The Searcher (3 page)

A
n investigator, Hammer liked to call himself. Not a private detective, which sounded a little seedy, and anyway, who detected? That wasn't what he did, at any rate. He talked to people, and he scoured documents, and then he sat back and figured out some part of the problem, and then he did some more talking. He liked to talk, in part because he was good at it but mainly because people told you things when they talked back—consciously or unconsciously. Information was to be found in documents or in people's heads, and Hammer had always thought that the heads held the best stuff.

No, he didn't detect. He investigated. It was a better word—it meant something. It suggested you might be interested in getting to the truth.

The fifteen visitors in the Ikertu lobby were detectives, come to do some detecting, he supposed. Some were in uniform, some weren't, but even those in plain clothes were plainly police; they had an air of prerogative that most people coming into this office did not. Hammer resented the deliberate aggression they had shown by turning up in force—five could have done the job, which meant the remainder were here to scare him and unsettle his staff. Katerina was with them, and his two receptionists looked on in confusion.

A woman in a suit had turned to meet him. She was forty, Hammer guessed, a little gaunt, the face tired but the brown eyes keen and sharp and resolutely on his. A band of freckles ran across her cheekbones under pronounced bags. She looked wary but belligerent, as if she spent her days in fluorescent-lit rooms, as she probably did, listening to people lie to her; there was a suppressed fervor about her, a tension that suggested she was trying to appear calmer than she was.

“Isaac Hammer?”

“I'm Ike Hammer.”

“Detective Inspector Sander. I have a warrant to search this office for documents and computer equipment.”

She handed him a piece of paper. He had seen its like before but this one had the name of his company at the top. Ikertu Limited. Then Isaac Hammer and Ben Webster. Their names still joined together. The wording was stark, familiar, and in order.

For a second he felt unsteady, a sort of swaying in the stomach, like a man feels on land after weeks at sea. Used to calmly advising clients in the worst of crises, now he reeled briefly, buffeted by the thought of confronting his own: advising was easy; living it would not be. But he was quickly in charge of himself again, and with a facility perfected on others' behalf began to rank the dozen questions competing for attention. What was at stake. How to defend himself. What to tell his people.

“Ben Webster no longer works here, Inspector.”

“I'm aware of that. It's his computer I want.”

Sander pressed her mouth into a line, the opposite of a smile. Better for you if we just start, it said.

“OK, Inspector. This all looks fine. But I'd appreciate it if you could give me two minutes. I have a guest to take care of. He was just leaving.”

Hammer turned to gesture toward Rapp, who had come through the glass door into the lobby and was frowning mildly at the crowd he found there. He looked at Hammer in search of an explanation.

“No one leaves,” said Sander.

“An hour ago I'd never seen him, nor him me. He has nothing to do with this.”

Sander held his eye, establishing control. She was his height, more or less, and her stare was level. Her eyebrows had been plucked into thin arches that gave her a look of fixed surprise.

“Until the search is complete no one leaves.”

“He has a plane to catch.”

“There'll be other planes.”

“You have discretion, no?”

“I do. And I'm exercising it.” The eyebrows lifted a little further. “You know your rights, do you, Mr. Hammer?”

“I've had clients in this situation.”

“I bet you have. Then you'll know you're not in charge. Your guest stays.”

Their audience seemed to sense that this was growing into a contest. Probably it wasn't a fight worth winning; Sander was here to do a job and nothing Hammer might do could stop her. Nor was there any clear benefit in making her like him even less than she seemed to already. But her manner, and the prickling hostility he detected in it, were unnecessary. Raid my offices, by all means, but don't try to humiliate me.

Rapp was watching the business calmly, confident that he occupied a different universe.

“Can we talk for a moment, Inspector? Privately.”

Sander shook her head.

“Mr. Hammer, this is a simple process. I ask you for things, you give them to me. There's no negotiation.”

