”

“Aftermarket surveillance feeds? Explain this.”

“These days there are observational cameras everywhere. I’m not talking about people running around with their cell phones
snapping away when a celebrity does something stupid and it gets posted online. I mean cameras at ATM sites, along streets,
office buildings, courthouses, airports, train stations, and millions of other places. Hell, London is one big camera, particularly
with the congestion charge enforcement requirements. The result is there are literally trillions of bytes of images out there
and it ends up on enormous servers. It’s made the cops’ job easier. With just about any crime, at least in a public area,
there’s a decent chance it was captured on film somewhere.”

“But how does that help us? Were there such cameras in the ancient town of Gordes?” Kuchin said skeptically.

Rice opened up his laptop and set it on a wooden coffee table. “No, we went at it from a different angle. You have to understand
that a lot of this data is not locally stored. The capacity just isn’t there, particularly for smaller firms and average-size municipalities, and it’s hugely expensive to store and maintain even for megafirms and large cities.
So what do folks do when confronted with a need that they are not equipped to handle or is too capital-intensive to take
on alone?”

“They outsource it to firms who specialize in that area.”

“Exactly. So much of this data is stored centrally at gigantic server complexes around the world. Think of it as massive file
cabinets organized by countries, states, cities, towns, suburbs, or divided tactically into government buildings, banks, commercial
office properties, even military facilities, and dozens of other subcategories. The images are typically saved for years,
or even in perpetuity. It’s not like you’ve got billions of photos stacked somewhere. It’s all digital. The storage footprint
is relatively small.”

“And you never know when some of this data might have value?”

“Exactly. Let’s say there’s an image of an employee meeting outside a building with the same person for weeks. It might not
mean anything then, but two years from now when business secrets are stolen it might very well aid in building a corporate
espionage case against that employee.”

“I see. Go on.”

“Years ago entrepreneurs saw opportunities in this fledgling field and took advantage to build substantial global businesses
from the fact that we really have become a Big Brother society. Now, here is the key for our purposes. Certain people within
some of these companies quickly realized that the stored images had value to many others besides the original client. This
is so because a camera captures many things outside of the original intent of why it was placed in a certain location. For
example, aside from anything to do with the client who put the camera there, if you know someone was at a certain place at
a certain time and you want a compromising picture of that person, chances are very good there was an electronic eye there
and that the feed exists on some server.”

“So in effect employees of these companies are selling the images to people who want them for reasons unrelated to why the
surveillance was conducted in the first place?”

“Exactly. They let it be known discreetly that they can run checks for the right price and the picture is delivered for a
fee. Some have gone a step further and the actual companies that collect this data and store it are also selling images to
third parties. Apparently the law is vague in some countries, or at least inconsistent enough about the uses that can be made
of the stored information to allow sufficient wiggle room for the companies to do this. And the original clients either don’t
care or more likely are unaware of these additional uses of the data.

“And that’s where we came in. We sent one well-known server platform covering a number of countries in Europe the digitized
images taken from your drawings and the photo of the woman. They ran it through every file they had. We didn’t get a hit the
first go-round, but we did the second.”

“And the
hit
?”

Rice keyed in some commands on his computer and turned the screen around for Kuchin to see. “It was only one hit, but it was
better than nothing. Zurich. Outside a hotel, seven months ago,” Rice explained.

Kuchin sat forward and studied the picture. That was the tall man all right.

“But
who
is he?”

“We don’t know yet.”

Kuchin slapped the table with his palm. “Then this is
useless
to me.”

“Wait, Evan, please, there’s more. Look at the woman beside him.”

Kuchin did. She was tall, slender, and blonde. Then he noted that the woman’s arm was touching Shaw’s hand. He shot a glance
at Rice. “They are together?”

“Apparently so, yes. We checked with the hotel. They would give out no information on either of them, so we next ran her photo
through the image data banks.”

“And you got a hit?”

“More than that.” Rice handed him a file. “I know you prefer paper to digital.”

Kuchin took the file, but did not open it. “Her name?”

“Katie James.”

“
C
AN’T WE
at least eat our meal before the pretend time is over?” said Reggie earnestly.

“Does it mean that much to you?”

“Actually it does.”

Shaw rifled a glance at the waiter hovering nearby. “Okay, this is probably not the best place to do it anyway.”

Their food came and they talked about things other people would normally talk about over a meal out. Another bottle of wine,
this one a red, was ordered and fully drunk. Coffees followed and they shared a dessert that had coconut and ribbons of white
icing on top. Shaw paid the bill with a credit card.

