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“Boswell wants to see you,” she announced, finally remembering what she had come over to say.
Boswell was not alone. A man in his forties was waiting for me and rose as I entered. He didn’t blink very much and had a large scar down one side of his face. Boswell hummed and hawed for a moment, coughed, looked at his watch and then said something about leaving us to it.
“Police?” I asked as soon as we were alone. “Has a relative died or something?”
The man closed the Venetian blinds to give us more privacy.
“Not that I heard about.”
“SO-1?” I asked, expecting a possible reprimand.
“Me?” replied the man with genuine surprise. “No.”
“Litera Tec?”
“Why don’t you sit down?”
He offered me a seat and then sat down in Boswell’s large oak swivel chair. He had a buff file with my name on the cover which he flopped on the desk in front of him. I was amazed by how thick the file was.
“Is that all about me?”
He ignored me. Instead of opening my file, he leaned forward and gazed at me with his unblinking eyes.
“How do you rate the Chuzzlewit case?”
I found myself staring at his scar. It ran from his forehead down to his chin and had all the size and subtlety of a shipbuilder’s weld. It pulled his lip up, but apart from that his face was pleasant enough; without the scar he might have been handsome. I was being unsubtle. He instinctively brought up a hand to cover it.
“Finest Cossack,” he murmured, making light of it.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s hard not to gawp.”
He paused for a moment.
“I work for SpecOps-5,” he announced slowly, showing me a shiny badge.
“SO-5?” I gasped, failing to hide the surprise in my voice. “What do you lot do?”
“That’s restricted, Miss Next. I showed you the badge so you could talk to me without worrying about security clearances. I can okay that with Boswell if you’d prefer?—”
My heart was beating faster. Interviews with SpecOps operatives farther up the ladder sometimes led to transfers—
“So, Miss Next, what do you think about Chuzzlewit?”
“You want my opinion or the official version?”
“Your opinion. Official versions I get from Boswell.”
“I think it’s too early to tell. If ransom is the motive then we can assume the manuscript is still in one piece. If it’s stolen to sell or barter we can also consider it in one piece. If terrorism is the game then we might have to be worried. In scenarios one and three the Litera Tecs have sod all to do with it. SO-9 get involved and we’re kind of out of the picture.”
The man looked at me intently and nodded his head.
“You don’t like it here, do you?”
“I’ve had enough, put it that way,” I responded, slightly less guardedly than I should. “Who are you, anyway?”
The man laughed.
