This seemed unlikely. Now, she couldn’t be worried about being bugged because if you’re taped then someone’s listening and probably isn’t going to fall for ‘this is a casual chat about the snow being particularly severe in Moscow this year’ – so this was more of a plausible deniability sort of phone call. Kimberley wanted to be able say it was a friendly call with no ‘policy’ implications. The question was who she would be plausibly denying it to – a question that, obviously, you couldn’t ask over the phone.

‘You know how it is,’ I said. ‘Fighting crime and stuff.’

‘Well, anyhoo,’ said Kimberley. ‘A real interesting thing happened to me the other day. I was working at my desk when a couple of gentlemen walked up and introduced themselves and started asking after you.’

‘Agents?’ I asked.

‘That was the interesting thing,’ she said, maintaining her bright tone, ‘they had visitor passes. But, you know what, their escort must have wandered off and left them to their own devices.’

‘Is that so?’ I said. Visitors that could wander around an FBI office without an escort had to have some official status, or at least sanction from somewhere. ‘What did they want to know about?’

‘Who you were. What office you work from.’ Kimberley paused. ‘Had you ever done anything extraordinary.’

‘Extraordinary?’

‘Yep, that’s what they asked.’

Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck with extra fuck.

‘What did you tell them?’ I asked.

‘I said you were a perfectly nice young low-ranking police officer who was on the task force investigating the murder of a US citizen abroad,’ said Kimberley.

‘And?’

‘They weren’t buying.’

‘Did they ask about anyone else?’ I said, meaning Nightingale.

‘No,’ said Kimberley. ‘They only seemed to know about you.’

Kimberley had left Nightingale out of her – already heavily edited – report when she returned to the US. Operation MATCHBOX, the investigation into the murder of James Gallagher Jr, had left him out too, along with the community of magical folk that lived under the streets of Notting Hill – that was standard policy.

‘Did they say why they wanted to know?’

‘Strangely, they didn’t,’ said Kimberly. ‘But I did get the impression that they might be coming to visit you in the near future, so I thought I’d give you a heads-up.’

‘Thanks for that,’ I said.

‘My pleasure, and you take care now,’ she said and hung up.

‘What was that?’ asked Guleed from the other side of our desk.

‘Big trouble,’ I said. ‘Right here in River City.’

6 On the Comparing of Watches

6

On the Comparing of Watches