A Death in Sweden(25)

“So, he’s Jack Redford. It would be better if you check with Patrick White than if I send it through my office.”

“You think someone could tip off the CIA?”

She was quick to say, “No, but we don’t know who Redford was, any more than we knew who Fillon was, and we don’t know what he did, so it’s possible anything I do will trigger an alarm.”

“I’ll speak to him later. First, I want to work out what this guy’s been doing here.” He handed the passport back, but she put it on the desk and stood, joining him in looking over the boards.

Some of them seemed random and unconnected except in tangential ways. One was covered by a map of Paris and clippings about the murder of a student. Another dealt with various stories of alleged corruption or suspicious trading, surrounding defense contracts, oil licenses, and intriguingly, Internet stocks.

A third board seemed to deal exclusively with people who’d been murdered or who’d disappeared for perceived political purposes. Dan felt his thoughts jar when he noticed the disappearance of Ahmad Habibi listed among them. It was quite possible that Brabham had pulled the strings on the Habibi job without Dan knowing about it, because he had no doubt Brabham was the thread linking all these stories.

There was only one serious problem. Dan could see what had happened here. Jack Redford had been involved with Brabham in some way, had known of his guilt in some activity or other, a knowledge dangerous enough to send him up here, but looking at these boards, it seemed Redford had become obsessed with Brabham’s entire family, as if he’d wanted to find dirt on all of them, destroy all of them.

The worst-case scenario for Patrick White, and definitely for Dan, was that Redford had lost his grip on reality, his obsession tipping over into insanity during all these years of self-imposed solitary confinement.

Inger had moved on, and he heard her opening the drawers in a couple of the filing cabinets.

“Dan, there’s enough material here to . . . I mean, tens of thousands of pages, and that’s without searching the computer. This is ten years’ work, far too much for you and me to sift through. And we have no way of knowing what’s important.”

That was true enough. Dan imagined Jack Redford looking at this room and knowing exactly what it all meant, the pattern that linked it all together. But he’d never imagined anyone else looking at it, so there was no key, there were no instructions, because Redford hadn’t needed them.

Dan went back to the picture of Bill Brabham, the same smart corporate blandness of so many CIA station chiefs, the same glassy-eyed half smile. Redford had known something damning about Bill Brabham, but he’d never had the proof and had spent the last decade trying to find that proof or some other way of bringing him down.

“Do you think this is a new board he was starting?”

Dan turned and looked over to where Inger was standing. It was a corkboard on the other side of the room, but with just one large photograph in the middle of it. He walked over. It was a print of something like a yearbook photo, though it looked as though Redford had printed it himself on photographic paper.

The subject was a girl or young woman, dark-haired, pretty, a partially formed smile that gave her an air of timidity. It was frustrating, because Inger could be right, this might have been a new board, representing a new lead, but they had no way of knowing who she was or how she fitted in to the rest of it.

Dan shook his head, the sense of bafflement even greater than before they’d known who Fillon really was.

He looked around now and said, “Why don’t you see what’s behind the other doors and I’ll take a look at his computer?”

“How will you know the password?”

He looked at it and said, “I doubt he used one, for the same reason the door wasn’t locked.”

“Maybe you’re right.” She hesitated a moment and said, “It’s strange to think, he imagined he’d be back here later that day, that he’d pick up where he left off. Though I guess that’s true for all of the ones who died on the bus.”

He nodded, conscious that a handful of the people he knew had also set out one day or other in the last few months and never returned. It could equally happen to him one day soon, and it was perhaps even more poignant that Dan would leave no great half-finished project.

She walked along to one of the additional doors at the far end of the room and Dan booted up the computer. As he’d suspected, there was no password, and he brought up Redford’s Internet history easily enough.

That was where he encountered his first surprise. Redford had been on a Baltimore news website looking at a story that covered Mike Naismith’s hit-and-run death.

That was the only one of the recent deaths to occur before the bus crash, but it could only have been a few days before. It was astonishing that Redford could have made the link so quickly, because Dan guessed the only reason he would have been interested in Mike Naismith’s death was if he’d believed there was a connection with Bill Brabham.

Was someone tipping him off? That was one possibility, that he’d still had contacts, still had a steady drip-feed of information from his former life. Dan doubted it though, doubted that someone so determined to disappear would have left a thread running through the maze. More plausible somehow, was the prospect that Redford had simply been good at this, the top of his game, master of all this information.