If it had been wise, Hammer would have sighed. In his experience, the people who found it so difficult to behave appropriately had some lack in them, a need to inconvenience others to feel good about themselves. He had respect for the police but expected some in return. So be it.

“Inspector, I wasn't going to make a deal. I was going to make a plan, see this all goes smoothly. Get the material ready, go over the computers and the servers and everything, because this can be a complicated process and if I can help make it easy for both of us then I will. We can do it like that. Or we can all just sit here and wait for my lawyer, which may take a while because he'll need to get a big team together to keep an eye on your hundreds of people, and when we get started I can drag the whole thing out with ten questions to your every one. I'm happy either way. No doubt you have all the time in the world. But my friend here, he has a plane to catch, and until just now no connection with this company, and I'd appreciate it greatly if you let him leave. OK? I shouldn't think he'd mind if you checked him for pieces of evidence.”

Throughout his speech Hammer kept his eyes on Sander and smiled a cool, hard smile that he didn't mean. Anger tended to show itself as frost in him. But given the chance he'd have marched her out of the building.

Sander looked from Hammer to Rapp and then back to Hammer, calculating, he imagined, the price and value of a compromise.

“What have you been discussing?”

“An e-mail breach in Poland. Nothing that concerns you.”

“Who is he?”

Hammer fished inside the top pocket of his jacket, pulled out a card, and passed it to her.

“He's a Polish businessman. He owns a television company.” He didn't think it necessary to mention all the others.

“Parker,” Sander said, with a nod, and one of the plainclothes officers walked over to Rapp, who held out his briefcase to be searched. Hammer went to shake his hand.

“My apologies.”

For the second time, Rapp surprised him by smiling.

“All the best people get raided from time to time, Mr. Hammer. Let me know if you need help with your strategy.”

Hammer saw him into the elevator and watched the doors close.

 • • • 

W
ebster's old office, still unfilled, was designated the hub (their jargon), an irony that may or may not have escaped Sander. Hammer felt it keenly enough as he watched officer after officer tramping across the floor with arms full of folders, papers, binders, taking them to be bagged and numbered as evidence. All those secrets. All that work.

Without Ben, none of this would be happening. Without his obsessions, his crusading, his perpetual fucking moral crisis, this would just be an ordinary day, with reports to be written and clients to see and money to be made. If Hammer had only acted sooner, on instinct rather than evidence, this less than ordinary day wouldn't be happening. Know someone for ten years and you get used to their nonsense. Your defenses drop. And your standards. If Ben had pulled that shit in his first week he would've been out, straightaway, without so much as a discussion.

Each time Hammer was asked a question—where the servers were kept, what the archiving procedures were, dozens of pointed, dreary questions—
his frustration grew. Who were these people, anyway, to be going through his things? Over this nonsense, this fad of an offense. How had they earned the right? No one had died. If there was a problem here he should be investigating it himself. This was his territory. His jurisdiction.

But not his world. The world was hysterical about small things these days, and heedless of the big ones. That was a change he had seen. It was like a man careering toward a cliff edge straightening his tie. So much energy consumed in the pursuit of empty rectitude.

For a start, he would be forced to defend himself. Better than most he knew how tedious that would be—the countless statements, the endless meetings with solicitors and barristers, the narrowing of one's life to a tiny set of disputed facts. Then he'd have to explain himself. Tomorrow or the next day news would leak and there'd be headlines reporting that the great detective had come unstuck, and sometime after that it would emerge that every e-mail to and from every client, on every imaginable sensitive subject, was now with the police. To each of those clients he would have to give an explanation, and some of them would leave, and he would watch them taking their problems and their confidences elsewhere. That was OK. Fuck 'em. He'd find out who his friends were.

Seven floors below, the world was doing what it always did, oblivious. Through the trees he could see groups of office workers eating their lunch on the grass of Lincoln's Inn Fields, while his own staff stayed inside, unable to leave. Traffic sat clogged on Fleet Street. It was a clear blue day, a late echo of summer. He entertained the childish notion of rappelling down the building and simply running away. Buying a dodgy passport. Spending his fortune somewhere remote where nothing ever happened.

