Free Bolt Action by Charlie Charters Page A

shuts the door carefully, watches the London cab move off and quickly accelerate to the end of the street. Dalia looks back, beaming at him. He waves. Amazement and gratitude written on his face. Brake lights, pause, then the cab turns left, disappears from view.
    Quiet and calm returns. All is as it should be on pretty Bushwood Road.
    And then a long, loud howl pierces the dignified quiet of this London suburb. As if a too-thick needle was being pushed through the tip of someone’s nose. The MoD’s Deputy Chief of Defence Materiel (directly controlling an operating budget of £ 16 billion per year and assets of £76 billion) bends down to gather up his luggage. Notices he has three bags instead of four. And the one that’s missing . . .
    It is just after midday when an exasperated MacIntyre finally tracks down Professor Sir Roddy Kerr, the MoD’s chief scientific adviser. As would be expected, the old man has a particularly dusty and vacant voice, bordering on contemptuous. Recently Sir Roddy had been char-grilled by the defence select committee, wanting to know why five hundred computers and laptops had gone missing from the MoD over a five-year period. His only defence had been an embarrassed ramble about the difference between missing-misplaced and missing-stolen. The MoD comprises more than four thousand sites, almost fifty thousand separate buildings on a quarter-million hectares of land. With an estate that large we must be allowed to lose a few things every so often.
    Kerr’s voice sounds suitably irked. ‘So long as your computer is encrypted, I don’t think you’ll have much of a problem.’
    MacIntyre grips the phone so hard he thinks he might end up crushing it. ‘But is my laptop encrypted?’
    In the background, he hears the tap-tapping of a keyboard. Pause. Then a hmmmm sort of sound as a list is slowly reviewed. MacIntyre is halfway up the wall with worry . . . ‘The serial number I have for your laptop . . . yes, it has the usual encryption features on it.’ The scientist explains the technicalities: theMoD uses a tailored version of an open-source encryption program to make-safe the dynamic random access memory, or DRAM chip. ‘I hope you didn’t leave it in sleep mode . . .’ But MacIntyre isn’t even listening now.
    Knowing his laptop is encrypted means losing it represents only the slightest stain on his administrative record. A trifling matter. Which is just as well. MacIntyre knows better than most the MoD are not frightened of making an arbitrary example of someone. The tethered-goat principle. He’d seen it before . . . he’d even happily set people up himself. Watched from a distance as the media pecked away till not even bones were left. As far as he is concerned, it was the easiest way to teach a sharp lesson to a large organisation. Memories of a wooded glade in Oxfordshire . . . a bloodstained penknife . . . and the ignominious end to the storied career of an MoD analyst called David Kelly.
    Thank Christ for encryption, he thinks, sinking back into his couch. His pulse returning to something like normal.
    Nine hours on the single malt has papered his mouth with what feels like cheap wall-to-wall carpet. So he rumbles off into his kitchen to find a glass, pours a generous measure of Laphroaig. Hair of the dog. Fishes out the boarding pass from his shirt pocket. Oh, happy day. Dalia’s mobile number is written in red. With a big love heart, and a cartoonish drawing of a kiss. The number looks . . . familiar. Vaguely. Perhaps she’d read it out to him on the plane . . . last night, this morning, it’s all a bit of a blur. MacIntyre can’t wait to mess up her pretty little face.
    He looks at the dialled number one more time, comparing it to the boarding pass, and presses the green button. A sequence of letters springs on to the Nokia’s screen. FSLCNS. A sign he’s calling a number already in his memory.
    Strange.
    He rubs his eyes, looks again . . . FSLCNS. That doesn’t make