The Old Enemy by Henry Porter (read with me .TXT) 📕

your kind of work, but I didn’t know who you were until my father’s friend Macy told me.’

Ulrike said, ‘I must now try to sleep.’ She moved to Samson and took his hand. ‘Thank you for coming, and thank you for being the person you are. Your room, if you need it, is right at the top of the stairs. And if you’re all going to talk all night, you need to do it quietly because I can hear everything in our bedroom.’

Samson tapped his screen. There was no movement.

‘Are you watching Naji?’ asked Zoe, getting up to try to see his screen. ‘Is that what the call was about when we came in?’

He lowered the phone. ‘No need to worry about that now. Shall we sit in the conservatory?’

‘So you’re the boss now?’ she said, collapsing into the sofa next to Rudi and hooking a leg across his thigh. He thought she was a little drunk.

‘Yes, and I need to know everything that you know – I mean, everything.’ Samson took in Rudi Rosenharte, whom he’d fleetingly met in Berlin with Bobby and Ulrike. He was very tall and had a slightly Slavic cast to a face that was open and engaged. Willingness shone from his eyes, and sensitivity too. Where Rudi had bearing, Zoe was, despite her good looks, ill at ease and defensive in manner. He had noticed that part of her at GreenState, but he had imagined that she’d be more self-assured in conversation. They were a strikingly handsome couple.

‘So is this it?’ she said, picking up the Nomenclature of Colours. ‘Is this the mother lode then? Did you find it out at the cabin? We thought something might be there. Can I look?’

Samson moved forward. ‘I’ll take that for the moment,’ he said.

‘It’s got everything?’

Instead of answering her, he said, ‘Let’s start at the beginning. What was your role at GreenState? I assume you were investigating Jonathan Mobius, but had little knowledge of the other strands of your father’s inquiry into Mila Daus, the person he had seen in Berlin and Mobius’s stepmother.’

‘And lover.’ She unhooked her leg. ‘You have to understand that for a long time we were looking for a way in. My father realised that we needed an entry point and that had to be GreenState, which of course is a front.’

‘For gathering data?’

‘Sure – Mila’s a data junkie, but what’s important about GreenState is that it’s like a hidden dimension and she moves in it without anyone knowing she’s there. And it’s structured so that all these harmless souls beavering away to save the planet have no clue about what’s really going on. You saw them! I mean, they’re kind of pathetic. And, by the way, when you did your little searches about the company they picked that up straight away and it was a real help because, right then, just before my father was murdered, I thought they might be on to me. So you drew some fire there, which was great. I realise now that in those last few weeks my father understood that they would be getting close. That’s why they put you in there, and I’m grateful for that, and to you because I know they twice tried to kill you. So, yeah, you have my thanks, Mr Samson.’

‘Part of the service,’ said Samson. ‘What precisely were you doing?’

Rudi suddenly got up and announced, ‘Ich bin echt müde.’ He was going to bed.

‘Oh, okay. You want to sleep here. I’ll see you in a bit.’ She watched him go. ‘He’s beautiful, isn’t he?’ she said when they heard him on the stairs. ‘We have a lot in common, and now it turns out both our fathers were killed by Mila Daus and her associates. Dad always said he thought she was ultimately behind the death of Rudi’s father.’

‘At GreenState, what were you doing?’ repeated Samson.

‘We needed to access Jonathan Mobius’s communications and follow the trail to Mila Daus, as well as work out the relationship between different entities in her empire and, in some cases, prove ownership, or control. She’s like a fucking mobster. She’s into everything, and her influence goes way beyond her companies and GreenState. And yet there’s no trace of her. You’ve tried looking her up on the internet, right, and you found that she doesn’t really exist out there?’

‘How did you obtain that access?’

‘Firstly, I had to get a job in GreenState, which is easy enough, but we had to put a lot of work into Ingrid Cole and eliminate from the Web as much as we could of my wild years. There are people who can do this for you. Denis paid for it. I had to win their trust at GreenState, which wasn’t that hard. I’d done some advertising work and I’m pretty good at data analytics. Eventually, we placed spyware on Mobius’s devices and in the GreenState server, all designed by Naji and Rudi. Then we just had to wait and collect the information. Jonathan Mobius is really security conscious and he’s always fucking travelling, so that took the best part of nine months.’

‘You accessed his phone and computers?’

‘Yes, he has a vulnerability.’

‘Meaning?’

‘A weakness for chicks, plus he’s a real bastard, which means he uses them then drops them. Likes S&M, too. Likes to hurt people.’

‘So you dated him?’

‘Jesus, no! We fixed him up. We put someone in his way that could really take care of herself and she slept with him and she got inside his phone. She’s a friend of Rudi’s. So, once we got access, my work at GreenState was to download as much as I could from inside the organisation, because they had good firewalls and it was just a bit simpler from inside the building. But we had to go gently, and of course I had my bloody job to do.’

‘Had you completed the work when your father was killed?’ Samson asked quietly.

‘Not quite – there was a lot of checking and assimilation to do.’

Samson thought for a