But that was not his way. He had fought to create this company and he would fight to save it.

Sander, it seemed, would cause him as much pain as she could. He'd met her type before, and thought he recognized that particular brand of zeal. There would be no reasoning with her. In her mind, every private investigator was the same: a stalker, a phone tapper, a rummager in other people's rubbish. An unnecessary form of lowlife that lived in the dark spaces left unlit by the shining light of the law. He hated that crap. He'd heard it ever
since he came to London, when everyone he met was surprised not to find him trailing spouses in a grimy trench coat and a worn trilby.

There were nearly two hundred people on this floor—his people—and more than anything Hammer wanted them to go home this evening knowing that they had no reason to be nervous about their jobs, or ashamed of them. They did good work, and the Sanders of this world would never see that. As soon as the police had gone he would talk to them. Sitting down at his desk again, flushed with a sort of righteousness of his own, he took a notebook from his pocket and began to sketch out a speech. A short, powerful speech.

It was good to do something, however modest; the first step to restoring control. After the speech he would talk to Hibbert, get the PR people in. Make a plan. But before he could finish writing, Sander appeared in the doorway, Hibbert at her shoulder looking grave and excited. He was a good man, Hibbert, but he did enjoy a crisis.

“Inspector. I hope you found everything you needed.”

“We have enough.” Sander came a yard into the room, looking pleased with herself. Not triumphal, but expecting triumph.

Hammer looked at Hibbert. “You're staying, yes?”

“You can talk later.” Sander moved past Hibbert and up to Hammer's desk. “Isaac Hammer, I am placing you under arrest on suspicion of breaching the Computer Misuse Act 1990. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”

Hammer had been arrested before but never had his rights been read to him. In Nicaragua they hadn't troubled themselves with the niceties. Nor in Iraq. The words had an unreal quality, as if they hadn't been written to be read aloud.

He looked at Sander and barely heard her. Everything else he had been prepared for, he realized. This, he was not.

T
he police station in Tbilisi was a green glass cube, and it glowed above the river like a jewel in the dusk. There are no secrets here, it said; watch us work for your protection; we are accountable to you. Hammer had been expecting something as dusty and established as his first glimpses of the city, but this was modern, new, even shiny. It might have been the headquarters of a minor insurance company somewhere quiet and European, Berne or Bonn. But tonight it was full of chaos, and even as he was led toward it, wrists cuffed in front of him, Hammer could tell from all the commotion and the running about that the Georgian police were having a bad night.

Inside, all was noise and hurry. Officers in and out of uniform marched new prisoners to the cells, ignoring their colleagues leaving the building to fetch more. The police were focused, their charges angry, drunk, shouting. The place had the strained air of a crisis not yet quite out of control. With his hands cuffed in front of him Hammer was pushed through a chaotic press of people waiting to be booked and into a room at the heart of the building, without windows, where he was left alone.

Two police stations in two days. Good going for a respectable citizen.

It was hot and airless but with his handcuffs on he couldn't take off his jacket or the sweater underneath it. Every so often he gently checked that the bleeding from his nose had stopped. It had, but God it still hurt, and the cartilage slipped around queasily as he examined it. He looked down at himself. The stitching on the cuff of his jacket had come loose, and there was grime on his lapels and on his sleeves where he had been held. Most of
the blood was on his shirt, as far as he could tell. When he closed his eyes he heard the crowd's thick roar.

Perhaps a younger man would have sidestepped all that trouble: caught a bus from the airport, run from the car, taken out that little fuck who'd stolen his passport. A wiser one might have sidestepped this whole business a long time ago. In either case, it was time to sharpen up. This wasn't the kind of job that could be done behind one's desk or in meetings, and an adjustment would have to be made. Well, if he needed a jolt, this qualified.

The room was completely blank. White walls, no mirrors, no cameras, no tricks that he could see. After five minutes he tried the door and found it locked.

