I gave him a detailed description of both visions, then added, “Wherever you were when you made that call, it sounds like it is bugged. There’s no other way he could have known what we were up to, because Sgott still regularly sweeps for them up here.”
Instead of answering, he retrieved his phone and made a call, placing it on speaker so that I could hear.
“Yes, sir?” Henrick said.
“Code one search. Immediately.”
“Bagged or destroyed?” Henrick asked implacably. Obviously, code one searches were not new to him.
“Bagged. I want a trace-back done.”
“Immediately, sir.”
He hung up. Mathi placed his phone on the table and took a drink of his coffee. “There are few places the public has access to my car. It should be easy enough to get the security footage and uncover who did this.”
“Why would they bother bugging you now and not before, though?”
He shrugged. “Until we find those responsible for the bugs, if indeed we find any, that is not a question I can answer. Have you googled the rivers you saw in the vision?”
“No, because I called Sgott first, then smelled the bacon and came straight down.”
He half laughed, picked up his phone, and searched for various options while I ate my food and drank my tea.
“Well,” he said, after a good ten minutes. “Let me assure you that there are plenty of ruined castles sitting on riverbanks within the UK.”
“That’s because rivers used to be strategically important back in those days. The question is, how many of them are near the convergence of two rivers?”
He gave me a somewhat pained look. “Far too many. It would help if your visions or the Codex itself were a little more detailed.”
On that we both agreed. I wrinkled my nose. “I’ll try to get something a little more detailed once we’ve checked out that cottage... but save the list so we can work out a plan of attack once we get more time.”
“Done,” he said, after a moment.
“Did you did get an answer to either of your calls?”
“I did, but thankfully, it was as I was walking down the lane. Option two is the best, I’m afraid.”
“Surprised, I am not.” I finished the final butty and licked the grease from my fingers. “What are the chances of your phone being bugged?”
“The police and the IIT could certainly be using IMSI catchers, but they’d need a court order to do so, and my father would have warned me.”
“What the hell is an IMSI catcher?”
“An IMSI is your SIM’s unique number. Once your phone connects with a catcher, it reveals this number. The catcher canthen reveal your phone’s location by measuring the strength of the signal from the phone.”
My eyebrows rose. “That all sounds very convoluted. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned call scanners?”
“The use of scanners for that sort of thing is illegal in this country.”
I grinned. “When has being illegal stopped anyone? When has it ever stopped you?”
“I will have you know that ninety-five per cent of the time, my actions are beyond legal reproach.”
“It’s the five per cent most people need to worry about.”
He smiled and didn’t deny it. “We should leave. I’ll call an Uber on the way down.”
“Why not call the emergency chauffeur and car?”