“A. Shaw?” said Reggie as she spied the name on the plastic. “What’s the A stand for?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

He signed on the dotted line and they rose and left. The evening was still warm, at least by London standards, though now
Reggie wished she had brought the sweater. Noticing her chill bumps, Shaw took off his jacket and draped it around her shoulders.
It hung down like a dress.

“Forty-six extra long?” she said, gripping the material.

“Something like that. How’re the feet?”

“Depends on where we’re headed.”

“My hotel’s in that direction. Ten-minute cab ride.”

She looked startled. “Your hotel?”

“Or we can go to your place.”

“Why does it have to be either one?”

“Or we can just go to another public place and talk about it and hope nobody overhears us.”

Reggie thought of the sex-crazed couple in the rooms above her. “My place is not that quiet,” she said.

“Mine is.”

“Where exactly is it?”

“The Savoy. It recently reopened. Excellent river views. Very nice.”

“What did you tell me before about being forward? Going to your hotel room this late at night seems to fall into that category.”

“That was before, this is now. We can cab it. It’s down in the Strand.”

“I know where the damn Savoy is.”

“Then let’s go.”

An efficient cabbie with “the knowledge,” as Londoners referred to the mental map cabdrivers were required to learn over several
years, whisked them along Piccadilly, over to Haymarket, around Lord Nelson and his army of pigeons, and onto the Strand.

“It’s always puzzled me why the only place one drives on the right in all of Britain is down the little street to the Savoy
entrance,” said Shaw.

“It’s because the hotel’s forecourt was too narrow for coachmen to pull up to the front doors if they had to hug the left
side.” Shaw stared at her in mild amusement. She said sharply, “What? I
am
English, after all.”

They walked through the lobby, up a flight of stairs, and rode an elevator car up to Shaw’s room. He closed the door behind
them, dropped his keys on the table, and pointed to a chair for Reggie to take while he sat on the edge of the bed.

“Wretched heels.” She slipped off her shoes and rubbed her aching feet. “Now what?”

“Now we talk survival.”

“Yours or mine?”

“Both, if we’re lucky.”

“Maybe it was just me, but your boss didn’t seem all that keen on working with us. It was more like he wanted to arrest us.”

“
Should
he want to do that?”

Reggie’s features stiffened a bit. “I’m not going to think for him.”

Shaw opened the room safe housed in a cabinet and pulled out a paper file. He flicked through some pages. “Fedir Kuchin. I
read up on him.”

“I could have saved you the trouble. We have lots of paper on him.”

“People believed he was dead; killed in an uprising in Ukraine years before the Wall fell.”

“Carefully orchestrated escape strategy. A number of them did that.”

Shaw looked over the top of the file at her. “A number of them? Interesting word choice. What exactly is it that you and your
comrades in arms do at Harrowsfield?”

“Something that I can’t tell you about. Ever.”

“You’re going to have to tell somebody.”

“Why? Have you already told your boss about the place?”

“I haven’t told him anything about anything. What I’m telling you is that you might need a friend on this.”

“And you’re that friend?” she scoffed.

“I didn’t say I was that friend. I don’t know enough to know whether I want to be your friend or not.”

“Meaning you might end up against us?”

“Just talk to me.”

Reggie rose and paced in her bare feet, scrunching her toes against the soft carpet, working out the cramps. “It’s not that
simple. Nothing about this is simple, Shaw.”

“It’s only as hard as you make it.”

“Oh come on, that’s bullshit logic and you know it.”

“Maybe it is, but I’m finding the words hard to come by to convince you to trust me. I thought maybe I’d earned some of that
back in Gordes.”

“That was then, this is now,” she said, throwing Shaw’s own words back at him.

“I guess risking life and limb doesn’t mean as much as it used to.”

Reggie stopped pacing and sat down next to him on the bed. She looked down at the floor and sighed. “No, it actually does.”

“So what’s the problem? I know Kuchin is a bad guy.”

“But you know what we were going to do to him.”

“Seemed pretty obvious.”

“I take it you don’t play by those rules?”

“Not unless it’s either them or me. Then I’ll do what I have to, to walk away.”

“That’s not exactly splitting hairs. It’s a big difference in philosophy.”

“Like I said before, I don’t have the authority to arrest anyone.”

“Right, sure.” She stood and drew over to the window and opened the drapes.

“Nicest views in London,” said Shaw, who joined her there.