No one came, and in the bare stillness of the room he waited. Hammer was never truly at rest. In quiet moments, in meetings, in conversations that didn't demand his full attention he tapped out rhythms, twirled pens, doodled on documents. His fingers kept pace with his thoughts. Now they beat an impatient, quickening tattoo on the desk.

His clothes were replaceable, his computer well protected—it would take a government to get inside. If they returned his wallet, which they'd graciously let him recover and then instantly taken, at least he'd have access to money. And medication he guessed he could replace. Presumably Georgians got depressed—God knows they had reason to. All he had lost was his passport, and time the one thing he couldn't control. Six days he had, and the first one, at least, lost to poor planning and bad luck. How long could one go missing in the bureaucracy of Georgia? Weeks perhaps, being processed, interviewed, forgotten.

Still no one came. Without any hope of a response he banged on the door and shouted, in English, Georgian, and Russian. Hello. Gamarjobat. Pazhalsta. Outside he could hear rushing footsteps and doors slamming and distant shouting, and somehow knew that in here he wasn't a priority.

 • • • 

S
ix o'clock in London. The office would be beginning to wind down. Ordinarily he'd be watching them leave, waving the occasional good night from his office, thinking about his run home, wondering what Mary had left
for his supper. Except not tonight, of course. Tonight he'd have been adjusting his tie and checking his shoulders for dandruff, maybe brushing his teeth clean of coffee and the residue of the day's talking before heading out to meet the perfectly nice Barbara Reynolds—a drink at the Connaught and then dinner at that overpriced place round the corner where you paid to watch the preening and the strutting. Not quite a blind date, because they had met once, at the Goulds', but as good as. An interesting woman, a good woman, but a little earnest. Not quick with the jokes, at least not that evening. Even without the whole jail sentence thing on his mind it would have taken him a while to warm the evening up, and he had been relieved to have a good reason to cancel, but God, how good it looked now, sitting in a cell without so much as a window or a glass of water. He'd have settled for warm beer and a conversation about the growing incidence of death among one's friends.

At the two-and-a-half-hour mark the door opened and a man in a bad gray suit came in. He had a bouncing walk and a slight frame at odds with a round, young, heavy face. Skinny pudgy, thought Hammer; office-bound but gym-fit, like that sidekick of Sander's. His thin lips and jutting chin made him look as if he was clenching his teeth, and Hammer wondered whether it was an affectation intended to make him look mean. His eyes helped. They were small and animal and a little too close, and they looked at Hammer from the first as if it was important to stare him into compliance. He was the kind who strove too hard for effect.

Hammer stood and offered his cuffed hand. Thrown by the courtesy, the man looked at it for a moment, then sat down without shaking it.

“Sit,” he said.

“Thank you,” said Hammer, smiling his most winning smile. This was a tactic, built on an inclination. It made sense to treat people with respect, if only to disarm the ones who weren't expecting it.

The man crossed his legs, made sure that Hammer knew he was comfortable, and gave him a long, appraising look, continuing to establish who was in charge. His suit was beginning to shine at the knees. Hammer kept his smile even.

For a moment the detective, if that's what he was, studied the top sheet of a sheaf of papers, reading it and rereading it and imagining, no doubt,
that he was making Hammer uneasy. Hammer suppressed a sigh. At least Sander knew what she was doing.

“No passport?”

“No passport. It was taken from me. In the riot.”

“In what?” The detective frowned in annoyance, as if the fault were Hammer's for using a word he didn't know.

“The riot. The march. The big fight, where you found me.”

Another stare, and a grunt.

“Why in Georgia?” His voice was a clear tenor, probably a fraction higher than he would have liked.

Hammer had thought about how to answer this. To keep his purpose secret made no sense.

“I'm here to find a friend of mine.”

“What friend?”

“He's an Englishman. He used to work for me.”

“Name?”

“My name is Isaac Hammer. His is Ben Webster. He came here for the funeral of a friend and no one's seen him since.”

