When The Devil Stays

Chapter Seven: The Name on the Paper

Claudine's technical team arrived at seven-fifteen.

There were two of them - a young woman named Sable who said nothing and moved like she'd been born inside a server room, and an older man called Henri who said too much and compensated for it by being extraordinarily good at what he did. They set up in the inner office, on a table that Claudine cleared with the efficiency of someone who had done this before and did not find it remarkable, and Sable plugged the drive into a device that Anna had never seen before and that Henri described at length in French-inflected English while nobody asked him to.

"It creates a forensic image," Jojo translated quietly, from the chair beside Anna. "An exact copy at the bit level. Legally defensible. Courts accept it as equivalent to the original."

"I know what forensic imaging is," Anna said.

"Of course you do."

"You don't have to explain things to me."

"I've noticed," he said, and there was something in his voice - warm and dry in equal measure - that made her want to smile and refuse to.

She refused to.

She watched Sable work instead. The device blinked steadily - green, green, green - and the room was quiet except for Henri, who had moved on to explaining the encryption protocol to no one in particular, and the distant sounds of Geneva waking up outside the window. The cobbled street below was beginning to fill: a baker's delivery van, two women with dogs, a man on a bicycle who seemed to be arguing with himself.

Ordinary life. Moving on entirely without her.

"Jojo," she said, without looking at him.

"Yes."

"The MP. You've been building this case for how long?"

"Formally, fourteen months," he said. "Before that - longer. Two years, perhaps. Since we first identified the routing structure."

"Two years," she repeated. "That's a long time to be looking for one name."

"He's careful," Jojo said. "His name appears nowhere obvious. He has lawyers who are very good at making sure of that. Every time we got close - a witness, a document, a thread - it disappeared. Either bought or scared or simply gone." A pause. "He has a great deal of money and a great deal of reach and he has been very comfortable for a very long time."

"Until a forensic auditor in Kensington read the supplementary filings," Anna said.

"Until that," he agreed.

She turned to look at him. He was watching Sable's device blink and his expression was the one she was beginning to recognise as his version of feeling something - contained and still and giving almost nothing away, except that she was starting to learn where almost ended.

"What's his name?" she asked. "The MP."

Jojo looked at her.

"Sutton," he said. "Richard Sutton. Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Financial Services. Member for West Wiltshire. Married, two daughters, patron of three children's charities, regular speaker at anti-corruption conferences." He said it flatly, without inflection, which was its own kind of contempt. "He gave a speech in the Commons last March about the importance of financial transparency in private equity."

Anna stared at him.

"He gave a speech about financial transparency."

"He received a standing ovation," Jojo said.

The room was quiet for a moment. Then Anna let out a breath through her nose - short and sharp and containing approximately four hundred words she chose not to say - and turned back to the window.

"Right," she said. "Let's make sure he never gives another one."

Across the room, Sable looked up from her device for the first time.

"Image complete," she said. "Three copies. Two servers here, one in a facility in Iceland that I won't name and you don't need to. The original drive is clean - no tracking software, no remote wipe capability. Whoever gave it to you trusted it to stay physical." She looked at Anna. "They didn't expect you to run."

"No," Anna said. "They didn't."

"Their mistake," Sable said, and went back to her device.

Anna looked at the drive in her hand. Small. Unremarkable. The kind of thing you'd lose in a coat pocket and forget about for a week. She had been carrying forty million pounds of evidence and a sitting MP's career and a two-year case and her own entirely dismantled life in something the size of her thumb for the last twenty hours, and she felt now - for the first time, with the image secure and the copies made - the specific and exhausted relief of a person who has been holding something very heavy for a very long time and has finally been permitted to set it down.

Just slightly. Just enough.

Claudine took the drive from her gently and locked it in the safe behind her desk with the brisk efficiency of someone filing a very important letter. Then she sat down, folded her hands, and looked at them both.

"Now," she said. "We talk about what comes next. And I want you both to understand that what comes next will not be simple, will not be fast, and will require both of you to be available and cooperative for the duration."

"How long?" Anna asked.

"If everything moves as it should - six to eight weeks to build the full evidentiary chain. Another four to present to the relevant Swiss authority, who will then coordinate with their British counterpart through a channel that does not involve the Metropolitan Police, for reasons I suspect you'll understand."

"Because Sutton has people in the Met," Jojo said.

"We suspect two," Claudine said. "Possibly three. We'll go around them." She looked at Anna. "In the interim, you cannot return to London. The injunction Marcus Hale's family has filed makes your position there legally precarious and physically unsafe. I have a flat - nothing dramatic, two rooms, quiet street - in the Eaux-Vives district. You can stay there."

"For six to eight weeks," Anna said.

"At minimum."

Anna absorbed this. She was getting better at absorbing large things quickly - the last twenty-four hours had been efficient practice.

"I'll need clothes," she said. "And my laptop - there's a secondary encrypted backup on a home server I can access remotely that has supporting documents from the audit. Things I noted but didn't photograph. Context."

Claudine nodded. "We can arrange the access securely. The clothes are manageable." She glanced at Jojo. "And you?"

"I'll stay," he said.

Anna turned to look at him. He was looking at Claudine, not at her, but something in his stillness suggested he was aware of being looked at.

"You don't need to," Anna said.

"I know," he said.

"Your firm-"

"This is my firm's case," he said. "I'm exactly where I should be." He paused. "And you shouldn't be here alone."

"I'm not alone," she said. "Claudine is here."

"Claudine has seventeen other cases and a full office to run," Claudine said helpfully, without looking up from the paper she'd begun annotating. "Don't use me as an argument."

Anna looked at Jojo. He looked back. The room was extremely unhelpful about offering her anywhere else to look.

"Fine," she said. "You can stay."

"Thank you," he said gravely.

"Don't make it annoying."

"I'll do my best."