Grateful for this momentary change in the discussion, Reggie pointed to a lighted structure in the distance and said, “Have
you been on the Eye?”

It looked like a Ferris wheel on growth hormones.

“Once, but only because a guy I was trailing decided to take a ride.”

Reggie pointed at another structure. “Did you know Claude Monet painted a picture of Waterloo Bridge from a balcony here?
And that Fred Astaire danced on the Savoy’s roof?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

She closed the drape and turned to him. “But the oddest story I ever heard about the Savoy has to do with a cat named Kaspar.”

“Kaspar the cat?”

“Yes. He’s the oldest resident here, actually. Whenever there’s a dinner party at the Savoy where the number of guests is
thirteen Kaspar comes out and fills a fourteenth seat.”

“That’s because superstition has it that the first person who gets up from a party of thirteen will die?”

“Precisely. I believe Agatha Christie even wrote a mystery about it.”

“But eating with a cat?”

“Kaspar is carved out of wood, which makes him invaluable as a dinner partner, if only for the ‘quiet’ companionship he provides.”

“Nice story,” Shaw said.

“Yes, isn’t it?” Reggie replied quietly.

“How many other Kuchins have there been?” Shaw asked.

“You deduce that from my vague phraseology? Big assumption on your part.”

“Not really.”

“What then?”

“You don’t get that good your first time out.”

“I’m not sure how good we really are. Gordes was a major cock-up all around, as you said.”

“Things happen in the field, no matter how well you plan it out. But the way I see it you have two major problems and they
may be connected.”

She sat back down on the bed and looked up at him. “Okay. What are they?”

“First, you guys got ambushed. That means you either let somebody sneak up on you or you have a mole.”

“And the second?”

“Kuchin is still out there.” He patted the file he’d pulled from the safe. “And unless the guy in these pages has really mellowed
over the years he’s not going to just walk away from this. And if he did take out those Muslim terrorists he’s apparently
still got his killing mojo. Now, if he also has a plant inside your place that makes it even more problematic.”

“But if he did have a mole, how could we have gotten him down to the catacombs?”

“Not sure. But regardless, the issue becomes, what are you going to do about it?”

“Quite frankly, this is a little bit of new territory for us.”

“I’d like to help you with this.”

“You would have no idea what you were getting into, trust me.”

“That’s all I’m asking you to do, trust
me
.”

“I’ve never really trusted anyone. Perhaps not even myself at times,” she added in a strained voice.

He perched next to her on the bed. “How did you get mixed up in something like this?”

She said angrily, “How did you get mixed up in what
you
do?”

“It was pretty much against my will, actually.”

“Yeah, well, I went voluntarily down my road.”

“Then I’ll voluntarily go down that same road with you.”

“Why? Why help me?”

“I don’t get to help many people. When the chance comes I try not to miss it.”

Reggie’s anger faded and she touched his cheek. “Who was Anna?”

“A woman I cared for. I told you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I.”

“I’m not Anna, Shaw.”

His eyes glimmered. “I know that. No one can be Anna.” He started to say something else but she covered his mouth with her
hand.

She said, “Please. Don’t.”

He looked at her as Reggie’s hand slid from his mouth to his cheek.

“Reggie?”

She shook her head, stood, unzipped her dress, and stepped out of it. Reggie stood there in front of him in panties and bra.
It was as though she was waiting for him to tell her to stop. Shaw said nothing, just looked at her. He finally put his hand
on her hip, squeezed lightly. She pushed him flat on the bed and straddled him.

Reggie attacked his mouth, biting his lower lip and then kissing him on the neck and face before hungrily returning to his
mouth, as they hastily worked their clothes off. There was energy and anger and desperation and even violence barely restrained
as they went at one another.

Sweat dripped off them both as the Savoy’s new HVAC system largely failed to keep up with the mingled heat thrown from their
energized coupling. They eventually collapsed into a crazy tangle, her hair in his eyes, his knee between her legs, her arm
curved around his head. She gently rubbed his face, kissed it.

Shaw’s eyes were closed, his breathing slowly returning to normal.

“Seems like it was as long in between for you as it was for me,” she said, her lungs still heaving.

He disengaged from her and sat against the headboard.

“Did I say something wrong?”

“It was nothing you did, Reggie.”

She wrapped her body against him, curling one of his chest hairs with her finger. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just stay
like this for a bit? Maybe a few years?”

“It would get old, don’t you think?”

“Actually, I’d really like to see for myself.”

I just don’t see that happening,
thought Shaw.