The policeman frowned and stared, grimly unbelieving.

“Why are you here?”

“To find my friend.”

“Who you work for?”

“No one. I'm here for myself.”

The policeman turned the corners of his thin mouth down, shook his head.

“Who you work for?”

“Myself.”

“You will tell me.”

“I have told you.” Hammer maintained his smile. Obstinacy in an investigator was a good thing but should have its limits. “You don't seem to have heard me.”

For a moment they looked at each other, until the policeman spoke again.

“No passport, no papers. You are in social demonstration against Republic of Georgia. Two weeks now there is election. This is bad. If you are spy, for Russia, for enemy of Georgia, this is crime. Very bad crime.”

“I'm not a spy. I'm a businessman.”

“Who you work for?”

Oh Jesus, thought Hammer. They really are going to lock me up.

He leaned forward on his chair, friendly and confidential, hiding all signs of exasperation, his senses working hard to find the essence of this man. He was rigid, that was for sure, unimaginative, leaning on process in the absence of ideas, but he was serious, too, and not corrupt. There was no point offering him money—if that had been his game he would have signaled it by now. An appeal to logic was the only thing that might work. Hammer's hands were usually busy when he talked but it was difficult to be expressive in handcuffs, so he clasped them frankly.

“Can you tell me, are you a policeman, or a spy yourself? I'm guessing you're a policeman.”

“Tbilisi police.”

“I thought so. You have that straightforward air. Look. I understand you're having a tough evening, and things here aren't easy. Right? You've got a police station full of angry people for the third night running, and things could get a whole lot worse real quick. But I'm not a problem. You've talked to my driver. You know what happened. But in case you didn't, let me tell you. This is my first visit to your fine country. Half an hour from the airport I had my things stolen and my nose broken. I've had better welcomes but I'm prepared to believe it wasn't personal.”

He smiled again and went on.

“There wasn't so much spying I could do in that half hour. OK? All I spied was one little punk taking my passport and another big one cracking my face open. I spied his elbow real close, and if you like I can tell you about that. He stole my bags and I'd love you to find them for me. But right now, all I really want is a bed, and some dinner, and in the morning I'll go to the embassy and sort out my passport, and you can get on with the riots, which don't concern me and look like they do need you.” He smiled frankly. “How does that sound?”

It was possible, of course, that the policeman had caught barely a word. Throughout, his pinched little eyes had been on Hammer's, but now they looked down to his papers. He slid a single sheet across the table, without comment.

Hammer looked at it.

“This is my company, yes.”

“You own company.”

“I own the company.”

“Here, it says intelligence company.”

Hammer gave a reassuring shake of his head. “If I was a spy I wouldn't advertise the fact on my website. I'm an adviser. I help companies. If anything, I'm more of an investigator, like you.”

“OK. What you investigate in Tbilisi?”

“Where my friend is. That's all. Ben Webster. Maybe you know what's happened to him. Would you check?”

The policeman continued to stare. There was an ill-defined dimple in his chin that Hammer was beginning to find annoying. He took the piece of paper back from Hammer and placed it carefully in the pile. “Karlo Toreli,” he said, watching his fingers thrumming on the table, nonchalant now. “Journalist.” Joornaleest. “You know him?”

“I met him once.”

“Your company,” he tapped the papers firmly with a finger and looked up at Hammer's face, “it gives him money. Why?”

So he wasn't completely stupid.

“He did some work for me. Once or twice.”

“Karlo Toreli is dead.”

“I know.”

“Karlo Toreli is bad person to know.”

“Was.”

The policeman did his best to stare Hammer down and then stood.

“Worst thing, we find you are spy, you stay here long time. Long time. I talk to my officer.”

Hammer raised a palm in protest and started to respond, but the policeman cut him off.

“Best thing, we put you to airport, you go home.”

Then Hammer understood. This wasn't a proper interrogation. It was just the prelude to being deported.