The Searcher Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    â€œInspector. I hope you found everything you needed.”
    â€œWe 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?”
    â€œYou 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.

FIVE
    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 ofthe 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